“Son of a… bastards.” She got her hands on the bench strut, trying to hold on. “Was Pavo lied to?”
Pavo walks a different path. The ‘whys’ pale in importance to the goal. Everyone’s path is different. Yours is no less or greater. Your life is yours to surrender, but how will Pavo feel?
She stared at the metal around her ankles. “Little late for that.”
Is it?
Despondence gave way, and a spark of hope led to determination. “You’re saying I’m not doomed?”
Have you ever heard the myth of Perseus?
“Sorry, ancient mythology wasn’t exactly an important topic in my fucked-up life.”
Perseus was the man who slew the creature Medusa. He bore a mirrored shield.
She squinted. “I don’t see any Perseus locked in here with me.”
No, Risa, but you have one. Your NIU contains an illegal modification. Underground deck jockeys call it a ‘Perseus.’
Her eyes shot open. She thought back to the little cartoon warrior with the mirror on his arm when she woke up in the medical tank. “Because it slays…”
As soon as the thought formed in her mind, a faint spark traversed a wire down her arms. She held her hands as far apart as she could. Ten Nano claws popped out. ‘Security override’ faltered, but continued to float in front of her. A careful twist and flick of her thumb severed the link in the binders and let her bring her arms around front. She slid a claw between wrist and metal and cut away the shackles. After freeing her legs, she got up and paced around in a circle. While the blades could cut the door in theory, her dainty arms couldn’t force them into metal that thick.
“Will this Perseus mod stop the thing from shocking the piss out of me if I try to take it out?”
The shock will happen, but it cannot pass into your NIU. It won’t strike like a thunderbolt to the brain, but it will be unpleasant.
Expecting to lose control of her legs, and possibly everything else, Risa sat on the bench and forced a series of rapid, deep breaths. The Medusa device consisted of a 5 mm-thick, half-inch square connected to a standard M3 interface prong. Almost everyone who did anything remotely illegal had heard the person it restrained should not touch the outer casing or it would complete a circuit and shock them. The voltage was miniscule, though it went straight into the brain. Risa hoped the Perseus worked. She let her fingertips hover around the little plastic square, closed her eyes, clenched her jaw, and pinched the little buttons to release the locked prong.
Hot tingles ran up and down her neck as though a swarm of angry bees descended upon her. Before the charge could paralyze her, she yanked the one-inch plug out. The final spark that leapt from the tip to the socket watered her eyes like a punch to the nose. She fell across the bench on her back, cradling her face in both hands. For a few seconds, she went blind as all of her cybernetic implants restarted and launched diagnostic processes. Worry began to take her, but dissipated when the world reappeared without the annoying red warning.
Hard deceleration of the van slid her toward the partition again. This time she got her arms up to catch herself before kissing plastisteel. When the g-forces released her, she leapt to her feet and engaged her claws, waving her arms to ‘surf’ the floor as the transport came to a complete stop. She listened to silence for half a minute. Perfect stillness made her think they’d stopped in the middle of nowhere. Adrenaline surged in her veins. Her mind ran away with thoughts of numerous horrible things the MPs might want to do to her with no witnesses.
So this is it, huh?
She crept close to the doors, crouching with blade-fingered hands raised like an angry wildcat. Seconds ticked by as she stared at the seam in the back doors, waiting for them to open. With her augmented hearing online, footsteps passing the side of the transport sounded loud and clear. She plotted three patterns of attack. As soon as the doors opened, she would use them. No hesitation. They’d be casual; the marines expected a helpless target; they’d be dead before they knew what happened. Her eyes narrowed as she remembered the female MP wanting to take her shirt.
I hope the bitch comes in first.
runching boots rounded the end of the transport. Risa lowered her stance, hoping her bare feet could find enough traction on the unadorned plastisteel floor to launch her into the MPs before they realized she’d gotten loose. Her claws caught the overhead glare, glowing pale blue as if made of shards of solid light. She couldn’t stop shivering, but despite the cold, runaway sweat beads conjured the illusion of crawling bugs.
Beep beep.
