The contract came in without a sender.
No logo, no syndicate watermark, no favored broker’s cipher burned into the metadata. Just a route, a time window, and a payout figure high enough that it immediately set off every internal alarm Etrius had left. Sigma City contracts were usually loud about who wanted what. Power liked to be seen. Fear liked to be named. This one did neither.
The Mantis idled in a dead zone beneath an elevated freight loop, its engine damped to a low, patient thrum. Sodium lights flickered overhead, washing the concrete in sickly amber bands that slid slowly across the APC’s armored flanks as trains passed above. Oil stains and old scorch marks layered the ground like sedimentyears of abandoned industry pressed into the city’s bones.
Zoey lounged sideways in the driver’s seat, one boot up on the dash, tail draped carelessly across the center console. She was half out of her jacket, rolling her shoulders, the faint whine of servos from her prosthetic arms rising and falling as she stretched. The Titan Vulpes was locked down in its rear cradle, inert but looming even in sleepten feet of red-and-black mass folded in on itself like a resting predator.
Etrius stood outside the vehicle, hood up, cloak pulled close despite the lack of wind. His reflection stared back at him from the Mantis’s matte armortoo tall, too sharp, eyes catching the light wrong. He didn’t like contracts that didn’t bother to lie convincingly.
“Tell me again why this pays more than a district purge,” Zoey said, glancing at the mission overlay projected faintly against the windshield.
“Because whoever owns that facility doesn’t want fingerprints,” Etrius replied. His voice was low, even. “And because they don’t expect resistance.”
Zoey snorted. “Those two things never go together.”
She flicked a switch with one claw, bringing up a schematic of the target: a blocky industrial complex squatting in Sigma City’s old manufacturing ring, half swallowed by newer construction. On paper it looked like a weapons plantautomated lines, hardened vault, layered internal security. In reality, the image kept glitching. Portions refused to resolve cleanly, like the map didn’t quite agree with itself.
Zoey tilted her head. “You seeing that?”
“Yes.”
“Cool,” she said brightly. “Already hate it.”
They rolled out just before dawn, merging into the industrial arteries of the city as shift sirens echoed in the distance. Sigma City never really slept, but it did change posturenight gave way to the heavy, resentful movement of labor and logistics. Cargo haulers, armored trams, security convoys. No one looked twice at a military APC threading through the sprawl. Violence was just another utility here.
The facility revealed itself slowly, not as a single structure but as a wrongness in the landscape. The air around it felt dense, as if sound didn’t want to travel properly. Surveillance pylons rose at uneven intervals, their lenses too dark, too glossy. The perimeter wall was old ferrocrete, patched and repatched, but threaded through with newer veins of something smoother, darkermaterial that drank light instead of reflecting it.
Zoey parked the Mantis in the shadow of a collapsed loading gantry and killed the engine. Silence settled in, broken only by the distant grind of machinery and the soft tick of cooling metal.
Etrius studied the wall. “No patrol rhythm.”
Zoey craned her neck, squinting. “No birds either.”
That gave him pause. Sigma City always had birds. Even the wrong onesmutated, cyber-tagged, half-feral things that nested in exhaust vents and fed off trash heat. The air here was empty.
“Alright,” Zoey said, cracking her knuckles. “You want quiet, or do you want fast?”
“Quiet,” Etrius said automatically.
She grinned, sharp and unapologetic. “I’ll try.”
He vaulted the wall without a sound, cloak dissolving into shadow as he landed inside the perimeter. The ground beyond was unnervingly cleanno debris, no weeds, no sign of long-term neglect despite the age of the structure. Embedded lights traced the paths between buildings, glowing faintly blue-white, not quite industrial standard. The color made his fur itch.
Inside the Mantis, Zoey watched his signal ghost across her HUD, then sighed theatrically.
“Five minutes,” she muttered to herself. “I give him five.”
Etrius moved through the outer structures like a rumor. Cameras died before they could register interference. Locks parted at a touch. The place was automated, yesbut lazily so, as if the systems expected obedience rather than intrusion. Guards existed, but they stood wrong, posture too rigid, movements delayed by fractions of a second that didn’t read as human fatigue.
He dropped one silently and frowned at the body. The armor was standard Sigma issue, but the internal bracing was not. Too dense. Too integrated. The man’s eyes were open, glassy, unfocusednot dead so much as unplugged.
