by Rick Partlow
“I recall a human saying,” Trint replied, “about the survival rate of battle plans once they come in contact with the enemy.”
“For a stone-cold killer Imperial Guard cyborg,” Kara opined, looking at Trint sidelong, “you sure do bitch a lot.”
Deke let out a snort but didn’t look back to see the scowl Trint was giving both of them. It was a human scowl, a facial expression he’d learned to mimic quite well. Rachel said it was from imitating me, but I don’t think I scowl that much.
I watched the tactical display switch from computer simulation to live camera view as we came into visual range of the Naga fleet and I heard a warning alarm sound softly as the Dutchman switched from impellers to fusion drive. The acceleration pushed me back into the cushion of my seat and I clenched my teeth at the twist in my stomach.
I wasn’t nervous at all, I realized. I’d been nervous back on that moon because Pete and Rachel were in danger, but now I felt…excited. This was what it had been like during the war, when the mission was everything and the only people I had to worry about were the people on my team. If Gregorian was the one behind all this, I’d have to thank him. Right before I killed him.
“They’re guiding us to that lighter,” Kara jabbed a finger at the converted freighter that was on the outer edge of the formation, furthest away from the cruiser. “Gonna take about ten to get into docking position.” She looked at Trint. “You should get ready.”
The drives had cut out and the only thrust was from maneuvering jets now, so Trint was able to float out of the cockpit back through the narrow tunnel into the utility bay. I unstrapped and followed him back into the bay, steadying myself on one of the many hand-straps spaced around the bay for such a purpose and watching as he began to arm himself.
“Be careful,” I warned him, smiling to take the truth out of it. “I know it takes a lot to kill you, but if you get too fucked up, we’ll have to get Cutter to clone new flesh for you and I don’t think I can afford his rates.”
“I would rather cease functioning permanently,” Trint told me as he slung a pulse carbine over his shoulder, “than let Robert Chang handle a single cell of my genetic material.” At my raised eyebrow, he expanded. “The man,” he said as he grabbed a portable rebreather unit out of a locker, “is mentally unstable. And I may be employing understatement when I say that.”
I snorted a laugh. “Yeah, I think we can agree on that. Cutter has always been a strange one and he’s only gotten weirder since he died that first time.”
“Yes,” Trint agreed, pulling on the rebreather and settling the mask over his face. He could have gone a few minutes without air, but we wanted to account for any unforeseen circumstances. “This thing of making copies of himself,” he went on, his voice muffled by the breathing mask, “is not healthy. I worry for his grasp on reality.”
“One problem at a time,” I told him, hitting the control to open the inner door of the utility airlock. “Wait till we’re less than a hundred meters away before you punch out. We’ll be close enough then that their sensors won’t be able to pick you out against our hull.”
Trint nodded curtly to me, then stepped into the airlock and shut the door behind him. I thought a quick prayer for him, hoping God had a sense of irony, then tried to clear my mind. I had to do something now, something I didn’t like at all. I had to give myself to The Machine, the thing they’d turned me into back in the Fleet labs. There was no other option: the fighting on board a ship is a special kind of chaos that I couldn’t think my way through or even feel my way through. I would only survive by letting The Machine take over, letting my implant combat computer guide my instincts and my choices.
The last time I’d let The Machine take over, I’d killed a lot of people, including maybe some that didn’t deserve it. Did these people deserve it? Who was I to make that call?
Yeah, those were the kinds of thoughts I couldn’t afford. I felt something click behind my eyes, a psychic feeling more than a physical one, and everything seemed to grow colder. Every second seemed like it stretched into minutes and every detail around me jumped out with incredible clarity.
I heard the hum of the fans as air was sucked out of the auxiliary lock and knew from the exterior camera feed that Trint had exited the Dutchman and was jetting toward the lighter, using a hand-held propulsion unit. The information registered but the emotional content was gone, blocked out by a filter I no longer controlled.
There was a sharp bang and a lurch as the ship’s braking thrusters fired one more time, and then the gentle shudder of the cutter settling into the docking collar of the lighter. Seconds that seemed like hours passed yet I moved not a muscle.
“You ready?” Kara asked, coming up behind me.
I turned and saw her eyes widen slightly. I knew why. I had seen the hard, dead-eyed expression before and I saw it mirrored on Deke’s face as he followed her up from the cockpit.
“You do the talking,” I told her, my voice sounding alien to my ears.
She nodded, pushing off towards the airlock. It was opening, our atmosphere matched with the docking collar’s, and waiting behind it was a tall man, looking efficient and business-like in his crisp brown uniform, his head completely depilated and shining in the reflection of the bay’s lightstrips.
“It’s about time you showed up,” he was saying as he reviewed what I assumed was a lading document on the tablet in his right hand. He wore sticky boots that adhered to the deck plating, which were practical for normal work, but not for combat. “We expected you yesterday.”
“Sorry,” Kara said, one hand gripping a utility strap on the hull by the airlock. “We were delayed onplanet by a weather front.”
He sniffed at that, obviously considering it a weak excuse, then finally looked up at us and frowned in confusion.
“Where’s Artemis? I thought Artemis was coming on this run.”
