by Alex Raizman
To the communications officer, Dale said, “Do whatever you can to get as many people as possible guarding the sphere.” Then he got back on the radio slowly explained the location of the item, giving Bast directions that were the opposite of the most direct path. Pivarti was glaring daggers at him, but he was confident that a force that was ready for her, and armed with ichor rounds, would take her down. If nothing else, this bought them more time.
“Excellent, Admiral. Now, for my second demand. Does Cassandra happen to be with you? Over.”
All eyes turned to Cassandra’s ashen face.
***
Bast crept through the hallway, following Dale’s directions.
There were two ways this could turn out. If Dale was smart, he had realized his only hope was to meet every one of Bast’s demands and pray that she would be merciful. Bast had decided that in that case she would be gracious and would kill him slightly more quickly than she had planned. It was good to reward intelligence.
Of course, he might not be intelligent. Instead, he might be trying to be clever by directing her into some kind of trap. In that case, she would see through it, evade it, kill whoever happened to be around, and then give Dale one more chance to give her proper directions. Then she would get her nanoverse, find Dale, and kill him without any semblance of mercy. There was nothing worse than a man who thought he was being clever.
And if he didn’t give her the proper directions the second time, she would find her nanoverse on her own, kill everyone in the building, and then show Dale exactly how creative she could be when she really set her mind to it.
Lubdublubdublubdub.
Bast stopped short. Just around the next corner, she heard at least a dozen heartbeats. She twisted light to give herself a window and rolled her eyes. Looks like he’d opted for “clever”.
She suspected that he’d thrown every available asset into this ambush. The soldiers were kitted out in Kevlar and high tech goggles, arranged in ranks as wide as the hallway would allow and staring ahead with rapt attention. The moment Bast stepped into the hall, it would be full of hot lead.
Bast was almost impressed. The soldiers were incredibly still and extremely quiet, and most other gods might have believed the hallway was safe, and the trap was still ahead further ahead. But Bast didn’t make assumptions, and the soldiers couldn’t quiet their hearts.
Careful now. Careful. There were a lot of guns in that hall, and without her nanoverse at hand, Bast would need to use a fair amount of power to arm herself. With a flick of her fingers, she twisted. Air condensed in her hand, forming a solid blade of perfectly sharpened iron.
Immediately, Bast’s Hunger sharpened, and the soldiers’ heartbeats seemed to grow louder. She was gambling on being able to feed before she expended too much energy, and the uncertainty of the situation made her own heart speed up.
Bast did one last twist and sprang around the corner.
Gunfire erupted in short bursts from at least ten automatic weapons. The sound was an oppressive force in its own right, enough to drown out the pounding heartbeats. Bast charged towards her attackers, her free hand held in front of her to maintain a shield of air. Bullets bounced off the barrier, and soldiers shouted and cursed but kept firing.
One of them, either in panic or desperate hope or genuine brilliance, turned his gun towards the wall and sent bullets ricocheting in new directions. One bounced behind her shield and punched into her left bicep. Pain exploded through her arm as the damn ichor-laced round tore through muscle and nicked bone, and Bast shrieked, losing both her concentration and her shield. An instant sooner, and they might have had her.
But now she was among them.
She slashed out with her sword, slicing a soldier’s throat. As his hand leapt uselessly to the wound, she kicked him out of the way. Blood began to run between his fingers. She plunged her sword into another man’s chest, then tore it loose and spun to decapitate another enemy. The gunfire went on, but the soldiers were beginning to panic, and their shots went wide.
The same soldier who had ricocheted his bullets dropped his rifle and lunged at her with a long hunting knife, drawing a thin line of blood along her ribs. Clearly neither panic nor hope-this one was smart. And fast. Bast risked ignoring the others for a few seconds as she sent a bludgeon of air against his knife hand. As his fingers broke and his weapon dropped, she plunged her hand into his chest and tore out his heart.
“Not quite smart enough,” she said aloud as she leapt up and flipped over the other soldiers, landing behind them and cramming the heart into her mouth, chewing madly, blood streaming down her face.
The sight was too much for some of her attackers, who broke rank and dashed in the other direction. If her mouth hadn’t been full, Bast might have laughed. Instead, she plunged the hallway into darkness and rushed into the center of the remaining foes. She spun her blade in a circle, blade slashing and hacking, and blood fountained around her.
Finally, there was only one, a barely ambulatory soldier who was trying desperately to scramble away. Bast let her twist fade and light filled the blood-soaked hallway.
“Oh my God,” the soldier moaned as Bast strolled toward him. “Oh, my God, please help me. Please.”
Bast took a handful of his hair and turned him roughly around.
“You’re asking the wrong one,” she purred. Then she fed.
