V M (NPC Thread) From the Grip of History

King Ghidorah

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During the day, Markov was a fairly dour place. For all of its energy, bustle and towering architecture, the hum of technology and progress, there was something very old about the city: a patina of dirt and fatigue that was bred in its steel bones, ground into the concrete. It had layers to it: there was the city with which most people interacted, the grid-pattern cross-streets, residential and commercial zoned, back-alleys, vendor-stalls and tenements, shops and glass-fronted skyscrapers down in the valleys between the truly massive towers that jutted like the vulgar fingers of a crowd of obscenely gesturing gods into the overcast sky. Overlayed upon that there was the city’s industry, foundries and factories spewing noxious gasses. Robotic mobile gantries and scaffolds a thousand feet high straddled monolithic corporate enclaves like the undead exoskeletons of titanic steel spiders. It all ran together, an almost organic tapestry. The megalithic corporate-industrial features, the very symbols of Markov’s drive towards progress merely enforced a sense of ancient weight, the largest and most venerable trees in the urban jungle holding dominion over all lesser architecture.

The city was a place treading water against the weight of its own history, literally mining the past for the resources to continue, but nonetheless clawing its way towards the future with the determined desperation of a man at sea who, after days afloat, has finally sighted land. In the light of day even the most casual observer could see the scars, could feel the strain of a society tuned to a precise fever-pitch by internal power-struggles and the endless war against a hostile planet.

At night, it was a different story.

In the dark, Markov glowed, a tapestry of deep shadows and blazing neon light. Every window of every tower shone forth like a star in a galaxy which, rather than being strewn across a rural sky, had been spilled across the landscape by some careless celestial being. The gantries and scaffolds loomed, great monstrous shadows lit by pin-prick warning lights. Sodium yellow, iodine-white and sickly faded green, emergency reds and warning blues, the electric tide cast an omnipresent scintillating haze, a dreamlike bloom which set the smog aglow. At ground-level it could be oppressive, the glare of the neon night almost predatory, as though the city were hunting its own citizens. It made what few shadows could survive even deeper, abandoned blocks, unlit alleyways and sheltered underpasses becoming wells of impenetrable black. From above, however, with just a touch of distance, with columnar searchlights lancing into the sky from the blazing dome of the space-port and every tower a solemn celestial grid of hazy electric wonder, it was a sight to fire the imagination and make a person believe in the future.

Jewels had never seen the city from this angle before. Growing up in the ruins, the sea of lights on the other side of the barrier had seemed impossibly distant – a challenge, accusing. ‘This place is not for you’ they said, and for much of her life she had listened. Now, riding above the neon hum of the night in the back of an unmarked corporate sky-car, looking out over the city through bulletproof tinted glass, it said something different: ‘I’m glad you’re back Jewels,’ buzzed the electric ocean. ‘Hope you don’t die.’
 

King Ghidorah

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Her thoughts were interrupted by a much less metaphorical voice.

“Hell of a sight isn’t it?”

The speaker was a large, mostly-well-dressed man with a shaved head, a loud shirt, and skin even darker than the car’s unlit interior. The dude was built like a refrigerator, did not wear a watch, and rocked sunglasses at night, an affectation which Jewels strongly suspected concealed some sort of functional hardware. She had not caught his name, nor the name of his partner, the equally large but comparatively nondescript man driving the car.

“Yeah,” said the surveyor, scratching an itch on the inside of her forearm and leaning back in her seat. “It really is. I do think I’d enjoy it a lot more if you told me where we were going though.”

Well rested and buzzing along in a pleasant cloud of mood-stabilizing drugs following a week’s stay in hospital on-board the Hub and a first-class ride on one of the finest commercial passenger liners leaving Inverxe-local space, Jewels had barely stepped off the trans-orbital shuttle before being politely but firmly herded into a car that smelled of leather and cloves by the large gentleman now seated beside her. He hadn’t threatened her, hadn’t touched her, hadn’t even raised his warmly rumbling voice – but he had addressed her by name without being told, requesting that she come with him on a matter of urgent Guild business. Then he’d flashed an ID that got them past customs without being challenged, which seemed to support that he really was either government, Guild, as he claimed, or corporate; Since she’d sold her mineral rights claim the only thing Jewels had that would be of interest to any of those groups was information, so if she played her cards right this could very well be an opportunity.

Jewels had nobody waiting for her and nowhere specific to be; Going along with the mysterious enforcer had seemed like the reasonable thing to do. But that didn’t mean she trusted him, and it certainly didn’t mean she wasn’t curious.

“It’s not a secret,” he said, adjusting his cuffs and folding his meaty hands in his lap. “We’re going to a rented penthouse downtown. Private meeting, strictly low-profile: I don’t know what you’re into, miss, but the Lady Palaxia would like a word. And that is all I’m paid to know.”

In the far distance, field-harmonics generated by short-lived resonances in the city’s energy barriers flashed briefly into visibility, soft green ribbons of light that whip-cracked silently across the sky, there and gone in an instant. As pretty as it was, Jewels was a little disappointed. She felt that, in the moment, some thunder was probably warranted.

Palaxia.

Even growing up on the utter fringe of Markov society, Jewels knew that name: The King’s trusted advisor, co-mistress of the Guild, and one of the most powerful people in the city. Before striking out into space to make her fortune, Jewels had been too concerned with matters of day-to-day survival to really pay much attention to the city’s byzantine political factionalism, but she had also spent a lot of her formative years around drunks and derelicts. Drunks love rumors, and Palaxia was one of Markov’s most enduring enigmas.

She had been around as long as anyone could remember, but nobody seemed to know how old she really was, or where she had originally come from. People said she was an android, a lich’s simulacrum, an intelligent hologram or a dragon in disguise. She had been called everything from the power behind the throne to the King’s secret heir. Practically the only things the rumor-mill could seem to agree on was that Palaxia was a monolithic force in Markov’s politics, that she possessed great personal power and that her reach was very long indeed.

“Oh,” said Jewels.

Her forearm itched again. She kept her breathing deliberately slow and kept her eyes fixed on the night-time cityscape outside the window, feeling the faint hum of the sky-car’s gravity-skirt. As long as she focused on the now, the surveyor reminded herself, this place, for all its familiar unfamiliarity, made her feel safer than she had in a long time. It was so unlike the caves, so physically distant from her darkest moments, that even the prospect of being brought to a secret meeting with someone who could easily make her disappear didn’t seem all that daunting.

What did seem daunting was the reason. Excluding the pleasure of her company, Jewels had been of no interest to anybody before she had left Cevanti. Now that she was back, all the ways she might have caught the interest of someone so powerful and secretive related back to what had happened to her on Inverxe – what had become of her partners and her home, and the trial-by-fire within the depths of the damaged Hub: All the things she really, really didn’t want to talk about.
 

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The sky-car set down on an private landing-pad atop the roof of one of the most intimidating towers: a looming, perfectly rectangular glass-fronted monolith with corners delineated by strips of red neon. The vehicle landed with barely a whisper of displaced air, and no sooner had it touched down than the landing-pad lit up, LEDs delineating a footpath which wended its way down a short staircase and through a manicured rooftop garden: it was a manufactured landscape, a thing of miniature forests, expertly arranged colored gravel and complex water features, dimly illuminated by the light of the pathway and the city’s ambient neon glow reflecting off the clouds.

Jewels didn’t have time to appreciate it in detail. The burly enforcer gently but insistently guided her to a doorway, at the bottom of a ramp recessed into the rooftop. It opened at their approach, revealing a wrought-iron spiral staircase.

Jewels descended into a broad, windowless ballroom lit by dim, blue light, shining from lamps positioned in the corners. The floor was black-and-gold marble tile, and the walls were paneled in black-stained hardwood with gold-inlaid arboreal scrollwork on the cornices and wainscotting. There were no visible overhead light-fixtures, the ceiling patterned after a rural night-sky, a great spray of clouds and nebulae. There was only one other door – and only three pieces of furniture.

In the middle of the room was a simple table of black cherrywood, with two matching chairs. There was an unmarked bottle of wine, and two equally nondescript glasses.

There was a woman seated in one of the chairs, nursing a half-empty glass and regarding Jewels with subdued curiosity.

“You must be Jewels. Please, sit. Have some wine, if that’s to your taste.”

The woman was short, not stocky, but compact in a way that suggested surprising strength and boundless energy, like a gymnast or a dancer. There was a stylized silver tattoo, either a dragon or a bird, covering the right side of her face and curling down over her shoulder to coil around her arm, and silver highlights in her straight blond hair. She wore a sleeveless black dress with little curls of gold lace embellishment sewed on seemingly at random, a matching scarf, and dully gleaming brass bracers on her forearms. Her feet were bare, and a suede red leather belt circled her waist. By Jewels’ estimation she couldn’t have been much more than eighteen, but if even the tamest rumours about Palaxia were true then appearances didn’t actually count for much.

The surveyor was caught off-guard, but tried her best not to let it show: standing there in a pair of black cargo pants, matching windbreaker and a Kaalakiota logo tank-top she suddenly, absurdly, felt underdressed.

“You’re Palaxia?” she asked, crossing the room and taking her seat, doing her very best not to be intimidated by the dark opulence of her surroundings.

She didn’t touch the wine.

The elaborately costumed guild-mistress sipped her drink and smiled, as though she thought something was funny.

“You sound surprised. It’s the height, isn’t it. People always expect someone taller.”

Jewels shook her head. “No. No, I’m just still getting used to the idea that you know who I am.”

Palaxia swirled her wine, considering it for a moment, and then set the glass down on the table and leaned back in her chair. “Well, that seems fair: I’m still getting used to knowing who you are. I’m told you’re very clever – do you know why I had you brought here?”

Jewels paused for a moment. It had to be either what had happened on the hub, or the underground encounter that had ruined her life. But how much did Palaxia know?

Fuck it.

“King Ghidorah,” the surveyor said. “You’re worried about King Ghidorah.”

Palaxia’s posture shifted. It wasn’t shock, exactly, but something closely related to that emotion passed across the guild-mistress’s face.

“That… that is a name which I doubt has been spoken aloud in a very long time. One I rather hoped I’d never hear again. I would dearly love to learn how you came to know it.”

Jewels leaned forward in her seat, resting her forearms on the table. “Am I right though?”

“Yes. Your exploits on CRVIII would have been enough to capture my interest, but not my attention. The beast, Ghidorah is… well. As you said: I’m concerned. I’ve read the corporate prospecting team’s report, and there are some holes in the narrative I was hoping you’ll be able to fill in for me.”

Jewels tensed very slightly, her own suspicions confirmed: Quite literally the very last thing she wanted to talk about was what had happened in those caves.

“But we’ll get to that in a minute. How did you know its name?”

The surveyor hesitated, then wondered why.

“…I’ve known it for a while, actually – even knew what it looked like. I just didn’t know it was something real until earlier this month.”

Palaxia’s eyes narrowed – a question, not a threat. “How?”

“It was about ten years ago,” Jewels explained, picking up her empty glass and reconsidering the drink, “before I left Cevanti. At the time I thought I was just tripping: I’d wandered off into the forest after doing a lot of stupid teenage shit, including some pretty weird drugs. I was gone for, like, six days, but during that time I found something. It must’ve been a terminal or holo-display, some kind of audiovisual record stuck in a loop. It showed a picture of a city under siege by… him. It kept saying that name. ‘King Ghidorah. Threat Level: multiplanetary. Status: Neutralized’.”

