Rachel was half way down the long curving perimeter corridor of the White Spear when she saw Lord Hades standing in the shadows ahead of her. He was a mountain of a man and his presence was unmistakable, burning a hole in her mind. She wasn't sure how long he had been standing there, but she knew that he was watching her. His green eyes regarded her in a way that she couldn't comprehend. Her heart missed a beat. What did he want? She didn't want to know. She turned left at the next intersection, and quickened her pace to get as far away from him as possible. She didn't look back, but she could feel his eyes on her as she walked. A tingling sensation ran down the length of her spine. If he saw her looking at him, it would reveal the lie that she hadn't seen him. She didn't know that he was there. She didn't know he wanted to talk to her. To face her lie would mean accepting whatever he wanted to talk about. The truth was something that she wasn't yet ready to face. Rachel quickened her pace again, walking as fast as she dared without breaking into a run.
After taking the long way back to the officers' accommodation, she followed the long empty corridor to her quarters. She was relieved to find that nobody was waiting outside her door. After an anxious glance up and down the corridor, she provided her security credentials to the wall console and waited until the door rose up into the ceiling.
Her room was just as she had left it. Three padded chairs formed a semicircle in one corner, and a pile of clothes sat on a side table by the wall. Rachel closed the door and picked up the clothes, carrying them through to the adjoining bunk room. A shiny black weapons case sat on her bunk. At first, she wondered what it was, and then she remembered that her impact pistol had been scheduled for upgrading by the tech workshop. The technicians must have delivered the new weapon while she was out.
Rachel opened a wall cabinet and put her clothes away. Turning back to the weapons case, she knelt on the floor in front of her bunk and examined it. When she tried to open the lid she realised that it was locked. She passed her wrist console over the top of it, providing her security credentials and waited for the case to open. Nothing happened. Rachel frowned and leant forward to take a closer look. On the top of the case, a pale green image showed a thumb beneath an arrow that pointed to the left. Rachel smiled to herself. After the Battle of Havers Compound, security procedures were being improved in all areas. What had happened at Beacon Station could happen here too. General Markov was already learning from the mistakes of others. It was about time that Central Command took security more seriously. The existing procedures were often outdated. Several times their algorithms had been compromised because of repeated use over long periods. Even strong security wouldn't stay that way forever. It had to be maintained and constantly improved to stay ahead of those who tried to break it.
Rachel located a smooth slot on the left side of the case and pushed her thumb against it. She felt a tingling sensation - a slight prick on the end of her thumb. She resisted the urge to pull her thumb out and look at it. The case analysed her blood sample for a couple of seconds, and the pale green image on the front of the case split into multiple blue symbols that arranged themselves into a vertical stack. The first symbol showed two diagonal lines facing away from each other. Rachel recognised it as the symbol for temperature. A green tick appeared beside it. The weapons case had validated that her blood temperature was normal. The next symbol was a vertical line that curved to form the crest of a hill. A green tick flashed beside it too. The case had verified that she was alive, she was still attached to her thumb, and she had a pulse. The next symbol showed three equilateral triangles arranged to form an overlapping circle. The symbol represented DNA. A green tick flashed to indicate that the case had verified the blood sample against her DNA profile. The case chimed, and then all the images disappeared, replaced by a single status message in a bold red font.
ACCESS GRANTED
The case clicked as the lid unlocked itself. Rachel removed her thumb from the slot, and opened the lid. Her impact pistol lay on its side on a plain brown cushion inside. She lifted it in her left hand and felt the weight of it. It still had the same comfortable balance that she was accustomed to, but the magazine had been altered. It was a now a light metallic grey with a silver line down one side. The barrel was also slightly wider than it had been before.
