> “Intent matters. Death on its own is death. Annihilation of the soul. Death for Mankind is a reach towards perfection. All we have is each other.”

>

> ~Deacon Manuellus Panhominae

Vio was lost.

She didn’t dare bring up the lights, but she was turned around. The front and the back of the cargo bay were mysterious to her. She couldn’t tell where the capos' gun drop was.

Maybe it would be okay. Maybe Razer and the other guy, DeMoss, would kill each other and she’d win this dumb little game.

“Vio.”

Razer again. Vio clenched her teeth.

“I’m sorry about earlier.”

She got behind a smaller crate and shoved as hard as she could, shoved until it moved across the ground. “Rrrgh.”

“You okay?”

She tried to slow the crate before it hit the cargo container, the massive wall-sized box of corrugated metal big enough to build a lower-hive house into. But she failed, and there was a low pong. She paused, listening with all her strength for approaching footsteps.

Silence. Semi-satisfied, she hopped up on the crate.

“I mean it,” he continued. “I’m sorry I scared you. I know we said that when it was down to just the two of us, we’d get hired on merit. I honestly didn’t think the final test was one I’d do so much better at than you.”

She jumped, hiking her arms over the top of the cargo container. The bare skin of her armpit was pinched badly as she began to slide back down, but she ignored it, struggling to pull herself up. The remaining four fingers of her mechanical arm scrabbled at the corrugated metal, hoisting her up, inexorably up.

Her left wasn’t doing as well. Mechanical arms were a bit stronger than fleshy ones.

“It’s the final test, where alliances are nothing, promises are nothing. That’s true. But I also said I preferred we wouldn’t betray each other.”

Her shoes squeaked against the metal below her. Her mechanical arm was failing, bringing her up to about a 50-degree angle and then grinding against something, dropping her back a few inches. Vio got her chest above the corner of the wall and flopped forward, straining to pull her hips up. The servos in her elbow squeaked.

“Then,” she grunted, “stop killing people.”

With a final grunt of pain and exertion, she hoisted her hips up over the upper corner of the box, rolling onto the top panting.

“What do you mean?”

She didn’t answer. She just took a moment to catch her breath.

“Vio, this is a test of knives and bullets. And I have these. I’m not going to lose for you. Arabel shot at me. She shot at you.”

“You’re killing everyone over a job,” she panted.

“What are you doing?” he asked curiously.

She scooted forward as quietly as she could, looking over the maze of stacked cargo containers, crates, boxes, everything. Vio withdrew her dataslate. She forgot that her right-hand thumb was gone and nearly dropped it, fumbling for a moment, the twitching servos making her arm react not quite as it should.

Finally, she caught the slate in her left, steadying her right into a cupped position and placing the slate carefully into it. Satisfied that it wasn’t going to slide out, she pulled up its connection to her ocular implants. She coded them to flag movement, to raise the brightness of the surrounding area.

She didn’t raise it too high. Didn’t want to blind herself if the lights came back suddenly. Just enough to take the grey two shades higher.

“This has gone absolutely sideways” a second voice in her earbead. Deep, soft. Unexpected.

Vio startled. “Fuck,” she breathed, nearly dropping the slate.

“Sorry, sorry, didn’t mean to startle you. I just noticed a lot of comms traffic in the twenty-six megahertz range.”

“DeMoss,” Razer breathed.

“I’m not talking to your knifey friend,” DeMoss said. “You, on the other hand, seem like the last reasonable person left.” There was a small blip as he left the channel.

A small vibration from her dataslate told her she was getting a ping. She considered it for a moment. A beat passed. A second. The slate showed an invitation to an encrypted channel; something she probably should have done to secure her feed with Razer. They’d never needed it before. Nobody else could do what she could do.

“Vio, listen to me,” Razer said, but she cut the connection.

Somewhat clumsily, she accepted. Then she stowed her dataslate.

“What do you want?” she asked cautiously.

“I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “Small, Dark, and Edgy is unstable, and I still want the job. We take him down, and you just tell Vinnius you’re giving up your claim to the Seneschal position. You in?”

“You shot at me,” she snapped.

“I shot,” some light grunting, some vaguely metallic noises transferred over the signal, “between you and Homicidal Blade Boy. Didn’t seem fair to get his brains all over you after you’d got a drink of Arabel’s carotid.”

“Oh god,” she jerked, rolled onto her back and felt at her shirt. Drying liquid in hard little patches littered her front. “Oh god.”

She squeezed her eyes shut. “Fuck. Okay.”

“You in?”

“No,” she rasped. “What do you mean, ‘take him out’.”

There was a silence. “Well, I was going to kill him. If that’s not you, we can get a little more elaborate.”

He paused. “Also, I’ve got a really big gun, and that tends to streamline your thinking. I’m open to ideas.”

“What if I-“

“Wait,” he hissed. “Shh.”

