Kraken Mare (17 page)

Wasn’t going to argue with him there. I blocked another weak punch from Ghordahn and shoved him away. He stumbled and fell on his ass, his feet flopping hideously around on his broken ankles. I didn’t pursue the attack, though. I didn’t want to fight him. This seemed to piss Baptiste off a bit.

“Johnny, I’ll make them all abuse themselves until they are nothing more than standing, ragged piled of flesh and meat,” Baptiste growled in a dangerous tone. “I will hurt them worse than I have hurt anyone before in my life. You know what I’m capable of. You know what I can do. Do not test me, Johnny.”

“What do you want me to do, you bastard?” I fairly screamed into the comm.

“I want you to reach down into that dark pit you call a soul, Johnny,” Baptiste whispered seductively, “and I want you to bring the monster to the surface and play with my toys. Or better still, let that dead bitch of yours come out and you can be her white knight once more by removing these poor, captured men from their earthly bonds. Be the hero if you insist, though we both know that you have a desire to be the villain.”

I don’t think he realized just how badly he screwed up just then. Whatever illusion or spell he had pulled over my psyche snapped apart with that comment.

Ghordahn managed to crawl back to his feet, a pool of blood forming beneath them. The poor guy was trying to do what Baptiste wanted, but the body could only take so much abuse before it stopped working. Compound fractures were murder on the body and were usually a good indicator that a person was seriously hurt and should stop what they were doing.

Only Baptiste wasn’t going to let him stop, or let any of them stop. It was up to me to do something about it, even if it was something that I would probably hate myself for afterwards. I decided to take the initiative instead.

I delivered a brutal kick to the inside of Ghordahn’s knee, the sickening
crunch!
audible to everyone in the room. I probably broke his leg as well, but whatever I had ruined, he was out of the fight. He lost his balance and fell to the ground. He tried to push himself up off the ground, but without ankles and a knee, there was no way he could fight me any longer.

“I’m impressed, Johnny,” Baptiste said. “That was a surprising bit of viciousness I hadn’t expected out of you. Can you do it again? For me?”

Two more maintenance workers joined the routine, bringing the number of mind-wiped dancers to three. The others continued to snap their fingers in a timed beat and dance a small two-step number, hands twirling in the air.

This was starting to go way past absurd. What was Baptiste’s end game?

The three men charged me at once, moving as a single unit to take me down. While hand-to-hand combat during recon training had covered being outnumbered, as a sniper it wasn’t something I really focused on. If I was in a fistfight and not on base or in a bar, it meant that somewhere along the line I had seriously screwed up.

However, just because it was something I hadn’t focused on didn’t mean I was hopeless at it.

I charged towards the lead mind-wiped and kicked him as hard as I could in the chest. He fell back onto the floor, hard, his head smacking the steel grate beneath. I landed on top of him and slammed the back of his head down into the grate a few more times to make sure. I could feel his chest rising and falling beneath me, so I knew he was still alive.

The other two grabbed me and hauled me off of him, each taking turns punching my ribs. The blows hurt but weren’t debilitating. Not yet, at least. I think Baptiste was causing them to pull their punches, though I didn’t know why. Or maybe something else was going on that I wasn’t aware of. It’s entirely possible, since I was simply focused on staying alive and not killing anyone else—except Baptiste. I was going to take great pleasure in murdering him.

“Come on, Johnny. Stop trying to hit them and hit them.”

That bastard was stealing all of my classic movie lines. I was going to kick his ass whenever I got ahold of him.

I ducked slightly, weaved and managed to avoid another elbow to the ribs, instead letting it bounce off the top of my head as I slammed an open palm into the solar plexus of the mind-wiped man holding me on my left. He stumbled back far enough to allow me room to maneuver and I used my momentary advantage. I grabbed the closest mind-wipe around the waist, twisted slightly and tossed him over my hip. He slammed down hard onto the floor and I used my own momentum to put a knee on top of his chest. I punched him a few times in the face to disorientate him before the other one came roaring back into the fight.

