“Shit,” she grunted. Going with the strike again, falling and rolling. Again an apparent ungainly struggle to her feet.
The monster loomed large above her, its arm raised to club her down. Standing close.
Rebka’s foot lashed out. She saw her foot slide along the program’s maximum impact vector, its force amplified by the metamolecules, which even actively corrected her body motion marginally. Her heel connected perfectly against its ankle. The power behind the strike knocked its legs out from under it, sending it crashing down onto the rumpled unforgiving ice. It immediately started to scramble to its feet.
With the metamolecule armor’s help Rebka beat it up. Just in time to see Angela sprinting up to help. “No,” she yelled, flinging out a hand to keep her mother away. That distraction was all the monster needed.
The kick landed full square at the base of her spine. She actually left the ground to half somersault through the gusting snow.
Ball lightning landed behind the convoy vehicles, detonating into a fountain spume of lightning fronds that soared twenty meters up into the blizzard. With her enhanced senses, Rebka saw the scene in perfect monochrome light.
The monster turning to follow her. Angela still charging forward with her hands extended wide. Elston lumbering on behind, trying to keep the warm pistol level on the monster.
“Stay back, Mother,” she cried, as if that would do any good. She watched in disbelief as Angela pulled her gloves off.
Her e-i was throwing up combat options. Weapons were coming online. She cursed herself for being so slow, for letting emotions interfere with her responses. Without the net gun, capturing the monster wasn’t going to be an option anymore. Survival was what drove her now. She started to rise.
The lightning withered down, spent against the frozen river. Darkness collapsed in on them again. Elston’s muzzle flash was bright in her sensors. Which made the monster turn toward him—and Angela. Those fatal blades swept up. Then Angela was jumping.
Rebka screamed: “No!”
But Angela reached out, and Rebka’s sensors perceived the weirdest pulse of electrical energy surging down her arm.
They worked, the old dark cy-tech weapons. Angela felt the tips surge up through the flesh of her fingertips, as she started to jump, to distract the monster from its brutal assault on her daughter. Ten sharp stabs of pain that she ignored. The monster was turning, its blades stretching out as they repeated their ancient dance. And she reached out to stroke its shoulder once again, but this time going low.
The cells discharged. As before, those twenty years ago, there was a blinding flash, and the monster went staggering back through the icy darkness. But this time there was something wrong, some piece of insulation that hadn’t quite developed correctly. Fire burned down the inside of her left wrist. Stunning her, stalling the scream of agony that was in her throat. Her senses blanked out for a moment and she hit the ground, sprawling helplessly, heart juddering wildly.
Five blades slid down amid the snowflakes. And she couldn’t move.
Elston came hurtling out of the blizzard, shoulder down in the old football tackle. Crunched into the side of the monster, sending them both crashing over together beside Angela. She saw him try to bring his pistol up to the monster’s face. Too slow. Five blades jabbed upward, penetrating his parka and the armor vest below, slicing deep into the abdomen.
“No!”
Angela wailed.
Elston’s face was inches from her. Shock filled his eyes as he drew down a feeble gasp of air. The blades were withdrawn from his body. He shook uncontrollably as he slumped down onto the ice.
Rebka watched in horror as Elston sacrificed himself to deflect the blades from her mother. Then the terrible creature was recovering, pushing the dying colonel to one side, ready to administer the same fatal blow to Angela. Angela who snarled with savage defiance, and brought her weaponized hands up again.
Rebka jumped, effortlessly covering the distance. She landed on both feet directly in front of it, knees bent, fist clenched. Purple and gold kinetic profile projections blossomed in her optic interface as the combat programs ran options. The armor locked into shape as the five-bladed hand came slashing around malevolently. The edges hit her upper shoulder and rebounded, slewing the humanoid shape around, trailing projections like neon contrails. Three opportunities opened for a counterstrike. Rebka punched with her right hand, seeing her fist slide along the combat program’s trajectory. Impact point was perfect, midtorso while it was still regaining equilibrium from its deflected attack. It left the ground to fly backward, thudding down heavily a couple of meters away.
