Assassin's Hunger (22 page)

Hating too the reminder that she was only half human.

It took her a long moment to run the analysis, since it hadn’t been done in awhile. Other than the expected decay of unmaintained status parameters and the warning messages of data packets not sent or received, everything appeared to be operating within standard margins.

Until she’d joined the
Asphodel
. The incursion of unknown code matching itself to her native security encryption was so subtle she hadn’t noticed at the time, wouldn’t have noticed it even if she’d been running her daily logs. Only now, suspicious, did she see it.

Her vision darkened as she tracked the accelerated progress of the mal code, comparing it to her chronometer of recent events.

At the canyon pool. In the shower. Both places with water, alien to Khamaseen.

Both places with Eril, an enemy to her.

Fury blasted through her, hot and stinging as the sand that whirled up with the first shriek of the storm. But she made no sound as she punched in the override sequence and returned to the runabout.

She powered the vehicle through the portal, just squeezing between the doors, as the sandstorm slammed into the wall.

The portal creaked and groaned against the weight of wind and electromagnetic dust, but she didn’t look back as she drove toward the hangar. She couldn’t let the shriving scour her now, not when she didn’t know what malicious code had been added to her. What would be left when she blanked her Hermitaj programming? Who would she be?

What had Eril made her?

Half blinded, she almost missed the darkened hangar, and she barely steered between the scrap in the yard without crashing. Had the static dust interfered with her ocular implant? Had finding the mal code triggered some breakdown?

She stopped the runabout in the middle of the hangar and bowed her head to touch her clouded eyes.

They were wet. Her pulse stuttered in alarm. But when she held her hands in front of her, her fingers weren’t bloody. Instead, they glistened with a clear liquid.

Tears. The word came to her, not from her onboard database which had no entry for the term, but from an older memory, from a time she’d hoped would be laid bare by the shriving winds to reveal who she’d been.

Mama had said she couldn’t have pixberries for breakfast.

“But the season is too short, Mama! We should eat them all day, every day, before they’re gone!”

“There will be more, later. I promise.” A sob, as if her mother too knew time was short. “They’ll wait for you, my sweet girl.”

“But I want them now!” The taste of salty water at the corners of her mouth was a nasty contrast to the sweet-tartness she desired. But worse than the denial of the treat was the awareness that something else was amiss. It wasn’t just the berries that were missing. Other things had begun to disappear. First her father, then Mama’s pretty sparkles that Daddy said made her eyes light up, then her two older brothers’ best toys, then their big home near the fields when they moved to a cramped space high in a building with so many others who watched her with eyes that did not sparkle, not ever.

“No tears, sweet child. Do you want your baby sister to cry?”

She didn’t, not when she knew the little one would gasp and turn blue if she breathed too hard. So she let her mother wipe her face.

“Now when the men come, no tears for them either, do you hear? You have to be strong. They want tough, not tears.”

Shaxi couldn’t nod or shake her head, not with her face clasped so tightly between her mother’s palms. “I’m tough.”

“Oh, sweet, sweet child, I know. I know you are. And that’s all that’s saving us.”

“No tears, Mama. I’ll wait for next year’s pix.”

Shaxi slumped over in the runabout. The throttle jammed up under her breastbone until she thought her heart must be punctured. That would explain the ache.

Was that the day her mother had sold her to Hermitaj?

With the memory of tears came another, older memory, of playing rough with her big brothers—something about who would go first jumping off the high wall around the garden—and breaking her arm. They’d begged her not to cry and she’d tried her best, but even though a few tears had leaked through, the medic had said she was a very strong little girl.

Perfect fodder for Hermitaj, apparently.

Even the memory of tears had been lost since then. Until Eril’s codejacking.

No wonder he’d never finished his tattoo. The delicate silver fern was a symbol of unfurling, endless new life. And he was death incarnate.

Stiffening her spine, she sat up, locking the throttle. But the pain in her heart didn’t ease.

She wasn’t sure how she’d untangle the mess of decaying programming and subtle new mal code, but ironically, at least she was safe for the moment, locked in this abandoned port city with the storm bearing down. No one could get to her, and she couldn’t get to anyone else.

She left the runabout, taking her small satchel of belongings with her, including the RTEs and water from the runabout’s stores, and climbed to the observation dome on the top decking of the hangar. On a clear day, the dome would have given a wide view of the valley and incoming sheerships and vehicles. There was even a small vertical hatch for launching hoppers from the belly of the hangar directly into the sky. Hoppers were barely larger than the runabout, although they could sustain low-altitude flight for short distances, which would have been used if Rampakh had ever become a bustling port with a thriving mining operation.

But Rampakh was falling apart. Like she was.

The deck was a sand painting with the wind tracing unreadable, shifting symbols in the ankle-deep drifts. Floodlights had kicked on as the day darkened, casting bleak shadows that washed out every time the ion field overhead sparked with dust. Already the sparks were almost continuous, and Shaxi didn’t see how the protective field could last through the storm. No wonder everyone had left, although Kala said a few hardy souls would take shelter in bunkers beneath the port.

Shaxi wouldn’t be one of them.

Standing at one of the windows, she could feel the hum of the polarization and, beyond that, the storm seeking a way in. She angled her wrist to the light, looking at the small wound, the evidence of Eril’s treachery.

She’d thought she wanted to remember him, the experiences he’d given her. Well, if she couldn’t unravel what he’d done to her, he might be the only thing she remembered. She tensed her jaw. No, if it came to that, she
would
walk out into the storm and let the shriving take it all away.