She waited, scanning the darkness. Her motion program was flagging lots of random pixels and video artefact, but she thought she saw something moving ahead and to the left. Maybe.

“Are you walking?” he breathed. “Ground. Left of the entrance.”

“No,” she whispered.

“Just checking. I don’t… want to… shoot you on accident.”

She waited. And then startled. Muzzle flare, shining from somewhere between crates, somewhere to her four. Vio dropped her dataslate. It clattered down to the ground between crates.

A couple more distant gunshots, some heavy breathing through the microbead. A few flares of light – there, near the motion earlier. More motion, running, someone running. She caught him between crates and the motion disappeared, reappearing from behind some other cargo boxes.

Slowly – fast movement made her motion-flag turn the cargo bay into a psychedelic hellscape – Vio shimmied down the side of the shipping crate, hanging by the mechanical arm.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

It seized for a moment and she dropped.

It was a surprisingly long way down. Not long. Just… surprising. She expected to hit the floor and when she didn’t, her stomach jumped into her throat.

Slap! Her shoes hit the thick metal ground with a horribly loud sound. Vio dropped down, feeling around like some kind of blinded children’s storybook character, searching for a flat tiny slate on a flat, dark expanse.

“Every time I fire,” DeMoss grunted raggedly, “he knows where I am.”

Vio scooted out from between the two crates, praying that Razer wasn’t waiting around the corner. Her fingers scrabbled at metal and thick rivets and weldlines.

“I think,” DeMoss breathed, “I think I may have lost him.”

But that meant that Razer would be searching. Vio felt her way along the bottom of the crate. There was a tiny gap between this nearest one and the ground. On a hunch, she slid her fingers under it, feeling along the edge.

Motion flared briefly, somewhere in her peripheral vision. She jerked instinctively to look, and the world swam in shades of blue and red.

By the time it cleared there was nothing there.

“Okay, we’re good,” DeMoss panted.

Another bloom of motion. Vio ducked back between the crates, fighting the nausea and the red/blue blur.

“Did you get him?” she breathed. She blinked a few times; this was starting to make her head hurt.

“That man is very hard to hit. Okay. About what I was saying earlier. You in?”

“What if I still want to be the Seneschal,” Vio asked. She tucked her fingers under the gap between the crate and the floor.

“Knowing what you know about Salieri and his team and everything. How they treated us. You really want to work here?”

“What else is there?” she murmured. Riches and glory and the stars. Or home, a steel-toothed trap.

“It’s always like this, isn’t it? Powerful men come with their money and their appetites. And we tear each other apart for the privilege of living and dying for them.”

“That’s just how it is.”

“All this violence at his whim, and where is he? It’ll never change. This will be your life. What does he really have for you?”

Vio thought about this. “I need to get off the planet.”

“Anywhere in particular?”

“Hm?”

“Anywhere in particular? Or are you okay with making it to, say, the nearest big spaceport and getting a shuttle from there?”

Movement flared nearby, off to the right. Vio stared at the darkness warily. “What do you mean?”

“If I end up Seneschal, I’ll get you a lift to wherever Salieri is stopping next. Swear.”

“Gonna need something in writing, boyo.”

“Here? Who’s even going to enforce ugh okay fine.”

Vio gave up on the slate. She was too exposed here, and this kind of environment was Razer’s. She made her way to a box that came up to about chest-height, moving slowly so as not to hit her visual motion flare.

Obviously, she couldn’t turn it off now.

Her HUD blipped. Incoming richtext. She pulled it into an overlay.

This Exchange of Services agreement (henceforth to be known as the “Agreement”)…

Motherfucker had made a contract. If she wasn’t trying to be quiet, Vio would have whistled through her teeth. “Whaaaa…?”

“Scroll down to ‘description of services’,” DeMoss said. There was a bit of a smirk in his voice.

Beginning on this day 0644780.M40

Vio checked her chrono. That was about five minutes ago.

the Hacker will provide the following services (collectively known as the “Service”):

1. Kill, disable, or otherwise disqualify (or assist to kill, disable, or otherwise disqualify) candidate known as Razer (henceforth to be known as “Crazy Knife Nut”) from candidacy as Seneschal High Factorum…

Vio gave this some careful thought. “Why do you want to work for these guys?”

“Reasons.”

"Do not fuck with me."

"The privilege of living and dying for powerful men." He sounded a little sad at this.

"Fuck off."

"I'm serious," he chuckled. "I'm already in it. It's just a choice of which man and what death."

"Right, who's out for your head then?"

"Surely there's something you'd rather not talk about. If I was out to win through blood I'd have turned you in for bugging the cameras."

Vio thought about this some more. She shimmied up the box and back up the large crate. "'Big gun tends to streamline your thinking'."

There was a pause. "You were nice to me," he said quietly.

"When?"

"Chapel."

