by Phil Wrede
CHAPTER 4
EARTH-7331, DETENTION THE PRESENT The elevator jolted, and a wrathful metallic scream split the air as the car's emergency brakes dropped, bringing the lift to a dead stop in a second. Lady Cyber-Knife managed to remain standing against its tremendous force; her feet left divots in the metal plating. She looked around the now-still lift, eyes open wide and scanning for the hidden hatch that the next wave of her attackers would certainly come pouring through. Lady Cyber-Knife opened her hands, curling her fingers in toward her palms. Her claws snapped out from her fingertips, their little barbed tips catching the flat overhead light for a second, and tracing little points of light across the metal that covered her face. She bent her knees, preparing to move. The enemy didn't come through a mystery doorway or an emergency access port. The roof of the car overhead split apart, torn into strips the way an impatient infant might peel an egg, revealing one of the ARN's Class Twos looming overhead. The beastly, ruthless predecessor of the One-Ex, each of the Two's eight legs was taller than Lady Cyber-Knife herself, and its body could have easily crushed any human upon which it may have fallen. For a moment, she was worried, but as it gingerly stepped through the fresh opening it had made, rocking the car back and forth as it crashed down onto it, she realized that the fight would be more fair than she'd anticipated. With a mental command, her feet split apart in the front, and they curled into the elevator floor, bunching up the metal underneath her. The Class Two lifted up its second set of legs, drawing them back to strike at her while keeping itself firmly attached to the interior wall. Lady Cyber-Knife could see the plasma projectors in its legs heating up - that green glow emanating from in between the “fingers” that it used to finely adjust its balance while standing - and she wondered if the ARN meant to conclude their confrontation before it had even really begun. She got herself ready to leap as high as she could, and tear through the roof of the car to avoid becoming its target practice, but the gunfire she expected didn't come. The Class Two lashed out with its limbs directly, steam trailing off its scorching-hot fists as they shot through the air at Lady Cyber-Knife. Punches, those she could dodge with her eyes closed. In her training, she frequently did just that; she didn't need to "see" something to track its movements. She ducked under the Class Two's punches, and its superheated fists stopped just before they made contact with the elevator wall. It wound up and attacked her again faster than a normal human's eye could have followed, aiming both low and high this time. Lady Cyber-Knife dove out of the way and slashed her hand behind her in a fast, full arc, her claws ripping into the Class Two's leg. She tore through the black armor plate, exposing delicate circuitry wrapped around the conduit that channeled its plasma blasts. For a second, she appreciated the damage one strike against the mechanical beast had managed to do, but that appreciation's half-life vanished. She realized that her evasive maneuver had trapped her in a corner of the elevator. The Class Two tilted its head down at her, a movement so exaggerated and so deliberate that she couldn't help but see humanity in it. No machine she had ever fought before had found satisfaction in anticipating its malicious action. The Class Two reared as far back on the six limbs supporting its weight as it could before rushing forward, trying to trap and trample her. As its feet slammed against the deck, the sound of heavy metal clanging against metal, the elevator car bounced around like a fish at the end of a line. Lady Cyber-Knife held fast against the floor as the technological terror took two long steps before leaping above it. She kicked down as hard as she could, driving the heels of her feet into its head. She felt its convex armor bend inward, and the Class Two crashed into the corner of the elevator as she bounded free. The mechanism holding the elevator car in place finally failed under all the stress to which it had been subjected, and they dropped, wildly out of control. The Class Two didn't even turn around to continue its attack; it just twisted three of its arms around and blasted plasma without taking a moment to aim. Lady Cyber-Knife smoothly stepped out of the way of one shot, while a second missed her entirely. They both burned into the elevator's vertical tunnel, leaving scorch marks they left behind in their uncontrolled descent. The third blast hit her square in the chest, and she flew backwards, the smells of burnt flesh and fabric twisting together in her nose. She looked down at her chest, and saw nothing but char from her waist to her throat. Lady Cyber-Knife reached back, to try and draw the Cyber-Sword from its sheath - she could hear its muffled, incoherent voice shouting - but the Class Two struck