Blue Resurrection, page 37
"You're truly insane," she stated, but her tone carried genuine awe.
Anika took a step forward and nearly fell, but steadied herself. It was over. For now. The sky had fallen, but they still stood unbroken.
* * *
The world was dying behind her back. The titanic thunder of the Tower's collapse hammered at her eardrums and made the air quiver like a taut string. Steel, glass, and human ambition crashed down into a shapeless mass, burying the colony's history under tons of rubble. Anika did not turn. The Blues' rule was clear: you look forward, or you die.
Her hands, wrapped in carbon-blackened polymer, still clutched the cargo—the civilian. The battery. His breathing was ragged, wheezing—an agonized groan of lungs fighting for air after a massive hemorrhage.
"All clear," her voice rasped through the external speakers.
It sounded mechanical, distorted by the vocoder, devoid of human inflection. The words fell onto the concrete along with her knees as the impact from the jump hit her like a delayed shock to the spine. The suit's systems registered overheating in the left ankle joint—nothing critical. Nothing that would stop her.
The man on the ground stirred. His eyes widened, pupils shrinking to pinpricks from shock and adrenaline. Anika removed her helmet.
The faceplate slid apart with a soft hiss of hydraulics. Europa's cold air bit into her skin. She looked up, and for the first time, the man saw the face of his rescuer.
And he screamed.
Her face was smeared with blood. Not his—the colonist's, whom she had pulled from the initial chaos. Crimson stains covered her chin, streaked down her neck, a stark contrast against her pale, almost translucent skin. But the worst were her eyes. They blazed with inhuman intensity, the pupils dilated wide from ingested energy. The eyes of a demon, peering from a human face.
His scream was not for help. It was primal, animalistic, the cry of a creature realizing it's trapped with a predator.
He pushed himself backward with his heels, scraping the concrete with bloodied nails, leaving trails in the gray dust. His mouth opened and closed, searching for words he couldn't form. He crawled away from her, despite the fact she had saved him. He knew.
Anika was aware of the price she had paid to haul him, alive, from the collapsing tower. Run! she thought, as her systems cooled the overheated joints. Run while you still have blood in your veins!
The air around the square began to clear. An icy wind, merciless and sharp, tore through the dust veil, revealing the scale of the destruction and the survivors.
From the shadows of surviving administration buildings, from basements and ventilation shafts, people began to emerge. Gray figures, covered in ash, spectral, crawling out of concrete shelters. First one, then ten, then hundreds. They moved slowly, hypnotized—like sleepwalkers drawn to the flames that had just ravaged their lives.
Anika straightened her back. Servomotors hissed in her knee joints. Beside her, in the periphery of her visor, the rest of her squad stood as well. Dark silhouettes, armored guardians who had just saved these people from oblivion.
The crowd stopped. There were no cheers. No tears of relief, no shouts of gratitude. There was only distance. An invisible barrier—a twenty-meter radius no civilian dared to cross. They had poured from their hiding places like a tidal wave but froze before reaching the shore—stalled in an awkward semicircular formation that was neither an attack nor an embrace.
Anika lowered her gaze to the man at her feet. He had stopped crawling, but his whole body was trembling. His arm was raised defensively in front of his face, his fingers splayed in a helpless gesture. But his eyes weren't fixed on her rifle. They were riveted to her face. To the blood. To the unnatural glow in her eyes.
She tasted it. It was sharp, salty, and insistent. Honey and iron. The taste of the life she had drained to fuel her bio-modifications, to gather the power and leap from the collapsing tower while carrying a man.
Her tongue instinctively passed over her lower lip. Wet. Sticky.
Anika looked up at the crowd. Hundreds of eyes watched her. And in not one of those glances was there respect. They saw the red stains on her face. They saw her essence in her—a weapon that must feed to function.
The silence in the square grew more oppressive than the fallen tower. The only sounds were the cracking of cooling metal and the distant wail of automated sirens. Somewhere in the distance, a child's cry was half-smothered, muffled by a parent's palm.
