Allies and Enemies: Exiles, Book 3

by Amy J. Murphy

  When she left her quarters, Sela encountered none of the rigger’s other personnel. Her assumption was that Tove was very selective about who she allowed so close to her person if her story of a murderous brother was to be believed. With such a skeleton crew, it was likely they were all at their posts, leaving the corridors empty for her to roam without their suspicious stares. Despite her best efforts not to, Sela found that part of her actually liked Tove Agrippa. The woman, for all her twisted appearance, was shrewd and perceptive.

  Sela located the armory. Her A6 was here, begrudgingly surrendered, along with the power armor. Weapons cleaning was her “meditation,” as Jon called it.

  She activated the hatchway and stepped inside, surprised to find the interior lights at full brilliance with a lone figure at the long workbench. Her armor lay in pieces across its surface. The smell of oil and gun cleaner wafted in the air like a heady cologne.

  The man did not react to the sounds of the outer hatch opening. Considering the low number of crew, it should have made him curious. She felt tiny hairs rise on the back of her neck. Even during her time with the Regime, she had been the only commander that still performed her own gear maintenance. Jon would have called her paranoid. To Sela, paranoid translated to alive.

  She approached. Over the crewman’s shoulder, she spied a mat with neatly placed instruments and tools. And to the man’s left was her A6, disassembled. A violated anger seized her by the throat. No one touched her A6. No one.

  “I do my own gear.” She gripped his arm. “No one else touches it.”

  He still did not turn, did not speak. Sela pulled. It was like touching a lifeless piece of equipment. He turned blind eyes up at her. The irises were covered in a thin blue film that possessed a subtle glow—implanted optics. A mapping of dark wires crisscrossed under the visible parts of his skin. She thought of Fisk and his implants. Poisoncry.

  He’d been a male Eugenes once. There was no presence to him as if some tinkerer had made him and forgot to insert a soul.

  She took her hand away, unconsciously wiping it on her trousers.

  “Ugly thing, ain’t it?” Grith called from the doorway. He strode in, a heavy glass bottle clutched in one hand. “Tove won’t let me kill it. Says it’s her reminder.”

  “He’s one of the Poisoncry.”

  “He was Splitdawn first. Before Poisoncry got their hands on him.” Grith slapped the back of the thing’s head: a move that seemed to communicate loathing and barely contained violence. “Ain’t that right, Otkel?”

  At the sound of Grith’s voice, the creature’s eyes flickered over the imaginary space as if registering things only it could see. Considering the implants that dotted its skin, Sela guessed that was very likely the case. Something like recognition flickered across its face. If it had any curiosity about Sela, she could not tell. Otkel turned back to the bench, hands moving over the stripped-down carcass of her A6 with an eerie efficiency.

  “He’s not one of their guildsmen?” she asked, watching him work, all the time itching to snatch her weapon away from the thing.

  “No. You’re looking at all that remains of Defensor Sim Otkel, trusted advisor to Imperator Orphus Agrippa.”

  She thought of the ruined armor in Tove’s quarters, set on display near the altar. “Tove’s father.”

  Grith stood at Otkel’s other side. Even from this distance, she could smell the vapor of sour mash on him. He’d likely been drinking for some time. She got the impression this was something that he did, drink and antagonize the remains of this man. It meant something significant to him, revisiting past wrongs and torturing himself in the process.

  “Is this his…punishment?” she asked.

  “Something like that.” Grith swallowed. “Maxim conspired with Poisoncry. He gave them Otkel, knowing how close he could get to Orphus. Maxim had them turn Otkel into his father’s assassin. They turned a once-loyal man into something else…unmade him. This is what those bastards do to people. They take you apart, turn you against your own. Don’t even know it’s happening, until it’s too late. All to suit their purpose. Orphus died. Tove almost joined him. But this bloody thing lived.

  “Now there’s nothing in there that was Otkel. This is him…made to play nice. At the time he was reprogrammed to do their bidding. No one noticed. He acted the same, talked the same.” A ragged edge entered Grith’s voice. He regarded a dark corner of the armory as if he could see a different story there. “Then they did something to…trigger him.”

