"Well, bye then." The past evening had done little for Behr's appearance -- the bruises that spanned the length of his stringy, bare torso had spread, dying the whole thing shades of purple beneath his bandages. His hair was black, short, and uneven above the bandage around his forehead, his hat left behind in the cave with his shirt. He searched the cupboard Derbish had stored the bug-box in before returning to the table with a mostly empty bottle of dark brown liquid.
"I was asking for advice, not your blessing." Nick stepped into the cave proper and sat across from him at the table. "I think you and I have a common enemy at this 'capital'-"
"You mean -Capital-?" Behr looked at him over the bottle as he took a swig, wincing as he swallowed. He held the bottle to his face. "Why does that hurt?"
Nick took a moment to turn inward and try to disable his translator -- Options danced in the back of his mind like unopened boxes, ticking with unknown mechanisms. The sensation was tender, a foreign world between himself and his nervous system where a single step could send the whole thing collapsing on itself. The black market neurosurgeons Leru had coerced into fixing him had mentioned his interface was lacking in safety features or even basic user interfaces that would keep him from hurting himself.
Nick turned his attention back to the table. "Whatever you want to call them, I want them taken down."
Behr coughed and spluttered, grinning and wincing as his diaphragm spasmed in an attempt at laughter. He raised his bottle to Nick. "Well, bye then."
Nick slapped his palms on the table. "What is your problem? I had to fight for whatever allies I could find, and here you've had a handful of them dropped in your lap!"
Behr took another swig, grimacing. "It's not enough," he belched and shrugged. "You clearly have no idea what you're up against if you think we're all it'll take to bring down -Capital-."
Nick leaned forward, the table's surface cool and moist on his forearms. "They know where you are, and they want you gone. You think we were thrown here by accident?" He added as Behr's gaze leveled at him through the sway of his head. "They threw us at you from orbit, and now that they've taken action they're going to send someone to make sure the job is finished. I'd rather they didn't find us alive and well when they get here."
"Very smart. Listen to the sober one." The new voice was a rough synthetic, rattling and hissing as if Perseverance's intercom had walked in from the wreckage.
Nick froze in the voice's echo, eye's locked with Behr's.
"Oh, me?" Slow, steady footfalls approached from behind, and a thin man in a dull-grey duster pulled out the chair beside Nick. "No, no, I don't work for them anymore. Not since I…" the word trailed off in a spluttering hiss like a lump of grease in a fryer. He sat, looking at Behr, "Lost their property."
Behr finished the bottle and slid it to the side, leaning back in his chair. "You talking about the beast, or those pretty green eyes?"
The man's face was covered in a simple metal mask. It was flat, with no bend where a nose should be, dark streams of dried blood streaking beneath empty eye-holes.
"That beast-" the word popped with violent static, "had a soul."
"Well it was their soul or mine." Behr gestured at his multitude of cuts and bruises. "At least their ending was quick -- I've got at least another week of this hell."
The masked man folded his hands on the table, eye-holes trained on Behr. "First thing's first: I need the assistance of the young woman in the hall."
Behr's eyes hardened. "I don't know what you're talking about."
The masked man flicked his wrist, producing two parallel lines of machinery from his sleeve. In a blink they snapped to a ninety-degree angle, forming the familiar shape of a pistol leveled at Behr. He raised his volume, "I don't need this one. Time is limited, don't make me come get you."
Behr stared headlong into the weapon's end. "I told you-"
"It's okay, Behr." A young woman emerged from the leftmost of the two caverns leading into the cave. She wore ill-fitting denim pants beneath an equally oversized leather shirt, reminding Nick of the hand-me-downs he'd grown up with. Her hair was dark, straight, and evenly trimmed to follow her jawline as it angled back to her throat, bangs falling left and right in perfect arches to frame her face. Ebony skin a shade darker than the glistening stone walls sported rich brown eyes, a button nose, and the firearm Nick had been bludgeoned with the day before in her right hand. She had the gun trained on the man's head, though her thin arms shook with the weapon's weight.
"Ari…" Behr's mouth was a thin, straight line, pointing downwards at the ends.
"Come, place that on the table -- I need your hands free." The masked man gestured to Behr's bandages as she moved across the uneven floor with short, graceful steps. "I assume this is your work?"
"How did you know?" Her voice was high and smooth, like a bird to the masked man's can full of shrapnel. She paced the distance between them til the barrel of the weapon was practically touching the man's mask.
