“Sergei,” she whispered. He looked down at her. She mimicked gulping something down while pointing at the open area. “Need a distraction.”
He clapped a hand on her shoulder, squeezed twice, and grunted before standing up to his full height. The former soldier, not quite Spetsnaz, stumbled around the rocks in a convincingly drunken sway.
“Goluboglazka ona byla,” he slurred in an attempt to sing.
The BMC guard readied a rifle. “You there, stop. Get back to your designated work area.”
“Litchiko angela,” sang Sergei, staggering to the right three paces before falling into a leftward sway that brought him closer to the ridge.
“Are you deaf?” The guard’s face reddened. He trotted down the steps, approaching Sergei. “Where did you get an intoxicant? You know that’s contraband.”
The Russian circled to the other side of the spires and fiddled with the crotch of his pants, “Moya Anya, moya Anya.”
Risa sank away from the gap in the rocks as the guard approached. She crawled to the far right side after giving Lawrence the universal sign for ‘stay quiet’―a finger over the lips. He nodded.
“Hands on the wall, don’t move.” The security man stopped a few paces away from Sergei. “You’re lucky you’re in good health and still have some use in you. You know, I can kill you just for being in this area.”
Sergei swooned about, on the verge of falling over as he made cupping motions over his chest. “Litchiko angela. A siski, siski,” he sang, raising his eyebrows with a drunken grin, as if picturing an idealized memory.
Edging closer, the security man seemed confident enough to lower his rifle and ready a stun prod. “Last chance, mine-meat. Down on your knees.”
Sergei leaned back in a posture that said he was about to urinate on the wall, ignoring him. “Moya Anya, kogda ya skazal yeiy chto vozvraschayus domoi, ona mne”―the drunkenness left him as he glanced over his shoulder, making eye contact with the guard―“Oglyanis.”
The security man froze. Risa slipped out from hiding and crept up on him. Sergei laughed in the guard’s face.
“Oglyanis … Look behind me? What the―” He gasped and whirled about.
Risa stood an arm’s length away, gaze down and canted to the side, her body slack in the stance of a malfunctioning doll. Nano claws slipped without a sound through his throat, leaving cuts too fine to see if not for the gush of red. His scream was a spray of bubbles and mist. Sergei grabbed the man’s helmet in both hands and broke his neck with a twist, flinging the body to the ground by its head.
“Cute song,” she said, grabbing the rifle. “Here.”
“It won’t work. We not have chips.” He tapped his palm.
“Trust me.” She hefted it to him with a wink.
Risa jogged to the porch, and waved her hand past a small security scanner to the right of the door. An expanding holo-panel already bore the words ‘Hi Risa’ in large, block letters. She grinned as the text erased itself and more appeared. ‘One moment, I’ll get the lock for you.’
Sergei shuffled up behind her, frowning at the red flashing border around the ammo counter. Lawrence dragged the dead guard over and shoved him under the armory pod. By some miracle, none of the automated defense guns paid them any notice.
She pressed her head against the door, listening to sounds of movement from inside.
“Ops, this is Gerard in Armory C. Some unidentified bitch in black is trying to hack the door. She’s not coming up on the roster as staff or property.” Three heavy bangs followed. “Ops?”
“Comm’s down,” said another man.
“Down? It can’t be down, everything’s green.”
Faint electronic flutter made her lean away from the door to look at the terminal.
More text appeared: “Take only what is in here, all other weapons will be offline. 3… 2… 1…”
Beep.
Slivers of heat shot down her limbs as she triggered her speedware. Too soon. The pneumatic hiss of the door opening deepened to a roaring rush as time slowed. She launched herself in, arms out and claws extending. The closer man stood near a desk, pointing at the door with his mouth frozen in mid-yell at the other guard. Five Nano claws punctured his helmet; her first swipe passed through with the feeling of crushing a hard-shelled cream puff between her fingers. The blades met resistance only from the armor―the insides may as well have been air. The dead man’s knees buckled and his body sagged. She raised her leg, planted a boot on the corner of the desk, and leapt at the second soldier. He broke free of slow motion, and moved in real time with her.
