‘Premature aging?’ Melissa asked.
Nava gave her a look and she shrank in her seat, but she still got an answer. ‘They wanted a product they could use quickly. They accelerated our development process. We spent five months in the incubators. We had mature, adult bodies by the age of nine. Nine Earth years. The base where they did all this was established on Earth, where no one bothered to go looking.’
Courtney nodded to herself. She said nothing, but that confirmed her speculation. Nava had been born on Earth, one hundred and forty-six light years away.
‘They got the genetics wrong at first,’ Nava went on. ‘The accelerated development became accelerated aging. Dramatically accelerated in some cases. Number six died young. She seemed okay at first, but she looked to be about seventy by the time I was three. Her heart gave out on her during daily exercise.’
‘Doesn’t that mean your lifespan–’
‘No, Mel, I’ll live longer than you. When they were creating the later genomes, they added every anti-aging trick they could find. If the lower numbers hadn’t died anyway, they’d have had shorter lives, but Maya, me, and a few earlier ones were engineered to live long, useful lives. I can expect to make two hundred years, uh, something like a hundred and sixty or more Alliance-standard years, even without any other intervention.’
Mitsuko let out a breath. Nava glanced at her and then went back to looking at the table.
‘Anyway, they started on the real training when I was six or so. We learned sorcery. Attack spells and spells to help us get in where we could kill our targets. As it went on, more and more of the girls were evaluated as “not up to standard.” Or they died. Uncontrolled, untreatable cancers. Organ failure. Not enough power or talent. The ones in the last category, like Maya, were taken away. I was told they were dead. Executed. It seems like at least some of that may have been part of my training.’
‘But Maya wasn’t dead,’ Courtney said.
‘No,’ Fawn said. ‘We’d all like to know how many of them the Redwings lied to Nava about. Maybe Maya was the last. We just don’t know, which is worrying.’
‘There are four more I can’t account for,’ Nava said. ‘I saw most of them die, but five, including Maya, were taken away as rejects. They wanted an emotionless, fearless weapon, so part of the training was emotional manipulation spells and attacks with Terror. The Terror spells worked. I just don’t get afraid like normal people. I suppose you could say I developed an immunity to fear. The emotionless bit… Well, I learned not to show my emotions. I got so good at hiding what I felt that I can’t stop. After Maya was gone, they started teaching me the final step. Two spells that were to make me their Handmaiden of Death. Some of the scientists wouldn’t shut up about that. Anyway, two spells. Magic Burst and Hand of Death. Hand of Death causes instantaneous heart failure in anyone I touch.’
‘That’s what killed Jesse Audley,’ Courtney said. ‘When he came after Mel, you killed him with that.’
‘Yes. Another thing they drilled into me was that enemies deserved to die. Enemies had to die, no matter what. Anyone I faced in combat, I had to kill. They would capture people and bring them to the base and offer to let them go, if they could kill me. None of them ever escaped. I’ve killed… a lot of people. I stopped counting.’
‘But… How did you end up like you are?’ Melissa asked. ‘Maya was… was a fanatic. You’re not like that!’
Nava shrugged. ‘I’m not entirely sure. They wanted me emotionless and I resisted. They taught me to sense when people were lying, and I started seeing that they were lying to me when they told me how corrupt the Clan Worlds were. They told me how the Redwing clan had been unjustly outlawed. It wasn’t even as if they believed what they were saying. When the ASF raided the base, I saw my chance.’
‘Huh, yeah,’ Fawn said. ‘We were working our way in, meeting fairly stiff resistance. And then it just stopped, and this girl walked out of one of the doors ahead of us, hands in the air. She got down on her knees before we could say anything. Turned around, dropped to her knees, and put her hands behind her head. She said, “You can take the rest of the facility now. They’re all dead.”’ Fawn glanced at Nava, then away. ‘It was the way she said it. Flat. Emotionless. It wasn’t a voice that ought to belong to a young adult. We brought her back here, taught her how to behave in clan society, and arranged for her to enrol at SAS-squared.’
