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Smoke curled upwards from the outpost, already dispersing from the cutting arctic wind that swept over the Central Ice Fields. Broken wrecks of MTs littered the landscape amongst rusting platforms of what had once been a small refuelling base for long-distance Coral haulers, their tanks mostly empty and dilapidated with age.
Rusty prowled amongst these wrecks and ruins in STEEL HAZE, content that any lingering Balam pilots were either dead, ejected or hunkering in place in their MTs. Unlike other members of the Vespers, Rusty was disinterested in rounding people up for re-education, so was content to leave any survivors to their own devices.
Besides, something more important demanded his attention.
“Hey, buddy,” he said, opening up private (and heavily encrypted) comms with his mission partner. “I’m finished up on my end. How about you?”
The answer came slowly and via text, as per usual: ‘Objectives have been achieved. All enemy MTs have been neutralised. But.’
Rusty raised an eyebrow when 621 stopped right there, already wheeling STEEL HAZE towards where its IFF system detected STALKER’s signal. He doubted it was anything dangerous or urgent, so he didn’t feel any true alarm, but he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t even a little concerned.
“Think you cut off, buddy. Last word I got was ‘but’.”
‘It’s better if you see for yourself. Rendezvous at my position.’
“Got it. On my way now.”
STEEL HAZE boosted over rusted metal beams and twisted machinery that towered even over his AC. The new vantage let him see 621’s side of the outpost, and from his eagle-eyed view, nothing seemed amiss. His HUD pinpointed 621 near the old oil tankers on the very edge of the outpost, nestled within a deep revetment and lined with tall, blast-proof walls. He gunned his thrusters and beelined for it.
STALKER, 621’s AC, stood out like a sore thumb amongst the white ice and gunmetal grey structures. The frame was a mix of pitch-black and crimson highlights, the glow of lights gleaming bright red. The AC’s head was angled towards him, giving the impression of a hawkish stare as STEEL HAZE gracefully landed beside him.
“What’s the problem?”
Wordlessly, STALKER gestured with his COQUILLET handgun at one of the nearest tankers. At a glance, it didn’t seem like anything special - though there were visible signs it had been used recently. The piping had been fixed up and properly attached, the ice had been scraped off, and slapped across the front were generic warning signs of flammable substances. Nothing about it stood out as anything special.
Then he got a ping: a data package from 621. Rusty accepted it, and blinked at the results found inside. If this was right, then this storage tank had-
‘Coral. I checked. It’s ‘fresh’. Not dregs. Recently harvested.’
The amount of willpower it took for Rusty not to swear was immense. He leaned back in his cockpit seat and closed his eyes briefly in tired exasperation, before shoving his unpleasant surprise aside. V.IV Rusty of the Vespers should be delighted that they scored some ‘free’ Coral from their competitors. Absolutely delighted. His buddy could be oblivious at times, but he wasn’t stupid. He’d realise something was off if Rusty responded negatively to this.
Right.
“...great find, buddy. Looks like you struck gold,” Rusty finally said, his mind already racing on how to handle this unexpected situation. Thank god he and 621 routinely used private communications on missions, it gave him some time to think of some way to ‘lose’ this tank before Arquebus found out. How quickly could Uncle move…?
‘I wonder where they extracted it from.’
A good question. Arquebus hadn’t found many surface veins of the Coral, not ones that could be harvested to this amount, but somehow Balam found a way. Rusty wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they’d decided to blast through the permafrost and bedrock out of sheer frustration and found a small pocket of the stuff.
“Me too. But…” Rusty frowned when he realised: “How did you know it was here? Coral in this small amount is difficult to detect without specialised scanners, not unless you were already standing practically on top of it.”
And he doubted Walter would’ve packed 621’s AC with very expensive and very delicate Coral scanners, if he even had them. Was it just a stroke of luck? Multiple strokes of luck, since one stray shot could’ve blown 621 skyhigh if he’d been standing too close to it…
‘Heard them.’
Rusty stared at those two words, understanding them but at the same time… not. Heard them. Heard them? Heard them?
“Sorry, buddy, I don’t get what you mean. You ‘heard’ it?”
