✴

You think your best chance is to incapacitate her before she can launch a cyberattack.

Your hands are pinned down, and you couldn’t hope to overcome her strength--but this close to the center of the colony she weighs almost nothing. You wait for the critical moment when her body relaxes--you push her away from you.

But just as her limp fingers start to slip from around your wrists, her grip suddenly tightens. Using your arms for leverage, she pulls her feet to the floor, then pulls you up, light as a feather--she throws you upward, activating the magnets in her boots to keep herself rooted. You drift up under the inescapable momentum, past the bare metal ladders and walkways, up into the core of the colony--microgravity. You manage to call to mind your microgravity training and twist your body around before you collide with a cluster of metal conduits. You get your hands around them and stabilize yourself.

Looking above you--below you--you see your adversary staring up at you. Her eyes are glowing green in the near-æther, and her aura flares with a strange resonance--not a human mind.

Elsewhere on another axis, 7’s avatar floats in the æther, separate from her physical position. A pathway opens between her and you--you sense it soon enough to focus your shield as her technopathic attack impacts it, deconstructing the data noise between you, corrupting it at random. You block her.

“Using a construct to possess your own body!” you shout across the space between, feeling simultaneously near on the surface and impossibly far below. The effects of her attack ripple outward in the æther, waves crashing on the distant rays tracing the local network. The ætherglow surrounds the edges of your vision, as you try to keep your eyes surfaceside. You feel her in your head--trying to drag you down with her into the depths of dissociation.

“11,” 7’s avatar speaks to you ætherside. “It protects my body.”

“Risky technique, 7!” you say.

“My Prime Constructs are all part of me, friends who would never turn their hands against me!”

You feel her influence, her will pushing on your empathic sense. For once you feel resilient against her--her skill at CommTech has nothing on Akiko’s.

“I don’t want to fight you, 7! But you’re leaving me no choice!” you say, in voice and in æther simultaneously. Reaching you toward her with your surface hand, your æthereal weapon takes shape in the hallucinatory field overlaid over your vision. Your target is in the sights of your laser. “If I have to go through you to save ÆON, I won’t hold back!”

????-??-?? ??:??:?? 7 > then neither will I.

“2.” Her æthereal voice echoes, and the æther responds--a command. Light gathers around her avatar--it forms into shapes, simple, then increasingly complex--a thousand irregular polyhedrons fit together, covering her body--a shell of glass, its surface shining like metal. A machine--a construct like no other you’ve seen--armor--encasing her in its heart, growing large around her.
Veins of light flow through the translucent plates and gears, leaving bright streaks across your vision as the construct moves its arms and legs. Weapons manifest on the æthereal machine, grasped in its humanoid hands, mounted on its shoulders, on its back. She’s manifesting everything she has against you.