Changeling

1.5

Nestra’s heart skipped a beat.

“What the—”

She charged, blade out, brain switched off from the fury. Her own gun wouldn’t go through Bard’s body armor.

“Ah,” Bard said with a lazy drawl. “You were not supposed to—”

Bard pivoted and shot. It went wide, mostly because Nestra’s thrown blade was planted in his shoulder.

“Fuck!”

She made contact. Her feet caught the gun but Bard’s grip held. His hook got her in the chest just as she grabbed the handle of her sword. Most of the damage was blocked by her armor and yet the punch still winded her. His sidearm could pierce armor. No choice. She thrust and he failed to catch it on his vambrace. The blade dug in the same shoulder a second time, not deep. Deep enough.

Bard screamed in pain when electricity coursed through it but most of it was caught by the armor, dissipating harmlessly on the floor. She struck his side arm and it broke. He stared in disbelief. She made for the kill.

She was sent flying across the room.

Nestra’s back hit a nearby pillar. Pain there. Pain in her shoulder. Pain in her chest. Shake her head. Get up. No, not get up. She stared dumbly at the piece of metal digging into her torso, just below the rib. It hurt. It hurt quite a bit. She opened her mouth and gulped some air. More air. Breathing was pain but it was life also.

Agony filled her mind. There was nothing but the next breath and the ruby blood darkening her uniform. Only when a noise came did she remember she was one bullet away from death. Bard was still alive.

MAJOR WOUND DETECTED

PLEASE PROCEED TO A SAFE AREA

She turned off the notifications to watch the man who’d pushed her. He faced Bard but his gaze found her and his bitter smile turned into a sneer filled with hatred.

“Well. Never send dregs to do a gleam’s job.”

Only now did Nestra notice the unmarked armored vest made from mana-enhanced material, the silver armband. His eyes shone with the tell-tale yellow of an electric elementalist. A buzzer. Still D-class from the intensity, not that it would matter to her. Bard clearly feared the guy but not in the way one would see death. In the way one would see a pissed off boss.

What the fuck was going on?

“I did what you—”

“Shut up. You messed up the timing which cost us a walker. You shot your comrade with your personal weapon, which means the bullet could be traced. You know what? Fuck this, dreg. Your incompetence just baffles me. Kill the bitch with the gun of one of the dead borgs so at least ballistics doesn’t get a clue. You can manage at least that much, right?”

The gleam’s presence warped and he appeared again near the stairs with a crackling sound, then he was gone.

MEDIPEN REQUIRED.

With feverish hands, she grabbed the medicine-filled tube from a chest pocket and slotted it into the armor near her throat. Cold relief filled her vein but it only brought into more contrast the foreign presence digging in her chest. Piece of rebar or something. She grabbed it then stopped. Had to keep it there or she’d bleed out.

Bard found a suitable gun. He turned. Nestra lifted her own gun and fired at him. The bullets pinged uselessly against reinforced ceramics but he still felt the impact. She stood. Something liquid dripped down her bodysuit below the armor, soaking it. Bard finally had enough. He ducked behind the remnants of the barricade. Stupid. He could finish her off easily but he was sloppy. Always looking for the easier way out.

“What the hell’s wrong with you!” Nestra roared, half to delay and half because she still couldn’t believe it. It hurt to scream.

She made her way forward then to the side, to her salvation.

Her gun clicked empty. She dropped it and kneeled, her hand behind her back, palm on her salvation.

Bard stood up, still slow and almost bored.

“Sorry, Palladian. We’re all on our way out. Just wanted a little retirement fund, see? I can’t just be on the loser’s side all the time.”

“Fuck you.”

“Yeah yeah.”

The message she was waiting for finally pinged her, trumping the medical diagnostic in the notification priority queue.

USER RECOGNIZED.

She dove to the side and pulled Nuts’ sidearm with her. Bard’s first shot went over her head. The second pinged against her greave.

She shot through Bard’s chest. For a brief instant, she saw concrete beyond before pressure filled the void with organs. Bard gasped behind the visor, surprised. Very surprised.

He fell like a puppet.

Something locked in place in Nestra’s mind. Suddenly, it was as if a veil was lifted. Her confusion and fear evaporated to leave behind a center of tranquil focus from whence she could draw. Even her mana craving receded to become nothing more but a quiet whisper. Pain still called.

SIGNIFICANT BLOOD LOSS DETECTED.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

PROCEED TO A SAFE AREA IMMEDIATELY.

