Come on… focus. Focus! Bloody Norah…

Looks like there’s some kind of interference again. You! Get over here and see if you can’t clean this up.

…?

Forget your blighted wardrobe! That Podar’unek vessel just activated. We have a once-in-a-lifetime oppor—no, duty to record the event. It is the sacred trust of all documentarians to preserve and collect such historical events for the eyes of later generations.

And anyway, we don’t have room for non-essentials.

…!

Precisely. After an explosion like that, the audience will be on the edge of their seats! We can’t just leave them hanging… and I will not be forced to construct an ending narrative out of the ether in editing.

Bloody critics raked me over the coals the last time I did that.

…

We don’t know they’re going to retaliate… because they don’t know it was our fault. And I, for one, do not plan on educating them.

Remember, we’re leaving because we’ve already been paid, so there’s no reason for us to be sticking around. Not because we’re terrified of what a couple of well-armed thugs might theoretically do to us if they find out we put a tiny dent in their ship. We don’t even know whether they survived!

Now, if you’ll just get over here and fix this, we might have a chance of finding out.

*

Mark was having some issues.

Or more than just some. Quite the number, really. First among them, simply sorting the lot out in his head so that he might begin to address one or two.

Obviously, he had been blinded by what felt like a flashbang grenade going off in his face. That one was his own fault. He wasn’t entirely sure how it was his own fault, but he knew it was. He had felt the curious build-up of energy in his hands before that snap, and he had sensed the wave that pulsed through the air afterward. The lights had to have come on as a direct result—cause and effect, simple as that.

The trouble he was having was in understanding how such a thing was even possible. Yes, Naomi had been giving off similar, if weak, such pulses ever since they had eaten the lightning root and he knew the bizarre substance reacted to him just fine, so it was reasonable to assume he had been emitting them as well. From there, it was easy to extrapolate a link between this latest mutation and the rather… questionable jerky they’d just gotten hold of. But that did nothing to explain the physical mechanics of the thing.

Nor was such an explanation at all likely to be forthcoming. Ever since they had found this place, it had been a constant bombardment of one thing after the next. He felt as if his entire world was unraveling.

And that wasn’t just hyperbole; he was more than willing to accept the possibility of a full-on psychotic break. His mind was like Swiss cheese, an old tweed suit left too long for the moths, or… no. A much better analogy would be to say that his very soul had been sieved, and the only thing left behind… was Naomi.

Anything and everything he had ever known was now eclipsed by her shadow. Any hour he had ever spent alone in his room, just playing games or what have you, was now tainted by her not having been by his side. Any model or actress he had ever, in his hubris, placed on a pedestal as the pinnacle of femininity had been viciously crushed by her colossus—to the point where everyone else had been entirely deleted from the category. It was as if his entire life had been a sick joke, a prank played by the universe, a trial to overcome until the day he met her.

He loved her. Completely and utterly.

Which was fine. He was glad to have finally met his soulmate. Overjoyed, even. Except about ten minutes prior, he would not have said he even liked her all that much.

And that was insane! How could he not have liked her? She was his perfect counterpart, no matter what metric you used to measure her with, and he would have been deeply insulted were anyone to suggest otherwise… if only that individual were not his own past self.

He honestly could not fathom why he might have ever held that opinion, either. It was like waking up to discover you had been a screeching macaque, cursed to toss dung at any passing stranger who failed to hand a peanut through the bars of your cage. He wanted to reach through time and strangle himself for being such an idiot, especially considering the backflips Naomi had been performing just to get him to notice her. The poor girl must have been so frustrated!

However, that lunacy was behind him. He was still feeling a little muddled, and certain phrases and concepts kept cropping up that didn’t make sense anymore—like that one she kept peppering him with: you’re the sexiest? Ha! As if. But there was a certain perverse enjoyment that came with sparring with her over it, and that was probably the point, knowing her. So for the moment, he needed to concentrate on the here and now.

