by Nick Ryder
Now she was going to die.
The beam of pure energy took the man’s head off.
It was concentrated so perfectly that it evaporated the head and left every other part of his body untouched. Lisa had managed to stop herself just short of impaling herself on the dead man’s boot knife anyway, and had to stop the hard panting she wanted to do because her chest was so close to the tip of the blade.
“Thanks,” she said to Cara when she’d rolled out of the way.
Cara wasn’t even there to thank. She’d already moved on, making quick work of the stragglers left defending the way out and to freedom. Behind her, she was dragging a frail looking girl who visibly struggled against her captor. Cara was too strong, and the threat of her powers and the halberd meant the girl wasn’t struggling too much.
The unleashing of Cara’s powers hadn’t tamed the tribe at all, and they continued to fight tooth and nail, still surging forward to try and attack from behind.
Lisa was done with the fight now. She hauled up the body of the dead savage and threw it over her back, ignoring the blood that still leaked from its neck and trickled down her fur.
She very much doubted the secret to his super power was in the blood. Getting the body back to Sol and Ego was her biggest priority.
Cara hopped onto her lizard and pulled the girl on with her. They started fleeing across the desert at such a speed that the girl would have risked being skinned alive if she struggled and fell off the lizard into the sand.
Lisa joined them when she’d tied the arms and legs of the dead man with straps of leather so that he didn’t fall off.
She looked to the side and saw Elaine and Marie, running with just scratches.
When she dared a glimpse behind her, she saw the tribe stood watching. Dead from both sides lay in the ground.
The leader of the tribe, the one she had seen strangle Cara — still adorned in colorful feathers and cat fangs — stood at the head of the onlookers, and his hands were clenched into fists.
It had been a messy operation, but she knew one thing for certain: he would be coming for the woman they had stolen. There was no doubt about that.
Chapter Twenty-One
I watched the returning party with interest, eager to get a report from them.
They were carrying with them two bodies. One missing a head, and another a young girl very much alive.
“Oh God,” I said. “She looks about thirteen.”
“Would you like me to run software that can estimate her age?” Ego asked.
“I think I’d rather not know.”
They entered the facility. I’d disabled all the traps, but they still avoided the areas where the pressure sensors had been.
I’d tell them about some of the changes I’d made to the facility when I’d heard their debrief.
“Don’t worry about the traps,” I said. “They’re disabled.”
Lisa still avoided the pressure sensors by virtue of muscle memory. She was frowning as though it was intentional though, as though she needed to prove it to herself.
The girl Cara was dragging with her struggled wildly, but she was tiny. She looked malnourished, and was barely five feet.
“Does she have a superpower?” I asked Ego, without airing the question through the speakers.
“No,” Ego confirmed. “Her stats show nothing indicating a superpower.”
“Great.” So she was just what I could see at face value. A weak girl who was nothing more than our bargaining chip.
Lisa was dragging a decapitated body with her.
“Who is that?” I asked her.
“The guy with the reflexes. I thought you would want his body to–” She cut herself short with a sideways glance at Cara.
“Bring him to the lab. Elaine and Marie, take Cara up to the lounge. Get the girl a drink.” He almost said food automatically, but he doubted the teenager would be made to feel at home by getting a glob of nutrigel.
Lisa broke off from the group and I followed her. “This is the one who broke into the facility?”
“Yes. I hope that you can get what you wanted out of him.” Her back was soaked with blood, but it seemed to have mostly dried in the baking hot sun as they ran back across the desert.
“Thank you.”
She gave me a weak smile.
“What’s wrong?”
“I forgot about the knives on his boots,” she spat, shielding her face from my camera. “The bastard almost got me, and it was because of my own stupidity.”
“Everyone makes mistakes.”
“I watched that footage a hundred times. I should not have forgotten that.”
“Don’t worry about it. You’ve never made a mistake up until this point.”
“It was just such a stupid thing to do.”
“What matters is that you’re alive.”
“What matters is that I don’t ever do it again.”
“It’s not that simple. You’ll always make mistakes, there’s no way to stop that.”
“So what, I just wait until something happens that kills me?”
“No, you surround yourself with enough people that you trust that when you make a mistake someone has your back, and when they make a mistake, you have their back. No one can be perfect all the time, but there are ways of minimizing the risk. Fighting with friends is one of those.”
Lisa finally smiled at me. “Thanks, Sol. That helps. I’m looking forward to you getting your body. I can add you to the list of people that have my back in a fight.”
It no longer made me feel bitter to know that I wasn’t out there right now fighting with them. My body was gestated, I could enter it any time I wanted. There was no rush anymore. It was all my choice, I wasn’t stuck behind the cameras anymore, I was choosing to be there so that I could keep improving my physical form.
“So… what happened to his head?”
Lisa laughed and gave him a rundown of what had happened in the fight.
“That invisibility power would be very useful,” I mused.
