Cyber-Knife II: Lady Cyber-Knife

by Phil Wrede

  CHAPTER 1

  EARTH-7331, SUPER-SECRET MILITARY COMPLEX BLACK SITE PRISON ("DETENTION") 900 DAYS AFTER THE EVENTS OF CYBER-KNIFE: APEX PREDATOR (“THE PRESENT”) Lady Cyber-Knife hurtled down the prison hallway, near incalculable numbers of plasma bolts flying after her and scoring the grey walls surrounding her. Most of them didn't come anywhere close to hitting her, and the ones that did, she batted away, either with the claws at the tips of her fingers, or with the blade of the Cyber-Sword. The weapon had been her faithful companion for more than a hundred days, and had saved her life as many times. So many of the detention facility's soldiers bore down on her that she barely had time to focus on all of the gunshots coming her way. This left her little bandwidth to get her bearings within the towering labyrinth she'd invaded. She ducked behind a corner as a chunk of wall exploded into shards behind her. Across from where she crouched, an elevator door slid open, and half a dozen soldiers clad in the deep blue of Riot Control began to file through. The one in front caught sight of her almost immediately, and was so stunned that he froze, his comrades bumping up behind him. She didn't freeze, though, but lunged forward, spinning the sword with such speed that it whined as it cut through the air. Lady Cyber-Knife severed the arm of the soldier at the front of the group completely; he shrieked as blood sprayed from his shoulder and coated the wall. She snatched his gun out of the air before it had even fallen and kicked him. The men behind fell like bowling pins. She unleashed the full-bore fury of the plasma rifle into their heads and chests, reducing them to pulpy slag against the floor. When she was confident that none of them would get up again, ever, she cracked the rifle's power core, causing the bright green light to shine through every seam in the weapon's construction, tossed the rifle aside, and ran off again. Barely ten seconds had passed. “Fuck fuck, fuck!” she shouted, smashing through a wall entirely as the rifle's core ruptured and exploded, blasting the elevator car apart and burning the bodies of the soldiers into ash. The elevator doors flew outward with the force of the explosion, tearing free from their house and nearly smashing into the pursuit hot on Lady Cyber-Knife's heels. Large chunks of debris clogged the hallway, impeding the pursuers, and ensuring she got further and further away from them with each step she took. One turn led into another, which led into another, and then another. Looking down a long hallway that ended in a T-junction, Lady Cyber-Knife stuck the Cyber-Sword into the sheath on her back and took a great leap upward. She pinned herself between the walls up against the ceiling, hiding as best she could while she attempted to get her bearings. The shining metal blade of the sword would've attracted attention, even in the darkest cavern, but the matte metal that made up her face, which moved and flexed with the same elasticity as skin, wouldn't catch the light, or an observant eye. Two quick mental commands in sequence brought up a three-dimensional model of the structure: the Complex's most secure, most secret black site detention, where the enemies that the State couldn't even acknowledge existing were kept, in the event of their capture. Not just the worst criminals that the White Zone couldn't know about, though, but every instance of them from across the multiverse, as well. They weren't necessarily duplicated across every planet, but certainly, if a dissident arose on one Earth, the odds were good that they would emerge on another. Here, they were held, even if they had yet to ever do anything, until the Complex decided what to do with them. Most of the time, they got executed, as remaining imprisoned without due process and held for years invariably poisoned prisoners against their captors. Lady Cyber-Knife brushed her fine, near-white hair from her face, revealing her imposing, artificial visage. Her metal skin, though which most of the movements of the motors, wires, and hinges directly beneath could be easily glimpsed, surrounded her devastatingly lifelike eyes. Though they were also cybernetic, great pains had been taken to make them resemble their organic counterparts. Specks of white and gold dotted her brilliant, light-blue irises; when she stared, it would have come as no surprise to anyone if her gaze cut through the toughest surfaces before her. If Lady Cyber-Knife had a soul (her designers had not specifically imparted her with one, but some things are beyond the reckoning of even the Complex’s most skilled engineers), her eyes were certainly the window into it. In truth, Lady Cyber-Knife looked a little like a robot that had decided to disguise itself by putting on a blonde wig, and nothing else. She had little interest in camouflage, though, and missions of pure stealth were not exactly her forte. “Now,” she muttered to herself, “were I an over-arrogant sack of shit, who thought I was untouchable, where would I stash the enemy I worried