"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."
I was sure the Umbrans could handle that. Mostly it would just involve rewriting an existing history into one more convenient... although I was sure this thing was perfectly willing to off a whole bunch more people just to lay a better paper trail.
Like a perfectly coordinated wave of motion, the borg-zombies began to withdraw, moving with unnatural power and grace despite their conditions, and of course they were perfectly in synch.
A map and course popped up on my Band. I looked at it, and started moving, dragging my trophy behind me. I did note that all the dead Steiners were now missing entirely...
I AM WATCHNG, scrolled across my Band, and I grinned despite myself. Someone else might be worried about that, but the fact was I believed the thing was paying marginal attention to everyone and everything on the Boole all the time, so that didn't bug me at all.
Rather, it meant that it knew that I knew, and so we had communication established, of a sort.
I trotted off to get to my destination, following signs of 'artificial kills' to be planted along the way, which would then intersect with the attempted ambush by the stalker, and I could timestamp and download it to my Band for my report, complete with location coordinates.
Of course, I was going to have to tell Philius to get some stuff ready. With Umbrans guiding Mekkers and whatever this necrobot thing in the shadows watching and tweaking approvingly was, an air-tight net should be woven about this thing if they decided to investigate.
Neither of us mentioned the fact that the target of interest on the kill was likely to shift from The Hole to me. How had a lone human chunked one of their flying, intangible, multi-armed space-ripping murder machines?
Indeed, that very fact is probably what prompted this thing to deal with me. I had obviously proven I could kill one of them very fast, by surprise, without harm to myself. It was indeed something to be wary of.
I wondered how much I was going to be paid for this, and sighed. The Umbrans would very publicly compensate my 'experimental warbot' without a shred of a doubt, and I'd get paid a pittance of a finder's fee in return. We'll see how curious everyone was about the fact I could kill one... which, since I could, was an indication of something, they just didn't know what. And they had to be curious enough to look.
After all, I was just a Termite, not even a mercenary...
-------
I handed the mission files back to My Queen, who took them with barely a glance. "Do you know what a Tekron is?"
His unsettling tan eyes lifted to me, narrowed. "Rumors. Nothing substantiated."
"That thing I killed was a Tekron Hunter-Killer. It was searching for a rogue Tekron which has been hiding in The Hole for the last three thousand years. The highest authorities of the city know about it, and have been aware of it for almost all of that time, and haven't made a move on it, because doing so might cause those looking for it to come here en masse and wipe the planet casually as they attempt to find it. There is no electronic record of it existing here, and everyone prefers it stay that way until it decides to leave."
His tired eyes didn't waver. "And why are you telling me this." He didn't sound particularly impressed.
"Because you deserve to know," I replied simply. "Also, making sure some spot-on analysis doesn't happen to the report you kick upstairs."
He grunted, as if such a thing was too much work for him. "Noted. Umbrans talked to you." His period-questions were holding out in style. Had to admire the man's consistency.
"It wasn't a talk on my end, but sure. The damn thing was made of necrochalcum. They gave me less than a thousandth of what it was worth, told me to be happy, and snaffled it up all mysterious-like."
"About what a high-end HK bot is worth," he noted, and I had to smile.
"That is true." Keeping up appearances and all. Ah, well, there was more money out there. "Got any more light jobs for me that stay high? I've got things to make." And more people to recruit. Trindi was already wondering if it would be okay to come Downspire to train more effectively, and get into a career that didn't mean catering to wealthy snobs and drunks. She'd rather be one of the wealthy snobs and drunks. From there it was a step to inviting some of her friends in to be part of this, and then getting into more active work...
It went without saying that the boys were attracting attention after what they'd done to Sharkey's men, too. Other young lads who didn't want to end up cannon fodder in turf wars or pushing pills for the zwilniks were making inquiries...
My Queen considered me for a moment, reading deeper. "There's always Termite work somewhere, but extermination jobs come in waves. If you want steady employment, you need to seek alternatives."
"The Backlog isn't endless," I agreed. "I am working on alternate sources of income." But of course, the Backlog was freaking huge... which meant a good amount of money was tied up in it. And most likely a lot of secrets. Resolving these two files was actually some pretty damn good pay for the time, and knowing more were coming was a Good Thing.
Training had continued full force while I was down below. I'd inherited a few broken jaws and cracked ribs among other bumps and bruises, which healing up. Approved heartily.
He transferred me over a couple light jobs, something for a newbie. I'd had the boys sign up to run jobs, focusing on the area around Habberblok. Practical experience and exposure were all good things.