Despite the relative urgency, I took a couple of virtual seconds to center myself, before I logged back into the video stream.

What I saw was… not good. It was not that bad either, fortunately. Mark was fussed over by Mia, while Christine and Jacky tried to provide first aid to Justin. The Cyberzombies laid motionless on the ground. I had no clue if they were dead or simply dormant but that was irrelevant. They would be dead soon anyway.

Kate was bleeding profusely from several wounds, and her upper left arm hung down motionless, but she was somehow still standing. Considering that her kind was developed first as support and later as a substitution for combat cyborgs, that was not completely surprising, but four to one were steep odds.

Darren on the other hand seemed to be at the end of his strength, barely keeping standing up. Natalie meanwhile had a rather sizeable rifle and tried to aim at the armored guy. I doubted it was particularly successful.

Ryan also had his pistol out, but he refrained from shooting.

From what Mark had told me, power armor was essentially impervious against anything anybody of us, except Kate, could use standing up.

So the situation was at the moment as stable as it could be, but we were by far not out of trouble yet. The power armor was an expensive game-changer. Yes, they had a very limited run time, as they depended on energy cells that depleted rather fast, but for 30 minutes to an hour, they were devastating.

The cluster identified the armor as a Falconer Templar Mk. VIII. It was not quite the top of the line from the Falconer Group, but it was a good solid frontline power armor, generously used by AFS shock troops.

I had no idea how much power he still had in his cells, but it was apparent that he would outlast Darren‘s efforts to stop him. In her current state, I was pretty sure Kate would not contribute much to the fight after that.

That meant I had to find a way to stop the power armor. And as such my new mission was accepted if I wanted it or not.

I dove back into the network of the op center. It was not particularly hard to find the files on the armor pilot. Unfortunately, he was smart. He had shut down the telemetry and maintenance links, and the only connection from the op center to his armor was a quantum encrypted data stream.

Alone the proximity to the quantum encryption made my teeth ache. Quantum computing had been, long ago, touted as the next big step in computing. It wasn’t. Yes, it was unbeatable in encryption and decryption, but it was too much effort to get the data in a format that humans could use.

We had to have the traditional hardware anyway to interpret what the quantum computer told us, and with the translation process, it was only a marginally faster system, for only an order of magnitude higher costs.

Still, en- and decryption were still the purview of the quantum world. And as such, every Jack had access to a quantum computer somewhere.

We hated to use them though. Quantum computers did… strange things with Jacks. And I mean seriously strange things. Have you ever tasted the color blue? Or heard the taste of sweet?

Synesthesia is only the least serious consequence of being too close to a quantum computer in cyberspace. I heard of Jacks who spoke backward for a day or so after such an encounter. I once saw neon-green and purple seven-legged elephants the size of rats crawling all over my walls. For a week.

From what I’ve been told, it has all the negatives of an overdose of psychoactive drugs, without the nice high to balance it out.

But there was no helping it, I had to break through the encryption of this data stream, as sadly, whoever had set up this connection had been clever enough to put the encryption before the point where the connection entered the network. For all the good it did me, the controlling computer could have been as well completely offline.

Thus I started up the quantum sections of the cluster, setting it immediately onto decrypting the stream.

I used the time it needed for that looking into who the fuck had sent a pack of Cyberzombies after me. The result was disheartening.

Somehow I had aroused the attention of one of the AAA corporations. Admittedly, it was the weakest of them, but still, the Falconer Group was interested in me.

They were at that time for all purposes the governmental corporation of the AFS. They got to be AAA because they had around 90% of the military contracts of the freebies, in addition to being the high-tech corp for the south-western states.

That was not saying much, in Nowhere, there were no less than two AAA and an AA that had better technology, but they had a mostly captive customer base. Of course, they were in the whole religious zealotry of the AFS, and fully supported the war against the NWC.

But what I was reading told me that they had seen the writing on the wall. While the idiot on the street in the AFS actually believed in the superiority of their army of god, the people with working brains knew that the Commonwealth used the war as a convenient method to keep its own population under control, be it by pointing the people towards the rabid enemy, or by sending troublemakers to the front to either wise up or get a hero’s burial.

The CDF could have, at any point in the last 120 years, crushed the AFS. I had some blueprints for weapons that were deemed too effective and withdrawn from the military because it would make it impossible to sell the illusion of the stalemate.

But all that had changed a bit over eight months ago. The government of the Commonwealth was nominally a democracy, with an elected parliament.

It had sessions and could vote on laws and decisions and all that. But none of its decisions were actually binding.

The true power rested with the so-called executive council. It consisted of the 100 most qualified persons of the Commonwealth and officially was there to moderate the populistic tendencies any democracy develops sooner or later.

In reality, the most qualified meant being the head of one of the 100 richest families, and the amount of power was, by law, set proportional to the wealth of the respective families.

