“(Concentrate. Visualize your body and systems. Connect yourself to them. Feel them, how they work. Then modify. Change the flow of your circuit. Alter the structures. Change the function.)”
“(I am telling you. It does not work.)”
“(Try again. Try with more intent.)”
My cheek twitched, but I don’t think it would have mattered if it did or didn’t. Lael was frighteningly perceptive, since she would have picked up on it either way. I took a breath, then let it out slowly.
My fluency was getting better. Practicing daily, all day, every day helped enormously. I had to get creative with word choice sometimes, and Lael was constantly correcting my phrasing and pronunciation. I’d had only a few opportunities to use it outside the manor, and when I had, it had gotten snickers and side-eye from other Sul’vari. They told me that I had a peculiar accent, and that it was very funny hearing it come from my mouth. They weren’t laughing at me. Or so they claimed. I wasn’t entirely sure that they were being entirely honest with me.
“You know I value you as a teacher, Lael. I really do. But either there’s something wrong with me, or I need a human instructor, or something, because it simply isn’t working.”
Lael glanced over at me, then clicked her tongue and did her head-rock thing. “Maybe. Could be because of your unique awakening. This has been known among other species. Continue to try. Every User is slightly different. You might only need to alter things slightly before you break through. You are dense enough now, you must increase your understanding and technique.”
I folded my arms under my chest and huffed. I knew she was talking about my development as a User, but being called sufficiently dense was still bothersome.
“You still haven’t told me what the goal here is today,” I told her, changing the subject to our flight into the depths of the city.
Lael’s AV wasn’t quite as luxurious as the Veris air-limo I’d been in, but it was extremely well equipped and by no means a cheap ride. It was a vectored thrust model and ran on some kind of hybrid electric and combustion engine that was remarkably quiet for the amount of power it must have needed to produce to keep us flying. It was an extremely dark blue, nearly black, and the color was only really visible under direct sunlight, where the flecks of blue sparkle stood out in the light. Under the full-spectrum lighting of the lower levels, it was a sleek black thing that screamed organized crime or other suitably dangerous individuals.
The autopilot was navigating us through the layers of the city as we passed through both level and stratum. The endlessly vast, big, blue sky had narrowed down to a point, then disappeared as we flew through the open airspace down into X-2, and as we went deeper into the layer, the space grew increasingly crowded and dense.
You could feel the walls and sky close in around you the deeper you went, and the deeper you went, the more confronted you became with the inescapable reality of crushing, generational poverty. From open skies, real weather, and corporate arcologies into the middle-class standards of packed but not literally living on top of one another. Then again, it changed when we crossed the level plate into X-3 proper. It looked and felt like you could stick your arm out the window of the AV and run your hands through someone’s laundry line or swipe someone’s algae beer off their luxury cube balcony.
I was grateful for the VI flying. I don’t know if I could keep my shit together if it were a human pilot flying.
Maybe if they were augged the fuck out and the aircraft was more their body than the meat shell was.
Lael didn’t answer me. She was being even more evasive than usual today. Instead, she made her own observation.
“(You seem tense. Are you not happy to be back in your home layer?)”
I gave her a look out of the corner of my eye. She was teasing me, if the smirk was anything to go by.
“(This is not my home. My home was 6-3.)”
She nodded slowly. “(Trade sector, yes?)”
I sighed. I wasn’t sure if she was making conversation, or if she really didn’t know with certainty. It was hard to tell with her, and my own growing literacy in reading her aura wasn’t helpful because she was deliberately suppressing and masking it to an extreme extent.
“(Yes. Trade and merchant’s sector, and home of the grand bazaar.)”
Her smile grew fractionally wider. “(This is good. Trade is good. Best when both parties benefit. You grew in a place to absorb wisdom.)”
I haven’t the faintest idea what the fuck she’s talking about right now.
Another glance over at her showed me what I already suspected. She knew, and thought it was amusing.
“(We come to learn, and to do trade with the outside Humans. You are here to watch, and to learn. I will ask you what you observe when we return. Pay attention closely.)”
Finally, a straight answer, if still vague.
The VI made a helpful chirp and displayed a holographic representation of the AV entering a landing pattern and a wireframe 3-D scan of our destination. A broad and robust building’s rooftop, with many other aircraft of varying designs. The building looked vaguely familiar, but I wasn’t able to place it, not exactly.
