‘So, they manufactured your genes in a lab,’ Mitsuko said, waving the comment away. ‘That doesn’t mean–’
‘Humans have twenty-two non-sex chromosomes. I have twenty-six. The extra ones don’t even have the usual types of base pairs. No one knows what they do or where they came from, but it’s probably something to do with enhancing my sorcery. Since my cells have to be able to process and replicate these weird genes, my biochemistry isn’t the same as a human’s. Some drugs work on me, others do nothing, a few cause problems. I’m not human.’ She shrugged. ‘I couldn’t have children with a human. It would be like a human and a chimpanzee mating. Actually, chimps are closer to humans, genetically, than I am. But I’m sterile anyway, so that’s not such a big problem.’
‘Oh,’ Mitsuko said.
‘Is that everything?’ Darius asked. He had been silent until now. Nava was vaguely wondering whether he was hoping she would forget he was there if he did not speak. Maybe that was not his angle. ‘You’re an artificially created humanoid, made by the Redwing Faction to kill their enemies. You turned against them, hence the other girl calling you a traitor. You’re a secret officer in the ASF and likely to become an extremely powerful weapon in their arsenal, but you’d really prefer to save lives than take them. That about it?’
‘Um, yes,’ Nava said. ‘That’s an accurate summary. I was expecting you to express it more negatively.’
‘And maybe I would under other circumstances. Right now, it seems like you’re exactly what we need.’
‘The VP makes an exceptionally valid point,’ Courtney said. ‘We can maybe worry over the implications of this later. What do we do next?’
‘Next?’ Nava asked. ‘Next, I go out there and kill the bad guys. Chess, please could you take a look outside? They’re bound to be wondering what happened to Maya.’
‘On it,’ Rochester said, closing his eyes.
‘You can’t go out there alone,’ Melissa said.
‘I tend to agree,’ Courtney added.
‘I can,’ Nava replied, ‘and I will. I’m sorry, but the rest of you are just going to slow me down. You’re going to stay right here and defend this room and each other while I go secure our way out. First Lieutenant, I believe you should be able to use Maya’s pistol and rifle. She’s carrying plenty of ammo. Hopefully, you won’t need any of it, but some of them might get past me. They’re going to know they have a problem up here pretty soon, I think.’
‘Yes,’ Rochester said. ‘There’s a team of eight on their way up the stairs.’
Nava started for the door. ‘Mel, let me out and then reseal the door. I’ll take care of those ones on my way down.’
Melissa got up to follow. ‘Okay, but I don’t like it.’
‘I’m not asking you to,’ Nava said, just before vanishing. Melissa’s wall collapsed and then the door opened by itself. ‘See you soon.’ And the door closed again.
~~~
Hubert Allard Haanraats was actually of Dutch descent, not German. He claimed to be able to trace his ancestry back to the fifteenth century on the old calendar, which was a lie, but he could go back five centuries, with a few gaps. The last few generations had been staunch individualists and Hubert was just as fanatical about fending for himself as his father and grandfather had been. He had learned to shoot when he was seven. Beherbergen had an ecosystem, but none of it was useful as a food source, having the wrong sort of proteins or something; eat a dead deer-like creature on Beherbergen and you were in for a night of vomiting uncontrollably. The local predators avoided humans like the plague. You learned to shoot on Beherbergen so that you could kill humans and for no other reason.
This operation was, as far as Hubert was concerned, the height of his career in Befreit Beherbergen. He had joined up when he was fifteen. His early years had been spent running messages between safehouses. He had killed his first traitor when he was seventeen, emptying a full clip from his AK-304 into a House-clan scientist who was experimenting with novel farming practices outside clan lands. The weapon he was carrying now, an AK-306, was a slight upgrade of his personal favourite. The 306 had a multispectral laser targeting system instead of a monochrome one; none of the Befreit troops had the gear to properly use such a system, but it was still a new gun.
So far, Hubert had not fired his new gun, but he was hopeful that that was about to change. He and seven other members of the invasion force had been sent up to check on one of the Redwing operatives working with them. Hubert did not trust the Redwings, but he was scared of the one they were going to look for. The one with the dead eyes and the powerful magic. If she had run into trouble… Well, it was not going to be something he and his friends could not deal with.
The team reached the top of the stairs and advanced into a corridor. There were doors on either side. They wanted the room five doors up on the left. They started for it, but they had gone only a couple of paces when there was a sound up ahead and their sergeant held up his fist. Everyone stopped.
‘Was that a door closing?’ the sergeant asked.
‘Not sure,’ someone replied.
Hubert shifted his position to look around the man in front of him, down the corridor toward their target. There was nothing to be seen. If a door had been opened and then closed, it seemed that no one had walked through.
There was a flash of light. Hubert had time to register it, and then the expanding wall of white before his eyes. Then he was screaming. Pain burned through every nerve in his body. It felt like he had been burned all
