by Scott Baron
The Chithiid rounded the corner a mere twenty meters away and saw the tiny human standing above his fallen comrade. He activated his power whip, but Sarah had already taken off running, dodging behind debris to block his line-of-sight attack.
She swerved left onto the next street, running hard, when she heard a familiar voice shout, “Follow me!” nearby.
“Shit, that’s Finn!” she realized. Her lookout position had been in the wrong place, and she was leading the armed and angry alien right toward him.
“Damn it, Finn. This is why we keep accurate records,” she grumbled as she unslung her pulse rifle and took off in a run toward the sound of his voice.
Sarah covered the two blocks in record time, realizing she had heard Finn clearly despite the distance as she ran. Another one of Freya’s surprise upgrades she would have to thank her for––if she survived the day.
The Chithiid following her was still far behind. Now if she could just retrieve the comms device and bolt before she was either seen or it caught up to her, things would be peachy.
She slid to an abrupt stop at the sight of pure, and utterly strange, carnage playing out in front of her.
The Chithiid were there, as she knew they would be, but the mutated humans attacking them were more hideous and misshapen than she had gathered from the reports. Fortunately, the deformed humans seemed more interested in alien flesh than human, at least for the moment, though in a melee situation, anything could change in an instant.
She regretted the thought as soon as she had it when a particularly large male––she could tell, even from a distance, as the mutants were all naked, though covered with matted hair and filth––fixed its attention on Finn.
“Come on, Finn. Move!” she urged from cover.
He wasn’t moving quickly enough, she realized. The beast of a man was going to be on him in seconds.
“Shit!” she heard him cry out in panic.
“Goddamn it, Finn,” she growled as she pulled her cloak lower over her head and leapt from cover, quickly shouldering her pulse rifle and letting off a single shot.
The mutated human fell dead in his tracks, a neat hole burned straight through him. Finn’s panicked eyes scanned the chaos to pinpoint the Chithiid that had fired, but instead of an alien, he saw a cloaked figure ducking away from the melee. Something about the way it moved tickled his senses, but there was no time. Finn recognized the opportunity he had been given and seized it.
“This way!” he shouted.
He bolted across the intersection to the access stairs on the other side of the street. He just hoped all of the disgusting creatures had followed their leader up the stairway they’d just taken, otherwise they were ten kinds of screwed.
“MEEEAAT!” one of the mutants shouted, pointing at Finn’s team as they popped the door and quickly scurried down the stairs.
The Chithiid that had been chasing her came upon the same scene that Sarah had. The sight of his comrades in distress changed his course of action, sending him charging into the fray, while Sarah watched quietly from cover a block away.
“Can’t reach it. Not with all that chaos,” she noted, spying the comms device where Finn had dropped it.
Quickly, she shouldered the weapon again, took careful aim, and destroyed the comms before it could be captured for study. She then slid quietly from the scene and took off at a quick jog, getting as clear of the conflict as she could. Surely the Chithiid would send more men to help put down the mutants, and she had no desire to be anywhere close by when that happened.
“Hey, Freya,” she said over her encrypted comms link as she slowed her pace several blocks later. “Shit just got a little hairy over here. How about you guys come pick me up a little early?”
Seen from above, the deconstruction of Denver looked almost like a flattened crater. The center of the city had been picked relatively clean, while the outskirts, where lower value resources were scattered, had been left largely untouched as Chithiid work crews skipped over them for better pickings elsewhere.
Daisy and Freya had redirected mid-flight to pick up Sarah after her run-in with the Chithiid. Once she was done cleaning up the remaining alien blood from her arm, Daisy’s resurrected sister filled them both in on the harrowing adventure she’d been on.
“Goddamn, Sis, so you took out a Chithiid in hand-to-hand on your first mission? That’s so badass,” Daisy marveled, appreciating her sister’s innate skills.
“It wasn’t my goal, that’s for sure,” she replied. “Things just kinda went south on me down there.”
“And you say the new arm kicked ass?” Freya chirped. “Sweet!”
“Oh yeah, it did that and then some. I think it’s somehow tied in to my neurological system or something, the way it shifted state like that.”
“Freya, was it even supposed to do that?” Daisy asked.
“Well, not exactly. I mean, sure, I hoped it would be able to, but, you know, it’s a theory, so it hadn’t been tested out with a real person yet.”
“So I was your guinea pig?” Sarah said. “Awesome.”
“No, it’s not like that. The arm would work no matter what, but the thing I didn’t know was if the nanites would totally bond and connect with you like that. Mine do what I need, fixing things and all that, but whether they’d do it for you was up in the air.”
“And Finn’s team? All safe and sound?”
“Yeah, Daze. They made a clean break of it, and the comms unit is toast.”
“Excellent,” she replied with a relieved sigh. “So are you ready to get back to it? Me and Freya were on our way to Denver when you called. The monorail was reading some power issues in Colorado Springs, and it looks like we have to physically access the links in Denver to get that half of the line back up and running.”
Sarah took a long sip from her chilled electrolyte pack.
“Fixing a monorail? That sounds downright relaxing after the morning I’ve had.”
