The Sphingid flew high above the darkened city of Surmil, taking an arced path from the security station to Getla Base. The security station relayed live information about the Sguvan woman's movements to the moth-like aircraft using lasers that were invisible to the naked eye. With the smoke cleared from Surmil's skies, the laser communication system was able to circumvent the radio jamming that still plagued the city.

Leanna and Lorias sat in the ship's bay with the brawny and loud-mouthed Testa, who'd been asking several questions about the Red Wolves Company in the minutes that they'd been airborne. Her questions soon fell on deaf ears as Leanna and Lorias received Ursun's anger-laden orders. Leanna got up from her seat and walked to the cockpit area of the Sphingid, where Remades was silently controlling the ship with his eyes closed.

"Is there any way that this ship could kill our escaped prisoner?" Leanna leaned over and said to the peaceful-looking young Remades.

"I doubt it. The Sphingid has weapons, but it’s not exactly a gun ship. And striking an invisible enemy would be pretty difficult, considering that we've only got a few seconds of knowing where her feet are at any given moment." Remades' boyish voice sounded half-asleep while he spoke to Leanna. "Also, I just-"

"That's what I thought..." Leanna interrupted absent-mindedly. Her voice began to trail off as she became unsure of how to proceed. "We have orders to neutralize her before she reaches the base." Leanna said hesitantly.

"If she learns that we're tracking her-" Remades began to say.

"I know, but we don't have much time left. She'll be there within the next ten minutes, at this rate." Leanna said firmly.

They'd all been amazed at the alacrity of the Sguvan cyborg. She'd leapt from rooftop to rooftop without stopping, running several kilometers in the process. Her cybernetic leg allowed her to jump great distances while landing safely afterwards. But that leg also gave her the unique gait that allowed her to be tracked.

"Just when did you receive your orders? The electromagnetic interference from the bombs is still blocking our comm-clasps." Remades asked rather innocently.

"My team's comms are unaffected by the jamming." Leanna said, which got a shocked expression from Remades.

The Sphingid jerked slightly as Remades opened his eyes and momentarily lost his focus on controlling the ship. He looked up suspiciously at Leanna, concerned by her lack of clarity. It was the third time that night that Remades had discovered a significant advantage that the Red Wolves had been hiding from his own team.

"That's...quite a thing to keep to yourself. We're allies, y'know?" Remades sounded hurt, which made Leanna feel a small pang of guilt.

"We don't have time for this. A lot of dangerous things are unfolding at the base right now. We need to stop these infiltrators from carrying out the next phase of their plans at all costs." Leanna was firm and strong-willed when she spoke, which only seemed to make Remades even more upset.

"I know. I received a laser message from the base commander a few minutes ago. I was going to tell you when you walked over here, but you cut me off." Remades said a bit dejectedly.

"Oh, I'm sorry. I was just so focused on following orders that I..." Leanna said before stopping herself from making excuses. "I shouldn't have been so rude to you. It wasn't warranted." Leanna said while reaching down and squeezing Remades' shoulder.

"We're all under a lot of stress, I get it. We can beat these guys, I know it. We just have to work together and share information freely, I think." Remades' words lacked confidence, but Leanna knew that he genuinely believed them.

"Fair enough. So, any ideas on improving our chances of stopping our cyborg?" Leanna asked sprightly.

"If we fly down low when she gets to the canal bridge, we'll have the best chance at catching her off guard. She'll be out in the open and have nowhere to hide." Remades said determinedly while looking out at the transparent walls of the cockpit and gesturing towards the bridge below them.

"Good. Now, does this ship have a way to fire fluids? If we coat her with a dark liquid, then we can deprive her of her cloak." Leanna reasoned.

"We do, actually! Our ship has a sticky tether shooter on the underside of the cockpit. I can modify it to fire a large wad of sticky goo that can cover a wide area. We can use that to coat her and trap her. We'll only get one shot, but it'll be a big, wide shot, at least!" Remades explained exuberantly.

"How long will it take to make the modifications?" Leanna asked.

"Only another minute. I'm having the ship make the necessary changes to itself as we speak." Remades said with a wide smile.

"Excellent. I'll leave you to it. I'll tell Testa and Lorias about our plan." Leanna said before walking back over to the transport bay area.

"We heard most of it." Lorias said.

"Open-floor plan." Testa smirked and shrugged. "Though what was the news about the base being in danger?" Her face suddenly shifted to a look of concern.

Leanna explained to Testa what had transpired at Getla Base since they'd left. Testa kept trying to interrupt and ask too many questions, but Leanna was steadfast in her storytelling. By the end of her mini-briefing, Testa was furious.