They knew.
The rumors about Project "Blue Resurrection" had spread through the colonies like a contagion. Super-soldiers who didn't need rations because the battlefield was their banquet. Monsters created to guard people from other monsters, but at a cost no one wanted to name aloud. The stories—half-fabricated, half-true, all horrifying.
A woman in the front ranks took a step back. Then another. She pressed her child to her chest, covering its eyes with her hand. The movement was sharp, filled with panic—a maternal instinct older than civilization. A ripple passed through the crowd: a slight recoil, a collective intake of breath, a shuffling of bodies into a denser, protective formation.
Fear.
Anika felt her lungs constrict, not from lack of air, but from the weight of that collective rejection. The feeling was there—trapped behind a steel wall, but pulsing like a wound under a bandage.
Her hand twitched to rise to her face. To wipe away the evidence. To hide the beast.
No.
The minutes she had been human had burned away along with the atmosphere upon entry. She was a weapon. And weapons don't apologize for being bloodied. If she wiped it off now, she'd be admitting guilt. She'd be showing them that what she had done was wrong.
I saved you, she thought, as her pulse slowed to the icy rhythm of a predator at rest. You breathe because I fed.
She slowly tilted her head toward the man on the ground. He whimpered—a short, choked exhalation.
"Get up," Anika commanded.
Her voice was no longer filtered through the vocoder. It was her own—hoarse, raw, human. The word sounded strange in the silence—too personal, too naked for what had transpired between them.
The man didn't move. He only slumped lower, curling on the ground like a child trying to become invisible.
Anika shifted her gaze from him and fixed it directly on the crowd. She met the eyes of the woman with the child. She met the gaze of the old man beside her—a face weathered by years of colonial labor, with an expression that had seen too much death to be shocked by a little more. She did not blink. The blood on her face was already drying, turning into a crust, a combat marking, truer than any patch on a pauldron.
The wind stirred a lock of hair stuck to her forehead. Anika stood motionless, a statue of ceramite and sin amidst the ruins of civilization.
The crowd did not attack. No one threw a stone. No one shouted "Murderer." The herd's instinct for self-preservation prevailed. They understood the bargain, struck without signatures or seals. The wolves were out there, in the darkness of space. And here, in the square, stood the guard dog. The rabid, bloodthirsty dog that had just bitten one of its own to have the strength to bark at the dark.
The space between the Blues and the colonists remained empty. No man's land.
The man at her feet finally mustered the courage to stand, swaying. He did not thank her. He didn't even look at her again. He turned his back and stumbled toward the crowd, which parted to swallow him and immediately closed behind him, restoring the defensive wall of bodies. Anonymous, caring hands caught him—leading him deep into the mass, away from the gaze of the one who had saved him.
Anika remained alone at the center of the circle.
She felt the cold. Not Europa's atmospheric cold—this was something else. Deeper. An isolation no armor could block. She was stronger than ever, thrumming with energy pulsing in her veins like liquid fire. But she had never been more alone.
She clicked off her rifle's safety with a distinct metallic snap that echoed like a gunshot in the silence. Somewhere in the crowd, someone gasped. Another closed their eyes. But no one fled.
"Check the perimeter," she ordered over the squad's internal channel. "We have civilians to protect."
Behind her, the remaining squad members fanned out like black stains across the periphery of the square. Nara planted her rifle in the ground and leaned on it with a weary, knowing look. Milo was quickly applying a field dressing—something in his shoulder was pulling wrong. Seila was already running diagnostics, scanning the crowd for injured civilians through biometric systems.
They said nothing. There was no need.
Anika did not wipe herself clean. The blood would fall away on its own. Or it would be covered by new blood. It didn't matter.
The line was drawn. And she stood on the correct side of the barrel, even if it meant standing alone.
Above her head, Europa Prime continued to burn.
CHAPTER 35
The landing shuttle's turbines screamed, tearing the silence over the Square. The air grew taut with pressure. Dust, saturated with the smell of burnt kerosene, swirled around the armored figures of Blue Squad.
