The First Technomancer

by G Aliaksei C

  Hacksaw, came enlightenment.

  Happily noticing that its shield and Slipstream were disabled I raised my Chini, indulging myself in a field test of the new weapon. Charges emptied their contents, the gun sending shield-covered blobs of death at vast speed towards my target. Antimatter fireballs ripped through the Beast, sending limbs and armor plates flying. Still evading despite its critical damage the Hacksaw swung around to point its maw at me. Gold filled its face-crater, blinding me a moment before it fired.

  My shield stood no chance, its energy reserves depleting in less than half a second of deflection. I felt a wave of heat roll over me as the impact of the terrible weapon threw me back. I leaned into the attack, shielding the unarmored chaingun with my body. In the critical second before the Flying Armor intercepted the beam I took incredible punishment that brought my medical state uncomfortably close to that of a cooked piece of meat.

  Feeling the pressure disappear I opened my eyes and stared through the optics of my burned helmet.

  For meters all around me, the earth burned and glowed. I stood in a pool of molten rock. Several suit functions were permanently disabled. I felt some of that terrible heat leak inside, burning muscle and skin. Before me, a wall of Flight Armor was struggling against the golden beam. Forward plates shifted back as they overheated, allowing new armor to take the relentless punishment while they cooled.

  I raised a gun, and for a moment ordered the armor plates apart. In the fraction of a second that the golden beam had to strike me I returned fire, landing several shots through the gap and into the golden beam’s projector. The Hacksaw choked on its own fire, teleporting from side to side in an attempt to evade. I tracked it through a spreading wall of armor plates, lading several final, decisive shots, tearing the Beast apart with terrible antimatter-matter explosions.

  A second damaged Hacksaw stabbed at me from the back, narrowly missing my head. My left hand went up, the sword cutting into a limb before it could pull back. The sword promptly broke as the limb withdrew. Armor spun around, blocking several more stabs, denting under very mighty attack.

  In the minute that it took me to beat my second challenger to the ground, the fight was over. Over fifty dead attackers lay in pieces around the heavily breathing villagers. I released the clamps on my broken blade and empty chaingun, letting the weapons fall to the ground, freeing me of their weight, and sat down between them. Cooling stone cracked under me.

  Half of my Flight Armor was in ruins, while the remaining half was glowing red, constantly moving around in an attempt to lose some heat. My own suit, mangled and glowing, was barely functioning. With every move something fell off or broke as the rapidly changing temperatures tore hydraulics and steel.

  “Great void,” someone muttered.

  “It has been so, so long since I nearly died in a fair fight…”

  “Is everyone alright?”

  “I lost an arm…” David’s pained voice came over the Menu.

  “I got you,” offered someone else.

  “I’m… not ok…” That was Jim. I spun around to look at the source of the voice.

  Jim was, to put it lightly, scattered. Only one of his twenty bodies was alive. The mechs were torn apart, burned and molten, in a graveyard of metal and carnage surrounding a single dead Hacksaw. The last Jim, missing an arm and a leg, half of his body molten beyond recognition, was leaning on the Beast’s corpse.

  “I’m… going to need some help.”

  “Woah,” There was surprise in the villager’s voice. “Jim, did you kill one?”

  “Sacrificed a body to deliver Black payload. Stunned it. Then stabbed. A lot.” Jim, unable to even project a hologram on his ruined face, turned to me.

  I pulled off my helmet, inhaled the rare, clear air, and gave Jim a thumbs up. I was proud of him.

  “Hey, who kept stealing my kills? I had three broken ones lined up for a streak.”

  “Sorry!” I raised my hand. “That was me.”

  “Drake!” Vili, by far the largest of the villagers when in armor, questioned me. “What in the void of space kind of armor is that? That was a direct hit with a very powerful Fusion Lance! I thought for sure you were dead!”

  I cracked my neck as I turned to look at the Cafe owner. “Energy Durasteel alloy. Ballistic Durasteel is great for kinetic and impact weapons, but it sucks at dissipating energy. Energy Durasteel is opposite - it’s terrible against kinetic energy, but dissipates deadly radiation, heat and light like a fucking mirror.”

