Directly ahead is the nurse’s station, staffed by four personnel in stark white uniforms trimmed with MEPHISTO maroon: two men, a woman, and one other person.
The older of the two men cocks an eyebrow. “Where are the wounded from the fight outside?” he asks as we advance, his deep voice filling the entire space for those few short seconds.
“There are no wounded,” Trix says, moving closer.
“No survivors, even,” I add.
The man looks confused, and four pairs of eyes sweep over us, scanning Trix’s weapon and exo, like she’s the threat. The nonbinary staffer inhales sharply and puts their arms up; only then do the other three figure out who we are.
“Oh, void,” the woman says, raising her arms to match her colleague’s stance.
When I reach the counter I lean over to check they aren’t hiding any weapons.
“Seeing as there are no wounded to help,” Squid says politely, “perhaps you could help us instead?”
“We need something for the kid’s seizures.” Trix turns so they can see Pale, dangling from her exoskeleton. “Sedatives, tranquilizers, whatever—you’re the experts.”
The woman nods and lowers her arms. She walks to a large cupboard built into the wall, doors almost seamless but marked with grimy finger smears. She stacks a pile of pillboxes, one atop the other with a flat clap, then she comes back and drops the cartons on the bench, keeping her eyes to the floor the whole time.
“He’ll only need half a tablet, once every four hours,” she says, stuttering.
Squid removes a pill from one of the packets and breaks it in half, then steps behind Trix. “I need you to take this, Pale, okay?”
The boy nods and swallows the pill with a swig of water from Squid’s canteen.
“It’s no use,” the older man says, “you cannot help the boy.”
“Why’s that?” I say.
His face is webbed with wrinkles and the side of his head is lined with deep scars in geometric patterns—the same as the soldiers we fought outside. He taps these scars with a finger, then says, “The Legion is endless, and they are coming here. They dispatched reinforcements the moment you killed the elements on the surface. They will be here soon to protect me.”
“What makes you so special?” Trix asks.
“They need me, they need my work.” The doctor continues, but I’m already headed for the nearest hospital bed.
The autodoc gives me a canned greeting as I approach, though “autovet” might be more accurate: the unconscious patient is a large, shaved primate. My stomach turns at the sight of the needles stuck in its right arm, delivering pain relief, or something else, from two fluid pods. The animal’s other arm is splayed open, flesh ending just beneath the elbow, metal bones exposed and glossy beneath the ceiling lights. The forearm is held in a hermetically sealed pod, tiny robotic digits rapidly threading veins, nerves, and muscle into place, knitting flesh onto bone in neat hexagonal segments.
Ocho wriggles out from my jacket and jumps onto the bed, cautiously sniffing the sleeping primate. She turns to look at me and yaows.
“I know,” I say, then I pick her up and press her to my shoulder. “What the fuck is this?” I say, storming back to the four medical workers now lined up against the wall, restrained by Trix’s lasrifle.
“What’s over there?” Squid asks.
I shake my head and glare at the older man.
He lifts his chin, but doesn’t meet my eyes. Proudly, he says, “That is my work. I develop new limbs, new nervous systems, and new epidermises. My research makes the Legion stronger, faster.”
“So you flay helpless animals?”
He opens his mouth to speak, but then closes it. I poke his chest to make him look at me. “You keep saying ‘the Legion’ like we should know what that means. They’re a bunch of cyborgs—so what?”
“They move and fight as one. They are Commander Hamid’s forces, but they are greater than her.”
Squid catches my eye and nods toward the bed, then goes to inspect the animal.
“If he’s telling the truth and they have reinforcements coming, we need to hurry,” Trix says.
“Just a minute,” I say. Trix glares at me, but I ignore her and push through a slit in the polyplastic wall.
Even with most of the cages sealed, the smell of feces and rotting fruit is thick enough to choke on. Ocho yaows again, louder and right beside my ear.
I scratch her chin. “I don’t like it either, little one.”
