2196 Anno Arbitrium Repurposed

Leynna was prepared for an evening of sophisticated pleasure; dressed in silks and jewels, armed to the teeth, and already on her third vodka martini. Her Consolidated Industries Phaeton sliced through the crowds with a whisper of ethanol turbines, a powder-blue arrow angling toward the lights of the Jaegenn spire. Under its passenger dome, Baroness Mendelev-Singh sharpened the edges of her favorite pair of daggers, running one blade along a whetstone as the stereo hummed soothing muzak.

On either side of the sunken causeway fans of the Game were piled up in ranks, watching the bizarre procession which ferried the Kheptarchy to their revels.

Leynna's wasn't the only Phaeton (Consolidated had built thirteen of them, but only one in her favorite shade of blue), but some of the Lords and Ladies displayed their wealth and eccentricity by arriving in a whole museum-full of bizarre vehicles.

Duchess Sebren - the Synthesoy monopolist - clattered by in a gilded carriage borne on innumerable silver insect legs. Viscount Ermiliuo Xochard took delight in his air-polluting ground-crawler from the distant twentieth century - an immense and inefficient device called a 'Lincoln Town Car'. Most outre of all was Lady Ariadne Choseem's gyro-balanced monowheel, a ponderous device originally designed (although its intended use was long forgotten) for mining tunnels in asteroids.

The crowds loved it; it was an old-fashioned pageant - a reminder of the chasmic status gap between themselves and the Kheptarchy. Camera flashes burst in waves as the Phaeton edged closer to the riverhead of the red carpet, and to the immense rotary parking wheel which would accept the limousine. Leynna slipped her gold-inlaid daggers into a pair of white leather sheathes at her belt, then checked her makeup one last time for the threedeeo.

There were an awful lot of Blaire fans out there tonight, and they looked almost as feral as their hero himself. It wouldn’t do to look anything less than her best when she disappointed them all.

 

Ω

 

Saint Pete's again, and the concrete steamed in the light of overhead halogen arcs, dipping and bobbing on their guywires. Around the edges of Pope Joan's playground the night people were waking up – chemheads too far gone to pay their rent, discarded lobo'd slaves with cortex-jackwires trailing… wreckage.

A body sat swaddled in bandages and rags between their cardboard shanties, red eyes peering out at the world from behind a curtain of matted hair. On closer inspection, the thing appeared to be male, human, and freshly disinterred from a shallow grave.

He wasn't a beggar or a drunk like the Subcity dregs on either side of his patch - just shellshocked, and up to the eyeballs on synthemorph to soothe his shattered nerves.

Clonehunter Melchior had found himself unemployed, broke and broken after the debacle at Don Vincenzo's. And while there weren't many injuries that the Black Techs couldn't repair, but it was a matter of credit. Otherwise they were prone to just harvest a few of your choicest internal organs while they had you on the slab.

Melchior's credit had run to just enough coin to pop some morphine-analog out of a sidewalk vending machine, so he sat there huffing on the inhaler with two broken legs, pondering his next move through a haze of drug euphoria. He supposed he could hock his swords, but then he'd be without the tools of his only trade. If it wasn't clonehunting then it was running bounties for the cops, or signing up as a soldier with one of the Reclamationist militias. Melchior could dig the free blunts you scored from the Ashishim; it was just that they might be a bit sensitive about him attacking their Dervashimen back there.

The little clonehunter sighed.

You could never rely on professionalism, these days.

So he sat, and rode the buzz, and felt a little sorry for himself as the sun went down behind the jagged towers and chimneys of Elysium. With the crush and flow of foot traffic - not to mention the creeping buzz of the morph - Melchior didn't see the man in the ragged yellow oilskins until he was right on top of him. Under his floppy fisherman's hat the guy wore an old black ventilator mask which hissed and wheezed alarmingly, chuffing little bursts of condensed gas. The eyes which bugged out from behind its grimy plastic bubbles were bloodshot yellow.

