Behind the Bitmask Read online

  We got a briefing 24 hours before we were scheduled to go in. Our target was named Hyperion, and there was scarcely a titan who liked building supercomputers more than she did. Oddly enough, that was why Sigmar wanted her dead. In recent years, I’d heard a lot of tech talk about distributed computing projects that could theoretically give an organization a supercomputer’s worth of power. All they had to do was develop ever more sophisticated social engineering to convince/deceive people into running scientific software on their computers. It was how we were discovering ever larger Mersenne primes, it was how we were searching for extraterrestrial life, and apparently, it was something Hyperion considered anathema. Sigmar drew his powers from something along these lines, and Hyperion had personally offended him by sending her own minions out to slaughter hell’s OS X users and harvest their computers for spare parts to make big, slow mainframes full of tangled wires and crispy roasted insects.

  Hyperion’s semiconductor manufacturing faculties were top notch for hell, though; if turned towards the construction of modern server clusters and workstations, it’d give Sigmar another source of money and magical power. Sigmar had also promised us a (small) cut of the profits, but for that to happen, we had to kill Hyperion. The only service we were getting was transportation – once we stepped into the portal, we’d be stuck there unless we managed to complete our mission. I noted that Sigmar had assigned Terminal to “assist” us yet again. I guessed we wouldn’t be wanting for firepower, but unless I could come up with some brilliant plan and also get everyone to play along, casualties were going to be the roof, and my life was in even more acute danger than usual.

  Once he’d explained why he wanted Hyperion dead and her realm added to his, Sigmar became surprisingly tight-lipped about what to expect in terms of defense, terrain, and anything else that would reduce our odds of getting killed. Surely, our survival would be to his benefit in the long run, especially if he was serious about forging his own empire the way I suspected he was? At least he didn’t waste time on torture; Sigmar wandered off after a few minutes of briefing.

  My first instinct was to load up with medicinal spellscripts and first aid equipment. I was about to call for Sarah to join me when I saw Terminal beckoning to me from within the crowd. Apparently, I didn’t get the message quickly enough, so he tripped the person in front of him in order to make a scene. It turned out to be Paul. I have never seen such a look of frustration on anyone’s face.

  “Why’d you have to go and do that?” shouted Paul at his assailant as I made my way through the gradually dispersing crowd. Terminal didn’t answer until he thought I was in earshot.

  “Well, I like to make sure people know how I feel! I’m still pretty sore about how you fucked up on Charlotte’s first day under the new management. Sigmar actually got mad at me! The nerve of some titans!” As usual, any conversations Terminal had quickly turned into self-aggrandizing monologues.

  “Charlotte! Say something nasty about Paul for me,” said Terminal.

  “I’ve got better things to do,” I snapped at him. Why’d he have to be such a sociopath all the time?

  “You’re no fun.” He stuck out his tongue at me like an overgrown child. Paul had scrabbled off and was probably going to spend the next 24 hours beseeching every god he’d learned about in his school’s religion classes for assistance in the upcoming battle.

  “What do you want, anyways?” I asked. Terminal put a finger to his lips and used his other hand to point at a small side room. On its own, this wouldn’t be enough to get me to do anything, and I almost turned to leave, but then he rooted around in his pants pocket and gave me a crumpled sheet of paper. I opened it – it was a map of Hyperion’s semiconductor factory, and a surprisingly detailed one. I couldn’t say if the floor plans within were accurate, but if Terminal was willing to give me this information, who knew what other bits of strategy he’d pass along? I followed him into the side room, where he pulled out more documents, placed them on a table, and beckoned for me to look at them.

  “Look, I’m sure we’re all in agreement that Sigmar botched the briefing. I can’t make him do it over again, but I’d prefer it if at least the high ups were properly informed about what to do. We’re hard to replace, you know?” Terminal said. He was getting ever more confusing by the day, but to be fair, who in the coven wasn’t?

