(Rewritten) Ch. 129 – Potential Energy Turns Into Kinetic Energy Turns into Buttplug Crater

"Ladies and Gentlemen, both and neither.

You do not want the Battlepoet pissed at you.

She has proven that buttplugs are not to be, heh, taken lightly."

– Road Rash on Twitch, after the global incursion of 2057

***

I saw waves move through the ground in great concentric circles. The trees surrounding the great clearing we'd turned into a battlefield were shaking and toppling as if a storm had hit. The Twenty-Eight didn't exist anymore. It was a mess of broken bone and green-brown mush at the bottom of a well, where it, and a whole lot of mud, was running together to surround the blob of extra-special cement I'd…mixed up inside the Eleven.

Buttplug for the win?

"Tinea!" Leah yelled. She sounded annoyed. Mildly. Her almost-calm was incongruous with the violent upheaval I was witnessing. The earth beneath her warband was liquifying. My space-concrete donkey—Where'd that term come from, anyway?—had hit the ground so hard it'd caused an actual earthquake.

But earthquakes tended to squeeze the water up out of the ground, and Leah was practically swimming in mud already.

Oops. Uh.

I looked at her spider mechs and the twenty-three legs they were bobbing around on, riding out the tremors, and realized she had twenty-three legs to kick my ass with.

Um.

"Sorry?"

She snorted at me. I suppose twenty-three legs made earthquakes a lot less threatening.

The Sapper lifted a leg, and stepped up onto the mud with a grace that belied its brutal combat engineer appearance. It unfolded huge discs from its ankles that pushed against the ground like the skirt of a hovercraft. The Dakka fired a few close cryo-grenades with dull thumps, but the thin ice was far too fragile and just cracked hopelessly beneath its mass. Spiders didn't have as large a footprint to spread their weight around as tracked vehicles did.

Leah's Daddy-Long-Legs and the Dakka had to wait for the Sapper's four heavy drones to lift from its cage of an abdomen, and spray pontoons of quickly hardening foam onto their feet. They also attached small, portable jet turbines to the two battle mechs, and within moments, the entire warband was trundling along, splashing mud everywhere.

"Hey Leah, why don't the other mechs have those…traction discs from the Sapper? They seem pretty useful."

"Saving costs, really. I'll upgrade them all with better all-terrain modules if I need to. For the journey home, I mean. The Sapper's repellers are useful, but I can't even jump with 'em."

I looked around us, and there weren't any more Antithesis. I decided to climb a few hundred meters again, to see further.

"Tynea, how far is the horizon at the moment?"

A little less than forty kilometers, at one hundred meters. It'll be around fifty at three hundred meters.

Eh. Good enough. I'd at least know if we'd be running into anything in the next thirty minutes.

But everything was clear. I saw no Ones scouting, no river of ground units. The Antithesis tracking app from the Family showed that the huge horde we were following south had reached about halfway to the coast.

Hmm. They're heading right for a place called Baie-Comeau.

A search on the Net revealed it was a tiny settlement that served as a stop-over point for rich-people transshore cruises out of Québec City. There was an entire market set up around the ultra-rich with adrenaline cravings. The modern extreme sports. Instead of jumping off of skyscrapers with parachutes or bungee cords, they sought out the dangerous waters, the edges of the shore, where Antithesis bred beneath the waves. It made them feel invincible, a high like no other.

That means there'll be some amount of service-industry. And they'll be flesh-and-blood workers, considering they're catering to the rich.

There were a few sprawling tree farms, too, but I figured those would be mostly robotic. People couldn't breathe the extreme amount of CO2 in their vertical farm towers.

Ah shit, there's an actual village. And…they've lived there for generations, too. They won't have fled, despite the global warning.

"Leah."

She was busy managing the mechs and picking her way out of the new swamp. "Mm?"

I opened my mouth and immediately coughed when some of the airborne ash choked me while I tried to speak. Before I'd realized, I'd already adjusted the forcefield around my head to filter out the particles. Then I froze, and for just a moment, panic clawed my guts. Sweating, I pushed through the beating of my heart and forced myself to breathe deeply.

I'd used the Quanta. And for reasons that I didn't fully understand without unpacking certain memories, I reacted badly to even the thought of doing so. Sonde scrabbled away in my brain, as the most…active element of the Quanta. It stressed me out.

Fuck. She's gonna experience all of this. Oh my god.

I was NOT willing to let a young, growing person suffer from my pain. The very thought beat back everything else with my uncompromising hatred for passed-on trauma. Suddenly it was quite easy to switch back to mental speech, even though that was using the Quanta.

"We need to get ahead of the swarm. It's moving towards a village and it'll be there in maybe seventeen hours."

***

Leah was splitting her attention between traversing the sucking mud, and bouncing her thoughts between the hazardous fallout from their battle, Tinea's concerns regarding the village, and the Littles that wanted to watch her firing the one-oh-five for the true black they'd only seen once, ever.

She loved them a whole bunch, but they could get awfully insistent. Andi was staring on wide-eyed as Sam and Jora both threw the cutest combined-arms tantrum at Leah they could manage. Big wet puppy eyes, cheeks squished together, pouting at her while hugging each other and clasping hands, shivering with soul-deep despondence.

She was going to say yes. She absolutely was going to say yes. There was no way she'd even consider stealing away their chance at seeing a true black again. The only reason she hadn't yet was because she knew exactly what accomplished actors they were, and because she didn't get to see this particular spectacle very often. It was getting difficult to suppress the aww and the smile, though.

She also figured that the lethality of such cuteness was best mitigated by distributing it across a maximum number of…victims.

So she decided to mesh the calls and patch Tinea in.

