Server Extant

The Devil appeared to a man. ‘Sell me your soul,’ said the Devil, ‘and I’ll grant you wealth and success unimaginable.’

'Holy shit,’ said the man, astonished, ‘The Devil is real? Then Hell is real, Heaven is real, God is real! I gotta get to church!’ And he hurried off, to rededicate himself to virtue.

'For fuck sake’ said the Devil.

-Grandma Nettle’s Short and Pointless stories, Vol. 8

When the overseer wreck had hit, the troopers inside the warehouse tower had been blown back and half-covered in rubble. Now they were trapped in the building by a sea of flame. The squad comm came to life. ’All units in-building, attempt to take the upper floors and assault the high cap link on the roof. We need to get eyes on it. Something heavy just came though.’

‘What happened?’ asked the squad leader.

‘They got our overseer’ replied the comm, ‘We need to know what came though. Armored groups B and C are heading to reinforce you’

‘Fuck that,’ said the leader, ‘we’ll just bail out and use the ASTs to collapse the building.’

‘Your AST’s got tagged in the crash, there’s only one hardshell and a quad remaining’ replied the comm. ‘It’s an Aliens Two situation out there. It’s up to you, boys, so yomp up top and get us a speccie.’

‘Damnit’, said the leader, to his second. He didn’t much fancy fighting his way up the darkened structure, to face whatever it was on the roof that could one-hit an overseer. Still, if they could kill it, it’d be worth top prop. His greed warring with caution, he wondered if he could tactfully expend his squad as cannon fodder, long enough to get a kill. Probably not.

He thumbed the comm. ‘Roger that!’ he said.

* * *

‘Kind of suicide to send them up to that roof, isn’t it?’ Asked DeLuca, in the forward base.

‘No,’ replied Bowral, ’technically, it’s negligent homicide to send them. It’s suicide to actually do it.′

‘We need contact,’ said M0nsterbra1ins, ‘If there are kingpins, we need to know.’

‘Who the fuck risks a kingpin Id on a breaker raid?’ asked Permanence. ‘Let alone four?’

‘I’ll tell you who,’ replied DeLuca, ‘someone going after the junction. They could be going for the server.’

‘Bullshit’ said Bowral.

‘Fuck you, Bowral, you dumb hack!’ yelled DeLuca, ‘And you shut the fuck up too, Permanence! Listen chief,’ she continued, turning to M0nsterbra1ns, ‘if they are going after the JB, the last thing we should be doing is chasing them around the city, especially since the steeds are always going to be faster. We should be pulling back to the depot and waiting for the picket force to arrive.’

‘The depot is T-shielded,’ said M0nsterbra1ns, uneasily.

By this, he meant that the depot was entirely clad in teleporting surfaces, like the ones that allowed egress and entry to the city for the low-poly cims, but of far higher capacity. Teleporting surfaces were infinity thin, four-vertice polygonal squares or rectangles. They were distinct from links in that they were objects, not icons, and could not be shut down once activated. When a teleporting surface was created, its duplicate other was simultaneously assigned, mirrored in capacity. The duplicate surface could be placed at a range constrained by the carrying power of the original surface, modified as a function of distance. The algorithm that governed this relationship of range versus carrying power was set in the fundament of the Knet engine and could not be modded. When any object, of vertex count lower than the surface’s carrying power as a function of range, touched the teleporting surface, it was transferred instantly, conserving all momentum, to its twin. The link was always two-way, which made T-Surfaces both useful and dangerous. As a device for tactical maneuver they were always a double-edged sword. T-surfaces used to transport fighters and materials around a battle space could just as easily be used by an enemy since, unlike links, they could not be turned off.

Since there was no form of ingenuity on Knet more enterprising and intelligent than that which gamers applied to killing each other, the teleporting surface had been quickly adopted into the eternal war of all-against-all. T-surfaces became traps, dodges, windows through which to spy and project firepower upon remote locations and unsuspecting intruders. Soon, it was discovered that they could also be used as a powerful form defense. Teleporting surfaces were not themselves particularity tough, but the deathmatchers had noticed that they were very difficult to destroy in practice. That was because they tended to teleport projectiles and energy through them, to their counter-plane, rather than absorbing it themselves. Soon the warmongers were placing high capacity T-surfaces on fixed structures, like stronghouses or walls. By completely armoring something in T-surfaces, one could render it almost indestructible, as firepower, striking the surface, was teleporting harmlessly through it, to a remote location. This was called T-shielding.

All Player Federation depots were T-shielded. The exit points were typically set to some killing zone. In the case of Epsilon server’s depot, the surfaces counterpointed to a large, spherical cavity, an underground amphitheater, sealed from the surface. The counterpoint surfaces were upside down, panelling the cavity’s roof. The side walls were studded with automatically tracking and firing guns, heavy kinetic emitters, heat energy and saw-beam projectors. Anyone foolish enough to touch the depot’s external T-armor would be teleported to the cavity, falling helplessly out of the ceiling into the open space, blasted, as they fell, by dozens of auto-tracking guns. The firepower of this parabolic, inward-facing gun range was rated higher than ten thousand points per second. Not even a kingpin could withstand it for long.

M0nsterbra1ns stared at the battle table. Armored in the T-cladding, the Depot, and the vault at its heart, seemed safe enough.

