mynovelonline Chapter 244 - Best Served Cold
Chapter 244 - Best Served Cold
Chapter 244
Best Served ColdAlexander stepped through the portal onto Sleipnir’s bridge.
The portal closed behind him.
The bridge was full. Carmen sat in the captain’s chair, Ryan standing beside her. Augustus leaned against the far bulkhead. Annie perched on the edge of the sensor station, her red jacket draped over the back of the chair. Vikram and Petra held navigation and sensors. The rest of the crew stayed at their stations.
Everyone looked at him.
Alexander didn’t say anything for a moment. He should have felt something. Triumph. Relief. Satisfaction. Santiago Systems had started with a prison cell and a bomb around his neck. Since then, it had dragged him across continents, into orbit, through hidden facilities, other worlds, alternate realities, a vampire’s path, and finally the corridors of a dead station above Jupiter.
And now it was over.
He felt empty.
Not sad. Not angry. Hollow. Everything that had driven him to this point had been spent in the lab below the station, and nothing had come to fill the space it left behind.
The suit hid his face. He was grateful for that.
“How’d it go?” Augustus asked.
“It’s done,” he said.
Annie and Augustus shared a glance.
Silence held the bridge.
Then Carmen nodded. “What are your orders?”
“Let’s go home.” Alexander turned toward the door. “I’ll be in the workshop if anyone needs me.”
The door slid open at his approach. He walked through without looking back.
His boots rang against the deck plating as he made his way down the corridor. Each step sent a dull ache through his ribs that he’d stopped noticing sometime during the descent through the station.
He reached his quarters and stepped inside. The door sealed behind him.
Alexander stood in the middle of the room and reached inward with Metallokinesis. The OACS responded, each piece disengaging in sequence. Chest plate first, lifting away from his torso and hovering beside him. Then the pauldrons. The arm segments. The leg plates. Each component detached, floated free, then slid into the ring one after another.
The deformed gauntlet came last. He peeled the duct tape off carefully, wound it into a ball, and tossed it onto the desk. Then the gauntlet joined the rest.
He stood in the underlayer. Sweat-soaked. Stained with blood that had leaked through the suit’s compromised seals.
He peeled that off too, dropping it to the floor, and walked into the bathroom.
The mirror showed him what he expected. Dried blood caked from his nose to his chin, cracking along the lines of his jaw. His nose was crooked, pushed to the left where the visor had broken it. Dark bruising spread beneath both eyes.
He leaned closer. Electricity arced across his irises in faint blue threads. His Core was still running hot, Electrokinesis flooding his system, not yet wound down from the fight.
He could feel the nanites gathering around the break in his nose. A faint tingling, almost imperceptible, as they congregated and began their work. But they were slow. It would be hours before they’d make a difference.
Alexander gripped the bridge of his nose with both hands. Set his teeth. And pulled it straight.
The crack echoed off the bathroom tiles. Pain flared white behind his eyes, then settled into a deep, steady throb.
He blocked his left nostril with a thumb and blew hard through the right. Blood sprayed across the sink basin. He switched sides and repeated the process. More blood. Then again until the airway cleared.
He ran the water. Leaned down and splashed it across his face, scrubbing at the dried blood with both hands until the water ran clear. The cold helped. He scrubbed harder around his nostrils and chin where the blood had caked thickest, then cupped water to his eyes and blinked through it.
He dried his face with a towel and lifted his shirt. Purple and black bruising covered the right side of his torso, spreading from his lower ribs to his hip. He pressed two fingers against the worst of it and felt the give where solid bone should have been.
Broken. At least two, probably three.
Nothing he could do about it. The nanites would get to them eventually. Or Felix could do something about it later. He dropped the shirt and left the bathroom.
His quarters were quiet. The bed waited with its sheets still made from whenever he’d last slept aboard. He couldn’t remember when that was.
Alexander looked at it for a long moment.
Then he turned to the workshop door and walked through.
The lights came on automatically, illuminating the workbenches, the fabrication tools, the racks of drone components and spare parts that lined the walls. His space. The one room on the ship where his mind worked best.
He reached into the ring.
Gabriel Santiago’s body hit the workbench with a heavy, wet thud. The corpse was charred across most of the upper body, clothing and flesh fused to melted cybernetics. The smell hit hard despite the ventilation. Alexander reached out with Technopathy, found the workshop’s dedicated air filtration controls, and pushed them to maximum. The system hummed to life, fans spinning up behind the walls.
He pulled a stool over and sat down. Looked at what was left of the man who had started everything.
Then he reached for his tools.
