"What is that?" Janine asked, cringing at the rubbing of chitin plates against the skin.
Chak and Anissa decided not to postpone their reunion for later, and segmented coils almost fully submerged the armored Wolfkin. It took an inhuman exertion of will not to grab the bastard for whatever passed by his nape and not smash him into a broken smear for daring to come near her princess, much less do whatever the Abyss was going on. But everyone deserved their bit of happiness, no matter how unnatural or degenerate it might have been, and so she focused on the thing in front of her.
They were in the underground hangar bay of Ingo Augmetics. The wide hall felt wrong; emptiness stretched for dozens of meters in every direction and disconnected and half-torn wires lay forgotten and damaged; their assembly lines had long been taken away. Arenas used for testing and areas for engineering and shipping purposes stood abandoned. Half of the lights didn't work, and even most of the mechanical arms disappeared from the ceiling. The scents of hundreds of people absent from their workstations didn't seem right to her.
We'll fix that. Janine promised herself, looking at the chains hanging from above. They held a harness containing a single object, shaped after a Wolfkin. Dull, red lenses reflected the light of her eyes; blunt vambraces seemed useless until she touched them with a finger and cut her skin. A wire, invisible to the naked eye, covered it, sharp enough to cut through her skin.
"Power armor," Banshee said, running a finger over the gray surface. The woman still wore her usual white uniform, but added a green coat over it, fastening its collar with a choker. "Prototype of the future mass-produced MK7 combat suit. True to its name, we no longer need to slowly fit it to the user piece by piece. Instead…" She pressed a remote controller, and seams opened on the plates, creating an entrance large enough for Janine to fit in. "… you just hop in and operate the beauty. Sorry for the blandness; we didn't have time for painting. But we added the emblem based on Marco's sketches!" Banshee turned the suit in its harness, showing the image of crossed muscular arms on the backpack.
"That wire… Why use it and not sharp edges?" Janine inquired.
"Another test of Dad's newest product," Banshee said happily, and fired a pistol from her hip without taking it from its holster. A black dot appeared on the smooth floor near her leg, lengthening itself as the woman took out the pistol and dragged its barrel to the side. "An idea from our new student."
"Slave."
Janine tensed, unsure where the voice came from. The word followed Banshee's sentence, correcting her, but she saw no one behind the woman.
"Hush! No one enslaved you. The wire is technically alive; we bred it from an organo-polymer compound, and it has to be kept in a liquid state to be successfully used in a ranged weapon." Banshee squeezed the trigger a second time, and a line of dust retracted itself back in the barrel of her gun. "Unless you are an Ice Fang, you can't even see it without special equipment. I bet the Investigation Bureau will have a field day using it for assassinations…" Janine coughed, and the pale New Breed nodded. "Yeah, right. Nerves. When exposed to open air, the wire's lifespan reaches four hundred years, during which it never loses its sharpness. Pretty cool, huh?"
"Amazing," Janine agreed and took the open helmet, looking in. "There are no sockets!" she exclaimed. "No connection cords either. How am I supposed to use it?" She tapped hard on the steel, expecting the alloy to yield and bend, but it resisted. Curious, the Wolfkin intensified the pressure, slowly growing amazed that the thinner plates had more durability than her lost gear.
"Please stop trying to ruin it, Warlord; you'll just waste your time," Chak said, wrapping himself around Anissa. They rubbed their foreheads, and the quartermaster continued. "Short of drilling it with diamonds over a course of a week or submerging it in a bath of inorganic acids at a temperature of two thousand degrees and proper catalysts, not much can damage it. It doesn't mean that you're invulnerable; the New Breeds will hack you just fine if you stand still, but since the development of the plates used by Alpha and First, the Reclamation Army has never produced such an advanced technological marvel. Feel honored."
His tail moved, touching the sleeve and showing it to Janine.
"The previous model improved your physical strength marginally. To give you an example you're capable of understanding, a Normie wearing your old gear would never have beaten dear Ani in an arm-wrestling match, but this model can fold her into a ball." The antennas on his tail caressed the suit's arm and let it drop. "Its HUD is immune to most known types of EMP; its communication systems can establish links spanning over forty-two kilometers, ignoring jamming. Solid stone, steel, spatial distortions, and even anomalies resulting from reality warping hardly matter! The lenses can discern the heat sources of an individual organism even through the thickest sandstorm or firestorm. Night vision is present, sure, but now you have access to spatial anomaly detectors that will give our warlords precious milliseconds to evade the exotic attacks of scum like Phaser."
"Good. Where are the cables? The plugs to connect my implants?" Janine asked exasperatedly, sticking her head into the armor.
Anissa freed herself from under the coils and joined in the examination. They frowned and exchanged glances.
"Mom's right," Anissa stated. "This thing is useless if it cannot work in sync with a fighter. It will end up being more of a hindrance in high-speed combat. You might as well offer her a foot soldier's exosuit."
"O ye of little faith," Chak smugly chittered and pushed a crate closer to Janine. Inside was a skin-tight suit that resembled leather but was silky smooth to the touch. "It's called the Underarmor MK. 2. Put it on and then gear up."
