by Sean Platt
“You don’t run from Beamers,” he said. Below his visor, his lips curled into an angry grimace as if the man was trying to prove something.
“But you caught me,” Kai wheezed. It was hard to speak, but she needed to say the rest: “What a big man you are.”
“I want to beat the shit out of her before we take her in,” the man yelled back to the other.
“Let’s just drag her up,” said the other. “Come on. Hurry. I’m already late for a meeting with my gaming guild.”
“Talk more about your gaming guild,” Kai coughed, still flat on her back. “You’re making me hot.”
The second man stopped and turned to Kai, pausing to assess what she hoped was a condescending smile on her lips.
“Okay,” he said. “We’ll beat her just a little.”
When the second Beamer’s face appeared above Kai, she spit up at him. The spit never left her lips, and ran down her cheeks instead.
“Did she just spit at me?”
“She’s drooling. Burned.”
“I think she just spit at me.”
“I would never spit at a man who’s part of a gaming guild,” Kai croaked. “Come over here, big boy. You’re giving me a fever.” She reached for the Beamer’s groin, but it was too far and her arm didn’t have the strength to stray outstretched. It flopped like spaghetti, slapping the table with the sound of a fallen fish.
“Is she coming on to me?” said the second Beamer.
Kai rolled her arm, palm up, and flexed her fingers in a grabbing motion. “Just lay it in my hand.”
The first Beamer said, “Yes, I think she is.”
“I won’t squeeze it until your balls pop or anything.”
Instead of answering or unzipping, the second man used a black-gloved hand to punch Kai hard in the gut. She wanted to laugh and would have if she’d had the air. But Kai didn’t even have the reflexes to flinch around the blow, so she just gasped, smiled, and waited to die.
The man who’d hit her said, “Do you have any idea how bad it looks for us, you escaping?”
“As bad as your acne?”
He hit her again.
“Keep mouthing off. We can bring you back dead. It’s what they expect anyway.”
“Then hurry,” she said. “Hit me like a man.”
The shack had a fireplace in the corner. Beside the fireplace was a set of black iron tools. The Beamer tucked his gun into his holster, grabbed the poker, slapped it against his palm, then raised it. With no hesitation for drama, he swung. The swing was already launched when a hovercar-sized cannonball blew through the shack’s far wall and knocked the Beamer sideways. He struck the table’s edge and folded the wrong way. Something snapped and the man screamed. A robot of some sort charged the room, its skeleton shifting from something wide-bodied, collapsing into something the size and shape of a silver man. Kai didn’t understand where the extra parts went; they seemed to simply melt into the smaller mechanical form. She wondered if she were hallucinating as the robot man removed what looked like a slumbergun from somewhere behind its body and fired it at the yelling Beamer, who fell immediately silent.
The other Beamer was coming at the robot man from behind with his own gun raised, but the robot man blurred to the side and the shot missed him entirely, obliterating a large mirror on the shack’s opposite wall and venting outside air into the cabin. Kai looked at the robot and saw the lower half of a human face inside its hood. The face’s mouth looked shocked, as if its own movement had been a surprise.
The Beamer aimed and fired again. The man in the suit moved, but again the movement seemed involuntary, judging by how the human mouth gaped, barely able to keep up. The movement was so fast that Kai barely saw it happen. The Beamer’s shot went wide for a second time, blowing a dozen bricks from the fireplace. He wasn’t firing slumbershots, and if anything, the robot man seemed offended by such rude lethality.
The Beamer touched something on his visor and yelled, “GET THE FUCK IN HERE!”
A third black-clothed Beamer stormed the shack and stood on the opposite side of the robot man. He aimed his gun as the first man re-aimed his. Neither gun was a slumber.
Then two things happened back-to-back.
First, the new Beamer discharged his weapon. The man in the suit moved as he had before, and the shot struck the first Beamer (the one whose partner had already been knocked flat) and cut him in two. Simultaneously, a second blur stormed the door and disarmed the remaining man. The Beamer who’d fired looked shocked, his weapon smoking in the first robot man’s grip like an old pistol, his mouth open. The two robot men blurred again, like bullets, and converged on the Beamer, stripping weapon from body, and sending the black-cloaked man to floor.
