But then my eyes snapped wide, and I looked up when I heard the whine of plasma drive trusters in overdrive. Vashon's tumbril was plummeting toward us, fighting winds it was never designed to fly in. She was in more of a controlled fall than actually flying.
My heart leapt into my throat as her tumbril hit the ground, hard, in the path of the oncoming debris, sending up a spray of dirt and vegetation that was stolen away by the storm. The tumbril slid along into the wind, furrowing the ground, and it slammed into the pressure vessel in a cacophony of sound that drown out the thunder and wind.
As her vessel was torn apart, but the pressure vessel was stopped I was screaming, “Vashon!” My voice was swallowed by a nearby lightning strike.
The moment there was a lull in the wind, Glitch released me and retracted his anchoring harpoon. Then we were rushing to the field of debris a hundred yards away. The sparking and flaming wreckage backlit a humanoid form striding toward us, and another flash of lightning lit up the Sky Guard ranger who owned my heart.
The wind was whipping her long black hair around her as she walked up to me in her violet plasti-ceramic armor, that flanterskelling, a self-assured smirk on her face that I had fallen for was on her almost too perfect face.
She reached me, and I pulled her into a tight hug as she yelled over the storm, the rain making rivulets of water roll across her face, “Hello Fixit, mind if I drop in?”
I blinked at her, not knowing if I should be happy or angry she had risked her own life like that. She looked back at the wreckage they turned to me with a wince on her face over the fate of her tumbril and yelled over the wind, “Well it looks like we're stuck dirt-side for the duration. That was our ride.”
Ok, I smiled at that. I knew she meant the duration of the storm, before another came in, not the duration of the Exodus. I'd prefer to stay dirt-side, but I knew how dangerous it was because of the earthquakes. The fury of the storms would be diminished by the photon shield if we can get the last of the projectors online.
I couldn't wipe the smile off my face as she kissed me, and my toes curled. She always seemed exhilarated by danger and action, like she had no impulse control. I'm not sure why she seemed to thrive on the adrenaline, but who am I to complain? It was how I got my first kiss from her after she saved me from a couple pirate vessels full of Betweeners when we first met. She seems so alive at times like this.
Her eyes unfocused a moment and then she was yelling over the wind, “New Terra control, this is Captain Peregradopolis. Tumbril Epsilon 1 is down, no injuries. I'll be staying at Agri-grid A1 for the duration.”
She was so flanterskelling hot when she was interfacing directly with the Prime Information Grid. I know I'm a little odd, but I found her implants sexy. What can I say? I'm a techie.
She was scowling and yelling, “Control, please repeat.” She squinted, and her eyes started flicking around as they lit up a little telling me she was seeing some sort of heads-up display in her visor... or was it actually projected from within her eyes?
She tapped the air a few times and did a wipe of the hand then said loudly, “Control, there is too much electromagnetic interference down here to receive, I've boosted my gain to transmit up. Again I say, I'll be staying at Agri-grid A1 for the duration. Peregradopolis out.”
Then she wiped her hand in the air and closed her fist and turned those dark eyes on me. She wiggled her eyebrows, and I bit my lower lip, my cheeks heating and I yelled out, “Hi.”
She chuckled and asked, “We good to go down here?”
I shook my head. “No, Glitch and I have one last set to service, and we can activate the photon shield over the grid.”
I stumbled when the ground shook. The tectonic shifts were coming more and more frequently. Her hand shot out to steady me, just as Glitch grabbed my other arm with his grappler to do the same until the temblor subsided. I pulled my arms from them feeling petulant and whined, “I'm not fragile you two!”
Glitch squeed something that sounded suspiciously patronizing, as Vash teased with a twinkling smile, biting the tip of her tongue. Then she yelled, “Then let's get this party started, Fixit.”
She made an ushering motion, and I looked up imperiously as I stepped onto Glitch's mobility platform, he grabbed my waist, and I whispered to him. He squealed out his giggle, and we were off, leaving my ranger behind. I gave her a royal wave and said, “Better step on it Glitchy.”