too fast, this time, and trapped her arms in two of its own. It kept her elbows bent between its enormous fingertips, and her hands dangling uselessly above her head, behind it. The machine tried to press its advantage, pushing its great weight against her in an attempt to drive her through the car and onto the swiftly-passing tube around them. It wanted to get friction to do its work for it. Lady Cyber-Knife fought against the ARN, thrashing her shoulders about and trying valiantly to remain upright. The quiet, expressionless battle they waged, accompanied solely by the scream of the wind around them, took long enough that her wound had all but healed by the time the Class Two had bent her shoulders nearly to her feet. It redoubled its efforts, the light in its eyes flaring in assumed victory. It would beat her; it would achieve victory for its entire machine race. What sorts of spoils awaited a conquering alien robot ninja? The Class Two would never know. In its furious grappling, the ARN had lost sight of the threats that still remained. Lady Cyber-Knife's knees bent backwards of their own accord, faster than her autonomous foe could compensate, and it lost its grip on her arms. She grabbed back with more than double the force it had applied, and whipped her body back over her knees in the opposite direction, a movement utterly impossible for a human. She tore the Class Two off the elevator car and smashed it into the tunnel, over and over, as its armor cracked, and eventually broke away. Bits and pieces of it were torn off with each and every strike, until she held onto two of its severed limbs, and the memory of the pain she felt when it had blasted her square in the chest. The elevator car had sped in free-fall already, and Lady Cyber-Knife needed to escape, lest she get crushed in its inevitable impact. She didn't even need to look up before leaping free, and grabbing onto her new best friend: the empty elevator shaft. Scratching against the smooth surface, she couldn't carve grips for her hands and feet right away, but she persisted, and the facility's construction yielded. From her perch, she watched, a small smile on her lips, as the elevator raced away and finally impacted in the lowest sub-basement level of the detention facility. She unhooked one hand from the wall, and extracted the Cyber-Sword before releasing her feet and following the car down, her open hand tearing chunks of material out of the wall as she guided her descent. EARTH-1, THE WHITE ZONE THE PAST (40 DAYS EARLIER) Lady Cyber-Knife had standing orders to report to General Dinesh upon their safe arrival from any alternate Earth, and found herself whisked away to a holding chamber, not her living quarters, immediately after she disembarked from the chopper. Lady Cyber-Knife hated meeting with Dinesh. He'd instituted a rule that she had to be “cleaned up” before her mission debriefing. She wouldn't have minded a shower, or a chance to rest her eyes, or even a nutrient pack, but all Dinesh wanted to see her his staff had slapped her into dresses cut low and high in all the wrong places. He'd had a special line item inserted into his budget that covered the development of high heels that could support her feet. She currently wore the nineteenth iteration of the design - this time, they were colored white and golden, nearly the same color as her hair. A special military transport had taken her from the Complex HQ to Dinesh's private apartment, an opal needle that dashed hundreds of stories out of the ground at the edge of the White Zone. She had called the elevator two minutes ago, and expected she'd wait another two before it descended all the way to the ground. She looked out towards the White Zone's ocean of lights behind the tower and felt a slight breeze - enormous machines, the size of buildings, controlled the Zone's climate. However, the further away from the control centers one traveled, the less exacting its
effect. Dinesh did live far away from any population enter. There wasn't much fabric to the black dress she wore, and she might've shivered, if much of Lady Cyber-Knife could feel cold. The hem of the dress barely covered her cybernetic legs, and as it was sleeveless, didn't cover any of her mechanical arms. Function would always appeal to her more than form, and she disliked both the form and the function of the dress. She disliked all of the dresses in which Dinesh had put her, in fact. The lift doors hissed as the elevator car finally came to a stop on the ground level, and they slid open with a deliberation that made Lady Cyber-Knife suspicious, as if Dinesh had already begun dragging out this night. She stepped inside the elevator; it was colder than even the air outside. She could feel her cheeks and the skin on the back of her neck pucker. The elevator doors slid shut authoritatively, with far greater speed than they'd opened, and she noticed that car's bare, shining metal walls. She saw no controls, no screens, no