On a whim, she attempted to enter her Ori-Inu code. The display over the keypad lit up with the words access denied.
Didn't think that would work, she thought as she attached one of the grenades to the door, set the timer for one minute, then clambered back along the asteroid. She moved farther than she needed to—the grenades provided a shaped charge that would blow outward, so she really only needed to move a meter to the side of the door to be safe. But it was better to err on the side of caution.
After one minute, the grenade blew with a flash of light and a sudden spread of metal fragments and quickly freezing dust particles and air into space.
If Olokun used the same protocols as Hegemony ships and bases, the airlock inner door would now be shut and would remain so until security gave the all-clear. Before that would happen, a damage-control team would be scrambled to assess the damage. Since this airlock was useless, they would have to come through a different egress. Folami figured it would be at least seven minutes before they would be anywhere nearby.
She'd done no active psionic work since she left L'owuro, and had eaten and drunk and gotten lots of rest, so she figured to be at full capacity.
Which was good, as her next trick was going to be tough.
Moving back to the now-shattered airlock door, she saw the small interior, with another keypad next to the inner door. The display over that keypad read emergency lockdown.
Not for long, Folami thought with a smile.
Taking a few deep breaths for good measure, and not twitching her nose, she both opened the airlock door and held the air on the other side from moving.
As a general rule, molecules moved from an area of greater concentration to one of lesser concentration. That most basic of natural laws led to explosive decompression when a sealed environment in a vacuum had a breach.
Right now, only Folami's will kept the air molecules inside the station after the door opened.
The hardest part, though, was to move through her own self-imposed barricade and enter the atmosphere of the station proper. A spike of pain drove through her right eye as she willed the airlock door open and the air not to move even though her own body was displacing it.
Once she got through, she released the door, which slid quickly shut.
Then she collapsed against the wall.
Ceasing her hold on the door and air had done little to relieve the pain behind her eye. Pausing to catch her breath, she then broke the seal on her helmet and removed it.
Depressingly, the air in the station was just as stale as it had become in her suit.
After wiping the blood from her upper lip with the sleeve of her EVA suit, she removed the suit, then activated its security system. Now if anyone other than herself or Hembadoon touched the suit, it would explode, likely killing anyone in a one-meter radius.
Under the EVA suit, she wore a long leather coat that Hembadoon had in a storage compartment on Ebun. The coat had heating circuitry woven inside it, probably meant for use during planetary winters—or any time he visited Esu. It was only marginally more protection than that provided by the hospital gown, but she took what she could get.
She started moving through the station, an Ayoka rifle in each hand, with the Bayo pistol in the coat's right pocket, the remaining grenade now in the left pocket.
Reaching out with her mind, she tried to find the familiar thoughts of either Abeje or Hembadoon.
She couldn't sense Abeje at all, but Hembadoon's mind was quite clear—and agitated.
Closer to her current location, though, was a highly powerful telepath. A Nide coming to play.
His thoughts were wild and chaotic and hard to pin down, but she got his name: Alagbara. She recalled that he was among the missing Ori-Inu, and that she'd gone on a mission with him once.
He also wasn't looking for her, but was trying to avoid Cavalry Master Apara.
When Folami rounded a corner, he was standing waiting for her, wearing white armor, a wrist weapon pointed at her. She immediately tried to telekinetically fire her Ayokas—
—then screamed in pain as agony sliced into her skull. It was the worst pain she'd felt since she destroyed Yemoja.
"Ha! See there, Folami? See, we were ready for you this time, Folami. Ready to do business and not get put in a box, ain't that right, Folami? No more of your oluwa, always getting the good assignments. Precious tenth-level buruku. Well, that ain't no good to you now, Folami, 'cause what we got here is feedback that only affects ninth-levels or higher if they do anything. Know what that means? Means you can't do anything. Not without a world of pain, anyhow. So, Folami, you got anything to say?"
In fact, Folami had nothing to say, but was happy to take advantage of Alagbara's gloating to focus past the pain and strike back, mindblasting what passed for his brain into mulch.