***

I was circling higher into the skies, stable on extended wings and managing my thrust-to-weight ratios perfectly, yet I found myself involved in a lethal shootout. Never had I expected to face such overwhelming enemies.

Their offensives battered down my ability to resist and their defenses were so utterly unbreachable that I could not even muster the will to retaliate.

The smallest one's vibrant smile full of uncomplicated glee slipped right past my guard and pierced my flesh with a razored edge and cruel barbs that hooked into my heart. I knew I would never be able to free myself from her soft, quiet cheers.

"Ti-ne-a!" she went. "Ma-ho sho-jo!"

I was so dead. KIA. Mission abort! We had to get home, stat!

"Awwww," I went, before I could even stop myself, despite knowing that Leah was studying me intensely.

The cat-got-the-cream expression on her face warred with the delighted wonder. Like she couldn't decide if she'd gotten away with something, or if she'd just seen the most sacred thing ever.

I blushed.

I'm not used to kids, okay!? I don't have any resistances! And mommy hormones! Fuck!

I didn't really recognize my own behavior. I'd very much changed over the last few days. I was coming to realize that shifting certain cardinal aspects of my biology had pretty far-reaching consequences where my behaviors and even priorities were concerned.

As Aden, I would've thought the kids cute, smiled at them, and moved on. Not my business. Maybe I'd have made sure they were safe. As Tinea, I wanted to squeeze and cuddle them and swear my undying love and protection. The impulse was so powerful that, even if I loved it, it quickly became overwhelming. There was a drive there, a motivation that I'd just…lacked, previously.

I distracted myself from the teeny bean in the background who'd nonetheless caught my eyes first of all, and focused on the rest of the occupants of my HUD.

In the foreground, there were the two other children clinging to each other with pitiful, pleading expressions and a cheeky twinkle hiding in their eyes.

They were maybe around six years old. A boy and a girl. The boy had richly black skin and very dark eyes. He also had black hair that curled tightly to his skull. If that wasn't prime afro or dreads material, I didn't know what was. He was very clearly of African descent. The girl was his complete opposite in all but height, long blonde hair with the gentlest of waves, rosy white skin, and bright blue eyes. I guessed she was of European descent, and from well further north than Germany. Scandinavian, perhaps.

Like opposites in perfect synchronization, they unclasped the hands they'd pitifully held up to their chins and waved at me with a bright, "Hello! I'm Sam," and, "Hello! I'm Jora!" at exactly the same time.

I had to giggle, and the taken happiness on Leah's face increased. I worried that she might have overdosed on endorphins, or something.

"Hi, Sam and Jora. I'm Tinea."

"Weird!" yelled Sam, followed instantly by Jora's, "Yuh! Your mouth didn't move!"

They immediately quieted down again when the prettiest woman I'd ever seen bopped them with a squishy paper fan for being too loud.

"That's because I'm not using my mouth to speak, but aug-gear in my head," I told them while I studied the woman on whose lap the cute teeny bean sat. She was studying me right back, and mirrored my warm smile. I sensed no wish from her to create friction, to reject or set excluding boundaries. It surprised me how immensely relieved I was.

But truly, she was stunning, even dressed in a somewhat unflattering habit. I could feel the same magnetism from her that Leah radiated. The one that made me want to undress her. Yet, unlike the heated promise that suffused Leah's motions, this woman seemed completely and utterly…innocent in her behavior. Unaware in a way that only highlighted her attractiveness. That the effect was so noticeable, it twigged something in my mind. A memory of when I'd created my own fresh body. It spoke of conscious design.

"Greetings. I'm Sister Lana."

She had a beautiful, faint Russian accent that played with her English, and her voice was just pure contralto sex. It shivered through me, again in a way that was reminiscent of the effect Leah had on me sometimes, and was reminded of a suspicion I'd had when Leah first told me of the editing to her and her little sister's DNA.

I'd dismissed it at the time. It had been far-fetched. Implausible.

But perhaps…not so much. Not if there were two of them. Not if there had been three of them at one point, all of them close in age.

"Hi, Sister Lana. I'm Tinea," I said, smiling at her, even as memories of a kidnapping operation gone wrong went through my head.

I'd been eight at the time. It'd been the first mission of that sort. I'd made it go wrong, sabotaged it, because it was the first time we weren't supposed to kill our target. And because the woman had been pregnant. She hadn't noticed that Aden had snuck within arm's reach, soporific quick-gas at the ready, and she'd been stroking her swollen tummy with such a gentle expression. He'd never, ever seen anybody look at anything, or anyone, like that before, and he'd known immediately that she couldn't be made to stop. Couldn't be hurt.

Something in broken, little Aden had rebelled, and he'd retreated quietly. Rearmed a lethal trap, without repairing the trigger so that it wouldn't rouse suspicion. And, indeed, nobody had noticed…until he'd detonated the mine.

Of six adult trainers and three children, I'd been the only one to return alive, and not a mark on myself, or the explosives, to give away that I'd rigged the wipeout. Father had still seen fit to punish me, and the Hauswart who'd been friendly to me had disappeared…and suffered.

"Oh, are you doing the sub-talking thing?" said Jora, bouncing on her heels. Her adorably cheerful, innocent voice dragged my attention away from grim memories and connections I was drawing. "We're going to learn to do that, too!"

"Oh? You'll learn subvocalization? That's pretty useful, you know," I answered, letting Jora's barely contained glee wash through me.

"Yuh! We'll be able to play tag'n'seek without the others hearing us if we're whispering too loud!"

Ah, bless kids and their utterly uncomplicated motivations. They were a soothing balm for a wounded soul sometimes, weren't they?

And if, for yet undiscovered reasons, that wasn't enough? Well, a gravity-boosted space-concrete buttplug would surely fix any issues a pissed off Tinea might have.

***