B3 Chapter 6 - Second Mover Advantage

This was, in a word, inconvenient.

Syl had done an analysis of as many fragments as he could. It had been a little annoying to do, of course. Even with access to the satellite network that the one-star general who ran SU-317 had founded, it was difficult. A great deal of the satellites had gone down due to enemy action, a direct impact by one of the many fragments, or the side effects of the flux brought in by said fragments.

As such, it hadn’t been nearly as comprehensive a scan as he would have liked. They weren’t flying blind, not exactly, but the state of affairs wasn’t one he was particularly fond of. This was the least information he had run on when dealing with a new development for quite some time.

The special unit had been formed to deal with problems on Earth. Dealing with the moon falling was a different story entirely. As it was, Syl had used their systems to see which frozen fragments had undergone significant colonization.

There were quite a few of them. Every impact that had only been softened instead of fully prevented so far had resulted in the moon fragments creating titanic craters in land or forming new islands where they dropped. Active wars were being fought for those, the competition for new resources so fierce that it had a number of Incarnate analysts worried that international defense systems would be insufficient for the next wave of potential impacts.

Syl wasn’t worried about that. In the absence of governments, the other Sinners and Zero remained active still. Soon enough, he would be back amongst their number.

It was unlikely that Pride would remain out of it for the entire duration of the moonfall. Thanks to odd trajectories brought on by the machines embedded in a number of the fragments, only a tiny fraction of the total fragments had made contact with atmosphere yet. Current projections had them falling on Earth over the course of the next year, and there were growing concerns that nations would run out of firepower with which they could continue preventing moonfall from wiping out humanity.

Syl didn’t intend to let that become a problem—hence, the trip to this fragment. He and the others aboard the shuttle had thought this one mostly unpopulated. Obviously, they were wrong.

“Thoughts on proceeding?” Uriel asked. “Our resident Sinner’s a bit under the weather, or I’d say we should push ahead in any case.”

“Proceeding is fine,” Bianca replied. “We anticipated resistance. Human or machine, it doesn’t matter.”

“I’d prefer if it was just humans,” Waylan grumbled. “A fair fight is easy. It’s been a while since I’ve taken one of those.”

Selection for the fragment journey hadn’t been rigorous. Most of what they were going to extract from this trip was going to be stuff only Syl could understand and use anyway, so the only problem they had really run into was one of competence and enough loyalty to ensure that they wouldn’t turn on them and try to kill them while in the middle of a mission.

There were no Polarian loyalists in Incarnate, at the very least. Most of the magicians involved in that initiative were disillusioned with sovereign bodies enough that they held no particular allegiance to anyone besides a compulsory, perfunctory one to Auria and a more real one to the organization that had provided them the resources they needed to work.

Viridian magicians, on the other hand, were a different story. Jennifer had trusted some of them enough to vouch for one as an expedition member.

Avery Viridian, master-class short-range artillery-type specialist. Not quite as capable of the same output that Jennifer could manage, but he was much more familiar with combat than she was. He was her second-in-command and was acting as Jennifer’s eyes and ears here. He’d been present as part of the response to the Virtue attack on the Viridian estate before Syl had arrived.

Apart from him, the task force was composed of Syl, Bianca, Waylan, Uriel, a master-class Incarnate magician, and Vivian, one of the members of special unit 317 that had been willing to loan herself to the Incarnate-Viridian alliance now that the unit had stabilized itself off the Pacific coast. The latter two were primarily acting as intelligence. Aaron, the Incarnate magician, specialized in perception-type magic and carried a specially-designed FCD that synced with segmented recoilless assault rifles that would automatically aim around cover and at targets it found.

All seven were equipped with stolen, modified pressure suits. The design was elegant for Aurian engineering. Rather than the bulky, difficult to operate spacesuits that had been the standard until humanity had turned its eyes away from the stars, these were almost form-fitting suits that could have been mistaken for standard military gear. While it hadn’t been filled with many innovations that should have been gained by studying the machines, it was efficient and redundant. Flux-powered life support and telemetry fit in a small console about the size of an open palm, of which there were three. The suit was lightly armored, secure enough that a few bullets wouldn’t be enough to pierce it but not bulky enough to restrict movement.

