B3 C4 - The Job

Syl relied more on the technology that he’d brought along with him than his magic when it came to monitoring the others with him. He didn’t have the flux to spare for expansive operations, but he had a few camera drones that he could control with minimal flux output. They didn’t have much in the way of stealth, but nobody was going to stop him from hooking into their camera system.

Once he had control over parts of their security system, it was trivial to keep an eye on the split teams.

Space travel had gone relatively unexplored after the world’s scientists had determined that flux couldn’t sustain itself past the outer boundaries of the atmosphere. A lack of exploration had meant a lack of conflict, which meant that Syl and Bianca’s unit had never had a reason to interfere with this specific black site.

Evidently, the Aurian king had stayed ahead of the world. Syl had known that this space program existed, of course—there was very little that the government could do without him noticing. He hadn’t, however, tracked the results of every spaceflight, having assumed it was mostly for vanity or LEO satellite deployment.

Maybe he should have. Then again, in his defense, he had been functionally dead for a critical decade.

There were no other space programs nearly as developed as Auria’s. Many other countries had the capacity to hit low orbit, but those were mostly disposable rockets that were meant to launch satellites. As far as Syl knew, Auria was the only one ever sending manned flights past the atmosphere.

That was reflected in this black site. As they passed through it silently, Syl continued hacking his way deeper into the security system, stripping through layers of cybernetic and magical defense until he had access to pretty much the entire layout of the compound.

This was not the only black site working on the space program, he knew—there were only a couple hundred people employed here, which wasn’t nearly enough to even maintain a program as dedicated as Auria’s had to have been in order for them to reach as far and establish as firm a link with the machines inside the moon that the king had evidently been able to.

It was, however, expansive enough to hold an underground launch site as well as a hangar housing multiple spacecraft. Neither Nethra nor Light provided much guidance as they moved, only stopping to make a few announcements to personnel who’d taken shelter that it was safe to come out now.

This one area alone was a larger scale operation than Incarnate’s headquarters, spanning a grand total of twelve floors in concentric circles around the central launch facility. Syl skipped over most of it, though he and Bianca downloaded data from any data center they could find. They were encrypted, of course, and there were any number of security protocols preventing them from freely accessing them—going so far as to attempt to brick themselves when accessed by an unauthorized individual—but while Syl hadn’t designed these specific ones, he had the memories of some of the magicians who had created the groundwork for modern Aurian magical security.

Hell, this design was based off of one of his own. The king’s modifications weren’t going to stop him from accessing this data.

Apart from their ongoing heist, that was Syl’s current largest question. After meeting Zero, he had gained some ability to model what the original Sinner was capable of and what he would likely do next. The king was a different story. Syl had only ever felt the reverberations of the Aurian king’s decisions in his own life, what with the special units and the wars and everything, which meant he didn’t know how to track what the paragon was going to do next.

At the very least, it didn’t seem like he was coming to interfere with Syl and Bianca’s assault on this. By the time they reached the warehouse, a solid hour or so had passed. That was more than long enough for any paragon-class to make it across Auria, and the king was clearly capable of that kind of speed given the pace at which he’d been able to evacuate from the capital city.

While Syl and Bianca’s intelligence network wasn’t as intact as they would have wanted it to be, they still had enough feelers out that they would have been able to sense a paragon-class presence traveling across Auria pretty easily. There wasn’t even a sign of the king coming for the time being.

That said, there were almost certainly reinforcements coming. While the power of his reputation might stall them for some time, Syl was certainly not going to be able to convince these strike team leaders to fight for him. He could probably take them if necessary, but he was in a state where he really did not want to take his chances in a fight.

They hadn’t brought any way to drag a hundred-foot-tall rocket and shuttle out of a facility that had been built around it, but he had never planned on dragging it.

“This is quite far enough, thank you,” Bianca said to the two strike team leaders. “I would advise scuttling the docks behind us.”

