(Rewritten) Ch. 50 – Nightma—

"The light at the end of the tunnel isn't always a train. Promise."

– Life

***

I rushed at indistinct shapes that tried to hurt a helplessly whining dog, running and punching as hard as I could. But with every punch, balloons full of blood exploded over my fist, sprayed fluid into my face, and the figures folded themselves around my hands with ugly crunches. They held on and on, weighing me down the more I punched, and there was a heartbeat in the background, throbbing and thumping louder and louder with every second, until I couldn't hear my own thoughts anymo—

I pushed myself off the floor hard enough to hit the ceiling. The knock that rattled my brain woke me right up, and I gasped for breath as I fell back to the ground. I was sticky with sweat.

My fingers and my skull alike told me I'd taken no injury from the collision, I didn't even have a concussion, but I was a bit too busy orienting myself to really appreciate the fact that I'd just had my first experience of my new toughness.

How'd I get outside the cocoon? And Leah's not around.

After a moment of anxiety, I straightened up, and flicked my forehead to exorcize the dumb worry. No reason for it. The facility was practically empty anyway, my antennae told me there wasn't anything moving nearby, plus, there were really only three things for her to reasonably do.

I checked the pantry first, but Leah wasn't there.

Nor was she in the top room, where I thought she might've been connecting to the uplink.

Only one place left.

I walked through the guard room to the facility's…facilities, and hollered. "Leah!"

"Yeah?" came her mildly confused voice from the second stall.

"Ah, sorry. Just, uh, wanted to know if you're fine! You know, enemy territory and all. I'll be up above."

"Sure, I'll join you in a bit."

Breathing easier, I went topside and looked through the shredded doorway, into the night. The storm had passed but it still rained evenly, and my improved vision let me see whatever pale moonlight made it through the clouds, reflecting off puddles everywhere. The smell of swamp had gained in intensity from the storm.

"Tynea, will the Antithesis be active in this weather?"

Certainly. Their models are suited to most environments, and a storm is not extreme enough to be much of an issue.

Hmm. I tried to check the map, but found that the uplink had lost connection to the satellites. I poked at its diagnostics, which reported no damage.

Ah, crap. Gotta go outside. The storm probably messed it up. I looked down at myself. Well, whatever. Mud or no mud, I'll want a shower either way.

I took off the bathrobe and let it flop to the floor, before I made my way outside, heading straight for the device. Being naked beyond the confines of our cocoon was…just a touch embarrassing. If anyone was around, I would've kept the bathrobe and dealt with the sogginess and getting tangled in the brush. Yet, I was proud of my new body. I probably wouldn't mind showing it off if I trusted somebody enough. Like Leah.

Look what I've got! I giggled to myself, wondering if this was how exhibitionists felt.

My antennae weren't working so well in the rain, but my eyes could pick out a long shape lying across where I'd buried the uplink.

As I got closer, details became clearer and I had to suppress a laugh. A dead model Three was squashed beneath the log of a tree that had fallen over in the storm, and teeth marks at the bottom of it told me that the Three had engineered its own death.

Had it wanted to drag the log home to its nest for biomass?

Ah, that's no good. That means they've got one nearby enough to bother. Nearby enough to not bother with a new nest instead.

A silent shit! escaped me, as I realized I'd not brought a weapon along, and I hastily looked around again, making sure there weren't any aliens sneaking up on me.

In a little bit of a hurry now, I shifted the log aside with a surprisingly easy heave. My strength amazed me. The thing was easily four meters long, and a little thicker than my torso as Aden had been. I had no idea how much it really weighed, but it was no joke.

Admonishing myself not to waste time with staring at deadwood, I tossed the Three a few meters clear and uncovered the uplink's segmented dish, waited impatiently as it restored its connection, and jogged quickly back inside once everything worked again.

My tail was soaked through, but I ignored that as I picked up yesterday's shift and patted it down for the Hummingbird I'd forgotten to move to my new clothes, relieved to have a gun again. I looked around for my rifle and Sentinel combo. Where'd I leave it, yesterday? It wasn't in this room. The cocoon, maybe?

"Wow, I must've really been out of it, huh?"

I estimate that you functioned at less than 50% efficiency, Tinea.

"That bad?"

Yes. Though they did not endanger you due to your physical improvements, you committed a number of tactical errors during the last two encounters that I'm fairly certain you would not have earlier in the day.

"Like the grenades I didn't set up right?"

With the number of dimensional shunts you had available, not a single bullet should have been necessary to end that fight.

"Hmmm… I see. Would've been less stressful for Leah too, I guess."

"What would've been less stress for me?" Leah asked, walking up the stairs.

"I shoulda eaten more yesterday—the lack of food made me perform badly. We could've cut down the fighting a lot. Walk with me? I'm looking for my rifle." I asked, while putting on the bathrobe—which wasn't really long enough to cover my legs.

