Chapter 6-2 Preparation

Chapter 6-2 Preparation

Squires live and die by their legwork, and Guilds bleed or are bled by their rivals through the successes and failures of their shaping operations.

Preparation. You'll never have enough of it. And before you even get to the fun shit like going over what kind of ordinance you'll need or which squires you wanna hire to form the core cadres of your lance, you got to get the fundamentals down.

And by fundamentals, I mean intelligence. Awareness. Knowing what the other half-strand is doing and not letting them know what you're doing. You know. People watching. Mem-mail reading. Real riveting stuff; and the most essential things you can do.

Culture; habits; flaws; leaders; personnel; other shit. All this is essential. Power ain't enough to light the wick in this city. Not when a golem can flip a switch and change the rules of reality.

The fight is won and lost before it even begins. So, you best get phylaceried or get good at playing the long game.The inaugural upload of this chapter took place via N0v3l-B1n.

Improvise? Sure. That's important too. But only the ready get to improvise. The rest of the bunch usually just gets dead.

-Quail Tavers, School of the Warrens

6-2

Preparation

Work slickened the passage of time, and ever was Avo pleased.

More than pleasing, however, was the splendorous radiance that formed the bars to his newest phantasmic. It was still a thing in progress--the skeleton of a cage fusing into shape around the megablock that served as the nexus of his palace--but already the sequences of memory he had to draw on were promising. Flashes of a parent hugging their child; a moment shared between loved ones; a girl calling after the fading form of her father's aero, stabbing through a curtain of falling rain.

All these lost instances offered heat; an intensity of emotion that rivaled the output of his beast. With these memories synthesized properly, in practice, their fire would choke the maw of cruelty and hunger that dwelled beneath the fabric of his being.

The composite for the neuro-metals of the Morality Injector was woven from strands of regret, fear, joy, shame, revulsion, and an even vaster multitude of emotions, all synthesized to serve as a grand cocktail to drown the beast. At the bottom of the cage were fanned blades, sharpened to dig into his Metamind's tissue and pierce into his instincts. If his mental architecture was sound and the phantasmic was stable, it would draw out the worst of his nature like a syringe and counteract its properties with an equal loop of counter-emotions.

Functionally, it would allow him to tranquilize the beast without overdosing himself on undistilled and secondhand rememberings. He examined the unfinished construct again. He would need to shower it with more time and effort before it could greet its conclusion. And shower it he did.

Work on it he did.

Hours washed past him as if currents, his tasks a joyous multitude, pressing down on him with the weight of comforting responsibility. Streams of mem-data played like a constant symphony in his mind, ever-present be he awake or asleep.

He had spent the better part of the last four days in a deep dive of his own mind, nested snuggly in a lung bed. Waking only to feed and talk with Kae regarding the nature of his Frame, a semblance of his past life returned to him. Again, he was giving himself over to his craft; Necrotheurgy his practice, his worship.

A worship that was interrupted every so often when Draus began synchronizing with his mind through their encrypted Seance session.

These days, Draus' mind remained close and easy to access. Though he had promised to leave her cognitive structure untouched, they had found an accord in limited mutual transparency. A Syndicate was a complex organism to poison and butcher, after all, and it would take the leveraging of many skills to see it undone; what he lacked in combat experience and tactics, he provided in terms of phantasmics and signal-based infiltration.

+Deployin' Larks,+ Draus said, without further elaboration or fanfare. Avo grunted. They both knew what was about to follow. If his phantasmics were sequenced right, the drones would remain hidden and serve as their instruments of aerial spycraft.

Through stuttered instances of Nether-lag, he started from Draus' perspective and watched her cog-feed trigger the ejection process. A trio of icons flashed into existence at the back of both their minds, each a micro-drone released from the bottom of the aerovec. In his mind's eye, Avo spun his DeepNav to a top-down perspective and watched the drones come alight with rectangular vertices.

Masked by the howl of the traffic and the haze of the rain, they moved, pace twinned to the midnight traffic, already beginning to filter mem-data up into the Nether.

