Moon pool six was not open to the public. The tunnel leading to it was cloutwalled and required Noviko to pass through an abundance of verification checks. At one point she had to wait thirty seconds while a fairy surgeon conducted a deep-scan of her skull.
“Nice to see you again, Noviko,” said the fairy surgeon. “I remember spraying this new face right back on you!”
She recognized the voice as that of the entity that reconstructed her face after a jellyfish collided with it. It felt like another lifetime (which it was, in a way). The scan was to detect signs of reconstructive surgery and DNA tampering consistent with primitive naichi espionage efforts.
“No anomalies,” said the surgeon, its centipede arms lifting up into the ports on the side of its spherical body. “But you’re developing cancer in your tongue. Bit of a drinker?”
“I am,” said Noviko. “I was.”
“I’ll zap it for you when you get back from your field trip. Feeling a little scrambled after the muscle memory upload?”
“Something like that, doctor.”
“You’ll even out in an hour. Now, off to destiny, young lady!”
The surgeon bumped its single eye against her back and shoved her forward, through the final passage and into moon pool six. The room was dimly-lit from safety lights and dominated by a massive pool of water. She saw the top of a submarine stretched out ahead of her, as big as a blue whale and polished to a sheen. Red tally-marks were on the top of the hull in dripping red spray-paint; as she walked to the boarding platform, she counted thirty-two marks.
The boarding platform sank down into a docking chamber. The docking chamber opened up for her to walk through. As she walked through, the main bulkhead on the belly of the submarine opened up and invited her into a narrow room with flat storage lockers along the walls. There was a device that reminded her of her home fabrication system built into the room, an emergency nitrogen narcosis kit, and a sleeping fairy surgeon tucked away into a ceiling pod. She shut the bulkhead behind her.
Noviko opened up the next bulkhead. A heavy, humanoid shape loomed just in front of her, and she dove into a crouch and handled her katana. She expected to see squished tentacles and squid eyes staring at her from the domed helmet, but it was empty.
“Ho ho,” rumbled a man’s voice on the intercom. “She’s jumpier than I remember.”
Noviko recognized the thing in front of her as a suit of ZON trench marine armor; the same kind from that terrible dream she had in Dr. Humboldt’s memories. The voice on the intercom was familiar, but she couldn’t yet place it.
To her left was an orange ladder and a sign pointing upwards that read ‘BRIDGE.’ She climbed the ladder and popped through a hatch into a wide engineering bay filled with fabrication tech, compact paneling, bubbling science stations she had no clue about, and a few of ZON’s proprietary KwikMango trees growing out of hydroponics basins throughout the wide room. At the center of the room was a hatch in the floor. It was surrounded by transparent floor paneling that revealed the docked trench marine armor in the hold below.
Noviko saw a sign that pointed right and read ‘BRIDGE.’ She turned right, opened up another heavy bulkhead, and walked onto a spacious bridge, complete with its own bunk beds set into wall cubbies, a standing desk for old-fashioned record-keeping, and plenty of other glossy ZON gadgets and features she had no concept of. Standing at the helm was Captain Dunkin Frost, wearing a blunt-toothed grin and a heavy, high-collar seaman’s coat with big brass buttons and deep pockets.
“Noviko Tanaka,” said Dunk. “This year’s content queen.”
“Captain Frost,” said Noviko, with a crisp bow. “Thank you for your assistance.”
“God damn, girl – they really sanded you down to a plank, didn’t they?”
“I’m… formal when I’m nervous.”
“There’s formal and then there’s bootlicking,” Dunk walked to a machine built into the wall near the helm. “You don’t wanna lick a fisherman’s boots.”
“I suppose I bootlick when I’m terrified, then.”
“You and half the world,” said Dunk. He pressed a button on the wall and a little coffee cup popped down. A grinder whirred on, and water bubbled in a tank. “How else do the fashies keep hanging on to their precious blood and soil?”
