Digital Chimera

by J N Chaney

  Veraldi left no time for response. He rushed toward the Erinys with careful, practiced strikes. He thrust the reinforcement bar with his right hand, guiding it with his left, then fluidly used that left hand as a fulcrum to slice the bar horizontally through the air. This wasn’t improvised technique, this was years of training. I realized then that Vincenzo Veraldi wasn’t simply obsessed with knives, he was a master of all edged weapons. In his hands, that twisted length of construction material was a deadly polearm, against which the Erinys could only defend by slipping between the strikes of his relentless assault.

  It was impressive, and against a lesser class of opponent it would have been more than enough, but the Erinys avoided every hit. Veraldi was keeping her on the defensive, but he’d tire out before long.

  “Do it, Tycho!”

  I raised my weapon and took aim. Veraldi’s plan was never to actually hit the Erinys, but to put it off-balance. Dodging his attacks meant it couldn’t dodge mine. I spotted an opening as the clawed Erinys twisted away from a strike, and fired.

  The round struck the back of the cyborg’s knee. It stumbled to the ground and, in that brief moment, Vincenzo pressed the advantage. He swung the reinforcement bar in a wicked arc, catching the Erinys across its featureless face. I fired two more rounds into the cyborg’s center mass and Veraldi followed up with another blow across her face, knocking the Erinys flat onto it’s back.

  Veraldi smoothly carried the movement through, bringing the bar behind his back and up above his head as he jumped into the air. He landed on the Erinys’s chest and drove the makeshift weapon through the base of the cyborg’s neck and out its back, pinning it to the ground. The Erinys flailed and kicked against the ground, grabbing at its neck and straining against the metal piercing its body. Vincenzo jumped back to get clear of its claws as they swung wildly.

  With my gun still trained on it, I walked closer to get a better shot and end the fight. Blood bubbled through the fractures in the nanosuit, but the damage was already closing around the reinforcement bar. Watching it bleed and struggle on the ground, I felt sorry for it in a way. The creature was smarter than some wild beast, I was certain of that much. Did it have the capacity to understand what it was doing? Did it ever have a choice?

  Veraldi walked up from behind me. “Fire a close grouping near that wound,” he said. I turned and saw that he’d found one of his missing blades. “Once you’ve broken the plating, I can end it with this.”

  I took aim, and the Erinys did something neither of us expected.

  The creature screamed, all rending metal and thunder, a sound both inhuman and familiar at the same time. It was a piercing cry from the dawn of history, a primal sound that reached into the most basic, reflexive part of the human mind and gripped it tight with fear. The Erinys dragged itself off of the ground, sliding the impaled metal through its body until it could find its footing and pry the reinforcement bar from the ground.

  Vincenzo and I stared at the bloody, enraged figure standing in front of us. Its crowned head lolled to the side as the metal impaled through its neck forced it’s chin up. The other end dragged across the ground, punctuating every step with the rasp of metal across plasticrete. I cursed inwardly at my earlier hesitation and was determined not to make that mistake again.

  I fired twice at the Erinys, fully expecting it to dodge, not knowing anything else I could do. To my surprise, the rounds hit as the cyborg struggled for balance. Emboldened, I fired two more, striking its chest. I aimed more carefully and fired at its neck, and the shot bathed the area in an amber glow as it trailed burning pyrotechnic powder.

  Vincenzo knew that tracer round meant I was down to my final four shots. He reversed his grip on the blade in his hand and rushed the Erinys. It slashed weakly at him and Vincenzo was able to close in. The cyborg brought up its strong arm to stab him in the gut, but he parried the claws with his blade as he grabbed a hold of the bar protruding from its neck. He wrestled it to the ground and held it down as I closed in to make each shot count. I pressed the gun to the Erinys’s throat and Veraldi turned his head to avoid the muzzle flare.

  “End this!’

  I fired four even, controlled rounds into the cyborg’s neck. The nanosuit plating shattered with the final shot. I knelt and stepped on the Erinys’s clawed hand, freeing Vincenzo’s blade. He raised the knife, but before he could bring it down on the creature’s exposed flesh, the reinforcement bar snapped.

