San Francisco lay smoldering in the early dawn light. Dan took a sip of coffee, wincing at the liquid’s heat and bitterness as he took in the devastation. Between the drones and the Viceroy, a good portion of the skyline was leveled in attempts to break up clusters of resistance from Best’s defenders.
The sounds of the city waking up wafted toward him. It was strange to see such a large mass of people shaking off the violence of the night before without the omnipresent sound of cars drowning everything out. Instead, many of the streets in residential areas had been converted into open-air markets where small-scale merchants and entrepreneurs hawked their wares.
Dan was still a little confused as to how Best managed to keep a metropolitan area the size of San Francisco fed in the middle of his war effort. After society collapsed, most people continued to work their old jobs for a couple of months until, one-by-one, they walked away, realizing that it was pointless.
Information technology and market analysis were hardly useful in a future plagued by brownouts, after all. Instead, more and more people were shifting toward subsistence and cooperative living. Pretty much every green space within sight had small plots of land where people were growing vegetables, guarded closely by the local community watch. Evidently, none of the locals trusted Best’s men to keep the peace.
Really, that would be the next challenge: stitching the country back together enough that Mayor DuBlanc could restart civil society’s sluggish pulse. Already, Dan could see the breakdown of order spreading at an unacceptable rate. It was only a matter of time before the facade of civility was torn away and people began to resort to outright barbarism and savagery as a matter of survival.
Even for the war efforts, it was rapidly growing into a problem. The various warlords and charismatic civil leaders stabilized the areas around them, but no one was really able to trade with their neighbors. If anyone had ammunition, food, or medicine, they tended to hoard it and hunker down. The warlords and military bases might be fairly well-stocked, but they were beginning to run low. Will estimated it was a matter of months, if not weeks, before the assorted belligerents started rationing ammunition.
While he didn’t really care if the oligarchs ran out of bullets, there was still the Orakh infestation of Manhattan to worry about. To date, they’d managed to hold off a complete breakout, but things weren’t looking great beyond that. Day-by-day, the human forces retreated further, and the reports from the national guard and NYPD were only getting more and more frantic. Dan wasn’t excited to see where things would go once they began running low on ammunition, and he suspected that the humans would run out of bullets before the Orakh ran out of bodies.
Of course, the supply limitations didn’t impact his forces nearly as much as anyone else. The Viceroy’s Pride’s teleportation drive was a boon that was hard to overstate. Depots, barracks, and warehouses littered the country, many of them abandoned by the workers and guards that usually should have populated them. At least once a day, the Viceroy and Dan would take teleportation runs to load the ship up with the supplies their growing army would need.
He glanced down into the mug, frowning slightly at it. Abe might be a genius at organization and infiltration, but he sure as hell couldn’t fix up a cup of coffee. Dan hadn’t slept a wink last night. Between the consolidation of San Francisco and worrying about the next step of their plans, sleep had eluded him completely. Even approaching productivity today meant several cups of coffee, and he’d be damned if he choked down more than one cup of a concoction this vile.
Dan stepped to the edge of the building and jumped down, using a combination of force bubble and Gravitational Easing to slow his descent to the point that the two-story drop was a minor inconvenience. Across the street from the compound, a pair of individuals stopped and pointed at him, gawking with open mouths. None of his guards even batted an eyelash at his superhero routine. Each of them had seen much more outlandish powers in both training and combat.
Nodding at them, he walked into the building. Despite the fairly widespread destruction around the city, Best’s factory compound was relatively intact. Dan smiled to himself. He supposed he’d have to thank the man, once they dug him out of whatever safehouse he’d holed himself up in. Every vital system from the factory, to Best’s archives, and to the laboratory were built into one large, reinforced compound.
Dan snorted, glancing at the well-lit and immaculate hallways. Best even had a small nuclear reactor powering the entire complex. Eventually, they’d have to make a run for more uranium, but by Sam’s count, they had enough for about ten years. They’d run out of steel for the assembly lines long before they exhausted the reactor.
Finally, he arrived at his destination, a large hangar overlooking a crater-filled field. A couple of workers glanced up at Dan’s arrival and wisely vacated the building. They were smart, and he trusted them working on the cutting-edge technology they’d scavenged from Best’s labs, but he’d prefer to only talk strategy with his inner circle.
He approached a partially gutted four-legged mech, ripped off armor plating and wiring littering the ground around it. Sam’s legs dangled out of the robot’s carapace where she’d wedged herself as she tried to inspect and improve the technology. Tatiana had managed to steal a copy of the schematics, but it was clear that the war machines could be improved by incorporating runescripting, something its original designers hadn’t really been able to study.
After waiting a couple of seconds, futilely hoping that Sam would look up from her project and notice him, Dan coughed loudly. Sam jolted, slamming her head into the mech with a dull thud and a curse, then she scurried out and plopped to her feet.
“Goddamnit, Dan,” she groused, rubbing the back of her head. “Couldn’t you have found a way to get my attention without startling me? I was in the middle of something there.”
