Kali's Tale: A Girl's Gotta Work
Bliss.
Falling water drenched Kali in sweet relief. Slowly the fatigue of the long day bled away as the lukewarm shower washed the sand, salt and blood from her pores. Finally turning off the flow, she caught sight of herself framed in the mirror against the dark velvet of the night. The single lamp's warm light clothed her powerful warrior body in unaccustomed softness, a shimmering jewelled film. A halo of dark hair framed a face that, just for a moment, showed only simple relaxation. A smile quirked her lips, slowly reaching all the way to emerald green eyes. Half a Pandoran day on-planet and she was becoming self-indulgent! She shrugged at herself. The iron discipline of Promethea was light-years away, and she was content with that.
Towelling herself, she took a tall bottle from the decrepit fridge and padded silently to the room's one and only window. The lights were sparse out there, she thought. The Hyperion company town on the horizon threw a harsh white glow into the night and the little hill community where she had paused showed a few comforting home-fires burning. For the most part though, the world was dark; little scatters of light here and there, huddled for protection, while out there in the hungry shadow, tracer ripped and headlights slashed as predators wandered the land.
She took a pull at the bottle, and flinched at its rawness. She scowled at the label: Rakk Ale?! Feeling the liquid burn down her throat, she didn't doubt it for a minute. Her eyes bored into the dark again. Tomorrow she'd be beyond "civilisation's" margins, even as Pandora measured it. Tomorrow, she felt, would be an opportunity to experience the real Pandora. Her journey had started well and she dared hope for more in the time allowed her. She took another long, bitter drink.
Killing is a thirsty business.
The skag roared.
The sound rolled on and on, as if the desert itself had found a voice. As the echoes faded up into the moon-filled sky, a heavily armoured adult erupted from its den, trifold jaws agape. Instantly it sprang at the prey, two hundred kilograms of relentless eating machine launched like a living missile to rend and tear.
Kali thought it was beautiful.
The flex of its powerful muscles, the sunlight glinting from the intricate organic armour, the lean economy of its form; there was no doubt it possessed a brutal elegance. It was…nice… to see such a perfect product of evolution in action. Pandora was very different from home, she thought idly, as she judged the animal's trajectory.
The skag's head and forequarters exploded in mid-leap in a shower of blood and shredded meat. The shattered corpse tumbled to a halt at Kali's feet as she methodically reloaded the shotgun. For a moment silence reigned as she knelt to study the body, but a rising drumming beat in the very earth alerted her that her first skag experience was not yet over. Turning, she saw a tide of dark jagged forms hurtling from their own dens amongst the rock outcrops. A chorus of roars began to fill the air.
The Runner was too far to be an option; so be it. Kali triggered her combat system. The electric thrill of Augmentation rushed through the nano-scale circuitry that suffused her brain and body. Her vision filled with targeting information for the weapon system that body and gun had now become. Firing from the hip, she walked a steady rhythm of explosive rounds across the leading skags. The animals went rolling to ruin in a welter of blood and broken bone, a dense red mist condensing for a moment out of the icy desert air above their torn and dying bodies. The bloody haze was suddenly parted by a still greater monster, easily the size of a horse, racing to the attack. Kali watched calmly as half a ton of murder filled her field of view. Mere metres away, its mouth gaped wide, as if to take her whole.
That'll do, she thought.
The shotgun out-roared the skag itself. Even as the explosive shot tore at the animal's head and throat Kali was pivoting, pirouetting in a ballet of death as the skag's momentum carried it onward, allowing her to fire into its unarmoured flank. The beast's rank musk enveloped her as it passed, a living wall, close enough to touch. Time seemed to slow. She could hear the metallic rhythm of the weapon's breech as it cycled, see the animal's flesh flinch and tear under the impacts, almost feel its heartbeat…
Normal time reasserted itself. Its spine shot through, the skag folded up in a cloud of dust like a broken doll, flesh cratered and hanging in strips. Kali holstered the shotgun and shivered as Augmentation released its grip on her. Slowly, the dust settled, and the natural sounds of the place reasserted themselves. Assessing the battlefield, she saw that though the lesser skags were clearly dead, the pack leader still hung on to life. Carefully she approached the mortally wounded animal. Even lying prone, its body was shoulder-high to her. Though it lay near death, its glinting armour and massive muscularity radiated a potent life force; badass indeed! She felt a powerful sense of the skag's rightness as part of this landscape. Running a hand over its quivering hide, she stooped to stroke the battered skull.
"Such a shame", she whispered.
The huge head whipped around without warning, jaws stretching wide to bite down with enough force to cut a human in half. Kali's shield flared resistance for a fraction of a second and collapsed.
It was enough. Desperately triggering her combat system, she was able to get a hand to each of the upper jaws. Gene-engineered muscle trembled with strain as she was driven to her knees by the impact. Blood was streaming down her arms as the skag's teeth pierced her hands and her reinforced bones actually creaked under the load, but she held. The skag attempted to shake her like a terrier with a rat but again, she held. Despite the situation, she counted herself fortunate. Not only was the skag unable to bring its full weight to bear due to its immobilised rear legs, but her first shot had shattered the animal's lower jaw. If that had still been functional, swinging at her face like a hatchet, she would have been in dire trouble. Her lips twisted in a smile made of sarcasm and pain. Unlike now of course…
The skag's roar was now a deafening scream of agony and rage, a rain of blood and phlegm. The huge animal strained and thrashed in her grasp, still going for the kill. Truly, she thought, this was something they could never have prepared her for in combat school.