The room seemed to darken a shade or two. There was a pregnant pause, and the surveyor wondered if she’d said something wrong.

“You found,” said the guild-mistress, speaking with slow, deliberate care at first but rapidly gaining steam, “a functional pre-End-times terminal? Where was it? Was it military hardware? Civil administration? Records? No, never mind that. Could you find it again?” Palaxia sounded hungry, standing up from her chair and leaning forward, knuckles on the table. She was pinning Jewels to her seat with a look that the surveyor had only previously received while holding a plate of hot food, a box of rare salvage, or coquettishly stripping off her underwear.

Fighting a sudden rush of self-conscious agitation, Jewels shrugged. “Why do you think I came back? I have to know what…” she paused, inhaled, started again. “There’s a story here; One that ends with the worst day of my life. I can’t just leave it alone, and this is the only lead I have. I’ve got a small fortune that means nothing to me, survey skills I’m not using, and a chip on my shoulder that you would not believe. Like, imagine a potato the size of a golden asshole three-headed dragon. Now imagine someone made chips out of it. It’s invisible, but trust me, it’s there. So yeah, given some time and a few good mercenaries, I think I could. I don’t really have a choice.”

“Give me a moment, please.”

The guild-mistress sat for several seconds with a look of intense concentration on her face. Jewels got the distinct impression that this wasn’t how she’d expected this conversation to go, and this was her way of re-calibrating.

When Palaxia spoke again, she had returned to her initial, even tones.

“We’ll come back to your remarkable discovery in a moment. I really do need to hear about your experience in the caves – how it was you ended up where you were found, and what happened to the people who were with you.”

Jewels lowered her gaze, examining the grain of the cherrywood table. It really was a very nice piece of furniture. Palaxia waited patiently, pouring herself more wine.

“Whenever you’re ready,” she said.

“We were mineralogical surveyors,” Jewels offered, surprising herself. And then, to her own mild -but-rising horror, she kept going. “There was me – I was engineering, caving and survival. There was Krade, who handled most of the geology and a lot of the tech, and there was Flipper, who was really into cooking. And guns. He was kind of a generalist. We went down there to stake a claim, thought we’d detected a pocket of exotic ores.… we were going to…we…”

Just as rapidly as it had come the strange urge to talk, to explain what had happened in spite of the pain, evaporated. Jewels’ eyes filled with tears, and a lump rose in her throat. She angrily wiped her face with the back of her wrist, to little effect.

Oh, sure. Fall apart in front of the most powerful person you’ve ever met. Great first impression.



Flipper.

Krade.


“Fuck,” she choked.

Palaxia reached across the table, offering a monogrammed black-silk handkerchief, her face a picture of intrigued concern.

“Are you okay?”

Jewels blew her nose. She wiped her eyes, and took a moment to check her breathing, choking back a series of strangled sobs.

“No,” she croaked, handling herself with a titanic act of will. “You obviously didn’t get my medical reports: I’m pretty amazingly far from okay. And I’m not going to tell you what happened. Not the first part, anyway. Not…I can’t, okay? I can’t. I can’t…But I will tell you what did it. And what happened after.”

The guild-mistress sat back and gestured for the surveyor to continue.

“You already know we found the thing’s corpse, King Ghidorah’s corpse – but there was a … a spawn. It was intelligent, telepathic, just a little larger than a man. There were no wings, just arms, and only one real head, though it looked like it was growing more. But it had golden hide, the same legs, and the same horrible face. It… it breathed lightning. We hit it with enough plasma to cut down a wampa on meth, but it didn’t even slow down.”

Palaxia frowned, brushing a stray lock of golden hair out of her eyes. “Okay. Why didn’t it kill you, though?”

It did. In every meaningful way, it did.

“…I… I tricked it. At least, I thought I did. I offered it a way out of the caves – explained about the teleport beacons our company used, and convinced it to let me live long enough to help it leave. I set up an ambush over comms with my boss, a plan to jump the thing with a bunch of big guns as soon as it came through – but I don’t know what happened after that, except that the receiving platform was destroyed. “Jewels stared into the middle distance. One side of her mouth twitched. “Also, the settlement was over-run by xenomorphs. The entire population was killed.”

“I see….”

Palaxia stood, retrieving her wine-glass and beginning to pace, bare feet making not a sound upon the tile floor. Her tattoos rippled as she moved, undulating in the low blue light.

“Thank you for taking me through that. I’m sorry for asking you to relive something so traumatic, but it really was critically important. Now – let’s talk a little bit more about what you found in the jungle…”
 

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It didn’t take long for Jewels to warm to the new topic – anything to take her mind off the dim golden glow that had started to tease the corners of her vision, to turn her thoughts away from the cold, the dead, and the dark. With Palaxia pacing a leisurely circle around the table, the surveyor laid out her plan.

“So – I left town that day on a broken-down sky-cycle, right? I know roughly what direction I was heading, and I know the range and maximum speed on one of those bikes when it’s working well. I was gone for about six days. So if I make some really, really generous guesses about how far the bike could take me before crapping out, how fast I could walk in that state and how straight a path I followed back to my old place, I can figure a maximum distance for how far I could have gotten and still returned home in that time. Call it a radius and shazam: we have a search area.”

Palaxia raised one flawless eyebrow and gave Jewels an appraising look. Very slightly, with only the corners of her mouth, she smiled.

“Hm. Clever. Do you have a way of narrowing it down further?”

Jewels nodded, finally pouring herself some wine. She looked back over her shoulder, trying to keep the other woman in view as she wandered.

“Some. I figure I can rule out areas with known and mapped subterranean features, ‘cause this thing has to be underground – otherwise it’s too close to the city for it not to have been discovered centuries ago. Also, I’d start with prominent, relatively intact above-ground ruins, the kinda thing teenage-me would have thought looked fun while stoned, and bring along equipment that can do acoustic subsurface scans. I never ran with the local salvage crews, but I saw enough of them growing up that I’m pretty sure most of them operate more like scavengers than prospector: Within a certain radius of Markov I’m willing to bet people just assume that everything good is long-gone, so they don’t look too hard, and they’re probably scanning for power-systems and alloys anyway. I’ve seen half-mad idiots hide both those things from corporate-equipped claim-jumpers using broken-down junk and sheer reckless balls. Who knows what some centuries-dead general or politician hid in their basement, or how well they hid it?”

Palaxia nodded thoughtfully, returned to the table and sat back down. There was an extended silence as she considered Jewels with the eye of an expert craftsman assessing the worth of an unfamiliar tool laid before them. Nervously, Jewels sipped her wine, mildly and inexplicably annoyed to discover it was the best alcohol she’d ever had.

“I have an offer for you,” the guild-mistress said, folding her hands on the table. “I’m willing to finance your expedition. I’ll even provide you with equipment and manpower - on the condition that any information or technology you recover be brought directly to me, and only to me. If you truly can locate a functioning link to an intact database from before the End then any files you can recover would be of the utmost importance, and in the event you would be paid accordingly – both in coin and in my personal gratitude, which many would say is far more valuable.”

The surveyor put down her glass. While the thought of bartering information for resources or leads had crossed her mind – a plan that had gone out the window alongside her composure - she hadn’t been expecting to acquire a patron when she came to this meeting. Also, an element of panic crept in at the thought of after. Jewels hadn’t considered what she’d do if she actually found what she’d come back to Cevanti to find, and the prospect of where she would point herself when the task was done was a daunting one.

All that said, there was no reason for her to say no – if nothing else, this gave her options. Guild backing would grease the wheels considerably, prevent anything from stalling before the expedition was underway. It would prevent frustration and doubt from creeping in and dragging her attention down to the monstrous, gnawing void of horror and loss that threatened to swallow her every waking moment of every –

Jewels drained her glass, poured another, and then drained that to. Palaxia watched, leaning her chin against one hand, mildly amused.

The surveyor gulped hard, blinked harder; Sighed at the realization that she was making a spectacle of herself again.

“Fuck it,” she said. “I accept.
 

King Ghidorah

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Palaxia left her with the keys to the penthouse and a promise that her people would be in contact with further details shortly. Jewels wasn’t quite sure how to interpret that, so she didn’t even try. Instead, after finishing the remaining wine and crying for a bit, she climbed the wrought-iron spiral staircase.

The door at the top slid open, and she poked her head outside. As she’d suspected, the burly enforcer who wore sunglasses at night was still around. He was practically right on top of her, leaning against the wall of the alcove with an unconcerned grace surprising in a man of his stature and smoking a comically tiny joint.

“Why are you still here?” Jewels asked, leaning unsteadily against the doorframe, half-in and half-out of the building.

“New instructions, and another zero on the end of my bank account. I’m told I’m in the prospecting business now.“

“You’re my minder,” Jewels said, concealing the majority of her irritation. She understood it: she was now an investment, and it only made sense that Palaxia would leave someone to make sure nobody tried to poach her – or that she didn’t go looking for a better offer. The surveyor scowled, scratching absently at her left arm.

The man blew a ring of dank-smelling smoke. “The word,” he said, forming every syllable with laconic precision, “is ‘contact’. So yes, I’m your minder. I’m also in charge of helping you arrange logistics and personnel for this shindig.’

He was inscrutable behind his shades, but Jewels stepped fully out of the building and studied him regardless: he had a face like a blunted hatchet, but one that had been polished and put to work as a conversation-piece. “Okay,” she said. “Well, my brain is screaming – so I’m going to go for a walk around town and see if I can wear myself out without thinking too hard. I’m drunk, I’m emotionally wired, and I think I want you to come with me, but I don’t know why.”

The man inhaled sharply, burning the rest of his joint down and grinding the butt beneath the steel-plated heel of one of his shiny black shoes.

“I’m not going to fuck you,” she added for clarity, straightening up with some effort.

“My name is Nael,” he responded, exhaling a massive cloud of smoke through his nose. An amused smile flickered across his stony face. “In case you were wondering.”
 
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King Ghidorah

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Wandering around the byways and back-alleys of downtown Markov was a new experience for Jewels. For all that she had grown up here, been bred and blooded among the exiles and derelicts of the ruins outside the barrier, the surveyor had never ventured this far into the city proper, never gotten further towards the interior than the spaceport – and that far only on the day she finally left this place behind.

The bustle of the night-markets was intoxicating. Down in the grimy canyons between the buildings, away from the main thoroughfares, the haze in the air reflected the electric glow of a city that never truly slept: the bloom of cheap holograms and more traditional neon signage casting every door and alcove in stark and living shadow, punctuated by the halogen warmth of rickshaw food-carts and ramshackle vendor-stalls bedecked with ancient, bare bulbs.

Nobody was in a hurry, but everyone knew where they were going. Everybody knew somebody, but nobody knew everybody. People ate, and argued, and drank, and worked, and fought in the street, and it never stopped moving. It was a shining gyroscope, dancing on the edge of a catastrophe curve, but there was an energy to it all: a spark, an urgency, a common sense of – success? Triumph, even? That made it impossible not to feel like something was coming, something you desperately wanted to be a part of.

In an alcoholic haze, Jewels wandered, her boots strangely silent on the cracked and ancient pavement and her silent minder ever at her side as they flowed through the crowd. The two of them stopped at a noodle-vendor stall made of sheet metal and scrap-wood, with surprisingly nice bar stools and a web of bare copper wiring feeding mis-matched bulbs arrayed across the ceiling. They bought gin by the shot, and real buckwheat noodles in vat-grown chicken-protein-broth, and Jewels laughed at the absurdity of not having to care how much she spent on food.