“I’m glad to see you’re doing better.” Dan half-smiled. “It’s been a while since you’ve torn into me with that kind of vitriol. I mean, I don’t know how I could’ve started this conversation without getting a jump out of you. I think my options were coughing, saying your name, or touching your foot. I’m really not sure that any of those would be better.”
“Definitely don’t touch my feet.” A flicker of her old haunted expression flitted across Sam’s face. “I’ve been a little bit iffy with personal contact since… yeah. There’s just something about having a torture device inside your own fucking skin that makes trusting people hard. Intellectually, I know that physical contact has nothing to do with it, but at the same time, that doesn’t stop me from having a panic attack when I end up with unsolicited physical contact.”
“No one’s given you trouble on that front, have they?” Dan asked with a frown.
“Nothing to worry about there,” Sam replied, flashing a weak smile. “Every once in a while, someone turns a corner suddenly, but no one has been giving me any shit for it, and everything to date has been an accident. I’m still improving, and it’s a day-to-day thing, but my outlook has certainly improved over the last couple of months. I don’t know how long it’ll be before I’m back on my feet entirely, but I feel like I’ve turned a corner. Finally, it seems like there’s light at the end of the tunnel, something for me to grow toward rather than just an ocean of negative thoughts.”
“Now,” she wiped her grease covered hands on her overalls. “I’m sure you came down here to talk about something more important than your friend’s broken feelings. Presumably, it has something to do with the giant death robots?”
“To be honest,” Dan said, looking Sam dead in the eyes, ignoring her hesitant expression as she tried to avoid his gaze. “The robots can wait. I don’t want you to think that your emotional wellbeing is secondary to some machines. Admittedly, they’re pretty awesome science fiction toys, but I want you to know that I’m here for you. We’ve been fighting one bad guy or another for months on end, which has led to me neglecting what happened to you. It was a traumatic experience, and the last thing I want us to do is gloss it over and let problems linger. If you have anything you need to talk about, I’m here.”
“Thanks, Thrush.” She smiled back at him, a surprisingly genuine and normal expression. “Really, what I need is for things to return to normal. Now, I know the outside world is pretty far from that, but at least within our organization, that means that you guys give me tasks, and I work on them. No kid gloves, no hand-holding. I’m a big girl, and I need to prove to myself that I’m bouncing back from this.”
Dan ran his fingers through his hair, unsure how exactly to respond to the situation. “If that’s what you want, who am I to say anything to the contrary.”
“Great.” She turned and walked over to the nearby mech. “I’m presuming you want to know what makes these bad boys tick? Also, just as an aside, Tatiana has been begging me to fit these things with wifi so she can pilot them. I think she wants to be helpful, but that is also one hundred percent how you end up with tyrannical robot overlords.”
“I promise I would be a benevolent overlord,” Tatiana chimed in from the webcam/speaker mount on Dan’s shoulder. “I would ensure the least painful transition from your weak and efficient forms to the digital perfection of the singularity.”
Sam narrowed her eyes slightly and looked back at Dan. He shrugged helplessly.
“She’s joking, right?” Sam asked cautiously. “I’ve been struggling with my sense of humor lately, but that seemed a bit dark.”
“I hope she’s kidding?” Dan responded, unsure of his own answer. “I think that’s just Tatiana’s sense of humor. Either that, or she’s actually planning on killing all of us. One or the other.”
Sam blinked at him. Dan did his best to maintain his poker face.
“Whatever.” She chuckled slightly. “After all of this mess, getting uploaded into the cloud really doesn’t sound like the worst outcome, anyway.”
“Tell me what we’re looking at, production-wise,” Dan prompted with a slight smile.
“The suits are all a slightly better model than Ibis was using,” Sam said with a shake of her head as she tried to focus herself on his question. “The factory can pump out three or four a day, so long as we have enough raw materials coming in. The problem is that the raw materials in question include some trace minerals and completed electronics that we don’t have an unlimited supply of. We’re going to have to secure a source of cobalt and ensure that we have a steady stream of computer chips, or we’re going to be out of business in about two months.”
Dan nodded, tapping his chin thoughtfully. “That’s still about one hundred new suits. If we enchant those up and slap operators with the System in them, that’s enough with proper air support to stop a small army.”
“The mechs are better.” Sam ran her hand over the metal contours of the hulking quadruped. “They’re functionally better-armed and armored main battle tanks with better maneuverability. Their only downside is that the power requirements to run them are obscene. They can only operate for about five to six minutes at a time without an extension cord, even with the best capacitors available. To be clear, I mean available to Best. They’re a lot better than anything I’ve seen on the open market.”
“What about magic?” Dan asked, walking up to the side of the mech and peering at it. “We’d probably have to swap the armor out with tungsten, but we could have the pilot supplement the power requirements. Mana sounds like it could improve the operational life of these things significantly.”
“I thought you’d never ask, my delightful guinea pig.” Sam smiled mischievously at him. “I had the same thought, but I just needed access to someone with enough mana to make experimentation worth my time.”
