Emerson Fortier
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Chapter 36 - Downtime
🕑 Added 2022-10-07 16:33:56 +0000 UTCTC served as their go between in the shifts that followed Zihan’s demonstration. Mostly he played messenger boy, carrying Zihan’s requests for updates to the Casino when Zihan couldn’t go himself, a separation the Casino Manager had asked for when he told them that the team he’d brought together had “agreed to the go ahead” and needed time to get to the rock so they could start to make their plans.
“This is fucking stupid.”
Yi Cao had taken to “serving him”, following the young master mostly, and watching him swing between an agitated restlessness that had him bothering the girls or pacing along the neon bars of the technomancer joints they visited while thumping music raised rippling circles in their cups, and a listless torpor where even the girls couldn’t get him to climb out of his chair to join them on the dance floor.
“Don’t you have something you should be doing?” He asked during one such mood. He lay on one of the tables in a club that flashed with light and thumped with the artificial heartbeat of some overbearing alien music.
No one else was in the place. A thing that had once been a man stood at the bar, lit from below by the purple neon tube set into the surface while it wiped the bar down with one long multi-jointed arm. Bealtiel stood on stage, stripping slowly while Kalemal reclined, already fully nude, on a platform just behind her. One or two other patrons sat tucked away in booths and tables, eyes on the girls or on their drinks, or cards, or glittering constructs held in chrome plated hands.
Yi Cao looked away from Bealtiel’s show.
Tobacco smoke curled between them from the lit smoker dangling from Zihan’s fingers.
The other boy looked up at him through the curtain of smoke, his cheek on the table.
“You ordered me to follow you.”
“Did I?” The Young Master reached for his tobacco stick with his lips, sucked in an apathetic hit, blew the smoke along the table and tapped ash onto his hand. “What were we doing when I said that?”
“I was cultivating.” Yi Cao said. “And you had… business… for the room.” Yi Cao looked back to the girls. Kalemal had taken to doing her exercises with her hair as she lounged on stage. It fanned out around her in the air, shifting between gold and silver in the surreal light, shining like a metallic halo behind her head while her skin changed color with the shifting light.
Zihan grunted. Watched the smoke curl, catching the light between them like a hologram. “What did I say?” He asked.
Bealtiel rotated on the stage, both thumbs beneath the waistband of her shorts, tattooed thorns writhing on her wrists in time to her movements.
“You said I’d been working too hard.”
“I remember now.” Zihan said. His gaze sharpened, regained some of its focus. “You said you’d hardly progressed.”
Bealtiel’s shorts came off and Yi Cao turned back to the Young Master.
“Can I go back now?”
Zihan let his eyes drop.
The smoke caught in the light between them spun, like a ghostly imitation of the girl twisting on stage over an empty dance floor.
“You need a break.” Zihan said eventually.
“What I need is to finish the first circle.”
Zihan snorted. “I could get you a pill back home that would finish your foundation in a single day.” He said. “I need you here.”
“For what?” Yi Cao demanded. “This?” He looked at the girls. Nearly naked now, little left to hide her but darkness and neon light.
Zihan pushed himself up with a sigh. He stuck the smoker into his lips and puffed. Watched Bealtiel finish, wrapping herself around the pole with a hooded look of disinterest before moving to lounge beside Kalemal, her hair and tattoos a dark complement to the other girl’s shining halo.
Zihan smirked and blew smoke in Yi’s direction. “You don’t like this?” He asked.
Yi Cao’s eyes caught on the girls, stuck like lodestones to their skin until he tore them away.
“I’d like to be cultivating.”
“You should be.” Zihan agreed. “But you can’t.”
Yi glared at him, then looked away.
He still wore the source, heavy around his neck on its loop of chain. The Ki tickled at the channels in his chest. He could have pulled on it now, lost himself in the thumping music and sunk into the white and empty vastness this aspect took him too when he entered the trance, to cut his channels like lightning through a distant horizon.
He touched the source but he didn’t pull. Thought of the visions that traveled with him the last time he’d sought the trance. Of burning men six inches tall charging him with spears before he ripped them apart with his gun.
He held the source as he stared at the table between them.
An empty cup slid onto the wood in front of him.
“Much as I appreciate your fixation on cultivation,” the Young Master told him, “it wasn’t really what I meant when I said you should be doing something.”
Yi Cao stared at the empty cup and Zihan sighed.
“I need a drink.” Zihan told him. “And so do you.”
Yi Cao looked up, found Zihan watching the girls who lay on their sides doing very little but playing with their augments, naked.
