System Supervillain, Chapter 162

Chapter 162 – Portal

It took some time, but within an hour, the battle in space was done, and Nemesis was just picking off the ships that had been disabled instead of destroyed. Then, we turned towards Thraxl Prime. The nine fighters that had tried to land and take their chances were easy to find. Their heat sources stood out against the frigid cold covering the planet. Point defense weapons ensured that they would never fly again.

With that done, Nemesis turned the ship to the place where Thraxlanth, the city I had nuked off the map, once sat. Radiation levels were high, obviously, because it takes more than a year and change for radiation levels to get actually ‘safe’ after a nuke goes off, but the radiation that was really dangerous in the short term had already broken down long ago. Now, what was left was the kind of lingering isotopes that took longer to decay, making the risks less ‘you have six hours to live’ and more ‘you have a high risk of cancer in the next few years’.

Of course, there were cures for cancer. The average guy on the street couldn’t afford them, but they existed, and the Guild naturally had them as well. Different governments did, too, and anyone rich enough could find a treatment center that would help them out.

Still, I didn’t need to worry about any of that. My costume from the Tailors protected against high radiation. Most supers picked up something like that, when they got a suit from the Tailors. Didn’t protect against actual radiation attacks, and I wouldn’t want to go into a reactor core without some extra assurance, but against environmental stuff? I was fine. Certainly good enough to walk around the blasted remains of the city I erased.

The place we landed was not the epicenter of the blast, the crater where the building that had housed the Emperor’s command center had been. Instead, we set down at the remains of the city’s spaceport. It was abandoned and empty. Any shuttles that used to be here had been taken long ago, by Gel-nak trying to get to less radioactive areas of the planet. Ironically, that meant this city, what was left of it after the blast, had survived most of the looting and chaos that had overtaken the rest of the planet as the ecosystem started to collapse. No point in coming to the city you couldn’t live in, after all.

The best that could be said about the spaceport was that the buildings were more or less intact. About ten kilometers from the main blast, the windows had shattered, and there was some structural damage, but the buildings stood. All the equipment in them was junk by now, either from the EMP, radiation, or general disuse, and power was out, but the bones of the building remained.

Setting up the actual gate was simple enough. We chose a wall to set up against. It could be free-standing, sure, but having it at or near a wall meant it was harder for things to just knock over by accident. More importantly, it prevented people from accidentally going through the wrong side of the portal. The Mechanics had tested what would happen if you did that, and the result was… educational, and made everyone glad that they only tried it on a guild employee that was found to be working for the SDI.

It turns out that when you have a portal that consists of a single plane in each location, if you go through the wrong way, the molecules in your body do not respond appropriately. The only reason the resulting mess was called blood slurry instead of blood spray was because some quirk of the portal meant that everything coming out just dropped to the ground in a puddle of blood and viscera, with nothing solid in the whole puddle. Most definitely not on my list of ways to go out, whenever it was my time.

A flick of the switch, and the gate pylons glowed a brilliant green, before an energy field caught between them. The energy matrix flickered, stabilized, and then coalesced into a solid green pane. Just like at Srusk. The portal was open.

First through the portal were the Green Knight and the Knave. Despite how much the two got under each other’s skin, and were decidedly on opposite sides of the law, they’d apparently had a decent working relationship through the last year, as people recovered from the attack, and both sides thought about going back to normal business. They weren’t working together, or anything like that, but they’d kept lines of communication open, and more aggressively policed their own when someone went too far. So far, it was working.

“Iceblade,” Green Knight nodded as they stepped through, and cleared the way for the military trucks that were already starting to roll through.

Knave moved up beside him, laughing. “Well, Icy, when you told the Emperor to chill out, you really meant it, huh?”

Neither super looked cold, despite their breath being visible in the icy air. Not unexpected, since they’d been supers long enough that the Tailors would have made sure they had what they needed to survive something like this, as well as the radiation. As the trucks began passing by, I noticed Technician in the back of the first truck, her iconic red robes and cybernetics making her easy to spot.

Nodding that way, I said, “I assume that truck has the Reset Device?”

“Right in one, Icy,” Knave nodded. “They need to get it as close to the center of your work as possible, which I’m guessing is in the middle of the blast zone?” I nodded, and Knave sighed. “Well, better them than me, I guess. Know the suits are supposed to protect us and all, but I don’t like playing around with nuclear sites.”

“That’s because you have an ounce of sense, Knave,” Brittania said as she joined the group. She nodded my way, and said, “Iceblade. I hear you’ve basically caused a planetary-scale disaster here, that essentially killed off almost all sapient life?”

