“I think we’re ready”, Eddie announced and they all quickly crowded around the holo table in the General’s tent. Several of the General’s techs continued to buzz around assisting Eddie and it looked like a sharply attractive blonde, whose uniform and rank identified her as a ‘Corporal Gibbs’, had been in charge. But now she seemed too pleased to be working with the legendary Dr Mathers to care about being supplanted. As she adjusted controls and Eddie tapped away at his workslate an image slowly formed, sharpened, and clarified in the air over a collapsible holo-table. Tammy immediately saw the satellite, smaller than her pinky, floating at a forty-five-degree angle in the upper right quadrant of the holo. It looked surprisingly delicate to her, like a long needle with complex structures at the top.
“It’s so small.“, she commented.
“Space is a big place”, the general replied, “Makes it hard to judge the size of things. It’s actually close to twelve hundred meters long”, and Tammy noticed that he had somehow replaced his hat during the five minutes it had taken her and Jacob to check on Barnes and Janelle. Fortunately, older woman’s head injury had turned out to be relatively minor and a few stitches would be all that was needed for her arm. But Barnes had not been so lucky and was being airlifted to Kansas City on one of the helicopters. They were cautiously confident about his chances, but made it clear that he would have a long recovery ahead of him. Vallard and Clark had remained at medical, where the doctors and soldiers were openly marveling at the giant, while surreptitiously sneaking admiring glances at the nurse.
“Geez”, Ginney exclaimed peering at the satellite, “That’s like three football fields. How could you lose it?”
“Well for one thing it has the most advanced stealth technology ever developed.“, Gibbs interjected, “Stuff we don’t use much, because we don’t want anyone knowing how far ahead we actually are. It can even make itself invisible to the naked eye or high powered telescopes. So with all of that running, it’s practically undetectable.”
“But”, Ginney began, “How can it...?”
“Don’t ask”, the General said, interrupting him bluntly.
“But...!“, Ginney protested.
“Do... Not... Ask...“, the General stated flatly, and the look on his face precluded further discussion.
“Uh...“, Elena interjected to change the subject, “Did it... run out of Ammo, like Jacob said?”
“In a manner of speaking”, Gibbs explained, “It still has three hundred or so rounds in it. But it takes a LOT of energy to power a rail gun, and even at full capacity it can only get off eight or nine shots before it needs recharging. That can take days, or even weeks using solar, depending on what time of year it is.”
“That’s all good to know, but none of its important now.“, Jacob interjected bluntly, and stepped up to the table. Then he surprised everyone by waving his hand over it with a degree of familiarity that implied expertise. Immediately it zoomed back out, panned, and a small glowing dot appeared in the bottom left quadrant, gradually closing in on the satellite.
“There she is. Can we zoom in closer?”
“Uh... yeah... sure”, Gibbs stammered and guided the table’s interface as Eddie made another series of adjustments from his workslate. The image grew fuzzy for a moment, but the dot grew larger until her figure could be distinguished. Then it enlarged and adjusted until she filled the entire frame. After a quick re-focus, what it displayed brought a collective gasp from everyone in the room.
Before them in a nearly life size representation, the newly reborn Jessica cruised effortlessly in the hard vacuum of space. Like a liquid blade of deadly quicksilver; she was nothing but obsidian blacks and brightly burnished chromes... with the perfection of her form making her both beautiful and terrifying. The lethality of her exquisite design shone forth with the kind of beauty only found in lovingly crafted weapons. She turned slowly as she travelled, reflecting back the stars and earth, while her visor unerringly tracked the satellite. Tammy could see the faintly glowing lines of a sophisticated HUD burning behind the gloss black surface, continuously displaying a stream of complex data.
“That’s her? The girl from the nanite cocoon?“, the General asked with his eyebrows raised so high that Tammy expected them to disappear under his hat.
“Not nanites, micronites, but yeah... that’s her”, Eddie replied with his voice hushed in awe..., ” The world’s first purely bio-synthetic, cybernetic organism... a living weapon so advanced it’s beyond our ability to comprehend.”
“My God… I would never have believed this if I wasn’t seeing it”, Gibbs declared, her voice as subdued as Eddie’s, “I mean… I read your reports on her, and you said she’d be powerful, but... how did she get into orbit?”
“I think she fought fire with fire...“, Eddie replied, “improvised her own rail gun out of the facility’s support pillars. NORAD and the Apex satellites registered her launch as hypersonic by a multiple of thirteen point five. So she was going just shy of ninety-two hundred miles an hour when she came out of the crevasse.”
