The hole in the sub’s roof wasn’t that huge. Nevertheless, water didn’t need huge holes to start flooding everything rapidly. Didn’t help that the blaring alarms and flashing warning lights were interfering with my mental processing. Aliya’s body really wasn’t built to process stimuli like this.

You never really miss something until it’s gone. Till then, it’s so easy to take everything that looks normal for granted.

But no point in moaning over what was gone. First, I had a killer to deal with.

The large man ignored the water splashing on and around him, looking around at the mess that was the sub’s interior instead.

“You,” he said in a voice reminiscent of a chain-smoker swallowing rocks. His regard had finally landed on me. Or my new body, rather. “You’re not him. But you’re still somebody… interesting. You’re one of them Morgue Operators, aren’t you?”

That, as I had known from the beginning, was my ticket out of here.

“I am,” I said.

“No, you’re shitting not,” Aliya said from inside my head. Good thing she had ceded control over her own body’s vocals to me.

I ignored her. “I was the one who set off the alarm in the—in your associate’s head.” I tried my best to add a convincing wince. After all, I wasn’t supposed to be the one who had killed the Cull. “After managing to take care of the Juggernaut.”

“Oh, yeah? You seem to know a lot, for a Morgue Operator.”

“I can explain.” I nudged my chin at my original, now-lifeless body. “I’ve known that man for a long time. Enough that he asked me for assistance, and I agreed. And I thought—” I looked away. “Well, I realized I had no real idea who he was. That he was actually a wanted criminal. So I decided to lure him in, hoping I could sneakily activate the head when he wasn’t looking…”

“But he caught you doing it, huh?”

Which would then have led to an altercation that ended in his death. But convincing this cobber that I had essentially killed myself was less important than convincing him I needed to get out of here alive.

“We can discuss this outside,” I said, letting some of the panic Aliya was experiencing show. “We need to get out of here.”

The alarms were still blaring and flashing. For good reason, too. The water was flooding everywhere, almost past my ankles. A few more minutes, and we’d need to start swimming in this muck.

“You think I’m just going to take your word for it on face value?” the Cull asked. His oafish face held no mercy.

I had to repress the urge to fling myself at him. All the old instincts I’d honed over decades of battles and combat were rising to the surface. They were yelling at me to stop talking to the brute and take my future into my own hands. As I had always done.

But I couldn’t rely on fighting all the time. My time with the revolutionaries had taught me that. It had taught me how to rely on subterfuge and trickery.

“Aliya,” I said inside my head. “I might need your help.”

“With what?”

“Pretending I’m you.”

She grumbled, but complied.

That whole little conversation happened in seconds. Time in mental spaces was weird. We weren’t really talking so much as exchanging information and the rate of information exchange was several gigabytes per second. Sentences like the ones were exchanging a mere few bytes each.

I had learned that a long time ago. We probably could have “conversed” about half of Aliya’s experiences in Underlevel and no real time would have passed.

Which was essential, because I didn’t want to make the Cull any more suspicious than he already was.

I was going to need Aliya’s assistance when I had to prove I was the Operator. Right now, though, there was no reason to make them believe that I thought they suspected my identity. That would just raise their hackles even further.

The idea of me not being Operator Aliya was preposterous to me.

“What the shit are you trying to suggest?” I asked. “That he’s not dead? That his whole thing is some kind of trap? Are you nuts? We’re going to drown!”

Before the Cull could reply, I confidently turned away from him, splashing over to my own corpse. Then I gave it a handy kick. Not on the head or something like that. Right on the still-bleeding wound where the arm was missing. Even with pain-receptors suppressed to their minimum, agitating a wound like that with a vicious kick would produce a visible response.

If I had been alive. In my old body, that was.

“See!” I whirled around to face the oversized brute. “He’s dead. Gone. I made sure of it before I called you guys.” The water was over halfway to my knees now. “We really need to get out. Once we’re gone, his mangy little mech-mutt will drown here.”