Banshee and Anissa helped the warlord into the ridiculous garment that covered her from neck to ankles and wrists. It refused to rip, stretching so that she could move her limbs freely, unhindered. The fabric clung to her skin, compressing the fur. Anissa searched for zippers, but Banshee stopped her.
"It is fully comparable to the prototype recycling systems," assured Banshee, misreading their intentions. "We tested it ourselves; feel free to piss and sweat; not a drop of moisture will be wasted."
"We? Not to harp on your enthusiasm, Your Highness." Anissa bowed, spreading the side of the non-existent cloak like an Ice Fang would. "But you are a tiny little bit smaller than the warlord. Unless you gained and burned through several hundred kilos while we were away."
"Something like that, yeah!" Banshee giggled, and Janine heard a chuckle that almost went unnoticed amid the laughter. Now she was certain. The noise came from the woman's back.
"Enough chatter!" Chak commanded. "Put on the armor. And no helping!"
"Where is Till Ingo?" Janine inquired, pushing her arms into the sleeves.
"Here," the scientist's voice boomed from a loudspeaker in the ceiling, and the screen of an observation room opened. Ingo's silhouette sat behind an examination table. "Don't worry, I observe, ideate, and search for flaws. You have brought me quite an intriguing gift, Warlord."
"Gift?"
"Yes, this… Your name is Mehmed, is it not, young man?" A wordless groan filled the compartment, voicing a plea to end the misery. "Why are they always suicidal initially? Oh, no, my life is over," Ingo mocked. "In a few years they cringe over it when you bring it up at the annual roasting," he grumbled. "Frankly, I have never seen such extreme cyberization."
"Really?" Janine leaned on the comfortable upholstery, feeling the artificial fibers in the padding expand, encompassing her sides and spine. "Haven't you met Reaper or Lyudochka?"
"The ambassador treated me to tea, yes. The thing is, you can hardly call her a human at this point. She has no trouble learning, but her emotional maturity is stunted. Even in the Old World, a full upload was frowned upon, as the sensory circuits were not yet perfected. To do this to a child. I'm not sure I would have done the same to my… children." Ingo grunted, filling the air with the hiss of a welding instrument. "And Reaper has over sixty percent of his body intact under that shell of his. Excuse my absence from the field test; I need to understand how to sustain and ensure the survival of the newest member of my research crew."
"Kill me," Mehmed begged. "End this suffering."
"Hush, student! Don't make me ask a therapist for help. Nobody dies in my care; etch this into your brain matter," Ingo coldly reprimanded him. "Trace! Attend me. I need a professional opinion about restoration!"
Waves passed over Banshee's coat, stretching it; the sleeves washed away from her arms, and the entire thing slumped with a wet slurp. The mass twisted, sprouting wet bones. Veins sprouted across the gleaming white; nerves followed, then muscles intertwined, reaching out to forming phalanges, and in the span of several breaths, a woman in a green coat stood up, checking the choker that moved from Banshee's neck to hers.
"The fuck?" Anissa reacted ahead of everyone. "It's that terrorist! Trace!"
She crashed into the slender woman, all two tons of her heavy armor and body. The claws dug into Trace's forehead, and the skin gobbled them up, blanketing the paw to the wrist. The terrorist leaned backward a little; her spine rearranged itself, and she shoved a tendril of her arm into Anissa's mouth.
"Away from my daughter!" Janine roared, and the suit closed around her, adjusting itself. The start-up of the reactor echoed her fury, and the warlord lunged at the bitch.
A dark train of segmented chitin joined her. Chak and Janine attacked simultaneously; punch and toxicognaths landing on the swaying woman. Her flesh, hot and soft as plasticine, swallowed both, coating around the warlord's fist and spewing venom pumped in by Chak through the opened sores in the billowing coat.
Janine didn't care. The fear that Anissa might suffer the fate she had allowed to happen to Marco drove her to action better than any stimulant. She unclenched the fist within the woman's face, grasping the dissolving bones, and tried to tear it free, stabbing with her clawed paw. Chak's spiky legs closed around the hordewoman along with his coils, and his body moved circularly, planning to shred her into pieces.
It didn't work. Her claws and the legs' tips scratched pointlessly against the very air that solidified around Trace.
"Enough!" Banshee yelled, her lower jaw reaching down to her belly. She fixed her mouth with a snap and grabbed Janine's arm. "She is not the enemy! Trace, let Anissa go."
"I am not harming her." Trace's face no longer existed. Janine's paw and Anissa's forearm were still in it. She spoke through grown lips on her belly. Her right arm was a thin appendage, lodged deep into Anissa's mouth, and she pinned the wolf hag down using the elephantine limb of her left arm.
"Bullshit you are not!" Janine reached for the Taleteller, but the limbs moved away from Anissa. "Wolf Hag? How are you?"
"It was as if… as if I had bitten a mass that kept on growing inside my maw." Anissa pressed a paw to her snout and retreated. "Mom, I could feel it. The harder I tried to bite, the more my fangs bogged down in that swamp. The threads connecting me to her, I should not have been able to breathe, yet I could and…"
"Bad tooth." Trace regained her humanoid form and tossed a yellowed fang to Janine. She checked her daughter's mouth and was greeted with a perfect white gleam of other fangs and a fresh replacement in place of the lost one.
"Never dare pull a dentist on me without my permission ever again! Got it, witch?!" Anissa barked.