by Rachel Bach
I plummeted silently through the billowing clouds that filled the room, my suit flipping me automatically to land neatly on my feet with Sasha ready in my hand. Rupert dropped down next, almost landing on top of me. He fell into a crouch at once, peering around blindly into the smoke before he pulled his scales over his head.
I had no such problems. I had thermal scanners, and now that we were away from that damn pipe, they painted a crystal-clear picture of the room, the cool furniture, and the bright shapes of the warm symbionts around us. My computer marked them as I watched, painting a target at the center of each glowing figure’s head, and I couldn’t help a smug smile. “Bet you wish you had armor right now.”
“What?” Rupert said almost in my ear.
My answer was a gunshot followed by the solid thunk as the first symbiont hit the far wall, thrown across the room by Sasha’s perfectly aimed blast to its head.
I didn’t wait to see if he’d get up. I was already on to the next target, my suit moving my pistol into place with millimeter precision. I’d marked Rupert and Brenton as friendlies so my Lady wouldn’t let me shoot them, but every other glowing heat shadow on my sensors was fair game as I hopped up on a metal lab table and got to work.
With the thick smoke, surprise, and my thermographics, the fight didn’t even deserve the name. This was a slaughter. I normally prefer to do my shooting myself, but this was the sort of situation my Lady was made for, and I didn’t dare stand in her way. Letting my suit guide me, we moved together like a turret, firing perfect shot after perfect shot as my firing system unfailingly guided my gun right to the target painted on each symbiont’s head. Even though Sasha’s bullets couldn’t puncture their scales, she was still accurate as hell and hit like a truck, and now that Rupert had revealed the symbiont’s weak spot, I was merciless. Every shot I fired sent a scaled body careening into the wall before collapsing in a heap, just like the one I’d shot back on Kessel. It was brutal, unfair, and deeply satisfying. It was also not enough.
I hadn’t actually realized until my suit counted them up for me just how full the room had been. At least now I knew why we hadn’t run into anyone out in the halls. There must have been thirty symbionts waiting here for us. I’d shot a good fifteen of them by the time someone thought to turn on the lab’s ventilation system and suck out the smoke, but as soon as the air began to clear, the tide began to turn.
I’d just finished taking out my sixteenth symbiont when I saw a glowing blur pop up behind me on my thermals. That was all the warning I got before a claw caught my arm, wrenching me back hard enough to overpower my stabilizer. Since not falling was no longer an option, I kicked off the table instead, slamming my body back into my attacker. But symbionts are tough bastards, and heavy as I was, I didn’t manage to knock him down. He did stumble, though, and I seized my opening, shoving Sasha back and under the arm he’d grab to plug a shot into his chest. The anti-armor round wasn’t enough to really hurt him, but it did blast him back, and when his hand opened on instinct, letting me go to catch himself, I kicked off, jumping clear of his reach to the other side of the table I’d been standing on.
I landed less gracefully than I would have liked, but my suit righted me soon enough, slamming me back against the lab table’s built-in cabinet. My smoke was almost completely gone now, and though several symbionts were down, plenty were still up. Worse, when I’d broken line of sight on Rupert, my suit had lost his friendly fire tag, which meant I was no longer sure which of the black-scaled figures was him.
There were four in front of me right now, actually, closing in fast. None of them were tall enough to be Rupert, so I cleared my suit to fire, shooting the first one square in the head before I could blink. Two of the remaining three jumped back at the shot, but the fourth didn’t even flinch, and I knew at once that this was my real enemy. The other two were civilians, likely scientists or engineers given symbionts to survive living near Maat, but this man was a soldier like me, and my gunshot had barely finished echoing before he lunged for my throat.
I threw my arm up, ejecting Elsie as I did, but this was a real symbiont, a trained Eye, and I was too slow. His claws shot through my guard to dig into my chest, slicing deep gouges in the Lady’s mist-silver plating above my ribs before I could roll away. I came up furious, swiping my now-burning plasma blade across his calves as I rose.
