The First Technomancer Read online

  The soldiers could be classified as decoration in comparison to the Director. For perhaps the second time in history, since prehistoric times, the world ran on a system where rank was proportional to physical prowess, not just mental or political competence and wealth. Fall was a prime example of that, capable of openly fighting alone against an entire enemy brigade. His very body was a weapon, prosthetic limbs filled to the brim with weapons and defenses, blood long ago replaced with nanites.

  “Sir!” I saluted, pumping a fist up next to my head, suppressing the urge to kneel. Crossing the throne room, I extended the glowing sensor box towards him.

  Fall stood, waving back the unhappy guards. His hands clasped my wrists, the iron grip of reinforced muscle locking me in place. Golden eyes bore into me.

  “Drake Frost.”

  Managing to keep my voice level, I gave the Director a nod.

  “Only three people in the Corporation have the raw gall to barge in here like that - my wife, you, and your brother. And a visit from the Frost brothers is almost always predated by vast, mountain-shattering destruction. Yet I hear no alarms, feel no shockwave, have seen no report of a new disaster. So I must wonder, Drake Frost, what terrible invention have you brought me today?”

  “It works, Sir.” I tried to shake the sensor in my hands. Fall’s grip lessened and he smoothly took the item, looking at the readout.

  His bright, golden eyes ran over the Gem, then tracked an invisible line sideways and down, through the floor. Without looking away he pulled the Gem out of the voltmeter. It immediately went dark, and the sensor stopped ticking.

  Fall snapped the Gem back in. The glow of the Gem lit up his smiling face.

  “Incredible,” he whispered, then raised his voice to the ceiling. “Get Jeb!”

  A few minutes later Jeb Klaim, engineering chief of the Corporation, rushed in. The gigantic man was equal parts fat and muscle, both spread squarely and efficiently across his body. Golden eyes ran over me, stopping on the sensor in the Director’s hands.

  In a silent exchange Fall demonstrated the Gem lighting up as it was inserted into the sensor. Jeb’s glowing eyes, too, followed the invisible line to the ground. I could only hope the transmitter wouldn’t break down in my absence.

  Now fully comprehending what they saw the two turned to me with glowing, golden eyes of excitement.

  “Wireless energy transfer,” hissed Jeb, excitement evident in his whisper.

  “Did you follow protocol? Did you backup how it works?” demanded Fall.

  I was going to say yes, to reassure them that I had indeed followed protocol and backed up my recordings and data. I wanted to share with Jeb how I accomplished this. I wanted to watch this miracle invention turn over the world, give us an advantage in The War.

  Before I had the chance to say anything a set of electric motors whined, moving many kilograms of muscle and armor with inhuman speed, and the air around me began to hum the song of death. I had heard this noise many times on the battlefield, often too close for comfort but too far to end my life.

  It was the hum of a disintegrating gravity lance.

  What madman would use such a destructive weapon indoors, I thought. For what reason would it be needed?

  I started collapse fall back, not knowing why, taking the moment of downward acceleration to look at the source of the sound. It was one of Fall’s troops. The air before the traitor’s rifle’s flat front vibrated, reaching out to and through my chest. What must have been an Imari or Syndicate spy had decided that his cover and life was worth less than the death of me and my invention before I uploaded the mental report. He gambled that I had not already done so, that no backup was made, and his gamble failed.

  Another moment and the gravity lance performed its gory work - I no longer had a chest or stomach. The weapon had done its job perfectly, and so had the traitor. I saw a terrible grin through the clear faceplate of the Fall’s traitorous soldier.

  I’m being murdered! The realization was sudden and late.

  A flash of anger removed the momentary paralysis of panic. I wasn’t dead yet. My eyes focused on the assailant through a tint of gold light, and his armor shimmered, dissipating the assault. The matrix within my mind energized, releasing a vast charge of energy in the form of deadly, focused radiation. Had I converted the equivalent energy into compressing and accelerating air the resulting particle lance could have gone through several meters of concrete with ease. The armor withstood for several milliseconds. Then the flesh underneath began to burn.

