Helena was worrying about being chased at every turn across the whole of Africa. She did not believe she could elude capture all the way to London. This might be her only chance. Worse yet, it might be her only option.
Voices became more distinct as they approached her position. Helena could not use her night-sight effectively because of the dazzle from the transport. If she shot the lights out she’d give away her position. She pulled back from the edge of the hollow and thought about what she could do. As she sat back she felt something digging into her back. Pulling the object from behind her she realised it was a stun grenade, still tagged to her belt. She tossed it in her hand a couple of times then, decided, made it live. She lobbed the canister to her right, away from the buggy, but also away from the transport.
The night was loud with life. It fell silent at the dull thump of the explosion.
Every available light swung round to search the area, surrounding the point where the detonation had occurred. Helena sprang out of her hollow and sprinted directly for the transport. She was almost there when a soldier came down the gangway of the transport.
He calmly brought up his weapon and fired. Helena ducked, rolling to evade his first shot, but she knew he was just as fast. She tried to close the gap between them before he could fire a second shot.
He waited for her to come point-blank then fired again. Stretching out, she managed to force the barrel of the rifle up, the shot scratching the air over her shoulder. The round was lost in the night sky.
The gunshot was going to bring everyone back to the shuttle. It was not going according to plan. He pulled the rifle back, trying to get distance between the two of them.
His focus on his weapon saved her, allowing her to punch him hard in the face. He staggered back, a foot caught on the edge of the ramp and he disappeared over the side. Helena didn’t stop to see if he was getting up.
The hold was empty. The pilot yelped as he saw her running towards the cabin. He managed to slam the door shut in her face before she could get there. She threw herself against it but it did not budge.
She had no time.
Placing a pistol up against the handle of the door, she closed her eyes and fired. The door swung open. The pilot screamed, holding his wrist as blood pumped messily through the remains of his left hand.
No amount of nanomachines will be able to reconstruct that, thought Helena.
Grabbing his collar with her free hand she pulled him past her, shoving him out of the cabin.
As she vaulted over the back of the pilot’s seat, her Tertiary AI was already commandeering the on board computer systems, powering up the engines so they could take off.
Her Primary AI declared triumphantly that the pilot had already keyed himself into the system, so the ship’s AI did not ask for authorisation to fly. Helena grabbed the joystick and pulled back, waiting for the thrusters to kick in.
Shots pinged off the glass of the cockpit; she ducked involuntarily. The short sound of a high-pressure impact caused her to look up from the readouts in front of her. The glass sported a small perfectly round hole several inches above her head. Whoever had fired it was using a high-powered rifle.
It’s over, said her AI.
The windshield in front of her slowly splintered outward from the bullet hole. Several more rounds pierced the glass. It was impossible to fly the ship with the screen a network of spreading cracks. It would be seconds before the whole thing exploded outwards under its own stress.
Damn it.
The sound of metal rolling across the floor caused her to look down. At the base of the co-pilot’s seat was a grenade.
Oh shit, thought Helena.
Move, said her Primary AI.
Helena had not buckled herself in and was able to twist out of her seat, away from the grenade. As she sprang for the door of the cockpit, the grenade exploded.
The main force of the blast flew forwards, ripping a large hole in the front of the transport. Helena felt herself lift up and slam into the bulkhead. As she lost consciousness, a sharp ripping sound in her ears felt like her eardrums rupturing.
Chapter 6
SHE WAS on fire. There was only agony. Every inch of her body screeched its distress. Helena tried to stay still. Where was she? How she had gotten there? What would she find if she did try to move?
What was certain was that she was alone. All her AIs were offline. She did not know the time; she did not know how serious her injuries were. All the pain told her was that she was still alive.
Her throat felt as if someone had eagerly taken sandpaper to it. Her eyes were sore. That was nothing compared to the ache in her head and the tenderness she felt in her lungs as she breathed. Overwhelming all of this was her skin; it felt as if it was cooking, a feeling of wet and dry at the same time.
She remembered the cockpit. The image of a grenade rolling across the metal floor made her sweat.
She tried to swallow but choked.
Racked with coughing from her own spit she sat up. She whimpered in pain, it was all she could do to not cry. She expected blood to fill her mouth as the coughing brought up the surface of her throat as small white flecks of skin.
Calming down, breathing as deeply as she could, Helena forced her eyes open. The room was fuzzy, her eyes were dry. It took her a few moments to focus enough in the dim light to realise she was in some sort of medical bay. Her legs were laid out in front of her, bare. She looked down, hazily seeing that she was naked.
Her skin was covered in serious flash burns, ugly glistening scar tissue. As her body and her nanomachines worked to undo the trauma, Helena tried to remember what had happened. Unable to concentrate, she let her hands rest on her thighs. The soft wet sound they made as they touched horrified her. She quickly pulled her hands away in panic. The surface layer of gooey blistered skin came with them. Her eyes watered and she gagged, the bile scorching her throat as it rose into her mouth. Another bout of coughing took hold.
Holding her palms out in front of her, not wanting to touch them, or even see them, she looked around the room hoping to see a basin or a towel. It was too dark to see the edge of the room. Someone had left her there alone, not expecting that she’d awaken.