could prove me wrong?” Lady Cyber-Knife heard a muffled sound trying to make its way out of the carrier on her back, and she sighed louder than she would have liked. She reached back and partially pulled the Cyber-Sword out of its sheath. “What?” she asked. “You bury things you want to forget,” it said, in a British accent, with a tone like it could barely muster the energy to care about what was going on. “No matter how tall towers reach, the men who build them will always make sure they can hide things underneath. This reminds me of a -” “Much obliged for the directions,” Lady Cyber-Knife interjected, tapping on the sword's hilt and sliding it back into place. She scanned down to the lowest levels of the prison's map, looking for what wasn't there, just as a chorus of boots, all slamming against the tile floor in time, began to echo down the hallway. Based on the resistance she'd encountered so far, she felt little concern about having to fight her way through another batch of soldiers, and she idly wondered if they would even notice her before they passed by. All they needed to do was look up to see her, but she wondered if they could even think that creatively, or if they'd need orders to search in three dimensions. Then again, with enough eyes in one group, some would look up, eventually. Her radar senses had constantly scanned the building since she'd entered, augmenting the detail of the schematic Major Tracy had shared with her, before they perished. The basements and sub-basements dove even deeper than the height the building stretched up into the sky, a constantly expanding spiderweb of laboratories, warehouses, lifts, and hallways that seemed to go nowhere at all. Unless the Complex was more devious than she had previously imagined - possible, but unlikely - those paths didn't simply dead-end for no reason; they fed into something so secretive that it had to be blocked from view, even from within an installation so secret that its existence was kept hidden. He has to be in there, she thought to herself, in one of those rooms that you would not recognize unless you stood in, or outside of, it. Only in a world this shitty would the powers that be keep secret the capture of their self-described greatest enemy. They did so only because the idea of him loose in the worlds served them as a more useful tool of control than his capture ever could. The truth would free humanity from the Complex's control. When they learned the truth of the lies stacked atop lies that had built the watchtowers from which the Complex exerted its influence over every life within the White Zone, the people would break free, just as Lady Cyber-Knife had, just as she imagined Cyber-Knife had done before her. If she saved him, they could save humanity, and she'd save herself in the process. Some people were clearly past saving, and she'd do the body a favor if she cut them out like necrotic flesh. The many could not be sacrificed at the expense of the few. Two by two, twenty-four more Complex guards strode down the hallway beneath Lady Cyber-Knife. She could barely contain her amusement at the carefully designed, constantly shifting digital camouflage covering their uniforms, remembering an advertisement that she watched while bored on a mission once which promised a “17.5% increase in survivability for every soldier, in any combat environment.” Maybe in a jungle, or even the tundra, but inside the spartan hallways of a secret prison? The facility might have been hidden, but hiding places inside it were rare, certainly for chemically enhanced men and women carrying weapons thicker around than their legs. For years, laser rifles had been the military's preferred tool for killing anyone who stood in their way, and they had been remarkably effective. Open war with the ARNs, though - the Auton
omous Resilient Nonhumans, who sought to end all human life - had taught even the Complex a few new things about killing. It was the ARNs who finally, effectively miniaturized an energy system to power plasma emitters in infantry weapons. It had taken autopsies on thousands of alien robot ninjas to unlock the secrets of just how their technology worked, but once it was uncovered, the Complex's massive industrial machine ensured their forces reached material parity with the enemy. Unfortunately for the Complex soldiers foolish enough to think they could hunt Lady Cyber-Knife, they were still only humans. They may take drugs to achieve the peak of their humanity, but they still had only human reaction time, human mental acuities, and especially human hardiness. She had carried a pair of plasma pistols herself, once upon a time. Now, the only tools at her disposal were the weapons built into her - her claws, her limbs, and her mind. She looked down at the two dozen soldiers sorted out obediently below her, and smiled. The warrior makes the weapon, not the other way around, and nothing those soldiers could think of doing to her would pose any kind of a threat. She would have happily killed them for their arrogance alone, and she wondered if any of them might kill each other in