Her lover was a woman, not quite two years her junior. The girl was sweet and she was beautiful, studying to be a healer. Mary finally turned her head to look behind her. Celeste had been brought before Mary’s father, naked and bruised, dragged between two of her father’s hulking brutes. A trickle of blood dripped from the corner of her mouth.

  Mary looked away from Celeste, to her father, the panic that was trying to well up within her ruthlessly suppressed. As fast as she knew she was, it would be impossible to take out all of the guards before shots were fired. If she had arranged this, she would have made sure that at least a few of the guards had orders to kill the young hostage first.

  Finally, minutes later, the cold man behind the desk acknowledged her presence. “You have an independent streak, Mary, necessitating this final test of your loyalty. Kill the girl.”

  “Father, please?” She was a killing machine, who had suffered for many excruciating years through the multiple operations ordered by her father to make her into such. She had suffered through gang rape more than once in order to “toughen” her. Once, she had nearly let herself enjoy it. The man on top of her had been one of her father’s prisoners, a gentle soul who was only participating to avoid his own immediate torture and death. It only added a few days to his life.

  That phase of her training had finally ended the day she was alone, already naked, in a room with a large bed and five of her father’s burly men. They were playing a dice game to determine which of them would get to have her first this time. They didn’t understand that for once, the prize they were gaming for wasn’t her body. It was their deaths. That time, her head had been clear. She didn’t remember all of the prior times as drugs had been used more than once. While she didn’t think her father had ever used her in that manner, she couldn’t be sure. To him, she was property, nothing more, purchased from a lab.

  Usually, the guards kept her to themselves. Once in a while, they brought in low-life prisoners to help her to fully comprehend that her status was less than that of even a prisoner. That time, once she had gutted the five guards looking to use her as their toy, she had dressed, kicked open the door, and gone on a killing spree. Seven additional rapists had lost their lives, leaving behind bloody messes for the cleaning robots to deal with.

  They had found her in the estate’s library hours later, calmly drinking coffee and reading a trashy romance novel. Celeste liked them. They had originally met each other in this same library.

  She didn’t believe the other tortures she had been forced to endure had anything, specifically, to do with toughening her, other than in the obvious manner. Her skin had been removed more than once in order to surgically implant fibers into her muscles, tendons, and ligaments. The final surgery covered her in a carbon-based biphase microfiber mesh, basically a sub-dermal armor, before her skin was put back in place. In theory, it would stop most bullets before they penetrated deeper than her skin. With a flourishing culture of nanobots, any superficial wounds sealed almost immediately and healed completely in a few hours. Also in theory, the armor should reduce the damage done by energy weapons.

  Fortunately, the enhancement technology didn’t require surgical removal and replacement of her bones as had been the case for earlier cybernetic models. Hers were modified in place by a cocktail of nanobots that, supposedly, were still residing in her body. She had bio-mechanical implants in her ears and her nostrils, enhancing her sense of smell and her hearing. Her eyes were no longer the ones she had been born with. Like her bones, something had been done to her nervous system. That treatment still brought her intense pain from time to time. The surgeons — who other than from an academic perspective, didn’t really care — told her the pain might lessen. Over time.

  She understood her father’s concerns about loyalty and independent streaks. If he was as clever as he thought, he would have installed a remote-controlled poison capsule in her brain. He wasn’t that clever. Although, to be realistic, she had more than one chip in there — the purposes of which hadn’t been explained to her. Maybe he was that clever. A chunk of octanitrocubane the size of a chip would be more than enough to remove her head.

  There were other treatments that hadn’t been applied yet that her father had at his disposal. Treatments she could have been subjected to — mental treatments, designed to enforce compliance and loyalty. All those would cost him were her mind and her ability to think. A reasonable “upgrade” for a rank and file soldier — not an ideal solution for a killing machine — for an assassin.

  “Personal connections, feelings, tenderness have no place in the life of an assassin, Mary.” He paused. “Only loyalty to your owner — the man who bought and paid for you.” Yes, he wasn’t her father in the biological sense. She had been born in a lab, genetically engineered as an enhanced human, and raised in the lab. One of the line items on her extended to-do list was to eventually find and destroy that lab. She hoped to liberate whatever children — her brothers and sisters — might still be held there.

  He nodded to the men. One reached forward with a long dagger and, without warning, sliced off Celeste’s right breast. It plopped on the floor, the nipple staring accusingly up at her like a swollen pink eye. Celeste screamed, more from the shock and horror of the mutilation than from the relatively painless cut from the sharp dagger. Blood seeped down Celeste’s torso from the wound.

  “Kill the girl, Mary. You are my assassin. You work for me. Demonstrate your loyalty to me. I will allow you to have other toys.” Damage such as that already inflicted on Celeste could easily be repaired. Death itself could be repaired given a fast-enough response and the right equipment. Celeste wasn’t a toy! Never a toy!

