A searing hot burn lit through my left shoulder and I was knocked sideways by the hard slash that cut me all the way to the bone. Euphoria flooded me and I fought to maintain control of my pain. Giggling as I rolled in the air, I aligned with another wall. I hit feet first and pushed off to take on the fool Cat who thought he could best me in zero G.
Five black and metal space-suited men ran around the bend of the corridor in their clunky magboots, using the magnetism to compensate for gravity. They aimed their rifles for the swarm of bodies in the hallway, most of which were dead. I twisted hard and grabbed the Warrior who’d slashed at me, using him as protection. I wrestled with his gauntlet arm by the wrist, keeping him at bay while plasma bolts seared across his back and shoulders.
The Warrior yowled in my face as his lips and sharp teeth scrunched up in agony. Five plasma rifles blasted through the hallway, scorching everything they touched. The Warrior’s gauntlet deactivated as his dead fingers slipped open. I screamed at the top of my lungs praying the men would hear me. “Stop! Don’t shoot Jason! We’re humans! Don’t shoot.”
The vicious spiked grip of fear dug into my chest and I fought frantically to get a glimpse of Jason. He floated down the hallway, but there were too many Cats. Severed limbs, smoke and blood floated everywhere. I couldn’t see Jason clearly through the chaos. Finally the plasma blasts let up and the only sound echoing in the corridor was my screams for Jason.
I cut through anything in my way and pushed off the disembodied pieces, striving to reach my lover. He floated listlessly through the air, face down. I prayed to a God that had never shown me a sliver of proof that he existed. I prayed for Jason, that he was alive, that we would be together, forever.
I barreled into him hard and we tumbled into the far wall. I clung to my lover and clawed at the wall, grasping for a handhold to arrest our momentum. Finally, I turned him in my arms to see his face. His beautiful unmarked face.
He floated unconscious in my arms. I felt the soft stubble on his chin and memorized the smooth lines of his brow. I wanted to see his eyes, but they were closed. He looked so peaceful. He could have been sleeping if not for the black, meaty scorch mark where a plasma blast had carved out the center of his chest.
I held my precious dead lover’s body in my arms. My sight blurred as hot tears burned away my vision and I screamed his name over and over. My world was unmade.
* * * *
Chapter 6
“Get that lunatic off my brother!”
I could hear the men yelling at me but understanding of their words eluded me. I clung to Jason’s lifeless body replaying the events over and over in my mind, wishing that somehow I could have done it differently. I could have saved his life. The men tried to pull me off of him, and I activated my gauntlet and sliced at them.
They backed away after I cut two of their murderous plasma rifles in half. “He’s mine! Get away from him! Get away!”
They shot nets at me and I sliced them to ribbons and then I turned on them, the wretched murderers of my lover. Flipping through the air with my blade in a killing arc, the man in gleaming black armor removed his helmet and appealed to me. “Please stop! I don’t want to hurt you!”
“Jason … is that you?”
I deactivated my blade just in time and hit the soldier hard with my full body weight. He caught me in his arms and staggered back a few paces from the impact. I looked into eyes that were almost Jason’s warm brown eyes, and a stubbled chin that was almost Jason’s chin. Reddish-brown stubble. The jaw was too wide, the haircut too short.
“You’re not Jason.”
Tears came to his eyes and seeing him cry brought it out of me. I couldn’t hold back the flood of my emotions. I sobbed and bawled in this man’s arms, and he cried with me, silently. He held me for a time, until more sounds of advancing Gran came from down the corridor. The electric whine and hum of gauntlet blades echoed towards us, a warning of things to come.
He nodded to the other four soldiers. “Get his body, bring him with us. Put her in the extra suit.”
One soldier stepped up and looked pointedly at me. “What’re you doin’? She’s a feckin’ psycho? Dinna you see how she hacked ‘em with their own weapon? Leave her be. She ain’t right in the head.”
