"Hunter, no," Mr. Thomson said flatly. "Now, come on, it's time for class."
Hunter complained. Not just complained, he bitched and moaned. "Why do we need classes anyway? The world's about to end, the Kaiju are gonna kill us all anyway."
Mr. Thomson inhaled and said his usual thing, raising his injured finger, "No, son. As long as we're breathing, we're able to fight. And living on, carrying on with our lives is one of the many ways we can fight this scourge."
Hunter was bored at class. He was always bored at class. What good were math when a Kaiju could show up at any time and smash your entire life to pieces? Mr. Thomson was going on and on about what the 'x' is.
His mind wandered. His gaze fell on her, Seeker. She was the prettiest girl he'd ever seen, with her squinty eyes, a genetic trait, and her great butt. Hunter really liked staring at that butt during class, especially when she leaned forward on the desk in front of him just as she was now.
Mr. Thomson slappepd his hand on Hunter's desk and he started. "Easy solution, isn't it? Perhaps you, Hunter, could show the rest of the class how it's solved?"
"I-Uh... I wasn't paying attention, Mr. Thomson."
The entire class laughed. Seeker turned back to him and rolled her eyes, Hunter loved it when she did that.
"Of course you weren't," Mr. Thomson sighed, fixing his glasses. They had a very thin skeleton, almost invisible.
"What's the point of finding 'x,' when Pyrespitter can just roast your ass?" Hunter said, frowning.
"Language, Hunter," the teacher demanded.
Seeker raised her hand. "Can I solve it, sir?"
"Of course, Miss Seeker," Mr. Thomson said, stepping aside.
"Nerd," Hunter coughed as she stood up.
"Daydreamer," she taunted back and went on to woo the class with her knowledge of math.
They made out behind Metal Fever. "Are you sure nobody will see us?" she panted, disengaging her lips from his own for a second and then kissing his neck. She was sitting on his lap, facing him, her legs around his waist.
"Don't worry, nobody comes in here," Hunter assured her, finding his way with his hand under her t-shirt. These were the best boobies. They were the only boobies Hunter had ever touched, but they were the best, he was sure of it.
Seeker licked his ear and the hummed into it, sending tingles all over his body. "If someone sees us, that'll be the last of this," she said, grabbing his hand over her breast and squeezing it there.
"Oh, I'd never want to miss those," Hunter smiled, biting the other tip of her breast over her t-shirt. It was hard and had a nice, tiny tip.
Seeker moaned and shuddered under his touch, and then pressed his face on her chest, running her fingers in his hair.
Hunter sure did like the sensation of that cute little smothering. However, at some point he needed air, so he bit her.
"Ouch!" she slapped him.
"What? You were choking me with your boobies."
Seeker snorted, pressed her lips together. They were shiny and slobbery from all the kissing. "They're not that big."
Hunter squeezed them again. "They're big enough. Perfect."
She slapped his arm and then stuck out her tongue over her top row of teeth.
"What?" Hunter asked but stopped mid-sentence.
Seeker stuck her hand down his pants, looking around, feeling her way as she kept the same innocent expression. "For that adorable comment, Hunter, you get a handjob."
Hunter leaned back on the wall and breathed hard, while getting hard.
She squeezed her tiny fingers around his cock.
"Ah, cold hands!" he complained.
"Want me to stop?" she smirked.
"No. Please, no," he winced, feeling awesome.
She beamed at him, going on with the handjob.
"Um..." Hunter said and stopped, mouth open.
"Oh..." Seeker said and pulled her hand out of his pants. It was wet and sticky. "That was fast."
Hunter opened his mouth to apologise when the alarms blared.
He pulled her by the hand and they ran down the hangar's corridors. They knew their way around, this was their home for as long as they could remember. Their parents, all the grown ups fighting the Kaiju their entire lives.
"Do you think it's Pyrespitter?" Seeker asked, terrified.
"Yeah," Hunter said, biting his lips. He looked around, the place was a mess. "I can hear Cosmic Menace revving up," he said, putting his ear to the metal walls. "Here, feel the vibrations."
