F-Rank
Fear is useful right up until your body decides to become creative with it.
My mind knew there were three coyote hybrids walking toward me.
My rabbit nervous system knew there were three predators.
Those were not the same conclusion.
My hands shook so badly that the end of Dad's staff rattled faintly against the limestone beside me. My breathing had gone shallow. Every muscle in my legs screamed the same command with an urgency no conscious thought could match.
Run.
Not retreat.
Not reposition.
Run.
Turn around, abandon the equipment, forget the spiders, forget the plan, forget pride, forget everything except putting distance between teeth and flesh.
I hated it.
I hated the ears hidden beneath my hood. I hated my weak legs. I hated the heart hammering inside my chest as if I had already started sprinting. More than anything, I hated discovering that the doctors had been telling the truth about prey reflexes.
The largest coyote kept approaching at an easy pace. He could smell what I was. All three of them could. I understood that from the way their posture had changed. Shoulders loose. No urgency. No caution.
They weren't approaching an unknown traveler anymore.
They were approaching dinner.
The woman shifted the long object from her shoulder. Not a rifle. A length of steel pipe with cloth wrapped around one end as a grip. Crude, heavy, perfectly capable of breaking my bones.
The third coyote was younger than the others. Male. Thin. Gray-brown fur covered his forearms and climbed along the sides of his face. He kept looking from me to the others with an expression I had seen on Kira before meals.
I forced air into my lungs.
Once.
Again.
Leona: "Think."
My voice barely carried.
The rabbit wanted to flee downhill.
Leona Voss wanted to know the terrain.
Three predators. Faster than me. Stronger than me. Better senses. One improvised weapon. Unknown additional weapons. I had no useful combat training and a body that would lose a wrestling match with a determined kitchen chair.
Running was not an option.
That simplified things.
The panic didn't disappear. It just gained walls.
I lowered myself behind the limestone shelf enough that the coyotes couldn't see my hands clearly and pulled the tablet from beneath the poncho. My fingers slipped across the screen on the first attempt.
Leona: "Come on."
I opened the spider-control interface.
Six units.
Three ahead and three behind or carrying equipment.
I didn't have time to write anything elegant.
Good.
Elegant code is what you write when nobody is trying to eat you.
I opened the behavioral layer and started adding a crude routine.
Movement burst for distraction.
Random interval.
Two to seven seconds.
Random direction within designated radius.
Maximum acceleration.
Use terrain concealment whenever possible.
No lights.
No audio.
Do not approach directly until secondary command.
I hesitated.
Then added another behavior.
COMBAT ASSIST: TARGET LOWER LIMBS.
The spiders weren't weapons.
Not really.
Their manipulators were meant for screws, cable bundles, inspection panels and retrieving objects from machinery.
But several carried maintenance probes.
Thin hardened steel.
Pointed.
I had spent years building robots capable of getting tools into difficult places.
A coyote's calf counted as a difficult place.
I added a second instruction.
On command, converge from blind angles.
Strike knees, ankles, Achilles region.
Withdraw immediately.
Repeat at random intervals.
The programming was ugly enough that Dad would have made a face at it.
It would work.
Probably.
I saved it.
The coyote woman was close enough now that I could hear her sniff.
Coyote Woman: "Little thing's scared."
The younger male laughed.
Young Coyote: "Can smell it."
I wanted to throw up.
My new biology was betraying me down to the scent.
The large male looked at my poncho, then the staff.
Large Coyote: "You lost?"
I didn't answer.
He smiled.
Large Coyote: "Collar somewhere?"
There it was.
He already knew.
Rabbit. Small. Alone.
Domestic.
The assumptions followed automatically.
The woman moved to my left. The younger male drifted right.
Spreading out.
Not surrounding me yet.
Preparing to.
Coyote Woman: "Maybe she slipped a farm."
Young Coyote: "Dwarf."
The large male tilted his head.
Large Coyote: "Yeah."
