Three Square Meals Ch. 101

Realising it wasn't Blake or his Lionesses approaching, Weber hurried onward and nearly bumped into Professor Friedrich, two soldiers, and the four Nymphs they were escorting. The professor had a holographic image floating above his arm, which showed video feedback from another part of the base. Weber could see something big and green stomping around on the holo-image, gunfire and laser bolts occasionally lighting up the screen, all to the dreadful accompaniment of hideous screams.

Friedrich strode across the intersection, shaking his head in admiration as he watched the images. "Magnificent, isn't she?"

The two soldiers with him just looked on in horror as their colleagues were systematically torn to pieces.

"Friedrich!" Weber blurted out, skidding to a halt.

The professor looked at him in surprise, then pushed his wire-frame glasses up his nose. "Admiral Weber! Please accept my apologies for my earlier intransigence, I'm sure you can understand my frustration at being unable to indulge my professional curiosity. You were quite correct though, evacuation does seem to be a sound plan..."

"You don't say..." Weber muttered, darting a glance at the video of the angry dragon demolishing the base's supposedly impregnable defences.

The Nymphs looked at this new arrival in delight. "Are you this one's new master?" they all chorused simultaneously.

Weber had had never intended to be their handler, but the present situation demanded drastic measures. He grimaced as he nodded, "Yes, I'm your new master"

They clapped in excitement, faces lighting up with glee. All four Nymphs began to shimmer in a green haze, their bodies altering shape as they scanned his mind, getting an image of Carl Weber's perfect woman. Having found what they were looking for, the change took a few seconds to complete, then four slender blondes gazed at him in adoration.

"Would you like to use this one now, Master?" the four girls crooned, their Germanic accents so wonderfully familiar.

"Erika..." Weber breathed in astonishment, overwhelmed by the sudden onrush of feelings dredged up by seeing the love of his life made flesh before his eyes.

It was his beloved step-sister... appearing exactly as she had all those years ago, when the two of them were just eighteen and secretly exploring their sexuality with each other. They'd had two blissful years together before that sweet, lovely girl was killed in a hovercar crash, her life tragically destroyed by a drugged-out Ornalith. Seeing his lost love was like being hurled back in time, with Carl experiencing an outpouring of grief that threatened to tear his heart in two. He wavered unsteadily and leaned against the wall to try and recover from the shock.

"My, my, she's certainly very attractive," Friedrich murmured, glancing at the four scantily-clad young women.

"This one will do anything you desire, Master," the closest Erika whispered, brushing her fingers along his arm.

That contact snapped Weber out of his trance and he recoiled in revulsion. It was like they were desecrating Erika's memory by copying her perfect face and he felt a wave of hatred for the degenerate alien filth. "Don't fucking touch me... and change shape to... anything else."

The four Nymphs exchanged surprised glances then looked at him in confusion. "But this is your ideal mate, Master..."

***

Jade dug her claws into the wall above the entryway to the elevator, then carved two huge furrows around the titanium doorframe. She slammed into it with her massive scaled head and the section toppled into the lift shaft, clanging and crashing as it fell to the bottom with a deafening boom. Peeking down through the gap in the wall where the elevator doors used to be, the Nymph glanced around to make sure there was enough room for her form to navigate the passage.

She was just about to plunge headfirst down the exposed hole, when Jade felt a ripple of strange echoes in her mind. The Nymph froze, her head tilted to one side as she felt that delicate psychic tremor. The flurry of sensation was faint but so achingly familiar and she froze as she revelled in the fluttering touch of those four presences.

*Sisters...* she murmured in wonder.

Jade could feel them now, they were so close...

*I'm coming for you!* she gasped, before hurling herself into the lift shaft, her claws tearing chunks from the walls as she dropped to the lower levels.

***

The Nymphs stared at each other in astonishment and blurted out, "Sister?!"

Weber flushed with embarrassment, turning away from the curious glances from Friedrich and his men. It was bad enough that they got to see these Xeno-sluts masquerading as his darling Erika, but knowing about his secret relationship with her was almost more shameful than he could stand.

"Change shape!" he demanded in a choked voice. "Anything... your normal shape! Just not her!"

