With her organics disabled, Cicada’s stride was a bit unnaturally jerky and unvarying, but that didn’t stop her from being fast… her legs were plenty long and while normally the implants worked with her muscles, they could drive the motion themselves. This tended to cause a lot of wear and tear in the form of stretched tendons and tiny muscle tears, but fortunately for her, numbness was a side effect of the stunning. She’d be in for a world of hurt when it wore off, but she was a cyborg… half her humanity had been ripped away from her on a cold rock circling a dark star, and she’d filled the wounds with metal and wire and plastic. She lived every day with her meat brain receiving signals from her meat body that screamed of pain and violation and absent limbs and organs.
There was nothing that could be done about this, not without losing natural sensation. Most cyborgs who were as far gone down the road to robot as she was went for the total conversion: brain in a can. If they weren’t in a physical line of work where they had to be mindful of injury, they’d numb everything, get a synthetic skin with artificial sensation routed through the neural interface and use biometric scanners to warn of damage and stress in the flesh beneath it, but that level of disconnect between body and brain made it hard for the latter to intuitively judge the limits of the former.
For someone with a rough and tumble lifestyle like Cicada, that would be suicide… and if she were the least little bit inclined towards laying down and dying, she would have done so on that dark planet so many years before.
Half of her humanity had been ripped away. She clung to what was left. She would be in for a world of hurt when the stunner wore off, but that would be only one world in a whole wide galaxy of pain. In the meantime, she led the charge down the hall, not looking back to make sure the men were keeping up and barely even aware of the pack on her back in which Handy was enfolded.
As the group from the Rebellion charged down the passages towards the security annex and detention cell where their crewmates were held, Fortunato was making his own way through the station.
The Meadows had been the first casino to attach itself to his original establishment, the Fickle Finger of Fate, and so it was relatively close to his personal suite. He knew the layout of the most secure areas of all the affiliated businesses… he’d made a point to memorize them.
The public areas that made up so much of the aggregation, he’d ignored. They had signs and maps and guides to point you where you wanted to go, and so when he made the rounds in his role as the celebrated founder he’d always just let himself be pointed to where he needed to be, or made use of the map consoles.
This had contributed to the image his colleagues in the Gaming Commission held of him as being out of touch with station goings-on and unaware of the bigger picture, but nothing could be further from the truth. He’d simply prioritized his brain space. There would have been no room to hold their secrets in his head if he’d filled it up with a bunch of publicly available information.
Following a map in his head that was every bit as accurate as the one that Galatea had forwarded to Cicada and Dick, he entered The Meadows proper through a back maintenance corridor that wasn’t even guarded.
He’d make it to the detention cell, and then his lovely Lilliana would be in for a world of pain.
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