indicators anywhere, just perfectly polished silver industrial metal. Once a person stepped in the car, it seemed, they were at the general's mercy. She supposed she should not have felt surprised. Lady Cyber-Knife felt a little tremor under her feet as the car began to move, but if she hadn't been paying close attention, it would have felt like she shifted her feet unconsciously. It certainly didn't feel like the elevator was moving with any great speed, which made her wonder precisely how much money the engineers had spent designing the inertial dampening system inside the general's elevator. How many special line items had he added to his budget? She disliked confinement - even seeing the doors of the hover copter shut was more than she really wanted to bear. During the moments when her mind was capable of wandering, it invariably wound back to thoughts of claustrophobia and terror. She could purge them easily enough as they cropped up, but they would always return. She had felt it in the office, even, and wondered why her programming would allow her an unproductive neurosis. When she asked MOM, she never got a satisfactory answer. The elevator slowed to a crawl just as the main doors swung open once again, and Lady Cyber-Knife banished these thoughts from her mind. She had a job, though she had no taste for it, and it would do her no good to dwell on anything else until she completed it. Even for a private apartment in the White Zone, Dinesh's home was elegant. Filters slid down over Lady Cyber-Knife's eyes as the doors opened, for an astonishing light greeting her, bouncing out of the bright white room open before her. Not an antiseptic white, like in a hospital, but a clean, opulent, and spotless one, like from an ivory statue, polished lovingly every day. She'd only seen ivory in a mission dossier, but she could extrapolate. Dinesh probably had a micro-filtration system installed in his home, the sort that prevented all but the tiniest of particles from building up. If she correctly recalled the commercials, a room equipped with such a system would only need dusting once a year. Had she not already known the general, a brief scan around his home would've outed him as an enthusiast of extremes. He had selected most of his furniture in dark-tones, brown or black, and the art jutting out from the walls and ceiling was hard and brutal in its angles. A geometrically perfect human face, carved from something like onyx, hung over a large, flat couch, while a twisted iron knot dangled chandelier-like over the entire room. She wondered, when he redecorated, if he drew from a cache of discomfiting art from across the multiverse. The general stood directly underneath the unlit chandelier at military precision; clearly, he'd been anticipating her arrival. The thin mustache accentuating his upper lip wasn't as dark as the crow's feet creeping in around his cheeks and eyes. It had become more and more difficult to estimate someone's age from their physical appearance for generations, but Dinesh had found a way to complicate even that task. Through his expertly-tailored dress uniform, she could make out the form of a man less than half his age, whatever that age might actually be. He looked as though he approached the peak of his physical health, like maybe he hadn't even reached it yet. He was nothing if not consistent in his inconsistencies, and try though she might, Lady Cyber-Knife actually caught herself musing on them in some moments. She stepped out of the elevator car, the heels of her shoes clicking against the marble floor. Even the surface on which they stood was an unblemished, perfect white. “General,” she said, keeping formality in her tone, “thank you for seeing me.” She stopped just out of arm's reach and saluted. “The pleasure is all mine, Lady Cyber-Knife,” Dinesh replied, raising a gloved hand as he returned her salute. They lowered their arms, and he continued, “Something to drink, a refreshment?” “I hydrated before I came, General.” Dinesh reached down to the small table at his side and drew one of the long-stemmed glasses atop it to his mouth. “Are you certain? This wine traveled through the infinite void, across space and time, to arrive here tonight.” The glasses nearly overflowed with a red-and-yellow drink that looked like a liquid sunset. “My enhancements filter toxins out of anything I ingest before it reaches my stomach, sir; I'm afraid that to give me any of that would be to waste it,” Lady Cyber-Knife said. “A tragedy,” Dinesh said, draining nearly all the contents of the glass in a single swallow, “to drink something this wondrous alone.” The general picked up the glass and took Lady Cyber-Knife's left arm with his right hand. “Perhaps I can tempt you with food?” he asked as he tried to take a step forward to guide her towards the back table, only to stumble as he attempted to put his foot down. Wine sloshed out of his glass, dribbled down his hand, and splashed on the floor. He