Class 5
Off-Planet, SubIonspheric Earth-orbit. The Lenisker seed is growing in a cryogenics chamber carefully overseen by the highest of technicians. Limbs sprawl outwardly from a protoplasmic sample over the course of time, like trees growing toward the embrace of the Sky Goddess. Bio-assemblage of conscious cells networking in a suspended animation of antiseptic, subzero blue-ish liquid. It shimmers and hints at shades of red and purple-azure in the light of the LEDs on the nearby computers. Genomic data fragments freefloat. The station is unattended, completely automated by the programmers in one of the NZ capitals - astute and laboring folk, but they don't really have a choice... The roots of it's code were planted in the Towers Below. Launched by way of some seedy connection to dayside...Tin teethsmen eating ICE. Surely a few had their mouths to the curb under the ruthless patrol of עמ on the otherside of the scrapyard borders; but enough got through to these Dangerlands which house dangerous minds. Enough to get the old Lenny-seed up into space atleast.
Al Diamond drags a cigarette, stamping it out on the corner stool of the bar he was sitting at before grabbing his Standard-issue agent coat to leave. A dim overhead lamp flickers and sways casting growing & shifting shadows on a nearby wall. He picks up his folder and strolls past the mutant patrons of the tavern - moving through the door swiftly and back out into the night. A piece of paper falls from the folder under his arm and it reads:
"Put the squeeze on Maurice down at the docks, got 3gs of the stuff. Johnny too - info: little demonspawn coming crawling out of the tunnels. Arranged by a Brantley node under the influence of HiVE-Mother. Thee Vortex Motel. 3:35AM. "
9Cubed is sitting in shadows across the street watching. Intense chronesthesia to the early days of Machine-Man-Drum warfare and submarine battles blur his perception of the events across the street as Diamond storms out the door and back into the embrace of night. Cubed stands to follow him in a slow, pacing movement toward the same direction Al is heading off to swiftly. Tails him in the distant, silent shadows all the way to the outskirts of the ICE-wall.
Orgone-motor overlays in the cryogenic, DNA-assembling pod begin to run at rates which seem to indicate overclocking of the developing cerebral circuit powering the craft. The embryonic clone's nerves burn with the sensation of unbearable cold...Reality's cruel hand is touching this circuit as it begins to reach completion. The pod is growing too...it's beginning to resemble some sort of half-etheric jellyfish like creature, only with odd wires and circuits integrated into it's goo-like organs.
A clunking sound against the back of Diamonds knees and he's down. "Am I not infinitely merciful?" a sick grimace on Cubed's face as he spits some vicious liquid to the left and looks down at the prey. He swings the blunt object again, but Al rolls out of the way. The pain is beginning to run along his spine, fire in his cortex. A loose neural wire sparking somewhere in the back of his head. A distant godhead reaches out an electric-blue ghost hand and touches his forehead in a lingering moment removed from time. Static discharge echoes in optic nerves as Cubed continues rushing forward, black shadow-slime echoing from his form. "Operation Oreb is still pending, Must purge and consume all refractions of light both forward and backwards!"
⤓
The remote sensors in artic bio-labs alert the controllers as to the changes on-board the ship, they've been watching the situation carefully. Behind them, the Owl King smiles as his Datashade-monocle catches a ray of light off the technicians screens.
The clink of the pipe shatters checkered tiles carelessly laid on a dingy, dust filled floor. The fight between Diamond and Cubed has moved into a withering shell of a house. "Where the fuck is Brantley?" echoes Cubed's dry, sandpaper voice down the empty corridors and shadows of the house. He wants the mask bound by the thousand handed B-bot in the bowels of hell for his collection. He breathes Diamond's death trail in the air up 'til zeropoint. "That bastard's gone...somehow." he thinks, eyes flaring before an orange sunset sizzle. The aire is fixed with stagnancy.