  “You nearly blinded us all when you took that hit!”

  “But almost none of it got to me.”

  Inna walked between her people, checking everyone over, before coming to me.

  “Drake, are you alright?”

  “So…” I sat up, exhaling pain through my broken ribs, “so glad I brought that bomb!” I looked up at her with shining, golden eyes.

  “Drake, do you know what this is?” Inna tapped the brilliant blue-gold star on her shoulder. I shook my head. “This is a Champion Star. It means that I have been acknowledged to be so capable, so dangerous in combat that I, alone, am worth a team of a lower Class. It took me two hundred years of non-stop combat and practice to achieve this star. Less than a few dozen million beings have it! On ringworlds with trillions!”

  “Cool…” I exhaled again, ordering the nanites in my body from the dislocated arm to my ribs.

  “Drake, do you know how long it has been since I got scratched by a Beast? A long time!” Inna demonstrated to me her left leg, where a long line of red paint was missing, revealing black, Ballistic Durasteel armor.

  “Well, that’s… bad.”

  “We’re in deep shit Drake!” She sounded almost hysterical. “I don’t even know what these things are! I have never seen them!”

  “Hacksaw.”

  Inna stared at me in surprise, but I shook my aching head. “I just named them. I don’t know what in the void they are either.”

  “I like that name!” commented someone from my flank.

  “Drake, do you just not care that we are in a Class 8 zone now?”

  “Well I ain’t moving from here!” I pointed. Inna turned to follow my finger, her gaze landing on the black obelisk at the center of the base. “I built this base around my grave! I called it Vazanklav, a name that holds a lot of value to me. I am not leaving!”

  Several people cheered. The excitement at my words was heavily diluted with exhaustion

  Inna raised her hands. “I am not complaining! I am just making sure you are set on staying here! Because, fun fact, no long-term outpost exists anywhere above a Class 6 zone for longer than a year, thanks to New Year’s, and for hundreds of years now no one even tries!”

  “Then we’ll be the first.”

  Part Four: A War of Greed

  “The Hades Ringers are… impossible. Unpredictable. Malevolent and kind. They do not seek war, yet they are the masters of it. They are few, yet our armies are worthless against them. They are not a variable that can be quantified, a unit that can be planned and accounted for. They care least of all for the Monopolies that hold our worlds in their grasp, nor do they fear our trillions that hate them so much. There is no line they are unwilling to cross, for our borders and limits mean nothing to them.”

  0 : Beyond Vazanklav

  Day 73

  The empty flask fell from my hands, hitting the stone floor by my feet, ringing on impact and bouncing under a table. Healing water spread through me, working to repair what remained of the damage and wear from recent combat. I stood tall and spread my hands, keeping as still as I could manage.

  The villagers behind me shuffled. Inna stepped closer, looking reluctant.

  “Just do it already.” I closed my eyes and raised my head up, preparing for the pain.

  “You’re not even under anesthesia!”

  “And you’re not a surgeon. Now cut!”

  A whistle echoed across the room. Then, a moment later, my arms hit the ground, severe
d from my shoulders by Inna’s precise cuts.

  In an effort of will I kept still, relaxed, resisting the urge to scream from the pain.

  The villagers behind me shifted, securing two mechanical contraptions over the stumps. The machines tightened, grabbing on and beginning their gruesome work. Swarms of nanites reached into my shoulders, cauterizing the cut and installing transitional elements and electronics into my flesh, weaving the ends of biological muscle into artificial nanoweave.

  The Shield Strider and its Hacksaw escorts had been defeated only minutes earlier. I was still badly bruised and burned from the fight. But Inna explained that, even in peak condition, I was badly outmatched in our current predicament. She proposed two solutions: a three day surgery that upgraded my very body with various implants and improvements, or a quicker, more brutal operation that accomplished the same effect with less time and more pain.

  The choice was obvious.

  Someone caught my falling body, lifting me slightly, and another whistling cut severed my legs. Two more of the gruesome contraptions were quickly applied to the fresh stumps.

