“What do you mean, 'made?'” Stavros demanded. His rifle drooped and his posture seemed more like a man taking notes in a lecture than a soldier.
“Little ones, mikros, grow, they. Become sophont, even become elite, they. Hid from killer, I. Speak with you now must, I. Survive must, I.”
“Why?” Victoria demanded. “The other sophont and every damned mastigas I encountered down here tried to kill me on sight.”
“Few left, us. Survive want, us. Trapped were.”
“Don't listen to it,” Photeos hissed. “A sophont will tell you anything to get you to let it live.”
Victoria ignored him. “The other sophont said that as soon as it escaped, it was going to kill everyone here.”
“Yes,” the sophont agreed. “Said that, it. Wanted that, it. Do not want that, I. Freedom want, I.”
“Photeos is right. We have more information than we had before, but we still have a mission to carry out. And that,” Pallasophia nodded once in the direction of the sophont, “is still a mastigas.”
“You,” Victoria said, ignoring her as well. “What will you do if we let you go free?”
“Leave, we. Return to ship, we. No kill you, we.” For a moment, its face changed. The three hairless brows pinched together in a look Victoria would have called confusion on a human face. “Not want to return to ship, I, but must. Calls, ship. Call, they. Return must, I.”
“Ship?” Victoria whispered, turning her head slightly toward Pallasophia.
“There's a huge ship sitting somewhere at the edges of the binary where they keep coming from. We've found it, but haven't been able to do anything about it. If this thing leaves here, it will take information about Project Titan with it,” Photeos replied.
Victoria nodded. “One more question.”
“Alright.”
To the sophont, she demanded, “why do you kill us?”
The sophont made a face of disgust. The reaction looked immediate, involuntary, as though the very conception of humanity revolted it. It seemed to be choosing its words carefully, as though struggling against powerful emotions. “Hate, we. Understand not, I, but hate, we. Kill must. Speak of revenge, gigas.”
“Then I can't let you leave.”
“Must escape, I! Freedom, must have, I! Hate, I!” it bellowed.
As it yelled, the catwalks above the room creaked with dozens of bodies shifting around. The sophont's smaller pair of arms uncurled, revealing something small and metallic in one hand, which it pointed at Victoria faster than she could react. The dull cylinder barked and pain blossomed in her right shoulder.
In the heartbeat following the shot, the other four humans poured a dozen bullets into the sophont, splattering the wall behind it with bright blood.
Half a second after that, several pairs of feet hit the floor as mastigas sprang from the catwalks above them. Victoria jumped to the side as a gigas crashed down in the exact spot she had been standing.
The gigas opened its mouth. In a voice that sounded like the deep maw of an earthquake given life, it bellowed.
“HATE! KILL!”
***
Victoria's shoulder burned. Whatever the sophont hit her with did not seem to have done much damage—she could still move the arm, after all—but the dull ache warned her the shot did more than just bruise.
The nearest gigas turned toward her and slammed a fist into the floor. The spike on its rod shattered the tiles underneath, sending a cloud of dust and ceramic debris into the air.
Victoria took several quick steps backward, putting as much distance as she could between herself and the gigas's crushing strength. She stopped after a second and a half, not wanting to take too much time and risk the giant's attention turning toward her team instead.
She raised her rifle to her shoulder and spared a quick glance around the room. Less than ten seconds had passed since the sophont's death. Pallasophia and Photeos stood nearly shoulder-to-shoulder, raising their rifles as though in slow motion. Eleni stood by herself, sweeping the muzzle of her rifle back and forth. Victoria at first thought she was unable to fix on a single target amid the milling chaos, but a half-second's consideration, watching the diminutive woman's movements, told her that Eleni was calmer than that and likely assessing the situation just like she was. She could not see Stavros—a fact which concerned her.
“Pallas! Teos!” Victoria snapped. Her brain automatically truncated their names into something she could snap out as a command. She gestured to largest group of fonias. “Deal with that group! Don't let them surround you!”
