by Foxx Ballard
“Your eye! It’s metallic…” Zondra stared for a moment and then tucked her head in against Lais. “That’s why you’re so strong,” the woman said, more to herself than to Lais.
“I’m a human AI with an alien android body. ‘Technoid’ is the closest equivalent in Earth Common.”
Zondra didn’t say anything more. She just held tight, allowing Lais to focus on where they were heading. Thankfully, at least for her, one eye didn’t seem to be all that big of an adjustment. She recognized the lay of the land. They were close to where they had first arrived.
The blow from behind surprised her. She stumbled forward and spun so when she landed Zondra would not take the brunt of the fall, but even so, they landed hard and Zondra was lost from her grasp.
As Lais skidded backwards in a sitting position, her body came to a halt in a pile of leaves and loamy dirt. When she looked up, she saw what had struck her.
The gray metal glider wings folded back under Chais’s cloak, the jet wash from the tips of the wings blowing up detritus in a dirty cloud until they clicked off. Lais had just enough time to see Chais level the rifle before she went blind in her right eye. She cut the pain off instantly.
There was only one chance. She sprang at Chais’s last position like a panther, arms wide so she could catch her sister if she moved. The moment she felt something solid, she latched on with all her strength, clamping down with her arms and legs, but immediately she knew she had failed. It was a tree. There was another searing pain, this one in her right ear. Dammit! She was deafening her too! With one ear, Lais tried to keep her bearings on Chais’s movements, but it was hopeless. She couldn’t get a proper direction with only one ear. She finally stopped, realizing there was nothing she could do.
There was the brrrup of Gatling laser fire a distance away, and cracking and tearing of a tree being pulled up by the roots, followed by some yelling in the clearing, but it was reassuring to know that Synth-E-Uh and Mogul were still going strong.
“Why, Chais?” she asked. “Why are you doing this?”
Chais’s footsteps were walking around her as best she could tell, but Chais was playing it smart and was keeping her distance.
“I could ask the same thing.” Chais answered, continuing to walk. “I told you the Chakran had a plan that minimized casualties.”
Lais could hear her sister circling her and tried to get an exact bearing.
“They killed innocent people to achieve their goals. I don’t accept it.” Lais was getting angry and Chais was keeping her distance. Chais could finish her off at any time.
“The sacrifice of the few to save the many. A few of the flesh-beings have merit, but most of them are just weak.”
When there was a snap of a twig beneath Chais’s boot, Lais sprang again. Mid-flight, she felt a laser stab harmlessly through the skin of her right shoulder, the weaved mesh beneath the skin reflecting the beam of light enough that it failed to penetrate.
For a moment she was afraid she had missed, but then her legs struck Chais solidly and they both landed hard, rolling across the forest floor until they hit a tree. It would mean nothing to the mechanical body of her sister, so she couldn’t give her time to think. Lais clamped on tight, wrapping her legs around Chais, and felt frantically for the laser rifle, but instead came up with latching onto Chais’s face with her hand. Lais wrenched Chais’s head violently to the side so Chais couldn’t look in her direction.
A rifle butt came up hard under her chin. Had she been a human, her jaw would have been shattered. Instead, it told her where the rifle was. Lais let go of Chais’s face and grabbed the rifle with both hands, yanking it hard from her sister’s grasp and started bashing it repeatedly across Chais’s body until it fell apart in her hands, the pieces sticking to and absorbing into Chais’s body.
“You forget, I have complete control over the rifle, and my nanites.”
Where Lais was touching Chais, she could feel her outer skin dissolving, and then the metallic mesh beneath was starting to fray. Something was wrong. Why weren’t her nanites repairing her? Or maybe they were, but not fast enough?
Lais panicked. It was the second time in not a very long time period that she felt her mortality. She wasn’t invincible. Chais wasn’t built for combat, so she was much weaker than Lais, but that she was just as smart and had her own tricks up her sleeve.
