Viridian Wolf Page 8

  Sarah had gotten so used to the ‘ominousness’ of her biotechnology that seeing it from the sky took her aback.

  “Okay,” she whispered. “I can see how someone might think I’m a little evil.”

  But even that whisper was lost in the simultaneous, impossible roar of the rest of the transports. Each one had become completely glommed over by large sacks of glistening bioplasm, and each bioplasm sack was crammed to the gills with bladelings, spitters, and some new critters that she had devised while the transports had been built. She mentally tagged which transports held which, then grinned as her first flight of escort planes took to the heavens as well. They were shaped a bit like a highly popular form of cheap chip that she sometimes enjoyed chowing down on – Delta-Ds. The D stood for delicious. Also, the fighter planes (and the chips) were shaped a bit like extremely angular, angry looking Ds. Sarah giggled to herself.

  “What are you giggling about?” Tex asked as the whole airforce arranged itself into chevrons – overlapping protective squadrons.

  “Uhh, nothing!” Sarah said. “It’s dumb.”

  “Well, now I have to hear it,” Aiden said, his voice drawling into the coms.

  “Uh, okay,” Sarah said, caving instantly. “So, uh, all these fighters, they kinda look like Delta-Ds. You know, the chips?”

  “No,” Tex said.

  “No,” Steve said.

  “No,” Hailee said.

  “No,” Synth said.

  “None of you have had-” Sarah stopped herself. Half of them were robots or disembodied AIs. The others had been StarCon or Disney corporate-citizens. She coughed. “T-They’re chips, and, they look like these fighters. So, I was thinking, I, uh, I finally have some... double Ds !”

  Silence.

  “Sarah, you have the biggest tits I’ve ever seen in my life,” Tex said, his voice dry.

  “Dude!” Steve hissed. “You can’t just say that!”

  “It’s okay,” Sarah said, her cheeks burning. “I mean, uh, it’s not like I have any shame left.”

  “You’re blushing though,” Aiden said.

  “No I’m-” Sarah stammered. “I, yes, I...because I...it’s warm up here! That’s why! I mean, you can’t see my face! I...” She stopped as she heard Aiden’s chuckle. “You fucking asshole!”

  “That’s why we’re going to have very angry sex when she gets back,” Aiden faux whispered.

  “Airforce!” Sarah reached behind herself, unhooking her scythe and twirling it. The bone gleamed as she thrust the bladed tip forward, into the air. “Forward!” Her voice and her mental command cracked out at the same time and every jet in the front ranks burst into movement at once, their rear thrusters flaring brilliantly. Sarah placed one of her bare feet backwards, bracing herself as her transport started forward. Ahead of her, her bombardiers – who had been trudging forward at their own stolid, steady pace – settled down. They fired the first spread of plasma projectiles before the airforce rushed overhead. Sarah had a glorious view of the dozens of glittering blue spheres, dripping with plasma discharge, arcing up into the air. The next blast came after the airforce had followed, bracketing them with blazing death.

  The explosions in and among the front ranks of Kellen Grant’s army was quite satisfying.

  Kellen Grant had not been wasting time while his air force had been dueling with hers. Sarah took a moment to survey not only the vast army below her – the vast army that was now becoming significantly less vast – but also took a moment to eyeball his base. This was assisted by the queer way that her eyes could zoom in and make things seem to shine out among the background. She immediately saw that Kellen’s sprawling, rapid attack style was writ large in his bases: He had half a dozen production centers, clustered around radioactive and metal deposits that he had secure. The only base that was larger than the others was the one in the center of a concentric ring of mobile defenses: Tank battalions, dug in squads of combots, and a constant combat air patrol that swirled by overhead.

  The plasma projectiles were landing in his forward army – mostly light tanks and CBC – combot carriers – that looked as if they had been lining up to begin their own blitz.

  Sarah waved her hand. “Give em hell, boys!”