‘And gave her rank in the ASF,’ Kyle said. ‘You called her “specialist.” That means she has rank as a sorceress.’
‘Officially, she’s a second lieutenant, specialist, under the junior officer programme. Well, semi-officially. It’s a secret. Mostly because we don’t consider it as informal as that position usually implies. Nava is an asset we’d like to develop further. Potentially, she’s one of the most powerful sorceresses in the Alliance.’
‘You mean she isn’t already?’ Mitsuko asked. ‘She’s way ahead of pretty much everyone in the school. Including faculty.’
‘She can get better.’
‘Because I’m not–’ Nava began.
‘You don’t need to tell them that,’ Fawn said quickly. ‘That’s… personal.’
‘If I’m telling them how I got here, they might as well know it all. When they brought me back here, they sequenced my genome. I’m not human.’
‘So, they manufactured your genes in a lab,’ Mitsuko said, waving the comment away. ‘That doesn’t mean–’
‘Humans have twenty-two non-sex chromosomes. I have twenty-six. The extra ones don’t even have the usual types of base pairs. No one knows what they do or where they came from, but it’s probably something to do with enhancing my sorcery. Since my cells have to be able to process and replicate these weird genes, my biochemistry isn’t the same as a human’s. Some drugs work on me, others do nothing, a few cause problems. I’m not human.’ She shrugged. ‘I couldn’t have children with a human. It would be like a human and a chimpanzee mating. Actually, chimps are closer to humans, genetically, than I am. But I’m sterile anyway, so that’s not such a big problem.’
‘Oh,’ Mitsuko said.
‘Is that everything?’ Darius asked. He had been silent until now. Nava was vaguely wondering whether he was hoping she would forget he was there if he did not speak. Maybe that was not his angle. ‘You’re an artificially created humanoid, made by the Redwing Faction to kill their enemies. You turned against them, hence the other girl calling you a traitor. You’re a secret officer in the ASF and likely to become an extremely powerful weapon in their arsenal, but you’d really prefer to save lives than take them. That about it?’
‘Um, yes,’ Nava said. ‘That’s an accurate summary. I was expecting you to express it more negatively.’
‘And maybe I would under other circumstances. Right now, it seems like you’re exactly what we need.’
‘The VP makes an exceptionally valid point,’ Courtney said. ‘We can maybe worry over the implications of this later. What do we do next?’
‘Next?’ Nava asked. ‘Next, I go out there and kill the bad guys. Chess, please could you take a look outside? They’re bound to be wondering what happened to Maya.’
‘On it,’ Rochester said, closing his eyes.
‘You can’t go out there alone,’ Melissa said.
‘I tend to agree,’ Courtney added.
‘I can,’ Nava replied, ‘and I will. I’m sorry, but the rest of you are just going to slow me down. You’re going to stay right here and defend this room and each other while I go secure our way out. First Lieutenant, I believe you should be able to use Maya’s pistol and rifle. She’s carrying plenty of ammo. Hopefully, you won’t need any of it, but some of them might get past me. They’re going to know they have a problem up here pretty soon, I think.’
‘Yes,’ Rochester said. ‘There’s a team of eight on their way up the stairs.’
Nava started for the door. ‘Mel, let me out and then reseal the door. I’ll take care of those ones on my way down.’
&nbs
p; Melissa got up to follow. ‘Okay, but I don’t like it.’
‘I’m not asking you to,’ Nava said, just before vanishing. Melissa’s wall collapsed and then the door opened by itself. ‘See you soon.’ And the door closed again.
~~~
Hubert Allard Haanraats was actually of Dutch descent, not German. He claimed to be able to trace his ancestry back to the fifteenth century on the old calendar, which was a lie, but he could go back five centuries, with a few gaps. The last few generations had been staunch individualists and Hubert was just as fanatical about fending for himself as his father and grandfather had been. He had learned to shoot when he was seven. Beherbergen had an ecosystem, but none of it was useful as a food source, having the wrong sort of proteins or something; eat a dead deer-like creature on Beherbergen and you were in for a night of vomiting uncontrollably. The local predators avoided humans like the plague. You learned to shoot on Beherbergen so that you could kill humans and for no other reason.