their panic to defend themselves from her. She thought she might as well find out. Lady Cyber-Knife dropped from the ceiling in a single smooth, quiet maneuver, letting go of the walls with both her hands and feet. She fell, and she picked up speed as she went, twisting in the air to bring her feet to point exactly down. Like spears, her feet pierced the chests of the two soldiers directly beneath her; she came to a stop with her shins sticking out of their backs, wearing them like a pair of new shoes. Bodily fluids leaked out of them, pooling into sticky puddles as they came in contact with the cold, sterile floor below. She whipped out the Cyber-Sword and cut those soldiers in half just below their sternums, stepping out of her impromptu slippers as more gore still slid out of them. She left footprints in the blood as she stepped out of the bodies. Most of the soldiers panicked - and they were right to - but a few snapped up their rifles and started firing in bursts. Lady Cyber-Knife caught most of their shots along the angles of her artificial limbs, knocking them harmlessly away into the nearby walls, but one slipped past her guard, smacking her squarely in the stomach. It interrupted her defensive spins and she flew off her feet, corkscrewing in the air and falling to the floor. The plasma shot burnt through her uniform and scorched the flesh beneath. She didn't cry out, or make any kind of sound at all, for most of her pain responses had been programmed away by the Complex's scientists. The soldiers advanced on her prone form, rifles held tight to their chests in white-knuckle grips. “Bet you didn't think you would bag yourselves this little prize this morning, did you, boys?” asked the smiling jackass who had to be their captain. “Sir, no, sir!” the remaining soldiers shouted in unison, cocky in their momentary and unearned success. Lady Cyber-Knife lifted her unoccupied hand weakly, stretching out with her fingers like a dying man in the desert, desperate for help from anyone, even a mirage, even an enemy. Steam rose from her midriff; the microscopic machines that lived within her cells had done their work well and had nearly restored a layer of healthy flesh beneath that which had been burned away. The soldiers chuckled viciously in unison, confident of victory in only the way that those who've never had to fight before can be. The talons snapped out of Lady Cyber-Knife's fingers yet again, too far away for her to imagine doing any damage to any of the people encroaching upon her. That's what they thought, anyway, and it was the last thought a few of them had, as the spikes flew directly out of her hand, with little puffs of compressed gas behind them. She'd lined up the angles perfectly, and the tiny spikes tore straight through the throats of five more soldiers, sending tiny fountains of blood gushing from the fresh holes in their flesh. They all grasped at their wounds, but realized too late that blood was rushing out from both sides of their bodies, and couldn't act in time to halt the flow before collapsing, desperate and struggling to hold onto consciousness. As she stood, the dynamic fabric that hugged her body had also nearly finished its repair job, closing the hole over her swiftly-healing wound. She swung the Cyber-Sword with a sort of lazy confidence, its blade slicing through the air with a swish and a hum. The soldiers halted suddenly in their advance, looking back and forth at one another, freshly unsure of what might befall them next. EARTH-1, THE WHITE ZONE THE PAST (200 DAYS EARLIER) In the infinite void of the millions of realities that span the multiverse, there's mostly empty space. On that occasion that something fills that space, it's usually a dead rock. Sometimes it's a ball of gas, or even flaming gas, or just a self-sustaining nuclear reactor so big that the mind cannot comprehend its size, but usually? Dead rock. Across the infinite planes of parallel universes, the void is dotted by a single jewel. It has the same name in every one of them: Earth. This Earth had a jewel of its own, on a continent named for an Italian cartographer so insignificant his own descendants could not have picked him out of a crowd. From East to West, it stretched from one ocean to the other; bordered by Great Lakes in the North and large Gulfs in the South. Inside The White Zone, anything to which any human had ever aspired was within reach. Towers of crystal and stone stretched up from verdant, perfectly manicured grass lawns, so tall and spacious that there was enough room for everyone blessed enough to call themselves a citizen. Every square centimeter of The White Zone was climate-controlled, indoors or outside, and scientists had long ago learned how to manipulate the weather as well as the temperature. Inside The White Zone, it would never be too hot or too cold, nor would it ever rain unexpectedly or snow without warning. Extreme weather was unheard of within its borders; there was not a person alive who had ever seen a tornado, earthquake, or hurricane. The term “natural disaster” had passed into legend. Nobody living in