Notes :
Still taking my break. I was thinking of forcing myself to write, but...better not. The patreon backlog is here to allow me to take those breaks after all.
I wrote a bit of cyberpunk RED stuff, mostly adventure material for kicks. It helps getting me back on an even keel.
Also I've been thinking of Book 11, and i think the book might be shorter than others. We shall see, but as it currently stands it is at 78k words, and I'm thinking of putting it at 86k total length instead of 90k.
The reason was that CQ was supposed to be in the Western Baronies and engaging the UDC by now, but it's been pushed back to cover, well, the stuff you've seen covered.
So, just like book 6 (which, reminder for those who didn't see my notes after writing the book on patreon, was supposed to have the battle against the duchess at the end), things are expanding. Probably not as much as it did back then, but still.
...I'm never gonna finish this series in 18 novels like I was planning, am I ?
Chapter 433
Eris Empire, Capital City of Starcore
Agency Operations Center
Cassissa entered the Agency's operations center, though many called it the 'situation room', since it was only used when shit hit the fan, and made her way to the Director, who was standing in the middle, with her screens surrounding her.
The elf didn't even bother looking up or greeting her. She simply started briefing.
"The agent we sent to get your letter and the files across missed their exfil and failed to check in after their meeting. Their partner is running for their life. We take at least three full squads of city guardsmen veering off pattern, scouring ways to leave the city."
"I'm guessing we had a contingency for that."
The elf nodded.
"We did. The agent is heading into the farms and will slip into a caravan once it leaves Rebirth. They have an established cover as a druid for hire and agricultural expert specifically for that scenario."
"That's good." Cassissa tried to stay inscrutable, but the elf simply glanced at her, and she sighed, cracking just the tiniest bit. "I hope the package got across. If this backfires..."
The Director nodded.
"It would be highly counterproductive." She turned around, as an analyst stood up. "Report!"
"We have...oh fuck, we have weapons fire in the city! Multiple reports coming in of guard units engaging adventurers!"
The map on the wall updated.
The reported battles were taking place around where the Merchant was housed.
"...Shit." Said Cassissa.
*****
"Damn they're fast." Said Alexandra as Allya and Trira's holograms appeared in the tactical operations center. Her own avatar was on its way there through the transport network, so she had to use an hologram of her own to be present as well.
"My agent managed to report in that the adventurers are aware they've been compromised." The spymistress paused. "I'm...not sure if they actually found out, or if their new contact just convinced them to make them move faster and recklessly."
"It's sure easier to conceal one's involvement if they all get themselves killed in a reckless attack." Said the dungeon core. "Guard squads engaging. Given the high alert level, and the port search we just ordered, Anders is dropping the hammer."
Allya smiled.
"He's good at that." Her smile wavered. "Will it compromise things?"
Alexandra gazed at the estimates. The recon capabilities of the mesa fortress were considerable, and she had one of her stealth drones take to the skies as soon as everything went to hell. It was the same one, in fact, that had foiled the adventurers guild's sand kraken gambit.
"No. The merchants guild's security will slow them down, but there's at least half a dozen medium to high ranked adventurers in there." No one at mythril or above, thankfully, as those would have required some serious firepower to put down. "They'll make it through. The trick is going to be to make sure none of the guys who get to where our dear Merchant is supposed to be survive to tell how he's missing."
"No pressure." Said Allya. "Your troops?"
"Already on the move." With everything that had happened with the guild, and the rush to counter the sand kraken, she'd made building some proper stealth assault shuttles, and not the rushjobs she'd used to raid Iralia's Glory, the Hammer of Eternity's supply ship, a priority.
Thankfully, that had proven rather easy. Because she had the stealth coating, and detailed scans of the shuttles onboard the Flickerlight, including the one carrying the fusion tank. She didn't technically have the schematics, but she did have the blueprints for all the standardized systems and spare parts the ship used.
Upgrading her previous shuttles from there had been a remarkably simple process. She couldn't just copy the Flickerlight's shuttles, as many of their systems weren't meant for stealth, and even the coating could only do much, but she could adapt a great deal to her previous builds.
