V M (NPC Thread) From the Grip of History

[King Ghidorah]

Unfortunately, even Jewels’ tricked-out handheld super-tool’s forensic utilities weren’t able to get much from the binder. There were pages of technical diagrams, schematics, reports: all unrecoverable. The dead man had apparently bled all over them, and after centuries they were little more than smears. There was one section, though, near the middle, where there was enough of a chemical impression remaining on a few laminated pages for fragments of the text to emerge.

When she read it, Jewels almost wished it hadn’t worked.

***
Cytosoft Anthropology (TM) Document-Recovery Chemical Analysis Suite v 3.2.2
Scan Complete
>% of sample reconstructed: 0.002
>All fragments belong to the same document/section within a 0.5% confidence interval.
>% of section reconstructed: 3-5% (EST.)
Content follows
_______________________________

Model: MFS1 “

construction halted b



ose bright idea was it to try to run a combat robot off of a fission pile?


o brittle: S-Titanium may be nearly completely impervious, but

minor deformation

like glass.



mounting it on a gun-boat when what we need is a gladiator. Th



t’s bigger than any mecha anyone has ever built


blow it up without noticing then he’d pick this thing up and break it in half like


therapod body-shape might be worth leaning int




: MFS2-b Garuda heavy-bombardment aircraft/modular support-system fully prototyped, stored pending disassembly. Construction of primary MFS-2 combat-frame halte

agnetic bearings have solved the articulation issue


op-notch: the dermal energy-siphon/plasma-grenade loop in particular is brilliant, and the modular aerial support-vehicle is a stroke of genius


ust not good enough.


Garuda aircraft isn’t anywhere near as well-armored as the main we

fusion-core could overload th

nuclear explosion

the S-Titanium with nanofi

ull tricephalic electrogravitic bombardment the heat-siphon overloads and the nanofibres igni

instant firestorm.


Machine would be totally destroyed


100 meters is acceptable, height-wise, but we do *not* have enough mas


ough the magnetic bearings solve the articulation problem this thing still doesn’t have anywhere near the level of

is unwieldy, and unsuited to existing cockpit techn

er incinerate it or rip its head off with little fanfare - he’d just have to work a bit har




Model: MFS3 “Ki

MFS3 combat-frame

ully Prototyped and onli

perfect

e cloned nuclear-organic muscle-tissue is dur

obscenely powerful

Absolute-Zero

n entirely new class of short-range multiple-warhead deliv


capable of translating a theropod body-shape for a human neurological map,

MKIII MFS

they don’t want it.

e destroyer is coming ba


f course

doomed

Lon-Gigas


reserves


nd with the Crown


our world


no wa

Cytokine


godlike, but it’s not designed fo


Iron Dragon


we have a responsibility


ads this
gone


ight monsters.

f we have to, we can fight you, too.


IRON DRAGON

______________
<End of Reconstruction

***


Jewels shut off the tricorder feed to her goggles and studied the dead man in front of her.

What had he been doing here, on the eve of the end of the world? What was this stuff that he’d been shot in the head for it?

It looked like they were attempting to prototype a new class of combat-mech, and the surveyor strongly suspected she knew the reason why: it had three heads, and had ruined her life. The problem was that what little she could glean of the story from the tiny fragments the binder provided seemed to fall apart at the end, as though the project’s (presumed) success had coincided with some kind of fundamental shift in its nature. The tone was a little inconsistent throughout but that last part in particular, scant though it was, felt less like a technical document or analysis and more like a personal ultimatum to the reader.

Jewels shook her head and grimaced. The ancient documents raised too many questions, and with the answers rooted centuries in the past there was a good chance that even if she did recover the final object of her quest those mysteries would remain unsolved.

“Iron Dragon,” she muttered.

Hamil Shane knew something about this, and in the event that Jewels found something down here he’d wanted her to know he knew.

She had never liked being messed with, and the degree to which she simply didn’t need that shit at this point in her life was truly remarkable. The surveyor could figure out what to do with this information some other time - a task to feed her mental dynamo in a quiet moment, when she needed a distraction and getting angry wasn’t a liability. Right now, though, there was a job already at hand and she needed to stay focused.

As though on cue, Marty stuck his head in the door.

“Everything okay? You got a little quiet there.”

Jewels stood up. “Yeah. There’s a body, but he’s not going anywhere. I found a whole binder full of, like, old technical specs, but they’re completely ruined. I’m going to hang onto it though - I think it’s related to what we’re actually here for.”

She tucked the binder carefully in her backpack, wrapping it sterile bandages from her med-kit, spared one last look for the dead, then strode out of the room. "Let's go help the rest of the crew. We've still got one more floor to go."

 

[King Ghidorah]

It took longer than it should have to find the elevator - various members of the salvage crew walked past it several times before realizing that the shadows in the back of an alcove, half-blocked by a fallen server-rack, concealed a short hallway leading to an open shaft.

Jewels took point, rifle at the ready, clearing the entryway and waving the rest of the crew forward. While two of them set about quickly and expertly anchoring cables for the descent, bolting them into the floor, another ran a gloved hand over the twisted, ancient frame of the absent lift doors.

“Breaching charges,” they said.

Artemia looked at them. “What’s that you say?”

“The doors, boss - they were breached using directional thermal charges. See? The frame is melted at the corners. You can still spot the carbonization even under all this corrosion.”

Jewels stepped back and shouldered her rifle, fiddling with her tricorder’s scanning parameters.
Her goggle-display lit up, highlighting the damage; The man was right. There was evidence of a forced entry to the lift, possibly even a fight: weapon-score on the walls and ceiling hidden beneath the grime. But it had happened centuries ago - probably on the very day the rest of the basement was ransacked.

The surveyor added that to the growing list of things she didn’t like about this place. Like why, in spite of the fact it didn’t appear anyone had cleaned up following whatever happened here and the growing evidence of a gunfight, they had only found the one body.

They expedition left half their team at the top of the shaft, Jewels and six other crew descending into the depths of the complex’s hidden sublevel while Artemia and the rest hung back to provide rear-guard and quick support if needed. The surveyor was cautiously belaying down walls wreathed in rotting conduits and dripping corrosion when their communications with the surface cut out, a hiss of static and an error message flashing across her goggle-display.

Jewels looked up. Poking out into empty space, Artemia’s bearded face appeared, a pale oval against the darkness above, peering down the shaft at the climbers.

The dwarf disappeared for several seconds, then an arm reached into the shaft and stuck something to the wall. Her voice crackled in Jewels’ ear.

“General comms are still up, boss. Base-camp thinks the substructure must be shielded. We’ve stuck a signal-repeater in the shaft, but you’re going to have to put another one at the bottom or we’ll lose you again.”

And eventually, that is what they did. There was a bit of a delay though, because the hallway at the bottom of the elevator was full of mummies.

 

[King Ghidorah]

The floor was concrete, the walls metal, clouded by rust, scored and pitted by age and long-ago plasma.

The corpses were ancient: humanoid bodies desiccated by time rather than design - shrivveled skins and rictus grins with wispy, fragile hair still clinging to their skulls. One group lay at the far end of the passage, some fifty meters from the freight-lift, just in front of a sealed bulkhead door. They were sprawled across a shattered barricade constructed of office-furniture and one-meter sections of chromed armor paneling clearly intended for another purpose, dressed in rags that might once have been office-casual: Weapons-fire and the weight of ages made it impossible to tell for sure.

Another group lay just outside the lift. These wore ergonomic tactical armor, custom-molded ceramic plating on advanced polymer mesh, clutching weapons that Jewels didn’t recognize - some kind of advanced energy-carbine of unknown manufacture. Helmets with faded names and forgotten ranks stamped across the forehead failed to hide grey faces of wrinkled leather howling silent and slack-jawed behind shattered face-plates.

For a solid minute, nobody spoke. In the stark monochrome gradients of the salvage-team’s night-vision, the ancient tableaux was startlingly urgent. You could practically hear the shouting, the clang of metal, smell the fear-sweat and the burning flesh mixed with the hot-circuit reek of plasma-fire.

“These guys were government,” said Marty.

Jewels nearly jumped out of her skin. The atmosphere of this tunnel, this tomb, had a terrible gravity to it. For a moment, stunned by the sudden macabre pressure crashing against her pharmaceutical bulwarks, by the pounding of her own broken heart, she had nearly forgotten the rest of the salvage team was here.

She pushed her goggles up onto her forehead, forcing herself to breathe normally, and rubbed tears out of her eyes before sliding the lenses back into place.
“What did you say, Marty?”

The husky scavenger was kneeling by one of the armored bodies. He pointed to a faded emblem stencilled on its shoulder.

“This sigil. It’s the mark of the pre-End government. You find it in old deep-well bunkers, or really remote ruins. If you go far enough out in the wastes, to some of the old battlefields, you can see it stamped on mech-husks or downed aircraft.”

Another one of the crew, a guy with purple hair and tusks, moved over to the nearest wall and ran his gloved fingers over the scarred metal. “So what do you think it means?” he asked.

Marty shook his head. “I don’t think we’re ever going to know. I guess they were doing something down here that someone important really didn’t like.”

Something at the far end of the tunnel moved.

It was a small sound, a hiss of metal sliding over metal, followed by a click, and then silence.

