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In Buddhist tradition, it is said that all things are impermanent. One cycle leads into the next until enlightenment, and release from the universe, is achieved. Even Avicii — the hell where the worst of the worst go, the patricidalists and the heretics — is ultimately a place to burn off bad karma by being boiled alive. After purification, reincarnation will begin afresh in, oh, three-point-four quintillion years.
The mind inexorably fears such timespans. Could any self exist intact for even a thousand years of eternal torment? Even if the mind were to grow numb to infinite pain, surely what would come out of that experience would not be a mind at all, but the neural equivalent of banana pudding. The great learned monks agree, too, and sidestep this by saying that the self is an illusion, and that actions happen independent of such an entity, but merely exist and accrue karma all the same. Descartes? I think therefore I am? Puh-leaze. There is no you, there is no reality, there is no causality, there is no nothing, only actions and their consequences.
Facedown in a dark bathroom, grappled by an unseen assailant, David Martinez remembered Hanako Arasaka telling him all this, knowing that he could not, and would not, respond. The memory came unbidden and unwanted, and stuck with him, even as he tried to keep from being choked out by the hands of an invisible machine.
The memory made him angry.
The memory drove him as he gripped his attacker’s left arm, swinging the fucker around and into the mirror.
Whatever it was seemed to flicker into existence as the mirror shattered, then reverted back into nothingness. David envisioned its contours — it had to be using metacamouflage, he realized — and made a grab for its head as his night vision kicked in.
He pulled the head back, and smashed it in again, driving it into the crater of smartglass. The rest of the mirror shattered, glittering dull green shards springing forth from the impact.
The assailant wriggled out from under his grip inhumanly fast, spun into a wheel kick that smacked David across the chest, staggering him back until he almost tripped into the bathtub. From there, it yanked the sink out from its foundation, wielding it with both hands, swinging it up, ready to break it over his head. Even through a hardsuit, he could tell having that much mass smashed into his skull would hurt, stun him just enough for it to finish the job with its resonance knife.
David didn’t give the thing a chance.
He lunged forward to grapple the thing’s exposed chest, surged out of the bathroom and into a slightly-more-lit hallway. Every square inch of the artificial musculature in his body and his hardsuit strained to lift the machine off its feet, slamming it into the far wall before it could respond in kind.
He felt something inside his enemy shift, and knew he had succeeded. Or, at least, started to succeed.
Boomers — the biomechanical robots that defined this new era — were extremely hard to kill with only blunt force, after all.
But if nothing else, he could see his attacker. The metacamo ghost threw the sink aside and pushed him off. It melted into a humanoid shape not much taller than him, lanky and blue-black, with a mouthless face like that of a cicada. Its eyes, or what passed for them, were large and oval-shaped. You could tell the designer was going for a Little Grey Men sort of thing for whatever fucking monstrosity this thing was. It was bleeding where David had smashed it into the mirror, rivulets of indigo circ fluid hardening in seconds.
It made no sound, only drew its resonance knife again and came for him.
David blinked, and let the Riastrad take over.
The Sandevistan, ten years and a lifetime ago, was crude compared to the hardware that was his nervous system now. Self-assembling fiber-optics wrapping around big motor nerve trunks were all well and good, but the only way his brain could keep up was juicing with ionic-exchange accelerators that threatened to shred neural sheathes every time they fired.
The Riastrad, though? New shit, a neuro-photonic mass of synthetic hyperbrain that had burrowed its way into his motor cortices. It saw what the brain edited out. Reacted when mere flesh could not. Drew up battleplans and worked with its symbiotic host to carry them out in fractions of seconds. Saw problems, found solutions.
It was the feeling, as all the others agreed with him, that he knew what he had to do. So he did it.
The Boomer was leading with its knife, not overextending, its free hand on guard for anything David tried. He let it come, let it make its first swipe towards his neck, using the opening to slam his right knee into its freshly cracked ribs. Crunching filled the hall as it stumbled, yet it kept the knife coming, now toward his exposed leg. David took the cue to whip his knee back as he slammed a palm into the side of its now unguarded face.
The Boomer was fast, certainly. Any normal human, unprepared for the encounter, would be mere bait.
David’s crew, throughout the structure, were prepared. And David, on his own against one of them? He was faster.
It whirled off course, trying to recover. Gave him time enough for armored plates to drop over his knuckles, for one of the Mayhem Bombers mounted on one of those plates to prime, and for him to drive the shaped-charge explosive under the Boomer’s jaw.
K-THOOM!
Even with audio compensators, the cramped space of the hallway meant the mounted micro-warhead’s detonation resonated, blanking out all other noise for a moment, as the five thousand degree C tungsten spike blasted its way through the machine’s frontal lobe. When the dust cleared, the Boomer didn’t have a face so much as it had a ditch where a face should be.
David wasn’t done, though. Machines like this had an unnerving tendency to keep going even after a human-fatal wound. He grabbed one shoulder, grabbed the skull again, and in one swift motion, yanked the fucker’s head off, half of its spinal column snapping free in a spray of indigo.