A beep from her console surprised her. Rachel placed the impact pistol on the bunk and reached down to the wide pockets of her combat trousers. When she pulled out her console, she saw that there was a new message. Opening the case had activated an automatic message delivery. Rachel opened the message to see what it said. The tech guys had sent her a report explaining the modifications that had made to her impact pistol. She browsed through the report, skipping ahead to the sections that interested her. The report said that the barrel and the magazine had been upgraded to support a new kind of ammunition, but the firing mechanism was unchanged.
When the operator pulled the trigger, a high voltage electrical discharge heated a small volume of air inside the combustion chamber. As the air heated up to extreme temperatures, it expanded rapidly, forcing a single projectile from the barrel at high velocity. The weapon had always been effective over short distances. A footnote said that the combustion mechanism had been optimised to provide twice as much power as the previous model. Rachel nodded to herself. More power was always useful, but she knew that the changes to the chamber were only secondary. The most significant modifications had been to the ammunition.
Each bullet had been redesigned from the previous simple hard pellet into a compound material that was assembled into the shape of a thin cylinder. It left the muzzle of the impact pistol as a single projectile, but it was designed to fail as soon as it was released. When the pistol was fired, the cylinder would experience increased air resistance as it forced its way through the air towards its target. It was designed to fracture into twelve separate, parallel rods, each with their own unique drag coefficients. Some of them would travel faster than others, causing the rods to arrive at the target over a configurable impact period. The scatter range could be configured too. By default, the pistol was set up to strike the target twelve times in a tenth of a second, damaging an area five centimetres across.
Rachel reached one hand towards the impact pistol, touching the magazine before returning her attention to her console. The report said that the scatter range and impact period would vary according to the distance to the target, which made sense. The longer the rods travelled through the air, the greater would be their scatter range and impact period. Some assumptions had been made about the typical distance to the target, reflecting the weapon's intended short range use. It went on to say that the weapon could be configured for use at ranges up to five hundred metres. Configuring the settings on the side of the pistol would send wireless encrypted signals to the currently attached magazine, configuring the munitions inside it. The same settings were automatically applied to subsequent magazines as soon as they were inserted.
Rachel decided to read the rest later, after she had been able to test it out. The report said that the new staggered cluster impacts would cause significantly more trauma to the target than a single projectile, and the additional power of the chamber would amplify the effect still further. Rachel didn't understand all the finer details of how it worked, but she got the general idea. The next Kamari agent that she shot was going to go down faster and harder than before. That could only be a good thing. She had to admit that she was looking forward to trying it out. She felt a certain excitement at the thought of using her upgraded impact pistol, but at the same time she felt guilty about being excited. She knew that she would never kill anyone unless it was absolutely necessary, and she knew that the choice of weapon would make no difference to how dead they would be afterwards, but it felt good to know that when necessary, she had a reliable weapon by her side.
Brushing a hand through her hair, Rachel thought about how different her life had become. Before she had met Nick, she had led a very ordinary life. She had always been outspoken, but she had been professional and good at her job. She had liked her apartment in the city, and she had slept well after days of hard training and solid service. Having Lisa had changed all that. It had changed who she was. Nick had affected her too, but he had only been the catalyst. Lisa had been the cause.
Becoming a mother was something that Rachel had never planned on, but she had come to realise that it had changed the way she thought about life. It had made every decision more complicated. She could no longer think about things in terms of herself alone. She had to think about how they affected her daughter too. She knew that she had always relied on Annie too much. It was the easy option in many ways. Annie was almost a surrogate mother to Lisa, and sometimes Rachel wondered whether she had let them become so close because she assumed, in the back of her mind, that one day she might not come home. Her job was dangerous. The risks she took were unfair on her daughter, but she knew that she would never choose a different career. Central Command was where she belonged. It was her home as much as any other. The White Spear called out to her, and she lived inside it, but somehow it felt as though it lived inside her too. It was always present, tugging at her thoughts.
Rachel got up from her knees and sat down on her bunk. She had been deliberately keeping busy all morning, avoiding sitting still so such thoughts couldn't enter her mind. She knew deep down that she had also been ignoring what she didn't want to see. She was different from other people. She could deny the truth to others, but what use was it denying it to herself? Would fooling herself really help her to achieve her goals?
