“Get out of here, I said!” Cassandra hissed.
As the creature lay there whining, taking far too long to die, and dying far too painfully, as was their custom, Laney looked up at her sister. “Don’t say I never gave you anything.” And then she darted out of harm’s way to join the rest of her retreating forces.
Only now did she process Cassandra’s strange body markings. She retained her bald head as always, but her skin was an animated mural of animals and creatures ripped out of the Amazon rainforest. Did she mean to pay homage to the Ubuku or did she mean to do them one better? It was as if her skin was smart fabric receiving live feeds of videographers covering the jungle. But the more Laney thought about it, the more it seemed like the broadcast was coming from an Amazon rainforest spirit that had been stirred by the Ubuku, and was now focusing its wrath on the triple threat through the vehicle of Cassandra’s body.
SEVENTY
Cassandra picked up the slingshot from the hand of the dead Umbrage that had been providing her sister support just seconds earlier. He deserved having his death stand for something. He’d fought bravely, loyally, and, most importantly, well, by her sister’s side. She scooped up a bolus of nomad drool from the floor into a hollowed out sphere bomb she’d picked up from one of the munitions labs earlier. She had vacated the shell because while the latest generation of explosives might well work against the Nomads, you only got one try with that and someone else may have beaten her to the draw, meaning it was useless now.
The empty shell instead would serve her well dispensing the deadly venom. The symbolism of the egg-like delivery system was not lost on her.
With the aid of the slingshot, making her target unclear until she ultimately released its payload, she catapulted the three-inch diameter ball into the snarling mouth of Mudra’s Nomad. The creature was currently trying to flambé her with the bolus of fire erupting from its throat. But Cassandra was immune to the flames. Natty’s latest generation of nanites had seen to that. Since they were no longer fighting a single-asset war, but a mixed asset war, Cassandra had reactivated her dormant next-generation nanites.
The Nomad fell with an agonizing cry as the venom, gathered from the drool of another Nomad with its own unique toxic mix, took hold. For all of her extended bond with the creature, Mudra showed no remorse over its hanging at death’s door. Just jumped off, looking less than impressed despite the sudden turnabout in her fate. Cassandra figured she knew why.
Mudra had no doubt activated her next generation nanites as well.
Cassandra waited ever so impatiently for her sister to get out of the way before taking things further. Once Laney was finished soothing the dying beast and out of the picture, and the bit player was no longer upstaging the central actors, the drama between herself and Mudra became sharper and more focused.
One thing was clear.
This was going to be one hell of a knockdown drag-out fight with both of them next to impossible to kill.
All the same, Cassandra put her chances at less than forty percent. She’d have put it much higher a moment ago. But seeing Mudra shift into a trance with the Ubuku’s ability to access altered states of consciousness at will was all it took to convince her that she was the underdog in this fight.
“You really have to learn how to do that brainwave modulation thing,” she thought, as Mudra came for her.
SEVENTY-ONE
Turned out it wasn’t a basketball gym but a bicycle race track. Leon grimaced. At least it fit the whole nerds-on-exercise-break concept in his mind better. Even if it wasn’t his favorite sport. Panno was taking full advantage though, using the angled slopes of the track to whiz around him faster and faster on the motorbike.
Leon, standing in the oval enclosed by the track, was still trying to figure out what to do about a moving mountain of a Nomad that was virtually impervious to any and all weapons. He didn’t have time to worry about whatever the hell Panno was up to on the bike, short of finding a blind spot to come at him from, in a moment when he was sufficiently distracted by the creature. Which is what Leon would have done.
The Nomad and Leon eyed one another testily. It roared at him. So he roared back.
Then it shot a bolus of flames at him out its mouth. And he did the only thing he could; he jumped out of the way. A stunt he repeated several more times as the creature held on to its determination to fry his ass.
Every obstacle he could think to put between him and the flames was now a burning inferno itself. If this kept up much longer he was going to be fighting through a wall of fire.