The body stopped moving after that.
Good.
Bigger, meaner models had these weird distributed nervous systems, like a cockroach scaled up, which meant nothing short of a shot right through their power source could kill them. For good measure, though, David chucked the skull down the hallway, where it smashed facefirst into the far wall and stayed there.
He stopped. Let out the breath that he’d been holding. Ran his fingers down his hardsuit. Scratches — the thing’s knife had easily damaged material that could stand up to BMG rounds.
It would be incredible, were it not for the fact that David was pretty sure there were more of that particular breed of Boomer out there.
He needed backup. Needed to get back to the team. He knew who to ping first in the group comm.
“Lucy? Got one down.”
Silence. Then, heavy, afraid: “David, I need your visual feed.”
He sent her it with a thought, gazing over the headless corpse. “Yeah,” he said, letting the video do the talking. “Whatever it was, it had resonance blades and metacamo. That’s… new, right? For GENOM?”
“Unfortunately not.” Kiwi’s voice cut in. “They’re Cryptid Boomers, spec-ops types. They don’t sell this onel, I think. All in-house spooky shit.”
He could almost hear Lucy shudder. “My camo’s on. I know there’s one or two in the room with me, carrying big guns. Either they can’t see me or they’re toying with me.”
Fuck. “Where are you?” David said. “Actually, can I get a location from everyone else?”
“Tenth floor atrium.” Lucy.
“Forty-second, descending the stairs.” Kiwi. “Sorry, had to break overwatch.”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck fuck,
fuuuuuuuck
!” Becca.
“Fuck doesn’t help us much, Bex!” David said. He started to walk back to the hole where he’d fallen in.
“The lobby, you dicks! There’s one on me and it wont get —
OFF!
”
David looked up at the hole and jumped through it, six meters in a single bounce. He hit the ground running towards the atrium, his closest meet-up point.
“Reika—”
“I’m fine,” she replied, sounding poised to sprint. “I’m keeping my back to a wall on the seventh floor. Should I assist Rebecca, since I’m the closest?”
“Yeah,” David said. “But don’t stay too long in that lobby. We need to set a rally point—”
“We’re not gonna talk about the gunship circling this building?” Kiwi said.
David almost jerked to a stop. “Kiwi,” he said as the realization sunk in like the pending barrage of gunfire that could vape him the instant it saw him,
“what fucking gunship?”
“I had to break overwatch, remember? Couldn’t exactly stay up on the more transparent levels when there’s a big, mean WEAV craft with a thirty-mike autocannon waiting for us to make a mistake.”
“It must have deployed the Cryptids,” Lucy said. “Why doesn’t it just ventilate the building?”
“The building’s owned by World Prosperity,” Reika said. “It might be incomplete, but sending shock troops after us is still
almost
a violation of their nonaggression standards. Going further would be grounds for Chinese intervention. So they drive us to wherever the gunship can get us, and do what needs to be done with only a few shots.”
David reached the atrium, an open-air space at the heart of the building. He thought back to the blueprints Reika showed them hours ago. Plates of metallic glass divided the apartment building every ten floors, providing crude courtyards people could walk around on.
He was on the thirty-fifth floor. Lucy was two plates away.
“Tenth floor atrium’s our rallying point,” he said. “Reika, get to Rebecca and drag her up there if you have to. Kiwi, try not to run into any trouble. Oh, and Reika, do we have running water here?”
“I don’t
think
so…”
“Both of you, find out. That might be our only defense against these things. Now if you’ll excuse me—”
He reached the atrium. Flung himself over the side. Angled his thrusters to point up.
Dove.
Lucy Kushinada’s metacamo was one of those little marvels of twenty-first century technology that only Knight Saber technology had scaled down from big military projects. The photo-channeling metamaterials a millimeter under the surface of her armor bent every spectrum of light short of X-rays around her, rendering her effectively invisible to anything that saw or scanned. Like her electronic warfare suite, it was most often used on fighter jets and tanks, which had fewer angles and curves to cloak than smaller objects, but the designers of the hardsuits were ingenious weirdos and had leapt a generation or two ahead of technology’s hemorrhaging edge effortlessly.
She didn’t dare turn it off.
Her sensors couldn’t see the two Cryptids, but she knew they were there. Passive sonar picked up the soft padding of bipedal feet, two pairs, in erratic directions. They knew she was here, they just didn’t know where. It was the same for her.
If she tried to shoot one, the other would have a bead on her position, and Lucy had no idea if their weapons were strong enough to crack her armor. She didn’t want to find out. She had no choice but to wait them out, make no sound, let them make the first move—
She heard a horrible crash from above her. She didn’t look, but the Cryptids stopped moving. Maybe she had a chance to tag their positions, try to take them out with one quick jackwhip strike—
A fireball streaked through the plate above her in an instant. It stopped, with the hiss of verniers, meters above where she was standing. Plasma hissed away, and the fireball resolved itself into her lover’s hardsuit. He dropped.
Both Cryptids fired.
Their mistake.
