Standing back, I admired the new armour—some of my best yet. I'd just finished the last few checks, which it had passed with flying colours. No surprise there. I had made it after all. An advantage, one of the few of doing it all myself.
Even with me making it, I still wanted to do my checks. At least the ones that would have my name on it or went to important people.
Professional pride if nothing else.
This was my fourth set of what I was calling my enclosed heavy carapace armour I'd made this year, which was an improvement from last year, where I only made five. Going at the same pace, I should be able to knock out another four before the end of the year. This one was special and had taken far longer. The overall build was the same, but I had worked hard on the exterior.
Rather than my normal utilitarian design, this one had intricate carving in white enamel. Mostly skulls and the gang's symbol, but also personal symbols. I didn't know what all of them meant, but I knew enough to know how important they were to Zardelle.
Others in the gang did the same thing, but with ink instead.
Then on the pauldron it had the large skull, matching the designs of her current armour. I was finally happy enough with them to make her one, and it would be enough of an upgrade to warrant it, since her old one was some of the best available anyway, so there was little point in swapping it out at an earlier stage.
The earlier ones had gone to those on the waiting list. That had made me laugh, knowing there was a waiting list for carapace armour. But it made sense. The only way to really get one was from the gang. Who could only get the very occasional set from the guilds or nobles.
But now they were able to get them internally, with me handcrafting them, they had started to work through their backlog. My work alone had almost doubled the number of sets within the gang. Which already had a huge number. Sure, other gangs had lots of the plates, but fully enclosed?
Those were rare.
Good-fitting ones were rarer still. The first few I made after mine were worse, with me tweaking the process each time, trying to speed the process up, but now that I had it all nailed down, they were as good as mine. Maybe fewer add-ons or as fitted, but the base was as good.
I'd supplied one to Jereks early this year, to the jealousy of his teammates. Well, only for a few weeks and then he was moved fully into the Red Corsairs, fully taking over my role within the unit. That was another reason Zardelle didn't need hers so urgently; she was rarely in the field these days, much to her disgust. But she was learning all the behind-the-scenes stuff from Lanto and Selina.
Katra had taken command, which she hated, preferring to be the second. Hell, I think she loved back when she was effectively my bodyguard the most. But it did give me the pleasure of saying 'I told you so' to her. Her armour was one of the first few of good quality ones I did. She was heavily augmented already, but the armour wouldn't impede her and would only make her more survivable. Something I hadn't considered at first, but the many augments made it hard, if not impossible, to get form-fitting armour, which was why she had been stuck with flak for years.
Two other suites went to other mates, one to Voff, the little shit, for surviving and thriving. Unfortunately, Caidold, the shotgun wielding manic that was my first squad leader, was not so lucky. His entire squad was wiped out in the first few days by the chaos spawn. The other went to Adira. Those I just gave away, but the ones to the gang, I made a very healthy profit off.
A few more years and they would have several units composed of heavy carapace armour, which would be a sight. Nie impossible to stop, unless they brought out something heavy. Whereas the ones I sold were the base models, as I liked to think of them, the ones that went to people I actually cared about had all the upgrades. Better auspex, better vox, better helmet, the works, and all perfectly fitted.
I did get some strange looks when I asked for their measurements. Katra almost thumped me.
Giving the armour one last look over, I threw a cloth over it and moved to the other end of the workshop. It had grown in size again with my promotion. I actually moved to the main HQ with the workshop deep within the bowels of the building. With my quarters now in the same area as the others.
Not sure if it was their cunning plan, but living there did make me do some upgrades. I had already given them sonic showers, but living in the area made the other items a priority. First were the air filtration systems. Since I could replace the parts like for like, I pretty much rebuilt the system from the ground up, all throughout the building.
You could actually breathe air without your lungs burning, which was heavenly and was quickly demanded throughout the rest of the city. The lights I had already done years ago, but also had a look at the plumbing. Which ended with me upgrading the water filtration system as well. That had been a fucker to get going. But it was worth it.
All of the work for a hot water shower. Oh it was blissful. However, access was severely limited; I could only have one a month, but few others had the luxury, so that felt fair. Water was still a precious commodity after all.
Passing one workbench made me wince. I still had not got the shield to work as I wanted it to. It was close, smaller now, down to the backpack size, but not quite there yet. With nothing else to learn from the original, I'd reassembled it and slotted it into my combat knife at my hip.
Scattered across another table sat a plasma pistol, which I'd finally given in to and started learning. Progress was slow, but it was progress. Finally, in the far corner, covered by another tarpaulin, was what I was looking to work on now. Grabbing the cover, I pulled it off.
