EIGHT

"Vera!" came a panicked voice in the distance. "H-H-Help! B-bb-bleeding. . . shot bad."

Vera opened her eyes. Sand and grit stung her eyelids. The air was hot. Glowing embers floated by like flaming snow flurries. She smelled war. It was the scent of blood and opened guts mixed with charred metal. She raised her head, feeling a painful twinge in her neck. Some of her hair was burned off and she had lost her helmet. She was lying down in a steel walled foxhole. It was magnetic, she knew this somehow even before the hairs on her arms stood on end as she shifted to stand. She felt wet and something she could not explain. An unfamiliar texture. She looked down at her hands to find scratches and callouses encrusting the tips of her fingers.

"Vera!" more desperate this time. "Are you alive? I know you must be out there somewhere!"

’Alive’, such a foreign sounding term. It felt out of place. By definition, she was surely alive. A functioning sentient being with its own energy consumption and waste release system, but ’alive’ in this context seemed wrong. That’s what they called humans, ’alive’. But how could she be human?

The landscape revealed itself as a gust of wind cleared the air from the smoke of smoldering fires all around. Body parts and bodies with blackened burnt skin littered a shallow trench she was lying in with her back leaning against a 3D-printed fibro support plank. About twenty-four meters away, she saw an arm raise and wave sluggishly, a broken deformed thumb turned sideways at a ninety-degree angle. This somehow unnerved her. Her programming felt no empathy for sights humans considered visually disturbing.

She felt dizzy. Her vision blurred.

Then everything refocused and shifted into a different environment.

She washed kale over a sink, running cool water over it and pulling out the spines. She smiled, smelling a heavily seasoned broth that she had been simmering on the stove top. Soup. She remembered planning on cooking it all week for Sammi and Rian.

She could hear Sammy in the living room on her tablet. The girl loved playing gems and crystals on it. The sound effects were a bit irritating though.

"Sam, have you read today in your book?" Vera asked. "You promised before games."

"No, Mommy, but I will," Sammy said. "Just wanted two minutes."

"Two minutes. Two minutes," Vera said, laughing.

Sammy giggled.

"Should I start calling you that? Sammy two minutes?" It was her daughter’s four-year-old answer to everything. Vera could never fuss out what the significance of two minutes was though. As long as the girl would read some of her story book, Vera wouldn’t complain.

Vera had a thought then and couldn’t help saying it out loud. "I know there is something I’m supposed to do here. Something big, but I can’t think what. Fucking hell, I can’t fucking remember, Sam!"

The doorbell rang then. She put down the kale and stood still for seconds trying to pry into her mind before she went to answer it. Nothing. She shrugged and hurried through the living room and opened the door.

Two Prime soldiers wearing graphene body armor stood outside the doorway holding plasma rifles.

"Vera Randall. There has been an accident with your husband. May we come in?" said the one on the left. His right eye twitched and had a scar striped across it. A shoddy cyber replacement.

"Uhm. Sure," she said and stepped aside. "What do you mean accident? He’s just a scientist." Then she remembered the something she was supposed to do. It came to her like a flashing red alarm in her mind.

She did. Sammy, somehow, maybe hearing the true instinctive threat of danger in her mother’s voice, jumped up, threw down her tablet and scrambled in a blur of blond curls toward the back of the house.

The Prime soldiers grabbed Vera by the wrists and cuffed her.

"What’s going on here? Where is my husband? What have we done?"

"Your husband is dead. He was in an accident while testing a bio-printed android for weapons research for Prime," said the twitchy-eyed soldier. "Brain mapping indicated he had spoken to you about the classified experiment. We are taking you into custody until a decision can be made on your behalf."

"Sammy!"

"She will also be detained."

"This is a violation of our human rights! You can’t do this!"

"You are no longer human. You are property of the Prime military as of now. Your best option is not to resist."

NINE

"Vera! Please!" the voice again.

The smell of burnt flesh seeped through her again. She had passed out briefly. She remembered the dream, the little girl, her little girl somewhere, a memory? Planted memories, bubbling up in her subconscious? There was another purpose here. She was a leader, a respected savior of some group she cared for deeply.

"I’m here!" she cried out. "I’m here and I’m coming to help! Don’t fucking move! Drones are on the way! I’ll drag you to cover!"

"Oh, thank you, Vera! I knew you wouldn’t fail us! Oh, please hurry! I may bleed out! I feel so cold!" It was Skyler, his shaky voice said he was shivering... a lot.

