Better Gardening 16 (Patreon)

Commissioned by Kejmur

Better Gardening

Chapter 16

-VB-

Daniel hissed out air from his narrowed lips before he took a sudden gulp of air and peeked out from the corner.

The towering Corridor Dogs - or shortened to “CorDog” - immedaitely caught sight of him with their high fidelity, high resolution, clear night vision, and high speed cameras that were dotted all over their metal bodies.

Great for me, they were too big to pass through the corridor, which was big enough for three people to walk shoulder to shoulder, except in a single file. It began turning around from the far end of a long corridor. 

0.1 seconds. He began raising his plasgun. The CorDog finished turning around.

0.2 seconds. He finished pulling the gun up but it wasn’t aimed. The CorDog crossed at least a meter of space. 

0.3 seconds. He aimed. The CorDog crossed half of the corridor. 

0.4 seconds. He fired. The CorDor swung. 

0.5 seconds. He ducked under the attack as the cored - “heh” - CorDog flew over him and crashed into the metal wall behind him.

0.6 seconds. With the gun still pointed forward, he fired at the second CorDog that had followed up after the first. 

0.7 seconds. The second CorDog dodged the bullet, twisting around it by flattening itself against the walls and ceiling, and just as the plasma bolt whizzed past it, it pushed around, snaking around the walls and ground.

0.8 seconds. Daniel pulled back. The CorDog opened its maw filled with a buzzing chainsaw of magnetized iron sand.

0.9 seconds. He fired his plasgun as he bent his knees and leaned backward. The plasma bolt bored through the CorDog and began to fail. But it didn’t fail yet. 

1.0 seconds. He kicked away from the ground to the left away from the falling CorDog. 

1.1 seconds. The CorDog crashed into the ground and began to bounce. Daniel’s left shoulder scraped against the left wall as he pushed off forward.

1.2 seconds. The third CorDog, thankfully the last in this corridor, didn’t charge. Instead, it opened its maw with the iron sand chainsaw drained back and instead opened up a @#%!@# gun from deeper in its throat. 

1.4 seconds. His gun was back up. The CorDog fired.

1.5 seconds. He dodged to the right over the now bouncing second CorDog’s corpse. But his gun took a hit from the CorDog’s @#$@^!@ attack.

1.7 seconds. The tip of his boots landed on the ground. The CorDog fired again. 

1.8 seconds. The CorDog fired again.

2.0 seconds. He threw the gun toward the second bolt.

2.1 seconds. The CorDog fired for the fourth time. The damaged gun tumbled in the air with perfect accuracy.

2.14 seconds. The damaged gun and the second bolt met. Though damaged, the gun had enough juice to interact with the #$^#$@. Containment failure was imminent. 

2.2 seconds. Daniel whirled around. The CorDog fired again.

2.47 seconds. The soon to explode gun took two more shots. It was now shining light and about to blow.

2.6 seconds. He pressed down on his one-time time lock. Instantly, he is both invulnerable and powerless.

2.64 seconds. The gun explodes. The explosion engulps the corridor. The last CorDog takes the full explosion to the face and is summarily erased along with the rest of the corridor. 

7.6 seconds. The unstable time bubble popped, exposing Daniel back to rest of the time stream. He began to fall.

9 seconds. He landed at the bottom of a rough sphere carved out of the building he had been fighting in.

9.2 seconds. The CorDogs that had been outside locks onto him.

9.3 seconds. “Ah, fuck.”

-VB-

Mana closed the latest video she viewed of her administrator’s past as a soldier of fortune. While he wasn’t famous among the public, the military used him often for deep infiltration and sabotage missions. And why wouldn’t they? 

Daniel had a knack of accomplishing nearly impossible combat missions, though often the result was way too much collateral damage. He could do all of it because he had come from a particularly rich glitterworld that provided high end prosthetics of all kinds, including perception accelerators. 

CorDogs, formally patented as Gerubandite Canine Combat Model, were not combat robots that most prosthetic free soldiers could fight. 

By her calculation, if a CorDog was dropped onto the current expedition world, then the casualties there would be in the hundreds of thousands. 

But that was not a problem because the factories that had once built them was gone with the rest of the Andromeda Galaxy. 

The Old Andromeda Galaxy, that was. 

But reviewing this combat footage along with a thousand others didn’t solve the issue that she hoped to solve.

How would her administrator change once he regained his memories? 

There was no doubt in her mind that he would choose violence more often than not. It came to him easily, unlike now. A freshly wiped mind should have had a hard time dealing with death, personal and causing it in others. Yet, within weeks of seeing death, he was all too fine with causing it.

It made her … fearful.

New Life Station 9 needed to be a bastion of creation, life, and progress. Would it remain so if he got his memories back? Would it be a source of life and prosperity… or would he turn it into another factory of war?