Completion, A Logical World serial

[Ford Prefect]

That's essentially correct; Babylon's (and as an extension every member of her species) body requires a lot of energy to keep running. Especially considering she probably hasn't eaten for a day.

[Kwizard]

I see..

The truth was in eating. As a posthuman, Babylon was physically superior in every conceivable way to her genetic forebears, like Vittoria. However, the amount of food she consumed in one sitting would have fed Vittoria for a week.

15,000 calories in one meal maybe? .. that's still quite a bit of energy - unless you were only making a hyperbole.

[bilateralrope]

Considering how much energy she must of expended during the fighting, I'm not suprised she needs to eat a lot.

[Ford Prefect]

It's a little bit of hyperbole, but essentially true. Posthumans have a lot going on inside that needs lots of food; nanomachines and biological whatsits and such.

[Ford Prefect]

Another update! A faster, smaller one too, but that's how it goes. I hope you find it good to digest; yet more of that crazy crazy language too.

Completion

Act One: A Town Called Wolfram

Chapter Six


Clariana Babylon tapped her earring terminal and the lock on the door in front of her clicked open. When she opened the cupboard doors, the scent of guns was even stronger. Babylon already had the twelve-gauge shotgun she had taken from Vittoria; amusingly its shells had a winged hippopotamus pressed into the brass. Sitting smugly in its rack was some bolt-action rifle, which Babylon eagerly snatched out. She examined it and smirked.

“What are you doing?” Vittoria asked from behind her.

Babylon held up a battered looking scope and peered through; it was in just about perfect working order. “I’m arming myself.” The Knight replied, and left it at that. No need to explain that when it came down to it, she didn’t have that much in the way of ammunition. However, Vittoria’s father did. Boxes of the stuff; shotgun shells filled with buckshot and solid lumps of metal; sharp-nosed rifle bullets and stumpy broad handgun slugs.

“Arming yourself?” Vittoria repeated as Babylon set the hunting rifle down by the shotgun. She returned to the gun cupboard and produced a holstered revolver. Vittoria drew up beside her as she examined the weapon, clipping a kind of infinity sight to the frame. “How did you even get in? I locked the cupboard.” Babylon shrugged, making a stack of ammunition boxes six high and carrying it over to the table.

“Maybe you didn’t lock it, and just thought you did. Perceptual fallibility.”

Rafken Ghandi snorted as Babylon went about checking each bullet. “Do you have chargers?” she asked Vittoria without looking up, who replied they she did. Babylon sent her to fetch them then start loading rifle bullets onto them.

It was mechanical work; check the round, put it aside; load it into the stripper clip. Babylon expanded pouches from her belt and started stacking her ammunition by type and purpose. The weapons were pulled apart, the components cleaned, and then put back together again. The names were unfamiliar, though Babylon knew the calibres quite well; the rifle was chambered for a nasty .338 – rather close to being ten centimetres long. The revolver was bigger still, all business and dead killy. Sure, they weren’t what she’d call impressive, but she had no doubt that it would be sufficient, even against the superhuman survivability of the Wolframites.

Holding up one of the eleven millimetre wide revolver bullets and seeing her face reflected in the dull brass of the jacket, she knew that it would be useless against Guadaña-sai. With that annoying swarm of tiny compression engines, it could slow down a projectile's velocity to nothing. Assuming it wasn't showing off and simply knocking them out of midair. Babylon had to admit that the only reason she wasn't dead was because for whatever reason, the reaper had decided to bring itself down to her level.

It bothered her.

Ignoring the momentary doubt, Babylon stood up and surveyed the table full of weapons. Vittoria had placed down some automatic pistol that Babylon had seen on her belt when they had first run into each other, and the Knight finally added her own weapon to the array. She sat it in the middle, as befitted the pistol. Vittoria cocked her head at Babylon as she stared a hole through the table before turning to the Berretta. She reached out and picked it up, turning it over in her hands. She looked at a tiny lens at the barrel, and sighted down the slide.

“This is a nice gun,” she said, placing it back down.

“See?” Rafken-Ghandi chirped, “She thinks it's a good weapon.”

“I suppose.” Babylon replied, eliciting an audible scowl from Rafken-Ghandi. She stood and began attaching her pouches of shells to her belt. As Babylon pulled her shoulder holster on she asked “You've been around these parts for a long time now, right?” Vittoria nodded “So you've probably gotten quite good at avoiding whatever patrols they have to have.”

“I am not coming with you.” Vittoria replied, suddenly defiant.

“Actually, you are.” Babylon smiled, using her sweetest possible voice. She tapped Vittoria's head with the shotgun “You can get about with minimal fuss. I like minimal fuss.”

“Do you know how many Wolframites there actually are? Thousands.”

Vittoria whirled around, brought off her chair by some indiscernible force. She found herself with Babylon's arms firmly locked around her. “Please,” she crooned, “I'm far scarier than any amount of these crazed farmers.” She craned her head around and looked Vittoria in the eye. Grey-green met cobalt blue and Babylon spoke “You'll be fine. I'll watch out for you.”

Eyes locked shut, Vittoria relented, body loosening and slumping against Babylon.

“That's the spirit!” Babylon clapped, pushing the girl away and grabbing for her poncho.

*

Human though she was, Vittoria could move. From a very young age she had been an outdoors kind of girl, and had learned under her father, and no finer master would there have been in all of Madris. More than that, over three years of foraging through a forest infested by murderous men, women and children had left her with a startling knowledge of how not to get noticed. Babylon probably could gotten to Wolfram Proper faster on her own, but Vittoria's trail lead to a much quieter area. The girl pointed, and Babylon pulled out Old Torquemaeder's rifle. She twiddled with a knob on the side of the scope, and found the area more or less devoid of life. She glanced over at Vittoria, who tried to explain that the ring of farms had staggered harvests. In this part, there was no harvest, so there was a lower concentration of Wolframites.

Babylon suspected that there was something very wrong with that idea, as Vittoria made it sound as though the did this all year round; crops didn't work like that with communities with this level of technological know-how. The agricultural impossibilities weren't important, however. Babylon instead decided that using this low concentration of force to her advantage was paramount. Playing with her glasses, Babylon got a total of eight thermal signatures within the house below. One was leaving the house, and Babylon surveyed him through the magnification of her glasses. Vittoria had no idea what she was doing, apart from staring strangely into the farm below.

Casting about for a moment, Babylon wrapped her fingers around the comfortable edges of a stone. There was a pause only of a moment, and the stone bounced off the farmer's head. He rubbed at his temple, and then noticed the stone nearby, stooping for it. Examining the rock, the farmer looked over to the tree line, walking away from the house. He peered for a moment and locked gazes with Babylon. She exhaled and squeezed the trigger.

A dark tunnel replaced his eye, and the farmer fell to his knees, clutching at his face. They could hear his howling from where they sat, though it was drowned out briefly by Babylon expending the spent brass. The other inhabitants began to emerge from the house; women in greasy, torn dresses men in battered suspenders. Another one of those filthy, gaunt children. They crowded around the squirming form of Babylon's first victim; one of the men kneeling by him suddenly slumped to the side, his brains splattered across someone else's face.

They all turned to look at the approaching women as Babylon worked the action on her rifle. Vittoria stood a little behind her, hands curled tightly around the grip of a pistol for comfort. The farmers were muttering, and Babylon punctuated their words with booming rifle shots. The sprinting Wolframites paid her fire no heed, even though two were dropped by shots that destroyed their knees; the last round in the chamber tore open the throat of another. The blood spurting from her carotid artery didn't seem to bother her.

The impact of the stock of the rifle did, especially considering it crumpled her face into a bloody ruin. But while Babylon dealt swiftly and brutally with the adults left, the child launched it self at Vittoria.

To her credit, she quite nearly hit it several times, though its weaving lunges threw off her aim. It leapt for Vittoria, who caught the child on her arm, hitting the ground under its weight. Matted locks of hair swung about its face as it reached for Vittoria. Even in her desperation she wasn't nearly strong enough; the child opened its mouth and bit down. Her hand spasmed, and she beat down on its head with her handgun, before pushing the barrel against its head and pulling the trigger. The little monster reared away, tatters of Vittoria's flesh and clothing stuck between its teeth. A falling boot picked the kid up and flung it almost thirty metres away, broken in two.

Babylon peeled Vittoria's hand away from her arm, and pulled the torn, reddened sleeve up. Blood seeped from dark half-circles punctured into Vittoria's flesh. Babylon frowned and pulled at her poncho, taking a long strip of it off, and wrapping it around the wound. The smart fabric tightened and hardened, stemming the flow of blood out of her body.

“That's a real special poncho you've got there.” Vittoria murmured, lifted to her feet while still staring at the makeshift bandage.

“Not really.” Babylon replied, seizing her by the wrist and dragging her away.

*

Certainly, Wolfram as a town was not a desolate sight. It was quiet, however, especially so for Babylon. She had lived much of her life in a city that teemed with the sounds of trillions going about their lives. Here was a town where most buildings were squat, single story affairs made of stones in six shades of boring. Compared to her soaring towers of multi-coloured glass, Wolfram was a slum.

But Babylon's experiences of architecture made her a poor judge. Wolfram might not have built objects that defied several physical laws, but they could design. The entire town was circular, and each street was laid out perfectly, so that from the air Wolfram would possess a perfectly symmetrical pattern of concentric circles, all radiating out from the central hill and the house atop it. The style of the town, from the houses to the church to the gigantic clock tower under construction, seemed so much older than the plastered constructs of Aascalada. Wolfram really was a blast from the past on Dumont.

“I can’t see anyone.” Babylon said finally.

“They’re probably mostly in church. It’s Thursday afternoon.” Vittoria replied, picking at her nails “Where do you want to head to?” Babylon tapped her chin and pointed towards the manor house looming over the town. Vittoria raised her eyebrows. “Wulf Manor? Do you think the mayor or his brother are behind this?”

Babylon shrugged “I don’t think they’re the cause, though they know about it.”

Walking through the empty town was somewhat disconcerting. No one walked the streets; there were no shadows behind the glass of windows facing the road. No children played in the parks dispersed through their path. In the distance one could hear a mumbling, the chanting of worshippers at a service for the Merciful Maker. As they went on, Vittoria drew closer to Babylon, even though there seemed to be no immediate danger. They pulled into the shadow of what appeared to be a police station as they approached an open, paved space. There were people here, mingling and chatting. Some sort of Town Square.

The differences between the townspeople and farmers were great. Where the farmers were unkempt and dirty, these people were well dressed, their skin clear of dirt, food and gore. The men often sported well-trimmed facial hair instead of the raggedly growing stubble of the farmers; the women wore makeup. The children even seemed fed, as opposed to frighteningly wiry. Babylon the shotgun’s strap off of her shoulder, catching it as it fell.

“Scusileer las señoras.” Said a voice from behind, and they whirled around, coming face to face with a local policeman. He was standing very close, and Vittoria squeaked, grabbing a hold of Babylon. For one very long moment, he looked down at them both and then tipped his hat, smiling “Stato caza, parece het. Misser, creo de Burgemeester quisiera vederlo.”

“Pardon?” Babylon said, though the officer went on, telling her that they could find the mayor in the town hall. With that, he tipped his hat again, and walked off, whistling. Babylon and Vittoria watched him go then looked at each other. Babylon’s arms tightened around Vittoria “That was very strange,” she breathed “and yet helpful at the same time.”

They were not attacked, as Babylon had expected, some people looked them over curiously, but there were no knife wielding madwomen or men with pitchforks eager for her blood. The children were children, and were even playing with a football. When it came her way Babylon trapped it under her foot. The owner in his Thursday best stopped a few metres away and looked up at her; Vittoria shied away, involuntarily clutching at her arm. Babylon waited a moment then flicked the ball into the air, catching it on her forehead. It wobbled and she tossed it back to the boy, who laughed. When they made it to the town hall, which Vittoria remembered from trips into Wolfram years before, they were waved inside.

The big room was empty but for the rows and rows of seats all set around a space at the middle, and a single figure sitting ahead. The double doors swung shut behind them.

