Chapter 57: Chloe’s Rampage

Aoi heard it.

’...Nee-san.’

The way he’d said it when he was six and the thunder shook the roof in Kyoto... The way he’d said it from under her futon at two in the morning with his small cold feet pressed against her legs.

’Nee-san, I’m scared... Nee-san, don’t go...’

Her whole body jerked against the rope on instinct and then she saw Leo’s hand reaching out toward his at the mouth of the airlock.

She saw his boots sliding across the plates toward the gap... she saw his face, for one frozen millisecond, through the tear in the sleeve then Aoi heard the boot crack against her own cheek.

’I always hated you, Nee-san.’

Aoi stopped struggling.

She lay there on the deck with her one good eye open and her split lips pressed together, and she didn’t say a word.

Chloe giggled.

"She can’t hear you," she whispered sweetly, and another drop of blood fell off the tip of her nose onto his cheek. "Nobody can hear you, Ren. You threw him away..."

Her claws flexed in his shoulders as Ren screamed.

"You threw him away like TRASH." The giggle cracked into something higher and wetter. "He gave me mint water, you know. He put it next to my plate so I wouldn’t have an empty space... Did you know that? Did anybody ever give YOU mint water, Ren?"

"Please—" Ren sobbed. "Please, I’ll... I’ll give you the ship, I’ll give you everything, the credits, the—"

"Shhh." She pressed one bloody fingertip against his lips. "Shh, shh, shh... It’s okay."

Slowly with a dark devilish smile carving itself across her blood-splattered lips, she shifted her grip.

Her left hand drove down and buried its ivory claws deep in the meat and bone of his upper chest, pinning him to the floor.

Her right hand hooked under his hip bone with the fingers tearing straight through his trousers and sinking into his flesh like iron spikes.

"People like you deserve to die..."

CRUNCH... RIP!

"NO! NO, STOP! PLEASE!"

His voice went up and up and broke into a wet squeal of agony that didn’t sound like a man anymore.

"A horrid death... We need to rid scum like you off the face of this planet..."

Chloe took her time, hell she hummed while she did it.

It was the same little lullaby sounding soft and completely out of tune as her fingers sank deeper and deeper and the screaming got higher and higher.

"My Leo... You threw away my Leo... He should be treated like a King."

Elena was shaking her head over and over with her eyes squeezed shut as her lips moved silently.

Jin-Ah had turned her face to the wall, Harper stood frozen with both hands hanging at her sides since she couldn’t make herself look away.

Chloe bent her elbows.

The S-Rank Blood Sovereign strength surged up through her slender arms, every tendon standing out like steel cable under her pale skin, and her lips pulled back from her fangs in a wide shining grin.

"Bye-bye~" Chloe sang and she pulled.

There was a slow agonizing continuous pull that lasted three full seconds and Chloe tore Ren Tachibana in half.

SCREEEEEEEEEEECH... SHLUCK!

The sound of spine and muscle and artery parting was loud and sickeningly heavy as he came apart at the lower stomach.

The raider’s gravity had flickered down to less than a fifth of a G, and the violence of the tear didn’t just spill him onto the deck.

A huge warm cloud of dark blood exploded outward into the air, and behind it came floating weightless loops of pale pink intestine, chunks of liver, white shards of vertebrae... drifting slowly up through the red strobes like grotesque deep-sea creatures.

His upper body gave one last violent convulsion as his eyes rolled back and his mouth went slack.

...What was left of Ren Tachibana floated a few centimeters above the cratered floor and turned slowly in the red light.

Aoi looked at him.

His face drifted past her... just a meter from her own with his eyes half open and her mouth slack.

The neat hair was finally ruined however he didn’t look like a monster now... He looked like a tired boy who’d fallen asleep somewhere strange.

She waited for the grief to come but it didn’t.

There was only a great cold empty quiet where it should have been, and in the middle of the quiet, very far away, a gunmetal ship circling in the dark.

Chloe sat back on her heels in the middle of the floating cloud with her face and hair and arms soaked to the elbows, and tilted her head at him, curious, like a cat looking at a broken toy.

"Oh," she said softly. "You stopped..."

Elena stared at the floating organs with her hands shaking and her mouth hanging open in a silent paralyzed scream.

Camila vomited onto her own knees, then kept heaving long after there was nothing left, sobbing between breaths.

Jin-Ah pressed herself back against the bulkhead so hard her shoulder blades ground into the iron with her face drained of every drop of color and her eyes as wide as saucers, staring at the tiny delicate girl who had just ripped a grown man apart with her bare hands like an old rag doll.

Harper moved without thinking.

She scooped Ren’s pistol up off the wet deck and held it in both shaking hands, and she honestly didn’t know who she was going to point it at.

Elena’s lips were still moving.

’That’s a girl,’ she was thinking, over and over, numbly. ’That is Chloe... That is the girl who said sorry when she bumped into me in the hall...’

Across the bridge, Voss and Dekker stood frozen as the pulse rifle slid out of Voss’s huge hands and hit the deck.

CLANG!

The bearded giant dropped to his knees in the drifting droplets of Ren’s blood and threw both hands over his head, his face white as chalk and his chest heaving.

"Don’t kill me!" he sobbed. His deep voice broke into a high cracked wail. "Please! I was just hired! I didn’t know! I didn’t KNOW—"

Dekker threw his carbine away and dropped flat on his stomach with his face pressed into the deck plates, weeping hysterically.

"Mercy! Mercy, please! We’ll give you the ship! We’ll give you the coordinates! Just don’t let that THING touch me!"

Chloe turned her head.

Her bangs were soaked in Ren’s blood and plastered to her cheeks as her red eyes found the two men kneeling five meters away and settled on them, unblinking.