‘Falling back to the Dep is weak,’ said Permanence. ‘We’ll look like fags.’

‘Optic matter’ said Bowral, nodding thoughtfully, ‘don’t want to look like a fag. Man in your position.’

‘We can hunt them down in the city’ continued Permanence, ’and when the picket arrive we’ll have ‘em trapped on-surface. I’m not saying they have kingpins, like certain persons who are of the female persuasion and therefore susceptible to hysterical imaginations under stress-’

‘Fuck you, Permanence!’

’-but if they do have kingpins, even better. We’ll kill ‘em and tap some top leaderboard cred.’

’If they stick around to fight, which they won’t’ said Bowral, with the air of an old pro explaining tactics to a noobie. ‘Nobody’s gonna lose a kingpin on a breaker raid. And their rankers are watching the same countdown we are. They’ll bail before the picket force arrives. Guarantee it.’

M0nsterbra1ns looked around the board, to his other captains. DeLuca looked at the map, annoyed and hard-faced. Marquis shrugged. ‘It’ll be hard to pull our dogs off anyway’ he said. ‘Everyone’s keen to fight. They don’t want to sit around the Depot getting sniped. They want to get out there, mix it up. If you pull back, you’ll look indecisive. And it’ll piss off the troops.’

‘Where’s the comm to the Dep?’ asked M0nsterbra1ns. He scanned the rows of blinking icons on the map. Having the comm indicated to him, he hit it and his voice rang out in the cavernous space of the Depot. ‘Okay, listen up,’ it said, ’there is a possibility these guys are going for the junction box. It’s unlikely, but we need to be aware. Keep an eye on your external cams and tell forward immediately of you see any activity outside the depot.’

* * *

Inside the Vault, the six servitors that operated the junction box looked up from their work. There was no entry or exit through the vault’s super-dense walls, the Ids inside had been permanently entombed, their encrypted player controls only accessible to the most trusted of P-Fed’s minions. The junction box took the form of a monstrous cube of living, clicking, switches, of endlessly variegating shape and size. From here, most of the functions of the cim settlement, its roads, defenses, cameras, its myriad devices and machineries had been gradually built up, in tandem with the autonomous behavior of the cims themselves, who, being self replicating AIs, could not be directly controlled, but had to be shunted around like cattle, in order for their human overlords to have any means of helping or protecting them. The Junction box ran all switchable operations inside a P-Fed territory. In Knet, all motors and effectors could be assigned a switch, at creation. But like most things Knet, which ran on universal rules, these could not be keyed to be accessible only by an ‘authorized’ individual, they could be operated by any person which came in physical contact with them.

Everything in the Knet system fell in to one of four categories: Icons, Objects, Energy and Devices. Links and tokens, for example, were icons, part of the fabric of the universe. Some behaved, in limited ways, outside of Knet’s physics engine. Most physical things were objects, moddable and subject to physics.

All form of energy were consolidated into one category, Power. Power was created and expended, mostly when it was converted to kinetic force, acting on or generated by, an object or used to run a device. It could also be converted to a stable form, the power sink, an icon that everyone called the ‘Ammo box’ or ‘crate’.

Lights, motors and effectors were in the final category; Devices. They behaved like objects and were moddable in limited ways, but had their own rules. These were controlled by switches. Between the three switch types (flip, variable and multi), and the Lego-like tool kit of Devices the Knet offered, including the base power core, the advanced power core, the power sink (ammo box), five different motors and effectors, two cable types (kinetic and spring), one cam, one audio node, one all-size screen, three lights (beam, bar and dome), the variable-capacity teleporting surface, the sequence itemiser (that allowed the programming of simple AI-like behavior) and five moddable object categories, one of which was the Id, with its universal player control, it was astonishing the kind of inventive, Rube-Goldbergish machinery that ingenious Knetters could rig up.

But devices answered to whoever held the switch. Thus, it was common to concentrate all the switches that controlled the machine process of a fortress or cim settlement into central location, so they could be guarded from improper use. This was the junction box. Losing it generally meant losing control of the server because it meant losing control of the cim concentration, rendering it a mindless organism, its resources no longer available to its defenders, and open to attack from opportunists of every species and faction.

The servitors exchanged glances at the Controller’s announcement.

‘M0nsterbra1ns is losing it,’ said one of them. ‘A few roaches get through the wall and he’s talking Alamo.’

‘The pressures of leadership,’ laughed another.

* * *

Although it was later agreed that the day was a colossal fuckup and a huge black eye for P-Fed, considering how it turned out, the fighting leading up to the disaster was great. The situation on the ground, the scattered nature of the clashes and the furious concentration required in the skirmishes, soon had the P-Fed managers overwhelmed and gave the individual units the excuse they needed to start ignoring orders and engaging as they saw fit. Despite his increasingly frustrated demands, M0nsterbra1ns could not get control of the situation or pull his eager troops back from their enemies in the urban tangle between the inner and outer ring. The board was soon showing a swirl of warring red and green icons, splitting apart and duelling one another. New link columns were appearing, most of them probably decoys, set up by unseen teams of Kysairon infiltrators that the P-Fedders no longer had the air power to deal with.

