by Rachel Bach
Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have cut it so close. The disrupter pistol was so old my suit didn’t know what to make of it, which meant my targeting computer was lagging dangerously behind. With symbiont speed, though, I didn’t have a choice.
I’d been out for less than a second—the echo of Mia’s shot was still bouncing across the dump—but the symbionts on top of the hull were already turning. I threw back my arm at the same time, using my suit’s rear camera and years of experience to aim the disrupter pistol, but I didn’t shoot yet. I couldn’t afford to mess this up, not with two shots and no computer, so I waited, holding my breath until my enemy spun completely around. The moment their surprised faces came into view, I pulled the trigger.
The first time I fired a disrupter pistol, the burn had seared my palm. This time, with my suit to protect me, all I felt was a pleasant warmth as the shot went off without a whisper of recoil. Since the energy-based shot moved at the speed of light, I didn’t even see it fly. From my point of view, all I did was pull the trigger and the symbiont in the middle of the trio fell backward, downed by a perfect shot to the head.
Considering the angle and how fast I’d had to line that sucker up, the fact that I’d hit a target that small on a quick draw with no computer-assisted targeting while shooting backward was nothing short of a career best. I didn’t have time to be cocky, though. The boom of the shot had barely sounded before both the remaining Eyes jumped me.
If I’d had any lingering doubts these men were symbionts, that jump would have done them in. They leaped off the hull like the fifteen-foot drop was nothing, angling to come down right on my head. But I must have gotten spoiled from my time with Rupert, because while the two men were faster than any human should be, they still weren’t as fast as I expected, and I dove out of the way with time to spare. We all came up at the same time, the symbionts recovering from their landing as I rolled to my feet, my disrupter pistol already up and aimed square at the taller Eye’s head.
I was fully prepared to take the shot right then, but the symbiont threw his hands up in surrender. That surprised me enough to make me pause. His partner also looked shocked, his eyes darting to the taller man for a signal, but the other symbiont wasn’t looking at him at all. Instead, he lowered his raised arms just enough to pull off his snow goggles and hat, revealing a thick head of dark blond hair and a handsome, young face set with a kind smile.
“Please don’t shoot,” he said. “You’re Devi Morris, right?”
He was speaking King’s Tongue like a good old boy from the Summerlands, warm and friendly as could be. A few months ago, that alone would have been enough to make me smile back, but I’d been around far too many Eyes at this point to buy it now.
“Depends on who’s asking,” I said, sticking to Universal to show him just how much I was not playing along. “Tell your buddy hands up.”
Even though they had to know there was no way I could get both of them with the one shot I had left, the other symbiont put up his hands as soon as I asked, and the taller Eye, who looked every inch the big, handsome farm boy his accent suggested, gave me an apologetic look so sincere I wondered how long he’d practiced it. “I’m real sorry about this misunderstanding, ma’am,” he said, his drawling voice deep and contrite. “We’re not here to hurt you.”
“Really?” I said, tightening my finger on the trigger. “Then why don’t you just let us go?”
“I’m afraid we can’t do that,” the Eye said. “The man you’re with is very dangerous. Rupert Charkov has been deemed extremely unstable, unfit for civilian interaction. We were sent here for your protection. Please, all we want is to get you somewhere safe.”
I opened my mouth to tell him what a load of bull that was, but before I could get a word out, something screamed to our left. Neither the Eyes nor I were amateur enough to turn and look, but I swung a camera over to the hole I’d blasted in the hull, desperate to know if that horrible sound had come from Rupert. The shadows inside were so deep I couldn’t make out a thing. A second later, though, it didn’t matter, because a man flew out of the hole I’d made and slammed headfirst into the Eye I hadn’t been talking to.
The thrown man must have weighed a ton, because he took out the other symbiont like a wrecking ball. I didn’t dare take my attention off the smooth-talking Eye I’d been dealing with, so I didn’t see where they landed, but my computer reported they’d crashed into a pile of trash some thirty feet away. The fake farm boy had stayed locked on me through the whole exchange as well, which was both good and bad for him. Good, because he’d given me no opportunity to run, bad because with his full attention on me, he didn’t see what was coming up behind him until Rupert’s arm closed around his throat.
