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CHAOS REDEEMED


star


Deborah A. Wolf


“I exist in agreement with all the weird chaos, destruction, and agony that is undoubtedly part of the texture of being alive.”

—Arca


“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche



“We should turn back,” Garey urged, his voice coming thick and wet through his RASP mask. “We got all the bastards, and it’s getting dark.”

“Are you afraid of the dark, Staff Sergeant?” Dutt answered. Red flashed across his visor as it adjusted to the dying light. “Or of the Indij? That little group we took out this morning was nothing more than bait for an ambush, and you know it.”

Garey didn’t answer for a long minute, staring at the lieutenant and letting his own visor adjust. “There’s been no sign for two hours, Lieutenant. If the Indij bastards were gonna ambush us, they’d have done it by now. Williams, have you seen anything?”

My visor flashed yellow as the suit’s biofeedback picked up an adrenaline spike. “Not a damn thing, sir.” Yellow again, two long flashes, visible to the others.

Dutt must have seen it. He stopped and turned to face me square on. “And . . .?” he demanded.

Garey’s visor flashed a warning to me. My adrenaline spiked again. “And, uh. It’s odd, sir. Usually we’d see roadrunners, at least. Horned toads. Maybe a fox. But we haven’t seen a thing since we killed those villagers. Unless you count that vulture.” I pointed up at the vulture that had been circling overhead since that morning.

Vultur gryphus,” a voice in my head offered. The asex voice of my guidance system, MUSE, offered her unsolicited, though often helpful, commentary. She could speak to others if she chose, through the speaker in my visor, and she did so now. “Andean condor. The world’s largest flying bird, with a wingspan up to three meters and weighing up to fifteen kilograms. Critically endangered.

“Thank you, Muse,” the lieutenant said dryly. “And now back to our regularly scheduled program. Garey, Williams, your asses are going to be critically endangered unless you can find me my enemy combatants. I didn’t come all the way down to this Godforsaken asshole of a country to go birdwatching.”

“Those villagers—” I started to say, but cut off as Dutt closed the distance between us in a few long strides. He bent so that his visor was nearly touching mine, and I took a half step back.

“Villagers?” he asked. His voice was calm, matter-of-fact, but his visor flashed yellow-red-red-red.

“Enemy combatants,” I whispered, and cleared my throat. “Sir.”

“That’s right, Specialist, and don’t you fucking forget it. I don’t care if they look like men, women, children, or your Goddamn grandmother, these Indij bastards are goddamn enemy combatants. Now—”

And then the screaming.

Blood.

A flash of color—

And the visor went dark.


“Rewind,” I told Muse. “Twenty seconds.”


Those villagers—” I started to say, but

“Forward. Ten seconds.”

“ . . .or your Goddamn grandmother . . .”

“Forward. Three seconds.”

Blood. A flash of

“Pause.”

—color.

Biocams capture a moment of time in its entirety, and perfectly. Because of this, there can be no blurring or imperfection in a neuro image. Nevertheless, I found myself staring at the blurred image of bright feathers, claws, teeth.

“Muse? Identify, please.”

Muse paused a long moment, which was unusual. “Species unknown.”

“Bullshit. Clean the image up and identify species.”

Another, longer pause. “Request cannot be completed. Object’s neurological processes were compromised by an excessive fear response.”

“Fear response?” That was odd in the extreme. “I didn’t think the Septagon was still sending unmodded troops to the southern border.”

“Specialist Williams was fully modified in 2077, at the age of ten,” Muse answered.

I let myself sink more fully into the sense-dep gel and stared through the eyes of a dead man, trying to figure out what it was that had been killing our troops for the better part of a year.

“Any guesses as to what it might be?”

“I do not guess.” If Muse had been capable of emotion, I suppose her voice would have been as dry as the shithole they were sending me to.

Feathers. Fangs. Claws. It certainly couldn’t be natural—the only predator larger than a house cat that had survived the Drought was an elderly white tiger kept in a life tank at a zoo in New Washington. This thing—whatever it was—looked to be at least that big. And it had killed at least two dozen highly modded Trans Ops soldiers and disrupted our mission in Tula for nearly a year now.

I closed my eyes against the headache. “Disengage. Wake me when we’re there.”

“Yes, Lieutenant.”

The low hum of the ABI halted abruptly, and the biomesh that covered my scalp went blessedly silent. I closed my eyes and allowed myself a moment of pleasure as my senses realigned themselves with my own body. My head itched fiercely as new hair pushed through the scalp transplant, my eyes ached, and my new melanin-heavy skin felt too tightly stretched. Small discomforts, easily ignored.