  “And Tove keeps him as a reminder.” She repeated his earlier comment. With stunning efficiency, Otkel completed the reassembly of the A6. The barrel snapped into place with a nearly musical sound. The time was faster than she could have ever managed. Efficiency aside, it did not seem safe to keep him onboard. “Reminder of what?”

  “Never to trust.” Grith regarded her. “Never to underestimate Maxim. And the carnage she owes Poisoncry.”

  Sela snatched up her A6, hastily reseating it in her holster as she backed away from the bench. She checked the charge setting, surprised to find it at max capacity and reading at ninety-eight percent efficiency. The best she’d ever been able to reach was eighty-seven percent.

  Regardless, the only way she’d return it to their custody was at the losing end of a fight. Grith didn’t seem to care; he’d sunk into some inner bleak mire. She got the impression that he did this often, perhaps as his own penance. Earlier he had implied feelings of guilt for ignoring Tove in the earlier stages of their interaction.

  Otkel said nothing, did nothing. Only turned to his next task: her power armor. Grith leaned back against the bench, cup in hand, staring at the side of the man’s head. “Might want to check back on your armor. He’s a little slower with those.”

  She nodded stiffly.

  Twenty-Five

  Four hours. Fourteen minutes.

  Sela was almost disappointed that she did not find a problem with the suit. When she returned to the armory, Grith was gone. Otkel remained, unmoved from the spot as he worked on what looked like a vox relay. She wondered if he—it—ate, slept. A creeping sensation, like spiders’ legs, crawled over her neck.

  Was this what Fisk wanted to do to me?

  Sela shifted inside the rig, feeling the hundreds of tiny connection barbs move with her. Like a second skin, it functioned as the nervous system for the shell of armor. The movement triggered the HUD. A query screen offered her an anti-anxiety pharm, one of the multitudes of things the suit would do to and for the occupant. Little wonder Grith and his people seemed to spend their lives in their suits.

  She focused on dismissing the command, then found the root command to disable that function. It was satisfying, like cracking knuckles. She activated the secondary diagnostic and minimized the alarmingly long scroll feed in her viewer.

  Otkel was watching her. It was subtle, but she was sure of it. A glance here and there while he worked, or appeared to focus on the task at hand. He had to realize there were cameras all around the helm of her rig. She studied him in turn.

  If her attention made him uncomfortable, it did not show. He blinked rapidly. Considering the enhancements, it was likely he wasn’t really seeing her anyway. She got the impression that much of his time and attention were stuck inside of his skull, a slave to the tech that had been made part of his physiology.

  He bore a vague air of haughty impatience as if she were interrupting something far more captivating and worthy of his time and attention. Part of her understood Grith’s animosity.

  “Do you remember anything?” she asked.

  His voice carried an electronic buzz. “I have entry logs for daily cycles—”

  “That’s not what I meant.” She jerked her chin in the direction of the main corridor, to indicate life outside the confines of the armory. “I meant from before all this.”

  His face twisted, as if a flood of things to say in reply all occurred at once and he was picking through them.

  “System paramete
rs were not engineered for inquiries of this nature.” His head bobbed in a bird-like fashion. “There is no baseline operation requiring knowledge of ‘before all this.’” Something about his forced-patient tone reminded her of Fisk. Perhaps all of Poisoncry’s creatures held the same aloofness.

  The purple-tinted lips twitched into a smirk. Otkel seemed pleased with how he’d borrowed her phrase. Then he went unnervingly silent. She was wrong; it wasn’t aloofness, it was a complete lack of presence.

  “What are you?”

  “A traitor to Tove and Orphus Agrippa.” The words came out as rote, like a basic recitation devoid of connection to anything else.

  Sela felt something hollow twist behind her sternum. It would be a mercy to put this thing out of its misery, stuck in this wretched limbo, unliving and yet not dead. Perhaps that was the other purpose he served: Tove’s reminder to be without mercy.