"You've been staring at what's left of my eyes-" in a blink, his hand was on the gun, his own firearm disappearing back into his sleeve. His fingers curled backwards around the weapon's hilt, thumb laying over Ari's pointer on the trigger. Before her jaw could fall, he pulled the trigger.
The weapon clacked as the massive hammer on its back end rose and fell, resulting in nothing more but a round of winces from all but the masked man. His hand left the weapon, slowly lingering on Ari as his pistol popped out of his sleeve once again. "A shame." His weapon was on Behr as fast as he'd grabbed the one in Ari's hands. "A barrel that wide can't hold more than one shot, and ammo of that caliber only comes from one place -- a place that recently burned to the ground." His eye sockets never left Behr the entire time he spoke. "Put that on the table, now."
Ari slowly switched hands, and laid the weapon down.
Nick could feel a sickness radiating from the masked man as the firearm was laid before him. He worried the cyborg might be leaking radiation before realizing he recognized the sensation -- it was anger, seeping from the man like tepid, wet sunshine. His heartbeat increased in tempo as his stomach clenched around what was left of the bugs in his stomach.
The masked man slid the oversized weapon into the pocket of his duster with his free hand. "The removal of my eyes was an emergency procedure -- I lacked disinfectant, among other things."
"You cut them out?" Ari breathed, hand rising to her mouth.
With a flick of his other wrist, the masked man produced a combat knife with a three-by-ten centimeter blade. The straight edge of the blade was serrated near the handle, the tip curving to a wicked point. His fingers -- an arrangement of metal circles more akin to a plant tendril than segmented bones -- didn't wrap around the hilt so much as they became it, folding around each other into an unrecognizable stub. He flicked his wrist again, and the blade disappeared back up his wrist. "Not the right tool for the job, but it got me here. Now you must finish. Go, and return with your supplies -- and remember, time is limited."
Ari hurried back down the left-most tunnel, returning a moment later with a brown, leather messenger bag over her shoulder.
"Very good, you listen well." The masked man reached up to his face, clicking the mask off unseen latches and pulling it away with a sound like peeling adhesive. Wires hidden in the dried blood slid through the eye-holes as the mask came away, and the room filled with the stench of rot and machinery. Ari grimaced as her nose inched towards her wide eyes, forehead caving down the middle.
Nick stood, stepping away as the man tilted his head back in his chair and motioned Ari near with his free hand. His gun switched between Nick and Behr at random intervals, but it never lingered off-target.
Nick stared, enraptured by the man's horrific visage as he centered himself in the light of a solar lamp.
The wires snaked back through exposed red flesh of lidless eye sockets, yellow-white bone visible in patches along the brow where facial muscles had been carved away to secure various synthetic patches and ports. Everything from where the nose should have been and below was covered in a flexible material with a thick, woven texture, stretched tight over protrusions and recesses completely incongruous with human anatomy.
The gun moved to Nick. "Tell them to wait outside, or I start shooting."
Nick looked from Behr to Ari, exchanging the briefest of confused glances before jogging to the cave entrance. He met Jenni and Derbish on their way in. "Uh, don't go in there right now."
They looked at each other, then at Nick with narrowed eyes as they moved to step past him.
Nick put out his hands. "No seriously, there's a, uh, sort of hostage situation- whoah!" His hands went from out to his sides, to above his shoulders as they trained their guns on him. "I'm not the one holding the hostages!"
"Who else could it be?" Jenni asked.
"It's some pissed off, mutilated cyborg -- I don't know who you've pissed off. Look, the rest of mine are on the ship. One of you can go check while the other holds me hostage."
Jenni glanced sideways at Derbish, who nodded and headed back out of the cave, gun in hand. She poked Nick in the belly with her gun, standing a few centimeters above him. "Do you know which is faster, death by dehydration or death by gut-shot?"
Nick's answer was a silent frown.
They waited in silence, sweat beading on Nick's forehead as he fought to keep his breathing deep and steady -- he may have imagined it, but he could feel an anxiety radiating from the woman not unlike the anger he'd felt from the masked man -- Had he somehow caught Leru's ohmatic empathy?
"They're all here." Derbish's voice finally echoed off the canyon walls.
Jenny lowered her gun, but kept it in hand. "Tell me more about this eyeless -invader-."
"He's -- I think it's a he -- got weapons in his wrists, wears a metal mask and a grey duster."
"The high citizen…" Jenni looked to the ground.
"You can come in now," Behr's voice echoed from within. "He says no weapons."
Jenni slowly uncocked the hammer on her gun and reluctantly placed it back in her holster, stopping one step in before turning. "I'm going in," she shouted over her shoulder. "Bring the others."