I could imagine Vash's laugh as she started running after us. Her advanced reactive armor did more than protect her from enemy weapons. The flexible servos also enhanced her speed and strength. I looked back and saw her gaining on us, she ran into the wind like it wasn't an obstacle to her, her gorgeous black locks streaming out behind her from under her helmet, in that driving wind.
I saw Turk heading through the fields behind her, toward the Quonset hut repair bay to hunker down until the Perihelion pass was over in a couple months. The harvester was the biggest and smartest pinger I took care of down here, and the massive Mark 9 didn't even look like he noticed the storm. And he was a great guy and friend.
He had been finishing up on some of the corn harvesting, anything he got before the pass began was to be used as seed corn for the next harvest. We'd basically be starting over, so we wanted to make sure we had plenty to start the replanting. I waved and I just barely heard his deafening warning horn over the fury of the storm. He waggled one of his telescoping ocular ports in greeting. I loved my family.
Glitch slowed a bit as the platform shook when Vash made a great leap into the wind and landed beside me on Glitch's mobility platform, causing a shower of sparks to cascade out of his open access ports. He squealed a playful welcome to her.
She tilted her head back and laughed and said, “You're just as bad as her, you tin scamp.”
I really loved how she treated my pingers like people. Others just saw them as machines.
I grinned up at her with no apology in my expression, then snuggled in as she hugged me to her by the waist. This was going to be fun with us stranded here between storms. I found myself hoping this one lasted a week or more. I've never had her to myself for more than twelve hours or so.
An aftershock of the temblor rolled through bucking the ground beneath us. Glitch's suspension took the brunt of it, but we all went tumbling onto the ground. We just lay there, the rain being driven sideways by the wind, our laughs being drowned out by the wind while we rode out the tremors.
Once it passed, we helped Glitchy get back upright. He made a silly squee as he wobbled his orb-shaped body around. I rolled my eyes at his silly theatrics and then checked our gear and made sure the power storage crystal buckets were still sealed and we didn't lose any.
Then we stepped back up onto Glitch, and the chivalrous pinger wrapped his grappler arm around both of us before we were pushing back against the storm again. The faster we could get this over with and the photonic shield raised, the quicker we would only have to deal with a moderate amount of storm bleed through and the tectonic shifts.
We reached the last pair of projectors and started to split up when Glitch and Vashon shared a look, and she stepped in front of me as Glitch grabbed me again. A gust of wind hit us that had me pressing against my loyal pinger as Vash slid along the ground, leaning into the wind, her legs behind her, leaving furrows on the ground.
I started to push away as the gust died down, shaking my head. This storm was an order of magnitude worse than the meteorologists had predicted, and it was coming in far faster than the computer models. I guess some things haven't really changed in eons of weather forecasting.
I was about to voice that, but then Vash yelled over the wind, “Incoming!” Glitch nodded and yanked me to the side as I saw it coming at us, frozen in a moment of time in a lightning flash. A Kavorat tree which had been uprooted by that storm was tumbling through the air toward us.
Vash leaned forward, I swear I could hear her growl over the chaos of sound around us when the tree struck her as she
crossed her arms in front of her. She had diverted the tree just enough as it splintered like it had hit a plasti-steel wall. The trunk whizzed past us, Glitchy pulled my head down and took the brunt of the rain of slivers as Vashon's body went flinging back into the projector, sending it tumbling in a hundred pieces, pushed by the wind.
I scrambled low and started crawling across the ground, into the wind toward her, yelling, “Vash!”
She looked over at me sheepishly from where she lay on the ground. I exhaled in relief, she must have told the nano-panels in her armor to go rigid to take the brunt of the impact, making her no more than an obstacle made of plasti-ceramic. I saw some damage to its violet surface, but it looked mostly intact.
