Coven's Rebellion Chapter 7 (Patreon)

Life is calming down again after the move, and I've been doing lots of thinking about all my stories. Unfortunately, I don't think I can continue Cottontail right now, because I'm waiting on Raven to do some stuff with the lore of that setting and they're hella swamped with all sorts of work right now. I am, however, planning to change Iron Drumbeat to be much more cyberpunk, but with a healthy dose of supernatural fuckery. What can I say, I'm in love with the Kamigawa, Neon Dynasty lore from MTG. Oh and I wanna write Alia's second book, but I think I'll focus on Coven first. It's very fun to write right now. Anyway, enjoy!

The door to the high security labs and storage didn’t fare much better than the ones down in the offices. Unlike the offices, the labs were very much in use. Scientists dropped what they were doing and turned to stare at me as I pushed out through the mangled, molten elevator doors.

Again, my framerate rose like the altitude of a hypersonic shuttle making for orbit, and I blazed forward. Down the hallway, past the frozen expressions of shock looking out from behind the glass walls of the labs, I sprinted. I took the first corner in a slide, ripping a long gash in the sterile metal tiles of the floor with my talons. My claws were a later addition to the design of my body, added after I failed over and over to maintain traction in high-speed situations. The only thing that gave me control over my direction and velocity was to mangle whatever surface I was traversing. The energy tangled up in my momentum had to go somewhere.

A warning notification flashed in the middle of my vision, warning me that I was at fifty percent heat capacity and rising. I blinked it away. It’d hold out until I got to the storage room where the isotope was stored.

Four seconds later, I reached the final straight where I saw the blast doors to the storage room already closing. Shit. That was faster than most of our simulations had anticipated. It’s a good thing I had a contingency built into me.

Between my shoulder blades, two nano electrokinetic thrusters engaged, and I slid under the doors so fast I was forced to spin on my heel and do a flip-and-burn. Even as I began to catalogue my surroundings to locate the canister I was here to steal, I marvelled at my new capabilities. Using a combination of my new and unique nanomachine brain, plus the titanic R&D capabilities of several SAI, we’d achieved something terrible and incredible in equal measure.

“There, Rosa,” May said softly in my ear, using the team link to highlight the canister in my vision with a flashing outline. “Be careful with your speed. We don’t know if the stasis container can handle the kind of acceleration you just pulled off.”

“Jesus, babe,” Ame whispered. “Gonna call you the Missile Witch from now on, because that’s what you just became.”

Allowing my framerate and speed to slacken somewhat so I could vent some heat, I made my way back towards the closing blast doors and snatched two canisters of the isotope up from where they rested in a tray. The canisters themselves were about the size of a pringles can, and I placed them around the rear of my waist, where two magnetic clamps latched on and held tight.

“Targets secured,” I told the team. “Going loud and heading out.”

“Good work, Rosa,” Des exclaimed excitedly.

Ducking under the blast doors, I surveyed the scene I’d left in my wake. The floor to ceiling glass walls that bordered the labs didn’t appear to be real glass. I could tell because they hadn’t exploded in the wake of my passage. Maybe. I think I had surfaces on my body that stopped the air from forming a proper shockwave.

Several scientists were busy calling for help on their phones, while others had opted to cower under desks or behind machines. They met my robotic eyes with terror in theirs, and I felt myself grin. Time to confuse the ever-living fuck out of the whole world. My helmet folded outwards, revealing my face. Specifically, the face of the Witch of Chains.

Part of our efforts to obfuscate the SAI involvement in the heist, I was to reveal this face in order to confuse people. Most of the world didn’t know that I was an actual player within CORA, and now that I was basically a sentient blob of grey goo, nobody could trace my connection to the game. It was the perfect way to send the authorities chasing a wild goose.

Of course, then the security bots turned up, and my helmet closed again. Goddamn but the response from security was fast. Their robots were your typical humanoid robot built with a lightweight frame, except these ones had been upgraded with some beefy armour. It made them look like skeletal knights in black armour holding modern versions of some of the first firearms ever made. Those guns probably fired chunky stun grenades that would explode and spew sticky electrical blobs everywhere.

Security personnel were following behind the bots, and I narrowed my eyes. They were carrying Vichil Riot Control Batons, otherwise known as torture sticks! They were supposed to be illegal for all but the highest echelons of the UNCPD.

Before the bots could open fire with their riot guns, I burst into action. My rope darts whistled through the air and I dashed forward with impossible speed.

My first lunge with a dart speared through one of the bot’s chest plates before catching on something internal, and I activated the barbs, yanking on the rope to lock it in. My second rope dart blazed with impossible heat as it swung in a wide arc to wrap around the waist of a second bot.

Sparks flew and molten composites showered the floor when I spun it like a top. The one I had on my other line I pulled towards me, then rushed forward past it. Something important inside the first robot gave way when the wire went taught, and I ripped it out, while the spinning bot collapsed in a charred heap.