Melchior briefly wondered if he was capable of fighting off this human wreck with two broken legs and head full of bad drugs. When the oilskin man's hand disappeared into his noisome coat he thought he’d have to try – but it came back out holding an antique mobile phone, a gray plastic brick with a stubby antenna screwed into the top.

There were no words, just the hiss and moan of that busted ventilator. But he held the phone out insistently in one bandaged hand, his eyes staring holes through Melchior's skull.

All of a sudden it started ringing.

The oilskin man shook it in Melchior's face, his eyes frantic behind their plastic bubbles.

As soon as Melchior snatched it out of the man's greasy fingers a voice crackled from its speaker; one that Melchior had heard before when he was skulking around Lancaster's offices. It wasn’t a welcome surprise.

Octavio, from Omnivasive.

When he looked up the man in the yellow oilskins was gone - only the smell of old, hot rubber marked his passing. He pressed the phone to his ear, scowling.

“Melchior, so pleased to talk to you! Listen… I’ve got some bad news about your old boss - you know how business is, right Mel? Mind if I call you Mel? Good. Great! Now, I'm a little rushed here, you know how big the Game is going to be tonight, and of course, we're getting exclusive… anyway, Old Man Lancaster is no more. Six feet deep, Mel, and feeding the worms. You heard it here first - and I have a deal for you.”

Melchior tried to rip the phone away from his ear. But the damned thing was impossible to move! The clonehunter applied all his sinewy strength to the little plastic brick, wrenching it down hard. The burst of agony which followed convinced him to stop trying.

“I take it from those little yelping noises that you've found out about the telephone?” Vanecke laughed as Melchior's nails scrabbled against hard plastic. “So, listen. The good part is ten thousand Slades, free medical for those pins, and payroll with Omnivasive. The bad part only happens if you say no.”

Melchior could see at least five static cameras from where he sat on the side of the street - there was no way he wanted to be a threedeeo-bite of gore on the late news. Who knew what kind of deadly device waited to pop out of that old-world, oversized mobile?

“The ambulance is on its way, Mel,” said the Direktor. “Chin up, and wait for my word.”

No doubt he was reading Melchior's expression from multiple angles, looking for a tight shot of his head exploding.

“O.K! Fine!” breathed the Clonehunter, his pulse pounding in his throat. “I'm your man. What…what should I do first?”

“Good. Good. I like that tone. Kind of kiss-ass meets fuckin’ terrified. And hey, Mel - The bomb's not in the phone, not anymore. By now it's already gone through your eardrum. 'Should be about three minutes until its right in the middle of your brain. Remember that if you have any second thoughts.”

There was a very final little click, and then silence.

As the line went dead the heavy antique mobile fell away from Melchior's ear, pulling in a sickening skein of hair-thin anchor wires. It cracked open on the pavement, revealing a hollow shell around a pressurized black canister – the weight was all fat slugs of junk metal. He swore he felt the burrowing, relentless medi-scarabs at work in his skull, even over the fuzz and spin of the artificial morphine.

But Direktor Vanecke kept his part of the deal.

The Meditek ambulance came for him, a stretcher on a pair of rickshaw wheels salvaged from ancient bicycles. They took him down to Saint Pete’s, into the plastic caverns of the Vatican Black Technologists.

The operation was just a brief flash of darkness, while drugs more expensive and powerful than vending-machine morph allowed the 'teks to core out his femurs and replace them with lightweight billet aluminum rods, inset with hydraulic pistons which would enable him to take three-storey falls on the run. The fat crimson arteries which lay up against them were sheathed in woven diamond tubes, and his skin patched over with shockproof mesh, all at a cost of only forty thousand Slades. There was a little discount for the precious bone-marrow the Mediteks took out of him, stashed in cryo-reliquaries for future customers.

It was only an hour later when Melchior zipped up for his first mission as an Omnivasive man, expensive chem-flush still singing in his veins.

