Incorporeated with DeepSeek
The rain in Berlin doesn’t wash away the grime. It just recycles it. That’s what we were counting on.
My name’s Jannik. Or “Drossel” to the four other idiots stupid enough to crawl through the primary wastewater artery under the Bannmeile on a Tuesday night. The gig was simple: crack the main bypass valve, flood the sub-basements of the Bundestag with two million liters of recycled currywurst and worse. A "hygienic protest," Kira called it. She was our rigger, all chrome-plated dreads and a drone swarm that could map a gnat’s balls from two klicks out. The idea was to make the Platz der Republik smell so bad that the evening security briefing had to be evacuated. Standard low-level chaos. Annoy the state, don’t break it.
We were three hundred meters due south of the Kanzleramt, knee-deep in the flow. My gasmask fogged as I welded the explosive charge to the main gate valve. Fritz, our demo man, was twitching—not from nerves, but from the cheap simsense stims he’d jacked into his datajack to keep his hands steady. Behind him, Elif kept overwatch on the tunnel entrance, her cybereye glowing a dull crimson in the dark. She was the muscle. The only one of us with real combat chrome.
“Drossel, got movement on the seismic,” Kira’s voice crackled in my cochlear implant. “Heavy. Really heavy. Like, building-moving heavy. Not Polizei.”
I paused the arc welder. The concrete around us vibrated. Not the usual U-Bahn rumble. This was a rhythmic, mechanical *thud-thud-thud*, like a giant walking. “Tunnel boring machine?” I asked.
“Wrong frequency,” she said, her voice dropping. “That’s the gait of a bipedal walker. I’ve seen the schematics on the black matrix. Fraunhofer prototypes.”
Before I could call bullshit, the world above us detonated.
The shockwave didn't hit us directly, but the pressure change blew the stagnant gas back into our suits. Through the concrete ceiling, we heard the distinct, roaring *whoosh* of missile pods firing in rapid succession. Then the sky above the Bannmeile—barely visible through a maintenance grate thirty meters ahead—turned the color of a magnesium flare.
Elif scrambled up the rusted ladder and pried the grate open a crack. Her cybereye zoomed and fed the feed directly to my optic nerve. I saw the carnage.
The Knights Templar weren't a myth. They were a hardline RCC splinter—Catholic-integralist zealots with more nuyen than God—and they had just turned the government district into a free-fire zone. They dropped out of low-altitude stealth birds, but they weren't wearing standard power armor. They were piloting **Marodeur Mk. IVs**. They looked like miniature *Atlas* battlemechs, but shrunk down to the size of a shipping container—four meters of reinforced durasteel, rotary autocannons mounted on the right arms, and shoulder-mounted SRM pods. They walked through the barricades like they were made of wet cardboard.
And they were heading straight for the Kanzleramt.
Through the grate, I saw the BKA’s heavy response teams dug in around the memorial. They were using NATO standard *Panzerfaust 6* launchers and MILAN wire-guided missiles. The Bundeswehr Ehrenwache—the ceremonial guard—had abandoned their parade uniforms and were pulling out MG5s and G36s with underslung grenade launchers, laying down a suppression field that turned the granite plaza into a blender. But the Marodeurs just soaked it. One of them took a Panzerfaust to the chest, shrugged it off like a punch, and returned fire with its rotary cannon. The Ehrenwache positions evaporated in a mist of red and grey.
“Frag the pipe,” Fritz yelled, his voice cracking. “We have to get out!”
“No,” I said, staring at the tactical feed. “They’re not just attacking. Look.”
The Marodeurs moved with surgical precision. Two of them flanked left to suppress the BKA command post; three breached the main entrance of the Kanzleramt. But one, the leader, broke right—straight toward the emergency bunker entrance underneath the garden. The one reserved for the Bundespräsident and the Kanzler. They were inside. They were in a meeting. And the Templars knew *exactly* which room they were in.
The heavy infantry of the Ehrenwache counter-charged, deploying portable energy shields—rumored to be leftovers from the Eurocorps R&D—and pushed down the garden steps. But the Marodeur leader leveled its primary weapon. A particle projection cannon. The blue-white bolt hit the shield line and the Germans evaporated, their NATO-issue ceramic plates fusing to their skeletons.
We were directly underneath the garden. Right between the Templar Marodeur and the bunker entrance.
“They’re going to collapse the ceiling to get in!” Elif shouted. “We’re standing on the fault line!”
Fritz was already running back the way we came. He didn't make it. The Marodeur stomped forward, its foot crushing the concrete above. The tunnel collapsed in a cascade of rebar and slurry. I dove behind the valve we were supposed to blow. Elif grabbed Kira’s drone case and hauled her behind a maintenance pillar.
The Marodeur dropped into the tunnel with a crash that ruptured my eardrums. Its cockpit window—narrow and menacing—glowed with the blue light of its pilot’s HUD. It raised its foot to crush us like insects.
But Elif had the heavy ordnance. She yanked the shaped charge off the valve, primed it, and tossed it right under the mech's hip joint. Fritz had built that charge to blow through a meter of reinforced steel. It wasn't a Panzerfaust, but at point-blank, it was enough to sheer the Marodeur's right leg actuator.
The explosion was deafening. The mech toppled sideways, crashing into the tunnel wall, its rotary cannon firing wildly into the sewage. The pilot screamed over a loudspeaker—a prayer, or a curse, I didn't care.
I scrambled over the wreckage, dragging Kira. Above us, the battle raged. The Ehrenwache were regrouping, bringing up a MILAN launcher. They aimed at the downed Marodeur. We had three seconds to get out of the blast radius.
As we burst from a maintenance hatch into the burning garden, I saw the BKA and the Ehrenwache not as enemies, but as the only line between the Templars and the state. We were AntiFa. We hated these suits. But as two Marodeurs stomped past us toward the bunker, ignoring us completely, they didn't care about our politics. They were just obstacles.
The Ehrenwache commander, a grizzled Oberst with a ruined eye, saw us scrabbling out of the dirt. He pointed his G36 at me. For a second, our eyes met. The Kanzler was fifty meters away, pinned down in a glass pavilion, security scrambling to get him to the helipad.
The Oberst lowered his gun. "You saw the leg actuator on that thing?" he shouted over the din.
"Yes," I coughed, sewage dripping from my gasmask.
"Can you do it again?"
Kira was already patching her control rig into the Ehrenwache's targeting uplink. "Get me a missile lock and a bottle of cheap vodka," she wheezed. "I'll show you how the poor people fight."
We fought on lost ground. We held the garden steps while the Ehrenwache pulled the VIPs into a Black Hawk. I watched the President and the Kanzler lift off, the rotor wash blowing the sewer stink and the cordite across our faces. The Templars lost two more Marodeurs to our impromptu alliance—low-level street tech mixed with high-end NATO railguns.
When the helicopter disappeared over the Tiergarten, the Templars withdrew. Their mission was a failure. Our mission—to clog a drain—was a cosmic joke.
The Oberst looked at us, standing ankle-deep in mud and spent casings. He didn't arrest us. He just turned his back and walked toward the burning Chancellery.
I lit a cigarette that was somehow still dry in my pocket. Elif stared at the smoking husk of the Marodeur. Kira was crying, though whether from adrenaline or the realization that we had just helped the government survive, she couldn't say.
The rain came back. Cold, black, metallic. It washed the blood off the stones. But it didn't wash away the smell. It never does.
It was just another Tuesday in the sprawl. We won. We lost. And the pipe was still intact. Berlin always finds a way to keep the shit flowing.
