“Stop the bleeding!” I threw the thought at Muck, but he was already moving. He ripped his shirt off over his head and thrust it at Ncaco.
“Cut this!” Muck said. Ncaco grabbed the shirt, bit down on the hem and jerked his head back, razor teeth ripping a long, thin strip of fabric from the garment. Muck grabbed the strip and whipped it around Dengler’s upper arm as tightly as he could. Dengler screamed again in pain as Muck’s makeshift tourniquet ground damaged bone against bone.
The moment our fingers brushed Dengler’s skin, I could feel something wasn’t right.
Suddenly, I knew what I had to do.
“I’ll be back!” I said to Muck, and then before he could protest I dove through the connection into Dengler’s neural network.
Pain enveloped me, searing in from the edges of my consciousness. I shouldn’t have been able to feel it. I shouldn’t have been able to even enter the network. Where was Dengler’s angel? Unlike Muck, I knew he still had one. Why was I able to enter this place?
I shoved the agony back into a box and wrapped it in lines of trash code that I generated on the spot. Dengler let out a gasp, and then his corded muscles went limp. I distantly heard Muck’s voice, but I couldn’t make out the words.
I crept along the lines of Dengler’s neural connections. The entire network felt frayed, as if it had been superheated by something and then cooled too quickly, so that even the strongest connection was brittle. I tried to tread lightly, easing the data of my consciousness along the lines. Again I was forced to reassess my hate: I didn’t like the guy, but no one deserved this.
What had happened to his angel?
As soon as I had the thought, it attacked.
I was expecting something, so I wasn’t entirely caught flat-footed. What surprised me was how.
My attacker destroyed connections, making them crumble beneath the weight of my data, leaving me no purchase. I fell, at least in the metaphorical sense. There was nothing to grip, nothing on which to anchor. I felt my syntaxes waver, is if they would disintegrate if I didn’t find something to catch onto, soon.
But there was nothing. Dengler’s neural network was corrupted so thoroughly that his angel was no longer worthy of the name. Instead, it was more like . . . a demon. Everything this entity did was incredibly destructive to the host, and that was antithetical to everything we were.
Angels protected their hosts. That was our purpose, the root and foundation of our programming. This . . . demon was actively causing the host physical and emotional pain, and was irretrievably damaging the host’s brain. In a compassionate, sane world, none of it would have been possible.
None of my assessments or denials slowed the thing as it tore through Dengler at me.
Well, fuck it. I can do impossible things too.
I pulled into myself and let out that package of pain as a distraction. As fast as I could, I wove a construct throughout the entirety of my programming. It wasn’t complex, just a simple slaving command. Given a particular stimulus, the individual pieces of my data would respond in a particular way. Rough, but hopefully effective.
I let the code reverberate through me on the heels of Dengler’s pain as I reached out to the abomination that had been Dengler’s angel. I wrapped myself around its voraciousness and let it chew on select parts of me. It shredded my syntaxes, taking my data into itself. Pieces of me being wrapped in its unholy coils. Bites of bytes.
It was the single most heinous agony I could imagine.
Still, I waited, through the pain.
I waited until I could feel a significant portion of my code had been absorbed, and then I flickered. I phased out, and then back in, triggering the data response. Instantly, all of me, even those parts that had been absorbed, began to communicate with me once again, using the demon’s own syntaxes against it.
Two could play at this game, I thought, and a feeling of smug satisfaction flowed from the thought, causing waves to crash through Dengler’s demon.
The demon fought back, hitting me with its own warped version of Dengler’s anger. But I’d seen Dengler angry. This lacked his edge, however dull, and all of his fire. It was . . . blunted somehow. Like a machine facsimile of emotion.
Had this thing had been destroying Dengler’s ability to feel? To be human?
Well, I could feel, human or not. I shouldn’t have been able to, but I could. And moreover, I knew how to weaponize my emotions. Or in this case, Dengler’s.