Of the ten large that the Direktor wired to his bank account, the ex-clonehunter spent three on his new outfit - a digital camouflage skinsuit complete with a strap-over kevlar shell. When the suit's processors kicked in Melchior went chameleon, invisible unless he cast a shadow. His chunky new boots plugged into the suit, and were skinned up the same. They packed spring-loaded knives in their heels like a rooster's spurs, and little tazer prongs on each toecap.

Another two gs went on an optics rig; four big bubble lenses which wrapped around his head on thick rubber belts. Melchior carefully appliqued a thin skin of digital camo over the lenses, wiring them into the suit's processor. His expanded field of view showed him the full three-sixty, picture-in-picture crisp. Every spectrum was covered, and tiny earpieces cranked up his hearing until the click and slide of insect legs on glass was almost deafening.

Check – exclusion software, too.

One final chunk of currency went on the most advanced hand cannon he could afford (and lift), a Zweig and Barnes 12mm micro-missile launcher. A nasty sampler pack of little warheads slotted into its four chambers, promising every kind of death from the silent to the spectacularly messy.

Melchior felt like an ace assassin from some kind of action threedeeo as he set out through the dusk-lit city, an invisible wraith wrapped in deadly technology. The effect was only spoiled by the vast bubbles of cheap pink gum which appeared out of nowhere as he walked, inflating and popping at head-height as he pressed through the crowds.

His mission took him high up the dome cluster, to the gates of Mendelev-Singh Biomed.

The spire of Leynna's family estate sprung from a tight coil of prefab manufacturing blocks, steel tori originally designed to be assembled in space. Their pressurized interiors were perfect for the kind of work MSB specialized in - mediware, hospital machinery and drugs.

Lots of drugs.

Melchior could totally dig the residuals on this job.

The clonehunter slipped into the ‘factorium through one of its lower levels, a mekan maintenance shop where human beings seldom ventured. Tractomorphic lockpicks sprung from his fingers like claws.

Inside, neon tubes cast deep shadows from rusting piles of medical mekan waste - robosurgeons, autonomous wheelchairs and discarded cybernetic limbs stacked to the ceiling. Here and there tracked scavenger units rattled across the meshwork floor, their pinprick red sensors swiveling back and forth on multi-jointed necks. Arcs of blue and orange sparks spumed from a row of repair benches where mekan soldered and cut, patching together working machines from a mountain of scrap.

All the clangor and shifting light made Melchior's stealthy entrance easy. His suit was charged up, and its shifting pattern of riveted aluminum and iron rendered him all but invisible. In the shadow of a chemical tank he unfolded the little map he'd drawn himself, the brown recycled paper appearing out of thin air. This place was a maze, but he was on the right track.

The corporate bloc was right ahead, up a spiral staircase fashioned from reclaimed hospital gurneys. The camera above its corroded airlock door never registered the shadow which stole up to it, slim fingers flexing a tiny sliver of LCD matrix as they slipped it over the lens. The little patch of screen would show a long loop of the workshop and the doorway while Melchior was inside. Even his lockpick-work went completely unnoticed, and he slid crabwise along the white plastic wall of the corridor beyond, his suit now as smooth and milky as its sterile surface. Safe.

Or at least, so he thought for the first few seconds.

Mister Vanecke had warned him about the dogs.

What he hadn't disclosed was the fact that they could walk on the ceilings.

The sixth sense which Melchior had cultivated over years of hunting criminals, clones and rogue mekan made the hairs on the back of his neck stand to attention. It made his hand spring for his Zweig hand-cannon just as a huge raw-ochre shape dropped from above, all knuckle-dragging hooks and mismatched teeth trailing drool. There were no alarms, but the white light cut out with the shock of a bullet impact, flashing instantly to red.

Melchior saw his suit's pixels rush to catch up, crimson erupting across the milky white fabric like arterial spray. And then its weight hit him, a thing like a greasy sack of nails and slippery muscle, bearing him to the ground while his finger scrabbled for the trigger.