“Fuck,” Nestra said.

Had to save Stib.

Maybe.

No choice. There were still gangers below, she remembered, and she was in no state to face them. She had to go up, find Gorge and Stib if they were still alive. Lock the wall access. A tall order considering a gleam was after them.

There was only one thing that could improve her odds, even slightly.

She made her way to Preach. Found he was still alive but unconscious. Slotted a medipen. Her com system was off. She didn’t know what else to do. There was a fast-acting clotting spray she could use to seal his wound so she did that. Then she found what she wanted. Combat stim. She dropped the empty medipen and slotted the stim instead. The rush was immediate.

“Much better.”

The gangers would come or they wouldn’t. They would find Preach and kill him or not. She was in no position to stop them. What she needed to do was go up. Carefully, she climbed the stairs, well aware of the metal still digging under her ribs shifting with every step. She was leaving bloody footprints behind her. It was probably super bad. Two floors went as quickly as she dared, then she heard a loud gunshot. Two. Gorge’s special sidearm. She reached the access floor.

There were no platforms here, only an empty space surrounded by walls with openings overlooking the hab blocks below on every side. The maintenance access gate waited beyond, locked tight. Stib was supposed to be inside but she wasn’t. She was on the ground, crying, holding a bleeding Gorge doing his best to hold his guts in. There was a lot of blood. His gun lay to the side, discarded. There were two impact holes on the otherwise pristine walls.

The gleam was here, because of course he was. Blood dripped from his hand, evidence he’d hit Gorge instead of simply frying him with a spell. He was playing with his food.

The gleam knew she was here. He was merely watching with utter disbelief.

“How the fuck did that dreg… Nevermind. All the better. That just gives me more material to work with. So, still going to be silent?”

“Nooo,” Stib wailed.

Gorge coughed.

The gleam pointed a finger at her.

Nestra moved before he was done. Her mind was so clear. Everything made perfect sense. It wasn’t the blood loss, or the stims. It was the absence of craving despite the lack of mana concentration in the air. She was not sated. She was just not hungry, the feeling turning into a cool wave settling in her bones.

Her blade hit the ground as a bolt hit her gauntlet, electricity traveling down her blade. It was mana electricity so a part of it couldn't be denied that easily and yet what coursed through her body fed her more than it harmed her. The rest dissipated harmlessly in the ground.

“Open the door,” the gleam calmly ordered.

Then he saw Nestra still standing.

“What the hell?”

She felt him move to her side and pivoted to cut him but a sharp pain aborted the motion. Fingers like steel vises gripped her left shoulder. Her pauldron creaked from the pressure.

“How did you get your dreg fingers on a mana blade?”

Before she could respond, there was a gunshot.

The gleam made to sigh with annoyance. Nestra knew why. He had a mana vest.

However, his condescending gaze turned into a scowl of disbelief, then shock. He gasped painfully.

A second shot forced him to take a step forward.

“What? You dreg—”

Gorge’s gun clicked empty. He grinned, sweat covering his brow and pain clouding his eyes but his bastard smile still showed the triumph that came with a last ‘fuck you’. The gleam turned away from Nestra, rage distorting his features in a terrible rictus. Crackling energy coursed through his arm to deliver death. Nestra saw his back was hurt through the armor. He was distracted. Confused. He was still holding her, and she was still holding her blade. A detached part of her felt an intense feeling of satisfaction for having outsmarted such an arrogant hunter. The rest of her focused on the one thing she’d practiced for endlessly, spending thousands of hours repeating the motions until they became perfectly ingrained: that one necessary, perfect strike.

Nestra pushed back her pain. Feet planted, strike with the whole body. The sharp blade caught the gleam in the side of the head and bit deep. He spasmed. He fell to his knees. Nestra waited until he was done falling with her blade overhead, ready.

He stopped moving.

Up to down, two handed strike on the crown of his head. Her blade bit into bone with a pleasant crunch just as she was absolutely sure it would. He was dead before he hit the ground, sword still embedded. She knew he was dead. She felt him die.

Her head swam. She collapsed against a nearby wall. There was a puddle of blood under her feet. That was a lot of blood. Shit, that was a lot of blood.

“Ooooh that’s a lot of blood.”

A lot of blood.

“Nestra!”

“Uh?”

“Stabilize her, Riel dammit,” a man said.

Nestra could see it coating the piece of metal in her torso. Mazingwe always said, save the brain, the heart, and enough blood to keep them working and I can fix anything else. But that was too much blood. Hands pushed hers away, gently laying her on the ground. Clotting spray on the wound, she thought. Her head swam a lot.