It wasn’t like the grenade launchers they carried were going to do
no
damage to David. And it wasn’t like the muzzle flash of the weapons was particularly bright. But Lucy was prepared for them while actively scanning, and that earned her tracking system a target lock.
The Riastrad whispered up her spine. Her left-arm laser gun snapped up, and she fired.
T-T-TANG!
Whatever the one Cryptid’s metacamo was made of, no matter how much light it twisted away, there was still enough residual energy it couldn’t catch to blow away three craters on its arm. Enough to show her where the rest of the Boomer was.
It whirled to face her, yet she was already moving. Lucy ducked under the first round of shots, slid under the next barrage, got in range, and let her jackwhip slide free.
It was a thicker wire than her old monowhip, but the nanoserrated edges of the cord still cut true as the whip cracked across the sound barrier, slicing through the Cryptid’s arm, circ fluid spurting into existence as the limb flew free.
Before the Boomer could respond, she retracted her whip and cut what was left of it in two at an almost perfect diagonal.
That done, she turned her attention to the other Boomer, to David. He was intact, somehow. Lucy realized he’d probably burned out the last of his shield detonating grenades point-blank. But he had targeting data, too—
K-KRACK!
And was using it, a single railgun shot through the guts of the thing, putting it down instantly.
They stopped. David rose from his firing position. She got a good look at his hardsuit; the dark gray chestplate was scratched badly, but the yellow accents on his limbs were still mostly intact. She’d gotten off easy, compared to him.
“Hey, love,” David said.
“Hey, love,” she said back. “You… don’t look so good.”
“Don’t worry about it.” He shrugged, and even under the hardsuit she could see — or at least imagine — his muscles ripple with the motion. “I’m sorry I got you into this. I didn’t think the enemy would bring in Boomers like these.”
Lucy shook her head. “Don’t apologize, love. We’ll make it out of this intact.”
“We’ll see,” David said. She wished the suits had internal face cameras, because right now she wanted to see him smile. He opened up comms. “Reika?”
“There’s at least three down here! Two assaulting Rebecca, one hidden sniper. Don’t know where, it keeps changing positions — wait, she just pushed one off. One sec!”
“DIE YOU SPOOKY COCKSUCKERS!”
Ten floors up and she could hear Becca’s payload cannon fire on full blast. “
Now
I’m clear!”
Lucy brought up the team’s status reports on her HUD. Becca had just activated her smoke projectors point-blank. Another payload shot, the impact from it vibrating up through the building.
“We need to get down there,” Lucy said to David, checking his status as well. He’d drained his shield’s capacitors. They could recharge, but they didn’t have time for that.
“We’ll have to jump down the elevator shaft,” Lucy swapped to wider comms. “Kiwi, please tell me you’ll be here soon—”
“Just cleared floor twenty,” the other e-witch grumbled. “You guys take the main shaft, I’m going to stay in an environment where if a Cryptid tries to nail me I’ll be ready for it. Water’s out, too. Sprinklers aren’t going to kick in and magically reveal our enemies. Too bad, huh?”
“Fuck,” David said, turning towards the elevator banks. “Ready?”
“Always, love,” she said, and meant it.
Meanwhile, Rebecca Flores was having an absolutely shitty time.
One of the Cryptids had raked a massive scar down her front, nearly hacked off her suit’s left arm, and almost pried it open. Only after she’d almost ripped an armor plate off had the little shit finally come loose and given her enough room to blindfire a flechette shotshell into it point-blank. That scared the other one long enough to give her room to pop smoke, filling the lobby with the stuff in the blind hope that she might spoof the sniper.
Trouble was, her sensors had taken some damage. She knew where her teammates were and that was it. She couldn’t see through her smoke, had only the vaguest idea of where the elevator shaft was. She began to run towards it, silent movement be damned—
And yelped as a railgun round tore through the smoke and smashed into the floor inches away from where she was standing.
She juked to the side while trying to guess where the sniper was from the round’s trajectory. The angle suggested the opposite side of the lobby, but where would the damn thing find a vantage point? “David, Lucy? Sniper’s definitely marked the elevator doors as a killbox! If you go through any one of those floors you’ll get ganked!”
“Well, shit, we kinda already dropped,” David said. “Reika, that means it’s taken up a fixed position, doesn’t it? Can you tag the bastard?”
“I think so? Once the smoke starts to clear I should have his contours, and I’ll be able to—”
Rebecca lost patience. “If you can see it, then it can see me! It has to be on the big chandelier across the lobby! Jump over there and take out the fucker before the next shot connects!”
“Um! Yes! Right!”
A flash of thrusters amidst the roiling black. Then, the sound of one of Reika’s limpet mines going off.
“Down! It’s down!”
Good thing, too, because the smoke was starting to disperse. If Rebecca wasn’t so heavily jacked into her hardsuit, she would have rolled her eyes.
The doors opened. David and Lucy entered. Both of her lovers turned their heads in the general direction of the purple smear that had been a Cryptid moments ago — and then in the direction of the third Cryptid, decloaked.