Staring down at the corpse inside the armor that was now hemorrhaging blood from his eyes, nose, ears, and mouth, she said, "I've been living with a lot more than a world of pain for years now, you stupid buruku."
Then she shot him repeatedly with the Ayokas. Eventually, the pain stopped, meaning that her rounds had destroyed the device causing the feedback.
Folami considered then abandoned the notion of trying to put on one of the Nide suits of armor. If Tobi and Oranmiyan had any sense, they'd be biometrically keyed to the user, same as the Ori-Inu armor.
She sensed four cavalry on their way toward her from the other direction, so she kept moving forward, hoping to stay ahead of them. After all that, she really needed to conserve her energy.
Interestingly, the cavalry weren't after her, but were looking for Alagbara.
When she turned a corner, she literally bumped into Oranmiyan.
To her shock and disgust, he was holding Abeje in his arms—and she was dead.
"Folami? It's you! Good! Now it can be like it was, you know? It's all good now. All good. Yes, it is."
Folami blinked. Oranmiyan's eyes were glazed, his tone was softer than usual, and he barely seemed aware of the corpse in his arms.
Oh mogbe, he has lost it. "Oranmiyan? What happened to Abeje?"
"Nothing. We're all together again, that's all, just like it was in the good old times. Remember those good times with Orisha Hembadoon? Those were some good times."
Folami felt that the four cavalry were now almost upon them. Oranmiyan's apparent descent into madness brought her up short. She had been prepared to fight him, not see him broken like this.
One of the cavalry said, "Both of you, stand very still and put your hands where I can see them."
Folami ignored him, instead staring at Oranmiyan.
"It's fine, Cavalryman," Oranmiyan muttered. "Everything's taken care of."
"I'm sorry, Oranmiyan," the cavalryman said, "but I have orders straight from War Chief Tobi to take both of you to detention until L'owuro returns—and also to dispose of Abeje's corpse."
That was the wrong thing to say. Oranmiyan's face exploded into blind fury. "Shut up! Shut up! She's not dead, dammit, shut up!"
Suddenly, Folami found herself on her knees, her headache having intensified a hundredfold. I would kill for my armor right now, just for the supply of analgesics, she thought, wondering how and when her knees buckled.
She also didn't sense any active minds nearby. Looking behind her, she saw that all four cavalry were dead.
"Oranmiyan?" she said slowly, getting to her feet.
He was caressing Abeje's face now. Folami could see that her friend's neck had been broken, and she wondered how it happened.
She had a horrible feeling as to what the answer was—which may have had as much to do with Oranmiyan's instability as the Shango-oti.
"Come on, Folami," he finally said, "let's go to the hangar. We can get away."
"I can't leave, Oranmiyan," she said. "This place—it has to be destroyed. Ojiji is an abomination."
"No!" he screamed, dropping Abeje's body to the ground. "You don't understand—Shango-oti, it'll make you fre
e!"
"Free to do what? Oranmiyan, you remember me during training? You remember how desperately, more than anything else, I wanted to forget who I was? All the death and destruction, all the people that Olorun made me kill! When I was exposed to your filthy Shango-oti, it undid all of the mindwiping! I remember every single person that I killed, Oranmiyan! All the people on Yemoja—it's more than I can bear, and I'll be damned if I let that happen to anyone else!"
Even as she was screaming, Folami felt the presence of four more cavalry coming down the corridor. The pounding in her head was a warning to go easy on the telepathy, so instead she raised her weapons.
That was a mistake, as Oranmiyan seemed to assume she was pointing her Ayokas at him. How far gone is he?
And how far gone am I?
She telekinetically shoved Oranmiyan out of her way, even as he was about to fire his own Ayoka. His rounds fired into the ceiling as he fell.
Folami fired both weapons, which tore through the armor of each cavalry as they rounded the corner, before they'd even had a chance to get Folami in their sights.
As she shot them, she heard the orders that all four of them had received directly from Tobi, still stuck on L'owuro in Folami's trap: "Your orders are to kill both Folami and Oranmiyan. She's too dangerous and he's become too much of a liability. Use any means necessary."