When we landed, Lael slid a large, silvery metal briefcase out of the storage compartment of the AV, and motioned for me to follow along behind her. We took a lift down off the rooftop, and it clicked why the building seemed familiar. It was a somewhat generic and mass-produced shipping center, the type which were located near all of the maglev lines throughout X-3. When we made it down to street level–true street level, the bottom stratum of 1-3–the crowds were thick and milling about.
The locals took one look at Lael, in her strips of cloth, golden jewelry, and radiant teal eyes, and they parted like artificial rainwater around a gutter corpse.
I might have been little more than her human-shaped shadow in that moment, but I had a strange thrill seeing people react to her, and knowing that I’d done things with Lael.
No time for hubris. She said there would be a quiz later.
I kept my eyes open as we walked two blocks and seemed to cross an invisible threshold. At some point, we’d entered the temporary turf of the Wildlanders. You could see it as much as feel it, if you had User senses.
An unusually large percentage of their population was Users. Mostly low-tier, like myself, but even dimly glowing eyes were a step above the non-glowing kind. Not my own prejudice speaking, but the common wisdom of the city itself. That would have been notable on its own, if reliant on paying attention to one's surroundings–an essential life skill for any X-3 resident who makes it to adulthood–but what made it clear these were Wildlanders and not just some other street organization, was the mutations.
Strange pigmentations. Unusual hair colors and textures. Features that were clearly inhuman, but blended into a human body. Some were beautiful. Some seemed functional and useful. Others were grotesque, and seemingly malignant or burdensome.
A woman with the upper right half of her body twisted, swollen, and lumpy, with half a face that was swallowed by swollen and blistered flesh. A man who had teeth in empty eye sockets, but seemed to still be able to see, somehow. People with claws, tails, and an odd number of limbs and appendages. There was a man selling jewelry from a table booth set up on the street who had two sets of arms and hands, but only from the elbow down. A woman with tentacles for hair and gills in her cheeks who was constantly smoking from some vaporizer tube attached to a backpack she wore.
The people looked sick, twisted, and off to my eyes, but despite their appearances, they seemed every bit as Human as the rest of the city. Arguing over prices, haggling, debating the merits of living outside the walls.
A tiny voice in the back of my head wondered if those who I identified as my own now saw me the same way that I saw the Wildlanders. I wasn’t exactly just another baseliner, even if you managed to ignore the glow of my eyes.
While continuing to look around, I saw a not-insignificant number of the travellers offering sexual services, and equally as many people taking them up on those offers.
I suppose that it isn’t terribly different than some of the deliberate exoticism of 5-3. I don’t know if it is any better or worse to sleep with someone with an interchangeable face than it would be to sleep with someone who has needle teeth and no lips.
As we moved deeper, I saw that the actual convoy itself was stationed in the middle of the massive avenues leading up to the ramps going under the wall. The vehicles were as varied as the people. Things with wheels, things with tracks, or with both. Walking and crawling things of a distinctly Tokh-derived design were present as well. Almost all of it looked old, severely damaged and battered, and heavily tended to, with no small amount of creative liberties taken in the repair process. One part of the convoy stood out from the rest, and for good reason.
Mostly, it was the heavily armed heavies carrying big, scary-looking, and very modern-looking rattlers who were keeping people a respectful distance away from what looked like the latest additions to the convoy.
War Walkers. The real thing, not the shit you see on the vidreels and immsim games.
Krath Defense Industries logos were on each of them, ten in total that I could see. And not some paint layer, either, but built into the actual armor plating of the walkers. Lael noticed my interest and guided us closer so I could take a better look.
Under the relief of the KDI logo, there was a series of names.
Tirek For Sen Doss
Quek Dil Kres Doss
Aadaa Aan Skiss Szit
The letters were welded, pressed, or fused into the surface of the frame, and the camouflage patterning covered them, but they were still clearly visible up close.
I pointed at them and asked Lael what it meant.
“(Tokh master engineers. Who checked all work done on the machine and performed testing. Without three, it is incomplete. Each checks not only the work, but also the other two. Only when all three concur is it agreed that it is a worthy contribution to the company or house. Triple signature is a mark of quality; also, of expense. No split corners.)”
“(Cut corners, not split,)” I corrected her.
