by Rick Partlow
I regained consciousness almost immediately after the crash, and almost immediately regretted it. My whole body was one, huge, throbbing ache; my head felt as if it were filled with buildfoam; and it looked very much like half of the fucking ship was sitting on top of my left leg. I couldn't feel any pain in the limb---or at least no more than the rest of my body felt, but that could have been a function of the nerves being severed or possibly the cold finally setting in. Even if my leg wasn't badly hurt, and even if my reserve air supply wasn't perilously close to exhaustion, the fact remained that I couldn't move...and Roger West could.
Seeing him rummaging frantically through one of the equipment lockers, I remained motionless, hoping he would still believe me helpless. He pulled on an emergency EVA mask, and seemed to relax somewhat, and I thought for a moment that he would take the time to finish me off, but, instead, he exited the courier through the gaping split in its hull.
Fighting the urge to breath a sigh of relief, I pulled myself up on one elbow to more carefully assess my situation...and felt my leg move slightly under the deckplates. My eyes widened in surprise. There had to be about a hundred metric tons of BiPhase Carbide and duralloy resting squarely on my calf; my leg, bone reinforcement and Reflex Armor notwithstanding, should have been the approximate consistency of gelatin. Encouraged, I attempted to pull my leg free, but felt my foot snag on something.
I was about to try to stick my head down and find out what was happening, but was interrupted by the sudden return of Cowboy. I froze, afraid he had seen me moving; but, again, he seemed to pay me no heed. Instead, he was intent on prying open another of the ship's lockers, going so far as to use his talons to rip the door off. Out of the container he pulled a plasma gun---I had seen more of the damn things in the last half hour than I had in the last ten years---and immediately jumped back out of the gap in the hull. Something obviously had him spooked, and I was all for that.
Hesitating for a moment to be sure he wouldn't return yet again, I twisted around awkwardly to try to get a look at my leg---and had to shake my head at the fickle whims of fate. Cowboy, apparently, hadn't been able to fully retract the belly gear because of the damage I had done with the plasma blast. The twisted, burned wreckage of the left-side strut was caught in the belly door, leaving open about a half a meter, and wedging the ship off the ground enough to save my leg from being crushed to paste.
My foot, however, was trapped by a jagged section of BiPhase carbide that had splintered off the hull across my ankle. Bracing my right foot on the broken edge of the hull, I pushed with firm and consistent pressure, but let off as I felt the tendons in my ankle begin to stretch.
Damn it. Cowboy was out there, probably going for another ship, and I was laying here, worrying about a few tendons? The hell with that. Directing my pharmacy organ to dose my leg with a local anesthetic, I jerked it out from beneath the hull, feeling the dull tug of the tendons and ligaments in my ankle snapping as my foot came free.
I could still walk---my implant muscles were attached to the bones by strands of byomer---and I quickly scrambled to my feet. I took a moment to check the weapons' locker, hoping Cowboy had left me something to work with, but it was bare. I guess he figured the pulse carbine and the plasma gun were all he'd conceivably need, but that left me with nothing but my talons and my balls if I went out there.
Hell, I thought with more bravado than I actually felt, that was four talons and one testicle more than I needed to take down that backstabbing bastard. I sprang out of the courier headfirst, flying a good ten meters over the pad before hitting on my shoulder and rolling into a crouch with my talons extended. I was ready for an attack, but the attack I witnessed wasn't directed at me.
I winced as I saw the bright flare of a plasmoid take the Tahni cyborg's arm off at the shoulder and send him reeling back over the side. I shook my head slightly, wondering why this Trint had turned on his masters. The few of the machines I'd encountered had seemed fanatically devoted. Could something like that actually have feelings and a personality? I mean, it was just a machine, right?
The point seemed moot, until Cowboy rose to his feet, and I noticed the clenching hand of the Tahni desperately holding on to the rim of the platform. Good Lord, those things were tough! I couldn't help but admire its determination, and I also couldn't help but wonder...did a construct like that have a will to live?
