Alright then.” Demiurge concludes describing the situation to the entire group. Using words instead of text, this time around. “Does anyone have any questions whatsoever? Now’s the time to ask them.”
“What…” One of the civilians asks, staring at her dumbfounded. “... the fuck?”
Palmer glances at the man, but says nothing. Yeah. Space fucking zombies. For as far as Demiurge’s understanding of this universe goes, everyone but that Explorers’ Guild organization and some ethnopolity governments (plus the Confederation’s leadership) knew that they weren’t living in a military and mostly hard sci-fi.
Cue, this.
“Exotechs.” Demiurge decides to default to something more palatable to them. “It’s an exotech gone wrong.”
Somehow, that seems to sell it more than everything else she did. Wow. That had to ruin the local paranormal enthusiasts’ community, if everything weird could be explained with the term ‘exotech’.
Say what you want about Revenant’s sidekicks, but his elite mooks were distinctly unfazed by the whole deal. It was the Armageddon’s Death March all over again, and they knew how to deal with this sort of thing.
Anyways.
“We’re going to enter the ship, and have the transhuman guide us to the bridge.” Demiurge reiterates the plan in a much shortened version. Because that’s always a good idea. “We’re going to restart the ship’s main power source, hack the security system, initiate security lockdown throughout the ship to keep the enemy forces compartmentalized, activate air filtration systems and then go through the decks one by one, purging out everything that moves. Keep your gas masks on, and be extremely cautious when approaching doors and other places that restrain visibility. The enemy is going to be mostly engaging in close quarters, and while they aren’t fast, they are durable. Accidental ambushes are going to be the biggest issue here. We’re going to…”
***
Demiurge isn’t exactly sure what she expected the ship to be. The bit where it was seized by an extradimensional zombie eldritch abomination implied certain things. Odd fleshy growth? Psychic attacks attempting to break their minds into willingly giving themselves up to their space zombie overlords?
The ship has denied those expectations.
No fleshy growths. Just a lot of darkness, as one would expect from a horror experience - the ship was unpowered, after all. She regretted that fact, because what their flashlights illuminated appeared to speak to her sense of aesthetics.
White floors, walls and ceilings with some golden detail here and there. Someone really cared about aesthetics as much as about pure utility. Demiurge can, without a doubt, dig it. Very much so.
No blood splatters either. If Demiurge’s understanding of the Far Future is anything to go by, there was no fight here. NIGHTMARE/COLORLESS unmade everyone’s mind during the Touchdown Event, then NIGHTMARE/VIRIDIAN came and infected the empty shells populating the ship.
Their entire unit is steadily advancing through the mess of the corridors. Songbird’s in the middle of the group, using her individuality to suppress the sounds they are making. Perfect for infiltration, even if the complete lack of sounds they are making makes it much easier to accidentally separate from each other.
They end up halting their march every few minutes or so, just to recount their group and make sure that no one strayed off. They might have been professionals, but it was still a hostile environment.
Seven minutes into Aesculapius they found their first enemy.
Songbird warns them with a gesture that there are sounds ahead, approaching. So they stop for a moment, and check their surroundings to make sure that nothing in that area could potentially surprise them mid-fight.
A moment later, the space-zombie emerges from behind the turn of the corridor.
It’s a tall man, wearing combat armor, parts of it clearly made to resemble that of ancient roman legionnaires, all while maintaining a clear aura of advanced technology. Someone was really dedicated to the retrofuturistic vibe.
They had a sledgehammer in their hands, one that Demiurge could only wonder about the origin of. Something in the way they moved was odd, the zombie (‘reanimate’ officially) clearly not using their body as a human would.
They didn’t expect to run into a group of humans, thanks to Songbird completely suppressing any sounds they made. As you can expect from a space zombie, they immediately rushed towards the nearest human, either not making a sound or Songbird suppressing those.
The reanimate had the time to make three steps before four nearest soldiers pulled their triggers. Over-expenditure of ammunition, Demiurge would point that out, but it’s their first encounter with something that they aren’t familiar with, so it was perhaps unavoidable. The zombie is shot multiple times, clearly finding it hard to keep charging, a fact that lasts until Palmer calmly puts a pistol round right in the middle of its helmet faceplate.
