Fabienne Gschwind - The Fallen Heroine

More than four hours later, we were barely twenty meters from the aforementioned central chamber where the terrorist was supposedly located. After the hullabaloo we had made, everyone inside must have known that we were on our way and from which direction we would come.

"No sophisticated tactics, we're going to storm in and zap everything. Emily take my zapper, I'll use the Pox to shoot down the animals. I really can't imagine there are many left, though."

I hoped so, too. First, none of us had any reasonable armor left to stop any repro. Emily was walking around in nothing but her underpants because the armor on her legs had completely melted away, rendering her useless. But even barefoot and with a burned lower leg, she didn't complain once. After all, she was the only one who still had radio communication with Thibault and a working helmet.

My suit, while covering most of my body parts, was as loose as a poorly tied plate armor.

Tartelette's leg armor was still intact. Her torso was naked, even her sports bra was only scraps, which she had stripped off with aplomb. With another woman and under different circumstances, I would have found the sight of such a small, firm bosom highly exciting. But here, with my honored commander, it had the same erotic appeal as if I had seen my mother naked. Instead, I looked enviously at her steeled body. Like a Greek marble statue, muscles stood out in good proportion. I sighed with envy.

Tamara rushed forward. I was too exhausted to do anything but follow Tartelette's orders - she knew what to do. I was convinced she would get us out of here alive.

The fight was short and fierce. When he saw us, the terrorist opened cages with animals. Tartelette shot and decapitated a bear and a tiger before they even came to attack. Then she sort of threw herself into the chamber as bait, and immediately two more predators rushed at her. We zapped them before they reached her - and immediately decapitated them. Had they been Repros at all? But we did not get to think. The terrorist rushed at us, wearing a blood-soaked plastic dress and slurring something in a language unknown to me. Unfortunately, our speech computers were not very good, but apparently he said. "There are hundreds of us. We are everywhere and the world will have to bow to our rule. We will KILL kings and nobles and free the world." He brandished a ReS machete - Tamara tried to grab him. But he simply slipped out of her grasp. Then he threw himself at Emily, who could barely walk with her badly raped lower legs and was sitting on the ground. Tamara took her explosive pistol and shot the man apart. In a few weeks at the ReS I had already seen several people killed and I felt nothing. Thank Adalin!

We looked around. I had seen cages like this in zoo transports. Otherwise there were only two tables in the hall. Some food and drink. No equipment, no tools, no electronics, nothing that reminded me of a workshop where they took repros and implanted electrodes in their bodies. "Tamara, take my helmet, Thibault and the others want to see something too." Emily handed her helmet with the camera to Tamara who was about to film.

Suddenly, Thibaul's panicked voice rang out. "Damn it, the idiots have launched the nuclear missiles! Run!"

I didn't think any further and helped Emily up.

"Are they nuts, now that we've spent a whole day scrambling through caves to secure all the evidence!" Tartelette was stunned.

"Tamara, shut up. And run for your life. There are three minutes left."

We took Emiliy between us and dragged her through the cave passage. It was quite wide, enough for a small vehicle to enter and to transport the boxes we have seen. That seemed to surprise Tamara, too: "Didn't the Vice President say that the corridor is so narrow that soldiers in robot gear can't get through? It's not like those things are that wide."

Although we were running erratically, Tamara could still speak normally. We saw the exit and could already hear how the military hurriedly started their return flight. Decacopter noise blared towards us. I panicked that everyone was leaving without us. There were only 20 seconds left!

Our commander even seemed to blossom. "Finally, an exciting mission, huh?"

We got reinforcements. Two jetcopter pilots ran toward us. They took Emily and lifted her in the copter.

We threw ourselves through the open door.

The jet took off, even though I was still hanging halfway out. Hands grabbed me and hoisted me up.

A soldier rammed the door shut.

"Lay flat, I'm accelerating 3 - 2 - 1 - 0."

The pilot accelerated with everything the jetcopter could give. But we couldn't get away fast enough. I was already almost fainting from the acceleration and as if through a fog, I heard, "Impact!" and saw the bright flash of the small hydrogen bomb. That wiped out everything from the cave.

"Damn hospital food. Get me the cook!"

After sleeping in the regeneration tanks for all of two days. The very moment we were allowed to leave Tamara had jumped out of the tank and grabbed a doctor by the collar and shook him violently, "What idiot gave the order for the nuke drop?"

I realized that this outburst of anger was real. But we got an answer immediately. Supposedly, a spy drone in a chamber next to us had seen 10 boxes full of rats opening. If no one had acted, we would have been killed and the rats would have spread everywhere. Only a few people had the authority to launch a nuclear missile. The press rumored that it was probably even the king himself who had acted with presence of mind to save us and also to stop the rat plague. He held back because he did not want to appear as a hero.

"Save us???" cursed Tamara, “Well, 30 more seconds we could have happily taken!!!"

We were moved to a common room for another day of control. The three pilots were in the room next to us.

The jetcopter had gotten high enough to hold off the worst of it, but then had to crash-land with its rotors almost completely smashed.

Our injury list was accordingly long. It was just not clear when we had picked up what. I claimed that the broken collarbone happened during the crash.

In any case, Gabin's legs were wrapped thickly with synth skin after they replaced his burned muscles. His left leg was badly injured and several bones were replaced with synbones, but it did not need to be amputated. Emily had received two new cybernetic fingers. With me everything had remained intact, except for the said collarbone, two ribs, the burst spleen, the complete incisor teeth. In addition, I had a ruptured eardrum, detached retina, dislocated shoulder, ruptured cruciate ligament and burns all over my body.

For this, every injury in the service was compensated with money. I calculated what I could afford with the new fortune and hoped that ReS headquarters would pay it out quickly.

In the meantime, everyone was in the dark as to what this crazy man wanted and whether there really were other stations like this or if it was a lone perpetrator. Apparently he was a lunatic from an asylum in Poland who had escaped a few weeks ago. The circumstances of his escape were puzzling, and how he had found this cave in deepest Auvergne and managed to steal predators was almost impossible to think. He surely had people helping him.

"It bugs me that the whole thing was for nothing, we could have just sat on the edge of the forest and looked at the beautiful explosion," Emily grumbled, moving her also thickly bound legs.

"It's always easier in hindsight," Tartelette agreed. Such things didn't seem to grieve her at all. She took out another old-fashioned photograph and nodded approvingly. Emily's high-resolution helmet camera had caught the exact moment when Tartelette had decapitated the tiger. It was an impressive image. ReS headquarters had released our footage the moment we were recovered alive from the jetcopter wreckage. Only the fight in the dimly lit main chamber was shown, because the helmet cameras had had no infrared and our crawl through the cave was far too blurry. Our fight with the crazy man was also not suitable for public viewing and supposedly the helmet had failed, right when Tamara wanted to film the cave and the zoo-boxes. So we were the only ones who had seen that it was not a “repros training den". The images of the spy drone that had seen these 10 boxes with rats had been classified as strictly secret and no one had seen them.