by Rick Partlow
"We're going forward," I said. "You take the one on the left." I didn't wait for an answer---there was no more time for talking.
I could hear the adrenaline-laced blood pumping in my veins, feel the surge of natural and artificial stimulants and the rush of extra oxygen being forced into my bloodstream as my headcomp put me into combat mode and the Machine took over. I went from a walking gait to a forty-kilometer-an-hour sprint in a fraction of a second, rushing at my chosen opponent with Kara beside me.
In the scant moments before I reached him, my headcomp went over everything I knew about DSI Cadre---and it wasn't good. They carried extensive augmentation, though not as elaborate or sophisticated as mine, with bionic weapon mounts in both hands and sometimes their feet as well. They wouldn't have lasers because of station customs, so I assumed some sort of blade.
I got about four meters from my target before I left the ground, leaping from a brisk walk into a flying side kick. He dodged out of the way like I knew he would, and tried to come in at me as I landed. I hit on the ball of my right foot, spinning into a back kick that caught him in the chest. It was little more than a glancing blow, but it knocked him back a good two meters, and gave me the second I needed to look to my left at where Kara was engaged with the other Cadre commando, her knives tangled with the seven-centimeter claws that had extended from the tips of his fingers.
My vibroshiv wasn't meant for throwing, and couldn't be tossed with any accuracy while activated, but I had done this before. I cut the knife's power and, with a flick of my wrist, sent the deactivated blade flying straight at the head of Kara's opponent. Only a conventional knife without the vibration that turned it into a deadly cutting machine, it was still sufficient to bury itself up to the hilt in the commando's left eye.
I didn't pause to see the effects of my handiwork, just turned my attention back to my own adversary, extending my talons to meet the rush of his finger claws. We were a whirlwind of slashing blades and clashing ceramic, our hands moving so fast I'm not sure that it would have been visible to the unaugmented eye, and our feet doing a high-stepping dance as each of us tried to trip up the other, or get into position for a kick.
Dull-grey ceramic claws passed centimeters from my face, hunting my eyes as I bobbed in rhythm with the swings, and I felt the warm spray of blood on my face---I caught a vague indication from my battlecomp that I had taken slashing wounds in my arm and chest, but my endorphin high masked the pain. I was more clearly focused on my opponent's blood, splattered across the front of his jacket from a pair of deep slashes in both sides of his chest that had penetrated his subdermal armor. The Killing Machine rumbled deep in my chest, feeding on the sight like a shark smelling blood in the water, and I felt a savage thrill course through me, while at the same time the reasoning part of me withdrew to watch the Machine take over.
We danced backward, my implant sensors and sonar keeping a careful watch on the storage bins behind me as I warded off my opponent's relentless attack, all the while my battlecomp analyzing the fight to provide me with a strategy. My main advantage was my superior strength. I had the muscles of my homeworld, plus the flexor fibers the Commonwealth had given me, while he had bionic servos in all of his major joints. They gave him great strength within a limited range of motion, mostly straight lines and up-and-down arcs, while my augments gave me full strength on an almost unlimited range of movement. I had to find a way to take advantage of that.
I sensed a shoulder-high storage bin coming behind me, and the Machine made a decision that the reasoning Cal Mitchell probably wouldn't have, took a risk and flipped backward onto it. The world spun around me and I caught a freeze-frame of Kara engaging the female DSI agent, the one I had knifed lay face-down in a pool of blood at their feet. My opponent leaped after me, his eyes cold and business-like, and I ducked under his flying body, slashing across his belly with my talons.
Blood flew from the wounds as he slammed into the wall, and I jumped into a roundhouse kick that caught him between the shoulder blades. He jerked with the impact of the blow, but his pain receptors, like mine, were clouded by a haze of endorphines and adrenaline, and he was back on his guard before I could follow up the kick. I screamed at the Machine, and finally it listened, realizing that those kinds of attacks would buy me time, but do little towards putting him away. I had to catch him where he was vulnerable.
