by K. Gorman
Then, the way was clear for her.
She sprinted for the stairs, phased, smashed through the door in the Shadow world, and popped back across the worlds on the other side.
Sure enough, five soldiers had been waiting for her, Centauri blasters ready to end her night in a hail of burning neon.
They died in a pile of blood and screams.
Bile sawed through the back of her throat. She clenched her jaw, avoided the spreading slickness, hopped onto the stairs, and raced upward, bare feet slapping on the pre-fab. Someone—several someones—shot at her around the next corner. A dimensional port sliced them in half. Tia urged her over the pieces of their bleeding, dying bodies.
Faster, faster. Kill them.
It seemed that, with the Cradle protected, her bloodlust could move onto other things.
When she crashed through the doors at the top, skidding into the main hallway, a thunderstorm of blasterfire cracked into the floor and walls, pelting the air with heat and sound. She danced around it, phasing halfway through reality—but not before one nicked her across the bicep.
She sucked in a yelp and grabbed at the wound, sharp pain spiking through her nerves like a shockwave. Blood spilled down her arm, her blood, this time. She blinked against the glare of light—cyborgs, apparently, had a floodlight attachment to their shoulders and some of them used it—intending to get a bearing on what type of crowd she was dealing with, then go deal with it in a violent, bloody manner. But a familiar voice barked a lilting order.
Leisler, standing tall at the back of the group. Her target.
Anger roared up within her, deep and coarse. Hot. Her hands shook, entire body brimming with a sudden, cutting focus, mind focused on him like the target-lock of a Fallon laser system.
After a few seconds, the weapons fire ceased. The hall fell silent, the dust literally settling around them in the light. She squinted and breathed shallowly as it touched at her face, but couldn’t stop the grit that caught at the back of her throat and settled on her skin in a fine, gray haze.
The blasters had kicked into the concrete and drywall. Even if Seirlin had left cleaning bots—which they hadn’t—it would have been a shitshow.
About fifteen soldiers stood between her and her target. Mismatched, a slice-of-life hodgepodge of everything from two front-line troops in powersuits, cyborgs, and ordinary support workers in the same gray and yellow Centauri uniform that Daniel had been wearing when they’d caught him, their expressions ran the gamut of pure, undiluted fear, caution, blank-faced stoicism, and barely-restrained rage.
At the very back, doused in the bright glow of the ship lights outside the windows, his cybernetic modifications making him tower above the rest of the group by at least half a meter—a dangerous prospect, given the shortness of the ceiling—Leisler stared her down, an ugly, intense expression on his face.
Laughter bubbled in her chest. She leaned against the wall, unable to stop it, the fizzy giddiness of hysteria rising in her like the raw scratch of caffeine. It felt like her entire body was wired with darts of adrenaline.
Gods, she must look like a fucking monster. Naked, covered in blood, fresh from a science tank that was attached to a floating brain. The pain in her arm faded, neurological blockers clearing it like a whiteboard eraser. A wide, manic grin split her face. She could feel the light shining on the blood.
“Ready to surrender?” she called out. “Or shall I kill my way through some more of your people?”
Silence met her words. She shifted, dropping her weight forward. Some of the blood was drying, getting tacky. Pulling at her skin. The grit of dust and dirt rubbed in. Everyone’s eyes were on her, following her. The scent of salt and copper rose to her senses again. Only this time, instead of disgust and horror, all she felt was uncontrollable glee.
“Surrender is not an option,” Leisler said, his words slow and careful, the severity of his tone belying the humor in hers. “Not for one such as myself.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t go pissing off genetically engineered freaks like myself,” she hissed, suddenly all business. Rage fueled through her, hot and unpredictable. The front line flinched when she took several steps forward, weapons rising back up, but they didn’t fire. She stopped, holding the snarl that bared her teeth. “I meant what I said—I didn’t give a two shits who had custody of me. You could have taken me, had me under your control. I would have let you—even with what you did to my sister.”