Shit, he’s got boosters.
He flung himself backward. Two hands’ worth of transparent claws passed inches shy of his face. He fired a shot into her chest, leaving a flattened lead disc adhered to her ballistic suit. A chair crept by overhead, distracting the man from taking another shot while she staggered to keep her feet under her. Sergei’s slowed roar sounded like a baleful demon. Risa ignored the pain in her chest and sprang at him again. He caught her wrist, trying to twist her around into an arm-bar grapple.
She threw herself into the motion rather than fighting it. Kicking her legs for added momentum, she flipped over him and hit the ground hard on her shoulder. Her free hand swiped claws at his knee, slicing flesh and bone with little resistance. The man howled, releasing her arm by reflex. Risa drew back her legs, knees to her cheeks, and mule-kicked him in the side. One shin and boot remained upright as the rest of him fell. He hit the ground on his side and shoved his gun in her face. She grabbed his forearm and pushed up. The shot nipped some hair; muzzle flare warmed her cheek. Flash protectors in her eyes prevented her brain from receiving the surge of bright light. Her claws sliced through his forearm, severing the hand and showering her with an arterial spurt. The man scurried backwards, trying to clamp his hand over the stump. Risa let her speedware shut down as the helpless man with one hand and one and a half legs fumbled at his belt.
Threat neutralized.
Lawrence and Sergei’s slow-motion sprint surged back to real time. She curled on her side, cradling her gut, not watching the men rush over and break the guard’s neck. Her body trembled. Already, she teetered at the precipice of permanent nerve damage. Pain radiated outward from her stomach in tingling waves of fire. Too much, too soon. Behind a desk, she had a few precious seconds to suffer before the miners could see, a few precious seconds she did not need to keep the illusion. As far as they witnessed, she’d become a black smear. The whole fight had passed in three seconds of real time. She picked the flattened bullet out of the thick rubbery material covering her chest. Only a minor abrasion remained on the outside. It didn’t look like the hit had punctured anything vital, though breathing hurt.
By the time Sergei and Lawrence peered over the desk, she appeared calm. No trace of her breath-stealing abdominal pain visible upon her face, she forced herself to stand and approached the reason they’d sought out this room. Rows of weapons lockers gleamed in silver and red, lit by the code panels on each door. She smiled, keying in four sevens.
The door chirped. Twenty-four lockers went from red to green and popped open. The men gawked at their find. Each chamber held four combat rifles and eight magazines. Risa helped herself to a few bright-red autoinjectors from the medical cabinet. While the men set about loading the rifles into a quartet of large duffel bags, she pulled the rubbery armor away from her neck and administered two stimpaks in turn. The cool presence of nanobots swimming in synthetic adrenaline spread from her throat over her back and stomach. Flashes of needlepoints traced the outline of speedware in her muscles. Her pain lessened, as did her exhaustion. The bruise in the center of her back flared with a sudden ache before the pain faded. Lawrence tossed rifles into the duffel bag two at a time, swiping out magazines like dominoes. Sergei mirrored him on the other side.
The enemy is blind and their weapons are disabled. Do not scavenge. Raziel’s voice sounded distant, still lacking the usual paralytic wave of divi
ne energy.
“BMC soldiers won’t be able to fire. Only the guns in this room will work. Don’t bother grabbing more weapons. Go; arm the others and get to the ore loader.”
“Where you go?” asked Sergei.
Lawrence blinked. “You ain’t comin’?”
“I need to go sweet-talk a shuttle.” She wiped blood off her fingers, examining her nails. “I just hope I can teach myself to fly one in six minutes.”
The men zipped up the bags and hurried out.
Risa, half sitting on the desk, stared at the floor. I don’t want to move. A memory of Garrison hovering over her as she lay on a medical table flooded her mind.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” His voice echoed in the daydream. Surgical lights formed a halo around his head.
“I have to,” yelled a petulant-sounding version of herself.
What was I, seventeen? She stared at her bloody hands. Garrison said he found me fifteen years ago. I guess I’m twenty-four. Risa laughed. “Never thought I’d make it to ten.”