“You aren’t one of those ‘reclaim the land’ types, are you?”
“No ma’am,” said Dunk, as he lifted a cup of steaming coffee to his smile. “Let the fuckers have their dirt. The sea provides, the sea abides, and the sea decides.”
Noviko eyed the coffee and felt a little pang of desire. “Do you have cream?”
“Bitch,” grunted Dunk as he kicked open the mini-fridge in the wall like a smuggler revealing a hidden cache of illicit treats, “I’ve got French vanilla and hazelnut.”
“You are a god.”
“I know it.”
It was a stunning cruise out to the southern reaches of the Aleutian strait. They moved through the icy sea with the sub’s top exposed, which meant she could recline on the bridge and watch churning water and sunny skies through the simulated observation dome at the front of the sub. It wasn’t actual clear material, of course, but a huge screen transmitting from thousands of micro-lenses on the exterior; as far as Noviko’s senses were concerned, she was relaxing in a clear observation dome, watching a pod of orca whales swimming ahead of them and riding the currents generated by the sub. She sipped her hazelnut coffee and enjoyed the peace while she could.
Dunk had even been kind enough to share his stash of cinnamon biscuits with her. They dunked well into the hot coffee, but she had to be quick, or they disintegrated into a grainy silt she’d be forced to swallow cold at the end of her drink.
Through the walls of the sub, she heard the pulsing bass of music. Dunk was in the engineering bay rocking out to some kind of archaic rock music, likely from before the fall of Seattle and the loss of ZON’s ancestral HQ. She heard the voice of a lead singer who sounded like he subsisted on a diet of razor blades and gravel singing a chorus that translated roughly to ‘eat the rich’ and she had to consult her Angrish dictionary to get clarity; it meant ‘cannibalize the wealthy people.’
Unfortunately this was distracting, and she found it difficult to tolerate. It drowned out the orca song and the gentle churning of the sea. She finished her biscuits and coffee, then stood up and opened the bulkheads to enter the engineering bay full of trees, and now, the sound of shredding rock music and humming fabricators. She saw Dunk, alongside Neon Vox, leaning over a terminal and talking shop.
“I’ll handle getting her through the facility,” said Vox, “you keep the sub safe.”
“Yup. Armor’s ready to rock.”
“How big do those mama squid get, anyways?
“Big as a bowhead.”
“Jesus fuck.”
They eyed Noviko but continued their conversation. The music volume went down.
“You got a shock membrane on this sub?” Vox asked Dunk.
“We’re gonna need to do a quick refit with the S.S. Tibeluk if you want one.”
“What about whip-it harpoons?”
“Heh… you trying to get me in shit with PRISMA?”
“I’m just telling you what works.”
“Yeah, harpooning something and then shock-filling it with C02 works. Question is whether or not we’re permitted to use lethal tech on the squids.”
Dunk and Vox turned to look at Noviko as she entered. “What do you think?” Vox asked.
Noviko was confused. “What do I think about what?”
“Should we go in ‘poons blazing or try a diplomatic approach?”
“Explain to me,” said Noviko, “how this facility has been abandoned for two-hundred years, exactly? Couldn’t the power cables just be followed back to the site?”
Dunk smirked at Noviko. “You’re a rigrat, not a mariner, right?”
“… I don’t think anyone has ever called me a ‘rig rat’ before.”
“Let me enlighten you,” said Dunk. “On this side of the Pacific, around the Aleutian islands, there’s spots where ZON got real tired of losing good submarines – so they stopped trying to get through. Those are the no-go zones, usually around four-thousand meters deep, all around the Aleutian isles and well up into the North Pole.”
“And what happens to these submarines in the ‘no-go zone’?”
Vox answered: “They get ripped apart by giant squid.”
“Just in Aleutia?”
“Just in Aleutia. Those colossals are reclusive animals everywhere else. Here? They’re everywhere at the twilight zone and as mean as rattlesnakes.”