The four Nymphs looked bewildered, but did as he asked, shifting in a green haze. Sprouting soft, dark-green fur, they shrank and grew more slender, cat-like ears and tails appearing as they altered their form. Each had subtly different patterns to their markings, with lighter green spots, patches, and stripes differentiating them from each other.

"Follow me," Weber said gruffly. "We've got to get out of here!"

Professor Friedrich and the two soldiers fell into step behind the Admiral as they hurried onwards, following the sparsely-lit tunnels deeper into Tartarus. They had long since passed from the newer upper sections into remnants of one of the original bases constructed on Ganymede. The air was musty down here, dust thick in the air in these recently unearthed tunnels. There were tracks on the metal decking, with booted footprints going back and forth that revealed there had been lots more activity in the past few months.

Weber glanced back at the holo-screen floating above Friedrich's arm. The jade dragon opened its jaws and unleashed a terrifying blast of energy, disintegrating all the turrets and soldiers facing her. The camera feed cut out a split-second later, then restarted from the next checkpoint, where he got to see the enraged Nymph batter her way through another reinforced bulkhead.

"We've got to slow her down," Weber said to the professor, the nervous tremor in his voice revealing his fear.

Friedrich nodded thoughtfully, a gleam in his otherwise dispassionate eyes. "The experiments? Yes, it would be intriguing to see how they performed..." His hands began to move over the wrist computer, activating programs and unlocking cell doors...

***

Jehanna walked along behind the two soldiers, the sergeant following after her with the stun pistol aimed at her back. She could have struggled and forced him to shoot her, making the three men have to carry her wherever they were going. However, there were two reasons why she chose not to. Being knocked unconscious would have slowed them down, but it would have also left her incapacitated and she was hoping for a more decisive opportunity to escape her captors.

The second reason was that these lower reaches of the base were fascinating. The construction was clearly much, much older, and there were a few things about it that didn't feel quite right. The place had obviously survived some kind of cataclysmic earthquake, because the walls and ceiling were cracked and battered, with new plating patched over in places. They also passed a number of doors that obviously led into other sections of the base, but they seemed to have two sets of door controls. One at normal height which looked like they'd been installed recently, the other was lower down at thigh level and by the dust covering the panel must have been part of the original facility.

Jehanna spotted slightly-raised domes set in the floor every twenty paces or so, but could see no purpose behind them. Frowning in confusion she slowed to deliberately scuff her foot over one of the domes, then saw the light filaments inside. Why would someone set lights in the floor?

"Keep moving," Sergeant Green grunted, poking her in the back with the muzzle of his pistol.

Jehanna stumbled onwards, then suddenly realised the answer. "This place is upside down! We're walking on the ceiling!"

One of the soldiers turned and smirked. "Wait until you see what's coming up..."

She could see long windows up ahead on either side of the corridor, the newly installed overhead lamps casting their light into the room beyond. Jehanna stared through the glass in wide-eyed astonishment as she saw the enormous industrial factory suspended from the ceiling, automated assembly lines frozen mid-production. Piled up on the floor were hundreds of metallic body parts, partially built robots lying motionless where they'd fallen. There was a feeling of antiquity about this place, and the robots looked sinister and menacing, filling her with an awful sense of foreboding.

She turned to look at Green speculatively. "This base is so old and battered; something terrible must have happened here... it must have been so bad that you've had to set the artificial gravity upside down! Then there were all those robots..." It was like someone flicked a lightbulb on in her head and she stared at him in shock. "We must be in the remains of the AI base on Ganymede!"

The sergeant's expression flickered with surprise but he neither confirmed or denied her suspicions. His brief reaction was enough for Jehanna to realise that she was right and she looked on in awe as they headed deeper into the base. They turned at an intersection then walked for another couple of minutes, stopping in front of an imposing set of double doors, with 249 inscribed in huge numbers on the surface.

One of the soldiers hit a button and the doors juddered open with a grating noise, revealing a huge enclosed room. Jehanna gaped at the intimidating vessel floating in the centre. It was clamped to a sturdy maintenance gantry that had been constructed recently. The titanium-grey warship was about 200-metres-long, the sleek and sinister hull obviously designed by a malevolent alien mind. Below it were the sealed hangar doors, which she knew must have been the ceiling before Ganymede was blown apart.