The man fell with a yelp as I cut his legs out from under him. Even if he hadn’t, my next punch to his jaw would have knocked him flat. I was burning with anger over the damage to my suit, so much that I felt the first tingles of the virus on my fingers. That snuffed my rage like a candle in a vacuum, but not before I’d sliced the symbiont’s neck open.
I kicked his body for good measure and turned, blade ready, only to find I had no more opponents. My anger-fueled execution must have looked even worse than I’d thought, because the remaining two symbionts backed off at once, their hands up in surrender. I switched Sasha to my left hand and kept her trained on them just in case while my cameras scanned the room, looking for the next real threat.
I found it on the other side. Whereas I’d pulled the coward symbionts, Rupert was facing off against four opponents who looked like they knew exactly what they were doing. Brenton was over there, too, holding his own in the back corner against two more, though not nearly as well as he should have been considering how I’d seen him fight before. I hopped up on the table to go help, but as I jumped over the symbiont with the slashed neck, his hand shot out and grabbed my ankle to yank me back down.
I gasped and fell, landing flat on the table before my suit pushed me back up, but I couldn’t break the bleeding symbiont’s hold as he jumped on top of me. I had no idea where he was getting his strength from; he should have been half bled out by now, not to mention unable to breathe thanks to a filleted windpipe. But I must not have hit him as well as I’d thought, because he was gasping in my ear as he held me down, throwing up his hand to catch something one of the other symbionts tossed. I was still trying to shove him off me, which meant I didn’t see what he’d caught until it was too late.
The bolt of lightning crashed into my suit like a spear, and then everything went dark as my Lady overloaded. I went limp a second later, landing hard on the table’s edge as my suit’s weight crushed me. I didn’t even try to catch myself. First, I’d only break my arms without my suit’s motors to help with the weight, and second, I was too busy frantically trying to get my Lady back online.
After what felt like an eternity of darkness, my cameras flickered back to life, giving me a clear view of the bastard who’d shot me. He was still leaning into me where I was doubled over the table, resting his weight on my back to avoid putting it on his injured legs. His chest was soaked with blood from what I’d done to his neck and he seemed to be barely holding on. Despite all that, though, he was still up, pressing a clunky anti-armor charge thrower pistol into the back of my neck, the same goddamn gun Brenton’s team had used on me on Ample.
“Target secure,” he panted. “Call the commander. Tell him we’ve got—”
I had Sasha down and pressed against his knee before he could finish. I fired three shots in rapid succession, and while the first two only slammed him around, I felt the third one crack bone. The symbiont lurched back a second later, clutching his knee with a pained cry. The second his weight was off me, I whirled and shot him in the head, blasting him into the door that led back to the kill box.
He hit the blast door like a cannon shot, knocking it half off its track. I kept my gun on his limp body, but it wasn’t necessary. This time, he wasn’t getting up again.
The symbiont had dropped the charge thrower when I’d shot his knee. I stomped on it with all my weight, cracking the plastic casing to tiny bits. Threat eliminated, I turned back to my cowering enemies, Elsie shining like a star on my right and Sasha ready on my left. My targeting system was already lining up the shots for their miserable heads when I heard the unmistakable blast of a disrupter pistol behi
nd me.
Before I could think better of it, I glanced at my rear cameras. I was too late to see who’d fired, but they must not have hit, because a second later, the knot of symbionts surrounding Rupert blew open as he grabbed one of his attackers around the throat and hurled him as hard as he could. I ducked as the man flew over my head to slam into the door I’d just broken with his buddy, taking it clean off its railings this time.
The first man hadn’t even landed before Rupert kicked the next one, slamming him into a metal specimen refrigerator hard enough to dent the wall behind it. He slammed the third symbiont into the ground with his heel, stomping the man’s chest so hard I heard his ribs crack under his scales.
