| |
Lucia spun down the corridors of the Kalashnikov at nearly her top speed. The passageways were neither narrow nor winding, so she was able to eschew excessive caution and focus on beating her quarry to the finish line.
As she moved further and further aft, she began to encounter Privateers and pirates both. Often interrupting pitched battles and firefights as she sped along, she rendered such aid as she could without stopping. A well placed flechette here, a flash-bang grenade there, and soon rumors of a wraithlike super fighter began to circulate the comm chatter on both sides of the fight.
Even with the distractions, Lucia made it to the aft docking cradle in less than ninety seconds, which was just in time to intercept the other woman sprinting to the hatch that led to the Red Vengeance. Lucia did not recognize the woman, but she recognized a target when she saw it and she raised her CZ to bring it down.
At the same moment, the auburn-haired woman saw Lucia and fired her own pistol. The projectiles crossed each other in transit and both women dove out of the way. Lucia made a dash for a small alcove behind a workstation, and her target posted up behind a steel column. The hair and the body were different, but the icy visage of her opponent was unmistakable, and Lucia recognized her the moment she saw the woman’s face clearly.
“Laura!” she shouted while sliding into an alcove, “It’s over! Give it up!”
Laura responded with two more shots from her massive sidearm. White-hot metal fragments and angry orange sparks rained down on Lucia when the powerful projectiles exploded against the station terminal and bounced into the bulkhead above her. She flattened herself deeper into the alcove and issued her rebuttal in the form of a blistering fusillade from her own weapon.
Whereas the Dragoon was a bit of a novelty weapon and had Lucia’s CZ-105 beat in raw power, the smaller pistol was purpose-built for military applications. It fired a medium-power flechette and had rapid cycle times. In Lucia’s hands, it could match rate-of-fire with many commercially available sub-machine guns.
Lucia illustrated this capability by dumping a twenty-flechette magazine into the support column Laura had taken cover behind. The onslaught made a terrific racket of cracking bursts and whining ricochets but the flechettes did little more than scorch paint and burn shallow holes into the dense metal. The sustained fire served its purpose by keeping Laura’s new red head down while Lucia advanced on her position. When the magazine ran dry however, Lucia was still three long strides away from the improvised cover. Under normal circumstances, this would not have been an issue. Lucia was so much faster than other people that those three paces might as well have been three inches.
But this was not the same person that Lucia had brawled with before. The newly augmented woman stepped out from behind the column and her Dragoon snapped up less than a third of a second after Lucia’s last flechette creased the column. With her sense of time dilated, Lucia watched in slow motion as a delicate finger pressed on the trigger of a poised weapon now looming large in her field of vision.
There was nothing Lucia could do but drop to a slide and hope that she would sink below the path of the incoming slug before it tore through her body. It was moments like this that she hated her warped perception of time. Lucia was not fast enough to see the flight path of the slug. Even at maximum dilation the projectile would still appear to be moving at just under five hundred miles per hour to her. So, she was spared the agony of watching her death approach, at least. But the quarter of a second between her perception of the danger and her attempt at dodging still seemed like an eternity.
With mere inches to spare, the tungsten slug flashed over her shoulder and past her left ear. It passed so close to her face that the corona of superheated air around the magnetically driven missile singed her hair and the searing brightness painted dancing pink swirls in the images of her left eye.
Her momentum carried her forward and under the barrel of Laura’s raised hand cannon, but she had lost any ability to control her trajectory when she dodged the gunshot. Lucia collided with Laura with a bone-jarring crash and the two went down together in a writhing, spitting mass of tangled appendages.
Lucia still wore full armor, and so Laura got the worst of the collision as the two women crashed to the floor in a pile of madly flailing limbs. But Laura was not going down easily or quietly. As the scuffling duo flopped and scrambled across the floor of the docking cradle, Laura dropped her Dragoon and deployed her palm blade. Still lying on her side, the weaponized left hand darted at Lucia’s guts and sunk the eight-inch stiletto into Lucia’s flank as far and as hard as she could.
Fortunately for Lucia, the armor plates designed to stop Sasori blades were more than a match for the mundane carbon fiber dirk Laura wielded. Even with the strength of a bionic arm behind it, Laura’s un-augmented collarbones weren’t going to support the kind of force it was going to take to pierce the laminated composite. The tip of the blade sank a few centimeters into the panel covering the ribs of Lucia’s left side and stuck there. The air whooshed out of her lungs when the armor compressed under the pressure of the strike, but it held and Lucia’s innards remained safely unpunctured.
