by M. D. Cooper
“H-h-how?” Tom asked.
Katrina gestured at the medtable. “Get on it.”
Tom nodded three times, his head bobbling like it was on a spring before he rushed to the table and climbed on.
Katrina reactivated the console and triggered the restraints, then instructed the table to deliver a sedative to Tom.
“Goodnight, Tom.”
“Uhh…goodni….”
Katrina turned to the cabinets—all but the one that rested on Anna’s former head—and looked for replenishment silicate.
“Gotta be some somewhere,” she muttered.
She hunted through half a dozen shelves before she found some.
“Jackpot,” she whispered, and looked down at her stomach, surprised to see that she was still naked.
Damn…I’ve gotten way too used to that.
Katrina fed the silicate rods into the port within her navel and felt her body begin to fabricate new nano: medical, general, and infiltration.
An alert flashed over her vision as the material was assimilated, and Katrina saw that her internal power reserves were flagging.
“Just what I need,” she muttered, and walked back to the medtable, pulling a charge cable out from the side. Katrina had never sported large internal batteries—just a single superconductor coil around each femur. Nothing like the entire bevy of batteries that military operators like Tanis ran.
She sagged against the table as it ran a fast charge on her SC Batts. Katrina watched the charge level slowly climb. She was prepared to disconnect at 50%, when the door suddenly opened and Liam stormed in.
“Anna!” he shouted, rage evident on his features before he stopped and looked around. “What in the star’s burning light….”
“Hi, Liam,” Katrina said with a tired smile. “How are we going to do this? The easy way, or the hard way?”
Liam’s right hand formed a fist, and he smacked it into the palm of his left. “I think it’s going to be the hard way.”
“Be careful,” Katrina warned. “I control the only medtable. You kill me, and Malorie will have your hide.”
Liam snorted. “We’ll see.”
Katrina pulled the charge cable from her side and swung it in front of herself in a lazy circle as Liam approached.
She was feeling better—not great—but definitely better. Liam was a monstrous brute, but he had a weakness—everyone did.
He came around the side of the table and lunged for her, both hands out. Feeling renewed, Katrina leapt onto the table, one foot on Tom’s leg.
Liam’s right arm wrapped around Katrina’s right leg, and he pulled her toward him, but that was just what she wanted. She swung her other leg around him, twisting in his grasp so that she was sitting on his shoulders.
“What the—?” Liam grunted, and reached his other arm up for her just as Katrina swung her right hand into his eye.
The hand that was holding the fast charge cable.
She sent a command to the table to bypass the safeties, and delivered a max charge into his skull.
Liam convulsed, and Katrina groaned as he squeezed her leg, but she didn’t let go.
Smoke began to pour out of the man’s eye, and then his body went limp, falling to the ground. Katrina fell with him, landing atop him as he convulsed.
She sent a command to the table to turn off the charging cable and pulled herself upright on shaking legs.
“Damn…” she whispered, leaning against the table and taking deep breaths. “Four down, a whole freakin’ castle to go.”
She took four unsteady steps to the sink and poured another glass of water. Leaning against the counter, Katrina surveyed the destruction in the room as she slowly drank the cool liquid. Three dead bodies, and Tom unconscious on the table.
She felt a twinge of guilt for Ainsley; the woman had been at least somewhat cautious in her work to probe Katrina’s mind.
Tom had always operated with less concern for her safety, and here he was, alive, while Ainsley was dead. The universe really just didn’t give a fuck.
Katrina pushed herself off the counter and stood upright. Her next order of business was to capture Malorie and free Juasa. Not necessarily in that order. Of course, that would require moving through the castle…and moving through the castle required clothing.
Anna’s outfit was more to Verisa’s tastes, but it was also a bloody mess.
“Looks like I’ll be playing the part of Ainsley this evening,” Katrina said, a small smile on her lips.
She pulled Ainsley out of her hazsuit, thinking that the medtech should have kept her helmet on—she and Tom had become lax in their time around Katrina.
That one precaution probably would have saved her life. Though not in the way she would have expected.
Underneath, Ainsley wore a pair of black leggings and a dark grey top. Katrina crouched to pull off the medtech’s pants, and felt searing pain in her thighs. She looked down and saw that the skin on the tops of her thighs had ripped wide open, the medical glue that had held it together giving out under the pressure.
Must have weakened it in the fighting.
Katrina looked herself over and realized that she was currently bleeding from a dozen locations. With the amount of pain she’d been in for days, she hadn’t even noticed.
Clothing was not going to be much of a disguise if it was soaked in blood and pus.
“I guess we find out how weird it is for someone to walk around the castle in a hazsuit.”
Talking aloud to yourself. Great, Katrina.
Five minutes later, she stood in the lift, rising to the third floor where Malorie’s quarters lay. The plan she’d devised was simple. She’d lie in wait for Malorie and Juasa. Once she had Juasa safe, Katrina would lock down the castle and take control.
Jace still had comeuppance due him, and he was likely five days out at the very least.
The lift doors opened, and Katrina strode down the hall, taking the first right and then the second left.
