Embers After Flames, Chapter 8.3 (Patreon)

8.3

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If not for the fact that she was travelling in a group, Carla would have been a tricky bitch to keep track of. I was honestly kind of impressed with how good she was at going to ground. She was usually so... loud.

Carla’s group was fairly small, all considered though. A few transports carrying a few MTs each, and a few more carrying nothing but equipment and manufacturing. They had evidently come prepared for Rubicon, but if they were caught out now, they were fucked. Carla did have her own AC and transport, though. The transport was one of those fully automated helicopter transports that could carry way the fuck too much equipment. As for her AC, by the look of it, it had been at one point been a standard BAWS SORA 1400 model, but by now it had been modified further for combat rather than the general purpose testing platform it had been.

In true Carla fashion, its entire weapon complement was missiles. A lot of fucking missiles. Handheld missile launchers, shoulder missile launchers, and I’m sure that if she could have stuffed a missile launcher in the Expansion slot of its Core Block, she’d have done that, too.

Carla’s first steps had been to gather information. This didn’t surprise me, but her subtlety did. The first thing she did was sneak into one of the few remaining corporate holdings, before raiding its data. I was impressed, because she was able to get about halfway through that before she was discovered.

It might have been better for that corp if she hadn’t been discovered, honestly. The moment she’d known she’d been found out, she brought out the missiles and laughter.

The corporate holding was now a series of craters.

From there, she and her group dipped into a nearby Grid, using its resources to replenish their stock and get the refining started. When that was done, she went upwards in order to find a place they could hide out in. She didn’t bother trying to get into the interior, just sticking to upper areas beneath the plates where their transports could easily go unnoticed. When she found a place she liked, she tossed out enough sensors to monitor any possible approach points, which would have made continued observation a lot more difficult if the Antigen hadn’t already been inside that envelope.

And, there they stayed. They got to work quickly, tearing into the data that Carla had recovered.

I was, fortunately, able to listen in on the chatter of the base without too much effort. Their comms traffic wasn’t particularly secure, merely made safe because of how short-ranged it was. If not for the Antigen’s stealth... Well, it would have been quite impossible.

And then Carla surprised me. Rather than doing her work inside the transports where it was nice and warm and all her companions were, she chose to pull out a camping chair, a foot stool, a laptop, and do her work outside.

It was... quite something. Carla had always had a devil-may-care attitude, but still... They’d set up some five or so kilometers above the ground. Rubicon’s atmosphere wasn’t that different from Earth’s. Oxygen content up there was a lot lower than normal, not even mentioning the temperature, pressure, or wind issues.

Unsurvivable? No. With the right augmentations, it’d even be perfectly liveable. Carla obviously had them, because everyone else who joined her came out wearing breathing apparatuses and thick coats. She slept inside the transports, but otherwise? Just lounging outside of it. I suppose she’s feeling cozy.

Eh.

Her choices to make.

The first thing Carla went after was the historical data records. Carla had picked her target well, in that particular factor, because that corporation she’d raided had been here for a decent amount of time, and they had raided the data of their predecessors, just as their predecessors had raided their predecessors.

With that, Carla was able to piece together a rough chronology of the events on Rubicon. A good first move for sure.

That gave the clues on who to look into first, next. All the dossiers that had already been built up were next on the list, and the only thing that Carla’s group did at first was organize those dossiers into various categories based on who and what group they were about.

The tasks took about a day each, since they were currently doing it manually. The thing that surprised me the most was that Carla had the ability to sit still for so long in the first place. They called a meeting on the third, though it ended up being a virtual meeting since they didn’t actually have enough space to host everybody in a single room comfortably.

Which... Honestly, that was still good for me. It meant that I was able to listen in.

The first thing they discussed were the two Megacorps on the planet. Arquebus and Balam were threats, and both were seeking out the Coral with a great fervour. Carla thought they were probably going to have to fight them in order to actually get at the Coral when it was found.

The second thing they discussed was the PCA. The gist of that conversation had been pretty much the same as the corporation’s. They were an obstacle to the plan, but they also undoubtedly knew where the Coral actually was, so they were a potential raid target on top of that. However, they had a bit too much power to raid so freely, and a long history of using that power freely.

The RLF’s turn came next. There had been a bit of back and forth on that particular subject. Most of them were surprised that anybody had been able to build something so functional in the face of continuous PCA aggression. Carla had paused, briefly, when the picture of Dolmayan’s now much more youthful face had been shown on the screen, but aside from that I couldn’t tell if she’d recognized him or not. They eventually settled on the RLF not being an active threat, but it was clear to everyone that they had access to Coral, and had been fighting for decades to defend it.

And then came the last on the list.

