“Cut off The Head and The Body will die.”

Nine words. One for each finger he had left. The edict was simple. Its execution would not be.

Lem Arciv swung his arms back and forth to test out the armor. It was perfect. To the untrained eye, and even to one with whatever training would be necessary to distinguish such a thing, it looked exactly like the red-and-black worn by The Cells. The only thing that betrayed his true identity was the fourth finger on the glove of his right hand, hanging empty and limp.

Despite his training telling him otherwise, his instinct made him hold his breath as he walked between the two guards, nodding a “Hello,” all three of them too busy to bother with actual words. The easy part was over. The fun part was about to begin.

The inside was exactly how the schematics described it. One hall running off to his right dead-ended at a large metal door. He knew from the briefing that the keypad was also tied in to a biometric scan, something that wouldn’t be fooled by the armor. As he approached the door, another Cell joined him from another perpendicular hall.

“Ya catch the game last night?”

Great. This one’s social. No, he hadn’t seen the game. And no, he wouldn’t be able to convincingly fake the accent. He reached over and put a hand on the back of the man’s neck and with a quick flick of his wrist, snapped it. The sound was deafening in the echo chamber the bare hall created.

Not much time to lose, Lem dragged the limp corpse of the Cell to the keypad. He removed the man’s glove and used his finger to type out the combination.

Eight. One. Eight. One. One. One. Five. Five. Four. One--

“Hey!” Shit. Another Cell sprinted down the hall toward Lem and his new companion, weapon drawn. Lem used his left hand to swing the Cell-shaped deadweight around to absorb the first shot. The smell of burnt flesh was strong. He used his right to unholster his own custom-built pistol. The Cell continued to fire, almost blindly, I thought these assholes were trained, at Lem. The ones that came close opened new holes in the corpse. Lem used the body’s shoulder to steady his shot.

PEW!

One shot, right between the Cell’s eyes, and he collapsed in a heap.

Lem quickly turned back to the keypad. The dead Cell in his arms was beginning to smell like a cannibal had burned dinner, but he still had need of him. Damn, where was I?

Four. Nine. One. Nine. One. Seven. One. Seven. Six. One. Six. One. Zero. What the hell kind of combination is this? One. Three. Three. Two. Zero. One. Two.

The door slid open before he could force the Cell to hit “2” one last time.

“Seriously?” he asked no one in particular, even though he was face-to-face with a third Cell.

“I heard gunfi--”

The rest of that word was lost in a low gurgle as Lem, lightning-quick, grabbed the goon by the throat with his left hand and started choking the life out of him. Another Cell came out of nowhere, but Lem was too fast for him.

PEW!

The body count hit four as the Cell in his left hand expired just as the one he’d just shot collapsed in a heap. Lem went to drop his arm back down, but the plates in the armor had locked into place. Lem knew better than to panic. He also knew better than to think that he was going to last much longer lumbering around in this shit. He needed to find a hiding place, and he needed it now. He found what he needed when he spotted the universal symbol for “Restroom” three doors down. He opened the door,

PEW! PEW!

and dropped the two Cells relieving themselves into a watersaving communal waste disposal receptacle. Asshole makes his guards piss into a trough! He kicked open the door to the last stall and worked frantically to pull the plates apart. He used his teeth to remove his left glove to improve his dexterity. He managed to slide the breastplate down far enough to dislodge the shoulder piece, and the rest of the armor came off relatively quickly. His bodysuit would make sneaking around so much easier. And stealth was going to be key now that he’d already dispatched six Cells.

He propped one of the trough corpses up on the commode and dragged his companion over and laid his head in a compromising position. For no reason. He just thought it was funny.

He pushed his way back into the hall, surprised to find himself alone. Using the wall for cover, he inched toward the corner. He swung around, gun drawn, only to find another abandoned hallway. Surely, word had spread by now that someone had infiltrated The Heart. So where were the alarms?

BWOMP! BWOMP! BWOMP!

Oh, there they are.

They began pouring into the hall from both sides. Dozens of Cells, marching in formation, holes getting shot through them before they could even turn to face Lem. Cannon fodder. The body count was climbing, but so was the internal temperature of his weapon, and he couldn’t risk it overheating at a time like this. Lem knew it was time to use the only other weapon he had at his disposal. His body.

Just kidding, it was the pile of weapons left behind by the mountain of corpses he’d created. He threw the straps of two rifles over his shoulders and grabbed two more in his hands. He looked for all the Seven Known Worlds like the star of one of the ancient action “movies” that his ancestors would have enjoyed.

He unloaded into the stream of faceless, nameless, useless soldiers that came at him with both barrels. They fell in scores, then they fell in grosses, then they fell silent. He’d had to discard one of their rifles and replace it with another, but the hall had turned into an armory. The smell was nearly unbearable. Burnt flesh mingled with the rifles’ ozone stench and Lem had to squeeze the grips of the rifles so hard his hands hurt just to take his mind off of it. Laser burns are a much more humane way to kill than the bullets they talked about in the history books, but dead bodies still smell like dead bodies. Especially when their numbers were approaching four digits long.

He stepped over the piles and into the next room. Every door he breached brought him closer to The Head. He only hoped they were right. “Cut off The Head and The Body will die.” If they were wrong, things would get worse before they got better.

But Lem Arciv wasn’t paid to think about the political ramifications of what he was doing. He was paid for the skills he’d learned as a Fist. The Cells were expendable. You could always train Cells. Well, “train” was probably generous. You could always find Cells. Somebody, somewhere was always poor enough or desperate enough to put on some armor and go off to die for The Body. Fists. There were only ever two of those.

The Governing Body Of The Seven Known Worlds started as a way to bring together the wildly disparate peoples that inhabited them. It was also a prohibitively obnoxious name for a government. It was pretty quickly shortened to The Body. Its leader began calling himself The Head, and the anatomical metaphors just never stopped. There was The Face, the public spokesperson for The Body. The Fists were The Head’s personal bodyguards. The Cells made up The Skin, the first line of The Body’s defense. There was even a Pancreas, though most people had no idea what his job was.

And then there was The Heart. The Heart was the center of The Body. Not the literal center, because there were Seven Known Worlds, spread across galaxies, all with their own rotations and revolutions, and really, how do you find a geographical center in space? It was the center of government, what would have been called a “capitol” centuries ago, but really it was a fortress. It kept The Head away from those who would do him harm. People like Lem.

While I was talking about Body stuff, Lem killed like a hundred more Cells. It was getting pretty repetitive, so I went off on a little tangent. That’s probably going to happen a lot, so get used to it.

Somewhere along the way, Lem had been grazed by a shot. A lucky shot. It didn’t hurt, the wound had instantly cauterized itself, and it wasn’t anywhere serious, just across his left shoulder, well away from anything vital. But it was still a stark reminder that if you give a thousand monkeys a thousand weapons, one of them might figure out which direction the shooty end should be pointed.

He leaned up against a wall to catch his breath. He tried not to think of what he was doing as genocide. It was war. These were trained soldiers. Well, they were soldiers. Well, they had guns and there were a lot of them. He checked the core temp on his own weapon and, satisfied with what he found, he dropped one of the rifles onto the pile of bodies to free up his hand.

His custom weapon just felt right. The developers had customized it to his unique grip. There was an extra ridge between his third and fifth fingers, where there should have been a fourth. That helped steady the weapon in his hand. He could use any weapon in the Seven Known Worlds, and he was proficient with them as well, but this... this was no weapon. This was the part of his hand that was missing. He stepped out of the room and into the hall.

PEW!

Next Chapter: Gary