“Fucker!” I kicked him in the face and he tumbled down.
I’d almost lost my grip on the bars, so I readjusted and held on tighter. I traced the Warrior’s unconscious body to his hand pressed against the bars. The hand that had the wristcom. I swung from bar to bar to his limp arm. As I reached for the button to freedom another hand grabbed my ankle.
A hard yank and my tenuous one-handed grip on the bar slipped loose. I fell into the waiting arms of ten worker drones. Their hands were everywhere at once. On my face, my ass, between my legs, pulling my hair, squeezing my breasts. An idiot sexual frenzy.
Fighting to get to my feet against the flailing limbs, several of them had their pants down, fondling themselves. They grabbed at my arms, trying to hold me still. Hands tore away the backside of my skirt. Strong hands grasped my hips in a rough grip and a warm, hard cock pushed up against my ass. The burning push spread me open, searing deeper and deeper.
Jason screamed obscenities and cursed the idiots, all the time calling my name. He banged on the bars and tried to reach through to grab at the drones to pull them off me. It was no use. He watched helplessly as a large, powerful worker drone tried to rape me. I went psycho.
I screamed in berserker fury and thrashed out in every direction in a spinning whirlwind of fists and elbows. The ones with their dicks out got it first.
I broke noses, kicked balls, smashed kneecaps, kicked, punched, pummeled and tore at anyone in reach. I broke arms, shattered collar bones and stomped on any fool with his genitals bared. The screams of their agony drove me harder and faster. Ribs split before my fists. Cheek bones shattered. I slammed faces against the bars. Skulls crushed from my blows. Leg bones broke beneath the power of my snapping kicks.
After a blurred flurry of blood splatter and vicious attacks, I stood alone, in the open, men crying and groaning all around me. Several clones cradled their broken bodies up against the walls, trying to get out of my reach.
Jason screamed my name over and over, begging me to stop. Gradually his voice called me back from the brink of berserker insanity.
“Angel, please stop! You’re killing them! They don’t know any better. Please, stop!”
Covered in the blood of my would-be rapists I looked at him with eyes and nostrils wide – a mad-woman – a psychotic killer. I breathed hard to work past the adrenaline rush that had my whole body vibrating. With my shaking, bloody hands I went to him. The men scattered away from the bars to get out of my way as I reached through to my lover. “They were … they.”
“I know, Angel. I know what they were doing. It’s okay …”
“I’m sorry.” Tears streamed down my face and I smeared blood everywhere trying to wipe my tears from my eyes. “I … I panicked. I’m sorry, Jason.”
“What are you, Angel? What did Nugene do to you?”
The holovid flipped to another moment with Jason. I recognized it instantly … the last scene of his life. Jason and I floated in zero G through the corridors of Cronin’s ship. Awkward in zero G, he let me hold his hand and guide him, seeking an escape from the ship.
Smoke drifted on the air and wet mist hit my face. I wiped it away and found red blood on my hand. A Warrior in full battle dress, gauntlet blazing brightly floated around the corner, several meters away. His furry chest was slashed open, plasma scorched. Bleeding droplets floated in the air around him like little red moons in orbit.
The Warrior saw me first and shifted position. He snarled curses at us. The Warrior shoved off the wall and came at me growling a battle cry. I pushed off Jason and dived for the Warrior.
He swung his blade at my face and I lit up my gauntlet and slashed across his wrist, severing his weapon hand. Cat blood sprayed everywhere as I screamed my fury and hacked farther up his arm, and shoulder. He yowled in a high pitch I’d never heard from the mouth of a Cat, shrieks of agony.
I took off his legs at the knees, and then his other arm at the elbow and sliced through the cloud of blood to get to his chest and face. By the time I finished with him, he was separated into pieces floating in all directions of the hallway. I flowed through with my momentum and caught myself on the opposite wall. I looked back to Jason and launched for him and deactivated my gauntlet. I slammed him against the wall. His shaking hands gripped my arms hard.
“Did you have to … you cut him into pieces, Angel! What’s wrong with you?”