“You do need a break.” The Young Master told him. “Despite what you may think, you can’t cultivate non-stop without introducing imbalances into your techniques. You need to center yourself. Get rid of the distractions. Have a little fun.” He raised his smoker to his lips. “Move forward with a clear mind.”
Yi Cao glowered at him as the coal lit their booth.
“I’ve wanted it for so long.” He said after a moment. “I don’t want to lose it just because…because… to the things… in my head.” He waved a hand lamely, let it drop without returning to the source around his neck.
“It will come back.” Zihan promised. “Finding it again is just a part of the process. The first step towards defining your law.” He turned back to the girls and took a hit from his smoke stick. “You just need to find a way to cope until then.”
Yi Cao didn’t reply. The empty glass stared up at him from the table, sparkling in the neon twilight. He picked it up and stood to go and get another.
“Something hard.” Zihan told him as he left. “For both of us.”
Zihan wasn’t waiting at the table when Yi returned. Yi sat and slid the drink he’d gotten for the Young Master, his, master, across the table then waited, sipping from his own glass while he watched the lights flash on a stage empty of anything but the two girl’s clothes. Something in the alcohol made his tongue fuzzed and thick in his mouth and his throat tight so he set it aside and just sat, staring at the changing light.
High notes mingled with the thumping beat as the song changed and Yi Cao felt something change in the air, thought, for a moment, that Zihan had activated the technique he’d used to share his Ki when Yi Cao finished the scripture in his palm. Then every light in the place blinked off. The music died mid beat, and the ensuing silence seemed almost as deafening as the music that thumped from the stage only moments before.
“What’s going on?” Someone shouted.
The door opened, and Yi Cao felt his heart jump into his throat.
He threw himself to the floor just as the booth beside him exploded into splinters.
Yi Cao threw himself to the floor as the booth beside him exploded.
The music died mid beat and the
A single light snapped to life on the opposite side of the booth, throwing the world into jagged shadows as a voive boomed louder than the music that had just died.
“Remain where you are! This is the Nine Spears Security Group. Under Governor order forty nine seventy three this establishment is now closed. Every agent, employee, owner, and client is required to present themselves for inspection under suspicion of conspiracy against good order.”
A second voice thundered back in Urdul, loud enough to shake the floor and rattle Yi Cao’s bones.
“What is this?”
“This is the Nine Spears Security Group.” The intruders replied, they said more, repeated itself, mentioned illegal augments and something about smuggling.
Yi Cao didn’t pay attention.
A sword stood jammed into the stone floor just in front of him no more than three feet from his face. Scripts along it’s blade flashed as Yi Cao stared at it, then the thing quivered and ripped itself out of the floor to fly back through the hole it burst in the side of his booth.
The clip in his ear chimed something Yi Cao couldn’t hear over the thundering voices going back and forth above him, then Yi Cao scurried down the length of the booths on hands and knees.
“There are no cyborgs here above a class three in power, and each of those are licensed according to all the governor’s regulations.” The voice inside boomed.
“Present yourselves and there is no need for this to become violent.” The intruder boomed back. “Information was passed along and must be verified. Present yourself and permit us to inspect the premises and a fine is the worst you can expect.”
Yi Cao felt his breath coming fast and hard. He ripped the pistol from its holster and held it in front of him. Saw again the silhouette of the man who’d stood in the door and thrown the sword. A man he’d recognized.
“Bo Bo!” He whispered.
The intruder’s voice boomed. A cup fell from the table above Yi Cao and splashed alcohol across his shirt, he jerked but didn’t roll away.
“Tactical advice?”
The pistol hummed thoughtfully for a moment as the intruders roared for the voice on the opposite side of the bar to submit.
“If they are here for you, then you are doomed, but if only one of them wants you dead, then you have a chance. In ambush and glorious battle lay your only salvation. Kill your pursuer first, then pretend that it never happened unless they try to kill you.”
Yi Cao nodded. The pistol’s safety was already off but he dialed it now to maximum lethality while the pistol giggled happily in his ear.
Something rumbled. It transmitted beneath the boom of arguing voices as a tremor in the floor, a shaking of the light that still illuminated most of the bar from one side of the room. He heard a buzzing sound and looked up to see security constructs, small flying T shapes with tiny lights at their center, lining up across the ceiling above the exit.
“Fucking Inscrypti.” The bar rumbled. “I never liked your kind.”
Then something came together at the center of the empty dance floor. Parts swung from the ceiling, rose from the floor, congealed from flickering purple subspace portals that winked to life in the middle of the air.