There was a pause, where STALKER turned to face him more fully. The AC was slightly taller than STEEL HAZE, but Rusty didn’t have to crick his AC’s neck to look up at him. STALKER lowered itself into a resting state on its ‘haunches’, the reverse jointed legs functioning pretty well as an inbuilt seat. The position didn’t serve any benefit to the AC itself, but Rusty noticed that 621 preferred to adopt this position when he didn’t have to be actively moving.
‘Rusty. What generation are you?’
The non-sequitur took him entirely off guard, but not enough to make him stumble his answer: “Eighth.”
‘That explains it. You can’t hear the Coral’s voices.’
Rusty was used to 621 saying strange and concerning things, but as he read and reread that sentence, he could admit that a chill crept down his spine for reasons he couldn’t quite pin down. Fourth generation usually did have a few quirks - okay, plenty of quirks, but 621 had always seemed remarkably well-adjusted, considering his everything.
Still, 621 also had a bad habit of wording himself poorly at times. Rusty may be leaping to conclusions about what he meant by ‘voices’. It’s possible that he just meant-
“As in, a unique noise? A frequency that your augments can pick up?”
The early generations of augmented humans all used Coral. It was how augmentation even began as a concept: a miracle resource that you could stick into a neural implant to allow never before processing of digital data in volumes that would kill a normal human. It had launched AC piloting into a golden era, built on the bones of countless failed augmentation specimens - an era that had stagnated once all the Coral had dried up.
Humanity had tried to recapture what they had with the later generations, but there was a reason Gen 5 had such an abysmally low survival rate. Reinventing the wheel that Coral had made for them hadn’t been easy - or ethical - and plenty more had died on the operating table before the far more stable and safer Gen 7 came out.
They weren’t quite the same as the early generations, though. Sure, they were all mostly mentally stable, retaining their ‘humanity’ and not requiring dedicated care outside of their AC, but they’d never been able to reach the insane heights that the early generations could. Their synchronisation with their ACs were worse, and they couldn’t process as much raw digital data through their neural implants. But the non-Coral augments were all humanity had left with their ‘miracle substance’ firmly off the table, so they were touted as the superior generations, to protect the corporations’ share values more than anything.
But with the early generations, with 621… if he had Coral in his neural implants, if he had heightened synchronisation with his AC’s sensors, then it made sense that there’s be some kind of sympathetic resonance. Coral liked to gather, after all. It didn’t necessarily mean that 621 was succumbing to the dreaded mental degradation that most early generations inevitably fell to.
‘A frequency…? I suppose. It’s a noise unique to Coral. I can hear it when I’m very close to it.’
Rusty felt something in him relax.
“You know, buddy, going around saying you’re hearing a ‘voice’ kind of makes people think of something else…” Rusty sighed, and even shook STEEL HAZE’s head a little to properly express his exasperation. 621 read body language a lot better than tone, even if Rusty wasn’t quite used to demonstrating it through his AC. Still, he could adapt.
‘Like insanity?’
“Well, I wouldn’t say insanity, but…” Rusty waffled a little before shifting the topic slightly. “I didn’t know early generations could sense Coral. I guess it’s some kind of sympathetic response…?”
621 didn’t reply.
“...ah, don’t mind me. I’m just curious.” God, imagine if Arquebus ever found out early Gens could be used as, what, Coral sniffer dogs? Rusty pushed aside that unnerving thought. “Let’s think about the actual issue: what to do with this.”
Both of them shifted their focus onto the tank. It was slightly taller than their ACs, and three times as wide. A heavy-duty cargo helicopter would be needed to transport this, and it wasn’t something he and 621 could just carry between the both of them like they were taking a sofa up a set of stairs. Not to say how volatile Coral got when compressed into a confined space like this. One breach and both of them would be blown sky high.
‘...this mission is Arquebus’s, and they requested any salvage to be given to them. I assume this would fall under that.’
“Yeah, I guess so…” Rusty didn’t want that at all. If he didn’t get a chance to contact Uncle, then: “But I think finders keepers works fine here too. How about it, buddy? You sniffed it out, and the amount in here should be enough to pay off your remaining debt. I’m sure your Handler will be able to rustle up some transportation for it.”