The White Zone wanted for anything. Every resource was infinite, inexpensive, and immediately available. For generations, humanity had wished for perfection, and within the borders of The White Zone, they had it, and everything they could ever want. When they didn't want something anymore, they took it to a molecular compactor, where it quite literally disappeared. If they decided they wanted it again, ordering another one took no more effort than pressing a button. Every want was met instantly. The citizens had long ago stopped asking where all of the stuff they consumed came from; the Earth wasn't infinite, after all, and the boundaries of science couldn't stretch themselves to encompass alchemy. Fuel, metals, raw earth materials, all of it had to come from somewhere. The leaders claimed a recycling breakthrough generations ago had enabled their building a waste-free consumer society, but anyone who took more than a moment to think about it knew that claim to be a lie. It only demanded the asking of one question to expose that lie and start picking away at the foundation resting atop it. Some questions are too big to be asked, though, and through a unique combination of benign ignorance and willful blindness, The White Zone's perfection was maintained. The heady, ambitious days of asteroid mining and the desperate quest for energy alternatives were long in the past; humanity got what it wanted the old-fashioned way: by taking it. They just had to find someplace that had what they needed. They had found all of it and more in the limitless swath of the multiverse. Infinite complacency demanded infinite consumption, which could only be supplied by infinite Earths. The Complex kept up appearances, lest the people spontaneously develop a conscience one day and find an excuse to rise up against them. The mechanisms by which they shipped in resources from the other Earths were hidden underground, safely away from prying eyes. Beneath the White Zone, raw materials underwent processing and transformation into anything the populace desired, like a new electronic gadget that wirelessly connected into the brain's pleasure center, allowing waves of ecstasy to roll over the user in time with their music, or an entertainment video, or even a voice chat. From all the conversations tracked by their surveillance, the Complex predicted that more than half of their citizens intended to obtain one. In anticipation of this demand, supplies had been shipped in from across the multiverse, with the automated manufacturing facilities
pumping out products incessantly. Doorways between worlds opened onto the floors of the factories, as huge automatic arms lifted and twisted stacks of all different kinds of metal, reaching into one Earth and bringing all it had to offer back into the White Zone. One such facility sat directly beneath the flagship electronics store, around which men, women, and children milled, impatiently waiting for the thing they so dearly wanted. When a particular blue crate, which was supposed to contain copper and gold, but actually housed volatile chemicals that had been patiently mixing, a little bit at a time, shook, and then exploded, the blast ripped upwards, through the building, and across the people outside. It ripped out from the center of the crowd, a wave of pressure knocking to the ground those who didn't dive clear of the heat and flame. Those closest to the blast's source vanished in an instant, before they were even able to feel what was happening. Others lost only parts of their bodies - when they were finally able to open their eyes, they saw only scorched bones and charred flesh where there had been healthy bodies the instant before. Still more felt the very moisture in their bodies boil away and died screaming as the last thing they saw was their skin bubbling and cracking. Streams of blood began to trickle down the street, and as they merged, they grew into a river. Lives lived in The White Zone were safe and comfortable, so for trauma to suddenly and violently rear its head again, to inflict so much unexpected pain and suffering all at once, it wounded the very psyche of the citizenry. Four more explosions set off: three beneath other electronics vendors, and one at the base of an apartment building that towered dozens of stories into the air. The sight of the building's destruction was easy to see from the sites of the other four explosions, and the noise of the metal twisting and groaning as it struggled to stay upright sounded over for miles. As emergency responders rushed to offer what help they could give, they found their heads all turning up towards the building to watch it thrash in its death throes. In the White Zone, the closer to the heaviest urban centers one lived, the more comfortable one had to be with shadows. Despite the most thoughtful and advanced urban planning humanity had ever known, gigantic structures would always block the sun. Natives of the city centers would tell recent transplants that they could reckon time by the angle of the buildings' shadows. They stretched out in exactly the same way, precisely