The running fight was mostly between the defender’s more mobile units and the Kysairon steed-riders, who split into three harassment groups and ran the defense all over the city. This war of hit-and-run was made memorable, chiefly, by the sheer carnage it wreaked in the population of non-combatant cims. Running wild, like wolves though a field of sheep, the Kysairons riders mowed down screaming masses of digital citizens with machine gun fire, blew commuter trains off their rails, barged vehicles off their lanes into oncoming traffic, cut off heads and limbs, sweeping, like a scythe, through a field of human wheat. The P-Fed fighters, released from their normal strictures against ‘trashing the farm’, seized the excuse of tactical necessity to perpetrate some hilarious and satisfying massacres of their own. Annihilating hapless cims was great, harmless fun. After all, no matter how horrifying it looked to a child psychiatrist, no one was really dying. In a chain of running fights, up and down the inner ring, they blasted at their nimble opponents with little regard to who got in the way, ripping out the bottom floors of high rises and watching them topple into each other like ponderous dominoes, crashing through shopfronts and rolling over masses of trapped cim cars with the hardshells, compacting the digital drivers into their vehicles like bloody grapes.

Several of what gamers referred to as ’kickass sets’ would now take place. A ‘set’ or setpiece fight, needed a few things to make it memorable, get it stored and re-viewed and gloated over, months, or even years, after it went down. It had to have relatively interesting terrain, with a few levels. It generally had to feature a victory for your side, suitably overwhelming, or else suitably dramatic, like a brawl fought to the last man over some prize. If it featured a defeat, it had to be hilarious in some way. To make the grade, the set would have to include several LULzy, instances of pawnage or très kek. A severed body part, spinning out from some explosion and randomly killing a deaths-door antagonist a hundred meter sway, just as he was about to escape or secure some goal, would qualify as suitably amusing. Kicking a bomb though an enemy’s own link and blowing up his HQ, for example, was a classic. Simulated sex with an opponent’s corpse was always good for a cheap laugh. ‘Lightning-chan’, disastrous chain-reactions, explosions or collisions that triggered other catastrophes, even if it was on your own side, always made the grade.

The battle for BC was particularly fertile ground. In one, particularly watchable, playback, P-Fed soldiers on flat tops, yodelling and blasting away like heavily-armed yahoos on a pickup truck, pursued Kysairon steed-riders though an underground subway system, swerving from track to track to avoid the commuter trains that came howling at them from around bends and side-switches. Making a split-second misjudgement of distance, one of their quarry’s number cut too sharp on a junction and came off his steed, tumbling into the face of an onrushing commuter. The Kysairon ranker’s high-density body smashed through the forward compartment, sending cim bodies flying and, as the pursuing flattop jumped rail and swerved to miss the train, one of its gunmen snapped off a perfect shot, a one-in-a-hundred, blowing off the dazed Kysairon’s head as he got to his feet inside the wrecked compartment. The killshot was so sweet it made the week’s top ten on the P-Fed leader board, and was featured on Jerry and Jerry.

Similarly amusing was the pancaking of more than twenty roaches who were firing from a factory building under a highway overpass complex. Guaging the position of the overpass, the AST force-B commander ordered his vehicles to fire in unison, blowing out the support columns and dropping the entire causeway span to the street, squashing its infestation of enemy players between the floors like a layer cake. Agampreet, Pavitar and the other surviving members of the Steve Austin gate crew, still in a running gunfight of their own as they tried to link up with other P-Fed units, witnessed that one themselves.

The fight up the warehouse tower was one of the few sets where the invaders held a fixed location, presumably to protect the high-cap. Red-group’s squads fought room-to-stairwell, blasting holes though levels when the resistance got to strong at the landings and choke points. Matched against enemy rankers as well as roaches, the P-Fed soldiers had a rough parity in skill and firepower but the Kysairons had the advantage of reinforcement and retreat, due to the link on the roof, which connected them with their still-undiscovered landing ships. Early on, they began stacking the elevators with explosive crates, and sending them down to the floors below. After being savaged by a couple of these blasts, the P-Fedders began forcing elevator doors and firing up the shafts. Several times, elevators being loaded on the top floor by roaches, blew up and sent mangled Kysairon bodies and body parts raining into the street, to general hilarity. But when the attackers, bullet-raddled and ragged, finally fought their way onto the burning rooftop, the link was dark and all that greeted them were corpses.

* * *

‘How long?’ yelled Supa to Toad, meaning the picket force.

‘Twenty nine minutes!’ replied Toad. The K-Bee pilot and her wingman were flying high, to keep eyes on the city and stay out of the shit. The city below was full of flashes and the pop and crunch of gunfire. Multiple columns of smoke were going up, from two dozen locations. It was crazy.

‘Supa, how many links are you seeing now?’ asked her comm.

‘A dozen. All around the inner ring. They’re flashing, but I don’t know what’s coming through. They mostly look low-cap, although one or two are building up.’

There was a wump and a rolling ball of fire went up from some unseen source in the city canyons, casting a blue glare off the office building walls. ‘Jeez’ said Supa. A dozen or so city blocks beyond it, the beam of the high-capacity link, which had disgorged whatever mysterious force had downed the overseer, went dark. Supa hit her comm. ‘Hey control, the big high-cap on the tower went out.’

* * *

On the tower roof, Red-group’s assault force, battered and blackened by seven floors of furious room-to-room fighting, had emerged. There were only eleven of the original thirty two remaining. The building below them was gutted and belching fire from its flanks, its landings heaped with bodies, Kysairon and P-Fed alike. The survivors were nervy, twitch-alert, high-keyed and exultant, ready for anything. But the roof was deserted.

