Shattered Worlds

by Midnightshadow

The Road to Damascus - Part 1

The
CONVERSION
►Bureau

Shh-pock, shh-pock, shh-pock, shh-pock.

The machinery was as regular as clockwork, smooth and powerful. Outside, it was little but an innocuous background rumble. Inside, it dominated every square inch of the facility.

Three backup generators, one of them on hot-standby, lurk unobtrusively in the outer complex. They are surrounded by fifteen-foot high, three-foot thick stressed plascrete walls strong enough to take several direct hits from even phased plasmic discharge railguns. Area denial weaponry coated the surrounding countryside, with autogun emplacements in strategic locations and surface-to-air silos secreted in others.

The complex was powered by no less than two thermobaric nuclear reactors, each reinforced to survive the attacks of a good cross-section of any global superpower's standing army for long enough to evacuate at least critical personnel and other ordinances.

It was, in a word, impregnable.

And as we all know, familiarity breeds contempt.

The complex was secreted away within a small, artificial forest. The foliage was thought to protect the main sections from prying eyes, whilst granting an extra modicum of obfuscation. The truth was that it made approach by a single individual, armed with a reactive camouflage suit, relatively simple.

Jacob Damascus current wore just such a suit. He walked slowly, carefully and with precision through the undergrowth. The trick was not to remain silent - nature is never silent - but to fit between the sounds as any other animal does.

If there had been olfactory sensors installed, he would have been discovered a mile off. If there had been dogs even, he would have been caught. There were no such sensors, and there were no dogs. With landmines peppering the forest, the price for replacement guards and trained canines - who could obviously not be trusted with the layout - was deemed too high an ongoing price.

Once again, the lowest bidder fulfilled the contract, and as a result, Jacob Damascus slipped right up to the walls of Jericho. It had been simple, really; find a creature large enough to implant control wetware into, which was large enough to set off the mines and small enough for any trace to be obliterated. Slowly but surely, a single, safe path had been gouged out of the complex's defence-network by a continued application of augmented rabbits.

Jacob looked upwards at the walls. They were sheer, grey stone, with barbed wire on top. The machinery beneath the ground was more audible, now. Subconsciously, Jacob matched his breathing to the beat.

Ssh-pock, ssh-pock.

He calmed himself. This had to be done slowly, quickly and efficiently. And his reactive camouflage had to last just a few minutes more. He reached up with his right hand and placed it against the wall. Reaching out in a hug, he applied his left. Then his right foot, and finally his left. Then he shifted his weight and - with a precise, practiced and fluid motion - raised his right foot.

Thanks to some basic nano-technology, he clung to the wall like the long-extinct gecko. Limb over limb, he lifted himself up the wall. He all but flowed over the top of it and under the gun emplacement, the barbed wire proved as much trouble as the wall had been. He was too close now for it to fire, not even the owners of this complex were mad enough to shoot their own people. Not without a reason at least, however flimsy.

Jacob surveyed the grounds. Attack by ground was impossible. Attack by air was impossible. Attack by sea would have been interesting, since the nearest body of water was several hundred miles away, and the object of his mission wasn't something that a railgun bombardment would take kindly to.

Grinning slightly, he checked his chronostat. All he had to do was wait.

Artificial Intelligences had come a long way in the last half-century, even given the hiccup during the short Equestrian war. The defences of the fortress were run by a gaggle of artificial intelligences, modelled roughly on ants, dogs and piranha. The ants ran all the myriad little things, picking up and dropping off. The dogs patrolled, keeping watchful eyes on who came in and who left. The piranha circled, waiting for the sign to strike. Not that there was movement - actual robotic bodies were horribly expensive. Fixed emplacements were more than enough most of the time, so long as the sensors were accurate.

The fortress relied on the maxim that anything larger than a medium-sized bird of prey was a legitimate target if unidentified. So it was that a group of circling crows were identified, studied and then downgraded to a threat level of 'negligible', even when they broke off to land on the cooling towers of the nuclear reactors. The AI had never been told that crows could be dangerous, so the fact that six of them dropped into the towers went unremarked except in a log requiring maintenance to check for damage.

The crows, however, were anything but innocuous. If they'd been robots, they would have been little more than short-range spying devices which would easily have been detected. They were, in fact, one-hundred-percent bonafide crows. They just also happened to have been implanted with military-spec wetware control augments. And a special little package.