She wouldn’t be a puppet anymore, not to Hermitaj, not to Eril Morav, not even to her own delusion she could tough out this unfathomable betrayal.
She
would be her own master from now on, to the end.

Withdrawing a utility knife from her satchel, she cut open her inner forearm from elbow to wrist. It pumped blood for a few frantic heartbeats, crimson pouring over her skin and soaking the sleeve of her combat jacket before the implant sent an impulse to close off the severed edges. She wiped away the gore. At least Eril had used a less physically invasive method of accessing the port; maybe she’d thank him. With her hazer set to kill.

If she ever saw him again.

She sent the implant an internal release code—which had always been unbreakable to any but her and Hermitaj, as far as she’d known—and stared down at the inescapable truth of what she was.

She’d had to do an emergency recoding herself once before. The exact mission had been erased from her data, but Hermitaj had left her the experience since it was useful. Her strike team had been cut off from base, conditions had changed, and no new orders had been able to reach them. She’d reassessed, reprogrammed, and sent the new mission parameters to her unit. Because of her changes, most of them had survived.

She hadn’t cried over the ones who were lost, but she’d spoken their designations—since she didn’t know their names—as she torched the corpses with their proprietary Hermitaj tech, and hoped some molecule of ash made it home.

Too bad there would be no one to whisper her name to the stars.

She hooked her tablet directly to her implant port, extracting pure data and prepping the system for a hard reset.

Eril’s mal code had been able to match and infiltrate her encryption, remaining nearly undetectable. Which meant it would be using something similar to her native data patterns to hide itself… There. She’d had no Hermitaj coding for sweet dreams, which is what he’d said to her before touching her with the device, somehow sending her to sleep and making her forget.

Once she had the “flavor” of mal code, she followed its path. It hadn’t gone far, just duplicated the Hermitaj patterns for suggestibility, compliance, and dedication. Whatever orders he sent along that path, she would’ve followed, willingly and completely.

And what were those orders, exactly? She looked for more paths that led to commands like “sleep and sweet dreams”. She found another compulsion that should have induced her to stay on the
Asphodel
.

She remembered how hard it had been to rise from the bed beside him and to walk away. How she’d longed to touch him and wake him and have him touch her again. Because she thought he
wanted her
to stay. Wanted her because he loved her.

As she loved him.

Her stomach heaved at her ignorance. She’d thought there was a link between them, and oh yes, there had been. A mechanical leash and an encoded collar. The link was a one-way lie, and she’d been lying to herself.

She’d wanted a connection so badly, to anyone, to end the silence in her heart, she’d all but put the leash and collar on herself.

The lie should have worked, though. She wasn’t sure why it’d failed, when the sleep command had worked so well. He’d wanted her to stay on the sheership with him, and yet she had gone.

Because she wanted to prove herself a real woman, a woman worthy of the love of a flesh and blood man.

A man who was a liar! And a thief, trying to commandeer the small bit of soul she’d wrestled back from the oblivion where it had been banished.

He did not deserve her, heart or soul, or body. And not her strength.

Seething anger made her hand clench involuntarily, and blood oozed out from the edges of the wound, despite the seal imposed by her implants.

She stared impassively at the gore. Evidence, she supposed, that her programming could be washed away in blood and fury.

He would have no idea what hit him—

She slammed through the coding, relentlessly searching after his purpose. Certainly no one did such a thing to another person—and she
was
a person, no matter what it said on Hermitaj’s charter, approved by countless federations and alliances—without a dire purpose.

She found it, running parallel to the last mission she’d given herself.
Keep the twins safe.

And there was his mission alongside, which he’d stated aloud to her on several occasions, as if he was speaking the truth to her.
Preserve the sheerways.

And in an ugly tangle, like a dark reflection, his mission twisted hers back along itself.

Kill the l’auraly.

Sickened by the loss of the blood and the realization of what she might have done—worse even than what had been done to her all those years ago—she sank to her knees. Her forehead rested against the dome, and the low thrum of the storm reverberated in her, as if her bones had gone hollow, as if she was empty already.

But she refused to let the emptiness win. There was nothing to fill her except what she gave to herself. And she would not let him hurt the girls. She’d given herself the mission of guarding them until they’d left Khamaseen. They’d still had hours of work on the
Asphodel
before they could break atmo. She might have time. To save the girls, to save herself.

She thrust to her feet.

The vibration in the dome was almost subsonic now, and she feared the transparent plysteel would shatter under the force of the shriving storm. Closing the edges of her wound, she slapped a sealant patch over the incision. It would have to hold.
She
had to hold on.

She gritted her teeth, her ears pounding with the near-constant explosions of sparks from the ion field. As she turned for her descent to the runabout, the field overhead stilled.

But the rumbling intensified.

Out of the red-black darkness, a sheership—hull ablaze with electromagnetism—streaked across the sky, thrusters screaming at the sand and shooting out garlands of burning dust behind.

Shaxi raced to the opposite window, following its path, frantic to catch its insignia.

Nothing. Just a blackened bulkhead where its designation should be.

She knew how that felt.

The subsonic rumbling eased as the ship sped away. She ran back to the deck comm panel and summoned up its menus. It was intended to track incoming ships; it should have caught the ship’s ID.

No name. No manifest. Just a notation of class and subtype, surmised from the vid clip as it blew past. But Shaxi didn’t need the confirmation; she already knew what it was.