What’s more, stacked storage cases meant to house rubber tires and patches, once up in flames, were adding noxious fumes to the mix of air Leon was breathing. The fancy metal-polymer composites the bikers used released toxic odors also as the bike racks with spare bikes and bike frames went up in flames. To say nothing of the proprietary aerodynamic racing uniforms and helmets. The glue-like resins the scientists were experimenting with to make the complex polymer composites might well have been drawn from rare Amazon trees.
Unless Leon missed his guess, these FORESCO techies couldn’t resist tweaking the materials-science formulas used in the construction of everything related to bicycle racing, just so some out-of-shape geeks could feel like studs narrowing the margins between their racing times and the pros.
Unlike Cassandra, Leon wasn’t immune to flames, couldn’t breathe toxic air, and honestly even all this hitting the deck every five seconds was playing hell with his hip arthritis.
And Natty, brave soul that he was, going after Truman on his own, had neglected to inject Leon with the self-dissolving nextgen nano he had injected him with during the Nano Wars. Now that this was a mixed asset campaign, it wouldn’t have been against the rules. But shame on both of them for not thinking about it at the time.
Leon sighed, biding his time. The Nomad had to run out of flames sooner or later, right? Get a sore throat? Something.
He sprinted away from the latest cover turned death trap, coughing at the fumes and trying to cover his mouth and nose as he fled with a torn piece of his tee shirt that left his stomach exposed. He hated showing off his abs when there were no women about to appreciate it. Seemed like a wasted opportunity.
He bolted towards the Nomad and up its tail and along its spine, ultimately saddling its head. The creature apparently couldn’t see him as well now that the flames were brighter than he was, neutralizing its infrared vision, which apparently it relied on more than visible light. And it could scarcely feel him on it through its armored scales.
Unsheathing his bowie knife from its shin guard, Leon dug around one of the eyes. The eye itself may have been impervious to his weapons, but that didn’t mean he still couldn’t dig it out. Once he popped it out of the socket, he severed the connecting nerves and blood vessels with one sweep of the knife, sending the eye rolling to the ground.
The creature felt that well enough. Screaming and flailing its head in an effort to throw its rider. Leon just had a few seconds before it thought to bang its head against something to relieve the pain and to squish him like a bug.
Okay, maybe not a few seconds.
Leon was now officially dangling from where he’d inserted the blade in the remaining eye as the creature banged its head hard against the wall of the coliseum. The crashing cinderblock and rubble played hell with Panno on the bicycle course, forcing him into the air to clear the hurdles. It wouldn’t be long before bright boy figured out how to turn that to his advantage.
Yep, not long at all.
Panno soared off the makeshift ramp and blew on his dart gun. The only thing that saved Leon from taking a dart to the back of the neck was the eye he was currently glommed on to, wedged free of its socket. Leon grabbed hold of it to cushion the fall from twenty-four feet up in the air. The eye should have ripped away from the nerves and blood vessels under his weight, but these creatures were made of hardy stuff. Instead he dangled like a bonbon before the enraged creature and its
snapping mouth. The dinosaur flicked his head, sending Leon high into the air, still holding on to the eye. He felt like a kid on a swing set, but he knew when he swung back down he was going to be in the Nomad’s mouth, so he cut the lines attaching the eye to the creature with his bowie knife and took his chances with gravity instead.
His landing knocked the wind out of him. As he fought for air he also fought to get a bead on Panno. Panno made it easy on him by driving his bike over him. Leon could hear a couple of his ribs cracking even over the sound of the bike’s roar. He didn’t get a chance to indulge the pain with additional feelings of remorse. Because as Panno was driving away, he craned behind him and stood up in the saddle to pepper Leon with poisoned darts from his blowgun.
