Randoms (36 page)

This was no game. This was someone, someone I cared about, dying right before my eyes. The Phandic guard let go of the sword and reached for his plasma wand, but I wasn't going to let him have it. He was fifteen feet away from me. Tamret's still body was on the floor between us, leaking blood. I met the guard's gaze. My face felt hot, and my teeth were clenched. I could see a look of fear in the Phand's eyes as he began to grasp his weapon, He was afraid of me. Without realizing what I was doing, I took two steps forward and leaped at him.

By the time I left the floor, there must have been at least ten feet between us, and then I was on him. I couldn't leap ten feet. I knew that, but I was not rational. Ideas, sensations, images were
all fragmentary. I was flying through the air and coming down on him. He fell hard, his head hitting the concretelike surface. His eyes rolled back, and just like that he was unconscious. I can't say it made me happy—I was never going to feel happy again—but there was something to savor in my victory.

But it was not enough. I raised my pistol, ready to bring it down, to crush his stupid Phandic face. I knew I should stop, that he was no longer a threat, but somewhere in the back of my head I decided that it was too late for that. He had killed Tamret, and there had to be justice.

I sucked in air, stretched out my arm, and prepared to take my revenge. Then I stopped. I was full of rage beyond anything I had ever known, and I did not want to let go of the anger, because I knew if I did, I would have to face the fact that Tamret was dead, and I was not ready for that. I would never be ready for that, but I wasn't a murderer. The Phand was harmless now, and I could not strike again. I remained there for several long seconds, my pistol still raised, unable or unwilling to move. Then I heard her voice.

“Zeke,” she said. “Help me.”

I was off the guard in an instant. I fired a quick shot, to make sure he didn't get up, and then I was kneeling at Tamret's side. There was blood everywhere. So much blood. My knees rested in a pool of it. Her shirt was soaked through. Her fur up to her neck was bright red and horribly damp. I hated to see her like this, dying, her life leaking out of her, but I could not look away. “I'm here,” I told her. I dropped the pistol and took her hand. “I'm right here.”

“Don't kill him,” she groaned, her voice raspy and weak. “It's not who you are.”

I tried to swallow. My throat closed up on me. “Tamret,” I managed, but I couldn't say anything else.

“Not as bad as it looks,” she said, gasping. “I need you to pull it out.” She squeezed her eyes shut then opened them again. “It hurts so much.”

I would have done anything to save her. If getting her back to the station in time were a possibility, I would have turned around right then. Rescuing my father could wait. I would have blasted through Phandic blockades and braved weapons, but none of that would have made a difference. Dr. Roop had said the nanites could protect about almost anything except traumatic heart or brain injury. Even if I could steal a Phandic shuttle and somehow elude the orbiting cruiser, she would never survive the two days back to the station.

I kept trying to think of alternatives, places I could take her, things I could do, but there were no options, no surprises, no plot twists to make all this go away. Her heart had been pierced. She was going to die. The only thing I could do for her was to ease her suffering.

“I'm so sorry, Tamret.” I placed both hands on the hilt of the blade and propped one knee against her back. Squeezing my eyes shut, feeling the tears stream down my face, I pulled the sword out, knowing that it would be the last thing she would ever feel.

•   •   •

“By [
the primary revenge goddess
] that hurts,” she said. She was sitting up, pressing a hand to her chest. “This is really extremely painful. Wow.” She vomited, and there was blood in what she spewed up, but not a lot. “Sorry,” she said as she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I'm kind of dizzy. Can you hold me? I think I might black out.”

I sat down and I held her, leaning her body against mine, feeling her hot blood soak my shirt. But not that much of it. Somehow, in my confusion, I understood she should be bleeding far more than she was.

“Why aren't you dead?” I sputtered.

“It wasn't
that
bad,” she said. “Just kind of, yeah, painful.”

I tried several times to speak, but each effort came out as a choking sound. Finally, I was able to form actual words. “It
was
bad,” I managed.

