by Scott Baron
“Wait, exactly how long are we talking here?” Daisy felt a hot flush of adrenaline hit her veins.
“We’ve waited one hundred twenty years for you to be ready,” Fatima replied.
“Holy shit! We’re how old?”
Her sister ignored her.
“Getting us ready for what, exactly?” Daisy managed to say as her world spun around her.
Fatima rested her calm almond eyes on her.
“Ready for you to help us reclaim Earth, Daisy. Your intel has given us hope, and with your unique genetic makeup and skill set, we might just be able to pull it off, but it won’t be easy. You’d best get some rest now. Your training starts tomorrow.”
Epilogue
Daisy walked the corridor in a daze. Things had snowballed from bad to worse to what-the-hell-is-going-on, world-flipping-upside-down levels of crazy. She could feel her racing heart pounding in her head as the walls threatened to spin around her.
I need to think.
“You need to not think for a minute or you’re gonna hurl. Deep breaths, Daze.”
“Good point. Yeah,” Daisy replied as she staggered toward the nearest maintenance hangar to sit and digest all she’d just learned in peace.
A bit of self-centering and focus. That’s what I need. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere to be alone.
She swung the door open and stepped inside, the cool air immediately taking her panic down a notch. She shut the door quietly, then breathed a sigh of relief as she began focusing on lowering her heart rate and respirations.
It’s going to be okay. Just relax. Relax and breathe.
Daisy turned to find a crate to sit on rather than the chilly metal floor.
That’s when she noticed the furious metal-armed woman barreling toward her.
“Shit! Tamara, wait!”
A flurry of blows rained down on her from every direction, then a heavy-booted foot kicked her square in the chest, sending her flying backward into the unforgiving metal wall.
She clenched her teeth and tasted blood on her tongue, the adrenaline already pumping hard in her veins making an instantaneous decision between fight or flight.
“So, it’s going to be like that?” she said with grim resolution. “Fine.”
Daisy uncoiled her tensed legs and leapt toward the larger woman.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this, Daze.”
“You and me both,” she replied, then began a furious counterattack.
Welcome home, Daisy, she thought with a grim laugh as her fist connected with her opponent’s solid chin. Welcome home.
Pushing Daisy
THE CLOCKWORK CHIMERA BOOK 2
SCOTT BARON
It is not only the living who are killed in war
- Isaac Asimov
Chapter One
The hard rubber of the heavy-soled boot caught Daisy square in her chest with bone-crushing force. The impact was great enough to send her sliding backwards on the ceramisteel floor before she managed to dig in her feet and stop herself just short of the hard metal wall.
She flashed a little grin.
“Is that all you’ve got?” she said, taunting the burly woman with the menacing steel-alloy cybernetic replacement arm, who was circling her like a hungry shark. Daisy shrugged off the piercing pain, acting as if the blow hadn’t fazed her one bit. She wouldn’t give Tamara the pleasure of seeing her wince.
“I think she cracked a couple of ribs, Daze,” Sarah said.
Gee, ya think? Daisy silently replied to the woman living in her head.
The disembodied voice of her deceased sister had been a constant companion ever since Daisy accidentally downloaded her entire consciousness into a partition within her own brain. At first, they had both thought the voice in her head was merely Daisy’s way of coping with Sarah’s untimely death when a malfunction aboard their ship blew her into space. It wasn’t long thereafter that it became apparent she was something more.
She was a ghost in the shell, but in the wrong shell. It was quite the revelation, learning that while she may have been dead, she was far from gone, and it was one secret the pair had decided not to share with the others on the base. Not yet, at least. Not while it could be an advantage.
“Look at her shoulder dip. She’s going to do that fake high kick–low switch trick she loves,” Sarah warned.
Thanks, I see it.
Sarah had eventually settled into her new home riding shotgun with her sister. She learned to become a second set of eyes, seeing what Daisy saw, but also able to disconnect and scan the entire picture while Daisy focused on the task at hand. It had been proving to be a rather useful partnership.
