To the Victor

by R Coots

  Syrus lost control of his lungs. He sucked in a breath, both real and metaphorical, as the monster reared up and bit the head off the man who’d taught him. Then it turned, all hissing corrosion and dripping acid, and swallowed him whole.

  And for a long time, all he knew was the searing, baking heat of fury, underscored by the electric current of absolute terror. His mouth opened. All the curses and profanities of a life stuck at the bottom of existence spilled out in one wordless roar.

  >><<

  It was the despair, creeping in around the edges, that finally damped the flames. But not before they burned his soul to a crisp. Every thought, every breath brought agony . Not physical. Emotional.

  The pain of knowing it would not end. That nothing could stop it. No hope of escape. No way to survive this. There was no enduring. There was only the final release. It would come, but not soon enough. The agony would go on much longer than the body could handle it.

  He knew that feeling. He'd felt it before. Inside and out. He'd taken it, stuffed it down, and walled it up with as much determination as he'd ever felt in his life. He'd thought he'd hidden it forever. It must have escaped when his willpower failed.

  A mewling gasp of pain scraped inside his ears. The voice was quiet. Broken. A rasping mutter in He’la answered it. And he realized where the despair was coming from.

  Him, yes. But it was answering someone else. Delfi or Jossa. He couldn’t tell. The air against his skin was still superheated, the mental manifestation of all the pissed-as-fuck people turning him into some sort of half-baked roast. Burnt on one side, raw on the other. They should have stuck him on a spit and rotated it so he’d cook straight through.

  Now he was hungry. Fuck it all. The fuck was wrong with him?

  You’re looking for any way to distract yourself from what you know you’re going to do.

  Growling, he stomped on the voice in his head. She was dead. She couldn’t feel it.

  The wet slap slap of skin on skin alternated with the gasps and hisses of a woman in pain. He forced his eyes to focus. Delfi. The first man to take her had ended up knifed in the neck. Probably by the man currently working her over. Two more soldiers were dead on the floor in the middle of the room. Blunt-force trauma by the look of it. By the door, a couple more still struggled. They’d shed almost all their armor.

  Iira was still flat on her back under one soldier, growling like a pissed-off cat. She’d stopped kicking. Instead, it looked like she was trying to peel strips off the man’s arms with her nails. She’d already managed a few long gouges, but the man ignored them as he pounded away. The emotions coming off her were faint compared to the rage filling the room.

  Oona watched the pair with murder in her eyes. One eye was swollen shut. Her mouth was a bloody mess. Her knees looked like someone had inflated them. The bruises hadn’t risen yet, but she’d go from her usual tan to black and purple soon enough.

  Quinn . . . he’d managed to pull one of the tethers on his legs free of the deck. None of the men had been paying attention to where they were while they fought. The man who’d been beating Oona with his helmet lay with one kneecap poking through his skin. Or maybe that was a leg bone. Not the worst thing that could have happened. He could have kept fighting. Except for the fact that Quinn was in the process of shoving his heel through the man’s temple. An erection the size of the Edde Belo lay against the second’s stomach, bobbing in time with the kicks.

  All right then. Get loose before Quinn.

  Another broken cry pulled his attention around and threatened to drown him all over again. The despair rose a little higher. Not much better than the anger, all things considered.

  If Jossa knew what she was doing, Syrus would throw himself out an airlock right now. Her eyes were glazed, tears streaming down her face. Blood leaked around the edges of the cuffs and ran down her arms. Somehow she’d twisted around and gotten her feet braced against the wall, straining in the direction of her sousi. She hadn’t dislocated her shoulder, but she was about to.

  Jossa was the oven of fury and fear still burning him down to char. She was the despair too.

  No wonder it felt so familiar.

  Remember the target. Remember. Focus on the target. He’d be worse than useless if he gave in to the soul-crushing grief she was feeling. She was about to be the leftover half of a sousi pairing. She had no idea how to survive that. If she hadn’t infected the whole base by now, anti-sai armor or not, what she would do when Delfi died under this sort of torture . . .