"The Queen hasn't gotten this involved in any of our conflicts for over ten years! Where does she get off throwing her tech at these thugs now?" Testa yelled, her question being more of a rhetorical exclamation.

If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

“Some say that she sees the world as a big science experiment, and that she sees all of us as rats in a maze.” Lorias said cheekily.

“We aren’t rats, we’re human beings! We should all be working together to stop her instead of squabbling amongst our selves. That’s the only reason that the Queen and her Kingdom still exist today.” Testa’s anger began to die down as she began to state the obvious.

“The Queen’s in her Kingdom, all's right with the world." Lorias said mockingly, quoting a centuries-old song.

It had been a general rule that Æba usually saw periods of relative peace while the Queen stayed in her own nation. The Monarchists and the Conjunction would ordinarily limit their conflicts to small territorial disputes and retaliatory strikes after terrorist attacks. Such constrained conflicts would be carried out mainly by private military companies, known as PMCs, like the Red Wolves or the Destructors.

It had been during the times that the Queen left her Kingdom that the Monarchists were emboldened to launch large-scale attacks on Conjunction nations. The grand battles of the Centuries-Long War would involve the militaries of their respective countries, in addition to the PMCs and joint Conjunction and Monarchist forces. But from what the Conjunction could presently tell, the Queen hadn't left the shores of her own lands. Even still, the fires of war were threatening to become a conflagration once more.

“I've never liked that song. Too propagandistic." Leanna said with a shake of her head.

"We're a minute out from the bridge. The sticky shooter is primed and ready to fire." Remades voice blared over the Sphingid's intercom.

Leanna rushed to Remades’ pilot seat and leaned down to say, “Make sure that you shoot as soon as you’re in range. We can’t give her a single moment to react.”

“I understand.” Remade spoke aloud while keeping his eyes closed as he sat up straight and focused on the task at hand. “Strap in everyone. We’re going to dive, and then we’re going to be stopping hard, fast, and at an extreme angle.” Remades said over the intercom again.

Leanna went back to her seat, placed its harness over her armored chest and buckled herself in, while Lorias did the same. Testa sat across from Leanna and mirrored Leanna’s movements. Testa kept her eyes on the younger woman that she admired, and Leanna couldn’t help but grin back at the orange-haired Thorn.

"Let's trap this queenie bitch." Testa said while throwing a few punches in the air in front of her.

"Yes, let's." Leanna said with a simple nod at Testa, who shot her a rather charming smile.

Remades received the cloaked cyborg’s location and saw that she was running full-speed down an empty road and straight towards the canal bridge. It was a 1.5 kilometer-long suspension bridge with two impressive stone towers that held up its thick cables. The Etrysian soldiers that had been standing guard around the area had been ordered onto the bridge itself, creating several additional barricades and turrets atop its light-brown towers that would act as the last line of defense if the Sphingid failed.

“Beginning our dive. Brace yourselves.” Remades said calmly over the intercom.

Lorias, Leanna, and Testa gripped their harnesses as Remades flew the Sphingid down in a sweeping arc, in the hopes that the Sguvan woman wouldn't notice their ambush until it was too late. His precision in calculating where his ship’s path needed to intersect the cyborg’s was impeccable; the Sphingid was soon hovering with its “mouth” shooter pointed directly at the Sguvan woman. Posed like a hummingbird tenderly getting nectar from a flower, the Sphingid fired its ball of sticky fluid directly at the cyborg. The street that surrounded the woman became covered in gooey white webbing that spanned several yards in all directions. The cyborg’s movements were easily detected by the Sphingid’s visual organs as she tried to tear herself out of the sticky substance.

“We’ve caught her! Mission accomplished!” Remades cheered over the intercom as he leveled out the ship.

The Sphingid’s passengers removed their harnesses and went to Remades’ chair in the cockpit area. Leanna stood on his right side, Testa stood on his left, and Lorias stood silently behind the sleek red chair. There, the young pilot showed the cyborg woman trapped within the sticky webbing on the transparent surface displays that lined the domed walls of the cockpit. Leanna and Testa patted Remades on each of his respective shoulders while they gleefully watched the zoomed-in video.

“Excellent work, young man. We should be good to proceed to Getla Base. The soldiers should be able to make sure that she’s properly contained.” Leanna said resolutely.

“Weren’t your orders to kill her? I mean, she could very well escape.” Testa said worriedly.

“She’s our prisoner, and she’s very well captured. It would be wrong to kill her; illegal, even.” Remades was quick to say as they hovered high above the mess of white webbing on the street below.

