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Killam Grimes uttered an unbroken stream of expletives with each excruciating breath.
Allowing Jericho to distract him was a mistake. The sort of stupid mistake that only amateurs and idiots made. Something about that blue fool just got under his skin, and Grimes had let his antipathy cloud his judgment. His ribs throbbed, and his lungs burned. Jericho had broken something inside his body, but not bad enough to put him down. The price of his stupidity was pain, it seemed. In this, he had been fortunate.
At least the unrest in the Underworld had finally provided him with the cover he needed to make his way out. He did not know how long he could survive on the icy surface, but he suspected a call to Fleming would get him rid of the package with a ride to one of the other spaceports soon enough. Getting to the main lift offered no challenge thanks to the roiling din of the atrium’s current state of excitement. Getting out proved much more difficult. The lift would not budge, though he had expected as much considering the state of things. The activation panel did not display the platform’s position, nor did it indicate the time to expect the next transit. Instead, it flashed a warning in bright red letters instructing all passengers to remain clear of the doors until the current emergency passed.
The inconvenience represented yet another annoying obstacle on his path, though Grimes forced himself to remain clam in the face of it. He knew the lift could not stay locked out forever. A riot was about to kick off, and the Sword Brothers would require reinforcements to put it down. If Cantonino wanted to play chicken with the stability of the population at stake, Grimes did not mind. He had patience to spare. Sooner or later, more Knights would come down, or Inquisitors would go up. Both outcomes worked for him.
He found a vantage point where he could see the atrium and the lift at once. Wedging his body between a recycler chute and a vehicle charging block, Grimes pulled his hood over his head and sat down to wait. Once settled, he tried to find mushin. He needed the calm more than ever. His thoughts swirled with competing questions and powerful urges. As usual, mushin remained no more than a fond memory. He wondered if it had ever been real to begin with, or just another trick played on him by those who needed his skills. Zanshin betrayed him as well, and this came as an unwelcome surprise. Every breath reminded him that his focus on the goal was not so inviolate as he thought it should be. Why did he bother to talk to Jericho? What purpose did taunting a dying man serve, other than to distract him from the mission? Grimes felt his neck cramp and forced his jaw to relax. His brain refused to focus, no matter what else he did.
I am losing my mind.
The internal rebuke hurt like the dull ache of an old bruise, and it brought a familiar enemy with it. Grimes struggled to suppress the creeping, soaking, all-encompassing fear that he was no more than a mindless killing machine, devoid of purpose or a will of his own. Grimes always killed for a reason. Anything else was madness, and Grimes refused to be mad. He hoped he was not mad, though niggling suspicions lingered. The need for detachment returned with a vengeance. He had to disconnect from these invading thoughts, or they would render him useless. He chased the clarity of the candle in the void as he had been taught, and again failed to find it. His mental discipline, always the bulwark against doubt and fear, suddenly felt weak and porous. All the old fears streaked across his thoughts with unstoppable alacrity and frequency. They struck at angles, each wearing its own form and shape yet all insistent upon one terrifying message.
I am insane.
Grimes did not kill with purpose, and deep beneath his years of training and internalized lies he had always known one disheartening truth. Grimes killed because he wanted to. Because he was good at it. Because he liked it. He was a monster, and no quantity of self-delusion or self-righteous posturing would ever change that.
His eyes darted across the atrium. He saw faces filled with anger and fear. He saw people raging against the lies they were told, and a legion of injustices suffered. He hated these helpless idiots, this shambling horde of powerless children. They suffered no more than their weakness warranted, yet they bleated and moaned like sheep over their pitiful state. If he killed every pathetic one of them, Grimes knew he would feel nothing but contempt for their corpses.
He hated Jericho even more. The man wasted his life in service to people who thought less of him than they did garbage. He never questioned his place. Never wavered in his duty. Grimes felt the disgust rise in his throat, tasted bile. Jericho should have abandoned that cause as soon as he learned the truth, just as Grimes had abandoned the Red Hats. Still the idiot chose death, and Grimes despised him for it. It was not his way to be envious of anyone, but Jericho’s faith mocked Grimes. Leaving the Red Hats left Grimes a confused murderer, wandering space in a fruitless cycle of hunting and killing. Masking his murderlust with a thin veneer of purpose did not make Grimes righteous. He was still the same murderer he had always been, and damn that armored buffoon for pointing it out.
Jericho’s final insult, far worse than the broken ribs, was that Grimes felt nothing when the Knight died. No elation, no sense of satisfaction, certainly not the heady rush of near-sexual joy at the moment of death. Nothing. The Knight simply died, and Grimes felt nothing.
He shifted his weight, less for comfort and more to simply stop thinking about the collapse of his sanity. The memory core rubbed against his back, the edges digging into his skin and reminding him of what had brought him to this place. He tried to imagine what could be so important that OmniCorp would chase it across known space and endure such hassle. In the end, like so many other things that dictated the movements of his life, Grimes discovered that he did not care. He would complete the mission for no other reason than it gave him opportunities to kill with that oh-so-fragile illusion of righteousness.