“Freya, drop us off, then do a quick hop to low orbit and monitor the entire region from there. I want an eye in the sky in case the Ra’az catch on to what we're doing.”
“Okay, Daisy. I can take up a geosynchronous orbit so I’ll be able to be back down in just a few minutes if you need me.”
She deposited the sisters where they requested then flew off to assume her monitoring position. A half hour later, the duo emerged from a small service hatch accessing the small regional monorail tunnel beneath the outskirts of Denver just a half mile from where they’d entered it.
Unlike Colorado Springs, getting this section of track operational had been as easy as re-routing a power feed to that particular tunnel’s line. It was only a seventy-mile or so leg, so the power requirements weren’t even that extensive.
“All clear from up here,” Freya informed them. “No Ra’az in your area.”
“All right, then. Head back down from orbit and stay close by. We’ll be back to the pickup clearing pretty soon,” Daisy replied.
“Okay. See you soon.”
Freya dropped out of orbit and reentered the atmosphere high above, the distant sonic boom the only evidence of her arrival.
“The team should have hit the city a few hours ago,” Daisy said as they quietly made their way to the rendezvous point. “The loop tube was damaged, and our pods ground to a halt, so we had to go the rest of the way on foot.”
“Lame. No one likes a forced march,” Sarah said.
“Yeah, well, it’s about to get worse.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” Daisy replied. “Bears. Big ones.”
“And here I thought four-armed aliens were bad,” Sarah said with a little chuckle.
A crackling in the bushes not too far away caught Sarah’s modified ears.
“I hear something. Maybe two or three hundred meters that way.”
“Shit, the team’s closer than I thought. We’ve gotta move. Come on!”
They took off at as quiet a run as possible, and were just out
side the warehouse building Daisy’s team had taken refuge in when a much louder crunching of branches from not far to their left caught their attention.
“Shit. We’ve gotta get elevated. Quick, up this tree!” Daisy said in a frantic hush, scaling the branches like her life depended on it, which, given what she thought was down below, it very well may have.
Sarah looked at the distant shapes of the approaching team from their new vantage point.
“You see that, Daze?”
Yep. That’s us. Keep your eyes peeled for the bears. I want to see how something that big was able to sneak up on us like that.
Daisy passed her binoculars to Sarah.
“You see the cyborg to the rear?”
“Yeah.”
“It sucks what happens, but keep an eye on him. The guy had a pair of brass balls, even for a cyborg.”
“I know we can’t interfere, but damn, Daze, this watching horrible shit unfold sucks.”
“I’m with ya, Sis.”
The tiny specks that were Daisy’s team grew steadily larger as they approached the site of the impending attack. For what it was worth, Daisy felt her people moved efficiently and with relatively good situational awareness, for civvies, of course.
“There. Three o’clock,” Sarah said.
“Thanks. Got it.”
“Internal me?”
“Yep.”
“What’d she see?”
“Look over there. Three o’clock.”
Sarah raised the binoculars and scanned the area.
“I don’t see any––” A hulking form she had thought was a mound of debris moved. “Oh damn. That thing is huge.”
“Yeah. Not a grizzly like I originally thought. From the morphology, I’d say kodiaks and grizzlies interbred at some point. Now we’ve got these massive hybrid things out there.”
“How many did you say there were?”
“We’ll find out in a minute. Then something bigger and badder came along and kicked all their asses.”
“Maybe what we heard down below us?”
“Yep.”
“Hence hiding in a tree.”
“Precisely.”
The bear moved disquietingly easily through the foliage, sneaking up on the unsuspecting team with great speed. As before, it lunged and made quick work of the poor teammate at the rear.
Anthony, the brave, yet foolish, cyborg, launched into a furious attack on the beast.
“Jesus, what was he thinking?”
“Trying to help out,” Daisy replied. “Something I’ve seen many times since then. These cyborgs, though self-aware and not wanting to die, put themselves in harm’s way to do the right thing over and over.”
“Gotta respect that.”
“Yeah,” Daisy agreed.
In short order the mechanical man was torn to pieces as the team sprinted for the nearest building, while Daisy and Sarah watched from above.
The thing that had been making noise below them turned out to be another enormous bear, which ran a looping flanking course, then burst from the bushes, racing to meet the others.
In all the panic and confusion, the main body of the team made it into the structure just past their elevated hiding spot, but Daisy was lagging behind.
“You’re not going to make it!” Sarah hissed.
“I will,” she replied, a hint of uncertainty in her voice as she watched herself run far too slowly to escape.
“Shit! It’s right on you! Fuck this!”
“Sarah, no!”
Her familial instincts kicking in, Sarah dropped to the ground and raced to protect her sibling.
“Dammit!” Daisy growled, quickly dropping down and following her.
The bear was close. Really close, when an unexpected thing happened to it. Something that had never happened. A tiny prey animal barreled into its side, knocking it off course and forcing it to miss its quarry, which darted inside the shelter-thing nearby.
The animal turned and roared in fury, drawing its fuzzy siblings to its call. Sarah found herself surrounded by enormous, angry bears, armed with only her cybernetic arm and a bad attitude. She realized quite quickly, neither of those would be enough against a half-dozen ursine opponents.
