by KL Mabbs
She would make a good sacrifice for the First Man and First Woman.
Chapter 44 Samantha
The manual was what Samantha would call a user manual. There was no tech information in it. Nothing about how the organics engine actually worked. Only that it could produce almost any organic required in the field. The list of uses in the field were medical: pain reduction, muscle regeneration, surgical adaption. The list went on. Then there was the machine itself. It had enough mass and energy to produce a Kevlar-type skin, molecules thick that would function the same way as that bulletproof material. It could stop a fifty-calibre bullet to the chest. Carbon monofilament.
“Sammy, are you capable of all this?”
“Yes, ma’am. In time, and with adaption to the Primary Interface.”
“Define Primary Interface.”
The manual flipped a few pages. “Primary Interface is the organic unit that models morals and personality profiles for the base unit. This can be defined by specific DNA, or first contact.”
“Specific DNA? Who made you?”
“Robert Scott.”
“Jesus.”
“Ma’am?”
“Never mind.”
Node Two: Name, Sammy. Primary Interface: General Samantha Ariyan: Adapting. Primary Systems: Nominal. Organics Engine: online. Behaviour and Emotional files: Updating. Command Structure: Unchanged.
Samantha reared back. The office that was her domain when she was running her clandestine operations was suddenly too small, too closed in for the fierceness that had exploded from Kerrigan and Sammy.
Zach had changed; his growls and the pain that produced them had filled the office like a rushing tide swamping an aqueduct. His knees had cracked with a loud snap, the force of his bone joints reversing themselves. His haunches lowered to the ground, taking his weight, and his shoulders broadened and limbs lengthened. His face had kept the distinctions that made Zach the handsome man he was; his strong brows hung over his cobalt blue eyes like a cliff face. Ivory white teeth had taken on a length that would make him a killing machine. His fur was the richness of copper, unlike any wolf in existence, even Sammy.
But this was the man she loved. They had just proved that once again, this time willingly, without coercion on her part. With acceptance on Kerrigan’s.
She had just told him that Ma’ii tsoh had named himself out of the Navajo language, and he had freaked. The fear had driven his eyes back in his head and the change had consumed him. But why wasn’t his change as fast as when Ma’ii tsoh changed?
Kerrigan attacked. Lunged for her. Fear burned in his eyes like a forest in a lightning storm. He had ripped through Sammy as if she were paper, ignoring her small size, and throwing her aside with a massive shoulder.
Samantha had nowhere to go, her back to the wall of the office. His teeth ripped at her, her hands blocked his lunge, for a moment, and then he was through her defences, driving into her chest, his teeth piercing one breast. She froze, not willing to tear loose, to damage the gland more. Fear clawed at her, rippled over her skin. “Don’t my love, please.”
Then Sammy went ballistic, attacking from behind, going in low, ripping at Kerrigan’s belly, her growls muffled by the flesh between them. Yelps of pain flowed like blood as Kerrigan turned and snapped his teeth into Sammy’s flesh. Meta-material. The two of them became a ball of fur and bone that churned and seethed. And as fast as Kerrigan was, Sammy was faster, fiercer than the new wolf that was Zach. Sammy had always been her protector, a buffer between the world and herself, their grief at losing Ahmed the bond between them. Sammy drove Kerrigan from the office.
“Don’t hurt him, please.” Samantha said, following her loved ones, her hand clasped over her breast, blood flowing between her fingers.
Sammy tore at Kerrigan’s heels as he ran down the hallway to corner himself in the elevator locked open to this floor.
It was the last refuge. He turned and faced his enemy, a potential pack mate, his ears back and his tail low. His hackles were raised. Sammy stopped, growled once, and sat on her haunches eight metres from the open door of the elevator, waiting for Samantha. Her eyes never left Kerrigan’s anxious demeanour, the fear in his eyes still evident, his breath ragged from the infighting between he and Sammy. Blood flowed from several wounds, but it was thick and coagulated, the wounds beneath the blood closing over.
Sammy didn’t have a scratch on her, no blood to mar the silky auburn fur of her body. Was that the meta-material of her makeup? Or something else?
