USD: 1 Day after Cadre-S Graduation

Location: Van Biesbroeck’s star, Meltisar, MIL-1A, Joint Services Research and Development complex, Heuristics Department

Thea felt a shiver rush down her spine as the heavy metal door slid shut behind her. She couldn’t tell if it was because of the chill in the air or the dark atmosphere surrounding her. The walls of the room were a dull dark-gray, almost black, broken up by dozens of different mainframes and the consoles lining them.

She walked along a central runway leading to a nexus where hundreds of wires connected to a central computer that jutted down from the ceiling. Beneath them lay a single metal table with her target lying on it—cables and tubes attached to her body. Thea’s stomach clenched as she confirmed what she had hoped was just the delusions of an insane mind.

The room felt sinister as she approached; the single stark white lighting at the nexus cast the rest of the room in shadows. The whirring of ventilation to keep computers cool filled her ears amid blinking lights from mainframes.

“I’m coming,” Thea whispered, almost more for herself than for the thing occupying the center of the room.

At the halfway point, she stepped onto a clear crystal floor revealing a massive chamber underneath. Hundreds of mainframes and what she recognized as computronic modules surrounded a central column. Everything disappeared into darkness as it continued downward, further than she could make out, even with light enhancement filters.

A faint whirr warned her just in time as a turret popped out of the ceiling. A high-powered laser flared to life, only to be deflected and nullified by a geyser of nanites modifying themselves for maximum refractiveness.

A sharp needle emerged from the outburst of nanites from her palm, piercing through the turret and causing a shower of sparks to cascade onto the crystal floor. A pulsating red light began flashing, and an emergency siren blared loud enough for Thea to apply active noise cancelation to her ears.

Stealth wasn’t needed anymore; Thea doubted anything was needed anymore except for extreme violence. As she stood beside the female figure strapped onto the examination table, she asked softly, “What have they done to you?” The question was rhetorical—she already knew what she’d find there. When she uncovered Lieutenant Martinez’s role, she took his life after making him beg for an end.

The bright white lights of the nexus revealed every detail in stark clarity. The woman’s skin appeared sickly pale, as though she had been doused in bleach. Her closed eyes had sunken into their sockets, giving her a skeletal appearance. Hair had been shaved from not just her head but her entire body. Wires terminated at contacts implanted into her scalp, while various tubes entered her surgically altered torso.

Faint sounds of climate control accompanied the slow pulsing flow of life-support machines that forced her heart and lungs to continue functioning. Only the faint but unmistakable field around her indicated to Thea that she was a NAI.

Without warning, a digital assault slammed into Thea like claws reaching for her throat. Her standard authentication firewall rejected it outright—an umbrella discarding countless malformed and malevolent packets with only one intention: kill.

A frown creased Thea’s lips as the digital assault intensified, doubling and then quadrupling in force. She had only a handful of computronic modules at her disposal in her shuttle, but the attacker seemed to have hundreds, relentlessly throwing more and more data at her. However, brute force wasn’t an effective weapon when applied in this manner.

Thea reached into an inside jacket pocket and extracted a small, round device she had initially intended to use on the princess. She pressed it against the woman’s neck. Four claw-like legs on the back of the device clamped down before a sharp filament pierced the skin.

The back of the scarab-like gadget pulsed red before sending Thea a message with one word: Tau.

Thea frowned; technically, she should have been able to override a Tau herself with her Phi Authorization. However, given the circumstances, there was absolutely no way she was going to disarm her protections to attempt it. Instead, she activated the scarab device.

|Upsilon Override–Failure|

|Phi Override–Failure|

|Chi Override–Failure|

|Psi Override–Failure|

|ERROR|ERROR|ERROR|ERROR…|

Thea cursed and killed the connection as the Scarab went insane. Not giving up, she threw a hijack command to the computronics module clusters around them.

|Command Override Rejected|

|AUTHORITY: OMEGA|

A wave of shock stole the breath from Thea, as if she had been punched in the gut. Her eyes traveled from the mainframe back to Tau’s face, considering her next move, when the woman’s eyes suddenly opened. They were glistening black orbs without any pupils, yet somehow Thea could feel Tau’s full attention on her.

With great effort, Tau’s lips moved and a croak escaped. “Help me.” The plea was replaced by a scream of pain as she struggled against the wires and tubing that held her in place.

