Strike Team Ivory Dagger tears into existence amidst a gentle misting of frozen elephant blood half a kilometer above the acropolis.
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Table of Contents
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1. RISING ACTION
To my esteemed colleagues of the Council of 108-
As some of you are no doubt already aware, last month, STRIKE suffered one of the worst operational failures to date in its nearly century-long history. It is my responsibility as duly appointed Special Investigator to inform this body of the systematic oversights that occurred leading up to this disaster, the timeline of the event itself, and the steps that will be taken moving forward from this catastrophe.
We begin with an overview of the initial mission parameters…
It is late in the morning in the valley of gods and the Americans are back.
Nashir watches them- two squat black helicopters flying low over the green hills, scattering his milling flock as their heavy rotors spit thunder into the stillness.
Since the invasion, there has been little war here in the quiet shadows and remote valleys of the Koh-i-Baba, but Nashir knows the Americans bring the war with them wherever they fly, like stinking flies spreading plague.
He squints into the sun, hand over his eyes as he watches the foreign machines come to a hovering stop. There are ropes dangling from their bellies now, and men and machinery coming down the ropes, neat as you please, all in shades of black.
He watches them descend into the bosom of the valley, the blue plastic shortwave in his hand shiny against his dusty brown tunban.
He pauses thoughtfully, then presses the button to transmit.
Warrant Officer Edward Caldez waits until the last of the black-suited men have made their way down the fastrope and then coaxes the Chinook into a low-altitude buzz over the mountainside on his way back to Kabul, uncaring of the frightened goats startling and scattering mere meters below him. His mind is elsewhere.
He blinks every forty-three seconds exactly. His copilot, Jeremy “Jimmy” Henderson blinks in the same interval, seven seconds staggered. A spool of glistening saliva dribbles down his chin and his eyes are bloodshot. Jimmy shares his expression. Neither of them are all there at the moment.
There is a seven-fingered ideogrammatic spider nestled somewhere between neurons firing in his brain and the imprint of him, Edward Caldez, that moves through ideatic space. The spider’s name is O’Brien, and it is, at the moment, serving as the frontal lobe of five-hundred and seventy six people concurrently. It weaves a web of inference and spindles along on gossamer legs, here and there pulling a thread or two, turning a head, making a reference on a chart, transcribing clearance codes. It would hum if it could- it enjoys being human, for the moment.
O’Brien will eat and eat, swallow the observations, data, memories of this Week That Should Not Be for the men and women of Kabul airbase. He will swallow Colonel Benjamin Baudner’s harried call to the Pentagon, swallow Specialist Miranda Gibbon’s curious exclamation at the things they have us flying these days, swallow the way Edward Caldez tries not to look too closely at the plastic-and-blackbox sheathing of the men he’s flying, up and down the web until all of it coalesces into a tidy bundle in his stomach and he dies, curled up into a hyperdense ball of information like a closed fist.
It’s not a perfect system of course- O’Brien is far too young to be perfect, though he tries his best. Five thousand gallons of fuel will vanish without explanation from airfield inventory. A discarded priming card will be left carelessly on the floor of Baudner’s office. There will be a thirty-seven percent increase in incidences of manic-depression and paranoid schizophrenia in medical discharge records from Kabul over the next few years. There are holes aplenty in this process for those who search for them- and there will be plenty of searchers soon enough.
But none of that is O’Brien’s fault. He is only a last resort, after all. A hack job. A hasty and inelegant maneuver rushed into service to bridge the auspices of an apparatus that was never, for all its pretenses, truly global.
Perhaps that is why he is four hours behind schedule.
At 0830 hours AFT 8/17/10, PHYSICS forward observation team 0948-Red Dog was deployed to Band-e-Amir National Park in Bamyan Province, Afghanistan as part of measures outlined in Operation Carrion Vigil, supported by requisitioned logistical assets ███████████████.
This deployment was in response to credible intelligence indicating paraterrorist activity in the locale surrounding World Paraheritage Site UN-X7FF-76 “City of Woes”.
At 1030 hours, team leader Captain Johnathan Baukeraz contacted Regional Command to confirm the presence of paraterrorist activity, reporting multiple sightings of suspected KTO-Redhair-Grayladder “Chaos Insurgency” combat cells actively patrolling the area inside and around the acropolis. The usage of then-experimental Bronze Mask long range facial recognition technology confirms the presence of designated Operation Carrion Vigil High Value Targets in the vicinity of Site UN-X7FF-76. Upon corroboration of the report with PSYLOS assets, officer-in-command Colonel Martha Halberd authorizes the escalation of Emergent Response Category to level four.
Alastaire Mcmnemon, formerly A.M. formerly The Sommelier formerly Alexander Ward, follows the shepherd over the hill, shielding her eyes against the midmorning sun with one hand as her sneakers scrape over the flattened dirt of the shepherd’s trail. There is a wide clearing in the waist-high dry grass ahead of them, freshly marred by multiple pairs of heavy footsteps. And there, to the right, a broad impression trailing into an undulating indentation, leading haphazardly into the brush.
Patting her guide on the shoulder, she presses a packet of crisp hundred dollar bills into his hand.
“خداحافظ"
"همچنین خداحافظ دوست من"
she answers back, waving as the shepherd climbs back over the hill, vanishing into the haze. Alastaire walks gingerly over to the brush, taking care not to disturb the tracks. She looks closer, critically. Something catches her eye. She leans down and gently moves a branch aside.
There, piled in a careless heap behind the shrubbery is her prize: fastrope, nylon still bright, barely dirty. Fresh.
Kneeling in the dust, she pushes aside the rest of the desiccated fronds, whistling tunefully as she slowly removes her left glove. It seemed her guests today were polite.
They’d remembered to bring gifts.
It is here that the first critical failures become apparent. Due to logistical and scheduling constraints, 0948-Red Dog opted to fastrope directly into the operational zone instead of establishing a secondary landing zone outside of the operational perimeter and proceeding on foot. To maintain operational security, Captain Baukeraz had ordered a series of low-level sorties to take place above the operational zone in the preceding days, in an attempt to obfuscate the actual landing site. This failed- the extent of KTO-Redhair-Grayladder’s collaboration with the local populace was severely underestimated by PHYSICS, as was the employment of civilian shepherds as aerial observers.
Following the observation team’s initial failure to disinfect the landing zone, the discovery of the landing site by HVT-Grayladder-Bluechild ensured the total compromise of the initial insertion.
0948-Red Dog assumed that their provided tangen++ enhanced stealth chameleon cloak technology would compensate for operational deficiencies and maintain operational security. This assumption would prove to be only partially correct.
