Authors: John Koetsier
Livia’s voice came on again, but this time in a shriek of pain, followed by silence. I heard a clatter of a fallen weapon in her bay, and then Rast’s voice.
“Direct 100 percent stimulation of the pain centers, Geno,” he said. “Ultimate agony as every nerve in your body shrieks with total pain, all at once. Too bad I can’t do it for you too, but now you’ve got a choice, don’t you?”
Naturally, Rast had it all figured out. Withdrawing would have been the smart option, looking for a better place to ambush or fight a better-equipped opponent. But now with Livia down and unconscious, that option was gone. I could either abandon her to Rast, or attack a highly-competent enemy with a very dangerous weapon over entirely open ground.
“I hear Hermes is going to make some modifications to Livia when this is all over,” Rast said. I sneaked a peek — he was almost down. “Make her more amenable to his charms, I think. I doubt he minds if I get a little action first, though. Don’t you agree?”
I did not answer.
Rage flowed out of me as I went cold. I needed all my wits, all my faculties, all my energy. I stripped off my equipment, everything. Boots, combat armored pants — built to withstand 20th century weapons, not laser bolts — vest, radio. Backup weapons, knives, everything but my underwear. I leaned out, holding my submachine gun as Rast just appeared on the last flight of stairs, and squeezed every round out, knocking him down, but knowing it was not going to work.
I could hear his laugh across the intervening space as I stepped out of cover and into his full view, clad only in t-shirt and boxers. He got up, looked at me suspiciously, wonderingly. I held my hands over my head and took one step towards him. Another. He came down the last stairs. I took another step, hands still high. Then another. He shook his head, snorted, and raised his rifle.
Time slowed. Seconds congealed and hung there in the air before me. Minutes became unimaginable eternities.
Before the stock of his rifle reached his shoulder I was in motion. Faster than I had ever moved before, quicker than his bolts could follow, I moved. Like lightning I dodged left, rolled head-first forward, uncoiled springing and leaping from my back to my feet. Faked left and moved right, sold a jump but did a roll, moving faster than I had ever moved before. Ran straight at him for three paces, faked right and kept going, then restarted the tricks, always only inches from the laser bolts that filled the space around me, crackling through suddenly super-heated air, seeking my flesh, attempting to boil my blood and burst the thin skin of the balloon that kept me together. Jinking, ducking, turning, rolling, side-stepping, but always closer, nearer.
Moving faster than I ever knew I could, almost flitting from space to space, faster than any human had ever moved before, close to magical to the ordinary human eye, extraordinary even to mine. Turned a roll into a leaping sideways dive, even using my hands for extra lift like a gymnast doing a handspring. My skin began to burn with the heat that the laser was pumping into air just inches from me as Rast came closer and closer and my lungs sucked in great gasps of air that were entirely insufficient for the huge amount of energy I was consuming.
But with each passing millisecond I moved closer to striking distance.
Then Rast switched tactics and instead of trying to nail me with quick individual bursts, he pinned the trigger to the barrel and let loose with one long continuous blast that he just hosed from left to right in front of him. I abandoned my left and right jinking and, putting everything into it, leaped high into the air, above the deadly beam. I seemed to hang there for long seconds, vulnerable, unable to change my trajectory. But when Rast vectored the beam, still on, up and onto me, I twisted in mid-air, avoiding the laser like a high-jumper avoids the bar, curling around the deadly beam flashing just inches from my stomach, my thighs, and corkscrewing down faster than Rast could follow. Landing in a rolling, controlled fall as the beam flicked out and bouncing up to my feet just a few feet from Rast’s face.
He looked at me, smiled, centered the weapon directly on my naked chest, and touched the trigger, happy to finally incinerate me.
Nothing happened. The laser gun whined, clicked. No ravening beam spit out of the muzzle to flash-boil my flesh and blood and break my body down into its constituent elements. Rast’s smile froze on his face, curdled to something so comically disappointed and uncomprehending that I couldn’t help but laugh.