The nuclear reactors were hardened against conventional or even kinetic bombardment. They weren't hardened against thaumic discharge. The three crows plunged down into each cooling tower, and at the bottom, detonated. The 'bomb' was meagre, but the payload was deadly to advanced electronics. Three globs of glowing purple liquid penetrated the cooling system and was quickly dispersed throughout the pipework, and the whole reactor was shutdown moments later to prevent the entire thing going critical as the magic-spewing liquid interfered randomly and fatally with a myriad of control circuits.

Multiple puffs of pink mist later, and the backup generators were neither backing up, nor generating. For the first time ever, the fortress experienced a complete and total loss of power.

Shh-pock, sshhhh...pock, ssssshhhhhh-po-po-pock-clunk

Jacob Damascus listened as the machinery slowed, and then stopped.

Showtime.

The first guard went down with a knife in the neck, mono-molecular blade slicing through his armour like it wasn't there. The second's neck was snapped before the first had hit the floor. The door to the inner complex wasn't open, but the magnetic lock hadn't been designed with power-failures in mind. Either that, or a fast exit was preferable to blocking an entrance during what had only ever been seen as a doomsday scenario. The door, with a lot of huffing and puffing, slid open.

Jacob's gun was small and precise, and very quiet. The bullets gleamed oddly in the low light, their tracks causing his night-vision implants to glitch. They shattered on impact with the blackmesh nano-weave, but the guards they hit dropped moments later in silence, their armour melting off them in puddles of black goo as the flesh beneath turned waxy and white. Glass fragments crunched under his feet as he passed them, sneering.

Jacob forced the outer elevator doors open. The rest of the complex's inner doors had proven even less of a challenge than the first, often being open and none being locked. The elevator, however, wouldn't be quite so simple. The car was, of course, several floors down. He severed the cables holding it in place and listened until the crashing had stopped. Then he grasped the promising-looking ladder and slid merrily down it.

Bullets whizzing past his head a few seconds later highlighted the fact he was both a sitting duck, and relatively lucky to have got just far enough before the excrement had finally impacted with the air excitation device. He didn't bother trying to fire back up the shaft, it would be about as much use as firing down. What he would have to do, however, was move before they either got lucky or—

There was an explosion that momentarily blinded him. Yup, grenades. Internal wetware told him the fools had just made his job easier. The car had ruptured, and it was a bare ten feet below. He could make it. He pushed himself off the wall and let go.

It couldn't be said that forcing a body through the burning, twisted wreckage of an elevator car was fun, but it certainly did narrow the focus and catch the attention. Despite his suit, he yelped in pain as he snagged a cable and slowed his descent. Twelve feet from the bottom, his grip failed and he landed flat on his back, slamming his head into the concrete.

He wasn't sure if he was seeing stars, or if the gunfire was getting closer. Either way, he had to move. He groaned as he pulled himself upright and swore as he forced open the doors.

There were only a few guards down this far, which was a blessing; his potion-gun was running out of bullets. The scientists he merely killed or knocked out, they were no threat and certainly weren't worth his time. It wouldn't matter soon. His internal map had proved accurate so far, and it had to be leading him to his prize.

After a maze of twisting, turning corridors, he finally came to a dull, white, heavy-set metal door with a hand-crank mechanism. It obviously wasn't made to be opened all that often. Breathing heavily, Jacob swore in appreciation. He was at his goal.

It was then that the lights came back on.

"Shit!" Jacob hissed, and he pulled a one-time use security-card-based device from his belt. With a Frankenstein's Monster's worth of cables and electronics hooked up to it, he had no idea if it would even work, but it was a last-ditch attempt. It sparked and smoldered, and something in it flared into brief flames, but the yellow, revolving light at the top of the huge white gunmetal door lit up as the mechanism engaged.

"Stop right there!" shouted a voice behind him, and Jacob felt his kidneys flare up with pain as the armor-piercing rounds penetrated his body. He coughed, a spurt of blood ejecting from his mouth as he forced his way through the partly-open door. Whimpering, he tried to get it to close, but the time-lock had a mind of it's own, and he was in no shape to oppose several metric tonnes of torque.

Not that it mattered, he had made it. Another round of shots shattered his shinbone and he fell the floor. It didn't stop him, he just dragged himself across the floor with both hands, his wetware glitching but suppressing pain..

It was there!

Another bullet shattered his collar bone, but with his one good hand he grabbed onto the oddly-shaped trunk on the pedestal, and pulled. It came down, smashing open....