Punch, punch, and punch. Create Photias, shoot them, and create some more. And then punch again.
In the narrow metal-walled corridor, illuminated by the red emergency lights and wrapped in war cries, groans of pain, and the repetitive screech of the combat alarm, Simon felt free to unleash what abounded in his spirit: rage, stupid blind rage; and every once in a while, a victory cry, as if each downed guard were a point on the score.
How good it felt to punch imperialists again! Blow Cyclops to pieces with one power punch! It put him on the brink of euphoria.
They had blocked part of the entrance to the corridor using the very same steel door that Kitten had ripped off its hinges a few minutes before and tying it with a long string of wires to the metal panels of the walls, which forced the soldiers and androids who came to face them to cross through a very small space. That way, it was so much easier to disarm them and take them down one by one.
Of course, from time to time, several soldiers got in and outnumbered them. It was then that the brute force and the enormous body mass of Kitten came into play.
With his massive arms and monstrous hands, the giant grabbed the soldiers by the head and smashed them into each other or lunged like a rugby player ready to score a point. A giant bowling ball knocking over pins. A mechanical bull throwing anyone who wanted to hold him back. His yellow jumpsuit, which at the beginning of the fight, had no sleeves, now no longer had a part of the pants, and had earned a tear in the back.
Simon would have sworn to have seen a couple of bullets entering the flesh of that beast only to get lost in that mountain of muscles that was his body, making him spit a little blood and adding one more scar to the many others that already covered his skin. Great! That stupid man had turned out to be the best human shield he could ever hope to have: the shield that kept fighting!
At one point, like a speeding truck, Kitten rammed two of those creepy Cyclops and sent them flying through the air. He took the third one from the head and ankles and snapped it in two with the same ease with which Simon had snapped his chicken piece at lunch. Chunks of metal and solid silicone flew everywhere, sprayed with jets of dark oil.
Luckily, what had just been smashed was a cybernetic mechanism and not a human being; otherwise, Simon would have been covered in blood and guts. Hell! That guy was on fire! He’d never seen such savagery in real life, only in movies; witnessing it live and hearing the crunch of bones breaking or pieces of metal smashing into pieces was a unique experience, as terrifying as it was exciting.
“You enjoy it, huh, you big man, don’t you?” he said to Kitten and laughed. “Oh, yeah! You enjoy it as much as I do! After we’re done here, let’s celebrate with some beers! What do you say, gorilla, huh? A bunch of beers!”
Kitten turned his scarred head toward Simon, grabbed him by the neck, and pulled him close. Simon had Kitten so close to him he could even feel the beast’s horrible breath and notice he had some teeth missing.
“You call Kitten a gorilla again, and Kitten will tear you apart,” the big man told him, splashing him with saliva, and then and then released him grumpily.
Simon fixed his yellow jumpsuit, walked away from his new companion with more disgust than fear, and continued to confront the incoming imperialists. The Eddanian woman had ordered them to prevent the soldiers from reaching the next gate in the corridor, the one that was behind their backs, and unlike Kitten, she did inspire true terror in him; he didn’t want to let her down.
Until an explosion brought down the fence they had improvised; the torn steel door fell to the ground, taking the metal plates of the walls and the wires with it. There was a hiss, and from the curtain of smoke and fire that was now entering the corridor, a projectile shot out, circling the air, heading straight for them. The military used heavy weaponry.
Just in time to stop the little rocket from blowing up in his face, Simon threw himself to the ground and covered his head. He ground his face and teeth against the floor, and a second later he felt the impact. The explosion was deafening.
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The blast at his rear spread fingers of fire across the walls, spitting scraps of metal and debris down the hall, plus a wave of hot air that scraped his butt. That was close!
With an unbearable ringing in his ears, Simon got to his feet before more soldiers arrived. He would be easy prey if they found him still on the ground.
Kitten was standing, covered in dust and with a splatter of black android oil across his face. The big guy hadn’t made it to the ground, but he had stepped aside before the missile hit him. He spat out some of the oil that had touched his lips, wrinkled his face with disgust, uttered a cry that sounded over the alarm itself, and as a rabid animal lunged at the soldiers.
