Karla looked over the harness the man wore. It was old, and heavily worn, but looked cared for and heavily modified. The small faceplate showed the visage of a young man, maybe not even twenty years old peering out. Now that she was looking, the harnesses of these people were all highly customized and unique. Only the old harness of the approaching man looked in any way standard. Only he had his face visible. He fidgeted as he stood over her, his harness clunky and awkward looking compared to the sleek tech of the others. A cloth covering bore seams around numerous black panels. It looked very practical and heavy-duty.

She turned her head to the others. They wore metallic/ceramic face plates that integrated with actuators along the neck and helmets over their heads. The two snipers had wide, black helmets with many grooves and openings for sensors. The man in red had a tall, ornate helmet that almost looked like a shell with horns sprouted from his head. None of their equipment was simple or plain. Each piece was heavily designed, ornate. As if they were making a statement of glory and awe.

They looked like cosplayers. Her helpful brain was telling her these people were dangerous, that their armor was high-quality, but deep down she just couldn’t accept that these were combat harnesses. It looked like some high-tech anime had sprung to life. She still wasn’t sure if this was some kind of dream. The pain told her she was awake and alive, but everything was just so surreal.

“I’d very much like to speak with you, and if possible, I’d like to bring you back to my master… You see she is very interested in those in the Inner Circle, and… and… I’d appreciate it if you came quietly.”

Karla stared at him for a moment. The man… no, boy, Karla corrected herself, was an awkward interrogator. He spoke as if he was asking a girl to dance with him. She was pretty sure she had been murdering his friends a few minutes ago, and now he’s asking if she’d come quietly? She wanted to laugh, but only a faint wheeze exited where her mouth should be.

She shook her head. He’s an idiot, she thought. Naive, but perhaps better him than those with their weapons still aimed at her.

“Oh, do you not have a voice synthesizer? I don’t have one, but I do have a basic display if you’d like to talk?” He fiddled with the large, bulky hands of the harness, pulling out a small box from one of the panels that littered the harness.

“I’ll plug in an information cable so we can talk, okay?” He held up a thin cable. “It’s just I/O, nothing else.”

She looked at the cable, and knew fuck all about it. She nodded her head, she had nothing to lose, she supposed.

“Okay, okay. Um, I’ll just need you to turn your head.”

Karla turned her head away and heard him approach and kneel down behind her. He pulled at something that sounded wet and metallic, and took in a sharp breath of air. There was a pause, then a click as something was cut.

[Warning. Iso-Bomb disconnected from main links. Switching to backup.]

She snapped her head around and the boy jolted back. Sweat dripped down his face, and his arms trembled. He’d taken off part of the harness to expose his hands which now held a pair of needle-nosed pliers and a side cutter.

“Um, there is a bomb. I would like to disconnect it… uh, please? It will be hard to talk with you with a bomb in the way.”

[Functionality: 0.1% Weapons online: 0 Recommended action: Self-Destruct.]

[Activate? Y/N]

Karla huffed mentally and confirmed the No option once more. The kid wasn’t lying, he really was just disconnecting her suicide bomb. She didn’t need it anyways. She nodded again slowly and turned her head away from the trembling figure. A few moments passed where he didn’t move, then more movement at the back of her skull. Something clicked, then a jolt of electricity ran through her brain.

[Warning. Iso-Bomb disabled. Contacting headquarters…]

There was another snap behind her head.

[Warning. Satallite connectivity severed.]

And another.

[Warning. Wireless transmissions severed. Backup transmitters offline.]

She frowned. Not really, she couldn’t frown, but in her mind she was. The kid was audacious, taking more than he asked for, but she supposed it made sense from his point of view.

[I/O line connected. Blocking… Blocking…]

She didn’t know how to make it accept the connection. Once she made a conscious thought of accepting the input, she found the answer relatively straightforward.

[I/O line connection accepted.]

Karla felt a small pinch at the base of her neck, and then… nothing. The boy seemed satisfied. “Okay, I have you plugged in now. I’d like to ask you a few questions if you don’t mind.”

Karla turned her head back to him. He was holding a small screen with a blinking cursor on it. She nodded.

“You can talk through this.” He held up the box.

“So you can hear me?” she tried to ask. Her words appeared on the monitor instead.

“Yes! I mean, kind of. You don’t seem to have a speech synthesizer installed, this just rides along on that same output.” Karla stared at him. He grew nervous once again. “Uh, I’ll start with some questions. My name is Delta. What is your designation?”