One of the robot men touched something on his arm and said, “We found her. All clear.”
Then they tidied. The disarmed Beamer’s weapon collapsed to a third of its full size, so the second robot man tossed it into a compartment on his back. With Kai’s two rescuers now looking like silver men with a few knobby, mechanical protrusions, she again wondered where their weapons and suits (she could have sworn they’d been larger when they’d burst through the door) were going. The new robot man raised his slumber and fired it unceremoniously at the Beamer. He fell, and the first robot man pulled out a pair of cuffs and shackled him to an iron ring set into the brick by the fireplace.
“That one’s hurt,” said one of the robot men.
The other looked at the splatter of gore on the shack’s far wall. A pair of black-clad legs with boots on the end slumped against the wall, the torso missing.
“He sure is.”
“I meant that one.” He pointed at the first of the two Beamers — the man who’d cracked when he’d struck the table.
“And you want me to help him.”
“We’re not animals,” said the first man.
“Rowr,” said the second.
“Fine. And they say you’re the nice one.” While his partner made tiger noises and clawed the air, the robot man who’d expressed concern for the Beamer walked over and pressed a small tube to the sleeping man’s neck. Almost immediately, his body straightened and twisted as nanos knitted his bones.
“You’re too compassionate,” said the other man. “They tried to kill you.”
The other shook his head. Kai, who thought she might be imagining the entire scene, pictured him rolling his eyes beneath his robot helmet… or whatever it was.
“You could at least help her,” said the first robot man.
The man jumped as if suddenly realizing he’d forgotten something. He’d been leaning casually against the shed’s wall, ignoring Kai. He walked toward her, pulling a similar tube from a pocket on his silver robotic leg.
“I have nanos,” Kai croaked up at him. “Lots.”
The lips above her smiled. The smile was genuine. Kai wondered just what the hell had happened. Everyone was killing and beating and torturing everyone; everyone was brutal, brimming with bloodlust. Yet she’d just been saved by two superhuman cyborgs, but they were taking mercy on their prey (which they clearly outmatched and could easily squash), as well as the prey of the prey.
“This is Neuralin,” said the man, showing her the vial.
As Kai looked up, she saw that he wasn’t a cyborg or a robot at all. He was an ordinary man, covered in a skin-tight metal suit. And as she watched, the metal surged and shifted and flowed like waves across his body, like liquid.
Kai wanted to know more about Neuralin (starting with what it was), but before she could ask anything, the man had injected her and Kai found herself falling into dreamless sleep.
Chapter 7
Kai had been hauled off the Orion and out of the simulator room approximately ten thousand years ago. Doc reasoned that she had to be dead. At the time, her departure had seemed worth noting — maybe even worth his concern — but now, as his nerves retched for breath, Kai and her death fell neatly into the pile of shit that Doc couldn’t spend a splinter
of energy to think about.
Now, what felt like thousands of years later, Doc realized that Nicolai was also gone from the room — another fact that for some reason no longer mattered. He figured this out shortly after Kane used the Orion to make Doc feel as if something the size of a utility pole was being shoved through his stomach. The sensation, looking back, had been as interesting as it was unbearable. If a man were struck with a utility pole in real life, the thing would pulverize him, not impale him. And if it did manage to impale him, it’d do the job in a single blunt strike, displacing his center in one big chunk like dough through a cookie cutter. But that wasn’t how the Orion’s utility pole impaling felt. What Doc felt was like being impaled by a needle-thin pole which then rapidly expanded inside him like an umbrella popping open. The sensation had been so horrifyingly awful that Doc’s abdominal contraction in the real world was strong enough to break the Orion’s chest strap. It had also unseated the cap that delivered the Orion’s horror to his cortex, and when that happened, the utility-pole-through-the-gut sensation had faded in a blink. Doc had found himself sitting up, confused, wondering where the pole had gone as he noticed that the room was empty save himself and his torturer.
