Chapter 30 (Patreon)

The battle began with the bassy detonation of Dolmayan’s assault armor. Inspired and Markson were forced backward while the HC officer stood firm, raising their pulse shield and stepping backward in a fluid, calm motion. 

Of them only Ethan appeared to take any damage, and even then she was skeptical of it. His AC wasn’t normal, probably something custom he whipped up himself, and while he was singed by the violent energy Carla couldn’t see anything other than some mild warping of external plating. 

A glance at the result was all she got, because while Dolmayan’s opening move may not have harmed their enemy, it had scattered them, which was all they needed. 

“Chatty, fire support! Walter-!”

“On it.” The two of them knew each other well enough to all but read the other’s mind. He had probably been working on their exit plan ever since Inspired showed up. If she guessed right, he’d direct them down to the moon pools at Xylem’s base. When it was in the air it was a spacecraft hangar, and now that the city sat in the ocean that hangar was repurposed for submarines. 

Theoretically, they could escape in one, because even if they defeated Inspired and his allies there would be another wave of PCA en-route. Shit, there probably was already. 

Knowing her luck it would be EKDROMOI spec-ops. 

This flashed through her mind while her body moved on instinct, locking on to Kate Markson and unleashing every weapon she had. Micro missiles suspended themselves mid-air as her shoulder mounts headed straight to her. The woman took two direct hits before she managed to dodge out of the way of the volley, and was left with her systems strained as the micro missiles propelled themselves toward her. 

As did Carla, as she began a more daring maneuver than she normally liked. She boosted herself around her moving missiles and threw herself at the mercenary with a kick, one that connected with a bang that dented her chestplate with a boot print and stunned the woman long enough for the micro missiles to stream onto her left side. 

Honestly, she was surprised that maneuver had worked. It was risky and aggressive, but the risk had paid off, and her estimation of the merc dropped a few levels. Her hesitation spoke of inexperience. 

Not entirely, though, as the other woman’s crazy-looking laser rifle swung up and blasted Carla right in the face before her feet even hit the ground again. She began evasive maneuvers right afterward, leaping once again as the mercenary counterattacked further with a swing of her laser dagger as her shoulder mounted turret came alive. 

In the corner of her eye she saw Dolmayan getting shield bashed by the HC, the squat AC mostly undamaged and nimble enough to stay out of reach of the pulse blade that glowed an eye-searing blue. As dated as his AC was, Dolmayan was a master of using his squat height to his advantage. 

More impressive was how he was keeping the HC between himself and Ethan to force the man to check his fire constantly. It wouldn’t last forever, but that was what Chatty was for. Her little buddy was taking conservative shots at the HC and Ethan, keeping himself at long range and bolting behind cover whenever Ethan got annoyed enough to change targets. 

The four of them were at a stalemate, one that would last until Dolmayan got unlucky. When either she or Markson proved victorious the tide would change. 

And the odds of her victory shifted after a few more engagements, when Inspired gave up on Dolmayan to start aiming at her. 

She had already been copying Dolmayan’s maneuvering, but now she began to do so at the expense of taking easy opportunities to harm Markson. The two of them were in rough shape after trading blows, but Carla had avoided giving her time to charge up her fancy cannon while the merc was quick on the draw to make her siege missiles useless. 

As effective as the micro missiles were on slow targets, if someone could plan ahead well and was nimble, they could avoid them pretty easily. And Kate was quick and had plenty of skill. 

But she was no master, as proven earlier. And Carla was beginning to catch onto her weaknesses. 

The woman fought like a schemer, a planner. She didn’t take risks where she didn’t have to, never backed herself or Carla into a corner, and kept several avenues of escape open in case she unloaded all of her missiles onto her at once like with her aggressive opening. 

She was whittling Carla down, playing her fight extremely safe. It was almost textbook perfection, weirdly in opposition to the PCA officer who had never once let up the pressure on the RLF’s father. Conventional wisdom suggested that the soldier would fight by the book and the merc would be more of a daredevil. 