She grunted with the effort it took to stand, and shambled like a stick figure to the door. A few stretches worked stiffness out of her limbs, and she trotted across the clearing toward the large plastisteel roadway. The night offered plenty of darkness to hide in as she made her way past the hulking shapes of ore containers, military-looking crates, and a few piles of machine parts. Whirring from overhead made her nervous, but the automatic turrets kept panning side to side as if nothing had gone wrong.
Out of the corner of her eye, the darting figures of rebelling miners ran among the shadows. They moved from pod to pod, bringing weapons, plans, and hope. Seeing them helped ease the agony creeping up the backs of her legs, and got her limping faster in the direction of several ore haulers. The massive, blocky vehicles perched on six independent tread trucks shaped like upside-down trapezoids. A short sprint ended underneath a six-ton ore-mover, where she crouched against one of the treads. Her hiding place brought her within inches of the atmospheric retention field. The shimmering blue haze electrified her hair, making it float on a static charge. Sixty meters away, surrounded by unbreathable atmosphere, waited her escape plan.
The squat shuttle perched on its landing pad with the posture of an overstuffed pigeon. Clouds of Cryomil fog clung to its underbelly. Its shape resembled common interplanetary passenger craft; however, the cargo model had a widened bottom, giving it a distended appearance. The canopy windows lurked at the level of a four-story building, tiny, beady eyes atop long, sloping sides.
I can’t hold my breath that long. She shifted to the other side, peering into the compound at guard towers. I’ll get seen.
The same invisible bars that kept the miners prisoner here also jailed her. Thinking about being trapped here brought a ghostly shadow of pain across her back. The holed e-suit might give her enough time, but she’d stashed it on the other side of the compound.
Sometimes, the answers we seek are right on top of us.
Raziel’s voice flooded her senses and wracked her body with a feeling halfway between ecstasy and agony. Risa clutched her fingers between the plates on the giant tread to keep from falling, clenching her jaw to stifle a scream. Every muscle in her body drew taut at the sensation of his presence. She gasped, staring at her whitening knuckles before looking up at the belly of the huge machine. A point of red light upon the dirty metal flicked to green. Distant shouting stole any time she may have wanted to spend thanking Raziel, and she crawled toward the glow.
The panel accepted the code of four sevens, granting access to a maintenance space full of wire bundles and bulky components. She pulled herself up into a chamber awash with eerie orange light, and drew the hatch closed behind her. The space felt cramped, even to someone used to living in vent shafts, but it could seal. She reached between her knees to the primary control interface panel, using a single Nano claw to circumvent the lock.
From a pouch on her weapon harness, she removed a double-ended M3 interface wire and took the plastic protectors off the asterisk-shaped prongs. One end went into a socket behind her left ear, sliding into place with a soft click that jolted her skull. When she connected the other lead to the panel, her consciousness fell out of reality and she found herself seated in a virtual driver’s seat, as if looking out the windshield of a cargo transporter.
The immense box on tracks had no such cockpit in reality; machines like this ran on full automation. Risa looked over the controls, shimmering in otherworldly amber light. Five or six minutes in cyberspace passed in barely a few seconds of real time. She accessed the status control and changed the value from ‘empty/waiting’ to ‘full/queued.’ Several cyberspace minutes later, the control sticks moved of their own accord and the entire dashboard came to life.
That’s it. That’s it. She touched nothing else, watching as the automatic ore handling software moved the empty transport onto the track of plastisteel plates. In the virtual driver’s seat, she felt no motion as it lurched up over the edge of the raised roadway and turned toward the distant shuttle pad. Soon, her ride whirred along at a blistering four miles per hour. One panel flashed from green to yellow warning it left the safe atmosphere behind, evidence BMC had purchased generic vehicle control software, borrowed from machinery people were meant to operate and rehashed into this device.
Cheap. Just what I’d expect from a corporation that uses slave labor.
