Chapter One Hundred Thirteen - Intensity

She slipped and she stumbled
And her knife flew winged

She tripped and she fell
And her knife speared skull

She scrambled and she stood
And she saw and stared

Her knife had flown
And It had hit home

She screamed and she cried
For her love had died

– Careless, November 2023

 

***

 

My heart bled. I was losing her. She was letting herself be somebody she wasn't, and I was losing her.

Black lightning caressed Daddy-Long-Legs.

Whump went the cannon. There wasn't a shockwave.

A soft thing stroked down my back, full of gentle deadliness. Light too black, too perfect to be light tattooed reality into my retinas. A glittering, shattering mirage sacrificed itself for us.

I've already seen this. More than once. When?

The littlest of the little brothers of a black hole, whirling, chaotic, inexpertly crafted, and attached to a motor that punched the world, shore a line across the battlefield and murdered several Fourteens, before it violently disassembled the left shoulder of the Twenty-Eight.

Leah's twisting laughter reached into my brain and fished out fear.

I sobbed like a baby, but Leah didn't notice. She was too busy with violence. I collapsed on top of her, but she didn't react. Ugly helplessness, useless frustration bubbled inside of me, like black tar. Anger that hurt and had no power.

No.

I crawled up Leah, sat on her tummy. Then I took her by the shoulders and started shaking her. Blinded by tears and sobbing, I yelled over and over again, "Not like this! Not like this!"

 

***

 

Hatred was a billowing fire inside Leah, and violence filled her with power and liberated her from the cloying, smothering fear that had cornered her just minutes ago.

The turret's exotic recoil absorbers shunted the consequences of firing a weapon far too powerful for Daddy-Long-Legs to somebody, or something, else, and Leah's heart sang with careless ire.

Something whispered in the back of her mind that she wasn't being normal, that she was doing something hinky. She beat it down and made it shut up.

She laughed with vengeful glee when the gravitic projectile tore another leg off of the monster and rejoiced in the flood of greenish blood from its stump. The visuals and the sense of power completely absorbed her. She sank into it, loved it.

Try and hurt me now, bitch! She giggled as her lips stretched in a cruel grin. See how you like it!

Powerful hands suddenly grabbed her by the shoulders and started shaking her. Leah felt belts restrain her torso and she flashed back to a different place, where uncaring hands shoved slime down her throat and forced her to choke on it or suffocate.

Leah almost screamed in terrible memory and helpless fear, but then her fists connected with a warm body, and shouted words pummeled her ears.

"Not like this! Not like this! Leah!"

Confusion and discomposure smacked her in the brain. She stumbled with seven limbs, and the loud crack of a concrete cocoon a dozen meters away pulled her attention back to the bigger of her two bodies.

A large alien was freeing itself and Leah had to kill it, but she couldn't focus with the strong hands on her shoulders making her smaller body wobble and the desperate, sobby screaming in her ear.

Sobby. Wait. Tinea?

Leah refocused and realized that the girl was bawling her eyes out and horrible anxiety and worry had marred her pretty face. She was still yelling at Leah, too.

More cracking, outside.

Fuck. Leah analyzed the positioning of the rest of the Fourteens. Several were breaking free, and she didn't have a clean shot. They'd start chasing her again.

Eh. Whatever, she thought with a satisfying shiver down her back. I'm the one with the big gun now.

She adjusted the one-oh-five and smiled as she stroked the mental trigger. The fourth of the deadly, esoteric projectiles ate monster flesh, while the temporal shadow of the recoil's potential caressed her back with its fuzzy fingers on its way past into a failing, fragmenting pocket of space.

Tinea suddenly went silent and her hands stopped shaking her smaller body.

The sudden change made Leah look again, and she saw the girl look around herself with a sort of distrustful confusion, looking for something, harried and scared. Trying to remember something.

Um, Leah! said Ypsi, you haven't told Tinea about how the gun works yet. Her memory doesn't have the knowledge saved to reconnect the patterns after the shot, so she's fraying a bit with every shot.

Ah.

Also…can you listen to what she's gonna tell you, please? Leah?

"What?" Leah asked, confused.

Tinea's head whipped back around and her fingers clamped down on her shoulders, hard enough to bruise and Leah winced.

But Tinea just cried and sobbed again, "Not like this!"

More confusion clouded Leah's mind and she scrambled for words. What was the girl on about?

"Don't fight like that! Please! It'll change you!"

Huh? Leah wasn't any clearer on the problem and getting a little annoyed. She wanted to go back to hurting the Twenty-Eight and rip the beast apart. The words to quit bothering her lay on the tip of her tongue, almost spilled past her lips, and that's what made her freeze.

'Cause that really, really wasn't okay.

Things inside her tore and cramped, like a muscle stretched in too many directions. She wanted to exercise her new power, but looking at Tinea drowned her with guilt. What she was doing wasn't okay. Not if it hurt her partner like that.

So, she lifted a hand and cupped Tinea's face to help her calm down a little, instead.

"What do you mean?" she asked, careful to sieve her frustration out of her voice. It wouldn't help any.

Tinea sat up, thighs clamped around Leah's pelvis, and tried to wipe away her tears with her knuckles and palms, but they just kept coming. She dragged a heaving breath in and, voice clogged and watery, spoke.

"Don't fight with hate, Leah. Please. You're supposed to be a protector. It makes you go bitter and bad. Fighting like that sours you even when you're not in battle anymore. You won't be able to guard your Littles anymore. Please."

