An Old Enemy

Astarte observed the assassin, who matched the description Alice had given her of Rachel’s attacker to a T. That, and their brief clash told Astarte that she was heavily augmented with cybernetics. So heavily that it left the question of whether there was any human left in her.

Astarte wasn’t one to shy away from artificial augmentations. A good forty percent of her body mass had been replaced or enhanced with the fruits of the Toy man’s research. But ripping off entire limbs just to replace them with reinforced metal prosthetics didn’t sit right with her. It was why she had settled for the Toy mans unique brand of augmentation.

There was also the assassin’s supposed connection to Astarte’s past to consider. She had called her Daisey, and that above everything else unsettled her.

She had few friends who had known her as Daisey, and none of them still called her that. Kar had only known Daisey for a few months before she had become Astarte, so he adapted easily to the new name. Lucile, her biological mother, had just shrugged and said ‘Daisey’ was a dumb name anyway. Which had stung a bit, even if she agreed.

Her real mother, Saint Mary, the woman who had actually raised her had just smiled sadly and asked if she could call her Aster for short. Astarte had agreed, not knowing that Asteraceae was another word for Daisey. It was her mom’s subtle way of saying she would always be the same little Daisey to her.

Then there was Alwen, who had teased the name out of her and then promptly ignored it. She…she wasn’t sure how she felt about that.

It was a short list of friends who knew her by her original name, and the list of enemies was even shorter. Most, if not all, having died during the battle of Greyland when Astarte led her ship into battle against her old crew.

The assassin could be using info she had dug up second hand, but something about the way she said the name suggested otherwise. That, and the fact that Daisey had never had a birth certificate or any other official documents with her name on them.

Which left with absolutely no idea who this assassin was.

“Sorry you’ve got the wrong person, no Daisey’s here” Astarte said blandly, like the assassin had dialed the wrong number. Then turned her back on the assassin and began to stride away, like someone hadn’t just tried to take her head off.

Astarte got a good ten or twenty meters before the assassin got over the shock at being so blatantly ignored. The sound of rushing, heavy, footsteps soon grew uncomfortably close. Astarte had spotted a reflective bit of glass and had been waiting for the moment the assassin struck a second time. Going for her head once again, and once again completely overextending.

Astarte could have taken this chance to take the assassins arm and break it at the elbow. But something told Astarte that it wouldn’t be as effective as it would normally be. And besides, she also liked going for peoples heads. In one smooth motion she ducked below the assassin’s stab, sidestepped the slash from her other arm, and swung up with Tenken. She misjudged the assassin’s position from the reflection and was aiming a little higher than she had wanted, but a bisecting face slash was just as good as any decapitating chop.

Or, it should have been.

Her sword had a clear shot through the assassin’s guard and was pushed forward with all her not inconsiderable strength. Tenken’s edge cut straight into the assassin’s green bug mask and should have bit in the soft tissue of their flesh with ease. Instead the blade’s edge was stopped, and the assassin was thrown back with the brute kinetic force of the attack.

Astarte stared at the still breathing assassin with shock before glancing down at her blade. There, along the edge that had connected with her attacker, was a noticeable blunted section. Her eyes widened at the sight.

The literal edge of the blade folded back along its thinnest section. Astarte felt her blood boil and glowered at the assassin rising to her feet. “You thick headed bitch, do you know how many hours this will take to fix?” she spat with all the bile she could summon.

She took care of her blade. She had commissioned the most technologically superior blade money could buy and had taken its maintenance very seriously. Hours of sharpening and polishing set aside from her busy schedule. Sweaty sparing sessions in the ship’s gym to keep her skills sharp and worthy of such a fine blade. She even kept a cloth on her at all times to wipe the blood off, even though the metal used in its smithing literally couldn’t rust!

And this bitch just blunted a whole five inches of its blade.

Well better blunted than chipped.

No, wait, there was a chip!

The assassin had the gall to laugh. “I’m here to kill you, and your worried about your stupid sword? You’ve spent too much time with Mizuno.” The assassin spat.

Now that was an old name.

Mizuno-sensei had been a high-ranking member of Greyson’s crew aboard the Black Saint, Astarte’s first ship. He had taken pity on the hafu whore’s daughter from New Mombasa who knew nothing about her cultural heritage and had decided to mentor her. He had been one of the few people aboard the Black Saint who was kind and caring. He had taught her what he could of Japanese culture and had started training her in the ways of the sword and Bushido, though admittedly the lessons in bushido never fully took hold.

He had seen potential in her and had nurtured it.

And in return, when he refused to leave his ‘lord’ Greyson, she killed him.