Helena could hear the faint bass sounds of industry beyond the walls of the room and assumed she was on one of the other transports. She couldn’t tune her hearing. She wanted to put her hand to her head, to massage her temples, but her hands were still covered in her own thigh.
Helena slowly examined the newly self-inflicted wounds. Raw layers of skin, fat and muscle showed through the half-melted mess. Her arms were blistered and hairless from the blast of the explosion, her legs must have burned for some time. As she looked at the raw meat of her lower body her stomach felt as if she’d been eating iron.
She remembered the explosion. The memory made her wince. Why had Euros asked her to find the boy? What had they been thinking?
Feeling dizzy, she slowly lay back down and dozed off. Closing her eyes, the last thing she saw were the underwhelming lights on the ceiling accompanied by the sound of ten thousand people running for their lives.
A SHADOW falling over her face brought her round. She opened her eyes, slowly; the lights had been turned off. The darkness had the feel of molasses flickering green as her genetically enhanced eyes struggled to make out details in the dark. She could see the silhouettes of tables and chairs and another operating table a couple of metres to her left.
The floor radiated a soft inconstant glow, like an exhausted glow stick. At the edges of her senses, she could smell blood and urine. Splashes of ammonia irritated her nose. She could not see her skin, but running her hands slowly along the length of her legs, being careful to keep them a few millimetres away from touching them, she still felt heat radiating from her burns.
They were healing well, but she was not in a fit state to attempt anything more than rest.
Her mind was still empty. Her AIs, her lifelong companions, were absent. The si
lence worried her. She felt her nakedness more deeply in their loss than in her missing clothes. Her implants were constructed to repair themselves with the highest priority. Their silence implied permanent damage. She hoped they would come online later but the dread feeling that, for the first time in more than a century, she was alone inside her head pressed in on her.
She lay back and waited for time to pass, unable to think, unable to hope for rescue, seeing faces, shots, wounds opening up as bullets ripped bodies to broken sacks of life.
HELENA FOUGHT to stay awake. She had no way of gauging time. When the lights came back on it could have been minutes or hours. Given the damage she had sustained to her internal systems, there was no way of knowing how long it was taking her nanomachines to repair her or how many of them had survived the explosion.
The smell of other people’s blood was thicker now, all around her. Feeling steadier, she sat up and tried to find whose blood it was. At first her head span. Helena held on in silence, eyes closed, waiting.
Feeling stable she opened her eyes, stared down. Almost beneath her, she saw a hand, half closed in a passive posture of death. Following it with her eyes she came to the floor that had been glowing but had gone dark.
She saw why. Dozens, possibly hundreds, of bodies were stacked, thrown, dropped all around her. There was nowhere to stand. The differences in temperature she had noted with her lowlight were explained by the depth and position of the different corpses around her. The smell of urine and blood hit her like a sudden gust, as if knowing where it came from stirred it up.
Whoever had discarded these people here had sprayed bleach across the floor before the disposal: hardly an effective strategy.
Helena’s skin was looking better, the blisters were becoming sparser, the acres of puss and melted fat replaced with healthy new skin. The newly grown skin had defaulted to pale white.
The remnants of the skin on her palms had been dissected and used as fuel and material to repair her. She wanted to cry in relief and horror at the autocannibalism she was engaged in. The fear of being permanently scarred made itself felt for what it was: a making powerless. Examining herself, Helena knew she would be OK, that her youth was not beyond recovery. She was an Oligarch still.
She was well enough to think about how the grenade would have killed a Normal human, that she had survived only because of the privilege she’d been born with.
The worst of the damage was confined to her legs. Her breasts and stomach were okay, the flesh was firm, toned once again. Her areolas tightened as she felt her skin’s smoothness. Running her hands upwards from the base of her stomach, slightly above where her pubic hair began, she stopped at the base of her neck. Skipping her chin, she placed the tips of her fingers first to her cheeks, then across her nose and lips. On finding them intact Helena finally closed her eyes and gently felt her eyelids, drawing her hands up, across her thin eyebrows and forehead to her hairline.
The strands of hair she encountered were brittle, snapping under her fingers. Her nanomachines would have to be explicitly commanded to repair the dead proteins. Without her Tertiary AI they had done nothing.
Right now, ‘shocked blast victim’ is the only look available, she thought. Helena slumped back as she felt a wave of unhappiness sweep over her.
The bodies around her were stripped naked, suffering the same indignity in death that she was enduring in survival.
After tentatively trying to find the floor with her right foot, she resigned herself to walking across a carpet of dead flesh. The bodies were warm, barely dead. Blood, urine and shit pooled in the spaces between the dead.
There were two doors to the room. Reaching the one closest to her, she gingerly touched the handle. A blinding flash centred on her palm threw her backwards into unconsciousness.
HELENA AWOKE to find herself lying among the dead, a pair of open eyes staring sightlessly into hers. She jumped, only to bang her head on someone else’s foot. Terror seeped into her bones like acid. She scrabbled against the dead for a solid foothold, desperate to find an inorganic surface she could rest against. Standing up straight, feet on the floor, Helena forced herself through a series of breathing exercises she normally used before critical negotiations. She managed to stop whimpering.
