Mind Games Ch. 04

###

"Oh god..." Tracy whispered, her voice ragged. "It's Danielle."

Jules and Marisa were working together to drag the corpses from the suicide pool to the morgue. Apparently, there was one on every level. That said a lot about TempleSoft. Nothing good. I sighed as I checked the restraints keeping the hybrid trussed up in case she woke up, looking up at Tracy.

"Did you use to work with her?"

"Yeah," Tracy said. "We both worked in corporate, handling the orbital transfers between the corporate resorts." Her voice took on the faint monotone of someone who was just talking to be heard. "We had one or two every few days. Big people. Rich people. They show up, they want to get here with minimum fuss and bother. You'd think that'd be a flip and burn, just straight there and there. But no, see, most of these pleasure yachts didn't have major thrusters. Why ever accelerate harder than 0.1G? Cheaper and leaves more room for the fuckslaves."

"Did you meet me?" I asked, looking at her.

Tracy blinked. "I...don't..." She paused. "Wait, you said your name was Beatrice?"

I nodded.

"No, but Danielle did," she said, looking down at the hybrid.

"That was why she said she knew who I was, huh?" I asked, frowning.

Jules came back, puffing softly. "They're being recycled," he said at my questioning look. "But Marisa and I heard...well...Brood." He frowned. "Not the big ones, the smaller ones. They're definitely congregating in the gardens."

I groaned. "That means Warriors are going to be coming out soon." I rubbed my face and then stood up, pulling out my pistol. "Before I go, tell me about the Tesc power source. I want to know if it's going to crap out on me before I go throw myself at five Broodmothers."

"Well, uh, quick version?" Jules asked, looking nervous. "The Tesc don't have time. That is, when we sent the probe into their dimension, it read that it was detecting temperatures at absolute zero and five thousand million degrees over the point where quarks stop being able to form. The Tesc don't have a tomorrow or a yesterday. Everything happens at the same time, constantly. Our artifacts sent into their dimension drag time with them - small amounts in the case of the probe. Large amounts when it comes to us." He sighed. "So, when-"

"Seven bullets," I said, frowning.

"So, when...what?" he asked.

"This pistol has seven bullets," I said, frowning. "It had seven bullets when I pulled it out of the locker. It had seven bullets after I fought Maria for the first time. It has seven bullets right now." I looked at him, my jaw tightening slightly. "You said things, not people, have less time?"

"What...what...what?" Jules asked, rubbing his nose.

I held up the gun and then fired a bullet into the ceiling. It thudded home. I fired another bullet into the wall. The others gaped at me, and Jules jerked away from the report of the gunshot. Then I discharged the magazine, holding it up. Seven bullets. I turned, and hurled the magazine as far away as I could. It hit the ground and skittered around the corner. Then, turning back at Jules, I held up the gun, then aimed it at the wall and pulled the trigger. Another bang.

"I-Its semi-automatic," he stammered, trying, groping desperately for an answer that wasn't what I knew it was.

I pulled the trigger again. Another bullet.

The magazine was back in the pistol. It had never left. It could never leave. The gun had no time - it merely was, stuck forever at the point that it had been in when it...and everything else on the fucking station was dragged into the Tesseract.

I hadn't been looking at Earth at all.

I had been looking at their homeworld.

"What do we do?" Tracy asked.

"Lucas?" I asked.

"We're fucked, lass," he said - causing the rest of the group to jerk in surprise.

"Lucas, you son of a bitch!" Jules exclaimed. "You're alive!?"

"I'm stuck in a closet down in storage, but aye, I'm alive, Jules," he said, sounding distracted. "Listen, all my readings say we're around Earth. But I think that they're just detecting leftover...I don't know...shite that was dragged in with us? Or the computers are fucked? Either way, if we're in the Tesc dimension, we're fucked."

"No we're not," Jules said, his voice firm. "We have the portal generators down in Physics Labs! And we have a fucking Tesc right here!" He kicked the hybrid, which grunted softly - her eyes were open and glittering. "We can open a portal, target it right at Earth, and waltz out and leave this station behind to rot."

I nodded - and heard hissing. The sounds of clattering feet echoing down the corridors approaching our area. I frowned. "Everyone, get the hybrid to the elevator!" I said, snapping up my shotgun - my timeless ammo at the ready. "I'll hold them off."

