Girl Cyborg: A Dystopian Action Adventure Thriller

Getting Cold

Bess and her team picked their way over the debris to where she knew there was the highest probability of survivors near the surface. Without heavy equipment, the first teams on the scene were moving rubble with shovels and their hands. Later, there would be excavators but by the time they arrived it was usually too late to do anything but retrieve bodies.

They were working against time, and asphyxiation in the case of victims trapped without air. Bess's senses were hyper alert to any sign of life in the rubble pile. They pulled survivors out of sections that still stood, walls upright amongst the rubble surrounding them. The first couple of hours were the most fruitful, but the operation continued long after the last rescue.

It turned into a long day of heavy lifting for meagre results, which made Bess feel very grateful. The residents of Bedabun city were used to bombings and this time they had warning. Bess had heard air raid sirens still going off as she arrived. The streets were filled with able-bodied survivors who now found themselves homeless. She tried not to think of it. She had a job to do and the less sorry she felt for these people, the easier it would be to keep calm.

The ethics of man-made disaster were beyond her anyway; something Academy prefects studied, not search and rescue specialists like her. Bess's personal policy, and the policy of most like her, was to save lives first and let the Academy ask questions later. She would pull out an enemy if one got trapped. It was the human thing to do.

Still, sometimes Bess thought the Eurasian Axis acted less interested in destroying military targets, than in making the territory unusable to the New Union States. It was either that or they wanted to scare the locals into changing alliances. As if that could ever happen. Bess shook her head at the incomprehensibility of it all and kept digging.

By the time the sun was fading in the sky, the signal had delivered nine hormone boosts to Bess:

· three for energy

· four for pain relief

· two for morale

None of the search and rescue specialists knew exactly how the signal from Academy net went to a receiver in their bodies and released these hormone cocktails. It was top secret, known only to Academy doctors. All Bess knew was that after hours of digging and searching for survivors her success rate had flat-lined. If it weren't for boosts they would have all been too exhausted to go on.

It had become a twilight recovery job now, with no hope of saving another life. She was shaking with fatigue but the emotional letdown was worse. She craved another morale boost, except requesting more would look bad on her evaluation. Her instructors were always probing, looking for signs of weakness or overdependence. She would just have to hold on a bit longer, despite her melancholy.

Which meant she felt as chipper as a wrung-out washcloth by the time medics signalled their last run. There was nobody left to save, and as far as they knew, no bodies left to take away for burial. Bess resisted the temptation to sit down on a nearby concrete block and close her eyes. Leaders weren't supposed to nap on the job.

Capt. came up behind her and put a heavy hand on her shoulder. "You look like crap."

Bess turned and smiled at him through gritted teeth. "I feel great, Tom."

"That's Capt. to you."

"Sure, I can call you anything you like." She hated the military-sounding nickname he gave himself. "Just don't pretend to be in charge of my mission."

"'Course not. Just looking out for you, little sis." He tried to touch her shoulder again but she stepped back.

She hated the way he joked around as if she were the baby of the family and he was the big brother. She had grown up with plenty of adopted brothers — the Academy was her family — but none of them put her down.