"Dammit, Folami, why are you doing this? We can be free and together again just like the old days and we'll be free!"
"We weren't 'free' in the old days, Oranmiyan, we were under the Hegemony's thumb. They mindwiped us every other day to cover things up!"
"I know that!" he cried. "But it's different now!"
"How?" Folami pointed at Abeje's corpse. "How is that different? What did Abeje do to deserve that?"
Oranmiyan stared down at Abeje's corpse.
"No, it's not like that." He knelt down and held Abeje's broken body against his massive chest. "It'll all be okay. Shango-oti will—"
"All Shango-oti will do is trade Isembi for Tobi. Come on, Oranmiyan, you can read these guys as well as I can. Tobi wants us both dead, because we're both messing with his plan."
"No!" Oranmiyan screamed, and Folami felt his scream in her mind even more than she heard it with her ears. One massive fist careened toward Folami's head with the same speed as that of the Eso on Oshun, and she was barely able to mentally shove it aside the same way.
"It's not like that! It's all gonna be good, like it used to be!"
Folami considered then abandoned the notion of trying to convince Oranmiyan that their days as trainees were far from an ideal time to be re-created—especially since he himself faked his own death to get away from it. Rational arguments weren't going to win the day here.
Instead, she blew out the rock wall next to Oranmiyan.
In Kaduna Township, an attempt to do something similar with the cornice Oranmiyan was standing behind failed because Oranmiyan saw it coming.
On Olokun Station, though, Oranmiyan didn't even notice that Folami hadn't wrinkled her nose this time.
Screaming with pain as the rocks sliced into his large forearms—he wasn't so far gone that he didn't know to raise his arms to protect his face—Folami didn't wait for him to recover, instead leaping toward him with a jumping side kick to the solar plexus.
She regretted the action as soon as her bare foot struck Oranmiyan's rock-hard stomach. She'd been unable to use her telekinesis to make the kick stronger—too much psionics in too short a time—and without the heavy-soled boots of her battlesuit, her foot took the brunt of the impact.
However, Oranmiyan did stumble backward even as Folami fell to the floor.
Pushing herself to her feet, Folami said, "It's over, Oranmiyan. All of it."
But Oranmiyan wasn't getting up. Instead, he rocked back and forth on the floor, blood dripping from his arms, muttering to himself.
"It'll be good again, just like the old days, all of us together again, just like the old days, it'll all be good again, you'll see, me, Folami, Abeje, the best of the best of the best of the best, we'll show them, we will..."
Folami stared down at the man who she once considered her closest friend, and thought about how much she had lost.
And how much she never had.
There was little she could do for Oranmiyan, and less she could do for Abeje.
But I can end this project once and for all.
Promising herself that she'd come back for Oranmiyan and for Abeje's body—no matter what happened, she owed both of them that—she ran toward the inner section of the asteroid. From the wounded and dying security personnel, Folami had telepathically gleaned the precise layout of Olokun Station, and discerned where they were holding Hembadoon. That was her next stop.
As she ran through the rocky corridors, which were even harsher than the metal decks of L'owuro on her bare feet, she soon came across two more corpses, both bleeding from the eyes, nose, ears, and mouth.
Oranmiyan must have done this.
There were only eight other cavalry still left on the station—Olokun's primary security was secrecy, after all—and they were occupied gathering up the remaining Nide and the support staff. Interestingly, the Nide were being placed into stasis pods. Some of them were even going willingly. Probably a security precaution—Tobi doesn't want any telepaths sensing the Nide on L'owuro.
Tobi was planning to abandon Olokun Station. Folami wasn't letting him get away that easily.
Thanks to the reduced security being so fully occupied, Folami didn't encounter anybody by the time she reached the room where Hembadoon was being held.
Conveniently, both the people she wanted to find were present: Hembadoon and Cavalry Master Apara. There was a third, Doctor Ogumefu. Apara's thoughts were urgent, Ogumefu's frustrated, Hembadoon's angry.
Holding back for a moment, Folami telepathically eavesdropped on the conversation in the room, which also gave her a moment to learn the layout, and where everyone was. Hembadoon was lying on a pallet in restraints, with Ogumefu standing nearby, looking at something on a computer screen. Apara was standing about a meter behind Ogumefu.
