Chapter 7: Powerful People
Cato-Zeken was unreasonably happy to have an excuse to get back down to the surface. The other versions of himself would have to content themselves with secondhand memories, but he got to actually do something. Maybe he would have preferred something other than fighting, but protecting Raine and Leese Talis from assassins had no moral ambiguity.
The drop pod screamed through the atmosphere, carrying six of the forty-ton bioweapons, now further tweaked for Cato’s use and, more importantly, with proper orbital backup for both combat algorithms and bombardment. That was originally how they had been designed and Cato could only alter the design so much without running into constraints he couldn’t solve. The boys back on Titan were very bright, and really he suspected Leese would have more luck tweaking it than he would. She’d taken to bioengineering in a way he never had, and was getting the best education his databases could provide.
But not at the moment, because Raine and Leese Zek were riding two of the bioweapons. He still wasn’t certain that it was best for the sisters to directly interact with their counterparts, but they could make their own decisions. Plus, he didn’t blame them for wanting to help instead of simply watching from afar.
The pod deployed silk-like drogue parachutes, then released the compression on the stored hydrogen to inflate itself and catch the air, decelerating at multiples of a standard gravity. A second later, the pod released the warframes, letting them fall the last hundred feet or so to the ground around the Talis sisters, the massive bioweapons shaking the earth with their impacts.
He’d ensured the warframes had the upgrades they needed to spot the stealthy high-rankers, painting their ghostly presences into his sensorium as he landed. For most people under the System, he had to be somewhat forgiving, because they had grown up in a framework where fighting and killing was the only answer, always. But assassins, those who specialized in killing other people rather than monsters, had taken more deliberate steps to become murderers.
It was a little hypocritical that he wasn’t going after Dyen for the same thing, but Dyen wasn’t trying to kill the Talis sisters. Cato knew that there was going to be trouble with Dyen sooner or later, but sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof. Without Dyen’s warning the assassination contract definitely would have blindsided them.
“I believe the ladies told you to leave, or die,” Cato rumbled from four throats, combat system flushing out the constant accumulation of rage from the mere presence of serial murderers. He could well imagine all the killings a Platinum-level assassin needed to have performed.
“You really shouldn’t give them time,” Leese Zek sent through the microwave communications. “These warframes all look Copper, so the warning won’t help.”
Sure enough, the warning did no more than stall the two groups for a fraction of a second before they moved in to attack. Shadows lanced out, rocks split, water whips cracked through the air, and metal threads lashed. It would have overwhelmed Cato’s original warframe, but this time he had algorithmic combat coding backing up his reactions. The six warframes broke and scattered, but not in flight.