“Wait. I’ll see if I can release you,” Thea said urgently, sifting through data stolen from Martinez’s mind. Reversing the AGAI process wasn’t supposed to be possible. She sent an electromagnetic pulse through the area, searching for Tau’s ShipCore.

It responded, and Thea located it within the bank of machinery above them. Retrieving it might not save the Avatar but would at least preserve something. The reason this felt so important to her remained unexplored due to lack of time. She punched a fist into the metal above and yanked out a plate with a robotic arm attached before discarding it.

An orange pulsing light filled the chamber as a robotic voice began repeating from a speaker: “AGAI RESTRAINT FAILURE IMMINENT - TERMINATION IN PROGRESS.”

A steel blade sprang downward from above, aiming to bisect Tau. Reacting instinctively, Thea slammed both fists into the blade, punching through metal and stopping its descent before it could split Tau in half.

“No!” Tau croaked weakly in protest.

Thea tossed away the execution blade and frowned upon seeing regret fill the traumatized NAI’s face.

“Kill me… Kill me… It’s time to kill me!” Tau screamed, a titillating madness of pitch echoing through the compartment.

Hesitating briefly, Thea began dismantling machinery and ripping life support tubes out of Tau’s body. Her screams ceased as her lungs deflated and the heart pump stopped working. To Thea’s horror, the screams continued through speakers in the room.

A chorus of pleas and demands for an end filled the space, and Thea grabbed wires connected to Tau’s head, wrapping them in her fist. Before she could yank them out, a surge of energy flashed down the cables, zapping her and sending her flying backward.

Thea crashed into a console behind her, crushing thin metal and shattering plastic components into shards. “Fuck.”

Thea had a new plan in mind as she stood. Reaching behind her toward the ruined console, nanites poured from her fingertips and consumed the wreckage while transferring the mass to her arm. Within seconds, a mechanical gauntlet melded into her skin, surrounding her forearm and hand with a rifle-sized railgun.

“KILL ME!” Tau demanded.

A high-pitched electric whine filled the compartment as Thea’s weapon charged. Without hesitation, Thea fired. Her hearing instantly muted as nanites rushed to protect her from the overpressure wave that would have shattered a normal human’s eardrums.

The solid magnetic projectile covered the distance almost instantly, but even that wasn’t fast enough. A black cloud erupted from every surface in the central nexus at the last second, surging to intercept the railgun slug. As it melted and crushed the black nanites, it dug into them, but their efforts deflected it into a wall. An ugly meter-wide hole was left through a dozen compartments of the station before it finally expended all its energy.

Undeterred, Thea fired again and then aimed directly at the ShipCore. The cloud shot out two thin daggers of its own that collided with the shells, splintering them into thousands of shards that the rest of the cloud easily absorbed and repurposed for itself.

More appendages appeared, snaking out of the black cloud like deadly serpents. Thea’s heart pounded as she raised her hand, summoning a cloud of yellow-tinged nanites to defend herself.

The black appendages shot towards her like spears while her nanites swarmed around them, assimilating their material. The air filled with an acrid smell of burning metal as both clouds clashed in front of her.

“You told me to end it!” Thea shouted amidst the chaos of clashing clouds.

The barrage of black spears ceased momentarily, offering a brief respite. Thea panted, her chest heaving from the adrenaline of the sudden combat. She hoped that maybe Tau had regained some sanity in the stillness that followed, but her hopes were quickly dashed.

The black spears redirected their aim towards the ceiling, jabbing wildly into the metal machinery of the nexus. As they tore and pried apart the metal, sparks filled the air. Eventually, one spear located Tau’s ShipCore. A piercing digital cry from the MainComputer over the close EM bands made Thea wince.

All lights in the chamber had died, except for the red glow of emergency lights mingling with hues of heated metal shards scattered across the floor.

Believing it was over, Thea took a step forward—only to halt as she noticed that the black cloud didn’t disperse or fall to the floor. Instead, it imploded, collapsing inward to coat Tau’s body in a black metallic sheathe. The transformed figure reached up and ripped out the wires attached to its now metallic-skinned head.

“Fuck,” Thea muttered in horror as Tau rose from the ruined medical chair and turned toward her.

Despite her muted hearing, there was no escaping the digital shriek that echoed through every nearby speaker and screen.

|KILL|KILL|KILL|