by Ramy Vance
“Yep,” Toner mumbled.
Sphynx stared at him. “The blast didn’t kill you, but it destroyed what little sense you had,” he decided.
“No.” Toner let out a little bloody cough. His eyes felt like they weighed eight thousand pounds each, but he forced himself to glance up into the deep shadows of the side stacks on the second floor. “Iss an ole mili’ary tactic,” he slurred. “Surprisss…you haven’t heard of it.”
Sphynx’s eyes narrowed. A lonely opera singer screamed from the only functioning speaker in the cathedral.
“I have heard of every tactic,” Sphynx said suspiciously. “What do you mean by this?”
Ah, there it was. The shadow moving up the stacks.
Jaeger’s stupid plan.
Toner glanced back to Sphynx. “It’s called painting the target, buddy.”
Sphynx opened his mouth, but he didn’t get the chance to respond as two tons of farting tardigrade soared out from the wings and slammed into his spine at fifty kilometers an hour.
Sphynx did scream, then—letting out the high, tortured whine of a twisted violin as he became unfortunately well-acquainted with the spinning rings of teeth lining Baby’s face-hole.
Baby had a special fondness for raisins, but when you got right down to it, Toner thought, tardigrades really would eat anything.
Toner drifted in a cloud of blood and shrapnel, fading in and out of consciousness to the sounds of a rabid cat going through a woodchipper. That sonic blast had done a number on him. Should have killed him instantly, but of course, he was too tough for that.
So now he’d have to die slowly, listening to this shitshow.
He hoped Jaeger could manage all right on her own. Feisty kid. Bright future. Great ass.
Something bumped lightly into his side. Toner squinted down at it.
It looked like two things. It looked like a bleeding, drifting, severed tentacle, and it looked like a nourishing snack.
Chapter Forty-One
“Hang in there, kid.” Jaeger panted for breath as she towed Occy through the stacks by one of his few remaining tentacles. Her head hurt. Her legs hurt. Her everything hurt. She winced every time she turned down a row and felt part of Occy’s body catch on a corner behind her. The No-A lounge, and its elaborate medical cabinet, seemed so very far away.
“Keep breathing,” she whispered. The air was heavy and damp with his blood. She felt a mist of it collect and coat her skin. “Hang in there. I’ll get you fixed. I promise.”
The fading sounds of a screaming, dying cat echoed through the cathedral behind her, punctuated by the sounds of ripping and crunching. Jaeger’s stomach did a flip.
It didn’t matter. She couldn’t do anything for Baby or Toner or even Sphynx. But she could do something for this poor kid.
She rounded the last corner and pulled Occy into the No-A lounge. She let him drift free in the small space and scrambled to the medical cabinet. Chunks of tattered tentacles and gobs of sticky drying blood filled the air. For such a small boy, Occy could take up so much space.
Gasping for breath, Jaeger wrenched open the cabinet and dug through the supplies. The shelf for blood substitute pouches was empty.
Somewhere far behind her, Toner roared. There was a high, whirring, screeching noise like tortured spinning saw blades.
Jaeger hoped Toner was putting blood substitute pouches to good use.
There. Her trembling hands landed on a large pouch of medfoam and an emergency suture kit. It would have to do until she could get the synthesizers to make more blood substitute.
She rushed back to Occy, ripping the pouch open with her teeth. She smeared gobs of foam over the bleeding stumps of his severed tentacles and the dozens of bloody gashes torn across his belly and chest. Shards of twisted metal flechettes jutted out of him at all angles. Pincushion. Sphynx had turned him into a pincushion.
But she thought, she hoped, she prayed, that was the ghost of a pulse she felt beneath her fingers as she smeared the foam over his open, bleeding wounds.
“Hang in there,” she whispered. “Hang in there. We’re almost safe. Stay with me a little longer.”
“You’re a resourceful bitch. I’ll give you that.”
Jaeger froze.
Seeker stood at the edge of the lounge, where the galley kitchen opened into the stacks—comfortably out of reach of Jaeger or Occy’s drifting tentacles.
He pointed the barrel of that awful flechette pistol at her.
Jaeger lifted her hands, palms open. Gobs of foam and blood caked her fingers.
Seeker was too perfect. A beast of a man, neck and legs like tree trunks, thick arms rippling with muscles popping against his skin-tight fatigues. Buzz cut. Jaw so square you could use it to draft blueprints. The ideal soldier.
Then again, they were all too perfect, weren’t they? Too perfect, or too terrible, or both.
“He’s still alive,” Jaeger breathed. She could barely hear her voice above the sounds of Baby’s feasting, the music, her own shredded and ringing eardrums. Exposed to air, the gobs of foam on her fingers started to stiffen.