Vera belly-crawled over mounds of silty ashes and dry pebbled ground, kicking up a haze of dust clouds. Skyler’s form came into view. She could see his gnarly red beard, flitting like a little flag in the wind. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes for seconds before moving forward. Skyler had risked his life to save her just a week ago. Prime had sent an assassin robot programmed with her as the target. Skyler had stepped into a scattering stream of plasma fire aimed at her and drove towards it with multiple grenade rounds. The only thing that had kept him alive had been his shielding and even with that he still suffered concussion injuries that awarded him a three-day vacation in a trauma container.

His skin looked pallid and lifeless when she finally got to him. He shivered erratically.

"Oh, Skyler," she said. "Hold on. Just try to breathe slowly."

Skyler tried, but his breaths still sounded like that of a man who had just emerged from icy water. "I get... another... vac..vac..ation."

Vera paused, then understood and smiled. "Probably. Right now we gotta get you to the foxhole. Here, hold still." She jabbed an oxygen pen needle into his chest right over his heart. "That should keep you alive for another ten or fifteen minutes at least until I can get you stabilized."

She heard them then. The faint but growing sound of an army of eagle-sized wasps buzzed in the distance. Vera judged between three and four hundred sweeper drones armed with armor piercing energy cannons. She hooked her arms beneath Skyler’s shoulders and started kicking her weight back with Skyler in tow as she scooted them both on her butt backward in route to her foxhole. If she didn’t keep them low the drones would detect their movement.

The buzzing sound swelled. She looked up and saw the swarm dimming the sky.

The first arriving began a rapid downpour of plasma bursts, igniting the ground below with a swollen wave of crackling sparks headed in their direction.

Vera shoved harder backward with Skyler, frantically kicking her heels into the loose silt. "Fuck you all!" she shouted.

The curtain of fire seemed to grow taller as it neared. The wave of sparking plasma was only about twenty meters away and closing. She was still about five meters away from the foxhole.

The drones came into view overhead, still not right above them, but she could make out their eight beady little eyes, designed like those of spiders to seem intimidating to humans. She didn’t think she would make it in time. She just closed her eyes and kept kicking and shoving. She heard the sounds of the plasma bolts sizzling through the debris of battle all around her, felt the sting of tiny sparks on her skin. Then she was tumbling downward with Skyler. She hit the bottom and he landed on her chest, smashing into her tits and knocking the wind from her. The blow blinded her for seconds. When her vision came back, and she could breathe again, she smelled burnt human flesh. Skyler was a lifeless corpse on top of her.

The sound of the drones faded, but she had failed to save one of her soldiers yet again. This was not the first time she had led a strike team into battle only to be the only one left breathing. Every time she felt like a murderer. Was it all really for peace? Was it all chipping away, each death, one by one lives lost, putting dents in the standing fascist regime? She rested her face in her hands and sobbed for a long time before lying down in the loose dirt in the bottom of the foxhole and going to sleep.

TEN

A pungent odor of rot and organic refuse assaulted Vera’s every breath.

"Hey, Lady," came a gravelly voice. "Bor Teir Tok! Grambie Ozi?"

"She looks to be foreign. Speak universal to her," a second voice, nasally with a tinny accent.

"Why is she naked? It’s a bit chilly out," said gravelly voice.

"I don’t know but she’s awful pasty, isn’t she?" said tinny voice.

Vera listened to the chatter through a mental fog. A bootup thread of characters blinked in her vision. Something had nearly annihilated her and she had regenerated. It must’ve destroyed her clothes. These two voices had just discovered her. She opened her eyes. The two figures peered down at her. One had a lumpy hat on his head, fastened with hundreds of bottle caps. He had a black beard and a disturbingly caved-in nose and right cheekbone. It was an old injury it seemed. She felt a jab in her gut as he poked her with a cane.

The other studied her feet as he was much closer to her. She felt his breath on her toes. When she turned her head to look, she saw he was using only his hands to walk, dragging what remained of his legless hips and ass in a leather bag. He had burns over most of his torso and arms, but was quite handsome in the face, his jaw chiseled and square.

"She’s definitely alive," said the one in the hat. He giggled. "She don’t like the looks of you, Ashi."

"Fuck off, Skakurow! She just can’t bear the sight of your hammered face!"

Skakurow made a long hoot then, chuckling at the end. "Well, delete my ancestors. I don’t think she’s a wounded veteran. Someone must’ve dumped her here thinking she’s dead."

Queuing her navigation system, a NO ACCESS message scrolled across her vision. "Where am I?" she said.

