The Year's Best Military & Adventure SF: Volume 4 by David Afsharirad

Author:David Afsharirad [Afsharirad, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781625796493
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 2018-06-05T04:00:00+00:00

So here’s a thing or two you might not know about the Cutters. Most everyone knows we call them that because they have this really disconcerting practice of grafting a huge, wickedly sharp blade onto one or more of their various appendages. Cutters are, of course, bipedal, and vaguely humanoid shaped because of it, but the size and shape of these cutting blades meant that they didn’t necessarily look humanoid all the time.

What we found on that hellish trek through the bowels of the Cutter ship was that they really seemed to like using those blades. In fact, they preferred melee combat to shooting. To be honest, that worked in our favor more than once, as they tended to put down their own energy weapons in order to watch Aiella and wait for their opportunity to match blades with her. Part of the reason for that might have been the tight confines of the ship’s passages, but it really did seem like they were queuing up for their turn. I started holding my fire and just basically covering her, keeping them from picking us off from the rear. Not that they seemed inclined to do that. They could have taken us out ten times over, but the ones I saw just watched us, their six-eyed stare bright as she moved like a scythe through the ranks of challengers.

I don’t speak Cutter, but damn me if they didn’t sound like they enjoyed watching her. You might almost say that they admired her. Me? She scared the living piss out of me . . . but she was on my side.

At one point, several of them were awaiting us in an open area that served as a large junction. For the first time, two of the Cutters attacked at once. Aiella severed one of their bladed forearms. Like something you’d see in a holo, it fell in front of me while a spray of apparently arterial blood made a perfect arc through the air. I kicked the limb out of the way and felt the hot patter of the blood on my face. Perfect. Disgust roiled through me, and when one of the waiting Cutters managed to slide by Aiella without getting sliced open, I struck more by instinct than anything else. I brought the butt of my energy rifle up and smashed it roughly in the direction of the creature’s face. It reeled backward, tripped on the severed blade arm, and fell to the ground. It let out a howl of pain, and I looked down to see that the blade arm had cut the back of its leg, just above the foot. On a human, it would have caught the Achilles tendon. Essentially, the Cutter had just hamstrung himself on his buddy’s severed arm. Apparently they kept those blade arms insanely sharp. I’d been lucky not to have severed my toes!

Howler at my feet wasn’t done, though, despite being flat on its back. It swung its own blade arm up over his head to try and tangle in Aiella’s dancing footwork.

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