by Phil Wrede
She heard a mechanical groaning at her feet, and although she recognized its source, she didn't consider it a threat in the first second after it made itself known. That mistake nearly proved her undoing, as a single, barely-functional One-Ex lifted its sole remaining limb to take a shot at her out of vengeance. She even heard the emitter charge up in the second before the blast made contact, cutting across her back just above her shoulders. Lady Cyber-Knife could feel her skin pucker and peel away where it struck her body, before ripping through the wall and flying into the nothingness outside.
Even before the damaged tissue had been sloughed away, before her body could start generating new cells to repair the obliterated ones, Lady Cyber-Knife strode over to the remaining One-Ex and lifted her right foot above it. The heavy mechanical contraption stretched from the middle out, splitting just the way a bird's foot spread. When it had reached its maximum extension, she brought it down on the alien robot ninja's head, cracking the weakened armor like an eggshell until it, too, split completely along its long axis. The plasma projector in its sole intact arm, which had been spinning up for another shot, switched off reluctantly, the hum of its motor fading out before disappearing entirely.
Although she didn't need to, Lady Cyber-Knife probed at the wound on her back. She could feel the burned skin flaking away from her body, and when she brought forth her hand to look at it, she saw no blood. In a few moments, it would have been like the One-Ex's attack had never even happened. Even her clothing had begun to repair itself, the fibers regenerating and twisting around each other to close the gaping hole that the plasma shot had made. She stepped into the elevator cautiously, deliberately, putting distance between her and the wreckage one step at a time, until she arrived at the doorway through which the One-Exes had swarmed. As she stepped through it, the doors slid shut from both sides, slamming into one another with a thud of finality. She pressed the button for the very bottom floor, and, for the first time today, took a moment to rest, the Cyber-Sword in her hand.
EARTH-363 THE PAST (60 DAYS EARLIER) The planet was a desert. Every planet on the other side of every transdimensional doorway the team had walked through was a desert of one variety or another, but not all of them had had every single drop of moisture wrung from the air and earth. There was no water anywhere on Earth-363, which meant there was no life, or at least there shouldn't have been. The sun hung in the midday sky, haloed by all the noxious chemicals in the air, the poisons left behind from the invasion. Bolts of pink and green stitched through the clouds, shifting imperceptibly as a hover chopper cruised over endless dunes of dust and rock. The chopper was itself only barely visible; stealth mode made it appear no more than an odd shimmer in the air. If no eyes existed to see the vehicle, there would've been no need for stealth mode, but if nothing resided on Earth-363, there would've been no need for the chopper there. The chopper had a crew of four: Winston, up front in the pilot's seat; Tracy sat next to him in the co-pilot's chair, in overall command of the mission; Anwan oversaw navigation, sitting in the secondary cabin with his back to the pilot; and Semi rode in the lower part of the vehicle, waiting to spew thousands of bullets a second from the chopper's belly gun. The chopper carried one passenger, and she dangled out the open hatch on its port side. “Life signs, five kilometers,” Anwan reported, his voice audible over the chopper’s engine through implanted radio communicators. A thin strip of metal lead from their throats up to the back of their right ears. “Switching to silent running,” Winston said, flipping a green square on his control panel over to red. The noise in the chopper dropped dramatically; if someone carried a pin, everyone aboard could’ve heard it drop. “Ma’am,” Tracy said, tilting nir chair generally in Lady Cyber-Knife's direction, “we’ll need you back inside now." Lady Cyber-Knife took a great heaving breath of air before she leaned back inside the chopper, falling under its protective cloak. Her metal joints clinked as she walked across the bit of deck plating that separated her from her mission couch, a large wire-and-mesh chair suspended from the craft’s ceiling. She languidly sat, and clinked her gloved fingers against the chair’s metal arms. Lady Cyber-Knife rested her head against the cradle at the crest of the chair’s back, cueing a a small probe to extend from its framework into a port just at the base of her skull. She winced just a little as the probe docked, opening the custom-arranged dossier on the planet behind her eyes. Her cheeks flushed subtly, her pale skin turning red for just an instant. Silently, she started flicking through her briefing, even though every one of these shitty planets they'd visited was basically the same. Tracy kept their face angled back to the chopper's rear, even though