Theseus

As someone who spends a good deal of her time effectively consciously separated from her human body, even I wasn’t prepared for how surreal it felt to deal with the aftermath of a shaped concussive blast so close to me. Somehow, it felt like nothing around me could possibly actually be happening the way it was, and that I was detached from reality entirely, like I was in a dream. To say I was disoriented would be a gross understatement. I was only technically conscious. It somehow both felt like I was on auto-pilot while it also took monumental effort to make every physical motion. It was hard to focus on anything but the one objective my brain had latched onto with laser precision: the ledger.

I dizzily led Joel back into the compound where he had to haul a couple large pieces of debris out of the way of the door to force it open again. While he worked, I’d simply stared at the mangled corpses of my jailors, still and heaped into the remains of the violently collapsed wall. My mind began to wander without the object of my focus.

They probably deserved that, right? They were definitely going to kill me as soon as I outlived my usefulness, so getting mashed together into some kind of grotesque mockery of modern art was probably a fitting end. I stared at the mangled arm of one of the men sticking out of the once-human pile and wondered how any part of them was still identifiable.

In my dazed waiting state, I became introspective. I began to wonder what led them to this point in life. What made them desperate enough to take hostages and force them to work on their own schemes rather than work together for mutual gain? I probably wouldn’t even have objected to helping them if they’d just taken it up with the captain and cut us in on whatever scheme they were planning. That might even make me feel bad for double crossing them to steal their records. Maybe that was why they didn’t trust me with that, actually.

The rest of their gang had gathered at the opposite end of the complex to engage the rest of the crew in a mockery of an assault. The confusion would only last so long, and sooner or later they’d realize we didn’t actually have the kind of force we were projecting, so we’d have to act quick before the crew was overrun.

I looked down, away from the bodies for a moment, to notice that there was a dark, wet splash quickly drying across the arm and the lower part of my shirt, a bit of much more visible red spattered across my pants. Blood, splashed back from the carnage I’d narrowly avoided being a part of, then coated in a thin layer of particulate dust from the compromised structure of the building filling the air. Washing that out was going to be annoying.

I turned my hands over to see thin lines of red and gray where the shrapnel cut into them and left dust in their wake. While my makeshift keyboard shield had spared my face the worst of the stray flying bits of stone wall, my hands had taken some mild scrapes. Not that they were deep, but I hadn’t even felt them cutting into me.

Some stray feral part of my mind lifted my hand up slowly to my mouth, and I hovered over the wound. Dazed instinct and habit told me to bite and salve the minor wound with saliva and pressure, but Joel interrupted me.

He thankfully hadn’t take too long to clear the way, and before I knew it, he pushed me to break me out of the existential stupor I’d fallen into, my hands falling again to my side as I moved forward.

I stumbled into the next room, lined with several messy desks with idling terminals, and without thinking, grabbed a hastily discarded pistol off a desktop and stuffed it into the waistband of my pants. I still hadn’t shot anyone with small arms yet, but I had taken out a couple people with Theseus’s cannons, and Aisling made sure I practiced how to handle a gun, so I didn’t think I’d hesitate if I absolutely needed to take someone out. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d killed, and Aisling had been right; it had gotten easier each time.

“Just move.” Joel grumbled as I took the firearm. I definitely wasn’t in any kind of shape to handle an actual fight, and it was probably for the best that he handle anyone we run into, but I was too mixed up to think about it too hard. I kept thinking the pistol would come in handy. “Come on, hurry up, grab the thing, and let’s go.”

I nodded slowly and walked through the office with little regard for cover, trying to recall exactly where I’d felt it through the haze that was my mind. I’d only mapped it in relation to the other electronics in the room, most of which had moved with their owners toward the firefight, so I would have been more than a little disoriented even if I wasn’t shellshocked. “It’s here. S-Somewhere.” I grumbled as I started throwing open drawers from a desk in one corner of the room, not even actually looking at what I revealed. “Know it’s here.”

Joel rolled his eyes, let his rifle drop around his torso thanks to the strap over his shoulder, and grabbed me by both my arms. My eyes went wide as he shook me slightly, and that just made me feel dizzy, my head lolling about and making me feel like I needed to lie down. What was he doing? Then I felt it. A sharp sting on both sides of my face as he lifted his hands and slapped them together on both my cheeks. I took in a deep breath, and it felt like I was almost present again. “Hey. Come on. You with me?” He asked as he grabbed me by the shoulders and held me firmly in place so I wouldn’t fall.

