The Mammoth Book of SF Wars (69 page)

Yaetes and the others were watching them in silence, intent, primed to fight like spring-loaded coils. Hypron’s anger blazed in her mind. He had no intention of sitting by while yet another person he cared for died.

Your gun has finished its analysis
, her node thought.

Does that guy have any clue what he’s holding?
Soz asked.

His vital signs don’t indicate the fear most people experience when facing a Jagernaut or their weaponry. I’d say he’s never seen a jumbler before.

Good.
The pirates probably would have recognized her uniform if she had been wearing it; most people knew what a Jagernaut looked like. But jumblers were less infamous than the tech-mech warriors who carried them. The more this captain underestimated her, the better. Given how badly her people were outnumbered, she needed every advantage, for she had little doubt these intruders would kill them after they finished enjoying their captives.

“Captain, I’m getting a weird reading.” That came from the pirate woman who had spoken earlier. She was frowning at her ingot-encrusted gauntlet.

What’s she looking at?
Soz asked her node.

I’m not sure. A sensor. Your jumbler isn’t close enough to determine more.

The captain glanced at the woman. “What kind of reading?”

She indicated Soz. “Uh, sir … it says she’s a micro-fusion reactor.”

Damn!
How had they picked that up? Her internal power source was shielded by state-of-the-art military-grade shrouds.

The captain scowled at the woman. “Is that a fucking joke?”

“No, sir.” She held out her gauntlet. “You can see the reading.”

“That tech is a piece of crap,” he said. “You should never have taken it off that corpse.”

Soz gritted her teeth. Very few sensors could pick up the reactor that powered her internal systems. If they had murdered an ISC officer with a rank high enough to carry such a detector, that added assassination to their crimes.

“So.” The captain looked Soz up and down, his gaze lingering on her breasts and hips. “You don’t look like a micro-fusion reactor to me.”

“Yeah, sure, I explode like a bomb,” Soz said. In truth, it was almost impossible, given the safeguards on her reactor.

The captain gave a raspy laugh. “Sounds like fun. Come here, sweets.”

Hypron’s anger surged, and Soz knew he was about to push his chair forward. Of course they would shoot him before he made it halfway across the room.

Hypron, stop!
Soz thought.

Shock exploded over her.
His
shock, at hearing her “voice” in his mind. Outwardly, he showed almost no reaction, a phenomenal display of self-control given his stunned mental response.

Soz?
he asked.
Is that you?

Yes.
She stepped carefully towards the captain.
Stay put. He’s giving me an excuse to get close to them.

Be careful
, he thought.

She felt how hard it was for him to hold back. He didn’t care about dying; as far as he was concerned, he had no reason to live. She wanted whoever had murdered his brother to pay, and she’d bet a year’s wage the killers were in this room. She didn’t pick up any details about the death on the surface of their minds, and she couldn’t risk lowering her shields more, but she had a general sense that at least some of them had been here before.

She stopped in front of the frigate captain. He was tall, but with her boots, she stood at his height. He put an arm around her waist and yanked her closer. “What do you think, hmm? Still trying to survive? I got thoughts on how you can do that, babe.”

“I’m sure you do,” she said.
Toggle combat mode
, she thought.

Toggled
, her node answered.

Soz spun out of the captain’s grip. The world slowed down; everyone else seemed to move at a fraction of normal speed. She kicked up her leg as she whirled, jamming her boot heel in the captain’s stomach. As he slammed back into the wall, she swung her fist, her aim fine-tuned by combat libraries in her node. Her knuckles smashed the wrist of the woman with the gauntlet sensor, and the crack of shattering bone broke the air. The woman screamed, a counterpoint to the captain’s bellow. In Soz’s speeded-up state, their voices sounded eerily deepened and drawn out.