Lady Cyber-Knife could hear them perfectly well in her ear. “Earth-363 is the textbook example of a dead world. No remaining natural resources, an environment absolutely hostile to life as we know it; setting foot here is tantamount to a death sentence. The extreme nature of the conditions here trace their origins back to the level of resistance with which the population met us upon initial contact. After some of our troops died in the opening hostilities, the President decided to send a message. The Centers for Disease released a pathogen code-named 'Vindicator' that -” “Sir,” Lady Cyber-Knife interrupted, “could we have a quiet approach inside and outside the craft, today?” “I suppose,” Tracy replied after a pause. “Thank you, for shutting the fuck up,” Lady Cyber-Knife spit. “Shutting the fuck up...” Tracy's voice trailed off. “Shutting the fuck up, Major," Lady Cyber-Knife said wryly. “Shutting the fuck up, Lady Cyber-Knife,” Tracy agreed, turning themself back towards the front. Thin-faced but muscular, Tracy could never quite find the right way to sit in the chopper's seats, and the bun into which they pulled their long brown hair during missions always bumped against the head rest. They'd tolerate any amount of sitting discomfort, however, as long as it meant not having to run into tunnels packed with furious death, again and again, like Lady Cyber-Knife did. Teaching people to use their preferred, gender-neutral pronouns had long proven agony enough, thank you very much. Lady Cyber-Knife pressed her back against the chair, relishing in the quiet and the cold, logical kiss of the data flowing into her mind. There was nothing messy about this entwining, no vagaries, nothing left to chance, just knowledge. She had whole oceans of it in her mind - which was more than this dusty shit planet could say for itself - and she gained more every time she was deployed on a mission. She wore a black body stocking, made of a thick, though breathable, synthetic material, that molded itself to every curve of her body and stretched from the top of her throat, to her wrists and ankles. The computerized tailors had sewn the multipolyweave from millions of microscopic layers of fabrics, insulated from weather, resistant to edged weapons and gunfire, and intelligent enough to repair itself when damaged. Over the stocking she wore a dark grey vest and a silver belt; the vest sported plenty of pockets, though most lay open and empty, and a single holster dangled from her belt, fastened around her right thigh. It, too, was empty. Her boots reached nearly to her knees, and her gloves almost to her elbows. She clinked her fingers against the arm rests as the briefing data finished its upload to the biocomputer that had replaced most of her brain. She expected to face the same foes she'd only come to know better since stepping out from behind her desk. ARNs. Autonomous Resilient Nonhumans. Alien robot ninjas. They held their territory maniacally, fighting to the final, functioning warrior. Lady Cyber-Knife wondered how that qualified as logic, why nothing in their calculations recommended preserving resources for another time, instead of expending them all, every time. Men would do that, the human rebels. They would preserve their lives, if they understood there was no sense in wasting them. Machines didn't turn tail and run like men did. Men, no matter how numerous or powerful, could be killed. Long ago, when manufacturers identified a critical flaw in their machines, they would recall them, take them out of circulation in a half-hearted attempt to make it seem as though they had never existed at all. Lady Cyber-Knife felt she had set out to do those corporations one better, for she didn't intend to rest until
she had wiped every trace of The Triumvirate, the ARN's shadowy puppeteers, and their spawn from the multiverse. She'd never met them - no one ever had - but she knew that when they finally did meet, they never would again. The moment she laid eyes on them, she would kill them, kill them deader than any human thing had ever been killed. Intelligence had found ARNs on Earth-363, ones who might know the whereabouts of The Triumvirate. Their hiding place would stick out like a sore thumb. The enemy would have formulated contingency plans. Lady Cyber-Knife had once overheard a colonel telling General Dinesh that you could drive yourself crazy trying to examine all the variables and plan for every possible obstacle. Better to go in so hard and so fast that the enemy had no chance to execute; make sure the conflict takes place on your terms. She was satisfied to be a weapon, to go and kill everything in the direction in which she the Complex pointed her. Doing this fulfilled the destiny for which it had created her. Anwan's voice interrupted her reflection: “Two kilometers' distance from target.” “Ready for the drop,” Tracy said, pulling a pair of silver aviator sunglasses from a pocket above their left breast and sliding them over their face. The lights in the cabin dimmed; even though the chopper should have been invisible to everything