  Mary stepped forward, contemptuously taking the dagger from the guard’s hand. Celeste was already dead. Mary knew that. She had signed the warrant for Celeste’s death the moment that she had formed an attachment to her. She wished she had understood that then. Despite all of her enhancements, all that she was capable of, there was no way out of this for either of them.

  She should have known better than to fall in love with anyone while her father was alive, while her father owned her. This room was too large for her to reach all of the armed guards around the periphery and the balcony before they cut Celeste to ribbons with their weapons. Despite their probable orders to kill both women, she might be able to reach her father. If Celeste hadn’t been kneeling behind her, she could probably have gotten herself out of this killing field relatively unscathed. It was what she was designed for.

  She had routinely fudged her abilities for the last six months, as a matter of course. Still, the man was rumored to possess a personal shield. Even if she could reach him, and his shield was either fictional or just not strong enough to protect him, the guards would immediately spray both Celeste and her with death. Mary could be killed, if she took enough damage. The only choice she had open to her was whether her friend’s — no, her lover’s — death would be long and painful at the hands of her father’s minions or quick and merciful by her own hand.

  Celeste had never been with a man. Forcing her already bruised body would be the least of the painful indignities these brutes would inflict on her. They would keep her alive while her body was mutilated. Celeste understood all of this too. Mary could see it in her sad eyes. She deserved to have a long and joyous life ahead of her — a gift Mary would have given anything, even her own life, to give to her. It was a gift Mary didn’t have to offer. Even if she suicided right here and now, her father would still have Celeste brutally killed. If he had a resuscitation pod waiting outside of the room, he might even bring Mary back in order to apply the mental procedures. After all, he had invested a small fortune in her development. Worse, he might bring Celeste back as well. That was how terror worked.

  Celeste looked up at Mary and said in a soft voice, her eyes resigned. “Don’t blame yourself, love. I don’t.”

  Mary whispered back, “I’ll never forget you. I love you.” Refusing to allow tears, Mary moved so quickly that all anyone saw of her kill stroke was a blur, the sharp knife decapitating the woman she loved in a single stroke. It was the only mercy she could show her. Without any pause or hesitation, the blade continued its arc, powered by the full force of her muscles, tearing through the throat of the second guard. In the same graceful motion, she returned the blade to its briefly startled owner, turning her back on all three bodies, her face composed, assuming the parade rest position in front of her father. The man who had removed Celeste’s breast toppled to the floor behind her, his dagger protruding from the side of his head, the blade embedded deep into his brain. More than one of the guards around the balcony was sweating now.

  At that point, with any obligation to protect Celeste removed, she could have escaped. She didn’t. She had other plans — the plans Celeste had been helping her to formulate.

  Her father sighed, not overly concerned by the deaths of two guards too stupid to get out of his assassin’s way. They had known what she was. “That’s what I mean by an independent streak.” He shook his head. “You may go. I will have an assignment for you in the near future.”

  She left the room with her gaze straight ahead. She didn’t want the vision of Celeste, in death, embedded in her mind any more than it already was.

  Chapter 4

  Taking Leave

  Mary left her father’s compound that night on a Stealth Dart — a small, armed ship her father had ordered constructed for her personal use. All of its functions were available through the chip implanted inside her skull. Supposedly, no one else could even turn it on, much less fly it or activate its weapons. She wasn’t truly sure that was the case. It had, after all, been her father’s flunky who had explained the controls to her. Still, she thought it was likely to be close to the truth. Doubtless his organization had override codes. “Had,” perhaps, being the operative word. They were all vapors scattered to the eighteen winds now.

  It was truly a lovely ship — strong, fast, and deadly — much like Mary herself. She knew her father would be livid when he found out that she had stolen it — except, oops, was that a nuclear explosion that just took out his residence and a large portion of the surrounding area?

  Mary kept herself from looking at the second, empty seat, where Celeste was supposed to be sitting. The two of them had been planning and preparing for this break for months. She spent more than a moment staring at the still expanding mushroom cloud behind her.

  They had had to wait until Mary’s most recent surgery had healed. The chip that had been placed in her head had to stabilize or she wouldn’t be able to control her new Dart with maximum efficiency. Then there had been the matter of quietly supplying the ship with enough food for two people and a couple of bottles of a wine that Celeste particularly liked. She had also smuggled on board a box of expensive chocolates — a birthday present for Celeste. Celeste would have been seventeen in only eleven more days.

  Mary had most, maybe even all, of her father’s sensitive data. That was what Celeste had been doing for them, while they had been waiting. Celeste had her own reasons for hating Mary’s father. The girl was a wizard with electronics. Mary never understood why, with her talents, Celeste wanted to move into medicine. Maybe it was Mary’s training, but Celeste’s response of “to help people” was just something else that she had never understood.

