Читать книгу The Fallen Heroine - Fabienne Gschwind - Страница 18

"Damn hospital food. Get me the cook!"

After sleeping in the regeneration tanks for all of two days. The very moment we were allowed to leave Tamara had jumped out of the tank and grabbed a doctor by the collar and shook him violently, "What idiot gave the order for the nuke drop?"

I realized that this outburst of anger was real. But we got an answer immediately. Supposedly, a spy drone in a chamber next to us had seen 10 boxes full of rats opening. If no one had acted, we would have been killed and the rats would have spread everywhere. Only a few people had the authority to launch a nuclear missile. The press rumored that it was probably even the king himself who had acted with presence of mind to save us and also to stop the rat plague. He held back because he did not want to appear as a hero.

"Save us???" cursed Tamara, “Well, 30 more seconds we could have happily taken!!!"

We were moved to a common room for another day of control. The three pilots were in the room next to us.

The jetcopter had gotten high enough to hold off the worst of it, but then had to crash-land with its rotors almost completely smashed.

Our injury list was accordingly long. It was just not clear when we had picked up what. I claimed that the broken collarbone happened during the crash.

In any case, Gabin's legs were wrapped thickly with synth skin after they replaced his burned muscles. His left leg was badly injured and several bones were replaced with synbones, but it did not need to be amputated. Emily had received two new cybernetic fingers. With me everything had remained intact, except for the said collarbone, two ribs, the burst spleen, the complete incisor teeth. In addition, I had a ruptured eardrum, detached retina, dislocated shoulder, ruptured cruciate ligament and burns all over my body.

For this, every injury in the service was compensated with money. I calculated what I could afford with the new fortune and hoped that ReS headquarters would pay it out quickly.

In the meantime, everyone was in the dark as to what this crazy man wanted and whether there really were other stations like this or if it was a lone perpetrator. Apparently he was a lunatic from an asylum in Poland who had escaped a few weeks ago. The circumstances of his escape were puzzling, and how he had found this cave in deepest Auvergne and managed to steal predators was almost impossible to think. He surely had people helping him.

"It bugs me that the whole thing was for nothing, we could have just sat on the edge of the forest and looked at the beautiful explosion," Emily grumbled, moving her also thickly bound legs.

"It's always easier in hindsight," Tartelette agreed. Such things didn't seem to grieve her at all. She took out another old-fashioned photograph and nodded approvingly. Emily's high-resolution helmet camera had caught the exact moment when Tartelette had decapitated the tiger. It was an impressive image. ReS headquarters had released our footage the moment we were recovered alive from the jetcopter wreckage. Only the fight in the dimly lit main chamber was shown, because the helmet cameras had had no infrared and our crawl through the cave was far too blurry. Our fight with the crazy man was also not suitable for public viewing and supposedly the helmet had failed, right when Tamara wanted to film the cave and the zoo-boxes. So we were the only ones who had seen that it was not a “repros training den". The images of the spy drone that had seen these 10 boxes with rats had been classified as strictly secret and no one had seen them.

But still: the few minutes of footage were hollywood.

From Emily's perspective, Tartelette was seen leaping into that cave chamber, zapping the brown bear, then the tiger, which was already leaping. The shot deflected the tiger from its trajectory and while still in the air, Tartelette decapitated it. The rest of the shots were almost unusable because Emily was fighting and everything was moving. But Tartelette had then just that one still image printed on old-fashioned photo paper. And the slow-motion sequence was clicked on millions of times. The title of the clip was "Watch famous Reproslayer Arlette killing a tiger. Naked!" Its popularity surely had something to do with the fact that Tartelette's upper body was naked. Not all viewers seemed to be reminded of their mother at the sight of it....

I was now quite envious of the commander's steeled body and vowed that within this year I would also acquire such beautifully proportioned muscles that stood out under the skin. Should I survive that long...

Unfortunately, there were no heroic shots of me. But Tartelette comforted me, in time there would also be many nice shots of me, which I could then compile into an album.

Then an orderly entered and announced:

"A robo-messenger is at the door with a huge basket of Auvergne specialties, apparently someone ordered him here."

The nurse looked at us in irritation. The robo-messenger in question, holding the basket, was standing just behind him.

"Everything for me. Can't have me being in Clermont-Ferrand and not tasting any of the local specialties."

In reality, Tartelette had not only thought of herself, but had ordered enough for all of us and the soldiers from the jetcopter. And so we ate our way through Aligot, Truffade, Bleu d'Augerne and Cantal cheese, until in the evening we were flown by a decacopter to La Rochelle, where the specialists nursed us back to health.