Yoko felt a stillness in the world around her. She was at a 
momentary point of surfacing: seconds, perhaps a pair of 
minutes, separated her from renewed turmoil. Zalem now knew 
her location for certain, and though it would not alter her 
goals or the means to achieve them, it did serve as a 
momentary distraction, like the sensation that lingers even 
with anesthesia.

With a thought-laden mind, she shouldered her weapon and 
retraced her steps. The odor of death, both biological and 
biomechanical, ran through the air. She looked impassively 
down at the now-shapeless forms that had once been the 
rainments of living beings. Curiously, she caught herself 
wishing she could feel for them, extend them a bit of pity or 
honor. She crossed the catwalk and descended the flight of 
stairs to the ground floor, and from there made her way 
towards the doorway she had entered through.

A few paces before it, she paused. Her eyes detected something 
outside, something that was trying to camouflage its own 
existence from her. A bounty hunter? An android puppet of 
Zalem?

"Open door so I walk inside..."

Yoko stepped out through the door. In an instant, she was 
washed in death-white light from spotlights and floodlights 
all around her. The sudden shift, from the dark solemnity of 
Nova's laboratory to the radiation of the outside, dazzled her 
for a moment.

"Close my eyes, find my place to hide..."

She guessed that this must be Zalem's security forces: the 
bounty hunters she had seen were too motley a lot to organize 
so fast and so effectively. As her eyesight returned, Yoko saw 
a flock of Netmen encircling the building, led by two heavier 
mecha.

"And I shake as I take it in..."

One mecha was blaring charges, or propaganda, or protocol. 
Yoko couldn't have cared any less, it was merely the chirping 
of a locust in the face of a sandstorm. She licked her lips and 
cleared her mind for battle.

"Let the show begin."
--
In the center of a spot-lit stage stood the angel of darkness. 
She was a black swath through a white background: the 
tightness of her attire made her feet, legs and hips quite 
visible. Just above her waist, her silhouette 
was less revealing. Her black jacket was open, like wings 
unfurled, camouflaging her torso; likewise, the sleeves hid the 
outlines of her arms. Her hair was free, and it enveloped her 
head; but four lines of metal across her face hinted at 
obscured topography.

With their target locked and static, the Netmen turned on 
ultrasonic range finders. Automatically, they switched to low-
differential infrared cameras as a way of targeting the brain or 
central nervous system. This proved to be a useless act, as 
their quarry was at exactly the same temperature as the night 
air around her. The Deckman, the quasi-self-aware sergeant of 
the Netmen, overrode their change. Alarmingly, switching back 
to visible light showed their target was gone. The entire unit, 
in effect, had blinked.

The Deckman issued a group command to scan the area, using 
visible light at 10x illumination, for the suspect. Within a 
quarter of a second, Netman 02-15 had located the target at a 
range of 0.000 meters.

"Open my eyes! Just to have them closed again!"

With first two fingers and thumb of her right hand, Yoko 
crushed and severed the Netman's face from his body. Her arm 
raised, she followed the strike by jamming her elbow down 
through the Netman's body, cleaving the metal and shattering 
its computers to the midsection. The two missile batteries on 
either side of the android fell to the ground, useless.

The appearance of the target inside the Netman formation 
presented a strategic difficulty for the Deckman, as all the 
robots were armed with short-range missile batteries. While 
loss of life and property was a feasible option for the Factory, 
self-destruction of Factory property would have to be diverted 
to a different level of decision making than the Cylinder was 
capable of performing. As rapidly as possible, the Deckman 
opened an access channel with Melchizedek, its supervisory 
computer.

Yoko's rampage continued, for the moment uninhibited and 
unopposed. She turned around and hooked her arms up 
underneath the missile batteries of another Netman. She pulled 
her forearms up as close to her chest as she could manage, then 
raised her elbows up, prying and then severing the batteries.

"Well on my way, but on my way to where I've been..."

She grasped the literally disarmed Netman around the neck and, 
wielding it like a club, smashed another into smithereens.

"It follows me as it takes me in its fog..."

Yoko allowed herself a smirk.

"I twist away as I give this world the nod."

She reached to seize a fleeing Netman, twisted its torso 180 
degrees around, and bent its head down around to its chest.

In the control mecha, the Deckman acknowledged a 
communication from Melchizedek. Missiles were too dangerous 
within the confines of the security force superorganism; 
lasers, while less effective and not immune from drawbacks, 
would suffice. The Deckman responded with a communication 
of its own. The Netmen were to suspend use of their missile 
batteries and to deploy lasers from within their chassises. 
The order of the unit was restored as the Netmen 
simultaneously allowed their batteries to fall. One by one, 
pulse lasers emerged from over their "shoulders" and prowled 
around for their target.
--
Atop the mecha, Yoko slid her hands beneath the edge of the 
riveted upper hatch. A meter below her was the central 
"intelligence" of the entire unit, the Deckman.