Beneath it was once human but could no longer realistically be called that. Much of the flesh had been cut away and wires, cables and servos taking its place. Its eyes replaced with cheap, crappy bionics, same with its left arm and both legs. A crude exoskeleton was bolted straight onto the ribcage and limbs. What flesh was left sagged pale and burnt, chemical scars layered over heat-seared flesh. Finally, to finish off the walking abomination were hydraulic struts punched through bone on its legs.
A servitor. Industrial class servitor to be exact. Modified for hauling heavy loads. One of the worst fates a soul could end up with.
There were not many in the underhive, only those who'd been forgotten or gone rogue. Higher up the hive though, they became so common that you couldn't turn a corner without bumping into one.
They came in every flavour: bar attenders, shop assistants, and factory drones. Some were fused into the machines they ran—door controls, cogitators, whole systems that couldn't function without the meat still twitching inside.
A truly horrifying existence. Shuddering, I pushed the thought from my mind and leaned in for a closer look.
I'd disabled its eyes and kept it strapped down as a precaution. I had no interest in a tech-priest activating it and seeing where it was or, more to the point, seeing who was messing with it. That was a very good way to get killed and converted into one yourself.
It was brain-dead, so that shouldn't be an issue, but why take the risk?
The stench of its rotting organic components was gag-inducing, so I'd put my helmet on. With a big sigh, I got started with the grisly task of breaking it apart.
First came the rig, plating, exposed cables and the visible bionics like its arm. With them off, I moved to the deeper components, cutting through skin and bone to access them. Some of the skin was so loose that it pulled off rather than being cut.
Forcing myself not to vomit, I tried not to focus on the grisly sight before me.
Each piece of tech went straight to another table and was put into the ionising bath. It removed both grime and grease without damaging the electronics. By the time I was done, the workstation and I were coated in blood and stinking fluids. I thought about a shower but knew if I left the grisly remains, I would regret it.
I dumped what was left of the carcass, minus the head, outside, to some incredulous and fearful looks from other gang members. But they left me well enough alone, so maybe being covered in blood and guts had an upside, few as they were.
The head stayed in the workshop. It still held the neural sockets and impulse units and a small connector that I didn't know. Although I had a good idea that it was the connection to the network I'd found. So, I left it all intact.
With the body left for the corpse collectors, I scrubbed the workshop, made sure my parts were cleaning or clean, and then headed home for the much-needed shower. I felt so grimy, I had a sonic shower and then a water shower after.
Just the memories of it unsettled my stomach, which I thought was unshakeable by this point.
Feeling halfway human, I got to the bit I was excited about. The technology. Starting with the head so I could get rid of it as soon as possible, I connected it to my neural transductor and started to pore through its code. Like much of the newer code I'd seen, it was a hodgepodge of things.
Parts of the code looked beautiful, and other parts were a mess, with entire sections obsolete or even conflicting. My decoder was still working like a dream. It had gone through a few iterations over the years, but its core was still the same. With the raw binary code extracted and converted, I saved it to my cogitator to look through when I didn't have a slowly rotting head on my workbench.
With the data now safe, I took it to the neural transductor and set about the last delicate task of cutting into it and digging around the brain for the last pieces of tech and probably what I was most interested in. The skeletal reinforcement and arm bionics were crude. Effective, but crude, so there was little I could learn from them. I would still take them apart, but I wasn't expecting much.
The head was different.
First was the sensor array, slightly different from what I was used to, so it might have some interesting insights, but it was still crude compared to what my armour and Snuffles had. The interface ports in the back of its skull were also put to one side. I already understood them, but they were useful to keep. Then we came to what I was actually looking for.
A dense knot of tangled wires and chips. The logic chip, memory storage and most importantly of all, the Mechanicus layer connection. The logic chip was what gave it its orders, turning a person into nothing more than a biomechanical machine. When the procedure was done right, there was nothing left of the original individual, as they got lobotomised, their memories and self stripped from them.
All that remained was a husk bound to follow the strict protocols found in the memory and logic chips. But it was the final chip and receiver that was the real prize. It might let me connect to the layer. I wasn't about to poke it, but one of the gangs we might come into contact with used something similar, so I wanted to learn all I could.
I was lucky this one had it, not all servitors did. After all, many of them didn't need to have any data exchange or be controlled remotely. But this was an older model, abandoned to rot in the depths of the hive, stuck repeating long-since obsolete orders for decades on end.
They'd found it stacking and restacking empty crates in a partially collapsed manafactorum, near the Sump.