A pair of servants came around a corner ahead, and Katrina kept her eyes forward and head slightly lowered. Her face still looked like crap, and her hair was a mess—only as straight and clean as she could manage with some water and her fingers.
She probably looked like a drowned rat.
The pair of servants cast her an appraising look, but neither stopped, and Katrina breathed a sigh of relief, turning the final corner that would take her to Malorie’s suite.
“Dammit,” Katrina swore as she caught sight of a guard standing before Malorie’s door. It was one of the massively overmuscled brutes that filled the place.
Katrina rolled her hips—glad the hazsuit was fitted enough to show some of her figure—as she strode toward the man and walked past him, praying that he’d be looking at her ass and not the patchy red skin that covered her face. At the last moment, she turned abruptly and rushed toward him, placing her hands on his cheeks.
“Hey, wha—” was all he managed to get out before her lips met his, and she breathed a stream of nano into his body. The miniscule machines penetrated the back of his throat and attached to his spine. From there, Katrina locked up the man’s nervous system, trapping him inside his own body, rendering him unable to move.
It was a trick she hadn’t employed since her time operating as a spy for Luminescent Society in Sirius. It involved hacking another human’s nervous system—something expressly forbidden by the Phobos Accords.
“Fuck the Phobos Accords,” she muttered as she stepped past the frozen man and pushed open the door to Malorie’s suite. She surveyed the room, and her eyes alighted on the autodresser.
She wondered if there was something it could cover her ruined body with to hold it together a bit longer. Katrina grinned as she pulled off the hazsuit and walked into the machine, her feet leaving yellow and red stains on the floor.
Once inside, the door slid closed, and she accessed its menus over the Link. Malorie’s tastes were not so different from Verisa’s, and she select
ed a rubbery, silver and black skinsuit that would compress her skin and hide her condition.
She was about to tell the autodresser to engage when her mantra came to mind. She was not Verisa; she was Katrina.
“I am all these things, but they are not me. I am Katrina,” she whispered.
But she didn’t know who Katrina was anymore. The doting wife of the president would not survive what was to come next. Nor would the aristocratic Verisa. Even the spy, Yolanda, whom she had played at when on platform SK45 in Sirius was too full of compassion to do what may need to be done.
She needed to become someone else.
Once upon a time, during her father’s trials, he had told her that she needed to be as cold and deadly as steel to survive. She’d had a name then, not a cover, not a disguise. That name was Katrina.
In that instant, Katrina decided to make a change. Katrina was no longer the wife of Markus, making up for the evil acts she had committed as a spy. She was no longer the president, carrying on her dead husband’s legacy. Not even the searcher, looking for the ship that would lead her to Tanis’s promised utopia.
This morass that humanity had devolved into was her new reality, and a new Katrina needed to emerge to deal with it. What she needed to be now was to be a woman the likes of which Jace and his goons would tremble before.
Katrina saw that the autodresser had a 3D printer and enough formation material to make nearly anything. She looked down at her mutilated flesh, so beautiful and new just a few years ago, back on High Victoria—or four thousand years ago, depending on one’s point of view.
Her nano could repair it and stave off the cancer cells and infections in her body…or she could replace it with something strong, something impervious to such simple a thing as Persia’s raging star.
Her eyes lit upon an armor costume, matte grey with blue highlights. It would offer flexibility and protection. The formation alloys in the autodresser were capable of creating it; with the design specs that Katrina possessed for the advanced armors of the Intrepid, as well as those of Luminescent Society, she could create something that would actually be functional.
The autodresser also had supplies of steel and carbon fiber used for various outfits Malorie crafted for herself. Katrina would put them to far better use.
She connected with the machine over the Link and applied updates to its specifications, removing its safety protocols and updating the design of the armor costume to suit her needs.
Then she turned and touched each of the armatures that the autodresser used to apply its formation material when printing clothing onto a person. Filaments of nano left her fingers and touched each of them, enhancing their capabilities with simple tweaks and efficiencies.
It wasn’t perfect, but it would do.
She turned and almost slipped on the blood that had run down her legs and pooled at her feet.
Before she could do anything else, her ruined flesh would have to go.
Now that the collar was no longer around her neck, Katrina could deaden her nerves so she wouldn’t sense the pain of her skinning. What pain she could still feel would be a comfort—suffering had become her friend over the past weeks.
She welcomed its embrace.
Her nano coursed through her body, severing nerves until she couldn’t feel her flesh at all anymore. The fire of the burns, cuts, and welts was replaced by a different type of pain, more of a dull, bone-crushing ache that made her feel like her entire body was pulsing and about to burst.
The autodresser had a medical suite; this sort of body modification was not beyond its programming. Needles sank into her, delivering larger medical bots that coursed through her veins and began to sever and seal up the blood vessels feeding her skin—those that hadn’t already been sealed by the medtable in her multiple visits.
A soft tone emitted from within the autodresser indicating that the preparation stages were complete.
“Fuck. This is going to suck,” Katrina whispered.
