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  Purgatory Wars

  The Murder Stroke

  Riposte

  The Cross Guard

  The Blood Groove

  Powder And Shot

  Blood And Iron

  Grapeshot Pantheon

  The Star Fort

  "Statues And Suitors" in Sex & Sorcery 4

  Worldshard

  Cadet

  Cadre

  Champion

  The Adventures of Sam the Succubus

  The Squire and the Succubus

  The Templar and the Temptress

  Dragons In Space

  Scales Like Stars

  Brash the Dragon and the Schrodinger Snare

  Tales of the Liminal Knights

  To Walk the Constellations

  The Viridian Cycle

  Viridian Nova

  Viridian Wolf

  The Life and Times of Rayburn Cog

  Catastrophe at Dawn

  Assassins in the Afternoon

  Elves in the Evening

  Midnight beyond the Edge of the World

  Other works

  A Fetch Job

  "The Last Mage" in Sex & Sorcery 3

  Furicana

  Devil May Care

  Prismatic High

  A Dirty T.A.S.K Needs Doing

  Dreams of a Silver Age

  The War to End All Worlds

  Fi’s New Family

  CHAPTER ONE

  Cold

  Cold

  Cold

  Cold

  Cold

  The world fell forward and, with a gasp, I tumbled into a hateful grid of metal and fierce, biting cold.

  I hissed wordlessly through gritted teeth. My body curled up on itself, desperate to beat away the blinding, shocking cold. Wracking shivers rolled through me, fierce enough to send twinging bright spots flaring through my spine and along the back of my neck. I clenched my eyes shut against the pain of it. My brain buzzed . I opened my eyes and…nothing. My eyes couldn’t – didn’t – work. I breathed in shallow, fast gasps. Slowly, the sensations of dislocation faded and I became aware that I was laying on a metal gridwork, with enough space between the lines of metal to fit a finger. My eyes were still so blurred I couldn’t see so much as a dark, gray smudge.

  Blink.

  Light filled in around the smudges.

  Blink.

  The smudges cleared a touch .

  Blink.

  The smudges gained sharp edges - sharp enough to slice me up, leave me bleeding out through the grill. One last blink and I could really see where I was. I was sprawled in a corrodr - narrow and long and metal lit by a pale, unearthly blue luminescence. A soft voice spoke in a language I knew. I had no idea how. I had no idea what the language was. I simply knew it, the worlds unfolding like origami inside of my head. Which…

  “S-S-Station time is- is- is- is errr-rr-error .”

  I had no idea what origami was. Ugh.

  I closed my eyes again - focusing inwards, trying to find some strength in my cold muscles. My hand pushed to the floor and I shoved myself to my feet. My body unfolded with a series of creaks and pops and I gasped as I finally stood straight. My head spun and I grabbed onto the oddly hewn, curiously shaped protrusion that thrust from the still blurry wall to keep myself from toppling right back to my knees. My skin prickled and I realized I was naked and I knew that there was something deeply shameful in that fact. My eyes closed and I felt images – disassociated and pulsing with red light – pushing against the back of my mind. They refused to form into coherence. I saw a triangle of black material, grasped in a bleeding hand. I saw an orb of metal, looking down at me.

  I heard the words.

  She’ll do.

  I shook my head.

  I had no name. I had no memory. But I could speak. I could understand. I could stand. That was something. I clung to that something . When I opened my eyes, I saw that the corridor was not quite a corridor. Rather, it was two rows of machines, running in parallel - both lines vanishing into the murky darkness beyond the puddle of luminescence that surrounded me. I had grabbed onto one of the machines - that was why it had felt so fucking odd. I stepped back and away from the machine I was sprawled against and gave it a good long look, my arms wrapping tight around my chest, compacting my breasts. I was still shivering. But at least I knew one fact about myself.

  I had tits.

  The machine looked like a coffin, something you’d put dead people in. It was taller than it was wide, with black metal siding, and a silvery front door. The door was actually more of a hatch, but the entire thing was clunky . Chunky, actually. I didn’t know why, but for some reason my brain said a place called a ‘station’ should have all been sleek metal and egg-shapes and rounded lines. Instead of that subconscious idea of a station, the machine was all nuts and bolts and latches and rivets. A fine mist coiled around my feet and the chill in the air felt like it had been made for a reason. The machine I had stumbled from remained open – the hatch swung wide. Inside, there was a drain and I could see the last droplets of a pale blue fluid sweeping away.

  I shuddered and didn’t know why.

  Each machine was labeled. My brow furrowed as I saw mine was labeled with a number, printed in stenciled white paint.

  0451 .

  I shook my head.

  The interior of the machine had a reflective, metallic sheen. I stepped closer and in the distorted reflection, I saw myself. Strawberry blond hair, spilling around a wide, heart shaped face. A small button nose and a pair of cat-green eyes. Freckles and a trim, athletic body. Once I had dropped my arms from my chest, I could see that my breasts were large, and tipped with a pair of rosy red nipples. Looking down, I saw that they jutted from my chest even without support. They looked firm and perky and I wondered what it would be like to squeeze them. I shook my head slightly. Focus. A pair of pert pussy lips sat between my thighs, utterly hairless. I had no hair on my body, in fact, beyond my eyebrows and my head.

