by M. D. Cooper
One foot in front of the other; she kept her focus on that, and what meager amount of balance she could manage. Stones on the gravel road dug into her feet, though at least she couldn’t feel the burning heat anymore. The soles of her feet were in too much agony to tell that pain apart from any other.
She gave herself three more days of this before she died. Maybe less.
Of course, Malorie wouldn’t let it come to that—she hoped. If Katrina died, all the tech in her body would erase her data stores and destroy itself. She’d be back on the table before long, getting stitched back together like the frankenstein monster she was.
It had been many days, nineteen to be exact, since Juasa had been taken from her. To Katrina, it felt like it had been a lifetime. The beatings and abuse, so many delivered by Juasa’s own hands, had begun to take their toll on her spirit.
Her love for Juasa was still a flame in her heart, but it was miniscule next to the rage that had begun to build within her. The next time she was on the medtable, she’d not pussyfoot around. Katrina would disable the collar, no matter how much it hurt, and then kill those miserable techs.
Then she’d find Anna and kill her too, followed by Malorie and Jace. They’d all die, along with anyone who got in her way.
A voice in the back of her mind brought up the deal she’d made with Anna—but the bitch hadn’t come through. She’d raised Katrina’s hopes, that one day with the cream, and then followed it up by making Juasa beat her.
No, Anna was dead. The woman was unredeemable, and Katrina would leave her corpse for the crows.
She tripped on a small stone and stumbled, landing hard on her knees and hands. The pain was excruciating, or it should be, but Katrina couldn’t separate it from the rest of the agony crushing her mind.
Somehow she found a new reserve of strength and stood up, elated at her own fortitude for a moment—until she realized that the guard had picked her up by her hair.
“You’re heavy for such a scrawny thing,” he grunted.
Katrina didn’t respond, but resumed her focus on her feet. Left, drag it forward, shift weight. Right, drag forward—avoid that sharp rock—shift weight.
Then something hit her in the side.
At first she thought it was a blow from the guard, but it didn’t hurt as much as the overseer’s massive fists usually did.
Then something else struck her on the other side. There was yelling, and she looked up from her downward focus to see a sea of white workers crowding around her, their faces angry, voices loud and harsh.
The guard bellowed something, and a whip cracked, but still more blows struck her.
Body, face, head, arms.
Katrina’s legs gave out, her body going limp. For a moment, the sheer volume of fists and feet striking her served to keep her upright—but only for a moment.
She crashed to the ground, stones digging into her face as blows continued to land on her body.
More whips cracked in the air, and Liam’s throaty bellow sounded above the mayhem. A second later, the attack stopped.
Katrina’s tongue pushed gravel out of her mouth. She paused. It wasn’t all gravel; there were teeth too, at least four of them.
“What the hell?!” Liam bellowed from somewhere above her.
“Liam!” another voice shrieked. Anna’s. “What did you let happen? Malorie is going to kill the both of us!”
“Get a carry-board from the station,” Liam hollered at someone. “I’m calling the medtechs to the lab.”
Shit, Katrina thought, as even the voices above her became indistinct and warbly-sounding. How am I going to get the collar off if I pass out?
Then darkness took her.
REPAIR
STELLAR DATE: 01.19.8512 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Revenence Castle
REGION: Persia, Midditerra System
Anna paced back and forth in the medlab, one hand on her chin, her eyes casting nervous looks at Verisa’s broken body. She turned and caught sight of Liam sitting on a tall stool, his expression also far more worried than Anna had ever seen it.
If Verisa dies, I’m a dead woman.
She was certain that Liam was thinking the same thing.
The medtable had managed to stabilize Verisa, but her breathing was shallow, and Tom and Ainsley were debating putting her on a respirator.
“It’s amazing that her ribs aren’t broken,” Tom said as he looked over the holodisplay of Verisa’s body that was suspended above the table.
Ainsley cast Tom a disparaging look. “Well duh, they’re reinforced. We saw that the first time she was on here. Beautiful work, too. Shows how advanced she is.”
“Too bad we can’t get our nano to do more than assist and repair,” Tom replied, ignoring Ainsley’s gibe. “I want to cut a sample out, just to see what she’s made of.”
“Tom, you know what Malorie said. There’s too much risk in her internal systems putting up a defense that triggers the collar. It could create a loop that kills her. Besides, she’s barely stable; if you start cutting bits out, she’ll go into shock again.”
The pair continued to debate what to do, and Anna wanted to walk over and slap them both in the head. Whatever kept Verisa alive was what they needed to do.
“There she goes,” Tom said after another minute. “Her heart rate is steadying. Blood pressure is improving, too. She’s one hell of a tough woman.”
Liam released a long, pent-up breath. “Oh, thank the gods.”
“She’s coming to,” Ainsley said. “Quick! Reset the collar attenuation to defaults.”
* * * * *
Consciousness snapped back for Katrina in one sudden moment of clarity.
Brutal clarity.
Her body hurt everywhere. However, in the initial moments of wakefulness, she knew that it hurt decidedly less than before…before she was attacked.