And that meant letting his eyes adjust, figuring out where that explosion had come from, making sure Naomi was okay…

…and getting his damned auditory warning system to shut up long enough for him to concentrate on any of it!

Bwah-bwah-bwah!

Advanced weapon discharge detected. You are not yet equipped to survive contact with armaments of this caliber. Please seek shelter immediately.

Bwah-bwah-bwah!

Advanced weapon discharge detected. You are not…

“Alright, alright!” he shouted, cupping a pair of hands to his ears—for all the good it did him. The inhuman, buzzing voice was coming from inside his own head. “I get the message, but we’re trapped in this room! Where else do you expect us to go?”

…caliber. Please seek—boo-doop.

Acknowledged.

Calculating possible strategic counters. Please minimize the proximal distance between yourself and Destroyer Unit to increase processing power.

His eyebrows bunched together. “O…kay? Guess I was right about that Destroyer thing…”

“Mike?” Naomi called from somewhere nearby, and he turned toward the sound. He was still forced to squint through the overwhelming brightness, but whatever he had done fortunately did not seem to be affecting his perving senses. “Who are you talking to? Are you alright?”

“Just a little shaken up, but I’m fine.” And apparently, so was she, thank goodness. Directing his steps toward her, he absently waved a hand at his face. “And I was talking to the uh… the Nexus-whatever. It was yelling at me. It can… it can do that now… I—I guess.”

His voice trailed off as his vision began to clear.

He had known what Naomi looked like, of course. Thanks to his omnidirectional perving senses, he was as intimately familiar with her body as a man could be. But there was just something about seeing her in the light that spoke to his instincts. The sweep of her hip, the gentle shifting of her bosom with her every breath, the fine play of muscle beneath her skin—itself so soft, it almost looked as if she was the one blinding him with her radiance and not the room. All of these combined into an experience of her that was as wholly new as it was viscerally… normal.

Finally.

It was grounding. A balm for the soul. He could not help but smile just being near her—a being of such incarnate perfection, such breathtaking beauty, it was difficult to remember trivial details like explosions and purported weapons fire.

“I can see your stripes again,” he informed her dreamily. “I missed them. Especially this one.”

Most of the striations ran up the sides of her legs and arms, making her look something like a blue tigress, but there was a thicker band just beneath her breasts in a natural imitation of a corset. It was sexy as hell too, and in a rare moment of daring, he allowed his finger to trace its outline.

She inhaled sharply at his touch, and her torso shifted to follow the movement of his hand, as though hoping it might drift that last inch higher to tease her breast. But then she pulled away. “Not now, Mike. What was the Nexus yelling about?”

Right. That.

“Um… something about a weapon’s discharge?” he replied, trying to shake loose the lust-addled cobwebs, but they were sticky little buggers and his male brain was not overly concerned with keeping his jaw working right then. “It, uh… wanted me to get close to you so it could um… could come up w-with uh…” Belatedly, he realized he had been staring, so he squeezed his eyes shut to block out at least the one portion of her hypnotic allure. “…so it could come up with countermeasures. Apparently, that helps it think better.”

She scoffed, but with a hint of a smile at her lips. “You liar. It did not!”

“It’s certainly not helping me think better,” he admitted.

Naomi made a high-pitched sound in her throat that was difficult to interpret, but from her expression, you might have thought he had just kissed a puppy. “Damn it, Mike. There was just an explosion! I’m trying to be serious for once, and here you are, coming up with… with ridiculous stories just to flirt with me?”

For a brief moment, he thought to defend himself; no part of that had been fabrication, and he was in no condition to come up with anything approaching word-play. But she had started wriggling and twitching about to such a degree that his already beleaguered mind was hard-pressed even to remember what they had been talking about. And then, she let out a moan of frustration that was so sensually charged, you would have thought their few seconds of simple conversation had been actively edging her toward climax.

“Like you need one,” she groaned.