The blurred afterimage lingered: Feathers. Fangs. Claws.

I didn’t know what this thing was, whether it was some animal mutated by chems or rads used in the war, or some new bioweapon thrown together by the Russians and Venezuelans. The last I thought much likelier. Of course, being a bioweapon myself, I was probably biased.

It didn’t matter, anyway. I had my orders. Whatever that thing was, I would track it down, kill it, and slaughter any other enemy combatants in the area.

Yes, Muse whispered in my head, as a mother might have whispered to a child, back when we had such luxuries as children and mothers. Kill them all.

I slept.


Staff Sergeant Angela Milatz stared at me through a natural-looking set of blue eyes. She was modded, of course, but not heavily so; her phenotype was all northern European, and pale enough to be a hindrance in the naked heat of New Hidalgo. Her sweat stank of fear, and I felt my own biosuit hurry to dampen my own reaction.

That was just as well. Nobody wanted a repeat of Bosnia. I smiled at the memory, and Milatz stepped deliberately away from me. One of the other soldiers coughed to cover a laugh.

“Nice teeth,” Milatz said under her breath.

“Nice teeth, Lieutenant.”

I turned to face the man who had joined us. He was handsome despite a mass of chemical scarring which bleached and distorted one cheek and the side of his neck. Shorter than I, broad shouldered, NIUs clean and stiff despite the dust and heat.

Captain Herman Cortez, Muse informed me through the psylink. Twelve years in. N3 mods.

“Nice teeth, Lieutenant,” Milatz said in a neutral voice.

“That’s better, Staff Sergeant,” said the captain. “And I must comment on your sharp eyes—The lieutenant here has an impressive set of canines which doubtless cost the Transmurican taxpayer more than your sorry ass is worth. Those sharp eyes of yours just earned you a week’s patrol outside the green. Dismissed.”

“Sir.”

“That goes for the lot of you. Get out of my sight. No, not you.” He grabbed my arm. “You stay.” When the others had left, he continued.

“You’ll have to forgive Milatz. Her wife was killed in Texas, and she has a thing about prototypes.”

“Texas was ugly.”

“Yes, it was. And you were there.”

“So were you,” I guessed, and Muse affirmed. I felt my biosuit cool in response to the images that flashed through my mind: Houston. The invasion. We’d barely beaten them back, and to do so we’d had to . . .

“We won,” Cortez said. “We did what we had to do, and we won. That’s all there is, Lieutenant.”

“I’ll drink to that.” I held up a gel pack, and he laughed.

“I like you already, Lieutenant . . . K? OS? K-OS?”

“Kay is fine.”

“Pleased to meet you, Kay. And who’s your little doggy?” He crouched down to inspect the bright metal droid that hovered at my ankle like an anxious pet.

“It’s just a HOUND. They don’t have names.”

“No? What does it do?” He leaned in closer, and the droid buzzed a little in warning.

“It finds things,” I said. “And kills them.”

Cortez straightened, brushing the wrinkles from his trousers, and dropped his false smile. “Like you?”

“Not at all, Captain. I’m a bio, not a droid.”

“What’s the difference?” A small smile played around his mouth, and heat flushed through me just a little faster than my biosuit could cool it down. My understanding of social cues was imperfect, but I knew when I was being laughed at.

“Well, for one thing.” I punctured the metal skin of the gel packet with my canines and drained it, enjoying the sensation of moisture if not the bland taste. “A droid will give multiple warnings before killing a human. I’ll only give one.”

“One warning? And what’s that?”

I smiled and tossed the drained packet into a recycling bin. “That was it, Captain.”


Despite their misgivings, the humans accepted me quickly enough. Mostly because they needed me: Whatever had killed Williams’s squad had killed half a platoon in the past few weeks, and President Donaldson was beside himself with fury. Transmurica wouldn’t be whole until we had retaken those lands south of Hidalgo which had been claimed by Russian-backed Venezuela in War Three. There was only one tiny, weak, insignificant pocket of Indigenous resistance to imperial rule dug into a system of tunnels beneath the ruins of Tula. One small band of Indij—and the thing or weapon with them that had been killing the best and most heavily modified soldiers on the planet. They were making Donaldson look like an idiot, and the last time that had happened we’d nuked half the planet.

On the other hand, if we hadn’t fucked up the planet, there wouldn’t have been a need for enhanced transhumans like me, so I guess that was a win. Now all I had to do was wipe out this band of Indij rebels, neutralize or capture their weapon, and in doing so convince New Washington to overlook the bloody mess I’d made in Houston and not scrap the bioengineering program that had led to my creation.

