Several months pass...

It had been a good fight, and an enthusiastic one.

Jimo had fallen under Briggs’ wing as a power armor enthusiast, and gone into the dueling. Given the inordinate toughness of my soulclaw boys, and the ability to Empathic Transfer injuries to me, he wasn’t afraid of getting hurt, and he fairly worshipped the huge Ancient whose borg-wrecking career was an inspiration for anyone made of flesh and bone.

Of course, the borgs on the other side were less than happy to see a wave of power-armored mind-clawed bastards with all their meat climbing the rankings. This M’bale the Breaker was one of them, a true cyborg with eighty percent of his meat gone, just wearing a borg suit everywhere he went. He’d given up basically all of himself to be a high-end cyborg.

Jimo had made a good fight of it, but six attack limbs, multiple gun ports, chains, and nets later, he’d run out of gas as the mini-rockets detonated in his face and sent him flying back, armor crumped and insides shaken.

Of course, most of those attack limbs, gun ports, chains, and nets were now in many pieces, and M’bale the Breaker was lurching around on two legs carefully, as Jimo had hacked the other two off.

Jimo slapped the ground twice, the universal symbol for a surrender, but the outraged M’bale didn’t back off.

“Let me leave you with the same souvenir you left me with!” he howled in a voice artificially amplified for effect, and hacked at Jimo’s leg with an adamantine powersaw.

The crackling, spinning weapon on its extendor drove down on Jimo’s leg, sparks flying as it cut into the durasteel, and then into the meat beneath. Blood sprayed and bits of meat flew around as M’bale cackled.

“How’s it feel, boy?” the cyborg shouted at him. “I’ll be good as new, any cyborg would, this is just some friendly play!”

And then Briggs was on top of him, even as Jimo’s leg was kicked free of him.

M’bale barely had time to look up before Briggs’ Hammer plowed through his exo-skeleton, shrieking energy melted and fused the durasteel of his frame, and the cyborg was smashed over backwards.

“You’re interfering in a fight!” M’bale screamed, ignoring what had just happened, almost happy. “You’ll be thrown out of the league for this!”

“The fight ends when the opponent is judged unable to continue, surrenders, or is forced from the ring,” Briggs rumbled as he kicked the trembling legs of the cyborg aside, shattering his pelvis with the force of an armored boot. Very precisely, a dendrite snaked out of the back of his suit, wrapped around Jimo’s leg, and pressed it back against the bloody stump it had been severed from.

There was a hiss and a glow of light. The sprayed meat and blood everywhere shimmered and disappeared, flowing back as mere mist in the direction it had come from.

From start to end, Jimo had not uttered a cry. Steam vented out the gash in his armor, and he stiffly pushed himself up on his armored leg.

“What I am doing now is effectively after the fight, which falls under the area of personal unregulated combat... or would, if you hadn’t tried to maim someone outside a fighting ring. On camera. In a public venue. Before lots and lots of people watching.”

His dendrite retracted, and Briggs stepped forwards, violet eyes glowing with their own non-mechanical backlight. M’Bale the Breaker tried to retreat, but chainsaws aren’t made for scrabbling, and he didn’t have any other effective limbs... plus Briggs had obliterated his main power core, and he basically only had life support active.

Briggs stopped, towering over the man, psi-circuits and hardware criss-crossing the remnants of his head and torso. Behind him, Jimo got to his feet, took off his helmet, and slowly stepped up next to him.

“A little playing around, something a cyborg can easily recover from, huh?” Briggs repeated, his voice low enough to make the sands of the arena tremble, and M’bale blanched as he looked at the unharmed Jimo. Psionic healing could be much faster than nanite repairs, after all. “Well, that means you’re absolutely fine with the same being done to you, right?”

His hand flicked with a golden blade across his hand, cutting right across Jimo’s throat. The same cutting arc flared around his Hammer as it flicked out, the thirty-pound head lighter than a willow wand, and sliced through M’Bale’s throat.

“Let’s see who comes to fix you.”

Blood was gushing out Jimo’s throat, but his eyes were firm. There was a flash, and a hiss of red steam. The gushing wall coming down his throat stopped, and the escaping red was visibly sealed off, the deadly wound reduced to little more than an angry red line.

M’Bale gaped and quivered as black-red biotic fluid poured down his throat and chest. He was starting to choke, and lights from his life-support systems flashed danger lights as he thrashed helplessly and then jerked forwards, lolling as his mechanical eyes went dim, and red lights danced over the frame of his borg-suit.

Briggs waited patiently, but nobody from the crowds or the emergency resuscitation crews seemed interested in preserving the cyborg’s life. That kind of behavior was indicative of someone going Cyber, losing their humanity and having nothing but prejudice against those with all their flesh.

Also, the freaking huge Ancient with the massive Hammer standing over him kind of discouraged anyone.

The blood on Jimo’s neck and chest evaporated into red mist, and even the red line faded back to his normal olive skin tone. Briggs grunted as he hefted Beat, which thrummed strongly in his hand, plenty ready to go ahead and mash some more cyberized opponents.

“Huh. Too bad you couldn’t heal up on your own,” Briggs murmured as all the lights went dead on M’Bale. He tapped the corpse, and lightning arced out from his Hammer, frying all his hardware and incidentally making sure he couldn’t be resuscitated, making the job of the arena crew a lot simpler. “Let’s go, Jimo. You should’ve beaten this guy. Let’s watch some tapes.”