The whole team froze. Jewels’ tricorder flashed an alert across her smart-goggles. She scrolled through filters, peering into the dark as she unshouldered her gauss-rifle and gestured her team back into the shelter of the elevator-shaft.

The sound came again. A hiss. A hum… a click, and then the groan of an ancient servomotor threatening to die.

With a slow whine of tortured electronics, something stood up.

It was shaped like a man - or part of one, anyway: A robot skeleton with shreds of artificial skin hanging from its ribs and the red-sun ember of an ancient, exhausted power-supply glowing in its chest. One of its arm was missing, and most of its head. Most disturbingly of all, however, the mummified remains of an actual human leg were hung uselessly from one side of its pelvis.

The ancient thing took a single step away from the barricade, and immediately fell over with a terrible *crash*.

As information scrolled across Jewels’ visual display, her tricorder telling her what she was seeing, the surveyor began to feel cold: there were traces of organic matter where the arm was missing, where the thing’s head was damaged - traces of ancient brain-material on the latter. This wasn’t an android.

It was a dead man’s cybernetics.

The walking mecha-corpse began to push itself off the floor.

Jewels took two steps out into the hall, levelled her rifle, and fired. There was a blue flash, a shriek as the gauss-rifle discharged, and the macabre relic’s chest blew apart in a shower of molten shrapnel and crackling static discharge. It fell back down, and didn’t move again.

The surveyor had seen zombies before, seen the dead walk, bodies hijacked by ancient alien malice, and considerably worse things besides. It had long ago ceased to bother her, and with the medication she was on there was a limit to how ‘bothered’ she could actually be. Still, there was something uniquely horrible about that shambling prosthesis. Had there been something in there, some spark of the owner trapped in software for centuries in the dark, which didn’t know they were dead?

Jewels put it aside.

Clear the hallway.

Open the door.

Finish this up.

This definitely isn't the place, but there might still be something.

“Somebody get a repeater set up,” said Jewels, managing to keep her voice steady. She gestured to the far end of the hallway.

“We need the rest of the team down here if we’re going to get that heavy-ass door open.”

 

[King Ghidorah]

After all the ancient corpses were removed, their gear catalogued, and the barricade broken down and set aside, a set of ancient automated security-cannons dropped out of shielded housings concealed in the ceiling and immediately came apart in a shower of sparks, leading to several minutes of general panic.

Once things had calmed down and they were certain that, in the near term, nobody was going to die suddenly, the leaders of the salvage crew considered the problem at hand. Around them was a buzz of activity - crew-members making sure the busted sentry-guns were well and truly out of commission, people running deep-scans of the walls, and a group of four setting up a heavy winch-system in the elevator shaft.

“Cutting through this is going to take ages,” said Jewels. Tricorder in hand, she watched text scroll by on her goggle-display, telling her everything the bulkhead- door was resistant to. It was a very long list.

“Aye,” said Artemia. “But I don’t think we’ll have to. Those sentry-guns might not work anymore, thank the gods, but they did deploy.”

Jewels nodded. “I get it. Somehow, there’s power down here. Some kind of shielded emergency back-up.”

She altered her scanning parameters. Most everything in here was shielded, broken, or both - but there was a panel beside the door, fitted with sensors and a long-dead holographic interphase. Filtering for electrical activity, something behind it glowed a faint, inviting blue in her augmented visual field.

The surveyor was about to point it out, but by the time she opened her mouth one of Artemia’s crew was already in the process of popping the antediluvian security-node’s face-plate off the wall, using a small crow-bar-like tool that appeared to have been custom-designed for that purpose.

Artemia crossed her arms and shifted her weight, settling in to watch. “This’ll take a minute,” she said. “But it’ll be a damn sight faster than brute-forcing it.”

The dwarf was right. Jewels had barely had time to settle into a new task - attempting, to no avail, to pull information off a tablet one of the corpses on the barricade had been carrying - when a horrible metallic grinding echoed through the ancient hallway. Rotted LEDs in the ceiling and floor flickered and died a final death, emergency lighting that had failed centuries ago flaring briefly as the crewman working on the door rerouted power. The grinding rose to whine, then with a juddering clunk, a groan of metal under strain and a hiss of stale air, the door lurched a bare centimeter off the floor..

The whine grew louder. The air began to smell of burning copper - another clunk, another lurch, several centimeters this time - then, with a pop, the noise cut out completely.

“Well balls,” said Artemia. She turned and shouted down the hall for someone to bring a hydraulic jack.

Jewels watched the door begin to rise, watched the ancient machinery fail, and then watched an absurd thought scuttle across the inside of her own head.

That doesn’t look that heavy. I’ll bet I could lift it.

It was stupid, and patently untrue, and doubly weird for how certain she felt about it. The bulkhead looked absurdly heavy. Now that it was open a bit, it was apparent that the door was twice as thick as Jewels’ torso. The pitted metal slab had to weigh at least a ton, probably much more, plus the resistance from whatever old-ass machinery had just destroyed itself opening the damn thing just that little bit.

On the other hand, Jewels had been climbing tall buildings to relax lately, was riddled with mysterious alien bio-metallic fibers, and she hadn’t slept in two days. And despite the formidable appearance of the door, it somehow seemed very doable.

On the other other hand, if she messed with it and actually did manage to move it, there was a distinct possibility it would fall back down and crush both of her hands. The real, non-metaphorical ones where she kept all of her favorite fingers.

The surveyor pushed her goggles up onto her forehead, stripped off one of her gloves, and rubbed her eyes.

She still didn’t feel even slightly tired, or lurgy, or floaty, or uncoordinated, or any of the other stuff that usually comes with near-48-hour sleep-deprivation, but maybe that was the meds. They weren’t supposed to be uppers, as far as she knew, but with all the weird garbage going on with her body and mind, who the fuck could tell. It was entirely possible that her insomnia was getting to her after all.

Jewels put her glove back on, pulled her goggles back down and took a deep, slow breath.

Ancient mysteries now.

Go crazy later.

 

[King Ghidorah]

As the pair of automated hydraulic jacks Artemia's people had wedged into the sides of the frame forced the heavy shielded door the last few centimeters into its fully open position, a procedure accompanied by the grind and groan of broken mechanisms recessed within the ceiling and walls, several things happened at once.

Somewhere, there was a squeal, and then a chunk, a closed circuit tripping an age-old relay - and the shadows looming beyond the door-frame were suddenly illuminated.

Whatever power systems were still alive down here, opening the door had triggered an automatic response: drawing on near-depleted capacitors buried even deeper underground, the sub-basement facility attempted to wake up.

For just a moment, monitors hummed to life and overhead lights flickered. The salvage crew caught a glimpse of a hangar, of an enormous, forked mechanical shape, surrounded by robotic construction armature, terminals and scaffolding - then, in a zapping, arcing, brilliant cascade of cracked glass and burning wiring, energized by a power-load they could no longer withstand, the time-worn systems all began to fail at once.

Amidst the burst and flare of ancient electronics giving up the ghost, the dominant feature of the space loomed beneath a play of shifting shadow and flashing light, filling nearly the entire hangar.

It was an aircraft, judging by the massive stern-mounted ramjet engines and stubby backswept stabilizers, lying off-kilter on a half-collapsed maintenance-gantry. The machine had a flying-wing design, a triangle with no proper separation between the body of the craft and the aeronautic surfaces, but with two massive energy-cannons harnessed to its flanks: steel-framed columns of capacitor-banks stacked with sapphire lenses and accelerator-coils twice again as long as the aircraft itself completely ruining the aerodynamic profile. It was like a giant, over-thick arrowhead, clad in corroded chrome panels and the dust of centuries, with a pair of inverted cyberpunk telescopes glued to the sides.

The design was vaguely ridiculous, little more than an impractically large flying gun-battery, yet in the cramped hangar and the dying light it still managed to reek of threat and sorrow.

“Myrrdin’s bones. Are those masers?” said Artemia, once she’d finished cursing the ancestors of whoever had designed this facility to power up when the doors opened. “They’re bloody huge. What kind of craft is it?”

Jewels crept cautiously into the room, with sparks raining down all around. Everything smelt of ozone and burnt copper. She was breathing rapidly in spite of herself, a surge of panic which accompanied the sight and smell of the expiring electronics, bright yellow flashes in the shadows under the earth. Weapon drawn and alert for movement, screaming internally and sweating through her clothes, she stopped just shy of the ancient machine’s shadow.

It was hard to shake the feeling that it was watching her.

“The MFS 2-b” she said, remembering the fragmentary documents she’d recovered upstairs and feigning an authority on the subject which she absolutely did not possess. For all she knew this was something else entirely - but it certainly looked like a part of a failed project.

But then, what the hell had they, whoever they were, been doing with it down here that someone sent a government strike-team after them?

Jewels mouth felt dry. She licked her lips and continued, raising her voice to be sure she was heard over the ongoing hiss and crackle:

“The Garuda heavy-bombardment modular support-system. It’s a mothballed prototype… I think. Fuck knows what it’s doing down here.”

The last of the overhead lights flickered out and the storm of shorting equipment finally died. In the shadows old, cracked LCDs and distorted holograms flickered error messages and crash alerts before falling dark in their turn.

“Is this what we’re looking for?” asked the dwarf. “Because honestly, it’s not a database, but this would do me just fine.”