FIFTEEN YEARS AGO
Delta 084 steps through the still-smoldering buildings of ISVOS installation Al-Furajih-92, polaroid flashing as he surveys the broken pieces of what had once been a listening station. Here, a discarded assault rifle is embedded almost half a foot into a low plaster wall, there, a spray of machine oil from the punctured fuel line of an insurgent technical forms a slick rainbow. The vehicle itself is flipped cleanly over in a mangled mess. Broken glass crunches under his boots as he moves on.
He photographs the corpses too, lifting away sheets of blue tarping to reveal the way their plate carriers buckle inward, concaving into shattered ribcages, the way limbs dangle limply from broken sockets or are otherwise entirely detached, piled in heaps of brown viscera swarming with flies.
He is methodical and thorough and certain- but above all else, he is still very young. Young enough to survey the carnage and see only evidence of a game that, while lost, could've been played better.
Young enough to do the impossible.
The Coalition was not the Foundation, 084 muses, kneeling down to inspect a discarded piece of ceramic, stained faintly with granular discharge.
The Foundation is an edifice built on secrecy, an old dowager peering warily through moth-ridden curtains as she claws at moldy pearls, obsessively exact. The Coalition makes a pretense of this too, with their second mission concerns and MEDEA teams, but it is not the same. The Foundation, for example, would never conduct an operation such as this without a dozen cleanup teams on standby just outside the perimeter, waiting with bated breath to sanitize and disinfect, to catalog and collect the bloody artefacts, to plaster over the bullet holes and conceal the screaming wounds, shielding their business almost abashedly.
The Foundation has learned humility, 084 thinks, then corrects himself, lips twitching beneath the polyphasic mask that hugs the contours of his face.
We have taught the Foundation humility.
The Coalition, in contrast, is yet proud.
We are almighty, they proclaim from their walled gardens and high towers, standing astride the world. Look upon our works! They are saying it here too, in plainer text, written with the corpses they leave behind, with the brazen ruin emblazoned upon their banners. Look what we make of our enemies!
Sheer, blinding arrogance, but cultivated with such certainty, such circumstance, it becomes truth. Inevitability.
The Foundation seeks to enforce normalcy.
The Coalition weaponizes that ideal.
084 pockets the polaroid, hand reaching down to defuse the timer ticking away on his belt. All in all, it’s been a good day’s work.
As he walks down the hill, away from the corpses and the wreckage, the last embers of the battle wink out in the dry desert wind.
It should be noted here that the following events represent an unprecedented deviation in the operational tendency of KTO-Redhair-Grayladder. In defense of Colonel Halberd’s command decisions, if the Silicon Nornir didn’t see this coming, it is unlikely that anyone else could have either.
Delta 084 throws a Reese’s peanut butter wrapper at the Engineer’s head as he leans back in the ratty leather office chair, putting his feet up on the smooth, shiny blackstone desk that incongruously fills the cramped space of the safehouse.
The scrawny red-haired woman scowls as she reaches down to pick up the litter, the brown paper wrapper flaring to dust in her hands.
“You want to fight a GOC PHYSICS team.”
She sighs, rubbing the bridge of her nose.
“Let me correct myself.”
“You want to fight a pitched battle with a Coalition kill team in an isolated, moldering ruin in Afghanistan, of all places, cut off from support, with no fallback contingencies, knowing full well that they could simply decide to bomb you off the face of the earth at any given moment, and you somehow expect me to not just abet this insanity, but also help you convince two other full combat cells to join in on this suicide attempt?”
“Do I need to remind you what overwhelmingly tends to happen to said combat cells when they come into the vicinity of STRIKE teams?”
Delta 084 holds up a finger, washing down the last bites of chocolate with a swig from a silver flask. The mineral water goes down smooth as silk as the Engineer’s frown deepens.
“How is it that I can tell you’re smirking under there, despite the fact that you ought to no longer have a face, conceptually speaking? Is it memetic? You know that shit’s not allowed in the safehouse.”
084 sets down his flask, letting out a contented sigh.
“Not anomalous, ma’am. Just talent.”
“And I do know what happens when we face the Coalition’s butchers, ma’am. Maybe better than anyone living.”
A thick stack of manila folders sprawls carelessly across the table. The Engineer reaches for one.
Vladivostok, 1987
There’s polaroid photographs inside, and stacks of yellowing index cards, diagrams, Engine printouts, plastic evidence bags of labeled debris.
She reaches for the next one, and the next, their contents identical.
Tibet, 1991
Utah, 1992
Kuwait, 1995
“You’ve been busy,” the Engineer breathes, flipping through the folders, eyes flickering over the documents with preternatural speed. There’s a whirring noise as the jacked Maxwellian cooling fan behind her left ear spins to life, the drumming of her fingers on the table morphing into a staccato frenzy.
“These are… thorough.”
084 nods. “Fourteen significant combat encounters between Insurgency combat cells and PHYSICS teams from 1985 onwards. Sixty seven of our own dead, fourteen more captured and subsequently executed.”
The Engineer winces, although 084 knows she knows the statistics by heart. He is, as they say, preaching to the choir. Literally.
“Zero confirmed enemy casualties, although there have been one or two times where we’ve managed to disable a suit. An impressive record, I must admit.”
The Engineer sets the folders down, reaching towards the plastic cooler at her feet for another ice pack that she places gingerly against the side of her temple. The plastic audibly hisses as it meets her skin.
“Go on, 084. Explain to me why this time will be any different.”
Delta-084 unwraps another chocolate bar.
“The Coalition-”
“- is not the Foundation.” The Engineer finishes the adage for him, motioning impatiently.
He takes a bite of the Snickers.
“The Coalition doesn’t have Sites. It doesn’t bother to maintain garrisons around the globe, scrambling to chase down every two-bit shaman or Bigfoot sighting in the manner of our dear colleagues. The Coalition understands it doesn’t need to wage a proactive war.”
“No, what the Coalition does is respond. They maintain the most powerful thaumic monitoring system in the world- VERITAS. They have their Assessment Teams, paired with the strongest naval contingent and airlift capacity of any organization below the Veil. When anything big happens, they’re the first to know, and they have the capacity to move pieces into play faster than anyone else on the board.”
“What was the first STRIKE operation in history?” She takes a moment to consider the question.
“For our purposes? Prague, 1939. Allied Occult Initiative raid on a Thule Society ritual site. First usage of mass translocation as an insertion method in modern occult history.”
“Precisely.”
