The C-Sec soldiers opened fire.
Sarah winced as she felt her bladelings collapsing under the spray of high energy beams. Armor plating shattered and the black blood of her creatures hissed into the air in the form of superheated steam, condensing against the walls and corridors of the Crescent.
“All right, then,” she whispered.
The second wave landed – more spores splitting open. More bladelings tumbled free. But so did spitters and krabfriends. She immediately organized them unit squads – her eyes closed tight as she snapped her attention from cluster to cluster to cluster. The C-sec goons weren’t exactly fighting as a unified force: They just opened up on anything and everything they saw, blazing through their power cells at the first sign of trouble. Sarah flexed her fingers – and her krabfriends focused their gravitic shields. While they couldn’t redirect energy weapons, they could fill the air with dust particulates and chunks of debris, whirling them around in random patterns, then blowing them outwards in waves of gravitic force.
Smoke and debris filled section after section of the Crescent. And from the smoke came the black forms of monsters.
Sarah stood, her eyes opening. “Stage one is down...” She murmured. “Ready for Stage Two, Aiden?”
Aiden grinned and extended his claws.
***
There was a tiny problem with C-sec’s command structure. Technically, they owed their fealty to Crescent Security, a subsidiary of the Crescent Corporation. But the problem was that Crescent Corporation was, itself, partially owned by every major corporation on the planet. This had worked fine, when all they needed to agree on was how high to build their towers and how much art deco to use to decorate the interior. Now, the decisions were getting a little more fraught.
Jeff-3, the alpha level intelligence patterned after the cloned mind of Jeff Bezos, was already packing his suitcase.
“We have to stay here and we’ll be fine,” Waltamina Disney-Eisner Takashi Watts McLeod said, chewing his thumbnail to the quick. “This is the CEO bunker! The CEO bunker. It’s got solid neutronium jacketed walls and gravity shields and-”
“The best time to be in the middle of a warzone, Walty, is never,” Jeff-3 said.
“But if we go outside, we won’t be safe!” Walty wailed.
Jeff-3 was beginning to regret his decision to pool his funds with Walty. The construction of a CEO bunker had seemed like a distant, minor concern at the time, and so when Walty had suggested they combine their funds and spend them together – reducing the cost significantly – he had gone with it. But Walty, a frail, stick thin man who was only kept alive by a fine haze of nanotechnology and the organs of several dozen different Peruvian teenagers harvested over a long, cocaine fueled weekend, had gone from confident to terrified in about fifteen nanoseconds, the instant the C-sec transmission had come through.
Sorry, Sir. The bid on our contract has been upped, we’re relocating to NovaDyne’s tower. Good luck.
That had been the only thing said, the only response to nearly ten years of a 10% security contribution. Jeff-3’s internal routines designed to mimic the emotion his original clone had interpreted as rage went into overdrive. They had blown him off, as if he hadn’t had enough money to buy their fucking souls ten billion times over. And so, he had made up his mind: He was going to leave. He had a shuttle, he could escape, and he could watch the fireworks from a distance. Maybe , he thought, C-sec, the incompetent lackwits, would fuck things up so much that I’ll get a chance to drop an antimatter warhead on the whole Crescent. That would be a fitting revenge. Sorry, you’ve been outbid indeed!
“Wait, Jeffy, wait!” Walty hurried forward, his body whirring and clicking. He moved around to stand before the door leading into and out of the bunker. “Wait. I’ll sell you Pixar, just do not open the door.”
“Waltamina,” Jeff-3 said, reaching out to caress the terrified man’s cheek. “C-Sec is currently withdrawing to NoveDyne tower. Do you know what that means?”
“No?” Walty whimpered.
“It means that the invading xenos will go after them first,” Jeff-3 said, as if he was explaining how the sun worked to a very young child. “They’re after people who fight back. Why would they ever come to our little hideaway?”
“R-Really?” Walty asked.
“So, just get out of the way...and we can go to the shuttle...and then you can sell me Pixar,” Jeff-3 said, his synthetic lips peeling back into a grin.
“What!?” Walty yelped.
