Godclads

Most Syndicate “combat” exoskeletons are usually bashed together from centuries-old industrial or explorer variants. Don’t get spoofed by these half-strands. Their promos are gonna be fake and the shit you get will be years out of date.

Guild licensing issues. All it takes is a ghost-sweep from our owners up the Tiers to find if anything’s got leaked. Then…well, then they start scalpelling people from on high.

Here's something to remember: You don’t own what you can’t keep someone else from taking. Not your feelings, thoughts, materials, or even your death.

Not in New Vultun

-Quail Tavers, School of the Warrens

4-1

The Exo-Rig

The armory was some two hundred levels down, and so, seizing the opportunity, Avo made a brief pitstop in the mess hall to feed himself again. His bones and muscles felt raw. Like a chisel had run up and through his insides, working pockets of pain into him.

For the Celerostylus to still inflict such torment on his body was a sign of deeper nerve damage. His surface biomass should be healed. But the more intricate systems within him had yet to adapt to this new state of suffering.

Stumbling over to the auto-chefs as Chambers whined behind him, Avo punched a request for a ten-thousand-calorie meal. Listening to the machine hum and churn, he grabbed his quota. And reconsidered. He made the meal twenty, just in case.

“What’s that fucking noise I keep hearing?” Chambers asked. They leaned back as they watched the auto-chef rattle, straining to produce such a dense meal. “The hells did you order?”

“Nutri-paste,” Avo said. It wouldn’t taste very well, but it was a solid dose of calories. It'd be like taking bites directly from a biocell. From such nourishment, he may yet last the day without the need to eat again, but Avo doubted that. There was a burgeoning tension around him in the air; fated violence that clung to him like an invisible shroud. Better that he had the energy to heal when he needed it.

“No shit?” Chambers continued. “The thing sounds like it's goddamn screaming. What’d you do to it? Ask it for a ten-thousand calorie tube of sludge?”

“Twenty.”

“Jaus? You trying to give our godsdamned machines a mechanical hernia?” Chambers snickered as if having a hyperactive metabolism was a punchline of some sort. “Fuck, man the techs are gonna hate you. Your monthly meal expenditures have to be insane.”

Such was why he started his own nu-fish farm and aratnid nests. Supplementing his diet using rapidly breeding bioforms cost less than constant takeout and was more effective than trying to store tons of meat. The shipping would have drawn too much attention as well, there was always a chance that someone could have audited him on his suspicious meat consumption. Wasn’t something he wanted to deal with.

After a painful few mechanical groans, a hefty tube of paste slid out from the processing slot as a coiling rope of thick sludge. Noticing a distinct lack of a bowl, Avo shrugged and took the slug-like texture of his meal into his hand.

The bubblegum taste of the meal was most unwelcome.

“Let’s go,” Avo said, eating while he walked. He stared at where he sat with Ved yesterday. She was missing right now. Could’ve been too early for her. Could’ve been that she was trying to avoid him. Shame. Her affability was refreshing compared to the other enforcers, and she didn’t laugh nearly as much, nor as gratingly as Chambers did.

As they got back into the elevator Chamber clanged his armored hands together. “Alright, here’s what’s the what: gonna be walkin’ you through using an exo-rig today. Real basic shit. Stuff that even a ghoul can handle.”

Avo stared. Chambers giggled.

“We'll get you set up first. Walk you through the paces–the ush. But–” Chambers lifted an eyebrow wryly. –When we get to the test run later, I need you–"

“Want me to do the favor.”

The enforcer snapped his fingers and mimed firing guns at Avo. “Want you to do me that favor. Trust me: total milk run. Much easier than brawling with Rantula.” He pointed himself with a thumb. “Boss man wants you to be showtime-ready on the quick, but don’t worry, your new master’s gonna make sure everything turns out to be a-okay.”

New master. Avo grunted. Cute. “New master. Didn’t know Essus was getting promoted already. Maybe I should also kill a tech. See if I get promoted too. Might even get freedom back.”

Chambers laughed. “Fuck you. You know I was talking about me.”

Avo wolfed another few bites down as the floors slide by, ebontas appearing and passing, numbers flashing overhead.

From where he stood, the entire block felt deathly quiet. The elevator was stained with new smells: a stinging musk of cheap cologne mixed with the faint whiff of Numb or some other paralytic drug. Alcohol and puke were more subdued, but still there.

The armory was a vast open floor that was lined with groaning pistons hissing along the walls. A literal legion of drones assembled and attached exo-rigs to different stations, sawing and charging different pieces of machinery, making adjustments to guns, and imprinting symbols and holotags upon hardened alloys.

To the left, countless weapons of all shapes and sizes were festooned across the magnetic plates layered over the walls. The guns were haphazardly organized, with no sense or logic to their groupings. More than once, Avo saw two drones fighting over the same item, each tasked to bolt it onto a different rig for different enforcers.

Stranger still, few actual personnel were present. Beside him and Chambers, only two techs worked at the very edge of the room, directing a swarm of drones as they continued adding extensions to the arms of a rig.

