30. A Waking Nightmare
30 – A Waking Nightmare
Alright, Evie. What floor is she on?
//The ground floor.//
Oh. Why am I in the stairwell? Evie didn’t answer; the question was rhetorical, and she knew it. Hector had gone into the stairwell to give that woman and her nanny-bot the impression that he was about to climb up to the fifth floor. He glanced at his mini-map, and sure enough, Evie had filled in a dotted line that would lead him out into the lobby, around a corner, and then to the last door at the end of a long hallway.
As he pulled open the stairwell door, he glanced left and right, past the row of tenant mailboxes and the scattered bits of trash on the stained, dusty tile floor. Nobody was around. Go ahead and fire up the jammer. If those guys are watching her place, they might be close by.
He heard a faint ringing in his ears—the jammer interfering with his auditory implants—but Evie tuned it out as he slipped through the door into the lobby. Following his mini-map, he walked past the mailboxes and turned left at the corner, walking down a long, dimly lit corridor. Apartment doors lined the walls, the gap between them more generous than in the housing stacks back in Helio. It seemed that being in the middle of nowhere was a net-positive when it came to apartment size.
He was padding down the hallway, passing by the apartment before his objective, when he heard a thud and a muffled voice through the thin door. He paused and mentally asked Evie to increase the gain on his ears. The voice was still muffled, but Evie was clever, and she filtered the interference and sharpened the vocal tones enough for him to make out some words:
“…cam feed went all fuzzy.”
Hector held his breath, moving closer to the wall, just before the door. Is it gonna be this easy?
“That guy from the lobby, you think?” This voice was easier to discern—nasally and higher-pitched, though still masculine.
“…right size…face covered.”
Hector slowly blew out his breath, weighing his options. There was a good chance the two mercs—he hoped it was only two—would investigate. They were probably already trying comms and finding interference. He had to consider that they might have optics that could detect him through the wall, so lying in wait might not be the best move.
Between the space of two heartbeats, he calculated as many variables as he could think of: the availability of decent cybernetic equipment on Mars, how wealthy the men’s employer was, what they were doing in the building, and how they intended to observe. Hector decided he had to act.
He took a step away from the wall, pivoted on his left foot, and sent a surge of four aura into his Strength Boost. As his body erupted with a crimson glow and he seemed to swell, Hector smashed his right boot into the door beside the latch. The pressed-plastic and paper-fiber door split around the latch and flew open, slamming into the wall to the right. Hector charged through and took in the scene at a glance.
It was pretty much what he’d imagined. A one-way screen covered the window, letting a high-end camera see the street clearly. A single bed sat against one wall, its gray blanket tucked tight enough to bounce a bullet casing. Foodstuffs lined the narrow kitchen counter. A rifle with a suppressor and a tripod lay on the floor near the window.
At the center of the room was a card table, its top covered with a mess of puzzle pieces and a crystal-glass tablet. And, sitting at the table, quickly stealing Hector’s focus, were two bulky men in very different states of readiness.
One man, pale-skinned and bald, held a fat pistol in one hand, its magazine in another, and he looked at Hector with wide, startled eyes as he moved to slam the magazine into the gun. The other merc was shirtless, leaning over to pull on his shoes, and fell forward out of his chair as Hector burst into the room.
Strength still boosted, Hector kicked off the wall, sending himself hurtling toward the man with the gun. He twisted in the air, tracking the barrel’s trajectory as the merc’s thick finger hammered the trigger down. Hot lead snapped through the air, so close that Hector felt the pull of the air as it hurtled past his face. Then he slammed into the guy and, as they crashed to the floor, mangling the chair beneath them, he knocked the gun out of the merc’s hand.
Hector knew that every fraction of a second counted; the other guy, surprised as he was, was behind him, and that wasn’t any kind of position he wanted to be in. He grappled with his initial target, but as his Strength Boost faded, Hector’s lanky, youthful body put him out of his depth. The man was a bruiser with boulder-like shoulders and arms built by throwing around massive weights.
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Even so, Hector was an expert grappler, a deadly striker, and he had more than one aura trick up his sleeve. As the hairs on the back of his neck reminded him that an enemy was behind him, he tucked his elbows close, guarding his neck and face as the bigger man pummeled him, then he summoned his Aura Blade.
Flickering crimson ghost flames erupted along his shoulders and arms; they streamed toward his right hand, coalescing there into a heavy, straight, single-edged knife. Hector’s fingers reflexively grasped the hilt—a strangely tactile but smooth surface. It was warm and welcoming, and his fingers, though they’d never touched the thing, remembered the feel of it well.
The Aura Blade didn’t look like steel; it shimmered like twenty centimeters of mirrored red glass. Wispy aura steamed off it, almost like it was on fire, and it might as well have been for the way Hector’s opponent reacted, recoiling as Hector lashed out, slicing through his forearm until the blade bit bone. More tingles on the back of his neck convinced Hector to abandon his attack and dive into a roll—just in time as something whistled through the air and cracked against the engineered polymer flooring.