I grinned at her then was blinded and thrown back, my body buzzing as she was engulfed in a lightning strike. Even with my ears ringing from the roar of thunder, which had ruptured my eardrums, if the popping sound was any indication, I could hear her scream.
Chapter 3 – Frantic
Then we were all tumbling across the ground as another torrent of wind roared through. I was trying to keep Vashon in sight as I tumbled, grasping at the bent over cornstalks we were blown into. Then a huge shadow blotted out the sky and the wind died down in an eerie calm. My ears were buzzing from the damage to them.
My eyes focussed and I saw Turk towering above us, using his massive form as a windbreak for us. I nodded at our savior and then scrambled over to Vashon. Her armor was sparking, and the side of her face was burned where her visor had been blown away. Parts of the armor were torn away from her side as well as some flesh.
Her eyes were wide and frantic, her mouth wide open as she gasped for air. I tied to pull her to me but she was as rigid as a statue, and I realized what had happened. She couldn't breathe because the controllers that ran the nano-panels of the armor had been fused by the lightning, and she couldn't expand her lungs.
She was going to suffocate unless I did something. I was yelling at her, my own voice sounding muffled in my head, “Where is the armor controller located?” I put my face in front of hers, she was turning blue. “Stay with me, ranger! The controller, where is it?”
She nudged her eyes to the left and down a bit as it was currently the only part of herself she could move in the unyielding plasti-ceramic cocoon she was in. She had sorrow and... fear? In her eyes. I've never seen her afraid of anything before. That just pissed me off. This flanterskelling storm did this, and it wasn't going to win.
I muttered to the universe, “No you don't you crystal licking bootwaffle, I've only just found her, you're not taking her from me.”
I yelled at her, “I've got you Vash. Just hold on a moment... trust me.”
She moved her head infinitesimally in a nod inside the plasti-ceramic prison it was in.
I tried to turn her to the side but it was awkward in the stance she was frozen in. But Glitch was there, squeeing in worry and alarm as he grasped her in his grappler and lifted and turned her. There was a smoking pit in the armor where I assumed the controller had been, with burned flesh beneath.
I had to hand it to the designers of the armor, it took that strike from the tree then five hundred megajoules from a lightning strike, and Vashon was still alive... for now.
I just stared at the slag, blinking dumbly. Even if I could hotwire the connections, all I could do was to provide power to the armor. It would take a huge amount of processing power to be able to access the trillions of nano panels that made it up and instruct them to allow elasticity between the connections.
As I frantically cleaned away the debris to get to a group of melted contacts, I was going through hundreds of scenarios. I could hack something together to transmit a cascade pulse with a single command, but it would take me precious time I didn't have. Vashon had stopped gasping, and her lips were turning blue.
Theselean shunt? No time. If only I had a replacement controller that was capable of the number crunching that was... My eyes flew wide at a realization. My multi-tool! I had cobbled the original together using an old Mark 27 jump ship navigational computer, and the torso of a damaged and discarded Sky Guard ranger armor suit from the boneyard.
It had the needed processing power and more to spare so I could imagine the improved version that Anna Germaine gave me was of similar design. I yanked it from my belt as I yelled to Glitch, “Need some monofilament!” He was instantly digging in our repair packs and pulled out a spool.
Glitch was already replacing his grappler with a spool feed and nano-fuser, he looked as frantic as I did. Vashon was his friend too. The first topsider to treat him as an equal, and he loved her for it. He understood how fragile us humans were, and that you couldn't repair dead. I could hear a continuous high pitched whine coming from him.
I was barely keeping myself together, and his whine was threatening to break the last of my resolve. But my girl needed me to keep my head about me. I found they had put safety lockouts on the multi-tool so I couldn't open the panel to the processor.
They had only used a military grade phased quantum encryption lock on them. I smirked, just like the topsiders to think electronic lockouts, not the possibility someone could do this. My fingers absently coded on the pad, and the tool reconfigured itself... into itself, with no casing except the processor panel, which promptly fell to the ground without anything to keep it attached to the tool.
