"Many have theorized why the uncanny valley exists, from avoiding disease to just an accidental mix-up of visual cues in the brain.

  I have a different theory. Its well known that its Hard to teach humans to kill other humans, most of us just aren't wired for it. Some say that innate empathy for each other is a strength.

  But if a hostile being could seem human enough to activate that empathy? Trigger a moment of hesitation?

  That's why we have the uncanny valley."

  — Ash 'Helix' Gabrys

  The iron swan roared towards Ohio and the coordinates of the hidden amazon weapon facility.

  Coming from a different direction, the hover-semi trundled along, carrying one large combat mech, one very antsy Samurai, and two of her ever so patient but a little exasperated paramours.

  "Quinn, you need to chill." Elliot sighed, sitting on one side of her as she leaned into his shoulder. "If you're too worked up when we go in, it might well cause you to make mistakes. We got the intel, we made a plan, we have the smarts to improv when things go wrong."

  She took a deep breath, in and out. Focusing on the feeling of her cheek on Elliot's shoulder, Aisha's thumb tracing over her knuckles on the other side.

  "I'm sorry, I know I'm being the worst right now."

  Aisha chuckled. "Cutie, your friend got kidnapped and we're about to do the thing to save them. I'd be kind of a mess."

  Quinn paused, not wanting to say what she wanted out loud. Aisha picked up on it though.

  "Yes, we can go over the plan one more time."

  After Magus, Requiem and Watchdog had handed over the results of a successful heist, they'd treated the in person group to a dinner and then retired. Magus and Requiem to head home and check up on… their daughter? Magus' daughter? They clearly were caring for a child, but had been a little fuzzy on the exact details, and Quinn wasn't going to pry. Watchdog had threatened them with turning their feeds into nothing but the new generations brain-rot memes unless they came to visit her in person at some point to buy her dinner as well.

  They'd disassembled Cassie, gotten back in the Semi, and flown out. Starting by going north again but then veering east once out of sight of any casual observer. While Elliot drove, Quinn and Aisha had gotten in contact with a Samurai known as Mj?lnir who had sold them detailed scans of the facility, taken from orbital satellites. Something told Quinn his price of 'A delivery of a red bull and bag of toxic waste flavour Doritos' wasn't his usual requirement, but gift horses and looking in mouths. He'd even thrown in a basic saturation bombardment from orbit at cost, which Elliot had paid the 80 points for.

  With that information they'd concocted a plan. Best guess, Jing Qi was being held somewhere in the middle of the lower level as that appeared to have secured sleeping quarters, but it was reasonably likely they'd need to search around and had identified a few other likely spots.

  Quinn fell.

  The wind whipped past her, though she didn't as much feel it as have this strange, instinctual knowledge of its existence.

  The world below was a brown blur, growing in size as she hurtled towards it. Right below her sat a grey smudge that contrasted against the brown, that she was rapidly gaining on. As she passed the wispy dregs of the clouds, she checked her armaments. After some thought, she'd stuck mostly with her energy weapon load-out for this fight, not expecting to need the heavier penetration of her new kinetic weapons. The only exception being she'd swapped the howitzer for the particle cannon, planning to make great use of its highly destructive potential.

  As the ground grew closer she began to make out the lines of the walls and buildings from the compound. Then the movement of little dots became visible. She could determine the moment they detected her, when a large portion of the dots changed direction and accelerated in frantic movement.

  A surge of panic rose as the ground rushed up towards her, but she forced it down. They'd, well Iris, had calculated that while hitting the ground at this speed was survivable, it wasn't going to leave Cassie very mobile for a while afterwards. So, they'd come up with this instead, relying on machines to pull off the precise timing.

  At the last second the momentum drive fired. Quinn's stomach lurched as what was a free-fall directly downwards was suddenly replaced with a dash forwards. The momentum drive spooled down and Quinn was unceremoniously left dangling still in midair before gravity remembered it was supposed to be functioning. She fell to the floor with a light thunk. She could hear sirens wailing and yelling to her right.

  In the next moment she was already turning, charging a plasma shot as the first of the security guards rounded a corner and opened fire. Cracks sounded as sparks blasted off her front armor, but she barely noticed as she wheeled the glowing ball of plasma to point directly at them.