  A third of her transports peeled off and swept down. Two of them almost instantly exploded – one of them with every engine burning, pierced by dozens of dart-fast micromissiles fired by the combots on the ground – but the remainder sung themselves upwards, as if they were flaunting their bellies at the enemies. Those bellies ,those bioplasm containers, ripped open and the first of her new toys came out. She had gotten the idea by watching one of her carbon cows being rolled into a biopit. Rolling was a great way to move a heavy object a short distance in a hurry – so long as the ground was level.

  Or they were being vomited out of still rapidly moving transports.

  Her blobbies came out in a torrential rain, like marbles vomiting from a bag. Each one was a translucent membrane that was drawn taut over a stomach of burbling, hissing hydraulic acid. They had very small brainstems linked to a set of optic nerves that looped around their bellies. Those stems had been coded with the most rudimentary commands of her bladelings – of which the blobbies were a descendent, theoretically.

  Find friend, those instincts said. Hug them!

  The blobbies tumbled and rolled towards tanks and combots and combot carries. The defense systems on those vehicles opened fire. Lasers and plasma and bullets and flechettes skewered each blobbie that came close – and their acid spilled into the vacuum, splashing over the enemy army like a green wave. If they hadn’t been robots, Sarah might have felt bad – but as it was, she whooped as she saw more and more of Kellen Grant’s army literally melting away under the enthusiastic hugs of her blobbies.

  Not every enemy got taken out. And not every enemy was on the ground.

  Sarah lifted her head as she saw missiles and lasers both angling towards her airforce. Chaff exploded into the air, filling vacuum with white poofs like the flowers of some extinct genus. Her fighters plunged into the furball with the eagerness of hunting wolves, and soon, the air was a maelstrom of exploding air-frames and whizzing missiles. One such missile flew straight for the cockpit of the transport she stood upon. Sarah snapped up her palm, instinctively, and the missile skidded to a stop, hovering in the air before her fingers, which clenched on nothing .

  This hadn’t been the first time she had done something like this – and Sarah made a mental note to do some investigation when she wasn’t being shot at. Instead, she angled her arm to the left, sighted at a needle-shaped fighter from the other side, and flicked her fingers wide, so that her hand formed a flat palm. The missile whipped off as if it had been fired from a slingshot, its tail sputtering uselessly as it tried to reorient itself before it impacted, side first, into the enemy plane, both of them exploding in a roaring fireball.

  “Drop! Drop! Drop!” Sarah shouted, pointing at the groups of transports, then down at the areas she had picked.

  And Hailee’s music began to blare over the radio, filling Sarah’s head – and, from the ‘what the fuck?’ she heard from Kellen, Kellen’s radio as well.

  “Da dun dan-nah nah, dun dah nah nah!” Sarah sang along as her transport swept low, opening its guts and vomiting out a chittering swarm of bladelings onto one of Kellen’s forward resourcing bases. The bladelings screeched with happiness, their bodies landing on top of the whirring machinery and utility droids that ran the metal and radioactive extraction. Sarah spared a glance to watch the destruction, before lifting her head to see that the main defenders of Kellen Grant’s base were beginning to move out: Massive, rapid moving combots, each one armed to the teeth. The main combot in the group had a torpedo shaped head with two, ear-like rectangles mounted to either side of the ‘cockpit’ that held the AI core. The rectangles were loaded with LRMs. Each of them also had two arms, which stuck off the sides in a canted mount, with long ranged particle acceleration cannons that speared the
air with beams of blue-white energy. They blasted into the swarms, firing their missiles en masse.

  “Ride of the Valkyries? Seriously!?” Kellen shouted over the music.

  “It’s Disney music, it seemed appropriate!” Sarah shouted as her transport, moving faster now that it had dropped its load – arced towards his main line of combots.

  Three LRMs impacted into the side of her transport at the same time. Sarah didn’t care. She sprang off the cockpit, arcing through the air, her bone scythe held in both hands as she let out a fierce war-cry, landing right on the face of one of his combots. She brought the bladed tip of her scythe slamming down into the armored glass front of the cockpit, puncturing through to skewer the AI core’s armored casing. The combot staggered, and then she wrenched her scythe backwards, the AI core shattering the glass as it came out with her scythe. She looked it over.

