by Rick Partlow
I managed to free my left-hand talons and jab them to the hilt into his right side. He screamed, and I used the sudden shift of leverage to wedge my knee into his groin and flip him over my head. I tried to get to my feet, but then the hard surface of the pad rushed up to smack into us and everything was black...
Interlude: Trint
Trint heard the approaching footsteps and took refuge in a recessed corner to let the squad of Fleet Intell commandos pass. He bore them no ill will...in fact, he was impressed with the foresight that whoever was in charge of the raid had shown by holding something in reserve. But he wasn't willing to expose himself to Terrans who had probably served in the war and would assume him an enemy.
That event could keep him from accomplishing his remaining goal in life during the time he had remaining. It wasn't the wound in his chest that worried him; the warhead had done only minor damage to his organs despite the ugly hole it had produced. No, his only concern was the explosive in his cerebellum. Damiani had slipped away, and unless he could kill the man within the next twenty-six minutes and stop the transmission from his headcomp, that device would put an end to his short and unusual life.
Once the coast was clear, Trint moved back into the corridor and took off at a quick jog of only about fifty kilometers an hour. The hallways of the installation were cast into an eerie relief by the emergency chemical "ghostlights" that had come on with the failure of main power---Trint had heard the distant explosions that he assumed had been the commandos taking out the generators. The lack of light didn't overly concern him; he raced through the labyrinth like a homing missile.
He knew where the man would go, much as the Corporate Executive Director had tried to conceal his escape preparations. He had a cutter in a cold orbit, with all power shut down, and a small orbital flyer concealed at the perimeter of the dome, built into the outer skin. Trint had to reach it before he did...he knew that Damiani could activate the explosive just as easily from orbit, and wouldn't hesitate to do it. He didn't believe that the signal would be effective over interstellar distances, as Damiani had hinted before, but he couldn't take that chance---it would violate his basic programming.
Much as he wanted to help Rachel Mitchell and her husband, he could not ignore the threat of his own destruction. He managed to make his way to the other side of the dome without confronting any of the Commonwealth troops, though he very nearly ran smack into the middle of a raging firefight between the commandos and Damiani's Executive Bodyguards at one point. The Corporate guards seemed to be getting the worst of it, which he found particularly gratifying. He understood having that kind of implantation and augmentation if it was forced on you by the necessity of a war, but he found it intensely disgusting that one would do it so as to become a sell-sword mercenary. He realized, however, that his particular situation might color his opinions on the subject.
He managed to sneak by the battle, ducking through a utility storage area, and soon reached the perimeter of the dome. Coming up around the curve of the structure, he was brought up short by the sound of strident human voices. He edged around the corner until he could see three of the Executive Guards gathered around Andre Damiani, arrayed around a maintenance hatch that Trint knew to lead to the man's escape shuttle.
"You're not leaving us here," one of the Guards was saying, gesturing meaningfully with his pulse carbine. "Our contract didn't include dying for you...or spending the next millennium in a penal colony."
"Don't be a moron!" Damiani snapped, seemingly unintimidated by the show of force. "So long as I'm free, I can undo anything they've done! Simply surrender...within two months, you'll be back at your jobs and these peons will be the ones breaking rocks for a living."
The lead Guardsman seemed to be wavering, but Trint couldn't wait for them to make up their minds...if he did, Damiani would be gone. He wished, for a moment, that he'd been equipped with the implant weapons that were so prevalent among the humans, but his Tahni designers had preferred the flexibility to mount different armaments externally without the need for separate internal energy feeds.
Still, as the Sacred Book said, a wise warrior wishes only for a brave death. He'd have to use the weapons available to him, and he'd have to take out the guards first, or risk being shot in the back. He burst from his hiding place at a full sprint, barely visible to a natural eye, and slammed into the nearest of the Corporate elite. The human was wearing Reflex Armor and sporting a hardened skeleton and bionic joints, but he was caught flat-footed by the savage attack and took the cyborg's flying kick flush in the chest. The Guard was smashed into the wall, and his pulse carbine popped free of his hands and into Trint's.
