Augment

by C R MacFarlane

  Again, fire raced through Sarrin’s veins, suddenly adding pulsating blue and red to the rolling blackness. Despair washed over her — they would never get out alive. She dropped to her knees, and though the torn-apart ceiling she caught sight of the soldiers below and a pulsing blue orb.

  Thomas took a laz-rifle from one of Hoepe’s men, lifting it to his shoulder and shooting. Two others joined him, spraying laz-fire through the hole. The bolts hit their targets, only the guards didn’t fall. Laz-beams landed on their chests, and they barely flinched. The crawlspace came alive with shooting light once more as the guards returned fire.

  Grant fashioned a pulse bomb out of one of the rifles and threw it down. Heat from the explosion melted the edges of the steel-plastique, but the guards were unrelenting. “Limpets,” he said. The same flesh-material that made up Grant’s suit — they had turned it into armour for their soldiers.

  “We’ll have to fight our way out,” Grant shouted. “Their armour is impervious to energy weapons, but it’s not immune.” She remembered the piece of suit she ripped apart with her hands, shuddering. They would have to do the same. “How many, Sarrin?’

  She shook her head. They could see ten through the hole, but there were more. So many more. Her mind was too jumbled to count them all, it was all she could do to hold onto herself.

  Grant crouched by the edge, others assembling behind him with the few rifles they had. He signalled, and they jumped as one. Laz-fire shot at him from behind, even as he spun and took out the two nearest guards. Without warning, he collapsed, the second skin exploding from his back.

  He laid still, fingers twitching. The other three Augments fell to the ground.

  Sarrin took a ragged breath. If Grant lost himself to their mind control….

  He turned his head toward her, his one eye visible through the jagged tear in the mottled skin. The look in his eyes was foreign: fear, raw and unfettered. He winked at her in code, a number: one-hundred-fifty-six.

  Another group prepared, launching through the ceiling unarmed. Someone landed a shattering hook, but the guard only staggered back before lifting his laz-rifle and shooting her point blank in the chest. The Augment fell and did not move again.

  “Gods,” muttered a girl still in the tiny island of ceiling beside Sarrin.

  “We have to run, all together,” Thomas said in a panic.

  They were trapped, beyond a doubt, no weapons besides themselves. No other option. They had strength in numbers, some of them would die, but some would pass.

  Only once before had they found themselves facing such desperate odds — when reprogrammed Augments had been sent to seek and destroy their hideouts during the war. Sarrin clung to the steel truss, bending it with her grip. Don’t lose yourself.

  Thomas leapt through the laz-fire, the others following closely.

  She pressed her head into the truss, desperate for something solid as the trance crowded in.

  Augments fell. Many kept running. Thomas stooped to pick up Grant and pushed him ahead.

  A guard shouted, and the UEC laz-fire stopped. She knew it would.

  She crouched alone in the ceiling. In a second, Grant turned, his eye meeting hers. She shook her head slowly, and his one visible eye widened slightly as he understood her meaning.

  The guards turned their laz-fire upwards, circling, slowly chipping away at what remained of the platform.

  She closed her eyes, pulling up the image of Kieran and Halud. There would be no saving her, but, the others, if they were smart, would run. A strange calm came over her. No more fighting. The trance dissipated and her body felt light.

  It was always inevitable, wasn’t it, in the end?

  She held the truss, even as the ceiling under her fell away. Even as laz-fire grazed her side. It didn’t matter now, the black hole that had always been sucking her in pulled inescapably, a finish line, the event horizon. Maybe she could have a night’s rest without dreams.

  She waited for the final laz-bolt. It would be a close shot aimed mid-back, between the eighth and ninth rips, slightly to the left. A killing blow.

  She had strangled Kieran, shot Grant. She was a monster, she couldn’t help it, it was in her DNA. Such aberrations deserved to be omega. A smile cracked across her face, imaging Kieran there to crack some absurd joke. Knowing peace would come.

  Her muscles faltered, her hand slipping from her hold. She closed her eyes as she fell. She landed with a hard thud. Pain ripped through her body. Five of the glowing blue orbs surrounded her, their power thrumming loudly in her ears. A hundred-odd laz-rifles pointed down.

