The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Fourteen

As they traveled the cluttered interior of the busy drydock, they were aware of the stares their presence provoked. Even among the ranks of the somewhat exotic, nomadic population who traveled throughout the Withered Land, the sight of Pnoom-Ogg and Pnoom-Aig still managed to be unusually arresting. Synthetic humanoids were a throwback to the times before the Great Revocation, when the Emperium was still highly invested in space travel and Offworld empire building. Those advanced technologies were famed for creating miracles that both dazzled and frightened the normal populace.

From the perspective of Pnoom-Ogg and Pnoom-Aig, the attention they received was distracting, but no more especially unpleasant than what they normally experienced from the less sophisticated of Teshiwahur's peoples. They were synthetic humanoids, strangers among a world made increasingly more strange since the commencement of the Long Death.

Pnoom-Ogg and Pnoom-Aig, the synthetic gene robot constructs known amongst the naval militia of Peravendath as "the Duality of Kohra'andum", found the person they had been searching for over above Terash Munyatt's windward, southwestern slope on the Sinaudruim mountain range. Within the Ureeon Dockyard, the strange duo had traveled to the Level Six Machine Tekk Tooling Lab, near the open doorway to the lab's loading zone.

When Durkka-jan had assigned them the task of investigating the particulars of Layvis Kroule's business aboard the drydock built into Terash Munyatt's massive cinder-and-spatter cone, they had foregone the obvious effort of checking Kroule's airship's declared Bill of Lading inventory. The most truly valuable of the assorted cargo that the mercenary was carrying inside the hold of that ship was not going to be freely and prominently revealed on the Bill of Lading. Given his reputation and public record as a bounty hunter and high-end renegade security operative, Kroule was obviously involved in something unsavory and better left opaque to unauthorized public scrutiny.

So Pnoom-Ogg checked the Assemblage Listings showing the names of the latest arrivals into the drydock while Pnoom-Aig reviewed the latest, updated list of names for technical employees visiting or consulting with the staff of Ureeon. They ran the names against their own voluminous mnemonic database of individuals with extensive or exotic technical expertise, isolating those persons known to have interaction with unsanctioned or illegal trade in black market Tekk. They cross-checked those names against records of possible members or former members of the Fraternity Machus, the clan of enigmatic scholars who had rediscovered the Laws of the System Mages after the appearance of The Wound. The Machusians were scientists who'd once been, before arrival of The Wound, enemies of the Church of the Emperium and who had thereafter become outlaw seditionists. Amassing this knowledge had taken the pair only a few moments of computer network interfacing and a moment more of focused, intense personal concentration. And that was how they found him.

The name under which he was listed as a crewmember among the staff of Ureeon base was a false name, but it was one behind which he had twice before hidden himself so he could walk unmolested among normal humanity. Like the artificially-created fraternal twins, the man was a Synthetic, a gene'bot. But unlike them, he was a model of Synthetic long outlawed by the Emperium and by most territorial city-state metropolises on Teshiwahur.

The twins were an advanced model of gene'bot with multiple varieties of cybernetic augmentations in their neural networks, bio-mechanical skeletal and supportive musculature structure, and sensory receptors. They had been designed for military duty as sophisticated machines of war. But the Synthetic they sought was designed to be an evolutionary step upwards, beyond man, beyond machine, virtually god-like, gene'bot mutants with unusual and unpredictable special abilities. He, and the other Ultra-synths like him, was an experiment that had not been expected to survive. He did not have semi-transparent, hard crystalline flesh with overlapping segments at the joints of their limbs like the twins. He looked exactly like a normal human being, virtually indistinguishable from them. His kind had been created on Pex'Insava, the craggy disc-shaped moon that orbited the giant planet, frequently eclipsing the world's dual suns in its erratic orbit. Pnoom-Ogg and Pnoom-Aig were classified by the Post-Wound government as "industrially-produced non-human variants" and, since they had been manufactured on Teshiwahur, they were assigned as citizens the social classification of the Yur'seyn'Ahktar bloodline. The Synthetic individual for which the twins searched was classified by the government as an "Offworld non-human, hybridized evolutionary alternative" and bore the social distinction as being only one of sixty-six living beings declared to be "Alpha Progenitors".