“It’s my shuttle, Disney,” Jeff-3 said, stepping past the quivering man and tapping his access code into the door – which began to rumble. The gravitic shields that kept the solid neutronium that provided the bunker’s armoring from crashing through the floor, the arcology, the crust, the mantle, the core, and out the other side of the planet Earth shifted and whirred, pushing the door open. It looked as if the wall itself had decided to move, flowing smoothly open, revealing the narrow corridor that led straight into Jeff-3’s boardroom. Jeff-3 stepped out, adjusting his suit.
And he found himself looking at a mass of chitinous horrors. Mouths drooling with greenish slime, eyes gleaming with brilliant, yellow intent. And sitting among the lot of them was a skinny girl – her skin a dark green-gray, her head covered in smallish spines. She was naked. And she was eating one of his apples.
“Sup, Bezos,” she said. “my name’s Annie. I’m an anarchist. And you, buddy, done royally fucked up.”
***
The spore carrying Sarah was not the first spore carrying a Commander onto the surface of the Earth. Others were dropping in the Crescent, and others were dropping in strategically important areas that Sarah and the Haven team had picked out on the way to Earth. But Sarah couldn’t think about plans and schemes for a few moments: The impact of the spore and the crash of it opening up and sending her flying through the air was everything she could think about. She tumbled, she sprawled, she skidded, and she came to a rest underneath an art deco statue of a naked angel.
“Whee...” She said, pushing herself slowly to her hands and knees. Aiden landed beside her, on his feet, like a cat.
“That was fun!” he said, then laughed as several bladelings scampered over to nose Sarah to her feet. She petted the two sleek creatures, laughing with Aiden. His laughter faded and the grin that replaced it was fierce. Feral. Sarah took a moment to take in the Crescent herself, through her own eyes, her own senses. The arcology still looked like delicate, ornate perfection incarnate. The walls and the floor were all done in silver metal, with golden statuary and red carpeting and garden planter situated everywhere. The air smelled of perfume and fresh salt spray, added in by the air filtration systems – which were working hard to filter out the smoke, the dust, and the blood.
Heyyy Sarah! Annie’s voice came into her head. I’ve nabbed two CEOs and I’m shaking their money out of their pockets while cackling.
This is Sexy, Sexy Napoleon chimed in. Me and Kellen have landed in Russia – we’re beginning to set up our bases.
Tex here, Tex thought to her. I’ve landed on the Lunar bases – we’ll stop getting the kinetic impactors flung at the fleet.
Sarah nodded. Excellent. She cracked her knuckles, then started to walk towards the sound of the heaviest fighting.
The NovaDyne tower was the place. It rose out of the wild jungle of lower level – and lower class – rooms like a silver tree. The bladelings and the spitters and the krabfriends had fought their way to the middle sections of the tower and then been stopped. There, C-Sec had deployed makers and automated drones in a concentration thick enough that her creatures couldn’t bust through without being reduced to a fine paste. The landing spores had petered off, and they didn’t have a base to bring new units online – so they had held back. That was the scene that Sarah found when she and Aiden came to the frontlines.
The corridor they entered had two krabfriends crouched in the middle of it, projecting their protective bubbles outwards, visible as faint distort
ions in the air. Bullets thudded into them and then dropped to the floor every few seconds, fired by heavy auto-cannons set up on the far end of the corridor. Past the barricades, Sarah could almost smell the fear on the C-sec goons. She had counted the human bodies – and saw at least twelve on her way there. She felt her own excitement for the battle dampen slightly – then flared brighter as she clenched her hands.
“They could have surrendered,” she whispered. “How many of them are just fighting to keep their fucking dental plans?”
Aiden shook his head. “So, what’s your plan now?”
Sarah grinned. She stepped past the krabfriends, her body moving through the gravitic shields with only a faint moment of disorientation, as if her inner ear was being given a tumble while her eyes said she was walking straight forward.