“Good afternoon, madams.” Said the figure, standing up and turning to face them. He stood tall, as tall as Babylon herself. He was dressed most finely; his waistcoat was of dark red silk, his jacket and trousers night black. His creases were knife-sharp. He rested his hands atop of a black cane; there was a ring upon one finger, shaped like the head of a wolf, with twin emeralds for eyes. More than that, he had hair to kill for. Had Babylon not known that she was going to meet with Mayor Zacharias Wulf, she would have known that this man was he.

“Your lordship.” Babylon curtsied with her poncho and Vittoria hid herself behind the Knight “I'm so happy to finally meet you. I've been given such a warm welcome to your beautiful town.”

“I'm glad, Miss Babylon. I wouldn't want such an esteemed guest to go without sufficient hospitality.” Wulf ran his hand over his scalp “Our benefactors did ask us to make you feel at home in our quaint little village. I could not refuse such a request.”

“Well you can tell them you're doing a great job.”

“You'll be able to tell them yourself; you too, Miss Torqumaeder.” Vittoria pulled herself closer to Babylon's back.

“No more attempted murder then?” Babylon asked, pushing Vittoria back and unholstering her Berretta. She levelled it squarely at Wulf's forehead.

“For the time being at least. Our benefactors reacts to you, after all; whether we are allowed to kill you or not depends on how you act.” Wulf shrugged “I've been asked to capture you, and that's what I'll do. I would much rather kill you, however. My brother would rather not.”

“How considerate of him and them and you.” Babylon replied “But I think you'll fi-”

She was cut off by the Mayor's cane whistling into her face. Babylon's gun went off and blew a considerable hole into the far wall, while steel-trap hands fastened round her wrist and throat. Her weapon clattered against the floor, while she herself was lifted bodily, her feet kicking at the height of Wulf's knees. He tossed her across the room, sending her through chairs, smashing them to matchwood. Vittoria stepped away, pulling out her handgun, but Wulf had droped her to the floor before she could even get her gun up.

“I have been told,” Wulf called as he strode towards where Babylon was pulling herself to her feet “That you can withstand sevre trauma before falling unconscious.” he explained “I was given a series of interesting figures regarding how much you could probably take before blacking out.” Babylon whipped out Old Torqumaeder's shotgun, raising it to her shoulder. She knew that she had buckshot loaded, and Wulf was too far away for it. “However, I do know that you can go under. I fully intend for that to take place.”

Babylon got off three shots, though only one hit Wulf; fully in the face at close range. His momentum knocked her to the ground, and she was stuck looking up his face, pockmarked by the spread of shot. He was grinning, and his blow drove her through the floor. Black spots danced in front of her eyes, and she could see him stand up. His foot eclipsed everything.

[Kwizard]

Our posthuman friend seems to have endured quite a few beatings lately.

I await the next chapter.

[Ford Prefect]

OH MY GOD HE'S UPDATED!

Well readers, I finally managed to get it together. It's been awhile, I know. Two weeks or so bereft of Completion. But it's back. And frankly I'm not sure about this chapter. It didn't flow as well as some of the others, though I have at least attempted a little bit of work on who Clariana Babylon is as she strides to greater feats and limitless frustration (a reflection of me during the writing). Anyway, I hope you don't mind it too much.

Completion

Act One: A Town Called Wolfram

Chapter Seven


“I am not happy with leaving her alive.”

“We all have our orders.”

“These orders are flawed.”

Clariana Babylon’s whole body, from the tips of her toes to the tip of her nose, felt as though it had been submerged in ice. Saliva trickled from the corner of her mouth, and through half-lidded eyes she could see two pairs of feet. One pair was encased in soft-looking black leather dress shoes, the other in a set of heavily set, multi-clasped boots. The dress shoes were tapping almost impatiently, sending vibrations across to her numbed face; vibrations that on another day she’d have felt. Every so often, her vision would fail her, and she’d blank out.

But it would come back, and she would hear the two sets of feet speaking again. Dress Shoes was still complaining to Boots.

“And what do you intend to do with her? She’s dangerous. She should be killed.”

“Certainly. However, this is a proving test we can use; the Wolframites haven’t had a test like this before.”

“A test that kills them in their dozens? Are you mad!?” Dress Shoes took a step forward though boots didn’t move.

“They’ll adapt, they’ll learn, they’ll get better. It’s what they do after all.” Boots turned away from Dress Shoes (Babylon was slowly getting her brain to identify his as Mayor Wulf, but in its drugged state wasn’t managing it) and started to take steps towards where Babylon lay “But to assuage your fears, we’ll move her out to Tasdua with the girl. They’re better equipped to keep her under control.”

A hand seized her by the chin and pulled her face up. Through the haze of the sedative she could see a bearded face and a ponytail. Eyes too that sent a burst of recognition through her addled brain. Boots patted her cheek, though she didn’t feel it. She slipped under again, and when she awoke, she was somewhere else. She could see rough wood slats, a canvas wall and Vittoria lying opposite. There was dried blood on her face, and she looked quite soundly unconscious. There were legs behind Vittoria, and occasionally the whole scene would jump. There was a rumbling too – she had to be in some sort of truck.

There was a voice too “Clariana.” It was saying “Fabricator rust it all, Clariana! How could you let yourself get taken like that? I don’t know whether you’re still wearing your terminal or not, so I have no idea if-” and she was gone again. When she returned, the canvas wall of the truck was gone, replaced with a window. Her head was angled so that she could see out at the pink sky. There were men; one at some sort of wheel, another with her own shotgun. The voice was there too “…lasses weren’t blocked I could actually see where you are. They’re moving you north, that’s really all I know, and it annoys me. If you don’t make up soon I’m going to demolish that town with my bare hands.”

The voice was punctuated by the sound of something very large hitting a body of water. She was on a boat? The coxswain laughed and chattered something in that stupid, stupid language.

“It’s feeding time?”

And she was gone again. With what seemed like no time passing, she was back in the land of the living. She felt cold, but this seemed internal. Babylon quirked her face, then twitched. Feeling was returning to her extremities and she sat up “Rafken?” she asked quietly, but there was no reply. Rolling backwards, she pulled her bound hands over her legs, feeling at the lobes of her ears. Her earrings, and thus her terminal, were gone. She thumped the stone floor beneath her and sent up a cloud of pulverised rock. Babylon stared at her bonds; they had the oily grey look of memory-moulded buckycarbon. No lock to pick, and far too strong to even consider snapping. If she had her terminal she could have made it unravel with the built in force effector. Obviously she didn’t have that luxury.

Rolling onto her back again, Babylon leaped to her feet. The room was small, damp, and bare. On one side was a flat metal door, and opposite that was a barred window. Babylon pulled her face up to bars and looked out. The bars would have come off easily enough, though not even a little thing like Vittoria would have fit through the space it would have revealed, let alone Babylon. Not that she particularly wanted to swim through the choppy seas fifty metres below. She could have, but she didn’t want to. The meant the door.

Tapping it, she guessed there to be forty millimetres of steel making up the door. It might have had an older mechanical lock once upon a time, but now it had a more modern effector lock, likely wired up to some sort of security system if it was broken. Instead, Babylon turned to the hinges and struck at them, leaving indentations that she could grab. The Knight pulled and peeled the door away, bending the thick steel like paper, leaving the lock connected.

In the hallway, there was a camera smoothly making rounds of the hallway. As it turned away, Babylon skidded to a halt beneath it. Craning her head up, she watched it rotate back around and sprinted past the dark steel doors. She paused at corner and peaked around the edge. Another camera, rolling back towards her position; again she halted in its blind spot, and moved on again.

Babylon opened a door and stepped through into a monitoring room. Screens lined one wall, and a Wolframite stood with his back to her. On one hip was a handgun, in one hand was a cracked and dirty mug. Though her entry was quiet, the prison guard heard her, and twisted about. The cup fell towards the ground, and the guard reached for his gun, drawing it free before the mug had shattered against the floor. He placed Babylon within the sights of the gun and squeezed the trigger, but found the bullet breezing past her. She didn't give the Wolframite a chance to get another bead on her; and instead crossed the room and took his head off. Babylon freed his gun from his tottering body before immediately scrounging for more ammunition, stuffing it into one pocket.

The screens along one side of the wall showed views of a dozen different hallways looking almost identical. There was another guard making his rounds of the prison; he looked perturbed, glancing up at the cameras he passed. Babylon smirked, then left the room, passing the coffee machine spilling its hot brown contents out onto the floor.

Shafts of light shed illumination from the tops of tall towers, scrawling their way across squat, clustered buildings of uniform brown stone. Babylon could see Wolframites on patrol, rifles cradled easily in their arms. Babylon frowned, noting that they wore some kind of body armour, and tough looking helmets. The Wolframites were suddenly soldiers, though soldiers that could do better when it came to looking uniform. Babylon tapped her new found weapon against her thigh, and backed up against the wall opposite the prison.

“Fly low, sweet Babylon” she told herself, craning her neck up. She leapt and her toes, encased in her boots, bent against the sandstone wall. Even as she began slip downward, Babylon crouched and pushed away. She turned end over end, finally hooking her heels against the edge of the smaller building. Visible only for a moment, Babylon flung herself to the roof of the prison; one hand snagged the precipice of the roughly cut building and she skid across fifteen metres of rooftop. The whole movement hadn't lasted very long, but Babylon still breathed a quiet sigh of relief. So long as one of the Wolframites in the watchtowers didn't get the sudden, bright idea to swing a spotlight over her position, she'd be fine.

Rubbing the bridge of her nose, Babylon tried to squeeze out her hazy memories after she had been sedated. The man with the ponytail and boots really did seem familiar, as though she'd met him before; maybe a long time ago. As it stood, she didn't quite mind that she couldn't remember either way; finding out was one of the more enjoyable portions of her job. She wondered for a moment why she'd been left alive; to be a test seemed somewhat unlikely. Either way, it had been lucky she hadn't just been killed. But in what twisted reality was a shotgun useless? That just wasn't on.

And poor little Vittoria. Babylon had a feeling that she wasn't in the prison below, but somewhere else on this island. Whoever was behind this all had some use for Vittoria, as though the girl was special in some way. Whatever way that was, Babylon didn't know. It could have been genetic or mental, but Babylon hadn't thought to scan her. Of course, considering they way the Wolframites acted, Babylon suspected something special about Vittoria's genetic makeup. When she had her earring terminal back, and Vittoria herself, she was going to make sure to check her out.

If she could find her. It wasn't a small complex, a veritable fortress drenched in buildings and watchtowers and undoubtedly underground caverns. Babylon sighed and rubbed at her temples.

Looking away from the fortress island, out at the horizon. The clouds above flashed a blue colour and Babylon's eyebrows arched. Lights danced in the distance for almost half a minute. The light show ended as suddenly as it had begun and Babylon remembered some silly rumour of a ghost ship; the sea was certainly that far out.

A ghost ship is though, Babylon reflected silently.What to do? She needed her earring terminal back, and her Berretta and really, here was probably one of the best places to investigate the happenings the valley. It was obviously heavily entwined with the upper echelons of whatever plot controlled the Wolframites. All she needed was to find an important looking building and infiltrate; which would be as simple as breathing. It wasn't as if they had much of a chance to stop her if she tried. They might have been able to sustain more physical punishment than Babylon, but they couldn't dish it out.

After all, wasn't she their evolutionary superior? No, that wasn't strong enough; she was the end result of six thousand years of making evolution obsolescent with a hundred thousand years worth of technological expertise! For all their superiority to their brethern, the Wolframites were merely proto-human, transhuman. They might have shared outward similarites, but aesthetics was the only thing they had in common. Babylonwas stronger, faster, smarter.

“Just plain better.” she said quietly to herself and sighed. It was nice, quite frankly.

Babylon raised her head to look down at one of the guard towers, then rolled herself to her feet. In a crouch, she drew in a deep lungfull of air before taking off in a sprint.