With a whine of engines, Supa and Toad swept down to hover level with the rooftop and call across to the assault leader.

‘What’s up!’

‘They bailed, link’s dead!’ he shouted back. Digital intestines hung in loops from a gash in his belly, his left arm was blasted off at a charcoaled stump, from which bone protruded and his body armor was punctured with numerous bullet holes, streaming blood. He bore these wounds with indifference. Knet, for all its sound and fury, was ultimately make-believe, the suffering pretended.

‘You’re lucky they didn’t send a bomb through before they deactivated,’ shouted Supa, and immediately thought ’why didn’t they?’ Links, unlike teleporting surfaces, could be turned on and off and coded to different exit points but this one was now useless to them. ‘Too bad they didn’t catch it live,’ Supa thought. It almost certainly led back to the enemy’s landing site. She waved to the assault crew, gunned her engines and rose into the sky.

* * *

In the forward base, M0nsterbrains stared at the battle map in frustration. ‘Why they hell are units breaking up?’ he demanded, ‘They’re supposed to keep them off the inner ring! It’s like a fucking sieve.’

‘All heavies, hold position on the ring highway’ said Bowral, to the board, ‘that’s our killing zone, don’t let them pull you into the side roads.’

‘I gotta pull back, I got no troop cover’ replied one of the little green squares. ‘Jesus Christ, it’s like being attacked by ants!’ said another. ’Noltz isn’t doing his job for shit.’ ‘Fuck you Tater!’ replied another square, presumably Noltz.

‘Hah listen to Noltz,’ said Parmanence, ‘he’s pissed.’

‘This is going good,’ said Bowral. ‘We’re getting tons of kills.’

‘But we don’t know where their kingpins are’ said Deluca.

‘There are no kingpins’ replied Permanence.

* * *

The roach stared at the tank. It sat on the intersection of an overpass and an up-ramp, directly blocking their advance towards the city’s inner ring. He was pretty sure it was a holo, but there was not enough in its appearance that was out of sync for him to know for sure.

Holos, were 3D objects with no mass, illusions. They could run a loopable animation, as long as it was done with a points cache (because they couldn’t be rigged, skinned or modded) and play a pre-recorded sound. They were useful for many things peaceable; advertising, commercial displays and so on, but they were useful in warfare too. They could cover a trap, block an enemy’s view, or present a decoy to lure an opponent. An experienced gamer could spot a holo by the idiosyncrasies in their lighting. Holos did not interact with the live-rendered environment. They cast no shadows, had baked textures that were self-illuminated and, thus, would often not sit properly within the color temperature and shading of of their surroundings. To a pro deathmatcher or breaker, an inaccurate angling of shadow, a misalignment in its ground plane, was all that it took to detect a holo.

The roach was becoming more sure the tank wasn’t real, but if it was, and they broke cover to run for the ramp, it would spit fire and they would be out of the fun. They were all determined not to die too early. This was an awesome raid and they were having allot of fun. He put his head to the ground, trying to see if the thing’s specular tracked a change in angle. It didn’t seem to, but the vehicle’s surface was pretty mat. Then he noticed the shadows. It had been hard to see from their position, creeping up over the culvert lip, but the tank had none.

‘Holo’ he hand-signed, and pointed to another roach. ‘Go check it.’

‘Fuck you!’ replied the middle finger of the loyal and well disciplined soldier of Kys.

‘Your turn!’ hissed someone else, verbally. The squad took dumb risks in rotation.

Cursing silently, the roach popped up over the railing and ran towards the ramp, his eyes on the motionless tank. He felt intensely aware of the quiet. The aural rattle of gunfire was dim and softened, but the slap of his feet on the concrete was sharp and present. The armored beast didn’t move, but that wasn’t proof. Sometimes experienced players, realizing their opponents had mistaken them for holos, would remain still and try to lure their enemies into a better killing range. The roach swerved from his path and went to the tank. He waved his arm through it. It was an illusion. He turned to signal ‘holo’ to his comrades, but they were already running to join him. Since the thing provided a natural piece of cover, they stood inside it to converse.

‘Where are the rankers?’ whispered the first.

‘They’re running decoy, we’re penetrating,’ said another. ‘We should split up.’

‘Fuck that.’

‘Then what?’ whispered a third.

‘We go up this ramp and get onto the ring road, Then we run a little way across it to the east and drop down onto one of the low rises. Then we’ll be past the ring and able to get to the objective. But we should split up.’

‘Fuck that,’ repeated the second, ‘we won’t be able to kill anything alone.’

‘We’re not supposed to be tagging shit! We’re penetrating, to get eyes on the-’

‘Let’s just get across the road!’ interrupted a forth. ‘And leave off the arguing, for five minutes. We can’t do anything on this side of the ring.’

That was agreed to. They moved swiftly up the ramp and emerged onto the wide, concrete upland of the empty ring highway, a dark ribbon, elevated about twenty meters above the city floor.

‘We’re-’ said the leader and the whole group vanished in a white flash.

* * *

‘Boom!’ laughed the tank gunner, as the six hunch-back figures in his turret sight were vaporised by the invisible heat-energy beam. The sound of the concussion rolled back to them from the city canyons. ‘Just nailed six at once with the plasma!’