She stalled her breathing, imagining one of the MPs punching in a code to open the back door. They had stopped out in the middle of nowhere for a reason, and the more she thought about what these two wanted to do to her, the less she felt guilty about her plan. In her mind, the door slipped open and she dove into the shaft of sunlight. Her left hand would seek the throat of the closer MP. Based on the sound of their motion, the other would be on her right. Thin slivers of Myofiber in her legs would propel her jump, sending her into a clean flip and disorienting them. She’d land behind them, striking with both hands before they could get their guns out.
Thud, thud. An armored fist pounded on the wall.
Her fingers tensed.
“Do honorem Marti, ad ei inimici dabo ira mea.” The female MP’s voice crackled from a crappy speaker somewhere inside the ceiling.
Risa’s jaw fell open. What the fuck? Tension in her muscles conspired with the cold to accelerate her shivering.
The male MP cleared his throat. “Ab umbris vigilemus donec exiguntur.”
“Et vae qui minentur, nam prævaleamus,” whispered Risa, backing away from the door.
“We’re on your side,” said the woman.
Three more beeps chirped and the doors parted. Risa’s leg twitched, but she didn’t pounce. Two figures in Mars-red camouflage armor stood in front of a panorama of dry, dusty rock fields. Round-bottomed wheel ruts trailed off into the horizon in a gradual rightward arc. Overhead, a mass of dark-blue sky rolled and swirled with a brighter patch, two colossal blob-creatures battling for dominion. Terraforming had done a lot to mitigate the inhospitable chill of pre-human Mars. The settled areas were no longer prone to eighty-below in the winter, but it still only hit about fifty degrees in the summer. With nothing more than a man’s dress shirt on, her teeth chattered from the blast of outside air.
“Come on.” The female MP waved her over. “We don’t have a lot of time before we’re missed.”
Risa glared at her.
The woman eyed her claws and took a step back. “Sorry about the shirt thing, just acting the part. I was counting on Everett not letting me do it.”
It occurred to Risa her hesitation stemmed from disappointment at losing her reason to kill this woman. She let her claws slide back into her fingers. If the military had discovered the oath of the Pueri Verum Martis, there would be far larger problems than anything they could do to Risa out in the middle of nowhere. She scooted to the edge and let them help her to the ground. Coarse, cold Martian soil engulfed her toes, full of tiny little points. Every muscle in her back tensed.
“What if he didn’t?” Risa tried to hug warmth into her chest.
“Then I would’ve objected,” said the male MP.
The ground was warmer than the prisoner transport floor, but not by much. She stuck her hands under her arms, still shivering. Her heart leapt at the thunk of doors shutting behind her, but her body betrayed no reaction.
A status display created by Risa’s eyes claimed the air was sixty-two degrees. Yeah right. “So, what now?”
“Now,” said the woman, “we drive back to base and act surprised when we discover you are gone.”
“We do have a minute since we’d budgeted time to take the binders off.” The man shook his head at the broken cuffs and pushed the other door closed. “How’d you manage that?”
“Help from an angel,” she said.
The MPs exchanged a glance and w
alked around the transport, one per side.
“Hey, you’re not just going to leave me out here like this? This shirt isn’t much better than being naked.”
“You’re welcome to come to base with us, but I doubt you’d want that,” said the woman.
“But…” Risa looked down at herself. “How about a hydration unit or some shoes or some damn pants? If I stumble into an atmospheric gap, I’m dead.”
“Pants won’t help with that.” The man pointed to the right, compared to the way the transport faced. “Closest civilization is that way. Don’t follow us or backtrack our trail. I”―he offered a sympathetic frown―“If we give you anything, we won’t be able to explain away our missing equipment with not having noticed you escape. Besides, you’re not out in the middle of the desert. Civilization is close.”
“I wish we could do more,” said the woman, “but we have to keep our cover intact, too.”
The MPs climbed up the boarding ladders to the cab doors.
Risa followed the woman around to the driver’s side, cringing from the occasional sharp stone underfoot. “I’m not above wearing borrowed underwear.”