“Under twenty minutes,” Chambers shouted, suddenly. Both the techs jumped, startled by the sudden noise. Chambers shook his head. “Fuckin’ half-strands.” He pointed at Avo. “Pay up, you fucks. Told you I could bring him down here, no trouble. Show me the imps.”

Ducking down low to avoid getting clipped by any of the erratically flying drones, Avo found himself standing before the exo-rig. The Nightmantis.

His exo-rig.

The Nightmantis wasn’t particularly large, being more like armor than a literal tank built to hold the shape of a person. It stood barely half a meter taller and wider than he was naturally, and its arms were still in the process of being extended to mirror the oddities of his physiology. The only thing that seemed to protrude from it was the gauss cannon attached to its shoulder, twin-blade-like barrels humming with static.

He could also see a great deal more scratches and dents than he expected. How disappointing. The memory sold him a sleek suit of high-tech violence. Before him, instead of a knightly plate of power armor layered in hyper-reinforced hexagonal cells of titanium, parts of the exoskeleton were outright welded from misshapen steel. A melted stop sign was even melded over the rig's left shoulder.

The best thing that he could say about the armor right then was that it held the shape of what he was promised, but none of the other details.

A rough armored hand clapped him on the shoulder. The beast recoiled. Avo flexed his claws and nearly fired his reflexes. Only the annoying grin of Chambers leering into his cog-feed from the periphery brought a jerking halt to the reactive violence burning inside Avo.

“Don’t do that,” Avo said.

Chambers kept his grin in place and leaned back, holding his hands up defensively. “Hey, don’t wanna make you bleed me. Just wanna let you know that you made me happy and wealthy.”

“It’s just three hundred imps, Chambers,” one of the techs said, spitting.

“Three hundred free imps, consang. All thanks to you.” Chambers nudged Avo. “Well, you and these two stupid fuckers. All you had to do was get down on time.”

Avo thought he understood. “Betting that I would be late?”

Chambers squealed a pig-like laugh. Avo winced at the sound. “They were betting that you’d get lost.” He suddenly threw a surprisingly strong arm over Avo’s shoulder again. Avo went stiff, eyeing the enforcer with disbelief. He was looking to get cut. The man ignored him and continued. “They think you’re simple. Illiterate. I swore up and down that you seemed plenty smart for a ghoul. But nope, techs gotta be techs. Gotta show that stupid fucking enforcer the what for when they can.”

Pulled along by Chambers, Avo found himself staring down two technicians who suddenly found no interest in talking to him or even making eye contact. With an awkward cough, one fled to the rear of the Nightmantis’ rig station while the other grew hyper-focused on jocking her drones.

“Didn’t say they were shy,” Avo grunted.

Chambers flicked his gaze across the two techs, his eyes a scythe of derision. “Nah. Just sore. Just glassjaws about losing a couple of imps to a simple grunt like me.” He turned to face the tech fiddling behind the armor. “Hey, you. Janon.”

“Janand,” the male tech corrected with a sigh.

“Ja-whatever the fuck. Lower the rig. Let our ghoulie here see what he’s probably going to die in.”

The tech did as obliged, entering something into the console behind the station.

Immediately, the armor stopped folding light across its shell and revealed its scratched black carapace.

It seemed as if the techs had made a few additional changes to the armor beyond just the lengthening of the arms. Avo noted dots of swiveling optics installed on its front and back. The outside of the armor was lined with three graphene blades that extended along the arms and greaves like jutting rails. The chest piece, meanwhile, was further lined in diamond-like grids.

“In case you weren’t able to tell, most of our kit has seen action,” Chambers said, walking over to rap his knuckles on the Nightmantis. The melted stop sign clanked like a dented drum. “So the good news is that, at least at some point in time, this shit used to work.”

“Good news,” Avo said dryly.

Chambers opened his mouth to say something undoubtedly brilliant and philosophical but ended up choking on his own spit instead. Avo frowned as he just watched the man hack for a minute. The techs ignored him. Avo ignored him. Unfortunately, Chambers survived. “Before…I get into the bad shit, tell me what you know about rigs?”

“Keeps you alive,” Avo said. “Takes bullets better than meat.”

Chambers nodded. “Yeah, that’s about right.” He stared. Avo stared too, having spoken all that he knew in detail about rigs. The enforcer sighed. “That’s all you know about rigs?”

“Ones Regs wear seem to be better. Killed lots of us. That count?”

“Well, since you have to be the one shooting instead of dying now, no. Not fuckin’ really.”

Avo grunted. “Rigs have hardpoints,” he added.

Chambers stared at him blankly. “Do you know what a hardpoint even is?”

“Something that can attach a gun?”

“Close,” Chambers said, shaking his head. He suckled on his teeth as he motioned at Janand, the tech. “Open it up.” He shot Avo another glance. “You–uh–never even played any shooters? Gunmetal Glory? Fields of Valor? Stormjumper?”

Avo grunted. “No. No interest. No time.”

