This is how it feels to be Hope Beckons.
When you look in the mirror in the morning, the first thing you see is the scar given to you by the only person who ever cared about you when she tried to kill you. Beneath it: A face you still recognize, despite your efforts.
Cold water across your face stirs your senses from the comfort of slumber. You know you don't have time to sit around and lick your wounds, just another discomfort to push through. You down a number of pills; healing accelerants, hormones, and some of the Ministry of The Future's special psionic enhancers that you're still unconvinced have any real effect. But they give you the pills you want to take, so you take the pills they want you to take. You wash them down, give yourself a single moment to center yourself, and then move on.
Technically, as a Shadow of the Future, you have an official uniform; but you don't bother with it, and nobody really expects you to. So long as your jacket shows the logo of the organization that owns you, everyone is satisfied. It has the benefit of letting you pass as a civilian, something that is useful to a covert operative like you, and VISOR, for all its flaws, cares more about you being effective than following protocol.
The crew members of the Burning Oracle don't meet your eyes as you walk through the ship's corridors, they talk about you in hushed tones, acting like you're invisible as you walk by. You find it funny that so much of your training is how to pass without notice, but when you don't bother trying, people still ignore you. It's not out of disrespect; it's fear you sense from each turned head, a terror that catching your attention will have horrible consequence. It's a foolish fear, but not without basis; if these people know one thing about you, it's that you could kill them all without particular effort.
Though like them, this ship is your home, you will never be their crewmate. You won't be their friend, or their superior officer, or even a hated enemy. All these categories require some level of empathy to be extended to you. Instead, you are something simpler, a role without social dynamic or political worry to it. You are a weapon. A blade gifted to Rhamnousia Vestal by Hannibal Koroste, for the sole purpose of eliminating any mystics that enemy insurgents might employ. You are a weapon; crafted, forged, shaped, into the perfect killer.
You also have four marks on the back of your neck where you dig in your fingernails when you feel anxious, marks that deepen as you await Rhamnousia in the debriefing room. There's a familiar chill to the room, two degrees colder than the rest of the ship, a place designed to create honesty through discomfort. This is how VISOR treats its own people; the fate of those it wishes to truly interrogate is much worse. This isn't what has your fingernails digging into your skin, though.
You remember your last duel with Rune as you wait. Each movement you took plays through your memory, each step in the dance analyzed. There's a certainty in combat that puts you at ease; there's no questioning of purpose, motivation, or decision when blades are flying. There is simply intent and the movement it drives, and with Rune, that intent was written so long ago. You were left exhausted, subjected to agonizing pain, and in the end, failed your objective. And it was all worth it to put yourself against her again. To see the anguish on her face. Rune, who told you that you could be more than a tool, then abandoned you to be made into a weapon. There could be no better whetstone for you. All of this, the discomfort and anxiety you felt now as Rhamnousia Vestal entered the room, was the price you paid to get the chance to see her again and again.
Rhamnousia is not cruel to you. She praises your successes, criticizes your failings, with an honest, even hand. There are far worse people to work for within the Hegemony, you've seen this first hand. But you never mistake her respect for kindness. Her words are not friendship, they are maintenance. She treats you right in the same way one has to treat a Thunderbolt missile right if you want it to deliver its payload. She controls the conversation like the conductor of an orchestra, knowing how to guide the answers she wants out of your mouth to build her little mental model of the situation at hand. You offer no resistance, you have nothing to hide from her, even if you wish she was paying less attention to those poor children Rune had roped into her wasteland of a life. Occasionally, you respond with teenage indolence, mocking a minor error in speaking the woman makes, or joking about how after you handed Rune to them the moment you left they lost her; the little power these barbs make you feel is empty, which is why Rhamnousia lets you have them without punishment.
There is one thing you say that gives you power that is not empty, that she has to respect, and it gives you no satisfaction because that power comes from your other jailer. You left this last week to confer with Hannibal Koroste's scientists on Rockwater, to get crucial strategic information that you couldn't care less about except for one consequence of them; The Minister of the Future demands that Rune be taken alive. This was the answer you were hoping to hear, an excuse to play with your food, to extend this little game of cat and mouse which was your only joy in life, to justify the actions that you are more than aware you would have taken anyways. If you had wanted to, you could have killed Rune in that fight when you disarmed her of her stupid little lightning pipe, in the moment before that cute girl in the fancy blue dress had lobbed a wrench at your back. But you never would have ended it there, even if you had permission to. Even if they had ordered you to.
Rune didn't get to die that easily. She didn't get to die when Hannibal Koroste, or Rhamnousia Vestal, or the Hegemon himself wanted her dead. If there was one thing in the galaxy that was yours, that your soul still had a claim on even after you had been a tool then a lab rat then a weapon, it was her life.
Eventually, you explain everything you know to the spymaster, seeing the various pieces click together in her calculating head, feeling telepathically that cold mechanical thought put plans together. Her strategy has many components; a need to deal with local insurgent groups, the Magistrate's office's political concerns, to meet the needs of the Ministry of the Future such that they kept supplying her with the tools to carry out her ambitions, but none of that matters to you. This whole conversation is in effect, just Vestal's final command to her, a thing the Major says in many words, but you summarize to yourself simply.
Hunt Rune down. Tear the world she's built without you to pieces.
For the first time today, you smile.
YOU ARE READING
Outer Olympus
Science FictionIt is ten years since the rebellion in Outer Olympus was put down by the forces of the Hyperion Hegemony. As orphans living under this cruel empire, Viola, Taroh, and Geode have had to beg, steal, and lie to make a living on board Maintenance Six, a...