“It didn’t used to be like this, you know,” said Nael, slurping the last of his broth straight from the bowl and waving for another shot of gin. He’d taken off his suit-jacket, folded it, and draped it over his shoulder, allowing the true loudness of his paisley shirt to shine through.

“What didn’t?” asked Jewels.

“The vibe. Everything changed since the big fight last year. Used to be, walking around downtown, near everyone was too tired to really appreciate a good night. Markov gets you down, y’know? Now though?”

The big man downed his shot, the glass comically tiny between his thumb and forefinger.

“Place is lit. And with so many people joining the military, you never have to go far to find a send-off party. If that’s your scene.”

Jewels thought for a second. She was full of noodles, lost in the post-midnight haze, and her buzz was properly fortified by four shots of slightly-above-average gin which may have even contained actual juniper. She felt warm, and disconnected from herself. She had a companion she didn’t feel close enough to to be convinced he was going to be snatched away the moment she turned her back. The last thing she wanted was to go somewhere indoors – so she got up off her stool, and she led the way back into the crowd.
 

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The pair ended up staying out - and on Jewels’ part at least, staying drunk - for most of the night. With a bottle of gin and a companionable silence they wandered the throughfares and alleys of downtown Markov like ghosts until the crowds thinned out in the pre-dawn lull. Then, by wordless agreement, they climbed the first fire-escape they saw to the roof of what turned out to be a hundred-story high-rise.

Jewels barely noticed the climb – something which she would wonder about later. She was floating, half-dreaming in the space between drunkenness and long-delayed sleep, riding that emergency-line of early-morning energy provided by bodies that have given up on rest for the time-being. The surveyor couldn’t have told you where she was, or how to get back to the penthouse, or even what day it was – but for the first time in weeks, in the cool oblivion of the gloaming, she felt good.

Standing beside her taciturn minder, a cracked and weathered roof-slab of ancient concrete beneath her booted feet, she leaned heavily against a rusted safety-rail and looked out across the ancient and battered city, watched as the sun began to come up, a red-orange haze creeping in upon the edges of the night.

“Thank you,” she said, raising the bottle to her lips. Finding it empty, she tossed it absently over her shoulder, where it bounced noisily away into a pile of broken machinery.

Nael lit a joint, joining her by the rail.

“For what?” he asked.

“Coming with me. Not… not talking, much. Not trying to … help, I guess.”

Her tired and inebriated brain couldn’t frame the words. She could barely remember who she was talking to, and her arm was beginning to itch again.

The enforcer took a puff, and let it sit for a moment.

“No problem. Your business is your business, and you deal with it how you deal with it. Like I said in the car, I don’t know what you’re into – you’ve clearly seen some shit. But if you don’t want to tell me about it, that’s okay. We can just work together.”

He forced the remaining smoke out of his lungs, lifted his chin to feel the roof-top breeze on his neck as the weed did its work. A distant bustle was rising as the city began to wake up.

“This was nice, though. People in this city can be intense. It’s good to meet somebody else who can just…be.”

The surveyor didn’t respond. Her back rose and fell rhythmically, and she had begun to sag at the knees, kept upright only by her arms hooked over the rail.

Nael sighed. The enforcer wasn’t surprised this had happened – the night had been heading in this direction for a while. But did she really have to crash out on a rooftop a hundred stories above street-level?

He touched the frame of his shades, concealed hardware dialing a pre-programmed number. A subcutaneous implant buzzed in his ear, and he spoke aloud, murmuring in response.

“Yeah. Yeah, she’s okay. Mhm. Definitely fucked up, but I think she’s handling it. Strongest chick I’ve ever seen. Climbed three hundred meters of rusty ladders dead-ass drunk and I don’t think she even noticed…Yeah. I got it. Just send the car.”

Gently, Nael disentangled Jewels from the rail and laid her down upon the rooftop, covering her with his jacket.

For just a moment, her eyes fluttered.

“ ‘snice, Krade” she slurred. “Next time...…”

The surveyor rolled onto her side, head resting in the crook of her arm, and settled once more into the soft rhythms of sleep.

Nael took another long puff on his joint, watching the skyways for their ride as the piercing star-burst of daybreak crested the distant and ruined horizon.
 
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King Ghidorah

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Jewels jerked awake, upright in bed before her eyes were even open. She was drenched in sweat and tears, with her heart hammering so hard she could hear her pulse, feel the veins in her forehead throbbing. She was also back in the penthouse, still wearing her clothes from the night before – the only outfit that she currently owned. The lavish silk sheets of a four-poster canopy bed large enough for six people were tangled around her, and the afternoon sun was streaming in through the blue-tinted windows that made up the entirety of one wall.

The surveyor couldn’t remember her dream – it was already gone, receding further with every beat of her rapidly-calming heart - but the smell of boiling concrete lingered, the echo of breaking cities, and the conviction that someone she loved desperately needed help which she was woefully unable to give. Her nerves felt raw, a sickness of the soul, as though her chest had been unzipped and filled with ice and honey.

She retrieved her mood-stabilizers from her jacket-pocket and swallowed one dry, then disentangled herself from the sheets and made her way to the edge of the bed.

It wasn’t until she had her feet planted firmly on the thickly carpeted floor and had begun to feel the desperate necessity of a shower and a glass of water that Jewels noticed Nael stretched out on a pile of ornate pillows which filled a shallow pit in the middle of the room. His shoes and folded suit-jacket lay in a neat pile on the floor nearby, and his hands were clasped over his expansive paisley-clad chest.

He was still wearing his shades. It was impossible to tell if he was awake – until he spoke.

“You good?”

Jewels stood, and stretched, pondering the question. To her great shock, she didn’t have even the vaguest hint of a hangover. If she were to put aside the lingering tachycardia, sticky panic-sweat, and competing urges to weep, scream, break everything in sight, vomit, and take a header off the roof, she actually felt remarkably well-rested. And she could put those things aside: Jewels always woke up this way, now – she knew she would feel better after she’d had a shower and her meds had kicked in.

“Yeah. Amazingly enough, yeah, I think I am. Did we climb a building last night?”

Nael sat up, stretched one arm, then the other. His rippling shoulders rose and fell like mountains, accompanied by the creak and pop of stiff-jointed tectonic drift.

“Yes ma’am, we did.”

“Huh.”

Jewels looked at her arms, flexed and stretched again. There wasn’t even a hint of fatigue. That was fucking weird, but she supposed that climbing a ladder up the side of a tenement was a lot easier than descending into a kilometers-deep cave carrying forty kilos of equipment on your back.

The surveyor rubbed the bridge of her nose, forcibly curtailing that line of thought. The meds were still spinning up, and there were places she absolutely did not want to go if her psychochemical lifeline wasn’t in full swing.

“I’m going to take a shower,” she announced. “Then we should probably get to work. I’ve got a pretty specific logistics wish-list in mind, but I’m going to really need your help with personnel. Everything I know about the Markov tech-scavenger scene is at least seven years out of date.”

The enforcer sat on the edge of the pillow-pit, and began to lace up his shoes.

“Cool. I’ll get us some lunch – and you some clothes. That outfit’s got to be getting kinda nasty.”



The next hour or so passed uneventfully. Nael left to run errands, and Jewels had her shower, and began to feel properly human again. It wasn’t until she was toweling herself off, however, equal parts blissful and furious at the sheer fluffy luxury and obvious expense of this square of cloth whose only purpose was to dry her naked body, that the first surprise of the day presented itself.

Standing in the middle of a slate-tiled bathroom several times the size of any place she had ever previously lived, the surveyor’s arm began to itch, as it had been doing with increasing frequency over the past week. As she had a hundred times before, she scratched at it – only for a patch of damp skin the size of a small coin to slough off the inside of her forearm, clinging to her nails.

Jewels stared in dumbstruck confusion. There, on the very spot that had been bothering her so, shone a single, platinum scale.

She poked it, and she could feel the pressure. She picked at it, and found it seamlessly fused with the surrounding skin. She flicked it, and it rang like a tiny bell.

A brittle chuckle escaped her lips.

“What the fuck?”
 

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It was such a bizarre development that she didn’t even know how to feel about it.

Jewels had been out of the hospital for less than a month, and the itch had been bothering her for a chunk of that: whatever this strange little growth was, Kaalakiota’s medics hadn’t spotted anything wrong when they scanned her whole body at the atomic level mere weeks ago; It was definitely new, not cancer, or some disease she had picked up in the caves just for that one last kick in the teeth from Inverxe – but other than that? The surveyor had no idea what it could possibly be.

The scale felt like part of her body - but it also felt like metal. And there was something familiar about the way it caught the light that her conscious mind was scuttling infuriatingly around the edges of without actually making the connection.

Jewels sighed, and wrapped herself in a sinfully fluffy white bathrobe, retrieved from the same cabinet as the towel, which she left slung over the shower-head, ignoring the wall-mounted bamboo towel-rack in a minor display of class-solidarity. Her meds were definitely working now, because once she got past the sheer baffling randomness of this development she really couldn’t bring herself to care that much.

By the end of the day, Jewels figured, she would probably have access to a tricorder. She’d download some medical-scanner apps and let the handheld computer tell her whether she needed to make her shiny new passenger a priority.

As it turned out, she didn’t even have to wait that long.

When Nael returned he had changed his shirt – now a different shade and pattern of paisley - and, at some point, had a shave and a shower of his own. In one hand, he brought street-food in greasy paper bags, and an oversize, nondescript briefcase. In the other he brought a garment-bag, which Jewels took from him as soon as he stepped out of the en-suite elevator, and bore away to the bedroom.

Nael’s lip twitched in what might have been a smile, but otherwise he didn’t react, making his way across the sports-field-sized sitting-room to the luxury penthouse’s expansive kitchenette.

Upon inspection, with its contents laid out on the bed, the garment bag contained a set of slate-grey fatigues, a Guild-insignia t-shirt and sweatpants, several sets of featureless women’s underwear with matching socks, and a black double-breasted suit nearly identical to Nael’s own, paisley shirt and all, tailored to Jewel’s measurements.

The suit raised all kinds of questions: Jewels wondered where Nael had gotten her sizes, or who’d done the tailoring. She wondered just how much the Guild had found out about her since the decision to sponsor her had been made. And then she decided that it really didn’t matter, as long as they held up their end of the deal.

The fatigues were definitely going to put in work, but for moving around the city and being taken seriously by people who had no idea who she was, the suit was probably the best option. Jewels had never worn a suit before, never been in a position where wearing one made sense, so as weird as it was that Nael had bought her a matching outfit to his own the sheer novelty won her over in the end.

Besides, it was surprisingly comfortable, and the suit-jacket was the only item of the bunch that would allow her to conceal a quickly-accessible gun.

There was a mirror on the inside of the bedroom door. With the suit added to her very short hair and caver’s build, the dark circles under her eyes and the heavy-duty prospector’s boots which remained her only footwear, Jewels thought she looked like something that powerful interests would point at grand and potentially-violent problems.

It reminded her of the Kaalakiota Corporation’s lawyers.

She wasn’t sure how she felt about that – but it was a look that would certainly make things easier in the short term, and really, that was the only thing that mattered.

Putting the jacket aside for the moment but otherwise dressed to impress, Jewels joined Nael at the genuine marble-topped kitchen-island. She took up a perch beside him atop a row of lacquered wooden stools, wordlessly accepting a foil-wrapped burrito from within one of the greasy paper bags and ripping into it with gusto.

“Looks good on you,” Nael said, putting his own lunch aside. He placed the briefcase on the counter in front of them and unlatched it. “Check this out.”

