Cleave
True to his word, Dominous was efficient and lethal.
The elevator carried them deeper into the facility. When the doors opened, Dominous moved quickly and quietly into a large hall. He glanced left, then right.
As his head turned, he saw a group of seven people in Vesta Model suits like those worn by the soldiers at the drop site. They stood twenty feet away, their full attention fixed on a man in a basic emergency suit.
These were the sort of suits stored aboard ships for use during catastrophic failures. They were meant to keep someone alive in the void until rescue or repairs made them unnecessary.
They did not amplify strength, provide a functional UI, or withstand harsh use. They certainly could not survive even light weapons fire.
Their primary advantage was that they were cheap, easy to store, and occupied very little valuable space. Each suit had a small oxygen sensor that activated when the surrounding atmosphere lacked a breathable mixture of gases. The sensor triggered a small pump in the helmet, releasing bursts of breathable gas from mixed-oxygen canisters mounted on the back.
Each of the
9Lives’
shuttles carried a complement of these suits. Ava was intimately familiar with them and hated the idea of ever being forced to use one.
In her estimation, they were necessary but dangerous death traps.
Even a small puncture from a sharp piece of metal could render one useless. A hard impact against the oxygen canisters could cause a small detonation or, if the wearer was lucky, merely a leak.
The emergency suit did nothing to protect the man from Dominous’s assault rifle.
Dominous snapped off a shot.
It struck the man directly in the forehead as his eyes widened in surprise and he began shouting a warning to the others.
As one, they turned.
Some began raising their weapons.
Others never got that far.
Dominous continued firing as he sprinted down the hallway. His rifle remained perfectly level, as though it were being carried on an inertia-stabilized dolly.
Every shot landed exactly where he intended.
Every one struck the cranium.
Each person fell backward from the impact like debris thrown by an explosion.
Ava had only just stepped from the elevator when she watched, undisguised shock and awe on her face, as Dominous sprinted past the fallen bodies and launched himself into a forward tumble.
He rolled, sprang onto one knee, and aimed his rifle back up the hallway toward her.
Ava flinched backward into the elevator as he fired.
Twenty-eight shots flew past the opening.
Ava counted them, only then realizing there was no accompanying bark, bang, or boom from a weapon of that size.
The sound, almost lost beneath the pounding of her own heart, was closer to the light clap of fingers striking a palm.
“What the hell are you doing?!” she yelled into her comm.
“The hallway is secure. Wait thirty seconds, then follow the navigational data I am sending to your suit,” Dominous said.
“I am not waiting here and doing nothing,” she replied, expecting an argument.
None came.
“Dominous?” she asked.
No response.
“Dominous?” she repeated as she cautiously peered into the corridor.
The hallway was wide compared with those she had explored near the laboratory. It was fifteen feet across and twenty feet tall. The grating beneath her boots was gray, worn, thick, and reinforced. Telltale marks showed years of vehicle traffic.
The walls were off-white, with lines of different colors running their length.
Blue.
Yellow.
Orange.
Red.
Purple.
Black.
The yellow line ended at the elevator.
Ava quickly realized each color probably led somewhere specific. Barracks, elevators, exits, or different sections of the facility.
She had neither the time nor inclination to care.
She looked down the hallway toward the pile of bodies she had watched Dominous terminate with such unfeeling efficiency.
She had never seen anything like it.
Ava was a talented marksman, but this had been machine-like.
Sterile and clean in a way that sent a chill up her spine.
Dominous had wasted no time and made no unnecessary movement.
They had never stood a chance.
Ava turned and looked in the opposite direction, toward whatever Dominous had been firing at.
She saw nothing nearby.
The hallway was long enough to be measured in miles rather than feet. She could not see its end.
Ava adjusted a setting on her HUD, amplifying her vision until she could just make out a door at the far end.
It was more tunnel than hallway, she thought.
“Dom…” she began.
Then her enhanced vision found another, much larger pile of bodies.