The marbles that each of the Incarnate-Viridian teams had been carrying with them were not the only artifacts Syl had created. They were the only ones the other teams had, yes, but Syl had dedicated a significant portion of the time where he hadn’t been working on the anti-metorite weapon to creating artifacts for specifically this purpose.

Together, he and Bianca levitated a grand total of eight magnetic rings each just wide enough to fit around a wrist, positioning them at roughly equal intervals to encompass a rough cylinder a hundred fifty feet high and fifty wide.

Based on the design that two Cascadian Virtues had used to teleport to the Taiwan seas, this artifact was clunky enough that it was only capable of being used once and could only go to one paired location.

That was enough. It was all they needed.

Syl and Bianca stepped into the area of effect as they triggered it, pearlescent panels generating between the rings.

“What the fuck,” Nethra said.

“Told you it was a bad idea to fight them,” Light said.

“You didn’t tell me shit. I started it.”

“If you still want to work together, you know where to find me,” Bianca called out to them. “Same methods as before.”

The two bickering magicians paused as if they’d forgotten that Bianca could, in fact, still speak.

Before they could respond, the artifact’s borders snapped into place and they were gone.

#

Incarnate didn’t have a location to launch a rocket from, nor did the Viridian estate. That was only natural given the lack of desire from pretty much everyone worldwide to have a robust space program, which did complicate their ability to execute the rest of Syl’s loose plan. The data they’d lifted from the Aurian black site would help with that, but it was unlikely that they were going to be able to form infrastructure before the moon fragments were at risk of entering atmosphere.

That meant that for the time being, the priority would have to shift. Now that they had secured the physical rocket and the data from the black site’s reserves, they could relax on that end. While it was possible that they wouldn’t be the first ones to reach the fragments, they didn’t need to be. All the Incarnate-Viridian alliance had to do was ensure that they weren’t out of the game when it came to getting up there.

The other teams hadn’t been fruitless in their search, though the rocks they’d overturned had been debatably useful.

“At least we confirmed who hates us,” Waylan grumbled at their after-action report. “So much for blood bonds.”

Waylan and Uriel had each headed their own strike team. Waylan’s had nearly run straight into an ambush set up by none other than his own family. The Reds hadn’t officially declared any wars, but they’d turned on the Viridians quietly. They didn’t seem to care much about whether they were one of the Incarnate-aligned groups or the one that had split off after Jennifer had taken control over the family’s operations.

“Didn’t lose anyone, though,” Uriel said. “That’s commendable.”

While her group hadn’t directly fought anyone, they had located and entered a black site that had already been scuttled and had had to deal with the resultant array of death traps there. A couple of them had taken near-lethal doses of radiation, which they were still in treatment for.

“The data’s good,” Jennifer said. “It’ll help with the complications of the mass driver past low orbit.”

It should increase the effective range by a fair amount, Syl signed.

The biggest problem they had encountered when it came to setting up the mass driver that would keep their part of the Americas from being obliterated by a falling moon fragment had been the lack of ambient flux in space. Obviously, the machines had identified a way to manage otherwise, but Syl hadn’t been able to divine how they’d done so during his near three years canvassing the ruins of Taiwan.

It was almost certainly new technology that they’d developed in order to keep themselves alive in the wake of their country’s obliteration, which meant it was unlikely that Syl was going to make the breakthrough himself before he coul dlearn about it from studying them.

That meant that their problems remained. Thinner ambient flux meant that any ongoing magical effect had a much harder time continuing onwards, which in turn meant that their in-progress mass driver started relying on physics more than raw magic by the time its projectiles left the atmosphere. With the current design, they would have had to play it fast and loose, not pulling the trigger on the device until the moon fragment was already falling deep towards the Earth.

Auria had been secretly looking into space, and while their data wasn’t promising with respect to keeping flux active that far out from the magic-rich Earth, they had optimizations and technologies that Syl would have taken at least a while to come up with on his own.