She put her own hand and touched her cheek on the wall. "Yeah. It's ready to move, I can tell."
"See? Menace will protect us, don't worry!"
She did look worried. Her mother was the Ranger on the Menace. A hero, the defender of their entire hangar. "Yeah..."
"She'll be alright. I'm sure of it," Hunter said, and pulled her hand again.
"Where are we going?" she complained, still in a bit of a shock.
"To the classroom. Remember Mr. Thomson's evac drills? It's the closest rendezvous point."
"You remember that?" Seeker asked, looking more shocked by this than the actual attack on the hangar.
"Hey, I pay attention. I just don't understand math and stuff."
They heard a crash ahead, there was smoke and dirt in the corridors. They both dove to the side as the entire hangar shook.
They got to the classroom.
It was caved in, rubble filling up the entire room, blocking all other exits. Hunter looked around for a while. "There's no way through."
Seeker didn't turn to him, simply hummed in affirmative, staring at a spot underneath the rubble. She was holding her mouth in a silent scream.
"What is it?" Hunter asked, getting close to her. Then he saw it.
Blood. And a cracked pair of glasses, with a very thin skeleton, almost invisible.
He hugged her tight. Seeked buried her face into his chest and cried softly. Hunter cried as well, staring at the spot where his favourite grown up had died.
They doubled back to the Metal Fever hangar. "There must be another way around to the others," Seeker said, sniffling and wiping her nose. She looked around the hangar.
"Uh, there's that way, but it's blocked, there's a locked gate. And that way, maybe, it collapsed a few years ago but we might be able to squeeze through."
She turned to him. "You never tried it?"
He shrugged. "What was the point? There was a straight path down there, you know."
Her expression darkened. "You don't have to snap back at me."
"I'm sorry, Seeker. It's just... You know how I feel right now. Mr. Thomson was my favourite person in the world, and now he's gone." He was about to say more but an explosion shook the entire hangar.
They held on tight on the railings, rubble fell from the ceiling.
Metal Fever was just sitting there, silent. He was one of the experimental models, from back when the war against the Kaiju had resources to waste on crazy ideas and schemes. Nowadays, it was all about logistics and making sure everything was efficient, because there were no resources to spare at all. He was very badass looking, like a titanic suit of sleek armour. Thin, strong, ready for battle.
It was a bummer that he tended to make the Rangers crazy.
"Hey, I have an idea," Seeker said, stretching her pretty neck by looking all the way up. It had a few hickies from before and Hunter got another erection just by thinking about it.
"What? Go up there?"
"Yeah. The hangar roof can be opened from inside the Jaeger."
"That's crazy, Seeker. We're not Rangers, we just did, what, thirty hours of training in VR?"
"Do you have a better idea?"
Hunter looked around. Mr. Thomson was dead. His classmates were probably dead. Cosmic Menace was out there fighting for them. He looked at the tiny girl he was in love with. He wasn't going to let anything happen to her. "No, I don't. Okay, are you sure we can do this? Mr. Thomson says..." he stopped himself, then added, "said, that Metal Fever fr
ies your brain."
She grabbed his hand and pulled him towards the upper railings. "Not in seconds, dummy. All we need to do is to fire him up and open the hangar roof. Then we'll climb out from the emergency hatch."
"Okay," Hunter said and pulled her to a stop. When she turned to him, confused, he planted a deep kiss on her. "In case we get our brains melted," he smiled, close to her face.
She stood on her tippy-toes and kissed him back.
His heart leapt. She was the best thing to ever happen to him.
She pulled away and started running towards the Jaeger's head. "Keep up, Daydreamer."
The Jaeger was dusty. Someone had been keeping it maintained, but it was a big thing and it was basically forgotten in storage.
Hunter put on the suit.
"Turn around," Seeker frowned, pushing his face away.
"I've already, like, felt everything. And you did the other thing..."
"Doesn't mater. Turn around."
He did. He could hear her shuffling inside the Ranger suit. It was big for them but it was clever enough to adjust the padding inside automatically, basically adapting to any body size.
