Erol found Suzanne in the room right in front. She had curled herself in a casket similar to the one where he had found her a few days before. Now that the power current had returned, the cryo-tube prototype had been turned on and emitted a pleasant white light around the room.

“How are you feeling?” he had the courage to ask, accosting her on the edge of the casket.

A message on the internal touchscreen indicated that the sarcophagus was currently being recharged so it could be used outside the system. They were once again cut off from the rest of the world.

“I can’t really believe it,” Suzanne answered him, her voice strained. “That woman in the office—”

“Who gives a scheiße, right? She is dead and … dried.”

“It was me, Erol. I mean—I don’t know.”

“It was not you. You are here, breathing the dust…”

“You have a weird way of trying to make me feel better.”

Erol snickered. “All of this, it’s Thomas Lionheardt’s fault. Unfortunately, him and his little friends have still not given it up.” He turned his gaze towards the office where Suzanne Courtois had died, one thousand years before. “But, thanks to his iron-armed humble servant, humanity possesses a second Suzanne Courtois at hand to finish the job.”

Suzanne smiled. She got out of the casket and headed straight for what remained of Tom’s office. She seemed to have found a second breath, which pleased the archaeologist.

The casket closed once more. He winced when he saw the cables fill with white liquid from a reservoir attached to the wall. Then, not wishing to delay himself any further, he joined Suzanne. “Does everything correspond to … your memories?” he asked, cleaning away the debris of past battles.

Suzanne, still silent, pointed with her finger the two inert metallic carcasses. Erol approached and began to release them. Between them, curled up under the back of the chair, another dried up body appeared. Like his old acolyte, he had mummified over the time. But his corpse was different. His skin was carbonized. His clothes were nothing but gray tatters, glued to his crackled epidermis. On his head stood a crown of cables and circuits connected to the ceiling by a rubber arm that was half burned.

With the point of his blade, Erol opened further the half-cracked jaw of their host and realized that the mummy’s teeth had exploded then melted. His bones had cracked under the pressure of the metal. If the impact of the bullet visible on his neck had not caused his death, this individual had certainly had one of the most atrocious deaths possible only a few minutes later.

“Do you know what is covering his head? It’s the same device that you used with Byte, isn’t it? It looks like it toasted him on the spot in any case.”

“Show me,” Suzanne answered, getting closer to the corpse. Then she stopped.

“Tom?”

“It’s very likely.”

“And yet you had described him to me as very handsome. Any theories?”

“He actually finally transcended. A metallic crown of this sort was not a simple cyber-reality casket used for a dive.”

“Mince! Using this, really? But it’s handmade!”

“Don’t forget that Thomas Lionheardt was the most brilliant man of the end of the 21st century.”

“And he ended up grilled like—what are you doing?”

Suzanne had seized the iron crown that encircled Thomas’s skull. In her effort to extract the device, she ripped off the head of the dead man that turned into dust almost immediately. She possessed the same finesse that he had towards the dead. Suzanne would have made a marvelous associate.

But perhaps it was not too late for that, Erol thought.

“Strangely, the module looks to be in a rather good state. It looks like his body was the only thing to get damaged,” she noted.

“A very strong electromagnetic current must have instantly killed him and dried him up. A fire started from the device would have burned up the entire room otherwise,” commented the archaeologist before seizing the yellow box from where Lionheardt must have launched his cerebral copying program.

He had barely been able to learn more when the consoles flickered like Christmas lights. The control room turned on again after a long beeping that sounded more like agony than a rebirth. The terminals displayed a blue background and the logo of the Lionheardt Corporation appeared on the main monitor.

A few steps from Erol and Suzanne, a block of servers shrank away, unveiling a reinforced door. The red circle of its console that indicated its locked status turned green and the steel shutter opened under the orders of a piercing feminine voice.

Erol grabbed Suzanne’s arm and dumped her behind the corpse of one of the Sentinels. Using a fortuitous gap between the frontal machine gun and the rest of the armor, the archaeologist continued to probe the room with his gaze.

“Who is that? An Inquisitor—Maev? Where could she have come from?” he murmured to Suzanne who had crawled to reach one of the steel paws of the Sentinel.