  In another day or two, Mary would have had the two things she wanted the most. Freedom with her lover and protection from her father. Sure, he had other assassins — older ones than Mary, all with burned brains, that he could have, and probably would have, send after the two of them. Mary felt that she could ensure she and her co-conspirator would never be found. If she was mistaken, and assassin showed up, she could handle it. She had sparred with those men and women as part of her training.

  At first, she had let them beat her, painful as that always was. To be honest, at first she hadn’t been “letting” them do anything. She had been unable to prevent them from hurting her. She learned. She trained. And she survived further enhancements. Then, on occasion, she won, while always underplaying her abilities — never making it look easy. Not that beating the older assassins, brain-burned or not, was easy early on.

  By the time she had murdered Celeste, she was at the point where, while she allowed some blows to connect, she consistently won. It had been essential that she impress her father. She had to convince him that she understood what she was — that she was worth every single one of the millions of credits he had invested in her. She was fairly certain that if she failed at that, he would make himself another brain-burned assassin.

  She and Celeste were supposed to have been able to leave this place, together, never looking back. It was a day or two they weren’t permitted to have. She now realized there was no way that they had been caught. She wouldn’t have been permitted to leave her father’s office if that had been the case.

  He had truly been testing her loyalty to him by having her kill poor, sweet, Celeste. Celeste wasn’t enhanced in any way. She didn’t even have a chip in her head. She was just the best natural-born hacker ever.

  Mary had at least one chip in her head. Clearly, one of them interfaced her to the ship. She wouldn’t be surprised to discover a few more had been implanted — their purposes unknown. Her dead father was like that. When she got a chance, she would need to have a scan to find out what else she was carrying around and if one was a kill-charge — as she expected — and have it either neutralized or, preferably, removed. Removing the damn things was trickier, and more dangerous, than installing them.

  Her escape went well until the damn little ship started demanding that she enter a mission code. Damn her father’s paranoia. If she didn’t enter it soon, her prize would stop working and probably start broadcasting a locater signal. She didn’t know how much time she had. It wouldn’t be immediate, she told herself. There were bound to be legitimate situations where a delay in entering the code could be unavoidable.

  She wondered if she had been hasty — driven by her anger to destroy her father. She knew that her anger was legitimate, but allowing it the power to make decisions for her could prove fatal. With the incentive to lose herself among the stars dying with Celeste, she could have waited, getting a full mission briefing which would have included the consequences of not entering a damn mission code.

  Whatever her father had had done to her ship, it only made sense that it would be something beyond her degree of competence to deal with. Celeste could have found the problem and hacked it into uselessness. She needed to find someone, a computer tech or an engineer, with near Celeste’s level of skill.

  In the meantime, she needed to stash the ship somewhere safe and shut it down completely. She knew just the place. A nearby planet she had already scoped out as a place where she and Celeste could have lost themselves for a time. She would have needed that time to assess their situation. The original plan hadn’t included nuking their home. She figured it would be more painful for her father to watch all of his accounts drained.

  Her destination was less than two weeks away. She hoped the Dart would get her that far. The planet she chose was named Narlarkic.

  Chapter 5

  Narlarkic

  Narlarkic hadn’t ever been the most pleasant of worlds to build a home on. Still, humans are humans — often skilled at making the best of a bad situation. At least the planet had been life-supporting, without requiring modification. It came with a breathable atmosphere — one with almost too much water — and an abundance of green plants sporting a chemistry similar to what humans expected from their plant life.

  The first settlement was, as frequently is the case, a mining operation. That had been at least two thousand years ago, long before the Big War. Those pioneers had branched out, taken up farming, fishing, and making babies. Today, there are sixty million people milling around on the surface. Even after all of this time, the ore deposits still haven’t played out. There are almost always two or three tramp freighters at the single starport picking up ore, bulk seafood, seafood delicacies, and edible fungi. While it couldn’t be said the planet was thriving, it was doing well enough for itself.

  Narlarkic had been left largely untouched when humans and the Uvaloothi decided to see what they could do about destroying each other. History claims the aliens sparked the conflict, but mankind and its allied races had enthusiastically fought each other just as violently and with as much hatred centuries before they had run up against the Uvaloothi.

  Alone in space, Mary frequently dreamed. She knew from discussions with a few of the people in her father’s compound that on those occasions when she remembered having a dream, hers were always more vivid than those of most others. Of course, the brain-burns never dreamed at all. She never mentioned her dreams to the psychologists who monitored her progress. Even as a child, she had realized that anything unexpected, anything that made her stand out as being different, would prove dangerous to her wellbeing.

 

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