Kharmic Rebound

by Yeager, Aaron

  * * *

  The assassin chambered a fourth round just as her target folded out. Her lips pursed in frustration. She hadn’t expected the Issaguardian to sense the aether buildup of her weapon from this range, much less to throw herself on top of the target and foul up her third shot.

  “Sarai, would you like some purp-cobbler, sweetie?” the Tyo’sen mother asked the assassin, holding out a steaming plate.

  “No, thank you.”

  The assassin was already zeroing in on her target again. Folding had a limited range, so she released a viral charge, slicing into every camera feed and pedestrian within that radius. Within three minutes she had her target again, as her piggyback program alerted her of an alarm going off in one of the surgery rooms at Calius Regional Medical Center only six blocks from the café.

  A compromised spy satellite in orbit switched to aethiric imaging and confirmed the alarm. Six people had folded into the room and were gathering together medical staff to attend to the Issaguardian. The target was shoved into a corner, and the assassin began her targeting algorithms anew.

  With the help of the articulated tripod, she realigned her shot. At this range, it was only fractions of a degree, but the whirring sounds of the servos made the baby laugh happily as she ate her cobbler.

  “Goodbye Gerald Dyson.” The assassin locked onto the target and squeezed the trigger.

  There was a flash of red-hot claws, and the assassin’s rifle came apart in her hands, chopped into metallic slices like deli-meat. Her prosthetic body reacted quicker than thought, flipping her backwards, narrowly avoiding being decapitated by a second swing.

  The assassin landed and sized up her attacker.

  Ilrica leaned forward on her knees, breathing heavily. “You made me fly accelerated across half a continent. I’ll get you for that one, whoever you are.”

  The Tyo’sen father walked over and placed his hands on his hips. “Sarai, aren’t you going to introduce us to your friend?”

  They both ignored him.

  “How did you find me so quickly?” the assassin asked, a little irritation managing to come through her synthetic voice. “Every system was scrambled.”

  Ilrica wiped the blood from her nose and tapped her snout. “You can’t scramble this. I tracked the ozone trails.”

  Ilrica fought to catch her breath. She could barely stand up.

  “You are exhausted. You will not be able to bend time.”

  Ilrica raised an eyebrow. “You think I need to bend time to beat you?”

  Suddenly the assassin fell upwards, slamming into the ceiling as if gravity had reversed itself. She tried to upright herself, but then immediately fell down again, crashing into the floor. Her prosthetic arms blossomed into cannons, and she fired two spheres of white-hot energy at her opponent. Ilrica leapt sideways, dodging the first shot as it sailed out the window, then snagging the second out of the air with glowing claws and throwing it back where it came from. The assassin’s personal force field absorbed the energy, but the discharge momentarily washed out her vision.

  When it cleared, Ilrica was already on top of her. The assassin held up her arm as it folded open into an energized shield, but Ilrica’s glowing claws slashed right through it, slicing her prosthetics into sparking ruin.

  The assassin spun low, attempting to sweep her opponent’s legs out from under her, but Ilrica landed upside down on the ceiling, pushing off and launching herself into the surprised assassin.

  The floor gave way and the two combatants crashed through into the apartment below them, nearly giving a terrified old woman a heart attack as her hundreds of pets scattered in all directions.

  Mr. Tyo’sen looked down through the hole and shook his head in gentle rebuke. “Hey, be careful you two, we don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

  The assassin rolled herself to her feet, clutching the sparking stump of her ruined arm. Her artificial muscles charged up to their highest setting as Ilrica leapt at her again.

  Quicker than thought, the assassin bend backwards like a contortionist, allowing Ilrica to sail over her. Her remaining arm flipped open into an energized blade and she stabbed upwards, catching her opponent in the side, before narrowly spinning free of a kick that would have taken her head off.

  The assassin spun to her feet as Ilrica landed at the far side of the room, crushing an oversized and overused scratching post.