“Karla.”

“Really?” He glanced up from the screen. “You have an actual name?”

“Yeah, why? What did you expect?”

“I-I don’t know honestly. The Inner Circle have never surrendered or been taken down without self-destructing. We kind of thought you would have a model number, or a code. Surprised old William Stoke named his creations.”

Karla jolted, her few remaining neck muscles pulled as if she wanted to drag herself over to him. “Stoke! William Stoke! Where is he?” She wanted to scream and curse and stomp the name into the mud, but all that came of it was her feeble wriggling and a line of text.

“Uh, I’m not sure. He was with the northern assault forces, but for all I know he’s now dead.”

The cursor flashed without moving for a few seconds. “He’s dead?”

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“I assume so. His command strider went down right at the end, just before all of you Inner Circle folks fell…” Delta frowned. “Did his death affect you somehow?”

Karla laughed internally. He death affected her alright. Memories flooded her mind as she thought of that bastard. The day she entered that dream, the day she lost herself over and over and over. William Stoke had merely touched her palm and had locked her mind away. She had realized it before, while in the dream. She had raged and fought against the small house in Seattle, the death of her parents, she had cursed the name William Stoke cycle after cycle. But after a while, she grew tired. She didn’t know how many times that same dream played out, but she did know she eventually gave in, gave up. She eventually allowed herself to forget and be absorbed in the dream. The warmth of her mother, the horror of her father. The last moment of peace and the shattering of the quiet that was the Upheaval.

She dropped her head onto the ground, lost in thought. Delta scratched his chin, a few tufts of patchy hair stood out here and there.

“Was William Stoke like a father to you or something?” said Delta. Karla turned her head back slowly. “Or like, your creator?”

The text box filled with obscenities. Overflowed. Overlapped. Delta watched as decades of words piled up over themselves, overwriting each other, corrupting each other. He glanced at her.

Karla took a breath. A mental breath. She wasn’t able to control her lungs, they seemed to move on their own. She allowed her head to drop into the mud once again. “May he rot in hell, that bastard,” she said at last.

Delta nodded slowly. “Okay, um. In that case, could you give us some information? Like, what was Stoke’s objectives? You guys came in pretty lightly—”

“How long has it been.” Karla cut him off.

“Oh, huh?”

“Since the Upheaval. How long has it been.”

“The Upheaval? Gosh, I don’t know.” He scratched at his chin hairs. “That was a while ago…” He turned away and shouted. “Hey Jay!”

“Yeah?” A man’s voice called back.

“How long has it been since the Upheaval?”

“What the fuck Delta? You’re supposed to be interrogating that mechanical piece of shit not playing trivia with it!”

“No, well. She asked!”

“I don’t fucking know… Two hundred and fifty years or so? Stop dicking around Delta.”

Delta turned back. “Jay says two fifty. I think that’s close…”

Karla didn’t answer. She just stared up at the sky. All she could think of was How? How could it be that long?

“So, as I was saying, do you have any knowledge on what Stoke’s objectives were? He pushed in without support—”

“We have incoming!” A voice shouted from one of the clan members. “Twelve Albatross heavy bombers heading our way!”

“But… but how did they get here so fast?” Delta stood up.

“It doesn’t matter! Leave the Witch and let’s go!” Jay shouted as an offroad troop transport vehicle skidded to a halt nearby. “Get in!”

Boots splashed through the mud and into the vehicle. Delta stood there, glancing back and forth. “But, we didn’t get any good info out of her. Olivia told me to interrogate her.”

“Too bad! We can’t bring it back to any of our main bases. Leave the scrap for the birds.”

Delta stood, looking uncertainly between the vehicle and Karla. “Then let’s take her to one of the small bunkers where she can’t hurt anybody.”

“Delta! Leave it!”

“Olivia told me to get something out of her!”

“Ahhhh! Fuck! Fine!” A man in transparent green cloak ran up. “I know Olivia will want her. I know I know I know! But… are you positive you’ve disconnected everything?”

“Yes! She shouldn’t have any outside connections besides this.” Delta held up the screen.

“How? How? How? How?” Karla repeated over and over. By now it had filled the display and had began scrolling.

Delta scrolled down, not finding an end. “Uh, I’ll unplug this for now.”

The two picked her up with surprising ease and dragged her into the bed of the vehicle. Several clan members snarled and cursed as her torso was pushed up between them. Karla barely took any notice.

