by JM Guillen
It did.
For all the training Assets are given regarding physics, a battlefield is a fluid place. Sometimes there are things that we know and completely understand, but in the heat of the moment, we don’t quite piece together how it might really work.
Which is why, when I hit the Raptor with a bolt of kinetic force as he landed from an impossible leap—a leap only achievable if he weighed something akin to a chicken feather—he sailed off, hurtling into the darkened, lurid hallway from the unexpected force.
“All according to plan.” I could do nothing but gape.
Still, it had bought me a few moments. I had no concept where the conduit might be, except for the quite obvious marker, so I sprinted on, running straight for the Raptor, hoping to get at least a little closer to Telemetry Relay.
Then, a thunderous, stuttering voice sounded from the ceiling.
WARNING! AIR-AIR-AREA IS OFF LIMITS TO NON-CLASSED PERSON… PERSONEL. DEFENSIVE MEASURES INITIATING.
A violet flash down the hallway followed these words. I did not find this encouraging at all.
“Not helpful.”
I had no way of knowing what might lie ahead, but I pounded along the hallway anyway. Nothing I could do would stop whatever defensive measures were in progress—
Wait a minute.
I toggled my comm and gritted my teeth against the numerical onslaught.
“Bishop, Michael, Asset 108!” I screamed at the ceiling. “Access code iota-six-three! Disengage defensive protocol! Repeat, disengage!”
AREA IS OFF LIMITS TO NON-CLASSED PER—IS OFF LIMITS TO—TO NON-CLASSED PERS—PERSONEL.
“Now even the machines think I have no class,” I groused.
DEFENSIVE MEASURES INIT—INITIATING.
Shit.
Well, maybe nothing would happen. The systems here were schitzy, after all.
I shut off the comm and concentrated on running, looking for anything useful but mainly aiming for the bright blue icon that represented my goal. Passing several doors, I considered Spectre-ing through the door to Morphological Ballistics but decided not to press my luck.
At a long curve of unoccupied corridor, I slowed.
DEPLOYMENT INITIATED.
Great. I looked up at the ceiling, irritation bleeding through my snark.
“Oh sure, you can’t say personnel without stuttering like Porky Pig, but you have no problem—” I cut off my grousing at the sound of fighting just around the corner.
Wait a minute. A slow grin whispered around the edge of my mouth.
Perhaps this could be a good thing.
Slowing to a cautious trot, I activated the Spectre and waited for the red emergency light to show me what lay ahead.
Streaks of silver darted through the air, reflective shapes that threw back carmine flashes. The defensive protocols The Spire had initiated looked to be Facility drones; winged robots that resembled metallic crossbreeds between a jeweled hornet and a hyperactive dragonfly—if someone had blown the result up to the size of a dachshund and given it a pneumatic projector, a hold full of limited-capacity, barbed grappling hooks, axiomatic spikes, and God knew what else.
I allowed the shadow of a smile to touch my lips. Perhaps they could tackle the Raptor.
The drones’ movements nearly matched the whirling form of the lost Asset they attacked. In response, he spun and leapt, slashing the air just behind them.
“This is better than a movie,” I chuckled.
The airborne defense systems bristled and buzzed, and the Raptor’s blades cleft the air at his right, his hand blurring down just behind the second drone. He spun around, left hand nearly brushing the floor to gather speed for his uppercut.
The second drone spit a metallic stream of tiny missiles in an elegant descending spiral around the Asset. The detaining darts threw off brilliant electric-gold sparks as soon as they left the drone, streaking to the floor to form a perfect, scintillating circle of itty-bitty Tasers.
I imagined that they wouldn’t feel as cute as they looked.
As effervescent streaks leapt up and inward, forming a dome of electric pain around the Raptor’s spinning legs, I shut down the Spectre packet but kept the Adept at the ready.
Now I could run past the tricky bastard while the drones kept him engaged. I imagined that the electrical field would hold him for at least a minute or two.
