Hand of Raziel (Daughter of Mars Book 1)

by Matthew S. Cox

  A dozen slugs stalled on a grey armored vest, pummeling the wind out of the man. He staggered. She rolled flat on her front, aiming. The BMC soldier steadied himself, his silent roar manifesting as a reddening face in her scope. Figures they have heavy ballistic armor. She tossed the borrowed rifle aside and drew one of her Hotaru-6 pistols. Risa writhed around two more bullets as she fired six times into his chest. Time returned to normal as her speedware cut off. Six half-inch tunnels ringed with embers holed his body. He lingered upright for a few seconds with a dumbfounded expression, as if he couldn’t believe he was dead.

  “Complain to HR for being cheap. Everyone else on this planet uses lasers.”

  The man fell over backwards.

  Ouch. She let herself lie flat for a moment, wanting to cradle the huge bruise on her back. I shouldn’t throw those kinds of stones. She tried to rub her aching back with the ground. My suit won’t stop lasers either.

  Not sure when the next roving patrol would come by, she forced herself up. Sweat peeled down her face as she dragged one man and then the next behind the rocks. Hauling corpses around would have taken a lot out of her even without speedware wires cooking her muscles and a hole in her e-suit stealing her oxygen. All the while she struggled, the ever-present hiss of her failing atmosphere kept her heart pounding in her head.

  When she had the second man out of sight, her fear reached even footing with her reason. She sprinted for the edge of the blue field, leaving it up to Raziel’s master if anyone saw her. The hissing faded to a whining squeal, the sound of a deflating balloon when she breached the energy wall, and died out four seconds later.

  Risa sped across forty meters of open ground, and dove into a chest slide under a low-slung drop building, thirteen inches of clearance between it and the ground. No longer able to resist, she raked her fingers at the helmet release and sucked in a breath of pure air, unconcerned with the taste of Martian dust. One arm over her face muffled the noise of her coughing. The ground quaked from the activity of heavy machinery. Even BMC wasn’t stupid enough to dig directly under their camp. She glanced to her right at the entrance to the mines over a hundred meters away, a huge tunnel yawning at the sky. As much as the ground vibrated, their digging machines had to be massive.

  The near silence of the thin air outside left her overwhelmed by the presence of chaos. Turrets moved, heavy equipment whirred, distant plasma cutters echoed out from the mineshaft, and the bone-jarring rumble of the ore transport shook everything. She curled into a ball, trembling from pain and fatigue. Soreness spread over her back, outlining the exact dimensions of the bruise she knew was there. Risa lay still, panting, until the involuntary twitching ceased and she regained control of her muscles.

  She squirmed around in the confined space, slipping out of the maroon e-suit before bundling it into a mass and covering it with dirt. Black ballistic stealth armor would hide her better in the night, even if it did little against the dangerous atmosphere outside. Then again, the guard holed her e-suit; it wouldn’t allow her to survive a four-day ride home. I’m as trapped as the poor bastards I’m here to save. Risa dragged herself to the inward side of the structure, hiding under a portable stairway. Nothing like having proper motivation.

  From here, she observed a command building, barracks, several ore-storage pods, the mine entrance, and the worker housing. She spent a good ten minutes staring at the closest gun tower. The weapon appeared ballistic in nature, but had to be on the order of 20mm. She wasn’t sure her ballistic suit could stop a slug that big―or if she would want it to. Her fingers dug into the ground when another quake rattled everything. The massive ore transporter came grinding back along a road of plastisteel plates. This is going wrong already. I should have stopped farther out, watched. I don’t know how much time I have until the next shift finds the bodies. Risa peeked around the corner, trying to get a sense of the guards’ routine.

  Close your eyes, Risa, said Raziel. Turn on night vision.

  He sounded normal this time, bereft of the overwhelming divine presence he often had. Is that him whispering? She did as he asked.

  Four seconds. Now!

  She opened her eyes, finding every single light in the compound dark except for faint flickering behind the miners’ quarters. Sensing it as both omen and opportunity, she bolted from cover.

