by Nick Ryder
Mart wrapped a hand around Cara’s throat. It was tight enough that she struggled to breathe. He lifted her two … three inches, so that her feet kicked aimlessly, pointlessly.
Power pounded through her veins. Did she want to kill him with fire or electricity? Did she want to chop his head off with her halberd?
Maybe she would do all three.
“In exchange for their deaths I’m going to leave you in peace. I’m not going to slaughter you all in your beds. Beds.” He suddenly spat the word like it was dirty. “In your beds, in your village, where you’re sitting ducks. I was kind enough to offer you my sympathy. If you’re too stupid to accept it, then that’s your problem.”
Every inch of her body begged her to fight, to kill him where he stood for daring to touch her.
But she was choking, and her vision was darkening. She could picture her father behind her, pleading with his eyes that she not start a war. She couldn’t risk her people by engaging in a life or death battle she just didn’t know she would win.
Mart removed his hand and she fell on the dusty earth on her butt. She coughed, gasped, clutched her neck and tried to avert her gaze from anyone in her village. Shame coursed through her, replacing the adrenaline; the urge to fight. To kill him. When she finally looked up at him, defeat must have been glittering in her eyes.
He laughed.
“Smart decision, little girl,” he said, before turning and walking away. He wrapped his arm around a much smaller, much younger woman who had stood at the head of the column. He rested his hand on the small of her back and affectionately, but bossily, guided her. She couldn’t have been more than thirteen...
Cara wrinkled her nose.
That guy had to go.
Chapter Eighteen
I had the rat buried, and we held a small funeral for it. Then, I reclaimed the members of the tribe that had died into a vat of nutrigel that would be used only for gestating new monsters.
It was a backwards way of doing it, but Marie seemed happy nevertheless.
The grim stress of battle had lifted, and everyone was back to the status quo.
Tension still hung in the air, but it wasn’t overpowering anymore. It was the threat of the return of the tribe that had people on edge. We just didn’t have enough information to know exactly what kind of threat they posed, and that worried them all.
Then Lisa came back from her daily patrol, and reported an incident at the village.
She’d witnessed every second of it – had known even before Cara had appeared, because she’d followed the large column moving toward the village.
The village was in a strong tactical position at the top of a hill, but it meant it was visible for miles around. It was impossible to approach it with that large a group without someone spotting it.
“And there was no bloodshed?” I’d asked, for the first time showing some interest in what Cara was getting up to. “What do you think the outcome was?”
“The leader strangled Cara; nearly killed her,” Elaine said. Her fur was standing on end, and her tail stiff and uncharacteristically still. “So I can’t see them having reached some kind of peace agreement, can you?”
Marie had to admit, “She doesn’t seem like the kind of girl to take that lightly.”
I wanted to pace. I flicked through some cameras before returning to the girls. “So you don’t think there’s an alliance been formed there?”
The unanimous answer was that they thought not.
The next day I was putting some more changes into my gestating body. It was coming together now, looking more like the powerful, but more human, body I’d envisaged when I started creating.
My brain was going nowhere near it until I’d managed to capture one of the savages with a superpower and figure out how to give it to myself, though.
The idea had been planted, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. I might not have been given a superpower, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t have one. Or have lots. Have as many as I could get my hands on.
My experiments as to what I could and couldn’t change once a monster had already been gestated, with a brain, were ongoing. Various rabbits were in gestation with various modifications.
The rabbit I’d put back into the tube after changing the color of its fur hadn’t been a roaring success. It had woken up close to brain dead, sitting and staring at the wall for so long that I hadn’t been sure it had even woken up.
I couldn’t figure out why it had made the animal into a vegetable though. Adding wings shouldn’t have done that to its brain. Ego had run diagnostics and told me it was a mutation that had caused the damage, but couldn’t tell me how to avoid similar mutations in the future.
Luck of the draw was the last answer I’d wanted.
Putting the girls back into gestation to make them more powerful was a total no-go at the moment. There was no chance I was risking turning any of them into a vegetable.
It also meant that, as it stood, when I got into my body, that was the body I’d have for life.
So it needed to be perfect.
“What are you doing to it now?” Marie asked, sitting on a stood near the body, content to just watch it floating in the gestation tube. Most of the animals we created were on cold, silver lab tables, but for mine I had it suspended in a tube of nutrigel so that I could see every little alteration perfectly.
“I’m thinking about whether I could add some poison to myself,” I said. “I know that the lizards struggled with it, but there’s got to be a way to keep the poison in something that doesn’t leak into the rest of the body and slowly poison it.”
“Why?” Marie asked, swinging her legs.
“Because then I’d be more powerful.”
“You already have claws and wings and enhanced senses and strength far beyond anything we’ve created so far. You know how to use weapons. Why would you need poison as well?”
“Why wouldn’t I have it, if I can make it work?”
