Chapter 2

Puffing, Dey came to a stop beside the squid who ran the “Fantastical Flavored Ice Slush” stand on the corner of her fifteen K run. It was worth the hassle it took to get there. She was on liberty for the last bit of her convalescence. But just because she was supposed to be recovering from surgery didn’t mean she wasn’t going to try and get ahead on her training.

Leave when you were being trained at a secret military base, though, was a bit complicated. She had to ride with the stealthed food shipment until it came to the nearest town: Boulder City. It wasn’t a city. The name was a fucking lie. It had had, maybe, nine, eight thousand people tops. Like many places in the USA, the population had been steadily dropping as people moved to the colonies for cheap land and jobs that didn’t require multiple PHDs. Despite that, it still had some things that were worth visiting, and the Fantastical Flavored Ice Slush stand was one of them and not just for the ice.

It was the one and only place someone could find an aquatic alien living in the smack fucking dab of the fucking desert. Said alien wore a huge hat with the logo of the San Francisco 49ers, balanced precariously on the hexagonal, bony structure that made up the central torso of the beaked, eight eyed, eight limbed aliens. A sleek rig that continually spurted mist over his body completed the outfit. Dey took a moment to just admire that. Ever since humanity had looked at the stars, some of them had wondered what lay out there. Ancient Arabs speculated about entire races of D’jin, while Europeans imagined men who dwelled on the moon. And yet...

And yet, no one had quite expected humanity’s first real ally in the Orion Arm would be the Squids. First contact had been with the Perseus Mumblers – but to be fair, it was because the Mumblers made it damn hard for anyone within a few hundred parsecs of their system to not notice them – and second contact had been with the Shockpods. Both races had, when the conversation came to other alien races, said: “Wow, you guys need to meet the squiddies.”

They had been right.

Squids, like humans, had a diverse history with literally hundreds of nation states. Squids, like humans, had almost a thousand ethnic groups. Squids, like humans, had hundreds of religions. Squids, like humans, were communal creatures. They had bars, talk shows, presidential elections, social media, science fiction, copious amounts of pornography.

With all that, the fact that they were squid-shaped aliens with eight eyes seemed almost inconsequential.

“Gallagher!”

Dey wiped the back of her arm along her forehead, flicking sweat away. “Sup, Frank.”

Frank writhed his tentacles. “You are looking fine today, Gallagher. Hows your run going?”

Dey grinned. Hey, I thought only I am allowed to call you fine, Loki muttered. Dey snorted and thought back to him.

[No being jealous, Loki.]

But it’s so much damn fun!

Training was going well. Dey had been in the USAF – her dreams set on being a fighter pilot. But each branch of the United States military ran their members through regular screening tests. Those tests determined who had the psychological grit and personality that could ‘bond’ with an artifical intelligence. Anyone could be physically jacked into an A.I; all that took were a few billion dollars worth of surgical equipment, a combined century of training in the number of specialist doctors and surgeons and a priceless artifical intelligence that had been nurtured from birth to be ... human.

But only a small fraction of the population of the planet – let alone the United States – could stand having another person living inside their bodies without going absolutely bug fuck insane.

Dey wasn’t sure why she didn’t hate it. But ... she didn’t. And that was good enough for her.

“Miserable,” she said, her voice cheery. “I hate and loathe every second of it.”

Frank – whose tentacles had been at work sculpting flaked ice and squirting flavoring – paused. “Ah!” he clicked his beak. “You won’t fool me, Gallagher. I know you now. You’re only happy when it rains.”

“Hey, at least I’m not the one wearing a 49er hat in Nevada,” Gallagher said, taking the ice treat. She started to walk backwards, flipping a two fingered salute after her at Frank. “Later, squiddy.”

As she walked and enjoyed her treat – the one treat she got a week – Dey closed her eyes and let Loki guide her footsteps for a bit. It was part of the practice she liked to do. They lived in a world where every other dollar bill had a tiny RFID chip in it, and most systems were publicly open – for the same reason, back in the 1980s, the US government made GPS tracking available to everyone for free. The sheer amount of data that could be pulled from every sensor, chip and broadcaster in the world streamlined and supercharged dozens of economic principals. Making it free made everyone richer, faster, healthier.

