Ashley Fox - Ninja Orphan
Chapter 35 – The Order of the Dragon
Saturday Evening, September 24, 2310
First Sergeant King tied the laces on a pair of boots in a safe-house locker room. All around him were various pieces of armor, waiting their turn. His nametag read Tarnung. Their unit patch was the mouth of a striking serpent, below a winged parachute.
Across the aisle, a beautiful woman in a t-shirt was likewise occupied with her weapons and battle armor. She pulled on her jacket; captain's bars were attached to her collar, her nametag read Snow.
Next to her, Staff Sergeant Splitter, and beside him, the youngest member of the group, Corporal Sorpresa, secured armor and weapons.
The combat engineers checked their various large and watertight cases, installing batteries where necessary and running function checks.
"Where's Spider?" Splitter asked.
"He'll be here," replied Sorpresa.
"Not tonight," Captain Snow said.
They looked over to her.
"We've got a stand-in. Spidey's TAD out to MI-5 Special Teams. We got someone special ourselves. Lieutenant Grey. Well, he’s a captain now.”
"The Grey?" Splitter asked.
"Yeah, you know him?" King asked.
"Not personally," Splitter answered, "but I've heard of him.”
"Everyone's heard of him," Snow said.
"Who?" Sorpresa asked.
The others laughed.
In the Senator's warm and comfortable study, the fire had died down to a glow, crackling embers under mounds of ash.
Danforth handed his son a large envelope. David looked through bruised eyelids. It hurt to sit, he did not want to read.
"Your grandfather wrote that while he lived on 13. Read it later. We have something more important to do right now.”
Danforth extended his hand.
David took it and his father helped him up. "I don't think I understand," he said.
"I'm promoting you to captain and awarding you forth and fifth gate citizenship ranks.”
"You're a senator, you can't promote me.”
Danforth handed David another packet of documents. "It's already done."
The senator led his son toward a back wall of his study.
David followed, suspicious and conscious of the heavy pistol at his side. He hardly knew his father. He hadn't spoken to him in years, with the exception of just a few days ago. He had no right to be suspicious. But promotion in rank and citizenship were not cheap favors of the Republic.
Danforth produced a key and unlocked a panel. Above the transom, set into the woodwork was a circular carving of a winged dragon encircling a two-armed cross.
Danforth entered first. Low lights came up, triggered by his entrance. Medieval standards, shields and weapons leaned against walls of the small dark room.
"Son, I'd like to invite you to join the Royal Order of the Dragon.”
David blinked but didn't reply.
"Stand here." Danforth gestured to an ornate version of the same seal on the floor. David stood on a circular seal, set into marble in the center of the room.
From behind a curtain his Father wheeled out several large medical machines and devices. Danforth arranged the items around David.
The senator handed his son a red cloak, a sword and a heavy chain with a large seal attached.
Then, from behind, David's father stepped up and drew his son’s weapon. David spun but his hands were full, holding the cloak and sword. He felt like a fool. He'd been played.
Danforth walked around in front of his son. "In the old days, this is where they would talk about honor and loyalty. Back then they used swords, but I'm not going to waste your time.”
Danforth raised the weapon and fired, shooting his son in the chest.
The senator crouched with his son as he fell, “You have to die in order to live.”
David coughed up blood.
“My son, you’re already so much closer to immortality than any of us. You don’t realize it, but Black Willow was Fox’s unit. You served with the finest military unit the Republic has ever had the privilege of forming.”
David coughed up more blood, clearly confused as to how a unit he hardly served with had inspired his father to shoot him in some maudlin melodrama.
The last thing David saw was his half-brother Douglas and several other men rush forward to lift him into the air.
A surgical station was rolled beneath him. His arms and legs were placed in the corresponding slots and the station was activated.
David knew his heart had stopped. These would be his last thoughts, ever.
The men surrounding him stepped back.
The robo-surgeon went to work. It performed over seventy procedures on David's mortally wounded body. First, it cut away and stripped him of his clothes. Then, using its perfectly precise lasers, it unzipped his skin.
The surgical unit worked on the entire body all at once. Over the next few minutes, it repaired all the damage caused by the bullet. Then it moved on to enhancements.
The surgeon used ninety-two different scalpels, made over twenty thousand incisions and set fourteen hundred, twelve clamps. David's limbs were vivisected and his entire blood-supply was completely transfused. His heart, lungs, major and minor organs, including his entire digestive tract, were replaced with improved models.
Two needles pierced each eyeball. They removed old humors and injected new, from left to right, replacing the natural fluid with enriched versions. The needles injected flexible monitors which expanded inside his eyeballs, providing his brain with an optical interface for the wireless bio-mechanical system that were being embedded throughout his musculature.
David’s skin and muscles were treated with a multi-million-dollar terillium cocktail, guaranteed to perform at top proficiency for twenty years in the most hostile environments on earth.
David was awake for the first half of the procedure, before he lost consciousness due to oxygen deprivation. Once brain death occurred, twelve needles pierced David's skull. The surgical unit again flushed his natural fluids and replaced them with a more advanced mixture.
The enhancements to David's physical structure; his nervous system, his musculature, his circulatory system, all reinforced or replaced. His bones and muscles coated and saturated with terillium protein chains designed to withstand violent impact as well as extreme temperatures.
A bit later, the robot zipped David up, firing the final laser stitch only forty-seven seconds after brain death occurred. The young man had been awake for three minutes and six seconds of surgery.
The moment David lost consciousness; the machine began pumping his blood for him, with a mixture of anesthetics, sparing his mind the remaining horrors of the biomechanical upgrade.
The new fluids had dyed his skin a metallic blue-grey, the color of winter, the color of pale death.
The surgeon paused to run its final diagnostic, then twin metal plates whirled out, settled on David's chest and administered a violent jolt of electricity to his new heart.
David's eyes fluttered and he inhaled his first breath with new lungs.
The young man lurched from the station and doubled over in pain as his nervous system came online, experiencing what can only be described as the equivalent of a total-body brain-freeze.
He vomited syrupy blue fluids, tinged with the scent of potent industrial chemicals, into a puddle on the floor.
In the secret lab on District Thirteen, Cedric's machine dinged and revived Governor Maime. She sat up and ripped the rubbery purple goo from over her face, gulping in fresh air. The woman looked alien, darkly-tinted and bald, utterly devoid of brow or lash.
Far across the wide hall, Cedric and Mallus separated corpses: dead citizen some-ones to the left, dead orphan no-ones to the right. Bergstrom’s cyber-reincarnation project would have many new recruits tonight.