Rupert wrenched the symbiont backward, taking him off his feet. “Devi! Behind you!”
I glanced at my cameras just in time to see the man Rupert had thrown into the trash heap roll off the symbiont he’d bowled over and launch at me. At that point, instinct took over. I didn’t even make a conscious decision to attack. I simply turned and fired, pegging the charging symbiont in the head with the disrupter a second before he crashed into me.
I knew as soon as it went off that my shot had killed him, but death didn’t stop his momentum. The symbiont crashed into me anyway, knocking me back into the hull. Without Mia’s heat to soften the way, we didn’t go through the metal this time, but we made a hell of a dent. Even with my stabilizers, the impact hit me so hard my vision went dark, but it didn’t matter, because my Lady had me.
I have never loved my suit as much as I did right then. I was still reeling when the Lady Gray rolled me over, kicking the symbiont off me and flipping me back to my feet. I landed perfectly right in front of Rupert, back in the fight after only a few seconds down. Unfortunately, it was a few seconds too many, because my disrupter pistol was now out of shots, and the smooth-talking farm boy knew it.
I heard Rupert hiss as the symbiont tore out of his hold, and then a hand grabbed my left arm, nearly ripping it out of its socket as the symbiont swung me around. By the time I stopped moving, the farm boy had a disrupter pistol of his own out and pointed at Rupert’s head. I held my breath at the sight, waiting for a threat or an ultimatum, but the man’s sweet-talking front must have been pure fiction, because he didn’t say a word. He simply pulled the trigger.
I screamed as the shot went off, but after all the times I’d fired at Rupert and missed, I should have had more faith. By the time the other man finished squeezing the trigger, Rupert was long gone. The disrupter blast slammed into the hull behind him instead, turning the old metal to molten sludge.
The symbiont didn’t even seem fazed by the miss. He just followed Rupert with his gun, lining up for the second shot. He might have gotten it, too, because Rupert was watching me and not his enemy, but fortunately for him, I wasn’t an idle prisoner. My suit wasn’t strong enough to break the symbiont’s death grip on my left arm, but Elsie was on my right. I had her out and fired before the echo of the symbiont’s first shot had faded, and by the time he pulled the trigger for his second, I was jamming my thermite blade into his unprotected ribs.
The man hissed in pain as his shot went crooked, flying off harmlessly into the air above Rupert’s head, but even though I had a thermite knife in his ribs, he didn’t let me go. That was fine with me. I leaned in like a lover, using my suit’s weight to dig the blade deeper.
Thanks to my fight with Rupert in the forest, I had some experience cutting symbionts. They were surprisingly dense and tough, more like cutting cement than flesh. That made it easy to slip and cut shallow if you went too fast, so I kept it slow, focusing on making every inch count as I worked my blade up the man’s chest toward his heart.
I’d almost made it before he kicked me away. The blow sent me flying, but not far. I was only in the air for a heartbeat before Rupert caught me, setting me down on my feet again as we both turned to face our enemy.
At this point, there were only tw
o symbionts left. One really, since the man who’d tried to sweet-talk me was on his knees clutching his bleeding chest. His friendly farm-boy affect was gone completely now, and he shot me a murderous look as his scales blossomed over his skin, shredding his clothing as they spread up to staunch the wound.
Like hell was I letting that happen. This man had chased us down, lied to me, and tried to blow Rupert’s brains out. He was going to die. But as I stepped in and swung Elsie down to cut off his lying head, Rupert grabbed my shoulder.
I jerked to a halt, Elsie’s white thermite steaming in the blowing snow just inches away from the man’s exposed throat. But before I could yell at Rupert to stop ruining my strike, he grabbed Sasha out of my holster, pressed her against the man’s forehead, and pulled the trigger.