  Veraldi’s weight had been mostly on that bar, and it accounted for most of the leverage keeping the Erinys down. When it broke, he fell forward, and the Erinys bucked. We were both thrown. Vincenzo rolled over his shoulders into a kneel and I scrambled backward on my ass to get clear of the cyborg’s reach.

  The Erinys rolled over into a three-point stance and stared eyelessly at the two of us. For a second, I thought I knew how this was going to play out. Being the least armed, in a hilariously indefensible position, I was going to be attacked first. Once it killed me, it would focus on Veraldi and wear him down until he made a mistake. We’d both die here in the dark, forgotten ruins of Mars.

  But again, the Erinys did something I didn’t expect. It shrunk back, eying us both—as much as something without visible eyes can, anyway—then turned and ran into the dark of the old city.

  Vincenzo was already on his feet and running after it. “We can’t let it get away.”

  He was right, of course. We might have hurt it, but it wasn’t dead and the last thing we needed was a wounded predator skulking through the dark as we tried to climb out of Old Hellas. My gun was little more than a glorified club, not entirely useless, but it would force me closer to those claws than I’d want to be.

  I looked around for anything I could use, ruling out the reinforcement bar I had no chance of using with anywhere near the expertise of my teammate. A length of chain caught my eye, and I decided that would have to work.

  I ran off towards Vincenzo’s marker on my schematic and before long I could hear the sounds of combat. I saw movement in what looked like a courtyard beneath the skeletal facade of an unfinished building, and as I drew closer, I could make out the shapes of Veraldi and the Erinys trading slashes inside.

  I dangled a meter of chain from my hand then wrapped the rest around my wrist as I entered the building. Vincenzo was bleeding, but I couldn’t tell how badly he was hurt. It didn’t seem to have affected him much—he was warily circling the Erinys to put himself in the path of any way out it might have had.

  “Is it bad?” I asked him, as I moved to cut off the Erinys from his right.

  “A lucky hit, nothing serious. The beast’s left arm isn’t completely useless.”

  “Got it.”

  The Erinys was backed against a wall, so it wasn’t a surprise when it sprang forward and lashed out a clawed hand at Vincenzo. It must have gauged him to be the more immediate threat, and that made perfect sense to me. He was, after all, the one responsible for the length of metal jutting through its back.

  He dodged and parried the cyborg’s renewed assault, but he was being driven back all the same. Even with those horrific injuries, the Erinys was still a frightening force in combat. We only did as well as we’d done because of sheer luck and circumstance. Had this fight remained contained to the bridge, things might have gone very differently, and Ares Terrestrial would have won the day. Not to imply that things were inevitable by that point. They were far from it, in fact.

  I swung my chain and let loose with a lash across the cyborg’s back. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t for the thing to ignore the blow and remain focused on Veraldi. Nanosuits are designed to counteract ballistic, high-speed impacts with concentrated force across a small area. Blunt impact should still have some effect. I reeled back and whipped the Erinys again, and again, until my hands stung and the Erinys had finally had enough.

  It stopped attacking Vincenzo and wheeled around with a wild slash at me. I stumbled back in surprise just in time to avoid its deadly
claws.

  “We need to get those blades under control.” I let out a little more slack on the chain.

  “My thoughts as well,” Vincenzo replied. “You take point.”

  I swung the length of chain around to draw the Erinys’s attention. I needed to be sure it would block the attack instead of slipping it. When I felt confident it anticipated my attack, I lashed at it, and sure enough, it took the bait. The Erinys grabbed at the chain as it wrapped around its wrist and tried to pull me closer. I let out a bit of slack to compensate then snapped the chain with a whip of my arm. It smacked the Erinys across the face—certainly nowhere near hard enough to hurt, but enough to distract.

  That was when Veraldi came in from behind and kicked in the cyborg’s knee. Its leg buckled and it fell to a kneel, giving me the opening I needed. I rushed in, pulled the chain over and around its head, then stomped on the slack between that and my wrist. The cyborg was pulled to the ground facedown, with its strong arm pinned beneath its body.

