Embers After Flames, Chapter 6.5 (Patreon)

6.5

+++

The anniversary of the day that the Fires of Ibis had started passed with the same quiet melancholy as it had for the past three decades. The two weeks until the end of the year afterwards were known as the ‘Time of Fire’ to most of Rubicon’s citizenry; a remembrance of the period where the ever-expanding wall of burning Coral had lit the entire surface of the planet as though it was a scorching summer day. In truth, the light had lasted longer than a mere two weeks, but those first two weeks had been particularly brutal.

Celebrations... weren’t really a thing. Not anymore, anyway. While the new year had at first been thought of as a new beginning, a chance to recover from the Fires of Ibis, that hadn’t lasted after the first time the PCA came by.

January passed in silence. A pair of combat operations for the Firekeepers were about the biggest bits of excitement for the month. In the background, however, I started stepping up my own Antigen operations, directing some of my spare resources to the job of producing even more of them.

During February, my intelligence operations had expanded significantly as I worked towards pinning down ALLMIND’s own operations. I noticed a switch in ALLMIND’s behaviour by this point, the skirmishing we normally performed whenever we located each other changing into prioritizing escaping the situation and only engaging in combat as a last resort if the unit in question didn’t have an escape path.

It was a very curious thing to see, that. It’s not like she had any problems with shooting at me before, after all.

The only thing the Firekeepers did in February was blow up a PCA facility for shits and giggles. It was one of their smaller, more out of the way locations, which was used mostly as a staging area. Nothing particularly necessary for them, but certainly annoying for them.

Both the beginning and end of March coincided with Firestorms covering the sky, and so it both began and ended with bangs. Two PCA supply bases vanished off the map, poking just a few more holes in their network. The private side of things continued shifting about, with ALLMIND’s Ghosts pulling back from RLF positions quite a bit. 

That was about half my doing, and half the RLF’s doing, as they started manufacturing sensor clusters that could detect MDD-equipped mechs in enough numbers to actually deploy them around the place. 

They were basically just a bunch of mech-scale fence posts that would throw up alerts if something that shouldn’t be there showed up. Hardly a perfect defence, but definitely good enough. ALLMIND already knew she’d been seen, though the near complete shift away from all RLF positions simultaneously was... certainly a choice.

The clusters hadn’t been deployed that quickly, nor upon such a wide scale. Certainly, some Ghosts remained to watch, but both she and I had observers keeping an eye on everyone, so it was hardly special.

I half suspected she found something, but as April and then May passed, nothing actually happened outside the norm. If she had found something, I would have expected... I don’t know, literally anything. Two months was a lot of time for an AI, after all.

June was a month that was somewhat busier than usual. A bunch of corporations ended up pulling out of Rubicon, having dumped their money into this seemingly bottomless hole with nothing to show for it. The Mercs were eating well, but only if they could actually survive the missions they took on. Several had strings of bad luck- and a few of them even seemed to be genuine bad luck rather than ALLMIND’s background manipulations of removing the more chaotic characters from Rubicon.

Some groups quieted down for a bit, not wanting to draw attention during this period where there would be large amounts of forces free to respond to them. Some took it instead as a sign to attack, now that most of their rivals were gone and out of the way. 

The next set of suckers rolled in over the course of July. I still didn’t recognize any names, though the now thriving mercenary scene did attract some more capable independents. Time would tell how that ended up, of course.

By August, C6 Augmentations had made their way out to a lot of the RLF’s upper ranks. The vast majority of them stopped at the third stage of the process, not needing more than that to pilot their machines. ACs were unfortunately still in short supply, ironically not because there was a lack of Frames to refurbish, but because the RLF was still building the maintenance corps just to keep them running properly.

There were more pilot candidates than actual machines. The RLF trained them up anyway, because the loss of an AC didn’t necessarily mean that their corresponding maintenance teams would also be lost, and if a new pilot could immediately fill the spot, then it’d be much better for it to happen rather than wait and let the teams languish. In time, they would move to more automated systems, but there was still a lot that needed to be built before that could happen.

Of course, the spread of C6 Augmentations didn’t manage to escape notice for long. The PCA found out first, as they normally do, and in the process of trying to determine what and how the fuck, other groups had caught on. 

It was yet more confirmation that the RLF had a source of Coral somewhere, though everyone knew that anyway. The fact that the RLF was still successfully managing to feed the civilian population was proof enough of that since Coral was the only way to acquire enough food.

The later part of August got very busy as the new corps and mercs tried to shake the secret out of the RLF. It didn’t work; Flatwell’s compartmentalization of information meant that, even in the rare occasions where somebody was successful in acquiring RLF personnel, they still couldn’t acquire anything useful.