  She laid on the ground, too tired to fight back.

  A man limped toward her, his silver cane clunking on the ground, step-step-clack, hideous scar running from above his right eye all the way to his jawline.

  Panic tore through her. She yelled at her body to get up, to flee, but it couldn’t. Even the monster was quiet. She heard herself scream.

  He signalled with his hand, and the energy field intensified, filling her with despair. Guitteriez’s sadistic grin filled her vision as the flames consumed her.

  SEVENTEEN

  SPARKS EXPLODED ACROSS THE ENGINE room, and Kieran swore under his breath. The Kepheus Drive swung dangerously back and forth where part of its makeshift supports had given way. Lifting his arm up to protect his face, he ran in and shook the drive — no rattle. Only disconnected then, not cracked. Thank God.

  The ship rocked, nearly knocking his feet out from under him as he secured the drive and re-attached the conduits. His fingers punched the console so hard they hurt.

  The FTL failed to power up. He tried again, by-passing safety checks. Nothing.

  He crawled inside the engine, wishing for Sarrin — she at least fit inside the thing. He lifted a panel, smoke billowing around him. “Jesus,” he swore. Heaving himself back out, he checked the conduit under the floor. The relays were on fire, smoking from the inside.

  Bad. Very, very bad.

  Reaching for the nearest console, he called the bridge. “The relays are fried,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady. Even his wildcard of a father wouldn’t have had a solution for this.

  On the other end of the comm call, Hoepe hesitated. “What does that mean?”

  “It means they can’t carry the energy from the engine to the graviton emitters. No FTL.”

  “So, you’re saying?”

  “I have replacements. Some anyway. But it will take me a few hours.”

  “We can’t jump out of here.” Silence hung between them. “Get started, Kieran.”

  Short of a better idea, he ran to the storage room. They kept two replacement relays, even though the ship needed eight. Huge long, heavy things. The lines weaved through the ship, almost impossible to damage, but the surge coming through the modified shields had hit them in just the wrong way.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to remember to breathe. He’d never written that letter home. The ship jerked out from under him again.

  Kieran dripped with sweat, chest straining as he heaved the conduit across the deck. He had to work faster.

  “Kieran!” Hoepe called him again. “We can see the shuttles.”

  “What?” He dropped the conduit and glanced up at the console. The shuttles carrying the Augments from Junk — carrying Sarrin — were docking. They were still alive. He called out, “I need Sarrin’s help right away, and anyone else.”

  “I’ll send her,” replied Hoepe.

  Pulling the conduit into the engine room, he lifted up the floor panels and dropped down on top of the burnt relays. He grunted, detaching the first conduit from the engine. He strained with the second, the valve sealed from years of FTL jumps.

  As he strained, a stream of people — Augments presumably — came into Engineering. They automatically moved to display consoles lining the main engineering bay, talking quickly and quietly to each other.

  “Hey,” he called out. A burst of sparks from the engine punctuated his sho
ut, making him duck.

  Several of the men and women ran into the engine room, stopping at the doorway. Their eyes went wide at the sight of so much smoke.

  “I need help replacing these relays,” he said, pointing at the stuck valve in front of him and the coiled conduit on the floor. Twelve sets of bright blue eyes stared at him, but none that he knew. “Where’s Sarrin?”

  They looked between each other, hesitant. Grant appeared in the doorway, his face haunted.

  A terrible feeling washed over Kieran. “Where’s Sarrin?”

  Grant turned away without answering, the back of his shirt torn and bloody.

  Blindly, Kieran jumped up. His body shook as he pushed through the crowd. “Sarrin? Sarrin?” he called, surging forward.

  Grant put a hand on his arm, stopping him. “She fell.”

  Kieran spun around and shoved him. Hard. “Did you kill her?” He felt sick, his thoughts firing in so many different directions he felt numb.

  “No — no, she fell.” Grant swallowed. “She was captured.”

  She fell. She was captured. The words echoed, the only thoughts he could discern in the jumble.