It was Skakurow that answered, "Why you’re in the trash, love. Right here with the rest of the vets looking for food and baubles."

Vera sat up then and looked around to find that indeed she was in some kind of landfill. Giant steel walls about the perimeter of a city block secluded it from the outside. Mountains of trash and discarded junk surrounded her. Several figures scurried about the debris, sorting and pilfering throughout.

"This is how Krakko-9 rewards they’re veterans who sacrifice themselves for the order of justice in the Black Eye System. Nice ain’t they?" Skakurow snorted.

Ashi reached into a leather pack strapped onto his naked back then and pulled out a box-shaped guitar fashioned entirely from garbage. The body was a discarded oxygen canister and the neck looked like an ornate table leg. He smiled and began to strum the most hypnotically enchanting sounds from it and sang with such emotive vibrato that Vera felt nearly moved to tears at once. The half man’s voice reverberated throughout the landfill as it might in an opera house.

It was odd to her to feel such empathy for something so useless to her as sound for entertainment purposes. She put her finger to her eye and felt the dampness there again, just as before piloting Nancy. She didn’t know how she knew it, but she knew this was a moment she should save in her memory as significant.

Ashi sang, "Take us to the event horizon. Take us to the dark. Make us your puppeteers and we will donate our hearts. Nothing tastes as sweet as lies in candy wrappers. Millions die and get erased so happy ever after."

"Ahh, you sound so beautiful, but tell such dreary stories, Legs," Skakurow said. "Cheer up a bit. We need merrier spirits around here." He indicated the dreary veterans digging through all the trash around them, and then crinkled what remained of his nose and made a sour face. "Could use a bit of air freshener, too. Smells like shit on every breeze."

Vera grinned. She thought the two were charming, given the discomforting place their lives had put them in.

"Does anyone have any clothes I might borrow around here?" She did not feel shame, but she knew the custom of most human cultures descended from mostly religious backgrounds and kept their composure better when you wore clothing.

"Oh, I bet there’d be some old rags round here you could snatch up," said Skakurow, pushing his misshapen hat up a bit with his cane and surveying the heaps around them. "There!" He pointed with the cane at a small pile of discarded clothes. "Bound to be somethin’ in that pile for sure. Find you a real nice ball gown for the dance." He chuckled.

Vera got up and walked over to the pile of clothes. Many scavenging vets paused to gawk at her as she passed by, both male and female, most of them obviously injured or disfigured in some way. She wondered why this government wouldn’t budget them repairs. It was more cost effective in most military regimes to recycle damaged officers.

Vera looked through the pile, rummaging for the most durable protective garments. She found a black siltex under armor shirt, long-sleeved and arrayed with pockets. It still sported a name and rank from the previous owner.

EILEEN DRIVER

CITY PATROL UNIT 44.7

How fortunate for the previous owner to be a patrol woman. Maybe she could slip through the city a little easier this way, given they weren’t minding their I.D. markers in their visors, if she could snatch one of their helmets, she would easily be able to hack their entire network to hide her facial identity. She found a pair of bullet peppered camo pants. They were too big. She would need a belt or a rope if she were lucky enough to find one.

Somehow, she still had her own boots on, printed as allocarb, a flexible and breathable metal fibrous material that was nearly indestructible, even to grenade shrapnel. The bullet-holed pants were so baggy and torn, she easily pulled them over her boots.

"Looking like a right pissed off soldier now, love. Ready for a revolution," said Skakurow, chuckling.

Vera smirked. She thought about the scroll still hidden away in Nancy’s locker. The docking bay still held those patrolmen unless someone had discovered them. She didn’t know how she had gotten into the landfill, but she knew she was probably still in the city and she needed to get on with her mission at once.

Ashi finished his song to a few small claps. These people had probably heard it a thousand times. He really had an amazing singing voice. When he spoke, however, it was as if he had the throat of a small bird. "Lady, if you are looking for the exit, head down this path until it twists to the left once and to the right twice. There will be a tunnel through old broken machines and vehicles. Go through it. You’ll be in Marshal’s square then. It’s easy." He smiled.

"Thank you," she said. "Your song was very beautiful."

Ashi dipped his head in a bow. He waved his junk guitar at the scavengers around them. "They’re all just bored of it is all. I gotta write some more songs. Maybe Skakurow is right. Something more upbeat and happy. They all need a warming up I’m sure."

Smiling, Vera said, "Maybe I’ll be back to hear one myself sometime."

He bowed, and she returned a bow before heading off down the path.

Next Chapter: Part 4: Defect