Two hundred and fifty years! How is that possible? How could someone live that long? She thought of what these people had said about her body. She was only a torso? She lifted her head to look, but a boot came down on her, pressing her skull back into the floor with a metallic clunk.

“Stay down bitch.” The last remaining orange clan member glared at her, a heatblade sizzling in his hand. He bit his lip till blood ran down his chin. “Don’t you fucking move.”

Karla stared at a boot with one eye, and the top of the vehicle with her other. She scoffed inside her mind and instead looked around with her powers… nothing happened.

She focused and pushed, but nothing changed. She couldn’t ‘see’ anything beyond what her eyes told her. She tried to ‘see’ through the car, through her body, just over her face, but no matter how small of an action she did, her power didn’t activate. She struggled as she laid there, but it was useless. She tried to move something instead. Above her, a small flap swung from the ceiling. She tried to push it aside, to halt its movement, something, anything. But again it was a failure. The same as her dream.

The vehicle roared with electric life. The large tires churned against mud as the electric motors whined to life. Something electronic hummed over the vehicle. A stereo phasic camouflage, she somehow knew. What that actually meant, she didn’t know, only that it was very effective against electronic imaging, but rather useless against human sight.

Outside there was a buzz of small flying egg-shaped devices, drones. Built to analyze the battlefield, they didn’t have enough firepower to damage even the lightest particle shields used by the clan members. Instead the drones scattered over the entire battlefield and sent back data to assault ships and bombers. The air came to life with the sound of many small thrusters overhead.

“Shit, they’re close,” said the driver as she looked up through the curved windshield. “They’ll spot us before long.”

A man in green crouched near the front of the troop compartment and spoke into the driver cab. “Not close enough. Just keep it nice and slow and let the camo do its job. We’ll be clear of any bombs by the time the birds get here, just relax.” He turned his head, his eyes were non-existent. In their place were a pair of sensors that covered his eye-sockets. He appeared to look straight through the sides of the truck.

The wheels whirred underneath, steadily pulling the vehicle up towards a tall forest. The trees were tall and mature, and hardy. Ironbark trees. A species that grew after the upheaval. Their roots searched out metals in the soil and bedrock, imbuing their bark with the resulting metallic blend. They were hell to cut down, but fantastic in providing cover during combat. They wouldn’t stop a two-hundred kilo Kite Bomb, but it would limit the effects.

Karla tried to remember how she knew this.

[A minimum one-meter wide ironbark tree is required to halt an eighteen millimeter heavy sniper round.]

[A minimum two-meter wide ironbark tree is required to provide adequate protection from two-hundred kilogram Kite Bomb at a distance of twenty meters.]

The knowledge spilled out when she tried to access it, but nothing useful revealed itself. What had she been doing all this time, why was she here? The kid Delta had asked what her mission was, but she was entirely clueless. She didn’t remember this morning much less days or years ago. The last conscious thought she had was Stoke touching her hand all of those years ago…

No, that wasn’t right, was it? She had moments when she felt like her dream was particularly wrong. When her dream slipped past the dream-like quality and into the uncanny. She had been brought back to lucidity each time, and each time she had struggled. But the hold was powerful, unforgiving, relentless. No matter how much she struggled, the inevitability of the dream won out.

She shook way her thoughts, earning her a glare from the man sitting above her. The heatblade at the ready, all-too-eager to end her life at the first sigh of struggle. She laid still and tried to remember something useful.

Mission parameters, she thought.

[Follow order of the commander.]

Overhead, several craft cut through the clouds, leaving long vapor trails from their wingtips. Their bomb bay doors opened.

Current commander.

[The Undying One.]

Karla mentally snarled at that name. It has to be that prick Stoke, she thought.

From the belly of the large craft, many bombs began dropping. The bombs floated lazily at first, then the guidance system kicked in. The bombs twitched as they began hunting targets. Heat signatures, movements, data provided from the drones. Each bomb spaced itself from its brethren, carpeting the battlefield and focusing on hardpoints and potential enemy hideouts.

Current orders.

[Self-destruct.]

Karla felt a sudden urge to activate her bomb that still rode along the backside of her skull. She resisted, but found the order enacted without her will. A small, loud spark jumped to the bed of the truck, the connections severed and useless.

“Shit we’ve been seen!” The man in green shouted as he looked up through the roof of the vehicle. The whine of electric motors kicked up pulling the vehicle quickly into the edge of the forest just as bombs began to land.