"What do we do, J?" V asked for what felt like the hundredth time in the last twenty minutes.
"I'm thinking," J grumbled.
When V had first shown up, missing an arm, impaled by a kitchen knife and practically catatonic, she'd asked that same question with all the fear and desperation of a child lost in a dark forest. But now, after so many lame non-answers, she was aggressively sarcastic and mocking. Like she wanted to fight and was trying to goad J into giving her a reason.
'Can you blame her?' a traitorous part of J's mind piped up.
Indeed, though she still struggled to accept what was happening, J had to admit thiswas entirely on her.
She was the one who chose to conduct the operation before bringing N to heel, purely for the sake of giving him the smallest piece of the pie she could get away with.
She was the one who convinced everyone that prep and recon were a waste of time with this colony of supposed morons.
She was the one who didn't bother to come up with a backup plan, and in fact laughed at the idea of needing one.
Now they were trapped in this funhouse from hell, with an enemy that had the knowledge and means to be a major threat, along with seventeen years worth of motivation to use it.
'How do they know so much?' J thought.
While their defenses would have been more than effective on anyone or anything that tried to take the bunker, they were clearly designed with Disassembly Drones in mind. The toasters knew their regeneration was based on finite resources. They knew how their nanites worked, better than the DDs themselves. They knew what their armor was rated for and what it was made of. They even knew that DDs sucked at multitasking!
'I guess the real question is have they had this info for a while, or is it more recent?'
Though she was loath to give the air-fryers with legs the benefit of the doubt, she didn't think they had just been sitting on this knowledge for years while their friends were torn apart. That left her with only two feasible answers.
Either they had taken advantage of the Moron's kindness and stupidity to con him into giving them Intel, or they had captured him and figured it out for themselves.
Both options enraged the corporate stooge. How dare he sell out his own kind? How dare they take what was hers?!
So far, the only saving grace was that they apparently knew nothing about Alphas. The door that might have been a problem once upon a time was no match for her new strength, making escape an easy matter once she dispatched enough of the zombie drones to get some breathing room. She could only hope that meant R would also be able to handle anything thrown her way.
"What are we gonna d-"
"We need to pray that at least R is still alive, and hopefully B as well, so we can regroup," J interrupted. "Because the two of us alone aren't doing much of anything."
"What about G?" V asked as she worked her newly regrown arm.
"Probably shredded by the same autoguns keeping us from getting back to the entrance," J replied with a grimace, subconsciously rubbing the left side of her face. It had only winged her and the wound had of course healed without a trace, but the memory of nearly getting your head taken off by a .30-caliber API round is the kind of thing that sticks with you.
"You're half right," a monotonous voice called out, startling J and V enough to make them draw their guns, prompting the newcomers to do the same.
"Jesus, don't do that!" J whisper-yelled at R and B as she retracted her weapon.
