Gaya woke to pain and sirens, and a growing sense of satisfaction.
The recovery room was a disaster. Monitors were tipped, displays were shattered, and the IV shunts had been ripped from her neck and arms on both sides. The countertops were nearly bare, their contents smashed and scattered on the ground. A nurse and two guards lay in various unnatural positions on the floor, arms and necks twisted to angles their skeletons wouldn’t permit. There was some blood.
Gaya began to sit up, but the shooting pain in her lower back convinced her otherwise. It wasn’t the pain itself that concerned her, but the worry that she might abort the results of the operation.
Lorry – reliable Lorry – stood over the bed, chest heaving from exertion. “We have to go.” She was still in disguise: her hair straight and black, her eyes sunken and sallow, her cheeks spare. They couldn’t do much for her nose, not without surgery – it was still a cute little button – but her freckles were hidden beneath makeup. They could do even less for her size – at nearly three meters tall and bulked with muscle she filled her worker’s coveralls and nearly the room. It was a wonder she’d managed to infiltrate at all, to find a job that put her in the medical wing of the research facility. Companies like Turnbull Red Weapons Group typically wouldn’t naturalize someone whose genetic stock wasn’t fully human.
“Hurry, or we’ll miss her.” Lorry had taken the batons from the guards – in her hands they looked tiny. Her gloves crinkled as her fists tightened.
Gaya rolled to the side and felt at her back. Beneath the bandage there was ichor and blood, but the semi-implant still clung to her spine, and the lozenge was firmly seated in the implant. “Help me wrap myself so I can run.”
“I’ll carry you.”
“No. You’ll need your hands.” That was true, but it was more true that Gaya wanted to run. Her legs ached for real exertion, not just the treatments of superdermal excitation the doctors had given her the last few weeks. She was free of them now – free of so much more when this job was complete. It was the biggest she’d pulled in a decade, and all that was left was to escape. To run.
Lorry nodded, and together they searched through the drawers until they found a stretch-wrap that would work, once it had been anchored across her belly. There were no clothes for Gaya – only a privacy robe that was too voluminous for quick movement – and there wouldn’t have been time for her to dress anyway.
Lorry opened the door just enough to peer out with one eye, then pushed it open and led Gaya out. The corridor was long and straight, except for the slight uphill curve in both directions. Gaya could count a dozen guards before the corridor curved away, none in better shape than the two inside.
“You did all of this?” Gaya’s brows raised.
“It would have been faster with your help.”
Fly waited for them with a flick in the vacuum hold three levels down. She would never been able to infiltrate the station, not as anything other than a pirate. She wasn’t quite as tall as Lorry, but the pointed ears she refused to have cropped, the slitted eyes, the fangs – they were too inhuman to pass as mere aberration. She would have been lucky only to be laughed at and blackmarked by the hiring officer.
“Get inside,” she hissed. “The whole station is under alarm. The ship got in just before the lockdown – it’s on the southern boom, still tagged as a holiday rental. Here, toss this out and close the door.”
Lorry tossed the canister out before the flick door slid into place, sealing with a sucking sound and a pressure change they could feel in their ears.
Fly nudged the flick back from its tie-off, and the canister outside began to belch thick, oily smoke.
The hold door opened. Guards wearing armor the color of dried blood poured in, and they acknowledged the smoke simply by pulling visors down over their eyes. The pointed excitedly at the flick, raising their slugthrowers to their shoulders to fire, and just as quickly pointing them back to the floor.
Then the canister exploded and everything happened at once. The oily smoke erupted with fire. Several guards flew through the air in strange, spinning arcs. The hold door slammed shut at the pressure change, and the flick bucked up and angled toward the ceiling. The vacuum seal on the outer door cracked, and wisps of still-burning smoke began curling away from the cloud and licking at the outer door.
Fly growled as she stabbed repeatedly at another button on the control panel, then the outer door shifted and flished open in two directions, and the untethered flick tumbled out of the station.
They paid no mind to the guards that followed them out into the vacuum. Fly rescued the tumble and slowed it to a yaw that brought them back along the horizon of the station, where she could maneuver in the radar shadow of the station itself.
Lorry walked up to the flick’s big dish window and pressed up against it. “Well, that went well.” Gaya joined her at the window. Even at the just above-average height of two meters, her body felt tiny beside Lorry’s.
Fly grimaced as she swung the flick through a thruster arc that pulled it around a tower jutting from the base of the boom. “It’s not over yet.”
Lorry ignored the other Brute and glanced down at Gaya. Her brows, dyed black like her hair, arced in concern “So… are you okay? Did it take? I mean..”
Gaya pressed her whole body up against the plastic dish of the window. It was cold, and it felt good against her bare flesh. It was a distraction from the sharp pain in her back. “It’s not over yet.” Her mind turned inward to examine itself, to sort through volumes of memory and artifacts of personality Hello? she called into the caverns of her thoughts. Can you hear me?
A voice echoed back, sounding like her own thoughts. <Who am I?>