Cowboy limped slowly over to the edge, and I realized that he meant to finish the cyborg off. I wondered if I should let him. True, the thing had helped us; but every memory I had of the Imperial Guard 'borgs was of coldly efficient killing machines, usually trying to work their craft on me or my comrades.
But if I let Cowboy kill him...how was I any better than those I was fighting? It's easy to be morally neutral when the hardest decisions you have to make are whether or not to bootleg some pirated ViR-ware, but when you've killed as many people as I have, you have to believe you were justified or you'll become a sociopath.
So I guess there was no other choice for me than the one I made.
Playtime's over, motherfucker, I broadcast at Cowboy on my neurolink, trying to distract him as I took off towards the edge at a dead sprint. His head snapped around as he saw me approach, and I saw his right arm begin to bring up the plasma gun. There was about thirty meters separating us, and I had to cross it before he could jack a new round home and put a hole in my torso the size of a planetoid.
Twenty meters. Every step seemed to take hours, and I could see in great detail each minute motion as Cowboy worked the action of the assault gun and brought its muzzle on line with my charge. The spent shell was ejected from the chamber in a lazy arc, still shimmering with ambient heat.
Ten meters. The slide racked home, and I could see the dull finish of the fresh round slamming into battery before it closed.
Five meters. The barrel of the gun, angled downward as Cowboy worked the action, began to climb upward with an agonizing slowness that still seemed too quick for me. I left the ground in a flying kick, guessing he would fire at my legs rather than attempting to raise the muzzle for a center-mass shot. I sensed rather than saw the flash-roast heat of the weapon discharging, the blast passing only centimeters below my outstretched legs in the heartbeat before my right heel connected with his chest.
Cowboy's back arched and the plasma gun dropped from his hands as he shot off the side of the pad like he'd been launched by a mass driver---and I was about to join him, unable to halt my momentum toward the edge. I threw my hands out as I fell, desperate to grasp onto anything to break my fall, and somehow grasped the equipment belt strapped around Trint's waist. I was jerked to an abrupt halt, and found myself dangling in front of his legs, above fifty meters of featureless metal and endless kilometers of acid lake.
Twisting my head around, I saw Cowboy's wildly flailing form finally impact the surface of the lake with a splash of caustic fluid, and grimaced in appreciation. If the Reflex suit he'd been wearing had been a hundred percent uncompromised, he would have had a slight chance of making it to shore...but with the burn-throughs from the hits he had taken, that hydrochloric acid would eat him up from the inside out within minutes. I didn't know if anyone, even a Glory Boy, could survive that...but no one I knew would want to.
Turning away from the scene, I blinked and shook my head. I was feeling dizzy, and I suddenly realized that my oxygen was running out. I had to get back up onto the pad. Letting loose of the Tahni's belt with one hand, I grabbed his shoulder and pulled myself up far enough to reach the rim of the platform. My vision was beginning to cloud as I levered myself onto the surface of the pad, and my head was swimming with crazy, disjointed thoughts---all I could think was that it was funny how the 'borg's shoulder felt kind of soft, just like a real, live person's.
I was perilously close to blacking out, but I forced myself back over the rim, struggling to retain enough coherency to grasp the cyborg by the wrist and pull him up. I nearly went off the side myself doing it, but I managed to
get one knee underneath me and yank him up beside me as I fell on my back.
The last thing I saw before the darkness closed in on me was his singed, blocky, ugly face staring down into mine...and smiling...
* * *
I awoke to a bright light that flooded my vision and the gleaming auburn hair of an angel spilling down above me. This, I decided, had to be Heaven.
"Am I dead?" I asked, the words coming out in a hoarse rasp. Why, I wondered silently, would I have a scratchy throat in Heaven?
"You're not getting away from me that easy, Constable Mitchell," the angel said, her image focusing into one I knew well.
"Hi, baby." I tried to smile at Rachel, but my face seemed stiff, somehow. "You okay?"
"I'm fine," she said, smiling widely, yet also seeming close to tears. "God, Cal, you're a real mess." She lost the battle to hold the tears spilling out of her eye.
