For Every Action - The Quantum Mechanic Series Book I

Jessica sprinted through a complex maze of alleys just northwest of the New Orleans waterfront as her cerebral HUD showed a gently highlighted path for her to follow. She intentionally ignored it at times and turned at random to force it to recalculate. She knew she had to because her pursuers were also equipped with GPS and if they guessed where she was going they would try to intercept her. There was no way she was going to take that chance. She had learned from experience that making bets while fighting The Embodied was a bad idea. They were the masters at bringing you bad luck and they enjoyed doing it.

She was tempted to veer left onto the Pontchartrain Expressway, where she knew she could outrun them with ease. In fact, there wasn’t anything that could keep up with her if she got the room to really pour it on. But she didn’t want to get away this time. She had finally grown tired of playing tit-for-tat, picking them off and trying to get away before the rest of the unit could catch her. The game had gone on long enough, and even though she was sure they had no idea who, or what she was... she knew that she had become a serious problem for them.

For the better part of three years she had been showing up when they least expected it, harassing them to the point of distraction. She had to admit, it had been incredibly satisfying to make them feel impotent for this long, blocking the transmitters for their explosives, detouring the motorcades they were waiting to ambush, sabotaging their equipment, and generally ruining their plans before destroying the underwater or airborne transports sent to retrieve them.

But she knew that they’d realize that she’d broken the encryption on their satellite relay messaging system soon. So this time she had to finish it and end what they started on the bridge. So she deliberately slowed down to take a couple of wrong turns and allow them to partially catch up. After a moment her passive atmospheric sonar confirmed that they had taken the bait and the red dots in her terminal began rapidly converging on her. She slowed a little more to taunt them and when she heard a series of sharp reports she zigzagged through a group of parked cars. Several of the vehicles exploded into fiery slag behind her as incendiary rounds tore through them. Without slowing down, she risked a glance over her shoulder and saw four towering ebony forms closing on her, weapons raised and firing as they tried to close the distance. Their longer stride gave them an advantage in this maze, allowing them to cover the distance between turns more easily than she could. But she was far from helpless… and these fuckers were about to find out the hard way.

Leaping over a bus as it came barreling out of a side street, she intentionally let her left foot drag and catch slightly on its roof. This threw her off balance a little, but nowhere near enough to have an effect on her new light-speed reflexes. She was just using it as part two of her plan, and mock-staggered for a few steps to allow her pursuers to gain more ground. They quickly formed up into a phalanx as they drew nearer, exactly as they had when she harassed them in the Borneo jungle two months ago. Two of them slid to the side of the wedge facing her, while the other two took up offset supporting positions behind them. This allowed their weaponized left arms to point over the shoulders of their comrades and it was an impressive maneuver, considering that they did it at a dead run.

It would also be their last.

Precisely according to the transit schedule she had downloaded off the city website moments ago, an empty two forty-seven a.m. bus to the French Quarter erupted from the station ahead of her, and she leaped. Turning in midair, she hammered with her bare feet into the side of the three car, auto-piloted behemoth and used the tilt created by her impact to leap backwards over the heads of The Embodied soldiers. As she did, she extended her hands towards them, and emptied out her entire complement of sixty thousand titanium core micro-flechettes from her palms. They flew at just under three times the speed of sound and her hands wove back and forth as her targeting systems sent them slicing into The Embodied through the nearly microscopic seams in their impregnable armor. They did so with smoothness so subtle that the soldiers continued to run for another ten paces before staggering. Then they fell to their knees as black ichor erupted from their penetrated seams like geysers. The synthetic arteries, nerves, organs, and muscles of their bodies had all been shredded along with the organic brains that controlled them. She smiled blissfully as she watched them fall face forward into the asphalt with their legs still spasming. For them running would no longer be possible, but the message had apparently not quite reached that far yet.

