“Tired, Maire? Or can you do it all?”
“So it was you. Your vessel got in my way.”
“Looks like it. You must be drained, or you would’ve killed me already.”
“Yeah. I’m drained.”
“Good.”
“Who’s that?” She gestured at the wreck.
“Just a photographer. I needed his ship.”
“Is he dead?”
“He will be soon.”
“Good.”
“Yeah. Good.”
Awkward silence. The wind was becoming colder.
“You killed my wife.”
Maire smiled. “We killed your wife.”
Berlin glared. He shifted the knife nervously in his hand. If she knew about it, she wasn’t showing it.
“She didn’t deserve to die. Not like that. Not at all.”
“You had such promise, Berlin. Such promise to change that place.”
“So did you.”
“So did Kath.”
Berlin snapped. Maire wasn’t expecting his attack.
He lunged forward, sweeping the blade from behind his arm. The first slash lacerated Maire’s throat deeply, cutting almost to the spine. She staggered backward, strangely-red blood pouring over uniform and snow and Berlin, who slammed into her. Her hands reached up to her neck, but Berlin knocked them away on the return path of his blade, which sliced hilt-deep between Maire’s ribs, through that single heart. Berlin’s twisting wrist ensured that the heart would be destroyed beyond repair. He fell with her onto the ice, and with a final snap, he jerked the blade up, breaking through her ribcage. A small geyser of blood erupted from Maire’s ravaged chest.
She fell into stillness.
Berlin stood, shaking with exertion. It couldn’t be this easy. He wiped her blood from his face, neck. It smelled like copper. It was red.
With a swift, brutal motion, Berlin fell upon Maire’s body, plunging the blade again and again into her skull. Overcome with grief, shuddering with emotion, he stabbed her again and again, covered in her blood, slivers of her bone, great chunks of that mind that had meticulously planned the genocide of his species. He stabbed until she was gone, stabbed until he was satisfied that she could not possibly be anymore. He stood and surveyed the extent of his fury.
Maire knocked him to the ground, one foot connecting solidly with his jaw as the other landed on his knife hand, crushing fingers and shredding his palm with his own blade. Her form shimmered with silver flux, fading between solid and snow, sky and ice. With horror, Berlin realized that
Maire stepped away from him, walked to the bloodied doppelganger. She reached into its open chest and removed a tiny silver sphere, threw it playfully into the air and catching it with ease. The projected dissolved to static and nothing. Berlin cradled his crushed hand, rolled over to look up at the true Maire.
“I win.”
The door cycled open, revealing sub-commander Hull. His eyes were averted, tracing the grid of the floor. He cleared his throat.
“I’m sorry to interrupt.”
“What is it?” Lilith’s voice bounced around the interior of her shield:
“We’ve—” His eyes remained on the floor, but glanced toward Hunter for an instant. “We’ve removed Tallis’s body from the works. What should we do with—”
“Space it.”
“No.” Lilith turned to Hunter. “There’s something we need to do first.”
He nodded in realization.
“Sir?” Hull was restless, his hands clenching and unclenching on nothing.
“What is it?”
“Do we have orders?” Hull’s eyes were now locked on the broken command display, the shattered biomech angel, the wires hanging like vines from ceiling displays.
“We’re making our own orders from now on.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Take me to the body.”
Hull nodded an affirmative. “And sir?”
“What is it?”
“Your—” Hull’s hand went to his fly. His brow furrowed in embarrassment. He was one of the youngest soldiers on the vessel, just now growing facial hair for the first time. “Your—”
“Thanks, Hull.” Hunter blushed and zipped his pants.
Within her bubble, Lilith covered her smile with a silver hand.
“Let’s go.”
The head was gone now, crushed between the gears of the inner workings of a docking bay slither cradle. The vessel itself had twisted away from its dock, and now it sat incapacitated on the bay’s floor. Hunter could still see the coagulating black outline of his former commander’s end underneath the slither. The rest of the body was almost intact. Hunter flexed his swollen hand, felt the incisions threaten to tear open again. It could have been his blood under that vessel, splashed across the gears and pistons of the cradle. It could have been, but then it would have been red.
“It’s in the chest cavity.”
Hunter undid the soaked top of Tallis’s uniform, pulled the fabric back to reveal a hairless chest.
“You’ll have to crack through the bone. It’ll be between the hearts.” She pointed to a place just under the sternal notch. Hunter’s blade sliced through the thin film of near-skin in an “I” shape. He used the tip of the knife to fold back each flap. It wasn’t a human ribcage.
Hunter hesitated.
“You have to do it.” Lilith indicated her shielded hands, arms. “I can’t.”
Hull looked on with the other nine members of the officer class. The young men were uneasy; the events of the last few days had forever changed their purpose in this metal box between the stars.
Hunter bore down with his blade, holding it with both hands and shifting his weight directly down. The sternum cracked and he eased off, placing one hand on Tallis’s right shoulder and wrenching the knife to the left. The bone shield retracted with disconcerting biological precision.
“Believe me now?”
“Sir, I—” Hull’s grasped for words. “I didn’t mean to doubt you.”
“And you? And you?” Hunter stood from the opened corpse. “Do you believe me now?” The officers nodded in turn. The evidence was irrefutable.
He reached into the chest cavity with his bare hand and dug around until he found it. His hand retreated, clasped around the final evidence, trailing strands of viscous black matter, neither flesh nor machine, neither now nor then. He snapped the final connection, a vile umbilicus securing the device to the central cavity.
Hunter held out his hand, slow black spattering to the grid flooring.
His fingers uncurled to reveal a marble-sized silver sphere.
“Tallis was the mole. He was Mother’s link.”
“So now what? You’re in command.”
Hunter looked from Hull to Lilith. “We have to protect her. We have to hide. Mother will send someone to get her now.”
“But the Fleet is everywhere. Where can we hide?”
“We’ll take the ship to the Outer.”
“Where?”