at the same time, every day; they were totems of comfort and familiarity to those who lived among them. Today, though, as the shadows cast by the bombed-out building wobbled in a way no one had ever seen before, the shadows betrayed them. They couldn't live in peaceful, blissful ignorance surrounded by such darkness forever. Residual smoke wafted up from beneath the apartment building, like the mist that crept across the stage before the headlining act leapt in front of the crowd. Engineering struggled mightily against nature for as long as the city could hold its breath, but with one great shuddering gasp, the building lost its fight with gravity and toppled over and in upon itself. Smoke and ash rushed out across the streets in a tidal wave as the building broke apart. The roar it made as it cut through the air sounded like a demonic creature that had only ever lived in myth, one that thrived on chaos and death. An entire block vanished as the rest of the building slammed into the ground, and the earth shook, as if from vengeful, giant footsteps. Barely a handful of moments passed between the recorded time of the first explosion and when General Maximilian Gerhardt Onobope McAllister, head of domestic security for The Complex, activated the holographic projectors in his office. Although they were great distances apart, he could still meet face-to-face with his peers: General Golda Wendy Minh Nehru Diop, the Complex's Chief of Staff, and General Dinesh Barton Dinh Fong Yeltsin, the only other member of the Complex's upper echelon to face the rogue agent Cyber-Knife in direct combat and survive. Golda lived on a hypersonic hovercraft as she constantly traveled from one end of The White Zone to another, and Dinesh led the exploratory force that hunted Cyber-Knife across dimensions, with the latest and greatest military hardware to assist him. Instantly, it was as though all three of them were standing in the same room. He crossed his silver arms across his chest, two of the four souvenirs that had been gifted him after the battle with Cyber-Knife. His arms had been severed at the elbows, and his legs, at the ankles. When asked what sort of replacements he desired, Maximilian had demanded cybernetics. If he were ever to fight the traitorous killer again, he wanted to battle on more equal ground. His bushy beard reached almost down to his belly, and narrow streaks of black ran through the grey that had mostly overtaken it. His grey hair looked almost dirty, in comparison to his shining arms and legs, and though he'd never admit it, he had shaved his head smooth to minimize the effect. He could've gotten implants, had his hair recolored, or his skin stretched out, but he didn't want to look young. He wanted to look like a warrior, a survivor. Like Maximilian, Dinesh hadn't come through the encounter with Cyber-Knife wholly intact - he'd had his head transplanted wholesale onto a new body, a younger body, one in its physical prime, and in this new body, he towered over Maximilian. Maximilian didn't like that. One advantage to holographic projectors was the ability to manipulate the image, and Maximilian had paid an overeager technician to adjust his defaults, so whenever Dinesh's image appeared in his office, he would always look just a little bit shorter than Maximilian himself. He'd ordered the tech quietly eliminated a few days later. Unlike her two compatriots, Golda had led something of a charmed existence through her combat tours. The first one in and the last out of nearly a dozen hostile worlds, she'd been directly responsible for the deaths of at least as many as The White Zone's entire population, and personally pulled the trigger, or pushed the button, or flicked the switch for more than half of them. Through it all, she'd come through without even a scratch. Curly hair bunched up around her ears and bounced just above her shoulders as she walked, and her eyes blazed with undeniable purpose. Every time he looked into them, Maximilian had to admit to himself that he was looking at the better soldier. He had no cause to fuck with her holographic representation. Before the connection had even solidified, Golda snapped, “Max, what the fuck?!” She didn't mince words; it endeared her to nearly everyone who'd served with her. “Report something right the hell now.” Maximilian had slaved two of the monitors on his desk to the feeds of the equipment carried by the response team, so as soon as they knew something, he would, too. He looked down and saw that he'd had a little bit of luck this day, relatively speaking. “My people haven't been on site for that long,” he began, “but they've reached the original blast's epicenter.” “I'm sure we're all relieved to know they can walk and carry heavy equipment,” Dinesh said. Maximilian had thought getting Dinesh exiled to the task force and away from The White Zone would bring him some peace from him, but it hadn't. Dinesh was constantly angling to get home, and to get the job, which he felt was rightly his: Maximilian's. He never passed up an opportunity to make those feelings known, and the fucker