“We’ll make the flux driver our number one priority for the time being,” Jennifer said, slapping a stack of handwritten notes down on the table with a sigh. “The daisy chain for the recharge cyclers isn’t working as nice as I’d like them to. I think it might be something to do with the sighting. It’s a scaled-up version of the activation detector we have already, but that…”

“Before you get deeper into the technical talk,” Uriel started, raising a hand to stall her fellow ex-Reserve magician. “Jennifer. I assume you’re going to spend the rest of our remaining time working on the weapon?”

“Naturally,” Jennifer said.

“If you’re stepping back from the people-facing end of things, you should appoint someone in your stead,” Waylan suggested. He frowned. “Appoint is a strong word. What I mean is that there are still refugees out there. Tons of them, actually. A lot of them are going to die in the days before the rocks start hitting. Assuming we clear those, the people who survive are going to make up Auria.

Auria doesn’t exist anymore, Syl signed.

Bianca translated, then added, “I agree with him. It was already a country on shaky ground, and it no longer appreciably exists. There are a few major factions, but whatever comes out of the ashes, I doubt it will be the same kingdom.”

“The point remains, though,” Waylan countered. “Whether or not it’s Auria, the country is still made of its people. We should still be trying to help the people who are left.”

“I never said anything about not doing that,” Jennifer said shortly. “I already have programs in place. Food synthesis is still all systems green. If you want to deal with onboarding, be my guest. I have better things to do.”

“You don’t need to be that aggressive about it,” Waylan said.

“In case you haven’t noticed, we’re dealing with the end of the human race,” Jennifer snapped. “Our options are oblivion or the greatest technological advancement we have ever seen short of the initial integration itself. No matter what happens, there’s going to be war. We’ll fight over the scraps or we’ll fight over the bounty of the machines we lost control of. Every second I spend here is one where my ability to control my people’s destiny slips through my fingers and into someone else’s. Excuse me if I’m a little aggressive, Waylan. We’re not playing at war anymore. I have responsibilities more important than deciding who gets to represent me.”

She stood up, glowering, then shoved the papers at Syl. “I’m going to go to the lab. Do as you like. Just don’t break anything.”

With that, she left.

Waylan huffed out a sigh. “Seriously…”

“We’re all under a lot of stress, her especially,” Uriel said. “Give her some time.”

If that’s all, Syl signed. I’m also going to go.

“I’ll handle the rest,” Bianca said. “You have more important tasks than a meeting. I remember the events better than you, anyway.”

Syl’s lips quirked upwards. I’ll leave it to you, then.

The surviving labs were deeper down. Between the efforts of Syl and two Virtues, a good chunk of the upper levels were either unusable or had enough critical infrastructure damaged that they lacked the precision tools that they needed at the moment. As a byproduct, they were functionally cut off from the outside world here. Even with the intranet range extenders, FCDs didn’t get much in the way of reception here, especially in the inner labs where external signals would actively interfere with the machinery.

Which made it extremely suspicious when Syl’s FCD lit up with a notification. He excused himself from the lab, leaving Jennifer to rerun the simulations with the new data they’d acquired. Given the circumstances, he had a sneaking suspicion about who that was.

There was no sender name.

Pride.

It was always going to happen eventually, but I didn’t anticipate it happening this early. Goes to show that all of you continue to have cards I’ve never seen before.

That spell really was something. I had been wondering how you got out of Sloth’s sin, but that explained it all. I’ve never seen anything like it.

I’m sure you’ve already divined why I’m contacting you today. The sky is falling. We have no purpose in existence if there are no others alive. I have reached out to each of the other six. They will protect the areas of the globe they currently operate in.

I do not want to demand of you to do the same, but I suggest you look at the world around you. The Sinners are not the only ones taking advantage of this. Don’t let it leave you behind.

Zero.

Syl discarded it almost as soon as he received it. Obviously, he’d be working to keep himself and everyone he cared about alive and well.

The only new piece of information in that message was about the Sinners. Once he stepped back in the lab, he opened a new subroutine on one of the monitors, trying to re-establish contact with some of the sensors outside.

“What are you doing?” Jennifer asked.

Looking, Syl signed back. The winds are changing. I’m going to ensure they don’t blow the wrong way.