Symphony of the Iron Underbelly, Movement No. XX – Survivor Bias
[The Past – Indira Gandhi Arena, New Delhi, India]
Cartilage cracks under the force of my heel as it drives in hard against her throat. What little air is left in my lungs is forced out as I crash down against the mat, but I can always take another breath when the pain subsides and my diaphragm once again accepts the ever-more urgent pleas of my autonomic nervous system for urgent, life-sustaining oxygen. For the Bombshells’ World Champion, the fractured mass of her twisted larynx collapses in on itself and she gurgles and bubbles foaming pink froth that spills over blood-flecked, slack lips.
Powered inch-by-inch with every rasping, agonising lungful of air I drag myself across until I can fall over her jerking body and spend a few moments watching the blinding halo of the overhead spotlights high up in the rafters spin and cavort as they circle me. I do not hear the nearby Official and I do not hear a bell but I hear the crowd react.
A boiling, swelling torrent of rage that expands logarithmically until it is concussive – almost strong enough to physically assault me as I feel a superhero quiver and shake underneath me. It takes virtually all the strength left in my lactic-poisoned arms to push me over and up onto my knees. Thick ropes of red twist and drip in long, drawn-out spindles pooling down from the exposed edge of my chin, where the reinforced composite porcelain has been shattered and broken off by the careful attention of the Bombshells’ World Champion, Miss Roxi Johnson.
Former Bombshells’ World Champion. It is mine now. It is me.
The Official hesitantly reaches out with an outstretched arm, off-balance and leaning forward, the weight of the title belt threatening to send him toppling into a place that only fools rush toward. Running out of courage despite the fact I am struggling to lift the shattered remains of my pseudo-face up from the red-splattered mat, he throws the Championship the last metre down and it lands in the blood and the sweat.
Those dancing overhead lights pick out the shining gold of the centre plate. With another constrained breath, rib cage pulled in taut with iron bands forged from bruises, I reach out with my prosthetic and drag the heavy leather strap in. The delicate, painted black thorn work which once spiralled around its bone-white plastic fingers are gouged and scratched, and the servomotors within judder and spasm with effort …
But it is mine.
I have captured her heart, at last.
Shards of broken glass spin away as I lift the metal and leather up into my grasp. Such a curious thing – for so many to have given so much for something that seems so tired, so banal. The leather is dried and cracked, made shiny in places and rough where the oil from dozens of worthy and unworthy hands had held tight until it was finally ripped from their desperate grasp. Where it flexes the backing peaks through in splits and slits, and the polished plated gold is worn away at the edges where years of the uncaring attentions of airport baggage handlers, interspersed with the odd exposed forehead driven into edge-on, have combined to strip away the finish and leave the bare silver underneath.
And still, so many have given so much. Given everything. Still on my knees, I glance over my shoulder at the murmuring form of the woman I have just taken it from. A Superhero who has just given everything to stop what is happening right before her glassy eyes.
I would be lying to say the sight of realisation making its dogged, determined way into her addled and oxygen-starved brain did not thrill me. It did. It does.
For a few moments, I think I can almost understand why this title is such a toxic attraction. A shining, cancerous trinket and trophy that hollows out the bones of all those who spend too long in its poisoned presence. But those are only a few moments, because I have taken this, made it mine, for a subtly different reason.
Others have simply survived this Championship, but I have set my sights on an altogether loftier purpose. It will be reforged. Remade.
It will not change me. I will change it.
Even though they are so very high above – too high to warm my sweat-slicked skin – I feel the heat of the overhead lights, and it spreads across my shoulders as it heralds the comingl of something long-promised.
The Rapture has finally arrived, borne on the winds of a hurricane and the cape of a superhero.
[The Rapture]
There is little to be gleaned from those wounds most obviously on display. The angry red welts and criss-crossed scars that mar the skin have already told their stories; they have nothing more to say beyond announcing their presence. The pain they carried has already been inflicted – spent in the past and with limited potential to influence the future beyond limiting the scope of Instagram-worthy pictures.
Instead, it is far more illuminating to consider those injuries which are hidden from view. The wounds that did not make it back to the eye of the beholder to be judged and grimaced against. Their stories are still in-progress; still to be understood. Quantified. Their impact has yet to be fully felt. A slow-motion metaphysical car crash in which the occupant is still in mid-agonising whiplash.