turned to see that Lady Cyber-Knife hadn't moved, and the expression on her face made it clear she had no intention of allowing Dinesh to guide her anywhere. Dinesh smiled thinly and released his grip, sliding the tips of his fingers along her arm until the last possible moment. “If you would follow me, please? It's quite a spread.” Lady Cyber-Knife acquiesced. “I am sorry about your floor,” she said. Dinesh managed to hold onto his composure as he said, “The spill? Pay it no mind; the filtration system will take care of it.” “Do you have automated butlers, now?” Dinesh smiled as he gestured to the entirety of his living space. “I'm testing a new prototype. Everything inside my home, living or decorative - or living and decorative,” he leered at Lady Cyber-Knife illustratively, “is automatically draped in a molecule-thin force field upon entrance. It prevents the buildup of any particulates, purifies the air, immobilizes intruders at my command, and protects the floor from falling liquids. The field can burn away anything undesirable that's collected atop it on a regular schedule; it automatically cleans itself once an hour.” “Maintenance and security in one convenient package, it would seem,” Lady Cyber-Knife observed. “They spare no expense when it comes to the most celebrated military commander in the history of the White Zone,” Dinesh said, flashing a much wider smile this time. She looked at the banquet table placed near the far back wall, and felt some surprise that she hadn't seen it immediately when she entered. The black stone table stretched across nearly the length of the wall. Dinesh had covered it with an array of foods Lady Cyber-Knife had never before seen, and many she'd never even imagined. A neon-pink fruit that looked like a grape the size of a basketball, an overlong strip of meat arranged to look like the petals of a blooming flower, a little field of eggs with shells every color of the rainbow. Lady Cyber-Knife knew she fought to preserve the way of life cherished by the citizens of the White Zone, but even she could be taken aback by the opulence the most powerful so casually accepted as a fact of living. “Something atop this table must catch your eye,” Dinesh said, the leer on his face all the more apparent in his voice. Looking up and down the spread, Lady Cyber-Knife replied, “When I eat real food, my system digests vegetables best. I don't see many here; do you have a vendetta against them?” Dinesh swirled his drink around in his glass a bit before speaking. “My dear, you know about evolution, yes? Our computers can tell you all about it. Every moment from the moment of creation, every obstacle existence has struggled past, they have led here, to this moment. Our ancestors dragged themselves out of the muck and slime, choked down shoots of grass that tore at their mouths, scrambled to remain out of a pred
ator's reach. They did all of these impossible things in the name of survival, and they survive in us. They did not do these things so that we, in turn, struggle to swallow the same soulless roots and flowers as them. My palate has evolved past the little satisfaction plants can offer. I make no apologies for it.” “I did not mean any offense, General,” Lady Cyber-Knife said. “It barely matters,” Dinesh replied, staring through the perfectly clear glass wall lining his living room as he spoke. “A predilection towards mercy has always infected some, powerful and weak alike. Never enough to make a difference, but enough to cause me irritation. I have wasted days of my life listening to weaklings who do not deserve what we have achieved apologizing for it.” His drink glass unexpectedly exploded in his hand, spraying the few remaining drops of liquid across his tunic, or the force field shielding it. Lady Cyber-Knife noticed that the field had also interrupted the glass shards mid-flight, arresting their momentum and guiding them gently into a little bundle on the floor. Dinesh didn't speak for a while, as he glared furiously at the hand whose strength he still did not know. “Can I assume,” he finally said, “that if you won't eat dinner, you don't plan to eat dessert?” Dinesh gestured to a spot on the table Lady Cyber-Knife hadn't yet seen, buried under three-tiered silver trays that were themselves laden with the most creative sculptures of sugar, forming sweeping spires and nearly impossible geometric shapes. They shimmered underneath the light, and for a moment, she had an idea of what it was like to look at something beautiful. Dinesh snapped a branch off a pink tree and dangled it near Lady Cyber-Knife's mouth. “At least taste something,” he implored her. Almost instinctively, Lady Cyber-Knife licked her lips, and her tongue brushed up against the sugary bit for just an instant. She hadn't meant for it to; she'd done it by accident. But, by every fiber and bit of code in her being, it was good! She took the dessert, her lips sliding up the general's fingers as she pulled the