I kissed him on the lips. “I can’t let them hurt you. I don’t know what I’d do without you, Jason.” More noise echoed from the corridor, something coming our way fast. “I told you we should hide. This is too dangerous.”
Loud menacing growls drew my attention to the Guild Cats. Their hissing curses made clear they would not stand idle and watch me slaughter their Warriors.
Flash – the holovid snapped to another image of massacre in the same corridor. I was rooted in place, unable to look away from the horrifying end of Jason’s life. Blood and dead Cat limbs and torsos littered the air, a sea of carnage encapsulated in tiny bubbles of red Cat blood and spinning body parts. I floated in the center of the gore, my face, arms and hair soaked red.
I screamed Jason’s name, as he fought for his life with a Cat bearing down on him. They clashed in midair and Jason buried the yowling Cat’s gauntlet into his throat, almost cutting his head off in the process.
I cried his name again as he shoved the dead Cat away.
A Warrior slashed through my left shoulder and I was knocked sideways by the hard blow that sent me spinning through the air. Giggling, insane with adrenaline and euphoria, I rolled in the air and aligned with the wall. I hit feet first and pushed off to fly straight for the Warrior.
Five black and metal space-suited men ran around the bend of the corridor in their clunky magboots, using the magnetism to compensate for gravity. They aimed their rifles for the swarm of Cat bodies swirling in the hallway, most of which were dead. I twisted hard and grabbed the Warrior, using him as protection. I wrestled with his gauntlet arm by the wrist, keeping him at bay while plasma bolts seared his back and shoulders.
The Warrior yowled in my face as his lips and sharp teeth scrunched up in agony. Five plasma rifles blasted through the hallway, scorching everything in their line of fire. The Warrior’s gauntlet deactivated as his dead fingers slipped open. I screamed shrilly. “Stop! Don’t shoot Jason! We’re humans! Don’t shoot.”
The end of the holovid recording left me sobbing in tears, reliving the most traumatic loss of my life. “They wouldn’t listen until it was too late.”
I looked at the smug face of the Chairman who watched me and the snarling Cats growling at my back, hissing curses and moving in on me with threats to have me executed for my crimes.
The Chairman eyed the Guild Cats behind me. “Princess or not, she’s a psychotic killer, and her hands are stained with the blood of humans and Gran. Kill this abomination! No longer will our relations be tainted by her corrupt influence.” The translator fed his words to the Guild Cats who howled their fury. The raucous sound echoed off the walls of the room.
Still choking on the powerful roller coaster of emotions and adrenaline, I grabbed the Irishman by the collar of his spacesuit. “We jump now!”
Chancy looked at me like the psychotic bitch that I was and did exactly what I told him to do. “Cesar, Now!”
Smirking men to one side of me, and hissing Cats to the other, I dashed over to the bulky artificial G module bolted to the floor and raised my right fist high in the air. A flick of my wrist activated a white hot arc of energy across my knuckles – a fully functional battle gauntlet. I slashed down through the core of the machine.
The Guild Cats were almost on me. I could hear the clicking of their claws on the steel floor as they closed in on either side, teeth bared, hissing in righteous indignation. Sparks flew and a percussive gravity wave slapped us all flat on the floor. The whining-grinding sound of failing graviton dynamos echoed across the enclosed space and suddenly we were in zero G.
Free
d of the burden of weight, I floated off the floor.
Cats and men flailed in the air, spinning and cartwheeling in panic. Streams of curses flew at me in both languages. The slamming thud noises of Cesar’s grappling tethers punched into the hull of the station. The station walls shook and more calls of alarm filled the room.
The shimmery effect of space-time distortion fields turned every floating object in the room into a series of zig-zag tracers across my vision. The deja-vu sensation of the jump drive flickered and popped in my ears as everything realigned into the new space-time continuum on the other side of the jump. The swirling, cloudy orb of Jupiter materialized in the massive viewport window of the station.