  “What do you care? You and I will probably just make a secure base camp somewhere and get through this just fine. It’s my subordinates that are going to take the heat, and I can’t afford to keep getting them killed,” I responded. If I were talking to someone like Sarah, or even a generic underling like Paul, I’d have to find a more diplomatic way of phrasing it, but with Terminal, I could be blunt. I liked to be insulated from micromanaging the coven, but that doesn’t mean they were cannon fodder. Four years wasn’t enough time for computer magic to reshape society and create a new generation of witches. Even if it had been, most people don’t join murder cults.

  “Don’t get the wrong idea about this,” Terminal reassured me. “I find having your coven around gives me a lot of scapegoats in case I fuck up and do something wrong. I mean, it’ll never happen to me, but there’s a reason people save up for a rainy day.”

  “Do you ever get the feeling Sigmar doesn’t have your best interests at heart?” I asked, trying to make it come off as some sort of stereotypically feminine meek question that he could easily pat on the head and dismiss. However, Terminal ended up taking it in a very different direction.

  “What? Please don’t tell me you think Sigmar truly cares about any of his subordinates. I work with Sigmar because it’s entertaining and it gets me access to useful stuff, like weapons and spells. Isn’t it the same for you?” Terminal explained. To say he had more leverage to work with is a bit of an understatement.

  “No, I work for Sigmar because the alternative is being personally executed by Sigmar,” I snapped. You’d be frustrated in my situation, too.

  “Don’t be silly. You’ve been casting spells recently that you wouldn’t have imagined before we offed Aux. I’d say you’re pilfering from his library, and I’ll probably say it to his face if you botch your role in the coming battle.”

  I had no response to that.

  “Good thing you’re studying with me, eh? Last thing you want to do is get dependent on Sigmar’s bounties. Who knows what’ll happen after I kill him-”

  “Wait, what?”

  “Oh, come on! It’s not like he can eavesdrop on us! You have to admit that killing titans is a lucrative business. Why else would we be going after Hyperion?”

  I decided I was just going to stop talking and see how long it took for Terminal to notice.

  “After all, if I can bump her off, Sigmar would probably be a worthy challenge. Hyperion is way stronger than Aux ever was. Not sure what I’d do afterward, but if I can manage to destroy Sigmar, I’d have to imagine my options would be pretty open. Maybe I’ll go back to gardening, and see if I can get as good at creating life as taking it away...”

  Terminal trailed off. Apparently, he decided he was done justifying himself (and plotting insubordination), since he pointed to the map I was still carrying.

  “First tip – no matter what you do, don’t make the mistake of going through the actual manufacturing floor. Hyperion’s got a nasty clean room enchantment there that’ll break you up into nanoparticles if you can’t get your hands on a clean room suit. Focus on taking over the office space on the higher floors,” he explained. It wasn’t enough information to devise a proper strategy, but it was a start.

  “If we do that, what keeps them from barricading themselves in the facility until some sort of daemon police arrive and shut us down?” I countered.

  “Well, if they do that, we can blow up the doors.” Terminal pulled out a pen and drew some lines on an abstract schematic of Hyperion’s clean-room system. “If we can expose it to the usual daemonic
air and get a lot of contaminants into their system, it should go into overdrive and purge the employees, which will make getting to Hyperion herself easy. The hardware should be unaffected.”

  “Any tips for dealing with Hyperion?” Turns out that Terminal had some intel for that, too, as he pointed to a third document. This was a detailed report on Hyperion’s fighting style. I’ll spare you the minutiae, but apparently she’s very sword and board oriented. Her broadsword could cleave Aux in half if it were still alive. Such heavy weapons and armor tend to be very bad for your mobility, but if the information Terminal had unearthed was at all accurate, we weren’t going to be able to barrage her to death with a torrent of magical energy, and if we managed to trap her on the manufacturing floor after we’d overloaded it, she’d probably laugh off the purge even as her underlings were torn to shreds.