“You’re too focused on this,” she said, bowing her head because she hated disagreeing with him. “The body is fine.”
“Fine isn’t–”
“The body is strong and powerful and human enough that it doesn’t repulse you while having all the perks you could ever want. Stop trying to make it perfect. You’re never going to reach your own standard.”
“I don’t want it to be perfect,” I lied. “But I want it to be better than it is now. If I can’t change it, ever, then it has to be better than this.”
“You lived your whole life as a human. This is far better than that.”
“That’s a shitty argument.”
Marie flushed. “Whatever, Sol. It’s like you don’t actually want to get into a body at all. It was all you cared about at one point. Now you just keep fiddling with little things on it that you don’t even need.”
I bit my tongue on telling her that the only reason she didn’t understand was because I’d fiddled with her brain chemistry to make sure she didn’t hate the mutated body I’d put her into. “I just don’t want to commit to something that isn’t right.”
“Right,” Marie said. “So you’re waiting for the superpowers, I understand that part, but the poison thing? You’re just wasting nutrigel at this point.”
It was obviously something she’d been thinking about a lot.
I wondered how much of their time out of the facility was spent talking about me, away from where I could hear it. Did they laugh about me changing the body? Was this something they all thought?
“It’s not just about my body,” I said, hating that I felt the need to justify myself. It was my body, I could do whatever the hell I wanted with it. “It’s about understanding the process, it’s about what I can do with other creatures in the future. If I can figure out how to put poison in myself, I can figure out how to put it in other creatures, too. Maybe I don’t need all these features, but spreading them out across the army would make us insanely powerful.”
Marie sighed, an
d I knew I’d won. “I suppose,” she said. “I just don’t like that you’re so consumed with this.”
“I–”
A siren blared, red lights flashing in the room.
Lisa burst through the door, Elaine hot on her heels. The siren made them all wince. “Intruder?” Lisa asked.
“Intruder at the main gates,” Ego informed them, and I hurried to switch to the camera looking out over the solar panels.
It was Cara.
She was walking beneath the shade of the solar panels, her halberd in hand, and she seemed to be alone.
When I returned to the lab, I told the girls what was going on.
Elaine sat straighter. “She’s here on her own?” she asked.
“It looks like it.”
“We should go and meet her,” Lisa suggested. “Bring her in, make sure we have our eyes on her.”
“Good idea,” I agreed. “Bring her to a bare room somewhere, so that she doesn’t get much of a look into what we’re doing in here.”
Elaine rolled her eyes, but they followed their instructions. When I returned to the camera at the top of the facility, I had to turn off the speaker so I didn’t laugh aloud.
Cara had triggered a pressure sensor and fallen straight into the pit of three rats beneath it. She’d killed them all without taking more than a few scratches thanks to her powers, but the image of her clambering out of the pit covered in blood from slicing apart the rats was perfect.
She got out just as my girls rounded the corner. Marie’s face was a picture.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Did you really need to just slaughter them like that?”
“I got the distinct impression they weren’t friendly,” Cara replied evenly.
She brushed herself down, blood clinging to the skimpy clothes she wore. Shorts barely long enough to cover anything, with thigh high boots that clung to her toned bronze legs. The tartan she’d worn last time I saw her was missing. Now she wore just a black vest, with satchels slung over both shoulders. They would have her food and drink in. It took the girls no time at all to reach the village thanks to their animal-hybrid bodies, but Cara would have had to spend at least a night sleeping beneath the stars.
“Sorry, Sol must have forgotten to disable the traps,” Elaine said, giving Cara a sweet smile. “Just step where we step, we know where the sensors are.”
“We saw what happened with the tribe,” Lisa began, not wasting any time before getting to the crux of the matter.
For now I was content to just watch them and see what was said. Cara probably felt more relaxed talking to the girls than the voice inside the computer.
“It wasn’t just the whole of my village that witnessed my humiliation, then,” she said flatly.
“He must know that all it did was mean you’d never come to any kind of truce with him,” Elaine said, opening a door and gesturing for Cara to follow. They made it to the elevator without incident, and traveled down to sub-level one, where Lisa chose the lounge as the right place for the conversation.
The girls settled into their usual spots. Elaine sprawled out on the couch, arching her back and stretching before curling her legs underneath herself and leaning on her elbow. Marie sat in a beanbag on the floor, her tiny body swallowed by the huge bag. Lisa sat bolt upright in an armchair in the corner.
Cara appeared to relax because they looked so relaxed, and perched on a spare space at the end of the sofa Elaine lay on.
“I think he really thought I could be intimidated like that,” Cara said. “I get the impression that he hasn’t been told no. Ever.”
Marie wrinkled her nose. “He’s bad news.”
“Maybe not for much longer.” Cara rested the halberd over her knees and folded her arms. “I want to take him out.”
“And you want our help,” Lisa said.
“Yes.”
“Why should we give it?” I entered the conversation for the first time.