Smuggling it off Rubicon was another matter entirely, but Walter was a resourceful man.
‘Pay off my debt… you know about that?’
“Ah.” Rusty hadn’t realised that wasn’t something 621 had wanted to keep on the downlow. “Sorry, buddy. It’s kind of an open secret that Walter’s Hounds are… well.”
There was a lengthy pause, one that Rusty found almost unbearably awkward.
‘I see. In which case, you’re correct. I could use this to pay off my debt… to reverse my augmentations and become human again. My handler says that’s what I want.’
Rusty frowned at the wording. “Why do you care what he thinks you want? Do you want to reverse augmentations?”
‘I don’t know. I want to pay off my debt, but after that…? I remember nothing of my life before I became Augmented Human C4-621. I have nothing in life except being an AC pilot. Handler Walter says there’s more to life than that, but it’s all I know, and I don’t hate it. It’s familiar, and that makes it comfortable.’
Rusty was quiet for a moment. People got augmentations for many different reasons, and most of them had to do with desperation. Buyer’s remorse was rampant and assumed, and most became mercenaries in an effort to save up enough COAM to reverse the procedure. How many succeeded in that was depressingly low, because not only was the reversal surgery expensive, it had an abysmal success rate too. But again, desperation…
It’d be safer for 621 to hedge his bets and keep his augments, find himself a cushy job elsewhere after finishing up on Rubicon - he certainly built up enough of a reputation to find several well-paying patrons within the military and various corporations more prestigious than Arquebus. But Rusty held his tongue on suggesting any of these. He didn’t want 621 to think that’s what he should want just because Rusty told him he should want it.
i really need to have a frank talk with walter one day, Rusty thought darkly.
“Well… if you want my opinion, buddy, it’s your life. Ultimately, it comes down to what you want after all this. You don’t have to know the answer now, but you should give it a good, long think. Make sure it’s not something you feel pressured into or feel regret over.”
‘What do you think I should do?’
“I don’t know. I’m not you, buddy.” Rusty laughed it off, even as he felt a pang at how he’d predicted that question a mile off. “You’ve gotta find that out yourself.”
‘How do I do that?’
“Well… you do some soul-searching, find something you feel strongly about like, an ideology, a cause, a group, even. Not Arquebus, though. They’re a pack of jackals that’ll eat you alive.”
‘I can say with absolute certainty I have no interest in joining the Vespers.’ Even through text that sentiment came across as firm. ‘The Redguns are more tolerable, but they’re too loud.’
“Haha, yeah. You won’t be able to get a word in edgewise with those lot.”
‘I could stay with Handler Walter, but I feel that this is the last job he’ll be interested in taking. Carla is nice, but her employees are insane. I don’t have the mental energy to endure that constantly.’
“What about the Liberation Front?” Rusty asked idly. “I hear you’ve taken several jobs from them. They’ll probably snap your hand right off if you offered to stay with them on a permanent basis. Unless you want to leave Rubicon behind entirely?”
‘Maybe. I’m not sure. I haven’t really thought ahead about what comes after finding the Coral.’
Rusty couldn’t help but laugh at that. “I don’t think anyone has here. We’re all just focused on getting to the Coral. What comes after…”
Will the RLF succeed in kicking the corporations and the PCA off Rubicon? Will the PCA succeed in closing off the planet for good? Will the corporations get what they want, clawing at each other over the Coral reserves growing within this planet, not giving a damn about the colonists or a potential catastrophe? Or will this all end up being a wild goose chase, and there weren't any major Coral reserves at all, just cinders from the fire?
Who knew. Who the hell knew.
“...well, that’s anyone’s guess. Still, no time like the present to think about it, especially if you’re an independent merc that just struck pay dirt.”
STEEL HAZE gestured a hand towards the Coral storage tank. “Take it. If Arquebus gets their way, they’ll be rolling in the stuff once they find the main vein. I’ll pretend I didn’t see a thing.”
‘Thank you, Ruenemy’
The garbled warning came just as STEEL HAZE’s ballistic sensors frantically beeped. As one, the pair of them quick boosted in opposite directions - just as a plasma bolt struck the Coral storage tank and-
‘BOOOOOOM!’
