The door to his cubby suddenly materialized before him. He peered at the number closely, even though it had been easy enough to find because it was the last door in a dead-end corridor. That was a nice touch. Whoever said hospital administrators didn’t have a sense of humor?
B/164/G. Home sweet home.
He rummaged through his pouch, pulling out the door key with a gray-gloved hand, watching that hand ’face it with the lock as if it were some unconnected piece of arcane machinery operating on its own.
The lock chirped acceptance and the door slid open. He shuffled in, slapping the plate to close it behind him. One nightcap—well, maybe two—and a check to see how his patient was doing. By pad, of course. There was no sense in taking a chance on killing the poor bastard by looking in on him after saving his life in the first place, That would kind of defeat the whole point of having come here, wouldn’t it?
Now if he could just remember the man’s name…
Had they even told it to him? Probably not.
It wasn’t until he turned toward the bed that he finally realized he was not alone in the room.
—
Scylla sat rigidly on the bed, waiting for her quarry to react to her presence.
No matter what he did, she was ready. If he tried to run, she would bring him down before he could get even halfway to the door. If he came at her, he would quickly learn what a deadly mistake it was to dare attack an angel.
But he only stood there, swaying slightly, staring at her so blankly that for a moment she wondered if he saw her at all.
His face was broad and rough-hewn, a craggy landscape of shadowed crevasses and eroded cliffs. Only a thinning gray-black fringe of hair clung to the back of his head. His lips were twisted into an odd half grimace that was habitual, judging by the deep grooves bracketing his mouth. He was of medium height, barrel-chested and blocky. She decided he was probably quite strong, even though his broad shoulders were slumped as if from years of grinding toil.
It was his gray eyes that bothered Scylla. They were flat and incurious. She saw nothing of herself reflected in them.
He appeared to be willing to stand there, unspeaking, unmoving, and unmoved, forever. Scylla was not used to people failing to react to her. She did not like it one bit.
“You are Dr. Georgory Marchey,” she said sharply. “You will do exactly as I say. I want you to sit down. Will you obey me, or must I demonstrate what will happen if you defy me?”
Marchey shrugged indifferently, but complied. He dropped heavily into the cubicle’s sole chair. “That’s an UNSRA-issue Armark Full Combat Exo you’re wearing,” he said blandly. “Aside from its armaments, it makes you at least fifteen times faster and thirty times stronger than me.”
“You have correctly judged my superiority over you,” Scylla said tightly, “But do not spout nonsense. I am an angel.”
Her prey gave her a mordant smile. “My mistake. I always expected my drinking to make me see pink elephants.” He leaned over to retrieve a bottle from the table beside him. “Speaking of drinking, would you care to join me in a nightcap?”
His refusing to take her seriously could not be tolerated. Scylla moved, a living lightning bolt as she came up off the bed, streaked across the room and snatched the bottle from his hand faster than the eye could follow.
Then slowly, deliberately, she crushed it to splinters in one silver-coated hand. The small cubby filled with the sharp tang of spilled alcohol. The shards tinkled to the floor.
“No?” Marchey said mildly, staring up into her face. It had been tattooed into a nightmarish red-and-black demon’s mask, a face designed to instill fear in the beholder. “Or are you just not particularly fond of gin?”
“What is the matter with you?” Scylla demanded, frustration turning her voice into a caustic hiss. “Are you stupid? Suicidal? What are you?”
Marchey stared unblinkingly back at her, his face empty of fear, empty of anything she could name.
“Thirsty,” he said.
This was not going at all the way Scylla expected.
Her world was a simple one, the rules unvarying and unbreakable, and her place in it clearly understood by one and all. People feared her because she was an angel. Angels are made to be feared; they are instruments forged in Heaven to make man comply with the Laws of God, and mete out punishment when those Laws are broken. Only one person in her life and world did not cringe in her presence, and that was Brother Fist. As she was His angel, it was only fitting that it was she who feared Him.
But this man she had been sent to fetch was no Chosen of God. He was an infidel, and she an angel. How could he look upon her and not be daunted?