“Keep fighting and you die, simple as that,” Chais said in her remaining good ear.
Lais felt again for Chais’s face, but this time she wrapped her fingers around her sister’s throat. The skin on her fingers immediately started to peel away.
Chais laughed. “What are you going to do, choke me?” Chais grabbed onto Lais’s arms with her hands and where she grabbed the skin dissolved.
Lais sighed. “I really wish you hadn’t forced my hand.”
Straining every metallic muscle, Lais arched her back while holding Chais with her legs and yanked hard on her sister’s head. There was a crack. The second yank loosened her head, and Chais suddenly realized the predicament she was in.
“No, wait—!” she cried as Lais yanked a third time and her sister’s head popped off in her hands, a few metallic links of spine being pulled off with it. Fat sparks arced between the spine and the body.
“Love you,” Lais whispered, imagining the light in Chais’s eyes going out before she tossed the head aside and jumped off of the body, anticipating the fusion drive destabilizing inside Chais’s body as it had in hers when she had been nearly decapitated. She didn’t have much time. Lais ran in the first direction she faced, trying to put some distance between herself and her sister’s destabilizing power core.
“Run Zondra, if you can! Her drive is going to blow!” she shouted to the air, not even knowing if the woman was alive. Lais ran full on into a tree and fell, then rolled to the side and ran a few more steps before tripping over a root.
She listened for a moment, expecting some sort of sound to go with the expected implosion, or explosion, or whatever was going to happen, but there was no sound. Had it just simply stopped? The light in her sister going out without any notification at all? It was depressing and underwhelming, like her existence hadn’t mattered.
When all she could hear were the forest sounds around her, Lais let herself cry. How could they have been so different?! Her own sister, her twin. The sister that had been kind enough to create her a body. The one that had come back to rescue her when no one else had. She was so kind and yet so… mistaken. How could a few different experiences between them make them so contrasting?
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Rusty: Fallen Hive, Farrun
Rusty watched the ground rapidly approaching and his body and mind were tensing for the impact when a familiar voice sounded in his head.
I got you!
A moment later, Angel’s arms and legs were wrapped around him and her wings were extending rigidly to angle their descent into a different flight path, one that took them in the direction they had arrived in.
“You rescued me, the least I could do was return the favor.”
Rusty laughed and yelled “Thank you!” as she angled them down towards the forest canopy. The relief from not falling to his death was pure joy. Ahead of them, something else with jet-powered wings angled into the forest and disappeared out of sight in the thick foliage.
“Oh, we don’t want to go there,” Angel said in his ear, and angled them sharply to the right. “Or there.” She turned in a sharp circle to the right again as she caught sight of a couple of Galantar in the sky with them. Thankfully, the Galantar seemed preoccupied with avoiding hurled trees, as was the mixed mob below them of humans, Chakran, a couple Tigrans and a Ripper, all taking cover behind stumps from a barrage of laser fire that swept across the field.
Angel instead chose an empty space between two large trees that would take them into the forest about a hundred paces from where they had initially arrived. Backpedaling her wings, she landed on her feet at the same time
that she released Rusty. Her timing was perfect. Keeping his balance wasn’t even an effort.
“I figured we could approach on foot. That winged figure could have been Chais, but I don’t know if she is on our side anymore, and we should be very careful if she isn’t. I’ll let you go first, you’re sneakier than I am. Don’t let her get a bead on you. Remember, she can shoot someone through the eye.”
Rusty looked back to wink at her and then slipped silently through the trees. He could clearly smell the jet exhaust and the underlying oxidized alien metal molecules. He followed that until he was sure that Chais must have been just ahead. He could smell Lais too, and Zondra. No blood, so that was a good sign.