Chewing enthusiastically, Jewels leaned forward.

The case contained a foam lining, molded to support its contents. There was a plasma pistol, of model Jewels didn’t recognize, with an assortment of power-cells and components. There was a tricorder, also of a model Jewels didn’t recognize, but sleek and new and shiny beetle-shell black, grouped with a pair of matching black shades – confirming her suspicions about Nael’s eye-ware – and a variety of related accessories.

The surveyor swallowed, updating her mental checklist, reprioritizing the day’s tasks.

Arrange logistics.

Recruit personnel.

Refine search parameters and strategy.

Plan tomorrow’s itinerary.

Find a way to get away from myself for a while.


“It’s actually a little disturbing the way you keep anticipating the stuff I need; you know that, right?”

“I’ve been told,” said Nael. He swiped his thumb across the inside of the case’s lid and a holographic interface lit up in front of them, flashing a rotating Guild insignia in three dimensions before booting into a bare-bones list of directories.

Jewels put her food down, wiped her hands on a paper napkin.

“What am I looking at here?”

Nael poked at the display, scrolling down the list. “Guild internal network. Most of what we’ll need for this shindig, we can requisition remotely – the Lady has given us carte blanche.”

The next three hours were spent searching through equipment stockpiles and filling out electronic requisition forms while their lunch sat largely forgotten on the counter. By the end of it, they had lined up a pair of heavy trucks with silent-running electric engines, a small arsenal (including a pair of directional plasma-grenade energy-lances in case of zoids), a flock of miniature security-drones, enough non-perishable food to feed twenty people for a month, and a mobile heavy-duty seismic imaging rig. They had rented a warehouse as a staging area, and put in a request for a couple of technical specialists – a data retrieval guy, a structural engineer and, of course, a geo-acoustic imaging technician.

“That’s just about all I think we can do from here,” said Nael. “What-all are you thinking for the rest of the crew?”

Jewels was silent for a moment. Her arm was starting to itch again, and she began fiddling with her new tricorder, getting it synched with the HUD in her sunglasses and downloading some medical diagnostic applications while she spoke.

“I figure we’ll need a prospecting team and a support team: about seven guys each. We could go in with just a salvage crew and cut things back to just the one truck, but I honestly don’t know what we’re going to find, and if we get swarmed by akata or somebody decides to try and jump our claim I’d rather have the numbers.”

Nael sat back on his stool, rolling his rippling shoulders and rubbing his neck with one meaty hand. “Okay. I can get us the support crew through the Guild-net easily enough – there’s always somebody needs a few guys to carry shit and hold a gun, so we got more than a few in-house mercenary outfits to pick from. But if we want a decent salvage team, and I'm guessing you want the best, then we’re going to have to take a walk.”
 
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King Ghidorah

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It turned out to be a pretty long walk. Cloaked in the particular aura of mystery and threat that only a pair of vaguely chipped-around-the-edges physical specimens in dark shades and expensive black suits can conjure, Jewels and Nael wound their way through the concrete valleys of downtown Markov, passing like phantoms through the crowds and ground-level traffic. The air smelled of electricity and teeming bodies, exhaust and ancient garbage, cool shadows and hot pavement. An easy silence prevailed between them as they made their way out of the 'prosperous' city-center and towards one of the more heavily industrialized zones.

Jewels would have liked to enjoy the walk, to take in the city and allow herself to just be, but her thoughts were troubled. She’d gotten the medical-scanning app working when they were still in the elevator – and it had raised more questions than answers.

The little metallic patch on her forearm was connected to a whole network of micro-fibers that had, evidently, spread throughout her entire body - infiltrating every tissue, every organ, but doing remarkably little actual damage in the process. The scan had ruled out cancer, or parasites, or nanotechnological infection, or any of the other obvious things, and characterized the stuff’s behavior (within a 70% confidence interval) as ultimately benign.

Jewels could at least rest easy that it probably wasn’t going to kill her – not that she would have cared that much if the opposite were the case. But the tricorder couldn’t tell her what the stuff was.

Her body was riddled with a substance, or possibly substances, that were completely undocumented.

The surveyor turned it around and around in her mind. It couldn’t have been something she picked up on Inverxe – her initial stay in the hospital, before her descent into the depths of the Hub, would have caught it. It couldn’t have been something the Unmaking had saddled her with, because the whole point of the Unmaking was that you didn’t have a you anymore, and without her meds Jewels’ soul still felt like an infinite descending note, a scream that didn’t end. Hell, it felt that way with the meds – they just muffled the sound, stopped her from engaging with her emotions so much so that she could actually function.

It couldn’t be a toxin she’d been exposed to in the guts of the damaged space-station because there had been that second stay in the hospital...

She went to scratch at her forearm again, and experienced a flash of half-memory – the pinch of an IV-needle sliding out of her flesh.

It stopped the surveyor dead in her tracks.

The hospital.

“Holy Shit,” she said, her voice bright with disbelief. “Those ungrateful wampa-sucking motherfuckers.”

Back on that hellish moon she’d left behind, there had been rumors among the surveyors: stories about miners who went up to the Hub for medical treatment and didn’t come back. Jewels had never thought that was any great mystery – if you had the money to get to the space-station, then a certain number of people were inevitably going to decide they’d rather not return. Even if you couldn’t pay for necessary treatment after the cost of booking a shuttle you could probably barter your way into indentured servitude under Kaalakiota’s alternative compensation program, and in that case you weren’t leaving either. Besides, it was only one of many completely mundane reasons why somebody might disappear on or around Inverxe.

Even so: People said that miners and other planet-siders occasionally vanished from hospitals on CRVIII, their contracts bought out and their paper-trail obscured by byzantine corporate voodoo. They said that the Corporation, in its relentless drive to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible, sometimes took untested therapies, surgeries, drugs of all kinds, and trialed them on easily-missed workers.

Jewels had never believed it - but here she was, walking around with mysterious alien bio-metal sprouting from the exact spot where her intravenous feeding-tube had gone in.

Nael turned, a few steps further down the sidewalk, looking back over his shoulder to see what was keeping her. People streamed passed, going about their business. Somewhere nearby, a siren wailed. “You good?”

“I,” declared Jewels, remarkably calmly, to her thinking, “am going to shoot Raph Hannigan in the face. And not just once, either. I am going to blow his smug, backstabbing fuck-boy lawyer brains out all over the sidewalk, wait for Kaalakiota’s clone-banks to bring him back, and then I’m going to do it again. It’ll be a whole project. Like a long game of whack-a-morph, but with plasma-weapons and a single corporate douchebag.”

There was no way in hell she was actually going to do any of that, of course, not the least reason for which was it would require her to go back to Inverxe. But it felt nice to say.

Jewels sniffed back furious tears, grateful for the dark sunglasses and moreso for the drugs.

She had risked her life for those assholes. She was pretty sure it wasn’t much of an exaggeration to say she’d saved their damn space-station – and then they did this.

Was she even supposed to be alive right now? Had they tried to kill her? Used her for a medical guinea-pig in the hope that when whatever untested fringe-science they’d shot her up with turned her into a sad, angry puddle they wouldn’t have had to pay out on her contract?

Shit.

Corporate gotta Corporate.

“Who’s Raph Hannigan?” asked Nael.

With a minor effort, the surveyor composed herself. “An asshole. I thought he was alright, for a lawyer, but I just now figured out he tried to kill me a while back.”

The enforcer nodded, seemingly unpurturbed. He produced a joint from seemingly nowhere and lit it with a wooden match. “This gonna be a problem? You need to talk about it?”

Jewels considered the question.

She was probably never going to see Raph Hannigan, or the CRVIII, ever again. Besides, she had other things to worry about, and the whole mess was an insult to her fragile sense of self-worth. She could afford to put it on the back-burner for the time being.

The surveyor resumed walking, weaving through a group of refugees with stacks of possessions on their backs and falling into step beside her minder.

“Let’s just go where we’re going. But if I fall over dead tomorrow, make sure Palaxia knows who to sue.”

Nael took a drag on his weed, unhurried and seemingly unconcerned. “Alright then.”
 
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King Ghidorah

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Where they were going turned out to be a salvage-broker. It was a squat, unremarkable, brutalist building, two stories of molded concrete with pretensions of intimidation sandwiched in between a warehouse and one massive, rust-speckled leg of a forty-story industrial gantry. The interior was dimly lit and functional – a tile floor, corrugated metal walls, and a bare ceiling lit by LED strips. There were was an air-conditioner bolted in one-corner beside a water-cooler with a stack of paper cups beside it, and a plain metal service-counter at the back with two prominent signs bolted to its face reading ‘PREMISES UNDER SURVEILANCE’ and ‘OTHER PATRONS ARE ARMED’. Behind the counter, there was a pale man on a stool, wearing a white blouse and a red bow-tie. He had one cybernetic eye, no hair, and a bolter-rifle within easy reach on the counter in front of him.

Tables were set up throughout the room, at which various rough-looking customers were seated – a crowd in leather and denim, canvas and metal and cut-price cybernetics. None of them were drinking – it wasn’t a tavern – but they were all engaged in heated discussion. The whole place smelled of rust, sweat, and burnt electrical wiring.

Jewels was familiar with the style and purpose of the establishment, if not the specific location. In addition to no-doubt buying and selling salvage directly, it was a semi-legal clearing house for others to turn salvage into cash, or cash into salvage, without leaving a paper-trail or directly involving the management. She’d been to similar businesses devoted to the trading of raw-ores in bulk; At least one person at each table would be a buyer, and probably far more well-off than they looked.

“ So, like, I appreciate the walk, but why couldn’t we have lined this up online?” she asked, as they strode unhurriedly across the room. “Just because we’re hiring scavengers doesn’t mean they don’t have e-mail, and it’s not like we’re setting up anything shady.”

“We could,” Nael acknowledged. “But this way’s faster.”

The bald fellow behind the counter nodded at their approach, though his expression did not change. “Master Nael,” he said, his tones shockingly cultured. “A pleasure to see you again. Have you spoken with your father lately?”

The enforcer paused for a moment, then ignored the question, opting instead to burn down half his remaining joint, letting the smoke slowly leak out as he spoke. “Jewels, meet mister Topher Grace-Balefrost. He manages this establishment, and he is a very useful person to know. He’s also the man we’re her to talk to today. Toph, this is Jewels – outta Inverxe by way of the Hub. The Guild is backing her, word from on-high, so you can consider her a paying customer.”

Toph folded his hands against his cummerbund and gave a very slight bow, but otherwise gave away nothing.

“A privilege,” he said, sounding like he meant it but emoting like a cinderblock. “How may I help you today, madame?”

Jewels breathed deeply, gathering her thoughts. The man’s courtesy was unsettling – Jewels still wasn’t used to anyone being this polite who wasn’t actively trying to cheat her, but that wasn’t the impression she was getting here.

She wished Krade was here: He could talk to anybody – it had been one of his great gifts, and in the moment she felt his absence acutely, like a shard of ice under her ribs.

The surveyor swallowed the lump rising in her throat and plunged ahead, fleeing into the business at hand.

“I need to hire a scavenger team,” she said, adjusting her shades for effect. “At least five guys, but no more than ten. I’m looking for expertise in wasteland-survival, underground prospecting and deep structural exploration. Not just scanner-monkeys – guys who know how to look for something specific, probably deliberately hidden, and can work with a support team that includes professional muscle and consulting experts. It could be a long expedition, but we’ll never get more than a couple-hundred kilometers out from the city, so we’ll mostly be in mapped territory. The Guild will be providing weapons and equipment, but I know some crews like to bring their own stuff – and that’s fine, as long as the stuff they bring isn’t garbage. Like, nobody bringing along a plasma-gun that doesn’t friggin’ work because their ex-girlfriend pissed on it once and they think that makes it lucky. I’m looking for professionals, not assholes.”