Not even on Promethea.
Teeth gritted, she brought up one foot, fought for breath. Placing the other foot securely, she convulsively thrust herself to full height, roaring defiance, still with the skag's head pinned in her superhuman grip. Kali felt the creature's eyes boring into her own. She saw a soul there; a living thing acting according to its nature, without pity, without remorse.
"Sorry my friend", she gasped, "not today". Wrenching her injured hands free, she slammed the skag's head to the ground, drew her revolver with a near-invisible blur and put two heavy bullets into its brain before it could even flinch. She drew a great shuddering breath.
"Not today".
Kali was discovering that she liked driving.
Oh, she was proficient in driving or piloting a wide variety of combat vehicles. This though, just driving, chasing down the horizonina fast car over a seemingly limitless landscape with the wind in her hair and the scent of the land filling her senses was, was wonderful. Of course, (her hands flexed on the steering wheel), it did pay to be careful how far you wandered when stretching your legs. After three days of experiencing Pandora's extraordinary terrain, not to mention its inhabitants, she was coming to understand the appeal of this planet, despite its dangers. It was a world of many…freedoms.
Those were thoughts for another day though. A mental command brought a translucent map overlay of her position into her vision. Her superiors had decided not to risk accessing the local GPS; her eyes flickered momentarily to Hyperion's recently-arrived orbital facility. It appeared though that inertial guidance alone was providing a close match to the terrain she was passing. Excellent! Assuming the data she had was accurate, she shouldn't need to get her boots too dusty before she was actually standing in front of her goal. In fact…She eased back on the throttle as the Runner crested a final rise. She pulled up and dismounted. Before her stretched a tremendous valley, opening out into the distant east.
Her hunting ground.
Her Atlas database information was quite comprehensive, though in this case there was a crucial gap. Two days of careful searching for the lost and camouflaged entrance had proved fruitless, when inspiration had struck. So here she was perched on a crag, the great valley's floor hundreds of metres below.
Waiting.
She idly examined her hands. A Vault Hunter she was not, especially where healing was concerned! Livid scars still marked her like ragged stigmata, but she was fully functional and pain-free. The nanites that suffused her body were slow, but they got the job done. Mercifully, her enhanced body was also immune to the nightmare cocktail of organisms and poisons that undoubtedly filled a skag's mouth. The energy demands of the nanites did leave a girl hungry though. She poured the contents of three self-heating combat rations she'd activated into a large bowl and started to wolf it down. Vat-grown meat and veg never tasted so good.
The silence of the desert pressed in, broken only by a breeze laden with the scent of ice and dust. A riot of colour grew slowly in the eastern sky to herald the oncoming dawn. Kali considered the vista before her, as the last seconds counted down. There are two ways to hunt, she thought.
One can search for and pursue the prey, with all the attendant effort…
The rich light of the new-risen sun flooded the landscape as it crested the horizon.
…or the hunter can choose just the right position, and lie in wait.
Involuntarily, she sprang to her feet. Patterns of unnaturally regular shadow spread like a tide to criss-cross the valley floor beneath her. The brilliant light of the true-dawn, coming in almost horizontally, lit the landscape in a way that the usual diffuse and variable glow of the Pandoran day did not. Roads, mine diggings, the foundations of vanished structures; all were revealed in sharp relief. For a few seconds it was all there to see, all the works of man so painstakingly erased and concealed. The sun lifted a fraction of a degree more…and it was gone, without trace. Kali looked down from her high place, and her smile was brighter than the dawn.
Time to go to work.
A great sound echoed in the deepness of the world.
"So much for stealth", Kali muttered. She'd barely entered the huge cavern within when the damn door she'd unlocked slammed shut in a cloud of rust equally as violently as it had opened, plunging her into darkness. Given the lack of traces and level of concealment, she had no reason to believe that the facility was inhabited, but the noise was an insult to her professionalism. She would have to do better from now on. She stepped forward, activating an infrared headlamp that her gene-modified eyes could use; and light flickered into existence across hundreds of square metres of ceiling.
"Oh, perfect".
A great sound echoed in the deepness of the world.
Ticktock flinched at the sound, as he did at all sights and sounds that alarmed him. He cringed and flinched again as a shaft of sunlight speared briefly into the comfortable darkness of his home and was just as suddenly cut off by another ringing clang. His heart raced with fear. Sunlight meant Outside; Outside meant danger; Outside was where his kin hunted; Outside was the smell of blood and lust and sky. No Outside had ever come into his home before! A voice sounded under the echoes, but he couldn't understand it. Fear still coursed through him, but something about the voice caught and clung at his mind. None of his brethren sounded like that. Light flared again! Not the harsh rays of the sun though, but the softer light of the Inside world, laying bare to sight the metal and concrete world he knew so well by touch. Cowering in his nest he sought comfort, as always, in the Beauty that surrounded him.
"Save me", he squeaked.
A great sound echoed in the deepness of the world, and a flowering of light.
The hive awakened.
