The burning deck sagged another few degrees, and she screamed. “If you're going to do something, do it!”
The boy activated controls on his nanomesh suit, and started entering a stream of commands. “Get your head down.”
“Why?”
“So you can live.”
They both ducked. The Razorman was nearly on top of them. It looked almost disappointed that they weren't running, and weren't trying to fight.
Ubra closed her eyes. Instantly the visual world disappeared, amplifying her other senses. The crackling of flame. The screech of Quetzals, soaring far above. And through it all, a thin, metallic whistling, coming closer and closer...
She opened her eyes in time to see a metallic hook on a length of flexible cord some zipping out of the sky.
It crashed directly into the Razorman's neck with killing force.
There was a sickening crack as its spine gave way. It was flung forward, flying from his feet and soaring off the sagging platform into the vast empyrean of space belong.
“What the hell was that?” Ubra asked, as they got to their feet and started running for the exit. They only had seconds left.
“A skyhook. They're used to guarantee the safety of our customers.” Vante said.
Ubra turned and watched the falling corpse. It had been half decapitated. “It worked.”
One moment, Wake was moments from death. The flashing tracer bolts were coming so close that it was burning his skin.
Then, he heard the sickening crash and squawk from up above, and the tracer shots immediately went wide.
Nice, he thought, but this is still almost over.
He was almost at the limit of what he could do with Vyres. They burned nearly a thousand extra kilocalories per hour of flight, and he was exhausted, his muscles shaking with glycogen depletion.
He had no weapons left to fight with, and little will.
He circled for a while, going wide, trying to see what had disrupted the Adagio’s fire.
Ubra’s fireworks had made her a target, and the Quetzals kept making dive-bomb runs on the shuttle. One of them had managed to burst through the front canopy, and the Adagio began its death throes.
How did they find me here? There were many options. Perhaps he’d slipped up at some point, left some trail that would point them straight to here.
Did I leave a fingerprint somewhere? Then his exhausted brain remaindered him that this was impossible. Early in his criminal career, he’d genehacked his own fingerprints at an underground lab on Ceres. The exact whorls and gyruses of human fingerprints are shaped by epigenetic factors, and it was easy to alter them by changing a few transcription factors in human RNA. Every few months, his fingerprints would assume a completely new pattern, with little or no similarity with the old set. He was immune to dactylography.
Then, as Ubra’s craft started its terminal descent down to the platform, a platform that would never support his weight, he wondered about her part in all of this.
Damn it, he cursed as a critical piece of information fell into place. The Reformation Confederacy didn’t know about Aaron Wake. Only the Solar Arm had known that, and they were all dead, either at Raya Yithdras’s hand or his own.
The Solar Arm, and Ubra.
She turned me in to them. It was the only thing that made sense.
In his berserk rage, he’d shot Vadim Gokla and then rampaged through the man’s well-ordered facility, intent on seizing his daughter.
Yalin.
He had created Yalin. No matter the circumstances, he was her father. It was a single pearl of truth in a world of lies, and he’d desired to have her.
The blast of the grenade under the table had been intended to kill him, and maybe it had. Aaron Wake’s psychosis had lost its deathgrip on his brain, and Andrei Kazmer had begun to struggle for control over his actions.
The fighting going on in his own head – mass murderer versus constabulary member, serial killer versus not serial killer, had confused and deranged him.
In the cover provided by the blind shooting of the deranged veteran Lucas Farholt, he’d just run. Out of the hospital, into the train tracks beyond. He had no ability to resolve this contradiction in his head, the way facts and motives seemed not to match. What Kazmer saw as mercy, Wake saw as weakness. What Wake saw as expediency, Kazmer saw as murder.
There was only escape, if not from the voices in his head.
He realized that Wake was too unstable to command his head for long, and that the old, originally personality would periodically emerge. The relaxation of Venus had helped enormously, as had Vante.
But Wake would not go. He would be there forever.
