The Vanguard Vixen

One of A kind

Turana leaned back and sighed when she realized the General had probably left the room which meant there was nothing else to listen to. Turana had only before seen Vivian's gun from afar but had never really considered it much different from any other gun. Even the few moments when she had held it that morning she hadn't bothered to understand its limits. Lewis however must have had a lot of time to analyze it, or he was just a very curious person. Turana thought it to be the latter since Lewis had told her he was a journalist before.

The numbers on the note had been coordinates, and they led to where Lewis had stashed the vixen's gun. At the time she found it Turana had failed to understand how Lewis had been able to write down the exact coordinates of the location. It was atop an abandoned structure that looked a lot like someone had dropped a bomb through the roof. The walls were matted with black and most of the walls and pillars were leaning at dangerous angles.

The gun was all by itself except for a tiny blinking red light. On closer scrutiny, she had found that it was a bullet. Attached to it was a small earpiece which she had put into her ear.

It was an audio recording of Lewis. he was breathing hard, so Turana knew he had been running.

"This thing is not a toy Turana. I found it can do a lot more than blow someone's head off. Something's wrong with you, I tried to wake you up but you wouldn't budge."

He must have had to stop to catch his breath then, and there was silence for so long that Turana feared something had happened to him. She knew his weak heart wouldn't be able to handle much strain, especially the kind that involved running away from mercenaries. But Lewis' voice had come through the earpiece once more.

"There are people after me and I can't keep running for long so I have to hide it somewhere. Oh there's a lot more it can do but I think the best functions are coded to her. By the way where is she? You've got to find her, she's the only one that...I am out of time."

The recording ended there. Turana figured she would have the time to explore the gun later, for Lewis was the first and immediate priority. He had told her to find Vivian, who Turana knew was probably halfway to the western border of Vanguard by then. The vixen had left her with a responsibility to protect Lewis and it had taken her not even half a day to lose him to the enemy. For someone that had been cloned from the Vanguard President's bodyguard, Turana had failed big time.

She could have called out to Vivian through this new connection they had but she still couldn't understand it so well, and the last thing she wanted was to fall into another day-long daydream. Also, Turana didn't want Vivian to think that she couldn't handle things on her own. She could almost imagine the emotionless stare from Vivian, which would ironically convey disappointment thick enough to stop a bullet. No, she would handle things on her own.

Finding where Lewis had been put wasn't a problem, as it was the only building protected and surrounded by heavily armed soldiers every few paces. Turana immediately noted there were no mercenaries, but only soldiers. That meant the General was possibly the one that had ordered Lewis' capture. The building had only two floors, whereas all those surrounding were at least a floor higher. There were soldiers, not snipers Turana noted once again on the other buildings. There was no plan for stealth by the General if it came to keeping Lewis.

Turana had stayed well out of their perimeter, looking through the scope of the gun to keep track of things. She saw absolutely no way she could shoot through all of them. No way to take down all the soldiers without putting Lewis in harm's way too. Vivian perhaps would have been able to get through them and back out with Lewis alive, but she wasn't around and Turana had no intentions of calling her. This was something she would figure out on her own.

She watched on, waiting for something, anything that would help when suddenly there was a scuffle on the eastern edge of the perimeter. Someone was trying to get through but the soldiers there weren't letting him. On zooming closer, Turana saw that it was Zhirkov, the guy they had met at the entrance to the dark route. Vivian had told her he had control of most of the mercenaries in the dark route, and that he had agreed to keep them from hurting her and Lewis. Seeing that there were none involved meant he had kept his promise.

She looked down at the bullet Lewis had used to record himself and wondered if there were more somewhere. The gun itself only had normal bullets, at least as normal as they could get for such a gun. She decided to use the same one that Lewis had used. But as she brought it closer to the gun something clicked, and a small compartment slid out from the side of the gun. In it were five other similar bullets. Turana almost put the bullet back in place when she noticed something engraved on the compartment in tiny capital letters. I-TECH.

That alone was enough to make Turana drop the gun and scuttle as far away from it as she could.

 The Great War like all other smaller ones before it had a lull in the fighting when each territory drew back to prepare for the next phase of the battles. The lull lasted a whole year as each dictator rebuilt and improved their arsenal; recruited more ground forces and made open demonstrations of weaponry to scare the enemy. All in all one kind of weapon technology had been focused upon by all territories; artificial intelligence. Mainstream Technology provided the base code to all the territories so they didn't have to start from scratch, adding that it would help reduce human casualties if weapons were automated. At a hefty price, of course, each territory, except Stralia that stayed out of offensive warfare acquired an A.I. By the time the year ended and the fighting began once more ninety percent of the weapons were run remotely by the territory A.Is.

All was as fair as war gets until somehow the AIs of the six territories, which by then included the Amazon territory found a way to network. Rumor was that it was all sabotage from a Stralian hacker, but there was no proof of this, and due to the natural isolation of Stralia they had the advantage of always seeing any missiles sent at them coming, and they had the time and technology to stop them. The word never got out of what happened or exactly how the AIs were stopped, but all four dictators having lost control of their armories to the machines had come together and made a plan, except for an adamant Amazonian leader. Three months after that widely documented and popular conference the entire Amazon territory was destroyed with atomic bombs launched from the other four territories. The entire population was wiped out, the land was inhabitable and the air there unbreathable but somehow so the AI was gone, and the one thing that they all agreed on was to never use AI again.

Having seen a sign that might relate the gun to AI Turana was even wary of being a few feet next to it. She of course hadn't seen the A but it must have been scrubbed off or something like that. Several assumptions started going through her head; what if Vivian was actually under the control of artificial intelligence? Or even worse what if she was a walking manifestation of the dreaded A.I? Before it had been easy to destroy the A.Is probably because they were in metallic cases and were limited to flowing through cables and the wireless network. But being inside a F.O.X soldier was a whole other thing. Vivian had told them herself the only way to kill her was to cut her head off if you could get close enough to do it. It had been a matter of fact and they had had a laugh about it, but thinking on it now Turana didn't find it funny. Not to mention the vixen had the memory chip with her, the one that gave the holder power over the whole planet from its data.

Before she could act on her impulse to crash and break the gun she felt herself being pulled into another flash of memory.

No, not now!

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