by M. D. Cooper
Rika fell to the ground once more, her gun-arm twisted under her body. The AM-3 held out his rifle and pulled the trigger.
CLICK!
In the time it took him to switch his rifle’s firing mode, Rika rolled over, straightened her GNR, and fired her third uranium rod into his torso.
Her aim was good and the shot penetrated the armor where the burn stick had melted it away. The upper half of his body exploded outward, blood, bone, and armor spraying across the room.
Rika looked around, amazed that no other guards were present. Maybe these two had been the only ones down here when the president arrived.
Biofoam was filling her wound, and Rika noted that the med-readout on her HUD showed her femur as intact. She grabbed a shard of nearby armor—one of the AM-3s, by its color—and stuck it into the biofoam filling her wound.
It wouldn’t offer any significant protection, but something was better than nothing.
She got her left leg under her, picked up her JE78 rifle, and rose up, leaning on her GNR’s barrel as she tested her right leg’s strength. Her armor and mods dulled the pain, but it still hurt like a fucker when she put weight on it.
Rika glanced back to see that the massive blast door at the foyer’s entrance was sealed. Rika knew that it would not open easily, so any pursuit was a ways off. Still, there could be a rear exit, and she had to find the president before she and her remaining guard reached it.
Rika turned and limped in the direction the guard had taken the president. She passed through the door on the far side of the foyer and into a maze of hallways filled with offices and meeting rooms.
She scanned the ground and saw a trail of blood. She wondered if the president had been wounded at some point or if the blood was from the guard—or even someone else.
Still, it was all she needed.
Rika ignored the pain in her leg and began to lope through the halls, following the trail of blood. It passed through the nicer portion of the bunker and into a rear area filled with supply rooms and environmental systems.
The droplets were decreasing in frequency, but so were the available paths to take. After five minutes, Rika heard voices and she slowed her approach.
“Can you open it?” she heard a woman’s voice say, and she recognized it as the president’s. She sounded scared, terrified, and Rika felt a pang of guilt. The worry that she was doing something terribly wrong assaulted her once more.
She peered around a corner and saw President Ariana and her guard at the far end—twenty-three meters away. Before them was a large door. One that either led deeper into the bunker or out to an exit. Given that it was sealed, Rika suspected it was an exit that had closed at the same time as the main door by the lift.
“Nowhere left to run,” Rika said as she stepped into the corridor, her GNR-41C extended and aimed at the president’s head.
The guard spun, raised his rifle, and fired it full auto at Rika. She twitched her GNR to the side and fired an electron beam that melted his armor, followed by a trio of ballistic rounds that tore his right arm off.
The man screamed in pain and collapsed, and Rika pulled her JE78 off her back and shot a pulse blast, pushing him back and away from the rifle still held by his severed, twitching arm.
She kept the JE78 trained on him as he whimpered in pain, and she leveled the GNR at the president once more.
“Why are you doing this?!” the woman shrieked. “Who’s paying you? We can double it! Please!”
Rika shook her head. “I guess it’s easy to see I’m Genevian, which makes me a merc. Funny thing is I don’t get paid for this. I’m a slave.”
“A what?” the president asked. “You’re doing this under compliance? We can help you, we can free you!”
“Those two AM-3s, were they under compliance?” Rika asked.
“No!” the president shook her head emphatically. “What your people did to you was barbaric. We would never do that to any living being.”
Rika felt sick to her stomach. Though she was still technically a slave, she was no longer under compliance. She was about to murder this woman of her own free will.
“I’m sorry,” Rika said. “I have to do this.”
“You can fight it,” the woman said. “Others have! Fight the Discipline, please!”
Rika felt tears on her cheeks. “I don’t have to…. I’m not currently under Discipline. My compliance chip is offline.”
“Then why are you doing this?!” Ariana shrieked. “You have no reason to kill me!”
“I have to belong somewhere…” Rika said, her voice cracking. “I need a home, I can’t make it on my own. I tried, I really tried.”
“I’ll help you, Thebes can help you! Just please don’t kill me!”
A sob tore through Rika’s body and she lowered her GNR. She couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t do it. Basilisk team had been kind to her—more than they had to be—but she just couldn’t kill this woman in cold blood as she pleaded for her life.
“I won’t…” Rika said quietly. “I won’t kill you. I’m done.”
She fell to the ground as Ariana began to weep with relief.
“What happens now?” Rika asked—knowing that things were unlikely to play out well for her no matter what.
President Ariana wiped her cheeks dry and pushed her hair back out of her face. “I don’t know…you just killed a lot of people.”
Rika sighed. “I tried not to…as much as I could.”
The guard beside Ariana shifted, and Rika suspected that he had passed out and was just coming to.
“Madam President!” he called out, turning his head toward her. “You’re…you’re OK?”
