“NO!” Rauch yelled as he sprang from his chair. He lurched towards the console and scooped up his weapon of choice from its place atop the pile of debris. In one motion he raised it, advanced on Charles, and swung it in a wide arc, its stainless tip gleaming as it whistled through the air. Charles, startled by Rauch’s yell, pivoted, exposing his chest just in time to catch the blow in in full. It penetrated just beneath his clavicle.

Charles convulsed as the tag team of pain and shock hit him in force. Blood squirted from the wound, staining both his and Rauch’s coats in crimson. Spray stippled Rauch’s face. Miller and Britt sat in silence, too stunned to move. Charles grabbed for the handle, but Rauch beat him to it. “You can’t!” he screamed. “We can fix it! We can FIX IT!” With a manic look on his face he wrenched it from the wound, causing blood to gush and pool in the cavity. He raised it for another blow. The girl caught him from behind and tried to drag him away, but Rauch fought her off with a kick and a shove, sending her stumbling backwards, into Miller, a broken Fblood-hand printed on her chest.

The action snapped Charles out of his stupor. His eyes widened as he noticed the holo, which had shadowed Rauch across the distance and maintained its place above his shoulder. It now showed the warrior-beast dancing in the mist, a necklace of bone bouncing against his chiseled chest as he hopped and pirouetted. The head of his vanquished foe sat on a spike in the foreground. Its eyes had rolled back to the whites, and the skin had drawn pale and tight over its sockets. Its tongue lolled pathetically from its slackened jaw.

He sprung into action as his blood began to drain. He swiped wildly at the interface, trying to send up the final packets of code for the kill-switch. One took, then a second, data whooshing into existence in the launching chamber on the screen. Blood was pooling on the floor, forming a twistedf angel’s wing as his flailing arm pushed it this way and that. He swiped a third time and the screen went blank, fading to a vacant black. He swiped again, less strongly than before, but this time it had no effect.

Rauch recovered from the girl’s advance and redoubled his attack on Charles. He grabbed his victim by the shoulder and turned him downwards, dragged him back to the floor and once again exposing his chest to the wrath of the screwdriver. Charles tried to struggle but the angles were all wrong for him; he’d lost all his leverage when he’d reached for the interface. He was quickly overpowered and found himself on his back, pinned beneath Rauch’s greater bulk.

The first blow faltered and went wide as Charles blocked it with his forearm, forcing it into his upper arm and robbing it of most of its power, but Charles’s strength was fading fast. The second landed just above his heart, and the third pierced its center. The point met with some resistance. Rauch leaned forward and forced it further, to the sound of snapping bone. Fresh blood oozed from the openings, hot dribbles puddling to join the rest as the beating heart began to slow. Charles clawed again at the handle, now slick with sheets of red, but feebly. So feebly.

Britt and Miller finally reached them. Rauch fought against them both, trying for another blow, and in his berserker state he almost managed to get free, but together they were able to wrap him up and drag him off of Charles. They threw him back in his chair, where Miller held him in place while Britt searched for something to restrain him. Rauch though continued to struggle, but halfheartedly; his bloodlust seemed to disappear once they had him pulled away. The girl, meanwhile, tended to Charles. Or tried to, anyways. She cradled his head in her hands, then let it go in favor of wadding up her lab coat, and used that to prop him up instead. She tested the screwdriver after that, pinching at the handle gingerly, searching for the least congealed portions, but she gave that up when Charles let out a groan and a wail. Next she reclaimed her coat and used it to try and stop the blood, which by now had slowed to a dribble. She wadded it up again and applied pressure to as many of the wounds as she could. Blood welled in each. Some of it soaked into the fabric, but most ran down Charles’s chest in rivulets, where it joined the growing pool. Charles groaned again and tried to sit up. Jets squirted from his wounds.

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“Shhhhhhhhhh” the girl whispered, as soothingly as she could, and eased him back down. She stroked his wispy hair. “Save your strength. Everything’s going to be OK.” The panicky look she gave Miller suggested anything but. Help, she mouthed.

Miller spared a glance at Britt, who considered his charge, then nodded his blessing. He knelt beside the girl. Her relief at having someone to share her burden with was clear. Miller took her coat from her and set it aside. He peeled back Charles’s shirt, with some difficulty in places that had already started to congeal, and inspected the wounds. “There’s a first aid kit behind the Tower” he said, “get me the Sanimax and the cryoseal.” She did as she was told. Her path took her close to Rauch; they locked eyes as she trotted past. Rauch’s holo showed a garbled mixture of images and text. The words ‘deserved it’ and ‘fixable’ swirled among pictures of the warrior-Rauch tossing and turning in his bed and a mouse hiding in a field.

Charles had passed out by the time she returned. His head collapsed to one side and his eyes, unlidded, rolled back in their sockets. His jaw slackened. His tongue lolled lifelessly to one side, not quite in or out of his mouth. His lips thinned as all the blood that had been in his head sought lower ground. She dumped the kit next to Miller and knelt beside him, cradling his head in her lap once more, her face an anguished wail. Miller, acting on instinct, started to give him CPR. The first thrust sent fresh blood geysering from of his wounds, coating his forearms with its spray. He gave up and fingered the screwdriver, but he had to give that up too, when he saw the blood that welled in the gaps he created every time he moved the handle.

“Call Head,” he ordered. “Get some help.” He reached for the cryoseal from the pile of sundries the girl had spilled.

“It’s too late,” Rauch whispered. There was a smile on his face when he said it.

“Shut up!” Miller’s hand found the cryoseal. He uncapped the canister and began unfurling the mesh. “We’ll deal with you later.”

Rauch squirmed in his chair, as much as Britt’s grasp would allow. He clicked his heels together gleefully. “I’m telling you, you’re wasting your time!” he gloated. “He’s gone.”

“We still have to try.” He said it more to himself, or perhaps to the girl, than as a response to Rauch. “If there’s any chance at all…”

“There isn’t.”

“Your opinion.”

“Fact!”

Miller stopped, mesh crackling in his hand as the nitrogen from the canister chilled it to Antarctic temperatures, and held Rauch with his gaze. “See for yourself!” Rauch said, and nodded.

Miller followed his nod towards the station Charles had used to queue up the kill. The screen there had not changed. It remained vacant and dark just as it was for Charles’s final swipe. But now…there was another. A corollary of Rauch’s fairy hovered just beneath the desk, this one smaller, pale and translucent, as if only partly formed. Three words were legible on its pulsing surface, standing out amidst the expected mash of pictures and text:

Done…

And then, several lines below that, in a space reserved for it alone:

and…

Goodbye ()