Chapter Fifty - Nightma—

“The light at the end of the tunnel isn’t always a train. Promise.”

– Road Rash, entertaining his Twitch chat

 

***

 

I rushed at indistinct shapes that tried to hurt a helplessly whining dog, running and punching as hard as I could. But with every punch, balloons full of blood exploded over my fist, sprayed fluid into my face, and the figures folded themselves around my hands with ugly crunches. They held on and on, weighing me down the more I punched, and there was a heartbeat in the background, throbbing and thumping louder and louder with every second, until I couldn’t hear my own thoughts anymo—

I pushed myself off the floor hard enough to hit the ceiling. The knock that rattled my brain woke me right up, and I gasped for breath as I fell back to the ground. I was sticky with sweat.

My fingers and my skull alike told me I’d taken no injury from the collision, but I was a bit too busy orienting myself to really appreciate the fact that I’d just had my first experience of my new toughness. 

I‘d woken just outside the cocoon’s entrance tunnel? And Leah wasn’t here.

After a moment of anxiety, I straightened up, and flicked my forehead slightly. No reason to worry. The facility was practically empty anyway, my antennae told me there wasn’t anything moving nearby, plus, there were really only three things for her to reasonably do.

I checked the pantry first, but Leah wasn’t there.

Nor was she in the top room, where I thought she might’ve been connecting to the uplink.

Only one place left.

I walked through the guard room to the facility’s…facilities, and hollered. “Leah!”

“Yeah?”, came her mildly confused voice from the second stall.

“Ah, sorry. Just, uh, wanted to know if you’re fine! You know, enemy territory and all. I’ll be up above.”

“Sure, I’ll join you in a bit.”

Breathing easier, I went topside and looked outside through the shredded doorway, into the night. The storm had passed, but it still rained evenly, and my improved night vision let me see whatever pale moonlight made it through the clouds, reflecting off puddles everywhere. The smell of swamp had gained in intensity from the storm.

“Tynea, will the Antithesis be active in this weather?”

Certainly. Their models are suited to most environments, and a storm is not extreme enough to be much of an issue.

Hmm. I tried to check the map, but found that the uplink had lost connection to the satellites. I poked at its diagnostics, which reported no damage.

“Ah, crap. Gotta go outside. The storm probably messed it up.” I looked down at myself. “Well, whatever. I’m sweaty anyway. A bit of mud will make no difference to my need for a shower…”

I took off the bathrobe and let it flop to the floor, before I made my way outside, heading straight for the device. My antennae weren’t working so well in the rain, but my eyes could pick out a long shape lying across where I’d buried the uplink.

As I got closer, details became clearer and I had to suppress a laugh. A dead model Three was squashed beneath the log of a tree that had fallen over in the storm, and teeth marks at the bottom of it told me that the Three had engineered its own death.

Had it wanted to drag the log home to its nest for biomass?

Ah, that wasn’t good. That meant there’d be one nearby…

A silent “Shit.” escaped me, as I realized I’d not brought a weapon along, and I hastily looked around again, making sure there weren’t any xenos sneaking up on me.

In a little bit of a hurry now, I shifted the log aside with a surprisingly easy heave. I was amazed at my strength. The thing was easily four meters long, and a little thicker than my torso as Aden had been. I had no idea how much it really weighed, but it was no joke.

Admonishing myself not to waste time with staring at dead trees, I moved the Three to the side so the uplink’s segmented dish was uncovered, waited impatiently for it to restore its connection, and jogged quickly back inside once everything seemed to function.

My tail was soaked through, but I ignored that as I picked up yesterday’s shift and patted it down for the Hummingbird I’d forgotten to move to my new clothes, relieved to have a gun again. I looked around for my rifle and Sentinel combo. Where’d I leave it, yesterday? It wasn’t in this room. The cocoon, maybe?

“Wow, I must’ve really been out of it yesterday, huh?”

I estimate that you functioned at less than 50% efficiency, Tinea.

“That bad?”

Yes. Though they did not endanger you due to your physical improvements, you committed a number of tactical errors during the last two encounters that I’m fairly certain you would not have done earlier in the day.

“Like the grenades I didn’t set up right?”

Yes, for example. With the number of dimensional shunts you had available, not a single bullet should have been necessary to end that fight.

“Hmmm… I see. Yeah, you’re probably right. Would’ve been less stressful for Leah too, I guess.” 

“What would’ve been less stress for me?” Leah asked, walking up the stairs.

“I was commenting on my performance yesterday, and Tynea highlighted a mistake I’d made. Could’ve handled the big battle in a much simpler manner, but I was already too exhausted to make good decisions, stuff like that. Walk with me? I’m looking for my rifle.” I asked, while putting on the bathrobe—which wasn’t really long enough to cover my legs.

Leah stared at my feet and soggy tail, raising her eyebrows at the splatter of mud along the rest of me. “Did you go outside? You look like you could use a bath. And your rifle’s down in the cocoon. Didn’t see it?”

“I woke up just outside the tunnel, so no, I didn’t.”

She glanced at me again, with her eyebrows raised. “That’s not where I left you, some twenty minutes ago.”

