Part 2
House of Javierra
Within minutes of waking up, Tasìa downed two Ki-Jack Ginseng Energy Elixers while eating a bag of pistachios and a couple of strips of jerky.
The extra twitch in her eye gave her the satisfaction that she was doing it right.
While engaged in her morning constitutional, she scanned the news feeds with Val's device. Tasìa found out little beyond the media calling it a Densida-related event. On that score, they may have even been right.
That was the Infernal Madre's greatest threat to humanity. How she manipulated the density of information that floated about the Quadra through the nanospores.
Tasìa recalled an incident from her burglar days. She was furnishing a medical lab in her Vida Esconda hideaway by robbing a medical device R&D site when four lab coat wearing scientists walked into the room in which she surveyed for the purposes of five finger discount shopping.
Tasìa managed to hide on a top shelf full of glowing jars as the quartet was enrapt in conversation.
One egghead declared that the nanospores were biologically based computational machines. His three peers, including a redhead with a brogue accent (when hearing English spoken, Tasìa could never tell Irish, Scottish and Wales accents apart) scoffed at the man.
"That barely scratches the surface of their capabilities, mate," the very livid redheaded colleague put it.
He went into a long diatribe about how the spores used scent tones to communicate with one another just as plants do.
When the first speaker made a deflective argument, "if we harnessed the computational capabilities of the nanospores, we would not even need manufactured chips inside the Quadra."
The redheaded man grew even angrier.
"Heretic! You understand nothing!"
He punched the man who misspoke. The man fell from the blow, and all three scientists that remained standing began kicking him.
As the man screamed out for help, Tasìa skirted away with the devices she had came after.
Though their reaction seemed out of proportion, Tasìa understood their fears.
The Densida had the potential of warping reality itself beyond the sculpted illusions of entities and architectural geometry. The faerie mounds were merely symptomatic of this underlying problem kept in check by the boundaries of the Quadra, and the struggle of the dueling AIs.
Tasìa scanned the casualty report. It only included staff members but no prisoners. Missi was listed among them. Tasìa bit her lip as she shook her head, and wondered how Missi felt about Tasìa's violent take-no-prisoners-style escape from the prison.
Missi's husband was among the security detail of the IMCQ, but Tasìa had no idea whether he was amongst those that she confronted that day.
She decided not to dwell on it. It was useless to argue with the Dead.
Let the dead bury the dead.
She wanted to find out more about the best friend that she made while incarcerated, Marcìa. Otherwise known as Este-Oeste.
Tasìa with a prayer on her tongue had not given up hope. Marcìa happened to be very close to her release date.
There was a chance, however, due to the lockdown triggering events of Tasìa's escape and Ria's murder that the system would clear out the log of those currently slated for release.
Lockdowns tended to make paperwork triplicate in volume for any administration that had to deal with them. Clearing out of the current logs eased the pressure.
The release reports were public records so it turned out easy for her to obtain them. To Tasìa's eternal elation, Marcìa did get her early release several days previously. She yelped a very American 'hoo-hah!' in celebration for this one small victory this merciless world did so grant.
But as she was flying high, Tasìa noticed something. Another name was on that short list of prisoners released for the month, Felicité Antonella Paz.
What the hell?
Tasìa thought about their conversation from the previous night. She specifically asked Felicité about how she was holding up in the IMCQ. Felicité told her nothing that contradicted the assumption that Felicité was still incarcerated there.
That bitch lied to me!
And what was the purpose of that lie? To have Tasìa contact Sylvia, the Serbian assassin, who was still under mind control.
So, what was this really about? The story made little sense. The whole meetup with the Human Rights Commission and the agenda Felicité presented for it never set right with Tasìa. It unsettled her every instinct for what one would expect of an anarchist like Felicité.
She was quite a different sort of anarchist from Aunt Tatiana's creed. Felicite's kind was a mercenary one fueled with a strong hatred for the state. Closer to libertarian than communist.
What was Felicite's true agenda? She had to have been playing for a specific team from the start.
More importantly.
That bitch lied to me!
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
Tasìa took it out on the RokumSokums.
The pair of robots in the octagon could take a punch and give a smackdown in return. Tasìa set them at the lowest setting of response given her unfamiliarity with fighting them in the ring.
Also, at the moment, she was uninterested in a fair fight. That could wait till she started her training, proper.
The red and blue robots surrounded her. They sidestepped around her like stalking coyotes. Tasìa waited for one of them to make a move.
The blue one tried to throw a punch, but Tasìa deflected it with the meat of her forearm. She let out a jab with her left hand against the robot's face.
In a LED display on the robot's forehead, it stated: 1 for 10.
That meant when she successfully smacked its head ten times, with a certain minimum amount of force backing the hit, its head would pop up like a toy from elder days.
When she landed her second hit, however, its red partner laid into her good with two solid punches against the back of her shoulder.
Tasìa tripped over her own feet, but she recovered quickly before the red robot could close in on her.
Good golly damn, I am not a boxer! No other field of endeavor makes me feel like such a clumsy oaf as this one does. Without a blade and some room to dodge I'm not much of anything in a fight.
She needed to take one of them out of the fight as quickly as possible. She already landed two strikes on the blue one so it was drafted for the cause.
Tasìa lured the red robot away from its fighting partner, with its back turned towards it. The red robot attempted a combination hook, jab, counter jab, and hook, but she was ready for it.
With each of its attempts, she lured it farther and farther away from its partner. She rolled out of the way, leaped in front of the blue robot, and managed to smack it three times before it hit her once on the side of the head protective helm that she wore.