from the naked eye to the most sophisticated sensor suite, it didn't pay to take chances. Until the drop, they'd keep electrical consumption and transmission to a minimum, with one exception. Even through the armored hull, Lady Cyber-Knife could hear Semi's baby, the super-automatic needle gun, power up, ready to go. Lady Cyber-Knife stood up, spun her hair around, and started equipping herself for the mission. A plasma blaster - styled just like her, sleek and deadly - went into the holster on her right thigh. Two fist-sized plasma grenades went into pouches just below her shoulders. To the left side of her belt, she clipped the Cyber-Sword's scabbard, worn and slightly torn. She tapped a little stud on the side of her chair, and a compartment slid open, revealing a shining sword, with a bare, golden hilt. She hefted the Cyber-Sword's reassuring weight in her hand for a moment before sliding it into the scabbard. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath. When she opened them again, she was ready. “One kilometer,” Anwan reported. Lady Cyber-Knife stepped to the deck's edge as the vehicle silently descended, kicking up ever-increasing whorls of sand into a dozen miniature dust devils. She could hear Tracy's voice command in her ear - "Deploy!" - as she leapt from the chopper. She stayed hidden in the shadow of its invisibility as her boots hit the ground, but only for a moment; the team sped off to orbit the target site, providing up-to-the-moment intelligence and cover as she approached. “Anything between me and the target?” she asked. “You have clearance to approach,” Anwan replied. “Hey,” Semi chimed in, “how about leaving something for us to do this time? I hate getting all worked up every time we go on a mission, only to not ever get off, ever, during that mission.” “Would you not be so goddamn disgusting,” Winston said, “at least, not on the clock?” “Oh, what, did I offend your delicate sensibilities?” Semi said, blowing a raspberry into her microphone. “I'm just amazed you don't understand professional decorum, after all this time.” “I can do plenty of things like a professional,” Semi almost cooed back, “which you'd know firsthand if you didn't like to shove huge sticks up your ass by yourself.” Anwan got in on the action now. “Hey, not everyone gets their jollies through dismemberment and murder. Some people like a big old stick up their ass just fine.” A loud clicking sound echoed across the network; Lady Cyber-Knife winced, as it felt like the noise was bouncing around her brain. “Speaking of professional decorum,” Tracy said, “what part of, 'priority radio silence' do you motherfuckers not understand?” Lady Cyber-Knife smiled and shook her head a little as the voices inside it clammed up. She could already feel the planet's dead air sucking the moisture out of her lips. Her feet flexed against her boots and she cracked her knuckles, each one making a sound like a revolver's hammer slamming down. The enemy was right in front of her - all she had to do was meet it with that same hammer-like force. She blinked in quick succession, four times, feeding a digital Heads-Up-Display into her mechanical eyes. Anwan had tagged the source of the energy readings with an electronic tag; it showed up as a little red flag in her vision. She'd landed exactly a kilometer away. Lady Cyber-Knife took off at a dead run, kicking up little fountains of sand every time she planted her foot. She reached cheetah-like speed in an instant, and almost before she knew it, she'd reached her destination. She'd scaled a shitty little sandy hill, one that barely rose high enough to qualify as a hill. Certainly, the enemy's stronghold wasn't going to be something as obvious as a sandstone castle or a spire spun from glass. She switched her implanted scanners from passive to active mode, trying to narrow the focus of the energy readings. Had the enemy hidden its base in an underground cavern, or had they thrown a huge cloaking net around it the second any activity around the transdimensional gateway was detected? She couldn't find anything beneath her feet - was this facility decentralized? Did she stand above miles and miles of networked tunnels and bulkheads? Tracy's voice sounded in her ear: “Lady Cyber-Knife, report.” “I have difficulty pinpointing the site, Major,” she replied. “You're right there,” Anwan said. “You should be able to reach out and touch it.” “Well,” Lady Cyber-Knife said, “I do not detect it underground, and if it sat on top of the ground I would have identified it by now.” “You would've run into it,” Semi said. “That, too.” Lady Cyber-Knife thought about this for an instant. “I should have, but I did not.” As her voice trailed off, she thrust her right arm skyward, but wasn't even able to fully extend it before it smacked right into something that shouldn't have even been there. It felt strong, metallic, and warm. She looked up, but didn’t see anything at all. When Lady Cyber-Knife flicked her visual filters over a couple of settings, and rotated her arm so she could press the entirety of her palm against the