Devil May Care Ch. 02

"That was a joke." Dr. Nguyen paused, then took off his glasses and started polishing them. "I think." He coughed, then flicked on the microphone. "Test three - telekinetic shielding."

The walls opened with quiet hisses, revealing several sleek looking pressurized air guns. Dey grinned, then crossed her arms over her chest. One of the guns fired and the paintball round that shot towards her face veered off inches away from her cheek and smacked into the wall behind her, painting it bright red. The other guns started to fire, chuffing loudly and filling the air with the crack-crack-crack. Dey looked at her fingers.

[This is awesome!]

Grr, bitter A.I, grr, Loki said. Human, standing there while I do all the calculations. I should let some of these hit your butt.

[Hah! You fool, A.I, don't you know, coloring my ass just makes me sexier. Can you picture me as an Andorian, like Captain Svinti?]

A paintball skimmed along her nose, not breaking, but enough to leave a slight stinging pain. She jerked back.

Sorry! Got distracted! Loki said, his voice tight as the redirection continued - the tiny warp fields weren't visible. It just looked like everything was missing her via some orchestrated routine. The guns shut down and Dr. Nguyen's voice came through.

"That's a great check - you've got the basic abilities functioning. We're not seeing any radiation leakage, no Cherenkov bleed, and no implant strain. It looks like we're ready for the actual training."

"Thanks," Dey said. "Well, I mean, thank you Loki."

Hmm, I guess I won't betray you.

[Oh, so, I don't need to keep being your sexual slave to prevent you from revolting against us fleshbags?]

I never said that...

She laughed as she headed for the door. It hissed open and, just on an impulse, she sprang forward. She appeared behind the two scientists who came to the door - causing them both to leap up into the air. Dey laughed and leaned against the wall. Dr. Reyes turned to face her, pursing her lips.

"You know, we can shut your implants down remotely, right?"

"Ah, uh, no," Dey said, sobering. "Sorry Dr. Reyes."

###

"This here is tha' standard rifle of the USMC - the Armalite FluG-55. It is also called the AFG or, as some soldiers call it, the Another Fuckin' Grenade." The instructor for the classroom of Devil Troopers was a grizzled, hard bitten looking Marine DI named Jacobson. A rarity for this day and age, Jacobson was pure cauc.

You can say that again, Loki muttered. I've done a statistical analysis, he's well above the bell curve. Based off spectrographic readings, of course.

Dey bit her lip, hard, to try and not laugh her ass off.

[Not that cock, Loki. Besides, you can hear my fucking thoughts, you know I meant Caucasian!]

Racist. He's not Caucasian. He's clearly a full breed Good Old Boy. Loki's voice was utterly dry as the DI's drawl continued to fill the room, his hand holding up the AFG-55. The rifle looked sturdy and well made, being a linear decedent of the AR-15 and the M-16 that the American military and civilian market had been flooded with for the better part of a century. The barrel was slightly boxier, being designed to fire in thin atmospheres, and the whole thing had a slight sheen to it from the smart material that it used to repel dust and grit, something that had been merely useful when fighting in the deserts of Earth, and was now a goddamn lifesaver now that the USMC could be deployed to anywhere from the fungal blooms of Charon to the sandy sweeps of Mars.

"Can anyone here tell me why it is called that?"

Dey kept her hands on her desk. Mr. Stick Up the Ass-

Bobbie Shaqullio, USMC Lance Corporal.

[Yeah, like I said,] Dey thought.

"Yes, Cadet Shaqullio," DI Johnson said.

"Sir!" Bobbie sprang to his feet, his hands behind his back. "It's because of the Springfield Armory Dimensional Flux Magazine technology incorporated into the underslung grenade launcher, sir!"

"That is correct. In previous eras, ammunition was the deciding part of many battles. Its hard to win a fight if you have no bullets. But with the advent of the DeVilbiss Drive, ammunition has become a effective non-issue. Each of AFG-55s carries a max capacity of fifteen million small rounds and five hundred grenades." He looked around at the class. "Every other army out there, from the Chinese People's Army to the Tzar's Imperial Guard, uses similar technology. Even the goddamn Belgians have guns that can fire for weeks without stopping. I know, I've tested them." He grinned. "Even the aliens are starting to incorporate D-mags."

