Hand of Raziel (Daughter of Mars Book 1)

by Matthew S. Cox

  The color of the ground changed as she passed into the atmosphere inside, no longer tinted blue by the retention field. Thirty square miles of Arden Settlement stretched out below, seeming much larger than it did from outside. A few beds of enriched soil supported natural plants, exotics for the wealthy. At the edge of the dome to her left, a large cluster of drop-box buildings stood with their doors, awnings and hatches open. It reminded her of an e-book Garrison had given her when she turned eleven: a story of a Mars frontier settlement told from the point of view of mice living in discarded food containers.

  Drop pods do kind of look like takeout boxes.

  In truth, the gate in the dome would’ve accommodated a ship much larger than the one she’d stolen, but to her inexperienced consciousness, it had been as scary as flying the ship into the eye of a needle. After a moment, she recovered her nerve, and once the ‘ooh-ahh’ effect of gazing over the settlement faded, she navigated toward a landing pad along the north wall, at the middle of the long oval. A few other aircraft perched on it: two civilian cargo movers, and another Lava Wasp.

  Her conscious mind took a backseat as the ghost sharing her brain brought the plane in over an open berth. She hit one button that made the wings flare out with an uncountable number of separate flaps, and another that caused loud whirring in the airframe. It worried her until the knowledge that she’d deployed the landing pads surfaced in her awareness. The nose pulled up as she throttled back and set the ship down like a practiced aviator. An A–B trip wasn’t anything to brag about, but the silicon echo of a pilot said any flight you can walk away from was worth celebrating.

  Two men appeared at the top of a ramp at the front end of the berth, riding a refueling cart consisting of a large tank, six tiny wheels, and a pair of seats bolted onto the front. Their animated discussion faded from blurry sound to a clear argument as the canopy opened.

  “…utter dustblow. Karl up and disappeared, so I got stuck covering sixteen hour shifts all damn week.”

  “No kidding, man. I heard that one electrician who never talks to nobody and that hot piece of ass in Operations vanished too. Damn, I was so close.”

  “Only thing you were close to is a mark-up from HR.”

  Risa hopped out, earning odd looks. She assumed their confusion stemmed from her lack of a military uniform. Her skin-tight ballistic stealth suit guided their bewilderment into placid contentment to stare at her. This wasn’t her usual job. She hadn’t come here to kill anyone in the name of Martian liberation. Quite the contrary. Risa swallowed her instinctual unease at being seen in the open and jogged right over to them.

  “I know what you’re thinking. You’re right. I’m not a military pilot. This is going to sound crazy, but bear with me. I’m with C-Branch. Military intelligence. We have rogue operatives here planning to detonate several explosive devices and destroy Arden. They want to blame the MLF.”

  “What’s that?” Asked the pudgy one with the goatee.

  “Martian Liberation Front?” Risa fought the urge to scowl. I’ve almost died for these slobs’ freedom how many times and they don’t even know who we are.

  “That is kinda crazy,” said the shorter man on the left―to her breasts.

  His co-worker focused an intense stare into her eyes, as if terrified she’d catch him looking anywhere else.

  “I don’t have time to argue or people are going to die. Where’s the Cryomil tank?”

  The short man made eye contact at last. “What if you’re the one what’s gonna bomb it?”

  “You’ve been staring at my ass long enough. Do you think I could hide bombs in this outfit?”

  “Uhh, ‘spose not.” He turned to point in the direction of a large ovoid tank at the far end of the landing pads.

  “Thanks.” She jogged two paces before she glanced back at them. “Keep quiet. If you raise the alarm, the people planting the bombs will panic and might set them off early.”

  “What if you’re lying?” asked the taller one.

  “Wait here then.” She gestured at the aircraft. “If I’m lying, you can make sure I don’t leave.”

  Not lingering to see what they did, she sprinted along a metal grating path connecting the landing pads to the main platform. The Cryomil tank dwarfed the one from the ACC science outpost. By the time she stopped in its shadow, she was sure it towered four stories over the pads, even with the top of the reinforced portion of the wall.