Her fingers twitched. She itched to reach out, through the veil, and catch his throat. She could already feel his flesh parting for her, the warm gush of his blood over her skin. The need to kill him was so strong that it made her body visibly shake in anticipation. She took another step.
“Tell me, how many times did you hit her?” she asked. Faces stared at her from the crowd, all eyes fixed on her, but her gaze rooted solidly over their heads, meeting Leisler’s grim countenance.
Blackness bubbled up within her. Her body shuddered again, like a rabid animal.
“Three, at least,” she supplied. “I can tell that much from the breaks and bruising.”
“She killed my soldiers. She’s lucky to be alive.”
“You were going to kill her in front of me. My own sister.” She bared her teeth. “No, it’s your bad luck that I just turned into a powerfully violent psychopath. And I mean that in the very literal interpretation of those words. How many times? Three? Four? Twenty? I need to know how many pieces I should carve off before I kill you.”
He didn’t answer her immediately, but the muscles in his jaw moved. Clenching. Neck going taut. He knew he’d made a mistake. Knew he’d severely underestimated her. She was covered in the blood of his soldiers, people whose violent deaths were on her as much as they were on him, and her body seethed for more.
The smell of blood rose in her senses again, twisted into the touch and grit of the muggy air. It caught her attention. Her body trembled again. Hummed to its tune.
His expression darkened.
“No surrender, Karin Makos. Only death.” He turned away, but not before he’d barked a few words to the group between them in Centauri.
By the way the group bristled, she had a feeling he’d just told them to kill her.
Dark, violent thoughts wrenched through her psyche like raw lead. Her chest clenched.
Not today, jackass.
She tracked the sight of his head as he turned to the left and vanished beyond the edge of a corner, mind racing. There was a door out the front that way, and the glare of light on the windows told her at least one ship would be waiting for him, ready to make a getaway. She could even see the slope of its nose tapering down outside.
She’d have to be quick.
The air ripped apart with the thunder of blasterfire.
She phased through as the first shots hit, slipping straight into the Shadow realm, the heat close enough to brush her skin. Three shots followed her through the warp and slammed into the wall behind her.
Then, quiet.
Her ears rang at the suddenness of it. Five Shadows watched her—the first she’d seen in Brazil.
She didn’t have time to wonder at that. If she didn’t kill the squad in the hallway, they might head down the stairs and bother Nomiki, and she couldn’t have that.
Instead, she took a long, quiet breath. Her mind collected together, its new modifications shedding thoughts and fitting together like a honed, compact, violence machine.
She reached through the worlds and sliced through every last person that had been in the hallway, pulling pieces of them into the Shadow dimension with her. Blood and viscera splattered in a quiet patter. They darkened the floor, falling together like wet meat. A few legs kicked, twitched. She heard one mangled scream from a partially-torn throat. Several blasters and plasma rifles exploded in fiery hisses, burning in violent slashes of neon color—like volcano flowers under a rave light. The air grew muggy, thick, smothering her senses with the smell of raw meat, chemicals, and burning.
&nb
sp; As she slipped back over to the real world, a small part of her recoiled with horror—like a tiny bird beating its wings against the cage of her ribs—but the numbness kept the emotion at bay. She strode up the hall, careful not to slip on the warm wetness of the floor.
Two more soldiers met her in the next hall, each armed with a serious gun. Light glared in her eyes from the ship outside, catching them in stark, monochromatic relief. She phased, straddling the border between Shadow and reality. Armored rounds—not lasers or plasma, but real, honest to goodness, metal bullets—slammed into the wall at her back, chewing a path of destruction. Glass crashed, wood fiber and old paint blown apart in a thunderstorm. Dust flew into the air like a cloud, billowing, falling.
Still phased, she split the two soldiers apart like bloody rain, bits of them pattering to the floor. She took the guns, too, slicing the stocks and barrel neatly in half. She clearly heard the clunks of metal from the Shadow world as the other halves landed on the other hallway.
As she was focused on the guns, a third soldier rushed her out of the doorway on her left, slashing a laser-edged knife.