Kill him now, the Machine whispered at me.
Wait, I adjured it. Wait for Trint.
“Artemis is dead,” Kara improvised with admirable alacrity, hardly missing a beat. “We lost a whole dome to an unexpected eruption.”
“What?” the man’s mouth fell open in shock. “That’s…” He looked back and forth between her and the two of us, suspicion clear in his eyes. “How the hell…”
Time’s up.
I didn’t have to push off of Kara, though I’d been prepared to---that was why she held the strap. I simply had to lunge forward with one arm, my opposite leg stretching backwards to counter the motion, and extend one of the talons from my right wrist. The Naga administrator froze with the same look of confusion locked on his face forever as the plastalloy talon pierced through his ear canal and bisected his brain.
I saw Kara about to exclaim something, most likely expressing alarm at having acted too soon; but before she could get the words out, we all heard Trint’s broadcast over our neurolinks.
“Their antennae array is disabled,” he said, voice muffled by his breath mask. “I’m heading for the lock.”
I withdrew the talon from the man’s ear and a thin trail of red globules floated free, leaving him still standing there, anchored by his boots and propped up by the lack of gravity. I tried not to look into his eyes, but they stared at me, still open, still wide with disbelief.
“Go,” I said, pushing off from Kara and rebounding off the interior of the airlock, then heading through the collar.
I didn’t wait to see if they were following; I knew they would. We’d cut off their communications, but that only gave us minutes: if someone discovered the damage, they could use the board on one of the shuttles to get a call out to the other ships. Everything now came down to speed.
The hangar bay of the lighter was large, but it was packed with three assault shuttles and our cutter, giving the already narrow transparent access tunnel an even more claustrophobic feel. There were two other Naga-uniformed workers in the tunnel, moving briskly from one task to the next, their sticky boots holding them
to the deck. They barely looked up as I approached, propelling myself with increasing speed by using hand-holds along the tunnel walls.
This was too easy; it felt like murder, not combat. The Machine didn’t care, though and with a thought my talons extended through the byomer gloves soundlessly. Their edges were honed to a thickness of a few molecules and with a single swipe I took the first man’s head from his body. Had I been dealing with DSI cadre or boosted mercs, I would have taken the last man first, but these were just Norms---normal, unaugmented humans---and I wasn’t alone.
Before either of the other two, a short man and a stocky woman, could react to the sudden fountain of blood bubbling up from their co-worker’s neck like a spray of fireworks, Deke and Kara were on them. Deke speared the man through an eye with a talon, pithing his brain like a frog ready to be dissected, while Kara raised her right hand and pointed her index finger at the woman’s head. A flash of light seared a pinprick through the synthskin covering the end of the cybernetic finger and the pulse from the implant laser burned through the Naga worker’s forehead. There was a sharp crack, about as loud as someone clapping their hands, but nothing that would attract attention or set off alarms the way a regular pulse pistol would have.
We had just minutes now…maybe less if each worker had a health monitor, but I doubted that. This wasn’t the sort of operation that was worried about the health of its employees. We pushed past the bodies and out of the embarkation tunnel and into the utility bay, which was empty except for row upon row of vacc suit lockers. Past the bay was a corridor junction that led forward to the bridge and left and right to engineering and weapons control.
“I’ve got engineering,” Deke said, splitting off to the right.
“Weapons,” Kara confirmed, heading down the branch to the left.
That left the bridge for me, which was the plan. It was where we’d face the stiffest opposition, most likely. I had to get there before the alarm went up and they sealed it tight. If that happened, things got much more complicated.
The corridor ended in a vertical tunnel with ladders heading down to the crew cabins and up toward the command bridge. Behind me, I knew that Trint was entering the maintenance airlock back in the utility bay; his job would be to clean out the living quarters. I headed for the bridge.
The walls of the tunnel were antiseptic white, just like the corridors before them. This ship was Corporate and new, lacking the personalization and clutter of an older vessel…even a pirated one. A small part of my consciousness that wasn’t being swallowed by the needs of the Machine wondered about that, about how much Gregorian had brought together out here, in the middle of nowhere, while the DSI and the military hunted for him.
The hatch to the bridge was open and I could hear voices coming down the tunnel, a woman and a man arguing about the communications being down, talking about bringing up the feed from the exterior cameras. I grasped a handhold on the tunnel just five meters from the hatch and pulled my pulse pistol from its holster. Once I was inside, it wouldn’t matter if any alarms went off.
I tried to get a sense of where the occupants of the bridge were located, using the acoustics of their voices to pinpoint their locations. The male was on the far side of the control room, while the female was closer to the center. I couldn’t pick out any other voices and thermal couldn’t penetrate the bulkheads. Recon by fire, then.
I whipped myself forward with a good fraction of my strength and flew across the five meters to the hatch in the space of a heartbeat. The bulkhead blurred with motion as I sailed past, yet everything seemed to slow enough that I could count the dimples in the spray-foam coating. Then I was through the hatch and inside the control room, with my pulse pistol held out at arm’s length.
The woman was next to the communications console, her legs floating upward as she held herself close to it, examining a readout. I put two shots through her head and it burst like a melon, but I didn’t pause to stare at the explosion because I discovered two things just then.