  That felt faintly unnatural. But...pleasant...

  I stepped over to the next chamber – 0452 – and looked inside the porthole sat on the top of the closed hatch.

  A death’s head leered back at me. Desiccated flesh and sunken eyes, teeth clenched in a rictus grin. My heart hammered and I put my fingers on the machine, trying to feel what had gone wrong. I was alive. This person was dead. Why? I stepped to the next tube. 0453 was also a shriveled corpse. I started to run now, my whole body jiggling as I ran past row after row of corpses. Dead. Dead. All dead. Who had put so many people into...into...these things? Were we supposed to be dead? My heart sprang into my throat and my toe caught on the grille of the floor. I tripped and skidded forward.

  I rolled onto my side, gasping, my hand going to my knee.

  “ Fuck ,” I croaked, my voice feeling strange in my throat. I closed my eyes. Had I always sounded like that? I laid on the ground, trying to control the emotions that were surging through me. Dead. I was surrounded by dead people . The mental image of them in those tombs, those coffins, made my skin crawl almost as much as the cold. I swore I could smell the stink of it, seeping around the edges of the machines. Creeping from every seam, crawling past the window. I could see, in my mind, the hatches swinging open and a hiss of fetid mist swirling with it. Then from that would stretch-

  No . I forced the fear and the disgust back, my jaw so tight that I could hear my teeth grinding. Without the fear and the disgust, there was just the pain. Pain that slowly ebbed.

  Once the pain had completely gone and my heart no longer raced and my mind
no longer danced with death-heads and rotting arms, I forced myself to my feet.

  This time, I walked.

  It took me an eternity to reach a doorway. The door itself actually provided one answer: Where I was. Scrawled on the middle of the door, right underneath the window that looked out into the adjoining corridor, was a symbol and a pair of words. The symbol was a gear surrounding a small flame in a golden cup. The words were in the same language I spoke and thought in. English? That was the name, wasn’t it?

  The words.

  Virgil Station .

  The door had a black plate of plastic next to it. A glowing interface of numeral keys sprang up when I brought my hand near it. I somehow knew that was going to happen. The numerals went.

  7 8 9

  4 5 6

  1 2 3

  A zero was tucked into the corner, with a backspace and enter key to the other side. I shook my head. What a weird way of arranging numbers. But it was clear the door wanted numbers. I hesitated. Then slowly, I tapped in my machine’s numbers. The keypad flashed red and didn’t open. I scowled. My fingernail dug into the edge of the plastic and I yanked it hard. My fingernails ached, but the plastic gave first, revealing the internal guts of the machine. I let my hands work – not questioning it. But I managed to connect that optical core to that wire and the door hissed . Pneumatic pressure faded and the door dropped into the floor.

  I looked at my hands. Flexed my fingers. Ow .

  How had I done that?

  No. It…

  It was like a ghost had reached into my gray matter and worked me like a puppet. That ghost had known what to do, how to get into the door. How to hack . My eyes closed and for a moment, a ghostly image floated before my eyes. My brow furrowed and I closed my eyes tighter, forcing the image to cohere.

  While my eyes were closed, I could see...boxes.

  There was a large, rectangular box that lined the top of my vision. It was subdivided yet more by a set of smaller boxes, each one filled in with a gray sphere. Adjoining that box, on the left side, was what appeared to be a small replica of myself. I stood in that box with my arms spread, my eyes looking straight forward, while gray lines were drawn to point out my head, my chest, my arms, my legs, my hands. Those lines connected to nearly transparent green boxes that were each labeled with those little ‘english’ letters that I could read so effortlessly.

  Head. Chest. Left Arm. Right Arm. Left Weapon. Right Weapon. Legs.

  On the lower edge of my vision were a pair of smaller boxes. On the right hand side, there was an empty box that had the green outline of a fist in it, clenched tight and held up at ready. That was labeled as Readied Weapon. On the left hand side, there were a pair of long rectangular bars, layered atop one another. The higher one was bright red and had a numeral on it: 100/100. The lower bar was black - or possibly empty. That second theory was confirmed when I saw the numbers on it said 0/0. The two bars were labeled: Health for red. Psi for the black bar.

  I opened my eyes and yelped in alarm.

  It wasn’t just because the lower boxes remained - though, thankfully, the larger, upper box had vanished from my vision. No. The reason I had yelped was that there, beyond the door, was someone else . Laying on the floor, tucked up against the corner of the adjoining corridor, was another woman. She was dead. And I could see why. Her mouth was filled with a frothing white liquid, her throat bulging grotesquely. The rest of her body was achingly beautiful, even in death. She had been wearing some kind of nice suit that had been shredded, her body marked with dozens of cuts that no longer bled. Claws had torn her suit apart, careful to leave the skin underneath untouched. Her legs were cocked wide, and her sex lips dripped with the same thick white fluid that filled her throat. But the thing that made my breath catch was her eyes.