Suzanne raised her shoulders. If Maev was accompanied by the transcended mind of Lionheardt, it was obvious that she now knew all the secrets of the compound. This emergency crossing included.

Sainte Maev, founder and commander of the Inquisition, wore a red traveling outfit adorned with a red leather corset. Her pants were of the same shining crimson and split at the level of her thighs. She barked her orders to a dozen Paladins that she had brought over.

With their enhanced armors and assisted by drones, the Paladins had nothing to do with the ordinary Inquisition; it was one of its special sections. They formed a circle around the main console that had been sabotaged by the old Suzanne. One of them threw a glance at the Sentinels but did not notice the presence of the other two visitors.

“Madame, most of these consoles are unusable,” yelped an engineer covered in implants. He tapped rapidly on the mechanical keyboard of the console, but did not receive any answer from the computer. After, he dusted off the ports of the unit hovering above the lowest row of screens.

“What can we do?” howled Maev, approaching him. Her boots and the long black cape hanging over her shoulders were covered in a white powder that she kept cleaning off as soon as it accumulated.

“I am going to continue looking for how to stabilize the signal towards the outside!” The engineer pointed at an enormous square port, a bit farther left on the consoles. He wired himself up, using a cable that came out of the tip of his index finger.

“Hurry up! The defragmentation must continue.”

Erol and Suzanne witnessed the scene.

“Defragmentation? Either I don’t understand anything or this techno-monk is going to reactivate the Josias! We must prohibit them from doing so!” Erol grumbled, his eyes fixed on the engineer and his implant.

“Can you raise the machine gun of the Sentinels?” Suzanne asked, already trying to raise the hood that covered one of the sides of the steel beast.

“Are you crazy? They are going to see us!” Erol replied between his teeth.

“At three, pull the arm towards you.” Suzanne had already plunged her fingers into the circuits. “One.”

“This is going to get us killed!”

“Two.”

She is crazy!

“Three!”

Erol pulled the machine gun towards him making the rubber dampers that cluttered its base screech. Suzanne, as for her, she removed her fingers from the Sentinel’s maintenance hatch that threw up a spray of sparks.

Everything happened very fast. Carried away by its own backward momentum, the revolver spit out its last reserve of munitions as big as a thumb in a roar that would have deafened the city that still slept a few hundred meters above their head.

The first round mowed through the Paladins like ripe wheat. Pulverized, the rest of the men who were closest to Erol and Suzanne were blasted against the consoles. The lowest screens exploded into pieces. The few drones that were still intact were disabled thanks to the bundles of electricity that emanated from the servers lining the walls.

After that shower of bullets, there remained nothing but a handful of Inquisition soldiers who had been able to run for cover in the corridor through which they had come. Maev was not among the victims. As for the engineer, he had pinned himself to the ground. His implant and the vestiges of his arm and shoulder still hung from the connection port of the console.

“Erol! I am going to unplug this guy. Close the door!”

Erol answered only with a disjointed bellow. The round of bullets had rendered him completely deaf. Nevertheless, when the young woman pointed to the emergency exit door, he understood what he had to do.

Suzanne took the direction of the console as he jumped over the Sentinels. On the other side, he came face to face with the Sainte. They swore at the same time, but Erol was the first to hit his adversary straight in the face.

When he tried to repeat his attack, a socket slid from the carcass of the beetle-like robot and burned his neck. In a desperate effort to get rid of it, Erol rolled to the side and Maev took advantage of that distraction to run towards the exit.

The four Paladins who had survived the deathly barrage, busted into the room again. The first two, handling gigantic shields that Erol had never seen before, protected their superior. From behind, the other two opened fire with weapons that were much more impressive than their predecessors’. Each shot raised a shower of dust from the walls.

“Suzanne! Watch it!” Erol screamed, going back behind the Sentinels.

Suzanne backtracked, having been unable to disconnect the implant from the console. As she tried to get cover again, she was hit in the abdomen and neck. Under the shock of the blows, she almost stumbled, but somehow managed to reach him.

“Suzanne! Nein!” Erol shouted.