The only thing that soothed that particular wound in her psyche was that she had the luxury of facing her mentor in one-on-one combat. It was what he had wanted.

The fact that this assassin knew that name meant she had ties with Astarte’s days with the Terran pirates. But that still left a huge question mark over who she was.

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“Still don’t remember me?” the assassin growled. “I thought you might be pretending, but you really don’t recognize me.” The assassin said in disbelief.

“How could I recognize anyone behind a mask? The whole point of a mask is to hide your identity.” Astarte snarked. Whoever this woman was, she was prone to angry outbursts and reckless attacks. Better to keep her pissed off and reckless than calm and collected.

The assassin huffed a laugh and lifted a hand to the mask with a huge gash in it. she pulled it off her face and it came off with a hiss. Underneath Astarte saw the dark skin and slim rounded features of a shaved African women. And as someone born and raised in New Mombasa she easily saw the ethnic similarities between this woman and her own Kenyan mother.

But there were discrepancies in her face that triggered something primal in Astarte’s mind. Something that said her face was wrong. Human-like, but not fully human. Like a creepy too real android, or some oddly rendered 3d rendering of a human.

Skin that was just a little too shiny, and not expressive enough. Eyes just a little too wide with a higher reflective quality. And the dark brown coloring of her eye was too uniform. Like a single band of brown instead of the typical variations found in human eyes.

All that, along with the huge dent in her cheek from where her blade had impacted, told Astarte that nothing about this woman’s face was flesh and blood.

She allowed her one surprised blink before Astarte shifted her weight into a more relaxed stance. “So are you a cyborg or an android?”

Body modding was something that had emerged on Earth after first contact. Most however didn’t go full cyborg. Most people were very attached to their flesh and blood limbs, and didn’t want to get amputated for some cold metal replacement. Most people with metal prosthetics were victims of industrial accidents, or like her own men had lost them in combat. Some adapted well to the prosthetic, others couldn’t cope with the loss of the limbs and spent years saving up for a new limb to be cloned.

Only a few chose to go full cyborg. Those like the Toy man who had suffered greatly and then fell in love with their cold replacements.

The assassins eyes squinted in confusion, moving just a little to fast to be natural. Her features just shifting into new expressions with little in between. Which sent a chill down Aster’s spin from the creepiness of it.

“You still don’t recognize me? Really?” the assassin asked in disbelief. As if Astarte was failing to follow some sort of script she had planned for this meeting.

Aster shrugged “Nope, you sure they made your new face look like your old one?”

The assassin glowered, “you steal the love of my life, leave me a shredded bloody mess to rot in a Union prison, and you don’t even remember me? You ruined my life and you can’t be bothered to remember me?”

Again Aster shrugged “I ruin a lot of lives, you’ll have to be more specific.”

The assassin let out a frustrated growl, one that did trigger an old memory.

Aster frowned as she tried to recall where she had heard that growl before. She remembered a faint whiff of spoiled beer and piss, dim lights, and a stab to the back. The scar on her shoulder tingled at the memory. She had been young, sixteen in fact. She had been with Greyson for over a year and had finally started to prove herself in raids. She wasn’t considered cannon fodder anymore and had earned the right to claim some of the bounty to start buying better gear. It was the new Kevlar vest under the Haori from Mizuno-sensei that had saved her life that day.

Greyson had started to take an interest in her rise, and his second in command had taken offense at that.

They had called her the butcher because when she fought she left behind scenes from a slaughterhouse. She reveled in tearing apart weak xenos, literally. She made a game out of it, slowly ripping them like they were tissue paper. Limb by limb.

Seeing it had changed a lot of Astarte’s brash and more xenophobic opinions she had developed as a dipshit street kid.

The butcher would doll out discipline to the crew with cold hard brutality. She had once gotten pissed at one of the cannon fodder kids Greyson hired and began beating them until his face was unrecognizable and he was permanently incapable of walking without severe medical intervention. Daisey had then been ordered to dump the bloody mess of a boy on a station and leave him for the xeno rats. She had instead taken him to a hospital, paid for his treatment, and earned her own beating for not just dumping him in a gutter. Daisey had only been spared the worst because she kept trying to fight back and Mizuno had respected that.

He said it was brave to stand up and fight against hopeless odds. Daisey had just been trying to spite the women by actually fighting back.

That woman always got away with her violent behavior because she was warming Greyson’s bed, and was by all accounts madly in love with him. Emphasis on madly. Woman worshiped him like a god and was insanely jealous and insecure. It wasn’t Byron’s fault that he slept around, it was all the conniving harlots trying to steal him away from her. Or something like that.

And when the brat who had disobeyed her orders, fought back instead of cower, and had been training diligently under Mizuno-sensei’s, drew Grayson’s wandering eye. Well, it seemed only right to kill the girl. Only for Daisey to be the better fighter.

