Changeling

1.4

Nestra had a day off. She filed her report remotely, stretched, then she was a free woman. Aunt Claire was raiding and Siobhan Stibbons was going home so that left her with no one to go out with. She wasn’t staying inside a minute more than necessary, though. That left her with one good option: visiting her favorite hole in the wall.

District twenty-three was a dorm district for well-to-do baselines. It meant two-story houses with an actual fence. It meant wide, clean curbs with sparse trees and the occasional park for the kids. Nestra walked over a few streets to the CBD though it was barely more than a gathering of designer studios, gyms, stylists, and restaurants. All of those had found refuge in a large glass structure reflecting the hope and creativity that came at the end of the incursion, before megacorps had snatched all the best skills to hoard them in their arcologies. The businesses still outside were left to survive on smaller contracts, a diverse ecology curated to produce an occasional genius to snap up. It was rather empty on a weekday, so Nestra was confident there would be a spot for her.

The Sunflour was a true bakery, not a chain that got their stuff drone-dropped every morning. Fabricators didn’t work well with organics so they had small robots do the dough for them. It was all very artisanal, very fresh. It was also quiet and the regulars knew to leave her alone. She got in and frowned immediately.

Inside, an old-style counter filled the right wall while the left of the room sprawled in a mess of tables and counters. Some old folks and the odd freelancers worked on slates, steaming cups of coffee by their side. The smell was right. The low hum of conversation was right. The minimalist dark wood background was the same as ever. There was only one anomaly: the man behind the counter.

Not someone she knew.

He was also… weird. For one, he was impossibly tall — at about one Mazingwe though thinner. He was the tallest baseline she’d ever seen in person. He also had frizzy hair and very deep, soft brown eyes that gave him a dreamer aspect, one reinforced by the most genuine smile she’d seen on a retail worker’s face.

That immediately set off all kinds of alarms in Nestra’s head. Who the fuck smiled like that? She shook her head. He was probably new and not yet used to the job’s realities. She wouldn’t be the one to pop his abuse cherry.

“Welcome!”

“Hello,” Nestra replied, approaching like a scared deer and feeling silly about the whole affair. “Are you new?”

“Oh, yes, Miss Yeung mentioned selling. I’m glad she found someone.”

“Yes! And glad to have you for this… arvo tea?”

Nestra frowned.

“Where are you from?”

“Oh,” the man replied with a cunning smile, “here and there. Would you care for my new dessert? It’s on the house. I think Miss Yeung mentioned you. Flat white, yes?”

He pointed at tiny squares, brown with red marbling.

“Sure.”

She leaned forward. It was a painful thing to do but she had to be sure. Better to have cold service than leaving any sort of ambiguity. She wasn’t sure but he did feel a little too friendly. His eyes positively sparkled.

“Maybe Miss Yeung mentioned it… If you’re coming onto me, I’m not interested in such things.”

It was as if she’d accused him of bathing in the blood of puppies. He was absolutely horrified.

“Oh no, no! Look!”

Nestra turned and realized most people had either a small empty plate or a half-eaten cube. She felt stupid again.

“Sorry, shouldn’t have assumed.”

“All is forgiven,” the man replied genially. “I’m Seth. Here is your dessert. Enjoy!”

Nestra got her cup and walked to her usual table at the back. It was blissfully empty. She placed her slate on the table and got a beep signaling it was charging, which meant it was time to waste time. She scrolled through the news. Star gleams getting married and filming new shows. Bio augs in development. Gidung group gaining market cap on the coattails of Hong Wang’s meteoric rise to power, the star gleam raiding at record speed with the help of an absolutely impressive fire affinity. The article led her down a familiar rabbit hole. There was always a moment of fear before she pressed enter.

The Palladian group’s page appeared in all its sober glory.

No new obituaries.

Nestra released a breath she didn’t know she was holding. Her family was fine. Of course they were. Aunt Claire would have told her something, except she couldn’t tell her anything while she was raiding herself. No news of her little sis. Her older brother Ulysses just made it to B-rank at a record age, passing the test with ease. They were all doing fine.

They were also very far away. It was better like this. She knew it was better like this. It had been proven true time and time again.