  Lines of fire ran down her legs as she tapped her speedware again. Nanometer platinum threads burned energy into her nerves, boosting her run up to forty miles an hour. Four seconds wasn’t much time. In her green-on-black night-vision world, she headed for the great shimmering ball of light, many times exaggerated from its true intensity.

  Men and women shouted in the distant blackness. Amid numerous simple curses or yells of shock, a few voices maintained an air of command.

  “What the hell broke now?”

  “Again?”

  “Fix it!” screamed a stern-sounding woman.

  Risa cut the boost and rounded the corner three-tenths of a second before the lights came on, finding cover in a cozy alcove between the plastisteel pod and a massive stone ridge, easily thirty stories tall. Her eyes changed modes back to normal sight, and the blinding orb faded to sparks raining from an open electrical box. A grungy man knelt before it, paralyzed by her sudden appearance. Fine tools fell from his fingers as he recoiled with the expression of a boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

  She ignored the burn in her legs, leaning one hand on the wall to still the mutinous tremor of overstressed muscles that tried to overtake her body. She slouched in the posture of a broken marionette, gaze down and to the side, face emotionless. Violet light leaked from her cybernetic eyes through a curtain of raven hair.

  The man gasped, eyes wide. He fell out of his kneel, scampering back against the stone. “Y-you’re…” A shaking finger pointed.

  “Yes, I am,” she said, her voice eerie and calm. “I’m here to help.”

  Trembling, the dust-covered man scooted away from her. He covered his mouth with a hand, smearing four finger trails of dirt down his cheek. She took a step closer and he fell on his ass, raising a sleeve of frayed brown cloth in a defensive gesture. Two yellow buttons at the cuff caught the weak light, the letters BMC visible amid the glow. Her hand slid over the metal wall, bracing herself as she crept closer. The heat along the wirepaths in her muscles gave way to wisps of cool tingling, a full-body sensation of pins and needles.

  I’m pushing too hard. This is gonna kill me.

  She remembered the warnings, the talk of winding up a permanently twitching wretch unable to get out of bed. Every nerve in her body shot to shit and crisped. They said it would cripple her by forty; it didn’t matter, not like she’d live to get there.

  “D… Don’t kill me.” His arm covered his silt-darkened eyes.

  In the shadow of the barracks, Risa loomed over the wretched man, a femme silhouette drawn in black against a darkening rose-hued sky. Glowing violet eyes stared off at an angle. Seconds later, her glare softened. “I don’t know what wild stories you poor bastards hear this far out, but I’m not here to harm you.” She sank into a squat, putting a hand on his wrist to pull it down from his face.

  The castoff glow from her eyes tinted his cheeks purple. This close to her, he stopped breathing. Underground folklore and reality seemed to collide in his mind; a spasm, a gasp, and he gulped.

  “T-the MLF is gonna b-blow us up?”

  “We don’t blow up civilians.” She looked at the ground and sighed. “I’ve been sent to get you out. We know you’re all being held against your will. There isn’t much time. Two soldiers are dead at the perimeter.”

  Fear melted from his expression. He grinned and grabbed her hand. “I’m Kal. Come on.” He scurried back to the panel and resumed tinkering. “I just made it into the security system before you gave me a heart attack.”

  “Sorry,” she muttered. “I have that effect.”

  Kal chuckled, pausing with a cocked eyebrow. “Strangest thing. I got a text-on
ly comm this morning fulla passwords and schematics. The whole damn place. Whoever it was even sent me a loop feed of the barracks to splice into the cameras. Was that―”

  “I’m not much of a hacker. Maybe Raziel decided to help.”

  “Raziel?”

  Risa answered in a deadpan voice: “The angel.”

  He shot her a look, lost track of what he was doing, and enjoyed a few hundred volts. His body slapped into the ground, paralyzed and smoking.

  She helped him up.

  “I-I-I’ve got the patch in. Eight s-s-seconds to upload. It’s t-true what they say?”

  She examined her fingertips. “He is real. I’m not Cat-6.”

  They both froze as crunching boots passed in front of the thirty-meter-long barracks pod.

  “Okay, the worm is in the system.” He removed his tools and closed the box. “Crawl under so you don’t get seen. There’s a hatch in the head.” He got up and wandered around to the front at a casual stroll.

