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Lucia bit her lip to distract herself from her mounting panic.
She hurt all over her body, but she was fairly certain there were no serious wounds to contend with. Roland had preached the gospel of quality armor to her on enough occasions that rare indeed was the time she went on a mission without a Level II tac harness and plates. Fox’s fusillade had cracked several, and bruised her in many places, but his tiny pistol had been far too weak to penetrate. Manny had not been so clever. He had never worn real armor before, and he wasn’t sure how it would have affected his ability to sneak about. The scout had settled for a light, Level I vest instead of the bulkier harness and plates. The vest ended up being superfluous, anyway. Because the shots came upward from the floor, Fox’s bead had entered through Manny’s unprotected armpit. It had traveled through his shoulder and exited at his clavicle. The wound would be grievous enough under any circumstance, but Lucia was convinced that it had severed his brachial artery.
This was a new situation for Lucia, with new fears and new outcomes for her brain to calculate. Her nanobots, having no experience with this paradigm, could offer only the most basic assistance with her mounting panic. She was on her own with her anxiety once again, and she hated it. She had gotten quite accustomed to all the wonderful things the machines that lived in her body and replaced many of her cells could do for her. Lucia liked that part. She liked being strong, fast, and agile. More so than anything else however, she especially liked being fearless. For so much of her life, her anxiety had held her down. It was a monkey on her back that fed on itself and grew larger as it did so. It was not enough for the fear to pop up at inconvenient times. No, it had to come as a crippling terror rendering her weak and useless. When she had learned to manage that, then there was the omnipresent fear of the fear. The endless gnawing knowledge even though she was fine if her concentration slipped at the wrong time she could be reduced to a useless sobbing mess once again. It was a horrible thing to live life being afraid of being afraid.
The machines were fixing this, and knowing they were on the job had taken some of the endless, interminable weight from her shoulders. She felt powerful again. Whole. She had thought she could accept the price for this. Losing her fear bore the risk of altering he personality into something darker, or perhaps more robotic. This seemed like a bargain to her at the time. Now, as her fingers slipped for a third time pulling the release tab on her second bottle of ElastoQuet, she wondered if she should reconsider.
How did I not check for a gun? How could I be so careless?
She knew the answer to that.
Because I’m super fast and wearing armor. I didn’t think to check because I didn’t need to. I wasn’t afraid of a gun, so I didn’t care.
If she had been just a little more nervous and a little less casual, Manny might not be dying on the floor of the enemy’s stronghold right now. Her wonderful, empowering confidence may have just resulted in a teammate’s death. The young man, whose face had always been a rich dark tan, lay on the floor looking ashen and pallid. The floor was carpeted, so the total volume of blood staining it black where he rested was hard to determine, but the rug squelched and wept crimson tears when pressed with anything more than the slightest touch of force. Lucia was not a doctor, but nobody could lose that much blood without serious consequences. As a final, bitter, ironic touch, she was about to have a panic attack on top of it all. If her reckless tactics and lack of fear failed to kill her teammate, the overwhelming flood of unvarnished terror turning her fingers to clay and her mind to tapioca stood ready to finish the job.
The terrified woman bit down harder, tasting blood, and she hissed out long slow breaths. Searching for a quiet place in her mind, she willed herself to calm as she inhaled for a four-count, and then exhaled for the same. She focused her entire attention to the task of opening an ElastoQuet. Desperate, she willed each individual finger to move, visualizing what it would look like when they at last complied. Then, finally and to her extreme relief, they did. Her sense of time was dilated further than she had ever experienced, and a task taking her less than one second to complete felt like it had taken hours. But the tab peeled away and the applicator tip sat exposed and waiting.
Lucia had widened the entrance wound with her knife already. With her gorge rising and her fear a crushing pressure in her ears, the former corporate executive stuck her hand inside the weeping red flesh of her friend’s arm and peeled back muscles to expose a gushing red nub of stringy meat. Breathing in tortured sobs, she fumbled the ElastoQuet near what she hoped was the upstream end of the damaged blood vessel. It was bleeding so heavily she assumed it had to be.
She pressed down firmly on the activator stud and a stream of tiny thread-like strands jetted from the white plastic tip. Trembling, she spread and smeared them as best she could around the oozing artery. When the canister was empty, she twisted the stud to the right and pressed it again. The strands all twisted and contracted when she did, binding around the artery in a tight knot and sealing it. Manny lurched and exhaled a low moan as this happened, his eyes opening wide with pain and surprise. Then he lay back down with a thud.
With the worst of the bleeding stopped, she now faced the daunting prospect of closing the hole with a can of ReStaunch expanding foam. Repeating the process she had used to open the ElastoQuet, Lucia managed the task of opening the can with less trouble this time. Forcing herself to move slowly, she filled the exit wound with the slimy yellow goo and checked Manny’s vitals again. He was breathing in quick shallow breaths, and his eyes fluttered without closing or opening completely. But his pulse, though weak, was regular. She found an ampule of atropine in the first aid kit and gave Manny a shot to strengthen his heart beat, and a moment later his eyes stopped fluttering and he shifted about like he wanted to get up.