  “You’re slippery when you need to be,” Ilrica praised, licking her maw as she circled her opponent, her tail flicking about in anticipation. Black blood was dripping from the wound in her side, but she seemed unaffected by it. Her eyes were full with the thrill of the hunt. “But I wonder how fast you’ll be when you weigh fifty times as much.”

  Suddenly the assassin bent over with exertion, her servos whirring in protest as her artificial legs cracked under the strain. The floor buckled under her weight as Ilrica leapt straight at her. The assassin fired another blast, but Ilrica fell upwards in mid-leap, allowing the shot to pass harmlessly beneath her and destroy the old woman’s pantry.

  With every ounce of strength she had, the assassin took a step forward and slashed her glowing blade at her opponent, timed to take her head off as she landed, but Ilrica increased her own necass and came crashing down, landing faster than humanly possible before the attack could connect. The floor gave way and the two of them fell through. Ilrica kicked in the air, then fell sideways into the assassin, slamming her through a frightened man’s bathroom, and tearing her other prosthetic arm off with her bare hands.

  Electricity and blue fluid sprayed everywhere, and the assassin cried out, pain in her synthetic voice. Her legs split apart into four thinner limbs. With two she grabbed her opponent by the throat, and she kicked the other two beneath her to catch her landing.

  As Ilrica’s hands came up to her neck, the assassin’s chest opened up, revealing a short cannon barrel. In the heartbeat it took for the weapon to charge, the assassin smirked triumphantly, but then the smile disappeared. Her opponent was grinning from ear to ear.

  “She’s not reaching for her neck, she’s preparing a lateral strike!” the assassin realized, but it was too late. Ilrica templed her hands, then slashed outwards, her glowing claws severing the limbs wrapped around her throat.

  They both became an hundred times as heavy and rammed into the floor, snapping the assassin’s thin prosthetic limbs in half.

  The assassin’s now limbless body hit the floor and crashed through it, a look of astonished disbelief on her face as her chest cannot fired a beam up through the ceiling, punching a hole through the building and streaking out into the morning sky.

  Ilrica laughed as she picked herself up, clutching the wound on her side. Across the ruined kitchen, a man sat there in his pajamas, his spoonful of cereal trembling at his lips.

  “You prey make all these gadgets and gizmos,” Ilrica chuckled as she walked over to the hole. “And you think they’ll make a difference, but they never do. You should learn by now that there are hunters and there are prey. It is the law of the universe, and nothing can change that.”

  Ilrica looked down through the hole. The dark apartment below was empty, except for a whiff of ozone left behind from an emergency fold.

  “Ah, frakk.”

  The door flew open and Mr. Tyo’sen ran in along with the building guard. Both had pistols drawn. “Stop right there!” the guard yelled. “We won’t let you hurt Sarai!”

  Ilrica rolled her eyes. “What is her favorite food?”

  The two men gawked at her. “What?”

  “You think you’ve known her forever. Can you remember her ever eating her favorite food? Can you remember her listening to her favorite song? Can you recall her favorite outfit, her favorite joke, her favorite holo-vid?”

  The men’s faces pinched as they realized they couldn’t. They shook their heads in confusion.

  Ilrica walked up and put a sympathetic hand on Mr. Tyo’sen’s shoulder. “You’ve been brain-dived. The memories you hav
e of her are fake. Go get professional help.”

  As the men stood there, eyes trembling, Ilrica walked over to the window. “And backup your real memories next time so you can compare them and spot any fakes, ya buncha troobs.”

  Ilrica put a foot up on the windowsill, ready to fly out, but her vision blurred. The fight had taken more out of her than she had realized.

  “Whoo. I think I’ll just take a taxi instead,” she said, turning around and heading for the door.

  * * *

  It was nearly evening before Ilrica made it back to the Kalia Greir. She had avoided most of the bureaurocratic nightmare that follows when you wreck the upper floors of an apartment building by filing a tort in the lower courts from her hover taxi, explaining her intention to sue to the local law enforcement for their negligence in security. It was a trick she picked up from the Duchess. In legal matters, it doesn’t matter who is right, it only matters who strikes first. Once you are the first to file a complaint, that must be resolved first before any other matter is considered, so you can force the entire subject to remain bogged down on that single point until you wear out any other issues that you’d rather not deal with.

