“So are the new seats here?”

Dealer walked outside to where four of her companions were. They were busy fixing up the jeep as they couldn’t afford to lose it since it was the only one left. As she approached, Sweeper turned to answer her.

“We’re just finishing up here, Guard’s in there changing the seats.” She gestured behind her to the vehicle, which was shaking around. “Where’s the Captain?”

“Aw man you guys started without me?” Dealer frowned. “Oh yeah and the Captain’s still talking to Command.”

After they got back from scouting the forest they reported about the new arrivals. Their identities were a mystery so the Captain told the group to try and keep a close eye on the surroundings.

“I don’t think it really mattered since you would’ve just stood there and watched.” Sweeper pointed out.

Sweeper was right but she still felt sad about being left out. Dealer looked over at Reaper who was carrying the old seats and chucking them to the side. Guard was doing the repairs, Reaper was doing the heavy lifting and Sweeper was the one giving out orders due to her current back problems. They also had a new member who was standing perfectly still right next to the jeep. She was recently unofficially added to the ranks and introduced to everyone after Sweeper had woken up.

“Hey Mirabelle, how’re you doing?” Dealer waved at the newest recruit. Her head seemed like it snapped in place as it turned to look at Dealer.

In the end Guard’s name suggestion won due to the insistent begging and the fact that everyone else did not care. Mirabelle stood out from the others mostly due to Guard and Sweeper being in charge of designing for her. Her medium length hair was dark gray and her eyes were bronze in colour. She had a white right sleeve pea coat with red outlines going down the middle. The left sleeve was cut off revealing a gray sweatshirt underneath. She wore a black circle skirt and matching black tights. She looked more like someone out of a fashion show than a soldier. She was also 7’9.

“She’s not very talkative is she?” Dealer turned to Sweeper who just shook her head.

“Oh no she can talk quite a bit, it’s just that her topics of interest are… niche.” Sweeper brows furrowed.

Weird Dealer thought, all the stories she had heard about droids were about how they were all emotionless killing machines. Ignoring her height no one would judge Mirabelle like that but that was due to them wrapping her in a skin-like substance that made her look more like a human. Before that she was more like a tank in humanoid form, she was entirely mechanical.

“It took a lot of work getting the skin machine to give her a good looking face!” A voice came out of the jeep as Guard’s head popped out of the window.

“Can we not call it the skin machine please?” Dealer curled her arms up in disgust.

“But that’s its official name, what else should we call it?”

“Urgh never mind that. Did you finish putting in the new seats?” Dealer took a peek inside the vehicle.

“Yep! Hey everyone come take a look!” She shouted out to Reaper and Mirabelle and gestured for them to come closer.

The old seats weren’t anything remarkable, they were standard issue. Dealer always hated the stiffness of the seats since a long ride would always give her butt pain. With some convincing, Dealer had managed to get them to send more comfortable seats. She pushed against one of the seats and it felt like her hands dissolved right into it.

“Holy shit this feels great.” She started bouncing her hands on the seats.

“I’m not sure how this will increase our combat effectiveness.” Reaper surveyed the interior through the window.

“Does it matter? I mean if we die at least we die comfortably.”

Dealer jumped into the backseat and laid down. Staring at the roof of the jeep she slowly traced her eyes down to the back cushion and headrest, they had a strange but familiar pattern. It was an orange background with plenty of what appeared to be black lightning coming down and at the bottom the orange tone started to drain out and become white. They had chosen this pattern because it looked cool on the screen but now that she was really looking at it she was reminded of something but couldn’t put it in words. Just as she was beginning to give up she finally pieced it together.

“A liger!” She jolted up from her position which startled Guard and Sweeper.

“Don’t just do that!” Sweeper shouted as she held onto Reaper for balance.

“I got it!” Dealer quickly got out of the jeep and pointed at the seats. “This is from a tiger!”

“Is that what’s got you all worked up?” Sweeper glared at Dealer.

“Of course it is, it was in the name of the seats. Extra Comfortable Extremely Fluffy and Exceptionally Durable car seats – Tiger patterned.” Guard explained.

“I’m not talking about the pattern, I’m talking about the animal.”

“They named an animal after the pattern?” Guard looked at Dealer confused.

“No it was the other way around. Tigers were around back before World War 3.”

“How did you know that?” Sweeper said.

This caused Dealer to confidently put her hands on her hips and puff her chest out. The shear smugness radiating from her caused Sweeper to regret asking while the others looked on curiously.

“Well I guess I can tell you guys if you don’t know. I read about it in a magazine.”

“The things we put our bullets in?” Reaper said as she pulled out her pistol and looked around for words.