And the alternate personality had briefly raged to life at the sight of the Sons of the Vanitar. If he survived, it would emerge again, uncontrollable and unstoppable.
Kazmer regretted Wake being in there.
Wake loathed Kazmer being there. Sometimes, even denied that he was in there entirely.
The situation continued to play out on the deck, and he felt himself start to lose altitude.
No Quetzal tearing out his wings, this time. No Razorman hanging on to his foot.
Just simple sheer exhaustion.
He tried to pick out Vante, failed. He just had to hope that the boy had survived somehow.
He flew underneath the platform, through a gentle rain of dust, ash, and flaming tendrils of fuel. The platform was sagging inwards, weakened from the inside and pressured from the outside. He still saw a few glints of metal. Perhaps one or two Razormen had survived.
It would be smart to escape underneath the city, as he’d done before.
This had the smell of an operation authorized at the highest levels. Multiple Sons of the Vanitar present, along with military grade gear and even some sort of biokinetic supersoldier. Very likely, Raya Yithdras herself had signed off on this little catch and retrieve mission.
Very well, he thought, angling his wings as he zipped past columns. If she wants to flush me out, then she’ll get more of me than she can handle.
He arrived at the Quetzal roost.
Three of the massive dinosoids had returned to their perches. They were all utterly gorged on human flesh, their beaks shiny with blood, and paid him little attention. They were heavily scarred from the blades. Blood soaked their feathers, and slash-marks cross-cut their beaks.
He moved around them, passing close enough that he could have reached out and touched their feathers. He found the trapdoor, suddenly remembering that he’d bolted it from the other side.
Curiously, when he touched it, he found that it wasn’t bolted any more.
Strange.
He swung open the door, revealing the city beyond, and hauled himself through the portal. He climbed to his feet -
- And a sudden blow smashed into him.
He was flung backwards, tumbling across the polyglass-lined floor, stars swimming in front of his vision.
A glint of metal raced towards his face.
He ducked on blind instinct. The hook whooshed overhead.
He rolled to his feet, settled into a crouch to lower his center of mass as the attacker rushed at him.
The Razormen were unforgettable but uniform. Their blank masks made them anonymous. The similarities in their body armor and dress made it almost look like they’d rolled off an assembly line, but slight differences in their heights and builds bespoke the truth that they were people.
Wake had no weapon. He scooped up a piece of metal rebar from the floor, wielding like a pole staff, and rammed it straight into the Razorman’s chest. There was a slight gasp, and its forward charge was arrested.
Then it sized the rebar pole with one hand, and slashed downwards with the other.
Sparks flew, and the rebar was shorn in half. Wake fell back, clutching a shortened staff that glowed dull red at the edge.
The Razorman lunged.
Wake dodged.
The Razorman swiped.
Wake parried.
He was getting better at telling these masked freaks apart from slight differences in their gait and deportment.
He was fairly sure that Nolund Esper had called this one B-31.
Pleased to meet you, he thought, as a curved edge whickered overhead, stirring air against his scalp.
He wielded the rebar like a cross-staff, hammering blows against B-31’s head and shoulders. Nothing stopped the metal-covered lunatic. He still pressed forward, still slashing, still trying to tear Wake apart.
His muscles felt like cooling lead, congesting and clogging with exhaustion and fatigue. Lactic acid burned. His joints ached every time the metal stick deflected a clanging strike from his assailant.
Wake was done.
The rigors of the past two hours had drained him, sucked him dry like a leaf.
“Fuck all of this,” he said, and tried to spread his Vyres and fly above Zephyr city.
It was a mistake, and he realised it was a mistake just when it was a moment too late to correct himself.
The corridors of the street were narrow, and his biokinetic wings scraped the edges, impeding his wing profile. He awkwardly flapped upwards, not generating the downdraft he needed to get off the ground, and B-31 pounced.
A foot flashed out in a metallic streak. Wake turned to avoid the kick, but it wasn’t his body that the blow was aimed at. It was his wings.