  “She can’t fly, so maybe we could try to push her off a high ledge or something?” It sounded really stupid, but it was the best strategy we had for dealing with Hyperion at the moment. Terminal gave me a nasty smile at this.

  “Let’s throw her out the window. The top floor of the facility is all offices and headquarters. Not only are we more likely to find her there, but the windows are big and probably fragile.”

  Terminal then pulled out a chart of weather data for Hyperion’s realm.

  “This part’s easy,” he claimed. “Hyperion’s part of hell is unusually cold, so dress for winter. Don’t wear heavy gloves, though, since you’ll need your fingers to operate your phone.” He put the chart away after that. What do you know? That was easy. I made a note of it since regardless of how simple it is to prepare for the climate, you still have to actually do so in order to not freeze to death.

  We managed to sketch out further some plans of attack, but even after a half hour, we didn’t come up with a more dignified way of killing Hyperion, short of perhaps trying to cook her in her suit of armor. We dismissed incineration pretty quickly, since our knowledge of titan anatomy was sketchy…and also because titans tended to enjoy greater extremes of temperature than humans could tolerate. After that, we had to adjourn and scramble back to our usual places, lest Sigmar figure out that we were trying to do his job for him and denounce us as usurpers.

  With Terminal’s intel on my side, I was able to convert our broad plan (blow up the fabrication plant, seize the offices, and knock Hyperion over) into one that I could dole out piece by piece to the coven. Despite Sigmar, we still numbered over a hundred people, so yet again, I was glad for a strict hierarchy. I could assign major elements to my trusted lieutenants and recurse my way on down to the lowliest of peons with minimal effort once I had the strategy worked out. Ideally, I would have spent even more time planning this out…actually, in an ideal situation, I wouldn’t be attacking other titans at all, but months under Sigmar have dramatically lowered my standards for what constitutes the ideal situation. The attack was fortunately set for a Friday evening, so we could theoretically spend a few days at war before we had to start calling in sick and using vacation hours at our day jobs.

  “Think of it like this,” Sigmar had told us during the briefing, “The sooner Hyperion’s cuirass hits the ground, the sooner you can go home to your normal lives.”

  Damn it all! He knew what we were dealing with and chose not to tell us!

  On Friday morning, I made a special effort to eat a wholesome breakfast (instead of my usual fare of light pastries and coffee), in the hopes it would improve my overall awareness and energy levels throughout the day. I don’t know if it helped; I can function without issue on a junk food breakfast, but I’ve trained my body to tolerate lots of caffeine and sugar. I also booted up my occult laptop to make sure I remembered my work with the material from Unfathomable Destruction. As Edgar had promised back in the day, it was definitely a masterpiece of magical theory, and were it not for the risk of an apocalypse, I would call for its wisdom to be taught in public schools. After I packed up, it was time to go to work. If there was one thing that hadn’t become more difficult over the last few months, it was passing for a mild mannered but dedicated accountant.

  One of my coworkers came up to me when I was filling out a report around 11 am. and told me I looked distant today.

  “Have you got a date tonight or something?” he asked.

  “No, that’s not it. It’s actually kind of private,” I responded.

  “I see. You wouldn’t happen to be interested in going to see a movie or anything, would you-”

  “NO.”

  And, my coworker tore off like a banshee. I hope that I hadn’t accidentally cursed him. With any luck, he would just think that I didn’t want to put up with his advances. Now that I think about it, my company has a really bad sexual harassment problem, and we should probably do something about it before someone gets groped. I resolved to look into it once I figured out how to stabilize the Sigmar situation, but I probably wasn’t going to learn anything about it from the coven.

  In order to shorten the amount of time between getting off work and getting to the coven office, I had packed a backpack with enough provisions in it to keep me alive for 48 hours before I had to resort to foraging off hell’s wildlife or begging Sigmar to give us some basic supplies. I also begrudgingly packed a practical outfit that would protect me against the impending cold. Furthermore, I’d told the coven that they needed to scrounge up everything they could if they wanted to live through the next few days. They did not disappoint. When I got to the office, pretty much everyone had at least a pack’s worth of goods; most of them had managed to get their hands on conventional weapons, and the rest could probably summon temporary ones if necessary. Some people had gone even further than I had, including Sarah, who was preparing a portable headquarters with Paul and a few other occultists she trusted. I’m honestly not sure what she saw in Paul, but maybe she could mold him into something useful.

