Server Extant
The Battle for Big Cock

'To know all? To judge all? Every virtue, every villainy, the very recess of the human spirit? In my Arctic solitude, I sit and contemplate these enormities. Why me? No man should have such power.'

-Santa Claus

The attack on the Epsilon Server cim concentration began at 13:00 KST.

Like any self-respecting brigands, the attack’s planners had utilized the principle of surprise and distraction. Checkpoints Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Steve Austin, would be struck simultaneously, each attacking force functioning as both decoy and penetrator. The goal was to see to which of the gates was most competently manned, and on to which the defending force would least concentrate. The main force, held in reserve, would then strike the weakest.

Agampreet Singh and his Cousin Pavitar, still arguing, in idle boredom, at their sentry post, were soon to become early players in a drama that would have Epsilon celebrated and memed on battle leader boards for a full thirty-eight hours, before being overtaken by more pressing events and forgotten.

* * *

The forward station was located in one of the anonymous low rises that ringed the city, where the lower structures began to mount, like a staircase, into a crown of skyscrapers and high rises. It utilized security through obscurity, a dangerous tactic in the Knet. The lack of hardening made the post difficult to spot through the maze of wireframe interference from the buildings around it but, once identified, it had little in the way of defense.

Forward stations were part of the traditional P-Fed garrisoning structure. P-Fed doctrine called for three elements, linked together, to defend a city. First, was the ring of forward stations, their positions regularly moved, serving as command posts, while placing the strongest fighters, usually the leads in command and control, close to the scene of the action. The second was the Depot, a hardened storage for the garrison’s military hardware and logged-off Ids. At the center of the Depot was the Vault, a super-dense container for the junction box, the utility that regulated the cim settlement and allowed control by the P-Fed’s local server boss, called a controller. It was the controller’s job to govern and protect the territory from predation.

The FS looked deceptively simple. A floor of the building had been cleared and emptied. In the middle of its open space, illuminated by a pale florescence, was a rectangular tent-like structure, about fifteen meters on each side, sheeted with pearly material that diffused its interior into a softened halo of dimmer shades. It looked like the kind of thing the military might set up to conduct an alien autopsy. A converging mass of cables snaked across the roof, combining into a thick column that descended into the center of the station where they fed the battle board, a great, flat, touch-sensitive map of the city, that tracked P-Fed’s units and opened channels to comms and cams around the city. It was currently zoomed out to display the whole street system of the city in filigree tracers of blue, glowing like a the circulatory system of a living creature.

On this occasion, the station interior was empty, except for two P-Fed officers. They were clad in gray, utilitarian uniforms, designed with the sense of ascetic brutality that characterized the hegemon’s militarist kultur.

The first, tall and female, strode slowly back and forth along the far side of the board, either lost in thought or abstracted by whatever news, music or other entertainment played in her headset. Her breast and arm tags displayed the name ‘Cptn. DeLuca.’

The second, more heavy-set and male, half-reclined on the room’s dimmer periphery, on a lounge improvised from crates and stacked communications equipment. His uniform tags read ‘Cptn. Bowral.’ Neither were paying attention to the somnambulant board.

Bowral’s face displayed the idle stare of the blind. He was motionless save for his right hand, which hovered above his groin, moving up and down along some invisible protuberance.

Catching sight of this, his companion swept up a chair and flung it over his head, crashing away into the shadows, startling him upright.

‘What! What?’ yelled Bowral, reaching for his head and sending his face, constantly recorded by his headset and mocapped into his Id’s 3D facial topography, slightly askew, as if he’d suffered a partial stroke. The tinny sound of pornography, feeding back from his headset, became faintly audible.

‘Do you have to do that?’ demanded DeLuca, pointing at his apparently empty groin.

‘Oh shit! I forgot I still had my body feedback turned on, ha ha! You see that?’

‘Yes I saw it, you fucking pig!’

‘It make you wet?’

‘So inappropriate.’

‘I know,’ sighed Bowral, ‘but who are you going to complain to? That’s the thing.’

‘Dude..!’

‘Fine,’ replied her companion, with the air of a fratboy, told by his female house-mates to stop pissing in the kitchen sink. ‘I’ll turn my feedback off, so you don’t see my perfectly natural and healthy expression of self love.’

DeLuca was opening her mouth to reply when a voice, startlingly loud and radio-brittle shrieked out from the tactical board.

‘-truck! Oh fuck!’

There was a sound like colliding metal, cut abruptly off. Simultaneously, three bright icons, yellow squares, appeared in a ring about the city. One at each of the three entry points on the city wall. A low, repetitive warning tone sounded.

For an instant, the two P-Fed officers stared, dumbfounded, then, yelling curses, leapt for the board, Bowral’s body lagging asymmetrically, as he got his gamer rig back on. DeLuca dragged up the magnification to bring the hot points into frame, tapping icons on the street plan to activate cameras. Video windows began to open up and she began orientating them to get a view of the problem. Bowral opened the staff call-up tables and hit the alarms.

* * *

Pavitar had seen the truck come off the slip from the highway before anyone else, if only because he was still panning his gun sight over the rivers of heedless cim traffic, imagining their destruction. He was thus, ironically, considering his avowed disinterest in the whole project, the only person on the checkpoint actually doing his job. He saw immediately that there was something alarming about the truck, its reckless speed, rolling its weight off-center, as if too heavy for its suspension, dangerously solid. The truck swung across two lanes and entered the slipway, its side striking sparks from the curving wall as it came onto the bridge.

‘Hey’ said Pavitar.

No siren or alarm sounded from the scanliner tower as the truck hit the bottom of the ramp, rebounding off its shocks, and accelerated along the short bridge towards them. Since the tower crew would not survive the raid, and would subsequently get new logins to avoid the wrath of their P-Fed overlords, no one ever did find out what they’d been doing instead of scanning traffic.

‘Hey!’ said Pavitar.

