As a psion attached to an Umbran Striker Team was hurriedly arranged to rendezvous with Kylee Rantha, one of her sisters across town was standing in a parade line.

Jensa Rantha had reached Eight and Charisma 30, and popped open her Reincarnation to find out whose soul she had inherited basically as soon as she could. Her Talent had been Eagle-Eyed, which was +4 to Perception checks related to sight, doubling to +8 at Ten. It was a mighty Talent for an adventurer just about all ways you looked at it, and Ranthas being adventurous combat-heavy sorts with all kinds of visual prowess, they all expressed great envy of her.

She’d found that she had been a twitchy, paranoid addict whose Talent only made him sensitive to the shadows and suffering of those around him. He noticed everything, and it was all bad, and he just wanted to shut out the world, play games, and ignore the reality he was in.

His incredible Talent just made him notice more of the subliminal shit in the games designed to manipulate those playing...

He died when the fucking Wilders had come down and made his nightmares a screaming reality he couldn’t escape from.

She had taken out her rage on some duracrete walls for a couple of days, and then went straight off and joined the Juris, crashing through the Academy in record time and promptly starting a zealous crusade against all sorts of the shit plaguing this damn town.

Because she could see it all.

Her first day on the job, she shot three dops walking by her, so confident they were invisible. By the end of her first week, she had shot ten of them. The Dop Squad went ape-nuts over her ability to see them, and recruited her simply to locate them so they could be tracked down secretly, their connections shown, and then those connections further tracked.

She shot a dop acting as one of the Politae support staff who helped run the Juris systems, someone who had compromised many Juris operations in the past, and her reputation was made. Stone-cold fearless, a VERY intimidating gaze, and combat skills that terrified all her instructors meant she was very, very wanted for special duties, and when she wasn’t on them, she was out in disguise, somewhere, moving through the mass of humanity, hunting down all the terrors and evils that had terrified her in her last life... and quite legally as a Juris, putting them to rest.

This time, she had been called off important duty for some other important duty. A trade convention was being held, bringing in officials from half the mega-cities on Janus III, and they wanted her looking over the delegates.

Duke Parablum wanted her looking for more than that.

So, right now she was drawn up in the honor guard assigned to meet the envoys from Pitchral, a mega-city on the far side of the Warp Zone plateau. She watched as their shuttle touched down with professional skill, the ramp extended in the back, and the delegates strolled down in their fine robes and expensive chrome and escort bodyguards, enjoying the pomp and ceremony as the live band struck up their city’s anthem.

With typical Rantha overenthusiasm, she had looked at everything. Ranthas had more color cones than humans, and their vision extended up and down below visible light, as well as into parallel spectrums. It was a lot of information to judge and process, and Jensa had made it her everything to be able to read and understand all that she could.

In particular, she had met and seen all kinds of humans and genotypes thereof, all the inherited bloodlines, and multiple kinds of environmental adjustments and their effects on people. She could read body language and muscle movement like an open book, and her Spot the Opening was so keen she could identify the weaknesses and openings in a fighting style in almost an instant, making her one of the very best fencers among the sword-crazed Ranthas.

One of the fucks coming off this shuttle was dead, two of them were neo-dead, and the rest had a sheen to them that said they weren’t human anymore.

Only a spectrometer coded to look for the peculiarities would have seen them.

-Terminate all of them!- she /relayed to Umbran Agent Calgren, disguised as a flunkie in civilian garb off to the side.

He blinked, looked over in his head, out her eyes, and then looked up into the sky, tapped his ear, and said a couple short words.

The ‘Terminate’ message came up in all the Juris helms, the entire delegation was painted red, and the self-defense cannons on the top of the building behind snapped around and glowed.

The bodyguards and envoys didn’t have any time to react. Remarkably used to making snap judgements (and obeying difficult orders), the Juris snapped down their firearms and simply opened up on the lot of them.

Jensa blew out the heads of the two neo-dead, and their skulls exploded, the greenish psychoactive fluid within replacing their brains spraying everywhere. Her soulsword snapped up in diamond silver, and drove straight through the skull of the vice trade delegation minister, flaring with a Sun Strike, and then she rammed her head into the hilt to set off another one, just for good measure.

The man’s head exploded from inside, and an alien telepathic cry faintly skittered on the edges of everyone’s brains, matched by the sudden and explosive detonation of the shuttle and crew aboard it behind them by four banks of plasma bursts unloaded into it.

Impaled on her soulsword, the fungoid, swollen brain-form of the cerevore, three short clawed limbs lengthening and shrinking spasmodically as it was lifted in the air, was visible to everyone. It naturally didn’t fit into the skull of the dead man it had been riding in its natural form, and a soulsword through the nexal was a good way to disrupt that kind of thing.

She held it over her head, and the nearest Juris promptly unloaded on it, blowing the stony, fungoid body to bits and pieces in a flurry of bright light and sound.

One second later, the alarm was going out to the Umbran and Coronal detachments in Pitchral, as well as the soldiers recruited from there, and the Janus Prime trainers active there. They didn’t know how long they had before the shit hit the fan, but it wasn’t going to be long...