  “Delta or gamma level?” She whispered.

  “It’s gamma,” Synth said.

  “Take them alive, then!” she shouted to her bladelings, which were charging towards the other combots. Their headlong rush was checked only by the explosions of LRMs, arcing upwards and plunging down into the front ranks. Meanwhile, Sarah swung herself through the shattered cockpit after tossing the core to the ground, where it could sit and wait for her and her friends to unhobble it. Once she was in the combot proper, she started to spray the interior with her nanolathe, humming to herself as she brought up a StarCon designed cockpit. The plush chair clashed with the utilitarian look of a NovaDyne control panel, and the art-deco styling on the new frame around the front of the combot looked downright silly, and she would have preferred the joystick to not be gold. But it would work.

  “What are you doing?” Kellen asked.

  “Uh, stealing one of your rides,” Sarah said – thinking to herself: I hope this works, I hope this works.

  She grabbed onto the joystick, then pushed it forward. The combot began to stomp forward, bladelings and spitters flowing around it. She twisted it to the side and nearly fell – the combot’s legs flinging themselves out wildly to make up for the wildly shifting gravity. “Meep meep meep meep!” Sarah said, flinging herself to the left in her seat, to try and use her own weight to help, her hair spines clamping tight to her head. “Whoa whoa whoa! Steady, girl!”

  “It’s a robot, not a horse!” Kellen said, sounding somewhere between furious and offended. “And it’s mine .”

  “Technically, uh, it was your enslaved gamma level intelligence, not yours,” Sarah said, the combot righting itself as she completed her ungainly turn. Kellen had marshaled his defenses and stopped trying to engage her swarm with his own counter-blitz. Instead, his tanks and his combots had fallen back to a defensive line that he was still nanolathing into existence: Laser towers, bunkers, and missile defenses, which created what looked like an impenetrable wall of death. Her bladelings flung themselves cheerfully at it – but she focused, making them draw back.

  A barrage of plasma from her bombardiers arced overhead – but Kellen had prepared for that. As the spheres of roiling energy flew down, they reached an invisible dome above Kellen’st last base and lost cohesion. They roiled apart, exploding far too early, flashing in the air. “Some kind of mag-shield?” Sarah said, biting her lip, tapping at red buttons on her mech. She pushed down one and a small coffee maker unfolded from an articulated case in the side of the refurbished cockpit. Coffee poured into it with a burbling hiss. “Man,” she whispered. “StarCon builds everything into their cockpits.” She pushed another red button and the chair rocked under her, unfolding. A rather obscenely large, purple colored dildo peeked out of the chair and brushed against her pussy. “I was kidding !”

  “Did you find the dildo button?” Tex asked.

  “Tex?” Kellen asked. “Texas Dallas, is that you?”

  “This is an open line?” Tex asked.

  “Holy shit, Tex!” Kellen said. “Your sister says hi.”

  “Sister?” Sarah perked up, then gasped as the dildo, without warning, hilted itself inside of her, sliding into her tight, eager pussy with a slurp loud enough that she knew it was audible over the radio. Her eyes closed, her hair clamped against her head, and she bit her lip hard enough to almost draw blood to prevent herself from moaning.

  “It’s not important-” Tex said.

  “I married his sister,” Kellen said. “She’s Becky 4Chan Grant now.”

  “Y-Your sister...is named Becky 4Chan? What the fuck even is a f...ahh!” Sarah’s mouth opened and an involuntary moan escaped – the dildo had begun to buzz within her, deep within her. She clapped her hand over her mouth. Her fingers mashed against the controls, trying to find the way to turn off the dildo button. Two things happened. The first was the dildo’s buzzing kicked up a few notches and it began to plunge into her even harder and faster. The faint whirr whirr whirr of it moving inside of her body, the slap of the base against her pussy lips, and the slick, slurping noises, were all so unimaginably lewd that they nearly completely distracted her from the fact that she had turned on the targeting computer and half the screen of the cockpit was lighting up with targeting reticules.

