Page 18 of True As Steel
She stared at me for a moment longer. I barely resisted the urge to squirm in my seat.
“Well, let’s meet this Cyborg of yours. For both of your sakes, I hope he lives up to the trust you bestow upon him.”
“Both our sakes?” I asked, proud that the fear crawling in the pit of my stomach didn’t reflect in my voice.
“You want a metal head in the rebellion,” Haelin said, amused that I thought she’d implied I might come to harm. “But if he’s a snake, I will have him dismantled in the most painful ways.”
Chapter 7
Jarog
Icouldn’t figure out what game the Narengis were playing. While I understood Haelin’s desire to speak with Tamryn alone to get all the juicy details about me, having me sitting here in plain view of all the patrons made no sense. The table I sat at naturally drew many eyes to me. The moody lighting of the club only provided the intimate type of darkness in the VIP booths alongside the walls, but definitely not alongside the executive lounge staircase or its base.
With the brand on my face, I felt like bait, flaunted by our host to dare the foolish and the reckless into doing something stupid. Maybe that was in fact their goal. The presence of two rebels in Satos, one of them a Cyborg, would be spreading like wildfire either way. Exposing me publicly could be Haelin’s way of warning the locals that—at least for the time being—Tamryn and I benefited from her protection.
Moments after Tamryn disappeared at the top of the stairs, an androgenous-looking human male, wearing nothing but skin-tight leather shorts and a harness of the same black leather over his bare chest, placed a colorful drink on the table in front of me. It was quite impressive how each colorful layer didn’t mix, even when I stirred the drink. Obviously, I hadn’t ordered it. As the man who had brought it clearly worked here, I could only presume he had done so at his boss’ request.
Is this an act of courtesy or a test?
I leaned towards the latter. Courtesy would have been bringing me a glass of water then asking me if I wanted something a bit stiffer, on the house. This was a message: her house, her rules, could I submit to them?
I picked up the glass and pretended to take a big sip. However, I only let a few drops on my tongue and directed the nanobots flooding my system to analyze them. It took less than a minute to complete, the result popping up in the heads-up display of my retinal implants. To my relief, my drink hadn’t been spiked. While I resumed sipping it, I nevertheless paced myself so that its strong alcohol contents wouldn’t affect my reflexes. Granted, the nanobots would quickly handle any excess I might consume, but I liked being as much in control as possible when in a hostile environment.
Aside from the distance that separated me from Tamryn, the loud music blaring and the just-as-loud crowd talking and shouting made my enhanced hearing useless. Instead, I made use of my enhanced vision to first examine the place for the locations of all the exits, cameras, and defense systems. I also checked for the weak spots that could be exploited or any object—decorative or otherwise—that could be leveraged as a weapon or to my advantage.
I then turned my gaze to the patrons. Despite Satos officially being a Narengi town, the diverse population inhabiting it actually surpassed them in number. That diversity could be seen in the club. Despite my mere presence drawing people’s attention, I didn’t feel threatened by the patrons gyrating on the dance floor. However, a couple at a booth and a single male at the bar caught my attention. They were… too laidback.
People in clubs usually displayed an excess of energy in one form or another, or a great mellowness due to excessive indulgence in alcohol or drugs. Sprinkled among those were also the sullen people fighting a heartbreak or nursing an impending monster headache. But generally speaking, even the sitting guests would sway absentmindedly to the music or mark the beat with their foot or with a tapping finger. The body language of those three individuals gave off the perfectly relaxed air, each of their movements studied to give a casual impression. However, their eyes revealed a very different mind-set than their smiling faces.
Like me, they were studying the room, with a particular interest for the executive lounge where Tamryn was still conversing with Haelin. Moments like this made the loss of part of my humanity worthwhile to have become a Cyborg. Aside from allowing me to zoom in on them to read their lips—which revealed nothing—and get a better sense of what they were up to, my enhanced vision also allowed me to use my eyes independently to simultaneously track multiple targets. In this instance, I was literally keeping one eye on the couple and the lone man at the bar.
Their efforts not to look in my general direction made them all the more suspicious. They weren’t part of Haelin’s staff. Those guys I had already identified, even the ones dressed as customers to blend in with the crowd. It troubled me that the trio didn’t seem to have caught the guards’ attention. I didn’t know what those three were up to, but my gut screamed none of it was good.
The female suddenly retrieved a pair of tiny vials. As she was hidden from the waist down by the table, I couldn’t tell if she’d taken them from her pocket or any purse she might have with her. She extended one to her companion, and both poured the powdery contents into their respective drinks—which they had barely touched. They didn’t try to hide what they were doing. Recreational drugs were both legal and a common thing in venues such as this one. Many were consumed that way for a gradual buzz instead of getting too brutally hammered in one shot.