“Conserve ammo.” He says. Songbird’s suppression of sounds makes it extremely easy to transfer orders in the thick of the battle. “Songbird, any more movement?”
Demiurge doesn’t like the fact that he asks Songbird for details behind her back. Ugh. He clearly doesn’t enjoy working with the metahumans, so a certain degree of operational friction is possibly understandable.
PRONTO: no
PRONTO: no more movement in the area
On a sidenote, the commplants made communication between Demiurge and Songbird extremely easy. Which was a big boon, seeing as Songbird was mute ever since that horrible injury to the throat.
Overhaul could have healed it. Clockmaker offered to make them do it. Songbird, for her own incomprehensible reasons, didn’t want to be able to talk again. Demiurge stopped understanding her long ago, Songbird becoming an enigma. Her complete dedication to Demiurge was the only constant between the Musical Killer and the girl that used to be Demiurge's friend.
Friend with a massive, yet one-sided, crush on Demiurge.
They step over the reanimate’s corpse, Demiurge glancing down at it. The liquid seeping out of the hole in a helmet was part blood, part brain, part something in a color of viridian green. No points for figuring out where the threat designator came from.
***
They’ve encountered a few more reanimates, shambling around the corridors of Aesculapius. A few dozen, in fact.
Now, NIGHTMARE/VIRIDIAN is a major threat, capable of wiping out entire ships full of people in one fell swoop. Any louder noise they’d make would provoke the reanimates from the whole area around them to swarm at them. And guess what?
They only need a single open wound or a damage to their gas mask to end the fight. Even if you had power armor on you, you’d succumb eventually. Because you’d be stranded on a ship with a poisonous atmosphere. Hunger and dehydration would force you to risk getting off the armor, and then…
The end.
The ‘actual’ NIGHTMARE/VIRIDIAN was the gaseous compound in the air. Demiurge had a million questions to ask about the whole mechanism, really. The gas itself supposedly just… popped out, at random, aboard ships traversing Hyperspace. Like a 0.00001% chance of inevitable doom to space zombies while trying to visit your cousin in the neighboring planet.
No wonder the government didn’t want the people to know about it. Way to deal a deadly blow to interplanetary traffic, even if the 0.00001% was, apparently, only a thing in the less commonly traversed routes. Why? No one knew.
Insanity.
Thankfully, the NIGHTMARE/VIRIDIAN had only very limited capability for strategic planning and even lesser situational awareness. It was a force of nature that only accidentally obliterated human lives. No one to realize that the reanimates were going ‘off the grid’ in a straight line and have others converge on their location.
Of course, there were still thousands of reanimates out there, but without a mind to lead them and with Songbird making sure that all takedowns were quiet, it was… almost disgustingly simple.
Eventually, they reached the proximity of the ship’s bridge. The way forward was blocked with some very intimidatingly-sized security gates.
“Interesting.” Humility comments as it approaches the gate. “Someone or something activated the security lockdown before the ship’s reactor went offline.”
Something? Actually, let’s ask just in case. Demiurge is commanding an operation in a completely foreign environment. This isn’t the right moment to make assumptions.
“By ‘something’ you mean the automatic systems of the ship that detected the spread of some biological agent, rather than another spooky scary alien stuff.” Demiurge asks, while sending a message to Songbird to try to listen if there are any sounds from the other side. “Right?”
“Yes.” Humility confirms it. “It’s highly likely that the outbreak of the NIGHTMARE/VIRIDIAN started elsewhere. A ship’s command deck tends to be the most protected part of the ship, as keeping your leadership and communication up is crucial to surviving any crisis whatsoever. On a ship so ripe with biological factors, it’s likely that most of the ship could be locked airtight.”
Which was the AI-speech for ‘the chances are likely that there are NIGHTMARE/COLORLESS conduits on the other side, and that opening up the gate will infect them with NIGHTMARE/VIRIDIAN.
Demiurge has sudden flashbacks to that one ancient SCP Foundation article (hey, she is allowed to have hobbies) about a cult summoning eldritch abominations to a single location just to let them have a battle royale to cut down their numbers. Was COLORLESS going to be angry at VIRIDIAN over taking away their toys?