"Open door so I walk inside..."

Straining and grunting, she peeled away the hatch's cover. One 
by one, the rivets sprang from their housings with a musical 
tintinnabulation.

"Swallow me...as the pain..subsides..."

As she opened the cover beyond the halfway mark, Yoko reached 
and pulled the Cylinder out, its face jammed up into her 
armpit. She casually threw it away and slipped down into the 
mecha's turret.

Monitors and keyboards surrounded her like panes of glass in an 
antique lantern. Some were views of the outside world in 
different wavelengths of light. Some were auguring with the 
data and feedback of the Netmen. Some, for no apparent reason, 
were turned off or static-laden.

"And I shake as I take it in..."

"I mean, really, Yoko. Who in their right mind would have 
designed a robot like this without a contingency plan for 
takeover by hostile forces?"

She swept her hand across a trackball, and several crosshaired 
screens centered on the partner heavy mecha.

"Let the show begin."

The howitzer erupted in flame, and the reports as it fired 
reverberated through the night streets. Each blast fired a 
densematter shell into, and through, the now-opponent mecha. 
Its body was riddled with 50-millimeter-wide holes, and 
massive structural failure began almost at once. It staggered, 
like a fetal bird suddenly given life, as the contrapositives to 
the rules of gravity and mechanics let it slide towards decay 
and thermodynamic equilibrium; then, in sorry death throes, it 
fell to the ground.

"Open my eyes! Just to have them closed once again!"

Without their intelligence base, and without any iota of their 
own, the Netmen had taken to milling about as a way of 
fulfilling their last directive to acquire the target. Their 
motion looked like water, like honeybees around a hive. Yoko 
switched to her 3-megawatt turret laser.

"Don't want control! As it takes me down and down and down 
again."

She fired a barrage of laser blasts into the pack of Netmen. 
Shots tore through computers, sensory apparati, even into the 
jettisoned missile batteries. There, the heat was sufficient to 
detonate the solid fuel of the missiles, then the explosive 
warheads themselves. In seconds, the entire platoon had been 
reduced to scrap metal and flames.

Yoko laughed with dark joy at her triumph. Her eyes were 
captivated by the sight of a fire, burning in three different 
wavelengths.

"Is that the moon, or just a light that lights this dead end 
street?"

From there, she tilted her cameras upwards to the sky above. 
Zalem floated there, parasite suckling from the Scrapyard.

"'Lowliness is young ambition's ladder, whereto the climber-
upward turns his face; But when he once attains the upmost 
round, he then unto the ladder turns his back, looks in the 
clouds, scorning the base degrees by which he did ascend.' 
Shakespeare, Julius Caesar."

"Is that you there, or just another demon that I meet?"

The mecha staggered off through the streets of the town, 
awkward on its two legs. Like a wooden horse--Trojan, 
rocking, the similes are limitless--it coursed towards the 
nearest tube.

"The higher you are, the farther you fall,
"The longer the walk, the farther you crawl,
"My body, my temple, this temple it tilts,
"Step into the house that Jack built."
--
Scrapbook:

Where passion met precision, so was born the white world of 
violence. She meditated on it, let it soak into her breast, with 
her arms drawn across her chest and her eyes closed. Focus and 
fury would give birth to destruction.

Her eyes jolted open, and a split second later the electronic 
timer on Yoko's wrist beeped once. Conscious thought left her 
as she drove her fists through the plasteel dome over her 
isolation booth. It shattered, and she slipped up and through 
the shards without giving them attention. She knew what her 
prey would look like, the expression on its face, and how to 
eliminate it even before she located it; and as she did, she 
swung her legs up from the booth with her right hand on the 
cover's edge, her left arm locked and extended from her body, 
hand raised.

Bullets flew out of the weapon carefully concealed in her arm, 
striking the two attendants in the faces. Projectile weapons 
are of little use in zero gravity, as even trained warriors find 
it difficult to position and fire them; her bullets were not 
even designed to penetrate. Instead, their hollow ceramic tips 
shattered and released tear gas, only enough to stun the prey. 
The tear gas did not disperse, but instead formed a tiny ball in 
the eyes of the targets; nor did it respond to wiping or evasion, 
but clung to skin like a teardrop itself.

Yoko had been slowly rotating up towards the ceiling of the 
chamber. As she touched, her right leg caught her, and brought 
her spinning to an end, while her left leg kicked out and 
launched her towards her targets. From her body, she withdrew 
two knives. She stuck them into her prey at an angle, and 
snapped her wrist as she did so.