When the Tahni touched down, he swung around with the carbine and sent a burst directly through the faceplate of the Guard who had been arguing with Damiani. The last of the elite troopers had a moment to react, and she used it to squeeze the trigger of her pulse carbine, emptying the weapon's magazine in a sweeping arc that pocked the wall behind them and shattered the muzzle of Trint's appropriated weapon before catching him across the left leg. The laser blasts burned away cloned flesh from the Tahni's thigh, but they weren't sufficient to penetrate his duralloy endoskeleton, and they missed the thermoplastic muscles that flanked the artificial femur.
Realizing that his own laser had been ruined by the wild burst, Trint used the carbine like a club, first smacking the woman's own weapon out of her hands, then reversing it and smashing the buttstock through her faceplate. Blood and transplas fragments flew as the helmet was knocked off and she staggered back into the wall...and that was when Trint noticed that the maintenance hatch was yawning open, and Damiani had escaped through it.
Roaring a Tahni curse, the cyborg grabbed the dazed Executive Guard by the shoulder and thigh, lifted her high above him and threw her head-first into the opposite wall. She impacted with a wet crunch, her skull splitting open satisfyingly, but the cyborg didn't wait around to watch the results of his gory coup-de-grace; instead, he ducked through the open hatch, intent on his pursuit of the man whose death could keep him alive.
The maintenance tunnel was narrow and low, forcing Trint to run hunched over through its dark passages, but it was mercifully short. Less than a hundred meters from its entrance was the compact, lifting-body shape of the shuttle, set sideways in the wall of the dome on a swing-out platform---and he didn't need the rush of outgoing air whistling by him at increasing pitch to tell him that it was already halfway open.
Trint could feel the bitterly cold, caustic atmosphere leaking through as the air in the tunnel rushed out with the force of a hurricane, sending a hail of loose bits of trash and metal fragments lashing at him, but it was nothing against the futile rage that burned inside him. He didn't know whether to call it a survival instinct programmed into him by his creators or just raw, unplanned-for emotion, but he could feel it pulsing inside him and he had to act.
The platform wasn't yet all the way down, but Damiani had already lit the shuttle's take-off jets, trying to get out of the dome before his former slave could reach him. The heat from the flaring hydrogen rockets washed over the Tahni, but he ignored it as he did the cold, sprinting across the meters between him and the shuttle and throwing himself onto the edge of its wing just as it began to lift from the platform.
He sank his duralloy-boned fingers into the heat-resistant thermoplastic shielding that covered the wing, trying to hold on as the little ship jolted free of the dome, rising jerkily on twin columns of fire as Damiani attempted to shake off his tormenter. Trint's legs swung crazily across the surface of the wing, but he managed to keep his tentative hold, despite the gyrating of the shuttle. The little aerospacecraft swung out over the landing pad, climbing to nearly twenty meters above it---before ice began to form on the wings.
It was ice, not the solid hydrochloric acid that sometimes precipitated on the uninviting base---the moisture in the dome's atmosphere had condensed and then frozen, and the ice was filling in the indentations Trint's fingertip
s had dug into the wing's surface. His hold on the flyer gave way with sickening slowness, and he found himself sliding backward off the wing and dropping nearly twenty meters to the graphite below.
The cyborg landed hard on his back, feeling some of his support organs burst from the impact. It didn't matter, he thought, lying face-up on the pad. He didn't need the biological material to survive short-term---and his hope for long-term survival was rising quickly through the atmosphere, trailing tongues of white fire.
The Commonwealth ships might capture him before Damiani could make it to his cutter, but it would be too late. Trint was, effectively, dead. It was an oddly peaceful feeling. There were no programming directives to cover the situation, and he somehow felt that he had overcome his programming and become his own master. It had come a bit late, of course.