I couldn’t keep a grim smile from my lips. My luck had turned, and I hadn’t even known it. The Spire hadn’t triggered me as a non-classed person in an off-limits area at all. It had sensed the ambulatory symbiont and kept him helpfully busy for me.
“Way to go, Porky,” I muttered to the system as I pelted down the hallway.
When I passed a small white and chrome box set in the left hand wall, I realized things might not be as they seemed.
“Wait.” I looked at the box, realization dawning.
WARRRNING! AREA IS OFF LIMITS TOOO NON-CLASSED PERSON-LELLE. DEFENSE MEAZZZURES INITIATING.
“Oh. You traitorous pig.” I groaned to the ceiling.
The box embedded in the wall emitted a violet burst of light far stronger than the flashing red emergency lights, and I flinched, my head jerking away to the right.
I had processed too many safety protocols on Facility matter-to-energy confluxes. That violet light could burn my eyes right out of my head.
As a result, I didn’t see when two insectine drones crawled out of the white and chrome box and dove into the air, aimed straight at me. Instead, I heard the mechanized whirr of their wings and the low droning buzz of their processors.
“Oh, fuck you, Porky!” I seethed, triggering the Spectre again.
The Spectre packet blurred my outline just before the first drone fired on me.
Behind me, the Raptor emitted muted snarls, leaping with liquid grace. As he spun, beset by angrily buzzing streaks of metallic light, I dodged as well.
The righteous wrath of every hive ever disturbed fell upon us, brought together with bigger than life, weaponized revenge.
Glowing blades slashed the air, and I jogged to the left just as rotating razors plunged through my right side and burst out my insubstantial chest.
The Raptor growled, intent on my death.
Thank you, random Designate that picked my packets! I might have complained earlier, but it truly seemed as if the Designates had planned well when they assigned my neuralware.
I hadn’t even finished the thought when my body suddenly felt peppered with that odd, shivering sensation. A dozen sleek, armored darts had been fired straight through me, creating small detonations on the floor at the Raptor’s dancing feet.
“Ha! Take that, jackass!” I crowed.
The Asset made a breathtakingly fast dash halfway up the wall, followed by a line of tiny explosions scant centimeters from his feet. He pushed off into a backflip and landed, scowling.
Well, I thought he scowled. Hard to tell with all the red chitin cov—
A somewhat familiar click! sounded from my left.
“What now?”
My eyes jerked back to the front as one of the drones hovered in front of me, a panel on its right side sliding closed as tiny sphere landed at my feet.
“You’re so cute,” I told it, wishing I could pat it on the head like a puppy. “But I’m out of phase; a missile’s not going to do anything to m—”
The grenade at my feet went off with a soundless whoomp, and the world shivered. My packets powered down, effectively dampened. My eyes widened.
Damn it.
“Bad dog!” I yelped and turned to run. “Bad fucking dog!” I hadn’t even fully turned around when I heard several hissing bursts, all in succession as another drone fired its tiny projectiles toward me.
I had no idea what those darts would do to me, but I sure as hell didn’t want to find out.
I reinitialized the Adept packet with annoyance and ran, skidding around a small, stuttering stasis field that had somehow failed to hold the Raptor’s foot.
My op
tions growing ever more slim, I drew my disruptors.
At the buzzing sound of pursuit, I spun to aim at the traitorous drone only to leap back as the face of a blood-drenched nightmare screamed at me from half a meter away.
“Wha—?” I stumbled, taken completely by surprise.
The Raptor slashed toward me, razored fists glowing.
“Argh!” I half-screamed and half-gurgled in alarm. I brought up my disruptor instinctively, trying madly to block whatever came my way.
The weapon all but disintegrated in my hand as the Raptor’s left hand blade sliced into it. Some pieces fell to the floor, but much of it shattered into a burst of useless debris.
I stared at the remnants of the pistol grip, then glared at the former Asset, stunned.
“You—fucki—WHAT?!” I blathered, dumbstruck. “DUDE! I—!”