Thoughts turn to those that were overwhelmed and never returned to show their cowed faces. And there are so many faces: Miss Benton, Miss De Salco, Miss Rainbow … A Zdunich by every other name under the Sun and Moon …
Inconspicuous by their absence, because they were never a meaningful challenge or threat. Obstacles to be negotiated in order to move forward, but nothing more. That they failed to reappear, to learn and adapt, is simply reflective of their irrelevance. Perhaps it was for the best, given the likelihood of a repeat performance. There can be no growth without suffering, but misery for the sake of misery is sadomasochistic. A twisted form of pleasure for some, perhaps.
Then, there are those who did profess to have something new to offer. Our former Bombshells’ World Champion, Miss Johnson, is one such rare example. Indeed, she can hold the impressive – if purely academic – claim to have been the only individual to inflict a so-called defeat upon me … Though as I hold her title between my plastic fingers, such a claim seems hollow at best.
Still, she returned with something approximating growth. Development. A new challenge to be negotiated and overcome. The cuts still healing in subtle pink lines on her belly carry testament to that attempt, ultimately for nought. Those are not the scars, however, that tell the most interesting story.
The reality of her defeat, of her vulnerability, leaves twisted track marks all across the inside of her mind. Psychosomatic wounds that pulse and ache with pain; reminding her that in the end she could not save any of them. Not her wife, not her title and not the Division which now looks up on craned necks to see me standing at its summit. Agonies of the spirit she will carry for a great many years, completely and utterly invisible. Those lingering aftereffects are the most intriguing.
And so … What of those that do not seem to carry any such wounds of the soul, but choose to reappear? How best to understand where they clamp a hand to their side and grimace with some unseen, unknowable pain?
Where does Mercedes Vargas hurt?
It is a subtle wound she wears and it is inexorably wrapped up in the curvature of her spine, brought on by the enormous weight she apparently carries. The combined mass of the entire Bombshell Division, singularly placed on her back as she continues to demonstrate without exception her talents and credentials, would force almost any other contender to her knee to scrape bloodily against concrete, but Miss Vargas is made of sterner stuff.
Louder stuff.
Look through the noise, however, and back into the past. Beyond her victory fresh from the fallout of Violent Conduct, further back to the Climax Control of previous weeks. There, she faced off against a superhero and failed to achieve the victory she so desperately yearned for. Strove for. This is not a particularly hard indictment of her inadequacies – after all, I did not succeed at the first attempt when dealing with superhuman Champions and to expect others to have done so would be purely hypocritical.
But we are not the same.
There is a desperation to Miss Vargas that pours red and thick to clot on the ground as plainly as the wounds she keeps hidden from view. A growing and ever-more urgent need to take by force what has so far been refused voluntarily; recognition. Respect. Appreciation. Her due.
We are not the same, and yet both of us are inexorably linked. For while Roxi was the first to defeat me, per se, Mercedes was the first to survive me. No-one – not SCW’s resident Saviour in a flowing cape, not a Hurricane Painted Red – has remained standing after a mutual exchange of miseries with my thorn-painted hand. No-one, except Miss Vargas.
No-one has stood under their own power to look at me and signal without ambiguity or hesitation, that this was not and is not over. Except Miss Vargas.
When I was deployed as this company’s resident boogeywoman; used to scare impressionable young women and children into compliance, she sought out confrontation with abandon. That alone is worthy of her much-thirsted recognition and appreciation. It is so much easier when they come out from the wings willingly, and step into the light to share centre-stage of their own free but vastly-misjudged appetite for success.
But I am not interested in what I can see in Mercedes; only what I cannot.
It is said that in the penultimate stages of the Second World War, aerospace engineers studied the damage patterns of aircraft that returned from bombing missions over mainland Europe; seeking to understand where the design could be strengthened based on that visible damage and distress and the obvious wounds of war.
It was not until a relatively maverick engineer suggested what was of interest was less the visible and more the invisible. In other words, the areas without damage were those most vulnerable areas, and those that suffered impacts there simply did not survive to return at all. To consider only the assets which made it back created an implied Survivor Bias which did not represent reality.