  She licked her lips. “How did Poisoncry capture you?”

  “System parameters were not engineered for inquiries—” His head jerked aside. “Please wait.”

  His dark eyes, rimmed in the blue-green glow of implanted optics, seemed to focus on the space between them. The tiny hairs rose on the back of her neck. Whatever he was looking at, it wasn’t her. It wasn’t even in this room.

  He was frozen, unblinking. Her eyes watered in sympathetic response. His gaze snapped back to center. “Ship’s internal alerts have been triggered. Emergency protocol in progress.”

  “What?” Sela shut down the incomplete diagnostic, simultaneously calling up her link with the ship via the HUD. Neither system showed such activity. “I’m not showing a bloody thing.”

  She spotted movement in the rear camera of her suit: Otkel striding away from the bench in a stiff, but efficient motion.

  “Where are you going? What’s the emergency?”

  Otkel stepped through the hatch without a backward glance. “Unknown source.”

  With a thought, Sela opened the intra-ship vox: “Grith. What’s our status?”

  Her only answer was a hiss of static. “Grith, read?”

  Already striding for the hatch, she rolled to another line: “Imperator Tove. Respond.”

  The rumble of the ship’s engines was suddenly absent. Red lights came on in the hall.

  A bleating noise and an amber bar popped up on her suit’s external sensor reads:

  \///Artificial Gravity Offline\///

  There were twined popping sounds as the mag-soles on her boots activated. Red emergency lights—not the customary green of a Fleet ship—throbbed in the corridor as she crossed the threshold. Their strobing effect showed her a deserted corridor. The HUD flashed into her field of vision, showing her a layout of the ship, a lone blue dot indicating her location.

  Where was the crew? Someone should be responding to this. She extended the range of the display. One by one, six additional signatures sprang into the display. Four were on the bridge—presumably the unseen command crew—and two in the hab area.

  None of them were tagged. Brilliant. Would Otkel even show up on the display? Her intention had been to follow him. Now she had to find out, instead, what the change in gravity meant.

  Hab? Or bridge?

  Considering that only a trusted few knew of Sela’s true mission, appearing in power armor might not be well-received by the bridge crew and would generate too many questions. She turned toward the hab level to find Tove and Grith.

  Twenty-Six

  There was no way a body could hold that much blood.

  The soldier in Sela knew the volume of blood coming from Tove’s body had more to do with bleeding out under null g than the possibility that Tove’s body had more blood than required by an organism of her size. The red globs floated in a steadily pumping stream from the area where her head used to be. The part that was her head was a gory mass of pale flesh and pulverized bone, gently drifting away from Grith’s armored grip. Some of the globs collided, forming new, larger spheres. Some stuck to the walls of Tove’s quarters, spreading into abstract patterns.

  “What did you do?” Sela realized she had to repeat herself. The link hadn’t been open the first time.

  Grith glared at her from behind the visor of his helm, his eyes flattened, unfocused. A globule of Tove’s blood clung to the clearplas. He waved a hand as if swatting an annoying insect. The motion dispersed the blood into a swarm of smaller droplets that clung to his gauntlet.

  He said nothing.

  Sela stepped closer, hands out to her sides. A sense of wrongness stretched out over everything of that moment, not just the body of the headless Tove. It came as little surprise when her rig’s HUD warned her that Grith’s armor was activating battle mode and prompted her to do the same.

  “You killed her,” Sela breathed. The familiar hum of adrenaline slid into her blood. The sensation was familiar, but the icy revelation filled her gut: Grith had betrayed them.

  A choking sound filtered in her speakers. Grith’s face pulled with distress. “Can’t stop it.”

  He stepped aside and released Tove’s body. It twisted like a weed in a soft breeze.

  “Ain’t me, Tyron.” Grith’s hands curled and flexed, curled and flexed. It was as if he were fighting something, some urge. Right now, his HUD was likely assessing the easiest routes of attack, the likely outcomes. Same as hers.

  “Grith.”