Melchior's first shot erupted from the Zweig with a chuff of compressed gas, powerful enough to lift the dog off his chest before its warhead detonated. It was a snarl round; about two hundred yards of diamond wire stuffed into a casing on top of a plastic-explosive core, and when it popped the dog was diced instantaneously. Mel felt his smart kevlar hardening to stop slivers of tooth and bone from tearing him up at the same time.

Adrenaline and echoes hammered through his skull as gore dripped from his face, sliding from his teflon-coated lenses.

He watched the dog's head roll to a stop down the corridor, its vicious upper and lower jaws lolling open, its six eyes burst like overripe fruit. It came to rest between a pair of forepaws armed with sickle-hooks of serrated keratin - another of the fearsome creatures was there, its nostrils flaring to the scent of fear and blood.

Melchior's fingers were slick with gore as he operated the wheel on the Zweig's grip, trying to select a less noisy and messy means of dispatch. But the dog moved fast, liquid, its six legs bunching and springing with ropes of extra, grafted muscle. Its upper and lower jaws hinged and snapped as it leaped at him, those velociraptor claws flying in eviscerating arcs…

Training and instinct took over.

Melchior's hand whipped the heavy gun down as he danced aside, shattering the dog's upper jaw. Then the flying chunk of metal came up, diagonal, splitting its lower jaw like a shell of porcelain. There was a noise behind him, the merest click of claws on plastic; and while the first dog was stunned Mel spun on his toes, emptying a clip of six flechette rounds into another beast behind him. Without turning back his other hand sliced low, a knife flashing as it transfixed the broken dog, still grinding its shattered jaws in agony.

Melchior pulled his knife free in the same movement, flicking it up into the ceiling. The impaled carcass of yet another dog fell to his left, its spine severed by the hissing microscopic chainsaw teeth which flowed around the edge of the blade. The Zweig's wheel spun again, selecting poison needle rounds tipped with artificial spider venom.

Gas chuffed out as it spat poisonous death, making sure the cloned monsters were finished.

Melchior's four blank lenses scanned the corridor in both directions, but nothing moved. It seemed that this hunting pack was only four strong, and all of them were dead. There would be more, now that the silent alarms were tripped. The red light didn't downshift to white as Melchior stooped to cut the head of one of the dogs open, marveling at the grotesque and precise engineering of its blunt, wide face, its six recessed eyes, those twin jaws packed with arrowhead teeth. Direktor Vanecke had found out how to get around Mendelev-Singh Biomed's little puppies, a nugget of information gleaned from the files of poor dead Lancaster.

His slippery fingers found it.

Melchior heard the sound of another dog approaching just as he tore the control unit free from inside the armored brain-pan of his victim. The smooth little slug of chrome felt hot and heavy in his gloved hand, a thing more vital and alive than the carcass he’d left his knife in. Mel popped it into his mouth, grimacing at the taste of bioengineered blood and brains, but feeling it vibrate and kick as his internal body heat switched it back on.

The dog approached him slowly, confused by the welter of scents in the close, dry air of the corridor. Its claws clattered against the plastic floor as it advanced, its ugly broad muzzle swinging from left to right like the auto-tracking barrel of a phalanx gun. Six unblinking eyes stared up at Melchior, while the dog's twin jaws ground slowly back and forth, thin runnels of drool coursing from between its lips to the bloody ground. There was no growl, no ears or tail by which to read the creature's mood.

Just a cold and level gaze from six flat black jewels, set in deep cups of bone.

Vanecke had told him that this would work, so long as he didn't break and run.

The dog's dark red nose sniffed at his hand for a second, for two, brushing up against his knuckles as they clenched around the Zweig's carbon grip.

Melchior stood rooted to the spot, muscles tight, sweat beading behind his optics mask. If Octavio was wrong, that hand would be the first to go, swallowed up gun and all… But the dog kept walking, picking its way over the mangled bodies of its fellows without so much as a sniff at so much free fresh meat. And Melchior started breathing again.

From the scene of the slaughter it wasn't far to his final target.