“Uh, yeah. Would’ve surprised me if you did. I woke from a weird nightmare, so maybe I just climbed out somehow, just before I woke up? Anyway, had to pay the uplink a visit, to make sure it could see the satellites again.”

Speaking of which, I needed to check the map… I had to scroll south a bit, but the swarm had only moved about fifty kilometers, its tail end having passed us a short while ago.

I was shaken out of my focus by Leah. “Tinea, I had a funny idea earlier, regarding this place and the Antithesis.”

“Oh?” Gander at the map complete, I led the way downstairs.

“What if we took those jars in the pantry, and poisoned them all with something that would kill Antithesis eating from them? If we prep the place so that the Antithesis find the jars and die within minutes from the poison, and if we make sure they don’t consider it a worthwhile nesting place, then we should naturally end up in a situation where it looks like something in those jars is somehow a miracle poison against the aliens. Enough so, that they don’t even want to nest nearby.”

That got my attention. “Aaaah…”

“Yeah!”

“Make our kidnappers think they somehow stumbled across something with their slop, and watch for any attempts to market it as an Antithesis Killer?”

“Yup!”

“It’d have to be a special poison. The kind of thing where they can tell not just how to make it, but also how it came to exist out here in the first place. Say, some kind of contaminant made it happen? If we leave traces of that around here as well, then the whole thing really becomes believable. Tynea, how many points would something like that cost?”

There’s a species of bacteria that was bred by the same Moonsingers who designed your augmentations, that would fit your criteria. Since their first generation was created from altered Antithesis cells, any Earth research would make the scientist think that somehow the Antithesis themselves dragged their own death in, and it just so happened that the slurry activated these bacteria.

“Heh, nice and devious.”

Indeed. The Class I Moonsinger Designs: Pulvinophages would be your cheapest catalog at twenty-five points, due to its extreme degree of specialization on bacteria targeting only specific types of muscle cells within the Antithesis body. The chances that you would draw any use from it beyond this and very similar instances, is vanishingly small. A phial of inert phages would cost you five points. They will not reproduce, however.

“Even so, that’s actually really cheap. I was prepared to have to pay hundreds of points for this…”

A beneficial example of extreme specialization.

“Right. Leah?”

We entered the room with the cocoon, and instead of crawling through it, I felt around the cocoon with my tail, and once I found the rifle, I curled it around it like a monkey and lifted it out. Really useful appendage, that, and it was so easy to control my, uh, grip strength, too.

And still very wet. Instead of helicoptering it, I whipped it at the wall, spraying an arc of water across it. A few more times, to play tic-tac-toe against myself. There. Tail sufficiently dry.

Leah grinned at my tail-tastic antics, but answered anyway. “I’ve got no issues with that. A few spy drones as backups, and I’m happy to leave anytime. I’ve also come to a decision regarding my limbs.”

Ah, that was a rather more cardinal topic.

“Tell me.”

“We’ve only got around six hundred points, and that’s if we ignore that we wanted to dedicate several hundred of those to emergency funds for both of us.”

“Yeah.”

“So I think I should buy Class 0 limbs first, with a Class I implant to manage them, and which gives me proper life-like feedback, to help with, you know, self-perception.”

“Class 0, huh?” 

“Yes. Earth has working prosthetics after all, and if we buy them for points, then they’re going to be perfectly crafted. Plus the superior implant…I think that’s the absolute cheapest, but still useful, combination that I can get right now. That would leave us with about three hundred points. If we got ourselves some Class 0 ATVs for fifty points each, then we would actually have a reserve left.”

I smiled at Leah, beautifully impressed by her thinking. “Nice! If those ATVs come with a baggage area, we could probably get some automated turrets installed on those. Something to help us make points while driving?”

“Oh, yes! Wanna do it?”

“Sure! Weather’s still crap, so, legs and arms first?”

“Yeah!”

Her infectious cheer made me grin, and I tugged her along with me, this time into the cocoon itself, where we sat down. Didn’t have internet connection down here, nor to the spy drones, but I would be able to sense anything heading down the stairwell.

Leah, preparing to shop, said, “Alright, gimme a moment.”

I studied her face while waiting. She looked quite a bit more relaxed than yesterday. The strain to her eyes was gone, her brows in gentle relaxed arches, rather than furrowed by anxiety. Even her shoulders were set easy, not bowed.

Yeah, somehow, for reasons that only made sense if you really dug into it, she came out of the flashback stronger than she went in. I saw a certain readiness to her eyes, coupled with a confidence to handle whatever life threw her way. That idea that familiar issues were issues she’d long proven she could own. I guessed they were at the least distracting her from other worries—or more likely, had made her realize how small

those worries were, compared to what she’d already won against.

Or in other words, she looked good, and my heart lifted with happiness at the realization.

A smile played around her lips as four boxes of identical dimensions, about the length and girth of her legs, hit the ground seconds later.

Tynea tabulated our point total for me:

 

Cost	x	Item
32	1	Class 0 Prosthetic Arm, pair, customized
68	1	Class 0 Prosthetic Leg, pair, customized
200	1	Class I ‘Polylaterality’ Warforge Technologies Personal Prosthetics Control Implant
300		Total
337		Combined Remaining Points

I sat down across from her, and relaxed as I watched her unbox her purchases.

 

***