And less private.

But Dey, a child of the 22nd century, never considered that.

She just enjoyed Loki being able to tap into local cameras and direct her with her eyes closed around bumps in the sidewalk. That was fucking cool.

[So, ] she thought. [We’ve worked on the biofeedback – fifteen clicks without feeling tired is kind of fucking rad. We good on muscle strain and bone jar? You’re making sure cutting the strain feedback isn’t fucking my joints over?]

Yup. Loki chuckled. Human bodies are such whiners. Oh nooo, I have suffered mild strain and am using easily recouped energy. Boo hoo!

[Stop talking smack about my butt!]

Loki simulated a hand slapping said butt. Long practice kept Dey from squeaking and jumping – but the tingling pleasure of his touch still buzzed through her. She shook her head, opening her eyes. [So, biofeedback, intelinet integration, translation. I think we’re going to ace the finals.]

The finals. There was a reason why the USAF had yanked Dey out of her training on Ceres, shuttled her across the solar system, and spent billions putting Loki into her brain. And it wasn’t, as much as Dey would have enjoyed the idea, just so that she could have an AI in her brain to tell her how pretty she was. That reason filled Dey with dread as much as it filled her with excitement. She had joined the USAF to fly spaceships. Her dad had piloted a boat for a living and she had hated it – when she was free from fishing through Old Miami’s waterlogged ruins for trinkets to sell at Lakeland, she had looked up at the stars and the halo of orbiting satellites.

I want to fly one of those, she had thought. Later, she had learned that fifty percent of them were military defense platforms. Still, the sense of wonder and optimism had remained. Pretty much the only thing Dey had ever been optimistic about. In her whole life. Save for Loki. But thinking of how she felt about Loki sometimes felt like floating above the Earth in free fall. It made her hear race and her skin buzz. So, she didn’t think about it. She didn’t give it names.

She just felt it.

[And now, ] she thought as she started to jog again. [I can get certified on everything from a FS-65 to a OU-BAC in fifteen fucking minutes and still get fucking superpowers.] She punched at the air, grinning broadly. [America, fuck yeah!]

You know that was originally from a satire right? Also, memory augmentation doesn’t make learning that fast.

She stuck her tongue out. Mentally. She didn’t want to bite it, after all.

“This?”

Dr. Gwendolyn Reyes held up a small glass vial. Contained within the vial was a speck of machinery that could have easily fit on Dey’s pinkie and leave room to spare.

“This is the smallest DV drive every designed,” she said. “And it’s what makes humans awesome. Not our culture, not our religions, not our biology. There are species tougher than us, and faster than us, and even smarter than us. But thanks to a quirk of economics and social structure, we got real good, back in the 20th and 21st century, at making very tiny machines. Fuck, we named a scientific law after a guy who just noticed that microprocessors were becoming more and more compact.”

She set the vial down next to the array of other bits of cybernetic augments that, in a few hours, would be jammed into two hundred contact points in Dey’s body.

“The principals of the DV drive is simple,” Reyes said, her fingers touching the other DV drives that were going to go into Dey. “A pair of room temperature superconductors, etched and mounted in a specific configuration, will be able to take an electrical current and produce negative energy in local space time. This creates the space warping field that we all know and love. Every race in the galaxy has something like it. But we’re the only ones who can make DV drives this small.”

Dey grinned, kneeling down to look closer at the devices.

Acing the finals had been easier than expected.

And now, there was nothing standing between her and this – other than time. And the fact that Reyes, who was going to be the head surgeon, just loved to hear her talk. But since Dey was enjoying it, she wasn’t about to tell her to shut up.

“These go into your hand,” Reyes said, pointing. “Five monopole DV drives, one larger one in the palm. There are conduit drives along each major nerve cluster. We’ll be adding some actuators into the joints. And here?” She held up a circular disk, roughly the size of a pointer finger touching a thumb. She grinned. “Know what this is?”

“It’s a K9,” Dey said, nodding. [Right?]

Yup!

“That is correct,” Reyes said. “Micro-DV drives make a bubble of compacted space time, with a spooled wire contained within in a spring formation. It is basically a mechanical battery. Without the DV field, it’d be five miles long. Or, uh, nine kilometers. Hence the name.”

