Chapter 150 – The Deus Ex Machina Protocol, Act III

It seems the release schedule has caused some memory-related clarity issues. Here's a quick recap to catch you back up:

"Second to last is the transportation phase. If the arrest in the second phase fails and the avalanche continues to build in momentum and mass, it will culminate in this most energetic phase. An avalanche may show a variety of flow dynamics: Slab avalanches consist of solid, rather heavy and dangerous snowpacks that break apart; Loose snow avalanches start very small but rapidly fan outwards; Powder snow avalanches go airborne and appear cloud-like."

– Jenny's fingers flutter over the pile of white (and wet, but Jenny's too busy to remember that Sister Lana does stern very well) laundry she's dumped off the side of the couch. She narrates in a hushed, documentary voice, "Now entering the white zone, she's fast, she's quiet, she's bringing doom. Oh no! The cil…civll…ci-vil-li-ans didn't evacuate in time!" A domino line of tiny toy people tip into the chaos. "This is...total...tra-ns-por-ta-tion."

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If you'd asked me a week ago as to whether rainbows could look bedraggled, I'd have given you a confused and askance stare.

There were, after all, three ingredients to the appearance of one, two of which were the sun and freshly cleared skies.

Those images didn't exactly lend themselves to sharing a sentence with the word bedraggled.

But if one added a fourth ingredient to the rainbow's genesis, such as the technological imitation of nature, it appeared the rules changed for the worse. To no one's surprise, probably.

My rainbowy antennae rainbows were positively ragged—and soggy—not even ten seconds into the deluge. They clung to the sides of my face as the mufflers' lightshow battled the gloom of too much aerated water. It had scrambled the electric shield of my forcefield, enough so that I'd needed to turn it off to preserve the capacitor charge.

I'd kind of expected the fog-slash-spray-slash-waterfall to be warm, considering its Dervish-Cooker origins, but apparently the vapors had risen way up high—the condensed stuff coming back down was almost freezing. If there'd been stronger winds coming down from the north, I'd probably be dealing with hail, not upside-down rivers.

My world had shrunk to a bubble bordered by oversized water beads that seemed to float wobbly in the air when I fell with them, always splitting and merging as their own air drag overcame surface tension; or punch the back of my head and my back when I fired my thrusters to slow my descent.

The Auxiliant's flying gun pod pushed against my belly and chest as I rode its whining hover engines forward into yet more falling drops that splashed my face and tertiary eyelids, towards where Leah said she'd hunker down. The only bits of me that remained dry were the bits covered by the undergarments of the Chrysaora and the Auxiliant.

I'd tried spying the orange-red glow of my skyfires, but everything was black—I figured it'd all gotten drowned. The swarms of model Ones too, probably. It'd surprise me greatly if they could handle that much weather beating down on their wings if even I had trouble managing my descent rate, and my thrusters could fling me hundreds of meters through the air with a single good blast.

They'll also have lost track of me, I thought with a breath of relief. They were still out there somewhere, but the loss of their malevolent attention felt like a mountain off my shoulders.

Instead, I had to fight down the instinctive fear and vertigo of falling from great height, of death at the end of a long drop. I knew perfectly well I wasn't gonna get hurt, but my amygdala was convinced otherwise.

The sensation of falling into the black unknown didn't make that any easier.

I knew how high up I was compared to the general mass of the Earth, but…I didn't know where the surface was, exactly. There weren't any lights down there either—I'd tried to find the village to judge my altitude.

No luck.

Everything was black, my antennae were almost deaf, and my sense of mass mostly told me I was surrounded by it.

No shit, Sherlock. Just wish I knew what to expect on arrival, and how close I'll be to Leah.

At least I knew I was gonna hit the ground split seconds before I did. Its shadow of solid mass crashed into my sphere of awareness like an unforgiving wall—it was so sudden my heart literally froze even as my body went on autopilot and barely managed to kick the Auxiliant free.

Some part of me hadn't been sure if the thing would take damage from getting squished beneath me, and, because I was trained to act even when less than coherent, that guess turned into reflex.

Another part forced itself to suck in a hard, hard breath that went all the way to my diaphragm and shot bolts of giddy go-go-go through my brain. Battle lust kicked my awareness in the ass and sat it back into the captain's chair—I'd swear my nose just about touched the muddy torrent below by the time I let all my thrusters rip at maximum force.

They greeted the wall of solid mass beneath with a wall of solid force, and the water in between hissed with pressurized indignity, sending shockwaves ringing into the distance. Superheated steam exploded in my face and against my limbs, scalding, melting my skin and eyes with temperatures beyond five hundred degrees Celsius. I instinctively yanked my shielding all the way up and hid my antennae along my back.

Screaming pain clawed maddened laughter from my lungs, and activated my muscles with memories of pain = mortal-danger-go-go-go ingrained so deeply they might as well have been muscle memory. Spasms forced my legs to push against the boiling mud and threw me into motion, forward and away.