Following Dale’s directions again, she turned left at the end of the hall, into corridor H. She was starting to think she might be taking the long way, thanks to Dale’s “cleverness”, but it didn’t matter. She would find what she needed eventually. A few turns later and she saw something promising: a solid steel door with several complex locking mechanisms.
Bast rolled her eyes. Humans and their fancy toys. With a gesture, she turned the steel to mist, flooding both the hallway and the room beyond. Her nanoverse was inside. She could feel it and wanted to rush in, but this was not the time to ignore caution, especially since she heard a heartbeat. Someone was waiting for her. She began to call up a gentle wind to disperse the mist throughout the building, but then she heard a voice from inside.
“B-Bast?”
Cassandra.
“Yes, it’s me,” Bast said quietly.
“Don’t you dare come any closer,” Cassandra spat.
Bast could sense the woman’s anger, and her fear, and paused to consider the situation. “Cassandra, I told them to send you to me. You came. You’re obviously waiting for me. Why would you tell me to stop?”
Cassandra laughed bitterly. “You think I came because I wanted to? Jesus Christ, Bast, you...you honestly thought that, didn’t you?”
“Of course I did.” Bast blinked, trying to make sense of this. “Why wouldn’t I? Cassandra, you saved me.”
“Yes, I did,” Cassandra said. “What they were doing to you...it was wrong. Completely, undeniably wrong. I had to put a stop to it. But I didn’t think you’d do this. I didn’t even think you could get free! You told me you couldn’t.”
“No, I didn’t.” Bast sighed and leaned against the doorframe, respecting Cassandra’s wish for distance. She began to clear the mist. “I was cautious about how I answered your questions.”
“Yeah, I guess you were. How did you do it, Bast? What question did I miss?” Cassandra knew she was provoking the goddess, but she couldn’t have cared less. The moment that she’d been shoved into Black Sphere’s room with a bomb padlocked to her chest, she’d stopped worrying about anything as mundane as pissing off their former test subject.
“Warn her,” Pivarti had said, “and the Admiral will have no choice but to detonate the bomb. Stall her, and perhaps there’s still a chance of salvaging something. Including your life.”
Cassandra hadn’t believed her for a second.
“You didn’t even have the context to ask the right questions.” Bast waved her hand, and the mist began to clear. “I don’t see a harm in telling you, and I owe you that much, at least. We gods depend on two thi
ngs for our power. One is our nanoverse, what you call the Black Sphere. It’s a...battery of sorts. The nanoverse has near-infinite power, but we cannot use it indefinitely without cost. Our Hungers limit as. As we burn through power, we start needing mortal things. Air. Water. Food. Sleep. Socialization. Without them, we become helpless.”
As the mist began to clear, Bast saw the bulky black vest over Cassandra’s lab coat. She felt a sharp stab of fear and twisted quickly. Bridges, you bastard, she thought. You despicable, insolent worm. Death is too good for you.
The work was done in an instant, and Bast clamped down her rage. The worm could wait. Cassandra was what mattered now.
“So I let you escape,” Cassandra whispered. “Jesus Christ. You played me. That’s... I’m such an idiot. I fell for it hook, line, and sinker. You needed all of those, and I gave them to you because I thought you were in pain.”
“I was!” Bast snapped. How could Cassandra not see what was going on here? She softened her voice. “I was in pain. These are real, physical needs. My mouth was a desert, my stomach a pit. I could barely stay awake yet was in too much pain to sleep. The need to socialize...it was as sharp as grief. We feel these things as sharply as you do, except that mortals will eventually die, while we just...persist. In agony. I was in pain, and you spared me from it. It was the right thing to do.”
Exhausted, terrified, and confused, Cassandra took a deep breath. Any second now, the mist would clear enough for Bridges to confirm Bast’s proximity, and then this would all be over. At least she would die knowing that she had made her mistakes for the right reasons. “It was wrong to let you suffer. But Bast, this...what you’re doing is monstrous. How many people have you killed today?”
“Not that many. Only those that got in my way.”
“How many, damn it?”
Bast considered for a moment, hoping to find some way to calm Cassandra down. This definitely wasn’t going well. “I haven’t been keeping track,” she finally admitted.
“You’ve been killing people and you lost track, and you don’t see a problem with that? Those deaths are on my head, too!” Cassandra’s voice was cold with fury.
Bast shrugged. “Let go of that. I am a goddess, Cassandra. I am over three thousand years old. Do you really think you can take credit for my actions?”
“I don’t want credit!” Cassandra shrieked in anguished rage.
