Cyber-Knife II: Lady Cyber-Knife Read online

  Cyber-Knife 2: Lady Cyber-Knife

  Book 2 in the Saga of Cyber-Knife

  by Phil Wrede

  Table of Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  About

  © 2017 Phil Wrede. All rights reserved.

  No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

  First Edition

  Cover illustration by Matt Muse.

  Illustrations © 2017 Matt Muse.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  I'd like to dedicate this book

  to two good friends from high school:

  Jamie, you were the first

  person who really helped me

  think harder about the way

  things are, and the way things

  should be.

  Richard, I wish you were here,

  not just to read this,

  but to do all the things we

  were all supposed to do,

  forever.

  PROLOGUE

  EARTH-1, THE WHITE ZONE HIDDEN MILITARY COMPLEX LABORATORY (W.O.M.B. - WEAPONS OBJECTIVE: MAXIMUM BEDLAM) SO FAR IN THE FUTURE, IT'S POINTLESS TO SAY HOW FAR FIVE YEARS BEFORE THE EVENTS OF CYBER-KNFE: APEX PREDATOR She didn't remember anything before waking up for the first time. She knew things - almost everything, in fact, because her head had been filled with a state-of-the-art, near-infinite capacity fluid hard drive that contained a carefully curated selection of information from all across the span of human discovery. Lady Cyber-Knife knew how to make gunpowder, how to scale a tree silently, the proper angle at which to cut a man's throat so as to totally avoid the spray of blood, even the formal differences between Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnets (the Shakespearean is made up of three four-lined stanzas, called quatrains, and a concluding couplet of two lines, while the Petrarchan is split into two parts, one of eight lines - an octave - and another of six - a sestet). She knew anything she might ever need to know to be the most effective soldier humanity had ever known, and her development had taken the best minds the Complex had to offer for nearly two decades. But until a moment ago, her heart had never pumped a drop of blood. Electrical signals had never run through her brain. She had no life experience from which to make memories; she remembered a soft voice in her ears, but didn't recall what it had said. She opened her eyes, and found herself surrounded by a heavy pink gel. It turned all the light around her an obnoxious rose color, though since it was the first thing she'd ever seen, she wouldn't know how obnoxious it was until much later. Lady Cyber-Knife saw shapes moving outside of her incubation tank, but couldn't tell that they were people dressed from head to toe in close-fitting fabric that covered all of them, save their eyes. Their eyes, in turn, were covered by thick lenses that protected those precious final millimeters of their skin. Lady Cyber-Knife saw their clothing, and wondered what sort she wore. It took a lot of effort for her to tilt her head against the gel, to look down her body, and after all that work, she saw that she wore nothing at all. She hadn't expected anything; she was simply curious. More immediately important than her nakedness, though, was her discovery that she had neither arms nor legs. Everyone on the other side of the gel tank had a complete set of both arms and legs. She could see the edges of metal along her hips and shoulders, a tremendous difference there from the smooth, taut flesh of the rest of her torso, but that discovery did little to help her understand her situation. She saw a hand press against the outside edge of the tank. A technician, holding a computer sheet as thin as a piece of paper, stared right at her, waving her open hand excitedly. Lady Cyber-Knife could see the fabric near the edge of the tech's lenses crinkle inward. She didn't know how, but she knew this meant the tech was smiling at her. If she'd had hands, Lady Cyber-Knife would have returned the wave, but she had to settle for making a slow nod in reply. The gel in the tank above Lady Cyber-Knife rippled, a disturbance that could only mean something else was entering into her world. She managed to turn her gaze just over her shoulder in time to see a thick metal claw, each of its four great prongs ending with ribbed rubber tips, pushing its way into the gel and making a great squishy sucking sound as it entered. It captured her just below her waist, and slowly withdrew her, upside down, from the tank. Her undignified emergence into the air, dripping gel while suspended from a mechanical arm, her hair so matted and coated by the gel that it was impossible to tell it was blonde. As the claw extracted her from the tank, pulling her from the warm gel into the cold, sterile laboratory, a rubber arm extended from the base of the claw, and pressed against her belly with steady, increasing force. Lady Cyber-Knife didn't understand what