by S J Taylor
The best I could do was a few whispered words. “Please don’t make her do this. I’ll do anything. Please.”
Amicus narrowed his eyes at me, still smiling. “You have nothing to offer me, Era Rae. I have you now. I don’t need the Freemen anymore. In fact, everything you have is already mine for the taking.”
“Just shut up,” the Master Field Sergeant told me, her voice dripping contempt. “Be quiet, and watch the show. Saskia remembers her place. She knows who she serves.”
“Era Rae.” It was Saskia’s damaged, distorted voice. I looked into her eyes, searching for something that would show me my friend was still there.
Nothing. Her eyes were washed out, cold, and dead.
But she was looking at me.
Now I felt the calm creeping up over me.
For all the good it would do me.
“Era Rae,” Saskia repeated my name. “I remember. I am what I was made. I remember who I am.”
Fire burned in me, cold and fierce inside the enveloping folds of the calm. Saskia was lost. One more thing I’d managed to lose along the way in my daring escape from the evil people trying to rule a world they’d broken into crumbling bits. Now the entire Freemen camp was going to be wiped off the face of the Earth.
How many other people were going to have to die for me to live?
Amicus began tapping his booted foot against the metal floor. “Let’s begin, Saskia. Send the signal to the ground troops for the advance. They need some exercise. You remember the sequence, don’t you? We did input that knowledge to your memory drives?”
I fixed my gaze on Amicus. If looks could kill…
He winked at me.
Saskia raised a gloved hand to the control board. “I remember.”
Her finger extended to a coms panel.
And then she took a deliberate step to the right and pressed a red, square button I knew she shouldn’t press.
The release for the binder restraints that were holding me back.
Amicus stared at her blankly as the metal rings snicked off me and recessed back into the wall. I slumped to the floor, on my hands and knees, bleeding and free.
I lifted my head up, taking in everything and everyone around me.
On the exhale, I moved.
Master Field Sergeant lady pulled her pistol from its holster. I recognized it as a nasty little compact electrolaser that would blow apart my insides if she got off a shot. As she raised it I snapped my hands at her arm from both directions. Her wrist broke, and she dropped the gun.
My knee in her midsection and my elbow driven hard in the back of her skull put her down.
The other man in the room lunged at me. I never did know his name, or his rank in the Restored Society, but I knew everything I needed to. His shoulder was only meant to bend so far, and a heel strike to his groin would put him in enough pain to render him unconscious.
He slid down to the floor in a crumpled heap.
Then I turned on Third Marshall Amicus.
“That’s quite enough,” he said to me, no concern in his voice at all for the human killing machine that just took down two high-ranking members of the Enforcers. That was probably because he was holding a ballistic laser pistol to the side of Saskia’s head. The threat was very real and very immediate. Just one discharge from that range would sear away half her skull.
I knew I could get to Amicus before he could do anything to me. I could see a dozen different ways to end him, incapacitate him, break him in half. He’d be dead in the next five seconds.
Except if I did any of that, he’d still have time to pull that trigger and kill Saskia.
“Yes,” he said to me, nodding his head to my unspoken thoughts. “I will kill her. She represents the perfection the Society has tried to reach in a troubled world. But, she is one among many. We found several ways to create perfection. Saskia here is just one. There will be others. You will see that for yourself.”
He reached out with his other hand to work the com panel. “Pilot. Bring us in closer.”
I felt the HoverHawk tilt forward. On the viewscreen behind Saskia, New Merica loomed.
At my feet, the Master Field Sergeant groaned and stirred, cradling her hand to her chest.
“Now, then, Saskia.” The Third Marshall spoke to her but kept his eyes on me. “Do what I tell you. Put your friend back in her restraints. We have a long way to go yet. We can’t have Era getting in our way again.”
Maybe once Saskia got far enough away from Amicus I could get at him and end this. Yes. Maybe. Probably. I stayed coiled up, ready to spring, waiting for Saskia to move. Her face was a blank, her pale eyes unblinking. She went to take a step toward me but then she stopped. She turned, just her head, to the Third Marshall.
“I do not understand the request. Please advise.”
That finally made Amicus’s expression break. His smile slipped. His hand gripped his pistol tighter. “Do as I say. You live to serve the Restored Society. You have to do as I say. Remember?”
Saskia’s lips trembled, the one corner tugging against the edge of a scar. “I… remember,” she said.
“Good. Now, contact the troops on the ground—”
“I remember,” Saskia repeated. “I remember… Era Rae.”
She moved quicker than my eyes could follow. Her arm whipped up and she grabbed his wrist and wrenched it completely around until the bones snapped and the gun fell. At the same time her other hand came up to his neck and picked him up off the floor and smashed him hard enough into the viewscreen wall to leave a dent in the scene of the Freemen camp.
Amicus’s eyes rolled back up in his head. Still Saskia squeezed tighter.
Around me the calm dissolved as panic burst through to take its place. I rushed to Saskia’s side, grabbing hold of her arm. Trying to pull her away from Amicus was like trying to bend stone in my bare hands. “No! Saskia, no! Let him go. Don’t do this. You aren’t just a killing machine. You aren’t just what they made you. Don’t do this!”