“If you can’t take credit, you can’t accept guilt,” Bast said. That didn’t seem to help, so she tried another tactic. “I’m not a monster, Cassandra. I’ve been tortured all this time, with no recourse. If it drove me to the brink of madness. Maybe even over the edge of it. There’s nothing monstrous in that, is there? And my nanoverse...I need it, in a way I couldn’t ever explain to you. I need it, and they took it, and used it somehow, without my consent. It’s...a violation. That’s the best way I can think to describe it. As serious as the violation of my body.”
“I can’t imagine what you went through,” Cassandra said. Her mind whirled, trying to make sense of it all, trying to answer questions of psychology and culpability that would take a lifetime to unravel. She felt her sympathies pricked again, but the carnage in the base overruled them. “What you’re doing here... it’s too much. You’ve gone too far.”
Cassandra closed her eyes and braced herself. Any moment now, the vest was going to explode, and that would be that. As far as last words go, I could have done worse than “You’ve gone too far.” Makes me sound a bit like an action movie heroine. Always figured if I did die early, my last words would be “the chemicals aren’t supposed to turn that color,” but this will do.
Bast knew that she needed to move this along, so she decided to say whatever was necessary now and sort the truth out later. “I was half-mad, I think,” she said, “but I also thought to protect you. To protect you, Cassandra. That’s why I asked for you: so they couldn’t hurt or punish you for being the only worthwhile person in this whole accursed building. And because you’re decent, because you’re better than all of them, they turned you into a weapon so they could throw your life away for their own purposes. Who’s the real monster, Cassandra?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does, because we aren’t going to die. I already turned the C4 into ice. I won’t let anything happen to you. You’re safe, Cassandra. So let me ask you again: who is the monster?”
All of you, Cassandra thought, but didn’t say. A moment ago she’d been sure she was going to die, but now she had a chance to live. The last thing she was going to do was risk throwing it away by making Bast angry.
And...Doctor Pivarti had sent her here to die. Cassandra had given the woman years of her life, devoted her career to the doctor’s theories, and she’d been willing to sacrifice Cassandra for a chance of stopping Bast.
“They are,” Cassandra said finally. “Admiral Bridges and Doctor Pivarti.”
Bast nodded. “I thought you’d see it that way. Cassandra, you set me free, even if you didn’t intend to. You did intend to ease my pain, and I will forever be grateful. Honestly grateful. I’ll protect you, but you have to make a choice. If you want to stay here and face whatever consequences the monsters deem necessary, I’ll make sure you’re unharmed until they come for you. Or you can accept my gift and come with me.”
Cassandra, still getting used to the idea that she wasn’t about to die, stared at Bast in confusion. “What…what gift?”
“It’s a horrible gift. A terrible thing. But you will never, ever be weak again. No one will be able to use you. I can promise you that. And it’s the only way for you to be safe during what’s ahead of us. Do you accept?” Bast held her breath. If Cassandra said no, Bast would have to figure out another way to preserve her life or force the change on her. Please say yes.
Cassandra couldn’t think straight, couldn’t figure out the right questions to ask, or how much time she had before Bast grew impatient. But she had been about to die, so how could this gift, no matter how terrible, be worse? And if it was, she could always give it back, or choose death on her own terms. Besides, she had no idea what Bast would do if she said no. “Okay. I’ll. I’ll do it.”
Bast felt a flood of relief and moved quickly. She snatched her nanoverse, feeling whole for the first time since she’d fallen on Graham Island, and then pulled out a dagger. With a single, swift gesture, she sliced open her own palm. Before Cassandra could react, she grabbed the other woman by the back of the head and pushed her palm against Cassandra’s lips.
Terrified, Cassandra began to struggle. Bast spoke quietly, “I’m going to share my immortality with you, and my Hunger. What Vlad once called his gift, I give you as both gift and curse. It’s the only way.”
Cassandra’s eyes widened as she heard the name “Vlad”, and Bast remembered how incredibly intelligent this woman was. She slapped and punched at Bast’s arm, and Bast didn’t bother defending herself. The blows were nothing to her.
“Drink, Cassandra,” she said, soothing but insistent. “Drink, and be safe. Drink, and be greater than these mortals. Drink, and be my companion. My friend.”
Eventually, she did.
“Can you hear me, Admiral?” Bast shouted. “I gave you a chance. You sent me on a goose chase, you absolute cretin. You led me into an ambush. You toyed with me. I might still have been merciful...but you would have killed Cassandra, and that is too far. I’m coming for you, Admiral. It’s long overdue.”
Chapter 21
Tides Turn
Ryan dove back to safety as the super-soldiers lowered their hands and twisted. He didn’t see exactly what they did, but it was immediately apparent that something was burning. The orange light of the flames cast flickering shadows on the street in front of him, and the air was thick with steam as rain boiled before it could even hit the ground.
This is good, he thought. This is great. He took a deep breath and peered around the wall.