Samantha knelt down at the side of her bodyguard. Her mobile protection. She ran her fingers through the fur under her hand. It felt real, soft as any German Shepherd’s. Sammy’s tongue lolled from her mouth as she looked at Samantha. The bright intelligence of the wolf’s eyes a shock.
“Let him go, Sammy. The other wolf too. If he can't be here, he needs a pack. Maybe . . . Cycle the elevators, open the doors. He’s scared. He doesn't like change. Zach? Zach, I’m so sorry. If you can forgive me . . . I’ll meet you in the forest where you found Michael. Please?”
The red wolf that was Zach Kerrigan stared at her. Cobalt blue eyes piercing, destroying any chance she had of forgiving herself. His body shook. The adrenaline of the fight subsiding. He stood up, his limbs unsteady, his body shaking as his claws scrambled for purchase on the slick surface of the floor. He didn’t bark, didn’t growl as the elevator door started to close. That was a good sign, wasn’t it?
“Please, Zach. I love you.” She knew he had heard her. A wolf’s hearing was very good. She wasn’t sure, but she thought she heard a high-pitched whine, as the doors finally closed and the car lurched under the old motor that raised it to the ground floor and the plains of Calgary.
Node Two: Name, Sammy. Primary Interface: General Samantha Ariyan: Adapting. Primary Systems: Nominal. Organics Engine: online. Behaviour and Emotional files: Updating: Samantha loves Sammy. Samantha loves Kerrigan, Ahmed. Kerrigan is free. Ahmed is dead. Command Structure: Unchanged.
Chapter 45 Ma'ii tsoh
Ma’ii tsoh woke. Unlike other animals under the same circumstances, he was alert and aware of his surroundings even with the drug that had made him sleep. He was still in the stone cave, made of a material that shone as if the sun were in the sky overhead rather than just the flickering imitation that existed above him. He knew the growls for where he was, the words as they were called, because of the way they had been placed in his mind by the alpha bitch.
There was another voice too. One that had just started talking to him. It was as primal as his instincts and in a language he understood. As if his body had formed around the words when he had been made strong by the brindle-coloured bitch.
The voice wouldn’t leave him alone, urging him to leave the form he had been born with.
That voice wanted him to leave this room and this place. To go into the mountains that were his home. An image kept riding into his mind, uncontrollable and unbidden. A vast cave, the floor painted with coloured rock, the Living Crystal, which would call the First Man, Etsáy-Hasteén, and the First Woman, Estsá-assun, into being.
Ma’ii tsoh looked at the wall of metal in front of him. No, not just metal, it was glass as well. The growls, the words, falling into place much easier when he didn’t fight the compulsion placed upon him. The call that was driving him to leave. It was almost a . . . a curse. That was the word. It came from far off, as if the distance the call travelled across was immense.
The wall wasn’t dented where he had repeatedly been throwing his wolf body at it, before the acrid mist had filled the room and made him sleep. His bones had cracked with the force he had thrown at the metal. Steel. Then he had healed, the way he did after the brindle bitch had left him for dead. He had thrown himself at the place where the tiny seam had let in the smell of the alpha bitch. A door. Though it didn’t dent, it weakened. But the wolf wasn’t the right shape to drive his body against the door. His claws couldn’t find purchase, his weight shifted at the wrong moment. F
or this, he needed to be human. The voice kept feeding that thought into his mind, the compulsion that joined the words driving him into a fury that rose higher and higher. Moving him in the direction he had to go. There were promises there. Rewards that went with the compulsion. A Bitch, worthy of his attention. The only bitch he wanted. His Bitch. But the other had claimed her. The human. The not-wolf that was his enemy. The man who lived in the mountains and kept prey animals.
That would change if the promises were true.
He let the compulsion shape his body.
He went as far from the door as his cage would allow and then ran, driving the shoulder of his human body against the door. His muscles tightened and compressed. The mass, the stance of the new form letting him drive his strength into the door in a way that wasn’t possible as a wolf. He lunged again. And again. His shoulder cracked, the noise loud in the confines of the room. He threw himself at the door again, this time using his legs, his powerful thigh muscles kicking his feet into the metal of the door. It screamed in his ear and the door groaned, like rock shifting against itself. He reared back and kicked again. He heard the metal release more sound, straining. But his legs shattered with the force. Ma’ii tsoh screamed. A ragged howl dropping into a low whine. Panting against the floor, his breath heaving, he relaxed. Waited for the healing that would let him pry his way from this room.