Five hits down on the blue RokumSokum with five more to go. She shook off the smack on the head that she received. It still felt like a pretty heaping helping sized whelp even on the low setting.
The robots were made with a simulated limited power reserve in mind, to make the responses more realistic. Else, wearing down the physical resolve of a human opponent would be a simple task for a robot to accomplish.
She lured Blue around the octagon, while she kept Red in check. Blue was forced to keep lunging at an awkward angle of attack. She blocked as it threw punches in energy-dilapidating combinations.
The attention she could focus on Blue now made her defenses near impregnable, so long as its partner was kept in check.
More importantly, the blue robot was tiring quickly due to being simulated to slow down as its energy reserve lessened. With one last dodge to throw it off balance, Tasìa put three good punches and two jabs against the side of its face.
Satisfyingly, the last punch popped its head up in a cartoonishly boingy fashion.
After Blue was finished, Tasìa made quick work out of the red robot.
She wasn't really training with Annebél's best collection of androids and drones, just yet. The RokumSokums were just toys to keep Big Red entertained.
Tasìa took a breather and downed a Ki-Jack, but she still felt like she needed something to unleash some anger-based energy to quell the raw emotions that still surged up inside of her.
She needed to beat something into a pile of waste.
The betrayal struck deep. She had suspicions from the very start about Paz and her true loyalties but over time, she had let that guard down. Tasìa would have gone into the meeting with Sylvia assuming that Felicité had taken care of the killer satellite problem. She would have gone in trusting the Argentinian without hesitation.
Was Paz trying to get Tasìa killed with a blind side?
Wear my guard down through weeks of sympathetic actions? Until that crucial moment with Sylvia and the HRC rep who was likely the real target.
What was I? The patsy. Tasìa grew furious at the notion.
Me? The patsy!
With a console controller in hand, Tasìa commanded the two robots to leave the octagon. She replaced them with a Kalistar Metrics Android.
She ran a fight sequence for the android to follow before she lined-up with it in the octagon. When it closed in on her, Tasìa took advantage of an opening in the programned sequence with a punch in the android's simulated throat.
It even coughed in a similar fashion as a human who would have sustained the same hit.
She glanced at the readout.
ACD: 1.62
She repeated the sequence twice more before she took another break.
The next jab didn't connect. The android successfully blocked it with its left forearm. Tasìa would be the first to admit her punches were limited in their impact. Her muscularity was wiry with no bulk, awesome for gymnastic activities but not so much for hand-to-hand combat.
A trade off certainly given no male, 6'5 and 250 lbs of muscle bulk could scamper up the wall of a building at even half the speed she was able to climb, nor climb half as high without breaking a sweat as she did.
However, there was little power to even the best punches she was landing on the android. What could she do differently given she had both speed and precision in her favor.
All the power she did put into her punches came from the superior speed at which she landed them. Could she land them even quicker than she was doing so currently, without invoking the Modality?
The less that she relied on it in a fight, the better.
She commanded the android.
"Repeat your last sequence. Only count in-coming double taps as successes."
The sequence consisted of the robot blocking for eighty seconds.
In the first sprint match, the successful taps went from six hits to just one.
"Average contact depth," she asked.
ACD was essentially a PSI for volumed surface measurement. A differential that could be measured against the internal status of an inflated volume. The answer came back: 3.2.
There was only one data point to average in its calculation instead of six. It nearly doubled from the 1.62 average of her previous attempt.
That was quite a difference that the quicker jabs were making in the destructive potential of her hit contact.
She repeated the sequence several more times and improved with each performance. In the last of the attempts, she doubled tapped eight times with the Average Contact Depth of 3.57.
To a great extent, speed and precision would compensate for the limits of her muscle strength, but she was well aware from her research that there were welterweight-sized men of average 5'2 height and 140 lbs in weight with similar lean, wiry frames as herself who punched around or above 3.9 and in some cases, much higher.
She would have to keep working at it, and she would. Negativity never held her back.
"Your form needs improvement. How you use your left swing, especially. If you learn to execute it correctly, it'll be even more powerful than you're right hook. And no one ever sees that coming from a righty, like you. Do it the right way, and you'll add another whole point to your ACD."
Tasìa turned around.
Annebél leaned over a weight machine as she studied the thief.
"How did you get this deep into the house without my notice?"
Annebél shrugged.
"I guess I'm just a big sneaky fat ass!"
Tasìa chuckled.
"That must be it."
Annebél thumbed her hands into her back pockets and gave her a side glance.
"What do you need with fighting for anyway? You got your blades and guns like any self-respecting country girl chica."
"From San Pedro, Big Stuff. But I get what you mean."
Tasìa sat down beside her friend and leaned over for a big hug.
She explained her situation that called for weaponless training.
"I've got some business in the professional district coming up soon. They've got those AR spotter cameras to pick up on concealed weapons."
Annebél gave her a sympathetic pat on the head.
"That's a big polished turd to suck on, for you."
"Yep. Where is your boyfriend?"
"I've got him unloading stuff."
"Is your brother going to make it out okay, staying with Sachmilli for a few weeks?"
Annebél gave her a rubbery grin that emphasized her pretty dimpled chin.
"So long as he doesn't fall off the side of that building and break his neck, I guess he will be."
She helped Tasìa get back up, and she urged the little thief along, back into the octagon.
"Come on. Let me show you how to stun, and kill with your hands. And how you inflict internal bleeding, like I did to that cannibal fucker last week."