Fourteen

 

 

ARMANDO DODGED THE bullet. At point-blank range. It sounds impossible, I know, but trust me: I was there.

I had the muzzle of my gun pressed against the back of his neck, at the base of his skull, and as I squeezed the trigger he moved to the left, spinning at the same time, flicking his left arm up.

By the time the round exited the barrel, Armando had both moved out of its path and knocked my arm with his left elbow.

As the bullet ricocheted off the wall next to the door, Armando jabbed the heel of his right hand into my sternum, and pulled the gun from my grip with his left hand. And I thought I’d been slick, when I’d grabbed the gun from Takenaga.

I crashed back into the wall behind me, but I wasn’t winded or wounded—I wasn’t out of the fight yet.

In the second or so it took me to recover, Armando had already disarmed Vine and was slamming my gun into Takenaga’s stomach.

Armando tossed both guns aside, grabbed hold of Kurya’s arm and was pulling her around, putting her between himself and me. Clearly, in this berserker state, he either didn’t remember what had happened with Wightman or he didn’t care. A sharp, hard punch to Kurya’s face disoriented her, allowing him to manipulate her almost as though she were a plastic mannequin.

I had beaten him before, yes, but that had only been a few hours earlier. I was still aching from that fight, and I wasn’t sure that I could do it again.

I could have made a grab for one of the guns, and I might have even reached it, but the angles, the positions... If I opened fire I’d hit Kurya for sure, possibly also Takenaga and Vine. I didn’t want that.

Vine slammed her fist into Armando’s right side with enough force to put a normal person out for good, but he barely registered it. Instead, he continued swinging Kurya around, shoving her against Vine.

I took a quick glance through the glass door: Colonel D’Angelo was staring back, watching the scene with a cold detachment. It seemed to me that he was studying Armando the same way an entomologist might study a pair of clashing insects.

But this wasn’t the time for me to start studying him. I needed a plan.

I couldn’t risk shooting Kurya, Vine or Takenaga; they were all accomplished fighters, and while they were no match for Armando, they were slowing him down.

He would kill them, I was certain, but right now, they were still getting in his way.

Often, the wise warrior knows he has to choose a path that his opponent won’t expect. Armando—or whatever part of his brain was in control—knew I’d beaten him before, and expected me to try again. So I’d do something else.

Instead of diving for a gun, I rushed at him, reached past Kurya and slammed my fist into Armando’s already-broken clavicle.

He didn’t scream, but there was no mistaking the pain registering on his face.

He shoved Kurya aside and advanced on me, half staggering, clutching his shoulder. I knew I had one more shot: a quick side-kick aimed at his stomach. He instinctively dropped his hand to block the kick... That was when I added a last-second flick to my ankle that took some power out of the kick but shifted its aim.

I heard the broken halves of his clavicle crunch under my boot.

Then I ran.

Not because I was scared—I could probably take Armando in a one-on-one fight, especially now—but because the risk to the others was too high. I wanted him to abandon them completely and chase me. After all, I was clearly the bigger threat.

Some of them don’t see it that way: they argue that I fled the scene. That’s obviously stomm. I had the upper hand. I wasn’t running from Armando, I was leading him. But I don’t care what anyone else chooses to believe. Their opinions are considerably less important than the truth.

And my plan worked, too. I ran in the opposite direction of the gymnasium, and within seconds I could hear Armando scrabbling after me.

I have to admit, at this stage I was seriously regretting cracking his handcuffs.

The biggest disadvantage I had was that I didn’t know the base, or certainly not as well as Armando did. This had been his home for seventeen months. He would have been able to move around it blindfolded and not bump into anything.

Ahead, the corridor curved to the right, and against one wall was a long red-and-pink smear—the still-drying blood and brain matter of one of the corporal’s dead colleagues. After about four metres the smear dropped down to the floor and led to a thick pool of almost-congealed blood: I could feel it stick to my boots and was all too aware that I was leaving a very easy trail for Armando to follow.

But there was no sign of the body. My guess was that the colonel’s men had been cleaning up.

I skidded to a stop at a junction and turned right. A trail of blood-dots on the ground disappeared under a closed door. I couldn’t tell whether that meant that a body had been carried into the room or out of it; I was hoping it would turn out to be the latter.

I could still hear him behind me—any second now he’d reach the junction—but I tried the door anyway: locked. I moved on, all too aware that every door I tried would almost certainly be the same.

But a Judge doesn’t quit just because the odds are against him. He keeps going. He changes the odds. He improvises a weapon, or he uses the enemy’s strength against him. Or he changes the playing field. That’s what I was about to do.

Armando had killed thirty-four people on this base. Colonel D’Angelo’s people had done a rudimentary job of clearing up, but they hadn’t had a lot of time. Certainly not enough time to dispose of thirty-four bodies. The smears and blood-drops on the floor told me that they’d just moved the bodies out of the way.

The military mind is efficient and methodical, so I knew that they’d have quickly developed a routine. Find the bodies, identify them, check them against the base’s manifest, then move them somewhere. Can’t have them stinking up the rest of the base. And you don’t want them decaying, either, before a proper investigation can take place. You put the bodies into the morgue, if you have one. And if you don’t, you still need to keep them cold.

