Nanoshock
Page 35
Never fucking forgive.
A bullet pinged off my nanosteel arm. It ricocheted past my ear, scoring a thick line across my temple. Pain only drove me deeper into the angry wasps shrieking between my ears.
I don’t remember what came next. Only that armor came apart like cardboard and meat tore like Kongtown lanterns.
No mercy.
Not for myself.
Not for them.
A trail of carnage before I die.
And black as night eyes burning into mine. “Snap out of it.”
Why the fuck I did, how the fuck he did it, I don’t know. At least I came to myself, one shoulder shrieking under Malik Reed’s nanosteel grip, swaying in the center of a ring made of meat and bone and gore and brain and shit and…
Exhaustion swamped me. Even the .357 in my metal hand felt like too damn much to carry. Somehow, I was breathing. Not smoothly. Not deeply. But I hadn’t died, and that was something.
Maybe, I thought numbly as my gaze slid slowly to Malik’s, it was because they’d gotten to me. Maybe that was it.
Fucked with me.
“A second chance,” I rasped.
Lights shredded my vision, spiraled and flashed. The backdraft of a settling helo raked across the roof. My skin, already scraped raw, felt like it peeled from every nerve. I shook in Malik’s grip. Firmed myself.
“Riko.” A low order. Fuck his authority. “Enough. You’re done.”
Heh. “Let me go.”
He studied my face. Searched my gaze. When he let me go, I knew it was because the sedative had done its work. I felt it in my flesh. My veins. Working through all the damaged cells and brutalized muscles.
Across the roof, lit to a blinding shine, Indigo lay on his back. No more face. Just enough hair to flutter blue and black in the helo’s wafting heat.
Muerte was gone.
My laugh twisted. “About time you showed,” I croaked.
His jaw, carved in metal and stone, had ground so tight that I could reach out and trace the sharpened angles.
Wouldn’t. Not unless I used the stolen .357 to do it, and I didn’t want to. Wouldn’t help. Wouldn’t do anything at all.
I turned, wrapping my metal arm and the heavy pistol I carried over my ribs. How I wasn’t dead…
My skin crawled.
Slowly, I picked my way through my grotesque handiwork. One foot dragged behind me. The knee split. I stumbled, righted myself.
Malik followed. He didn’t offer to help.
He gave me that, at least.
Corporate drones swarmed the area, enforcers checking bodies, securing the perimeter. Everything they did best. Sealing, hiding, removing, erasing.
I wanted to laugh so badly.
“Riko.” My name on Malik’s lady lips again.
“What.”
He stopped when I did. Gave me enough respect that I wasn’t forced to stare at him as I knelt by Indigo’s ruined husk.
This would never have happened…
“You took Kern’s chipset.”
My hands fell to my knees. Pistol pointed down at the rooftop. Indigo’s lean, whipcord chest didn’t move. Didn’t rise. No breath. No pulse.
No chipset.
My smile cut like razors. Even for me. “I did.”
Malik circled, shiny shoes dragging blood and gibbets with each step. He looked down at me. Implacable. Firm. “You need to give it to me.”
I raised my gaze to his. “Why?”
“Because it obviously went viral.”
I wanted to laugh to the point that my heart erupted with agony. Not on the outside. I’d never known anything like this.
I’m sorry.
Three times spoken. Nanji. Digo.
A whisper in that cunting chopshop.
“Did it,” I croaked. Not a question. “Fine.” Slowly, so slowly, I reached into the interior of my ruined, smeared boots. I’d tucked the thing there. Taped it in place, to give to Digo.
The tape tore in my bloodied, swollen fingers.
Malik’s expression didn’t change. He remained standing. The lights slid over his perfectly shaped head, picking out glints of brown in his close-cropped hair. Mine was longer. Even after buzzing it.
Longer, and dripping with the carnage I’d walked out of.
But I knew how to read him. I’d learned. His dark, short lashes narrowed. A fraction. The tension in his jaw; it shifted.
One hand came up. Palm to the sky. Ready.
“We’ll get the data in the closed lab,” he said. A promise. It rang like one.
I lifted the muck-seamed tech up to my face, balanced on two fingers and thumb. So small. A bitch to hit. But not impossible.
Muerte had missed on purpose. Shattered Kern’s skull. I hadn’t realized in time.
“I’d thought MetaCorp the common denominator.” My smile pulled at both sides of my mouth.
Malik’s gaze sharpened. Ice and oil, fire and steel. “Riko.”
“Then,” I said with effort, “I thought maybe Mantis was the common denominator.”
“Riko.” He took a step forward. “Get the chipsets!” His enforcers. Booted feet pounded. A helo whined. Harsh, shrieking.
Chipsets, huh? Plural.
He had too high hopes.
“Turns out,” I said louder, hoarser, “I was right. But, Malik…”
For the first time, I watched Malik Reed lose his shit. Teeth bared in his perfect goatee, shiny shoes slick with guts and gore, he put all that training and muscle to use. Launched himself at me.
Too late.
Vicious rage, violent satisfaction, filled me as I spat around it, “You can’t do anything without me.” Rotating the .357 in my tech hand, I locked the barrel to the chipset. Pinned the chipset between metal and my gore-logged teeth.
“Don’t–!”
I pulled the trigger. One finger, one click.
A blinding flash. Hands wrapped around my head, the gun. Shouting. Swearing.
Venomous. Savage.
The chipset carved a path through my brain the bullet only tore wider. The sound in my head cranked so high, so loud, so powerful that nothing else mattered.
The Maverick .357 isn’t as big as my old Adjudicator, but it’s more than enough to blow out the back of my skull.
No chipsets left.
Go fuck yourself.
Chapter 1
I plunged into brutal consciousness.
Acknowledgments
Nanoshock has been a long time in the making. While Riko battled the demons she’d made along the way, I was battling mine – and they made this the hardest fucking book I’d ever written.
But I did it, and this kind of awesome shit doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
Lisa Rodgers, you are and have always been the Indigo to my Riko. Without you, I’d have given up long ago.
Marc, Phil and the Angry Robot team: your patience, support, kindnesses and outright speed have been more than I ever dreamed could exist in the publishing dimensions. Thanks for being a back-asswards sort of reintroduction to a “people don’t all suck” mode of play.
Stephen: I will always help you bury the bodies. Also murder them. Because I care.
Kevin: TO WORDHALLA!
And to everyone who supported me and continues to support me, to all my patrons, my amazing service dog donators, my very kind translators, my friends, and all my murderfriends: thank you.
About the Author
KC Alexander is the author of Necrotech – a transhumanist sci-fi called “a speed freak rush” by NYT bestseller Richard Kadrey and “a violent thrillride” by award-nominated Stephen Blackmoore. She co-wrote Mass Effect: Andromeda: Nexus Uprising with NYT bestseller Jason M Hough, Bioware’s first novelization for Mass Effect: Andromeda. Other credits consist of short stories to Fireside magazine and a contribution to Geeky Giving. Specialties include voice-driven prose, imperfect characters, and reckless profanity. Also, creative ways to murder the deserving – in fiction. Probably. She champions men
tal health awareness and prefers animals to people. And she writes anything she wants to.
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kcalexander.com • twitter.com/kacealexander
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An Angry Robot paperback original 2017
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Copyright © KC Alexander 2017
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US ISBN 978 0 85766 627 7
EBook ISBN 978 0 85766 628 4
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This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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ISBN: 978-0-85766-628-4