"You found an AI ship..." she whispered, knowing she had just stumbled into another scoop of a lifetime.

***

Jade could feel her Lenarran sisters up ahead and her claws scrabbled on the spotlessly-clean white floor as she ran down the corridors. Further along were scores of prison cells, the windows blacked out and the doors on both sides all wide open. Spotting movement up ahead, she curled her lips back from her fangs in revulsion, when she saw the misshapen horrors that started lurching out of the rooms.

There were Drakkar, Kirrix drones, Trankarans, and several Ornalith amongst the horde; or at least that's what they used to be... They had all undergone horrific cybernetic surgery, their upper limbs replaced with all sorts of serrated blades and spinning buzzsaws. The glint of metal circuitry could be seen on their heads, where the Tartarus scientists had implanted control chips. The monstrous creatures turned their blank eyes towards the dragon running towards them, then raised their whirring limbs and moved to attack.

Jade flinched when she heard a disturbingly familiar hum and the abominations charged towards her, moving with unnatural speed. She had a flashback of the fight with Shinatobe, the cyborg assassin impaling her through the heart as Jade desperately tried to protect her master. Not wanting to risk underestimating these creatures when her sisters were in danger, or waste time hacking her way through the pack of abominations, Jade skidded to a halt and sucked in her breath. Electricity arced over her fangs as she opened her jaws wide and unleashed an incandescent blast of lightning that she strafed across the hall.

The first few ranks of malformed creatures were instantly obliterated by the power of that blast, the ones behind caught by wild arcs of electricity, their cybernetic limbs exploding in a vicious storm of metal flechettes. The rearmost ranks of cyborg monstrosities were flayed by the storm of electrified shrapnel and were hurled backwards by the impact. They juddered and crashed to the floor, convulsing violently as their control implants were fried. With nothing left to stand in her way, Jade leapt forward again, trampling over twitching corpses as she continued the pursuit of her quarry.

*You're getting low on psychic energy, Jade,* Alyssa warned her. *Those lightning blasts are sucking up tons of power...*

*Can you give me more?* Jade requested as she galloped along the corridor.

There was a moment's hesitation before her matriarch replied, *We're all getting tapped out, everyone's been running hot on powers. I can give you more but we don't want to leave Rachel without any reserves...*

*Save it, I'll be okay,* the Nymph replied firmly. *I'll stop shifting to save energy.*

Jade could hear John's concerned thoughts as he said, *We'll be there in a couple of minutes; I'll join you as fast as I can!*

*I'm quite deep in the base now... I think I'm getting very close to the Nymphs!* she replied, sounding cheerful and optimistic.

*Any sign of Jehanna?* he asked, unable to hide his worry.

She hesitated as she dashed down the corridor, leaping over sparking cyborgs. *I haven't seen her yet...*

***

"So much for your work, Professor," Weber sneered in disgust, as he watched the dragon obliterate the results of years of top-secret and highly illegal experiments designed to create the perfect shock troops. "How many billions of credits did that cost us?"

Friedrich winced and looked chagrined. "I had hoped they'd give a considerably better account of themselves..." Glancing back at the four catwomen following obediently after the Admiral, he continued, "But you've seen how strong that Nymph is! Imagine having four dragons like her at your disposal... not even Blake could stand up to their destructive potential!"

They walked quickly along the corridor overlooking the robot manufacturing plant and Weber felt a surge of relief, knowing they were nearly to the ship. "Are you sure that AI ship is safe?"

"Computers aren't my area of expertise, but I believe all the control systems have been gutted and the ship fully stripped. In any case, the Artificial Intelligence that controlled it was destroyed long ago; the ship's simply a relic from the Ganymede Incident," Friedrich explained, darting a nervous glance at his holo-screen. "We might want to hurry by the way..."

Weber heard the clanging footsteps of something big in the corridor far behind them, and while he knew they had a long lead on the pursuing Nymph, he couldn't help glancing nervously over his shoulder. He broke into a jog, with the rest of his entourage matching his pace.

"Are the rest of the hostages aboard?" he asked, darting a glance at the professor.

