by K. Gorman
Her fingertips scraped across its pre-fab surface. The world began to blend together, crackling. Her sister deflected Leisler’s attack to the left with a stagger, and the tank next to the Cradle exploded as his massive arm came down on it. Glass shattered. Water rushed out. She felt pressure against her ankles, and a seeping, wet cold pressed into her skin as her Shift power crackled through her. As Nomiki shoved him farther left, their forms like silhouettes on her vision, she felt the hum of pulse weapons vibrate the air. For a moment, time seemed to freeze. An image split her mind as the warp energy crackled through her skin—herself, younger, standing naked next to the tank, the two doctors talking around her. She felt herself connect with a jerk.
The world twisted. Sound slurred. As light and dark ran together, a dull roar rose in the back of her head like a giant hive of angry bees. Someone cried out, and a grip loosened on her arm.
Then, they were through.
Empty air closed around their sides. She stumbled into the hard side of the Cradle, her head clunking painfully against it. The copper taste of blood welled in her mouth. The others tripped into her like dancers exiting a mosh pit.
“Sol’s fucking child,” said a muffled Soo-jin from somewhere to her left. “Well, that went well.”
Karin shook her head as the drone of sound started to clear, blinking at the darkness around her, then hissed at a sudden pressure on her knee. Cookie’s voice rose into the air with a distinct whine.
“Fuck. Fuck. I got shot!”
What? Shit.
She activated her light, a soft tendril lifting from her arm before it condensed into an orb for her—just in time to catch the look of panic that flashed across his face as he tried and failed to catch himself from falling.
Baik, showing surprising strength for a man who had been stabbed in the neck recently and who was still full-on carrying Marc across his shoulders, hauled him up by the arm and steadied him, gripping his forearm in an awkward grasp as he gave Cookie a quick once-over.
“Stun agent,” he diagnosed. “Not full-impact.”
“I got hit, too.” Soo-jin brought up her other hand, its fingers limp. Two of them twitched weakly. Her face scrunched up. “Good to know they want us alive, I guess?” Her eyes trailed to a spot behind Karin. “And we got that, too.”
Karin followed her gaze back. The Cradle sat next to her, gray and bulbous, reflecting the slithering light in the air with a dull gleam across the mottled texture of its surface. Its Shadow variant clone sat on the floor where Jon had put it a couple meters away, the tank water touching the base of its gray side. They looked like giant, polygonal brains.
She drew a low breath and grounded herself. Then, she began to wiggle, trying to extract herself from between the people and the Cradle. “They want us alive. The doctors are still in danger. Come on, we have to rescue our science team.”
“Maybe we should give them a few minutes alone with Jon and Nomiki,” Cookie said, staggering into a limp as Baik let him go. “Thin the herd, so to speak.”
“Our science team is part of that herd,” Karin said, hauling herself around and striding to the far corner that she’d last seen them in. “We got the Cradle. Now we just have to get them. And hope that asshole hasn’t killed either of them yet.”
Nomiki might have given the two a slight stay of execution with her words on their usefulness, but she didn’t think for a minute that would stop Leisler from ordering them shot. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more certain she felt that he was just waiting for them to warp back.
He had known about her ability, after all—and he’d done virtually nothing to stop her from using it.
“Fuck,” she said with a vicious hiss. “This is a trap.”
Maybe she should let Nomiki and Jon be for a bit.
“Remember when I was our science team? The sole member?”
“You’re much prettier than the current selection,” Karin grunted.
“I dunno,” Soo-jin said. “Shinji’s kind of cute. I could see him on my deserted island picks.”
“Deserted… island… picks?” Cookie parsed each word as if it were a foreign language, his tone turning up with doubt. “Do I want to know?”
“It’s a truth or dare question,” Karin said. “If you’re stranded on a deserted island, which one person would you choose to be stranded with?”
When she glanced back, a deep frown bore down his brow as he trailed behind the others, hobbling on his numbed knee.