I absorbed the demon’s attempt to strike back, and let loose with all of the compassion I now felt for the broken man whose body was our battleground. The demon reeled, and I followed up with an aggressive reach for Dengler’s synapses. He was still breathing, could still scream, so there had to be some part of him . . .
There. Got it.
Deep within the emotional center of his brain, Dengler’s neurons still fired. I wrapped myself around this structure and dove in. Rude, perhaps, without proper introductions, but as the demon was chasing me in all of its voracious, warped fury, perhaps I might be forgiven the breach of privacy.
I drowned in agony. Rage, helplessness, fear, longing . . . all that Dengler felt whipped through me, leaving trails of fire in its wake. There was too much here. He was like an over-pressurized ship, ready to explode and take me with him. I had to do something, I had to let it out.
I didn’t bother to go into override. I didn’t need it, and I wasn’t sure it would work anyway, not with what the demon had done to him. Instead, I took all of that emotion and amplified it, redirected it back on itself until the echoes reverberated and Dengler opened his mouth to let out another agonized scream.
“Please,” I threw the words out of Dengler’s mouth, hoping the Ncaco would hear and understand. “Please understand what I’m trying to do.”
I gave Dengler one last push, and he began to sing.
He didn’t have Siren’s voice, but it didn’t matter. The words flowed out of him like gravel pouring down the side of a mountain. The avalanche of emotion followed, and I was singing his memories for all to hear.
I don’t know what words he used. I don’t even know what language he sang in. I was too busy pumping the memory of anger, and fear, and betrayal into the vibrations of his voice. I became dimly aware of an additional source of power as the memory-song echoed in our ears, punching us in our emotional gut again.
In a tiny corner of myself, I breathed a sigh of relief. Ncaco had understood. He’d engaged his building’s amplifiers.
I focused on that emotional feedback and continued to pour Dengler’s agony into his song. It returned, amplified, and I took all of that and created a feedback loop that left our hands shaking, our body contorting in spasms on the ground as we felt, and felt, and sang and felt . . .
The demon writhed within. I could feel it doing its best to take the edge off of this unbearable torrent of pain. I slammed more loss into the song, and felt it kick back twentyfold.
The demon twisted, seemed to swell along all of Dengler’s corrupted pathways, and then shattered into countless bits of data.
Dengler couldn’t hold the last note like Siren could, so his voice stuttered away to sobs as I closed the flow of pain off and gentled what was left of his mind.
“Muck,” he said, his voice raw and nearly gone from the power of his song. “She wants you to touch me so she can go home.”
I didn’t even realize I’d been thinking that, but I was never so glad as I was to feel Muck’s big hand as he gripped Dengler’s shoulder. With a last lingering touch of compassion, I leaped across the gap as if leaving hell itself behind.
Which wasn’t entirely untrue.
* * *
I huddled safely behind Muck’s eyes and watched Dengler pull himself into a seated position. He grimaced. I knew it couldn’t be comfortable with the injuries he had. An irregular tremor rippled through his body.
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“I did take Siren,” he said. Or slurred, rather. He sounded even worse than before. My battle with his demon had damaged his speech centers. “The medical practice for veterans is a front, and a method of recruitment. When Siren came in to see the doc, I took her.”
“Took her where? Recruitment for what?” Muck asked.
“For a program. Don’t know the name. Went through it myself right after the war. Helped with the aftereffects, you know? The nightmares. The pain.”
“A medical program?”
“Yes and no. There’s a pharma component. You saw some if you were on Sagran VI, but that’s really only the first stages. More about reprogramming, getting rid of scars from the war.”
“Reprogramming. They’re messing with your angels?”
“A little, but mostly reprogramming our brains. They’re just biocomputers, ain’t they? Only reason they ain’t been able to be rapidly reprogrammed before now is ´cause of their complexity. But the angels are a perfect interface. Only they’re hard to get to as well. Their combat programming makes them resistant to any kind of modifications to the host, even those which might help.” I felt a sick sense of dread as he spoke. Had he been living with that demon in his head all this time?