Topher Grace-Balefrost stared ahead, unblinking. The lull of conversation rose and fell at the tables around them. The air-conditioner thumped, clanked, and fell silent. Something in the proprietor’s head whirred quietly, and a lens in his cybernetic eye shifted position, catching the light.

“Interesting,” he said. “That is a highly specific request, madame. However, as money is no object, I believe that this establishment can accommodate. There will, naturally, be an agency fee, but the Guild’s money is always good here. An invoice will be provided through the usual channels… And you may rest assured, miss Jewels, however they may do things on Inverxe, this establishment only works with professionals.”

Toph twitched very slightly at the word ‘only’, more of a nervous tic than an actual change in expression, but Jewels could tell she’d offended him.

The surveyor bit her lip. “ I’m… I apologize,” she said, looking at the counter-top. “Where I come from, there are a lot of assholes. Specifying is a habit. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

The proprietor was still again. Listening to the low hum as he processed the conversation, Jewels wondered just how much of him was actually a machine.

Eventually he said, “Think nothing of it, madame. It always pays to know whom one is dealing with – and not every salvage-broker in this city is as discriminating as we are. Your… habits will no-doubt continue to serve you well. As to the business at hand, an appropriately specialized salvage-crew will be in touch through Guild channels within forty-eight hours.”

An extended silence followed.

“That’s it?” Jewels asked.

“That’s it,” said Nael.

“Indeed,” said Toph. “I wish you both success in your endeavor, and I would request, Master Nael, that you remember me to your father. It has been a pleasure doing business. Good day.”
 
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King Ghidorah

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In a flurry of increasingly frenzied preparation, two weeks went by. With Nael at her side, Jewels sorted through their supplies as pallet after pallet of weapons and equipment arrived at their rented warehouse. She met with and vetted their experts and support crew, ensuring to her own satisfaction that nobody was coming on this trip who didn’t know their job. She had drinks with the dwarven woman who was boss, owner, and CEO of their newly-contracted salvage crew, a relentlessly charming Arcadian expatriate named Artemia Cranadash, and left reassured that the expedition was in good hands. At least a couple of hours were spent every afternoon pouring over maps and survey-data, determining search-parameters and refining the plan.

Everything was going smoothly – but Jewels was still restless. When night fell and the day’s tasks were done, with no immediate goal to pull her forward the surveyor would wander the city, as she had that first night, in search of that simple and lively oblivion – eating and drinking and dancing through the neon chaos, shedding brittle and inadequate tears in the quiet and forgotten corners of the dawn. On most nights, Nael would come with her, his solid, silent presence an anchor – but as the date of departure grew nearer, her minder began to disappear more often, his own preparations to make.

This was how Jewels found herself alone in a nightclub on the evening before the final team-briefing was due to take place: drunk, armed and miserable, dressed in her corporate tee and cargo pants and lamenting her newfound inability to be horny without also being desperately sad.

The music was loud and the alcohol was cheap. Crimson spotlights and electric blue strobes burned the eyes, and everything reeked of sweat, booze and artificial fog. The bassline pounded, a female vocalist expounding the uninhibited momentum of youth alternating stanzas with a nigh-unintelligible death-metal growl, all backed by electric guitars. At least a quarter of the patrons were fucking, and most of the rest would be by the end of the night: the pheromones were so thick in the air you could practically crunch them between your teeth. The place was an assault on the senses, numbing, even to someone whose situational awareness was honed to a razor-edge, and it all came together to make it easy not to think – which, for Jewels, was exactly the point.

The surveyor sat at a booth in the corner, nursing a gin-and-tonic and just… existing. Part of her, the part that remembered who she used to be, wanted to dance, but with the energy in here the way it was the odds of getting laid were too high. Anonymous dance-floor sex required an emotional equilibrium and detachment she didn’t think she could maintain, so she was stuck with just drinking, and letting the relentless energy of the club burn down her mental reserves until she was overwhelmed enough to go back to the penthouse and pass out.

So far it was working pretty well; Jewels was drifting, taking in everything and processing nothing – until a fit, barrel-shaped man in a plaid work-shirt and black fatigue-pants touched her lightly on the shoulder.

“Beggin’ your pardon, miss” he drawled, shouting to be heard over the music and the crowd, “but would you mind if I joined you, just to set for a spell?”

Something went clunk in her brain, some skill or instinct that said she needed to pay attention to this man. With a titanic effort, the drunken and half-hypnotized surveyor pulled enough of her awareness together to respond – and to assess the newcomer in greater depth.

He was older, going grey at the temples, he was completely sure of himself, and even though he didn’t fit in with crowd, he most definitely looked like he was here to have fun.

“Yeah… go ahead, I guess. I’m not going to fuck you though.”

The man barked a laugh, and slid into the overstuffed seat on the opposite side of the table.

“Well, kind of you not to waste my time,” he said. “Though if we were to talk for awhile you might change your tune – I’m told I’m quite the charmer. Still, I can see you’re not interested, and far be it from me to impose upon a lady, so I’ll content myself with a simple introduction: my name is Hamil Shane,”

His smile decreased just a fraction in intensity, and he folded his weathered hands upon the table. A trickle of adrenaline climbed like ice up Jewels’ spine as Shane continued:

“I work for Cytokine Industries.”

Jewels blinked hard, trying to martial her reluctant synapses and only half-succeeding. She was pretty sure there was subtext here that she was intended to pick up, but she was too drunk for subtext.

“Do you already know who I am?” Jewels ventured.

Shane spread his arms in a gesture of acceptance and smiled graciously.

“Guilty as charged. I reckon you have seen through my clever ruse.”

He hung his head in mock-shame.

The surveyor had to stop herself from smiling, and again didn’t entirely succeed. He was charming.

“So this’s business. Some kind of corporate espipi-… espinach…fuck, I’m drunk. It’s a corporate spy thing?”

Shane lounged, resting his arms across the top of the seat-back as though he were draping them over shoulders of a pair of dates.

“Everything’s business,” he said. “Don’t mean it can’t be fun, too. Now, we could keep beatin’ ‘round this bush – but you’re tired, and I do value courtesy, so I reckon I’ll get to the point.”

Jewels set her drink aside – a long habit when approached by strange men. The club around them was beginning to feel strangely distant, the music bizzarely muted, and the colors were running together; every instinct she had was storming her comfortable haze, telling her she was in danger, but they were at war with Shane’s aw-shucks theatrics, and she was still too absent to put together what the problem was.

“You rode in outta Kaalakiota’s patch, and right off the boat you and the Guild were thick as thieves, makin’ moves: puttin’ together a specialized crew, and invokin’ the authority of some powerful people to do it. It’s ruffled a few tail-feathers - got Cytokine tactical acquisitions directorate cluckin’ like chickens.”

Shane reached for Jewels’ discarded glass, raising a thick, questioning eyebrow.

“Be my guest,” she said. Her brain was almost spun up enough that she could follow where this was going: The local megacorporation had taken an interest in what she, a nobody, was doing wielding the resources of the local commodities-and-trade-union. That made sense. She’d half-expected it – and it probably wasn’t an accident that she’d been approached while Nael wasn’t around.

“Thank you kindly,” said Shane, picking up the glass but not yet taking a drink.

“Now… my people, we been puttin’ out feelers, tryin’ to figure what y’all are doin’. Got your records from CRVIII for a song, and a few other things besides – we know what you were into out there, maybe even more than you do, but we ain’t been able to find a blessed thing about what you’re into down here.”

Shane leaned conspiratorially across the table. “So, uh… I thought I’d ask.”

Jewels stared at him - then immediately squinted again, because the strobe-lights hurt her eyes. She couldn’t hear the music – she was aware it was must be there, could feel the bass in her ribcage, but it somehow wasn’t reaching he ears. Everything seemed to be going sideways, in a way that she couldn’t quite define.

“Well… I’m… not going to tell you?”

Shane sighed, leaning back in his seat with the glass in one hand and his chin in the other. He still hadn’t taken a drink.

“Well, shoot. I reckon I will be on my way then. But uh, should you change your mind, or find the Guild to be a less than satisfactory partner… ”

The man reached into his shirt-pocket and retrieved a little square of hard-backed paper, sliding it across the table.

“My card.” he said. He extracted himself from the booth and sketched a sloppy little bow. “With my thanks for the drink.” Then he added, waving absently over his shoulder as he began to walk away: “I’m sure I’ll see you around – test subject H-36.”

Jewels picked up the card, baffled over the fact that he’d just left without argument when she said 'no'. It took a moment for what else he had said to her to fully infiltrate her brain.

“Wait, what the fuck?”

She scrambled haphazardly out of the booth, and the music washed over her, the lights, the atmosphere, the roar of the crowd – everything was normal again: hypnotizing, but now utterly spoiled by the sinister mystery of what had just happened.

Hamil Shane had vanished without a trace.

The surveyor didn’t even realize until much, much later that he’d walked off with her glass – and that that might have been the point all along.
 
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King Ghidorah

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Jewels didn’t sleep that night.

She wandered the city, but in spite of her best efforts couldn’t seem to get any drunker than she was already. She drifted from the dizzying lights of downtown to the shadows of the heavy-industrial quarter, out past the space-port until she was up against the former edge of the city, where the barrier would have been before the expansion - then turned and followed the old borders back into a warren of warehouses, eventually surprising herself by landing, mostly sober, at her team’s rented staging-ground.

It was a two-story building which took up the greater part of a city-block, constructed of concrete and prefabricated metal sheets, with loading-docks all along one side and a hangar-door facing the street. The surveyor fiddled with the crappy biometric lock on the office-door around the back, only half paying attention as she let herself in.

Her mind was churning, torn between the stress of the coming day and the sheer paranoia that Shane’s parting remark had inspired. Cytokine Industries knew what the Kaalakiota corporation had done to her – or at least, they knew for certain that something had been done – and they wanted her to know that they knew.

What the fuck did that mean?

Was it something she was supposed to react to? An intimidation tactic? A warning? Was it supposed to make her curious enough to call up Shane, to approach him from the viewpoint that he had somethings she wanted, some kind of bullshit corporate psychological-ops trick? Well if so the joke was on them. Jewels only had time for one mystery right now: the one that haunted her dreams. She was way too fucking depressed to go chasing after that charming yee-haw motherfucker’s trail of breadcrumbs as well, and she had shit to do today.

Jewel breezed through the bare-bones little office, hit the lights as she stepped out into the warehouse-proper, emerging into the vague scent of moist cement and hot plastic. The overhead halogen bulbs engaged row-by-row, a series of mechanical clunks echoing in the enclosed space, banishing the dark by sections.

It was all here: the trucks, ready and waiting, a pair of converted military cargo-movers with silent-running electric engines and re-enforced off-road tires. Clustered around them were a dozen pallets full of olive-drab plastic packing crates – weapons, armor, provisions and specialized equipment, prospecting and communications gear. Jewels and Nael had gone over it twice – they had everything they needed.

The whole lot looked remarkably small in the warehouse’s great hollow expanse, barely occupying a dozen square meters in the middle of the bare concrete floor. Jewels footfalls echoed on the pavement as she strode over to one of the enormous trucks. She put one booted foot on the bumper and levered herself up onto the hood, lying down spreadeagled on the cool matte-grey metal and staring up at the ceiling.

