Prism and The Red Wolves

“What is your mission?” Lorias asked the young Sguvan woman sternly.

The brown-skinned woman’s eyes remained locked on a section of the wooden floor of the security station's basement. She appeared to be catatonic, being as still as stone. The long, thin braid that she normally tucked behind her right ear hung down from the right side of her round face, and her short straight hair was a tussled mess atop her scalp.

She’d been stripped of her stealth bodysuit, leaving her dressed in only a beige bra and panties. Her wrists, ankles, and neck were strapped into a sturdy wooden chair, and she was wrapped in thin bluish-green cables that shimmered with a golden light. Four security officers stood at each corner of the room with machine pistols at their sides, while Lorias and Chief Goginae loomed over their captive.

“You will tell us what we want to know, or we will kill you. Do you understand me, you cyborg freak?” Chief Goginae said in an oddly reserved tone while bending down and staring directly into the cyborg’s placid face.

When the infiltrator said nothing, Lorias nodded over to Leanna, whose left hand was on the switch of the strewn-together panel that controlled the flow of electricity through the thin strands of nerve-cable that they’d coiled around their captive. Leanna flipped the switch mindlessly, and averted her eyes when she saw the Sguvan woman’s body jerk and twitch in the chair that they’d strapped her into.

Though the woman’s body was affected by the electric current, her face was not. She simply continued to stare unseeingly at the same section of floor until the seizures of her body ceased shortly after Leanna switched off the increased voltage through the nerve-cables. Leanna noticed that the golden lines that ran over certain sections of the woman’s body began to glow, but Leanna couldn’t be sure if it was a sign of her self-healing or a sign of stress on her cybernetic systems.

“This isn’t working. We’ve been at this for thirty minutes, and she hasn’t even whispered a word.” Leanna said in frustration to the men that had been questioning the Sguvan.

The two Roses that had been with them, Remades and Testa, had tried to stop the torture before it had begun. Chief Goginae had forced the two of them to stay within the lobby of the security station so that they couldn't interfere with the brutal interrogation of the prisoner.

“Her tech is healing her. She still seems to feel pain, but there is no threat of doing her any serious harm, it seems.” Lorias said while faintly running his slender fingers across his jaw-line.

“Then perhaps we should rip out her cybernetics, and make her bleed out onto the floor like she did to my officers.” The security chief said coldly while rubbing his dark-brown beard.

“You are all animals, soulless and stupid.” The Sguvan woman said loudly in a heavy accent.

She began to laugh heartily, causing her light-brown eyes to squint.

“And you are nothing more than a queenie goon.” Chief Goginae said calmly before pulling his pistol off of his hip holster and slamming its grip across the left side of her face.

The chief then ran his right forefinger along a single thick strand of gray hair that ran up from his forehead, which had been knocked in front of his face, and slicked it back along the rest of his brown hair. He holstered his pistol and then used both of his hands to sweep his neck-length hair back behind his right ear. He looked down at the seemingly-superficial damage that he had done to the cyborg’s face, and felt somewhat satisfied with himself.

Multicolored light soon began to flicker from the Sguvan woman’s left eye, and a golden seam that framed the bone structure of its socket began to glow. The woman began to wildly throw her head back as she started to have a full-body seizure. Her small body shook so hard that the chair she was tied to fell to its side.

“If she dies, we’ll have learned nothing from her to stop whatever else is coming!” Leanna shouted to Chief Goginae before she ran to the woman’s aid.

Leanna held their captive’s head as the woman began to foam at the mouth. They began to worry that the infiltrator may have triggered some sort of self-destruct as the woman’s shining left eye continued to flicker just as wildly as her body twitched. Lorias squatted down and held the woman’s mouth open, checking for a broken tooth and smelling her breath for signs of poison.

Once Lorias and Leanna were at the woman’s side, she suddenly burst through her restraints and began to swipe at her captors. Leanna reflexively dodged several chops from the woman’s right hand, which had suddenly sharpened from her wrist up to the tip of her pinky into a gleaming blade. Lorias reached for the variable dagger holstered on his gear belt.

But before Lorias could slash off the woman's bladed hand at its golden-seamed wrist, Chief Goginae flipped the switch on the nearby control panel, causing a massive amount of electricity to pour into their errant captive's body from the strands of nerve-cable that were still tied around her. Lorias and Leanna stepped back from the glowing woman to avoid being electrocuted themselves. The golden seams on the woman's face, right wrist, and left thigh began to glow more and more brightly as she stood seemingly paralyzed by the bio-electricity surging through her. In seconds, she was squeezing her fists closed and leaning over slightly, resisting the electrical onslaught as Chief Goginae increased the voltage being sent into her.

"It's not working! She seems to be adapting to the current!" Leanna shouted to Lorias and Chief Goginae.