An explosion of blooming scarlets forced STEEL HAZE’s ocular feeds to black out to save his sight, the pressure wave of the explosion rattling through the lightweight frame of the AC. Rusty gritted his teeth, quickly orientating himself towards the direction of the bolt, his FCS trying to lock onto any hostiles within range.
He only got a fraction of a second to really take in the scene before he had to quickly evade several plasma mines aimed for STEEL HAZE’s head. The subsequent explosions sent steam and chunks of half-vaporised ice high into the air, and his HUD started methodically beeping out various warnings:
AP AT 84%. BEEPBEEP. INCOMING. AP AT 80%. BEEPBEEP. INCOMING. AP AT-
Rusty didn’t let the chaos of the ambush throw him off balance though. The attackers weren’t Balam, that was for sure, and he swiftly got into the rhythm of dodging and weaving around the attacks being thrown at him: cloaking and plasma- PCA? No, the mech designs were too different, they were-
‘atk b4.’ Came the text, flittering fast across Rusty’s feed. ‘g086b aws fac invisi.’
“Got it,” Rusty said. “PCA?”
‘n’
Lovely. Another faction with a skin in the game. Rusty was endlessly fascinated by how many groups could be fighting over the same damn thing.
“Right, I think I’ve got their measure. I’ll take the snipers in the back.”
‘mel=me.’
It showed just how often they had fought together that Rusty understood what that meant. He disengaged instantly from the two mechs trying to trap him in a pincer with their dangerous plasma mine launchers, assault boosting towards where the long-range plasma strikes were coming from seemingly thin air. The two melee-style mechs didn’t give chase - 621 had intercepted them while juggling his own two new friends.
The snipers, with the fiendish aim and powerful rifles, were disappointingly slow in responding to his charge. They didn’t change position between shots, despite their impressive cloaking, and they only stirred into mobile action when STEEL HAZE smashed a brutal dropkick into one mech, crumpling its Core between his AC’s feet and the ice wall it had been huddled in front of.
No ejection was logged as STEEL HAZE boosted away, and the mech exploded in an impressive burst of blue. Unmanned? Or committed to keeping their secrets?
He set aside the mystery for now. With the unceremonious destruction of its comrade, the other three snipers sprang away from their position, a flurry of chaff sparking into the air, sending STEEL HAZE’s FCS haywire for a brief moment.
“Sorry, but hide and seek was never my favourite game,” Rusty drawled, gunning for where a suspicious glint of blue had betrayed one sniper’s hasty retreat. “I’ve always preferred tag.”
The sniper’s cloaking peeled away when STEEL HAZE’s laser slice carved through the mech’s ‘neck’, sending its severed head flying off in one direction. Twin bolts of plasma forced Rusty to back off from the spasming AC he’d just decapitated, but it didn’t stop him from pressing his advantage. As he quick boosted backwards, he shot off a few plasma missiles - and was rewarded when the crippled mech erupted into an explosion of brilliant blue when those missiles connected, finishing the job his laser slicer hadn’t.
“Two left,” Rusty said. “Everything good on your end, buddy?”
‘y.’
As if it’d be any other way. Rusty smirked slightly, already eyeballing his next target. Again, the two snipers didn’t move after each shot even though they had cloaking technology Arquebus would literally kill for. Overconfidence? Poorly trained…?
Whatever the case, their mistake was his gain. STEEL HAZE rocketed towards one of the remaining snipers, weaving around the shots sent his way, his RANSETSU rifle barking out bursts. The first burst missed because of distance, but the second grazed and the third hit dead on, disengaging the sniper’s cloaking just in time for STEEL HAZE to kick that one into an early grave too.
Again, no ejection logged.
“Last one.” STEEL HAZE boosted backwards, moving into a lazy strafe as he circled towards the last sniper, easily evading the long-range plasma shots that came in… insultingly predictable intervals, like it was a machine just following a set list of actions.
A machine, hm…
A chirp over his communications feed, and 621 boosted past him, gunning for the last sniper with his pile bunker primed for a charged hit. Rusty let him have it, still mulling over the strangeness of that whole encounter.