mystery structure, everything suddenly became clear. She could feel the heat of antigravity pads, track the circuits radiating out across the skin, which in turn were fed by power generators buried inside. The generators ran all sorts of other systems, and as soon as she began to identify those, Lady Cyber-Knife knew what she faced: the enemy was operating out of a airborne, camouflaged facility on Earth-363. “Never mind, Control,” she said, her hand fingering the Cyber-Sword's hilt. “Proceeding with operation.” Lady Cyber-Knife couldn't see a seam in the facility's hull, so she just decided to make her own. She whipped out the Cyber-Sword and slashed in a long arc above her head. The piercing sound of metal shrieking against metal brought with it no visual cues; the Cyber-Sword largely vanished as she swung it, but any resistance the hull gave her fell away in an instant, so she knew she'd gotten through. She jumped up, into the empty space, trusting she could handle whatever came her way. The outside world vanished as she came face-to-face with impossibly tangled bundles of cables that threatened to wrap around her like an angry cephalopod. She slashed out with the Cyber-Sword once again, and the offending cables fell away as easily as jungle brush. She'd climbed into the belly of the craft, where no one was meant to go. In the darkness, she found it slightly difficult to tell how far this morass of wires and conduits stretched, so she put away the Cyber-Sword and flexed the fingers of both her hands like claws. In an instant, they became claws; metallic talons shot out of of her fingers, ripping through the material of her gloves. She struck out, again and again, climbing up through the crowded cavern, indiscriminately tearing away anything that threatened to impede her progress. She reached deck plating above after a long minute, and with a swift, two-handed swipe, ripped through it. Lady Cyber-Knife emerged into a domed room that stretched out far further than she'd expected it to; in truth, it looked like this one room comprised the entire facility, supported by the rows of engines below. A fairly pathetic cluster of computer banks sat in the middle of the room, their multicolored displays wildly flipping from one cascading rainbow to another, while about two dozen technicians sat around them, hunched over curved consoles. The grey floor on which they stood matched almost perfectly t
he slate color of the clothing they all wore, a generic industrial coverall. Thousands of images - from thousands of Earths - sped across the dome above, bunching themselves into categories that Lady Cyber-Knife found herself uninterested in deciphering. Humans? she thought to herself. She'd heard a tale or two of cybernetically-altered humans, taken as captives by the ARNs and surgically altered. She hadn't seen any, and believed they carried no more weight than myths. No one had ever actually seen one of these sub-humans. Had she found a fortress of collaborators, eager to betray The White Zone, or could the enemy have altered its tactics, employing its slaves as expendable worker bees and expendable, half-human infantry? Another moment of examination buttressed the second half of her theory, that she had come upon perverted monstrosities. The people looked like the ARNs had hacked them apart with cleavers and band saws, and reconstituted them around cores of mechanical garbage and cast-off, obsolete parts. One man held his hands up to the oversized lenses that had replaced his eyes, struggling to manually keep them in focus. Another woman crawled along the floor on treads better suited for a battlefield vehicle; the entire lower half of her body gone. A couple walked next to each other with their heads bent at opposing 45-degree angles, forced to do so by the mechanical brain they both shared. Another still stood in front of a computer console with his arms physically linked into it; countless cords and wires running between man and machine indicated that he could never leave his station. One more technician, his eyes bleary and the metal plates around his collar beaded with the condensation from his sweat, looked up just in time to see Lady Cyber-Knife push herself through the deck. She couldn't believe no one had heard her cut apart the plating in the first place, although she knew what office work could do to the human mind. The technician's jaw dropped. He pointed at her, his fragile-seeming mechanical finger trembling in the air, and screamed, the remains of his human voice barely audible underneath the burst of static that sounded from his throat. All the other workers started, roused from their tasks. About half froze in terror, while those mobile enough tried to flee. She never understood why they ran. They had nowhere to run, and even if they knew of a place, she would catch up. As if responding to some sort of offstage cue, a trio of security guards - muscular, square-jawed, and mostly human-looking, probably to further sharpen the divide between them and their charges - emerged from the other side of the computer towers. They