Vio screwed up her eyes. She thudded her forehead gently against the corrugated metal. No good choices, just which powerful man would kill her.

“Do I have to sign your dumb contract?”

He tried and failed to keep the relief out of his voice. “Whatever you want. I just did it because you asked.”

Vio took a deep breath. “Fine. Whatever. Fuck Salieri anyway. Guy’s org is a mess.”

Vio scanned the cargo bay. Something caught her eyes. Another flare of movement, closer this time. Bigger. “I think he’s coming.”

“Where are you? You on top of a box?”

Vio weighed this. No safe options. “Yeah.”

“Think I see you.”

There was a little clomp behind her. Vio whirled. Movement. Everywhere. A gunshot clanged off of the crate nearby, almost blinding bright, and the movement flare, it was everywhere and blinding her, blocking off her ability to tell what was going on.

“If I can’t shoot him, can I damage him a little?”

Vio dove off the crate, and the world spun dizzyingly around her, blooms of movement as she rushed toward the ground.

She caught it at a bad angle, slamming into her flesh shoulder, cracking her head badly. She clenched her teeth. “Aaargh,” she moaned. Stunned, her flesh arm flopped to the side, settling on something hard, rectangular, and plasticky.

A flare above her. Vio rolled to one side, grabbed the object.

Her slate.

Her slate.

Moving with speed born of instinct, she swiped at it, trying to disable her visual flare, but dropping brightness instead. All the way to minimum.

The sound of soft shoes on metal. She ducked and rolled in a random direction, luck and memory keeping her from slamming into an obstacle. Red and blue bloomed in her visual field, the only things that she could see.

Quickly, Vio concentrated on the dataslate, shaking it gently in her mechanical hand so that she could even see it. She removed the movement script, and hit the lights.

Gleam. Corrugated metal. Fluorescent strips. Leather jacket. Silver studs.

Razer squinted painfully at her. “Vio,” he grunted. But she was not blinded, because the brightness on her eyes was at negative forty. She scrambled up a nearby box, swiped back to defaults. With that catlike fluidity, he ran for her and her box, bounded upwards, foot outstretched, ready to land perfectly beside her –

At that instant, she turned off the gravity.

He lunged up into the air. Looking around in wonder as he floated, his arms flailing wildly trying to swim back to the ground.

The angle he went at took him right into a nearby cargo container. He hit it heavily with an “oof.” The box shifted backwards an inch or so, drifting as he slid along it, scrabbling against it with fingernails. He finally managed to find purchase on a ridge of metal framing the box, grabbed it with one hand.

There was a moment as he looked at Vio, looked at himself floating, smiled at the weird free-grav whimsy of it all. She pushed with her toes until she was rising gently, and he smiled all the more at her. “Hey.”

Vio touched her right hand to the metal frame and pulsed the electricity.

His fingers flexed, holding him tighter to the frame as his body contorted under the effects of the shock. His eyes rolled wildly backwards, and when the pulse ended he stopped moving.

Vio took her hand off the frame and put the gravity back on. She landed neatly; the same could not be said for Razer. He was out before he slammed to the ground.

“It’s done,” she panted.

There was a little blip in her HUD as the terms of a contract were fulfilled. How had DeMoss gotten it to sync into her task list? She shook her head sharply.

A thought occurred to her. “What about you?”

“Mm?”

“This is really what you want? Tearing yourself apart for a powerful man?”

There was a brush of static. A soft, near-ironic sigh. “What else is there?”

----------------------------------------

“What has happened here?” Salieri was back in his skull helmet and carapace, glowering at his caporegime.

“Long story, boss. We got a lotta bodies to dump.”

“Explaining it is probably the Seneschal’s job,” DiBattista put in.

“Very well,” Salieri turned to DeMoss. “So you’re the new man.”

“Yes, Lord Captain,” DeMoss said.

The Lord Captain studied him for a moment. “Hm.” He turned to Vinnius and DiBattista. “And you are satisfied with this choice? I recall hearing about a woman.”

“She was a bad idea,” Vinnius said. DiBattista nodded and they both joined in shaking their heads and waving their hands no. “Nope.” “Very bad.” “Terrible, in fact.”

“But this one,” Salieri turned back to DeMoss.

“Trained at the Academy in accounting, economics, and logistical strategy,” DeMoss said.

“He hacked an enemy comms channel during a firefight,” Vinnius agreed.

“Negotiated an alliance during a combat situation,” DiBattista put in.

“Held his own against a crazy gun lady and a crazy knife guy.”

“Teamwork, communication, and leadership moments.”

“Collaborative mindset.”

“During the beginning of the meeting at least,” DiBattista snickered.

“This is your guy, boss,” Vinnius said.

“Your guy,” DiBattista agreed.

Salieri looked at DeMoss. DeMoss looked back at Salieri.

Salieri held out his hand. “Welcome,” he said, “to Salieri’s Shadow.”