Cesar had done exactly as I ordered. The station and all its inhabitants were effectively cut off from external support. Wailing Cats and screaming men bounced off the walls, careening into each other, incapable of finding equilibrium or control over their inertia and momentum.
I kicked off the ceiling and reached for Chancy who was turning green and moaning. “Take the escape pod. Get the fuck out now!” I shoved him towards the doorway leading to the emergency hatches. He looked back at me wide eyed with fear and his gaze locked on the blazing hot cutting torch on the end of my right hand. The Irishman struggled to get to the wall to pull himself out of the room.
I eyed each of my targets as they flailed through the air. The Guild Cats were nearest, and trying to make their way towards me with howls of murderous menace.
“Fuck the industrialist whores who take profits at the expense of everyone else. Fuck the war mongering savages who make business from death, destruction and slavery. Fuck the self-righteous activists who talk peace, but only on their terms. I hate you all!”
I could not bridge the worlds of Cats and men. I could not navigate the malice, ignorance, greed, egotism, and xenophobia of these two war-mongering species. I’d labored under the delusion that I connected them, that I could bring them together – a romantic notion born of the Emperor and his expectations.
“Face your enemy, Chairman. I am the enemy of ignorance and intolerance. I am the enemy of war. And I do not take prisoners!”
I accepted the ugly truth of my genetic design and embraced it. I wasn’t anyone’s savior. Engineered as a lethal soldier, my true purpose in the universe was far less glorious.
I was a killer.
Love and affection, happiness, contentment … these were but fleeting experiences in my short life. The only thing for me was the thing I had been made to do. I knew now why the universe brought me here – to fulfill the purpose of my creation.
A normal person wasn’t born to fly through zero G with the grace and fluidity of a ballet dancer. A normal person wouldn’t relish the carnage of death and dismemberment floating through the air as my cutting torch gauntlet hacked and slashed through any living thing in my path.
I was not normal, and I enjoyed it all too much.
Covered in the gore of my victims, I cut through man and Cat alike. Not a lick of discrimination. I was an equal opportunity killer, and I dispatched each with the same thirst for vengeance. When the screams of Cats and men died off and only my screams remained, I swam through the air and gore seeking a new victim.
The room was silent with death. No one left to kill. The adrenaline crash hit like a hangover, as if I’d downed a whole bottle of Gran liquor. My head pounded and confusion reigned. Massacre floating all around me, I knew this was my graveyard. I’d done what I was made to do, and now my purpose ceased to exist. Therefore so should I.
I floated my way to the airlock and moved through the mechanisms with clarity of mind. The interior door sealed behind me, closing off the station. Warning lights and sirens blared as I felt the synchronicity of the universe. My destiny had reached its end.
I finally got my wish to dance in zero G one last time.
The exterior airlock opened and sent me out into the void in a blast of air and blood – one more speck among the cosmic debris soon to be vacuumed in by the mass of Jupiter.
* * * *
Angel’s adventure is almost finished, don’t forget to join Travis Luedke’s Readers Group for free ebooks, giveaways and publishing updates.
Epilogue
The soft touch of gentle hands fluttered around me. A man with a distinctly French accent spoke to someone nearby. “She’s lucid. I knew she’d make it. She’s living proof of miracles!”
My eyes opened and a dreamy vision swam into view. A man in a lab coat. Brown hair sowed with grey streaks. Generous, loving brown eyes assessed me.
I recognized the corporate logo on his lab coat – Nugene.
“Father?”
He smiled and leaned in to kiss me gently on the forehead. “Yes, Angel. I am here for you mon petit chou.” I loved it when he called me that. Since my first year at Nugene, when he used my pet name, I knew my father loved me.
“How? You’re dead … I’m dead.” I’d never given religion a second thought, but concepts of heaven and hell came to mind.
He pulled back the sleeve of his right hand and showed me the heavy scarring where his limb had been severed the day I was kidnapped by the Gran. He opened several buttons on his shirt and showed me the scar running up his belly where he’d been disemboweled by a battle gauntlet.
