Lana lay alone. The silent aftermath of the submarine eruptions matched by the eerie silence of the now extinguished satellites’ data feeds. Her view from space was gone. She felt the loss of their vast databanks and aerial weaponry like the loss of a parent and mourned.

Carefully she uncovered one eye. Her calculations told her that the initial blast should be washing upward now, creating a small mushroom cloud above her. With her eye’s sensors reporting that the fire had dissipated, she stood and surveyed the scene. The black of her body matched the charred remnants of the base. A huge steam cloud rose from where the shed and its two wards had been, but bar that the base was flattened for about a quarter of a mile. An eerie silence lay over everything, matched by the deafness of her collapsed eardrums.

A lone black figure in a circle of obliteration, she stood. Hairless, skin burned off, deaf and lame she alone had survived the blast. She stepped forward gingerly, balancing her good leg against her broken limb, and she felt vulnerable for the first time in her life.

She needed to get away from here. They would be coming with everything they had and she could not survive that again. Soon they would be evacuating Jacksonville and the surrounding area and she needed to get out before they set up radiation checkpoints.

Limping away, she came to the edge of the blast radius and found the first of the explosion’s survivors. The man was moaning and crawling away, as if to escape his own charred, mangled legs. She ignored his cries for help and limped onward until she spotted a Humvee. The base was slowly responding, variously running toward the disaster or away from the aftermath, depending on how much they understood about the radioactive cloud that was even now bathing them all with certain death. Jumping into the Hummer, she ignored the lack of keys and tried to use the sheathed wires in her finger to start the vehicle, but like so many of her systems, it was unresponsive. She accessed her memory banks and quickly retrieved information on how to boost a car.

A minute later she was driving away from the base at speed, running down anyone who got in her way. Her machine mind estimated that she was going to need approximately three weeks to reconstruct the systems that the attack had destroyed. Princess Lamati had never had to run from anything in her life. But now she needed to hide. She needed to repair and regroup. And then she needed to decide how best to punish the humans for what they had done.

Chapter 55: Violent Reactions