It was then that Noviko realized no amount of Ghost training or muscle memory or bladework would save her on this mission. If a giant squid, or multiple giant squid, decided to crack their submarine open at three-thousand meters below the surface of the ocean, she would be crushed to death and torn apart in the directionless darkness of the abyss. Even if she somehow managed to escape the wreckage and the predatory squids, she would drown before even seeing the light of day, and even if she had scuba gear, the bends would have her wishing she was dead by the time she surfaced, and even if the bends didn’t kill her, the frigid arctic water would sap the life from her body in minutes.
“Yeah,” said Vox, clicking her tongue. “I don’t wanna be a creeper, but… I see your hesitation, Noviko. I see the pieces falling together in your head. We’re heading into the deadliest place on the planet. I would rather infiltrate a thousand fash-states before going down into this slice of the sea. We either complete this mission, or we die real awful deaths.”
“And how are we supposed to do what no one else has?”
“You.”
“Me?!”
“PRISMA says you’ve got some rudimentary understanding of biospeak.”
“I have no earthly clue what that is.”
“Color language – cephalopods use it. We’re gonna hook you up to the ship’s cloaking module and use it to communicate in their language.”
“I have no confidence whatsoever in my ability to accomplish that.”
“Well, thanks for the team spirit Noviko, but PRISMA thinks you can do it, so just do it.”
“There has to be a plan B.”
Dunk laughed. “Plan B is to fight them off until we can retreat into our backup.”
“Basically,” Vox added, “you’re the only way forward, Noviko. We’re just here to make sure you don’t die, and to make sure you escape if things go to shit, so we can regroup at a later date and try this whole thing all over again.”
“No…” Noviko gripped the hilt of her mother’s katana for comfort. “I’d prefer to get this done correctly on the first attempt. I want this all to be over with.”
“Measure twice, cut once,” said Vox with a nod. “Respect. And if we die, we die.”
“Ha.” Noviko already wanted to die, just a little. “‘If we die, we die,’ so poetic, Neon Vox. And I suppose I should be thankful that a clone of myself is raising my child and fucking my husband on my behalf.”
“Hey, at least you had love and family,” said Vox. “Better to love and lose, right?”
Dunk slapped Vox’s shoulder with the back of his hand. Vox smiled at him. “My bad, Dunk, didn’t mean to sound woe-is-me.”
“Found family counts,” said Dunk. “Now let’s get this shitshow rolling.”
They had a quick rendezvous with the utility carrier S.S. Tibeluk in the open ocean. It was one of the smaller nuclear carriers, a scaled-down version of the massive agri-carriers. The Tibeluk focused entirely on open sea logistics and engineering services. Dunk seemed to know half the pit crew on a first name basis, and they stocked up the hull with gas canisters, harpoons for the launcher, and spent a few hours applying what looked like giant electrodes to the hull’s glossy outer membrane. Dunk and the pit boss nerded out over ancient music like Motorhead and Amon Amarth, smoked marijuana while using power tools, and waxed philosophical about the mysteries of the lost seas of the Atlantic and Mediterranean.
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Noviko watched it all from the bridge and couldn’t help but smile; Dunk had a kind of zest for life she associated with her beloved Banh and Trip. She’d always seen a kind of innocence in masculinity, in its propensity for hyperfocus and compartmentalization, in its tendency to throw away the broad in favor of the narrow. She envied it and loved it, even if it infuriated her at times. Despite the chill in her nerves and the warrior’s calm in her heart, she felt nostalgic love for her lost family.
Maybe, somehow, when all was said and done, she could find a way to return to them. But that was a fantasy. Her replacement was active. It was as much her as she was. And it deserved not to have its life uprooted the same way hers had been months before.
This was just. It was important to be just.
But maybe she didn’t care about that anymore. She didn’t know.