Nobody wanted to see a loved one fail. Nobody wanted to see success day after day, then face someone who was unable to share in. Nobody wanted to rejoice about a successful raid with the one who would never raid. Her father had recently celebrated his ninetieth birthday. He still looked like a man in his late thirties and would for a long time. That would never be the case for her.

It was what it was.

Nestra’s mood was demolished. She took a bite of Seth’s confection out of annoyance and realized it was pretty good - crispy almonds on top with almond paste mixed with raspberry jam in the middle. It was a little too sweet but it went surprisingly well with her coffee. Maybe Seth wasn’t a complete wanker. Thus revitalized, she was in a good enough mood to open the urgent mail pinging at the side of her slate. It was, unsurprisingly, from Chief Ruben.

“Squad alpha and beta will be providing support for a larger operation tomorrow evening around district fifteen. Your tasks will be to hold a control point. Please prepare accordingly.”

As usual, what mattered was what remained unsaid. Camus wasn’t back so it would be the leftover together holding a choke point while someone else ‘pacified’ district fifteen. Possibly police gleams, maybe with reinforcement. Maybe the army. Hopefully, things would be easy. There were talks that district fifteen was the home of rogue gleams and she knew her side had been busy for the past few weeks. So tomorrow was the big push. Interesting.

Nestra pulled whatever files she could both from public domain and the TPD archives. The archive window glibly apologized that she didn’t have clearance. The news were more generous. District fifteen had descended into lawlessness, the long-abandoned hab blocs now used as dens by several gangs. Patrols no longer went there while suspicions of smuggling rings abounded. Short version, a fat load of nothing. No numbers, no names. Nothing concrete.

“Huh.”

A commotion distracted Nestra from her funk. Well, not exactly a commotion. The cozy hum of the cafe had grown unexpectedly silent. She saw them, then, standing by the door: a pair of gleams with their mana under control. She masked her surprise while she observed them much like the entire population of the cafe.

They were fairly young. One was a man with a bashful air and the brown glint of an earth elementalist. The girl was different, more guarded. Mildly disapproving. Her eyes shone brightly with a strange pink shade Nestra could not recognize. She’d opted for a more exotic designer clothes to the man’s old school shirt and slacks. They were twenty if they were a day, and they didn’t belong here at all.

“Sorry! I grew up around here. Don’t mind me,” the boy said, affable.

He went to the counter to order. Nestra wanted to leave but if she packed up now, they might take it as an insult and that could lead to unnecessarily unpleasantness. Even now, the woman scrutinized the room with silent disapproval while her companion made small talk. They settled far enough away, at least. The boy was probably a first gen returning to his roots with his love interest. She didn’t seem to be enjoying herself though. Nestra shrugged. After enough time had passed, she left.

“Come back soon!” Seth cheered.

What a strange man.

***

“This is it. Central has had enough of the district fifteen debacle. They’re sending four shuttles of auged grunts as well as three districts worth of police users, including someone from district one. They’ll raise the inner walls for the duration of the purge. Our role is to lock up the maintenance access to sixteen, sit on it, and make sure no one goes through. Alpha and beta will move and hold. For this operation, you will have access to lethal weapons.”

Nestra frowned. That wasn’t normal. They were supposed to take down perps in a non-lethal fashion.

“What’s the deal, Ruben?” Gorge asked. “What are you not telling us?”

“You know all you need to know,” Chief Ruben replied, pressing a key to show a holo rendition of fifteen.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

The briefing room may have seen better days but the holo was as reliable as ever. Nestra called the image on her visor, moving it around but there was something about that huge 3D rendition that just worked better for her.

Gorge switched the display off.

Ruben’s eyes grew sharp and dangerous but Gorge, to Nestra’s surprise, raised his hands in surrender.

“Off the record? Please, chief.”

Fearful silence filled the room. The chief was well within her rights to punish him for that, dearly so. Everyone waited to see what she would do. Gorge clearly wouldn’t push the matter farther.

Eventually and to Nestra’s surprise, she relented. That meant things were bad.

“I’ve had reports that the augmented companies expect fierce resistance including hostile users and heavy weapons. Corp weapons.”