Then again, they were literally living in the middle of a planet-sized battle royale. It was really drowned in the background.
“So, another airlock.” Demiurge sighs. “Except, it won’t work due to the odd way in which the NIGHTMARE/VIRIDIAN’s influence expands. So the moment we open the door, the conduits inside are going to be zombified. And we don’t know how many of them there are.”
“Yes.” Humility replies, Palmer looking at them through his gasmask but without saying anything.. “But the initial problem we’re facing is how to open the door.”
“It’s not hard at all.” Demiurge replies. “Amplitude can open them up, no problem. Right?”
“Sure, Demi.” Amplitude violates their little paramilitary communication code by being herself (Demiurge loves her that way). “Always ready to melt a wall or two for you. But it’ll take me a while, especially if it’s this thick. By the time I make the hole large enough to pass and then cool it to be passable, the gas is probably going to get to the other side.”
Songbird reports back that she hears no heartbeats in the vicinity of the gate. So, they probably won’t be swarmed by a group of reanimates right after the doors are open.
“Do it.” Demiurge orders. Whatever zombies were waiting for them on the other side, they would suffer from the same issue as all others. Namely, the voice suppression of Songbird that lets them engage enemies in smaller groups.
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She could even easily draw more of them by only making sounds propagate in a particular direction. They were all highly skilled professionals, after all.
Amplitude puts her hand on the gate, before telling them to take a few steps back. Then, a warm air blasts them as the villain generates enough heat for the security gate in front of them to begin to melt, bit by bit.
It’s not superheated plasma, but Amplitude could still reach temperatures comparable to that of the surface of the sun. While making sure that Amplitude herself wasn’t influenced by them. Rather incredible feat of both firepower and fine control over it. .
Before switching the temperature around her to a much lower one for express cooling to make the area traversable.
Soon after that, they march through it, entering the Aesculapius Command Deck, fully ready for combat, flashlights illuminating the empty corridors.
A minute later, Demiurge notices a NIGHTMARE/COLORLESS conduit. This is… actually disturbing. A member of the crew of the ship that was hit by the Touchdown Event. A man, looking… normal.
Just standing there, frozen midstep, staring into space with open eyes. He didn’t have the time to notice what was happening, the second the NIGHTMARE/COLORLESS showed up around, the man’s career (and life) was over.
It’s incredibly terrifying when you think about it more closely. Sure, it was an extreme rarity. Add up all the NIGHTMARES and you’ll discover that you had a much greater chance of dying in a plane crash in the 21st Century than ever encountering those guys.
They were the modern equivalent of natural disasters. Extremely rare, largely unpredictable, and when they happen, it’s extremely hard to survive.
Once they are out of this goddamn maze, Demiurge is going to find herself a heavily populated urban planet and never leave it ever again. She can deal with earthquakes, landslides and whatnot, but the NIGHTMARES? No. Just no.
She should… probably think about what to do once they leave this hell maze. But that’s for the future.
Amplitude melts the crew member’s head off, just as his body starts twitching, signifying the start of his transformation into a reanimate. The fight is over before it starts.
***
Demiurge wishes that she could say the same thing about their assault on the bridge. Instead, there was a large crowd of people there, all of which ended up transforming into reanimates at nearly the same time.
Thankfully, once again, the renimates weren’t particularly intelligent. As a result, they were easily lured into a chokepoint. The rest was a matter of slowly withdrawing their firing line, decimating the enemies without letting them get closer.
When they actually did manage to do it, Amplitude blasted them with a temperature approaching several thousands of degrees Celsius, just as Songbird generated soundwaves powerful enough to rupture the nearest reanimates and push the others back, all while tearing the corridor walls and floors quite a bit.
Without making noise. Songbird was skilled at this sort of thing.
Then they were back to slowly retreating, Songbird joining the shooting party. She was a good shot with assault rifles and submachine guns. Amplitude unable to use firearms due to the risk of igniting her bullets when using her individuality. Demiurge herself had a thing for sniper rifles, but…
Not the right moment for that. It’s nice to know that her tendency to drift off in her thoughts is still there, though.
They repeat it multiple times, until the enemy forces are spent.