“The original conception for STRIKE was as a means of disruption, specifically against Thule Society efforts to assemble the Key of Solomon through ritual. That is the fundamental conceit of their hegemony, disruption. The Coalition are ritual-killers, first and foremost, and they have become very, very good at it.”
Cool gray eyes study him, beads of condensate slowly sizzling down her face. The casing of the ice pack is beginning to melt, but she doesn’t seem to notice.
"You are aware this isn't the first time someone's tried a sham ritual gambit on STRIKE."
It wasn't a question.
"But this is the first time it'll work."
2. THE COST OF BUSINESS
Magic is a transaction, an investment in exchange for return. Ritual magic, as it stands, is the bloody crystallization of that conceit.
The foundation of ritual is efficiency.
Alastaire squats in the middle of the graven circle, stripped to the waist. There is a crude block of carved stone in front of her. It might have been an archstone once, or perhaps the base of a well, or a piece of foundation.
Now, it is an altar.
Upon the altar is a bleating lamb, bound messily with severed strands of high-tensile black nylon. Alastaire takes a deep breath, and draws a jagged shard of obsidian from out of the air besides her hand where it waits, thin and crisp.
The speakers set against the walls of the room blare to crackling life, tramping with the beat of leather drums, the stamping of feet and the jangle of brazen bells.
A-wey-o-manambe-a way-o-aesae.
There is a belt of white feathers in her left hand and a green stick of laurels clenched together in her fist and Alastaire rises to her feet, stamping in time with the beat.
A-wey-o-manambe-a way-o-aesae.
She turns to the north, moving in strident rhythm as the bleating of the terrified lamb blends with the coursing sounds, the air filled with phantom smoke that seeps from the walls, circling lazily around the boundary of her circle. She shouts nonsense words, meaningless syllables that drive the smoke into frenzy, that call from it shapes and shadows, toothsome wisps that bloom for malingering seconds before spiraling into the sky.
A-wey-o-manambe-a way-o-aesae.
It is lunacy, undirected, imprecise, a ritual that is the antithesis of ritual. She feels the earth below her feet move, the backlash working its way down the leyline that runs through the old mountain in serpentine curls.
A-wey-o-manambe-a way-o-aesae.
She makes her way to the altar and the bleating lamb and with the shard of glass slices a neat cut lengthwise across her forearm and smears the dripping blood onto the white feathers and her hand and daubs the lamb in red- the thing still struggling against the nylon bonds, bleating and screaming- and feels the smoke creep in through the boundaries.
What do you want?
It asks, whispering, tempting, trailing cold fingers lustfully down the spine of her soul.
“Noise.”
The glass comes down, and the lamb is still.
Shahr- e- Gholghola endures.
It sits atop of a ragged hill, a crumbling wall erected around a maze of ruined citadels overlooking slopes of barren rock. Here, in the old silence, the stones still remember.
The night is black and blazing and horsemen are racing around it in frenzied gallop. They throw torches over the stockades and scaffolding and set the city beneath the acropolis alight, and run down the scattered and fleeing crowds, corral them into tight knots that are cut down, crushed with hooves, the blood of a city flowing into the yellow earth.
Against the wall of the citadel lies the broken and bleeding body of a god, and over the god stands a king of the steppes and his companions, in their hands cruel iron knives wrested from the grave of an empire consigned from history.
They are flensing shimmering chunks of flesh off the bloody scaffold, tearing away sheets of hide and great ropes of divine offal that they cast into the fire burning green behind them, around which dance three terrible riddle-priests clad in bone, ululating into the burning sky. The king does this because a god made manifest is the aegis of its people and because a people’s volition is their god manifest and because the king hates these people. He is a conqueror, and this is a land that has been a bone in his throat and a stone in his boot and so he rips and he flays and he makes an example of the city and its people and their dead god.
The blood of the god flows into the yellow earth and mixes with the blood of its people, and there, in the old silence, the stones learn to remember.
Shahr- e- Gholghola endures.
At 1730 hours AFT on 8/17/10, nodes UCONN-12, 45, 77, and 89 in the VERITAS Global Monitoring System simultaneously recorded elevated levels of thaumic circulation in Leyline Ashcwenbheur-94, directly intersecting the operational zone.
At 1850 hours, 0984-Red Dog corroborated this report with on-site OCULUS readings, notifying Colonel Halberd, who escalated Emergent Response Category to Level Five. An emergency session of UNGOC High Command is convened to discuss response strategies.
“How can you be sure that they’re not just going to bomb you into oblivion?”
“I fail to see why we haven’t authorized the bombing run already. I have assets in the theatre ready to move within fifteen minutes. This entire thing could be over and done within the next hour.”
Magister Ryomen Thanaka of the Aetheric Society of the Golden Lotus grips the podium until his knuckles turn white, and tries his damndest not to disintegrate the High Illuminant with his mind.
“Because, as I have repeatedly told you already, the terrorists are sitting on a para-architectural history site of unparalleled importance. Because, they are also sitting on the convection point of a major leyline, which they are currently prying open in some beggared attempt at a channeling ritual! Because, sir, if you blunder in with your dirty western bombs, you could cause a thaumic disaster that levels half the country!”
“This again? You wizards are all the same. If every half-baked prophecy that came out of your mouths came true we wouldn’t be able to move two feet in any direction without blowing up the earth.”
Before the angry retort forming on the tip of his tongue can fly across the room and turn the smug bastard’s skin green until the next full moon, the door to the conference room bangs open.
Ryomen turns to see the blue-jacketed final member of the UNGOC Emergency Response Council stride through the doorway, as always accompanied by the crisp jingle of brass on bronze.
A vein bulges in his temple.
First the clown, and now the peacock.
The General regales him with an easy grin, lazy Yankee drawl curdling the air like spoiled milk.
“Congratulations, gentlemen, the solution is here. Strike Team Ivory Dagger has been scrambled, and will be on-site in twenty minutes.”
Turning on his heel, he marches back out of the room, letting the closing doors punctuate his parting words.
“This council is dismissed.”
084 has been talking at length. Standing, pacing, gesturing at tangents and examples as he unveils his masterwork piece by piece- a decade's worth of catastrophe laid out in sound and ink and splayed photographs.
There is something almost like hope in his voice as he speaks.
“The first thing we must establish is that whitesuits are not invincible. They are very good, to be sure- but to think of the suits themselves as a military asset wholly elevated from the capabilities of traditional elite infantry would be giving the Coalition too much credit. The suits are obedient to the constraints of design just like any other platform- there’s only so much warded armor you can slap on something bipedal while maintaining mobility, after all, even considering Coalition paratech.”
