by King, Sara
She forced her blistered fingers into another crevice. She lowered herself another foot, powered by the thought of finding Colonel Steele in her crosshairs. The others, she just wanted to kill. Steele, she wanted to hurt.
Her toes found a tiny lip and she lowered herself a few more feet down the wall of rock.
She would kill him last.
The other Nephyrs would die, but she would save Steele for last. She would hunt him like the animal that he was.
She was standing on the crunchy stone dirt at the bottom of the Snake for several minutes before she recognized the fact. Magali blinked, then reluctantly let go of the stone in front of her. She fell back onto her heels, the first time she’d used them all day. The crumbly red-orange dirt dug into the soles of her feet, sticking to the blood and weeping blisters of her toes. She stared down at it, uncomprehending.
I made it.
She wondered if she was hallucinating again. Magali looked up.
The top of the cliff seemed to swim above her, swirling with the deep blue sky, blotting out the sun. Magali quickly returned her attention to her feet, fighting vertigo. Without having anything to eat for almost four days, it was all she could do to keep standing. All she’d had to drink was a few handfuls of the brackish water dribbling from a crack in the stone that afternoon. She glanced at the Snake, wondered if she could stomach its venom.
Magali stood there, unable to make her feet move, feeling light-headed. She listened to the rush of liquid in the channel behind her, the watercourse that had carved its long, ribbony path across the globe. The highly acidic water had a greenish hue, its surface almost placid as it continued to eat its way through the face of Fortune.
I made it, she thought again, this time registering shock, as well. She looked up again, startled. When she had first put her foot over the edge, she had hoped, but she had never once thought she’d actually make it. It all seemed dreamlike, now, something that had happened to somebody else.
Did I really do that? Even with her throbbing toes, her scabbed and bleeding fingers, she had trouble believing.
A humming in the distance brought her attention back to the task at hand. Somewhere down the Snake, she heard the increasing roar of an engine echoing against the canyon walls, approaching fast. Magali stumbled backwards automatically, pressing her shoulder blades into the cliff. No, she panicked. Oh no.
The gun.
It had to be near Benny. But where was Benny? In her grueling climb, she had sought handholds and footholds wherever she could find them, paying little attention to her position in relation to the ground. In fact, she had tried her best to avoid looking down. Now, Magali found herself in strange surroundings, with no points of reference to match up where she was with where she had been. Had she gone north or south in her climb, and how far?
The approaching ship spurring her into motion, she hurriedly moved from the wall and started searching the rocky red earth, climbing boulders to get a better view. She found Ben a few dozen yards away, his tiny body twisted, limbs askew, his head facing the ground. Saying a mental prayer for him, Magali began searching for the gun. She looked into crevices and frantically pushed aside Fortune pin-scrub, barely feeling the biting sting the leaves left on her skin. Nothing.
What if they took it? she suddenly thought, freezing in place. What if, after Steele had dropped it, the Nephyrs had retrieved the gun when they had gone down to grab his companions? What if it bounced against the canyon wall and fell into the Snake? What if the canyon’s gusting wind had blown it a hundred feet off course?
The engine was getting closer, coming from the direction of the Yolk camp.
No! a part of her screamed. She would not be caught helpless again. Never again. It came on a powerful inner surge, one that left her limbs tingling with the strength of her rage.
Almost as if her own stubborn will had conjured it, she saw a flash amidst the boulders to the north. She jogged up the Snake, eyes pinned to the spot, terrified she would lose track of it.
She found the gun lodged between two boulders, intact. Seeing it, beaten but not broken, Magali let out a sob of relief.
The engine was almost upon her when she ran back to Ben’s body and sprawled out between the boulders beside it, her hand and the gun hidden under a pin-scrub bush. Moments later, the ship rounded the last bend in the river and the engines were an overpowering roar bearing down on her. Magali heard the vessel slow directly overhead and clenched the gun tighter. Stay still, she told herself. Don’t move. They’ll pass.
But they didn’t pass. She heard the metal clang and the whirring grind as the landing gear extended, then the shift in tone as the engines prepared for landing. Magali lay still, though her heart was hammering, now. It was all she could do not to sit up to make sure one of the metal legs wasn’t about to crush her.
