The running part of the chase ended quite suddenly, and left Lilijoy wondering if she had discovered a completely novel type of awkwardness. The orc zombies simply stopped in their tracks, halting their shamble-run mid stride. One of them fell over.

“So…” she said.

She had come to a belated halt as well, not sure if this was her chance to make a clean break, or their chance to leave her sight and potentially become far more dangerous. It was a standoff, in that everyone was standing. Well, almost everyone.

“So,” she began again. “Are we… done?”

She didn’t really expect a reply, but the scene called for someone to say something. That pretty much fell to her, since she was quite sure the zombies no longer had any functional speech-producing parts.

The zombies stared blankly, and not even at her. She shuffled her feet, ready for something new to happen, another ash-puppet show or the like.

This scene could really use a tumbleweed rolling by, she thought.

The change, when it happened, was abrupt. The stars came out. The bodies of the orc scouts collapsed. Her senses returned in all their glory. Epic explosions filled the nearby sky.

For the tiniest, irrational moment she thought it might be some type of celebration, the universe acknowledging whatever it was that had come to pass to free her from the Rotted Land. Then a portion of the landscape at the horizon reared up, and seconds later she felt the sub-sonic roar. She saw the ashy earth ripple past her feet, and understood that the battle between the Hongse clan and the Regional Lord was in full swing, and far closer than she would have expected.

She wondered if the Maasai clan was involved yet.

That had been Anda’s contribution to the grand scheme that had emerged from her discovery of the Regional Lord. Not to simply auction the location, but to invite those clans that had the worst relations with the Maasai, and then allow just a few hints of the event to come to reach his former clan. It created the possibility she might lose the credits held in escrow for her by the auction house, but she wasn’t terribly worried. Even if Hongse did somehow come up with proof that such a thing had occurred, money just didn’t have much of a hold on her. She couldn’t help but see it as the convenient fiction it was, a willfully adopted, quasi-fictional, social proxy for resources and power. It probably helped that she didn’t have such a concept while growing up.

Of course, she didn’t have much in the way of concepts in general as a child.

She put aside the distractions of memory and distant battle to focus on a more important question. Just where in the heck was everybody?

Her question was answered a bit at a time, as she made her way through the clouds of ash picked up by a newly liberated wind. The peaks and tips of rocks and formations all around sent off lines of dust as the wind caught on them, forming swirling streams and rivers around her knees and waist. She could only imagine what the Rotted Land might be like when it finally rained, and hoped fervently to be far away for the event. But even with the newly airborne ash stinging her eyes, she saw little blobs of heat in the distance, which she could only hope were orcs making their way out.

Jess and her greatly diminished honor guard were the first she could identify, and she began running toward them, exalting in her ridiculous Flash. Her legs were too short, and the surface below her too soft to get as fast as her multiple of over four hundred percent might allow in theory, but it was an amazing feeling nonetheless, once the grit abrading her face at nearly fifty miles per hour was subtracted.

From Jess, Lilijoy heard of the attacks that had beset the band, and the panic that followed. She had thrown Skria into the air, once the ash started wending its way up her body, then she in turn had been lifted from the ground by one of her honor guard, who immediately ran, or more likely staggered away from the group, with Jessila in his arms, on the theory that anywhere was probably better than the area where the bad things were happening.

This turned out to be almost correct, once they realized that staying in motion seemed to prevent the ash from climbing, and that severing its connection to the ground would cause it to fall away harmlessly. This realization, however, followed more than a few minutes of running through the darkness, with Jess being handed back and forth among the even larger males. The image made Lilijoy repress a smile, even in light of their mutual concern about Skria’s absence, especially when she thought of all the times she or Skria had been so handled.

“… and then we couldn’t find our way back,” Jess finished, the Orsurs on either side of her nodding in support. It was at that point that Anda finally replied to her.

The process of being speechless took a vanishingly small amount of time by normal human processing standards, so her reply was sent back within a second.

Everything seemed fine when she checked on his Outside body. He was half reclined, propped up on some broken crates. This could be a problem, she thought. I wonder how hard it would be to get a pod here?

There was another potential problem associated with Anda being stuck Inside for the time being as well. He was the contact with Kurtz, who was supposed to be getting them an airship. If Anda was out of commission, that left her with one other person who Kurtz might be willing to deal with. Mo. She didn’t feel great about that.

The timing wasn’t ideal. She had completed her part of the deal over the past couple days, a feat that had left her with little ability to pay attention to the others on the Outside. She imagined that they were very bored, or very stiff from spending so much time Inside. Building the disassemblers was painstaking work, or rather the preparation was. It wasn’t until she figured out that the evil little things could be suspended and handled in shaped magnetic fields that she was finally able to build them. The only breaks she had taken were for her regular sessions with Maria.