“Yes, sir,” Jimo sighed, still feeling his aches and pains leaving. He wasn’t very good at the self-healing bit in his own estimation, but he would have qualified as a trained combat medic in any military in the world, given how many of his own injuries he’d healed, and helped others with.

Briggs clapped him on the shoulder, and the two walked out of the arena, as the crew and bots came in to clean up the mess and prepare for the next match.

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“Mom, you gotta see this.”

I cocked an eye at Lieutenant Thoma Rantha, my secretary. Her Talent was Stickler, which made her awesomely good at stupid minutiae, which she waged war upon with heavy weapons and terrifying enthusiasm. Gorgeous supergeniuses who are actually good at micro-managing complete idiocy are not people to fuck with, as more than a few bureaucrats who’d come tramping to my door had found out. She could navigate redundant laws, conflicting rules, excessive hierarchies, overlapping jurisdictions of power, and peevish twaddle-heads like a piranha going after fingers, and anyone who dared, DARED to contest her domain with such stupidity ended up screaming for mercy under the deluge of paperwork she unleashed upon them.

She had so far forced six pencil-dicks into retirement, cashiered a general who made an unwanted pass at her, started her third stage of regulation rewrites (Coronal approved), and on the side she represented poor people in virtual court and worked with Aura in a mediation room. She took charge of lists of Stuff for the excursions of the Hag Squads going out every other night outside the city for their Karma fix with great enthusiasm.

It was fun when you knew your Talent, gloried in it, were superhumanly awesome at it, and knew just how it looked to others. Sir Dorval wanted to snatch her from me, and I had to rap his knuckles. I only had so many thoughtstreams to handle that shit, you know?

One such stream turned my attention to the video she sent. In virtua space I could fast forward without compromising anything.

Okay, this was a bitching show of a cybergang gone full Cyber, two of them Possessed. Strike Team Silver, which Romila Rantha was assigned to, was urgently dispatched to deal with it, and arrived on the scene less than one minute after the gang started rolling out in their suits, vehicles, and walkers, killing everything around them.

Romila’d taken a five-g dive from the hoverwagon to hit the ground first, zone in a safe teleport site for the rest of the team to come in on, and then there had been a knock-down, drag-out, explosions everywhere, laser and slugthrowing shooty-shoot with lots of property damage, drones crashing and exploding, missiles flying, mechs and borgs shorting out with arcane eruptions of energy, and two Warp Entities getting flash-fried and boom-exorcised the hard way. The Juris had lost an attack wagon and over three hundred civilians had died, but Strike Team Silver and their Juris back-up had lost nobody, because Romila was on the job as their combat medic and a reaaaaaally good shot when those Warp-fried idiots tried to flank.

She might have done a Cleave Run through like ten of the smaller borgs when they hunkered down behind a bunker of overturned cars, making a convenient line for such a thing, but nobody really caught that, except for a lot of sparks and a golden mindblade moving through a bunch of abruptly dead metal-heads.

It was a great show.

Cut to... an interview with a high-ranking cyborg arena guy, one Buzzcutter. He was providing analytics to the fight in a bored tone, kinda disparaging the skills of the Cybered ‘borgs, their aim, their gear, their tactics, and making it sound like the two Coronal Squires attached to the squad hadn’t done much of anything.

“Yeah, if those guys were from the league, guarantee you that fight would not have been so easy for ‘em,” he kind of droned, waving a metal hand dismissively. “Just amateurs throwing metal around, didn’t know what the fuck they were doing.”

I narrowed my virtua eyes. “So, how pissed is Romila?” I asked her.

“You saw how they had that zone wired and were waiting for the Juris to show, right?”

Of course I had. There were mines, snipers, monofilament nets, booby traps, flanking crews, mixed heavy and light teams, hidden bunkers, disguised shooters among the civilians, armored vehicles, and some damn impressive firepower. They’d gone out, butchered hundreds of people, withdrawn to their zone, and pulled the Juris in to get slaughtered.

Romila’s early and non-cyber arrival had really upset the applecart. She had painted all their traps and positions, read the ambushers, confirmed the ground layout, and reported it to the strike team so they could insert into a location where they could rip the formation of the borgs apart. With the constant upload, the Juris had been able to pick off the stray elements and avoid most of the booby traps simply by being able to shoot them first. The casualties among the lawmen had mostly come from random shots and splash damage.

The borgs had done everything right. In return, the Silver Strike team had done everything even more right, from their very expensive, flashy, and woo-hoo violent initial barrage, to their Borg tanking both of the Warped Borgs for a few crucial seconds, saving at least three dozen civilians and letting the two Squires get into position to blast them, overloading their mindblades with psionic lightning to fry the mechanical and neural systems of demon and host together, before plasma cannons to the cortex finished the job.

It was telepathically coordinated cooperation and teamwork of the highest order. There had been nothing wrong with the Cybered idiots. They’d just been hit hard and from too many angles, and their prep work had been killed ahead of time. If the Strikers hadn’t come in to do the job, the Juris would’ve had a bloody day.

I frowned, despite myself. Yeah, that Buzzcutter was just selling stuff. He hadn’t looked at things seriously, focused just on the Warped borgs, who looked ineffective because of the tactics used and coordination of all sides ripping them apart before they could get going.

“Well, I can probably skip getting eaten by Sand Wurms for a day. Let me call up Philius and ask for a small favor...”

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