Hekate's Call, Chapter 48

Errant HQ reminded her of those old Las Vegas conferences. Morian always hated getting dragged to them for work. She was always promptly abandoned to be lost in the labyrinthine casinos, getting turned around by dizzying lights and sounds, the moment the people she was with finished their talks. Well, Vegas was the worst of them, but the conferences were terrible no matter what city they were hosted in.

Morian caught little Liz at an intersection, and they stood in an awkward silence. You often met the devil at crossroads, but Morian always took that to be more of a metaphorical crossroads and not quite so literally. Poor thing adjusted her clothes like she needed to impress Morian of all people.

“Are you coming to see the valuation?” Liz asked meekly.

“Of course,” Morian smiled and watched the tension fall away from Liz. “I promised, didn’t I?”

“You did,” Liz motioned to the correct path and they began to walk. “But, I was worried you were upset…”

She trailed off without finishing her thought. It was a bad habit of hers. Little Liz could never speak plainly, she always had to be roundabout. That hadn’t changed since she was young.

“I promised,” Morian affirmed. “I am going to see this through.”

Gate after gate the two of them walked in a comfortable silence through to an inner observation room. A large window oversaw the battlefield below, with all manner of little screens and outputs reporting on all the pilots. There was no way to communicate to the pilots or the field from the observation room, which was good. It would need to be called something else if it served any other purpose.

It wasn’t the only observation room, either. There was one somewhere else manned by a dozen little code monkeys and insurance suits conducting the valuation. Nearby, there were rooms where Velia Lore and Beatrice Manning each took up the mantle of Control to direct their little metal dolls across the field in a mockery of human life and conflict. But this observation room was solely for Morian and her soon-to-be former apprentice. Like a VIP booth overlooking a sporting event. Only with less booze and chicken wings. They wouldn’t let her smoke in those either.

“You planned for them to take her?” Morian asked as she leaned over a console and brought up the data that interested her.

Elisabet audibly shuddered and let out that little whine of hers. “I failed. Again. I’m sorry...”

Ah. She was going to have to soothe her again. She needed a cigarette. “I don’t understand,” Morian raked her nails across the back of her neck. “I know you’re planning on making a lot of money, and removing Manning from the picture. From what I can see, you’ve arranged everything quite well. How have you failed?”

“I made a miscalculation somewhere,” the woman slumped onto an uncomfortable airport terminal bench and put her head in her hands. Morian used to think she was being overly dramatic, but the girl was just being hard on herself. Much too hard on herself, given her work ethic. Every attempt to break her of that only reinforced the behavior, so Morian figured it was best to leave it be. “I knew those brats would find a chance and take it, but I expected Charlotte Krystyn to respond much faster than she did. Maybe she doesn’t care about Ilina Hunter as much as I thought.”

“But Krystyn did respond, and you got what you wanted. How did you fail?”

“She wasn’t supposed to get hurt like that. If we’d been there sooner…”

If you’d been there sooner, Hunter might not have been notched like a stray cat. She might not have the words FAGGOT PRINCESS messily tattooed into her back. Maybe she’d only have a few bruises. It wasn’t fair to hold it against Elisabet though. Too many variables to control. She trusted her people and made a winning bet.

Morian placed a hand on Elisabet’s head and stroked her hair.

“Elisabet, this isn’t your fault,” Morian smiled weakly. “It’s mine.”

Her failure began at her first meeting with Hunter. Scrawny and dirty holed up in a Mark 3 extracting data using a terminal stolen from a turned over comms trailer a block away. In the middle of an active battle zone. Too young to be there.

Morian stepped up on the machine and peered over that ledge fifty-two times and was shot dead fifty-two times. Most of the shots were center-of-mass, near the heart. But a few were headshots. The closest to a miss was a double-tap gone awry that took out half of Morian’s face and ripped a hole through her jugular and windpipe — that one was perhaps the most exciting.

Her approach had to change. A single step back, shouting from the ground nearby to get the girl’s attention. It took many oh so many attempts to get through that conversation without getting riddled with bullets or catching an overcooked grenade.

Hunter was truly a wonderful child, resolute in a way that Morian had never encountered before. Unremarkable and rather forgettable at the time to most, but Morian could never forget the way the foundation buckled beneath the child’s will.

“I tried to teach her to rely on others,” Morian said solemnly. “I thought she’d made progress on that. Instead, the only person she ever learned to rely on was me.”

“Charlotte Krystyn—“

“Loves Hunter. More than either of us assume, probably. That’s why she was trying so hard to respect the girl’s boundaries. Which made her late to respond.” Morian turned away and looked back to the monitors and readouts as the spectacle started. “What preparations have you taken?

