I landed wrong. Things broke.
But my hand still worked.
Auto-targeting readjusted.
I fired.
Warhammer’s helmet melted at the contact spot. Her face turned scarlet. Her cheeks and nose boiled and melted. Her eyeballs, that disconcerting orange like mine, bulged and burst. Blood and viscera splatted on her face shield.
It wasn’t enough. I kept firing.
Inside the helmet, her head . . . exploded.
Skull fragments, blood, and gray matter hit her face shield.
The face shield opened. More of her filth pulsed onto my armor and helmet.
My armor cleaned the gore from my faceplate.
Her neck stump pumped a final gush that fell to a trickle.
Clarisse Warhammer was dead.
I had killed her.
“That worked,” Mateo said.
Breathing hard, hurting, I studied the queen. What was left of her.
My suit began sending out alarms. I shut it off. I knew it was bad. I didn’t need the list of injuries.
I punched a button on my suit. It stood me upright, and I walked to Clarisse’s body and picked up her right hand. Lifted it across her body and with her own index finger pressed the disengage button under her left arm. Her armor opened up like a lobster tail, splitting down the legs, then the arms, then the torso.
Clarisse Warhammer really was dead.
“Harlan,” I said aloud. “You are avenged, my friend.”
The pain increased. I was breathing too fast.
My suit overrode my commands and broadcast alarms.
Darkness descended over my vision.
My gyros failed. I fell over.
The ground came at me.
* * *
I woke to see a darkened room and a vision of a human face, but elongated like a hologram with bad software problems.
“Jagger,” I murmured. “You look like shit.”
“I look better than you,” he said, a weird stretched-out smile lighting his far-too-pretty face.
“Am I in a med-bay?”
“Yes. In the bunker medical ward. You got hit. Multiple times,” he said, conversationally. “Your armor managed to deflect or absorb most of the rounds, but a few things got through.”
