I made my way back to my lab, sore and bruised, but feeling much better emotionally. Not only had I manually equalized things, I was also taking steps in the right direction. I was even learning to cope with low levels of fear again, because that seemed to help me gain energy for my power more quickly.
My sparring had gone quite well. I'd managed my first unarmed win against an unpowered E88 gangster, and then fought several more with my scalpels, boots, tazer fingers and pulse weapons. I'd even fought Cricket again. It had been a little bit nerve wracking, but she hadn't mentioned what she said the first time, under the effects of morphine. She seemed as willing to forget about the whole thing as I was.
Although she was wearing a different shirt today, one that showed off her extremely well defined abs...
I checked that Stacy had fed Sveta, and then went to bed. I used to have trouble falling asleep unless I pushed myself to complete exhaustion, but my neural enhancement could send me off to sleep very quickly when I needed it to. I was still working on a way to stop the nightmares.
I was woken up by someone shaking me, and quickly put my mask on, so I could see who it was.
"Victor's on the phone. The ABB are attacking." Stacy said, helping me settle the mask, and then handing me a mobile and leaving the room. Presumably to prepare the clinic. I put it to my ear.
"Victor?" I said.
"Mayhem. We have a problem. Bakuda's going into a meltdown without Lee or Lung to control her. We have multiple bombs going off in our territory. She's blowing up schools, warehouses… it's a huge mess. Normally we'd go all unwritten rules on her, everyone in the city would gang up to put her down, but she's in public, we know where she is, and she has no backup. Kaiser's decided it's time to end the problem, once and for all."
I blinked, got out of bed, and started attaching the legs of my jetpack to my back.
"All right, what do you want me to do?" I asked.
"Medical. You, Rune, Othala and Cricket are going to be helping victims in our territory as much as possible. You're also our defensive line if one of the other gangs tries to take a crack at us while we mop up the ABB. Rune will begin delivering wounded to you soon, I need you to set up the clinic for an influx of casualties."
"On it." I told him.
"Good. Have you managed to make any direct counters to Bakuda?"
"I didn't have the time. I wasn't expecting things to move this quickly!" I told him.
"All right. Keep the mobile phone on you, I'll keep you posted." Victor said, then he hung up.
They must be in a rush. I wasn't expecting things to move this quickly.
I'd have to be in costume for this.
My costume wasn't that impressive. Just my white blindfold mask. A white lab coat, and under that white jeans and a white shirt. The lab coat did have a lot of pockets though, which I used to store some basic medical gear, some tinkering tools, a few of my more commonly needed chemical compounds, and a few extra scalpels. The shirt and the lab coat had holes in the back which the legs of my jetpack could fit through.
I fumbled for a minute, figured out that I needed to put my costume on first, and then the jetpack legs, did things in the right order and then left my room. I'd need to brew another batch or so of my cell growth formula, get the surgery prepped in case it was… no, for when it was needed.
Victor hadn't been kidding about bombs going off. I heard one as I started to mix my formula. It rattled the building, startling Sveta in her container, and sending her tendrils hammering against the glass.
My first patients arrived only minutes later.
To my surprise I was mostly treating civilians. The E88 were racist, horrible dickwads, and I had to remind myself of that regularly, but they were well aware that if they didn't treat the one species that they did approve of…
Did I just think 'species?' Dear god I was going to have to leave this organization soon. Anyway, the E88 treated white people well, because if they didn't they alienated everyone, and turned the whole world into their enemies. The clinic would probably have to be moved after this, but people in E88 territory would be protected, as much as w… they were able to protect them.
There were a few skinheads and gang members who made it through the doors of the clinic, but Bakuda had obviously had a hard time attacking E88 warehouses or gatherings directly. Instead she'd just scattered her bombs near undefended, unwatched targets. I treated soccer mums, accountants, a janitor who had stayed to late at a school.
Othala arrived, and she was able to help quite a lot. Our powers complemented each other. Her ability to heal wasn't perfect, it wasn't instant regeneration, in fact it was rather slow unless everything was lined up, ready to heal quickly anyway, and she was able to use it for triage, to stabilize a patient while they waited for attention. It closed the cuts and bleeding wounds, helped people come out of shock, generally took the edge off my own work.
She wasn't much help for the exotic cases though. Some were fairly simple. The man who's arm was turned to crystal just needed a tourniquet, some cauterization, and a sedative.
Others were very tricky. How do you heal someone who's nervous system has been re-purposed into an overactive Christmas Tree? I think I actually killed that poor woman, shut down everything in her body, then got it started again before brain death set in, but I was too deep in a tinker fugue state to really pay attention.
Things went fairly well, most people who walked through the doors we were able to save. Some corpses were carried through, but there wasn't a lot Othala or I could do about that, and there was this one man who's blood vessels had turned to lead from the torso down, I couldn't really do a lot for him, but we saved a lot of lives.
Again I had to keep people out of the lab. Once I left the door open while I was brewing some coagulant, and someone saw Sveta and there was a bit of fuss because they seemed to think that I was the one who made her that way. Cricket quieted that down with a few waves of her kama.