He looked me over slowly.
He didn't say eat.
He didn't need to.
People imagine predators announcing things because stories like clarity.
Reality is usually quieter.
A glance between them.
A tongue across teeth.
A question about ownership.
That was enough.
I locked the tablet.
Then another idea occurred to me.
I reopened it, selected the three spiders carrying auxiliary equipment and ordered them to drop everything at my current position.
The little machines released the bags.
Good.
I shrugged off my backpack.
That hurt.
Leaving equipment behind felt almost physically offensive.
But fighting while carrying ten percent of my body weight in electronics was stupid.
Laptop included.
I set the bag behind the limestone shelf.
If I survived, I would retrieve it.
If I didn't, losing the laptop would be among my smaller problems.
I slipped the tablet into a front pouch where I could reach it with one hand.
Then I stood.
My legs were trembling.
The coyotes saw.
The young one grinned.
Young Coyote: "Look at that."
The rabbit in me screamed.
I tightened my grip on Dad's staff until my fingers hurt.
Leona: "You should leave."
That made them laugh.
Not loudly.
Worse.
The casual laughter of people who had already decided nothing I did mattered.
The woman tapped the steel pipe against her palm.
Coyote Woman: "Listen to her."
The large male stepped closer.
Twenty meters.
Large Coyote: "Where's your owner, rabbit?"
My hands stopped shaking.
Not completely.
Enough.
Leona: "Don't have one."
He smiled wider.
Large Coyote: "Everybody's got somebody."
Fifteen meters.
Spider Two moved through grass behind him.
He didn't notice.
Ten.
My tablet vibrated once.
All six drones in position.
The large male extended one hand.
Not attacking.
Reaching.
That insulted me more than an attack would have.
He expected to simply grab me.
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I let him get closer.
Five meters.
Three.
The coyote woman frowned.
Maybe she saw something in my posture.
Maybe the staff stopped looking decorative.
Coyote Woman: "Careful."
The large male glanced toward her.
That was when I triggered the first routine.
Six spiders moved at once.
Not toward the coyotes.
Away.
Fast.
Grass exploded in three directions.
A metallic blur shot across the woman's peripheral vision. Another crossed behind the young male. Two more scrambled over stone with claws clicking loudly enough to sound much larger than they were.
All three coyotes turned instinctively.
Predators have reflexes too.
Mine just happened to be more humiliating.
I stepped forward.
Dad had taught me staff work once.
Not combat.
Walking-stick leverage. Moving objects. Breaking stubborn fittings loose. Using your whole body instead of your wrists.
Turns out knees don't care why you understand leverage.
I swung low.
The metal staff struck the side of the large male's knee with everything my tiny body could generate.
I felt the impact through both arms.
He shouted.
Not enough.
I hit the same spot again.
No mercy.
That mattered.
A stronger person could afford warning blows.
I couldn't.
If one of them got both hands on me, the fight ended.
So I struck the knee a third time.
Something shifted wrong.
The coyote collapsed sideways with a scream.
The woman reacted first.
Fast.
Far too fast.
The steel pipe came across horizontally.
I ducked because every prey reflex in my body had already thrown me downward before conscious thought caught up.
For once, I thanked the rabbit.
The pipe passed over my head.
I drove the end of the staff into her abdomen.
She grunted.
Barely.
Bad choice.
Too much muscle.
I changed target.
Throat.
She saw it coming and caught the staff.
That was worse.
Her hand closed around the aluminum shaft.
I pulled.
Nothing.
She was vastly stronger.
Her lips peeled back from her teeth.
Coyote Woman: "Got you."
I released the staff.
Her expression changed.
She hadn't expected that.
Neither had I, until the instant I did it.
I hit the tablet through the poncho.
Combat assist.
The spiders converged.
Spider Five came from behind her right leg and drove its maintenance probe into the soft tissue behind the knee.
The woman's leg buckled.
She screamed and looked down.