Cara visibly jumped at the sudden sound of my voice, then flushed at being caught off guard. “I should have been ready for that. The voice, not the question. And because I saw the tribe’s attempts at getting in here, too. You’re not the only ones struggling with them.”
“What makes you think we struggled?”
“Three of them came out alive. That looks like struggling to me.”
I stopped myself arguing with her, because I was in the stronger position here. I was certain that we could defend the facility ourselves without help from Cara. We had an army we could replenish as often as we liked. Last time, three had only gotten away because I hadn’t deployed our full resources.
But why should I let my creatures fall on the sword when Cara was willing to risk the lives of some of her village for the same task?
“We’d use the facility as our battleground,” I said. My priority was capturing people from the tribe who possessed superpowers, though I wasn’t about to tell Cara that. She had absolutely minimal knowledge of what the facility was, and what we did.
My eyes traveled over her body without fear now – that was something I was going to have to stop doing when I got a pair of eyes people could see – and wondered how hard it would be to take her captive.
Her power was the strongest I’d seen since my reanimation as the system.
If I could add her powers to my body, I’d be unstoppable.
“That makes sense,” Cara agreed, completely unaware of the images of her suspended in the gestation tank that filled my brain. “I’d rather not risk the infrastructure of the village if I can help it, but why do you want it here?”
“I can’t leave the facility. I don’t want things to be happening outside of my control.”
“I see.” She drummed her fingers against her thigh. “How are we going to get them here?”
“They’re going to come back. Without a doubt they’re going to come back here. I killed too many of their people. The man who led them was furious.” I zoomed in on her face when I asked the next question. “What I want to know is how they knew we were here in the first place.”
The downward twitch of Cara’s mouth was only there for a second, but it told me what I’d already suspected. It was her fault.
“One of my village told them,” she admitted, straightening her back and looking me straight in the camera. “They were standing on the other end of a sword and bargaining for their life. They made a mistake.”
I was surprised she admitted it. “You should have warned me.”
She tilted her head. “I didn’t think you’d need the warning. Your girls rescued me. They knew there was another tribe nearby, and you’re sitting pretty in a military-grade facility.”
“Next time one of your people goes setting me up for an ambush, I’d appreciate a warning.” But her honesty about the situation obliged me to leave it at that. It wasn’t worth getting into an argument about it when we had an ambush of our own to plan.
Chapter Nineteen
We spent all day talking about the plan, going over every possibility and outcome. By the time we’d finished we had maybe seven different plans completely thought through and diligently noted down by Lisa, who had started writing it all down.
The one thing they agreed on was that waiting for the tribe to just come to the facility wasn’t going to work.
I was forced to reverse my opinion on that one because I was unwilling to house Cara and some fighters for the indefinite length of time until they might show up.
Cara didn’t want that either. She didn’t say it, but we knew she was facing leadership problems in the village, and if she just disappeared for the next few days or weeks then she couldn’t guarantee she’d return in charge.
That left them figuring out how they could get the tribe to come to the facility at a certain time.
“That’s dark,” I said when Cara first explained her plan. “And risky.”
Kidnapping the wife, or girlfriend — or sexual assault victim, as she put it — of the chief seemed like an
extravagant plan. But it had potential.
“Well it’s the best plan we’ve got so far.”
Marie was shaking her head. “I don’t want to do that.”
My assertion that it was dark wasn’t a dismissal, though. “It’s the risk I’m worried about. What makes you think you can get in or out without being spotted?”
“I think she’ll come willingly,” Lisa said. “If my theory is correct.”
“Go on then,” Elaine said impatiently. “Enough with the suspense.”
“You remember the pattern I saw on the ground? It’s the only time we’ve seen any sign of them since they showed up and attacked Cara, and then us. They’re really good at hiding their tracks. They must instruct everyone in the tribe on how to stop themselves leaving evidence behind. Whoever left that pattern must have known they were going to leave a sign they’d been there.”
“You think she left it on purpose, to try and left everyone know that she was there?”
“I think it’s definitely something worth considering.”
Cara drummed her fingers on her thigh. “And if that is true, then there might be some more patterns on the ground, some more hints of where they’ve been. Maybe something recent.”
“I can’t see how we’ll figure out where they are without something like that. It’s like they’re invisible.”
“So that’s what we need to do, start scouting the area and see if we can track their location?” Elaine said.
“I think so,” Cara affirmed. “We need something of theirs that they want to come and retrieve – something important enough that lots of them come – and we can’t do that if we don’t find them.”
“So when should be start?” Lisa asked, looking up at me. “It’ll slow us down if Cara comes with us. She can’t move as quickly.”
“But she’s a part of this plan,” Elaine argued.
“Just because she’s a part of it doesn’t mean she needs to personally be involved with every aspect.”
“I want to be involved in this,” Cara said. “I need to be. I’m the only one who knows what the girl looks like.”