One of the plastic cages has a large shadow across its front panel. I key the opacity to clear, and see it’s a smaller primate, sleeping crouched in the corner. Green-gray fur covers its body in patches, and bits of metal show through beneath the skin. Both its arms have been replaced with human-sized cyborg limbs, skin stretched and split over the too-large prosthetics. This is what the animals look like after surgery—painfully altered, bloodied, broken.
My eyes burn. I don’t cry, but I could. The creature whimpers in its sleep, feet shuffling over the floor of the cage.
I find the master controls and turn all the cages transparent. My breath catches in my throat when I see them, each one wretched and damaged, glinting with steel where there should be flesh.
In the tortured animals I can’t help seeing myself, and Ocho, and Pale. I feel the needles and remember the rooms and the doctors and the tests. Even some of the smells are the same—the sickeningly familiar mingling scents of antiseptic, latex gloves, piss, and shit.
There are twenty animals, give or take, each a different sort of primate. One is awake and eyeing me warily—it can’t tell that I’m not one of the doctors, it can’t know that I’m not one of the people who did this. I grab it and squeeze. A noise builds in my throat as I crush the tiny thing’s reinforced ribs, but the growl isn’t loud enough to cover its dying yelp.
I open my mind wide enough to take in all the animals, and with a scream loud enough to stir the sleeping ones, I crush them. I do it hard and fast, to make sure they don’t suffer, but still I hear a few cry out.
The sharp smell of blood fills my nose as I turn away. I can kill people in the hundreds when I need to, but this? This is different. Is that fucked up? If it is, blame Ocho.
I drop down to my haunches and take Ocho from my shoulder. I hold her tight against my chest; she squirms for a few seconds before stopping to let me pet her.
“I’m sorry, Ocho, I’m sorry,” I say, though I’m not sure why.
I exhale slowly until my chest stops rattling, then I return to the others. I stop behind Trix and make sure Pale’s asleep: he’s seen enough carnage for one day.
I step up to the doctor, close enough to see the fine points of sweat beading on his head and smell the coppery stink of his breath. “That’s your work too?”
“The Legion’s next generation relies on me perfecting the treatments. The animals suffer, but the results are worth it.”
I shake my head and take a step back. I wrap my thoughts around his skull, but I don’t bother squeezing the metal cranium. Instead, I yank his head free from the neck; vertebrae crack and pieces of bone burst through mangled flesh.
The doctor’s body slumps back and slides down the wall. I drop his head into his lap and red seeps through the material—cohesion leaching blood across the fabric. The younger man screams while the others watch in silence, eyes wide in horror.
“Are you okay?” Trix asks. I’m so surprised by her concern that I don’t answer at first, and after a few long seconds have passed, it feels like the moment has too. “I’ll kill the others,” she says.
“What?” Squid says, sounding incredulous.
“The animals, I mean. So Mars doesn’t have to.” It’s the first time since we lost Mookie that she’s treated me like a friend.
“Thank you,” I say, staring down at the doctor’s corpse but not really seeing it.
She goes to the bed, and her gun whines as it charges. Her shadow stretches across the ceiling, haloed by the br
ight white of laserfire. There’s a sizzle and the autodoc makes a distressed beep. She shoots the doc too and continues to the next occupied bed.
Squid takes a medic bag marked with a white cross from behind the counter, and stashes the rest of Pale’s drugs inside.
Trix returns, and before we can talk about the other three workers, before I have to decide how complicit they are in animal torture and experimental surgery, I turn back toward the entrance.
We’re leaving them here, faced by the doctor’s corpse, and surrounded by the soon-decaying bodies of all those animals.
Hopefully that’s punishment enough.
CHAPTER SIX
A heavy silence hangs over the elevator as it lifts us toward Data Storage.
“We’re going to get him back,” I say, partly to break the quiet, and partly to repay Trix’s earlier kindness. I glance over, but her face is impassive beneath the wan yellow light. I can’t tell what she’s thinking, but after a few long seconds without a response, I continue: “It’s my fault, and you hate me, and that’s fine, but I won’t stop ’til he’s safe.”