  Still, diplomats had been hurt, and she had been subject to a lot of grilling, until she finally just sent them her memory files of the entire event, and that seemed to placate them, at least for the night.

  Ilrica looked around. The ship was quieter than usual, and Cadbury was pecking around like no one had fed her. “Computer, where is Mediator Dyson?” she asked, slapping a rune on the wall, releasing some feed into Cadbury’s bowl.

  “Mediator Dyson is not on the ship.”

  Ilrica’s lupine ears perked up. She placed a hand on the sore spot on her side, where a patch of synth-skin had been applied. “Where is he, then?”

  “Mediator Dyson left in the yacht this morning. He did not file a flight plan.”

  “Ah, Gerald you idiot!”

  Ilrica didn’t have permission to leave. She didn’t ask for it, either. In the middle of a police investigation and with one crewmember still in the recovery ward, she simply took off.

  Most of the defense satellites were still offline, but the ones that were on took more than a passing interest in her presence. It took her a few minutes to slice into their systems and put them on standby, much to the chagrin of the engineers down on the surface, furious to see that the few satellites they had managed to cleanse get immediately sliced into again.

  As she broke orbit, Ilrica couldn’t help but notice a huge number of Alliance ships in formation nearby, just sitting there, like they were waiting for something. At the head was the attack wing with Admiral Greir that had come to their rescue before.

  “That’s the entire western fleet,” Ilrica noted. “What the trell are they doing out here?”

  She considered for a moment that they may have come because the Duchess had been injured, but immediately dismissed that idea. “There’s no way they could have gotten here that fast.”

  Deciding she didn’t care, she kicked the ship into a fast slither, and swam off into space, following the yacht’s nearly dissipated aether trail.

  * * *

  Gerald was sitting alone in the dark when the call came in. The internal lights had already failed, and the backups died soon afterwards. Amazingly the ship was still flying, despite the fact that three of the fins had broken off.

  “Gerald, wake up!” Ilrica yelled as her window appeared. Her outburst managed to break him out of his stupor.

  “Go away,” he said softly.

  “What.”

  “Go away, just leave me alone.”

  “Just what are you doing?” she asked. “It’s not safe for you to be out in a ship by yourself.”

  “I know it’s not safe,” he said morosely. “No one is safe around me. The Duchess had some of the best security possible, and look what happened to her.”

  “She’ll be okay. She is impressively tough for a rich girl, just don’t ever tell her I said that.”

  “It wasn’t enough.”

  Gerald sank lower into his knees. “Trahzi is probably the most powerful species to ever exist, and look what I did to her.”

  “Okay, first of all, everyone knows that the Bertulf are the most powerful. Second of all, she’s a child, Gerald. She may be millions of cycles old, but when it comes to emotions she’s just a child, dealing with feelings she’s never had to face before. Believe me, I know what that feels like. She’ll grow up, like everyone does.”

  “And poor Zurra... I just don’t want to see anyone else get hurt because of me.”

  “Is that why you ran away?”

  Gerald nodded.

  “Well, I think that is incredibly selfish of you.”

  Gerald looked up. “Is this supposed to make me feel better?”

  “You want soft stuff, go talk to a soft girl. That’s not my style.”

  Gerald chuckled sadly. “Ain’t that the truth.”

  Ilrica scratched her chin. “Okay, so you have bad luck; so you’re dangerous to be around, but isn’t that our decision, not yours?”

  “But...”

  “But nothing. You’re always preaching to everyone about choice, but here you are telling the rest of us that we don’t get to choose whether or not we can spend time with you. Well, you know what I say to that? I say I’m a big girl and I can decide for myself who I spend my time with. So, quit standing on your own tail and get back here.”

  Gerald rubbed his red eyes. “I see what you’re saying, I just don’t want...”

