Claymore

by bloodsword

Deep in the heart of EVIL, Inc., a secret agent contorted his body to get past the red laser tripwires. If he'd even so much as breathed on them he would have been immediately vaporized. He somersaulted beneath the crotch of an RDU—robot defence unit—that was in sleep mode. He cooed to the crying kittens, thus destroying the security's CARE Protocol.

He wasn't worried. As the best agent in GOOD Corp.'s intergalactic ranks, this mission was a cakewalk.

Beat EVIL's ancient—albeit extensive—security system, hack into the data vault, steal the cipher, assassinate the head of EVIL, get out, and be home in time to catch the new episode of Lunar Coronation Street.

That was when he found himself locked in the gas-spectrometer room. His stomach trembled.

Rule one, he thought to himself. Never eat Venusian tacos before a mission. Should've known better.

He plugged up and forced himself not to breathe as he maneuvered through the room and out the door. His years of training put to good use.

Unfortunately things went tits up right then and there. He turned to see fifteen RDUs aiming their .50-cal cannons at all his tender places. How the hell had this gone wrong?

And then it dawned on him.

No.

Moving slower than a space slug, he lowered his hand to his waist and tapped his comms unit. And seconds before the RDUs blew him to pieces, he screamed out the coded message to the boys and girls back home in High Command: "Fuck you, MadMikeMarsbergen!"

Clay 'The Claymore' Severn frowned as he slowly unjacked the storage chip from the direct neural interlink embedded into his skull.

"This is what they sent you?" he quietly asked, referring to the vid he had just watched as he stared down at the chip in his hand. Picking up his voice via a conductive mandibular implant, his nano-communicator sent his encoded question deep into the twisting ether. It didn't take long for the ether to answer back.

"They didn't send it, Severn. We pulled it directly from Agent Talos' fragmenting mind via his interlink," a soft voice replied. The voice was decoded and transmitted directly into his inner ear by the nano, beyond any eavesdropper's ability to overhear.

"We know it looks like something out of an old school spy vid from the 2030's. Most of it is gibberish, background noise created by Talos himself in an attempt to protect his mind as they tortured him. But we think some of it is encoded information that he managed to download before they caught him."

Severn's frown deepened as he continued to stare at the chip. Encoded information? How in Ganymede were they going to figure out which was which?

"If you're asking me to winnow the wheat from the chaff, you've got the wrong agent, Central," he murmured, closing his fist around the chip. "I'm the blunt instrument, remember?"

"How can we forget?" the voice replied, its tone wry. "You remind us every time you blow something up."

Before Severn could frame a suitable retort, the holographic readout dominating the forward panel of his transport pod began flashing an alert.

"Hold that thought, Central," he muttered as he began to work his control interface. "I'm entering Earth space. I need to lockdown."

There was a time, as recently as a couple hundred years ago, where entering Earth space didn't require security lockdowns and communications blackouts. That was because all of the inhabitants of the Solar System were on the same side.

Now, however, in the chaotic soup the system had become in the wake of multiple rebellions and devastating civil wars, there was nothing left resembling friendliness between humanity's surviving solar holdings. Following the central government's fall, and Earth's near destruction, the terraformed and colonized inner worlds of Venus and Mars, along with the terraformed moons of Saturn and Jupiter, now fought over the crumbling fragments of what was left.

A proximity sensor chirped. Hearing it, Severn brought up a visual of the space around him. That visual showed him chunks of rock, big ones, and lots of them. It was the Equatorial Rock Field, or E.R.F.: an asteroid field that marked what was formerly the southern approach to high Earth orbit. It was created when separatist rebels used overly-powerful nukes to strike at the central government's southern blast bunker buried a dozen kilometers deep beneath the Andes Mountains.

Not only did the rebels destroy the base, they also blew a chunk of the Earth's crust into space when they detonated. It was the first in a series of nuclear attacks on government assets that cracked the planet apart, devastating the civilian population and rendering much of the planet uninhabitable for a hundred years.

Seeing the rock field didn't remind Severn of the violence of the past, however. Instead, for him and others trying to sneak onto what was left of Earth without detection, it marked the way in.

Severn resolutely began maneuvering his pod through the rocks. His destination: Darkside, a smuggler's port clinging to the shadows beneath the jagged outcrop of what was left of North America. His mission brief had him meeting his contact there. She was a local smuggler that moved black market goods between feuding factions which were the remnants of once-powerful local governments.

Did he care about those feuds? Not especially. The independent worlds had long since learned to ignore the squabbling the factions engaged in over the shattered remains of their world.

