Fabienne Gschwind - The Fallen Heroine

In the quiet car, this confusion seemed to disturb even Tartelette, who was usually used to listening to the conversations of the policemen, Voltaires and other units as well.

"Thibault, can you get a handle on the radio, it's a mess."

No answer.

"Thibault!!!"

Then the radio traffic just stopped. Probably an overload.

I wanted to sit back and get some sleep, because the last of the Adalin had fizzled out and I was infinitely tired. But as I dozed off, the back of Tartelette's hand slammed into my face.

"What? Use the time to watch theory videos." I held my aching nose, gave myself a generous shot of Adalin, and listlessly set to work. I wondered why Tamara had done this, there was no one filming here far and wide. And she threw another tantrum. She wanted the car to stop at an organic farm to get some goodies. But the vehicle drove on unperturbed, because the boss had had no access rights.

An hour later we were there. No one was waiting for us in the huge parking lot and we had received no further information. The sun had almost set. A tourism robot spit out two paper plans with sightseeing routes through this rock labyrinth and so we set off.

The rock formations were beyond beautiful and the view of the Gorges de La Jonte was magnificent as well.

"And we're back!" came Thibault's voice over the radio.

Eventually it turned out that a drone had shot down the suspect wolf pack, the wolves were not repros as we now knew. Instead, Thibault sent us to Roc Hourtuc, where there was supposedly a repro sheep running around.

"It's going to be fun if we have to chase every animal in the backcountry because it might be a trained repro..." grumbled Tamara.

As we got into the car, the boss asked about the Ghosty. The answer after the missing Ghosty was complicated and Thibault had to elaborate a bit: "Here's what happened: the Commodore was here briefly earlier, after all, to hold an impromptu media conference on the spot. He's doing damage control. He tried to explain that he knew, of course, that you can't kill repros with a zapper... and that it was all a radio misunderstanding. In short, he personally dispatched your Ghosty for his own transport to fly him back to his hotel in Nice. After all, he has to prove what a hardened fighter he is," Thibault explained.

"WHAT?!?"

It was all the way back, with a raging boss beside me. What else could you expect on a Friday the thirteenth? I don't think I've ever watched a training video so intently.

Finally we arrived and in the darkness, made worse by a threatening storm cloud, we set off.

In pouring rain we found the mangled carcass of another sheep, but the tracks had been washed away and any repro smell had dissipated. We took shelter in a crumbling stone hut while listening to Smilly's news. They had had to make an emergency landing in the middle of the Alps because the commodore had refused to wear combat gear. He was massively hypothermic and wanted to sit in the pilot's dome. But there he had to find out that it did not provide any weather protection, but only kept the insects from slapping the pilots in the face.

So our guys had gotten out and parked the Ghosty between two glaciers while they unpacked the survival gear to keep the Commodore warm.

An ambulance deca was already on its way. Tartelette was amused by this.

Saturday, July 14, 2164

Finally, we found our repro ram. A chaotic chase along the deep canyon ensued. But unfortunately the ram went over the slope into the river.

Tamara ordered a deca with missiles to take him out. It was simply too dangerous to jump after him in white water.

But someone in the government insisted that we had to take him out by hand. If it was a trained repro after all, it would be important evidence.

Even ReS headquarters got involved and Tamara and I were lectured about our rights and that we should do what the authorities ordered, otherwise our families would suffer.

Of course, right at this moment our live broadcast was interrupted with a commercial break.

After all the threating of our families, we had no choice and jumped in after it.

"Someone in the royal government is doing their best to kill me by forcing us to take dangerous actions.” Tamara cursed.

I had somehow not expected that the headquarters would threaten us so clearly! My employers were no better than Mafiosi and were not afraid to threaten my family openly! Actually, something like that should have put me in fear and terror. But I didn't have time to really think about it, because I had to survive the next few hours first.

Due to all the rain, the Tarn was swollen and we were whirled through rapids. It was chaotic, every now and then I was pushed up to the surface and could see something.

Tartelette caught the ram and clawed at his leg. Both were pushed underwater for minutes. When they resurfaced, the buck was bloody, Tartelette's combat gear leaking and filling with water.

"Too many rocks down there," she gasps.

Tartelette had hit several times, but not fatally, so the buck bit into her shoulder armor and swiped at her with its hooves. Tartelette jerked her visor open and gasped desperately. Finally, she wrapped her legs around the ram and grabbed my chest strap with her hands to keep me from being swept away from her. "Blow his head off."

Now that I could let go of the animal, I got the slippery Gun out of the holder and put it to its head. It was darn close to Tartelette's unprotected face. "Shoot it!"

I shot. A gush of blood and brains splashed up and shrapnel flew around. For a few seconds, I thought that this was surely a movie scene that would go viral.

There was another surge. It was like being in a washing machine full of rocks. At least my suit stayed tight, Tartelette's was flooded and she could barely hold on to the surface. Her right arm dangled powerlessly in her combat gear. Together we dragged ourselves to the shallow shore. The dead ram washed up right next to me without having struggled as I had.

I opened the visor, gasping like crazy, and everything hurt. I gave myself a strong medicine to be on the safe side. I didn't even know exactly where I was hurt.

The boss was vomiting river water. She was panting heavily, an absolute rarity. And I had her perfectly in the frame of my helmet camera...unfortunately the shots belonged to the ReS headquartes… I already saw the title: "Reproslayer Arlette almost drawn by a Repro-Ram."

"Something in my shoulder is broken," she said, trying to give herself a pain block. But the pack of injectors was destroyed. She unceremoniously fixed her arm with pieces of the destroyed armor.

I was still lying in the sand when the commander got up and inspected the carcass of the buck. Her face was swollen on one side and shrapnel flashed in the flesh. But that didn't seem to bother her much, because part of her facial muscles were synthetic, after the accident with the tiger.

We could not detect any bite marks. Therefore, we assumed that it was a natural reprogramming. A glance at the clock told me that we had been fighting in the river for almost an hour. Slowly the exhaustion of the last two days was adding up and I could barely walk. In addition, I seemed to have sprained my foot when I hit a boulder. The pain blocker prevented the most suffering, but I was buckling under strain.

"Thibault, what's up."

"Let's see, Gabin and Emily are about to collect the last repro. The wolves that started it all are dead and you have the sheep too. And an ambulance is coming to pick you up."

As we were flown to the field hospital, we got word that even the king had come to look at the human repros.

The matter was so important that Louis-Napoleon the Third showed up in person!

Somehow I was proud of that. But we wouldn't see him, because the medical team immediately packed the two of us into regeneration tanks. Tartelette's collarbone was broken and her shoulder dislocated, my foot was badly sprained. But unfortunately they were not the generous glass regeneration tanks from the hospital, but only narrow mobile metal tubes. Through the small peepholes one could hardly see outside. I felt like I was in a coffin and counted down the seconds. They had promised to get us out in two hours. So two counts to 3600.