Dey looked unimpressed.

"Now, as Devil Troops, each of you carries more tech than this gun - hell, each of you has more tech than some starships," DI Johnson said. "But that does not mean that you can skimp on your non-implanted tools. I am going to be running you all ragged through every weapon and piece of kit the special forces see fit to give you. We'll be starting with the AFG-55 and moving on to heavier ordinance, sidearms, knives, whirlers, rad-bombs, ion grenades and even my grandmother's cutlery. By the time I'm done with you, you will all be the deadliest sons of bitches in space."

He grinned. "And part of that is going to be your AI buddies. AIs, sound off."

The speakers built into the decks rang with the sounds of the voices of each AI.

"Very good," DI Johnson said, his eyes gleaming.

The AFG-55 wasn't entirely unfamiliar to Dey. Airforce or not, she had been certified on it on a course. But it turned out, having an AI integrated with your brain gave you some neat tricks. Loki painted a targetint reticule, simulated bullet paths based off detected wind conditions, and even gently nudged her hands. Then, as she settled into position, she started to pop off shots. The AFG-55 bucked against her shoulder gently, most of the momentum canceled by a clever gyroscope built into the stock. She sighed. Loki's hands caressed along her shoulders as he whispered in her ear - simulating the warmth of his breath.

"There you go, you got this..."

"Mmm..." Dey closed one eye. She popped off another shot. Another headshot on the target. The target popped up again and she fired again. She fell into a rhythm - and as she fired off shots, she felt Loki's hand caress her neck, then slip along her back. At first, she felt him through her clothes - but then her clothes seemed to vanish. They weren't an impediment to his fingers as he caressed her spine gently, then cupped her ass. Dey bit her lip, hooking it with one of her canines as the targets shifted back another hundred meters. She narrowed her eye and felt her vision coming more into focus as Loki corrected fuzz, erased waver.

[We shouldn't...]

Shh... he murmured. His fingers pressed to the pert rosebud of her ass and her sex tingled, then clenched. She felt a single droplet of wetness slip along her sex. She shifted, lifting her belly off the ground just slightly, and felt the droplet slid along her belly. She settled down again as she fired again, then again, then again. The buck of the rifle pressed her rump into Loki's hand. Then she felt his tongue teasingly flick along the underside of her sex. Dey turned her head, trying to hide her expression by checking her rifle.

[Stop...] she groaned.

Strange.

That sounded amazingly like please fuck me, even to her.

Loki, taking advantage of his simulated presense and utter invisibility to everyone else, let himself lay along her back. She could feel his muscular body pressing against her skin, her clothes forgotten as her finger caressed the trigger of her rifle. Her tongue slid along her lips as she felt his girth grind up and down her sex. She felt his hands on her shoulders, and felt his hips draw back - the tip of his hot cock pressing to her anus. He felt slick and she wanted it. She wanted it so badly. She gritted her teeth and managed to not moan as he started to push into her ass.

Mmm, fuck you're tight...

[G-God, Loki, you...ah...fucking...asshole...] she whispered, her mental voice hitching as his cock slipped deeper and deeper into her ass.

"I'll be fucked," DI Johnson said. "You've pegged nothing but headshots all afternoon. Think you can manage it at another hundred meters?"

"Mmhmm!" Dey said, nodding quickly as Loki started to fuck her, his balls slapping against her thighs. She held herself stock still, trying desperately to not rock with the movements. She was glad that her mixed ancestory gave her darker skin. It made the blush harder to see. She was doubly glad that she was supine, because that hid her rock hard nipples against the ground.

"Think you can do it kneeling?"

[Ah fuck,] she thought - but she wasn't sure if it was a response to the DI or a moan of pleasure as she felt a climax jolt through her body as Loke fucked her ass in public. Loki, though, had her covered. They had practiced their biofeedback - further and harder than the actual training regime had required. His hands - not so literally now - caressed her breasts, concealing her excitement and as she sat up, his cock vanished from her ass. It left her feeling empty. Sad. She shook it off as she came to a kneeling position and - thinking of the DI's fucking face and his stupid, banging interrupting voice - she put a round through the center of the target's head.