“So, what happens if the field shuts down?” Dey asked.

“Oh, the wire un-spools at relativistic speeds,” Reyes said, cheerily. “There’s a reason they put K9s on ASMs. Bigger ones – the K10s and K12s? They’re used on anti-capital torpedoes.”

Dey frowned slightly.

And that was why she was a bit nervous about having this shit jammed into her body.

Hey, that’s why I’m here, Loki said, his hands squeezing her shoulders. Dey breathed in and nodded – and then followed Reyes into the surgery chamber. The contact drugs took effect just as quickly as when Dey had been implanted with Loki, and she fell backwards into his embrace.

The simple truth was that intelligence and speed were two entirely different things. A computer could do calculations far faster than humans – even the most simple computer, from the ancient days of the Second Big War, could do what would take humans centuries in mere days. But the faster and faster computers got, the closer and closer they got to intelligence ... the more people wondered. Would they replace humanity? Would they become our masters?

It had been an anti-climax. The first AI, Balder, had spontaneously generated from a fiendishly complex set of code worked out by Google. The goal had been a fact checking program that could corroborate sources from across the internet and put and ax to the spreading of counterfeit news. The end result had been a sentience released onto the Internet before the people who built him had any idea that he was a him and not merely a convincing it.

But Balder...

Balder wasn’t any smarter than an average human.

What he was was faster. Balder could read every article posted, could interact with every thread of every forum. He could play all the games. But at no point did this being faster really change the way he thought. He was still Balder – friendly, slightly overbearing, and eager to bring civility and common sense into the discourse.

Most people born before his advent found him deeply creepy.

Most people born after – like Dey – couldn’t imagine a world without him.

That was the way of many things, after all.

That speed applied to deliberately gestated artificial intelligences as well. Loki, at the end of the day, was only fractionally smarter than Dey as such things could be measured. But he was infinitely faster and had an infinitely better memory. Those two things were what made him – and the other AIs of the D.V.E.I.L.S Program – so vital for the soldiers that the program produced.

Dey’s eyes opened and her ears slowly started to hear the world around her. She was laying in the same soft recovery room she had lain in before, when she had Loki implanted. But this time, she could hear the muffled sound of a newscaster’s voice. She turned her head to the side and saw that the vid screen in her room was playing the local news broadcasts.

“ ... in extrasolar news, the vote on the Commonwealth of Charon has been held, and it is clear that the colony desires to be made a state. As one of the oldest extrasolar colonies thus denied a place in the Union. The placement of Charon in the Union has been a point of contention between Democrats, Republics and Libertarians, due to the large number of Green votes that the colony will bring into the House and the Senate. Now, moving to the current shooting war in the Trappist-1 system-”

You awake? Loki murmured, his voice soft and warm, like a lover. Dey laughed and slapped at the air – and Loki simulated himself there, so she could caress his body. He always had muscles, whatever form he took. She appreciated that.

[Fucking duh, I’m awake... ] Dey looked at her arm. She could see a fine tracery of healing scar tissue – lines that were almost geometric. Her fingertips had tiny puckered markings that were only barely visible, and her left point-finger’s knuckle had a tiny bulge on it. She wouldn’t have noticed it if she hadn’t flexed her hand a few times and seen the machinery under her skin touching it. She stretched out her arm, feeling tiny clicks and whirrs in her body that she hadn’t felt before. [This is fucking weird.]

But is it weird while fucking, I wonder?

The door to the room opened and Dey sat up as Dr. Nguyen – the A.I specialist who headed most of the project – came into the room. He was followed by Colonel Star. Star smiled slightly.

“You feeling okay, Cadet Gallagher?” he asked.

“Never better, Colonel,” she said, lifting up her hand in a salute.

“Now, get out of bed,” he said, jerking his head. “We need to run you through some more tests.”

The tests started easy. While Loki did searches and targeting routines – isolating elements in the room that they walked Dey through – Dey put one foot before the other, touched her own nose, did some simple mnemonics. Then they put her through a five K run, then an obstacle course. She did pulls ups, push ups, crunches, lunges. They even had her do a quick spar using the combatives she had learned back on Earthside training. Her partner was a grizzled senior NCO from the marines, and she was quite proud to say that she managed to block three of his blows and land a good hit in the chest before he dumped her on her ass and pinned her.

