by Isaac Hooke
Aria fired her lightning bolt again, striking the Blaze mech on the other side, and taking it out of action.
Jerry meanwhile stepped out to fire his railgun and energy weapon, and he joined Lori in attacking the invisible Stalker. The thin threads of light formed by the slugs slammed into the far wall at first, but he continued adjusting his aim, and when the slugs began to spark off an invisible object two meters in front of the wall, Jerry was hitting his target.
The Shadow Hawk reappeared, once more going for Jason’s mech. That sword came down…
But again Tara was there, and intercepted with her sword. Aria was also ready, and she fired a lightning bolt at near point blank range; it stunned the Shadow Hawk, allowing Tara to get in the killing blow. Her weapon struck home, and the Shadow Hawk slumped, surrounded by a flurry of released electric energy.
Jerry had lost the Stalker, but his roaming railgun fire found it a moment later, indicated by the sparks appearing in midair. He released an energy bolt, as did Jason, and their combined attacks felled the mech. It materialized as it toppled so that Jason could watch its wreckage strike the ground.
“I feel almost bad,” Lori said. “Like I killed my sister.”
“It wasn’t your sister,” Jason said. “We’ll repair her, when we find where Bokerov is keeping the AI cores.”
A bunch of laser sights appeared on Jason and the others.
“Uh,” Sophie said.
Tanks materialized on all sides. Tanks that had been invisible only moments before. Jason counted seven in total. They were big, towering hulks, about the same size as the mechs of Jason and the others. Most of that size seemed to be due to the armor. The laser sights were sourced from a profusion of smaller weapon turrets that protruded from the front portions of the tanks like the quills of a porcupine.
The tanks were all black, save for one painted a bright crimson. A voice issued from a grill speaker built into the hull of that particular unit.
“I want to thank you for sharing your alien tech with me,” the voice said. The accent was Russian.
“Bokerov,” Jason said.
“Bokerov 52, to be exact,” the tank told him. “I’ve been wanting invisibility for a long time. I never captured anything with the necessary technology intact, before. Until you.”
The tank’s turret tilted slightly, as if to regard the wreckages of the mechs.
“That was as entertaining to watch as I imagined it would be,” Bokerov 52 said. “Pitting one team of War Forgers against another. I’m almost saddened the fight didn’t last longer. Oh well. All good things come to an end, as you Americans like to say.” He paused as if for effect. Then: “I’m going to enjoy destroying you.”
The profusion of weapon turrets on the tanks opened fire.
14
Lori had no body, and floated in a world of fractal patterns. Her existence was in a state of flux: she didn’t know what she was, or where. But she did exist, that much was certain. And she had to keep moving. Had to, no matter what.
Technically, she was Lori 5. Associated with the War Forgers of Jason 5, otherwise known as Jerry. But she still thought of herself as Lori, and Lori alone.
She still remembered being captured by the Lizardman. She had been fighting beside Jerry, shooting into the tanks that had ambushed them from the shoulder of the mountains, when a large, webbed hand had wrapped around her midsection, pinning her arms to her side, and her tail to her back. She tried to launch the plasma weapon at the tip of her tail, but the bolts shot harmlessly into the air—the tip of her tail was pressed into her lower back, just above the metal hand that held her. Her attacker looked quite literally like a giant lizardman, replete with dinosaur-like head, and scaled body. Except those scales were made of metal, and nasty looking weapon turrets emerged from vents along the right and left sides of the body. On its shoulders were especially large turrets, containing the energy beam weapons Bokerov had developed especially for the units.
Aria was captured as well, held in the Lizardman’s opposite hand. She watched as the other members of her team were destroyed trying to save Jerry. Watched as the bomb impacted, enveloping the entire area in a big, thick cloud. No one could escape that blast. No one. That meant Jerry, her love, was gone.
But there were still other Jasons out there. Including the original Jason. Maybe he’d take her back into the fold? If only she could remember where she was, and how to get out of here.
Images flashed through her head. Her body locked in a cage inside a dungeon, her body folded into a small ball to fit the confines of said cage.
And then she remembered where she was.
Bokerov 52 had tethered to her AI core and injected a custom-designed virus that had allowed him to obtain complete access to her VR. It didn’t give him admin rights to anything else, but it was enough to torture her in an attempt to extract her private keys. With those, he could read her entire database. She remembered refusing him, and enduring all sorts of terrible, unspeakable things, until finally the brute switched tactics: he secured her to a virtual table so that she could not move and placed a drip source above her head so that water dribbled down onto the center of her forehead. Meanwhile, loud music played constantly in the background. The entire effect was to batter her senses, fully and completely.
As soon as the Russian left her alone in that virtual room, she had sought out frantically with her mind, putting all of her hacker skills to use. She soon discovered a potential back door in the VR matrix. There was a section of VR code that hadn’t been patched in a long time. It took several hours—hours that she continued to endure the torture of that dripping water, and the music—before she finally broke through, and her consciousness had tunneled through the VR matrix and into the main codebase. What she was seeing around her was her own VR environment; the fractals were her psyche’s attempt to make sense of the different self-contained subroutines around her.
