“Alright, looks like we’ve got all the team leads, so let’s get this shit started.”
Cole took his seat in the conference room, scooting his chair in. He recognized the woman giving the briefing as one of the senior Kickers he’d seen around the DOR compound more than a few times but only greeted her in passing. Other than her, he recognized Morganstern sitting close to the projector, and Moriarty leaning against the back wall.
“I’m Anne-Marie, but most of you know me as Hard Tone. I’ve been through Babel six times, and between me, Deadlight, Faust, and Suture, our team has hit the highest floors on record. So, trust me when I say I know what the fuck I’m talking about.” She looked pointedly at Cole. “That’s mostly for you new kids.”
“Noted,” said Cole. He’d seen the name Hard Tone on several mission reports while crawling through archives in the Termlink lab and she was one of the highest-level Kickers in the department. She was a kinetic manipulation class, like himself. But for her, the ability manifested in such a way as to change the vector of energy released by explosives like a scalpel, which she used to great effect by creating blades of flame that could slice through stone and steel.
“Now, there’s two ways to approach the ant farm. The safest is to blend in with the other ants. We slip into a safe room, climb like anyone else, make contact with the target, and slip out the same way via implanted transponders. Each of you has been assigned a range of floors for your team. The packets in front of you are a collection of your assigned floor details as recent as we have, but the environment within Babel changes every year according to the whims of Dallemonte. Take these with you, use them in Babel.”
Cole flipped open his packet, looking at the outline for floors five and six. Floor five had several walled settlements marked on a hand-drawn chart, as well as areas with high-level or tight clusters of monsters, and the common traveled routes and passageways leading to the next level of the tower, locations of fresh water, and other notes. Floor six had none. Great.
Hard Tone pointed to the screen at the picture Sophie had showed at Cole’s house. “This is Beth Black. Age sixteen, female, clearly spends too much time in Hot Topic. She’s from Portland Oregon, and lucky for us, she’s the only one taken from the US this year, though the JIRF is running a parallel op to search for a Japanese national who was also taken. Beth has been in Babel a total of twenty six days, but her whereabouts and floor are unknown. We’re focusing our search on the first twelve floors, because it’s highly unlikely that she’ll have climbed even half that. Most likely she’s on the first three floors holed up in a walled settlement waiting as long as possible until she gets kicked out. Once she hits the next set of floors, her life expectancy drops dramatically.”
“How dramatically?” asked Cole.
“Single digits,” replied Hard Tone. “I know you’re pretty new, so you might not have had time to read the entire archive. But Babel is an all-hands-on-deck operation. As many Kickers as we can muster, and it’s still only got a sixty-percent extraction rate. Part of that is the delay between when kids are taken and when we’re able to start jumping in because we have to time the cycles to avoid Dallemonte’s notice—until we send in the hornets, that is. But the biggest threat on the first twelve floors isn’t the monsters or the god. It’s the other humans. Challengers can vary wildly in power from those who struggle on the first floors, to those who won’t even break a sweat until the thirties.”
Cole looked ahead in his packet, finding a list of other worlds confirmed to have participated in Babel—and it was long. One name, Kevlesh, he recognized as the world from his own crossover event. He tried to imagine what kind of warriors such a harsh world would produce.
Hard Tone continued. “Some of the challengers are volunteers, others were volunteered by Dallemonte. And yet a few others have found their way unbidden in search of glory and treasure. Some are even there looking to hop to other worlds, treating the tower like one big transfer station. Out of all the ant-farm worlds, Babel has the widest collection of otherworld paths and peoples that we’ve encountered. And few, if any, will be charitable. Lots of rogues, lots of people who will strike first to avoid being taken advantage of themselves. Most settlements and fortresses are looking to separate you from your loot in exchange for a little food or alchemical tinctures. Watch your asses. Trust no one.”
Despite her words, there was a list in Cole’s packet of reliable vendors and merchants on his floors that would trade loot or LF residue for perishables like food and fresh water, and how a whole fortress might be built over something as simple as a freshwater spring. He’d have his team bring extra potable water, for sure. Considering his section of floors went from a blazing badland desert to a blistering lava-field, they were going to burn through fluids fast.
“Your job isn’t to pull Beth Black out yourself. But even getting a twenty on her location and climb status is critical, and then we’ll smash and grab. The reason, of course, is that disrupting the climb can draw Dallemonte’s attention. And if you grab his attention, he will try to kill you until you can get out from under his gaze. That is not something someone under level forty can survive for more than a few minutes. So our strike team kicks down the door, locates the target based on the intel you collect, and gets out before Dallemonte gets out of the universe’s biggest cuck chair to clean up his ant farm. Do whatever you can to avoid being noticed.”
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Morganstern raised her hand. “They got the ripcords figured out, yet?”
“They’re not ready. More likely to leave your team stranded or split.”
One of the team leads Cole didn’t know winced at that.
The rest of the briefing went by in a blur. With the rest of his team still at the West Texas training facility, Cole had flown back early for the brief. He’d be spending the last few days before their return studying the information and working on their strategy for executing their search.
