Training took over and Arin immediately got up, handling the larger woman until she could perform the proper maneuver to get her to spit up the tart. But even after forcing it out, Cherry convulsed on the floor.
A very unhealthy color was spreading up through her veins.
"Shit! Shit, shit, shit, shit..." Arin pulled up her comm and signaled for medical attention.
"Polity Medical, what is your emergency?" The soft but business-like AI on the other end of the line asked.
"My friend, she's convulsing on the floor... I'm at the Capital H-"
"I have your location as the Earth Capital Hotel, Suite 4488, is that correct, Miss Firenze?"
"Yes that's-"
"I will be deploying that floor's medical robot presently. Please stand by."
After thirty seconds, the door opened itself and a medical robot shaped like a human entered on treads.
"Please step back, and remain calm," the bot said in a vaguely male voice.
After several minutes, there were other new arrivals. Polity Security Bureau agents in their stereotypical grey suits.
"Miss Paragon, we got notification of a disturbance."
Arin was anything but calm. "I-It's Cherry, she ate a, a tart and- and-"
After stumbling through her explanation, one of the agents went over and retrieved the tart, bagging it for evidence in a quick-polymer bubble emitted from a device on his wrist - an omnitool.
"Medbot, report," the agent in charge - a pangolin-like demihuman woman with multicolored scales instead of hair commanded the medical bot.
"Presently an adaptive, hostile catalytic nanite mass is transmitting itself through Miss Cherry Noceda's muscle tissue. It is attempting to recombine her oxygen, iron, and carbon into a form of thermo-reactive incendiary. At present, I have her stabilized, but cannot dislocate the nanites already bonded without a magnetic induction room."
The nanites were turning Cherry into something...
"Clarify," the agent said firmly.
"Her mass is being converted into a bomb. One with a present radius of one kilometer and a potential radius of eleven kilometers, based on the mass available. I am stabilizing her, but it will be two minutes until the nanites are able to repropagate via direct intercellular contact, at which point she will rapidly convert and explode.
A magnetic induction room... That gave Arin an idea.
"M-Medbot, what's your magnetic susceptibility rating?"
"I am pleased to have a Solar-class magnetic resistance for all primary and secondary functions."
"Good, because I'm about to test that," Arin surged forward, but the lead agent stopped her by grabbing her arm.
"Paragon, we need to get you away from here."
"I'm not leaving Cherry! And unless any of you shits are from Jupiter you're not budging me!" She put her foot down, cracking the tiled marble of the floor beneath.
The agent in charge let go, muttering a curse or perhaps a prayer under her breath as Arin knelt with Cherry between her and the bot. She didn't touch Cherry, that could be a death sentence with nanites involved, so instead she closed her eyes and concentrated.
Her face scrunched, and she felt her power slide into place, the warm, slight buzz of the magnetic fields around her, which she visualized as bubbles; from the building, from herself, with her dense-iron blood, and even from the Earth.
And she felt the tiny, abnormal fields of the nanites, which were denser than the iron of an Earth-born human.
Towards these fields, she reached out, and held them still. She held them still and felt the invisible but potent radiation emitted by the medbot's multi-arm start to eradicate the nanites, breaking them into their elemental components at the cost of burning Cherry's insides just a bit. Burns were easy to repair, but hearing Cherry's screams was still terrible all the same.
It made Arin's concentration slip, and when that happened...
When it happened, the magnetic fields Arin caused everything with metal in it to suddenly draw toward her. The nanite globules inside Cherry were suddenly compressed beyond their capacity to maintain programming, as Arin crushed them all magnetically, before ripping her arm back and pulling the offending nanites out of her friend.
They came out in two golf-ball-sized chunks, and remained inert when Arin dropped them onto the marble, where they rolled into the pit she'd stomped in the floor.
The effort left her panting, and the agents around her stood shocked. Behind them, toward the door, a coat hangar clattered to the ground.
After a moment of stunned silence, the Medbot spoke, withdrawing its multi-arm from where it had been spraying Cherry's open wound with regrowth foam.
"Miss Noceda is now stable. Her wounds have been healed, and a prescription has been approved for her present iron deficiency, alcohol damage to the liver, and asymptomatic pre-diabetic insulin deficiency. Thank you for staying at Earth's Capital Hotel. Would you like to rate your service?"
*
An hour later, Arin and Cherry were sitting in a proper hospital, surrounded outside the doors by guards in proper combat suits, and getting a proper grilling by the PSB.
"Next time, tell your friends what's expected in the food you order. Any 'surprise' could be poisoned or worse, as you just saw. And it goes without saying, do not eat anything you aren't expecting, especially if there's catnip on it," the PSB's Chief Sports Liason warned them.
Arin felt embarrassed by the fact she'd thought the tart was so attractive... this "catnip" stuff was a joke around Jupiter, where it banned because of the high population of cait sith. She didn't think it could actually affect her...
The shared line closed and Cherry sat back. "You saved me..."
"You said we were in this together. All the way."
"Yeah... Yeah I did," Cherry turned her head, looking out the window. Well, simulated window. They were in a bunker hospital a kilometer under the city, one reserved for Polity Senators and the most important guests. This place alone could have doubled the city's medical capacity, but it was only for emergencies. "I just didn't think anything would happen this soon..."
"Yeah... No wonder most Paragons don't have any friends, huh?" Arin said. It wasn't a sore point for her, even though she felt it should be. Arin wasn't good at making friends. She was a generally good person, she hoped, and an amazing psyjock, but friend-making was the one skill she wanted but never seemed able to have. Not with her combative personality and tendency to break the rules.
It was only the latter plus alcohol - once she found the table with ethanol spikers - that had carried her through the night with Autumn...
"Only the Hek Paragons make friends, and that's with each other," Cherry groaned and looked up at the ceiling.
"Are you okay? Should I call for a nurse?"
"I just realized something... those nanites were trying to make me explode, right?"
"Yeah. What about it?"
"You're not from Earth so you don't know..." she covered her face with her hands. "If I died like that, I'd have to be buried under the name of my signature move."
"The Chokehold?" Arin asked, relieved it wasn't something worse than Cherry's feelings.
"No~, my other signature move. Bomba de Cereza."
Arin had to wait for the translator in her HUD to flash before she processed what her friend meant.
"What's a cherry bomb?" It was probably banned around Jupiter.
"Ay Dios mia. You're hopeless, Arin."
"Whatever," Arin replied. "I'm just glad you're alive."
"Me too... Ready to smash some alien Paragons?"
Arin punched her own palm with her fist. "Hell yeah. When do we start?"
"Three weeks from now."
"WHAT?!"