The nearest bear angrily swatted at her, but she dodged the huge claws with a twisting lunge. The other bears, unlike opponents in martial arts movies, attacked her at once, swinging their mighty paws in a flurry of violence.
Sarah was able to dodge the first several blows, but then one made contact, the sheer force behind it slamming her to the side. Then another. Then another, like a meat-grinder of a pinball game.
She looked up through the swatting paws and saw her death coming for her in the form of an enormous, open mouth, when the beast was abruptly snatched up into the air and flung to the ground with enough force to snap its neck.
Daisy, her face red with fury, was wielding the Ra’az power whip with one hand, her bone sword brandished in the other.
The remaining bears turned and roared, but Daisy let out a blood-curdling roar of her own and charged them. It was such an unexpected thing, the nearest beast took a step back before remembering it was the biggest, baddest predator in the woods.
Was the baddest predator.
Daisy’s power whip fed off her rage-fueled intensity and slapped the animal aside like a toy as she dove toward the others, her sword held high and singing its song of blood-lust.
Sarah regained her wits and lurched to her feet to help her sister, but stopped and watched in both awe and horror.
Daisy was a dervish of destruction, bringing violent death and dismemberment to all in her path. The largest of the bears suddenly felt something completely foreign to it as its bladder released a flush of hot urine down its legs.
It felt fear.
Not uncertainty, or even pre-fight anxiety. No, this was something its primitive ancestors may have once felt, before they became the apex predators of today. Gut-wrenching, panic-inducing fear.
Its comrades in pieces, dying with groans of agony, the lone surviving bear did what none had done for centuries. It turned tail and fled.
Daisy spun and raised the power whip, its massive beam crackling with ill intent.
“Daze, it’s over.”
No.
“It is, Sis. Don’t be this.”
She gritted her teeth, blood of her carnage dripping from her hair, streaking her cheeks. She wanted to chase it down so badly, to kill it for attacking her sister. Sarah felt the dark impulse in their shared body.
“They’re just bears, Daisy. Let it go. They were just doing what bears do.”
The words of reason somehow sank in, and slowly, the power whip retracted. The sword in her hand likewise relaxed, its hunger sated by a full meal of blood and battle.
Her shocked sister stood nearby, surveying the scene of utter carnage.
“Uh, Freya?” Sarah said quietly into her comms.
“Yeah, Sarah? Are you ready to go?”
“You could say that,” she replied. “Come get us, and have the showers and sanitation drone ready. It’s going to be a bit messy when we come aboard.”
Daisy looked at the Ra’az device on her forearm and shuddered ever so slightly. She knew, now, what it took to make it function, and it was something she wasn’t sure she wanted to tap into ever again.
Chapter Seventeen
“I am your father,” Sarah cracked.
“Shut up.”
“Give in to the Dark Side,” she chided.
“Bite me,” Daisy said with a forced laugh.
She had cleaned the blood from her hair and skin, courtesy of a scalding-hot shower, then slid into a fresh pair of sweats before padding barefoot to Freya’s small galley. Sarah was waiting for her, but had at least given her a minute to grab a beverage and a much-needed snack before launching into her quips.
“So...you wanna talk about it?”
“Not really, no,” Daisy replied.
The visceral conne
ction she had felt with the Ra’az power whip had disturbed her far more than she would have expected it ever could. The way it tapped into and fed off of her rage and anger. It was the complete opposite of the Chithiid devices, and if that was the only way to access its power, Daisy didn’t know if she ever wanted to make it function again.
“Look, I get it. Tapping into that sort of thing can be disquieting.”
“That’s not the half of it,” Daisy said, grimly.
“So what was it? Talk to me, Daze.”
Daisy struggled to put into words the sensation she had felt when she had connected to the alien device. How to voice the disquieting way it wrapped itself around her anger.
“I-I think I understand the Ra’az now,” she began. “The amount of pure anger and aggression that must fill them at every waking moment for them to so casually wield their power whips...” She swallowed hard, nearly tearing up from the memory.
“The Chithiid whip, the one I used before, it was intuitive, you know?” she continued. “Maybe it’s because they’re a peaceful race at heart. I believe it was because of their nature that the Ra’az were forced to build them a specialized––and very underpowered––version that would work for a calm mind.”
“But now that you know how the Ra’az one works, can’t you control it?” Sarah asked.
“It’s the opposite of what I’ve trained to do. Where I center and calm myself, the Ra’az let the rage flow. It might even be part of what makes the device so powerful.”
“But you’re not an angry person, Daisy,” Freya chimed in.
“No, I’m not, kiddo, and that’s what was so scary about using this thing. The Ra’az? They’re a purely war-like race. Knowing how they think, feeling how they react like that, I fear there may never be any chance of reasoning with them.”
Sarah’s face grew dark.
“So we kill the bastards. Wipe them the fuck out. Every last one of them. They do it to other races. We’ll flip the script, as it were.”
Daisy’s eyes flashed as inspiration hit.
“Wait. Hang on. What was that?”