Someone close to the door fired off a technique that splashed across the metallic monster at the center of the dance floor and transformed into fire. Shimmering chromatic liquid burst from the center of the monstrosity, flowing across the mechanical frame of the thing until it seemed clothed in flesh, quenching the flames at the same time. It opened its mouth and a shockwave blew from the machine, shattering more Ki techniques fired at it and blasting Yi Cao into a corner of the booth he’d hidden behind.
“Get out!”
The piss bots fired. Yi Cao didn’t see them, rammed into the back of a booth underneath the table as he was, but he saw the twisting lines of electricity impact the rippling metal at the center of the room. The thing had shape now, definition. Like a man forged from mercury wrapped around metallic bones visible through gaps where the liquid flesh was too thin.
The man thing hurtled forward, smashing into things out of sight. He heard glass shatter, men scream, felt the sizzle of foreign Ki as the warriors of the Nine Spears threw techniques at it, felt the ground tremble under the titanic weight of the thing ripping into them.
“Now!” His pistol screamed in his ear. “Now! Now! Now!”
Yi grabbed the stem of the table and yanked himself out from underneath. A light flickered on the floor, a green arrow pointing him back the way the monster had gone. Yi Cao turned back just in time to see the thing pulp a cultivator against a wall, a spear sticking from its back that flickered and buzzed as it tore bits from it in bursts of static.
Yi Cao yanked his eyes from the battle just in time to see one of the cultivators looking at him, arm raised over his head.
Xialu threw, and Yi Cao jerked sideways. The sword shot by inches from his face, a flash of silver, a taste of sparking Ki. A spurr jutting from the handguard smacked into his shoulder and threw him backwards as the sword sailed by.
It curved as it passed, flipped in the air, spun in a glittering arch and shot down towards Yi Cao’s face. He shouted and twisted, just enough so that the blade slammed into the floor. He kicked, hyperventilating as the pistol screamed something at him he didn’t hear. Arrows of green light everywhere now, the pistol tight in his hand, his target just out of sight.
The pistol buzzed in his hand as he emptied the magazine into the booth that stood between him and his ambusher, ripping a line through it and tearing it to pieces as he tried to fire through the chair.
He only had time to empty half the pistol before the scripts on the sword lit up and he twisted himself away.
The sword jerked as it sailed through the air towards Su Xialu and Yi Cao screamed something incomprehensible as he threw himself into the booth to take aim again.
His shots went wide. They ripped into the cloud of smoke and vapor created by the monster’s clash with the cultivators at the door. Piss bots sparked and buzzed above the battlefield, lashing at the thing in the smoke with electricity, and something rumbled deep within.
“Reload!” The pistol screamed at him. “Reload! Reload!”
He didn’t have time.
The sword whipped around Su Xialu in a glittering arch as the cultivator stepped from the smoke and raised his palm in Yi Cao’s direction. Vapor materialized behind Xialu in twin clouds like a halo for his entire body and light flashed between them.
A piss bot exploded.
Xialu jerked. He leapt sideways as the bartender roared and let go with a technomancer weapon that spat a stream of fat plasma bolts into the mellee. Xialu’s palm turned and a lightning bolt leapt from his fingers to slam into the long armed thing holding the cannon.
The mercury thing from the dancefloor bellowed in rage as its arm burst into shrapnel, then it shattered on of the piss bots harrying it from above and thundered towards the group of cultivators that had Xialu standing in the back.
Yi Cao gashed himself as he ripped a fresh clip from his holster and shoved it into his gun. He let fly, cutting a glittering beam of fire through the cloud that enveloped the battlefield as he shouted something even he couldn’t understand.
A strip of lighting leapt at him from one of the pissbots and Yi Cao jerked away as it tangled itself on the ornamental pole beside their table. It sparked and he cried out as lightning touched him, the voice in his ear going wobbly for a moment as electricity traveled down his arm.
“Recalibrating.” The pistol burbled.
Yi Cao pulled the trigger, getting a single shot and then nothing. He whacked the gun on the table, shouting something, then Zihan appeared behind him, strolling from the back of the club with a on oversized chunk of technomancer steel balanced in one hand.
The steel roared and spat flame as he walked, shirtless, shoeless, one hand in his pocket as though he was out for a stroll, the thunder and the combat just another interesting part of his day. Someone in the cloud let out a blood curdling scream and Zihan let go with the hand cannon one last time before tossing it into the bar.
He smiled grimly as he met Yi Cao’s eyes and stuck his other hand into his pocket.
“Having fun?”