  It would make her reaction when she’d woken up alone on the Edde Belo look like the work of a Numb. She was the unstable half of her bond. Anyone could see that. Fuck Delfi and her flash-bang fits of temper, camouflaging the truth.

  How had Kizen figured all this out? Did he know what he’d set free when he turned the men on the Foreseer?

  A scrap of conversation. What does it take to make one of those sai bend to their master’s will?

  If you can’t condition them, you need to find a sai with something to lose and squeeze her until she breaks.

  He’d handed this plan to Kizen with a fucking bow on it. Sure, the man might get Syrus’s Helm out of it. If he didn’t die. Which was likely, since the sai Kizen was trying to break was about to go insane and kill them all with her mind.

  You could help her with that.

  He told his conscience to shut up—not that she ever listened to him—and concentrated. He could do this. The soldiers had set the moorings wrong. They were over a seam in the wall, and that weakened the seal. If Kizen knew what it meant to be Savage, to be nehkeh, he would have made sure the men didn’t do something that stupid. And if Syrus had been Fleet born, the bastard would have checked the moorings himself. The man had no idea how much like the Svis Konanuog Syrus really was.

  Fucker.

  He must have done some struggling of his own while he was lost in the inferno. His arms hurt like hell. They were about to hurt even worse.

  Syrus braced his feet, sucked in as much of the free-floating anger as he could manage, and made sure the target sat in the front of his brain. Get free. Get. Free.

  For heartbeat after heartbeat, nothing happened. Syrus snarled, blocking his ears to the pained whimpering at the other end of the room and the rhythmic slapping that went with it. The smell of burnt flesh filled his nose. He ignored it. His day had gone from a possible shitstorm to full-blown Hell. He was too pissed to let himself get distracted by something as simple as cooking meat. He wanted free, fuck it all. He’d spent too long chained up and helpless. Never again. He’d promised. Now look where he was. Stuck on a wall like a fucking museum exhibit.

  Sons of bitches thought they could hold him, did they? Thought they’d leave him here to rot? Here’s the freak from planetside. Thought he could escape his birth. Look how far he made it.

  He’d show them. First he’d break free. Then he’d show them just how much he’d been holding back.

  Snarling and growling, feeling blood trickle down his arm as the edges of the cuffs cut into his skin, he pulled. Get free. That was all he had to do. Get free. Then he could pound every single beating heart in this place down into silence, and he’d finally have some peace. He just had to get free so he could use his hands.

  The left arm popped loose a fraction of a second before the right. Moorings, tether, cuffs and all. He lurched forward and almost landed face first on the dead soldier in front of him. Flailing, Syrus tried to catch himself, then lost his fight with gravity and tripped instead. His roll brought him up near Quinn’s feet. The second’s bloody heel skidded along his cheekbone as Syrus jerked his head back.

  He punched at the foot, just on principle. Something cracked and Quinn grunted in pain, then kicked again.

  Fix the target. Remember the target. What the fuck was the other part of that again? He was free now. That was what he’d wanted. He could kill anyone he wanted. Make them all shut up. Leave him alone. Turn the emotions off and let him have a little quiet.
Then go out and finish off the rest of the base.

  You know that’s not what peace is, the voice told him.

  That sort of peace wasn’t going to help now.

  Moron. This is exactly what that sort of peace is for.

  Fucking dead people talking in his head. Why couldn’t she just shut the fuck up and let him think to himself?

  Something hit him in the gut. He turned over to see that the two soldiers trying to beat each other to death had finally noticed him.

  Oh yeah. That was the second thing. The soldiers. People he could kill. Legitimately. Gladly.

  Maybe they’d have some credit bits on them and he could get paid for all these extra big words he’d been using today. In the meantime, his too-vocal conscience wasn’t going to kick a fuss about him pounding their heads in.

  He rolled out of the way of Quinn’s second kick, grabbed a hilt off the body of the soldier he’d tripped over, and came up in a crouch near Oona. She screeched and kicked at him, still lost in Jossa’s emotions. He ignored her. He knew his target now. This was going to be the most fun he’d had in a long time.