“Don’t be naïve. The rules of war have no standing here. These infiltrators are essentially terrorists, and therefore have no rights.” Lorias said coldly. “We should dispense with this cyborg before she becomes a nuisance to us again.”

Leanna tried to contact her teammates within the base through their telepathic link to apprise them of their situation. Though she felt the familiar tug of the link within her mind, she found that she couldn’t actually communicate with anyone with it. She began to fear that Prism was close to death, though she quickly pushed such thoughts from her mind.

Leanna then looked at Lorias, and saw that his icy-blue eyes were looking back at her. His face was unreadable, as usual. She couldn't even tell if he had lost his ability to use telepathy as well. She didn’t enjoy how readily he devalued the lives of his enemies, even those who could no longer fight back. She felt a familiar thought enter her head, one that she wasn’t very proud of.

“Rvljsan, through and through.”

It was a stereotype that was well-known across Æba. The blonde-haired, blue-eyed people of the Antarctic nation of Rvljse lived in a bitterly cold and isolated region that tended to make them seem just as frigid as their homeland. It was a rough life there, and ruthlessness was a trait that was oftentimes rewarded. Though Lorias had been brought to Etrysia’s warm west coast as a baby and had never even set foot in the infamously Monarchist Rvljse, he’d never been able to get away from such generalizations. Many believed that he had a cold Rvljsan heart that was incased in ice, just like the land that he was born in.

“You’ll want to keep her alive, and you’ll want to give her a chance to explain herself. Don’t let your misplaced morality interfere with the safety of this nation, Leanna. Our foe is cunning and powerful, and she will not help us.” Lorias said indefatigably, which drew Leanna out of her own disdainful thoughts.

“I can’t say that you’re wrong. But I also can’t condone her execution. But I suppose our orders aren’t wrong, either.” Leanna after sharply taking in breath through her teeth.

“We should kill her. I don’t feel good about it either, but it needs to be done.” Testa said solemnly, causing Leanna to raise an eyebrow at her.

“I’m the pilot of this ship, and I won’t do it. I’m sorry, but that’s that.” Remades raised his voice only slightly while keeping his eyes closed.

“Can we send a laser message to the soldiers on the ground, telling them to fire at the cyborg?” Leanna asked Testa.

Testa walked over to a small console near the pilot’s chair, but smacked it in frustration only a short time later.

“He’s locked down any peripheral controls. We can’t do anything without controlling the ship now.” Testa groaned as she looked angrily down at Remades.

“Please, Remades. Every moment we fight with each other is another chance for the cyborg to escape.” Leanna said softly to the green-haired pilot.

“I won’t kill her.” Remades said defiantly.

“Then I will.”

Testa leaned over the back of the pilot chair and then reached down to push Remades out of it. Remades suddenly opened his eyes to see who was touching him, and was shocked that it was his own teammate. Testa simply continued to grip his waist and back, pulling his further off the seat until the control nerve-cable became visible down at his lower back.

“Pull it out of him while I hold him still! The ship will continue to hover until I jack in!” Testa shouted to Leanna.

“I..” Leanna hesitated.

“He won’t be harmed by the sudden disconnection. Please, help me.” Testa begged, her voice becoming calmer as she noticed how panicked Leanna was becoming.

Leanna looked over at Lorias again, and saw him gesture towards the young man who was starting to thrash against Testa’s restraining grip. He wouldn’t help her, Leanna realized. Sighing to herself, she reached down and carefully pulled the warm, slick nerve-cable out of Remades’ spinal port. Testa then brought Remades down to the ground in front of the seat and placed his arms behind his back. Leanna could see that the lanky young man was crying silently to himself. He had stopped resisting, and had begun to come to terms with the situation.

“Get connected to the ship, Testa. I’ll tend to Remades.” Leanna said gently as she stopped down to cover his wrists.

“Yes ma’am.” Testa said loudly before sliding into the pilot chair and inserting its nerve-cable into her own spinal port adapter that was a part of her torso armor.

It didn’t take Testa long to establish a connection with the Sphingid, nor to communicate their situation to Getla Base. Deriges was quick to tell his soldiers to begin firing on the trapped cyborg, and it didn’t take long before she became motionless within the webbing. The Sguvan cyborg’s white prison became stained with her blood as the woman began to bleed out from the numerous bullet wounds that she’d sustained. The grisly scene was displayed on the screens of the Sphingid’s cockpit, and all within couldn’t look away.

“Mission accomplished…” Remades said before he began to bawl onto the floor beneath him and Leanna.

Leanna took her hands off of his wrists and watched him cry like a small boy. She then looked at Lorias again, and the two of them shared a gaze of understanding between them.