it was doing until she felt a bizarre sensation in her gut and heaved violently, regurgitating all of the gel that her body had taken in while inside the tank. The heavy, viscous, rubbery slime left her body slowly; she had to heave again and again before purging all of it from her stomach and lungs. The gel flew in an arc away from the tank and sprayed any unlucky technicians in its path, coating their blue unitards in sticky pink goop. “Motherfucker!” one of them shouted, removing his protective lenses and wiping gel away with the tip of his finger. “Caution: the first three rows will get wet,” remarked a nearby tech who'd somehow managed to dodge the detritus from Lady Cyber-Knife's birth. “Fuck off, Ronnie,” the drenched technician said, flinging a handful of gel at his co-worker and pasting him exactly across the face with it. Ronnie spun around with the impact, wobbling but not exactly losing his balance. "Come on, you stupid assholes," a third technician, taller than both of them, said, reaching down and slapping them on the backs of their heads hard enough to make them see stars. “The clock started ticking the instant she left the WOMB. Let's make ourselves a killer super-weapon.” The claw dipped down towards a long metal work table that had curved troughs along both sides of its length, stuffed with dangerous-looking hand tools. It dropped Lady Cyber-Knife on the table like a fish in a boat. She flopped around, hacking and gasping for breath. “Ronnie! Ken!” the third tech shouted. “Hold her down.” It took the both of them several tries to get a good grip on her limbless torso - again, the fault of the gel. When they had her stabilized, though, the tall tech withdrew a small nozzle, protruding from a narrow hose, from the base of the table and opened up with a fine, powerful spray of water. Lady Cyber-Knife screamed as he cleaned her off, and both Ken and Ronnie shrank back from the spray. She hadn't felt anything before, hadn't experienced anything directly. Her first memories after getting yanked free of her soft, warm, gelatinous home would forever be getting assaulted by an unfeeling machine, then a hose which sprayed water powerful enough to cut her. The world had utterly ripped any feeling of safety and comfort away, and, as she felt the upper layers of her skin deform and tear under the hose's spray, she asked her first question of herself: “Would this ever end?” At first, as the water warmed, she thought it might, that perhaps more parts of the world were warm and soft. “She sure looks clean enough to me, Mr. Truman,” Ronnie shouted over the hose's volume. He stood on her right, one hand
each on her shoulder and hips. He was oriented toward the spray, and had gotten a faceful of water and excess gel from the moment the hose had been turned on. Most days, he complained about the confining laboratory suits, but not on that day. He understood just how much protection his gear afforded him. Truman shut off the feed to the hose for a second. “Oh, you think so, do you, Ronnie?” he asked. “I didn't realize I had myself a bona fide expert on my team.” He turned the hose back on, full blast, knocking Ronnie totally off his feet this time. Ken laughed so hard that he nearly lost his grip on Lady Cyber-Knife. He held on, but not without a little cost when she rocked forward quickly enough to sink her teeth into the meat of his right bicep. She punctured the clean suit almost immediately, and he screamed out as she closed her jaw into his arm, biting off a piece of him. Blood gushed out of Ken's arm like a leaky pipe. The sticky, crimson gore dripped all over Lady Cyber-Knife's face, and all down her bare torso. She locked onto Ken with a primal ferocity, yanking her head back and forth, tearing at his flesh and flaying him down to the bone. Ken screamed, and kept on screaming, whipping his arm about and trying like hell to escape her grip, but she was too strong for him. Her perfectly engineered muscles, even before they were to be augmented with miles and miles of microscopic cybernetic implants, were too powerful for an ordinary human being to fight off. Even over the sounds of his cries, which got louder and louder as terror and panic bled into his system like lead into a tainted water supply, the other techs could hear the sound of flesh ripping away from flesh. Ronnie couldn't stop himself from laughing at the grotesque sight, but fortunately for Ken, Truman leapt into action. The supervising tech grabbed a syringe with a large-gauged needle from the supply trough and jabbed it all the way into Lady Cyber-Knife's neck. It took what would be a massive overdose of sedatives for a normal human being to calm her down, but even then, with the entire contents of the emergency soothing agents pumped into her system, she didn't lose consciousness. She did relax her vise-like