  She hesitated, and the squad took that moment to dive for cover. Quinn slapped her hands to her cheeks in her mental environment.

  "Quinn, now is not the time to get skittish about violence. Do you want a medical aid? Or maybe I can substitute them in your view."

  Quinn gritted her teeth, and released the plasma blast at the concrete wall two of the soldiers had ducked behind. There wasn't even a scream as the barrier, a portion of the floor, and the majority of both soldiers turned to ash. A few steaming piles of meat fused with plastic and concrete were all that remained, and she fought down the instinct to vomit.

  Jing Qi, she was doing this for her, her and all the others Amazon abused. They had started this, now she just needed to finish it.

  Swallowing the taste of bile, she opened fire with the laser rifle on the soldier's who were now scrambling for sturdier cover. Raking the gun over the street, the blasts burrowed into the figures and left them smoking on the ground as she saturated the area with laser fire.

  An instinct, and she jumped to the left as a rocket sailed past her, exploding into the wall of the compound a little past her and pelting her back with small chunks of masonry. She wheeled on the new squad and let rip, catching one before the rest could sequester themselves behind the solid walls of buildings a little further on.

  There was a moment of quiet, nothing in the base moving except for the slight waving of fabric on the corpses of dead men. Quinn gave it a moment, shifting slightly with a light whisper of well made servos as she surveyed the area. As planned, she'd landed close to one of the entrances of the compound, with a guard post near by and unloading areas on the other side. Further along were the first sets of blocky, dirt coloured buildings, with very little decoration or indentation, which Quinn assumed was to look inconspicuous from orbital satellites. It was like standing in a labyrinth of concrete, and she wasn't even sure how they determined which buildings were which.

  Deciding it was time to force a response, she shrugged her shoulders to deploy the howitzer. They'd settled on loading what Irys called 'Demolition rounds'. High explosive cluster shells designed to maximize damage to structures above all else. She glanced at the next building in, took aim and fired. In midair the shell spun open, raining dozens of tiny bombs onto the building that detonated on impact. They pummeled the entire wall and half the ceiling into powder, revealing what looked like administrative offices in the squishy interior as well as kitchens and storage in the building over.

  Quinn gave it a moment for the dust to settle, then fired another shell.

  Elliot and Aisha had been crouched by a concrete wall for a number of minutes, silently trying to keep themselves ready while they waited for Quinn's explosive arrival. Thankfully the jammer appeared to have worked, else the camera that had been sweeping over their location consistently over the last 10 minutes or so would have produced a reaction by now.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  They heard when the sirens began sounding, able to see the vague shape of Quinn plummeting to earth from the clouds briefly before the wall blocked their vision. Elliot threw a two and ten fingers at Aisha, hoping she knew what it meant, and began the countdown in his head.

  At the twenty second mark he stepped back and reduced the density of a section of wall to something akin to damp sand, and Aisha stepped up before driving her hammer into the spot in an overhead swing. Part of the wall fell through, but the hammer stuck mostly just stuck itself into the wall. Aisha turned to give him a look, and he just shrugged and turned the effect down a notch. The next strike successfully blasted the wall apart like pottery, and they hustled through the gap before moving towards what they guessed was an entrance.

  Quinn had finished turning what looked like a rather expensive lab of some kind into rubble when the assault finally arrived. A pair of rockets shot at her, and when she dodged to the side she was met by a third that blasted plates off her shoulder. She opened fire in return, pushing forward at speed to deny her assailants any cover. Rounding the corner, she raised her weapons towards where the squad had ducked around the side of one of the half collapsed buildings.

  She emerged into an open plaza like area, space to fit multiple trucks between the building she'd just passed and the rest. There was a double barreled tank turret staring directly at her, and a pair of heavy machine guns mounted on armored trucks behind her. Soldiers with almost makeshift looking heavy rifles, coils open to the air, drew a bead on her from the remaining windows and hastily assembled barricades. The tank cannon fired, shell spiraling out and narrowly missing her as she jerked to the side. Quinn gritted her teeth and mentally prepared for a fight.

  Aisha followed behind Elliot as they moved through the maze of underground tunnels.