Daisy moved to block Tamara’s feinted high strike, then quickly jumped aside, leaving the vicious follow-up kick swinging through empty air.
“Not bad, Swarthmore,” the sweating woman grudgingly conceded, then launched a fierce attack at twice the speed.
Daisy blocked and counter-struck as best she could, but Tamara was too fast. Too strong. Too angry.
The anger—that was her edge over Daisy, though Daisy couldn’t really fault her for it. After all, she had blown Tamara out an airlock and left her for dead, drifting in space, only four short months ago.
Crossed wires, mixed messages, none of that mattered, though she still believed it had really seemed like the right choice at the time. Tamara, however, held a grudge. and their daily sparring sessions were as much about taking out her anger as they were about training Daisy to be combat-ready.
Tamara feinted a hook, then slapped her with an open palm—which was quite unexpected. She used that momentary shock to switch her attack from hard style to soft, sliding in close and throwing Daisy through the air with a modified AikiJutsu move.
Daisy crashed into the ground at an awkward angle, the wind knocked out of her from the impact on her aching ribs.
“Yup. Definitely cracked.”
Shut up, Sarah. Not helping, she shot back at her mental ride-along.
“Come on, Swarthmore. You were built for this! Stop pussy-footing around and fight!” Tamara punched a command into the small panel embedded in her metal arm and lunged at Daisy again.
The gravity in the room shifted, allowing the thickly muscled woman to angle her attack from a new trajectory as she jumped to the ceiling, then redirected down toward her target. Daisy scrambled aside, narrowly avoiding the boots she had become all too familiar with.
Fortunately, she had overcome her dislike of low and zero-g environments, and had been secretly using the modified gravity in her daily meditation practices. Tamara thought she was gaining a tactical edge, shifting things like that. It was an overconfidence, one that Daisy pretended had her on the run. But that was far from the case.
Daisy shifted and spun through the low-gravity air and landed a quick series of blows before deflecting off to the side and landing near the far wall. Tamara shook them off easily, but nonetheless gritted her teeth at her opponent making that much contact.
The thing about low-g fighting is that it doesn’t favor the strong so much as the quick, and where Tamara was used to relying on her brute strength, Daisy could utilize her lithe frame to outmaneuver her. Also, if you hit someone too hard in low-g, you ran the risk of the transferred force rebounding you right into a wall.
The two women locked eyes, then pushed off into the air on a collision course.
Oh yeah, I’ve finally got her this time, Daisy thought as they rapidly closed in on one another.
Mid-flight, Tamara quickly tapped another command into her arm panel, and just as the two impacted, the gravity shifted once more, sending them plummeting to the ground with a painful thud. Tamara sat atop Daisy, her mechanical arm pulled back and ready to deliver a debilitating blow. But, despite her grudge, she held off.
After four long months of training, Daisy was nearly undefeatable, and none but a single one of her sparring partners could best her. Tamara, however, fueled by her simmering anger, was unstoppable.
/> “Yield?”
Daisy reluctantly accepted her defeat. “Yeah. Yield.”
The two slowly got to their feet in the now-doubled gravity of the room.
“Sneaky trick,” Daisy grumbled.
“You have to be ready for anything,” Tamara replied as she tapped the command into her arm’s control pad to return the room’s gravity to normal. Ever the soldier, that one, even though she hadn’t been active as one for some time.
“Real fighting is reaction, not thinking, Daisy. Repetition. You’ve got all this amazing skill stored in your brain, but until your body is ready, you’ll never be able to access it. Theory is one thing, but muscle memory always wins out.”
Annoyed at yet another loss, Daisy nevertheless knew she was right.
“Okay, enough for today. Go get cleaned up. I know you’ve got a session with Fatima after lunch, and she won’t be happy if I send you to her too bruised up,” Tamara said over her shoulder as she exited the room. “See you tomorrow. Same time.”
