BioShock: Rapture

Bill stood up, walked over to Karlofsky—together they looked through a window into the mailroom of Jet Postal. The shadowy, indirectly lit room was scattered with undelivered mail. And with bodies—several bodies, men in maintenance coveralls lying about on the floor, motionless, pasted to the deck with their own blood. They seemed to have been hacked up by some sharp blade.

Bill sighed, stomach contracting at the sight. “Yeah. I don’t see that splicer. Maybe…”

Karlosky nodded, musingly patting the breach of his tommy gun. “Not good workers, those splicers,” he said dryly. “They go crazy; they kill. A man does not get job done when busy being crazy and killing.” After a moment, he shrugged and added, “Unless killing is the job.”

“Well, I’m going to make a list of cracks and leaks and get a team in here with a constable escort,” Bill said. “We can’t risk…” He broke off, staring at a small figure in a pinafore, a child, moving through the shadows of the Jet Postal sorting room. Steel boots clanked; a great metal shape loomed up behind her.

A Big Daddy and a Little Sister. She skipped along, a large syringe in one hand, singing a song they couldn’t clearly hear. Something about “Mr. Bubbles” and “the angels.” Her enormous chaperone stumped along close behind her.

Bill and Karlosky watched with an uneasy mix of fascination and revulsion as the little girl squatted by a man’s awkwardly sprawling, facedown corpse and jammed the syringe into the back of his neck. She did something with the syringe, chirruping happily to herself, and it began to glow with extracted ADAM.

Bill stepped closer to the window and bent over to peer at the Little Sister. “Karlosky—is that Mascha?”

Karlosky groaned to himself. “Yes, maybe—maybe not. All Little Sisters look much alike to me.”

“If it’s her—I owe it to her folks to get her back.”

“We tried, Bill! You spoke to many people—no one would help.”

“That’s why I’ve got to do this myself, right now…”

“Please, don’t argue with Big Daddy, Bill—oh—there is splicer!”

A spider splicer was creeping upside down on the ceiling over the Little Sister. He had a hooked blade in one hand. He was chattering to himself—the intervening pane of glass muted the sound.

The Little Sister stood up, turned toward the Big Daddy—and then a blade spun past her, whipping through the air like a boomerang. The blade narrowly missed her head—so close it cut a bit of her hair, which drifted prettily away. The weapon circled the room and returned to the splicer, who caught the blade handle neatly, cackling as he did it.

The Little Sister’s guardian reacted instantly. The Big Daddy stepped into a pool of light, raised a rivet gun to aim at the ceiling, and fired a long strafe of rivets at the spider splicer. The gun nailed its target at such close range it cut the splicer in half. The spider splicer’s lower half and its upper half clung to the ceiling… separately, by feet and hands, the two halves gushing blood. Then they let go, and the halves of the splicer dropped heavily to the floor.

The little girl chirruped happily.

“You see?” Karlosky whispered. “If you interfere with her—you end up like him!”

“I’ve got to try,” Bill said. “Maybe if you distract him, I can grab her…”

“Oh shit, Bill, you son of bitch bastard!” Karlosky said, and muttered another imprecation in Russian. “You get me killed!”

“I’ve got faith in your gift for self-preservation, mate. Come on.” Bill led the way to the door of the Jet Postal sorting room. He hesitated, wondering what Elaine would want him to do. She would want Mascha rescued—if this Little Sister was in fact Mascha—but Elaine wouldn’t want him to risk himself this way. Still—there probably wouldn’t be another chance.

He opened the door, then stepped back, crouching down to one side, signaling to Karlosky. “Do it. Then run…”

Karlosky swore in Russian once more, but he raised his tommy gun and fired a short burst toward the Big Daddy—a burst from a tommy gun wasn’t going to kill it, and Karlosky wouldn’t risk the wrath of his employers by destroying the valuable cyborg, but it got the Big Daddy’s attention. The lumbering metal golem turned and rushed like an accelerating freight train at the source of the assault. Karlosky was already running, cursing Bill as he went. The Big Daddy clanged past Bill, not seeing him crouching by the door.

Bill slipped behind the metal guardian and through the door, seeing the little girl standing up from another extraction, blood-dripping syringe in her hand. She looked at him with big eyes, mouth opened in a round O.

Was this Mascha? He wasn’t sure.

“Mr. Buuuuuuubbles!” she called. “There is a bad man here waiting to be turned into an aaaaaaangel!”

“Mascha,” Bill said. “Is that you?” He took a step toward her. “Listen… I’m going to pick you up, but I won’t hurt you—”