Ashfall clock at 2 of 4.
Deep within Fires of the Emperor, another gateway has opened. Transmissions and contacts are flowing. The loss of Rael has been noted. Atlas is forking to assume direct control. Response is inbound. Systems here cannot fully handle the load of Atlas’ manifestation but it is taking command. Weapon systems are reactivating. General quarters is sounded. New clock at 0 of 6.
Breach clock at 1 of 4. Atlas was working on its own goals of establishing a permanent breach within our reality.
Tu’rosan support of Union and Umbra’s recovery are stationary.
We find ourselves on the wasteland battlefield yet again. Each of us deploys two frames – one our own, the other piloted by a partially-recovered instance of Umbra and Boomer. These are older fragments of ourselves. Once again, our frames are hard-used, battered and damaged. This time, we have memories not only of coming to stop Atlas’ takeover of Tu’rosa, but of being on the other side. We’re facing off against versions of ourselves. The opposing frames are covered in flesh, biotech, nanotech – also showing signs of intensive damage. Again, the wreckage and bodies of the 501st are scattered all around us.
The Boomer (hammer) and Umbra (sniper) instances are impaired by what we’ve done up to this point to bolster their fragments. The dark reflections of us aren’t impaired, but they aren’t bolstered. They’re reaching out.
The 501st sacrificed themselves to get us to this point. Atlas has invested a lot in the four of us. If we win, the road to Atlas is open.
I open tightbeam comms with both Boomers. Remind him that before he was this, he was an insurgent. Remind him how we used to fight when we were child soldiers – asymmetrically. Roll a natural 20 on a Lead/Inspire check, with a maxed 6 on the added accuracy – total of 28. Atlas still has control of the frame, but Boomer’s presence withdraws.
Something has been bothering Ilias for a while. Why does Atlas need proxies? Why does Atlas need custom-made proxies – us, Umbra, Boomer, the pruned Rael – for the sorts of things it’s trying to do? Why does it keep trying to latch onto us?
It’s time for Ilias to resolve Umbra’s multiplicity. There’s only one casket, but as long as any instantiation of it is still under Atlas’ influence, Umbra isn’t free. Ilias attempts to collapse Umbra into a single instantiation – that within the casket in his frame.
Needs a 20. Rolls a 25.
Janus flickers through a thousand iterations of this place and time. Across the field, Atlas shuffles opposing probabilities. And in this one instance that becomes every instance, the wavefront collapses in Echo’s favor. The instance of Umbra that was here was never here. In this place and time, we had long ago recovered all instances of Umbra’s casket and reintegrated her.
“I only needed to be right once.”
Our Boomer isn’t fully personality-integrated yet. But he’s there enough to just sit there with an open comm line to the other instance. Sometimes all you need to do is sit with someone.
Main Control, which houses the opposing Ilias, opens a channel to Boomer and injects paracausal code. Boomer resists. Control disconnects abruptly, in apparent frustration.
I attempt to give Main Control an existential crisis by telling it that there’s no way it can be Ilias, that Ilias would never have let himself be put under Atlas’ heel. Doesn’t work (among other reasons, because there is a chance that Ilias could have let this happen to pull a thread).
Ilias sends his other self some historical puzzles from NHP history to try to get it to de-escalate.
As we start to fade out of this reality, I flick a message to my other self again: “You became an insurgent because you wanted to be free.”
Echo scans Main Control, looking for “his” casket. And finds it – centrally located in the core of the frame. The mech’s core is so large to incorporate not only the frame but the structure and biological material around it. It contains a merged Ilias and Janus.
Main Control scans in return. It considers the battlefield in a new light.
Back to reality. The Belter rescuees have found improvised weapons but are outclassed by the incoming killbots. The space superiority frame has launched; two VTOLs are prepping for launch. Atlas has not yet gotten the ship’s weapons online.
The surge that caused our reality bleed… as Atlas surged through into the ship and our reality, something surged back in return.
Rael is down, Atlas isn’t fully here, Umbra and Boomer are uncooperative – who’s piloting the space superiority frame? It’s an uncomfortable question, but we won’t be addressing it now.
Ilias unshackles the omnigun and deletes the killbots that are advancing on our rescuees.
I do a death blossom and kill one VTOL and the space superiority frame.
The rescuees are holding the airlock against the husks inside it.
Another VTOL launches. I take a couple of hard hits and get structured again, but when I’m done shooting, the sky is clear.
The SSF’s dimensional annihilation engine deleted it – there’s nothing left to scan. The launch bay contains several husks, several loader mechs, and some weapon canisters containing WMD nanites that were being prepped to load onto the VTOLs.