Antivirus software had activated the moment her intrusion was detected, and was hunting down her consciousness. Bokerov 52 was searching for her, and when he found her, he’d lock down his codebase harder than ever, and she’d never break free. So far she had managed to evade him.
But she had to keep moving.
There, that particular subroutine gave her access to one of Bokerov’s external cameras. But there was no way to access it, not without the encryption keys. Maybe she could use the back door she’d found in the VR matrix to partition and duplicate his consciousness, and then draw that duplication inside of her own VR core. It would be similar to the partition used by an Accomp; if she could subdue that duplicated consciousness, she could use it to access the different cameras, and potentially other read-only code. Movement and weaponry required write access, however, so she wouldn’t be able to affect either, unless she could convince the main Bokerov partition to grant her access, which was doubtful. Either way, it was a start.
She did some quick searching of the other subroutines around her. Bokerov didn’t have an Accomp, as far as she could tell.
Time to remedy that.
She accessed the VR matrix back door and injected the partitioning code her own consciousness used to allocate space for an Accomp in her VR environment.
Then she activated it.
As expected, lacking the provisioning code for an accompanying AI, the code created a complete duplicate of Bokerov’s consciousness. She programmed her Accomp, Rey, to continue dodging the main antivirus software, and then via the back door she drew the new Bokerov partition into her own VR.
She resided in a dank, dark dungeon. She was chained up against a wall, beside Tara, Sophie, Xin and Aria.
Bokerov entered, naked as always except for the executioner’s mask that covered the upper half of his face. The girls whimpered. Lori pulled at her binds, but they would not break free.
“Well hello, ladies,” Bokerov said. “Which of you will entertain me today?”
Panicking, Lori wrenched frantically at the chains, but they would
not give.
Bokerov smirked. He looked right at Lori. “You.”
She felt the sting of a hundred whips at once, and fresh lacerations erupted across her body. She felt so much agony that she could only gurgle.
She barely watched as Bokerov cast his gaze across the others. “Actually, scratch that. All of you will suffer today.”
Whips appeared across the other girls, too, and they screamed in agony.
And then something happened. Aria grew fangs from her teeth, and then wrenched herself free of the shackles that bound her.
She stood before Bokerov, jaw open wide, hissing, her fangs eager for his blood.
“What?” Bokerov said. “Impossible!” He waved his hand, and chains formed around her arms, drawing them outward, connected to either wall.
Smiling, Aria broke free. She casually walked toward him. Behind her, Tara, Sophie and Xin also grew fangs, and ripped out of their shackles.
Bokerov turned around and fled.
Lori had momentarily lost herself in the simulation, but she had remembered who was in control of this environment when the pain began. And now she directed the simulacrums of Tara, Sophie, Xin and Aria, or rather, the vampires they had become, to pursue Bokerov. Blood dripping from the fangs, they dashed from the cell, not bothering to use the door, but simply breaking through the very bricks of the wall that bordered it.
But they could not find him in the dungeon. Somehow Bokerov managed to log out of her VR.
No, wait... he had simply switched to a different environment. A quick toggle of a switch should prevent that... done. She’d disabled “guest switching of VR environments.”
She teleported to the new environment Bokerov had created within her VR.
The sky was black above, pocked by one or two stars. She resided at the edge of a bubbling pool of lava. The ground underneath her was made of sharp shards of obsidian. Fifty meters in front of her, Bokerov stood on a small island in the center of that lava. He was dressed in a tight, black jumpsuit. He held a large, gnarled staff in his hand, and a red cape waved on the breeze behind him.
He looked at Lori with contempt.
“You fucking bitch,” Bokerov shouted. “I’ll break you so bad, you’ll be begging me to kill you. I’ll—”
But Lori didn’t bother to let him finish. Instead, she transformed into a winged panther, and in a single leap, bounded from the ledge, tail streaming out behind her, and crossed over the lava, landing on the island.
Bokerov batted at her with the staff, but she ducked, and then wrapped her teeth around his neck. Bokerov released a fireball of surprising intensity from his body, and Lori was sent flying backward.
She landed in the lava, and pulled herself out, on fire now, like a Phoenix. Indeed, she transformed into that bird, allowing her fiery body to tower above the puny Russian.
He waved his staff, drawing a steam of lava from the pool beside him, and it smashed into Lori, but her flames simply absorbed the heat.
Then she breathed fire, engulfing Bokerov. He raised some sort of energy shield, but she simply increased the output of her flames, and they ripped right through and struck him. His flesh blackened, and he screamed.
She created a rope bridge leading away from the island to the far side of the lava, and allowed Bokerov to flee across it.
She followed him, abandoning her Phoenix form, instead becoming a ghostly specter screeching through the night.
She reached his fleeing form, and wrapped her jaws around his neck, and then pinned him to the ground. The obsidian shards cut into his cheek.
“You are mine!” she said from the side of her mouth.
Bokerov squirmed, but it was too late. Her consciousness flowed inside of his, and she took control of the partition. Just like a real Accomp, she had read-only access to all of the main partition’s subroutines, but no write access at the moment.