I rolled away from him, using the body of the man I had just taken down to cushion the move. It must have caught Baptiste off guard because the mind-wipe stumbled over the other and fell flat on his face. I kicked him in the temple with the heel of my boot and hoped like hell I didn’t kill him.

“Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do,” Baptiste sang over the comm as I scrambled back up to my feet. Three more of the finger-snapping maintenance workers came rushing in, trying to all use their weight advantage to pin me down. Meanwhile, as I fought to maintain control, Baptiste continued to torment me with his horrid singing. “I’m half crazy, all for the love of you. It won’t be a stylish marriage, I can’t afford a carriage. But you’ll look sweet upon the seat of this bicycle built for two.”

I tried to block out what Baptiste considered music as I redirected two swift punches with my hands. It’s difficult to time just right but if done properly all you have are stinging hands. It also opened them up to a counterstrike. Thank you Senior Drill Instructor Jonathan LaForce.

Blows were coming in from all directions at such a rapid pace that I felt my control of the situation slipping. I still refused to kill the men, even if they were trying to kill me. They had no control over their actions, and I’ll be damned if I let Baptiste beat me here as well. But I had to do something, and do it quick. The solution came to me after I stepped over the downed mind-wipe with the busted ankles.

Broken legs are painful and debilitating. The mind-wipes may not feel pain, but I’d already proven that they couldn’t stay upright with broken bones. I felt like shit for doing it, but it was the only way I could keep them alive while making certain they couldn’t keep attacking me.

Brutal? Definitely. Necessary? Of course.

The tibia and fibula don’t require as much effort to break as the femur does, which is why they are the most broken bone in the human leg. They also have the least amount of muscle go through to hurt them as well. It’s why banging your shins on the coffee tables hurts so much. There’s just not much there to protect them.

It’s also fairly easy to break someone’s leg when they’re already on the ground.

I grabbed the nearest ankle of a felled foe and twisted as hard as I could while I delivered a stomp directly onto the upper part of the tibia. Combined with the pressure I’d put on it with the ankle grab, it splintered like a cheap piece of balsa wood. If he hadn’t been unconscious and under the mind control of a psychotic killer, I’m sure that he would have screamed and passed out. So I guess he was fortunate to have skipped a step.

“You’re avoiding the issue, Johnny,” Baptiste’s voice cut through the sound of flesh being pummeled. I wasn’t fighting fair at this point. You don’t fight fair if you were trying to stay alive. Legs were choice targets and Baptiste the Puppetmaster did not know quite how to counter the attacks. The guy knew how to play mind games, but physical confrontation without a huge advantage? I could tell that he was stretched to the limits of his abilities while trying to control the remaining two mind-wipes who had yet to enter the fray.

His hesitancy allowed me to wreck the two poor bastards who had already attacked me. They went down hard and fast, both legs ruined. I felt a little guilty but I also knew that modern medicine could heal those broken bones inside of four days. It was painful for now, but it was far better than killing them. Even if they weren’t precisely innocent.

Me? My body ached, my nose was bleeding again, I had a numb spot on my elbow and the top of my head was throbbing. To the victor, the spoils.

“Fine. Time to change the rules a bit.”

“Wait…what are you doing?” I asked, confused as I watched the two men who had remained behind turn and look at the other. Baptiste clucked his tongue.

“You disappoint me, Johnny. I expected a little more out of you.”

The two men grabbed each other by the throat and began to squeeze simultaneously. Both men were large and strong, and I could see the veins on their arms pop out from exertion as they tried to strangle one another. Neither fought back against the other, and both refused to let go. I realized what now what was going on.

Baptiste was making a point.

“Stop it,” I told him. He chuckled.

“Stop what? This is what you wanted, since you refused to put them out of their misery for me,” Baptiste said. He sounded convincing, but I knew he was full of it. He was toying with me.

