NOVEL NEXT 099 - Good News, Bad News
Blake awoke to the sensation of cold terrazzo tile against his cheek, gritty with fine dust. A film coated his tongue, the coppery slick of blood mixed with the acrid char of melted polymers. He blinked, and the light from Caprea's dome washed over the wreckage of the mall concourse in a flat, sterile blue.
He curled the fingers of his left hand into a fist, the joints grinding. His toes pressed against the inside of his boots. A grunt tore from his throat as he shoved himself away from the floor, a hot spike driving deep between his ribs. He barely managed a few steps before falling against a toppled planter, the sharp, broken ceramic digging into the muscle of his back.
"Don't try to move yet, hero." Kitt manifested in Blake's vision, as welcome as sight as anything. "You're more than a little scratched up."
"Yeah," Blake agreed. "Whose fault is that again?"
He stripped off his right gauntlet, the material crinkling abnormally under his grip. A spiderweb of burst capillaries crawled up his forearm, angry red lightning against his skin. That was what channeling a goddamn Leviathan did to human plumbing. The nerves beneath the skin felt like they were still humming, a low-grade electrical fire that wouldn't go out.
"Technically Caprea's, if we want to get specific … But it was my plan. I'll own it." Kitt's avatar flickered softly in his vision—a pixelated chimera no bigger than a German Shepherd, her leonine head hung low, and her wings drooped against her flanks. The digital rendering couldn't quite capture the depth of her expression, but the slumped shoulders and averted gaze spoke volumes about her guilt.
"It worked, and we're alive; that makes it a good plan."
"You say that now, but I don't think you've got the full context," she replied, head still drooping. Blake flexed his right hand. The sensation at his fingertips was fuzzed, like he was wearing gloves made of static.
"Alright, give me the high-level. How bad are things?"
"I'll walk you through it, but you should see for yourself as well," she replied.
Blake reached out and pulled Verdict into his grip from where it had been resting on the ground nearby. The minor exertion of [Telekinesis] sent a sharp pain running from the base of his neck down to the tip of his middle finger. Involuntarily, his hand clenched around Verdict's familiar grip. The metal was warm to the touch, radiating heat like a fever. He held the pistol up to catch the light from Caprea's dome, and his stomach dropped.
"Christ."
The barrel was heat-checked, hairline cracks spider-webbing across the steel in a pattern that caught the light with a faint rainbow sheen. The slide had warped, just slightly, but enough that he could feel the drag when he worked the action. The compensator's breaks looked like someone had taken a torch to them; their precise geometry was visibly off from true.
[Warden's Insight] confirmed what his eyes were telling him—the weapon was compromised. Not dead, but unreliable. A coin flip every time he pulled the trigger.
"I had to use the gear as … basically a sort of heat sink," Kitt said, her avatar's wings drooping further. "I had a handle on Caprea's power for a bit, but it got to be too much after a while. I needed something to channel the overflow, or we both would have started cooking. The gear was the closest thing I had to work with."
Blake holstered Verdict and drew Fang, the knife's familiar grip felt solid in his hand, but distinctly unstable to his bond-sense. He looked it over carefully with [Warden's Insight], trying to identify the issues before Kitt needed to explain. The damage was about as obvious as Verdict's, even if the damaged portions were more esoteric than engineered. Three of the emitter nodes in the interior matrix had spider-web cracks running through their crystalline structure. Kitt had rebuilt the knife as an ideal delivery mechanism for [Kinetic Detonation], but now .. Well, if he tried to channel through this thing, he'd be turning it into a shrapnel grenade with himself at ground zero.
"Define catastrophic damage." He trusted Kitt implicitly, but he wanted to know what was worth destroying his gear to avoid.
"Best case? Permanent neural scarring. Worst case? We both burn out completely." Kitt's avatar met his eyes. "I'm sorry, Blake. I should have warned you about the risks."
"You did, briefly. There wasn't exactly a lot of time for nuance in the run up to the action, though. You told me drawing on the ship would be a risk—a potentially fatal one, even. I went in eyes open."
He slipped the knife back into its sheath. His armor was worse off than anything else. The weave was pitted and scarred where Caprea's power had arced along the seams, leaving burn patterns that looked like lightning frozen in fabric. Two of the armor plates over his chest had delaminated, their edges curled up like burned paper. He pressed his thumb against one of the kinetic gel packs beneath—brittle as old plastic. Cooked.
He sighed and deactivated [Warden's Insight] completely for the first time in ages. Even keeping it active on its minimal power was making his eyes itch at the moment. He was awake, sure, but he was in near the same state as his gear. He wouldn't be field-ready for a while.
"How long until you can fabricate replacements?"
"Me personally? With the biomass I've got in storage, ready for conversion? Two weeks." Kitt's tone was firm. She knew her own limits, and she knew how bad the situation was. Blake sighed. It was going to make things tough.
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
"Thankfully," she continued, "Caprea is more than willing to help. With this Locus in action, she's got access to all the local fabricators. Not all of them are still operational, but she says there are a dozen left around the mall that were available to merchants. She's willing to draw on her reserves and print us up whatever we need."