might find a way to make reality reflect his opinion this time. “They haven't concretely identified the source, but they can make a good guess. These were four critical supply transport points that got hit,” Maximilian continued. “An actual tactical attack?” Golda asked. “That would mean that the human rebels didn't do it.” Maximilian just nodded. He'd known Golda long enough to know that, around her, you didn't have to play a game to demonstrate competency, you just had to be competent. His security measures had fallen short; he had gotten too used to thinking of the ARNs as a second-tier threat, ever since Cyber-Knife had completed his last mission. Maximilian knew that, if he could respond, demonstrate some flexibility and forward thinking, he could salvage things. At best, Dinesh would get promoted into his job, and he demoted into Dinesh's. At least he'd still be breathing. “Which would mean the ARNs just decided to push in closer and more aggressively. They're staking their claim,” Maximilian said. “Dinesh, have you heard anything from them out there on the front lines?” Dinesh waved his hand past his face, a gesture equally dismissive and disgusted. “Ever since... HE completed his only mission, we've neither seen n
or heard a single thing from the ARN Triumvirate. You should know that, Maximilian; we all see the same briefings. “Then again,” Dinesh continued, “our operational parameters are narrow, so we don't exactly listen for ARN chatter. I put all of my resources into securing new territory.” “Which is, at least, more successful of an undertaking than keeping our people safe was today,” Golda said. Maximilian felt his heart sink a little, and hoped it didn't show. “It is a big multiverse,” Dinesh said, “and to that end, I'd like to renew my request for Lady Cyber-Knife's deployment.” “This is hardly the time or the place to have this discussion again,” Maximilian immediately replied. “Just because you're too terrified to take the necessary steps to ensure our security, doesn't mean you get to stop me from taking them,” Dinesh fired back. “You both need to cool those tempers of yours right now,” Golda ordered. After a moment, she continued: “Today is an extraordinary day, General, so make your case in an extraordinary way.” “Thank you, Madame Chief of Staff," Dinesh said, sparing a smug glance for Maximilian. "One word: predator. Cyber-Knife was made to be the battlefield's apex predator, and Lady Cyber-Knife, we kept around to prey on him. Let her do as she was meant to. With specific instructions, close supervision, and a limited deployment, you can trust us to turn the tables and be the predator ourselves, General. It's as simple as that.” “Even if I felt I could trust you - which I don't,” Maximilian said, “it'd demand a biblical leap of faith to extend that trust to her.” He pointed at Dinesh's hologram, and he imagined the metal joints of his prosthetic arm rattled ever so slightly, the way he always did when they moved a little too fast. An incurable genetic condition that affected less than one percent of all live births in The White Zone had seen fit to bless him, the sort that made it impossible for his body to accept regrown or transplanted tissue. He'd have molded prosthetics for the rest of his life, or nothing at all. “We can secure the multiverse without turning to yet another ungodly monster.” “Have you lost your fucking head?” Dinesh shouted. “Oh, wait, no. That happened to me. I wake up every day to someone else's body! These hands aren't the ones I learned to play the piano with! These feet aren't the feet that carried me through basic training! This isn't the cock that made my children! I won't stop at anything to make the monsters that threaten us feel the kind of pain and loss I feel every day - nothing, you hear me? I'll climb in bed with a thousand Lady Cyber-Knives, if that's what it takes!” Golda plucked at a switch just slightly out of the range of the camera transmitting her image, but the ear-piercing burst of static that blasted out next could not be missed. Both Maximilian and Dinesh threw their hands up over their ears in a futile gesture to protect their hearing, but the noise still dropped them to their knees in pain. She let the sound ring on for long seconds, shrieking long past when her point had been made. Finally, she turned the switch back, and the screaming ended. “Jesus fucking Christ,” she grumbled, “I don't know whether to tell you to fuck or kill each other. Whatever you have, get it out in the open and move past it, or tamp it down so far that you'll never feel it again. “I'll say this about your stupid-ass bickering,” she continued, “it does give a body time to think. General Dinesh, I'll grant your request: Lady Cyber-Knife will be activated for duty on the front lines immediately. Maximilian, see to it personally.” “What?” Maximilian almost screamed. “General, I don't know what to say,” Dinesh said. “I'm almost overwhelmed at the generosity you're -” “Did I look like I had finished speaking?” Golda interrupted. When Dinesh finally realized she expected a response, he shook his