At full tilt, Babylon was fast. Her feet would scrape against the sandstone rooftops briefly and propel her forward ten metres a stride. The super-tough soles of her boots grinded away the top levels of stone, leaving shallow impressions and clouds of yellow-brown dust. Babylon, with all the grace of highly practised professional, skipped along the rooftops like a stone across water. She was almost seen a half dozen times but the operative word was 'almost'; she ignored the soldiers on their patrols and focussed purely on her objective. A guard tower. Her plan, if you wished to call it that, was to hop, skip, and then jump on to it. The main problem which she had noticed was that to manage this feet she need to leap almost eight times her own height.

Details. She snapped to herself, springing to the tall, narrow spine of the watchtower. There was a guard turning around, watching the turn of his automated searchlight. The idea was to land feet first there, but that failed miserably. Instead Babylon hit the wall four metres short. The Knight scrabled her feet against the stone and climbed as well she could, almost bug-like up the side of the tower. Movement was key, she told herself and if she stopped she would fall. It was a long drop too. It wouldn't kill her, but no one wanted to fall thirty metres.

Her fingers wrapped around the edge of the tower and she sighed happily, hauling herself up. Her forehead bumped into something cold, hard and metallic and Babylon turned her eyes up at the Wolframite. His mouth spilt into a predatory smile, showing his poorly maintained teeth. Babylon quirked her mouth and was picked up by the hair, pulled easily inside. The soldier, keeping his gun firmly focussed on her head, reached for the handgun in Babylon's belt; in return Babylon snapped his gun-arm and snapped his head around. He fell backwards, and ended up looking down at the floor. Babylon bent over and smiled.

“That looks painful.” she said.

She couldn't stay here, she knew. Eventually the hapless guard's replacment would come to replace him on watch, so Babylon would have to kill him too. Someone would notice that soldiers weren't coming back and get suspicious of the tower. It could take on a sudden dark air about; the tower of death as such. A place where -

Babylon stopped her imagination from running away with that tangent. Finished with looting the guards body, she headed down the stairs. She still didn't know where to go; what she needed was some sort of prisoner. From her short time on the tower, she had a rough map of the island in her head. Parts of, anyway.

Peeking her head out the door, she watched for soldiers on their rounds, then dashed across the open courtyard.

*

Kneading her eyes with her knuckles, Babylon crouched frustrated in the shadows. The sky had lightened in the long hours she had been crossing Tasdua, looking for something – anything – useful. So far, all she'd managed to find were rooms and rooms of nothing.

Where she was at now, however, was roughly the centre of the island. She eyed a juicy looking building only a block or so over, the most modern looking, the most important. She had a feeling that that was the building that she wanted to head into, and that was the new plan. It wasn't exactly what she'd call a professional choice, but she had literally no leads and no indication of anything in the slightest. Babylon glanced quickly round the corner, pulled away then quickly looked back.

A small group of Wolframites were moving across the yard, and with them they hauled a much cleaner man. “Lombardi?” Babylon breathed, watching the detective squirm against the grip of his captors. Pulling away, she bit a knuckle. What was he doing here? Undoubtedly he had been snooping around, and had been taken. And he had been snooping around because she'd been snooping around. That was ironic, and also highly annoying. It was something though and by this point Babylon was willing to jump on anything. She followed, as they lead the way into a path between two buildings..

The Wolframites knew something was wrong when one of the men holding onto Lombardi stumbled away with a triplicate of bullets sunk into the base of his skull. They responded to this action by whirling around and opening fire with eerie speed and precision. Automatic rifles beat out a tatoo of deafening death, but there was no one there. Fire from above landed the remaining bullets in the clip into the face of one Wolframite and unlike the first, this one dropped for good. Feet first, Babylon landed on the shoulders of the foremost Wolframite. She spun and emptied her new clip toward the remaining three soldiers, four nine millimetre bullets each, straight to the face. One died, the others stumbled. They took only a few moments to recover, but in those few moments, they found Babylon far too close for comfort. One of the remaining soldiers only cleared his head to find Babylon's boot hit him like a thunderbolt, smashing teeth from his gums and sending him careening into a wall. The other raised his rifle. She threw her handgun into his bleeding face, knocking him backward. Her final act was to break his neck as well, using his own weapon to do it.

Lombardi blinked slowly as Babylon dusted her hands off. His eyelids felt like lead shutters, and there was blood on his face. He surveyed the scene as Babylon approached: the leader appeared to have his head almost twisted off, and there was a man with his head in a wall – blood was running out of the crater. When Babylon (or as he knew her, Brookeson) approached, he jumped backwards. The detective leveled his finger at Babylon's face.

“What in the inferno was that?!” he screeched.

“An on the fly rescue.” Babylon replied, picking up one of the assault rifles lying limply by their former owners. She cocked her head and grabbed his outstretched wrist “Which was just a little too loud. Shall we go?”

[Kwizard]

Ah, it's good to see Babylon twisting some more heads off - doubly so on a Friday like this.

Keep it up, Ford.

[Ford Prefect]

Okay, wow. This one took me a long time to write, but that's more because it's longer than normal. Without further ado:

Completion

Act One: A Town Called Wolfram

Chapter Eight


Clariana Babylon had to admit that whatever the Wolframites were, they were certainly punctual. She and Lombardi were lucky to avoid being caught out in the open by gaggles of dirty, angry looking men. As soldiers fanned out, their prey disappeared into a non-descript building through a window Babylon forced open. Lombardi went through first, and when Babylon swung herself over the sill, she slumped against the wall. Her head lolled.

“Are you alright?” Lombardi voiced anxiously, kneeling before her.

Babylon hugged the assault rifle she had stolen and moaned softly “I'm so hungry.” Lombardi's eyebrows twitched and he shifted uncomfortably. The woman looked expectantly at the detective and he had to shake his head when she asked if he had anything “They had food, you know. But it wasn't exactly appetising. At least no one here is as bad as Barend.” she pushed herself onto her haunches and shuffled away “My appetite is not sated by rotting food. Not at all.” She glanced behind to Lombardi “I mean I’ve eaten food that’s been kept at near-spoil, just to be soft. And I know insects have lots of protein, but that’s just not on.” She shuddered and moved on “What’s worse was it didn’t even taste like anything. At least it was moist, but I think that was-“

“Could you perhaps not?” Lombardi asked, hand on his stomach “Why are you worried about food? More to the point, who are you?”

Turning her head back again she said: “You’re not going to believe ‘Marshal from the United – sorry, Unified – Concordiat of Calican’ by any chance?”

“Not in the slightest.”

A pause hung between them and Babylon made a popping sound “Well, that’s somewhat more believable than the truth, so let’s go with that.” Before he could protest he was being left behind.

The building had the look of an old office block and Babylon guessed that it had once been administration for the island. The room through which they entered still had some indications that it was such, with the frames of cubicles and bulky typewriters sitting neatly in the geometric. However, much of it appeared to be abandoned in favour of the newer building. Dust clung to desks and chairs and a pedal-powered printing press. Everything appeared to have been locked in state; except for the dust, there was no indication of decay – there was unused and unmarred paper sitting in typing machines. It was like a preserving stasis field, though she dismissed it before it even took full hold in her imagination. Certainly it would be odd if they weren’t using such technology to keep food fresh.

When they found filing cabinets on the second floor, they found them to be empty, devoid of files. As Babylon went through each and every drawer, muttering; Lombardi stopped after only a few, and looked out one window set into the wall. Through it he could see another office, looking more modern. In the midday warmth, someone had left the window open; there was an office there, something new.

“I guess all the other files must have been moved into the new building.” Lombardi remarked. Babylon’s hand came down on his shoulder and his knees buckled. His palms stung when he came down on them.

“That’s genius Michael.” She mused, walking towards the window “Look at that. Perfectly in line. It’s only ten metres and I can jump that in my sleep.”

Rubbing his hands together, Lombardi shook his head “That’s … impressive. But I can’t jump that; I was more of a high jump kind of guy.” He chuckled quietly at his own joke, but when he looked up he found Babylon eyeing him, tugging at her lip.

“That’s fine,” she flung the window open “I’ll just toss you.”

Lombardi took a step back as Babylon advanced “Toss me? What?” her reply involved taking him by the collar and belt and flinging him out the window. The detective sailed through into the new office and came down on a long desk, sliding across it and knocking paper and writing implement aside. He came to a halt and looked to his left. A pair of Wolframites were pushing themselves out of their seats. When he looked the other way, he found one standing over him, string tie pushed tight up to his grubby collar. He looked extremely disgruntled at having some man come into his office via the window and he seized Lombardi by the throat, his grip snapping shut like a trap.

As Lombardi clawed at the steel hand and gasped for breath, Babylon stepped through the window and walked up the table. There was a murmur in Madrin and Lombardi focussed at the woman standing above. The Wolframite’s grip redoubled; Babylon’s foot scythed through it, taking it off at the shoulder. The heel came back down onto the office worker’s head, shattering it into an unrecognisable mess of bone and brain. Lombardi rubbed at the red marks on his throat and rolled off the table, coming across Babylon’s fallen victim. He had an unpleasant thought of a watermelon falling from a great height onto a church steeple. The contents of his stomach ended up on the floor, while Babylon reached down and pulled a pen from the dead man’s pocket.

Twirling the prize between her fingers, Babylon watched the two Wolframites circle about. They might have been dressed as paper-pushers – one even wore glasses – she had no doubt that there was inhuman strength and durability in them, and a drive to kill. The pen imbedded it into one eye, almost totally disappearing. Glasses picked up a chair and flung it in return; Babylon caught it and put it down, laughing. She rubbed at her eyes “That’s it? A chair? You can do-” she was cut off by a computer tower hitting her in the face. It crashed to the ground, a fair imprint of her face in its stylish brushed metal side. “Now that’s just low,” the Knight snarled, feeling the inside of her mouth and finding blood “I wasn’t even looking.”

If they cared, they said nothing. The Wolframite with the pen in his head even went so far as to grab a desk and throw it. It approached and Babylon punched her way through it, leaving it in splinters. Advancing quickly, she let the man she had already grievously wounded lunge forward; seizing his head and driving it into her knee with practically explosive force. Spinning, she slumped against Glasses’ chest. Her elbow became suddenly acquainted with his stomach, before she back-fisted into his face, crushing his frames into his skin. Babylon took his face in one hand and took the back of his head to the floor. Everything jumped.

“Has anyone ever told you,” Lombardi began, wiping at his mouth “That you’re a very brutal person, Brookeson?”

“Me? Brutal?” she retorted, snorting. She surveyed the two dead men by her feet and shrugged “It’s not my fault they’re so slow and fragile.”

“What are you?” Lombardi insisted striding forward. He dropped both of his hands onto her shoulders “Tell me Brookeson, because you’re starting to seem less human as time goes on. What are you?”

“Lombardi,” Babylon said calmly, taking his hands away “Settle down. I’m an alien, that’s all.” she smiled sweetly, and then left him standing there, pondering her words.

*

“What do you mean ‘alien’?”

“Look, shut up about it.”

“But-”

“No, seriously.”

So Lombardi closed his mouth and kept quiet. Babylon was peering out the doorway they had dashed into as Wolframites had approached. It was copy room, filled with stacks and stacks of paper and a pair of multi-function machines. There were voices coming from the hall outside, one snapping about loosing two prisoners in quick succession. Things like, ‘these men are trained and heavily armed’ and ‘I don’t care if she’s very tall, there’s only one of her’. Lombardi had no doubt that the loud voice belonged to whoever was in charge of this island. He finished with a shout of “Find them!” and quite probably stormed off to his office. Babylon closed the door.

“He’s the one we need to see.” She sighed, sitting on one of the copy machines.

“What do you intend to do?” Lombardi inquired, himself moving towards the door.

“Find,” Babylon paused “Find out what’s behind all this.”

“Aliens, right?”

“Exactly!”