And so, it is here we must be cautious to ascribe too much heroism, skill and wonder to Miss Vargas simply for the feat of having returned on a second occasion. Where has she been shot through by heavy flak, and does that represent a significant wound or something altogether more cosmetic?
Her weakness is not in defeat against the previous Champion all those weeks ago, or even those failures previous to that. No, her vulnerability is in the reaction to that defeat – a powerful need to make amends, to prove she is still capable of achieving great things despite such setbacks. That desire can make a person do foolish things at foolish times, and act with a reckless abandon usually reserved for fools chased by their hapless angels. I am not interested in what Mercedes has failed to do previously; I am intrigued by what she might do in her attempt to redress that failure.
What secret wounds lie out of sight, representing mortal blows if only they puncture her thin and stressed skin, sending her tumbling out of the sky trailing thick smoke and flickering flames? We know such miseries have yet to be inflicted upon her, because she stands here. Now. The scars and the aches and the pains are an inconvenience, but hardly fatal.
Not now. Not yet.
[The Past ERROR]
Counter-fire barriers flared into existence, disintegrating the incoming rounds which hit their mark with a swirling detonation so bright it momentarily reduced the surrounding block to a silhouette. The rounds aimed too high exploded chunks of brittle concrete, sending plumes of pulverised masonry up into the air as they collapsed. A pall of choking dust settled over anything and everything below, making it difficult to see, shoot or think.
Undeterred, the deafening crack-crack-crack of a rifle on automatic rang out. Even through the gloom, the unmistakable pattern of light which marked out every hit stopped in its tracks was easily visible, and simply attracted more. Something heavier joined the mix, slower and more deliberate with a bass-like thud as it fired and a billowing sheet of orange flame as it hit. A rolling wind swept out from the impact, bathing the ruins in warmth.
It emerged from the afterglow, striding over scorched earth and through the blackened, broken fragments of metal still-burning in the aftermath. Pitted and scratched and still coming.
Shuffling out of sight and into cover, Abigayle pressed her back up against the remnants of a brick wall and stooped down to keep her skull on top of her shoulders where it belonged. Swiftly changing out the magazine, she cycled the rifle once, twice – three times before the battered action overcame the grime and sludge and loaded a round into the chamber. Smearing a grit and mortar aerosol from her features, she pressed the weapon’s stock in against the meat of her shoulder and made to swing around.
The wall, now in front, which should have given her the perfect firing position broke apart, shattered by the penetrating power of a hyper-velocity round that could only have come from her own side. The splintering brickwork gave Abigayle just enough time to squeeze her eyes shut.
Dumped on her belly hard, she ground her bloody forearms into the dirt; desperately trying to lift her chest up high enough to relieve the crushing pressure and breathe. Air finally came in hacking, spluttering gasps as her diaphragm jerked back to work. Rolling onto her side, she cradled her ribs and wretched.
Abigayle roughly pawed at her ears, grimacing as something hot and slick wet the fingers. Leaving a red streak smeared across her body armour, she reached ahead towards the muzzle of her rifle, protruding from a pile of blasted brick and rock. As she tugged weakly on the still-warm barrel her bloody grip slipped free, staining the metal.
The pale sun in the sky, still struggling to push through the thick blanket of dust and debris suspended in the chill air was blotted out completely. A localised shadow fell over her, the sound of gunfire and her own wheezing replaced by a ringing that swamped out every sound. This great armoured machine, rumbling and shining even through all the dirt and din of battle, looked down on her without any discernible face other than an elongated muzzle. It rolled to a halt, poised to deliver a killing blow with the deadly weapon mounted on its front but the point of the barrel never found her. Instead, it simply rolled over\Abigayle’s prone form, saved by crushed girders and breezeblocks jutting overhead and continued elsewhere.
Gritting her teeth together and fuelled by something equal parts anger, disbelief and tinnitus she scrambled to her knees. With a single whole-body effort she heaved her rifle free of its burial mound and back into her grasp. Abigayle lurched up to her feet, ignoring the taste of iron on her tongue as she stumbled after it, released the safety and squeezed the trigger hard.