There, Lilijoy was still doing most of the heavy lifting, as Maria didn’t have any Stage Two elements for her own cultivation. Every day, they would meet and she would add another batch of vines and flowers, then guide them to the areas they were working on, mostly still the visual and auditory cortex, though they had begun to lay down basic connections in the motor areas as well. Thanks to the upgrades, Maria was now able to perceive the work going on in her brain, and guide it to some extent, though she lacked confidence. Lilijoy gave her little assignments, all the while marveling that Maria had not already taken command of her own growth. It was foreign to her how the young woman seemed to need permission and reassurance at every turn.

Currently, everyone was sleeping, with the exception of Attaboy, who was Inside. He had only emerged for food and other necessities over the past days, and Lilijoy couldn’t help but wonder what he was getting up to in there. It was just after one in the morning, and only a few beams of faint light from the distant arcology illuminated the ground floor room, filtering between the broken boards of a high-set window.

She took a deep breath and turned to head up to the roof, when her spider sense tingled. In this case, quite literally. She had organized her remaining spiders, along with a few new ones she had found, to string strands of web across every road heading into the area she controlled, and one of them had just broken. It wasn’t the first time this had happened. There were still people in the area, and dogs too. Sometimes the wind would knock something off a roof, or a mostly dead tree would drop its last branch.

The webs represented the farthest perimeter, too large an area for her flies to effectively cover, so she reached out through her network and sent out a patrol to investigate. At night, her flies’ vision was quite poor, but their chemo-sensory abilities worked just fine. They hadn’t even reached the area when the web across a street on the opposite side of her domain broke. As she was moving to investigate that, another broke, and then another.

She fired off a message to Attaboy and ran to wake Nykka. She had just put her hand on the pale girl’s shoulder when she saw the plumes of carbon dioxide and other chemicals of human breath marking a group of people walking down the middle of the street where the first web had broken.

“Nykka, wake up,” she hissed. A moan of protest and a flopping hand were ignored as she went to silent communications.

Nykka rolled off the crude cot she had fashioned, retrieving her sword in the process. she sent.

She cast about in all four directions.

Nykka sent

Nykka made a noncommittal sound, and half ran out of the room, on her way to wake up Mo and Maria, Lilijoy assumed. She sent off a quick message to Anda to inform him of the crisis and then gave herself a few seconds of real time to think, or really to process.

Had she screwed up? This was clearly an attack, and one planned to have a decisive outcome. The enemy was bringing what they no doubt considered to be overwhelming force. Somehow, they knew where to attack, and had acquired that intelligence without being discovered in turn. Was it a betrayal?

Mo came to mind, for obvious reasons, but she couldn’t imagine how, and more importantly why, given that he was asleep with Maria in the next room. Nykka was a possibility too, but Lilijoy would be able to largely rule that out in a few seconds, when her first flies landed on the attackers and determined what kinds of systems were involved. Attaboy could have done something boneheaded, but she really wanted to believe he wasn’t that dumb.

Of course, if it wasn’t betrayal, then everyone in the group who should know better had missed something. They had relied on obscurity as their first line of defense, but perhaps they hadn’t factored in the opponent’s motivation. They had been very careful when they returned from the arcology, stopping more than once for Lilijoy to scour the area for anyone who might be following. They had taken a circuitous route. Their various hovercars were stashed out of sight, and only the assault vehicle was close at hand.

Somehow, they had underestimated the capabilities of their opponents. Now they could only hope their opponents had underestimated them just as much. The fact that they were walking down the middle of the street gave her the notion that they had, but she couldn’t rule out the possibility that this was simply a maneuver to flush them out. If she used her flies to attack and subvert or destroy their systems, it would almost certainly lead to even bigger problems down the road. On the other hand, if they fled, assuming Mo could haul Anda to the assault vehicle, they might be doing exactly what the enemy wanted.

She was still wracking her brain for further options when one of her flies landed on the back of one of men. It scurried up the thick fabric, seeking skin. Now other flies were landing, only a few because she feared that their presence would be noticed. Her midges were mostly closer in, aside from those that were relaying her signal, though she had begun to switch to roaches for that task. They were happy to hunker down on the sides of buildings, and their larger bodies made them much better antennas.

She divided her attention, moving each fly personally. The men, and it was entirely men as far as she could tell from their chemical presence, were wearing dark clothing and masks, which was complicating the flies’ mission, since any exposed skin was in places where the small intruders would surely be noticed.