Still propelled by her leap, she continued along a long arc and then executed a gymnastically perfect flip with the assist of her onboard coordinators. Her feet struck the side of a brick building and she left a deep crater as she propelled herself back to the street to speed away. A giggle escaped under her breath as she went and she opened the exhaust ports on her torso to disperse the heat from her exertions. Microturbines in her ribcage engaged and she picked up a burst of speed as she closed in on the superdome.

The terminal overlaying her vision updated as she went and she smiled at the proximity and direction of the remaining dots. They had to know that their teammates now lay lifeless in their own gore and this would give any other experienced military team pause. But if there was one thing she could count on with The Embodied… it was arrogance. Sheng had been very confident that he could predict their behavior based on their past mission logs. But he had also warned her that in the real world there would be differences. She had probed him for details, but he refused to tell her anything more, preferring that she learn by experience. So now she was hoping that experience would pay off since she had undertaken over eight hundred and sixty combat simulations against The Embodied before Sheng had released her from the chrysalis.

It had taken years to track them down after that, resulting in nineteen violent engagements in various locations across the globe and her bagging the heads of seven Embodied along the way. But they always managed to replenish their ranks almost as fast as she could pick them off and the core of the team had remained too crafty for her to reach.

Ahead, she spotted the distinctive shape of the dome and poured on even more speed. She needed to get there with enough time to lay her trap and with a flick of her eyes, she set her internal systems to work on the calculations she would need. Then she executed a neat skipping hop to sail herself over the superdome’s fencing, and continued to streak towards it without missing a step. As the computations poured in, she allowed her internal coordinators to take over and focused on her timing. They could control her running more accurately than she ever could and there would be no room for error. Her angle and speed had to be perfect.

Then as she cleared the curve of the dome just enough to be out of sight, she heard a thunderous crash behind her. The remaining Embodied had obviously used their mass to plow through the gates instead of slowing down. That was good, she thought. They were angry, and they always became too aggressive when they were angry. She had learned the hard way that angry was bad. Angry led to stupid, and in combat stupid led to dead. So she used that as a reminder to engage in the meditation techniques she had learned, and soon her mind was as still as pool of water. A moment later her coordinators quietly cued her for phase one and she calmly extended her right hand in response. Continuing around the dome, she allowed a spidery thread to spool from her fingers, trailing it to catch on the turnstiles, ramps, and other structures she passed. At just a single molecule thick, the webbing would normally have sliced neatly through anything it touched. But her fingers worked in a complex pattern as they extruded the material, weaving it into a cobweb of thicker, braided connections. This gave the cutting edges a larger surface area and caused them to grip anything they touched with the trillions of tiny braided spikes.

The drag this anchor created helped her to push her speed towards the upper limits of what she could achieve and she leaned in to leverage the centrifugal force. By the time she completed half of her rotation around the dome she was hitting nearly eight hundred miles per hour and the debris that tumbled behind in the vacuum of her wake punched holes in the solitary vehicles nearby.

Then she finally rounded the last third of the dome and three Embodied soldiers came into view. Just as she had expected, they were fanned out in a defensive line, having assumed that she had entered the stadium. They were quickly coordinating an advance from multiple angles and she knew that once they had secured the perimeter they would use heavy ordinance to enter. They were already finishing their sweep of the lots while they closed ranks and she could see the auto-rotators in their left forearms reconfiguring into RPG launchers.

The one closest to her was a tall, slender female, and Jessica ceased weaving her monofilament silk as she approached the monstress. A deft flick from her wrist created a wide loop of thread that sailed over its head as she passed, completely undetected. Jessica didn’t bother looking back as she raced on. If she missed she would die and knowing beforehand wouldn’t change anything. So she focused on the stocky figure ahead instead and flipped another lasso towards him as she flew past. The third figure was again female, but rounder and more muscular. This one had been given the benefit of a tenth of a second to detect and react to Jessica’s approach. But it had only given her enough time to raise her weaponized arm in a defensive gesture and Jessica grinned at her as she went by... flashing a mouth full of glittering, needle sharp titanium fangs.

