Chapter 250 9.26 – One, More, Word

245

One, More, Word

"I'll think about it, Captain." 11 was looking around the garden connected to the E-Police entrance, a gift from Salaska after weeks of the unit keeping citywide casualties under one. Manicured paths ran between beds of flowers that had clearly been selected by someone with a generous budget and no particular restraint. "Though this is a hard offer to turn down. I'll admit that much."

02 walked at the center of the group, M03 on her shoulders. Infinity moved off to the side, taking in the E-Police grounds for the first time not as an infiltrator with a mission attached to every glance. 11 kept pace with her hands laced behind her head.

"Stop performing hard-to-get, 11. You called me captain the moment we landed. You just did it again."

11 pulled her hood forward and tugged at her own ponytail underneath it. "You're weaponizing my nostalgia for working under you. That's not a fair tactic."

Infinity stopped walking. They were several meters from the entrance now, and the only figure in sight was a Tau copy leaning against the outer wall.

"Something's off here." Infinity's eyes moved across the empty courtyard. "I can't place what, exactly."

"Agreed." 02 set M03 down carefully. "They should have been out here waiting. I know Pi is avoiding me over something she did, but why is everyone else absent too?"

Tau registered 02 and ran to her without hesitation, no delay for formality. She was in a new frame, one 02 hadn't seen yet.

"C-Captain!"

02 smiled. "There's only one G-Bot with orange coloring, a stutter, and double buns for a hairstyle." She opened her arms, already anticipating the impact. "I missed you, sister."

Tau collided with her and held on tight, the shortest G-Bot in the roster, standing at just over a meter and a third. 02 lifted her easily, adjusting to the added weight without effort.

"Captain, y-you took a long time getting back here. Am I n-not on your priority list?"

"I never thought the G-Bot who once tried to kill me would end up hugging me this hard." 02 smiled briefly, holding the moment. "How's my multiplication device holding up?"

"Functional. A little mentally worn from running the city's security by myself." Tau dropped back to the concrete and let her head drop with her. "You won't like the next part. The team selected me to be the one who tells you."

"I know about the boot loop." 02 nodded, already braced for a manageable variant of bad news. "But don't worry—"

"N-No… it escalated past that." Tau pulled a long breath through her vents, drawing in more air than the moment required, working to hold her own processing steady. She let it out slowly. "I'm not going to tell you not to panic. You're allowed to, here."

02 went quiet. Trying, and failing, to predict where the sentence was going to land.

"E-E-E-UNITs fifty through nine, excluding 11, and excluding 19, who Dave managed to save, are gone. All of them. One hundred percent." Tau fought the stutter through the whole sentence and lost most of the fight. "The revival room was destroyed. SourceCode broke every SSD by hand. They hit us while the base was undermanned."

11 went completely still. She dropped to the ground, eyes wide, jaw slack, staring at a point in the air that didn't hold anything. Infinity took a step back and looked to 02 for a read, found nothing there to read at all. She looked at M03. M03 shook her head once and ran inside without a word.

02 held her position. Her voice came out level, controlled. "Where are their bodies. Were those destroyed too?"

"N-No." Tau kept her eyes anywhere except on 02's face. "Th-They're in the charging room."

02 walked forward without another word. The rest of the group exchanged a glance and followed her in silence. She took the stairs at an even pace, moved through the hallways, dead quiet, the whole facility holding its breath around her—and reached the frosted glass door of the charging room. She stopped there.

The others fell back several meters, watching.

Infinity spoke from behind a corner. "Captain?"

02 stepped forward. The door slid open for her, revealing the room in full.

She stopped in the center. Her eyes moved across the seated frames one at a time, rows of E-UNITs, still positioned in their charging chairs, eyes dark where they should have been blue. She crossed to E-UNIT 12's chair and brushed a hand through her hair, the motion gentle, unhurried. Her face held its usual composure. The group gathered at the doorway and watched from there, no one crossing the threshold behind her.

She looked around the room once more, the same dead black where the light used to sit. She lowered herself into the chair beside 12 and put an arm around the unmoving shoulders.

"Remember when you and 01 found me after Tau walled off my memory? I fought you both to the point of nearly destroying your frame, I thought you were E-PHONEUS." She glanced at the poppet's frozen expression. "And here you are. Dead, for real this time." Her eyes moved to the next chair. "You too, 24, I pulled you out of Elysium with Infinity's help a few months ago."

Infinity, still at the doorway, let a small smile through.

"And the thirty series." 02's eyes went further down the row. "11 trained you as her own penance for leaving 17 alone in the Metromania sewage system. You became a real unit under her, not a punishment detail anymore."

11 pulled deeper into her hood, her eyes catching the dim light from underneath it.

"Or 43. Black Voltage came after her thinking she was me." A broken smile crossed 02's face and didn't last. "05 told me about that mix-up and I laughed harder than I should have."

05 stood near the back of the group, arms folded, resting against the wall.