I saw the force of my anti-armor pistol’s shot ripple across the man’s changing skin just before her blast sent him flying. He landed on his back a good fifteen feet away, skipping over the snow-covered trash like a stone over a pond. By the time he stopped, his scales covered him completely, and he lay still, a black shape in the howling snow. I watched him just long enough to be sure he wasn’t getting up again before I turned on Rupert.
“What the hell did you do that for?” I shouted, snatching Sasha out of his hand. “That man tried to kill you!”
“Because, like Natalia, he was only following orders,” Rupert said with a sigh. He stretched as he spoke, reaching up to rub Sasha’s kick out of his shoulder with a hand I only now saw he’d transformed into a claw. “And I have enough blood on my conscience already.”
I itched to point out that Rupert had stopped my kill, which meant the blood would have been on my conscience, and, unlike him, I had absolutely no problem with that. But any recriminations would have to wait, because my thermite was ticking down and there was still one enemy left.
The farm boy’s companion, the quiet symbiont Rupert had sent flying when he’d thrown the other man into him, had gotten up from the trash heap while we’d been fighting. Unlike the others, he’d hung back, not helping his team or taking any of the openings I was sure we’d given him. In fact, he didn’t seem interested in attacking at all. For all that he was clearly a symbiont, he was quaking in fear, staring at Rupert like the man was death incarnate, which I found pretty insulting since I was the who’d been doing all the killing.
“I’ve got left,” I whispered to Rupert, nodding for him to move right for the pincer before breaking into a run. The shaking man didn’t look like a real threat, but I only had thirty seconds left on my thermite. Once Elsie’s fire was gone, I was out of symbiont killers, so if I was going to do this, it had to be now. I’d thought Rupert understood this, but despite my hurry, he took his time, walking straight across the trash yard toward the other man like he was just coming over to say hello.
I couldn’t yell at him about it either, because whatever Rupert was doing, it was working. The symbiont wasn’t even looking at me or my burning blade. His eyes were riveted on Rupert, and he started scrambling back up the trash heap, pressing his back to the flat wall of a burned-out power adapter as Rupert closed the final distance.
I slowed down as well, lowering my blade in confusion. The man was clearly a symbiont, and Rupert was obviously injured. Now that I had the time to look at him, I was actually surprised Rupert was still standing.
He’d transformed his upper body beneath his tattered coat, including his arms and hands, but even that hadn’t been enough to stop the bleeding. Blood streaked his cheek and neck where the scales ended, and though no sign of what must be horrible pain showed on his face, his stiff walk gave the whole thing away. If Rupert had been my enemy, I would have been on him in an instant, using his wounds for an easy victory. But even though he looked so beaten up I might have been able to take him without my suit, the symbiont on the ground was cowering harder than ever, his face pale and sweaty as Rupert stopped in front of him.
“Mr. Kendris?” Rupert said, his voice colder than the biting wind. “Correct?”
The other man nodded, and Rupert smiled that icy killer smile of his, the one that still made the hairs on the back of my neck prickle. “How many more of you are there?”
“Just me, Natalia, and Ross, who’s watching the daughter,” Kendris croaked out, sinking deeper into the snowy trash. “Please, Eye Charkov, don’t go after them. This daughter has serious stability issues already. If—”
He cut off when Rupert scowled, snapping his mouth shut, but it wasn’t until he started nearly hyperventilating that I finally understood what was going on. This man wasn’t seeing the real Rupert, who was shot up and barely standing. He saw Eye Charkov, the cold killer, now gone rogue. From that angle, I could totally understand why he was so scared. Standing there with blood dripping from his claws and his loose black hair catching the blowing snow around his cold killer mask, Rupert looked every inch the monster his reputation said he was.
“I’m not interested in the daughter,” Rupert said, tilting his head toward me. “I’m guarding Deviana Morris. She’s your target, right?”