Photeos tensed, seemed ready to argue, then turned toward the mastigas. Pallasophia, either more willing to follow Victoria's orders or simply already thinking the same thing, fired a short burst into the close-packed mastigas. Photeos followed suit a moment later.
Victoria snapped another order. “Ele! Find Stavros!”
Eleni nodded. Her attention turned to the flank of the group of mastigas approaching Pallasophia and Photeos. She let off a series shots, one round at a time, as she moved away. From where Victoria was standing, it seemed as though each bullet found its mark in the skull of a mastigas.
Orders given, Victoria planted her rear foot and fixed her attention on the lead gigas. One had turned into two, but that meant two fewer to threaten her team. Four of them jumped from the catwalk, however, and Victoria knew she needed to resolve this fight as soon as possible.
She dropped her short rifle's front sight over the nearest monster's chest in a move that was both comfortable and unfamiliar. Her finger tightened on her rifle's trigger as the gigas swiped at her. She stepped back, aim never wavering, and squeezed the trigger the rest of the way. Three bullets exited the muzzle in a single brilliant flash and slammed into the lead gigas.
The giant's shoulder erupted in a brief spray of blood so red it looked cartoonish. Victoria knew that blood all too well. It covered her skin for days early on and some of it remained even after she made her first set of clothes. Some still coated her side where she used the burning stuff to seal the wound left by the elite's sword.
The first gigas stumbled, never actually losing footing. The second stepped around it, swinging the metal spike clutched in its fist. Victoria lunged backward, firing. Her shots went wide, but the gigas's automatic jerk backward gave her the space she needed.
She looked around the room again, searching for the two frustratingly absent gigas. Eleni had replaced Photeos at Pallasophia's side. The two of them were walking shots across the front of the mastigas horde, but too few of them fell at a time. The little knife-wielders were getting closer by the moment, using their own dead as cover.
At the far side of the room, she saw Stavros sprinting past an approaching group of mikros, firing as he went. Photeos, halfway between him and the spot where Pallasophia and Eleni stood rooted, moved toward him at a more controlled pace.
Stavros passed Photeos as their paired gunfire dropped several of the mikros on the spot. Two broke away from the group, chasing Photeos, while the last three continued toward Stavros. One immediately flew backwards, propelled by a burst of gunfire. The others lunged at him, clinging and dragging him to the floor.
Photeos body checked one of the mikros, knocking it out of the way, and shot the second in the stomach as he turned in place. Above the sounds of combat, Victoria thought she heard him say, “don't panic!”
She then lost sight of them as a gigas interposed itself. For a moment, she wondered if the giant was actively trying to separate her from the other four. None of the gigas she fought before had used anything resembling tactics, yet now these two seemed to be doing exactly that.
In fact, none of the mastigas assailing them acted quite like they had before. She had watched unguided mastigas attack one another, or at least get in each other's way, more than once. The only differences were the sophont and the sheer number of mastigas present. Experience taught her that they did not get smarter with more of them in one place, which only left one option:
something the sophont had done had improved their ability to coordinate, and done so to potentially deadly effect.
An idle thought crossed her brain: so this was the monster Tritogenes brought into the facility. Victoria would have words with the Hexarch when they met, and as the heated things she wanted to say to him rushed to the surface, her focus crystallized on the two gigas in front of her.
Both gigas streamed bright blood from over a dozen bullet wounds each. They moved slower now, and one seemed to be favoring one arm over the other, but neither had actually stopped by the time Victoria realized she was running out of space. A quick look around the room told her that her instincts were right: the pair of gigas were pushing her away from the others, maneuvering so that they were always between Victoria and her team.
The nearer of the two gigas swung its fist at her and Victoria jumped backward again. There was no parrying or blocking the force that the gigas could put into a simple attack like that. That left only dodging, which, as she noticed a moment before, she was quickly running out of room to do.
