Chapter Forty-Five - Walkie Talkie

The Pictures On The Screen Tell A Story - Part 1

Little fingers cradle a frame, little eyes stare silently at the screen. Little knees pulled to her chest, little girl's tears flow no more, long dry.

Her parents lie dead not far, father's hand dropped his ax, mother's hand dropped her knife. Five mangled bodies slashed and sliced lie there too, gruesome maws wide open, butcher's grimace.

Her brother bleeds weakly, his pistol droops to the ground, his eyes unfocused, thoughts grow faint.

The pictures on the screen move and tell a story, of many dead people and more dead creatures. She watches her sister fight and watches her die, impaled on spears of bone and claw. She watches as a switch falls from her sister's hands and fire swallows all.

The pictures on the screen move and tell a story, of many dead people and more dead creatures. She watches as strangers lift their guns and clouds of lead tear through the bodies of beasts. She watches as tidal waves of teeth crash against mountains of flesh and blood. She watches as many switches slide free and fires bloom.

 

***

 

As we walked, hand in hand, I took a look at our points. We’d had three left, before the big fight. Counting those, and that entire group we killed, we had…a total of five hundred sixty-four points, of which I had two hundred and fifty-five. My emergency funds were full up.

More points than we’d had in a while. More than enough to start fighting large groups on the move, if we invested them wisely. And we still had five of those void grenades.

Absorbed in my thoughts, I didn’t really notice how the steadily strengthening drizzle misted in the air, and eventually, a strange quiver went through my head appendages. Suddenly, my antennae shook, splattering water everywhere as a weird tickle went through my nose until I sneezed, surprising Leah, who twirled towards me just as I sneezed a second time.

Even the hydrophobic nature of my sensilla wasn’t quite enough to keep them dry.

My feelers shivered again, reflexive tears wetted my eyes, snot clogged my nose, and one of those nasal whines you usually only hear from sick people escaped me.

Leah looked at my bedraggled form and aww’d at me, glomped me from the side and ruffled my hair.

I sniffed a little more. “Tynea?”

Um. The senses of your antennae are connected to those areas of the brain that use similar senses. Taste to taste, smell to smell. They’re way more sensitive, however. You may find that certain bodily reflexes will be triggered in…unusually usual situations.

Another sneeze wanted out, but I vigorously rubbed the tip of my nose with my palm, and it receded again. Leah cooed at me, so I reached up to pinch her nose, and added another tally to Tickle Time.

Laughing, she let go of me and I abused my silk-weaving to create a handkerchief for myself, to dry my eyes and my nose.

Huh… Make-up. I’d want to learn about that stuff too, and…that meant I’d need to learn how to not smear it, wouldn’t I? Much stuff to explore!

Antithesis approaching, ETA twenty seconds. One Four, six Threes. They heard your sneezing, it seems.

My head whipped to Leah, whose reaction indicated understanding, and pointed up.

She nodded, and we selected a thick branch she could straddle, with her back to the trunk of the tree itself for support.

I took her in a quick princess carry, relying on the Sleeve’s stiffness to hold up her weight, and deposited her three meters up with a single jump. Leah secured, I hopped back down and ran for some distance from her gun.

The Four is traveling up in the foliage.

One of the drones’ cameras picked it out, and Tynea highlighted it, as it swung itself from tree to tree with grabby tentacles. The Threes accompanying it were directly below, keeping pace on the ground with bounding leaps.

“Share with Ypsi and Leah, please?”

I have done so.

“Okay, I’ll leave the Four to Leah, again. Rain’s picking up, draw those outlines from before? They were really useful.”

Certainly. Five seconds.

I decided to position myself in a tree as well, where I wouldn’t need to scoot and dodge. Amazingly, not having to move your feet really made shooting easier.

Guns ready, I counted down the seconds until I gained line of sight on the hauling Four, and with it, the sextet of dog-like aliens.

Their mobility and juking around the trees made hitting them a little more difficult, but I still managed to screw with the smaller ones. Two I killed immediately, the others I sent stumbling with body-shots that, while not lethal, did cause disorienting damage, even breaking the spine in one case.

That Three kept crawling forwards stubbornly, jaws rabidly biting at empty air as it scented me.

I put it out of its misery with a bullet to the brain. Flechette. Whatever.

The Four flew by in a wake of rushing air just as I murdered the final Three, and I decided to drop to the floor, to stay out of any potential line of fire for Leah, whose projectiles zinged past me within a few meters.

Hmm, it seemed like Leah had trouble actually hitting the Four. It wasn’t moving in a straight line, and going pretty quickly. It looked like she might end up needing my help, and I didn’t have five seconds to catch up.

With a thought, I connected to Leah’s bullets in her gun, and checked their guiding, to find it was turned off. Confused I checked her targeting visor, and found that it was talking to the 9mm cartridges in the Foxteeth still. Why?

That’d be something to sort out, but for now, I just let my cerebral aug spin up a new tab to take control of the darts her gun was spitting out, and let it calculate proper trajectories, until they slammed home into the xeno’s brain moments later. 

Its tentacles splayed out, got caught up in surrounding branches, and tossed the ballistic corpse off course. It slammed into the ground and slid to a halt. A wave of wet dirt smacked against trunks ahead of it.

I stepped around it, checking the entrance wounds to see if the nanite was working, and the black of rot around the edges confirmed it.

I turned towards Leah, and checked up; she was already busy climbing down the tree by herself.

Huh, that’s good. She was starting to trust the Sleeve a little more, wasn’t she?