One by one, the team leads filed out or broke into smaller circles to chat. Morganstern offered him a friendly knuckle to his shoulder as she passed, along with a quick “Good luck, Airborne.”
He grinned at her. “When are we gonna go get your hammer?” he asked.
“Sooner than you want,” she said. “Curahee is still on the table. It’s too valuable a resource to abandon, but we’re increasing the number of proctors. Interested?”
Cole considered for a moment. Spend more time in the worst fungus-infested forest where he’d nearly died a half-dozen times in from mushroom monsters and otherworld invaders?
“Count me in,” he said.
“Get to level fifteen,” said Morganstern. “Minimum for the clearing team and proctor support. What are you now?”
“Thirteen,” said Cole.
Morganstern whistled. “Damn, boy. I thought you’d be ten at the highest. No wonder Anne’s got you on the second set of floors. Who’d you kill in Vael?”
Cole shrugged. “A squad of demon commandos, a dozen Vaelian soldiers, and a high-level knight protecting the rescue. Oh, and we blew up a fortress.”
Morganstern just stared at him.
“It wasn’t on purpose,” he added. “It was their own fault, really.”
Morganstern shook her head and left. Cole chuckled as he watched her go. After she left, Moriarty waved him to the back of the room.
“Looks like we’re on the same bracket,” he said.
“Looks like,” said Cole.
“Would be smart to pool our resources, again. Search together.”
“I’ll have to run that idea by my team,” said Cole, already knowing what each of them would say to the idea. Pooling resources probably meant the same thing it had on Vael: Moriarty giving the orders and Cole’s team doing the shady, high-risk work while Moriarty collected the loot. Cole wasn’t following any more demons through underground tunnels, that was for sure. “Big groups attract big threats.”
“Just means bigger rewards,” said Moriarty.
“I’m not going to Babel for the loot,” said Cole.
“Riiight,” scoffed Moriarty. He wasn’t stupid. Even without whatever LF ability let him read people, the man recognized the tacit rejection for what it was. The Kicker pushed off the wall and waved as he walked away. “Good luck, Cole.”
So much for no additional bad blood. Cole couldn’t blame Alexa for wanting to get out from under the manipulative asshole’s authority. For all that DOR was filled with skilled individuals, Cole was starting to realize it had the same cliquey authority issues as the regular Army. Pair that with the majority of its members harboring teenage trauma from abductions and otherworldly entities, and it was a caustic recipe for personality conflicts. Though, one of his own teammates had a part of her soul severed while on Earth, so maybe he shouldn’t throw stones.
Cole left the meeting and headed to the armory for his afternoon Tinker duty, still thinking about Babel and the trust issues he seemed to be seeing within the department. There wasn’t any clear solution for it. You couldn’t force people to trust each other, and not everyone was deserving of trust in the first place. Leadership had to be demonstrated, not declared or appointed.
Jefferson waved him on, and Norn and Bjorn greeted him in the lab. They were turning out bladed rounds on a custom machine they’d brought from their home world, so Cole grabbed his ear protection to block out the sound of shrieking metal and sat down at his workstation.
Coincidentally, his top request was from Hard Tone, probably prep for Babel. She wanted an elemental-boosted launcher broken down in order to add a different trait to a recoilless rifle.
Cole put in the order, and a few minutes later, Jefferson staggered down to the lab, carrying both launchers. His face was red from the effort of lugging the heavy equipment, but Cole helped him get it up onto the workbench, where Cole went to work with his Field Strip ability while Jefferson got distracted watching whatever cartoon Norn and Bjorn had running on the TV.
Breaking down the elemental launcher left him with two parts, which he tapped in turn with the lab’s analyzer.
Increases the effective blast radius or penetration and recoil of elemental munitions by 6%-8%.>
Well that was no good. Hard Tone was specifically looking for a non-elemental affix. He tapped the other one.
Enemies slain with this weapon restore up to 9%-12% of a primary ability charge, based on the resilience of the target.>
Pay dirt. And he’d even gotten the proc for an average quality part. He looked at the over-under otherworld launcher it was being put into. Of course, that armament had a greater quality designation, which meant its in-built effects carried a 17%-21% percent increase by default. And it had two of them: Shockwave and Precision, increasing the concussion of explosions and the accuracy of munitions fired. He went to work on melding the fire control system into the launcher as Jefferson watched.
The armorer shook his head. “That’ll never not be weird to me. Guns ain’t supposed to just melt together like that. Disparate parts are supposed to fit poorly, need tooling, and then jam up for seemingly no reason until you pull your hair out.”
“I feel that in my soul,” said Cole. He handed the launcher up and then looked at the remaining part. Hard Tone hadn’t been interested in the elemental portion of her launcher at all. Shame, since if he were keyed to it, that launcher would have been amazing for Howie, who specialized in elemental attacks.
Cole stopped and looked at the breech, then stopped short of smacking himself in the face.
“Jeff, what’s our spare part count at?”