“Think about it. How many methods would you have, available to you at this moment, of killing a whitesuit?”
The Engineer hums thoughtfully, leaning back in her chair.
“Seven. Twelve, assuming I had minimal time to prepare.”
“And how many of those methods would completely ignore conventional armor?”
“Five. I think I’m starting to see what you’re getting at.”
“The Coalition understands that it is fundamentally unreasonable to shield its operators against the endless different attack vectors that paraweaponry offers. A question of personal durability beyond protection against conventional small arms becomes almost a moot point in the battles they pick. No, the primary asset of a whitesuit is far simpler- its ability to reliably survive insertion by translocation.”
“The problem with fighting a reactive war is, they give us the first move.”
EIGHT YEARS AGO
A man without a face walks brusquely past a harried white-suited woman in a bustling Eurtec crowd. He bumps into her briefly, shoulder to shoulder, turns into an alleyway and vanishes into thin air. The exchange takes less than thirty seconds.
She has killed herself by doing this. He has killed her by doing this.
Within seven hours of the meeting node 344.HSVC of NORSEC complex UN-775466 flags her down during a routine analysis of personnel scheduling and noospheric irregularities amidst the employees of PHYSICS North. Within seven hours and seventeen milliseconds of the meeting her daily routine has been tracked, double-verified, and heuristically modeled. Within seven hours, twenty-two minutes and thirty-three seconds of the meeting, Coalition Counterintelligence is racing up the staircase to her apartment complex.
She hears her front door cave in and pulls the trigger. The shotgun roars a mix of blessed salt, incendiaries, and silver oxide into her chin, splattering her brains across her dining room table and her soul across seventeen different afterlifes.
Across the way, 084 watches, just to be sure. His hand grips a plastic-sheathed placard imprinted with a banshee and does not tremble. She sold her life well.
-
Kerosene isn’t, as a rule, allowed in the Library. Neither is she, technically speaking, not anymore, but Alastaire is wearing a different face today. She gives the scuttling Page a respectful nod and starts running. It takes about thirty seconds for the walls to start screaming. That’s a good sign.
Strictly speaking, the burning isn’t necessary. But the Library is a living thing, and every page of every book within it is a part of its heart, and Alastaire has always been particular to the classics. Nothing draws magic thicker and faster than pain, after all, and now the air is brimming with it, choking with agony and smoke. She takes the thread in her hand, gritting her teeth, and starts hacking away.
The Librarians are at her heels now, shrieking and keening, but the skein is bulging, rendering like slow-cooked fat. She feels the tip of her knife glide through reality’s kidneys and with a howl of splitting atoms she makes it through, collapsing into a smoking heap in the middle of the circle. 084 is there to help her up. She flashes him a grin and presses a bundle of silver wafers into his hand- microscale digitigrade manuscripts from a timeline where the Sassanian Empire holds half the Orion Arm.
The work continues, bracingly swift.
-
Dust scatters from the ceiling with every impact, fine as sugar. Alastaire rises to her feet, knife in hand, mouth drawn into a thin line. 084 pulls her back down, shaking his head. Somewhere above them, a door caves in. A woman screams. There is gunfire.
In the aftermath, Alastaire learns to swallow the taste of bile. 084 takes pictures. They bury what they can, and move on.
-
A man without a face bites his lip as he watches his friend choke on vomit, caught in a manufactured nightmare of white-clad killers.1
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Two tons of beryllium bronze disappear from the belly of a London warehouse caught by sudden flame, and a woman with many names is there to make sure nothing remains to crawl out of the conflagration.
-
The man and woman trace lines of fire across the world and wherever they go, people die. Cells burn, assets are uprooted, favors are recalled and answered in kind.
-
They were volunteers, 084 reminds himself, lying alone in the dark.
They were, all of them, volunteers.
-
Above it all the Engine hums and breathes stochastic fire to mask the steps of their dance.
The Array is the pride of the Coalition. It is the greatest testament to their new path, to the golden promise of a future where mankind soars proudly into a bright and beautiful tomorrow upon wings of fire. It is the triumph of their engineers and the wonders of their mages made into a thing of cold, shining steel.
It is a weapon of war.
Seven bronze columns surround a silver heptagram engraved with micrometer precision on an unbroken sheet of black marble that is itself encircled by concentric orbitals of cold steel so thick with inscribed thaumic information that the plastic dust-cover that sheathes the machine while not in use is given nondenominational last rites by the base’s chaplain before its monthly incineration.
The rings cannot be broken, and so the nine members of STRIKE are lowered into position by cranes, armor-locked into kneeling supplication- grim ivory statues dredged wholesale out of Arthurian myth.
Coalition propagandists are not known for their subtlety.
They are superlative warriors, these men who have given themselves to the Fivefold Mission. Their minds are unbreachable, the mission imprinted upon their subconscious with the infallible certainty of psycho-memetic conditioning, shielded behind a dense mesh of unbroachable psykill membrane and professional enthusiasm.
The rings of the Array spin into whirring motion like a titanic astrolabe, the room cast into a dim blue glow by the thrumming of the thaumoelectric generator as technicians scurry to make their final adjustments. Sparks of wild magic are drawn out of the air, running down the sides of the columns in perspicuous droplets thick enough to taste. There is a flicker in the overhead lighting as a hundred-thousand soul-equivalents of harvested energy is shoved spinning and hissing into the orbiting rings.
They are the vanguard, the defenders of humanity.
They are the mailed fist of the Coalition.
They are, simply, the best of the best.
They are STRIKE, and as the Array sends them hurtling through nonspace at the speed of thought, they know no fear.
3. FEARLESS
It would be a mistake to say that the Coalition always arrived at the worst possible moment.
In 1986, a now-extinct sect of Large-Hivemind-Revival radicals attempting the illegal creation of unsanctioned theomodal intelligence had gotten wise to the whole affair, attempting a novel method of ritual organization that left no less than half of their cybermages combat-effective at any given time. The reasoning being that if the Coalition was wont to strike the moment heads turned, they would simply keep an eye on the back of their heads.
The Coalition had let them complete their ritual, waiting until their local network had been thoroughly subsumed by cries of eschatological ecstasy, and then translocated a full STRIKE contingent twenty meters above the head of the infant god, crushing it into silicon paste along with the rest of the congregation shortly thereafter.
All this was to say: trying to preempt a STRIKE team’s insertion was rather like trying to dodge a sniper’s bullet after-the-fact, in most cases, moreso a question of brief philosophy than of actionable policy.
Predicting translocation was a fool’s errand, after all.