This operation was, as far as Hubert was concerned, the height of his career in Befreit Beherbergen. He had joined up when he was fifteen. His early years had been spent running messages between safehouses. He had killed his first traitor when he was seventeen, emptying a full clip from his AK-304 into a House-clan scientist who was experimenting with novel farming practices outside clan lands. The weapon he was carrying now, an AK-306, was a slight upgrade of his personal favourite. The 306 had a multispectral laser targeting system instead of a monochrome one; none of the Befreit troops had the gear to properly use such a system, but it was still a new gun.
So far, Hubert had not fired his new gun, but he was hopeful that that was about to change. He and seven other members of the invasion force had been sent up to check on one of the Redwing operatives working with them. Hubert did not trust the Redwings, but he was scared of the one they were going to look for. The one with the dead eyes and the powerful magic. If she had run into trouble… Well, it was not going to be something he and his friends could not deal with.
The team reached the top of the stairs and advanced into a corridor. There were doors on either side. They wanted the room five doors up on the left. They started for it, but they had gone only a couple of paces when there was a sound up ahead and their sergeant held up his fist. Everyone stopped.
‘Was that a door closing?’ the sergeant asked.
‘Not sure,’ someone replied.
Hubert shifted his position to look around the man in front of him, down the corridor toward their target. There was nothing to be seen. If a door had been opened and then closed, it seemed that no one had walked through.
There was a flash of light. Hubert had time to register it, and then the expanding wall of white before his eyes. Then he was screaming. Pain burned through every nerve in his body. It felt like he had been burned all across his chest and face, and he had no idea what had just happened to him. He heard someone firing, panicked fire on full auto. His eyes fell on their leader, the sergeant, now a corpse with no upper body. White filled his vision again and the gunfire ceased. Silence fell, aside from some whimpering.
He heard a footfall just to the left of his head, but he could see no one there. He did feel a hand touch his chest. He was just realising that it had touched bare skin, and that the front of his uniform had been entirely destroyed by the invisible attacker, when his heart stopped.
~~~
‘Okay,’ Fawn said, ‘we have a radio.’ She was going through Maya’s possessions and the first thing she had found was an earpiece for a handheld radio. ‘They must have a hole in the jamming to let them communicate.’ She popped the earpiece in her ear and then started on the pouches strung across Maya’s stomach.
‘I’m not sure how you can put a dead woman’s earpiece in your ear,’ Melissa commented.
‘Needs must. They’re a noisy bunch. Let’s see… rifle ammo, rifle ammo, rifle ammo. Was this woman a magician or a gunship? Pistol ammo and…’ Fawn took a small bottle from one of the pouches and held it up. ‘Well damn.’
‘Is that Crystal Mana?’ Courtney asked.
‘Looks like it. So, she was a reject.’
‘They put her on that stuff to boost her power? That’s…’
‘Sick? They engineered a girl to be a walking weapon and tried to brainwash her into murdering their enemies. They half succeeded. The Redwings are not noted for being nice people. There’s a reason they were ejected from the Alliance.’
‘That’s a valid point. Are you hearing anything interesting?’
‘Well, they’ve figured out that the team they sent up to get us has gone silent…’
~~~
The delegates had been gathered into four lecture theatres with six men guarding each room. Nava had already found a few bodies, all of them civilians. Either it was making a point, or these people had tried to resist. Perhaps the terrorists were making a point by killing people who resisted. Now they would pay for that.
The first of them fell without warning and his partner just stood there, confused, until Nava’s touch took him down too. The other two pairs were not paying enough attention to notice by the time Nava had reached the stage where her next pair of targets were standing.
When the third fell, his companion let out a yelp which drew the attention of the last pair. It made no difference to the one who had cried out; he died before the echoes died away. Bullets sprayed over the stage, but they were aiming at something they could not see which was moving fast. Still, there was a chance they could hit a hostage. Nava paused at the edge of the stage to throw out an improvised Slice spell. Her target went down in a spray of blood, his unprotected neck slashed open.