“Firefox Model 45TD,” I said, whipping the weapon out of his grasp faster than he could react. “Maximum continuous fire time: 10 seconds. Less if you’ve been spending energy like a madman in the last few seconds.”
I smiled, moved my fingers, disassembled the weapon into five pieces in seconds, tossing them behind me. I fake-lunged, causing Rast to flinch, smiled again to disarm him. Then melded fingers into a single hard stabbing instrument put every last bit of energy into a lightning-quick full extension of my right arm sprung my legs and body dove towards Rast struck him with spike-like fingers right in his Adam’s apple flattening his throat and crushing his larynx before he could so much as twitch.
And stepping back, at the ready, eyes hard on Rast.
He fell to the floor, clutching his neck uselessly, scrabbling around with his legs as his lungs tried but failed and failed and failed to suck air and oxygen and life into his body. I watched as his feet began to drum on the floor and the panic took his face, then I looked away, unable to take this so-personal death of even a worst and most evil enemy who had just threatened rape and worse of the one I loved.
That’s when I knew that I had found myself — my original self — and was becoming more like me every day.
“That was for Livia,” I said, as the noises behind me began to subside and I started to walk back over the laser-scarred floor that I had just crossed, heading to the one I loved.
I found her barely conscious, just starting to wake up, still in pain. Sat down on the bare metal floor and gathered her up in my arms, and just held her and held her and held her.
“Livia,” I whispered to her. “We’re going to find a way out of this place and out of this world and out of this war. We’re going to find a place where we can be, just the two of us, where we can be ourselves, and where we can live, where we can love.”
“I’d like that,” she whispered back with a ghost of a smile. “Somewhere where Hermes isn’t and could never be.”
I nodded, smiling.
“Somewhere where we can live without fighting and destruction and death. Somewhere where we will never again be required to kill. Somewhere where we can live, grow old, maybe even have kids.”
“Why, Geno,” Livia almost grinned, growing in strength. “Are you proposing to me?”
I swallowed, looked up. Made the mistake of looking down, into her eyes. Looked up again.
“Well, yes,” I said. “Yes, I guess I am.”
We got to our feet slowly. I found my equipment and clothing, dressed, and suited up. Left the rifle where it was, came back to find Livia fully recovered and her usual self. Smiled at her, received an unexpected kiss, and turned towards the staircase.
Felt an unexpected swat on the nether portions of my hindmost anatomy, and turned to see Livia with her finger in my face.
“Geno,” she said. “How dare you propose to a girl without a ring?”
I stopped, shocked, and opened my mouth, ready to fill it with justifications, excuses, and righteous indignation, only to see the smirk on her face and the twinkle in her eye. And started grinning, as she started laughing, almost giggling, and dissolved into a fit of laughter, nearly collapsed on the floor myself in pure, honest, simple delight.
“I can’t remember you laughing like that, Geno,” Livia said, coming alongside and slipping her hand into mine. “It looks good on you.”
I smiled back, then squared my shoulders as we started toward the staircase again. There was work yet to be done.
We walked back past Rast’s body, leaving it and his weapon on the floor. Trotted up the stairs, then looked over that immense room yet again, wondering if we would ever relearn all that we once knew, then smiled, knowing that it did not matter … that we had new plans now.
But first we had to find out what had happened to Kin and Sama.
We opened the door and walked through the corridors, so familiar, and yet so different from our home base. Hermes’ home base, I reminded myself — not ours. Servitors were out in the halls, picking up corpses, retrieving weapons, and repairing damage. We walked past them, making a mental note to return and check where they were putting the bodies, now that all the s.Leep pods were damaged.
Rounding the last corner, we came upon the blasted remains of what shelter Kin and Sama had managed to erect. Kinetic weapons it would have — and did — stop, but energy weapons carved their own paths. Sama had taken a bolt right through the chest, and Kin’s head was missing. We looked at each other for a long moment, then came together and simply held each other. Expected as it was, this was still a shock. But we had had so many shocks this day, so many shocks in past months. We grew numb.