Lombardi rolled his eyes, but he knew somewhere in the back of his skull that humans didn’t commonly twist heads off shoulders. In fact, now that he had finally gotten the motivation to get out to Wolfram, he wasn’t sure he was up to the task of finding out what was wrong. They had taken apart his car with their bare hands. Looking out the doorway, he found the hallway to be clear and told Babylon so. Slipping from the copier and snagging her rifle, she came up by Lombardi, who drew his revolver, taken back from his captors. He led the way out, and headed down the hallway, for the door marked ‘escaler’.

Earlier they had found a series of elevators, though using them would have been dangerous, if quick. Instead, they had trooped up multiple flights of stairs. Again their feet pounded against the lime green linoleum as they climbed one floor upwards. On the landing above, Babylon glanced outside and immediately ducked back in. She saw the administrator leave into what was probably his office. It was times like these that one needed a crisis to get the attention of the boss, something like –

She was cut off by a resounding crash. It made her steal a glance out again, just to see the administrator sprinting down the hall. His office door was lethargically making its way closed. On impulse, Babylon dashed out and caught it before it could seal itself. The boss was well out of sight; they must have discovered some of the dead Wolframites. Both she and Lombardi entered. The change was somewhat dramatic. From well-trodden blue carpet to polished dark floorboards. There was a carved desk and an exotic plant that didn’t belong in Madris. On the desk: a photo in a frame and a pair of telephones. One was a simple, sleek piece of equipment; the other was an ornate device of brass. In one corner there was a cupboard of some sort, which Lombardi went to check.

Babylon herself went to the desk and examined it briefly, before tapping the surface. Hologrammatic windows wrote themselves into the air and she clucked her tongue; the text was in her own language. The administrator was not of her species, that much she knew, however he seemed to be well involved with the outside presence, which made him useful in the extreme. Lombardi walked over and glared at her through the holograms.

“I’ve got nothing. Just clothes.” He watched as Babylon began tapping virtual keys, looking for the password. Her eyes fell on the photo sitting on the desk, a woman with sweat on her forehead and a hoe in one hand. The glass was cracked. Sliding out the colourless picture, Babylon spied a short description of what was happening: My beautiful Quanha after a day on the field. Triumphantly she keyed the name into appropriate field on the login screen; it changed, and showed a simple background with a single icon. Babylon tapped it, bringing up a whole new window doused in folders. Zipping through, one stood out. She opened it.

“What’s it about?” Lombardi asked, staring at the reverse letters. He couldn’t make any sense of the words there, which appeared to be written in some foreign (alien, whispered his mind conspiratorially) style. There seemed to be a few familiar letters, however not enough for him to remotely understand.

“It’s about Tasdua output margins,” Babylon explained “This place is a training ground for soldiers, but …” she paused “It’s not for training the people. They’re referred to as ‘carriers’ when they come up. They’re being used to ‘pattern the project’ or so it says.”

“Pardon me?” Lombardi stared harder at writing on the screen, as though he might make some sense of it. He was quite clearly confused.

“It’s an old, old technique of programming a blank slate to perform some task;” Babylon explained “Like robots. I always heard stories about the earliest patrol mecha. They learnt by experience; theirs or someone else’s. I think they did that with Blank type Genomes, too. It’s not like they’re building an army, though they want the expertise …” Babylon broke off, cocking her head to the side. Her hand flashed to the floating screen, shutting it down. She set the photo back in its frame and vaulted the desk, grabbing Lombardi by the collar, hauling him to the closet in the corner.

The office door burst open and the administrator strode in. He crossed the room and threw himself into his chair, arms crossed. Babylon watched him seethe through a crack she had left open. Like the mayor, he was clean, if hard faced. His eyes searched his desk, before settling on the photo of his wife. His frown changed and he reached for it, only to be cut off by the brass phone ringing. He jumped and snatched handset up. Babylon twitched her ears and heard a voice speaking in her language – and more to the point in what seemed to be a familiar accent.

“Ornez.” Said the voice “I have word that the agent has escaped.”

“She has sir. I have reason to believe that she is in this building. Already I have men sweeping every floor.”

“You have permission to use any assets necessary to kill or capture her.”

“I thought that we had orders to let her live.” Ornez said, suddenly confused, but equally concerned.

“Things change, Administrator. By now you should understand that we deal asymmetrically,” the voice consoled, though it also carried with it the tones of rebuke “She needs to be dealt with. She always has; the opportunity has presented itself again, and we must, I stress we must take advantage of it.”

“And what of the package sir. Do you think that it is the target of the agent?”

“It doesn’t matter. The package is in my possession, and we will be moving soon.”

“I see sir. And I have to -”

“Wait,” the voice snapped urgently, and Babylon caught her breath “Are you alone?” it asked after a pause “I can hear another heart in the room besides your own.” Babylon glanced down at her chest, then over her shoulder at Lombardi. He was pushed as close into the corner as he could possibly be. Babylon’s hand shot out and hit his chest, holding there. Tense seconds passed and the voice continued “I must have been mistaken. I have to go, Ornez. I trust you can take care of this.” The administrator hung up, and Babylon removed her hand from Lombardi’s chest, and he screamed out in shock. Ornez leapt out of his chair, reaching toward his chest, quick as a snake.

Babylon was faster and burst out, stolen handgun pointed at the administrator’s face. “Don’t move.” She crooned as Lombardi collapsed into a heap, clutching at his chest. Ornez smiled and raised his hands as Babylon advanced. She removed the gun in his shoulder holster, then the knife in his boot, before sitting herself on his lap. “Now.” She began.

“Oh sweet Maker!” Lombardi moaned. Babylon glanced backwards at him, before focussing her attention fully on the administrator.

“So, your name is Ornez, right?” he nodded and she grinned “I’m Clariana, and this is an interrogation. I’m going to ask you some questions, and you’re going to answer them.” She held up her hands “Don’t worry. I can be very persuasive. When you were on the phone, who was the man you were talking to?” Ornez shrugged, his eyes closed. “Pity,” Babylon pouted, shooting him in the stomach. He grimaced “Now, the way I see it, you lot aren’t immune to pain, but very resilient. I wonder how much I have to ruin your body before you comply. Bullets to the gut are the least of your problems. Now. Who.”

“One of our benefactors, that’s all.” Ornez grunted “One of the men that Mayor Wulf asked to help our people.”

“And the package he has?” Babylon queried. Ornez was silent again. The Knight stood up, overturned the man’s chair and stomped down on his shoulder. She seized his arm firmly and pulled, popping it out of joint, eliciting a sharp howl of pain. She pulled a little harder and flesh tore, his entire arm coming free. Blood splashed from the limb and Ornez’s shoulder, and Babylon waved one of his fingers under his nose. “You were saying? The girl, yes? The one I came in with.” He nodded. “What’s so special about her?”

“I have no idea.” He grinned. Babylon seized a hold of the arm still attached to Ornez, snapping one finger. She did it as easily as one might break a dry stick, though it was far louder. She snapped another one almost immediately and he shouted out in distress “I didn’t ev-” he was cut off again by the sound of his own bones breaking “Stop!” Babylon let go of the mangled hand and let it drop “I really don’t know. Our benefactors, they didn’t tell me. Their liaison to me simply took the girl into his custody when she first arrived, and left you with us.”

Babylon stomped down on Ornez’s left hand, the heel pulverising it into a red, lumpy mess. The administrator gritted his teeth together, and then looked up at her, tapping her fingers against one cheek nonchalantly. She was not quite what he had expected; her questions came out in the same level monotone, but he had an idea that she was taking it just a little personally. Babylon continued “Who has her?”

“Tasdua’s liaison. Normally answers to Mister Mistoffelees.” Ornez broke off as some kind of recognition flashed over Babylon’s face. He felt her fingers tight around his throat and she heaved him into the air, holding him arms length above her.

“Lords of the Southern Cross. Does that name mean anything to you?” she barked, blood welling up around her fingertips and carving rivers of red onto his throat.

“No.” he squeaked in reply, trying uselessly to pull her hand away with the remains of his own. Babylon released him and he fell, landing on his feet. She jammed her palm into his chest and practically blasted him into the wall. The whole room shook, the photo of Quanha toppling over. Momentum pushed Babylon back onto the desk, and she crossed one leg over the other. Rubbing her temple, she watched Ornez slide down to the floor, blood dripping from his chin.

Lombardi hauled himself onto the desk, panting heavily. He looked from the collapsed form of Ornez, then to Babylon. She was still, almost carved from stone. Caressing her eyes, she was mumbling to herself; though he didn’t catch what.

It was a frightening prospect however, to know what Babylon was muttering about. In her head she was putting together the pieces of a remarkably small puzzle. In her past, she had been involved with a company of soldiers for hire, and had essentially destroyed it. Strange then that they should reappear. The man with the boots talking with the mayor – Randel Franks. Mister Mistoffelees, though that was just a nickname, his actual name was Brandon Hertz. She had forgotten the twins entirely; thinking back, she remembered that they had only been children, four or five years old. Who else had survived? Surely not the boss; Babylon had squeezed the life out of her with her bare hands.

The Lords of the Southern Cross had died eighteen years before today. It seemed that some of the individual mercenaries had not, however. Babylon doubted that they were behind whatever madness had struck Wolfram. They had never much been into causing strange happenings. Just cleaning them up.

“Where are my things?” she asked finally.

*

“Do you think it was particularly intelligent to believe him? People under torture are likely to -”

“Tell me something about yourself. Doesn’t matter if it’s true or false.”

Lombardi turned his eyes from the floor counter and its descending numbers, and looked over at Babylon. He considered her for a moment and spoke “My mother’s name was Clarice.”

“That’s true.” She smiled at him “You can hear a lie, with practice.”

With that, the lift doors opened. The display read ‘B3’ and they emerged into a remarkably sterile environment. The floor was black linoleum, the walls a stark white. The lighting was almost diffuse, coming from the entire ceiling. There was a sharp tang in the cool air; something that escaped the recycling filters. Babylon unshouldered her rifle; Lombardi slipped his revolver out of its holster.

“What is that?” he asked, nostrils twitching “That disinfectant? It’s not hydrogen peroxide.”

“No, it’s a lab substance.” She sniffed herself “Potassium peroxymonosulfate, sodium chloride, sulphamic acid, malic acid, sodium hexametaphosphate and sodium dodecyl benzene sulphonate.”

Lombardi halted “You can smell all those?”

“Not all of it. I’m guessing.”

They continued on, and didn’t speak, even when a new scent appeared amidst that of the laboratory disinfectant. Cordite, and something metallic; blood, quite obviously. Lombardi checked the ammunition in his weapon. He was having a rapidly bad feeling about this whole basement area. Ornez had said that Babylon’s equipment (the list of things they had taken had severely confused Lombardi; there was a gun of course, but also a pair of earrings and a pair of glasses) was being stored in the armoury on basement three. Babylon had forced a key out of him which they used to make the lift go down that far.

Occasionally he would pat at his chest, and still his breath came out almost as shallow gasps. At a junction in the austere passage they found a sign, a suddenly vibrant buffer in the white. The sign placidly dispensed directions. In one direction there was Storage (which was blue) and in the other Dispatch (which was green). Babylon immediately turned in the direction of storage, and Lombardi tagged along at her heels.

*

Exactly what they were storing wasn’t quite what Babylon had expected, and it was something new and hideous for Lombardi. As he shivered, mist coiling around his ankles Babylon went further inside. They had found the heavy metal door asking for a retinal pattern to get inside; Babylon replied by pounding away on the portal until it caved into her demands. Though vault-like, the door did not lead into some gun-drenched armoury, but instead a freezer. Lombardi had chosen to stay outside; mostly because of the cold, but partially because of what was inside. Babylon had no such reservations and stepped past the forced door.

It was cold inside, to say the least – practically cryogenic. There were people hanging from the roof in orderly rows. They were dormant, and there were more than a few; two dozen or more by a rough count and she hadn’t even reached the end yet. They all looked like Wolframites; though they were uniformly hairless and unnaturally purple. Some wore one piece jumpsuits, and yet others were naked. Taking some time, she poked one experimentally; the flesh was very hard, and the cadaver swung back and forth feebly on its hook. Grinning, Babylon gave it a considerably shove in the small of its back, sending it through the rack like a corpsified game of dominos.

