Memetic Drift - J.N. Chaney Page 0,29

with the beam weapon wasn’t facing me when I popped up, but it turned as I went running by. I dove for the floor, and the energy beam sliced through the air behind me. I waited for what felt like forever, but a fraction of a second later Li Fei cut the thing in half with gunfire.

“It’s done. There are three of them still standing.” His voice was still neutral, but it had lost a little of its cold anger. The android responsible for Mike Mitchell’s death was now just as dead as he was. The universe made at least that much sense.

“Let’s clean it up.” Andrea sounded confident, but then the three remaining androids opened up with their own weapons all at once.

“I have them,” said Raven, and she came out of hiding shooting. The first shot to connect hit the android in the head and sent it pinwheeling into the airlock door. The second shot went through another android’s chest and knocked it onto the floor. It kept firing until its magazine was empty, but it never moved again. The third shot went through the remaining android’s neck, mostly severing its head from its body. It stopped shooting and blindly walked forward until it hit a wall and went still.

Raven had aimed her weapon progressively lower and further off to one side with every shot, and I realized later that she was correcting her aim on the spot. At the time it just seemed like divine intervention. It was an impressive show of marksmanship to take out three androids with exactly three shots under those conditions, but I would have expected it from her.

“Nice work, Robin.” Andrea stood up from hiding, followed by Li Fei and then the rest of us.

Li Fei seconded her words, but with the sarcasm I’d come to expect. “Excellent shooting, for a Section 3 agent.” As a pure intelligence unit, Section 3 is not exactly known for fielding high-level sharpshooters.

“Let’s not waste even more time,” Capanelli began. “We need to get on—”

The ship’s thrusters burned to life and the dock gate began to part. Either someone on the Havisham had managed to hack the system and rescind the lockdown, or someone on Llyr Station had gone up to the bridge while we were fighting the androids.

“Move!” she shouted. “We need to board that ship!”

The mooring arms pulled away and the ship began to drift forward in preparation for takeoff. As I started to run, I heard the Arbiter Commander over our shared channel.

“They’re trying to run, Li!”

Li Fei replied from behind me. “I’m on it, sir!”

I ran for the airlock, knowing that the ship couldn’t develop any real velocity until it cleared the station. Even so, it was a desperate sprint to catch it anyway. The Havisham was eclipsing me and getting faster with every passing second. I came up close enough that I thought I could make the jump, and I took the opportunity. Li Fei followed suit, and both our mag boots gripped the side of the ship at almost the same moment.

I looked back and saw no one else had managed the same. It was just the two of us. I reached the airlock as we cleared the dock platform, then remembered I couldn’t access my skeleton key. Luckily, Li Fei had that covered.

“Move aside, I’ve got this.”

It’s standard Arbiter Force policy to keep your skeleton key loaded in the finger of your drop suit whenever you’re wearing it. Li Fei may have played it fast and loose, but he was certainly a veteran Arbiter. He used the skeleton key to override the door and got the airlock open for us. We crawled inside, and just as I closed the door behind us, I caught a glimpse of open space.

“You move pretty smoothly in that drop suit, Contralvo.”

“We have bigger concerns right now, don’t you think?”

“I’m not sure I do.” He turned away from me and unlocked the inner airlock door. “I’m not sure there is a bigger problem.”

“The fact that we’re currently boarding this ship entirely on our own? The fact that your drop ship can’t even fire on it now that we’re inside?”

The inner door slid open. I was half-expecting a face full of grenade shrapnel, but there was no one on the other side. Just an empty white room with tasteful furniture.

“Cute,” Li Fei commented. “Love the minimalism.”

He was right about that, anyway. The room we were in looked like a Shinto temple, all clean lines and