The first few rounds dug into the ash-strewn dirt, too low and missing their mark by ten feet or more but as they came thick and fast, the brutal recoil kicked the muzzle upwards bringing the rest of the magazine on target. Metal slugs crashed into a familiar, dazzling wall of detonations conjured out of thin air; each impact spreading waves of kinetic energy that radiated out across twisting, seething bands. Dozens of rounds skimmed across an expanding plume of fire, no more effective than stones against water.
The defensive kaleidoscope became a lighthouse; shining so brightly that any surrounding “ship”, and its gun, could see and respond. Withering fire began to coordinate and grow exponentially, a mixture of handguns, rifles and siege-grade weaponry. Missiles and grenades slammed themselves into the counter-fire barrier, competing for space in air already thick with metal. Opaque with the density of the attack, the siege machine beyond the shielding was impossible to see, but it was soon felt.
The beam swept out in an irresistible arc, electric blue and scintillating. It burnt the air itself before it burnt the ground – slicing through concrete, iron, armour, flesh and bone in a continuous emission that disappeared to kill further than Abigayle could see. Methodically the armoured vehicle turned, cutting and vaporising. She watched it boil brickwork into molten slag, and then she watched it sweep towards her–
Abigayle’s eyes snapped open as she sat bolt upright, consciousness lagging a few moments behind her heart as it wrenched and twisted inside her chest. Struggling to catch her breath, she ran a shaking hand across her damp, scarred scalp down to rest on the nape of her neck. Overhead, a single irritating strobe light flashed rhythmically. Throwing out a hand, she slammed it down on the nearby panel, silencing the tactile alarml and once again plunged the room into merciful darkness.
It had been designed to operate silently; using a pattern of light instead of noise to avoid the worst unpleasantness associated with triggers like shrieking, wailing, crying …
Sighing, she grimaced and peeled the sweat-stained sheets away, flinging them over the side of the bed. Pressing the bare soles of her feet down against the carpet, she buried her head in her hands. The warmth of her breath against her palms in the blackness went some way to steadying strained nerves.
By feel alone and patting from the mattress to the nightstand, Kino’s fingers closed around a wide silver bracelet, clamshell-shaped and smooth to the touch. She snapped it closed around her wrist, snug against the flesh. A panel inset into the top of the bracelet lit up in response, and she dismissed its blue light with a tap of her fingertip against the metal. From a hook on the wall Abigayle pulled free a dressing gown that had evidently been bright red once when new, its intricate and embroidered flower-petal shapes faded by time and too many hot washes.
Throwing it on and rubbing at her face with the hilt of her palm, she made hard work of trudging to the nearby sink. Shoving her hands underneath the tap automatically brought warm water, and a much less welcome piercing light over the mirror. Screwing her eyes shut, she splashed the water against her face and let it run freely down to join the sweat stains on her vest.
Scooping a palmful into her mouth, Abigayle glanced at the mirror. Her reflection looked terrible, successfully managing to make her appear almost as bad as she felt. She stretched the skin of her cheeks downward, temporarily smoothing out the creases. Pulling her hands away they snapped back into being; re-joining the experiences and the years that had created them. That no smoothing could remove.
The bracelet on her wrist began to vibrate furiously. Patting a towel across her forehead, Abigaye flicked open the lock on her apartment’s door.
They had said her hearing would return soon, given treatment. Given time. Until then, she experienced the world with her eyes and the occasional painful stab of tinnitus.
The man stood outside in the spinal corridor was dressed in an impeccably starched shirt, blue like the sky and sporting creases from epaulette to short-sleeve cuff. She instantly recognised the coloured beret on his head – scarlet red – that marked him out as a member of the local security services, and the razor-sharp creases which always followed a veteran’s wardrobe wherever they went. Abigayle frowned as she watched the guard talk, or at least, watched his lips move wordlessly. Her confusion encouraged his and he stopped, awkwardly over-enunciating as though that would make any difference.
Realisation dawned and holding her hand up to stop him, she darted back to the nightstand by an embarrassingly unkempt bed. Snatching up a small black orb, she pushed the device inside the inner concave of her ear and held it there for a few moments. A single muted tone conducted directly into her brain brought all the sounds of the world flooding back.
Abigayle tapped the side of her head by way of explanation. “I am sorry; you were saying?”