‘Nice!’ replied the driver. ‘Should remember to drive over there and tag those tokens.’

At this range, the tokens of the dead raiders were just visible, glinting-golden, rotating slowly on their tails, represented the meager density that had been mined to create the Ids. There, they would remain, until an autonomous entity, either a human-controlled Id, or AI-controlled cim, encountered them and added their substance to its own.

‘They were only roaches.’

‘Every little counts.’

‘Not that little.’

The real AST lay in the shadows of a toll station, which the small Kysairon group had not even noticed, as they came up the culvert. AST 013 was piloted by a P-Fed player called Valued Acer Customer, VAC for short, a tanker pro. An AST had a two-man crew, a pilot and a turret-controlling gunner. VAC and his crewmate were lying in wait for any enemies who might try to cross the overpasses. Up until now, they’d been very bored.

‘Holy shit, look at the size of that sucker!’ said his gunner, suddenly, and, an instant later, the big, main gun boomed. Lopslide, emerging from a narrow alley, was knocked back a step, as a tank shell ricocheted off his skull. The round spun away with a vicious whine and exploded in a nearby building front, sending furniture and debris scattering into the street.

‘Ha ha’ laughed the gunner, ’I skipped one right off his head!

‘I’m gonna rape you full of babies!’ yelled the Kysairon boss, from down the causeway.

‘What’d he say?’ said VAC and, a second later, their tank was struck by the full force of Lopslide’s arm gun. The heavy vehicle rocked back on its shocks, as the Knet physics transferring the kinetic force of the shells even as it inflicted damage. It was almost hidden, momentarily, by dust and explosions of bright sparks, its coaxial machine gun torn off the upper turret and spinning away.

‘Shitshitfuck!’ yelled the driver, throwing the tank into hard reverse. They flew backwards, into the wall of a building and smashed through it, reversing through the dim lower floor of what looked like a parking garage, an avalanche of debris sliding off their hull. On the driver’s display, the ‘health’ bar was flashing yellow.

‘Christ!’ said VAC, ‘I just got halved out by that fucking monster. He barely touched us.’

‘It went straight though the shield’ said the gunner. ‘Back it up and hook right, we’ll try to get him with the plasma, as he crosses one of the side streets.’

‘Better call this in.’ VAC thumbed the comm. ‘Control, priority, control priority! AST013 reporting heavy contact!’

’What is it 013?’ replied the comm.

‘We just traded shots with a kingpin. Crossing the ring highway, heading inward.’

‘How many did you see?’

‘Just one, I think, but we only got a glimpse. We had to pull back.’

‘Are you sure it’s a kingpin?’

‘Dude, it nearly one-hit my AST. It’s a kingpin.’

There was a sound of multiple voices and swearing from the comm.

* * *

In the forward command, all eyes were now on VAC’s position, in the mid eastern quad of the ring highway. It was alarmingly close to the Depot, a fact not lost on any of the command center.

‘Kingpins!’ yelled DeLuca, ‘you stupid fuckwads, I told you!’

‘They’re going for the Depot,’ said Bowral, in sudden panic, ‘we gotta pull all units back to defend it!’

‘That’s what-’ said DeLuca but Marquis cut her off.

‘We can’t pull back’ he said, ‘We’ve got our guys all over the city, glued up with running fights. If they try to withdraw under fire they’ll get hammered, and they’ll never get there in time to intercept anyway.’

‘Get all the cams around the Depot up on the board, I want to see anything that moves,’ ordered M0nsterbra1ns, ‘and pull the ASTs back at least, they’re not under heavy fire-’

‘They’re not under heavy fire but they’re supporting the units that are’ said Marquis.

’Too bad. Pull them back and bunch them here and here. We got to mass ‘em up.’

M0nsterbra1ns looked at the board in frustration. The green icons representing his forces were scattered throughout the outer rings of the city, bogged down with red. They’d done exactly what he’d ordered them to do, but it now seemed obvious that, after initial penetration, the Kysairons had pulled outward, drawing his people away from the central fortress. He felt an unpleasant premonition of danger, a feeling that he’d been stupid after all, and considered his, suddenly limited, options. Breaking contact with an aggressive enemy meant a staged retreat. The lighter units couldn’t just turn their unprotected backs and run for the Depot, they’d be pursued and fired upon every step of the way. Right now, his fighters were supporting each other in good order, if a recall was issued it, would all go to shit. With the steed riders on their heels, the P-Fed vehicles would probably arrive at the Depot just in time to find themselves sandwiched between their pursuers and the kingpins. The formations would break up and it would be every man for himself.

He reviewed his unit list. With the Overseer down, the only hope was to bunch up the ASTs into an assault force, so that their combined fire-power and shields would be enough to drive the Kysairon heavies off, but the kingpins were already inside the ring, and who knew how long it would be before they made contact with the Depot. As for the Killer-Bs.. M0nsterbra1ns suddenly realized that there were still only four of the little green triangles loitering over the city map.

‘Wait a minute,’ he said, ‘where are the K-Bees? I ordered them back!’

‘I countered the order,’ said DeLuca.

‘What?’

‘She’s killed us all!’ yelled Bowral, in horror.