Ariana nodded solemnly, glancing up at Rika, “For no reason other than my would-be assassin’s conscience striking at the last moment.”
Rika could tell that the president had meant the words to be kind—at least to a degree—but they cut her to the core.
The president glanced back down at her guard. “Are you OK, John? Other than the arm….”
The guard—John—nodded. “Yeah, I’ll live. You, there; if you really mean no further harm, put down your weapons…if you can.”
Rika pulled herself back to her feet, wincing as pain lanced up her injured leg. John tried to rise as well, but fell back against the wall.
“I can’t” Rika said as she placed her JE78 on her back. “I’m not going to rot in one of your prisons any more than I’m going to be a slave.”
“You’re not getting out of here,” Ariana said. “There’ll be an entire army above, waiting for you to emerge.”
“Maybe,” Rika said. “Depends on whether or not the other trigger pullers had more steel than I did.”
“Other?” Ariana asked. “How many others?”
“I don’t know,” Rika shrugged. “Slave, remember? Though I don’t even know if my team knew for sure. Enough to wipe out the upper echelon of your leadership—both civilian and military.”
“Fuuuuhck,” Ariana breathed. “John! We have to get out of here!”
John coughed. “No. No we shouldn’t. If what she says is true, then this is where you need to stay.”
“Do you have Link access?” Rika asked. “You could get out a warning, at least.”
“Offline right now. It has to be initiated from down here,” John said, coughing again. “Could…could someone help me get my helmet off? I’m coughing blood here, and it’s getting nasty.”
“Yeah, how do I do it?” Ariana asked.
John reached up with his remaining arm and unclipped a latch on each side. “Just twist counter clockwise, and then lift straight up.”
Ariana nodded and complied as Rika looked on silently.
When John’s face appeared, his mouth and chin were covered in blood.
“John!” Ariana gasped.
The man gave a macabre smile. “Madam President, my arm is missing, how is a little blood on my face compared to that?”
“John, really, I don’t know, OK? Le
t me help you up.”
“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry,” Rika said sheepishly.
“Why don’t you pull off your helmet so we can see who you are?” President Ariana asked.
Rika shook her head. “No, ma’am. John there is sure to have another weapon on him, and I wouldn’t blame him for taking a shot at me.”
Ariana looked to John, who nodded grimly, “I certainly would.”
“No, John, you won’t. This woman is not a threat anymore. If she wanted to kill me, she would have already. You’re not to harm her. That’s an order.”
John gritted his teeth but nodded.
“I need to hear it, John,” Ariana said.
“Fine. I won’t harm her.”
Ariana turned back to Rika. “See? I’m showing my trust in you. Now I need something back. Remove your helmet.”
Rika sighed and signaled her helmet to unlatch; then she pulled it off and hooked it on her hip.
“Huh,” John said, while the President shook her head. “You’re just a young woman.”
“Not so young. Just a new face,” Rika said. “War took the old one.”
“It’s in your eyes,” Ariana said as she approached. “You’re what, twenty-seven?”
“A bit older,” Rika replied.
“What’s your name?”
“Rika.”
Ariana nodded. “Well, Rika; if you’d like, let’s go to the command center and see if we can find out if I’m still president of this alliance or if we’ve been invaded.”
Rika gestured silently for the president to precede her, and John barked a laugh as he scooped up his rifle. “Fat chance. You’re in the lead, Rika.”
“John,” President Ariana said. “Seriously. She’s no threat.”
“Respectfully, Madam President, you’re wrong. She is absolutely still a threat.”
“It’s OK,” Rika said. “I can go in front. Just let me know if I make a wrong turn.”
Rika began to walk back to where she suspected the command center to be—a room filled with holotanks and consoles that she had passed on the way to their present position.
Strange as it was, Rika felt that she could trust the president. The woman seemed honorable—of course, she was a politician, which also meant she was likely a demagogue capable of telling any tale to suit her. If Ariana became hostile and broke her word, Rika harbored no illusions that John would go along with it.
As Rika limped along—her injury still sending waves of pain up her thigh with each step—Ariana caught up with her.
“Do you know who hired you?” she asked. “What outfit are you with?”
“I’d rather not say,” Rika replied.
“About which?”
“About either,” Rika said.
“Do you even know who hired you?”
“I don’t, but my team has suspicions.”
“Nietzschean Empire, most likely,” John said from behind them.
Rika had been walking with her head turned just enough to keep John in her peripheral vision. She saw the sneer on his face and wondered about the relationship between Thebes and the Empire.
“Wouldn’t be Niets,” Rika replied. “Too many Genevians in the—uh…our outfit to ever take work from them. Besides. Assassination isn’t the Niets’ style. They only do full frontal assault.” Rika remembered a few ambushes from the war. “Well, mostly.”