“Sorry for the early hour Ma’am.” He dipped his chin sharply and rocked up on the heels of his polished shoes. “There’s been an incident down at one of the camps. They’re looking for any and all able hands— “
“Internal or external?” She interrupted, already swooping down to collect her boots.
“Internal; ruckus broke out in the food lines and grew from there. For now at least, but that could change at any minute. I thought you might be able to help, given you can still … Well, see well enough. And your hand …”
The new prosthetic she wore glinted in the corridor light, fingers flexing in autonomic response.
She tried not to look at it, knotting the laces. “Take me to them.”
He hesitated. “Don’t you want to finish getting dressed?”
“That depends,” Abigayle said. Her words suggested there might be a little hesitation, but her tone didn’t ask for any suggestions. “Do they have the time to spare me?”
She fell in behind as he turned and left, silently.
[The Rapture]
There has been such a change – I hope you can feel it as strongly as I do.
It is the beginning of something wonderful, something I have worked so hard to show you all for so long. It is not a continuation of the old, whereby excellence was defined as a counter which ticked up on each successful defence of a symbol that long since stopped representing anything greater than the selfish, individualistic machinations of an army of one.
No, this is the culmination of a grand and celestial work carefully and painstakingly assembled from all the myriad parts taken from the Bombshells’ Division. Some willingly, as they gave me their careers and others at the greatest resistance; as I took their hearts. Through submission or subjugation, however, their contributions have finally ushered in something rapturous.
The summit of this Division and the wider company is no longer brutal, hierarchical combat. It is altogether more transformational. It is no longer necessary to simply survive and in that, outlive all your competitors. Now is the time for growth, to revel in the miseries and agonies that go hand-in-plastic hand with that self-actualisation and realisation. To become better, one must endure hardship.
Thus, as World Champion, my remit is no longer simply to defeat those that oppose me, but to educate them. Improve them.
Grow them.
And so through all the smoke and screeching treads and booming guns, Miss Vargas becomes my newest student. Not to learn about why she should never have come here, again, but instead the first of many to learn such very important lessons. Lessons which will leave her nursing wounds both visible and hidden but equally choice and measured out.
It is not enough to survive, Mercedes. Your singular claim to fame – of simply enduring me to be able to emerge from the other side still standing and drawing breath to tell the world how wonderfully you performed – is insufficient. At Climax Control, this Sunday, you will be placed into the same situation which saw you fail to grow, fail to learn and fail to achieve more than simply continuing to exist from one moment until the next.
There are no more unknowns by which learned aerospace engineers can frown and look at the punctured fuselage of your achievements and wonder: how can we make this better? The bias is fully understood and clear. Survival is no pre-qualification to take what I have worked so relentlessly to finally, blessedly make mine.
I am your Bombshells’ World Champion, and while I am your future, you are nothing but the past. A flawed, biased dataset which hides the truth from those who would step into the centre-stage light and take the beautiful lessons I have come wearing gold and precious stones to teach.
Last time, you survived to win. This time it will not be sufficient. There will be nothing left to look upon the holes and the scars and wonder how to make better, make stronger next time.
Welcome to the Rapture. It welcomes return guests.
[The Past ERROR]
The rain, spat by a furious sky, probed every inch of brick and metalwork on its determined way down to the ground. Where it could, water gathered in swollen rivulets which poured through the torn walls and shattered ceilings it met. Occasional claps of thunder reverberated against these burnt-out, broken shards – competing with the terrific, rolling boom of something else falling from the storm raging above. Something not made there.
Wind whipped against the buckled frame of a window long abandoned by glass, pushing the storm and its ire inside. Other than a pockmarked concrete floor, lined with spiralling cracks and the occasional tile balanced precariously on a fire-blackened, sagging beam overhead there was nothing left for the weather to wreak havoc upon. Even the shattered panes, left where they’d tumbled and broken were further pummelled into fine shards by the elements and washed away; carried by an urban waterfall cascading down from the ruined levels above.
Something that didn’t belong in the sky roared again. Painful, if anyone had been there to hear it and wince. It was close now, shaking the air and buoying the wind with newfound strength. What little that was still left standing shuddered, and more of it fell in on itself. Great chunks of concrete worn smooth by storms and scorched by fire toppled, punching ugly wounds in the floor where it found a way through and down.