Shrraaaaaak
His extended nervous system was truncated like a cut string as the biokinetic implants were sliced away from his back. They fell, and a second later, so did he.
Wake landed on the ground, raising the staff as metal hissed down at his neck.
Clang
Wake parried the blow.
He had the guy at full lockout, pushing down on him with a sharp steel talon.
A female had overpowered him on the platform. Against this one, a male, he stood no chance whatsoever.
It was just throwing him around.
He managed to move fast enough to avoid evisceration on any of the lightning-fast strikes, but that was all he achieved.
His energy flagging, he was moving slower and slower. His severed Vyres didn’t cause pain, just an irritating buzzing sensation as dendrites kept on insisting there were wings there when there in fact weren’t any.
Then there was the sound of a door opening behind them.
“Hey, what the hell’s going on?” a portly middle aged face poked around the doorway. “What’s with the fuckin’ racket?
B-31 jumped up from the ground and spun, its hands crossing in an x-shaped blur of light.
One blade sliced the man’s skull in half. The other clove deep into his breastbone.
Wake had an opening.
He grabbed his quarterstaff, and aimed the jagged sharp edge at the base of B-31’s turned head.
The weak spot.
But he didn’t make it. B-31 was ready for the movement and twisted again, taking the jagged metal edge in a raking strike across his chest.
It hooked right into a weak spot in the Razorman’s Kevlar body armor, and tore it from his torso. It dangled downwards like a disgraced flag, revealing B-31’s bare upper body.
Wake gasped.
There was a yellow tattoo on the mutilated and surgically reconstructed chest.
The burning platform was just a few seconds away from falling, and they were making their way into the city. Then Ubra saw something.
She grabbed Vante by the shoulder. “Reel in that skyhook. Don't ask questions. Just do it.”
The boy complied, asking questions anyway. “Why? Who?”
Ubra pointed out to the falling deck. “Look out the back of the Adagio.”
The cupola Ubra had kicked her way out of now had a pair of pale white hands struggling to claw their way through the gap.
In the seconds that followed, they saw Nolund Esper's head poke through the hole.
“Let him burn,” Vante said, remembering the phobia resonator.
“No,” Ubra said. “Save him. I want him.”
“Why?”
“I was a prisoner in that craft. They thought I'd be able to help them catch Kazmer. I killed one of them, and the other was knocked unconscious. He's no threat to me, which means I want him as a hostage?”
“A hostage?”
“Jesus, just pull him out of there before the deck collapses!” Ubra cried. “Yeah, a hostage. I killed one of them when I escaped, and as of now, I'm a fugitive, and will be running from the Sons of the Vanitar until my dying day. I'm just a woman stranded on a strange planet. I can't even get back home to my baby, because they control the star lanes. If I had one of them as a hostage, perhaps I can barter my way off this floating funeral barge of a city.”
Nolund Esper was standing precariously on the sagging top of the Adagio, looking in despair across the field of flames.
He would not last long.
His place was in darkened rooms, in clandestine meetings, behind computer terminals. His specialty was orchestrating mayhem from safely beyond the blast fire radius.
Put him in the field, and he was a dead man walking.
Vante enjoyed his misery for another few seconds, then activated the spooled skyhook.
It was actually mounted on a satellite in Venus's LEO. It was guided by gas-spewing vents, and navigated through a highly advanced geographic positioning system allowed it to hit a target two inches across.
You could make it strike with less velocity for low-pressure rescues, when dealing with a weak or injured flyer. Wake dialed it back to its lowest setting.
If it hit with any force, it would probably cave in this skinny runt's collarbone.
The whistling sound occurred, and then a gleaming point of light smacked into the man's shirt, bonding with the metallic-woven fiber.
It yanked him upwards, lifting free from the flaming sea.
It was a very close rescue.
Mere seconds after he cleared the edge of the Adagio, a fuel line touched flame.