I stood staring at the body of one of our soldiers, an E-3 named Martinez whose remains had been recovered and packed in dry ice before my arrival. It was a gruesome sight; the brightly enameled titanium of her enhanced limbs stood out in terrible contrast to the mutilated flesh. Her eyes had been burned in their sockets, mouth stitched shut, and the heart cut from her chest—perimortem, the medic slash coroner had informed me.

“See here,” he pointed to a shoulder, which had been torn to the bone, “and here, at the base of her neck, where the flesh has been torn? What does this look like to you?”

Teeth. Claws. “An animal attack.”

“Exactly. And look here.” He turned the soldier’s body partway over. “Here, you can see that a great deal of the flesh has been removed and presumably consumed.

Consumed.

I could feel him watching me, trying to gauge my reaction, and I almost said, “I’ve eaten worse.” It would have been true, too, but Cortez was in the room, so I just shrugged.

“Consumed. Got it.”

“Any idea what could have done this?”

I had sharpened my senses to the five thousandth degree, and I did smell something, but whatever had maimed the young soldier wasn’t in any database accessible to me, Muse, or the Hound.

“None whatsoever,” I said cheerfully.

The coroner slash medic frowned at my flippant tone. “If you don’t know what it is . . .”

I felt the heat of a human body approach as Captain Cortez drew near, so I wasn’t surprised when he spoke. “Fortunately, you don’t have to know what something is to kill it. Isn’t that so, Lieutenant?”

“As a matter of fact,” I answered without turning, “I have found it is easier to destroy that which we don’t understand.” I glanced pointedly at a wheeled cart piled high with bits of flesh-encrusted mech they’d salvaged from the soldier’s corpse.

The medic’s face went pale.

“Kay,” Cortez said firmly.

K-OS, Muse repeated the warning. Your suit indicates a heightened fight response, which would be inappropriate to act upon under current circumstances.

“Oh, don’t worry,” I told them both, “if I killed everyone who hated me for being trans, humans would have gone the way of elephants and polar bears by now. Besides which, I’m going to go hunt this thing in the morning.” I bared my teeth in a rictus grin. “And I never hunt on a full stomach.”


I stared at my pod’s pale ceiling late into the night. How often had I lain awake in the mountains of Pakistan, or the forests of Siberia, just like this?

Seven hundred and twenty-eight, Muse answered helpfully.

“At least there were stars in Pakistan,” I said, “and trees in Siberia. They were beautiful, even if they were dying. Do you understand beauty, Muse?”

I understand death. Is that not the same thing?

I knew immediately I did not want to follow that train of thought. I had never understood the AI, any more than full humans or half-mechs could understand me, and I found those brief moments in which Muse let me see her inner workings truly terrifying.

I asked instead, “Muse, what are the chances that this mission will be a success?”

Define success, she answered.

“I don’t end up in a lab in New Washington being dissected for future study.”

Approximatelythere was a soft whirringseven point six six six six six two percent.

“And assuming no fuckups? Give me my best-case scenario.”

That is the best-case scenario, came the cheerful reply. If you prefer, you may round it up to an eight percent chance of success.

“Eight percent, huh,” I said. “I’ll take it.”


The next morning, a squad of half-mechs escorted me to the scrub-covered hills where they’d found Martinez’s body. I sent them a short distance away so the Hound and I could work. Not because I gave a fuck what they thought about my methods, but because those methods were classified well above their pay grades.

“You smell that?” I asked the Hound. Overlaid with blood and fear was a scent unlike any I’d ever experienced. It was at once musky, oily, and . . . spicy? I opened my mouth a little, flaring my nostrils, even as the Hound whirled around in an odd little pattern, making a weird metallic whine and a series of excited beeps.

It was cute. I wondered if real dogs had acted like that, before they went extinct.

“What is it?” I asked Muse. “Snake? Bird? Lizard? Synth?”

I could hear the whir . . . whir . . . whir of Muse thinking things over. I . . . don’t know.

I would have said she sounded surprised, or puzzled, but neither was possible.

The Hound stopped dancing around, antennae going stiff and oculus glowing hazy red, and sounded an alarm which would have deafened unmodified ears. Even as it shot toward the rest of the squad, yells and gunfire erupted from the thin cover of dead trees clinging to the rocky hilltop. I screamed—the battle cry my makers had granted me came from the same jaguar who had inspired them to give me a predator’s bite—and joined the fray, rifle kicking against my shoulder as we sent those Indij bastards to whatever hell their gods might choose. My M2024 had been tweaked to work with my mods and might as well have been an extension of my body through which I could cast a wide net of death.