As she brought her fractured thoughts under control, she watched the door and thought, I am stuck.
The datastore was in the hands of whoever was holding her prisoner.
For the first time since the explosion, her hearing returned to normal. She tuned out the extraneous noise filtering through the walls. Beneath the static of the air conditioning she could hear a deep bass resonance pulsing through the biometallic structure of the room. She was on board some sort of vessel: most likely one of the two remaining transports.
She’d been there before. Why was she still there? After so many hours, her captors could have taken her anywhere, even into orbit. At least she hadn’t been left wallowing in darkness.
“Hello?” she tried, was anyone listening?
There was no response.
She turned around, her feet brushing up against the soft bodies, her toenails catching folds of limp skin. She stumbled her way back to the operating table. The smears of blood and excrement on her shins and between her toes were dry. The bodies around her had not bled all that much, they’d been killed elsewhere, dumped in the room with her. She wasn’t motivated to bend down and find out how they had been killed.
Moments later, a cold and cheerful voice came through the room.
“Good evening Ms.” Helena only nodded.
“Cat got your tongue eh?” The tone reminded her of George, an excessively vain second cousin, who would preen at family dinners and pass comment upon the supposed imperfections of others.
“I’m not going to dispense pleasantries here. I’m not simply waiting around for you to recover your good health and then set you down where you left off. You’re mine now. This medical bay is our world. You belong to me.”
Helena shivered in spite of herself. “What will it take to satisfy you?” she asked carefully, not wanting to give him any ideas.
“Well it’s clear to me that you’re an Oligarch, hmm? If that’s the case, I can go about persuading you in ways Normal people would never stand for.” Helena felt sick.
“It doesn’t matter whether you cooperate or not. Please don’t have any illusions. My satisfaction is not something you can work towards. You can only contribute. I noticed you try the door.” There was a pause. “For an uberfrau you’re remarkably stupid aren’t you?” The voice chuckled to itself. “Did you really believe you could simply walk up and open the door?”
“Fuck you,” said Helena.
“No. Fuck you,” said the voice, mirth wiped from its demeanour. “Fuck you, you superior whore.” The floor crackled and the few pools of blood started bubbling. Bodies twitched. Helena smelt the acrid odour of burning flesh and hair. “Fuck you, you self-satisfied Oligarch shit.”
Helena realised too late that every surface in the room was electrified. As she tensed to jump onto the operating table, her foot slipped off a leg and onto the floor. The shock jolted her into the air. She spasmed onto the bodies beneath.
“WAKE UP,” Helena rolled over, her head leaving the soft and warm cranny where it had been nestled. Coming to, she looked at it fondly before it occurred to her that it was the back of a child’s knee.
Groaning, she sat up, her hand awkwardly pushing against someone else’s neck.
“Who are you?” asked the voice.
She said nothing.
“I said; who are you?” Helena shook her head, refusing to answer.
She sat there waiting for the jolt: nothing. A sensation like that of a small spider roaming across the back of her hand caused Helena to start. Looking down at the hand she had instinctively shaken, she saw the skin slowly begin to fold back along a short crease cut into it. Beyond a slight stinging, it did not hurt.
“The pain will begin momentari
ly, as your body begins to realise what’s happening. The good news is that your nanotech will repair you. Your own superiority will, in the end, be what breaks you.” She could not see, nor hear, what was happening at the nanoscale without her AIs, but she guessed what was going on. Whilst she had been unconscious, perhaps before, the interrogator had introduced nanomachines into the room. He was counting on her own to heal her each time he damaged her.
Helena grit her teeth, and ripped the flayed skin from the back of her hand. Screaming out in agony, she threw the piece of flesh across the room then threw up between her legs.
“You really are a moron,” said the voice. The same sensation started on her other hand. While her right hand struggled to heal the damage, her left hand slowly began to skin itself as she watched. The pain began as a desire to scratch, intensifying until she couldn’t think, could bear to leave it alone. She brushed, once, against the wound, futilely attempting to remove the nanomachines. A slick of blood came away as she cried out. It felt as if she was on fire, the pain a constant rush of unshakeable flat grey that swallowed her attention. The pain grew, spreading out across her hand as if someone was burning an ever greater area, she found it harder and harder to hold her mind together against the pain.
“The first piece of skin was to show you what was going to happen; to give you a sense of anticipation. Your brain couldn’t quite register what was occurring. Now it’s caught up it will hurt.” Blood was collecting around her hand like dew in the morning, dripping from her in a dozen places.
In desperation, she brought her other hand up to scratch the exposed muscle again but clamped her fingers around her wrist instead, gripping as hard as she could. As the skin fell from her hand, the skin around the tops of her fingers on her other hand began to unravel down towards her fingernails, even as her own nanomachines worked to heal the damage.
She started to cry, the sound building in her chest until it became shouted sobs of agony. The tears rolled down her cheeks unhindered as she screamed and screamed. She wanted to explode, to die, to be free from the pain, whatever the cost.
A Family War: The Oligarchy - Book 1 Page 13
