The Last day of the 3/5 Darkhorse

This is a work of fiction.

Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or real events is purely coincidental and not desired by the author.

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She met the first body some twelve hundred meters before the actual ground zero. It was a man, maybe - judging by what was left of the face.

The corpse was crudely, and messily cut along a sagittal plane. Some two hundred meters after, she found a big smear on a concrete wall, and she understood what had happened - the man hit the concrete with half the body, while projected at a high speed across the air.

The part that hit the concrete just disintegrated, while the rest continued - somewhat - its flight till resting where she found it. He was probably one of the lucky - hardly a second had passed from when he crossed the Avatar, and when he died.

Others - owing to the nature of "It", mostly women -  had probably died in slower and more painful ways.

Keysha heart shrunk at the thought that she could have avoided this massacre.

She wanted out, to be free of all the crap being inside "It" 's posse, but she hadn't realized that this meant that It itself could have to handle human opponents, and that "It" really hated soldiers, policemen, everything that resembled an authority.

She just found them inconvenient and she rather did not kill unless she felt it was extremely necessary, instead. All these deaths, all this horror was - not so indirectly - on her shoulders.

The 3rd Battalion 5th Marines had moved out of Camp Pendleton following its order, to try to subdue a dangerous menace to their country and its authorities. They died as heroes, each and every one of the 998 men and women in the unit.

They died as assassins, too - the kid that they were sent to kill never menaced anybody in her life, super-strong inhuman monster that she may have been.

They were also minced meat, from the very moment that they killed "Ice" and they were reached by the shortish, bulky, ugly looking full battle Avatar of Keisha's 'god'.

It was in the middle of the wreckage, once upon a time a town called Utica, now forever gone.

A last soldier, a woman with what looked like some ranks on what was left of her uniform's sleeve, was the object of its attentions. Obviously, every major joint of her limbs had been luxated, and she was tensed  by contorted rebar carved out of what were some of the town's library main pillars.

She was hardly conscious, but she dedicated what little energy she may had at damning the shortish monster. The avatar didn't care - the thing had absolutely no relationship with the human bodies that it emulated.

Its only purpose was to allow some interaction between actual humans and the "once-upon-a-time-I-was-a-man" entity called "it", "The Other", "Le Lofoque" and "Me, Myself" - by different subjects.

Its purpose was that, and carrying enough firepower to destroy every conventional army on the planet.

The avatar had its right hand on what should have been the woman's left breast- Keisha doubted there was any recognizable anatomical detail left, there - which it kept squeezing and twisting, while the  sergeant continued to shout curses at her assailant.

It stopped and raised its head, to look up to the sky.

"Oh, they are so dumb" - Keisha looked up, too, with all the visual acuity of her augmented eyes.

She didn't see anything, until a warning broadcast came in from the hyperlink in the back of her skull.
Then the new data got integrated by her cerebellum, and the image of a high speed W85 missile appeared, falling toward them at Mach 18.

The Avatar just smirked, raised its hand , and projected  five bursts of something that Keisha recognized as "Color" beams. Maybe.  The Avatar was a mismatch of old and new techs... every new trick that "It" tried, he used one of these almost-mindless drones as test beds.

The missile never had a chance to deliver its nuke - it was engulfed by  3 Tera-Watts of tractive kinetic energy, arranged in a rapidly moving grid... where any of it touched solid material, this was accelerated forward at 35000 gravities, while the rest was left behind. Keisha reckoned that it could tear HER apart with hardly any difficulty, as well as the occasional mountain.

The missile and its fission-fusion-fission  payload ceased to exist, along with everything in its line of sight for another thousand miles.

The Avatar continued to smirk, then it looked East... in the direction of Washington, D.C.

Keysha felt the stream of inner authorizations, negotiations, calculations.... below the surface of "It"'s consciousness.With horror, she realized that the old machine wasn't mindless... it hosted some very old, very nasty piece of "It" essence, from before the birth of "The Girls" like her. An aspect of her 'god' that did not accept the concept of forgiveness.

It had reached inside some of "It" most obscure corners, and activated parts of the massive AI that were sleeping since before she was even conceived.

Near the south border of the Mare Insularum, on the bright side of the moon, a ten metres wide port opened up, showing the end of a three hundred km linear accelerator.

A one meter long, 80 kg tungsten penetrator, with a chromatic-field hardened point and fine pointing rocket thrusters, got accelerated by a stored energy of about 6peta-Joules.

Final speed, nearly ten thousand km per second - a 1/30 of the speed of light.

Time to impact was 39 seconds, owing  to the small apparent deflection of the trajectory and the Moon being near its apogee.

The ricochet was too fast and small to be intercepted by Earth's primitive anti-missile protections. The computer in the back of Keisha's mind answered her silent petition, about the yield of the imminent explosion - 0.98 megatons... she was glad that she knew nobody in Washington.  

The avatar continued to slowly kill the woman-soldier in its hand; Keisha turned back, and flew away. Even if she had been inclined to save the American, she had no way to stop the Avatar.

Her body was mostly human, with some "black boxes" and various enhancements tossed in - she was no match for the four tonnes of metals and ceramic, compressed in a vaguely human shape,  that was killing the woman.

She looked around, till she found what she was looking for.

The body of the tall, blonde girl seemed even more frail than she remembered, the face of a Nordic Madonna shattered by what was, probably, a weapon designed to subdue one of the Betans.

Ice's face seemed as gentle, in death, as she always had been in life - the most hopeful, and optimistic of "It" "daughters", grown up in the deep of space learning, from books, over the potential for good of humans.

In the three years in which she had been The Ghost inside "It"'s heart, the monster had become more of a saint, trying to use its power to heal things and make the world better... instead than having just some lewd fun at the expense of some woman.

Which was probably the reason why the hidden levels of U.S. bureaucracy, those where the operative decisions are really taken, had finally identified her as en enemy, and sent these marines.

These poor, poor idiots, that managed to kill the little Princess that kept the real monster sedate.


The link to the belly of the beast, in the back of Keisha mind, roared with mind-numbing rage...

"IT" had absorbed much more than just its creator bad sexual tastes. It indulged in those, a lot, but there was also an incredible amount of rage against the world, perceived as a collection of small dictators hiding beyond apparent democratic rule, that needed oh-so-desperately to be killed.

On the near face of the Moon, more accelerator ports opened up - the schematics of each installation that awoke from a decades long slumber suddenly appearing in Keisha's mind.

Keisha embraced the albino girl that had drove her mad so many times, for her refusal to admit that this world's human race was beyond salvation, and cried softly.

The first lesson that "IT" had learned, a long time ago, still applied.  The one that drove it, well, mad.

A clone, a copy, a revenant, a mind upload... are individual selves, not a continuation of their "original".

Her friend had died and even if another Ice would soon be around, to plug the hole in their organization, that girl would have been someone else.

The same feeling was going to engulf millions, soon, as the destruction of Washington would reach every body that had family there. Billions would follow, if "IT" didn't calm down...  so, she reached through the link, and let all her sadness flow through. The things on the moon closed their ports, but didn't go back to sleep - the 'bots in the Asteroid Belt would probably keep watching the Moon with attention, now.

A light column raised through the sky, marking the spot where the Avatar had last stood - Keisha recognized the technology, fusion-fed plasma jets. Something crude, and disruptive of everything based on human biology, that had never been `placed in any of her sisters.

The avatar was old - like the linear cannons on the Moon, a relic of an age when "IT" had been ready, almost eager, even, to destroy the only world it knew, to protect itself.

Which could still happen.

Keisha had an awful lot of damage management to do, before retiring.