‘We need to find their landers’ said DeLuca, to M0nsterbra1ns. ‘You made the wrong call and I fixed it. No, you listen to me!’ she added, as the Controller opened his mouth, ’I told you this was bigger than a breaker raid, I told you they had kingpins, I told you to sit on the fucking Depot and not keep reacting to the enemy in the exact way they want us to-’

’That’s not my recollection,’ said Permanence.

‘Are you going to let her talk to you like that?’ whispered Bowral.

‘You fucked up and I fixed it,’ continued DeLuca, ignoring the others, ‘at least we have a chance of getting to their landers now, before they get our Depot.’

M0nsterbra1ns waved for silence, putting one hand to his temple as if feeling the onset of a migraine. ‘Alright, alright,’ he said, ‘then bring Supa and the others we still got on-station in to the Depot area and get eyes on it. We have to see what they’re up to.’

* * *

Supa and Toad pulled up from a run, soaring around and over the great curve of the ring highway. Supa was standing in her seat, craning back to see the effect of the hits. In the distance, checkpoint Steve Austin was wreathed in a great fog of dark smoke, but the action had shifted into the city. She could see columns of fire and debris shooting up between the buildings.

‘Look!’ said Toad. Supa could see the blocky shapes of the tanks, which had been squatting along the ring highway, reversing, turning and heading inward.

Her comm beeped into life. ’Air, this is DeLuca! Leave off watch and get back to base, fast! We have confirmation that Kysairon kingpins are on-server, they’re headed for the Depot. Spot them for the ASTs, top priority, don’t engage, don’t get tagged. All flying units. Go, go go!’

The comm went dark. ‘Uh-oh’ said Toad. ‘This isn’t going to look good on someone’s resume.’

‘We could go in high, but they’ll see us,’ said Supa. ‘If we stay at roof we might catch some shit.’

‘Fuck that, let’s just roll in through the waterworks,’ said Toad. ‘It’s wide open.’

Supa laughed. The idea of a white-knuckle ride through the wrecked pumping complex, blowing by whatever remnants of the invading force still infested it, appealed to her. ‘Let’s go,’ she said, turning and wheeling around a multi-story parking complex.

They saw the Kysairon rankers, seated on steeds, in the shadow of the street below, a split second too late. Toad was struck dead center by something that whined up through the air with the teething tone of a dentist’s drill and thrown off his machine, dead instantly. His K-Bee spun into the block buildings across the street and exploded. As Supa leaned into a desperate turn, trying to get the side of the building between her and the fire below, the concrete wall of the parking structure blew out, at the level of the fourth floor. A Kysairon steed flew out into the empty air. Even as it began its ruinous decent, its rider was leaping from the saddle. The vehicle assist, and her own closing speed, were enough for him to bridge the air gap. Supa only had time for one thought, holy shit, that’s badass, before the Kysairon ranker smashed into her K-Bee and nearly spun it completely around. He grabbed one of the bulbous engines and drove his hooked foot into the side of her fuselage to brace. Supa fought to get control, as her machine spun drunkenly on its unbalanced axis. She barely had a chance to register her attacker’s details before it was upon her. The ranker was insect-lean, a black-chitinous, techno-carapaced demon. Its face was a kabuki mask, ivory white, the eyes slits, with a long, red tongue protruding between sharpened teeth. From its groin, a fifth limb jutted obscenely, an articulated chainsaw. Without realizing it, Supa had grabbed her officer’s pistol. She fired cross-body with her spare hand, blasting the thing’s devil face, but the bullets sparked and whined away ineffectually. Its penile chainsaw tore into the sides of her cockpit and opened up her leg, paining the fuselage of the K-Bee with digital blood. Desperate to ward off the chain-bladed murder-cock, but unable to pull a heavier weapon, Supa had no choice but to use her machine. She pulled hard left and rolled, hoping to throw the freak off. She never even saw what she hit that sheared off her right engine. The world spun violently, there was a flash of light off water, then they plowed deep into a canal and struck bottom.

Supa kicked clear of her harness and looked up. The surface was shimmering, about fifteen meters above. But as she worked free, her field of vision lurched, as the Kysairon’s claw-fingered hand snapped around her ankle. She looked down to see the ranker, its body pinned under the K-Bee wreckage, broken, leaking florescent blood in a cloud, its unalterable mask-face seeming to reflect a message of gleeful malice, we go together. In a few seconds her Id would begin to drown. She kicked but it was futile, the ranker’s combat Id was far denser and more physically powerful than hers, she knew that. Desperately, she fumbled the long-barreled missile launcher from the fuselage webbing and jammed its head into the Kysairon’s grinning face. Fuck y- There was a white flash and everything went grey.

Two sentences glowed on the blank field of view, in little orange letters:

KILLED THE SEXECUTIONER

KILLED SELF

‘Fuck.’ said the physical person who had called herself ‘Supa’. She pulled of her gaming headset and blinked at the bright light spilling into the living room. Morning already? She stretched a kink out of her back, yawning, and pulled the feedback gloves off her hands. She tried to stand and felt her legs cramp. That was ridiculous. It was ridiculous when you got cramps from the simple act of standing up. She was getting so unfit. How long have I been playing? She sat back down and massaged her legs. Through an open door she could see the rumpled sheets of a bed, boyfriend not included, meaning he had probably gone to work.

’Sista Supa Soldier’ was dead. Poor Supa. The Id had run for five months and battled through many a desperate scrape. Built up some nice prop too. But she had gone out like a hero.