She closed her eyes as the autodresser’s a-grav field lifted her into the air, and its armatures sliced into her, using the blades normally reserved for removing complex, printed outfits to instead pull her skin off as though it were nothing more than a costume she was ready to discard.
A scream erupted from Katrina’s throat—it wasn’t supposed to hurt this much, but the feeling of her flesh being slowly peeled from her body still seared her mind. She couldn’t tell if it was psychosomatic, or if she’d somehow missed something. Maybe the nano had only severed a percentage of her nerves; maybe her body just knew how wrong this was.
The anguish became a crescendo of delight in her mind. She lost herself in it, reveling in the torment, remembering Liam’s whip cutting into her skin, remembering Anna’s rods crushing her flesh. Somehow this new misery was a comfort, the final removal of all their abuse.
As her face was peeled away, Katrina felt her missing teeth with her tongue and passed additional instructions to the machine to replace them.
She considered what to do with her face, and decided to have her skin replicated by a polymer approximating human flesh, though the underside would be augmented by a layer of carbon fiber.
Katrina passed the machine an image of how she had looked in the years when she had worked by Markus’s side to build the Victoria colony. Not young, but not old, either. Lines around her mouth, crows feet in the corners of her eyes.
Though her eyes were open—there were no eyelids to cover them anymore—she kept her mind focused on the autodresser’s progress over the Link. It showed a rough view of how she looked with her flesh gone, and that was more than enough for her.
Layer by layer, the autodresser began to print on her new skin, layering in the tech she had selected, and adding in protective plates and carbon fiber meshes.
A part of her mind knew that this was a bad idea, a very bad idea. This level of modification was normally done over days, with careful mental preparation. It occurred to Katrina that she must be in some sort of state of shock to even consider doing this to herself.
It’s just flesh, she thought, feeling her new lips twist with a sneer. And it was ruined anyway…just like me.
After what felt like a thousand years, or maybe just forty minutes, the machine completed its work, and Katrina opened her eyes.
Her breath caught as she saw her reflection in the autodresser’s door. Her body was now an homage to war. The grey armor—her new flesh—gleamed dully, dark blue and russet orange sections adding an artistic feel to her new body.
In an affectation she’d added at the last moment, the armor plunged at the neckline—or appeared to. Steel and carbon fiber still lay beneath the flesh-like surface layer. Her breasts were emphasized, making her still feel somewhat womanly, even though there were no remains of mammary glands beneath.
She held up her grey fingers and flexed them, forming a fist.
It still hurt. Everything hurt, inflamed nerves protesting at being connected to the armor’s new cybernetic interface layer.
The smile was still on her face as Katrina flipped through the options, looking for something to complete the outfit; something unique, something that would fit in with this strange throwback world she was on.
“Perfect,” she whispered when the right item appeared.
She selected it to be fabricated from raw materials that the autodresser had on hand, and stepped out of the machine. It would let her know when her addition was ready.
An alert flashed in her mind, and Katrina saw that Malorie’s shuttle had departed from Farsa Station. Ground ATC had it listed as arriving at the castle in thirty minutes.
She reviewed the status of the Revenence Castle. Many of the denizens had taken Malorie’s absence as an opportunity to take the night off, and the building was operating on a skeleton staff.
Should Malorie check the castle’s status, she would find that Katrina was in her cell, Liam had taken the evening off, and Anna was in her quarters.
Everythi
ng was just as it should be.
Katrina walked to the bar and leant against it, nodding to the automaton. “Whisky. Straight up.”
She should probably drink something more nutritious to give her body the fuel to rebuild its reserves, but right now she needed a different type of reserve.
The automaton—whose name was Jeavons, by the indicator showing on her HUD—nodded and poured the drink, setting it on the bar.
Katrina grabbed it—carefully, getting used to the different sensations her fingers provided—and threw it back. The liquid burned its way down her throat, and she dropped the glass onto the bar.
“Another.”
Jeavons complied, and Katrina downed that glass in one gulp before standing and walking back to the autodresser. Its door slid open as she approached, and within, hanging from the armatures, was a long, brown, leather coat.
“Excellent,” Katrina said as she grabbed it and pulled it on. It hung perfectly from her shoulders, falling all the way to her ankles. She reached into the autodresser and grabbed the leather belt and holster that hung within, and buckled the belt around her waist.
“Now I just need something to put in you,” she mused and thought of the guard out front. She sent a signal over the Link, and he came into the room, his steps wooden and halting as she manipulated his limbs.
Katrina felt a moment’s regret for his suffering, but then images of the overseers whipping her, skin hanging off her body in strips, flashed before her eyes.
“The gun,” Katrina said, gesturing to the guard’s sidearm.
The man handed it over, and Katrina slid it into her holster before waving a hand at the guard. “As you were.”
He left the suite and resumed his position outside the entrance as Katrina walked back to Jeavons. “Another, if you don’t mind. I have a bit of time to kill…before I kill.”
THE CHANGE
STELLAR DATE: 01.19.8512 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Revenence Castle
REGION: Persia, Midditerra System
“At least we got a decent meal out of the trip,” Malorie said as the shuttle set down in its cradle behind the castle.
