Ch. 146 – Faith New-Found

Summer 2016 – The Lady's Virtues

Profound beauty goes beyond the skin. It does not drape bone and tendon. It cannot be acquired through cosmetic surgery. It begins with your judgment, it mirrors your thoughts.

Practice kindness, for the peace of inner gentleness exudes immaculate beauty.Practice grace, for the refinement of motion defines true elegance.

Practice the Lady's Virtues, for they elevate the soul:

– The Young Mistress magazine's Fortune Cookie section, summer edition 2016

Summer 2056 – The Corporate Mandate

Profound value goes beyond the body. It does not drape bone and tendon. It cannot be acquired through cybernetic augmentation. It begins with your judgment, it mirrors your metrics.

Practice compliance, for seamless integration exudes immaculate synergy.Practice efficiency, for optimized execution defines true excellence.

Practice the Corporate Mandate, for it advances the Brand:

– The Young Mistress magazine's Corporate Fortune section, summer edition 2056

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"Tynea, Tynea!"

Yes, Tinea? the AI laughed.

"HSRP! I want HSRP on full auto!"

My, my, someone is excited.

"Tynea…" I whined.

Fine, fine. They cannot be made of simple lead anymore for the distances you're working with, but you already have the materials your Auxiliant needs to make them.

Purchased:

Total cost: 50Remaining points: 50689

If you want rounds larger than twenty millimeters, you'll need blueprints for a different design.

"Okay! Auxiliant!"

"Awaiting orders, Tinea," chimed the Class I AI in her upbeat-slash-honey-soaked voice.

"Switch to HSRP!"

"Scaling blueprint detected. Please designate the target so that I may select the factor most pleasing."

Designate…ah. The heads-up display atop the Universal Soldier configuration mimed myself bracing the weapon and laying a finger on the trigger.

The moment I lifted her buttstock to my shoulder, the display became transparent. I found myself looking through an old-school optical scope at the nearest cloud of model Ones, with the display overlaying the picture like augmented reality glasses. The best of both worlds, huh? Lag-free optics, but with the situational awareness networked gear promised.

When I touched the trigger, the scope lit up with reticle-locks. The pack on my back vibrated for a moment before the belt carrier underneath my arm rattled as a train of fresh bullets traveled through it. A dozen unfired cartridges spewed into the empty air, wasted, as the chamber accepted the first of the new ones.

Before I could even question that, Auxiliant updated her status:

"No reclamation module detected, obsolete cartridges expelled. Combat safety protocols satisfied, safeties disengaged!"

The scope automatically zoomed in on the grouping of marked targets, and I got my first good look at the cataclysm I'd wrought earlier.

Whirling cyclones of model Ones everywhere combined into one giant supercell that spanned the horizon left to right, coast to coast. From it, a thousand tentacles bursting with fake pigeons reached out like fingers ready to grasp me.

It cracked something in me to be the sole object of their attention. It curled my toes, it drove that part of my brain that sniffed mortal danger like glue insane with pent-up go-go-go.

The world went bright in that adrenaline-fueled way, and all my cramping muscles relaxed. My body heated up, went buttery smooth, conditioned to do battle.

With a jerk, I suddenly realized that I'd been giggling freakily for several seconds, only to forget again when the endless tide of foreign flora flew into the wall of red-hot fireflies dancing on ashen flakes. They wanted me, and they cooked, they smoked, they breathed skyfire.

Their little bodies dried out in seconds. Their skin pulled taut and ruptured, pulling back from flesh turned into oxygen-starved charcoal. Dying and blinded, they collided and broke into more fuel to feed the glowing hell drifting between them and myself.

I thought back to that moment when I'd thrown my first Monster Hunter mortar grenades, where I'd worshiped the circles of shellburst death from each explosion.

I laughed at that version of myself, at her, the mad, shrieking priestess of holy carnage who thought a few fragmentation grenades were sacrosanct violence.

I laughed at the fires that ate the sky.

Winds kicked, a wall of warm air drove up into the stratosphere; cold air rushed to fill the vacuum below, pushing up again as it heated, building a storm of a different kind.

The vast, impossibly heavy gears of weather creaked and began to turn, and I laughed at that, too.

Then my finger depressed the trigger, and thirty bullets howling like banshees broke the air and carved channels of plasma through the ravenous fires, to kindle flowers of green blood that wilted instantly in the heat.

The recoil set me to swinging in my lines, but all I did was chortle when my flight brain crunched those numbers like the tastiest of cookies and fired my jets in perfect counter-percussion.

Distraction soothed my chaotic giggles as I bought more raw materials for Chrysaora to transform into bleeding horizons. My hands still shook, though, until I bit down on my knuckle. I licked my knuckle, licked her—the mad priestess riding the blood pounding in my ears—until she calmed and retreated from my head and back into my chest.

It was finally quiet enough between my ears for me to hear the distant splashing behind us.

I'd wondered if we were going to be fighting them, too. The Antithesis in the water, off the coast, deep in the St. Lawrence River. It was only one of the biggest rivers on the planet.