His left foot came up in a textbook example of a roundhouse kick that would have separated my good looks from my face had I not engaged the Spectre even as I sputtered my utter denial of what had just happened.
I let him take his time trying to decapitate me, noticing the drones getting into position around him.
Maybe…
“Missed, asshole.”
Drones at the ready, I allowed the Spectre to flicker, regaining solidity just long enough to gain the Asset’s attention. At the last moment, I leapt back into a crouch on the tiled floor. I didn’t want to be in the line of fire if one of the drones dropped another dampening grenade.
The drones fired.
As the darts embedded themselves in the Raptor and the floor around him, he roared. His body jerked and danced with tiny arcs of blue electricity from the two dozen or so darts the drones had fired on him from behind.
So satisfying.
“They’re almost like tanglers.” I quirked my mouth into a thoughtful grin. “Must be some kind of mini-spike inside those suckers,” I mused as the Raptor hit the floor with a thud that echoed with finality.
The amount of electricity coursing through him had to be far beyond a lethal dose. These drones weren’t messing around. His corpse smoked, and the air filled with a scent reminiscent of cooked pork.
I stood, staring down at the body. “It’s been nice chewin’ the fat with ya—oh, wait, no it hasn’t.”
Click. One of the four drones dropped a small sphere at my feet, like a pet that had fetched me the paper.
I closed my eyes as my shoulders drooped. “Fuck me sidew—”
The world trembled around me with silent thunder as the grenade restored Rationality.
9
I stood there like a complete tool as reality shivered and rippled. Within the span of a thought, the dampener grenade stripped me of the recently re-installed Spectre packet.
“Hey there.” I spoke to the drone that hovered in the air, almost as if surprised to see me.
I flipped it off.
Then I ran.
I reinitialized the Spectre as I sprinted away. Missiles pelted down around me like rain, and I frantically tried to think of the quickest way to disengage the defense protocols. Soon, the drones would find the right timing of dampening grenade and detainment mechanisms.
They only had to get lucky once.
As I rounded a corner, I raised my other—my only, damn him—disruptor and shot the closest drone squarely between its hopeful little bug eyes.
The kinetic burst punched through the metal like warm butter.
“Bad dog!” I insisted as I burst into a dash. “Stay down!”
Pounding around the bend in the hall, I drew my katana with my right hand and prepared to do battle with the remaining three drones. Then my brain abruptly went to sleep, pins and needles pricking all over the inside of my skull like a pissed off cat.
Shit. The Spectre needed a break that I couldn’t afford to give it.
I couldn’t really blame the thing; I had been pushing it quite a bit, even using it in bursts. Hell, dodging aberrant blood-blooms, whacked-out Assets, and stray Irrats that seemed to know more about the Facility than I did, I wanted a rest too.
I squinted, feeling my reflexes dull and noticing that the world seemed a little fuzzy around the edges.
Bzzt! A giant metallic dragonfly dove by my head and missed.
Dammit, I had finally gotten to the proper floor, even if I hadn’t yet made the Telemetry Relay Station. This was not the time to careen down to the basement just because I pushed my luck too far with the Spectre. I’d never get to the Telemetry Relay Station in time then.
Scanning the hall, I made an abrupt left and dove through a door marked Quantum Chronodynamics. I powered the Spectre down as soon as I stepped inside the darkened room.
Breathe, Bishop. I had at least a moment before the slaughter-bots made their way through the door.
The prickles inside my skull slowly faded into nothingness.
Pawing at the wall next to the door, I searched for a light switch. Typically, Facility locations initiated their luminary systems whenever they detected an active Crown in their location. However, they often also—
“Ha!” I hit the physical switch and winced in the thankfully brilliant white light.
“Finally.” I thought I might puke if I had to deal with more red emergency lighting.
Blinking, I took stock of the room. More spacious than I expected, Quantum Chronodynamics housed several workstations crammed with complex mechanisms crafted from white metal and chrome. A holographic map of the world hovered over a nearby lectern covered with large sheaves of old-smelling paper.
“Wait. What?”