It was all going to happen at noon tomorrow: her crew would assemble in this very room. Nael would be there, and several other Guild personnel who would be acting as their home-base while they were in the field. There would be a catering table, and Nael would bring the visual aids they had prepared. She would tell everyone what, specifically, they’d actually been hired for(basic operational security for this kind of prospecting venture forbidding the objective from being spread around too freely and too early), leaving out the specific details of how she knew about it. They would go over everyone’s role, the search-pattern and protocols they’d be running, and outline schedule, communications and command structure. They’d all eat lunch – then they’d gear-up, load up the trucks and roll out into the wastes.

Despite the fact that she had made it happen, Jewels didn’t fully understand, on an emotional level, how things had gotten to this point. She had never been a leader – that had been Krade. She could plan, and she could prospect. She could negotiate, and fight, and cave, and climb, organize and argue and spot a bad deal. Shyness had never been a problem for her before – but that was before, and public speaking wasn’t in the surveyor’s skill-set. On the other hand, she knew everything she was going to say backwards and forwards at this point, and its not like she was afraid of being judged by these people.

No, she was afraid that she was going to get them all killed.

Jewels buried her face in her hands, digging her palms into her eyes, blocking out the glare of the overhead lamps as she forced herself to breath slowly.

Cevanti wasn’t as dangerous as Inverxe – but it was still lethal in its own right. Yes, they’d be sticking to territory that had already been mostly explored; Yes, the odds of getting ambushed by ravening zoids in open country this close to the city were low, especially since their numbers had been thinned during the assault on Markov the previous year – but that wasn’t a guarantee. Besides, there were all kinds of things that could kill you down in the bowels of a ruin, especially a ruin with a potentially active old-world system inside it. Just because teenage-Jewels had gotten inside wherever it was they were searching for without getting processed into meat-cubes by a laser-security-grid, or dissolved in fast-acting security foam gone caustic from centuries of rot, or imprisoned in some forgotten cell by half-rabid robot guardians didn’t mean they were going to be that lucky this time.

And then there were the akata, the bestial void-born hunters, sinister ghost-predators of the wastes.

Jewels groaned, gritting her teeth, and tried to tell herself that she was being stupid. This wasn’t her and two companions descending into a death-moon, or a space-station over-run by Darkseid’s corruption. She had an entire crew – twenty-four people in total, armed, experienced, hand-picked for the task. She had maps, and weapons, specialized tools and a goal that they could afford to approach slowly and methodically.

She pulled her mood-stabilizers out of her pocket and dry-swallowed a pill.

It was going to be fine. Jewels was going to get answers, and those answers would buy her access, and maybe even some clue as to what task she was going to point herself at next.

She would not, the surveyor told herself, ever again be the lone survivor of a doomed expedition.

One way or another.
 
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The presentation went well, for the most part.

Jewels stood up in front of her assembled crew, who were seated on metal folding chairs or leaning against packing crates, dour in her grey fatigues, and did her very best to look like she was serious goddamn business. She maintained eye-contact as she introduced herself, looking from one person to the next, and managed to avoid thinking to hard about how different they all were from anybody she had ever worked with. An Inverxian prospecting crew this size would have been less lively, but more tense. Their clothing would have been more ragged, and even the youngest among them would have had something haunted and yearning behind their eyes.

These people were calm and collected, eager and curious. They had a hunger she recognized, but it wasn’t feral, wasn’t desperate – it was a tool, not an obsession. They listened with rapt attention, men and women, dwarves, elves and a few more exotic humanoid species, all dressed in some variation of military-casual; and every single one of them perked up and leaned forward when she told them what they were going after.

“I have confirmed information that there is an intact pre-End-Times data-cache, or possibly even an active link to a wider old-world network, within a one-hundred fifty kilometer radius of this city. We are going to find it, we are going to claim it, and we are going to retrieve everything we can. Also, we’re doing this job on the personal behalf of the Lady Palaxia, so should we succeed, in addition to your regular fees, we are all going to get silly-ass paid.”

She went over the six likely locations they’d be investigating – prominent above-ground features with relatively unmapped subterranean features. As she spoke, holograms flickered behind her, charts and maps and bullet-point lists. She explained the search parameters they’d devised, using the ground-penetrating sonar equipment to locate cavities or hidden rooms prior to the salvage crew conducting a manual sweep, and the role of the support crew: rear-guard, and, if necessary, backup. She went over their arsenal and emergency protocols, and the communications link with the guild personnel who would be acting as home-base and coordinating a rescue from inside the city in the unlikely event an urgent aerial extraction became necessary.

Then, gritting her teeth and forcing down the tight feeling in her chest, reassuring herself that the lights in the room were not a soft and sinister shade of gold, she asked if there were any questions.

A stubby arm immediately shot up. It was Artemia Cranadash, blond, bold, and daintily bearded in a tie-dyed muscle-shirt and grey camo-pattern cargo-pants, standing on her chair the better to be seen. The flimsy folding seat creaked under the weight of her stout dwarven body.

“I just wanted to double-check, boss-lady. Where are you going to be in all of this?”

Jewels relaxed a notch, sticking her hands in her pockets and forcing herself to continue to maintain eye-contact. “If it looks like we’ve found something, I’m going down with the salvage-team. That’s closest to my skill-set, and out of everyone here I’m the only one… well, I know best what we’re looking for. Otherwise, I’ll be strictly administration. I’m not going to micromanage – you all know your jobs or you wouldn’t be here – but somebody’s got to integrate all this in the field, and I put the crew together, so I guess I’m elected.”

Artemia stroked her beard thoughtfully. “Fair, fair… and while you’re below with us, who’s going to be running base-camp?”

The surveyor didn’t hesitate, nodding at her minder, sitting off to the side with the briefcase-projection unit. He’d ditched his suit-jacket and slacks for cargo-pants and a tactical harness, but he was still wearing one of his loud paisley shirts.

“Nael. He helped me plan this operation, and he’s going to be heading up our security net. When I’m below, he’s in charge.”

The dwarf looked like she was going to say something else, but a shrewd look passed across her face, and she sat back down.

Jewels fielded a couple more questions, both prying for details about the object of their search, and then the crew broke for lunch, all two-dozen of them clustering around a nest of catering-tables which had been set up against the rear-wall of the warehouse while she was talking.

The surveyor was using wooden tongs to extract a weird little pie-slice from a cheap folding table covered with the nicest food she’d ever seen, meats and vegetables in savory sauces, presented In little heated trays alongside a selection of pastries and fruits, and trying to fight down the conflicting emotions she had over the sheer availability of such a banquet, when she received an unexpected shock.

“Holy shit. ‘Six-Day’ Jewels. It really is you.”

She jumped, nearly dropping her desert, and losing a sausage off the side of her plate. Nobody had called her that in almost a decade. Out of a life-long and deeply-ingrained certainty that food was precious and not to be wasted, she crouched down and retrieved the fallen morsel from the concrete floor without even thinking about it – only then did she look to find out who knew her old nickname.

It was one of Artemia’s guys, a pale, shortish man in grey fatigues similar to Jewels’ own. His red hair was pulled back in a shoulder-length braid and he was trending towards the heavy side of husky.

“Okay… I must have known you before I left, but the weight is throwing me. I’m sorry, man, but it’s been actual years and nobody in the old neighborhood was that well fed.”

She bit into her rescued sausage and chewed thoughtfully. The guy was definitely familiar.

“Well,” he said, “the last time you saw me I was also a lot more naked.”

Jewels nearly choked. She did know this guy. In fact, along with her best friend at the time, she’d lost her virginity to this guy.

“No way,” she hissed, swallowing hard. “Fucking Martin?!”

The curse-word wasn’t an exclamation – that was what everyone had called him. He’d been very good at it.

Fucking Martin frowned, blushing furiously, and stepped up beside her to fill his own plate with meats and gravy. “Nobody calls me that anymore,” he muttered. “It’s just Marty now. Or Big Marty if I’ve done something cool lately. But yeah. You could knock me over with a leaf right now. I can’t believe you’re our mysterious employer. Look at you, all tight with the Guild. Seriously though, Jewels, after the way you left, nobody thought you would ever come back.”

Jewels finished her sausage, chewing for a few seconds so that she had time to think of a response as they moved away from the service table. The buzz of the overhead lights abruptly seemed strangely loud, somehow eclipsing the hum of conversation, but nobody else seemed to notice; It was giving her a headache.

“Most of the time I don't feel like I did,” she said, and instantly regretted it.

Over the course of an awkward silence, Marty studied her. “… yeah. I think I see what you mean. You’re not the same, are you.”

The surveyor sighed, screwing her eyes shut. She’d never had real feelings for Fucking Martin, but he’d always been a kind enough guy, bold in his way, and weirdly emotionally perceptive; it was part of what had made him so good at getting laid.

In short, he was absolutely the last person in the universe that she wanted to talk with right now, or for the foreseeable future.

“No. I’m sorry Marty, but I’m really not. I’m glad you got out, though. Of the neighborhood, I mean. Artemia’s crew has a good reputation, and you’re clearly doing alright for yourself.”

Marty’s eyes narrowed, and his face fell by a nigh-imperceptible degree. He hadn’t touched his food. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s not a bad old life. Anyway… you’ve probably got stuff to do. Talk to you later, maybe?”

“Sure,” said Jewels. “Maybe.”

She turned away, her nerves screaming, and immediately began scanning the warehouse floor for Nael’s mountainous paisley-clad form. If there was one thing she knew she could count on from the burly enforcer, it was that he’d know when not to talk. Standing in silent simulacrum of engagement with him, she might be able to avoid any further conversation until the time came for her to start giving instructions again.
 
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King Ghidorah

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The further they got from the walls of Markov, the more relaxed Jewels felt.

Rolling through the wastes, everything became simple – the hard work was done, the goals and conditions by which she would haul herself day-by-crushing-day into the future over the coming weeks were set. Now all that was left was the job, and making sure nobody died. At the moment, that largely consisted of checking and re-checking the baud-rate and field-integrity on her plasma side-arm and watching the landscape roll by out the passenger-side window of a converted half-track.

Their little convoy crept silently through ancient streets, valleys lined with rubble between the disheveled and drooping facades of once-proud tenements, long-since stripped of anything remotely salvageable and left to crumble away, draped in vines and creeping ivy, a funeral-shroud of living green. The trucks crawled over mounds of twisted rebar and shattered concrete polymer, the disintegrating wreckage of entire city-blocks tangled in the root-systems of massive pine-trees. Sophisticated little robots, squirrels and birds composed of coils and springs, metal chassis and blinking diodes, fled at the rumble of their tires. The expedition detoured around the shattered hulk of an ancient war machine, little more than a tarnished alloy skeleton in the vague shape of a titanic man, slumped drunkenly across a collapsed monorail overpass. Rust stains on the pavement before it suggested bygone companions, their fate unknown.

The wind gusted and moaned through empty and eyeless windows and temperate canopy, sending little clouds of dusts sidewinding across broken pavement. It smelled of rain and tragedy.

This was a different kind of desolation than Jewels had become accustomed to: Inverxe’s emptiness had been ravenous. Even its endless icy deserts, where a person could see for kilometers with their view unobstructed by any man-made structure, were but another face of the planet’s twisted malice. From the moment you set foot on that hungry moon, you could feel it trying to take you.