  “This isn’t about what you want, Gerald. You taught me that, remember? You practically browbeat it into me. You taught me that friendship isn’t something you receive, it’s something you give. Well, why do you think I came out here looking for you, you big dummy?”

  Gerald raised an eyebrow. “I thought you said a hunter doesn’t need friends.”

  She smiled. “I don’t, but that doesn’t mean they’re not nice to have anyway. After all, when that detective offered you a deal to sell me out, you weren’t even tempted for a second by the offer. That kind of loyalty can’t be bought, and most certainly shouldn’t be discarded.”

  Some of her bravado melted away, and she looked away and blushed. “In that moment, I almost forgot you weren’t an alpha.”

  “You heard all that?”

  “Of course I heard that,” she said, tapping her tall ear. “You were howling like one of those trebs from the academy drama club.”

  Gerald sat back. It was easy to run. It was easy to hide. Facing things was so much harder; it took real courage. He wanted to be the kind of person that could face things, but he was afraid to try.

  “I just don’t want people to get hurt.”

  “Well, that’s stupid.”

  “You really should have been a therapist, do you know that?”

  Ilrica snorted. “So I lack bedside manner. So what? The fact is, if you turn left people get hurt, if you turn right, people get hurt, if you just sit there and refuse to choose, people still get hurt. It’s a big dangerous universe out there, and crying about it won’t change anything.”

  Gerald looked up, his eyes pleading. “So what do I do?”

  Ilrica grinned. “In between hurting people, you show them some kindness, and hope they forgive you. That’s really all you can do.”

  Ilrica looked down, her eyes sorrowful. “You wouldn’t believe how starved people can become for a little kindness.” She looked back up, suddenly emboldened. “That is what you did for me, Dyson. That is who you are, and you can’t do that when you’re a frozen lump floating in space.”

  Gerald looked up. “I’ve been a coward, haven’t I?”

  “Yup.”

  “Instead of fixing the problem, I’ve been running from it.”

  “Basically.”

  “And I’m not showing enough appreciation for your friendship, am I?”

  “Wow, three for three, you are good at this. Now, if you had just figur
ed all this out BEFORE you ran half way across a sector, we’d be in good shape right now.”

  Gerald took a deep breath. He still felt terrible about what happened to Trahzi, Zurra, and Cha’Rolette. None of that had changed. The guilt still gnawed deeply at his heart. But he decided that instead of running from those feelings, he would use them, and if he could, he would make things right again. The least he could do was try.

  “Okay, fine, I’ll come back, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “Pffft,” she scoffed holding up a severed prosthetic arm. “You see this? This is all that’s left of the sniper that went after you. If this is all your bad luck can throw at me, I say bring it on! I enjoy a light workout every now and then anyway.”

  “We need to find out why the sniper attacked us.”

  Ilrica used the severed arm as a back-scratcher. “We will, but first we’ve got to get you back to Mara-Delli. There’s a nice mountain of paperwork waiting for us there.”

  Gerald nodded and looked up. “Computer, stop us here.”

  “Yes, Mediator Dyson.”

  The yacht lurched to a stop. Gerald was now truly in the middle of nowhere. One of those spots in the galaxy as far from any star in every direction as one can get without leaving the galactic plane entirely. Somehow, it felt colder than regular space, even though he knew that was impossible.

  Being in the middle of such an empty void made him feel small and alone, but Ilrica’s window gave him some comfort.

  Ilrica looked at the severed arm’s extended index finger and considered something for a second, then shrugged and tried to use it to pick her nose.

  “Gross!” Gerald yelled.

  Ilrica wagged her head. “It’s not that bad, actually. Just stay put, I need a few more minutes to catch up with you.”

  There was a drop in clarity and her image went fuzzy for a moment.

  “Ah blast,” she swore.

  “You okay?” Gerald asked, a little concerned,

  “Yeah, well, I’m just plugged into each station right now. I’m basically flying the ship by myself, and Zurra’s console keeps giving me trouble. It’s like there’s a big section of the wave that’s been sealed off.”