She had to suppress a giggle at the reaction she got. This was more fun than she’d had in years.

The way her appearance affected The Embodied always gave her a little thrill. Even in her currently blended state, halfway between combat and pursuit modes, she knew she was still terrifying to behold. Nothing of the sweet angelic aspects of her little girl body remained when she changed and even the most miniscule details of her new form had been intensively crafted by Sheng to strike fear into her enemies. The Tesla Micro-Antimatter generators in her back helped by giving off a ghoulish glow that lit her from within, occasionally arcing blinding bolts of energy into nearby metallic objects when she ramped them up hard. Their reality-bending properties radiated a vision warping field that made her extremely difficult to pick up on sensors and impossible to record by camera. So in recent years she had become something of an urban legend and dozens of theories about her were being bandied about. Her favorite was that she was El Chupacabre, seeking revenge for the victims of the Ebola vapor-bomb at the Olympics in Puerto Rico in twenty thirty-five. But she doubted that even that Latin American boogeyman could have matched the sort of fear she instilled. Without doubt, she was the most viciously predatory looking thing to have ever existed on earth and her fangs were one of the parts she enjoyed displaying to her enemies the most. Sheng had taught her that seeing a set of razor sharp teeth triggered an involuntary fear reaction in most human beings and despite their appearance... The Embodied were still piloted by human brains.

How her head and face were built probably had a lot to do with why so many people thought her to be the Latin American demon. In her opinion, it had been Sheng’s crowning achievement in terror. When she shifted into combat mode, its surface broke apart into a series of streamlined plates that ran from her jaw to the back of her head. Then it all retracted upwards towards the middle, forcing her already voluminous white-blonde hair into a freakishly high mohawk. A pitch black visor would then snap down over her eyes and nose, leaving only the terrifying maw that she flashed at her prey exposed. She had other modes, but combat was her favorite, and so she had thrown everything she could into the baleful look that she cast at the towering cybernetic woman.

The effect had been instantaneous and intensely gratifying as The Embodied female staggered backwards to raise both of her hands in a reflexive posture of fear. Jessica reveled in it for a split second, and then did a double flick of her wrist as she weaved her fingers to braid the silk into something she could hold. Grasping this newly created loop, she rocketed in a straight line across the southeast parking lot and pulled the silk taut. A satisfying series of pops told her that her opponents were being dismembered as she turned to survey the damage...

And then something hit her so hard that she was propelled backwards through the air to land squarely amidst the butchered Embodied. The force of her impact dug a long, deep gorge into the asphalt with her armored left shoulder and she ground to a bone rattling halt. Her HUD sputtered, flickered and buzzed momentarily as she fought to remain conscious. Then it suddenly re-lit, blazing with red warnings as a massive black figure soared towards her.

He had leaped powerfully across a perfectly mirrored arc to hers, aiming to bring his right heel down on her neck. But before he could land the killing blow, she whipped her right arm around in a perfect right cross punch, slamming it into the ground so hard that she was propelled up from the torn asphalt and back into the air. Her head passed within centimeters of his as she flipped over him to land lightly on her feet. When he struck the ground the impact was like thunder and she stumbled from the shock wave as it propelled rocks and soil into the sky. He looked over his shoulder at her and she berated herself for the stupidity of her mistake. She had been so overtaken by zeal that she had lost count of her attackers. Four died at the bus depot and she had just dealt with three more, but there were always eight. Eight Embodied… and she had lost track of the one she knew she must beware the most.

Bao Zhi.

He was taller, more powerfully built than the others, and far... far more deadly. He had been the first to become Embodied and the tale of his horrific transition had become the stuff of legend. Chinese scientists had miscalculated when they began disassembling his human body and his cybernetic form was not ready in time. So they put his encapsulated brain on a shelf, believing him to be in stasis. But a malfunction had left him awake and prevented the monitoring systems from reporting it. So he had spent the better part of a year drifting in and out of madness before finally pulling himself back together out of sheer willpower. After being Embodied, the results had been dramatic, pushing his psyche radically farther away from human understanding than anyone expected and creating an almost perfect warrior.