With the refit complete, they disembarked and moved out to the open ocean. Alarms sounded through the sub and soon, they dived. All three of them sat on the bridge and watched the water grow darker and darker with every passing minute.
Noviko noted the emptiness of the sea around them. “Where is that backup you mentioned, Captain Frost?”
Dunk had his hands on the helm’s controls and stood with his eyes always straight ahead into the sea. “They’re not far off. Ship hears them on sonar.”
“Other submarines? A fleet?
“Better than that.”
Noviko did see. Within minutes, their sub was surrounded by clicks and beeps, chirps, and trilling songs. And soon she saw a pod of grizzled, scarred old sperm whales diving alongside them. She could see the subtitles in her vision translating the whale speech:
“Hard whale is starfish ship,” said the whales to one another. She knew that whales called humans starfish; this had begun as an early-collaboration mistranslation and had stuck for two-hundred years. “Escort to pain zone,” the whales continued. “Food.”
“Pain zone…” Noviko frowned. “Do they mean the ‘no-go zone’?”
Dunk grunted. “They’re risking a lot for us.”
Vox turned on the intercom in her seat and typed a text message into the armrest. This message translated into a series of whalesong chirps that emanated from the sub:
“Thank you, warriors. You are brave.”
“Fragile starfish,” said the whales. “You are braver.”
“Don’t attack the enemy unless they attack first.”
“We understand. We have been fed.”
And the water darkened further and further. Soon it was the color of a bruise. Dunk hit a button and set the sub to hold its position. The sperm whale pod swam around them in circles.
“The enemy comes,” sang the pod.
Dunk swapped through cameras on the display ahead of them all. Below, glistening squid eyes and winding tentacles fluttered through the shadows. Dunk and Vox looked to Noviko. Noviko looked down at the jack in her seat. She pulled it up to her head and stuck it into the neural port hidden in her hair. She then closed her eyes and let her mind relax.
The large female squid opened its tentacles below the sub. It resembled a hideous flower. Its skin flickered lights and colors. It said in biospeak:
“PROTECT. EGG. PROTECT. KILL. EAT. PROTECT. EGG.”
Noviko intuited her way around a response. Her mind ached from the effort. She hoped that she responded with the following phrase: “HELP. PROTECT. THIS. HELP. PROTECT. SHOW. EGG. SHOW EGG. THIS. HELP. PROTECT.”
The giant squid drifted in a lazy pinwheel, as if stunned. The sperm whales cooed in their loose orbit around the sub: “Squids lie. Squids kill. Squids are delicious. Squids are bad.”
The squid flickered with new words: “WHALES. AFRAID. ENEMY. HELP. KILL.”
Noviko spoke to her companions with her mouth. “Tell the whales to leave.”
“… fuck no,” said Dunk.
“Do it. The squid is frightened of them.”
Vox typed the message into her seat to be translated into whalesong: “Go back. We must go deeper. Go back.”
The whales replied: “Deeper is death. Deeper is bad. Starfish are too brave.”
Vox repeated the message: “Go back. Thank you. Go back.”
The whales hesitated, but soon drifted upwards. Once they retreated, the squid lunged toward the submarine. Noviko’s biospeak was a shuddering red: “NO. STOP.”
Dunk reached for the priming lever for their weapons systems. “Stop!” Noviko cried. He hesitated with his hand on the lever.
“I’ve seen this behavior before,” she said. “They play rough.”
The squid stopped just short of them. It drifted around their perimeter and signaled: “HUNGRY. HUNGRY. HUNT. COME. EGG. PROTECT. DEEP. NEW. NEW. NEW. NEW.”
The word ‘NEW’ was visible as a rhythmic cascade of every color on the spectrum. Noviko did not know what it meant in this context.
“Do we have food to give it?” She asked.
Dunk reached up and pulled down a separate lever. “Yep.”
A chute within the sub shot out a mangled tuna carcass. It drifted toward the squid. The squid swam around it, but did not take the gift.