With no more warning than that, she leapt into his arms… which was a new and revelatory experience, given how many they collectively had. It really gave new meaning to ‘her hands were everywhere.’ They were running through his hair, teasing at the skin of his back, massaging his behind… and all at once! It was as amazing as it was disorienting, like she was feverishly discovering the opening passages of whatever the opposite of phantom limb syndrome would be for the kama sutra.

He tried to give as good as he got too, but half of his available appendages were occupied with supporting her weight. That was okay, though. How she could have armored plates under there and still maintain such a deliciously plush backside was behind him.

Unfortunately, they were only allowed a few too-brief seconds of passion before…

Boo-dwip.

Biologic development deemed sufficient to attempt communications with local non-native technologies. Please transport Destroyer Unit to nearest interface node.

Doot… doot… doot…

He pulled his lips from hers with a regret that bordered on malice as the homing beacon drilled its way through his mental fog. “I guess we go this way now,” he grumbled, dutifully ‘transporting’ Naomi as instructed.

She stared at him with no little bewilderment. “Wait. You were being serious? Like… seriously serious? The Nexus wanted us to make out so it could think?”

“It didn’t say anything about making out,” he informed her. “That was your idea. Not that I’m complaining.”

She snorted. “And what? Now it wants you to carry me somewhere? Like this?”

“It wasn’t being super specific about it,” he replied, then as dry as he was able, he added, “as long as your boobs are touching me.”

She surged upward to glare at him, though the effect would have been better if she could have kept the grin off her face. Or pulled her breasts even a millimeter away from him. “Now I know you’re lying. What did it say for real?”

“I don’t think I could tell you word-for-word. It’s kind of hard to understand,” he replied. “Like… have you ever heard one of those pianos that they’ve synced with a wave file to mimic human voice?”

She shook her head. “Should I have?”

“Hmm… well, the closest I can describe it then is… kind of buzzy and disjointed? And it likes stringing a lot of big words together.”

“That part sounds about right,” she agreed.

Arriving at a particular spot along the outer wall, he halted to scan up and down the surface, trying to figure out what technologies might be here to even communicate with. Obviously, there were the many panels they had found before, but the lightning seemed to avoid those wherever possible, preferring to instead pass between them.

Given what had happened the last time one of them had been struck, he could imagine why. This entire room had to be a giant food storage hub—like one of those old automats he’d seen in the movies. But the light had revealed no buttons or other such mechanisms through which he might summon more. Nor could he see anything that shouted ‘interface node.’ There had to be more here.

Slowly, his eyes rose higher, toward where the dome of the ceiling began, and there, just beyond the wall, he saw traces of lightning warping toward and through a familiar, distorted construct—though this one was a little different. The spidery webs of living plasma did not seem to require constant contact with it, nor was the architecture built to highlight it, as had been the case in the hall. So it was no wonder he had missed it in the dark.

“Apparently, we’re going to try to communicate with that thing,” he said, nodding toward it.

She followed his gaze upward. “Oh, there it is. I knew there would have to be a lightning bulb in here somewhere. So, how does it expect us to talk to it? Did it say?”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Before he could hazard a guess, her head jerked slightly back, and her eyes refocused on something invisible to him. “Uh… okay? Let me down,” she instructed.

“It’s talking to you now?” he asked, complying.

“Just some images. Kind of like an instructional picture book. Hold on.”

Turning to face the wall, she twisted a pair of hands about each other in mimicry of what he had done earlier, then once she had built up a weak distortion between them—which apparently was just that easy—she pointed, one hand in front of the other in a line, toward the nearby construct. But nothing happened. Whatever energy she had built up simply dissipated into the atmosphere the second her hands stopped.

She frowned in confusion.

“Did the picture book not mention the snapping bit?” he asked. “Because that’s what I did.”