Even with its grenade launcher arm raised, it looked so … inadequate. It couldn’t win and it knew it.
It spoke. Voice scratchy and distant, but still unmistakable as a human voice.
“Well,” it said, “congratulations. You beat my first wave. No more Cryptids, just the Calydonian.”
“That’s not the name of the gunship’s model,” Kiwi said over internal comms. “Don’t tell me there’s more bullshit inbound…”
“You’re Julius Vanderberg, right?” David said, his own voice modulated. “Chief Exec of Anchorpoint? So much for neutrality, huh? Especially if you’re using GENOM’s personal equipment.”
The Boomer, or Julius, shrugged. “Who am I to deny my patrons what they want? Our goals align, anyway. They want SIA, they want you dead, and I think those are both fine objectives.”
“Who are you? A coward, that’s what you are. Another warlord who thinks he’s a king. Must be thousands of people like you in this world.”
The Boomer’s stance tensed up. “I am the herald of technological progress. My city has not only mastered the art of raising humanity to the stars, but it has
honed
the science of human biodiversity, and in so doing has developed new techniques for societal optimization that civilization will rely on for the rest of our existence. I am on the verge of building a dynasty that will last for millennia. What are you in my eyes?”
“The guy who’s gonna ruin your day,” David said. “Simple as that.”
Somewhere in the shadow of Anchorpoint’s Central Sector, Julius laughed, and his puppet machine laughed with him. “You know, plenty of men have sworn to kill me, but I don’t think I’ve ever met a man who’s sworn to just ruin my day. A single day, at that. Well, good luck, anyway. I think the Calydonian will relieve you of that promise pretty quickly.”
“Goddammit,” Kiwi said, “does any of this team know what the Calydonian even
is
?”
“I think,” David said, “we’re about to find out.”
The Cryptid lifted its gun to its head, its mouthparts twisting into something like a smirk, and pulled the trigger.
On instinct, Rebecca looked up. Saw the gunship, which looked like a flying saucer with half of an attack helicopter bolted to it. Saw something very big drop from it, and start falling through the building, poised to impact into the lobby.
It is said in Buddhist tradition that all things are impermanent. That even eternal torment in the deepest pits of Naraka is not eternal. Siddartha knew full well that a big number is scarier than infinity, because the human mind never attempts to understand infinity, but will quail and quiver at the concept of near-infinity. Knowing is just as painful as not knowing.
David Martinez knew this very well. Ten years he’d spent as Hanako Arasaka’s cyborg guinea pig and hitman. Ten years he’d mindlessly drowned himself in targets, bodies, assets. The memories, now that he could comprehend them, were too painful to think about for long.
It was easy to ignore the evil he did. Draw on that concept of ‘no self.’ Why not, right?
Fuck that.
What he had done he could not undo. What he had seen he could not unsee.
But he wasn’t going back. He wasn’t going to let whatever was coming his way squish him into so much nanolaminate and cultured flesh smeared over black marble.
He had a war to win.
David Martinez said this to himself, and didn’t know how right he was.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches growOut of this stony rubbish? Son of man,You cannot say, or guess, for you know onlyA heap of broken images, where the sun beats,And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,And the dry stone no sound of water. OnlyThere is shadow under this red rock,(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
STMPD FICTITIOUS PRODUCTIONS PRESENTS
And I will show you something different from either
BASED ON THE WORK OF TOSHIMICHI SUZUKI AND MIKE PONDSMITH
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
A NEW STORY OF THE KNIGHT SABERS
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I WILL SHOW YOU FEAR IN A HANDFUL OF DUST.
- T.S. Elliot, The Waste Land
STARRING
KENN AS DAVID MARTINEZ
YUKI AOI AS LUCYNA KUSHINADA
TOMOYO KUROSAWA AS REBECCA FLORES
TAKAKO HONDA AS KAYLA ‘KIWI’ FAVREAU
AND MAIKO HASHIMOTO AS REIKA CHANG
HARDSUIT EFFECTS BY STINGRAY LUXURY GOODS, LTD.
