(Rewritten) Ch. 125 – Murderous Acceleration

"When I first began experiencing insane thoughts, they seemed normal and plausible, if only a bit more creative."

– Aaron Reina, The Spectrum of Sanity and Insanity, published online June 26th, 2009

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"I believe I'll have plenty use for you in a moment," I said to Auxiliant as the battlefield caught my eye again. A small group of Antithesis fliers had just exited one of the Elevens on hot clouds of gas.

They were appreciably accelerating. That was a problem.

I was still dilating my perception of time, and while the entire battlefield was in motion, it was so slow that the creatures on it might as well have been still to me. The bullets of the Dakka were tracing their web across the aliens, and the explosions from Leah's auxiliary mortars were visible ripples in the air, traveling meters every second. Only the organics across the field weren't fast enough to register proper movement.

But I could reliably tell that these Antithesis birds were picking up speed.

Variant of the model One, Tynea told me. This one is very rare. It's the model One B.

They were only barely bigger than a normal One. It would be difficult for me to notice them in a swarm of Ones without the Quanta. Their heads looked slightly more massive, and their beaks seemed made of metal instead of the usual bony wood material. Much pointier than those of the normal Ones, too. The metal stretched backwards across their skull in organic curves that looked a bit like an exoskeleton. It gave their fronts the sharp, aerodynamic wedge preferable for supersonic flight.

The Antithesis have little use for metals. But instead of throwing them away, they'll concentrate them and use them as bludgeons at the tip of a Thirteen's tentacles. Or, quite rarely, they might grow variants like these. Suicidal kinetic kill vehicles.

I saw the twin twenty-mil cannons of the Dakka snap around fast enough that their barrels flexed ever so slightly, even as the One variants reoriented themselves. One each was pointed at Leah's spider mechs, and one directly at me. From this angle I could see that their bodies were flat at the bottom, and slightly squarish at the top. A look I usually associated with hypersonic missiles.

The birds shivered weirdly and the metal at the rear of their skulls flexed and punctured their bodies. There were a few bright flashes, like pieces of metal getting welded together.

They're getting ready to attack. Ypsilon has targeted the three heading for her warband. You will not be able to dodge in time, Tinea.

Should've brought the horseshoe, I thought. I'd left it, thinking it would've weighed me down unnecessarily.

"Can the Auxiliant stop it?"

Usually, yes. It won't prepare the hexweaves fast enough.

Great shockwaves exploded from their butt ends, followed by a cone of fire so bright it was white. The outline of their skeletons pressed through their skin as they were shoved forward. Muscles warped and tore, and their eyes pureed themselves against their sockets. Icky warping of the skull hinted at squished brain matter. They'd killed themselves with their own acceleration.

They've ignited their terminal stage.

Their wings snapped off and left stubby fins. Those kept the dead suicide bombers stable on their trajectories.

Thinking fast, I set my own jets to a full burn and marked two coordinates between the alien rocket and myself, one after the other. The first spot was ten meters out, just beneath the alien's vector, and the second one in arms reach.

"Spawn an activated Artificial Mass Ball at the first spot," I sent Tynea through the Quanta, "and a huge sphere of water at the second. Big enough to envelop the Mass Ball, too."

I didn't know how much water I'd need. Tynea would. I did know that water was at least eight hundred times denser than air.

The black orb blinked into existence and started falling towards me as it began gathering mass. An instant later, water was everywhere and the Second Wind sent an emergency shutdown alert. Its thrusters weren't designed for submersion and would rip themselves apart in the dense medium.

No movement for me. I felt the first tug on my legs as the Mass Ball gained enough attraction to start up a current.

The One variants were moving pretty fast now, almost half as fast as the tracers from the Dakka's cannons screaming towards the first of the diving kinetic killers. It looked like all the birds would hit the water, not just mine.

There'll be shockwaves in the water, Tynea warned me. Water's next to incompressible.

"I know." Shockwaves in the water were beyond deadly.

The shield emitter of Leah's gift was wrapped around my head and antennae and pushed the water away in a bubble. It would protect my vulnerable senses. It didn't cover the rest of my body, but I had a very tough body. My skin could diffuse the impact of small arms fire. If that kind of energy hit me everywhere all at once, there wouldn't be much diffusing my skin could do. But water was a liquid. I was hoping the Mass Ball would create enough interference to diffuse the shockwaves a bit. Make them lash at me piece by piece. Water was dense after all, and there'd be lots of it moving very soon.

Wisps of condensing air trailed the stubby fins of the One-B's.

They're transonic now, Tynea told me. They'll go supersonic before they impact the water.

There was more I could do.

"More grenades, Tynea. Something that'll absorb energy."

Four balls of different colors appeared in front of me, and moments after the first two cracked like shells, I was encased in an instantly hardening, porous material. My sense of things beyond disappeared as the gray stuff deadened all echoes.

I'll turn the water immediately next to you into foam, Tinea.

A very loud pop vibrated my coffin and bits of it crumpled around my knees, followed by an ongoing hiss that sounded a lot like a massive amount of boiling water. Pain seared my left leg beneath the knee. It dragged itself across my skin like a thousand red-hot pokers. Nerve endings were laid bare and cooked, and the time dilation didn't help. I realized I'd be suffering the full brunt of the injury even as it was being inflicted on me for hours.