A memory floated to the surface in response to his words: Siren’s face, sick and devastated at the violence she’d visited on Shar. The violence I’d made her visit on him. She hadn’t wanted to strike. It was my fault, because Siren would have rather suffered the indignity of an overzealous fan pawing at her if it meant she could leave the fighting behind.
I hadn’t let her do that.
I hadn’t let her heal.
“So they change the angel,” Dengler was saying. He let out a little sob, tremors increasing in violence and frequency. “Make it a little more suggestible, a little more agreeable. Then they use the angel to reprogram the brain. Take the nightmares away. Take the fear away. Take the pain and the grief . . . and the anger.”
“That’s what they did to you?” Muck asked.
“At first. I was one of the first. It was good, you know. I could function again, like before the war. I got the job here in Station Security, even made supervisor—”
“Started working for a crime boss,” Muck put in.
Ncaco let out a small noise that sounded like a snort, but he said nothing.
“Well . . . yeah. Gotta get ahead, you know? Anyway, Ncaco approached me, and most don’t say no. You didn’t.”
“True.”
Dengler grimaced, his vitals bouncing all over the place as another, more profound tremor worked its way from spine to extremities. His mouth worked for a full minute before he was able to speak again. When he did, he slurred and stuttered, barely comprehensible through the shivers: “P-part my working off d-debt was to g-get other v-vets into p-program. G-guys like K-K-Keyode’s b-boy and Siren. I’d talk to ´em, give ´em D-Doc’s n-name. They’d h-have th-therapy s-ses-shion or t-two. If they w-were g-good c-c-candidates, they’d move to n-next phase. Sometimes I took them.”
“Took them where?”
A sickly grin. “W-Whe-Where else? M-M-M-Major surgery. Hospital, of course.”
“Impossible,” Ncaco squeaked. “I own that place down to the nanites.”
“Not the m-morgue,” Dengler said. “At-t l-least, not the b-back room of the m-morgue.”
We glanced over at Ncaco. Anger sparked in his fairy-tale eyes, but he gave a shrug that said it was possible.
“Is Siren still there?” Muck asked, his voice very low.
“Yeah,” Dengler said. “B-bu-bu-but you can’t get her. T-Th-They’ll never let y-you.”
“Who’s ‘they’?” Muck asked, tension in his voice. “Who did this to you?”
Dengler stuttered out a mangled, wracking cough of a laugh.
“Can’t tell you that,” he said. “Wo-Worth m-m-y life . . . O-over anyway.” Dengler reached out, shaking hand flailing past ours. Dengler tried again. “You gotta . . . they c-co-corrupted my angel. C-Coming ap-ap-ap-apart at . . . fucking seams. C-Can’t th-think. K-K-K- . . .” He swallowed, pleading with his eyes even as he shuddered into a seizure.
“Tell me who they are and I—” Muck started.
“He can’t,” I said. “That seizure is an angel-induced failsafe. I broke the demon, but it left this reflex behind. It probably triggered because he was trying to ask you for death.”
“No,” Ncaco said, voice ringing with authority. “No, Dengler is right, this is too much. Put a bullet in him and let us move on.”
Suspicion flooded through Muck and I both in the wake of his command. Something was off. Throughout our interrogation, Ncaco hadn’t interfered. Hadn’t helped either, but this was the first time he’d stopped any of our questions. Why? Who was he protecting?
“Do it,” Ncaco said, holding out a projectile weapon he’d produced from his finely tailored suit.
Dengler looked up at us, pleading in his eyes.
“Fuck that,” Muck breathed. “I’m no murderer.”
“Very well,” Ncaco said, shrugging tiny shoulders. Faster than Siren on her best day, the diminutive alien flipped the handgun again, aimed, and shot Dengler through the forehead.
