As it turned out, they did install a kill switch in her. Iris became acutely aware of it when she ended up face down outside a bombed out Israeli synagogue. Old from the looks of it, pre-apocalypse construction, and she had plenty of time to look at it from the ditch out front. Recently, the bell tower had been retrofitted into a broadcasting tower. The locals had been looping jazz music into the night, which didn’t matter to Iris so much as the ability to get a signal boost on her own radio transmission and call in a Blumhagen rescue crew.

With her body power set to the absolute bare minimum required to keep her alive, she couldn’t even turn her head out of the puddle. She could, however, watch the global broadcast stream Amy Sherman was putting on with her husband. That, and wait for one of the two PMCs to find her.

Adam Sherman looked like he was in everyman clothes, strutting around on stage before a collection of his investors. He had on a black t-shirt that actually had a black designer logo embossed across the breast, meaning it cost at least a thousand bucks. Same deal with his acid distressed blue jeans. Right next to the fraying at the bottom, was a silk logo tag that had never seen a speck of dirt. “Good morning, everybody. I am so happy to be here in front of you all. I want each of you to know that it wouldn’t have been possible without your support. Give yourselves a round of applause,” the billionaire said, drawing out of them a raucous roar of self-congratulation.

Iris tried to figure out where they were broadcasting from. It had seemed like they were outside, but the more the camera panned to follow him, the more she was certain it was just wall-to-wall projections. He could have been anywhere in the world, deep underground even. Adam had paused for a cart to be wheeled out.

“There was a time when new crops revolutionized the world, brought an end to mass starvation. Children no longer died in their mother’s arms because of foodstuffs from the new world. People would say that potatoes could be grown anywhere, even in the worst soil. While not quite true, at the time it was true enough…” He paced the stage to build expectation. “Our world has gotten much more populated since then, and the soil much worse. Forget nutrient quality, water runoff, erosion, we have mass radiation zones. Just think how silly us Americans were in the twentieth century! We built houses on farmland. We didn’t grow food, we didn’t let nature coexist with us, we put down houses and cultivated grass. Can you believe it? Grass too short even for a cow to eat. Naturally, these subdivisions, this suburban sprawl, the mesh of dilute humanity between cheap factory land and natural city locations… we’ve had to spend the last few decades attempting to dig it out and rejuvenate the soil because it’s all we have left to meet the demand for food.”

His wife walked out on stage behind him. She was in a red ballgown, like she had silk gowns wrapped around a cocktail slip. She smiled, unnaturally white teeth sparkling. “We at BISON are proud to present a much easier solution. A crop even more resilient than anything before.” She pulled the cover from the cart and revealed what was on it; a vat of brown mass. It twitched like it had a heartbeat to it.

Adam stepped aside, gesturing to the alien thing. “Cultivated from deep in the Amazon, a strain of blight that can’t infect humans. It’s a biologically regressed fungus responsible for the resurgence of Amazon rainforest that has nearly overrun all of South America with its sheer vitality. But it’s more than that. The Amazon has never been healthier, because of it. Historically, the soil depth of a rainforest is pitiful. All the nutrients are held up through the canopy until the ground has been nearly choked. Where this fungus has grown, the soil depth has reached dozens of meters. A hundred meters deep in some spots, like the Great Plains in the heyday of the American Bison.”

They had a vat of Fauxnir’s body. Iris was sure of it. That was the same fungal mass she had fought in Siberia, that they had just bombed across half the world. They were so full of shit, she could hardly believe it.

Amy Sherman reached inside and ripped a chunk of the fungal creature off. She held it up and crumbled it between her fingers, making it dust to the ground like dirt. “We call it Myca-Max, and it is actually so effective at soil regrowth, it can actually fix our radiation problem. It’s no miracle worker, it won’t make uranium decay any faster, but after a few years, it will have buried the contaminated material so deeply that crops can be grown on the surface, fit for human consumption for the next millenia.”

Even with her basic understanding of radiation, Iris’ head was spinning with the thousands of variables the Shermans were just glossing over, the sheer uncontrollable nature of intentionally releasing a fungus like they had. They were going to terraform Earth with it. The radiation particles would never be extracted, not in ten thousand years. That was if they actually had a handle on what the fungus would do after it was released.