The snapping sound made me want to cheer. Every other time we’d fought symbionts, with the exception of Brenton’s first invasion of the Fool, I’d felt that Rupert was holding back. In a way, I couldn’t blame him. These were his former teammates; for him, fighting them would be like me attacking Blackbirds. I didn’t know what had finally pushed Rupert over the edge—getting locked up maybe, or perhaps it was getting shot. Now that he’d thinned the herd a bit, I could see that his side was burned where the earlier disrupter blast had grazed him. The wound looked painful, but Rupert didn’t even seem to feel it as he reached out and crushed the disrupter pistol in the final symbiont’s hand.
I wasn’t the only one watching, either. Back on my side of the room, the symbionts I’d been preparing to fight were breaking. They turned as I watched, abandoning their fallen comrades as they fled back through the kill box into the station proper, and they weren’t alone. The room that had been packed full of symbionts was now nearly empty as the remaining combatants turned and ran for the door.
I didn’t bother trying to stop them. My goal was to reach Maat, not slaughter the station, however appealing that might sound while the battle rage was singing through me. But I had a job to do, and anyway, the panic only confirmed my suspicions that most of these people weren’t real symbionts but technicians forced into fighting, and bloodthirsty as I can be, I’d never liked hurting civilians.
Elsie had burned out by this point anyway. I broke off her blackened edge and pulled her back into her sheath on my wrist, walking toward Rupert as I did. He was still standing with his foot on the downed symbiont’s chest. There was blood on his claws and splattered across his upper body, making his blank, scale-masked face look truly monstrous in the bright white lab lights. This should have been a reminder of what Rupert really was, but as I looked him over, all I felt was a primal, possessive pride. That was my man standing victorious over his defeated enemies, and I couldn’t have been happier if I’d beaten them all myself.
Rupert must not have been able to see through my visor, though, because when he saw me staring, he dropped his head. “I’m sorry,” he said, scraping the blood off his cheek with a scaly claw. “That was … I didn’t want you to see—”
I hopped over the table, landing neatly beside him. The second my feet were on the ground, I hugged him. It was very brief, just a squeeze, but when I stepped back, I could practically feel the confusion radiating off his body.
“Very Paradoxian, remember?” I said with a smirk, running my hand over the smooth scales on his back before I let him go. “You were marvelous.” I kicked one of the downed symbionts with the toe of my boot. “That’ll teach ’em to mess with us.”
When Rupert didn’t answer, I knew he was staring dumbfounded at me. Normally I would have reveled in my ability to throw him so completely off balance, but I had no time to enjoy it right now. I was already jogging over to help Brenton.
Despite his physical problems, Brenton had defeated the symbionts who’d been trying to corner him, but the fight had taken its toll. He was leaning against the wall, his brittle, brown-black scales rattling with every wheezing breath. He accepted my arm without comment, letting me haul him up. “Where now, Mr. Guide?” I asked when I got him back on his feet.
“Through there,” he whispered, nodding at the heavily reinforced door at the opposite end of the room.
I frowned. That door was going to be a problem, especially if there were more symbionts on the other side, which I was sure there must be. Martin would never leave Maat without a final guard.
“That door is the only way into Maat’s prison,” Rupert said, stepping up beside us. “Devi, if you go down, it’s all for nothing, so Brenton and I—”
“No way,” I snapped, glaring. “They were going after you with disrupters, but I got charge throwers. The Eyes must still want me alive or that symbiont would have ripped off my head instead of just shocking me. The fact that they want me alive is a weapon we can use, so if anyone does anything, it’s going to be me.”
I heard Rupert take a breath to argue, but before he could, a loud, mechanical hum filled the air. When I glanced up reflexively to find the source, I was nearly blinded as a pair of huge targeting floodlights flashed on from the far wall. My suit adjusted to the brightness automatically, though not fast enough to save my eyes. I was still blinking away spots when the room filled with a harsh, jangling rattle, like something metal was spinning up very fast. It was a sound I recognized, but it was so out of place here that I couldn’t put a name to it until Rupert grabbed my arm.
The next thing I knew, I was on the ground, pinned under Rupert’s weight as the heavy door at the end of the lab slid open to reveal two enormous, automated, anti-armor chain guns. They’d already spun up, the noise I’d heard earlier, and the second the door was out of their way, they opened fire, shredding everything in their path.