  She split her attention between watching him and acknowledging the HUD. Then the red-bannered alert flashed into life.

  ///\ Primary Weapons Off Line ///\

  She cursed under her breath. It made sense to sabotage her suit. It was their suit, after all. Otkel and Grith had access. Couldn’t fault him for being thorough. She probably would have done the same thing. She cursed her own gullibility, her stupidity.

  “They unmake you.” He flexed his shoulders, an unnecessary move with the augmentation of the armor, but a customary one, she’d observed. “Like I said.”

  “Fight it,” she growled. He had a temper, easy to provoke. Maybe get him off-focus to find an edge, any edge.

  “Makes you feel any better, I can’t fire either. Weapons are disabled.” His mouth split in an expression that was part agony, part victory. There was a fight going on in him. “That’s one thing I could still control. Bastard Maxim didn’t think of that.”

  She flicked the vox link open to alert the bridge. It cycled for what seemed like an eternity before bouncing back:

  ///\Connection Failed///\

  Signal scrambler. Even if she could connect to the bridge crew, what good would it do? Maxim—and very likely, Poisoncry—had found a way to infect Grith with their tech. She was the outsider here.

  “Maxim did this…didn’t he? He knows our plan to kill him.” Sela backed up half a step. The door was still at her back. She could retreat, seal him inside. But her repeated attempts to tell the suit to access the door failed. New alerts appeared in the HUD—messages from the ship itself that spoke of failing systems.

  “How did he get to you?” It was a guess, just something to keeping him talking while her brain raced through options. “How—”

  “Don’t know. Can’t remember.” He sobbed, pressing his gloved hands to either side of his helm. “She begged me. Tove begged me to let her live. My Tove.” It was a croaking, gagging sound, like a man trapped in a nightmare. “Couldn’t stop it. Still can’t stop it.”

  Grith went still. That was worse. He was losing control; the tech was taking over. Whatever sabotage Maxim had engineered was winning.

  Years of fighting hand to hand told her that he meant to attack.

  “You’re gonna have to kill me, Tyron.” It sounded like a plea. “Make it a good death.”

  “Wait—”

  Grith charged. It was a soundless lunge, a combination of powered armor and null g. Her instinct was to dodge, but she fought it. Those were rules that applied to fighting in a gravity well. Not out here, in a heavy armored suit. All of the training of the past two days
was paltry against his lifetime of living and fighting in armor.

  She went low, pushing herself under his center of mass, her mag boots set to anchor her to the spot. The move surprised him. Her arms came around his thighs; she pushed up and back. There was an answering whine of her rig’s servos. Grith was sent in a sprawling flip into the bulkhead behind her. The collision rang the hull like a bell.

  Sela pivoted. Grith timed the momentum of his strike to push off against the wall, aiming for her. Too fast. His armored body collided with her, a mountain of crushing force. Her head whipped back. Muscles snapped taut in her neck despite the impact foam. Air left her lungs in a wounded rush as he pinned her in place. The HUD flashed an impact warning and advised her that future similar strikes would decrease suit integrity.

  With an irritated grunt, she swiped the warning away in time to see Grith’s helmeted head rear back. He crashed it into her own. With an epic yell, he drew back. The eyes behind his visor were wide and empty. More useless alerts flashed through the HUD. A slender crack appeared on the right corner of her visor. His upper body wound up for another blow. She ducked, using his arms to push herself down.

  She felt the vibration as his helm struck the wall where she’d been. His resultant cry boiled with pain. Sela pushed to her left, hoping to clear some space. If she could manually open the hatch and close it off on him. Maybe keep him contained until—

  Her leg jerked from beneath her. The force of his hand wrapping her ankle was enough to have crushed her unarmored limb several times over. The resultant pain did not make her particularly grateful. He swung her overhead like a club. She struck the deck. Red-bannered alerts bloomed across her visor.

  He brought her up with another swinging arc. This time she tucked low, timing the pivot, and activated the mags on the boots. She locked down onto his armor. Her feet braced against his chest.