Spider Three hit the opposite ankle.
The probe wasn't long enough to cripple her, but it didn't need to be.
Pain changes priorities.
I jumped for the staff.
The young coyote intercepted me.
He hit me with his shoulder.
The world vanished sideways.
I struck the ground hard enough to empty my lungs.
Armor plate scraped limestone.
Something snapped near my ribs.
For half a second I thought it was bone.
Then I realized one of the outer spikes had broken.
My body panicked completely.
I scrambled backward on hands and feet.
The young coyote was already above me.
Huge.
That was how he looked from the ground.
Not human-sized.
Huge.
Teeth.
Hands.
Predator smell flooding my new senses.
My legs tried to kick uselessly.
He reached down.
I grabbed the nearest thing available.
A broken armor spike.
I drove it into his forearm.
He jerked back with a howl.
I stabbed again.
Not deep.
Didn't matter.
He wasn't expecting prey to stab him.
That bought half a second.
I rolled.
His hand closed on the back of my poncho instead of my neck.
The fabric tightened.
He lifted.
My feet left the ground.
Everything inside me became terror.
Young Coyote: "Got the little bitch!"
I twisted.
The poncho tore against one of the armor spikes.
Exactly why I'd made it loose.
I dropped out of it.
He was left holding cloth.
I hit the ground again, rolled badly and came up on one knee.
The coyote woman had pulled Spider Five from her leg and thrown it against a rock.
My tablet flashed.
UNIT 5: MOBILITY FAILURE.
Anger hit harder than fear.
Leona: "You bitch."
She looked toward me.
Good.
I triggered the spiders again.
Random movement.
The remaining five scattered.
Her attention followed them.
I ran three steps, grabbed Dad's staff from where she'd dropped it and swung upward into her wrist.
The steel pipe fell.
I hit the wrist again.
Then her knee.
Then the inside of the ankle.
Weak points.
No chest.
No shoulders.
No skull unless I had to.
Places where strength mattered less.
She snarled and swiped at me.
Claws caught the armor across my shoulder.
Metal shrieked.
I spun away.
The claws didn't reach flesh.
The armor worked.
My ridiculous fucking armor worked.
The large male was getting up.
His right leg wouldn't take weight properly, but he was furious enough not to care.
Three opponents again.
No.
Think.
One injured knee.
One stabbed knee and damaged wrist.
One forearm wound.
Still three.
Still stronger.
The large male lunged awkwardly.
I stepped sideways and stabbed the staff between his legs at knee height.
Not elegant.
He tripped over it.
His body hit the ground.
I brought the staff down across the back of the same damaged knee.
He screamed.
I hit it again.
Large Coyote: "STOP!"
I didn't.
One more.
Then I moved away.
That was probably the moment I understood something unpleasant about myself.
I wasn't brave.
Brave people overcome fear.
I was still terrified.
I could barely breathe.
My hands were numb.
My legs wanted to flee so badly they twitched between strikes.
I simply hated the idea of being helpless.
That hatred turned out to be useful.
The large male heard his own shout echo across the hillside and seemed almost surprised by it. Stop. As though the rules had changed only when he became the one on the ground. As though three people surrounding a one-meter rabbit in the dark had been perfectly reasonable until the rabbit started breaking knees.
I backed away from him, chest heaving. My arms already felt heavy. The staff trembled in my grip from exhaustion rather than fear now, although there was plenty of that left too. My tablet showed four spiders fully mobile, one limping and Spider Five almost completely disabled near the rocks. The coyote woman was favoring her right leg. The younger male had blood running down one forearm and wasn't putting his full weight on one ankle. The large one was worse. His knee was finished.
I should have run.
Every rational part of me wanted to.
Then the woman looked at the large male.
He looked at her.
No words.
They didn't need them.
The woman reached slowly toward the steel pipe.
The young coyote began moving to my side again.
And I understood.
They weren't done.