His companion reared back as blood splashed over his face. Bullets riddled the ceiling panels. He brought his weapon back down toward the aisle he had been guarding, but he was too late. Nava’s fist hit his chest, doing no damage thanks to his fatigues, but nothing could stop the spell her punch was the vector for. His eyes widened, shock registering briefly on his face before he fell to the floor.
Nava started for the door. ‘Stay in this room,’ she ordered, just a disembodied voice to the hostages. ‘No one leaves here until the rest are gone.’ Then she was out and away before anyone could respond.
~~~
‘… under attack. Unknown…’
‘Sergeant Battle. Say again. Report, Sergeant!’ There was no response and Nikolas Wolfe glared at the radio. He pressed the transmit button again. ‘Anyone on the second floor, report.’ Pause. ‘Now!’ Nothing.
What was going on? They had complete control over the building, so… No, there was the room on the third floor and the possibility that the traitor was up there. Maya had apparently failed, but the other one, the traitor, would stay put. Right? There was no way she would expose herself. She was a traitor. A coward. An engineered thing put together in a lab… to be the most powerful sorceress in the faction’s arsenal.
‘We may have incoming resistance,’ Nikolas said, raising his voice to be heard through the theatre. ‘A teenager with white hair. She’s to be shot on sight.’
Beside him, the radio jammer vanished in a ball of white light which washed over him in an instant. The pain was indescribable, but it lasted for barely a second before he blacked out. Three metres away, across the stage, the wave from the Magic Burst explosion hit the men preparing for their first broadcast. Its force was diminished by distance, but they were still left reeling from the pain or lying on the ground, writhing in agony as the raw magic power shredded nerve endings and ate into flesh.
‘Was war das?!’
‘Wo sind sie?!’
Nava did not understand German, but she got the general idea. She was not where she had fired from anyway; she was heading for the Befreit soldiers guarding a select group of hostages who had been brought to the theatre. She only recognised a few faces: Oliver Barnes Garavain had been one of the panellists with Mitsuko and there was Auberon Ewart and Joslyn Harris. The others were presumably also membe
rs of the assembly or other political figures. Maybe important clan members. She did not actually place an especially high priority on rescuing them. Maybe the principal and VP. Maybe. Certainly no more than any other civilians at any rate. Having them die on her would be less than perfect, however; the remaining men on stage could wait for the guards to die. She launched a Slice spell across the seats at another terrorist’s throat, and then she was reaching out for her next victim.
~~~
‘Network’s back up,’ Melissa reported. She had been watching her ketcom screen for the last few minutes, from about when they had decided Nava would go for the jammer next.
‘Thanks,’ Fawn said, pulling her own ketcom from where it was fixed to the waistband of her leggings. Two seconds later, she was saluting an image on her screen. ‘Major Deveraux Wescott, sir. First Lieutenant Fawn Tyrell reporting.’
‘We noticed the jamming field going down, Lieutenant,’ said a deep, authoritative voice. ‘Is that your doing?’
‘Second Lieutenant, Specialist, Nava Ward is engaging with the enemy, sir. She took the jammer down.’
There was a slight pause. ‘I see. Are they from Befreit Beherbergen? We’ve received no notifications of intent so far and they seem strangely well equipped for backwater terrorists.’
‘The majority are Befreit, sir, but they have Redwings with them. The agent designated DH thirteen, Maya, attempted an attack on Nava.’
‘Attempted? I see. It’s not like interrogating fanatics usually produces results. We’ll hold here and move in once the second lieutenant has disabled that tank. We’ve lost enough people today as is.’
‘Yes, sir. We weren’t expecting something on this–’ She stopped as an explosion shook the door to the meeting room. She looked up to see that their barrier was still on its hinges and shut, but another blast like that was probably going to bring it down. ‘I need to get back to you, sir. We have a situation here.’
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