A Bad Deal for the Whole Galaxy

by Alex White

  From there, Nilah wouldn’t hit all of the cameras with her pulse code, but it’d have to do. She flashed her arms in a precise pattern, triggering the hack she’d installed in the imagers. The shadow shifted abruptly to the left, its coordinates confused by the partial loss of imaging.

  But there were other cameras, and a sea of darkness enveloped her like a crushing fist.

  “Maybe you’re more trouble than you’re worth,” came Vraba’s voice, shouting over the sound of Nilah’s screams. “Better to simply end it.”

  Her voice left her. She couldn’t take another breath. Eyes bulged. Muscles burned. This was how she would die—crushed like a rat under a boot. Everything dimmed out.

  Distant thunder filled her ears. Was it a precursor to the crackle of crushed bone? The roar grew louder, rattling Nilah’s teeth until it was the only sound left. Then came a colossal crack and the splitting of stone.

  A sine wave tore through all other sounds, reverberating in Nilah’s chest with a heavy bass thud. Light flooded her eyes as the shadows tore asunder, but she saw only white.

  Cold wind blew across her skin. The chemical stenches of ozone and sulfur filled her nose. Baked metal tick-ticked away as it cooled. She tested her limbs to find they still worked.

  Charger’s body came into focus, bloodred armor shining like the evening sun, completed disperser rifle in its hand. Behind it, an orbital drop capsule hung open like a bent-up sarcophagus. Smoke poured from the capsule’s exterior, and pockmarks marred the sides from hostile spellfire.

  The robot extended a hand to Nilah and, in Orna’s gorgeous voice, said, “Hey, babe. How’s it going?”

  Behind Charger, the Ferriers rose to their feet, dusting themselves off and checking for damage. And behind them, Nilah spied a spell forming, like a little black flame waiting to consume them all.

  “Destroy the imagers!” shouted Nilah.

  Charger’s shoulders sagged. “That’s it? That was, like, the single greatest entrance of all time, and you’re making demands already?”

  The black flame sprouted into a spindly, blade-footed spider and charged at the battle armor. It leapt, its ultra-sharp knives bound straight for Charger’s back plates.

  “Look out!” shouted Nilah, and Orna spun, planting a shot from her disperser into the dead center of the spell. The shadow exploded into gossamer webs of energy, dissipating.

  “Nilah!” bellowed Charger, resting its hands on its hips. “I was worried sick about you, and you need to say hello!”

  Nilah raced to the armor and hugged it just above the waist. “I love you, babe. I’m sorry. Can we please destroy the imagers?”

  “Thank you,” said Orna, and Charger’s chest popped open, allowing her to jump out. She wore a formfitting cold-weather suit, a bandolier of heavy rounds, and her personal slinger at the ready in its holster. “Charger, scan and lock onto all imager lenses, then destroy them.”

  Charger’s head spun in place, stuttering at intervals as it noted the locations of cameras. Then it leapt, bounding about the rotunda and smashing its claws into hidden recesses to rip out imagers Nilah hadn’t even seen.

  She watched in awe of the robot until Orna’s warm arms wrapped around her. Nilah sighed and kissed her girlfriend deeply before pulling away.

  “Listen,” said Nilah, “there’s this guy. Sharp. We’ve got to get him, too.”

  Orna glanced about. “Where is he? Can we even get to him?”

  “He’s the insider! He knows more about this operation than anyone.”

  “We’re glad to see you, Miss Sokol,” Jeannie huffed, limping over with Alister.

  He’d gone pale. One of his eyes was closed, leaking blood, and he held on to his sister with a death grip. Nilah couldn’t shake the feeling of the bristling roots on her skin and could only imagine how bad the damage to his eye would be.

  Its work done, Charger returned to Orna and dumped a canister at her feet. She popped it open and pulled out three cold-weather suits.

  “We’ll guard the door,” Orna said, drawing her slinger and checking the safety. “Get dressed.”

  “We’re going outside?” mumbled Alister.

  Orna smiled. “We’re going home.”

  Before they could so much as contemplate the frost gear, the door buckled inward, sending shards of regraded steel into the nearby stone.