  She hung her head head forward as Tex barked: “This doesn’t matter.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Kellen said. “Say bye bye to your pet Commander, Tex.”

  Sarah saw that one of the large plasma turrets that served as the backbone to his defense was angling around, taking aim at her combot. She bit her lower lip to try and keep herself from mewling as the dildo whirred inside of her. But she was unable to stop herself from panting quietly, her hips rocking. She flicked a switch that she hoped was related to the missiles. Several of the reticules went from green to red and she heard the quiet whirrrr of a target lock being confirmed.

  “Sarah!” Tex said.

  “Boom,” Sarah moaned. Her finger stabbed down on what she was eighty seven percent sure was the launch button.

  Her combot rocked and missiles arrowed into space, leaving behind expanding plumes of smoke and fire. Sarah’s cunt clenched upon the dildo thrusting into her and moaned in bliss, her back arching as she grabbed onto the console, her fingers digging furrows into the brass and wood paneling. Her eyes closed to slits and white flared before her eyes – the white of her orgasm and the whites of several dozen long ranged missiles zipping through an anti-missile system that had been primed to not fire upon them.

  It was, after all, one of Kellen Grant’s combots.

  The missiles had targeted a single area in his defensive line, ripping open a hole in the overlapping fields of fire, a hole that was filled, instantly, by her bladelings and spitters, which flowed past the legs of her mechs and towards the trenches. Kellen started screaming orders over an open line, and she could faintly see his power armor stomping towards the breach. His B-gun arced antimatter into the air and tore ragged gaps in the swarm. But there were simply too many bladelings, and they swarmed inwards, then outwards. Laser towers started to fall. Missile tubes were ripped apart. Fragments of combots flew into the air as her bladelings did their work – and as the sphere of anti-aircraft weaponry was taken down, her fighters arced down to join the fray, lashing the fusion reactors and solar collectors with projectiles.

  As the power stations died, the remaining lasers died and were swarmed over with by her bladelings.

  Mechs which had drawn back fired into the crowd – and then fell themselves, their fuselages riddled with dripping, acid tipped spikes launches by the spitters.

  By then, Sarah had piloted her mech close, then popped the cockpit. She blushed, gripped the base of the dildo – which had stilled inside of her, then stood. Her knees felt weak and she needed to bite her lip to keep from mewling into the vacuum. But once she was standing, her sex was only completely soaked and ready for round two, rather than still actively throbbing with desire. Sarah forced herself to step onto the art deco dashboard, onto the furrows she had left on the wood paneling, and looked down at her victory. Smoking, wrecked bases in e
very direction. Tanks hulls and burnt out CBCs littered the ground – mixed among her own dead. By her count, she’d lost almost fifty to seventy percent of her army.

  “Give me back my legions,” Tex murmured.

  “Huh?” Sarah asked, then leaped off the side of the mech. She spread her arms and landed with a graceful plunge onto the silty ground, then started to walk towards her swarm – towards a huge clot of bladelings, which had completely surrounded something that still wriggled and squirmed beneath their mass.

  “It’s something an old Roman Emperor said, back before the corporations,” Tex said. “After a huge battle where he lost most of his troops, he said something about getting his legions back. But that was before makers and...whatever you are. You can lose seventy percent, ninety percent, of an army and still come back swinging.”

  Sarah nodded. “What was his name?”

  “No idea,” Tex said. “The detailed course cost, like, a hundred and fifty extra and I was saving up for a new lootbox.”

  Sarah nodded again. “I hear you on that.”

  She sighed, then stepped up to the bladelings. She reached out with her wrist, and injected one of them with an enzyme. The enzyme broke the bladeling down into a biological glop, which spread to other bladelings, breaking them down as well, until the entire biomass had been converted into a large, hardened shell that drank in sunlight and created oxygen within the shell. She stepped to a sphincter-like door in the shell, pushed through, and stood before Kellen Grant. He was in his armor – but his armor had been heavily damaged. Specifically, the bladelings had ripped off his escape portal device thingy, leaving a gaping hole on his back.