  The traitor’s gravity lance had turned a vast, important chunk of my body into expanding mist. Blood and vaporized flesh blasted out behind me. Flooded with pain, disbelief and rage, I fell. Before my upper half hit the floor, I managed to reflexively draw the sidearm from my separated lower half, leveling the barrel with my reaper’s head, and landed two shots into the faceplate. The first slug cracked the armored glass, sending vapor and burning dust flying back at me. The second shattered the damaged visor and passed through. I saw his satisfaction through the smoke of burning flesh, just before my second bullet returned the favor of the gravity lance, painting the scene red and killing the traitor.

  My head, arms and shoulders, separated from my legs, fell onto the floor. The pistol fell next to my remains.

  The fight took one second to play out. The traitor shot me, I scorched him and shot him twice in return before collapsing. One dead enemy and one dying engineer now decorated the floor.

  Nanites in my blood, driven into overload by my rampant Fall Coefficient, first tried to dull the pain and make me combat-capable again. Then, realizing the hopelessness of their task, the microscopic machines began shutting down the brain to save me from the agony of death.

  Fate granted me three more seconds of life. I managed to send a final goodbye to my brother in the first and consider my life and its end in the last two.

  It was a… passing existence, I figured. I had done my best. I was decent, and I left behind much good.

  My brother would cry, I thought, he hasn’t cried for so many years.

  For the first time in years I relaxed, letting the gold glow in my eyes die.

  1 : The War That Never Ended

  Galactic ‘North’, Syndicate Space, 12,940 AD, 10,740 Earth Years After the Fall of Earth.

  For over ten thousand years, I didn’t matter. I was forgotten, a relic of the past, a ruin in a frozen box. My body, stored in a stasis coffin like some sort of vegetable, changed hands a few dozen times, got captured and recaptured, and was eventually abandoned on a distant Syndicate World, left behind as the enemy forces moved on. The War played out without me, now on an interstellar scale. I didn’t know how I came to be in Syndicate possession, and I didn’t much care either. Knowing and caring was not possible in my limbo state.

  Now, millennia after my assassination, my non-existence was coming to an end.

  Somewhere out near the far ‘North’ of the Milky Way galaxy, opposite of the Solar System if taken relative to the center of the galaxy, a lone Prowler Class transport of the Syndicate Empire cruised in warp across a stretch of neutral, empty interstellar space.

  The bureaucracy of the Empire had grudgingly invested into an expedition ‘South’, in Earth’s direction. The expedition objective was to retrace the path taken by the Syndicate Generation Fleet when fleeing Earth, the Fleet that crossed the galaxy before settling where the Syndicate Empire was sprawled now.

  The expedition had encountered amazing success early on in their mission. Scout ships discovered artifacts in colony ruins, priceless relics of the past. A decision was made, and the most capable transport in the fleet, the Prowler Class transport, was filled to the brim with loot and sent back to Empire territory with a report and request for further resources and ships.

  Unknowingly the Prowler’s trip took it through an ambush of an ancient, long forgotten enemy. A scattering of Corporate stasis traps had been deployed across the void near the edge of Syndicate space,
waiting for prey. The nigh-undetectable traps had held their position for decades, finally finding their purpose when the Prowler passed through their sector.

  Six satellites spread throughout space snapped awake, their sensors having been alerted to a visitor within their perimeter. The tiny probes pulsed the inside of their territory with a powerful U-flash of random frequency, collecting a six-perspective snapshot of their guest.

  The target ship was traveling in a warp bubble, the massive gravitational disruptions fracturing the snapshot to a point where it would take several seconds on a powerful analyzer to clean up. The probes had neither the computing power nor time for such complications. They simply did their job - notifying and catching.

  In an instant the stasis bombs inside each probe converted the mass of the meter-wide black sphere into energy. That energy was directed at the stasis bomb by the surviving thin shell. The shell itself didn’t last much longer either - the process left a molecule-thin sphere of Durasteel, which soon drifted apart into dust.

