by Rachel Bach
But while these awful thoughts were busy spinning through my head, Brenton and Rupert were moving. They weren’t even looking at the guns in the hallway. Instead, they were huddled beside the blown off door with their heads together, talking in rapid whispers. This was odd, because not five minutes ago I would have sworn they hated each other. They must have put their differences aside, though, because when Brenton gave what looked to me like an order, Rupert just nodded and returned to my side.
“Stick close to us,” he whispered. “Go for the gun on the left. I’ll get the right. Brenton will take Martin.”
I blinked. He couldn’t be serious. Even if we could miraculously make it to the other side of the room under fire, Martin was a full symbiont who hadn’t lifted a claw yet. Brenton was a nasty customer, but he was in a bad way. If it came to a fight, he wouldn’t have a chance.
“Ten seconds, Miss Morris,” Martin called from the other room.
I clenched my teeth as I looked at Rupert, and then I made a field decision. The second I nodded, Rupert walked to the mangled door and heaved it up, setting it in front of him. Before I could figure out why, Rupert rushed into the room, using the battered door as a shield. I followed a few steps behind with Brenton, throwing myself entirely into whatever we were doing, even though I still wasn’t quite sure what it was.
Once we were through the door, I understood what Rupert and Brenton had been planning. At the other end of the bullet-riddled lab, a fully changed symbiont was standing between the two deployed chain guns. If I hadn’t heard him speaking earlier, I wouldn’t have guessed the muscular man was Martin. But though his scaled mask covered his graying beard and false, grandfatherly face, nothing could hide the surprise and fear in his body as he stumbled backward, hitting the switch in his hands.
The huge, belt-fed chain guns spun up at Martin’s command, but their motors were no match for symbiont speed. The door in Rupert’s hands ate the first shot, the bullet nearly breaking through. The second would have made it for sure, but it never got the chance. By the time the second shot fired, Rupert was already on top of the guns.
He brought the door down like a hammer, slamming it into the motor of the right turret. I heard the thing squeal as its metal casing broke, but I was too busy with my own gun to pay attention. As we’d agreed, I took the gun on the left, jumping on top of it before its targeting system could get a lock on me. I popped Elsie as I flew, and though my thermite blade was dark, she was still sharp enough to punch through the turret’s control board. The hard circuitry cracked like a plate, and the gun sputtered to a stop, the chain spinning off its gears.
I grinned, yanking my blade out as I turned to see if Rupert needed help, but I should have known better. While I’d been stabbing circuit boards, he’d ripped his gun completely out of the floor. He hurled it as I watched, launching it into the far wall. It landed with a crash I felt through my stabilizers, and I sagged with relief. All this back-and-forth between hope and despair was starting to take its toll. But while we’d eliminated the guns, the battle wasn’t done yet.
Brenton and Martin were on the floor in front of Maat’s door, brawling like schoolboys. As I’d feared, Martin’s healthy symbiont had a definite edge on Brenton’s sickly one, but what I’d failed to take into account was the difference in skill. Forever ago, when I’d watched Brenton fight Rupert in the Fool’s lounge, the difference had been a razor’s edge. Here it was more like miles.
Despite his superior strength and claws, Martin was on the bottom on his back, and he couldn’t seem to get up. Any time he managed to get something free to take a shot, Brenton would just readjust and attack from another direction, methodically pounding the commander into the floor. Martin must have gotten some hits in at some point because Brenton was bleeding freely from his stomach, his brittle scales chipped in several places, but he didn’t seem to feel it. If anything, he seemed to be getting stronger, driving his fists into the commander over and over until the floor began to dent beneath them.