  A hulking mech burst through the frame, flanked by a swarm of thralls, their expressions locked in aimless rage. Blue shield bubbles bristled from its exterior, covering its eidolon core and all its most vulnerable parts. Its head resembled one of the drawings of ancient elephants from Origin, with a pair of sizzling red eyes.

  It leveled a pair of cannons at them and, in Elder Osmond’s voice, bellowed, “Welcome, Orna Sokol!”

  Chapter Twelve

  Desperate Measures

  We’ve hit a snag, Boss!” Orna’s thin voice came over Boots’s comm as she waited in the cockpit of the Midnight Runner. Heavy slinger fire crackled over the connection, and the quartermaster shouted something unintelligible.

  Boots understood one word: “Trap.”

  Well, they’d have to be stupid not to lay a trap.

  “Boots,” said Armin. “Stand by to sortie.”

  She gave all her controls a last preflight check, the familiar ball of nerves forming in her gut. “Departure, no offense, but let’s go.”

  “Boots, it’s Boss,” said Cordell. “I think we’re looking at a worst-case scenario here.”

  “Anti-air in place?” she asked.

  “Yep.”

  “No clear exfil path?”

  “Yep.”

  Boots took a deep breath and steadied her hand over the throttle. “All right, then. Let’s light these punks up.”

  “Departure,” said Armin as the flashing yellow lights popped out around the opening cargo bay door. “You are cleared for launch, weapons free. Good hunting.”

  “You’ve got this,” Cordell added, failing to say the phrase he’d told her during every sortie of the Famine War.

  She placed her index finger over the mag-clamp switch. “Aw, Boss. Am I not your only wing anymore?”

  “No need to stay on the bird this time,” the captain replied. “Just bring our folks home.”

  The Capricious pulled straight up, and Boots launched out the back, her stomach flipping with each rise of the horizon. She fired her maneuvering thrusters in the old familiar pattern before leveling out and blasting for the Pinnacle.

  “Priority one,” said Armin, “take out any air towers and clear us a path for approach.”

  “Copy.”

  The engines shoved her back in her seat, and threat warning indicators spread out across her HUD. She couldn’t believe she was jealous of Orna’s jarring orbital drop, but at least a capsule was too fast to be targeted by the towers. The Midnight Runner was another story.

  She dipped low and skimmed the ice, angling her dispersers forward; maybe she could avoid a lancer smashing through her keel. Maybe her defenses would hold. The target calculator counted down, possibly a timer for her fiery demise.

  The anti-air towers opened up on her right on time, and she had to peel off to avoid their initial volleys. They’d fired in a spread pattern to prevent any break off, and her dispersers smashed the first anti-air spell. They continued filling the sky with sizzling death until she was forced to bank away.

  “Damn it! Prince, I can’t even get close!”

  “Sleepy here. Maybe I can help,” said Malik, his smooth voice filling her ears. “Any chance you can pick me up?”

  “In an MRX-20?” laughed Boots. “Are you insane?”

  “Boss here. What’s your plan?”

  “I’ve got a few explosive charges and a grappling hook,” said Malik. “If you can pick me up and drop me in the canyon by the Pinnacle, I’ll put a hole in their active defenses.”

  “No time to get you up into the cockpit, buddy,” Boots grunted, angling her dispersers to zap the shots coming up her
backside.

  “I’ll hang on to the skids. Orna did it.”

  “In Ranger!” said Aisha, breaking radio protocols.

  “So did Mother!” was his reply.

  Boots grunted in annoyance. A normal fighter jock might’ve felt more like a taxi service, given the circumstances.

  “Boss, that’s a suicide mission,” Aisha spat.

  “Combat simulations aren’t good with those towers in play, Boss,” said Armin. “I give Boots a ten percent chance of survival.”

  “I want my crew back,” said Cordell. “You’re to execute Sleepy’s plan.”

  “Copy that,” said Boots. “Sleepy, get ready for the least comfortable ride of your life.”

  She ripped back the flight stick and hammered the thrusters, rocketing in the direction of Malik’s mountain hideout. If she was too slow picking him up, mortar rounds would zero in on her location, blowing her future package to smithereens. Strafing across the ice, she set her dispersers to cover her ninety, bobbing up and down to prevent the computers from leading her craft with their targeting.