No matter. Taking no risks was itself a weakness, because it was predictable. 

The merc took just a few more hits when they were completely unavoidable, and when Carla got gutsy once and went in for another round of cqc, she used a charge of pulse armor, the temporary shield letting her meet her head on with her dagger in hand without worry of injury. 

Pulse armor was a safety net, a way to mitigate mistakes. Temporary invincibility was nothing to sneer at, and she respected the use of it. Long ago, when she’d first been learning to fight, she’d used it all the time as a trump card the exact same way that Markson did. 

But now she was older, wiser, and crazier. This time she backed off, wincing as the quick blade cut her once. A repair kit was released onto her chassis, repairing what it could. That was her second one down, having given the first to Chatty earlier. One remained. That was enough to work with. 

She danced around Markson as her luck failed her for the first time. Inspired got a clean shot on her left shoulder, the beam piercing straight through her AC and rendering the arm useless after damaging critical pistons. It was locked in place now, motionless at her side. At least her gun still worked, even if she couldn’t aim it anymore. 

It was going to cost a lot to repair that too… 

Feigning desperation, and not entirely acting, she went for CQC again, and Markson used her pulse armor, the formulaic response having worked just fine before. But combat wasn’t a math formula, and doing the same thing expecting the same outcome was naivety. 

Instead of shying away like before Carla left herself entirely open to Ethan, not even looking at him. Off of gut feeling alone she activated her own assault shield, the blast washing over Markson while weakening her armor. More importantly, the core expansion negated the shot Inspired fired the instant afterward. 

Pulse energies didn’t work amazingly against hard light weaponry, but a focused blast like assault armor was the second best defense on the market for them. Timed perfectly, the focused beam broke apart into harmless light. 

Markson threw herself forward, following her tried and true formula of trusting her pulse armor and going in for melee, except this time Carla wasn’t scared off. She stepped in as the merc landed a clean, deep slice over her head, down her neck, and through her chest. The AC’s hand spun 180 degrees to come back up for a stab. 

It went clean through FULL COURSE, and Carla winced as her eyes were momentarily torn away from her display to the roof of her core, where a cherry-red line scarred the metal. If that stab had been a meter closer to the heart of her machine she might be dead. 

She knew she wouldn’t be though. FULL COURSE was made with her designs, every part handcrafted and memorized inside and out. That stab hadn’t hit anything that hadn’t been damaged already. 

The good arm of her AC that remained acted outside of calculations, hissing as the pressurized grip around her siege missile launcher was released. Instead she reached forward to Kate Markson’s left shoulder, where her spare weapon, the boltshot, was holstered. 

The other woman realized her plan and tore her blade out of her baby, making Carla wince as she mentally tracked the blade going through one of her boosters. That was an arm and a booster down, she was getting pretty fucked up. 

She still had her legs though!

The merc was kicked away and the boltshot was leveled at her, not a second spared before the trigger was pulled. 

Nothing happened. 

Fucking biometric locks!

With only her shoulder mounts left, she discarded the useless weapon and instead used her boosters. One fired with a wild sputter, making her twist to accommodate the broken one. The wild movement helped her avoid the shot from Markson’s laser rifle and grab her by a crevice in her core’s armor plates. While she began to swing her laser dagger, possibly for the final time, Carla heaved the MIND ALPHA AC between herself and Chatty. 

An onslaught of grenades and rockets ripped into the mercenary’s back, staggering her while her body protected Carla from the blast, even though the concussive force passed through her violently.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Inspired take the bait. His rifle was raised, and for the second time she swung the merc around, this time between her fiancee and herself. 

An orange beam pierced the woman’s core, going straight through the heart into Carla’s AC, where it passed above her generator, making her heart skip a beat and putting her poor FULL COURSE at death’s door. She popped her final repair kit, but it wasn’t like the nanites could do anything for her internal injuries and light-melted pistons. 