It was a fairly neat setup. Rune scouted and brought us wounded on stretchers. Cricket was on guard duty, and Othala and I saved the ones who could be saved. Later they had vans as well, carting people in and out of the clinic. The place was designed for exclusive clients, nowhere near this sort of volume, but we made do.
I focused on the task at hand, not really retaining the surgery, the screams, and the carnage. There was one case where someone walked in with a bomb implanted in their body. A white male, visibly sweating. I don't know how Cricket picked up on it, but as soon as she saw him she threw one of her scythes through his face, grabbed his body, carried it across the street and ran back before he exploded into purplish mist. Again there was panic, but this time Cricket was able to calm it down with a few glares.
The worst thing to happen was the new trigger. A dark haired woman with a split lip and a child who was dead when she was bought to us. She showed me the small, green crystal body, and begged me to fix her daughter.
There is not a lot you can do when someone's been completely transmuted. No brain patterns, ontological inertia means that getting rid of the cause isn't going to fix the problem, being turned to crystal makes someone more dead than having their head cut off.
"I'm sorry. There's nothing I can do." I told her. She fell to her knees, crying, and I was moving past her to help a man who'd suffered severe burns when I suddenly found myself on the floor, picking myself up slowly. Cricket had already leaped to her feet. Confusion on her face, and her head searching for an unseen attack.
My neural chip is designed to alert me when it senses the brain activity that coincides with a trigger, or I would probably have suspected an attack as well. I would have figured it out quickly anyway, it wasn't really a private trigger.
"No, no look!" The woman cried. "She's moving, see! She's moving!"
The corpse of the child was moving. Cracks were spreading through it's fingers, but the shards of crystal were staying together, making a sort of lattice that let the fingers twitch. Some sort of crystal kinesis, or telekinesis. Or some sort of illusion thing.
I didn't really know what to do. What do you do? Triggers were horrible things. You lost everything, and you were very likely to lash out. I reached for one of my scalpels. Sedate her and deal with the issue when I wasn't in a crowded room filled with wounded sounded like a good plan to me.
Othala beat me to it.
"She is moving, isn't she. Why don't we take her into the back room over there, and we'll see what we can do for you. You look like you ran all the way here, is there something I can get you? Some water maybe?"
I glanced at Othala, raised the scalpel questioningly as she hugged the distraught woman. The healer shook her head and gently lead the woman and her child out of the room. Not how I would have handled it, but I was more than willing to let someone else deal with that mess.
Guess I'd be operating without regeneration for a while.
Finally my mobile phone rang. I put it on speaker so I could finish wrapping the burn victim in treated bandages, which would hopefully help his skin grow back.
"Mayhem here. With a patient." Who I had just nicked with a scalpel. He'd be asleep in about seven seconds, given his current heart rate.
"Mayhem this is Victor. We captured Bakuda but she says she has a bomb hidden that could take out the whole city if she doesn't send it a regular signal."
I frowned. EMP? No, I couldn't make one big enough. Jammer? No, it was primed to detonate without a signal. Fleet of seeking drones? To long to build them, and I didn't have those sorts of schematics yet.
"How often does she need to send this signal out?" I asked, tying the last bandage.
"No idea. But from her wording she intends to hold the bomb over our heads for a long time. It should be a long enough interval for her to sleep. She isn't nervous about dying right now, my best guess is we have at least an hour."
I thought furiously, then sighed.
"Bring her here. I can force her to tell us how to find it and defuse it."
"How? Torture is unreliable, even for a bio-Tinker."
I thought back to the men and women I'd treated. I could do this. Wouldn't even make me feel bad.
"I'll Tinker with her brain. Make her compliant. It's not hard."
There was a pause from the other end, some muffled conversation, then Victor came back.
"Purity will be bringing her. I'll be there as soon as possible. I hope you know what you're doing."
So did I. Oh, I knew how to manipulate someone's brain. Neural Enhancements was the branch that I was currently most invested in. It was my highest tech at the moment, and I was confident that Bakuda would keep her memories, and loose her ability to say no or lie. Long term there would be problems, she'd probably end up a vegetable unless I put a chip in to regulate things properly, but I knew I could get answers from her.
What I wasn't so sure about was letting the E88 know that I could do this sort of thing. It was… hardly safe. Their recruitment policy was aggressive enough already.
I went to the back room, where Othala had taken the new trigger, knocked, and entered.
The woman was lying on the ground, shards of green crystal turning red with her blood as they pierced her body.
Othala looked up at me, stopped holding the hand of the corpse.
"I… I tried to stop her. As soon as she realized the girl wasn't alive…"
I nodded.
"They have Bakuda. She had a fail-safe, I need to prep for neurosurgery, can you keep healing?"
Othala grimaced, wiped a fine crystal dust from herself, and nodded.
"Yeah. I need a few seconds to collect myself, but I can do this."
I went to the surgery, started Tinkering with the equipment, made up a chemical that when injected correctly would inhibit certain higher thought functions.
I wasn't sure if I would make a neural chip. Bakuda becoming a vegetable was fine by me. On the other hand her bombs might actually hurt the Siberian, and the whole 'trapped behind your own eyes' thing made a good punishment as well.
Choices, choices.