  It felt like she was in an action vid, but instead of the protagonist she was the fucking camera. Following around and watching as Elliot, the real protagonist, punched through anything in his way like a vibroblade through paper.

  Bursting through a door, rifle raised. Three sharp clicks and three bodies hitting the floor, leaking blood from shots to the chest and head. A door opening, and a brief yell that was cut off as Elliot purged all sound from the area, with the silence abating a moment later as he called out 'clear.'

  He even seemed to sense when a group ahead had detected them, or at least was moderately more prepared, as he suddenly turned and moved back towards the corridor they had just come from. A brief moment of concentration, then he sprinted at the concrete wall and just pushed through, spraying the soldiers watching the entrance on the other side with grey sand. A couple more clicks and a very one sided knife fight later and he had three more kills to add to his tally.

  He even reloaded like a video game protagonist, flipping the magazine out with a jerk and inserting a new one without even looking.

  She thought she had a chance to contribute when three shots in a row plinked off the skull of a huge, beefy guy who turned out to be a huge, borged to the nines guy. She tapped the controller for her shunt, drawing the huge heavy machine gun she'd acquired from Quinn. Just as she raised it there was a whump and a brief feeling of incredible wrongness, before the cybersoldier disappeared entirely, along with a perfectly circular radius of wall, floor and ceiling.

  She looked over to where Elliot was lowering his revolver, giving her a questioning look.

  She blew a raspberry at him.

  The first thing Quinn did was turn the face of the building to her right into dust in the wind.

  The second thing she did was attempt to turn the tank into molten slag via explosive plasma blast, only to annoyed when a shot from a smaller side turret destabilized the ball mid flight, merely splashing the tank with a little molten gas.

  The second shot of the tank landed, but did little but knock her somewhat off balance as the magnetic armor hardener kicked in. She dashed right to give herself a moment to regain her footing before opening fire with her laser rifle. That too, seemed to do not much more than scratch damage. A staccato of thumps to her back indicated the heavy machine guns opening up, and a few heavier blows landing informed her that there were more potent armaments in play as well.

  Determining the tank was, in all irony, one of the lesser threats, she threw a volley of laser fire at the soldiers on this side. As they ducked for cover, she turned to face the ambushers behind her.

  A plasma blast to the first APC caused something inside to catch, as it detonated in a rather impressive fireball. The second quickly began to reverse to escape, running over a few soldiers sheltering behind it as it did so. Quinn took the opportunity to gun down the newly exposed infantry, though she deliberately ignored the few that had dropped their weapons and fled. She spotted the tank cannon contracting and pushed off with her right leg, causing the shell that emerged a moment later to go wide.

  She went to fire the howitzer, only to find it throwing errors at her, part of the firing mechanism having been blasted out in a neat hole. She cursed, then spied a chunk of the wrecked APC. Grabbing it with both hands, she wheeled around and hurled it at where a gun peeked out of a window, where it entirely obliterated the wall.

  Another shot to the back rocked her forward, the tank shells still imparting quite the impact regardless of her armor. Deciding it was about time to demonstrate her armoured mastery, she turned back to the cannon wielding foe.

  With a dash, she was besides it, and as its turret desperately tried to rotate towards her she grabbed her sword and chopped down in an overhead strike. The blade severed the barrels of the cannon, before continuing on and unevenly bisecting the tank entirely. She withdrew the blade and cut again at the rear, then grabbed and tore the coaxial anti-plasma turrets off with her bare hands.

  Aisha had gotten her chance to contribute to the mission, and was almost wishing she hadn't. Killing antithesis had been one thing, but her mind was replaying the crunch when her hammer had met one of the soldiers skulls on repeat.

  A "Shit." from Elliot in the next room broke her out of her rumination, and she bashed through the door shoulder first, wincing as her armor didn't entirely cushion the blow. She found herself standing in a control room, numerous monitors displaying camera feeds of people in spartan looking rooms. Most of them were huddled on beds or under desks, though one in particular was sat gazing at what was clearly their augs unperturbed by the explosions.

  There was also a woman standing in the middle of the room, clad in the same basic t-shirt and sweat pants as the other prisoners. More importantly however was the guard, a wiry, black haired man, pressing a pistol to her head.

