Chapter 4: Static, Swarm, & Uncertain Shapes

  The red emergency lights painted the corridor in pulsing strokes of arterial gloom. Lyra Vasari’s grip was a cold, insistent pressure on my good arm, pulling me forward. Felt like being towed by a polite but firm automaton. My left side was a disaster zone – the newly attached metal limb, heavy and alien, buzzed with a low, ominous energy. Fissures spiderwebbed across its gunmetal surface from its earlier... episode. Glimpses of dark, pulsing biomech showed through. My shoulder ached with a deep, grinding pain that was both real and phantom. Just breathing felt like an accomplishment.

  Lyra hauled me around a corner into a wider, circur briefing space. Felt like a holding pen. Banks of dark monitors lined one wall. A low table sat center stage. Two other figures occupied the room, their presence immediately amplifying the wrongness of my own situation.

  Both women. Both cd in the same drab grey scrubs that felt like sandpaper against my skin. Both sporting the same impossible, gleaming gunmetal arms. Theirs, however, looked intact. Integrated. Functional.

  One stood leaning against the far wall, arms crossed – the metal catching the strobing red light. She was tall, built lean but wiry, with sharp features framed by dark hair cut brutally short, almost shaved at the sides. Her posture radiated impatience, a tightly coiled energy that felt like disdain looking for a target. Her eyes, narrowed and dark, flicked over me as Lyra pulled me in. They lingered for less than a second on my busted arm, a flicker of something cold – calcution? Contempt? – before dismissing me entirely. She returned her gaze to a dead monitor screen, as if willing it to show something more interesting than the current shambles. Control etched into every line of her.

  The other woman was sitting at the central table, seemingly oblivious, tracing invisible patterns on its metallic surface with a segmented fingertip. Her light brown hair was a messy contrast to the other’s severity, falling across her face. Shorter, slighter build. She looked up as we entered, and the impact was… strange. Not threatening, just… off. Her eyes were warm brown, but held a profound, unsettling ck of focus, gazing somewhere past my shoulder, as if watching light patterns only she could see. Her expression was pcid, a faint, almost-smile pying on her lips. There was a quiet stillness about her that felt deeply alien in the midst of the shrieking arms and fshing lights. Was this the one from the corridor? The one who’d reacted to my arm exploding with an indifferent "Oops"? Recognition felt slippery, lost in the static.

  Lyra finally released my arm, stepping forward. "Report," she directed at the sharp-faced one.

  Sharp-Face pushed off the wall, movements economical, precise. "Fraying event confirmed, Gamma-Seven Junction," her voice was a low, clipped alto, each word bitten off cleanly. "Significant Du'at entity surge. Scramble pattern Zeta initiated by local system." She still didn't look at me. Professionalism bordering on hostility.

  "Containment status?" Lyra asked, voice tight.

  "Unknown. Team One comms ceased 0500 hours," Sharp-Face stated. "Presumed neutralized." Her gaze finally slid to me, taking in the damaged arm, the general air of someone recently disassembled. "Mandate is immediate recon, threat assessment, and stabilization if resources permit." The way she said 'resources' felt pointed. Like I was a drain on them.

  "Acknowledged." Lyra turned to me. Commander mode fully engaged now. Her eyes weren't soft; they scanned, assessed. Less 'how are you feeling?', more 'what broken parts can still function?'. "Core. You can operate?"

  Could I? What did operate even mean? Point and shoot? Try not to spontaneously sprout death bdes? The arm throbbed. The static buzzed louder. "Suppose we'll find out," I mumbled. Felt like the most honest answer I could manage. Aimed for wry detachment, probably hit 'bewildered exhaustion'.

  Sharp-Face definitely scoffed this time. The quiet one at the table blinked slowly, her distant gaze drifting towards me for a moment, unreadable.

  Lyra nodded curtly. "Standard recon protocols. Stay behind cover, provide suppressing fire on visual confirmation. Kassandra, issue secondary weapon."