That butcher had never fought someone as strong as she was. She only knew how to bully the weak. And Daisey had learned from the best swordsman in the whole Terran pirate faction. That butcher had growled in frustration as Daisey showed her up and out maneuvered her. Side stepping all her reckless strikes. Just like this assassin who had slaughtered an entire office and tried to attack Astarte in the same sort of sneak attack.

“Zera?” Astarte asked out loud.

The woman, Zera, scowled. “That’s right, finally remembered me.”

“Vaguely. Truth be told I haven’t thought of you in years. How’d you even survive, I left you in a puddle of your own blood missing an arm? I’d be impressed if you weren’t such a crazy bitch.”

She drew in a sharp breath and let it out through her teeth.

She looked like she was about to say something, but Astarte cut her off and waved her hand. “Actually, I don’t care. I killed you once, and I’ll do it again.”

Zera the butcher laughed. “I’m not the same woman I was before.” She stood up straighter and let the big cloak fall off her shoulders. Revealing a body with no visible flesh whatsoever. She didn’t even wear anything under that cloak since there was nothing to hide or be ashamed of. Just the shiny chrome-like surface of a body that was all machine. The only part of her body still recognizably human was her face, and that ended at her neck. “I’ve stepped beyond human limitations, and into a realm you can’t match.”

Astarte snorted. “No, you replaced the malleable limits of deathworlder anatomy for the stagnant hard barrier of titanium.”

“The flesh is weak.” Zera snarled.

“No,” Aster shot back. “Just your convictions. Besides, you’re not the only one to indulge in transhumanism. And I’ll admit I’m a little curious to see whose is superior.”

She settled into a guarded combat stance and the vision in her eye flicked into infrared and then into ultraviolet, scanning her opponent for any weak points. But just as her appearance suggested there was no flesh left in her. The rest was solid metal, wires, and artificial blood.

Astarte looked into full cybernetic augmentation before, but found the mechanical limitations… limiting. She had instead decided to lean into the superiority of Deathworld biology and work with what she had. Much to the Toy man’s delight.

Her bones were reinforced with a crystalline lattice that took advantage of the already sturdy nature of collogen bones and enhanced their structural abilities to allow for stronger muscles. The crystalline lattice acting like the steel I-beams in skyscrapers, taking and redistributing the force of an impact or pressure. It wasn’t perfect, nor as strong as outright metal bones would have been, but by working within the natural healing process of the human body her bones were mostly capable of healing back stronger than before. So long as there weren’t too many fractures.

With the reinforced skeleton the Toy man had been capable of working wonders with the human musculature to better exert force. Most people only ever used a fraction of their strength to begin with, only fully utilizing their muscles in extreme circumstances and often breaking their own bones and ligaments in the process. Simply unlocking the full strength of human muscles would been a miracle in its own right. But such petty accomplishments were beneath the Toy mans considerable skill. He had instead crafted advanced biomechanical ligaments so advanced it wasn’t hard to imagine them arising naturally on a more intense world than Earth.

Those two things, along a hundred other smaller alterations to improve the flow of oxygen and nutrients within her blood gave a her significant boost to the speed, strength, and endurance that made her a menace in a melee. But that was when facing ordinary people and unenhanced deathworlders. She had never had the chance to test herself against a full on cyborg assassin. She wondered how well the Toy mans more biologically focused enhancements compared to hydraulics and titanium.

They stood there staring at each other for a long moment, each sizing the other up. Zera’s glass eyes had flicked to Astarte’s red eye and a brief look of confusion flashed across her expression. Then her eyes flicked across Astarte’s armor, looking for good gaps in its coverage to strike at. Astarte in turn tried to judge whether any of Zera’s limbs could slide open to reveal a nasty surprise. She saw a few places to be concerned of.

Time stretched on, and soon it was just a silent battle of wills to see who would strike first. Each scanning the other for an opening, while also on guard for any fake openings. Astarte had to give some credit to Zera, her patience to stand there and look for openings already hinted at the fact that she had received some much needed combat training and discipline. Something she was utterly lacking in their last fight.

But time was on Aster’s side, and Zera knew this.

A slight lurch forward turned into a powerful standing leap that ate up the meters in between her and Astarte. Astarte heard a hard crack as some sort of mechanism in Zera’s legs sent launched her forward. Maybe some sort of tension spring that was let loose, or maybe something else. She didn’t have a spare moment to glance at the cyborg assassin’s legs as the woman was in her face and cutting down towards her head.

The battle had begun. And the struggle between enhanced flesh and metal cybernetics was fought.