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Their helmets unfurl to reveal their faces.
My name still means something. They want me to see their eyes as they kill me. They want me to comprehend their superiority. And each wants to deliver the blow, and with it declare themselves stronger than my decrepit bloodline. They are the future, not the last blood of Lune who couldn’t even survive a week at the front. And they want me to know it.
I take my razor and let it unfurl into the killing blade.
“No bribe? No begging?” Seneca asks. “I expected more whinging from the entitled cur.”
“As a human, I am entitled only to death.”
“That’s the spirit.” Seneca smiles with his pack. “Kill the Pixie.”
Seven Peerless butchers slip forward. My left hand pulls the activation wire of the firebrand payload, I drop the seat lining, and toss the payload into the air. I bury my face in the sand.
The air stills as the firebrand detonates overhead. It releases no kinetic wash of energy, only spasms of ultraviolet light brighter than that of a nuclear explosion. It makes no sound.
Even with my head in the sand, I go blind.
But so do the bare-faced killers. As they scream from the weapon flash burning their retinas, I search myself for the fear that has stalked me since I landed on this planet. I need not search further than what I felt in the hydra burrow. Fear writhes like a dark, maggoty river from my pelvis to the tip of my spine. Pulsing. Roaring. Not fear of death. Fear of failure. Fear of being a fool. Fear of inconsequence. Fear of being alone. Fear of proving I am nothing more than my grandmother’s puppet. Fear that I am weak and meant for the maggots.
But the Mind’s Eye waits for me like an old glove.
I am the last of its acolytes.
It is not Grandmother’s anymore. It was never an inheritance. I earned it by suffering as a boy as she did as a girl. Fear is the torrent.
My transition into the folds of harmony is fulfilling.
My eyes may be blind, but my mind sees.
The world rushes through the multi-sensorial pupil of the Mind’s Eye. The projection stems from memory. I see the grains of sand as they were before the blast of light. I feel the weight of the men on its surface. Smell the musty sweat of unwashed armor, the bitter roast of coffee, the sweet reek of combat chemicals and the protein cubes they ate before they descended. Blood pumps in their veins. Insulated feet slide in their boots. I feel their skins, knowing where instinct will take them, where training will guide them to my blade like sheep to slaughter. I see them in the blindness, and I take on the Winter Whirlwind stance of the Willow Way.
Are you awake or asleep, Lysander?
I slip forward.
Three die without even swinging their razors.
The pommel of the Bellona razor jolts in my hand as the blade carves through pulseArmor, bone, and flesh of the third man. I feel the heat of blood sluicing down my arm. Hear the puking as it comes out of the man’s mouth. I pull the razor upward from his belly, holding his sword hand down, and saw through his breastplate. I stop shy of his heart so that he will continue to scream. I trip him and ride his momentum down to the ground, rolling forward then upward and crouching on a knee.
They shout to one another now. The noise of the dying a bedlam to muddle their ears. GravBoots whine as one takes blindly to the air. I rip the pulseFist off the dying man. With the Mind’s Eye, I sort through the soup of sound until I find the whine of the gravBoots and feel the reverberation. I swivel toward it, brace myself on a knee, lead the sound by several meters, and fire five shots in a diagonal line. I hear the snapping sound of a pulseShield absorbing the blast. There he is. I fire thirty shots until I hear the pulseShield collapse with a scream. Metal and man crash down into the sand.
Four down. Three left.
I slide toward the ship as they fire at anything that makes noise. GravBoots whine at my eleven o’clock. I fire a full stream from my cover. The man gets away. Several seconds pass. There is a thump in the desert. My visitor doesn’t want any escaping either.
The last two are difficult to locate. My memory is outdated now by a minute, but as I killed I populated the mental image with my victims. I know the second body is approximately nine meters and a half west and has a pulseFist still. I know the fourth body creates a tripping barrier between a broken wing of the downed bomber and the fus
elage. And when I hear a clink, I know one of the two survivors is checking the pulse of the first corpse two meters behind me.
I swoop to kill him with a backhand flick of the razor. It glances off his risen helmet. I parry his first riposte, knowing it would come as a lower thrust because he was in a crouch and it is the natural transition strike to prepare for a diagonal downward slash. I parry that slash and three more blows of a tight set. He is a clever swordsman, far stronger supplemented with his armor, but he relies upon sustained contact to know where I am. I break off. Wait. And as he probes the darkness with tentative thrusts, I rotate around and slip soundlessly forward. The razor digs the roots. It severs his leg at the thigh. The second strike takes his hand. The third his ankle.
I let him bleed out. His groans give me cover to move.
Seneca calls to his compatriots. None answer but the wounded.
“What the fuck?” he growls. I hear his razor hissing through the air as he swings wildly. His pulseFist roars. “You little prim bastard! How can you see?”
“Rather, how is it you are blind, Seneca?” As I move quietly over the sand, I can hear the heartblood pumping out of the dying men. Glug. Glug. Glug into their broken armor. “Is this how you saw your future?”