"I'll be okay," I assured her. "Takes a lot more than this to kill me."
"That's what I told her, big brother," Pete grinned, kneeling beside her. Wait a second...Pete?
"What the hell are you doing here?" I rose up to an elbow, ignoring the pain that shot through my back. Then I saw Jason Chen standing behind them, wearing a suit of Reflex Armor, an electron beamer held in the crook of his arm. "Jase?" I stared at him dumbly.
"Blame General Murdock," came Deke's voice from my right.
I looked around at him, noticing for the first time that I was laying on the floor of the utility airlock room into which Deke and his people had raided. I assumed they had docked one of the Stealth ships at the lock, probably after Kara had sent them a signal. I felt a gnawing sense of betrayal at just how much in the dark I'd been kept.
"He wanted to keep something in reserve, just in case, and your brother and Inspector Chen insisted."
"So he knew West was the traitor?" I surmised.
"He couldn't be sure," Deke shrugged, lighting up a cigar. "For all he knew, you could have been. This way, he had an ace in the hole."
"So why not tell me?" I wanted to know. I found Kara leaning tiredly against a wall, dressed again in her combat suit. "You obviously knew."
"We had to make West believe that we thought Deke was the one," she explained, seeming a bit dispassionate about it all. "Murdock figured that the best way to do that was for you to believe it, too."
I just nodded, not trusting myself to comment on it. Twisting around, I saw the cyborg laid out across the room, with one of the Intell medics leaning over him, running a scan. The charred alloy stub of his shoulder bone seemed obscenely artificial, yet the blood was all too natural.
"How is he?" I asked Rachel.
"He'll live," she told me, obviously relieved. "He's going to need some extensive treatment, but he should be fine."
"He...he pulled me in here, didn't he?" I realized abruptly.
"It was the least I could do, Constable Mitchell," the 'borg replied unexpectedly from his prone position. "After all, you saved my life, and not without considerable risk to your own."
"Yeah, well," I hemmed uncomfortably, "no big deal."
"You may not realize just how 'big a deal' it is," he disagreed. I could see his face from where I sat, and it looked oddly peaceful. "Unfortunately, I am now confronted by two questions to which I have no immediate answer. What do I do now? I have a rather narrow range of skills, and my very existence is forbidden by your government."
"Well, Trint 'ol pal," Deke drawled, flicking an ash from his cigar, "I think there's about to be a few fundamental changes in our government. And I'm sure General Murdock could use someone with those kind of skills."
"Sure," I muttered, looking across the room where a pair of combat-suited troopers were hauling in Mat's body, sealed in a plastic wrapping. "General Murdock can use anybody."
The Tahni locked eyes with me, and I thought I saw a glint of understanding behind that blackness. Were they real or cybernetic, I wondered. Hell, what did it matter? The soul wasn't in the details. If anyone should know that, it's me.
"No," Trint declared. "That would be much like trading one master for another. I would like to find a place to become my own master."
"You could come with us," Rachel offered. "I mean, if we can go home, if all this works out and we have a home to go back to..."
"Yeah." I surprised myself by the readiness with which I seconded her offer. "You're welcome to come back with us. I don't know if it's what you're looking for, but it's a place to start."
"I thank you," he nodded. "I wish I had met humans such as yourself at the war's end."
"Shit," Deke chuckled. "You probably did---I think I took a shot at you once."
"What's the other question, Trint?" Rachel asked suddenly. "You said there were two."
"Put simply," he told her, "why am I still alive? My jamming device expired nearly fifteen minutes ago, and I saw Damiani escape on his shuttle...he would have been sure to try to activate it before he left orbit." He looked to Deke. "Did your people shoot him down?"
"Hell, no," he spat. "We were damn lucky to get past the picket ships with the Stealth jobs. The Bulldog had four squadrons of missile cutters jump in after us, and I'm not even sure if there's half a squadron left, but they finally took out the Predecessor-technology ships. I doubt they're hunting for shuttles."
"I've got another question that might be pertinent." Kara pushed off from the wall and paced over to us. "Where's Secarius?"