“No,” said Jewels, leaning into the false confidence to keep from sliding the other direction, reminding herself that none of the shadows in here had horns, that nothing was laughing in the dark. “This is something else. I can’t say for sure it’s not related though. This entire room needs to be scanned and recorded. Leave the airframe alone, but I want any surviving data-storage copied, tagged and bagged - and that includes any hard-copy documentation that hasn’t crumbled. I’m going to head up top and call the Guild - we’re going to need to move on to the next site in a day or two and somebody on our side needs to take possession of this stuff when we do.”

The crew-boss gave Jewels a long, calculating look, tugging thoughtfully at her beard, then turned to her team and began shouting orders.

 

[King Ghidorah]

The next morning, Jewels sat with Nael on the hood of one of the cargo trucks and watched her team have breakfast.

Spirits in camp were high - the fact that they’d found something, even if it wasn’t what they were looking for, and without any casualties, was considered a good omen. The Guild was sending another crew to take possession of the site and strip it of anything valuable. Perhaps most importantly, although the facility’s systems had so far proved a total loss, the Garuda’s internal computers were all intact. The data-retrieval specialist Jewels had hired for the expedition, a guy named Dok (which rhymed with ‘Poke’) had managed to rip some very detailed old-world maps out of its navigational array, which, with some proper analysis, could probably be used to narrow their search considerably. Jewels had also handed him her scans of the document-binder she’d recovered, in case he wanted something challenging to work on in his down-time, which he seemed to appreciate.

It had rained overnight, and everything smelled of wet vegetation, damp earth and hot field-rations.

Jewels had just told Nael about her encounters with Hamil Shane.

The big man sighed heavily, his shoulders rising and falling like tectonic plates. He produced a joint from somewhere and lit it with a match, but didn’t take a puff.

“Damn,” he said.

“I’m sorry I didn’t say something sooner,” said Jewels. “I just… didn’t want to think about him at all, if I could help it. He was just one more thing, you know? And I wasn’t going to take his offer, so I didn’t let him be part of the picture. And then there was just so much shit to do.”

Now the enforcer took a hit. “Don’t sweat it. It’s done, and you’re telling me now. It doesn’t change anything. We just got to be a little more careful, is all.”

There was something in the way Nael said ‘careful’, in the way his stony face moved behind his dark glasses, that made Jewels immediately worry. She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees and gazing curiously at him.

“Who is he?” she asked. “He’s starting to feel like the kind of problem I should know more about.”

Nael regarded his joint, for a moment, took another hit, then met Jewels’ eyes with his mirrored lenses.

“A precision instrument. Cytokine dug him up somewhere on Mesa Roja. He’s big in their strategic acquisitions department, which is corpo-speak for a bunch of hucksters and highwaymen with really amazing lawyers.”

The enforcer blew a cloud of smoke into the crisp morning air. Far overhead, something mechanical flew by, flapping and screeching like a bird in distress.

“I never met the man myself. But Shane’s got a rep. He’s augmented - strength, speed, stealth-tech: next-gen cybernetics, supposedly. Nanites and shit, though I knew a couple of guys from Mesa who swore he’s a witch. And he doesn’t get out of bed unless there’s something on the market that Cytokine’s fat cats think has the potential to change the status-quo.”

“Iron Dragon,” said Jewels. She straightened up, and pulled her meds out of her jacket pocket, dry swallowing a pill.

Nael thought for a moment, then shook his head.

“Nah. I know you been around, Jewels, no disrespect, but you’re new to this side of the game. It’s too thin. He had no way of knowing we were coming here when he pulled up on you in the club. Which tells me two things.”

He puffed on his joint again. The enforcer's capacity to handle his weed was genuinely inspiring.

“First, there’s either something about you - your weird medical shit, maybe, but I wouldn’t put money it - or something you know that Cytokine industries thinks is going to lead to big things.

Nael offered her the weed. Half on reflex and half out of courtesy, Jewels took a hit and handed it back. Given the rate at which the enforcer burned those things down, she’d been expecting something milder, wasn’t entirely prepared for the strength of his blend of choice; It was all she could do not to choke. He watched without comment until she’d composed herself, then continued:

“Second, You didn’t know anything about this Iron Dragon business back then, but you knew about the database. Cytokine knew you were putting together a crew to look for something, that you’d managed to get Guild backing, which you could only have done if you had a good chance of finding it, and they knew what you were into on Inverxe.”

He stubbed out the joint on the hood of the truck, leaving a spot of soot on the metal between them. A cool breeze turned the morning damp chilly.

“Cytokine’s been around forever, Jewels. They got a loooong memory. I think Shane might know more about what we’re eventually going to find out here than you do.”

 

[King Ghidorah]

Jewels’ team left the facility in the hands of a secondary retrieval crew hurriedly dispatched from Markov, complete with a Guild-liveried veritech fighter looming in giant-robot mode beside the entrance to the dome: a stark warning to would-be claim-jumpers.

As the site steadily vanished in the rear-view mirrors, disappearing behind canopy and ruins which in turn faded into a late-afternoon mist, Jewels couldn’t help feeling troubled.

Ever since the previous night, when she had finally managed to sleep, there had been a sense of threat building in the back of her mind which was getting harder and harder to ignore: an instinct pointing straight up into the sky, screaming that something was coming. It felt somehow related to the changes she was undergoing, her messed up sleep-cycle, her increased strength.

There was also a suspicion which she didn’t dare articulate, even within her own mind - a thought without a shape with the potential to blow her tottering sense of identity to pieces. The fragile sense of distance, of safety, that Jewels had acquired by fleeing Inverxe was beginning to fade - and that just made her ever more desperate for context, made it ever more important that she know how her nightmare began.

The Iron Dragon stuff was just the icing on the apocalyptic cake.

It had been her expectation that wherever they searched they would either find nothing or find the database. Setting out, she’d never considered that they might find something else.

Now that she’d had some time to process though, she couldn’t stop thinking about it. If that was the Garuda in that underground hangar, a failed prototype destined for disassembly - and according to the ID tags they’d found emblazoned on its hull, it certainly was - then why had people been killing each other over it on the eve of the End? And what about the rest of it? Based on what little information she had, whatever Iron Dragon was they had managed to produce something absurdly powerful.

So what had happened to it? And what was it for? Her initial thought that it was Ghidorah-related was, taking a step back, a possibility, but Jewels would be the first to admit that she was pretty damn biased in that regard.

The little convoy pulled onto the wreckage of an elevated highway, broken slabs of plasticrete forming a thoroughfare of rugged, oversize cobbles through a district of drunkenly-leaning tower-shells largely overtaken by creeping ivy and temperate forest. It was not a smooth ride, but neither had the Guild skimped on the trucks’ suspension. With only the occasional large bump carrying through her seat, Jewels cued her coms.

“Dok, have you had a chance to look at those scans I gave you? The fucked up documents?”

There was a moment of static before the data-retrieval tech responded.

“I’m looking at them now, actually. These are… really degraded. If I had the originals, a fully stocked clean-room and an expert in archaeological chemical forensics I could probably separate the pages and bring out some of the original text. Or get a chrono-mage to revert them to a point in their timeline when they weren’t ruined. As it stands though, the only thing I think we’ve got a chance with is that middle section you’ve already had a run at. Chemical residue analysis isn’t going to get us any further, but there are probabilistic approaches I could try based on the existing text and back-match to see which are possible precursors to the molecular structure of the indecipherable bits.”

“Cool.” said Jewels, making a mental note to ask Nael if any chrono-mages paid dues to the Guild. “Do that, then.”

There was another pause. “... I do have to say. Whatever this is? I don’t think it’s formal scientific documentation. Some of these fragments, they look more like developer’s notes. But like, for something really, really big.”

Jewels nodded absently to herself, swallowing a mood-stabilizer and gazing out the window as the landscape rolled past.

“Keep me posted,” she said.

The surveyor’s increasingly melancholy thoughts were interrupted by a grating buzz from the truck’s dashboard. A hologram flickered across the windscreen, and the uneven terrain became more noticeable as the vehicle picked up speed. She sat up straighter in her seat and reflexively checked her weapons.

“What’s happening?”

“Proximity alert,” growled Artemia, switching the vehicle to manual control and gripping the wheel tight. “We’ve got Zoids!”

 

[King Ghidorah]

It was coming up behind them, tearing up the road at over a hundred fifty kilometers per hour, just a dot on the horizon at first but steadily gaining: a birdlike, saurian chassis, paint stripped from its metal form by time and the elements so that only chrome and tarnish remained. It stood twice as high as the convoy trucks at their highest point on a pair of powerful, graceful hydraulic legs, propelling itself forward along the ancient, broken road with a steady, bobbing gait, deceptively fast. A pair of massive curved blades graced each forelimb and a single even larger metal claw nestled between the toes of each foot, striking sparks from the fallen skyway as the machine ran. Peering from above its vicious mechanical jaws, there was a dark purple glow streaming from its optics probably was not part of its original design-specs.

Watching it in the rear-view holo-display, Jewels could hear a voice she didn’t know well, probably one of the support crew, swearing into the general coms channel.

“Fuck. Fuck! Rev Raptor! Rev Raptor!”

“Will someone shut him up!” Yelled Artemia.