She could not clearly identify the class or model of the suits, but several flattened figures lay at different intervals along the corridor.
Ava activated her range-finding tools.
The first group was 1,245 feet away.
The next was 1,734 feet.
The final and largest group was one mile and forty-five feet distant.
Ava could not visually confirm the number of bodies. They overlapped one another, their similarly colored suits breaking apart the familiar shapes of the corpses and making them resemble one continuous mass.
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She estimated that twenty-eight bodies littered the hallway.
“Thirty seconds have elapsed. You may safely follow in my wake,” Dominous said through her comm.
Ava jumped at the sudden sound of his voice as she surveyed his work.
She was beginning to have serious doubts about following this monster anywhere.
She forced herself to turn and walk toward where Dominous had disappeared, following the navigation markers he had transmitted to her suit.
The first marker hovered at the intersection just beyond the smaller pile of bodies near the elevator.
The next appeared to the right, indicating the direction she should take upon reaching it.
She increased her pace from a walk to a trot and then a jog.
At the intersection, Ava carefully peered down each possible route before accepting that there was no immediate danger and continuing along the indicated path.
She heard no gunfire.
She found more bodies as she ran.
Lone men and women lay scattered through the halls. Some wore light combat suits, though most had been dressed in emergency atmosphere suits like the first man near the elevator.
No pools of blood had gathered beneath many of them. Their bodies had been hurled backward, though it was obvious they had been facing the direction from which Ava approached.
Some lay in twisted heaps as though they had been picked up and dropped elsewhere. Their heads had been turned completely around so that those lying on their backs stared into the floor, while those on their chests looked upward at Ava as she passed.
Ava fought back a wave of revulsion after passing one body that had landed in an arch. The legs remained standing, but the torso bent forward until the neck met the floor at a right angle.
The woman’s face looked up at Ava in bewildered shock.
Ava thought she saw one eye twitch, but her HUD assured her the woman was dead.
No heartbeat appeared in the ambient scans Ava was now running, paranoid that Dominous might be violently incapacitating people and leaving them to die slowly for the sake of efficiency.
Her concern was unfounded.
Every body was only that.
There were no signs of life anywhere Dominous had traveled.
Only death and efficiency.
Ava felt cold.
Now that she was no longer directly involved in the action, her adrenaline had faded, leaving behind the pain and aches from her journey.
She was filled with apprehension over the thing she had unleashed upon the station.
These people were her enemies.
They had taken her family.
They would have killed her.
They had tortured her.
They were mad, talking about recovering lost power, becoming gods, and ruling all of humanity.
But that could not describe every person here.
Surely some were good people.
Some likely posed no threat.
Some might have released or even helped her.
Most of the bodies she passed now had been unarmed noncombatants.
They had not been a threat.
Ava shook her head.
She was second-guessing the mission before it was over.
Kane called that trying to captain from the mess.
It was easy to make decisions while sitting in comfort, removed from the reality of the situation.
Hadn’t Ava killed several people herself?
She had snapped the neck of the young man in the office.
She had killed.
Did it matter that she felt terrible about it?
Did it matter that Dominous’s ability to scythe through the base like arcing plasma through low-grade hull plating disturbed her?
Yes.
She decided that it did matter.
Still, she could not argue with the results.
Ava pushed the images of the dead from her mind and continued toward the next marker.
This marker did not indicate an intersection but a door leading into a stairwell.
The hatch already stood open, and its control panel had been removed.
It looked as though it had simply been ripped from the wall.
Ava puzzled over that. The panel had been mounted flush, leaving no obvious purchase for gripping and pulling. Even with tools, prying it free would have been difficult.
Yet it lay on the floor to the right of the doorway.
The hatch could no longer be opened or closed electronically. Moving it manually would be nearly impossible because the internal gear system remained locked in place.
Ava stepped into the stairwell.
The stairs descended from this uppermost entrance, spiraling around the cylindrical room. They were narrow, comfortably allowing only one person to pass at a time.