My mech siblings-in-arms were just as deadly. The rebels were heavily armed and had the home-field advantage, but my soldiers were upgrades, motherfucker, with skin of titanium and biosteel scales, tendons enhanced with medgrade plastics, eyes sharper than raptors’ and cybernetic biofeedback loops informing their every action and reaction. The Hound was a literal killing machine, its adorable antics of moments before given over to the deadly rat-tat-tat-tat of rapid fire. And I—

I was the goddess of death. With Muse riding my mind and my biosuit riding my skin, I could see them all, red pulsing bags of guts and blood and bone. Killing them was no harder than reaching up into a tree for a ripe plum and crushing it with my fingers.

Then came the serpentinous spice stink, stronger than before, and a sound that made me pause midkill, made me hold my breath as my heart leaped after it. A breath, a snatch of song—of song, which had gone extinct long before the polar bear and the osprey, having had perished perhaps when the last human mother had birthed a child only to find it dead and her lullabies with it. I half dropped my rifle and turned toward the whisper, yearning—

And found myself face-to-face . . . to face . . . with a god.

A two-headed serpent taller than the charred trees looked down at me, its plumage bright and beautiful, an echo of things lost to this world. It stared at me with four enormous, slitted, sun-yellow eyes. And those eyes fill with tears.

Its sorrow engulfed me. I dropped my rifle, I fell to my knees, and opened my mouth to beg forgiveness—for killing, for dying, for having been created by a cruel world. The god opened its mouths and breathed into my face, a white steam which I thought might melt me as I’d seen that little girl melt in Texas. First her skin, then her flesh, and finally her bones had been scoured away, until there was nothing left at all of her but an afterimage in my mind.

I had killed her, I had killed them all, and now it was my turn to die.

At last.


I was awakened by the smell of blood and burning flesh. My first thought was one of relief; the burning flesh was not my own. Then I opened my eyes, and relief fled.

A ceasefire had been called at the end of War Three, and the killing was supposed to have stopped. But the President of Transmurica, angered and humiliated by his defeat in Venezuela, had not given the orders to cease hostilities in Texas. He had, in fact, ordered that the Muse-linked transhumans be set to maximum aggression, our kill switches disabled, and all of those things that make us appear more human—fear, empathy, compassion—set to “null.”

“Let it burn,” he had told his horrified commanders. “Let it all burn.” And it had, for three days of Hell on Earth, during which I and my transhuman siblings carried out a massacre the likes of which had never been seen on this planet.

I had been set to “null”. Made inhuman. Unfeeling. Then I opened my eyes and saw what had been done to my squad.

My companions had been strung up in a ring of dead trees where they hung heads-down, arms outstretched as if they would beg for mercy. Their eyes had been burned in the sockets, and the white flash of ribs stark against the gaping crimson holes in their torsos told me the hearts had been torn from their chests.

Even as I sat in the rocks and dirt, staring at the desecrated bodies, the mutilated thing that had once been Milatz gave a long, rasping groan and expired. She had been enucleated, eviscerated, behearted—partly flayed as well, I could see now—and hung to bleed out. And yet until this moment she had been alive.

If I’d been capable of terror, I would have been gibbering. As it was, I reached out to Muse, my one constant source of comfort and familiarity.

“Have you ever seen anything like—” I stopped, groping after the empty void in my mind like a woman who’d recently lost a limb in combat. “Muse? Muse?”

There was no answer. Nothing but silence. Was this what it was like to be human? I wondered. All alone in your head?

And then the song began again. There was nothing I could do but stagger to my feet and follow it.


I followed the song and the serpentine scent over some low scrub-thick hills and toward the ruins of the pyramid. I hadn’t bothered noticing it when we’d flown in, not being made for wondering at such things, but I saw it now. The sun baked through what was left of our atmosphere and raked hot fingers across the naked stone, scarred here by the passage of time and there by man’s wars. Robbed of my Muse I struggled to imagine what purpose the structure might once have served. Was it a marker of some type, I wondered, a place of gathering and governance, perhaps a stairway which a human might ascend, the better to speak with the gods?

All of these and more, came a voice. It is a place of death. It is a place of life.

I started, reached out tentatively. “Muse?”

Sometimes, the voice replied. It was not my Muse, whose presence I could feel but not touch, but the deep biphonic croon of the two-headed serpent.