“They tried to kill me, and nearly did. I survived with the scars to show for it. I knew you would return to me some day my Angel. I knew it! After Nugene decommissioned this station I stayed on, waiting for the Gran to bring you back to me.”
Tears blurred my vision as the truth put a stupid grin on my face. I’d had nightmares of my horrid memories of my father falling beneath a blazing battle gauntlet. I choked on the powerful wave of love I felt for this man who’d survived and given me life yet again.
“How did I get here?”
He smiled with the benevolent love of a father. His hand reached for the intercom on the wall and tapped out a quick sequence. “She’s awake and she wants answers.”
The sound of running feet preceded Cesar, and right behind him, the bloody Irishman. Both men smiled at me, but Cesar fell to his knees at my bed and grasped my hand, tears running down his face. I’d never seen a grown man cry from happiness before.
Chancy popped him in the shoulder. “Jaysus! I told ya! She’s a flamin’ hellion. There’s no putting her down. Call her Angel all ya like. She’s a bloody demon and a damn sight harder to kill.”
Cesar chuckled and leaned over me for a delicate kiss, as if he might break something precious. He glanced back at his man and then looked to me with that shark-like twinkle. “If you’d played dead for a few more hours I might’ve got away with not paying him.”
D’Anton served me macaroni and cheese with steamed broccoli, and I ate in the company of my pirate lover, my father, and the Irishman waiting impatiently for his payday. I listened to the story of my insane leap into space from the point of view of my savior, Chancy. He’d seen me swan dive out the airlock and snatched me up into his escape pod right away.
“But how did you know to come here, to Nugene? How did you find my father?”
Cesar petted my hair affectionately. “When we picked up Chancy’s pod and saw your condition, we thought you were dead for sure.” The pain on his face … I’d hurt him badly with my suicide attempt.
His lips tilted in a half smile. “Then I recalled Nugene, and all their biotech goodies, their cloning tanks. I came straight here at full burn. Luckily the Doctor knew exactly what to do.”
I looked back and forth between my lover and my father, and felt a warm sensation in my soul. I had people who truly cared about me, loved me, and I’d almost ruined everything in my selfishness.
With tears in my eyes I changed the subject. “What’s happening with the war?”
D’Anton set a holovid projector at my feet and flicked on a large display. He scrolled through all the media coverage of the peace talks. His face turned contemplative and serious, the look he always got when he was about to
lecture me.
“There were six mass extinction events in the history of Earthside, the final being mankind’s dominance over the planet. Humanity has always hunted predators and larger mammals – and each other. With the Gran fleets in orbit, we had a new predator knocking on our door, begging to be hunted. Nothing you said in the UN meetings could overcome that facet of human nature, the primal drive to hunt for sport and rule the food chain … or in this case the galaxy.”
I listened quietly, dreading the news of the devastation and war that surely resulted from my impetuous actions in a moment of psychotic rage.
“But, there is another primal drive within the human condition that’s equally powerful, compassion. The holovids of you with your lover, Jason … they filled every channel of Earthside media. When news of the negotiation massacre was revealed in all its gory detail, someone decided it was time to publicly release the ‘Angel recordings’ … hours and hours of you and Jason. It’s a perverse soap opera, a real life drama that enthralled the entire world in your plight. A master stroke of timing.”
I couldn’t understand how I mattered, how the dark details of Jason’s death made any difference, but somehow it did.
“The public’s outcry to your holovids with Jason, to your efforts at peace, and then your actions in the negotiation … controversial doesn’t begin to describe it. What emerged from the controversy was a miracle. You taught the world the most important lesson of our century. You who lost your lover, whose intense love and equally intense suffering had been broadcast across the world in high definition clarity, in horrific detail. Not to mention the many intimate scenes with Jason. The whole world knew exactly how much you loved that man, and then to have lost him with such violence … Your holovids created the most viral media event in the history of Earthside.”
I hid my face in my hands in embarrassment. The most intimate moments of my sex life splattered across Earthside media for humanity’s entertainment. How fucking delightful.