Up or down? I asked myself. Down was the cool detachment of the Quanta. But the memories would stick, wouldn't they? Up was the practiced battle lust that had preserved my mind so many times before, when I'd taken cripplingly painful injuries.

I began to shift my awareness upwards to escape the pain, towards that quarantine between the Quanta and my natural brain. Time crawled a little faster, echoes of my emotions washed across my consciousness. That old and purely physical arousal shivered through my guts. It hit me like a sugar flash and shoved the pain down.

Apologies, it seems there was a fault in the structure of your encasement. Your lower left leg lies exposed. I've altered the reactions aerating the water around it to prevent harm beyond the first and second degree burns you've already suffered.

A tingle of worry reached me through the Quanta's boundaries.

"Will this compromise my protection?"

No, Tinea. You've got enough skin covered to disperse the incoming shockwaves. You'll be fine.

That was good, but I was still almost shaking from the frissons running through me and there wasn't anything left to do. So I distracted myself for a second and watched the fluttering impulses track a pattern across my amygdala and other bits of my rear brain. It originated from spots that flickered with the processing of pain, strengthened patterns that made me run-go-move and interfered with yet others more towards the front, where the making of complex decisions would've slowed me down.

The mechanism that always made me fall back on training and survive where others failed, I thought. So that's what it looks like…

It was a strange experience to know that attacks were coming and yet to not be doing anything. Holding still went against my instincts. I was rather heavily conditioned against it, in fact.

I tapped into the sensors of Leah's mechs and looked through them, towards myself. There was a massive sphere of water hanging in the sky, an olympic swimming pool's worth of it. Near its edge swirled the black Artificial Mass Ball, dragging the water around it into a frenzied bulge of a whirlpool that would drag the aliens off of their paths. Their method of propulsion left them no brains to correct their headings with. The Dakka would have to adjust its aim, and indeed, its muzzles were already shifting as the targeting computers updated their calculations.

I wondered how much pressure the water was under, around the Mass Ball. It wasn't boiling, but was that because the temperatures were too low, or the pressure too high?

And in the middle of the aerial swimming pool, a core of white turbulence several meters across ate the water surrounding it, turning more and more of it into whatever the white stuff was. It sent the water boiling from the inside out.

The first of the suicidal kill vehicles pierced the rippling surface of the water. There was an explosive evaporation, the first shockwave crashing into the water and finding it incompressible. As the kinetic energy traveled through the fluid, it violently dispersed much of it. The wave left a cold vacuum behind it that created a cone of condensing moisture.

Within moments, the water was entirely too turbulent for me to make out much anymore. I could only watch the blur of the attenuated, lessened shockwave creep towards me.

Eventually, some of the water made it past the foamy stuff boiling it, and a heavy pressure pushed against my leg. It wandered down towards my foot as the force kept increasing. A threshold was crossed, and my skin reacted. Gel repositories just beneath the dermis absorbed most of the force and let it disperse across the rest of my body as ripples in the gel. More was passed onto my enhanced skeleton, which flexed gently and disarmed the kinetic energy before it could tear at my softer tissues.

Sensing my body deal so elegantly with a wave of force, which was traveling through it so quickly it would've pasted normal flesh and then boiled it for good measure, was a hell of an experience. It made me aware in a visceral way that I wasn't human anymore. Not entirely.

I kinda liked it.

The rest of the birds struck my liquid buffer, along with the Dakka's gunfire. It was entirely too much energy getting soaked up and steam occluded the sensors. I saw lightning flash within the unnatural clouds.

Shards of piercing pain blasted me below my left knee and rammed shock up my spine. As I hung between the cold analytics of the Quanta and the mad monkey battle lust above, vertigo reached into my brain and twisted my vision. Everything wavered. I found myself mentally dislodged, shocked, and beautifully distracted by the way my irises widened to a ridiculous degree.

Medical shock, I thought and giggled drunkenly, half mad and half numbed. Autonomous reactions of my nervous system to grievous injury.

I witnessed the destruction of my left leg, beneath the knee, in excruciating detail. One of their metallic skeletons had failed and broken apart. It splintered into horribly sharp shrapnel, razor blades turned into a blender by their own velocity and the turbulent currents in the water around me. A few of those knives dug into my leg and shredded my flesh. My bones were too tough, but terrible gouges traced the path of the murderous shards of metal. Muscles and ligaments got torn apart.

My leg was bloody rags and battered bone.

I saw everything, stuck halfway between the Quanta and my emotional self, unable to choose either. The pain smashed hot wedges into my psyche and the shocking battle lust answered in kind. But my awareness floated on the Quanta's boundary, too close to my emotions, yet too aware in dilated time. My brain couldn't properly block out the twisty bits with the battle lust. Panicked confusion filled me, choked me. I couldn't escape beyond the Quanta, and I couldn't move into its sterile currents either. The barrier burned a wedge into my psyche.

The pain and the confusion and the knowledge of what was happening separated and became a twisty ball, and they felt alien.

Ah, no good, I thought with a ghastly, sick grin as part of myself slipped into a mental state that didn't make sense. I wasn't meant to experience things in this way.

Something tripped within the Quanta. It reverberated through my failing awareness like a gong.

– Warning! Anomalous brain activity detected! Sanity safety thresholds violated! –

– Conditions met. Engaging Self -> True-Self Emergency Override. –

A black hole sucked my consciousness away.

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