head, and only then did she continue. “I'm changing Forward Command's objective. You do not let your vendetta against Cyber-Knife get in the way of your duty, which, as of five seconds ago, is to wipe the remaining ARNs off the face of the multiverse. Lady Cyber-Knife should be able to make short work of that task. “Finally, you two need to focus up. Between hating Cyber-Knife and hating each other, you've barely done your jobs at all. So, starting today, you don't do those jobs anymore. Dinesh, you're coming home, back to The White Zone, where you'll ensure domestic tranquility and serve as my overall second-in-command. Maximilian, you're headed out to the front. Take this opportunity to clear your heads, the both of you, because this is your last last chance. Do you feel me?” “Yes, ma'am,” Dinesh said. “Yes, sir,” Maximilian said. “Updated orders will be sent to you within the hour; be ready to depart for your new assignments by the end of the day.” Golda moved like she was about to walk out of the camera's range, but thought better of it an paused for a moment. “Know this: if you two fuck up again, you will wish Cyber-Knife had finished you off in that cavern.” She broke off the connection, and Dinesh disappeared from the office an instant later. Maximilian had lived a soldier's life; as a boy, it was the only thing he had ever wanted to be. Even when he'd left the battlefield behind for offices and desks, his old habits remained. He lived light, didn't accumulate much. Most of the possessions that meant something to him sat on shelves in his office, in fact, not in his apartment. He had a pistol he'd taken off a human insurgent sitting in a desk drawer; he liked to look at it sometimes. Maximilian didn't understand the insurgent mindset. On tens of thousands of worlds, they had lost outright. Their militaries had been destroyed, their spirits broken, every conceivable natural resource extracted from their Earth and brought to his, fueling an unprecedented, centuries-long expansion of human society, technology, and culture. Most of the time, the survivors didn't stay that way for long, as they suffocated, starved, or froze. There weren't very many dissidents, or at least, there shouldn't have been. Those who had managed to survive, who insensibly refused to yield in the face of a thoroughly implacable foe, wouldn't go quietly. They fought, engaging the Army with sneaky, pussified guerrilla tactics across hundreds of worlds. They wouldn't even die fairly; they'd slowly retreated across dimensions repeatedly, and for decades. The cost their rebellion had incurred was incalculable, though even that was a pittance in the face of the infinite resources the United fucking States of America could bring to bear. In all these years of fighting, they'd learned a good deal about the enemy, and one thing was clear: they wouldn't even broach the idea of a truce, or a negotiated settlement, until their spirit was well and truly broken. Fortunately, he could turn his thoughts away from them, and back towards the killer robots. The enemy had first manufactured the ARNs as expendable foot soldiers, only they broke away from their creators' control when the ARNs determined that the practical difference between them and their hated foes was virtually nil. The first ARN he'd ever killed had, in fact, almost killed him instead, so he'd kept a piece of its armor from that day on, to help keep things in perspective, always. Standing in his office, Maximilian felt more and more fury rise within himself as he replayed the conversation from moments ago again and again. Perspective abandoned him. He saw red and plucked the memento off the desk, whipped it at the wall. It struck and splintered into a million tiny pieces, mostly dust. The intercom buzzed. His personal assistant, Renée, spoke. “Is everything all right, General?” Her warm, reassuring voice belied her figure, a coiled spring of muscles ready to snap at a moment's notice in defense of comrade or country. Even if she'd not been his niece, Maximilian liked to think he would've still selected her for the position. Maximilian took a moment to gather his thoughts before he replied. “No, it's not.” A moment more passed before he continued. “Renée, could you scare me up a broom and a dustpan, please? And, after that, get MOM's tech team on the line. I need them over here by the close of business today.” “I can set up another holoconference,” she said, trying to be helpful. “You could talk to them in five minutes.” “From your mouth to God's ears,” Maximilian replied, “only not even His ears can listen in to what I have to tell them. Besides, they're going to need to work through the night to ensure her deployment tomorrow.” “I'm sorry, General," she said. “Right away. I didn't mean to forget the soldiers' credo like that: 'Ours is not to reason why...'” Renée left the last part of the phrase unsaid, and Maximilian didn't find himself in a m
ood to complete it. He only wanted two deaths on his mind this day, and sure as shit, neither one of them were his own. Fuck, he thought to himself, that could've been terrible.