By all accounts, his ordeal had completely purged him of fear, hesitation, empathy, compassion, or any notion of mercy. Unlike the others, it was uncertain if the core of him was human at all anymore and she suspected that there was not much left for her to frighten.

Still, she had no intention of going down without a fight and she was going to take him with her if she could. So she snatched a rock out of the air as it fell back to earth and fired her right side rear microturbines up to an ear-splitting scream. Pushing them as far beyond their tolerances as she could manage, she retracted her limbs and streamlined her spin. Ignoring the blaze of red warnings from her HUD, she tucked her arms in close, added the power of her left side forward microturbines to her acceleration and then shifted the significant weight of her body onto the ball of one foot. The ice skater’s spin that this created gained speed at such an exponential rate that Bao Zhi had not even come halfway around to face her before she reached nearly twenty thousand rotations per second. Her onboard systems screamed as she increased to thirty five and then fifty thousand. Several CPUs burned out from the searing punishment, but nine thousandths of a second later a solution was successfully plotted and her arm whipped out like a slingshot, creating a horrific crack that echoed across New Orleans. Windows in all directions exploded as the projectile she hurled at Bao’s head broke the sound barrier six fold, propelled with all the ferocity her immeasurable hatred for him could generate.

Then she watched with satisfaction as the stone sailed true. As if it had come from the slingshot of David himself, it left Bao without time to dodge. With a sound like thunder it smashed through his visor where a human’s left eye would have been and tore the left side of his head completely off. Black ichor, sparks, and a small gout of flame erupted from the gaping hole… and he staggered backwards. His hand came up protectively to cover his face and for a moment she watched as he fought to keep his balance.

But he did not fall.

To make matters worse, she saw as she brought herself to a dragging halt that at least two of The Embodied she had dismembered weren’t dead. The male had sat up and reattached one of his legs. Now the seam where he held the other in place was quickly disappearing. She could practically see his internal nanite systems working feverishly to weld it back on, and she estimated that she had three to five seconds at most before he was back in the fight. But he and the languid female that had survived would be at a disadvantage because their weaponized left arms had incinerated themselves when they were severed to protect the secrets of their self-assembling weaponry. The female had also lost a leg and been partially decapitated. But the nanites were reconnecting the limb and she was feeling about with one hand for the remaining pieces of her head. Jessica guessed she had another ten to fifteen seconds before that one was also battle ready and glanced at where the last female had been. She needed to know if she was going to be outnumbered four to one, or just three. But luck had entangled that one so thoroughly in Jessica’s silk that she now lay on the ground in more pieces than if she’d been pushed through an egg slicer.

Jessica smiled… Good, three to one was enough to make them overconfident because they had her outnumbered. But she knew she still had them outclassed.

As Bao regained his balance she could see that she’d had just a little additional luck. The left side of his head hadn’t merely been smashed off; it had been completely obliterated with no hope of nanite restoration. So the diseased ichor that represented blood for them had flowed over the gaping hole and was clotting into a marbled green-black shell like contaminated tar.

The sky rumbled and she cursed under her breath as their Mexican style standoff came under a torrential rain. That would make a lot of her gymnastic offensive techniques impossible and so she tried to gain some thinking time through intimidation. With a sneer she tilted her head to leer at them from a disturbing angle and spread her arms as she extended her talons as threateningly as she could manage. Then she did her best impression of a poisonous insect and let out a long, deep-throated hiss. Both actions were nearly perfect imitations of a terrifying creature she’d seen in a late night horror movie.

The effect was immediate and The Embodied ceased their advance. She used the pause to try and circle into a better position, but Bao and the other male drifted into the dance with her, shifting and angling with a practiced ease. Then the female arrived to lope into the choreography and did so with a liquid grace that Jessica found nauseating. Slowly they all drew still and stood as experienced warriors had for millennium, perfectly unmoving as they watched for the slightest twitch that would telegraph their opponent’s attack.

