Godclads

Chapter 4-2 The Tubes

Early on, before the advent of golemics and imbuements, most in-field operators used exo-rigs.

Now, rigs are probably closer to being a combat platform than armor most times, but the conceptualization of its design is simple: To create adaptive, survivable light infantry for a new hyper-lethal era of warfare.

Of course, with the following advent of quick-fabbed atomic and newly created Heavens, the rig themselves lasted barely more than two centuries before being consumed by obsolescence.

That being said, most criminals and low-class enterprises still use outdated models from centuries prior for their ease of procurement and lack of licensing controls…

-Kare Kitzuhada, Dissertation, “Stillborn Metal: The Weapons New Vultun Left Behind”

4-2

The Tubes

Inching back-first against the drills was an affair more ticklish than painful. Neither fear nor worry greeted him in that instant, and oddly it was this lack of worry that spurred a flicker of anxiety within him. He had died twice just yesterday. Thrice, if he counted his first resurrection in the barge. Now, it seemed that mortality was taking its weight off him, that long-familiar dread of oblivion losing its hold.

Yet, he knew that if he died now, his consciousness should be eternally shredded by the Rend stored within him; that entropic property Draus had warned him about.

How close lay the borders between liberation and hubris? With that dormant power that yet burned within his being, Avo wondered how far he would go again once he made his next kill. Already, he was feeling it–the addiction. The beast had tasted the ichor of blood and supped flesh from people he never dared dream of sampling in his past life.

A slight whine of machine servos sang as the needle tips of the drills cupped along his spine and spun. Unlike his surgery at the grafters, he didn’t feel much cutting, nor did pain come in any capacity. Instead, it felt like his body was expanding, his senses filtering out as his Celerostylus wriggled along his spine, accommodating the pricks of neurally-binding needles.

One by one, he felt the digits of the rig twitch. The connection, already, felt far more fluid than that which held the scavengers on the barge. Sinking deeper, his legs slid to the bottom of his armor’s sabatons, claws scraping all the way.

Janand’s skull implant flashed red, coming alight across his head like a band. “Expand sabatons. Ten inches.”

Two drones darted by and began plucking and untightening bolts within the boots.

Avo felt his feet stretch out slowly, the interior of the armor loosening to fit him better.

A dozen clicks sounded across his spine as he felt clasps rise to stabilize the position of his torso. A semi-circle sprouting thin metal threads closed around his skull before he saw the armor begin to close itself up. Like disappearing into a lightless cage, the outside world was sealed from him. Gridded segments of plating spilled over his vision as the world was suddenly encased in darkness.

For the length of a minute, he felt at peace, enjoying the quiet. The world outside could barely be heard aside from dull murmurs. Macabre thoughts greeted him as he wondered if anyone had starved to death within one of these armors, or if there was a way to tear his way out from the inside if he needed to.

A static jolt cleaved into his awareness as the threads stung into the flesh around his skull. Avo blinked as he felt a wave of stuttering pulses rush through his mind. Flashing pictures and choked flickers of sound speared into his perception in irregular doses.

All of a sudden, Avo felt his awareness yawn open like a fissuring chasm. He was suddenly seeing in front, behind, to his sides, and from his hands. Each of his new “eyes” also offered him greater clarity and more detail than his natural eyesight could ever muster. Yet, it was not as intuitive as his cog-feed was. The rig couldn't detect thoughtstuff for one.

Vertices and other icons streamed into his mind as the armor fed new telemetries and data into his brain, his Metamind working to accommodate this most direct of intruders.

Sweeping his eyes tentatively across the room, he saw Chambers making a vulgar gesture at him. Reflexively, he found himself zooming in on the gesture through the optics built into his shoulder.

The sheer dissonance and overload of angles he could perceive made him nauseous. He wondered what would happen if someone fouled themselves in the armor. From what he could tell so far, this thing didn’t have any waste disposal ports.

A crack of sound went off as if directly beside his ears. “A…vo….Avooooo!” The sudden spike of the pitch made him wince. Well, that wasn’t normal. Ghouls had a multi-layered cochlear organ for an ear. The Low Masters supposedly put it into them to reduce their weakness to sonic weaponry.

Reduce, however, did not mean remove.

“AVO!” The greeting was deafening, the sound patched directly into Avo’s innermost ear layerings. “HEY! GHOULIE! CAN YOU HEAR ME!”