The Brenton I knew was normally a calm, rational fighter, but right now he was drowning in blind fury, tearing into Martin like an animal even though he’d clearly already won. And while it was disturbing to watch, I didn’t dare try to stop him. I’d been fighting the Eyes for just a few months, but Brenton had been waging a personal war on them for years in his quest to save Maat, and Martin was now feeling the result of all that pent-up anger. I wouldn’t have risked getting in the way of that to save someone I liked. Like hell was I risking it for Martin.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity, Brenton stopped swinging. Martin had stopped moving a while ago, but it took Brenton a few tries to actually ease off the man. For a long moment, there was no sound except his labored breathing, and then the tension cracked as Brenton began to chuckle.
“Bastard always was a damn paper pusher,” he said, slinging the blood off his claws. “A bureaucrat who took the symbiont because it was part of the job. Never learned to use it, never bothered to learn anything about the real work of being an Eye. I’ll hate the man to my dying day, but Caldswell was twice the commander Martin was.”
I wasn’t sure Caldswell would take that as a compliment. “Let’s go,” I said softly, offering Brenton my hand. “We’ve got a princess to save.”
“Maat never was a princess,” Brenton grunted, nearly pulling me over when he grabbed my hand and hauled himself up. “She was just a little girl.”
“They all were,” Rupert said bitterly, tapping the panel by the reinforced door Martin’s body was still blocking. A second later, the lock turned green, and the door opened with a hiss, revealing a pure white room.
With a deep breath, I stepped forward. “Let’s end this.”
Brenton and Rupert followed without a word, their claws and my boots leaving bloody tracks on the pure white plastic as we entered Maat’s prison.
CHAPTER 12
The room was long and featureless, a white plastic box. The only relief from the unrelenting nothingness was a panel about twice the size of my armor case that had been folded down from the wall. It was quaintly old-fashioned with dusty buttons and old-style screens where you had to actually push your finger down instead of just brushing. Other than this, there was nothing. Not even another door.
“Is this the right place?” I asked, swirling my cameras.
“It’s the right place,” Brenton wheezed. He was using the wall for support, his shoulder leaving a blood smear as he pulled himself forward. “Maat is kept in seclusion beyond that wall.”
He nodded at the back of the room as he said this, but I didn’t see anything. Stranger still, this place didn’t trigger any of Rupert’s memories. When I tried to remember it, all I got was a terrible feeling of unease. One that Rupert apparently still felt if his hunched shoulders were any sign.
“This is the threshold of Maat’s quarantine,” he said quietly. “There used to be a lab past here, but these days everything beyond this first door is automated. Eyes never set foot in here unless Maat is drugged unconscious.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because when she’s awake, even being a symbiont won’t save you at this range,” Brenton said bitterly. “This is where they throw the daughters to be changed. No one else would dare come in. This close Maat could pop all our heads like rotten tomatoes if she wanted to.” He looked back at the bloody mess he’d left on the floor. “I’m surprised Martin had the guts to hide in here, drugs or no.”
“He didn’t have a choice,” Rupert said, walking up to the dusty console. “Republic command ordered the subcommand station be moved in here two years ago. This room was to be considered the very last line of defense. Martin was following protocol. If things went bad outside, he could detonate the separation charges from this console.” He pointed at a large red button placed prominently at the top of the console’s slanted control board. “Once he’d blasted this arm free from the rest of the station, we’d have been sucked into space while he and Maat wo
uld float off to safety and wait for a pickup.”
“So why didn’t he?” I asked.
“Maybe he wasn’t ready to give you up yet,” Rupert said with a shrug. “Maybe he thought the guns would be enough.”
“Or maybe he was too chicken to float off into space alone with Maat,” Brenton said, pulling himself along the wall until there was a bloody trail leading all the way to the end of the room. “How do we get in?”
I gaped at him. “You don’t know?”
Brenton shook his head. “They changed everything. I might not have formally defected until five years ago, but Caldswell mistrusted me long before that. I haven’t been here in twenty years. Back then, this was a hallway that led to Maat’s room. She had a bed then, even a window, though they never let her out of her restraints long enough to walk over and look out of it. I guess they finally did away with even the pretense.” He reached up, running his bloody claws over the white wall at the far end of the room. “Open it, Charkov.”