Jewels had never seen a Rev Raptor before - the only zoids she’d encountered growing up had been either really small or fuck-off huge. Still, it didn’t take a genius to see what this thing was built for, or to figure out what it would do if it caught them, and the trucks’ nominally-silent engines were beginning to whine alarmingly as they pushed the limits of their performance envelope.

Gunfire echoed through the forest, high-velocity rounds and mid-wattage plasma-fire erupting from the back of the trucks and ricocheting off the Raptor’s chassis as it continued to gain ground, approaching to within a kilometer of the juddering, speeding convoy.

The surveyor cued her coms. “There are energy-lances in the big-ass crates near the back of each truck. Directional plasma grenades, one use only. We went over this at the briefing, dammit now somebody blow that overbuilt-can-opener-paparazzi-asshole-robot up!”

There was a lull in the gunfire - and then a flash like lightning as a thundering column of coherent plasma erupted from the back of the lagging truck. Stray heat set the edges of its armored canvas canopy ablaze, tiny fires dying in the slipstream of the vehicle’s headlong rush.

At the last possible fraction of a second, the Rev Raptor swerved - the blast merely clipped it, slagging its left forelimb and carving a molten trench in the ancient, shattered tarmac.

“Balls,” said Artemia, pounding on the dashboard and scowling at the windscreen-display. “It’s slowed down, but the bastard’s still gaining on us. I was hoping it’d break off pursuit after we gave it a taste.”

Jewels sighed. Trusting her team to do their jobs was all well and good, but if there was one thing she was good at, it was discouraging pursuit-predators.

“Fuck it,” she said. “I’m going back there.”

“And doing what?” asked Artemia.

“Hopefully nothing reckless,” said Jewels, slipping through the curtain that separated the cab from the vehicle's substantial cargo-bed. “But if that's what happens, it's been working for me lately.”

The road got rougher, the cargo-bed vibrating beneath her boots as she squeezed between stacked crates of equipment and racks of provisions secured by straps and brackets. Finally, she reached the rearmost section of the truck, which was doing double-duty as a personnel carrier.

The space was insanely loud, echoing with weapons-fire and the percussion of bullet-proof tires skipping across slabs of broken highway. Artemia’s crew was crowded around the rear, a dozen men and women taking turns firing, reloading, and tossing grenades out the back.

The rev raptor was still gaining, ducking and weaving to evade the withering hail of fire still coming at it from both trucks. As the sun sank low and the horizon turned red the ancient mechanical predator seemed to catch fire, gleaming in the gathering twilight.

The surveyor frowned, retrieving a bandolier of plasma-grenades from the gathered supplies and looping it over her shoulder. With great care so as not to get anyone shot, she caught the attention of and switched places with a tusky, purple-haired guy whose name she felt like she should probably learn.

“HOLD FIRE!”

She had to yell it a couple of times, but the crew did stop shooting. They all turned to look at her.

“Okay. Really fast. Knees: Your spread's too wide. Concentrate fire on the legs -

She was interrupted by an enormous bump which nearly threw her out of the speeding truck, several of the salvage-team having to grab onto their fellows to keep from flying out the back. The support crew wasn’t so lucky, a hapless mercenary sailing out of the other transport and bouncing off the fractured tarmac. The rev raptor snatched him up in its jaws without breaking stride, his body disappearing in a cloud-burst of red.

The truck began to slow down, even as the feral zoid picked up speed again. Shots echoed from the direction of the cab, the thudding shriek of a plasma-pistol: Artemia was firing a gun at something.

They saw it at the same time as they heard it, swarming into view: an akata pack, great four-legged vaguely lupine beasts wreathed in purple-black void, trailing streamers of thrashing shadow. They leapt from their hiding-spots amidst the crevices between slabs of broken tarmac, attacking the lagging truck. Several were sucked under the wheels - but at least two managed to scramble onto the hood, or sink their claws into the canopy of the cargo bed.

“Right,” said Jewels, fighting back a tide of nauseous emotion, both relieved and ashamed that she'd never learned the dead man's name. “New plan. The raptor’s probably going to catch us. It’ll have to attack the truck first to get at all us squishy goodies. That’s your window - get a plasma-grenade inside its armor while it’s stationary. Top of the knee joint, probably your best bet. Right now though - Akata. I’m going up top. Good talk.”

She heard Marty begin to ask what the fuck she meant by ‘Up Top’, but by that point she had already leapt, gripped the upper edge of the truck’s canopy in both hands and swung herself up onto the roof.

 

[King Ghidorah]

The wind of the truck’s passage through the overgrown twilight wastes nearly snatched Jewels up as she came over the lip of the canopy, almost sent her sailing off into the waiting jaws of the pursuing zoid. She dug her fingers in reflexively, the blast-proof graphene-teflon weave giving way beneath her grip with an audible pop as she kicked one of her booted feet over the top and dug its hob-nailed heel into the rigid fabric.

With proper leverage established, she steadied herself and fully mounted the speeding vehicle.

Crouching atop her perch and squinting into the slipstream, she had a clear line of sight at the Akata clinging to the other truck. As she watched, one of them succeeded in shattering the windscreen - only for Nael to blow it back over the hood with a weapon Jewels had never seen before, some sort of concealed blaster which released a burst of piercing white energy. The creature bounced once, smack, off the shattered road, before being sucked under the wheels of the speeding transport. The blast itself didn’t appear to hurt the shadowborn predator, but being run over did the job.

The other one was in the process of ripping the canopy open - only to catch a barrage of weapons-fire in the face through the hole it had torn in the armored fabric, knocking off the roof with an echoing yelp. This one wasn’t down for long though - it picked itself up from the mosaic causeway and took up the pursuit just slightly behind the saurian war-mech.

“Well fuck,” said Jewels, rapidly taking stock. The other truck was probably okay for now - but the sun was going down, and there was no telling how many more akata were lurking about, so stopping to make camp was an invitation to disaster. There was a hole in the cabin roof of the truck she was crouching atop of, but it hadn’t crashed, and no akata seemed to be clinging to it for now.

But the rev raptor was closing in, weapons-fire splashing against its gleaming metal body and darkness streaming from its open jaws. With the akata attempting to join its pursuit, though rapidly falling behind, the way they reacted to each other it was obvious: the machine was somehow possessed.

The surveyor looked down at her fingers, sunk to the second knuckle into the cargo-bed’s rigid canopy. She knew, intellectually, that it was armored polycarbon canvas - but it offered her grip no more resistance than wet cardboard.

This confirmed it: her strength had increased drastically since arriving on Cevanti, far outside the bounds of human norms.

She glanced ahead - and found they were running out of road. They were rapidly approaching an intact section of the skyway along which they sped, cracked and riven by the passing of ages but still held above the treetops by ancient pillars. There was a fallen slab that provided a ramp of sorts, between the fallen and broken sections of road and that higher path - but even if the transports managed to mount it without crashing, and even if it didn’t collapse under their weight it too would eventually end and they’d go flying off into empty air.

She glanced behind - and found that the mechanical predator hounding their way, though pitted by gunfire and sparking at the knees with every bounding step, had closed the distance to less than thirty meters.

A plan began to form in her mind - and then on each of the machine’s flanks, a blue-white particle-jet roared, and the beast leapt forward, tons of ancient metal, gleaming sunset-red, pouncing on the fleeing truck like a Jurassic predator.

For a moment, things seemed to slow down, and a bizarre sense of clarity stole over the surveyor.

Get to the head.

Hope you don’t get shot.

Open the cockpit-hatch - you’re probably strong enough to force it.

Drop a grenade in there.

Bail.

Hope you’re as tough as you are strong.

Events crashed back into focus, and Jewels rose explosively to meet the descending machine, a superhuman leap, an insane scheme, a desperate instinct. She screamed into her coms: “ARTEMIA SWERVE SWERVE *NOW*”

 

[King Ghidorah]

The dwarven crew-boss yanked the wheel hard to the left and the truck jackknifed, skidding and screeching on its tires, coming within an inch or rolling over as it juddered between slabs of shattered street. It lost so much speed in the process that the raptor ended up clearing it by several meters, striking sparks from the tarmac as the zoid came down hard. It braked with its massive claws as it slid, spiralling across the road in a hail of concrete embers, very nearly colliding with the out-of-control transport.

By that point, Jewels was already clinging to the mechanical predator’s face; it had been surprisingly easy to twist in the air like a serpent and hook her fingers under the front of the machine’s face-plate as it soared past her, to wedge the toes of her boots into the flanges of the anterior cooling vents which gave the machine the appearance of nostrils. She had always been athletic, but this was ridiculous: As the zoid first landed, skidded, and then bucked, stomping in a crooked circle and shaking its head about violently and letting loose with a deafening metallic screech, she was astonished, moment-to-moment, that her grip was strong enough to maintain her perch.

The bucking, heaving machine calmed for just a moment. Subsiding into a wide, pensive stance. It almost seemed to be planning something. The surveyor wasted no time, however: she scuttled across its face to the machine’s left side, where the energy lance had taken its arm, and kicked her boot into the primary optics there with all the strength she could muster, shattering the crystal polycarbon lens placed just below the faceplate like a predatory eye.

The zoid screeched once more, reacting as though it had lost a flesh and blood eyeball. Attempting to claw her free with its bullet-riddled rear-leg but unable to overcome the limits of its own articulation, the raptor toppled to the cracked and crumbling pavement with a moan of metal under strain and an earth-shaking clang!