  Even through the anesthetic, I felt pain. My body attempted to neutralize the relieving chemical, inevitably causing me more pain.

  What remained of me was laid out on a metal table. Needle after needle was jabbed into my chest, various nanite cocktails injected into the core of my torso. A mask-like device was secured to my face, and local anesthetic was injected, temporarily overpowering my nanite’s ability to neutralize it. I was glad the small mercy - the machine was already removing my eyes, replacing them with Class 5 cybernetics.

  Within me a mass of nanites was now working to rebuild organs with plastic and Durasteel. Bones were torn apart, dissolved and recycled, replaced with a weave of polymer and metal. Every nerve was reinforced, shielded and armored. Muscle dissolved and faded, making way for strings of hydraulic tissue that far surpassed it in output. Every blood cell was caught, filtered and upgraded to service the new additions.

  The terrible process was over in minutes. The mask was removed, and proper prosthetics were secured to the ports where my stubs had been. I opened my eyes.

  It was as if I had spent every waking moment after my death blind. The cybernetics of my time were impressive, but the Class 5 upgrades I was looking through now were amazing. I examined the ceiling above me, the new resolution allowing me to track ever speck of dust and dirt in the air.

  “Is he awake?” Asked Inna. Her voice was clear, isolated from all background noise. I suddenly knew the location of every wall, object and person in the room, a map derived from nothing but sound and echo.

  “He was awake through the whole procedure,” said David. “Whatever that gold glow is, it kept him mentally acute the whole time.”

  “The pain… It must have been like torture. Let’s give him time to…”

  I shifted, getting a sense of my new joints, then rapidly sat up, gripping the edges of the table with metal fingers. The table groaned, bending under the pressure.

  “I don’t think this man knows how to stay still, Inna.” David quickly ran a scanner over every connection between my prosthetics and torso, then stepped aside. “How do you feel?” He asked me.

  “Great. Thank you.”

  I looked at my hands, slowly moving my fingers, tuning the new limbs until their movements perfectly mirrored my will. Then, in a rush of motion, I stood.

  “Woah!” David stepped back. “How the…”

  Without so much as a stumble I walked over to a wall mirror, looking over my bruised body. The new legs and arms were not armored yet, and I could see fiber muscles shift under their metal frames. Deep within, Gems glowed like white ambers, igniting joints with every motion.

  But, aside from raw physical strength, there were new sensations. Just as I could move a muscle, I could also perform entirely new motions that were not natural to the Human body. I focused on these new powers, trying to tell them apart.

  The deflector was easiest to access. The air around me shimmered as I discharged the shield’s capacitors, testing the reach of the shield. The gravity sinks were equally simple to control, along with several less relevant functions.

  But there was one power I couldn’t seem to find.

  “How do I teleport?”

  “Oh thank the void,” sighed David.

  I turned to him, frowning. “What?”

  He raised his hands slightly, signaling surrender, as if my stare was an assault on him. “I’m just glad there’s something in the upgrades you can’t instantly access. Usually even basic motion takes a few hours to recall after a surgery like this. If you suddenly grew a new arm, you wouldn’t know how to use it, not without a lot of practice. Most of these upgrades are like that, new extensions your mind shouldn’t know how to control right away.”

  I stared at the wall next to David’s head, focusing it. The incomplete energy matrix within my skull released the little power it had accumulated in the last few minutes. A spot on the wall glowed with heat, foam-concrete cracking and melting away, red drops rolling down to the floor.

  David, feeling the heat above his shoulder, dodged away.

  “It’s called neural adaptability,” I said, still trying to initiate a teleport. “I was trained to quickly create neural pathways to control extensions like this. If I suddenly grew a new arm, I could punch whoever was responsible for that horrendous mutation within the minute. With that arm.”

  David’s eyes gleamed. “That’s something you learn? Neural adaptability?”

  “Sure.” I turned to Inna. “You must have switched prosthetics hundreds of times. Does it get easier?”

  Inna nodded. “When I first started using a combat body I was immobile for two days after the switch. Now it takes minutes.”