She rolled to the right, grabbed the knife with a strong hand, and punched a fist into his inner thigh, just above his knee. When his metal suit neither parted nor bent, and he only let out a grunt—the angle was awkward, and she was already falling back on her momentum—she twisted under and lashed out with a kick. He smashed into the opposite wall.
She pushed him into the Shadow world before he recovered and left him there.
The hallway was empty. She rolled to her feet, shook out the blunt pain from her wrist and knuckles, and searched for her target.
Her eyebrows twitched when she found him, disbelief sucking at her diaphragm at what she saw.
What in the ten hells?
Both Centauri corvettes were parked sidelong in the lot, the angle necessary to avoid the lampposts that stuck up from the concrete, but they weren’t alone. As before, the Skim Bird had accompanied them, likely a forward scout to check the place beforehand, given its greater ability of speed. It was tucked to the side, almost as an afterthought, though it was more likely that they’d simply wanted room to land, but the placement of the corvettes left two entire rows of stalls and lanes open—a good fifteen meters of space when combined with the building’s egress.
In that space stood the bare frame of a semi-circle, Centauri troops spread across the lot, grouping together like ants to a honey site. She paused, watching as the line of the circle grew thicker. There were so many people, all a mix, piling in without rank or order—what had to be the entire remaining population of the Centauri force that had come from those ships.
Leisler stood planted at their center, his stocky frame facing the building, his grim, stoic countenance plain for her to see.
What the fuck?
She opened the door and stepped out into the glare of the spotlights. The sound of the pushbar—a thunk, with a small squeak from neglected parts and hinges—echoed like a gunshot in the night.
Lights from the ships behind put the scene in a stark delineation of light and shadow, illuminating the back of every person that faced her and leaving no inch of her body hidden. She stepped into it, feeling her other power—Eos, not Eurynome—skim off the top of the brightness and trickle a path of energy into her core.
She eyed the crowd warily. The troops were giving him a wide berth, putting a good five meters of space between Leisler and themselves. All carried weapons, but no one made a move to fire.
A hundred stares followed her as she came out. Her skin crawled, instincts screaming at her, but her new programming kept her cool.
The door clunked shut behind her.
“So, where were we?” She raised an eyebrow, ignoring her feelings and making a point to look to the gathered crowd before pinning her gaze back on him. “Do you finally surrender?”
Her voice wasn’t particularly loud—not compared to the booming quality of his—but it met an anticipatory silence. It felt as if the crowd had taken a collective breath and tensed.
Still, no weapons turned toward her.
“No,” he said. “One such as me cannot surrender.”
The odd turn of phrase caught at her mind. He’d said something like that before. It could have been an awkward translation—Centauri clearly didn’t have much use for System Standard in their daily lives—but she didn’t think so. The rest of his speech had been accurate, if thick and accented. This sounded deliberate. A formality. Like the royalty’s use of ‘we’ and ‘us’ to refer to themselves in matters of state.
There was something going on here. Something more than their impending battle.
Her frown deepened. What was his game? Takahashi? A hostage situation? No, her sharp eyes didn’t spy the doctor anywhere among the crowd.
Her gaze flicked around. The watching Centauri all stood with neutral, grim-faced expressions. Tension was thick in the air, but it wasn’t as taut as it had been in the hallway. Like a simmering storm rather than a lightning strike. She spotted his second in the crowd, the woman she’d seen with him on the bridge of the corvette when she’d been dragged in for questioning, only now donned in the formfitting metal armor of the other cyborgs, hers bulkier and with a larger waistline to accommodate the enormity of her older-model cybernetics. Her body was alert and ready, but restrained, eyes as dark and tense as the rest of them.
Karin tucked a lock of wet blond hair behind her ear and slid her gaze back to Leisler, giving him a quiet, thorough assessment. There was fear in his eyes. A bare glint of it, present and acknowledged, affecting his body in a loose, primal way that she noticed but couldn’t quite pinpoint, but buried deep under a mountain of grim-faced calculation, caution, and resignation.