It had taken Avo a few days more to sequence the ghosts needed to direct each drone along their routed path. Presently, they ran on minds most paranoid and anxious. He had tested their pathfinding and ensured they never took the same route twice. The pattern deviation would help them avoid the notice of Syndicate patrols long enough to get the intelligence they needed.

Across the DeepNav--a three-dimensional simulation of the city as mapped by constantly updated mem-data--the drones separated, each taking one of the three major skylanes outside Conflux headquarters. Running down arteries of holo-projected light, the loci of the Lark-pattern drones sang in a symphony of synched memories.

With a thought, Avo slotted another session of memories into his Auto-Seance, his thought-frequency tuned in tandem with the drones. Draus cut out momentarily as he twinned his mind to one of the Larks. Immediately, a second window of awareness opened in the back of his mind.

His thoughts masked by the ghost anchored to the Lark's locus, Avo swept his gaze over the district of Mazza's Junction. Drone-spec data dotted the corner of his perception as mem-code ran through the back of his mind as a constant spray of information.

SHI-WA CLASS [LARK]-PATTERN RECONNAISSANCE DRONE

SIZE: LENGTH 3 FEET; WINGSPAN 1.5 FEET

WEIGHT: 20 POUNDS

SPEED: 130 MPH

OPERATIONAL PERIOD: 1D/22H/24M

PAYLOAD/ENGINE: MICRO-FUSION REACTOR

INTEGRITY: OPTIMAL

He swept his mind through his optical sensors and zoomed on the streets expanding from the core of the block. Accretions came alight in his vision as pedestrian foot traffic littered the streets, vagrants, peddlers, refugees, wagers, and gangers running thicker than the pouring rain.

Flashes of gunfire were detected and logged in the drone's sensory suite. Warnings played constantly through its Phys-Sim. The Lark wasn't his best job. Not even close, but it would serve his needs for now.

Peeking out from its optics again he found himself gazing upon the bifurcated form of Conflux headquarters. Mirrorhead had other establishments he could flee to--maybe even up the Tiers if he got desperate enough--but the critical density of the Syndicate boss' forces were centered here.

To abandon them would relinquish the last real foothold he had over this little pseudo-kingdom he played at ruling. Something that his ego wouldn't allow him to forsake without a fight.

There was no room for both of them to share. He tasted the inevitability of a clash between them somehow. Or at least the tension, as if they were two hounds circling each other, one curious, the other wary, both trying to cling to an advantage.

+Alright,+ Draus said. +Think I'm going to make another lap near Burner's way and see how Vincintine's butchers are gearing this fine Thulsday before finishin' today's rounds. See how chilled things are. Far as I've gleaned from the past few days, them Scalpers scraped their dead out of the block where the Rupture is and bugged out.+

+If luck keeps favorin' us, they'll keep on hittin' Conflux, seeing how they considered you a special operative. Bad news is that they're definitely sure you're still alive and know you got a Frame burning inside you. One of my old contacts embedded with them said you got an internal bounty on your head. Two hundred thousand imps. Not for outside distribution. Figure they want what you got for themselves. My guess was that the Scalpers you snuffed were running visual cyberware. Send snapshots of visual feed back up the chain. Nether might've been all jammed up durin' your little brawl in Burner's Way but... sometimes coldtech got poise that thaumaturgy lacks.+

A grunt of annoyance sounded in Avo's throat. He had been so certain the lives he shed in combat against the golems were enough to cast prying eyes off his trail. Draus was quick to dissuade his hopes from achieving the bloom of delusion. He knew much of how the Nether worked, but the nature of pure technology evaded him still. With a twin-aspected system, it seemed that they sidestepped a great many matters that crippled his communicative capabilities. Little wonder they were so willing to use thoughtwave bombs.

Here was another thing he needed to supplement down the line. As much as he loathed the impenetrability of coldtech, for the sake of his enduring survival, he needed to get accustomed to more of its functions before he found himself blindsided again.

