The Duty (Play to Live: Book # 3) Read online

  Finally she pulled the wrapper off—and gasped, taking out the so recognizable and so widely advertised top-level iCom9 communicator. She remembered the bogus buyers' stage whisper on every street corner as they "discussed" the product properties from the company's fact sheet: "It's a millimeter thinner! And six grams lighter!" Then the hired actors would sneak a glance around them, as if saying to the curious crowd, "Did you hear that? If you hurry you might still get an easy term loan with negative interest!"

  Honestly, she couldn't have cared less about the crowds being manipulated into changing their gadgets every three months, but her current comm was already four generations old, making it a bit awkward for her to answer a call as the consumerists around her cringed, stigmatizing her as an old-fashioned klutz.

  She forced her wrist into the everlasting gel bracelet waiting for the morphplastic to adjust to her anatomy, then held her breath as she slid her finger across the sensor, activating the device. Expensive toy: a hundred and forty gold rubles, her wages for three months. But unfortunately, you couldn't buy foreign goods for traditional paper banknotes as the Russian government was trying hard to encourage production.

  As she admired the perfect holographic image on the comm's internal surface, a tiny swab of custom-made polish was softening in the warmth of her skin, releasing a tiny spring-like needle.

  Thinner than a bee's sting, just thick enough to pierce her skin, the miniscule hollow injector contained exactly one milligram of synthetic batrachotoxin: twenty times the lethal dose for an adult.

  The poison had no effective antidote, identical to the one produced by poison dart frogs with their warningly bright coloration. More importantly, it was perfect to imitate an accident as the hired killer wouldn't wish to alarm the other victims or expose himself to the police.

  A sharp pain pierced her hand. Her muscles twitched. Olga gasped trying to catch her breath, her heart missing a beat, then restarting double time in a desperately ragged rhythm. The toxin had stopped the neural impulses in her cells, leading to a paralysis and causing immediate arrhythmia, fibrillation and irreversible cardiac arrest.

  Her strong young body convulsed, knocking over the vase and the flowers. Her workmates looked up again, this time in alarm. The sight of Olga wheezing and clutching her heart paralyzed some of them while encouraging others to act.

  An anxious senior manager arrived to their screams of panic from his cubicle of one-way glass. As his title suggested, he was the first to take control, mumbling something into his own communicator as he summoned the resuscitation team—which was always on call in their office conveniently located in the very heart of Moscow.

  The team arrived in no time. These guys were used to emergencies and countdowns. Their hefty bonuses were calculated by a complex formula that covered everything: the time the brain remained deprived of oxygen, the degree of medication administered to the patient and the amount of general resuscitation provided.

  A paramedic shoved aside a clumsy volunteer who was kneading the girl's breasts imagining he was administering CPR. Other team members began bustling about, activating and connecting their diagnostics equipment. One of them yanked the girl's shoes off as they kept whining, empathizing with their departing owner.

  The oxygen mask, the unsettlingly frequent clicks of the jet injector, the familiar discharges of the defibrillator so familiar to all of us from the movies—ten exhausting minutes of struggle for life. Then the team leader rose from the girl's body, shaking his head.

  "Pointless. Irreversible cardiac arrest."

  He looked around, searching for the senior manager who couldn't but cast glances at the girl's slim bare legs and the front of her torn blouse. The paramedic frowned and stepped in front of her, his burly figure obscuring the man's view. "Request your permission to commence procedure Protocol A2/1."

  The balding manager jumped, the sickly dreamy expression leaving his face, replaced by the scowl of a cornered rat. Chronos affairs had been going south lately as potential clients refused to be turned into deep-frozen drumsticks and kept pulling their money out, opting for going perma instead. The staff's wages had plummeted and so had the prospectives, prompting the smartest workers to quit. Then an idea had struck him. The senior manager had checked staff medical records and came forward with an initiative aimed at keeping the remaining workers. He suggested offering every worker a personal corporate insurance that included the cryogenic immortality program. He'd bent over backwards at the board meeting as he displayed charts and schemes proving that even if they'd introduced the program ten years ago, they still wouldn't have had to pay for a single instance of hibernation procedure.