She stopped and fired again as the second gigas attacked. At least one of her shots hit it in the hand, and it roared and drew back, coating her visor with a spray of bright red. In the half-second between that moment and when she was able to wipe it clear, the first gigas attacked again.
The blow took her in the midsection and Victoria crumpled and flew across the room like a doll. She went some three or four meters through the air before hitting the wall with an impact that drove the air from her lungs. She bounced and fell to the floor amid the clatter of broken tile.
When injured, humans naturally fell into one of two categories. The first coddle the wound, curl up around it and protect the ache from the world. That sort of person would have paid more attention to the pain, probably checked for broken ribs, or at the very least been distracted by the sudden blaze of agony in their core.
The second sort of person would fight harder when tired or hurt. To that sort of person, an injury was simply another source of adrenaline, more fuel for the fire. That is, assuming they even registered the injury at all.
Victoria belonged in the second category. Somewhere, she was dimly aware that her ribs were screaming, her abs were on fire, and her spine felt like it had taken the brunt of the gigas's attack. Those notions never formed clearly enough to be considered thoughts, because one overriding thought screamed in her brain: KILL.
In a flash, she took in the battlefield with crystal clarity. Her adrenaline-pumped senses worked with a sharpness she had only experienced during her fight with the four-armed elite.
To her right, across the room, Stavros and Photeos faced a crawling horde of mastigas that refused to go down. Bodies littered the floor, and the two soldiers swayed on their feet. Stavros's uniform and armor had been ripped and torn, and he streamed blood from a dozen places. Photeos howled like a madman, wordless screams of bloodthirst rising above even the gunfire.
To her left, Pallasophia and Eleni were nearly buried under mastigas. The line between living and dead blurred and ten or twelve of them still moved and lashed out. Pallasophia favored her left side, using only that hand to aim and fire her backup pistol. Her right arm hung limp at her side. Eleni stood a step ahead of her, leaning heavily on one leg. Her other foot stood in a dark pool of human blood.
Victoria processed all of that in the space between two rapid-fire heartbeats, then turned her attention to her own fight. Directly in front of her, the further gigas held its wounded hand in a tight fist that leaked blood. Its brief retreat meant that, for a few seconds, she was only fighting one of the resilient giants. She flicked the selector switch on the side of her rifle, taking advantage of her unnatural knowledge and letting her fingers operate on instinct.
The first gigas attacked, swinging down hard. The blow, had it connected, would have hit ten times harder than the one that threw her into the wall, probably hard enough to kill her on the spot. She, however, was not there. Rather than dodging away, Victoria lunged forward and with just enough of an angle to avoid the potentially fatal blow.
She contorted her body into a twist a gymnast would have envied and jammed the barrel of her short rifle into the underside of the gigas's jaw. Her heart thudded once before her rifle roared with all of the rage she felt inside. The hail of bullets ripped the monster's skull apart like a saw that only stopped when the magazine clicked empty.
Victoria sprang out of her crouch, ignoring the protests that came from her ribs and core muscles. Before the mastigas could fall, she grabbed it, sinking her fingers tightly into the dense, black fabric of its clothes. In a single motion, she hauled herself aloft, climbing up to the collapsing giant's shoulders and then dropping down the other side.
The gigas slumped against her. Victoria dropped the magazine from her rifle, inserted a new one from the bandolier given to her during one of their earlier rest stops. She chambered a round, and braced her shoulders against its massive back. The other one swatted at her. It missed as Victoria jumped away, sending the corpse of its dead comrade to the side.
For half a second, the other gigas's attention was on the dead one as it stepped around the fallen corpse. That was all Victoria needed. Her rifle remained in automatic mode, and she held the trigger down for two solid seconds. What was left of the gigas's torso when the gun clicked empty and Victoria released the trigger was unidentifiable.
She looked around again. Eleni and Photeos were nowhere to be seen, and Stavros had moved far into the shadows. He seemed to be wrestling with a lone fonias. Pallasophia stood alone, retreating from the few remaining fonias approaching her. She fired slowly, and Victoria wondered if she was running out of ammunition.