The body was a mess. Charred skin fused to metal fused to melted polymer. But beneath the surface damage, Technopathy painted a different picture. Santiago’s torso was packed with hardware integrated in layers. Components nested inside components, all of it spatially compressed in ways Alexander had never encountered outside of his ring.
The man might have been the most advanced Forged on the planet. The second Dream of Earth 1.
Alexander had only fought one other, and he’d been nothing special. Fresh to his Dream.
He started with the chest.
A circular housing sat atop the sternum, wired into the ribcage through six anchor points. The device itself was a flat disc, with a thin resonance chamber at its center and a series of concentric amplification rings surrounding it. An audio-concussive emitter, designed to channel force outward in a way that defied physics.
Alexander selected a laser cutter from the tool rack and began separating the anchor points.
***
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“I just need you to stop breathing.”
Santiago’s eyes held his for a heartbeat. Then the man’s chest bulged beneath his shirt.
The blast hit Alexander square in the torso, lifting him clean off his feet. Metallokinesis caught him before he’d traveled more than a few meters, stabilizing him mid-air. Across the lab, Santiago let the concussive recoil throw him backward, riding his own shockwave to the far wall.
He landed in a crouch. And then the man started changing.
His skin split along seams Alexander hadn’t known were there. Metal unfolded from inside his body. Wet sounds. Cracking bone. His frame expanded as some sort of spatial compression released through his body, cybernetics erupting outward and locking into place. His spine restructured with an audible series of clicks, each vertebra seating into an exoskeletal housing. Claw-like casings enclosed his fingers, racing up his forearms to the elbows. Exoskeleton components snapped around his shoulders, his legs, his hips. A neural jack extended from the base of his skull, filaments reaching outward to connect with the emerging weapon systems.
His shirt tore apart. He grew seven inches in three seconds, the aging CEO replaced by something that barely looked human.
Part of his face encased. Both eyes disappeared behind dual-lens combat optics. Armor wrapped his jaw. Plating climbed his neck.
Gabriel Santiago straightened to his full height and looked down at Alexander through mechanical eyes.
He hadn’t made a sound the entire time.
***
Alexander set the concussive emitter aside and turned back to the body.
The lenses were cracked from the lightning strike, but the housings were intact. The targeting systems were fused directly into the skull, with neural bridges running through the back of each orbital socket and into the visual cortex. Not military-grade. Not anything Alexander recognized as human engineering.
He worked the first lens free.
***
The optics fired once the transformation was complete. Twin beams lanced across the lab.
Alexander raised his right hand, palm out.
The gauntlet caught both beams and held them. Metallokinesis reinforced the plating. Animachina empowered it. The lasers splashed across his palm and dissipated harmlessly.
He’d seen this technology before. The Forged during the vault heist in New York had used something similar. Weaker, but the same principle.
Alexander stood there and let Santiago pour everything the optics had into his open hand.
Santiago’s jaw clenched behind the armor plating. The beams intensified. Alexander’s gauntlet heated, the temperature warnings flickering across his HUD, but the metal held.
Then the beams cut out. Santiago’s mechanical eyes refocused, recalculating.
Alexander lowered his hand. The gauntlet’s palm glowed dull red.
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to.
***
The second lens came free with a crack of brittle bone. Alexander placed both optics beside the emitter and turned the body onto its front.
The shoulder-mounted launcher assemblies were more complex. Integrated into the scapulae, with firing mechanisms and targeting systems wired back through the neural jack. But there were no ammunition feeds. No reservoirs. No storage of any kind. The man had fired dozens of missiles from launchers that had nowhere to hold them.
Alexander stared at the empty housings for a long moment before cutting deeper.
***
The shoulder launchers deployed. Mini cluster-missiles fired in a spiral pattern, dozens of them corkscrewing outward before curving back and raining down toward Alexander.
He reached out with Metallokinesis and found Santiago’s Will riding each one.
Alexander crushed it. Seized the missiles. Spun them around. Technopathy rewrote the targeting in a fraction of a second, and they turned and dove back toward Santiago.
A shimmer of blue energy wrapped around the man. He phase-shifted five meters sideways as the first volley detonated where he’d been standing. The rest adjusted course and chased him.
Santiago threw both hands forward. A repulsor wave erupted outward, catching the remaining missiles and sending them spiraling into the walls and ceiling. Explosions tore through the lab. Equipment shattered. Workbenches flipped. Fires started all across the room.
Santiago was lucky the ceiling was reinforced and the floor was anchored in moon rock.
***
Alexander disconnected the launcher assemblies and set them on the growing pile. Between the scapulae, attached directly to the spinal exoskeleton, he found the phase-shift module. Barely larger than a playing card. He worked it free and held it up. Technopathy showed that the circuitry was folded in on itself in ways that shouldn’t have been possible at this scale.