The moment Grimes acknowledged the lie of that, mushin returned.
He almost did not recognize it. Crammed into an alcove watching a burgeoning riot, Killam Grimes took a good hard look at the unspeakable thing he had become and found that he just no longer cared to fight it. He wanted to kill, loved to kill. The reason, he now understood, was entirely irrelevant.
It all made sense too. The objectivity of mushin revealed deeper truths, letting him experience his circumstances without judgment. Born into a war, the Red Hats fed him a steady diet of hate and propaganda, then trained him to solve all his problems with violence. Grimes was no different from Jericho, his anger at the Knight little more than a reflection of his own self-loathing. A self-loathing he no longer needed, because the truth freed him from the illusion of righteousness and his addiction to it. Jericho had been right. Grimes was a lie. But then again, everything else is too. He decided to stop lying and get back to killing.
I am a murderer and a psychopath, and I really do not care.
This is what he had always feared. Inside the cocoon of perfect objective peace, he accepted the truth, and doing so banished the fear. He had run from this for too long, run from himself for too long. Letting go of righteousness felt like releasing a ten-ton weight from around his neck.
Grimes considered what to do next. He knew what he wanted to do, and without his illusions to make him reconsider, he decided to do it. Before he could act on the impulse, the crowd in the atrium surged to life, a roar building that hurt his sensitive ears. Grimes scanned the throng with all the various tools in his bionic eyes. He found the source of the uproar and smiled to himself. Those fixers were whipping the crowd into a fury. His sensors picked out the hulking mass of Tankowicz without trouble, and the fool’s height made it easy to find him even without that help. Grimes slipped from his alcove and began to move along the edge of the crowd. Part of his mind told him that the path was foolish and counterproductive. Most of his mind did not care.
For the first time in his entire life, Killam Grimes was doing what he wanted to do for no other reason than the desire itself. A delicious sort of glee colored his thoughts. Without his need for purpose, without his addiction, something else took root in his psyche that satisfied him in ways he did not know were possible. He did not have the right words for it, though he suspected that in this moment Killam Grimes might actually be having fun. He laughed the first real laugh of his entire life. A strange, deranged giggle that must have looked unhinged to anyone who saw it. Still, Grimes did not care. Fun was even better than purpose.
Mindy and her assassin’s instincts presented the largest challenge. He assumed the ludicrous helmet Tankowicz wore had sensors as well. Ribiero and Richardson he did not worry too much about. By the time they noticed his presence it would be too late to do anything about it.
He did not approach directly. He moved in a wide semicircle, hiding deep within the mass of angry people, until he was behind them. As a unit they moved out of the atrium and into the outer concourse. From a safe distance he watched them enter a maintenance chase. He allowed them a few minutes to clear the door and then slipped through himself. He did not like the idea of trying his luck in the narrow tunnel. He had a specific target in mind, and fighting his way through all the fixers offered nothing but the certainty of failure and death. When they slipped into a larger area, he moved back to the concourse door and posted himself behind some piece of equipment he did not recognize. It was large enough to hide his whole body and within ten yards of the door. This would be perfect as long as they came back the way they entered. Otherwise, he would pick up the stalk and try again. His plan required perfection of timing and focus. The Balisong is a hidden blade, he told himself. He would strike from the darkness, then fade back into it. A single thrust was all it would take. A thrust, a dodge, and then disappear into the shadows.
He liked this spot. The doorway would funnel the group and separate the target from help. The distance between the kill zone and his hiding place presented no challenge for his new body. The concourse split into several potential escape routes nearby, as well. Everything was perfect.
Mere minutes later, his ears pricked up at the distant sound of what he knew had to be the heavy footsteps of the big cyborg. His prey approached the exact spot he wanted them to. The giggle returned, and Grimes pressed hand over his mouth to suppress it. Then he took a deep breath, drew his blade, and waited.
The first through the door was Mindy. Grimes held his breath. If anyone had the skills to detect his presence, it would be her. His luck held, and she passed without noticing him. Next came the giant, who needed several seconds to wedge his body through the opening. After that, the Ribiero woman appeared, looking tight and agitated. She stepped through on light feet and one hand on her pistol butt. Grimes could not help but smile. This was going perfectly to plan.
Finally, Richardson emerged. He looked pale and tense, stepping across the threshold as if the floor beyond might fall away beneath his weight. The fool had no head for combat missions. He had no place in the field, no place in the universe. Grimes intended to correct that.
The killer oozed from his hiding spot and threw himself toward the target. Time slowed, and a rush like no other filled his body with a fierce energy. Of all his foes, of all the men and women he had killed, Killam Grimes had only ever truly hated one of them. Manuel Richardson ruined everything. The stupid, faithless, naïve brat set into motion all the events leading to the deconstruction of Grimes’s sanity, and now the boy would pay. This was his moment.