“KATE!” Ethan roared. He sounded so furious that she felt brief surprise. He had seemed like the kind of guy to go into shock and grief, having just killed his girlfriend. 

Maybe he was tougher than Carla thought. She respected that, in the back of her mind. The majority of her thoughts were on how the hell she was going to get out of this alive now. 

“West one point five klicks, hack the statue and go down the maintenance elevator. Close it behind you.” Walter said, as cool as a cucumber. 

That man was a godsend. 

Inspired’s rifle began to glow, however, and with her boosters broken Carla was pretty fucked. Once again Chatty saved her dumb ass, hitting Inspired with the same barrage that had just hit Kate Markson and throwing off his aim. 

She ignored Dolmayan, who was still locked in combat with the HC and making no progress, to zoom past him and hide behind a ruined building. 

“Chatty, we’re moving! Dolmayan, you coming with?” She shouted into the comms, her heart racing. If she could see herself, she knew that she’d see sweaty hair sticking to her face and wild eyes clawing over monitory, uncertain if she would actually make it. 

For posterity she took a screenshot, made in the hopes that she’d still be alive to remember the moment later. 

“Affirmati-”

“You’re fucking dead, Carla.” Ethan hissed, bringing a grimace to her face. That didn’t sound like a man who was going to let her escape easily. 

It didn’t escape her notice that Dolmayan didn’t reply, and it couldn’t just be because he was busy with the PCA officer. The woman clearly wasn’t a fast learner, still trying the same patterns against him with little variation in her technique. 

But with Kate dead, Ethan murderous, and her AC busted there was only one good course of action. 

She booked it, trying the same boosting trick as before, her AC spinning disorientingly, and another beam pierced her ruined arm again, damaging the already disabled limb further. She heard something bang and muttered a quick prayer to whatever could be listening that her fuel lines wouldn’t catch fire. 

Right, no more boosting. 

“CARLA!” A ghost of a smile passed her lips as Chatty landed two grenades in Ethan’s face, a smile that died as she realized that he was barely damaged at all. 

That was superior hardware to what she was using. Normally she was in his position, kitted out to wipe the floor with some peon, but life was throwing curveballs at her today. 

Her partner ran after her, using the recoil of his grenades to slow down the inventor and propel himself as fast as he could. The accuracy was terrible, but the detonations caused Inspired to swerve around them somewhat, slowing him down. The three of them set off on a chase, leaving the HC and Dolmayan alone. 

But not before their pursuer spun around and paused for one good shot at the man’s backside from well over a kilometer away. With his girlfriend dead he had finally found it in himself to hit his targets, made easier by the unexpectedness of the shot at all. 

Neither herself or Dolmayan him to launch an attack from three kilometers away down a city street. With his back turned the priest was oblivious until the beam pierced him through the waist. But as devastating as the blow was, she didn’t have the time to give a shit, too busy running the fuck away. 

And for a time they did, quickly learning the hard way that Ethan had some tech to see through walls. She tried to fix that by giving the command code to reactivate the fog but found that the signal was blocked. When she came on a deactivated KITE mech the same thing happened. Somehow the son of a bitch was blocking her signals without a visible jammer. Maybe he built one into his AC? It wouldn’t surprise her at this point. 

If so, she really fucked up making an enemy out of him. He was going to be a pain to maneuver around. Worse, Walter was going to say ‘I told you so’. 

“Almost to the end of this foxhunt,” she said to Chatty as they neared the maintenance elevator. “Delay him and I’ll pop the cover.”

“I will, chief.” He assured her. 

The elevator was, like most RRI technology, teetering the line between advanced and overengineered. A circle large enough to easily fit ten ACs sat under an overpass, showing signs of rust but probably still functional. Carla interfaced with it through a physical connection, knowing that Inspired would intercept anything wireless, and commanded it to open. 