And then there was a pair of sonic booms that sounded almost together, up in the sky, well above the forest. When he looked up, he couldn’t see through the canopy of leaves, so he peeked instead around a tree to see if he could see Chais, or Lais and Zondra. What he saw surprised him. The decapitated body of Chais was on all fours, feeling around for what Rusty could only assume was her head, which was lying about seven paces away. It was even closer to Rusty. As he watched, two long antennae sprouted from the shoulders of the body with flat metal circles on the end of them. The antennae flicked around in different directions, but quickly settled in the direction of the head. They had to be metal detectors. Rusty bolted out, scooped up the head and ran further into the forest, hoping that Chais’s body didn’t regain any of its other senses. Angel followed close behind. At least he hadn’t seen the laser rifle Lais had mentioned.
Lais and Zondra were somewhere ahead, so he continued in that direction until he heard the roaring of jets behind him. It sounded like the fighters that they had seen on the coastline, and they had to be just above where Chais was. When he looked back, a grapple-line fired through the forest canopy to something on the ground, and then almost immediately Chais’s body was lifted through the trees and the jet sounds roared back into the sky.
Angel stepped out into the open where he could see her and held her hands up, like ‘what was that all about?’ Except he wasn’t sure. He glanced down at the conical metal head in his hands, with its spiky antennae sprouting from the rear of it. It looked just like a dead piece of metal. Did Chais even need her head? It appeared not. He needed to find Lais and their other friends. They also needed to get out of here before the hives all came down at once, or they would be easily overwhelmed. He motioned Angel to follow him and then walked towards the scent-path of Zondra and Lais. It wasn’t long before he found them.
Lais was seated against a tree with horrible burns on her metallic eye sockets and one in her ear. He could see the holes slowly filling. Sitting beside her was Zondra, nursing a visibly swollen ankle. At the sight of Zondra, his feelings of love and warmth came to the fore. For a long time now, he had thought she was dead, and here she was, just slightly injured. As his hearts beat faster and his endorphins kicked in, Angel caught up to them.
“Ooh, she means something to you…” Angel said, approaching the woman and kneeling in front of her and Lais.
Immediately Rusty was concerned. Jealousy was a horrible emotion, but Angel surprised him.
“I’ve been keeping him warm for you. He loves you very much.”
“Umm, thanks?” Zondra replied, mildly confused. “I thought he was dead too.” When she looked in his direction, his hearts melted. He hadn’t realized just how much he had missed her until this moment. When he stepped up and knelt next to take her hand, Angel folded her wings behind her and examined Lais.
“I can see your eyes are growing back. How long before you can see, do you think? We’re not quite out of this yet.”
Before Lais could answer, a barrage of laser fire sounded in the distance, and more trees were snapping and being torn up by the roots. Someone needed to tell the others that the rescue had been a bust. Well, more like completed, but not as expected. They hadn’t rescued the person they thought they would. Maybe they still could.
“You stay with them,” Rusty suggested to Angel as he gave Zondra’s hand a squeeze. “I tell the others.”
You said ‘I’ Rusty! Your English Common is improving! And yes, I will stay.
Thanks, he replied mentally, smiling at Angel, and then he quickly kissed Zondra’s hand before drawing Buck and running back into the forest.
“You’re a lucky woman,” he heard Angel say before he got out of earshot.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Rusty: Battle of the Fallen Hive, Farrun
With one last glance back, Rusty ran further into the forest. He didn't need his nose, he just had to head in the direction of all the weapon fire. Although it was easier to run without his hands full, he couldn't make himself sheathe Buck. It sounded like a war zone; he didn't want to get caught flatfooted.
He made a wide circle through the forest, wanting to come out behind the three friends causing all the commotion, but as he moved, so did they, they weren't standing still. Made sense, they would likely have been flanked by the enemy if they hadn't. It appeared that they were circling the clearing in a direction to distract further from where they had first arrived.
When he could finally see them ahead, he whistled, catching Synth-E-Uh's attention. She nodded in his direction and laid down some more suppressive laser fire. She was making a good show of keeping the Chakran forces occupied. They had to keep ducking behind stumps in the clearing. There had been a few of the giant rock-spiders in the open ground, but it looked like they had been crushed by trees, along with a Ripper whose feet and fur were barely visible beneath the trunk of one that had landed on top of it.
