Around her many of the lean-tos and cargo containers had been repaired since the bioweapon attack, though there were still countless heaps of debris between them, marking the sites of former homes. 3D-printing drones sifted through the ruins, occasionally recovering dead bodies, but otherwise the small flying machines processed the debris into sheets of metal for the humans, cyborgs and robots to use in the construction of new lean-tos or to repair the more intact ones. In theory, the drones could have printed the cargo containers and so forth entirely from scratch, but complicated designs required a lot more time to form; a much faster throughput could be achieved by printing simple sheets and sharing the workload with more prehensile entities.
Dead Hydras were still scattered throughout the city. Groups of people and machines towed the corpses to different piles where they awaited burning. Early on, someone discovered the creatures were edible—which wasn’t surprising, given they were crafted from the DNA of many animals—and large chunks of meat had been cut away to feed the masses. Some of the more enterprising individuals had drained the blood and converted it to water for resale as well. But otherwise the carcasses were too big to put on ice, considering how few storage facilities remained intact within the settlement, and the remaining meat was quickly going bad. Hence the need for burning.
The makeshift pyres rarely reached a heat high enough to turn the bones to ash, and some people used them to create foundations for new lean-tos and other buildings, while the remainder were discarded in the Outlands. A few of the more twisted inhabitants had cut off the heads of several bioweapons and impaled them on flagpole-style pikes outside the rebuilt Texas barriers as a warning to any other creatures that might come this way. Rhea doubted it would have any effect if more Hydras arrived—in fact, it would probably only enrage them—but the gruesome displays certainly seemed to boost settlement morale.
Rhea passed a Hydra corpse that was lying next to the path. At that very moment a man was chopping off one of its multiple heads. He carried a rather large laser cutter, and his corded forearms were currently steeped in blood. He was a Robo, judging from the extra pair of robotic limbs he sported.
“You know, I’m still pissed that I missed the battle of the century,” Brinks said. “I had to watch what went down here on the streaming networks, and I couldn’t do a thing. I felt so useless. I would’ve hopped onto the first flight to Rust Town, but I knew I’d never arrive in time.” Brinks was from Stables, a settlement in the Midwest. The Wardenite was rather short and squat, with a wattle of skin dangling beneath his chin; Rhea doubted he would have held up very well when the bioweapons had come. But while his fighting capabilities might not be up to par, he was loyal to a fault.
“Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll get your chance to fight again.” Will nodded at Rhea. “Hang around her long enough, you’ll see.”
“She has a propensity to attract trouble,” Horatio agreed.
“I do not,” Rhea said.
“I’m telling you, if I had been here, what that dude is doing to the dead Hydra, I’d be doing to a live one,” Brinks bragged.
“What, mating with it?” Chuck quipped. The barrel-chested man had no neck—or rather, it was consumed by his enormous trapezius muscles, making it almost look like his chiseled face was directly attached to the torso. His low body fat gave his face a gaunt appearance, while it made the rest of his body appear substantially ripped. Rhea had caught a glimpse of Chuck shirtless one time, and she very much liked what she saw. He used some kind of performance enhancing drugs to maintain that physique with no physical effort on his part. At least she assumed so, because she never saw him exercising. The heavy AR lenses he wore magnified his eyes, reminding Rhea of Bardain, her former mentor who had died trying to protect her during the bioweapon attack.
Brinks rolled his eyes. “No. Killing it, bro.”
“Don’t call me bro, Stick Arms,” Chuck said. That was basically what Chuck called everyone else, as very few had biceps to match him. Excerpt Rhea of course. He called her Warden.
“You talk a good talk,” Miles told Brinks. “But I wonder how you’d act if the bioweapons truly attacked again. Would you run or would you hide?” Miles was an albino, and his extremely pale skin burned badly when exposed to sunlight. As such, he was always seen wearing a wide-brimmed hat. That pallid skin, combined with the thin nose, big eyes and round face made him look very much like a mouse to Rhea. But perhaps his most glaring feature was the dark sphere protruding above the hat he wore: Miles was an Orber, one of those people who carried an orb camera permanently attached to the head, giving him three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision.
“I’d neither run nor hide,” Brinks intoned, raising his chin ever so slightly. “I’d fight, of course.”
Miles laughed, and cracks formed along the smile lines of the albino’s face. “So you say. If by ‘fight’ you mean launching a few energy attacks from the air while you sit safe and cozy in a flyer beyond their reach, then maybe I can see it.”
“What I’m wondering is how that Robo is able to cut off the head at all.” Chuck nodded at the man sitting astride the Hydra’s neck with the laser cutter. “He’s using an energy weapon. I thought these Hydras were supposed to absorb energy.”
“Certain forms, yes,” Horatio told him. “But when they die, their dermis cells lose the ability to absorb attacks. At