My almost-Jason let go of me, and left me floating, clinging to his armor. He pointed his maimed rifle at the man who’d challenged him. “Can’t you see what he meant to her? They were together, Chancy.” He shook his rifle that I’d slashed in half. “She almost cut us to pieces and took your fool head off just for retrieving his body. She’s coming with us and that’s an order!”
He let go of his useless rifle, brought his hands to my face and rubbed my sticky, matted hair away from my eyes. The look on his face drifted from pain to sadness to guilt and then back to pain. I noticed the blood I’d smeared all over his shiny black armor and remembered that I was covered in Cat blood.
He snapped his fingers in front of me. “Can you understand what I’m saying?”
I blinked and nodded.
“The Gran are coming. We must leave. We can get you off this ship, but you have to suit up. We’re going now.”
I nodded again. Survival trumped all else.
If I was to go with this man who looked like Jason but was not, I had to cooperate. One of the black-suited soldiers pulled another black suit from a backpack and helped me slip into it. Through his darkened visor, I could see the disgust on his face as he zipped the suit over my blood-drenched half-naked body.
“There’s enough air to get you out of here, but not much more than that.”
I watched him watching me. No words came to my mouth. His eyes looked at me as a waste of flesh filling the suit that had probably been intended for Jason.
I didn’t care what he thought of me. I operated on instinct, pure survival. He set down a pair of magboots. I stepped into them and adjusted the locks around my feet. My hands and body functioned on autopilot, doing what was necessary. Some part of me knew this was a good thing, but I could not feel any sense of joy or emotion for making my escape. Jason was gone and the pieces of my shattered soul would never fit together again.
I grabbed my gauntlet, slipped it over the thin black glove of my suit, and silently followed them down the corridor, away from the noise of the Gran. A black bag filled with Jason’s corpse trailed behind us on a tether.
We passed the cages full of drones, and the place where Jason and I had lived together for those short but wonderful weeks – the best time of my life. I didn’t give the worker drones a second look. My mind was numb, my body was numb. Without Jason my whole existence was numb.
* * * *
We stepped through some kind of temporary membrane that had sealed off a blast hole in the sidewall of the hull. Once outside the Gran ship, the soldiers guided me down a set of heavy grapple cables to their dull-black ship waiting off the bow of the Gran cruiser. My liberator’s ship was far smaller by comparison to the Gran cruiser, but I could see the four point crossbeams across the stern – the grav generators for a jumpship.
I didn’t recognize the sleek, spiky-looking design. As we drew nearer, I realized the spikes on top, bottom and both sides were actually gun turrets. It looked nothing like any of the military fleet ships from Earthside holovids and media, and far more compact than the freight haulers that had visited Nugene Station regularly. When we reached the entry port, my magboots didn’t lock onto the side of the hull. The ship was not made of steel.
Apart from my lover’s death at the hands of his friends and family, our escape from the Gran ship was unremarkable.
We made it through the airlock and when everyone stripped off their suits, I stripped off mine. My hands worked on autopilot and I tried to ignore the stares. Standing before the men in nothing but the bra and skirt Captain Cronin had given me, I picked up my gauntlet and slipped it back over my right hand. It was my weapon, and heaven help the fool who tried to take it.
The men’s eyes t
racked along my backside, and that’s when I realized my back skirt was gone. I’d forgotten how the worker drone had ripped the fabric away when he raped me.
During my time aboard the Gran ship with Jason, I had grown accustomed to wearing very little, or nothing at all, as an object of desire, loved and pampered. Yet these men were not giving me looks of interest or desire. Their eyes reflected disgust and distrust.
Covered in Cat blood, my left arm sliced open from shoulder to elbow, I could not find the will to care. I owed them nothing, and they’d get nothing from me.
“My name is Cesar, and I am very sorry for your loss.” The man who was not Jason stood with his hand out, a pathetic offering in exchange for my lover’s life. I looked at his hand, then at my blood-caked arm holding my blood-soaked gauntlet. I wasn’t about to take it off to accept his meager condolences.
“Why do you look like him?”