wore grey coveralls, had orange bands around their biceps, and carried enormous pistols. The guns were nearly bigger than the hands that held them, which meant they definitely outsized the heads of the rest of the crew. Any technicians who had remained standing hit the deck as soon as security arrived. Lady Cyber-Knife smiled; she didn't want this whole mission to be a fucking snipe hunt. The security guards didn't even bother to spread apart as they opened fire simultaneously. Lady Cyber-Knife ducked under their bullets as they passed over her head, hitting the dome and actually cracking it. As she stood back up, she thought to herself that these resistance fighters could either afford only really powerful guns, or really shitty building materials. The guards kept shooting, but in little more than the blink of an eye, Lady Cyber-Knife closed the distance between them, racing through the glut of panicky technicians. She moved so quickly that the guards lost track of her, and their eyes bugged out as she stared at them with no passion in her expression. Talons still extended from her fingers, she made short work of the first guard, cutting apart his wrist on his shooting arm, gouging his face, then slashing open his throat. As he grabbed at his neck, spraying blood and lubricating fluid from his mechanisms all over his comrades, Lady Cyber-Knife gripped both the second guard’s forearms, applying so much force that his tibias and fibulas just snapped between her fingers. Bone shards flew everywhere, and one even cut Lady Cyber-Knife beneath her left cheekbone. The wound immediately began to close, her red blood shining against her pale skin. She jammed a hand into the flesh of his mandible and tore all the soft tissue loose, bringing a handful of silken, filament-thin cables with it. The second guard collapsed to the ground right next to the first, their legs weakly kicking in blackly comic mirror images of one another. Upon seeing this, the third guard dropped her gun. She didn’t holster it, didn’t hold it above her head to make a big show of disarming - it clattered to the ground meekly, making a sound not at all like its authoritative booming from moments ago. Her hands shot towards the sky, and she tried to genuflect on her knees, but she’d already forfeited the right of surrender. Lady Cyber-Knife gave her a swifter death than her fellows, though, when she, in one smooth movement, freed the Cyber-Sword from its sheath and then freed that guard's head from her shoulders. She turned to face the technicians, who had mostly clustered together at the opposite side of the dome, as if a few hundred feet of open air would spare them from a gruesome fate themselves. Several screamed as Lady Cyber-Knife made eye contact, though most gazed just past her vacantly. Glimmers of humanity shone out from too few of the humans playing host to the slave technology parasitically embedded inside them. It was one thing to just blithely dispatch those who actively tried to kill her, but another entirely to butcher the people cowering before her. Even if only a drop of humanity remained within the beings before her, that meant they had the same mental frailties, the same emotional vulnerabilities as any other human, and Lady Cyber-Knife could exploit them. She sauntered over towards the technicians, making a big show of wiping the guards' blood off the Cyber-Sword’s blade before sheathing it. She rested her right hand on her hip as she came to a stop, looking back across the crowd one more time before opening her mouth. “You know who I am,” she said, after a moment, “and you also know what I want. If any of you possess useful information about The Triumvirate's location, or their activities, wins passage back to the White Zone. Our scientists will try to make you human again, to ensure you do not end up like them.” She punctuated this sentence by pointing back at the dead guards, whose blood had finally stopped steaming against the cool deck floor. A bulky man near the back of the group pushed a few people aside as he walked towards Lady Cyber-Knife. His hair was sandy, and cut close to his head. His mechanical nose was weirdly narrow, and his upper lip curled over his teeth in a hateful sneer as he spoke. “What you want, it's too well protected. You can interrogate us one at a time, make each of us watch, and you'll still never get it,” he stated. Lady Cyber-Knife walked up to him; the group shrank back from her, but the man who'd spoken stood his ground, foolishly thinking that his added bulk and his height - he was over a head taller than she was - would armor him against her wrath. As she jammed a clawed finger into his head, directly below his ear, he learned how wrong he was. She gouged his face all along the curve of his jaw line, tearing open the metal and through his flesh, all the way down to the bone, grabbing his head and wrenching it around as he screamed and tried to escape. There was no escape, though, not until she allowed it, and she dropped him to the floor in a fresh lake of his own gore. She lifted her right foot and