Gleefully, she slowed; and so, an aspect of her training in Das 
Haus, one that had seemed insignificant, played a role dear to 
her in her chosen path. How many times had she practiced on 
targets larger than herself? How often had she felt the change 
in inertia as her mass encountered another? How long had she 
worked on developing the ability to turn her own force into a 
foe's body?

The three were pushed against the wall. Gouts of electricity, 
strong enough to damage human or cybernetic bodies, crackled 
along the knife's blades and into the two victims. The human in 
the pair died instantly, while the cyborg was incapacitated. 
Yoko swung him around her, and drove her open palm against 
the side of his head.

The blow felt like speech: not in the sense of sound, though the 
reverberation was almost sonorant. It was speech in the sense 
of communication. A message of unadulterated hate, delivered 
to the distinguishing feature of the human, the brain. The Hertza 
Haeon slithered through the armor of the cyborg's head, 
agitated it, and then ruptured its contents.

Scorning the two wasted lives behind her, Yoko seized the 
handrail her targets had been making for and propelled herself 
along the ship's y-axis--the most apt term for it, as there was 
neither "up" nor "down" per se in zero gravity. She glanced 
overhead, and saw a fellow member of her team.

"Stevens! Status?"

"I'm OK, no idea about anyone else."

"How far to rendezvous?"

"Ten meters for me, and closing."

Stevens and Yoko emerged into an arterial tunnel, running along 
the dorsal portion of the Leviathan. Moving anterior, towards 
the pair, came eight other members of the group, half-floating 
and half-swimming their way between holdfasts and lighting 
fixtures. All but one in the rear were dressed in Martian 
civilian clothes; the odd man was dressed as a steward, and 
carried a large trunk with him.

"Head count. Yoko."

"Stevens."

"Olsen."

"Ng."

"Chin."

"Smith."

"Olsgaard."

"Wick."

"Davies."

"Horton. All accounted for, stern secured."

"On we go. Wick, help Horton with the gear." Yoko turned 
herself and led the group towards the cockpit. At the door, a 
large metal affair in red with "NO ADMITTANCE" in yellow on 
it, she kicked a rhythm into the side. The door slid horizontally 
and the ten filed in.

Two bodies were slumped over at the controls. Bertram was 
glancing over the monitors in the cockpit. A second cyborg was 
staring at nothing, though three leads ran from his face into 
the main computer. "Nihls," said Yoko earnestly, "what's our 
status?"

"Pfft. Some Terran dumbass wrote the operating system while 
he was on drugs. Gimmie 10 more seconds."

She glanced at her watch. "That's within our margin. Hi, 
Bertram, how'd everything go?"

"Like clockwork, honey." He floated over and they kissed 
briefly, both clutching at the overhead lighting, before Nihls 
broke their reverie. "We're good to go, Yoko. Overriding the life 
support codes...revive from stasis on your command."

Yoko nodded, and pushed herself over to the console. Her 
comrades had long since opened the trunk, and were changing 
into dun-colored kevlar-ceramite armor fatigues. She whistled 
to them, and they forbore any more action. Yoko again checked 
the time, reached for the public address microphone, then 
counted down the last five seconds aloud.

At zero, Nihls' face twitched, indicating some action in the 
mother computer; then Yoko switched on the microphone and 
spoke: "Ladies and Gentlemen, your attention please: this 
Leviathan-class evacuation ship is now the property of the 
Rockinghorse Liberation Army and the Free Planet of Mars. All 
are asked to join us in our mission of liberation and 
restoration of a free government. If you do not wish to join, 
your lives will be spared and your stasis pods will be ejected 
into space for retrieval by the Red Cross. You have three 
minutes to decide."...
--
..."This is renegade ship Sar-ha-Azaz, I am the Warrior Yoko. 
Paris Spaceport, are you there?"

"Roger, Sar-ha-Azaz, this is Geoffrey Heinz, Paris Spaceport. 
You are cleared for arrival at port AA, an entourage will meet 
you there."

"Copy, Paris Spaceport. Proceeding to double-alpha." She turned 
to Nihls. "OK, we've got our clearance. Let's go."

Far above the asteroid's surface, tiny capsules, tethered to the 
ground by carbon monofilament lines, awaited ferries from 
other planets bringing food and supplies in exchange for raw 
mineral ores from the asteroid. The commandeered Leviathan, 
moving like a whale among minnows, aimed for the closest one 
and eased up alongside it.

The passengers aboard the Sar-ha-Azaz had no tangible 
commodities to exchange; instead, they brought with them 
philosophy, and ways to capitalize upon it. Information has no 
price, but the buyers are often willing to pay exorbitantly for 
it.