Maybe pride wouldn't let them be done. Maybe hunger. Maybe they knew that if I reached a road and found Authority personnel, three feral predators attacking a registered Domestic could bring hunters into their territory. Maybe they simply couldn't accept that something they had already categorized as prey had hurt them.
Whatever the reason, they had made the same calculation I had.
Nobody could safely walk away while the other side remained capable of following.
My stomach turned.
Leona: "Don't."
The woman closed her fingers around the pipe.
Coyote Woman: "You should've run when you had the chance."
I almost laughed.
Leona: "I tried telling you that first."
The young male came from my right.
The woman from the front.
The large male began dragging himself toward my backpack.
My laptop.
My identification.
Everything.
I moved toward him instinctively.
Wrong.
The woman had been waiting for that.
Her steel pipe smashed into the staff halfway down its length.
Metal rang through the night.
The impact tore it from my numb fingers. Dad's old walking staff spun into the brush and vanished somewhere downhill.
I stared after it.
For perhaps half a second, something stupid inside me cared more about losing Dad's staff than about the predators trying to kill me.
The woman swung again.
I threw myself backward.
The pipe clipped the edge of my breastplate and sent me sprawling. My head struck dirt. Not stone, thankfully. The world flashed white anyway.
The young coyote lunged.
Spider Three hit his ankle.
He kicked it away.
Spider Two went for the other leg.
He stomped.
Metal cracked.
The signal vanished from my tablet.
Two down.
Young Coyote: "Fucking toys!"
He came after me.
I crawled backward, searching blindly with one hand.
Rock.
Grass.
Another rock.
My fingers closed around fist-sized limestone.
Useless.
Then another memory arrived.
Dad again.
Not combat.
Of course not combat.
A summer afternoon years ago, clearing brush near the creek. Dad showing me how people had made simple tools long before factories existed. Levers. Slings. Weighted ropes. How velocity often mattered more than strength. How putting weight at the end of something flexible let a weak arm produce a surprisingly violent impact.
Mechanics.
Always mechanics.
I grabbed the torn section of my poncho still hanging from the armor.
The young coyote slowed.
He saw me pulling fabric loose and smiled.
Young Coyote: "What are you doing?"
Good question.
I ripped the cloth free.
The fire-resistant material was tough. About half a meter long after the tear.
I shoved one stone into it.
Then another.
Wrapped.
Twisted.
Improvised weighted flail.
Primitive.
Ugly.
Wonderful.
The young coyote laughed.
Young Coyote: "Seriously?"
I stood.
My legs nearly folded.
I made them stay.
The weighted cloth hung from my right hand.
Maybe two kilograms.
For my new body, heavy.
Too heavy to hold out.
I didn't need to hold it.
I needed to swing it.
Leona: "Come closer."
That stopped the laugh.
He did.
Predators have pride.
Useful design flaw.
I started the stones moving beside me in a low circle. Slowly at first. My shoulder complained. Then faster. The cloth tightened under centrifugal force.
The young coyote hesitated.
Too late.
I stepped into the rotation and let the weight travel.
The stones struck the side of his knee.
The sound was different from the staff.
Duller.
He screamed and collapsed.
I almost lost the weapon from the rebound. My weak fingers barely held on.
The coyote woman charged before I could recover.
Pipe raised.
I ducked the first swing. The second clipped my hood and sent one rabbit ear painfully sideways. She tried to kick me.
That was her mistake.
Her injured leg became the supporting leg.
I swung low.
The stones struck her damaged knee.
She dropped with a snarl.
I kept the rotation going.
Once.
Twice.
The third circle came higher.
She raised an arm.
The stones hit the forearm instead of her head.
Something broke.
She screamed.
The pipe fell.
My mind went blank.
Not from panic.
From decision.
If she stood again, she would kill me.
If the young male stood again, he would kill me.
If the large male recovered enough to crawl to his companions, maybe all three would hunt me the moment I turned my back.