grip on what little remained of Ken's right arm, and he stumbled back from the table, long inches of meat dangling from the limb he clutched in terror. Ronnie's laugher subsided to a few scattered snorts and chuckles. “Get the fuck out of here,” Truman ordered. “Get up to medical and get that shit sorted out.” “If I leave,” Ken said, “I'm not coming back.” “I wouldn't expect you to,” Truman said. “Take a sick day. They'll heal you up, and if they can't, they'll chop the arm off and replace it. Either way, you'll need to take the rest of the day to heal up. Come back tomorrow. We'll do our best to handle the rest of the procedures.” Ronnie and Truman turned Lady Cyber-Knife over onto her back, and pulled thick synthetic mesh straps from little recesses in the table. They tied her down, across her ribs, belly, and forehead, leaving the exposed joint points at her shoulders and hips accessible. She drooled as the sedative worked its way through her system, saliva and blood leaking out of her mouth and pooling in the crook of her neck. “No, man,” Ken said. “I'm not coming back here, not ever. I'm out. I'll do service calls on trash robots, be a panopticon officer in one of those black site rendition prisons, even be a living organ farm, but I will never come back to this lab again. Fuck this shit, fuck that bitch, and fuck this army.” “Ken,” Ronnie managed to cough his words out in between choked-down laughs, “you can't leave because of one bad day. We're at the forefront of something big here. Everything that comes after this, we're going to be the first ones to have done it. The Complex'll treat us like gods.” Ken hefted his ruined limb, blood still trickling out of severed veins and arteries, the nerve impulses to his extremities already fading away. “I'm already as much like fucking Vulcan as I ever want to be, fucker,” he said, spitting on the filthy floor. “I want to go and live my quiet little life for as long as I'm allowed. You enjoy flying close to the sun. I hope it burns you so much worse than it did me.” “I love you too, buddy,” Ronnie shouted after Ken as he limped towards the sliding door exit to the lab. “Can you fucking believe that guy?” he pointed over his shoulder, turning back to the work in front of them. Truman had already begun arranging artificial limbs from the drawer underneath the table. He barely had to lift them at all, for the Complex had paid to have them machined out of next-generation, experimental polycarbonates and alloys. Each one of Lady Cyber-Knife's limbs weighed less than an average human limb, but were less than two percent as likely to break when subjected to stresses that would splinter human bones. They also had a variety of nasty tricks hidden away that would allow her to unfold deadly surprises, one after the other, against her enemies in combat. They'd be testing every one of them today. Ronnie ran his fingertips along the edge of what would soon be Lady Cyber-Knife's left arm. The structure of the limb looked remarkably like a beam used in ultra high-rise construction: thick, firm edges; a solid center around which the whole structure wrapped; and everywhere else, every bit of excess matter had been culled away. Finally, the manufacturers had coated each limb in a thick layer of black lacquer, both to weatherize it and, probably, to make her all the more intimidating. When they were through assembling her, Lady Cyber-Knife was going to be a bad motherfucker. After setting down her left leg, the final piece of the puzzle, Truman couldn't help but look at her. She hadn't looked like much a minute ago, but now that she'd calmed down some, and dried off more, he wanted to see what billions of dollars of genetic engineering had come up with. For her being only about half a woman, he thought, the investment had paid off pretty well. Her face was slim, her cheeks high, and her lips full. Thanks to the sedative, she'd shut her eyes, but he would have sworn to their blue color - not deep and dark, but bright, cool, like he imagined arctic ice looked. His eyes traced down her body, following the perfect curve of her neck, the two swells atop her chest with their tiny pink stems, and just the hint of her ribcage through her skin below. If someone had given him a budget to create the perfect woman, Tillman thought he couldn't have done any better than Lady Cyber-Knife, at least aesthetically. He could have done without the biting, but he didn't believe anybody was actually perfect. Ronnie stood back on Lady Cyber-Knife's right side, for he'd had good luck there up until now. Truman put his hands on her, to keep her stationary during the first half of the procedure. He couldn't say for certain, but he thought he felt her skin crawl beneath his touch, even against the sedatives. They looked at each other and silently agreed; they weren't willing to