It was probably time to take a break from Knet anyway, she thought. You knew you were losing a handle on your addiction when you started missing whole days, when the digital time started to bleed, like watercolor, into a hybrid reality. The last time she’d had sex, she’d done it with full gaming rig on, helmet and all. She’d let Toad do her online body while her boyfriend took care of her flesh one, neither aware of the other. It had been hot but, she had to admit, weird.

She stood up. Breakfast. A shower. Clean the apartment. Get organized. That was it. Then maybe look at some courses for this semester. No more Knet for a while. Maybe start jogging again. She noticed her slab, resting on the arm of the couch. Its surface was blinking with Gable alerts and chat invites from the P-Fed boards. She walked resolutely away from it, stood in the kitchen for a few moments, then came back and picked it up.

It wouldn’t kill her to just quickly check the leaderboard, she thought.

* * *

’I’m officially upgrading our strategic situation, from ‘what the fuck’ to ′shitshow’, said Bowral. ‘If we lose a server, three weeks into the job, we are fucked.’

‘Who the fuck’s idea was it to draw units way from the depot?’ demanded Permanence, ‘that’s what I want to investigate. That’s what I think we should focus on now and get our story straight, because, when you think about it, most of those decisions were made by DeLuca.’

‘Fuck you, Permanence!’

‘That’s it, I’m going down there’ said M0nstabra1ns.

‘No!’ said Marquis and DeLuca together.

‘Wait for the picket force,’ said Marquis, ‘it’s only twenty minutes away.’

‘Twenty three,’ said Permanence, sounding nervy. ‘That’s enough time for them to get to the box and cut us out of server control. Maybe we should all go down there-’

‘Well you two idiots are going down there anyway!’ yelled M0nsterbra1ns, at Bowral and Permanence, ‘Get out there and help the fucking defense group, before I annihilate you both!’

The two captains scuttled out.

Somewhere along the board, another one of the battle managers spoke up. ‘Aw shit, here we go.’ He punched up one of the feed displays from the numerous cams that surrounded the Depot. In the little window, four figures could be seen emerging from the buildings and walking towards the mirrored surface of the Depot. They were taller than rankers and, even in the compressed feed, their body language was supremely arrogant.

‘Can you zoom?’ asked DeLuca

‘No, that’s it.’

They crowded in on the screen. The four figures walked to the mirrored walls of the depot. They lined up against it, then each turned to an alternate cardinal direction. They then stepped in to touch the T-Surface simultaneously, and vanished.

’They went through the T-shielding! Said Marquis, astonished. ‘We got them!’

* * *

Carnivous, Lopslide, Cubist and Hammerziet fell out of the killing-room’s ceiling, towards the floor, twenty meters below.

The cavity was nearly featureless, white-tiled as a vivisectionist’s surgery, blazed in bright in floodlights. The walls were studded, in a hexagonal grid, with the snouts of auto-tracking guns, which now opened up on the four falling figures, but not quite swiftly as the intruders themselves, who raked the walls with their own projectiles, blasting several of the weapons out of their housings before they could even speak. Then the converging fire power fell on the intruders. It was like being caught in a hail of murderous stones. The Kysairons were slapped and jerked about by the impacts. Not even a kingpin could absorb that damage and survive, long enough, to kill all the guns. But four might. As they landed, they returned fire with matching violence, destroying the wall mounts in a lethal race of attrition.

Cubist, in the deathmatcher trance of total concentration, his twitch-trained brain tracking and killing targets through a blaze of impacts and beam light, noticed, in his peripheral cam, something that he had increasingly found unsettling. They were all getting hammered, however, as he watched the kinetic projectiles and beams strike Carnivous, the mouth in the mask-like face grimaced and jerked, as if shocked by stabs of real pain. Cubist had noticed that Carnivous’ digital body frequently shied from injuries with an animal quality, beyond that of the expert gamer’s long-developed instinct for evasion. It made him seem chillingly biological, as if his organic nerves were somehow connected to his virtual self. This upset Cubist, because it meant there was a fairly good chance that Carnivous was going insane, that he’d so lost touch with reality, and so identified with his digital alter-ego that he was hallucinating physical sensations when it got injured. Genuine mental illness was socially embarrassing, and Cubist resented having to deal with it. He put his mind back on shooting wall mounts.

All the kingpins were now flashing terrifyingly on amber health. But the storm was quieting, as the wall guns lessened rapidly in number. The roar fell to a chatter and then silence as the last of them exploded in spinning shrapnel and clattering wreckage. The large cavity was now filled with a haze of smoke, the floor littered with debris, the walls torn up and ruined. Cubist checked his health bar. Flashing red. Actual red, as in danger-zone, as in you might actually die, might actually lose a goddamn kingpin Id that had taken seven years to build. Fucking Carnivous. He turned angrily to locate the Kysairon leader and was shocked to see him half-crouching, almost shaking. They weren’t quite low enough for injury stochasm, so that was mocap, feeding back from his gaming rig. Out there in the R1, Carnivous was trembling. Physically.

‘Carnivous!’ Cubist shouted and they turned to the hunchback shape. But as they did, he suddenly straitened, his mouth hard again.

‘Links,’ he said.

