Embers After Flames, Chapter 8.8 (Patreon)

8.8

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By the time that Walter came back with the next set of Hounds, Carla had their new ACs ready to go. 618, 619, and 620 joined with 617, all of them receiving LUNCH models. It was a decent upgrade for them, especially since Carla had been kind enough to provide them with some varied sets of weaponry on top of that.

From gatling guns to missile launchers to Pulse shields, Carla had provided them with quite the arsenal. The entire squad could be carrying four different weapons each and they still wouldn’t hit all of their options. It would probably do pretty well to leave them a bit less predictable, which should help with their survivability.

They had arrived in August, and operations had started right back the moment they were settled in. Arquebus and Balam’s war was only getting hotter, the two of them grinding against each other continuously.

Yet, the war with each other wasn’t their highest concern. Finding the Coral was, and having enough forces around to keep it was only just behind it. This put an upper limit on the amount of violence they were willing to deploy at any given time, both of them knowing very well that if they made each other too weak, there were other factions on the planet that would capitalize.

They were still perfectly happy to throw mercs at each other, though. The only thing they could lose there was money, and both Arquebus and Balam had more than enough of that to spare when the results were worth it.

And so, they were hired. August, September, October, November, December, each month saw an entire slew of operations, and not just for Walter’s Hounds, either. Mercs were being hired left, right, and center, thrown against both megacorps, against each other, and for the occasional one that was particularly stupid, against the RLF or the PCA.

It was doing a real number of them, that was for sure.

Even so, the deaths didn’t stop new arrivals. More of them showed up as the old ones fell, a consistent stream to replace the losses. Those that survived fell into two categories, the ones who’s survival ruined them, and the ones who’s survival made them.

Steel sharpens steel.

It was easy to see how the patterns of history had begun to manifest again. This spiral of ever-escalating stakes and skills inevitably led towards either total destruction or a single, overwhelming force. Dominants.

Irregulars.

The year passed. We moved into the forty eighth year after the Fires of Ibis. Two years left on our clock.

It almost wasn’t enough. We were riding a fine edge, but we were still on track. The Coral of Institute City grew faster and faster with every passing day, it seemed like. My sensory capacity expanded as the colony grew ever larger. The day came where I stopped needing relays for other colonies of Belius, and I was able to detect their presence without getting a mass that was in Contact close.

It turns out that, even after all the calculations I’d done, I had still ended up missing a few. Small ones, mind, stabilized well after the Fires had occurred and growing through the decades until they reached the size of something useful.

Much more important than those minor colonies, however, were the Firestorms.

The Coral, still floating in the atmosphere. The Coral which I had been hearing the faint voices of for quite some time now.

It started slowly, at first. The northern Ice Fields that Institute City was buried under did not see much in the way of regularly travelling Coral these days, most of it caught in the planetary air currents that took it elsewhere. The storms had been slowly dragging themselves upwards over time as the supercolony grew, the effects of the Convergence magnifying as it did, but this was a relatively subtle thing.

Eventually, however, the day came where a storm did pass clean over the Ice Fields- and drew just close enough that I was able to force the Contact for a brief moment.

The voices of the sky had been growing louder alongside the size of the supercolony, but achieving Contact gave them clarity that I hadn’t had before.

What I found was... not quite true Coral Minds, but more... the potential of them. Thoughts, half-formed C-Pulse waves, that were passing from one particle of Coral to the next, shifting alongside the loose Contact that the Coral maintained throughout the entire Firestorm, breaking and reforming as the Coral burnt, Surged, and reproduced to keep going. The lack of stability had prevented proper formation, but if that instability was rectified...

Even for that small little Firestorm that passed overhead, there were hundreds, maybe even thousands of potential Minds there. If the other, larger, Firestorms held the same ratio...

On the basis of mass alone, there were potentially millions. Storm complexity and distribution... Who knew?

I couldn’t pull them from the floating Coral, unfortunately. The Contact I’d achieved was a minor, utterly meagre thing. They were just too far, too diffuse, for it to really work the way that Contact was meant to. When the storm passed, the Contact went with it.

Another few years, and then maybe... Or, to be somewhat quicker about it, a relay, a proper, smaller colony, brought to proximity. That would work just as well...

Except that was also years away because there was no possibility that I was going to somehow be able to get a craft into the upper atmosphere so long as the PCA was on this planet.

I was going to have to make that another priority when this all came to a head, then.

Mmm. So many things to do once this was all done...

January was a relatively quiet month. More series of small engagements. February broke the pattern when a mercenary hired by Arquebus fought, and killed, Balam’s G11, Logone.

To my genuine surprise, I actually knew the merc who did the job. He called himself Rummy, and if anything showed the effects of my presence on this world, then it was Rummy.

He was, somehow, actually pretty good now.

It took a month of investigation to figure out why. Turns out my Firekeeper’s anti-Doser spree had had knock-on effects for the Doser-associated mercenaries, which included Rummy. With his supply cut off, Rummy had been left with no choice but to not be a drug addicted moron with an AC scientifically designed to be as shitty as possible.

After a crashout of truly epic proportions as his inability to sate his addiction left him a nearly insensate mess, Rummy had somehow been able to pull himself back together and get working again.

In the face of his newfound sobriety, Rummy hadn’t gone back to chasing the drugs that had left him in this mess in the first place. No, with his mind now in something approaching the right order, Rummy had Gotten Gud, shooting up in the levels of danger as he was forced to engage with the world properly. He put himself on the market and started taking jobs- and then he started succeeding.

