Hand of Raziel (Daughter of Mars Book 1)

by Matthew S. Cox

  She kept her eyes shut and head tilted back, basking in the thrumming streams of relaxing hot water. I went to Shiro’s apartment. Am I really serious about escaping? Her gaze fell on the tiny whirlpool around her feet, going for the central drain. Pavo’s not interested in me. Shiro’s not awful. He’s handsome, healthy, mysterious. She sighed. Dangerous.

  With a hiss and rush of cold air, the autoshower opened. Risa stepped out, squinting at the overwhelming bright light in the bathroom. Her hand slid over the plush towel on the bar, as white as the walls and her skin. She gathered it to her face and inhaled the fragrance of detergent for a moment before wrapping it around herself, a makeshift dress from armpit to thigh. The door opened on its own when she walked toward it. She padded across the room to sit at a small table by the window.

  Cloth. She glanced at her ballistic stealth suit, a deflated balloon bundled on the floor a few meters away. The towel was soft and warm; cozy, not cool and slick against her skin like the armor. Her hand stroked the fabric as if she held a cat. A shift of light caught her eye, and she glanced up as Shiro entered via the glass patio door, carrying several boxes.

  “I bought you some clothes. Pants, a dress or two… and some lingerie.”

  “I don’t usually wear any.”

  Shiro almost dropped the boxes.

  She raked damp hair behind her ears one side at a time. “It gets in the way, hard to clean where I usually live, and believe it or not, I have fewer problems in the barracks without it.”

  “Perhaps I shouldn’t have gotten the black lace.” Shiro’s pursed lips became a smile as he faced her. “What a man doesn’t see is ten times as alluring as what he does.”

  “Thanks.”

  “For?” He sauntered over, sitting catty-corner in the nearest chair with two cups of tea.

  Her face tingled with a blush at the realization only a towel covered her. Still, it concealed more curves than her armor. “Letting me in, buying me clothes… being here to talk to. I had a close call.”

  Shiro raised a mug to his lips. “I thought you were underground during the worst of it?” He sipped.

  “No, after I got back. I… got trapped in a crowd, and the NewsNet was airing propaganda. I slipped and made a scene. Couple of MDF officers came over thinking I was about to get my ass kicked by an angry crowd.” She held her cup in two hands, watching the light waver on the surface.

  He pursed his lips, then smiled. “Good thing I had those records cleaned up.”

  “You did that?” She gasped. “I thought I was as good as dead.”

  Shiro chuckled. “It’s amazing what money can accomplish. The local government is for sale. Very few field personnel know your face. Tragic for them.” He set his mug down and slid an arm across the table, clasping her hand.

  “They rely too much on technology.” She stared at his thumb kneading over the back of her hand and bit her lip. “I… I don’t know how much longer I can do this. I can’t take the killing anymore. Maybe I want out.”

  “That’s why it’s important for you not to lose hope. You are fighting a noble war, Risa Black. Major Wymar wasn’t the man who made the call.”

  She blinked. “How do you know that? How do you even know about Wymar at all?”

  He glanced at the patio door. A patch of light from a passing advert bot slid across his face. “As I said, I have research people. I need to be careful. What else would you do?”

  Her toes grasped the carpet. “I had this stupid idea.” She let out a halfhearted chuckle. “Trying to make a normal life and such. No more getting shot at, no more bombs. I want to be a real person.”

  “You are a real person.” He brushed her cheek. “As desperate as the citizens here are, things are many times worse in the ACC territories.”

  Risa pulled her longing stare away. “You sound pro-UCF now. You’re from Earth. I bet you’re somehow making money off this whole mess.”

  He leaned back, tapping his fingers on the faux wood table. “I’m not pro-Earth, I’m pro ‘the way it is.’ Think about things realistically, Risa. No one ever wins a war fought on two fronts. Your people attack the ACC and the UCF at the same time, at random, with little if any follow up. As far as they are concerned, you’re just an annoyance.”

  “We’re not an annoyance!” She set the tea down and leapt to her feet, almost losing the towel. She re-bundled it around her chest while glaring at him. “We’re fighting to create a government that protects its people, not leaves them to fend for themselves in dirty tunnels while companies suck Mars dry and make Earth-dwellers rich.”