take any chances, not anymore. Lady Cyber-Knife knew, at some level between instinct and intellect, that she was bred for battle, that her creators intended for her to spend her life at war. To be brought into the world without any power or agency at all, and not even the ability to push back against the forces acting against her, was an intolerable thing to her. Regardless of the potent narcotics flooding her system, she knew this, and as her initial flicker of confidence developed into a fully-realized epiphany, her minds began to clear. The perfect, enhanced immune system they'd so kindly given her worked overtime to clean her body of any contaminants. If she could stay patient, something told her, she'd get her opportunity to revenge herself soon enough. Ronnie picked up one of the arms and adjusted a probe jutting out from the ball that would soon be Lady Cyber-Knife's shoulder joint. He slid it smoothly into her socket, and with a satisfying CLICK, she was no longer armless. It was about as easy as assembling a child's toy, which struck Ronnie as kind of funny. But she was no toy. The lacquer coating her arm looked remarkably like the black metal grafted onto her body, and he realized that every aspect of this procedure, from the grandest design to the smallest aesthetic, must have been considered a hundred times over. Even here, at the final stage of the process, he and Truman were completing procedures so intuitively obvious they didn't even need instruction manuals. For a second, he wondered if that said anything about the state of the human race: where it was going, where it had been, all the big questions about the meaning and value of existence. He didn't suppose he'd like the answers very much, so he put those thoughts out of his mind. Through all of this, Lady Cyber-Knife had been struggling to hold a fu
lly-formed escape plan in her mind. She could fight her way off the table without a plan, and past the sorry excuses for soldiers who stood above her, but she wouldn't make it far through the big sliding door without one. She didn't know for sure what lay on the other side of it. She had to learn, which likely meant she had to keep one of the techs alive long enough to show her a schematic of the building. She felt her right arm slide into her shoulder socket, a short, red flash of pain overwhelmed her vision. But after the red cleared, it felt like a reunion with a part of her missing for too long. She could see the software that had been constantly lingering in the back of her mind come to life, begin running diagnostics on the cybernetic limb, bringing it to life, as well. Lady Cyber-Knife could feel the connections racing down the length of the thing as they were made, in real time - in less than a moment, she sensed herself down to her elbow, and in less time still, felt each of her fingertips. Every single ingeniously engineered joint, every sensor, even things she didn't quite understand, each and every one of their sensations flooded into her mind and crashed across the beaches of her body. She nearly moaned, and didn't know why she did such a thing. Her cybernetic arm seemed like a living thing in its own right; she watched it twitch, stretch, and bend with a mind entirely its own. She fought to keep it still, to keep its success a secret from her captors. She would need every advantage she could muster, if she had even a hope of escape. She needn't have bothered. Truman kept his eyes fixated on the little screen at the base of the table, watching closely as the lab's diagnostic processes queried her cybernetic systems for its own real-time updates. As each physiological and mechanical connection concluded between Lady Cyber-Knife and her new limb, he watched them on a blocky progress bar. The instructions they'd been made to memorize said not to begin installing another limb until the previous one had reached eighty percent acceptance. Shit, he thought, she'd already come to seventy. That had barely taken any time at all. He blindly gestured at Ronnie. “Connect her leg,” he ordered. Ronnie wasn't paying attention to his work, but staring at Lady Cyber-Knife as her back arched more and more dramatically. He hadn't heard Truman. It was likely, in fact, that he wouldn't have heard the world end if the apocalypse had started next to him. Truman sighed dramatically and slapped the side of the table, the flat ringing sound it made echoing through the lab. “Motherfucker!” Truman yelled. “Are you at work or play?” Ronnie jumped, both of his feet leaving the floor in his surprise. His awareness of the world rushed back, and his cheeks grew flush as he realized what he'd done. “Sorry, boss,” he half-muttered. “Attach the other arm, you said?” “No!” Truman said. “The leg.” Even Ronnie had enough decorum so as not to look at every part of Lady Cyber-Knife on display