Marchey shrugged indifferently, but complied. He dropped heavily into the cubicle’s sole chair. “That’s an UNSRA-issue Armark Full Combat Exo you’re wearing,” he said blandly. “Aside from its armaments, it makes you at least fifteen times faster and thirty times stronger than me.”
“You have correctly judged my superiority over you,” Scylla said tightly, “But do not spout nonsense. I am an angel.”
Her prey gave her a mordant smile. “My mistake. I always expected my drinking to make me see pink elephants.” He leaned over to retrieve a bottle from the table beside him. “Speaking of drinking, would you care to join me in a nightcap?”
His refusing to take her seriously could not be tolerated. Scylla moved, a living lightning bolt as she came up off the bed, streaked across the room and snatched the bottle from his hand faster than the eye could follow.
Then slowly, deliberately, she crushed it to splinters in one silver-coated hand. The small cubby filled with the sharp tang of spilled alcohol. The shards tinkled to the floor.
“No?” Marchey said mildly, staring up into her face. It had been tattooed into a nightmarish red-and-black demon’s mask, a face designed to instill fear in the beholder. “Or are you just not particularly fond of gin?”
“What is the matter with you?” Scylla demanded, frustration turning her voice into a caustic hiss. “Are you stupid? Suicidal? What are you?”
Marchey stared unblinkingly back at her, his face empty of fear, empty of anything she could name.
“Thirsty,” he said.
This was not going at all the way Scylla expected.
Her world was a simple one, the rules unvarying and unbreakable, and her place in it clearly understood by one and all. People feared her because she was an angel. Angels are made to be feared; they are instruments forged in Heaven to make man comply with the Laws of God, and mete out punishment when those Laws are broken. Only one person in her life and world did not cringe in her presence, and that was Brother Fist. As she was His angel, it was only fitting that it was she who feared Him.
But this man she had been sent to fetch was no Chosen of God. He was an infidel, and she an angel. How could he look upon her and not be daunted?
Scylla knew exactly how she looked, and was proud of it. Her body was no unclean mass of soft, sagging, sweating flesh; she was polished, strutted, indestructible silver nearly head to toe. For her, nakedness was no shame. She was not cursed with a woman’s offensive parts to hide. Her groin was smooth, featureless, and unimpregnable. Her breasts were modest silver mounds without nipples to mark her as a suckling beast.
Her face was human-shaped and made of flesh, but it bore red-and-black God-marks etched into her very pores. Instead of hair, her skull was covered with gleaming silver. Her one green eye was human enough, for angels stand halfway between God and man. Her other, angel eye was an unblinking, ever-vigilant steel-framed glass lens. Brother Fist could look out through that eye, seeing His world through her when he wished, and it gave her sight in the darkness so that none could use it to escape the bringer of God’s Justice.
She shone like a sword of holy light, and yet this man Marchey was not blinded. He did not even blink.
She watched him pick up another bottle from the table. He drank from it, then offered it to her. “Come on, have a drink,” he said. “It’ll help you relax.”
She took it, but not to drink. As he started to withdraw his hand she clamped her other hand around his wrist. Her ceramyl talons hissed from their sheaths in the backs of her fingers and locked with a menacing snick, razor-sharp points dimpling the soft gray fabric of the glove he wore. Staring him straight in the eye, she squeezed. Not hard enough to crush, but more than enough to crack his infuriating indifference.
Much to her surprise his wrist was unyielding. The look of apathetic patience on his face never faltered.
Scylla frowned, red-scaled nostrils flaring. She squeezed harder. Hard enough to make him scream as bones of his wrist ground together. She was under strict orders to deliver him in one piece, but one way or another she was going to put him on his knees where he belonged, to look into his eyes and see the fear that belonged there.
Scylla knew her own strength. Her hands could crush granite to sand, twist and tear steel like putty. Yet his wrist was unyielding. His face showed nothing. Less than nothing.
She squeezed harder yet, her black-tattooed lips drawing back from teeth which had been filed to points and capped with a thin layer of bonded ceramyl. Their knife-sharp tips were bright bloodred.
Marchey cocked his head for a better look at her mouth. Against all reason, he smiled. “Nice touch,” he said. “Bet it hurts like a bastard if you bite your tongue.”
Scylla hissed in rising anger and baffled frustration. She dug her talons into his upper wrist and pulled. The cloth shredded like tissue under the ceramyl blades.
But instead of being rewarded with an agonized screech as his wrist was flayed to the bone, there was a shrill skreeeeeeee that vibrated up her arm and set her teeth on edge. Still he stared back at her, looking… amused.
Although it felt like a minor defeat, she dropped her gaze. Scraps of gray cloth dangled from her talons. His hand and wrist were silver—a silver exactly like her own angel skin. Her ceramyl blades were sharp and hard enough to slash through plate steel like cardboard, but they had not put so much as a scratch on the gleaming surface of his wrist and arm.
Her forehead furrowed, baffled by this impossibility.
When she looked up at his face again he was grinning at her.
“Surprise,” he said, daring to laugh at her. At her!
“Surprise yourself,” she snarled.
Then she shot him point-blank in the chest.
Marchey came to, shook his head groggily.
That proved to be a serious mistake. His brain felt like it had been sucked out his eye sockets, macerated, and squeezed back into his skull through the hole bored in the middle of his forehead. He moaned as it sloshed turgidly with every move he made.
Behind him someone laughed, a harsh sound that drove a blunt harpoon in one ear and out the other. A female someone? His memory coughed up a hazy picture of a one-eyed silver chimera.
Incapable of making any sense of that, he squinted at his surroundings. He recognized the high-backed chair under him, feeling a little better when he realized that he was in the familiar confines of the courier ship that had been his only real home for the past few years.
The main board was about three meters away. He managed to focus one bleary eye on the flight-status stack.
He was in transit.
That was strange. He didn’t remember—
“We are on our way to Ananke.”
That woman’s voice again. Maybe he wasn’t imagining it. He flirted with vertigo getting his chair swivelled around to find its source.
The silver-armored amazon with the hideously tattooed face hadn’t been a hallucination after all. She was sitting at his galley table. Drinking coffee, from the smell.
“Good for us,” he mumbled, fishing in his pouch for an analgesic. His fingers found only the bottom. It had been emptied.
She held up the purple foilpak he’d been searching for. “Are you looking for these?”
“Desperately.” He heaved himself to his feet, grimacing as the contents of his head ebbed and surged, and stood there a moment to regain the hang of standing before trying to walk. He felt his chest with his gloveless hand. It felt bruised and tender, like he had been hit in the sternum with a sledgehammer.