  “How?” Sarrin who could run a kilometre in three minutes and count her enemies through a solid wall. His hands clenched at his sides. It didn’t make sense.

  “It was a trap. I didn’t realize it. One of the UECs filthy, elaborate traps. They were waiting for us.”

  He stared, pulse pounding in his ears, trying to make sense of it. Something inside of him snapped. He punched Grant as hard as he could. “You said it would be simple!”

  Grant put his hands up. “I didn’t know.”

  “She didn’t want to go, but you made her.” He threw another blind punch. Augments crowded around, but Kieran no longer cared what he said or kind of a scene he made. “You and your stupid plan. You didn’t listen. None of us did.”

  “There are always casualties in battle.”

  Kieran pulled back, blinking. “Is she —?” Somehow, he couldn’t picture her dead.

  Grant looked away.

  “You just left her there.” Kieran’s vision went white with rage. Grant could kill him with one blow, but it didn’t even matter. All sense had flown out the viewport. All worry of keeping a low profile, of not interfering, went with it.

  “She’ll be okay,” Grant said.

  “They’re gonna kill her,” he screamed. “She said so herself, it’s her they want. They want to destroy her.” He lunged forward, but three sets of hands clamped onto his back, holding him.

  Grant took a step forward. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re the only one who cared. If I thought I could have saved her, I would have. Now, I have to live watching her fall over and over and over.”

  Kieran staggered back, cold regret suddenly pulling all the air from his lungs. “I shouldn’t have gotten so upset.” But it was his fault too. He could have told Grant or Hoepe what he had seen in the cargo bay. He could have pushed harder when he saw the worry plain on her face. But he’d let her go. He’d wanted the Augments on board and wanted to believe she could get them there, so when she stepped onto that shuttle, blue eyes pleading with him, he’d done nothing.

  And now she was gone.

  He drew in a deep breath, forcing his emotions down. He couldn’t afford to let this become personal, not now. Don’t interfere. Observation only.

  He missed home so badly. He wanted to see his mom and brother again, to run through the engine banks with his dad. But he was here too, part of the crew, whether he’d planned to be or not. Somehow, he had let it happen.

  The ship rocked violently, sending them all staggering.

  “That burned into Deck 3,” someone cried, reading off a console.

  “Kieran,” called Hoepe over the comm, “we can’t survive another direct hit like that.”

  Kieran gave Grant a warning look. “We’ll figure this out later.”

  * * *

  The ship rocked violently as Rayne climbed the last step to the bridge. She gripped the doorframe to keep from tumbling over on weak legs. She had watched Sarrin fall. Seen her disappear into the grip of over a hundred heavily armed UEC soldiers. And she had turned her back and run.

  A dark-haired girl pushed past her and into the pilots seat. She took the steering sphere in her hands and the ship levelled out. There were Augments all around, manning multiple consoles. They talked in urgent voices, trying to survive the warship attack the same as anyone.

  “Shields are down,” reported a short, muscular man at Tactical.

  Rayne leapt up beside him, elbowing him out of the way so she could spread her hands over the console. This was her ship, after all; no one knew its systems better than she did. She coaxed a little more out of the shields. “Shields back to twenty-percent.”

  The pilot spun the sphere casually, a laz-cannon burst flying harmlessly past them.

  Hoepe hit the comm. “Kieran, where’s that FTL?”

  Kieran’s reply sounded strained, far away. “Sarrin is still down there.”

  Rayne shut her eyes. She had left Sarrin helpless, moments after the girl had lifted her from certain death. Death. At the hands of the UECs.

  “What?” Hoepe stared at the console.

  Grant shouted, “It was a trap, Hoepe.”

  “Keep working on the FTL.”

  “We can’t leave her here.”

  “We have to lose this warship.”

  “I’m worried if we jump, we might not make it back.”

  “Kieran, the FTL.”

  “Even if we jump, there’s no predictin’ how many jumps the Kepheus has left in ‘er. Or what the warship will do when we leave.”

  “We’re going to be blown apart. Then we won’t be able to help anybody.”

  “I won’t leave her.” Kieran’s quiet voice hung in the room.

