A moment passed before a murmur shot through the crowd like electricity, and it fell silent in moments.
Korakti, confused, scanned the crowd for a moment before turning around the rest of the way. Tired as she was, she did not have the control to keep her jaw from falling open slightly as the unexpected sight.
Not only had Hyperion risen to his feet, but the Hexarch was making his way through the crowd to ground level. People parted before him like grain.
At the edge of the arena, a hand gesture from Hyperion prompted the staff to open the gate. They did not question him. He stepped through and nodded to Korakti who, out of reflex, nodded in return despite her confusion.
A moment passed and Hyperion explained without words what he was doing. With both hands he took hold of two different edges of his purple Hexarch's robe and tugged. With a flourish, he removed it, swirling the brilliant purple fabric through the air like a cape before letting it fall to the ground.
Standing there in an unadorned, gray wrestler's singlet, Korakti was struck by her Hexarch's presence in a way she never had been before. The act of disrobing added several centimeters to Hyperion's apparent height, then a deep breath and a roll of his shoulders made him seem taller still. Korakti might have been used to his presence, but she had never seen him quite so imposing.
Even the announcer fell silent, which told her Hyperion might have planned this, but no one else knew. Wordlessly, the Hexarch of Pteryga nodded to her again and strode forward.
She laughed to herself, careful not to let it show on her face. This, she thought, was a challenge from which she could not afford to back down. She exchanged a glance with Sotiria, then handed her mask, sword, and gloves to the other woman who took them out of the arena and to Korakti's locker room.
When she turned back, Hyperion's towering, imperious visage waited for her. His voice was warm and so at odds with his presence that it was almost jarring. “What rules would you like to use, my Titan?”
Korakti did not even have to think. “Submission,” she replied, then, “with striking.”
Hyperion nodded and backed away, going directly to the starting point marked out on the arena floor. No one in the audience said a word and electric tension hung in the air as he waited for her.
Korakti came to her staring point and they exchanged two gestures. First a mutual bow, one which Korakti was shocked to see Hyperion returned with equal depth, then a simple head nod of acknowledgment.
She assumed a ready stance, both feet forward and wide with her arms close in and torso inclined forward. Hyperion, by contrast, remained upright, but sank deep into a pugilist's guard. He extended one fist, keeping the other in close.
The muscles on his arms stood out like steel cables.
“Shit!” Korakti exclaimed as Hyperion shot forward faster than anyone his age should have been able to move.
She blocked the first punch, a jab delivered with his outstretched arm, but the second punch struck her in the stomach. Powered by a rotation of Hyperion's torso, it staggered her backward, a momentary opening of which the Hexarch quickly took advantage.
Another blow struck her, then a third, before Korakti got her balance again. She blocked the fourth punch, then darted backward away from a kick aimed at her side.
When Hyperion came forward again, she was ready. They traded punches, kicks, and blocks for a full twenty seconds before her fist found his face. Somewhere past his bushy beard was a jaw of steel, but her strike still knocked his head backward.
Korakti was not about to apologize for punching her Hexarch in the face.
Her followup strike took Hyperion in the stomach and he doubled over, but as he rose his elbow struck her in the side of the head. The heel of his hand followed, and he immediately chased it with another palm-heel strike with the other hand.
Hyperion grabbed her with both hands, one under her shoulder and the other on one wrist. In a single fluid movement, his feet shot in and he threw her smoothly to the ground. Under the rules, a throw was not enough to win, and so Hyperion followed her to the ground, seeking the pin that would finish things.
Korakti bucked as he landed, then rolled to one side, escaping. Before Hyperion could do anything else, she rose to her feet. He followed a moment later, springing up with his head tucked under one elbow, shielding his face from the obvious counter, even though it never came.
They traded several more strikes, all blocked, before Korakti stepped in for a throw. She planted, twisted, and suddenly Hyperion was simply not there. With a single twitched movement, he escaped her throw and reversed it.
Korakti fell, toppled at the knee, but as she did so, she threw out an arm that wrapped around Hyperion's own knees. She rolled hard, pulling him down as well, then continued until she came out on top.
Hyperion bucked, but she shifted forward. With one arm she swept his hands upward, and with the other delivered an open hand smack to the ground next to Hyperion's head.
A trickle of red from a busted lip stained his white beard and Hyperion smiled. A moment passed and that smile turned into a laugh as Korakti stood. She offered him a hand up, but for several moments, it seemed Hyperion was content to lay there and laugh as though losing was the most entertaining thing in the world to him.
Finally, he accepted her help up and patted her on the shoulder. “Well done, Titan of Pteryga. Well done, indeed.”
Chapter 18
Pallasophia's team—no, she corrected herself, Victoria's team—camped in a nearby room to tend to their wounds. Two kept watch while the other two worked. Victoria and Pallasophia stood guard first, saying only the minimum needed to convey whatever information was necessary at that moment.
When Eleni and Stavros, both haggard and hollow-eyed, came to trade places, Victoria went to the back of the room, trusting Pallasophia to follow. Thoughts, few of them pleasant, boiled in her brain. The things she had to say, if she said them at all, were for the ears of this facility's ostensible commander and no one else's.