Katrina’s mind felt sharper than it had in days. It became immediately apparent to her that the attack was staged. It had to have been. There was no way the workers would attack her en masse like that without provocation.
She suspected Anna. It was one hell of a way to get Katrina back to the medtable, but at least it had worked.
The collar was still around her neck, and a tentative probe with what little nano Katrina still possessed showed that the thing was active. So much for Anna’s great plan.
There was speaking going on around her, and Katrina strained to make out the words. Something about tough, and coming to, and reset the collar!
Shit!
Katrina rushed more nano into the collar while the attenuation was still in place, but then it shut down entirely. The collar, for all intents and purposes, was disabled.
It was as though a great weight had been lifted from Katrina’s shoulders. She could properly feel her body once more. Not just with her flesh, but also with the technological enhancements that ran though it. Her own internal systems began to effect repairs on her broken and battered flesh, and Katrina fed the last of her infiltration nano into the collar, rewiring its internal configuration to report functionality when, in fact, there was none.
Then she slowed her own repair processes, no need to alert the medtechs to the fact that she was healing faster than she should.
“Verisa, can you hear me?”
It took Katrina an instant longer than she liked to remember that Verisa meant her. It took a moment more to identify the speaker as Anna.
The woman had done it. She’d somehow altered the medtable to disable the collar. Would miracles never cease?
Katrina opened her eyes to see Anna leaning over her, and the massive form of Liam looming behind.
“Fuck off,” Katrina whispered.
Liam chuckled. “Looks like she’s on the mend. I’m going to go figure out whose fault this is and drop them in the moat.”
“You do that,” Anna said and winked at Katrina.
It wasn’t a kind wink; the woman’s expression was malicious in the extreme. Katr
ina wondered if Anna even knew how much bitch she exuded at all times.
For a moment, for reasons she couldn’t fathom, Katrina’s mind shifted back to Victoria, and she saw Laura’s face. Her young assistant who had wanted so badly for Katrina to stay. She wondered what sort of life she could have lived there. One thing was for certain: it would have been a life of peace.
Now she was deep in some of the worst shit she could ever have imagined, and it was all to find a ship that was probably lost forever.
As she looked up at the sinister grin on Anna’s face, it occurred to her that she really felt like Verisa more than Katrina at that moment. She was completely filled with anger, rage, and a burning desire for retribution.
She hadn’t felt this way since the trials for the sentencing of her father back on Victoria. Back then, Markus had been with her; always measured, always with a steady hand. His council had seen her through those dark days.
Markus…. Stars, I could use your guidance now.
Katrina’s nano completed its alterations to the collar and retreated back into her body. Now she could relax and let the medtable do its work while she planned out her next move.
Anna straightened and looked over Katrina’s head at the two medtechs. “How long ‘til she’s healed up? We’d all be better off if she was tip-top by the time Malorie and Juasa get back.”
That caught Katrina’s attention. “When?” she whispered.
“Shit, you’re probably thirsty as all get-out,” Anna said, and walked to the sink and poured a glass of water.
When she returned, she bent over Katrina and spoke softly. “Two, maybe three hours.”
That changed everything.
Katrina didn’t know when another opportunity like this would come again. She needed to make her move that very night.
She nodded and closed her eyes. The medtechs were debating reconnecting the medtable to her hard-Link port. They’d done it each other time Katrina had been on the table, and each time, she’d gained a little more information from the lab level network, and had fed the techs another blob of encrypted nothing.
They’d not yet cracked the encryption on the last batch of data they’d extracted, and Tom wanted to hunt through her mind for the encryption keys. Ainsley was against it, but Katrina could tell that she was on the fence.
If they made the hard-Link, Katrina’s job would be a piece of cake. Otherwise she’d have to do it wirelessly, and that was slower—and more detectable.
“Oh, fine!” Ainsley said at last. “She’s doing well enough. Jack her up and let’s see what we can find.”
“That’s more like it,” Tom replied. A moment later, Katrina felt him slide the hard-Link line into the port behind her ear. She had to hold back a smile as she redirected their probes while slipping into their system.
Now that she could use the full power of her mental augmentations, accessing the medtable’s systems was a breeze.
The first thing she did was find the controls for the table’s restraints and slave them to her. Following that, Katrina accessed the wireless network and located its access tokens and which frequencies accessed which segments.
Once she had her freedom and future access secured, Katrina worked her way out of the lab sublevel’s network and onto Revenence Castle’s main network, looking for the security control systems. She wanted to be able to lock down every gate, door, and window.
Tom and Ainsley were still arguing about how best to bypass Katrina’s safeguards, and Anna was giving her a curious look, when Katrina found the systems she needed. She brute-forced her way past their encryption and took control.
She was almost shocked at how easy it was, but the more she looked over the castle’s networks and control backplanes, the more she could see that it was a hodge-podge of different systems that had been inexpertly cobbled together. Many systems didn’t even speak to one another properly, and there were intermediary proxies everywhere. Some were doing double duty, linking lighting and security to things like water and plumbing. Often with full privileges and minimal encryption.
It was like sparring with children.