  The stasis bombs absorbed the released energy perfectly, leaving nearly no radiation to be detected, and exploded. The six entangled bombs formed a volume a thousandth of a lightyear across, halting time within that sector.

  All this happened in less than a second, leaving the Prowler frozen at the edge of the stasis field near its entry point. With their last breath the six probes transmitted their data to the nearby Corporate cruiser.

  In the bridge of the Corporate cruiser, five men and women lay in pods, semi-permanently wired into the ship. Their bodies remained in stasis, frozen and dead, preserved for emergencies and vacations, but were seldom used. Their minds, however, roamed the ship, its sensors and engines replacing the crew’s eyes and legs for the duration of the mission. The crew’s casual time-spending in the cruiser’s computer was interrupted by the incoming transmission from the Stasis Trap. Minds overclocked, and the crew appeared in a virtual conference room. All five hurriedly willed their clothes to change into uniforms, each initially appearing in various sub-discipline casuals.

  “Trap lemon-seven-zero-three caught something. Processing and forwarding the signal now,” said the ‘Eyes’ of the cruiser.

  “Resolving, give me a moment.” The ‘Brain’ of the ship worked over the data, using the previously recorded Syndicate warp field profiles to eliminate the interference from the scan. Unlike the probes, the warship had plenty of computing power. Three seconds later a model of the target ship was floating over the virtual table.

  “What in the void of space is a Prowler Class transport doing here?” The Captain waved to the ‘Brain’, “Where is it headed? Do we have a cargo listing for this thing? How long will the stasis trap last on such a massive ship?”

  “Not long, about twenty seconds. Intel channels are quiet. We have no idea what’s in there.”

  “Capture or kill?” The Captain raised a hand. “I vote capture.”

  The ‘Brain’ agreed. “Also capture. I am still going over the data, but this thing has the mass reading of a full ship.”

  “‘This thing’ is in a mighty hurry to get back to Empire space! Look at its vector!” Laughed the ‘Eyes’. “It must hold some value. Let’s capture.”

  “Capture.” The ‘Sword’ of the ship played with the model hovering next to him. “But it’s going to be a tight fight. Prowlers have top-tier weapons and deflectors. We will need to rub off all the guns, deflectors and drives, not just rip the bastard apart.”

  “Capture. Those weapons are large and have bad tracking, for the most part.” The ‘Muscle’ reached into the cruiser’s systems, spinning up the drives.

  The Captain nodded. “Let’s go, we have fifteen seconds left. Eyes, call for backup and a transport to haul the wreck out.” A snap, and the crew was back inside the ship systems, flexing their powers in preparation for battle.

  The warship figuratively cracked its knuckles. At full power now, the physical portion of the ship phased back into normal space. In two and a half seconds the cruiser jumped to the edge of the stasis field. Each side of the trap was massive, millions of kilometers across, but thanks to the transmitted data from the probes the cruiser knew exactly where to land to appear closest to the Prowler. Taking the remaining time to warm up and work out a plan of attack, the Corporate ship was more than ready for the battle when the stasis field collapsed, letting go of the Syndicate ship.

  The stasis effect remained undetected by the Syndicate crews. However, the sound of warp drives being ripped out of the hull was, in comparison, quite noticeable. The drive field, striking the Corporate disruption field, pushed on the generators, physically ripping them out of their frames, through the drive sections, and out the back, taking several slower-than-light engines and other systems with them. Two of the three primary reactors were ripped in half, the reactant inside venting, shredding the remains of the drive section.

  The surviving hulk still had weapons, deflectors and charged capacitors. Those tried, desperately, to stop the attacker. The Prowler’s nemesis - a single, small, cigar-shaped ship just under five hundred meters in length - was impossible to hit as it blinked around, stabbing out projectors with powerful, focused U-beams. The beams crossed the distance instantly, striking the target before the light of the transition arrived.