Metal screeched behind her. CIRCUS had boosted to Inspired’s AC and kicked it, something their foe had predicted. As she watched, Chatty was pulled upward into an arc that slammed back to the ground with enough force to pulverize the compacted asphalt beneath them. 

She fired both of her shoulder missiles while eyeing the maintenance shaft nervously. It opened with a mocking slowness. How the hell was she going to keep Inspired back? 

“Ethan,” she tried talking her way out of it first. Most of her other options were busted or being thrown around at the moment. “Why invade Xylem anyway? Coral tech, I’m guessing? Sorry to say, but that’s all better left in the past.” Hopefully he’d latch onto that and disagree. 

“It’s not in the past.” He tossed Chatty aside and aimed at him while dodging out of the way of the missiles. Her partner barely managed to avoid a direct shot to his core, instead the lightrifle scorched a line through the front camera. 

“With my death it will be.” She bluffed. 

He paused, holding his fire for just long enough for Chatty to catch on and hold his. “A dead man’s switch? No, you’re too selfish for that kind of thing. Or arrogant, rather. This was never supposed to be a risky mission for you.” She tried to match his reasoning. How did he know that? Or was he just guessing? 

Behind her the elevator doors were opened enough that she could leap through, but Chatty was still too far away. 

“I’m always prepared, Inspired. You forget that I’m an inventor too, and I make my babies for every situation.” 

“Except lightrifles. No, you’re lying.” He deduced, and aimed at her. 

“Go!” She yelled into her comms, moving back into the open pit. But it was too late, he was quick on the draw and, well, even if she was falling she’d still have to hope that he couldn’t force his way through the door. 

It was a good run. Walter would have to finish the fight. 

Explosions rocked Inspired, throwing him back. A signal went to the elevator and the bay doors started closing just as she was falling through. 

“Chatty! Chatty come on!” She yelled. Her leg boosters set alight, keeping her barely able to see her AI engaged with their hunter. 

“He’s a better hacker than you. The doors would just open again and you’d never make it to the submarine. I’ll buy you time.”

“The FUCK, you rust bucket?!” Her heart was gripped with something unpleasantly familiar. She could feel the loss coming. 

He was just a chatbot she made. People were too personal, too quick to die or betray her. Chatty was a little project she made for fun, just a weapon with some personality, and not much of it. 

So she should just leave, right? 

“Sorry Chief… but you’ve reached the end of support from this Chatty, Chief. Beep boop, powering down.” Her thrusters died as her generator ran out of juice. Above her she could hear a few more explosions as the elevator doors closed. The sky shrunk to a sliver and then disappeared entirely. 

“Heh… ahahaha! Ah…… that was pretty good.” More laughter welled up in her belly but wouldn’t crawl out of her tightened throat, leaving a violent feeling in her like she was going to explode. 

As she fell all the way to the bottom of the once-flying city she couldn’t find it in herself to draw out even a giggle. 

<__________<__________>__________>

I had rarely ever been so mad, maybe never, and while I looked at the sizzling wreck that was once Chatty that feeling didn’t fade so much as wilt, losing its vigor and turning into something bitter. 

Technically, nothing had been lost. Carla was on the run, I’d learned more about how she was in cahoots with Walter, and it was clear that she knew a lot more about Xylem and the RLF than I’d ever considered. 

Her nickname, that of Cinder, was apparently real. That woman predated the Fires of Ibis, not something unheard of, but certainly rare. 

Really I shouldn’t even be mad, Kate hadn’t lost much, just an hour or so of memories, but her black box had been slagged. Her usual wireless model of AC hadn’t been ready for a quick dispatch and we set out thinking that there was no way that we’d lose. 

And we were right, but not entirely. 

What stung the most wasn’t the lost memories, but that it had been preventable. In the heat of battle it was hard as hell to hit an AC, but that wasn’t much of an excuse. The same went for Kate. She was close to berating herself for her self-professed poor performance, and had already written a dozen after-action reports on her fight. 