“I don’t know, maybe we should knock her out,” Tom said loudly, obviously agitated at Ainsley over one of her suggestions. Katrina ignored their arguing and took control of the last of the castle’s systems. Once she had them all under her control, she connected them to a holographic console that overlaid her vison.
“No,” Katrina said loudly—or as loudly as she was able.
“‘No’ to being knocked out?” Ainsley asked. “You don’t really get a say in this.”
The woman hadn’t even finished speaking when the medtable’s restraints unlocked.
Katrina pushed herself up and slid off the table’s right side. She stood up straight and pulled the IV line from her arm.
“Took you long enough,” Anna said with a sneer as she walked around the left side of the table, advancing on Ainsley.
“What? Me?” Ainsley said, a look of confusion on her face.
“Not you, bitch. I mean Verisa.”
“What? How?” Tom stammered.
Katrina gestured toward the far wall. “Back away from the table, hands up.”
“But…we had you locked down, the collar…”
Katrina reached up and grasped the collar and triggered its release. It split into two pieces and fell to the ground.
“What collar?” Katrina asked.
“Shit! I can’t get on the Link, we’re cut off,” Tom exclaimed as he backed away from the console, but Ainsley stood her ground, frantically trying to access Katrina’s mind through the hard-Link cable that was still plugged into her.
Katrina looked at the control systems that overlaid her vision and shut down the console Ainsley was working on.
“Get over there with Tom.”
“Yeah,” Anna said, giving Ainsley a shove. “Get over there.”
Katrina paused, leaning against the medtable’s scanning arch as dizziness overcame her. She gritted her teeth and closed her eyes.
“No!” Ainsley shouted. “Help, someone, help!”
Anna’s hand darted out, striking Ainsley in the throat with the tips of her locked fingers.
The medtech gasped and grabbed her throat, struggling for breath.
“Shit, Anna,” Katrina said as she pulled the hard-Link cable from behind her ear. “You crushed her windpipe. Now we have to put her on the table.”
Anna stepped around the gasping Ainsley and wrapped one arm around her neck, and the other around her head.
“Stop!” Katrina called out, but it was too late.
With a sickening pop, Anna broke Ainsley’s neck and dropped the woman’s body to the floor.
“Grow the fuck up, Verisa,” Anna said. “I have a shuttle ready; we have to get out of here now. We can’t have these two running off to warn Liam and his goons.”
Tom had been muttering incoherently to himself, but that got his attention.
“Whoa! No! No need to kill, I won’t go anywhere. I won’t tell anyone—look there’s lots of stuff in here that can knock me out, I’ll let you hit me up with that, please, just don’t kill me!”
Anna walked toward Tom, a menacing smile on her lips. “Don’t worry, it won’t hurt. Much.”
Katrina summoned her last reserves of strength and took a step toward Anna. “Stop, Anna. Now.”
Anna ignored Katrina and drew a fist back to hit Tom.
Here goes nothing.
With a guttural scream, Katrina rushed Anna, knocking her over, and both women crashed to the ground. Katrina gathered all the rage, the hate, and the anger she felt about everything that had happened since the Streamer dumped them outside Bollam’s World and balled it up into a new source of energy inside herself.
Anna was beneath her; her back against the floor, her burning eyes staring up at Katrina.
“The fuck, Verisa!” Anna swore.
Katrina drew on her newfound energy, on that purified rage that she’d
gathered, and slammed her fist into Anna’s face, snapping the other woman’s head back against the floor.
Anna grunted, but her eyes remained focused, and she kicked out at Katrina, the blow catching her on the shoulder.
Katrina grabbed Anna’s ankle, shifted her weight, and dropped her shoulder into Anna’s knee while pulling up on her calf.
A scream filled the room, tearing out of Anna’s throat, but Katrina couldn’t quite break the woman’s knee. Then she got a foot under Anna’s armpit and pushed her shoulder against Anna’s knee with all her might.
With a grinding crunch, Anna’s knee broke, and the woman shrieked while tears of pain and rage streamed from her eyes.
Katrina glanced up to check on Tom, worried that the man would make a break for it, but he seemed frozen in place by the tableau before him.
With shaking knees, Katrina rose slowly, staring down at Anna who was holding her leg and whimpering from the pain.
“Why are you doing this?” Anna asked, fury in her eyes. “We were partners. I helped you.”
“Helped?” Katrina asked. “You were the one that caused this whole mess. You and your fucking avarice!”
“You still need me,” Anna said. “I have the way out. I can get you free.”
Katrina looked around the room, her eyes casting about for just the right implement.
She strode toward the closest cabinet, grasped the top, and turned her head toward Anna. “I’m already free, and I have no intention of leaving without Juasa.”
Anna’s eyes widened. “That bitch? She’s fucking useless! You told me you—”
Those were the last words Anna ever uttered. With all her strength, Katrina pulled at the cabinet, and it fell over, its solid steel frame slamming into Anna’s head with a sickening crunch.
Katrina stared at Anna’s twitching body for a moment before stepping over it to approach Tom.
He was quaking with fear, and a wet stain ran down his pants.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Katrina said. “But I am going to make sure you don’t get in the way right now.”