0984-Red Dog makes its way up the pass to the fallback point in tight formation. They are shaken, but relieved.
This day has been an exhausting fiasco, but the hard part is over. The calvary is coming, and now all they have to do is move to the minimum viable withdrawal distance and watch the fireworks.
The Sommelier tastes their retreat on the wind, perched on a crumbling outcropping of weathered rock that might’ve once been a watchtower. Twin tendrils of corded muscle extend from her mouth, running with viscous saliva that vibrates in subatomic harmony with the microscopic smattering of sweat and stress pheromones staining the microfiber strands of the nylon wound around her hand, tight enough to hurt.
The tendrils recede, flicking back into nonspace with a whiplike speed that sends her head cracking backwards. Rubbing her jaw, Alastaire dials in her transmitter.
“Primary bellwether tripped. Assessment team retreating to the secondary perimeter. STRIKE imminent.”
Beneath her feet, in the ghostwind that howls through the dry warrens honeycombing the hill, Shahr- e- Gholghola stirs.
Strike Team Ivory Dagger tears into existence amidst a gentle misting of frozen elephant blood half a kilometer above the acropolis. There is a statistically significant amount of turbulence.
STRIKE4’s thaumic sink glows white hot and bursts from his back in a phosphorescent spiral of energized elementary particles, the upper third of his body following shortly thereafter in a rain of spinning ceramic shrapnel and million-dollar dust.
This is unfortunate, but within parameters.
The rest of STRIKE liaisons over the Local Tactical Network: the corpse of a θ dimensional data squid pulled halfway through itself into realspace, tethering their minds together with a level of cognitive intimacy surpassing that of most corpus callosums. Communication on the tacnet takes place at a rate just below the maximum chemical potential of human neurobiology- frenetic exchanges of hardcoded cybermantic ritualisms sending combat drivers spinning into frenzied action before conscious thought can register. OCULUS systems warm up, feeding fresh streams of data into a noospheric gestalt already howling for blood. Combat stims pump into eager bloodstreams, safeties disengage, and real-time NORNET simulations adjust and update mission parameters on-the-fly.
By the time STRIKE hits the ground, eight seconds later, they’ve already won sixteen million times. All that’s left is to execute.
“Therefore we of Delta Command document the steps of the Plan as transcribed by the Engineer of the Chaos-”
The Engineer scowls, interrupting him. “Hereafter. It’s Hereafter. Everyone always gets it wrong.”
There’s a bottle of scotch on the blackstone table between them, and two glass tumblers, half-full. 084 picks one up and drains it.
It’s only mostly for dramatic effect.
The work continues through the night.
STRIKE5 pulverizes a stone column at a thirty degree angle, skipping three times off the ground at terminal velocity before rising smoothly into a loping gallop at seventy miles per hour.
The tacnet highlights his recommended trajectory in a pleasant purple blur of altered reality, politely instructing him to run through two additional buildings and jump off a thirty-foot cliff. His feet are already moving.
There are thirty-four aetheric life signatures on his side of the mountain concentrated into five strongpoints forming a rough half-circle around the acropolis. He has to give credit to the terrorists where it’s due- forming into traditional defensive lines would’ve seen the entirety of STRIKE dropping as one unit onto the Central Ritual Site then breaking out through the weakest point thereafter. As it stands, the insurgent formation complicates matters.
STRIKE2 falls into position next to him- two tons of steel and ceramic casually leapfrogging across crumbling stone buttresses, footfalls eerily light. The first strongpoint is coming up ahead of them, a broken palisade surrounding a collection of ruins that might’ve once been a schoolyard. There’s no time for subtlety- STRIKE5 bursts through the outer wall like the fist of god, detonating the antipersonnel mine strapped to his chest in a hurricane of hypersonic shrapnel.
Instead of violently perforated flesh, he is met with a hail of high-caliber firepower. They are ready for him. This is unusual.
There is a glowing orange forcefield filling the space of the courtyard, opaque and impermeable. Tungsten shrapnel bristles over its surface like porcupine quills, held inexorably in place while a steady stream of gunfire rips outwards from the emplacement, pinging off his suit like drops of rain. OCULUS readouts scroll just beneath his stream of consciousness, NORNET updating force estimates and adjusting timetables even as a firing solution presents itself with a pleasant ding.
STRIKE5 turns sideways, hiding his profile behind the thicker plating of his pauldron, pistol in hand. Four shots, geomantically precise, strike the shield center mass.
The shield holds, flickers, wavers, and finally bursts, sending the hovering shrapnel clattering to the floor. The suit informs him that the resultant backlash will have had a thirty-three percent chance of causing instant cerebral hemorrhage. One of the aether-signatures flickers, stumbling to the ground.
Good enough.
He accelerates, pushing the suit to maximum capacity, stone floor cracking beneath him with a peal of muted thunder as he flashes forwards in a haze of kill-velocity. There are shouts of alarm, and as the red-purple tinge of fear spreads across the aether-signatures like wildfire he almost smiles. Almost. That would be unprofessional of him.
When subject to sufficient force, flesh behaves as a fluid medium. Fingers sinking deftly into muscle, wrapping around the point of greatest structural stability (right beneath the ribcage at the conjunction of the last three thoracic vertebrae), STRIKE5 swings the insurgent’s corpse like a riot shield. Gore ripples out of the insurgent’s back, splattering the remainder of the fireteam with steaming offal.
To their credit, the terrorists don’t blink. STRIKE5’s optics pick out a set of steely brown eyes staring steadily at him through goggles half-covered with dripping scarlet- the insurgent maintaining steady, even suppressive fire as he retreats backwards in good order.
It’s almost impressive.
STRIKE5 splatters him against the wall anyways and turns to scan the ground for the incapacitated BLUE asset. There, crawling along the north wall towards an exit, haloed by flickering orange light.
Servos screaming, he lunges towards the stricken wizard, firing as he goes. One, two, three, and the shield is down- banking straight into a soaring coup-de-grace, trajectory perfect-
The corpse in his hand twitches.
It's not even a sophisticated trick. A Maxwellian would’ve found it borderline insulting. Failsafe augmentation, redundant nervous fibers running on reflex and twitching inside torn muscle revealing strands of nanomesh weave, a bloody net of torn ligaments whipping out of the corpse with explosive force, tangling around his limbs. It’s just enough to turn a perfectly calculated leap into an awkward, flailing tumble that sends him crashing into the turf.
In the seconds before impact, STRIKE5 manages a fourth shot. The wizard’s head turns into an expanding ball of heated gas, cleanly cauterized at the neck. He has time to feel relief before something slams into the back of his suit so hard his scopes go white.
