Fabienne Gschwind - The Fallen Heroine

"A double oyster platter for the ReS commander who saved our city from nuclear strike, stat!", I heard her shout loudly.

Tartelette managed to slurp down oysters despite synthetic skin, and I settled for a plaice. All this at barely 10 in the morning. The manager had the courage to serve us herself, though she was still shaking like a leaf.

"It's on the house," she then said in a firm voice. I felt uneasy; it hadn't been as funny as I had thought after all. Did the commander really think it was funny, or was she just playing to make money?

When she was gone, Tartelette grinned. "Must have been sweating blood for her beautiful interior," she said with a laugh.

More like for her life , I thought, and didn't find it quite so funny anymore. I was uncomfortable. Lately I had read enough newspapers from the area and knew that Tartelette had quite an ambivalent image. Like a superhero, but with weaknesses. That made her all the more human and even more people admired her because of that. Her orgies of swearing and insults when she slaughtered repros had also made her legendary.

Many people watched the missions for that very reason. There was a newspaper article or two with Tartelette’s 'waiter's terror' nickname. It was openly known that she liked to order a menu at gunpoint. Fortunately, however, she had never physicaly harmed anybody.

Tartelette, of course, took pains to maintain this 'bad girl' image. On video platforms and picture galleries, there were tons of posts depicting her in full action and ready for Hollywood. Some clips had been clicked multiple millions of times worldwide, especially her infamous freak-outs. For example, when she smashed a reporter's drone with the antlers of a repro deer, or when she flung a decapitated repro cat up into a journalists' copter. Or how at some vernissage she lifted a nobleman who had provoked her completely off the ground and hurled him over several meters into a pool of koi carp. Funnily enough, these freak-outs had become more and more frequent over the past year. I wondered if Tamara was just a great actress, or if she was really freaking out as the press would have us believe.

Also in international newspapers one could regularly read articles about the 'French Reproslayer Arlette'. Reproslayer had already become her second name. The farther away the country was, the more legendary her deeds were portrayed. ReS headquarters had to earn vast amounts of advertising money from these clips.

But suddenly I had to smile:

If I stayed with Tamara and learned from her, I was sure I would soon be as famous. I imagined myself as the 'bad boy' of France, with media appearances everywhere and heaps of girls who dreamed of getting into bed with a repro hunter like me. That was it! I just had to take a good look at how Tamara was doing it and let her inspire me. Soon I would be a superhero too. Provided I lived long enough.

With the help of the three jetcopter pilots, we packed everything up and Tartelette gave us a crash course on how to sit properly in the pressure seats. After all, none of us had ever been in a jetcopter except for her.

"Put the headband tightly over your temples. That sends out a signal and keeps you from getting sick during the extreme accelerartion. It also affects your heartbeat to keep blood flowing to your brain so you don't black out."

Already the pilot was counting down the seconds to takeoff, and a visor with a built-in display slid over my face from above. I could access the outside camera as well as view current flight data.

Then we were off. Despite the special seat and sensor control, I felt like I was being crushed as the jetcopter shot into the sky at nearly 5 Gs. Then the jets folded to the side and at 12 kilometers altitude we performed the supersonic fly-through almost from a standing start. I watched us accelerate from Mach1 to Mach6. Only a few minutes later we slowed down again. I had heard that some billionaires and aristocrats afforded such jetcopters to fly to America within two hours.

Then we were already in free fall towards the ground. Fortunately, the sensor band suppressed my nausea. Because I could really feel how my plaice, which I had eaten earlier, turned over in my stomach.

Then we braked brutally and the pilot landed butter-softly on the main street of Saint-Nectaire.

We got out with wobbly legs. Only Tartelette took out a cookie from her breast pocket and nibbled on it. The soldiers and policemen present unloaded our luggage and transported it to the hotel. This had been forcibly confiscated as a command post. We were in deepest Auvergne, wedged between hills and forests. The volcanoes were not far away and there were countless caves in the area.

Saint-Nectaire was now just a ghost village and no one lived in the village except for the hotel, the famous spas and the "Grotte petrifiante" tourist attraction. It would take quite a while for the population to return to pre-apocalypse levels.

"Sailors, I need about thirty minutes to confer with the leets here, so be in the lobby at twelve sharp in full gear."

A frightened receptionist, who had also been forcibly recruited, showed us to our reserved rooms. Gabin and I moved into a spacious suite, while Emily got a small single room. Gabin threw his gym bag on a suitcase rack and dug out his hygienic underpants from it before going to the bathroom. I had put on these special underpants earlier and didn't need to change. Combat gear provided you with air and nutrient solution for 36 hours, but if you couldn't remove your pants for some reason, that was a bit of a problem.

An hour later, a decacopter had dropped us off on a ridge where a frightened tourist had thought he saw a strange animal there. We walked along the narrow trail to locate the said spot and look for tracks. Our troop once again made a memorable picture.

I was carrying a set of HAN grenades and an Ex10 strapped to my chest, in addition to the standard equipment. The Ex10 is an intermediate between a shotgun and a large-caliber pistol loaded with explosive ammunition. HAN grenades are extremely small grenades that create a plasma cloud when they explode. Emily had two additional belts of HAN grenades and a matching grenade launcher plus a Pox9, a type of short submachine gun. Gabin lugged a compact Gatling in addition to his normal gear. On his back he carried the container with several thousand rounds of ammunition. He was the only one who could operate this monster weapon in a force-directed manner. The rest of us needed an additional exoskeleton for that, and Tartelette didn't want that. The commander herself also still carried a Pox9 and two short hatchets.

Finally, we arrived at the place in question. We were all well-trained trackers, but there wasn't much to make out on the igneous rocks and hard-dried soil.

The whole thing was a rather fruitless endeavor. We spotted the odd track of a smaller predator, but the scent faded as a light wind picked up.

"Either we get a tracking dog or leave it alone," Gabin grumbled, unloading his back by leaning the Gatling against a rock.

There were many ReS units that used trained dogs to sniff out the repro smell. Tartelette refrained from doing so because their survival time was too short. While many had been trained to fight repros, it was not effective. The only way to kill repros was by destroying the brain. You could also decapitate an animal or shoot it to a pulp. A dog could bite again and again or tear pieces out of a zombie, but all that didn't kill it.

Finally, word reached us from Thibault that a drone flying over the region had spotted a larger predator. The decacopter picked us up and took us near the said spot.

Then we found the animal. It was easy, because it smelled strongly with the typical repro smell. However, this predatory cat, probably a panther, had taken refuge in some thick brush. Occasionally we could make out its movements between the leaves.