Eventually, calm re-established itself and the downpour resumed as the only sound piercing a silent cityscape.
Pooling water had barely recharged ruts scored into the concrete floor before a body stumbling forwards and emptied them, falling hard. With a grunt and excruciating slowness made from pain in every body part, the figure rolled onto its back and blinked away the rain. She laughed.
The laughter was strained, interrupted by the occasional splutter and a sharp intake of pained breath. Pulling away the hand clamped against her side, she held up trembling fingertips that stained the falling rain red. Laughter gave way to the roar of the storm outside and in.
The stranger groped about with no coordination, pawing against the pitted concrete randomly until fingers closed around the muzzle guard of a long-barrelled rifle. Drawing the weapon into her body, teeth grinding together with effort, she pulled free the magazine and glanced inside. Six shots shy.
Clutching her gut, the rifle was soon forgotten as a wave of pain reduced the storm, the ruins, the six rounds – everything – to intolerable white noise. A bloodied glove lunged out, sending up grey rainwater and debris as it crashed about in search of something. Closing a fist tight around a soaked fabric bag marked DE LUNE she jerked on the strap, pulled it in and began rifling through. Weatherproof sheeting and dented tins were each flung away until a single grey cylinder rolled free from the confines of the bag, no larger than a finger. Breathing became a more deliberate effort, actions less coordinated with each passing second as she scraped it across the floor roughly, making hard work of tearing off the plastic protecting a tapered end. When it finally sheared, she twisted the cap until a sharp slither poked free.
Biting firmly down on her lip, DeLune plunged the point into a crimson-soaked undershirt. Her screams fought the storm still raging and won.
Strings of saliva splattered out across her bloodied chin, joining jaw to the concrete before euphoria flooded her system and gave her just enough presence of mind to wipe them away with an unsteady hand. Slowly she climbed to her knees, rifle in hand as she paused for the luxury of a few relatively pain-free breaths. Shuffling forwards with knuckles pressed into the rainwater, DeLune gradually stretched out as she neared the blasted remains of a window frame until her soaking body lay prone. Parallel with a crumbling ledge, the muzzle of a rifle extended out and down into the wind and weather.
Glancing over a shoulder, her eyes lingered on the red streak painting a short journey to the window’s edge. She sucked in a deep lungful of air as the pharmaceutical high began to fade. It would only continue to diminish. She shifted focus to the scope mounted on top of the rifle and the streets below.
It didn’t take long for her gaze to find its mark. Even if the storm and the furious skies sustaining it both departed, those things never made a sound. There were absolute silences that spoke more loudly than them, and in any case of all the senses, only the eye could see something so unnatural.
Elegance in such devastated surroundings was unmistakably out of place; something shining cerulean in a washed-out city of black and grey. Reaching forward, DeLune twisted a focusing ring and narrowed the scope’s field of view. She watched it move effortlessly through the destruction below and, bizarrely, with deliberate care which only seemed even more jarring considering the entire city had been shattered with much less hesitancy. Such deliberate gentleness, as though clipping the melted remains of any of the smoking hulks scattered around down below would upset someone. Their owners were long dead by now.
It stood easily twice her height on sweeping limbs which bent backwards, not forwards. Gangly in form, appearing slight – almost delicate. Disarming, if she hadn’t bitterly known better and seen worse. Over a shoulder it carried the unmistakable silhouette of a large weapon, the ringed barrel pointed upwards and trained against nothing more threatening than rainclouds. It sported a single arm on the opposite side, fingers and wrist rolled back in on itself so it had the shape of a crude club. From its centre of mass an ellipse bulged, opaque and riddled with fine lines and something DeLune couldn't place. Any number of lights pulsed and cycled within, blinking some incomprehensible message.
It didn’t matter. She had no intention of trying to understand. Her leading hand worked its way downwards, creeping along the underside of the barrel. A solitary fingertip reached out and depressed the safety, making the rifle fully capable of killing someone – or something. DeLune reached for the cocking handle, keenly aware she would have to be fast and firm. There’d be no second chance. Depending on her luck, there might not even be a first.
The skin of her palm pressed tight in around the grip grew hot and slick, even as her lips grew dry along with her throat. As she reached for the cocking arm, her hand began to tremble. Grasping the handle, DeLune ratcheted the slide forwards and chambered one of those last lucky six.
