Chapter Four - Still A Ways From Chicago

"It is important not to confuse Death Worlds with dead planets. Dead planets are planets that cannot support life. They have no magnetosphere, virtually no atmosphere, no water, and their surface is barren rock. They are glorified space rocks, not good for much more than mining, and asteroids are often better for that with their lower gravity, anyway.

Death Worlds, on the other hand, not only can support life, but often do. Their name comes from how dangerous they are, how likely they are to kill you, not how much they have on them. Threats found on Death Worlds include extreme weather events, extreme temperatures, dangerous predators, poisonous flora, high radiation, environmental toxins, tectonic activity, volcanic activity, hazardous environments and meteoric activity. They are most commonly ranked by how many categories of such threats they host. Most Death Worlds have between three to five such threats.

There is no recorded instance in all of Union history of a confirmed Category Ten Death World, one that possesses substantive quantities of all recognized threat categories, and intelligent life has never been found on anything above a Category Three. Anything beyond Category Five is considered too hostile to life to allow it to develop that far."

--Seminar, "Categorization of Planets," one year prior to Union discovery of Earth

***

"You really don't believe me!" I couldn't help but try again. Getting brushed off actually for being a samurai was a new experience to me. That, and I had to concentrate on something other than dat ass I was following.

"I do believe you," she replied over her shoulder without hesitation. "I just don't know what you're talking about."

"How do you not know what a Samurai is?"

"I do," she contradicted me again. "But you don't seem to be talking about a medieval era East Asian warrior caste."

"What?"

"Exactly."

That answer disoriented me for a moment, but I shook my head to clear it. "Fine. How about Vanguards? The Protectors? Hell, you're kitted out like one of us, yourself, and you expect me to believe you've never heard of any of it?"

She paused and looked back at me, blinking at me more in confusion than in a lack of recognition. "I'm a Defender," she explained, as if that explained anything.

On second thought, that was basically what I was doing.

I didn't like feeling like a hypocrite, though, so I scowled and crossed my arms. Not that she could see the scowl through my helmet. "You look like a cop to me."

She let herself fall back against the wall with a laugh that came so easily that I immediately decided I liked her more than any other cop I'd ever met. A low bar to clear, sure, but it was progress. "I assure you, I'm way outside my jurisdiction at the moment."

"And how far is that?" I asked. "I mean, where are you from that you've never heard of us?"

She looked toward the ceiling for a moment. Not at it, just in its direction, like someone in thought. Then she turned her head back to me again and asked me something I barely comprehended. "This is Earth, right?"

I blinked. Then, just because I was brain dead, I did it a couple more times. "As opposed to what, Andromeda?"

Andromeda is a galaxy, not a planet.

"Shut up." I saw the woman's eyebrow go up as if she were processing if that was supposed to be offensive, and I quickly raised my hands like she was drawing a weapon on me again. "No, no, not you! I was talking to my AI!"

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

That immediately caused understanding to cross her face, and she relaxed as she nodded. So she didn't know what a Samurai was, but she was used to people having voices in their heads?

Then the exchange at hand clicked back into my mind. "Wait, are you saying you're from another planet?"

"Nah," she waved the idea off, "I'm from Chicago." She waited until after I finished nodding. "I just work on another planet."

My gums flapped uselessly while two separate parts of my brain tried to process what I'd just heard. One part was trying to reconcile that she'd actually just claimed to have been from another planet - or worked on one - and decide whether or not she was pulling my leg. Another found the way she phrased it tickling some half-forgotten memory and couldn't brush aside the idea I'd just been memed.

When both realized they were leaving me hanging, they provided me with a suitable filler position and I pointed my finger at her. "Shut the fuck up. And this time, I am talking to you."

She didn't take offense this time, either, just grinned in amusement and pushed off the wall to start walking again.

"... What do you think?" I muttered as I followed her down the ruined hallway. "Is Defender another name for Vanguard somewhere, like Samurai is?"

...

"... Myalis?"

... You told me to shut up.

"Oh, for fuck's sake!" I gave a mighty eye roll as I sighed the sigh of the exasperated. Ahead of me, the woman laughed at the display, likely guessing at the missed half of the exchange.