And still, the surveyor clung to its face. With the reek of rust, ancient oil and the spicy void-stink of akata searing her nostrils, adrenaline roaring in her veins, Jewels abandoned her original plan, inhabiting the moment.

Pull two thermobaric grenades from your bandolier.

Trigger them.

Punch them as far as you can into this bastard’s broken eye.

Leap free.

Run like hell.

The convoy trucks had pulled to a stop about half a kilometer ahead, just shy of the looming section of intact elevated road, and the crew had begun to dismount. They didn’t seem to be shooting anything, on edge and alert but mostly watching Jewels, so presumably she didn’t have to worry that any Akata were in pursuit. Powering towards them as fast as she could go, leaping over crevices in the broken mosaic of the fallen skyway, the surveyor heard the explosion a couple of seconds before the heat slapped her across the back of the neck. The sounds of moaning robotics and scraping metal ceased.

She still didn’t slow down until she was within fifteen meters of the crew, nearly stumbling from her own momentum, actually tripping over the broken pavement, and safety-rolling to a slightly winded and scrape-covered halt. She flopped over onto her back as people gathered around, talking amongst themselves in hushed, baffled tones. The salvage-crew's medic began to check her over, quickly determining that, miraculously, she was uninjured save for a few scrapes.

Staring up at the darkening sky, Jewels waited for her thoughts and her breath to catch up to what had just happened.

She didn’t - couldn’t, yet - think about the fact that she’d lost another person, even if she’d never spoken to them directly, never learned their name. So instead her thoughts dwelled on what she’d done to the zoid.

Jewels wasn’t just stronger than she should be - her coordination, her agility, her reaction-time were obviously supercharged. She didn’t think one person in one-hundred thousand could have made that leap, clung to the raptor as it thrashed or scuttled across its face like a spider. And though her sense of time wasn’t the best in the heat of the moment, she was pretty sure she’d just run five hundred meters, give or take, in under fifteen seconds.

An impatient shout cut through the twilight. "Give her some room! Don't you all have jobs to do?"

Artemia’s daintily bearded face shoved its way through the crowd of murmuring salvagers clustering around the surveyor, crouched down to look her in the eye. Nael took charge of the rest of them, setting up a proper perimeter and getting everyone on task while the two leaders talked.

“So,” said the dwarf, her tone even and only a little shaky. “I’m glad to see you’re in one piece. When you said you were going to do something reckless, I didn’t think you meant bloody insane.”

“Sorry,” responded Jewels, sitting up with her arms braced just behind her, resting her weight on them. There was a cool breeze blowing along the road as the sun went down. It felt good on her sweaty, dusty face. “Sometimes the moment just… takes you. It’s a big part of why I’m still alive. Although the last couple of times before this I ended up hurt pretty badly.”

Artemia barked a grim laugh. “Behaviour like that is why you’re still alive? I’d heard people on Inverxe were mad. If one of my crew did that I’d give them a bonus and then kick them out on their arse. That’s the kind of thing that works right up until it doesn’t… though it did work. This time.”

With a sigh, Jewels levered herself to her feet. Her hands itched, and the scrapes on her elbows were beginning to burn. “Yeah. It’s not like I try to make a habit of it. It’s like… have you ever been shooting at something far away and you’re just completely in the zone, and you know, like absolutely know as you’re making it that your next shot is going to be dead-on and fuck the distance, the wind, the quality of the light and the asshole shouting into your comms? It’s like that. But with desperate uncertainty and plasma grenades.”

Artemia stroked her beard, rumbling thoughtfully.

“You will not,” she said, after a long moment, “Put any of my crew to undue risk. You’re welcome to risk your own life jumping off of moving trucks and wrestling zoids, and I can’t stop you. And yes, people die sometimes out here. It’s terrible: it’s a risk we take with this line of work. But leave them out of any mad heroics. You may be the money, but you don’t have the right to endanger them in that way. Are we clear?”

“I would never,” said Jewels. The mere suggestion made her feel cold.

“Are,” repeated the dwarf, “ we clear?”

“Yes ma’am,”

Artemia’s steel-soled boots clanked as she repositioned herself to slap Jewel’s companionably on the small of the back. “Good! Then let’s get this lot organized. Your man’s doing a decent job establishing the perimeter, but we’re going to need to do some work on these trucks before we can get moving again after running them that hard.”

word count check: 27,146 words total

 

[King Ghidorah]

They made camp atop the unfallen section of ancient skyway, leaving the trucks at the bottom of the makeshift on-ramp. It was the tactically sound choice, providing a commanding view of the countryside, a flat place to pitch their tents, and limited accessibility to predators - but Jewels was grateful for it for another reason.

She was once again unable to sleep. In the wee hours, when the lights were out and her only company was the man on watch and the hum of the security drones flitting overhead, the derelict four-lane road provided her a path to walk through the dark as she slipped away to reflect on the events of the day; The moon was out in full, and the cracked pavement and crumbling guardrails were lit in shades of gentle verdant silver.

Asking around had yielded little information on the man they’d lost to the rev raptor: he was a mercenary-for-hire, one body holding a gun among thousands operating in Markov, and none of his fellows on the support team had known him well. Apparently his name had been Jonas Tolliver: he snored in his sleep, and he had liked boats - and that was as much as anybody knew.

It was a different kind of loss. Prior to the great golden trauma that now defined her life, Jewels had believed herself well acquainted with death - it was a constant in the ruins growing up, moreso on Inverxe, and she’d seen more mercenaries snatched up by carnivorous horrors than she could rightly remember; She’d become almost inured to it. But losing Flipper and Kraid in the way she’d lost them, something so precious treated with such cruelty and scorn, had changed her relationship with the reaper.

This time wasn’t as bad as losing the engineer on the Hub had been: more time had passed, and with the drugs in her system, Jewels could barely feel it. But she could tell she would have felt something, like an unscratchable emotional itch.

Yet still, it wasn’t what was really bothering her.

In the distance, something mechanical screamed, and something else responded with a low-pitched drone. Jewels took her hands out of her pockets and studied them by the light of the moon.

Her palms gleamed.

She had torn up the skin on her hands pretty badly, grabbing onto the front edge of that feral zoid’s face-plate in mid-air. The lacerations, however, had already healed - shredded human skin replaced with streaks and patches of shining silver scales. It was the same with scrapes on her elbows.

Most people, she knew, would be thrilled to transcend their humble human origins. Living as a mundane resident of the Crossroads, even for the most well-adjusted person there was always a subtle sense of envy for those mighty in their midst, for the sorcerers and supermen. Jewels, however, couldn’t bring herself to be excited about her newfound potency. Instead, she just felt scared.

It wasn’t her strength. Whatever had been done to her on the Hub was still happening - and it was, to all appearances, opportunistic, creeping in at the edges, replacing damaged flesh with whatever it was changing her into.

Where would it end? She had no idea: only that nagging ghost of a whisper of a suspicion, rejected on so fundamental a level that she couldn’t produce it as a thought. But it permitted no joy - only a quiet and jangling terror, washing like gentle waves on the seawall of her mood-suppressors, known, but unfelt.

Jewels walked nearly to the edge of the crumbling skyway and peered out into the night. The breeze was cool and sweet, and in the silver-green moonglow the forest practically shone, jagged ruins poking from amidst the strangling trees like protrusions from some fey realm.

Tomorrow, they would arrive at the next site. They would run the geo-acoustic imaging rig and venture once more into a tomb-remnant of the old world in search of secrets to snatch from history’s jealous grasp. There would be the merciful preoccupation of work, and the muted thrill of discovery, and the balm of dependable companions: Maybe even success.

Tonight, though, it felt good to be alone.

The surveyor waited for a beat, then realized she had half been expecting Hamil Shane to show up.

She snorted, crossing her arms, breath misting in the night air. Jewels knew she should be more worried about the Cytokine operative, about the involvement of a power as monolithic as the corporate overlords of Markov in the whole espionage-bullshit angle that had crept up on this expedition, but she just couldn’t bring herself to care that much. The complications it raised, the politics - they didn’t feel real. And in any case, what was she supposed to do about it? She’d alerted Nael to the problem, and he’d doubtless alerted Palaxia, so unless and until Shane put in another appearance the situation was out of her hands.

As long as they didn’t make a fight out of it, and as long as she found what she was looking for, as far as Jewels was concerned, Cytokine Industries could do what they liked.

 

[King Ghidorah]

Nael was waiting for her when Jewels got back to camp, smoking silently in the moonlight like some ancient paisley-clad monolith guarding the tent-dwellings of a prehistoric tribe.

“Shouldn’t you be asleep?” she asked.

“Nah,” he said, inscrutable behind his shades. “I only need a couple hours, and I got shit on my mind. Shane show up again?”

Jewels shook her head. “No. I was a little surprised, honestly. I really can’t read that guy.”

“Cool.”

The enforcer sidled over to a supply-crate and sat down. He took a long drag on the joint he was smoking, burning it down like it was plain tobacco, then stubbed it out and waited a couple of seconds before blowing a long, dank cloud into the night sky.

“We gonna talk,” he asked, “about what’s going on with you?”

The surveyor almost felt betrayed - but then she realized he was talking about her powers. She frowned and looked away.

“You uh, you noticed, huh.”

