> Analysis: contagion detected
It was on the bottom of his rib cage on the right side, a bleeding wound the shape of a mouth. She could see tar like residue inside every teeth mark. It took 3 deep scans to locate the parasite. It hadn't traveled far. it was about 30cm away from the wound, beneath the skin. It had met a rib that it could not carve through and for some reason, it was stuck there. It seemed the type of tissue also played a factor in rate of infection. Ribs were much more complex shapes to navigate through than necks or scalps.
"Stay still, child" She said softly and pinned him down with one hand. He was more fragile than glass against her strength, she had to be careful.
> Sineul Recommendation: abandon the contaminated
> Override
> Analysis: requires precision surgery
- no suitable equipment
- base frame does not have training data for pediatric surgery
> Sineul Recommendation: abandon the contaminated
- time is limited
Liera considered her options. Abandoning Calan was certainly a valid option. He was doomed. The vervid would carve a path through the ribs, she could already see it starting to make some progress.
> Override
"This will hurt a lot, Calan. I apologize in advance" She beamed at him reassuringly. His face twisted into a mix of shock and horror as her fingers dug into his wound.
> Sineul: beam emitters engaged
- optimized for precision
- emitters calibrated...(3s)
- additional finger calibrations....(5s)
- refining servo clusters...(3s)
Nails on her right hand glowed orange hot as she formed a stabilized shape, propping up her forefinger with her thumb and middle finger. There was very small margin of error. A few nanoseconds too long, it would be a punctured organ and internal bleeding that kills him way before the vervid.
The boy struggled, trying to break free. Liera used her left hand to grab him by the ribs and locked his lower body with her knees. she keeping the bitten portion of the body completely still and pinned to the floor with as much force as his frail body could structurally handle. She could've easily knocked him out with a flick to the forehead but she didn't have any way to bring him back.
a single emitter at the center of her fore finger gathered just enough energy to blast a super heated, thin Klin beam. She only had nanoseconds to make a series of cuts. She calibrated her forefinger servos for the exact predicted movement to push out the Vervid. This was a zero shot task that she was not built for. She had been alive and around for a long time, she had done countless bootstrapped procedures like this before but none of them taught her about another. She had never operated on a ribcage of a six year old. That is perhaps the most unlikely combination it ever could've been.
Liera's irises shifted as she zoomed in, firing targeted scans in quick succession. There would be one targeted scan every nanosecond, the data stream directly linked to the servos on her finger.
It happened faster than the child could blink. A series of bright flashes of orange and a thin smoke trail from his ribs. There was barely any time for the pain to register before Liera widened the cut and squeezed out a tiny black blob from the wound. She burned it and crushed it to dust between her fingers. Without giving him any pause, she rubbed her palm over the entire area a couple times, each rub cauterizing a tiny square of the wound, wiping the burned layers of tissue and solidified tar. This part was incredibly painful for the child, he was struggling to even make a sound loud enough to express it. When it was done, he had two freshly burned dotted square patches on his ribs. The bite wound had the worst of it. It was smoking.
"It is done. You're safe now" She told him, releasing him immediately. "Where do you keep the medicine?"
"Y-YOU GET AWAY FROM ME!!"
They very clearly got off on the wrong foot but it was crucial for his survival.
Liera fired the scan in six different directions before she located the medicine cabinet in the storage room. The boy was in no condition to follow her instructions so she extended her shields temporarily to 15m to keep him protected and she found all the supplies to treat the wound there.
Calan was horrified as she returned and grabbed him again and applied all sorts of things on the wound. His mouth was pried open by two fingers as tough as iron and he was forced to swallow four large pills one after another. He threw up two of them but she put two new ones on his tongue and pushed them in until he swallowed them.
He also got three shots around the wound with the world's most dangerous injector, each one stung the inflamed area even further before the numbness came into effect. His eyes were dazed with horror and helplessness at his life saving procedure that he clearly did not know enough to appreciate. For Liera, that fit the optimal behavior set of a 6 year old. All was good and and fell within expected parameters.