confectionery between her teeth. The taste that danced across her tongue, the feeling that slid down into her belly, she'd never experienced anything like it before. Did the generals, their family, and their friends feel like this all the time? If you could, wouldn't you want to? “Did you like that?” Dinesh asked. Lady Cyber-Knife mumbled a little bit in the affirmative. “Of course you did,” the general said. “I bet you want more...” As Dinesh continued speaking, Lady Cyber-Knife felt the giddy buzz that had swept throughout her body suddenly fade away, replaced with a dull ache that threatened to gnaw her hollow from the inside out. The only thought she could hold in her mind, and it had already expanded so rapidly that it crowded everything else out, was that she desperately needed more. She worked her mouth open and shut, trying to recapture a bit of that initial euphoria. It seemed so long ago, all of a sudden. Dinesh snapped off a smaller piece of the dessert this time, colored a deep red. “Only the first taste is free, my darling,” he hissed. Lady Cyber-Knife's eyes blazed crimson. She grabbed Dinesh's left hand with her right. The general heard the bones in his hand break faster than he could feel them. His grip fell away, and she tore the rest of the chemically-treated sugar from his fingers, gulping it down. Lady Cyber-Knife shoved him against the wall; the impact cracked the paint, which had been mixed and applied by human hands. Dinesh shook his head to clear the stars from his vision, and reached up towards a small red pin attached to his jacket's left shoulder. The talons flicked out from Lady Cyber-Knife's fingers; she would rip apart anything between her and the dessert table, including the general. He squeezed the switch between his fingers, activating the emergency shutdown protocols hardwired in Lady Cyber-Knife's mind. Almost immediately, the color in her eyes dimmed, and her mechanically precise muscle control faded away, replaced by a swooning that looked all too human. It was theoretically impossible to poison Lady Cyber-Knife with something as pedestrian as a chemical, but if one found a way, it wouldn't require much - she didn't have a lot of human tissue left to pollute. It was only by the grace of dumb luck and impossibly vital muscles that Dinesh was able to catch Lady Cyber-Knife before she fell to the floor. She fell into his arms like a blushing ingenue, but he could barely hold her upright. He had to shuffle into the living room and drop her face first onto the couch. “Fuck,” Dinesh muttered. It had taken months for the scientists in the human enhancement lab to develop a sedative that her system wouldn't immediately recognize and filter out. He'd prepared for this night for months, and now that she'd overdosed, they'd have to start from square one again. This was to have been his night of triumph, but the unpredictable bitch had stymied him once again. Pressing a hand to his collar, activating a hidden transmitter, General Dinesh cleared his throat authoritatively. “Stand down, Barney,” he muttered, undoing the buttons of his uniform coat. “The dope put her to sleep. She had a busy day, so let's just let her rest. I say again, stand down.” From the hover copter waiting expectantly outside the tower, Winston shook his head. He knew the general was a big deal, and that he valued his private tactical debriefing sessions with Lady Cyber-Knife, but he hated having to fly these escorts. Oh, well, at least nothing ever happened, and they always got overtime. Tracy never came on these assignments, and he didn't think he'd ever get used to Barney sitting in their usual seat next to him. Tracy had a sense of humor; Tracy would let Winston, Anwan, and Semi bullshit when things were slow. Barney just sat with his faced buried in his weird fold-out computer all night, not letting anybody say anything. Not that Winston figured he'd have much to say, for Winston couldn't have imagined someone more his opposite than Barney. When Barney finally spoke, it took Winston by such surprise that he started in his seat a little. “Take us out and begin cruising in a high orbital pattern around General Dinesh's tower, Winston.” Winston grabbed the copter's controls in a tight grip. “Say again, sir?” he finally replied. Barney looked over at him like he was speaking to a particularly stupid dog. “The general has ordered us to relax for the remainder of the night.” “Very well, sir. Initiating orbital sequence,” Winston dutifully said as the hover copter peeled off from its parking station. Winston's eyes were too focused on his instruments to get a good look at Barney's computer as he flipped it open like a map and began to power it down. If he hadn't, he might have seen Lady Cyber-Knife's full-body schematic on Barney's screen, bordered with all sort of telemetric readouts and command keys. The general wouldn't need Barney to manipulate her this evening. Tonight, they served only as one more layer of security.
