Dex Warrior (Libertas Online)

33: Flight of the Shield

A-ee-den...

A shocking pain explodes from the base of my skull, arcing down my spine and igniting a wildfire in my brain. From living in a world of black, everything comes back in a flash of bright light. I can feel my limbs again, move them, and I remember what just happened. Felix happened. He's hellbent on threatening everyones lives in exchange for a life free from Libertas and the Shield, and a life beside Rin again. I couldn't change his mind, and he's armed.

Taking in my surroundings, I realize that I'm back on the table in the operating room, and both April and the scruffy surgeon are standing over me. He's holding a tablet, and I can see the worry on their faces wipe clean as I try to sit up slowly.

"Aiden! Thank the heavens!" April says. She pats the other doctor on the back with a sigh of relief, then tells him, "Well done."

I reach for my head to rub the headache from my temples, but realize it's pointless when I don't have any tissue to massage. My next human reaction is to run my hand down my face and rub my eyes, another pointless thing in this metal body. The fact that I have a headache is strange to me, now that I think about it. I can't have an old school disc-and-platter style hard drive in my brain, it would be too fragile, but the discomfort I'm having tells me something isn't quite right. Maybe it's something programmed into this body to give me feedback.

"Take it easy, Aiden. You took a nasty blow to the head," the surgeon says. "After I got to the stasis pods like you said, I had a bad feeling that you'd run into trouble. You're lucky I did. I called April here, and we had to re-map a part of your brain that had suffered some corruption. I guess it's a good thing you took that bonk, it shut down your systems before the insatiability caused a complete collapse on its own. You should be better now, we took more data from your organic brain, but you're far from perfect."

"Thank you, sir," I say.

The squat, bearded doctor smiles. "Please. My name is Richard. Also, I've taken a quick minute to make some small adjustments to your neural processing. You should feel a bit more limber, senses sharper, but don't think you're invincible just because you're piloting a mecha."

I laugh at the unexpected joke, then smile at Richard. "I should have expected that the tech-surgeon working on my robot body would be an anime guy."

"Hey," Richard says, holding out his palms. "You're not the only person with a lot of free time. Well..." His demeanor straightens. "Maybe not now. We should get to business. What do you know about the mutineers?"

"Enough, I think, to know that there's no way to change their minds. There's two of them; Felix Brandt and Alloy... Something. I never learned his last name. But the most important thing is that Felix is armed with a 3d printed gun, and I wouldn't be surprised if Alloy has one, too. Plus, they've got their hands on the ship's radioactive fuel."

April nods solemnly. "That's not the worst of it, Aiden. You've been out for a few hours and things have gone sour. Felix is in the bridge with the pilot and Captain Royal, holding them at gunpoint, and theirs no way to get to them. Felix opened the canister containing the plutonium and dropped it in the security chamber that connects the cockpit to the rest of the ship. Now the only way in and out of the bridge is highly radioactive. Exposure for a few seconds would result in radiation poisoning and sickness. A few minutes would kill. Not to mention, if the rod is damaged there's a chance it can't be used again."

"What a waste of fuel..." I murmur, thinking back to what Felix had said about the ship's limited resources. "Don't we have hazmat suits to get through with?"

"We did. Right before Felix took a knife and cut holes in all of them but his. Which is why I, begrudgingly, agreed with Richard here to repair and wake you up. We need you, Aiden."