I wandered over to the map, drawn by an additional small landmass hovering in the Atlantic. A ragged blob of green not much bigger than Poland sat there defying every geography lesson I’d ever had.
“Would you look at that?” I muttered as I looked for a label but found nothing.
Figures.
“I dub thee Exoceanic Landmass Seclunia 108.” I chuckled. If the Facility had been in charge of naming some hidden island, that sounded exactly like something they would come up with.
Still, hiding three-hundred-thousand square kilometers in the middle of an ocean seemed like a neat trick.
Tiny sparks of white kept appearing on the map, flashing on and off with muted pings. No discernable pattern to it though, and—
Ting!
My head snapped back to the metallic door where a tiny bulge had suddenly appeared.
Ting, ting!
Two more joined it, the steel lining jutting out at me like accusing fingers, inversions of the spikes the drones had fired at the other side.
“Oh. Good.” I frowned. I didn’t have long.
I looked around for anything that could help me at all, and the sharp scent of rust and decay caught my attention. I wrinkled my nose, trying to find the source.
There.
“What?” I peered across the room. An angry, violet mist simmered in the corner opposite the world map, a sheet of hazy energy in an oddly humanoid shape. It hung between three antennae-like structures, devices crafted from what looked like copper and crystalline rods.
“Well, hello.” I eyed it sidelong as it boiled and bent, growing ever larger.
It didn’t move randomly; it tried to push itself into the room somehow. Watching it, I had the impression that it might be much larger than what I could see here, as if part of it still existed in some other space.
It began buzzing. I found that far worse than the drone of the overgrown wasps waiting to kill me out in the hall. With an insistent, pissed-off complaint that rose and fell with the pulsing of the purple haze, its vague shape surged in pointed lances of violet light that thrusted angrily into reality. Several points lurched out in several directions at once. Testing its boundaries? Trying to escape?
“I don’t have time for any more problems.” I spoke in the creature’s general direction. “My docket is full. I’d appreciate you sitting there quietly, if you don’t mind.”
The buzzing sound gr
ew louder. I shook my head, trying to rid myself of it.
No matter what that creature might be, it didn’t seem like anything that would help me when I could be overrun by drones any second.
“I assume you aren’t going to try and murder me.”
Ting, ting, ting! Ting!
Turning my attention back to the door, I grimaced. The bulges had gotten larger.
What the hell are those drones throwing at it? Soon it would be so misshapen that the door wouldn’t swing on its hinges anymore. I’d be trapped.
I took two steps backward and held my weapons ready, disruptor in one hand, katana in the other, determinedly ignoring the angry buzz from the purple energy field. I needed to focus on the immediate danger.
Unfortunately, I didn’t understand the danger at all.
Like a cannonball to the skull, horror and soul-draining fear burst into my mind. There, they blossomed with sickly colors that swam behind my eyes and devoured my memories.
Time cannibalized space, bit it to the quick. Pain moldered in the cracks, sharp and hungry agony hidden behind the world.
For the briefest moment, all things swam, and I felt something fundamentally wrong, like being on a train travelling through a dark and forsaken land, barreling toward some doom only I saw.
I felt it, like a snag in space or perhaps a tear in time. I had caused it, I knew, but didn’t understand how.
“The fuck?” I nearly choked, going to one knee to steady myself. Shaking my head, I turned to my right, seeking the source of this malign emotion.
Once I did, I wished I could unsee the bizarre creature.
Mostly humanoid from the bits I could see, the aberration stood enormous, taller than the tallest basketball player I’d ever seen. Its attenuated limbs stretched into nothingness at irregular intervals, defined only by the long, metallic spikes pushed through the phantom extremities. I could see part of a foot here, a section of thigh there, a vague suggestion of an arm. The higher up I went, the less I saw until I reached the face. Further than it should be, even from its elongated body, and completely androgynous, the aberration’s features seemed to float in an oval of beige-tinted almost-nothingness. Faint purple strands, small sparks of horrifying light, floated between the creature and the violet mist.