Su Xialu’s flying sword smashed through the bottles along the back of the bar. The script in its blade flared as it made a hard turn to come at them in a parabolic arch.
Zihan just looked at it, flared his Ki, and the thing dropped clattering to the floor like inert steel.
“Come on.” Zihan nodded towards the door. “Let’s go.”
The clip on Yi Cao’s ear beeped. “Ready.” It told him. “Twenty percent of magazine remaining.”
Yi Cao looked back. Smoke obscured half the battlefield, the thing at its middle still roaring as it clashed, a massive silhouette surrounded by a pack of dogs.
“The cowards have hidden themselves from me.” Bo Bo said in his ear. “But we will meet again.”
“Come on.” Zihan told him again. “It’s time.”
Yi Cao lifted his pistol, grit his teeth. “Xialu is here.” He said. He had to shout it when Zihan didn’t hear him over the boom of some technique and the roar of the machine within the smoke.
“Xialu is here!” He shouted. “This is our chance!”
Zihan shook his head, ducked aside as a whip of lightning twisted by overhead, shoved Yi Cao out of the way as more snapped past. He squatted behind the booth and pulled Yi Cao down into cover with him.
“So is the governor!” He shouted. He shook his head. “Not our fight! Not right now!”
Yi Cao leaned towards the edge of their impromptu shelter and glanced past, into billowing smoke. “He tried to kill me!” Yi Cao shouted back. “How is that not our fight?”
Zihan thumbed over his shoulder. “You don’t get it!” He shouted. “Whole place is run by a captive spirit! Like your pistol! Whole station!”
Light flashed in the cloud, drawing a jagged line between the monstrous machine and some silhouette in the cloud. Yi let loose. Spat fire into the silhouette that ripped a line in the billowing cloud and nothing more.
Zihan grabbed him and pulled him to his feet, just as a construct of crystalline shimmering Ki smashed through the booth they’d been hiding behind as though it were built of reeds.
Zihan grabbed the writhing serpent with one hand and slammed it back into the floor. It shattered from the sheer force and glittering stars materialized as it’s Ki blasted across the bar, tiny crystalline stars that sparked and drifted on the battling aspects billowing from the battlefield.
“It’s watching through those constructs!” Zihan shouted as he dragged Yi Cao towards the back of the club. He shook his head again. “Not our fight. Not where it might see me for what I am.”
Yi Cao looked behind as he allowed the Young Master to drag him away by his free hand. A cannon materialized from a void space in the center of the room and roared as it tore into the fog, but Yi Cao had time to see the sword rattle across the floor then whip through the air into the outstretched hand of a silhouette waiting for it by the door.
Yi Cao let fly with the last of the flechettes in his pistol, but by the time he had his gun up the door to the club had already closed, and the silhouette was gone.
He turned, and they jogged away.
“What’s going on?”
Both girls waited for them at the end of a hall, still dressed in nothing, wide eyed at the roar and clash of the battle going on beyond a turn in the hall.
“Fight.” Zihan replied. “A setup. Tried to use the a raid on the bar to get at Yi Cao.” He grabbed Bealtiel by the arm and dragged her along.
“Why?” The girl asked. “What’s such a big deal about him?”
“Doesn’t matter.” Zihan replied. He touched a vent at the bag of the room, smoke rose and he peeled away the cage hiding a whirling blade just beneath. “We’re leaving.”
He kicked the blade and sent it spinning down the long dark corridor just behind.
He waited for the girls to get in before pushing Yi Cao into the dark ahead of him and taking up the rear. “We need to finish what we came here for.” He said as they made their way into the dark. “Before this Xialu forces me to deal with him in ways the station won’t be able to ignore. Not the attention we want right now.”
A field of the transparent technomancer’s glass should have stopped them from getting out of the club through the air vents not twenty yards from the gate they’d cut through. It broke under one punch from Zihan’s fist. After that nothing else tried to stop them.
“Public nudity is prohibited outside of licensed areas.” A piss bot informed them as they re-entered the flow of pedestrians from a maintenance tunnel. The little machine buzzed down above them until it floated just in front of their group, green eye flicking to red then back again in a kind of cycle that might have indicated mood. “Please cover yourselves before restraining actions are taken.”
Zihan cursed and they all stopped around him. He pulled out his wallet and dumped clothes into the arms of the two girls still wide eyed behind him.
“Of all the things.”
--- A/N---
Last one for the weekend.
I was hoping for more, but this is actually pretty close to the same word count as last week, just condensed into three chapters instead of 5. Just worked out that way this week.
More again next friday.
Thanks for reading!
- Emerson