Allya looked up at the hologram, showing the city, and shivered as she saw the dots rise from the mesa.
"You know, even though I'm aware they're ours and you're keeping an eye out for anyone else's stealth tech, it's still terrifying that they're right above the city and ninety percent of our defenses can't fucking see them."
Alexandra chuckled.
"Someday I'll tell you about proper stealth combat. You'll see how much worse it gets." She tilted her head. She wasn't possessing one of the golems on the assault team. This was one of the situations where she simply couldn't afford to. She had the training and certainly gotten some experience lately to play groundpounder, but she simply didn't have the finesse to pull this off.
Whiskey was taking point. And thanks to the fact that this was their home city and not the middle of the wasteland, they could do high tech covert communications just fine. With the fortress' jammers up as alarms blared everywhere, no one would find the traffic buried underneath it. Someone very, very paranoid and listening very, very closely might be able to infer that there had been some high tech communications buried in the mess, at which point...
At which point the adventurers would take all the blame for it. Because they were the ones whose guild had attacked with railguns, plasma cannons and power armor a few weeks ago.
Hell, even if her commandos had to use their high tech weapons, any remains would be blamed on the adventurers. There was already high tech weapons fire in the streets, clearly some of the guild's arsenal had survived its fall. Though not much, at least so far as her scans were showing. Even what little the adventurers had was mostly being kept in reserve.
"They've engaged the compound." Said Alexandra, before recoiling as the hologram flashed and various icons updated. "Wow! What the hell?"
"Suicide charge." Said Whiskey, her cheery voice gone and perfectly serious. "Plasma warhead, anti-tank missile. The party who deployed it is gone but the merchants guild compound is breached and being overrun. Time is shorter than expected. Green light?"
"Green light to engage." Said Alexandra, and the AI nodded.
"Engaging."
The shuttle dropped.
And all hell broke loose.
*****
The first inkling that something was terribly wrong was when the high powered sensor ping happened.
The second was when energy signatures began to power up inside the compound.
By the time the compound was firing missiles, both at the adventurers and at the sky, the AI controlling the assault had realized things had gone FUBAR.
The shuttle, which until then had been going on an unpowered drop, jinked, and narrowly dodged the surface to air missile. The weapon itself wasn't very advanced. It was actually a last generation Erisian weapon, built to attack pirate corvettes in swarms.
But advanced tech or no, there was no way to shoot it down without breaking stealth. A missile going off into the skies and wandering off when heavy counter-measures were being deployed by the mesa fortress and every damned warship in the city was easy to explain. One exploding from laser fire half a kilometer into the skies above a crowded city? Less so.
The sensors were another problem entirely. They didn't cause the stealth coating on the shuttle to fail like what the Order agents carried with them, but it clearly had been meant to defeat Old World stealth at close range.
Two things saved the operation. The first one was that Whiskey kept her cool and that, push came to shove, she could sacrifice the shuttle and bring in the backup. They'd probably have to fire up the guns of the mesa fortress to 'accidentally' destroy the sensors, trying to push back the adventurers, but it was doable.
The second one was that said adventurers had diviners among them, mages specializing in sensors, and they immediately pinpointed the guild's little surprise as the thing tagging them for the missiles currently raining down.
The sensor cluster exploded from a particularly well aimed fireball half a second before the next wave of missiles launched.
Bereft of their advanced targeting, the missiles simply locked onto whatever was in sight. Some of them struck the adventurers. One blew up part of its own compound.
But most locked onto the biggest source of interference and largest target in the area.
They began to fly towards the mesa fortress...and got obliterated by streams of gunfire as the twenty millimeter gatlings mounted all around the massive citadel of stone and death opened up.
There was no real need to justify anything at this point, and Whiskey stopped the shuttle meters off the roof of the Merchant's residence right as the mesa fortress' guns began to fire.
The merchants guild might not have a backup for their sensor system, or a separate datacore logging the data. But you never knew.