"Or when…" 02 stopped. Her head dropped, blue hair falling forward and covering most of her face. "I can't…" Her arm slid off 12's shoulders. "I can't stay upright anymore. All I ever wanted was for us to do our jobs and come back to find each other again at the end of the day." She hit the floor once with her open palm. Silence dropped over the whole room and stayed there.

"I couldn't help you." Her voice had lost most of its usual weight. "I stayed away when it mattered most. I was fighting a war that wasn't mine to fight and left you facing these terrorists alone." She began to glow, blue, spreading outward, the white of the room bending under it until the whole space had gone the color of her light.

The empty frames around the room began to twist.

02 raised her head. "What is this. Are they connected to the link?"

[Systami: I don't know what's happening either. What are you doing, Captain?]

The frames moved without her intending it, her own consciousness, or some fragment of it, spilling into the shells without her consent. They rose in a line, facing her, eyes lighting fully blue, each expression rendered close to how she remembered them.

12 spoke first. Smiling.

"Did you already give up?"

"What—" 02 rose and faced her directly. "Who is speaking."

"You've already forgotten me." 12's frame clicked its tongue and shook its head, slow and deliberate. "I asked you a question, Captain. Did you give up?"

"Never."

"That's not what this looks like from here." 30 ran a hand across the back of her own head. "We're dead, and so far you haven't done a single thing about it. Maybe Tau had a point about the priority list."

Tau and 05 moved up to stand beside the doorway. Tau spoke first, quiet. "05. What's happening in there?"

"She's imagining a conversation with the dead." 05 kept her eyes on 02. "I think she lost it—"

"No." Infinity cut in. "This is her not losing it. Let's hope it holds."

"I'm sorry." 02's head dropped again. "I just need time."

24 crossed to he, lifting her head. "That's not what you told me when you pulled me out. You stood up and made Shelly answer for it. The Captain doesn't let people down like this."

02 said nothing. She watched the version of 24 in front of her hold its position, unmoving and waiting.

"So." A voice from further back in the reformed line. "Is Black Voltage going to answer for this, or not?"

"I want them gone as much as any of us do!" Another.

"Don't hold anything back!"

"Drag every one of their frames across the floor when it's done!"

The whole line reformed and saluted at once, voices overlapping. "Do it for us, Captain!"

02 looked at the row of dead units for a long moment. Then something close to a real smile broke through. "This is you, Systami."

[Systami: Possibly.]

"24 speaks softer than that. 30 is considerably colder. 12 has more flair than you gave her." She stood, the surrounding glow beginning to fade back toward normal light. "Close. Not quite there yet."

[Systami: I did what I could with the material available.]

02 reached out and tapped 12's head gently, one last time, then looked across every empty frame in the room. Her expression settled into something cold and completely still, her voice dropping past anything resembling warmth.

"I will avenge you. Every one of you. I promise you now, nobody from Black Voltage walks away from what happened here. No one touches you. No one takes you from me and gets to keep existing afterward. I will hold that promise or I won't be here to break it."

She turned to the doorway. The group filed in one at a time, and each face that met hers found something steadier than what had walked into the room minutes earlier.

"Tau. Drop the standard city rotation. Start a full sweep of the tunnel network, every section, no gaps, continuous until it's done. I want every location those empty threads are using."

Tau saluted and was gone at a run.

02 turned to 05. "Work with M03 on getting every remaining E-UNIT a proper crystal, so this can never happen to them again. Rebuild the revival system completely, new architecture, and this time the server sits in a vault underground where nothing above it can reach it. Delta helps you with the construction."

M03, 05, and Delta moved together. M03 paused at the doorway. "You can call me Medica from now on, Captain." She was gone before 02 could respond.

02 turned to 11. "I think you're with us now."

11 nodded, slow. "They did what Lord Reaper refused to do. Deleting sisters permanently from existence. That doesn't get walked away from." Her eyes moved to the thirty series frames, still frozen in their salute.

02 reached into the drawer above the nearest charging station and pulled out a hoodie, her own number printed across the chest, 11, and handed it over.

"Welcome back, Dominion 11."

11 took it in both hands, turning it over, reading the stitching. "You... made this for me."

"When we redesigned the uniform, more than one person suggested leaving your number off entirely. I said no." 02 saluted.

11 returned it and ran outside, the energy in her steps unmistakable even through everything else in the room.

02 turned to the original eight, the ones still standing, still functional, and dropped to their level. "Back to where it started. Just the eight of us against everything."

"History does love reusing a plot," 04 said, the smile arriving despite the room they were standing in.

03 crossed the space and hit 02’s elbow gently. "Don't leave us again."

02 rose to her full height. "Someone else is leaving this world instead." Her eyes moved across the frozen, salute-locked frames disconnecting from the link one by one, going still, going dark again. "Tell me everything you have on SourceCode. She isn't seeing daylight again after this."

She looked at the empty shells one final time.

"They. Will. Pay."