Motioning to some nearby servitors, we managed to attract their attention.
I picked up Sama, Livia picked up Kin. Handed them to the servitors, watched as they took them away, then followed. The servitors carried them slowly, carefully, perhaps even respectfully. They took the bodies to a room we had never seen before, a cool room with oblong white containers. Coffin-like, I thought, but with some form of s.Leep technology. I strained and failed to remember what this room was … but I thought it was essentially an access point to storage, cold storage. It would not regenerate the dead, but it would preserve them, I thought. Although nothing would regenerate a missing head.
Livia and I bowed our heads as the bodies were lowered into the caskets. I saw other caskets in the room, and some leaving via a conveyer belt. The servitors had been busy today.
Then we left the room and walked to this base’s equivalent of the hall. Servitors came with food and drink, but in spite of the fact that we had gone all day without food, we were not hungry. We sat and stared into space, then gripped each other’s hands.
“We sat like this, not so long ago,” Livia said. “Remembering the first of our cohort who died.”
“Jaca,” I said with half a smile. “He died in Kazakhstan … the land of the free. Perhaps he is truly free now.”
Livia smiled, squeezed my hand. But a tear overflowed out of her eye and found its way down her cheek. I reached up, brushed it away, then putting my arms around her crushed her to my chest. We sat like that for a long time.
Then I made a decision.
“Livia, Livia, Livia,” I whispered, kissing her forehead. “I do not remember everything, and probably not half of what I once knew.”
“You remember more than me,” she said with sorrow and pain, and yet hope.
“Yes,” I agreed. “And I think I remember enough to set us free.”
We got up from the table, held our cups high.
“To fallen comrades,” Livia said.
“To fallen comrades,” I replied.
We lowered the cups to our mouths and drank the cup of vengeance, and the cup of renewed hope for life. Lowered them to the table slowly, and considered all those we had lost. Then I gripped the edge of the table and with a violent motion flipped it ten feet in the air. Food, cups, plates, and utensils scattered over the room. None broke: these implements were designed for use by violent men and women.
But soon something would break — something would be broken — I vowed. Or someone. Someone more violent than the warriors he sent to their senseless deaths.
He who can destroy a thing, can control a thing.
- Frank Herbert, Dune
“Are you sure you have your story straight?” I asked Livia for what must have been the twentieth time.
“Yes!” she answered, with some heat. We had been going over this for a while now.
“You must know, not just think, absolutely beyond-doubt-know what we are saying to be true,” I replied. “You may be tested by those who can see into your mind, and this must be what they find.”
“Yes,” she said, nodding. Worried.
We were going back. Back to Hermes’ domain, the home base that had been ours, the place where almost all we knew had happened. Back, in a sense, into the lion’s den, the home of our ‘god’ and our enemy. Back home, in a way, but to a home that was no longer ours.
It was clear from what Rast had told us that Hermes could not read me accurately because I did not have a human-computer interface brain implant. But Livia did, so if Hermes had any doubt whatsoever about the story we were feeding him, he would be able to violate Livia’s mind and check for himself.
Which was why we had been rehearsing our story incessantly for the last two hours. The best lie, I remembered from somewhen, was the one that was closest to the truth. So the story did not deviate from reality except where absolutely necessary. We had entered the base, lost the men and women that we had lost. Killed all we found. Been surprised to find Rast and two other familiar soldiers who had apparently been captured and killed just prior to or during our assault. Turned off a shielding mechanism that a captured tech revealed to us. And were returning home triumphantly, expecting great reward.
We had repeated it until we half-believed it, then started over. Finally, after hours, we had re-entered the machine room, made our way to the far corner with the pitiful remains of the ancient computer which had revealed so much of the truth and yet, ultimately, so little in comparison to all that there was to know. Accessed the controls built into the wall, and turned off the shield.
Now, we just had to wait.
And wait we did … but not for long.