  “Ouch.” He smiled through a cringe. “If it makes you feel any better, I don’t make money from Mars.”

  “Oh, you know what I mean.” She wandered in a circle before he snagged her hand and pulled her into his lap. “What are you doing?”

  “You found your fire again, and I want your movement to succeed. Your people need to be smart about it.”

  Rigidity faded. After a moment, having his arm around her didn’t seem so bad. “What do you mean smart?”

  “Have you ever heard the axiom, the enemy of an enemy is a friend?”

  She froze. At that distance, the violet of her stare reflected from his green eyes. “I’m not sure I like where this is going.”

  rimus was the second oldest human settlement on Mars, and smelled like it. Early colonists considered thirty meters below ground a safe distance for the uppermost level. From there, a vast network of underground tunnels and chambers extended sixteen levels deep. Visionaries had imagined it going three times that, but money and enthusiasm waned as reality set in. These days, the military appropriated the entire first tier, as well as the surface. Some people felt protected since the ACC would have to go through them to do damage to civilians. Others felt trapped.

  Shiro’s effort in scrubbing Risa’s file gave her confidence, and she had risked taking a public shuttle flight to Elysium. That city had started before the domes, burrowing underground like all the early settlements did. Around the time construction had reached ten tiers down, improvements in technology diverted the focus to the surface. Growth spread like an eruption of glittering silver plastisteel and glass bubbling out of a human ant hole. The appeal of sky overhead wicked the population out of the ground, leaving the tunnels for the underprivileged or undesirable. Her destination was on the surface, and she couldn’t help but stare up at a sky formed of a thousand shades of indigo while daydreaming about being an ordinary person on her way to an ordinary job. She doubted all the pedestrians passing by had the slightest clue how special it was to be able to stare up into the clouds without worry of an e-suit failing. Not one of them had any idea who she was, or what she had done. Her wanderings led her deep into the heart of the surface city. The shuttle from Primus lasted a touch under a half hour. It had taken longer to find this particular slum.

  She gathered her coat over her face in a vain attempt to block out the stench. Walking in the open had certain advantages over the vents, being upright and the ability to run the most appealing. Clouds of fog belched from alcoves where cheap noodle vendors had set up shops along a forlorn back alley. Every few doorways, a graffiti Marsborn logo, an ‘M’ formed by pie-slices missing from the planet, peered out from beneath newer plasfilm posters and two centuries of dirt.

  Grandparents she’d never met had fallen in with the first version of a group yearning for an identity separate from Earthlings. Someone got it in their head that cave-dwelling creatures were pale, so when a Reinventions clinic opened in Primus, they went for a bleach job on their DNA. Paper-white skin had swept the population as a display of ‘planetary identity.’ It had been the first in a long string of futile efforts. All they’d managed to do was fill the coffers of the clinic.

  Risa took her hand out of her pocket and looked at her palm.

  Back then, it had no more of a goal than pride. Her grandparents had probably been in university at the time, chasing the latest cause. She could not reconcile the one
image she had seen of the cute elderly couple with the idea of them being reckless students. By the time her father would’ve been old enough to hunt for a job, the climate had changed. One had to look Marsborn to get hired. Even the ACC had gone overboard with the cosmetic modification, a society based on capitalism couldn’t resist profit desperate to be taken. That, and it provided a small offering upon a tiny altar of morale. The laziness of human nature had returned. Newer immigrants didn’t bother with it. It passed down to children, so it had become a badge of who had deeper roots.

  She closed her fingers into a fist. It’s more than pride now.

  A pink-haired man shoved off a wall, away from a pair of prostitutes with whom he had been chatting, and blended into the crowd behind her. Tight, gloss-black material covered a narrow strip of chest between flaps of his open coat. Too thin to be armor. Risa shot a look to the map floating at the upper-left corner of her field of vision. Her destination, a blinking dot at the end of a dotted line, showed 196 meters away by route plot. She went to the end of the block, keeping one eye on her pink-haired escort.