"How, you're just ONE fucking girl!" Tracy howled - fear making her voice screech. I fired the shotgun into the side of the fountain. Water poured over the chunk I took out of the lip, scudding across the floor, rushing towards the corridor leading from one lobby to this. Five Warriors came rushing out, screeching as they sprinted at us. I lashed out with my left palm and lightning slammed into the lead figure - then sparked along the water. Each one stood, their backs arching, their mouths wide in pain as lightning crackled along the water, surging and buzzing through their bodies. They all collapsed at nearly the same moment, a pile of corpses.

I turned back to Tracy.

"That's fucking how!" I snarled.

The four others gaped at me. Then they turned and ran, grabbing up the hybrid who howled at me.

"You're gonna fucking die, you bitch!"

"Yeah," I said. "I heard that before."

Then the Brood were in the room. They skirted around the puddle of water - fifteen of them, maybe twenty. And as I glared at them, I felt a slow, shuddering rage burn through me. They had abused women's corpses, perverted them in the most grotesque way, just to breed more monsters to break and hurt and ruin and maim and kill. I trembled and snarled and felt my heart thunder faster and faster. Before I knew it, I was among the Brood. I leaped away from some slashing claws, grabbed one of their heads, and smashed it into the hard pavement that ringed the fountain. Their skull crumpled and I turned, then blasted one with lightning from my palm.

I didn't get tired anymore, not with the lightning.

The surge smashed into two of the creatures, sending them sprawling backwards. Then I felt claws slash along my back. I rolled with the impact, skidded between a pair of legs, and let the nanites slick themselves against the water. I fired once, twice, three times, pumping the shotgun mechanically as I blew Brood in half - from the crotch to the head. As they hit the ground, I kicked out with one leg, sending a Brood sprawling to the ground. I put the shotgun into his mouth and pulled the trigger. The kickback skidded me back against the wall.

A Brood lashed at my face. I ducked and metal shavings flew out into the air. I shoulder checked it as I stood, sending it sprawling into three of its fellows. I pumped and fired into the mass, the thump of pellets tearing through flesh giving me an aching feeling between my thighs. I pumped and fired again, then smashed jaws apart with the butt of my shotgun. Blood dripped from my face as I laughed, exhalting in their deaths. There was no moral gray area here.

There was just ripping.

Tearing.

Snapping.

I stepped onto a half-dead Brood, my heel driving its head almost a hundred and eighty degrees, then ducked under another one's slash. I didn't know how I was this fast. But since I was standing on a corpse, I leaped upwards and fired a lightning blast right down. It hit the corpse, surged through the water, and electrocuted another half dozen of the fuckers. AS they spasmed, I landed and felt the buzz of the remaining electrical currents, fading quickly.

Three Brood were left.

I let the shotgun rest on my shoulder.

"Run," I said, my voice flat.

The Brood turned and ran off, as quickly as they could scamper, leaving behind piles of corpses and smoking bodies and severed arms. I shivered and stepped off the body I had been on, breathing slowly out.

I looked around.

And not since I had been roundly fucked by Jules had I wanted to smoke a cigar quite so bad - the need tingling through me, a half remembered thing that I was fairly sure Beatrice did quite often.

"Damn," I purred. "Damn I'm good."

###

The elevator doors opened.

The other four gaped at me as I stood there, blood dripping from my face. I reached up and casually flicked a chunk of chiten from my shoulder.

Jules shook his head slowly. "W-What are you, Beatrice?"

I looked back at where I had left the pile of dead Brood, then back at him. I smirked. "Their worst nightmare, I think. Come on. Lets get you guys to Physics."

"Us?" Tracy asked - her voice tremulous.

"Yeah," I said, stepping into the elevator, then tapped the button for physics. As the elevator started to rattle down, I leaned against the wall and tried to not notice how scared of me Jules looked. Then he forced that expression down and smiled wryly at me.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

"Corporate," I said. "Tracy said that one of her coworkers helped get me - or Beatrice, or whatever - on the station. The computer says that I was here to wait for my brothers to die of old age to get the fortune. But I'm starting to doubt that story for some reason."

"Fair enough, lassie," Lucas said. "A-And, ah, maybe while you're down there, you can get me out of this closet and get me to the portal too?"

I nodded. "Can you get to the security cameras for physics?"

"Sure can."