“Well you haven’t exactly been subtle. After what you did to that zoid everyone in this crew knows you’ve got something. Only, I’ve got a little bit extra myself. From my dad’s side.”

The enforcer spat on the crumbling tarmac. “Only thing the old zealot ever gave me. But it means I can see that you’re changing. There’s power in you that wasn’t there a couple of weeks ago.”

Jewels sat down next to him. She sighed, hesitated, then held out the silvered-scaled palm of her right hand.

The enforcer observed for a moment without comment, then thoughtfully rubbed his stony jaw.

“Have you shown this to a medic?”

She shook her head. “It wasn’t there yet when I was checked out after the chase. But It’s on my elbows too: Anywhere I had a scrape or a cut. I think this is just how I heal now.”

Nael rumbled, a thoughtful sound from deep in his throat. “And you’re not happy about it.”

The surveyor met the gaze of his sunglasses. “I’m fucking terrified. Remember what I told you about Raph Hannigan? How I’m just amazingly pissed at him and his whole damn corporation? Well, what he actually did to get me so upset was use me for some kind of experiment while I was in the hospital. This whole thing, the strength, the speed, the fact that I can’t godsdamn sleep… it’s all a science project. And I don’t know where it’s going to end up.”

Jewels did her very best to keep her face still, but she could feel the muscles tensing in her jaw. Saying it out loud made it more real. She retrieved her pills from her pocket and choked one down.

Nael rested a massive hand gently on her shoulder. “I’ll pass it up the chain, see if we can get anything from Kaalakiota that we don’t already have. Maybe find out exactly what they put inside you. But aside from being scared, you feel alright? No psychological changes, trouble controlling yourself or memory problems or anything like that?”

She frowned, suspicion flickering across her face. The questions were just a little too specific.

The enforcer chuckled, patted her once, firmly, then removed his hand and went about lighting another joint. “I live in Markov, Jewels. I work for the Guild. You’re not the first weird-science alumnus I’ve been asked to watch.”

Jewels rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Right. That makes sense. Sorry… but aside from the trauma-induced garbage, which I already had, and the fact that I don’t seem to need to sleep anymore, the only new development is that I can feel something.”

“Feel something?”

She pointed at the nigh-starless moonlit sky. “Up there. All the time, even during the day. Like… like one of the stars fucking hates me, and it won’t stop screaming.”

The edges of Nael’s mouth twitched, and tension lines emerged in his face. He took a hit, but didn’t appear to derive any satisfaction from it. For the first time since Jewels had met him she thought the man seemed genuinely bothered.

“I’m not going to say that’s not deeply concerning,” he said. “But as long as you still feel like yourself I think you’re going to be okay. Keep an eye on it, and I’ll see what I can dig up.”

As long as she felt like herself? Jewels didn’t even know who that was anymore. She knew what he meant, but it was just such a ridiculous thing to hear…

She chuckled - and then found she couldn’t stop. Jewels erupted into uncontrollable sobbing laughter, muffled in the crook of her elbow for fear of waking the rest of the camp.

 

[King Ghidorah]

***​

IRON DRAGON Model: MFS2 “Cybersaur”/MFS2-b “Garuda”

Status: MFS2-b Garuda heavy-bombardment aircraft/modular support-system fully prototyped, stored pending disassembly. Construction of primary MFS-2 combat-frame halted by Chief Engineer Pearson due to repeated failures in simulation/critical flaws in armor design.


Director’s notes: This is a drastic improvement, but it’s still not going to work.

The magnetic bearings have solved the articulation issue, and everyone deserves to be commended for that. The weapon-systems are, again, top-notch: the dermal energy-siphon/plasma-grenade loop in particular is brilliant, and the modular aerial support-vehicle is a stroke of genius. I’m not saying this isn’t an amazing piece of engineering. It’s good - it’s just not good enough.

First, the power-source. We *cannot* run this thing off a fusion-core, no matter how much we ____ the specs or tinker with the fuel-mixture. When the modular support-unit is separated this design can only manage an ____ by diverting all power to weapon-systems, and the_____ aircraft isn’t anywhere near as well-armored as the main weapon. If it were to be destroyed when docked, the destruction of its fusion-core could overload the _____ plasma-furnace, and we already know a nuclear explosion isn’t enough to seriously hurt _____ so we can’t even call that a ____ win.

Speaking of which, the next issue is the armor. Augmenting the S-Titanium with nanofibers was a brilliant move, and mostly solved the ______ issue.The heat-siphoning _______ coating theoretically ups the survivability even further, but it’s still too fragile. In the simulations, without fail, under full tricephalic electrogravitic bombardment the heat-siphon overloads and the nanofibres ignite: instant firestorm. The armor____ burns, and the machine is totally destroyed in seconds. Even leaving that aside, although the armor no longer shatters when damaged, it’s still not strong enough to ______ resist the kind of ____-stress a creature of ________ size and power is capable of causing.

Which brings me to the last major problem: Size and strength.

The machine is still too small. 100 meters is acceptable, height-wise, but we do not have enough mass. This MFS2 is _____. I understand that we couldn’t run anything larger than __ thousand tonnes without designing a completely new kind of power-supply, but frankly _____ we have to do that anyway. Also, although the magnetic bearings solve the articulation problem this thing still doesn’t have anywhere near the level of _____ force required for its intended mission, and although the ______ are smoother it still moves like a cow. The Cybersaur is unwieldy, and unsuited to existing cockpit technology. We need to get away from bearings and conventional _____ and start looking at bio-realistic artificial ______ and AI-assisted piloting systems.

So yes - good job overall, but we need to up our game here. As with the previous model, if ______ got his ____ on this thing, he’d either incinerate it or rip its head off with little fanfare - he’d just have to work a bit harder to do it.

-Doctor _______ ___________

Project Director: IRON DRAGON

***​

Jewels looked away from her tricorder, mouth hanging open slightly as she regarded Dok’s bald, gnomish countenance. Unlike everyone else on the expedition, the data retrieval specialist was dressed for a vacation in an extra-small breezy cotton tee and miniature bermuda shorts. He sat cross-legged on the seat between Nael and the surveyor in the cab of what had the previous day been the lagging transport, picking his teeth with a push-pin. The fact that the truck was juddering along unpaved zoid-trails within a patch of dense deciduous forest strangling ancient crumbled architecture did not seem to concern him.

“You reconstructed all this over night?”

The gnome shrugged. “Yeah. When the probabilistic molecular backmatching started getting hits, I overlaid a simple AI to account for common word combinations, and factored that in too, and then I just let it run. The more of it the program locked in, the better the model became. It only really worked well on that middle section of the bit you already had, but now that I’ve got that I can probably use it as a language-map to apply a similar approach with the other bits. If you like.”

“I would like,” said Jewels.

But there was no more time to talk about it: they’d arrived at their destination.

The second dig site was marked by the reinforced durasteel skeleton of a lone tower, two hundred stories high: a naked lattice of corroded, lightning-scorched metal which continued to stand, looming above the forest and the ruins in brazen defiance of time, gravity and the elements. On a clear day, it was just barely visible from Markov, if you were looking for it; On a stormy one, lightning would strike nothing else for a hundred miles.

The base of the thing, the portion hidden by the forest canopy, was more intact - oddly so, as though some event in the distant past had blown away everything above the third story that wasn’t made of superhardened shape-memory steel alloy. As the convoy pulled to a halt in the leafy and eerily flat clearing which surrounded the ancient monolith, they got their first look at the foundations of one of the area's most reliable land-marks.

Aside from its sheer size - a rectangular footprint one-hundred meters on a side - it was a little underwhelming. The facade was timeworn black ceramic, cracked and pitted with the passing of ages, curved and elegant, with the suggestion of long-eroded carvings or sculpture. The doors gaped, half-buried in the earth, drifted with soil and leaves.

Em, the structural engineer, was the first one out of the transports; it was her personal goal, while they were here, to figure out how this place was still standing.

The process of unloading the trucks, assembling the seismic imager and making camp got underway once again. Amidst the bustle of men and women in fatigues and work-clothes, Nael sidled up to Jewels so silently that she wouldn’t have noticed his looming form if not for the paisley.

“If you’ve got a second,” he said, more dour than she’d ever seen him “I think there’s something you ought to see.”

The surveyor glanced around - under Artemia’s firm direction, the work seemed to be well in hand. If Nael hadn’t popped up then she probably would have ended up taking preliminary scans again, if Em wasn’t already doing that.

“Alright,” she said. “What’s happened?”

The enforcer shook his head. “Not here.”

Nael led her away from the bustle of the rapidly-materializing camp, ‘round the corner of the building. Once they were out of sight and earshot, he took off his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. The air was still, and thick with the scent of wet leaves.

“You should know, if you haven’t already put it together, that I’ve been briefed on the Ghidorah shit. Someone on this crew had to be, in case something happened to you, and I’m the ranking Guild officer on-site.”

He put his sunglasses back on. Jewels noticed that, for the first time since she’d met him, the laid-back giant showed no inclination to light up a joint. “So, knowing what I know, after what you said last night, I put out a call to the Hub. Standard Guild-backed information bounty plus thirty percent. I wasn’t really expecting to get anything back - but part of my job is covering all the angles.”

“No,” said Jewels. It slipped out involuntarily, almost inaudible - she could tell where this was going, and part of her desperately did not want to know.