Rain thundered down in sheets as they took stock of each other for the better part of a minute and it starkly silhouetted The Embodied monstrosities that had slaughtered her parents.

She flashed back briefly to the day they soaked her in their blood, and left her half dismembered to die. But the nightmare no longer held sway and she remained focused. She carefully weighed her situation and nearly trembled with the desire to slaughter them horrifically. For a moment she wished she hadn’t emptied all of her flechettes into the other Embodied. It had been an over enthusiastic mistake in hindsight, but she was still far from helpless and more than a match for any of them individually. So she watched as they spread out and saw in their movements the false belief that multiple angles of attack would confuse her. She ignored the tactic as a result and instead focused on visualizing a circle on the ground around her. It equaled her maximum reach plus half of the difference between her reach and theirs. She knew that from outside of it they could not touch her, but if they stepped inside... she could reach them with only the slightest shift of her footing. It put the burden of covering distance on them, and dramatically reduced the effort she had to expend to strike them.

Then, hoping to throw even greater fear into them, she let out an evil chuckle laced with what she hoped sounded like an unnerving undertone of madness. It was yet another skin-crawling sample that she had recorded and now she played it back through her body with perfect form.

Then she flicked her right hand, and allowed a gossamer thin, telescoping blade to slide gracefully from her wrist. It gleamed like sickening death as it extruded and then stopped when the length matched her arm. With a rapid set of clicking noises, her hand merged with it to form a weapon resembling a cross between a Rapier and a Samurai Katana. The she moved her head into another disturbingly insectile position, and grinned directly at the female as she turned the blade to shine the reflection into The Embodied woman’s face. Sheng had designed the weapon specifically to offend and enrage The Embodied by making it painfully symbolic of the two cultures that had brutalized their country in the most savage ways. Despite the high value their culture placed on humility, she knew that the Chinese were a fiercely proud people and there was still a powerful indignance in them for the humiliations they had endured during those times.

The effect worked and The Embodied responded by reaching up to their left shoulders and withdrawing the nearly six foot Wushu broadswords they stored in their backs. The blades gleamed in the fluorescent light, and their monofilament edges glittered with the promise of evisceration. Jessica could see with the power of her enhanced vision that the second male was trembling in rage and the posture of the female had lost a noticeable degree of its discipline. The fact that Bao still had his auto-rotator with its full complement of ammo, but still chose the sword gave his emotional state away. Despite the controlled warrior aura that he continued to exude he had let his pride get the better of him. They had all accepted the challenge that she had issued with her choice of weaponry. It would be battle by blade.

Then the female moved, crossing the circle’s boundary as a whirling storm of lightning fast slashes and flicker quick thrusts... only to have her emotionally fueled attack struck aside by her deceptively calm and far smaller opponent. Almost of its own accord, Jessica’s blade rode back along her attacker’s inferior technique and with a casual slice, lopped her only remaining arm off at the shoulder. The female staggered, flailing onto her knees in the mud as she flopped and crawled out of the circle in search of her lost limb.

Jessica’s feet never moved... but she smiled.

Her eyes remained fixed on the ground, watching the circle. Everything grew still and several pregnant moments stretched out under the constant roar of the pelting rain. Then out of the corner of her eye she saw the smaller male slide in from the far right. Defter. Older. More experienced and cunning. His fluid feint flicked high, then went low as he came back up at her face with a perfectly executed J-cut. Jessica caught what she could have sworn was a brief look of surprise on his featureless visor from her ‘attaque au fer’. But then her return slash sent his severed head bouncing out of the circle and she whipped her sword around to lance through the center of his chest. As he fell backwards into a deep puddle with the brain housed in his torso skewered, the translucently thin blade of her weapon returned to her side... slaked with blood but still thirsting for vengeance.