PYROTECHNICS AND WEAPONS BY INDUSTRIAL DEATH AND MAGIC
OTHER SPECIAL VISUAL EFFECTS BY WEEBOVISION 2000
MECHA BY ARAMAKI PANINDUSTRIAL
SPECIAL THANKS TO AIC RIGHTS, TOEI ANIMATION, R.TALSORIAN GAMES, CD PROJEKT RED, AND STUDIO TRIGGER
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Chicagoland, Gold Coast
December, 2069
Morning
Kayla ‘Kiwi’ Favreau had woken up a few hours ago, against her better judgment and mostly against her will.It wasn’t her fault. Her alarm wasn’t even set for another hour or two. It was supposed to be a lazy day, as flat gray clouds rolled in over the city to piss some new exotic superstate of solid and liquid water, that would start as hail and end as slush by the time it landed.But Becca snored, and she snored especially loudly when she was curled up in David’s arms. And the longer Kiwi tried to shut her eyes, go back to sleep, the more the petite woman’s murmurs seemed to vibrate inside of Kiwi’s head, to the point that she knew if she didn’t crawl out of bed and try to sleep on the couch her eyes were going to hum out of their sockets or something similarly gross.So she’d crawled out of bed, half-dressed, and tried to sleep on the couch. That hadn’t worked, either. Her anxiety forbade her from doing anything nice like that. She would have to go and be productive if she wanted to feel stable.A shower, some oatmeal shoved down her tract, a scrub of her chewing mouthparts with her nanofiber toothbrush, and she sat down on the couch and pulled up her holofeed to doomscroll. Then, she thought better of it, and just jacked into her console to do some neurocoding.IRL dropped away, and Kiwi faced down the problem she’d been playing around with for the past week, namely the Riastrad. Neurophotonic pseudocortical implants were all well and good – she shuddered to imagine trying to do hacking solely through her AR holofeed – but every time she thought she understood even its fundamental operating principles she’d discover something new. What she thought was magnetic leakage turned out to be standing-wave signaling protocols between neural clusters, which, fine, that was basic human neurology, but this thing was made out of the stuff GENOM used to make Boomer brains, which weren’t supposed to develop those higher-order processes that encouraged low-degree consciousness.So if this thing wasn’t wired up to a human brain, would it be conscious? Not a proper AGI, not something with emotions that would mirror humans? No, probably another entry in the long list of ‘pathologically divergent synthetic intelligences’. That was terrifying; what was more terrifying was the fact that she had one in her now.It was standard for the Knight Sabers, according to Lucy. No way to go toe-to-toe with GENOM’s worst without transhuman augmentation. And given that she was now part of Celia Stingray’s anti-corporate vigilante conspiracy, she had no choice but to let an autosurgeon inject the organoids that made up the Riastrad into the bone just above her brainstem and let them grow. But she was damned if she wasn’t going to understand what the thing was before it started talking to her brain and her extant hacking hardware in ways she didn’t like.The standing waves were encrypted, though. No, that was the wrong word. More that they were language in and of themselves, repeating in what seemed to be phonemes one moment, then melting away into something more like traditional AI neurolinguistics the next. The Riastrad was using different codes, different frequencies, for different purposes. A few correlations seemed possible, but as it was she was only working off her own data, as the thing watched her think and dream and move through the world.She tried again. Cross-referenced the phonemic signaling, isolated bits and pieces, ran what she thought were meme-chains against every anthrolinguistic grammar catalog she could find on the noosphere. She didn’t need to know what the thing was saying to itself, and to her – she just needed to know how it was saying it… Sinhala, Kalahari Bushmen click-language, c’mon c’mon c’mon c’mon find something…[[Kiwi?]]Shit.Her holofeed always sounded weird when she was this deep inside the datastream. But she could still recognize it as David.“What,” she said.[[Celia Stingray says she wants to get us on a conference call in fifteen minutes. Can you pull out of there and get ready?]]“You’re kidding. Three months of saying she’ll use us when she needs us, of her not needing us in any formal capacity, and now-”[[Yeah, and it's a live video, not a metazone. So you have to, y’know, get dressed. We are dealing with a fashion designer, after all.]]“Fuck. Fine. Give me a second.”She drew away from the Riastrad’s signaling, drifted back up to her mental representation of exit, and returned to IRL.She blinked. Let her vision resolve back to looking at real things.David was there, already dressed in a holo-coated bomber jacket he’d bought out in Wrigley Market a week ago, a blue Billy Goat Tavern t-shirt peeking out from underneath it. Waiting for her. She realized that what she was wearing – no facemask, no bra, just a loose poncho-ish Eternal Samsara Climbing Club shirt and some panties – would not cut it.“Gimme a sec,” she said. Thought for a moment. “What do you think, my normal mask or my human mouth? What would weird her out less?”He shrugged. “Really not my decision to make, is it? I just think you should get on the ol’ maroon trenchcoat. You always look good in that.”“Trenchcoats are for outside weather, not the nice climate-controlled environment of my apartment.”“Okay. Fair point. Just… you know…”“Try to look professional? Dude, I am a professional.”David backed up a little bit. He was trying not to look flustered and failing. Eventually his face hardened.