“Not the first time I’ve been jumped by murderous strangers without a word,” he muttered as the last sniper exploded from a fatal case of pile bunker to the Core. “But that was weird, even by my standards.”
‘They use encrypted communications that we haven’t been able to crack.’ The text came just as STALKER worked its pile bunker out of the now smoking wreckage of the last sniper. ‘Their affiliation and purpose is unknown.’
Interesting. Everyone piggybacked off the legacy telecommunication infrastructure that existed on Rubicon prior to the Fires of Ibis when it came to long range comms, such as taking orders from a distant handler. So, that meant they were purely communicating with those in their immediate vicinity, or were using long range comms entirely separate from what everyone else used.
Hm.
“Hey, you said they attacked you before?” Rusty asked. “Just like this? No warning, no demands?”
‘Yes. At a BAWS facility and Grid 086. They didn’t speak to us before or during their attack.’
“Hm, maybe they’re unmanned ACs?” Rusty said. “Would explain why they weren’t very… effective. The technology was what gave them an edge.”
STALKER boosted over to him, and Rusty gave the AC a quick once over. No major damage - the right arm seemed a little janky, but otherwise STALKER was in fighting condition. His buddy was fine.
“Shame about the Coral, though.” Rusty swivelled STEEL HAZE’s upper body to look over at where the mangled remains of the Coral storage tank were still smoking, a blackened ring scorching the platform around it. “They just blew up your potential ticket off this rock.”
‘It was their main target. They had a chance to strike us when our backs were turned, but instead focused on exploding the Coral tank first. Their priority was to deny it, not reclaim it.’
Rusty didn’t like this at all. There were too many unknowns to this very strange situation: invisible mechs, no communication, no understanding of their goals or motivations… and, all seemingly appearing whenever 621 was out and about. Rusty certainly didn’t recall any mission reports about random ghost mechs ambushing corporate or Rubiconian forces, so what made 621 so special?
“I better report this to my superiors. If there’s another unknown faction running around, they’ll want to know.” Rusty didn’t really want to deal with telling Snail, though, so: “I’ll run this by O’Keeffe. He’s the Vespers’ intelligence officer. There’s very little he can’t sniff out.”
‘Understood. I’ll report this to Handler Walter, though he and Carla are already aware of these strange mechs.’
“Sounds good to me.” An idea came to him abruptly. “You know, to make it easier to talk about them, let’s call these unwanted strangers ‘Ghosts’ for now.”
‘Ghosts… understood. Designation applied.’
“And, buddy?” Rusty murmured, his tone serious. “Watch your back. From the sounds of it, these Ghosts have been showing up mostly around you, and not with friendly intentions. I’m not always going to be able to back you up if they strike again.”
‘I know. I’ll be careful.’
“Happy to hear it. Well…”
Rusty did a quick sweep of the area. The Ghost snipers had been situated just beyond the perimeter of the base, but his scanners didn’t pick anything in the immediate vicinity - not that they had before they crashed the party anyways. But if there were any more Ghosts, they were purely observing for now. He didn’t want to linger to see if that’d change.
“...since the Coral’s gone, let’s make tracks before those Ghosts show up again. I’ll talk to you later, buddy.”
‘Yes. Later, buddy.’
Rusty watched as 621 boosted away, likely calling his Handler for a rendezvous pick up away from a potential hot zone. He lingered though, actually trailing after 621 at a slower pace for several minutes before he was content that there weren't any unwanted and malicious tails. His buddy was safe for today.
Peeling away from 621’s trail, STEEL HAZE jetted in the opposite direction, Rusty already compiling an encrypted message to send to O’Keeffe once he arrived back at the Vespers’ base. Something like this… it was best to keep only a few people in the loop. There was a chance those Ghosts had a mole or two embedded in Arquebus, or maybe even the PCA itself. The less who knew about this, the better.
O’Keeffe was discreet, and out of all the Vespers, Rusty sort of trusted him, enough to put this at his feet and leave it to him to sort out, at least.
They’ll get to the bottom of this before it became a major problem, he was sure.