At the end of it all, Calan crawled to the corner of the room, crying his eyes out, his mouth open in a silent, permanent scream. Liera had to make other preparations. She extended the shield to 15m again and gathered everything she wanted. She returned with a thick raincoat, rates for protection from razoee winds. She also had a large roll of plastic tape.
"The pain should be gone now, can you try to stand?" she asked as softly.
"NO DON'T HURT ME AGAIN!" He screamed, sinking further into his corner. He was eyeing the items in her hands with great suspicion. As far as he was concerned she was a stranger that listened to no reason and wasted no time in torturing him in so many ways. It hadn't even been 5 minutes since their encounter.
"I'm not going to hurt you, Calan" She lifted him off the floor like a pillow and gently placed him on the bed. There was no time waste on explanations.
"Y-you know my name! Wh-Who are you!"
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"Your mother wanted me to help you"
"M-mom! is she coming!? where is she! Li is all wierd! can you tell her! can you call her"
"No" Liera answered with a pleasant smile. "I'm sorry. We don't have much time. I need you to do exactly as I say. If you don't, I'll do them for you anyway"
"W-what's happening!"
"Please wear this" She handed him the raincoat. He was still shocked and didn't know what to do with the instruction. She dressed him up as fast as possible. She wrapped the tape tightly around the sleeves and ankles. She found a pair of gloves in his closet and socks and boots and she taped the gaps as well. The hood of the raincoat came with a thick plastic visor. She pulled it down and secured it with tape.
"I can't breathe!!!" Calan whined.
"You can, it'll be hot and uncomfortable. You’ll get used to it" She told him as she used the emitters on her finger to burn small holes into the hood. He did need fresh air but the holes had to be smaller than the parasites. This was not an ideal solution. There were many ways this alone could go wrong. There could always be smaller vervid she had never seen before and that tar could seep into this suit with those gray eggs.
"You need to stay close to me at all times" She told him, dragging him next to her, keeping him as close as possible.
"Let's leave"
"But my brother! you didn't look at him! we should take him too" his eyes welled up with tears. "Where is he! I yelled at him before"
> Analysis: severe mental distress
- subject is a child
Sineul Recommendation: avoid any discussion about other individuals
"We need to go, right now" Liera evaded his question. Sineul had assessed correctly that there was nothing anyone could say about this topic that would be productive for his survival.
"No but we can't leave him!"
> Analysis: severe mental distress
- subject is a child
Sineul Recommendation: carry the subject
- addressing subject's concerns will be counterproductive
Liera swept him off the floor. She had to agree with Sineul. She made no other effort to talk with Calan again. Her shield fried the Vervid that got within range, sparks and vapor trails surrounded them as they walked through the living room. He was distracted by them for a bit but he reverted to crying the further she took him from his house. She ignored all his protests, tears and pleading and brought him to the edge of the hole she made when she crashed into the building.
"We're going to jump. You will be fine" She told him, Calibrating her arms. She decoupled their movements from her torso, to act as gimbals for impact dampening. The child had no shields to absorb impacts, only she did and she had to account for him with her body. This was the fastest way to reach the space port.
"No! No!! Stop!!!" Calan's terrified screams echoed through the empty halls, cut off abruptly as she jumped to the nearest rooftop.
They reached the space port in record time. Calan wasn’t handling things well, in fact he was not handling things at all. She didn't expect him to, he was a child.
“I’m going to throw up!” He said, as soon as they came to a stop. His mouth already full of it.
“You might want to swallow that back” Liera told him. “Or you’ll have to get used to the smell”
She didn’t intend her recommendation to set him straight but he immediately did his very best to swallow all of it down and coughed violently. This was a clear indication some motivations could still work on him, that was good. Those were important to keep him alive. Perhaps it was the relative young age, but he had gotten used to being handled and dragged along.