I stared back at him, unsure how to respond. I was supposed to be doing something important, wasn’t I? I stammered out something, but I don’t think it was words. He groaned and reached down into the large satchel at his waist, producing a sealed water ration, which he wasted no time in tearing open and throwing into my face.

I gasped, suddenly drawn back to comprehension by the cold, wet splash against my face. I nodded vigorously. My head hurt, but it felt like I could think clearly again. “Yeah. Ow. Shit.” I nodded and put a hand to my head, feeling where he had struck me, and groaned. What did he just snap me out of, exactly? “Thanks,” I said as I took in a deep breath, grabbed the rest of the pouch of water out of his hand and immediately gulped it down. That helped. I felt dizzy and nauseous, but I at least felt present again.

“Please, give me more excuses to hit you.” Joel scoffed, letting me go and scanning the room with his rifle again to be sure no threats snuck up on him while he was distracted by my confusion. “Hurry the fuck up.”

I nodded and closed my eyes. The direct approach would be most useful here. I’d just find it again. I pinged the room and felt the right hardware address behind me now, in the next room, closer to the gunfire.

“There.” I swallowed, turning toward the door. I pulled the gun from my waistband, adrenaline taking over my muddled focus for now, and pressed myself to the door frame, watching Joel get in position opposite me before he pushed the door open and took point.

“Down!” I heard him shout, and after a moment, he motioned for me to follow in.

On the floor, a man in a suit with slicked back black hair lay with his arms extended across the floor. Seems we’d caught someone unarmed, or Joel wouldn’t have hesitated to respond with violence instead. “Just stay down and be quiet,” he instructed sternly, then addressed me. “Get your thing, quick.”

I nodded, holding my gun at the ready myself as I blinked to reorient myself to the ledger again. I approached the man and knelt down to him, holding the barrel of the pistol firmly against the side of his abdomen while he whimpered, “Please, I’m no one important. They make me do this shit. I don’t even want to be here!”

“Yeah, yeah. Not gonna hurt you if you don’t do any...thing stupid. Just stay down.” I told him as I rifled through his jacket with my other hand and pulled a handheld terminal from an internal pocket, checking it one more time with my virtual sight before nodding to Joel. “Let’s go.”

“’Bout time.” Joel grunted, motioning back the way we came. We closed ourselves off from the unarmed man and traced our way back to the opening in the wall before another crack of the Thunderbolt crashed in the distance and made me flinch. This one didn’t land anywhere near us, though. They must have been running out of convincing covering fire, and he had to use the artillery to convince them not to advance.

The two of us climbed through the hole in the wall, and we scrambled over the hills surrounding the compound, taking cover among the rocky terrain. I pinged the word ‘Clear!’ to Aisling’s handheld, and just continued moving. My head was pounding, and I was still a little bit confused, but I held it together long enough for us to move far away from the fading action of the staged assault.

“Hey!” I heard an unfamiliar voice call behind us just as we were about to turn into a ridge, and I whipped around with the pistol at the ready. I saw movement behind a rock and aimed down the iron sights of the gun. Unfortunately, my vision blurred as I tried to focus, and when the figure moved out from behind the rock, I pulled the trigger twice, the shot going wide and recoil sending the pistol kicking up uselessly off-target.

I saw the flash of black metal down range, a young woman with a brown ponytail and a long scar across her cheek ready to take her shot back at me, and I’m sure she wasn’t fighting what was probably a concussion. Luckily for me, I heard a series of returns from a firearm behind me. The woman flinched and fell down with a loud groan before she could take her shot at me.

Shaking, I turned to see Joel holding his rifle up, and let out a frustrated grunt as I lowered my own gun. “Your aim sucks,” he grumbled, grabbing me by the shoulder and pushing me forward. “Come on, move it.”

I nodded and began running again. Death had become normal for me by that point. It no longer bothered me that I just watched someone unceremoniously riddled with bullets and left to rot in the wilderness. At least, it didn’t bother me enough to dwell on it in the moment. I’d seen it happen numerous times since my journey began, and in the past few months, I’d even caused it more than a couple times, with much larger munitions. This was just a part of being an outlaw.

If Joel hadn’t been there, though, it would’ve been me in the dirt right there instead of some random stranger. We just had to make sure we were the ones still standing at the end of the day.

