Ultraviolet

by Yvonne Navarro

  Showing more courage than she would have expected from a medical sector employee—most of the time, these private sector techno-nerds never paid a bit of attention to their tactical training—the Combat Reserve Doctor actually snarled at her and tried to jerk the briefcase free. She yanked it toward her with the hand still holding it at the same time that she slammed the knife edge of her other hand across his forearm. She—and everyone else in the room—clearly heard the radius bone in his arm fracture.

  He let go of the case and careened backward, screaming like a baby as he cradled his arm, and before they could get hold of her, she spun to meet the instant reaction of the Armored Medical Techs. She punched the one closest to her with enough force to shatter his bullet-resistant glass chest plate; before the second one could reassess his approach, she put her fist completely through the face visor on his helmet. When she pulled it back and he collapsed at her feet, her gloved knuckles were covered with blood and bits of flesh. Another half dozen had leaped forward in unison, intending to box her inside the ring of their rifle barrels; she took care of their little circle with a double spinning crescent kick that turned her body into a blur of energy in their center. As the side of her boot struck the barrels, the rifles snapped to the right with enough force to yank them from the Med Techs’ hands and send them tumbling. She kept the kick going, twice more, then thrice, and let the black, metal-encased fighting boot do the dirty work of smashing cheekbones and jaws, crushing the delicate bones of the hands reaching for her.

  It took all of fifteen seconds for her to decimate every single one of the other Armored Med Techs lining the walls, and never once did she let go of that white titanium briefcase.

  Of course, its lovely, pearly white covering was a lot more red by the time Violet stood, the only upright person—no, the only vampire—in the center of the L.L.D.D. inner vault.

  SEVEN

  In contrast to the approaching thumps of the boots of the security force, the heels of the Chief of Research’s shoes made sharp, almost bulletlike sounds as he marched toward the main corridor. When he turned the corner, he nearly ran face first into the Security Commando who was leading the group; the soldier spun but didn’t slow down, and the Chief fell into step beside him, now moving at a slow jog.

  “She’s a Hemophage, sir!”

  The Chief couldn’t see the man’s eyes behind his visor, but he could hear the shock in his voice. It matched the level he’d felt when he’d first heard the alarm—a Hemophage, inside the L.L.D.D.! It was unthinkable, sacrilege . . . filthy. “How did she get past the screens?” he demanded. He was so furious that he wanted to stop, grab this soldier, and shake him as hard as he could. A foolish, immature reaction—this soldier had nothing to do with the problem. He was just within range, the closest target available on whom the Chief could vent his anger. And what was the Vice-Cardinal going to say? It wasn’t hard to guess. There would be repercussions here, serious repercussions. And here was this man, part of an elite security force that was supposed to be the best in the world, the only ones trained to deal with this. They alone were supposed to be trained to recognize this kind of threat, this specific kind of threat . . . and yet they had let her through, let her not only get all the way into their most sacred inner area, but had given her—

  The Chief’s face was china-white and his gaze was fiercely accusing; he was positive he actually heard the sound of the Commando’s throat working as he swallowed.

  “We don’t know, sir. Maybe meta-suppressants to subordinate her blood characteristics and healing capability . . . We just don’t know!” Panic made the guy’s voice overly loud and high, climbing toward the edge of strident.

  But the Chief’s black glare was steady, with no patience or sympathy. What a stupid, stupid man—he had no idea how his ignorance and that of his peers was going to so terribly affect the entire project.

  But there was no time for admonitions right now. He had a new goal: to not let this . . . setback actually destroy everything they’d worked so hard to accomplish. His face set, the Chief kept his silence and followed the Commando team in the direction of the inner vault.

  Violet leaped across the juncture of one corridor with another, then skidded to a stop and paused where the wall jutted outward before turning again—the perfect spot to pause and try to catch her breath. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d felt this horrible, and when she looked down at her hands, the skin was the color of old ash, mottled with gray spots like a hundred-year-old cadaver. Just that simple movement—looking downward—made perspiration splash from her forehead onto her fingers. She saw the droplets—there were three of them—fall like they were on slow-motion film, saw them leave a pattern in the whitish-looking powder that had formed over her skin. Her LCD overcoat, so vibrant and colorful only minutes ago, had morphed into a swirl of oily-looking gray and brown.

  Her hands were shaking so badly she almost couldn’t grasp the right button on her coat, and it took three precious seconds to get a good hold on it so she could retract the syringe from the flat-space receptacle just inside the seam. She had another heart-stuttering moment when she nearly dropped it to the ceramic tiled floor—she mustn’t contaminate the needle, and breaking it would be disastrous—then she managed to twist it around and get it into position so she could jam it into her thigh.