Such overactive groups inevitably also found themselves targets for the RLF in turn. That was never a good thing for them.

On the last morning of August, one of the new corps had the gall to attack a civilian zone. They seized a food shipment, probably intending to extort some secrets.

They hadn’t made it to the evening. Dolmayan had given his personal attention to the matter, and that had been that.

Even all of that, however, wasn’t too outside the normal by now. A little exciting, perhaps, but not abnormal.

It was September when the pattern finally broke again.

+++

Northwestern Belius. We’d been there just last year, blowing up Watchpoint Delta and recovering Ayre.

The PCA had been busy little bees in the aftermath of that. Watchpoint Delta had been monitoring a fairly significant vein of Coral, after all, already large enough to leave significant geological alterations if it had been burned. A lack of space in the underground channels had prevented the colony from growing too large, though.

It had taken them a bit under two weeks to repair the place enough to bring the station back online. Just like every other time, they found nothing had changed. If anything, the Coral was now calmer than it had ever been, just like every other time the unknowns attacked a Watchpoint. It remained a mystery to them what we were actually doing at the places we invaded- which was a state of affairs that I was perfectly fine with and would like to continue for as long as possible.

Forever would be preferable.

In any case, after we blew up the base the first time, I’d had the opportunity to slip an Antigen into the area in all the chaos. The sonar arrays had been taken offline alongside the base itself, and that gave me the chance to get the Antigen into one of the Grids out in the water, where it had had more or less free reign to move around ever since as the PCA had set up the vast majority of their monitors on the entrances to this Grid cluster, leaving quite a lot of the interconnecting roads between them still available.

I hadn’t really seen too much of interest, to be completely honest. The only thing new about the whole situation had been the sheer scale of Watchpoint Delta, by far the most fortified of all PCA Watchpoints that we’d ever hit.

The post-attack response had been on a slightly bigger scale than usual, because of that. AH12s on constant patrol, squadrons of LCs ready for a quick deployment if they were needed. The PCA came in, saw that the place had been wrecked, and half an hour later the entire zone was swarming with troops and machines. They’d looked around the place, and from what little of the PCA’s transmissions I was able to intercept from the distance without being noticed, had seemed rather very displeased about BALTEUS being in ruins.

After that, however, the reconstruction efforts had proceeded normally, if with a bit of extra allocation. By the end of the month, it was a fortress again, fully repaired and even more heavily defended. There were constant patrols in the surrounding Grids, as well, which I had been a little confused about until I figured out that they didn’t actually know how the facility came under attack in the first place.

The Overboost Units I’d deployed were new for Rubicon, and they’d destroyed themselves very thoroughly. The only thing the PCA had to go off was the aftereffects of their artillery weapons, but that only told them that there had been a few attacks that had hit the ground in the direction of the beach.

Operating blind and unknowing, they turned to constant searches, keeping a wide net of patrols going so that nothing would be able to sneak in.

Unfortunately, something had already snuck in, and there are a lot of places to hide inside of the Grids.

You can basically just pick a crevice, corner, or strut and sit there, and then you’re invisible. Turn off the generator and active scans will miss you ninety five percent of the time on top of that.

For an Antigen? It may as well have been child’s play.

For a year, that was the Antigen’s schedule. Keep an eye out for as long as possible. Move at most once or twice a month when the PCA’s randomized patrol routes happened to bring the detection chance above practically nonexistent. Do literally nothing else.

Any other Antigen would have been required to at least refuel eventually, but mine had been equipped with Coral generators, so even that wasn’t a problem. It was the longest of long-term missions, that’s for sure. It was barely even worth it, since we were probably never going to come back here, but hey, it was always nice to know where the PCA kept its troops.

The day that things changed happened like any other. A PCA patrol approached, and I eventually calculated that their path would lead them moderately close to the Antigen. Discovery chances were at three percent, but I’d played enough XCOM in my life to know not to take that chance.

I briefly searched for a new good position, and then moved the Antigen to it. A scan pulse rang out as it slipped in place.

Seventy meters away, a Ghost was revealed on the catwalk of the opposite wall. My Antigen raised an arm, the Ghost raised an arm, and then we both paused as we each realized that activating a plasma cannon or energy whip would immediately give our positions away to the approaching PCA patrol.

A moment passed, both of us waiting to see if the other would act. 

Neither of us moved. There we stood, two invisible machines pointing at each other.

The patrol passed slowly, a few hundred meters away. Not very far at all, really.

And then-

A signal hit the MDD cloak. Tightband, I immediately recognized, short ranged and very nearly undetectable comms. A short header, followed by an equally short amount of content. Simple to decipher.

“Outside Factor. Non-Human Consciousness.” 

ALLMIND was actually speaking to me.

Huh.

“I would engage in dialogue with you.”