Nael touched the frame of his shades. A hologram flickered in the air between the two of them - a seismic model of a super-deep borehole over two kilometers in diameter, appearing in a matter of hours: Of something incredibly energetic boring more than a mile into the crust of Inverxe.

“Someone in Kaalakiota’s monitor-creche sent me this,” said Nael. “Apparently the whole place is going crazy over it. Watch.”

The hologram flickered, changing from an annotated model to video footage of the borehole and the surrounding tundra, a split-display of orbital cloud-piercing telephoto and electromagnetic heat-map imaging.

Something massive and dark, a dragon with three heads atop graceful serpentine necks, great tattered wings, two tails and the crimson Omega iconography of Darkseid blazing on its foreheads erupted from the steaming pit, streaming violet lighting and blue flames. The source of the azure fire straddled the throat of its centermost head, a humanoid figure, one tenth the size of its mount.

Then a smaller dragon with a near-identical body-plan, smaller winged and less elegant in form but blazing gold and sparking with furious amber lightning, came screaming out of the borehole and did its level best to tackle its larger counterpart out of the air.

The footage paused, and annotations appeared. The larger beast was 160 meters high with a four hundred meter wingspan. The smaller dragon and the mysterious flaming figure were both pegged at 35 meters.

According to the heat-map, all three were kicking off enough energy to light up Markov for a year.

Jewels was dimly aware that Nael was still talking, but she couldn’t hear him.

The larger beast was obviously the thing she’d seen shining in the cave beneath Inverxe, embedded in the wall: the corpse of the original King Ghidorah. Parts of it were still visibly rotted, great torn strips of tattered scale and twisted, broken bone… but it was more complete than she remembered it, for all that its burnished metallic lustre had turned to shades of bruised violet and corpse-fat gray - returned to unholy life by the might of the Unmaking.

And the smaller dragon could only be one thing.

 

[King Ghidorah]

She could smell the scent of wet stone and burning air, corpse-fire and electric rot; remember second-hand the faces of ten thousand burning worlds and hear the echoes of ten thousand blaring klaxons, ten thousand doomsday choirs. She could hear Flipper break, and Krade scream.

From the depths of a dream, amidst a haze of bubbles, a pair of crimson eyes pierced her soul from behind an impossible door.

Jewels wasn’t aware that her legs had gone out until she felt Nael catch her, his enormous hands hooking her under the arms and lowering her to the ground, leaning her against the base of the tower.

Up until today, the surveyor had thought that, ultimately, what she was doing was about her - a way to drag herself into a future she no longer had a place in; that although Ghidorah would live forever in her nightmares, he would, if he had indeed survived, remain merely another horror among the thousands Inverxe could provide.

Now, in the eye of Jewels’ mind, a pair of chiropteran wings spread their electric shadow over a shattered, burning Crossroads.

It was too big - a horror so profound that it was as though the drugs she was taking weren’t even there. But something within the surveyor, the slightly detached part that made lists and assigned tasks, and told her what to do when all she wanted was to stop, had no time to be afraid.

Instead, it got mad.

She reached out and grabbed Nael by the front of the shirt, cutting off whatever he was saying.

“We need to move faster,” Jewels hissed, with tears streaming from her unblinking eyes. She pulled her shaking legs under herself, hanging from Naels shirt. In lurching, spasmodic movements, the surveyor forced herself to stand. She felt cold and hot at the same time; Sweat ran down the back of her neck. The silver-scaled patches on her palms and elbows burned.

“Ghidorah is awake. He’s growing, and no matter which one of them flew away from that fight it isn’t going to stay on Inverxe forever. It’s coming. We’re not a salvage crew anymore, Nael, and this isn’t just archaeology. Do you understand? I don’t give a shit what happens to me: I’m already fucking gone. But if we don’t find out how the ancients stopped this thing then everyone is going to die.”

Jewels let go of his shirt, her whole body tensing to keep from collapsing all over again. She could hear her blood roaring in her ears as she clenched her fists so hard that her knuckles turned white. “Everyone,” she repeated.

Nael smoothed the front of his flower-patterned shirt with one hand, once more unreadable behind his shades. “Alright. What’ve you got in mind?”

Jewels forced herself to breathe normally, her stunned and sparking brain running ahead of her. She dry-swallowed two pills.

“We need to go see Dok,” she said.

They found the gnome seated cross-legged on top of a crate of rations, fiddling with a holographic interface and eating a packet of cheeze-puffs. The little man looked up, but whatever he was going to say died on his lips when he saw Jewels’ face.

“Forget the Iron Dragon stuff for now,” she said, doing her best to suppress the tremor in her voice. “Shoot the scans to Nael, and he’ll forward them to Palaxia. Show us the maps you pulled off the MFS2-b. I know you haven’t finished analyzing them yet, but we can’t spare the time anymore. Just show us an overlay with the current topography.”

The data-retrieval tech didn’t ask questions or say anything flippant - he didn’t know what had happened, but it was never good practice to get smart with your boss when they looked like Darkseid himself had broken into their house and personally unmade their dog. With a few quick hand motions and a small amount of muttering, a placid blue image appeared in the air.

“Okay,” he said. “This is the current topography. Annotated. We’re located at the little flashing dot.”

Another image appeared next to it, this one far more detailed and dense with architecture. “This is a composite of the navigational charts we got off the aircraft. There’s a ton of metadata that my setup can’t read super-well, so I don’t know what a lot of these places are yet, but I’ve identified some of the major features within a few hundred kilometers of Markov - and I can at least give you a top-down view at a 1:1 scale with modern charts. If there’s anything specific that catches your interest I can probably get an ID on it if you give me like, twenty minutes.”

A third image popped up below the other two. “Annnd here’s what they look like overlaid.”

The surveyor and the enforcer studied the hovering maps in silence. Around them, the support crew was assembling the tents.

The previous site was on both sets of maps, identified on the ancient nav charts as the Lon-Gigas Heavy Prototyping Facility (Defunct). Their current location was apparently the former center of some sort of enormous complex. It looked important, but bore no label as of yet.

Jewels stared. Nael rubbed his chin. The wind rustled through the trees and whined through the high-above skeleton of the ancient skyscraper; it was beginning to smell like rain.

It was remarkable how much the countryside had changed - to see just how big the Markov of centuries gone had been compared to its shrunken modern borders. Jewels was able to eliminate several of her original candidate locations immediately: one had clearly been a sports-stadium, one a grain-silo, and another one Dok had identified as a civilian chemical processing facility.

And then there were the things that were missing from the modern maps: the things that time and disaster had utterly erased.

“What the fuck is that?” Jewels asked, pointing at the composite chart.

Where in the present day there was only a small lagoon nestled in the depths of a rocky, overgrown basin, there had, at the time the ancient charts were last updated, been a massive walled complex covering several square kilometers; Of the vanished urban features, it was undoubtedly the largest.

It was also the only prominent location on the old map that was coterminous with a body of water on the overlay; Jewels didn’t know why that was important, but in the inarticulate way that a person half-remembers a nightmare the surveyor was certain that it was so.

“I don’t know,” said Dok. “Like I said - give me twenty minutes.”

Jewels nodded. “Do it.”

Now that the initial shock of finding out that not one, but two iterations of Ghidorah were rampaging over the surface of Inverxe had begun to pass, she was experiencing the strangest sense of deja-vu.

Abruptly, as the double-dose of mood-stabilizing drugs hit her system and the sense that she was a fusion-powered gyroscope frantically sparking on the edge of a bottomless pit was washed out by a sense of near-mechanical calm, it occurred to her that there was a resource she wasn’t properly utilizing.

She turned to Nael. “Do you know where Marty got to?”

 

[King Ghidorah]

Marty wasn’t hard to find; Nael paged him on the coms, and they waited by the trucks for him to materialize out of the general busyness. It had begun to drizzle.

Marty appeared from behind a tent and waved at them, immediately spotting Nael’s looming bulk - but then he saw Jewels, and pulled up short. Even though her meds had smoothed things out on the inside, apparently she still looked like someone who had suffered a devastating psychological shock on the outside; the man hurried over, frowning.

“Are, uh, are you all right?”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Jewels. “There’s something I need your help with, Marty. Something only you can help with.”

The husky redhead nodded, rubbing the back of his neck with one meaty hand. ”Okay. You’re the boss. Which still blows my mind, by the way.”

Jewels knew that if she were less medicated, this would be awkward. As it was, she just climbed up on the hood of one of the trucks and sat down with her hands in her lap.

Nael crossed his arms, the simple menace of his massive presence providing a backdrop of authority when the surveyor spoke.

“You remember how I got my old nickname, yeah? My sixteenth birthday? This is going to sound weird - really fucking weird - but I need you to tell me everything you remember about the way I acted and what I said on the day I reappeared. I was too stoned to remember most of it, but there were some things I saw back then that have kinda… come up. It’s important.”

Marty blinked a couple of times, his confusion evident. “Okay. Mysterious. Give me a second to think: That was like, ten years ago.”

He exhaled briskly and tapped his hand rhythmically against his chest, peering into the middle-distance.

“... you kept saying you were the Dance Commander, whatever that means. You had made yourself a crown out of some random piece of metal you found somewhere. And you were really, really damp. Like, you squelched when you walked. Clean water, too, so you definitely hadn’t been rolling around in the sewers... And they locked down the security on the city reservoir after what we did for your fifteenth birthday.”