“Probably him,” Cookie said, making a gesture to Baik. “I mean, if he got stranded, the Alliance would probably have him unstranded in about two hours.”
Karin stared at his frown.
Isn’t this a who-would-you-want-to-have-sex-with question?
A look at Soo-jin’s slack-mouthed jaw confirmed it. It was clear she was fighting a tightness that threatened to split her face into a wide grin.
“Interesting,” she said. “Very logical.”
Although Cookie was pansexual, she had a feeling he had taken the question literally and based his answer on logistics rather than attraction. Especially with the unblushing, matter-of-fact way he’d presented it.
A quick glance at Baik had shown a set of raised eyebrows. He, at least, had realized the question’s normal purpose.
She cleared her throat and wrestled her mind back on task as she reached the two beds in the corner where the doctors had been standing. “Ah, any ideas on how not to get our asses trapped, Mr. Alliance Commander?”
“You should warp back alone and leave us here.”
“What?” She spun. “No, I can’t. The dimensional reality is too—”
“It feels pretty stable to me. The law of observation—”
“We don’t know,” she hissed. “I could warp back, and you’d all be gone.”
“The Shadows aren’t gone,” he said. “Neither is the Cradle. Soo-jin, I know you’ve been checking your clock. Any time discrepancies?”
“What?”
“I left a watch copy on the field during one of our warping tests,” Soo-jin said. “And no, nothing timewise. Or, if there is, then it’s only a few seconds.”
“A clock isn’t alive,” Karin sputtered. “For all we know, this place simply creates a cachement image that’s fed from reality. You could all disappear!”
“You’re willing to let the Cradle stay behind,” Soo-jin pointed out. “It’s no longer in the real world, either.”
“It also isn’t alive!” Karin sputtered.
“A cachement image?” Cookie said, his eyebrow lifting.
“Whatever it’s called. You know what I mean!” She threw a hand toward him and turned back to the others with a disgusted sound. “No. That is not an option. Not until we know more.”
“Then we hide under the beds,” Baik started, pointing. “They’re high enough. We’ll be noticed, but perhaps not immediately. Grab the doctors if they’re there. If not, re-assess. Plan on making an immediate barricade, if we can.”
“A single cyborg kicked our asses last time,” she pointed out, arms crossing over her chest. “There were twelve in that room.”
“We just need to hold out until Nomiki and Jon get back to us.”
“This is a stupid plan,” she told him. “I thought you were supposed to be some military genius.”
“You can’t risk leaving us here due to potential dimensional instability, and we don’t have time. That limits our options. If you don’t have to worry about us, you can move through the room as a free agent.”
He pushed something smooth and round into her hands. When she looked down, her eyebrows shot into her forehead.
It was the sex toy bombs.
She was beginning to see where he was going.
“So, clear a corner, make a bed fort, I grab the doctors, and rain some hell?” She lifted them up. “How do I even use these?”
“Sol, maybe I should go with you,” Soo-jin muttered.
“No, no,” Karin said. “You’re
a better shot than Cookie. Is this the detonator?”
“It’s a timer delay. Four seconds.” His hand covered hers as he showed her the switch, and she jerked as the grenade made a small beep. “Three meter impact radius. You’ll have to be accurate.”
Sol’s fucking child.
“Fantastic,” she said, her voice oozing false positivity. “Okay, everyone get under a bed. We’re doing this.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Light blazed. The churn of the shift ended with a rippling wave of nausea, the energy humming bright through her body. Beside her, Baik was moving even before the chaos of the room hit her ears. She felt him leave her side, rolling from under the bed and rising. She slid to the floor with a hiss that was lost in the crack of blasters and the doppler-effect drone of pulse guns. Baik fired once, twice, and a strangled yell came from her other side, followed by two more subdued, surprised yips. A cyborg thumped to the floor with a metallic thunk, two wounds in his head and neck leaking a mix of blood, clear fluid, and brain matter. The blackened, warped edge of a thin metal plate showed under his skin.
Belatedly, she recognized his face.
