Ch. 128 - Surprise Buttplug"Ladies and Gentlemen. Both and neither.

  No one, absolutely no one, expects the-"

  – Road Rash, when his Twitch stream cuts off when an explosion wrecks his camera drones, July 2056

  ***

  Huh. The ground was pretty close. And getting closer in a hurry.

  The completely natural urge to scream crawled up my throat, and I realized it didn't come alone. Echoes of a half-remembered, pain-driven madness rode shotgun and jammed my rynx with a crazed, warbling giggle.

  I couldn't breathe. I was falling, queer panic scrambled my thoughts, and I couldn't breathe.

  "Tinea!"

  Leah's voice echoed through my ears and shocked me out of it. I sucked in a breath and remembered that a) I could fly, and b) I wouldn't get hurt from this fall anyway.

  "Yeah," I croaked, "yeah."

  "Tin-Tin!"

  Tears suddenly sprang into my eyes and I hiccuped a wet giggle. I twisted around and let the aerofoils of the Second Wind unfold and catch air. I almost couldn't believe how hard the relief hit me when my muscles responded. I'd forgotten to appreciate just being allowed to move over the st twenty years. I'd learned to take it for granted.

  I had a feeling that I wouldn't again.

  Twin lines of searingly bright tracers whizzed past me into the sky above as an incredibly loud staccato roar beneath me demanded attention. The Dakka's twenty millimeter rotary cannons were the source of the tracers.

  My uncontrolled dive turned into a graceful swoop away from Leah's gunfire. Warm air billowed me from below, dry fkes flecked my sensil and tasted of ash. Chaotic winds tugged at my antennae when blue circles of ice bloomed across the battlefield and consumed the fires one by one.

  The whole battlefield's a mess. Friggin' fire tornadoes, even. And why the fuck is everything dead?

  "Yeah. Sorry. I'm okay."

  "You sure?" asked Leah. I could hear the broken insecurity of the kidnapped, lonely victim in her voice. "You weren't answering. And your leg." An anxious, stressed quaver had added itself, too.

  Leg. Cribbly, itchy numbness. A quick gnce at my left leg almost had me puking. I had to move it past the panels and streamers of the Chrysaora Plenum, which I didn't remember buying or putting on. The leg was a mess of exposed skeleton wrapped in strings of torn meat, beneath the knee.

  "What the fucking fuck?" I was begging for crity even as the familiar pulse of those frissons egged me on, forced me to keep moving.

  Apparently, the shock vibrating through my voice was enough for Tynea to pipe up.

  The Quanta's got logs for you. You'll have time to access them ter, Tinea. I don't recommend processing them right now. It might be…unwise.

  Just the thought of using the Quanta's time dition to give myself the space I'd need sent horrible shivers screeching down my spine. Tattered impressions informed me that it'd gone wrong the st time.

  I started shaking and dragged my knee up to hug. My good knee.

  Fuck.

  Tynea kept talking.

  Everything's under control. You're mostly safe. How are you feeling? Your bionite levels are very low, and your body is spent. You'll need to recover resources to even start healing.

  "I'm… Shit. A lot. I'm okay. Not. Sorry, Leah. Quanta weirdness."

  She made a face on the video. "I'm starting to wonder if you should try and get a refund, Tin-Tin."

  I ughed. Didn't manage to keep the stress out of it, either.

  "Yeah, maybe. But really, no way, not with the buds developing. Buds. Shit," I said as extremely vivid memories of creating and interacting with Sonde rolled through my mind.

  Oh, god. She's only hours from becoming a person. What the fuck was I thinking?!

  No, I knew exactly what I'd thought. Quantized Tinea was a menace. Holy fuck. She'd known exactly how I'd behave once we'd be off the battlefields and around people. That I might not be able to keep my promise and end up isoting myself again the moment I hit the first snag big enough to scare me away from interacting with people.

  I couldn't even say Quanta-me was wrong.