He was not pleading or asking chains of questions anymore. It only took the first 27 of his questions about his mother and brother going unanswered for him to figure out what questions he could get answers for. It was impressive, 6-year-olds had more brain capacity than she thought they did.
“Why are we here!?” He was puzzled.
“To get you off-planet” Liera answered promptly. That was a good question. He got shortest answer.
“Why?”
“The dome reactor” She pointed at the looming structure at the center of Rhea. “It's going into meltdown. We need to get out of here before that happens”
“What’s meltdown mean?” His vocabulary wasn't the best. She made adjustments.
“It’s broken”
“Huh? nobody fix it?”
“It’s going to be a big fire and explosion before anyone can fix it”
“OH!” He gasped, finally understanding why things were all wrong on this day. “We have to get Li and Mom!”
Liera didn’t respond, that would only lead to unnecessary chains of questions.
“We have to check what we have here. This place was supposed to be locked down” She said, her eyes piercing through the fog below. Visibility was low in this area due to various fires. She spotted several groups of people with weapons.
The space port had been reinforced with all of the military resources that could be spared for it. Automated turrets burned various targets in the distance, keeping anything from entering the premises. Even as she watched, she saw at least 5 people getting vaporized in the streets below.
There was no way to get through this without destruction.
“Calan, get down for a bit” She placed him at her feet and flexed her fingers. She couldn’t afford any mistakes.
> Analysis: defense array sub grouped to clusters of 3 for redundancy
- defense capability 0.8
- relies on numbers advantage
- 320 individual emitters each
Liera tightened her legs around Calan, trapping him in place to make sure he couldn't do anything to get in the way.
“What are you doing?”
“Making a path”
Her palms individually targeted two arrays on either ends of her field of vision. The destruction of the array has to be nearly simultaneous. Otherwise, their targeting system can pin a lock on her location. Being shot at with 320 high power burst lasers was not ideal. She could get out of it unharmed but it was best avoided now that she had a child trapped between her ankles.
> Sineul: targeting complete
- palm emitters calibrated (0.3s)
- pulse rate optimized for incineration
- estimated power cost 9%
Her vent lines glowed orange hot. This one was significant enough for her back plates to raise off her muscles, giving the cooling lattice more air to work with. She routed all the heat away from her legs. Calan was holding on to them for dear life.
Two Klin beams hit their target defense arrays simultaneously, the pulse pattern maximized the damage, incinerating everything from plastic to steel. Both exploded in thick fireballs, scattering debris over a wide area. The center array immediately pinned a lock on her and she immediately swung her palms one after the other over that general Area. The beams carved deep lines through concrete as they reached the center and the emitters turned off in milliseconds, obliterating the center defense array in the largest fireball.
“How did you do that!” Calan looked up at her with genuine shock plastered on his face. He had thought of her as human until now. Sure, there were some glaring differences. For one, he didn't think she was dressed appropriately for a lady, she didn't seem to have any clothes. All the jumping across rooftops were a bit much, but he had seen soldiers do that kind of thing before.
But this thing with hands was overwhelming even for his childish imagination. She had filled everything he could see, the whole picture with 3 gigantic explosions just by raising her hands. He expected that from the world’s coolest military ship, not a strange lady that broke into his house.
Liera shook her arms in the wind to cool them down faster. She had used her back to expel most of the heat because she had to carry the boy with her hands but her hands were still hot enough to give him third degree burns. She released him from her ankles as she diverted more power to her upper body shield, creating a second layer beneath the extension that was meant for protection from parasites. with the second stronger layer, There would be just enough of a gap to protect him from the heat.
“Let’s get going” She lifted him off the floor. “Don’t put your hands anywhere near the back, you’ll get burned” she warned him as he tried to wrap his arm around her neck like before. He quickly retracted his hand.
“Is it safe now?” He asked, pointing at the collapsed wall.
“It should be”
“What if it isn’t?”
“I’ll make it safe”