"Doc, will you hurry up?" Apara was saying, anxiously. Her primary concern was to get Ogumefu and Hembadoon to the airlock so they could board L'owuro when it came back.
Which was sooner than Folami had expected. She had been hoping to get another hour or so, but Tobi's techs were obviously better than she thought. She read in Apara's mind that L'owuro's ETA was ten minutes.
"Just one second, please," Ogumefu said in clipped tones. He was anxious, too, but it was the excitement of a scientific discovery. "I'm just getting the results of the subject's DNA scan, and it's fascinating."
"It can also be fascinating on L'owuro, Doc. We need to go, now. You can poke and prod him some more later."
Apara's urgency was borne of the other duty she had. Once she got Ogumefu and Hembadoon to the airlock, she was to go to the security office and start the destruction sequence. Her orders were to time it for ten minutes after L'owuro was fully loaded and away from the asteroid.
Folami smiled. This made her plan easier to enact.
"Yes, yes, of course," Ogumefu said, distractedly.
Then Folami's smile fell. Ogumefu's thoughts regarding "the subject" made Folami ill. The doctor was frustrated by Tobi's insistence on keeping Hembadoon alive, as Ogumefu felt he could learn so much more from dissecting the Orisha.
Scanning further into Ogumefu's mind revealed even more—including both dissection and vivisection of certain Nide. Some were Ori-Inu that Folami knew and had worked with.
Knowing that made her next move much easier. Psionically taking aim before she even came inside, she entered the room and shot Ogumefu four times in the chest with one of her stolen Ayokas, the first round pulverizing his heart before she even saw him.
Her only regret was that he never saw the kill shot coming, and so died without being aware of who killed him.
Folami regretted that. And a moment
later, she regretted that it had come to this: she enjoyed killing someone.
Those thoughts passed through her mind in an instant. The other Ayoka was trained on Apara's left knee.
Apara had been holding her own Ayoka at her chest, so pointing it at Folami would only have taken a second, but Folami didn't give her that second.
"Don't move, Apara," she said for good measure.
From the pallet came a chuckle. "About time you showed up."
Sparing a glance at Hembadoon, she saw that he was smiling raggedly. "Sorry—had to get Tobi out of the way. Oh, and I ate all of your food. Don't move, Apara," she added when she sensed that Apara tightened her grip on her Ayoka. "You know damn well what I am—you saw plenty of it on Oshun when I saved you all from the Eso. I know when you move, I know when you blink, and I know that you want to live long enough so that your next payday will cover the last of your uncle's medical expenses. Oh, and if you fire, I'll make your Ayoka blow up in your face."
As she said these words to Apara, she kept her left arm in the same place relative to Apara's knee, even as she moved toward the pallet and released Hembadoon. At no point did she actually look at Apara.
The moment his hands were free, Hembadoon yanked the psionic blocker off his forehead. "Finally!"
Only then did Folami turn to make eye contact with Apara. "Now then—you have orders from War Chief Tobi to set the destruction sequence. We're going to go do that, just on a slightly faster timetable."
"No chance, Ori-Inu. I'm the only one authorized to activate that sequence—not even Tobi can do it. Which means you can't kill me."
Folami sighed. She'd been hoping to do this the easy way.
"You're right," she said to Apara, "I can't kill you."
Then she shot Apara in the knee.
"Yeearrrrrrrrrrrh!" Apara collapsed to the floor, her Ayoka clattering on the rock.
Hembadoon smoothly picked the weapon up, while Folami removed Apara's helmet, and then locked eyes with the woman and concentrated.
While Hembadoon provided most of her training, he sometimes had to leave to find and recruit more telepaths. During those periods, others would come in to teach, and one such was an Ori-Inu named Aiku. He had taught her mind-control. It was incredibly difficult to accomplish, especially with a subject who was either unconscious or asleep—because the body resisted control when it was shut down like that—or fully conscious and actively resisting.
Guilt in Innocece Page 15
