60 - The Ol' Corpse Elevator Pt. 2 [Cherno]

Krahe summoned another cigarette. This had to be her sixth or seventh just today, and yet somehow, the smell of smoke didn't linger about her. Arrha smoke was pleasant, as far as smoke could be, but it still soaked into smokers' clothes, hair, very being. He supposed it made sense for a mage whose natural affinity included Smoke and whose Purge Remnants were also smoke.

"I can only hope we're not walking into an ambush."

"It has only been a few hours. They may not yet even know I am gone."

"Zastreon may lack easily-accessible, instant, long-range communication... But this city is small. It's entirely possible that they not only know, but that we are walking into a compound on high alert. I'm not sure what that looks like given the portable generator and two bottom-rung chucklefucks as guards down in the tunnel, but they might've been the bait to get us off-guard, or the tunnel might be a rarely-used entrance. I'm not saying it's likely, but it's possible. Maybe... Three percent. Four if I'm generous. Odds that some part of the Hashem Family knows about the Old Street Butchershop? I'd bump that to fifteen percent. Twenty-five if the guy I left alive had a spare key in his Kenoma Pocket, but then the odds of an ambush jump to nine percent at best. You get the gist."

"You calculate ahead to such an extent?" he tilted his head.

Grinning, she turned to face him.

"No, I'm just pulling numbers out of my ass. It's hard to calculate probability without a graft that compiles all available information and another that does the math for you."

"You used to have grafts?"

She took a long, long drag, exhaling, only to snap her fingers in the vague direction of the Corpse Elevator. The fuse began to smolder. Slowly, she started walking, entering the stairwell. Casus followed. Despite their stealthy approach, she didn't keep quiet. She just walked, casually, up the stairs, quietly patting out a countdown on the inside of her own palm.

"I used to be more metal than meat," she said quietly. At this volume, her voice almost sounded the part for how much she had smoked since Casus met her. A bitter chuckle. "My corpse might still be running around killing my killers. It might never stop if the fusion cell holds up long enough for it to get to one of my safehouses. I had an old Hunter-Killer AI blackbox wired up where my spleen used to be, as a Dead-man's Switch, y'know, to go with the nuke and the dataphage AI. A sort of anathema bomb strong enough to level a city and the other... A curse that destroys technology associated with those who had me killed, spreading forever until its task is done. In the same way, those HK-AI, once you let 'em rip, those things will keep going and learning and elaborating on their directive until they receive the shutdown code... But those codes used to change every week, and the code generating algos don't exist anymore. The unit I ripped my blackbox out of had been going for centuries, long enough to become a wrathful deity to the local scavengers..."

Krahe fell silent and stopped tapping; half because sounds from the surface were now carrying clearly-enough to worry about being overheard, and half because the Corpse Elevator had just shuddered into motion. Scraping and creaking, climbing and crawling its way up with wheels on uneven tracks rather than a proper rope lift system.

Something changed. Not overtly, she didn't suddenly drop into a low stance or take up a psychotic grimace, but... There was a shift. Behind her eyes. She pulled her gun and shifted it to her right hand, rolling her left shoulder. Casus didn't need to be told to keep quiet. The two of them snuck up the final three revolutions of the stairway, and emerged into a small surface booth, just big enough to contain the stairway's footprint and some extra... And a door-less archway, just staring down the pedestrian side of a street. It was doubtlessly connected to a section for the elevator. It lined up with their recon; the blocked-off area had monopolized a whole section of road, alongside the buildings between it and the adjacent streets. Thankfully Audunpoint wasn't laid out in blocks, else this would've been one hell of a gang compound.

They both slipped out, darting across the street and ducking into the nearest alleyway, its blocked-off status providing abundant rubble to hide behind. In their case, a large crate. No less than seven figures gathered to the noise. But... Something was off. Krahe didn't feel magic from them in the same way she had felt it from even the gangsters at the Old Street Butchershop. They felt somewhat like Jas'raba's Tur'ith ur-baneworms. They all showed significant signs of baneworm infestation, and shuffled about with somewhat uncoordinated gaits. She hadn't gotten the same sense from normal Gor'un, leading her to believe that these were Gor'ah, their lesser cousins. Some weren't even in complete bodies, but frankenstein-like patchwork bodies of mismatched proportion with stiff, dangling metal arms that occasionally twitched into brief spurts of motion.

Then the groaning started. Like a dog trying to speak with a man's voice.

The disturbance of the Corpse Elevator's arrival didn't go unnoticed.

"E-le-va-torrrr... Gre-go-reeeh... Mar-khusss... " a confused vocalization. Barely speech. But there was some distress, concern even in it as the man stumbled forward, leaning in towards the lower of the two corpses. 

A distinctly clearer voice from a further distance away came. Surly and angered, not in the way one might be angry at loitering subordinates, but at a misbehaving dog. The voice approached from the right-hand direction from Krahe's perspective, out of sight of the Corpse Elevator.

"Hey, the fuck you doin' over there?! We're not even half-done loading the shipment, nobody said you could- What the hell? Why's the lift up here? We only use that to send shit to Margusson 5th, did you fuckheads call it just for fun again?"

"Gor'ah having another episode? Seriously, at this rate we'll be hours overdue for emptying this place," A second voice joined the first, quickly catching up in distance as the other man joined his compatriot. 

"Who knows what kind of monstrosity the wheelers sent to wipe out Old Street? If a Red Hood shows up, we're fucked. Let's just cut our losses and get the fuck out of dodge. For one I'd rather have Semzar stick me in an old man again than get torn apart by a Red Hood, and for what? So some evoy can have kids? Fuck those bugs, man. I don't care who is paying Damrus how much, I'm not seeing a fuckin' ring of it."

"You know we can't do that. If nothing else, the Boss knows his accounting, he'll just throw us to the flies if he finds out we shorted him to get out of here sooner. The foreman's pet ought to be able to at least slow it down long enough for us to evacuate."

"Maybe, but the damn thing is so lazy it might as well be a puppet. Barely does anything without being told. Do you expect the foreman to stick around with a Red Hood around? No chance. He'll be the first one out."

A laugh. "True."