  Social anxiety was another menace. A far bigger one.

  So, unaffected as I'd been by my usual hangups, I'd set up a situation where emotional me'd have to…own up.

  Fuck.

  I needed a bigger vocabury.

  Shit fuck fuckity-fuck-shit-fuck.

  Even now, I could feel Sonde ticking away in my mind, absorbing and sorting memories, experiences, and how I'd reacted. Learning. Growing. Advancing in understanding. Unlocking independent cognition piece by piece, memory by memory. There was so much there, so much stuff I'd…prefer to look at another day.

  I wanted to reject all of it. Not deal with it, cause I'd already promised myself I'd do it with a therapist. But deep down…of course I knew that wasn't gonna fly. I wasn't gonna have a therapist when I needed one, I was gonna have one when they were avaible. Shit.

  I released my knee and rubbed my face. Hugged my tail, stopped when it nearly made me tumble.

  Fine. Fucking fine. At least I won't be bored. Fuck.

  I looked around again. Leah's twenty mils were tearing the Elevens a new one, hard. The things were on fire, every single one, and they were fpping their heads off, trying to get away. One was diving instead, like it was going to kill Leah no matter what.

  Uh.

  Another memory popped into my mind, of Leah smiling at me as I examined a particur munition blueprint for her Dakka. The ones with the spatial anchors that could form a net, lock down a target, and move it.

  "Leah! Use the anchoring rounds to crash it into the Twenty-Eight!"

  She froze for just a moment, then grinned evilly. It made the scrunching lines between her eyebrows go away, which was a real blessing for lowering my own stress levels. I breathed a little easier and grinned back.

  An eyeblink ter, the bright tracers disappeared and the sound of the cannons' pounding changed its timbre. I banked so I could look upwards easier.

  Violet, weirdly wavering slugs impacted all over the Eleven and stuck against its skin like wax candles. It only took a five second barrage to cover it in hundreds. Then the rear of each slug lit up and released violet gas that glowed from within. Like tiny stars hidden inside stelr dust clouds. The gas stretched into a net straining against the Eleven from below.

  The Eleven's trajectory began shifting, away from Leah, and more and more towards the Twenty-Eight. The gas thinned, and it sped up a little.

  I gnced at the Twenty-Eight, unsure if the house-sized flier would really kill it in the crash. The monstrous thing looked monstrously resilient.

  But, maybe I could help?

  Once Leah was done wrapping the beast in esoteric chains and the Dakka had switched back to grilling the other Elevens via remote application of molten metals, I approached the caught alien myself.

  "Tynea, can you modify Artificial Mass Balls and attach those stakes to them?"

  May I suggest a simir solution with better chances of success? The Mass Balls might work themselves free with their own weight.

  "Yes?"

  Blow open its butt and fill it up with gravity juice.

  "What?"

  There's a particur form of alloyed…concrete, for ck of a better word, that's used to pour foundations in gravitationally challenged pces. Such as asteroids to be mined, where it'll provide a basic form of attraction akin to gravity. It's dense, far heavier per liter than activated Mass Balls, and surprisingly cheap to produce. It'll turn the Eleven into a kinetic bunker buster. The catalog you'd have to unlock will be useful ter, too, in your efforts to build Leah's dream orphanage.

  "Oh, sure, let's do that," I said.

  Fantastic. Stick this mining charge where I've highlighted, please. It's from the same catalog.

  A rugged mushroom of metal popped into existence in front of me and I grabbed it before it had a chance to start falling. Painted a bright, gaudy orange, it was actually quite heavy.

  Heh. Construction ordnance.

  After I got Leah's approval via double thumbs-up emoji, I got real close to the alien troop transporter. Its posterior was a swollen sphincter, extended out like a bulbous…ovipositor. It was disgusting. It looked like it would y and/or shit out its passengers. I didn't want to know how they got in there.

  The spot Tynea highlighted was the constricted opening, of course.