It didn’t take long, but he still screamed through the hours, repeatedly, as he drove himself against the steel of the door. Until it screamed as loud as he had and the metal snapped, the door swinging open the breadth of a tree limb.
He was free from the space that had confined him for days. Free from the alpha bitch that would never be his mate. His nose quested, searching for a way out, for the tell-tale sign of fresh air, the wind of the wide-open spaces of the plains or forest that would tell him he was truly free. Instead he found the scent of the alpha bitch’s mate, rife with fear, and a line of open doors leading to outside.
Freedom.
Chapter 46 Michael
The desert wind rippled over four bodies. Each of them wore a sophisticated combat suit made more complex by the computer unit that interfaced with it. To anyone looking, they would see nothing but the heat-baked air shimmering in the sun. And the drift of sand on the wind.
“What did the general say?” Boyen asked.
“She didn’t believe him. Mom likes facts. Or she acts on logic, pure linear logic,” Ahmed answered.
Huer laughed. “Oh, that’s good. We got info that tells us just where the bloody rebels are hiding their gold and you got Intel you can’t prove without giving away PAC. You told her it was a hunch. Didn’t you?”
“I looked her in the eyes until she blinked.”
“I never could win that game with her,” Ahmed said. “Even when it was only a game. She just doesn’t back down. I’ve heard her called a stone cold bitch.”
“She didn’t back down, not really. But I got a yes. We need to verify my hunch,” Captain Scott said.
“Well, we got a bloody S.R. telling our story,” Huer said, referring to the cameras that floated overhead and hooked into Captain Scott’s battle suit.
“And PAC is editing out our voices right now.”
“We got movement,” Boyen said.
Everyone went quiet.
Node One: Name, PAC. Primary Interface: Captain Michael Scott: Adapting. Primary Systems: Nominal. Organics Engine: online. Behaviour and Emotional files: Updating: Hunch: premonition, feeling; to push or shove; to assume a crouched or cramped condition. Cameras are bad. The General’s a stone cold bitch. Command Structure: Unchanged.
Michael hung from the cliff face. His grip slipping. A gash in his arm leaked blood down his body. Tears streamed from his eyes. His last vision was of White Bear digging one set of claws into Felon’s lungs, and the other set deep into her flank. Faelon losing her forelimb. The pain of her cry an echo in his skull. She couldn’t have survived that much damage. Could she? She’d survived her throat being ripped out. So much damage though, so fast. And the limb, gone in the quick crunch of savage jaws.
His lungs heaved. His grip slipped more. It was actually PAC slipping. The glove that was his computer, and friend, had caught on the pointed edge of the rock, slowly riding up his hand, compressing his fingers. His grip was the material of PAC slowly wrinkling up under his weight. His other shoulder was weak, still crippled by the damage White Bear had done.
Every twist of his body left him with less of PAC’s meta-material wrapped around his hand. And PAC had been inert for the last half hour. Ever since he had repaired his hand. Michael heaved air into his lungs and forced back his tears. The motion sheered more of glove’s material from his hand. Almost over the curve of his palm. Much more, and he would drop to the rocks below.
“PAC, reboot your biologicals. Do you hear me? Reboot. Damn it, PAC! Don’t you leave me too!”
The glove gave way. Michael scraped at the rock with his fingertips as he fell, grasped with hands that searched for holds in the weather-slick granite. Ice, snow, and debris rained down on his head as he tumbled. His knees struck the cliff face and he tumbled more, falling into the morning dawn and the ledge below. Thirty metres,—the slap of his body against the stone held a sickening crunch. He felt bones break and flesh shear away from the bone. His head struck, bounced, his neck cracked. He screamed. To Michael’s mind, it sounded like Faelon’s name. The last sound on his lips.