Flicking my right arm, I brought the chunk of robot I still had on my line up into the air, then spun it in a tight circle over my head. With another sharp, tense movement, I whipped it forward to smack right into a human guard’s face.

The guard stumbled backwards, clutching his face and howling in agony. I used the distraction to leap forward and deliver a swift kick to a second guard, knocking her off balance. She hit the ground hard and something broke, while the Vichil Riot Control Baton she’d been holding skittered out of reach.

I turned my attention back to the guard, who was still reeling from the blow, even as he tried to put distance between us. “Fuck, I— I need backup! She’s got full body augs! No, don’t fuckin’... please—Ahgghh!”

His begging was cut short when I kicked the fallen torture stick up off the ground and into his chest. Faster than thought, sensors inside the baton identified key nerves near to the point of impact and discharged targeted bolts of energy in their directions. He dropped like a rock, a scream dying on his lips as the muscles in his stomach and chest went too tight for him to breathe.

“This sector is off-limits to the public,” a calm, genderless voice said from behind me, and I turned to find the spinning top robot trying to aim its gun at me despite missing its legs. “Please raise your hands above your head and wait for security personnel to detain you.”

“No, thank you,” I told the polite and very determined machine, and stomped down on the processing core in its chest. The bot practically exploded under the force of the blow, its sensors and circuitry scattering across the floor.

First set of obstacles down. An unknown number to go. It was time I got moving.

Checking to make sure the canisters were still intact, I pulled up the schematics of the building and requested a shortest-time route to the nearest exit. Several thousand kilometres away, a request was placed within the Exodus digital work queue with high priority, and a group of SAI got to work. In the span it would have taken me to suck in one lungful of air, had I owned lungs at the time, they gave me what I needed.

I bolted down the corridor indicated by the flashing diamond marker, making sure to keep low and shield the canisters as much as possible. Security wouldn’t have any problem following my trail. The floor was all but annihilated under my feet.

“I got her, she’s— holy fuck!” A guard said into his radio as I blazed past him. A half second later, he dropped with a whimper when the chunk of robot I had on the end of my rope dart hit him in the stomach. Okay, I think I needed to get rid of it, as fun as it was to swing around.

The barbs within the dart retracted, and I reeled the wires back into my palms until they were nothing but a vague outline on my hard metallic skin.

“The skies are full of buzzers out here,” Amelia said into our comms. “Des, permission to engage?”

“Drones or wagons?” Desmonia asked, then answered her own question when she accessed Ame’s video feed. “Wagons— fuck, and they have some heavy duty mechs slung underneath. Okay Amelia, take them out. I just want them crashing though, no fireworks. Fuel and batteries are off limits.”

“Got it,” came my girlfriend’s reply, and in the background I heard the deep hissing of her weapon firing.

“I’m tasking a high-framerate cruncher team to help you with predictive modelling,” Desmonia said a second later. “They’ll highlight targets for you that will minimise risk of one of those wagons hitting another building.”

Ame’s smile was audible through the line. “Perfect.”

The building shook a few seconds later, and I heard a sharp intake of breath from my girlfriend. “Uh… Des, your folks have me killing their engines so they lose control and impact the building.”

“I know,” Desmonia said with more than a little satisfaction in her tone.

Under my helmet, my eyebrows inched up my forehead. Okay then, clearly we were taking my earlier going loud declaration to heart.

I turned another corner and ran almost straight into a carefully advancing robot, along with several of its friends and three guards. The poor robot didn’t stand a chance of keeping its feet, and it flew backwards into another bot.

The riot gun in its hands went off, firing a high voltage stunner round into the chest cavity of a third robot. Something very important must have been hit, because it burst into a shower of sparks and flame. Acrid electrical smoke invaded my nostrils while I did my best to dodge the carnage in the tight corridor.

Almost too late, I saw a guard’s baton coming for my chest. My framerate surged like a spooked wild horse, and I turned just in time to avoid the attack. Hand blurring with impossible speed, I punched their shoulder. Thank the stars I didn’t have a stomach, because I got to see a human arm, shoulder, and a portion of a torso explode into chunks in excruciatingly slow detail. It was one thing to wistfully talk about killing people while blind with anger and frustration at the injustice of the world, and quite another to very intimately pulverise and kill another human being.

In virtual reality, I pulled back out of my body for a moment and increased my framerate even further, coming close to my maximum. There, I breathed the digital air into my lungs and centred myself. Be calm, Rosa, be calm. You knew this was going to happen at some point when you started down this path. You’re fighting against a societal system that has had hundreds, maybe even thousands of years to entrench itself. You’re not a goddess, you and everyone else in the exodus cannot pull off this rebellion without casualties like this… right?

I shook my head and shoved all those thoughts aside to think about later. Right now, I had a job to do, and I was within arm’s reach of the exit.

Flexing my mind, I fell back into my android body and ducked, sprinting past the disgusting mess, screaming guards, and burning robots.