The pit in her stomach opened further. She kept her gaze on him, cautious. Suspicious. What was his game?
His prosthesis whirred when he brought it up. He didn’t bother aiming the gun at her—they’d both seen how useful guns were on her—but he kept it in play. His body was loose, relaxed, weight balanced as well as it could. She could tell he was lopsided. Part of him had moved stiffly before, but it looked more relaxed now. Lubricated. Loosened.
Stimulants. D-Pen Adrenaline and a Cormar-class pain blocker, most likely, Tia observed, her thought-voice wry and calculating.
She was enjoying this.
Karin spared a thought about psychopathic AI and the effects of being trapped in one’s own world for seventy years.
Seventy years. Suns.
No wonder she was such a psychopath.
She tilted her head to the side, like a bird—one of Nomiki’s mannerisms, she realized—and slipped down the steps. Her feet transitioned smoothly onto the broken concrete of the lot, the first pricks of pain ebbing away to simple observances under her new neurological pathways.
“What’s going on?” she asked, her voice wary.
“One such as me cannot surrender,” he said, some part of him tensing as she drew closer—a side effect of his fear that he quickly erased. Tense muscles reacted more slowly, wasted energy. Better to be relaxed.
“Yeah, you said that before.” Her tone grew irritated, spiking as she threw her peripheral focus to the crowd that now began to flank her, caution threading warm, buzzing strips of worry through her guts. Her mind whirred, processing, head twitching like she’d seen Nomiki do when she listened to her senses. “Doesn’t answer the question.”
“They won’t attack you,” he said. “They are here for witness.”
She lifted her gaze to eye them again. They’d sure gathered quickly—it had been, what, thirty seconds since she’d confronted him in the hallway? Did the Centauri have some sort of code for this?
It looked practiced. Official.
She rolled a shoulder, still not quite looking at him, though she kept him square in the focus of her attention. After a few more seconds, she brought her gaze back to him and took him in.
Ten, she decided. That was how many pieces s
he would take off before she let him die. A nice, round, lucky number.
And she would start right now.
She stalked toward him, her arm lifting by her side. The bandage over her blaster wound was soaked red now, nearly black around its edges. She gave a quick, violent jerk of her hand, and a narrow, triangular slice of skin tore free from his shoulder.
One, she thought, watching the blood well.
He grunted. Then, he was moving.
Panic flooded her nerves. She stilled as he charged her. He was fast—unbelievably so, like watching a speeding jet whip by overhead. She remembered that from what she’d seen of his fight with Nomiki. Though the bulkiness of his cybernetics made him look like a lumbering tank, his swiftness reminded her more of a sparrow at wing.
A dangerous combination.
The ground shook under his footfalls, large, heavy metal pads—not feet, but a tripod construction of machinery and hydraulics. She tensed, bent her knees.
The first blow was a feint. She ducked as his thick arm swept the air where her head had been, but resisted the urge to dive through the gap between his knees, sensing a trap. Heart hammering, she twisted, instead, whirring into a blindspot behind his arm.
She tagged a spinning kick into his leg, aiming for the back of his mechanical knee joint.
It glanced off his thigh, proving her earlier sense correct—the first blow had been a feint, and he was highly alert and aware of potential strike points.
She jerked to the side, attempting to keep ahead of his spin as he turned to face her. As she did, she heard a whir and a click.
Down! screamed Tia.
Her muscles gave way. The ground crashed up to meet her, then tilted. She phased as several bullets slammed into the concrete, chewing up bits of cement. Pain scraped her skin as she rolled, and she felt her shoulder blade and roughly five vertebra catch the brunt of her roll as she returned to this dimension, the turn-over of the somersault not quite fast enough to keep up with the momentum she’d thrown herself with, but she came out of it on her feet and already spinning into his guard.
She scratched a long strip from his rib cage, reality bending under her fingers as she plucked a wedge-shaped piece of armor, flesh, and bone.
