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The lowColors shout in fear, terrified that I’m going to abandon them. I lunge back toward their cages, but I don’t have anything to cut with. I can’t use my plasma pistol. The wire is too tight to their bodies. Panic threatens to grip me. I tug on the severed strands of the Red woman’s cage. “Lysander…” Cassius says. The lowColors are clamoring now, rolling around on the floor. “It’s too late.” I pull as hard as I can. The fiberwire of the net slices through my gloves and into my skin. Blood wells against the wire. “Lysander! You have to leave them.”
“No, I can help them….”
I groan as I pull with all my strength at the wire, using my legs as leverage. The wire cuts my fingers to the bone. And it doesn’t even fray. There’s a scream from the lowColors. I wheel around and see an Obsidian at the door. I grab my pistol and fire clumsily. The plasma bolt takes the Obsidian’s head off from the nose up. Another one fills the frame. I fire and he ducks back into the hall.
“Lysander, get out of there!” Cassius says.
A scream wells up inside, but doesn’t escape my lips. I stare down at the wailing lowColors, at the mothers and fathers I could have freed, their cries puncturing my fantasy of heroism and honor. They thrash on the floor screaming at me to save them, but I can’t. The Obsidian death warble echoes down the hall.
Fear has come.
I run like a coward. Back into the hall, firing around the corner blindly. The Obsidian’s chest melts inward as he swings his axe. I bend under it and slam into the far wall, where I use the impact to push off and struggle to my feet. The Obsidian’s chest is burned through to the liver, but he stumbles toward me—a tower of sinewy muscle and scrap armor and the pelts of dead animals. Aja and Cassius both told me never to come within arm’s reach of an Obsidian. They alone can break the reinforced bones of my kind. But there’s no other choice. He swings his axe again, and I charge inside the blow, hitting the inside of his axe arm with the point of my elbow, jamming the point into his brachial artery. His arm goes limp, but the force of the collision knocks me sideways. I use the momentum to flow left, and drive my right knee into the genicular artery on the inside of his leg. He roars in pain and charges straight into me, slamming me against the wall. It’s like the time I was kicked by one of Virginia’s stallions. The breath goes out of me. His right hand grabs my throat and lifts me up against the wall, straining to crush my trachea. Cartilage crackles. I lower my jaw against his grip, but the world’s going black. Bits of meat cling to his beard. The rancid smell of rotting teeth fills my nose. Twisting my body, I pull twice on the trigger of my pistol. The p
lasma enters under his rib cage at an angle and burns through his heart. His eyes go wide with shock and his body collapses, dead. I land and suck in air just in time to see the third Obsidian raging toward me down the hall.
I fire, miss, and run.
Darkened hallways and empty rooms flash past. I heave myself around them, gripping girders to tighten my turns around corners.
“The Ascomanni corvette’s docked on 1C,” Pytha says. “Dead ahead.”
I skid to a halt. I hear them ahead of me, their tribal voices echoing as they move into the ship through the transfer causeways. Their boots rattle the metal. Each half again my weight, maybe more. They’ll cut off the route to the lift. I turn back the way I came, checking my gun’s display. The energy cartridge has seventeen pulls in it. I feel naked without my razor. But fighting isn’t the answer today.
“Pytha. Hallway to lift 11A is closed. I need you to guide me.”
“Take your next left,” she says without missing a beat. Conscious that Cassius is listening, judging, I take the left. “Two hundred meters.” I dash the distance, slow in my EVO suit. “Maintenance lift is on your second right.”
I reach the lift and press the call button. It doesn’t respond. A little sign’s been affixed to the door itself, apologizing rather crudely for the broken lift by means of a talking phallus. “Lift’s out,” I say, making efforts to measure my breathing.
“Back twenty meters, left, stairs are right there. Twenty down.”
“Back?” I ask, hoping I heard wrong.
“Now!”
I backtrack without running into the Obsidian and find the stairs to begin my descent. Two levels down the stairwell, I pause. I hear them. Their boots beat the stairs two levels above me. Through the metal grating I see their dark shapes, their milk-pale hair. The chant, called the khoomei, groans through the hall. It is a plea to Hel, Obsidian goddess of death, to receive her offerings. I clear the whole next flight of stairs with a single jump, racing down the levels as fast as I can. Behind me, like a dark avalanche, gaining, rumbling, and threatening to swallow me up, rush the raiders. Can’t see their numbers. Can’t hear what Pytha and Cassius are saying. My body is distant and numb and my mind still and focused.
I lose my footing on a rusted stair and nearly fall as the weight of the suit pulls me toward the ground. I stumble up, firing two quick shots with my pistol. I score a lucky hit. Someone grunts and a shadow of blood sprays on the wall as the green energy bolts hit meat, giving me time to reach the docking level.
I race through the metal door and close it behind me, cranking on the hatch as hard as I can to seal it. But the wheel stops and then turns against me as someone stronger on the other side begins to open it. I backpedal and fire three shots into the hatch, turning the metal wheel into red-hot slag and jamming the door. The muscle fibers of my arm tremble from the pistol’s recoil. They’ll be through the door in a moment, but I bought myself precious seconds.
“Hundred meters straight. Fifth left. Straight twenty meters. First right.”
I follow Pytha’s instructions, but as I turn to flee the door, I slam into someone and we both go down, hard. I roll as I fall and aim my pistol back up at my assailant. But it’s not an Obsidian. It’s the Gold girl. She’s limping to her feet, bearing half a dozen new wounds on her oil-slick skin. Her jacket is in tatters. She carries my razor in her hand. It is bloody to the hilt. Clumps of white hair cling to the gore.
How she is standing is a miracle. At her stomach, layers of skin and fat pull back along a six-inch gash to the right of the belly button. Looks like an axe wound. She hunches there, listening to the Obsidians hammering on the door.
“Give me my razor,” I say.
“Move.” She lunges toward the door with her razor and sticks it through the molten metal. A raider on the other side screams and she draws the razor back. Blood hisses as the molten metal turns it to vapor.
“Where’s your ship?” she asks, turning on me with wild, incandescent eyes. The door wheezes as the Obsidians knock half of it off its hinges. “Where is your gorydamn ship?” The Luna accent falters under the adrenaline in her voice, replaced by something very different. The wound in her gut is leaking blood badly.
“This way.” I move to help her walk, but she flinches away. “Don’t be a fool. You can barely stand,” I say. Glancing back at the bending door, she relents with a hiss of air between her teeth and throws her arm around mine. We hobble fast as we can, putting the door behind us, passing through the cargo level, containers and cranes to every side.
We take a right. Cassius stands guarding the interior of the transfer bridge that connects our ship to the Vindabona, clad in his EVO suit and helm. He fires his pulseRifle over our heads at the pack that rounds the corner behind us. The distorted energy screams past my ears. There’s a howl. I glance back and see an Obsidian’s head disappear, neck spouting blood. Magnetically shot bolts as long as my forearm rip past us and embed themselves into walls. Then we’re past Cassius and stumbling into the narrow causeway. He follows behind me, his pulseRifle roaring as he unloads the last of its battery into an Obsidian warrior who jumps into the causeway after us. The man’s torso tears in half and spins backward, leaving his legs behind on the causeway. Cassius kicks the legs off the ship.
“Disengage!” he shouts to Pytha. Our bulkhead door seals, closing off the causeway as I spill with the Gold girl to the transfer bay floor inside the Archimedes, panting and soaked with sweat and blood. The girl leans her forehead against the metal floor and coughs in pain. Pytha pulls an emergency disengage from the Vindabona and we bank away. Cassius stares down at me. I feel his rage, despite his helm’s smooth visage.
