Changeling

“Wow.”

Nestra had to admit, she was impressed. The hab housed an actual meat vat farm with slabs of cloned meat bobbing peacefully in nutrient juices. Helpers moved around the vats, checking indicators and adding powders to the mix. Much of the supplies were piled haphazardly across the room in piles. There was even mold in the corner. To Nestra’s left, an open door led to some sort of biomass recycling thing if the acidic stench of rot wafting from there was any indication. What didn’t look stolen had to be counterfeited and yet Nestra knew with absolute certainty that they still made it work.

Mostly because of the skewers she’d had.

“Welcome, welcome esteemed customers,” an old lady with a turban and a dark gaze said.

Shinoda greeted the lady with respect, which she returned. The file said she was Miss Yadar, no known first name, and probably the hab block’s richest denizen. The two discussed matters in a low voice while Nestra did her best not to scrunch her nose at the aggressive scents attacking her senses. Eventually, they left, though not before exchanging numbers so Nestra hoped this meant Yadar was taking them as serious potential partners. That or the lady wanted to bang Shinoda. She couldn’t be sure. Seduction plays were hard to read for her, especially when they weren’t aimed at her.

In any case, they got to visit the hab block’s upper floors.

It was simply incredible what humanity could achieve with a complete disregard of work safety, intellectual property rights, worker rights, and taxation. Truly inspirational. There were fabricators spitting jailbroken or custom made appliances to be used all around Fifteen! Rice cookers and mixers at prices that defied common sense were piled in thin metal boxes, ready to be sent down the stained elevators. At least, this specific part was healthy.

“No drug labs,” Nestra observed.

Shinoda agreed in silence. There didn’t seem to be many addicts either. It looked like they’d drawn the jackpot for assignments. So, that was nice.

“Hey, wait. I got something.”

Nestra opened her feed. One of her drones was keeping an eye on her car. A figure was approaching it. She paid attention this time because the figure didn’t fit. To her surprise, no one had pissed on the door handle, perhaps out of concern of getting their private parts zapped. There were a few young stone throwers but that was about it. The one who appeared was super suspicious. She shared the feed with Shinoda who watched it on his old datasheet.

“Oh, Palladian-san. Our friend seems lost.”

The guy approaching the car had a cap and a face mask for anonymity, but he also wore brand new nondescript cargo pants, sneakers, and a hoodie in brown and blue shades. They looked fresh out of the fabricator. In police parlance this was called the ‘undercover cops summer collection’. For the winter collection, just add a vest. This guy fit in like a zit on a gleam’s ass. He looked left and right, then walked closer, barely pausing near the door. His hand moved with aug speed then he was off.

“Tracker?” Nestra asked.

“It seems that way. Listener as well, certainly. Our Gidung friends have made their first move. They should have used a drone.”

“Perhaps they’re afraid of Flash. He noticed my drones immediately.”

“Hmmmm. Then it is fortunate you two reached an agreement, ne?”

“You could call it that.”

The pair rode the elevator down. It was getting close to 6PM so Nestra dropped her drones in slow mode at specific points across the block to keep an eye on things, expecting nights to be more animated. The pair climbed into their cruiser after unpeeling the tracker. Nestra tossed it at a garbage collector drone on the ride back.

“Today went very well, I think?” Nestra asked.

She didn’t really have a frame of reference.

“Yes. We were only… accosted once, ne? And no violence. But there were no crimes today. None that we were called to solve. Tomorrow might change that. They will be testing our ability to solve problems without bringing in the hammer. You did well, Palladian-san.”

“Not going to comment on the EMP threat?”

“Ah, I believe it pays to show a little teeth sometimes, ne? You can be bad cop.”

“Why thank you.”

To celebrate being a bad cop, Nestra ate her prepared snacks (spring rolls) before falling asleep in the car, only waking up long enough to transfer to her own car. She only woke up at midnight. It was time to raid again, and this time, she felt a certain sense of urgency along with the usual excitement.

It was only a matter of time before she was attacked for real. Every little bit of help would increase her chances of success. And soon, she would be using her demon form in the real world as well.

***

Tonight’s portal world was inside of a tightly locked warehouse at the edge of the city, where smaller companies or artisans stored their stuff. Nestra found no way to get in without breaking in so she did the same as last time. She followed the pleasant energy until she was close enough to slip into the portal.