I threw myself off the storage bin headfirst, twisting in midair to land on my feet and retracting my talons. He was on top of me in a heartbeat, trying to press me and not give me the chance to get away. I twisted away from his center of mass, darted a hand forward between his legs and caught him in mid-leap...by his testicles. The Machine cackled ghoulishly in my ear as I grabbed a good handful, swung him around by the organs, getting my hand into position before I re-extended my implant blades.
The talons sliced through the fabric of his trousers and the skin just above his balls, snipping them off neatly just as his penis was yanked off in my grasp. There was a spray of bright-red blood that even his intricate damage-control systems couldn't hope to quench and he went flying directly towards the female DSI commando, whose back was to us.
She sensed the flying body and moved to duck away from it, leaving her open to Kara's attack. I hardly saw Kara move, but suddenly a broad-bladed combat knife was buried in her opponent's left ear. The DSI attacker jerked like a pleasure doll with a burned-out control board and slumped to the ground, suddenly motionless.
The one I had castrated was writhing on the ground, moaning softly in psychological shock, hands trying to find his reproductive organ. I suddenly realized I still had it in my hand, dropped it and a handful of bloody cloth and stepped up to the man. The physical pain wouldn't come for him until his pharmacy organ ran out of endorphines, and even then it would be damped by his headcomp, but he was fucked and he knew it. If someone didn't get him to an automed soon, he'd bleed to death in minutes.
He looked up at me with a glazed expression, fighting to lever himself to his feet, claws still out on his right hand. Leaning over the body of the female DSI agent, I pulled the combat knife out of her brain with a messy splatter of blood, bone and chips of ceramic. The living commando had propped himself up on one knee and one hand, trying to get up for one last strike at me.
Kill him! The Machine screamed. For once, I agreed. I slammed the knife into the socket of his one organic eye, through to the cerebral tissue beneath it.
His arms groped nervelessly for a second, then he went limp, held upright only by the knife in my hand. I planted a boot on his shoulder and shoved him backwards, freeing the blade. His corpse smacked the ground with a soft, wet sound. With an orgasmic thrill, the Killer sighed within me and retreated back to the darkness of my soul. I nearly collapsed with the suddenness of its departure, had to catch myself on the storage bin before I keeled over.
Taking a deep breath, I staggered over to Kara. Her jacket was ripped to shreds, and soaked with blood from a dozen cuts, but it didn't appear that any of them were serious. A slice on her chin had laid bare a tiny patch of grey duraweave subdermal armor beneath the skin. We stood there for just a moment, looking at each other, just trying to catch our breaths.
"You look like shit," I told her in a hoarse voice, handing the knife back to her hilt-first.
"You don't look so good yourself, soldier." She smiled grimly, sheathing the weapon. Her eyes went to the corpse of the one I had de-testicled. "Interesting strategy," she commented.
"A shot to the nads," I reflected, trying to wipe bloody hands on bloody shirt. "How the hell could they have found us so quick?"
Her head jerked up, a tense frown tightening her features.
"Maybe," she said, "they weren't following us."
"Mat." I immediately realized what she meant.
Without another word, I took off down the corridor at a dead sprint.
Interlude: Trint
The stealth with which the big Tahni hugged the shadows belied his considerable bu
lk, but this was the job he had been created for. He had not attempted to follow his quarry directly---Trint had quite the unique thermal signature, which would have alerted the man had he but done a general sensor sweep.
Instead, he had followed the StarFleet officer, Mat M’voba. He had known of the human, even before his association with Damiani, through files audited during the Great Tragedy that the humans called the Second Interstellar War. He had known that the man he had come to observe would find M’voba.
The StarFleet officer had met with the other humans for a few minutes, but Trint had not been able to get close enough to observe what had occurred...there had been Tahni in the bar, and they would have known Trint for what he was at but a glance. Also, the man he had come to watch was too close, and might have detected him.