“Enough,” Rebka said coldly. She drew the e-carbine from her waist. Theoretically it could slice through a two-meter column of metalloceramic armor. But Rebka dialed the power down, and fired. A glaring purple-white beam of electrons stabbed out, hitting the monster’s waist. It juddered frantically under the blast. Rebka switched it off. “Don’t like electricity, huh?” She fired again. The monster’s fists and heels began to beat against the ice river. Slim serpents of electron currents writhed furiously around it in a splendorous cage of agonizing illumination; its hide was smoldering from the points where it was grounding out, thin wisps of smoke mingling with the steam fizzing up from the ice. “They want me to keep you alive. I can’t do that if you keep up the aggression.” She switched the e-carbine off again. “What do you say?”
Her e-i reported a link quest from the prone monster, using Bastian North’s identification tag. “I concede your advantage,” he said.
Angela knelt beside Elston and smiled wretchedly at him. “What did you do that for?” she choked. “That was so stupid. I had everything under control.”
He smiled weakly and held her hand, turning it around slowly so he could see her bleeding fingertips with the talons exposed. “Little girl fought off a monster all by herself. Never did believe it.”
“Good stuff, cy-tech. I’m sure you’ve got better today.”
“We have.”
“I’ll remember that for next time.”
“Angela.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
He tried to smile again, but a glob of blood spilled out of his mouth. “You have to see the end of this. I trust you, Angela. The Lord has shown me your true self. You are worthy of His love. Finish this properly. For me.”
“Elston.” Her e-i was questing Coniff, for the others, for help. It reported that a file was being sent to her on a secure link from Elston’s bodymesh.
“I understand now,” he said. “She’s wonderful. A surprise, just like you. You did the right thing.”
“Hold on,” she urged, and squeezed his hand.
A large spurt of blood gushed out of Elston’s mouth. “My Lord is calling. I will wait for you, Angela. We will meet again in His grace.”
“Vance—”
“Ha, first time …”
Angela watched a small smile lift his lips. Then he was staring at something beyond her, an expression of relief and hope filling his pained eyes at the last. In her grid, all his physiological readouts turned red, then bleached down to white. Her head snapped around to the monster, which was standing passively beside Rebka. “You son-of-a-bitch.” She brought her hands up—and fuck the broken insulation.
“He tried to destroy my world, everything I am,” the monster sent down the link.
“You killed him. You killed everyone.” Confronting her nightmare of twenty years was chilling her far more than any blizzard ever could. She wasn’t sure how long she could restrain herself.
“Examine the file he sent you. Examine the genocide weapon you have in the biolab. Tell me then who is evil, who is the murderer.”
“What? What are you talking about?” Angela regarded the urbane monster in dismay as she hugged her hands to her chest to shelter them from the subzero wind. She couldn’t even feel the pain from the talons anymore. Drops of her blood had frozen into lumps around the small tears where they’d punctured her fingertips.
“You were so full of life, Angela. Once. The most delightful human I ever knew; the most human human, despite the deception you were living. Your soul is not something you can disguise. Have you lost that zest? Is it only ever to be the coldhearted who judge me?”
“What the fuck are you?” she bellowed against the blizzard.
The monster’s shape changed—softening.
Angela swayed backward. Of all the things she’d braced herself for, a North in a parka and quilted trousers wasn’t one of them. “You’re not Bastian North,” she said to the thing, forcing herself to believe it. “So what are you?”
“I speak for this world.”
“Zebediah North.”
“I was. For a long time.” And amid the thick snow and treacherous gloaming illumination the humanoid shape lost cohesion, as if the North had only ever been a specter. Angela even doubted her brief memory.
“Yet you couldn’t be,” she told the monster. “Because he was never Barclay North to begin with. You murdered Barclay back at the mansion. So what are you? A different kind of clone?”
“I mirror Barclay North. In one respect I still am him, for I retain his essence. You loved me once, Angela, or so I thought. Even in my rage at what your kind had done to me, I cherished that thought.”
“You hesitated,” she said in astonishment. “That night twenty years ago, when you came out of Bartram’s bedroom, you hesitated. That’s why I survived.”
“Just like humans, I make mistakes. That and you do pack quite a punch. Who knew?”
“Why did you kill them all? The Norths, those poor helpless girls … Why?”