  Hoepe scrubbed a hand over his face. “Lieutenant,” he chided.

  “We can’t leave her there,” said Rayne. Even if she was an Augment, even if it went against the Gods. “We have to go back.”

  Hoepe turned to her, both eyebrows drawn with a deep furrow etched between them.

  “She went down and got all your friends,” Rayne explained. “You have to get her out too.”

  His head tilted in a nearly imperceptible nod. But he closed his eyes and shook his head. “It’s too dangerous. We have to escape before the warship destroys us.”

  Rayne slammed her open palms on the console, voice raising an octave. “Too dangerous?”

  He frowned again. “Do you want to go back out there in a shuttle? Go back to the base and find her?”

  “Yes, I do,” shouted Rayne. She looked at the men and women around her. “Sarrin is our friend. She saved our lives. I would have died if it weren’t for her. You can’t think we’re going to just leave her there.”

  Hoepe’s head tilted again, angling to the side, and his eyes narrow, this time in confusion.

  “That place was no work of the Gods,” she said, more to herself than to him. She suppressed a shudder thinking of her brief glimpse at rows and rows of cells, the armed platoon in what should have been a research lab, at the unrelenting attack as they all cowered in the ceiling. She saw the injuries and the deep seated horror painted on the faces around her. “I don’t know who those people are, but Sarrin is not safe there.”

  “She’s right,” said an Augment to her left. “We can’t leave Twenty-seven. You saw how she was affected by their new weapon.” Others nodded.

  “New weapon?” Hoepe’s eyebrows shot up.

  “A bioenergetic pulse,” said the Augment. “She just crumpled.”

  Hoepe rubbed a hand across his temples.

  “That was Twenty-seven?” said another Augment. A murmur passed through the crowd. “After everything she’s done for us, we have to help her.”

  Hoepe shook his head. “She’s probably already dead. And we will be soon.” As though to accentuate his point, the ship shook with another blow
from the warship’s laz-cannons.

  Rayne gripped the edge of the console. “I refuse to believe that.”

  Pointing his arm at the viewscreen where supercharged laser beams criss-crossed the darkness, Hoepe growled, “We can’t fight our way out.”

  “We don’t have to,” said Rayne. “Those are UEC ships, they serve the Gods.”

  All eyes on the bridge turned to her.

  “They’re trying to kill us,” said Hoepe.

  “They’re following orders.”

  “Rayne,” — he rubbed his temples again — “that’s no righteous UEC ship. They’re hunting us. They know what’s going on in that facility and they’re a part of it.”

  She shook her head. “You don’t know that.”

  “They’re all the same,” said Hoepe, “filthy, rotten, soulless.”

  Rayne stuck out her lower jaw, working it back and forth. Somebody had to follow the Path and do the right thing. She pushed in the command codes before Hoepe could take the two long strides to her station. “Warship Comrade, this is UECAS Ishash’tor,” she sent her hail. “Please acknowledge. We are not your enemy.”

  The bridge went silent, the viewscreen dark. “They’ve stopped firing,” breathed an Augment.

  Rayne pressed the controls again. They may have stopped firing, but they hadn’t responded. She needed to tell them about Sarrin. “Please, acknowledge. Comrade, this is Ishash’tor. We request assistance with a rescue operation.”

  More silence. “Comrade. This is Commander Rayne Nairu of UECAS Ishash’tor, daughter of Oleander Nairu, First General to the Speakers of the Gods. You are in violation. Please acknowledge. Acknowledge.” Why weren’t they responding? She clenched her hands to stop them from shaking.

  The Augment beside her tapped in a series of commands, peering at the console. “It looks like they’re standing down.”

  Rayne let out a sigh. “See, we’re not all bad.” She smiled at the Augment beside her.

  Hoepe raised a single eyebrow, a twitch of a smile turning up on his lips. “I can’t believe it.”

  Rayne shrugged, suppressing her grin. Now they could go home. And better yet, they could reveal the truth about the Augments: they were alive and they weren’t ruthless killing machines. They were people following the Path of the Gods just like everyone else.