People converged on her in slow motion. Soz kicked the gun out of one man’s hand while she broke the arm of another pirate, a woman who was raising a pistol. Shouts rang out, strange and sluggish. She caught the flicker of someone’s hand an instant before he fired his laser, and she dropped out of the beam’s path as it shot across the room. Rolling across the floor, she tackled him in the knees and knocked him unconscious when he hit the ground. Yaetes fired his pistol, catching one of the pirates in the torso. Another pirate swung his laser carbine around to shoot, and Soz lunged into him, knocking the gun out of his grip. Someone else fired and Soz jumped high, flipping over the path of a projectile bullet. She glimpsed the carbine she had liberated spinning through the air towards Hypron, and in the instant she landed, Hypron caught the laser.

Someone slammed Soz in the back. An agonized scream penetrated her mind as she went down. Not her cry; a bullet had struck one of Yaetes’ men. Its serrated edges barely touched him, but its shock wave slammed through his body, and his reaction reverberated in Soz’s hyper-sensitized mind as if she had also been hit. Her training kept her going even as she mentally reeled from the blow. She threw her attacker backward, then flipped her over and pressed against the woman’s windpipe, using enough pressure to knock her out.

The frigate captain was trying to fire the jumbler. Aiming at Soz, he jammed his thumb on the firing stud again and again. When nothing happened, he swore furiously and hurled the gun away. It crashed into the wall, then slammed down onto the floor.

Get ready
, Soz thought to the jumbler, her thoughts accelerated.

Priming
, the gun answered.

Soz rolled across the floor and grabbed the jumbler as she jumped to her feet. She had a glimpse of Yaetes sprawled on the ground. He was in
pain
, vivid and intense, but it meant he was alive. With

Yaetes down, it also meant Hypron was wide open to attack.

In the same moment Soz realized the frigate captain was looking straight at Hypron, she felt the pirate’s horrified recognition. He thought Hypron was a man he had already killed on the very dock of this house before he had left for reinforcements to take the homestead itself. In that instant, he believed was looking into the living face of a dead man.

Oxim.

The captain’s reaction burst over Soz, both his memory of the warped pleasure he had taken in Oxim’s murder and his nightmare that someday one of his victims would rise from a gruesome death to exact revenge. Hypron’s face contorted as he caught the images of Oxim’s death, and his horror blasted over Soz. Rage filled him, so intense it seared. He had never shot another person in his life, but he raised the laser carbine without hesitation.

The entire time Soz kept moving, swinging around to face the pirates. Standing with her feet planted wide, she fired her jumbler, sweeping its beam across the ground in front of the intruders. The floor exploded in a blaze of orange light. As it collapsed, some of the pirates fell to their knees and others stumbled back. One shouted as his gun discharged, blasting a projectile into the wall. The captain was still standing, staring at Hypron with his face contorted in a raw, unthinking hatred. He raised his gun to finish a man he believed he had already destroyed—

Hypron fired.

The laser beam shot across the room in a brilliant red streak. When it hit the frigate captain, his body flared so brightly it threw the room into a sharp relief of light and shadow. He blazed, and the stench of incinerated skin scorched the air.

The impact of his death slammed into Soz’s mind, and she reeled. Hypron picked it up as well, and it hit his untrained mind like an explosion. He had no mental shield that could withstand that onslaught. As colour drained from his face, Soz instinctively reached out to protect him. Her node spurred neural transmitters to block her synapses, muting what she felt, and she tried to do the same for Hypron. It couldn’t completely turn off their empathic reception; interfering with that many synapses would knock a person unconscious. But it could make the shock more bearable.

Soz stopped moving.

She stood in the middle of the room, breathing hard. The place was in shambles, the floor ravaged, the furniture broken, the window-wall networked by shatter patterns where bullets had hit the supposedly break-proof glass. The stench of the atmosphere leaked inside, and mud seeped into the trench in the floor.

Everyone was staring at her. The pirates were crouched on the ground or lying still. Yaetes’ people had taken shelter behind a pulverized table. Soz kept her jumbler up and primed as she swung from side to side, watching everyone, her mind focused like a laser.

Hostiles neutralized
, her node thought.
Kill or capture?

Hold
, Soz answered.

Motion flickered in her side vision.

In the same instant Soz whirled, her gun thought,
Primed to fire.