As a loose synonym to Vanguard, there are, indeed, other worlds where the equivalent term is used, but none of them are Human. Certainly none from Chicago. Human Vanguard operations do not exceed the Inner System, and she doesn't match any of them, anyway. None of her equipment matches that of any race known to the Protectors, either. There are some ... similarities, but no definite matches.

"Is that maybe why you haven't been able to connect to her? Mismatched tech?"

That could be a plausible explanation, actually.

She glanced back at that. "Your AI's been trying to connect to me?"

Whoops, probably shouldn't have said that part out loud. "Ah, no, not her, specifically," I floundered. "Those Protectors I mentioned. They've been trying to ring you up, I guess? It's why they sent me over, actually. We didn't know there were survivors sheltering up here, just that Antithesis were getting their asses kicked, and we couldn't tell how."

She nodded in understanding. "Well, once we get the civvies out of here, I'd be happy to sit down for a chat. Maybe you guys can help me out, too. I didn't come all the way out here for the view."

"You're still a ways from Chicago, too," I agreed. "What brings a space cop to Earth, then? What with it not being in your jurisdiction."

"An escaped criminal," she answered as she stepped over a fallen support beam. "Goes by the name Forgah, he's an Atellian." She glanced back at me as I made my own way over the rubble. "Your AI ever heard of them?"

... Maybe Andromeda wasn't so far off after all.

"Uh, pretty sure that's a no," I translated. It was a little worrying how unsure Myalis sounded. Know-it-all was kind of her natural state.

"Predator species. Bipedal, claws, prehensile tongue, bone plates," she explained. "I can show you a holo later. He escaped capture and fled through an experimental teleportation gate. When I followed, I ended up near here not long before the city's incursion alarms sounded. Didn't know what that meant until space preds started making orbital drops." She gave a Model Three corpse a kick for emphasis as she passed it.

"... And you've just been fighting the Antithesis by yourself since then?"

She rubbed at the side of her nose, a comfortingly human gesture. "Eh, they aren't too tough. Seems like a numbers game more than anything, and the corridors kill that pretty quick."

Her assessment may have merit. It doesn't seem as if anything but single digit Antithesis have made it here so far, and as you've said, she is equipped at least as well as a basic Samurai. Though even then, holding out against so many on one's own is impressive.

My own mind went back to less than an hour ago and the absolute mob that was chasing me. "... Space cops are badass."

Does she intend to take this Atellian back with her?

"Yeah," she confirmed after I relayed Myalis' question. "Alive if possible, but nobody's going to lose any sleep if it's not."

"That sounds awfully harsh."

She turned directly back at me when those words left my mouth, and managed to look me right in the eyes, helmet be damned. "He's killed at least seventy-two people, and eaten most of them."

I couldn't have said if it was her gaze or her words that made me stop in my tracks. "... Damn. Retracted." She nodded and we carried on. "And you think this bastard's somewhere in New Montreal?"

"Most likely," she agreed. "I wasn't so far behind him that it would make any sense for him to end up somewhere else." She looked out a window at the gray cityscape that filled every view, broken up only by neon and holoprojectors. "On the plus side, place like this, he doesn't have a lot at his disposal."

"What do you mean by that?" The odd statement had me tilting my head.

She waved the concern away with her hand. "Atellians are commonly called ..." She second-guessed using alien slang after a moment of hesitation. "... Well, it loosely translates to feral druid. They're one of the few predator species to find work in agriculture."

I felt my feet begin to slow down as something cold began to slip down into my stomach, like I'd swallowed ice cubes. I swallowed before I spoke. "Why?"

"They make temporary symbiotic attachments to flora," she explained. "In agriculture, it basically allows them to weed and manage rows just by walking down them. On their planet, they used it to weaponize undergrowth for ambush hunting."

Aaaaand my feet came to a complete stop.

Shit fuck.

"Shit fuck," I immediately concurred with my normally verbose and clean-spoken AI. Really, it said everything that needed to be said.

The space cop turned back to us with confusion thick on her face. "Did I miss something?"

I jerked my head toward one of her impressive number of bodies. "Antithesis ... aren't animals." I took a deep breath to settle my heart over what deep shit we we're in. "They're technically fruit."

I watched as she processed that and her eyes grew so wide I thought they might fall out.

"... Shit fuck," she repeated, and the triumvirate was in unanimous agreement.