You realise that by disobeying the orders of Haukwode, and not attempting to maintain even the barest pretense of communication or reporting in, the entire assault team is probably aware of how you have been hacked, taken over and controlled. They have probably worked out your rather unsubtle plan to demolish the vertical slum, and can reposition and converge upon your location faster than you can bring the wall down. The Assault Team will try relentlessly to kill you now. But wasn't the original mission... something about paydata? What was that about? What happens if Haukwode gets his hands on the Skulljack (was that what they were after?), the control interface that is piloting you right now... and yanks you out? Does that kill just one of your sharded selves, or all three at once?
If only you had chosen an operator more amenable to cyberinfiltration or reconnaissance... or if there were some hypothetical hacker child genius with accelerated intelligence available nearby.
But as you reflect on the children, Dev Boy and Glitter Girl,
>>5392707>>5392711Something strikes you as very peculiar. Shouldn't they be Deafened and Blinded and Stunned, if not outright killed, from when you tried to demolish the wall - from the electroshock blast of the battering ram?
And it makes you remember what the mysterious Sixth member, the Spike Head of the assault team, actually does. Sixth Domain Cognitive Warfare. Not only is the Spike Head
>>5391908an advanced battlefield C4ISR overview unit - from the spike antennae driven into its engorged, bulbous pulsing skull - but it saturates the information space with atrocities and psychowarfare. Bewilders and disorients with illusions and shock horror imagery. Theatre-shaping operations - for the battlespace can indeed become quite theatrical and histrionic, driven by war performances. Some of the atrocities may even be real, or not. It is difficult to tell when you have a Spike Head, antennae driven into your skull.
If those children ever existed, they are probably all already dead.
As the psychowarfare illusion of the tearful children is dispelled from your mind, you are contemplating the situation with unusual calmness and deliberation, whilst taking cover behind the damaged wall.
You notice the red aimpoint targeting sniper beam has flickered out - could it be that the clouds of debris from your half-completed attempted wall demolition is obscuring or interfering with the sniper's target designator, affording you a brief moment of respite?
There is a threshing motion, a high-speed whirring buzzing sound akin to a powered drill or the scything propeller blades of a rotorcraft.