The skin on my forearms prickled oddly, and I glanced down in surprise. Goosebumps.

“I’ll be damned.”

Sometimes, the voice said again, and dissolved into laughter that trailed away—with the serpentine stench and the fading song—toward the broken heart of an ancient civilization.

There was nothing for me to do but follow.


I came to the end of the scent trail, the laughter, and the song just as the sun was setting. It was a glorious sight. The ruins, which had seemed almost comically irrelevant in the light of our neo-doomed world, now felt as significant as the capital of any modern city, ponderous with whispered secrets and the weight of its own importance.

A tunnel’s mouth gaped wide before me. I was certain this tunnel had not been captured in any of the thousands of aerial images Muse had shown me on the flight to Hidalgo, just as I was certain that if I happened to find this exact spot again in the light of day, there would be nothing but tumbled rock and dead brush.

“Muse,” I said, in case she could still hear me, “I’m going in. Send the Hound, if you can. I’m at—”

My voice faltered. Where was I, exactly? I could not have said. My GPS was down, my Muse was silent, and I was as lost as Hansel and Gretel stumbling through the forest toward the witch’s gingerbread house. For the first time in my synthetic life, I was lost, and alone, and I shivered as some new emotion climbed up my spine like the tendrils of a growing thing. Was it fear?

No, I decided, after some thought. Not fear. Excitement.

Was this how humans felt all the time? How I might have envied them, had I known sooner what I’d been missing.

Smiling a little, knowing it was foolish but delighting in these new sensations all the same, I entered the tunnel, let my biosuit trigger the necessary changes to my eyes for twilight vision, and followed the narrow steps down into the darkness.


Even with my jaguar’s eyes it was difficult to penetrate the darkness of this underworld. Down I went, and down and down. I counted the steps aloud till I reached one thousand, three hundred and twenty-six. I realized that Muse was not there to keep track with me, or to tell me how many steps might still be before me, or how many meters down into the belly of the world I might have ventured. I quit counting. It seemed a mischief to me and an adventure—how many steps had I taken? I had no idea!—and this I added to my growing library of small delights. How nice it was to feel a little bit human.

And how quickly I was coming to dislike the idea of giving it up.

At last I came to a ledge, or a floor, and let my pupils stretch wide till my eyes ached. I could see, very dimly, that I was in a place of grey stone and great age. There were designs carved into the walls the likes of which I had never imagined—there were human figures, heavy featured and strangely proportioned but beautifully wrought, with dangling earlobes and outthrust tongues. Serpents, birds, and fantastic creatures, some of which were surely imaginary, but others—like the jaguar, whose face my heart leaped to see—I knew had once walked the earth, breathing the same air that now caressed my skin. In the distance I could see a faint, a very faint, gleam of light, and I followed this with a growing sense of what might have been hope, or dread, or both.

Another new sensation. It was too much. I, who had butchered a hundred humans in a single day without giving it a second thought, found my face wet with tears as I walked toward the light.

I heard them before I smelled them, and smelled them before I saw them. I came to the tunnel’s end and looked down into a cavern, wide enough that the other side was lost to shadow and lit with torches. It was filled with humans, full-blood humans without a single mech among them. There were perhaps fifty of them, and some—I stared openly, mouth gaping in shock—some of them were old. Their skin, as dark as mine but naturally so, was fragile-thin and wrinkled from long exposure to the elements, their hair was various shades of grey or silver, their eyes were hazed.

“Old people,” I whispered, as if Muse were there to hear it. Who would have believed such a thing? They looked so fragile, so—

Precious. All of them, precious. I could not tell if the voice belonged to the two-headed serpent, or to some facet of myself I’d never known existed. My mission, the very reason for my continued existence, was unambiguous: I was to find these people and kill them. Annihilate the Indij bastards and crush the rebellion.

I felt then a very strange stirring in my breast. A pain. A song. I did not know what that sensation was, but I knew that I had made a decision.

“I will not kill them,” I whispered into the void, wherein I knew Muse was lurking. Listening. “I will not.”

Just as the two-headed serpent’s song had carried, so too now did my whisper, growing to a shout as it winged through the walls and pillars of stone, and flung itself among the humans gathered far below.

“I WILL NOT!

The humans turned toward the tunnel, faces mirroring my own shock. Some of them pointed, shouting. And then they were running, or walking, some toward me and others away, as quickly as they could move. I saw guns, and makeshift spears, and torches, but I made no move to attack or escape.