‘What?’ said Agampreet, and then it was too late.

The truck struck the traffic barrier that sealed off the bridge, just below the tower and disintegrated, explosively disgorging a terrifying black mass of limbs and bodies, Kysairon roaches, packed into the vehicle’s thin shell like tadpoles in a tin can.

‘Oh fuck!’ yelled Agampreet, hitting his comm, ‘We’re under attack! Someone’s rushing-’ the rest of his words were drowned out, as Pavitar figured out that this was something he was definitely allowed to shoot at and opened up with his mounted gun. ‘Someone’s rushing us, they hit us with a truck loaded with-’ Agampreet realized he had his comm set on team speak instead of forward center, but as he switched it over, white flashes of gunfire rippled out from the glossy mass of black-clad attackers and a half dozen missiles flew up the causeway, striking the blast doors and the other centurion’s battle shield. All he could manage, as he dived for cover, was ’-truck! Oh fuck!

The centurion guns were sweeping the base struts of the scanner tower, sending up clouds of dust, sparks and flying debris, catching the attackers out of cover and tearing them apart in showers of glowing blood that looked like liquid neon. Someone in the tower was still fighting, but a second later, an internal explosion silenced the defenders and Kysairon fighters swarmed into the hatches.

* * *

Deluca looked up as the exterior flaps of the command center where thrown aside and a half dozen new uniforms shouldered in. They hurried to man the battle board, taking over operations from the harried officers. Only one was of Bowral and Deluca’s rank, his face sleep-hooded, slack and yawning. His tags identifying him as ‘Cptn Permanence’.

‘What’s the dilly?’ asked Permanence, but his peers were too distracted, yelling questions at the board and directing the newcomers to station, and he was left to asses the situation himself.

On the battle board, it was a struggle between little green squares, P-Fed soldiers and units, verses little red ones, hostiles. At Aldrin and Armstrong, the raiding vehicles had been detected and fired upon as they entered the slipway, disintegrating before they got to the bridge. The checkpoint defenders had rushed the gap and were now holding the bridge with the centurions, whose more powerful weapons were able to sweep the slipway clear and force the attacked back onto the highway. There, they were firing from behind the bridge supports and dividers. It was only at Steve Austin that the initial rush had managed to take the center tower, forcing the checkpoint crew to stand before the blast doors with little cover but the shield projectors on the centurions.

‘Where are the bosses?’ demanded DeLuca.

’Haven’t checked in yet, ’replied Bowral, scrolling down a list of blinking names.

‘I can’t be doing this shit in the middle of the night’ said one of the newcomers, ‘My wife is gonna divorce me.’

‘Shut up and concentrate’ snapped DeLuca. ‘Middle of the night is why they’re attacking us. We aren’t going to get half of our people. Better call auxiliaries.’

‘Aw no, that’s not necessary,’ protested Permanence.

‘That’ll cause a shitstorm’ said Bowral. ‘If we give Ids to auxies, and they get them killed, people will go mental.’

‘Tough shit’ replied DeLuca, ’that’s why we have auxiliaries. If it gets bad enough to need ’em, we’ll need ‘em. If not, they can hand them over to their proper players when they log in.’

‘It’s just a breaker raid,’ said Permanence, ‘they’ll blow something up and run off.’

‘Activate the auxiliaries! It’s an order! I’m station chief!’

’Yes but we’re all captains’, pointed out Bowral, ‘you, me and Permanence. I think we should vote.’

‘There’s no vote! I’m commanding officer!’ yelled DeLuca, in exasperation.

‘Yeahh..’ said Permanence. ‘We should vote.’

* * *

Pilot first class, Sista Supasoldier, more commonly referred to by comrades as ‘Supa’, wheeled her flying machine fast and light over the burning bridges, skimming around the defensive trench that ringed the security barrier. She and her wingman, Toad, were flying Killer Bs, also known as K-Bees, light reconnaissance and attack aircraft that were almost like flying motorbikes, with long, swallow-lean bodies sprouting two powerful, multi-directional wing motors.

‘I’m going to suck your dick, I loved that turn so much!’ Supa was saying.

‘I’m going to take you roughly from behind, to show you how much I value your leadership,’ replied her subordinate.

They’d been talking like that allot, lately.

‘I’m gonna- whoopsie-!’ Supa almost felt the rounds whirring up from below, an instinct born of long experience, and darted into her turn dipping under the lip of the low rises. Two rounds spanged viciously off her wing, sending sparks whirling into her slipstream, her wingman falling in tight behind her. The windows of the high rises blurred past. She didn’t see what had shot at them. They popped over the rooftops again and wheeled up to get some height, their eyes straining to find detail in the bases of the columns of black smoke, rising from the checkpoints. As they did, another explosion bloomed at Buzz Aldrin, and they heard the delayed whump.

‘Truck bomb!’ Toad shouted across to her, not using the comm.

Immediately there was another, further along the wall, where Steve Austin’s defenders could be seen in the smoke by the flash and glitter of their gunfire.

Supa flicked hers to the command channel. ‘Control, we’re seeing big explosions on the bridges. They’re sending cim vehicles loaded with crates at the blast doors.’

‘No shit, Supa’ crackled a radio voice in reply.

‘Is the stat chief there? Put me onto her.’

There was a bump and a hiss and DeLuca’s voice came on. ‘What?’

‘Listen boss, this looks big. But I can’t get a look at who’s rushing the checkpoints without getting heat.’

‘Checkpoint says they’re Kysairons’ replied Deluca’s tinny comlink, ’Or at least, breakers cloning Kys Ids.’

‘Ok then, well we definitely need the overlord out here, because there’s no way they don’t have a plan to hit those gates with something heavier than roaches and truck bombs.’

‘We’re working on it.’

Supa glanced across at her wingman, who gave her a shrug.