“Mask, then. Just be cool. Lucy says she owes this woman everything, which means you and Becca and I do too.”“Huh.”He walked back into the bedroom without responding to her ‘huh’, which was fine by Kiwi.She considered her living room. The massive chromatic glass windows that looked out over Lake Michigan. Her apartment was firmly upper-middle class, not quite luxury. It suited her well as a high-ranking syndicate enforcer. But those days were gone now, had disappeared when David snapped Goldie Musou’s neck and threw her off the Willis Tower into an angry mob. Whatever shape Chicagoland’s underworld would take in the years to come, there was no place for her in it.This was her life now. It was hard to tell if that was a good thing.Minutes later, they were there. On the couch, the living room camera mounted firmly on the wall, a blank screen visible on their shared Holofeed. The meeting room, secured by an entangled-particle link, waited to fulfill its purpose.“Lucy?” Rebecca whispered. “She is coming, right?”“She’s not the type of woman to send messages with no meaning,” Lucy said. “She’s a very deliberate person.”“Deliberate? Weird adjective to ascribe to a person,” Rebecca said.“You’ll see when she gets on. It’ll make sense.”“Eccentric, maybe,” Kiwi said, “if half the shit you’ve said about her is true–”On the screen, a wheel spun for the briefest of instants. The screen split, expanded itself to double its width.“Two calls?” David said.“She didn’t say anything about this…” Lucy whispered.And then, there they were.The two women on the different screens both made David think ‘glamorous’, and then ‘where have I seen them before?’. The woman on the right looked only slightly Asian, big chocolate-colored eyes, short bluish-black hair kept coiffed to emphasize a curly forelock, and wore a navy-blue ensemble that didn’t seem to be too expensive until you looked closer at the exacting way it fit over her body. Custom-tailored, David realized.“Good morning,” the woman said in a rich, cool voice with a slight British accent. “I am Celia Stingray, Chairwoman of Stingray Luxury Goods Incorporated and superheroine.” She said that last part without changing her tone, and took David a moment to realize she was making a joke. “I’m terribly sorry about the time, but as it is it’s close to midnight here in Megatokyo, and the matter I wish to discuss is quite urgent.” She nodded in what seemed to be Lucy’s direction. “Miss Kushinada. I trust you’re doing well?”Lucy smiled. “Never better. Oh, um, this is David, Rebecca, Kiwi. My… compatriots. More than friends.”“Hello,” David said.“Heyo,” Rebecca said.“Hi,” Kiwi said. “Who’s the other woman?”The other woman, for her part, looked slightly flushed. Pretty, clearly Chinese, a shot of green through her hair, which floated slightly to the sides in straight brown waves. Yeah, David was sure, he’d seen this woman before.“You can introduce yourself,” Celia said.“Oh!” The woman said in a softly musical voice. “I am Reika Chang. Possible heiress to the Sinotech branch of the China World Prosperity Corporation, and… Vision.”Oh, thought David, that was why, and then Rebecca lost her shit.“NO FUCKING WAY!” the petite gunmonger cried. “THAT’S SO FUCKING COOL!”She was vibrating in her seat; David could see it was taking every bit of willpower she had to not jump off the couch and get uncomfortably close to the camera.“Yes,” Reika said. “I guess it is cool. I take it you’re a fan of mine?”“She has the t-shirts, the noisemaking sticks, every album you’ve put out on oldstyle CD and vinyl and DRM-free digital. If you put out a body pillow she’d buy it,” Kiwi said, and David could see a little bit of a laugh in her eyes as he glanced over.Reika froze. “Please tell me that was a joke. I stopped doing backstage fan-bonding after the tenth homicidal stalker or so.”“It was a joke,” Kiwi said. “Sorry. Probably should have anticipated that reaction.”“Thank you. I accept your apology.”“In any case,” Celia cut in, “you’re all aware that Vision as a musical entity stopped doing formal tours some time ago, correct?”Rebecca blinked. “This has something to do with the Sabers n’ stuff?”Reika shook her head. “My Megatokyo tour was… oh, it was… well, it was an assassination attempt. I wanted Chairman Quincy dead for personal reasons and I was willing to blow the city seawall if that didn’t work out. I only made the decision to go into semi-retirement because of Celia, though.”“Oh?” Lucy said. “Go on.”Reika looked up, presumably to where Celia was. “You tell them.”“It was your decision, Reika. I think Miss Kushinada and her compatriots would appreciate honesty.”“But it was your decision to bring online more and more Saber teams, wasn’t it?”“Correct, but these fine people already are aware of that fact. If you’d be so kind."“Okay.” Reika sucked in a breath. “I moved to Anchorpoint several months ago, and intend to live here with a permanent address. This is because Anchorpoint is technically a neutral city in Cold War Two, and I… no longer trust my grandfather to not decide I am no longer useful to him and have me killed or humiliated publicly. As such, I’ve been working with Celia to assemble a Saber Team within the Nine Cities, not unlike the one you four have been aiding within the Chicagoland area.”David nodded.The concept of the Knight Sabers was the sort of thing only an insane woman could have come up with, but Celia didn’t seem very insane at first glance. Form-fitting power-armor hardsuits used to make a masked superhero team? Okay, fine, but to have that team openly and willfully attack the assets and executives of people in megacorps like GENOM, only occasionally taking on mercenary work to fund larger initiatives? He sort of understood the idea – tap into the public’s subconscious desire for costumed titans to determine right from wrong, act