A/N: I decided to take a little peek at the Eastern Seaboard Mews-don't worry, we'll be back on Calli and Co. next chapter.
The tension in the air at the Eastern Seaboard base was thick enough that, if Amu so chose, she could have taken one of her knives and sliced it like bread. At Coordinator Merrill's insistence, the team ate with their Head and Coordinator, and breakfast was more hostile than the average fight with the Cyniclons. Sakura sassed anyone who spoke to her, Currant argued with literally anything the Ace said, Coordinator Merrill tried and failed to break up the fight, while Rei—the Head—and Bree tried to stay out of the crossfire. Amu just watched. It was a better idea than getting involved, and the chaos of argument went against logic.
Inevitably, Currant got fed up. "Just shut up, Sakura! I am so sick of you right now it isn't even funny." She stood up, shoving her chair backwards so it toppled over with a bang. "I'm going to train. Anyone who wants to join, come on." She stalked out of the room, tail straight up in the air behind her. Everything went dead silent. Bree slipped out of the room next, almost unnoticed in the ensuing commotion.
Amu was the next out, trying to ignore Coordinator Merrill standing on top of the table and yelling at Sakura at the top of his lungs, Head Nishina trying to pull him down, and Sakura screaming right back. She groaned inwardly. The team was a big ball of conflicting personalities, and the two Mews who had gotten along with almost everyone—well, Lyra hated her teammates less than the rest of the Project, and Calliope was friendly with everyone except Sakura if you ignored her hacking rivalry with Bree—had left. After the reveal, the team had devolved into near-constant fighting outside of combat, without the icebreakers to ease the tension. After all, stuff like this was usually resolved with the removal of all weaponry from the Mews' wing of the base and a few carefully placed buckets of water. The jaguar Mew was half-convinced that her team could fall apart at any moment.
She ducked into Bree's room and found the smallest Mew perched in her chair at her desk, fingers flying across her keyboard and yellow eyes glued to the screen. Amu took a moment to study her. Bree was the second-youngest Mew on the team and by far the tiniest. Her long, dark hair, in sharp contrast with her pale features, made her look waifish and insubstantial and her shy personality made her easy to overlook, but behind those pale, luminous eyes was a formidable mind. Amu adored and admired her.
"How are you?" she asked, sitting down on Bree's bed. The mouse Mew jumped, startled, and spun in her chair.
"Oh! Amu! Sorry, I didn't hear you come in." Bree was blushing now. She always did that when she got flustered. "Ummm…did you need something?"
"Nothing. What are you doing?"
"Seeing if I can get access to Calliope's computer. She took it with her when she left and it should still be connected to the mainframe, but either she disconnected it, installed some sort of Cyniclon firewall or the equivalent, or she either wiped or replaced the hard drive, all of which are equally possible."
"Either way, you have no access."
"Right. I even tried inputting her computer's identification code to see if I could get anything, but nothing came up, which implies that her hard drive was wiped since even if she replaced it we could find where she dumped it and ask around to see if she'd been sighted in the area, but…"
"The last time anyone saw her was Japan, right?"
"Right."
"Any success on the Cyniclons yet?"
"Nope. I found their communications system pretty easily—they actually hacked the Earthnet satellites to broadcast their signals too—but their code is like nothing I've seen before. It'll take me a couple of weeks at least to figure out the basic units."
"It's not 1's and 0's like our code?"
"Not even close. I can't tell what any of it means."
"So they know our code, but we can't crack theirs. That means…"
Amu frowned thoughtfully. That was bad. The Cyniclons, if they wanted it, had complete access to everything if they could get through the firewalls protecting it, and open communication between bases left more holes than Swiss cheese. As Calliope had so artfully proven. By contrast, if they couldn't even interpret the Cyniclon's computer code—much less translate their written language—the aliens would always have the advantage. She didn't like that one bit.
"Well, keep working at it. You'll get it soon enough," Amu said, patting Bree on the right shoulder. The mouse Mew smiled bashfully and returned her attention to the screen.
In the training room Currant ran one of the solo simulations, facing off against a hologram of any one or two individuals whose fighting styles were stored in the program, chosen at random. It had elected to be especially sadistic today, since Currant ended up fighting Lyra—always devastatingly powerful—and a Cyniclon called Cumin, who specialized in ranged attacks. Though the two had never fought on the same side and the attacks didn't hurt, merely making the 'health meter' on the edge of the virtual-reality headset go down, it was still irritating when she ended up 'killed' by them. She hurled the headset across the room and smirked at the satisfying crack it made when it hit the wall, secure in the knowledge that even if she couldn't destroy her enemies she could still break equipment trying. But it didn't take long for that smirk to fade, for her confident, irritated mask to drop.
It wasn't easy being Leader, keeping the weight of every issue her team faced resting solely on her shoulders. She was tired. She was frustrated. She was fed up with Sakura's bullcrap but knew there wasn't a damn thing she could do about it without killing the other Mew, and knew her team couldn't afford another loss. She did all the reports herself, she kept her team informed only where they needed to be, she tried to keep them together…
"God, I've turned into a politician," Currant mumbled. "Damn it. I hate politicians."
She kicked the headset, wishing someone's head was in there. Preferably Eli's. It was, after all, his fault they were in this whole mess. He should never have left Calliope unattended with direct access—read: no firewalls—to the Project's database and with full knowledge of her tendency to poke her nose in places she shouldn't. Maybe if Calli's head were in there, Currant would be able to kick some sense into the blonde. Regardless, she had a job to do.