As the security chief turned up the voltage to its maximum, the Sguvan woman yelled and stood tall before releasing a concussive blast that knocked everyone else in the room back. The four security officers who'd had their guns aimed at her were slammed into the walls, rendering them unconscious. Chief Goginae, Lorias, and Leanna were all thrown onto the ground, and the cobbled-together control panel that had regulated the flow of power to the cables was wrecked. The thin nerve-cables that had been on the captured woman's body were destroyed, leaving what remained of the cables to leak a syrupy white fluid onto the floor near her feet.

The woman looked around for only a second before running at the heavy metal door that was a few meters in front of her. She leapt powerfully using her cybernetic left leg only a meter from the door, tackling it with a running start. The door was ripped from its hinges as she rolled onto the basement hallway floor and then stood up in a single, seamless motion.

She killed the two security officers that had been standing guard outside of the interrogation room with two swift slices of her bladed right hand while the guards were still stunned from her explosive exit. The cyborg then ran down the narrow hall and up the stairs that led to the ground floor of the security station. She killed several more security officers stationed atop the stairs in a white-floored area that served as a security checkpoint.

When a gene-gate that sat atop the door that led to the ground floor began to shoot its electrified tendrils towards her, she deftly sliced the whipping cables before dodging the spray of acid that the gene-gate then shot at her. The Sguvan acrobatically leapt around the small area before using her cybernetic leg to once again leap forward with tremendous force and tackle the sealed door.

She burst through the door, though her right shoulder became bloody in the process. She found herself surrounded by three security officers, as well as Remades and Testa, who all had their machine pistols trained on her scarcely-clothed body. The cyborg slowly stood up and raised her arms up high in surrender.

“Stay right there and don’t move!” Testa yelled mightily at the cyborg.

But as the brown-uniformed security officers started to approach the Sguvan, the cyborg smirked and seemingly winked with her right eye before the iris of her artificial left eye flashed so brilliantly that it blinded them. Remades, Testa, and one of the officers covered their eyes, while two officers began firing straight ahead. After a few minutes of disorientation, the two Roses and the officer who hadn't been shooting began to regain their vision.

"Hold your fire!" The recovered security officer said, not wanting to be shot accidentally by a blinded ally.

"Interesting...very interesting indeed..." Remades said while he rubbed his sore eyes.

The two officers that had been shooting intermittently and in a panic stopped. When the un-blinded officer looked around the room, he saw that the front door of the security station was open. Testa groaned at the sight, sure that their foe had escaped. Seconds later, Leanna, Lorias, and Chief Goginae ran through the broken door leading to the basement. They each visually scanned the lobby around them and soon surmised what had happened.

"She blinded us with her eye. Some sort of...flashbang cybernetic or something." Remades said to the trio.

"You did your best. Tend to your fellow officers, if you're able." Chief Goginae ordered his sole remaining able-bodied security officer, who nodded silently before doing as he said. "Put out a bulletin to the other stations via laser-link that she's escaped. We'll head out and track her down." The chief then said to Remades and Testa, who begrudgingly headed up to the upper levels of the station where the laser-link terminal was.

"See here? She's got some axoplasm on her feet, from the severed nerve-cable." Lorias squatted down near the station door and pointed out to Leanna and the chief.

"I should be able to track its chemical signature." Leanna said before tapping on the rim of her wrap-around glasses, causing them to glow as they displayed an augmented-reality overlay to her. "She's got a head start, but she's injured. It's faint, but I'm seeing specks of her blood along with the axoplasm footprints. And...okay, I've got a DNA trail. Without that stealth suit, we can track her bio-signature through the city now."

"Let's get her before she finds another suit. I'm sure she's got spares stashed around the city, like she had with her sniper weapon." Lorias said.

"We'll get in a crawler. We can cover a lot more ground that way. Follow me." Chief Goginae said.

After running into the security station's connected garage, they were all soon strapped into the roomy interior of a six-legged living vehicle. It had a sleek black exterior with long, spindly black legs that resembled the limbs of an ant. Its four bulbous headlights shined brightly at its front end, which looked similar to a more traditional car. Its rear, which sat behind the interior section that people sat within, looked more like the abdomen of a male stag beetle, being fat, long, and ovular.

Chief Goginae had risen up the back of his coat and shirt before stepping into the vehicle. He'd simply sat down and slid back in the driver's seat until the control nerve-cable in the seat's lower back section had slipped painlessly into his spinal port, which gave him mental control over all of the crawler's functions.

After Leanna shared the Sguvan woman's tracking data with the crawler's bio-computer, Chief Goginae drove the crawler out of the garage and onto the night streets of Surmil. The insect-like vehicle skittered rapidly down the street following their enemy's bio-signature. But after ten minutes of pursuit, their trail ended after the crawler climbed up onto the fourth level of a public parking garage. They saw a small empty black trunk that had been left there, signs that their enemy had indeed found a new stealth suit to wear.