Yoko, Bertram and Jonah were met at the coupling pod by a 
middle-aged man in an official uniform. He was 
accompanied by two guards, armed with what appeared to be 
tank-mounted flamethrowers. "How do you do, lady and 
gentlemen. I'm Geoff Heinz, deputy director of the Paris 
Interplanetary Spaceport. Glad to have you here."

"White in battle." Yoko placed her right fist over her chest and 
clenched it twice, mimicking the beating of a human heart. "I'm 
Warrior Yoko, this is my fiancee Warrior Bertram, and this is 
Jump Jonah."

"Pleased to meet you, young man."

"Hi." He was a anemic teenager, who crassly shook hands with 
Heinz. "I joined up when the RLA took over the ship. It was the 
right decision."

"Very well, good to see a man of conviction. Come along then." 
Heinz led the group to the back of the capsule, where they 
crammed into an elevator. The door closed behind them and the 
elevator began its course down to the planet's surface.

Yoko turned as best as she could to face Heinz. "So what's the 
hegemony's position?"

"Mixed would be the best way to describe it, I suppose," he 
replied. "Officially, we're proclaiming our sympathy to your 
cause while maintaining our neutrality, but sympathy's where 
the smart money is. Atena's all but up in arms, and even here in 
Newcastle a significant minority is calling for open armed 
rebellion. If you can keep up the momentum for a few weeks, 
the odds are that the entire belt will be up in arms. After that, 
Terra will have no way to communicate with anyone in the gas 
giants and will be in no position to negotiate. If I can ask, 
what's the situation on the front lines?"

"Some losses, some victories. In truth, this ship and the Sar-
ha-Gadri have been keeping as silent as possible so that Terra 
wouldn't realize we're here. Mostly, we've been going 
off of the same secondhand reports you have. My turn.
What do you think is the biggest hindrance to popular 
support? Loyalty?"

"No, loyalty is more or less a thing of the past," said Heinz. 
"It's fear. Did you hear about what happened on Phobos, with 
the destruction of Turnovac?"

"Turnovac? I don't recall."

"Yoko," said Bertram, "was that that garbled intelligence 
report we got off of the wire? That mentioned somewhere on 
Phobos."

"That's right," Yoko said. She struggled to recall the facts.
"One of our sources  hadn't coded a message properly, and
the wire service it ran on expurgated the thing as well. Didn't
it happen sometime after the seizing of the Leviathans?"

"As a reaction to it," answered Heinz gloomily. "The Terrans 
have some kind of polymorphic superweapon that's able to 
camouflage itself as a cyborg, then goes berserk and starts 
killing people by any means available to it. We even call it a 
'Berserker'. Turnovac was where the first one was encountered. 
It indescriminantly killed over 100 people before enough high 
voltage was pumped into it to fry the computer systems."

He gestured behind his shoulder to the two guards. "That's why 
these men are packing pressurized liquid helium. It's unwieldy 
to control, but the Berserker can't adapt to the change in 
temperature fast enough and freezes. You break the damn thing 
up into pieces, isolate them, and pray that they can't 
reassemble or replicate. So far, we've been lucky. The only one 
we've had has been destroyed."

"That so?" said Bertram. "I'd like to see that."

"My pleasure. We can do that for you."

Two minutes later the small group had arrived at the main 
level of the Paris spaceport. Heinz kept them from 
disembarking, and instead pressed his hand against three of 
the buttons on the elevator and recited a numerical code. The 
elevator continued descending, and presently opened to a 
warehouse-sized room, filled with boxes marked only by bar 
codes. A few security guards, likewise armed with the blue 
tanks, and some stock clerks were present, but there was 
little suggestion of urgency or activity.

"Nice little smuggling outfit you've got here," said Yoko.

"Please, Warrior. This is no time for semantics." Heinz strode 
briskly out of the elevator and motioned the party to follow 
him. "This is our beta-quarantine area. We are at present 
about three hundred meters below the surface, as deep as is 
convenient to go. We've turned part of this area into a morgue 
for the Berserker. Before we were certain it was dead," he 
grunted, bending over to fumble with a conventional lock, "we 
couldn't afford to take chances."

The room was a small supplies closet on one side of the 
warehouse. Inside were two scientists in white lab coats 
hunched over a square plasteel container that reached to knee-
height. They soundlessly stepped away from their work at the 
observers' entry.

The three freedom fighters could only marvel. The pieces 
before them were clearly metallic, full to bursting with wires 
and plating and sensors, and yet there was something wholly 
biological about them. The curves were too smooth and 
asymmetric to be unnatural. Sections were defined by 
gradients instead of by lines. The shapes that they could pick 
out were clearly humanoid, not merely by design, but as if they 
were another phase of human evolution.

Bertram turned to Jonah. "You see that, son? That's the face of 
the Antichrist."