“Maybe it was a little bad, but it's getting better. So that's what a collapsed lung repairing itself feels like. Good information to have. I don't recommend trying this, but I guess it beats the alternative. The skill points into healing go a long way.”

Skill points. Okay. That was an explanation, sort of. But then, not really. She was only level eleven, so there was no way her healing could be so significantly augmented. “You can't have put everything into healing. You've obviously put a lot into other things.”

“I've spread things around pretty well,” she said.

“But your heart,” I said. I couldn't get a handle on how she had come through this. I thought she was dead, and now she seemed almost fully recovered. “It went right through. Dr. Roop said that it was one of the few injuries the nanites couldn't fix.”

“Boys don't pay attention to anything,” she said, shaking her head at my foolishness. She took my hand and put it on the right side of her chest. Her fur was sopping wet with her blood. “Can't you feel that?” she asked. “I'm a Rarel, Zeke. My heart is on the right side.”

I buried my face against her soft, soft neck. I didn't care
that it was covered with blood. I only cared that it was her, that she was alive. Tamret was alive.

After a second, she said, “I saw you go after him. You were angry.”

“I was,” I admitted.

“That was some leap. You were practically flying.”

I thought I had imagined that. I looked at her, smiling at me in that knowing way of hers. There was something she wasn't telling me. “I really did that?”

She nodded. “I told you. You can do anything. We both can.”

I suddenly felt like there was something more to her words than Tamret's bravado. I had done things I ought not to have been able to do. Tamret was healing incredibly rapidly on her own. “When you say you can do anything, what exactly do you mean?”

She winced in pain, but then managed to grin at me, a full-on wicked Tamret grin, and I knew she'd been up to something clever and unexpected and almost certainly against the rules.

“I hacked your account,” she said. “Just before we left. After you leveled up yourself, since I thought that way you wouldn't notice. I did it with my account right after the fight with Ardov. At that point I'd already added a few points here and there, but after he almost killed me, there was no way I was about to let anyone mess with me like that again. And now no one is going to mess with you. Zeke, you are maxed out in all the branches of the skill tree, even the final, theoretical skills. Just like I am. You're the skill equivalent of level ninety-seven. You have Former skills in all categories.”

I quickly called up my personal skill tree on my HUD. She was right. My experience points had gone up since I'd last looked—raiding an enemy prison will do that—but I had no empty skill slots. “But I'm still only level sixteen.”

“I had to decouple your skill points from your experience points, otherwise everyone would see your real level and we'd be caught. This way you can still gain experience like you normally would, but you won't gain skill points because there's no place left to apply them.”

I shook my head. “I don't believe this. I'm a superhero.”

“Almost as much as I am. Your brain isn't wired to sense electromagnetic fields the way mine is. I'm an equivalent level one hundred and eight.”

Incredible powers. Incredible disregard for the Confederation's most sacred rules. I couldn't process this. “Why didn't you tell me?”

“I thought you might get mad at me for tinkering with the system.”

“This is totally illegal!” I protested. “They'll kick us out for this!”

“See? That's why I didn't tell you.” She rubbed her hands together. “Time to move on.”

“What are you doing? You can't get up. You almost died.”

She lashed out, slicing the back of my hand with an extended claw. There was a moment of pain, and then blood pooled across my skin.

“What is wrong with you?” I shouted.

“Nothing is wrong with me. I just knew there was no way you'd believe me if you didn't see it for yourself. Look at your hand.”

The blood was still copious and warm, but the wound she'd given me just seconds before was gone. No scab, no raised flesh, just gone.

“Next time, maybe give me the chance to believe you,” I said as I wiped my hand against my shirt. “Are you sure you're okay?”

“I'm fine.”

Then I realized what I'd forgotten, what had gone out of my mind the instant I saw the point of the sword emerge from her chest. We hadn't cleared our third floor.

“We need to go,” I said.

We ran down the stairs and entered the third control post. It was empty.