Let them come, let them go, let them do with me as they would. My world had been wrenched inside out, and I had nowhere left to hide.


A dozen or more of them swarmed me, eyes wide and white with human emotions. Though I offered no resistance they would likely have beaten me to death there and then, had Chimalma not been among them.

Chimalma. In beautifully accented English she told me her name, that she was a priestess of Quetzalcoatl, and that I was her prisoner. She held my face in her strong hands, breathed a thick herbal smoke into my nostrils, and seemed surprised when I blinked the smoke away without so much as a cough.

“Modded,” I told her, feeling almost apologetic about it. “Your drugs won’t have any effect on me.”

An old woman in a magnificent red robe sucked her teeth at me reprovingly and muttered something in the priestess’s ear.

“That won’t have much effect, either.” I shrugged when she glared at me. “I have a very high tolerance to pain.”

“Why have you come here?” the old woman snapped.

I smiled, charmed by her dry and crackling voice. She was so old. “I was sent here to kill you,” I answered.

There were gasps at this, and shouts, none of which needed any translation.

“What did I tell you?” the old woman cried. “She said it herself, she has come to kill us!”

“No.”

Silence fell as Chimalma raised both hands, palms out. Gold flashed at her wrists, her throat. Gold hung from her earlobes and from her nose, and her thick waist was coiled with chains of the precious metal. She glowed in the torchlight, and I was utterly enchanted.

“No,” she said again, “she has not come to kill us. She has come to save us.”

I opened my mouth to deny this—the idea of a transhuman hero was ludicrous—but Chimalma shifted her weight on the wide wooden bench and grimaced, and my mind finally connected myriad bits of irrelevant information into a magnificent, impossible, whole.

“You are pregnant,” I whispered, my voice loud and harsh with shock. How many years had it been since a natural human child had been born? How many decades? Muse might have told me, but Muse had no power in this place.

Chimalma’s lips compressed into a small, pained smile. She shifted again, and as she did so, the gold medallion at her throat flashed, two sets of jeweled eyes winked at me. I squeezed my eyes shut, but an afterimage of the two-headed serpent mocked my attempts to hide.

Save them, it whispered. Chaos, daughter of the Jaguar, save my people.

When I opened my eyes again, Chimalma was looking at me—not at the snakelike scales of my bioskin, my jaguar-fanged mouth, my too-wide eyes, but at me.

She draped one hand over her moon-round belly, and with the other gestured toward the people who crowded all around us. Gold chains whispered together like the scales of a great serpent, and I thought that I had been listening to that sound for my entire artificial life.

Chains. Without Muse to guide my eyes I could clearly see the chains which had bound me to the wheels of the war machine. I had been linked to Muse, and through Muse to those who created and trained me not to live, but to exist as an instrument of murder.

I could, if I chose, slip free of those chains and embrace my full potential. My . . . humanity.

In that moment, I came to know fear. Fear of what might happen were I to unleash my full power. I was afraid of a repeat of Houston, afraid of what I might do if left to my own devices. Kill them all, I had said in the past, and only Muse’s voice ever held me back. What might stop me now that her voice was silent? What monstrous things might I do, I who was created to be a monster?

I looked at them, these tender-skinned people, hurtling through space on a dying planet, and I felt something deep within me stir. My jaguar eyes filled with tears.

“There you are, little sister,” Chimalma said, and smiled. “I knew you would find your way home.”

Even as she said the words, even as I felt them, shouts rang out from those people closest to the tunnel. A red light shone forth from the darkness, and the shrill baying of a Hound whose quarry had been found.

There you are. It was Muse, sounding very far away, and strained. Where . . . can’t find . . .

“I’m sorry, Muse,” I said. “I was lost.”

. . . found you, Muse went on. I imagined that she sounded relieved, though that was of course impossible. Enemy target within range. Likelihood of mission success ninety-six point seven eight nine percent. You may round it up to ninety-seven percent. Proceed with final solution as per command forty-five, section three paragraph two . . .

“I was lost,” I continued as if Muse had not spoken, “but I have found my way. Goodbye, Muse.” With that, I broke the link which bound me to Muse, and to those who had made me to hunt, and kill, and kill.

I looked up and saw the Hound’s bright carapace, the faces of those I had called siblings, and whose weapons would now be raised against me.

“Safety off,” I told my biosuit, and grinned. Daughter of the Jaguar, indeed. “Let’s see what this thing can do.”

I raised my rifle, took aim at the Hound, fired off a short burst of incendiaries.

And then all Hell broke loose.


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