Stormblood, стр. 38

circuitry, legs hacked into broken metal stumps. It looked like something was trying to tear and claw its way out of it. Gritting my teeth, eyes locked with the monster, I brought the case down with one final, splintering crack. The monster’s dripping, roaring jaw was blasted into a screaming void of violent dark matter, its body disintegrating chunk by chunk until it was gone.

A sob burst out of me. Pieces of the casing crunched as I sprawled on my back. My senses returned, numbness dissipating like mist, the decrepit hallway peeling away to become the server room once more. My armour slowly resumed normal functionality as the HUD and all standard readouts regrew. The wires stopped writhing against my flesh. I didn’t even have the strength to kick the case again.

I was free. And weak. And disoriented. And on the verge of puking in my helmet. And still in the middle of a maze, in the middle of an abandoned floor, surrounded by my captors.

Got to start somewhere.

I dropped a hand to my chest and felt the stormtech snuggling up against my ribs. If it wasn’t for the alien DNA I had no doubt that the trauma would have sent me into shock. For the first time in years, now I felt it slithering through me with concentrated purpose. Swelling my veins and muscles with fury as I thought about the people who had done this to me.

And what do you know? One of them opened the door.

12

Prey

Lasky’s small mouth hung open, body tensed as he gaped at the cradle, empty of one very angry, very dangerous captive. But he cottoned on fast. Fast enough that he could have bolted out the room and raised the alarm and recaptured me.

Not fast enough for a Reaper.

I slammed my foot into his kneecap. He toppled like a felled pillar, head thunking off the terminal as he tumbled to the floor. He tried to scramble away but I yanked him back, wrapping my arm around his neck and kicking the door shut. He spluttered, legs thrashing against the metal floor. ‘Soundproof, you say?’

Strength charged into my battered limbs as I twisted my legs around his, using my weight to lock him down. The little bastard was stronger than he looked, but against my armour and my training, really, what chance did he have?

I slammed him against a server cabinet, grabbed his wrist and gave a sharp, practised twist. ‘I told you I’d break it,’ I panted. But he was too busy whimpering on the floor to hear. The stormtech spiked and I drove the heel of my armoured foot into his other hand, the bones shattering like breadsticks. He shrieked again as I hauled him up and dumped him into the cradle, restraints that had held me now locked tight around him.

‘Who the hell are you people?’ I croaked out.

Lasky spat at me, globs of saliva flecking my visor.

‘Really?’ My voice was still husky and choked up after my torture, scant wires still lodged in my teeth and around my tongue, but Lasky whimpered all the same. All his bravado up in smoke. A coward, like all bullies once the tables are turned. My body told me to kill him, and I knew I would if I stuck around. Instead, I pocketed his keycard and bundled out the door.

I was in a telescopic passageway, tangled with tight jungles of powerlines that plunged into ducts and cableways. I breathed deep, still furiously hot inside my armour despite the cooling-fans whirling away. Voices floated from further down the hall. It was tempting to stay and see what I could learn, but I was alone, cut off and surrounded by people who wanted my head on a spike. There was no telling how badly I was injured. And whoever Lasky’s boss was, meeting her was low on my list.

Time I was long gone.

I slipped down the passageway, eyes peeled for an exit, and noticed a room where it looked as if it was snowing as I passed. Razorstorms. Serious, high-end tech. Microscopic, artificial snowflakes swirled around the space, programmed not to float past the constraints of their allocated boundaries. The dark-red light in the room indicated they were deactivated, but the moment that changed the nanoflakes would whirl around, shredding anything and everything in their path. Even deactivated they were a significant deterrent. Someone really didn’t want people entering that room.

Aware that precious seconds for my escape were burning away, I got my visor to snap a photo on repeat every five seconds. Harmony would make more sense of this than I could.

Chatter floated up from the staircase, abnormally clear. My hearing had sharpened, enough for me to notice it was the stormtech doing it. It was enhancing my auditory senses, letting me detect footfalls and the clanging of objects a room or two further away than usual. At the end of the room, embedded in concrete, was the same pattern I’d glimpsed coming in here. Now, I had the opportunity to expect it in greater detail. A blue crosspiece, a little like an inverted letter Y. Didn’t look like any glyph I’d seen around Compass. Could have been an offworld design, maybe even outside the Common.

My visor took a snapshot, and that’s when everything went to hell.

The quiet was shattered by a skirling siren pounding through the compound and turning the walls an ugly, strobing yellow. Someone must have discovered Lasky. If they recaptured me now, I was dead. The stairs were a concrete blur as I tore down them, clearing floor after floor.

Someone suddenly slammed into me from the side, sending us crashing to the concrete and my head smacking against the wall. Lyndon. He was out of his armour but we both wore the same shocked expression as we picked ourselves up. And then it connected. ‘He’s over here! He’s—’

He choked as I slammed my fist into his sternum. I dove in for another swing when he feinted left, tangled one