I zoomed in my vision on the woman’s glass, the fingers of her left hand around it partially obscuring my view. With her right hand, she stirred her drink with a gold swizzle stick, her companion doing the same with his drink. My back stiffened seconds later when I realized the substance she had poured in her drink was crystallizing around the stick, forming a blade. I’d heard of such compounds, nearly impossible to detect by most scanners. All they needed was an activating agent—usually merely water. Cold temperatures accelerated the reaction. So, the icy drink was perfect.
As if this had been his cue, the lone man downed his drink and got up from his stool at the bar, slowly making his way to the dance floor. I hadn’t seen him create a similar makeshift weapon for himself, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t armed somehow. He stopped maybe three meters in front of me, nonchalantly swaying to the music while staring at a pair of sexy females dancing, as if he intended to insert himself between them. To anyone else, he’d look completely inconspicuous—just another guest trying to see if he could get lucky with a pair of hot women.
Moments later, the couple also rose from their booth before heading to the dance floor as well. This time, they gave away their target whose identity I’d been wondering about, initially thinking it might be me. But from the corner of my eye, I noticed Tamryn and Haelin approaching the top of the stairs. In the seconds it took me to assess the situation and plan a course of action, the couple had advanced through the dancing crowd to a perfect position to launch their attack. However, they didn’t join the lone man, starting to dance instead a good five meters away from him at the edge of the crowd.
Time seemed to slow as Tamryn began descending the stairs, a tense but hopeful look on her beautiful face. I started moving a split second before the couple attacked, my eyes calculating the trajectory of their blades and the speed at which I should launch an obstacle to block it. The woman, pretending to wave her hands in the air while dancing threw her makeshift blade at Haelin at the same time I sent one of the four chairs around me flying in its path. Before I could intercept the man throwing his blade a second later, I barely managed to dodge an incoming blade from the lone man. I never even saw him throw it, so well-choreographed his movement had been. In the half a beat it took me to recover, the man had already lost himself in the crowd.
To my relief, moments after the woman’s weapon embedded itself in the backrest of the chair, a static effect shimmered alongside the railing of the stairs. Realizing they were being attacked, Tamryn attempted to force Haelin down, but the Narengi resisted. The blade thrown by the woman’s companion all but disintegrated by the energy field Haelin’s people had just activated. By her stoic, but hard expression, the Narengi leader had known herself to be safe.
Alarmed shouts rose from the people closest to us who saw the chair. Their panic spread like wildfire among the crowd who quickly moved to the sides, away from the dance floor. For a split second, the couple also attempted to blend into the panicked crowd, but seeing me barreling down on them set them moving. The Narengi guards zeroed in on my targets, swarming them from every angle. Leaving them to it, I scanned the room, finding the lone man playing a masterful performance of fearful curiosity at the back of the room with the rest of the patrons.
I immediately pushed through the crowd, making a beeline for him, a couple of Narengi guards behind me. To my relief, they didn’t try to stop me, but were backing me up instead—or so I presumed—not that I needed it. The minute the lone man made eye contact with me, he knew the gig was up. While the guards battled the couple, I rushed him. He shoved the people in front of him towards me before trying to make a run for the exit. His victims stumbled to the floor with an alarmed cry. Using my momentum, I jumped over them and kept racing after my quarry, quickly gaining on him.
Without slowing his run, the man threw a makeshift blade backwards at me. This time, I not only saw him initiate the attack but planned my response, catching the weapon by its handle as it flew by my face. I threw it right back at him, the improvised dagger finding its mark in the back of his thigh. The would-be assassin stumbled, limping even as he yanked the blade out. But he didn’t go much farther as I tackled him to the floor. Even without that injury, he wouldn’t have made it far, not with the guards shutting the entrance.
We landed hard on the floor. Most people would have been stunned and winded by such a brutal impact. To my complete shock, he immediately swung his arm back in an attempt to smash my face with his elbow while turning to face me. I blocked his elbow with my palm, the jarring force of the impact resonating the length of my arm. Before I could retaliate, his spit towards my face in a steady stream, while simultaneously swiping the bloody blade at my throat. I barely managed to roll out of the way, allowing him to get back up at the same time I did. The hissing sound of the floor where the fluid he’d projected landed indicated it was some sort of acid.
He attempted to spit it at me again, but I violently backhanded him, dislocating his jaw. The wretch should have been on his knees, crying in agony. Instead, he stood steadfast on his feet, savagely swiping the blade at me. I dodged a couple of his swings, blocked a few more, and threw a flurry of punches and kicks at him, a handful of which he managed to parry—which he shouldn’t have been able to.
By now, the crowd had surrounded us and was cheering the fight as if we were in some sort of a battle arena. The guards stood by, weapons at the ready, but didn’t otherwise intervene.
Is this a test?