Daisy sat quietly on a crate in the empty sparring room, replaying the mistakes she had made over and over in her mind. She still couldn’t quite beat her metal-armed nemesis. Not yet, anyway, and now she would have to put her mental play-by-play on hold for a bit and redirect her attention to the day’s next task: an altogether different type of training.
Her next session with Fatima.
The silver-haired woman was an enigma. A Yoda-esque mentor, she had been picking through her psyche ever since she first arrived on the secret base hidden away on the dark side of Earth’s moon four months prior.
Fatima wasn’t like the others Daisy had met there. Not by a long shot.
Commander Mrazich, the ranking officer on Dark Side Base, with his buzzed hair, metal jaw, and cybernetic eye, was a battle-hardened leader of few words. His trusty soldiers, Shelly, with her shiny pair of rebuilt arms, and Omar, who sported two hip-down leg replacements, were both happy to follow his lead. As for Donovan, the base’s pilot, he was a bit of a rascal, but he fell in line when it was required.
But Fatima? She was different. Calmer than the rest. Wiser. More open to thinking outside the box, and possessing an uncanny way of seeming to know what was going on in your head. If she didn’t know better, Daisy would almost believe she was psychic.
Fatima was also the oldest resident of the base.
Oldest by far.
She’d been stranded there during one of the earliest failed attempts to reclaim Earth from its alien conquerors. The experience had left her not only injured and alone on the moon, but also suffering irreparable damage to the minor AI embedded in her head, rendering her forever unable to utilize a cryo unit without frying her brain.
So it was that she had been stuck on Dark Side Base, living out every hour of every day for more years than anyone would care to count. Her aging, however, was slowed to a trickle by radical gene therapy of her own design. It was that, along with a stem cell replacement regimen, that kept her telomeres healthier, and far longer, than a woman anywhere near her age should possess.
Fatima had coped with the years of hardships and loneliness by learning to focus deeply inward in times of stress, and in her early days in her new home, there had been plenty of that. By this point, she had been at the whole thing longer than any yogi ever had, and it was this mastery of meditative inner calm and control that she had been attempting to teach her impatient pupil.
Of course, she also loved to throw in often-frustrating, and seemingly random projects just to keep Daisy occupied, always reminding her that her exceptional mind held immense potential.
“If you just learn to focus, Daisy, you could harness the power of your mind and use it in ways no human has ever dreamed possible,” she would often say.
Or perhaps that was just an excuse she used to send Daisy off on random tasks solely for shits and giggles. At least, so it seemed to her often-frustrated student. Especially as she still had one more task to complete prior to her post-lunch training session.
The interesting thing was, despite Fatima being mechanically altered, and thus not entirely human, Daisy nevertheless found herself growing quite fond of the older woman, in spite of herself.
Daisy shifted on her makeshift seat, her limbs feeling a bit weak after her lengthy sparring practice. Her ribs were aching with every breath.
“Oh, yeah, that’s gonna leave a mark,” she said, examining her sore flank with a pained chuckle.
“Hey, we really should get to the mess hall,” Sarah urged.
“Gotta finish up Fatima’s latest torturous busy-work first,” Daisy grumbled in her outside voice. Fortunately, no one was present to hear her.
Her metabolism was above average by normal human standards, as one would expect with it supporting her rapidly strengthening musculature. But it was having Sarah’s piggybacked mind running at full-capacity in tandem with her own that really burned up the ATP and glycogen in her body at an alarming rate.
Too much dual-processor time with her sister revving on all cylinders, like during an all-out sparring match with an angry, metal-armed woman, for example, and Daisy could find herself drained, and with a nasty headache to boot. Such were the drawbacks of accidentally loading her dead sister’s entire consciousness into her head.
“Daze, come on. You need to eat.”
I know, I know, Daisy grumbled, pulling a few tubes of energy gel from her pocket and gulping them down. There. Happy? I’ll make a proper lunch after I finish Fatima’s little project, she said, slowly rising to her disconcertingly unsteady feet.
