Targeting Pack [2021] <ULTIMATE ⇒>

Kael shut his eyes. He felt the pack’s separate minds, their subroutines, their limitations. Hornet could blind. Firefly could stun, but the flash-bang was set for a full room, not a single target. It would knock the Archivist unconscious, maybe give him a concussion. It might also trigger the dead man’s switch if his vitals spiked wrong.

Kael froze. “Nest, I have a clean lock. Say again.” targeting pack

Kael settled into his immersion rig, a clamshell of cold metal and warm gel, and let his consciousness bleed into the pack. He didn't pilot them individually; that was too slow. He became the pack. He felt Peaseblossom’s keen vision as his own, Hornet’s listening array as a constant, low thrum of data, and Scarab’s heavy, brutal mass as a promise held in reserve. Kael shut his eyes

They fled back through the rusting corridors, a nightmare swarm of metal and purpose. Behind them, the Archivist’s substation crumbled into silence. Kael withdrew his consciousness from the pack, the familiar weight of his own body returning like a lead blanket. He sat up, gasping, sweat cold on his face. Firefly could stun, but the flash-bang was set

Their target: a man known as the Archivist. He wasn't a general or a politician. He was a whisper in the data-stacks, a ghost who carried the last uncorrupted copy of the continental water-grid schematics on a mem-stick the size of a child’s fingernail. He had gone to ground in the Sundered Quarter, a district of collapsed arcologies and acidic fogs where the old world had been scoured down to its rusting bones.

“Contact. Human, singular. Sublevel 3, section Bravo-6. Bio-signature 82% match.” Kael’s heart, the real one in his chest, beat a slow, deliberate rhythm. He zoomed in. The figure wore a heavy coat, a respirator mask, and a hood. One hand tapped a keyboard. The other held a small, metallic case – the schematics.