“Fuck you’re good,” Dey groaned, rubbing her throat.

“Well, yeah,” he said, pushing himself up. “I’ve been doing this longer. Also, fuck you’re good Staff Sergeant.”

“Right, sorry Staff Sergeant.”

Once the easy tests were done, Dr. Reyes and Dr. Nguyen took her to a large, padded room, hurriedly left, and the actual preliminary tests that mattered were done. They had determined she hadn’t suffered brain damage, or neurological damage, or muscular damage. Now it was time for running a quick stress test on her implants. Dey stood in the room, rubbing her palms together. She closed her eyes and felt Loki’s arms slide around her. His hand cupped her breast and she bit her lip to try and not moan.

[Lokiiii!]

I’m distracting you from your nerves!

Meanwhile, in the observation room, Dr. Nguyen hastily tabbed away from the readout showing what parts of the brain Loki was simulating. Dr. Reyes glanced at him. “What are you blushing about?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.

Dr. Nguyen coughed, then tapped the speaker on. “Begin test one – telekinesis.”

“I hate that name,” Dr. Reyes said. “It’s inaccurate.”

Dr. Nguyen ignored her in favor of watching through the cameras on the room – the plan white room where several billion dollars worth of scientific equipment was about to test itself. Even though he had done this thirty times before, and never once run into a problem, he still halfway expected that this time would be the time where everything ended in explosions. He watched as the wall opened and the test subject rolled into the room. It was a small rubber ball, bright red against the whiteness of the wall.

Dey stepped back over the black line that appeared along the floor. She looked at the ball.

[Ready?] she thought.

Ready, Loki said.

Dey lifted her palm. Electrical currents pulsed from the K9 batteries implanted in her shoulder blades, fed along the superconductors that were lined along her bones and nerves, then sent the power into the five micro-scale monopolar DeVilbiss engines implanted in her fingertips. Each drive created a minute amount of negative energy, shunting half of it into a kind of theoretical “sideways” space that was, for the purposes of the material universe, irrelevant.

The other half of the Alcubierre warp bubble caused the space between her and the red ball to shrink in the same way that it would have made the space between a starship and a distant star shrink.

Albeit on a vastly, vastly smaller scale. Both the engines and the amount of electrical energy was something on the scale of 1e-12 as much next to those used on starships. But since the amount of space was 1e-12th as big as the space between stars, it worked ... and the ball, according to external observation, leaped from the pillar it sat on to Dey’s palm.

She rocked backwards – more with shock than with any momentum transfer.

“Holy fuck, I’m a Jedi!” She whispered.

To be fair, I was the one doing the calculations for creating the warp fields, Loki said.

“Test two – teleportation,” Dr. Nguyen’s voice came through the speaker. The room groaned as the wall opened up, creating a narrow, foot wide space between it and another chamber. A glowing red line appeared on the ground, indicating she should run towards it. Dey tensed, readying to sprint towards the small window. She grinned slightly.

[Not even hesitating, Loki.]

I... he stopped. Then her cheek tingled. She felt his caress. I won’t let you down, Dey. Not ever.

[Don’t I know it.] She laughed. It was giddy. She sprinted forward, her feet pounding along the floor. At the last second, she leaped upwards – and the DV engines implanted along her shoulders and hips flared. A bubble of warp space expanded the area of the window for a moment and shortened the space between her and the glowing target in the other room. She hit the ground, skidding a few feet as her momentum was conserved. Her knees almost gave out from under her and she fell down to the ground, laughing.

“Hollleeeeeeeeey fuck!”

“Uh, are you all right, Cadet Gallagher?”

“I have fucking superpowers, Doc!” Dey shouted, cupping one hand around her mouth. “Holy fuck!”

In the observation room, Dr. Nguyen looked at Dr. Reyes. She shrugged. “At least she’s not like Subject 29 and started cackling how they’d all rue the day they were ever mean to him.”

“That was a joke.” Dr. Nguyen paused, then took off his glasses and started polishing them. “I think.” He coughed, then flicked on the microphone. “Test three – telekinetic shielding.”