  Elliot sighed and lowered his rifle. Something in his demeanor had shifted, and it set off alarm bells in Aisha's head. He cocked his head at the guard.

  "So, go on."

  That got him a blank stare.

  "You're clearly looking to negotiate with a hostage, so get on with it."

  The man shifted, uncomfortable. "Yeah, we know you're here for her, so surrender and I won't paint the walls with her brains."

  Elliot shrugged. "No."

  "The fuck you mean, No? You think I'm not serious?"

  "You seem to not realize. She's Mecha Suit Maiden's friend, not mine. Why would I care what happens to her? She dies, Maiden is upset for a bit, but you lose your only leverage."

  Aisha hissed at him. "What the fuck Elliot."

  The guard spat back. "So why not just shoot me, if you don't give a fuck."

  Elliot shifted his hands on his gun. "It'll make my life easier if she lived, but I'm not surrendering. Tell you what, drop the gun and run, and I won't bother hunting you down."

  The pregnant pause that followed ended with the guard practically throwing the gun away and scrambling for the door.

  The moment the door had slammed shut again, Elliot's look of disdainful indifference immediately dropped, replaced by his usual jolliness. Jing Qi launched herself into a hug when he opened his arms, thanking him profusely.

  Deciding to think about this later, Aisha subvocallized to Vyshnu.

  "Tell Quinn we have her."

  Quinn was in the process of hunting a particularly irritating sniper, attempting to kill him before he got the chance to land a shot on anything too critical. She was taken a little aback when an unarmed man in a business suit, accompanied by a pair of armed guards, stepped out from a corner with hands raised in a placating gesture. She almost laughed out loud at the sheer audacity.

  "Quinn Takimura? My name is Todd Colt, I'm the Managing Director of this facility. I was hoping we could have a discussion."

  She lowered her laser rifle from where it had been trained on Todd. "Fine, but if someone takes a shot at me during you'll die first."

  He nodded. "I'd expect nothing less. Well, I don't see any point in mincing words. If you agree to leave this facility immediately with no further violence I will ensure your friend leaves with you."

  If he could see her, he might have been concerned by the feral grin that sprung across her face.

  "Why would I make that deal? We have her safely away already."

  He cocked his head, then turned away slightly and murmured a few words sub-vocally. She decided not to give him time to catch his guard.

  "Counteroffer. Release any remaining prisoners to us, and we'll give you 30 minutes to evacuate before orbital bombardment turns this place into a graveyard. Additionally, you'll release her, me and all prisoners from any obligations to Amazon corporation."

  He glanced back up at her. "As much as I'd like to accept, I cannot make any legal changes even if I wanted to."

  She sneered. "Important enough to run a black-site, but not enough to lean on the legal department."

  Todd shook his head. "Not without being able to talk to them, you took down our connection to the outside world about five minutes ago. I wouldn't do you the disservice of making promises I have no way of keeping as soon as I'm away, too."

  He shrugged. "If its any consolation, I will continue to tell my superiors what a stupid decision holding a Samurai's friend hostage was, as I was before you arrived."

  Quinn took a step forward. "You could always have let her go."

  That got her a somewhat condescending eye. "Indentured servitude is not the only way corporations like Amazon bind people to its will. Assuming you accept those modified terms, I appreciate you giving us twenty minutes to extract what research data we can on top of the ten we'd need to evacuate."

  Something about his tone was off, but she took the opportunity given. "Same terms, minus the obligation release clause, 15 minutes to evacuate."

  He raised an eyebrow before replying in a stilted, deadpan flat voice. "How awful, I guess we will have to accept those terms as given." He returned to his normal tone. "I'll instruct the remaining guards to release all prisoners and inform them rescue is out front. If that is all, may we begin the evacuation?"

  She nodded, before realizing he couldn't see it. Saying nothing was probably cooler, anyway, so instead she merely turned away before speaking into her call with her fellow samurai.

  "I met with the facility director, he agreed to release all prisoners in exchange for us letting them leave alive."

  A moment later, Elliot responded. "Rodger, we're on our way out with some of those prisoners now. We'll meet you outside."

  Quinn sighed and let herself relax. They'd done it, time to go home.