317 Far Future Ch. 27– Cancha Hear, Cancha Hear that Thunder? (1/2)

What were the odds a kill team was NOT following me and using me as bait to draw out whoever was doing this?

Pretty low, I guessed.

Well, that was fine. Given the nature of the opponent, I rather expected to take out the hounds before the rabbit, but that wasn't my job, anyways.

I was past my target's last contact point, so now I was officially Looking For Something. My course was plotted towards the path the Mekker squad had taken along his probable rout, and so I was skating slowly over the gratings and slopes of the access tunnels and stairs.

Lights here were few and far between, and the air wasn't too good, either. I think The Hole nearby was partly to blame for the stagnation, because it was killing off even the micromolds nearby. Not to worry, I could tolerate some absurdly low oxygen levels with a Vajra, recycling my own carbon dioxide if I had to.

Likewise, the lack of lighting meant nothing to someone with devilsight... not that relying on eyesight was smart in a place with so many nooks and crannies to hide behind. No, the most important thing here was my tremblesense, subsonics echoing out through every step and breath. My feet were the primary sensor for the solids, my hair was reading the air, bouncing off the materials around and painting everything for me in a double-overlay that extended nicely past the visible and into the mass and matter of everything around.

The weeks I had spent wandering the city up above had given me an absurdly detailed map of the area directly under Downspire where I had walked. Now I was also filling in a Lived-Line map in my Virtual File that would make these Undermobs green with envy. Parallel corridors, hidden access points, where conduits, pipes, and vents led to, what might be in them, and hidden machinery behind walls and platings that might be important and all.

Mmm. So much stuff to look at.

And yeah, there were the footsteps, distant, shuffling remarkably quiet, but definitely on my tail. If I really wanted to, I could probably turn around and pick out the drone tailing me and keeping me in sight. As a matter of fact, Grim spotted it flitting across the exit I just left, as I came to a stupidly unfenced walkway across a deep abyss, which was curiously silent and unmoving despite pressure differentials fairly begging for such things. OSHA was so gonna hear about this.

It was structurally perfectly fine. I skated across it on my lightfoot, tremblesense making sure nothing close was lying in ambush, and I proceeded towards the ladder I'd have to climb up to a connecting tunnel nearby. Nobody should have gone through here recently, which meant that a trail from dust being disturbed should still hold. My tremblesense was fine-tuned to look for it...

Hah, footprints in a size 10, his boot size, and it was even the right tread style. The ladder was just ahead.

Behind me, there was a sudden scream.

Ah, yes. So unexpected.

I stopped and bolted backwards.

It wasn't so much that I wanted to help the Steiners as I wanted to see what I was dealing with.

Sluggers and lasers going off. There was a lot of racket from ricochets. The thoomp of a plasma gun slagger going off, and the crash of durasteel getting melted. A rotary laser fired up shrilly, and lasted five seconds before it suddenly went quiet.

I was around a corner, down a slope, between some pipes, and rounded the curve to the abyss, a great ambush point.

To be on the safe side, I had a point of Essence in my eyes. Succubi got their True Sight at Eight, and I at best could be considered a Karmic Seven. But a couple Essence in the old eyeballs took care of that problem, and stark reality was laid out before me.

Of course, it made my eyes into blue and gold light bulbs, but what could I do?

The number of things shooting had been cut by two-thirds.

A couple stiffs had been sliced into pieces just off that gantry on this side. There were remains of a couple more on the bridge, I assumed the rest of their bodies had gone for a dive. There were two Franks in power armor on the other side, also in multiple pieces, and three other stiffs with them. The screams were coming from the tunnel on the other side, rapidly retreating... but not rapidly enough, as the pounding trio of footsteps faded one... two... three.

Looked like a twelve-man strike team had just bit the dust.

I bent down to the two corpses closest to me, rifling through them with professional discourtesy and tossing the interesting stuff into my Masspack. Finders keepers and all that. I could disable any trackers on them in a bit.

I really hoped that rotary laser was intact. I hadn't heard a boom, so at least the power supply was good. Portable micro-fusion generators were muy expensive.

Would the killer come back out that corridor? Hmm. I waited by the edge of the doorway to see, my hand on Chalice.

It was a good thing that Grim shared my visual senses, 'cause when the bastard came floating down right through the pipes in the ceiling of the room that I was in, he could have had me dead to rights.

Some sort of trans-dimensional phasing. Slid right through the matter without a wobbling or distortion. Invisible to normal sight, too, as it was in another dimension.

It was a three-eyed orb of crawling dark metal, spiked in odd places, and with five spiked arms spread in a half-arc atop it. The three eyes were set into a virtual skull of some kind, vaguely humanoid, but the whole thing was basically a floating ball with cleaver-blades on extending arms, and there were probably at least one or two energy projectors in those eyes.

Would have had me cold. Came drifting down right behind me in otherplanar silence, brought its arms back, and snapped them forwards as it materialized.

I fell down at five gravities, slamming to the ground backwards, my feet still in place, those scythe-blades whisking above me. I basically wound up right under the thing as I rebounded, blowing an Interdiction as Chalice came out to full Sword form, and I hacked into this floating ball of metal from below.