Leon staggered to his feet. Laughed when he saw that the Kevlar had caught the darts. “You know the hardest thing about these mixed asset wars? Deciding what to bring and what to leave at home,” he said, reaching for the dart gun in the small of his back. He gingerly pulled the poison darts out of him with the help of his skin-tight leather gloves and inserted them into the dart gun. “For instance, you might think it’s foolish to bring a dart gun without the darts. But I beg to differ. It’s all about anticipating the kindness of others.”
Taking aim, Leon fired the dart gun at Panno. It wasn’t easy, because Panno didn’t have the decency to stand still for his lecture. Instead he was racing his bike in and around the flaming pyres. In all fairness he wasn’t thinking of them as useful for blocking Leon’s sight line. He was thinking of avoiding the boluses of flames coming at him from his blinded, enraged Nomad.
He was fighting to regain psychic control of the beast. But the pain of the headgear that typically commanded its attention was currently being overridden by the pain from having two of its eyes gouged out.
Suddenly Panno came out of nowhere, soaring through the air on his bike and sticking his tongue out at Leon. Panno had meant only to mop up the blood from biting down on his own lips unwittingly coming off of one of his jumps. So Leon did the only natural thing; he hit him with the dart, right smack on his tongue. Panno just laughed as he threw himself from the bike, ripped his vest open to expose his torso and beat his chest at Leon. Leon emptied the rest of the darts into his upper body.
Then it dawned on him.
Panno wasn’t exactly playing fair. This wasn’t a show of bravery. This was a reminder that he’d turned on his next-generation nanotech. The poisoned darts were a joke. The nanites would have used the venom as a source of food, same as everything else.
Realizing how outmatched he was, Leon didn’t have time to fear for his life. Stabbing pains were taking their toll all over his body as if he was being knifed to death. There could be only one explanation.
The voodoo doctor Jacko.
But Leon didn’t believe in that shit, so he shouldn’t be susceptible. Maybe he’d seen enough in recent weeks to believe anything. Maybe his sense of what separated reality from fantasy wasn’t as clear as it once was. If that were the case, he better get his head in order fast. Because Panno was coming for him and he had no idea how to neutralize that guy, working at a hundred percent, far less working impaired like this.
SEVENTY-TWO
Cassandra was making Mudra dance for her to avoid the ricocheting boomerangs bouncing off the surrounding debris. She kept no less than five boomerangs in the air at one time, juggling them better than a circus performer. It was one more way to honor the dead Umbrage lying in Mudra’s wake by employing the weapons they’d left behind. Leave it to Mudra to keep just clear of the knifing blades surrounding the edges of each boomerang despite it being near impossible to calculate the rebounding trajectories. Apparently it wasn’t so hard as all that from inside that trance of hers. Cassandra doubted Mudra was even making use of her mindchip and her nanites for that purpose. But Cassandra was, which left that much less mindpower for anticipating what came next.
And what came next was a tail growing out of Mudra’s lower back.
The tail, acting like a third arm, caught the boomerangs coming her way and flung them back at Cassandra faster and harder and along even more complex trajectories. Neither her mindchip nor her nanites had ever been maximized for mathematics—the kind it took to calculate where the boomerangs would come at her. That was enough of a problem for her to start thinking of another game to play.
Even as the boomerangs started taking a bite out of her. Each slice healed by her body nanites left that much less recuperative ability to bounce back from another blow. She only had so many nanites and too many blows at once would occupy them sufficiently so that they were unable to stymie a more serious attack.
Think fast or die, Cassandra!
Reading her mind and mocking her, Mudra said, “Think fast or die, Cassandra!”
If Mudra was inside her head, it meant her nanites had hacked Cassandra’s nanites. If they had enough time to continue their code-modifying, she might be able to shut down Cassandra’s defenses and her recuperative abilities altogether.
Cassandra let the boomerangs reach her. One of them wedging in the front of her skull, just below the hairline. Another, the back of her skull. She stopped the blades just short of her grey matter, beefed up the area around them so they wore now more like defensive armoring. She did the same with the boomerang blades she caught to the back and front of her torso.