“What?” Nestra blurted out.

“Possibly augs.”

Whispers of consternation shook the squads. No one liked the auged companies because they were brutes. If even they were worried…

“That is why, off the record, I am telling you this: be careful. You can use anything in the armory. You know why,” she finished with a pointed look.

Translation: it would be destroyed and moved soon anyway.

“Guess we got to train a little more then.”

***

The inner walls were designed to contain the hordes of beasts that came with a kaiju, if the outer wall of Threshold was ever breached. They wouldn’t stop a monster the size of a kaiju but if one actually got through intact, the district was fucked anyway.

There were maintenance accesses in a raised wall just to make sure all the proper parts that raised and lowered it could be reached. Those were structural weaknesses with access to the outside. Since the door was up the wall, and since beasts were not too smart, it didn’t matter in case of a breach. It did, however, matter when stopping humans.

Nestra watched the expanse of district 15 trailing in front of her to another wall several kilometers away, a field of old concrete flowered with fire blooms, flashpoints where the auged companies did what they did best. Hab blocs in various states of disrepair gave the entire hellscape a misshapen, bloated look that turned into the diseased skin of a titan far in the distance. A cacophony of gunshots and explosions animated the night air with a steady staccato. The augs’ gunships hovered over the battlefields, plural. Sometimes, a hail of bullets turned the night bright and annihilated whatever poor fuckers had the misfortune of being targeted. The sound that came half a second later was like the largest raspberry blown and added a grotesque dimension to the massacre, because it was a massacre. The weirdest thing was that it was not already over.

Somehow, the gangs were fighting back. And that was bad. Real bad. Because the only rational reaction when the augs dropped was to run for your fucking life. If the gangs stood and fought, it didn’t just mean they were hard targets. It meant they were ready.

They knew, or at least they expected someone to come.

Nestra grabbed her rifle tighter, well-aware that any goon with an unfettered fab could copy hundreds of them every day. The platform she was on was about two stories over the nearest roof and only a couple stories below the access itself, so about midway. She was the last line of defense before whoever came up reached the entrance and Stib. Gorge was here as well, checking his visor for the many feeds from security cameras and drones alike.

“Aight. Is the goodie ready?”

“Checking now,” Stib replied.

Nestra checked the feed of the room two floors below, their main defense node. The rest of the squad was here behind barricades centered around a small, rotating turret, courtesy of Gorge’s ‘cousin’. They had enough weapons to start a small rebellion. Well, not really. Not compared to the fuckers outside. The small, improvised fort faced the only way up and down: wide stairs without railings.

A loud explosion distracted her and she returned her attention to outside, seeing a new plume of incandescent death joining the rest.

“What is going on…” she whispered to herself.

“Don’t know,” Gorge replied, voice heavy for the first time since Nestra’d first met him.

“Nothing good. Lots of com chatter. The augs aren’t happy.”

“What are they saying?”

Gorge scoffed.

“Nes, you daft cunt. I can’t tap into mil-grade com systems with my homemade shit. Oh, look who’s here.”

A pair of gleams in the white armored uniform of the user police floated down from the wall, alighting on the platform with unearthly grace. Two men. One with a square jaw, a broody countenance reinforced by dark hair and the orange eyes of a firespark. The other had dirty blond hair and viridian eyes that could be jade or life, she wasn’t sure. They didn’t look happy.

“Well well well,” the firespark said. “It’s the fossils.”

“Ha-ha,” Nestra mocked before her brain could catch up with her.

The gleam’s features twisted with fury. His companion placed a hand over his shoulder, gently.

“Let it go,” he said in a soothing voice.

Nestra’s irritation flared in return. She’d been without mana for two days now and her temper was raw. A part of her wanted to tell the fucking gleam not to dish it out if he couldn’t take it but a more rational part knew that the gleam could just punch her until she projectile vomited and she’d get a warning for insubordination on top of that. That was just how things went.

It also looked like the gleam wasn’t going to let it go until something happened. Everyone turned when Gorge gasped.