  Risa crawled into the gap below the immense portable building, dragging herself on her belly to fit. Recessed pipes, some labeled ‘sewage,’ traced like circuit board paths along the underside, leading her to a maintenance port, where she rolled onto her back and waited. Great exhaustion had a way of making loose dirt comfortable. Her body wanted to wait for a few hours, preferably asleep, but that was out of the question. Amplified hearing turned footsteps into thuds and inaudible murmurs into legible speech as the people above her approached.

  “All I’m asking is for you to open the damn thing and look,” said Kal.

  A baritone voice seemed to vibrate the whole pod. “You been suckin’ on too much drill solvent.”

  “Trust me. Five seconds.”

  Risa tapped her foot on nothing.

  The seal broke with a hiss; a four-inch-thick hunk of plastisteel lifted on assisted hinges through a mist of water vapor. Three faces stared down at her. Kal, a dark-skinned man, and a muscular figure with a reddish tinge to his skin. Their bodies’ initial reaction at seeing a female in a skin-tight gloss-black suit shrank away with recognition of who she was.

  “Hello, boys.” She reached both arms up. “Give a girl a hand?”

  The dark man and the ruddy one each took an arm and pulled her in as though her weight barely registered to them. Neither man let go until she looked at their hands.

  Kal moved to shut the hatch and whispered, “Welcome to B Pod.”

  “I’ll be crab food. The Phantom.” The dark-skinned man ran a hand over his head, scratching the back. “Name’s Rick.”

  “Incredible,” said the other man, with a thick Russian accent.

  “His name’s not incredible,” whispered Kal. “That’s Sergei.”

  Wow.

  Risa covered her mouth. The interior of B Pod smelled like the locker room for a professional Gee-ball team after a triple-overtime game. Bunk beds and footlockers ran in two directions, a few rickety partitions of grey cloth remained here and there. Two autoshower tubes and four toilets by the innermost wall lacked any barriers. When a mining corporation literally owned their workers, privacy became expendable.

  Forty-six men crowded around her, most of them looked strong enough to lift the Foxbat. For once, Risa enjoyed her reputation. Not one of them had groped, winked, or made a suggestive comment, though the three on their beds already masturbating didn’t bother to stop―or hide what they were doing.

  “I’m here to get as many of you out as I can. You’ve probably heard some wild stories, but I can’t kill all of the guards fast enough to protect you from any retaliation.”

  “We need weapons.” A tall man with deep brown skin, face scarred from a years-old accident, shoved his way to the edge of the crowd. “Can you get to the armory? Kal got some codes. We don’t need our hands held.”

  “Lawrence is right,” said Sergei. “Before BMC trick me with job that not job, I train in Severomorsk.”

  Risa lifted an eyebrow. “Spetsnaz?”

  “No. Regular army, but I work with them sometimes.” Sergei slapped himself on the chest twice, hard. “If I Spetsnaz, I would have killed them all myself.”

  “Sounds like you’ve planned this out already.” She stretched.

  The crowd leaned with her, one or two smiled.

  Kal squirmed into view between two huge men, a battered datapad in hand. “We got a schematic map and codes to the armory lockers here.” He tapped a holographic plane, pinching and twisting his fingers through the light to center it in on a small green square representing one of the drop pods. “Manifest shows there’s at least a hundred rifles, vests, and ammunition in the guard’s command building.”

  In Risa’s vision, a blank amber panel spread out into space above the men. Access codes and details from the datapad typed in line by line as she took mental notes. “We need to move quick.” She scanned the group, ignoring the three lost to their self-gratification. She pointed at Sergei and Lawrence. “You two, follow me to the armory. Can the rest of you men handle yourselves?”

  Laughter rippled over the crowd. A few pillows got thrown at the men jerking off.

  “We’ll need suits,” said a voice somewhere amid the crowd.

  Kal waved the datapad; the wobbling green light made shadows dance on the walls. “All the e-suits are in the main security armory, inside the mountain.”

  “Bliad,” muttered Sergei. “We will not able to take them.”