Meanwhile she hurtled herself at Mudra, her cutlass in hand. Swiped with the blade, nearly cutting her in two at the midsection, as she head-butted her with her crown of blades. Mudra had put both arms up defensively anticipating the head-butting, and it cost her both arms from midway down the forearms, the hands falling to the side of her. Cassandra wasted no time turning her face to mashed potato with repeated head-butts.
As Mudra wrestled with her, she shape-shifted her stubs into spears to stab Cassandra back with. As Cassandra used the boomerangs in the front and back of her torso to continue to work on Mudra’s midsection. Twisting about herself like a power-rotisserie, slicing away at Mudra’s core.
Mudra’s fighting had fallen off quite a bit since having her skull crushed in. Cassandra figured she must have damaged Mudra’s mindchip.
The poisoned-tip boomerangs were also doing a lot more to Mudra than the spears at the end of Mudra’s hands were doing to Cassandra. Especially with Cassandra’s own hands free and able to block the spearing motions and in some cases turn them against Mudra.
Mudra’s still dying Nomad coughed up a bolus of spit meant to set the room afire, no doubt to put it out of its own misery. Cassandra shoveled the saliva up with a tile plate that had fallen from the ceiling and dumped it on Mudra. She lit her afire by yanking one of the Nomad’s scales out and scraping it against the floor. The spark was enough to turn Mudra into a sacrificial virgin offered up to her gods.
With that, Cassandra turned her back on her and started looking for a way out of the crater. The path out following the earlier deliberate cave in of the roof by Mudra and her beast that her sister had taken was now blocked by a subsequent cave in caused by Cassandra’s and Mudra’s tussling. Cassandra was intent on heading in the direction in which the war sounded as if it was being waged in earnest, more so than in any of the other directions.
She’d barely made it to the crater’s lip when she heard behind her, “Where are you going?”
Cassandra turned in the direction of the voice.
Mudra was standing in the well of the crater, wiping her lip. Fully restored except for the last of the blood at the back of her hand she’d just brushed clear of her mouth.
“Haven’t you heard the expression, ‘Just die already?’” Cassandra said, footing it down the sloping wall of the crater.
She didn’t get very far.
The belly of the fallen Nomad ripped open from the inside.
Out crawled not one but two Umbrage. These were more blue-colored than green like the others. It took Cassandra a beat or two to register that was because these two were females.
&nbs
p; They immediately flanked Mudra, tracing a circle about her and forcing Mudra to turn counterclockwise with them.
They both lunged for Mudra at once, pulling her arms free of her torso and her legs free.
The firstborn grabbed her head next and twisted it off while the second born contented herself with the torso, holding on to it until the twisting motion freed the head.
Both the female Umbrage feasted on the head and the torso. The venom from their mouths was putting a quick end to any notions Mudra might have had of reforming herself.
Cassandra finished descending into the mouth of the crater. “You two are more deadly than the others.”
“Of course,” the second born said, swallowing the latest bite from Mudra’s torso. “We’re the females.”
Cassandra snorted. “Welcome to the party.” She turned her back on them and ascended the pit wall.
When she was back up at the top of the depression she glanced back at the two women. “Typical babies. First comes eating, then comes pooping over all God’s creation. Which I’m guessing, in Leon’s case, isn’t such a bad thing.”
She yanked the boomerang blades out that she’d adorned herself with and tossed them to the ground. “What the hell did you do that for?” Cronos said, hiking by at just that moment.
“The act was getting old,” she said.
Swallowing hard, Cronos said, “I could have stood an encore performance.” He nodded in the direction of the army of morphing bots marching their way. These were shapeshifted into robo-bats, crawling their way along the walls, the ceiling, and the flooring as much with the spiked horns on their wings as their talons and beaks.
“God, I hate those things,” Cassandra said. “Shoot one of them, you just make ten babies.”
“Tell me about it. How do you think there came to be so many chasing me down?”
Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1) Page 57