Scylla knew exactly how she looked, and was proud of it. Her body was no unclean mass of soft, sagging, sweating flesh; she was polished, strutted, indestructible silver nearly head to toe. For her, nakedness was no shame. She was not cursed with a woman’s offensive parts to hide. Her groin was smooth, featureless, and unimpregnable. Her breasts were modest silver mounds without nipples to mark her as a suckling beast.
Her face was human-shaped and made of flesh, but it bore red-and-black God-marks etched into her very pores. Instead of hair, her skull was covered with gleaming silver. Her one green eye was human enough, for angels stand halfway between God and man. Her other, angel eye was an unblinking, ever-vigilant steel-framed glass lens. Brother Fist could look out through that eye, seeing His world through her when he wished, and it gave her sight in the darkness so that none could use it to escape the bringer of God’s Justice.
She shone like a sword of holy light, and yet this man Marchey was not blinded. He did not even blink.
She watched him pick up another bottle from the table. He drank from it, then offered it to her. “Come on, have a drink,” he said. “It’ll help you relax.”
She took it, but not to drink. As he started to withdraw his hand she clamped her other hand around his wrist. Her ceramyl talons hissed from their sheaths in the backs of her fingers and locked with a menacing snick, razor-sharp points dimpling the soft gray fabric of the glove he wore. Staring him straight in the eye, she squeezed. Not hard enough to crush, but more than enough to crack his infuriating indifference.
Much to her surprise his wrist was unyielding. The look of apathetic patience on his face never faltered.
Scylla frowned, red-scaled nostrils flaring. She squeezed harder. Hard enough to make him scream as bones of his wrist ground together. She was under strict orders to deliver him in one piece, but one way or another she was going to put him on his knees where he belonged, to look into his eyes and see the fear that belonged there.
Scylla knew her own strength. Her hands could crush granite to sand, twist and tear steel like putty. Yet his wrist was unyielding. His face showed nothing. Less than nothing.
She squeezed harder yet, her black-tattooed lips drawing back from teeth which had been filed to points and capped with a thin layer of bonded ceramyl. Their knife-sharp tips were bright bloodred.
Marchey cocked his head for a better look at her mouth. Against all reason, he smiled. “Nice touch,” he said. “Bet it hurts like a bastard if you bite your tongue.”
Scylla hissed in rising anger and baffled frustration. She dug her talons into his upper wrist and pulled. The cloth shredded like tissue under the ceramyl blades.
But instead of being rewarded with an agonized screech as his wrist was flayed to the bone, there was a shrill skreeeeeeee that vibrated up her arm and set her teeth on edge. Still he stared back at her, looking… amused.
Although it felt like a minor defeat, she dropped her gaze. Scraps of gray cloth dangled from her talons. His hand and wrist were silver—a silver exactly like her own angel skin. Her ceramyl blades were sharp and hard enough to slash through plate steel like cardboard, but they had not put so much as a scratch on the gleaming surface of his wrist and arm.
Her forehead furrowed, baffled by this impossibility.
When she looked up at his face
again he was grinning at her.
“Surprise,” he said, daring to laugh at her. At her!
“Surprise yourself,” she snarled.
Then she shot him point-blank in the chest.
—
Marchey came to, shook his head groggily.
That proved to be a serious mistake. His brain felt like it had been sucked out his eye sockets, macerated, and squeezed back into his skull through the hole bored in the middle of his forehead. He moaned as it sloshed turgidly with every move he made.
Behind him someone laughed, a harsh sound that drove a blunt harpoon in one ear and out the other. A female someone? His memory coughed up a hazy picture of a one-eyed silver chimera.
Incapable of making any sense of that, he squinted at his surroundings. He recognized the high-backed chair under him, feeling a little better when he realized that he was in the familiar confines of the courier ship that had been his only real home for the past few years.
The main board was about three meters away. He managed to focus one bleary eye on the flight-status stack.
He was in transit.
That was strange. He didn’t remember—
“We are on our way to Ananke.”