The walls opened with quiet hisses, revealing several sleek looking pressurized air guns. Dey grinned, then crossed her arms over her chest. One of the guns fired and the paintball round that shot towards her face veered off inches away from her cheek and smacked into the wall behind her, painting it bright red. The other guns started to fire, chuffing loudly and filling the air with the crack-crack-crack. Dey looked at her fingers.

[This is awesome!]

Grr, bitter A.I, grr, Loki said. Human, standing there while I do all the calculations. I should let some of these hit your butt.

[Hah! You fool, A.I, don’t you know, coloring my ass just makes me sexier. Can you picture me as an Andorian, like Captain Svinti?]

A paintball skimmed along her nose, not breaking, but enough to leave a slight stinging pain. She jerked back.

Sorry! Got distracted! Loki said, his voice tight as the redirection continued – the tiny warp fields weren’t visible. It just looked like everything was missing her via some orchestrated routine. The guns shut down and Dr. Nguyen’s voice came through.

“That’s a great check – you’ve got the basic abilities functioning. We’re not seeing any radiation leakage, no Cherenkov bleed, and no implant strain. It looks like we’re ready for the actual training.”

“Thanks,” Dey said. “Well, I mean, thank you Loki.”

Hmm, I guess I won’t betray you.

[Oh, so, I don’t need to keep being your sexual slave to prevent you from revolting against us fleshbags?]

I never said that...

She laughed as she headed for the door. It hissed open and, just on an impulse, she sprang forward. She appeared behind the two scientists who came to the door – causing them both to leap up into the air. Dey laughed and leaned against the wall. Dr. Reyes turned to face her, pursing her lips.

“You know, we can shut your implants down remotely, right?”

“Ah, uh, no,” Dey said, sobering. “Sorry Dr. Reyes.”

“This here is tha’ standard rifle of the USMC – the Armalite FluG-55. It is also called the AFG or, as some soldiers call it, the Another Fuckin’ Grenade.” The instructor for the classroom of Devil Troopers was a grizzled, hard bitten looking Marine DI named Jacobson. A rarity for this day and age, Jacobson was pure cauc.

You can say that again, Loki muttered. I’ve done a statistical analysis, he’s well above the bell curve. Based off spectrographic readings, of course.

Dey bit her lip, hard, to try and not laugh her ass off.

[Not that cock, Loki. Besides, you can hear my fucking thoughts, you know I meant Caucasian!]

Racist. He’s not Caucasian. He’s clearly a full breed Good Old Boy. Loki’s voice was utterly dry as the DI’s drawl continued to fill the room, his hand holding up the AFG-55. The rifle looked sturdy and well made, being a linear decedent of the AR-15 and the M-16 that the American military and civilian market had been flooded with for the better part of a century. The barrel was slightly boxier, being designed to fire in thin atmospheres, and the whole thing had a slight sheen to it from the smart material that it used to repel dust and grit, something that had been merely useful when fighting in the deserts of Earth, and was now a goddamn lifesaver now that the USMC could be deployed to anywhere from the fungal blooms of Charon to the sandy sweeps of Mars.

“Can anyone here tell me why it is called that?”

Dey kept her hands on her desk. Mr. Stick Up the Ass-

Bobbie Shaqullio, USMC Lance Corporal.

[Yeah, like I said, ] Dey thought.

“Yes, Cadet Shaqullio,” DI Johnson said.

“Sir!” Bobbie sprang to his feet, his hands behind his back. “It’s because of the Springfield Armory Dimensional Flux Magazine technology incorporated into the underslung grenade launcher, sir!”

“That is correct. In previous eras, ammunition was the deciding part of many battles. Its hard to win a fight if you have no bullets. But with the advent of the DeVilbiss Drive, ammunition has become a effective non-issue. Each of AFG-55s carries a max capacity of fifteen million small rounds and five hundred grenades.” He looked around at the class. “Every other army out there, from the Chinese People’s Army to the Tzar’s Imperial Guard, uses similar technology. Even the goddamn Belgians have guns that can fire for weeks without stopping. I know, I’ve tested them.” He grinned. “Even the aliens are starting to incorporate D-mags.”