The hissing noise of a missile launch heralded a light trail aiming for one of the gunships. It moved aside, shooting flares while a laser pulsed. Nestra almost breathed in relief when the blinded projectile missed its target but it was a trap. The gunship flew over one of the largest, highest hab blocs, and the moment it did, the jaws of the trap closed in on it.

Nestra counted at least five trails of white dumb fire rockets aimed with disturbing accuracy. Some sort of point defense took down three before they could hit but the other two hit with a loud boom that echoed against the wall.

Her previous missions hadn’t prepared Nestra for war. It was very bright and so damn loud. The gunship hiccuped and flailed, its surviving rotors struggling to compensate for massive damage. With a strong whooping sound, it crashed into the side of another building, leaving behind a black tail of smoke. Immediately, the other gunships gained altitude but the damage was done.

Nestra blinked.

They had missile launchers?

“We need to go,” the viridian gleam said, and the pair flew off at speed.

Nestra was left staring at the carnage.

“Fuck, it’s chaos down there,” Stib said a minute later.

“What?” Gorge replied.

“I don’t know what’s going on! Folks coming out from around. They’re augs. Something’s happening!”

Nestra moved to the edge of the platform and watched the incoming tide in the distance. There were men and women and old and young, all wearing sturdy street wear, thick garments meant to keep the owner warm and protected. There were augs, an arm there, legs here. Helmets. Weapons. A lot of weapons. Armbands.

“Nuts. Open fire,” Gorge ordered.

“Sir?”

That wasn’t what their rules of engagement said.

“You heard me Riel dammit!”

A hole the size of an orange opened in the chest of a man carrying an actual machine gun. He toppled, falling to his death floors below. A woman who stood still to shoot soon joined him. Gorge raced to the edge of the platform and Nestra followed. Both of them deployed their weapons, barrel twisting to the side to allow them to shoot from cover. It was always weird, watching distant targets through her visor with a target reticle on them. Nuts’ rifle spat again and pushed an aug back. He kept running, intestines following like a morbid snake.

Nestra’s world narrowed. She was cold, hot, excited, scared, then focused. She took down a man hoisting an old RPG on his shoulder. The return fire from the approaching wave shredded the access way, blowing holes in concrete and showering her in dust and debris. She lined up an old man whose weapon had a scope and shot him, catching him in the neck. He fell like a puppet with its strings cut.

A part of Nestra reminded her that she’d killed a person for the first time since the beginning of her career. It was weird to do it like that. Casually. From afar. It was wrong. It was only fair. It was necessary. Nestra forced her mind to shut up. The gangers outside had found cover. Others moved to street level, making their way up that she could see from her feed. Gorge triggered one of the traps and a couple of young men fell, body pierced by a hundred ball bearings. They still clawed on the next step after that with their eyes clouded, teeth bared in a rictus.

“Be advised, the perps are stimmed,” Gorge said with a calm Nestra didn’t feel.

She shot someone else and missed the first two bullets. Almost all the gangers had either gone to ground or—

Movement. Close. Nestra rolled to the side and something stomped where her head had been.

Man. Very close. Auged eyes. Auged chest. Auged legs visible under a tattered black waistcoat. She shot him point blank range and full auto but the bullets pinged against his chest.

He grinned, foam at the corner of his mouth. Nestra’s heart bounced against her ribs in that one defining moment. She stood and unsheathed her baton in the same upward movement. The blade caught the aug in the arm and stopped.

The electricity didn’t.

Enough juice to stun a horse seared the man’s augs through the slice Nestra had left there. He fell down with a ponderous clang, sliding off the platform a moment later. Nestra turned just as another aug landed there, leg actuators whining from the effort.

A loud boom made Nestra jump through her ear protector, then another. Gorge had both hands firmly around some illegal hand cannon. Each shot pulled the barrel up with a monstrous kick. The auged guy had two gaping wounds spurting blood and still, he kept coming.

The last shot took the head off.

Nestra looked.

There was brain tissue on the cement just to her side. Blood everywhere, the stench cloying. It was suddenly much silent. She was hyperventilating.

“Nes.”

What was that? Oh, yeah, her call sign.

“Nes!”

“WHAT?”

“Nes, stay with me.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Sorry.”

“We gotta keep shooting.”