That did it. I was almost tempted to smile.

“You ass,” Aliya said. “How can you sell out Mutton?”

The last thing I’d ever do was sell out my little fur-metal baby. But I’d be stupid not to use every little resource I possessed.

“Where’s the dog?” the Cull asked, looking around with suspicion. Suspicion that was not directed at me any longer.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It tried to attack me when I was trying to take care of its master. I didn’t manage to kill it, and I only got the Juggernaut because he was injured, with his arm gone and ammo all used up. I could try calling it, but—”

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

“Shut up, woman.”

I shut up as he started looking around, trashing the sub in the process.

“Kill him,” Aliya said.

I almost laughed again. “It won’t be easy. Not with his partner hanging around outside.”

“Partner?”

“The Culls won’t be working alone. Not when there’s someone like me involved. Even if we manage to kill this cobber, the one outside will just blow up everything before we can get out.”

“Shit. Then what do we do about him?”

“We’re going to need help.”

“Help? You were the help. Who else is supposed to help against shitting Culls?”

“Oh, don’t mess with me, Operator. You’ve got loads of people in your pocket. But if you really want my ideal suggestion, I’d go for those two.”

“Which two?” she asked.

“Those two. Jeb and Bush. Tucker and Dale. I don’t shitting remember their names, but it’s those two assholes you pretended not to know. The ones who came to check in on the Morgue.”

“Oh.”

“Yes. Oh. Now, you’re going to protest that they’re actually with the Commissioner, which I’ve suspected ever since this whole shit started. But that’s going to help us in turn. You’re going to reach out to them and tell them that I’m still alive. Tell them that I’m going to steal one of the Cull’s bodies, and then come after the Commissioner himself.”

“Are they going to be able to double-check? Can they corroborate, is what I’m asking.”

I sent a mental shrug. “They’ve got no means of doing so. With my old body gone, the Commissioner can’t contact me until I establish a comm line from my new body. But the real question is, can you make it convincing, Operator?”

“I’ll have to, won’t I? Shit.”

I let her handle that part of the business. The sub was starting to sink. I could feel it. The water was past my knees now. We were going to drown in no time at this rate.

Moving would have alerted the big cobber, but oh well. It was time to play my hand. You’d think I ought to have waited until the Commissioner’s goons arrived, but a part of me suspected that they were close by already to make sure nothing untoward happened.

It was a gamble, but I liked my odds here.

Like I had said, the shotgun took only seconds to assemble. I had it pointed at the Cull’s broad back, locked and loaded, as the man was about to enter the bedroom. Mutton, good boy, hadn’t made a single sound yet.

“You really thought I didn’t have eyes on the back of my head,” the Cull said.

I froze. Ah, screw me.

The shot I fired was ineffective. With blindingly fast motion despite his immensity, the Cull dodged to one side. Some of the bullets had scored bleeding holes in his shoulder and back. But I knew they were hardly dents. Unlike the holes the shotgun had blown into the walls of the sub.

With a roar, the Cull rammed at me. Again, his speed took me aback. It wasn’t that he was unnaturally fast. This was normal, if not somewhat slow, for a Cull.

It was just that Aliya’s body was really not built for combat. With her slower eyes, I had trouble processing the exact motion of my opponent’s movement.

That was probably why the Cull reached me in such a quick fashion. It was all I could do to jump back, jerking the shotgun away from his needle-armed grasp. He still got a grip on my other arm, though, which thankfully I could unlock in the blink of an eye.

Better to disconnect the limb entirely from my body than allow the hostile Arclight to enter this relatively defenceless body.

Aliya was shrieking a little at the loss of her arm. I ignored her. I had made the right decision. After all, the blast of Arclight plunging out of the brutish Cull’s arm and into the torn limb almost vaporized it. The flesh wilted and blood burned away, the bone turning black and the metal frame turned heated whitish yellow.