Trix sighs. “You think talking about Mookie will make me forget why he’s gone?” She shakes her head. “I thought you didn’t like to sit around, telling stories and holding hands.”
Now it’s my turn to sigh. I don’t push any further.
The elevator stops, and when the doors part diffuse white light fills the car. Data Storage is the only part of the facility aboveground; the remainder rests beneath the surface of Miyuki the way an iceberg’s bulk hides beneath the water. That way, most staff on-site can avoid the freezing conditions outside, while the waste heat from MEPHISTO’s servers is easily offset.
Squid disembarks first and I follow, squinting until my eyes adjust. It’s a short, glass-walled corridor that wears a fine coating of crystalline ice. At the far end is an armored steel door marked with security clearance restrictions and dire warnings in four languages.
Squid tries the control panel beside the door: it boops an anguished tone and stays closed.
“Could you try knocking, Mars?”
I roll my eyes but laugh. “Yeah, sure.”
Squid moves aside, and I use my mind to grab hold of the door, feeling its mass as a single heavy point near the back of my skull. The metal frame screeches and twists as I tear the door off its hinges and yank it free. There’s a loud thud when I lower the door to the ground and another when I lean it against the glass wall beside the opening.
“Did you hear that?” Squid asks.
“The door?”
“No, listen.”
There’s a series of distant, irregular booms. I step over to the southern wall of the corridor and Trix joins me, pounding on the glass with the forearm of her exoskeleton to knock some of the ice loose. She unslings her rifle and looks down the scope, pointing it toward the distant field of wreckage that juts from the snow like so many headstones.
Overhead, a dozen white streaks slice through the sky—more ships coming into orbit, descending fast enough to break the sound barrier on their way to the surface.
“Another fleet incoming,” I say.
Trix tracks one of the trails, then hands me the rifle. “Not a fleet—ROTs.”
I raise the weapon, straining at first because Trix makes it look so easy. It takes me a few seconds to get one of the objects into focus through the rifle’s powerful scope: a Rapid-response Orbital Torpedo—colloquially known as a “drop-pod.” Basically the same as the pod that delivered Briggs’s envoy to Ergot, but designed to drop soldiers into battle without turning them into meat paste. The ROT is a black cylinder, tapered at both ends and marked with a single stripe of maroon. The air beneath it shimmers, distorted by its engine burning at full-reverse.
The far-off whine of the landing pods lowers in pitch, and they plunge into the snow in quick succession. A pod door blasts open on explosive bolts. At this distance, the soldier that steps out is a few pixels tall, just enough for me to see MEPHISTO colors and the glint of weaponry. The Legion has arrived—just like the doctor promised.
I hand the lasrifle back to Trix and enter Data Storage through the wrecked opening. It’s warm inside, a dry heat—like, zero percent humidity—and right away the skin on my face feels like it’s flaking. The temperature climbs as I pass the nearest cylindrical server stack, waves of heat emanating off it. There must be a hundred of them—black monoliths lined with flickering lights of inexplicable purpose. It’s loud in here surrounded by the machines, countless quiet whirrings combining to form a relentless din. Squid is already walking along the northern wall searching for an open console.
“Trix,” I call out, “keep an eye on those troops and let me know when they get close.”
I rush to the far end and join Squid’s search for a workstation that’s already on and aglow with hope.
“Squid, you better get Einri to send the Nova’s shuttle down for exfil.”
“Already done,” they say.
I find a console that’s powered up, standby light winking infrequently enough that I almost miss it. I put Ocho down beside the console and she walks into the lightkeys, bringing the interface to life. She complains when I grab her, but then I sit and put her in my lap, and she quickly settles. I find the search function and type Mookie Healerman. A green bar fills from left to right, and the console chimes.
It gives me a couple hundred results, each one less relevant than the last, until I’m scrolling past entries for people named “Marky” or “Hillman” and cursing under my breath.
“There’s nothing here,” I yell.
“What?” Squid says, running over to join me. They lean in over my shoulder. “What name did you use?”
“‘Mookie Healerman’?”
