Danger Rank
Danger Rank was supposed to answer a simple question:
How dangerous is this person?
Naturally, humanity had managed to turn that simple question into a letter.
The Global Hybrid Classification Authority used seven recognized ranks, from F to S. The rating wasn't supposed to measure morality, intelligence, political importance or Civic Classification. It measured physical threat, theoretically based on what an individual could realistically do under normal circumstances.
That last phrase carried a lot of weight.
Normal circumstances.
An F-Rank was considered harmless or nearly harmless. Children, fragile Domestic lines, small hybrids, people with severe physical limitations. If an F-Rank attacked an ordinary healthy adult, the expectation was that the ordinary healthy adult would probably win.
I had decided that F stood for Fuck Rank.
As in:
Fuck you.
Fuck your database.
Fuck whoever decided I was harmless.
E-Rank meant low threat. Someone capable of hurting another person but unlikely to overpower trained resistance. A small canine hybrid, perhaps. Someone with claws but little strength. Dangerous if you were unlucky, drunk or stupid, but one competent police officer was usually enough.
D-Rank was where things became serious. Moderate threat. Strong hybrids, dangerous natural weapons, enhanced senses, minor regeneration. A D-Rank could kill an ordinary human under the right circumstances. Police didn't necessarily need specialized equipment, but nobody sensible treated the arrest like routine paperwork.
C-Rank was the first category I personally considered properly dangerous.
One C-Rank predator could reliably kill ordinary people.
Coyotes often lived there.
Wolves too, depending on build. Large feline hybrids. Some reptilians. Military-trained Civil hybrids without particularly exotic biology. A C-Rank could cross a room faster than most humans expected, break bones, tear open flesh and continue fighting through injuries that would stop someone unmodified.
Against an ordinary civilian, C-Rank meant run.
Against armed police, C-Rank meant bring friends.
Against me, according to the Authority, C-Rank should have meant meal.
There had been three of them.
I had some objections to the model.
B-Rank was different.
B stood for lethal, and the people designing the classification actually meant it. A B-Rank didn't merely have the ability to kill someone. Most humans had that ability if you gave them a knife and poor judgment. B-Ranks possessed reliable killing power as part of their bodies.
Mom had been B-Rank as a lamia.
That was a useful example.
Elara Voss baked pies, grew vegetables and once cried because she accidentally stepped on a beetle.
Elara Voss could also wrap several meters of muscle around a grown man and reduce his ribcage to an anatomical disagreement.
Both things were true.
A B-Rank loose in a crowd and actively trying to kill people could create a serious casualty event before ordinary security stopped them. Police wanted rifles. Response teams wanted preparation. Everyone wanted distance.
Then came A.
A-Rank was where the word person began sharing space with words such as containment protocol.
An A-Rank might possess extreme regeneration, biological armor, powerful venom, heavy natural weapons or enough raw strength to turn ordinary security measures into decoration. Arresting one generally required specialized teams, specialized ammunition, armored vehicles or weapons selected specifically for that hybrid's biology.
You did not send two deputies to knock on an A-Rank's door because someone had filed a noise complaint.
Well, you could.
It simply became an excellent way to create two job openings.
Then there was S-Rank.
Catastrophic.
I had only ever seen a few credible recordings of S-Rank incidents before my life became complicated enough to redefine the term.
S wasn't very strong A.
It was the point where ordinary military and security forces could reasonably fail.
One S-Rank hybrid could cause mass casualties. Tear through reinforced positions. Survive weapons intended to stop armored vehicles. Destroy infrastructure quickly enough that evacuation became more important than defeating them. Some could regenerate through catastrophic injury. Some carried biological abilities capable of killing dozens or hundreds without physically reaching them.
The precise upper limit was intentionally vague.
Nobody wanted an S-plus category.
The government disliked admitting that the alphabet could run out before the monsters did.
Of course, Danger Rank had one enormous weakness.
It measured the body.
It was much worse at measuring what somebody did with it.
Give an F-Rank rabbit nothing and put her against three C-Rank coyotes, and the mathematics looked straightforward.
Give the same rabbit six drones, homemade armor, terrain, a metal staff, several years of engineering experience and enough fear to remove any interest she might have had in fighting fairly?
Apparently the mathematics became negotiable.
By the time I left that hillside, three coyotes were dead.
The F-Rank was walking west.
I considered submitting a correction to the Authority.
Walking turned out to be generous terminology.
For perhaps the first twenty minutes, I limped.
Then I staggered.
Then I discovered an exciting third method of locomotion somewhere between the two.
Everything hurt.
My ribs were bruised badly enough that deep breaths had become a negotiation. One shoulder screamed whenever I raised my arm. My palms were torn where the weighted cloth had cut into them, and one knee had swollen from hitting the ground repeatedly. My right ear hurt near the base. The armor had done its job, but several plates were bent and two spikes were gone entirely.
Dad's staff was bent too.
I had found it in the brush after the fight. The shaft had developed a slight curve near the center.
I kept it anyway.
Partly because it was useful.
Mostly because it was Dad's.
Spider Five rode strapped across the top of my backpack like an injured mechanical passenger. Two of its legs were useless and part of the chassis had cracked. Spider Two was worse. Its central frame had been crushed badly enough that the processor no longer responded.
I carried that one too.
Weight limits could complain later.
For the first kilometer, I checked behind myself every few minutes.
Nothing followed.
The coyotes remained where I'd left them.
I tried not to think too hard about that.