He blinked and tears welled in his eyes once more. “He was my younger brother. My only brother.”
I looked at the black plastic bag filled with my lover’s corpse. “Why didn’t you stop firing? I screamed for Jason, I screamed at all of you. I know you heard me.”
The gauntlet activated in my hand, humming full of light and energy, begging to be wetted in the blood of Jason’s murderers. I saw fear in Cesar’s eyes, a moment before the grief returned. He stepped in closer with his hands out. “This mission was my responsibility. Your vengeance is with me.”
I could never think of hurting a man who looked so near identical to Jason. Even his voice held a touch of Jason’s curling accent.
Chancy grabbed a red-painted emergency fire axe from the wall. “I’m not standing by to watch this looney bitch shave off your bollocks!”
He raised his axe towards me and my gauntlet moved with a mind of its own. I sliced through the red plastic handle of the axe, an inch away from his knuckles. Humming white-hot death hovered near his throat. “The next one will be your head.”
“Chancy, stand down! Stand down, now!” Cesar spoke with such force of authority he gave me pause as well. Chancy stepped away and tossed his useless axe handle aside.
As the axe handle fell to the floor, I realized I had weight on my feet – the ship had gravity. Minutes before, when we stepped aboard, the ship was not spinning.
Artificial G.
Human ships did not use artificial G. We didn’t have the tech for it. I turned back to Cesar. “Are you military? Was Jason with the Defense Council?”
Cesar’s eyes flashed with something. He stood up slowly, hands held in the air in surrender. “No. Jason was … he wouldn’t listen to me. He was working on his own.”
Chancy looked like he was ready to find another axe to use on me. “The way you handle that Gran steak knife I’d ask you the same. Got to be military. Look how many of them she took on by herself.”
Cesar looked to Chancy and waved his hand. “This is not the time or place, Chancy. Let’s respect our dead and give this woman some clothes and a hot meal.”
Chancy stepped past me, making sure he didn’t touch me, and exited without a word. The other three men who’d watched us quietly followed Chancy. Cesar was the only one with the balls to face me and look in my eyes.
I shut down my gauntlet. A time would come when someone would pay for Jason’s death. But not this time. First, I had to learn the truth behind my lover’s secrets.
“My name is Angel, and I want to know everything about Jason. Everything.”
He looked me up and down, his eye’s drifting over my blood-caked, bare ass. “Let’s get you cleaned up first. Then we can talk in the galley.”
* * * *
Chapter 7
Sonic showers do not work well for removal of blood from hair. I stayed in the shower until I’d lost two full layers of skin and my whole body was raw. Still I couldn’t get my hair clean. I had to use a bottle of drinking water to finish the job in the tiny sink set into the shower room wall like an afterthought of design. As I dried my hair, I noticed the deep gash on my arm had already sealed, it would be completely gone within hours. If I ever showed my bare shoulder to these men again, they would start asking questions I didn’t want to answer.
Clean and dry, I zipped myself into the charcoal-colored one-piece Cesar had given me. It was too large, but once zipped, it shrunk down to fit me like a warm, soft glove. Everything about this vessel, its armor, guns, flat black paint job, the zipper suit, every detail screamed military.
The way they followed Cesar’s orders – had to be military. He was lying.
Cesar had promised to answer my questions after I had a chance to clean myself up. He promised me a bowl of hot chicken soup in the galley and a cup of coffee. Real human food.
I heard him in the hallway before he knocked. “Angel, let me take a look at your arm before it gets infected.” When I didn’t answer, he knocked again.
I shoved my overwhelming grief into a box, locked away inside my aching chest, and walked into hallway. “My arm is fine. I already took care of it.”
“We have a medkit with nanos…”
“I had my own meds. It’s fine.”
He watched me and I knew he wasn’t sure whether or not to believe me, but I didn’t care. His eyes took in my right hand covered in my lethal gauntlet. I’d cleaned it, but it still had dark bloodstains as evidence of my battle victories. Smart man that he was, he didn’t challenge me on it. Finally he nodded and led me to the galley. He sat across from me at a round, utilitarian table with fold-out chairs. Definitely military.
