318 Far Future Ch. 28 – You Better Run, You Better Take Cover (1/2)

”So, who's in charge of you lads?” I asked, sweeping my eyes over the ranks of cyber-undead in view, keeping my position between the bridge and the room behind me. All avenues out were basically blocked by corpses with gleaming tech embedded in them, and they were just starting to step forwards when I spoke.

There was a pause, as I'd spoken in Necrus.

I painted the faces into my Visual File, and matched them up with some of the missing, especially when I focused on those looking more preserved. Yeah, there, there, and there were three of the missing Mekkers, and there were another two wearing Mechanist Guild uniforms over there, but their skulls were too mangled for ID.

I scanned for a guy in light combat armor, and found him in the second rank of the zombies in the room behind me. It looked like he'd been sliced into at least six parts, and then welded back into a whole, leaving most of his clothing in tatters. But he still had most of the same hairdo, and the glowing orange eye that was his trademark had been left in place.

So, my Mekker crew and Milder Cogran were now accounted for, and I could technically leave.

Curiosity was keeping me here for the moment.

A sibilant whispering spread through them. They were negatively-charged corpses, animated by necrotech, naturally didn't breathe... but that didn't mean the vestiges of their spirits couldn't generate sounds. Dark pulses ran over them and the machinery stitched through them, conveying information back and forth from the puppet master controlling them.

”Interesting. How do you know this tongue?” a sibilant whisper ghosted in from a couple hundred throats, all of them staring at me eerily.

-He's a freaking show-off,- Chalice /groused, and I laughed despite myself, right in the teeth of all those undead eyes.

”One of my best friends is undead,” I replied in the same ghostly language, not made for human throats. Thankfully, how I spoke wasn't exactly tied to my vocal cords. ”Are you the rogue this stalker is looking for?” I tapped Chalice on the necrochalcum chassis of the dead killer necrobot.

Sudden, ominous silence.

”Oh, don't be so surprised. It dies, and then you show up... with a bunch of borgzombies, of all things. It's also drifting around The Hole, but not going in... meaning it knows there's a threat in there, and it's either trying to figure out an angle of attack, or it's waiting for reinforcements to show up. Either way, you're the reason it's here, and it was just removing bugs that were potentially interfering with it in the area.”

Yeah, the histories talked about rogue AI's, especially those corrupted by the Warp. I didn't think this was one of them, and given the alien nature of the design, it probably had nothing to do with humanity.

But things necrotized into orichalcum shells meant a familiarity with necrotech that exceeded humanity's by a fair chunk. I found it hard to believe these weren't related.

”You seem to have some sort of plan...” Cool, dead amusement, or the approximation thereof, came wafting back from multiple throats. Very chick in an eerie, spine-tingling way. Props for style.

”You want quiet and silence above all things. Let me take this thing back, proclaim it some sort of alien killbot that I killed, with very visual proof that I did so. It can even be posted as a public kill. I presume that standard operating procedure for things like you would include doing a datadump of the easily accessed infosphere. Finding out that a human hacked apart this guy who was popping wanderers down here will go a long way towards alleviating any suspicions of you... especially if it was killed ten kilometers away from here.”

UV lights pulsed on the necrotech, like a brain thinking using all the corpses. ”That will not preclude them from investigating this area if they come...” the multi-whisper drifted back to me.

”Of course it will, if there is obvious proof that it hung around this area for a time... and then moved on.”

”Indicating that it searched this area and found nothing of interest...” whispered the sepulchral voice. S. VoiceS.

”Oh, and make sure you clean up all the bodies there, so The Hole is acting normally by removing anything dead near it.”

”Inferring that what is within is either beneath notice or not to be disturbed easily.” The ghostly voice sounded even more vaguely amused. ”I notice that this leaves you alive to tell the truth. Would it not be more logical to find you dead at the end of this?...” Ominous hinting, but I just laughed back.

”Well, the logical reply to that is 'This human girl just mulched the stalker that was hunting me and supposed to take me out. Just how dangerous is my collection of spare parts strapped together with barbed wire and spit to her, and do I really want her depriving me of all my useful hands?' So, we can have a mutually beneficial partnership and allow things to continue as they are, or do I raise a big stink and hope that when they notice you are here, they send a bunch of these stalkers instead of wiping the planet?”

More UV flashes on the tech. ”You are a threat to my security. This is unacceptable...”

”Highly untrue. You should be able to calculate that the Mentats up above have deduced who and what you are long ago. The fact they have not disturbed you is recognition not that they fear you, because they certainly do not, but they fear what might be triggered if they did act against you, or make your identity public.

”I have no doubt whatsoever that information about what you actually are doesn't exist in any electronic database anywhere, only unverified, rampant, and probably heartily encouraged speculations.

”You are an unacceptable threat to the city's survival, and all within it, and your life means no more to us than ours do to you. Yet we've let you live here for three thousand years. I don't think it's a logical action to stop that relationship. If you like, you always have the option to leave. But we don't have the option to evict you without drawing some unwanted attention, and I doubt we could catch you if you had to flee. I also presume that trying to cover your tracks would only reveal the fact you were here to your pursuers, and give them another thread to trace you by.”

Silence, more UV lights processing, calculating. ”Your method is acceptable for the moment. There will need to be a trail firmly established, and signs of a fight at the far end...”

Yay me and supragenius intellect and fast tongue. Not that I wouldn't have minded a bit more of a scrum, purely for speculative purposes. ”I'm presuming your maps of the terrain are better than mine, and you can better calculate what kind of route he took. Faking killzones is easy enough, as anything like that is going to be cleaned up by morlocks, scavs, or maintenance crews in short order regardless.” Most likely the first two, as proven by thousands of years of history. Dead were food. ”I'm sure interested parties upstairs will be happy to invent more odd disappearances, complete with family histories from many ancestors ago to abrupt disappearances and death benefits being paid to grieving families.”