“I thought that. We’ll have to see what we can do with the people who come to rescue the girl.”
“You think they’ll come?”
“I’m certain of it. You should have seen the tribe leader’s face. He was absolutely furious.”
“Excellent.”
There was some doubt on her face though.
“Don’t worry,” I reassured her. “We’ve got plenty of traps here, and an army to meet them with head-on if that doesn’t work. We don’t have anything to worry about.”
She smiled, but I got the feeling I hadn’t completely eradicated her worry.
“Let’s go and see how they’re getting on with the girl.”
I left the decapitated body for Ego to deal with. The AI was going to root around and see if he could isolate the super power, and the science was too difficult for me to find engaging.
Elaine, Marie and Cara stood around the lounge with folded arms, watching as the girl sat on a couch with her arms folded and her bottom lip stuck out.
“Oh God, she really is a teenager,” I said.
The girl jumped. “Who is she?” she asked with a haughty scowl after recovering from the shock of hearing Sol’s voice out of nowhere.
“Do you have a name?” Cara asked, but she said it like a command rather than a genuine question and it made the girl stick her chin out further.
“I’m Marie,” Marie said, smiling at her. “I’m sorry that it all happened so violently, but we thought that maybe you didn’t want to be with that group of people anymore.”
The girl eased off slightly and scratched at her wrist. Finally the uncomfortable silence got to her. “You found my patterns?”
Marie beamed. “We did. We thought they might be you asking for help.”
She shifted her weight in her seat. “My name is Daisy.”
“That’s a cute name,” Elaine said. “My sister was called Daisy.”
Daisy managed a small smil
e in response.
Lisa tapped Cara on the shoulder and gestured for her to leave the room.
I stayed and watched Elaine and Marie a little longer. Daisy was nervous and shy, but struggled to hide her fascination at their hybrid bodies and the strange, futuristic facility she was currently inside.
It didn’t look like she was going to be an immediate problem at least.
One down, maybe ten thousand to go if Cara and Lisa’s body language when he located them was anything to go by.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Lisa hadn’t taken them far, just to an unused storage room two rooms along the corridor. I knew why, and I appreciated her concern. No one wanted Cara to see anymore of the facility than she had to. Well, except for maybe Elaine, but Elaine’s friendship with Cara wasn’t something I liked taking into consideration.
When she’d first entered the facility she’d seen the lab, but it had been a flying visit with high tensions and I hoped that she hadn’t managed to take much of anything in. I knew she’d be able to piece together something of how things worked, but keeping her in the dark as much as I could seemed like a priority.
And that was what Cara and Lisa were currently arguing about.
“What do you mean you can’t tell me what kind of traps you currently have set up?” Cara was demanding with her hands on her hips. Her halberd was strapped to her back, but never out of range of being used. I doubted she even needed the halberd to unleash her superpower, it was just an addition to the power to make herself even stronger.
Hopefully it wouldn’t reach the point of an actual fight.
“You have to understand that this is our home,” Lisa said. “And we can’t risk compromising the entire security of it for this. Not when we don’t even need–” Lisa cut herself short. “Look, it’s important for us to maintain some control of our home. You have to understand that.”
“I don’t have to–” Cara cut herself off this time. She clenched and unclenched her hands. “You want me to be a part of this, then you have to be willing to tell me how we’re planning on fighting these bastards. I can’t commit people to fight alongside us if you’re not going to tell me how high a chance they have of dying.”
“We don’t need–” Lisa started again, and this time I was the one who cut her off.
She was right, we didn’t need Cara’s help to kill this tribe, but I wanted it because I wanted to lose as few people as possible in this attack, and because as much as Elaine’s opinion about Cara was skewed, she was right that it was better to have an ally than an enemy.
If Cara got to feel involved in this and it made her more likely to stay his friend in the future, then he could see no real loss.
Lisa was just going to have to suck it up that she wasn’t the only one in control right now.
“Look,” I said, alerting them to my presence. “Cara, I can’t tell you everything about how this facility can defend itself, but you’re right that if you’re going to help then you need to understand the plan. Everyone needs to understand the plan, and that includes the traps that we’ve set up to damage the tribe when they come here.”
Lisa rankled a little, but Cara smiled up at the camera. She really was gorgeous. Tanned skin with piercing eyes that glinted in the cold white lights of the facility. It was the knowledge that she was powerful. It was what made all of my girls truly beautiful.
“Thanks, Sol,” she said. “I really do want to be a part of this.”
“I want you to be too, but we have to meet in the middle here.”
I’d have to speak to Lisa afterward, because right now she was visibly biting her tongue on a rebuff to explain exactly why we didn’t need Cara anywhere near this fight.
“I’ll take you through the traps,” I said. “Come back to the entrance and we can run through them.”
Lisa tagged along, and didn’t say a word as I went through the majority of the traps we’d laid out for the tribe while they were out hunting the girl. I kept some to myself, but Lisa didn’t know that yet. We’d completely overhauled the way the first level looked while she’d been gone.