The salvager paused. He frowned, pulling at a mental thread of vaguely remembered unease.

“There was this weird cartoony element to it - like, genuine Nostal’gia bizarreness. I remember arguing with Ilya about that after we got you dried off and properly hydrated instead of just soaked. Before you left, when you were really tripping big flaming balls? You’d said you were going swimming. You sang a song about it; But the nearest watering hole that wasn’t full of feral zoids or chemical waste was at least 3 days’ ride from the squat, right? And you didn’t smell like a swimming-pool. Plus, it hadn’t rained in like three weeks - there was a full-blown drought that summer. So if you didn’t break into the reservoir, and you hadn’t gone spelunking in the sewers then how the hell were you still so wet?”

Jewels wracked her brain. Except for the Dance Commander bit, which rang a vague bell of drug-addled pride, she didn’t remember any of what Marty was describing.

But there it was again.

Water.

She didn’t understand entirely where the feeling was coming from - why, after weeks spent preparing this expedition, she was only putting it together now. But Jewels was increasingly certain that they were looking for something hidden near or within a prominent water-feature - and, correspondingly, that their current location would, at best, yield only unrelated treasures.

A twisted little suspicion began to take shape.

“People always said I ‘reappeared’.” she said. “They kept using that word. Like, all the time, whenever they talked about it. Was there a reason for that?”

Marty scratched his head and shrugged. “Not really? You just kind of tottered around a corner one day shouting high-people stuff.”

Jewels frowned. She was about to pursue the thought further - but just then, Dok showed up, his little sandals squelch-slapping as he hurried across the increasingly damp leaves. The data-retrieval tech barged into the center of the conversation and grinned at all three of them.

“I got it,” the gnome said, spreading his spindly arms like a showman. “Only took ten minutes. That complex you wanted to know about? It was the regional Military Command and Control Headquarters. And as far as I know nobody - I mean nobody knows it was ever there.”

 

[King Ghidorah]

After some vigorous discussion with Artemia, the decision was made to finish up the work at their current location before striking out for the lagoon. The imaging gear was already set up and running, and camp was already made - and if there did turn out to be something here, well, the fault would be on them for not following up.

The rest of the day was spent checking gear, checking weapons, eating, planning next steps, and preparing for a possible descent while the seismic data was collected and analyzed. The drizzle progressed to a full downpour, but there was, thankfully, no lightning.

By the time the storm broke, the sun was setting - and the data analysis was complete, a result greeted with a mixture of relief and disappointment.

There had been a buried complex here - it was evident in the soil density, in the metal-and-concrete substructures that stood out like spotlights on the scans. However almost the whole thing had either collapsed or been filled in by soil and debris running through the front door whenever it rained for the past six hundred years. In order to explore it, they would need mining gear, and an entirely different kind of team.

The only person who was really happy about it was Em, who had found that the stress-tolerances of the remaining superstructure, coupled with the re-enforced subsurface architecture evident on the scans, matched the theoretical specifications for the foundation of a hollow-tether space-elevator - which neatly explained what had happened to the upper floors. If part of such a mega-structure had impacted the surface from high orbit, she said, then the blast-wave could have annihilated everything for dozens of kilometers in every direction.

The structural engineer spent the rest of the evening talking about it to anyone who would listen as they returned the equipment to the trucks and prepared to bunk down for the night.

By the time midnight rolled around, Jewels once again found herself sleepless and with too much on her mind. So, as was rapidly becoming her custom, she found something to climb.

The first three floors of the ancient tower were the easiest, the facade weathered and riven, with abundant hand and foot-holds. Once she reached the building’s bare metal skeleton, however, she found herself having to rely on the sheer pressure of her newly-superhuman grip to maintain a hold as she shimmied and clawed up the corroded, lightning-blackened girders.

She wasn’t worried about falling - with a pair of ruggedized tactical gloves (because the surveyor wasn’t eager to sacrifice any more of her human flesh to cuts on her hands) this wasn’t much harder than scaling a sheer rock-face. And even if she did fall she knew, in the same way she had known that she would have been able to lift the blast door under the dome, that even terminal velocity wouldn’t do her any lasting injury.

The air smelled of wet rust and moss. There were patches of vegetation growing in the joints of the tower, ferns and grasses and even, on the seventh story, a small tree.

The surveyor hauled herself upward, progressing almost entirely by arm-strength for the better part of an hour, until she was nearly thirty stories above the camp. There, a hundred feet above the last sporadic piece of opportunistic plant-growth she had seen, Jewels found a tiny frog, clinging to the bare metal in the dark and the damp and wondering, in its simple way, what it had gotten itself into.

She took the frog in hand and dismounted onto the thirtieth-floor cross-bar, an I-beam as wide as a suburban sidewalk. The little creature struggled weakly, made sluggish by the chill in the midnight air, but quickly settled down, seeking the warmth of Jewels’ palm beneath her glove.

Idly stroking the google-eyed amphibian with her thumb, she gazed out over a forest landscape shrouded in mist. While the moon-glow wasn’t as intense as on the previous night it still lit the coiling masses of fog as though from within, creating a silver vista of eerie shadows and far-off ruins. Rather than enchanted, these woods felt haunted.

“Mighty pretty night, ain’t it?” said Hamil Shane.

He was standing right next to her, in his buttoned-up greatcoat and black stetson hat, and she hadn’t seen him arrive; Jewels jumped back so fast she nearly fell off the tower. She fumbled her gun trying to draw it with her off hand, because her good hand was full of frog, but managed to catch it, leveling the plasma-pistol at the man’s chest.

“FUCK you. Holy shit… You did that on purpose.”

Shane spread his hands and hung his head apologetically. “I assure you, ma’am, I did no such thing. But seein’ as I do seem to have startled you, I’ll take no offense.”

He lit a cigarillo, the tip of the foul-smelling roll-up glowing ruby-red as he puffed on it.

Jewels took a moment to let her heart rate drop back to normal, and lowered her weapon. The frog chirped, and crawled in a little circle on her palm. Across the mist-shrouded forests below, the shadows seemed to inhale - and the surveyor’s hackles began to rise as Shane’s subtle aura of unreality and imminent threat began to assert itself.

“Can we please just get to the point this time?” Jewels said, tucking the amphibian in her pocket and taking a two-handed grip on the gun. “There’s something wrong with you Shane: being around you makes me feel like I’m strolling naked through the really nasty part of the Hub waving a sign that says ‘Young, broke and missable: all organs prime’. I’m never going to like you, so just say what you somehow came up here to say.”

The Cytokine operative blew a smoke ring and looked her in the eye. “Well now. I knew you could tell I had a little somethin’, but I did not cotton to the fact that you could see me quite so well. That’s a cryin’ shame. Still, have it your way.”

There was a shift in the quality of the moonlight, something which Jewels couldn’t quite define - but it did not make her feel any better about being alone with Hamil Shane over three hundred feet off the ground.

“I just figured I’d congratulate you on your recent success. And, given as what y’all dug up back at the dome, I figured that I’d inquire again - as per your preference, I’ll even ask you di-rectly: What is it you know about the Iron Dragon Project?”

Jewels stared. Abruptly, several things clicked into place in her head. She bit back a laugh. “Well shit… that’s what you think this is all about, isn’t it. That I’m chasing one of the Iron Dragon prototypes.”

She immediately knew that she’d made a mistake, and the way Shane’s eyes narrowed and gleamed confirmed it.

“So you do know what it is. But it’s not what you’re out here prospectin’ for. Now that,” he said, gesturing reproachfully with his cigarillo, “that is very interesting information. Probably should’ve kept it to yourself, but I reckon you realize that already.”

The surveyor began to feel unsteady on her feet - the building’s metal frame was starting to feel crooked in a less-than-strictly-physical sense. And worse, she had finally figured out what was bothering her about the moonlight:

Slowly, nigh-imperceptibly, it was turning red.

The air was beginning to smell like burnt sugar. Something Nael had said when they’d first talked about Shane bubbled to the surface of her thoughts.

I knew a couple of guys from Mesa who swore he was a witch.

Jewels fixed her stance, raised her gun and re-centered her aim. The plasma-pistol felt weak and fragile in her grip, its familiar weight reduced to nothing.

“I do,” she said. “So, before I say more stupid shit, I think it’s time again for your spooky ass to leave.”

Shane puffed on his roll-up and smiled. “You should know, I’m not leavin’ on account of the gun. I'll hit the trail, but only because this has been a social call as much as business, and when a lady asks a gentleman to leave then it is inarguably time for that feller to git.”

He flicked the cigarillo out into darkness, and its red ember plunged into the now-crimson mists roiling far below. “But - and I’m sayin’ this purely as a courtesy. Because I respect your resolve, you see - if we should ever encounter one another and it is purely a business engagement? You may find that ol’ dog won’t hunt.”

The man tipped his hat.

“Just somethin’ to keep in mind,” he said, and then, with his coat billowing around him, he leapt off the building.

There was a snapping sensation, like a mile-long rubber band. The sense of disjointed otherness and imminent disaster vanished, and the moonlight returned to its placid silver shade.

With the exception of the tiny frog poking its head from her pocket, Jewels was alone in the sky.