Elhertani’s neodymium knuckles knuckles delved deep into the guts of the craft, a surgeons hands with the implied violence of a steam press. On her fingertips, thin, membranous lines of silicate pressure transducers probe the stress responses of wires, cables and coils, like a child tugging another child’s hair experimentally to see if it will fall out. Satisfied, Elhertani struggled her hephastusian frame out from the folds of the surface hatch, the zaffre pinpricks of her hollow eyes expanding back to a mimicry of something almost human. A computer’s approximation of a woman.
Someone was moving behind. Beyond focus. Within reach. Close enough to stab or kiss.
Nes snapped around like the abuse end of a bullwhip.
“God damn it, Sunny; provide fair warning if you’re gonna’ oggle. Roadmap to avoiding an early grave: don’t silent walk on a seven foot cybergirl with combat shock and hair-trigger nerves - I nearly buggered up your baby by ripping the fusion phase regulator out of the core. Christ.”
She’d clamped herself around the butt of her lamina with such dead-handed fury she could feel the polymer buckling under her touch. Straining a smile, the cyborg lifted her hands away from her sidearm, splayed her steel fingers in the air in what she hoped was a universal example of deference and exhaled, low and slow, the practiced hypernea of a soldier whose seen too many shells.
“I’ve been digging at the fusion spool itself - don’t get me wrong, whoever wired this thing is a mean weld, and clearly knows a thing or two about antimatter initiated fusion process, but you run this power core to the wire and you’re going to get scalar distortion blooms. In english, it’s going to stall when you turn the key, and nobody wants a banger that won’t turn over two-point-seven times out of twenty starts.”
Nes habitually chewed her lip with a row of polydantium wolf teeth. Her mouth filled with copper. God damn, she has to stop doing this.
"So whose the Kus' you've got working on the corner? One of your boys? I don't see any surface tats."
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's outlawed trade unions, determined to take the underworld for themselves.)
![[Image: XTF1d6x.png]](https://i.imgur.com/XTF1d6x.png)