“Oh… Yeah, this one here—” she pointed to reference the invisible image, “—has some kind of cartoony action lines, but I wasn’t sure what it meant until you said it.” A pair of hands came up to rest on her hips. “I know you can make animations, you stupid thing. Why are you intentionally making things difficult?”

“Is it actually answering?” he asked curiously. It had talked to him earlier, if briefly, so it was possible—even if the question had been… rhetorical.

“No, of course not. The most I ever get is a highlight or a few images when it wants me to pay attention to something or do a thing, and the spinach-green text I’ve been getting lately has looked more like some kind of system boot-up message than anything. ‘Initiating’ this, ‘confirm’ that.”

“You mean like a BIOS?” he asked.

She waved a dismissive hand. “Sure, whatever. My point is, it never explains anything. So I don’t know what I’m doing… or why snapping would be necessary to trigger it.”

Off in the distance, he could hear an odd, screeching noise that reminded him of metal tearing. But the lightning racing overhead did not suddenly start flashing red or buzzing with claxons, so if there was a hull breach, the strange bunker they had found themselves within either considered it to be of no consequence… or whatever warning systems it had were not appreciable to the human mind. Regardless, he saw no signs of floodwaters rushing in and Naomi did not seem to have noticed, so he kept it to himself for now. They were actually on the verge of accomplishing something here.

“I don’t know. Maybe there’s flint and steel in our fingers?” he suggested.

Her glare flitted toward him. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t just say that.”

“I’m kidding!” he assured her, fanning out his hands. “And anyway, you’re the biologist—”

“Botanist,” she corrected. “And not really.”

“Yeah, alright. Life sciences. My point is, I don’t know anything either. This whole scenario might as well be lifted straight out of the X-Men for all the sense it makes.”

“X-Men?” Her glare softened into a thoughtful frown, and then she blinked innocently up at him. “Is that… like an Ultraman thing?”

His spine went ramrod straight. “Oh, you bi—”

His teeth clicked together before he could get the rest out. Getting upset would just egg her on, and anyway, he had known something like this would be coming. “You know better than that.”

But from the grin on her face, he knew he had already played into her hand. Cozying into his chest, she pouted. “Does that mean you’re going to punish me?”

“No.” He bopped her gently on the head. “Bad girls go to horny jail.”

“That’s your fault,” she reminded him. “But if you can’t appreciate a bad girl, I guess I’ll have to try a little harder. Maybe we could begin with some role-playing? I’ll be Spiral—”

His eyebrows shot up in complete shock. She knew Spiral?! For a moment, thrills raced up his spine in the faint hope of his dream girlfriend revealing herself as a secret comic-book nerd. Spiral was famous in the X-Men for having multiple arms, but it wasn’t like she had appeared in any of the movies.

But then she just had to ruin it. “—and you can play Captain Spock. Then, you could bend me over a knee and whip me with your lightsaber…”

“All of those are from completely different—” He stopped to keep the blood vessels in his neck from bursting with outrage. “I am going to strangle you.”

“Mike!” She sucked in a breath as gooseflesh visibly raced down her body. “Please. I can only get so wet.”

There was a beat of silence.

“I will be getting you back for this, you realize.”

She smiled, then caressed his cheek. “That’s the idea, bashert.”

From her tone, he had to assume that was some Yiddish term of endearment. That or, knowing Naomi, it was the most blistering insult ever to grace his ears… but meant as an endearment. Still, they had other things to be worrying about. He could hear more of that metallic screeching in the distance, this time accompanied by some kind of odd humming noise.

“Just get on with it,” he grumbled. Honestly, this woman, toying with his innocent, geeky heart. And right in the middle of a crisis situation, too. God, he loved her. “Something’s out there, and I’d rather not be here when it comes to knocking.”

Some of the eagerness faded from her face, replaced by a touch of unwilling contrition. “Right, sorry… the weapons. I forget myself when you get all flustered like that.” Her eyes drifted down to his midsection for a passing moment before she turned away with a regretful sigh. “Or maybe it’s something else.”