“Yes,” Avo said, wanting to rub his skull. When he tried anyway, he ended up just uselessly tapping a metal finger where he vaguely felt his head was. It was like he was blind to his own body. The dissonance just increased his nausea. “Too loud.”

Coordinating multiple eyes to zoom in on Chambers, Avo watched the enforcer snap his fingers at Janand. A light buzzing thrummed through Avo’s mind. Chambers spoke again. “How about now?”

“Better,” Avo said. “Project sounds to my outer ears if possible.”

A static series of pops sounded to his sides as if the noise was moving further and further away from him.

“How’s that?”

“Good.”

“Alright,” Chambers said. “Now, raise your arm as fast as you can.”

“Reflex test?” Avo asked.

“‘Because Chamber’s fucking said so’ test. Do it.”

Grunting a quiet note of displeasure, Avo raised his arm.

Something hard struck him in the side. Through his new eyes, he caught sight of the spinning ceiling blurring into the floor as he toppled over, the weight of his rig tearing him from his feet, an unseen force ripping him loose from the clamps of his rig station.

Aside from the suddenness of the jolt and a spike of surprise, he felt no pain. He noted a small subinterface displayed in the corner of a newly appeared interface, showing armor integrity and how much power remained in the armor. A splash of blue-coated the impact zone of his left pauldron.

No damage. No penetration.

Through the armor’s audio detection functions, he could hear Chambers cackling like a madman. Focusing on the sound brought up a spill of complex new features that analyzed the man’s voice and extracted an audio sample for posterity.

‘What just happened?” Avo asked.

“You whiplashed yourself is what happened,” Chambers said. “One second, nothing. Then, your arm went straight up and sent you sprawling. Jannard here probably overclocked the rig’s E.I. to match your speed but not your exact timing or some stupid geek shit like that.”

In the background, Avo could hear Janand cursing in frustration.

The sudden sensation of something magnetic and heavy clamped around his shoulders. Avo was dragged back to his feet. He swirled his backmost hardpoint optics to see an industrial drone with a square-shaped magnetic pulling him back to his feet.

He suddenly realized how odd the weight felt as he stood. Looking down from his knees, he saw his feet looking like two flexing blades, extending his new height well past nine feet in height. He knew the design was to grant him more speed during a run but the missing agility provided by his joints and claws instilled a certain instability in his movements.

Avo supposed that was just another byproduct of people building their kit to kill you rather than for you.

Janand had gone about more adjustments after that while Chambers rattled off thinly veiled insults at the man. Avo took this time to adjust his optics and narrow in on the other tech, who seemed to be doing her very best to avoid the enforcer’s attention.

He noticed multiple vision functions that were still shaded out. Inactive, if he was to assume. Low light, infrared, electro-spec, and thermal modes were all transparent in the background of his visual menu. He wondered if he could have multiple vision modes active across different optics. Judging from how he could assign submenus to each of his viewpoints, the answer was probably yes.

Avo couldn’t help but chuckle to himself bitterly. Little wonder how the Regs seemed omniscient. Little wonder how they seldom missed.

A memory of fleeing down narrow alleys came to him now, dashing like a scared animal as gauss fire tore through the walls. He charged through the misting remains of the brothers ahead, coating himself in their viscera, screaming prayers to the Deep Hungers--gods once worshipped by his former creators.

Behind, he heard the cooking of flesh as a blinding radiance flashed. His shoulder bubbled and welted as he rounded a corner, sprinting to escape the hellish battlefield that was the topside, desperate to flee back into the comfort of darkness, to the Umbra below.

Fusion burners have that effect.

“Hey, Avo,” Chambers said, shattering the memory. Avo grunted in acknowledgment.

“Change of plans, the Necro got caught up on doing whatever spook-ghost shit Mirrorhead thought was more important. Which means we get to go out on this outing without someone breathin' down our necks. Yay!”

Avo grunted. Odd that Mirrorhead was being so hands-off today so far. He expected the Syndicate boss to appear and threaten him vaguely or something or other. Maybe remind him that the armor was a gift as well and that Avo would be nowhere with him.