  No good deed goes unpunished! Barely a week had passed since they'd had a special meeting handing each office worker his or her insurance certificate—and they already had their first claim! He sensed the atmosphere thicken. All eyes were on him, growing grimmer by the minute.

  The manager chewed his lip. "Permission granted," he dropped. "Take her to the refrigerator."

  He swung round and slogged back to his office, struggling to remember if there was still some brandy left in the bottle he'd stashed away during the last office party.

  Behind his back, the well-oiled cryogenics machine was already gaining momentum. The gurney's wheels whirred, the resuscitation team's leader snapped orders as the Chronos in-house lawyer was mumbling something into his comm bracelet.

  The fickle finger of Chance touched the girl's shoulder as she walked down an endless corridor toward a blinding light.

  * * *

  "Give my love to the Spider Queen!" I croaked into the enemy's face watching his pupils contract in terror, his mouth dropping in a silent scream.

  The dagger in his body shook like a hungry dog on seeing a steak. Then it dug into the victim's flesh, slicing and viscerating its way through, devouring the unfortunate perma's soul. I recoiled in horror, trying to let go of the dagger. As if! The priest, the victim and the weapon—the ritual only worked if all three were connected in blood-curdling unity. On their own they weren't worth much. The vicious artifact sent a quick discharge through my arm paralyzing it, the spasm locking my fingers around the dagger's black handle. Six of the spider's legs had until now been folded up forming a single blade. They now clicked open like the fingers of an opening hand, piercing the victim's ribs. Slowly they left the body, revealing the wriggling bloodied claws.

  And now it was my turn to shake uncontrollably as I began soaking in everything that had only a moment ago been my enemy—all of his memories, his knowledge and his emotions, compressing them into a tight wad that gained energy and shot into space, beamlike, toward what I supposed were Lloth's domains.

  The unfortunate perma's body crumbled in a heap of black sand that immediately turned into thousands of spiders scattering in all directions. The satiated dagger clicked its legs closed, returning sensitivity to my arm. I staggered, trying hard not to collapse onto the swarming carpet of millions of tiny feet. I could barely register the mercs' hearty swearing as they danced on the spot trying to get out of Lloth's servants' way without squashing a single one of her favorites.

  In the meantime, I was trying to puzzle my mind back together, recoiling from the remaining shreds of somebody else's thoughts, feelings and memories. No idea who I was supposed to have been in this ritual sacrifice—the hand of vengeance or a brainless retrodirective antenna, but he'd turned my mind into a right pile of shit. I wasn't a 100% sure but I had a funny feeling I wouldn't need a Chinese translator any near time in the future. Besides, thanks to a tip from the ever-watchful greedy pig I'd managed to glean just one mental image from my enemy's compressed thought flow. A top combo from the repertoire of the rogue who'd chosen the path of a Dark assassin and somehow managed to reach level 260 on his way.

  The Wings of an Angel combo is dealt to your opponent's back by slicing his spine with one or both blades, removing the ribs from the spine and turning them inside out like a pair of sickening red and wh
ite wings. How gross. And still I couldn't deny I was dying to check out what it was I'd just gotten: mere information or an executable skill.

  I was only worried everyone would sink into a coma watching a blood-curdling combo like that performed by a low-level knight with a heavy two-handed sword.

  My unscrupulous inner pig studied the remaining prisoners with a greedy eye, then began whispering his plans into my ear, promising such a heady solution to all my problems that potentially could make the sun weep with envy. Even though I managed to suppress his voice in my head, I could now better understand the ways of those Dark Overlords corrupting their disciples. They simply played on their avarice and lust for power. So you think you're a useless waste of space, cringing with envy at the sight of a powerful warrior? No problem, bring him to the sacrificial altar! This was exactly the kind of field day the inquisition had had all those centuries ago with their genetic purges. Really, if you'd spent hundreds of years accusing every pretty girl of being a witch, no wonder the current gene pool was what it was...

