The rest of the room was a mosaic of faces, and that was what had stopped Olli just inside the doorway.
They were virtual images, larger than life-size. Probably there were more than a hundred, though Solace had no wish to count them. They were almost all twisted in pain, fear or desperation, where those emotions applied. Most were human: men and women both, and at least a handful of Partheni. There were some Hanni too, a few knots of eye-tipped Castigar tentacles and a beautiful metal mask, probably from a Hiver frame. And all these beings were dead, Solace knew. She knew because she saw Rollo’s likeness there, his last moments from Mesmon’s point of view. The Tothiat apparently liked to record mementos of his work. They were standing within his resumé.
She heard Mesmon coming just then, the soft scuff of him as he loped into the room behind them like a beast. He still managed to throw a solid punch into her ribs and took the gun from her, sending her tumbling down into the shadow of the floating bed. Olli spun the walker to face him but he just flipped her over, rolling the frame onto its side and half spilling her out of it.
‘I should be killing your friends now,’ he told Solace flatly. ‘But my sister will deal with the mess. She’s the homebody. I’m the people person.’
He stepped down into the curve of the room, the gun held loosely in his hand. ‘I will be made to suffer, for my failures. The Razor will cut me for how I’ve handled things. But I will remember then how I made you two bitches suffer, and that will warm me when my guts are out on wires again.’
Solace went for him before he’d finished speaking and he looked gratifyingly put out at that, a man who liked his own monologues. She slapped the gun barrel aside so he couldn’t just shoot her, then her thumb went into his eye. She struck hard enough to hook the rim of his socket and rammed his face into the hard plastic of the bed.
He grabbed her throat with one hand. His un-gouged eye stared at her, wide and mad. He grinned.
‘They don’t tell you about the pain,’ he explained conversationally, incrementally tightening his fingers. ‘When the blessing comes to live within your flesh, you know you’ll live forever, but they don’t tell you how these cuts and bruises still hurt. But the Unspeakable understands. He hurts you until nothing hurts anymore. Then you can really reach your full potential.’ He tried to snap at her fingers with his teeth where her hand gripped his skull, and she yanked it away, trailing blood and viscous jelly. She could look into the ruined pit of his socket and see the tissues busily mending themselves. But not for long, because there were black spots dotting her own vision and her breath was failing.
‘One day a legion of my people will make your precious angels extinct,’ he told her. ‘We are better than you’ll ever be.’
The sound of the Scorpion wrenching itself off the wall and crashing down behind him was like thunder.
Mesmon threw Solace across the room but she bounced off the bed, landing up against the rounded wall, surrounded by the faces of the dead. How did Olli climb up to her frame? she wondered. But of course Olli was still lying in the overturned walker, eyes closed as she linked into the Scorpion’s systems remotely. Mesmon came to the same conclusion and went for her, but the big frame caught him with one boathook arm and slung him across the room. He hit hard enough to crack the nacreous wall on the far side, extinguishing a dozen dead faces. Blood, tears and nameless alien ichor ran down his face as he straightened up.
‘It won’t help,’ he barked. He raised the gun to shoot at Olli past the Scorpion. Two bullets sparked from its casing, then Solace tackled him and grabbed the weapon. She kicked away from the Tothiat and shot him in the arm, an event he barely deigned to notice.
‘Kit, you there?’ Olli said. It would have been a non sequitur, except Solace saw she was speaking into the walker. ‘Kit, come on now!’
The Scorpion went for Mesmon, who did his best to vault over it. Blades and drills made a mess of the wall he’d fallen against. Then the tail clotheslined him across the chest, knocking him sideways. The frame tried to pounce and pin him, but he rolled out from beneath it. Instantly he was up again and made it to the fallen walker, ripping it aside to get at its passenger. Olli was desperately shrugging her way backwards across the floor, face locked in a snarl.
Solace rushed Mesmon again, kicking at his knee. She felt it grind, saw it snap back into shape a moment later. She rammed an elbow into the centre of his back, the articulated spine that was the symbiote. Maybe it didn’t share in the unnatural resilience with which it had gifted him?