But the agency he worked for, Jovan Intelligence, JovInt for short, had discovered something on Earth a few days ago. One of the factions had uncovered it as they desperately scavenged their broken world for resources.

Severn didn't know what that something was. But he did know it was important enough that JovInt pulled their best Earth-sector operative off of a case and sent him looking for it. And now that operative, Sen Talos, was dead, captured and tortured to death before he could find the important mystery object. The hunt for it, however, was not, with Severn being diverted from a high-priority mission on Venus to complete Talos' task.

Thrusters growling, the pod maneuvered free of the E.R.F.. With the last chunk of rock behind him, Severn switched to sensor-enhanced vision as he swung under the North American overhang and into the profound darkness of the Under Realm. Scanning the darkness in front of him with that enhanced vision, it didn't take Severn long to spot the dim lights of Darkside, the sprawling smuggling enclave spattered over multiple surfaces like glow-in-the-dark paint.

According to the brief, his contact was holed up in a watering hole on the edge of town. All he had to do was find a place to land, locate that bar, and avoid getting killed in-between the two.

"You look lost, pal," a hard, female voice noted as he finally stepped into the bar's poorly-lit interior. "You sure you're in the right place?"

With a hand on his hidden weapon, the JovInt agent turned towards the speaker, who was leaning against a wall near the door.

As humans went, she looked like a typical Earther: dark and tattered clothing, an underfed appearance, and chunks of metal piercing everything available. She had heightened that gaunt look by shaving her brows and cutting her black hair into a strange sort of bob. An O2 mask hung from a cord on her collar for use in those areas where Earth's shifting gravity wasn't enough to keep sufficient air close to the ground, and she had a radiation monitor embedded in her neck like some sort of perverse jewelry.

"Depends," he replied after his quick examination. "You running the tour group to the Black Sea?"

The woman pushed off the wall she was leaning on.

"Well, that also depends, friend," she said, letting her dark eyes give him a Once-over of her own. "Do you get seasick in bad weather?"

Severn's eyes narrowed slightly. It was the right countersign, but somehow he had expected someone a bit more capable-looking. Then he mentally shrugged. As long as she could get him where he needed to go, it didn't matter what she looked like.

"So you're Echo," he said, using the name from the file.

"And you're just another annoying Jovan looking to make his mark on the universe," Echo quickly retorted. Severn's answering smile was thin.

"The name is Severn and I'm actually looking for a friend of mine. He's gone missing, and word is you were the last to see him."

The woman scowled.

"You're looking for Talos, aren't you," she growled. "That oxygen-deprived idiot! He went all crazy when he found out the Mech Faction had uncovered something in the Under Mountains."

Severn frowned as he quickly scanned through his data files. The Under Mountains was what was left when those chunks of mantle were blown free. So anything found there would've been buried deep beneath the original surface.

As for the Mechs, they were an A.I.-only faction that had managed to survive Earth's destruction, banding together afterwards to protect themselves against human factions looking for tech to scavenge. They were dangerous and unpredictable as they worked to outwit, outplay, and outlast their competitors. It was bad news to learn they had the object that piqued JovInt's interest.

"Yeah, that's him." He fished out the storage chip. "This was his last transmission."

Echo looked from the chip to Severn's face.

"So? What do you want me to do with it?" she asked with a frown.

"You were working with him, weren't you?" Severn pressed.

"Maybe," the woman grudgingly conceded.

"Then you know the man." He held the chip out to her. "I think he's buried clues to what he found in this video. You might pick out things that I can't."

Echo looked from the chip to Severn and back to the chip. Then, with a snort of resignation, she snatched it from his hand.

"Fine," she grumbled, "I'll look. But only because Talos saved my ass a couple months back. He wasn't bad for a jovie, almost normal. But I do this and we're done. I get caught helping another jovie and my business will go to shit!"

With that said, she slammed the chip into an ancient-looking VR reader that she had fished out of somewhere. Once the reader was loaded, Echo pressed it to her face, which was twisted into an unhappy scowl.

Severn settled back against the wall, arms folded. He could only hope this clue-sifting wouldn't take long. He almost smiled when he heard her snort only seconds after she had put the VR reader to her face.

"Here I thought you jovies got being right down to an art," she said, dropping the unit to give Severn a mocking smirk. "But you're wrong about the clues being buried. They're right there, plain as day!"

Severn chose to ignore that.

"Since you've spotted the clues so easily, what are they?" he asked.