“That’s incredible”, the General murmured.
“How could she possibly survive that?“, Tammy asked, and Eddie took a moment to regard her seriously.
“Well, best I can guess is that by assembling her at a molecular level, Sheng could make perfect versions of her components. He could forge alloys we can’t and make flawless versions of the ones we can”, Eddie ventured, “It’s been theorized that a blend of copper and iron would have incredible properties, but they separate like oil and water if there’s even the slightest amount of gravity present. Despite that, her body is filled with it. For everyone else even our best methods of producing ordinary alloys introduce millions of tiny flaws. But the ceramiplastics and alloys in her skeleton showed none of that. Sheng avoided it all by just assembling her atomic structures in perfect geometric patterns. Perfect steel. Perfect titanium. Perfect everything. Her endo, and exo skeletons are composite layers of palladium silver alloys, hybridized graphene, maraging steel, and high performance polyethylene. There’s a hexagonal latticework of the same alloys and materials running through her at a cellular level and enough titanium steel to make her as heavy as a truck. We saw a dozen other structural technologies inside her that we are at a complete loss to explain and as far as we can tell only trace amounts of her original human flesh are present. She’s become a molecularly assembled, virtually indestructible cybernetic organism... her new body is a technological Juggernaut designed just to host her consciousness.”
Gibbs still looked incredulous, “But going from zero to ninety-two hundred miles per hour in a quarter of a second means she had to take close to seventeen hundred G’s. You can’t even comprehend how much force that is... l mean, the tungsten steel alloy projectiles the StarLance fires are nearly a foot thick. They still get compressed nearly twenty percent by the acceleration and it only uses about half as much power as she did... If she can survive something like that unscathed, what else is she capable of?”
“Merciless vengeance.“, Tammy replied flatly, “On a scale we can’t even imagine. She vowed that she would kill The Embodied with her bare hands... and she made damn well sure she had the muscle to do it.”
“But she’s just a kid, I mean... I couldn’t stay mad at my friends for more than a day when I was her age!“, Gibbs protested. But Tammy fixed her with a level stare, “Have you read her file?”
“Just Dr Mathers’ reports, why?”
“Because if you had, you’d know that she watched both her parents be crushed to death in front of her so powerfully that she was covered in their blood and tissues. Less than a second later she had a hand and a leg ripped off while the bones in the other two limbs were crushed into gravel. Somewhere in there she took a blow to the face so severe that it bruised her cerebral cortex. Then she dragged herself from the wreckage on the one bloody stump she had left, only to see that the bridge she was on was about to collapse and kill her anyway.”
“Oh... my God”, Gibbs gasped quietly.
“God had nothing to do with how she got hurt, and if Jacob here hadn’t jumped to the bridge to save her she would have died right then. As it was, she still had dozens of grand mal seizures and flat lined several times before and during surgery... but she came back on her own every time. No defib, no atropine, no adrenaline. Sallinger said he’d never seen anything like it. At one point her brain and heart showed no activity for almost six minutes, and she turned grey. He started to call the time of death - and then she kicked and started breathing again. She stayed in a coma for six weeks after that and came out of it with a scream that froze the blood of anyone who heard it. Then just a few weeks later, she gave permission for us to cut off the leg she had left without even blinking. Anything to get to a place where she could start working on revenge. To the best of my medical knowledge, this ‘kid’ has stared down death, or downright kicked it in the balls more times than any human in history. The fact is, she didn’t go into that chrysalis to become unkillable... she already was.”
Gibbs swallowed, and for the second time in the last several hours Ginney did something out of character and spoke up, “Uh, you guys should know... There’s something else.”
They all turned to look at him curiously, and he flushed before explaining.
“I... I could lose my license if anyone finds out I told you this. But, as a psychiatrist I’ve never encountered a mind even remotely like hers. I mean, I did a full battery on her as a matter of protocol and her results were, uh... bizarre. I wanted to ask some of my professors back at Harvard what it could mean, but Barnes said no. So I did a series of HDMRIs on her brain while I ran her through the Grassian Moral Dilemmas.”
“The what?“, the General asked...
“Grassian’s Moral Dilemmas. It’s a series of questions designed to determine your moral character. Each one presents a no-win scenario to see how you respond. There really aren’t any right or wrong answers, but how you handle them says a lot about how you would handle a moral crisis...”