Those words were doubly true since Es was alright against Dolmayan, content to stall him and waste both of their energy and ammo. I couldn’t catch onto the man’s logic. 

I left further self-admonishment behind since there was still work to do. Chatty was left behind for the sole remaining enemy. He and Es were playing a cat and mouse game now that they were alone, where he sought cheap hits from behind. It was a successful tactic as well, except that HCs were extraordinary durable, and her melee model was too slow to catch him. 

Without me to keep him in check, incentivising him to use her as cover, the odds were against her. 

With my return I aimed from afar and took my shot, hitting him in one of the knees as he fled after another guerilla strike. 

ASTGHIK, his AC, fell to one leg and tried to flee once more. It was for nothing, since Es shield-bashed him into the side of a building and another two shots from my light rifle disabled him. 

This was infinitely easier when I had a tank to stunlock and distract my targets. 

I approached the man. “Why stay?” I asked, caring about that more than anything else. He looked up at Es and I with his glowing red camera-eyes. 

“Faith and principle. I knew that this battle was largely hopeless, but it had to be done. Some things you simply can’t run away from.”

Seria’s voice came onto the comms. “Dolly… things could be so different if you would turn your faith to something productive. How does this conflict benefit anyone?!” She pleaded. He was silent to her words. 

“Whether it’s productive or not isn’t in question. Es, you fought him more than I did. Your verdict?”

“Death or imprisonment,” she said without hesitation, staring at me intimidatingly. It was the make of her HCs, I knew, and I tried not to let it rattle me. “Dolmayan is guilty of invading Xylem and numerous acts of sabotage against the PCA.”

“Inspired, please, this may sound absurd, but my host is not a bad man, only misguided,” Seria implored me. “There is no need for further violence. Please, spare him?” 

“Imprisonment is fine with me.”

“You do this to preserve Seria, don’t you? I will not participate in the release project, Ethan.” The priest said solemnly. Es’ head snapped from him to me. 

“Your participation isn’t required.”

“I see. So you can truly take her from me. No matter,” I heard a click from his comms. “Seria, I am truly sorry.”

“Wait, no, Dolmayan there is still a chance for resolution! You don’t need to-”

“Coral, abide with Rubicon. Coral, endure within us all, for none of us shall cast the die.” A gunshot. I clocked what had happened instantly. 

On the radio there was a scream. It was horrible and inhuman, grieving and furious and as loud as my volume settings permitted. Then it warped, becoming something openly inhuman. If white noise had been subjected to the blades of a blender with a dozen dying animals it might approach the horrible sound that I was subjected to. 

“Mother fucker!” I cursed, mind racing. “Seria! Seria, are you alright?” 

Coral minds were symbiotes, needing a host to survive. Mnemos had his tetrapod, Raven had her - well whatever they were called, and Seria had Dolmayan. Most symbiotic coral was stored in the brain and throughout the nervous system, particularly the central nervous system, consisting of the brain and spine. 

She was clearly alive for now, judging by the screaming, but how much had she been rattled by the bullet going through her physical body? And how long could she survive in her host’s corpse? 

Coral needed oxygen the same as humans, but were capable of glycolysis the same as a human cell. Sentient coral minds, though, consumed a lot more energy, enough to run a net negative before going into either a comatose or dead state. Which one? 

I didn’t know. 

Either way, I gave her between four to eight minutes for the heart to stop beating and blood to de-oxygenate, and then around one minute longer for her own cells to think themselves to starvation. At that point I didn’t know if I could bring her back. 

My first action was to try to hack Dolmayan’s AC to take over the systems and forcibly eject his core, a lengthy process that could be stopped from the cockpit through mechanical controls. With the pilot dead there would be no issues. 

Except that he had completely powered down the AC, disconnecting the battery to turn it into a metal tomb. 

“Es! I need you to cut open the core!” I barked. 