  A brush of pain between her shoulder blades reminded Risa of her e-suit’s demise. A sealed vehicle would be the best way out, avoiding a conflict with the entire corporate army stationed here. The ore carrier was far too slow. It would take a month to get back to the city, and they would be a sitting duck if BMC counterattacked. The transport shuttle. Risa’s head snapped up with a black lipstick smile.

  “I have an idea.” She snatched the datapad from Kal. “Sergei, Lawrence, you’ll go with me to the forward armory here. It’ll be easier to get to. I need someone to start spreading the word among the rest of you.”

  Four volunteers raised hands.

  “It’ll take at least six,” said Kal, “to warn everyone fast enough.”

  “What then?” asked Rick.

  “Head for the shuttle.” Risa rummaged around a few bunks before finding a large duffel bag, which she dropped on the floor at her feet. “Kal, lemme see that map again.”

  He held the datapad out. The armory pod was close to the entrance to the permanent construction inside the mountain, and in range of three of the six point defense turrets. A standing cluster of rocks represented the closest cover available, though at least fifty meters of open ground separated it from the target.

  “That’ll have to do.” She looked back and forth between Sergei and Lawrence, and poked her finger through the hologram at the rocks. “Can you two get to this point without arousing too much suspicion?”

  “Should be pie,” said Sergei.

  “Cake,” muttered Lawrence. “Yeah, we can act like we’re goin’ for a late dinner.”

  “Yes, I like cake too.” Sergei’s expression waxed thoughtful.

  Risa stepped into the bag. “Good. Let’s go.”

  She curled up into a ball, shifting a bit as Lawrence zipped her in. The bag lifted with surprising care. Rapid whispers discussing who went to which area to spread word grew faint as they carried her away. Metal squeaked. Door. Boots clanked down a few steps and crunched in loose dirt. The swish-swish of a leg brushed along her shins. Whoever carried her had the bag in one hand at his side. She closed her eyes, watching the grey wisps created by the Wraith. Her nylon cocoon blurred the effect, making it impossible to see enough detail to determine who.

  They walked for several minutes before coming to an abrupt stop.

  “Where are you two going?” asked a stern-sounding woman.

  “Ma’am,” said Lawrence. The bag bobbed up and down. “Gotta wash my shit. That mess you people call food’s been kicking my ass. I’ve had the shits for a week, and it ain’t a pre
tty sight.” The bag floated up. “Wanna smell?”

  That was stupid. If she’s got thermal, this is about to get ugly. Risa stared at the new grey shape. She sounded female, but the apparition was as big as the men. I hope that’s armor.

  “Disgusting.” The third apparition’s arm blurred with a sharp wave. “Get the fuck out of my way.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said both men.

  “Yei byi trahnutsya, i polehchalo byi,” muttered Sergei as they continued walking.

  “Yeah.” Lawrence chuckled. “Whatever you said, I agree.”

  Risa studied the digital map floating in the blackness. The compound nestled along the inner face of an angled rock ridge, with the entrance to the underground portion at the center of the vee. BMC put the forward armory pod a mere twenty meters from the front door. Her only chance to make it across the fifty-meter clearing would be another speedware-assisted sprint. The mere thought of it made every joint ache.

  I can’t let that boy grow up an orphan.

  “Here we are,” whispered Lawrence.

  He set the bag down and pulled the zipper open. She crawled out and clung to the rocks, peering at her target through the gap between two large spires. Unlike the barracks, the armory pod was dark grey, almost black, and had the look of reinforced armor plating. The loaf-shaped box perched on spring-loaded legs that kept it four feet off the ground. A lone security man stood on the portable staircase positioned at the narrow end. He paced back and forth on his five-by-five-foot perch, evidently stationed there as a guard. Fifty meters. A yellow line appeared, hanging in her vision. Numbers hovering at the midway point wavered between 2.2 and 2.5 seconds, indicating the time it would take to clear the distance at full speed. Those 0.3 seconds could make all the difference. If he sets off an alarm, they’ll be slaughtered.

  Sergei leaned close enough for the air coming out of his nostrils to wash over the back of her head. With each breath, her eyes narrowed a millimeter more, until she whirled to face him, ready to snap. At the sight of him studying the guard, and not her ass, she smiled.