I felt her queasiness as her words echoed in my head. “No, I don’t remember you ever saying, ‘Hey Cassie, the True have your face.’ I think I’d have remembered that.”
“We just found out. I thought we passed it on. With everything going on, I really don’t remember. It’s not just you though. They also based them on Emmy, the receptionist, and also Stephanie. She was at Stapledon.”
Stepping over to the body and staring down at it, Cassie held up her hand as if waving my comment away even as my implant reminded me that I had passed it on. Continue reading Mere Anarchy: Part 20→
Cassie and the gun’s arrival had distracted me from the Rook’s final killbot, something I realized as a wave of fear went through me.
The emotional push from knowing that my life could end at any moment left me scanning my HUD only to have the implant draw my attention to the small yellow glow behind the bot. It had flown past me in my moment of inattention and, contrary to its previous behavior, it wasn’t adjusting its course.
It should have had a backup controller in the mouthguard. They’d taken the rest of Grandpa’s design. Sure, the mouthguard took a little bit to learn to use, didn’t give you the precision of hand controls, made the helmet design more complicated, and theoretically, all you needed to control the suit’s major functions was one hand, but what if you needed both hands for something complicated while flying?
In the face of all that, I knew what the first thing I had to do was. Send Lim a message so that he knew that he was right. The Nine had infiltrated the FBI—and by the way, they’d also infiltrated the Engineering Department of my university.
In the grand scheme of things, the FBI was more important to the country, but the university had a more immediate impact on my life. Lim would want to know in any case. Continue reading Truth and the True: Part 12→
With everything going on at Higher Ground, you’d think that I’d work on that and nothing else, but life wasn’t that simple.
We’d gotten to that point in the semester when the tests begin to appear and papers along with them. Electronic engineering and materials science weren’t majors with a lot of papers, but I did have to turn in a couple of short ones explaining the technical choices I’d made on projects. The tests weren’t bad—Dr. Strazinsky’s calculus class asked about material I’d learned on my own and “Principles of Photonics” was interesting enough that I couldn’t ignore it. Continue reading Truth and the True: Part 1→
Possible responses hung in my head, most of them bad. I settled on, “I’m sorry. I wish we could have done something, but none of us are any good at healing.”
I thought back to my friend Alex. He was good at healing. It would have been nice if the Ghosts had grabbed him along with Rachel. He couldn’t have survived the trip without a spaceship, and everything I knew through my implant and Rachel said that they didn’t bother with them.
Kals shook her head. “Iolan could have done it if he had access to all his equipment. The Ascendancy killed her in more ways than one. I hate them. I don’t know how, but somehow we have to destroy them. Not everybody, but the Ascendant and the Ascendant Council, the Guard… It all needs to end.” Continue reading Trees & Shields: Part 36→
“What I’m asking is probably simple for you—take out the people who are trying to kill us or hide all of us or maybe move us somewhere else? I don’t know. A teleport would be ideal.”
She didn’t say anything but I could feel flickers of her emotions, much as I felt Daniel’s when I was back home. It wasn’t a telepathic connection or maybe it was, but if it was it felt different—bigger—a forty room mansion instead of your standard four bedroom house.
At the same time that the Ascendancy forces began to charge, bright light came from the sky toward the Waroo ship, hitting it in an explosion of light. The ship didn’t fall out of the sky.
Knowing that, I knew that the Waroo were okay or okay-ish. Their shields were still up. If they’d fallen, chunks of the ship would be falling from the sky, burning all the way down. All the same, they couldn’t be as much help. They were maneuvering to respond to the fighters, blasting upward with their weapons.
That meant the obvious, they weren’t firing at the Ascendancy troops, meaning the Ascendancy had no reason not to kill us all.
I zoomed in on the conversation, deciding that I wanted to know what Jadzen was telling Weffrik Aut to do. I supposed that I could have used my bots to listen in. I still had a few, but using the sonic systems as a shotgun microphone struck me as less likely for the Ascendancy’s soldiers to notice or stop.
I fiddled with the system for a few seconds and I began to hear their voices. The sound wasn’t perfect. It contained bits of static and sometimes a word or two from conversations behind them would become a little too loud, but I could hear them talk. Continue reading Trees & Shields: Part 25→
Cassie turned to watch Jadzen walk toward the Ascendancy troops. Her lips twisted. “It had better be brilliant because there’s not much she can do if she’s just going to walk over there. I’m sure they’d be able to detect if she’s a suicide bomber or if she’s carrying a gun to shoot them or something.”
I thought about it for a second. “She’s a motivator. Maybe she’s hoping to use that? The impression that I got from Kals was that Jadzen was among their best before she decided to turn against the Ascendancy. I mean, Kals was in the same program or something and she could get past my anti-voice defense. We probably avoided getting taken over a few different times because she told me how she did it and I changed my system.” Continue reading Trees & Shields: Part 24→
The Legion of Nothing: A Series of Online Superhero Novels (Updates Monday and Thursday)