"Damn! She beat us to it! She could be anywhere now!" Leanna shouted in anger.

"We should have seen her along the way. She must have some sort of inherent cloaking ability even without the suit. She just needs it so none of her DNA gets secreted for us to track..." Lorias reasoned.

“That’s fair. I examined the suit before we interrogated her…it didn’t seem to possess enough tech on it to have a cloaking function. The suits oddly-textured surface must simply be compatible with her cybernetic cloaking tech.” Leanna said quietly.

Chief Goginae sat silently in the driver's seat for a minute, gripped the handle on the console in front of him. Lorias and Leanna could sense his frustration, even without him voicing it. Leanna bowed her head and sighed quietly, secretly relieved that their ineffective torture session had ended. She pitied the lives that had been lost during the Sguvan woman's escape, and she'd wished that she’d learned something of value about their captive to make the officers' deaths more meaningful.

As she ran over the incident in her mind again, Leanna had an epiphany.

"There are pressure sensors within the station, right?" She asked a despondent Chief Goginae.

"Yes, several. Why do y-" The chief began to reply cautiously.

"Where are the city's pressure sensors? If there are any, do you have access to their data?" She asked eagerly with a look of pure excitement in her hazel eyes.

"Each street and most buildings. Practically everywhere with extensive nerve-cable coverage has pressure sensor functionality." Chief Goginae spoke quickly and more loudly as hope began to return to him. "It's a large amount of data, but I can access it. We just need to jack into the nerve grid."

The trio wasted no time returning to the station and rushing up to its top floor. They found Remades and Testa sending out messages on the third floor of the building, and left them to their devices. Leanna plugged her dronepack into the holographic map system at the center of the room, and then she had Chief Goginae plug another of the dronepack's nerve-cables into his spinal port, so that she could use his biological security codes to dive into both the security station's protected bio-system and Surmil's bio-system to access the data they needed from its nerve grid.

Leanna used the dronepack's onboard bio-computer to crunch the data involving the unique pressure signature of the cyborg's gait and other movements. Leanna then correlated that data with where she knew the cyborg had been within the city while wearing the stealth suit before being caught by Remades and Testa. Using the combined data, Leanna was able to create a model of the stealth-suited cyborg's unique pressure signature.

"Now we plug this model into a live feed of the city's nerve grid..." Leanna said intently while moving her fingers around the air in front of her on the computer controls that only she could see through her glasses.

Using Chief Goginae's nearly-unlimited security access, Leanna used the holographic map system to display a three-dimensional map of Surmil and its active nerve grid, so that the others could see what she saw in her glasses. In seconds, the hologram showed pressure signatures that it identified as their Sguvan infiltrator. Their enemy was leaping from rooftop to rooftop, heading towards the eastern outskirts of the city.

"She's headed to Getla Base, no doubt to meet up with the would-be saboteurs already there." Lorias said with an upturned chin.

"Simply genius! You've actually found her!" Remades yelled from across the room, as he and Testa approached the others. "I'll go tell the other stations." He said more calmly when he saw the icy reception he got from them.

"That can wait. We need you to fly us over to the base. We have to get there before she does." Leanna said loudly to him before beckoning him with her hand.

"Of course!" He shouted gleefully before running across the room and up to the stairway leading to the roof.

"Do you think we can stop whatever she's planning?" Testa said solemnly as she walked over to join the others around the circular hologram console.

"We have to." Lorias said simply.

As Leanna and Lorias walked over to the door leading to the rooftop stairway, they noticed that Chief Goginae wasn't following them. Lorias locked eyes with the man, who looked both tired and determined.

"I have a lot of work I need to do here in the city. There's no telling what forces are waiting to try and tear Surmil down. I need to make sure that it’s ready to put up a fight, with or without the hypergeneral. Go on ahead; I'm staying here." Chief Goginae said collectedly while gripping the rim of the hologram console's controls until his slightly-tanned knuckles became white.

"Good luck, chief." Lorias said with a respectful nod, which Chief Goginae returned.

Leanna noticed the exchange between the two men and cringed internally. She did not like the security chief, who she saw as ineffective and incompetent. He'd been the primary cause of the cyborg's escape, and he'd been the one who'd argued most fervently for the cyborg's torture. He’d let his feelings of vengeance cloud his judgment, which she believed to be completely reckless and unprofessional. Leanna did her best to push such thoughts from her mind, which she knew were altogether unhelpful to their mission. In truth, she'd been just as complicit in the act as Chief Goginae, for she engineered the implements of the torture.

"Never again." She said to herself before heading up the stairs.