  A wave drew a smile from a tall black man with straight, white thigh-length hair. His eyes hid behind scuffed ViewPane goggles, cybernetic eyes for the squeamish. Three tiny lights, two green and one red, glowed at the corners and center of the otherwise blank grey slab over his face. She sidestepped a small boy as he reached for her lack of pockets, and touched fists with the big man. The dotted line reoriented itself to compensate for her unexpected turn, the end now seventy-four meters away.

  “I find this amusing,” he said. “The queen of shadows has one.”

  Risa allowed a faint smile. “He seems to believe I haven’t noticed him. What do you think, Aon? Parts, cash, or ass?”

  Aon traced fingers over his chin. “Da man not strike me as a Borrower. ‘E doubtful knows ‘ow much ‘ware you got. My guess, way ‘e ‘olds his eyes, ‘e be lookin’ for ass.”

  “Figured. His two friends have been following me for almost a hundred meters.”

  A baritone laugh rumbled quiet in his throat. “Dose sorry fools know not what sort of tiger dey be followin’.”

  “This pussy cat has claws.” She smirked.

  “What’cha need, Lady Black?” Aon flashed a blinding smile. His dark hand engulfed her colorless fingers, lifting her arm up to kiss her knuckles. “I got you covered for chems. Got a new stock of Sylph-9, maybe some Twitch? You don’t seem like the type to Zoom, but you damn sure look like ya need a smiley. Or, ya visitin’ me for some hardware? Got a line on a plasma pistol as well, only slightly used. Won’t be but a ting to clean it up.”

  Risa looked down, chuckling. “I’m not interested in rec chems. If you got any mil-spec boosts, we might be able to talk, but I’d better watch… I’m jumpy enough as it is. I need info. Is my package still where I left it?”

  “So it be.” He took a hit off a Nicohaler. The essence of imitation berry crept into her senses. “The Synners be keepin’ her in seclusion. Wot kind’ o voodoo you got over them ‘at dey no yet kill ‘er? Word is she stole from dem, and da Synners not like ‘at one bit.”

  “Even they’re afraid of me.” She flipped her hand over, holding a credstick that seemed to come out of nowhere. “Thanks.”

  He made taking it appear to be a handshake. “For you, anything.”

  “Keep an eye. Going to find an empty alley.”

  Aon raised an eyebrow. “Mind where ya leave da scraps. DF boys are bored.”

  “Lazy. Plenty for them to do here, but there’s no money in it.”

  Aon laughed again.

  Risa winked and flowed into the crowd, bypassing the dot at the end of her navigation plot. The range counter ticked upward. She swiveled her shoulders to avoid another pickpocket, this one a bump-and-grab type, spinning around him out of reflex.

  Risa.

  Raziel’s voice came on like thunder, knocking her confident stride into an inebriated stumble. She swooned left, crashing into a wall covered in decades of graffiti and plasfilm adverts for local bands, illicit events, and merc work. Several punks to her right laughed. Her head whipped up, finding her hands upon the breasts of a spray-painted nude on the side of a brothel.

  Risa, said Raziel. The timbre of his speech vibrated in every bone. The pink one seeks to claim a bounty. A foreign agent, Lars Staanek, has infiltrated the disenfranchised. You should leave the city.

  She shuddered, unable to resist the urge to collapse into a squatting position. The idiots to her right made fun of where her face wound up in relation to graffiti girl’s anatomy. A woman among the gangers howled at her from a perch atop a stack of boxes. Her hair shifted from blue to lavender. Loose-fitting pants swished as she spread her legs and rested one boot on the head of a stoned man sitting on the ground next to her. She grabbed one breast through a thin mesh top and blew a kiss at Risa.

  “Hey honey, bring that tongue over here.” The woman patted her crotch. “I taste better than a wall.”

  With a snarl, Risa pushed herself upright.

  I can handle these idiots.

  Can you handle what you wish to know? His voice weakened, no longer washing over her with paralytic force. You should go back the way you came.

  “You got some bad shit, sweetness?” The seated ganger shoved the woman’s foot away. “I got some stuff’ll take the edge off.”

  The gang girl’s hair washed to deep violet as she smirked, and kicked the man’s shoulder. He grabbed her leg again, and an argument started.