It was dark in there, and it smelled musty. Bricks spoke of an artificial structure made by tools but not as much as an actual panel with arrows for direction.

Nestra caressed the rust-colored stone, going over the symbols with mixed feelings of curiosity and regret. Those were not magical inscriptions or anything. Just chiseled, coarse runes designed for functionality with arrows pointing towards empty corridors, and yet they evoked a sense of wonder.

There were theories.

In the last days of the incursion, an army spilled from the largest portals and contrary to normal monsters, they were organized. Organized and deadly. Some of the rising hopes of mankind died in the spears of those feathered, bipedal lizards. For a moment, it seemed that all was lost. Mankind saw its doom and simply called them the Shetanis, the devils.

It was Riel who saved them all. Riel the savior. Riel the messiah. Possibly still the most powerful human to have ever lived even years after the fact. Hell, he might still be alive. No one knew his real name. All humans knew was that he was a space mage of considerable power who used portals to carry his elite force from battlefield to battlefield, defeating the enemy in detail. He’d disappeared in one of his own spells at the paroxysm of the conflict, taking the opposing leadership with him. Some speculated he escaped into some other dimension afterward. Nestra thought he was finely minced atoms, but everyone needed their King Arthur ready to return from Avalon to save everyone once more.

Anyway, the main point was, there was intelligent life out there. Nestra was likely from out there and she was intelligent life as well, pretty sure. There were even theories that the Shetanis were meant to inherit the earth and that the portals they came from didn’t lead to an artificial world but a real one. Nestra believed in it - the ‘real worlds’ theory, not the inheriting part. All those creatures and landscapes were not taken from the void, They were real places, out there, being mimicked by whatever it was that did portals.

And just like this world, sometimes, the life was intelligent.

Maybe some aliens out there were chucking poison darts at magically cloned retail workers in some fried chicken franchise. Nestra imagined the enraged copies tossing boiling oil at the invaders from behind the fry stand. Glorious. May they spread the fear of mankind to all those species.

Nestra checked her hand for dust. So, apparently, she still felt somewhat human. Or at least on the human side. Even though she wasn’t one. That was… weird? Or was it? She really needed to get the benefactor to talk to her soonish.

In any case, she was in a copy of a base inhabited by intelligent life. Intelligent enough to write directions.

It was unfortunate she had to kill them but the truth was that portal creatures were irredeemably aggressive. Nestra knew there had been attempts to communicate with them, even including drugs and some ethically questionable and extremely rare gleam powers that made people more… amenable. All those efforts had failed. Now, capturing intelligent creatures was prohibited in Threshold for ethical reasons, which really went to show the unspeakable things humans had done for vengeance or for fun. And that was just here in one of the bastions of civility. In some places like the Nairobi enclave, killing captive intelligent species was a spectator sport because they tended to be… entertainingly resourceful.

“Right. Enough of this.”

Nestra was on a timer. The portals were growing increasingly complex which meant they took an increasingly longer time to clear. Maybe soon, they would start eating into her sleep time. Or her snack time. Awful. Better get on the way.

The portal world was clearly underground, in a complex of dark red, pitted bricks with spaced stones emitting a dull red light. The walls were rather high and the corridors were large enough for her to wield her sword comfortably. The directions on the wall pointed towards several corners. Besides them, there was nothing differentiating one path from the next and the place had obviously been designed to be confusing to navigate, with no corridor being straight for longer than twenty paces. Of course, that didn’t mean anything for Nestra since she had a visor with her. The onboard software would create a map as she progressed.

Carefully, Nestra moved out. Corridors only led to more corridors and, sometimes, dead ends. She decided to record the directions on the wall and just follow one for a while. As she glanced past an intersection, she heard a dull explosion. The ground shook once under her feet while dust fell from the ceiling.

This was… a bunker? Interesting. A memory brushed her mind, from an eternity ago. A lesson from her father about the rare worlds and what could be found there. Hmmm. Red stone. Bunkers. Explosions. Could it be… the Infinite War? No, that would be too perfect.

After one more turn, Nestra finally found her first opponents. The corridor turned right towards a large gate guarded by two bipedal creatures wearing a full body suit of dark material, possibly leather. Cumbersome masks with four bulbous glasses for — she presumed — the eyes, covered all their features. They were stout and almost round, slightly shorter than human, and wielded pneumatic rifles with a bayonet fixed under the barrel.