His old AC had, at some point, been replaced with a newer BAWS model. His weapons were unlike anything else on the planet- because he was the one who’d developed them.

These days, Rummy was an actually appreciably good mercenary, and he proved it by killing one of the Redguns on a mission that ended up worse than anticipated.

So, that was the second Redgun dead. They were doing better than some, honestly, but others didn’t have the advantage of an army of MTs escorting them, so the actual skill level probably balanced out a bit.

There was a bit of a lull in regular battles by April, both megacorporations briefly taking a moment to regroup and replace their forces. Something I noticed rather quickly was that both of them were starting to employ drones in their forces, almost certainly for the exact same reason that everybody else was doing it; keeping their actual pilots alive since their numbers were limited and they were going through them faster than expected.

Things restarted in force in June. Balam launched a raid against Arquebus, aiming for a fast and hard strike to deplete some of their usable resources. The thing is, they hadn’t been able to hide it properly, and Arquebus had prepared for a retaliation strike at the same time. Mercs were hired en masse by both sides during the entire thing, until it seemed like everybody except the RLF and the PCA were joining in. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, a massive fucking clusterfuck, leading to the deaths of eight percent of the planetary mercenary population, the destruction of approximately twelve percent of all existing megacorp forces by sheer numbers, and the deaths of two Redgun Pilots and one Vesper pilot, G9 Kwando, G12 Ruki, and V.X Hesse.

In the aftermath of that shitshow, both sides pulled back to lick their wounds, though they continued to send mercs at each other for what felt like shits and giggles. Brute -‘Honest’ Brute, who would have joined RaD in another life- showed up at one point, and just as quickly went to ground.

For the six months that followed, the scene was a mercenary show. Attack, defense, counterattack, sabotage, reprisal strikes... The mercs carried it all out while the two megacorporations waited to fix up.

The year passed, and both megacorporations went active again- except this time, they weren’t focusing on each other.

No, it was the RLF who had now drawn their attention, sitting quiet and deadly in their fortresses that locked the rest of the planet out. Apparently, now that they had savaged each other, both megacorps decided to pick on somebody else, and hopefully get closer to their actual goal in doing so.

It started small. At first, just raids by automated forces, trying to determine the extent of the defences. These small raids were not a problem to the RLF, because the PCA did it better and the RLF has always chewed them up when they tried. It quickly shifted into bigger, more complex assaults, the megacorporations trying to find an opening somewhere, anywhere, that they could make use of.

Unfortunately, the PCA had done that better, too, and unlike the PCA, the megacorps were not out of range of retaliation.

The first RLF responses were, perhaps ironically, straight out of the megacorps’ playbook.

They hired mercenaries.

The difference between the megacorps doing it and the RLF doing it is that the megacorps were operating blind, and the RLF had myself and my children, and we’ve been running clandestine intelligence operations for slightly over two decades now.

Under the megacorporations, the mercenaries had been deployed in probing, opportunistic strikes, entirely expendable and used simply for the convenience.

Under the RLF?

The RLF handed them precise, laser-focused goals, with thorough information on their targets, their expected forces, and what they’d require to be successful.

They were good days when they were RLF mercenaries. Most of the risk of being a mercenary was not knowing what you could expect, after all. The mercs were eager, the pay was good, and their jobs excellent.

Both of the megacorps suffered badly for it. Each and every single response was a dangerous strike, cutting at the organisations’ infrastructure. Painful losses, time-consuming to replace...

Arquebus and Balam realised very quickly that the RLF definitely had an information advantage somehow. Frantic reformations went into place, trying to limit the damage and throw off the prior information. Searches and investigations conducted, but they failed to yield anything of use.

It was a mystery to them. To be entirely fair, who would suspect a legion of invisible Antigens was the explanation for this? There were no indications of anything of the sort, which was something I made very certain of.

The kids and I had a great time, though. Excellent bonding activity.

By the time the year was over, and we moved to the forty ninth, both megacorporations were bleeding uncomfortably, but they were nowhere near out of the game. Six months of combat had slowly killed off the less capable mercs, and by now the ones who were left were exceptional somehow... even if that trait was simple luck.

January was a fun little month. The graduation of the RLF’s newest set of AC pilots happened that month. Little Ziyi officially joined everyone else- still a little bit too far on the young side of things for my tastes, but she had met the standards and earned her spot, despite her age.

Three months later, she came back from a scouting mission with another pilot in tow. Rokumonsen was this weeb’s name, and while the circumstances of their meeting were known to me, it was honestly still ridiculous regardless. Still, his gratitude for Ziyi’s generosity and respect for her morals was undeniable, and he too joined the RLF as... a more hidden blade.

July brought the next true upset in the schedule to me. Sulla, after months of trying, was finally able to claim 618’s life. No easy feat on his behalf, since the squad had known he’d existed this time around, and had better mechs. Sulla, however, couldn’t be denied forever.

The fighting continued, heedless. Hot, cold, hot again, knives, then hammers, then knives and hammers...

And then we hit November.

Walter sent his three remaining Hounds on a job, attacking a PCA facility in hopes of acquiring information.

They completed the job, as they always did.

But none of them returned.

And so, just like last time, he went to get another Hound.

A shame, really.

We weren’t going to get as much time as we hoped for.

After all, 621 will be coming next.