Killing them had felt necessary during the fight. It still felt necessary afterward. Those two facts did not magically make three bodies easy to remember.
I had killed people.
Feral predators who intended to kill and eat me, yes.
Still people.
I expected guilt to arrive dramatically.
Instead my brain mostly produced:
Your left ankle is hurting.
Spider Five needs a new actuator.
You lost seventeen percent battery charge during combat.
There is blood on your sleeve.
Trauma, I later learned, has terrible priorities.
The emotional breakdown arrived eventually.
It simply missed its appointment by several hours.
That night, survival remained in charge.
I moved southwest beneath the moon.
The terrain became rougher as I left the open pasture country. Limestone pushed through shallow soil in pale broken shelves. Cedar crowded narrow slopes. Dry creek beds cut through the hills, still holding occasional pockets of water from the storm.
My spiders went first.
Always.
The four healthy units spread ahead in a staggered reconnaissance pattern while Spider One limped behind them on seven functional legs. Their thermal cameras searched every patch of brush before I entered it.
That felt different now.
Before the coyotes, reconnaissance had been caution.
Afterward, it became religion.
Every ridge was checked before I climbed it.
Every abandoned structure got a full perimeter scan.
Every heat signature received distance, direction and size estimates before I continued.
A deer nearly killed me through embarrassment.
Spider Four detected a large warm body behind brush twenty meters ahead. My heart rate exploded. I dropped behind a rock, grabbed the tablet and prepared the surviving drones for combat.
A doe walked into moonlight.
She stared at me.
I stared at her.
Leona: "Don't."
The deer continued staring.
Leona: "I have had a very bad night."
One ear moved.
Judgment.
Every creature in Texas was judgmental.
She eventually walked away.
I waited another minute before standing.
Two hours passed.
Slowly.
Painfully.
But they passed.
That mattered.
The farm was farther behind me now.
The coyote bodies were farther behind me.
Every step converted fear into distance.
I crossed an old ranch road shortly before three in the morning. The pavement had broken badly along the edges, weeds growing through long cracks. No headlights appeared in either direction.
I stopped in the middle.
According to my map, I had traveled embarrassingly little compared with what the pre-accident version of me could have managed.
According to my body, I had crossed a continent.
I sat beside a drainage culvert and finally allowed myself ten minutes.
Water. Half a nutrient bar. Armor inspection. Spider Five inspection.
The drone's rear actuator was bent rather than completely destroyed.
Repairable.
Good.
Spider Two...
I opened the damaged chassis.
Circuit board cracked. Optical assembly destroyed. Three motor controllers gone. Processor possibly intact.
Maybe.
Leona: "You're not dead yet."
That was absurd. It wasn't alive.
Still.
I packed the pieces carefully.
The night had become cold enough that I pulled the torn remains of my poncho tighter around myself. One side was missing a large strip, now stained dark from its brief career as a stone-based argument.
I looked at it.
Then laughed softly.
Leona: "F-Rank."
I took another bite.
Leona: "Three C-Ranks."
Chew.
Swallow.
Leona: "against ONE rabbit."
That wasn't technically true if we count the drones.
I just liked the score better that way.
I opened my tablet and checked the nearest locations again. The old agricultural research property remained roughly southwest. At my current speed, reaching it before daylight was impossible.
That created a new problem.
Daylight meant visibility.
Visibility meant roads became dangerous.
The collar was gone, but anybody familiar with Domestic biology would recognize what I was the moment the hood moved and maybe even without.
Small rabbit hybrid traveling alone.
In rural Texas.
That invited questions ...or a riffle if you aren't lucky.
Questions invited Authority involvement.
Authority involvement invited registration scans.
Registration scans invited Mom.
I loved Mom and i did not want Mom involved.
Not yet.
Maybe once I found something.
A laboratory. A lead.
Anything.
Then I could contact her. Maybe explain. Maybe apologize. Maybe come home with a Civil body and pretend the entire nightmare had only been an unusually aggressive weekend trip.
That thought was stupid enough to be comforting.
I stood.
My knees protested.
Leona: "We're doing it anyway."
Spider Four moved first.
Then Three.
Six.
One.
The machines disappeared into the brush ahead.
I had taken perhaps twenty steps when all four stopped.
Simultaneously.
My hand went to the tablet.
No thermal contacts.
No movement warning.
Instead, the audio sensors had triggered.
Low-frequency sound.
Distant.
Rhythmic.
I listened.
At first I heard nothing except insects and wind.
Then my rabbit ears turned before I consciously located it.
North-east.
A faint mechanical beat.
Whup.
Pause.
Whup-whup-whup.
My stomach dropped.
Rotor.
Helicopter.
I killed the spiders' navigation lights even though they were already dim.
The sound grew clearer.
Heavy rotor system.
Not civilian traffic at three in the morning.
I crouched beside the road and opened a spectrum analyzer.
Encrypted aviation transponder.
Government frequency.
Then the radio scanner caught a fragment.
Static.
A voice.
Unknown Radio: "...search sector seven... Domestic escape report... thermal sweep continuing..."
I stared at the tablet.
Another transmission followed.
Unknown Radio: "...GHCA Air Response Two-One, moving southwest from Lampasas..."
Mom had reported me.
Or the hospital collar had.
Or both.
The rotor noise grew louder. Somewhere beyond the northeastern hills, a white searchlight touched the clouds.
I looked at my battered armor.
My broken drones.
My tiny exhausted body.
Then at several square kilometers of open Texas terrain surrounding me.
Leona: "Fuck."