“Hey Stib.”

Stib did not reply. Rude. There was someone else. There were two people. They’d just arrived. She didn’t see them arrive.

One of them was the viridian eyes boy from earlier. The cop gleam. He wasn't doing too well but he was being held by another guy, this one in armor that looked like bone and long ivory dreads falling down his back. He had weird milky eyes. Her brain finally noticed the silver armband and the fact he was, in fact, holding the viridian guy like a beat up human shield.

“Oh.”

Was probably pretty bad but that was no longer her problem because she was down here and down here was pretty comfortable and she was not moving, not with all this blood under her. Fuck, that was a lot of blood. Stib sobbed. That was bad. Stib was a friend. Nestra patted her shoulder. That was a gesture of comfort and affection, pretty sure. She didn’t look comforted. Maybe Nestra just needed more practice.

The new gleam’s eyes found the body of his ally.

Nestra was pretty sure she was about to die when, suddenly, something very bright exploded behind her.

The next moment, the gleam was gone.

Nestra looked outside the window to see the new gleam locked in a duel with a form clad in crimson armor. Or at least she assumed the ever-shifting form of flesh and bone was the milk-eyed gleam. They were far too fast for her to follow. She recognized the red shape from her newsfeed. That was Hong Wang, the red king. A proper guild star.

Someone touched her shoulder. It was the viridian guy, quickly healing from what she could see. He grabbed the piece of metal.

“This is going to hurt.”

Green mana expanded from his free hand. Nestra’s body gulped it down greedily, which caused the gleam to scowl but not to stop. A refreshing sensation spread as slowly and without more loss of blood, he extracted the foreign object.

Nestra was left staring at a pink piece of flesh where her wound used to be. It felt very tender.

“You didn't feel that?” viridian dude asked.

“Am drugged to the fucking gills.”

“Ah, I should have guessed. And now if you will excuse me, I must attend to your friend.”

Nestra wanted to tell viridian that Gorge wasn’t her friend just as Stib was holding her hand very tightly. That was probably a bad thing.

“The others?” Stib sobbed.

Right. Coms were still down. Maybe it was the walker. Maybe it was the dead buzzer.

She didn’t think it mattered.

“Uh, I think Preach was stable when I left him. You, uh...”

The drone operator left in a rush.

“Might not want to see this,” Nestra finished telling a block of concrete.

“Fuck.”

She was going to see… Ah fuck, this was going to be hard for her.

Nestra felt a strange disconnect. She was both healed and weakened, really awake and also really out of her mind. Bard’s inexplicable betrayal stabbed her heart like a prop knife. It was there. She knew it was there. It just didn’t hurt, at least, not yet. Most of the squad was dead. It wasn’t her squad. They should still count as her people but somehow, they didn’t. It was as if a solid wall like an iceberg blocked the path between her sensations and herself, pushing away confusion and the craving that had been her constant companion for so long. It wasn’t the combat stims. They weren’t designed to do that. It was something insidious seeping under her skin and now it was doing something.

Waking up.

Waking up? That made no sense.

“Sorry, sir, I cannot heal that level of damage,” viridian told Gorge.

“A polite gleam,” Gorge replied with a bitterness that edged on insanity.

Nestra watched outside. Night was falling fast and now plumes of dark smoke rose to the heavens like monstrous pillars, carrying with them the stench of ash. Shapes flew around at great speeds while corpo gunships flew in low altitudes, disgorging armored goons on the fleeing gangers below. Hong Wang remained the master of the sky. He wasn’t fighting anymore. He was just there, talking and gesturing a few hundred meters away.

Probably a promo shot.

To show what Gidung could do.

What a fucking disaster. At every possible level. The squad was dead, the gangers were dead, the traitor was dead, and the buzzer was dead. It was a fucking bloodbath and for what? For Gidung to swoop down and save the fucking day. Her mind replayed the elements of the evening and it became painfully, painfully obvious that it was very likely a set up. A set up to show the current police was not capable of handling the new threats of well-equipped gangers by creating that new threat to begin with. And Nestra’s squad was just collateral damage, a delicate machine pushed to the edge then used for a role they were not meant to fill. The squad had still managed to hold against all odds. And it would mean fuck all. In the end, whoever wanted to make a point had made it.

Maybe it was Nestra’s paranoia speaking. She didn’t think so.

She stayed there until reinforcements came. It took a while.

***