That woman’s voice again. Maybe he wasn’t imagining it. He flirted with vertigo getting his chair swivelled around to find its source.
The silver-armored amazon with the hideously tattooed face hadn’t been a hallucination after all. She was sitting at his galley table. Drinking coffee, from the smell.
“Good for us,” he mumbled, fishing in his pouch for an analgesic. His fingers found only the bottom. It had been emptied.
She held up the purple foilpak he’d been searching for. “Are you looking for these?”
“Desperately.” He heaved himself to his feet, grimacing as the contents of his head ebbed and surged, and stood there a moment to regain the hang of standing before trying to walk. He felt his chest with his gloveless hand. It felt bruised and tender, like he had been hit in the sternum with a sledgehammer.
“I… remember you shooting me. Disruptor?” That plus all the booze he’d drank would explain the monster hangover.
“God’s Wrath.” Marchey watched the woman’s face harden. It was not a pretty sight. “You will feel it again if you give me the slightest trouble.” She held up one silver arm. A bracer—a detachable weapons package interfaced with the exo’s systems and her own nervous system—was wrapped around it. There was another one around her other arm. This meant she was almost as heavily armed as a small platoon. He got the message.
“Perish the thought.” He tottered toward her. “Can I have one of those, please,” he asked, reaching for the pak. “Or is torture part of this package tour?”
She stared at him a long moment. “I am no torturer.” She flipped it at him. “To rely on such things is weakness.”
Somehow he managed to catch it. He popped out a derm and pasted it over his carotid artery. He closed his eyes, waiting for the high-powered analgesics to work their sweet magic.
Hangovers were business as usual, but the aftereffects of being shot with a disruptor made him feel as though every neuron were nearing nuclear fission. After a few moments he slumped and sighed as a soothing tide washed through him. He opened his eyes, moved his head experimentally. The brain-slop was gone. Once more he was nearly capable of what passed for rational thought.
Well, that could be remedied easily enough.
He managed a wan smile. “Thanks. I hope you didn’t have to break any Kidnappers’ Union rules to do that. I just can’t rise and shine the way you do.”
Although the tattoos made dragonesque fury its natural expression, Marchey found that he could still tell real anger when it appeared on her face. It showed in the curl of her black-webbed lips, the flare of her scaled nostrils, in the cold flash of that one green eye.
“Do not take me lightly, little man,” she warned, her voice brimming with unmistakable menace. “I will make you regret it.”
It was no mental feat to deduce that being feared was of cardinal importance to her. It explained the face, the teeth, the combat exo, the attitude. He supposed he should be more careful about what he said to her. But when he got right down to it, he just didn’t give a damn. Screw her if she couldn’t take a joke.
Still, he could be polite. After all, how often did he have company?
He held up his hands in a placating gesture. “I don’t doubt that you could tear off my head, squeeze it flat, and eat it like a brain sandwich. I don’t plan on trying to overpower you. I’m a surgeon, not a fighter. Besides, I interned in a UNSRA military hospital for a while, and helped install a couple shock troopers in exos like yours. I know how they work and what they can do.”
His kidnapper glared at him. “You spout nonsense again. I told you before, I am an angel. Do not forget it.”
Marchey shrugged. “Whatever you say.” He slid into the seat across from her, ordered a cup of coffee. There was a bottle of brandy in the condiment well next to the dispenser. A liberal dollop went into his cup, then he offered it to her. “Want some breakfast?”
She shook her head, looking displeased by his offer. Probably a teetotaler
“Suit yourself.” He put the bottle down within easy reach.
“Do you spend all of your time drunk?” she demanded.
“Define all.” He took a cautious sip of his laced coffee. “Define time. Define drunk.” Another sip, peering at her over the rim of his cup. “It’s a semantic minefield. You could lose a foot just thinking about it.”
Not even a hint of a smile. If she had a sense of humor, it was better armored than her body.
“Are you really a doctor?” She made the word doctor sound like it described something strange and hideous, perhaps even evil and perverse. Are you really a lycanthropic necrophile?