  As I said, the Erinys was a force to be reckoned with, even injured. Wounded, and with no leverage to speak of, I was struggling to keep it down with all of my weight centered on that chain beneath my heel. It was incomprehensibly strong, but I suppose being born and bred as a weapon would mean nothing less.

  Vincenzo grabbed the reinforcement bar still impaled through its body and pushed it back through the wound until it hit the ground on the other side.

  “On my mark, Tycho, pull as hard as you can.”

  I nodded.

  “Pull!”

  It started to scream again. That horrifying, heartbreaking sound was so loud it was less heard than felt. I pulled that chain for all my tired, spent body was worth while Vincenzo pushed with all of his strength on that bar. The Erinys’s nanite armor shredded apart, exposing the soft flesh buried deep beneath. Its head and right shoulder came free as its ribs cracked and its chest bifurcated. The chain slipped free, no longer moored by the base of the creature’s neck, and raked across its head, stripping away it’s faceplate. The scream lost its metallic tinge and became something much more familiar as the clawed Erinys was ripped in two.

  I fell to the ground, thrown off balance and too tired to stop it. Veraldi fell to his knees, breathing heavily. The Erinys’s head was twisted around and staring into the sky atop broken, exposed vertebrae, but despite the grizzly carnage, what I saw in that creature’s face made my blood run cold.

  It was human.

  A child, with the unmistakable hair and facial features of a Cavadora.

  22

  It took me some time to get my head together after I saw what it was we’d been fighting. What we’d ripped apart. It was all I could do to just sit and stare out at the silent streets.

  Old Hellas was empty. A forgotten place for things that used to be. Like I’ve said before, the Martian colony was old, old enough to have real history—and here that history was laid bare. Silent buildings filled with ghosts.

  Was everything as horrible back then as it was right now? Or was it a better time, a time when nobody would even think of doing what Sasha Ivanovich and Ares Terrestrial had done to that child?

  Veraldi walked over, looked me in the eyes, and said, “Are you ready to go?”

  I wasn’t. Not at all. But there was no point in staying where we were. I got to my feet without a word, and Vincenzo sent a message by subvocalization.

  Clawed Erinys neutralized. Requesting extraction route.

  I glanced over at him sharply, but he wouldn’t look at me. His use of neutralized suggested that he wasn’t much happier about what had happened than I was. He was just a bit better at not showing it.

  Thomas Young was the one who answered us. One minute. The schematics to the old city are in a separate system.

  Thirty seconds later, he was back with the answers we needed. There should be a large building at the end of the block you’re standing in. That’s an old banking center. It reaches nearly all the way up to the bridge.

  Understood, replied Veraldi. Do you have any way to get us from the roof back to the bridge?

  You should be able to make that jump, Thomas replied. As long as you get all the way to the top, it’s just a bit more than three meters. In Martian gravity—

  I’m aware. Thank you, Thomas.

  Veraldi turned to me. “I’m sure the elevators aren’t working. We’ll have to go up the staircase.” I shook my head and laughed quietly, though without much humor. “Sure. Fall off a bridge, murder a child, then climb a skyscraper and jump three meters straight up.”

  “Just a bit more than three meters,” said Veraldi drily. “I’m surprised he didn’t give it to us in centimeters.”

  “Maybe we’re having a humanizing influence on him.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it.”

  I looked at the buildings we passed as we walked down the street. Restaurants and shops, apartment buildings. It was all so familiar, like no time had passed at all. Some of the wording on the signs was a bit old-fashioned, and some of the ads were for things I’d never heard of. Still, the overwhelming impression was that life doesn’t change much. Human needs remained the same.

  I thought about the syndicates, the religious fanaticism, and the corrupt government. Maybe some of those things had always been there from the start, but I could hardly believe they were ever as bad in Old Hellas as life up there. No society like East Hellas could last long. That meant that something had changed in the past, and that something was going to change again in the future. Grounds for hope? I wasn’t sure, unless it was just hope for something different with no guarantees that it would be any better.