The first was that there’d been a third person in the control room, positioned just inside the hatchway, not talking because talking wasn’t his job.
The second, as I saw plastalloy claws descend from cybernetic fingers, was that he was a former DSI cadre commando.
They were the DSI’s direct action operatives, cut rate versions of the Glory Boys used for assassinations, infiltration, all sorts of wetwork. Kara had been one, and from his Naga uniform, this guy had apparently taken his services to a higher bidder. He pushed off against the wall with jacked reflexes and headed for me, his grey eyes fixed on me like targeting lasers.
But I was still in motion, still heading for the far end of the control room, where the man---the Captain of the ship, I estimated---was poised by the tactical station, his mouth still open with shock. And I still had to take him out or risk the alarm being spread.
My headcomp used precious nanoseconds debating the correct strategy, calculating whether I had time to bring my gun around from where it was halfway pointed at the ship’s Captain or whether I should abandon it and go with my claws. The decision was made without my input and I found myself firing a pulse into the Captain’s face, and then twisting around in mid-air to let my boots take the impact against the forward screens.
Then the former cadre-man was on me and things began to move very, very fast…
At some point I dropped the gun because by the time my flesh and blood mind caught up with things, both sets of talons were extended and I was pinwheeling back across the room. A kaleidoscope of holographic displays and floating crimson globules of blood passed through my vision, but I was acting on far more than visual input…insofar as I was acting at all.
I felt the tug of my talons ripping into the flesh of the former DSI commando, felt the impact halt my tumble and send me drifting towards the ceiling. A thought activated the adhesive plates in the soles of my boots and stuck them to the bridge ceiling with the combined effort of millions of microscopic setae like those on the feet of a lizard. I used the anchor to pull myself into a crouch, then cut loose the adhesion as I straightened out, launching myself at my opponent once more.
He was doing the same thing using what would be the floor when there was artificial gravity, and we met in the middle with a head-on collision of pure, bloody death. The cadre were on the cutting edge of technology, but they were production line material. They were recruited, they died, they retired and they were replaced. The Glory Boys were a one-off wartime experiment, using technology that was still too expensive to standardize. That was the advantage I had over him; that and the byomer Reflex armor I was wearing beneath my Naga uniform.
His claws were electrically hardened byomer and they slashed my appropriated uniform to shreds, but they never touched my skin, much less tested my own subdermal armor because the Reflex armor shed them like water. I wouldn’t have felt the pain anyway, since my headcomp had blocked those neural inputs, but as it was I barely felt the impact from the claws as he jabbed them at me, trying to reach a vital organ.
My own plastalloy talons had no such issues with him. Their laser-honed blades sliced through his uniform, through his flesh and through his own subdermal armor like it wasn’t there and chunks of him flew across the room to hit the opposite bulkhead. Then we were drifting apart again and my boots caught a hold once more, this time against the portside bulkhead. The DSI commando looked pretty rough, covered in blood and cut to pieces, with the dull grey of his duraweave subdermal armor visible under the ragged slices through his neck and face, but he was still totally alert and not showing any sign of the pain a Normal would be feeling.
His eyes, though…they had lost their previous focus. He was squinting now, deep in a frown and I could tell he was getting pretty worried. His gaze flickered to the left and I followed it to where my pulse pistol floated lazily near the ceiling.
He made his move and I made mine, both of us launching towards the gun. I was naturally stronger and my movements
were enhanced by the Reflex armor; I reached it first, slamming my right shoulder into the bulkhead with bruising force that took the air from my lungs despite my enhancements. The commando’s finger claws stabbed into the back of my neck just above my collar, one of them coming just centimeters from my brain stem, but I used my leverage from being up against the bulkhead to slam my heel backwards into his chest.
He impacted the opposite bulkhead with a solidly painful sound and I was dimly aware in some clinical sense that I was bleeding badly from my neck; and then just as quickly aware that the wound was being sealed by my own byomer subdermal armor. But the gun was in my hand once more and he was three meters away, across the room---too far away to make a move before I could shoot him.
“We’ve got the ship,” I told him, thinking that’s what Rachel would want. My voice sounded hoarse to my ears, alien. “Give it up and help us and we’ll let you live. We’ll even pay you.”
I could see his face very clearly for the first time. Age was impossible to determine just by features, but the lines of experience around his eyes and the way he carried himself told me he was at least as old as I was. Probably a veteran of the War, then. I wondered if he’d been a Corporate Council stooge like my old teammate Roger West.
His eyes narrowed, and I could see he was considering my offer. I also figured he was trying to call for help but finding out that the ship’s antennas were down; his neurolink couldn’t reach another ship in space without using the antennas.
“Who are you?” he finally asked me, his voice oddly pleasant and well-modulated for someone who made his living through violence.
“I’m Caleb Mitchell,” I told him, wondering if he’d know the name. The way his eyes widened told me he did. So much for anonymity.
I could see his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed hard. “All right,” he said, relaxing, his claws retracting back into their bionic weapons mounts in his fingers. “I guess Gregorian can’t kill me any deader than you could.”