Elisabet grumbled something about needing a drink — the last time she tried to mention what a bad habit the alcohol was, she got an earful about her smoking. A bit unfair. Well, she was going to blame herself no matter what Morian said, so it was best to say too little rather than too much.

“I destroyed the copy of Orchid’s overrides I had. I have nothing to keep Manya here anymore.”

“She’ll stay for Velia,” Morian affirmed.

“Velia has to stay with you, doesn’t she? For that drug?”

Morian shook her head. “I gave the recipe to Carie so she can look after Velia. Continue.”

“Symeon has full Domon citizenship. I thought about showing her how to apply to the Federation or the Union for refugee status, but she’ll have more rights as a clone in Domon than anywhere else.” Elisabet sighed. “It’s her sexuality I’m worried about.”

“The Federation and the Union wouldn’t know she’s a clone unless Symeon discloses it. One of the first things I did was remove the genetic markers. Nothing I can do about her shutdown trigger though.”

“I didn’t even know you could do that,” Elisabet sighed. Well, that was because nobody else knew how to remove those markers. If anyone else had figured it out then they were smart to keep it quiet. “I never really had anything on Charlotte Krystyn that could be used against her.”

“Nothing but her guilt,” Morian leaned forward and watched the vectors on the Again in Hell go wild as Hunter began her motions through the city below. A few of the madder ones back on the dust-bowl planet tried to copy Hunter’s acrobatics, but nearly all of them ended up as paste. Now the child was even deadlier with years of practice. “I don’t think there’s anything that can be done about that. Velia demonstrated how easy it is for anyone to use that against her.”

The two of them were quiet together. It was nice. The early days of Carrion were like this too. It was before the Fiends were given names, when they were numbered bodies in the morgue. Liz came so far to find the great Necromancer General and learn her ways, and found herself frustrated by it all. Morian always struggled to live up to the titles and expectations bestowed upon her.

If you’re going to cry over them, then at least give them names so you stop sounding like a numbers station with depression.

Scavenger was the first to be named. Little Elisabet’s first project. She always had a good eye for quality. Knocked it out of the park in selection and conditioning. Vulture and Coyote came and went soon afterward, along with so many others. Naming them was a mistake. Morian had known it would be before Elisabet pushed her to do it. She’d made the same mistake before. So many times on so many worlds she’d made that mistake.

“Charlotte’s Krystyn’s going to complain once you’re gone,” Elisabet broke the silence. “Can Taitle tune the Inertia?”

“Oh, the sync issues?” Morian smiled over her shoulder at her apprentice. “I said it from the start, didn’t I? The neural hook was for Krystyn’s protection. I haven’t been tuning anything, just slowly removing the limiters to keep her from reaching too far too fast.”

The Problem With Inertia was an incredible machine. It resembled tech from before the purge. Self-mending and malleable, but aware of its own shape. The early days of pilgrimage would have met the machine with discussions of what it meant to be an organism, and if steel like that could meet the definition. Maybe the Inertia could chime in with its own opinion. Seemed likely that it was alive by some metric, so there was a decent chance it was sentient. Once the war started, well, it could fight and so it would. So it does.

“It’s the first time I’ve seen a Legion candidate since Isobel Domon herself,” Morian mused to herself.

If Elisabet said anything in response, Morian missed it as she briefly touched the foundation. Little Isobel Domon with her ratty hair and emaciated, androgynous figure screamed at Morian about the war. Afflicted by some novel degenerative disease — genetic, they would later learn — that Morian and the other scientists hadn’t had the time to find a cure for. She wanted to be a soldier even though she couldn’t hold a rifle! Something about revenge. Morian never really learned what for. The war had taken a third of them already. She was just a spiteful hospital-bound child that nobody had the time to care for. When she passed the tests to pilot Legion, well, curing her disease became a very high priority and Morian could never blame the girl for being resentful about that.

The Domon Empire was nothing like the idealistic, impassioned girl who founded it for all the right reasons. A better humanity. Humanity without the shadow of the Necromancer General looming over it.

Now it was a corpse factory, churning out naught but necrosis and rot.

The little observation room readouts blinked and beeped. Morian didn’t like the interface. Too modern. She missed the discrete readouts and chunky dials and heavy switches of yore. The text was too small, too. Even with her glasses. Maybe she needed new eyes.

“Legion,” Elisabet’s voice finally broke through. Empty-hearted, probably from being momentarily ignored. “You mentioned it before. An Eidolon?”