  Even dead, those were the eyes of someone in the throws of intense pleasure.

  My mouth went dry.

  My eyes dipped from the obscene scene and I saw, laying on the ground about five feet from where she had finally died, was a wrench. It was a sturdy Krugmaster 98, made for loosening the kinds of bolts normally only seen on a fusion reactor. I knelt down and grabbed it up without a second thought. It was a comforting, heavy presence at the end of my arm. I tossed it into the air and caught it again with a meaty thunk .

  “Thanks,” I said, her voice still raspy.

  The dead woman didn’t respond.

  I stopped there, blinking.

  “How…” I rasped - but the realization came to my mind when I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, that the ‘readied weapon’ box that remained in the edge of my vision had shifted. Now, it had an image of the wrench, with its name stenciled underneath it. I closed my eyes and saw that the larger box showed that the Krugmaster 98 was held in my right hand. I opened my eyes again, looking down at the wrench. I looked at the woman.

  A single droplet of the white, frothing liquid that filled her mouth dripped down onto her breast.

  I left. Fast.

  ***

  I began, the instant I was away from the dead woman, with studying the interface that I had been ‘gifted’ with. I found that if I focused to the left or to the right sides of my vision, I could ‘shift’ the interface from side to side, swinging dizzyingly from the main interface to two other curious collection of heads-up-display elements. If I focused left, a collection of boxes appeared, filled with glowing green text. It was a kind of identification sheet, divided into biographic data, statistical data, and my assorted...skills.

  Not that I remembered learning a single one of them.

  According to the statistical data, I had the following codified statistics.

  BODY

  MIND

  SOUL

  Strength : 3

  Endurance : 3

  Perception : 2

  Smarts : 2

  Charisma : 5

  Psi : 0

  Heh. Charisma was measuring the size of my tits now?

  The only thing missing was a name.

  But, according to the sheet, I also knew the following skills.

  MARINE

  NAVY

  CADRE OMEGA

  Kinetic : 1

  Energy : 1

  Hack : 2

  Repair : 0

  Seduction : 1

  Persuasion : 1

  Melee : 1

  Heavy : 1

  Modify : 1

  Maintain : 1

  Telepathy : 0

  PreCog : 0

  First Aid : 1

  Research : 0

  PsychoK : 0

  ParaPsy : 0

  I’d have complained, but…

  All I had to do was to try and think of how to swing the wrench in my hand and I knew how to not just bludgeon, but how to block incoming attacks. Where to hit a man. The openings that a person might leave in their defenses. It wasn’t perfect - if anything, it was quite fuzzy and unclear. But it was there .

  If I dragged my vision to the right, I got something infinitely more useful for the moment.

  I got a goddamn map .

  It was currently a pitifully small map, showing only the central corridor that I had walked into and the tiny junction that I had found beyond the front door. But it’d mean that I’d at least be able to find where I was going. After I had that momentary sense of security from knowing I had a map, I forced myself to begin to walk further away from the corner I had started with. I thought I was ready for whatever was ahead of me.

  I was wrong.

  I moved from room to room in the corridors of this section of the station and found the same story, writ large again and again. Where there were people, those people were dead – and those places were rare. I only counted five other corpses, all men who had been ripped to pieces. This whole part of the station seemed devoted to the clunking, groaning, grinding pieces of machinery that kept everything running. Some rooms were filled with quiet machines whose purposes were entirely beyond me. Others, though, were more obvious: Store rooms filled wi
th materials and components for fixing the other, quiet machines. Each time I stopped in a room, I checked to make sure that my map was being diligently updated. It was. It was like having my own personal cartographer.

  That cartographer, once I had finished my first circuit around the place, gave me a clear as hell view of what this station of Virgil Station was like: There was an outer ‘ring’ of support rooms, all with pipes leading into the ceilings towards the central chambers. On the inner side of the ring there were four chambers, each one identical to the one I had been born in – long corridors of those coffins, numbered. I was able to find the highest number on the third room from mine and knew that there were six thousand, six hundred and sixty six coffins. I wasn’t brave enough to check each coffin to see if any of them held living people like me.

  I had planned to do it, mind.

  Instead, I ended up standing at the end of the chamber, looking at the vast vaulted room, at the tubes leading down into the coffins, at the empty face plates. I imagined walking past them and a cold, creeping dread started to fill me. My knees locked and I realized I couldn’t move – the thought of looking away was impossible. Instead, my mind could see the image of a coffin opening up and something like me coming out - the same mental image from before. No warm, living flesh for this sleeper. No. The thing would be cold and clammy and moist and rotting. Their flesh would creak and groan as they stood, eyes glowing with a pale light.

  And so I stood there for who knows how long, listening only to the faint groaning of the station and the thundering of my heart. If I turned away, the door would open behind me.

  You’re being ridiculous, I thought. You’ve got combat skills. You’ve got a wrench. Come on. Come on. Move. Move. Move.

  But my feet remained fast to the floor. As if I’d been welded in place.

  In the end, it took an explosion to shake me out of my paralysis.