Lucia used the spare moment to kick Laura away and she bounded to her feet with serpentine grace despite the ragged gasps working her abused lungs like a bellows. Laura was back to her feet just as quickly, and the women closed on each other without hesitation. Lucia was taken aback by Laura’s new speed, and her increased strength nearly won the day with the first exchange of blows.
Lucia underestimated how long Laura would need to follow a strike and inadvertently gifted her opponent a free shot to the ribs. Even through the armor Laura’s punch felt like getting hit by a meteor and Lucia crumpled over the blow with a guttural yelp. Before Laura could deliver a coup de grâce with the palm blade, Lucia threw herself to the side and narrowly avoided getting skewered.
Laura pressed her assault with a wordless snarl and a flurry of slashes. Lucia rolled and scrambled to avoid them, and it was fortunate that her reflexes were faster still than Laura’s. Lucia’s lungs burned and her ribs felt like they had been kicked by a mule, but she managed to keep away from the hissing dagger. She bobbed and wove, ducked and spun, a swirling dynamo of kinetic energy forever a nanosecond ahead of the relentless blade. She was still faster, but too weak to counterattack the bionic limb or the superhuman strength of her adversary.
Remembering Laura’s fury the last time they fought, Lucia tried to goad her, “Still too slow, Laura! Worn out from killing an old man?”
She was trying to sound relaxed, but the fire in her lungs may have betrayed her. Laura’s face twisted into a spitting rictus of pure hate and she snarled back, “You don’t know shit about it! What he took from me! Spoiled little rich bitch had everything given to you!” The enraged woman punctuated each sentence with a furious slash.
Lucia twisted to avoid a sweeping overhand blow and then pirouetted away from a follow-up right hook. Laura never stopped attacking, screeching with every swipe of the blade, “Daddy’s little girl! Apple of his eye! Captain of the cheerleaders too, I bet!”
Laura was beginning to lose control, and Lucia suspected she knew the reason. Whatever happened to the chairman’s assistant early in her life had left deep scars. Scars that Lucia was not above exploiting, “The Chairman’s favorite pet thinks I’m the spoiled bitch?” Lucia lodged a front kick in Laura's midriff that separated the two.
“I EARNED EVERYTHING!” Laura roared and pressed her attack even harder. A narrowly avoided slice dragged her bionic blade across a control console sending showers of sparks into the air. Lucia snuck a low kick to the inside of Laura’s knee while the enraged woman extracted her arm. Laura stumbled but resumed her offensive without acknowledging the hit, and Lucia was dancing away from the knife once more.
“All of their disgusting hands! Their bad breath! The fucking stink of their grimy clothes!” Laura’s voice was losing coherence, devolving into a shrill wail of desperate anger and sadness, “I paid for all of it, bitch! ALL OF IT IS MINE!”
Lucia was beginning to regret pushing Laura this way. This was about more than Laura’s megalomania or greed, this was about a deeply buried trauma that had warped Laura from an early age. Lucia’s stomach lurched with a sickening epiphany in that instant.
She doesn’t know here the harm done to her ends and the harm she is doing begins.
Suddenly, Roland’s ‘shades of grey’ comment made a lot more sense and Lucia experienced an uncomfortable twinge of guilt for exploiting Laura’s pain.
A near-miss hardened her resolve, however, and Lucia resumed her taunting out of tactical necessity. But her heart wasn’t in it anymore and the words tasted like ashes, “Poor little rich girl, is it?” Laura’s attacks were uncoordinated, rage-fuelled swipes that were easy to dodge. Lucia avoided them without counterattack to buy the time she needed to rest. Meanwhile, the frenetic pace of the onslaught had Laura growing tired.
“Men treated you horribly, so it’s OK for you to be horrible, too?” Lucia asked casually while neatly parrying a swipe from the blade.
“Horrible?” Laura snarled, and the bionic arm hummed past Lucia’s ribs, “Spoiled bitch! You don’t know anything about horrible! Pops deserved to die! They all deserve to die!”
Lucia stepped inside the arc of the slashing blade and fired a left that glanced off a shoulder and followed it with a right hook to the body. She frowned as she slipped Laura’s return right and danced out of range again. Her PC-10’s had failed to deliver the requisite electric charge to her opponent and Lucia felt an instant of panic. Laura had to be wearing some sort of insulated countermeasure.
Lucia cursed inwardly, That figures. She probably has a plan for everything. I guess I’ll just have to do this the old-fashioned way.