“Let me help him,” she whispered. “Please.”
The perfect soldier shook his head, but she saw: he never took his eye from the sight, dead-centered on her head.
“Naw,” he said. “I can’t let you wiggle free again. Sorry about the kid, though,” he added, sounding sincerely regretful. “That really is too bad. If you cooperate with me quickly enough, I might be able to help him out. So, it’s up to you, really.”
His grip on the pistol never wavering, he reached to his waist and unhooked something from his belt. He tossed the pair of plasticuffs in her direction. “I’m going to need you to put those on.”
Jaeger caught the drifting plasticuffs by instinct and stared, horrified.
“Don’t make this uglier than it already is,” Seeker said quietly. “I’m not like that asshole. I don’t want to kill you.” His grip tightened. “But I will if I have to.”
Jaeger slipped the cuffs over her wrists. There was nothing else she could do.
The devices sealed, smooth and seamless, over her flesh, binding her wrists together. The drying medfoam turned her fingers into uselessly stiff clubs.
“Good,” Seeker said. “Now go sit in the corner and don’t move. Play this right, and no one else has to die today.”
Numb, Jaeger pushed herself to Baby’s nest and sank into the foam. Seeker took a few cautious steps forward and checked Occy’s pulse. Then he nodded and pushed the drifting body through the torn hole into the fighter bay.
“He might make it,” Seeker offered to Jaeger. “I suspect pretty soon, either your vampire or the nutjob are going to come limping over here. If it’s your vampire, you’re going to order him to surrender and climb into one of the activation pods, you understand? Those things are tough. It will hold him long enough to let me get this ship under control.”
“We’re in hostile territory, and our clock is ticking,” Jaeger said. “We don’t have time for more infighting.”
“So don’t fight.”
Jaeger squeezed her eyes shut. Praying this man had stopped the Crusade upload when he ripped the hard drive out, she lifted her voice to the nearest speaker. “Virgil? You copy?”
There was an eternally long pause. Then, so softly she could barely hear it above the sounds of the distant music, the speaker beside her head activated. “I copy.”
Jaeger let out a breath. Virgil had survived the Crusade upload and must have begun repairing itself. “Good,” she whispered. “Good. What’s the status on the alien ships?”
“They are on approach,” Virgil said mildly. “On what looks to be an attack trajectory.”
“How long?”
“Oh,” Virgil hummed, “Five minutes until they enter lance range. Maybe seven.”
Jaeger opened her eyes and searched Seeker’s brick of a face. “You and me,” she said. “Do we know each other?”
Seeker hesitated. It
was only an instant, a flash of uncertainty that peeked out before that stoic look returned. It was all Jaeger needed.
Seeker turned at motion in the stacks.
Toner was swimming in their direction, his movements slow and ponderous. He dragged silence and a cloud of blood behind him.
Seeker lifted his flechette pistol and leveled it at Jaeger’s head. “I will kill her if you come any closer.”
Toner froze. He was a mass of colorless flesh and tattered cloth, laced with bright red gashes. His pale hair hung limp and damp over the twin pinpricks of his cold blue eyes. Blood stained his mouth, chin, and neck and spilled down his ears and the front of his tattered suit.
“Stand down, Toner,” Jaeger said softly. She didn’t know if he could hear her. She didn’t know what went on inside that man’s head when the blood started spilling. That frightened her. “Stand down,” she said again. “There’s been a change in plans.”
Behind Toner, she saw Baby’s hulking shadow filling the aisle, silent and drifting and also so bloody.
Toner met Jaeger’s eyes, and she saw the Jefferies tube monster staring at her, his mouth opening inhumanly wide.
Then he blinked, and the monster resolved back into the shape of a skinny, slouching man.
Toner nodded and lifted his hands, palms out and empty.
Jaeger let out a held breath. Even Seeker seemed to relax. “Turn full control of the AI over to me,” he told her.
“Okay.” She licked dry lips. “Virgil. Evade the hostiles. Turn us around.”
Seeker and Toner both turned puzzled gazes on her.
“Take us away from the wormhole,” she whispered.
There was a long moment of contemplative silence.
“The wormhole collapses soon,” Virgil said slowly. “We will not be able to pass through it again.”
Seeker was staring at Jaeger.
“We can’t go back.” Jaeger gave Seeker a bitter little smile. “You know that, don’t you?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Seeker asked.
“Look around.” She pointed at Toner. “Him? Occy? Sphynx was a mess. You said it yourself.” She gave a small, hysterical laugh. “And you saw what files were on the Crusade Protocol, right? This ship is a war machine, full of other, smaller war machines.”