“So, here’s what we’re going to do,”Chambers said, “we’re going to take the tubes to a nearby district occupied by our–ahem–esteemed competition. A little abandoned waste-pit of a spot called Burner’s Way–”

“–Burner’s Way?” Avo asked

“–I’ll teach you how to read the map in your HUD later. Right now, shut the fuck up, please. Anyway, we’re going to have you do a little walk, maybe a little run. Then, we’ll see how good you are with shooting before ending on a light note of organ theft. How does that sound?”

“Sounds more like a mission. Less like a milk run.”

Chambers began making squealing noises and mimicking what could only be the sound of an infant suckling on something. “You know who I’m pretending to be right now?”

Avo stared flatly at the enforcer. He had an urge to just try and kill the man now. Annoyingly, he realized that he couldn’t eat Chambers because the armor prevented it.

“You. Revealing autonepiophilia?” Avo deadpanned.

“Auto–what?”

“Fetish,” Avo continued. “When an adult wants to pretend to be an infant.”

Chambers stared at him, jaw slacking in confusion.

“Calling you a baby-man.”

Chambers chuckled as he shook his head. “Jaus, I was just going to call you a fucking wuss, but godsdamned and all the lowest hells, you’re not only a wuss-ghoul, but you’re also a dork-ghoul. Fuck me, consang, but I was expecting a hard, cold-blooded man-eater. Not a pigmentally-challenged thesaurus that goes ‘b-b-but that m-m-might not be s-s-safe’ every time I bring up an idea or ask them if they want a smoke.”

Avo hummed a low note of amusement at the man’s rant. Specieist, racist, amoral piece of Syndicate trash that he was, Walton would have liked this man. If only because he would make for good entertainment after being stolen from.“How many living ghouls have you met?”

A beat of silence followed. “Well, shit, consang. You might be onto something there.”

[***]

Before the Fourth Guild War, before the Low Masters Uprising, the G-Tube project stood as a hopeful symbol for potential peace between the Guilds and a sign that the long-promised prosperity offered by the powers that be was finally waterfalling past the Tiers down to the Warrens.

Spanning across the entire seven-and-a-half million square miles that splashed outward from the shining utopias built along the Tiers, the G-Tubes project was meant to be a far less expensive, far more reliable method of public transportation for people to travel. It combined a mag-propelled rail system, nanoferric tubing, and a specialized Heaven made to create pockets of vacuum. The project was supposed to join previous partitioned Sovereignties and districts back together.

And for a while, it did just that.

In those twenty years of relative peace, a growing spirit of prosperity had blossomed in New Vultun. Even quiet wars were choked to a halt by attritional stalemates and growing economic interdependence between the Great Guilds. The additional influx of the first Voidborn immigrants offering skilled labor and massive leaps in thaumaturgy brought explosive development. Each Ark stood the epicenter of industrial expansion, meant to serve as the central pillar of guidance and command to bring the Warrens into the Tiers and bring stability to the battle-scarred wastelands of the city.

Then, like all the false starts that came before, the Guilds found a large enough piece of a god or a Heaven, and suddenly the expenses of a new war were justified by the allure of domination.

Just what the Low Masters had been biding their time for.

In the G-Station nested within Conflux’s megablock, Avo stared down along the walls toward the ground. Between carvings of heat-borne glass that once bubbled through the melting plastics within the station, the shadows of long-slain ghouls and FATELESS shaped were imprinted on the walls in vague contours, bleached eternally by the brush of fusion burners as an unintentional mural.

He wondered if he was personally to blame for this damage, or if his brothers had been the ones to deliver a mem-bomb to this station. The ghouls hit all the stations at once when they surged out of the deep darkness below during the Uprising. They had taken the tubes first and foremost, cutting off transportation and opening new vectors of attack.

The G-Stations turned from public transit to slaughterhouses.

Avo wondered how many lives he bore a debt of blood for. Thousands? Millions?

A flash of an abandoned storefront was there and not. In the flicker, Avo caught sight of the yet-flickering hologram of a once-popular children’s mascot. Back when natural-born children were still a thing. Charlie the Chimera. Even now, it continued to dance, playing a jiggle with its duck-like face, goat-like legs, and its ape-like paws.

The toll inflicted on the city’s youngest, perhaps, was one of the greatest blemishes of being a ghoul. The Low Masters had taken deliberate action to attack the youngest, imprinting ghouls with the desire to hunt supple meat.

“Severing the future,”Avo’s former masters had called it.

