Xantoverse Shadowkill (2 page)

Still, waiting around to engage in combat would be suicide.

She stepped over the body, keeping the pillar between her and the encroaching hunters and climbed, slowly and deliberately so as to make as little noise as possible. One thing in her favor was that although the kronacs possessed many abilities, their hearing wasn’t one of them, having evolved to make out their strange whistling and clicking language at the higher frequencies. Lower bass tones didn’t register with them half as well.

Up and up, Kina climbed until she arrived at the gantry. A metal railing attached the gantry to the pillar with a plate and heavy bolts. She threw he leg over and straddled the railing while she got her breath back and waiting for her fingers and toes to regain feeling.

Reaper was rounding the generator below. He’d see the body any moment.

Chang had doubled back, having realized her location due to the ruse.

Not wasting any time, she threw her other leg over and carefully placed her weight on to the gantry’s surface. Like the rest of this old engineering place, the metal had decayed and rusted. It creaked beneath her weight despite her care.

Reaper didn’t notice, but Chang looked up, trying to find the source of the noise. The cavernous ceiling of the plant helped mask the location, thankfully.

A high-pitched whistle and the sound of duel sickles scraping against each other told her Reaper had found the body.

The game was on.

She ran down the gantry as three consecutive shotgun blasts blew out the surface just inches behind her footsteps.

No voices came—they didn’t need to talk with the telepathic link.

Freck, this wasn’t go well.

She reached the end, but instead of climbing down the spiral staircase, which would be assured death, she clambered over the side and climbed another pillar and onto the ceiling beams. Squeezing up, she just managed to get inside the half-meter crawl space. Dragging herself across on her knees and elbows, she reached the centre of the plant and stopped for a quick look. Both Reaper and Chang had taken up positions within the shadows of the far edges and were moving forward, their weapons aimed up and to the left.

Kina carried on crawling. The sweat started to drip from her forehead and dampened the back of her nanoweave suit. She reached the other side of the plant and stopped.

There’s no way she could get all the way down from here without them spotting her, and she couldn’t reach to the central beam that ran lengthways down the plant. There was only the right-hand gantry or to turn back.

Neither option appealed.

Time for a distraction.

Kina climbed down from the beam until her feet hovered over the gantry railing. She eased herself down and crouched into the corner, above the staircase. Reaper moved forward with purpose. Chang lurked somewhere below the mezzanine level.

As she reached behind her to remove the shotgun, a hand shot out of the darkness and smacked into the side of her face, knocking her down the staircase. She dropped the weapon and reached out to grab an upright, stopping her fall.

Above her, a human male, yelled to the others and jumped forward ready to stomp her into the steps. She let go of the upright and tumbled legs-over-head backward down the staircase until she rolled out on the plant floor.

Her head and shoulders throbbed with pain, but she tensed her muscles and got ready to move. The shotgun clattered next to her, having been kicked by the on-rushing male.

Her night-vision goggles had been lost in the fall.

But she didn’t need them to see the large man reaching down for the crude weapon. Kina flipped up on to her feet and flashed out a kick, catching the man square in the ribs. He sucked in a breath and fell back against the staircase. In one fluid movement, Kina pulled the daggers from her belt and sliced him across the throat and the belly, spilling his internal organs to the floor.

A pistol fired from her right. The round ricocheted off the steel just inches from her head. She backflipped into the shadows beneath the gantry as Reaper’s auto-shotgun pealed out a four-round volley, each shot slamming into the wall behind her, sending up a cloud of rust and debris.

Using it for cover, Kina dashed toward the heavy steel door and tried the handle. No luck. She checked the control panel and realized the wires had been pulled out. That gave her an idea—if she has enough time.

She reached into the control panel and felt around for the mechanism. Over the years, she’d done her fair share of breaking and entering hulks with Tairon Cauder. If she could just… wait, the door mechanism was melted. It was smooth to the touch.