He hunched his shoulders in a stillborn shrug. “Depends on whom you listen to, I guess.”
That wasn’t a subject he particularly wanted to get into this early or this sober.
“What kind of kidnapper are you, my angel?” he asked to change the subject. “What do you expect to get for me? And are you going to tell me your name, or should I just call you Madame Shanghai?”
“Only one question has any meaning. My name is Scylla.”
Marchey’s ears pricked up at her name. “Ah, were you once a fair maiden, now changed into a monster?”
Scylla’s frown deepened. “What do you mean by that?”
“Greek mythology.” No reaction. Apparently not a devotee of classical literature. Not many were.
“Homer’s Odyssey,” he explained. “Scylla was a fair young maiden who was changed into a monster. Twelve legs like tentacles. Six heads, each with a triple row of fangs, and a taste for sailors. Let’s see… ‘God or man, no one could look upon her in joy.’ That was poor Scylla after the sorceress Circe was done with her. Circe saw her as a rival for the love of a merman named, um, Glaucus. Turning her into a monster made her a lot less lovable.”
Scylla said nothing. There was no way for Marchey to tell what—if anything—she was thinking. His spiked coffee had cooled. He took a long swallow, then asked, “Did someone give you that name?”
“Brother Fist,” she said, an instant later looking confused. All expression drained from her face, and she sat there staring sightlessly past him like a robot which had encountered circumstances outside the scope of its programming.
His curiosity mildly piqued, and the brandy beginning to bring back the familiar comfortable buzz, Marchey settled back to see what happened next.
—
“Brother Fist.”
His name was the center of all Scylla was and did. She had uttered it a million times or more. But the moment she spoke it in answer to the infidel’s question—a question no one had ever asked her before— a sudden wrenching duality swept over her, her solid sense of self inexplicably straining in two directions and leaving her lost in the middle.
She
had always been Scylla.
Brother Fist named me.
She was an angel.
{—a blurred glimpse of a face. Small. White. In a… mirror?}
She served Brother Fist.
{—another face. Bigger. Beautiful.} (I love you, Angel. Love you.)
Brother Fist spoke God’s Will.
(Remember, Angel. I love you. Love you.)
His voice was God’s voice, His words God’s words.
(ANGEL IS DEAD. DEAD. YOUR NAME IS SCYLLA. SCYLLA. YOU ARE AN ANGEL. ANGEL. YOU WILL LOVE ME. LOVE ME. YOU WILL OBEY ME. OBEY ME. WHAT ARE YOU?)
An angel! she screamed silently, trying to drown the bewildering cacophany of voices inside her head. She was and had always been the angel Scylla! All else was deception!
Life is an endless battle against the lies and deceptions cast by the forces of darkness to lure the weak in faith and spirit from the One True Path.
Brother Fist had warned her of that a thousand times. Unholy evil was everywhere, made in the very flesh and marrow of every man and woman. Even an angel was human enough to be prey to it.
Doubt assailed her. Was she too weak for the task Brother Fist had given her?
He had ordered her away from her place at His side. Commanded her to leave the safe Eden of Ananke and venture into the Profane World to bring this infidel Marchey back to Him. The impious temptation to argue with His edict had been terrible. It went against her every instinct to leave Him vulnerable and unprotected.
Still, He was Brother Fist, and she was His angel.
His will was always to be done. Disobedience was blackest blasphemy.
So she had meekly obeyed, command deciding the conflict.
Deciding, but not resolving. She had left her home and risked her life and soul to capture Marchey, but that conflict was a smoldering ember of doubt buried deep in one chamber of her heart.
An ember that made her wonder what possible use this drunken infidel could be to him. Which led her to wonder—
—could Brother Fist have been… wrong?
That thought triggered a convulsive burst of pain and nausea, cramping her insides like some fatal poison. Her body stiffened, every muscle twisting into a quivering knot. The cup she held in her silver hands shattered as they clenched into fists.
Flesh and Silver Page 8