Here now, in the northwest section of the hundredth floor was the G-Station. Once vibrant. Now abandoned. A porcelain-smooth gravity capsule hovered down the steps, its frame shaped like a reverse raindrop. Avo had taken the elevator along with the techs and Chambers, stumbling and staggering in his armor, learning to walk again.

Having a working capsule was another sign of Conflux’s dissonance. To possess something as expensive as a capsule–and for it to still be in such pristine condition spoke of either immense material resources or masterful maintenance. With Mirrorhead, the former was far more likely due to the obvious lack of the latter.

“Chambers,” Avo asked. “How long?”

“How long what?” Chambers said, grinning. “Gotta use more of your words there, Moonblood. How long is my d–”

“Capsule. The station. How long have they been active?”

Chambers snorted. “Fuckin’, long as Mirrorhead’s been the head of this outfit.” He gestured at the room. “Boss is the only guy around that’s got a Soul, ya know? Kinda hard to keep this running without the thaums.”

Behind them, fused plascrete blockades left narrow openings behind shattered doors of glass. Ahead, past the dormant ticketing barriers stood the capsule hovering on plates of flowing ferromagnetic liquids, rising around the capulse to wreathe it in a weave of concentric tubing. Avo saw a dim flicker of divine fire in the rings. There was a Heaven here. A faint one. Close to drying out already.

It seemed that Mirrorhead’s determination to ensure himself as the sole fulcrum of power within this organization went even further than Avo expected. Looking at the rings around the capulse, something inside Avo hungered. His Sangeist spurred, briefly spinning up his Soul before it recoiled and sputtered against an impenetrable gate. The Rend was still caging his power, holding his Heaven in a death-grip.

Avo growled silently. The beast urged him to kill Chambers. Or at least one of the techs. Wake his Hell. Crown himself with the full mantle of his power. It took more will than Avo liked to resist. It would be folly to commit anything that could out his full capabilities to Mirrorhead right now. Not when the cortex bomb was still inside him. Not when Essus was still unused. Not when he didn’t know more about his enemy.

Still, his Soul burned for a taste–a drip of what stood before him. His Liminal Frame wanted to grow.

Wordlessly, the side of the capsule split open, revealing a far more rugged interior. Plush carpets were stained and torn by all the heavy machinery dragged aboard. A rig station awaited Avo along with a dozen more microdrones. The techs had more modifications they wanted to make during transit.

Quietly, Avo deposited himself upon the clamps of the station. All the while, he watched the mirrors, the reflections. Mirrorhead was still absent in flesh, but was he absent in attention? And how far did his power reach? A burning suspicion rose within Avo. Perhaps his esteemed owner wasn’t there today at all. Perhaps he was hiding again.

The doors to the capsule shut. A map flashed into being, showing three segments of their journey. Three segments amidst a massive sprawl. It was like they were traveling down the spines of a hydra.

“Plotting route to Burner’s Way,” an automated voice toned. "Time to arrival. Five minutes. Please stay within your gimbals. Thank you."

Avo looked around. The only evidence there were ever any passenger gimbals were the bolts still left stuck along the walls. Fifty feet wide, this thing could've fit more than a few people per slingshot. Strange that they were only carrying four and a dozen drones. Come to think of it, where were the other enforcers? Other techs? Someone to communicate with if things went wrong?

What was procedure? The way Conflux functioned was beyond nonsensical.

“Chambers?” Avo asked, a growing doubt manifesting inside him. “Mirrorhead. He approved this?”

Chambers shrugged. “Yeah, you know. More or less.”

Avo stared. “More. Or less.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Chambers said. “As I said: I know how the boss works. We ain’t disobeying shit, so you can just numb on the worryin’. He isn’t going to pop up and yell at us. I'm getting you to do the tests that he wants. We're just… going a bit above and beyond, is all.”

With a thought, Chambers manifested the model of a sloped megablock and pulled it up for Avo to see. “Tell me, ghoulie? What do you know of beta-grade biomods?”

“Sells good,” Avo said, suspicions growing even greater.

“Exactly,” Chambers said leaning in, his chrome-sheened teeth gleaming in a broad smile. “Sells really, really good. You--uh--see where I'm going with this?"

A sigh worked itself loose from Avo's chest. This wasn’t going to be a milk run. Not at all.