The hilt of his dagger hummed against the skin of his palm, vibrating softly and radiating gentle warmth. The edge glowed orange, the tip nearly white-hot. Grimes extended his arm, thrusting forward between heartbeats. It was all he could do to stifle his cry of elation when his dagger gobbled the distance between predator and prey in a single hungry gulp.
And missed.
Things happened too quickly for even his augmented reflexes. His blade passed well to the left of the target, knocked offline by some unseen force. Grimes planted a foot to halt his charge. His weight transferred to the lead leg, hips torqued, and the dagger arced back to his right in a horizontal slash. It missed again, deflected once more. Grimes saw the issue this time and snarled an expletive. The damned Ribiero woman stood between him and Richardson wearing a tight frown. Grimes thrust at her chest, knowing full well this was his last chance to score any kind of hit. As in their last duel, her speed beggared his. She slipped the thrust with a few inches to spare and fired her pistol.
Grimes was already fleeing, so her shot missed. He threw himself toward the wall, planted one foot on it, and launched himself back and away in a graceful aerial cartwheel. He heard and felt the flechettes impacting all around him. None struck flesh, and he juked again. He spun in the air, using the rotation to assess his surroundings and select the best escape route. He picked out Tankowicz moving to intercept his landing, found Mindy cutting off one path through a nearby intersection, and noted the Ribiero woman’s lightning-fast reload of her pistol. When his foot touched the floor, he spun again, dodging a blow from Tankowicz. He used the idiot’s bulk as cover from the woman’s shooting and retreated across the concourse. Incoming flechettes forced him to abandon the first branching hall, so he rolled across the deck and chose another. Flechettes followed him with preternatural speed and accuracy, denying him the time he needed to react rationally. He moved on instinct and experience, trusting zanshin to guide his efforts and keep him alive.
He dove across the corridor again, hitting the deck with his hands and vaulting over the arms of Tankowicz who had once again lunged for him. The giant clipped Grimes with a clubbing forearm in passing. This set the pain in his ribs on fire, but it also sent him skidding toward the welcome sight of an intersection and the connecting corridor. Grimes rolled as he hit, letting the momentum bring him closer to escape. Just as he rose to his feet, the crack of thunder deafened his bionic ears and something struck him hard in the guts. Grimes stumbled off course and crashed into a wall, though he pressed away in time to dodge two flechettes. Each drove a neat hole into the metal where his body had been microseconds before. He turned back toward the enemy and found the gaping maw of Richardson’s primitive shotgun in his face.
“Dodge this,” the boy growled.
Everything went black.
––––––––
FAR ABOVE THE CHAOS, on the bridge of the Maid of Orleans, an icon blinking on a viewscreen winked out. Alexander Fleming scowled and tapped at that screen. His finger jabbed the panel once, twice, three times to no avail.
“If you damage that terminal, I’m going to invoice you for the repairs,” Sloane remarked, dry as a desert.
As if to spite her, Fleming struck the console with his fist. He then winced at the lance of pain his moment of pique earned him. “What the fuck is happening down there!”
Sloane scowled her disapproval. “Do we have a fix on Grimes?”
“We did, but it just went dead. I don’t know why, but the goddamn Inquisition locked everything down. At the moment we have nothing!”
“We are being fucked with,” Sloane said.
“You think?” Fleming’s sarcastic tone did not amuse the captain, but he was well beyond caring.
“I suspect your operative is dead or captured, Alex.”
Fleming struggled to control his anger. “It’s starting to look that way, yes.”
“Sir! Exit Wound is moving.” Sloane and Fleming looked up as one. The Tac officer pointed to the main screen and repeated, “She’s moving, sir.”
“Where?” Sloane’s tone made it clear that she expected a correct answer.
“Looks like, ah... I think she’s landing, sir.”
Fleming looked to Sloane, his eyes wide. “What the fuck does that mean?”
“It means they received clearance from Gethsemane to land their ship. It means we’ve lost,” Sloane said. “This round, at least.”
“Stop them!” Fleming sounded shrill. “Blow them out of the sky!”
“You want me to fire on them while landing?”
Fleming replied, “Why not?”
“If I take military action against a non-aggressive vessel with landing clearance while it is in sovereign airspace, what do you suppose will happen?”
“Dammit!” Fleming shouted. “Can we get them coming out?”
Sloane answered with a raised eyebrow. “Once they are clear of the airspace, Fischer is going to hit maximum acceleration on that thing. I might get two shots off with particle beams at a tiny target moving at 50-G. It won’t do shit, Alex.”
Fleming slumped in his chair. “Dammit.” He rubbed his face with his hands. “Okay. We know where they’re going to go, at least. I didn’t want to do it this way, but I guess there’s no helping that now. How long until they make Earth?”
“In that thing?” Sloane thought for a moment. “Five days to the gate, one day at Enterprise for refit and refuel, then less than a day back to Earth.”
“One week is not a lot of time. But we’ll make it work, I guess.”
“You have a backup plan?” Sloane asked.
“More of an emergency plan,” he said. “But I think we are there. When Tankowicz returns to Dockside, he is going to find things very different than when he left. If you’ll excuse me, I need to make some calls.”
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