However, Simon only heard the blows, the shots, and the moans. He didn’t witness the epic fight that the maddened mastodon waged against his enemies. Something more important had captured his attention.
The door. The door behind them, the gate the Eddanian woman had ordered them to guard…
His heart pounded, and the euphoria that until a while ago had enraptured him now completely vanished, leaving a hollowness in his throat and a trembling in his legs.
Having been hit by the missile, the two iron sheets that had formed the gate were now down, dented, and fuming.
And then he saw them.
In the next corridor, behind the door that he and Kitten should have guarded, there was the woman with the violet eyes standing next to a Cyclops dressed in a long purple raincoat with the sleeves rolled up. It was an old A60-R8 model, one of those with an almond-shaped eye and a kind of iris engraved in the center of the crystal, instead of the round eye that the androids had today, like the ones he had been fighting until a moment ago.
The automaton had his arms stretched out to the sides while the woman, as if she were a technician replacing a defective part of a machine, inserted what could be a spark plug into his biceps. Beneath the whitish silicone muscles of his arm, within the tangle of circuitry inside, Simon noticed a pinkish flash, something that reminded him of the glow of the Fluo-Pink.
And, as if they had just detected his presence, both the Eddanian woman and the A60 turned toward him. That red eye landed on his eyes.
Simon could do nothing but remain dumbfounded, feeling he had just discovered something that must have remained secret, and that now, for him, there would be no other punishment than death.
However, they ignored him. As if he didn’t exist and the missile explosion had been nothing but a brief interruption, the woman continued to work on the android’s arm.
“I thought the likes of you lived by their rituals,” the Cyclops said to the woman.
The Cyclops’ voice was just as robotic as the others, yet Simon detected sarcasm in his tone. As if this particular Cyclops were more humane than the rest of his own.
“Ah, the religious ceremonies!” she said. “Today’s generations no longer take them into account. They only seek to eat the fruit; they are not interested in who planted the tree.”
Religious ceremonies? Rituals? What the hell were they talking about? Was this woman part of a cult involved in religious terrorism, or something like that? He knew that most of the inhabitants of the Edda Peninsula were engaged in commerce, but he had also heard that many of them were religious fanatics who organized diabolical rites from which they derived their powers.
The woman finished what she was doing; and the android checked the function of his arms, flexing them and moving his fingers.
“Done. Now you can cross the dome,” she said, and finally there, she punished Simon with her gaze.
Simon Pesha felt the woman’s eyes burn him from the inside. He couldn’t move. His legs weren’t responding. He was short of breath, and his heart was about to explode.
“I brought this one here because he’ll be our anchor,” the woman said, and although she was referring to him, she was still speaking to the android. “This bastard is an acquaintance of the Binary-R. Who would have thought?”
Binary-R?! Who the hell were they talking about?! He didn’t know anyone by that name!
The woman took Simon by the face and cut his mouth with her sharp fingernail. She moistened the tip of her finger with the gushing blood, brought it to her lips, and licked it as if she were looking for a particular taste in it.
“His connection to the Binary isn’t quite strong,” she added; “but he holds a particular grudge against someone very close to him—the Rowdy girl. That will do to create a link between them.” Then she licked the blood once more, as if there was an extra taste left to discover. “Well…” She smiled. “I told you. The Binary-R is close.”
“How close?”
“It’s hard to say. Your brother left the atmosphere very overloaded.”
“Then keep this one and the giant anchored to him just in case,” said the android, adjusting the sleeves of his raincoat. “Let no one stray far. We’ve had enough delays.”
“Like dogs tied to the same leash,” she replied, patting Simon lightly on the face. “Where one goes, the rest will go.”
Simon could hear them without understanding what the hell they were talking about. However, seconds later, everything he saw and heard became a mixture of images and sounds that were closer to being mistaken for a dream than to being considered a real experience; something like what he experienced when he drank too much.
Of course, after drinking too much, his nose didn’t bleed, as it did there.