“Ethan, what’s going on?” She asked calmly. 

“There’s a coral mind in that core. Just hurry!” She powered down her pulse shield and approached the AC with the urgency I’d requested. Her plasma blade was set on the core and sparked angrily. 

“Lower power! Again, there’s a person in there and I’d prefer her alive.” I tried not to let my annoyance bleed out. She followed my instructions, and over the course of several tense minutes we made an I incision into the BASHO AC’s reinforced core. 

When I got to peel open the flaps of metal I beheld a gruesome sight. Dolmayan hadn’t just shot himself, he did it with a handheld laser pistol. Not only would Seria’s cells be scrambled and suffocating, plenty of them had been cooked in the shot. 

It could have been worse. 

I hurried out of my AC, donning a full face mask and opening my AC’s core with a case of coral-sampling tools and my computer tucked under both arms. A jump pack, basically a mini jetpack, hung like a skirt along my waist. 

The trip to the corpse took a full minute of falling to Rubicon’s soil and then climbing up the destroyed mech. Up close it was grisly to look at. 

After experimenting on homunculi and taking some lives of my own I was hardened against bloody sights, but the rawness of it was still unsettling. 

Whatever. I hardened myself and got to work harvesting the dead man’s brain, taking all of it and straining it by hand through a cloth into a beaker. 

It was vile work, smearing the gray matter onto a cloth and pushing hard. “Es, time?” I asked as I worked. 

“Five minutes and twenty seconds.” I groaned. 

“Fuuuuck.” Still straining with one hand, my other grasped for a handheld coral readout. I held it close to the beaker, pulled the trigger, and saw the result. It was approximately 187% as active as brainless, wild coral. 

Mnemos had measured at 218%, enough of a difference that I was certain that Seria was going into shock or stress-induced hibernation. 

When the brain was strained to my satisfaction I scraped around the empty skull with a spoon and did the same with the goop that came out. What was left in the beaker was a glass of blood with flecks of intensely glowing red lines, like someone had mixed lava lamp liquid into it. 

The final step was pouring the beaker into a metal canister, a battery-powered collection canister, made for taking and preserving coral samples. The stuff was hardy, but could degrade if a small dosage was separated from a colony in bad conditions. Coral that hosted a mind was more delicate, I reckoned. 

In fact, I measured again. The reading was 181%, which was within expectations. Now that she was safely contained… 

Wait, was she safe? The only equipment I had on hand was made for conventional coral. Outside of a host body there were radically different conditions. 

And if she degraded back into wild coral again I wasn’t sure if I could successfully… reactivate her again. I only learned that coral could be sentient a little while ago, and my one research subject was acclimated to a mechanical body, not a biological one. 

“Es, we have a minute. Ask your questions.” Fatigue was starting to set in from all of this stress. Carla’s attack, an instance of Kate dying, killing Chatty, and now this mess. 

And I still had to answer for Dolmayan letting slip the words ‘coral release’ as a final, accidental, fuck you. 

“What is a coral mind?” She asked, starting with the easy question. 

“A coral mind, technically called a C-wave pulse mutation, is a microcolony of coral which became acclimated to a neural network and took on similar neural patterns in an attempt to assimilate into what is perceived to be a larger colony. Basically, a coral mind is a sentient mass of coral.”

“No records of this exists in my database, which is quite extensive.” 

“Yeah, well, the earliest example of this I know of is Seria, who’s right here. Raven, Walter’s hound, has another one, and a third is Mnemos, who is with the RLF right now. Seria was somehow born in Dolmayan, then a doser, after the Fires of Ibis, and I suspect that Raven got her little friend after the explosion at Watchpoint Delta. Without an explosion of coral to fracture a colony, something we’ve always avoided, you won’t see any coral minds.” 

“And Mnemos?”

“He used to be the piloting system for a SEA SPIDER, the one in grid 086, and I tried to take control of him only to find out that he had become sentient after essentially going rogue.” 

