Beacons in The Dark

Chapter 2 - Technomancers and Flexbone

“Entire galaxies were disrupted by the energy fluctuations, stars going early nova and planets ripped by the traveling gravity funnels” -Exo History 001a.a v.1

He was thinking about Technomancers right then, or Mancers as they called themselves; adepts of high technology who liked to pretend they were wizards. Pulling fireballs out of the air, using monofilament snakewire to move things surreptitiously. It could be entertaining to watch, but in the Outer Sectors of the Empire, many places were awash in superstition and lore, especially as you got closer and closer to the boundary of human habitation, where the other, more hostile races lived.

These Mancers would set themselves up as priests of some made up or old deity and carve out their own fiefdoms, preying on others with their false piety.

Blue was wondering about the adaptation of Mancer technology into a working visual distortion shield, good camouflage he thought - he had been infiltration the Technomancers before returning post haste to look more into this Jhiva business; this energy without energy, and his sudden absence had surely alerted some Mancers to his presence, and they were a people wont to be angry and retaliatory against intruders, so he was indeed wary.

He was accessing the networked grid with an encrypted databurst, he contacted Nami as he approached his apartment block, to see if the assistant was there, because a lot of work was to be done in the mini-cycles ahead when the protocrete wall in front of him exploded into a concussive shower of red and blue magma and debris.

“Wha...” he began, springing forward out of the way of another solid state beam, the pistol being held in the hands of a proto-troll; ancestors once human but had met an alien race and through breeding and millions of cycles through the Migration, this man had emerged.

He had more than a foot and half on Blue, easily outweighed him thrice over; his skin had a grayish-blue overcast and his face was piggish, with tufts of red hair spiking out of his head and face and a smashed nose with a few teeth that protruded over his bottom lip, giving him a ferocious gaze, whether the he man was in a good mood or not.

And he was most certainly not happy at this moment.

The beam blasted Blue sideways, his body crumpling against another polycrete wall as he was blasted forwards into an alleyway. And it hurt like all hell, throwing up black and yellow dots in Blue’s eyes that his processors scrambled to reassemble to something close to regular vision.

“What is this about?” Blue called out jauntily, and then he heard the whine. The proto-troll had depressed the button and was overloading the pistol, pulling all of its energy into one last shot that would render it useless, and would render BlueZek into a kind of meaty jelly with bits of metal and CPU’s melted it.

A few of his resinous polymer bones might not be fully incinerated, though.

Thankfully he had worn his jump boots that day, and the proto-troll didn’t know that. Scrambling quickly to his feet, Blue pressed down with his heels and mentally accessed the control panel that operated the tricky footwear. Regular bone would not be able to do this, it would shatter utterly, but Blue’s polymer bone was pliable and could compact itself, though it would be a few mini-cycles before he could perform this feat again, his skeleton would have to decompress.

A great arc of energy shot from his heels to the ground and he was propelled forward like a cannonball, his shoulder slamming into the proto-troll’s chest with enough force to cave it in, and worse off, his solid state laser pointed upwards, turning the man’s head and neck into a stump of melted goo that glowed hotly for a few moments before running down his ruined chest.

“Nami!” he databursted silently.

“Yes?” came the reply a few moments later.

“Been attacked, I’ll be at the apartment within the hour - someone just tried to kill me.”

And walking off at a brisk pace, Blue stretched his arms and back a few times, hating the pain of compressed bones, trying to will the hurt away, but a small smile played across his lips.