‘Ok, this is what I want you to do’ came DeLuca’s voice, ’leave four of your guys on station, to ferry officers and keep eyes on the gates, split the rest up and send them out from the city. I have a feeling these guys are going to use links as soon as they think they can bust through one of the hard points. When they do, the link counterpoints are going to be visible from wherever they have their landing ships, understand? If we can hit their landing ships we can shut this thing down, because they’ll probably lose their nerve and pull their rankers out.’

In the forward post, Persistence looked at DeLuca in consternation. ‘Is that a good idea? We need air here.’

‘Do it’ said DeLuca.

‘Got it’, said Supa’s voice from the board, where little green triangles marker her and Toad’s locations above the southern quadrant.

Supa disconnected from control and switched her comm to the all-team preset. ’Okay, everyone listen, we have to get eyes on the dark side of the server. Control thinks they have landing ships and links set up, ready to flood. When they do, we have to pinpoint them. Heart Attack and Syphilis stay over the battle with me and Toad. Everyone else spread out across the far board. Use the tacmap to coordinate your distances. Get as much height as you can. If you see links, call ‘em in.’

Affirmations came back across the comm. Across the hazed canyons of the metropolis, Supa saw the black fly-shapes of her air group wheel off and begin to head for the horizon. She reached down and pulled the long, narrow barrel of her missile launcher from its holster along the side her K-Bee’s fuselage, hoisting it like the lance of a knight.

‘Come on, let’s knock some of these fuckers off the bridges!’

‘Whoo!’ said Toad.

They wheeled their machines and fell into the city below, like a couple of hunting falcons.

* * *

In his logon, M0nsterbra1ns was a victim of the same quirk that had named the city he defended. If he’d known he was going to ascend into the upper power structure of the P-Fed hegemon and seen his moniker celebrated as that of a True Swashbuckler, he would have picked a better name than ‘M0nsterbra1ns’. His Id was not much different from that of his underlings, a thick-set man of severe lines, with a heavy, praetorian face, clad in the same utilitarian gray. Only a scanline view of his body would have revealed the massive density of his wireframe. M0nstabra1ns had only been Controller for three weeks, and, like many talented ground operators, was finding the transition to management disconcerting.

‘Why isn’t our overlord up?’ he demanded of Bowral, as he entered the forward base, in the company of his second in command, Marquis.

‘Isn’t crewed yet. Pilot hasn’t checked in.’

‘Then activate the auxiliaries! Why the fuck wasn’t that done already?’

‘That order can only be given by the station Chief,’ replied Bowral, directing his gaze, with reproachful dignity, toward Deluca.

‘Damnit, DeLuca!’

‘What? I-’ protested Deluca.

‘It’s been my experience that women are often insufficiently decisive for leadership roles,’ whispered Bowral.

‘Shut up Bowral! How many of our heavies are crewed?’

‘About half the tanks. And most of the air wing is up’ replied a manager from down-board.

‘HOW many?’

‘Eight ASTs, fifteen K-Bees, ten transports and ten quads. Forty one fighters logged in, plus the night crews, another twenty.’

‘Alright, send the ASTs out. Get the fighters into as many transports as they’ll fill and rolling, the quads too. Basically, split everything we have so far into three groups and divide them between the checkpoints. ’

‘One of them’s gonna be a tank short.’

‘Then give it an extra transport’.

The managers were already tapping and scrolling across their interfaces, issuing orders to ground units and corralling the garrison’s forces organized groups.

M0nstabra1ns looked at the contact icons blinking over the checkpoint gates. All three had now turned red. ‘I should get down there-’

‘No’ said Marquis, ‘you’re controller now. You can’t jump into every fight.’

‘He’s right,’ said DeLuca, ‘until we know which way this thing is going you need to stay here and keep charge.’

‘Where are our K-Bees?’ asked M0nstabra1ns, his worried eyes scanning the fringes of the battle map. ‘They should have eyes on the checkpoints.’

‘DeLuca sent them to the other side of the server, for some reason’ replied Permanence.

‘Then order them back!’ yelled M0nstabra1ns.

‘Chicks are bad at war,’ whispered Bowral.

* * *

‘Bring them back on station!’ Permanence’s voice was ordering from the comm.

‘Yes sir!’ said Supa.

The comm went dead.

‘Are you going to order the K’s back?’ asked Toad

‘Nope’ replied Supa. ‘DeLuca said she wants the search order to stand.’

‘You going to ignore a direct order?’

‘Yeah. DeLuca’s right, they have links warming up out there. And anyway, I don’t need no first-time controller double-guessing my play.’

‘Plus they wouldn’t get back here in time to do much good.’

‘Exactly.’

‘They might tag you for disobeying orders.’

’Only if we’re wrong. If we’re right, they’ll be too busy taking credit.

‘Let the record show,’ said Toad dramatically, pretending to talk into some invisible recording device, ‘I register my objection to Flight Leader Supa Soldier’s foolhardy course of action.’

‘Let’s do this’ she said.

Supa gunned her machine. She dropped into the trench that ran along the ring wall and accelerated. Her wing man fell in behind. Leaning in, like a motorcyclist taking a fast turn, she hoisted the launcher smoothly to her shoulder.

* * *

Agampreet, Pavitar and their comrades-in-arms were blasting away at the burning, wreckage-filled bridgeway. The scanner tower, now riddled with bullet holes, flame-belching tears in its metal skin, appeared in and out of the smoke like a lighthouse in heavy mist. They were firing blind, what wasn’t obscure by the flames and smoke was hidden in the walls of blue smoke and the cover holos that the unseen attackers were still throwing out from somewhere inside the maelstrom. An unknown, but apparently high, number of roaches were chattering off machine gun fire and rockets at the beleaguered defenders.They were not firing entirely blind, the tower, apparently, still contained a working scanliner, and someone was using it to direct Kysairon fire.