Glistening silver roadway, split every fifteen meters by a seam, passed in agonizing slowness. The shuttle’s nose opened, two behemoth doors split to either side and folded down into a ramp as the cart neared. The front treads hit the incline, knocking Risa’s head against the wall and causing her digital world to melt into a surrealist landscape of stretching stone and warped display dials.
Logout.
A kaleidoscope tunnel of color rushed over her from behind. Vertigo slapped into her brain as though she arched her back and sailed headfirst down a corkscrewing pipe made from every imaginable color. Reality hit her like a metal lunch tray to the face, and she found herself once more in the dim orange light of fuse indicators. She held on to the walls as the cart jostled about, cringing as far away from the sparking main power conduit as possible. The wire between her head and the console bounced around, but she dared not let go of the walls to unplug it.
When the room ceased moving and the heavy vibration of closing cargo doors rumbled in her bones, she disconnected the wire and put it away. She waited for forty seconds in silence before going for the hatch. Electronic retinas changed the darkness around her to the monochromatic green of night vision. With the ore carter loaded in the transport shuttle, the six independent drive trucks had partially retracted, leaving only two feet of clearance between the undercarriage and the floor of the cargo bay.
She slithered on her stomach over the grit-covered floor, frantic to reach an exit point before the doors opened for the next ore carrier and her lungs bled. Instinct called her to the nose, the fastest path to a place where she could stand. However, the schematic map her cybernetic eyes created showed a crew hatch deeper inside.
Three carts later, about thirty meters of crawling, she changed course and went to the right. Her cheek pressed tight against a smooth metal wall as she wriggled her way loose from under an ore carrier and onto her feet in a cramped, recessed channel containing a ladder. After fifteen meters, she passed the top of the ore carrier and no longer had to climb in an ungainly, compressed squirm. Clearing the next twenty feet with ease, she paused at a hexagonal hatch in the ceiling.
It had no code panel, operating by means of a hand crank in the center connected by gears to six metal slats securing it to the hull. She couldn’t budge the thing one-handed, and wound up hanging on it with her feet braced against the ladder for enough torque to get it open. Once the lock cleared, the plastisteel hatch itself proved light enough for her to push up. Still dreading the nose doors would open any second, she leapt up and slammed the hatch behind her, twisting the seal back i
n place.
For a moment, she allowed herself to squat and breathe, giving her arms a chance to recover.
A short crawl through a mechanic’s conduit led her to another hatch, which opened with ease, and into the crew area. She emerged in a cramped room with small lockers, a toilet, and an autoshower tube. To the right, a narrow hallway led to bunks built into wall cubbies. To the left, a similar passage connected to the cockpit.
A woman in a black and grey jumpsuit froze in shock, halfway out of the flight deck door.
Guess she heard the hatch slam.
The woman raised a pistol and narrowed her eyes. “Who the hell are you?”
Risa advanced with a deliberate stalk. “I need to borrow this bird.” Raziel said no other guns work.
“Stop. I-I will shoot.” The pilot poked at a shiny grey armband, composite plastic armor with an embedded NetMini. It didn’t do much, and she tapped frantically at it.
“You can’t shoot me. The angel won’t allow it.” Risa closed in.
Giving up on the comm, the woman backed into the cockpit, pistol shaking. “I mean it, stop. Angel? Are you Cat-6?”
“I assure you, I am perfectly sane.” Her voice came silken, almost sultry. “Put the gun down and I’ll let you live. I’m here to save lives, not take them.”
A man in a similar jumpsuit moved in behind the pilot, yanking her to the side. He leapt through the doorway clutching a shiny metal boarding-party axe with a rubberized handle. When Risa did not slow her approach, he roared into a charge.
The burn of speedware spread along her limbs, stretching threads of searing agony. Screaming from the pain, she lurched to the left as the curved blade came down, spinning to put her back to the wall. Nano claws slid out, pulling trails of blood from her fingertips. The man’s head turned, his face warped with horror as the realization his target had become a blur reached his brain. She slipped behind him, claws held millimeters from the sides of his neck. A single droplet of crimson ran down a pale finger and over the back of her hand.
Hand of Raziel (Daughter of Mars Book 1) Page 7