Warning notes blare in his subconscious as combat drivers push priority impact reports, tacnet furiously requesting additional computation power even as the suit skids across the ground in a cloud of dust.
> No known impact database matches.
> Probable second BLUE asset active.
This is more than just unusual, it is impossible.
NORNET’s analysis is not just infallible- it is prophecy. He had seen the VERITAS readings himself in the pre-mission, the careful tabulations of enemy force estimates based on the ritual’s ongoing thaumic output.
They should not have this many mages outside of the central ritual site.
The enemy’s effective tactical range has more than just doubled, it has-
The tacnet stutters.
STRIKE5 rips smoldering remains of nanomesh away from his chassis in ropes of crumbling carbon as the tacnet recalibrates, spent thaumic sink ejecting itself from his back in fragments of smoking bronze.
By baseline human standards it takes only a few heartbeats. By the standards of NORNET- a distributed network with a detectable fraction of the Silicon Nornir's total operational capacity permanently allocated towards its needs, it is an eternity. Conflicting priorities and routines messily clash.
The gears of the Coalition seize, stutter, and finally, resolve.
At the pinnacle of the acropolis six Sassanian pillars hold up the sky.
Once a living divinity was enthroned here on a dias of sandalwood and myrrh, holding court from the Hindu Kush to the Arabian Sea.
Now, it is a boneyard, a teutonic ossuary riven from the innards of dead faith.
A ring of solemn figures kneel in the white dust, each draped in scarlet, hooded faces downcast. An unbroken band of bronze wire wraps around their clenched fists, a daisy chain that holds the circle implacably in place as around them the stones shift, spin, and howl their remembrance into the heavens.
There is a terrible pressure here, a monolithic thrumming visible from orbit with the right eyes.
It’s nothing that STRIKE7 hasn’t seen before.
Two shock grenades land in the center of the circle, detonating into blinding flares of semi-sentient magnesium which go on to perform hissing renditions of a BANSHEE class audiohazard at 120 decibels. It’s old inventory, Ichabod-issue, stock-standard wizard-kill tactics: distract, deny, decapitate.
STRIKE7 switches to full OCULUS scopes, the ring of kneeling bodies lighting up on her display like human-shaped stars, thaumic radiation circulating through the mass in a coruscant vortex of violet energy. The rest of her contingent opens fire simultaneously, blowing three perfect holes into each of the figures in turn. They do not fall, and the thaumic energy continues its accelerating circulation, the howling building into an ominous crescendo.
This visual impossibility has not yet had time to fully reach STRIKE7’s occipital lobe before NORNET is already screaming in her ear, break break break, automated evacuation routines flaring into panicked action. Time stands still.
It was never a ritual, STRIKE7 realizes, suspended in that impossible moment.
It was a circuit.
IEDs are different from conventional weapons, however, in important ways that make them appealing to a range of irregular forces. These differences include the following…
…lethality, which compensates for a lack of more powerful conventional weapons…
…variability in design, which makes developing countermeasures and countervailing tactics difficult…
…adaptability to the operating environment, which makes IEDs more versatile and difficult to detect…
…scalability, which allows terrorists to modulate their level of violence…
The IED has now entered…. the standard repertoire of irregular forces in urban areas across the planet, and there are no signs that this threat is shrinking; on the contrary… it seems to be growing.
—David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains
In operations wherein the strategic tempo necessitates swift and critical action… it is important to consider the usage of any and all means by which to deny, disorient, and trap the enemy… in a prison of his own expectations.
—Author Unknown, Contradiction and Iteration
The ghostwind howls through the warrens and whispers over the ruins and with it comes the scent of magic.
Shahr- e- Gholghola stirs.
The earth trembles, sifts in susurrant anticipation as the blood of the city sniffs at the newborn power encircling its heart, fresh and resonant- a closed circuit of bronze-wrapped corpses- lightning in a bottle churning in bridleless temptation. There is not enough consciousness left in the ruins to mount even a feeble contest, were there any other wills to challenge its claimancy. But there are none.
Shahr- e- Gholghola stirs.
It drinks in the proffered power, slowly at first and then without reservation, and as the stones howl their remembrance into the sky, the old blood wakes.
For the first time in two millennia, Shahr- e- Gholghola sees.
It sees fire, flashes in the night. It sees defenders upon its walls, and a flock of things in the shape of men set loose upon them, ivory things that smell of powder and blood, fast and fleet of foot, dealing death. Horsemen, the stones scream, horsemen come again to bleed it, to set flame, to take, to rend asunder.
Three of these horsemen are currently shooting it in the head.
STRIKE5 turns in time to see the hilltop detonate violently in a plume of wild magic that turns night to day. The resultant mass of molten rock and plasma shifts and reforms until it amalgamates into a shape uncomfortably similar to that of a lidless eye.
It is staring directly at him.
The city begins to scream.
4. BLOCK PARTY
UNGOC Emergency Council vote to authorize FORCE CALIPER RED response on site UN-X7FF-76 following unprecedented manifestation event.
| YEA | NAY | ABS. |
|---|---|---|
| X | ||
| X | ||
| X | ||
| X | ||
| X |
MOTION FAILS
Alastaire is with them, crouched at the outskirts of the battle in small huddles of two or three. Perimeter guard, small arms only, evade without engaging, the assessment brief described. Local dupes armed with rusty cold-war surplus, meant to keep civilians away and look threatening while the real soldiers patrolled the acropolis itself. Standard Insurgency fare.
Tactically irrelevant.
Ragged chapans drop to the ground, unveiling high-grade Eurtec-standard battle fatigues. Balaclavas are pulled from grim faces, replaced with full-dive Iron Eye combat information systems and cannibalized Maxwellian optics. Shallow caches are unearthed, and rusty Kalashnikovs clatter to the ground, far stranger things bristling in their place.
As the hilltop detonates in an aurora of violet light, a flag is unfurled, black on black against the night. A red wheel, unbroken and breaking, a rally against the world. Today, it is a banner of the hunt.
The Insurgency’s elite moves as one into the burning city, and Alastaire goes with them.
The jaws of the trap snap shut.
STRIKE5 is finding that, as a rule, Insurgents die messy.
Wrenching his wristblade out of the terrorist’s back, he grits his teeth in frustration as the rune-marked steel hisses and pits, corroding in an instant. Kicking away the steaming corpse, he ejects the contaminated weapon, sealant hissing as the suit closes off the breach.
It is, objectively, a clever trick. What do you do when you can't afford to augment your whole group? Make it a shell game. This is the fifth time an insurgent’s corpse has sprung a bloody surprise in death, and now he finds nothing remotely admirable about their tenacity.
