• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Catrall cursed. “Those bastards dropped us in a Syndicate facility without even telling us? What kind of shi—”

“Stow it,” Li told him. “What Syndicate?” she asked Shanna. “What series?”

Shanna hesitated. “They’re . . . not. I don’t think they’re Syndicate genesets at all. This is obsolete tech. Prebreakaway corporate product. These things are fucking dinosaurs.”

And suddenly Li knew with sickening certainty what she was looking at. She remembered that face not because it was the face of her old enemy, but because it was her own face.

These constructs were her twins, their genesets spliced and assayed and patented to survive the man-made hell of the Bose-Einstein mines on Compson’s World. And they were here despite the fact that it had been illegal to tank a genetic construct anywhere in UN space for over twenty years.

She turned away, feeling sick and dizzy, hoping that the eerie resemblance was only visible to her eyes.

“Let’s finish up and get the hell out of here,” she said. “And keep your heads screwed on. We need to make that retrieval, or we’re going to be on the receiving end of a hot package. Seven minutes and counting.”

She flicked open her VR window and found Cohen still scanning datafiles.

<6:51 to retrieval,> she sent.

She gave him a full minute. <5:51,> she told him.

She toggled her realspace feed. The squad was hovering, eyeballing her nervously.

she told Dalloway.

Back on-line. Cohen was running twenty-odd parallel searches now, working so fast she could only track him as a vast icy sweep of light cutting through the lab comp’s numbers.

she queried.

No answer.

he said.

The link wavered. “Shit!” Kolodny said, shaking her head and blinking. Then she was gone, and the link was back up before Li even had time to feel the vertigo hit.

But a minute later he was still jacked in, and Li was still waiting.

she asked, turning to stare at him.

That was when she saw the blood on Kolodny’s face.

She jerked Kolodny away from the comp station and yanked the jack from her head, knowing even as she did it that she was too late. She was still standing there with the wire in her hands when the first shots whined down the corridor.

Dalloway broadcast.

Li flipped to VR, picked up Dalloway’s feed. Catrall lay in a twisted heap at the foot of the stairs. Four guards rattled into view, the last one down stopping to turn Catrall over with a booted foot and take his rifle.

“We’re leaving,” she told Cohen.

The only answer she got was the clatter of Kolodny’s carbine hitting the floor.

Kolodny was bleeding out. Fluid dripped from her nostrils, leaving watery pink splatters on the white tiles. She moved jerkily; the muscles of her back and legs were going into spasm. Li had seen wet bugs at work before. Cohen didn’t have to tell her Kolodny was only minutes away from being unable to walk at all. Or that she was slipping down a slope that would only end in one thing unless they got her out: flatlining.

Li asked.

Cohen’s laugh flickered across the numbers like brushfire.

She heard gunfire in the corridor—and this time it wasn’t the muffled whine of discharging pulse rifles but the crack of real bullets hitting concrete and ceramsteel. She toggled Dalloway’s channel and saw that he was pinned down at the far end of the corridor, and Shanna and the others were too far out of position even to give him covering fire.

The lab seemed three times longer than it had on the way in. By the time they’d covered half its