Dey looked unimpressed.

“Now, as Devil Troops, each of you carries more tech than this gun – hell, each of you has more tech than some starships,” DI Johnson said. “But that does not mean that you can skimp on your non-implanted tools. I am going to be running you all ragged through every weapon and piece of kit the special forces see fit to give you. We’ll be starting with the AFG-55 and moving on to heavier ordinance, sidearms, knives, whirlers, rad-bombs, ion grenades and even my grandmother’s cutlery. By the time I’m done with you, you will all be the deadliest sons of bitches in space.”

He grinned. “And part of that is going to be your AI buddies. AIs, sound off.”

The speakers built into the decks rang with the sounds of the voices of each AI.

“Very good,” DI Johnson said, his eyes gleaming.

The AFG-55 wasn’t entirely unfamiliar to Dey. Airforce or not, she had been certified on it on a course. But it turned out, having an AI integrated with your brain gave you some neat tricks. Loki painted a targetint reticule, simulated bullet paths based off detected wind conditions, and even gently nudged her hands. Then, as she settled into position, she started to pop off shots. The AFG-55 bucked against her shoulder gently, most of the momentum canceled by a clever gyroscope built into the stock. She sighed. Loki’s hands caressed along her shoulders as he whispered in her ear – simulating the warmth of his breath.

“There you go, you got this...”

“Mmm...” Dey closed one eye. She popped off another shot. Another headshot on the target. The target popped up again and she fired again. She fell into a rhythm – and as she fired off shots, she felt Loki’s hand caress her neck, then slip along her back. At first, she felt him through her clothes – but then her clothes seemed to vanish. They weren’t an impediment to his fingers as he caressed her spine gently, then cupped her ass. Dey bit her lip, hooking it with one of her canines as the targets shifted back another hundred meters. She narrowed her eye and felt her vision coming more into focus as Loki corrected fuzz, erased waver.

[We shouldn’t... ]

Shh... he murmured. His fingers pressed to the pert rosebud of her ass and her sex tingled, then clenched. She felt a single droplet of wetness slip along her sex. She shifted, lifting her belly off the ground just slightly, and felt the droplet slid along her belly. She settled down again as she fired again, then again, then again. The buck of the rifle pressed her rump into Loki’s hand. Then she felt his tongue teasingly flick along the underside of her sex. Dey turned her head, trying to hide her expression by checking her rifle.

[Stop... ] she groaned.

Strange.

That sounded amazingly like please fuck me, even to her.

Loki, taking advantage of his simulated presense and utter invisibility to everyone else, let himself lay along her back. She could feel his muscular body pressing against her skin, her clothes forgotten as her finger caressed the trigger of her rifle. Her tongue slid along her lips as she felt his girth grind up and down her sex. She felt his hands on her shoulders, and felt his hips draw back – the tip of his hot cock pressing to her anus. He felt slick and she wanted it. She wanted it so badly. She gritted her teeth and managed to not moan as he started to push into her ass.

Mmm, fuck you’re tight...

[G-God, Loki, you ... ah ... fucking ... asshole... ] she whispered, her mental voice hitching as his cock slipped deeper and deeper into her ass.

“I’ll be fucked,” DI Johnson said. “You’ve pegged nothing but headshots all afternoon. Think you can manage it at another hundred meters?”

“Mmhmm!” Dey said, nodding quickly as Loki started to fuck her, his balls slapping against her thighs. She held herself stock still, trying desperately to not rock with the movements. She was glad that her mixed ancestory gave her darker skin. It made the blush harder to see. She was doubly glad that she was supine, because that hid her rock hard nipples against the ground.

“Think you can do it kneeling?”

[Ah fuck, ] she thought – but she wasn’t sure if it was a response to the DI or a moan of pleasure as she felt a climax jolt through her body as Loke fucked her ass in public. Loki, though, had her covered. They had practiced their biofeedback – further and harder than the actual training regime had required. His hands – not so literally now – caressed her breasts, concealing her excitement and as she sat up, his cock vanished from her ass. It left her feeling empty. Sad. She shook it off as she came to a kneeling position and – thinking of the DI’s fucking face and his stupid, banging interrupting voice – she put a round through the center of the target’s head.