Amateurs. They do realize that this was my design, don't they? Why would they give me a tool with a lockout anyway? Afraid I'd steal my own design?
I looked at the processor, and my eyes bulged, a Mark 32! These were for controlling dreadnought class attack tumbril carriers. What the hell was it doing in a simple multi-tool? Then I realized they hadn't figured out how I was able to utilize phase shifts to make each data pathway multi-configurable, so they needed more processing power and pathways than my original design. Was that why Anna kept my original? To figure out my methods?
I started calling out contact numbers as I had the tool display its specs on the small touchscreen. With little sparks of loose electrons from the molecular bonding, Glitch performed the most delicate operation of his life. All of his erratic behavior was gone as he used everything he had to make sure it was done right. He knew he had to do it because without being in my shop with the proper tools, I couldn't even see most of the contacts.
Only a few seconds had passed, but I could see that Vashon's nostrils had stopped flaring as she was trying to breathe in the air she couldn't take in. No!
I moved the multi-tool over to the controller, it looked like it had gossamer strands of silk hanging from it. I started singing one of the songs my mother had taught me to memorize the firing order of instruction sets for nano-panels that worked like the firing of neurons in our brains. “X to the nth and the pathway is clear. The sine of the reciprocal makes them hold dear.”
I started calling out crossover pathways, and Glitch moved filaments he was keeping track of to me, as I kept track of each iteration of the calculations in my head. I held each filament to the larger group contacts, and he bonded each. No time to do things right, brute force was all we had time for.
The moment Glitch had the last monofilament bonded, I prayed they could take the amount of current I was going to push through them. I told him, “Ok move back.”
He did, and I went as far back as I could and then stretched out and typed a single instruction on the screen of the tool and then hit execute.
There was popping and hissing as some of the filaments fried, but enough survived and Vashon collapsed from the position she was locked in. She wasn't breathing! I hit a command on the multi-tool. Seeing it's crystal was burned almost all the way to trollite. This was the last command I could try. Seams appeared in her armor, and I was pulling it off of her in a panic as the multi tool's subtle vibration it always had ceased as the last of the crystal burned out.
I placed my ear on Vash's chest and tried to listen over the sound of the storm, water flowing down my face, hiding the t
ears that were freely flowing. I pulled back then did it again. I couldn't hear her heart, but I swear I heard a humming. It must have been her cybernetic implants.
I didn't know how many she had or what their functions were. She never wanted to talk about it. She seemed ashamed of them, I thought it made her just that much sexier. I mean, how hot is it to be able to connect directly with the Prime information grid? All that information accessible with but a thought.
I placed my cheek next to her mouth, and there was no warmth of her breath. She wasn't breathing and had no pulse, and I didn't know anything about emergency medical procedures. I looked at Glitch. All pingers were programmed for emergencies like this. I looked at him, and he understood and trundled up to us. Turk let out a bellowing blast of his warning horn telling of his own distress. They all loved my ranger.
I crawled aside so Glitch could get to her and he swiveled his orb-shaped body like he was cocking his head, contemplating the right thing to do. I was just panicking and about to yell at him to do something when he swapped out ends on his grappler, and reached out and touched her chest with his electric welding attachment.
Vashon's muscles all tensed up and her back arched with the current. Then he pulled his arm back. A moment later, Vash sucked in a huge gasp of air and sat up quickly. I pulled her into my lap as I started sobbing in relief as I stroked her hair.
Her eyes were wide as she looked up at me, fear in her eyes as she hugged my arm to her, repeating her name over and over. I hated seeing the fear in her, she was the strongest and most confident person I knew. Well, I didn't know many people at all, being isolated dirt side with my pingers, but it still applied.
She took a couple more deep breaths then she froze, a new panic coming over her. She cocked her head up to me, where I was just kissing the top of her head repeatedly. “Lo-si-ng p-p-p-ower. Ca-n't F-f-fixie. Can-n-n't lose the-the-them.”
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