before him as he connected her right leg. He kept his eyes keenly fixated on the connector at her hip as he slotted her mechanical limb into its proper port. Truman's eyebrows rose even further at what he saw on the progress screen this time; she accepted this limb even faster than she had the last one, and based on her psychological readouts, she'd have even greater control of this leg even faster still. In spite of her best efforts, she couldn't keep herself from moaning as the second connection finalized between her body and the new limb. Waves of limitless possibility and strength crashed down atop her, overcoming her higher brain functions and obliterating her concentration. The right side of her body thrashed about, stressing the restraints holding her down past their capacity. The metal groaned, and the straps tore. “Shit!” Truman shouted. “Activate the emergency force field around the operating table!” “What?” Ronnie replied, looking like he didn't understand a single word his supervisor had said. Truman gestured frantically at the end of the table. “Hit the switch on the underside of the lip there, and back away. I don't know what she'll do when she wakes up, but she's designed to kill everything in sight. Do what you want to do; I don't want to be next to her when she breaks through those restraints!” Ronnie looked at her, aghast, as though seeing her for the very first time. Her eyes had opened, and turned red. Her teeth gnashed behind her open lips, and every muscle in her body bulged, strained as far as they could go against her bonds. The world squirmed out of focus behind Lady Cyber-Knife's eyes as her brain finished making its connections to her mechanical limbs. Diagnostic information flew across her ocular implants, faster than she knew how to read it - at least at first - but she could understand it just fine: what was connected to her, and how she was meant to utilize it. Some extra components (her programming called them, "tricks") lay hidden beneath her skin. The men who built her had clearly meant to unlock these secrets for her in time, but they had underestimated their creation's own abilities. Detecting a toggle hidden just behind the palm of her hand, she flipped it with a momentary thought. Talons, made from a pure black material denser than the rest of the metal that formed her limbs and about an inch long, snapped out from her fingertips. The very tip of the spike shot out and then folded back on itself to form a vicious-looking barb. Lady Cyber-Knife twisted her elbow back - the joint bent in both directions - and sawed through her restraints instantly. Ronnie slapped the big red button underneath the table as the strips of fabric sprang away, no longer bound together. The air around them turned blue as the force field came crashing down. Ronnie hadn't had time to back away, so while he'd secured his boss, he'd trapped himself inside the field. "Motherfucker," Ronnie grumbled, half stepping around the table to keep it between himself and Lady Cyber-Knife. She spun around on the table, awkwardly at first, until she caught the hem of his cuffs. She yanked him onto the table, smacking his face against the metal with a dull clanging sound. Ronnie shouted at the impact, feeling his face split along the bridge of his nose and seeing blood spray out across the matte silver finish of the table. Ronnie recoiled immediately, hands blindly grasping for his wound to try and staunch it. "No!" Truman screamed, looking around futilely for a way to cut the power to the forcefield, even for just a second, so he could go in and retrieve his friend. He didn't have a chance; the power source for the shield, as well as its emitters, were embedded within the frame of the table itself. Lady Cyber-Knife finished snapping her restraints as Ronnie stuffed as much of his shirt sleeve as he could into the gaping hole in his face. She rolled across the table, shoulder over shoulder over shoulder, until she reached its opposite edge, her face and chest coated in Ronnie's deep red blood. In almost no time at all, Lady Cyber-Knife found her remaining limbs, reaching around to grab her left leg, which she immediately connected to her body, and then the arm. She only just managed to make both physical connections before fireworks started exploding in her brain, hardware sparking the activation of software at double the intensity she'd felt before. She couldn't keep herself from crying out this time; every response that she thought she could control grew more powerful by the moment. She managed to unscrew her eyes for about the space of time it took her to blink, in time to see Ronnie, blood streaking down his arms practically to his elbows, advancing on her, his hands reaching out, divining for her throat. Ronnie knew he had to push past every signal his body was sending him if