Unfortunately, the connector was a one-way device, so I could only receive data packages from the layer, not send them, but that might actually be better for now. It would allow me to learn.
My vox chirped. Rather than my personal one, which only a few people had access to, this was the one I used for my role as the Fixer.
'Yes?'
'Success.' Catiel said. He'd since gained his own team, with his reputation having grown enough that it was hard to reject him. I had kept an extra careful eye on him, waiting, expecting him to overreach or betray us so I could vanish him.
But he was on the straight and narrow for now.
I clenched my fist in victory. 'Any problems?'
'No, all the information was accurate, and we swept up the entire cult in one go.'
'Well done. Send the report to Peggi.'
'Got it, boss.'
Tossing the vox back onto the table, I did a little shake with triumph in the privacy of my workshop. That was a weight off my mind. It had turned out the death cult Jereks had stumbled on was unknown to us. We were lucky to catch it as early as we did, as it was one of the bad ones.
It was a miracle we hadn't discovered them earlier with their indiscriminate killings.
Going to my dataslate, I crossed that off my ever-growing list.
---
A few days later, I was scrapping the last of the bionics and metal from the servitor to sell. The brainware I'd obviously kept and stored, ready for me to work with next week. I was stacking the last box when my dataslate started to explode with messages.
There was always something.
I hurried over to read them. When I did, I swore for real. "Snuffle heel!" I snapped, striding from the room and down the corridors with him padding behind me, his paws clinking on the floor. At the junction to Peggi's domain, I saw Selina approaching from the other direction. I nodded at her. "Selina. Know what this is about?"
"Aleric." She said clipped. "I've some idea. But not nearly enough."
"Where's Lanto?" I asked as we walked briskly down the corridor together.
"Preparing for the worst."
With that cryptic statement, we stepped into a sea of chaos. Peggi's team rushed to and fro, not quite in a panic, but not far off. From across the room, Peggi poked her head out of her office and shouted, waving us over. "Selina, Aleric!"
Once we were all seated, just Peggi, Selina and I with the door shut behind us, Selina perched on her chair like it was a throne and said. "Brief me."
"Nothing new since I voxed you."
"But it's confirmed?"
"Yeah, I've confirmed it."
I frowned, not liking being uninformed. "Someone want to fill me in?"
"Right, Aleric." Peggi said, fixing me with her full attention.
"This might be the start. The Chainhand Enclave are making their move."
I blinked, surprised. We'd put in a lot of work to make sure this wouldn't happen, and the last I'd heard, there were no threats on the horizon. "How the hell did we miss this?"
"Timing and desperation." Peggi said. "We thought we neutralised them months ago, with our careful stranglehold. But in recent weeks, they have been hit hard by rivals, forcing their hand, so rather than the slow collapse as we planned, they are going to go out with a bang. They have sponsored a gang to attack the rival guild's muscle. At the same time, they will attack to claim as many of the factories controlled by them as possible. Reversing their fortune and even improving their situation."
"And we think this will be the spark?"
"Yes. It is not 100%, but I see very little that stops this from setting off the chain reaction and turning the conflict hot."
"So it's confirmed? What's their plan?" Selina asked.
"Yes. We have confirmation through the systems we have access to. They are sending a large shipment over. Once they have that, the gang, The Rusty Talons, are under express orders to go on the full offensive and cripple the Ashfangs, which Ironvein uses as their security. With them weakened, the Chainhand's would go on the attack, pressing their advantage.
Humming in thought, I said. "So what needs to be done?"
"We're too late to intercept the shipment. That ship has sailed. But we need to delay the gang's actions, giving us time to get a team together and neutralise them."
"And hitting the gang won't spark the wider war?"
Peggi shook her head. "There is no doubt in my mind that if the guilds start to fight, that's it, the war starts. But gangs fighting? Every day occurrence, so if we crush the gang, that should stop them in their tracks. And with a bit of persuasion, we should be able to smooth this over. Every week we can delay is better for us."
"Got it. So I just need to delay the gang's move?"
"Yes, in any way you can." Selina said.
Nodding in thought, I zoned out as they spoke, ideas racing through my head. I already had a good idea of how I was going to do it. With access to their systems, I could get their unique signatures. With that, it should be fairly easy to fabricate a message with the correct identifiers, codes and encryptions to fool them. Without them, there was no way they would fall for the fake message.
Looking back up, I cut into their conversation, cutting Selina off. "How do they communicate?"
"Coded messenger capsule."
"Paper and through the messenger ducts?" I asked Peggi.