She repeated it in English, and I nodded. It had taken me some getting used to, but Sul’vari teacher/pupil relationships were expected to be two-way, even if it was in a small or token manner. I didn’t know much that she wasn’t already some level of master at, so English was my contribution more often than not.
I mulled over the implications. It was one thing to sign your name to a work order to fix someone’s cracked slate screen. I couldn’t imagine permanently affixing my name to something serious, much less a literal war machine.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
There were different designs, and I saw two of them represented in the convoy. Five units had six legs with six toes, and the other five units had eight legs with four toes. All were bulbous and insectile-looking, with rounded, ball-like joints, and organic-looking curves and shapes. There wasn’t a straight edge or right angle anywhere to be found on them. The eight-legged models were smaller than the six-legged models, but they were anything but small in overall size. The smaller ones were the size of two-story buildings and had a large, upright tail attached to the abdomen. The tail was where the obvious weapon pods and mounts were located, and each was practically bristling with various projectile and energy weapons. I knew that these were a generation or two behind the current models, but I couldn’t imagine the sheer level of destructive potential such a machine would have.
It wasn’t just firepower, either. The form followed function with what I knew of Tokh engineering, and the buglike appearance was the result of carefully managed and massaged protective qualities. Layers upon layers of defensive systems, from the design of the exoskeletal armor to the ways in which the modular internal systems were built.
One of the biggest strengths of KDI engineering–at least according to the ad copy I’d seen–was that nearly every system was modular, swappable, and customizable to the exact situation and mission. Tokh crew, human crew, mixed-species crew. Transport, logistics, offensive batteries, salvage operations, hell, even mining and resource gathering. From what I had read, these things were originally crewed by a team of three Tokh, suspended in special harnesses that allowed them to use their hands and feet simultaneously to control the machine and hardware. One of the innovations that human engineers had brought to KDI after the company had entered the Arc was the introduction of automation, VI, and cybernetic control systems, allowing the pilot crew to be reduced to one or two, and freeing up additional room for more hardware or troops.
Although the War Walkers were of an older generation, they seemed to be in nearly like-new condition, either lovingly cared for or fully refurbished and refitted for resale.
What wasn’t old were the aerial defense arrays mounted on the center backs of each walker. Real energy weapons of the spooky variety. No warning, no visible display, just a drone exploding or an aerial monster getting sliced into pieces midair. What looked like densely packed sensor arrays with numerous independent emitters capable of fending off a dozen or more threats at once from several kilometers away.
The smaller models seemed to be outfitted specifically to deal with hordes or large groups of hostile targets. They had numerous independent weapon mounts and a number of multi-barreled projectile weapons that appeared built for volume of fire. The larger walkers had big Ranier-style coilguns in spinal turret mounts.
Who am I kidding? They probably literally are Ranier guns. It doesn’t seem like any expense was spared in purchasing this hardware. They look like they’re ready to leave here and go start a small war out in the Wildlands somewhere. Which begs the question…
Just where the fuck are they getting the kind of credits to buy this kind of shit?
Lael grabbed my hand and all but tugged me out of my gawking at gigantic death robo-bugs. We made our way over to one side, where security was somehow even tighter, but this time, rather than people carrying automatics, it was Users glaring at pedestrians who wandered too close. There was a line, and I was surprised that Lael didn’t simply cut it or walk straight to the front. From the little I’d seen in our outside interactions, it was pretty rare that people didn’t bend over backwards to try and garner her attention and favor.
Knowing what I knew, it was probably a small thrill for her to wait in line like the rest of the citizenry. The line moved, but very, very slowly. One person at a time; sometimes it felt like five or ten minutes between advancing. As we were nearing the front, I had to stop and do a double-take because I thought I saw someone I recognized.
Broader than an electric rickshaw, dark olive green, wearing heavily used half-plate armor held on by leather harnesses that looked like they could double as cargo webbing for a crane. Really, it was the violet eyes that stood out the most. If I wasn’t sure about it before, I was sure about it now as he came within arm’s reach.
“Tax?” I called out to him, still allowing some hedging to edge into my voice on the off chance I was being ignorant and had misidentified the individual.
He paused in his slow stride and considered me out of one eye. He looked like he had some kit packed on his harness and armor, along with his sword and a gun that was nearly as large as I was. Diving, maybe, but I didn’t know if he was coming or going. I didn’t see loot, but he could have just as easily sold it to the convoy.