Ariana sighed. “Whoever it is…if the rest of your teams were half as successful as you were, we’re in serious trouble. Our constitution has a very tricky transfer of power built in. If top military leaders are dead, too…”
“Depends on whether it’s an internal coup or an external attack,” John said.
“Let’s hope it’s a coup,” Ariana replied.
“Why?” Rika asked.
Ariana glanced up at her. “Because even if whoever takes over is a horrible despot, it’s probably better than an invasion.”
The sick feeling in Rika’s stomach intensified. Here she was worried about going to prison or how she’d escape, and the woman at her side was concerned with the fate of millions of her citizens.
Even so, Rika’s desire to get free was undiminished. She was tired of being the pawn of others. It was high time that she took control of her own destiny—even if that meant using President Ariana as a hostage to secure her freedom.
Of course, if the rest of the Marauders had succeeded, it was Ariana whose days were numbered. When whoever had paid the Marauders arrived to take advantage of the chaos, the bunker would eventually be cracked, and she would be executed.
Rika had to admit that she hoped such an outcome would not be the case.
They walked in silence for the remainder of the distance to the command center—which Rika had correctly identified. It wasn’t far from the entrance. One of the AM-3s bodies was visible through the door.
Ariana glanced at Rika, who, for all her augmentations was still under only two hundred and thirty centimeters tall, while the AM-3s had been over three hundred.
“I can’t believe you killed them…and are barely hurt.”
Rika shrugged. “There’s a reason they made my model after theirs.”
Ariana locked her eyes on Rika’s.
“Is that all you are? A model? A woman decided not to kill me. Not a machine. Do you see yourself as a woman?”
Rika felt a tear form in her eye and didn’t trust her voice. How is Ariana able to disarm me so completely? She had to believe that the Theban President was sincere; if not, she was playing Rika like a harp.
“I try,” she finally managed to reply, though her voice betrayed her emotions.
Ariana gave her a sympathetic look before turning and walking into the command center. She approached a console and keyed in a command.
“I’m opening up a connection to the surface networks,” Ariana said and glanced back at Rika. “Send me your codes. I’ll give you access.”
“Madam—” John began, but Ariana held up her hand.
“We’ve been over this, John.”
Rika connected to the bunker’s network and sent her public token to Ariana.
Rika sent an affirmative response but didn’t speak. She was desperate to find out what had happened on the surface, but also terrified.
A moment later, Rika felt the surface networks become available and sought out the encrypted channel Basilisk had used for comms.
Her queue was flooded with messages. From Leslie and Barne (though none from Jerry), one from Captain Ayer, and another from someone named Specialist David.
She was about to check the first message when Leslie’s voice barreled into her mind.
“Well, Rika. Looks like we’re on the same side now.”
FORGIVEN
STELLAR DATE: 12.18.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Capitol Bunker, Berlin
REGION: Pyra, Albany System, Theban Alliance
Thirty minutes later, Rika stood with President Ariana and a very pale John as the bunker’s main door slowly opened. She had moved the two AM-3s to the side and covered their bodies—what was left of them—with a sheet from a supply closet.
Ariana’s generals were torn. Some wished to get their president out of the bunker—and away from Rika—as quick
ly as possible. Others didn’t want her to leave the bunker until things with the Marauders were sorted out.
Between Ariana’s updates and intel Rika got from Leslie and Barne, they had pieced together the events of the previous hour.
As Rika had been rushing through the Capitol building, hundreds of Marauder comm drones had dumped out of the dark layer into the Albany system, broadcasting abort codes to all Marauder teams.
Leslie had informed her that the drone swarm was a last-ditch failsafe to abort an operation. Most of the drones were destroyed in the dark layer, but enough made it through to get the message out.
Then a Marauder fleet had jumped deep into the Albany system, only twenty AU from Pyra, which they were decelerating toward and would reach in two days. Although the Marauders only possessed one hundred and twenty capital ships, no system reacted kindly to a mercenary force of that size arriving without notice.
On top of that, another dozen rapid exfiltration ships had boosted out of hiding around various moons and planetary rings, scooping up Marauder teams across the system.
“My generals are certainly nervous,” Ariana had said at one point. “Granted, your Marauders’ small number of ships are no great threat; but given your close proximity to me down here, no one knows if we’re really in a hostage situation or not—despite my reassurances.”
“Understandable,” Rika had replied. “This is a mess no matter which way you turn it. But to think that I almost killed you for the Niets…. I’m sorry, President Ariana. I—I’m just sorry.”
Ariana had nodded and placed a hand on Rika’s arm. “Trust me, no one is more glad than I that you had a change of heart.”
Once Leslie and Barne had given her the details about the Niets hoax, she had asked the question that had been burning in her mind.
Leslie didn’t reply, but Rika sensed a wave of anguish over the Link.