"First, the RDU's: confirmation that the Mechs are involved," she said, her tone now sounding almost bored. "Mention of an ancient security system indicates they've activated an old world system to keep their holdings safe, probably salvaged from tech that fell from the surface. His move through the spectrometer room was, in actuality, him getting captured then tortured."

"And the Venusian taco?"

Echo frowned.

"Yeah, that was just gibberish, that bit," she said with a shrug.

Severn, in turn, also frowned.

"Anything else?"

Echo's frown deepened.

"Not sure, actually," she admitted after a moment's pause. "It's that last part, about Marsbergen. If you apply one of the codes you jovies use to encrypt basic text files, it would actually read: 'Progenitor remains are confirmed'. But I've no idea what that means."

"Progenitor?" Severn repeated hoarsely, eyes flying wide, before looking around to see if anybody was close enough to hear. Seeing his sudden change in attitude, Echo's brow lifted in curiosity.

"Yeah. I can see by your sudden freaking out, that it means something."

"It means the Mechs have somehow found Progenitor tech here, on Earth," Severn said, speaking so quickly, his words fell over each other. "I need you to fly me to the Mechs' home base. Now!"

"I don't know if you heard me back there, jovie. I said after giving you the clues, I was done," Echo quickly pointed out.

"And let me tell you something, my little Earther friend," Severn bit back, suddenly rigid with tension. "The Progenitors were aliens that, billions of years ago, conquered the entire universe with tech we could never understand. If a piece of that tech truly was buried here, and was somehow discovered by the Mechs, they could reverse engineer it and take several quantum leaps forward in technological advancement. Making them, ..."

"Way more powerful than anybody else," Echo finished for him, her look of realization mixed with a bit of dismay.

"Considering how the human factions have hunted the Mechs for parts since the rebellion, who do you think they'll come after first, once they can walk between the stars like gods?"

"Oh shit," Echo said, her voice suddenly very small and afraid.

"Precisely. Now can you get me to that base or not?"

It took nearly an hour of weaving through the broken underbelly of the dying planet to reach the Mech base. Landing nearby, twenty minutes of scrambling over jagged rock still warm from Earth's fluttering magnetic field and its proximity to the core, got them to the perimeter.

As they scrambled, Severn caught sight of the visibly glowing mass that dominated the left part of their rocky sky over his shoulder. It was the planet's core, radiating through what little remaining mantle that was covering it.

"The beating heart of our dying planet," Echo noted as she looked at the same thing, her voice muffled by her O2 mask. "I only hope it can't see us failing out here."

"We're not done yet," Severn said through his own mask. Then he turned away from the sight of Earth's sputtering core and climbed to the top of the ridge.

From there, Severn looked down at the rambling collection of buildings marking the base. The buildings, however, only got a cursory examination. What really interested him was the crumpled mass of weathered metal that had been dragged close to the base's outer wall.

Severn pulled out a pair of binoculars and, putting then to his eyes, zoomed in on the mass. First thing he saw were the A.I.'s themselves. Most were humanoid, some with faces, while others sported vertical sensor bars in cylindrical heads. The humanoid ones were wearing what appeared to be heavy leather trenchcoats.

Any other time Severn would've wondered why A.I.'s would actually bother wearing coats. Now, however, the mass of metal demanded his attention.

It didn't impress him much, looking more like junk than anything else. But, if he could still see identifiable parts after it had been buried in semi-molten rock for over 6 billion years, it pretty much confirmed that it was Progenitor in origin!

"Talos must've gotten himself captured trying to get a piece of that," Echo muttered. She looked over at him. "You going to try the same thing?"

For a brief moment, Severn considered it. He could just imagine what sort of things they could do with tech like that. But it was a thought easily pushed aside. He knew he wasn't here to retrieve the tech. Severn was a blunt instrument. He was here to make sure that tech didn't fall into the wrong hands.

"Nope," he said, pulling out the tactical nuke he had brought with him for that reason alone. "I'm turning that thing into dust!"

Echo smiled.

"Smartest thing you've said all day, jovie," she said with genuine relief.

Since he didn't have to sneak in, it was relatively easy to avoid the Mechs and their ancient security system to plant the nuke. It made a very satisfying flash of light in the rear view screen as they flew away.

"You never intended for me to finish Talos' mission," he accused sometime later as his pod cleared Earth space.

"You are correct, Severn," Central smugly replied. "You did precisely what we wanted you to do. Now the Progenitor tech belongs to no one!"

Severn could only shake his head. And, with a sigh of resignation, he resumed his original course for Venus.