+Going to keep working on Morality Injector,+ Avo said. +Assemble that first. Think about how to approach mod slave after.+

+That what we're going to keep callin' her?+

+That's all she was,+ Avo said. +Won't be anything more to us after. Can't afford a tail trailing behind us. She's a traumatized flat without Meta. Without wards. Fresh meat for all the predators in the city. Best we can do is plant her somewhere safe here. Move on.+

+Yeah,+ Draus said. +Get 'er done. Want us to be plugging Chambers and the other two with your mem-cons and scry-ware before the week is over. They'll offer another angle on Mirrorhead if we don't find something to press on from the exterior.+

Avo grunted. +Keep you updat--+ A flashing call sounded in his mind, interrupting his thoughts before they could be packaged and sent. Frowning, he glared at the small interface manifesting in the upper right corner of his cog-feed. Strange as it was for most to have an active perception filter in his own mind-scape, Necros tended to keep theirs on at all times.

LINK REQUEST INCOMING

CALLER: [SU, BRIGHT-WEALTH]

It took him a few moments to realize that he was being contacted by the junior. The one that Draus had assigned to personally escort Kae. The one that was now again gifted the new and glorious task of ensuring the mod slave didn't self-terminate.

Avo made a mental note to update to an Omniglot language phantasmic after he was finished with more pressing matters. He was still getting the most literal one-to-one character-meaning translations.

With a thought, he let the call come through, and Su's face came into shape as a ghost-made simulation of her current state.

+Hey, yao-guai, the crying one says she want to talk to you. Says she is finally ready to let go.+ The Sang wrinkled her nose. He could still taste the unease she held for him, her faulty wards leaking spills of alarm each time she looked upon him. Her fear wasn't primal, but that of a human looking into an uncanny valley.

The Sang made far superior predators than ghouls. Made them a century ago, even. Yet, he stood different from most creatures in their collection. A monster that somehow drifted from his fated course.

+Be there soon,+ Avo said. A beat followed. +Did she try it again?+

+No,+ Su said, frowning. +Not last night. But she still screams. She always screams. Loud as motherfucking shit, she is.+

Good thing the Second Fortune's walls were good insulators of sound. Or perhaps they were built to ensure the ease of listening for Green River, and Green River alone. Either way, her presence drew little attention in the real or the Nether as Avo observed.

Soon, if Avo performed his task right, she would be just another bland backdrop for thoughtscans to slide off.

With a thought, Avo ended the call and emerged from his palace.

RETURNING TO CONSCIOUSNESS

Sitting up, he found Kae watching the preliminaries of the New Vultun Grand Prix on the holovision. A great Rupture splayed the flesh of reality open in a metaphysical gash, the wound made all the clear for the former Agnos to examine as she used the haptic functions to zoom in closer across the concave holo-screens.

In the lead was Gaed anGeld, representing Stormtree. Her projected velocity had her about to lap the planets diameter for the third time in an hour, the satellite zooming in on her Heaven flaring at full burn as she tore across the horizon as an arcing javelin of lightning.

Behind her, the first casualty of the race was listed. Ressler Kandred, of Highflame; real death via thaumic overload. It looked like he was using a Heaven that could alter geometries. Had used. Space seemed to fold and bend in a span of 10 kilometers, up and forward bleeding together, crumpling physical matter into flattened shapes.

Multiple golems were being scrambled to clear up the damage then. They didn't look like any models he had seen before.

"New golems?" Avo asked.

Kae sudden shook, looking startled. "I... I... oh, oh! No. Those are Hellsinkers. Just... just there to soak up the Rend. Stabilize the Rupture." She gave a humming laugh. "Are... are you going to see... see Lucille again."

"Yes." Avo took a step toward the door and froze. Slowly, he turned to Kae again. "Kae. You know her name?"

The Agnos, bless her mem-burned mind, nodded, not comprehending what she did wrong. "You... you don't?"

"No," Avo said. "Makes things more difficult that way. Cements us more in memory. Will take me even more time to dislodge you from her mind."

It took a moment for the sadness to creep across Kae's face. "Oh. S-sorry. She was just... there's so much pain in her. Thought she could use... use someone to talk with."

Avo grunted. "New Vultun. As it goes. Going to see if I can finish with her today. Someone breaks in you know what to do."

Kae nodded. "Shoot myself."

Avo grunted. "Won't be able to fight them off alone. Don't want to be taken alive."

"Alright," Kae said, cheerfully. "I'll try to remember."