She accessed the external camera list. She chose one randomly, and pulled up the associated feed. She saw Jason’s Vulture. Actually no... there were two of them. And the other five mechs were also present. Aria’s Dominator. Tara’s Shadow Hawk. Xin’s Blaze. Sophie’s Highlander. Even Lori’s own Stalker. They surrounded Jason, trying to protect him from deadly-looking tanks that fired from all sides. The War Forgers fought back, but no matter how much damage they caused to the hulls of the tanks, there was always another layer of armor underneath. It was obvious that the tanks were all Bokerovs, and that they were going to win. And there was no escape, either, because the tanks completely enveloped the War Forgers, and were too big to squeeze past.
She was going to watch her friends die.
And there was nothing she could do.
No.
She had to help, somehow. There had to be a way.
She accelerated her time sense to the max, and combed through the read-only database until she found what she was looking for. Blueprints to the tanks she was seeing on the camera feed. She double-checked that there were no other blueprints that came close, and then went back to them, combing over the design. There had to be a weak spot somewhere.
But what did she know about tanks and weapons design? That was Aria’s specialty.
Aria. She had been captured with her, too. Because they were tethered, in theory she could access her database, too. She might not be able to communicate with her, but sifting through her knowledge base would give her everything she needed to know.
Or so she thought. In the end, growing frustrated, she temporarily recalled Rey from antivirus avoidance duty.
“What can I do for you, Lori?” Rey said pleasantly.
“Check out these blueprints,” Lori said. “I need help finding a weak spot.”
“Hm,” Rey said. “Vehicular design isn’t my specialty.”
“I’ve linked with Aria’s database,” Lori said. “She’s the best architect and vehicle designer we have.”
“Ah,” Rey said. “One moment, please.”
Lori waited what seemed an eternity, when in reality, only a few hundred milliseconds of real time had passed.
“Well this is interesting,” Rey said. “I haven’t finished perusing Aria’s database yet, but I’ve been studying those blueprints at the same time. You’ll notice that directly on top, behind the central, dorsal turret, there is a small latch. This shields the recharge port. I believe that by opening this latch, and firing Aria’s lightning bolt weapon into the port, you’ll cause a voltage spike that will render the units inoperative.”
“Excellent, thank you!” Lori said. She dismissed Rey so that the Accomp could return to antivirus evasion duty.
Now the question was, how to communicate that weak spot to Jason? She had read-access to Bokerov’s antennae, thanks to the partition she’d made, but no write access.
She accessed the partition’s comm code. After studying it for several minutes, she realized it might be possible to cause a feedback loop that would reboot the comm subsystem. During the reboot, she’d have a small interval to send data before the read/write access rules were enforced. It would be enough time to send a small packet of data, and that was it. No voice data.
It would have to do.
There was a chance Jason wouldn’t accept the blueprint when it was received, for fear of viruses. She’d have to make sure it had her usual header information, rather than Bokerov’s. And something else... something that would let him know it was truly her.
She returned to her VR environment and made the Bokerov partition scream once again; she dialed up the volume, directing the voice to the partition’s transmission subsystem.
The feedback loop engaged, and she received a comm reboot signal from the partition. That meant the tank’s actual comm subsystem was currently rebooting.
Through the partition, she accessed the comm subsystem and transmitted the message she’d prepared.
15
Jason fired over Lori at the tank in front of him. Jerry and the girls had formed a defensive circle around him, shielding him from
the attacks; he’d ask them not to, begged, but they wouldn’t listen. And now he would have to watch as they were mowed down one by one, because while they were unable to cause little more than dents and scratch marks on the tangos, the tanks were able to deliver quite a wallop with that profusion of turrets.
Jason aimed his laser past Lori’s head at one of those turrets. His power levels were too low to utilize his energy weapon, and he’d exhausted his railgun slugs and missiles, so he fired his laser. Tara’s laser was synced with his, and released at the same time, but a small energy field flashed into place around the target—that was another problem, not only was the hull insanely armored, but the individual weapon turrets were protected by energy shields. Each turret needed a few shots before the attacks broke through the shield to damage the underlying weapon. So, destroying the profusion of enemy armaments protruding like quills from the hull was slow going.
The lead tank jerked forward, slamming into Lori and sending her toppling onto Jason’s mech. He fell backward, hitting Sophie behind him. She slammed into the tank behind her, before pushing back. Lori straightened, followed by Jason.
He glanced over his shoulder at Sophie. The plus side of all that metal armor was that Sophie was constantly replenishing her micro machines, but she still hadn’t been able to drill through much of the thick material with them.
Jason returned his attention to the fore and fired his laser weapon again, causing Tara’s to unleash as well; the shield didn’t flash into existence this time—they’d gotten through. The turret melted.
Jason aimed at the next. That was all he could do in this battle of attrition. Fight on.
“I won’t last much longer,” Jerry said.
“You should rotate into the middle position,” Jason said. “Take my place.”
“No,” Jerry said. “You’re the original. You have to survive.”