###

The elevator ride passed in uncomfortable silence. Once the doors rattled open, though, we had something to take that silence and make it worse. For the doors opened into a corridor from hell. The walls were splattered with blood and the stink of rot was even more intense here. Firearms and spent shell casings lay on the floor, while dozens - hundreds? - of dead Brood were mixed with the Templesoft security and their drones. I walked slowly forward, shaking my head quietly.

"This is what Lucas told us to expect," I whispered. BUt it was one thing to be told 'it's a right mess in there' and another thing to see it.

"This must have been where the first incrusion started," Jules said. "If it wasn't my off shift..." He choked himself off. Amanda was quietly sick, vomiting in the elevator. The hybrid, who had been set down near the dried blood, slid her tongue against the floor with a slow, eager lick, her eyes glinting with malice.

"Come on," I said.

We made a queer band as we walked through the carnage and past the work spaces and labs that had been smashed and ripped and torn to shreds. It was clear that this place was less hard nosed than Engineering. There were no actual prototypes here. Just computers, all of them designed to run simulations of physics problems. There were a few labs for doing actual experiments, but those had been smashed up the worst of all. But while the security forces had wheeled out the heavy weapons here, the Brood had hit back with...stranger things...

We walked past a bulbous gun-like biomechanical throne, one that had been fused to a quartet of Brood, turning them into a kind of legged wheel for the thing. They were canted to the side, the weapon split almost completely in half by an equally slagged artillery laser that some enterprising security officer had fired off before being raped to death, his eye sockets still bubbling with Tesc cum.

"The amount of this battlefield that is basically an orgy is really fucking creeping me out," I whispered.

The others nodded.

Then we came to the central lab and I whistled quietly.

The portal that had been used to open the hole to the Tesc dimension didn't look scientific in the least. It looked, rather, like the collar of my nanite suit, ballooned to a size large enough to make the runic inscriptions on the inside easily seen, rather than faint impressions. Its cyclopean size combined with those runes made it seem like some ancient artifact, one that should be steeped in blood and sacrifice, not in scientific equipment. Corpses had been heaped around it. Most of them wore scientific gear and bore faintly shocked expressions, even as their bodies peutrified.

I breathed out, trying to breath shallowly and through my mouth. "Okay," i said, turning to face the others. "What do we need to get this to work?"

Jules - his eyes hardened, his shock worn away by endless horrors - pursed his lips.

"The powers off," Tracy said, quietly.

"The computers are slagged," Jules said, nodding.

"So, we need power and a new computer rig," I said, nodding. "And a Tesc's biological matter. Which we got." I kicked the hybrid. The hybrid snarled at me. "Don't snarl at me, Danielle. We're going to fucking fix you if I have to drag you into the Templesoft lobby and start shooting people until they get fucking doctors."

"I'm touched," she purred - her eyes flaring with hatred. "I'm sure they'll listen to you immediately, you fucking sleeve."

I ignored her, looking at the others. "There should be computers in Corporate, right?"

Tracy nodded. "Not as strong, but...we don't need a full supercomputer for this, you have the basic calculations, right Jules?"

Jules nodded as well.

"B-But how do we stay safe?" Marisa asked.

"I got an answer to that, lassie," Lucas cut in.

"For fuck's sake, my name is Beatrice!" I shouted at the ceiling.

"Sure about tha?" Lucas asked, his soft accent somehow making those words feel and sound even worse. I shuddered and closed my eyes, trying to not break down at the thought. I shook my head.

"Call me Bea," I hissed. "Okay. So, what's the solution?"

Lucas led us to them while Marisa and Amanda started to clear out bodies. Jules, Tracy and I all whistled in almost the exact same tone as we found what Lucas had spotted with the cameras. A pile of Brood had piled up around a corner. There, four automated turrets had been set up by a terrified looking engineer. With the corpses piled before him, he had quietly taken out his pistol, shoved it against his temple, and pulled the trigger. His corpse laid there, sprawled. But his turrets continued to tick from side to side, whirring so softly that we hadn't heard them till we got close.

"They used all their ammo!" Tracy said.

I stepped over the wall of bodies, grunting as I hopped down. I grabbed onto the ammo container, then popped it open.

Thousand of fresh rounds gleamed within. I slapped the container closed again as the turret whirred left, then right, then left. I looked at Tracy and smirked.

"Hey," I said. "There's a silver lining in every cloud."

TO BE CONTINUED