by Ian Cannon
Ben saw it on approach, eyes going wide. He screamed dipping REX into a plummet and came around underneath. The vessel slammed one of its brethren knocking it off kilter and throwing fire into space—which REX blew through—before pounding into Malice 1’s massive undercarriage. Everything crushed. Explosions thundered across the superstructure lighting the whole area up like a sun.
Inside Aphrodisia, pandemonium was in full throttle. The whole city felt the impact like a planetary quake—two big tectonic plates slamming together. Buildings at the impact point began twisting and crumbling. Everything shuddered.
The masses were taken off their feet. Several thousand lives vacationing in the city’s seedy joints took to the thoroughfares and alleys, everyone moving en mass without any coherent direction, most of them screaming and running mindlessly.
Up above along the sky frame, privateer vessels began disconnecting with their gravitonic engines booming like thunder in the skies. They pulled away, began emerging slowly up through the membrane in pairs and packs. They’d rather face the battle raging above than the destruction reigning below.
REX had been forced toward the big membrane bubble in his flight through the battle space. He slid along its surface as it kept forcing him back out and creating ripples in a cosmic-space pond. Blue Stripe was right behind blazing its payload at him. Ben yelled in desperation as one of the privateer vessels came emerging from the sky frame directly ahead—a large, flat-topped freighter of some kind ascending through the membrane. He jerked the guidance lever and weaved REX over and around, the big mag-spires swinging way out. Blue Stripe followed in suit, but the swarmers didn’t. They went straight for the freighter pounding through its top hull, shattering the fuselage and exploding its control deck. Gravitonic systems sputtered and its flight halted in mid ascension … then started sinking back down through the membrane.
The freighter slammed the sky frame over Aphrodisia, shattering one of its ribs and sending quakes of rent steel across the whole structure. The freighter began its free fall toward the city taking huge chunks of the sky frame with it. It whirled over picking up speed, approaching terminal velocity. It was several hundred tons falling from the sky.
The mag train exited the tube rail and entered the city all at once. It angled toward the passenger hub and began to brake to a stop. Tawny slammed through the train’s wall and hurled to the ground landing on her feet with a tremendous thud. All around her, people were going crazy, running every which way, all of them in a sheer panic.
Up ahead, the Bitch was still riding the top of the train. As it pulled to a stop she, too, leapt from the train and came down, summersaulting three, four, five times before sliding to her feet.
Behind the Bitch up in the sky, a massive freighter with columns of flame rising from its parts plummeted from the membrane, about to impact the city. Tawny blinked, took a step back. Nothing she could do. The thing crashed down sending a hellacious tremor across the whole city. Buildings crunched like hollow aluminum shells and everyone on the street got taken off their feet. A ball of fire erupted into a mushroom cloud lifting all the way back up to the sky frame. The blast impact spread across the surface level, through the buildings and across the thoroughfares leveling everyone off their feet. Once it receded, Tawny shook her head, got back to her feet and searched out the Bitch.
They looked at each other across the distance. The wild-weird smile on Xanatrissa’s face showed no remorse at the destruction of her city. She was loyal to no one or no thing—only the hunt, only the kill. She was enjoying this.
Tawny blasted a battle scream and began her charge, heavy armor-feet pounding toward the Bitch. Xantrissa ripped her whip from her side and slammed a powerful crack that exploded into a bright ball of erupting plasma. Tawny felt the concussion from thirty feet away. It blinded her overlay equipment and forced her to a stop. When she looked up, the Bitch wasn’t there. Tawny looked to the left. Only panicking masses and crumbling city structures. She looked to the right.
There!
She was fleeing across a crowded thoroughfare and toward a large, dome-topped building. Tawny took off with her motion-assist battle suit picking up speed and closing the distance. Xantrissa peeled into one of the tall archways and disappeared. Tawny pursued.
She found herself in a long, narrow corridor with an arched top. Explosions and falling structure shook the whole world just beyond, yet everything felt suddenly very quiet. Where was the Bitch hiding? What trap was she tempting her into?