as semi-public figures who would both do real material damage and so thoroughly label a megacorp as ‘the bad guys’ that they couldn’t function without massive pushback from everyone they hadn’t bought out. It just didn’t feel like it could work.He had memories of the inside of GENOM, after all, when Hanako killed her senile father and let one company swallow another. Lucy had shown him maps of just how many cities they had rebuilt in their own image, how many different breeds of Boomer they sold, how much shit they just fucking owned . So what if people didn’t like them? They weren’t just a megacorp, they were a meta corp, integral to everything in the Ameribloc. They didn’t need to be liked to be powerful. They didn’t even bother with spin control that much. Chairman Quincy saw his company slighted, shrugged, and moved on. That was how things worked.Except – it was working? Especially now that teams like the Big Cats, which Lucy had worked for, were popping up, one at a time in megacities all over the world. Damages were being incurred; urban redevelopment contracts were quietly being canceled; the European nations of NATO were stonewalling GENOM on the idea of the company completely automating their armies. The cynic in him said that it probably had something to do with the world being five months into an absolutely catastrophic financial crisis; the optimist inside him said it was a start, and something had to be done, didn’t it?Anyway.“So you want us to help you put together a Saber Team in Anchorpoint?” David asked.“That’s correct,” Celia said. “Normally we’d give you some time to prepare for this sort of thing, but your hardsuits will be printed on-site, and you’ll need to leave in about… oh, twelve hours.”“I’m sorry,” Kiwi cut in, “fucking what? ”“Twelve hours to pack, take a car to Midway Airport, get on a scramjet, and come to Anchorpoint. Simple as that. I don’t understand what the issue is, Miss Favreau.”“Ohhh,” Kiwi drawled, “y’know. Not much. Just the issue of me still paying rent on this apartment for the next year, the issue of where we’re going to stay, the issue of –”“We’ve anticipated that,” Celia said. “Reika will send her personal scramjet and you will be living in her compound in the Chinese sector of the city. Your apartment will be paid for, but you’re free to sublet it if you wish.” Her voice hardened. “Now, if you’d be so kind, might I explain the urgency of this mission?”“It’s not just setting up a new team?” Lucy said.“Yes, that’s correct. One moment.”Celia’s eyes lit up with her holofeed, and she made a few twisting motions with her right hand, cycling through AR only she could see. The screen widened again, splitting Celia and Reika to show a picture of what appeared to be the wreck of a multi-deck aircraft carrier – smashed into a harbor?Holy shit.“Nine hours ago, the USS Donald Trump megacarrier, the flagship of US-ASEAN Carrier Group Two, abruptly changed course to move towards Anchorpoint at full speed. The ship was unable to be hailed, monitoring satellites were unable to look at it without experiencing critical errors, and ultimately the carrier crashed smack into New Vadodara Harbor in the Indian sector, beaching itself and discharging several of its point-defense weapons into a police blockade. Anchorpoint’s own security Boomers were sent to secure the wreckage, only to find that half the human crew appeared to have deployed on its amphibious-landing submarines, their location unknown, the other half are currently comatose due to aneurysms induced via their neural implants, and all the Boomer crew are missing. The ship was on autopilot the whole time, apparently.”Holy shit. David was vaguely aware that his mouth was slack, wide open like an idiot. He closed it, and tried to look away from the way loading cranes had collapsed onto the top deck, the way shipping offices had been unceremoniously torn open by the long edges of the ship’s hull.“I reached out to one of my double agents in the American intelligence community,” Celia continued. “When it was clear that the ship was going to hit, the Office of Naval Intelligence covertly moved fifteen covert Boomers into Indosec against international law. Not to secure the ship’s onboard nuclear reactor – that miraculously hasn’t suffered a containment failure yet – but to nab something else.” She leaned forward. “They had something onboard, it got out, it hijacked the ship, and now they have no idea where it is.”“You know what it is, don’t you?” Lucy said.“No,” Celia said, and you could see the joviality drain from her face. “My team fought the thing that hijacked the orbital laser satellites last year, and if it was him then he would have rammed the ship into the city and then breached its reactor. It’s a different entity. I don’t know if it’s malicious or not. I don’t know what its agenda is. I do not want to wait around and find out. I want to keep it out of GENOM’s hands. That’s where you four come in.”Silence.“Was I unclear about something?”“No,” Lucy said. “It’s just… a lot to take in. That’s all.”Reika laughed. “If it’s any consolation, Celia called me up hours ago and told me this was what I had to do, very bluntly. I think even she’s not done processing the event.”Celia raised an eyebrow. “But you didn’t disagree, did you? I fail to see the issue.” Her gaze shifted back to David and company. “If it helps, think of this as the first step in a legendary hero’s journey. Were this Campbell, we might refer to this as the Call To Adventure–” and here David could hear the uppercase letters “–only in this case, you cannot refuse, and limp back to Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru’s farmstead.”“Hey!” Becca perked up. “I got that reference! Only stormtroopers would be this accurate, ami rite ?!”Celia smiled. “So you understand the significance of what I’m proposing, Miss Flores?”