he wanted to make it out of this colossal clusterfuck alive. He had one chance, while Lady Cyber-Knife was overwhelmed, just like him. If he could get his hands around her throat and choke the life out of her before she carved him up like some holiday meal, this lifeless lab wouldn't be the last thing he saw. He leapt off the floor, climbed atop the table, and straddled Lady Cyber-Knife's chest. The flow of blood from his wound had slowed to a drip, which splashed onto her face below, as his claw-like hands loomed over her. Just as his fingers approached her throat, her eyes sprang open and her muscles untied themselves from the great knots into which they'd wrapped. Lady Cyber-Knife looked up at Ronnie, assessing the desperation in his posture and his eyes. Her right hand shot out, talons sheathed beneath her fingertips, and closed about his neck instead, thumb and middle finger meeting directly over his vertebrae. Lady Cyber-Knife squeezed, and Ronnie's face turned red almost immediately as she cut off his air supply. Truman shouted again, even louder:
“No! Stop!” and ran up to the bleeding edge of the force field, where the blue light sparked against the open air. He stood on the very balls of his feet, with his hands at his side, fists clenching and unclenching in impotent rage, powerless to do anything at all. His mouth opened as if to scream when she raised her left hand in a tight fist and drove it directly into Ronnie's face, again and again, until she had to wrestle with his corpse to withdraw her hand, so buried in the ruined flesh and bone of his head had it become. Truman couldn't bring himself to make a single sound as he watched her beat Ronnie to death, then tossed him at the forcefield, against which he flopped before slumping entirely to the floor. Truman could smell Ronnie's flesh cooking from where the shield had flash-fried it. Lady Cyber-Knife stood gracefully, placing first one foot onto the floor, then the other, then sliding her body forward from her shoulders down to her hips. She knelt on one knee next to the post on which the table balanced, could feel the power emanating from it. An alarm went off, a bright klaxon that rang in her ears. She truly had no more time to waste, so she spun on one knee and whipped the heel of her foot through the pedestal, shattering it and dropping the table to the floor. As the table crushed the ruined remnants of what had once supported it, the housing around its power cell gave way, ejecting the small green core across the floor. Abandoned by its power supply, the forcefield blinked out of existence, its pale blue light and unnerving fluorescent hum gone with it. Lady Cyber-Knife stood up from behind the wrecked table, soot and oil caking her skin now, in addition to Ronnie's drying blood. She looked down at the power core, and tilted her head quietly in its glow before stepping over it entirely. Her mechanical feet split in the middle as she took her steps, bowing out in front like a bird's as she set them down, one after the other. It took the rhythmic tapping of her steps to shake Truman from his frozen terror; when he saw her coming for him, he realized he wasn't just having a particularly terrible nightmare. He scrambled across the lab floor to some stacked computer consoles. Running his hands down a row of buttons, he called up an escape alarm, and the ringing in their ears increased in both pitch and urgency. Truman leaned in close to the machines, shouting, “Mayday! Mayday! We have the worst situation developing down here in the WOMB! Lady Cyber-Knife has broken free! MOM, we know you're listening! Please -” Truman couldn't even get his full plea out before Lady Cyber-Knife strode up behind him, talons fully bared, and drove both of her hands into his back and through his chest. Ten deadly spikes all penetrated him at exactly the same instant. He rose off the floor with the force of her impact, and didn't even make a sound as the life rushed out of him. She threw him down, sliding him off her hands, and the wet sack of meat that used to be Truman made a disgusting smacking sound as it fell onto the floor. She wasn't even breathing heavily. With the exception of all the detritus that had collected on her skin, it would have been nearly impossible to tell that Lady Cyber-Knife had exerted herself at all. A bright light blinked frantically on Truman's control console and caught her attention from the corner of her eye. A pacification team had left for the lab, and she probably had only a few seconds to prepare. She turned around again, fixing her gaze on the power core that had separated from the table when she destroyed it. A quick search through her library identified it as a volatile material, that probably had no business being stored under such light protection. She smiled as an idea formed. A whine sounded