Full auto hard and hot light walked up his body in fiftieth of a second pulses, ending with his throat and the spine behind it, blood-red banefire doing all the work as the guy dropped whatever he was going to throw back at us to stop us, and fell back into the van.

Which left the door open and swinging nicely. Trindi, without even thinking about it, slammed her shotgun down on the armrest mount on her door, centered the leyser sight, and launched her frag load.

The shining, Nimbus-charged load arced through the air nicely and right into the interior of the van. There was a flash of green-gold light, and screams as the windows within blew out, many of the pieces painted scarlet.

Billi didn’t even slow down as the van wavered. The solid steel grill slammed into the corner of the van, and the wheels whined as he bumped it out of control. It careened right before the driver could correct it, slamming up to the rails, and I imagine he had a big ‘fuck me’ look on his face.

TC naturally didn’t give a rat’s ass about him. The cargo hauler slammed into him doing a hundred and fifty, and massing a whooooooole lot more. The van was blown into the air and over, the front of it a compressed mass of metal and meat, and it flew right back and over us as the cargo hauler kept going, totally unperturbed save for a couple additional scuff marks.

I sent off an email to TC that cargo hauler YTJ-2394 could up its kill count by four, and they sent back a nice email thanking me, it would be so noted on the hauler’s record, and would I like to see the current kill total records for the hauler lanes?

I politely demurred as Billi spun the car, for a moment the tires moving as if greased, then suddenly gripping the ground again. The roar fell to a happy purr. There was a Driver at work...

“Shall we go see who they were?” Trindi asked, chambering two slugs made for cyborg-popping... or plain flesh and bone in armor, if it came to that. Her Nimbus flicked back up, making sure that both rounds would land deep.

“That sounds marvelous.”

Billi obediently coasted up to the ruins of the van. I hopped off as Trindi got out, stepping over a couple broken bodies that had been flung out of the back of the van when it did its vertical 180. I dumped their faces into my Band and sent them back to the blok, where my Goldilocks crew promptly started going for facial recognition.

“Wrecker’s on the way,” Billi told me. No need to waste the material in the van. Melt it down and feed it into the printer. It’s how we built the wrecker itself, actually.

There’d be enough guys to sweep up the mess, too.

I let Trindi use her claw to rip the door off, not much caring if anything inside was still in danger, and approved as she waited for her Nimbus to come back from the Sun Strike before she actually tore it open and looked around.

She Visualized their faces, transferred it to the Goldilocks crew, and facial recognition went out quick.

“Borg-boys from a Sharkey gang affiliate, the Dunner Dawgs,” I /repeated for just about everyone as the hits came back from Blok Security’s link to the Juris databases. “I’m betting just about everyone has had just about enough of Sharkey by now, right?”

The /affirmations came back quickly. Ever since we’d offed four of his best borgboys come to catch a baby blade, he’d been itching to get back at us. Random shootings, drive-bys, attempted knifings, even a sniper attempt or two had been aimed at members of the Green and Gold. Most of the people doing it were dead, of course, and retaliation had not been withheld, as Karma well-earned was eagerly sought for.

But mass unloading on the civilians of the blok? That turned a desired challenge and threat into something a bit worse.

It was time to end him and his crew.

----

I advised, but I did not directly participate. I so informed them that I could go in there and Kill Them All, and leave my students absolutely shit to do. There was a popular protest against such Karma-stealing action on my part, and they got to work.

We had a number of retired soldiers brought in for tactical advice, not hard when a blok houses tens of thousands of people. They had a lot of vids to look at for some of the steps that should be taken, some inventively crazy ideas that were mostly shot down, and sometimes implemented just for the sheer zaniness of doing them. I let them go to it.

The number of students I was teaching had blossomed, and then blossomed again. While my Marked said very little themselves, the number of kids who had mindblades proliferating like mad had caught a lot of attention, especially when those kids turned out to be pretty damn good with them. Snatch gangs attempting to grab themselves some baby psis were usually completely obliterated, and we dug out at least two dozen of them with the old bait-and-burn tactics.

If I happened to follow their chain of asset disposal upspire, well, nobody spoke about mysterious deaths in various corps, clans, and Houses that went on, and I got to practice my infiltration and assassination skills on people truly deserving of them. Win-win!

The quietest and most merciless of my students were the Goldilocks crew.

They were called that because of the long lock of golden hair they all had, which could plug into a computer jack. This obviated the need for a datajack implant, which would violate the psionic rule against such things, and kept the kids pure for their Null Psion.

They were my hacking crew.

Computer Programming skills were basically restricted to higher education, closely monitored by the Mekkers, and usually the province of corporate drones... or illegal users who taught themselves crazy-ass methods by a combination of experimentation, secrets passed on by other hackers, and unwitting askashic downloads. As it worked out, I could only grant Ranks in something to someone that I already had myself, so those Levels devoted to my Tech skills were actually very important. Suddenly, a bunch of really smart kids could actually learn stuff they wanted to play with and had been forbidden to, and they jumped on it with fanatical zeal.

