赤裸裸的滑稽故事

The trip home was long and tiring. The flight alone was almost twelve hours, and the drive from the airport was another four. Ashleigh and Caleb were exhausted. All they wanted was to reach Summer and go to bed.

But they knew that wouldn’t be the case. The Alpha and Luna were returning from their honeymoon. It was Ashleigh’s first introduction, though unofficial, to the pack as their actual Luna and not just Caleb’s mate.

The fanfare and attention would be more than either of them had ever encountered. Moreover, it made them both even more tired. They briefly considered staying the night at one of the neutral territory cabins. But in the end, they decided it was better to get it over with.

Caleb had chosen to take one of the lesser-used gates. Hoping that if their arrival was not noticed right away, the celebration wouldn’t quite be in full swing, possibly making it easier to control and hopefully shut down.

The problem with that plan was that the gate wasn’t opening.

Caleb got out of the car and tried his controller again, but nothing happened. Then, as he approached the gate, he saw the automatic defenses were up, but the door itself was utterly unresponsive.

He stopped, knowing that if he took another step forward without disarming the gate, he would set off the defenses.

“Caleb, what’s the problem?” Ashleigh called as she got out of the car.

“Just a minute, Ash,” he called back.

Ashleigh looked around. The sun was setting, but this part of Summer looked darker than usual.

“Hey Caleb, does it look dark around here to you?”

Caleb pressed at the place on his thumbpad that should have connected him with Galen, but nothing happened.

“What the hell?” he questioned._.

“Caleb,” Ashleigh called, walking toward him as she looked up at the places she was sure she had seen some kind of illumination before. “Weren’t there lights here before?”

Caleb looked up into the trees. He furrowed his brows, knowing that she was right. There should have been some small lights in the area.

“Yes…” Caleb said quietly. He looked up just in time to see that Ashleigh was still moving toward the gate. “Ashleigh, wait!”

He reached out for her. Grabbing her hand and pulling her back as a row of sharp spikes sprang up from the ground where Ashleigh’s foot had been.

“What the hell!” Ashleigh shouted as she saw the spikes.

“The defenses are activated,” Caleb said, looking around.

“Why?!” she shouted.

“I don’t know, but it can’t be good,” Caleb replied. “I can’t reach Galen on my neural link either.”

“What about your phone?” Ashleigh asked.

Caleb hurried to the car and grabbed his phone, and Ashleigh did the same.

“No signal,” they said simultaneously.

“Now I’m worried,” Ashleigh said.

“Me too,” Caleb replied. He reached in and pulled out his backpack. He opened a small pocket and grabbed something before tossing it back in the car. “We need to get past these defenses and get inside. Then we must avoid the other automatic sentries and turrets between here and the main campus.”

He touched his chest and then extended his hand to her. Ashleigh looked down and saw that he was offering her an armor button. She took it and placed it on her chest.

The Alpha and Luna suited up and prepared to break into Summer.

***

“I’ve almost got it,” Nessa sighed.

“That’s what you said two hours ago!” A man in a blue sweater growled. “You obviously don’t know what you are doing, so why don’t you step aside and let me fix this!”

“Hey, Dave!” Clara interrupted, pointing a flashlight directly into his eyes. “How about you sit down and shut up! Because the last time you ‘fixed’ part of the problem, we lost the freakin’ lights!”

“It’s ok, Clara,” Nessa said gently. “He’s mad because he missed three different worms during his sweep.”

Clara growled at him and then sat down close to Nessa.

They were in the main server room. The systems for this building were all on their own grid and unaffected by the outage that most of Summer was experiencing.

“Weren’t you the one that claimed it wasn’t replicating?” Dave said smugly.

“I did, and it wasn’t,” Nessa sighed. “I already told you those worms were not the same as the one we found in the science lab.”

“No, according to you, our systems were infested for Goddess knows how long. And none of our highly trained analysts were able to identify these worms. But you, the self-trained wolf from a pack of brutes, were able to find them in a matter of hours?” Dave scoffed.

“Dave!” Clara growled, standing up and getting close to him. “If you don’t shut your stupid face, I swear to the Goddess I am gonna shove this flashlight so far up your–”

“Got it!” Nessa shouted.

“Really?” Clara said brightly. “Good job, babe!”

“Yeah, right,” Dave said, crossing his arms.

The door opened, a woman leaned in with a bright smile.

“Every sector reporting in is saying that they’ve got lights. Good job, Nessa!”

Nessa smiled, disconnecting her laptop from the server tower and closing it. She carefully put it in her bag and gave Dave a wink as she headed toward the door.

Clara, true to form, didn’t bother to play it cool. Instead, she stuck her tongue out at Dave and followed after Nessa.

The two women immediately returned to the central command building, where Galen and Fiona received updates and check-ins from all over Summer.

After the initial cyber-attack in Cain’s lab, Nessa had found that there were dozens of smaller worms crawling through the Summer systems. Most of them were generally harmless, only causing latency and crashing issues throughout the pack. Nessa surmised that these worms were intended to distract against rooting out the primary they had found in the lab.

They were easy enough to clean up until they found what Nessa called the ‘Big Brothers’. These were the more aggressive type. They spawned on the removal of the last of the nuisance worms, and these Big Brothers went out of their way to attack primary systems.

Nessa had tried to work with the systems team to neutralize and remove them as quickly as possible, but they struggled with teamwork.

At least two of the Big Brothers managed to detonate their systems before they could be removed.

The lights in one section of Summer were one of the casualties. The other was the gate and door locks. Several buildings had been locked down, trapping people inside for hours as the systems team worked to fix the problem.

Meanwhile, Nessa and Dave had been working on getting the lights back on. But unfortunately, Dave had been too busy making passive-aggressive remarks about Nessa’s origins to see the mistakes in his codework. So instead of repairing the lighting systems, he had inadvertently crashed the lighting in five different buildings.

“Where we at?” Galen asked as Nessa and Clara entered the room.

“Nes got the lights back up!” Clara said excitedly.

“Nes?” Nessa asked, turning to Clara.

“I was trying it out… no good?”

“Meh.”

“I’ll think of something better,” Clara said confidently.

“So… lights issue is solved?” Galen asked.

“Oh… no,” Nessa said, shaking her head.

“But you just said–” Galen began, looking to Clara.

“I said she got them back up,” she clarified.

“Yea, no, the system is totally screwed right now,” Nessa commented. “I have a mirror universe running right now for the remaining bugs and worms, so they believe that they are attacking multiple systems while they’re really just bouncing around in a sealed space. But it won’t last forever.”

“So… what are we supposed to do?” Galen asked.

On the far side of the room there was one door that was still not working; it had been one of the locks that had been triggered by the Big Brother. A loud pounding sound against said door drew everyone’s attention.

“What the hell….” Galen whispered.

Another sound like something hitting against the door.

He hit the button on his chest. Cords flew out to cover his body and he immediately materialized his shield.

“Everyone behind me!” he shouted.

Just as they all moved behind him the door came crashing down and through it came what appeared to be a large metal dome with a gun barrel.

“Is that… one of the sentries?” Galen asked aloud. He chanced to look over his shield.

From the darkness of the hallway beyond the door emerged Caleb and Ashleigh, looking haggard and angry.

Caleb stepped further into the room, and in a booming voice, he shouted.

“Can someone please tell me what the hell happened to my pack!”