Excerpt Thursday: SILENT ORDER: AXIOM HAND
It’s Excerpt Thursday! Today’s excerpt is from SILENT ORDER: AXIOM HAND.
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March slowed, his shoes making no sound against the carpeted floor of the footwear aisles. He passed an endcap laden with women’s running shoes in bright shades of orange and purple and pink and yellow, took a deep breath to steady his hand of flesh and hand of metal, and peered around the corner.
Reimer crouched at the end of the aisle, rummaging through the shoe boxes on the shelves and muttering to himself.
At least, it was the nightmare that had once been Reimer.
His body was still human shaped, more or less. But he was naked, and his skin had taken the grayish pallor of a man whose blood had been replaced with nanobots. Indeed, March saw the black veins threading their way through his flesh like corruption through the flesh of a corpse. At the base of his skull was the familiar gray metal plate of a Machinist hive implant, his link to the rest of the Final Consciousness, though right now he would only be able to communicate with the local mind group. To judge from the loose way the skin hung from his stomach and chest and thighs, Reimer had once been much heavier, even morbidly obese. That was hardly the most noticeable thing about him.
The four giant metal legs jutting from the side of his torso drew the eye.
The additional legs were thin, almost spindly, yet bore Reimer’s weight with ease. The legs were a dull gray color, the same color as March’s own cybernetic left arm. That wasn’t surprising, given that the same technology underlay both. And if those legs were like March’s arm, they would possess strength many times that of a normal man.
That would explain how Reimer had ripped off the head of that poor ensign.
“Blue,” muttered Reimer, picking up a running shoe and throwing it aside. “Yellow. Orange. It doesn’t make sense. The sugar is white. White! Why did it turn orange? Why?” He shrieked in frustration. “It doesn’t make sense!”
March swung around the corner, pointed his pistol at Reimer’s head, and squeezed the trigger twice. He did it fast, so fast that Reimer shouldn’t have been able to respond or recover in time.
But Reimer was just as fast as March.
He twisted with a snarl, and one of his metal spider legs moved in a blur.
-JM