Sword of Minerva (The Guild Wars Book 10) Mark Wandrey (e novels to read .TXT) 📖

weapon that slid out at the exact moment his hand made contact with it. He hadn’t had call to use this one yet, a tiny machine pistol firing .177 caliber caseless bullets at 750 rounds per minute. His arm brought the weapon out and played it across the two who’d shot him, firing 30 rounds in a little over a second; he scored eight hits on one and nine on the other. Their armor was good, but not perfect. Bright red arterial blood sprayed from one opSha’s neck, while a bullet went through the eye of another.

Rick countered the weapon’s ferocious recoil using his jets without thought. The remaining three tried to retreat. Lacking an active flight system, they were reduced to scrabbling for handholds. Another two seconds of fire and 90 more rounds left all three dead.

“I should have used this before,” Rick said and holstered the gun, which automatically retracted into his thigh. Of course, what it had in rate of fire, it lacked in firepower. A sound made him spin around, right arm laser up and armed. It was only one of the opSha he’d machinegunned, surprisingly still alive.

Rick flew over to the alien, who was holding its throat as blood bubbled out between its fingers. The corridor was full of red globs floating all over, splattering onto the walls and bodies, combining to make larger globs, with some landing on him. So he didn’t get any on a critical sensor, he used a leg thruster to blow a cone clear between him and the dying alien, automatically thrusting with a back unit in the opposite direction to hold position.

“Gahk,” the alien gurgled as blood roiled from its mouth. They didn’t use air to make their vocalizations, but the sounds still originated in their mouths.

“Where’s Sato?”

“Gah…gawn,” it said.

“Gone? Where?” The alien’s eyes went out of focus, and the blood stopped surging. “Fuck,” Rick snarled and spun around, boosting toward the airlock. As he feared, when he arrived it was closed, and nothing was outside. They’d taken Sato and their ship.

“Fuck, fuck, FUCK!” He slammed his fist into the wall with enough force to shatter the laser-smoothed rock. The energy propelled him backward, and he arrested the momentum with his back jets without thinking.

After a moment, he controlled his rage. He examined his knuckles, which were throbbing in pain. The metallic alloy was scuffed, but not broken. The map he’d compiled of the asteroid was, naturally, incomplete. He used his pinplants to plot what else might exist, based on his mapping thus far, and was rewarded with a probable outline of the remaining space. At least another airlock where the other ship was docked.

Rick channeled his fomenting rage into something useful. Focus. He considered; where could they have taken him? They wouldn’t leave the system. Well, they could; however, he doubted they would. If they had, there was nothing he could do. This left somewhere in-system, or, more likely, in orbit of the gas giant. There were only sparse asteroids elsewhere. While it appeared their enemies liked asteroids, this base was nothing more than a trap, a tar baby.

“They expected me to be dead,” he said as he examined the map. Or they thought he was just a bot. Maybe one of those Peacekeeper robots. It didn’t matter; he’d become the x-factor. They weren’t expecting him.

Rick pushed away from the airlock and flew down the corridors. Part of his mind remembered how it was to fly when the Æsir and he were separate. He’d command the suit through his pinplants. The control was precise, but measured, controlled, and ultimately delayed. It might appear fast and fluid to an observer. It really wasn’t, though, not even to him. Now? There was no delay or relay. He didn’t tell the suit what to do; he did it. He didn’t know how he ever flew before. Before the Æsir and he were one. Before he was the Æsir. Why didn’t Sato set it up this way from the beginning?

Corners in the corridors that would have required him to stop and change directions, he now took at speed. His body spun with blinding speed, using back and leg jets in intricate combinations to perform skew turns an observer would think was impossible. He laughed out loud in the joy of the moment. At last he felt whole, for the first time since he’d ‘woken up’ with Sato looking at him. The flesh inside the metal was so limiting.

Rick arrived at his destination, a predicted series of rooms on the opposite side of the asteroid from the center where he and Sato were ambushed. Its existence was further highlighted by the squad of armed opSha he’d blundered into. They’d been coming from that direction. It also made sense for a location of their enemy’s forces. Sato and he would have blundered into it, ignoring all other reasonable directions, to have reached it.

He braked with leg thrusters, slowing. Ahead was a lightly armored door that he was falling toward at 20 meters per second. Rick put both arms down, aiming between his legs, and pumped the lasers to full power, firing the millisecond they came on target. Both arms effected a precise arc, 250-kilowats of laser energy slicing into the doors, leaving glowing trails, and sending molten metal globules flying away. His armored legs slammed into the door’s center, feet first, a split second after he finished the cuts.

The doors split in the center. Half folded back, the cut on that side not quite complete. The other half was propelled away from the impact, a red-hot scythe cutting into the room’s occupants. A handful of opSha who’d been gathering weapons and armor were cut down by the projectile, either killed outright or horribly burned, out of action. The other 50-odd occupants cried out in surprise and tried to fight back.

It was a bloodbath. In a confined space