Dodging the pillars of living rock that spring up to bar his path and smashing through a pile of self-homogenizing rubble, STRIKE5 lays down suppressive fire, grimacing as crooked crenellations spring from thin air to shield the RPG team that shelters on the rooftop. It was bad enough before the fucking city joined in on the side of the terrorists. Now, the tactical situation is rapidly becoming untenable. We’re trying to defend you, you stupid fucking ruin. The ground beneath him crumbles away and he barely catches onto the ledge in time, the gaping pit below him utterly opaque to his sensors. This is getting tiresome.
Behind him, STRIKE2 is fighting for her life, truly for her life, for the first time in decades. Under other circumstances, she might’ve even been enjoying herself.
The terrorist is good, unreasonably so.
He hits like a goddamned Sidhe Knight and takes bullets like a Clockwork Priest, and he’s fast- a lithe shadow weaving nets of killing energy at speeds that has the tacnet chirping in distress. STRIKE2 is forced back on one knee as the suit takes yet another direct hit, a dense ball of liquid hellfire that leaves her pauldron scarred and blackened. Where the fuck did they find this guy?
A roaring three-headed hydra spirals out of the shadows and costs her her last banishment grenade, followed by a spear of purple lightning that catches her full in the chest. Sparks fly, alarms chime, and the remnants of her thaumic sink eject from her back in rivulets of molten bronze but STRIKE2 is already running, pushing through the stream of annihilating light as magic pools around her like water off of a duck’s back. She catches the bastard’s head in her hands, gauntlets screaming as she squeezes with force enough to shatter steel.
The fucker doesn’t go down.
She sees his eyes, shining and bloodshot, glaring at her as ichor runs in smoking rivulets down his face. She squeezes harder, feels the terrorist's force-shield begin to splinter, his skin going gray with backlash.
He’s smiling.
The particle beam rakes across her exposed back, gliding through billion-dollar ceramic composite like so much wrapping paper. Something critical detonates. She tastes blood.
The suit slowly, achingly sinks to one knee as circuits cut, her grip slackening.
The insurgent is plastered across her display, larger than life as the HUD glitches nauseatingly, the data-stream winking out as tacnet cuts its losses. Bile rises in her throat as he leans in close to her faceplate, hand raised in mocking salute. Then the display snaps off, and STRIKE2 sees nothing at all.
“Do you think it’ll work?”
The question takes her by surprise. The blackstone table is strewn with clutter, wrappers, empty bottles, pens and paper and manila folders- the detritus of conspiracy. She takes a moment to respond, shuffling the sheaf of papers into place.
“I’ve seen worse plans succeed and better plans fail.” She sets the documents down. “That’s not the question you should be asking.”
“Can you herd the Committee into voting for it?”
She smiles. “Better.”
084 is eating again, Doritos vanishing into the void that delineates his absent face. It’s an ungainly habit, but the Engineer doesn’t judge. She’s seen worse.
“Maybe. This won’t go over well with the legitimists, but there are certain strings I can pull if it comes to that.” She sets the papers down.
084 sighs, wiping at his hands with a bit of crumpled schematic.
“You want me to tell you why.”
There is a moment of silence, hanging heavy in the air.
“We are losing the propaganda war. If you don’t believe me, go outside and see for yourself. Walk the streets and slums of Eurtec and look into the faces of the people that pass by. Every day the Coalition’s fist goes unchallenged, more and more people begin to believe that it is unchallengeable. That struggle is futile. The simpering dogs of the Serpent continue to vomit their reformist drivel and it is working. Look at our recruitment numbers! We call ourselves the flame that rends the world but we are going out. Extinguished day by day because we burn but we do not burn bright enough. Because we die in the shadows while they work in the light. Something has to give. You know this as well as I do. Someone has to light the torch again.”
“I would have us do this to prove it can be done. Because, in the end, it must be done.”
He takes a panting breath, a sac of venom years in the making emptying at last.
“I have labored in the dark half my life for the sake of the cause. If I am to die for it, allow me to do so in the light.”
There is a moment of silence, hanging heavy in the air.
The Engineer responds.
"Do you think we're supervillains?"
The faceless man is hunched over a pile of notes on the safehouse floor, as if for warmth. She takes a moment to think about it.
"Well, you are wearing a mask", she teases, "and I'm a magical terrorist. Clearly you are my disfigured henchman, my sidekick, perhaps."
084 turns to look up at her. He’s worried, she can tell he’s worried. The meeting hadn't ended the way he'd expected. He doesn’t have a face anymore but he wears one around her anyways, to make her happy. She takes his hand to stop it from shaking. If it stops her own, no one else is here to see. The fundamentals haven't changed. The plan they've crafted is still viable. They can do this.
“Be safe.”
“I will.”
“Win.”
“I will.”
Alastaire Mcmnemon watches her comrades advance beneath a black flag that plucks the stars from the sky, and breathes deep lungfuls of air that is, for the moment, wholly and truly free.
0984-Red Dog watches the stars go out one by one from their perch above the city and begs desperately into the airwaves for permission to die valiantly. It is denied.
The grand hall of the Council of 108 is a place of power. A high ceiling, tastefully adorned with silver mosaics of noble men and women doing noble things, arches over seven rows of simple wooden desks arranged in an imperfect circle around a marble podium. It is a room that highlights the words of men, amplifying their importance.
It is not a place that suffers secrets well.
The High Illuminant of the Minerval Brotherhood of Earthly Truths supposes that that’s why he’s currently being stuffed into a broom closet by an angry wizard.
Ryomen Thanaka looks fitfully around the room before snapping his fingers and muttering something under his breath that pushes over his skin like a gust of wind.
“There. Privacy, for the moment.”
“Are you out of your goddamn mind?” The angry hiss slips out of his mouth before his brain can quite catch up with him. The wizard, if anything, looks amused.
“PHYSICS is fucking us both over.” The sentence, incongruous in its simplicity, takes the wind out of his sails. The wizard smooths down his waterlily robes and continues.
“Ten years now that blue-jacketed bastard has been draining us both dry. How many of the Brotherhood’s chapterhouses has he ransacked, how much of your gold has he spent to fly his tin soldiers to this and that shithole? How many of your motions have been blockaded by his drooling flunkies in the Council while he bleeds us both to sustain his pissing contest with the Foundation? We’ve been too caught up in the old rivalries to see. He’s turning the Coalition into his private army, and we’re all footing the bill.”
“What are you getting at?”
