Ninefox Gambit (The Machineries of Empire, #1)

by Yoon Ha Lee

They collided with Captain Kel Miyaud’s company on the way, a terrible mess with too many people clogging the passage. After some confusion, Miyaud gave way, which necessitated tucking away Kel in side-corridors and sad empty domiciles. Hren didn’t hear the shouts until they were about to pass through the reinforced breach. She was damned if the pale gauzy stuff the Nirai had put up could possibly filter out toxics, and for that matter the bridgework looked too delicate. Still, her orders were to go forward, so she marched obligingly forward, and – It happened between one footstep and the next. It didn’t hurt at first. There it came, that bizarre prickly speckling of the air she’d heard about with the corrosion gradient, but it wasn’t – When Hren fell, it hurt. She smelled blood and shit, heard things clattering. Something landed hard against two of her vertebrae. Her face was reflected smudgily in the floor. Most of her nose was missing. Blood all over. The world was quiet and slow, and her thinking was calm. Clear. For once there was no music in her head. She couldn’t hear much, not even the shouts from earlier. Her nose wasn’t the only thing missing. Her arms were gone, too. And her legs, except a bit of her right thigh. Her suit had injected her with coagulants, painkillers, sprayed her with temporary skin, but that wasn’t going to save her or anyone else. Hren coughed out a laugh, but she was sliding out of consciousness, and that wasn’t a horrible plan. She was only ...