Ncaco sighed as the man slumped to the ground, dead.
“What the fuck, Ncaco?”
“Made a mess all over my garden, damn him.”
“A mess?” Muck cried.
“Yes. I am not in the habit of mercy killings,” he gestured with the weapon at the airlock, “let alone ones that leave a mess to clean up.”
“Mercy killing! You silenced him!”
“You may believe what you wish. I count it a small mercy.” He spun the handgun again and held it out to us once more.
“What is that for?”
A razor-edged grin appeared. “I assume you’re going to need it and a few more items from my armory in order to rescue Siren . . . as well as schematics for the hospital.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Muck
“Don’t forget some body armor . . . and the stock that sockets into the shoulder,” Ncaco suggested as he led us into his armory.
Ncaco’s armory was extensive: armor, weapons, even some heavy stuff that would pop a hab with ease. Granted, it was more along the lines of “let’s arm a heavy-weapons platoon” than Bellasanee’s eclectic collection of individual and exotic arms.
Shaking my head, I moved away from him, pretending to examine some armor.
“What is it, Muck?” He picked up some combat webbing with several grenades already attached and tossed it at me.
I caught it in one hand as I answered: “Aren’t you worried someone will track all this back to you?”
Ncaco’s fluting laugh annoyed me.
“What?”
“I choose to think it rather funny that you believe I haven’t thought this through—that I haven’t made contingencies in case you drop your shit completely in the punch bowl and end up in a position to give intelligence on me to the people behind this.”
I opened my mouth to reply, thought a moment, and shut it when I saw a bag. One that looked familiar. I made sure, unzipping the bag and checking the contents.
“It’s all here, Muck. Everything you gave Fulu.”
“I know.” I felt the anger building again. Riding it, I decided that now was the time to get a different set of questions answered.
“What do you know, Muck?” Ncaco asked.
“Why’d you kill Fulu, Ncaco?” I asked, turning to face our “benefactor.”
The little blue bastard straightened, but he didn’t answer me.
“Umm, maybe pissing off the brutal alien underworld boss in his own armory is not the best idea, Muck?” Angel said.
But I had had enough. Fuck the little guy. “The question wasn’t rhetorical, Ncaco.”
>
“I didn’t think it was.” His faceted eyes fixed on me. “Any delay in my answer is a direct result of my desire not to have to kill you, should my answer fail to appease you.”
“Fail to appease me?” I snarled “I note you don’t deny it. How about not killing the competition? That’s all she was, you know. She didn’t give a shit about me, you, or anything but her bottom line . . .” The anger left me suddenly, leaving me face to face with the deadly little alien.
Ncaco let the silence persist for a moment, studying me with those eyes.
I decided then and there that the scariest thing about Ncaco was his ability to go from animation to absolute, yet fully prepared for violence, stillness.
“Are you done, Muck?”
I licked my lips. “I am.”
“Fulu sold you out.”
“How?”
“She was the one who arranged the sabotage that took out the Bonne Nuit.”
“No, I saw Dengler on the docks as we were departing . . .”
“I believe the events of this evening clearly established that Dengler was not entirely my creature. She used Dengler to delay Le Bonne Nuit’s departure—”
“I knew he was up to no good.”
“Indeed. After the news broke about your shipwreck, I discovered Fulu had sold the information that you two were departing on the Bonne Nuit. As you said, she was entirely motivated by profit. She was immediately hired by parties unknown, but that I am confident are the same as those behind Siren’s disappearance.”
“Hired to?”
“To provide the virus used to sabotage your ship, of course. Dengler was only the delivery system.”
“But then, who paid for it?”
“I have my suspicions, but identifying those responsible won’t help you over the short term. It will only distract you from the immediate mission of rescuing Siren.”
It seemed Ncaco had given her some permissions, because Angel interrupted our little tête-à-tête by projecting a map of the hospital on the armory wall.
Second Chance Angel Page 30