Pavitar fired off clipping bursts into the smoke, feeling the powerful gun shake the centurion’s frame, hoping he was hitting some of the bastards, or at least keeping their heads down. The only cover they really had was the traffic barrier, now almost degraded to rubble, and the war shields of the two gun pods, both flashing on depleted charge. Suddenly, the second centurion was struck by two rockets, which punched the last of its shield. It blew up, mixing its rider’s body parts with flying wreckage.

‘Fuck this!’ yelled Agampreet, we got to rush them, force them off the midway point!’

‘We don’t have the numbers!’ replied one of the soldiers. The name tag on his scorched armor was no longer visible, but his arm was striped with a red patch that indicated he was a seven-time, full-tour server. ‘There’s like fifty of them in there!’ continued Red Arm Band Guy, ‘We’ll have to go them hand to hand, and they’ll swam us! At least, here, we can tag them with the centurion if they clear the smoke!’

‘I’m gonna blow up like that other one did!’ said Pavitar, ‘I’m on red! This flashing thing’s my shield charge, right?’

‘Com on, they’re only roaches!’ said someone else, ‘we can take them!’

‘Fuck you, M0lst! I’m not gettin’ tagged here!’ yelled Red Arm Band. ’I did a month of day servs on this fucking bridge and they’re upgrading me after one more cycle! I’m not dying now!’

‘Fuck your long serv, you pussy!’ yelled M0lst.

‘Everyone stop swearing!’ yelled Pravitar.

‘Pavitar’s right,’ said Agampreet, ‘not about the swearing, the other thing. We’re getting chipped down. We need to-’

With the terrifying suddenness of a rhino charging from out of the brush, another cim truck came out of the wall of black and purple smoke that hid the mid bridge from view. This one was painted a cheerful candy stripe, and a large ice cream cone was bolted to its roof. ‘Mr Slimey’ was emblazoned across its hood. The defenders had a bare second to register the skull-masked roach driving it before their massed fire penetrated the vehicles thin shell and triggered the explosives it was loaded with. The blast flattened them back against the doors, sending them rolling, their body armor dinging with shrapnel hits.

Pavitar saw, above the rolling smoke, the roach driver’s severed head, flung upward by some freak of the explosion dynamics, spinning in the blue sky. He felt scared, adrenalin-shaky, beset and fighting for life. Agampreet was right about Knet. It was way better than Zombie Fortress.

‘Fuck!’ yelled his cousin, ‘Where is our air?’

* * *

In the P-Fed Depot, a cavernous, hangar-like space, surrounding the black square of the Vault, all was a swarming of martial activity. Atomic Super Tanks, or ASTs were the hegemon’s standard heavy ground unit, articulated monsters whose chassis could function either on wheeled tracks or quarter into robotic limbs that allowed it to clamber across rubble and broken terrain like massive crabs. The machine had two principle weapons, a slow-charging plasma array and a long-barrel kinetic shell thrower, and two secondaries, a coaxial machine gun on the top and another in a180 degree blister on the front of the turret.

The quads were light transports, squat flatbeds with a low profile. They were unarmed but could each carry two drivers and four more in the back with fairly good protection.

Hardshells were bulbous troop transports, almost beetle-ish on their six articulated wheels, each taking ten fully armed rankers with gear. Hardshells were armed only with a single gun but well-armored, providing excellent speed and protection as they charged into fire, their armored sides unfolding and raising like a beetle’s wing case to disgorge troops onto their targets.

The Killer Bs had already flown. But their queen mother was still resting in its landing cradle, towering over the floodlit scene of mobilizing soldiers and maneuvering vehicles. This was an Overlord, one of P-Fed’s heaviest air units, a deceptively smooth-lined cross between a naval destroyer and a helicopter.

The server garrison only had one of these flying monsters. Its five-man crew was present, except for the pilot, who had still not logged in. His auxiliary had, and was waiting to take control of the beast, an action resisted furiously by the regulars. Fists had been shaken and aspersions thrown. It had gotten heated. It had been alleged that the stand-in pilot was a mountebank and pretender, furthermore that his intelligence was poor as an Irishman’s, in addition, it had been broadly insinuated that he was a proponent of the Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name and that his mother was a woman of low repute. He had replied to these assertions by employing intemperate rhetoric of a similar vein. Side arms were drawn and brandished, more for effect than intent. Tankers and skirmishers leapt from their vehicles to mediate, contributing to the general din of shouting voices and roaring engines to express the popular view on the floor that they should stop arguing, like a ‘bunch of dumbass faggots,’ and get the overlord up.

It wasn’t until 15:25 that the official launch order came and the crew were forced to give way. The stand-in pilot climbed into the cockpit, his mutinous underlings nestling themselves into gun blisters. At 15:31 the beast finally lifted off its cradle, ascending, with ponderous strength, into the sky. By then, the armored columns were already racing for the besieged checkpoints, along the spaghetti of overhead highways, crushing the unwary cim traffic under their tracks.

Six minutes earlier, however, and unfortunately for all concerned with Big Cock’s defense, the defenders of Steve Austin, wilting under continuous truck bomb attacks and vexed by berserking roaches, were about to make the exact mistake the people running the raid were waiting for.

* * *

Supa raced up the trench, the concrete walls flashing by. Knet game physics were ruthlessly persistent and universal. The closing speed of her machine significantly added to the penetrating power of the missile, causing it to ‘bite’ better. That’s why she liked to come in fast and snap one off as she flashed over her target, hopefully too fast for it to get a bead on her. Arcing a missile onto the bullseye from a speed-pass was an art, and Supa was an acknowledged master of it. Her launcher could use two ammunition types, APs and Hydras. The APs had a powerful accelerator and a hyperdense cap, giving them good penetration, the hydras closed slower, and split into six smaller warheads before impact. For the run on the bridge, with numerous but lightly-armored roaches as the quarry, she chose hydras. Coming in from the rooftops, they were likely to cop allot of metal, but popping up from the trench, she doubted the attackers could get much bead on them. The shot itself would have to be taken on instinct. Supa guessed most of the attackers would be clustered on the bridge just beyond the scanner tower, where the wrecked vehicles gave them cover. A hydra dropped into that packed space should give them something to think about.