We continued on and thankfully didn’t run into any more trouble as we made our escape. The sound of gunfire and explosions faded as our crew made their way out of danger behind us as well, retreating into the rocky terrain for themselves, and I could only hope they could get away without trouble, too.

“Knew we should’ve sent a bodyguard with you.” Joel grumbled as the two of us stopped to catch our breath in a craggy outcropping of rocks. Well, I needed to catch my breath, anyway. Joel was fit enough to berate me instead. “But no, ‘it’s just a quick meeting. They’ll never suspect I’m casing the place.’ Didn’t account on the fuckers just forcing you to do something completely unrelated, huh? Like you’re not a valuable commodity on this planet or something. Fuck, even when people don’t know you’re a goddamn living computer, they’re still trying to take advantage of you, idiot.”

I panted loudly, finally holstering the pistol back in my waistband now that we had a moment to rest. Joel had a point. Maybe I was taking being incognito a little too lightly. Even if they didn’t know what I really was, I was still becoming a prolific hacker in this community. “Okay, yeah, fine, not my b-brightest idea. I’ll admit that. I thought they’d be more like the guys we w...work for, not some disorganized gang. You know, the type we could pretend to be wor...king with in the future, like civilized criminals!”

“Fucking whatever.” Joel let out a controlled breath. He gave a frustrated grunt, definitely still angry with me stumbling into what was an obvious trap in hindsight. But after a moment, he asked, “First time getting shelled, huh?”

“Huh? Yeah.” I nodded quickly. The mental fuzziness hadn’t completely gone away, even if Joel had helped temporarily jar me back to reality. I definitely wasn’t used to exploding. “Different from Theseus’s ar...armor taking a hit, that’s for s-sure.” I gave a nervous laugh. “Mouse doesn’t f-fuck around with that thing. Those two idiots got fuck...ing vaporized. If I was, like, a half meter c-closer to them...” It probably wasn’t something I should think about. “I blame my aim on that, just so you know. I can hit a target. Seriously.”

“Should’ve seen yourself, looked all dopey stumbling around with your head screwed on the wrong way.” Joel chuckled, checking back around the rock we were hiding against and scanning for anyone that might have followed before he cleared and checked the chamber of his rifle. “Nah, I get it. Almost feels like that just when you’re standing next to him shooting that thing. Bet you could mount it to your ship and you’d still feel the recoil. Ordinance like that’s no joke. I’d probably be pretty fucked up if I was that close to it, too.”

“No shit. Joel admits he’s n-not invincible.” I wasn’t sure if it was just surviving the prolonged brush with death, but I felt like I was in good spirits as I finally caught my breath. My head still hurt, and moving around still felt strange, like I was controlling a puppet instead of my own body, but I was feeling pretty good about myself for how I handled things, at least after the action started.

I looked down to inspect my clothes again now that I was thinking clearly. It wasn’t the mess I thought it was in my stupor; just a few dark splash lines that were barely visible against the black. I thought the stray spatter that hit my pants actually made the solid beige garment a little more interesting. My hands just had a couple scrapes, barely breaking the skin. I still felt the urge to bite them, but I ground my teeth, knowing to fight the habit rather than risk putting whatever might have been in the dust in my mouth.

My inspection complete, and my nerves as calmed as they were going to be, I looked to the far horizon past the ridge and took in a deep breath. We had to keep moving. “We have a rally position?” I asked, wondering if we should keep moving.

“The ship.” Joel nodded. I slumped a little at that. Theseus was too far away. Beyond a vague sense of the direction to it, I couldn’t even feel my shell. “No bitching. This is your fault, and you need the cardio, anyway. Fucking beanpole.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I pushed off of the rock and took another deep breath as I rolled up the sleeves of my sweater, consoling myself that this would be a march rather than a sprint, at the very least. I stopped for a moment to read my biometrics on my arm terminal. Other than an elevated heart rate and blood pressure, it read all normal. I’d definitely still need Doc to look me over once I was back home, but on the surface, it looked like I would be okay to carry myself there.

I navigated through my storage to my music, and started a playlist of upbeat music only I could hear. “You better have more water,” I told Joel as I started walking.

“Only if you admit you can’t aim for shit without a bunch of computers running calculations,” he chuckled as he pulled another pouch from his satchel.