Brit made a gesture and the ball floated back into Brit’s satchel. Then he stepped towards the field, but nothing happened.
“We must need higher security to enter,” he said. “The emitter won’t give us access.” He paused for a moment, his face twitching, then concluded, “You’ll have to get us through.”
“You think the contact is in there?” Sun li asked.
“There is a distinct possibility,” Brit replied, licking his lips. Sun li could not tell if he was nervous or excited, but she felt a mixture of both. Despite all her training, she wondered how she would hold up against trained soldiers if there were any inside.
She flicked her wrists and the blades sprang forth. She could have simply cut a hole in the wall, but that would have left a very obvious record of their presence. Instead, she thrust one of her blades forward into the locus energy field. Immediately it flickered and ran off into the weapon like evaporated steam. The room lay open before them.
A locus pulse sliced through the air before she could react, but the shot was off and one of her blades absorbed the blast. Her eyes ran across the room, searching for where the shot came from. The room was large with a high ceiling, filled with floating furniture. Two doors sat on the opposite wall near the corners but that was all she had time to take in.
More volleys streaked into her blades as four automatons opened fire, two on either side of her. They looked like thick cylinders with two pulsers embedded on rotating rings in the center of their bodies. They were at least eight feet tall and floated about three feet off the floor.
The automatons were laying down so much fire that the room looked like one of the fireworks shows her father used to put on for her when she was little, before such things had been banned. She had never blocked so many attacks before and wasn’t sure how long her blades would hold up; she was afraid they might overload.
She slid beneath one of the floating tables for more protection, but a moment later it shattered above her head. A piece of scrap sliced through her arm as she rolled away from the debris.
In the background she heard one of Brit’s deafening shots go off in the hallway, but she did not bother glancing back. Instead she sprang to her feet, keeping her blades out in front of her.
She charged at one of the automatons, cutting off its two swiveling guns before it could fire another volley. With one of her blades she blocked the incoming blasts. She swept the other blade in a wide arc above her, cleaving the automaton in two.
The top of its body had not even hit the floor before Sun li launched herself at a dead run towards two more of them. They were hovering next to each other and so she leapt onto one of the floating chairs and vaulted herself through the air, coming down between them. Her locus blades cut diagonally through them leaving their remains to fall to the floor like a pair of massive organ pipes filled with circuits.
Another shot boomed out in the hallway, but again she was too concerned about the remaining automaton to give it any thought.
The last of her mechanical enemies continued to lay down a torrent of fire. But instead of firing directly at her, it was scattering its shots all around the room, punching holes in the walls and shattering furniture near her so that two more pieces of shrapnel lodged in her back. Sun li staggered from the pain and went down on one knee.
Was it changing its tactics on purpose? Perhaps these automatons were more intelligent than she had thought.
“Brit,” she cried out, “I could use a little help.” Though she didn’t like calling for aid, there was no dishonor in doing so. In fact, it was taught in the Code: as a twice braided knot is not easily broken so an ally may lend strength when your own is not sufficient for the day.
A chattering blast lit through the room a moment later, eating an enormous hole through the torso of the automaton. Sun li watched the metal husk fall.
“I would have fired sooner, but I thought you could handle it yourself,” Brit needled her, but she just clenched her teeth and tried to fight the stabbing pain in her back.
“I’m a little hurt,” she said, giving him a cutting look.
“Here, take a few squeezes of jaunt cream,” he suggested, handing her some from his own pouch, “It should take the edge off the pain. You can’t die on me yet. Mission’s not over.”
She flashed him a scathing look, but he seemed genuinely concerned for her despite his flippant remark and so her anger quickly cooled. She downed half a tube of the acrid substance, praying that it would bring relief quickly. She had been wounded before, but those had been little nicks compared to this one. A spasm seized her back, forcing her body to arch in pain.
“Hello?” came a man’s voice from one of the side rooms. “Who’s out there? What’s happening?”
Brit gazed past Sun li towards the door.
“Is that you, Math?” he asked.
Sun li felt her back pop as a surge of energy from the cream shot through her system. Suddenly she was able to move again. She reached back and yanked out the two shards of metal with one pull. Slices of pain rippled up her back and down her leg, but after a few unbearable moments they began to fade and she could move normally again, although still with a great deal of pain.
Brit moved around behind her and pulled out a small black tube the size of his finger. Holding it over the two wounds, a cool mist spread out from the top of the canister, covering her skin and sealing the openings.
“Yes, it’s Math. Who are you?” came the frightened voice. He sounded young, like he was in his twenties or thirties.
“Someone who’s come for a delivery,” Brit replied. He motioned for Sun li to open the door.
“Stand back from the door,” she warned and then proceeded to slice along the left edge where it was connected to the wall. The thick slab of metal crashed to the floor.
Inside was a man strapped to a chair with energy bands surrounding his hands and feet. He was indeed young, perhaps only a few years older than Sun li. His dark curly hair was damp from sweat.
“Thank heavens it’s you,” he sighed. “I thought maybe one of the bounty hunters had found out I contacted you.”