The man nodded. “They say she can stop the phantoms. Please, I don’t know why you took the Paradoxian, but we must have her back. If you turn her in, I’m sure Commander Martin will overlook—”
“Hey, I’m right here, asshole,” I said, leaning down to shove the tip of my rapidly dying thermite blade so close to his nose that his skin started to blister. “Don’t talk about me like I’m a thing,” I growled, giving him a quelling look before glancing up at Rupert. “We’re not killing this one either, I guess?”
The man on the ground made a little choking sound, and Rupert sighed. “I would appreciate it if you didn’t.”
“Fine,” I said, sheathing Elsie as the last of her fire flickered out. “Listen up, then, Eye Whatever-Your-Name-Was, here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to run on back and tell your boss that Charkov didn’t take me anywhere. The Paradoxian is running her own show, and if the Eyes want any part of it, they’re going to have to meet some requirements. Now, I’m sure you assholes can find us anywhere in the universe, so next time you decide to drop in, come up peaceably and we’ll talk this over like civilized people. But try to kidnap me again and you’ll regret it, because unlike Eye Charkov, I’m not nice, and I have no problem whatsoever chopping up your head and playing dice with your teeth if you mess with me. Understand?”
The man’s face went gray as the dirty snow that was quickly piling up around us. I don’t know what scared him more—that I was giving him orders to relay to the commander of the Eyes or the idea that I could be worse than Rupert Charkov. Whichever it was, he nodded frantically, and I gave him a nice, bloodthirsty smile through my visor. And then, since Sasha was already in my hand, I snapped her up and took aim at the symbiont’s forehead. “Night night, starlight.”
The man didn’t even seem to realize what was happening before I pulled the trigger, blowing him back into the trash. When he didn’t get up again, I slid Sasha back into her holster. “God and king, what’s a cupcake like him doing in the Eyes?”
“He’s not actually an Eye,” Rupert said, his voice strained as he shifted his weight. “Kendris works on the Dark Star as one of Maat’s handlers. He’s basically a technician who was given a symbiont to protect him from Maat’s plasmex rather than to aid in combat. If Commander Martin sent him here, they must be quite short handed.”
“Scraping the bottom of the barrel, you mean,” I said, walking over to turn the unconscious Kendris over with the toe of my boot. “But then, they were coming to take down the great and terrible Eye Charkov. Guess they wanted all the manpower they could get.”
Rupert didn’t seem to find that funny. “You didn’t have to knock him out, you know. He wasn’t going to stop us.”
“Better safe than sorry,” I said with a shrug. “No offense, but I learned the hard way not to trust Eyes.”
Rupert sighed. “Fair enough.” He glanced around at the scattered bodies. “We�
��d better clean up.”
It took us just under five minutes to move everyone, dead and alive, under the cover of the rusted out ship hull. Considering we were a symbiont and a powered armor user, this shouldn’t have been a big deal, but by the time we had everyone safely out of the elements and, more importantly, out of sight, Rupert was looking pale, even for him.
“Are you okay?” I asked, grabbing Mia off the ground where I’d dropped her.
“I will be,” Rupert said, wrapping his arms tight around his chest. He’d traded out his ruined coat for mine. The gray snow jacket was a bit small for him, but at least it wasn’t full of holes. But even though he was zipped up tight, he hadn’t pulled his scales back, and his hands were still claws when he shoved them in his pockets. “I just need a little time. Getting hit with a disrupter blast takes it out of you.”
He said this like it was nothing, just an inconvenience, but I knew Rupert pretty well by this point, and I wasn’t fooled. I locked Mia on my back and walked over, pulling off my glove as I went. Before Rupert could react, I pressed my bare hand against his cheek, and what I felt wasn’t good.
“You’re freezing.” The words came out more sharply than I’d meant, but I couldn’t help it. I was so used to Rupert’s warmth that the feel of his cold skin was like a slap in the face. “How bad is it really?”
“Not life threatening,” he admitted. “But I did lose a lot of blood.”
It wasn’t until he said this that I realized he was leaning against the wall of the hull for support. “You’re dizzy, aren’t you?” I said, glaring at him. “Dammit, Rupert, why didn’t you tell me you were this hurt earlier?”