Then saw the female circling again, hastily recovered arm resealing in place as she repositioned herself. More cautious this time, the liquid-hipped bitch angled craftily, sidling and sliding until she managed to arrange Jessica between herself and Bao. He had not moved even a fraction while she parried with his inferiors and she knew it was not his style to be impulsive. Instead he would wait until the perfect moment. Like a poisonous viper he would stay just out of reach until he could strike her down with cowardly spite. But it wasn’t fear of her that held him back. No, his detachment from humanity had simply deleted any trace of honor from his character. What everyone else saw as cowardly, he simply thought of as expedient. So she waited, knowing how much he loved to use misdirection when he victimized and slaughtered the innocent. He could not know that he had stolen her innocence long ago and now there was nothing left to claim. Only a stone-like heart remained, more vicious and venomous than he could ever imagine.

Then they moved and as she expected, they charged together. Bao used the female to divide her attention in the hope that it would create his opportunity to strike her down. But she saw his mistake the moment he moved… caution. He was using his teammate as a sacrifice because he still feared death.

Jessica did not. By her last count she had already been dead at least six times.

So with a swirling cut, she went low and severed the synthetic thigh muscles of the female, causing the languid monstrosity to drop to her knees where the tip of Bao’s outthrust sword impaled the brain in her chest. Her body spasmed momentarily before finally going limp and then crumpled to the ground with a long mechanical gurgle. Jessica looked up at Bao’s featureless visor with her bared teeth grinning and reveled in a blood curdling hiss of victory. Boa seemed paralyzed in fear and his shaking arms betrayed him as he began pulling in panic at his sword. But it was still caught fast in Jessica’s ribs, welded into place where the seething power of her antimatter arteries passed through it. There it would forever stay where it passed through to slay his companion. All of the many other weapons and defenses built into China’s greatest warrior were forgotten, washed away in the torrent of terror and panic that she had created.

This was it, she thought. The moment she had dreamed of since the day she awoke from her coma, orphaned and butchered. A final end to the horrific pain and heartbreak she had been forced to endure. The white-hot, searing agony she had gone through to build her new body. The hundreds of thousands of hours training. The loss of Sheng when he sacrificed himself to help her escape the facility. Then seven years of pursuing this monster across the globe...

It had all brought her here.

So with a cool and casually detached motion, Jessica flicked her blade out and impaled the brain in his chest before her strength could fail... and watched as the mighty Bao Zhi fell.

The legendary warrior.

The pride of China.

Now just a rotting brain encased in a body made of obsolete technology.

It was over.

She stood for a moment with the blade still through her, watching as the rain washed away the ichor and blood that poured from him. Then she took a moment to flick her blade clean of his revolting fluids and sheathed it back into her arm before she fell. As she lay in the sheeting rain, she spent the last of her energy reverting to human form. It was her final insult. The world would know that the mighty Embodied had been slain by a little girl... one who did not regret her actions. They were dead, and that was all she had cared about since the day she lost everything.

But then as her head fell to one side, she saw something that she didn’t understand.

There was a man standing at the edge of the lot, and he was looking directly at her. He was tall, and of some unidentifiable Middle Eastern descent that gave him heavy, black, curly hair and a matching beard. He was wearing loose, almost shapeless clothing with a hood that he now lifted and let fall. As he stepped closer she saw his eyes and she was overwhelmed by the kindness in them. They came up to meet hers and something happened... Down inside of her, in a place so deep that she had never even known it existed, a well of emotion burst open... and a voice let out a cry of elation like nothing she had ever experienced. Her non-existent heart leaped in her chest, hammering like a runaway train and the strangely powerful voice came from within her again. She recognized it as the one she possessed when she was still human and the beauty of its chords sang through her...

“He has finally come! HE HAS COME! AT LAST HE HAS FINALLY COME!!!”

She was carried away by this voice onto a wave of bliss so cataclysmic that it threatened to set her on fire and she was unable to look away from his beautiful eyes as she faded away.

He smiled at her lovingly until the very end… and then darkness rose up to claim her.