Magali heard the metal pads crunch in the stony pebbles a dozen feet away, then the whine as a ship door opened and a ramp extended.
Just stay calm, she thought. They probably just want to make sure you’re dead. Just wait it out, Mag. Don’t shoot unless you have to. You can’t kill them all. Not yet. Still, her fingers were numb from gripping the gun too tightly.
She heard light cyborg footsteps travel down the ramp, so quiet they were almost imperceptible. Then the crunch of gravel as they approached, slow and wary.
They stopped a few feet off. Magali imagined the Nephyr dragging a gun from his cargo belt and shooting her between the eyes. Her heart-rate began to increase its tempo the longer the newcomer stood there, watching her. Was it Colonel Steele? Would he want to take her body in to be identified and condemned?
Magali concentrated on her breathing. She focused on keeping her chest movements as shallow as possible, despite the way her blood was thrumming through her veins. A Nephyr could read her heartbeat.
If it was a Nephyr there, he would know she was still alive.
Chapter 40
The Head Doctor
“Walk faster, traitor, or I’ll start plucking hardware right now and save the doctors the time.”
“Yeah, whatever, loser,” Tatiana muttered, but she stepped up the pace, anyway. She was wearing cuffs and ankle-shackles that made it incredibly difficult to do anything more than a slow shuffle, and the bigger, taller Nephyrs weren’t slowing down for her.
Up ahead, surgery patients and doctors stepped aside to watch the procession of eighteen Nephyrs, two Internal Investigations Officers, twelve Base Security personnel, and six specially-assigned, assault-capable Gryphon units. Tatiana lifted her chin and tried to ignore the wide eyes from the side-corridors and open room doors.
Screw ‘em.
Guilty. It still rankled her. They hadn’t even given her a trial. Sure, they’d got the whole thing on camera, right down to her getting down on her hands and knees so Milar could stand on her back and retrieve his shackles, but jeez. Not even a trial. What was this, the Stone-Age? Surely she deserved a few minutes to explain her innocence, maybe have a few pity-parties in front of the cameras. But no, they’d kept her locked in almost complete solitary ever since they’d dragged her back to Rath. Her conviction had been delivered to her via the smug sneer of a Nephyr Lieutenant-General. They’d fed her gruel. Gruel.
Now they were going to remove her hardware before the Nephyrs got her. Full correction. To the death, spare the potty-breaks. Damn, this sucked.
The Nephyr on point turned down a side-corridor marked SURGERY and Tatiana slowed again, looking up at the big white letters on the sign with trepidation. “Taking a right!” the next Nephyr in line shouted. Several Nephyrs down the procession repeated the call. As she turned the corner, she saw the big teal double-doors up ahead and Tatiana felt her feet slow further.
“Move it, tiny,” the Nephyr behind her snapped, slamming a heavy hand into her back, tumbling her into the Nephyr in front of her. Nobody bothered to help right her when she fell. In fact, one of them grabbed her by the arm-shackles and started hauling her forward, giving her
the option of stumbling to her feet or getting dragged.
“I bet you stole a lot of lunch money as a kid,” Tatiana muttered, struggling back into a standing position. “Lot of good it did you, eh?”
The Nephyr holding her wrist-chains gave her a grin that left her with goosebumps. “Oh,” she said, “I’m not too displeased with the results. I get to skin me a little operator bitch. Always wanted to do that.”
“Such lofty goals,” Tatiana muttered. “Remind me to nominate you for the school board.”
The Nephyr woman holding her chain looked up to one of her companions. “I want her tongue.”
Tatiana swallowed down bile and muttered, “Tastes like chicken.”
“Actually,” the Nephyr woman said, smiling at her, “it tastes like pork.”
She is not bullshitting me, Tatiana realized, looking up into the woman’s icy-calm face. Fuck me, I am so screwed.
“See,” the woman continued, plucking at Tatiana’s orange prisoner’s jumpsuit as they walked, “sometimes we’ll carve a chunk off and eat it in front of ‘em. Bit of thigh or backstrap or, if they’re boring, the tongue. Fry it right on the spot in a little salt and butter and garlic, slice it up nice, throw in a few onions for flavor. Hell, we’ll even offer ‘em a piece, if they’re hungry.”
