Talya Kapersky
Talya ejected the empty magazine from her XP4, admiring the smoking corpse that she’d just created. For her first kill, it could have been a lot cleaner. Talya pondered that, if she hadn’t been sent to the UAC, the only kills she’d have on her record would have been pieces of paper with silhouettes drawn on them. Not that she would have minded. There was something to be said for a security post where nothing happened, and her odds of survival back in Moscow were significantly higher than in Mars City.
Then again, given where she was, Talya was silently thanking her old boss for demanding that she get a firearms certification. She still wasn’t quite used to the idea of firing her weapon at actual people, but at least understanding the basic fundamentals of her firearm would prove more than useful. She searched her uniform jacket for a fresh clip and found only a single, half-loaded one. Good enough, she mused to herself as she effortlessly slid the magazine into the pistol and flicked the slide-release lever. She safetied the gun and slipped it back into the holster on her hip. Now that the room was clear, it was time she got a better look at what she was dealing with.
The figure that lay on the floor in front of her almost looked human from a distance, but a quick shine of her flashlight showed otherwise. It was only slightly taller than she was, and wore only skin and spikes. She’d assumed it to be an elaborate bodysuit made of leather or similar, but the nature of the bullet wounds suggested that this was its actual skin. She touched one of the spikes and pricked a finger on the tip. The spike was sharper than her Leatherman knife, which was probably still in a drawer in her boss’s office, several million miles away. He’d needed it once, she recalled, and never remembered to give it back to her.
Talya checked herself over. The sleeve of her uniform jacket was now somewhat singed, but not any worse for wear. Her right hand had been nicked with the very smallest traces of soot, but aside from that, she’d managed to escape this scuffle with minimal injury. Her attention shifted back to the dead creature. She recalled it tossing aside a small box when she’d approached. This box was only a few steps away from where the creature was now bleeding out. It was small, and white, and bore a Red Cross emblem. Inside, it contained...almost nothing. A small scrap of gauze, a bit of paper tape, an empty morphine syrette. The only things untouched were a small MediPatch and a bottle of mild painkillers, which the previous holder had probably tried to open by smashing it against something. So those child-proof bottles were worth something after all, Talya mused to herself, taking both items.
