Chapter 3

A sudden impact brought the airship tram to a halt.

The warning alarm blared “Malfunction,” and the cabin shook violently. In the corner of her vision, flames exploded and licked at the rear of the car. Smoke curled around the metal body, and the shattered shell refracted fierce firelight in midair.

Fortunately, it wasn’t their compartment that had been hit. The airship tram was stranded on a high-altitude track, sliced in two by another train that had barreled into it, and now both were swaying dangerously, on the verge of falling.

“…You…”

The interior erupted into chaos, noise overwhelming. It took Anni a while to hear Lin’s voice. She lowered her head, reached over to adjust the cap he’d pulled low, and met those azure eyes. “What?”

“You,” he paused, “You didn’t have to shield me.”

When the crash happened, Anni had wrapped her arms around him. She didn’t look strong or tall—certainly not as formidable as an adult merman. Even knowing she was more than she appeared, Lin still found it uncomfortable and perplexing when she placed herself in front of him.

She touched the wound on his head. She couldn’t afford to lose a controllable baseline sample just yet, so she deftly replaced his cap. “Keep your head down. Don’t speak.”

“Please do not tamper with the air valve—please—”

The synthesized voice was suddenly cut off, replaced by a lazy, irreverent human voice. Someone thumped the microphone, muttered about “outdated equipment, obviously a dry run,” then, in full voice, shouted, “Space pirates! This is a stickup!”

A fresh wave of uproar swept the carriage. Some passengers drew weapons from their luggage.

On Sea-Blue Star, carrying defensive weapons wasn’t forbidden, though there were limits to their lethality. Anni had seen the prices of more destructive arms on the black market—they fetched a high price.

About half the value of Lin, perhaps.

As the shout faded, the pirates surged in like a tide. Their attire varied wildly, all First-Model Humans, mostly with partial cyborg bodies, bristling with firepower.

The first passenger to resist was blasted to the floor, a slick red carpet marking where he’d stood.

The sheer inhuman violence forced the whole carriage into a cold, uneasy silence. The tall, burly pirates rotated their prosthetic limbs, metal joints grinding. While one group collected star-network accounts, another scoured identities down to the bone—if this was a robbery, it was a meticulous one.

“Well, working hard, are we?” A figure sauntered in from the adjacent car.

It was the voice from the broadcast. Anni recognized it, watching in silence.

“Boss, we sure are!” one burly pirate responded, instantly sycophantic. His half-mechanical frame stretched two and a half meters, yet he bent low like a groveling dog. “We’re on it, searching everywhere for that—whatever you ordered, we’ll find it!”

“No need to try too hard, just go through the motions,” the newcomer replied with a yawn and a laugh. “For all we know, it’s already been chopped and sold. Can’t even keep track of their own heir, and they call themselves the Azure Dragon of the Star Sea? Bunch of salted fish at a council, if you ask me.”

“But boss, we took three hundred million from their family…”

The man shot him a glance, and the burly one snapped his mouth shut. Clearly, that wasn’t to be discussed.

While everyone else was paralyzed by the threat to their lives, Anni listened intently. The two of them sat toward the back; the pirates hadn’t reached them yet.

As she focused, Lin, for reasons unknown, grew unusually quiet as well.

“What is the Azure Dragon of the Star Sea?” Anni suddenly whispered.

Lin stiffened, meeting her eyes for a few seconds. Realizing she was only curious about the term, he replied slowly, “It’s a famous merman family.”

Anni didn’t pursue it further. She clutched Lin’s star-network watch, thinking there probably wasn’t a passenger here whose valuables could compare to a living merman. At that moment, a pair of black leather boots stopped in front of her.

She looked up to see the pirate chief, arms folded, standing before them. He looked like an ordinary human, though all sorts of electronic trinkets jingled from his person, clinking with every movement.

“Blue hair, huh…” The pirate chief clicked his tongue and reached to drag Lin from his seat. But before he could seize the long-haired man by the neck, let alone touch a single strand, a pale pink shadow barred his way.

“He can’t see strangers, and he doesn’t have a star-network account. I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t touch him,” Anni said politely.

The pirate chief sized her up—a young woman, tall enough to just reach 1.7 meters, average among First-Model Humans, with no visible cybernetic enhancements.

He gave a derisive chuckle, grabbing her coat collar with a gloved hand. “Are you joking with me? Girl, if you say don’t touch, I just won’t touch?”

She was yanked toward him.

One of his eyes was a normal deep brown; the other was artificial, pupil-less, with a shifting red glow in the glass—cold as a thermal sensor.

“Please don’t touch him,” Anni repeated.

The pirate chief laughed outright, one hand on his hip, head thrown back, nearly weeping with amusement. His voice rose with delight. “You—are you making demands of me?”

The last word had barely left his lips.

Anni’s hand flashed by his side, deftly plucking the laser gun hidden in a leather holster among his array of gadgets. Catlike, swift and silent, she flicked her wrist and pressed the muzzle—capable of firing a deadly beam—to his spine.

His laughter stopped abruptly, though a smile still lingered, tinged with a sudden chill. “Little girl, this isn’t a toy you can handle, but I’ll admit you’ve got guts.”

Unfazed, Anni stood before Lin, gripping the high-end weapon she’d only seen on the black market. She slid the muzzle up his back to his carotid artery.

“Is your brain replaced with prosthetics?” she asked blandly. “Throat, blood vessels—are they all original?”