  The first man was missing his breastplate and greaves. Bastard had also forgotten every bit of discipline he’d ever learned when it came to hand-to-hand fighting. Syrus ducked in under one flailing fist and drove his activated blade into the gap between the fifth and sixth ribs. Lung strike. Not a fast kill.

  Jamming his knife into the side of the man’s neck won him an artery. Much better.

  The soldier hadn’t even hit the floor before Syrus stepped and pivoted around him. The second man still had his gorget and breastplate. His helmet was gone, along with his belt.

  Syrus didn’t get a chance to wonder about the belt. It whipped at him, empty holsters and all. He let it hit him on the shoulder instead of in the face. He caught the soldier’s other wrist before he could connect fist to flesh, then twisted. Cartilage crunched. Too far gone in the rage to notice his elbow had just popped free of the joint, the man struggled forward, snapping his teeth.

  Syrus slid his knife home in the underside of the man’s jaw, pinning the soldier’s mouth closed.

  Don’t forget your target. Remember. Use the anger inside. Let it control you, yes. But unless you can stay focused on the goal, you just end up dead. Apparently, while he’d been swimming in lunacy, his conscience had decided that moral guidance was for the dogs.

  This was why he hated having mental breakdowns. Someone was always telling him how to pull himself out of it.

  Despair seeped through the anger as he remembered that he didn’t actually have anyone to force him out of the berserker state. No one to silence the agony running rampant in his soul. Not anymore.

  A whimper and a breath of pain brushed against his mind, almost too faint for him to notice.

  Iira.

  The last two soldiers.

  Right. Targets.

  They were easy enough to take care of. Too caught up in what they were doing to notice the danger. He hauled the first one off Iira, feeling ripples of lust shoot up his arm. It felt like poison. Fuck. The shit Jossa was putting out had blown his defenses wide open. Any other day, a jolt like that would have damn near made him cream his pants. But not now. The monster still rode him too hard.

  He wrapped his arms around the man’s head and shoulders, then twisted. A cracking crunch announced the breaking of the man’s spine. Syrus threw the man back towards the pile of bodies in the middle of the room. Idiot. Should have listened to whoever told him to come in here with a helmet on. No chance it would have kept him from losing control, but he might have lasted a bit longer.

  Iira lay on the floor, gasping quietly. Her face was misshapen. The man who’d gone after her must have decided she needed some softening up before he took her. Every time she tried to pull her legs together, she winced. But she wasn’t crying. If she felt anything but impotent fury, he couldn’t tell. There was something in her eyes though. Something . . .

  He shook his arm free of the leftover lust and went to finish off the last soldier. This man was coming, driving deeper and deeper into Delfi as he all but convulsed. She was screaming again, the hoarse cry of overused vocal cords. Syrus could hear her. The sound was distant, echoing in his skull. But there. Real. He curled his lip. Watched his hand reach out to wrap itself around the man’s neck. Motherfucking sonofabitch! The hell did he think he was doing?

  The overlapping plates that made up the gorget of Fleet armor were designed to brace the spine. Protect it. They weren’t designed to stop a pissed off Savage who’d just decided to rip someone’s head off their shoulders.

  He didn’t quite manage it, but he did snap the spinal cord. That was good enough to cut the sick flow of emotion off at the source. The body landed on the pile with a dull thump.

  Leaving him still pissed—and aroused in ways he’d never wanted. Before him lay a woman spread eagled and broken. Her hips were deformed, her thighs covered in blood. Her breath rattled as she lay there and stared at the ceiling. She’d stopped struggling.

  Delfi, a woman he’d known barely a week. The biggest pain in his ass since—And she’d stopped fighting. If he hadn’t seen her ribs move, hadn’t felt the agony rising off her like a cloud, he would have thought she was dead. From the way she breathed and the look of her abdomen, she wasn’t going to be among the living for much longer.

  “No. No, please. Leave her alone.”