But, they already had released it, and all their investors were clapping like seals, toasting champagne and patting each other on the back. The Shermans might have just done more harm to Earth than every nuclear bomb in the world.

Her ears still worked fine, even with her body locked up, and the sound of a hoverjet brought her attention back. The only other living things within a dozen kilometers of her seemed to just be insects, so the tune of the rotors filtered through to her easily: the same model the Arctic Cutters used. She jumped on the Blumhagen frequency and hoped someone could hear her. “This is Iris Haber, can someone please tell me they’re about to rescue me?”

“What’s it worth to you?” Roselyn asked, her voice remarkably clear over the radio. She must have been close.

“You shark-toothed bitch, your previous employers may have just killed us all. Get me out of here and maybe I can do something about it!”

“You telling me you’ve got a plan?”

“I’ve got an idea for a plan.” What she had was information the Shermans didn’t. Namely that she had a chunk of Fauxnir sitting in her apartment in Fort Helsinki, which if things went wrong, might get the city destroyed. What to do with that information, she hadn’t figured out yet.

“I hope you’re not lying. Hang tight. I’ll be there in just a second. This wolf is pretty slick.”

“Go fast, I think Holly is about to touch down to snag me.”

“That little cupcake from Arctic Cutters?”

“That’s the one. Can’t imagine they’d send a regular soldier to pick me up.”

“Oh, she’s just tons of fun. Maybe I should slow down… ah, but I think your girlfriend would kill me if I did that.”

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

“Silvy and I aren’t dating!”

Roselyn laughed. “And yet you knew who I was talking about. Interesting.”

Iris rolled her eyes. The wait wasn’t much longer. Holly’s plane came to a stop, hovering over the old road Iris had taken, then it touched down and she hopped out. Roselyn sprang up onto the roof of the synagogue, the RW-33 gleaming in the moonlight. Unfortunately, Iris didn’t particularly want to be at either of their mercies.

“Well, well, well, if it isn’t the clean up crew,” Roselyn said, leering down at the two of them. Her internal systems were probably overheating from the sprint to intercept, barely cooking steam off to return to operating parameters. She needed the time spent talking.

Holly gulped and reached for her weapons. First, she reached for her mag-rifle, then thought better of it and drew her micro-blade. That at least might do something about the turrets poking from the shoulders of the RW-33. “Damn it, I thought I’d seen the last of you on Taiwan.”

“Just been biding my time,” Roselyn said, reaching her head down past the lip of the synagogue facade. “You know, the Shermans really fucked things up for us mercenaries, for a while there. They had all of geopolitics in a stranglehold until they finally did something. I had nothing better to do than play video games. Now look at all the fun there is to have.”

Holly frowned and glared at Iris. “You two sound like great friends, you know that?”

Iris groaned. “Just because we have similarities does not make us friends,” she said from the ditch. “And can’t you give me a bit of respect here? I’m laying in a mud pile.”

“Like hell!” Holly shouted, pointing her micro-blade at her. “I don’t feel like getting my legs cut off just so you can get even.”

“Oh, Holly, you know me so well,” Iris cooed, and rolled her eyes.

Roselyn jumped down, hitting the ground hard and prowling between the two of them. Iris didn’t actually know Holly’s performance specs, and couldn’t tell which of the two of them had the advantage. “Did the Shermans pay you enough to make up for bombing Pump Nine after sending you in to be bait for UAAF?”

Holly’s cheeks blushed as she pointed the micro-blade at the RW-33. “That’s under negotiation right now. But, do you have any idea how big of a bounty UAAF has put on Iris’ had? We could literally buy ourselves an entire Sprawl district with that kind of cash.”

“If you hand her over in one piece,” Roselyn said.

Iris frowned. “Excuse me, since when is there a bounty on me?”

“Since an hour ago,” Holly answered.

“Doesn’t UAAF have something more important to be dealing with right now? Like giant blight monsters popping up all over their territory?”

Roselyn laughed. “That’s probably why they want you. You’re the only one with a confirmed kill on this thing.”

That made Iris feel sick. She wondered whether the Shermans had gotten a full report on how she had taken down the monster. It didn’t seem possible that they hadn’t gotten a report of the orbital strike. It wasn’t like Blumhagen had owned that satellite, the strike had been purchased on Kodiak’s dime, they’d been the ones to hire them so everything was invoiced over, and a cannon slug from space cost a lot less than a nuclear warhead. Then again, the kinetic blast hadn’t really been what had killed the monster, if it could be said to be killed at all. That had been the napalm; chemical destruction.