  And back in those days, how many men could resist the temptation of grassing up the village girl who'd rejected their advances? And what holy Catholic brother would contest his accusation, impatient to get another victim for his torture chamber, to undress and shave her naked body, drooling in anticipation, then study it meticulously in search for the Devil's marks? And that was only the beginning, the first step on the path of absolute power of one "trembling creature" over another.

  I shook off the gloomy thoughts and peered into the system message window. What a bitch! Apparently, Lloth was offering me a tailor-made bait:

  The Goddess has looked with favor on your sacrifice.

  New religious status achieved: Junior Priest.

  Special skill: by offering a sacrifice favored by the Goddess, you will receive 1% of her XP.

  So you are using the stick and carrot tactic now, aren't you, Spider Lady? As if I didn't realize that if I wanted to reach level 300 and get a hundred uncategorized skills in the bargain, all I had to do was sacrifice the remaining prisoners on your altar. But what would that do to my mind after it had streamed terabytes of human fears, thoughts and desires? Could it be the path downhill, the very process of turning into an Evil Overlord—becoming a demented monster who only cares about his power—and to build that up, he has to kill more and more every time, increasing his fix.

  I noticed Widowmaker's intense stare as he whispered something into his private channel; glimpsed the spiral of superior officers and their men tightening around me. Did they know something about it that I didn't? Were they afraid I might lose it and order them to collar and bring me another sacrificial victim?

  Sorry, guys. Sure I'd love nothing more than to become one of those tough nuts and finally be able to hold my head up high—whether walking down an unlit street at night or standing up to some bent cops. If anything, my life in AlterWorld had only strengthened that desire. But I wasn't prepared to pay this kind of price for it.

  If only I could, I'd decline this dubious status completely, even though—to be brutally honest—my high morality had little to do with it. More precisely, I didn't trust my own willpower. The temptation was just too much—and it's all too easy to justify your actions after the fact. I was pretty sure that if we dug deeper into the captured slave drivers' past, a good half of them undoubtedly merited capital punishment. And judging by some real human emotions finally showing in their faces, they understood it too.

  Unfortunately, I had no say in it. The game had no reverse options. The reward corresponded to my actions, so I had to grin and live up to it.

  I made a show of flinging the dagger back into the inventory. Mechanically I wiped my hands on my pants.

  Widowmaker with his keen instincts immediately ran up to me. "Sir, we have a Mao's Legacy clan representative here," and added in a low voice, "he's seen everything."

  I stared at his drawn face. Ignoring the first part of his report, I asked him, "You don't think it was the right thing to do, do you?"

  He knew immediately what I meant. "Every coin has two sides," he shrugged. "Would be stupid to think the Dark Pantheon's purpose is to give away freebies and save kittens from trees. Personally, I'm only too happy it happened. There's a limit to wagging your finger at them: bad boy, don't do it again—don't kill, don't torture, don't rape... And now our First Priest has a proper stick capable of bringing them to justice and beat some common sense into those who're still redeemable."

  I nodded. You can't do good without using your fists, familiar strategy. There is no light without shade, and the light itself came in all sorts of shades. The flare of a nuclear explosion that left nothing but gray human silhouettes scorched into the remaining walls, was that the ultimate good? And the darkness of a nuclear shelter concealing and saving lives, how would you define that?

  My train of thought was interrupted by the Mao clan's negotiator who'd approached silently, his back bent in a deep bow. This wasn't the nine obligatory ritual kowtows due to an Emperor, but neither was it a negligent barely polite nod. I responded with a cursory bosslike version of the same and raised a quizzical eyebrow.

  Not a muscle twitched on the face of Daxueshi Xiao Long who'd arrived to personally conduct the negotiations. Serpent had a perfect control of his emotions. Expressing his repeat pleasure at seeing his Russian brother, he faltered before finally side-stepping the diplomatic etiquette.