Her armor-hand tightened its grip around the pommel of her sword and she moved forward. Leaving the corridor behind, she found herself in a large open area with high walls and terraced seating. This was an arena.
A battleground.
Her intellect-connect guided her human sight to the far end of the arena. Xantrissa stood there, a Portaxian Katana sword in each hand with blades narrow and long, a dastardly gleam in her eyes.
Tawny turned to face her square, her big thrasher held in both hands before her.
Xantrissa strutted forward, eyeing her. “Isn’t this what you wanted, little birdy? No guns, no bombs. Just you and me.” She chuckled ironically, “Man to man.”
REX roared across the endless complex of the Cabal mothership as it sidled up beneath Malice 1’s mighty bulk. Both had taken their damage. Entire swaths of the mothership’s complex showed black and charred battle scars with sizzling caverns in places where levels and control decks had once been. Its primary conning tower had been chewed through, leaving a vertical show of jagged spires standing akimbo. Yet the thing had plenty of firepower left to dole out some retribution. Laser cannons fired their payloads directly up, while the enemy bombarded from above creating a dangerous thatchwork of blaster streams.
REX navigated them, swinging left and right still getting pelted by Blue Stripe who dogged him relentlessly. REX’s upper cannons fired desperate volleys, swinging back and forth, but Blue Stripe had found REX’s blind spot. The blasts snaked overhead harmlessly. They couldn’t strike him.
“We gotta get rid of this guy, Cap,” REX said. “He keeps hitting our power cells. We’re running on auxiliaries. Internal systems are about to be toast.”
Another hail of blasts pealed across REX’s port, narrowed in and exploded against him. Ben bucked sideways with the cockpit, gritting his teeth, knowing each strike was bringing them closer to the end. Buzzers went off. He flipped switches diverting power sources to damaged systems. No good.
“Cap, now port ventral control is gone,” REX said starting to sound serious.
Ben jerked the vessel to the port. No response. “Gods blasted!” he snarled, “we can’t even maneuver.” They had looped around and headed back toward that faraway control stage where the dogfight had ensued, with that guy trailing them the whole way, hellbent on destroying them. Ben groaned, “If ever there was a narse-headed arse poo with an obsessive tendency, he’s right behind us.”
“You’d think we blew up his squadron or something,” REX said.
Ben looked directly ahead, squinted. Condors approached in a haphazardly formation. They were limping, half of them chewed up and spit out by the swarmers. But they were coming to join the cruiser fight.
Another blast rocked them.
“There goes our rear sensors. I’m blind,” REX said. “Do something!”
Ben scanned his piloting screens. Rex was right. No rear sensors. But they still had forward eyes. And they were spotting something way up ahead. Another swarmer cube was detaching from the control stage sub hull. Malice 1 was deploying more swarmers to mop up the surviving Condors.
Ben’s mind raced. Swarmers moved in mind-locked unison which made them capable of evading laser blasts en mass. He’d have to give them something they couldn’t read, confuse them, use them to help shake the bastard picking them apart from behind.
An idea.
He jerked the overhead mag-spire lever, notched it at the open position. The spires parted, began swinging out on their turn
stiles.
“Uh—fighters, Cap. Fighter, fighters!”
The Condors slew by at tremendous speed banking around REX and Blue Stripe. Up ahead, that swarmer cube swung around positioning itself. REX’s spires leveled out into the horizontal configuration, like long wings.
“Direct your blasters there!” Ben said pointing through the viewport.
The guns swiveled around, laid down a salvo. The cube flew apart into a thousand pieces, each part directed by a common hive mind. REX’s laser blasts slid harmlessly by. The swarmers swirled back together. Ben smiled big. Perfect!
“Okay, REX, let’s spin the monkey, pal!”
REX went into an immediate spiral—four hundred feet of pure demento mag-spire blade, churning space like a big blender—and the swarmers had no idea what to do. They became a confused mess of objects flying together exploding like rain, colliding and tumbling around in a discombobulated mess. REX made it through, roaring ahead, but Blue Stripe found himself tearing through an impossible wall of destruction. The fighter’s entire right side sheered away, exposing engine guts and internal systems, and he started to split apart. What was left of the fuselage trammeled in flight, then blew into a rumbling ball of flame.