He chose not to comment. After all, he was still a healthy young man where it counted; nothing about that situation needed explaining. But the necessity to hold himself back was wearing at his patience in a bad way.

Fortunately, Naomi was already spinning up another ball of should-not-be-physically-possible, so he channeled his pent up frustration into trying to understand that instead. He could perve it building just fine, but it was just as invisible to normal vision as it was to thermal. There might have been a slight transition in her hands from a muted orange into something verging on a warmer yellow during the process, but her body temperature fluctuated like that constantly. It was too early to say for sure whether there was a heat component involved.

All together, that seemed consistent with his theory that there was some form of electromagnetism at play, which lined up nicely with their ability to influence the unusual lightning-based technology in this place. What benefit that might be in the outside world was still very much in the air, of course, and he still had no idea how any of it worked. But one thing at a time.

Once the little ball grew to roughly the size of a dime, she again pointed in a line toward the nearby distortion machine, this time with a snap. For whatever reason, that addition did the trick. Instead of dissipating—or expanding outward in a wave as he had expected—the ball shot through her extended digits and toward the target like she had just fired it from a magic finger-gun.

“The fuck?” he said, nonplussed. “How did you do that?”

“You saw it just the same as I did,” she replied, then stared down at her hands. “Felt weird, though. And now my fingers are all tingly.”

“I’ll bet,” he agreed absently. “There’s no way that’s electromagnetism, though. Right? I mean, h-how would you concentrate something like that into a ball?”

“Don’t ask me. You’re the electronics guy,” she replied. It went without saying, of course, that he was just as much out of his depth with this as she was with the genetic engineering going on in their bodies. But before he could formulate something approaching even an educated guess, she tilted her nose upward. “Look. Something’s happening.”

That something turned out to be a whole lot of the ambient lightning gathering up into the construct, visibly dimming the room, followed by a faint pulse of its own, presumably in reply. A moment after the wave washed over them, there came an odd sound, almost like a computerized burp, and then the strange ball of curved reality started to drift down, still keeping behind the wall. Even more unusual, the many automat panels pulled aside to make way for it.

“Now, that’s some proper sci-fi shit,” Mark murmured. “It’s warping its own housing around like water.”

Naomi let that go without comment. But then, with the amount of bullshittery they had seen over the last few days, the simple ability to alter material states probably did not even appear on her radar.

After a moment, the alien mechanism settled at about eye level, then produced another of those burps, followed by a second distortion wave.

Silence descended. All they could do was stare at it, uncomprehending. And if the Nexus was getting anything from this, it was not saying.

The device waited some six or seven seconds before hitting them with a third wave, but this time, more focused on him.

Naomi elbowed him in the ribs and whispered out of the corner of her mouth, “Do the finger gun thing.”

“What?”

“Like I did. It wants you to identify yourself.”

He glanced down at her quickly. “How do you know that?”

“It focused on you, didn’t it?” she hissed. “What else could it mean? Just call it woman’s intuition.”

He shrugged; it was as good a guess as any. But then he paused. “Does it matter which pair of hands I use?”

“I don’t think so… and the Nexus didn’t specify,” she returned, holding up her own in momentary thought. “But I used the down-back pair, if you think it’ll make a difference.”

He couldn’t see why it would, either. But they had gotten the extra limbs and the ability to focus the balls of warped reality… or electromagnetism… or whatever it ultimately turned out to be from that alien, so he had to assume there was some level of nuance to this that he was as-yet ignorant of—especially if it was being used as a form of communication. For now, it was best to be specific.

So, with a nod, he moved to replicate her feat as exactly as he could. He had actually been thinking of the ‘down-back’ pair as his inner arms, as they seemed to prefer coming up beneath the other two when he held them to his face, but on reflection, that had more to do with how his shoulder was oriented than anything. At rest, they were positioned slightly lower and behind the others, so he knew what she meant. And after only a few seconds of fiddling with it, he managed to fire off a distortion bullet of his own.