They were the same words that I had said to myself, so many times, to remind myself that the Restored Society may have created my DNA sequence, or grown me in a test tube, or whatever, but I was still me. I was still Era Rae and my decisions were my own.
Saskia had been made over in the image of the Restored Society’s perfect world, but she was still Saskia.
She still had the choice to be human.
Slowly, her hand relaxed on his throat. I saw the purple bruises in the shape of her gloved hand left behind on his flesh, and I wasn’t sure he was still breathing. I didn’t bother to check. If he was dead, I simply didn’t care. The point was, Saskia had come back to me.
She looked into my eyes, and she blinked, and when she smiled I smiled with her. I touched her cheek with my fingertips, tracing the line of one of her many scars. “Saskia,” I breathed, trying to put into words what I was feeling. “I think… I mean…”
In that distorted voice of hers, she said what I was unable to. “I love you, Era Rae.”
And then she died.
The soft fzzzt sound from the Master Field Sergeant’s electrolaser pistol filled the room as a beam of lightning arced from the weapon into Saskia’s body. Sparks exploded from every electronic device in her skin and on her suit, followed by her piercing scream as her body twitched violently and dropped to the deck.
This time, when the calm took me, rage wasn’t just twisted through it.
My rage controlled it.
I dropped into a crouch and swept my leg around backward in a wide, sweeping loop that knocked the gun out of the Sergeant’s off hand, nearly breaking that one for her, too. Landing on my back, I spun in a circle on the bridge of my spine and then kicked up my feet while pushing off with my hands. I came down on my feet, and screaming in fury, I brought both of my fists down at her head.
She rolled away just as my hands came down. I felt the impact with the floor all the way up to my shoulders. It hurt, and I didn’t care.
We
both saw her gun, laying between us, and we both knew the other was going to try to get it first.
I was faster.
As I brought the electrolaser pistol up to kill the woman, the door to the room opened and one of the HoverHawk pilots stepped into the room, a little stun pistol in hand. The look of surprise on his face was almost comical.
I didn’t have time to shoot both of them. I turned the gun on the pilot, watching the electrified laser bolt lance through him and explode his heart in his chest.
The Master Field Sergeant took advantage of that momentary distraction to get to the side wall and slap her palm against a panel that dropped her through the floor into a small, cylindrical space that closed up behind her.
Escape pod. There were exactly five in every HoverHawk. Putting one in the room where prisoners were restrained made sense.
You never knew when your prisoner was going to escape and hold a gun to your head.
I screamed louder and beat at the release panel for the escape hatch. It wasn’t going to do me any good. Once those pods ejected the hatches sealed to the outside atmosphere. I knew that. I beat on the panel anyway, yelling after the Sergeant exactly what I was going to do to her when I found her.
“Era…”
Saskia’s voice brought me back from that brink. It was so quiet, so weak, that it was a wonder I heard her at all. With one last shaking, frustrated shout, I stumbled over to where she lay on the floor and knelt down beside her. Her eyes were completely blank, drained of every color now. She couldn’t see me. She couldn’t see anything. She should be dead.
Then the electronics in her suit squeaped and her body jerked and I realized it was the cybernetic implants the Restored Society had forced on her that were keeping her alive. They forced her to breathe, even though her heart had stopped. They kept her brain going, even as her soul shriveled inside its shell.
“I’m here,” I told her, carefully cradling her head in my arms. “Saskia, hold on.”
“Can’t,” she murmured, her voice more robotic than ever. “Systems failure. Core damage… catastrophic. This unit—”
“No!” I snapped. “You are not a thing! You’re a human being. You’re my friend. Do you hear me? You don’t belong to them!”
Somehow her blank eyes rolled to me, and I swear her lips tried to smile.
The tears in my eyes made it hard to tell.
“You belong to me,” I told her.
Her hand lifted up, and her fingers stroked my chin. “I… know who I am,” she promised. “They tried to change me. I was… so lost, Era. I couldn’t find myself. But… you did. You never stopped looking for me… did you?”
I shook my head, and tried not to see how the indicator lights on her battlesuit kept winking out. What could I say to her? I wanted to tell her I never gave up on her, but the truth was I had given her up for dead until today. I had given up hope.
I had even allowed myself to love someone else.
In that moment I was glad she couldn’t see my expression. It would give away too much.
“I love you,” she said, her voice faint and broken up by a whirring, clicking noise, like a broken wind-up toy. “You… found me.”
Yes. I did find her. I swallowed, and tried to let that be enough. I found her, in the end.
Her hand fell away, and I felt her body start to go slack. She had time enough to say just three more words. “You… saved me…”
Then even the implanted electronics failed her, and she slipped away.
I know the things that happened next. I know them as facts, devoid of any emotion or feeling. For the next few minutes I just floated through the world, acting without thinking.
The man I had dropped before with a strike to his groin, the nameless Society officer, groaned and tried to sit up and I drove the blade of my hand into the side of his neck just as hard as I could. He dropped again and stayed down. The other pilot—there was always two of them in a HoverHawk—finally came back to see what the trouble was and I broke both of his legs before smashing his head against the wall hard enough to crack his helmet. I think he was still alive when I walked away.