“No, why are you like this, and not the online articles either. I worked at, what you can call, an antique store and we had these old printed magazines lying around and since no one comes by I had the chance to read them all.”

“Are you even allowed to do that?” Sweeper crossed her arms. “Doesn’t that damage its value?”

“Hey, like I said no one comes around. Anyways I found some sweet magazines that talked about ligers.”

“Those things are all over China but what does that have to do about tigers?” Guard inquired. “Other than they rhyme.”

Tigers weren’t exactly important to Dealer as they were more of a step towards pushing the discussion towards ligers. Her discovery of the animal through old magazines got her to search the internet for more current facts about the creatures. She really wanted to talk to someone about them but there was never a good moment to bring it up and no one at the base really cared about animals. She knew that she was drawn towards the tiger patterned seats for a reason but couldn’t put a finger on why until now.

“You see, ligers are made from a male lion and a female tiger.”

“Really? I haven’t heard anything about them.”

“Well lions and tigers are also big cats, before World War 3 they had a couple of each in captivity in Australia. After the war, scientists and researchers had no hope for their survival what with the environment being all apocalyptic. They wanted to find a way for big cats to live on.

“Oh oh I think I know the answer! They slammed the last remaining lions and tigers together from a space launcher at high speed causing them to fuse into ligers!” Guard clapped her hands together.

“No… I don’t think that’s physically or theoretically possible.” Dealer continued. “So they wanted a bigger and stronger kitty to thrive in the new environment since the old ones were pretty much screwed. In most cases hybrid animals end up sucking real hard in the genetic and fertility department which usually ends up in an early death. But ligers are fortunate enough to suck less at breeding.”

“The Australian’s are well known for their manipulation of genes. To make up for the shortcomings of the old ligers they would try to stabilize them and improve upon their design in order to allow the new ligers to survive in the current environment.” Everyone stared at Sweeper who was now doing the lecturing about the apex predators.

“Hey I was supposed to tell everyone that!” Dealer exclaimed. “Yeah so what Sweeper said. Everything worked out for the ligers so they decided to release them back into the previous habitats of the tigers. The only problem was that they kinda forgot about the food source, other species bit the dust so there wasn’t anything for the ligers to eat so they spread across Asia killing anything they could find.”

“That’s correct.” Sweeper cutted her off. “Seeing the success of the hybridization project the Australian research groups decided to do the same with the other species of animals they held in captivity. They ended up creating an entirely new ecosystem in Asia with the liger standing at the apex.”

“How do you know so much about this?” Dealer said as she glared at her.

“I served as a maid for a biologist, he told me a lot about the current ecosystem of Asia.”

“Since ligers are the strongest can they breathe lightning?” Reaper spoke up.

“Huh? Where did that come from?” Dealer quickly turned to the girl in black.

“Someone told me that if you are really strong you can shoot lightning out of your mouth.”

“Well they’re wrong. And dumb. They’re wrong and dumb.” Dealer shook her finger. “What these 1800 pound behemoths can do is run as fast as a car on full tilt and has a bite force of 3250 psi which is strong enough to kill anything that moves.”

Those old magazines had talked about the worrying state of the old big cats and the possibility of ligers becoming a dominant species. Of course back then the common folk would’ve called it full of shit and crazy but seeing as the population back then had no idea that someone would go out of their way to biologically engineer a freak of nature and then further improve on those monster’s hunting capabilities, well let’s just say that hindsight is 20/20.

“Ligers are the coolest. Sadly the other hybrid big kitties weren’t so lucky.”

Dealer had gone down the rabbit hole of ligers to find every detail about them as they became her new favourite animal. Of course this led her to learn about other hybrids as well.

“Really? Couldn’t they have done the same thing that they did to the ligers?” Guard was now sitting comfortably in the backseat of the jeep.

“Ligers were pretty successful because they didn’t have a lot of restrictions to their growth. The tigon which is the baby of a female lion and male tiger ended up not being any bigger than their parents. This was cuz the parents had these genes that would put a damper on growth and so these poor cats couldn’t get any of the size benefits.” Dealer sighed. “Their attempts to create a tigon that wasn’t screwy ended up getting all the tigers and lions killed which sucks.”

“I wonder if all the animals out there right now are the result of these successful hybridizations.” Guard thought out loud.

“Nope. There are still animals that haven’t been touched by science. They ended up naturally surviving, though it really isn’t the case with Asia and their genetically enhanced animals that ended up out-competing them.” Sweeper assured Guard. She tried to go for a stretch before realizing that her spine was a kitchen pipe and stopped midway.