She just stood up as her knee was whole again... She put her weight on it and stretched, rolling her small shoulders, cracking her neck once to each side.

CRACK. CRACK.

"You laughed," she said to Dekker, conversationally. "When Ren said day four. I heard you... You laughed."

Dekker’s weeping cut off into a choked silent gurgle.

WHOOSH!

She blurred across the deck.

CRACK!

Her right fist drilled through the back of Dekker’s skull and drove his face straight down through the steel plates beneath it, and his body jerked once and went still.

Voss screamed and scrambled backward on his hands toward the rifle.

He got his fingers on it however he only got it halfway up.

BZZAP!

The pulse round took Chloe high in the left shoulder and burned a smoking hole straight through her suit and the flesh underneath as the smell of scorched meat filled the bridge.

"Mmmm~"

She looked down at the hole in her shoulder with mild interest, like someone noticing a stain on their shirt, and kept walking toward him.

BZZAP! BZZAP!

The second shot went wide and blew a console apart behind her.

The third hit her in the side and she rocked half a step... and laughed.

"That tickles a lot." She told him.

Voss stopped shooting.

His finger just stopped working and he knelt there with the rifle shaking in his hands and stared up at her with his mouth hanging open, like a man watching a wave come in.

Chloe’s bloody hand hooked into his thick bearded throat.

"And you just watched," she whispered into his face. "You watched the whole time..."

She jerked her hand up in one smooth fluid motion and ripped his windpipe clean out of his neck.

SPLAT!

Voss slumped forward into his own spreading pool, twitched twice, and went permanently still.

Silence came down over the bridge, broken only by the slow wet dripping of blood off the ceiling.

Drip! Drip! Drip!

Nobody moved.

HISSSSSS!

Thick white sweet-smelling vapor started pouring out of the environmental vents over the consoles.

The raider’s internal security system had finally woken up, flooding the cabin with automated tranquilizer gas.

Elena gagged, Camila started coughing with her eyes streaming.

Jin-Ah turned her face into her shoulder and held her breath while Aoi’s head swam with the red light going soft and far away as her one good eye slid shut... and some distant part of her thought that maybe it would be all right to just sleep now.

Chloe looked up at the vents as her bloody teeth bared in a feral snarl.

"SHUT UP!" she roared.

She leaped up onto the console banks and drove both fists down into the glass screens and the motherboards and the logic boards underneath, again and again and again, in rhythmic concussive fury.

SMASH! CRUNCH! SPARK!

"Shut up! Shut UP! SHUT UP!"

She tore the wiring harnesses straight out of the bulkheads with her bare hands and ripped them apart in fistfuls of sparking copper.

She punched through the main command interface until it was a heap of twisted aluminum and shattered quartz, kicked the remains of the navigation well across the floor, and tore the vent cover off the wall with one hand and shoved her fist into the duct behind it and squeezed.

KRRRRUNCH!

The hissing sputtered, choked on its own severed lines and died as the last wisps of white vapor curled away into the red light before fading.

"Haahh... Haah... Haah..."

Chloe stood on top of the wrecked console with her chest heaving and her fists dripping, surrounded by sparks and staring at nothing as Harper took one careful step toward her.

Slowly, with her hands open and low in case she needed to run.

"Chloe...?" Her voice came out cracked and tiny. "Hey. Hey, kid. It’s... it’s me. It’s Harper."

Chloe’s head turned.

The red eyes found her, and for one terrifying second Harper saw nothing in them at all.

There was no recognition and nothing human then Chloe blinked and she smiled.

That same small sweet shy smile from the dinner table, under all that blood.

"Hi, Harper," she said. "Your wrists are bleeding."

Harper didn’t take another step and on the bulkhead, the rest of them didn’t move.

THUD!

A heavy concussive impact rocked the outside of the Black Kite as every single head on the bridge snapped toward the hull.

THUD.

Something big was bumping up against the raider’s flank then the impacts stopped.

"Magnetic grapples," Jin-Ah whispered into the silence.

Her voice was shaking, but the numbers were still there, holding her up. "That was the sound of grapples. Something just latched onto our hull..."

Nobody wanted to say it out loud, in case it wasn’t true.

The Kite settled into a quiet unpowered drift.

The red strobes kept pulsing in total silence, washing the shattered consoles and the two dead mercenaries and the two floating halves of Ren Tachibana in slow rhythmic waves of blood-colored light.

The girls huddled against the bulkhead, afraid to breathe as they didn’t know what was happening outside.

...They didn’t know who’d won, or if the Wanderer-7 was burning, or if they were all just drifting off into an airless grave.

Chloe stood alone in the middle of the slaughter with her small chest rose and fell in slow heavy breaths.

Then, little by little, the blinding crimson in her eyes began to fade... The demonic fire pulled back like a tide going out and left those soft luminous green irises behind.

"E-eh...? I went crazy again, didn’t I?"

She looked down at her hands that were dripping with thick blood and she looked at the floating torso turning slowly by the dais however there wasn’t a single trace of horror or regret anywhere on her pale face.

She had hated them so much... She had hated them for taking Leo away... She had hated them for making the ship cold... She had hated them for making Sensei cry and now they were dead.

That was all there was to it.

CLANK... HISSSSS!

A heavy familiar metallic shudder came through the starboard airlock as the docking collar had engaged.

Every head on the bridge turned toward the sound at once.

Through the accordion sleeve came the soft hiss of equalizing pressure... and riding on it, clean warm air that smelled of damp volcanic gravel, sweet tomato leaves and recycled nitrogen.

It was the smell of the garden and the galley and the ship that had kept them alive.