Hammerziet produced a single link segment and tossed it down. It flashed into a blue column. Roaches came through in a black flood, like ants spewing out of a burrow. They were holding more link segments and began immediately building the array to high-cap.

* * *

‘What’s happening, are they dead?’ M0nsterbra1ns was demanding of the board as it’s operators fumbled through drop downs of camera locations inside the city. ‘Get a cam up inside the killing floor!’

‘I can’t find it. Can you Vin?’

‘It’s be under depo-surveilance-cams, right?’ asked Vince.

‘Unless it’s not filed under the depot macro because it’s not physically near the depot, so it would might have been assigned to its sector, which is a dumb way of doing it but I dunno.’

‘Come on, we don’t have a camera inside the killing floor cavity?’ said M0nsterbra1ns, impatiently.

‘We do, we just don’t know where the control is.’

‘Fly a drone in,’ said Deluca.

‘Don’t have any.’

‘Killer B?’

‘Only one left over the city. Bolo.’

M0nsherbra1ns hit the comm. ‘Hey Bolo, we need you for a suicide mission.’

‘Aw maaaan’ said Bolo, last survivor of the gallant squadron that has sallied out under Supa’s banner not an hour earlier.

‘Gotta do it man. Fly into the depot’s T-shielding and get a record of what’s going on inside. ’

’If the guns killed them, the guns’ll kill me, if they killed the guns, they’ll kill me. Either way, I’ll die in five seconds’ whined Bolo.

’Five seconds is all we need. We can look at the feed from your nose cam and freeze on what’s inside.

’They’ve got to be dead, right?’ said Bolo.

‘We don’t know. There were four of them. We don’t know if the killing floor can handle four of them. They might have shot out all the auto-guns. It’s possible.’

‘Fucking great. I want triple comp on this.’

‘You got it’ said M0nsterbra1ns.

‘I meant quadruple.’

‘Just drive into the fucking T-shielding!’ yelled M0nsterbra1ns.

They watched Bolo’s perspective dive towards the city, to the gleam of reflected sun on the mirrored cube that sat in the center of the city’s concentric rings. There was no fire from the streets and rooftops. Indeed, as he descended into ‘the shit’, Bolo noticed a strange quiet. Smoke still rose from the city, but the popping and wail of weapons had fallen off. In the Forward, the P-Fed battle managers watched as the nose feed from the K-Bee swooped in over the cooling stacks and rooftops. He approached on a low parallel to the earth, skimming at a couple of meters. The depo walls flashed up and the vehicle struck and was teleported through. It appeared with the same motion and vector, but now skimming above the roof of the killing field. Below, they saw it was alive with Kysairon activity. Roaches were putting together something that looked like a tall, narrow ramp of black struts. It had reached, nearly, to the roof. The field of view flashed and went black.

‘RIP, Bolo,’ said Permanence, doing the sign of the cross on his chest and getting it wrong.

‘They’re building a ramp,’ said DeLuca, having retrieved the playback and paused it. ‘Back up to the roof. ’

’They’re trying to escape, said Bowral.

‘If they were trying to escape, why would they go in to start with?’ Demanded DeLuca. ‘What’s the point of going into the killing floor, neutralizing it, then setting up a link and building a bridge to get out, when they could have just gone through the link? They want to use the T-surfaces, for some reason.’

‘They’re going to stack,’ said M0nsterbra1ns feeling the sudden cold-clutch of prophecy. ‘They’re going to run crates out of the link from their landers, they are going to run them up the ramp and tele them back through the T-surfaces. Once they stack up on the outside of the Depo, they’ll trigger them and blast the wall in, T-shielded or not.’ Even as he said this, the first boxes were appearing and tumbling from the Depot’s walls. They began to rapidly stack, immunized from re-teleportation by the T-surface rule that exempted an object from the surface’s effect until it had broken contact and re-contacted. The stack grew, a tumbling pyramid of red cubes, creating itself out of the seemingly solid wall. It was already three meters high. They didn’t see the trigger, a grenade thrown through the tele-surface, maybe, or some shot from a designated trigger man hiding in the surrounding buildings. But the stack blew in a white flash.

Immunized by the teleport reset rule that held to the objects generating it, the force of the exploding crates could not be transported by the surfaces. An area about ten meters wide was blown in the Depot wall.

‘Now they can just stream crates through the links and stack it too’ said DeLuca. ‘Holy fuck.’

‘But the Vault is tougher than the Depot’ said M0nsterbra1ns. ‘We can get in there and trigger it before it’s big enough. Use their own explosives to kill them without destroying the Vault.’

‘That’s suicidey,’ said Marquis, glumly, ‘but it might be all we can do now. There’s no way the ASTs will get here in time and everyone else is all over the city.’

In the cam window, black figures now appeared from the walls of the depot and ran around to the smoking hole in its side. There was the flash of shooting from within, then the blue lines of link lights shot up from the Depot’s roof.

‘There they go’, said DeLuca. ‘They’ll start the stack again, this time on the Vault. Once it blows, we lose the junction.’

‘Okay,’ said M0nsterbra1ns, ‘that’s it, we gotta-’

But, at that moment, he was interrupted by a communication from the battle map, from one of the little green triangles meandering far out from the city’s perimeter, in the wastelands on the far side of the server.

‘Got them!’ came the exited voice, ‘links spotted, I got their landers!’

‘Fucking YES!’ yelled M0nsterbra1ns.