He had picked M’voba up again in one of the corridors heading back to the docking bay, following him from a safe distance of fifty meters. Trint watched the human with a growing sense of respect. He carried himself like a warrior should, with pride in his gait and readiness screaming from every fiber of his being. Truly he would have been a worthy adversary to face in the battle pits back in the palace. Instead, he was destined to be ambushed and killed by one who had been his comrade-in-arms. It was not a fitting way for a warrior to die.
Trint watched carefully for the sign of M’voba's betrayer, but he had not shown himself by the time they had reached the lift banks at the far end of the station, and the Tahni was beginning to wonder if he hadn't miscalculated. That was when he saw them. Had he not known what to look for, he would never have noticed the thermal signature of the three humans that surreptitiously attempted to close in on the StarFleet officer from different directions. But these operatives had also been included in his tactical briefings in his time with the Empire: they were from the deep-cover commando branch of the Commonwealth's Department of Security and Intelligence, the Cadre.
Trint's capacity for emotion, like that of all of his kind, had been underestimated by his designers, and what anger he could muster flared suddenly. Was this not the ultimate dishonor, to use stooges to fight your battle rather than confront a foe yourself? He very nearly gave into an urge to go forward and aid the officer, but only curiosity stopped him---he wished mightily to see how M’voba handled himself.
So he waited at his hiding place in a shadowed alcove and watched the Cadre agents close in. They intercepted him just before he reached the lift banks, one attempting to focus his attention to the front while the other two came in at angles from behind. M’voba wasn't fooled; he flipped backwards into a defensive posture that let him see all three of them, extending his talons to meet their claws.
They came in at once with a blur of motion, a deadly ballet of sweeping blades that reminded Trint of the zero-gravity performance Damiani had dismissed so lightly. Blood flew in crimson handfuls as those implant blades struck home, and much of it belonged to the DSI Cadre, but enough was that of the big StarFleet officer for Trint to realize that the big man could not win. Civilians around the spectacle began to flee, though not in a panic---Belial was a rough place, and this sort of thing wasn't entirely unusual. Within a minute, the entire area was clear, but for the combatants and Trint.
It was a wonder that the fight lasted through that minute, with the hardwired speed of its participants. Messages travelled along superconductive threads connected to implant battlecomps, guiding flexor fibers or bionic servos at speeds a human nervous system couldn't hope to match. M’voba and the Cadre agents went through a half-dozen moves and counters in a second, just blurs moving through the empty street in front of the lift banks, leaving trails of blood in their wake.
Without warning, two of the blurs momentarily materialized into the big StarFleet officer, soaked and dripping with sanguine life, connected by his outstretched talon to the left eye of one of the DSI Cadre. The image lasted only a fraction of an eyeblink, then the agent's corpse collapsed to the ground and M’voba's figure blended back into the fray.
Lord Emperor, Trint swore to himself, nearly whispering it aloud. What warriors these humans of Omega group were! Small wonder the common Tahni soldiery had thought them the Tahn-Skii'ana, the very spirits of death.
A scissor-kick backed both of the remaining DSI agents away long enough for M’voba to get a breath, and he used the respite to lunge at a maintenance cart loaded down with tools. The nearest of the Cadre sprang at him, but it was too late---M’voba came around with an industrial vibrocutter that sliced through the top of the agent's skull, buried itself somewhere around his breastbone and stuck fast.
The Fleet officer tried to let go of the impromptu weapon, but the final DSI cadreman was on him. The agent had produced a monowire whip---a spool of line only a molecule in width and weighted at one end---that he had been unable to use before due to the proximity of his fellows; and, while M’voba was distracted, he wrapped the meter-long strand of wire around the big man's neck and pulled it tight.
Now Trint knew he could not stand by and let this man be assassinated by his lessers. He had been sent to ensure that the woman, McIntire, was dealt with; and perhaps, to prolong his existence, he might stand by at her death. But he knew that whatever purpose there was to killing M’voba, it was not necessarily that of Andre Damiani.