  The Syndicate APS, Analytical and Prediction System, attempted to anticipate the next teleportation of the ship, flinging shells and teleporting bombs at the most probable jump location, updating its algorithm with every transition. This system worked perfectly against Imari ships, as if looking into the future, knowing exactly where a random warp would place a ship. Yet this enemy didn’t warp, and the APS system couldn’t predict its movements.

  On the Corporate cruiser the Brain laughed, feeling the clumsy attempts of the Prowler to probe the strings of probability around the cruiser. Like a spider in its web he played with the APS, tugging at the matrix of reality, fooling the enemy system into sending shell after shell into empty space.

  It was an unnecessary precaution. Even without the Brain’s efforts against the APS, the Corporate cruiser’s Luck field generator was more than capable of ensuring that every shell, even fired in the right direction, would miss due to random chance - after all, the cruiser’s luck was far stronger than the Prowler’s.

  Then, a shot hit the Corporate cruiser.

  One of the Prowler’s secondary weapons had fired blind, freak chance bringing the nuclear slug towards one of the cruiser’s random teleports. The slug, recognizing its opportunity, corrected, angling its vast vector at the target of opportunity.

  The Corporate deflector, disoriented after the teleport, let the shot pass, and the multi-megaton warhead hit the cruiser dead center. Primitive, ancient mechanics powering the detonation were unaffected by the Luck field - no misfortune could stop a nuclear reaction.

  The outer layer of void-black Ballistic Durasteel boiled and cracked. An aura of superheated vapor engulfed the sharp outline of the Corporate war machine, forming a crack of light in the void of space.

  And under the black outer layer, exposed now that the Ballistic Durasteel covering it was vaporized, another material shined. The damaged section of the hull glowed, gleaming with a rainbow of colors as Energy Durasteel dissipated heat, illuminating the cloud of gas around it. The snow-white material, burning like a star in the perfect black of space, nearly blinded the Prowler’s sensors.

  Now, in the last seconds of its life, the Syndicate ship knew what it was facing. Recognition and fear flooded the remaining computer cores. An Imari dreadnought, or even a fleet of dreadnoughts was less terrifying, less catastrophic in implication than the single ship it was facing now.

  But there was nothing the Syndicate transport could do about it now.

  In under ten seconds the grand Prowler-class transport was gone. Only loosely connected, unpowered chains of cargo containers remained, small chunks of metal still holding on in a few places.

  Two minutes later an additional two
cruisers arrived, escorting a gigantic hauler. Gravity fields reached out, pulling every container into the open shell of the salvage ship. The useless chunks and wreckage particles of the Prowler were pushed into a single pile, incinerated, and jumped onto the surface of the nearest star.

  The operation left little evidence. The Syndicate Empire would blame the Imari for the disappearance of the transport. The Imari would not care or would assume the Syndicate simply used them to cover up an accident. Nothing would point at a third, long-forgotten side of the conflict - the Corporation.

  The looting hauler’s AI only needed several minutes to locate the true prize among the loot and raise alarms. Within one of the containers it spotted items from the ‘platinum’ loot listings - ancient stasis pods, relics from before the Fall of Earth. Within one of those pods I, Drake Frost, lay frozen, enjoying the last few months of my lengthy death.

  Part One: Brave New Megastructures

  “So, a few days ago, at the meeting with senior ‘Thea engineers, we all got high and took at least… three mental booster shots each. I don’t remember anything, but I wrote down a few amazing ideas…”

  Director Fall, about to invent a new type of Faster Than Light travel, an antigravity hairdryer, and the largest social arena in the Milky Way galaxy.

  0 : A Bad Case of Death

  Day 1

  The problem with being dead is that you never know how long you have been in said unfortunate state.

  Waking up after a bad case of dead is, therefore, a rather awkward experience for several reasons.

  One has expectations for almost everything in life. You expect that your cheap car will not start on the day of the interview, because it’s a piece of shit. You expect that the restroom is empty, and the door is unlocked, which makes for a rather awkward conversation though said door following your failed attempt to ram your way into an occupied stall.