Jesus, you’re disappointed? You’re disappointed you didn’t just see that girl killed? a man’s voice said. What is wrong with you? How do you live with yourself? Then, something else—a man, a woman, something—was with her and she was in the administrator’s office at Innis Deep and she was eleven. The administrator was explaining that her parents were dead. The overwhelming sense, unspoken but clear, was pity. This was why she’s so broken. This is why she hurts people. This is why she only fucks men she can dominate, because she’s always so frightened. Look at all the things that were wrong with her.
“I swear to God,” she said, softly enough that Holden and the girl couldn’t hear it, but not talking to herself. “I will put a bullet through my brain if you don’t get out of me.”
Holden was saying something to the girl. Tanaka didn’t care. Winston Duarte’s writhing, pale-fleshed body—still wrapped with black threads like someone had sewn them into him—was argument enough that the appeal-to-paternal-instinct plan wasn’t going to work. The girl was useless. And her mission—bring the high consul back to Trejo—was impossible now too. Even if Duarte was capable of leaving this place, Trejo and Laconia didn’t exist in any meaningful way.
Which meant her Omega status was meaningless. She had better than it. She had freedom. She had nothing to stop her from doing whatever she saw fit except whoever had the balls to try and stop her.
A sound plucked at her. A skittering, buzzing noise that was also like hearing soldiers on parade. At one of the openings in the bright, hot furnace of a chamber, one of the great insectile sentinels came out, and then another. And then a flood. Tanaka felt her eyes go wide.
“Holden, we have a problem.”
He muttered an obscenity. The girl was crying. Blue fireflies swirled like sparks at a bonfire.
“If you hurt them, they’ll take you apart. They literally use your body to fix the damage you do.”
“You were able to protect the girl?”
Holden looked confused for a moment. His skin looked wrong. Like there was some mother-of-pearl version growing up from under his skin. “I… Yes? I guess I was?”
Tanaka switched the gun on her forearm to armor-piercing rounds. “Good. Now do that for me.”
Her first shot was intended for Duarte, but her aim was fouled by the vanguard of the enemy slamming into her. The impact pushed her to the side and sent her spinning, but she kept a grip on the attacker. It was faceless, eyeless, more machine than organism. She put her fist to what passed for its thorax, resting her knuckles against the weird plates of its armor or exoskeleton, and opened fire. Even dampened by the strength of her power armor, the recoil felt wonderful. The sentinel twitched and went still, and then there were two more. She felt something tugging at her like a magnetic force that didn’t register on her suit’s sensor array, and a wave of pain washed over her like needles being driven into her body. One of the sentinels swung a scythe-like arm at her, the cutting edge skittering across her chest plate, and she caught a glimpse of Holden, shielding the girl with his body, his teeth bared in a rictus grin of effort.
The needles sensation faded, and she grabbed the scythe arm, braced her foot against the thing’s body, and ripped the arm free. There were more around her now, slamming into her until her ears rang with the impacts. She lost herself for a moment in the glory of the violence, breaking what she could get hold of, shooting what she couldn’t.
There were too many of them for her to have any hope of winning. One managed a lucky swing and left a sliver of its carapace stuck in her suit’s left shoulder joint. Another wrapped itself around her right leg and didn’t let go, even when she pumped a dozen rounds through its body. They swarmed her, threw themselves at her, died, and made way for a dozen more behind them. She switched back to incendiary rounds, and everything around her turned to fire, but they kept coming through the expanding balls of flame. Two of them grabbed her right arm, and between them, they bent the power armor back. Then two more had her left. She didn’t know how many she’d killed, but it had to be more than a dozen. That’s how long it had taken them to find a strategy against her that worked.
She kept firing, but they were in control of her aim now. The best she could hope was that a few of them would bumble into the line of fire and die there. Holden was wrapped around the girl, his eyes closed, sweat sheeting his skin. And beyond him, through the crowd of sentinels, Duarte.
The man she’d betrayed Mars for was flapping like a wet rag in a breeze. His bright, sightless eyes reminded her of nothing so much as Okoye’s pet catalyst. Blue fireflies ran along the black threads, sewing him back in place. She didn’t feel pity for him. It was now nothing but contempt.
The glowing eyes swung toward her, seemed to fix on her. See her for the first time. Something opened at the back of her consciousness, something was wrenched open, and Duarte flowed into her. The idea of Aliana Tanaka felt distant and small compared to the maelstrom of his—of its—awareness. An ant that defied the anthill was torn apart. No wasp betrayed the hive and lived.
The sentinels hauled her toward him and his black webbing, and she was abased. She felt an oceanic shame, and that shame was a punishment poured into her against her will—a manipulation, a proof that her own heart could be commanded against her—it didn’t matter. Nearby, the girl was screaming for her father, and somewhere deep in the prison of her mind, a young Aliana Tanaka wept for the loss of her own parents and for the evil she had done in turning against her spiritual father, her true father, and the ideal of Laconia. Voices flooded her, wailing and angry and scouring as a sandblaster. She felt herself falling apart under their attention, until all that was left of her was sorrow. Ongoing, intimate assault, another voice said in the mind that was no longer truly her own. An invasion in her secret space. The thing that she kept apart, only for herself.
Then another voice came through. This one, not from Duarte or his hive, but from her. From her past. If it hadn’t still hurt, she might not have heard it. Aunt Akari. Are you sad, or are you angry? And she felt the slap as a sting on her still-healing cheek. Are you sad, or are you angry?
I’m angry, Tanaka thought, and because she did, it was true.
She looked up. She wasn’t more than eight meters from Duarte in his torn, dark cradle. She couldn’t move. The sentinels had her well and truly restrained as they worked to tear her apart. But they were holding her power armor. No one was holding her.
The advantage of training in different forms of combat for as many years and as consistently as she had was simple: You moved past thought. There was no consideration, no weighing of what she should or shouldn’t do, no planning. There was no need for them. The emergency blow of the power armor was like a flower bud blossoming; the plates and joints that the alien insect things were holding popped and fell away like petals. The insect things kept their grip on them, but Tanaka had already pushed off. The air against her skin, the lightness of her underarmor, the oppressive heat of the chamber. They were all flashes of experience. Flickers that she was aware of without the need to attend to. She knew that one good blow from any of the sentinels would open her to the bone if it connected, but she knew it without fear. It was one fact among many, and the calculations were all as reflexive as catching a tossed ball.