When I turned, I saw a barrier of mist rising into the sky; droplets cascading off a million bodies that winged free of the water, up and up. Another stormcell made of alien bodies.

I studied the river itself, carefully, but I saw no currents to give away movement beneath the waves. That, I knew, was just a matter of appearance. They were coming, and the waters would churn soon enough. A mad giggle rode that particular thought.

Once the aquatic model Ones rose high and broke past their misty drag, I judged them dry enough for my embers to work and designated them to be minced and burned as well.

Chrysaora Plenum happily chimed her confirmation, and soon I was once more the node in the middle of a great bell of auric streamers full of self-assembling rockets.

"Dervish," I croaked across our comms, my voice hoarse from so much emotion. I cleared my throat before I continued, "they're in the water after all."

"Shocker."

She would've had to use industrial-strength compressors to stuff that much sarcasm into one word. It was so dense that its raw gravity tugged the violence-skewed thing in my brain straight again, and the quicksilver fizzing at the base of my skull subsided.

But…the looming presence of uncountable Antithesis—all focused on little old me—was just around the corner. Their attention beat on my senses, and I knew I was just a glance, just an admission of their existence, away from the next adrenaline dump.

"I'll go play Will It Blend over there first," she added.

"Please."

There was a shift in the world several hundred meters beneath me, in the grove. It felt like a piece of reality woke to the nettle-sting of a limb fallen asleep. Seeds of foreign energies that weren't electricity, exactly, spun, and as though they were generators, electromagnetic fields sparked into being around them.

And then, between one eyeblink and the next, Dervish's diminutive figure was running across the water as though it was solid ground and she were light as a feather. Perhaps she was—that organ in my tummy that kept me aware at all times in which direction Earth lay, it sensed an incongruent lack of mass from hers.

She was moving fast too, much faster than I could run.

Her gravimetric signature points at Class III technology, Tinea.

"Huh." It seemed useful, especially for someone like me, up in the air. "What's it cost?"

You'd need at least five tokens and a hundred thousand points, if you want something suitable for flying. Organic versions would require considerable metabolic upgrades, too. Internal ones are yet more expensive.

"...We'll leave that for another day." I wasn't gonna have those kinds of funds for a while, not without other stuff to invest in, first.

I'll mark your interest, if you'd like?

"Yeah, sure. Remind me sometime."

Our points counter read 53041 points. I turned my attention towards my girlfriend's video screen. "Leah?"

"I'm listening."

She'd climbed back into her pod and was already tossing shells at the ground-bound elements of the Antithesis army. Those were miles and miles behind the leading edge of the flying ones, but not beyond the reach of her one-oh-five. The distance meant she was aiming high though, too high for the recoil system, and so the spider's frame was parked firmly on the ground again, immobile.

I could feel the stressed attention she was paying the incoming data streams from the sensors I'd planted around her. It was a mirror of my own intrinsic awareness of the enemy gathering in the sky, staring at me, hungering to snatch me like predators snatch prey.

"I'm gonna reinforce the screen with another twenty thousand clusters, alright? We'll be safe enough to focus on getting you your mechs, after that."

"Alright," she replied, smiling at me just as another bout of recoil thumped through her and made things jiggle a little. When she noticed where my attention had gone, her smile lost some of that strain in favor of tickled smugness. "Go on, Tinea. The aliens ain't gonna grill themselves."

Snorting, I shot her a salute. "Aye-aye, ma'am."

⁂

Dolores dashed past wave after wave, her steps even and controlled. She moved with the economic clip of a distance runner, her shoulders traveling ruler-straight. True to her virtual namesake, Dervish carried an aeolian grace, never letting the scythe in her grip bob.

The world itself accommodated her advance. She imposed no alteration in her passing, and not even a laser altimeter could've detected any change to the river's natural wave equations.

That was the form of stealth the introverted samurai had chosen; the absence of measurable presence. No displacing of the air she passed through, no vibration or change in temperature to excite the senses. No mass for gravimeters, whether technological or organic, to pick up. The narrow spectrum of visible light was the sole quantity she allowed herself to be detected by—for if you saw her, so did she see you.

And see she did, as she ran across the river's surface, an army of aquatic aliens hundreds of thousands strong crossing beneath her. But Dervish moved on; they were not her concern, not her hunt.

She traced the subfluvial rivulets of Antithesis back to their sources. Nests hidden on and beneath the bed of St. Lawrence, making use of xenoformed kelp forests to cloak their vital network even in open water.

It didn't slow down Dolores, who earned her Initialization by hunting alien hives.

She stopped, and, target chosen, swung her scythe. A wave of liquid sunlight pulsed through its stave and down its blade, fed exotic-energy capacitors embedded in the edge, which released a wave of repellant force to cleave a corridor from the water, three dozen meters deep, all the way to the river's bottom.

Divine and majestic was the lady Dervish, a theater most verisimilar.

Which, naturally, did nothing to change the fact that somewhere inside all that mystic transcendence was an overly enthusiastic, roleplaying gamer Nerd gleefully enjoying the cheers of her circle of equally socially awkward friends riding shotgun in her body via full-Dive streams.

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