Loud tree limbs snapping to his right turned out to be Mogul, tearing a smaller tree up by bear-hugging it and ripping it out of the ground. A second after pulling it free, Mogul looked for a target. He was ignoring the musket shots and spears that were bouncing off of him. He found what he was looking for, a Galantar flying above the forest. The Ramogran threw the tree like a spear, but missed his target, the Galantar easily avoiding the massive projectile.
“Switch targets!” Rusty shouted. “Mogul ground, Synth-E-Uh air.”
They didn't argue, and in short order Synth-E-Uh was punching laser holes in the wings of a Galantar above the field. It had the desired effect though, as the other fliers were forced to go to ground for cover, or risk being shot down.
Mogul, on the other hand, had decided to pull out one more tree, but this one he was hanging onto. With a roar, he ran into the clearing, brandishing the tree like a club, sending broken Chakran flying left and right with each swing.
A blast of fire that encompassed Mogul caused the giant to roar in anger. It had to be The Boss. The ash scent in the air was definitely there. Rusty could only catch glimpses of the miniature dragon as it flitted about the giant's head. Mogul swung his massive club like a bat back and forth in front of him. He stepped forward and with the third swing there was a satisfying whonk and the dragon’s body flew, spinning wildly into the forest on the far side of the clearing. Rusty didn't know if The Boss could survive such a blow, but he would have to work his way over there. He had some burning questions, and maybe a few expletives, for the being that had taken away his family.
“Aaaah!” Jack yelled as he went speeding by, the volume of his yell increasing as he approached and decreasing as he disappeared back into the forest again. A few Chakran were chasing him through the trees, but Rusty had seen Jack travel faster before. He was leading them on. Leave it to Jack to distract the enemy the only way he knew how.
A bright laser beam flashed just past Rusty's head, startling him. He had been idle for too long. He immediately took cover behind a tree and then popped out the other side to shoot at his assailant. Just before he pulled the trigger, he snapped Buck upwards in case the weapon decided to fire on his own. It was the human girl they had been sent to rescue.
What was her name? “Keena!” he shouted, definitely getting her attention as she popped up again from behind a stump.
“Do I know you?!” she yelled back. She was no longer aiming her weapon at him.
“We rescue you!”
She brought the weapon out and pointed at him again, but he ducked behind the tree.
A few seconds went by and he could hear footsteps coming in his direction, followed shortly by the distinct smell of ant-men. He had given away his position. It was time to move.
Rusty dove from behind the tree and rolled once before sprinting further into the forest. He fired back over his shoulder once.
“Target missed,” announced Buck.
“Not aim, scare...”
“Oh, cover fire, got it. Just aim me over your shoulder, I'll take care of the rest.”
Rusty did as he was told, pointing Buck backwards over his shoulder as he ran, dodging left and right randomly to make himself a more difficult target. Buck occasionally fired back, but did not report on whether he had hit anything or not. Likely not, considering how Rusty was bouncing around.
When Buck had stopped firing for several seconds, Rusty figured he had lost his pursuers, so he circled back to the edge of the clearing. He watched, peeking around a tree, but did not see Keena popping up in the same position she had been.
Her smell gave her away. When he spun around, he noticed she already had her laser pistol aimed at him, but she wasn't firing.
“I with Lais and Angel!” he blurted, trying to discourage her from shooting. He slung Buck slowly onto his back and then held his hands out with his palms facing her.
“Lais?! And Angel? Here? How... Never mind...” The girl appeared to be caught in a moment of indecision as she lowered her pistol.
It was then that the Chakran jumped her, snatching the weapon from her hand and holding it against her head with the end of a hooked claw over the trigger. The other arm grasped her around the neck and it carefully positioned the young woman between itself and Rusty.