The surface temperature on Titan rarely goes above minus one-eighty.

I thundered up a metal staircase, taking the steps three at a time. At the top I grabbed the rail and hauled on it hard, used it to quickly swing myself around, heading back along the upper level for the next staircase. Again, three at a time—but by now I could hear Armando on the stairs below.

Another thin line of blood-drops told me that I was still going in the right direction, but I was too slow. Or Armando was too fast, depending on how you look at it. I needed something to slow him down.

There was no way this base would have a morgue large enough to hold all those bodies. Colonel D’Angelo would have ordered his team to carry the stiffs outside to preserve them. And the only way out of a mostly-underground base is through airlocks on the upper levels.

D’Angelo had sealed himself and his team off from the berserk Corporal Armando, but he’d clearly not sealed the entire base.

Even if he had locked all the outer doors, the base had started life as a ship... Spaceships’ airlocks have manual overrides in case of a ship-wide power-failure.

A third flight of stairs, and as I approached the top, Armando was five metres behind me and moving at twice my speed.

I dropped, planted my hands on the top step and kicked back with both feet.

I got lucky, I admit that. My left heel smashed into Armando’s face and he stumbled backwards, his grace stripped away by his sheer fury.

He fell, but I didn’t have the luxury of watching him tumble. I scrambled to my feet and kept going.

And there, to my left, I saw it: the inner door of an airlock large enough to take a family car. Piled up in front of it was the base’s former crew. About two-thirds of them were in body bags, but clearly they’d exhausted the supply; around a dozen were crudely wrapped in blankets bound with electricians’ tape.

At the left side of the door was a large, clearly-signposted recess, and in that recess was a solid, red-painted lever.

I made a dive for the lever and grabbed it just as Corporal Armando’s hands locked around my right ankle.

I slammed the lever down, and the airlock’s inner door instantly dropped down into its cavity in the floor as Armando dragged me away.

Earlier, Vine had told me that he wasn’t superhuman. Now, I wasn’t so sure. His powerful fingers felt like they were going to crush my ankle.

But that feeling didn’t last long. In fact, I barely had time to register it before Armando—still holding on with his left hand—ploughed his right fist hard into my stomach.

The impact jerked my hand free of the lever and I crashed to the floor, but Armando still hadn’t let go. He single-handedly heaved me up and swung me by my leg, bringing my face down to his rapidly-moving foot. There was nothing I could do to avoid it.

His boot hit my forehead with enough force that for a moment I thought my neck was going to snap.

Growing desperate, I flailed around with my left foot and by chance more than anything else I managed to hit him in the side of his neck with my heel. That staggered him for a second, long enough for me to get my right hand behind his left knee. I pulled, and he buckled.

I squirmed free, scrabbling my way across the floor towards the airlock. Ten metres to the second lever, the one that would open the outer door.

And Armando crashed into me again, his shoulder slamming into the small of my back. We tumbled to the floor, skidded a little further into the airlock, but now he was grabbing, punching, kicking. He slashed at my face with clawed fingers and ripped away one of the prosthetic pieces of my cybernetic breathing apparatus. The piece had been bonded to my skin and it tore off a chunk, but, worse, I could feel the ends of tubes scraping the inside of my lungs.

There was no way I could beat him. I knew that now. Armando was too strong, too fast. And you can’t reason with an enemy who’s in the thrall of a berserker rage.

Then another blow slammed into my throat and I felt my voicebox pop out, heard it clatter wetly across the floor.

And I saw a possible way out.

If you can’t outfight your enemy, and you can’t outrun them, and you’ve got nothing else to hand... Purge your sinus filters right into their face.

It’s a simple process, something that Wightman and I and the other mods did every day. You remove your voicebox, hit the switch on the cybernetic implant under your right ear, and whoosh. Or ‘splash,’ if you prefer.

Our sinus implants don’t produce a lot of artificial snot, but it’s pretty nasty stuff. Sticky, stringy, laced with dust and dirt and sand and specks of blood.

I triggered mine and it gushed out, hit Corporal John Armando square in the face.

He flinched, squirmed away to try and clean it.

And I jumped up and grabbed the outer door’s manual lever.

If we’d been in space, the air would have been blown out of the base, but on the surface of Titan the air pressure is actually greater than that on Earth—and in the base—so instead, Titan’s atmosphere rushed in.

I’d planned for that, of course. It wasn’t the air pressure that I’d needed. It was the cold.

I had to cover up the hole in my throat while I raced after my voicebox, but that only took a few seconds.

And in those few seconds, Corporal Armando collapsed shuddering to the floor and passed out. His polymer-laced skin shielded him from the cold, but his lungs were still human: ice forming inside your lungs is not a nice feeling.

I closed the airlock door again, gave Armando a few hard kicks just to be sure he wasn’t faking, then allowed myself a minute to sit down and rest. I mean, it had been a long day. And it wasn’t over.