Syl swapped from signing to typing on their closed comms network. At three hundred kilometers above sea level, atmosphere and gravity had both thinned out enough that moving his arms for sign was less efficient than just using an eye-typing interface inside the suit.

Syl: Vivian, Aaron, do we have contact?

“Not seeing anything on radar,” Vivian replied. She had her customized rifle dangling loosely beside her, the weak gravity of the moon fragment letting it bob and weave freely instead of just falling to the floor. “There are blockers up.”

“Flux signatures everywhere,” Aaron added. “Blockers are making my readings go haywire, but there’re probably people here. Proceed with caution.”

This particular fragment was one of the smaller ones, which was part of why Syl had selected it.  Only about ten kilometers across, it had nevertheless proven to be dense with magic and thus had the desirable traits of both being low-competition and high-return.

Syl: Heading outside. Waylan, Bianca, Avery with me. Aaron, spot for Uriel.

They had chosen to land the stolen shuttle near where they’d found the Polarian flag for two reasons. The first was that this was simply the best landing spot on the fragment, but the other was that they wanted to control how this potential engagement went.

Waylan and Avery both used movement-type spells to control their movement rather than try to walk under their own power, but both Syl and Bianca used the retrothrusters they’d modified into the suits. Cycling flux within themselves to fly would have been easier here than anywhere else, but even though their power was slowly returning to them, conservation and proper recovery was more important than slight movement.

“Deploying a camera drone,” Vivian said. “Getting visual… there we go. Soil’s disturbed half a klick north of the flag. Can’t get a proper perception spell going on it, but that’s where there’ll be. There’s a visual inconsistency in their stealth spell.”

“Shit, really?” Aaron asked. “Didn’t catch that at all.”

“That’s experience for you,” Uriel said. “You spend enough time in the field, you see a lot of stuff.”

“I’m good, thanks.”

“Focus, if you would,” Bianca said. “We’re approaching the site now.”

Syl could see the inconsistencies too. They had done something to a chunk of the fragment to hide it from view, but they’d done it hastily. The details didn’t line up perfectly, and the flux being disrupted int he area made it obvious to anyone with actual experience where it was.

“Uriel, can you—“ Bianca started.

“Already on it,” Uriel said. “Mau flagea!”

The tactical-class spell formed and detonated in instants, piercing through the veil ahead of them.

Props to the Polarians, Syl thought, watching a section of the illusion that had hid the Polarian operation fizzle away, revealing the lip of a crater behind it. They didn’t make it a single point of failure.

The illusion did actually have physical mass to it, which meant they had to funnel through the roughly garage-door-sized hole Uriel had made in it to get through.

They moved through in a rough formation, leaving the ground immediately. While going airborne was usually a bad idea—it was much easier to predict where someone was going if the primary force acting on them was gravity—that was different when gravity was so low.

Polaris hadn’t been here for very long, but they’d established a forward operating base inside an artificially neat crater that must have been created by one of the signature spells of a paragon Syl had met when she was still a strategic.

About three hundred meters across, the crater housed a few pressurized tents, all of them surrounding a set of three Gates, all three of which looked active and stable unlike the ones that tended to naturally generate on Earth. Exposed to the zero-atmosphere environment was an array of technology that Syl almost recognized.

Sure enough, the machines had made significant progress in the decades since they’d been forced off Earth. The tech here looked inactive, just like it had been in Taiwan.

That did make Syl wonder where the machines had their most current technology—or, if this was it, why they had left it here for humans to find. They were clearly active and had been so just days ago, but they weren’t active at all here.

The Polarians were, though. Sound didn’t transmit much if at all thanks to the lack of atmosphere, but there were clear signs of human activities in the base.

“How do you want to do this?” Waylan asked. “Feel like we should’ve thought about this more before we, y’know, bull in a china shop’d this.”

Uriel breaking through the barrier had alerted the magician in charge of defending this area. Syl didn’t need to confirm the presence of one Lila Adams visually for him to tell it was her.

Syl: Relax. I have their frequency. Vivian, Uriel, stealth spells.

“You what?”

“You really should get out in the field more often,” Vivian said, amused. “He does this a lot.”

#

Lila Adams wished she was doing something better with her time.

