Vol.3 Ch.41 – At Last
Chapter 41: At Last
Pain, blinding, unbearable pain erupted all across 259's body as the implant in her head triggered every single pain receptor across her body. Her skin felt like it was being flayed off, her muscles cramped up, her eyes felt like someone had poured acid into them, and everything inside her hurt, hurt, hurt! She collapsed to the ground like a marionette with her strings cut and the dirt and debris on the ground felt like jagged knives being driven into her flesh.
She began screaming, entirely involuntarily, and her screams went on and on and on, rising in pitch and continuing until she was hoarse, then continuing yet further. Her entire world was pain.
**
The cyborg dog that had taken a hold of Cassie was bizarre, even for Caulder's standards. A human woman, her limbs replaced by spindly robotic legs, her torso clad in a skin-tight bodysuit and a bulky mask over her face, tubes connecting all over her body in ways Elaine tried not to think about.
And it was that bulky mask that the butterfly girl had placed a shot into. No blood ran out the hole so she had likely managed to damage the electronics without hurting the physical body beneath. But none of that mattered to Elaine at the moment. Instead, the moment the shot rang out and the cyborg dog jerked, she took off at a dead sprint, grabbed its taloned forelimbs and crushed them in her grasp. The metal was tough, far tougher than it should have been. She knew. She could bend steel with minimal effort at this point, and yet this stuff took all her strength. And yet she managed it, practically pinching the limbs off with her bare hands, twisted metal landing on the ground.
When she was done she grabbed hold of the cyborg dog's legs and snapped those off as well, neutralizing the thing. She didn't know if it was even still functional after that gunshot but she didn't want to take any chances.
“You alright?” she asked Cassie once he was free of the horrid thing.
“Yeah,” he said, then nodded over to the butterfly girl. “But she isn't.”
Elaine spun around to look at the girl who had saved Cassie. She had clearly been part of this operation, clearly been part of Caulder's forces, and just as clearly she had only been there under duress. She had been terrified, no, traumatized, and when push had come to shove she had used her gun to help them rather than the cyborg dog keeping Cassie hostage.
And now she was writhing on the ground in pain, screaming her lungs out. What was going on? Was she linked to the cyborg dog in some way? She was part of Caulder's menagerie so just because Elaine couldn't see any metal parts inside her didn't mean there weren't any. Was there some sort of computer inside her? Was this some sort of punishment for betraying her squad mate?
She wasn't sure what to do about this. The girl deserved to be saved, deserved to at least be heard out, but Elaine wasn't sure how to make it happen.
She was pulled out of her musings when she noticed Cassie pulling out one of the EMP devices. Well that was an idea.
“Are you sure?” she asked. “For all we know, blasting her with an EMP will kill her.”
“If the alternative is leaving her like this, I think that wouldn't be the worst option,” he said, the words callous but the tone queasy.
“Alright,” she said. “But I'll do it.”
Cassie didn't ask why and she was grateful. If the girl died, Elaine didn't want Cassie to bear that responsibility.
She used the EMP device.
Instantly a wave of electric blue energy blasted out from the little metal sphere, washing over everything in the building, and the girl stopped screaming and went still. For a moment Elaine had a horrible feeling that she'd just killed their savior until she saw the girl's chest rising and falling with shallow breaths. She went over to the cyborg dog to feel for a heartbeat and, sure enough, there was one there as well.
“Can you hear me? Elaine? Cassie?” It was Clio's voice, coming from their CARDs.
“Clio?” Elaine asked. The mermaid had been suspiciously quiet the last few minutes. “Where were you?”
“That's my line,” Clio said. “I couldn't reach you at all. What did you do?”
“We were fighting a group of cyborgs,” Elaine said. “I just used one of the Professor's EMP devices. Apparently one of the cyborgs was jamming our communications.”
“Well shit,” Clio said. “Hold on. Cyborgs? As in...”
“Yeah, these were Caulder's handiwork. Much more importantly, we've picked up a... girl... She was working with the cyborgs but she betrayed them to help us. The Professor needs to take a look at her asap. Can you tell him?”
“Sure,” Clio said. “You're coming back?”
“We'll grab the cyborgs and then we're heading straight back, yes.”
“Understood. I'll go inform the Professor.”
The communication cut off and Elaine turned to Cassie.
“I'll take the girl, you take the... dog,” she told him.
“Got it,” he said. “What about the other cyborgs?”
“Leave them. If the Professor wants them we can grab them later. These two take priority.”
Cassie nodded and they each grabbed one of the unconscious women.
**
Elaine was very careful with the way she carried the girl. Not only was she a little slip of a woman, light as a feather and frail-looking, those gossamer-thin wings also looked like they weren't particularly durable. While carrying her Elaine had noticed that she wasn't nearly as fragile as she appeared and the wings had enough give to them to not break at the slightest touch, but she still wanted to be careful with her, carrying her like a princess through the corridors of Base 15 until she reached the Professor's laboratory.
He was already waiting for them with two open operating tables and Elaine wasted no time in placing the girl on one of them.
“Elaine,” he said with a small nod. “Tell me everything.”
And so she did. She explained how she had found the girl, who she had been working for and what she had done to save them both. While she was talking Cassie deposited the former cyborg dog on the other table.
“She started writhing in pain right after firing that gun?” the Professor asked for clarification.
“Yes,” she said.
He pressed his lips together, then muttered: “Still up to your old tricks...”
“What do you mean?”