The door led to a short, narrow space that led in turn directly to the cockpit of the airship. I’d been trained on these ships in simulators, and all of the controls were right where I needed them to be. Under my hands the HoverHawk rotated on its axis until I was facing the ordered lines of the Enforcer troops below me.
A flip of a switch activated the external speakers.
I didn’t know what I was going to say until I was saying it.
“This is Era Rae. You were looking for me. Here I am. Third Marshall Amicus is dead. I am declaring war on the Restored Society. The Freemen will evacuate their camp, unless they want to stand between me and the Enforcers. Our war starts now. Jadran—” his name echoed through the streets of the broken city “—get them out of there.”
That was all I said before I flipped the coms switch off again. I wasn’t going to discuss this. There was no warning for the Enforcers. No chance for them to leave. They had followed the Restored Society to this point, killing and doing harm all along the way. They knew what the Restored Society stood for. They’d had their chances to turn away, and they hadn’t. They were as guilty as the Society themselves.
I was their judge, and I was their executioner.
There was no jury.
On the handles of the steering column were the activation switches for the weapons, hidden behind protective covers so that some pilot wouldn’t accidentally fire off a salvo while performing evasive maneuvers. I flicked the covers out of the way with my thumbs, took a last deep breath, and fired into the front ranks of the Enforcers.
A sound started low in my throat, deep in my chest, building until it broke through my lips in a scream.
Missiles thundered from the HoverHawk’s slings in streaks of red, blazing light. The explosions struck down dozens of soldiers at a time, mangling bodies and vehicles and weaponry with indiscriminate destruction. It was death on a scale I had never imagined, and I was the one who dealt it out.
My scream rose in volume, higher and higher still, leaving me breathless and spent at the same moment that the HoverHawk ran out of ammunition. Now I just sat and stared, my fingers still pressed tight to the firing triggers even though there was nothing left in the tubes.
Fires burned. Smoke lifted and spread and rolled away. The wall, the only protection the Freemen camp really had, was smashed and broken where the explosions had caught it. There were bodies… oh, so many bodies, and I hoped in a distant and uncaring way that the Freemen had gotten away from this side of the camp before I had started shooting. There was wreckage that had been heavy support vehicles and it was hard to tell where one piece ended and the other began.
A single laser shot splashed off the transparent metal canopy. Then another. Then five, ten, thirty more.
Suddenly I was nothing more than a stationary target.
A long range lance emitter, huge and sleek and deadly, fired a high yield burst of yellow-tinged energy that struck one of the HoverHawk’s wings and I felt the loss of the antigrav engine on that corner as the airship bucked and careened wildly to the side. I couldn’t stay here.
Unless I wanted to die.
I wasn’t going to die. Not here.
Not until I was done making the Restored Society pay.
I jumped out of the pilot’s seat and ran for the back of the HoverHawk only to be thrown sideways and slammed against a wall. The stabilizers were gone. The ship couldn’t right itself or adjust the artificial gravity plates. The armor shielding was already failing.
When I got to the nearest escape pod, I paused, and looked back toward the part of the ship where Saskia would still be laying. I wanted so badly to go and get her and bring her with me.
Somewhere in the ship, I heard the sound of something exploding.
There was no more time. If I didn’t leave now, I wouldn’t be leaving at all.
; I touched the release panel, and dropped into the escape pod. It jettisoned me at some unknown angle as the airship began to spin out of control and all I could do was hold on.
Era’s Journal, Entry #3100
I know what I did. I killed all those people.
Dozens of deaths. All at my hands.
And I’m okay with that.
When it was happening, I didn’t feel anything. It was something that needed to be done. I was cold, and calculating, and I’m not even really sure I can blame it on my inner calm. I don’t think I can blame it on anything or anyone but me.
All this time, ever since leaving Colony 41, I’ve been trying to figure out who I am.
After what I just did I have to wonder. Am I more than what they made me?
Or less?
Not for the first time, I wished that I’d brought a weapon with me from the HoverHawk.
The decimated city that had once been known as Jacksonville wasn’t any less dangerous in the daylight. I was sure I heard the grunts and howls from Children of the Event hunting close to where I walked. I never saw them, but I’m sure they were there.
At least sunrise made it easier to follow the tracks of the Freemen survivors.
There were a few dozen footprints that I was following, so at least I knew most of them made it out alive. All I had to do was catch up to them, and find Jadran, and tell him what I had figured out onboard that HoverHawk.
The Reformed Society was moving toward one of their research facilities, out here in the Outlands, to destroy it. Half a plan had started to form in my head. If we could beat the rest of the Enforcers to that facility then we might be able to destroy both it, and them. That would be the kind of blow I was looking to deal out to the Society. That many Enforcers gone. They’d feel that.
I’d need to know more about their facility to make all that happen. Where it was, what kind of defenses it had, what sort of personnel. For that matter, I needed to know if this facility where the Society had been making monsters was even still functioning. They might just be going there to make sure the computer data stores were destroyed.