  Risa paid them no attention and stumbled back into the crowd. She walked off the last of the angel’s overwhelming presence. I’ve gone too long without asking. I’m not sure if you’re even still listening, but I need to know.

  A block later, she stopped against the corner of a noodle bar. Uncooperative legs wobbled as she propped herself against the building. A short, fat Chinese man smiled at her. Frazzled eyebrows resembling two electrocuted mice crawled together.

  “Special today. Synshrimp, six credits.”

  I have to know, Raziel. I’m humbled you have chosen me, but I need this. Sitting… yeah. Damn legs, come on. She took a seat on a rickety aluminum chair that threatened to collapse at even her mild weight. I haven’t eaten in… “One, and a tea please.”

  Raziel did not reply.

  Risa swiped her NetMini, paying for a meal that she took her time eating. The heat was cathartic and the flavor surprising in its quality. I must be starving. Her shadows waited behind her, one leaning on the wall less than ten meters away while the other two ducked into offshoot alleys and peeked around corners. Twenty minutes later, she dropped the disposable chopsticks in an empty bowl, and noted the position of all three men.

  Amateurs.

  “Xièxiè, Tāng shì hěn hao de.” Risa pushed the bowl away, leaving the chopsticks in it.

  “You are welcome,” said the man. “I am glad you enjoyed it.”

  His English is better than my Mandarin.

  They exchanged grins. She slid to her feet, acting as though she didn’t notice the three people following her as she took on the gait of a casual tourist, following the crowd. Street after street passed on either side, most with a handful of locals loitering or rummaging for treasure, booze, weapons, or drugs, in shin-deep trash. The sixth alley on the left appeared devoid of bystanders or witnesses. Risa stopped for a moment, staring at a blank NetMini, acting like a lost outsider studying a map. The men edged closer, as if emboldened by her act of cluelessness. She lurched into a sudden, brisk walk and took the corner.

  A mental impulse triggered her speedware as soon as she broke line of sight. Her twenty-meter run lofted trash into a whirlwind in her wake as she raced behind a metal crate in two seconds. Eyes closed, she turned on the Wraith. The three men following her appeared as smoke trails in the distant blackness, too far away for detail.

  “Shit,” whispered a voice.

  The chirp of laser pistols arming echoed, the faint noise loud by comparison to her breath.


  One advanced. “Where the hell did she go?”

  “Cloaked?” asked another.

  “Moron, she didn’t strip and turn that shit on in a second and a half.” Boots crunched over plastic. “She’s here somewhere.”

  “Here, kitty, kitty,” rasped the third man. “We won’t hurt ‘cha.”

  Risa stayed silent, all attention on the expanding forms morphing from gaseous clouds to human shapes. When they passed her hiding place, she leapt into the middle of their triangular formation and adopted her trademark posture.

  “Hello, boys.”

  The trio spun inward; three laser pistols pointed at her head.

  Their startled intake of breath dragged into a low roaring noise in her accelerated perception. A thread of saliva fluttered from Pink Hair’s front teeth, lofted by an exhale. The telltale sign of long-term Icewhisper use rattled glassy in the throat of the man to her left. Out of the corner of her periphery, she caught the third man flicking his thumbnail over his index finger, scraping in slowed time like an old, creaky door. All three narrowed their eyes within a tenth of a second of each other.

  Here it comes.

  Risa dropped to a crouch a quarter-second before they fired. A deep, demonic howl emanated from overhead, followed by a spray of ash particles and burning fingers falling past her. Pink Hair’s legs changed in appearance. A subtle shift in the way pants lay over muscle told her a dead body fell in slow motion.

  Transparent blades burst from her fingertips, extending as she sprang upward into a spinning rake. They locked at full length an instant before finding the soft, unprotected skin of two throats, the men standing motionless in her accelerated world. Nano blades severed flesh and bone with as little resistance as if she’d sliced gelatin. She continued the whirl, her lithe body whipping around many times faster than nature intended humans to move. Her spiral dance slashed each one twice more across the chest before she finished with a thrust of her arms to either side.

  Time resumed.