“El ic scopa!” came a distressed shout, punctuated by the sound of a man falling. Babylon giggled and moved on, calling out to Lombardi to keep his wits about him.

The corpse forest ended, and Babylon saw the frozen remains of a struggle; a young man in the throes of being torn apart. He was strapped to an operating table; a table of bloody implements had been overturned, and there was a dead man on the floor. This one wore a white coat and was clutching at his throat. There were others too; dead people practically littered the floor, caught in the snap freeze. Robotic arms with frighteningly large injectors hung above partly reclined couches. Looking up to one wall, Babylon saw frosted windows, as well as a skeletal staircase up to it. This was a lab, and she had a picture of an experiment going wrong; and a picture of containing it within a block of ice.

Clambering to the door, she found it shut, quite firmly too. Oddly though, it wasn’t locked and when she had wrenched it open, the change in temperature was dramatic. It was an airlock of some kind; so had the other, she realised, though much larger and probably used less often. The next door too was unlocked, and opened on demand. It was warmer still inside the control room (as she saw it). It wasn’t properly lit; most illumination was provided by the consoles lining the windows. Babylon was drawn to them, much as a child would be. Little dust had settled upon the consoles, which combined with the still running nature of things, might have suggested that whatever had occurred below was recent. But Babylon came from a society where technology was built to last, where things could be kept clean with relative ease. That society was becoming ever more prevalent. It had started in Ornez’s office, and was continuing down here.

A panel on the wall caught her attention, and she immediately began fiddling with it. In her own language it said: “Cryo-Containment/Storage Protocols”. They were simple, and quite quickly the deep freeze stopped. Other parts of machinery began to warm the lab, and in moments it was a balmy twelve degrees. The ice sloughed off the windows before her as water; now she could see into the lab below. She flicked the switch on a microphone; her voice ringing out into the lab, demanding that Lombardi come on through.

It was somewhat amusing, watching him grimace his way through the hanging dead, before stepping over the considerably dismembered corpse of some doctor or scientist. He looked up at her through the misty, inch-thick glass and shrugged. He started speaking, but it was until she flicked a switch that she could hear him. He was asking what she thought had happened, apart from bloody murder. She was about to reply when a hand fastened itself around Lombardi’s throat.

The owner was slumped against a wall almost ten metres away from the mild-mannered detective, though such a distance hadn’t stopped her from reaching out and wrapping a spidery hand the size of a dinner plate around Lombardi’s neck. When Babylon leapt from the airlock to the lab floor, the woman’s other arm shot out, almost elastic. The Knight sidestepped, and fired a burst from the rifle against her shoulder. The bullets caught the Wolframite monster in the face. It let go of Lombardi, winding both hands back in to clutch at its newly ruined face. Babylon didn’t give it any chance to recover, shooting it until its hands and face were irreparable.

Lombardi was rubbing at the red marks on his skin and looked backwards at the creature and whistled. Turning back, his face began to form an O. One of the things from the floor had pulled itself to its feet; driving its hand (a blade?) at the back of Babylon’s head. In a blur of movement, Babylon had the Wolframite by the arm. In the same graceful sweep that had moved her out of the line of stabbing, she hurled the Wolframite bodily into one of the over looking windows. His impact left the window scrawled with spired web cracks, so heavily that the window was essentially opaque. A red smear marked the spot where Babylon had tossed him.

The rifle she had dropped landed on her foot. She kicked it up into her hands, using it to end the life of the Wolframite before he had even reached the floor. Quite calmly, she replaced the clip.

Together they examined the body, and found that his hand really was a blade, moulded into something hard and sharp; sharp enough that it would score cleanly though the tile. Babylon commented that with enough force behind it – force a Wolframite could provide – it would probably punch through steel.

“That’s very, very odd.” Lombardi said, manhandling the bladed arm “How would you do this?”

“I wonder.” Babylon pondered aloud, pulling one of the robotic arms around. She eyed the injector arm and the empty canister in that, before walking towards one of the glass cases lining the wall. Reaching out one long lingered hand, Babylon paused, drawing back. What little apprehension she had she overcame and flung the cabinet open, shattering the glass in her burst of enthusiasm. She took a hold of a canister that looked as though it would fit into the mechanical injector arm and held it up. It did not contain a liquid, rather it was, as she said “Goo.”

“Pardon?” Lombardi asked, looking up from the dead body “What about goo?”

What Babylon held in her hand was a canister containing not some biological phenomenon, but rather a technological one. Countless nanomachines, so many that they took on the appearance of a kind of thick liquid. Within that one relatively small container – no more than twelve centimetres long and only four wide – there were billions and billions and billions of tiny little robots. This was the cause of Wolfram’s current state. With modern nanotechnology, there was quite a range of things you could do; at home it was mostly used in medicine, repairing injuries and such on the fly. Other applications existed as well. The ability to disassemble a variety of naturally occuring materials into individual components was rather useful, especially since it had applications as a weapon; and you could use nanomachines to alter a persons mind and body.

However, nanotechnology was largely obsolete in the face of better technologies. The hyperlathe, the force effector; such things were not limited by the density of materials or the immune systems of modern sapients like Babylon and her ilk. Nanotech was a brutish cudgel in an era of immaterial scalpels.

Babylon knew that what she held was in fact a nanovirus, and she tried to explain to Lombardi: they had been programmed to replicate throughout the bodies of the Wolframites. They would take over the neurons throughout the nervous system; alter the tissues their host was made up of. It was why the Wolframites were so much quicker to react than a normal human – the virus communicated faster, passing information on faster than the natural body could hope to manage. It was how their benefactors kept them under control, issuing programs throughout the nanobots, which would work the humans they controlled.

Though … that wasn’t entirely correct, Babylon noted. These were learning machines; hence why the Wolframites were being trained to be soldiers, so that the nanovirus would know. Perhaps it possessed a simpler directive; make the Wolframites compliant perhaps. She didn’t know, and as she commented to Lombardi “I’m not going to guess it.”

Pocketing the canister, they left the lab, heading through the control room. The duo emerged into another whitewashed hallway, lined with red doors.

“Why don’t you think there are any guards around here?” Lombardi whispered, as they made their way down the hall. Babylon tapped her chin.

“There’s only one dangerous enemy in here,” she replied, placing a hand on the smooth crimson surface “And it’s nothing you can fight with guns.” The Knight patted him on the shoulder and they continued on, occasionally checking behind the doors – more labs. Endless labs. Endless, empty labs. They both supposed they’d been used in the past, but currently didn’t serve any purpose; mass production, perhaps. There were no answers, no clues and certainly no people. Babylon said she had a very good idea that someone was watching them, and getting very nervous.

“Then why aren’t we being shot at? There are literally no people down here.”

Babylon wagged her finger under his nose “Because the person watching us knows that they can’t beat me in a place like this;” she swept her hand from his face across the hall “It’s an open space. Nowhere to hide except the labs.”

“Wouldn’t that be a good thing?”

“Trust me when I say that’d it’d be good for us.” She walked on, and Lombardi looked after her for a moment. He had to admit she was very confident, but he thought she was positively mad. How was being out in the open good for them? The only possible piece of cover was his companion – the human body made a very poor barrier. But as he ran over the short piece of conversation, he realised something:

“But the person, the one watching us – he’s setting an ambush somewhere.”

Babylon clapped, rifle swinging on its shoulder strap “That they are. Probably around where they work, because they’re afraid of me and feel the need to be guarded. They believe that I’m coming for them, because they know what’s going on here.”

“And are you?” Lombardi asked curiously.

The Knight looked up at the glowing roof and smiled, speaking softly “Yes.”

*

The underground labs had an admin block themselves, they discovered. Following signs led them to it, fronted by glass. Behind a pair of sliding sheets of transparent material, there was a desk, unmanned. It was a trap, though one of extreme simplicity. They walked in; they got shot. They would come from three sides, the left, the right and from behind – it would take a few seconds, she mouthed at him, pinned to the floor. Give it three seconds and they would be caught in a three way, horizontal rain of gunfire. He would die, she would be grievously injured. There would be a lot of fire.

Her plan was even less complex than that of Wolframites and the mysterious watcher. It wasn’t one he was particularly fond of, but he really didn’t have a choice. Their plan, she mouthed, would be executed faster. If Lombardi blinked, he could possibly miss it. It also hinged on the builder of this place not suddenly changing the composition of the wall behind the desk. She patted him on the cheek and sat back up.

Babylon picked Lombardi up as if he was a child, jumped from one foot to the other, and took off at a sprint.

The doors never managed to open, and instead they went straight through, shattering it into thousands of pieces. Lombardi didn’t see it with his arms about his head. Nor did he see the wall coming closer, or Babylon leap the desk. Her shoulder hit the wall; the moment of truth. If her head, she knew that if these walls unlike the others were made from stronger materials, she would shatter her shoulder and bounce off, ploughing back into the reception desk. They would be taken, and she would be in pain. But where she hit, the wall gave in, and she passed through in a rain of wood and plaster. Wolframites were pouring into the little lobby, but they only saw the disappearing end of they’re prey. They fired anyway, their bullets ripping through the wall to try and catch Babylon and Lombardi.

Crouched in a corner, Babylon watched white puffs explode from the partition. The gunfire stopped; they’re options were few. Babylon counted perhaps twelve fully armed men; with more coming from the rear – maybe twenty in all. Three possible entry points; outnumbered and outgunned, it wasn’t the sort of situation a normal person would want to be in.

Not that Clariana Babylon was a normal person. It wasn’t like she wanted this to be happening, but it could be handled. It just required a liberal application of killing to do so.

A grenade bounced around, and Babylon lobbed a computers screen to meet it, knocking it backwards. It was met by sudden cries, all cut off by the percussive explosion. More came, streaming smoke; whatever it was made Lombardi’s eyes burn and his lungs heave. It was cover, though Babylon intended to make use of it too. Their bootsteps were loud, and the first shot was hers, perforating the pointman. The whole room was filed with a cacophony of booming rifles and purple-orange flashes in the clouds of concealing smoke. Under it all were smaller sounds; the occasional breaking bones, the metallic clicking of reloading guns. To Lombardi crouched down with his hands over his head, it seemed to last forever, an endless stream – in actuality, it lasted less than thirty seconds.

When the smoke cleared, Lombardi saw Babylon was the victor. She sat on the edge of a desk by a remarkably undisturbed computer, blood streaming down the side of her face. Brass casings littered the floor, as did fallen bodies and pooling blood. The detective stepped over the twitching remains of a soldier and tapped Babylon on the shoulder. “Are you alright?” he asked and she nodded, pointing to her temple.

“Bullet skimmed against my skull. It’s superficial; nothing serious.”

“That was lucky,” Lombardi commented, pulling his neckerchief off and handing it over “You got hit once, and it’s superficial.”

Babylon wiped her face clean and smiled “In my business, you have to have improbability on your side.” She glanced over Lombardi’s shoulder, at the stairs “You want to take point?”

Revolver in hand, Lombardi stared up towards the landing. He took the first step almost tentatively and the next more confidently. All that was up there was one scared scientist; all his men spent on the ambush, all of them away from him to prevent his being caught in a fire fight. The gentle, quiet taps of something metallic bouncing down the stairs seemed to say that he wasn’t quite so scared as to be petrified.

*

The twin explosions were almost simultaneous and Caramel Franks found the almost reassuring. She removed her hands from her ears, and peaked out from behind the barrier she had made from tables and cabinets she had torn from the wall. Smoke was rising from the stairwell, and she couldn’t hear the falling of feet. Pushing herself to her feet, she smoothed a crease out of her white lab coat. After looking after the door downward one last time, Miss Franks hopped out of her hidey hole. To think an Imperial Knight had come after her, even hidden away in the island! It was a frightening prospect, even if she appeared to be baseline – and to think she’d been told to ‘deal with it’. What did they think she was? A soldier? She was an aspiring and talented young researcher. She knew practically nothing about tactics or fighting; though she knew that she had very few guards. Miss Franks sighed and fumbled about in one pocket, pulling out a half-eaten chocolate bar.