One of the fonias lunged, hitting Pallasophia in the stomach with his shoulder. She fell to one knee, struggling against the thing for a moment before firing three rounds through its torso. It fell to the side as the others approached.
She shot the next nearest mastigas twice in the head with her pistol, dropping it, before its slide locked open, empty. Victoria crossed the meters between them with a handful of fast, bounding lunges, slamming into the nearest fonias with her shoulder. She grabbed it around the head with her free hand and snapped its neck.
Pallasophia scrambled for a fresh magazine with fingers that refused to do their job. Without thinking, Victoria unslung her rifle and held it out to her. Pallasophia took it without protest and Victoria knelt to draw her daggers from their sheathes on her calves. Those daggers, the ones that she had taken from fonias just like these on that first day of her life, glinted in the light.
Victoria dove into the writhing mass of fonias and mikros, slashing violently. Less than a half-dozen of them remained, all injured. She struck with one dagger in the same motion as she parried with the other. Another step, and she dodged violently to the side, burying both knives indiscriminately in whatever mastigas was unlucky enough to find itself within her reach.
Against the guns, the mastigas had been hiding behind their own dead. Against a whirlwind of death in the midst, however, the remaining number fell rapidly. Victoria ripped through them like the proverbial hot knife through butter, carving her way from end to end of the shrinking horde.
Some part of her mind knew that some of the blood soaking her clothes and turning the floor slick and treacherous had to be her own. Her entire body hurt. She ached and her muscles burned and stung a hundred different ways. There were simply too many mastigas for even her combat skills to overwhelm with complete safety. She felt the cold edges of knives and the hot rip of claws as she went, but the mastigas had to die.
Again, the same thought from before roared through her brain, but now it was tempered with the scream from the fight the day before.
KILL.
PROTECT.
She slipped in the mingling of human and mastigas blood. Despite her reflexes, her bare feet simply failed to find purchase on the slick tile and she hit the floor hard. Her hip hit first, followed by a shoulder,
and one of her knives went skittering away. Before she could move, a mikros jumped on her, latching its long, spindly arms onto her shoulders.
The mikros tore at her face and throat with its claws, but failed to find a solid grip. Victoria lurched and twisted, throwing the little mastigas off balance just long enough to get out from under it. In a flash, she was on top, single remaining dagger in her dominant hand. A swipe of her arm drew the blade across the mikros's forearm and it hissed, flailing at her with the other hand. She ignored it as it beat on the side of her head, instead shattering the things faceplate with the heavy pommel of the dagger.
With a sharp exhalation of breath that might have been a scream, she drove the blunt end of the dagger through the opening in the thing's helmet. The first blow crushed its nose; the second shattered the bones around one eye. By the sixth impact, the mikros had stopped moving. She struck it three more times before a sharp pain in her leg took her attention.
Another mikros sank its long nails into her calf. She twisted, roared something incoherent, and slashed across its throat with the blade of the dagger. She kicked it away and rose as her instincts forced her to take stock of the scene around her.
Before she could do that, Pallasophia yelled from behind her. “Down!”
In the corner of her vision, something shifted, something big.
Victoria obeyed automatically, dropping flat to the floor in a pool of blood. A fonias slashed at her thigh as she dropped, painful but nothing that would incapacitate her any time soon.
On the floor, she rolled and wrapped her legs around that same fonias, pulling it to the ground with her. It ended up on top of her and raised its own knives to strike. She buried hers into one of its wrists and left it there. With the other hand, she grabbed the thing's other wrist and twisted that knife out of its hand. Heedless of it cutting into her palm as she held it by the blade, she slashed the tip of the dagger across the fonias's throat.
A curtain of red blood splashed across her face, stinging her cuts and scrapes as something immense sailed through the air above her. A dim part of her brain recognized it as the table the sophont had been hiding behind. That table had been easily two meters long or longer with a dense top.
Born in Darkness Page 30