Leah stared at my feet and soggy tail, raising her eyebrows at the splatter of mud along the rest of me. "You look like you could use a bath. And your rifle's down in the cocoon. Didn't see it?"

"Nope, I didn't. I woke up just outside the tunnel, somehow."

She glanced at me again. "That's not where I left you, some twenty minutes ago."

"Uh, yeah." I scratched my nape. "Had a nightmare, and somehow I ended up outside. Anyway, I fixed the uplink" I told Leah while checking the map. I had to scroll south a bit, but the swarm had moved about fifty kilometers, its tail end having passed us a short while ago.

I was shaken out of my focus by Leah. "Tinea, I had a funny idea earlier, regarding this place and the Antithesis."

"Oh?" Gander at the map complete, I led the way downstairs to recover my gun.

"What if we took those jars in the pantry, and poisoned them all with something that would kill Antithesis eating from them? If we prep the place so that the Antithesis find the jars and die within minutes from the poison, and if we make sure they don't consider it a worthwhile nesting place, then we should naturally end up in a situation where it looks like something in those jars is somehow a miracle poison against the aliens. Enough so, that they don't even want to nest nearby."

That got my attention. "Aaaah…"

"Yeah!"

"Make our kidnappers think they somehow stumbled across something with their slop, and watch for any attempts to market it as an Antithesis Killer?"

"Yup!"

"It'd have to be a special poison. The kind of thing where they can tell not just how to make it, but also how it came to exist out here in the first place. Say, some kind of contaminant made it happen? If we leave traces of that around here as well, then the whole thing really becomes believable. Tynea, how many points would something like that cost?"

"There's a species of bacteria that would fit your criteria. Since their first generation was created from altered Antithesis cells, designed by the Moonsingers and decidedly alien in nature, any Earth scientist would think that somehow the Antithesis themselves dragged their own death in, and it just so happened that the slurry activated these bacteria."

"Heh, nice and devious. Excellent, even," I said, snickering evilly.

"Indeed. The Class I Moonsinger Designs: Pulvinophages would be your cheapest catalog at twenty-five points, due to its extreme degree of specialization. The chances that you would draw any use from it beyond this and very similar instances, is vanishingly small. A phial of inert phages would cost you five points. They won't reproduce, however."

"Even so, that's actually really cheap. I was prepared to have to pay hundreds of points."

A beneficial example of extreme specialization.

"Right. Leah?"

We entered the room with the cocoon, and instead of crawling through it, I felt around the cocoon with my tail, and once I found the rifle, I curled it around it like a monkey and lifted it out. Really useful appendage, that. And still very wet. Instead of helicoptering it, I whipped it at the wall, spraying an arc of water across it. A few more times, to play tic-tac-toe against myself. There. Tail sufficiently dry, and I won, too.

Leah grinned at my tail-tastic antics. "Sounds like a workable plan. A few spy drones as backups, and I'm happy to leave anytime. I've also come to a decision regarding my limbs."

Ah, that was a rather more cardinal topic.

"Tell me."

"We've only got around six hundred points, and that's if we ignore that we wanted to dedicate several hundred of those to emergency funds for both of us."

"Yeah."

"So I think I should buy Class 0 limbs first, with a Class I implant to manage them and which gives me proper life-like feedback, to help with, you know, self-perception."

"Class 0, huh?"

"Yes. Earth has working prosthetics after all, and if we buy them for points, then they're going to be perfectly crafted. Plus the superior implant…I think that's the absolute cheapest, but still useful, combination that I can get right now. That would leave us with about three hundred points. If we got ourselves some Class 0 ATVs for fifty points each, then we would actually have a reserve left."

I smiled at Leah, beautifully impressed by her thinking. "Nice! If those ATVs come with a baggage area, we could probably get some automated turrets installed on those. Something to help us make points while driving?"

"Oh, yes! Wanna do it?"

"Sure! Weather's still crap, so, legs and arms first?"

"Yeah!"

Her infectious cheer made me grin, and I tugged her along with me, this time into the cocoon itself, where we sat down. Didn't have internet connection down here, nor to the spy drones, but I would be able to sense anything heading down the stairwell.

Leah, preparing to shop, said, "Alright, gimme a moment."

I studied her face while waiting. She looked quite a bit more relaxed than she had the previous days. The strain to her eyes was gone, her brows in gentle relaxed arches, rather than subtly furrowed from anxiety. Even her shoulders were set easy, unbowed.

Yeah. For reasons that only made sense if you really dug into it, she came out of the flashback rather put together. I saw a certain readiness to her eyes, coupled with a confidence that sat as naturally as a tailored suit. I guessed she'd realized how small our current worries were, compared to what she'd already won against.

Or in other words, she looked good, and my heart lifted with happiness.

A smile played around her lips as four boxes the size of human limbs hit the ground seconds later. Tynea tabulated the purchases for me:

Purchased:

Total cost: 300Remaining points: 337

I sat down across from her, and relaxed as I watched her unbox her purchases.

***