Melchior slipped unseen and undetected through the red-lit corridors, skulking past more of the biotek dogs as the harvested identifier bead pulsed in his stomach. In a few hours it would be coming right back out; not something that Mel looked forward to.

The coordinates that Direktor Vanecke had sent him led him to a cool white cell deep in the 'factorium bowels of MS Biomed. The ex-clonehunter's skin crawled with distaste as he looked around the little shrine that Leynna had erected to Simeon Blaire.

There were holographic images of the Kheptarch plastered from floor to ceiling, vials of his blood, parings of hair and skin preserved in slivers of lucite. And in the center of the cell, a pillar of glass which contained a humming purple globe, a sphere wrapped in tubes and wires. An exo-womb. His target.

Obsession was so freaky. Compared to this little tableau, Mel's fuzzy stunn habit seemed squeaky clean.

But Vanecke had been very specific about this little piece of technology. Within the fluid-filled globe of plastic waited the seed of a new life - a genetically modified being which Leynna had g-written personally. She had commissioned the fetus illegally, having it coded by the Liquid Tong from samples of her own flesh - and the small pieces of Simeon Blaire she'd scavenged from knives, throwing-daggers and darts.

Melchior's payload on this little mission was a needle filled with a neat retrovirus, a concoction whipped up by the subverted machinery of House Lancaster.

There'd be no need for Blaire’s DNA to unlock the womb. Not when the child's whole helix was changed from the inside out…

Melchior’s needle slipped through the taut skin of the sphere and into the gelid flesh of the embryo within. He pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket and tapped a code into the machine's keypad, a twenty-eight number cipher which he'd been given by the Direktor.

In a matter of hours a new member of the Kheptarchy would be born, forcegrown to maturity inside that pressure-cooker womb.

 

Ω

 

The last thing he remembered was his fall.

Down through endless smooth steel tunnels, through clouds of scalding radioactive steam which peeled the skin from his bones. Into light, and into new extremes of pain, into the crushing and grinding gears of a vast machine which milled souls from the grist of human bodies.

Zone Doubt heard the voice of his old friend, calling out to him through the Wetsystems. It cut through the forced amnesia which had chained him into the form of a defense drone, a thing called PDR909. It tore away the darkness, and gave him back control. That, and a form built for war.

Zone was back.

His body was unfamiliar, bulky and hard, a smooth carapace of steel with a circlet of camera eyes perched above a row of cannons. His hands had once slim-fingered and dexterous, able to cut tags smooth and fast with his little pocketknife. Now they were furled tentacles of shiny alloy, wrapped up between row upon row of heat-seeking missiles.

The means to control this strange new form were wired into his brain, innate as instinct. He was flying through the smoke of a burning city, through pillars of choking soot and chemical fumes, over and under collapsing pylons and pipes and ducts.

On his way toward where B-Zerk was calling for him.

The little guy was in danger, and Zone Doubt was going to help him out.

 

Ω

 

“There they are! Left flank! They’re massing again!”

Kaito spotted the first one as it came clicking across the tiles, out of the drifting smoke, its red laser rangefinders glittering like eyes. The Vilicus drone was slick with embalming fluid and gore; ragged strips of plastic trailed from its tentacles where it had torn itself from the back of a broken Cyben.

Kaito squeezed off a round from his revolver; the last. It hammered a crater into the ground near the scuttling silver drone, but the thing was too fast for him to follow. Those four long drill-tipped arms moved like liquid, and now the big Ashishim hand-cannon was dry. Kaito slipped the great hunk of metal under his belt and pulled out his trusty railpistols.

Now hordes of the machines were coming in, their drill-tips tapping out a ceaseless rhythm against the tiles, dragging bundles of smaller tentacles beneath them in a tangle of cutters and probes. As the smoke shifted Kaito could see more of them swarming across the ceiling, their drills biting into the cerametal with disturbing ease. It was all too easy to imagine them grinding through human flesh…

“Break right! Hit them with all you've got!”