Leah's heart gave an ugly beat, mixing concern, fear, a willful stubbornness to claim power through violence. And she froze again, mid-motion to help Tinea wipe her tears. She didn't want to lose her Littles.

But…

"But isn't that what you do? When you fight, Tinea? The battlelust thing. I've seen it on the recordings."

"No!" Tinea shouted vehemently, shaking her head. "There's no hate! No bitterness! I always made sure to keep that away, and to stop fighting when I couldn't!"

Leah bit her lip. Something in her deeply rebelled against not taking revenge. The fear and helpless anger popped up and wanted her to shove Tinea off her lap, to get back to murdering aliens.

She rubbed her face with her hands and gave a frustrated sigh. A quick glance told her that she still had a few moments before she actually needed to start shooting again.

Get a hold of yourself, Leah. Your wants don't just concern yourself. You're a caretaker.

"What do you want me to do, Tinea? How do you want me to deal with this?"

The woman kept looking her in the eyes, but Leah felt her shaking, saw the wet lashes, the distraught expression. Kicking herself, Leah moved further away from the vengeful anger and pulled Tinea down to hug her.

Time to return the favor, she thought, petting the girl's petite spine with slow strokes until Tinea stopped shivering so much.

"Leah, it's a job." The brunette's voice was a bit clearer, now. Leah could hear Tinea regain her composure bit by bit. "You're on a job, on a mission to get home. A battle isn't about the things you feel, even if your emotions can affect what happens. I don't fight to experience the battlelust. I have it because it's a biochemical trait I developed when I…was killing humans as a child and to handle the stress that came with all that, and it's reawakened recently. But…I don't have any need to seek it out. I'm exactly as happy on a couch cuddling kittens as I am slaughtering Antithesis.

"If you go and use your anger and hate to get revenge, you get addicted to it. You'll get to a point where you'll either be in battle, enacting your fantasies…or you'll be bitter and violent when you're not in battle."

Tinea broke the hug and lifted herself so she could lock eyes. Leah felt herself drowning in the pain swirling behind Tinea's gaze.

"I grew up around people like that, Leah. They conditioned the young ones to fight like that, so they'd always want to go to war. To make it easy to manipulate them into going after set targets with programmed hate. And at home, at the base, the leaders needed a way to limit the…angry

damage the others would cause each other when not on a mission. They conditioned me to be that target, Leah."

Horror replaced Leah's simmering anger as she watched her love tear up again. Tinea's shoulders started shaking badly.

"They needed something to soak up all that hate and bitterness, Leah. That…thing was me. Please, don't become like them, Leah. Please!" Tinea begged as her hands grabbed fistfuls of Leah's suit. She could see the fear and anxiety that bowed Tinea's back, the fragile hope in her eyes that Leah would understand.

An innocence she hadn't realized she still had broke inside Leah. It shattered hard enough that she couldn't breathe, and it transformed her anger into something entirely different. There was a nugget of ice-cold, endlessly patient and enduring, determination in there. Dense like the core of a star, surrounded by the raging wrath of unforgiving protectiveness.

Never fucking again. If I stamp those bastards out, it'll have been way too late.

 

***

 

Leah's arms caught me again and she crushed me against her.

"I promise," she said, nuzzling me between my antennae, "I'll not make that mistake, Tinea. I promise."

Relief sucked all the tension out of me and I collapsed, unable to move even a muscle as I just let all the emotions out. Leah held me as I cried and sobbed, mumbling promises and petting my hair.

But my organs pulled to the side a little as we swerved, and I remembered that we did actually have to take care of other things, too.

Then the world flashed monochrome and razor-sharp, painfully so. My brain screamed at me to runrunrun as I froze in the gaze of something dangerous, yet the cannon's toll caressed me from head to tail and freed me.

I looked around, confused.

I could swear I've felt that before. Multiple times.

Felt…what? Huh?

Leah cupped my face with both hands and rubbed her nose against mine.

"That's just the recoil shunting. Feels a bit weird, huh?"

I tilted my head in confusion, busy tracking the mess the projectile made of the closest Fourteens. It was kind of beautiful in a way, the tornado of death. Tickled me a little.

"What does?"

Leah answered, "The cannon and its turret are low-end Class II and use some esoteric quantum-mechanics to shunt the, uh, potential of the recoil elsewhere. It's not perfect and there's some splash-back, apparently, which is what we're feeling."

Feeling? What?

My mental focus continued tracking the projectile as it disappeared into the forest, and something clicked.

Wait. Uh, that thing had to be fired… From a gun. A cannon. Recoil.

I could feel the Quanta in my brain fixing connections within itself by extrapolating from the new knowledge Leah had shared, and like magnets, the lost, frayed memories snapped back together.

I collapsed on top of Leah for the umpteenth time in the last few minutes, dealing with the deluge of impressions as half of the battle that had somehow continuously slipped my memory, solidified.

"Huh."

She giggled at me, kissed the top of my head, and said, "Take your time. You don't have the pilot's implant, which would take care of the weird, esoteric stuff, but Ypsi told me your Quanta can manage just fine on its own. As long as it knows."

I nodded.

"And," she continued more softly, combing her fingers through my hair, "I promise, Tinea. I'll not let my fear twist me again. I promise."

"Mm," I nodded with a teary smile.

 

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