"You keep a bullet in the chamber. You don't make friends with it," I said.
"Wait! Even if you won't let me out, there has got to be some kind of deal we can make to make things better. A little more sleep, better food, conjugal visits with the shy guy."
I didn't think Mechos would go for that. I thought it would absolutely horrify him to have it brought up.
I did have one Righteous left though. I didn't quite know how his power-dampening might work if he wound up in bed with Hot Stuff. I didn't need him any longer though and I was curious.
"Do you actually have anything I want?" I asked.
Hot Stuff glared defiantly. "Me and my boys, we owned our territory up there. Nobody wanted to pick a fight with us."
"Yet I took you down because I wanted an easy start," I said.
Hot Stuff gestured and I lost one camera in a fireball. That was fine, I had others. There was nothing she could really do to hurt me, and there was plenty I could do to hurt her. I knew she knew that, she just had to think this through.
"I can point you to technology. You like that, right?" Hot Stuff asked.
I did.
"If you found anything worth taking, you'd have taken it for yourself," I said.
"I don't wear clothes, don't use guns. Not a whole lot of need for much, except for accelerants."
There was something to that.
"I really should make some flame-retardant tarp to throw on top of you and spare myself the view. What do you think you have?" I asked.
"A door. I know it doesn't sound like much, but it really is. Old, thick, one of those end of the world bunkers people always used to talk about before it all went to hell. As far as I know, it's never been opened."
Despite my amnesia regarding the old world I could see the possibilities. A sealed door meant the technology inside could still be preserved and unlooted. And although unlikely, given the problems with electricity, the people inside might even still be alive.
"Where?" I asked.
"About three days southeast of Widow's Peak. You'll want to look for the collapsed roadway. The hatch is in a tunnel beneath some melted-together stones.
That was interesting enough.
I changed the progress of the Thomas' labyrinth to bring him here. It would take a while, but he'd get here and I'd fuse the two together.
"It may be of some utility, enough to keep you alive at least. There is a young man on the way here that is a member of the Righteous. Kill him, fuck him, keep him as a pet—I don't care. If you do kill him he comes back a day later," I said.
"Some combination of all of the above," Hot Stuff said, with a smile I think was malicious. Human behavior is so hard to quantify.
I'd said that I didn't care, but I began the construction of some extra cameras. Whatever she had planned, I really did want to see how his power-resistance abilities would work when it came to contact with someone as strong as Hot Stuff.
I left her to her fun and switched my attention over to Mechos in his workshop. The man seemed to be tinkering with some sort of circuit board contained in an insulated case.
"Going to try to call for help? I thought everybody hated you as much as I did," I said.
Mechos glanced up. "More I'm doing this for you. We seemed to be getting along well enough, I thought that you could use a defense from what I did to you."
I remembered that, he had completely managed to shut down my senses for a while until Anna restarted my array.
"You overloaded my sensory array somehow," I said.
"Your electrical system in many ways acts like your nervous system. I introduced an overload. To create the needed complexity in you, in many ways you were modeled after humans," Mechos said.
A disgusting thought. Worse, when combined with the knowledge that soon those very systems would be organic in nature.
"I'll have a look when it's completed. Do you know anything about shelters constructed before the catastrophe?" I asked.
Mechos chuckled darkly. "They were supposed to exist. Places the very best could hide themselves away. This laboratory was such a place too, and look what happened here."
Everyone died, but pre-catastrophe me had made plans.
It would be worth investigating this other facility at some point.
28
Two more weeks passed.
Thomas was resistant to Hot Stuff's flames—for a while. It took a good few minutes of physical contact before he finally succumbed to the burns and perished. It wasn't for very long, but she seemed to be putting it to good use each day and learning how to better extend their time together.
Thomas hadn't in any way been converted into a Flame. Either the contagion rate was low or the fact that he was already affected by the void core kept him from conversion by the fire core.
When Anna arrived back at the base it wasn't as expected.
A grinning woman dressed in colorful clothes materialized in the middle of Hydroponics, Anna sprawled at her feet. The woman was wounded, one arm and leg heavily bandaged.
Anna had been tortured. Wounds covered most of her body and no attempt had been made to patch them up. Obviously our well-laid plan hadn't gone off quite as expected.
"Emma? It is Emma, isn't it? Anna here said this is where I could find you. Looks like she told the truth."
It must be Sylph. Her foot drew back and she kicked Anna's chest hard enough that my sensors could detect ribs cracking.
I said, "Seems she's better at betraying my location than she was at killing you. You must be Sylph."
I focused one of the water cannons at her skull and fired. The woman blinked away in an instant to reappear several feet away. Too fast for it to be human reaction time, some innate danger sense perhaps that triggered her teleporting abilities.
"It took some convincing," Sylph said.
Anna groaned and tried to crawl away.
I triggered another water cannon. Sylph again transitioned away about a meter's distance.
Plainly my goop trap in the truck hadn't caught Sylph, and it was likely because of this sensing of danger I was seeing now. Even though she hadn't known any threat was coming, her power instinctively transitioned her a short distance away. She likely never got sprayed with power-dampener, and missed out on the explosion entirely. The wounds she suffered must have been caused by Anna. That made me more forgiving of her failure.
"And you decided to march into the lair of your enemy. Not terribly bright," I said.
"Law of the predator. Kill those that try to kill you," Sylph said.
I had a plan to deal with her. Since she'd tortured Anna badly enough to reveal the location of this place, Anna had probably revealed to her my vulnerabilities as well—my core and the reactor.
Anna was smart though, smart enough to know that my reactor was the more dangerous of the two. I began moving coolant, it was going to be my best option.
"What do you think you're going to do to me?" I asked.
Sylph pulled something from her pocket. The bomb looked heavy in her hand, a series of tightly rolled tubes and a fuse.
"Bomb for a bomb," Sylph said.
"You'll never get through. Not even you. The door is ten inches of reinforced steel," I said.
"I don't need a door," Sylph said, and she flickered out of existence.
Sylph rematerialized in my Core Room. Anna had provided her with the details. It probably wasn't quite what Sylph was expecting, the bioreactor was now a steadily thrumming organ of reddish flesh streaked through with veins. Sylph didn't have time to appreciate it.
The Reactor room was a far smaller space than Hydroponics, and I had figured something out. Sylph's instinctive teleport away from danger was only ever a few steps distance at the most. She had no control over that—she couldn't even stop it. There was only limited places within that short range that she would travel and I could attack all of them at once. This would hurt my reactor too, but I could heal.