  We reached the bank offices, where Veraldi casually smashed out a window to gain us access. He didn’t even check whether the front door was unlocked.

  “You know, there’s something wrong with you,” I commented. “I mean, there’s something in how you think that doesn’t quite make sense to me.”

  “You don’t like to break things?” He frowned. “That doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “It’s not just the window, it’s your obsession with knives. It’s a lot of things.”

  He shrugged and opened the door to the stairwell. “A man has to have a hobby.”

  That seemed to wrap up my attempt at conversation, and we climbed the staircase in silence. I didn’t much feel like talking anyway, because the image of that child’s face still haunted me.

  The Cavadora girl. It wasn’t surprising Ares Terrestrial had used her. In the whole solar system, there was no group of people more ignored and exploited. They’d been the victims of genocide under the Jovian Alliance, and outright slaves for decades before that. Kidnapping, human trafficking, sex trade—the entire sol system turned a blind eye to their suffering, and nothing ever changed.

  I started to wonder about Sasha Ivanovich. I hadn’t liked the man from the moment I met him, but there was more to it than that. There was something about him we didn’t know, some part of his life we hadn’t uncovered. He’d displayed the reflexes and tactical thinking of a trained killer. There was nothing at all in his known history that would explain any of that.

  We’d been on the run for so long I hadn’t had much time to think about it, but climbing up those stairs I started to consider all those dead bodies in the Ares Terrestrial Med Lab. In Sasha Ivanovich’s personal lab. Someone had murdered them. Someone with the ability to kill remorselessly and the professionalism to do it without a mess.

  Someone who knew he was in a lot of trouble, who knew he needed a way out.

  Someone with information, the value of which depended on its scarcity.

  What kind of person would murder his colleagues solely to enhance the value of his own testimony? Quite possibly, the same sort of person who would make that wretched thing we’d killed on the street below.

  When we reached the roof, the jump didn’t turn out to be as easy as Thomas had made it sound. Veraldi made it, but he had to be caught at the edge by Andrea. The last th
ing I wanted to do was to attempt that jump, exhausted as I was and having just seen Veraldi barely make it a moment before.

  Then I caught sight of Ivanovich, and anger filled me with renewed strength. I made the jump with ease, landing on the bridge railing like I’d been doing it every day for months. I turned on the scientist with all the fury I could bring to bear.

  “Tell them the truth, Ivanovich. You murdering piece of shit! Your research went beyond using animals!”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” He looked away and picked at his teeth, his tone dismissive. “I mean, a Cavadora?”

  If I were still armed, I would have shot him through the head right then and there. As it was, I started toward him, but Andrew Jones stepped in and held me back.

  “What’s going on, Tycho?”

  “Those Erinyes aren’t just animals. He used humans. Children!”

  “Cavadora children,” he pointed out, as if I was behaving quite unreasonably. “Are you really insisting they’re not animals? Have you seen their—”

  “Racist fuck.” I started towards him, but Andrew still held me back. He was staring at Ivanovich with undisguised venom.

  Sasha gave Andrew an innocent look, spreading his arms in a wide shrug. “Spare me the morality theatrics. Need I remind you of the train you crashed through a border control station and how you killed everyone in it?”

  I turned to Andrea, whose face was cold and blank. “He was the one who murdered all those people in the med labs.”

  She nodded. “I assumed that all along.” She wouldn’t look at me, but even if she had, I could see that I wasn’t going to get anywhere.

  “You assumed that all along? What do you mean, you assumed—?”

  “Who else would have done it? Who else stood to gain?”

  Not for the first time, I found myself amazed and appalled by my commanding officer. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  She finally turned to face me. “Because you would have done something counterproductive, like you’re doing now. Our mission is to escort the Doctor to the West Hellas border. Our mission is not to punish him for the monstrous things he’s done, or to decide whether he deserves to live or not. We bring him over safely. That’s the work, Tycho.”