Noviko strained her mind. She did not find what she wanted.
She realized there was no squid word she knew for ‘gift’ or ‘share’ or ‘give.’
So she improvised and signaled: “FOOD.”
It mirrored her: “FOOD.”
The squid lunged for the tuna and gnashed it into bits with its beak. It used its hooked tentacles to drag bloody chunks toward itself, until nothing remained but a haze of red.
The large squid fluttered its frilled body in a way that Noviko interpreted as playful. It then drifted down into the depths and gradually out of view, only to betray itself with flashes of color that said: “FOLLOW. FRIEND. FOLLOW. NEW NEW NEW. EGG. NEW. EGG.”
“Keep diving,” said Noviko. “Follow her.”
“Fuck me…” Dunk loosened his grip on the weapons deployment lever.
Vox sat strapped into her bridge chair, leg bouncing from anxiety. She looked over to Noviko and smiled. “I think it worked.”
Noviko glanced over to Envy and smiled back. “Maybe. But I don’t know what it’s talking about, something about eggs, something ‘new’… I only understand half of what it’s saying. I think it’s protecting something down there.”
Dunk grimaced. “Don’t like it. Whales said squids lie.”
Vox leaned back into her seat and stared at the darkness ahead. “Deception is a mark of intelligence. But, maybe it thinks we’re one of its own kind?”
They both looked at Noviko, like she had answers. She could only guess. And she then realized that they were both anxious and relying on her for comfort in an alien scenario.
So she did the best she could.
“We’re going to the darkest place in the world,” said Noviko. “The only thing keeping us connected to PRISMA is our quantum chips. Whatever Syndicate tech remains down there predates that technology. I do not know what we will find. But my task is to get into what remains of the facility and find the last few pieces of their language research. If I can get that… perhaps this will be an exciting new era in deep sea expansion and collaboration with the natives of the ecosystem. I saw that squids were as capable as us or whales when receiving cybernetics. They could be valuable partners; they could even be good friends, for all we know.”
Dunk kept his hands on the helm and his eyes ahead. “Why do I get the feeling you’re trying to comfort yourself more than anyone else?”
“Because you’re an intuitive gentleman,” said Noviko. “And you would be right.”
Vox stood up from her chair. “I’m gonna brew another batch of coffee and suit up. See you at the bottom of the world.”
Dunk gave every assurance that their vessel would hold. It was graded for maximum depth and based on tested technology that’d been refined for centuries, since the first deep-sea challenger hit the bottom of the Marianas trench. Since then, that tech had been scaled up for more passengers, more comfort, and more safety. The depth wasn’t a concern.
The hundreds of patrolling squids signaling each other in the darkness was a concern. Ahead of them, Noviko observed the large female escorting them into the depths repeating the same signal over and over again: “DON’T. TOUCH… FOOD.”
Noviko had no idea what it meant. But she did notice that other squids, on contact, would belay their aggression. So, Noviko mirrored it herself. As the submarine left the last rays of light behind, she repeated that signal again and again; the exterior of the vessel flickered rainbow lights that, she assumed, were telling the local squid to back off. Dunk kept their defensive measures on standby, and Vox remained in the airlock.
Typically, Dunk would have used sonar to navigate. But Noviko told him not to; she had concerns that the squid would mistake them for a whale. So, he swapped the exterior camera lenses to telescopic thermal vision in an attempt to locate the (presumably) active facility.
After two hours of diving with this large squid escorting them, they hit eight-thousand-five-hundred meters deep. The hull of the sub creaked and shifted as it adjusted itself to the pressure. It was part titanium, part living foam and adaptive membranes. It held.
The facility spread out beneath them as a series of hot, flat structures connected by tiny tube bridges no doubt separated by bulkheads. Vox had studied the map for days, and it was exactly the layout she was anticipating. She sent docking instructions up to Dunk, who received them with a tense ‘aye aye’ and a redirection of their heading toward the aft section of the facility. There was an extended dock for larger subs there, as theirs was a Scylla-class three-person expedition sub and far too large for the compact facility’s moon pools.