First, she had a job to do. “You first,” Victoria ordered.
“I'm going to need help. My right arm.” She gestured with the left at the makeshift sling and bloody bandage around her right arm.
Victoria followed Pallasophia's instructions, acting more as a pair of functional hands than anything. First, she removed the Lochagos's uniform jacket, then the blood-soaked shirt beneath. Blood dripped in dark red rivulets from a deep gash in her arm, and the right side of her rib cage and her entire right upper arm were purple with bruising.
With Victoria's help, she first covered the cuts and gashes with quick heal, using the thick, surface-application version of the liquid. Pallasophia explained that it also functioned as a sort of bandage itself when it dried, sealing and protecting the wound with minimal scarring.
She massaged another dose into Pallasophia's bruised ribs, then checked her arm. To Victoria's surprise, Pallasophia did not cry out when she probed her arm. The bone there was clearly broken, however, and Pallasophia was on the verge of explaining how to set a broken bone when Victoria interrupted her.
“I know. I've done it before,” she said. “Or I dreamed about doing it. Other hands and other bodies. This will hurt.”
“I know.”
Victoria braced both herself and Pallasophia, then with a single sharp jerk, tugged the broken pieces of her arm bone back into place. The Lochagos grunted and sweat sprang out on her suddenly pale face, but still she did not scream.
Victoria nodded in satisfaction. Even some of her own past selves had not possessed such an iron will.
Before the bone could shift again, and working under instructions she did not need that were given through Pallasophia's clenched teeth, Victoria wrapped her arm with a long strip of sticky, beige fabric. According to the instructions she was being given, it would start to harden in moments, fully immobilizing the arm within minutes.
“With quick heal and regular doctor visits, it should be healed in a few days,” she added.
With a pointed stare at Victoria, she added, “your turn.”
“I'll be fine.”
“You're injured.”
“None of my bones are broken and none of the cuts are deep enough to be life threatening.”
“How can you tell?”
Victoria glared, but it softened in a moment. “I remember how a great many life-ending injuries feel.”
“You took the time to treat your wounds before,” Pallasophia offered, carefully dropping to the floor with her legs crossed. “What's different now?”
Victoria joined her, moving slowly as her muscles took advantage of the current rest period and started to ache. She repeated the question in her head several times before saying, “I'm not sure.”
“Is it privacy?”
Victoria shook her head. “No. It's...” She reached for the right words, struggling to say her thoughts out loud. Finally, she said, “my wounds are trivial. Myrto, Photeos, they're dead. You've got broken and bruised bones. I don't know how bad Stavros and Eleni are, but they don't look good.”
“All of us got hurt,” Pallasophia countered.
Victoria laughed. “Me? I have some cuts and bruises. Keep your trauma supplies for the ones who need it. I'll be fine with quick heal.”
“What about the bullet?”
Victoria withdrew a small bundle wrapped in bloody cloth from inside her mastigas-fabric shirt. She held it up like it was a winning playing card before handing it over.
Pallasophia's eyes went wide. “You removed it yourself?”
Victoria shrugged. “It was easy enough. I have knives. The quick heal helped some, though, so thank you for that.”
“You... dug it out yourself?”
Victoria nodded.
“When?”
A shrug. “Right after the fight, before the adrenaline faded and I remembered how to feel pain.”
“Why keep it?”
“The same reason I'm keeping the elite's sword. It's a,” she paused, smiled. “Souvenir.”
“At least let me look at your shoulder.”
“No.”
“And if I insist?”
“You're in no position to insist.”
“No,” she admitted, “I'm not. But no matter how much better you came out of that fight than I or anyone else did, you're still injured.”
“Yes.”
Pallasophia's voice changed, hardening and taking on more of the true tones of command. “Then let me look at it, and your side.”
Victoria sat for a moment before nodding once. “There's nothing you can do for my side anymore. The quick heal sealed the wound already. But...” She took a deep breath, then let it out all at once. “Yes, check my shoulder if it makes you feel better.”
She undid the fabric ties that held her shirt closed and peeled the tight fabric back away from her shoulder. The wound itself was ugly, bloody, and the marks from Victoria's own knife as she dug the bullet out were obvious.
Pallasophia frowned, but refrained from commenting on it directly. Instead, she said in a somewhat detached tone, “this will hurt.”
It did. In fact, as Pallasophia probed the wound, her fingers caused pain far in excess of the bullet itself. Burning agony flared there, eclipsing every other pain in her body for several seconds. Fortunately, those several seconds was all she needed to confirm that the wound was clean, and Pallasophia emptied an entire ampule of quick heal into ugly, torn flesh of her shoulder.
Warmth, pleasant this time, spread outward from her injury. Pallasophia handed the bloody bundle containing the sophont's bullet back to Victoria, who tucked it inside her shirt again.
Pallasophia sat back and waited a moment before withdrawing another of the dispensers and drinking a double oral dose. She smiled, a little giddy around the edges as the endorphin rush from the medicine hit. “You'd make a good commander,” she said, then, “no, you made a good commander today.”
Victoria's face tightened into an angry frown. In her head, she demanded to know how Pallasophia dared to say that. Instead, she said, “two people died.”