"No, they like to pretend they are better than they are and use encrypted datachips that can slot into any dataslate and yes, through them."
That made life easier. The messenger capsules and the messenger ducts were an extensive network of tubes that ran throughout the hive, which fed capsules to their destinations. They were surprisingly well maintained, as it had become the nerve system of the hive, facilitating much of the communications, particularly down to the lower levels.
There was one problem with them. Routes were often locked, with many capsules only able to travel between linked stations. But I should be able to override that and launch it from here and make it appear it came from the right locations.
"Peggi, I will need a messenger capsule. I will also need to know if there is anything else they might use to identify them."
"My people are available to you. Ask Matthias as normal."
"Good, then I will get it sorted." I said, already standing.
Peggi gave a relieved smile. "Thanks Aleric. So you will delay them?"
"Yes, I will get you the time needed to hit them." I said, waving to both of them, I left the office, shutting the door behind me.
Heading over to a particularly crowded workstation, paper stacked precariously high, and called out, "Matthias, need your help."
"Bossman. The priority?" The man said, looking up from the papers he was sorting through. He still preferred physical copies rather than online, unlike most everyone else by this point. But he was so good at his role that it was overlooked, no matter how inconvenient it was. His augmented eyes somehow looked like he had massive spectacles magnifying his irises. Apart from that defining feature, he was unremarkable, tall, gaunt, with a mop of black hair and a scraggly beard.
"Number one. Drop everything."
"You got it boss. What do you need?" He spun to face me on his spinny chair. He'd been ecstatic when I fabricated it for him. It had caught on in the rest of the room, with all of them being converted to the spinny chair.
Grabbing a pen from his desk and a piece of paper. "I need all the information on this list." I said, writing it all down. "I need to fabricate a message to delay a gang's movement, so if you find any other information that would be helpful, get that as well and send it over to my cogitator."
"Which workshop?"
"The HQ one."
"Got it." He said, glancing at the list. "I'll get everyone on it. Should be an hour or so. Will that do?"
"It will have to." Heading to the door, I grabbed one of our older, more obsolete messenger tubes and left. I'd revamped the ones we regularly used, making them significantly harder to break into or forge, like I was about to do.
Once outside, I called Snuffles and set off at a jog for the workshop. Picking up speed as I neared it. Locking it behind me, I sat at the cogitator and got to work. First, I accessed the backdoor into the network and connected to the guilds' systems, getting their messenger codes. Making sure I got the right ones, as like many in the hive, they had different ones depending on where they were going.
For example, the ones going to the Administratum were far more secure. Wouldn't want their tax returns to go missing or worse, intercepted. That could lead to a very sudden end.
I noted to cross-reference it with what Matthias would give me, but I could tweak things later it relatively easily. With the codes, I got to work on the messenger tubes. They were 30cm long of see-through glassite capped at both ends by plasteel to form the seal. They all looked more or less the same, needing to fit into the same tunnels.
What mattered was the code stamped onto the canister. This was what would get it sent to the right place. There were nodes throughout the tube network, with servitors that scanned the canisters and then sent them wherever they needed to go.
They also ran a security check, making sure the canister was correct, like, should it pass through this node, did it have the right security clearance and so on. This code was stamped onto the metal, which was easy for me to replicate and with the right symbols and codes, I could get it to the right place. I would need to change some of them, as they would obviously take a different path than normal.
If I sent it with the exact codes I copied from the guild, it would get flagged as wrong; having gone through a node it shouldn't have. With the metal now engraved with the right code, I grabbed a datachip and set about making the false message. The message itself was easy, but making sure it was encrypted and had all the correct codes so it could be used by the gangers' dataslate took a lot longer.
But with the information sent over by Matthias, it was ready. I double- and triple-checked, but it all looked good.
All that was left was to send it.
A runner had been hovering outside my door for the last two hours for that express purpose, so handing it off to him, I sent Peggi a message that it was moving and then sat back waiting to see if it worked.
I was confident it would, but I could still feel the tension in my shoulders. I tried to distract myself with some other work, stuff that would have normally drawn me in and I'd have lost hours to it, but now struggled to hold my attention.
Every hour dragged by.
Finally, mercifully, confirmation came, the message worked and gave us enough time. The gang would soon be hit and destroyed with extreme prejudice. We would also hit the surrounding gangs for good measure. Both to hide the target and to give them something else to think about while we dealt with the guild.
I let out a long sigh before grabbing my stuff and headed back to help Peggi and Carlora deal with the guild that caused this mess.
More final action might need to be taken rather than letting the slow collapse we had planned.