The only sign she got that something had been held back was when she realized the layout had been changed. I’d had the bots completely barricade the door and corridor that should have led to the elevator, which was how they’d gotten through the first time. The door had another slab of steel added to the back of it and it was welded shut. There was no way anyone should be able to get through it.
It had two advantages. Not only was the route different to the first time the savages had attacked the facility, but it also meant that I knew the route they were likely to take when they first attacked. I was leading them straight into a gauntlet.
Lisa grinned when she realized this, and flashed my camera a smile that was all teeth.
Her doubts seemed to have evaporated from the tour of the first level that we hoped would do most of the damage to the tribe before we even had to engage in combat with anyone.
“It’s good,” Cara had to admit. “I can’t see them getting through even half of that, never mind making it downstairs to where we are.”
“We still have to be ready for that possibility though,” Lisa said. “We need to be ready to fight them head on if they manage to get through. They did last time.” Lisa didn’t mention that we’d allowed them through because we wanted to steal the superpowers of their leader.
I resisted the urge to check in with Ego. If we could isolate that superpower then I wouldn’t need to concern myself with allying with Cara. I would have the tools to be the most powerful man on the planet, without a doubt.
“So when do you think they’ll be coming?” Cara asked. “Soon, right?”
“Definitely soon, but they’ll have to travel across the desert first and they can’t do it as quickly as us. We’ve got at least a few days before they can even come close enough, and they’ll be wary since we know their secret about moving around undetected and we know they’re coming.”
“So a few days,” I said. “That’s plenty of time to prepare.” I had plenty of things gestating. More combos that were pushing the boundaries of D-tier and would hopefully come out obedient rather than rebellious. Ego had warned me multiple times that I was pushing my luck, but he didn’t understand what taking risks meant if he couldn’t work out the exact percentage chance of success and failure.
Sometimes to win you needed to push the boat out, and that was what I was doing here.
“When should I bring my people?” Cara asked.
“Not until the day of the attack,” Lisa replied immediately.
“But we don’t know what day the attack is going to be. I’m not going to risk missing it.”
“You can’t camp an army inside our facility indefinitely.”
“Army is pushing. There’ll be a dozen of us, maybe a few more.”
Lisa narrowed her eyes.
“Besides, it doesn’t look like you’re exactly struggling for space, does it?”
“There’s no point coming straight away,” I said. “You don’t want to be away from the village longer than you have to be anyway, do you?”
Cara rolled her eyes, and I knew it was a deflection from how much the remark stung. “I suppose you’re right. I don’t want to miss this, though. If I miss it and it fails that means my village is fucked too. And I want to keep help an eye on the girl.”
“The girl – Daisy – doesn’t seem that bothered about you keeping an eye on her,” Lisa retorted.
“Elaine and Marie are doing well with her, I don’t think she’ll be an issue,” I said. “But you’re right that you shouldn’t miss the attack. Ego, what do you think the earliest time the tribe will arrive at the facility is?” I fed in all the information we had about their location, and because we already had the area mapped out so well, he could give us a fairly accurate guess.
“Three days.”
“Exactly?”
“I thought you would appreciate a round number.” T
he AI sounded offended. “My calculations actually show three days, six hours–”
“Okay, thanks Ego. You’re right, the round number is better. I was just surprised. Anyway. Three days minimum, so you can come here with your fighters then and there will be no chance of you having missed the fight.”
Cara shifted her weight.
“We’ll come and collect you, so there isn’t a long trek across the desert,” I further enticed her.
“I am worried about the girl though.”
“Don’t be, we’re going to take good care of her. You know I don’t sleep, I can keep an eye on her at all times. She’ll be safe and sound. We won’t let her get away.”
“Fine,” Cara said. “But come and get me a bit earlier so there’s no chance of us running into them on the way back to the facility. We don’t want the fight to take place anywhere but in here, otherwise we’ll be at a disadvantage.”
“Agreed. Did you want a lift home?”
“I’d appreciate that.”
Lisa said that she’d escort Cara back across the desert and they headed off together.
I returned to the room with Daisy and found them sat watching a movie. Daisy was entranced as the pictures moved across the wall and she sat, silently, with her mouth open.
“No wonder Ego is so sassy nowadays if this is the kind of drivel he consumes,” I muttered, watching girls with glittery phones and manicured nails pointing at each other over dramatically. I was almost proud of myself for having no idea what it was that they were watching.
There was no way I was going to make myself endure it now, and returned to the lab to wait for Lisa’s return so that we could go over the plan without having to watch our words in front of Cara.
“How is it going?” I asked Ego, looking at the decapitated body on the metal table. “Any luck?”
“Not yet. I’m struggling to see many differences in the physical body on this one. You’re certain that he had a superpower?”
“Positive. You know he did. We watched it with our own eyes and then watched the footage back afterward.”