  “There you go, that’s mental adaptability. Except I learn it all at once, though two weeks of intense exercise. Couldn’t tell if I had two legs or four for a month after.” I flexed my hands before my face. “Never thought it would be useful to me.”

  “It’s very impressive,” said Inna. David shook his head in agreement.

  “So.” I turned back towards the mirror. “Can you teach me to teleport?”

  “Sure.” The Lady of War stepped towards me. “Think fast.”

  I saw her attack in the mirror, the gleaming sword reaching for my neck. On reflex I dodged, willing myself away from the edge I knew could cut me in two…

  …and found myself standing at the other side of the room.

  “It’s more of a reflex.” The sword disappeared from the Lady of War’s hands, vanishing into thin air.

  “Thanks.” I focused, repeating the reflective action, now with intent. It was like walking without moving my legs. I wanted to stand next to David, so I moved there, skipping the steps and time in between, exhausting some accumulated energy instead.

  David picked up a black bag. I had no doubts about what was within. “I’ll dispose of this. Take it easy for a while Mr. Frost. If the joints begin to hurt, drink more Healing Water and walk it off.”

  I laughed. “Advanced medicine.”

  “If it doesn’t work, ask Inna to cut them off again.”

  Inna grinned, looking satisfied with her handywork.

  Of course we all forgot about the visitors scheduled to arrive later in the day. Fort’s reminder forced me off my healing couch and had me jogging for the south gate into the fortress.

  I was, without any shame, calling Vazanklav a fortress now. We had walls, firepower, a garrison, and all the right in the world to claim that respectable title.

  I had always wanted to own a fortress, I realized. I just didn’t know it until I stood within the walls of one, until I felt the security and comfort of weapon batteries and walls surrounding me. More than the fortifications I wanted the company of the exciting, capable people that had gathered around my grave, brought together by a simple, united cause - wealth and excitement.

  And now I would be meeting the latest add
ition to my little gathering of sociopaths and adrenaline junkies.

  By sunhide I arrived at the gate, just in time for Fort’s call - the guests appeared on radar, and were about to cross the mountains. They were, in fact, fleeing. Their mobility suits, designed specifically for running, were barely keeping ahead of a lone Hacksaw. The two nearly flew over the hill ridge in their panicked flight for life.

  Fort had excellent aim. As if threading a string through a needle he managed to land a RAM-D bolt between the fleeing Humans and directly into the Hacksaw. The shield of the Class 8 terror might have been effective against hand-held weapons, but it did nothing to reduce the vast firepower of a Rollback Artillery Mass Driver.

  The two were lifted off their feet and thrown downhill, into the valley as the ridge behind them turned to fire. To their credit they got up without delay, though the choice of which way to run now took them longer. Finally they carefully stared towards the formation of foam-concrete dominating the valley.

  We watched though scopes, enjoying their unsure approach. Two RAM-Ds tracked their approach, then suddenly looked away to point proudly at the sky, as if judging the visitors to be harmless.

  It was an impressive sight, I knew. The valley was filled with a layer of moving dust, massive, shapeless pillars of stone rising out of the gray-red ocean; In the middle of the apocalyptic view, an island of light shimmered behind a glass-like dome four kilometers across. Under the dome, threatening fortifications and weapons surrounding a small village and airport. A lonely black pillar marked the definite center for the assembly of structures. It seemed to project a strange calm over the oasis of foam-concrete and light.

  Near the northern side, an ominous pillar of smoke that left no doubt - something died there. There lay the radioactive, smoking remains of the Shield Strider, the wreckage still too hot for us to bring into the Comfort Dome.

  The guests both wore large, powered skeletons with additional joins at the feet that made them tower over any normal Human. The extended feet allowed movement at highway speed across the rocky terrain while wearing an excess of gear and supplies. They jogged through the energy done and wall gates, stopping to look around. One, with the unpainted jogger, quickly dismounted and waved to Rarus. I recognized him as Sylvester Ember, my freshly-hired Defender. He was hauling a square box half a meter across on his shoulder.