Logically, she knew that this was perhaps the single most important task she’d ever been on as an engineer. There was a part of her that was terribly excited over the prospect of finally being able to taste the forbidden fruit of the machines, but that was outweighed by the part of her that was a practicing combat magician.

She had always been one to lead from the front. That had been the case during the first of the great magical wars, and it continued to be the case now. While she knew that her expertise as an engineer was sorely needed for the machines when the bulk of Polaris’ foremost magical researchers were so focused on biological fields, Lila also wasn’t blind.

Polaris had barely even contributed to stopping this fragment. The only one that they’d been been able to manage stopping had been thanks to the immovable paragon who composed the other end of the Polarian dyad. That was exactly why Lila was here instead of managing fires on the ground—they needed the technology to protect themselves or, at the very least, survive.

Yet she remained acutely aware of the violence on the ground. People were dying by the millions. Polaris hadn’t started this war with the strongest population, and even though they had avoided the worst of the initial blast between Cascadia and Auria, the events of the past few days had driven the country into chaos. Globally, the death count was literally uncountable, but estimates for Polaris were currently at nearly five percent of the entire population. When compared to other countries like Auria who were well on their way to losing a full half of their populace, it was a blessing, but that was still hundreds of thousands if not over a million of her people dead.

Lila had taken up magic to protect people, and right now all she could do was defend this one station and learn what she could.

When she sensed her associates’ wards breaking down, the pent-up rage started to boil over. She reached out for Excalibur, its comfortable weight materalizing in her hand.

Someone had come. Of course they had. Even if this shard was relatively isolated, every single one of the stable fragments were valuable real estate.

Well, they’d picked the wrong one to attack. Lila decided she’d give them a single warning, then kill them when they inevitably refused to back down. That was courtesy enough. They should have been down there, not up here.

A bit hypocritical of her to think, she knew, but Lila was a bit past rational thought.

Which made it all the more startling when her extremely encrypted, private line lit up with a new message.

Pride: Lila Adams. “King Arthur,” going by some of the articles about you when you were making a name for yourself. We’ve met.

“What the fuck,” she whispered.

They’d crossed paths twice before. Both times had been incidental, and both times, she had barely escaped with her life. The second had been barely a week ago. She still remembered the feeling of an entire city being stilled behind her as she’d exited the area at many, many times the speed of sound.

Why was he here?

Pride: I’m sure you’re asking how I got into your network. That isn’t important. You might also be curious as to if I bear you any ill will. I don’t. I am here for samples and data only.

The airlock to the temporary command structure cycled.

“Who’s in the airlock?” Lila asked.

“Nobody on record!” one of the other engineers called. “It—it looks like it’s auto-cycling! Nothing on sensors!”

Shit.

The airlock cycled again, and Lila hefted Excalibur, pointing it towards—nothing.

She squinted, sending out a pulse of flux, and the stealth spell dissipated, revealing a single figure clad head to toe in a combat FCD that must have been serving as a spacesuit. It tilted its head.

Pride: Hello. I would advise you not activate that spell you’re holding. Everyone in this room will be dead before it goes off.

Lila had been suspicious of the name in the chat window, but when she looked at the figure in front of her, her blood ran cold.

There was no mistaking it. That was the same signature that had buried a city under the weight of his magic, defeating even an unkillable apocalyptic machine threat with ease. The same force that had destroyed an entire fleet in the San Francisco Bay, creating reverberations so powerful that seismographs on the east coast had picked them up.

This was Pride. His words scrolled across her screen like a sentencing.

Even if she was a paragon, there were still gaps of power vast enough to fit armies in. Lila knew how large this one was.

“Do not engage,” she said, lowering Excalibur slowly. “He is not hostile. Do not act against him. Do not try to sabotage him. Do not even think of doing anything that could be interpreted as asking against him. In fact, if you can, don’t do anything. Don’t cast. Don’t move. Don’t breathe.

“And maybe he’ll let us live.”

The figure looked around the room slowly. The weight of his gaze stunned the rest of them into silence without a single word, even though they were theoretically on a separate set of comms.

Then, abruptly, seeming satisfied with his examination, he nodded once, turned around, and left.

Pride: Thank you for your cooperation.