I shrugged, and said, “The ice age is my doing, sure, but the reason most of the people are dead is because of the civil war. I think I can be forgiven for not knowing that the former Emperor’s concubines were going to kill their own children upon hearing of his death, eliminating the entire royal line and throwing the entire empire into a civil war as someone tries to figure out who is next to rule, if anyone can even work out how to adapt their genetic ascension trick to other bloodlines.”

Brittania sighed. “Sadly, I cannot argue with that. Though it does not change the fact that this world is going to need significant investment.”

“It would have needed investment at any rate,” Web Mistress said as she came to my side. Looking over to me, she said, “I already sent what navigation data we have to Technician, Master. The route to crater at ground zero has a lot of debris in the way, so they may need supers or equipment to help out, unless they decide to walk.”

“Already handled,” Green Knight said. “We sent Strongman and Esper with Technician. Figured there would be rubble needing to be moved, even if there weren’t any nasty surprises left behind, like what the Russians found in Moscow after the lizards blew their reactors.”

“Shouldn’t be,” I said. “Something like that would have been noticed by the ships in orbit long before the damage grew to the point where no one was talking. Still, I’d be the last person to talk shit on someone wanting to add a bit of insurance and make sure things went according to plan.”

“Just so,” Knave nodded. “So, do you have any targets for us on this ice ball? You said that there were still some Gel-nak left, right?”

“Don’t know if they are Gel-nak or not. All I have is that there are still a low tens of thousands of sapient life signs on the world. What species they are, I can’t say with more detailed and time-intensive scans.”

“Don’t worry,” Web Mistress cut in. “I have already uploaded the sensor data we got from orbit, and from the systems of the gel-nak navy ships before they were destroyed. You’ll find the data in each of your personal communicators, as well as the command center computers that they just brought through the portal. Also in that upload is the wreck site of the Authority of Conquest, a battleship that managed to crash-land on the city of Helrath. There may be possible survivors and salvage.”

That brought all of them up short. None of them spoke for a good thirty seconds. Finally, Brittania said what all of them were thinking. “Iceblade, with all due respect, I believe Web Mistress, here, is far and away the most terrifying member of your team.”

I laughed at that. “Oh, I fully agree with you on that part, Brittania. Especially since you’ve never seen what she can do when she decides it is time for her to start getting ‘creative’. I’ll tell you now, the only way to keep any computer safe from her is to put it in a different star system. And even then, you’ll still have to keep it off network.”

Web Mistress, feigning nonchalance while secretly preening at the praise, added in, “Don’t worry, I also copied the information to the base computers on the other side of the portal, in Aldershot Garrison.”

Green Knight looked at her in barely disguised horror, but it was the Knave who spoke first. “Ah, the portal goes both ways, right? The same quirk of physics which allows us to call back across the portal probably lets whatever means of computer hacking she does to do the same. And once she gets into a network then she can jump from place to place anywhere that network touches, right?”

“Very good, Knave,” Web Mistress nodded.

“You do understand that doesn’t make you any less terrifying, right?” Green Knight asked, exasperated. “Can any technopath do this? Or some version of it?”

Web Mistress grinned. “Well, it depends on the specifics. Would you say that every super who uses fire is the same? It is the same idea. To give you one clear example, one need only look at the differences between myself and the Technician. We are both technopaths, but with a different focus. It wouldn’t be out of line to call my expertise ‘software’ and her skillset ‘hardware’. I would not be able to design and build a device to remove a planet-wide Change Environment ability without ever having set foot on the planet in question. She obviously can, which means she has skills I doubt any of you have fully considered. Just be glad that one is on your side, since I don’t know if there are any prisons on Earth that could hold her, even after the changes made post-Initialization.”

“Well, that’s just great,” Brittania sighs. “I didn’t need to sleep tonight.”

“That’s really unfair, Brittania!” Technician’s voice came through Brittania’s communicator, even though her hand was nowhere near it. “I’ll have you know that I never misuse my abilities!”

Web Mistress just smiled. “Come on, Techy. Don’t forget Isle of Man. You’re lucky I was keeping tabs on your ‘harmless nanomachine project’. Really, the self-replicating nanite swarm was nicely put together, from a technical perspective, but you rushed the programming, and forgot to put an ‘off’ switch on them. If I hadn’t shut down your lab and erased all your hard drives, you would have destroyed the world.”

“Ah,” I said. “So that’s where the idea for the Rhuk’s ‘make this planet go away’ weapon came from? I was wondering what mad genius came up with something like that.”

“You really think I’m a genius?”

The Knave put a hand on Green Knight’s shoulder. “I reckon you an’ I need to get a drink or twelve, aye?” Green Knight just nodded.