“Good girl. You’ve gotta recharge those glycogen stores. Wouldn’t want you running on an empty tank.”
Yeah, I do feel a bit wiped out, she admitted. Thanks for keeping an eye on the old fuel gauge, Sis.
“Hey, we share the same engine. You know I try to conserve energy whenever I can.”
It was true. Sarah, for her part, learned early on how to pull back and hang out in the periphery to help save their valuable resources. It was a neat trick, and one Daisy was quite grateful for.
She cracked her neck slowly, then opened the heavy door and stepped out of the sparring room, her damp clothes already drying to her body.
She was making good time down the long hallway, but stopped at a thick window to gaze out over the barren surface of the moon.
That was her next destination.
Fatima, always looking to push her limits, had taken quite a liking to having her perform tasks in the bulky annoyance of a space suit in the difficult environs of reduced gravity.
Oh joy, she grumbled to herself.
Daisy was exhausted, but at least her ribs were already beginning to feel a bit better, she noted, as she surveyed the rocky landscape and destroyed outer buildings of the moon base. Now she just had to suit up and get out there.
“Fuuuuck,” she said with a long sigh. “How the hell did I wind up in this place?”
This was it, like it or not. This was home, and it certainly wasn’t what Daisy had expected when she made a run for Earth all those months prior.
Dark Side Base, it was called. A lone, secret outpost hidden on the shadowy side of the moon. Daisy had arrived hoping the secret lunar refuge would be her salvation from the ship full of cybernetically modified humans she had believed were out to get her. Funny how far from the truth that had proved to be.
The machines weren’t trying to harm her. Far from it.
After mankind had been wiped out by a genetically-designed alien super plague, the AIs had managed to save humanity, sending a fleet carrying the last traces of viable human DNA far out into the depths of space to restore the species.
Daisy was their crown jewel, and she had been created, not born. A prodigal child sprung from one of the few salvaged cell lines that was immune to the alien plague.
It was a hell of a lot to take in, learning that she had been grown in a lab, was over a hundred years old, thanks to decades in cryo stasis, and that all of her memories of E
arth had actually been implanted during the decades-long flight.
The reality was, the entire population of the planet was long dead, and the only traces of the former inhabitants she had come across during her brief escape to the surface were an eccentric AI named Habby, and his dapper cyborg friends, whom she had only happened upon by blind chance.
Daisy had also stumbled upon other inhuman things in the city.
Fleshless, crazed cyborgs. Damaged ones. The ones who had gone mad, infected with the alien computer virus, their minds scrambled by the malicious code spread by the invading creatures. And what terrifying monsters those invaders were.
The Chithiid, she learned they were called. Four-armed aliens with a second set of eyes toward the back of their head, affording them a nearly three-hundred-degree field of vision. The bipedal creatures stood on two powerful legs, nearly a full head taller than most men, and sported skin as tough as a rhino’s hide.
Daisy had a brief skirmish with them before being forcibly dragged back to the moon, and that was where she’d been cooped up ever since. Just her and a dozen modified humans, a pair of AI-controlled ships, and the AI-run base itself.
All of them helping her train. All of them carrying the belief that she was created specifically for this task. All of them waiting for her to live up to her potential, whatever that was.
She was special, apparently.
Special, Daisy mused grimly. What a laugh.
“Well, you do have a dead girl riding along inside your head. That should count as special, right?”
Awesome pep talk, Sis. Really, don’t quit your day job.
“My day job is basically cruising around in your noggin, and believe me, I’d quit it for my old one if I could.”
Daisy chuckled.
The thing was, she actually was special. She’d been built that way. Genetically engineered. Stronger, faster, tougher. Her bones, cracked by Tamara’s kicks, were already healing, and the rest of her body was just as sturdy. Designed to endure far more than a normal human could. More importantly, though, she was still one hundred percent organic, and that meant invisible to Chithiid scans.