It was the Infinite War! Amazing!

Staying low to the ground, she walked out, sticking to the deeper shadows between the light stones. She was only a few steps away when the closest creature let out a grunt of surprise. She used momentum to move forward.

The creatures were so surprised they fumbled their weapons. Her first cut decapitated the right one, then she thrusted her blade into the chest of the second. It dropped its weapon but didn’t die immediately. A coup-de-grace silenced it.

A rush of power filled her. It spoke of increased resilience, of the ability to endure. Well, not resilient enough to stop her anyway. A quick search revealed nothing specific. The creatures were fleshy but shared more in common with worms than mammals that she could tell. They were just weird. They didn’t really wear armor but their uniforms were naturally protective. A quick shot with one of the pneumatic rifles sent a cone of steel lodging itself into the wall, not very deep but deep enough to hurt her. They did feel difficult to handle though, despite the lack of recoil.

So it really was Infinite War.

A rare world, Infinite War provided a bleak outlook of what positional battle could become if left to fester for too long. The creatures living there had dug themselves to standstill, with an unknown number of sides involved, all gathering a collection of creatures. The place wasn’t well researched since it was so rare anyway, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was the buffet of power provided to her. More diversity of prey meant more power ups since she had diminishing returns on creatures she’d hunted before.

It was time to hunt.

Giddy, Nestra found a key to the gate and opened it. Inside, she found… an armory.

Not a very big one though.

Much like the rest of the complex, the armory was bare-walled and devoid of any decoration. Crates and shelves lined the space in neat, well-organized stacks. There were cone ammo dumps, rifles, side arms that looked like extinguishers with handles, sabers, bayonets, helmets of various sizes, muzzles, and one thing that looked a bit like a flamethrower.

They were all shit.

That was the issue with many of the portal worlds, at least at her rank. What the natives were using was systematically inferior to human stuff. Ah, whatever. Going out, she selected another directional keyword and kept walking. Less than two corridors later, a noise alerted her.

There was a patrol nearby. It consisted of three of the footmen she’d already killed along with a pair of hound things but white and misshapen, and a strange creature that looked like a jellyfish planted on a gorilla’s body as its head. All of them were short and strong.

Even though she was in the shadows, the jellyfish turned directly to her. Nestra realized that the entire appendage was covered in eyes.

It was absolutely disgusting.

The creature screeched and Nestra charged forward. Momentum brought her among the group. The Scornful Crescent guided her steps when she pushed aside the barrels, when she slew the first two guards. A hound jumped and she stepped back, killing it mid-air. The other stumbled on its slain brethren and Nestra struck true. The last guard missed her with a rifle shot but she still rushed back when the jellyfish lit up like a Christmas tree. An azure shockwave spread through the corridor, banishing the darkness with a fizzle of spent electricity. Nestra was back in again before the rifleman finished reloading. She killed both.

The jellyfish’s head was super mushy. It pretty much exploded when she sliced it.

“Ugh.”

Power seeped into Nestra’s essence. Resilience from the guards, awareness from the hound, but from the jellyfish came something new. She felt a font awaken in her, pulsing in rhythm with her breath. It was the last piece of the puzzle, the last element of a core: fast mana generation. It was what allowed casting users to stay in the fight even after they’d depleted their reserves.

“Oh I’m loving this place.”

Nestra checked the patrol but found nothing worth taking, only mundane materials used on inferior technology. As for the meat of the hounds and jellyfish thing, it looked and smelled so vile, it might as well have been designed on purpose to induce nausea. That was ok.

A little later, Nestra encountered another, similar patrol. This time, she didn’t make the mistake of letting the jellyfish live. Her first slice covered the helmets of two guards in enough gore to blind them, leaving her to dispose of the hounds with ease. It was a slaughter and the… sobriety of movement of that hunt sent shivers down her spine. Perhaps it was a little premature to search for perfection in execution when she knew so little about the world, but there was no shame in enjoying a bit of pride when she managed it.

Nestra’s triumph was short-lived. A grunting call rang from all around as if from loudspeakers. The language was coarse and entirely guttural to the point that even differentiating between each curt, barked syllable proved impossible. A whoomp that sounded suspiciously like an alarm alternated with short sentences.

“Ah, oops?”