Definitely don’t be boring, Tatiana thought immediately. Then, with a sudden wave of hysteria, she realized that she was planning on doing her damndest to entertain Nephyrs as they flayed her alive. She swallowed, hard.
“Taking a left!” the lead Nephyr shouted, from up ahead. Two Nephyrs had stopped to hold open the double-doors as the procession passed through, revealing row after row of double-doored surgery rooms.
Oh man, Tatiana thought, seeing the first surgeon in blue scrubs and a facial mask, standing off to one side, watching. She felt her heart start to thunder in her ears. Oh man…
Then the Nephyrs were parting, leaving her a black-clad corridor into an open surgery room. Inside, she could see an operating table and a nice, big array of tools and electronics.
They were gonna tear out her hardware. She was never flying another soldier. Never flying another anything. She was grounded, man, and she hadn’t even gotten laid out of the deal. Seeing the guy with the syringe standing beside the bed, it finally started to sink in. His assistant, a much smaller woman who appeared to be some sort of dwarf, had everything but her eyes hidden by a facial mask. She was seated on a short stool, playing with a scalpel, shaving her fingernails.
Shaving her…fingernails? Wasn’t that, like, against some sort of health code?
The doors slammed shut behind her and two Nephyrs set the deadbolts, top and bottom, leaving Tatiana alone with four escorts and two surgeons. Tatiana slowed again, as they drew closer to the spotlit center of the room, and the female Nephyr in front of her laughed. “Aww, I think she’s starting to hyperventilate.” She shoved Tatiana, hard, and Tatiana went careening into the operating table, upending the carefully-laid-out trays and spilling medical instruments in a metallic clatter upon the floor. “Get on with it, docs,” the glittering broad said. “I want this bitch back in time for dinner.” She gave Tatiana a wink.
The dwarf stopped shaving her fingernails and narrowed her eyes at the instruments on the floor. In a high-pitched, childlike voice, she said, “I’m sorry, did someone ask the lawn ornament to talk, Dobie?”
The man beside the bed said, “I don’t believe they did, Anna.”
“I see.” She paused and held her tiny hand out to inspect the back of her nails. “Execute them, please.”
“As you wish, Anna.” As the Nephyrs were frowning, the man raised a hand and pointed a finger at the Nephyr closest to her, then raised a finger at each of the three others, and Tatiana had just enough time to see the tips of four of his fingers fold back, exposing small black tubes, before she heard a collective pop and jumped. In that instant, all four Nephyrs suddenly collapsed, their bodies shuddering. It had taken only a second. The man lowered his arm, blew smoke from the four steaming barrels jutting from his hand, then the tips of his fingers folded back into place and he dropped his arm back to his side. When Tatiana looked down, the Nephyrs’ brains were oozing gray-pink slime out an empty eye-socket.
“Niiice, Dobie. Your aim is improving.”
“I continue to modify myself as time allows, Anna,” the man said.
Listening to the perfectly-calculated pitch of his voice, Tatiana frowned. “Wait. Is that a…robot?”
“Wow, she’s a bright one.”
“Her statistical record indicates she is, Anna.”
The girl—it had to be a girl, Tatiana realized, maybe only five or six—snorted in disdain. Giving Tatiana a considering look, she blew on her fingernails, then rubbed them on her shirt. “Dobie, help her onto the table.” She pulled off her mask and flung it aside. “We’re gonna have some fun.”
Tatiana froze. “The…table? What? Why?”
The girl’s smile was icy. “So I can experiment on you, of course.”
Tatiana’s face fell as the robot moved to grab her by an arm and pull her towards the table. “What?”
“Oh, you actually thought you were getting rescued, didn’t you?” The kid laughed at her. “Oh no, sweetie. Oh no. This will be much, much better.” Smiling, the girl got off her stool and started walking towards her. “You see, you killed my friend, and I didn’t want the Nephyrs getting first whack at you.”