The sub started groaning. This wasn’t going to last longer. One fall, and I’d need to swim now.

For just a second, the Cull looked like he was going to reach for me with his bare hands. He changed his mind a second later. His other arm thrust at me, but instead of grasping my body, it transformed.

Several barrels poked around the forearm, the thick fingers straightening and opening their ends to become even more gun barrels. Ah, not good.

I was already diving and dodging to my left. A beam of compressed Arclight had flashed out of the many barrels on the Cull’s arm. It was stupid of me to think I could really dodge that in my current state. The first flash might have missed me, but the assassin swiped the beam like it was a gigantic sword.

It didn’t even give me the time to think about jumping over it. One second, I was splashing through the flood, and then I was dropping. The Arclight beam had severed my lower half entirely off.

The screech that burst from my body was more Aliya than me. But even I couldn’t get past the sharp pain clawing through me. The way it threatened to overwhelm all my senses.

All that saved me was the fact was that the beam of Arclight had destroyed the sub’s walls. An explosion rocked through the room, throwing a burst of fire, shrapnel, and a surge of water joining the flood with a horizontal geyser.

I was enshrouded in the smoke and flames and hissing water. The shock and pain were still trying to cut through my thoughts like a jagged knife, but I was able to get control of Aliya’s pain receptors and push them down to their minimum setting. I could recover. I could survive. Like I had always done.

The sub rocked again, harder than ever before, leaning to one side harshly. All the water started sinking to the new bottom, gathering at the end where the explosion had occurred.

It was a good thing the pain had been muted. I now had enough of my control over my consciousness to catch the notch I was falling past with my mouth. The water streamed past me, carrying debris, clanking against my skin, making it almost impossible to see, but Aliya’s eyes had membranes to improve underwater visibility.

That allowed me to see that the Cull had slipped when the sub had leaned to one side, when the water had rushed in my direction. But he too had caught on to a chair bolted to the floor, anchoring himself in place.

He might have attacked me next, finishing me off finally, but that’s where Mutton came into play.

Good boy rushed out of the bedroom, barrelling through the receding water. His entrance had distracted the Cull, who was bringing his arm around to take out my dog. Not on my watch. I pushed what remained of my body up with my only arm and the shotgun butt.

I screamed around the notch I was biting down on to hold myself steady.

The noise, honestly, was unearthly. I attributed that to whatever horror Aliya was going through. It was jarring enough to jerk the Cull’s attention back onto me.

Mutton arrived like a cannonball. Good boy jumped and his yawning jaws clamped around the assassin’s wrist on the chair. He couldn’t retaliate. The shock and pain had forced him to let go, and now he was slipping and sliding down.

Straight at me.

With a yell that was all my own, I thrust myself up with the shotgun butt again. As he slammed into me, his arms grabbing onto my sides with the needles digging in, I managed to nudge the shotgun barrel right under his chin. Just as the needles tried to drive corrupting Arclight into my body, I fired.

The recoil of the point-blank blast was absorbed by the grip of the assassin’s unrelenting arms. He wasn’t dead yet, though. Even if everything above his collarbones had been shattered into blood-fountaining smithereens, he was still crushing me, driving his Arclight deeper into me.

“Arms,” Aliya shouted in desperation inside my head.

I didn’t need to be told twice.

All those extra mechanical arms Aliya liked to control, always tucked away inside her back, now thrust out and forward. I stabbed them into gory wounds, immediately unleashing a crap ton of Arclight on my own.

I almost laughed as the Cull’s body jerked and twisted. Oh, yes. I knew exactly how that felt. A second later, we both slumped into the flood.

Aliya was once again yelling at me. I couldn’t tell if she was shouting in horror and despair, or if she was actually instructing me to do something, anything to not drown.

But I didn’t pay her much attention. All I could feel, as this stolen body’s strength faded, was strong, canine jaws closing around my only remaining wrist. Jaws that began dragging me out of the gloomy darkness of the sinking little submarine.