The duo continued to strangle one another, their lips taking on a blue tint as their bodies began to suffer from oxygen deprivation. Still they hung on, controlled completely by Baptiste. I had to stop him before he made them kill each other.

“Catch-22, Johnny,” Baptiste continued to mock me over the comm. “You do nothing and they kill each other, or you can kill them. Either way, I have determined that these two die. You get to choose how.”

Damn it. I was out of options. Even with broken legs they could still strangle each other. Especially with Baptiste controlling them.

“Fine!” I shouted and threw my hands into the air. “I’ll surrender if you stop them from killing each other.”

The strangling paused. The two men remained motionless but they had loosened their grasps on one another.

“Surrender? What in the world makes you think that I want you to surrender?” Baptiste asked, his tone incredulous. “I have you precisely where I want you.”

“Then why’d you stop them from strangling each other?”

“Well played, Johnny. Well played.” Baptiste paused for a moment, the comm falling eerily silent. I thought that the connection had failed and was just about to turn the comm off when he spoke again. “But while you are quite a catch—you really are, you know—I already have a chew toy in your little pal Doctor Isaac. I don’t need a little chewy Marine. No, Johnny, I want the real prize. The
grand
prize, so to speak. I want the traitor.”

“Traitor?” I asked, confused. “What traitor?”

“That bastard Holomisa was given a gift unlike any the universe had ever seen and he
spat in my eye!”
Baptiste roared. “He betrayed his brothers for the sake of his precious honor!”

It may not have been evident before the prison break had begun, but it seemed pretty obvious now that Baptiste was the sort to hold a grudge.

“I have no idea where he is,” I said. “Last I saw him, he was still in his cell.” This was true, I hadn’t seen him since things went south. The computer in Central said he was still in the cell, though I had never actually checked inside his cell to confirm what the computer told me. Still, the way things were going, I doubted that he would have escaped and made problems for us. Well, added to our growing list of problems, in any case. I could have checked my PDA but I wasn’t sure if it was working properly. Things had gotten decidedly strange over the past few hours.

“
I know this!
” Baptiste fairly screamed at me. It took him a few moments to regain control of his composure, which told me quite a bit about his mental stability. In a nutshell? He was crazy, plain and simple. If it hadn’t been obvious before, he was making certain everyone knew it now. After he had managed to rein in his heavy panting he continued. “I want you to track him down and eliminate him.”

I laughed out loud. Probably wasn’t the smartest thing I could have done, but I couldn’t help it.

“You want me to kill the man who has broken out of more prisons and escaped more search parties than all of us combined on this station? The one guy who could kill me without me ever even knowing he was there until after the knife enters my spine?” I laughed some more. “Yeah, that’s not going to happen.”

“Then they die,” Baptiste said and without a moment of hesitation the mind-wiped maintenance workers renewed their efforts to kill each other. I raised my hands in a defeated gesture.

“Fine! Just stop! I’ll do it,” I grudgingly agreed. I was still playing the role of the good guy, damn it. I needed to get that problem checked.

“As added motivation, I think I’ll bring these two up to my playroom,” Baptiste said in a silky voice. It was a tone which raised the pucker factor exponentially. “Now go and find the traitor. Kill him, and we’ll talk about saving these two—as well as your precious little doctor.”

“What guarantees do I have that you won’t simply kill them when I’m done?” I asked.

“None,” Baptiste replied, “but if you accomplish this, we can discuss your evacuation from the station. I can promise you that you will be in one piece and breathing, as long as you do as you’re told.”

He was lying. I knew that he was lying. He knew that I knew that he was lying. The problem, though? I did not want to be responsible for the deaths of the mind-wipes, or Doctor Isaac for that matter. Baptiste, the bastard, had factored all this into his plan. So he knew that even if I figured out that he was full of it, I would still struggle on in hopes of saving a few more lives. He knew me well enough by now and I him.