It was, honestly, a rather simple mission, but mostly due to the more or less perfect assortment of individualities at their disposal. Songbird was utterly and completely broken when employed against an enemy without a command structure to realize their casualties and organize a response.
“Give me a few minutes to see where we’re at.” Humility announces once they are back at the bridge’s main floor. “Check the surroundings with Songbird so that we don’t get ambushed while at it.”
***
ACORN: okay so the situation goes like this
ACORN: i’ve gotten auxiliary power back on and run diagnostics on the system
ACORN: no significant damages to the ship
ACORN: no signs of anyone but us being here
ACORN: no signs of any other hatch being open
ACORN: but don’t quote me on that since I’m not 100% sure about it, some parts of the network are completely down
ACORN: the ship’s AI [one of Neutrality’s kids] was kia due to colorless
ACORN: bad news is that the space romans are fairly good at coding so cracking their system will take a longer while
ACORN: we talk about several hours of coding speed chess even with the neutrality kiddo and the ship’s cybersecurity unit dead
SUNRAY:Let me guess.
SUNRAY: This is an overly long introduction to a fetch quest.
SUNRAY: You’re about to send us to a lengthy goose chase through the ship’s zombie-infested maze, giving us a short or not so short list of tasks we have to do, which would significantly speed-up the process.
SUNRAY: In the process of which we would encounter further complications, creating an unforgettable adventure full of intense combat, character development and so on.
ACORN: … are you a gamer
SUNRAY: Hell no, my hobby is unfiction, especially horror stories of this brand.
SUNRAY: But I know Revenant.
SUNRAY: also, to stick to the theme, Palmer is sus
ACORN: ???
STARLIGHT: I have no idea what it means
SUNRAY: looks like times have changed then
STARLIGHT: Could you please focus
STARLIGHT: It’s a serious situation in case of someone FAILING TO REALIZE THAT WE”RE IN THE MIDDLE OF A MAZE FULL OF SPACE ZOMBIES AND THE AIR IS ALSO TOXIC
SUNRAY: Sure.
SUNRAY: Consider this a sign that morale is high.
SUNRAY: Acorn?
ACORN: it’s not as bad as you make it seem
ACORN: we need to get to the engineering deck in order to get the reactor going
ACORN: i could activate it from here but I utterly refuse to reactivate a ship’s fission reactor that I have no physical access to
ACORN: It’s asking for trouble especially when we’re restarting the reactor from a complete shutdown and on an otherwise dead ship
SUNRAY: So we’re heading to engineering?
ACORN: yes
ACORN: that’s the idea, yes
***
In all honesty, the mission was fairly easy from then onward. Demiurge was a bit worried about the civvies-turned-soldiers, sort of suspecting them to do something stupid. However, they either watched enough horror movies to avoid common blunders or the training the Springfield conscripts received was actually pretty good.
They stuck to the group. When they thought they saw or heard something, they reported it immediately. They followed orders to the letter.
Revenant’s elite mooks were even better. They saw all sorts of bullshit in their life, and deeply internalized the fact that following orders in combat to the letter saved lives. They also operated against strong meta-ability users to know that sometimes you just got strict ‘if you do X, you’ll inevitably die’ rules and you had to stick to them.
Zombie gas worked like an example of such a rule.
Humility reactivated the auxiliary power in the engineering deck, ran appropriate diagnostics, then started the procedure for reigniting the reactor. Less than thirty minutes later, the lights start to flicker back to life, ship-wide.
“Am I allowed to say it?” Amplitude asks suddenly, Demiurge taking a step back from a railing on a balcony overseeing the reactor chamber and glances at her lower. Then she sighs and nods. “Alright. It’s boringly easy.”
Demiurge sighs again. That’s… dangerous. Really sets up some unpleasant tags. Then again…
They like it that way. They like it dangerous. They like that sweet, intoxicating rush of adrenaline. The reasons for them becoming villains were varied, but they both simply enjoyed it. Risking their lives, fighting against dangerous people, outthinking or simply destroying them in combat.
In moderation. They knew a lot of blood knight adrenaline-junkies in their first life, and most of them had one thing in common. They enjoyed murder and victory. But corner them instead, make them realize that they were about to die - and suddenly they didn’t enjoy murder at all.