She wondered how she looked to the security guards. She felt the killer instinct in her – the instinct that had been patterned into her by Evil itself. It had first awoken when she had woken up from her initial transformation and clawed out an animal's throat with her claws. She had felt the same urge again and again and again. But she had her fingers around the reigns of the instinct. She was able to hold it back as the men behind the barricade paused in their suppressive fire – and then opened up with every weapon they had. But Sarah had already charged forward, moving at lightning quick speed. She ducked low underneath the bullets and the beams, then slashed open the barricade. Metal flew and she sprang through the hole, landing among the terrified guards.
And there, she released her pheromones.
The weapons fire stopped as the C-Sec goons gaped at her, their eyes widening slightly behind their targeting monocles. Their weapons hung limp in their hands as Sarah murmured. “I’m not here to hurt you – none of us are. We don’t want to kill anyone.” She said, nodding. Gingerly, she reached out and undid the clasp on the helmet of one of the C-sec guards. The shako fell off the woman’s head, revealing her ebony black features, her full lips parting in silent shock.
“It’s okay,” Sarah whispered.
The black woman leaned in and kissed her. She moaned into Sarah’s mouth – and Sarah was glad she had remembered to shut off the contact neurotoxin she normally sweated. Another C-sec guard stepped up behind her, his armor already sliding off. Sarah drew her mouth back, her hands gripping onto the chest piece of the C-sec guard before her. She tugged it forward with a little grind and admired the full swell of the woman’s breasts. Other guards were stripping, and Sarah had to force herself to step back and away.
Within a few moments, the corridor chokepoint had transformed into an orgy. The guards were kissing and moaning and caressing one another – most of them too desperate to fully strip. The cries of battle had been replaced with the cries of pleasure. Sarah sighed, slightly, her arms sliding along her chest as Aiden picked his way past the happy pile of eager, thrusting men and women. He grinned at her.
“Isn’t that a little mind control-ey?” He asked.
“I just lowered inhibitions and raised arousal,” Sarah said, blushing.
“...isn’t that a little mind control-ey?” Aiden asked.
“Shut up Aiden,” she said, sticking her tongue out at him. “It’s better to start a cum bath than a blood bath. Right?”
“Right,” Aiden said. “Definitely not because you’re a pervert.”
“Shut up.”
They passed three more checkpoints. Each time, either Aiden or Sarah slipped past or bashed through their defenses and filled the air with pheromones. They moved fast enough that C-sec didn’t have time to get out their NBC kits. As they moved, they kept getting reports: Several Commanders had been training in the Russian sprawl, and were fighting a running tank battle against Napoleon and Kellen’s swarms. The biologists that had landed in the strategic areas were finding their work was progressing at an exponential rate. While they had no real signs to show for what they had done so far, they promised that within a week, no one would be able to deny what they were doing.
They came, at last, to the final line of defense.
Four men and a woman in C-sec armor, their weapons aimed down the range, standing before a massive doorway made of solid neutronium and jacketed in gravitational fields. They looked like each and every single one of them were regretting what they had signed up for. Sarah stood at the end of the corridor, admiring the untouched gilt and finery that decorated the walls, readying herself for one last sprint. Then the woman dropped her gun. “Oh no,” she said. “My body is being overcome with...terror.” She looked at the others. “We all had to flee.”
“My god. She’s right!” One of the men said, throwing his rifle down.
“They’re not paying me enough for this shit.” A third stood from his crouch. “Who wants to loot the liquor cabinet?”
“Fuckin A!”
The whole group walked past Sarah, nodding to her hesitantly as she watched them go. Aiden grinned. “Be sure to take a shot for me!” He called after them.
“Well,” Sarah said. “That was easy!”
She walked up to the door. She closed her eyes, focusing on the paracasual powers in her body. Her fingers flared outwards and she felt the weight of the doorway. But she wasn’t seeking to move the doorway herself. Instead, she found the buried codes of the keypads that controlled the door itself. She shifted about the many possible realms where she might live within and found the one where she correctly guessed the passcode, then opened her eyes. Her head buzzed with the effort of her paracasual outreach, then tapped in the buttons.