“Alright”, the General grunted, “So what... she scored perfect morals?”
“Well that’s just it. Like I said, we always thought that there were no right or wrong answers... until her... she actually beat the test.”
“What?“, Tammy exclaimed, “You can’t ‘beat’ Grassian. That’s not how it works.”
“Yeah well, that’s what all of the experts have believed for the last hundred years or so. But when I asked her about the ‘Father’s Delimma’, where you’re in a concentration camp, and a guard is going to hang your son. He says you have to pull the chair out from under him or he’ll do it and kill you, plus several other prisoners... Do you know what she said?... She said, ‘I pick up the chair before my son steps up on it and I kill the guard’. So I told her that the other guards would just kill her and her son, and she says, ‘So what? The guard was going to kill us both anyway. This way the other prisoners can live, the bastard guard dies, and my son and I get to see how many more of them we can kill before they kill us’. All the while her brain is lighting up this HDMRI like a Christmas tree. Totally abnormal readings, clusters that have no business communicating are practically screaming at each other, and she had enough overall brain activity to register as a seizure. One powerful enough to cause severe and fatal brain damage in anyone else. But she’s fine... and starts asking me if I know what’s for lunch in the cafeteria.”
The General let out a long whistle, and Tammy just stared at Ginney open-mouthed.
“Oh just wait, it gets better”, Ginney continued, “I asked her the Trolley question next... you know ‘A trolley is running out of control and in its path are five people who have been tied to the track, but you can flip a switch, and send the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track too. What do you do?’”
They all waited silently until Ginney went on.
“She says, ‘I flip the switch and throw myself on the track to stop the trolley before it hits the person tied there.’ Now I gotta tell you guys... I almost shit my pants in the control room. She was right, it was the only truly moral solution because the only person who dies does so of their own free will. The rest of her answers were like that... perfect solutions. She’s an eleven-year-old girl and I’m listening to her beat dilemmas designed by the man who literally wrote the book on moral reasoning!”
“And then weeks later she finds out that the people responsible for everything she went through are twelve-foot-tall invincible cyborgs”, Eddie added.
“Yeah, think about it. It was the Father’s dilemma and the Trolley all in one, but she was powerless to act on her morals. Then along comes this AI in her micronite healing tank and he offers her more power than she could have ever imagined.”
“Well, in about ten seconds she’s going to need it.“, the General declared, returning their attention to the holo as Gibbs zoomed back out a bit, “The StarLance was designed to defend itself against hostile spacecraft or boarding attempts.”
“With what?“, Jacob inquired in a concerned voice.
“Everything”, Gibbs replied quietly and turned back to the holo.
Her statement silenced them all and they watched as Jessica rapidly closed the distance to her target, fueled on by the fury of her launch. Before long she drew within striking distance and a long, delicate blade extruded from the underside of her right wrist. She grasped it and they all stared in disbelief as her hand rapidly disassembled itself, rotated and reformed thousands of complex components, and then reassembled around the blade to create a wickedly dangerous sword. She closed the last few meters and it looked for a moment as if she would overshoot, but then the blade flicked out and sparks flew as she sliced effortlessly through supports, structures, and machinery to slow herself down. Immediately, robotic armatures with sophisticated weaponry sprung forth from dozens of locations along the StarLance’s hull and began pouring firepower into her at a staggering rate.
But the cybernetic sylph simply ignored them and the hail of thumb-sized slugs, micro-missiles, spinning blades, lasers, and things they couldn’t even identify bounced off her without so much as slowing her down. In a staggering display of superior engineering her armor barely rippled at the impacts points and less than a second after each blow it would return to a mirror-like perfection. Bullets flattened and fell away, blades shattered on contact, lasers refracted off, and explosions went out like candles.
“Holy shit!... Micronite BioArmor!“, Eddie gasped, “She’s using it to absorb and redirect the energy.”
The General followed this exclamation with a stunned whisper, “Gibbs, those are the weapons we designed to even the odds against the Corsican assailants... but she’s just... shrugging them off!” Then he turned to her, “You better get a call started to the White House. I think... I think we’re gonna lose the StarLance.”
“Yes Sir”, she replied sharply and strode purposefully from the tent.