He rose from his prone position at the flash of light and subdued roar from behind him on the landing pad, and saw the star courier rising from the pad. He instantly knew it must be Roger West's escape ship, and thought it was amusing that the two men most responsible for all this would get away with their lives. A human, he reflected, would think it a gross miscarriage of justice; while a Tahni priest would shrug it off as the will of the Emperor---not the decadent fleshly shell that had run from the advancing Terran troops at the end of the war, but the immortal spirit ruler that supposedly inhabited him.
Trint had just decided that he preferred the human view when the wedge-shaped star courier's belly jets cut off, it listed to the side and plunged back to the pad, crashing only a few meters from the edge, less than thirty meters from where Trint rested. He was surprised the fusion reactor didn't rupture or the hydrogen tanks blow, but the craft merely split amidships, sending up a cloud of vapor, steam and bits of plastic and metal.
The Tahni watched with open curiosity, wondering what human god had brought about this fortuitous turn of events. He rose to his feet, intent on getting a better look at the crash, and then someone staggered out of the gap in the hull, falling to one knee beside it. The human was wearing a suit of byomer Reflex Armor, complete with a face-covering EVA helmet of the kind you might find in the locker of a star courier, but Trint knew the heartbeat and the body shape...it was Roger West.
Maybe, he reconsidered, there was justice after all.
Interlude: Cowboy
The only thing Roger West could think of once he recovered from the initial shock of the fall was air. His bronchial passages and lung tissue was already beginning to blister from the chlorine in the atmosphere, and his reserves of oxygen were perilously close to exhausted. He ignored the possible danger from Mitchell and concentrated on finding the EVA locker. It had broken loose from its moorings during the crash and was lying on its side in the middle of the equipment bay. Wrenching it open, he found what he needed---an emergency survival mask with an integral air supply---and pulled it over his head, sealing it to the universal yoke on the collar of his Reflex Armor.
He allowed himself a moment to savor the warm flow of oxygen rushing into the mouthpiece mounted on the front of the skintight mask, then he steadied himself and took stock of the situation. The courier, he quickly saw, was a lost cause. It had split in half amidships from the impact---actually, splintered would have been a better description, as the hull was mostly a light, graphite mix with the consistency of hard thermoplastic.
Cal Mitchell, at least, was no further danger. He had been too close to the gap he had blown in the boarding ramp when the ship hit, and the lower half of his left leg was trapped beneath the belly of the courier. West wasn't sure if he was conscious, but he suspected he was by now. West stared at him for a moment, wondering if he should kill him. True, Mitchell couldn't impede his escape any further, but as long as the man was alive, Cowboy knew that he would come after him. He had, he recognized, made a serious error in judgement by involving Cal's family in this mess. People had emotional borders, after which there was no return.
"Shit," he muttered. Maybe the cold and lack of oxygen would get Cal.
Turning away from him, West climbed painfully out of the ruined craft, aware with every move of the damage his body had taken. He had to get some attention soon, or he would lose mobility and, with it, his ability to escape. He looked around at the other ships on the pad, amazed that no one was patrolling the area. Their numbers must be limited, he decided---or perhaps their only mission was to take what was in the facility as proof of Damiani's plans, and they didn't care if anyone got out.
At any rate, it worked to his favor. He could take the cutter they had come in on---it would have adequate medical facilities, and less in the way of security systems than the Stealthships. He was about to set out for the bigger spacecraft when his sensors warned him of motion behind him, and he wheeled around...and froze.
Advancing towards him was the menacing, broad-shouldered stuff of nightmares. There was yet another error in judgement, embodied in the grim-visaged Tahni Imperial Guard cyborg, covered with frozen blood, the dull grey of duralloy bone visible through the wounds in his thigh and chest. West realized, quite suddenly, that he needed a gun fast.
His various injuries forgotten, the ex-commando jumped back into the body of the courier and went directly for the weapons locker. He'd used the now-destroyed pulse carbine against Mitchell because he'd been in a rush and it had been the first thing that came to hand, but he knew he'd need something more substantial to take out Trint. Luckily, he'd made provision to have something available.