In response, the device burped at them again. If he was generous, he might have said it sounded happy.

“Now what?” he whispered.

“I don’t know,” she whispered back. “Can you hear any more explosions out there?”

He listened intently before shaking his head. “It’s gone quiet… but there was something earlier, like someone was trying to break in.”

“The sniper?” she asked, suddenly tense.

“Probably. But if he came in through the front door, he’s lost in that hallway right now.”

“You’re assuming he doesn’t already know how to operate the tech in here,” she hissed, gesturing toward their recent meal. “If he’s one of those things, he definitely does. In which case, we’re screwed!”

“Why would he chase us into his own deactivated bunker, then?” he countered. “It was him shooting at us that got us trapped in here. He would have known that if it belonged to him, and he wouldn’t have needed explosives to break his way in.”

She nodded along thoughtfully. There were a lot of angles to consider and not a lot of answers. They didn’t even know why they were being hunted! But at least on this one point, he felt relatively confident. “Okay… okay, in that case, we need to figure out how to sound the alarm. Maybe there’s some… automated defenses we can activate? Or a way out of here?”

He blew out a flummoxed raspberry. How did she expect to accomplish any of that? They had barely gotten through a simple hello, and she was talking about activating peripheral devices.

The machine abruptly burped again before bombarding them with wave after wave of distortions in various thicknesses and widths. Then it just stopped, burped, and waited—apparently for their reply.

“Uh… did you get all that?” he wondered aloud.

“No, but I think the Nexus recorded it,” she informed him, and with a pinch to the bridge of her nose, she sighed. “Oy… hold on. Looks like it wants me to repeat the message back. This is going to take a minute.”

About then, he heard that strange humming again, and this time, much closer. But before he could warn Naomi, the Nexus returned with an announcement:

New energy signature detected: unregistered—assumed hostile.

Likely outcome: death or capture.

Recommendation: ambush—maximal aggression.

Preparing host-body for combat…

“Preparing what now?” he repeated dumbly.

The answer came soon enough.

He had heard the phrase ‘seeing red’ often enough, so he had a sort of intuitive understanding for what it probably meant. But he had never experienced it. Not until that very second. He could feel it building inside him: his heartbeat growing stronger and stronger until it was practically thundering in his chest, his lungs burning as though starved for air, his muscles twitching for action… and his face helplessly twisting into a rictus of absolute, mindless rage.

It was an implacable emotion, senseless and undirected, unmoored from rationality… at first. But as his flailing mind struggled to latch onto anything at all with which to ground himself, he remembered the Nexus’ warning. Someone was coming. Someone that meant to harm them. To harm Naomi!

More than an urge. More than compulsion. He knew with a certainty that bordered on madness that he would hunt. He would kill. He would tear them limb from limb, devour their flesh, rape their bodies while presenting their brains as a succulent for his precious Destroyer!

All of this, he would revel in, and there was absolutely no chance of him stopping until the deed was done… or he was dead.

Whether he liked it or not.

His thermal vision abruptly snapped to a minuscule point of molten white appearing along the far wall, and he grinned with anticipation. But before he could take a step forward, the computerized voice came again:

Mission Critical: Protect Destroyer until Unit completes terminal interface.

He nodded along. He would have done that anyway, but it was good to have some reasoning behind his potential sacrifice—if only to pull him from the edge of insanity.

“Wait here,” his voice rumbled out in a deep, threatening snarl. “I’m going to go… meet our guests.”

*

Oh, who cares about them?!

Focus on that… that thing! It moved. They’re clearly communicating with it somehow. That denotes at least some level of intelligence.

…!

Yes, I know recording the capture would make for more satisfying entertainment, but this is unprecedented. We’re talking about a long-dead civilization here! The potential for academic advancement is… is…

< sigh >

Fine! Follow Subject Two.

I don’t suppose we can coax any life back into Camera B, can we?