Cevanti wasn’t a predator: it was a coma patient. Away from the lights of Markov, the landscape mostly just felt exhausted, even the towering pines and sheets of ivy mere moss on the tombstone of an entire civilization. It was a twilight world, so badly hurt that it had fallen into a bone-deep sleep from which it was determined never to wake, swaddled in dreams of wreckage, robots and akata revenants - A world haunted by the furious mechanical ghosts not only of its past, but of all its stolen tomorrows.

There was a time when Jewels had taken the graveyard melancholy of the ruins in which she was raised as an almost personal affront, and had responded by living as hard and loud as possible. It had run against the grain of her soul, and so she’d run as far as she could afford to as soon as she was able.

Now, it was almost comforting.

“So now that we’re all shored and propped and underway, I was wondering if you’d answer me a question”, said Artemia.

The dwarf was driving – or rather, the dwarf was co-piloting the basic-ass AI that was actually driving. As long as nothing unexpected happened, she was mostly just monitoring the proximity scanners and keeping the seat warm.

Jewels holstered her weapon, and tightened a strap on her tactical harness. Her new rigging had armor plating under the mesh, and she was still figuring out the best fit.

“Sure.”

“What’s your stake in this? Some folk would put a job like this together for the money or the fame, but now I’ve some got some idea of how you work, and I’m not sure you care about either of those things. You definitely care about the work, though – so what are you after? What’s your angle?”

Jewels was silent. Artemia raised her eyebrows and presented a disarming smile.

“It is, of course, your business – and you are the boss. Just making conversation is all.”

The surveyor sighed and rubbed her face. There were way too many emotionally literate people on this expedition.

“I’d rather not,” she said. “talk about it, I mean. It’s not a corporate thing or an ego thing - I’m not trying to be the secretive mysterious expedition leader or some shit – but I have some heavy personal stuff tied up in finding this database that I am just not comfortable discussing yet unless it’s absolutely necessary. With anyone at all, not just you.”

Artemia’s smile faded, and she nodded slowly. She patted Jewels companionably on the shoulder, but said nothing further. Raindrops began to hit the windshield, one, then two, then a dozen, and then the sky opened, a hiss and a roar of falling water. The dwarf switched on the hi-beams.

In the gathering downpour, the two trucks full of supplies and crew plunged undeterred through the wastes, leaving Markov far behind .
 
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It was evening when they reached the first dig site.

The dome loomed above the surrounding forest, flanked by the overgrown shells of lesser ruins: a polyhedral hump, glowing orange in the setting sun, its outlines blurred by the creeping cloak of vegetation that had accrued over centuries of neglect, with the tangled skeleton of an antenna-array twisted and broken at the top, all choked by vines and ivy. Nobody knew what it had originally been for, but an ancient set of monorail tracks led directly up to a gaping vault door set into the foundations, wide enough for a convoy of heavy-duty trucks to drive through two-abreast.

That wasn’t what Jewels and her crew did. They parked the trucks a good hundred meters out from the entrance, far enough that they’d have time to gun down anything that came crawling, creeping, or clanking out, then spent a couple of hours clearing the surrounding undergrowth with machetes. With a site established, amidst the fading light they set up camp.

It was a remarkably smooth operation. Nael got the security-net up and running, mini-drones patrolling silently overhead and among the trees; the support-team set to work assisting the imaging technician with getting his survey-rig out of the truck, assembled and powered up. Artemia’s scavengers got the tents in place and, weapons close at-hand, set about preparing dinner.

There wasn’t actually much for Jewels to do, past the moving-boxes-off trucks stage of the proceedings. Everyone knew their job, and had somebody supervising their task. In the name of keeping busy, the surveyor found herself standing amidst the invigorating smell of cut vegetation, tricorder in hand, attempting some preliminary exterior scans of the building - without getting too close, of course. She had seen too many people get dragged screaming into foreboding, unlit cavern-mouths to make that mistake.

The structural engineer she had hired, similarly at loose ends, appeared beside her. The woman was short, blond, energetic like a bandsaw, and had one of those timeless faces that some people get when they turn fifteen and don’t lose until they’re fifty-five. Jewels thought her name was Em, but couldn’t remember if it was short for anything.

“How’s it look?” asked the engineer. A breeze kicked up, rustling the decapitated fronds of the undergrowth underfoot and the unmarred canopy above..

Jewels frowned, and poked at the tricorder. “The dome is some kind of exotic polymer, but the interior is mostly hollow above the third story. There’s a couple of floors that are just… filled with junk - nothing that looks functional though. And nothing alive, thank fuck. I can’t get a clean read on the sublevels, but considering what we’re looking for that’s probably a good thing. Shielded means secrets, and that’s what we’re here for..”

“Show me,” said Em.

The surveyor expanded the holo-display, showing the engineer an exploded view of the building’s interior floor-plan, sketched in shades of pale blue, with annotations for substructures and infrastructure.

Em made a wordless noise of interest. “This is… huh. Okay, look at this here, near the top of the dome - those are re-enforced robotics hardpoints, like for gantries and industrial armature. They’re missing, obviously, but if those conduits -” she pointed at a series of lines tracing the interior arc of the dome -”haven’t been stripped then the power-systems for them should still be intact… curious. Are those readings on the dome composition accurate?”

Jewels glanced again at the corner of the display, a cross-sectional readout of the dome’s shell and what it was made of.

“They should be? This tricorder is brand new: it’s loaded with architectural and industrial diagnostic apps, and it’s the fanciest thing I think I’ve ever owned.”

The engineer shook her head pointing at the display, then at the building. “A tungsten-doped ferro-silicate-polycarbide geodesic dome layered with shape-memory xeno-polymers and shock-absorbing gel. This thing is massively heat, impact, and shock-resistant, but only from the outside. I think we’re looking at some kind of military production facility. I’d almost say it could be a mech-bay, but the ground-floor architecture is all wrong.”

Jewels cut off the display and clipped the tricorder to her belt as the sun dipped fully below the horizon. Overhead, the stars were coming out in earnest, the Crossroads spiraling its crazed cosmic lightshow across the mid-evening sky.

“So it’s the kind of place you’d expect to find a functioning old-world terminal hiding in the basement?”

“Let me put it this way,” said Em, putting her hands on her hips and scowling at the looming structure. “I’d be surprised if a structure like this didn’t have a hard-wired link to a shielded network. Whether it’s still running… well, I’m not an archaeologist.”

Jewels followed her gaze, peering into the deeper darkness of the dome’s open door. They were going to go in as soon as the subsurface scans were complete and they had a route mapped out - probably tomorrow afternoon or the following morning.

The surveyor wracked her brain. Had she been here before? This place didn’t seem familiar, but then, she’d been so amazingly stoned at that time that any memory she might have had wouldn’t actually resemble the reality.

She frowned. It didn’t feel right… but then, nothing much did these days.

The aroma of quite excellent preserved food cooking itself in self-heating packages wafted from the camp, failing to overpower the smell of chlorophyll but nonetheless making itself known.

“You okay?” asked Em.

Jewels rubbed her face, digging her palms into her eyes. “I’m just hungry,” she lied. “Come on. Let’s go eat.”
 
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King Ghidorah

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For the second night in a row, Jewels didn’t sleep.

It was starting to worry her - it didn’t feel like simple insomnia, didn’t come with the lurgy brightness and dull aches that usually accompany sleep-deprivation over the course of days. If anything, she felt like she’d just gotten up from a really solid nap: there was simply no need to go back down. After tossing and turning in her bedroll for a couple of hours, listening to the sounds of the forest, the buzz of insects and the slow breathing of the people she was sharing a tent with, her emotions began to catch up with her, the shattering empty weight of lying in bed alone.

There was no way Jewels was letting herself pull on *that* thread, so instead she pulled her boots on, dry-swallowed a pill, strapped on her sidearm and tricorder, and strode out into the dark.

The camp was still, a silent monument of trucks and consoles, tents and cables, except for a single man on watch. He was sitting with his gun atop the great dark bulk of one of the trucks, monitoring the security grid and finding ways to keep himself awake. Like the truck, he was a shadow in the dark, backlit by the razor-sharp light of the stars.

It was Marty. Well, fuck that very much; Jewels crept past him without saying hello - she didn’t need to talk, she needed to move, needed to be doing something so that she wasn’t stuck in the dark with her thoughts.

The surveyor wasn’t certain exactly what that something was until she found herself retrieving a set of smart-goggles from the equipment stores and slinking out of camp, circling around to a pile of rubble on one side of the dome.

Then she began to climb.

It was relatively easy going - the centuries of plant-growth which had enveloped the dome’s surface provided ample handholds, and with the goggles set to night-vision the darkness presented no issues. It was simply a matter of hauling herself upward and navigating the tangle, zig-zagging across the ancient structure and pushing aside leaves and brush until a critical point was reached and the slope of the curve became more vertical than horizontal, a hike instead of a climb. Enveloped by the smell of soil and growing things, feeling the rough springiness of plants against her skin and the pock-marked surface of the ancient dome through the soles of her boots, everything was simple for a while: you went up, and the rest took care of itself.

The overgrowth got more sparse the higher Jewels climbed, until eventually she wasn’t climbing anymore, or even hiking - just picking her way over ancient plastic and ankle-high tangles of stubborn bark-crusted vines.

And then she was at the top. Standing beneath the twisted, strangled broadcast array which crowned the abandoned facility, she stripped off her goggles and stared out into the night.

The light of the crossroads blazed down, sharp and attentive, like the cyclopean eyes of some great unfathomable audience, stars and planets wheeling across the void-black sky. The dark blanket of the forest rolled away to the horizon, punctuated by ruins, wastes, and great gaping wounds in the earth. She could see the hectic lights of Markov in the distance, a chaotic, inviting stack of urban jewels gleaming at the bottom of the sky, behind a shimmering, emerald curtain.

Jewels took a deep breath. The air was still and cold, dirt and rust, ancient plastic and new-growth forest.

She still wasn’t tired. She was pretty sure the climb hadn’t even raised her heart-rate. The surveyor looked at her hand and flexed her fingers. Here and now, in the clarity and stillness of the night, she could feel a strength in her limbs beyond her own, a seismic alien potency that was nothing less than alarming.

“What's happening to me?” she wondered.

“It’s an excellent question, ma'am, but I most assuredly do not know.” said Hamil Shane.
 

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Jewels didn’t waste time being surprised. She had her weapon out, primed, and leveled at the man’s chest almost before he had finished speaking. Shane stood at his ease in the shadow of the broadcast-tower, flanked by vine-growth and withered leaves over rusted steel. He was dressed for the road, with a black stetson hat and a weathered black duster, buttoned up tight.

He put his hands up and made slow, placating movements.

“Easy now, ain’t no need for unpleasantries. It’d be a shame to ruin such a clement evenin’ with violence.”

Exhaling slowly, Jewels lowered her weapon but didn’t put it away, backing up several paces..

“How the hell are you here, Shane?”

The man produced a tar-black cigarillo from out of the shadows of his coat, stuck it between his teeth and lit it with a match.
“That,” he said. “Ain’t the question. The question is why am I here, and I could rightly ask you the very same thing. This here facility was picked clean decades ago.”

He took a long drag and blew an oily smoke-ring. The tip of his roll-up glowed red in the dark.

“But here y’all are. Now, what that says to me is that your either a fool, or you know somethin'. And I don’t think your a fool, Miss Jewels.”

His slate-grey eyes, bright points in the night, bored into hers. That sense of unreality and danger that Jewels had experienced in the club, as though everything were tilting subtly sideways, began to creep again up her spine.