Realizing the absurdity of the question, Doc had then asked Kane about Nicolai. Kane had tried to push Doc back down and to re-seat the electrode cap, but a man in white entered the room at that moment and told Doc rather casually (for a man witnessing torture) that the speechwriter was gone. Kane shouted at the man for a reason Doc didn’t understand, and the man, his composure suddenly snapping, shouted back at Kane. The man told Kane to stop, that he was going to get them all Respero’d, and Kane told the man to get off his back. The exchange had the feeling of an ongoing debate, equivalent to a wife telling her husband that he never took her anywhere nice and the husband snapping back that the wife was letting herself go. Doc, his nerves trying to recover and his head foggy, found this all fascinating. He tried to decide whose side he was on, but thirty seconds later, when his Orion connections were re-seated, Doc found that he no longer cared.
He came back to reality after another mental beating to find that someone was tugging at the straps holding him down on the torture machine. Doc looked up and saw the man in white who had been arguing with Kane. He wanted to thank the man, then hug him. Anyone who argued with Kane was aces in Doc’s book. But then Doc passed out from remembered pain and didn’t wake again until he spilled onto the floor and landed with his arm wrenched beneath him. Above him, Kane and the man in white were arguing, but it was Doc’s fall that seemed to be the source of their disagreement. Kane was saying that the man in white didn’t know what he was doing. The man was telling Kane that he could at least fucking help, if he wanted the evidence disposed of in time.
Doc saw that they were going to kill him, but the news seemed less appalling than it should have.
Then, again, he blacked out.
His interlude couldn’t have lasted long, because when he woke he was just five feet from the Orion’s bright aluminum legs, his limbs somehow wound around his torso like a wet and floppy doll that has been wrung dry. His head was pointed toward the two men, who were still scrapping with each other, so Doc was able to watch them fight and argue. He heard the man in white say something about Nicolai. Kane replied that Nicolai was “handled” and resumed his yelling, now questioning the other man’s competence, appearance, and ability to satisfy his wife. The man in white retorted with a well-reasoned argument accusing Kane of fornicating with corpses.
They must have come to some sort of an agreement because the next time Doc woke, he had both of his arms over his head, one held by each man, with his feet splayed out behind him. They were dragging him from the room, still arguing. Both men seemed to agree that they should not be the ones “taking out the trash,” but seemed to disagree about the reasons. The tall man argued that Kane was at fault because he was “an incompetent sadistic fuck” and Kane replied by suggesting that the other man engage in sexual activity with his own mother.
Before Doc could be dragged through the doorway of the simulator, however, several voices appeared behind him. He wanted to turn and see the source of the new voices, but didn’t have the strength. Doc also wasn’t sure he cared. He really just wanted to die, ideally soon. Anything that got between Doc and dying a non-horrible death seemed like an unneeded distraction. But as the voices talked further — and Doc heard the names “Kai,” “Nicolai,” and someone important who was referred to simply as “the boss” — Doc’s interest grew. He decided he could die later, after he heard a bit more.
There was pressure on his chest and a flash of silver, and Doc felt himself rising into the air. Suddenly he found himself looking at something long and gleaming that looked like buttocks. This went on for several seconds, until the man whose shoulder Doc had apparently been flung over propped him in a corner.
In front of Doc were five people: the man in white (who looked satisfied before he marched from the room, apparently vindicated), Kane, two silvery men who appeared to be covered mostly in mercury (and with a few robotic protrusions — islands in the mercury), and… and…
He blinked. The fifth person in the group was Kai. She was standing among the others unbound, acting for all the world as if she wasn’t dead.
Doc tried saying her name. He failed.
The small group was across the room. He couldn’t concentrate enough to figure out their words, but he could read body language well, and what he saw was so shocking it was clearly delusion.
The person in charge of the group wasn’t Alix, or the men in silver. It was Kai.