  “Let’s get some cover in here!” shouted Boots, flinching as a blinding round passed too close to her canopy.

  The Capricious roared into view, its keel slinger pounding the Pinnacle, but the installation’s defensive measures tore the spells into bits of glowing glyphs. If the marauder came in range of the lancers, they’d be cut down. The Capricious’s covering fire distracted their anti-air towers, but not enough.

  “Prince, I need an approach vector to the canyon by the Pinnacle. I’d rather not get perforated dropping him off.”

  “Copy, Boots. Calculating now.”

  Her distance to target fell by the thousands. “You’d better be ready with bells on, Doc!”

  “Leave it to me,” Malik replied.

  She raced up the mountain and came in hot on his campsite, deploying her landing skids. With the gear down, she’d lose 20 percent of her maneuvering, and Malik would be outside of the inertial dampers, so the more extreme maneuvers would be out of the question.

  The ice crunched under her ship, and she spotted a prone figure in the snow, hanging on to a rock for dear life. Malik rose and sprinted for her craft. The hillside exploded with an off-target mortar round, and she winced. The opposition force would walk the next one right onto the canopy of the Midnight Runner.

  “Let’s go, let’s go!” she barked, watching the keel gun camera.

  Malik’s tiny figure rushed up under the craft and wrapped his arms around the skid pylon, and Boots rotated the image to make sure he was latched.

  “I’m on!”

  Boots fired her maneuvering thrusters, lifting off the ice. “Brace for incoming, Sleepy. I guarantee another mortar strike in the next five seconds.”

  Pulling away, she took care not to rise above the lee of the mountain—any exposure could mean instant puncture of her cockpit by anti-air.

  Another mortar slammed the mountainside, ravaging what was left of Malik’s campsite. The Runner listed to one side, and the keel slinger camera depicted Malik barely hanging on in the wake of the explosion. Another strike would knock him clean off into a hail of rocks, fire, and ice.

  “Where’s my vector, Prince?” Boots demanded, hurtling down the back of the mountain.

  “Hold tight,” said Armin. “I’m relaying the targeting envelopes to your HUD now.”

  The entire landscape lit up red, save for a small tunnel scarcely larger than the Midnight Runner itself. Boots’s gaze slid along the translucent projection, finding altogether too many kinks and turns for her liking.

  “You’re not going to like this, Doc,” she breathed.

  “Doesn’t matter what I like,” he grunted. “We’re in it together now!”

  “Hang on!”

  Boots weaved through the rocky landscape, dashing from cover to cover before the slinger turrets could lock on to her. Mortars crashed down before her, rattling her cockpit with stray rocks. Every time one landed too close, she checked her displays, expecting to see Malik plummeting to his doom. Despite everything, the doctor held on with an ironclad grip, teeth gritted below his frosty goggles.

  “Distance to drop, fifteen hundred, Doc! Just—”

  She’d climbed too high, and her HUD screamed warnings at her. A stray lance round cut through the rock face before her, and her disperser blew it apart, but the burning spell threads cut into Malik’s arms and back. He wailed over the comm and buckled, sliding down the landing skid and catching himself at the last second. His legs dangled precariously above the stony ground—a meat grinder at this speed.

  “Oh god, Boots, land!” he shouted.

  “If I set you down here, a mortar will end you,” she said. “You have to hold tight.”

  “I’m going to fall!”

  She checked her distance to target—seven hundred meters. Just a few seconds. “Use your grapple gun.”

  “I can’t reach it,” he groaned.

  Her eyes darted between his dangling form and the approach envelope. She couldn’t get careless again.

  “Four hundred meters, Sleepy. Stay with me.”

  An ominous rusty stain began to spread across one side of his parka.

  “I think I’m hit,” he said.

  She dropped the Runner closer to the trench floor, just in case he let go of the skid, but to her amazement, he held fast. “Just a stray rock, buddy. One hundred meters.”

  She eased off the throttle, firing her maneuvering thrusters as she edged closer to the landing point.

  “I’m a doctor, Boots,” he growled, the effort consuming every ounce of his being. “You have to set me down, right now. I’m—”

  And he let go.