“I don’t suppose,” he continued, “that if I were to say the words ‘Iron Dragon’ that would mean anything to you?”

Jewels blinked in mild confusion. “I’m… still not going to tell you anything? And you haven’t answered my question. How are you up here? I didn’t even know I was going to be up here.”

Shane smiled amiably and spread his arms. “I don’t reckon you’d believe it if I said you had chanced upon me during my evening constitutional?”

In spite of the tension, Jewels had to stop herself from smiling, too.

“Yeah, I thought not,” the man said. “Well, like yourself, there are certain things it ain’t prudent for me to discuss. But, since we are now firm acquaintances, I will tell you this: it is very interestin’ to me that, given your history, you’d come snoopin’ around these parts. ”

He took one last pull off his cigarillo, dropped it, and ground it with the heel of his boot as the smoke drifted past his teeth, wreathing his smiling face in a slithering cloud.

Jewels blinked hard. He was turning it all around on her, the whole conversation. She could see him doing it, but it was very hard not to get lost in the maze. What the hell was ‘Iron Dragon?’. What was he implying? And how did he know she’d be here?

Stop.

Breathe.

Step back.

Don’t let him confuse you.


“...You’re following us,” she said. “This is the highest vantage point for kilometers in every direction. You’re following us, and you settled in up here because it’s the best place to watch what we do.”

Shane tipped his hat.

“Man’s gotta make a livin’,” he said, “ ain’t gonna apologize for doing my job. Of course, that does raise the question of why I made my presence known, doesn’t it?”
He tapped the side of his nose with one finger and gave her a conspiratorial wink.

A breeze blew across the top of the dome, rustling the vegetation and carrying with it a scent of rain. The hem of Shane’s coat flapped around his shins.

“At the club,” the surveyor said, “You called me ‘test subject 36-H’. What does that mean? How much do you know about what Kaalakiota did to me?”

“Less than I’d like,” said Shane, his smile fading for a moment, “And I reckon not much less than those what done it. You are the sole beneficiary of some gin-u-wine mad science, and I have no idea why they let you go. It’s just one more piece of what makes all o’ this so interesting.”

Jewels didn’t have a clue if he was lying or not. The man’s demeanor was seamless, gesturing as he spoke, clearly enjoying the conversation: at ease in her company, armed or not.

The surveyor still couldn’t shake the feeling that she was in danger. The stars seemed to be closing in, somehow, far too bright, as Shane, unmoving, nonetheless sunk deeper into shadow.

Jewels raised her weapon once more, forcing down the absurd feeling that she was being rude.

“I think maybe you should leave,” she said.

Shane raised his hands again. “Far be it from me to overstay my welcome. I’ll just be on my way then.”

He pushed the brim of his hat low over his eyes. “Pleasant dreams.”

The surveyor felt a hand on her shoulder. She spun, dropping her plasma-pistol to waist-height and pulling it in close to her hip, ready to boil the guts of whoever had crept up behind her.

Jewels stared. There was nobody there - not only that, but the sinister pressure of nameless and imminent threat which seemed to accompany Shane’s presence was gone.

She was alone on the top of the dome, save for the last flickering embers of the mystery-man’s cigarillo wafting a miniscule thread of spicy, foul-smelling smoke into the midnight air.
 
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When the subsurface scans were all finished and compiled, ‘round about noon the following day, there turned out to be a sealed chamber directly under their camp.

It was about eight stories below ground, a space the size of an aircraft-hangar connected to the dome’s sub-basement by an isolated elevator-shaft and a short tunnel. The space was blocked off from the rest of the complex by some sort of heavy obstruction, presumably shielded doors. The geo-imaging rig couldn’t make out fine details - that’s not what it was for - but there was definitely something down there.

Jewels thought it was unlikely that this was what they were looking for. The chamber seemed too large to her, and she didn’t think her drug-addled sixteen-year-old self would have had the ability or inclination to both ascend and descend an inoperable elevator shaft, let alone seal a set of blast-doors behind her when she left.

Even so, it was a hidden chamber under what was probably a former military facility - it would be stupid not to at least have a look.

The plan was for the salvage team to sweep the facility from the top down, one floor at a time, saving the underground hangar for last so as to prevent anything hidden in the main building surprising them in the elevator shaft or trapping them underground.

Getting in wasn’t hard. The freight-doors near which they had set up camp opened into a loading dock/supply depot several floors deep, connected by a network of lifts, catwalks and mezzanines to the main dome/factory floor, the two above-ground floors beneath it, and the topmost basement level. Artemia’s crew went in fully equipped, each according to their specialty - armored tactical mesh and backpacks, scanners, goggles and compact climbing gear, hand-held cutting-torches, data-ripping algorithms and other more esoteric tools.

Of all them, Jewels was the most heavily armed. Following her experience on the Hub, she just wasn’t comfortable going to work without a bullpup gauss-rifle strapped to her shoulder and at least three plasma-grenades.

Not that it looked like she was going to need it.

The freight-depot was completely stripped down. Ancient, empty plastic packing-crates lay scattered around the rusting, picked-clean skeletons of derelict cargo-moving vehicles. Even the lifts had been scavenged, electronics ripped out, leaving only plastic housings and tangled, rusting metal.

High up on one wall, a discoloration against the crumbling panelling formed the shape of a corporate text-logo, the actual letters for which had also been stolen at some point. With the help of a visual filter courtesy of her multifunctional smart-goggles, Jewels could just barely read it.

Lon-Gigas Heavy Robotics


After a quick sweep of the area, Jewels radioed Nael. “The freight dock is clear, for now. We’re proceeding to the dome. Get a couple of guys from the support team in here to hold it down, just in case.”

They took the unadorned industrial staircase single file, emerging through what had clearly been a factory-floor at one point. The dome, large enough to house a sports-stadium, was almost entirely empty now: bare brackets traced the corroded outlines of long-gone mechanical apparatus. Small plants, ferns and shrubs, grew in the corners and between the floor-panels amidst drifts of rust and soil, and corroded cables hung from the distant ceiling, entwined with the roots of the plants growing on the structure’s exterior. The hollow, rotting plastic shell of a command-console lay drunkenly on its side in the center of the floor, illuminated by a single beam of sunlight which shone from a hole in the dome where a panel had fallen through at some point in the distant past.

There was nothing there, and nowhere for anything to hide.

The salvage crew took some cursory scans, then moved on.

Much of the same greeted them on the next two floors - a scavenger crew, possibly several at different times, had clearly been through this place, and they had left next to nothing behind. Wall-panels and floor-panels were missing where hardwired systems had been ripped out, and save for the occasional unit of empty antique shelving or a random stack of twisted metal there was little to find in the surface-level facility.

The basement proved to be more interesting. The destruction there was less complete, the looting less thorough: although consoles and other obvious valuables were missing, the walls and floors were intact, as was much of the original furniture. This level had been built on an institutional grid-plan, tiled sheetrock corridors, discolored and crumbling under the weight of centuries. with rows of identical doors opening onto private offices and meeting-rooms. In the interest of time, the salvage crew split into two teams, with Jewels and Artemia each taking charge of a group of six. They started at opposite ends of the floor, and cleared the offices hall by hall, working towards the center.

Every now and then they would pass a square discoloration on the wall or a pile of rot on the floor - the remains of flyers, bulletin-boards, empty pots of dehydrated soil - the long-ago debris of a living work-place.

The desks and shelves were strangely empty, Jewels couldn’t help but note. What kind of scavenger, she wondered, took personal items? Books and technical manuals, she could see - the kind of literature that might exist in a facility like this was probably worth something to somebody. Still, whatever equivalent to bobble-heads and anime-figurines existed before the End, she would have expected a few at a robotics lab, if only as long-shattered debris. There should have at least been a broken picture-frame, a loose and time-faded photograph or two, as melancholy as that might have been. Yet every single office was bare, empty desks with empty drawers and not so much as a fossilized sticky-note left behind.

After about the twentieth empty office, Jewels signaled her squad to hold position and cued her coms.

“Artemia, are you guys finding anything down here?”

The surveyor waited a second, then the dwarven crew-chief’s voice crackled in her ear.

“Not a blessed thing. It’s odd - usually a place like this, you find everything either near-to-intact, reclaimed by nature or all smashed, rotted, and looted. These offices almost look sanitized.”

They cleared the rest of the floor, and moved on.
 

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The sub-basement was differrent.They had to cut through a security-door at the bottom of a concrete stairwell to get in, for a start, but that was the least of it.

It was an open-plan space with a vaguely technical look about it. If the previous floor had been administrative, then this was probably a design or drafting space. There were grounded work-benches bolted to the floor and large overhead lamps, a series of alcoves along one wall, inset with yet more benches, and a single door at one one of the room. Long-dead robotic armature equipped for esoteric technical tasks dangled limply from the ceiling like a hanging garden of severed limbs. Everything reeked of rotting metal and bad air.

It didn’t look looted or scavenged, like the above-ground levels, or strangely sedate like the upper basement; this level looked ransacked, resembling the aftermath of a Corporate tactical raid. It was old damage, too, likely dating to the day the room was sealed, half-subsumed by entropy: broken tools lay blunted by rot or corrosion, the remains of ancient draft-documents covering the tile in a thin layer of compost. Smashed consoles and personal terminals spilled their corroded guts across the floor, stripped-down server-racks dangling severed cables. There were abandoned projects discarded in corners, fused into lumps of verdigris and plastic, and faded plasma-burns on the walls.

Someone, long ago, had gone through this room with thoroughness and deliberate scorn.

“Well shit,” said Jewels.

“This… this could be something.” said Artemia, her eyes sparkling with equal parts adventure and greed.

Jewels gestured to the door at the far end of the room. “I’m going to go check what’s behind that. Marty - cover me. Everyone else, just spread out and do your jobs. Scan everything, masks on. I don’t like the way this place smells.”

Picking her way between the ancient benches, boots crunching on the debris of another time, Jewels wondered what had happened here, all those centuries gone. This place told a story, but too much of it was missing - she couldn’t figure it out.

There was a nameplate on the door, faded to illegibility. It was locked, but, on a hunch, the surveyor simply twisted the handle as hard as she could until she felt something give, and the ancient mechanism fell apart in her hand. She stepped back, then leveled her rifle and kicked the door open. It swung inward with a muted bang.

Inside was an office. There was an LCD screen covering all of one wall, and a complicated command-console in front of it. Its maintenance panels were open, ancient cables and crystal-lattice storage cut to pieces, smashed to powder, its control-surfaces melted to slag.

Here were the broken picture-frames, the faded photographs, gathered in their dozens, lined up on shelves, taped to the walls alongside discolored posters rendered to abstract art by centuries of rot. Here were the bobbleheads and figurines of characters nobody now-living remembered, guarding diplomas and certificates and a stack of moldering books with titles so technical Jewels doubted she could pronounce them.

It was as though all of the character that was missing from the empty offices upstairs had been concentrated in this room.

But here, too, was a trashcan containing a pile of ancient ash. Here was a body clad in rags of former corporate finery, with a complicated gun in its hand and a hole in its mummified head, slumped in the corner facing the door.

And here, at its feet, was a three-ring binder containing a sheaf of documents as thick as Jewels’ wrist.

The surveyor shouldered her weapon, took her medication, and knelt in front of the body.

“What were you trying to protect?” she muttered. Then, wary of its age, with great care she retrieved the three-ring binder. It was so old, she didn’t dare open it - but fortunately, she didn’t have to.

This was why the gods invented tricorders.
 
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