Under the circumstances, she had done her best. Chewing thoughtfully on her chocolate, she thought she’d done quite well. Killed her – what was her name? Babylon, that was it (though the native seemed convinced it was ‘Brookeson’) – even, and that was a considerable feat. To kill a Knight, well at the top of the list of dangerous people in the whole of the Local Group. Caramel smiled and bounced on her heels.

The click of a gun made her freeze.

[Ford Prefect]

Well, after a looong wait, I finally managed to whip up an update for this serial. About damn time if you ask me.

Completion

Act One: A Town Called Wolfram

Chapter Nine


Caramel drooped and raised her hands in defeat. Scrunching up her face, she turned to face Babylon. She looked down the barrel of the gun, then up at the Knight herself, all stone faced authority and death. Blood wept down one side of her face; het shoulder was bloodstained. Caramel swallowed the chocolate in her mouth.

Babylon stepped forward and pulled the remains of Caramel’s chocolate bar out of her hand, stuffing it into her mouth. She chewed a few times, and then swallowed it, patting Miss Franks on the head “You didn’t actually think a pair of crappy grenades like that would stop me, did you?” Caramel shuddered, and tried to take a step back – she’d barely moved before Babylon’s free hand, chocolate wrapper and all, had grabbed the back of her head. “Tut tut. Bad move was that. Lots of them, actually, but you don’t look like a military sort of girl.” Babylon tapped her chin with her gun, and then Caramel’s forehead “But there are military sorts of people about. This means you were ignored. This means that I’m being played with again.”

Caramel didn’t really know and she said so. Even when she tried calling her brother, she’d –

“Your brother?”

“Randel Franks. I tried to –”

“I don’t ever remember him having a sister.” Babylon continued, only partly to Caramel “Though that was almost twenty years ago.”

Lombardi sifted through the room, then looked over at the two women. He didn’t have a clue what they were talking about – they were speaking some other language He asked casually “You’re not going to pull her limbs off, are you?”

“What!?”

“There’s no point, she doesn’t have to feel pain if she doesn’t want to.” Babylon sighed and pushed Caramel to one of the desks in the office, making her sit down. The Knight put her gun into the waistband of her trousers, placed both hands onto the girl’s shoulders and looked very closely at her face. She asked what exactly was happening in this underground complex, and Caramel called it a centre for experimental research. She was a geneticist, of sorts, and she studied what her superior’s nanites could do to an organism. It really was rather remarkable; Babylon had seen it for herself. They were physically superhuman, even if their brains suffered – though that didn’t happen with everyone. The nanomachines were also capable of altering organisms in truly incredible ways:

“We ended up making whole new species of life with Rubicon,” Caramel blushed proudly “Not just parahumans or splices, but things that we never expected to see on this world.” Babylon nodded encouragingly and asked what it was actually for; according to her, this Rubicon series of nanites had made life better for the Wolframites. Their community was devoid of conflict, and they found it much easier to farm with the year-round crops and the monomolecular farming implements. There were still kinks to work out, though they weren’t anything major. The Professor was taking his sweet time.

“I highly doubt that this strain has been created to make life easier for a bunch of backwaters.” Babylon stated brusquely “Who’s this ‘Professor’?”

“He’s the man behind the design of the nanites.”

“Does he have a name?”

Caramel tugged at the skin of her cheek “Randomin. I don’t see him very often though. I don’t see much of anyone, actually.”

Babylon rubbed her forehead. “I have a very good feeling you’re a complete moron with practically no useful information.” She paused and leant up very close into Caramel Frank’s face “But perhaps you can tell me where I can find my belongings.”

*

Clariana Babylon stormed down the halls, Lombardi in tow. She was muttering to herself and when they past a sign pointing to ‘dispatch’ she paused just long enough to leave a fist shaped imprint in the concrete.

The door to the armoury was sufficiently tough that Babylon preferred to key in the code as opposed to tearing it down. Two feet of steel slid aside silently and smoothly, and they stepped through into a world drenched in weapons. Rifles and shotguns and grenades and all manner of death making tools. Lombardi laid his hand on a truly enormous weapon with a three centimetre bore and whistled when Babylon told him it was not designed to be mounted on a vehicle, but instead as some sort of enormous man-portable weapon. There appeared to be variants; either an autocannon or some sort of breechloader. Passing through a rack of tactical vests, Babylon stopped, and considered them, yanking one off the rack and pushing it into Lombardi’s hands.

“It’s fish scale ceramic,” she explained, strapping him in as he fumbled “It’s probably pretty good, and really, you can do with all the protection you can get.” She pulled her own on, though mostly for the pockets. Babylon hurried through the racks, stealing grenades and guns and clipping them to her vest, as well as stuff a duffle bag full of remote charges; when she was done, she had a sizeable arsenal of explosive and ballistic weapons. Lombardi took a step backwards when she approached.

“Isn’t all that heavy?” he asked as they moved down further into the armoury and Babylon shrugged. Their way was impeded by another door, though the code for this one had also been coaxed free from Miss Franks. Compared to the previous room, this one had few shelves, and fewer items. Some immediately caught her eye, and she dashed across to the opposite side of the room.

Clipping both black squares to her ear lobes, she heard the words ‘About Fabricator-damned time’ reverberated straight into her brain. Babylon heaved a sigh of relief.

“It’s nice to hear from you too.” She said.

“I have a feeling that you’ve managed get things under control again?”

So Babylon told him, about the Rubicon nanomachines and the mercenaries that should have been dead. For a machine of Rafken-Ghandi’s intellect, it only took a few words for him to deduce exactly what she knew, and he had already worked out that the Lords of the Southern Cross were involved, from the voice of Franks at the town hall back in Wolfram. However, he had never heard of a Randomin with any interest in nanomachines. As they spoke, she found her Berretta, and replaced the Wolframite issue handgun with that.

“Exactly what else are you carrying?” Rafken-Ghandi asked as she browsed the shelves running around the walls. Babylon told him: a submachine gun with a fifty round magazine filled with high velocity armour piercing ammunition, some burst firing handgun with a detachable stock, a rather frightening anti-material rifle with fin-stabilised, discarding sabot ammunition and a –

“That’s ridiculous. What would you need with an anti-armour sniper rifle? It’s almost a metre and a half long.”

Babylon ignored him and found her glasses; they were in perfect working order. Her list of weaponry went on to include another scoped rifle, though with a considerably smaller calibre; she had collected together a duffle bag she counted eight grenades – not just fragmentation, but flash and smoke types as well. “Make that nine,” Babylon said gleefully, holding up a sphere smaller than her fist, inscribed with the letters N3. Rafken-Ghandi whistled and commented that he was surprised they would even consider possessing an explosive weapon of such power. It made her thirty kilo bad of bombs look like a wet fire cracker; and that was on a good day for the satchel charges. The Knight clipped it to her belt and patted it affectionately. At last she found her field-knife; the Fairbairn-Sykes wrapped safely in its sheath. Babylon securely fastened it to her shoulder and heard Lombardi finally step inside. She also heard the door slide shut behind him.

“What?” she asked, and turned towards the entry. Lombardi was staring after the door as well. He looked back at Babylon with a rather confused look on his face; he opened his mouth to speak, and was cut off by a sound eerily similar to hitting an empty bucket with a sizeable wrench. When Babylon looked up, she found herself looking directly at a vent of some kind; she stepped aside from some kind of falling liquid, thick and red. There were other pillars of ruby falling from the ceiling; the liquid was filling the room and in seconds it had flown above her ankles.

It was a kind of thermosetting plastic, and in the seconds it took for Babylon to get to the door, it was already up to her chest. She drove the blade of her knife into the seam running through the thick steel door; the six inch blade only making it a quarter of the way in. She threw all her weight onto the hilt and levered the door part of the way open; just enough for her to get her fingers inside.

The liquid plastic was already lapping at her chin.

The Knight pushed against the hydraulics of the heavy portal, straining all the magnificent posthuman muscles in her upper body. Tendons in her neck bulged under the red haze of the plastic trap. It was a test to see who would give way first; Clariana Babylon or the faceless metallic muscles governing the opening and closing of the armoury door. The plastic had gone over both their heads, and though she couldn’t see the door through the syrup threatening to seal her in, Babylon could feel it. The substance was starting to set, becoming thicker and less watery. She pushed harder, and the hydraulics gave in. The door slid open ever so slowly, and the slowly setting plastic seeped through like molasses, to spill lazily into the greater arsenal.

Seizing her knife before it could lethargically float away, Babylon pulled her braid undone, squeezing plastic out. She sheathed the Fairbairn-Sykes and shook the hair band into a stick; using it, Babylon collected her hair like spaghetti into a bun, spearing it to the back of her head. Lombardi watched her, slumped against the wall; he coughed wetly and tried to straighten. He clutched at his chest and hacked loudly, cut off by a hand coming down on his curved back. Babylon hauled him vertical and slapped him roughly on the front; red fluid vomited past his lips.

“I don’t like your method of fixing.” He spluttered. The detective tried to angrily push her away, but Babylon was immobile. Seeing him grind his teeth behind his skin, seeing his muscles tense so, she shifted herself away, satisfying him for the time being. “That was so …” he broke off and looked back up at the roof; the liquid was still flowing through, though in a trickle instead of a flood. Lombardi levelled his eyes at Babylon “What the hell was that?”

The Knight pulled at her cheek until it popped and shrugged ambiguously “Polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride? Some other kind of self-setting resin?” she sloshed on through into the larger room, heading towards the exit proper. “I don’t think it’s Franks; and I know that they could have managed a better attempt then that.”

The armoury door here was still open, and when they were close to leaving, grenades bounced around into the room. Babylon hit one with her heel and sent it careening down towards the far end of the magazine; another with a higher bounce she caught a curved it around one corner, the last was kicked out the door, rebounded from a wall and covered the other side. The all exploded simultaneously, high explosive concussion grenades. Lombardi’s eyes swivelled around; Babylon was blocking his ears and holding his mouth open. She let him go suddenly and whirled towards the door, her left hand curling around the butt of the ten millimetre she’d borrowed from the Wolframites’ store. It whipped up and juddered in Babylon’s hand; once to knock a soldier’s gun off aim, and three times into his face.

Babylon one handedly tossed Lombardi aside tossed herself aside. She rolled into a crouch and skidded across the floor, firing as she went; her bullets passed by the big riot shield that her target carried and shattered his knee out from under him. He fell through his own mist of blood and suffered a cluster of bullets through his face. More men were streaming in, some with ballistic shields, some with fully enclosed helmets; the best of the Wolframite militia, with their faces hidden behind the small ruby red lenses and integrated filters of their helmets. They moved with dedicated purpose and a sharp mechanical grace beyond that of their lesser brethren. With unnatural precision and incredible speed, they acquired her position and opened fire. However, their target was not to be caught so easily; she sprung against the wall and emptied the clip she had loaded to deflect the firing weapons. Landing, Babylon backed into a soldier, her arm moving under his; she spun around. Like a human missile he impacted one of the others and they both careened into the far wall.

The combat was tight; with so little space, Babylon had nowhere to run. She dodged past a swinging baton and jammed her elbow into the back of the soldiers head, shattering vertebrae and collapsing both helmet and skull. Her training had taught her to be on the offensive in combat; it had taught her how to deal with worse situations than a half dozen armed men on their feet and ready to fight. Predictive muscle reading gave her an advantage that they couldn’t factor in; she knew what they were about to do before they actually did it. Superior strength and speed meant that they couldn’t hope to match her close up, and she was too close for them to fight with gun. A ballistic shield snapped when she hit it; one of the gun racks crumpled when she kicked a soldier into it.

One of the elites, the last, fired his shotgun at her, but she sidestepped it, moving closer. In desperation he racked the slide and fired again, and again, but found he could not hit Babylon. When she was within range, she kicked out, pushing the barrel of his weapon under his chin. His last shot spread his brains onto the wall above his head.