Commandos in stealth armor exited the shuttle, directly ejected from the sides as it took to the skies again. Those had nothing to do with the praetorian guard of the dungeon. Based on an entirely different Sagitarian golem chassis, they were wearing actual infantry power armor, the same as the puppeteered marines who had defended the Iralia's Glory. It would also quite handily justify how they could take so much punishment and keep going, if it came down to it, since the armor would keep fighting long after the user was dead.
The merchants guild compound was in total chaos. It had been built by Elkaryos' people when the city had started booming, and it was a kind of waystation for the guild. A safe spot members could rest at, talk to connections, and prepare their next move. All of the ones who had set up shop in Rebirth had their own permanent lodgings and offices of course, but this place saw a lot of activity as trade routes changed and the Empire formed.
Guild personnel were trying to evacuate while the merchants' private army attempted to mount a defense and buy them time. And in the mix, the bodyguards, guild affiliated or not, were trying to keep their charges' heads down in the chaos, and avoid getting caught up in the fighting until they knew who the hell they were supposed to shoot and why.
The commandos landed on the roof, and quickly sliced their way through. As they jumped down the hole, the entire area became blanketed in dust as the artillery shells began to arrive, detonating the hidden missile launchers, obliterating their entire launch site with the sensor cluster wreckage, and sending the entire situation from bubbling chaos to outright pandemonium.
There were neutrals in the building, and the commandos avoided those they could, and stunned those they couldn't. The latter part was simply being practical. Being knocked out or fainting in this mess was hardly surprising, in fact they found unconscious bodies very quickly, and the power signature of a stun weapon was a fraction's that of a gauss rifle or laser pistol. With no idea what had happened to knock them out, and their memories compromised by the general chaos and stress, the chance of them reaching for 'I was knocked out by a high tech stun weapon' was so abysmally low Whiskey hadn't even bothered quantifying it.
The commandos quickly split into two teams. One was to check the Merchant's office, where he should be sheltering in place. The other was heading towards the building's secret escape tunnel.
The tunnel team didn't even make it two floors before they ran into someone, moving quickly towards not the tunnel, but the regular exit.
That someone jerked away the second they entered the hallway, and pulled out what turned out to be a compact plasma pistol.
The first commando went down. The second one threw itself into the room, discharging its pulse rifle.
The man wasn't so much shot as cut in half as high velocity tungsten shards ripped through his flesh, the rate of fire so high the gun's magazine was empty before the commando even hit the floor.
The upper half of the man flopped to the floor, writhing. But the bottom one stayed up, and Whiskey noted that there was less biological flesh than augments in that body. More importantly, those augments were undetectable anywhere but through the wound.
Her remaining commandos advanced, and she stopped as they were about to drop a plasma grenade on the body.
First, because it wasn't a body, the man was still alive, even if faintly.
Secondly, because despite his features being utterly different, and even his height and build having changed, the molecular scanners were insisting the scattered fragments of flesh bore the right DNA.
This was the merchant.
The other team breached through his office a second later, finding it empty.
"Well. That simplifies the problem." Said the AI to herself, before transmitting to the command center as one of the commandos jabbed the writhing upper part of the man with a cocktail of regeneration elixirs and various other stabilization agents. It wouldn't do to have him die, not when there might be soul sealing in play. "Target bagged. Highly damaged and leaking. Prep emergency medical suite. Beginning sterilization."
The office team began to set some demolition charges, as the tunnel team pulled back, both halves of their quarry into stealth bags. Before leaving, they dropped a plasma grenade behind them, vaporizing the hallway, their fallen comrade, and any trace of their target's messy encounter there.
Seventy one seconds later, the adventurers barreled through the Merchant's office door.
The demolition charges went off. Plasma screamed out, vaporizing the adventurers. It was supposed to be limited yield, only to destroy the room and the immediate hallways.
Unfortunately, the adventurers were much less caring about collateral damage, and plasma missile warheads weren't exactly stable at the best of times.
Half of the building ceased to exist, alongside most of the remaining adventurers.
The shocked survivors never got to regroup, as drop pods began to scream through the skies.
And the golems they disgorged had no inclinations to be taking prisoners.