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Colby Rantha was a Tunnel Rat. In her past life, she’d been a maintenance worker, one of the Mekker crews that ran around and kept the city and its millennia-old tech working. She felt happier and safer in enclosed spaces, had no unease about tight quarters, and life as a Termite pursuing the Dead Files, and getting into places others didn’t want to, was totally up her alley.

She had taken the step of adjusting her skeleton size permanently to further this. Ranthas were practically identical in build; a slender, if wide-shouldered build that was close to six feet tall, long of leg and arm, Natural Swordswomen.

She made herself a head shorter and even skinnier, so she could fit in places her taller sisters couldn’t, and really stood out... or down... in a crowd of them. The Blade she used never got bigger than a long knife, as she was the epitome of a tight-quarters specialist.

She had just cleared out a group of Morlocks, rampant evidence of their cannibalism and people-eating shoved into every nook and corner of the lair they’d occupied between pipes of rumbling sea water a thousand meters below the streets. She had ripped and shredded them in close quarters, ignoring the stink and cramped spaces, tearing through them with no remorse or pity as they ferociously defended their home, or tried to run from her.

None of them got very far, as she was shooting as she was killing, Tremblesense as finely tuned as any Rantha could get it... and then the cerevore shot up her nose, coming straight out of the mouth of the chief of the tribe and his crazy ass stare as she cut his head from his shoulders.

“Fuck!” she swore, and promptly drove her short Blade, and her hand, right into her own nasal cavity.

Her own bone scraped and flesh tore as she impaled the fucking thing before it could hit her cortex, Sun Strikes went off inside her skull, and it lost its focus and expanded.

Her face tore away as the full size of the cerevore, still impaled on the golden edge of her Sword, blew out the front of her skull and flopped to the ground. Shattered bone from her split nasal cavity and the shattered roof of her mouth hung on to scraps of skin and muscle as she staggered back... but didn’t fall down.

Colby did gargle for a moment, and didn’t even try to see visibly, eyes squeezed to a pulp and only the fact her main braincase was reinforced harder than any of her other bones letting her still think. The internal support structures wound through her brain meant that the shock of the size explosion didn’t actually do any brain damage, and she could retain her balance and think.

There weren’t many morlocks left, and they were staring at her, at the thing kicking on the glowing point of her Blade, the ruin of her face... and then the four stingers that rose out of her back.

Fast Healing, and perhaps more importantly, her Regeneration, began to get to work on what would have been a lethal wound to any normal person.

-A cerevore just tried to make me its mule,- she /reported, as the stingers began to glow and lash out, stabbing out with uncommon energy and explosive impacts as her face and skull slowly began to pull back together. Morlocks were thrust through the skull and the heart remorselessly as she advanced, and when the cerevore kicked, she drove her Claws down into it and ripped out something important inside its stony flesh with a burst of Nimbus fudge-you. -I am way down in the Underspires, crimping a suborned morlock tribe.- Who were now all trying to run away from the tentacle-spiked horrors impaling them and throwing them around the woman with a big bloody hole for a face.

They were fast and they knew the terrain. It didn’t matter, as she slid and skittered through the world of pipes and booming water flows, and killed them all.

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Keffin Torquill blinked and woke up, hastily looking around to see if anyone had noticed that he’d dozed off again. He frowned, shaking his head, wondering why he'd lost focus and was falling asleep so much recently. Maybe it had something to do with the nightmares he’d been having, of tentacles and brains and shadows whispering in the corners of his mind...

He looked over the dataflow in front of him, measuring the traffic flow and patterns of Janus III. With an experienced eye, he looked over the graphics and lights, and everything still looked good, countless thousands of vehicles still in motion on multiple levels. There were some minor lights and cautions in neighboring zones, signs of traffic swells and congestion that could cause disruptions and accidents, but such things were quickly evened out by the mighty algorithms and calculations of Traffic Control...

There was a beep, and suddenly his terminal froze. He blinked at it, shocked, flashing red lights starting to pop up in multiple vectors. “What? What’s going on?” he asked, and heard the urgent tramp of feet coming down the corridor behind him, along with the startled murmurs of his colleagues.

The merciless stare of a Juris visor behind a riot gun greeted him as he turned around. He could only gape in shock and confusion, wondering what he had done, in his plain drudge of a life, and the gun barked once.

Microflechettes tore apart his skull, and psychoactive green goo painted the workstation behind him. His body slumped back, the empty skull draining of the fluid that had replaced his brain some time ago.

Workstations were blaring and turning red all around. “Crash Traffic Control!” shouted Bobbi Rantha in her coms and in Marktell.

---

In an unknown place some distance away, a brain floating in a jar of preservative fluid twitched in the psychoactive stuff, and Keffin Torquil found himself imprisoned in his own mind, with nothing else to keep him company but his nightmares...

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In the great Juris and Administra towers that housed the data-minds that regulated Traffic Control, certain switches blew as mass overrides went out in one final pulse of data, and Traffic Control went off-line.