Going Bold

“I’m under attack!” Andrea pinged Lin with an emergency alert as she engaged her field uniform’s low power exoskeleton and threw herself sideways into a desperate sprint through the nearby trees as the hulking furry beast bore down on her. The first blow had fortunately been mostly absorbed by her uniform’s built in armor systems and her implants had kept her organs from splattering themselves against one another as she hit the tree. If she could keep the animal from pinning her down she’d get away with some easily healed bruises.

Keeping out of the predator’s claws was immediately proven to be an ambitious goal. To Andrea’s dismay the massive weight of the charging creature seemed to be effortlessly redirected as it made a nearly 90 degree turn and was at a full speed charge again in a fraction of a second, right on Andrea’s heels.

“I’m sending some airborne attack drones to assist you, if needed Andrea. Try and lead the animal away from our planned destination, I’m seeing increased activity at the alien camp and I don’t want the trail of the rampage to compromise our location.” Lin had been taken totally off guard by this attack as well. None of her drones had noted anything suspicious until a fraction of a second before what looked like a cross between a tiger and a grizzly bear shot through the perimeter and made it all the way to Andrea in less time than it took for Lin to process what was happening.

Andrea was stretching her ability to move to the upmost. With her enhanced physique and implants she could sustain speeds of about 60 kilometers an hour and sprint in bursts of up to 90. Combined with the agility her light weight and small form allowed, Andrea was used to being able to outmaneuver most problems. The rush of air as a massive paw missed her head by a hairsbreadth demonstrated that this was one problem that she was not going to out maneuver for long. Despite appearing to weigh 7 or 8 times as much as Andrea the huge predator was almost more agile than her. Turning near instantly and with seemingly no loss of speed. Andrea wasn’t sure what was going on, but there had to be some trick to what was happening because plenty of the moves she witnessed seemed physically impossible. She had noticed heating and cooling spikes in infrared every time the beast pulled one of its incredible maneuvers, and the whole creature seemed to being staying warmer and warmer after each stunt.

“I think it’s going to wear itself out eventually Lin, but I’m not sure I can keep out of its grasp for that long.” Lin’s attack drones had been following along closely the whole time, strangely the animal appeared uninterested in anything except relentlessly pursuing Andrea. “What about me specifically is setting this big guy off? If we can’t think of anything soon, I might have to kill it.”

Lin began studying Andrea comparing her emissions to the drones’. This creature had bypassed all of the perimeter drones and virtually ignored the Donkeys in favor of Andrea’s far smaller and less obtrusive frame. As she watched Andrea began to leap up onto the massive old growth trees planting her feet 5 meters up on the side of the massive trunks then pushing off, launching herself towards another tree trunk. Acrobatically rotating as she flew to land feet first again letting her momentum push her into the tree and wind up her legs for the next big leap. The ability to make those sorts of maneuvers in unknown terrain, in the dark, and without pre-planning was dependent on Andrea’s implants and the augmented physical capacity they provided, not to mention the huge number of extra senses that came with them. Lin had a sudden realization, Andrea’s sensors! A quick check confirmed her thought, the biggest difference between Andrea and everything else was her sonar system it was actively pulsing ultrasonically. “Andrea! Switch off your active sonar! I think that’s what’s making the creature so aggressive!”

Andrea immediately followed Lin’s suggestion and the results were apparent almost instantly. The predator’s pursuit became far less aggressive and after another few seconds of pursuit the heavily panting creature broke off and retreated into the forest. Lin tasked one of the combat drones to follow the strange creature at a distance and observe, this task was made far easier by its fairly sedate pace and the glowing infrared presence of the bizarre heat build up in the animal.

With heavy breaths Andrea took a moment to recover from her wild pinball like flight through the dense forest. After taking a minute, Andrea broke the silence. “Lin how did that huge beast get by you, and how did it manage to maneuver like that?” Lin took a moment to consider before responding. “It was on you before the drones that spotted it could get my attention. That last part is my failure, I’m switching up all of the drone’s protocols to send you alerts on nearby threats directly rather than pinging me first.” Andrea nodded along with Lin’s assessment until the last comment. “That’s fine Lin, standard protocol has drones ping their primary operator first and right now you’re the primary operator on all our drones. I didn’t even bother to deploy my own mini-drones and I made the boneheaded mistake of leaving my active sonar going. So don’t be too hard on yourself, we’re both going into this mission way more blind than we usually would.” Lin paused a moment, appreciating Andrea’s reassurance. “We’ve got this Andrea, it’s a much bigger challenge than usual, but that’s part of why we both wanted to do this in the first place, and we’re the perfect team for challenging situations.”

Andrea silently signaled agreement as she turned and began to carefully plot a course back to meet up with the caravan while leaving as little trace as possible. The handful of combat drones Lin had tasked with aiding Andrea kept pace with her and helped form a perimeter, Andrea also deployed her own swarm of 10 mini-drones from their shoulder docking ports and sent them out to help keep watch and map out good paths. Lin tasked a couple of spider drones to leave the convoy and meet Andrea before moving back along her trail to cover up any trace of her passage. Neither of them were sure yet how the large predator had escaped detection until moments before hitting Andrea but they were going to keep maintaining a perimeter as they had been and try to determine what the animal had done to get so close without being detected.

By the time Andrea had rejoined the convoy the large predator had worked its way back to an area near where the ambush had occurred but well outside the edge of the area that had been covered by the main perimeter of drones. The still extremely hot creature reached the base of one of the larger old growth trees, put its fore-paws up on the trunk and suddenly hurtled almost 10 meters straight up the trunk as Lin witnessed this bizarre feat the infrared imaging system also made it obvious as parts of its body near instantly plummeted from feverishly hot, to nearly hypothermically cold. It continued to climb until it reached what appeared to be a sort of nest nearly 50 meters up the trunk of the tree. “Well I still can’t conclude much, but it sure looks like this animal can somehow convert its momentum into other forms of energy, at least partly heat, and convert that energy back into momentum following a vector of its choice. That might explain how it got the drop on us, it literally dropped from 50 meters in the air and used that energy to launch itself at high speed across the forest floor through my drones and attack you a fraction of a second after being noticed. I’ve never seen or heard of anything like this, its fascinating.”

Andrea had by this point hopped back aboard her slightly dented but still functional Donkey and was going through the footage of the creature’s attack and its subsequent return to its nest. “This is strange, and it implies some pretty extreme possibilities, what’s letting that animal seemingly violate the laws of physics as we understand them? We’re going to need to learn a lot more to even start to get a handle on what is going on, and we’ll have to keep a closer eye out for other strange phenomena that doesn’t fit with what seems possible.” Lin signaled agreement and began deploying her flying drones out in a wider net, activating some of the reserves that had been perched on various Donkeys and forming a thicker and farther ranging perimeter. “I know one thing we can learn and act on immediately, at least some of the wildlife here can strike at speeds closer to modern attack drones then anything natural we’ve ever encountered before. I’m redeploying the perimeter in a configuration closer to what is called for when threatened with modern weapons systems.” Andrea shook her head a bit in wry amusement. “Well we certainly hit the jackpot this time Lin, an animal that can manipulate physical reality in ways that seem impossible is a good sign that this world won’t get boring anytime soon.” After a moment of thought she cocked her head and added dryly. “Though it might kill us if we aren’t careful.”