Twenty-Seven #2
Waterboy and his UF buddies didn’t skimp on their promise of a distraction, and she intends to make good use of it.
She stays low as she runs, hand poised over triggersheath.
Too much adrenaline to feel any strain in her knees.
The map of the synthtech clinic is as clear in her mind as a detailed sim projection as she passes the consultation rooms, the staff lounge, and the administrative offices.
The centrally located design center is the designated first-floor gathering place in case of emergency.
She avoids it and doesn’t run into any of the staff.
Left. Right. Right. Second left. Stairwell door.
The second floor is where the postoperative testing centers are located, next to the surgery and recovery suites. That’s where Sandbar Uchi will be.
In case of fire, do not take elevator. She leaps the steps two at a time, pushing past two technicians in moss-green uniforms going the other direction. They shout after her. She ignores them, reaches the second-floor landing, and barrels through the steel door.
A second lobby, this one for surgery intake. Nicely carpeted, furnished with reclining lableather chairs and an expensive coffee machine for that last luxurious taste of gourmet caffeine before giving up the pleasures of the flesh.
The place is empty, fortunately. Surgeries don’t start until an hour after clinic opening. The glowing outline of a scangate separates the waiting area from the secure interior of the facility, with its advanced equipment and eighth-generation-synthtech secrets.
Isako sucks in a breath and forces herself to think of this as another Agency sim.
She lunges through the opening at full speed.
The security system reacts to her unidentified badge and the presence of a concealed weapon.
The alarm blast that goes off is drowned out by the ongoing wailing of the general lockdown alert, but the electricity that floods Isako’s body lights her up instantly with excruciating pain.
Fiery pulses of agony spasm through every muscle.
She loses conscious connection to her limbs.
Her brain turns to static. Her involuntary attempts to scream come out as disjointed grunting noises.
But she’s been through simdeath five times. This is nothing.
Her initial momentum carries her most of the way.
With a burst of willpower, she pushes through the blinding pain, forces her collapsing body to land beyond the glowing gate.
All the air leaves her lungs as she hits the carpeted floor of the hallway.
She bangs her shoulder something fierce and tastes blood; she bit through the side of her tongue.
But she’s through, and the pain is gone.
Her legs feel wrung out and quivery but she gets to her feet and keeps going.
Uchi and his team should be in the next block of rooms. According to the clinic’s security protocol, all staff and patients are directed to designated safe rooms, which can be sealed from the inside if necessary.
But high-ranking Company leaders follow different rules.
There’s no telling if a would-be assassin or kidnapper is among the clinic staff.
Uchi’s bodyguard won’t place her client in a small space with a bunch of strange wagefolk, even if they are synthtech workers.
He’ll be kept apart, with a defense set up around him.
Isako knows she’s right when she rounds the corner toward the post-op center and runs into one of the uniformed SoCon GasPro bodyguards.
He has time to shout a warning before the longknife shoots soundlessly into her hands and she carries the trajectory of the ejection into an upward slicing motion that finds its way through his throat.
She’s already running past by the time his body hits the floor.
The second uniformed guard is ready for her at the end of the hall.
Longknife already in hand, he charges to meet her, confident in his superior strength and youthfulness.
Isako retreats; he advances. In the confines of the corridor, there’s nowhere to go.
She lets her eyes drift to the side, drops the tip of her blade, gives him an opening.
She knows he’ll take it; she can read his energy, recognizes the stress-induced hastiness she’s seen in plenty of other longknivesmen.
She used to berate Martim. Don’t drop your elbow, don’t telegraph your next move.
She guides the high cut over her right shoulder, pivots left into Sixth Stance, Opening the Path , slices low across the femoral artery, and reverses the blade for a kidney thrust.
The second guard goes down.
Twenty paces ahead, in front of the double doors to the post-op center, River Thea stands, blocking the way. She’s as motionless as only a second stager is capable of being.
“You don’t know what you’re doing.” Is that a hint of fear in her voice as Isako approaches? “You’re being used, can’t you see that? This isn’t what Martim would want.”
Isako keeps coming. “You didn’t hire enough shadowcons.”
Her next step flows into attack.
The perfect offense emerges from neutrality.
Isako’s rush forward is smooth and balanced; even the traitorous knees are cooperating.
Her longknife is poised without bias to become any one of a dozen lethal manifestations in the blink of an eye.
As Isthmus Akio used to say, the longknife already knows where to go; the longknivesman merely carries it there.
She may not be as fast as she used to be, but she’s still a hell of a lot faster than any jarbrain.
She’s never seen a synthbody achieve more than an awkward jog.
They’re prosthetic machines designed for the elderly, not high-performance athletic vehicles.
At the final moment, her momentum transforms into a horizontal cut that’ll cleave into her target’s creamy-white neck.
No one’s ever been recorporalized twice. River Thea will be well and truly dead.