As they arrived and initiated docking procedures, the enormous female squid kept swimming around them in what appeared to be protective circles. Over and over she signaled, warning off equally large competitors with her “DON’T. TOUCH… FOOD” communication. For her own mental health, Noviko chose to interpret this as a good omen.
“Seals are secure,” said Dunk, as he squinted at the helm terminals. “We’re docked. Vox, you ready to rock?”
“Place is in good repair. Bots?”
“Maybe. I could try hailing them first.”
“Go for it.”
Dunk pulled down the comms tether and chirped the line on: “Trenchport Aleutia One, this is the S.S. Muddy Waters making her maiden call at your facility. Could we get a plaque to commemorate this fine occasion?”
Silence.
Dunk tried another hail. No response. He let go of the tether and walked back toward the engineering bay. “Whelp,” he said, “I’m gonna tool up. You stick close to Vox, hear? No telling what kinda spookery is in that place.”
Noviko rose. “I’ll set the biospeak message to repeat. I think it should keep the squids off the sub.”
“Let’s hope so. I don’t wanna have to defend her.”
“How would you even do that?”
He walked through the engineering bay with a smile and stomped the button in the glass floor. The hatch to his trench marine armor opened up from the top. He scratched at his prickly jowls, folded up his coat, and sat on the edge of the hatch. “By killing shit, mama.”
He slid down into the armor and closed the hatch behind. Noviko smiled and felt both safe and unsafe knowing that man was watching their backs. Down the ladder to the airlock she went, where Vox stood waiting in her ghost exosuit, with the red-lensed eyes and filtered voice.
“Stay behind me,” said Vox. “You’ve got no combat cyberware and no armor.”
“I have a shield belt.”
“Those things can deflect like four bullets before shutting down, one moron with a submachine gun could murder you around a corner.”
“Are we expecting to be attacked by morons with submachine guns?”
“No, I expect this to be pretty boring – anything that was alive in there is long dead, and the place would have been kept running by automated, dumb labor bots, not even modern fairy AI. But just in case there’s something I’m not considering, tell me the plan.”
“I already explained it to you twice.”
“One more time.”
Noviko steadied herself with a few circular breaths. “I go in behind you. You access the facility systems and make sure everything is clear. We proceed to the last known location of the data drive’s shards and collect them. We scan them on the spot and put together as much of the squid’s language as we can. We then stick around and attempt to communicate with the squids on site to establish diplomatic outreach. If possible, we attempt to discern the reason for their generations of aggression and negotiate a peace treaty.”
“Sounds more and more insane every time you say it,” said Vox.
“Thank you for your reassuring leadership in these trying times, Neon Vox.”
The airlock hatch communicated with the facility and ran through a depressurization cycle. They stepped into the facility airlock. The sub’s bulkhead closed and sealed up behind them. Ahead, the next bulkhead leading into the facility’s first hallway did not open. Vox walked up to the terminal. “Gene reader, manual passcode keypad… override switch for admin keycard. This is adorable, I feel like I’m in a museum.”
“Is it locked?”
“Yep. It’s old, probably hasn’t had a sub dock here in… what, two centuries? Give me a minute, I’ll sort it out.”
Vox unspooled a thread of prehensile wire from the wrist port of her exosuit. She wormed it through the admin keycard reader and directly interfaced with the facility’s systems. Noviko felt a lurching, déjà vu kind of feeling as a wave of attention from PRISMA flowed through both of their entanglement implants and into this single, poor old security terminal.
PRISMA’s organic superclusters shattered the binary encryption lock instantaneously.
The terminal chirped: “ADMIN ACCESS GRANTED.”