"Oh. That's great news, actually," Blake said, mood brightening momentarily before his natural survival-oriented cynicism came back into effect. "Except you're not bubbly with excitement about it. Why?"
"Even with the pseudo-bond I've got with Cee, the gear isn't going to be me. We're going to have to bind it, which takes time and energy. The time and energy we need to recover. It's a solution—a good one—but it isn't perfect."
"Because … Ah. Because we've got time constraints. Of course." He sighed again, deeply. Always another complication. "The big blob guarding access to one of the Loci might have been a coincidence, but the Pupetteer actively assaulting this Locus means that the Outsider knows about them now. And he's going after them."
"Got it in one. Mostly," Kitt replied.
"Mostly? What did I miss?"
"A lot, but you don't have context for it," Kitt said. "It's an issue of power, control, and attrition. Caprea had ten Loci throughout the ship tied into sub-structures and control systems. They were all in a largely passive state, just like the first few we activated, until we popped the third and triggered a failsafe that woke up Caprea's main core."
"Alright," Blake said. He wanted to rush her along, but he knew a proper briefing often required setup, and so he let Kitt talk.
"Right, so counting this most recent Locus, Caprea theoretically has control of seventy percent of the ship."
"Why only theoretically? I've bled a lot for these stupid crystals."
"You have, and it has definitely been worth it, but the reality is complicated. Caprea has control, but most of the ship is completely overrun with biomass corrupted by the Outsider. To actually have full control, she'd need to purge enough of the biomass to perform repairs and get things back up and running correctly."
"With systems and material tied to her. Like you with my gear."
"Right. And if things stayed as they are right now, Caprea would be able to do it. But…"
"But the outsider is on the move now. Yeah, that could be bad," Blake continued for her.
"It's worse than just that, Blake. You were out for almost six hours. Another one of the larger Outsider-spawn has already gotten to work. They took one of the remaining Loci about twenty minutes ago."
"Oh," Blake replied dumbly. "Yeah, that is bad. Especially in the context of us still needing more time to heal and regroup."
"Exactly. There are two more Loci in play, but the Pupetteer is already active in the area of one of them."
"And the odds I get there in time to intervene?"
"Slim to none. We have to write that one off, too." Kitt sounded resigned. Blake didn't blame her; it didn't sound good.
"Still, that's two Loci to seven. With our help, the ship—Caprea, sorry—she can pull ahead still, right?"
"Probably, given time and assistance, but if she loses the final Locus, we're going to be in a bad position. With the amount of Caprea that the Outsider currently controls, plus access to thirty percent of her power … if the hungry bastard put his mind to it, he'd be able to start taking the rest right out from under us."
"How much harder would the fighting be than it has been, though?" Blake asked. "If we fabricate some flamethrowers or something that can wipe out corrupt material en masse, wouldn't that mitigate things?"
"I don't think you've really comprehended some of the things we've been saying about the Outsider, Blake," Kitt replied. She sounded as tired as he felt. "It hasn't been paying attention to us this entire time. Every shred of resistance it has thrown our way has been automatic. A fraction of its Intent spread across the ship to attack the mind of any sapient it encounters, its minions that are all functionally independent… The most attention it's directed toward us was when you fought those things that sent out the distress pheromones when they died."
"And even that was probably something like a reflex action on the Outsider's part, huh?" Blake said, finishing Kitt's thought. "It's hard to believe, but if it's true, I see your point. Getting this thing's direct attention would be something else entirely."
"Right now, our biggest advantage is that it's focused so entirely on cracking the rift at the center of the crash. But if it thinks that absorbing the rest of Caprea will give it the strength or the insight or tools it needs to get into that rift, we're in trouble."
"Well, with Mr. Strings and his merry band of undead assholes already at the next Locus, aren't we already up a creek?"
"Not quite," Kitt said. Blake saw something like hope in her feline expression as her avatar looked at him. "There's some unexpectedly good news. The Pupetteer seems to be somewhat … rebellious. You probably noted the way that the Pupetteer's husks were in conflict with the other undead, yes?"
"I did, yeah. I thought it was just the Pupetteer trying to make sure it could eat me itself, though."
"You were probably right, but it goes deeper. Caprea has watched the Puppetteer's forces clashing with the general Outsider forces, basically anytime the two sides meet. It's like it's gone rogue."
"That … I wouldn't have imagined it was possible, but that is a big deal. It means that the Outsider isn't about to get its hands on a second Locus, even if the Pupetteer takes the one it's attacking." Blake thought the situation through a little longer, with Kitt sidling up to him, seemingly content to let him think things through.
"So the last Locus," he said after a few moments' consideration. "It's going to be a fight, isn't it?"
"Both sides have already started sending their minions toward it. The fighting has already started," Kitt confirmed. "So if we have a chance at all, it's in that. We need to make use of the infighting."
"Two out of three times I've come against the larger Outsider-spawn, I've ended up unconscious on the ground," Blake said. His tone was grim, but he wore a gallows-smile. "So sure, let's fight two of them."