“… Are they hostile?”

“Mostly benevolent. Coral is, as always, incredibly social, and don’t seem predisposed to antisocial behaviors like violence or general abrasiveness.”

“Fascinating and disturbing. The coral release project. Dolmayan implied that you wanted him to participate in it, and named after the Coral release theory…” 

I was suddenly very aware that I was a small human, kneeling in the husk of a dead AC, and Es was in a comparatively massive robot looking over me. Even with both of her weapons powered down, it would only take a punch to turn me into a red smear. 

Coral release was exactly what she was created to stop, after all, a coral disaster of galactic scale. 

“Named after the theory, but not parallel. It’s a research project, one that’s classified.”

“Ethan,” her voice was warning, and rightfully so. I was toeing a line that I’d rather stay far away from. “I have meant every word I’ve ever said to you. So believe me when I tell you that I won’t tolerate an intentionally caused coral disaster. That is a line in the sand, and I advise you not to cross it.”

“I understand.” I said, hiding the slight tremor in my hands. 

My readout registered again. It had been about a minute, and it now declared 175%. Seria wasn’t dying because of bad conditions, she was degenerating at an unsustainable rate. A few solutions came to mind. I could jimmy the canister to slow the decay as best as I could and try to get her to my lab, where I’d throw together a better solution… 

Or I’d take her in myself. 

Could a coral mind, injected into a foreign body, reacclimate itself? Seria wasn’t a violent burst of energy like what Raven and Dolmayan had endured, she had stable neural patterns, the incredible adaptability inherent to all coral, and was already suited for living inside of a human host. 

Coral was safe for human consumption. People injected themselves with it all the time, and the symptoms it caused were mild, to say the least. 

Seria wasn’t really a friend to me, more of an opportunity and an acquaintance I intended to strike up a business relationship with. I didn’t really want a foreign creature living in my head, potentially reading my memories. 

If she saw what I had, the inspired inventor system, could she try to subsume my brain and take it for herself? Coral wasn’t carnivorous, but she could purposefully grow to choke out my brain and attempt to copy my own neural patterns to try and keep the system attached to me. 

Was I being paranoid? Maybe, nothing I’d ever learned about coral minds suggested that they were prone to something so ruthless, or that she would be privy to the system in the first place, but it was still a risk that I didn’t relish taking. 

I scanned again. The canister was mimicking the conditions of the human body as well as it could, keeping the temperature at a cozy 98.7 degrees fahrenheit and 1.1 atmospheres, roughly the same as on Rubicon. 

173%. She was still degenerating, just slower, and it was too fast for me to be confident that I could revive her. 

“What are you doing now?” Es asked as I unsealed the canister and sucked up the solution with a syringe. For a few seconds I ignored her, positioning the needle behind myself a few inches above my tailbone. A lumbar puncture was my best bet for a quick, direct route to my brain unless I wanted to pierce my skull. 

Raven and Dolmayan took their coral through an explosion to the face. I could take a needle to the spine. 

“Mad science.” The needle slid through my back, injecting me with a new friend. 

<__________<__________>__________>

AN: People predicted that Ethan might get a coral passenger, but before I brought up and named Seria could anyone have really predicted this? I like to think that while this was foreshadowed, it's still a pretty good twist!

And in case it wasn't clear, the reason Seria was degenerating is because sentient coral uses a lot more energy to function than the mostly-mindless, 'wild' coral that's burning up in the atmosphere and all around Rubicon. It's headcannon, but I think it makes sense. Our brains use, what, 20% of our energy? That's a lot for a power spent on what accounts for around 2% of our body mass.

Sticking Seria in his head will have consequences, both good and bad. I'm eager to hear what you all think of this.

Oh, and the fight scene too. A couple people were complaining that the light rifle felt useless and underpowered, a fair criticism, so I tried to show that it's powerful but hampered by Ethan's inexperience and lack of combat talent. Hope it went well.