Otherwise, she couldn’t fathom his brazenness.

“Boss!” At last, the thug extorting money elsewhere in the car noticed the commotion at the rear.

When the hulking cyborgs ran, the ground shook.

The man waved a hand, impatiently shooing his underlings away. Then, almost playfully, he rested his chin on the barrel, cheek pressed to the gun’s coating, and smiled. “Aside from this eye, the rest is all original. Tell me, who’s the man behind you? Stolen merchandise? Go ahead, tell me, and I’ll let you fire a shot—guaranteed satisfaction.”

“Merchandise?” Anni showed no reaction to the term, but answered earnestly, “He might be the father of my child.”

The man’s eyes widened, then he burst out laughing again, loud and unrestrained. “Ha! All the melodrama that’s gone out of fashion for centuries, and here you are—girl, you’re killing me—”

Bang.

The muffled blast of the laser shot was followed by a blooming rose of blood across both their faces.

Too close—Anni’s face was splattered with his blood.

Too close—in the blood, she saw his eyes flicker strangely.

He tilted his head back to show her the hole bored in his neck. A blackened wound, the flesh inside not only unburned but rapidly regenerating, healing before her eyes.

Anni froze.

He wasn’t a First-Model Human? …No, he was. A mutant, or someone genetically enhanced.

The man grinned triumphantly, seizing her wrist still gripping the gun. “Want to shoot again? Sweetheart, step aside. If you need a father for that child, maybe I’ll do.”

Anni stared at him for a few seconds, then said, “Now you might also be the father of my child. What’s your name?”

“Huh?”

Even this hardened pirate chief was momentarily stunned by her words. He wiped the blood from his face, considered for all of half a second, then answered with a grin, “Fine by me. You’re not bad-looking, and if I can become a father without any effort, that’s a blessing.”

His underlings looked on, faces twitching.

“I’m Anni. What’s your name?” she insisted.

“Zero One Three,” he replied, eyes crinkling. “Alright, sweetheart, let your husband take care of your old flame first.”

Zero One Three slid his hand into Anni’s palm, trying to reclaim the laser gun. Having realized it was useless against him, Anni seemed unbothered, but she still didn’t yield, gazing at him with unwavering, earnest intent. “I need to inspect the goods before I consider letting you handle him. If you’re unsatisfactory, I’ll keep him instead.”

He arched a brow, his smile deepening, taking her words as flirtation. “Inspect the goods? So eager?”

Anni nodded. “Right now.”

For once, he seemed taken aback. He studied her delicate face, the girl’s rapt attention fixed on the rapidly healing wound on his neck, as if bewitched.

The searing pain in his neck was her doing.

Zero One Three found himself vaguely excited and pleased. That crisp, decisive shot had genuinely entertained him. Chuckling, he abruptly scooped Anni up, smearing blood from his cheek onto the clean side of her face.

The metallic tang spread as he smeared crimson across her skin.

“Fine, then. Let’s go somewhere private and take our time inspecting. Two hours—” his artificial eye’s display ticked down, “—will that be enough to leave you speechless?”

He carried Anni off, his body clanking with accessories, and strode into the only sealed cockpit.

“How long do you think she’ll last—two hours?” The cockpit door closed, and the remaining pirates inside the car resumed their work, chatting idly.

“You wish. Our boss spends just a few minutes before he kills someone. He’s not looking for lovers—he’s a killer, a beast…ugh, I shouldn’t say that out loud.”

“Stop saying what we’re all thinking. So, what about the guy?”

“Check his identity, then kill him. What else? You really think that girl’s coming out alive? If she does, that ‘old flame’ of hers definitely can’t be left alive…”

—

The cockpit door slid shut. The original operator lay dead on the floor, gone for some time.

The console was dark, shut down completely. Beside the power switch sat a pitch-black briefcase.

Zero One Three set Anni atop the flat display, right over the words “No Signal.” She watched his face loom close.

He sniffed at the blood clinging to her, eyes forever crescent-shaped and smiling. Deftly, he pulled off her black casual jacket and lifted her fitted shirt to her waist.

His hand had barely touched her when Anni’s slender, pale fingers slipped free from his grip and suddenly clamped around his throat.

A flash of suffocation shot through his mind.

Zero One Three wasn’t angry; if anything, he was even more exhilarated. The tighter her grip, the more delighted he seemed, a hint of pleasure coloring his hoarse voice. “So fierce, sweetheart.”

Her fingers dug into the wound at his neck.

The injury, fatal by any measure, was now just a shallow surface cut—no ordinary human could do that. She peeled back the nearly healed skin, murmuring, “Mutant…”

“Yes, mutant,” Zero One Three replied nonchalantly. “Never seen one? Of course you haven’t. Mutants violate interstellar law; we’re nothing like those who ascend by gene boosters. My kind are to be exterminated, wanted from birth—ah.”

He hadn’t finished saying “wanted criminal” when Anni’s fingers tried to tear open the freshly healed flesh.

The exquisite pain made him gasp, bending to pin her against the console. His shoulders trembled slightly—pain, or laughter, it was hard to tell.

Zero One Three wrapped an arm around her waist, his voice unsteady with pain but tinged with laughter. “You’re spicy, aren’t you—”

Suddenly, Anni hugged him tightly. She didn’t understand the compliment, but her body language was clear—she was delighted at the chance to collect a new sample.

From beneath her fitted shirt, several sticky tendrils writhed out, sliding through the split at her waist, emerging from her human skin.