Rupert bristled at the order, but he began fiddling with a console. When nothing happened for several seconds, I walked over to see what was wrong. “They have her on lockdown,” he explained before I’d even said a word. “And I used to do this from the other side of the wall. This console is different.”
“I wasn’t criticizing,” I replied, glancing through my cameras at the rapidly spreading pool of red at Brenton’s feet before dropping my voice to a whisper. “Do you think he’ll make it?”
Rupert dropped his voice to match mine. “If his symbiont hasn’t stopped the bleeding by now, it’s not going to.”
I’d thought as much, but hearing it confirmed hurt more than I’d expected. I didn’t like Brenton, but I’d come to grudgingly respect him. It was hard not to respect a man who went after something with everything he had.
Finally, Rupert tapped a sequence into the console, and I heard machinery grind to life somewhere above me. That was all the warning I got before the wall at the end of the white room rolled away and another wall was lifted up on a pneumatic wrench to replace it. And pinned to this wall by a massive web of white straps like a spider’s victim was a figure I’d seen before, though not in Rupert’s memories. From the way he was staring, I didn’t know if he’d actually seen Maat before this moment, but I had. The white wrapped figure with her head trapped in that horrible, faceless mask was exactly the one the lelgis had shown me in their warning. Even now, seeing her, a complex knot of feelings was rolling over and over inside me until I could almost hear the alien whisper.
Mad queen.
But while I was trying to master the flood of dread and revulsion the lelgis had left in my mind, Brenton stumbled forward, falling to his knees at Maat’s feet. For a long moment, he knelt there like a pilgrim before the Sainted King, and then he jolted up again without a sound and began shredding the white straps that bound her to the wall.
I stepped forward to help, but then thought better of it. Brenton’s claws might have been brittle, but they were more than sharp enough to cut Maat’s restraints. Even if they hadn’t been, he would have made it work. Brenton was tearing her down like a madman, shredding everything in reach: the IV tubes, the cloth straps, even the metal chains that bound her wrists and ankles. Those last ones he broke by slipping his claws into the links and wrenching them sideways like a lever, snapping off two of his claws in the process. But Brenton seemed to be beyond pain’s reach as he pulled Maat free at last, clutching her skeletal body in his arms.
“I’ve got you,” he said, the words crumbling into a sob. “I told you I’d come, Enna. I kept my promise. I told you I’d come.” He leaned over, pressing his scaled face against her narrow shoulders, and then his head shot back up. “Help me get her mask off.”
That command was clearly meant for me, and though it was on the tip of my tongue to snap that I didn’t take orders from him, I swallowed the words. Now wasn’t the time. “Let me repack my blade,” I muttered, reaching up to grab my block of thermite gel out of Phoebe’s old nook.
It took me just under thirty seconds to replenish my thermite blade. Brenton waited impatiently, snapping his fingers like I was taking forever. I ignored him, waving my blade to set the gel before walking over to examine the problem.
Maat’s blank faced helmet was just like Rupert’s, a metal shell completely encasing her head that locked at the nape of the neck. I motioned for Brenton to ease her head forward and flared my thermite, using what I’d learned from cutting Rupert’s to slice the lock with a single clean stroke. The second I was done, Brenton grabbed the still smoldering edge of the crack I’d made and snapped the helmet in two.
I’d seen Maat’s face many times, so I thought I knew what to expect. But as the helmet broke away, I realized I was utterly wrong. The girl I knew had olive skin, dark almond eyes, and straight black hair, cut flat above her shoulders. But that projected image must have been how Maat remembered herself from before all this began, because the thing beneath the mask didn’t even look human.
She was bald and bone thin, her paper-thin eyelids closed in fitful sleep. Her skin was as gray as my armor and speckled with pale blue patches. Scales, I realized belatedly, from her symbiont, but they were the wrong color. Even Brenton’s unhealthy brownish black scales at least looked vaguely xith’cal, but the strange blue-white things poking out of Maat’s skin didn’t look like any lizard I’d ever seen. Her gaunt face was relatively clear, but once you got past her shoulders, her body was completely covered in the things, poking up in uneven waves beneath her white medical gown like rumpled, razor-sharp feathers.