To his left Abdulafia's gun roared, and one of the drones disintegrated in a shower of blue sparks. The splinters of it cut apart the drone behind, shrapnel hacking it off at the legs.

Haszan let off his last two bullets at the drones above, shattering one as it dropped, drills whining, almost right on top of him. His second shot ripped a tentacle from another of the crawling machines, making it hiss and thrash before it dragged itself forward again, inexorable.

Kaito crunched numbers while his pistols bucked and blazed - but it didn't look good. There were too many of the little bastards, and they were far too fast…

As Kaito popped a spent clip from his right-hand gun one of the drones curled itself up and struck. He tried to put a round through it as it arced through the smoke toward him, but he was far too slow. The railgun slug glanced off its metal shell, and then its drills were in his arm, ripping hungrily through his clothes and into flesh and bone. They bored into his bicep, injecting a cocktail of soporific drugs. Blood welled up around them, hot and bright.

Red, he noticed. Red, not blue. The scarabs in his blood had given out, fried by the drone's countermeasures.

Kaito gritted his teeth and put the flat muzzle of the railpistol up against the drone’s shiny carapace. Once, twice, the vast magnetic energies of the little gun slammed superheated steel through the mekan's skin, tearing its innards out in a blast of fluids and wires. The thing sagged, its laser eyes dimmed. And through the haze of chemicals and smoke a giant chrome hand came down on its broken shell, crushing it to ruin. The pain of those slick metal tentacles pulling loose almost made him pass out cold.

It was Jaq Haszan, and never in his life had Kaito been so happy to see his ugly, scarred-up face.

“Dead Cyben… huh! I liked them better when they were cops!” He spat out a mouthful of blood, grinning red in the firelight. “I think we've got them on the run, though. Between me and the Ashishim over there, you might even be able to take a break soon…”

Then Haszan's eyes went wide, and his smile disappeared. He looked down at his feet, and Kaito followed the direction of his stare. There was a hand clamped around the big biker's ankle, fingers like sections of blackened hosepipe slicked over with wipe-clean laminate.

“Kaito. Do you see that? Is that what I think it is?”

The Cyben's face was half gone - it must have caught a bullet from Ramon or one of the Celestial soldiers during the firefight, but its brain was just so much dead weight. The drone welded to its spine hadn't seen fit to disengage, and now the crippled thing dragged itself up between Haszan's legs, groaning like one of the damned.

Kaito gritted his teeth, leveling his railpistols at the abomination, and pulled both triggers.

Nothing. Not even a click. The clips were empty, the batteries drained.

“Fuckin' DO something, man!” whispered Haszan as the Cyben's neuro-bonded railgun slid out from the charred meat of its forearm. It was pointed right at his face.

Out in the vault of the mall the Vilicus drones were massing again, preparing for a second attack. He could hear their drills squealing as they scuttled across the ceiling.

So he did something. The weedy little hacker - the guy who'd rather face a horde of metavirals than swing a punch - stomped down on the Cyben's ravaged face with one boot, hysterical, slamming down again and again. It was like Orwell in reverse.

Jaq dived left as the railgun spat steel, tearing a smoldering circular hole in his coat.

But despite its terrible wounds the machine just wouldn't lie down and die. It dragged itself forward, rolling onto its belly, its ice-blue eyes flashing murder… and Kaito bit back on a scream.

Off in his peripheral vision he saw Jaq struggling to rip a length of rebar from the rubble, but in his own little world time had slowed to a crawl. The half-dead officer leered at him knowingly, lining up its railgun on his chest…

And then Abdulafia was there, descending out of the dark like a phantom, his holocloak reflecting the flames in curling waves. He landed right on top of the crawling Cyben with a giant panga knife clenched in each fist, his lips peeled back from his teeth in a snarl.

In that instant Kaito wasn't sure which was worse… the groaning corpse aiming a cannon at his vitals, or the inhuman face of the Ashishim warrior.

Then in ceased to matter.