Pulsing lights far below changed their rhythm and intensity almost instantly. Faster than she could return to a firing position, his target down below pivoted and brought its own weapon to bear. A building whine, on the edge of sensation at first but instantaneously becoming shrill, signalled DeLune’s death before she had the time to squeeze the trigger in her grasp.
A loud clatter of something-on-concrete out of sight fought to snatch away their duelling focus, but from his vantage point above DeLune couldn’t do anything but watch. Unwilling to take her magnified eye from the colourful phantom even as it whirled about to face this new threat, she reset the focusing ring on the rifle scope and sacrificed detail for a larger field of view. What she saw wore through the last of pain relief that was all but spent. The adrenaline which burnt the blood in her veins for fuel would have to see her through this alone.
A shape darted through the collapsed innards of what might have once been a residence block, or a factory, or a store. It had been years since anything in this city had been more than ruins. A child. A redhead. Ragged, running freely and kicking up stones, clutching something stuffed that sported buttons for eyes but missed arms and legs. She emerged from the shadows of twisted steel trussing out into the open. The barrel of the Phantom’s shoulder-mounted weapon instantly swung about, tracking across to find its target. Taking a single step forward it froze, mirroring the little girl who found herself in the shadow of something incomprehensible.
The pattern of those strange lights changed again, slowing down.
Snaking her finger inside the guard and taking up the slack on the trigger, DeLune blinked away the opaque, salty combination of rainwater and sweat dripping from her brow.
Suddenly the previously trained weapon swung abruptly up, back to threatening nothing more than sky. The Phantom stooped down – something that should have been awkward given its long limbs – somehow accomplished with disturbing grace. The stumped club of its single arm unfolded, until it flexed individual, multi-segmented digits. For seconds that stretched out to make agonising minutes, she watched; transfixed as this child and this thing stood studying each other.
Eventually, trembling, the little girl held out her hand. Those lights buried deep within the Phantom pulsed in another incomprehensible pattern and fashion. DeLune’s heart hammered against the prison of her chest in a dreadful, altogether familiar pattern.
Growing in confidence, the little girl cautiously offered up the remains of the stuffed animal she held. Taking it from the child with a deftness that seemed incompatible with something so much more massive, it spent the next few moments seemingly deep in whatever passed for thought inside those flowing organic lines. What passed for fingers closed around the toy, until they began to compress its dirty orange fur and cause the buttons for eyes to balloon outwards. Freezing and then reversing its grip, the Phantom seemed enraptured. Captivated.
Distracted. Vulnerable.
Agony lanced through DeLune, forcing her to press teeth together hard to keep her jaw shut and the scream confined. Having burnt through medicine and adrenaline, there was precious little left to keep her focused, on track … And conscious. Reaching back inside the shattered window, she pressed a hand against her side and grimaced as something hot and wet warmed the skin. Smearing the ledge red and her hand clean, DeLune took up the target again. The little girl took a step backwards, unwittingly creating just enough space to give her a chance of growing up. She pulled the trigger.
The first of a lucky six rang out, finding its mark with a detonating flash so bright DeLune had to look away from the scope to avoid making her eyes a casualty too. Before what was left of the city below resolved back into existence, a shrieking wail cut through her blindness.
The Phantom lurched forward; its long limbs suddenly emptied of all that grace as it stumbled. Colourful coruscating arcs crackled violently between rents in its smooth exterior, exposing intricate silver machinery underneath that was promptly blackened by each discharge. What was left of the weapon on its shoulder veered in random vectors, tracking imagined targets with the twisted snout of its sheared barrel. Impotent. Confused. Still, it screamed as it wheeled about. All but hidden by the erupting electrical impulses which danced between the damage on display, the lights buried beneath a translucent chest flickering furiously as they began to dim.
From her vantage point above and as executioner, DeLune watched the Phantom die, or whatever approximation of death passed for it. Her finger remained taut against the trigger, but with only five rounds left and less than that in full pints of blood, she stayed her hand.