Why dress like ninjas and then come down the middle of the street​? she wondered. Perhaps anonymity is more important than stealth?

It seemed relevant as well, that they hadn’t simply driven in, though she couldn’t figure out what it meant. Her first suspicion had been that the men were from the Walden clan, who possessed both resources and motivation, but she couldn’t make the behaviors add up. That left Kurtz as the next most likely suspect. If it was Kurtz, she felt a bit better about simply making a break for it.

Finally, a fly found a thin strip of exposed neck and began to deliver its payload. Going through skin wasn’t ideal, but it was far less likely to be discovered than targeting the nose, mouth, or eyes. The first step was the slowest, wending vines through the layers of oil and dead cells, seeking the tiny blood vessels that would lead to the brain, though the lack of Rank Five skin augmentation boded well for any potential violence to come. Already, she was picking up signals passing between the men, and as soon as she got into the bloodstream she began to bump into blood bugs.

At that point, she detected Rank Five from a man in another of the groups, a fine mesh of subcutaneous threads covered his neck. Fortunately, it presented no problem for her vines to penetrate.

“What’s going on?” she heard Maria ask sleepily from the other room. Nykka shushed her, and Lilijoy had a moment of regret that she hadn’t pushed harder to get Maria’s communication network established. Mo’s lack of a system was going to present a problem too. She highly doubted that the attackers were close enough to hear anything, no matter how well augmented their auditory processors were, but they were closing in on the point where it would be a real possibility. Still, Mo had been around the block a few times. She heard nothing more than a brief, inarticulate grumble from him.

she sent to Nykka.

Attaboy still hadn’t stirred, but it hadn’t been that long since she sent the message. She sent another, even more urgent, and threatened him with having Nykka carry his body.

Out in the streets, the attackers paused their approach, and she could detect encrypted signals being exchanged. She would a little more time to get more of her flowers into place before she had a chance to intercept them in the appropriate part of the men’s brains, which would still be faster than doing the hard work of breaking the encryption herself, particularly if the keys were rotating.

What are they doing now? she wondered, a question that was soon answered when the groups split, fanning out into side streets and generally moving with more caution as they tightened the net around their target. Several began to scale the sides of buildings, obviously intending to establish a rooftop presence. Once again, she couldn’t help but wonder how they knew where to attack. Their movements were confident and coordinated, almost as if…

They’ve been watching us. How?

She had been overconfident in her command over the area, that much seemed clear. Their attackers had something that let them see from a distance, probably the same thing that let them find her little group in the first place. She scanned the attackers again, wishing her insect senses were just a bit better suited for the task at night. There were twenty two individuals, and she had already started to infiltrate four of them, one from each of the initial groups. She had enough horseflies in the area to inject all of them, unless they were actively protecting themselves. Her midges were closer in, but they would provide another layer of defense, flying in noses and mouths to deliver their payload. Even ears would do, in a pinch.

I’ve got this, she reassured herself. I just have to figure out how to expose as few of my abilities as possible and conserve resources if there’s another wave. Then we relocate, maybe to the storm drains. I bet they have plans if we leave by hovercar. Though they might not know we have a Sinaloa assault vehicle.

Like most cities where it had once rained in abundance, Guayaquil had a network of drains to carry away the water. They were now partly collapsed and clogged, but still navigable in places. They were where Lilijoy had found some of her roaches and beetles. It would be a very tight squeeze for the full sized members of the group, never mind the problem of moving Anda if he couldn’t disengage from the Inside. Of course, if it came down to his life or a setback, even a huge calamity, on the Inside, it wouldn’t be a hard choice. She just hoped she could solve this situation well enough so he wouldn't have to make it.

The men, who were closing in on all sides, aside from a few who had found higher ground that she took to be snipers, all paused again, and her flies picked up a short burst of radio activity.

Come on! she urged her flowers, who were still finding their way through the men’s brains. Go faster!

She didn’t have to wait for that in order to figure out what the command had been though. Through a hundred faceted eyes she saw the men move their hands to their heads, and saw the output from their breath change.

Oh no, she realized. They’ve put on gas masks. This is bad.

Only a few seconds later the first of her flowers began to intercept signals from the auditory cortex of one of the men. It was scattered at first, and then grew in clarity as more and more of her tiny infiltrators made their connections.

“They’re dropping gas on us!” she yelled, all pretenses of subtlety flying out the window.

She heard objects striking the roof and the street, heard the hissing sound of gas being released.

She could only hope that was all it was.

.

.

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