“Why do you kill me? You slash, you burn, you poison; and now you bring a weapon that will destroy all my life on this world.”
“I … didn’t know that.” She told her e-i to open Elston’s file.
Angela went in first. Four carbines were aimed at her as she came out of biolab-1’s door compartment. Jay, Roarke, Omar, and Paresh who were holding them had hyped themselves up on fear and adrenaline. It wasn’t a good combination, not if you were facing that many muzzles, all of which were shaking to some degree.
“Come on, guys, it’s only me,” Angela said as she carefully unwound the scarf from her face. As soon as she came into contact with the cabin’s warm air her frozen blood droplets began to melt, mingling with the ice clinging to her hands. Sensation was creeping back into her extremities, as if she’d been stung by a wasp on each finger.
But they weren’t listening to her, they were looking at the other two figures in the door compartment: Rebka in her metamolecule armor and the hulking Barclay-avatar with its five-bladed hands.
“Get down,” Paresh pleaded desperately.
“Stop it,” she told him. “There’s nothing to fear, this is Rebka and—”
“Who?”
“Madeleine. You know her as Madeleine.”
Rebka’s armor flowed away from her face, and she smiled out stoically. “Hi.”
Paresh kept looking at Angela along the carbine’s barrel. “Down,” he whispered.
“Listen to me,” Angela said slowly. “All of you. Put your weapons down. There is to be no more violence. We agreed to that.”
“It killed Elston,” Jay said. “And you’re part of this, you’re its partner.”
“A part of what?” Angela studied the fear on Jay’s face, and knew she’d never win him over. “Paresh. Omar. Listen to me, the time for killing and weapons is over. We have to salvage this another way, we have to think and act like rational creatures. Now, please put the weapons down. We all know they’re no good against the avatar. The only thing you’ll damage with bullets in here is us and the bulkheads.”
Omar glanced at Paresh for a lead, as she knew he would. She kept eye contact with her devoted puppy boy, smiling encouragement. “It’s me, Paresh,” she said. “I’m telling you this is the only way we’re all going to get out of this. And you know I wouldn’t lie to you. You know that, don’t you? Please. Trust me.” She could see the uncertainty building, his need to believe in her. “It’s me. Okay. Me!”
“What’s going to happen if we put the weapons down?” Paresh asked.
“Corporal!” Jay yelled. “You keep that fucking
thing
covered.”
“Until you have a chance to launch the missiles?” Angela asked sharply. “That’s not going to happen. Not without Elston’s codes.”
“How did you know …”
She gave Paresh an expectant glance. “It’ll be all right. Really it will.”
Paresh let out a long sigh, and raised his weapon, engaging the safety. “Stand down,” he told Omar.
“No,” Jay said.
Paresh put his hand on the barrel of Jay’s carbine and forced it down. “This is over. You and I don’t get to decide this.”
“Thank you,” Angela said. She turned to face the decontam air lock door at the back of the compartment. Her e-i told her it was locked, and not even Elston’s code could open it. She quested a link to Antrinell. “Open it up, please.”
“I always knew you were part of whatever was going on,” Antrinell replied.
“Then you were always wrong. I am not a part of anything. I never have been. Even Elston knew that in the end.”
“Why have you brought that creature here?”
“Because we have to finish this,” she said. “We have to destroy the zero metavirus.”
“That’s the only leverage we have. It’s been trying to get in here since the start, so it must fear the weapon. That’s all we have left to use against it.”
“No, Antrinell, we have our humanity. We can show St. Libra what we really are. That we are mature enough to venture out into the galaxy and take our rightful place in God’s creation.”
“What do you know of God, murderess?”
“I have never killed anyone. And I know what you believe, that life—all life—is a precious gift from God. You don’t really think, do you, that He wants you to kill all the life on this planet?”
“We picked up some of what you were saying out there,” Antrinell said. “We heard what it claimed. It’s part of the planet, the jungle?”
“Yes,” the Barclay-avatar said.
“Then you’re some kind of macro-life, just like the Zanth. You’re not part of God’s creation.”
“I am nothing like the Zanth. I don’t even understand where the Zanth came from. I evolved from true biological life, just as you are evolving.”