A torrent of energy bolts showered the floor area where Mbeki had squatted a heartbeat earlier. But the experienced trooper wasn’t there anymore. Spotting the approaching danger, he flung himself sideways, rolled, and, bent low, scuttled to cover behind a tall shelving unit with slots for diners to leave their empty trays at the end of a meal. Fire spat from Mbeki’s weapon in response, aiming for the figure visible behind the glimmer spewing from the machine laser.
The barrage ended without warning, accompanied by a harsh beep and discordant clicking, signaling the charge was depleted, causing the attacker to toss the cumbersome weapon aside as if it weighed almost nothing.
The figure lurched forward, its steps jerky as smoke wafted from its chest. Her chest. Grady rose into a crouch, took aim, and fired even as his eyes registered the fact that their opponent was female, as witnessed by the curved shape of the now dented and scarred body armor encasing her torso.
He ducked low to avoid return fire, the woman not bothering to draw the laser pistol resting in a holster that appeared welded to her thigh. Instead, barrels popped up from each of her forearms and Grady threw himself into a desperate roll as bolts gouged the tabletop above him. He wasn’t fast enough. Sharp agony seared his leg, and he gritted his teeth, almost biting his tongue.
His assailant divided her fire, targeting Mbeki with her right arm and him with her left. As he risked another swift glance, Grady startled, realizing he’d been mistaken. The laser barrels hadn’t emerged from recesses in the woman’s body armor, but from within cavities in her arms themselves, where he spotted another flash of flesh where he would have expected protective plating. Her appearance was like no armor-wearing soldier he had ever encountered. What was she?
A loud scraping noise followed by a series of crashes echoed around the capacious room as she shoved tables aside—requiring a lot less effort than Grady would have anticipated—to get a clearer shot at him.
Mbeki took advantage of her distraction, and the temporary dip in her rate of fire, and appeared from behind the shattered shelves to send a volley of bolts winging toward her. Several found their mark, ripping into the hardened, composite material enfolding much of her body. She bellowed in fury, turning to face the sergeant.
Grady seized his chance and levered himself to one knee, squinting as he took careful aim. Whether the woman was wearing some new form of body armor—lending her unparalleled strength and resistance to injury—or was jacked up on performance-enhancing drugs, rendering her less sensitive to pain, he was conscious of the need to make every shot count.
This time, instead of responding to Mbeki’s blitz with a laser strike of her own, the aggressor flicked her right wrist. A chunky, round object seemed to slide out from her side as she tilted her palm up. She snarled and advanced on the sergeant, who dived back behind the collapsed shelving unit, seeking whatever sparse protection it afforded.
Grady hesitated, frowning as he eyed the assailant’s actions. Thoughts raced through his mind. Was the object now nestled beneath her arm the source of the grenade she’d launched at him earlier? Or another device they had yet to experience?
He made a sudden decision and switched his aim from her torso to the apparent weapon she now directed at Mbeki. This meant he presented himself with a much smaller target to hit—made more challenging by the dim lighting and her movements.
His first attempt flew wide, chiseling the wall behind her. His second bolt skimmed her arm, and she took no notice. He suspected she had decided to eliminate the greater threat, Mbeki, before turning all her attention to him.
A thunk, her arm lifting a little because of the recoil, and Mbeki’s makeshift barrier exploded, sending him hurtling through the air to smash into the wall, debris scything upward and outward. Grady swore, his ears smarting from the detonation. He could only hope the sergeant’s body armor protected him from the force of the impact. But would it withstand a second lethal strike? He couldn’t let her fire again.
Left eye shut, Grady steadied his arm, one hand supporting the other, and fixed his gaze on the blocky weapon, stark in the emergency lighting’s ruddy wash.
He squeezed the trigger at the same moment the attacker made to fire another fragmentation grenade at Mbeki’s prone shape. A fireball sprouted from her arm, followed by a thunderous explosion and a high-pitched shriek.
As Grady hurled himself down to avoid the deadly shrapnel, he realized what must have happened. His shot sliced into the launcher just as the high-yield projectile was primed and ready, and it blew up, tossing the woman aside like a mangled and discarded rag doll.
Pistol clasped in his hand, Grady cursed and reached for the top of a dented and warped table, heaving himself to his feet. With the danger now over, the adrenaline coursing through his system began to ebb, and he was aware of pain spiking from several places as his battered body delivered its repair bill. He clenched his jaw, ignored the discomfort, and stepped toward the unmoving figure.
As he drew near, he heard a gurgling sound, breath rasping in the intruder’s throat, and concluded her lungs must have been punctured by the blast. Her right arm was gone, reduced to a gory pulped stub hanging from her shoulder.