Her face fell. “Two, yes. But you saved three of us.”
“I did what I had to to survive.”
“And I'm alive because of it,” Pallasophia said. A moment passed and she reached into a pocket with her left hand. Out of it, she withdrew a small device. “Here, I thought you might want to see this.”
She handed it over, and Victoria took it gingerly with both hands. It was a gun, at least in the most literal sense of the term. One end was dominated by a hollow tube wrapped in polished copper wire. The other end was gently curved and sat awkwardly in her human hands. The sophont's hands were longer and thinner and probably wrapped comfortably around the elongated shape. A battery protruded from one end.
Despite only having seen a flash of it before, the thing was etched into her brain after the firefight earlier. “This is the gun the sophont used?”
“It's not actually a gun,” Pallasophia said. “At least not in the conventional sense. See that wire? It's a magnetic accelerator.”
Victoria aimed the thing at a wall and pulled the trigger. It clicked, but nothing happened. She looked it over again, removing the battery. Past the battery was a nest of wires and small cylindrical objects. It was hard to tell, but it looked like the wires ran from the battery connector to the bare copper wrapped around the tube.
Pallasophia continued. “As to where it came from, the only explanation I can give is that the sophont made it.”
“You said they were locked down here, locked in with me, with no high-tech weapons of any sort. That's why they all came at me with knives and clubs,” Victoria accused. Despite the anger slowly bubbling to the surface, she kept her voice quiet, reminding herself of her earlier decision to keep this conversation between the two of them.
“That's true. May I?” Pallasophia extended her hand and Victoria passed the gun back to her. “This tube looks like a piece of pipe, probably ripped from any one of a thousand conduits. The wire and battery could have come from anywhere here.”
“And the bullet,” Victoria added, “was just a chunk of metal.”
Pallasophia's next words were quiet, almost so soft that Victoria herself could not hear them. “In any event, I'm pleased you survived.”
In a flash, the anger that had been bubbling beneath the surface ever since the mastigas killed Second Lord Myrto all came out. It was quiet, contained, but Victoria's words still hissed and spat like fire. “You're glad your weapon survived.”
Pallasophia stared for a moment before looking away. She worked her jaw muscles for a second longer before saying, “yes.”
“I must have been very expensive.”
Pallasophia did not look her in the eyes. “Yes.”
Victoria growled deep in her throat. “Nothing else to add?”
“No.”
“Damn you, say something else!”
“What do you want me to say? I condemned ninety-nine good men and women, to say nothing of the dozens we lost in the Incident, to death just to produce you. That is a cost far in excess of any material or financial loss we might have taken.”
Victoria regarded her for a long moment. Like her honesty when they first met, it seemed to her that the Second Lord was being genuine. In a strange way, that honesty disarmed much of Victoria's anger. “There is more that you're not telling me, isn't there?”
After a minute of silence, Pallasophia finally said, “there is. I started to tell you earlier, but didn't get through it all. Let me start again. The mastigas appeared at the outer edges of our system thirty years ago...”
She proceeded to give a summarized version of the last three decades. Mastigas had raided the outer settlements and facilities indiscriminately. They would hit a factory just as soon as a mine or a colony. Their very unpredictability, she explained, had been one of the hardest things to fight.
Early on, the death toll had been immense, hard to even calculate. The Technocrat military attacked
the mastigas battleship, a massive vessel parked two weeks' travel beyond even Aphelion and defended by devastating missiles. One way or another, the mastigas won every engagement. After the first few years, the Technocrats pulled back and simply evacuated the outer edge of the system.
Then the day came when the mastigas ventured into the inner system. In hushed tones and with few words, she explained that millions died in the first few days.
“Project Titan followed almost directly after that attack, and now here you are.”
“You're talking like I'm the subject of a prophecy.”
“To a lot of people, you are. Project Titan was envisioned as a way to create the perfect soldier, six of them, to lead an assault on the mastigas directly.
“So yes,” she continued, “I was concerned that we would lose our investment. You represent the hope of billions, Victoria. But I was also concerned that I would lose you, a flesh-and-blood human being.”
Victoria folded her arms across her chest. “Then I need to know everything you know about them. Not just you personally, but I need access to every scrap of information your government has on these things. Because you clearly did not expect,” she pointed to the sophont's gun, forgotten on the ground, “that.”
Pallasophia looked back down at the gun. Wondering aloud, she said, “if they could build guns, why did they only build the one, and why only now?”
“Maybe this sophont was smarter than the other one?” Victoria offered.
“Perhaps. Hell,” she let out a bitter laugh, “we didn't even know the mikros could, I don't know, 'morph' into sophonts.”
Victoria spoke slowly, articulating thoughts as they came to her. “What if the two of them wanted radically different things?”
“What do you mean?”
Victoria explained how the first sophont had drawn her through the labyrinth of corridors, taunted her, then said, “this one didn't do that. It tried to reason with us.”
Pallasophia's voice was like iron. “It tried to trick us.”
“Probably,” Victoria agreed, “but how could it trick us if it didn't understand how to adapt to what we might have wanted or been willing to offer?”
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