brought it down on the man's head, smashing it open like a ripe melon. The crowd screamed as one, a chorus of terrified voices. She looked up at them, and the sentence she didn't have to speak was, Wouldn't you prefer a better end than this? Two technicians raised their hands: a short, stocky woman, with telescoping eyes, and a shorter, stockier man, with a hundred fingers on each of his hands. They waved them back and forth to get Lady Cyber-Knife's attention. The man opened his mouth first, saying, “They're on Earth-3337. The one where the Army Corps of Engineers drilled into the planet's core and turned its surface into an endless range of volcanoes.” Then, it was the woman's turn. She slapped the man in the face. “No, you idiot!” she cried out. “They moved to Earth-8200, the one the Complex uses to field-test all their planet-killer ordinance. No one could survive on a lava planet, but they'd never think to look for him on the one they're always blowing up!” “I'm telling you, it's Earth-3337, you stupid bitch!” the man yelled back. “No wonder you weren't named Triumvirate Liason,” the woman replied, “you're even stupider than the Comm
ander said!” The male technician hit the female technician in the face so fast that he didn't even wind up. He looked terrified as he pulled his hand away; he hadn't known what he was doing as he did it. He had cut his knuckle open on the rims of her eyes, and as she wiped his blood away from her face, Lady Cyber-Knife could the expression on the woman's face shift from shock to rage. A single brush from her hand would not suffice - blood kept dripping down her face. It accented her frizzy red hair weirdly well. Now, the woman took her turn. She bulled into the man and knocked him to the deck, and stayed on top of him even as they hit the floor. She pinned his arms under her substantial legs, so he couldn't even throw them up in weak defense as she pummeled his face. The thick thwacking sound of meat smacking against meat seemed to shock everyone except her and Lady Cyber-Knife. He cried out at first, but the noises he made grew more pathetic with every blow she struck. His head, too, bounced from side to side with each punch - the blood spraying from his face to the floor formed a halo around his head. With each punch, she screamed another word: “Eighty! Two! Hundred!” The remaining crew members smashed themselves into the tightest cluster they could manage, trying to carefully inch themselves away from the mess before them. Lady Cyber-Knife sighed inwardly; she had managed to push their fragile minds past the tipping point between sanity and panic. She wondered if these cybernetic minds had flaws that made them weaker, more susceptible to stress. Those were thoughts better left for another day, for she could see she would not get anything actionable from this group. One more technician cried out, “What about Earth-5069? Have you been there?” but it was of no use. Lady Cyber-Knife stepped to the control console just next to the gaggle of technicians and swiped a series of yellow indicator lights down, until they turned a deep red color, barely visible against the shiny black surface of the console itself. Immediately, the soft humming noise to which they'd all become accustomed aboard the craft cut out, replaced by an eerie creaking sound. The stocky female technician looked up from the battered husk of the male technician's face, which she'd beaten into unrecognizable tissue a good ten punches ago. “What did you do?” she croaked. “Wouldn't you prefer burial in the earth, to burning up in the sky?” Lady Cyber-Knife said. “You didn't...” one of the other technicians said. Lady Cyber-Knife was silent as the resistance's mobile command platform dropped out of the air and pitched forward upon impact with the ground. The craft's curved underside set the whole structure to rolling forward, sending everyone tumbling off their feet. Everyone, that was, except Lady Cyber-Knife, whose feet had split apart into their two pointed, metal claws. They dug into the deck plating, and she held her footing even as the craft rolled over on itself. The dome smashed into the ground and exploded inward - a terrifying alarm sounded, echoing through the room. Sparks shot out of every console on the deck, and the surviving technicians went into a frenzy trying to dodge razor-sharp glass shards, searing hot electrical flashes, and one another's bodies as they struggled to grab onto anything. An obese man grabbed the legs bolting one console into the deck, but it held for only moments before snapping off. He screamed as he fell toward the jagged remains of the dome. Lady Cyber-Knife arched her back and twisted her wrists around, so her taloned fingers could grab into the deck plating just above her feet. All about its circumference, the dome cracked apart as it rolled. Glass flew in all directions as the base of the craft fell towards the ground, and the entire craft burst into flames. A few bodies spilled out of it, falling free of the inevitable site of its impact, and flames shot out of the deck as the reactors