The colourful ribbons of energy drawing lines between the thing’s wounds faded, and the wail softened so it became possible to think about something other than its deafening, all-consuming power. The Phantom’s thrashing diminished until, mercifully, it stumbled into a broken concrete barricade, toppled forwards and did not move again. In a final reflexive spasm, the segmented digits of its single hand splayed open, revealing an undamaged stuffed animal with buttons for eyes. As dead now as it had always been.
Jutting her neck outwards, Cooper scanned the scene. Of the little girl there was no sign, or at least no sign of a body. She had probably survived. Or she had died quickly. Only anything in the middle didn’t bear thinking about.
There were already others creeping through the surrounding ruins, bearing down on her even though not one of them had ever even stepped foot within a mile of this killing ground. They didn’t need to; they’d all seen through the broken doll DeLune had just put down as surely as if she’d run each of them through with one of her lucky six. Phantoms brought more Phantoms. Every single time.
A surge of anger fought its way up from the pit of her bleeding gut as she watched a dozen of them begin to converge on her location, twisting her features into a scowl. Not a single one even had the decency to attempt to avoid being an easy target. They picked their way through the rubble; using those long limbs to find a path between concrete, broken brick and mortar all the while presenting ceramic-smooth something to the muzzle of his rifle. Even their shoulder-mounted weapons – each one packing ten times the killing potential of her own – stayed upwards, tasting the rain instead.
“Why do you not fucking shoot me!” She shouted, voice distorting against the broken buildings beyond. Pulling herself up to her knees and oblivious to the pain it caused, DeLune rose above the ability of the window’s ledge to hide, but her challenge went unanswered.
Twelve impossibly-machined shapes deftly moved through larger, broken city shapes. Pressing her chest back down against the rutted concrete floor, DeLune shifted the rifle back into position. Determination despite the grim odds took control and the scowl soon melted away, joining the great lumps of boiled metal spread across the streets below where her first round hit true.
The rifle drove backwards into the meat of her shoulder with a crack, bruising it as she squeezed the trigger and sent a second of six through the surrounding devastation. This time, there was no accompanying flash or harrowing wail. Instead, the round impacted something stronger and thicker than thin air but just as invisible. The targeted Phantom continued forwards, nonplussed by the attempt. Hefting the rifle back up, she picked a new target and fired. Quickly now, with less patience and a deeper twisting of the gut that had nothing to do with anger.
Three, four and five from six found their mark, each one in a new direction and none matched the success of the first. Each one abruptly stopped at point-blank range by something her eyes couldn’t move fast enough to see.
DeLune did pick out movement a few hundred metres to his right, and she turned her head in that direction in time to witness an intense light paint a thin beam from the shoulder of a Phantom all the way up towards her. Concrete left and right blackened, sagged and pulverised under the assault, spewing out billowing clouds of choking dust and shards of masonry. The remains of what had once been a wall in front of her collapsed. Rolling hard, savagely crushing wounds repeatedly against the floor, DeLune pulled her knees up into her chest and tucked her chin down. The attack was uncoordinated, imprecise and the beam simply continued tracking up, cutting into the floor above. Rusted fixtures and broken fittings began to rain down, shattering as they struck the floor if they were delicate or simply punching through and continuing down if not.
Struggling to draw anything but debris into her lungs, DeLune spluttered for air as she groped about in the dusty gloom, blind. Falling back onto her haunches, wheezing, her starving mind took a moment to try to count the spinning particles suspended in the haze. Something bright pierced the haze, disrupting her confused count and forcing her to dive forward. Head crashing violently against concrete, DeLune rolled onto her back, slack-jawed, and stared up helplessly at the beam of light cutting cleanly through everything in its path–
Abigayle’s eyes flashed open as she rolled to the side of the bed and gagged. The dream was always the same – real people, who bled and died – replaced by strange facsimiles but she always survived somehow. Walking metal ghosts … Phantoms, impervious to violence and her best efforts. A little girl and her teddy bear. A redhead. Some of it was true; some of it came from memory but others were distortions. Ripplies of the imagination that somehow merged with reality.
She brought up a hand to wipe at the sweat staining her cheeks, but met only air. Her prosthetic sat uselessly on the bedside table, a truncated and scarred forearm swinging pointlessly overhead. The fingers she had dreamed were still there only a few moments ago tingled. Not everything survived, it would seem.
But she always survived. Somehow.
She had never been a soldier. Why did she dream like one?