  If that thing goes…

  She looked it over, clueless where to start.

  On top, where no one would see it.

  Raziel’s whisper weakened her legs and rode a static crackle down her spine.

  Risa brushed a hand on the tank: cold, smooth, and not climbable. “How the hell am I going to get up there? It’s like an enormous metal tit.”

  Whirring behind her grew close. She whirled, a half-second away from popping claws. One of the drone robots used to tend the hydroponics glided over. It resembled a chrome horsefly with a seven-foot wingspan and an army of tiny utility extensions on bug legs.

  “Oh, fuck. Damn.” How does Raziel influence machines like this?

  The creepy flying robot confirmed her suspicions when it hovered to a stop over her. She reached up into its body, grabbing on to struts between the inner workings and the curved outer hull.

  “Okay.”

  The bot floated straight up, lifting her to the top of the dome where a round platform sat inside a meager retaining railing. A safe place to stand without sliding down the precarious curve. The large, armored hatch in the center had a docking ring around it, a port to allow resupply shuttles to offload Cryomil without landing. Risa smirked at the protruding metal at the top.

  It does look like a big boob.

  She dropped onto the circular grating around the opening. Nothing looked out of place.

  “Let me guess―it’s inside.”

  As if in answer to her question, the hatch beeped. Before it could open, she sucked in a huge breath and held it. The seal broke with a loud hiss, and a four-inch thick disc rose into the air on a hinge to reveal a cylindrical shaft six feet deep to another armored door. From the looks of it, the tank was double-walled with at least that much separation. A mass of glowing cyan fog lingered around the inner door. Fumes forced their way into her lungs and brought tears from her eyes. Her nose ran like a faucet, and she gagged on phlegm gathering in the back of her throat.

  A shoebox-sized brick of Mars-red clung to the underside of the door flap. It had no displays, buttons, or controls other than a single M3 port protected by a rubber plug. Risa leaned away from the opening, threw up, and gagged more.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” She fell to her knees, arm over the railing around the little island, and forced snot out of her nose. “Raziel… I’m no deck jockey, I―”

  Plug in. Have faith. All you need to do is destroy the timer construct and the bomb will not function.

  She dragged herself back to the hatch and took a coil of wire from her harness. One end went into the interface port behind her right ear, the other into the bomb. The vertigo of connection probably made her puke again, though she didn’t remain in the real world long enough to enjoy it.

  Risa landed on all fours in a room that looked like a military operations and control center, complete with a holographic war map in the middle. A lone human form, carved from obsidian with bright lime-green lines highlighting the edge of every facet paced around with his hands clasped behind his back. Blobs of olive drab exuded from the gemstone figure and spread over areas covered by clothing. Seconds later, it solidified into a military dress uniform centuries old in design. Three black stars adorned the center of a camouflage cap with a visor.

  “You look unauthorized,” barked the figure. “Stand to and provide your credentials immediately.”

  Heat raced up the back of her neck. The M3 socket in her skull throbbed. Net combat wasn’t anything she had ever done before. Her first instinct was to activate speedware and
claws. Much to her surprise, both seemed to work. Glimmering shards of energy burst from her fingertips in place of the synthetic diamond she expected. Time froze. The figure raised its arms as if to defend itself from a girl’s slap. Her energy claws shredded its chest as though she slashed paper. Luminous white fluid sprayed from the wound. Screaming degenerated into warbling, digitized noises. Its cry of rage slowed to the point of hollow, throaty clicks. Risa sank her other hand into the chest and pulled, tearing him in half. Jagged shards of onyx scattered over the floor. The eyes of the severed head, broken off at the neck like a smashed effigy, turned to white electric snow, and a great, roaring rush filled the air. Chunks cracked and split apart into ever-smaller flakes of mirrored silver, which degenerated into wireframe lumps and melted into the floor.

  Risa looked at her hands, covered in glowing white blood, and twelve-inch laser claws. This shouldn’t be this easy.

  “Slash up the controls,” said Raziel, sounding as though he stood right behind her.