The power blocks changed somewhat when somebody new took over a family, or when the fortunes changed, but largely it was a switch back and forth between the biggest power blocks, both equally corrupt.

And then it happened. Somehow a hacker had managed to steal 90% of the wealth of the two biggest blocks, just before the assessment of rank.

And the third most powerful block suddenly was in control. While they were not going so far as setting up a real democracy, they used the time to cut back on much of the corruption in the NWC.

The AFS naturally had observed the shift change, and an unofficial cease-fire of the endless war had been the result.

But for over a century, they had used every means possible to whip a religious frenzy in their population, and it was only a matter of time before military actions had to be renewed.

Everybody knew that, and everybody who had an inkling about the realities knew that this council would not keep it at a stalemate. It was a matter of months, not years before the AFS would be conquered by the NWC. And the Falconer Group would lose its captive customer base.

They would also be suddenly subject to new laws. Laws they knew would be not particularly favorable towards their religious zealotry.

That was of course, while not common knowledge, something most informed people knew.

I found out what solution the Falconer Group had come up with in the files.

First, they decided to move their operations somewhere else.

It had to be somewhat modern, as they did not want to spend the energy to lift some hellhole up from the stone age, and that was literally what they wrote in the analysis, but it had to be malleable, aka corrupt, enough for them to gain influence quickly.

It had to be somewhere where they could actually compete with the local powerhouses.

And it could not have a significant portion of Abominations having a say in politics.

The first necessity reduced the candidates to Greater Japan, Australia, the NWC, the USA, the CSA, a couple of the Chinese successor states, and the EU.

The second limited the selection to the USA, the NWC, GJ, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.

The third limited it to the USA and Shanghai.

The fourth had become irrelevant anyway.

They looked at their options and decided to move to the USA. They had the idea of weakening the feds, and with that the local AAAs, Ralcon and Enertech, by sparking a series of riots, gang wars and uprisings.

And then somebody had a brilliant idea. Falconer was known for its stance that only the righteous should have access to things like heavy weapons, power armor, and of course, cyberware.

They could do nothing about weapons and armor, but cyberware was vulnerable. Why not kill two birds with one stone and use corrupted cyberware to spark the trouble?

Yes, I know, it is a convoluted mess of a plan, and they would have had much higher chances of success if they used more traditional methods like assassins, planted evidence, and such, but the thing one has to keep in mind is that the Falconer Group is led by religious zealots.

For them, the chance at striking at the undeserved use of cyberware was a worthwhile undertaking.

But then little old me had to traipse into New York and not only unveil their scheming, but having the audacity of making cyberware safe. How could I?

It took a bit before the leadership took my explanation that I could create CRS-free cyberware seriously.

Then they had to decide how to react to that. It resulted in the decision of abducting me and making me an offer I could not refuse of working for them. Giving them, and their holy army of god, the means of finally destroying the Abominations.

After that, they had to get their special operations team to New York and plan the operation. Their early observation made it clear to them that they would not be able to overcome the fortress with anything smaller than a grav cruiser, and even a AAA could not pull that off. Especially as they could not guarantee they would not kill me in the process.

So they had to deactivate the defenses and open the door. That in turn proved much harder than they expected. Yes, I did not upgrade the hardware considerably, but the reason was that the hardware of the security system was perfectly adequate, and I installed better software on it.

Their cybersecurity specialists, aka the hackers, found with tentative probing that they would have a seriously hard time breaking through without alerting us.

That meant they brought in reinforcements, in the form of THE JUSTICAR. He was promised CRS-free cyberware for himself as well.

And my upgraded security system did not stand up to him. If I had not taken the additional step to set up the cluster to monitor the fortress computers, we would have been surprised.

Fortunately, I had used one of my Q-links to the cluster to connect it to the fortress, and as such nobody could see the link from the outside. They had basically isolated this neighborhood from the matrix with their attack to make sure I could not bring in support.

In the end, it had been a much more costly operation for them than they could even dream of, and I still had good chances to win, if I managed to crack the link to the power armor in time.

The best they could achieve was that I died, removing the option of CRS-free cyberware. Well, to be honest, the best they could achieve was getting out without a higher price. If I died, the cluster would release The Lamb and that would put an end to their dubious victory real fast.

But I had to do something to show them how amused I was about their antics.

I started by putting together an encrypted package of my files. Mostly early designs of things I had built, a few of my obsolescent utilities, all the research for an early, failed attempt for the CRS-free cyberware and as a party favor, I included a self-executing copy of Tsar, before I thought again, and replaced it with Enola Gay.

Enola Gay would shred files, corrupt executables, scramble databases, and then use whatever tool I had ever gotten my hand on to destroy the hardware, including the control circuits of any fusactor it came across.

Tsar would mostly do the same, except it did not bother with melting the control circuits of the fusactors, because when it was done, the circuits would physically no longer be there, along with the fusactors, and a large chunk of the surrounding area.