Chambers puffed out a plume of smoke. “Looks like Papa Chambers got himself a lesson to teach. Judy, why am I not hearing the psst-psst sound that armor’s make and shit?”

With sagging shoulders, Janand responded. The armor hissed and peeled open from the front. The diamond grid receded as the top of the rig seemed to open itself before him in a spontaneous autopsy.

The first thing that Avo noticed wasn’t the neural lacing bands, nor the cheap polymater coating the exposed power grid. No. He noticed the razor-thin rows of needles built where his spine was supposed to fit. It made the rig look more like an ancient torture device than an exoskeleton.

“Needles catch your eye, huh,” Chambers said. “Won’t bullshit you: it hurts like godsdamn shit when those fucking neural drills sink into your spine. See them make a cripple or two in my time.”

“Drills?” Avo asked, trying to see if the man was just having a laugh.

Chambers managed to hold a straight face for half a second before breaking. Half a second longer than Avo thought he could. “Fuck no, consang. It’s supposed to just get you with the tip. Works in tandem with the neural lace so the armor moves with you. Without those, you’ll be wrestling with two-thousand pounds of second-war era ghoulshit that may or may not dislocate your limbs when the servos overreact.”

Great. One anxiety for another.

Chambers grinned. “Hey, before we do the other shit, step inside the armor. Mirrorhead is sending one of his pet Necros out with us and I wanna see the look on her face when you suddenly start talking inside the armor.”

“Great way to get nulled using a Ghostjack,” Avo said.

“Trust me, she’s more likely to dump a ghost into her own mind. She’s got no taste for the hurt business.”

Avo just glared at him, unconvinced. Great. Another Necro watching him. Last thing he needed. Had to keep his modified phantasmics hidden from her. He didn’t need Mirrorhead to know more about what he was capable of.

“Come on, consang. Don’t be a glassjaw. It’ll be a laugh.”

“Not unless you want to induce a seizure in him,” Avo heard Janand mutter. Avo couldn't see the tech’s face but he felt the annoyance all the same. Seemed Chambers liked testing people. “Haven’t even adjusted the neural interface to sync with his synapses. Shit. With his biology, I don’t even know if I can.”

“Synapses?” Avo said, as loudly as he could.

“What?” Chambers said, sounding confused.

“Janand was whispering to himself. Something about Synapses. Seizures. Me.”

“Jannard,” Chamber said, his face spreading into a grin as he narrowed his attention on the exhausted tech, “how do you plead? Saying our ghoulie here’s got brain problems.”

“I–no. Well, yes, but it's with the machine,” Jannanrd said, stepping out from behind the station. The metal bands implanted into his skull were spinning fast. On his back, a large coldtech machine of some kind hummed a dull ambiance. “The Nightmantis’ hardware isn’t designed for hyper-boosted reflexes like his. Some of our other enforcers with wired reflexes or cheap dilation boosters also got clobbered by similar bugs. Considering the clustered strands of his new bioware, we could be looking at a reaction differential by point three seconds.”

“Means I’m too fast for the machine?” Avo asked.

“Means that you might feel stuttering with linking to the machine. Worse: maybe it won't get the full data from your mind due to being unable to keep up with your mental pace. Potentially even pairing rejection if your, uh, mind’s biology is too deviant for it to understand.”

Chambers laughed. “What? You saying Avo here is too weird for the machine to handle?”

Janand sighed. “I’m saying that I have no idea how the machine might react to him. He’s a ghoul. Probably the first one to ever step into a rig. Judging from his…biology, he should just be close enough to pass for a human when interfacing with the machine. Should be, but I’m not sure.”

Chuckling, Chambers jagged at Avo’s shoulder.

“Hear that,” Chambers said. “He’s complimenting you.”

Avo glanced at the armor, frowning. “So? Usable or not?”

“Well,” Janand said, “I’ll need to do some adjustments while you’re inside. You might experience some disorientation for a moment though.”

Avo looked at the needles and then back at Chambers. “This kills me, I eat you.”

Chambers smirked. “Hm. Sounds fair.”

Wordlessly, Avo ascended the rig station's steps with a scowl, turning as he stepped into the open armor, its neural drills glinting at him the entire way.

A wary apprehension built up inside of him. He didn’t know why a dozen feeble little needles were making him feel this way. Not after the sheer agony he suffered at the hands of Little Vicious. But still, the idea of letting them sink into his backbone made him shiver.

He felt his Celerostylus twitch too.

Maybe it was something simple, with how it looked like a contraption for torture. Maybe it was the fact that he spent most of his infancy fighting incomprehensible and implacable foes clad in shells much like the one that he was about to entomb himself in. Ultimately, something felt deeply wrong about doing this. But things hadn’t felt right since he found himself in the Maw.

Stifling a sigh, he turned, ignoring the saccharine smirk plastered across Chamber’s face. “Machine leaves me mind-dead; shoot me.”

Chambers scoffed. “Hells no. I’ll keep you alive and sell your kidneys for as long as I can.”

Avo nodded in resignation. Again, at least the enforcer was honest. More than one could expect from most these days.

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