Morian nodded. “Hunter is a Erinyes candidate too,” she responded quietly. “Never thought I’d see one of those again.”

“You haven’t mentioned that one before. You had her tested?”

Morian waved off the question. She didn’t have to. The Again in Hell was a design descendant of the Erinyes, and even those would have held Hunter back the same way Hell did.

The two halves of the fight played out in front of her. She was inclined to pay closer attention to Hunter. She used the Again in Hell all wrong from the start. The tripwires were meant to be deployed to knock over machines, and the inertial-mass normalization tool in the axe was meant to make carving easier once the machine hit the dirt. Neither it nor the Erinyes were designed for the kinds of acrobatics and force-multiplying momentum tricks Hunter applied to her piloting.

Hunter set the kill zone. Laid the bait. And snapped it quickly. She moved with preternatural grace between the wires and used extra movement and her short-throw thrusters to maximize the axe’s impact. She had less than a year of combat experience in the Again in Hell.

Imagine a Hunter with four or six more years of experience and training.

Morian frowned at the thought. Not just because of the extraordinary toll that would take on her body. There should never be a singular weapon that powerful again. Isobel was correct about that too. The technological advancements of the war needed to be discarded and forgotten. Maybe there were some important losses, but Isobel had seen what horrors so called medical technology produced at Morian’s hands.

Hopefully Hunter would retire after this. Go somewhere with Krystyn. Maybe they’d take Symeon with them. She was a good girl. Away from Velia if possible.

Something in the air of the observation room shifted.

“What the fuck?” Elisabet cursed under her breath, finally standing and approaching the consoles.

The Problem With Inertia was dragging the torso of one of those awful little children through the street towards the ridge. Morian could see that the cockpit had been fused shut by the Inertia. Holes bored into the body where the emergency flares were located. Very thorough. Very unforgiving.

What a beautiful machine. Oh, insult her tastes all you wanted. The bleeding skeleton was cool. Hopefully there would be movies about it in the future, the way there were films back on the dust bowl about Scavenger. Walking endlessly across the battlefield eating the wrecks of other machines to keep sustain itself. None of them would compare to the graphic reality. Morian would sit and watch and nag and nitpick over all the things they got almost right. Scavenger always laughed, or what passed for one with sliced vocal cords and no tongue, when they showed the horrible wretch that piloted it in the movies — I don’t think he’s as handsome as I am. Despite its flaws, Scavenger had a sense of humor about it all.

“Didn’t you want them to kill those girls? It solves your little spat with Manning.”

Crater stared in awe at the Inertia. The girl never had the stomach for blood. Never had the nerve for the hard parts. Would rather lead people to acting on their own than force the subject directly. A little coward to her core. Sweet little Elisabet. If she had a flaw it was that she never wanted to admit to being a softie.

The Inertia threw Ragdoll’s cockpit. Frame registered ID, Ragdoll. Pilot callsign, Ragdoll. Officially, as far as Morian was able to glean from the documents provided to her by one of Crater’s little busybody paper pushing friends, the pilot’s legal name was also Ragdoll. All three of the pilots were the same.

Did Elisabet realize that she’d done the same thing as Manning by giving the processors the names of their machines? No longer a swappable part, but the brain of the machine. Its soul. At least Morian hadn’t lied about how they were being treated and never tried to convince herself otherwise.

The Problem With Inertia moved fast across the field, all at once. Giant strides. Little use of cover. The Scandal split Toybox’s attention until the Inertia was in the blind at the bottom of the ridge. The readouts were incomprehensible. The Inertia stopped trying to feed realistic combat data back to the logging and observation systems and let itself vomit up an immeasurable amount of static. Up the ridge in a single accelerated leap, and once it was over the lip it began crawling through machine gun fire like those old black-and-whites from the second world war.

Or was it the first?

No. It was the second. The first was the one with horses. The second was all about trenches, tanks, and long black overcoats.

When did the Domon officer-class start dressing like nazis?

Morian frowned. Isobel would have had every one of those little fascists executed. The way she’d had Morian’s officers and scientists executed. Morian had been away too long. Let too much rot grow.

No, no. Focus on the present. You made your choices, Morian Kyrnn.

At least the present had the Inertia, in its full glory.

There was a moment of quiet as the Inertia nestled in the carcass of its kill. The bleach bone plating cracked like a chrysalis and bore out two giant black wings. The birth of divinity. Krystyn wouldn’t have done this. She wouldn’t have known how.

Morian couldn’t contain her smile, but managed to keep herself from laughing with the giddy energy bouncing around in her chest.