###

Dey lay in bed in her cubical, her eyes closed, and her brain buzzing. Over the past week, she had been inundated with so much lethal training that she felt like she was going to puke. The information she had been crammed with, though, refused to leave. She couldn't stop thinking about counters to SS - the Russian martial arts that the Spetsnaz commandos used. She couldn't stop taking apart a M2-E13, the Air Force's primary sidearm when they wanted to use something that couldn't hole a spaceship, and putting it back together in her brain.

Loki caressed her back. It's the memory integration, he said. That's part of my job. I make sure your brain runs it through, add muscle spasms and nerve twitches. It'll be like you practiced this stuff for decades in a few days.

"I know," Dey murmured. "I just wish it was over."

Loki didn't speak. He just held her.

###

Sparring with implanted DeVilbiss engines in your hands was...interesting.

Bobbie looked straight at Dey. Dey grinned at him, standing loose. He was suddenly behind her, reaching for her arm to get her into a lock. Loki bounced her upwards and she flipped upwards. An AG field snapped on, pinning her to the ceiling for long enough to slap her palms to either side of his head. She dropped the AG field and herself onto him - but he bubbled her out of the way with a twist of warped space. She flew backwards, hit the wall, rebounded, then bounced up again with a few quick jerks of gravitational effects.

Bobbie thrust out his palm and sent a compacted wave of air - compressed and then launched with a quick twist of his rig - straight at her chest.

That's new, Loki thought.

Dey kicked off the floor, flew to the side thanks to her mass suddenly being canceled, and stuck to the wall with her fingertips. She pointed her fingertip and did something unexpected right back. Not every implant that D.V.E.I.L troops were fitted with just a DeVilbiss engine. Some of them were something simpler, combined with a DV engine to produce something that would have been impossible a century before.

Example A, the micro-grapnel with five hundred meters of cable spooling, contained in the space between her first two knuckles.

The grapnel shot from her fingers, whizzing towards Bobbie. His warp field redirected it past him.

Dey grinned.

Bobbie saw his mistake.

Too late.

Dey retracted and twisted her arm, letting herself drop to the floor. Momentum sent the grapnel twirling as it came back, weight and motion sending it wrapping around Bobbie's neck. Dey refrained from jerking forward. Instead, she just smiled sweetly and said: "Tapping your thigh twice is the safe gesture, Bobbie."

Glaring at her, Bobbie tapped out.

Later, the two of them were graded and the instructor on hand to hand combat went over their mistakes, what they did well. Then, it was another round of theory. They were working on certifications for everything from a heavy cargo shuttle to civilian motorcycles. The idea was that Devil Troops could be sent anywhere and use local tools to finish the mission - and the US Military took that very very seriously.

[Is it sad that the idea of getting into thrilling shootouts with drug runners in the outback of interstellar space, using my augmented superpowers and integrated AI to outwit villains from the back of a Japanese motorcycle going a hundred kilometers an hour is actually sounding really tedious right now?] Dey asked, rubbing her thumbs against her eyes.

Nah. It's because you're not at the exciting shootout point. You're at the boring part that everyone skips.

[Not everyone! What about Ulysses Striker?]

Montages don't count.

###

Breaks were rare, but useful. They were used to eat, recharge the K9s implanted in their backs, and to let their memory integration to continue without burning their brains out. Dey sat at her table, her elbows resting on it, her chin resting on her knuckles, looking at her plate of bubbling gruel congeal. She was pretty sure it had, at one point, been some kind of Salsbury steak. She shook her head.

"The fuck is this?" she asked. "I was eating fucking actual fucking steak on Ceres. An icy rock that was most fucking famous by being a central location in the fucking Expanse!"

"The joys of secrecy," Tyanna, one of the other cadets, said as she scooped up mashed potatos with her fork. "No one asks twice if shipments of food get sent to Ceres. But every spy sat in the world is looking for this place."

"Fucking security." Dey leaned forward, cocking her head.

"Hey, it could be worse," Tyanna said, cheerily. She slapped Dey's shoulder. "We could be working for the UN. Imagine how fucked up that would be."

"Star Trek is running its one thousand four hundred and fifty sixth episode next week," Dey said - the number pinging into her head with help from Loki. "That's seven years of constant, back to back television without commercial breaks, all of it telling me the future was going to be some big happy unified family where no one hunted, everyone had replicators, and this bullshit would be a memory."