Friedrich lifted his arm and started tapping on his holo-interface to check. "Yes, they are," he said nodding as he viewed the cameras aboard the ship.

A throaty roar behind them startled the scientist, and not watching where he was going, the professor tripped over one of the lights set into the floor. Friedrich tumbled to the deck, and his glasses flew off his nose, only for them to be crunched under one of the soldier's heavy boots. Collins and Halverson skidded to a halt after running past him, then darted back to lift the professor up under his arms.

Weber kept on running and didn't look back, the catgirls padding along effortlessly behind him. He soon reached the intersection and darted to the left, following the dozens of footsteps marking the path to the excavated hangar. The sound of huge reptilian claws scraping across the metallic floors was getting louder and louder, drowning out his fearful panted breaths and the booted footsteps of the soldiers following him.

The door to hangar 249 was already open, so he bolted inside, then froze and glanced behind him at the yawning portal. Wanting to buy as much time to escape as possible, he slapped his hand down on the control panel, making the doors groan in protest as they started creaking closed. Backing away, he heard Friedrich and the soldiers running to catch up, but the pounding steps of the furious dragon were worryingly close. Pulling his pistol from the holster on his waist, he hesitated for a second, then emptied the magazine into the control panel. To his relief, the panel shorted out, but the doors kept closing.

Turning around, Weber rushed for the repurposed destroyer, sucking in air to his tortured lungs, with his obedient Nymphs jogging along happily in his wake. "Turn into... a dragon..." he gasped between breaths, as he looked at the catgirls watching his every move.

"This one can turn into your perfect mate?" the closest suggested, giving him a hopeful smile.

He shook his head in revulsion as he staggered towards the open airlock ahead, a pair of soldiers waiting just inside. "No! Turn into a tiger, a dinosaur, anything dangerous!" he pleaded. "I need you to fight the fucking monster that's trying to kill me!"

One of the Nymphs with striking tiger's stripes looked deeply distressed and blurted out, "Master should flee! Escape from whatever is chasing you." She looked heartbroken as she continued, "This one cannot change into the forms Master has requested... This one is so sorry!"

"She can do it, you must be able to as well!" he insisted, as he reached the airlock. "I order you to change!"

Their blank looks of incomprehension told Weber all he needed to know and he realised these dumb aliens were too stupid to try and deceive him. He frowned at them, realising they were useless to him now. Unable to bear the thought of them turning into his beloved Erika again, he scowled and looked at them with contempt.

"Wait here, don't move from this spot," he demanded, before stepping inside the airlock.

The four nymphs nodded obediently, bright smiles of happiness forming on their faces as they were given a command they were able to follow to the letter. They stood there contentedly on the gantry as the airlock closed behind Weber, pleased to be obeying their master's wishes. When the frantic pounding on the hangar doors started up, they ignored it, their cat-like eyes locked onto the grey ship as it started to pull away.

***

Jade careened around the corner, bouncing off the far wall with a heavy thump as she tore up the ground clawing after the fleeing soldiers. They stopped to pound on a hangar door, letting her know where her sisters had gone, even if she couldn't sense them on the other side of the portal.

"Fuck me!" one of the soldiers cried out in fear, as he and his colleague grabbed for their assault rifles.

They sprayed the corridor with bullets, rounds bouncing off Jade's armoured skull as she leapt towards them. The dragon lashed out with a powerful swipe, catching both soldiers across the torso and ripping their chests open in a fountain of blood. Friedrich cowered by the door and watched the two men pitch over, before blinking bleary-eyed at Jade as she approached.

"How?" he murmured, gazing up at her in awe. "There's no record of any Nymph being able to do the things you can! How did you get so powerful?!"

"John loves me," Jade rumbled, slamming her bloodstained claws into the huge hangar doors and heaving backwards. "And he'll love my sisters too..."

Friedrich winced at that tortured shriek of metal as the dragon hauled the door wide open, the opening mechanism snapping and buckling under that savage assault. Jade peered through the entrance and spotted her four sisters standing calmly on the gantry. They were unheeding of the danger as a big grey ship drifted backwards, flank guns trained on them. There was something eerily familiar about the shape of that craft and seeing it sent a shiver down Jade's long spine.