  "Sir Laith, I have become an unwilling witness of that rat Weidong's execution. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against it. That piece of elephant dung has long lost his mind. The only reason he was still walking this earth was because you couldn't deliver him a final death. But what I've just witnessed, I... I could have written it off as a hoax but Weidong has been perma for over two years, and now his status shows offline! Could you please tell me if this asswipe has died for good? Your artifact, it's not a fake, is it? One word from you would make hundreds of honest Chinese people very happy, lighting festive lanterns in their homes!"

  Overtaken with emotion, Serpent swung his hands around indicating the size of the happiness showering the unsuspecting heads of peace-loving Chinese workers. Then he froze, awaiting my answer, his stare fixed on my face, his nostrils widening, his sensitive fingers about to close around my wrists taking my pulse like some human lie detector. I could understand him. Any information about a weapon capable of killing an immortal was in the same league as a definite answer to the question of the existence of God.

  After a moment's hesitation, I told him the truth. Possibly, it was my subconscious attempt to wash my hands of the man's cruel punishment—my desire to explain that I wasn't his executioner. Because I wasn't! Because when you actually stab a living shaking body, staring into the victim's fading eyes and listening to the wheezing sound coming from his pierced lungs—that's unbearable.

  "I'm afraid he's alive."

  Everyone tensed up in surprise—not only the negotiator, but also the mercs who'd surrounded us in a demonstration of my protection and status.

  "He's alive," I repeated. "But if he had a choice, he'd probably prefer to die. Lloth has some truly limitless imagination, considering human flesh is so vulnerable and sensitive to pain. Especially facing an eternity."

  Something must have flickered in my eyes because the negotiator gulped and shrank back, his cheek twitching. "Have you... been there?"

  I retrieved the Spider Dagger and showed it to him. "A gift from Lloth's very own hands. Just don't think I came by it easily or even that I'm happy to have it."

  Subconsciously, Serpent swayed forward, his hand shaking greedily, betraying his desire to possess it. The dagger played along with me though, demonstrating its unyielding nature and divine fury. The blade's six legs swung to one side, snapping through the air and missing his greedy eyes by a millimeter.

  Again the negotiator shrank back, but there was no fear in his stare, only a thoughtful reverie. "May I... might I ask you to do me the favor of sellin
g me this item? I could give you a million gold for it."

  Seeing my skeptical smile, he hurried to add, "Three. Five. Oh, ten million, dammit!"

  Jesus. It looked like the shrewd court advisor already had a list of the dagger's next victims up and running. Given some energy and disingenuity, he might in a couple of years' time take over the whole cluster. No wonder his eyes were glinting—did it mean that my hunch was good?

  I shook my head. "My lord Daxueshi, I highly appreciate your offer. But I received this dagger from the hands of the Goddess herself and it is non-transferrable. Besides, you've just seen it doesn't want to be transferred. The dagger isn't what these negotiations are about. Shui Fong is, and their warriors are already tightening the noose around the castle. In view of which I would like to remind you of the purpose of your visit. I hope that this delay was caused by your impressionable nature and not by any preliminary agreement with our enemy."

  My voice grew cold as I said it but Serpent had already brought himself back in check, forcing all dreams of the almighty artifact back down to the bottom of his heart. He turned back into an emotionless diplomat with a mind as sharp as an analytical machine. His squinted glare studied the walls, the court, the prisoners, as if he was selecting a long-range target. Finally he nodded and rubbed his hands, looking well pleased.

  "Very well. I confirm the deal. But this situation allows us to play an interesting game with far-reaching consequences. I hope for your cooperation: after all, any weakening of Shui Fong's positions is in your interests, as well."

  I gave a cautious nod. His words made sense but I was wary of showing him my interest in anything at all. His plan was simple: to create an ambush by allowing Shui Fong members to break into the castle, then attack them with superior forces and take as many prisoners as we could. We signed an agreement cementing the deal with delayed change of ownership. Three hefty million dropped into my account, although the castle itself was to remain our property for another hour, granting the "Maoists" the right of free movement around the castle grounds. I felt uneasy as the first fifty steel-clad warriors burst out of the portal and began scurrying around the court looking for suitable ambush locations.