  She whirled around, but was alone. “Raziel?” Risa spun the other way. “Why do you sound like you’re next to me?”

  “I am always with you, Risa. Please, you must hurry.”

  Risa did her impression of ‘bad kitty’ on the controls. Anything that resembled a dial, screen, button, or lever, she scratched into oblivion. Once everything went dark, her consciousness flew back into her body hard enough to knock her over. She sat up, finding her chest covered in bile. The chemical presence in the air scorched her throat as if she attempted to breathe a stink like fire and piss.

  “Fuck. I hate Cryomil. I’m probably going to get cancer from this.”

  Be quick, unless you want to climb down the tube.

  Risa hit her speedware at the mere suggestion of having to descend into the tank. No sooner did the world plunge into slow motion than the bomb detached from the door, its magnet dead. She leapt at it, tackling the ten-pound bundle to the other side. Faced with a choice of riding the bomb down the side of the tank or grabbing the railing, she released it and hooked her arms around the metal post. The bomb slid down the side with a horrible scraping screech, fell out of sight, and landed with a thud. Behind her, the outer hatch closed on its own.

  Leave it for now, said Raziel in her head. The second demolition charge is in the power station.

  “Great.” Risa struggled upright, dry heaving from the fumes as she reached for the waiting metal fly. “I love fusion reactors.”

  Viscous fluid dripped from the underside of the insectoid bot as it carried Risa across the hydroponic field. She gritted her teeth and suppressed the instinct to wipe at her hair. The liquid smelled like a mixture of soil and methane, likely the same syrup in the hundred-meter-long grow tanks racing by thirty feet below.

  A four-legged walker, painted yellow and striped black, halted astride one of the rows. Its flat thorax tilted up toward her. At the front end, suspended on a precarious seat with legs dangling free, a young teenager leaned forward to gaze up at her as she passed overhead. For a second, they made eye contact. The dirt-smeared girl couldn’t have been much more than thirteen. Risa lifted her knees to her chest to clear a narrow horizontal pipe covered in moss, letting herself dangle again on the other side. Her fingers almost slipped off the narrow struts, slick with hydroponic nutrient fluid. She growled, holding on in defiance of the pain in her hands. Hopefully, finding the last bomb wouldn’t require flying.

  Her unorthodox transport dropped her off on the roof of a rectangular plastisteel building, two stories tall. Slippery grime coated every inch of it, sweeping her boots out from under her as she landed. She closed and opened her hands, trying to chase the numbness away. A nest of cube-shaped machine housings clustered on the left half of the power station, thrumming with activity. She scrambled upright, slipping in the grease in an effort to rush among the waist-high devices, in search of another bomb.

  Knowing she stood on top of eight twenty-foot-tall fusion reactor cores didn’t do a whole lot for her nerves.

  A minute later, she found the device wedged between two of the ventilation housings on the same row, leaving only three inches of clearance on the face with the M3 jack.

  “Shit.”

  She squeezed herself into a crouch and grabbed the corner, trying to pull it out of the narrow channel.

  Don’t.

  That time, Raziel’s voice had its usual energy, paralyzing her.

  Risa shuddered, hands balled into fists against her breast. She clenched her jaw and whined.

  When his presence released her muscles, she sagged limp against the foul-smelling metal. “Okay, that was stupid.” She panted and gasped at the fire in her muscles. “I suppose I deserved that. This thing’s gotta have a motion trigger.” It still bothered her how easily she had defeated the detonator program in the first bomb. Her skills in cyberspace were not much more than that of a spectator, and she didn’t have a deck turning her thoughts and desires into commands to run attack and defense programs.

  She readied the wire, holding the prong between two fingers as she forced her hand in the space between the bomb and the next chamber.

  Wonder how much radiation I’m absorbing here.

  The plug scraped around the socket, threatening to slip out of her grip. Risa bit her lip and clenched her already-deadened fingers tight. After a few seconds of fumbling around, it clicked in. A jolt in the back of her head sent a spasm down her body; the world went black.