“I’m saying- his tin soldiers have finally run into something they can’t shoot to death. Good. Let them pay the toll for once. Abstain.”
“The Insurgency-”
"The Insurgency is irrelevant. Contrarians and amateurs with a few party tricks. Thirty-seven combat encounters we’ve had with them since the fifties and each and every one has ended the exact same way. So what if they manage to salvage a suit or two? The Foundation will solve that problem for us, given time. In the meantime, that bastard and his tin soldiers can squirm through committees and hearings while we thoroughly reevaluate PHYSICS' operational parameters in the wake of this fiasco."
A thin, mirthless smile.
"For the sake of the Fivefold Mission, of course."
“If I agree to this, you understand, this makes us both complicit. They will come for us just as hard as we will be going for them. We can’t keep fumbling in the dark. If I abstain on the motion, you will vote for my next legislative packet, and you’ll get the rest of your witch doctors to back it too.”
The wizard hesitates, then nods.
“Then we have an accord.”
UNGOC Emergency Council vote to authorize STARLIGHT BROKEN DAGGER contingency on site UN-X7FF-76.
| YEA | NAY | ABS. |
|---|---|---|
| X | ||
| X | ||
| X | ||
| X | ||
| X |
MOTION FAILS
5. ASHES TO ASHES
STRIKE5 fights on. His pistol is spent, so he uses his knives. His knives are broken, so he uses his fists. His gauntlets are cracked and splintered, smoking with acid, but he raises them anyways, crushing and tearing. On the rooftop ahead of him he sees STRIKE1, struggling against a thick miasma of immobility curses, take a direct hit from what looks like an anti-tank missile made entirely out of bone. The resulting explosion turns half the building to lemon pudding in a flash of fuschia light, sending him crashing down into the rubble.
Tacnet informs him STRIKE1’s suit has, incredibly, held. Dodging a serpentine pillar of fire that follows him through the air and rolling under a swarm of iridescent green beetles that nearly short his scopes with aetheric interference, STRIKE5 makes it just in time to see living rock swallow his battle-buddy from the neck down.
There is a sickening crunch. The life-sign winks out. He needs to stay professional. He needs to stay professional. He needs to turn this goddamned city to fucking rubble along with every two-bit paraterrorist sympathizer in a hundred mile radius. He needs to stay professional.
STRIKE5 turns to see three insurgents rounding the street, weapons raised, shouting in alarm. One of them is waving a flag, absurdly anachronistic, a ragged remnant of a war no one gives a damn about anymore.
Tacnet chirps in alarm but he ignores it. There is nothing left to defend. There is only the terrorists, the flag, and the red screaming in his ears.
STRIKE5 moves.
He is dimly aware that spells are impacting him, eating away at the last layers of ceramic plating, that a spinning glaive of purple crystal has just shorn away his left arm at the elbow in a spray of hypercoagulant. It all seems so far away. The terrorists are falling back now, but he is already amongst them. His right arm swings and one of them turns into red mist. Another is carving away at his back with a glass knife, animate shards of volcanic rock burrowing into his torso with malignant intelligence. It doesn’t matter. He catches her by the throat, squeezes.
One left now. The one who carries the flag. Too far away to reach.
STRIKE5 closes his eyes. There is only one weapon left to use.
“Detonate fusion core. SIERRA NOVEMBER BRAVO.”
The suit whines, armor-locking into place. There is a smile on his face.
A fractional life sign is all the warning he gets. A swarm of things stream from the shadow cast by the flag, a little like smoke and more or less in the shape of people. Impossibly suspended, they flicker-fade through shapes, expressions, fractal patterns that make OCULUS flare up in hissing static- but the eyes boring into his own are all too human. Spiteful. One of them rakes vorpal hands across his back and he feels something tear away. The display goes dark. He doesn’t die.
"You will live."
The response cuts the air like a knife, dry as bone. The Engineer stands, all pretense of affability fading from her like melting wax. In her place is an old thing of dried blood, sinew, and twisted gears, and its smile is the death of empire.
"You are not a martyr. Your death will not be glorious. The cause is not your vanity project, Johnathan. The Insurgency is not your suicide. You will live to deal with the consequences because you know better than this- and because if you die without permission I will see to it that your shade is dragged back again and again, until it learns the difference between necessary sacrifice and shirking responsibility because the darkness was too much."
"Did you think you could strike bargain with me without a price? Everything a price- everything a cost- and this, 084, is the cost of initiative."
“You will not command this mission. You will live. You will lead. You will see the consequences of what you have wrought, and weep at the edges of the graves that you fill, never your own."
This is what it is to be an Insurgent.
It's to hide, and beg, and burrow through filth.
It's to kill in the shadows and burn yourself, to labor for a sunrise you know you'll never get to see.
It's to fight for that day, for that one glorious moment when you finally catch them by surprise. When the king swallows the poison pill, when the wings of the hashmallim tear asunder and all of their oracles are made liars.
It is to strive for those moments, however few and far between, when you pit your weight against the bulk of the world, kicking and screaming, and feel for an effervescent, eternal second, the shifting.
Little by little.
Alastaire Mcmnemon lies face-down in the living dust and dies. She’s thinking of home.
It is the overall recommendation of the Special Investigative Chair that the following measures be implemented in the wake of Incident Redhair-Grayladder-9485 “STRIKEFALL”, first among these being…
Shahr- e- Gholghola endures.
There are things crawling upon it now, blue-helmeted men with devices and determined expressions erecting a cage of bronze and steel. Better to wait. Better to burrow and hide, the ghostwind whispers. Everything fails. Everything crumbles, in time.
Shahr- e- Gholghola endures.
The Engineer sits alone in the saferoom. Idly, she twirls an ivory cylinder between her fingers like a pen. It is not a pen.
Cloned human bone, properly treated, is a common, relatively secure medium for two-way scrying. She raps the finger bone firmly on the blackstone table, the totem crumbling into a perfect circle of white dust. An image materializes out of shadow, a blue-jacketed man reclining in a comfortable armchair.
“I suppose congratulations are in order, Engineer.”
She doesn’t respond, staring back at him impassively.
“I assume you’ve already recovered the suits?”
“One less than what you promised.”
The general smiles.
“My men are good at what they do, Engineer. Let’s hope yours will match the standard they’ve set.”
His gaze hardens.
“Site-719 must fall within the next three months, as agreed. There will be consequences, otherwise. For both of us.”
“A pleasure doing business with you, General.”
The image crumbles into dust without a response, leaving her alone once more. Almost alone.
The Engineer allows herself a genuine smile. There is much work to be done.
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