The shaft was not large, perhaps twelve feet from side to side, though the stairs curved around it several times before reaching the bottom.
Doors were set into the wall at each rotation, one directly beneath another.
Every control panel had been removed until Ava reached the door marked by the blinking navigational indicator.
This door stood open, though its panel remained intact.
Ava stepped through into a smaller hallway.
It was not as cramped as the corridors near the laboratory, but neither was it as spacious as the miles-long tunnel she had just crossed.
As she entered, Dominous was suddenly there.
He materialized in her vision, stepped forward, and scraped the control panel from the wall with one hand.
For a moment, his right hand had seemed like a shovel-shaped claw as he drove it into the narrow space between the panel and the hull.
When the panel fell to the floor, his hand appeared normal again.
His suit had also seemed reflective or perhaps transparent only moments earlier.
Ava had not seen him.
Then he had simply been there.
Dominous did not comment or indicate that he noticed when Ava jumped backward and raised her weapon. She did not point it directly at him, though the barrel briefly flashed in his direction.
“Damn it, Dominous. You can turn invisible?” she demanded.
“No. My suit can obscure itself, making my form difficult for some observers to perceive,” he said.
“Why aren’t you doing that now?”
“You are here now.”
“And that matters why?”
“This way, we can communicate more effectively.”
“I don’t follow,” Ava said, giving the giant man a skeptical look. “How does seeing you help us communicate?”
“Humans communicate through verbal and auditory sounds, but also through expressions, gestures, and other forms of nonverbal communication. If you can see me, you will be better able to understand me,” he explained.
“Are you serious?”
“Yes. There is a wealth of literature on the subject spanning more than a thousand years. I could recommend several treatises on nonverbal or general human communication,” he offered.
“No. I meant that you do not really communicate with your body. You don’t move like a person does. You’re… rigid.”
“I had thought I was exaggerating my expressions,” he said.
He turned away and moved toward the next navigational marker.
Then he added, “I have not had the opportunity to practice.”
Ava watched him walk away.
His pace was ordinary—fast for an average person—but she had seen him move at speeds no normal human should have been capable of reaching without mechanical assistance.
She felt strange for it, but she could not stop herself from feeling sorry for the giant.
He had sounded slightly sad.
That was the first spark of humanity she had detected from him.
“Dominous, I’m sorry,” she said as she jogged to catch up. “I didn’t mean that you weren’t communicating. Maybe it is difficult with the helmet on, since most expression comes from the face.”
Dominous paused in midstep and turned toward her.
The helmet seemed to melt away.
“You are correct. Human facial expression forms a significant component of nonverbal communication. The helmet prevented the reception of those signals. This should rectify the oversight. Thank you.”
His cheeks twitched into the faintest suggestion of a smile.
“You just smiled,” Ava said.
“Yes. I was demonstrating that I am satisfied with the solution to our communication issue.”
“Is your helmet still there, or is it invisible?” she asked as she began walking beside him.
“The helmet remains in place, but it refracts light so that it appears as the material directly opposite the viewer. From my perspective, nothing has changed. From the perspective of someone such as yourself, it appears that I am not wearing one,” he explained.
“That is very handy.”
Dominous nodded, and they continued in silence without encountering anyone on the way to the next marker.
“Ava, you shortened my name to Dom earlier. I have considered it and accept this appellation as my nickname. You may refer to me as Dom in the future,” he said, turning toward her and twitching his cheeks again.
“When did I…”
She remembered calling for him over the comm while looking at the bodies.
Dom…
Ava shuddered.
He was a killer.
A monster.
A relic.
But he was also something else.
He was a person.
She knew almost nothing about who he was, what he had been doing, or for how long.
He did not appear old, but when dealing with Old World technology, Ava had no concept of what might be possible. If the artifact was a stasis pod or cryogenic chamber, it was entirely possible that he came from the distant past.
Perhaps even Old Earth itself.
“Okay,” she said. “Dom it is.”