Ben and REX both wailed out a celebratory, “Woo hoo!”
“Oh, thank you, sister suns. You got ‘em, Cap!”
Ben wilted into his captain’s seat as Malice 1’s control stage neared through the viewport. The battle had moved on, now congregating toward the massive rear cityscape. They’d found the lull in the storm. “All stop, REX. All stop, buddy.”
Tawny shrieked in anger swinging her thrasher blade fully around. The Bitch launched herself out of the way and the blade bit dirt, shearing a divot the size of a rug out of the ground. Xantrissa heckled at her, so Tawny flung around against her own inertia bringing the blade fully at her head. Xantrissa’s dual blades met the thrasher with a steel-on-steel scream deflecting it up and over. The Bitch rolled over on her shoulders and came to full height.
Tawny stared her down, heaving. The irritation of striking at an unstrikable target was beginning to overtake her patience. She screamed coming in with another foray of strikes, slicing high, then low, coming around with a parry, then a chopper move. The Bitch was too fast, too keen on the rhythm of combat. She read Tawny too well. It seemed evasion was a simple matter of stepping aside, then stepping back, then not stepping at all. She stood there laughing at her.
Something boomed directly overhead. They both looked up. The sky frame two thousand feet up shimmied and shook. Huge purlin bars warped under duress, each starting to bend. Vessels hanging from their couplers swung back and forth as if a strong wind were gusting through the city skies.
Xantrissa took the opportunity and came flipping toward Tawny. Her swords struck, one coming in low and harmless, the other slicing high. Tawny’s helmet jarred, the overlay shimmering momentarily. She turned around to gather her bearings and the intellect-connect feature screamed in her mind—Move!
She dove away as a long section of beamage came slamming down into the arena, quaking the floor. She grunted and looked up. It was an endless piece of the sky frame that had plummeted down. But was still attached to the sky frame by long, bending pieces of ribbing—like a stairway to the sky. Superstructure cried in agony bending and popping. The whole world became a thunder of falling tonnage.
Tawny rolled away as steel and iron pounded down around her. She had no time to get to her feet before Xantrissa was on her again, straddling the battle suit and shrieking in fits of hilarity. Her sword went up over her head and stabbed down. The razor-sharp tip found the flexion points between the gorget and breastplate. It would never sever the armor weave under-suit, nor the vacuum-weave bio-suit, but it pressed against the base of her throat, clenching off her wind pipe. It was a good shot, very accurate.
Xantrissa lowered, bringing her face closer. “Let me see you, coward!” she screamed.
Tawny’s visor slid away and they stared at each other clenching teeth, eyes bore in malicious mirrors of the other. “I will kill you!” Xantrissa growled pressing her weight into her hilt, driving the tip deeper into the suit.
Tawny’s armor-hand grabbed the blade and twisted, snapping it in a steely note. She jabbed the broken end upward and sank it into Xantrissa’s flank. The Bitch squealed in pain and jerked completely away as quick as a Molosian cat, gaining separation, clutching the wound. Blood spilled out of her side as Tawny got to her feet.
“Uh-oh,” Tawny said leaning over and collecting her thrasher weapon. “I see you’re a bleeder.”
Xantrissa made an evil hiss spinning around on all fours and danced her fingers across her forearm—the subcutaneous control pad. The sound of heavy steel gears churning caught Tawny’s attention. She turned to look. A door reeled open in the arena wall showing a dark antechamber.
Tawny took a step back. This wasn’t a trick. There was a reason for this.
A heavy robotic foot set with gears and motors stepped into the light … and then the rest followed. It was eight feet tall, whatever it was, held a steel-woven net in one hand, a club in the other, and biodic armor encasing a living core. At its top was a helmet pan that housed a pink, pulsing brain.
A biod.