The bridge that extended across the trench to Steve Austin was coming up fast. At the last instant, the flyers jumped above the trench and Supa took the scene in an instant. She saw the columns of smoke, the wreckage-jammed causeway and bridge, the small group of P-Fed defenders hunkering behind a disintegrated traffic divider, and something else. Dozens of roaches were running up the spillway, carrying flat, black, triangular objects.

The instant she let the missile go, she knew, like a pro golfer who perfectly chips a ball out of the rough, that it was arcing dead-on. The hydra split and its scatter pattern explosions blew apart the largest concentration of attackers, even as Supa’s machine flashed over them. An instant later, Toad’s missile struck further down the causeway, sending roach body parts skyward.

‘Yeah!’ exulted Supa, and pulled hard around the edge of a low rise as bullets were sent whining after them. ‘Those looked like links!’ she shouted to Toad, meaning the objects she’d seen the hunchbacked shapes carrying.

‘Called it!’ he replied, ‘better report it to FC.’

Supa hit the comm, but couldn’t get a reply from control.

* * *

In the forward command, her comm beeped on the board without answer. The gods of war ranged above the flickering surface, in a gabble of dueling voices.

‘Where’s Nolandus?’

‘Do we need to call him in?’

‘It’s his job now. He should get some experience.’

‘SA calls, control!’ yelled a radio voice. ’they’re pounding at us with rockets!’

‘So shoot em off the wall!’

‘We cant’ said someone else, ‘they got our gunpoints. Maybe we should-’

‘They’re hitting us too, control!’ There was a tinny sound of explosions.

‘-but they ain’t going at the door, because they have to still engage us. We’re going to hunker down and draw off their fire-’

‘Ok try not to die!’

‘We should open it and rush them. Otherwise we’re gonna get dicked in the hardhouse.’

‘No rushing! Air cover will be here soon. Everyone just calm the fuck down and wait for the heavies.’

‘He’s right, they can’t get through the blast doors.’

‘We only got one big bird up-’

‘That’ll be more than enough for this trash-’

* * *

‘No answer’ said Supa, to Toad. She opened her comm menu and looked down it, for ground units.

On the bridge, the defenders had cheered to see the Killer B’s, the first support they’d had, flash over, striking fiery death to their enemies, somewhere on the other side of the smoke, then ducked back down as the fire from within resumed.

The holo projections the roaches had thrown out, to cover them, silently danced and gibbered, making the smoke around them glow.

‘Let’s do it!’ yelled Pavitar, ‘Let’s rush them!’

Agampreet’s comm beeped and Supa’s voice came on. ’How you going down there, Steve Austin?’

‘We’re getting blasted!’ replied Agampreet.

‘Can you guys see the spillway?’

‘We can’t see shit!’ replied Agampreet. ‘The bridge is covered in wrecks, and they keep throwing out screens.’

‘Listen’ said Supa, ’I think I saw them bringing up links to the midway point and I can’t get FC to answer. How about we try to take back the scanner tower? You rush ’em, we’ll strafe ’em up good from this side. What do you say?’

‘Let’s do it,’ replied Agampreet, ’I- what the fuck?’

With a rumble of low-geared motors, the super-massive duel slab that formed the blast doors to Steve Austin gate split at their waist and began to retract. Red Arm Band stood in the shadow of the gate, turning a large, yellow rectangle key, like a colorful building block, in the override.

‘What are you doing, dude?’

‘Bailing!’ yelled the RAB rat. ‘We’ll get through the gates and close them back up again!’

Agampreet looked back at the bridge, just in time to see the purple and black cloud that obscured the midway tower light up from within, with an emerald effulgence, and five bright blue beams go up into the sky. ‘Liiiiiiiinkss!!’ yelled Agampreet. The front of the cloud bulged and expelled demons. Figures similar in style to the hump-backed roaches, but taller and horned with various bizarre configurations, swinging hook-edge chainswords and toting ugly-gunmetal-black projectile weapons, rode long-backed beasts that fused into fat tires at their front and back, and breathed fire out of their sides from rowed exhaust pipes. These were Kysairon rankers, players who were ‘somebodies’, riding ‘steeds’, motorcycle-like monsters popular with the Kysairon clans. They closed in seconds, engine-voices roaring, flashing high-powered projectiles at the remaining centurion.

Pavitar managed to dive off his gun pod, screened by the last of his shield, as his machine was turned into a blazing wreck, staggering on collapsing legs. He hit and rolled, unfortunately not on the ground, but the lip of the bridge, went over, just managing to catch himself before he fell to the floor of the security trench, fifty meters below.

Agampreet threw himself flat, as a chainsword swept over his head and cut a furrow of concrete chips and sparks out of the divider. His squad mates had hit the dirt too, but several were struck by bullets and rolled by the wheels of the steeds. The riders, however, had no thought but to charge through the widening orifice. Red Arm Soldier was just hopping over the last of the descending door when Agampreet saw him struck by the full weight and density of the lead riders and thrown into the air. Another ranker, standing in his saddle and swinging his chain weapon in a two-handed strike, like a tennis player sending a particularly vicious return, cut him in half, diagonally, through his chest. The blood splattering, disintegrating body rolled under the wheels.

* * *

Supa watched the steed riders thunder through the opening blast doors, machine gun rounds from the scattered defenders sparking off their armor. ’Control, twenty or more Kysairon rankers just went through. ‘They’re in the city’ she said, with the same feeling captain Smith must have had when he saw the iceberg.

‘Holy fuck! Who gave a door key to an exterior unit?’ crackled her comm.

