Memetic Drift - J.N. Chaney Page 0,33

need.

Let her go for the helmet, I told Li. I’ll drop when she goes for it, and you can take the shot.

Copy that, he answered, which surprised me a little. I’d been assuming all along that he wanted me dead, but he was giving me the chance to survive this encounter. I didn’t understand why, but maybe he was just a decent Arbiter. Maybe we were enemies only through a sequence of events I didn’t choose and couldn’t control.

The woman had sidled to arm’s reach of the seat. When she went for the helmet at last, she was a blur of pure speed. I ducked down as soon as I saw her make a move, but the beam still only missed me by inches. The particle stream cut through the air behind me, grew wider as it interacted with the cabin’s atmosphere, and punched a ragged hole through the hull. In the same moment, Li Fei fired, but the woman spun on her heel and reversed direction entirely. She kicked the helmet out of the chair as she sprang to the right into a shoulder roll. She came up into a kneel and caught the helmet in one hand even as she leveled her weapon with the other.

I couldn’t believe the speed or the ease with which she moved. She slipped the helmet on and faded from view with the telltale ripple of active camouflage. I came up shooting, but a moment later something hit my rifle from the side and plucked it out of my hands. It went flying across the bridge and bounced off a wall. An instant later, my legs were kicked out from under me and I was driven into the floor on my chest. For an instant, I could see the woman as she stood over me before she once again rippled out of view.

I scrambled onto my feet. When I caught my next glimpse of her, she was fighting Li Fei. He was wrestling to hold onto his rifle. This was forcing him to remain in place and would have given her the opportunity to do just about anything she wanted to him if not for the extraordinary protection offered by his drop suit. As it was, she was whipping the weapon from side to side, and he was using all his strength just trying to hold on.

I slammed into her from behind with my shoulder and knocked her sprawling, but she rolled out of the fall and was back up again before I could do anything to stop her. She kicked me in the face, with the same technique I’d seen her use in Artorias. It didn’t hurt, but it did unbalance me. I stumbled backward and then fell over, and she turned back to Li Fei before he could even fire his weapon.

She freed the rifle from his grip and tossed it away, then she ducked out from under his attempt to grab her and countered with a flurry of jabs and knee strikes. The blows kept coming as she faded away, and it was all Li Fei could do to keep his balance, let alone defend or counter. Even with the dropsuit’s actuators multiplying our strength, she’d managed to disarm the both of us. She was winning this fight, just like she’d done in Artorias.

Li Fei’s arm hyperextended, pulled into the air in front of him like a marionette. A moment later, the woman flashed into view as she stepped around him and twisted his wrist. She torqued his arm backward, forcing him to double over. She then swept his legs from beneath him, flipping him head over heels onto his back right next to me.

Standing from a supine position is not an easy thing to do in a drop suit. The woman decloaked, her weapon aimed at us. “Tell me, please. At this moment, are you afraid?”

It didn’t look like there was any option except to die, but I wasn’t about to grovel.

“Section 9 will find you.”

“That’s good. You didn’t negotiate, you didn’t plead, you didn’t burst into anger or despair. Very good. I think I won’t kill you after all.”

Li Fei was still conscious. What’s going on here? Who is she?

I didn’t respond to him.

She walked toward the door of the bridge, her weapon still trained on us despite what she’d said. “You’ve stumbled onto something you aren’t capable of understanding. Nothing you’ve done so far has made it absolutely necessary for me to kill you, so if you