Lightning Strike

“Connection is good, suit integrity at a hundred percent, eighteen seconds of alpha. Amber, you are good to deploy. ORCA swarms to the southeast, mind the Gap.”

I grin over my hardlink, manic energy filling me. “Traffic control,” I say, using their hated nickname, “I confirm. Heading northwest.”

“Then good luck.”

Operations Command terminates the connection, and I pull the link-cable out of my suit’s palm-socket. Grabbing a cup from the replicator, I walk to the edge of Arisen and look out over the clouds, waiting, drinking in view and water alike.

“Shame it’s Sixday.”

My smile flickers, goes stiff as my copilot announces her arrival. “Yeah, well,” I say eloquently, shrugging.

I pick out the Gap, that perfect ring of cloudless, sunny skies over Redwood Town. With optical magnification I might see a hundred thousand happy people living quiet lives; but it’s Sixday afternoon. And you do not overfly there between Sixday afternoon and dawn on Firstday, much less go to do business.

“Clock’s going tick tock, babe,” Portia reminds me. “Do your thing.”

Instead of answering, I stretch my arms out to the side, feeling joints creaking. Perceptible power flows through my suit as she kicks off the music, drums and bass guitar snapping my mind back into the moment.

I look over the edge again, take two steps, and leap. And with wind blowing through the vents of the form-hugging suit and roaring in my ears, my armor starts to form around me.

They say I’m crazy, up in the City. Honestly, valid; I dive into the Wastes below to scavenge for ideas, that’s crazy. I do it with the digitized shadow of an ex-girlfriend riding shotgun, sure, weird. But mostly people say I’m crazy because of this.

I go from arms-out to arms-akimbo, posing for just the two of us. Electricity crackles between my still-ghostly gauntlets as I rock my elbows backwards, and it blasts outwards as I slam one fist into the other palm. Hardlight armor forms around me as I plummet towards the ground. The music pounds its way into full gear, and I jackknife into a proper dive.

“I am the Lightning,” Portia howls along with the music, laughing. “I bring the thunder! I am a titan, plough you under!”

“I am the storm,” I belt into the open sky, moments before we hit the cloudline. “I am reborn!”

I streamline and hit the low-boost, fire flaring behind me as I accelerate towards the ground. Because every moment is an opportunity to be stylish, I tell myself, and I’m laughing as we pass into the Wastes.

I stop laughing. Not because I’m “on mission”; it’s just hard to laugh here. The air is magically and chemically toxic, and the ground radiates misery. Concrete saps your energy, wood drinks your blood through your boots, water rises to shove itself down your throat and don’t even get me started on the wasps.

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I’m wearing a sealed, full-body battlesuit in a badass conjured mecha, and I’m still terrified of the wasps.

Our target this time is a heme, a rich idiot’s bunker. Domes built to filter the air and water, supply their own power, and grow their own food; when the End came, the lucky ones went fast. This one’s still running somehow. That means magic took over where technology failed, and that usually means stasis tech… and time-frozen loot.

I pull out of the dive at two hundred feet, Portia’s wings flaring. The glide stabilizes at a hundred and we study the target—crazy, not stupid. See, magic means monsters, and technology plus magic means nightmares.

“One second bursts,” I tell her. I don’t wait for confirmation; I drift down while targeting the dome, and my gauntlets give voice to my arrogant power.

The first blast of lightning slams into the dome and gets eaten by something, because of course it does. I switch to ice, which sticks; then I hit it with fire, and the roof explodes.

“That one always works.”

“Yeah, yeah, yuk it up.” Portia had thought of it, but I got it working; she’s dead, though, so I try to be nice. “What’s our target?”

“Pod here. Pod there. Giant nightmare everywhere.”

“Giant nightma—”

It formed up, and I pissed myself. It wasn’t in the heme, it was the heme. The concrete and wiring, the wood paneling and curtains, a bunch of bodies; it was an amalgam of sinuous coils and a hundred maws, radiating hunger and despair.

“We’re so fucked.”

“I’m so turned on right now.”

“Hard same.” Portia’s as shameless as I am. “Pods highlighted. Switching to max-output sustained lightning.”

“You know me, bestie,” I murmur.

I dive.

A heavy like Portia’s old Draka would have scouted with drones and dropped onto the heme at terminal velocity, paving the road with plasma cannon fire. Instead I pump a continuous stream of charged particles into wherever the nightmare has flesh or circuits, forcing my lightning to avoid the ground. It seizes for a few seconds, just long enough for me to make a perfect three-point landing next to a stasis pod, and then it tries to crush and eat me.

We both see it coming. Portia handles it by manifesting the ghost of her old mech. The giant fuck-off dragon forms—dead as she is, she can buy me just under three seconds—and the nightmare explodes backwards. I pop open the first stasis pod while she fights, and my eyes go wide as I dismiss my mech and grab what’s inside with my almost-bare hands.

“Extract now!”

She doesn’t argue. The lightning crackling everywhere returns as we bullshit the universe—lightning strikes upwards.

And it takes us with it, into the skies.

“You found something.”

“Yeah.” My fingers stroke our prize as we glide home. I can’t even smile. It’s too big. “The jackpot.”

On the crinkling plastic is one word I know only from books and bounties.

We’ve got replicators, but never much variety. And now?

Now, we have chocolate.