* * *

‘-I’m going to see him executed!’ Permanence was finishing, in the forward base, his finger on Supa’s green triangle.

‘Ground says enemy forces are retreating from Buzz Aldrin and Armstrong,’ said Bowral.

‘Of course they are, you retard!’ yelled M0nstabra1ns, ‘they just got Austin open! Close it, use the junction box!’

‘We’re on it’ said DeLuca, ‘they’re finding the switch now.’

‘Although the way these morons are going, they’ll probably accidentally open the other two blast doors,’ muttered Permanence.

‘Whoever’s fighting us is organized as hell,’ said M0nsterbra1ns, ‘as soon as they saw a gap, they fired links and sent a penetrating force right through. Tell every group to converge on Steve Austin.’

‘Already doing it,’ said DeLuca,’ but they were heading out to the other perimeter gates and it’ll take a while to work their way back. Overseer is almost there though.’

* * *

On the bridge, ‘Get the door, get the door!’someone was yelling,‘close the door!’ but Agampreet knew it was already too late. By the time they got the key, fitted it and started the re-close, they would be swarmed.

‘Run!’ he said. Roaches would be coming out of the links, behind the rankers, like a tide. As they ran under the gate, Pavitar saw, glimmering, in a pile of intestines, Red Arm Band Soldier’s token, glinting gold as it rotated, a valuable object. Token’s were icons, like links, impervious pieces of Knet mechanics, with unalterable rules, that could not be modded. Tokens represented the accreted density value of a destroyed or killed object, cim or Id. They were the essential link in Knet’s predatory ecology, allowing acceted density to be transferred. In a way, they also functioned as a tremendously inconvenient and insecure cryptocurrency. Value was lost in density transfer, at almost the identical rate of biological catabolism. Somewhere, in the origins of Ksource, the system’s creator had designated the token’s appearance as that most classic and stereotypical of computer game iconographies, a rotating gold coin, probably as a placeholder until he thought of something better. He never had, and now it was embedded in the core of the system.

Pavitar swerved to run over it. He saw his field of vision tint momentarily green, saw his health return a third. He’d just accreted his Id the old-fashioned way. On the other side of the blast doors was a descending ramp to the feeder highway. Stipples of dust and sparks burst out around them from unseen bullets. The pursuing roaches had made the top of the ramp.

‘Jump!’ yelled Agampreet. Fortunately, they had descended to the level of the rooftops. They leapt from the edge of the ramp. As they did, another of their number was struck by some projectile and taxed of the last of his Id’s integrity, or ‘health’ as practically everybody referred to it. The death animations P-Fed modded into their standard-issue Ids were every bit as spectacular and sadistic as those of the cims. Since his Id’s collision system had tracked the hit as a head shot, the front of his helmet split like a bloody melon, sending his brain, intact and trailing blood, spinning out like a pea from an over-sized pod.

’Holy shit!’yelled Pravitar, genuinely, if only momentarily, horrified.

‘Someone get his token!’ yelled Agampreet, as they rolled on the flat rooftop, but it had fallen somewhere in the street below and been lost. There was only four of them now. They kicked out the door of the stairwell and descended into the dim regions of the building. It appeared abandoned. It was a testament to the depths of the P-Fed cim source that it was complex enough to create areas of relative prosperity as well as slums. But then, it was supposed to be complex, a vast processor hog.

Agampreet’s comm was blaring and he activated it. ’What the fuck happened?’ it demanded.

‘Some tard opened the gate’ said Agampreet, as they clattered down the fire stairs to the street level. ‘I don’t know his name. You have to close it with the junction box, we can’t get near it.’

‘Who gave you monkeys a key?’ demanded the comm.

‘All three checkpoints have one,’ replied Agampreet, for emergency access, you gave us-’

‘It’s not supposed to be held by someone on the danger side of the door, you morons!’

‘Well, I didn’t know that! Anyway, it’s too late now-’

‘You’re all sentenced to death! Execute yourselves immediately!’

‘What?’

‘You heard me!’ The comm cut. There was a momentary silence.

‘Should we.. kill ourselves?’ asked Pravitar, uncertainly.

’Fuck no!’said Agampreet. ‘Come on, let’s go do some fighting.’

They ran on though the darkened building, looking for a way down.

* * *

‘They got steeds through,’ said M0nsterbrains, in frustration, staring at the board.

‘Looks like they’re splitting up,’ said Permanence.

The little red triangles that had flowed through the gate in a mass had gone out of visual contact with P-Fed units and disappeared. They could be scattering throughout the city. The gate itself, however was still a sea of red. The black and white sec-cam window showed Kysairon roaches, streaming from the links onto the half-wrecked bridge. They were dying, gunned down by unseen defenders, who were still manning the gun blisters along the wall, but not fast enough. The little group of green squares, the task force of mixed ASTs, quads and hardshells making for the gate, was still a kilometer away.

’Where the FUCK is that FUCKING overseer?’ M0snterbrains yelled, as the armored groups sent their quads out, tracing through the city, trying to regain contact with the Kysairon steed riders. ‘Oh there it is.’ A large, green square was slowly moving out from the city center. A little text marker tracked it Overseer. ‘Tell junction to turn off the field dome’ he said.

‘Is that wise?’ asked Marquis.

‘No, but they have units inside the city. They almost certainly brought links with them so it’s too late now. I want the air units to have maneuver space. And why the fuck aren’t those Killer Bs back yet?’

‘Still returning,’ lied DeLuca, an act that might have severely challenged her position in P-Fed, had she survived the day’s events.

M0nsterbra1ns touched the green square to shortcut to its comm. ‘Overseer, we’re turning the sky shield off. I want you to concentrate on blowing up links when they appear, starting with the ones they have at Steve Austin.’

‘On it’ came the reply.

‘They’re already in the city,’ pointed out Bowral.

‘Yes but I don’t want their links open anywhere’ said M0nsterbra1ns. ’Light ‘em up, Overseer.’