Breathing slowly, Babylon replaced the half expended clip in her sub-machine gun with one she took from one of the soldiers. She called out to Lombardi as the clip slid smoothly along the top of the weapon. He poked his head out from further down the armoury, before getting to his feet and joining her. When Babylon was finished with her weapons they left.

*

“Rafken-Ghandi, I was wondering.”

“That’s dangerous.” The mechanoid replied as the distantly related organics trooped onwards and upwards to the surface.

“My earrings. What sort of output do they have?”

“They’re remote terminals smaller than the nail on your little finger. You cannot use them to blow heads up to save time and ammo.”

Babylon heaved a quiet sigh and approached a ladder. Clambering to the top, she tapped the frame of her glasses, looking for heat signals in the general area; finding none, she pulled out her knife and cut through the lock; even without its cutting field activated, the blade passed through steel like it was water. That was advanced materials science for you. The pair emerged into the late afternoon; in the hour they had been underground, the sun had dipped, and they had covered several miles of the island, close to ten. Caramel Franks had said that they would likely find Vittoria in this direction, towards a dock built into the island. Babylon was quite sure that that was the truth.

Weapons out, they crept through the well trod streets. Babylon could hear helicopters of some sort in the distance; slow steady beats. She could hear the tense anticipation in the air. She shouldered her rifle and picked Lombardi up; with nary a pause, she sprung onto the roof of a nearby building, dumping her detective partner and dropping into a crouch. Lombardi rolled across the roof and came to a halt on his stomach. Babylon craned her neck and cringed. She looked over at Lombardi then back towards the direction she wanted to go; at the glowing mass.

He’ll never survive that. Babylon told herself and she rapped her knuckles against her temple. She pulled one ear stud off, and her glasses, gesturing for Lombardi to come closer. He put the glasses on when handed them. “Do you see all the heat out there?” she asked, and he nodded “There’s hundreds of them, not counting the vehicle emissions.”

“We’re going to go through that?” Lombardi sounded incredulous, and when he turned to look at Babylon, his face twisted into a mask of incredulity. Babylon shook her head, and Lombardi’s muscles relaxed.

“I’m going to go through that. You’re going to sneak around it.”

There was a moment of silence in which Lombardi searched Babylon’s face, as if trying to ascertain wether she was serious. “Pardon me?” he asked finally, the first word almost squeaked. Babylon held up one of her terminals, and roughly explained what it was. It attached itself quite securely to his earlobe, and Lombardi recoiled suddenly, looking about himself. “There’s someone talking to me,” he whispered to her “I can hear him, but I can’t hear him.”

“You’ll get used to it.” Babylon assured him “The voice belongs to Rafken-Ghandi, a man who I trust my life with. He’s going to direct you through the quickest, safest route he can see. Do everything he tells you.” She pulled out the ten millimetre pistol, and attached its stock.

“But what about you?” Lombardi asked as he test aimed his new weapon “You can’t possibly fight a small army …”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Babylon replied airily, helping him get a comfortable hold onto the duffel bag and patting him on the shoulder. She helped him back down to street level and they stood facing each other. The detective was searching her face, when he cocked his head, undoubtedly in response to his new friend. He seized her hand in a tight grip and nodded, turning and jogging off. Lombardi stopped at the corner and checked around it, before dashing on.

“Run Michael.” Babylon whispered, before bounding back to the roof.

*

In all her time as a Knight in the service of SGN2, Clariana Babylon had seen and done a variety of things which would be considered most frightening by the average citizen of the Imperial Commonwealth. She had destroyed whole armies before; even had a hand in the collapse of whole civilisations. She had competed with an esoteric order of monks in the search for a hand-held weapon of obscene power yet surprising utility. There had been a psychic cephalopod. There had been zombies. Most of the people who came to her graduation to the position of Knight were herself. She had walked through the shadow of the valley of death, feared no evil and kicked God in the shins.

Generally she accomplished her feats through trickery. The idea of engaging in direct combat hundreds of armed soldiers and their supporting armour was not palpable at all. Rolling her head and loosening the muscles in her neck she examined them all; from the conscripts with their faces shining with anticipation, to the stalwart elites hidden within their all encompassing body armour to veritable giants standing three times the height of a man. The giants were something new; like the conscript Wolframites, they were moderately well armoured, though not with ceramic filled jackets – they had strapped to them plates that looked like they had once belonged to tanks. They wore helmets too, and carried the massive weapons Lombardi had been fascinated with down below. Those with the autocannon variant beared enormous ammunition tenders strapped to their backs.

There were armoured vehicles, wheeled personnel carriers, and one tank visible. In the air hovered a pair of gunships; there were others still in the distance. Certainly she was outnumbered, though definitely not outgunned. She slipped her Berretta into her hand and breathed in slowly. It was all about shot placement; the maximum damage on the maximum amount of people. When Babylon fired the first shot, she intended it to cut a swathe through the ranks of Wolframites, and cut a swathe it did. The slug passed through bodies and limbs, reducing them to bloody tatters and crimson mist, or converting people into deadly bombs. Eighteen men were struck down instantly; one moment they were soldiers, the next they were flaming ruins. The bullet gave no indication of slowing down; it passed through the depleted uranium composite armour of a tank as if it wasn’t there, sending eighty tonnes of vehicle sliding sideways for almost a metre. The only indication that it was damaged was the coin-wide tunnel passing through on a diagonal, and the dead crewmen, their innards coating the walls.

They broke instantly, falling back under well-trained fire designed to keep Babylon’s head down. Though where was she? The shot had come from one of the thoroughfare from the south, but there wasn’t anyone standing there; none of the thermal cameras showed anyone at ground level. They swept the roofs, and there she was – autocannon started up and tore watermelon-sized chunks out of the stone with every hit. A whole rooftop was reduced to dust, when fire sounded from a roof halfway round the plaza. The target was so fast; rifle fire cored out the heads of almost a dozen Wolframites before they had a chance to put down some smoke and get into cover. The main gun of their tank thudded and reduced the building which the sniping fire had come from to rubble.

Two shots struck the IFV’s and their turret mounted guns, shook them apart. The pintle mounted machine gun on the tank swung on its mechanical arm and blistered red-hot with fire, raking the roof tops – the twin giants with their cannons braced themselves and dusted stone with the roar of their weapons. Something small raced past one, and its arms came off, falling to the ground. Blood rained from the cleanly cut stumps just below the shoulders. The giant thrashed and bellowed and spread its blood across the cobbles.

Twenty seconds. That’s all the time that had passed. In twenty seconds thirty soldiers had been killed, two vehicles destroyed and one rendered immobile. For the remaining Wolframites and their giant, not even the presence of one of the gunships was remotely reassuring. They could not see their enemy (was she in a building?) and she was carrying some sort of deadly anti-armour weapon (but that was insane; it was no guided missile launcher!) and she was blisteringly fast (too fast to keep a bead on!). The remaining soldiers, only one short of making an entire squad of twelve men, crouched in their cover; one fire team was using the bulk of the tank to hide behind. The mighty warmachine’s camera’s swept the plaza, as did its machine gun.

Already there was more support streaming in; two personnel carriers came zipping in, disgorging a squad of men each. They fanned out and covered the surrounding buildings; a medic rushed towards the fallen giant thrashing upon the hard ground.

Ten seconds. That’s all the time had passed for the Wolframites to mount an effort in support; twenty four men, split up into six teams of four; two infantry carriers with autocannons, a gun carrier with a smoothbore tank weapon. All streamed in from the west, and spread across the open space. A considerable force, all looking for one person. Fire from the top floor windows of one of the buldings drew the attention of the soldiers, and they perforated the floor on reflex. In just a second or two the wall had been shot away, revealing the hall to contain no evidence of life. Though weapons had discharged, no one had fired the gun. A half second passed where the Wolframites stared up at the broken building. A soldier, panning his rifle around, turned and caught sight of a blue flash. His throat was laid open and charred; his head fell away on a hinge of skin; blood flowed from his severed veins and arteries and into the air.

All hell broke loose as Babylon ploughed into the remaining three men, lashing out his her fighting blade. The Wolframite designated as support tried to pull his machine gun up, but the blisteringly quick Knight had her hand on the barrel. She gave it a twist and snapped all his fingers, then gave him a hard elbow that shattered his helmet and caved in his head.

Another fire team whirled about as the machine gun beat out a rapid rhythm in Babylon’s hands as she dived for cover. She fired in bursts, four precisely placed sets of ammunition that blasted brains out the back of heads. Skidding to a halt, she cringed away from a sudden explosion; her cover rumbled and started to move away, but she kept pace with it, and hugged close to the vehicle. Bracing the squad support weapon at her hip, Babylon squeezed the trigger at precisely timed intervals, each time putting men down. In their death throes they squeezed off their last shots – once aimed for the kill, they were rendered pointless acts.

The gunship came in low; blasting craters into the ground with the gun under its nose. It was surgically accurate fire, placed to kill her, but not the IFV she was keeping close to. Diving through the spinning wheels, she rolled and used the vehicle as a stepping stone, leaping from the cannon on its back. The attack helicopter’s pilot recoiled in sudden surprise, for there was a woman kneeling upon his cockpit canopy. Her hand came through the canopy and grasped him by the head – her fingers sunk through both facemask and face – then proceeded to toss him from the gunship like a doll. Without the pilot there to keep a handle on the helicopter, it began to go out of control; before the co-pilot could save it, he was shot through the throat.

Thrashing like a wounded beast, the helicopter gunship careened into an already damaged building, crushing what remained of the wall under its weight.

The whole building came apart in a hail of rubble, broken apart by the gunship violently exploding. Those close to the source were thrown off their feet; others simply cringed away from the falling masonry. The plaza, once lit by the stabbing spotlights on the various vehicles, was now illuminated orange by the rising pillar of flame. One Wolframite watched the dark smoke billow voluminously, embers dancing. He was scanning the demolished building, when something bounced against his feet. He was whipping his head and rifle down when the grenade exploded; the shrapnel embedded harmlessly in their body armour, the shockwave violently propelling them into hard stone walls. Babylon landed heavily on a rooftop.

The air was hot as she sucked it into her lungs. Babylon wiped her forehead free of sweat, feeling the scab by her temple from earlier. She swallowed, then spied another of the helicopter gunships making a beeline for her position, it would be overhead in just under ten seconds by her calculations. The Beretta came out and she squeezed off a shot. It covered eight hundred metres practically instantly, exploded the pilot and his gunner, and shattered the powerplant; it careened into the ground and exploded violently, setting another spiralling column of smoke into the night air.

Babylon broke into a run, leaping to another rooftop as it was torn apart by the heavy calibres at the disposal of the Wolframites. She left it behind, skipping across the tops of buildings. Almost a mile away, a helicopter had her in its sights and launched a missile that streaked through the dark and hit the building beneath Babylon’s feet. The mighty explosion turned a once sturdy three story sandstone structure into flying chunks; the enormous force tossed Babylon over a distance of nearly two hundred metres. The light machine gun she had appropriated from one of the soldiers was torn from her shoulder. Fingers outstretched, Babylon reached for it, but she only brushed the flailing strap. The gun landed on a building two ahead of where Babylon landed.

Head first, she came down and was propelled across the roof top. Momentum had her slide all the way across, and when she slowed, she remained balanced on her forehead, before flopping down unceremoniously. Her breath was gasped, and when she sat up, she grabbed a hold of her neck, gritting her teeth. One handedly Babylon aimed her handgun and launched off a shot at the gunship; the bullet severed the rotors of the helicopter. The whirling blades soared off across the island and imbedded themselves through a wall. The greater body of the flying machine dropped like a stone.

Across the roofs again, scooping up the SAW without even stopping. Rafken-Ghandi was dropping troop positions into her head at intervals, making sure she had an idea of just where her enemies were. She dropped to street level again and skidded around a corner; there was an entire squad there, emplaced with armour support. Babylon let inertia take her and she fell into cover, rolling into a sitting position. Gunfire filled the street, driving her away. The IFV’s big gun chewed holes through the building, keeping track of her with a thermal imaging camera. She sprinted, outstripping the speed of the turret’s turn. An intersection, and another gun carrier slewing to a halt and pointing its massive gun towards Babylon.