  Ah, so Sharp-Face had a name. Kassandra. Fit the brittle intensity. She moved to a weapons locker, keyed it open. Pulled out the matte bck pistol with blue highlights. Thrust it at me. "Ma'at Repeater. Energy pulse. Semi-auto. Keep your trigger discipline functional." No 'don't shoot us' this time. Progress? Or maybe she just assumed I'd be too incompetent to hit anything important.

  I took it. Heavier than it looked. Banced wrong in my one good hand. Lyra tapped the quiet one on the shoulder. "Selene. Let's move."

  Selene. Okay. Names acquired. Didn't make them feel less like components in some malfunctioning machine I'd woken up inside. Selene rose with that same slightly drifting grace, offering me that same disconnected smile. Maybe she gave Kassandra a nod? Hard to tell. Her focus seemed… elsewhere.

  Lyra led the way to Deployment Bay Gamma. The heavy door hissed open onto the howling wrongness of Sector Gamma. Ruined cityscape under the bruised, pulsing violet sky. Reality felt thin, colours bled, shadows writhed. The air hummed, vibrating in my teeth, smelling like ozone, dust, and something vaguely rotten beneath the metallic tang. Kassandra moved out instantly, Repeater up, scanning like a predator. Lyra shoved spare energy cells at me. "Cover fire. Stay alert. Don't engage directly unless forced."

  We stepped onto the broken street. Debris crunched. Wind howled. My arm buzzed, a constant, low-level thrum of wrongness. My skin crawled.

  Then, the skittering. Oily, segmented shapes, rat-sized, maybe bigger, pouring from the shadows. Hundreds. Multi-legged, clicking, tiny red eyes glinting. They flowed over rubble like a tide of living filth.

  "Hostiles sighted," Kassandra's voice, ft in my ear via internal comms I hadn't activated but were apparently just on. "Designation?"

  "Unknown," Lyra snapped back. "Low profile, swarm behaviour observed. Possible scavenger entities?"

  "Can we even hurt these things?" My voice sounded thin over the comms, tinny. Stupid question, probably.

  "Only one way to find out," Kassandra replied, maybe with a hint of grim satisfaction. Blue energy bolts cracked from her position, vaporizing a few of the skittering things. They popped like greasy blisters. Lyra joined in, firing methodical bursts. Selene raised a hand, palm out, and that strange shimmer rippled again, confusing the closest wave of creatures.

  Right. Cover fire. I ducked behind a chunk of fallen concrete wall, using it as a brace for the Repeater. The things were fast, erratic. I took aim at the main mass, trying to lead them. Fired. Hit one. It popped. Felt… nothing. Fired again. Another pop. Okay. Not entirely useless. Just… overwhelmed. The sheer number was horrifying. I kept firing, focusing on the rhythm, the recoil, anything but the buzzing in my arm and the crawling under my skin. Just shoot. Don't think.

  Then, the chanting. Discordant, high-pitched, scraping at the edges of hearing. From deeper in the ruins, a taller shape emerged. Tattered wrappings, pulsing wires, featureless head with glowing glyphs.

  "New hostile," Lyra reported, voice tight. "Designation?"

  "Unknown," Kassandra echoed. "Tall humanoid? Emitting… anomalous energy readings."

  The tall thing raised its hands. A wave of psychic static washed over us. Not pain, exactly. More like… amplified self-doubt. Inadequate. Failure. Weak. My own internal soundtrack turned up to eleven. I flinched, gritting my teeth, forcing the thoughts down. Just noise. Performance. I kept firing the Repeater, maybe a little more wildly now, but still firing from cover. The noise was bad, but the physical threat of the swarm was immediate. Function first.

  But the swarm reacted to the tall thing's presence, surging forward with renewed frenzy, ignoring Lyra and Kassandra's fire, heading directly towards Selene and her confusing shimmer-field, and towards me, hunched behind my concrete sb, trying desperately to just keep shooting the creepy crawlies. My arm spasmed, a sharp jolt of pain. The cracks glowed faintly.

  "Core! Selene! Fall back to secondary position!" Lyra ordered, her fire intensifying.

  Easier said than done when you're ankle-deep in a tide of biomechanical nightmares and your own arm feels like it's about to explode.