Even through his haze, Doc could easily interpret her look as she spoke to Kane. Kai was expert with false faces, but couldn’t hide her venom when addressing the man who had tortured her. If Kane were smart, he’d double his security and maybe go into a short stint of hiding for the rest of his life. Kai had obviously gained some kind of odd authority over the torturer, and now he was cow-towing. Doc could see each of his not-so-subtle Yes ma’am, no ma’am nods as she grilled him.
After a while they walked over to Doc, with Kai in the lead.
“Help him,” she said.
Only the lower halves of the silver men’s faces were visible, but Doc could see their lips press together. “We only carried the one dose,” said the one on Doc’s right.
“You only carry one?”
“Who ever ends up needing Neuralin?” the man replied, looking at Kai. “Of course we only carry one! We’ve got all sorts of repair nanos, though.”
“Nanos won’t help,” said Kai.
“I’m just saying, we carry a complete kit. I could manually remove his appendix. Noah Fucking West, we don’t expect to run into two nerve-strips in one outing!”
“Okay, okay,” said Kai. “Relax. What can you do for him?”
“Take him back,” said the silver man on Doc’s left. “We have refills at the station.”
“Fine. We’ll go to the station.”
Doc squirmed and protested. He didn’t have the core strength to stay upright, so squirming sent him onto his side. Shockingly, it was Kane who reached down to prop him up. Something in the small man’s eyes seemed afraid.
“It’s okay, Doc,” said Kai, squatting in front of him. “They came to help us.”
Doc looked at Kai, at the robot men, and at Kane. Somehow, they were all in this together. And where was Nicolai? They had killed him for sure. Kai seemed to be okay. That meant she must’ve been with them since the beginning. Doc wasn’t sure that made sense, or about anything else. But he was sure that he didn’t want to be taken to any station.
“No,” he croaked.
“We have to do something. We need to return a favor.”
“No,” Doc croaked again.
He looked up at Kai. Her clothes were filthy and torn, and she had smudges of blood on her cheeks and neck. She seemed strong and upright and (he had to admit, even now) looked dead sexy, but she’d taken a beating.
He could see bruises and cuts that her nanos had yet to erase. She seemed to have a slight limp. So maybe she hadn’t been in on it from the beginning after all. She had somehow moved into a position of control mid-stream. But how? It made no sense… but then Doc had it.
Kai was being played.
They were both being tricked — another tactic intended to mine information that Doc didn’t have, about fucking Omar and his role in espionage at Xenia. They hadn’t been able to draw information out using torture, so they were playing Kai so that she could unwittingly play him.
“Trust me, Doc,” she said, reading the doubt on his face.
“I don’t trust them,” he said, looking at the others.
Kai gave a tiny, humorless laugh. “Let’s just say they’re afraid of the right person. Come on.” She reached for him. He flinched away like a frightened child. She reached again, this time grasping his arm. Kai was small, but Doc knew she could easily handle him, especially now. He had a drunken thought that Kai sure was one tough honey. She could probably lift him even without add-ons.
“No,” he repeated.
“Don’t make me carry you.”
“Nicolai,” said Doc. It was just one word, but it was also an avalanche of questions.
“He’s safe,” said Kane, above Kai. “We sent him home.”
From the corner of his eye, Doc saw Kai’s eyes close and her shoulders relax. She must not have thought to ask about Nicolai, because hearing Kane now and apparently believing him, her body language told Doc that she was relieved.
“Bullshit,” said Doc.
“We got a call,” said Kane.
“Nicolai is safe if Mr. Kane here says he is,” Kai echoed, speaking to Doc. She turned her head and eyed Kane with ice-cold hatred. “He knows how far his balls are into the evaporator already.”
“Bullshit,” Doc repeated. “They didn’t even put him on the table. And they didn’t let me go.”
“He had better connections than you did,” said Kane. “I figured from the beginning that we’d have to toss that particular fish back into the water — after seeing how he lined up with your lies, of course.”