Yesterday, she had seen her arm broken, the elbow hanging loose at an impossible angle. The pain had been excruciating, and yet she had blocked it out, forcing the pain to the back of her mind. She had focussed on the injury and denied its existence, pushing the perceived damage away from what she considered to be her true self. Something had changed within her. She had felt the damage unravelling like a twine. Somehow, the injury had gone away. Her arm was now back to normal. Not only was the joint repaired, but the muscles and tendons felt stronger than they had ever been. Her elbow moved freely and without pain. Rachel struggled with a mixture of emotions. She had healed herself. What other explanation could there be? All her rationalisation and excuses could offer no other conclusion. A great sadness filled her as she sat looking down at her hands.
She had lied to herself about the extent of her back injuries too. She had ignored the words of the doctors when they had told her that she was paralysed. She had rejected their prognoses as though she knew better, and yet she had no training as a physician. She didn't understand the extent of the damage that Damen's knife had caused to her spine, but she knew that she had almost died. She hadn't been able to accept the possibility that she might be paralysed. It wasn't part of her life plan. It didn't fit with what she wanted to do. She had rejected the doctors' words, in the same way that she had rejected her own injuries. She had ignored the complete lack of feeling in her legs and denied her inability to stand or walk.
While others had accepted her condition as inevitable, Rachel had never accepted it at all. Her anger, frustration and grief had all become hammers against her own thoughts and feelings. She had bludgeoned the truth out of her mind. She had ordered her body to recover from whatever had happened to it. She didn't care how bad the injuries were. She refused to accept what had happened. It had taken her a long time to recover. It had taken more mental energy than she ever thought she possessed. But however much she denied it, she had to admit that her back had recovered a lot faster than anyone else had expected. The doctors had been stunned that she had recovered at all. Rachel smiled sadly. She was different from other people. She couldn't deny it any longer.
Thoughts tumbled through her mind. She remembered how she had seen a man in the Mekinet News building, even though he had been standing behind a thick stone wall. She had known that he was there, but how could she have known? She remembered also how Rickworth had reacted when she had stopped a messenger in the Old Quarter. The messenger had pointed an impact pistol straight at her face. She hadn't expected him to turn so fast. There had been no time to knock the weapon out of his hand. She had sensed his finger tightening on the trigger, and she had known that she was about to die, unless... what had she done? She had reacted on pure instinct. The messenger's wrist had jerked to one side, snapping like a twig. His bullet had hit the ground instead of her head. She remembered the shock in his eyes. How could she forget Rickworth's accusations, and the anger that had filled him when she had tried to deny what she had done? He had accused her of something impossible. Nobody could break bones with their thoughts and instincts alone. Nobody could see through stone walls. Nobody could heal themselves with nothing more than need and desperation. Rachel felt a lot like nobody. She felt frightened for the first time since she had been a child. She wasn't afraid of the Kamari. She wasn't afraid of dying, but she was afraid of herself, and what she had become. She didn't feel like the same woman who had joined the security forces seven years ago.
As she held her hands out in front of her, examining her empty palms, she felt, not for the first time, as though she was looking at the hands of a stranger. The woman she used to be was fading away. Could it be that another Rachel was growing inside her? She buried her face in her hands. She needed to understand what was happening to her, but she had no idea where to begin. Maybe she should have listened to Willow? He seemed to know more about what was happening to her than she did, at least he thought he did. But how could she trust him? He was a diplomat. What could he possibly know about anything? She knew that she needed to talk to somebody. Even with all her strange new abilities, she wasn't able to understand whether Willow really wanted to help her or whether he had ambitions of his own. She could sometimes see through walls but such basic human understanding escaped her entirely.
Rachel lifted her head. She felt pain rising in her stomach. The other Rachel was trying to get out.