John Williams
Stories
9
Chapters
3,072
Words
1.2 M
Comments
0
Reading
4 d, 2 h
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“I wish I could use Appraise on what I’m seeing,” Yaniss grumped as she peered through the telescope. Or rather, the “That would defeat the point,” Cato-Ikent told her with a laugh. Cato’s mind-ripping algorithms turned out to be entirely necessary. There was no way that he could fully scan a Bismuth normally, and while there was a faint possibility that he could have brought in System-jamming biology to try, that would have been a risk on two fronts. One, that it might be incredibly harmful…-
186 •
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“Nobody’s nearby,” Leese reported, as Raine withdrew the new, much larger and much heavier Cato-spear from her spatial storage. Not that either of them expected anyone else to be atop the enormous plateau, but their previous run-ins had shown that they were more obvious than they would have liked. In a process that had become exceedingly familiar, Raine prepared the weapon by slotting in the small vial of living green powder, revived with water, and then hefted it as she aimed into the air. The air…
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186 •
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Returning to the System, Niya Talur, née Raine Ikent, felt utterly out of place as they went through the rote requirements of slaughtering their way to Silver yet again. Only a few days had passed in base reality, but she and Leese – under the guise of Karis Eili – had spent five There were good reasons for it. First and foremost, it was awfully difficult to adopt a new identity when they were doing the same thing they had always done, returning to a life of ranking up and getting stronger. To…
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186 •
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Muar meditated within the Temple, consolidating the gains he’d made at Platinum. The Divine System had seen fit to reward him with an A-tier Estate Token in recognition of his deeds, though he hadn’t yet deployed it. Uriva had been generous to him, but he didn’t think it was going to be his home. Especially not with the traitors still alive and on the loose. As he sat before the pylon, the System saw fit to speak to him. Sometimes divine guidance was subtle, hints and nudges and feelings, but other…
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186 •
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Cato-Zeken was unreasonably happy to have an excuse to get back down to the surface. The other versions of himself would have to content themselves with secondhand memories, but he got to actually The drop pod screamed through the atmosphere, carrying six of the forty-ton bioweapons, now further tweaked for Cato’s use and, more importantly, with proper orbital backup for both combat algorithms and bombardment. That was originally how they had been designed and Cato could only alter the design so much…
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186 •
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Cato’s voice buzzed through Raine’s head as she approached the outskirts of Ellesz’s capital city. She let out a long breath, some tension within her easing. It was more stressful than she’d expected to know that she was being hunted by assassins, who might be Platinum or even higher. Even if both she and her sister had incredibly sharp senses for Peak Gold, they didn’t have the Skills to defeat dedicated stealth and assassination builds. Something Dyen had proven. It was damned unsettling, the…
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186 •
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Gods were not supposed to feel fear. Initik the Warden, of Uriva, was fairly certain that aphorism only applied to the soft, distant rulers of the core worlds. The ones who had never needed to rise from Copper, or the ones who had been safely ensconced in their own power for so long that they’d forgotten what it was to be alive. He very clearly remembered the early days before the System arrived and knew that even gods were not safe from those more powerful than them. Even so, he have never expected to…
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186 •
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Cato found that, despite everything, he did enjoy the chance to explore a completely alien solar system. There was a distinctly pragmatic reason to survey the planets and moons around the K-class primary, because he absolutely would need resources and hardened backups, but it was also just interesting. Most of the bodies around Sol had been surveyed and tracked long ago – save for a zillion chunks of ice out in the Oort Cloud – so even if he’d dabbled in exogeology, there hadn’t been much novel…
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186 •
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Muar strode through the city streets, still slightly frazzled around the edges from his time in the . It hadn’t been pleasant, but the healing of his divine Skills had kept his group intact. He wasn’t with the Spikey Delvers anymore, simply because he had advanced too quickly, but the Temple had been quite helpful in giving him opportunities to fill in for groups who needed a temporary member. Sometimes he missed At peak Gold, Muar could hardly do much about Cato’s plans, but Gold was only a…
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186 •
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Cato was impressed with how well the two Sydeans were taking to existence as postbiological life. He was aware that was some sort of chauvinism — a bias against, not System natives, but those who hadn’t been raised to be postbiological from the beginning. More than a few natives of Earth or the asteroid belt that he’d known, raised on the surface or in rotating habitats, hadn’t found the transition too dramatic but had still ended up as a single person in a single body, even if it wasn’t a…
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186 •
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