Etrius didn’t like that either.
By the time Zoey breached the wall, it was less of an infiltration and more of a statement. A section of ferrocrete simply folded inward with a muted thunderclap as she shoved through, the reinforced plating cracking like old bone. Alarms should have screamed.
They didn’t.
Instead, lights shifted. The blue-white glow deepened toward cyan, washing the interior corridors in a cold, aquatic hue. Symbols rippled briefly across the wallsgeometric, recursive patterns that slid out of existence when Zoey blinked.
“Hey, Etz,” she said over comms, tone light but edged. “Your ‘quiet’ is being weird.”
“I see it.”
Turrets unfolded from ceiling recesses as she advanced, their barrels tracking her mass with unsettling smoothness. They hesitated, micro-adjusting, as if recalculating assumptions.
Zoey didn’t give them time to finish.
The first rocket turned the corridor into a collapsing throat of fire and debris. The blast wave rolled back over her armor, rattling teeth she didn’t have to worry about anymore. She laughed onceshort, sharpand pushed forward through the smoke, rounds tearing through machinery that felt less like steel and more like brittle ceramic when it broke.
Etrius slipped past the chaos, deeper into the facility. The vault sat at its heart, a perfect cylinder of seamless black material sunk into the floor like a tumor. No visible interface. No keyway. Just a faint internal pulse, slow and steady, like a heartbeat.
The closer he got, the more the air hummed.
Zoey arrived seconds later, stepping over wreckage with the casual disdain of someone unimpressed by resistance.
“That door looks expensive,” she said, planting a hand against it experimentally.
“Don’t,” Etrius snapped.
She raised an eyebrow. “Wasn’t gonna. Yet.”
He knelt, pressing his palm to the surface. The material warmed under his touchnot from heat, but from recognition. His implants screamed quietly as unfamiliar protocols brushed against them, testing, retreating, testing again.
“Someone built this to talk,” he murmured.
“To you?” Zoey asked.
“To things like me.”
The vault opened without ceremony. Inside, there was no gold, no weapons, no dramatic prize. Just a single data core suspended in a lattice of light, its surface crawling with the same recursive geometry they’d seen flicker through the halls. As Etrius reached for it, the patterns shiftedaligning, resolving.
Zoey felt it then. Not a sound, not a voice. Pressure. Like a hand closing gently around the inside of her skull, testing the shape of her thoughts and finding them… interesting.
She growled, a low, visceral sound, and the pressure vanished.
“Yeah,” she said flatly. “No.”
Etrius pulled the core free. The facility shuddered, not in alarm but in response, like a creature realizing something vital had been removed. Walls dimmed. Systems hesitated. Somewhere deep below them, something vast adjusted its attention.
They didn’t wait to find out how that adjustment would manifest.
Extraction was violent and fast. The Mantis tore free of the industrial district just as secondary structures began to fold inward, collapsing with surgical precision rather than explosive failure. From the roof hatch, Zoey watched the complex sink into itself, neat as a controlled demolition, leaving behind nothing but smooth, fused slag and a lingering cyan afterimage burned into her retinas.
She dropped back into the cabin, breathing hard.
“Well,” she said after a moment. “That wasn’t normal.”
Etrius stared at the data core resting between them, its surface now inert, patterns dormant but not gone. “No,” he agreed. “It wasn’t.”
The city swallowed them as they drove, Sigma City’s noise and filth rushing back in to fill the absence. But something had shifted. The air felt thinner. The world felt… observed.
Zoey flexed her hands, servos whispering. “You get the feeling,” she said slowly, “that we just rang a doorbell?”
Etrius didn’t answer right away.
“Yes,” he said at last.
The Mantis didn’t slow until they were three districts out.
Sigma City closed over them like nothing had happenedtraffic snarls, flickering signage, the constant background violence that passed for normal. The industrial ring vanished behind concrete and light, swallowed whole. If anyone had been watching from a distance, it would have looked like just another merc contract completed, just another armored vehicle peeling away from a mess it helped create.
Inside the cabin, it was quiet.
The data core sat on the central work surface between them, no longer glowing. No hum, no pulse, no geometric crawl across its surface. Just a dull, opaque object the size of a brick, matte and unassuming, like a piece of slag torn free from a larger machine.
Zoey eyed it sideways while she drove.
“That thing do anything on your end?” she asked.