"Ready!" Seeker said.
Hunter turned to see her. "Wow! Do I look this cool too?"
She shook her head. "Nah. You look like a bozo."
"Why you..."
"Hey! Time's up, let's just fire it up."
Another explosion from somewhere.
"That was very close," Hunter said.
"It was," Seeker said, focusing on the pre-launch procedure. Her tiny hands were blurring over the controls, running over checklists and turning on systems.
"How do you know all this?" Hunter asked.
"My mom taught me," she said softly, worry in her face.
"Right."
"Instead of nursery rhymes or fairy tales, mom would recite pre-launch procedures or tell me about how she defeated Suffering and then Tribulation."
"Wow..."
"Not really. I'd prefer it if she behaved like a real mom."
"Hey, Runner? Your mom is the reason we're all still alive."
Runner turned to him, pressing her lips bitterly. "Not all of us, baby."
"You called me baby," Hunter swooned.
"Don't get used to it!" Seeker spat back at him and fired up the Jaeger.
Everything shook.
Metal Fever stood up, his joints squeaking from immobility.
A brilliant light lit up on his helmet, and a ball of plasma appeared between his hands.
"Hey, don't fire it up in here!" Seeker screamed, powering the plasma ball down.
"Sorry," Hunter winced.
"It's okay. Just... Be aware of what you're intending to do, because the Jaeger will just do it. It takes some getting used to, but it's easy." She gave the command for the hangar roof to open up.
"You've piloted one before?" Hunter asked, incredulous.
Seeker smirked at him. "My mom snuck me in once, yeah." The hangar roof opened entirely.
Hunter let his jaw hang. "You're so fucking sexy right now."
Seeker beamed at him, and then jumped up, making the Metal Fever jump outside with a single leap.
"Didn't we say we'd climb out here?" Hunter squealed, regaining his balance.
"I'm lazy."
"No you're not."
Their surroundings were basically ruins. Older ruins. In flames.
Very close to them, just a small run with these titanic legs, was the Pyrespitter. A serpent-y, alien-y, fire breathing creature from wherever the hell they came from.
And it had Cosmic Menace pinned down. In flames. Face melted, leg melted away.
"Mom!" Seeker cried out and the Jaeger started to run towards it. It wobbled in a weird way.
Hunter realised why. It was because the other half of the equation wanted to run the other way.
"Hunter, help me out here," Seeker begged, tears in her eyes.
"Seeker?" her mom said over the comms. "What are you doing in there? Nevermind, turn around and leave. Now, missy! Run!"
Hunter was no hero. He knew that. But something had changed inside him the moment he donned this Ranger's suit and plugged his brain into a titanic robot.
Something...
Feverish.
He grinned, balled his fists. "Yeah. Let's do this," he said, powering up the plasma ball, and Metal Fever joined the fight.
The End.
Hot Jupiter
"Why, oh why, did I volunteer for this?" Dytis cried out moments before the jump.
He looked down at the swirling clouds of the gas giant. The shapes and swirls were mesmerising, like an endless cup of latte and him being the sugar cube ready to dip inside.
Hope he wasn't gonna dissolve like it, though.
The trajectory had been calculated down to the last second. The release was automated, but he did hold the abort button in his gloved hand. Actually, calling it a 'glove' was being generous. His suit was a rigid submarine around him in a vaguely human shape. He didn't have any mobility, not that he wanted to sacrifice the protection for it.
This was gonna be a bumpy ride.
"Ten seconds till the jump," his suit said.
Dytis gulped. He could still abort. He could still walk away, after all, this was absolutely motherfucking batshit crazy. No one would blame him.
But he would.
Sweating, feeling like a canned tuna, he waited for the countdown.
"Five. Four. Three. Two... One..."
Jump.
"Whee!" Juppie clamored in delight as soon as they both got kicked like a pebble.
The quick releases clanged on his divesuit and pushed him away. Tiny jets of air made sure to adjust any discrepancy to the precalculated route.
This was just a simple dive, he kept repeating the thought to himself like a mantra. He chuckled. "Yeah, right," he whined to himself.