“Fuck,” was all Vox said, before she pushed Noviko to the side, around the corner of the airlock and out of the way of the opening bulkhead, then took up a breaching position in cover at the other corner.
“Not a sound,” said Vox, through covert comms that reached Noviko’s eardrum directly.
“Are you sure you’re not expecting trouble?”
“PRISMA connected and saw logs, surveillance footage, centuries worth of habitation and hydroponics access exchanges… something organic is living here.”
Noviko’s mind raced at the possibilities. Horrible squid hybrids walking on two feet?
Vox held the very tip of her index finger around the corner. There was a micro-lens over the fingerpad, allowing her to see down the hallway. After about seven seconds of the bulkhead door being open, Vox swatted at something. To Noviko, it had looked like a grenade someone had thrown and Vox deflected back into their face.
A thunderclap and a flash of light brightened the hall beyond the bulkhead. Noviko heard men swearing in a language that sounded almost Ryukyuan, but whinier, with a kind of tremulous fear behind it at all times, like it was being muttered by an angry slave. The sound of it made her nerves go cold and her hand grip the hilt of her katana. Tokiko’s body knew that language.
Naichi.
“Fuck! How the fuck?!” Vox yelled into comms as she ducked back around the corner. “DUNK, HOW THE FUCK?!”
“I dunno,” said Dunk on comms, “but this just turned into a smash and grab.”
Dunk hit the mayday transponder on the sub. PRISMA saw everything. Syndicate saw everything. News of an entire geothermal plant being infested by fash spread throughout the cloutwalled MetaNet. It only took ten seconds after that before someone leaked it into the broader MetaNet. PRISMA shuddered under the weight of the implications.
“Stand down,” said a voice on the facility intercoms. “We can help you.”
Vox did not understand the naichi dialect and PRISMA was overwhelmed managing the sudden chaos of the MetaNet’s activity surge. Vox looked to Noviko for guidance.
Noviko screamed internally. It was only the chill of Tokiko’s inherited neural pathways that kept her from unraveling on the spot. “We come seeking an artifact!” She yelled past the bulkhead. “Please, there’s no need for bloodshed! Perhaps we can bargain!”
“Are you joking?!” Vox clutched a grenade at her belt. “They’re CHUDS!”
Noviko felt her mother’s hatred boiling down into the tips of her fingers. She wanted nothing more than to charge into the hallway, straight into their formations, and rip the naichi apart with Vox at her side. But a little stubborn seed of grief remained in her heart.
She imagined that clone that stole her family. She felt railroaded. She felt ignored, pressured, coerced, cajoled, and cornered. She was still angry.
“Vox,” said Noviko. “I like you just the way you are.”
Vox looked at her. “No.”
“I like you just the way you are.”
“No… no, no. NO! NO! They gave it to you?! WHY?!”
“Please… stand down, Vox.”
Noviko could hear Vox seething through clenched teeth behind her mask. She let go of the grenade and obeyed her designated handler. Noviko called out to the hallway:
“My name is Noviko Tanaka! I surrender! I am coming through, do not shoot!”
The facility intercom responded: “Hold fire, men! Let her surrender!”
“Killing you,” said Vox, as she stood frozen near the wall, “is the kindest treatment you can expect from these primitive motherfuckers.”
“Maybe so,” said Noviko, as she raised her hands in surrender and prepared to step into the doorway. “But, everything I know could very well be a lie. So, I’ll take my chances. If they can help me escape this nightmare, I want it.”
Neon Vox laughed. It was a low, rising, chesty sound. “You have no idea what a nightmare is.”
Dunk’s voice boomed over the comms: “She defecting?!”
Vox tilted her head as she responded: “Yep. She has my handler code -- I’m stuck.”
Noviko ignored the sound of Dunk yelling into her ear. She stepped out into the doorway and saw dozens of rifles trained on her from over barricades. She squinted into floodlights and kept her palms visible.
“Help me,” she said aloud. “Please.”