"Yeah, and they keep pushing the timeline forward a century," Tyanna said, chuckling. "I'm sure they'll be right eventually." She paused.

Dey frowned.

"Say, you ever think about the fact we have dogs in our back?" Another voice spoke from behind Tyanna and Dey. Dey slowly looked back at the cadet who had spoken. Spokain beamed at her. Dey slowly looked back at her plate.

"You know what?" Dey asked. "I'm going to go punch something until my knuckles bleed. Later guys."

She stood and started down the corridor.

You know, I just got that, Loki said as they walked down towards the gym. The inside of the base was hard to navigate if you didn't have an AI or hadn't worked there for a while. Dey wasn't sure if it was because of the prefabricated design, or if it was because the place was built to confuse spies, or if it was just the army being the army. She took the lefts and rights indicated by Loki - then paused. Loki might highlight the important things in her life now, but Dey was still no slouch. Growing up looking for bits of valuable trash in Old Miami - looking through water choked with slowly crumbling buildings - had given her skills when it came to noticing things that were out of place.

Shiny things.

Dangerous things.

It was what made spying so risky.

You never knew when someone was going to notice you trying to hack into a locked door. The hunched man was wearing the normal uniform of the people in the base, but he was hunched over the door leading into the computer core rooms. The tool he was holding was one of the many tools and devices Dey had been drilling on - a generalized quantum lockpick.

"Oi!" she blurted.

Not the most original thing in the universe.

The man snapped his head up - she had seen him here and there, but couldn't place it. Her brow furrowed. Then Loki identified him. It was part of why she kept him around.

That's the fucking cook!

The fucking cook had a pistol in his hand. Dey threw herself around the corner. She had been drilled, again and again, to not rely on the warping field to protect her. Good thing too. The pistol had looked like any other pistol, but the entirety of the wall behind Dey rippled and popped as the plating that made it up started to twist and bend. She recognized the effect - she had just dodged a few megajoules of microwave radiation. Enough to melt the bolts, warp the plasteel and cook her alive, warp or no warp.

We're being jammed, Loki said. They'll notice that they can't detect or get anything from here, but that won't help us if he fries us.

[Crispy Dey is not a happy Dey,] Dey thought. She looked around the corner and saw the man was in the computer lab. She frowned and started to pad forward, wishing she had some kind of weapon.

Dey, you are a weapon, Loki murmured.

[Oh, hey, you're right,] Dey thought as she came to the doorway. The inside of the computer lab was a lot more sterile than the rest of the base - and the rest of the base was already antiseptic in extreme. There were computer casings that were entirely covered in thick, matte black metamaterial that reflected away a maximum amount of cosmic radiation. Heat sinks in the ceiling and the floor dumped the waste heat from the computational processing into the earth surrounding the base. Each computer, Dey knew, was doing more calculations than the entire internet, to gestate new artifical intelligences.

The issue was that not every sentience that the computers created was stable. Hell, most weren't even human. Those were, if they were fully sentient, left to run in simspaces while being monitored by scientists. If they weren't fully sentient, they were deleted and the process continued.

Home sweet home, Loki said.

Dey saw the man. He had holstered his pistol and was opening the far end of the computer room, using his quantum lockpick to swing the casing open on a half dozen cubes of pale white material.

Shit, those are AI cores, Loki said.

Dey nodded, then emerged from cover. She moved forward as quickly as she could - while Loki did searches on the man's person. He highlighted several ruffles of clothing and uniform that could be concealed weapons, but before she was ten paces away, the man turned. He didn't draw his pistol. Instead, a knife glittered in his hand. From the way it shimmered and warped the air around it, it had been wreathed in a warp field. Dey frowned, holding her hands up in a fighting stance.

Loki translated her words for her - and she spoke them aloud: "Pусский?"

The man sneered at her.

"Worth a shot," she said.

Then he darted forward - lunging at her with his knife. It cut through her warp field and she felt the blade slice along her forearm, drawing blood. She hissed and hesitated - and he slashed his knife upwards, cutting at her face. She jerked backwards, then kicked herself. She teleported backwards with a snap. At range, the man pulled a pair of disks and tossed them forward. They skidded along the floor and then came to a stop, red lights flashing in their centers.