The MP seemed to consider it for a few seconds, but shook her head when she checked her forearm guard. “Can’t. This armor’s not easy to get out of. There’s not enough time. We’re already going to have to lean on it not to arouse suspicion.”
“Whatever,” mumbled Risa.
She cringed away from the dust cloud as the transport rumbled off into the distance, moving in a gradual leftward arc. The prospect of a safe ride, even a cage leading to execution, seemed almost welcome in comparison to being stranded in the Martian wastes with nothing but a button-down shirt. A moment of dark whimsy brought a smile. She had on more than she did in the vents as a kid, and she’d managed.
Risa took a breath and turned in a circle, surveying the endless fields of dull-red ground. If the curved trail of the transport formed an enormous longbow, she oriented herself in the direction the arrow would fly, and walked.
Some rocks were easy to avoid, anything the size of an egg or larger. Others, often the nasty, pointy ones, had the annoying habit of being half-buried. Every few minutes, she’d stumble and cry out as her unprotected feet found pain lurking in the silt. Her toes went numb within minutes, and the steady vibration of her chattering teeth faded out of conscious awareness. Old stories told around the dark barracks back in the safehouse haunted her. Risa remembered being twelve or thirteen, playing at being asleep, while the men shared stories of ancient alien ruins, or parasitic organisms in the soil that could take over your brain.
Oops. I forgot my boots. She scowled.
Vast open nothingness went in every direction, though the sky held a mixture of swirling blues as well as a distant whorl of black starscape. With no one around to see her, she abandoned her battle with the gusty wind whenever it blew the shirt in indecent ways. That effort could be better spent on studying the ground and exhaling heat over her icicle fingers.
Risa placed her steps with care, treading as though she navigated a field of landmines. She tried counting seconds and minutes into at least two hours. Twice, she stepped on something so painful she wound up crumpling to the ground and cradling her foot, praying to Raziel that whatever just stabbed her hadn’t broken skin with some horrible alien microbe. The ground offered no more kindness to her backside than it did to her soles, but the third time a sharp rock brought her down, she decided to stay there and rest.
“I can’t be too far away from civilization. We’d been driving for an hour maybe… I think.” She squinted at the horizon. “I’ve been in worse situations.” She thought back to the BMC mine/prison camp. “At least I’m not trapped by an atmospheric dead zone and surrounded by corporate slavers.”
She slouched forward, running a hand through her hair. Her feet had gone up to the ankles in the soft dirt. Whorls of red dust gathered and spiraled around her legs in the breeze. The close brush with institutionalized death triggered a fit of nervous laughter. After a minute, she went from giggling to staring mute at where her legs disappeared into the ground. Her father was a spy working for the more evil of the two powers. She debated the UCF and ACC in terms of morality.
With the ACC, the corporations offered no illusions that they considered their citizens anything other than serfs in service of the board of directors. A rigid social order had criminals at the bottom, with commoners not too far above that. Anyone who served in the military lived like royalty by comparison, but the executive caste was untouchable. Between the executives and the citizens, a small group of ‘wealthy elite’ had it the best of all―freedom and wealth without any responsibility to govern. For three percent of the population, the ACC wasn’t a bad place to be.
The UCF wrapped itself in the pageantry of its former nations. They claimed democracy while in reality they were every bit a police state controlled by a small number of supposedly elected officials who always seemed to come from the same two-dozen families, a small government lording over the people instead of a board of directors. Still, the military-industrial complex ruled the masses, the same as the ACC, but they spoon-fed patriotism, duty, honor, and loyalty to the citizens. At least they didn’t show up in the middle of the night and arrest you for speaking against the government.
Risa frowned.
The suits got half of Mars and the politicians the other.