The air rippled as the wave of heat tore through the combat zone. The closest cameras were knocked out instantly, the farther ones showed the glass of the lenses warp before they fell to the heat too. Life support systems were still functional on the Again in Hell, so Hunter survived the blast. Almost certainly buried herself in rubble before the wave hit in full, but her reactor was in a forced cooling cycle.

It was just so fucking cool. It just was. There was nothing else one could say about The Problem With Inertia. It was just so fucking cool.

Someday she would have to ask Elisabet what scrapyard or desolate pre-purge Federation R&D lab she’d hauled the tech out of. Maybe make a pilgrimage to pay her respects to the designers.

Thinking of the future was good too. As far as she could remember she was always looking forward. Months, years, decades forward. How to win the war. How many sacrifices there would be. Converting the Ossuary from a colony ship to a capital warship was like building a cathedral. The ones who began the work never saw the end of it, and neither did their children.

Focus, Morian. She shook her head. There was work to be done. In the present.

The door to the dreary little observation room opened and Beatrice Manning stormed in. Knickers in a twist, or whatever the saying was. Red in the face and beading sweat. Like a cartoon character about to blow steam out of her ears.

Sorry, Isobel. Every word you spoke about me was true. The disarmament procedures were a wild success, and the purging of the technological advancements from wartime will forever stand as your greatest achievement. Maintaining humanity’s military might without those advanced forms of barbarism during peacetime would be rightfully criticized by future generations, but I could never judge you so.

You were right, as you always were.

I was always going to be the one to bring it to an end, eventually.

The work begins now.

Time to see how prepared you really were for the inevitable end, Isobel Domon.

The sound of emergency sirens had faded into the distance. Krystyn had found herself devoured by the heat and delirium of piloting. Slumped half in her seat, hanging from her harness. The Inertia was still running, despite several shutdown orders. It had stopped talking to her, thank the stars above. There were a few little red lights from various consoles, but otherwise she was in the dark.

The magnetic radar picked up movement. Not the small scale movers that had come out in droves to pick up the pieces of the battle and to retrieve cockpits and pilots and other parts. Something the size of the Scandal. Her regular sensor suite didn’t react to the object either, which made Krystyn perk up. Visual sensors on.

There was a flash of blue or green light. One of those imaginary colors your eyes couldn’t actually perceive but your brain approximated it and filled in the gap. An outline of unreal like the fluttering of a cape off an outstretched arm, and a long thin sword moving like a whip. It cleaved Ragdoll’s cockpit in half, and then in quarters, in a few swift movements. Managed to miss the workers trying to cut their own way in, but one of Ragdoll’s limbs dripped out onto the ground.

And then it was gone. It reappeared over the ejection-ball that Toybox had crawled out of, supported under each shoulder by a medical team. Surprised she managed to make it out under her own power. Hardy girl. A single movement of the blade bifurcated Toybox vertically without harming a single member of the medical team.

Krystyn’s pilot-brain kicked into gear first. The False Scandal back on that stupid little colony had a different trick that almost froze time to make it look like it was teleporting. But the magnetic fields indicated no movement. Matching the visual sensor data to the magnetic radar indicated what Krystyn knew instinctively. The only part about that machine that was real was the blade. The rest of it was somewhere else.

Like a magic trick.

It was Morian Kyrnn’s doing.

She knew it before the thing moved to kill the third Errant pilot somewhere else on the field. She knew it was before the encrypted radio line lit up with Elisabet’s shellshocked voice shaking through a quick report.

She took my gun and shot Bea.

Silence.

Bea.

You didn’t even get to gloat about your victory.

I didn’t get to say goodbye. She’s gone.

Didn’t know you fucking cared. Silence.

Krystyn grit her teeth. This was her team. If Elisabet wasn’t in a state to take command, Krystyn had to step up. Velia could shove her sub-commander title up her ass.

“Where’s Kyrnn?”

I just said she’s gone. Liz’s voice steadied. A few heavy breaths into the microphone. We need to head her off. If we can get to her first… We can control the situation. Salvage this.

A year ago Krystyn would have assumed that control the situation meant a full takeover of Errant. Everything Liz ever wanted handed to her on a silver platter like she earned an ounce of it. No, no. This entire team probably had the same thoughts running through all their heads, save Manya.

What mattered to them was stopping Kyrnn from leaving them behind.

Not killing or capturing Morian and handing her over to the Domon Imperium. Here’s your nemesis in the flesh. Maybe we could stop with the endless warmongering once the Necromancer was in chains. Killing Kyrnn was a quick solution to making all of Domon a better place, Krystyn reckoned.

But none of these girls gave a damn. That’s not what any of this was about for them.