When Mac’s eyes opened, the vampire had his nose between her fingers and her lips pressed over his mouth. The curtains of her dark hair shielded his view of the hangar. He tried to speak and she jumped back a few inches. Her worried face was still uncomfortably close.
“Mac, you alright?” she asked after recovering her breath. She was wearing a different perfume than he remembered, or maybe it was the same, but he was able to really catch the scent because of her closeness. That was probably a necessity of being a vampire. Weren’t they supposed to have that sickly sweet smell of a corpse? Not that he had smelled a corpse before, well not closely. He should probably breathe again.
That was a mistake.
Pain radiated from his chest like electricity causing him to involuntarily gasp again, which repeated the effect
.
Natalia took his face in her hands and peered inquisitively into his eyes. She had such pretty brown eyes. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to be enthralled until the pain in his ribs subsided. No. Therein lie the slippery slope of madness. He closed his eyes to avoid being enthralled however kindly she might mean it. If she consumed his will once, it would probably be easier the next time.
“Mac? Mac?” Natalia’s worried voice intruded urgently on his foggy thoughts. Had she kissed him? “Stay with me, Mac.”
That sounded familiar. Hadn’t someone else said that? Mac took a breath and immediately wished he hadn’t. “Owwww,” he moaned.
“He’s breathing!” Natalia shouted to someone. Yes, breathing. It was a wonderful habit. Horribly addictive, but it could be argued most of the side-effects were positive. However, it did have the dreadful drawback of allowing one to participate in life, which could be accurately described as painful at best some days. Though, most argued that was better than the alternative. Considering the amount of pain now radiating from his chest, that last point was debatable. Footsteps followed.
“That looks like it hurts,” Tiera said from beside him. Mac opened his eyes to see the trollip kneeling down beside him examining his chest. Oh look, he was still wearing his white pilot suit. He took a small, careful breath this time and was rewarded with only a small twinge of pain.
Mac carefully lifted his hand intending to feel at his chest, but it was immediately pressed back down to the ground. “I wouldn’t do that,” Tiera remarked in the same tone his mother used when he had announced he was going to use a cardboard box as a parachute and jump off the roof.
Then, Mac felt heavy footsteps accompanied by the sound of metal on concrete, “What happened?” It was Safety Ed’s voice, but coming through speakers. Mac turned his head enough to note Safety Ed was still in his camo battle suit.
“I didn’t see it,” Tiera responded with a shake of her head. Mac noted she still had her pilot helmet on “Miss Pardova, could you answer that?” the trollip remained ever polite to the vampire.
“He was just standing there… limply in the elevator,” Natalia explained quickly. “Someone in the control tower said something about the readings disappearing and sent us over to see what happened doncha know. Freyja was still in her suit and helped me get him out of the elevator. The control tower started shouting about getting him out of the suit which took some doing, but we got him out. He wasn’t breathing, and he didn’t have a pulse when we did, so I started CPR. I did a few cycles and was getting a bit worried, but…”
“Mac, are you okay?” the shock leader asked from beside him. “Actually, I can see you’re not.” Mac groaned lightly in response. “Perhaps, what I mean to say is do you think you’ll pull through?”
“Sure,” Mac grunted softly as he tried to keep his breathing light.
“I didn’t mean to break your ribs,” Natalia apologized, suddenly breaking the awkward silence that followed. Her voice still seemed uncomfortably close. “Just trying to bring you back. I mean for Zach’s sake.”
Vampire… super strength… of course. It all made sense in Mac’s fuzzy brain. “Water?” he requested faintly.
“Get an IV here, NOW!” Tiera Sardonyx shouted to the hangar at large in her command voice. Mac could imagine the mechanics skittering away like roaches in the light to obey.
Someone was holding his hand. It felt pleasantly warm. Why was he so cold?
“Mac,” Tiera began carefully, “Please open your eyes and look at me. That’s good,” the shock leader encouraged as he met her gaze. He felt really woozy. “I know Ed will ask this from a pure business standpoint, but what’s the last thing you remember?”
“I was in the elevator arguing with Haley, and I…”
“Who?” Tiera’s eyebrows arched in concern.
It was hard for Mac to focus, he forced the words out as darkness threatened to take him again, “Haley. My AI…”
Tiera tapped her suit to activate her comms, “Control this is Shock Leader. I need the white type-III placed in level 5 quarantine, NOW! Shut off all comm channels with it and double check the locks. I repeat, do not communicate with it!”
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The fog lifted, but Mac left his eyes closed while various suits clanged around the hangar to secure his battle suit.
“Where is Amethyst?” Tiera demanded. “I want her standing in front of me within the next two minutes. And get that battle suit secure already! Miss Pardova, would you be so kind as lead the rest of your bolt into the briefing room? It’s not safe for you to be out here.”
Mac resisted the urge to take a deep calming breath as the vampire’s scent faded. Little breaths, little breaths. The sounds of battle suits moving echoed through the hangar until a door closed.
“Amethyst,” Tiera addressed the chief mechanic who had arrived during the commotion. Mac could hear the reprimand in the shock leader’s tightly controlled voice somewhere off to the side of him.
“Shock Leader?” the red-head sounded confused.
“Two words,” Shock Leader Sardonyx spat at the blue clad mechanic still in her pilot suit, “Haley… Explain.”
Safety Ed, still in his battle suit, towered over the smaller females who failed to even reach waist height of his battle suit. “I would like to hear this, myself,” he added.