“Voss,” he said, his translator not bothering to interpret. It was more silibant coming from him than I was used to hearing, but it wasn’t a bad sound to my ears. It clearly cut through the noise that enveloped us.
If there is one thing that I might grudgingly admit is nicer about X-1, it’s the fact that it’s not constantly at a near-deafening level of racket the way the streets of X-3 are.
I glanced at the ornate tent that the line was leading to, and where he’d just come from, then back up at him.
“Are you uh… here doing–”
The synthesized voice of his translator spoke, and his eye roamed over me in a way that I might have taken as inappropriate in other circumstances.
“You have grown well. Many dives?”
I swallowed and scratched the back of my head with one hand. “Err, hah, no. A lot of training. And growing plants. You should see these tomatoes I’ve been working on…”
He tilted his head, and his eye slid off my rambling self to Lael. I joined his gaze. She was still holding my other hand and had a highly amused look on her face now. Tax brought his hands together and clicked his claws together. I wasn’t familiar with the gesture, but I took it as some kind of show of respect via contextual clues and the shift in Lael’s expression. Lael slid her hand out of mine and repeated the gesture back.
“I understand. You are fortunate. Train well, Voss.” Tax turned as if he was going to leave.
“Hey, uh, wait, can we talk?” I looked between Lael and Tax. Lael made a shooing motion with her hand, and Tax seemed to consider, then gestured to a secluded nook between a trio of tightly packed convoy vehicles. It was marginally less crowded, and the hulls of the big industrial-looking vehicles helped block out some of the ambient noise.
“What uh, so what brings you here? Have your fights been going well? Sorry, I sort of fell off the sector plate, but I got an offer to train I couldn’t really refuse to pass up.”
He held one huge hand up, palm out.
The translator spoke over the clicks, hisses, and pops of his native language. “I came to seek employment, and perhaps purpose. I have received only non-answers. I suspect they have no interest, maybe politics.”
I frowned. “Leaving the city? Isn’t that basically a death wish? To do what, merc shit?”
Tokh weren’t terribly expressive as a species. There was a whole thing with wiggling and waggling quills, but it was a body language one had to be somewhat well-versed in to begin to decode. To me, it might as well have been Japanese or Cantonese.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean any offense; it just, I don’t know, surely you have other, better options?”
“None was taken, but your curiosity is odd.”
I sucked a breath in between my teeth. “Well, it’s just, I am basically done with my training for now. I have my dive license exams, and then I’m going all in on Diving with Vael, the woman I was with, you know, before.”
“Yes. The daughter of your teacher. We have spoken since, in your absence.”
“Well?” I asked him, a little exasperated at the circuitous route this conversation was taking.
“Well?” His translator parroted back after a hiss and a series of sharp pops.
“We–it was really her idea. I don’t know why she said it was mine, but we wanted to form our own Dive team. Why don’t you join us? It’s got to be better than living in the back of some repurposed mining equipment and worrying about random convergent attacks, mana eruptions, and tornadoes!”
He made a sound that I’d describe as a hum, if I were feeling very generous.
“I turn your question back on you: What is it that brings you to this place, here and now?”
“Are we just going to ignore my questions and continue to change the topic, rather than actually discuss anything?” There was a heat bleeding into my voice, and I could feel a flush on my cheeks.
If only I didn’t give a shit.
“The exchange must be equitable, so far, you have nothing to offer in return, so I ask before offering an answer.”
Deep breaths, Kiera. Maybe this is a Tax thing, but let’s not be too ignorant in our haste.
“Truthfully? I don’t know why I’m here. Lael has some business or something she’s doing. She wants me to come along and maybe learn something. Maybe she’ll ask me for something about X-3 culture, or a human cultural reference, or maybe she’s just bored and thinks it’s fun to drag me around to her appointments.” I held my hands up and gave a loose shrug.
Tax seemed to consider my response for several long beats.
“What do you know about the Sul’Vethik clan?”
I offered a loose shrug. “Not that much, really. I’m getting training, and I have a debt arrangement with them.”
His eye slipped down to my gold bangle. “You wear their mark and know so little?”
I wanted to raise a complaint. Protest. But truthfully, he had me dead to rights here. I looked to the side, feeling suddenly very self-conscious.