Abruptly, an alarm blared somewhere deep within the base. Currant grinned and ran for her gear. An alien attack was exactly what she needed right then.
Central Park on a Saturday. Sakura couldn't believe the Cyniclons' audacity. But there they were, two tall, slim figures hovering over the well-manicured lawn as chimaera wreaked havoc on the New Yorkers picnicking in the park. Her eyes focused in on the shorter, curvier of the two: her habitual enemy and near-stalker, Cinnamon. Blue eyes locked with hazel, and the female Cyniclon dive-bombed the Mew, laughing like a fiend and swinging her scythe. If Death were a Cyniclon, this—in Sakura's opinion—was what it would look like. The Mew sprang lightly out of the way and drew her laser batons. They were smaller and less ranged than Currant's laser cannon, but no less deadly.
"Long time no see, sweetheart," Cinnamon mocked. "I was beginning to miss your boring, human face."
"Missed you too, maniac," Sakura snarled before firing off a laser bolt.
Cinnamon's scythe swung, and Sakura felt the EMP pass through her as a thudding sensation in the center of her chest. The laser fizzled and died midair. She swore under her breath and fired again, leaping all around the hovering Cyniclon and firing at all angles. Well-timed EMPs took care of them all, and Sakura was forced to rely on her knives to deflect the razor-sharp edge of the scythe aimed at her face. They stood immobile, glaring hatred at each other, weapons locked.
"Well, now what?"
Across the battlefield, Bree dueled Coriander. As the most senior Cyniclon—he'd been attacking the base longer than she'd been in the field—he was probably the de facto leader, but Currant was needed elsewhere on the battlefield. And she was suited nearly perfectly to fight him anyway; her war fans were equally suited to deflection and attack. She flipped out of the way of a shot from his plasma rifle and shivered as those cold yellow eyes passed over her body. She didn't like the way he looked at her—almost like how a hawk or an owl looked at a potential meal, only she didn't think he wanted to eat her.
Another plasma bullet hit her fan, and she winced. The piece of machinery was durable, but delicate in its own right, and if it took too many hits it would damage the generator inside and cause it to stop working—or worse, explode.
Abruptly, Coriander was right in her face. His hand clamped around her wrist like a vise, and Bree stifled a scream. "You're mine," he hissed in her ear.
"Get off!" Bree shrieked, twisting her wrist and kicking him in the shin. His grip tightened, grinding the bones of her wrist against each other, and she really did scream that time.
"I don't need you in perfect condition, little Mew," he whispered, twisting her arm painfully. "I just need you in good enough shape to…" his voice dropped so low it was scarcely audible, bringing out his heavy Cyniclon accent, "…take you apart and find out what makes you tick."
Bree screamed at the top of her lungs—a war cry, not an expression of pain or fear—and slashed her war fan across his face, paralleling the silvery line of an old scar. He hissed and released her, placing a hand over the injury and glaring at her. Bree shuddered and pressed the button on the base of her fan, her sharp ears catching the electrical hum as it came to life.
She slid the weapon closed, concentrating the negative charge at the tip, and launched a lightning bolt at her target. All it did was singe his clothes and frizzle his hair out of its ponytail, but it was enough. He took three steps back and, on the third step, vanished. Bree ducked into the tree line to catch her breath and study the battlefield.
Sakura and Cinnamon had detached from their lock and dueled up and down the length of the lawn, neither managing to land a blow. Cinnamon's scythe cut giant divots in the grass, making her look like an inexperienced golfer whose ball—Sakura's head—kept dodging. Currant and Amu handled the chimaera—Amu had taken up a post in a tree and was sniping at the chimaera, while Currant's laser strafed the area, leaving gaping wounds in every chimaera the beam touched. Bree turned her attention to the remaining civilians, hustling those who had stuck around to watch out of the park.
Currant laughed as her laser seared a hole through a chimaera's head. It felt good to take her frustrations out on something she could actually hurt and kill. And the chimaera seemed weaker than normal—though maybe that was just her being so angry. Her adrenaline had probably hit the point where nothing could reach her, and it just felt like the chimaera died quickly. Beside her, Amu dropped out of her tree, hamstrung a chimaera, and slashed the knife across its throat. It dropped; the spray of blood and fanning of black-and-purple hair eerie mirrors.
"Well, that was the last of 'em," Currant said, slinging her cannon across her back. Amu nodded and swiped her knives across the chimaera's hide to remove most of the gore. Across the lawn Cinnamon teleported out, but not without leaving a nice gash along Sakura's arm. Currant groaned in frustration.
"Saks, you alright over there?"
"Fine! It's not serious!"
Currant facepalmed. 'Fine' usually meant 'it hurts like a SOB, but I'll live' and always required Currant filling out a damage report. "God damn it. I hate paperwork." She sighed and brushed her hair out of her eyes. "Come on, guys. We're headed back to base."
A/N: The DNA for the chimaera is actually taken from Earth animals and spliced together in giant monsters. The Cyniclons actually got the idea from human horror movies, which frequently feature mutant or otherwise abnormal animals, and ran with it. It gets less and less effective as a psychological tool and more effective as biological weapons of mass destruction as time goes on.