“Rebecca’s fine, Celia . I get the whole honorifics thing for Japan? But hey, this is America .” She grinned, and David could tell that this, too, was a joke. Judging by Celia’s expression, she did, too. “And yeah, I get it. I’ll speak only for myself: I’m down.”Celia’s smile widened. “And the rest of you? Mister Mart– David?”“Yeah,” he said, without really thinking about it, drawing up a justification as he spoke. “This is the kind of thing you helped Lucy bring me back for. More value than merc work. I’ll see what I can do.”“Lucy?”“Yes! Yes, of course.” She leaned closer to David. She felt warm as her head nestled against his shoulder. “I’ve always wanted to go to that city, even if it’s for business and not pleasure.”“Kiwi?”The blonde hacker looked away. “If we refuse, will you find someone else?”Celia paused, looking thoughtful. “It would be difficult. We’d have to recruit a whole new team from the local population, vet them for security concerns, and design new hardsuits for them in… probably under a week. Actually, no, that would be borderline impossible to do within a reasonable timespan.” Her eyes narrowed. “Do not refuse. I do not want to lose this thing. And knowing your reputation as an anti-infrastructure hacker, I’ll need you to control surveillance within the city so we can find this… asset.”David glared at Kiwi. She withered a little. “Just checking. Yeah. Sure. I’m in. Give me a name, a fuckton of cash, and I’ll be your snatcher.”It was as if the Celia they were watching had just been replaced by the one they’d been looking at minutes ago. She brightened that fast. “Wonderful! Reika will see you in fifteen hours, then. Good luck. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go rest.”She disconnected like that . The boat wreckage disappeared with her. David had been looking over the picture, and seeing it disappear felt comforting. It was just Reika, now.“Well, then, everybody,” Reika said, trying to look cheerful. “Celia’s quite a personality, isn’t she?”“She’s fun!” Rebecca said. “And, uh, let me just say, I’m such a fan of your music, you know? When you finally outsold those K-pop pansies I had a field day on the noosphere telling their stans to just fuckin’ cope . So… keep going!” She punctuated that with a thumbs-up.Reika leaned back. The lighting adjusted. It seemed to suggest a very large room beyond the darkness. David had to wonder – how did a woman who had outsold Taylor Swift and the Bangtan Boys and Eurodyne combined live? Was there a limit to size, even for her?“I will,” Reika said, and hung up.The camera eye raised up to its standing position. David draped a shoulder over Lucy.“What should we bring, love?” she asked. “She never did say if she wanted us to stay there permanently… maybe she doesn’t know herself.”“Clothes, toiletries, spare cyberware, hacking gear, maybe a gun or two,” Rebecca said, casually wriggling herself down so her back lay in David’s lap.“If you bring your guns, we’ll never get on the plane,” Kiwi laughed. “Even if it’s a private jet, even if there’s no security check for rich people, the sheer weight of all that shit–”“I said a gun or two.”“And if you have to pick two, you’ll get so caught up in the process that you won’t find the time to do anything else.”“I’ll just bring Guts, then, ‘kay?” Becca groaned, kicking her legs up and down in Kiwi’s general direction. “Just Guts. Nothing else. Like, as a keepsake. I’ll only bring one box of ammo, the custom-tooled slugs! I’ll buy buckshot and Dragon’s Breath while I’m there!”“And end up on a surveillance watchlist?”“Auuuuuggggggghhhhhhhhhh. Daaaaaaaviiiiiid,” Rebecca whined, “Kiwi’s bulllllyyyyyying meee.”David ran his free hand through her seafoam-colored hair. “She’s not wrong! Even in a city like that, they probably don’t sell incendiaries to civvies. And I think Reika would appreciate it if we didn’t bump up against the black market.”“Yeah.” She deflated, then perked up again. “Oh man, I wonder what kinda shit I’ll get on my hardsuit? Do they have shotguns? They gotta have shotguns, right?”“Payload cannons,” Lucy said. “Better than buckshot, I think.”Rebecca’s eyes sparkled. “Preeeeeem.”David nodded. “Damn straight.” He turned to Kiwi. “You know what you’re bringing? A rig or two?”“It’d take too much time to rip my gear out of here. I’ll write down the specs and ask Reika to get me something like it. Plus my usual tools.” She nodded. “What’re you bringing?”“Eh,” David said. “Toothbrush, a few changes of clothes. Don’t want to bring too much to a city like this…”He stopped. He could feel one of his old memories, from when he was Puppy, leaching up into his brainpan.“Girls?” he said. “Can I get up for a second? Stretch my legs? Stave off a flashback?”Lucy jerked back. It took Becca a little longer to roll off of him, but once he was clear, David stood up in an instant.He did not dare shut his eyes. He did not know what he would see if he did that. He did not want to know.He looked out over the lake. Tried to see no city, no skyline, no skyline marked by a single perpendicular line stretching up beyond sight’s reach. What had he done there? What facet of any given invisible war had he been the frontline of?Multiple facets, he realized. Several.Which made sense; Hanako Arasaka was the GENOM’s Extraterrestrial Development head, assigned to puppeteer the Space Public Development Corporation and keep mankind’s paths to the stars under their control…The memory passed. Tension drained out of his body.“Lucy,” he said at last. “Kiwi. Becca.”He turned to them.“Whatever we do there, let’s do it right. Let’s not hesitate. Let’s… find this fucking thing and hand it over to Celia. No fuss, no mess.”He unzipped his bomber jacket a little.“Let’s save the world.”