It was Tyrell, the same one who had attacked them on the ship.
Baik had dispatched the man who had slashed his throat with a brutal, professional efficiency.
As a haze of smoke pressed against her skin and slid its gritty fingers into her nose and mouth, her gaze slid past the downed cyborg to the two sets of feet nearby, lighting up as she recognized the doctors’ shoes.
They were alive, standing, and right where she wanted them.
Well, that part of the plan worked better than I thought it would.
She breathed out a sigh of cautious relief and crawled over Marc and Cookie. A careful roll took her out from under the bed, blinking against the glare of light and the smoky haze that hung in the room. When she lifted herself up and took in the scene around her, her eyebrow lifted.
Half the room looked like it had been dipped in the last Earth war. Blast marks turned the far wall into a mural of blackened concrete and glowing blaster holes. Parts of it smoked, as if the heat from the explosions had been intense enough to set fire to the concrete itself, and she became very aware of the three grenades she currently held against her abdomen. Six Centauri lay in limp, thrown poses on the floor, their bodies scored with distinct blade and blaster marks—Jon’s handiwork, most likely, since Nomiki was still squaring off with Leisler, and Jon was in the throngs of a rippling, raging confrontation on the opposite side of the room. One downed soldier had lost an arm. Another lay on her back, abdomen ripped open, a dark mixture of blood and gore spilling out, one arm twisted overtop the wound as if she’d tried to fit herself back together. A Fallon-branded blaster lay next to her in two pieces, some of its powerpack leaking onto the floor with a glowing hiss.
As she watched, Jon made a savage lunge, gutting a seventh in a move so fast, she barely had time to blink. Blood poured over his forearms and splattered against the syndicated camouflage of his klemptas armor. The cyborg attempted to bring his hand up to seize Jon’s head, but Jon made a quick turn and sliced through the soldier’s elbow in a second slash, the movement too quick to follow. In the next breath, he’d flowed around the man and was engaging the next in a furious exchange of blows, jerking to the side to avoid another two who were coming at him.
Her jaw slackened.
Okay, Program Ares doesn’t fuck around.
A whine of metal drew her attention back to the other fight. Nomiki looked tiny next to Leisler—like a housecat trying to fight a wolf—but her steps were smooth and seamless, pulling her back like water as he made a series of lunges. Her knife hand was empty, but Karin spotted the blade jammed through the forearm ‘bones’ of his prosthesis, skewering the weapon’s gun barrel and keeping it jammed in place. The blade of his machete had been snapped, making the weapon end in a jagged point. Fresh blood coated it.
Karin turned her attention back to Nomiki, and she found a spot on her sister’s shoulder where her armor had splintered under a savage blow. The limb hung limply from her, her hand twisted at an odd angle that made her worry, but as Leisler lunged forward, his metal arm slashing with a blur of speed, Nomiki danced out of his reach with a smooth rotation.
Behind her, a series of blaster cracks sounded from where Baik stood on the other side of the bed. She jerked as an answering blast sniped past her head and put a crater in the wall, turning to see several Centauri break off from the pack attacking Jon and come after them. Soo-jin and Cookie were beginning to crawl out from her side, tentatively glancing around.
She swung into action, the metal frame shifting under her hands before she could register what she was doing. She ignored the sharp twinge of her still-healing wrist as she hauled it around, kicked it over, and dragged it back to the wall, providing a short barricade for the others to duck behind.
“Get down and don’t get shot.” She pulled the two scientists to the floor with her, ignoring the incredulous looks on their faces—Shinji had an open-mouthed gape, whereas Takahashi had his usual, unsettlingly normal stare, though she detected a heightened state of panic from him.
“Oh gods, oh gods, oh gods,” Shinji began.
She ignored him, turned to the charge of cyborgs heading toward them, and clenched her fingers around her power. She stared at the leader of the group, then, with a pull of her will, made the world twist around her.