  After a sense of falling, she landed upon a stamped metal floor. The single doorless room looked the same as the one before. A large tactical map divided the space in half, displaying an army of red tanks advancing toward an army of blue ones. A man in a general’s uniform whirled to face her, staring through the display. Before it could bark at her, she leapt into the war map, shattering it into thousands of glowing fragments. Glimmering energy claws grew from her fingertips as she descended upon the man-shaped program. The general convulsed and gurgled; ten slivers of bright violet light tore gleaming swaths down his chest. She slashed at the program until the virtual body collapsed in a scattering of silver shards.

  Raziel did not need to prod her further. She shredded the consoles next. When she’d inflicted enough damage to the system, the node failed. Risa awoke draped over the bomb, feeling as though she’d been stabbed in the cerebellum by a red-hot knife.

  “Ngh.” She rubbed her forehead.

  It took her a moment to find the willpower to move. Burning, as though a lit ember of charcoal rested upon her brain stem, kept her eyes closed.

  The pain is regrettable, whispered Raziel into her mind. You endure for the lives of a thousand innocents.

  “Where is it?” She grabbed the machinery and forced herself up, more weight borne by her arms than legs. “Please tell me I don’t have to fly there.”

  Follow the light.

  He muted the weight of his voice enough to cause only a shiver. A crackle of pain washed over her head as though a dozen mosquitoes plunged their needles into her brain at once. A hallucination of Pavo appeared at the end of the roof, holding Kree. The little girl waved at her. Beyond them, a glittery trail of golden energy traced a line in the air, curving over the edge and down.

  Risa put a hand to her head. “This is going to kill me.”

  She eyed the Lava Wasp, perched on the landing pad so far away it looked no bigger than its namesake. Why am I here? Tightness gathered in her throat. The thought of how Pavo would react to news of her death made fleeing seem like the best thing to do, and she hadn’t even considered anyone telling Kree.

  The walker thudded by, the young pilot still squinting up at her. “Who’re you? Upta no good?”

  Risa dragged herself to her feet and staggered the length of the roof to the edge. “Aren’t you a little young to work?”

  The large walker shambled sideways to keep pace with her.

  “My dad’s hurt an’ can’t work. Damn Cydonian crab got him, nipped his leg off at the thigh.” She wiped at her f
ace with a cloth, which only re-distributed the grime. “Company won’t pay for a new leg ‘cause they said he hasn’t filled out some form.” The girl shrugged. “Either I work this tender, or we lose our pod.” She shook her head. “I ain’t gonna take no job workin’ outside.”

  “Bastards.” Risa gave up rubbing the back of her neck. It didn’t help. “I thought this was the UCF.”

  “It is, but there ain’t no news bots out here, so no one gives a cydo’s ass.”

  Risa glanced along the length of a gossamer thread hanging in the air as though a pixie had left a path of glowing dust. It led from the reactor building across the grow field to where five massive metal boxes sat in a row by the dome wall. Power capacitors the size of cargo-truck trailers―the interface between the reactor and everything in Arden that used electricity.

  “I’m trying to stop people from setting off bombs. Your pod, is it sealed?”

  The girl shrugged. “It can be. We usuall’ keep the hatches an’ shit open so it don’ stink so much.”

  “You might wanna get inside. Just in case I mess this up.” Risa squatted at the edge of the roof. I used to be able to hold back my guilt until I was done. Why am I thinking so much about not wanting to be here?

  That girl is someone’s daughter. They don’t deserve to lose her.

  She dropped to the ground, evading the curious teen, and sprinted into the speckles of pixie dust flying past her face. A bit over two hundred meters away, the line swerved between the third and fourth units, leading her to an opening between the capacitor boxes and the wall. The third explosive had been placed on the end of unit four.

  Risa fished the wire out of her harness as she walked up to it. She lined up the asterisk-shaped prong and plugged in. With a soft click that echoed as thunder in her mind, the real world faded away. She pounced on the same general she had killed twice already, sinking a handful of claws into his throat and tearing him open from neck to crotch. White light spilled out instead of blood, and the false man screamed.