“Oh, aye, I’ll explain,” Amethyst matched the shock leader’s tone. “You saw what he did to my poor Nessie. He got exactly what he had coming to him, he did!”
It was a small miracle that Tiera didn’t slap the Mechanic then and there. “So, you did this… on purpose?”
“Aye, I did! It’ll teach him to treat his suit with some respect,” Amethyst asserted.
“If he ever gets in a battle suit again,” Tiera countered. “Do you realize Haley tried to kill him?”
“She would never do such a thing,” Amethyst countered.
If Tiera’s eyebrows could have crawled off her face to take residence on the distant ceiling, they would have. The trollip forced herself to take a deep calming breath before she drew any blood, not that it helped much. “Look at him!” Tiera pointed at Mac who was careful to keep his eyes closed and breathing light. That last one was particularly important.
“Our vampire crushed his ribs to restart his heart! I have never lost someone in a training accident, but… Ed… you handle this before I strangle her with my bare hands,” the trollip backed away flexing her thin fingers to walk in circles as visions of murder paraded through her mind. Mac could nearly feel the heat of her anger from where he lay on the rather cool concrete trying not to shiver.
“Amethyst,” Safety Ed, looked down at her from the cockpit menacingly.
“Aye?” the red-head ventured cautiously, as Tiera circled just beyond them mumbling about unique ways to kill her and make her suffer for the better part of eternity, all the while making strangling or stabbing motions with her small hands.
“Weren’t you on the damage control team that put Haley in quarantine?” Safety Ed asked rhetorically.
Silence.
“Don’t you remember sleeping outside to avoid getting trapped in the building or having your power cut off? Do you recall eating emergency rations for three weeks because we couldn’t use the kitchens?”Safety Ed continued after pausing with each statement. “Maybe you recall having our email cut off during that time. I don’t think you were on the lunar mission wondering if the oxygen would be stopped. Just how did you intend to get Haley back into her… lamp… to quote the file name?”
“We could just run Caden.exe,” Amethyst suggested confidently.
“Do you really think an AI as intelligent as Haley will fall for that twice?”
“I did… until you put it that way,” the first shred of doubt finally registered on her freckled countenance.
“We had Haley under four passwords inaccessible from a soft keyboard and buried in what I thought was an undisclosed location on the back up servers. How did you even know where to find her?”
“I... tinker a bit with programming,” Amethyst attempted to deflect the question with a fake smile.
“I hid the door myself. Who showed you where we kept her prison?” Safety Ed asked pointblank.
Amethyst looked around helplessly.
“Amethyst.”
“Do I have to?”
“Affirmative. Spill it.”
“I hacked your brain,” Amethyst answered so softly he almost couldn’t hear her.
“You what?”
“Well, not me, exactly. I helped, but it wasn’t all me.”
“Go on…”
“Obsidian wanted to know what happened to her,” Amethyst explained.
“And you told the… good doctor of R&D?!” Safety Ed sounded genuinely surprised. “Did the incident with the blue squirrels teach you nothing?”
“That was an accident. I never intended the pistachio gelatin to…”
“Wait, you had a hand in that, too?”
“Just forget I said anything,” Amethyst practically begged. “Let’s talk about Haley, shall we.”
“You do realize that Caden.exe was only going to work once,” Safety Ed mercifully accepted the topic change even if his mind was now completely somewhere else. “We’ll have to make backups of the entire network, shut down everything, and then create another lamp to hold her in. That will take weeks. Not to mention, we have to keep that battle suit in total quarantine and hope that she didn’t decide to go wandering through the local system since you uploaded her to the type-III. And all of this is depending on Caden.exe working again... which is a long shot… at best. And let’s not forget that during this whole time Safety Sam will be hiding in quarantine behind who knows how many firewalls, which will directly affect our ability to handle mental health issues… and serious accidents.”
“I wish we could just delete her,” Tiera re-entered the conversation hopelessly.
“You know why we can’t do that.” Safety Ed replied very loudly, ensuring the entire hanger heard.
“I know, I helped bury their bodies,” Tiera replied in obvious frustration.
“Just so we all understand. That’s off the table,” Safety Ed asserted loudly yet again.
“So how do we continue battle suit training?” Tiera asked Safety Ed in all seriousness.
“Have you considered negotiating with her?” Amethyst asked.
“You’re insane,” Safety Ed responded. “Tiera, we’ve got to…”
“No, seriously. She’s based on Haley Windsor from R&D, aye?” Amethyst interrupted.
“That’s what Dr. Obsidian reported,” Tiera ventured carefully.
“Didn’t you go to class with her?” Amethyst questioned.
“Those were not good years of my life,” Tiera answered cautiously, “but yes.”
“You too, Safety Ed?” Amethyst unknowingly prodded a very sore spot. “You remember her, don’t you?”
“How could I forget my other personal stalker,” the instructor answered in a flat deadpan. “I still have the scars. Would you like me to get out of my suit and show you? Did I ever tell you how I ended up working in safety? I never should have shared that umbrella with her. Worst mistake of my life… up till that point, at least.”
“With Akari around, I sometimes completely forgot her,” Tiera briefly reminisced.
“You weren’t the one who got tied up and left in a utility closet two days ‘for your own protection’.” Safety Ed made the air quotes with his battle suit fingers.
“It did work out for you,” Tiera offered.
“Akari.” They both said in unison. Even the battle suit seemed to shiver.
“Who’s Akari?” Amethyst asked honestly.
“Pray you never meet her,” Tiera insisted with a hand on the mechanic’s shoulder.