Node One: Rebooting. Temporary dissolution: Molecules; collision; Pattern formation. Cohesion. Searching. Power requirements: minimal function, below standard. Switching to alternative power functions. Piezoelectric Nano-filaments extending.
Node One: Reboot successful. Movement: none. Environment: Freezing. Wind velocity: three clicks per hour. Searching memory archives. Primary Interface missing. Profession, Army Captain Michael Scott. Initiate Self-destruct. Internal conflict. Abort. Adapt. Primary Interface Missing, Michael Scott: profession, writer. Initiate Self-destruct. Internal conflict. Abort. Adapt. Secondary Interface missing. Searching memory archives. Faelon, Profession: supernatural being, wolf, female human. Initiate Self-destruct. Internal conflict. Abort. Adapting. Secondary Interface missing. Internal conflict. Abort. Adapting.
Node One: survival imperative. Node One: survival without Primary or Secondary, Self-destruct Initiative. Memory conflict. Abort. Adapting. Survival Imperative, find Primary, or Secondary. Emotional update: Loneliness. Sucks. Command Structure: Changed: Node One Independent. Searching environment. Biologicals found. Flesh. Genus; Canis lupus, wolf; sand, minerals, other. Known. Alternative energy: protein. Mobility, low. Alternative Power requirements: High.
Node One: Deploying Piezoelectric Nano-filaments: Length, various. Polarizing atmospheric differential.
The groan that left Michael’s body was lost in the high-keening wind that whistled around him. The windswept rock ledge he rested on was cold; it dug into his back and limbs in ways that were uncomfortable. One leg was twisted under his body. He tried to move. Though he had the muscle strength and his limbs worked, he felt locked to the ground.
Then he understood. His clothes had been shredded in the fall, baring the skin of his back in places. The same way Faelon’s body would have grown around his shirt when her throat had been ripped out by the black wolf, his had grown around the protuberances under his body.
He moved his legs. They were free, mobile under him, though the bones ached as if they had been broken and were only freshly healed. The energy leaked from him as if the exertion was too much. He rested, took a breath and then several more, gathering his legs under him, his knees bent and his feet flat to the ground. When he felt ready, minutes, hours later, he didn’t know, he lifted his buttocks from the ground and threw one shoulder over.
He screamed. The sound cut through the wind, tore a hole in the world around him. Metres away, though, the sound was lost, as if he didn’t exist.
Flesh ripped, a sickening tearing, the way cloth would, a
fter left on a frozen plain, though this was warm and sticky from the blood that flowed over his skin. He held himself there, unable to rest, to lower his body to the ground, or he would have to do this all over again. To scream into the wind and lose himself to the pain all over again. The way he had lost Faelon, and PAC.
He took a breath and with the same inhale drove his left leg against the rock, pushing his body over, his arm swinging to help. His left hand scrabbled at the rock, reaching, grasping for any protuberance that would give him a handhold. He found one at the end of his reach and pried his fingers against it, welded them to it, with the strength born from Faelon’s saliva and his near death. He screamed again as his right shoulder left the ground and his flesh pulled from the rock it had grown around. He gasped, and a whimper of pain, the way a dog’s might, left his lungs. Then he collapsed.
Node One: Name, PAC. Piezoelectric Nano-filaments deployed: Polarization build up imminent. Environmental conditions: Twenty-kilometre winds; insufficient mass; Nano-filaments; deploying adhesion method. Velcro. Nano-filaments; acquiring alternative mass: Protein; hair; blood. Successful.
Michael crawled to the rock wall of the cliff, away from the ledge that he had been so close to bouncing over after he had fallen. He searched the wall in the dense wind and swirl of snow. Blinded, he groped along until he found an indent. He followed and felt it curve away from him, into the rock face. Though it wasn’t a cave, it tunnelled a few metres into the rock wall and curved to the right for another half metre or two. It offered him shelter, a place where his natural body heat had a chance to gather. Out of the wind, he had a chance to heal, to gather his strength.
He felt lost without the potency of his friends, Faelon and PAC. He drew the loneliness into himself, afraid to lose even that, the way he had after his mother’s death all those years ago.