  “Charlotte! Do you know where we can get some more of those magical batteries Sigmar gave us?” she asked me. I pulled three out of my backpack, and she immediately gasped.

  “Did you...you know...” she began.

  “No. Sigmar gave these to me for my own use because we did a good job with Dewey, remember? And, don’t suggest otherwise if you know what’s good for us,” I told her. While I relished the idea of stealing more artifacts from Sigmar and using them to strengthen myself, I had, in fact, received my latest pack of titan batteries as a gift from him. You had to take Sigmar’s generosity when you could because as today was clearly proving, you couldn’t depend on him in times of actual need.

  After a few minutes of checking in, I called for everyone to congregate in the main headquarters room to await Sigmar and the beginning of our task. Sigmar, in fact, made an unusually dramatic entrance, appearing spontaneously in the air above us with a puff of flame. Was he wearing a little cape? On anything else, that would’ve been cute.

  “Ladies! Gentlemen! Ambiguous half-breeds of partial daemonic ancestry! Are you ready to make history?” he shouted. In the interest of not getting singled out for torture (how surprising), we quickly figured out things to shout back at him.

  “Good, that’s settled! Onwards, to the lands of Hyperion!” With a thunderclap, an especially large, unstable-looking portal materialized in front of us.

  “This portal will only last a few minutes before it collapses, so you all had best get in there quickly,” explained Sigmar, thus confirming my suspicions.

  “You heard Sigmar. Let’s move,” I commanded my underlings. We formed rows of three and marched through the portal in something resembling an orderly fashion. Actual soldiers would’ve done much better, but as far as I’m concerned, human soldiers unaided by magic are no match for the rag-tag group of misfits I had at my command. Once we passed into hell, I whistled for my general staff to join me. Terminal, as the closest thing we had to a liaison with Sigmar, had forced his way into that group, and I was pleased
to see that he’d brought the maps and schematics he’d overviewed with me for reference.

  “Your guys gonna set up a base camp or something? We need electricity as soon as possible so we can start casting,” he said to me.

  That was unusually business-like of him, but he was right: we could only cast so much before our laptops, PDAs, and cell phones started complaining of low batteries, and the last thing a magician wants to do is run out of magic. This was the time for my so-called “engineer corps” to shine. As part of yesterday’s preparations, I’d rounded up everyone that Sarah told me had a background in construction, architecture, or really any sort of design work, and told them to get cracking on generators and fortifications. Today, they’d entered hell with a gasoline-powered generator and jerrycans full of fuel. This gave us enough battery recharging for about a day before we had to find more fuel, but as part of our attack we were hoping to secure one of Hyperion’s power plants, which would allow us to gorge ourselves on electricity.

  It turns out some titans are really into hydroelectric dams. Hyperion’s factory was located in a rare flat plateau among jagged mountains. Were it not for the occasional gravity-defying rock spire, or the usual skybox problems, it would fit nicely on Earth. The air felt thick enough that I didn’t expect any lung issues, but it was still cold, and I saw many people shivering even through their coats. I couldn’t see any of Hyperion’s structures from here, but according to our map, following a nearby river for about a mile would lead us to Hyperion’s primary dam. We wanted to make that our interim base of operations. I’d considered busting the dam, but the inevitable torrent of daemonic water surging through hell would probably cause devastation to realms far beyond this one, leading to all sorts of disproportionate retaliation and almost certainly denying Sigmar the use of this factory. At least the trip down to the dam was mostly downhill. Maybe Terminal had convinced Sigmar that he shouldn’t deliberately make our jobs harder?