“Not all of Caulder's servants are lobotomized,” he explained. “In some ways, those are the lucky ones. He also has servants who retain full use of their minds but they have brain implants that check for rebellious thoughts and punish them by triggering their pain receptors until someone can come and collect them for proper punishment.”
“Proper punishment like...?”
In response he gestured at the cyborg dog. “Like that.”
“Being lobotomized and turned into a dog?”
He chuckled. “If it were only that. No, this woman is not lobotomized. She was fully aware but unable to intervene as the AI that spoke to you controlled her movements.”
She stared at him in horror. She had seen some horrible shit from Caulder. The Red Rider had been a horrid being born of the suffering of thinking beings but at least Elaine had been able to comfort herself with the idea that Caulder had only truly gone off the deep end after starting to work with Outsider matter. But now it turned out that he had always been that horrible.
“It will take me the better part of the day to remove the electronics from their bodies,” the Professor continued. “Even then, it will take a while to figure out how much damage was caused. But from the girl's breathing patterns I assume that she, at least, will make it through.”
“Can I help?” she asked instinctively.
“I'd rather the two of you bring me the other cyborgs,” he said. “And fetch Rachel, please. I fear I will need a medic for this.”
“Understood,” she said and nodded at Cassie.
Together they left the room and sent Rachel the Professor's way before grabbing a Gospel to transport the other cyborgs.
**
It had been a good long while since Stollos had last performed major surgery. There had been smaller procedures he'd performed on the Awakeners, adding small implants to their bodies that would make gradual changes to their body chemistry, and then taking them out once they'd served their purpose, but nothing as invasive as what needed to be done here. As such, having one of Hell's premier healers around made things that much easier.
Rachel stood by, constantly projecting a soothing aura as he worked on the butterfly girl. He had scanned her for metal parts and found only two, a record low for Caulder's designs. She had one implant resting high on her spine that interfaced with both her spinal cord and the choker she wore. The other implant was inside her skull, attached to her brain. Both of them were dead, thank the stars, but they still needed to be removed.
And so he began by cutting open her skull. In normal surgery this would have been terribly messy business but he had technology mundane hospitals could only dream of. By the time he would be done not only would there be no scars, she would keep that lovely turquoise hair as well.
He opened up her skull and shuddered as he saw the implant. Normal brain implants were small microchips, not exactly pleasant to look at in that context but not too terrible either. This one, however, was vile, looking like a mechanical spider that had wrapped its legs around a large part of the brain. As he extracted it he noticed several wires that went all the way down to the brain stem and the amygdala and digging them out of her without causing damage took even him a while. Even then he was grateful that Rachel's healing magic could not just repair brain tissue but also restore all the synapses that had been disrupted along the way.
When he was done with the implant in the brain he put her back together again, good as new thanks to Rachel's magic, and went on to remove the implant set into her spinal cord. This was was just as risky as messing up might leave her paralyzed and that was the kind of injury that even Rachel could not fix quickly. But even so, he managed.
When he was done with her he moved on to the former cyborg dog. That procedure proved to be far, far more difficult. The bypass that allowed an AI to control the body but left the brain alive to witness the horror of its existence was as difficult to untangle as it was horrid to imagine. What sick things had Caulder forced this 'dog' to do while the owner of the body could only scream into the void, unable to act?
Well, he knew Caulder better than most so he had a good idea of what the woman had gone through. If he managed to bring her back to consciousness he assumed her first request would be to let her die. He would do his best to convince her that her nightmare was over now but he knew perfectly well that he was not the most reassuring and life-affirming person to talk to.
Either way, that didn't mean he would get to slack off in restoring her body. Once he reconnected her nervous system to her brain her entire body started spasming and he had to sedate her to continue working. Because those limbs still needed to be fixed.
Elaine certainly had done a number on them. The forelimbs looked as if someone had pinched off a roll of taffy while the hind limbs were bent out of shape, nearly twisted into pretzels. A cursory inspection revealed that the prosthetics were bolted into her bones and fused into her flesh. He was grateful Elaine hadn't attempted to rip the metal limbs off or she would have torn the woman's body apart.
And so he spent hours digging the metal parts out of the woman's flesh, all the while trying his damndest not to compare what he was doing to deboning a piece of meat. Each time he got done with a limb the woman was left with a stump with a jagged hole in the center and Rachel then had to spend half an hour regrowing the limb from scratch.
When she was done with the fourth limb the woman was whole again, and looking quite different from what Stollos had imagined. As a quadriplegic she had looked almost entirely human but that image had quickly been shattered once he'd begun working on her. Removing the bulky face mask had revealed filed-off stumps of bone on her forehead that Rachel had regenerated into magnificent horns. Similarly, the limbs she regrew had not been entirely human, either. The thighs had been mostly normal, with a light scattering of reddish scales all over them, but from her knees downward the woman was covered in those same scales and rather than feet she had wickedly sharp talons. Her forearms, similarly, were covered in scales, her hands ending in retractable claws.
And finally, after peeling off the skin-tight suit she wore over her torso they had found two scars on her back, scars Stollos recognized. Angels and demons had scars on their backs to indicate where their wings would manifest. And this woman had scars in the exact same place. The only conclusion was that Caulder had amputated the woman's wings as part of her punishment. Growing those back was possible but, having been so neatly amputated, it would take time.
Once he was done with both of them he helped Rachel carry them into the infirmary, where Jeanne was already waiting for her lover.