Wild, skewed giggles broke the molten mess that was my lips as I raced through the scorching steam towards cool water. My lungs burned and my eyes were blind, but it didn't matter—my antennae hadn't suffered more than a sting and they pierced the mayhem farther than my eyes would have anyway.

Everything was moving and shifting, hot water vapor curling the limits of my senses into indistinct blurs. I wobbled madly with vertigo from the crazed currents in the air, but my other senses kept me going straight.

Everywhere that hurt gnawed at me, my capillaries dilated. My skin flushed lobster red and my heart beat five times harder to keep my blood pressure up and bionites pumping towards my injuries. I hacked more coughing, bloody laughter from my scalded lungs when I realized that the sizzling came from my own blood cooking as it sheathed my legs with every step.

My attention swung to my left between one step and the next as I ran past the form of a dying model Three. It was half falling, half dripping down a rock, too resistant to die quickly to the insane temperatures in the pit, but not tough enough to actually survive them. Its skin and flesh were sloughing off its ribcage, steam rising from the exposed lung visibly drying and collapsing.

I could see the grapes of Antithesis seeds behind it, and they were intact. The one part of the trash-tier Three made to survive even this hellhole.

It's too hot for that to work safely, Tynea warned me when my tail twitched over, pointing the Sentinel at it. Better use the Auxiliant.

Oh, right. Way hot. Cook off. My head wasn't quite screwed on right. Too much pain. "How's the Sentinel fine with these temperatures anyway?" I whispered through the Quanta.

The Sentinel's storage compartment is isolated well enough. Leave the area within three minutes and nothing will happen.

Somewhere above me, meters beyond my sphere of awareness in the dense fog and spray, the Auxiliant loaded a single, kinetic dumbfire shell and blasted the pulsing grapes to pieces. I ducked beneath the Antithesis's liberated skull with a wheezing laugh as it came flying, only to clap a hand over my lips as hissing steam stung the half-healed insides of my mouth again.

Twelve meters and a little to the left, a current of cold flood water carrying more live aliens crashed into the steaming pit. I could feel the violent mixing and curling where the temperatures clashed and equalized.

With the next step, I leaned all the way forward over my tippy toes and spread my wing arms. Just before I'd have dunked my face yet again, the Second Wind gave another blast and catapulted my burned, boiled, and barbecued body dozens of meters past the edge of the pit and directly into the cold water and on top of a Three. My fingers automatically speared its eyeholes.

Every muscle in my body cramped the moment I hit the cold. My fingers locked down hard enough that they shattered the Three's orbits and tore a plate from its skull, and my other arm cinched its belly so tightly its gut ruptured with an ugly, ripping squirt.

I caught glimpses of more Threes ahead, following the current, swimming with the snaking motions of fishes. My brain, high on adrenaline, conjured that stupid "Antithefeesh!" meme. Laughing distorted bubbles into the icy water, I cramped around my tummy, curling up even harder. My teeth chattered.

My entire body vibrated still with involuntarily clenching muscles, but I forced my hands open and started slapping my thighs until the hot stinging overwrote the cramp reflex and my legs unlocked and shot straight.

I was already coughing and whining and sucking air the moment my head broke free from the freezing water. Warm, comfortable air salved my body's instinctive need to guard against the cold and unlocked muscle by muscle with a last shiver.

I'm fine, I told myself. I'm safe. My skin was a mess. Burnt, scalded, boiled fat deposits running over. Blisters everywhere, but healing at an appreciable rate as my bionites repaired me. Yet even as damaged as it was, my skin insulated against the cold just fine. I wasn't really freezing.

My amygdala didn't believe me. It kept squeezing that adrenaline gland and shoving white-hot pokers of go-go-go through my brain.

Might have had something to do with the Three dolphin-diving towards my face with its jaws wide open.

Oh well.

Grinning like a mad scientist—entirely appropriate, considering the mad idea sparked within my thinky juices—I shoved a pair of wing arms in front of me with the engines pointing right at the airborne alien, and let 'em rip.

Something in my head had crossed itself earlier, when I'd caught myself at the end of the fall. It equated the sound of my engines blasting water with pain, horrible boiling pain, and flooded me with fear and a brutal desire for violence forward when it heard the counterpoint engines behind me gassing the water again.

I was hurling myself through the vaporized mist of the Three's corpse before I knew it, away from hissing torture and towards the next-thing-that-must-die with arms outstretched. I bowled into it, crushed its snout against my knee and dug my fingers into the back of its skull. I flicked my torch on and brought hissing, burning pain when I sheared through its hind legs and rendered it immobile even as I broke its neck.

The thing was still twitching when I remembered that I did have the Auxiliant now, with its cannonettes to handle nearby opponents.

Oops.

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Antithefeesh meme by BlackShad