Nestra could see why. More augs and gangers ran up the stairs while others were approaching from the rooftop, trying to split the lower squad’s attention. Nestra grabbed her gun. Reloaded. Crawled to the edge of the platform to resume firing so she could force the gangers to hunker down. One of them made the mistake of hiding behind an empty panel and died for it. Too thin. Line the sights on her visor. Shoot. Line. Shoot. Keep an eye on the various feeds. A man with a rocket launcher aiming up at the squad’s location from a floor below.

“Shit. Explosives.”

“Don’t worry,” Gorge said.

The entire access stairs shook from the detonation. They lost the feed.

“Place is designed to hold against monsters. It will take more than that. Focus on keeping them away. Stib, reinforcements?”

“No dice, sir. They didn’t even give me an ETA.”

Nestra didn’t swear because she was a pro like that. She reloaded again. There was a lull in the battle. Below, the access stairs were a mess of body parts and entrails where the gangers had tried to storm their way in.

Stib threw up in her microphone. Nestra remembered that turrets needed to have a drone operator plugged in even on auto-fire for safety reasons. Yeah. Could not have been fun.

“They’re pulling out?”

The feed — whatever cameras were left — showed no more people. Explosions had taken out some of them.

One more winked out as she watched.

She heard the slow clang of something heavy making their way forward.

“I’m losing the feeds. Jammer,” Stib said.

“The turret’s shielded. Focus on that,” Gorge replied. “Nuts, you good?”

“Got the AMR ready. Concrete’s too thick to get a reading but I think it’s a walker.”

“Got a visual!” Stib said.

She’d sent a flying drone at record speed. Pictures captured through the gaps in the stairs’ structure showed the frame of some combat walker. Nestra didn’t recognize it. It looked unmarked. Plain. Who the fuck could make homemade walkers? Those were military weapons for Riel’s sake!

Gorge stayed calm.

“Looks like a makeshift Dilong Mk 3. Without the plating. Ok I need you to do exactly as I say. Bard, Preach, Pudding, toss grenades as it climbs, then shoot the limbs. Arms first, then legs. Shoot it to shit to confuse the pilot. Nuts, get the top weapons. Don’t bother with the habitacle. And don’t leave cover. You leave cover, you die. Stibs?”

“Reconfigured for point defense and disablement.”

“What about us?” Nestra asked. “Should we get down?”

Gorge shook his head.

“We got nothing that can pierce this thing. Even if we did, the lads have steel barricades. We show our asses, we get pulped.”

“That won’t—”

“I know! Shut up. I’m thinking.”

The clangs continued. Nestra was out of her depth. Her job was small monster extermination and taking down criminals, not waging a fucking war. She watched the feed of the main room. Her team huddled behind a thick pane of neosteel, weapons slid through ports. Not one inch of their body was exposed.

“Now,” Pudding said.

The squad pulled pins and released the grenades almost immediately. The walker crested the edge of the stairs.

The feed went white. The building rumbled. Nestra’s ear protections tried to stop the cataclysmic exchange but she could feel it in her bones. Her teeth clicked. She fell to one knee, balance lost for an instant. There were a few more exchanges. There were holes in the barrier.

The feed died and Stib screamed. Gorge and Nestra were running before she was gone.

“You get down and do what you can. I’ll get her,” Gorge ordered.

Nestra didn’t want to listen. She wanted to protect Stib first. The others… but no. She nodded.

“If you hear the walker, run away.”

“Yeah.”

The stairs. The smell of spent powder and offal. A late gunshot.

Nestra arrived.

The barricade was savaged. One major hole, a series of smaller ones. Nuts was dead, cut in half, augs coated with blood. His ribs jutted out and the broken ivory caught her eye first. Preach was down but she couldn’t see how bad it was. He was lying on his side. Very little was left of the walker except a steel sarcophagus shredded to ribbons, metal peeled like old paint, limbs bleeding oil and propellant.

The last thing that caught her eye forced her to a stop. It was Bard. He was holding a strange device that looked far too much like a spent EMP grenade to be real. That wouldn’t make sense. Walkers were heavily shielded.

His other arm held his sidearm. He pointed it at Pudding and blew his head off.