Then the downed shuttle exploded in an enormous fireball.
Vante and Ubra ducked, closing their eyes and nonetheless feeling the flash of ignition burn their retinas.
Vicious buzzsaws of shrapnel and debris flashed overhead, one hitting the crate they were hiding in front of with enough force to throw them backwards.
The rolling explosions consumed the deck, shaking the ground. They crawled away, vaguely aware that the deck was finally falling away.
In a final screech of metal twisting beyond its failure point, the platform swung away like a branch sawn from a tree.
It and everything on it – flaming remains of the Adagio, dead Razormen, dead Sons, dead Quetzals, just peeled off and tumbled away into the bottomless pit of Venus's atmosphere.
skreeeeeeeeeee
It was so massive – dozens of square meters across – and such a familiar part of the visual panorama, that it was disconcerting to see it fall. Like watching the ground suddenly reveal itself as an illusion, falling to reveal nothing but the inky blackness of the Nordic cosmos and the stem of Yggdrasil.
“Did he live?” Asked Ubra, as soon as their pounded eardrums had recovered.
“I hope not,” Vante said, activating the winch on the skyhook.
They scanned the sky, looking for Nolund Esper. There was so much oily-black smoke that it was difficult to make out details.
In time, the rope swung through the loops of viscous black. Suspended from it was a bedraggled figure.
He’d made it. Barely.
His clothes were in tatters. He was bleeding, both from a crack on his head and the gaping gunshot wound Wake had drilled into his back.
“Why?” he croaked at Ubra.
“I saw an opportunity to escape, and I took it,” she told him. “You wouldn’t have ever allowed me to go back to my daughter, and don’t deny it. Not with all the classified information in my head. I’d have fucking died in an unfortunate accident somewhere. So, I became the unfortunate accident.”<
br />
“Please don’t hurt me,” Nolund whined.
“I want to shove that phobia resonator up your ass, sideways,” Vante said. “And when I see Aaron Wake, I’m sure he’ll volunteer to put it there with his fist.”
The boy unceremoniously dropped the man, just a few inches free from the ledge.
He screamed, feeling himself fall to the clouds below.
Moving in tandem, Ubra and Vante snatched him by his tattered shirt, and pulled him back on to the ingress into Zephyr City.
“Uhhh . . . uhhhh . . .” he sobbed, tears streaming from his eyes. “Please...we can discuss things.”
Vante tapped him on the shirt. “Discuss things? Fine. Let’s start now. You ruined my business. Bringing a battle shuttle here. Shooting up the deck. Causing the whole thing to collapse. Let's not even talk about my pain and suffering.”
“You…” Vante glared with undisguised rancor “don’t know the full story, boy…”
“Well, we don’t have time for you to sit here and explain everything,” Ubra said. “It’s time to hustle.”
“Why?” Nolund croaked.
“The job’s still not done, dumbass! You know, the job your boss sent you here to do? Andrei Kazmer is still walking around alive. We have to find him.”
“I need medical care,” he spat. “I’m shot.”
“Tough shit. You want another bullet? Make it a matching set. Come on, and let’s get looking. If you do a good job, maybe you can live.”
She took him by the arm, and started marching him through the narrow maze of streets.
As she left, she turned and nodded to Vante. “Thanks for the assist, kid. I don't know why you were hanging out with that monster, but I guess he ran a pretty good sales pitch on you. I guess your boss is probably cowering somewhere. Good luck explaining this mess.”
“I'm coming with you,” Vante said.
“Are you now?”
“Yeah. I have to stop you from hurting Wake. He's a good man. A kind man.”
Ubra lowered herself down to his four foot nine height. Their eyes were very close, close enough for each of them to be surprised by the resoluteness in the other's gaze.
Surprised by how much steel was in there.
“I don't have time to have this conversation,” Ubra said. “But he is not a good man.”
Foreverlight (The Consilience War Book 4) Page 16