“I’m a nobody, Tax. Just some street rat from 6-3 who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I don’t matter, I’m not worth anything, or own anything to leverage. I don’t come from a family or house, or anything else. It was a pretty simple choice between choosing to have zero support and choosing to have training that wouldn’t be me signing my life away to a corporation.”
Tax had gone still while I wallowed through my feelings on the matter. He made a series of clicks in his throat and rustled his eye-quills when I was done.
“There is wisdom in this. Standing alone is a curse.”
He squatted down so he was at eye-level with me, and I held his gaze.
“You speak their language. You know the meaning of Vethik’Sul?” He asked me.
It was an antiquated word, like old-world English. “It’s a title. It means ‘Tender of the Fire,’ or ‘Fire Keeper,’ I replied.”
“And what about Sul’Vethik?”
“Of the Old Flame,” I replied from rote memorization.
“Did you never question the…” the translator seemed to hiccup and work through the meaning of what Tax said before offering “...the proximity?”
“Of Vethik’Sul and Sul’Vethik? No, not really. It’s an alien language, English does the same things, with having a word or phrase inverted to mean different things.”
He made a tisk sound, and I didn’t need the translator to tell me that it was condescension.
“They are one and the same. One birthed the other. Ask your master about the history, and why their culture split. You serve a house of war. It is fair to assume that your business here today is of a similar nature.”
I was listening, but still a little hung up on what his deal was.
“What about my question? Why leave the city?”
He didn’t answer for what felt like a long time. Instead, a great big violent eye studied my face.
“You study Diving; you should know the answer to why I did not accept your offer.”
I did. I just hadn’t connected the data cable between the different nodes. I’d spent so long drilling the dive handbook into my cranium that I could visualize the text on the digital pages in my mind’s eye:
The two greatest threats to a Dive team are Portal World unpredictability and membrane instability. Membranes degrade as matter passes through, and the greater the level of complexity or mana density of the matter, the greater the impact. There is a notable inversion to this principle, and that is found in mechanical complexity. Although robotics are orders of magnitude less complex than the organic systems found in sapient life, they paradoxically have a much heavier impact on degrading portal stability. It is the current working hypothesis of the Civil Defense Authority, in conjunction with the University of Daretha, that portal membranes operate on a weighted scale system which intentionally penalizes the use of mechanized and automated forces.
“Unpredictability, right? ITEPS.”
The University of Daretha has identified a system which translates to “The Intelligent Tampering and Exploitation Prevention System,” further referred to as ITEPS in this handbook. Portal Worlds are not passive constructs, but an actively monitored and managed system designed to present a credible challenge to occupants. The system allows for passive observation and instruction by third parties who are outside the intended challenge level of a world, but will respond aggressively should third parties interfere in the progression of the Portal World experience. Responses can include a dramatic escalation in relative challenge level and, in more severe instances, can cause portal instability and premature rupture. It is believed that this instability is caused by stressing or exceeding a pre-allocated energy budget.
This is one of the foundational principles for the practice of tier bracketing. For additional reference, see Chapter 10: Failure Modes.
His muzzle bobbed in the air in front of me. “A gap of one is okay, but no more.”
I swallowed past the lump in my throat. Being rejected wasn’t personal; it was a matter of best practice. Trying to group across our skill and power gap meant lives could be lost, and not just ours, either. Breaking these rules was only allowed under CDA alert conditions.
“Lael says I am about to break through to tier two. What then?”
A transparent membrane slid over his eye from one side to the other, then retracted back. A slow blink if I ever saw one. “If I am still in the city and alive, we will discuss formal terms.”
Getting any kind of answer out of him is like trying to pull rebar out of polycrete with your fingernails. Small victories, I suppose.
I held my hand out. “I’ll hold you to that, you know.” I shook his index finger to seal the deal.
The bond on my arm itched, and the intricate scrollwork lit up with the light amber of my mana, just below the surface of my skin.
“I’m being summoned back; I guess her number got called finally,” I told Tax while rubbing my glowing arm.
“Beware the still grass,” his translator rasped out.
I went to ask him to explain whatever the fuck that was supposed to mean to me, but he was already moving, his long tail slipping out between the parked vehicles.
I’ve only recently even learned what non-virtual grass is; how am I supposed to know what the good kind and bad kinds are?