Etrius shook his head. “It went inert the moment we sealed the rear hatch.”
Zoey frowned slightly. She reached back with one arm, tapped a claw against the core.
Nothing.
She lifted it instead. The moment it cleared the armored lip of the work surfaceno alarms, no warningthe surface shimmered. Lines of faint cyan geometry rippled across it like light through shallow water.
Zoey froze.
“…okay,” she said carefully. “That’s new.”
Etrius leaned forward, eyes narrowing. The patterns weren’t aggressive. They weren’t even fast. They simply existed, sliding over one another in slow, deliberate recursion, as if the object were waking up.
Zoey lowered it back onto the metal surface.
The light died instantly.
She raised it again.
The glow returned.
Once more, she set it down. Dead.
They exchanged a look.
“That’s not shielding,” Etrius said. “That’s suppression.”
Zoey snorted. “Yeah, well, whatever it is, it doesn’t like my ride.”
She didn’t sound amused. The joking edge was gone. This wasn’t curiosity anymoreit was the instinctive irritation of someone realizing they were interacting with a thing that behaved too intentionally for comfort.
She slid the core into a steel storage bin bolted directly into the Mantis’s frame. The glow vanished again, swallowed by layered armor, composite plating, and enough mass to stop tank fire.
For a long moment, neither of them spoke.
Finally, Zoey broke the silence. “This whole job was bullshit.”
“Yes.”
“No client,” she continued. “No cleanup crew. No attempt to stop us once we were inside. Just… watching.”
Etrius’s jaw tightened. “They wanted to see how we’d move. How much force we’d use. Whether we’d take the core or leave it.”
“A test,” Zoey said flatly.
“Of some kind.”
She glanced at the road, then back at the sealed bin behind her. “They get their data either way?”
“Likely,” he said. “But not the outcome they expected.”
That earned a thin, humorless smile from her.
They drove another mile in silence.
Then Zoey reached over, flipped a switch, and brought the Titan Vulpes’ rear compartment online.
The locker hissed open, hydraulics unlocking the restraints. The suit loomed there in the half-light, massive and familiar, its red-and-black plating scarred from years of abuse. Without the core installed, it was inertnothing more than armored weight and memory.
Zoey pulled over beneath a collapsed overpass and killed the engine.
“Nope,” she said, already unbuckling. “I don’t like being part of anyone’s experiment.”
Etrius didn’t argue.
They dragged the steel bin out onto cracked concrete, the city’s distant noise echoing faintly through the hollow space beneath the roadway. Zoey pried it open and hooked the core with two fingers, lifting it clear.
It lit up immediately.
Not brighter than beforebut eager. The patterns moved faster now, reacting to proximity, to exposure. Zoey felt that same faint pressure behind her eyes again, testing, brushing, retreating the moment she tensed.
She bared her teeth.
“Yeah,” she muttered. “Definitely no.”
The Titan’s restraints disengaged with a heavy clunk. Zoey climbed in without ceremony, sealing the armor around herself. Systems flickered to life on auxiliary power, enough to move, enough to act.
She stepped out of the Mantis’s shadow and planted one massive foot directly over the core.
For half a second, nothing happened.
Then the patterns flaredsharp, frantic, no longer smooth. The pressure spiked, sudden and ugly, like fingers digging in where they didn’t belong.
Zoey brought her heel down.
The core shattered.
Not explosively. Not violently. It fractured like tempered glass struck at exactly the wrong angle, collapsing inward with a sharp, crystalline crack. Light bled out of the fragments and vanished mid-air, as if it had never existed at all.
Silence followed.
No shockwave. No backlash. No retaliation.
Just debris.
Zoey ground her foot once more for emphasis, reducing the shards to dull, lifeless splinters, then stepped back. The Titan powered down as she exited, the suit returning to its inert, obedient stillness.
Etrius crouched, studying the remains. Whatever the core had been, it wasn’t anymore.
“Think that ends it?” Zoey asked, stripping off a gauntlet and flexing her fingers.
“No,” he said honestly. “But it ends this part.”
She nodded, accepting that.
They loaded the wreckage into a disposal chute and rolled back onto the road without ceremony, without ceremony, without looking back.
Behind them, Sigma City continued as it always diduncaring, enormous, alive.
And somewhere far beyond it, something noticed the absence.
No comments:
Post a Comment