When the drive didn’t detonate, Tessa hardly noticed. Laying curled up next to Izzy, head on her dead lover’s chest, her eyes stared blank, almost catatonic, peering endlessly into the writhing dimness of twisting, corrupted corridors. One by one, lights blinked out, shattered or sputtered to darkness, and as she watched them, she waited silently, almost meditatively for death to come and claim her. Uniform matted with blood, each breath slower, shallower, each coming further apart, she too looked like a corpse, felt like a corpse. Just another casualty in this bloody war. When the clicks and chitters of another Cygnan echoed nearby, vibrating eerily though the darkness, she didn’t even flinch, didn’t care, just waited, only dimly wondering if it would notice, if it would pass her by or mercifully kill her.
Once, she realized, being trapped alone and unarmed in the darkness with a Cygnan would have terrified her, would have put a shock into every hair that could prickle– but now there was nothing, only the trace of an expectant tightening that moved somewhere in the center of her sluggish heart. The dead do not feel fear; they are beyond it. Eyes blinked once, slow, a wet sliding that was more dim reflex than response. Come, end it.
Set me free.
She could hear the blueskin moving, clattering, its angular-toed feet padding across mottled deck plating like the paws of a stalking tiger, but in the darkness it was a specter, as invisible to her eyes as a rifle in a hunting blind. Somewhere in that unbreachable night, the clicking intensified suddenly, dipped, then rose on a series of spine-tingling alterations and stopped again just as abruptly. Traces of fear rose like tendrils of mist within the vault of Tessa’s chest, anticipation mixed with the hesitation of suicide, of knowing that death, real, unavoidable death, could come at any moment, any second– and then a half-shape moved in the darkness, shifted close, so close. Terror reached up to seize Tessa’s heart, and for a moment she thought the twitches, the shakes and tenseness playing across her body might give her away, might be all the blueskin would need to notice her, to pounce on her...
And in that moment, as the large, flat foot of the Cygnan rose out of the darkness and pressed into the floor less than a foot from her face, spreading out paw like, she realized that there was a part of her that did not want to die, a strong part, a part that had seized her heart suddenly, her soul, and was growing stronger with each passing moment. She swallowed reflexively, fought back the urge to run, to move at all. Far above her, something stirred the air, moved spiderlike– and then it was gone, shapes and feet disappearing back into the darkness. Tessa blinked reflexively, hands tightening against Izzy’s uniform, against cold and hardening flesh.
Less than a breath passed before the walls suddenly came to life, flared brilliant with an iridescent violet light that broke from every vein and vessel embedding itself in the wall like some bioluminescent cancer, blinding her with a brightness she couldn’t see, a brilliance of a frequency beyond the range of the human eye that carried a certain subtle vibration with it which seemed to permeate everything. A single scissored hand hung suspended at the end of a spindly limb, silhouetted as it reached toward the ceiling with appendages spread, moving almost as if pulling at something, calling the light and sound into being– and then, slowly, methodically and with all the grace of a coiling snake, the limb descended again, meshed back into the breathing, shifting mass of appendages, became one of the many, featureless and common as the creature scuttled and padded across the deck, picking hesitantly at a larger, almost sickly looking vein that would not glow.
For what felt like an eternity, she watched the thing with wide, terrified eyes, afraid to move, knowing she had to do something, anything. The urge to run rose up in her chest, pulled at her, then fell away again repressed. A battle of emotions lit like fire in her heart, burning at her, pulling and pushing her urges, her plans, creating ideas and cancelling them out just as quickly. All the while, the creature tinkered with the veins, worked with what she assumed was its back to her. There were no eyes, no sensory organs that she could see, but even when she twisted, breathed, hands moving in small, unconscious movements, it did not react, did not turn or pounce on her.
And then she realized suddenly that there were no spheres, none of the viscous chrome orbs hanging inexplicably in the air that she had seen before, that had turned to weapons and shields to rip and rend or block the shots of her stunner. Fear turned to curiosity, passed into a steely strength, picked up a slow, thin edge of anger, of hate and anxiety. The thing was here, now– she had the element of surprise, and for the moment, it seemed totally defenseless. If death was to come, then she would choose to meet it on her own terms, to avenge Izzy and leave one less Blueskin for the clean-up crews to deal with. She swallowed, one hand knotting into a shaky fist– all she needed was a weapon.
Hang on, Izzy. I won’t be long.