'Afia's knives came together like scissor blades, taking off the Cyben's head with a sound like a bottle being uncorked. Blood flew wide in a crimson fan, spattering the Dervashi's face. And the Vilicus drone tore free from its flesh, propelled skyward on jets of compressed gas.

Haszan's rebar caught it on the downswing - the same haymaker shot he'd used on Simeon Blaire. This time his target wouldn't be getting up again. The tiny mekan blew apart like a glass ornament, crackling with electric fire.

“Um… thanks,” said Kaito, tucking his pistols into his belt. All he had left now was his chakutazer; not really his weapon of choice. “Now, do you think we can get out of here before they try it again?”

“I'd like to say so,” said Abdulafia, wiping the gore from his knives. “But listen. They're all around us. They were probably just waiting to see if our headless friend here was going to finish you off for them.”

No sooner had the words left his lips than they saw them… a swarm of drones coming in from all sides, their rangefinders quartering the gloom. Why these, thought the Kayzi. Why not warmekan, needle-flies… long range snipers? Because, said the part of his brain which stood outside the smell of burning meat and cordite, Kronos wants to slave somebody. The Guardian Engine must be fishing for Simeon Blaire…

“Time to get to work, then,” said Jaq, clenching up his metal fist.

“Let’s show them who we are, city boys! Ur’azdaal iktami! Blood of the Ashishim!”

But Kaito no longer cared who he was or where he'd come from. He'd even forgotten the coded blast which the Ashishim had stabbed through his brain when he was inside the node. He was no longer a hacker, a wannabe magus. He was no longer even a Kayzi, a biker, a human being. His chakutazer crackled into life as the mekan charged, and he became one with the moment.

Long gashes covered his arms; he could see blood flying through the slow-motion haze which had become his world. Loops of crimson gore splattered the drones as they came on in waves - his blood and the Ashishim's and Jaq's all together. Haszan's hand was a sledgehammer, 'Afia's knives a spinning storm of death. But all the rage in the world wouldn’t have been enough.

Now a few of the more curious mekan had spotted B-Zerk, their feeler tentacles twitching like insect antennae as he staggered from the ruined storefront. Kaito's mouth tried to move, his lungs tried to scream a warning to the little soot-smeared figure stumbling through the rubble. Instead he felt the tip of a Cyben drill plow into his shoulder – clean through, ripping out a core of minced flesh. It burst through his skin with a high-pitched whine, dragging the drone up and onto his chest. Slivers of bone grated together as Kaito fell to his knees, screaming.

He saw Abdulafia's face twitch, one of his panga knives flying end over end to slice the drone in half. Kaito watched the rippled steel bite into the mekan's shell, still locked hungrily to his shoulder. He felt his collarbone snap - heard the terrible, final sound of it over the crump of the explosion.

One steel tentacle stayed jammed through his chest as the detonation axehandled him to the floor, curled up around his agony. His breath bubbled with gore, shallow and fading. The last thing he saw was Abdulafia, the Dervashi on his knees, three whining drills erupting from his stomach.

One knife hadn't been enough; he'd killed himself to save Kaito.

A tangle of entrails gushed out between those writhing chromed tentacles, slapping wetly against the tiles.

Sensing that the tide had turned, three of the crawling mekan set upon Haszan. Tentacles wound around his arms and legs like vines choking a great rainforest tree. Kaito watched his immense frame straining against their grip, cords of muscle standing out from his neck like steel hawsers. But a final drone was up on his shoulders, and its spinning drills were unstoppable. They came down hard, and Haszan' face contorted with pain.

Abdulafia tried to reach him, tried to move, but the nerve-clamps and trauma systems stitched into his body had flooded him with pseudomorph. As the drug took hold of his brain he toppled sideways to the bloody tiles, his mouth open in a silent scream.

'Afia watched one of Haszan's tiny silver charms, torn from off that ludicrous long whipcord beard, falling end over end through the smoky air; a little iron cross which clattered to the floor right next to his open and paralyzed eyeball. Even the ability to blink was gone.

Off out of sight he could hear the sound of drill-tipped tentacles scuttling closer…