  One knee buckled and she went down, thwacking her kneecap viciously on the floor. Then, without warning, she leaned over and vomited, her belly and lungs working in tandem to expel the contents of her stomach. There wasn’t much in her belly but bile and water, but her body’s reaction to the high dose of suppressants she’d ingested this morning made the small, black-looking puddle just putrid enough to make her retch all over again. Gasping, she twisted away, scuttling backward like an injured crab with one knee still down. Time was an extravagance she didn’t have here, and she could stay there and rest for only a few precious seconds; as the neutralizers did their work her breathing quickly slowed from panting to normal, her heart rate sped up to where it should be, and she could feel the ugly brown over-color on one of her irises—they felt like too-thick contact lenses—being eaten away as her natural clear blue temporarily reasserted itself. She didn’t need to look in a mirror to know that the unnatural violet and evanescent sheen of a vampire would just as quickly obliterate the blue.

  By the time the doors at the far end of the hallway burst open and the security forces spilled through, the neutralizers had done their work and Violet was more than ready for action. She yanked the syringe out of her thigh and tossed it aside, not even registering the tinkle of shattering glass as she pressed a concealed button on her belt. What had looked like nothing more than one of a series of ornamental disks along the leather suddenly bulged outward as a small, four-dimensional gyroscope activated. The security forces realized she was right there at the same time she sprang to her feet and charged directly at them. By now her overcoat was a deep burnt orange and she looked like a ball of flame headed right for the group of Commandos. Their leader bellowed out an order and they raised their weapons on cue and opened fire. The roar of gunfire filled the corridor and Violet dove—

  —straight up.

  There was an astonished pause as the soldiers blinked at the empty spot where she’d stood only a second before, and that moment of hesitation was enough to seal their doom. Before they could change tactics, she spun two machine pistols from flat-space holsters sewn against the fabric of her slacks on both hips; a millisecond later the barrels of both her guns belched fire and death down on their heads.

  From the safety of the compound’s surveillance room, the Chief of Research and several Commando supervisors and security technicians stood frozen in front of a bank of surveillance screens. The Chief could feel the stress and anxiety building inside his skull like a massive migraine headache, the kind he’d gotten as a child before Beltane Pharmaceuticals had come up with the medication, an inoculation much like the smallpox shots of the old centuries th
at had ended migraines forever. His stomach churned with sudden nausea and little yellow lights sparkled at the edges of his vision. Yep, just like a migraine.

  Gripping the edge of the counter, the Chief finally found his voice. It came out raspy and low, almost a whisper. “Christ—how did she do that?”

  “She must have some kind of gravity leveler,” offered one of the techs nervously. He slapped his fingers against his face and wiped roughly at the corners of his mouth, the movement betraying his own fear. “Or—”

  The Chief waved him away impatiently; he’d neither expected nor wanted an answer right now—explanations could wait for later. Right now, they had to think forward. “Well, whatever it is, it’s ours now.” He glared at the monitor that showed Violet scuttling along the ceiling of a corridor like some sort of oversized spider. God, how he wished he could reach right through the screen and pluck her through it. He’d throttle the bitch himself. “Because she is not going to make it out of this complex alive.”

  Violet found the door to the emergency exit staircase almost immediately, but when she tugged it open she could already hear the security forces rushing up from the lower floors. Their boots clapped against the rubberized metal stairs, giving her a decent idea of their numbers. Clearly they weren’t concerned that she could hear them—they had plenty of confidence that they could best her by sheer numbers. It didn’t matter. Her gyroscope was still engaged and she saw them long before they saw her. The ignorant soldiers were, of course, looking forward and up—that was how the world in which they had been trained operated. Violet, on the other hand, was looking down at them from the rear, at an almost negative, Escher-like image of the staircase. Once you knew how this dimension worked, it was absurdly easy to walk across the ceiling over their heads and mow them down with machine-gun fire like the images in the old twenty-first-century video games.

  She left the bodies behind with barely a glance, and the next corridor she stepped into was empty . . . but of course, it wouldn’t be for long. She kept her pace brisk and her gaze darted in every direction as she reloaded her guns from magazines stored in flat-space reservoirs on the inside of her coat, all the while never loosening her iron-tight hold on that priceless white briefcase. Even so, she damn near dropped it when the familiar voice of the Chief of Research came thundering out of a set of speakers hidden in the wall almost directly above her head.

  “Violet Song jat Sharif! Tell me I’m wrong!”

  Without looking up from her task, Violet snapped back, “You’re wrong.” It was a stupid thing for the idiot to say, so she gave him a stupid answer. Sometimes, the little things balanced out just right.

  “Taking a break from blowing up government buildings?” When she didn’t bother to answer, he continued in a more frustrated tone of voice, “Why are you doing this?”

  His voice was loud enough so that she could feel the vibrations through the soles of her boots. Of course, she was extrasensitive to most things that the so-called normal people missed on a daily basis—hearing, smell, taste. Wasn’t that funny, considering the public’s impression of “vampires” was still Bram Stoker and Bela Lugosi, neither of whom had been presumed to have any predilection toward real food.

  But wait—he’d asked another stupid question, hadn’t he? And, of course, she was expected to answer. Just in case there were video cameras hidden in the walls as a companion to the speakers, she lifted her head so that her face could clearly be seen. Then she drew her mouth back in something that was part snarl, part derision, and the rest an exaggerated caricature of innocence. “Because I hate humans with every fiber of my being?” She widened her eyes and blinked, then her mouth twisted of its own accord. “And I’ll kill every one I see almost as quickly as they’ll try to kill me.”