The weapons' locker was still in place, but its door was jammed, and he had to use his talons to pry the door open. It only took him a second to accomplish, but he knew that the cyborg would be on him quickly, and he ran a nervous scan over his shoulder as he pulled out the hefty length of a plasma assault gun. He'd been impressed with the effectiveness of the somewhat-unwieldy weapon during the war, and had made sure to have plenty of them around wherever he found himself. He knew that the gun could take out the Tahni cyborg in one shot, a boast not too many other weapons could make.
Jacking a round home, Roger West rose from the locker and hopped back out of the split in the courier, ready to blast away at his pursuer...but Trint was nowhere in sight. It only took West a heartbeat to realize that the only place the cyborg could have gone was around the other side of the courier, but that was one heartbeat too long. Even as he was spinning around to heed the warning of his auxiliary sensors, one hundred and sixty kilos of flesh, steel and plastic pounded into his left side, jarring the plasma gun loose and bearing him down to the ground.
Despite the desperation of his struggle with the obviously pissed-off Tahni, the first thought that went through West's mind was that the surface of the pad was really fucking cold. With all of his other problems, he hadn't noticed the cold until now. He just had to get out of there...this had dragged on way too long, and with every passing second, his prospects for survival dimmed.
The only problem was, Trint was in no mood to be cooperative, and he was one mean, dangerous son of a bitch...no, strike that, Cowboy thought crazily. The cyborg was no one's son. He'd been created in a lab, and whatever progress he'd made since then, he was still a construct. He couldn't push himself beyond programmed envelopes, and he couldn't improvise like a real sentient...could he?
Time to find out. Cowboy couldn't beat him with pure brute strength, he realized as they grappled on the ground...but maybe he could channel one last burst of energy into a focused attack. He instructed his headcomp to inject him with a massive dose of adrenaline and endorphines, knowing he was taking a huge risk---a hit that big could blow up his heart, or cause a massive brain hemorrhage.
Then it came, and West felt as if his body was floating on a sea of fire, his heart threatening to pound out of his chest. He used the burst to work a leg under Trint's chest and throw him back toward the edge of the pad. The Tahni landed on his back, less than a meter from the edge of the platform, less than a meter from a fifty-meter drop into an ocean of hydrochloric acid, and struggled
to his feet.
Cowboy threw himself at the fallen plasma gun, its muzzle already pointed toward Trint, and fired it one-handed from the ground, not bothering to aim. The searing, white-hot ball of ionized hydrogen took the cyborg in the right shoulder, incinerating the upper half of his right arm and sending the rest of the limb skittering across the graphite pad. Thrown off balance by the impact and explosion of plasma, Trint toppled backwards, flipping head-over-heels off the landing platform, barely managing to grasp the edge of the pad as fell.
West stared for a moment in disbelief at the fingers gripping the rim of the platform that were all he could still see of Trint. God damn it! What did it take to finish that thing? Levering himself off the ground, Cowboy began limping over to the edge of the pad, plasma gun held loosely by the pistol grip. He just had to make sure that thing was dead.
Reaching the rim, he stared down into the face of the...being that he had brought to Damiani more than ten years before. There was an almost-human hatred in those eyes, and a most inhuman determination as well. Back when he had taken the thing away from Tahn-Skyiiah, he had thought, naively, that he was doing it a favor, giving it a chance at continued existence. He'd entertained notions of himself as Androcles to the cyborg's lion, but that had been a nearly-fatal misreading of the situation. Roger West had no doubt that, if he just walked away from the Tahni, that the cyborg would find a way to pull himself up and come after him again. The thing had to be killed.
And since the Tahni war machine had beat the living shit out of him back inside the dome, West wasn't particularly inclined to give it a quick death. Grinning with satisfaction, he tracked the muzzle of the plasma gun away from the cyborg's face and toward its remaining hand, all that separated it from a nice, slow acid bath...
Chapter Nineteen