“Defense mechanism,” Brenton said, his voice uneven. “She can’t control them like other symbionts. They’re only out because her body tried to defend her when they drugged her unconscious. Here”—he reached back toward the wall—“help me.”
I didn’t realize what Brenton was asking me to do until I saw what his hand was clutching. When I did, I almost threw up. Under the helmet, Maat’s head was open. A window had been cut in the top of her skull to make way for a nest of wires that seemed to be plugged directly into her brain. Brenton had gathered the lot of them with his broken claws and was now squeezing the multicolored rope in his fist.
“This is how they control her, make her create the daughters,” he said, his voice shaking with rage. “She used to say she could feel them, worms in her brain, making her do things.” He held the wires up to me. “Cut them.”
I swallowed. “Are you sure? They look kind of vital.”
“If Maat could be killed this easily, she wouldn’t need you,” Brenton said bitterly. “Cut her free. Now.”
My thermite was still burning, so I did as he asked, slicing through the wrist-thick rope of plastic-coated wires like it was gossamer. Maat’s entire body convulsed when I severed the cord, her small, clawed fingers digging into Brenton’s arm so hard his scales cracked. It must have hurt, but the only sound he made was a relieved sigh. That twitch was the first sign of life Maat had given.
“Come on,” I said softly, touching Brenton’s shoulder. “We have to go.”
He nodded and held Maat out, but it took me a second to realize he wanted me to take her, and yet another to realize this was because he couldn’t stand. The white floor where Brenton had been sitting was now entirely red.
“God and king, Brenton,” I whispered, taking Maat from him. “You’re leaking everywhere. We’ve got to get you—”
A loud thump echoed through the walls, cutting me off. I went silent, craning my neck even though there was nothing to see in the blank room. I could hear it, though. The hull around us was groaning softly, and I felt the floor beneath my boots vibrating like a string about to snap. The vibrating got stronger and stronger until, all of a sudden, it stopped with a sharp crack, like something had broken.
“Rupert,” I hissed in the sudden silence, clutching Maat tighter. “What was that?”
I’d thought he was still at the console, but when I looked for him, Rupert was
right beside me, almost making me jump. “Something hit the hull,” he whispered, looking up at the white ceiling. “Maybe the battleships decided to fire after Maat’s cell alarm went off?”
I’d been on ships that were getting shot plenty of times, and that hadn’t sounded like any missile strike I’d ever heard. From the sound of his voice, I could tell Rupert didn’t believe that story either. Whatever it was, though, we needed to move. Now.
“You take Maat,” I said, holding her thin body out to Rupert. “I’ll find something to patch up Brenton and—”
I cut off, eyes going wide. Behind Rupert, a dark shadow was moving erratically. It left a trail of blood behind it, but it wasn’t until the thing threw out its arm to grab the console that I realized what—or rather, who—I was looking at.
“No!” I shouted. “Martin!”
Rupert had turned before the name left my mouth, but it was too late. Wobbling like a drunk, Commander Martin reached up and slammed his fist down on the red button Rupert had pointed to earlier, the one that blew the charges that would separate Maat’s ray from the rest of Dark Star Station. Rupert sent him flying a second later, but the damage was already done, and I braced for the thunder of the explosions …
Which never came.
“What?” I said, looking around bewildered. “Did something go wrong?”
“No,” Rupert breathed, stepping back to let me see his hand pressed flat on the console, holding down the button.
“It doesn’t fire until the pressure is released,” he said, nodding at Martin. “Deal with him, please?”
The please wasn’t necessary. I didn’t even have to put Maat down. I just shifted her to my left arm and pulled out Sasha as I walked over to where Martin was lying, his chest heaving as he tried to get back the breath Rupert had just slammed out of him.