“I guess you can say they’re ti-gone.” Dealer laughed hysterically at her own joke while the other looked on.

“Oh I get it.” Reaper smiled to herself.

As soon as she finished laughing she looked up to see Sweeper who had an unimpressed look on her face. She coughed and tried to get back on track.

“Anyways I’ve also read up on failed hybrids done by Africa and Britain. Apparently their monarchs were down for whatever was going on in Australia so they grabbed the closest big cats that they could get their hands on. They had lions but no tigers, can you guess what a cross between a lion and a leopard is?” Dealer looked around the group hoping that they didn’t answer correctly.

“A leo-on?” Guard guessed.

“Close, its leopon. And the baby of a leopard and jaguar is called a jagulep.”

“They really weren’t using their imaginations when they were naming them.” Sweeper said.

“What? I’ll give you leopon but jagulep is sick as hell. Sounds like it could be an eldritch monster.”

“They could still afford to be more creative.”

“I don’t think people can afford to be creative with names when they need to be descriptive… Sweeper.”

Sweeper couldn’t say anything back, it was not often but in this case she was right at least to some extent. It’s better to give something a name that could instantly tell the reader or listener the basics of it. All androids were named with this basic premise in mind though some tend to push it too far but those were usually combat androids and they at least were designed to fit their type name.

“So is the jeep ready to go?” A voice called at them from a distance. It was their Captain.

“Yep all set to go and do things.” Guard got out of the vehicle to salute Savage.

“So uh what’re we going to do?” Dealer questioned.

“Isn’t it obvious? We’re going to attack the enemy base!” Savage stood with confidence.

“I don’t usually question your orders Captain but isn’t it too soon?” Sweeper pointed out. “And we’ve been in the dark about the UCNA base since the last attack, they could’ve acquired more soldier.”

Savage struck a pose like she was thinking really hard about it. But to Sweeper and Dealer the plan was already set in stone. This was her way of getting her soldiers to think that she thought about other options but decided that this was the only effective one.

“No, this is the only effective option.”

“This vehicle only has five seats, there are six of us. What should we do?” Reaper walked around the jeep trying to figure out how to fit everyone in.

“Can I even sit? I haven’t tried sitting down for the past few days.”

“That’s insane Sweeper, is that why you keep asking us to lift you up and put you on the bed?” Dealer was annoyed at having to do extra work.

The group paused as they tried to come up with a good solution, Savage was the first to speak. “Alright we could keep Corporal Sweeper in the trunk since it should be nice and straight enough for her.”

“We could have her lie down on the roof of the vehicle.” Reaper suggested.

“Hm this is tough. What do you think Mirabelle?” Guard looked up at the large girl behind her.

“Kill.” She replied

Sweeper did not like any of those ideas but she could not find any way for her to fit in the jeep without sitting down. Her stress only increased as she kept hearing more suggestions from her companions. Weirdly enough Dealer was rather quiet.

“Why don’t we have Sweeper lie down on our laps in the backseats?” She finally said.

The Captain snapped her fingers. “Yes that could work. But we still need one person to guard the base.”

“I don’t think one person can hold a base.” Dealer replied.

“They’re not expected to. They will be there to tell us who the attackers were with their dying breath and we will then obtain sweet vengeance afterwards for our fallen comrade. Which is why I decided you will stay Private Guard.”

“What me? I don’t get to go on a car ride? Well how will Mira fit into the jeep?”

“I will kill the jeep.” Mirabelle grabbed the vehicle and almost lifted it up before being stopped by Dealer and Sweeper.

“Hm what was your idea again Reaper?” The Captain pointed at her.

“We disconnect Sweeper’s consciousness, cut her body into pieces and put them together again once we arrive at the destination.”

“No, the first one.”

“Oh… we have her cling onto the roof of the vehicle.”

“Yes! That’s it, we’ll have Private Mirabelle here grab onto the roof. Her grip strength is a magnitude higher than a tank if a tank were to have hands.” Savage lifted and squeezed her hands together.

“Ok I’ll stay here then and… protect the area I guess!” Guard saluted the group before running back into the base.

“That’s the spirit Private Guard!” Shouted Savage before turning her attention back to the rest. “Alright ladies, our first destination is beyond that forest to the north. We’ll head there first to give a proper greeting to our new guests.”

“Murder. I must murder the guests.” Mirabelle lifted her arms straight.

“Hold your horses private. We’ll only do that if we come to a disagreement or we find out that they are part of the UCNA.”

With that said everyone got into position inside, and outside, the jeep. They set off with their targets being the people in the woods and the UCNA base right after.