The bodyguard sidesteps with none of the jerky lag of a typical synthbody. With the reflexes of an Agency-trained longkniveswoman, she raises her longknife to parry.
Isako spares a fraction of a second to wonder how it’s possible.
Whether eighth-generation synthtech really is a revolutionary breakthrough or whether it’s Thea’s own brain—so much younger and more pliable than a typical second stager—that accounts for the difference.
To be able to move like that… maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to be a jarbrain.
The thought is fleeting, quickly dispelled by the thrust of Thea’s longknife to her chest. Isako twists and deflects—feels death go sliding past—then counters to the throat.
The blade nicks lab-grown flesh bloodlessly.
Thea slides away and they’re apart, still alive, neither having won the first exchange, both having lost the advantage of the quick draw.
Any longknife battle that goes beyond three moves is already a failure in Isako’s opinion.
Contractors aren’t soldiers. They’re aides, strategists, protectors, executioners.
In the opening moves of a contest, she possesses the advantages of experience, precision, skill, and surprise.
The older she gets, the faster she needs to finish a fight.
When stamina enters the equation, she can’t compete with an opponent who doesn’t feel physical fatigue or injury.
“Why are you protecting the man who did this to you?” she says. “You’re nothing but a twisted synthtech experiment. Other jarbrains will only ever pity you.”
“Shut up,” Thea says.
“Any self-respecting longkniveswoman would sooner run into the Vastness.”
“I said shut the fuck up .” Thea attacks, but the footwork is sloppy, the drawback on the shoulder too obvious. Isako evades the diagonal slash with ease and sees the opening like a red beacon. Her longknife rips across Thea’s torso in a deep, disemboweling cut.
She realizes her error in an instant.
She thought she was goading her opponent into attacking foolishly, but she’s the one who’s made the mistake.
A fatal injury to an ordinary human isn’t the same for a second stager.
The flesh of Thea’s abdomen splits like cleaved rubber, pink tissue flayed open, milky liquid sluicing out with a consistency too viscous to be blood.
Isako glimpses clear tubing, some sort of rigid polymer structure, no guts or organs.
Thea doesn’t react, feels no pain, doesn’t even look down at the damage to her torso, only swings the longknife back at Isako while the atier’s distracted by the weird sight of her opponent’s artificial innards.
Ironically, the traitors save her.
Her right knee wobbles from taking the full body weight of her committed attack.
She pitches too far to the side to recover her balance and stumbles, going down on one hip and one hand, just as Thea’s blade carves the air right above her.
Isako scrambles to find her footing, to bring her weapon back up in time to save her life—
Thea’s legs buckle. Apparently, cutting her nearly in half did some serious damage after all, severed some important connection between her brain and lower body. She glances down at herself, sees her gaping-wide abdomen and the slick pink-and-white mess within.
The woman’s full red lips part in an O of abject horror.
“No, no, nooooo ,” she moans. The pathetic sound is unnaturally high and tinny, like a voice run through a synthesizer. She collapses, grabs at the torn edges of her bloodless wound with frantic, flapping hands. The stunning hazel eyes widen with unblinking panic.
Thea’s cries become the eerie, glitchy noises of a machine trying to replicate sounds outside its functional range, as if she’s struggling for breath even though she has no lungs.
Isako gets to her feet and runs. She leaves the bodyguard on the floor and bursts through the double doors into the room beyond. A synthsurgeon in a white medical coat throws his hands up overhead and drops to his knees in surrender. “Please don’t hurt me!”
Sandbar Uchi lies naked and still as death in a white coffin-like capsule.
A panel on the side of the container glows with technical readouts.
The upper section is transparent; she sees Uchi’s broad shoulders and familiar uncompromising face, eyes closed, silver hair swept back.
No breath escapes his lips to fog the clear surface of the suspension chamber.
She realizes she’s looking at Uchi’s original body.
What the fuck?
The second-stage Sandbar Uchi starts upright from where he appeared to be bent over, examining his own corpse.
His mouth falls open at the sight of Isako standing in the doorway, longknife in hand.
The director takes several astonished steps backward, until his shoulders nearly touch the far wall.
The cryogenic capsule containing his organic body is a barrier between them—too tall to vault over, too wide to get around quickly.
“Jesus Christ,” Uchi exclaims. “How the hell did you—”
She shifts the longknife to her left hand, draws the compact pistol from the shoulder holster with her right. She’s spent hours in her room practicing the draw, the aim, the trigger pull—but she’s never fired it. Two bullets, two chances. She’s too close to miss.
Uchi throws his hands over his head. “Wait, Isa, don’t !” he screams.
He’s dead in her sights. The barrel of the gun wobbles.
She darts a glance over at the unmoving figure in the cryo capsule, swings her aim between the two faces of the man she came here to kill, one serene and one panicked.
Her brain spasms, as if in a licensing simulation she knows is designed by sadistic masterminds to fuck with her. No time for doubt.
She pulls the trigger.