Trint prepared himself to rush in and aid the Fleet officer, regardless of the consequences; but in the eyeblink between making this decision and carrying it out, something streaked out from an open liftcar and slammed into the DSI agent in a tornado of taloned fists. The cadreman went down in heartbeats, an ultrasharp implant blade buried in his brain through the right ear, and the blur materialized into...Andre Damiani's Chief of Security.
Trint allowed himself a breath of surprise, but could not afford the luxury of remaining to ponder the reasoning behind the man's action...if he stayed in the area any longer, he would surely be detected. With an almost imperceptible shake of his head, the Tahni fled down the corridor.
There were mysteries here that could not be solved today.
Chapter Ten
I tried to contact Mat over the neurolink as we ran, but received no answer, so I called Deke and told him to meet us at the docking bay, then tried to tap into the station's security system. That was met with a polite rebuff by the Netdogs, the automatic safeguards, which were much more sophisticated than I thought likely on a place like this.
By the time they'd finished warning me that any further attempts would result in my ejection from the station, we reached the lift banks---and came to an abrupt halt. Blood and carnage was everywhere, but I'd grown used to that. There were four bodies littering the ground in front of the lift station, but the only one that concerned me was the one laying face-down in a pool of bright, arterial life. While Kara kept watch, I ran over to Mat's side, nearly slipping in the liquid around him. There was a monowire whip lying next to his shoulder, and the matching wound around his neck was only now beginning to be filled by his byomer subdermal armor.
That was the difference between the DSI goons and us: their duraweave protection was not complete, as I had demonstrated, due to the details of the process by which it was installed. A new Cadre agent was anesthetized, and the outer layer of skin over their torsos and limbs was burned away by a laser. The duraweave was laid over the exposed areas, which were then covered by cloned skin tissue. This left the face and groin unprotected, which was unavoidable because the process of removing the skin from those areas would have been too dangerous and expensive.
The 'Boys, being a bit more elite and much more expensive, were injected with electrically-active byomer, which was then guided around the body under the skin by electromagnets. Byomer---a lab-grown virus infused with a polymer structure that could be selectively hardened through the use of pulsed electric currents---had several advantages over crystalline duraweave, the foremost of which was that it could be guided beneath the skin to safely protect the entire body. The other, and the one that just might have saved Mat's life, was t
hat it could be connected to our headcomps and the superconductive hardwires that supplemented our nerves to seal wounds by coming back together after it was sliced.
I didn't know how he managed to kill the agent who'd used the whip on him or pull the weapon off of his neck before he'd collapsed, but a quick contact with his headcomp's medical monitors told me he was still alive. I let out the breath I'd been holding, the sick feeling in my stomach finally beginning to die down. If the wounds hadn't killed him outright, I knew he could survive.
I gently turned him over, noting the score of slashes across his arms and chest. None of them was anywhere near as serious, however, as the wound that went all the way around his neck. With all the blood and oozing byomer, I couldn't tell if the artery had been completely sealed, or if the trachea had been injured, but I knew he needed some serious medical attention, and quick, if he was going to survive this.
"He's still alive," I told Kara, coming up into a crouch and throwing Mat over my shoulder. "We've got to get him to an automed and the closest one's in the Dutchman."
No. The transmission was so weak, it took me a moment to realize that it was from Mat. No...take me to my ship...Ismael. Have to call the General.
"All right," I whispered to him, earning a puzzled look from Kara. "We're going to Mat's ship," I told her. "Follow me."
Mat's blood soaked into my jacket as I ran him to the lift bank, a warm, sticky feeling spreading across my shoulders. So great was my relief that the one hope we had of getting some help hadn't been cut off, I hadn't thought to argue with him, even though the Dutchman would have been closer.
I felt vaguely disturbed at myself that I was more concerned with the help Mat represented than with his survival as a human being, but seeing Rachel broken and still in that automed had gone a long way toward inuring me to the suffering of others. Until I saw her whole and safe again, my gentler emotions were in stasis, suspended in a frozen solution of fear, hate and desperation, slaves to the Machine.