As the robot bodily hefted Tatiana onto the table and cinched down the wrist and ankle restraints, Tatiana frowned down at the little girl, struggling against hyperventilation. “I don’t know what you’re talking about—who are you?”
“They skinned him, you know,” the little girl said, twisting the scalpel in the light, looking at the blade. “All those pretty dragons—one of the Nephyrs decided to tan it and use it as a coat.” She looked up at Tatiana with a smile that left Tatiana cold. “She’s dead now.”
Dragons… It took her a moment to make the connection. Milar. “I didn’t kill him!” Tatiana cried, as the robot buckled her head to the table. She frantically strained against the straps holding her down. “I helped him escape!”
“I see.” The girl smiled and lowered the scalpel to the metal tray. Idly, she picked up what looked like a circular bone-saw. Pressing the button, the blade shrieked in a high-pitched whine as she watched it thoughtfully. “Dobie, perhaps you could replay the scene in question for our new friend?” She turned to smile at Tatiana. “Since her memory seems to be so…fragile.”
“As you wish, Anna.” The scene immediately came up on the operating screen, which the girl twisted so that Tatiana could see.
A man, hanging from his wrists in a tiny concrete cell, his skin hanging on a hook beside him. Tatiana recognized the sinuous red and black serpents and felt sick. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “I thought he escaped.”
Jeanne said he went down, she remembered. He went down and they skinned him alive.
“Took him four days to die,” the little girl said. “The Nephyrs running the show were quite disappointed. Seems one of their techs arrived with a highly virulent form of bacteria on their sterile medical equipment. What a shame.”
Four days… Tatiana frowned, remembering the charges that the Lieutenant General had read to her the day she returned. He’d left her the paper to examine, after he’d left. The date had been in the upper left-hand corner. Blinking at the kid, she said, “But I’ve only been back two days.” They had escaped four days ago.
She saw a flicker of confusion in the girl’s face before she shook herself and continued, “So here’s the deal. I need guinea-pigs, and I don’t like you, so I’m going to run a few experiments before I hand you back to the Nephyrs. Sound like fun?”
But Tatiana was frowning at the skin. The dragons looked wrong, somehow. She’d gotten a really good look, earlier, back when the bastard had been teasing her, and the nose of the red one was tucked over the black one’s back, instead of behind it. �
�Kid,” she said. “I don’t know who that is, but that’s not Milar. The red dragon is wrong.”
The girl frowned at Tatiana a long moment, then reluctantly glanced at the screen. She cocked her head at it a moment, then turned back to Tatiana. “Explain.” She still had not turned off the bone-saw.
“I went back and rescued him from the Nephyr compound,” Tatiana babbled in relief. “Four days ago. He had a little EMP wand in his knife and he used it to disable some Nephyrs. I took out his lifeline and stuffed him in my soldier and flew him back to his brother. I took out a couple of Bouncers with his ship, then we spent a couple days laying low, staying under radar. Then there was a big firefight over Deaddrunk. I flew a TAG and took out a pod of operators and about a dozen Nephyrs.”
The girl wrinkled her nose. “Dobie?”
“An unarmed cargo ship wiped out three Bouncers on patrol over the western jungle,” the robot said. “Two days later, there was a fight over Deaddrunk, but the information is classified, pending a Director’s code.”
Narrowing her eyes at Tatiana, the girl shut off the bone saw and swiveled the console back around and began typing something into the screen. A few moments later, she cocked her head, looking genuinely surprised. “Huh. She’s telling the truth.”
“It appears that way, Anna.”
The girl tapped her fingers against her cheek a moment, glancing at the screen, then to Tatiana, then back. “Says Miles and Patty went down in the north end of the Tear. There’s a huge search out for them right now. Most operators north of the equator have been deployed. Big firefight. They found the ship, but colonial resistance isn’t allowing them to land and do a thorough search.”
Tatiana let out a huge breath of relief. “Oh thank God. See? I’m on your side. You can let me go, now.”
The girl spun the console away from her and gave Tatiana an easy smile. “You’re right. I could.”
The girl made no move to disengage the shackles holding Tatiana to the stainless-steel table. Instead, she smiled, and Tatiana felt the coldness of it in her soul.