from the other side of the heavy sealed door, followed a few seconds later by a shower of glowing, molten metal as the pacification team cut their way inside. The door yielded in no time, and it fell to the floor with a heavy clang. They started inside almost before the door had fallen, an enormous, oversized swarm of enormous, oversized men storming forward. The soldiers, clad in armor and the grey tones of urban camouflage, stormed into the lab, pressing blocky, unibody assault rifles to their shoulders. The metallic ribbons from their chemically-coated anti-personnel grenades drifted towards the floor like morbid confetti, reflecting the red warning lights and making the space look almost like a party. With the exception of their boots slamming against the tile, the soldiers didn't make a sound. They fanned out aggressively, scanning down the barrels of their weapons for Lady Cyber-Knife, but found nothing. They didn't see her until she wanted to be seen, dropping out of the shadows, holding the power core in front of her, her back curved like an expert diver. Lady Cyber-Knife landed on the soldier unluckiest enough to be standing beneath her, shattering his bones and driving his body into the floor so hard that it burst. The power core's casing crumpled in her grip and she pounced away instantly as the intensity of the green light shining from it began to grow. She put as many bodies between herself and her improvised explosive as she could, but when it finally ruptured, no one in the room was really safe from the impact. Soldiers nearest the volatile energy when it was released vanished before they had a chance to scream, subsumed by heat and light. Those who didn't vaporize in the blast were knocked over by it, or knocked apart by it, their skin scorched where it was exposed and their armor melted into it where they had thought it protected them. Sparks flew from the electronic equipment lining the room as screens ruptured and circuits fried. As the explosion tore at the wall, paint peeled away and plaster broke apart into rubble and powder. Foreknowledge of her plan couldn't fully protect even Lady Cyber-Knife. The concussive force blasted through a line of bodies nearly a dozen people deep and hit her with the strength of a cargo truck hauling another, heavier-loaded truck. The bones in her torso split into a hundred shards each and immediately started to reform; her metal limbs deformed from the heat and force. It was enough to overwhelm even her experimental cybernetic cognitive network, and she lost consciousness. She got off luckier than every soldier who'd come for her, at least. Through the smoke and rubble, with the danger well and clearly gone, stepped Generals Dinesh and Maximilian. Stopping immediately next to Lady Cyber-Knife's prone form, the two men looked down at her over their expanded bellies. “We should just vaporize the bitch and start over,” Maximilian said. Dinesh's jaw nearly dropped from his mouth in his shock. “She represents the most tremendous outlay of dollars and time that this man's army has ever made! Do you think we can just throw something like that away? We didn't even do that with that tank that didn't work!” “Machinery can be improved,” Maximilian grumbled. “It cannot have fundamental flaws in its attitude or thought process. It doesn't have them! She will be dangerous, now and forever. Better to start fresh than to put more lives and material at risk.” Dinesh's long, thin fingers stroked his narrow chin. He could feel his stubble scratching the soft skin just below his fingertips. “What if we compromise?” he asked. “Take everything we've learned developing this subject, and apply it to a new one, more malleable and receptive to our will? We can keep her in deep storage - cryogenic stasis - as a contingency.” “What sort of disaster could befall us that you would want to let this loose in our world again?” Maximilian asked, gesturing at the carnage, the blood, and the crater before them. “One I can't even imagine,” Dinesh said, placing his hand on his counterpart's shoulder. “But, if the world ever proves itself even more brutal than my imagination, on that day, you'll be glad we kept her around.” He looked down at Lady Cyber-Knife, already starting to stir, even in the of the explosion that had consumed nearly twenty soldiers, and nearly taken her own life. A soft voice, the same voice that Lady Cyber-Knife remembered hearing in the back of her mind as she awoke, came lilting out of the walls around them. “The ultimate fucking contingency plan,” whispered the Complex's Maternal Operations Matrix - MOM - the artificial intelligence that oversaw every action taken within the White Zone. She had tested both Lady Cyber-Knife and the soldiers just now, and it only took five simple words for Dinesh and Maximilian to understand who had passed.