I remembered the strange half-real feedback it fed me, and combined with her experiences prior to meeting me, I was glad to see her take control over her own mobility even in unstable situations.

It didn’t even have to mean less physical contact!

I moved forward, ready to welcome Leah with a hug on the last drop, which she happily accepted the moment she noticed me. She let herself fall the last half meter and landed on her feet right between my arms, and warmth spread through my chest at the easy smile she gave me. I went up on my tip-toes, and buried my face in the crook of her neck, which she answered with a squeeze tight enough to hold me up.

Yeah. I absolutely wanted more of this. Always.

The rain hit us for real, and completely soaked me through in seconds. My shift was completely sodden and lost its shape as the fibroin absorbed all the water it got, while at the same time getting stiffer and denser.

I raised my arms, looked at myself, and sighed to Leah’s giggle. I raised an eyebrow at her helmeted face, but refrained from other reactions—her overall wasn’t waterproof either and she’d be just as miserable if we didn’t get dry soon. Unlike me, her body was already taxed by all the injuries, the healing she’d done, and no bionites or nanites to keep her healthy.

“Let’s go back? We’re three hundred meters out.”

“Yep.”

“Tynea, any more Antithesis along the way?”

None that I can find.

“Alright, thanks.”

The rain came down in heavy sheets, dark clouds above our heads, and darker clouds smudging the horizon to the east, whenever there was a break in the foliage.

I parked my antennae behind my back as much as possible, and even the fuzz of my tail looked soggy and sad. I really was completely bedraggled. Leah suppressed a giggle every time she looked at me until I gave her the stink-eye—which just made her laugh.

“Sorry, Tin-Tin. I’ll help you dry yourself, later. If we can find a towel, or something.” 

My eyebrow rose of its own volition, as I slicked my hair back. “Tin-Tin?”

“Yes. You’re too cute not to have a cozyname.” Leah said, completely unapologetically.

Eyes squinting, I replied, “You’re correct.”, to which Leah smiled brilliantly with a laugh.

She took me by the hand again, and we continued on our way back to shelter. I considered that as we walked. Even though we hadn’t actually spent much time here, it sure felt like it. Between taking control of the place and actually using it as a base, it didn’t feel like enemy territory anymore.

“Leah?”

“Hmm?”

“How are you doing?”

“Uh.” Leah paused a little, a frown between her eyebrows. “Better than I should by all rights, really…”

I gave her some more time to consider, but eventually it seemed like she didn’t quite know what to say, so I prompted her.

“I was just thinking about the facility, how it’s sort of starting to feel like actual shelter to me. Which I thought was…at least remarkable, if not strange, because it’s where I got kidnapped to, right?”

Her eyebrows rose higher and higher while I was talking, and I could tell she was not only surprised by my words, but also disagreed. Yet, as she thought about it more, realization bloomed across her face.

“Leah?”

“Well. Mostly I disagree, but I think that’s to be expected, considering the time I spent strapped to that bed, completely immobilized. But when I think about your cocoon, that’s different. That feels like…sanctuary. More even than my own place.”

“Hmm. Well, it is a piece of me, of my own home. It’s…territory that they’d never conquered, even if they moved it. Do you, like, want to take it along? It could be a sort of home-away-from-home thing, I guess.”

“Oh… Uh. It’s comfortable and all, but I don’t think that’s quite right, either. Let me figure that out, first?”

“Sure. And otherwise? About your limbs and stuff?”

“...” Leah looked down and opened and closed the fingers of her free hand. “Honestly, I can’t wait for replacements that feel properly. This…ersatz stuff, I guess, it’s good enough. But really? I don’t feel like myself. I sorta got used to it, but every time I’m off in lala-land thinking about stuff, and I come back, suddenly I feel like a stranger in my own skin, ‘cause of the fake feedback.”

I pondered that a little.

“You know, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to prioritize cheap prosthetics if you want them. What’s the cost for replacements that feel like the real thing? Does your Warforge catalog have any?”

“Yeah. The cheapest ones for non-combat use are a hundred and fifty points per limb. They’re not that tough, but frankly, if normal humans can fight single-digit Antithesis, then these definitely can. They’re just really basic. Zero functionality outside of being an arm or a leg.”

“Tynea, what’s the cheapest equivalent from my catalogs?”

Naturally grown, you would start at eighty points per limb. They would require roughly a week to fully grow, but you could speed that up with bionites, or nanites, to about three days. Combat grafted, they would cost a hundred and sixty points each. Their bones would match the toughness of artificial limbs, but the musculature and skin wouldn’t compare, unless you used chitin, instead of skin.

“Chitin, huh? Leah?”

“Yeah, no. Not my thing. I’d prefer metal over that, to be honest.”

“Fair enough. Do you want to buy yours? Six hundred isn’t that much, all things considered. We have slightly more than that.”

“Ah, I’m not sure, yet? Let’s talk about that later. There’s other stuff we have to think about, first.”

“Okay. Yeah, alright. Later.”

Let’s see. We had…six hundred and forty-six points.

That was enough for a useful vehicle, if we didn’t expect much flexibility beyond its role from it. And if we didn’t need an additional catalog. Hmm.

Well, that too, could wait. Better sleep first, maybe. I thought back to Tynea’s advice from back just before I went into chrysalis. I didn’t want to come to regret a decision that I didn’t even have to make, yet.

Yeah. Later.

Leah and I continued walking hand in hand, until we arrived back at the facility. I took a quick trip around the above-ground portion of it, to check if anything had changed since we’d left, but found nothing of note. Just loads of mud.

After a last glance towards the horizon, taking in the heavy storm front, we went inside.

 

***