  The words weren’t spoken above a whisper. He managed to turn his head from the ruin at his feet. Jossa was still trying to pull free of the wall. Her feet scrabbled on the deck, slipping in the blood dripping from her arms. The tethers didn’t have any slack left. Her hands were pinned to the wall.

  “No,” she said again, voice cracking. “Please don’t.”

  He walked over and crouched in front of her. She didn’t even look at him. She was focused on Delfi. On her sousi, battered and dying not five feet away. So close and so far.

  What would his target be when the stable one died and he was left locked in a room with this one? Kizen? He could go for Kizen. Given her range, he’d still have a shitstorm of emotion to fuel him when he found the man. Bastard. Fucking piece of shit. He’d find him, all right. He’d show him just how stupid it was to—

  The voice in his head laughed her manic laugh. To what? she asked. Leave an ignition source near a compressed container of combustible gas? What do you think the Fleet’s made of? Think these men weren’t expendable? Why didn’t they set up surveillance? This’s gone to Hell in a handbasket; you’d think someone would do something about it before it got so bad.

  Delfi coughed and whimpered. Jossa sobbed and lurched against her tethers. Syrus reached out and caught her jaw without thinking, forcing her head around so he could see her face. Blind panic mixed with fury and turned to a sort of liquid explosive. His arm, already burning, nearly charred itself to the bone. She pulled against him, eyes rolling like a panicked animal. “Del,” she whispered. “Del, no.”

  Here was something beyond despair. She knew what was coming. She could feel it. The bond would break and she’d be left alone. Half a soul, half alive. Forever a wanderer. Bereft.

  At least that was what all the stories said.

  He should just kill her now. Put her out of her misery. Do it before Delfi died, so that when the Foreseer breathed her last, Jossa wouldn’t turn him back into a raging maniac. He had his mind for now, although the half-formed shields he’d managed to throw up wouldn’t hold very long when he was skin-to-skin like this. Kill Jossa. Get her out of his head for good and ever. Purge himself of the voices she’d resurrected. Kill Delfi, so she wouldn’t keep struggling along with the one lung she had left. Then go find Kizen and smear his brains all over the inside of a medunit.

  You know better than that. You know how to fix this.

  I’d have to set up a link, he told his conscience. It’s not like sex. That’s easy. I don’t even know if it will work. I don’t have time anyway.

  Th
en remember.

  Fucking voice. He made it out of this alive, he was stuffing her back down so he’d never have to hear from her again. He’d enjoyed the peace and quiet since he’d took up the Helm of Warlord.

  No you didn’t. You missed me. You’ve enjoyed having me nag you these past few weeks.

  Cool hands reached into his soul and pulled out one of his first good memories. Now, like this, but a little different. You know. I showed you.

  .

  >Chapter Thirty-Four

  Jossa

  Contrary to what the commoners think, peace is not the absence of troubles. It’s knowing you have shelter in the storms that life brings. That, my dear, is the essence of the bond.

  Never forget.

  -Chataf Kuchru lis Chuis isk Fuerrus, to Delfi

  When the peace first touched her, Jossa thought Delfi had come back. It felt right. So right. Like the bond at its strongest, when everything just dropped into place. She reached for it, so relieved that she wasn’t even worried about the fact that the bond wouldn’t let her speak to Del in its current condition. What she found was like a slap in the face.

  Delfi still hurt. Was still lost in agony and fear. The stake holding Jossa’s mind to her sousi’s had vanished. Her sister couldn’t even tell what was real and what she imagined. There was no way in the universe she could have done anything for Jossa. What in the name of—

  Frustration. Mixed with that eerie calm, like a petrol slick on water. A sense of resignation, as if the owner half expected his efforts to be ignored. And then another push of cool water along her nerves, the raw heat of anger and the burn of fear dissipating beneath the wave.

  Someone had their hands on her. She nearly screamed when she realized. She smelled sweat and the musk of man and almost lost her stomach.

  “Don’t you start that again. Can’t keep this up forever.”

  She froze mid-thrash. She knew that voice.