Anika Reyes did not blink. The shuttle's spotlights hit her directly — a white light, ruthless and uncompromising. She stood motionless amidst the ruins, her feet planted in the rubble, her body marked by countless wounds. Her armor, once standard gray, was now coated only in chipped ceramic, soot, and dried blood. Not hers.
Let them come.
The engine noise faded into a high-frequency whine. Hydraulics hissed. The massive ramp slammed onto the cracked pavement with a dull thud that echoed in Anika's chest.
The Cleaners descended first. An elite Federation platoon. Black armor, faces hidden behind mirrored visors, weapons gleaming with lubricant, untouched by combat. They fanned out, the muzzles of their plasma rifles aimed synchronously at Anika and the people behind her. There was no hesitation. Only programmed discipline.
After them, descending like a deity among mortals, came Admiral Vane.
His suit was a blinding white — so white it hurt the eyes against the backdrop of gray dust and dried blood on the pavement. He looked like a sterile foreign body, painfully embedded in the city's wound. His golden epaulets caught the spotlight's glare and reflected it back, cutting and cold. His boots stepped onto the filthy pavement with visible disgust, as if the mere contact could taint him. He didn't look at Anika as a soldier. He observed her as a medical waste product.
Vane stopped ten paces away. His gaze swept over the squad. Milo, whose left arm hung lifeless. Nara, breathing laboriously through a ruptured respirator. Seila and Elliot. And Anika, whose eyes shone with that unnatural, radioactive blue glow — the mark of the Project.
"We have a quarantine situation," Vane pronounced, the suit's amplifiers carrying his words across the entire square — too loud, too high above everyone's heads. It sounded not like human speech, but like a recording broadcast from a loudspeaker. There was no emotion in his tone. Only bureaucratic efficiency. "The subjects are compromised. Unstable. A threat to the civilian population and the command structure."
He raised a hand, palm open, ready to curl into a fist. An unambiguous gesture of execution.
"Target clearance. Fire on my command."
The Cleaners' platoon tightened their grips on their weapons. The dry clack of simultaneously released safeties echoed. The sound was mechanical, final.
Anika felt adrenaline flood her veins, but this time it didn't bring panic. It brought icy calm.
He doesn't see people. He sees rows in a spreadsheet that need to be deleted.
She did not reach for her weapon. The magnetic locks on her thigh remained untouched. Instead, she took a step forward. The movement was slow, deliberate. Her boot crunched on stone. She positioned herself directly in front of the muzzles, squaring her shoulders to stand as a shield for the people at her back.
"Don't look at them," she growled over the internal channel to her squad, without moving her lips. "Look at me."
Vane narrowed his eyes. The lack of a plea for mercy clearly disrupted his script.
"Aim for the heads," he ordered, his tone taking on a slightly higher pitch. "Sever the neural chain before regeneration triggers. Now!"
Silence. The seconds stretched, sticky and endless. The wind fluttered the admiral's cape, but not a single beam pierced the air.
Anika stood. Her breathing was even. The blue glow in her irises pulsed to the rhythm of her heart. She stared straight into the visors of the soldiers before her. Not with a plea, but with a challenge.
Pull the trigger. And see what happens to your soul.
Vane's soldiers flinched. The muzzles dipped slightly, just a few millimeters, but enough. They saw the blood on Anika's armor. The exhaustion. And the lack of aggression. These were not rabid beasts. These were soldiers who had just won a battle for a colony written off by the Federation.
Then a sound came from behind Anika. A sound of feet dragging, of steps in the dust. Multiple footsteps were approaching. Anika did not turn, but her peripheral vision caught the movement.
The crowd.
The colonists, moments ago hidden in the ruins of buildings, were now streaming forward. They were not running. They were walking toward the muzzles. Men with bandaged heads, women with faces blackened by soot, workers who had discarded their makeshift weapons. They spilled around The Blues like living water, filling the gaps between the armored figures.