It fired; Babylon bounded against the walls. The entire stretch of street was filled with the buzzing of thousands of flechettes. Babylon herself came down on top of the mobile gun, seized a hold of the hatch and heaved. Cords stood out on her neck and after a moment, the armoured hatch came free. Babylon primed a grenade and dropped it inside and dove away. Wolframite shouts of surprise were lost in the sudden percussion of the explosive going off. Flame geysered through the path of least resistance, though Babylon was already sprinting away. Passing into the open with a dive, she held down the trigger on her machine gun, putting enough of a bend into the barrel of the armour piece that it could not fire. A few men fell, perforated, as Babylon landed on her shoulder, rolled to her feet, and kept running. She could hear soldiers pounding towards her position, though frankly they had no chance of catching her. Eight men grabbed a hold of the IFV as it roared passed, letting the machine snatch them from their feet.

It came onto the same straight of road as that which Babylon now sprinted down, and accelerated to top speed. Every second it covered thirty metres; every second it gained ten metres on Babylon. When it was close, she stepped back onto it, letting the vehicle almost slide beneath her feet. Her machine gun rattled out over the hot roar of the engine; all the men fell dead from the sides. Babylon jumped from the rear and let her empty LMG fall to the ground; her knife flashed out and she charged towards the braking fighting machine. She cut open a hole big enough for her to pass through, then clambered through, striking twice to kill both driver and the gunner. Another deft circle of the blade allowed her to pass out of the dead vehicle. The knight dropped into a crouch and sheathed her knife, reaching for the submachine gun attached to her.

An enormous weight came down upon her cover, making the IFV dip. She spun and sidestepped as one of the Wolframite giants opened fire with its mighty weapon. Fire belched from the cavernous weapon, not to kill the woman but instead ping uselessly against the piece of armour on the ground. Babylon sprung onto the juddering weapon and ran straight up the ogre-soldier’s arm; her kick crushed the giant’s jaw. Her downward slicing hand cleaved through thick skull, splitting the moon-like face. Thick, dark blood splashed against her. In the distance she spied armour charging towards her position; she pushed against the toppling giant and hit the ground. The enormous soldier above had chunks the size of watermelons blown out of its enormous girth. Babylon had already sprinted away as the body hit the ground and all manner of military technology had burst in. Soldiers streamed from their transports; tanks lowered their mighty guns at the building which Babylon had escaped into. The air was filled with the sound of a hundred and fifty weapons being primed.

Babylon leaned heavily against an inner wall then let herself fall down it. Her submachine gun clattered noisily against the marble floor. Her fingers went to her neck, to massage the sore muscles; pain was shooting through her neck and drilling into her skull. Babylon shifted to her face, wiping blood away.

Taking a deep breath, she asked Rafken-Ghandi about Lombardi.

“He’s fine. He’s hugging to the north now.” The mechanoid paused, more for effect than anything else “There are a lot of them out there Babylon. Do you really intend to kill all of them?”

“More or less. How’s my electronic warfare holding up?”

“This planet will be able to contemplate fighting your ECM in about a hundred and twenty thousand years. It’s why they’re taking their time; they can’t see you on any of their scopes.”

“I need a building schematic.” Babylon said it aloud, pushing against the wall and scraping her way to her feet. Her request was processed before she had said the word ‘need’, though Rafken-Ghandi waited until she had finished her sentence. Closing her eyes, Babylon could picture with perfect clarity the entirety of the building she was in. It was much more modern than most of the other buildings on Tasdua, and the largest. Unfinished, it still stood fifteen stories tall. Hundreds of rooms and corridors; given two minutes the force of Wolframites outside could have them all searched. She padded off further inside, gun in one hand.

*

Adminstrator Ornez frowned heavily at the screens in front of him. At his disposal were thermal images and x-rays of the unfinished admin block. The target had gone into that building, they had seen it. She could have moved into another building, but his gunships and patrols on the other side had noticed nothing. He tapped his fingers against the arm of his chair then leaned forward. She was of similar origins as their benefactors; she would have similarly advanced technology also. If she carried a hand weapon capable of disabling his Hero main battle tanks, then it was more than possible that she could possess some way of hiding her presence from their detection equipment; after all, his full soldiers carried at least marginal masking technology.

Ornez may not have known for sure that Babylon was inside, but he had a feeling that she was. There was no doubting she was dangerous in the extreme; first contact had been only seven minutes ago, and already there were fifty men dead, as well as two attack helicopters, a tank and several Beagles had been taken out of commission.

He knew well the capabilities of his men; if he let them, they could thoroughly sweep the entire building in minutes. If she was inside, then she would be found. Or he could order a missile or a missile barrage. He could have that building turned into a ten metre deep crater. Rubbing his chin, he keyed his radio.

*

“They’re moving.”

With Rafken-Ghandi’s warning, Babylon crouched down, hands over her ears. The entire building began to shake itself apart. Walls came down, flame filled hallways. There was only one noise; that of high explosives going about their purpose: exploding. Missiles streaked from the helicopters, from the launchers on the turrets of Hero tanks, from the command and control vehicle at the rear of it all. When it stopped, smoke wreathed the building, fire filled its windows. Sudden flashes lit the night to day and Wolframite soldiers headed inside the building. Some headed in through the front doors, though those doors had yet to be put up. From above, Wolframites dropped onto the tops of the building. Without pause, they infiltrated, some stabbing grapples into the walls and rappelling down to different levels of the building.

In moments, there were soldiers all through the building. Their advances were both careful and rapid; they moved with practised efficiency down hallways. All too often fire squads would pause as they uncovered booby-traps … or what at first looked like booby-traps. Wires that would be strung in such ways to release pins on grenades were attached to nothing. Professionals to the last, the Wolframites checked each on they came across; who knew when one might turn out to be real? A combat zone was no place to be sloppy.

But the real traps were not to be triggered by wires or opening doors; Babylon’s grenades were simply well hidden. When they exploded at her behest and through application of her earring terminal, the soldiers who were caught in the blasts and flung through walls didn’t know how they set them off. Watching them through the walls was easy enough, so when a fire team set themselves up to burst into the room, she was ready. The door came off its hinges and the room was illuminated to featureless white, and the sound shattered the windows. The point man made a single step inside when a knife entered his chest and forced him to exit the room. With the cutting fields of the Fairbairn-Sykes turned up, so much energy was dumped into his body that he exploded, so aggressively that his team mates were battered off their feet with fragments of bone bouncing off their body armour like shrapnel. Babylon’s knife flew back into the room, where she caught it and sheathed it, running through the door. A hand slapped against one man’s helmet as he shouted a set of coordinates. His words were almost cut short by a sudden burst of fire that swiss-cheesed his head.

Babylon sprinted down the hall as Wolframites swung around the corner ahead and opened fire – Babylon stepped away and snapped off a burst, pushing them back into cover. Soldiers emerged from the other end; Babylon twisted into a sitting position and killed them. She tracked her fire across walls as well – the ammunition she was using was armour piercing and went clear through the walls like they weren’t even there. Turning the submachine gun back, she eliminated the others.

Where Wolframites were, Babylon went. There were dozens of them, and she was using hit and run tactics to draw them into a kill-zone. The primary consideration was killing her; all the soldiers in the building were on her heels, sprinting down the halls at a speed no normal human could manage. They burst into a larger, more open space in time to see a pair of heavy doors slam closed – holes appeared in it as the leading Wolframites opened fire. They all halted – four squads in total – and conferred with command. As they received their orders, a roughly circular chuck of the ceiling fell upon a few of the soldiers. They were pushed down by Babylon’s falling weight.

Obscured by the purple flecked muzzle-flash, Babylon came down into the centre of the contingent. Flechettes opened holes in helmets, evacuating blood out the back of heads. In five seconds the box magazine was empty. The submachine gun clattered against the floor and she seized a man’s arm; his arm broke as she spun, the rifle going off and punctured the chest of another soldier. Babylon hurled him bodily, sending men tumbling from their feet. Sharp strikes knocked an aiming gun barrel upwards and bent the arm backwards.

In such close quarters, rifles and machine guns were cumbersome – they were replaced by telescoping batons. One swung at her with a sound like a cracking whip; she leaned back, the heavy tip passing by her nose. Her hand snaked out grab the passing wrist, the other hand pointed like a knife and took the head from his shoulders.

Babylon fought with the techniques honed by decades of service. The techniques designed to make a person into nothing less than a brutally efficient killing machine. Every strike Babylon made was designed to murder; wether he broke necks, shattered pelvises or severed spines. Sharp blows from her elbows forced heads around into unnatural positions; her feet barely touched the floor as she moved from one Wolframite to the next. The Wolframites fought with all their training and coordination, but it seemed impossible to hit the Knight. Every time they tried she would move inside their guard, or grab their arms and twist them free, or simply bend the steel rods. Occasionally she would snatch a sidearm and empty it at close range, though there was little need.

Babylon’s brought her knee up and snapped an elbow; her boot collapsed the man’s knee. One hand racked the slide of his outstretched shotgun; the huge slug passed her by and sheared free the striking arm of a soldier trying to catch her from behind. With his limb falling away in a showered of blood, he lashed out with his other hand. Babylon caught his attack and flattened his face within his mask.

Taking the helmeted head of the last soldier in her hands, Babylon jerked viciously. He fell to the ground, his shotgun bouncing. Aiming at the floor, she tapped her terminal and cupped the gun firmly in both hands. She pulled the trigger, and her arm whipped up through the anti-recoil measures.

Outside, armoured vehicles – even the mighty Hero main battle tanks – jumped several metres into the air and went up in incredible firestorms; helicopter gunships were torn two at the waist and tumbled flaming to the earth.

The empty cartridge fell to the uncarpeted floor with a hollow kind of finality. Babylon slid another one home, though when she looked at the weapon, her glasses showed her a simple message saying that the weapon’s charge was currently depleted. Rafken-Ghandi tutted as she holstered the weapon still warm against her side. “Siphoning power will bring your sidearm back up to nominal power levels in seven hundred seconds,” Babylon dropped herself through one of the enormous holes her shots had caused “Till then your weapon is practically useless.” He didn’t need to tell her why; it wasn’t that it wouldn’t fire, just that it wouldn’t fire safely or at its normal velocity.

The outside was strewn with blackened stone and dismantled machinery. She sprinted past, carefully stepping around fallen bodies. Flickering fires sent her shadow sprawling against the wall as Rafken-Ghandi noted that he was bringing Lombardi towards the rendezvous point. She affirmed it and kept running. For the moment, she had no foe to deal with, but that would not last forever. No, what was important now was getting a hold of Vittoria and getting off Tasdua. The situation was well in hand, but it could rapidly spiral out of control with a man like Brandon Hertz to deal with.

*

Michael Lombardi had not really gotten used to the voice in his head telling him what to do. It had steered him in the right direction and kept him out of the way of Wolframites; though what ever was happening to the south was attracting most of their attention. He could see the smoke from his position, wafting into the sky in black plumes. Thinking about it, he wondered just who Brookeson worked for – maybe it really was aliens.

Rafken-Ghandi told him to halt, and he did, leaning up against the corner of a building. He had guessed by now that the voice already knew what was beyond the corners, but had no intention of letting Lombardi get slack. He glanced out; saw a warehouse of some kind, an open space and a woman with submachine gun in hand. The detective heaved a happy sigh and dashed out to meet her. “Brookeson!” he called “Claire!” as he approached, he noticed how bad she looked. The cut on her temple had been joined by torn away skin above her right eye. There was blood on her, probably not her own. When he approached, she leant her head against his shoulder.

“It’s Clariana.”

Lombardi did not reply, but instead let her stand there for a few moments. Then she raised her head and smiled at him, adjusting her glasses. She took back the equipment she had sent him off carrying, slinging the big bag over her shoulder. Babylon tapped her earring terminal and the warehouse opened.