  I used my psma torch to stab a hole into the thing's side where I could hold on. The squelchy sensations past the charred bits made me shudder.

  Yuck.

  I braced myself with my good leg and shoved the stake into the fleshy opening. It twitched and loosened a bit. I had to push the explosive deeper, elbow deep, so it wouldn't come loose. The intrusion of my arm made gross fluids squish out. I swallowed really, really hard so I wouldn't vomit. The wind would make that even less fun.

  I'd probably stunlock myself with an eternal loop of puke-in-face.

  Recognizing that my brain was trying to distract itself from the tragic, horrible reality of where I'd put my arm, I kicked off the Eleven instead and used the Second Wind to jet away. Tynea blew the mining charge as soon as I'd gained enough distance.

  The Eleven reacted to the geologically…anal…viotion by constricting its body hard. It straight up pulped whatever Antithesis were inside and jettisoned them in a river of green mush and blood. The air stank of cut grass and mold.

  I was so fucking gd I'd cleared out in time.

  We'd have to destroy the rain of biomass, considering that I saw a whole bunch of Antithesis nest seeds join the deluge.

  You'll need to get close again, please, said Tynea.

  "Urgh. Fine."

  I flipped around and let the thrusters bst me back towards the Eleven. Its insides were cavernous, lined with immensely powerful, squirming muscle.

  "Are you sure we can put your gravity juice in there? It kinda looks like it'll just expel it again."

  If we activate it as we pour it in, even the Eleven will not have the strength it would need to accomplish that. Now would be a good time too, we've arrived above the Twenty-Eight.

  "Okay, anything I need to do?"

  I'll teleport a steady flow of the liquid just above the opening. Hold this device into the stream, please, she said even as she let a green and orange gun-shaped object fall into my arms. Instead of a muzzle, it had a rge grate at the front.

  I slipped the belt of the unwieldy tool around my shoulders, and held its grate out above the Eleven's broken rear hole. A gray stream of sludge as thick as my arm appeared from nowhere. The moment it touched the grate, it audibly fizzed, turned bck and dropped like a megaton of bricks into the Eleven. I was kind of expecting the elongated string of heavy goop to punch right through, but it just stopped the moment it touched its flesh and began spreading out like syrup instead.

  Strange waves of an indescribable energy spilled from where the tool and gravity juice made contact. Some kind of reaction was happening and the waves it produced wafted against my skin like steam from boiling water. But this was almost more…concept than something real.

  Weird.

  It took roughly a minute for the Eleven to fill up halfway. Its internal muscles had intensified their squirming, but they weren't able to contract against the goop. I'd already had to crank up my thrusters just to stay up against the nearly doubled gravity, so close to this stuff.

  Then I heard a crack and the Eleven lurched downwards. Streams of violet gas from below told me that the weight was starting to exceed what Leah's anchoring slugs could bear.

  Before I could even say anything, Tynea cranked the flow-rate of the gravity juice way up. I was barely able to steady the gun thing and it took everything the Second Wind had to keep me upright.

  Coulda really used a second leg.

  My organic flight computer yelled at me, warning me that my tanks were going to run out in two seconds. I had my eyes fixed on the hole in the Eleven's butt.

  Three quarters. More cracks like a rifle firing and the alien dropped.

  Enough! Distance! Tynea yelled and shut off the goop delivery. The sudden ck of resistance unbanced me and I shot off hard, catapulted by the full power of the jets and corkscrewing through the air moments before I ran out of fuel.

  The gun-grate-thing slipped from my fingers and bashed me in the chest, right where I was still tender from the injury the stealthy Twenty-One's cws had given me.

  Grunting, I curled and stretched like a cat in free fall until I flipped onto my front, and let the wings out. The thrusters needed time to recharge. Part of my brain was busy wondering what processes they used to create their fuel, but then the world shook beneath me and Leah cursed into my ears.

  ***

  Eleeyah