Meanwhile, with a deft and graceful move, Jessica reached out and hooked a support bar with the backside curve of her sword, executed a perfect forward twisting somersault, and landed gracefully on a support rail. Powerful magnets must have kicked in, because she stood there confidently with her feet shoulders width apart. Then, like a tiny, invincible Valkyrie, she sprinted forward with impossible agility and sliced away supports, equipment, and weaponry as she went. Nothing slowed her down, not even the massive guns that rose up from the head of the satellite and fired short range micro-nuclear missiles at her. She simply swatted most of them away with the flat of her sword and did so at speeds too fast for their eyes to follow. Warheads went spinning off into space and exploded without so much as disturbing her balance. The concussive blasts rocked the StarLance, but none of it slowed her by even a fraction. It was as if she could sense and react to things almost as fast as they happened. It was deeply disturbing to watch, with essentially no delay between the attacks and her responses.
“Check it out. Whoever’s running that thing is watching.“, Ginney noted, and pointed to a series of camera arms on the satellite’s head. They had all swiveled around and were tracking her intensely. Jessica must have noticed them as well, because she suddenly paused for a moment, allowing several of the missiles to detonate against her without so much as a flinch. Then she whipped her left hand out so fast that it seemed to simply disappear, and reappeared - with the last missile clutched in its grasp.
Then she slowly crushed it.
The resulting detonation exploded out between her fingers with a blinding flash, but failed to loosen her grip at all. She slowly opened her hand a second later and let the fragments drift into space. The message was clear.
You cannot harm me, but you’re beginning to piss me off.
For a moment there was no movement from the StarLance, and she stood stock still. Her featureless black visor and the camera array stayed locked on each other like legendary gunfighters out of the old west. Then without warning, the satellite went dark, all of its weaponized arms retracted, and aside from a single red signal light at its tip, it seemed to go dead in space.
“Oh geez... fuck me.“, the General said, and the gravity of his tone caused everyone to turn.
“What?“, Ginney asked.
The General looked almost ashen as he replied, “In the event that the StarLance has been compromised, it has a small amount of fissionable material on board. It just redirected all of its power to charge the emitters for an electron bombardment of that material - resulting in an explosion somewhere in the low megaton range. But it shouldn’t be able to do that. Safety protocols are supposed to prevent it from detonating low enough to cause an EMP event.”
This statement was met with mostly blank stares and so Eddie offered up a more common term explanation, “It has a small nuclear bomb and it’s getting ready to blow it. If it does that while it’s this close to earth - it could destroy every electronic device from Mexico to Alaska.”
In the stunned silence that followed there was a creaking sound from the other side of the room and everyone turned to look at Jacob. His grip on the table had tightened to the point that the steel edging had bent around his fingers.
“How long?“, he asked in a barely controlled voice.
“About two minutes.“, the General responded, and before Jacob could say anything else Elena pointed back to the holo and interrupted, “Wait!... You guys... look.”
In the table top holo, Jessica had walked casually up the remaining distance between her and the control housing of the satellite and stood peering down at it. Her head was tilted at an odd angle and after a moment she turned and took several steps to her right. Then she peered down again with her head at a different, but equally odd perspective. Whatever she saw seemed to confirm something to her and so she knelt down as her sword retracted and returned her right hand to normal. Then she slid her left hand along the steel hull of the housing for a moment, and adhered it to the surface like her feet. Her right arm pulled back… and with a strike so fast it again defied their eyes to follow, she punched almost shoulder deep into the satellite.
“What is she doing?“, Tammy asked and in response the General whistled and exclaimed quietly, “Well fuck me”, as Jessica’s arm yanked itself back out. Then she stood up with what looked like a baseball sized metallic sphere in her hand. She inspected it for a moment with her head flicking between variations on the strangely insectile angles they had seen before. Then she flipped it casually over her shoulder and out into open space.
Ginney looked at the rest of them, knotted the fingers of both of his hands into his wildly splayed hair, and then sat down heavily on a nearby crate. “Did… did... she just yank a nuclear warhead out of a satellite and threw it into space like a toy?”
“Apparently so”, the General intoned, locking eyes with Jacob, “Clever girl you’ve got there.“,
The white haired man locked eyes with him before he replied evenly, “You have no idea.”
Then they all watched as Jessica knelt and hovered her left hand over the hole she had just created. A strange material like spider silk extruded from her fingertips and in a matter of seconds it formed a complex series of connections to the hull. Then it began to glow in a softly pulsing neon-tinged blue and plunged down into the satellite’s control housing.
Sᴇarch the FindNovel.net website on G𝘰𝘰gle to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.
If you find any errors (non-standard content, ads redirect, broken links, etc..), Please let us know so we can fix it as soon as possible.
Report