Another explosion erupted from behind her. They were firing blind while the dust settled. One bullet grazed against her leg, slicing through the nanoweave fabric and making her shudder and wince with the burning pain.

Heavy footsteps of the kronac pounded nearer—as did the maniacal laughing of Chang as they sought to trap her.

Frek!

She ran her hands around the wires hoping to find some contacts left—but wait, the power core was good, the transformer still warm … of course!

Kina grabbed the insulated part of the severed cable and jammed it against the contacts on the power transformer. With her free hand she pulled the power lever—not for the door, but for the …

With a stuttering flash, the overhead algae lights bloomed bright, dousing the plant in bright yellow light. Kina squinted against the sudden change and spun round, drawing her blades.

In front of her, both Reaper and Chang were fumbling for their night-vision apparatus, the extreme contrast of light blinding them. Not taking any more chances, Kina darted forward, clenching her jaw against the pain in her leg, and buried one of the daggers directly into Chang’s chest, piercing his heart. He dropped the shock-stick with the fall.

Kina picked it up and threw it like a spear into Reaper’s back.

It struck true. The kronac’s four arms tensed outward. He dropped the auto-shotgun and fell forward as he tried to reach behind him to remove the shock-stick. It wouldn’t have enough charge to hold the massive creature for long.

In her focused frenzy, when instinct took over from thought, she leaped forward onto the kronac’s back and raised the dagger ready to bring it down into the back of his head to sever his brain stem.

“Stop!” a voice boomed, knocking Kina out of her focused state.

“That’s enough,” a second voice followed.

Dzagnev and Lanat.

Kina stepped off the kronac and spun round to find the human Wraiths but she couldn’t see them.

“That means you too, Reaper,” Lanat said with her husky, seductive voice.

Kina’s heart pounded against her chest. The wound in her leg throbbed and her hands shook from the frenzy of survival. She staggered away to lean against the staircase. As she looked up she saw the Wraiths.

They were hanging from nanoweave ropes in the middle of the ceiling. Together, they leaned forward and rappelled to the floor in a single graceful moment. Unclipping from the ropes, they stepped forward and assessed the carnage. They wore their special form-fitting outfits that gave them incredible concealment. Embedded nano-particles, powered by their body heat, changed color to match their surroundings.

Kina thought about protesting that she should have had such equipment too, but decided to keep her mouth shut. She was so close, she didn’t want to blow it now. Not to mention that her body was still recovering from the exertion and it was too much to argue.

Lanat, with her long auburn hair tied back into pony tail, reached down and removed the shock-stick from the kronac. She tossed it aside and allowed the hunter to stand. Lanat whistled in his language, telling him his role was over. He inclined his large, scaly lizard head in understanding. He shot Kina a look that was part hate and part admiration. He stepped away from the Wraiths and waited.

Dzagnev approached Kina. Like Lanat’s, his eyes were so dark it was hard to tell where the pupils finished and the irises started—genetic modification by the Penumbra’s surgeons. It gave them incredible vision across a multitude of spectrums. They would have seen everything that happened.

“You did—reasonably well,” he said in that low, gravely voice of his.

Kina balked inwardly at the superior tone and lessening of her achievements. She’d taken out three human bounty hunters and was a single second away from ending Reaper’s one hundred year reign of terror. Reasonable didn’t cut it.

But again, her inner voice told her to shut the frek up and wait.

“Here,” the Wraith said to Reaper as he tossed him a small pouch.

Reaper snatched it out of the air with one of his arms, weighed it, and did his species’ version of a smile. He blinked his black eyes and whistled his thanks. With that, he scrambled up the left most pillar until he came to the ceiling. He smashed the butt of one of his sickles against a ceiling panel, exposing an exit into a dark level above.

Sonofabitch
. Sneaky bounty hunter is sneaky.

Kina filed away the location of this panel for future reference if she ever needed to hide out here in the future. Lanat joined Dzagnev. They both stared at her.

Fed up with waiting, and finally getting her breath back, Kina spoke. “Is… this done? I mean, I passed, right? I survived.”