buried within its belly went critical. From up in the air, Lady Cyber-Knife's support team had seen the facility's camouflage vanish as she disengaged its engines. They watched with pleasure as the structure disintegrated and rolled across the ground, devolving into a flaming wreck, then settling. “Take us down,” Tracy said, waving at the demolished craft. A few survivors emerged from underneath the debris, smeared with soot and grease; most of them were on fire in at least one spot. “What do you want me to do, Major?” Semi asked, her hands tightly gripping the massive gun's controls. “Don't take any chances,” Tracy replied. Semi didn't say anything as her thumbs jammed down on the controls' firing studs, and the bodies of each of the surviving technicians disappeared in clouds of fine red mist. The force of the gun rattled through the craft, and Anwan found himself thankful for the noise suppression tech built into their communication implants. As the chopper landed, Tracy swung their head back and forth across the cockpit’s long window, doing everything in their power to spot Lady Cyber-Knife. “Come on,” Tracy muttered. “Where the fuck are you?” “Is it worth mentioning that we'll see her when she's good and ready, Major?” Anwan said, squinching up his face as he spoke. “No, so shut the fuck up,” was Tracy’s only reply. Without any warning, an elephant-sized fragment of scorched metal, still molten at the edges, flew from the wreckage, propelled by explosive force. It sailed past the cockpit, near Winston’s side, far too close for comfort, like a terminator asteroid barely missing Earth-1. Winston flinched in his seat a little; he couldn’t help it. Flying debris in combat was one thing, but something flying out of a wreck like a jack-in-the-box? Maybe he hadn’t seen everything, after all. The look of restrained panic on Tracy’s face quickly gave way to one of satisfaction as Lady Cyber-Knife punched a hole through what once was the underside of the insurrectionists’ command center and emerged virtually unscathed from the wreck. She threw a mechanical salute towards her team. Lady Cyber-Knife turned back to the broken, smoldering husk and ripped apart a segment of hull. She dug around in it and wrenched a single body from the wreckage - a man, the technician who had suggested Earth-5069 as The Triumvirate’s hiding place. Even from several hundred feet away, and through the sound-dampening technology, every member of the support team could hear the technician scream as his left leg tore apart at the knee. Lady Cyber-Knife didn’t stop for a second as they left the severed limb behind. Winston flipped a switch as Lady Cyber-Knife approached, opening up the hatch on the chopper’s starboard side. She threw the technician inside; he hadn’t stopped screaming, and his voice was already beginning to sound raw. His mangled leg, caked with dust and dirt, still managed to smear blood and oil all over the inside of the craft. “Shut him up,” Lady Cyber-Knife said. Anwan looked at Tracy through the transparent divider that separated the cockpit from the rest of the craft. Tracy just looked back and replied disinterestedly, “You heard what she said.” Anwan pushed his control arm away, unbuckling from his seat. “Semi, could you give me a hand?” he grumbled as he got to his feet. “Sure thing,” Semi replied, and almost immediately, a hissing noise began to leak from the floor. Steam rose from a heretofore invisible seam in the deck and several plates parted as she pulled herself up from the belly. “Let's put him in a pod,” Anwan said, hefting one of the technician's arms up over his shoulders. Semi did the same with the other arm, and they carried their prisoner to the back of the chopper, where a tapered, casket-like metal box sat, magnetically bolted into the floor. Semi kicked at the side of the pod and the top half rose up the wall, revealing a bed of neon blue jelly at the bottom. They threw the technician inside and pulled the pod back together, sealing him inside. The chemical bath in which they placed him would lower his heart rate dramatically, preserving his tissue and putting him into a medical coma, maximizing the chances that he'd make it back to Earth-1 alive, and give up whatever secrets he might know. As Anwan and Semi returned to their stations, Lady Cyber-Knife turned towards the cockpit. “Take us home, Major,” she ordered. “But,” Tracy replied, “you left us a whole wreckage to examine.” “Let the Complex send a scavenger crew to pick through the bones,” Lady Cyber-Knife said. “We have completed our mission.” She returned to her couch, drawing the Cyber-Sword from its sheath before sitting down. She retracted her talons and drew the tips of her metallic fingers along its blade, now seemingly oblivious to the world surrounding her. Tracy turned towards Winston. “Set a course for the door, and let them know we'll want it open as soon as
we get there,” they ordered. “You don't hear me complaining,” Winston muttered as the chopper put some real distance between itself and the ground, beginning the long flight back to civilization.