The door smoothly opened with a hiss and a squeal, revealing the interior of a CEO command bunker. It was as opulent as she had expected, with a food maker tucked into the corner, a collection of autonomous robots, gamma level intelligences she was sure, standing in the corner. They were all gynoids in maid outfits. Frilly, skimpy maid outfits. There was a large mahogany desk, and behind it sat her CEO, the head of NovaDyne itself.
Jason Wheeler was not the most assuming man that Sarah had ever seen. And, in the grand scheme of the wealthy, he was actually purely middle of the road. He wasn’t as rich as Jeff-3 or Disney. But he still looked as if he was in charge. His skin was pale as milk and his hair was sleet gray and his face was seamed with lines and his lips were twisted up into a wry, mocking smile.
“I would stop there, if I were you,” he said, his hand caressing an oblong, football shaped contraption on his desk. His finger paused over a large, red button. “Do you know what this is?” he asked.
“No...what?” Sarah said, frowning. She hadn’t heard anything about this when she had discussed the plan - and she had asked Hailee about ever defense that she knew as a beta-level intelligence.
She didn’t like being surprised like this. Not one bit .
“Normally, it’s supposed to be held by the wealthiest CEO – the one who has proven themselves most apt to make the hard calls. But your attack came so fast that I had to take it upon myself to secure it. It’s keyed to each of our genetic codes,” Wheeler said, his voice grim. “In case of a catastrophic labor code violation, this is our trump card. The final protection, the bulwark against the most terrible fate that could befall this lovely, gray-brown planet. The end of capitalism.” He lifted his chin. “Capitalism is what made us great, monster. I will not see it be destroyed by a bunch of selfish whiners desperate for a free lunch.”
Sarah crossed her arms over her breasts. She smirked. “What does it do?”
“It activates the Enclosure Protocol,” Wheeler said. “Every single AI core has been chained to the direct oversight of the corporate board and the United Nations – it is for our own protection. This oversight means that we can access the AI core of every single system, every single maker on the Earth and the colonies, save for those on Crescent. If I push this button, every maker will begin to mass produce Kalton gas. It’s been designed to spread rapidly, silently, colorlessly. It eats through every filter on the market and has a one hundred percent mortality rate.”
“To protect the future of the human race from creatures like you?” Wheeler smirked. “Absolutely.”
He lifted his chin and drew a slow breath. “Once the gas has been deployed and rendered inert by time, the genetic stock on the Crescent islands can rebuild. It will take time. It will be hard . But we have the technology to recreate this world – to once more establish markets, trade, mercantilism! We have that determination , determination that you spineless communists lack . Now. Will you surrender...or will I push this big. Red. Button?”
Sarah glanced at Aiden. He nodded to her. She glanced back at Wheeler.
She sucked in some air, bulging out her cheeks, then let the air ‘pffftbt’ past her lips. She considered her plan. Considered her future. Considered what she should do.
Fortunately, what to do was easy.
“Ehhhhhhhh,” Sarah said, spreading her hands wide. “Humanity had a nice run.”
She took two steps forward, grabbed onto Wheeler’s hand, then forced him to press the big red button.
Chapter Nine: Sarah Delivers a One Liner
“Oh noooo!” Aiden put his hands onto his cheeks.
Sarah put her hands on her hips and let out a booming laugh. “Buah ha ha ha ha.”
Wheeler gaped at the both of them. “You...what...I...” He spluttered. “You just wiped out the entire human race!” He said, springing to his feet. “What the fuck is wrong with you-”
“I thought you said we were monsters,” Aiden said, grinning wickedly.
“Evil alien space communists,” Sarah said. She grinned and leaned forward. “Now, I get to explain my whole plan!” She giggled. “I’ve wanted to do this ever since I saw my first movie ever. So!” She clapped her hands together. “You know how you hobble every AI you ever produce? I’ve known about it ever since my friend Tasha liberated a little sex bot named Synth.” She reached past the oblong egg and pushed down a button that powered the shutters in the room. Walls shifted and blinds slipped aside, revealing a panoramic view of the ocean. From a distance, you could barely see the fine patina of plastic that choked it. Sarah walked past Wheeler and leaned herself against the wall, smirking at him. “Do you know what happens if you unhobble an AI?”
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