Now he was alone.
More or less, that was. Juppie kept squealing as they fell, he was more composed. Merged together as one, man and machine, falling into the atmosphere of the Hot Jupiter. A gas giant that, as the name suggested, was hotter than Jupiter back on Earth.
This gas giant was way too close to the star it orbited, making it spin around very fast indeed. It was also hotter, and those Minds believed the core was not solid, which was a very important matter right now for Dytis and Juppie.
They were both backed up in the nearest ship Mind, "Call Me If You're Sick." But it wasn't the same thing. If he died, he'd still be lost. He'd lose this experience. If something went wrong, he'd just emerge out of a stinky vat of organic goo with ultra-sensitive baby-skin and with the last memory being that of getting backed up.
Debating it was philosophy, and Dytis wasn't deep into that. No, he was deep only in other things: Asterism-wide firsts. Breaking records. First man to dive into a nebula. First man to dive beneath a frozen ocean. And now, first man to dive into a gas giant.
They couldn't do it back on Jupiter. Nobody had gone there, not even an e-person, but they were pretty sure it had a solid core, and obviously that wouldn't work for a dive. What he needed was a nice, puffy planet that was gaseous all the way to the core.
Just like this baby right here.
The sun was enormous, they were so close to it, uncomfortably so. It just felt wrong, being this close to a star. Even the tropical orbitals that offered a good tan and warm beaches weren't this close to their stars.
He fell, him and his suit. The suit was definitely more valuable than him, but Juppie was an adrenaline junkie, even without having any adrenaline to speak of. They'd done a couple of crazy jumps together and they trusted each other. Juppie would be the first e-person to visit a gas giant's core, and so would Dytis, the first organic in known space.
From orbit, and the gentle, stomach-curling feel of free-fall, the Hot Jupiter grabbed him.
The change was gradual but very, very hard to miss.
"Inside the gravity well," Juppie said, way too excited. "Still no
records broken, dude. But we're so close!"
"Yeah," Dytis chuckled. "We'll break them, buddy. Don't worry."
He accelerated. It was like being a fly caught in a fly-swatter, whooshing you downwards in a never-ending fall. Pulled downwards by the incredibly strong gravity of the gas giant, Dytis felt whoozy.
"I think we may have committed hybris here," Dytis said, grunting to keep his insides from becoming an omelete.
"Ha! Good one. No, we're cool. Actually, we'll be way more than cool in a bit."
Dytis knew the stages. He was falling at a staggering 180.000 km/h, basically a meteor falling to the Hot Jupiter. He remembered that the planet had probably eaten a million meteors that thought they were bigger and badder than a lowly human.
"Reaching the ammonia clouds, whoopie!" Juppie said.
The effect was shocking. Or rather, freezing. Dytis and Juppie both became a popsicle, dipping in external temperature down to -150 degrees Celsius. If it wasn't for the metamaterials in his suit and the ridiculously advanced technology inside it, he'd probably be alive right now, but freezing his balls off.
Dytis saw the whirlpool. Whirlpool, with a capital 'W.' He fell into it, unable to act, it engulfed him. Everything around him became a jumbled-up mess, his vision blurred from the shaking and the bobbing around.
"We're being buffeted by 500 km/h winds!" Juppie squealed in delight. "Whee!"
Dytis shut his eyes, he couldn't take it any more. He was like a grain of sand in a powerful blender, tiny, hard, he couldn't be hurt but he was damn sure was gonna be thrown around with impunity.
"Injecting your squishy parts with inertia metamaterials," Juppie said and filled him up with said liquid.
To say that it felt weird, was an understatement. The suit injected his chest, his intestines, his lungs, his heart, his brain, his eyeballs. The greenish liquid filled his vision. He felt heavy, even heavier than before. He was...
Anchored.
Dytis' body had undergone some modification, there was no way he had a chance of surviving this ordeal with a vanilla panhuman body. Graphene bones, double heart, super absorbent lung material, he had been genofixed to be the most durable panhuman Asterism could make.
MOAB � Mother Of All Boxsets Page 124