“No, Manny. Lie still. Once I’m sure you’re stable, I’ll carry you out of here and get to a hospital.”
His eyes, heavy-lidded and slow, looked around, “Fox?” He croaked.
“Don’t worry about him. We’ll get him next time.”
“No,” he lurched again. Lucia held him down.
“Relax Manny, we’ll get him, don’t worry.”
“No,” he said again, as if she did not understand a very simple concept. His hand fumbled and flopped at his side until it found his satchel, the brown leather dyed black with his own blood. He tore open the flap with clumsy fingers and dumped the contents one-handed onto the gore-soaked carpet. Then he quested with his hand for some item. He was too weak to look over, and so he searched by feel until he found it. His fingers closed over his handheld and he lifted it to waver unsteadily in front of Lucia’s face.
She wrinkled her nose, not understanding. Then she read the scrolling message on the blood-smeared screen and her eyes widened.
“Oh, Manny! What a sneaky, nasty, clever little bastard you are!”
The notification was simple and clear:
TRACKING SIGNAL: STRONG <980MhZ> BEARING: <265>
The “DISTANCE” number was ever changing, climbing as Fox ran further and further away.
“Go... get... him...” the young man insisted.
“Not yet. Hospital first.”
“No!” Manny insisted and pointed to himself, “Terrorist. Hospital... no good.”
Lucia smiled down at the boy, “Manny. You have a lot to learn about our little town. There are eight places in Dockside alone that will treat you without anyone ever finding out about it. Trust me. Hospital first.”
She picked him up as gently as she could. Since stealth was no longer important, she would not concern herself with the challenge of getting Manny back up through the hole in the reactor room floor. There was a stairwell just a few doors down the hall, and it seemed as good an exit as any, so long as she didn’t mind making noise or running into another patrol. He weighed about a hundred and fifty pounds, which while heavy enough to be noticeable, did not feel like too much for her to carry to the stairs. Going up would be unpleasant, but she would manage.
Lucia wrapped the wound in a bandage and then bound the arm tight to his side so it would not move. Then with a brief apology for the indignity of it all, she pulled him up and over her shoulder in a fireman’s carry. Manny grunted and hissed, biting down on his pain but otherwise not complaining.
With her partner over her left shoulder, and her pistol in her right hand, Lucia exited the office and made her way to the stairs. As she moved, she noticed that all of her perceptions had altered from when they had started the mission. The fear was back, the uncertainty and trepidation returning now that the operation had taken on a new and unexpected turn. Not in a crippling way, but in the sort of normal buzzing background anxiety she had grown familiar with over the years.
New situation. She thought. The nanobots haven’t learned what to do with this. She realized she did not want them to learn how to fix this feeling. She was scared and anxious because someone was hurt and needed her to help. That was normal. That was appropriate.
Not all fear is bad. I need to talk to Dad about this.
Her booted foot eliminated the need to work any of Manny’s infiltrator magic on the stairwell door. Two kicks bent the bolt and broke the latch, rendering both devices incapable of serving their intended purposes. Lucia liked to go through doorways fast and hard. Her speed and preternatural accuracy gave her distinct advantages when she employed this tactic. Now, carrying her wounded partner, she had to take a more measured approach. She peeked through the opening, leading with her pistol, and swept the landing from left to right in a wide arc. The landing appeared clear, so she moved through with a brisk step and swept the muzzle both up and down to clear the other landings.
She registered two guards coming down. They were dressed like the previous men they had encountered, and they were moving like focused predators down from the lobby level. Lucia assumed they were moving to investigate all the noise she was making, or perhaps encroaching at the command of a fleeing Reynard. She evaluated her options in an eighth of a second, and action followed decision with no delay at all.
She made the shots one-handed, carrying a wounded man, leaning out into a stairwell, and shooting at two moving targets twenty feet above her. If her marksmanship proved imperfect, there were a lot of justifiable reasons for it.
But her marksmanship, as usual, was flawless. Each man grew a 5mm hole under the chin and then fell in a heap to the landing. It was likely they had never even known she was there. She felt a twinge of regret at killing so casually. If she had not been carrying Manny, she might had dropped them without killing them. But Manny came first, and while she still did not like to kill, she could not bring herself to regret it too hard in this case.
I guess the ‘bots haven’t completely ruined me yet, she lamented silently.
Lucia trotted up the stairs with her payload. She started at a brisk jog, but carrying a grown man while ascending stairs was just a little more than even her impressive musculature was up for. Before long she had to slow to a plodding climb, which felt to her accelerated perceptions like the progress of a glacier. This too, frustrated the nanobots trying to regulate her brain chemistry. She had a strong urge to drop Manny and run at her top speed to safety, but recognizing the influence of her augmentation, she stifled it.
After thirty seconds that felt like an hour, she kicked her way through the lobby stairwell door and staggered out. Forty feet away was the exit, and its proximity bolstered her resolve. She jogged across the reception area and burst through the exterior doors onto the street. Her comm was in her hand before she made it three steps and she was pinging for an aerocar by the fourth.
Manny groaned softly as he jostled on her shoulder and Lucia sighed.
We’re going to make it.