* * *

The overseer pilot turned his machine heavily over the city. Through the densely tessellated glass of his cockpit, the digital metropolis wheeled across his field of vision, bringing the southern gate, at the base of a column of black smoke, to view.

‘Watch me shine, niggas!’ said the pilot, to his surly crew, lining up the bridge, where the thin vertical lines of the link markers were still glimmering and expelling running black figures. Locking in an approach, he placed the cockpit main target on the spot and fired the machine’s spinal-mount cannon. The two thousand point beam emitter flashed once and the bridge broke and burst up, in two hinging parts, collapsing back into the trench in a cloud of dust. The link lights went out.

* * *

’Got ‘em’ said Permanence, watching the red boxes disappear on the battle map.

‘Door closing, too,’ said DeLuca. ‘and the heavies are closing on Steve Austin.’

‘We’ll get this under control,’ said M0nsterbra1ns. ‘Overseer will whack-a-mole their links and the ground heavies will corner them eventually. How far away is the picket force?’

‘Thirty three minutes’ someone said, from down board.

‘Time’s on our side,’ said Deluca. ‘They got to bail before they get trapped on surface by our orbiters.’

‘They’ll lose their nerve’ agreed Permanence, ‘oh fuck,’ he added, ‘more links going up.’

The board came alive with alerts and tinny voices could be heard as battle managers touched on them, ’We see two link-columns, control’, ‘four sets of links, control, around the inside ring-’ etc. DeLuca was watching the feed from the Overseer. She could see the vertical beams flicker up from the skyline.

‘Those are inside the city’ she said.

‘Knock them down, Overseer,’ said M0nsterbra1ns.

* * *

In a swarming cim office block, with glass-fronted flanks opened on the vista of the city, a half dozen roaches had set up a high-cap link and were moving to make it a double-high. A link, at its base unit, was a flat, black triangle. It was an icon, like a token, not a moddable object, and was, thus, always the same. Six of the link triangles, arranged in a flower pattern, formed a hexagon, a high-capacity link that could bring through much larger objects. The link could be additioned. Six of the hexagons, thirty six triangles in a double rosette, formed a ‘super-highcap’. Unfortunately, the base link had to be activated before it could be additioned to high cap, betraying its location. Thus it was often a race to get the highcap built before an enemy shut it down.

The overseer unfolded its sides like a high-tech galleon, into a wall of guns that blasted a great, ripping broadside of machine gun fire into the side of the building. The panicking cim workers were cut to pieces or disintegrated into blood mist, the canyon wall of skyscraper glass shattered into a diamond waterfall of falling lass as its interior floors were swept clean. The low-poly Kysairons roaches were killed in place, their link assembly going dark. The gunship thundered past, sending flurries of office paper, like panicking birds, rolling from the gutted building in the wake of its rotors.

‘Another down!’ said the pilot. He came around, bringing the next link column into alignment with his blunt nose. It appeared to be rising from an apartment block. He dropped missile pods from his short wings and rained an arching fire onto the target, not firing accurately, but hoping to collapse the building and kill the site. The structure was now a mass of smoke and explosions. Suddenly, the shape within seemed to fall into its own footprint, sending up a geyser of dust and debris as the building collapsed. The link lights went out. The heavy gunship rolled on onto a new heading.

‘Three down!’ called the pilot.

The roaches at the remaining two link builds were working feverishly to unload triangles and put them together. The column lights, the tell-tail indicator of a links presence, were growing thicker and brighter.

At the base of an avenue, trying to find a gap in the wall of warehouses and low-rise structures that fronted the main ring road, the battle group originally tasked to Buzz Aldrin, but now curving back into the city, had closed with one of the remaining Kysairon locations.

The Kysairon steed-riders had indeed split up, into five groups of six. These now diverged from the middle and began spreading out into the city. Only the middle group encountered the P-Fed armored group, swerving away and escaping down a highway loop-off as the tanks blasted the concrete overpass behind them.

‘Control,’ said the AST red squad leader, called, appropriately but completely coincidentally, Red Leader, ‘we’re seeing a link column from over the next block. We’re about to close and assault the site. But it’s getting brighter, they’re building up to super-highs.’

‘Just get eyes on the site,’ said the comm, ‘don’t engage. Overseer is inbound.’

His group turned the avenue corner to bring the link site into view, the lead AST not bothering to make the turn wide enough to avoid smashing through the bottom floor of a department building. Cims screamed and went under the treads, the busy shopping crowd scattered. A blue-clad cim cop was firing at the armored group with his little, ten-point gun. They were programmed to attack anyone who killed cims, friend or foe. Such was the fear and consternation of the armored group, three ASTs, four quads and four hardshells, that no one even bothered to blood-mist the digital rentacop with their vehicle weapons. All eyes were on the pure band of blue beam of light that ascended into the sky from the building’s roof. Somewhere up there, a super-highcap was being assembled.

The first story windows of the warehouse suddenly erupted with fire. Unseen Kysairon fighters were shooting at the P-Fed heavies. The quads veered off, but the hardshells accelerated, ricochets and missile blasts bursting off their sides, and crashed into the bottom floor of the warehouse tower. Inside, their sides unfolded like beetle wings and the bottom story of the structure was suddenly full of P-Fed soldiers, running, looking for the stairs and elevators. They could hear gunfire could above, Kysairons were shooting at the P-Fed vehicles outside. There was an explosion and falling of dust and debris, the building shook. The AST’s were blasting the upper floors.

‘If those cocksuckers collapse this building on us-’ one of the players swore.

‘Heavies cease fire, cease fire!’ said the squad leader on his comm. A second later, bullets howled and ricocheted off his chest armor, as the doors to the fire stars were thrown open and roach gunfire came from within. Even as they hit the deck, a grenade from one of the P-Fedders arced perfectly into the cavity and blew it out, in a roll of dust and smoke and flapping roach body-parts.