  To land directly onto the snow. She watched through the slinger cam as he fell to his knees and kissed the snow, the nasty wound on his back bright red.

  “Okay, you are hit. Didn’t want to tell you,” she said, spinning the craft and pulling off the way she came. “Might want to take care of that.”

  “Boots!” snapped Aisha.

  “This is Boss. Can you still complete your mission, Sleepy?”

  “Yeah. The others are counting on me,” he replied, a little unsteady. “Still got some styptifoam. Going to apply that now.”

  Boots’s heart sank as he whimpered into her comm. Her carelessness had put him in that position, and when he got to the Pinnacle, it might cost him his life.

  Armin’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “Back off, Boots, and let the man do his job. We’ll provide topsight from here.”

  “Copy, Prince. Good luck, Doc.”

  “I’ll open a hole for you,” said Malik. “Be ready.”

  The whine of the hulk’s autoslingers filled the air as they hunkered down behind what was left of a stone plinth. Each spell tore away more chunks of the statue above, and Nilah pulled her limbs in close, huddling next to Orna and the twins.

  The slinger fire stopped, and metal screeches wailed in Nilah’s ears. She poked her head around the corner just in time to see Charger leap onto the giant mech.

  “Gotcha,” Orna muttered, smirking.

  The battle armor whipped out a short handle and flicked it, ejecting a flaming blade so bright it could’ve seared Nilah’s retinas. White light washed the room like a supernova, and she had to squint to see the battle.

  Charger swiped its blade across the hulk’s arm, cleanly severing one of the autoslingers. Only the glowing cross section of the weapon’s internal components remained, like a technical drawing. Wild magic oozed from the ruptured shells, forming a makeshift, prismatic flamethrower, and the hulk brought this new weapon to bear on Charger.

  Orna’s battle armor retreated, an enraged tiger circling its opponent. It lunged and swiped but couldn’t quite get the angle of attack it sought.

  Meanwhile, the thralls fanned out through the room, their poisonous glyphs throbbing with malice. The hulk’s preoccupation with Charger got the fire off Nilah’s cover, but Orna couldn’t s
pare the concentration to do anything about the minor combatants.

  Nilah leaned over and kissed her on the cheek, lifting the quartermaster’s slinger out of its holster and checking the clip—six shots, glowing with a light she hadn’t seen before.

  “Thanks, babe,” Nilah whispered before ducking around the corner to snap off a round at a howling thrall.

  A bright flash blinded Nilah, and then all that remained of the thrall was a smeared shadow across the floor.

  “Shadowflash,” said Orna. “It’s not perfect though—”

  “Bloody fantastic,” Nilah interrupted, before taking aim at another target and vaporizing her.

  One of the dead-eyed thralls approximated rage before ripping the summoner’s mark out of the air. A portal opened before her and a pack of ravening wolves rushed out. They tore across the stone toward Nilah in a swarm of teeth while another thrall carved out some unknown spell. The strange glyph completed, it began to strobe with a cold light, coating the rotunda in a deathly pallor.

  She’d never seen the effect before, but she felt her downfall coming in the pit of her stomach. Crushing dread filled Nilah’s bones, and she understood the hopelessness of her battle. The phrase We’re all going to die here began to play on repeat in her mind. After the first surprise cut, the hulk easily batted aside Charger’s assaults with its glowing shields. Jeannie and Alister waited their turn to be useful—a turn that would never come.

  They were doomed. The thrall’s spell had only shown her the truth.

  “Nilah!” Orna’s voice sliced through the fog of alien thoughts. “You have to shoot!”

  Stumbling backward, Nilah jerked the trigger at the wolves, vaporizing two of them. The beasts broke off, but again came waves of nauseating despair. Suicidal thoughts invaded her mind, and she considered offering herself up to whatever fate would give her.

  Charger gestured to the thrall holding the cold glyph. “Shoot that one! Now!” it bellowed in Orna’s voice. “Also, don’t use the shadowflash on—”

  The hulk took advantage of the momentary distraction to bat Charger across the hall, where it skidded across the floor with a furrow of sparks. It rolled backward, catching its talons in the stones and springing upright. With a flourish, it sliced one of the thralls in half, and the devastating depression vanished like smoke on the wind.