There was no Authority patrol coming.
No hospital nearby.
No stronger person about to step between us.
Just me.
That was the terrible freedom of being alone.
Nobody else could make the choice.
Coyote Woman: "Wait."
I stopped the stones.
She was on one knee, one arm hanging badly, blood dark against the fur along her leg.
Her eyes finally looked afraid.
I'd wanted that earlier.
Now I hated it.
Coyote Woman: "We're done."
I believed that she believed it.
Right then.
But I looked at her teeth.
Her good arm.
Her size.
Then at my own hands.
If I turned around and she changed her mind thirty seconds later, there would be no second fight.
I was already running on whatever came after adrenaline.
Leona: "You were going to eat me."
She swallowed.
Coyote Woman: "We didn't."
Leona: "Because I stopped you."
The young male groaned behind me.
The woman's eyes flicked toward him.
There.
Not surrender.
Calculation.
I recognized it because I had been doing the same thing all night.
I swung.
This time I aimed for the head.
The stones connected.
She fell.
She tried to rise.
I swung again.
After the second impact she stopped trying.
I stood over her, breathing so hard my vision pulsed.
For one horrible second I expected her to move.
She didn't.
The young male screamed something and came at me on one functional leg.
Not words I remember.
Maybe I never heard them properly.
I turned and swung badly.
He caught the cloth.
His hand closed around it.
He yanked.
I flew forward.
He grabbed my shoulder.
The armor spike entered his palm.
He howled and released me.
I didn't release the cloth.
He still had it tangled around his other hand.
So I ran around him.
Not away.
Around.
The weighted end wrapped behind his legs.
I pulled with everything I had.
He toppled.
His head struck limestone.
Hard.
He lay stunned.
I climbed onto his back before he could recover and wrapped the cloth around his throat.
That wasn't engineering.
That was desperation.
He was stronger even injured.
His hands clawed at the fabric. He rolled, nearly crushing me beneath him. One elbow hit my ribs and something inside my armor hurt sharply enough that I screamed.
I held on.
My whole body was too weak to overpower him.
So I didn't try.
I braced both feet against the back of his shoulders, leaned away and used my legs, back and the cloth together.
Leverage.
He bucked.
My arms burned.
The fabric cut into my palms.
One of his hands caught my ankle.
My rabbit body detonated into panic again.
I pulled harder.
His grip weakened.
Then disappeared.
I kept pulling.
Longer than I needed to.
Because I didn't know how long I needed to.
Eventually I realized he wasn't moving.
I released the cloth and rolled away from him.
I lay on my back staring at the stars.
My chest rose and fell too fast.
The moon looked absurdly peaceful.
Then one of my spiders chirped an alert.
Movement.
I sat up so quickly I nearly blacked out.
The large male.
Still alive.
He had crawled to my backpack.
One hand was inside it.
For half a heartbeat, I thought he was stealing something.
Then I saw the knife.
I'd packed it in the utility pouch.
My knife.
He had found it.
Of course he had.
He rolled onto his good side, knife in hand.
Large Coyote: "Come here, rabbit."
His voice barely worked.
I looked at the woman.
Still.
The young male.
Still.
Then back to him.
Leona: "No."
He laughed weakly.
Large Coyote: "Scared?"
Yes.
Incredibly.
My entire body felt constructed from fear by then.
I picked up the weighted cloth.
The stones inside were slick with dirt.
Leona: "Very."
He stared.
I began swinging it again.
Slow circles.
My shoulder screamed.
My wrists screamed.
My legs were barely supporting me.
The large coyote tried to stand.
His destroyed knee folded immediately.
He caught himself with one hand and raised the knife with the other.
Large Coyote: "I'll gut you."
I believed him.
That made what came next easier.
He lunged from his knee when I entered range.
The knife passed through the outer edge of my poncho.
I stepped sideways.
Swing.
The stones hit his wrist.
The knife fell.