I gasped in surprise, covering my head, not that it would do any good. The bullets that thing was firing were the size of my hand. They’d punch right through my arm into my head if they hit. I was scrambling to think of something they wouldn’t punch through when Rupert grabbed my arm.
“Door!” he yelled, yanking me up.
I jumped to my feet and bolted for the door the symbionts had fled through, the one our carnage had knocked off its track, turning the corner into a short hallway that dead-ended at another heavy door, the final compartment of the kill box we’d avoided by taking the pipe. Brenton was already here, crouched down behind the final kill box wall, which, since it had been built to keep even symbionts in, was sufficient for keeping bullets out, even huge ones. Thankfully, the turrets here had already been yanked down, probably by the fleeing symbionts, so we were able to hole up without fear.
Shaking my head at the irony of using a kill box for cover, I crouched down between my two symbionts, glaring at the rain of bullets pecking a hole in the wall on the opposite side of the sundered blast door not three feet in front of me. “Who the hell uses guns like that inside? Does Martin want to slag his station?”
“At this point, I don’t think he cares,” Brenton said, panting. “Those guns were put in as a last-stand defense.”
“More like suicide,” I grumbled, nodding at the rapidly disintegrating metal wall. “He’s going to puncture the hull and kill us all.”
“I don’t think he’d mind that,” Rupert said quietly. “And I don’t think he’s worrying about keeping you alive anymore, either.”
Couldn’t argue with that. The guns in the other room were chewing up everything, including the symbionts we’d knocked out. The two men we’d thrown at the door were such a bloody mess I had to look away, which is saying something when you’ve seen as much blood as I have. “He’s killing everyone,” I whispered. “His own people.”
“Of course,” Brenton said. “He’s an Eye.”
I snorted. Brenton was one to talk about sacrificing his men. But that was an old argument, and now was not the time. The tiny hall we’d holed up in had no vents or openings, no escape other than the doors at either end, which weren’t escapes at all. If we busted the door behind us and retreated, we’d still be trapped inside the kill box, maybe even in a bit where the kill part still worked. But if we tried to go forward, we’d get shot. Either way, we’d be dead.
“He can’t keep this up forever,” I said, taking the chance to reload Sasha. “Those guns have to run out some—”
I was cut off by sudden, deafening silence as the hail of bullets stopped. I held my breath, listening, but I didn’t hear the click of a new belt being fed in. They weren’t reloading. The guns hadn’t spun down on their own, though, which meant something had stopped them. I was about to peek out and see what when I heard the distinct sound of symbiont claws crunching over spent shells.
“You can stop delaying the inevitable, Miss Morris.”
I threw my head back with a silent curse. I’d only heard it once before, but that little exchange had been memorable enough for me to forever recognize Commander Martin’s dry, genteel voice. It seemed the old bastard had come out to finish the job himself.
“There’s no point in being stubborn,” he called. “You’re dead no matter what. But if you remove your armor and weapons and surrender now with no more fuss, I won’t kill Charkov.”
I heard Rupert suck in an angry breath, but I put up my hand. “Aren’t you supposed to tempt me with my life, too?” I yelled.
“Unfortunately, your death is a foregone conclusion,” Martin said. “After your actions today, your risk-to-reward ratio has proven far too dangerous for my blood. But I am a fair man, Miss Morris, and so I’m giving you a choice: come out now, save your lover, and die a hero, or I kill all of you. You have thirty seconds to decide.”
I took a step back, bumping into the blast-rated wall. As my back hit the reinforced plates, the awful feeling of being trapped, really trapped, curdled in my gut. Fear followed right behind, but not because I was going to die. I’d long accustomed myself to that. No, I was afraid because, with Maat knocked out, I wasn’t sure I could give her the virus like I’d promised. Even if I gave in to my anger at Martin and blacked my whole body right now, she wasn’t aware enough to grab it, which meant I wasn’t just going to die, I was going to fail. I’d put everyone in danger, Rupert in danger, for nothing.