“And YOU!” Laura stalked toward her quarry, “You and your lumbering behemoth think you understand ANYTHING?” Laura punctuated her question with another savage flurry. The maddening target parried and slipped each strike, further frustrating the manic woman, “Do you even know what he is? What he’s done? Stupid rich-bitch, you’re playing house with a MONSTER and you don’t even know it.” She sneered. It was a twisted, ugly expression full of derision and arrogance, “He’s just the captain of the football team to you, isn’t he? Just another hand-job under the bleachers? God, you are a stupid slut. Everywhere he goes, people die! Hell has followed him his whole life, and now you follow him too!”
That dig gave Lucia a bit of a pause which Laura used to send another slash for her throat. A few strands of dark hair floated gracefully away from her head as Lucia slid to the side with only picoseconds to spare.
Lucia, moderately enraged herself at this point, began to hurl combinations in earnest. When Lucia fought in earnest, she was a terrible thing to behold. Laura’s new body was superhumanly fast and even a bit stronger than hers, but Lucia had been training in various fighting styles since she was twelve years old. Fighting Laura was a lot like fighting a very strong, very fast man who was decently skilled and carrying a knife. Lucia was aware that the whole prospect was risky in the extreme, but it was also the sort of thing she was pretty good at.
She thought of endless hours with Rodrigo and all the gruelling slugfests the gnarled old coach had put her through. She smiled back through gritted teeth, “I don’t follow anyone, Laura.”
Since her gauntlets weren’t getting the job done with electricity, she employed them like any other set of knuckle dusters and simply started putting hits into Laura’s softer areas.
She had to keep circling away from the prosthetic limb and its pointy payload, which limited her attack angles. But she was more than fast enough to work at long range, so Lucia alternated low kicks with snappy jabs to keep Laura chasing, and the enraged woman obliged with increasing anger at every stinging hit.
“Monster?” Lucia snarled, “You wouldn’t know a monster if you saw one in the mirror, lady.” Lucia saw an opening and took it. A quick left snapped Laura’s head back and bloodied her brand-new nose, “And you do.”
The gauntlets popped and whined, and a small electric charge burned two neat scorch marks into Laura’s cheek. Lucia’s eyes widened at the sight.
It’s her clothes! Lucia realized. Her clothes are insulated!
Laura had staggered back and instinctively put her hand to her cheek. With a shriek of pure hatred, she hurled herself at Lucia like a howling tornado of fists, feet, and blade.
Lucia forced herself to relax and focus. She squinted at the oncoming enemy and tried to anticipate where each limb would be at the instant they made contact. Then with outward serenity she did not truly feel, she moved.
The blade passed over her head and she was turning. A fist followed, and Lucia was parrying it at the elbow. The left arm was coming back to slash again, but it was light-years behind the simple, elegant, and flawlessly executed overhand right that shoved Laura’s jaw out of its home and stopped all her forward momentum with merciless abruptness.
The punch alone might have been sufficient to end the conflict, but the PC-10 Pacification Gauntlet on her right arm then administered a brutal electric shock directly to the head of the would-be crime lord. Her entire nervous system short-circuited at that point and Laura went first very stiff, and then very limp as she fell forward to the deck. Lucia backed away and quickly retrieved and reloaded her CZ-105 while Laura writhed on the floor.
The weight of the CZ in her hand was reassuring, and her heart rate began to slow as she caught her breath. She would have to hold Laura until one of Pike’s fire teams arrived to take custody, and Lucia did not want to have to fight the crazy woman again if she woke up before they arrived. Her pistol made all that possible.
But Laura was not interested in giving Lucia the chance to relax. Lucia did not know if it was the insulation in her clothes, or the strength augmentations, or a combination of both that made her opponent resistant to the gauntlets. Either way, in just a few seconds Laura was scrambling to rise.
“Stay down,” Lucia warned. Lucia still had issues with killing. She understood the necessity of killing in combat, but she did not like it and did not want to execute Laura. Dragging her back to Earth for a trial would suit Lucia’s taste just fine, but Laura was not having it.
“Stay down?” She rasped through her broken jaw, “Stay DOWN?” She wobbled to her feet and held her palm dagger in front of her face, “Don't you get it? That is all anybody has ever wanted me to do!” She spat blood, “You fucking bitch, you weak pathetic little cunt! I will not stay down. I WILL NOT STAY DOWN!”
Laura charged. On wobbling legs and with tears in her eyes she charged. She was ready to kill and she was ready to die and she did not care which came first anymore.
Now I’m playing the game! Laura thought as the barrel of Lucia’s gun loomed large in her view.
And then she died.