He set it aside. Then rolled the body and returned to the chest. The concussive emitter’s removal had exposed the sternum, but the real hardware was deeper. He peeled back layers of subdermal armor plating beneath it, each section anchored by micro-bolts that he removed with Metallokinesis. Then he cracked the ribs apart.
Santiago’s heart sat in the cavity where a human one should have been, connected to the same arteries and veins, pumping the same blood. But it wasn’t organic. It was a mechanical pump wrapped around a toroidal coil and capacitor bank, with discharge vents threading outward through channels carved into the surrounding ribs.
Santiago’s heart was an EMP generator. And the man had turned his own skeleton into the delivery system while somehow not affecting his own cybernetics.
***
Santiago’s torso pulsed. A visible ripple erupted outward from his chest, racing across the lab.
Several of his drones died as the wave passed over them, falling from the air and crashing against the floor.
Around Alexander, the ripple crashed against some invisible boundary and vanished. The sparks in the surrounding air flared brighter for a moment, then faded again.
Santiago’s eyes widened. Then he extended nozzles from both palms.
***
Alexander set the EMP generator beside the optics and turned the body over again. The spinal exoskeleton ran from the base of the skull to the tailbone. Removing it would take time. He started at the top, where the neural jack connected to the brainstem.
The filaments were still embedded in Santiago’s nervous tissue. Alexander extracted them one strand at a time, each one pulling free with a faint resistance that suggested they’d been growing into the tissue rather than simply attached to it.
He stopped. Looked at the filament pinched between his tools. It was partially biological. A hybrid of synthetic fiber and organic nerve tissue, fused at a cellular level.
Alexander set it down carefully and kept working.
The forearm nozzle assemblies came out as a pair, chemical reservoirs still attached. One reservoir ran along each forearm, elbow to wrist, feeding into nozzle ports embedded in the palms. Alexander couldn’t determine how the two compounds combined. The reservoirs held them separately, but somewhere between storage and discharge, they became napalm.
***
Santiago threw both hands forward, palms out.
Napalm sprayed from the nozzle ports in a wide arc, the two compounds combining somewhere between his palms and the air. The stream ignited on contact with oxygen, a roaring curtain of liquid fire crossing the lab toward Alexander.
Alexander swept a hand forward. Floor panels tore free and launched into the napalm stream, catching the burning compound on metal instead of his suit. Everything else followed. Cabinet doors. Bench supports. Equipment housings. Anything not bolted down ripped free and joined the barricade.
The napalm hit metal and spread. Burning. Dripping. Pooling. The lab filled with heat and the stink of chemical fire. His HUD screamed environmental warnings.
Alexander reached up with his other hand, seized the ceiling with Metallokinesis, and twisted.
The structural supports groaned and buckled. Then the ceiling collapsed.
Santiago threw his hands up to catch it, nozzles still firing. The napalm sprayed upward now, into the tonnes of metal he was trying to hold above his head. It splashed back down across his arms, his shoulders, his chest. His own weapon eating through his own cybernetics, melting components that had been spatially compressed inside his body minutes ago.
Santiago screamed. His arms shook. One knee hit the floor.
Alexander watched him burn for a few seconds.
Then he raised his cybernetic hand and put a lightning bolt through the man’s head.
Santiago dropped. The ceiling followed. Alexander caught it before it crushed the body, held it long enough to stuff the corpse into the ring.
Then he let it fall.
***
Alexander finished disconnecting the last chemical line, taking care not to set the ship on fire, then set them aside.
The pile on the adjacent workbench had grown. Some of the technology made sense to him. Most of it was strange. Impossibly compressed. Operating without ammunition feeds. Capable of things that human technology hadn’t even gotten close to yet. Or simply defied physics.
It was quite the haul. His first mental thread acknowledged that it should have made him very happy. The other thread ignored it and grabbed an oscillating saw designed for cutting metal alloys at a macro-scale.
One component remained. It sat inside Santiago’s skull. All of his powers could sense it. Metallokinesis told him it was a sphere, roughly the size of a golf ball, made of a material he couldn’t even identify. Technopathy couldn’t penetrate the object, though it knew something mechanical existed in the space. Even Animachina hummed at its existence, while Electrokinesis sensed a live current.
Alexander sawed open Santiago’s skull, then reached his fingers inside and cracked it open the rest of the way before pulling the sphere out with a pulse of power.
He grabbed it out of the air and turned it over. The surface was smooth and featureless.
The Machine God, who understood all machines, was holding something he could not comprehend.
Alexander set it down on the bench, apart from the others.
Then he stared at it for a very long time.