“All that aside, there’s another thing that’s been causing problems for people.” One of Carla’s subordinates spoke. “And it’s basically a regular old ghost story too- ‘cept this one’s true. It started about twenty years ago, with unidentified forces attacking locations whenever the Coral storms in the atmosphere covered the sky, and reducing everything present to scrap metal. Nobody knows who they are, what they want, or where they come from, but whenever you bothered people in the wrong way and the RLF didn’t get to you first? These guys would show up and wipe you from existence. Their biggest target has been the PCA, who have been losing bases all across the continent on the regular ever since the start. It’s slowed down these days, though.”

Heh. ‘Ghost story’. It’s so much fun being on the inside of these kinds of things. My Firekeeper’s status as cryptids... Well, I’d be lying if I was saying it had been completely accidental.

“‘Slowed down’ doesn’t mean ‘stopped’, though. Far as anyone can tell, they’re still active and doing things despite the fact that the PCA has been mostly staying out of Belius. Even Arquebus and Balam have been having some trouble, because their monitoring posts, forward bases, sensors arrays, and stuff like that has had a real bad problem with getting blown up out of the blue.”

Mmhmm. Yes, yes they were. That’s a decent chunk of their current job, actually; information denial efforts. I wanted to ensure that, at all points in time, everybody should know absolutely nothing, and while that lofty goal wasn’t possible to actually achieve, the Firekeepers were making a very good effort regardless. I also occasionally had them poking at the PCA whenever they were looking a bit too intently at wherever they thought Raven was currently hiding, as well as running interference for my allies.

Technically, they were still on the duty of handling anybody who thought playing stupid games with the civilians was a good idea, but... Well, we’d finally run out of idiots who could both try and be successful.

“Sounds neat.” Carla said. “Are they allied to the RLF?”

“I mean, probably, but there’s no direct evidence. With how much the RLF likes to fortify their stuff, maybe these guys just don’t bother. The only thing we know is that they seem to care about Rubiconian civilians, because they respond to threats with deadly force.” Her subordinate stated. “We don’t know how many of them there are, or even what the hell kind of stuff they’re using. The data that anybody has been able to recover is minimal, because they’re apparently also really good at erasing their tracks. We’ve got maybe one useful picture for every three or four years. Take a look.”

The data went through the link. I unpacked it.

Six pictures. Stills from security videos, it looks like. They had all been cleaned up a bit, too.

The first was from the Zatsuba operation. Not a real surprise. Stealth had been broken there. The second, from a fair bit later on. The third showed two members of Squad Beta, wielding newer weapons. Four had yet more weapons. Five and six, though?

Between the two of them, all three of the new AC models were present. The fifth had the Heavyweight MILLEPORA, while the sixth had another double shot of the Mediumweight EUSMILIA, and the Lightweight CARNATION.

Impressive. By the time those models had been developed, the Firekeepers had been on primarily anti-PCA duties. There had not been very many opportunities for those last two pictures to have been taken.

Oh well.

The pictures showed up on the screens, and Carla inhaled so sharply she almost swallowed her smoke. It sent her into a coughing fit as she tried to hack it back up.

The other, older members of the crew she brought with her, didn’t bother waiting so long to start shouting.

“Is that the SOL?!”

“That’s a Coral Oscillator!”

“C-WEAPONS?!”

And they went nuts, of course. No surprise. The RRI design inspiration was plain to see. It was a good aesthetic and I liked it.

Carla, after a few seconds, finally hacked up the smoke, spitting it out as fast as she could. “Shut it!”

The chat went quiet. Carla sighed, then cleared her throat.

“That is not a C-Weapon built by RRI.” She spoke. “But these designs are clearly reminiscent of RRI designs. Those first four- that entire chest section is clearly a simplified version of SOL 644’s chest, and that Oscillator is almost a mirror of the WLT 101. Those last two images- those three designs are refined, hell...”

Her entire body language was shifting right in front of me. All that devil-may-care attitude was fading away as the scientist she’d once been and the determined woman she still was came to the surface.

Her eyes traced over the images, cataloguing everything she was seeing, dissecting it as best as she could based on just still images. “Damn. Damn! And that means we have a big damned problem on our hands, because someone is running around with RRI’s tech, and all of this... They’re clearly good enough with it to make more.”

Ah, Carla... Yeah, no surprise here, really. The entire reason Nagai set the Fire was to end the threat of Coral. Now, here they were, finding out that no, the threat had not only not ended, but someone had gone ahead and made it worse.

And they’d had no idea that Pandora’s Box had been opened right up until they stumbled upon it.

“We’re changing plans. We need as much information as we can get on this, and we need it right now. Simmons!”

“Ma’am?”

“Get Walter on the line. And then get me everything you know about the PCA.”

...

Wait.

Was she really considering raiding the PCA?

No, surely not. Even she isn’t that spontaneous.

“We’re gonna raid ‘em.”

...

On the other hand, it has been forty five years.

Hmm.

Damn it, Carla.