“Harmon, I can’t control him. I’ve not set him to do anything. Even if I could, believe me, I wouldn’t be throwing him at Allison.”
I’d be keeping him all to myself.
“I’d have sent him away if I could,” I finished with much less conviction than I’d started with. Harmon sneered at me, not believing a word I’d said. Beside him, his holographic polar bear companion growled at Glitch, who stood his ground.
“Liar. What’s your plan? Isolating me so you can do away with me? Or do you have designs on me yourself?”
He was drunk, but the couple of drinks I’d had loosened my inhibitions too.
“Oh, get over yourself,” I snapped. Harmon reared back as though I’d slapped him, and his eyes narrowed. Real bright move, Molly, antagonize the huge drunk man. Too late to back off now. “Not everything’s about you, Harmon. I don’t care if you and Allison are fucking as long as you don’t break anything I have to repair. Get it? So if you’re losing her attention, go win her back. Scaring me won’t help.”
Afterward, when I had time to think this over, I decided that my mistake was suggesting that he wasn’t the center of the universe. Harmon Baltimore was a big man, but his ego easily outweighed his body, and like so many egos, was fragile enough for the slightest prod to hurt.
At the time, his explosion took me by surprise. With no warning at all, he swung a hand up in an open-palmed slap that sent me staggering backward. Unbalanced in unfamiliar heels, I tripped and fell to the floor with a clatter. My cheek numb from the power of the blow, I stared up at him not quite believing what he’d done.
Harmon advanced and I scrambled back, not even trying to get up. If I slowed to do that, he’d have me before I made it to my feet. Beside me, Ursa the polar bear rushed Glitch in a meaningless fight. Neither could hurt the other, but they could stop each other from interfering in our fight.
“You’re behind this, bitch,” Harmon shouted, towering over me. “I’ll not let you weasel out of it with words, mark me now. Why would you dress like this if you weren’t planning to seduce me? I’ll have the truth.”
He loomed over me like a storm about to break, face in shadow, voice like thunder. I didn’t try to reason with him, not now. Anything I said would somehow become proof of his ridiculous theory.
Instead, I reached for my wrist, fumbling for the emergency alarm on my comm bracelet. Eyes, narrowing, Harmon stamped on my wrist before I could trigger it. The painful crunch of the bracelet shattering followed by a static-filled howl that cut off abruptly as Glitch vanished.
My pulse raced, vision narrowed, hands curled into fists. “You fucker.”
I didn’t shout. Too angry for that. The icy rage in my voice gave Harmon pause, even in his state, and I lashed out, kicking the side of his knee with all my strength. With a cry of pain, my attacker stumbled back. I rolled to my feet unsteadily.
“You’ll pay for that, bitch,” he growled, and charged. Even limping on his left leg he was faster than I’d expected, and bulky enough to fill the hallway. No way to avoid taking this hit, and that would be that.
I closed my eyes and tried to brace.
Thump. The sound was so loud I felt it rather than heard it. I didn’t feel the impact, though. At first I thought it was one of those ‘you don’t hear the bullet that kills you’ things — I was dead or unconscious, and my mind hadn’t registered the blow that sent me there.
Harmon dispelled that theory with a howl of pain and rage and fear mixed in one terrible noise. Something else snarled, a noise that should have been terrifying but reassured me instead.
I risked opening an eye, then two when I didn’t believe what the first showed me.
Karnac stood between me and a fallen Harmon, who struggled to his feet. A bruise was already visible, the whole left side of his face dark and swelling.
“I knew you two were in this together,” the actor said, words slurred even more than before. Making it to his feet he staggered forward, waving a hand at us. “Fuck you both!”
He lowered his head, like a bull getting ready to charge, and although he’d attacked me, I felt an urge to warn him. To stop him doing something foolish and pointless.
Harmon was a big, powerful man. He had some experience in a fight, and he knew how to use his weight. But against Karnac, that was like a firecracker competing with the sun. Before I found the right words to warn him, he roared and ran at us.
Karnac stepped forward and slashed with vicious speed. His claws caught Harmon’s face, driving him back with a cry of pain and ending his charge on the spot. Touching his face, Harmon stared at his bloody hand in horror.
Serves you right for stamping on Glitch’s projector, I thought, looking at the broken comm unit to see how bad the damage was.
“No.” I breathed the word, looking at the cracked open shell of the wristband. Inside, the delicate projector was in pieces — that, I’d expected. What shocked and frightened me was that the datastore itself had snapped in half too. Glitch’s memories, his personality, everything that made him was in that store. They’d fade fast, now, leaving nothing of him behind.
I might be able to patch it. Might. Even if I could, though, running repairs to an active datastore risked messing up the information kept inside.
And that ‘information’ was my friend.
4 Karnac
Advancing on the human male as he scrambled unsteadily to his feet, I tried to work out what to do with him. Every instinct in my body shouted for his blood, for his heart.
He hurt my khara, he threatened her, and he would pay.
“You get back,” he shouted as I stalked forward, baring my teeth in a killer snarl. The bravado he’d displayed when his foe was a woman half his size vanished like ice in a drive-flame. “I didn’t hurt her, I wouldn’t, just scared her a little. That’s all. Get away!”
Cowardice didn’t endear him to me. The color drained from his face and his eyes darted in every direction, looking for salvation. He wouldn’t find it. Nothing would save him now.
From behind me came the soft breath of Molly’s whispered “no.”
More a sound of pain and horror than a word, it chilled me. I spun to see what was wrong, and Harmon took that moment to turn and flee. I ignored him for now — Molly came first.
“What is wrong?” I looked over her shoulder at the shattered parts of her comm bracelet and understood. Molly was still drawing breath to answer me when I scooped up the parts in one hand, slung her over my shoulder with the other, and ran.
“What are you doing?” she protested. I ignored her — taking time to explain would waste precious seconds.
As it was, it took too long to reach the workshop. Putting Molly down on the sofa at the back of the room, I spread the parts of Glitch’s projector bracelet on my workbench. Peeling open the remains, separating the broken parts, trying to make sense of the primitive construction.
Stopping the datastore’s degeneration was the priority — repair could come later. Throwing parts out of the way, I grabbed up the salvaged shipbrain of a Prytheen fighter and tore the outer casing off.
It was long dead. No power since the Crash, nothing to stop the computer from degenerating into inert gel. But, hopefully, that would still be of use.