Swing again.
Shoulder.
He toppled.
He reached for me.
I moved behind him.
The third strike landed at the base of the skull.
He dropped flat.
I stood there.
Waiting.
He groaned.
Still alive.
My stomach twisted again.
There is nothing heroic about killing someone who is already on the ground.
People like to imagine survival as a clean moment. A decisive blow. A threat defeated in a way that lets everyone preserve whatever image of themselves they had before the fight.
Reality did not care about my self-image.
He was stronger than me.
If he recovered, I died.
So I hit him again.
Then once more.
He stopped moving.
I kept the stones raised.
Ten seconds.
Twenty.
Nothing.
The only sounds left were wind, insects and my own ragged breathing.
I dropped the weapon.
My knees followed.
I sat in the dirt between three bodies.
For a while, I didn't feel proud. I didn't feel guilty either.
I felt empty.
Then the shaking returned.
Violent this time.
My teeth clicked. My ears had escaped the hood during the fight and stood rigid above my white hair, tracking every tiny sound on the hillside as if more predators might materialize from the rocks.
I looked at the woman.
Dead.
The younger male.
Dead.
The large one.
Dead.
Three people had decided I was food.
Now they weren't alive.
That equation was so simple it frightened me.
I crawled toward Spider Two first.
Crushed. Camera gone. Main chassis bent.
Not repairable in the field.
Leona: "Fuck."
My voice cracked.
Spider Five was damaged but salvageable. Spider One had lost a leg. Three and Four were functional. Six still carried equipment and had somehow escaped the entire fight without damage.
Of course Six had.
Lazy bastard.
I found Dad's staff after several minutes of searching.
Bent.
Not destroyed.
The sight of it nearly made me cry harder than the bodies had.
I dragged everything together near the limestone shelf.
Backpack. Tablet. Staff. Broken spiders. Improvised weapon.
Me.
I sat against the rock and inspected myself.
Bruised ribs.
Claw marks across armor.
One ear hurting badly.
Raw palms.
Several cuts.
Nothing obviously broken.
The armor had saved my life at least twice.
The spiders had saved it more.
The stupid cloth full of rocks had finished the job.
I looked at that last weapon.
A torn piece of clothing.
Two stones.
Humanity had invented railguns, drones, hybrid soldiers and genetic reconstruction.
Apparently sometimes the correct answer was still put rocks in cloth and hit the problem.
Dad would have loved that.
That thought finally broke the tension.
I laughed.
A small exhausted sound at first.
Then again.
I looked at the bodies.
Three coyote hybrids.
Predators.
Stronger.
Faster.
Built to kill.
Then down at myself.
One meter tall.
White-haired.
Red-eyed.
Rabbit ears.
My arms were shaking so badly I couldn't lift the water bottle on the first attempt.
The Authority had examined this body and assigned it the lowest threat rating available.
I pulled the bottle free with both hands and drank.
Water ran down my chin.
I didn't care.
Leona: "F-Rank."
I started laughing again.
The sound echoed faintly off the limestone.
Leona: "Harmless."
I nudged the large coyote's dropped knife with the end of my bent staff.
Leona: "Nearly harmless."
That one made me laugh hard enough that my ribs hurt.
I had to stop.
I sat there beneath the moon with blood on my armor, two broken drones at my feet and three dead predators cooling in the grass.
Exhausted beyond anything I had ever experienced.
Terrified.
Hurting.
Probably going into shock.
And beneath all of that, buried somewhere warm and stubborn in my chest, I felt something I hadn't felt since the truck hit me.
Pride.
Not because I'd killed them.
Because they had been stronger than me.
Because my body had screamed prey at me every second of the fight.
Because the law had looked at everything I was and decided the correct word was harmless.
And I had survived anyway.
I leaned my head against the rock, smiling despite myself.
Leona: "Fucking F-Rank."
The surviving spiders watched me in silence.
For once, I decided they were probably impressed.