Granted, she did believe that citizens lived better in the United Coalition Front territories, but Mars was a far cry from Earth society. Most people considered Earth-UCF nice by comparison. Mars-UCF, as Garrison had once explained, existed in a state of permanent martial law with the additional threat of random attack from ACC forces. Small comfort came in that the UCF’s illusion of rights offered the people somewhat of a cushion. No one there had ever been shot for failing to meet work quotas or refusing to allow soldiers to drag their wives and daughters off for rape parties. She scowled again. Those stories had to be exaggerated or pure fabrication. It defied logic that mass rebellion hadn’t broken out by now if things were as bad as the stories made them out to be. Even the most sheepish of people would rebel given enough mistreatment. Maybe the Front wasn’t necessary. Maybe the UCF wasn’t so bad after all. Maybe a citizen’s life with Pavo would make her happy.
“Maybe I’m getting delirious from dehydration.”
Her inner political debate ground to a halt behind more practical thoughts of her lack of water, clothing, and shelter. Terraforming or not, Mars became frigid at night. Arcadia City sat at the center of one of the older artificial atmosphere ‘bubbles’ that acted like a greenhouse. Knowing she couldn’t be more than ten miles away from civilization didn’t make her feel much better. This ‘escape’ could easily lead her into the path of another military patrol, and they probably wouldn’t be PVM. Worse yet, outlaws could find her, or raiders who preyed on cargo caravans headed for small settlements. That would make getting kidnapped by the Syndicate seem pleasant.
Risa squinted, a flare of anger exploding into giddy laughter. “Dammit Raziel, you sent them, didn’t you? This whole thing was…” She let her head sag forward, both hands raking fingers through her dirty hair. “Some kind of giant ‘I-told-you-so.’”
She listened to the baleful howl of the wind for a moment, unsure if she should laugh or cry.
Laughter erupted. She leaned her head back, arms out to the sides, and spun about, shouting, “Okay, you win. You were right. I’m sorry.” She let her arms fall limp at her sides, but kept her gaze upward, on a shifting indigo mass. You’re up there right now watching me, aren’t you?
A pale blue shape slid past the darker portion of sky, two gargantuan amoeba dancing.
“Please,” she whispered. “Don’t leave me alone out here.”
Perhaps twenty minutes of walking later, a distant rumble made her snap her gaze to the side. An orb of bright white light appeared on the distant horizon, tracking from left to right. Behind it, a series of glinting meta
l segments followed. From this distance, it resembled a giant metal snake gliding out of a cloud of dust. Risa thought back to an operation where she snuck aboard one of the Millipedes, riding the inter-city cargo transport vehicle among boxes of pungent fertilizer. They were halfway between truck and train, with hundreds of tiny wheels running on the closest thing Mars had to roads. Wherever Millipedes existed, so too did a trail of plastisteel plates, and that meant a road she could follow.
The idea of walking on smooth, comfortable metal got her moving and accelerated her pace to a careless jog―until her foot found another hidden dagger. She fell into a somersault and bounded right back up, slowing a bit to avoid a repeat.
Soon, the glorious sight of a ribbon of silver upon the rocky red ground came into view. She rushed for it with barely exercised restraint. The Millipede had long since gone by the time she reached the edge of the road, only ozone-flavored air from its batteries lingered. Metal came up to her chest at the edge, where she draped herself over the side as if hugging the thing, even if the gesture did allow the wind to bare her ass to the world behind her.
The track wall beveled inward at a forty-five degree angle at about the level of her stomach, creating a three-foot tall barrier on either side of the roadway. It reminded her of the toy where little cars zoom around a track, lips on either side keeping them from flying off. Risa climbed over the top and sat on the edge long enough to brush grit from her soles before hopping down to the driving surface. The inside faces of the retaining walls had been liberally scratched and gouged by the inattentiveness of long-haul drivers.
She slid from her perch, landing on charcoal grey traction coating sprayed over the plastisteel road. Tiny rubbery nuggets embedded in softer binding material provided something for tires to grip, plain metal having proved too slippery. She lost a moment of relief at the soft surface, as if walking on a massage. With the beautiful texture under her feet, she found a second wind. She stayed close to one side so she would have time to dive away in the event another Millipede came by. The drivers were notorious for falling asleep at the controls, and she had no confidence one would stop in time not to run her down, or bother trying to change lanes.
Hand of Raziel (Daughter of Mars Book 1) Page 30