No!
Soz told it.
That’s Yaetes
. The racer captain was climbing to his feet with careful movements, his gaze fixed on Soz.

He is too close to the psion you are protecting
, her node thought.
Advise attack.

She wondered why her node singled out Hypron as the person she was protecting.
I’m here to defend everyone. Including Captain Yaetes.

The captain took a deep breath, holding his pistol by his side. He let the gun drop, and it clattered on the floor. Then he limped towards Soz, holding out his hands to show he had no other weapons.

Defence primed
, her node thought.
Attack?

No attack
, Soz told it.

Yaetes stopped a few metres away. “Secondary Valdoria, it’s over. You can stand down.”

Soz considered him. He had a point.
Combat mode off
, she told her node.

Toggled off.

With an exhale, Soz lowered her jumbler.

“Gods almighty,” one of the pirates muttered.

Doctor Carlon spoke, his voice easily carrying in the stunned silence. “She’s a Jagernaut, asshole.”

Soz looked around at the pirates. “And all of you,” she said, “are under arrest.”

Hypron sat on the edge of his bed in the dark, fully dressed, worn out but unable to lie down. Nothing could erase the images burned into his mind. He had killed today, and lived that death as if it were his own. Worse, he had felt that monster’s pleasure in murdering Oxim.

After the battle, he had said nothing. He felt as if amber encased him. While Soz and the others had guarded the pirates, he had worked on repairing the mesh circuitry in the backup EI. When the racer returned with patrol authorities from the mainland, the officers asked for his statement, and Hypron had somehow given it, his voice numb. He had watched them take away the surviving pirates and the remains of the frigate captain. The ashes. No one arrested Hypron. No one condemned him. Self-defence, they said. He couldn’t respond. Too much had happened, too much loss, pain, grief, violence. It seared his mind.

The door creaked, and an invisible cloak of calm spread over his thoughts. Soz.

Hypron closed his eyes. He didn’t understand how her mind could be so luminous given what she lived through in battle, experiencing the injuries of her enemies, their pain, fear, cruelty, whatever they felt. Their
deaths
. He knew now, from Soz, what to call himself. Empath. Perhaps even a telepath. How could she survive it? ISC was even worse than he had thought, sending empaths into combat, even technologically enhancing their abilities, all so they could become better killers. He was surprised Jagernauts didn’t all commit suicide.

“Hypron.” Her voice was soft in the dark. The bed rustled as she sat next to him. She laid her hand on his shoulder, but he didn’t move. He couldn’t accept comfort, not after what he had done. She stroked his cheek, until finally his resolve crumbled and he pulled her close, resting his cheek on the top of her head.

“It’s all right,” she whispered. “You’ll be all right, I swear.”

“Soz—” His voice cracked. Nothing would ever be right again.

She touched his chin with her fingers and turned his face towards hers. Her lips were warm as she kissed him. He knew he shouldn’t hold her, that making love wouldn’t fix anything, but gods, he needed the refuge. He was breaking inside. He pulled her close, and she drew him onto the bed, caressing him.

As they came together in the deep, quiet places of the night, his mind blended with hers. She wrapped her legs around his waist, and he moved within her, strong and steady, until he finally lost all thought in the oblivion of a healing as old as the human race.

Hypron was drowsily aware of Soz turning over in bed. He lay on his back, one arm thrown over his head, the other feeling cold as she moved away. He wondered if she would leave.

“Not unless you want,” she mumbled, her voice deepened by sleep.

“Stay,” he murmured. She was shielding her mind somehow, but he picked up her contentment. After a moment, he added, “How can you hear what I think?”

She rolled over and nestled against his side. “I can’t that much, only if the thought is intense and on the surface of your mind.”

“I’ve never met anyone like me.” He put his arm around her, settling her head against his shoulder. “Someone who feels moods.” The closest he had known was with Oxim. Hard on the heels of that memory came a sharp pang of grief.

“You must have loved him a lot,” Soz said. Then she muttered, “Gods, that sounded trite.”

“It’s fine,” he said softly, leaning his head against hers. “I’m glad you stayed tonight.”