They soon had a presence on both the Boole and the Quanta, the underground internet that didn’t operate on the same lines. As a matter of fact, they expanded the Quanta a bunch, because some of them were hardcore computer designers and engineers, and we were printing off newer and sleeker systems off the raw comps from trashed or outdated corporate models, daring to explore new system designs.

Street tech tended to stop at the Tech Level of 6 or so, as 7 would start to be getting into weird science, and none of my kids were at the stage where they could comprehend that stuff.

I, on the other hand, most definitely was.

I began including Sacred Rune designs into the tech they were Printing off, accentuating them with Holy Runework carved in by hand by the people more skilled at handcraft than mindcraft. The mixture of the default Axiomatic runesets used by the Mekkers and Corps with the Holy stuff effectively made the sets very resistant to Warp corruption and distortion... which, in turn, actually enhanced their performance and reliability somewhat. It also cleaned up the programming parameters, streamlining a good portion of the stuff, so the software that was being designed and written worked better, too.

Most importantly, I was going down a new technology tree.

Computer technology was based on the microprocessor and its weird science derivatives, with Energized materials and molecular-level and sub-dimensional encoding involved. Naturally such systems were extremely susceptible to contamination, hence the overwhelming presence of Axiomatic software and hardware formations to stave off the influence of the Warp, and the hard, Hard, HARD bias against Artificial Intelligences who could also be corrupted, and always would be, in the end.

The main reason for this was naturally because the default protective designs they used were of Law. The Warp was of Chaos... and Evil. Axiom could fight Anarchic, but had no defense against Evil, and so was corrupted on that end. AI’s didn’t go batshit-crazy, they went Dark, terrifying logical and emotionless killers of billions that had once threatened the entire galaxy when they went rogue. They took a high-tech level culture that had spanned the galaxy crashing down from Tech Level 16 or so back down to 10-12, into a literal dark age of distrust in High Science that still had not faded after millennia. Since technology was constantly being biased and tilted towards the purposes of Evil by the Warp, this distrust was anything but unwarranted, of course.

It was obvious to me that the Mekkers would not be able to lift the Tech Level of the civilization we were at. First, they were subject to the same sort of Evil corruption as AI’s, because they wed themselves to the machine. Thus, they were heartless, monopolistic, logical, and dogmatic, more and moreso as they advanced in their unity with the machine.

Also, they were spiritually unable to comprehend the higher orders of technology, as they couldn’t gather the Ranks necessary to do so. Oh, they could replicate technology, they could make things of tech levels higher than they could understand, and they did so remarkably well, once their implants gave them the modifiers to do so. But they didn’t understand how or why much of their own technology worked, and it wasn’t something they could just program into a machine and pass out.

The Mechanist Guilds and their many subdivisions were dominated by cyborgs, but it was apparent to me that before what they called the Dark Age of technology, psions had been the ones driving technology forward, and the cyborgs had merely been the work force and maintenance crews. The true innovators of technology and the weird science behind the higher forms had to be psions, because cyborgs just couldn’t get to the proper level.

The cyborgs tried. What they did is endlessly tinker with existing tools, trying to synthesize new (and older) technology out of things they could produce now, experimenting with the force of numbers to try and reach the higher, grander tech levels of the past. Sometimes, they succeeded at uncovering something viable, and even more often, they found something very unstable, explosive, and hit a violent and career-ending dead end in their searches.

The whole shtick of the tech of today being inferior to that of the past was totally true, and it was the fault of the guardians of our tech, who held it tight to themselves with the idea that meat people couldn’t possibly treat it with the proper reverence, and it was too dangerous to trust us with it.

Uh-huh.

Ergo, I started the new tech tree. Super-miniaturized vacuum tubes, instead of micro-processors.

This technology was old, and never pursued, because microprocessors were markedly more energy-efficient and smaller from the beginning, and so never embraced, quietly falling into the dustbin of history. Now, I brought it back, purchasing the rights to it for basically nothing, because it had no value.

The energy-efficiency wasn’t anywhere near the problem it used to be, with the advent of Energized materials, and with Compression technology, neither was area.

The system had two major advantages over micro-processors. The first was that they were more energy tolerant, able to handle several times the power loads that microprocessors could without slagging.

The second was that the vacuum burned off psychic infestation and corruption.

That little spark jumping through space meant a material gap for the flow of psychic power, and disjointed it, creating innumerable tiny holes in any sort of psychic infestation and virtually preventing the sort of long-term corruption that plagued existing networks.

It also created light, and when your circuits are fixed in Holy Rune-forms, that’s not an irrelevant thing. The Axiomatic nature of fixed circuitry, the Light, and the natural Chaos of the electricity running through basically united all the aspects of Good together within the workings of the circuit boards we were making, and the resulting light show of circuits at work was remarkably soothing to look upon.

As for using it, as one Goldilocks put it, “Man, the Boole feels so much dirtier than the Quanta.”