Tawny roared in anger, spun around and brought her sword down onto Xantrissa. But the Bitch leapt away leaving the sword to raise a geyser of dirt. She squirreled up onto the fallen girders and started climbing, fast. Tawny leapt after her clanging the battle armor onto the girder and started clawing up its curvature. She’d pursue the Bitch all the way up to the sky if she had to.
But … not quite so fast.
The biod snatched her armor-foot and jerked her back to the ground. She landed hard on her back as the club came wheeling down. She rolled out of the way. The club smashed the ground. Tawny got to her feet, but the thing was faster than it appeared to be. It committed a head shot that she ducked, and threw herself against the huge steel girder. The biod swiveled around and lashed a huge fist at her. She fended the blow and bolted under the girder throwing a look up for her prey.
Xantrissa.
She couldn’t see her, but the visor overlay could. Found her. Placed a digital target on her. She was way up there still climbing the girder to the sky.
“Lock on!” Tawny yelled.
“Locked.” The suit’s overlay would follow Xantrissa wherever she went. There would be no hiding from Tawny now. But first …
The biod muscled its way under the broad girder coming around to engage. It whipped its net at her as she turned to evade, caught her armor-foot. She crashed to the ground, spun over. Another club shot. She groaned juking to the left. A miss. It swung again. She juked right. Another miss. At least the thing was as dumb as it looked.
She sprang up and rammed it with her sword. The blade pierced through with a metallic shriek and green biod juices splashed over her feet. But the creature didn’t stop. Didn’t even slow down. It grabbed her by the armor-neck and hoisted her in the air, squeezing. Tawny’s overlay started blinking in and out as the biod began crushing the sensory jackets inside. Desperate to maintain eyes on Xantrissa, she jerked a look up through the visor. Her target was blinking in and out of registry. She didn’t have time for this.
She looked at the biod as it held her high, and stretched her arm toward its pulsing, little raisin brain. Armor-fingers stretched and wiggled. Couldn’t reach.
Narse-headed jackwad!
She brought her free hand down like a thunder shot into the crook of the biod’s elbow bending its arm and opening a free path to its pseudo-head. She grabbed the brain and ripped it up from the helmet pan. A spinal cord followed it, all pale and slimy. She drew it up like a repelling rope with the other hand … and drew it up some more … and drew it some more wondering when the hells she’d reach the end of it. Finally, it caught against the inside of the biod’s helmet. Growling, she jerked the whole mechanism free along with whatever pinkish-colored organ it was that squ
eezed out the top of the helmet pan, and the biod folded to its knees, then to the ground, dead.
Tawny dropped to her feet and sheathed her sword, fuming mad. The Bitch cheated, called one of her pets after her. So much for “just you and me.” So much for, “man to man.”
Tawny looked up following the girder. It was a long, flexing scaffold leading into the sky. A few hundred feet up, it became entangled in a mesh of twisted, knotted steel ribbing. Parts and pieces of the sky rained down. City structures were collapsing. The whole world was falling apart.
Xantrissa was up there, waiting. Tawny started her climb.
Chapter Eighteen
The battle suit made the climb easy, if not a bit cumbersome. All Tawny needed was for the twisted piece of wreckage to maintain its integrity, not snap free and go plummeting down to the city with her riding it. She came to a huge jumble of stanchions and bracing that had twisted into impossible knots, caught between the pieces of sky frame still holding it up, and the artificial gravity wanting to pull it down. Winding in broken stretches was a maintenance catwalk that shimmied and shuddered with each tumultuous vibration carrying through the whole of Malice 1.
Tawny picked her way onto the catwalk feeling it flex and bow under the weight of her battle suit. Huge, broken spires clung all around, moments from snapping free and bringing the whole sky frame down with it.
Eyes looked at her from shadow. They shimmered with a silvery life. Tawny grinned under her visor.
Bitch Xantrissa.
Xantrissa snaked into view grinning madly, holding the whip, allowing its long, snaky coil to draw out across the metal walk. Blood shimmered across her torso. Tawny had slid the blade in deep. But as she stepped forward, Tawny squinted. She didn’t seem all that hurt. She wasn’t behaving too-badly injured.