The first merc was scrabbling with his undamaged hand, reaching for something to use as a weapon. His other hand was hanging on by a thread, most of the meat cut clean through. Hector knew his blade wouldn’t last long, so he pounced, driving it into the merc’s side, angling it to maximum effect. It slid through flesh and bone, and the gout of blood the man coughed told him he’d struck true—lung and heart pierced.
Hector didn’t wait around; as he dismissed the blade, saving his aura, he dove for the bed, using it to springboard back to his feet as he spun to face the other merc. Something whistled through the air behind him again, and when he reoriented, he saw what it was—the merc was wielding a mono-wire. The black reflective bead at the end was making the whistling sound; the wire was deadly silent. He’d already sliced the card table in half, and his third attempt to dismember Hector took the legs off the little bed.
Hector waited for the next attack, and when the man’s arm extended, he lurched forward, reached out and cracked him across the jaw with a lightning jab. The merc jerked his head back, dazed, but he was tough, and the way his hand hurt told Hector he knew how to take a punch. The merc tried to bring his mono-wire into play, but Hector moved in close, made a fist and chopped his hand toward the guy’s wrist. As his fist descended, red light flared, and his Aura Blade flickered into existence. The terrible edge took the man’s hand and the mono-wire rattled as it slid across the floor toward the door.
The merc’s eyes went wide as he looked at his stump—cut so cleanly that the blood took a full second to start weeping. Meanwhile, Hector dismissed the blade and glanced at his aura report, a constant display in the corner of his AUI:
//Aura Pool: 5/12
Aura Gain: 1.3 units per minute.//
That was the only problem with the Aura Blade. No matter how careful he was to dismiss it quickly, it took its due of two aura when he summoned it. As he climbed in power, harvesting potentia, that cost would become insignificant, but for now, he had to be cautious.
The merc backpedaled, his remaining hand grasping at his belt for a weapon he didn’t have equipped, and Hector reached out and caught his hand in a come-along, turning his arm so it strained his elbow and he gasped. His eyes were still fixated on his missing hand, watching as a thin stream of blood began to spurt, decorating the floor in bright crimson.
“Don’t fight,” Hector growled. “There’s a chance I won’t kill you.”
The man made a pained face as Hector applied pressure, but he blanched as his focus shifted to something behind Hector. “F-fuck! I knew it!”
Frowning, Hector twisted his arm further, eliciting another gasp, as he took a step to his left, turning to get a view of whatever the man had seen. Even as he did so, he heard a wet, squelching, popping sound, and then his eyes fell upon horror. The man he’d killed—the man he’d thought he’d killed—was stretching, his skin splitting as new flesh, black as midnight and slick with blood and moisture, roiled, fighting to come out of its grisly cocoon.
“Aura fiend,” Hector spat, pushing his prisoner more solidly between him and the thing.
The merc screamed, yanking against Hector’s hold. It didn’t matter how hard Hector twisted that arm; primal terror was overriding the pain. Hector glanced around the room, looking for the first merc’s pistol. He saw it on the floor by the window, near the scoped rifle. With a grunt, he shoved the one-handed man forward and jumped for the gun.
As he stooped to pick up the pistol, a new sort of scream echoed through the room—rough and clicking, like vocal cords turned plastic. It was too loud, too hollow, and everything in Hector’s being told him to jump out the window and run the hell away. He heard the merc scrabbling to recover from Hector’s shove, heard him panting in abject terror, and then the thing screamed again and wet squelches told Hector it had emerged from its human chrysalis.
Pistol in hand, he spun, took aim—and came face to face with a waking nightmare. The aura fiend stood there, the merc’s body hanging from one hook-clawed arm and his head from the other. The creature was more than two meters tall with black flesh that looked to be rapidly hardening into a carapace. Its eyes blazed with violet aura, its jaw hung agape, exposing wet, glistening fangs, and its long, razor-edged tail swayed back and forth as it turned its murderous gaze upon Hector.
Hector had seen aura fiends before, but he’d been with a team and they’d had overwhelming firepower. This was another matter. Still, he knew it was fight or flight, and flight would probably get him dismembered. He lifted the pistol and unloaded. The gun was a slug-thrower with a heavy caliber—maybe eleven or twelve millimeters—and it bucked in his hand with each thunderous report. Hector kept his cool, centering his sights with each trigger depression, and he felt his tension ease as the impacts had an effect on the creature.
It recoiled, and the black flesh tore, equally black blood spraying out behind the thing to paint the wall with its slick, oily texture. The fiend dropped the dead merc, staggering against the barrage, and when the slide locked back, the bullets gone, Hector realized his assessment of the damage had been premature; even as he watched, the holes began to knit together, and the fiend’s smile widened, exposing hundreds of needle-sharp teeth in its elongated jaw. Then it leaped at him.