Fusactors are a very safe technology unless somebody neglects relatively simple maintenance. Then, under some unfortunate circumstances, people find out that there is no great difference in the construction of a fusactor and a fusion bomb.

They use the same fuel, the same casings, and the same grav-coils. The difference is that in fusactors the coils are limited to a non-critical level of gravity, which starts a relatively limited fusion reaction in the core.           

Fusion bombs on the other hand crank up the gravity almost instantly to a level that ignites fusion of the complete fuel, making things go boom. As in kilo-tonnes types of boom for a small bomb.

I had learned that one could disable the limiters in the fusactor, transforming it from a safe energy producer into a city-block vaporizing boom device.

Tsar did exactly that, along with all the other niceties I had baked into Enola Gay.

As it was, while I could justify the use of Tsar at least somewhat to myself, I considered myself better than that.

Yes, it was extremely unlikely that it would wipe out many innocents. That was not a given though.

But at the same time, I could not let them get away.

For good measure, I added several other Enola Gay packages to the gift basket, all with a slightly different encryption scheme, so that half of what I prepared was an epic landmine.

Then I used THE JUSTICARS board, after I vacuumed it for all information I could get, to send the basket with a message to the operations command of Falconer. With a bit of luck, it would cripple their shadow war capabilities for a few months.

Essentially I told them that the assault had seen unexpected problems, but that he had liberated some of my files. He would contact them after they had captured me.

Assumed they used something similar to the cluster for decryption, it would take them a day, maybe two for each file. Even if they were extremely lucky it was unlikely that they would manage to open more than one or two before they tripped over Enola Gay.

In a couple of days, I would post a notice in the Abyss that THE JUSTICAR had attacked me, and was killed in the process, but not before he could steal some of my files. I would place a warning to everybody that some of them may be one of my more destructive utilities and might cause damage, so keep their hands off it.

Thankfully the cluster had several encryption schemes ready, and except for the quantum computer part was mostly idle, so it managed to encrypt the files in a couple of seconds in parallel.

That still left me fidgeting over the power armor link. I always laugh when I see a status bar for hacking, decryption, or such in a holo-drama. It is virtually impossible to predict how long it takes to break the encryption.

Now I wished reality were more in line with fiction, as I desperately needed to get through this specific encryption, but reality was a cold, heartless female dog in that regard and stubbornly refused to provide me with a status bar.

While I was on tenterhooks observing the link, it suddenly winked out of existence. From one moment to the next, flatline.

To say I was surprised would be an understatement, and it took me a couple of seconds to process that it happened. Then I began to rant and activated the video feed again, only to go silent almost immediately.

My friends were still mostly in the same positions they were before and looked surprised.

The Cyberzombies still lying motionless on the ground.

The power armor user was probably the most surprised of all of them, but more important, he was in two places at once. His body laid where he had stood before, while his head rolled on the floor a few meters away from that.

Behind the power armor on the ground stood the heavy work bot I had bought in the beginning, having one of its claws at head height for the power armor.

At first, I simply could not understand what happened, but then it dawned on me. I had bought a general-purpose heavy industrial worker bot. These things were designed to be used in heavy manufacturing, heavy warehousing, heavy mining, and other tasks.

This specific model could lift up to 35 metric tons, had the same power if used as an impromptu hydraulic press, and could if need be exert the same amount of force to rip something it had in its claws.

But most important one of the tasks it was designed for was salvaging. Its claws were designed to have heavy-duty cutting tools beneath protective grip surfaces. Enough to cut through battle steel with 35 tons of pressure.

And regardless of how strong the armor was, it was not strong enough to withstand that kind of assault.

So yes, I understood generally what had happened, but I could not figure out why.

Why had the unintelligent heavy bot, equipped with extensive safety devices designed to prevent exactly that, gone up to a human in power armor and decapitated him?

Yes, I was happy that it did that, but if it could do this, what was preventing it from doing something similar to any of us? That was, honestly disconcerting.

While I pondered the question, I noticed a small message notification blinking on my HUD. Usually, they don’t blink, only when the message is deemed highly important. But nobody should have the access to send me a high-priority message at all.

The sender was revealed as the MCU of the cluster. And the message was that the threat had been neutralized.

I could not understand why it did not push a message onto my HUD directly. The MCU was one of the few devices that had that option, the others were Precious and my cranial board.

Yes, the MCU was much higher developed than the boards, simply because I equipped it with a learning module, with the ill-fated idea to build an AI in the cluster.

But that attempt failed when I ran into the same problem as everybody else. It simply would not think for itself. So why did it change its behavior now?

That was something I had to look into, and soon, but for now, the bot was already in the process of turning around, it did not seem to be interested in removing any other heads, so that problem was also a thing that could wait.

I left the op-center network and moved much more sedately to my own computers, before surfacing.

I was the only medically trained person in the building after all and we had casualties.