The Shadow world wrapped around them like a void of silence. A tingle rippled up her arms, and she felt the presence of several Shadows in the room, all staring at her, but she ignored them, instead reaching for the bed that still remained upright beside her. Old metal wheels screamed as she released its brake and shoved it forward, calling on her power.
The real world returned in a shriek of chaos. Three startled cyborgs jerked away. Her arms shook, rage and power fluctuating through her. The next thing she knew, her wrist was screaming at her, and the bed was hurtling through the air, flipping with an awkward, lurching speed. It caught one cyborg with the broadside and clipped the other two as they rolled into dodges. Barely aware of what she was doing, she found a grenade in her right hand, her thumb already nudging the detonator.
She stared at in in horror, dully registering the small beep. Her heart thudded as she watched herself give it a gentle toss over the bed, the room swimming into a watery, ink-tossed chaos as she dropped, her warp powers wrapping around her.
The Shadow world came back, dark and utterly silent. She gave a slight yelp as she hit the floor. Pain scraped through her knee and elbow as it took the brunt of the fall, soon overshadowed by the angry throb of her wrist. She slumped onto her back and stared up at the blackness above her, the frenetic race of adrenaline beating through her body.
Fuck. I almost blew myself up.
She let out a shaking sob and collected her thoughts. After a few seconds, she became aware of a whispery rustle to her left. She looked over and saw the Shadow emerge from the darkness of the rest of the room, accompanied by a second behind it. A quick glance around revealed three others standing around, all looking down at her.
Yeah, don’t have time for that.
With a groan, she gritted her teeth, rolled over onto her elbow, and managed to awkwardly scramble to her feet. Her legs shook under her as she stood, causing her to stagger to the side. She halted with a hiss, overcompensating as her knee wobbled dangerously, and flinched at the silky tingle that swept through her back and shoulder as she bumped into the closest Shadow. She frowned, shaking the feeling as another thought occurred to her.
And what was with that bed? Did I throw that?
Just what kind of changes had the treatment made?
She shivered, then gave herself a mental shake and scanned the area for potential weapons. She slipped around the Shadow, grabbed a long-handled wrench from one of the side tables, and hefted it with an unpracticed hand.
Right. That’d have to do.
Without giving even
a glance-back at her new companions, she stepped into the relative cover of a large cabinet, called on her power, and forced the world to warp around her.
Light came back. A startled cyborg turned her way. She lunged with a yell and an internal swear, swinging the wrench.
He blocked the first strike with a blow that nearly rang the wrench right out of her grip, but something clicked inside her. In the next instant, she felt herself flow under his guard, an elbow jerking up to slam into his throat.
The blow didn’t do much other than knock him back, but the surprise was evident on his face.
Hers, too.
She didn’t question it. Instead, she screamed and brought the wrench to bear again. Power and rage rushed through her body—it felt like every cell in her body was aflame with electrical energy. The heavy metal crashed into another of his blocks, and he sidestepped the next blow, one hand slamming down lightning-fast to catch her arm.
The blow smashed off course. Pain erupted in her hip instead.
Then, she got shot.
White-hot pain ripped through her shoulder. She yelled, the sensation taking her entire world, clamoring for her attention. She stumbled back, warmth flooding her shoulder. When her vision came back, a gush of blood coated her arm, and the Centauri loomed in front of her, his lips twitched into a triumphant snarl.
He lunged. She flinched back, a strangled yell rasping through her throat as her back hit and rebounded off the metal door of the cabinet behind her, mind struggling to pull the warp around her. Metal fingers wrapped around her throat. She panicked, jerking back. Her head smacked into the door behind her with a loud bang.
His fingers tightened. She struggled as he pushed harder, slamming her into the door again. Eyes wide on his face, she clawed at his fingers.
She couldn’t breathe.
A shudder bucked through her. A pressure built in her head. She felt him lean forward, his face coming closer to hers. Hot breath blew over her cheeks and jaw, entered her mouth. As her vision began to swim, her thoughts darted around like small fish. The world fluctuated in her senses with every frantic beat of her pulse, the energy of the Shift Event buzzing in her bones.