Sun li stepped through the door and into the room. There was a white plastic bed and a steel table and chairs there, none of which were floating.
“Don’t move,” she warned him as she approached with her blades. “I’m going to free you from those bonds.”
She touched the energy bands one by one lightly with the tip of her blade and all of them disappeared in quick succession.
“Thank you,” said the man. “If you’ll free Constance,” he pointed towards another door nearby, “I’ll get the device.”
“How long do we have before they send in a response team?” asked Brit.
Math had turned towards an alcove in the back of the room, but stopped to address Brit’s question.
“The chief engineer isn’t likely to send any more automatons if you took care of the ones in the hallway. This is a repair vessel and most of the automatons here are not combat ready. There are a few patrol mechs in the hangar, but they’re too big to fit into the interior hallways.”
“Math, are you alright?” came a feminine voice from behind the other door.
“Yes, Const,” Math replied. “We’ll have you out soon.”
Brit’s face screwed itself up in disbelief. “You’re saying they’ll just let us walk off this ship without a fight?”
“No,” Math shook his head. “Jel will lock down the ship instead. It has other defenses.”
“Like what?” Sun li interjected.
“And who’s Jel?” Brit asked at the same time.
But Math didn’t have time to answer. At that moment a burst of light erupted in the doorway. A blast of concussive force knocked her feet out from under her and slammed her onto the floor like a rag doll. The light briefly blinded her, but she was certain she felt waves of energy ripple across her blades, perhaps some after effect of the blast.
“Math, are you all righ
t?” Constance yelled from beyond the door.
As the room came back into focus and Sun li struggled to her feet she saw a gray figure standing in the doorway. At first she thought it was a man, but then realized that it was a very human-like automaton. What she had at first taken for some sort of battle armor looked like it was actually fused to its skin. Even its face was covered in the metal plates and it had metal slats flowing down the top and back of its head like some form of stylized hair.
But its eyes were not made by a machine. They were human eyes, though whiter than most with striking gray pupils. Was it a human or a machine? She could not be sure. But once it opened its mouth to speak, she no longer had any doubt.
“So Deliverance hired a blade?” said the man. He spoke through metal teeth and lips but his voice was unmistakably human. “A shame that you returned to your homeland only to die along with the rest of your people.”
Sun li glanced to either side and caught sight of both Math and Brit sprawled out on the floor. They weren’t moving. She raised her blades, one forward for defense and the other arched back to attack.
She knew the man had mentioned the Purge to unnerve her. It made sense coming from one of the soldiers of Factor Ten. She knew they were heavy augers but she doubted that all the soldiers in their army could look as gruesome as this one.
“Math, what’s going on out there?” Constance screamed, her voice panicked.
“It’s all right, Constance,” Sun li assured her. “I’ll have you out in a moment.” She fixed her eyes on the auger. “You’d better leave here,” she warned him. “Math is coming with us.”
The man’s mouth stretched into what passed for a smile on his soldered face. He gestured towards the fallen men. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think there is any more ‘us’ left. It’s just you.”
He advanced towards her, spreading his empty hands wide as if he were unarmed. But if this man really did know about blades, his gesture made no sense. He had to know that she could slice off his arms with the flick of her wrist when he got close enough. Something told her that he was not that foolish. She took a step back, buying herself some time, trying to assess how he meant to attack her.
For a moment she thought he might be doing the same, sizing her up with those gruesome eyes of his, but if that were so, he didn’t waste much time. He dashed forward, leaping in the air. Sun li thought she saw a light flicker in his hand as she dove underneath him.
Something about the man’s maneuver sent off a flash of warning in her mind. His movements were uncannily similar to the automaton that had nearly killed her in the canyon. Going on intuition, she flicked one of her blades up at him as he sailed above her, almost exactly the way she had done in the canyon. Only this time, she kept one blade at her side.
She saw another flash and then the blade she had attacked with was gone. She sprang to her feet and spun around just in time for her blade to absorb a surge of energy from her opponent’s outstretched hand. She felt it ripple as before, but this time there was no blast to knock her off her feet.
“You’re learning,” said the metallic man.
Sun li flicked her wrist so that her second blade returned to life. “I would learn your name as well,” she said. “Who are you?”
“I should have thought your friend the jammer would have told you about me. Most call me the Gray Man. Like any decent bounty hunter my real name is a secret. And everyone who knows that secret is dead,” he replied, circling around her to the side, holding out a single outstretched arm towards her. White slivers of energy danced on the ends of his fingers. “Don’t worry, I’ll tell you the secret soon enough. Just before you join them.”
With his other hand, he reached behind his back and pulled out a silvery ring a little larger than his hand and tossed it on the ground at his feet. The next moment, his form seemed to spilt until there were two identical figures standing next to each other. The same bizarre metallic hair, the same gross caricature of a face.
“Time for another lesson,” the two figures said in unison.
CHAPTER NINE
The Rubricon
The figures moved in sync, eyeing her with two sets of horrific eyes.
