You can’t say I wasn’t a fast learner.
Delight and Pritchard waded into the fourth fight. At first, I thought they were going to try and pull us apart, but then Delight smacked my opponent, and Pritchard smacked me, and it was on. My original opponent and I teamed up to put Delight on her ass, but Pritchard was quick to take advantage and tossed me into a wall. Delight regained her feet and took my sparring partner out, and then the pair of them headed my way as I picked myself up.
I started to laugh, and went for Delight, who was the closest—or so they thought, until I blindsided Pritchard with a sudden change of direction and clipped him upside the head. It went downhill from there, but I was trying to more than bruise one or both of them, and I made them work for the victory. I musta made my mark, because the next time I took Pritchard off his feet, Delight shot me.
“Son of a bitch!”
I was still cursing when I came round.
“You shit-eating, dung-crawling, larvae-munching, bug-fucking, goat-sucking, spit-sacking whore!”
I was half-way onto my feet, when Delight reached out and pulled me upright.
“You spent too much time with the vespis.”
I hauled back a fist, only to have someone grab my arm and twist it behind my back at the same time as they wrapped an arm across my other shoulder and pull me tight into them.
“Let me go, Scarpil. You have no idea what you’re playing with.”
He tweaked my arm a bit higher and I gasped.
“Who says I’m playing?”
“Stand down, Cutter.” Pritchard’s voice slid over me, his command repeated in my head, as Cascade bounced his presence into my implant and leant his body against my legs.
I closed my eyes, took a breath, counted to ten in Galbas, ran it backwards in Galfran, tried to work out what the numbers were in vespis and lupar. Took another breath. Pritchard watched me start to calm.
“Scarpil.”
I felt the tension on my arm ease, but the big guy didn’t let me go. When I opened my eyes, again, Delight was still standing there. She glanced over at Pritchard.
“That went a lot better than we hoped.”
I followed her look, caught Pritchard’s slow nod.
“Still needs a little work, though.”
“Well, at least she’s not completely off the planet, this time.”
And I realized what they’d done. No wonder the medics had looked upset. I looked at the way Delight’s combat team had gathered around her.
“Did they know?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“No fun in it. Besides, they needed to learn not to underestimate the unenhanced.”
“Except today, I was…”
I let the words hang there, and Delight grinned.
“They figured it out fast enough—and you weren’t enhanced, yesterday.”
When I’d taken Scarpil down, she meant.
“But I was,” Scarpil added.
I twisted my head to look up at him, but one of the other team members spoke.
“We all are.”
Are?
“As in permanently?” I asked, my voice coming out pitched higher than I’d intended, and the team members I could see all nodded.
Well, no wonder they’d been handing my ass to me all week.
I glared at Delight.
“Doc is gonna have your hide.”
Her face took on a hard edge.
“Not if it gets him back his captain, he won’t. And not if it keeps you alive. You might want to think about that. Where we go, we do a lot of good. We can’t do that without the boosts we take. It’s a price we’re willing to pay.”
She paused, looked around at her team. The hardness I’d seen in them, before, was back, and they nodded in unison. Whatever missions these guys took, they believed in what they were doing. I stared at them, wondering just how crazy they had to be to let themselves stay permanently juiced. The three times I remembered seemed a little crazy to me… Well, okay, the first two times. This last one…
I looked over the team, feeling like I’d had the snot kicked out of me—and they looked back. I had to give them credit, though; they all looked as knackered as I felt, and there were at least four missing. Medical was definitely not going to be impressed.
In the end, none of us were.
Delight took us straight from the sparring mats to wolf-based scenarios—and from the feel of those, she’d ripped them straight out of some poor soul’s head. Several poor souls, if the team’s reactions were anything to go by… and then we came to the one where we were staring down a newly docked wolf drop-ship in a spaceship’s hangar bay, and I was sure of it.
She didn’t give me time to do more than glare, and the scenario started rolling—and she’d tweaked it. Of course, she had.
“You spit-sucking, psychotic, mouth-breeding—”
The first wolf construct came at me with a roar, and I slid under its swing, slamming a boot into its shin so I could stop and fire two shots from the Blazer up into its midriff at very close range. Things got more interesting after that.
24—Finding Mack
Delight ran us hard and ran us late, and then gave us two days’ rest.
“I want you all on-deck in forty-eight,” she said, taking a good look at us, merciless and hard as they come, “and I want you up to speed on wolves, Aktrovaran, and the system in general. Don’t disappoint me.”
“Never!” the team roared back, and, for a moment, it was like none of them were injured, which was a sheer impossibility, given the workout we’d just had.
Delight smiled at them.
“Excellent. Now go lie down before you fall down. No one’s getting tucked in, tonight.”
The team went, and I turned to follow them.
“Where do you think you’re going, shit-for-brains?”
And I stopped, because she could only mean one person, since her voice was inside my head, as well as outside it.
“San, caf, and bed,” I told her, and resumed walking towards the door.
“Not