Squid looks at the screen and laughs. “He’s a medic, and his surname just happens to be ‘Healerman’?”
The pieces fall into place, and I say, “He changed his name when he went AWOL.”
“Precisely,” Squid says. “May I?”
I get out of the seat and hold onto Ocho, then drop her into Squid’s lap as they sit down and start to glide their fingers through the keys.
“How’s it looking out there?” I yell to Trix.
“About half are heading to the wreckage of the Mouse, the rest are marching this way.”
Another chime draws my eyes back to the console.
Squid opens the file for Cadwell Amos Moreland and scrolls past his basic details, looking to find out what they’ve done with him.
“He’s alive,” Squid says, “being held at a place called Homan Sphere.”
Before I need to ask, Squid drills down further into the files. I read over their shoulder, taking it all in. Homan Sphere: it’s not an official imperial prison, it’s not even a military prison—it’s MEPHISTO’s own facility; a designated black site, beyond-maximum security. The file doesn’t say who gets sent there, but from the language used I can guess: traitors, dissenters, anyone with the gall to stand against the empire. I doubt Mookie even got court-martialed before they disappeared him.
I point at the console to where the location coordinates glimmer. “Could you burst them to Einri?” I ask Squid, then I open a link with the AI: “What do you make of these coordinates?”
There’s a loud burst of static as Einri’s voice curves around from the far side of Miyuki’s moon where the Nova is hiding. Einri says, “Those coordinates are well beyond the limits of colonized space.”
“Fuck,” I say, “that’s what I thought.”
“Mars,” Trix yells, “I need you over here!”
“You go,” Squid says. “I’ll see what I can find about Pale.”
I unclip Waren’s cylinder from my belt and pass it to Squid.
“Mind Waren’s brain for me?”
“Of course,” Squid says.
“And while you’re in there, could you look for anything on Commander Briggs, the voidwitch program, or my father, Marius Teo?”
“Ma
rius Teo,” Squid repeats, nodding.
I turn away and Ocho leaps off Squid’s lap to follow me. I scoop her up and put her back beside the console, but she mraows loudly, runs up to sit on my shoulder, and nuzzles my ear.
“Alright, alright,” I say. “But you better not get in the way, and you better not fucking die again.”
I join Trix in the corridor and she lowers her weapon.
“He’s alive,” I say. Her face stays blank—no smile, no tears, just the glow of daylight reflected in her eyes.
Out the window, a dozen Legionnaires are approaching, closing on the moat of slush around the facility.
I rest a hand on the glass wall and push outward with my mind. The wall shatters into a hundred razor shards that I hold floating. I spread them aside and step through the opening, my boots sinking into the black mud with a loud squelch. Trix follows, her weapon primed but pointed at the ground.
Seeing us emerge from the building, the Legionnaires rush forward like liquid, flowing into a semicircle with choreographed precision, each one pointing a ballistic carbine at me and Trix.
“This planet is a restricted area,” the troops say in unison—even their inflections match. “You are under arrest, by order of their Imperial Highness.”
One of the grunts steps forward and pushes back the hood on his jacket, revealing pink geometric scars. I recognize him, I’m sure of it—one of the bodychoppers who stood up for me on Aylett when MEPHISTO came, looking to take me back. He had a pincer for a hand back then, but that’s been replaced: a new hand made of metal and fresh gene-fabricated tissue. What else do they replace when they make their Legionnaires? Their names? Their memories? Are they still themselves?
On his own he says, “Come along quietly, or we will use lethal force.”
Trix lifts her weapon and shoots him in the chest. The piercing beam of white casts his face in deep shadows for an instant before he collapses to the ground, smoke and blood vapor drifting from the wound.
The other Legionnaires shift slightly, fingers tightening on triggers, but I snatch their weapons away before they can fire. I crush the guns and discard the pieces, then launch my knives of broken glass. Three more Legionnaires go down, clutching at wide red gashes splitting their throats. The rest don’t hesitate before rushing forward, drawing blades and laser sidearms.
Void Black Shadow Page 3