She had plenty of time to ponder that, unable to move and hoping for the best.

Roselyn had pounced on Holly. Iris didn’t even bother cranking up her reflexes to watch; she didn’t see a point. With purely human cognition, she watched the rapid fire blurs of limbs, the leaps and dashes, the explosions of gunfire that peppered the old asphalt. Half a paw from the RW-33 flew off. Holly took a hip slam to the side and crashed through the wall of a derelict gas station. The chrome boy wolf leapt in after her, and a moment later the whole building came down around them. That didn’t stop either of them, they leapt out, trailing dustand leapt back at one another. The clash of blade and claws rang like a smithy, hammers railing against molten slugs of steel.

Her fate was in the hands of a mercenary who had tried to kill her the first time they had met. One who had lost because she fought for fun instead of to win.

“Mendel? Can you hear me?” she asked, praying that the RW-33 was signal boosting and she could ride the frequency.

“Mendel, no. I can though,” Silvy answered, her voice crackling in Iris’ ears.

“Hey, are you feeling better?”

“Yeah, the doctors juiced me up with the good stuff . Said I had fourteen fractures when I first showed up, but they’ve all healed now. Still a bit… uhm… I don’t want to get shot out of the sky again, let’s put it that way.”

Iris laughed. “No one typically does. Why do you think I find drop pods so annoying?”

“Trust me, I understand now.”

“Where is the Blumhagen ship right now? In the Mediterranean?”

“Yeah, we’re coming in, due west of you.”

“Are you in range of a missile strike from the Washington Blues?”

“Hopefully not? We’ve got defenses if they try to do something like that though.” She didn’t sound very confident in it.

“Silvy, I need you to send me a plane. Or, well, after we get this kill switch out of me, I need to take a plane up to Helsinki.”

“Iris, the reason Mendel can’t answer you right now is because he’s negotiating with the Tribunal to arrest the Shermans. That fourth man? The one who spoke to you in the Leviathan-3? He might have some authority, but he can still be outvoted. We don’t think the Shermans got full approval for what they did. That was a rogue missile launch. There’s a schism in the American government right now.”

“What? Between a War Now party and a War Later party?”

Silvy scoffed. “Something like that. Doesn’t change the fact that BISON is the only company on the planet likely to have the blighted genome studied properly. Mendel says a counter-plague is going to be needed, like a viral wildfire to trim it back. There are research labs down in Rio that might be able to do something eventually, if it actually came from the Amazon strain, but that might be too slow. We need you to get in and get BISON’s research data.”

Iris glanced over. Roselyn was missing a hind leg, half the armor from the RW-33’s chest, and one eye, but she had Holly by the ankle and was thrashing her around. The mercenary was getting slapped into the ground so hard her face was digging trenches through the dirt.

Iris groaned. “Silvy, I’m not going to be able to do this alone. There’s too many objectives, too many places.”

“I can help.”

“No, you are Overwatch. Unless Mendel has another Archjet for you, I don’t want you anywhere near one of these monsters. Besides, you’re still healing. We can’t just put you in a pod and weld up all your cracks.”

“You’re getting worn out too, you know. You still have a heart and a brain. Stress still gets to you, Iris.”

“I had a month off, I’m fine. The circumstances aren’t giving me a choice anyways. What I need is…” she faltered, the words just feeling wrong in her mouth as she watched Holly try to crush the RW-33’s neck with a headlock. From the creaking noise, she might have been succeeding before Roselyn rolled on her. “I need those two.”

At last, a steel paw slammed Holly to the ground. Her arms reached up, trembled, and collapsed. Her inner energy ran out as Roselyn howled in pleasure. Silvy cut in over the radio before Roselyn could finish the job, and said, “Rosey, bring the two of them or I’m revoking your drone access.”

“Oh, come on!” she screamed back. Then she groaned and flicked Holly’s body over next to Iris. “Fine. Fight was over anyway. Wait, how am I supposed to carry these two? In my mouth or something?”

“Figure it out,” Silvy ordered. Iris and Holly silently frowned at one another as Roselyn’s creativity was put to the test.