The squad leader bounded up the stairs, his military chain sword in one hand, a heavy pistol in the other, his squad members behind him. As he came to the landing a figure leaped at him from ambush, not a roach but a ranker, a demonic insect-shape in the smoky gloom, its black, hook-backed chain sword sweeping at him in a vicious undercut. The leader blocked and, as the chain blades met, lighting up the darkened stairwell like the white flashes of an electrical discharge.

* * *

The overseer pilot rolled away from the third link location, now just a column of dust and smoke rising to the sky. ‘One left’ he said to his comm. He could see the final link light column, projecting upward from a curving mass of mid-height buildings, about half way around the curve of the city’s inner ring.

‘Blast it, Overseer,’ replied M0nsterbra1ns voice.

* * *

‘There’s squads in the building though!’ protested DeLuca, looking at the multiple green squares inside the outline of the warehouse tower.

’We told them not to go in, so fuck ‘em’ said Bowral, ’They’re great guys and I salute their sacrifice, but fuck ‘em, basically.’

‘We got to close the links down, Deluca,’ said M0nsterbra1ns. ’Do ‘em, Overseer.’

Outside the warehouse tower, the Squad Leader got the tip. ‘Oh fuck,’ he said and opened the all-squad comm. ‘Everyone out of the building! They’re gonna smash it with the overseer!’

’Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck’ squawked the all-squad comm. The bottom story bulged out again, and the hardshells emerged, reversing hard, in a slurry of dust and falling debris.

Inside, P-Fed troopers abandoned the battle for the landings and ran for the bottom floor. Some kicked out the windows and jumped, preferring to risk a four-story drop than being buried under the collapsing building.

’Here goes number four,’ said the pilot, lining up the warehouse tower roof. He could see hurrying black shapes, working on the pad of a super-highcap, from which the strengthening beam ascended.

As he placed his finger on the firing stud, the link flashed blue. The pilot saw four black shapes appear on the roof, far taller and heavier than either roaches or rankers. ‘Oh shit,’ he said, and pulled the trigger. There was a green flash and he died instantly.

The AST commander saw the beam, thin, green, blazing bright, lance from the warehouse roof, illuminating the sides of the surrounding buildings in a glaze of emerald. He saw the overseer sliced down the middle, the two parts diverging and spinning under the suddenly disunified thrust of their engines, the main rotor shattering.

’Holy shit!’ he yelled, unoriginally. The massive carcass was still coming at them, in two spinning parts. ‘Full reverse!’ he yelled at his driver and the man surged the heavy vehicle backward. The first half of the overseer clipped the middle story of a huge radio tower and sheared it out. The great, scaffold superstructure began to topple, the main mass of the wreckage exploding in the air just beyond. The second half was spinning, inescapable, indifferent to its murderous weight as a dinosaur-killing asteroid, right at them. He had to admit getting hit by half of your own overseer was pretty kek, just as it struck, killing him and most of his armored group.

* * *

On the map, the P-Fed battle managers and officers watched the large, green triangle of the overseer disappear, followed by a mass of smaller, green squares. The board squawked with alarmed radio voices, ‘-the overseer-’, ’Shitfuck, someone just took out the overseer-’

M0nsterbra1ns had his hands to his head in disbelief. ’What just happened?

‘Someone took out the-’

‘I know that! How?’

DeLuca hit Supa’s comm. ‘Supa, what you see?’

‘Superbright beam emitter from the rooftop. It just one-hit the overseer’ came Supa’s voice. ’It had to be supercomped.’

‘Those cheating fucks!’ yelled Bowral, although, technically, super compression was an exploit of a kink in the existing physics, it was impossible to really cheat Knet.

‘Someone get the pilot on Gable or something!’ ordered M0nsterbra1ns, ‘find out what he saw before he got tagged.’

‘I was watching the feed form his nose camera,’ said DeLuca, ‘I think I saw four figures, big ones, come through, just before the flash. They looked like kingpins.’

* * *

On the roof of the warehouse tower, a Kysairon ranker, tall, whip-lean and armored in black chitin, bowed obsequiously to the four massive figures who had just stepped through the link.

The first was Carnivous, the smallest but densest of the four. He was crowned with horns that were like the pincers of a mechanoid stag beetle, his face was a cruel and hard-chiselled mask, revealing only a slot for his mouth, turned downward in a permanent curl of imperial contempt. In his hand was a small, spherical object, concaved on its front by a dish-like cavity, the Pocket Death Star, or PDS, pinnacle expression of the super-compressor’s dark art. It was from this that the lethal beam had emitted.

The second was Cubist, broader and taller than Carnivous, his body a bio-mechanical simulacrum of exaggerated human musculature, his face arranged into a surreal, angular mix up, like a modern painting.

The third was Lopslide, his body asymmetrical. His right arm was grotesquely massive, melded into a powerful chain gun, the long barrel of which rested on the ground, his left limb was as withered as a thalidomide victim’s.

The fourth was Hammerziet, his head rose from a turret-like neck, fusing into a skull that looked like an old-fashioned German army helmet. Over his shoulder, he had a giant, sledge-like hammer, an industrial/medieval war mattock.

All four were known-knowns, leader-boarders, gamers who stood at the apex of Knet’s warrior society, kingpins. They watched, with the indifference of those long jaded to digital carnage, as the whirling sections of the destroyed overseer tumble past them, on either side of their building, and exploded, with ruinous force, in the city below.

‘Report’ said Carnivous. His voice was permanently modded through a built-in sound modulator, making it heavy, coldly mechanical.

‘Three link sites now up, Carnivous,’ said the ranker, ‘thirty steed riders in the city, three hundred and five roaches, forty more rankers with heavy weapons. They don’t seem to have any air up, except a few K-Bees. Their heavies are split all over, looking for our riders. We’re ready.’

‘Begin’ said Carnivous.

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