He was using a tasm replicator. They were used as decoys by undersiders to throw pursuers off their trail. Sun li had never heard of them being used in combat before. They looked solid, but of course they were only projections. All you had to do to disable them was destroy the ring projection system. She couldn’t think what advantage they could have given him since he had laid down the ring in plain sight, but the eyes had a cunning look to them. She knew that somehow he intended to use the device to his advantage. She studied the two figures standing next to it. There was a sudden shift and now the figures were no longer moving in sync, but remained next to the disc. She wished she could tell what he was up to, but his intentions eluded her.
Why wasn’t he pressing his advantage? He had the dampening field. All he had to do was to get close enough to disable both of her blades. She doubted she could defeat him in hand to hand combat since his body was covered in metal and hers was not. But perhaps he had come to realize that she could avoid his attacks now using a single blade at a time and so would not be an easy victim.
Her only hope was to stall him until Math or Brit woke up—if they woke up—and evened the odds. Her eyes shot over to Brit and an idea flashed into her mind. If she could just get his weapon, she could destroy her opponent. Her enemy stood between her and Brit but she doubted he planned to stray very far from the projector. It could not effectively mimic the presence of someone from far away.
“Why do you fight for a bunch of murderers like Factor Ten?” she asked, trying to distract him as she eased towards her left.
Whether or not he guessed what she intended the man moved in the same direction, blocking her path towards Brit.
“Who says they’re murderers?” the figure on her left replied. “And who says I work for Factor Ten?” added the one on her right.
Sun li studied the two faces. She had not expected that reply. Perhaps he was lying but she did not see what there was to be gained by doing so.
“So who do you work for?” she asked, shifting to the right. Her opponent shifted as well, but then seemed to change his mind. One of the figures began walking backwards towards Brit. She gritted her teeth. Maybe he was on to her.
“My employers are a more closely guarded secret than even my name,” he answered. The figure that had retreated towards Brit cast a lingering glance on the jammer’s limp figure but strolled on past until he stopped and pulled out another disc from his back and placed it on the floor.
Now two more figures appeared, identical to the others. They all looked exactly the same but she knew that the real one must have been the one that had planted the second replicator near Brit.
She continued to maneuver around the first set of figures and now had a direct path to Brit. But the others had been moving as well. One of them was advancing straight towards her while the other three fanned out around Brit. She gave a feint as if she meant to lunge to the right and when the one closest to Brit fell for the move, she pivoted back to the left, rushing forward towards the unconscious jammer.
She slid on the ground and thrust her hand out towards his satchel. Flinging it open she pulled out the weapon and pointed it at one of the figures, but then stopped. She could not remember how many shots Brit had said the weapon had, but she knew that it wasn’t very many. And she’d heard him fire it out in the hallway as well. She had to make sure she was firing at the right one.
As she rose to her feet the figures flashed their mechanical grins at her. She spun from figure to figure, aiming at each one of them, threatening to fire, but they converged on her without fear, one from each direction. Now she knew why he’d used the tasm projector. A blade could only block from two directions at once. The four-fold attack was the great weakness of a blade and she had walked right into it.
She fired the weapon at
one of the figures. A sizzling crack ripped through the air and passed right through it, making an immense hole in the wall beyond. She gasped and turned for another shot—another explosion of noise ripped through the room but once again passed harmlessly through the illusion.
The four figures stretched out their arms just as she was swinging the gun around for another shot. She felt a burst of heat stab at her from behind. The energy seized her body and threw her to the ground like a rag doll. She thought she would lose consciousness, but it only left her paralyzed.
She landed on her back and her enemy strolled towards her. There was only one figure now.
“Lesson over,” he said. Then he reached down and pulled up one of her deadened arms. The blade was still active. All he had to do was bend her arm and the weapon would slice her in two. So this was how she was meant to die, pierced by her own blade.
He leaned in close to whisper in her ear, “I have no name any more,” he told her. Then he pulled back and gave her one last look at his mangled face.
A high-pitched hiss infiltrated the room at that same moment and Sun li smelled something acrid in the air. The metallic man shot his eyes towards the door where the energy barrier had reappeared. For the first time she thought she saw fear in his eyes. In that moment, he did not look like some metallic monster, but someone very human.
Yanking on Sun li’s arm he dragged her towards the door. A light green mist was rising up from the floor. Sun li could see what he meant to do: deactivate the energy barrier with her blade and escape.
But the Gray Man stumbled and lost his grip on her. His arm strayed unexpectedly into her blade as he fell and shut itself off. The man rose to a crawling position and fumbled about until he found her arm again. He twisted on her wrist and the blade came back to life, but then he dropped her hand a second time and fell to the floor.
Then, mercifully, his eyes went shut at last.
* * *
The energy barrier vanished and a woman in a black synth uni-suit entered the room. Her light brown hair was flecked with gray and hung down just past her shoulders. She wore over-sized gauntlets and boots that were gun metal silver. Or perhaps they were augmented replacements for her actual hands and feet. The white monochrome insignia she wore on her left shoulder depicted the number “10” inside a circle.
The Jammer and the Blade Page 6