Page 7 of Throwing Fire

“Movement seventeen meters ahead,” says a voice in my ear.

I nod to let the speaker know I’ve heard him. Mike-the-Merc. He’s a few steps behind me, but I only hear him through the receiver in my ear. He’s got what Top used to call The Voice down pat. The Voice that lets him speak into the mic wired into his cheek without being heard a meter away. I’ve never mastered The Voice. When I speak, you can hear me a planet away. Since we’re trying to sneak up on whoever is moving ahead of us, I limit myself to gestures.

I give another gesture. Two fingers pointing down the corridor. Mike follows me silently as I pull out the stun wand that’s the approved Tyng security weapon and move fast and quiet down the corridor.

At ten meters, the corridor branches. I can see the corridor straight ahead. It’s empty, which means that whatever’s moving ahead of us is down the branch, around a corner. I doubt whoever breached the Xec level security will have a projectile weapon. They’re illegal on Kuseros and damn hard to get. But since I’m taking point, and I don’t want to disappoint my kitten by getting my face blown off before dinner, I resist the urge to charge around the corner. Instead, I draw my personal weapon of choice, a hollow-ground kukri, out of my boot and use its shiny, flat blade as a mirror to peer around the corner.

The blurred reflection shows me a muscular woman in black body armor kneeling in front of the door that ends the corridor. She’s got the door’s access panel open and has clipped a machine into it that she works feverishly, thumbs blurring as she enters codes. In profile, I can see that she’s got the tip of her tongue clenched between her teeth.

I can also see her face.

I roll my shoulders to relieve the knot that’s been tightening between them since one of my personal security alarms went off. After the second attempt on Chiara’s life, I added a layer of security to Tyng Tower and Kez’s place that only I – or someone who has the same modifications to their eyes I have – can see. Not that I don’t trust Tyng security. Some of them, like the merc at my back, are good people. But they’re notmypeople.

Some of them, like the woman working the access panel seven meters in front of me, ain’t so good.

I make another hand gesture. A raised fist. Behind me, Mike goes still. I raise one finger.

“One minute. Confirmed.”

I tuck away my shock stick. It’s not going to do any good against her body armor. I draw the other kukri from my boot, take a couple of deep breaths to pump oxygen into my muscles, then charge around the corner.

Mara-the-Traitor hears me a second too late. She drops hercrypto-cracker and grabs for a holstered weapon on her belt. Guess she got her hands on a projectile weapon after all.

She tries to step backwards, away from my charge, but she’s cornered herself against the door. She balls her hand into a fist and swings, and I have a fraction of a second to make a decision: duck and avoid her fist or take the hit and finish my charge.

She’s augmented. Huge muscles filling out that heavy body armor. I’ve evaluated her before and my guess is that she’s stronger than me: a couple of orders of magnitude stronger than an unmodified human. If she connects, it’s going to fucking hurt.

But pain’s an old friend. Better to take a hit and make sure she’s neutralized than risk her taking me down and getting through the door. Chiara’s office, where she’s in the middle of a meeting with some govvies from Ykimo, is less than three meters away.

I finish the charge.

Mara’s fist slams into my jaw, snapping my head back. But my kukris take her at neck and waist, the vulnerable points in her body armor. The force of my charge drives her back against the door, drives the kukris through her with a heavy crunch of bone and metal. By the time I stagger upright, shaking my head against the ringing in my ears, the light is dying out of her eyes.

I watch her die, pinioned against the door by my knives. When I hear Mike come around the corner, I pull out the kukris. Her body slides limply down the door and folds into an odd, hunched position, held by her armor.

Mike stops beside me. “Look at me,” he says.

I slant a glance at him. He has some fucking explaining to do, since it’s his partner that’s lying at our feet.

“Both eyes.” When I turn my head to glare at him, he nods. “You’re not concussed.”

She rang my bell pretty good, but Mara’s not the only one of us who’s augmented. “I’d trade you headaches. Mine’ll wear off in a couple of hours. You’re about to drop into a bottomless pit of shit.”

Mike pulls off the blue spectacles he wears over his eyes,breaking his connection to whomever he’s wired into. Supposedly only the Tyng AI and his own security company, but now I have to wonder. “You do not think I had anything to do with this.”

“No? Last time I saw you two together, you were pretty pally.”

Mike’s eyes, narrowed by epicanthal folds, close to slits and his mouth tightens. “The last time you saw the two of us together we were escorting the Tyng scion. I appreciate that encounter did not go well and you may have gotten the wrong impression?—”

I raise my hand and close it to a fist. Mike’s mouth closes with a snap.

“Report to Myhre,” I tell him. “She can debrief you.”

I grab Mara’s body by the gap at her neck armor, drag her away from the door and press my thumb against the access panel.

“I’d rather explain to you,” Mike calls after me. “If you want my chief involved, I’ll call him. He can be here in fifteen minutes.”

“Sure,” I toss over my shoulder. “Both of you can have a nice, long talk with Myhre. I got places to be.”

---