A little girl in a torn dress broke away from the group. She ran the distance to Milo and wrapped her arms around his armored leg, burying her face in the chipped metal. A woman — likely her mother — followed, standing tight against the massive fighter and placing a hand on his shoulder.
A living shield. Flesh and bone against plasma and steel.
Vane's face paled. The sterile mask cracked.
"What are you doing?!" he shrieked, all restraint gone from his tone. "They are bio-modified deserters! Dangerous! Step back! That is a direct order!"
No one moved. The crowd looked at the admiral with eyes that held no fear, only contempt. They had seen who bled for them. And they saw who stood clean before them.
Vane turned to his platoon, his neck flushed red with rage.
"Fire! Shoot, even if you have to go through them! This is a mutiny! Execute the order, damn it!"
The Cleaners' commander slowly lowered his rifle. The barrel pointed at the ground. One by one, the others followed. The mechanical sound of weapons being lowered rang louder than the admiral's shouts. They were Federation killers, but they were not butchers. The rules had changed.
Vane was alone. Isolated in his snow-white uniform, surrounded by the dust of a planet he did not understand.
Anika moved. The crowd parted before her. She walked slowly, her boots crushing debris. Every step was a statement. She crossed the invisible line that separated the "monsters" from the "people" and entered the admiral's personal space.
Vane instinctively stepped back, his hand twitching toward the holster of his dress pistol, but froze. He saw her eyes up close. The blue was not just a color. It was an abyss.
Anika stopped so close to him that she caught the scent of the expensive cologne he used to mask the smell of war. She leaned forward slightly, looming over him despite their equal height. Her presence was palpable, suffocating.
"You thought we were dogs," she whispered. Her voice was raspy, like grinding metal, but clear in the dead silence. "You thought you held the leash."
Vane opened his mouth to say something, to quote a regulation, to threaten a court-martial, but the words stuck in his throat.
He realized that if he drew a weapon now, he wouldn't live long enough to use it.
"Look around, Admiral," Anika continued, without blinking. "They're not protecting us from you. They're protecting you from us."
She drew herself up to her full height, shifting her armor with a distinct movement. The glow in her eyes intensified, illuminating Vane's pale, sweaty face.
"The cage is open," she said quietly, finally, and nodded toward the crowd. "And we are no longer yours. We are theirs."
Anika turned her back on him. She waited for no reply, no permission. Vane stood diminished as Anika Reyes and her squad, surrounded by the people who had chosen to protect them, reclaimed Victory Square.
The hierarchy was dead. Long live the new order.
CHAPTER 36
A vibration traveled through the soles of his boots, then shook the armored glass of the observation tower. Admiral Vane's transport shuttle hovered above the runway, bulky as a sated metal beetle—its engines spewed bluish ion plasma that scorched the concrete pavement of Base "Silence." Thornen didn't move. He stood in the shadows, alone, surrounded by the cold hum of server cabinets. His hands were clasped behind his back, fingers clenched into fists.
Down in the vast hangar, the lights flickered. The shuttle touched down. Hydraulics hissed, releasing pressure. He had arrived.
The king returns to his castle to find the walls are made of sand.
Thornen's gaze drifted from the runway to the wall of monitors on his left. Moments ago, they displayed standard telemetry data—green graphs, streams of logistical information, the dull routine of military daily life. Now, however, the screens were disintegrating into chaos, with an irregular rhythm reminiscent of a dying heart's arrhythmia.
The "door" he had left open in the firewall's code gaped wide. The data packet Elliot Dane had inserted into the system was no longer a passive file. It was a predator unleashed among its prey.
Terminals lit up one by one in blood-red—the first, the second, the third, the fourth.
There were no alarms. Thornen had taken care of that—the system would log them as a routine software update before it was too late. The silence in the tower remained absolute, broken only by his own quickened breathing. But within the digital bowels of the base, a storm was brewing. Communication nodes were overheating under the strain of terabytes of encrypted information spreading at a furious pace. Files stamped "Top Secret — Command Eyes Only" were now copying themselves to every available display, tablet, and personal communicator within five systems.