Gathering her strength, she used her feet to drag one of the machine guns in the direction of the archaeologist who grabbed it. He emptied the entire first magazine on the soldiers, forcing the Inquisition to backtrack.

“You have been hit!”

Suzanne’s blue blood was spilling out. The high penetration bullets had not had any pity for their contemporaries. With her left hand, she kept her head in place. The projectile had torn away a part of her neck.

“Erol...”

“Can’t believe they call themselves an anti-technology sect. Look at them, those verdammt hypocrites!” The archaeologist had placed his two hands on her stomach, trying to stop the bleeding. Soon, he noticed that it was all in vain. The nanoparticles were already at work, but too much of the miraculous blood would be lost before they finished their job. The wound was too severe, even for a clone. “We are going to find the gelo-tubes. We are going to repair—cure you.”

“What worries me is this,” Suzanne confessed, her mouth filled with blue blood. The Lionheardt’s logo had disappeared from the few screens that had remained intact. A purple charging bar, almost entirely full, had taken its place.

Out of the corner of his eye, the archaeologist saw the Inquisition advance once again. He emptied his second magazine. The monitors turned lilac and the entire compound fell into darkness and silence. Even the ventilators of the control post suddenly stopped spinning.

Filled with rage, he shot once again. He heard one man scream and one of the steel shields fell to the ground. From the corner of his eye, he continued to monitor the young woman who was bathed in a pool of sparkling blue blood. The wound in her neck was closing up, but the one in her stomach continued to bleed in abundance.

When the power returned, he noticed that the two of the Inquisition shooters were taking cover next to the console. Without hesitating, he shot one last round who killed them both.

A bullet grazed the Sainte’s cheek who was also hiding on the side of the console. She raged before bursting out into a demented laughter. She held in her hand the engineer’s implants that she proceeded to break under her heel. “It’s over, Feuerhammer. You can see for yourself. The great Thomas Lionheardt is back in his lair. And in his entirety!”

Lionheardt? Entirety? But what was she talking about? And the Josias?

She backtracked behind the blinded door with her men, who had drawn out their blades. “Kill them, kill them both! And bring me the girl’s head—or crush it!”

“Suzanne?” Absently, Suzanne looked at the screens. “Suzanne! What are we going to do?” Erol asked. “I can keep these hurensohns at gunpoint, but the moment they realize that I don’t have any bullets left, they are going to jump at me.”

“I still have your gun.”

“Yes! You are right.”

She then handed him the weapon. “Keep them at a distance, I am going to transcend.”

“What? You have gone mad?”

“I have all the equipment I need to do so, and the control console is still intact,” she answered without listening, as she approached with her fingertips the transcendence crown and its activation box.

“Stop! You are going to get grilled too!”

Suzanne had already put on the cable casket. Behind him, Maev had ordered her men to launch one last attack. “Can you reach the switch on the side?”

Surveying from the advancement of the two Paladins from above the Sentinel’s carcass, Erol seized the yellow box. With the point of his sword, he grated the molten plastic that blocked the switch and activated it. “There must be another way,” Erol stuttered, his hands full of the blue blood that seemed like it would never stop flowing.

“Maybe. But this one appears to be a good alternative. I am going to try and stop Tom. You—you need to try to directly disable the mechanical system of the silo. Your navigation device will tell you where it is. If one of us makes it, we will have won!”

“So, it is here that we say goodbye,” Erol prophesied.

“There is a very high chance, I fear. But don’t be too sad. It’s already a miracle that we even met each other.”

“This will be one hell of a story to tell if I survive.”

“Give it your best shot, Erol. Then, look for a cryogenic module. If I fail, the explosion will blow up the entire compound, but maybe you will have the chance, like me, to be unburied by someone.”

“That would be the height of irony,” the archaeologist concluded, before the siren gained in intensity.

Again, he heard Maev order their death as Erol switched on the switch.

Suzanne initiated her transcendence. There was no flash of lightning nor any blast. The diodes positioned on the young woman’s temples turned orange then green. Suzanne’s hands limped to the ground, dipping into a pool of blue liquid that had stopped shining.