  “Listen to yourself,” he came back immediately. “You used to be human.” He sounded absurdly like a parent trying to admonish a teenaged girl for doing something he couldn’t quite explain was wrong.

  Unfortunately, his words—“You used to be”—had only validated her rage. Her expression was thunderous. “But not anymore, right?” She tossed her head and, with the briefcase tucked beneath her arm, spun the guns expertly in each hand. “I got sick . . . and now I’m something less than human.” Her voice slid down until it was nearly a hiss. “Something worthy of extermination.”

  “It’s academic now, isn’t it?” She could almost picture the man shrugging carelessly. He’d been running scared for a few moments there, but now he would be reenergized, confident that the abundant security forces had strategically repositioned themselves for her capture. Her demise. Yes, he had the same disregard for her and her race that the rest of them did; sometimes she felt that the noninfected looked at her and saw the word “DISPOSABLE” tattooed across her forehead. Then the Chief spoke again and her renewed anger wiped out the rest of Violet’s musing. “You won’t make it out of here with that case.”

  She snapped her wrists, then brought the weapons up to bear and lengthened her stride. “Watch me!” Before he could answer she turned a corner, paused to get her bearings, then spotted a ventilation grate high on the wall by the ceiling juncture. Without hesitating, she scuttled up the wall like a crab and pulled on the cover; when it resisted, she grimaced and forced her fingers through the slots, then yanked backward. The screws gave out and the metal screeched as she forced it free. When Violet peered inside, it was all clear. The security forces hadn’t thought about this route yet. She clambered inside and tried to put the grate covering back, but it was useless—too strong for her own good, not only had she sheared off every one of the screws when she’d pulled it free, she’d mangled it so badly that there was no way to bend the metal back into shape so she could at least fake it. She pulled it inside and let it drop noisily to the floor of the metal duct in which she was crouching. The sound was like thunder, reverberating along the metal pathway and bouncing back on itself. It didn’t matter; they were going to find her anyway.

  There wasn’t much light inside the ventilation duct, just what bled in from the gratings every so many feet. Violet’s eyes adjusted to the lower light immediately but everything looked the same in every direction and she had to allow herself a precious few seconds to orient herself. Being in here at least gave her several choices, although predictably most of those would already be compromised—the security forces might not be as quick as she was, but they weren’t dummies either. They also had access to computer blueprint imagery showing every last space in this building, including all the ductwork, ingress and egress. There was nothing to do but charge ahead and let her instincts guide her toward her outside rendezvous and freedom. And she was not leaving this installation without this briefcase.

  Violet nearly fell when she came to the intersection of another part of the ductwork, this one a vertical air shaft. With its drop-off only an inch or two in front of her feet, it fell away into muted silver shadows, backlit periodically by workers’ tube lights set into the metal every four yards or so. When she looked up the shaft, she could just spot the Medical Commandos getting ready to drop toward her.

  She grinned, checked the integrity of the small gyroscope at her belt, then jumped into the air shaft and fell upward.

  The Commandos writhed on their drop ropes and tried to get out of the way of her bullets, but there was simply no escaping the barrage of gunfire as she twisted and fired behind herself, taking advantage of the still activated technology. Good old gravity, that one thing that in the past had always been so very inescapable turned out to be their doom— in seconds they all hung there, limp and lifeless at the end of their rappeling cords; in another instant, Violet hit the grating at the top of the shaft with a crash! and exploded through it without having a clue about what was on the other side. She somersaulted up, then came back down as her body’s inner ear adjusted itself and intervened. When she landed, she was straddling one of the skylights and already belting out hundreds of rounds at the waiting security forces. They went down easil
y, and before their superiors could think to regroup and send more, Violet leaped off the skylight and ran for the edge of the roof. Again without bothering to look, she vaulted over the side.

  She swung and, for the barest of seconds, went into free fall. Did birds feel like this? It was wonderful—weightless and giddy—and it was a damned shame she didn’t have the time to enjoy it. Then her trajectory, angled ever so slightly, took her back against the side of the building. She touched it and stuck, then instantly sprinted down its slick metal side. When she came to a huge plate-glass window, she jumped over its ten-foot expanse; there would be security forces on the other side of the glass, so she beat them to the draw and fired into it, showering them with jagged pieces of glass and the remains of the window frame, driving them solidly back into the interior. They returned fire even as they fell, until what was left of the heavy plate glass seemed to be going in all directions at once.

  She sprinted onto the earth-gravity surface of the alley behind the building with the gyroscope still giving off a reassuring pulse at her hip. She blinked once and started to turn, then froze as she looked eye-to-barrel at the auto-rifle pointed directly at her nose, a mere half a foot separating her skin from the cold metal.

  For the first time since she’d come out of the air shaft, Violet realized it was raining. Not that hard, but enough to coat her skin and slick her hair down against her scalp at the same time it drifted against the face visors of the seven Command Marines surrounding her. Raindrops trickled slowly down the dark shields, making it impossible for her to see the eyes of the men she was about to kill.

  No matter. She never did.