Interlude: Damiani
Beads of sweat had collected on the shuttle's sensor screen in the few minutes it had taken to achieve orbit, and Damiani took a moment to brush them away. This had been far too close, he realized. He had greatly underestimated General Murdock's ingenuity and resources, and he was going to pay for it. This development would slow down his plans considerably, and perhaps permanently alter them.
Ah, well, he sighed, letting himself rest against the straps of his acceleration couch in the zero gravity. He still retained his position, and, with it, effective control of the Commonwealth Executive. He could put the best possible spin on this on his pet news networks, and possibly salvage the elections through computer simulations of the Predecessors and Skrela. His enemies he could deal with at his leisure.
Things could be much worse.
The Corporate Council Executive Director closed his eyes, attempting to let the tension drain from his body. The shuttle would dock with his cutter in less than an hour, and there was nothing else for him to do until then---except keep trying to transmit the destruct code to Trint's cortex bomb. He wasn't sure if the Tahni had somehow removed the bomb or merely blocked the signal, but it didn't hurt to try. That was one enemy he would like to deal with immediately.
* * *
His eyes closed, Damiani couldn't see the slow, gradual movement out of the shadows behind the cockpit. The compact control room expanded through a narrow corridor to the large equipment bay, now empty but for a pair of sturdy lockers. From behind one of them emerged a dark, sinuous shape, moving silently and stealthfully despite its considerable size. Through the corridor it crept, floating out of the darkened depths of the bay and into the gentle light of the cockpit.
Secarius smiled thinly, baring his fangs at the sight of Damiani floating there with his eyes closed. This was too easy. Faster than an eyeblink, his talons had sliced through the Director's restraining straps, and his tail had wrapped around the man, pinning his arms to his side and lifting him out of the chair to face the former street surgeon.
Damiani sputtered incoherently, eyes wide as baseballs, at the sight of the restructured body that had once been Robert Chang's.
"What...what...what do you want with me?" Damiani stuttered.
"The realization of my destiny," Secarius declared cheerfully. "I created myself to exact revenge upon you. It was rather foolish of you to assume I would settle for anything less."
"I can give you anything you want," his prey protested desperately. "I can get you a new body if you want! Anything!"
/> "Thanks much, Andre old chap." The creature gently patted Damiani's cheek with a scaly palm. "But I already have a new body waiting back home---I'm turning over something of a new leaf, as it were. Just one little piece of unfinished business before I dispose of this brutishly short existence of mine." He grinned broadly. "Don't suppose you had time to take advantage of your little technological breakthrough and store a biological insurance policy of your own, eh, Andre?"
The man didn't answer, but Secarius could see in his eyes that he hadn't.
"Pity," the construct tsk'ed. "I'm afraid there won't be enough left of you to clone when I'm finished..."
The cockpit of the shuttle was abruptly filled with ugly, wet sounds and shrill screams that warbled on for long minutes before fading into the silence of space.
* * *
Outside, the small craft drifted along blissfully, approaching closer to the dark bulk of the cutter waiting in a high orbit. It seemed to be on a nominal docking course---until the engines abruptly flared to life, accelerating the shuttle nose-on into the rear of the starship at several thousand kilometers per second.
The two craft glowed briefly in an expanding, spherical fusion explosion, and then were gone as if they'd never been.
Chapter Twenty
"You're the quiet one all of a sudden," Rachel murmured, nibbling playfully at my earlobe. I smiled, shifting around on the bed to look at her.
Despite the best efforts of the room's air conditioning, a thin sheen of perspiration glistened on the pale softness of her skin, both from Inferno's intolerable midday heat and from the intensity of our lovemaking. Stray rays of Eridani-light filtered through the closed shades, streaking golden highlights through her auburn hair, gleaming in the azure facets of her eyes.
"Just thinking," I told her, tracing a line across her hip with my fingers. I felt as if I were trying to drink in the whole experience of her: the gentle curves of her breasts, the sweet smell of her hair, the salty taste of the sweat on her skin...all the things I'd thought I lost.