“No,” Lanat said, resting one hand on her hips. Her fingernails were long and sharpened, strengthened with graphene fibre to provide capable melee weapons. She tapped them lazily against her body. Kina waited for her to expand on her point. “The kronac would have taken you out if we hadn’t stopped proceedings.”

The word bullshit formed on Kina’s lips, but Dzagnev stopped her.

“He wasn’t reaching for the shock-stick, Kina, he was reaching for his detonation device.”

“We thought it better you both survive,” Lanat added.

Kina slumped to her haunches and dropped her head.

She had failed.

She didn’t even bother to check, despite the MAD—Mutually Assured Destruction—devices being common among the more brutal bounty hunters on
Haven
.

How could she forget?

“It was the battle frenzy,” Dzagnev said as though reading her mind. “You got too far into it. Lost objectivity. Wraith’s have to remain passionless throughout.”

“I know,” Kina said. “I didn’t learn well enough. I don’t deserve this.”

Just as she was considering going back to work in the farm levels doing menial and deadly work maintaining the ancient and often-malfunctioning machinery, Lanat approached her and handed a piece of paper rolled up into a scroll.

“There’s still a chance for you,” she said.

CHAPTER 2

Failure did not come easily to Kina
. The oversight of the MAD device had nearly ended not just her career prospects, but her life. She walked through the oil and blood stained corridors of Haven, clutching the paper scroll on which was scrawled the name of the contract, fuming at her stupidity.

She placed the paper inside her solan-leather jacket and zipped it up. The jacket extended below her hips, concealing her weapons. She didn’t want any undue attention.

Weaving her way through a line of eager Havenites, mostly of the human variety, dashing busily from one level to another on business of both the legit and shady sides, Kina ducked her head down and assumed the hunched aspect of a usual downtrodden member of the station.

Attention did not befit a future Wraith, and to be found holding paper would have her ejected out of an airlock by a Drift—the walking shrub-like creatures that ruled over the Great Library as the Scholars Guild. To say they had a ‘thing’ for a paper was the biggest understatement in the entire system.

A particularly loud-mouthed and obnoxious member of the Blackmarks—a two-bit criminal organization made up of the lowest of the low when it came to crime syndicates on the station—bustled his way though the throng of Havenites, pushing and bellowing at the old and infirm. Kina’s hands moved to the bottom of her jacket, ready to pull her blades, but she resisted the temptation and remembered her status. She turned away. She was no longer the Kina who dealt with scum like that whenever she came across them. She was on Wraith business, which was too important to be derailed.

She waited for the line of people, including the gangster, to pass by, all the while she keeping her head low and her eyes on the middle-distance. A few more steps and she left the corridor, walking into a wider area. The steel walls were no different. They wore the Haven patina of blood, grease and rust.

While Kina made her way across this landing area to the operator-less elevator, she wondered what had happened to those who originally built the station. The Drifts had their ideas, but kept them to themselves. Rumors were it was the Xantonians, others suggested it had come through into Hollow Space like all other craft here—sucked in via hyperspace. Kina didn’t buy that.

Though she didn’t really know what to believe. Although she was born and raised on the station, she never felt like it was her home. The place just had an… alien feel to it. Mostly due to the number of new species and arrivals that constantly flowed in after their ships jumped into, and got trapped within, Hollow Space.

Such a turnover never made the place feel settled.

Kina got into the elevator, sliding the door shut behind her. There were only two such elevators on the station—the others all had operators within to work the grav-plates that lifted or lowered the cars.

Where she was going, she would prefer to work it herself, knowing that Miriam Cauder, aka, the Red Cauder, head of Cauder Industries and one of
Haven’s
most notorious and feared gang bosses—not that you would guess that upon looking at her leather-covered rotund figure—had ears working for her all through the two-hundred plus levels of the station.

Short of working her way up through the dark levels, which would only bring added risk, given the creatures and nefarious dealings that went on in those uncharted places, Kina had little choice but to be as invisible as possible.