Anything might have happened. The guards might have run past us while I was considering beating the life out of the man who had stabbed Tamret. He might have signaled the Phandic cruiser in orbit right now. I stood there, still and terrified and furious with myself. The entire mission could be blown right now, because of me.

Then I heard the whizzing sound of weapons fire coming from farther down. Maybe, just maybe, it wasn't the worst news possible.

We ran down the stairs, and now that I was aware of my augmentations, I knew immediately how to exploit them, like I had always been this strong, this perceptive, this agile. I was leaping six or seven stairs at once, and it was easy. It was easier than taking them one at a time. I vaulted over the last fifteen stairs and landed on the final level, illuminated by the intermittent flash of weapons fire. Steve and Mi Sun were crouched behind a bulkhead, firing down a long corridor at a Phand, or maybe several. I couldn't see because they were
taking cover behind a corner where the hall branched off.

“I think you might have missed a couple, mate,” Steve called out to me.

“We ran into some trouble,” I said.

“I know the feeling,” he said. “Also, just so you know, the armory is not the only place on the planet where they store PPB pistols. These two took some from a strongbox. Live and learn.” He glanced around to see Tamret, still dripping with her own blood. “Everyone all right? You don't look too good, love.”

“I'm fine now,” she said. “But thanks.”

As first I thought the hallway was completely silent; then I realized there was a sound, just on the periphery of my perception. I understood at once that it was something I could never have heard before Tamret had hacked my skill tree. It was the low, rhythmic rasping of the two Phands breathing. Almost the instant I understood what I was hearing, the sound changed to distant footsteps, boots hissing against the hard floor.

“They're taking off,” I said.

“I hear it too.” Tamret was checking something on her data bracelet. “That corridor isn't on the schematic. Zeke, this is bad. We can't let those guys get away.”

“Why?”

“Because, if my sense of direction is right, that corridor leads right back to the bunker where we started. If they get back there, they've got a straight shot to the shuttle hangar, and I don't have a whole lot of faith in Charles and Nayana being able to stop them.”

This was my mess, and I was going to clean it up. “I'm going after them,” I told Steve and Mi Sun. “You guys go find Captain
Qwlessl. Get her, anyone from the
Dependable
, and whoever else she vouches for.”

Steve cocked his head at me. “You sure you have this? I don't want to hurt your feelings, mate, but me and Mi Sun are both faster, stronger, have surer aim, and are generally so much better at this sort of thing than you that it's silly for you to even think of going.”

“Thanks for soft-pedaling it,” I said as I reviewed my new skill tree on my HUD, “but we've got this.”

They looked at each other, and Mi Sun shrugged as if to say it was my funeral. Then they ran off.

Tamret gave my hand a quick squeeze. “Let's be careful,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Cover me.”

I ran out, pistols firing.

•   •   •

I don't tend to think of myself as a terribly frightening person, but my team had taken out virtually every other Phand in the compound, and here I was, running at impossible speeds, legs bounding off the floor, as I erased the distance separating us from the fleeing Phands. I had enhanced strength, enhanced speed, enhanced endurance. I moved more quickly than I would have thought possible, and each step, each bound, was pure joy. The two Phands saw me coming, and they fled.

You can't dodge a PPB blast the way you can dodge a blaster bolt in
Star Wars
. You can, however, evade the yellow laser light. If the light isn't on you, you can't be hit. It's as simple as that.

Before Tamret had turned me into Captain America, I probably could not have run at top speeds, fired my own weapon, and
kept an eye on two laser dots to make certain neither of us was about to be hit. I don't want to suggest it was effortless, because it required all my concentration, but I could do it. PPB lights flashed ahead, and Tamret and I dodged and ducked and evaded and fired. It was nearly impossible to hit the enemies, who were moving as erratically as we were. Our shots were suppressing fire, nothing more, but they did the job of keeping the Phands off balance and, best of all, slowing them down. We were faster than they were. In fact we were much faster, though I suspected that Tamret was slowing herself to keep pace with me.