2. Draevik #3
The body takes the step before the trained mind offers input.
The capture frame has sunk its hooks into the base of my spine, and it is running my legs now, deliberate, long-strided, the hunting gait my kind is bred to use in enclosed spaces.
My weight rolls forward through the arch of each foot and settles on the heel without pressure.
My breathing drops into the shallow, economical meter of a predator keeping its chest still enough to avoid any readable rise and fall.
Every part of my attention hooks onto her.
All of it. The combat matrix narrows the cones of my awareness into a single point: the line of her shoulders under the patched pressure suit, the small motion of her hands across the console, and the soft, disciplined sigh of her breath behind the faceplate of her helmet.
The chamber collapses around her. The pod fades from relevance.
The deck falls away from consideration. Virex Prime's lattice reverberates somewhere in the ether of my bond, and I am barely aware of it.
Nothing feels real except the point at the top of the stack, now three meters closer, while the muscles along my flanks hold as still and as ready as the instant before a strike.
The space dividing us collapses with agonizing tension—eight meters, then seven. Despite the massive shift in the chamber's atmosphere and the proximity of my approach, she has not turned to face the entity stalking her.
The thing she has woken has just stepped out of its pod onto the plating of the chamber, and every system in the thing is drilled down to her.
Six meters.
Five.
The bio-synthetic vascular structure along the insides of my forearms palpitates once in a sluggish, deep, blue-black throb, keyed now to her pulse and no longer to mine.
The buried layer in me rings with a dim, stable note of satisfaction that she remains unaware of my presence; my satisfaction stems purely from the approach, the shrinking distance.
The satisfaction is in watching her work the panel that cannot save her while I close the distance one measured step at a time.
Her dark hair is bound in a quick knot at the back of her skull.
The shorter pieces have escaped around her jaw.
The angle conceals the thin scar I cataloged from the corridor feed.
I want to see it. The line of it runs along her cheekbone, impossible to ignore.
I want to know what put it there, and I want to know the identity of whatever put it there to determine if it still draws breath.
If so, I will correct that oversight with a clarity I have not felt about anything in more than a century.
Four meters.
Her drone drifts halfway around her shoulder in a tarrying rotational scan, its floodbeam panning.
Its aperture catches the nearest part of the chamber, sweeps past, continues its arc, and then, with the unmistakable stutter of a damaged unit finally registering the thing it was built to register, it stops.
The drone's floodbeam swings back in a jerky, frantic arc as its primary lens dilates to process the massive silhouette it has finally uncovered.
Its mechanical warble cracks, snapping into a single, thin, urgent electronic cry perfectly positioned behind her shoulder.
I halt my advance, freezing exactly three and a half meters away to let the terrifying realization wash over her.
She remains facing away. The drone’s warning halts her hands on the console; her shoulders go rigid under the patched suit. She pulls a single sharp breath, her entire nervous system suddenly aware of my presence.
Her pulse is in my own chest now. One-forty-one. One-forty-three.
The buried layer inside me reverberates with its deep, unwavering note of approval at the sound.
She begins to turn.
Reluctant. So hesitant. A refusal, even in the last moments, to give the thing behind her the satisfaction of seeing her break.
Her gloved hand leaves the console. Her other hand closes around the grip of the pistol at her thigh.
Her shoulders rotate first. Her helmet beams swing across the chamber, and for one single breath, the twin cones of her light catch the plating of my harness and illuminate the shape of me.
I let her see me.
That is a choice. It is the first choice I make with a fully waking mind since the cold began to lift, and I make it deliberately because the top of my command stack has one item on it and the item is this small warm creature with a pistol in her hand and a scar I have already memorized.
My newly acquired target deserves to see what has come for her.
Her helmet beams find my chest. They climb. They reach my throat. They reach the line of my jaw. They reach my eyes.
Her breath breaks once inside the helmet.
And the chapter of her life that ended when she engaged the wake panel is done, and the one that began the moment my body answered her is about to start, and my hand is lifting, and the capture frame has her, and the stack at the top of my mind has only one word on it, and the word is what every cell of me has been pressing toward since the first layer of cold began to thin.
Mine.