I tried to still the shaking of my left hand when I caught Cesar’s eyes watching me, assessing me. He looked so much like Jason it hurt to be near him. I just wanted to touch him, kiss him, tell him how much I missed him. Cesar was a cruel illusion. This man did not care about me – he was lying to me.
One of the other men put a steaming bowl of soup in front of me, along with a hot cup of coffee that sloshed over onto the table. The strong scent of coffee reminded me of another life, another girl named Angel who had once known a father, D’Anton. That girl had once sat with D’Anton, enjoyed coffee and chatted of simple, human things.
I was not that girl.
I was a killer looking for vengeance. Gone were the days of sexual abandon as a concubine to the Gran. I had lost everything that mattered to me. I wanted answers. My index and middle fingers felt the ridges of the activation buttons inside my gauntlet. Rubbing those ridges, feeling the flow of my rage simmering just beneath the surface, I knew I could cut through this table and every man in reach.
“She’s liable to take someone’s head off with that bloody fist.” Chancy threw his accusations from the safety of a table across the room.
Another man sitting near Chancy watched me quietly, then murmured. “What would the Gran want with a woman? What do you think they did to her?”
He must have thought I couldn’t hear him. Many people made that mistake on Nugene. My hearing is very sharp. I watched the murmurer and my eyes let him know I’d heard his whispers.
Cesar drank from his cup of coffee and smiled at me. “If you feel the urge to slice and dice please do us the favor of starting with Chancy.”
My lips crinkled slightly in a smile. I didn’t want to smile, but I couldn’t help it.
Chancy slapped his hand on the table. “Don’t give the witch any ideas. She’s been watching me, I know it. She’ll push that humdinger up my backside when I ain’t lookin’.” He stood up and pointed at me and Cesar. “Keep away from that header, Cesar. The wheel’s turning but the hamster’s dead.”
He stomped out of the galley and Cesar’s grin prompted another half-smile from me. “Don’t mind Chancy. He’s … overprotective, but he’s a good man in a pinch. He blames himself for what happened to Jason.”
“I think he blames me.”
Cesar sipped his coffee and I dug into the bowl of soup that I needed to eat, but could hardly taste. My world had turned grey without Jason. Cesar looked me in the
eyes. “You might be right about that, but it’s not your fault. It’s my fault. If anyone should carry blame, it’s me. I failed Jason from the beginning.”
I sipped my soup and listened to his story of my lover, a young man with morals that drove him to do things against the advice of his older brother.
“I told him to stay the hell out of this business. It had nothing to do with him. I told him if the DC didn’t get him the Gran surely would. No matter what I said he wouldn’t listen.”
“Why should he listen? Were you his commander?”
Cesar stopped talking. He eyed me and sipped his coffee cup which was emptying quickly. “Despite what it looks like, we are not military. We’re merchants … of a sort. Did Jason say anything about me?”
“No. Though I loved him, and we spent a lot of time together, he wouldn’t tell me much of anything. We had nothing but each other, and still he would not talk to me about his past, about how he was captured by the Gran. He only said he was investigating.”
“How did you end up together? He didn’t tell me he was working with anyone.”
“The Gran kidnapped me from Nugene.”
Cesar watched me closely. When I didn’t speak or move or blink, he slowly nodded his head. Surprisingly, the Gran domination routine seemed to work on humans too.
“It started six months ago when Jason called me for a ride to Jupiter. I picked him up at Luna and he was raving about encrypted files he’d acquired from someone working inside DC headquarters. He showed me several files – communications from Nugene about shipments of product and payments received from the Gran in quantities of semi-precious metals and rare earths.”
Product. That was an unusual term for human clones.
“He’d researched Nugene. All he could find was that they were a biotech company. Jason got it in his head that Nugene had a secret installation outside the asteroid belt, near Jupiter, and they were doing some dirty business with the Cats. He wanted to see it for himself.”