None of them enjoyed Revenant making them experience being on the receiving side of the rather crushing beating. The lesson was there, and while they didn’t talk a lot about it, it might have just given them something to think about.
For now, well. It really is kind of boring.
“Where was the last time we did stuff like that together, Demi?” Amplitude asks. Demiurge regrets not being able to take her gasmask off. “Feels like a whole lifetime, eh?”
Demiurge lets herself laugh a bit. Yeah, it really was a lifetime ago. And no, a part of her still didn’t sort out her own feelings about that fact. Ugh. The whole thing was incredibly confusing.
“Yeah, yeah.” Demiurge replies, while grinning under the mask. “I miss the times of Halworth Industries. Life was much simpler back then, wasn’t it?”
“True.” Amplitude nods. “Wake up in the morning, then have a healthy day best summed up as ‘be gay do crime’...” Demiurge chuckles at that. “... then again, I don’t think that the origin of this term included trading drugs and weapons as a part of the ‘do crime’ bit. Don’t have me start on equipping asshats like the Legion of Purity for a quick buck.”
No, it probably didn’t. Then again, who cared? Demiurge was a member of organized crime, she didn’t do charity and her response to issues of modern society was ‘how much money can I earn from it’.
“Once we’re out of this maze, we should engage in some illegal arms trade, just for old times sake.” Demiurge then says, grinning at Amplitude from behind the mask. “We should steal at least a few thousand guns from people in this labyrinth, then sell them to some illegal insurgency group. Organized crime, maybe? It always gives me the ‘job well done’ feeling.”
“That sounds fun, indeed.” Amplitude agrees. “You think that this ship has some drugs aboard? We could sell that too. You remember the deal with House of Glass? The big one? That was beautiful. I still remember the party after we sealed it.”
Demiurge remembers it too. Especially the afterparty. She got super drunk, Amplitude got super drunk, and that’s when things got particularly fun.
Did it really have to be an illegal business? She did a good job running the Stellar Mining & Processing Inc., the shell company that the Halworth Industries used to mask its presence on Ceres.
She could destroy her enemies for her own nigh-sexual enjoyment as a company CEO, too. What exactly was the difference between that and organized crime, aside from its legal status?
Speaking of her enemies, she could only wonder what was Revenant doing right now. Frolicking with his girlfriends? She could scarcely imagine him having human feelings, if she was to be honest.
***
Revenant had a very nice morning. Once more.
Waking up in the morning, with a bed full of women he loved and who were totally ready to kick his ass (vocally or not) if he was being a dumbass? Yeah, that had big positives. Massive positives. The ‘I’d absolutely kill everyone between me and that… but I won’t’ positive.
His plan for the day - thanks to dealing with the most pressing issues right after their arrival in his life - was mostly the peaceful management of the Ball Python. Day as any other, with maybe a hint of existential dread over Clockmaker being left about as unshackled as their resident AI (thankfully Humility claimed to have hidden the Uragan-B bombs outside of her reach and promised her a reward of implied sexual nature if she doesn’t do anything stupid).
He could only wonder what Demiurge was up to. And that the next set of complications was comfortably away from the present moment. Was that asking for too much?
***
“I see.” Enlightened Udo Weber says, after hearing the report from one of the Endless assigned to his unit. “A frigate?”
“Yes, sir.” The soldier replies. “We’ve managed to confirm that it’s inhabited. A group of what looks like the Springfield citizens. No signs of anyone carrying the same powers as the group that we’re pursuing.”
Pursuing was a nice term. ‘Trying to figure out what the fuck was the deal with them’ with a hint of ‘taking revenge for those people manipulating them all into a completely pointless war with the transhumans’ and a solid chunk of ‘science demands that we find them and understand how their powers work’ was a better summary of the situation.
Truthseekers Corporation (or, at least, their present local detachment of it) was on a warpath. And for now, the transhumans were temporarily repelled… they had time for some reconnaissance.
“Alright then.” Enlightened Weber decides. “We’re attacking.” The best reconnaissance, after all, was reconnaissance by force.
***
You know the drill and so do I
Obraz [https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1106241074403483798/1130150908542595142/00007-150926899.png]