With her left hand, she tried to reach for the pistol on her right hip, but her body writhed, betraying her, and she lay back with a strangled gasp, struggling to breathe. She uttered a throaty groan and attempted to lift her left arm, only to discover that the pop-up laser now dangled uselessly, blood spattering the floor tiles beneath.
“Lie still,” Grady said, standing over her, his pistol pointing at the ravaged portion of her face visible beneath the dented helmet. Her eyes met his, and he startled. The emergency lighting prevented him from discerning the color, but while one eye was normal, even if tightened in agony, the other was metallic, like a miniature embedded sensor, and glinted as she gazed back at him.
“Surrender,” he said, surprised at how rough his voice sounded in his own ears. “And I’ll get you medical help.”
Not taking his eyes off the woman, Grady raised his voice. “Sergeant, you still with me?”
With a tortured grunt, Mbeki found his feet and tottered forward. “I’ll live, though my combat armor will need some TLC.” He placed his hand against his side and grimaced. “Not to mention my ribs.” He drew up short, staring at the figure lying on the floor. “What the blazes is this?”
Grady shook his head and leaned over the woman. “Who are you?” he asked. “Why did you attack us?”
Her lips parted to reveal blood-smeared teeth, and she gave a hoarse laugh, cut short by a sharp intake of breath. “You’ll never know.” She clenched her hand, forming a fist, and made a peculiar sequence of gestures. A pale orange light at the base of her throat began to blink, the pulses slow at first, then speeding up. “I don’t like the look of that,” Mbeki said.
“Self-destruct,” Grady shouted. “Move!” He turned away and signaled for Mbeki to follow him. Together, they hobbled from the mess hall and Grady punched the wall panel as they passed, activating the emergency bulkhead. A heavy reinforced synth-steel barrier dropped from the roof, sealing off the dining area.
And not a second too soon. With a deafening roar, the flexible high explosives embedded in the assailant’s upper body detonated, turning the mess hall into a volcanic inferno. The corridor floor heaved, flinging both men to the ground.
An alarm shrilled, then the automated safety system sprang into action, dousing what was left of the dining section and galley in a cocktail of water and fire-retardant foam. The blast door had prevented the detonation from reaching beyond the now devastated mess hall.
Both men crawled across the ground and sat up, their backs against the far wall, eyes closed, taking deep, grateful gulps of air. Grady wiped the back of his hand across his brow, leaving a smear of blood. “Damn,” he said, eyeing the doorway beyond which lay the shambles that was now the galley and dining area.
“Are you hurt, Captain?” Mbeki asked.
Grady groaned, cursed, and slowly turned his head. “I’ll mend. But that’s not the worst of it.” His expression turned mournful as he added, “I never got to finish my coffee.”
24
“A cyborg?” Grady nodded in silence, grimacing as a spear of agony lanced across his temple. He could understand Zoe’s skepticism, plain on her face for all to see. He lay on a bed in a corner of a small hospital ward—one of three in the outpost’s medical center—his upper body tilted at a forty-five-degree angle so he could converse with others.
His ripped and bloodied clothes, along with his shattered forearm patch, had been removed soon after he and Mbeki had struggled across the threshold, helped by Chalmers and Zoe—the women alerted by the sound of combat. His clothing, including his treasured flight jacket, would be placed in the base’s reclamation unit in the hope at least some of it could be restored for further use. Anything not salvageable would be recycled.
“You sure you didn’t whack your head during the melee, Boss?” Zoe asked, folding her arms over her chest, her eyebrows arched. She eyed the scratches on the side of his face. “No offense meant, but that woman tried to use you as a human pincushion. You’re lucky to be alive. Sounds to me like she’d filled herself with a witch’s brew of pain suppressing drugs before attacking you. And wore hardened composite body armor.”
She cursed, glancing down at her own well-muscled biceps. “Hells, she must have been insanely fit to wear all that and manage to carry a machine laser into the bargain. No wonder she almost nailed you and Sarge.”
Grady shook his head. “I’m convinced it was more than that.” His voice was reduced to a raspy whisper. “I caught a good look at her before she self-destructed. She wasn’t just wearing body armor, she had advanced implants like I’ve never seen before, fused to her skin. She was a cyborg. It’s the only explanation that makes sense.”
His throat felt raw, like he’d chewed and swallowed shards of glass, and the painkillers he’d been given when he woke earlier were beginning to lose their potency.
A holo monitor floated above and behind his right shoulder, displaying his vital statistics, a sensor in the ceiling monitoring his condition from a small flat module taped to his chest. A thin tube had been inserted into the back of his left hand for the delivery of meds and fluids as necessary.