Seeker’s permanent scowl deepened. Toner frowned.
“Guys.” Jaeger’s laugh turned rich and deep. “I stole this ship. I don’t even remember doing it, but nothing else makes sense. I stole Tribe Six because it’s a monster made by monsters and controlled by monsters.
“It’s not a colony ship. It’s the tip of an invasion. We’re the bad guys. If we go back to the fleet, they’ll turn us around and send us back to wipe out the Locari and conquer that nice little planet of theirs, or if not them, some other people who can’t fight back.”
“You don’t know that,” Seeker growled.
Jaeger gave him a genuine smile. That was doubt tugging at the corner of his face. He didn’t want to believe it. She could work with that.
“You saw what Sphynx was growing in those pods. Do you really want to work for the people who made them possible? Sphynx wasn’t insane. He was exactly as they made him to be.”
Seeker’s jaw flexed, and she saw the sliver of doubt turn into a wedge. Over his shoulder, Toner met Jaeger’s eyes and gave the tiniest of nods.
He understood.
“Was growing…he’s gone now and so are…whatever that was. You stopped the sequence, and those embryos are now lost.” She shook her head, lamenting that she’d already lost so many, even if they were only eggs. Then lifting her voice, she said, “Virgil, take us away from the saucers. They were right. We brought the instruments of death to their door. They’re only defending their home.”
“I advise against it,” Virgil said tightly. “The wormhole—”
“We are going to have to find another way back,” Jaeger said. “In our way, with full understanding. This ship is a weapon, and we can’t put it right back in the hands of the people who thought building it was a good idea.”
“I advise against it,” Virgil said again, its voice growing to the edge of panic. Jaeger frowned. The Crusade Protocol must have done a number on an already frazzled AI. She pushed herself up from Baby’s nest, heading in the direction of the nearest AI interface. She’d have to—
“Stop right there.”
Jaeger froze. Seeker had lifted the flechette pistol again. At the edge of the lounge, Toner tensed.
“I don’t know much,” Seeker growled. “Whatever you’re trying to save humanity from, mutiny isn’t the answer, Jaeger. We have to stick together. If there are problems with central command, we’ll have to fix them from the inside. You’re going to turn AI control over to me. We are going back through that wormhole.”
Jaeger stilled. She stared at Seeker and at Toner, who slipped silently closer.
“No.” She lifted her chin, staring down the barrel of that body-shredding pistol. “We’re not. Not like this.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Seeker said. “I really am.” He pulled the trigger.
Toner lunged, arms outstretched to wrap Seeker in a brutal embrace as Jaeger threw herself to the side. Seeker’s shot went wild, burying a spray of razor-sharp metal into the ceiling. Pain tore into her shoulder as a few darts ricocheted off the walls.
Baby bobbed out of the stacks behind Toner, catching the drifting Jaeger in her front legs. Jaeger groaned, ripped one long needle out of her shoulder with her teeth, and turned, ready to fight beside Toner—
The lounge had gone still. Seeker’s back was pressed to the far wall of the lounge, with Toner drifting two meters in front of him, staring wide-eyed.
Seeker’s face had turned purple. His massive chest heaved and dipped, struggling for breath against the single tentacle wrapped around his throat. His blunt fingers dug uselessly into the rubbery flesh as he thrashed.
“I don’t like you.” Occy’s dreamy, sleepy voice came from behind Seeker, who had made the fatal mistake of stepping a little too close to the hole Baby had torn between the lounge and the fighter bay.
“You look like the Instructor,” Occy added—a young boy’s voice coming from somewhere within a mass of bloody tentacles.
A bubble of foam appeared in the corner of Seeker’s mouth as his face turned purple. Toner took one hasty kick backward as a few more tentacles crept out from the hole behind Seeker. He cast a wild, worried look at Jaeger.
“He was a bully, too,” Occy murmured, lifting a second tentacle to the top of Seeker’s head. It folded a line of suckers around his forehead and tightened in a squeeze. “Why are there so many bullies?”
Jaeger found her voice, somewhere beneath all the pain. She shoved herself away from Baby’s thick legs with a gasp. “Occy! Don’t!”
The tentacles froze.
“He was going to kill you.” The boy sounded puzzled, even a little hurt.
“I know.” She heard herself babbling, but suddenly it didn’t matter. Suddenly, stopping the kid from becoming a murderer was the most important thing she could ever do. “I know, but it’s okay. We can work past that. Let him breathe, Occy. Let him breathe. Everybody makes mistakes.”
Seeker’s breathing turned shallow and wet.
“He might hurt you again!” Occy cried.
“No. We’ll tie him up and lock him in the brig. He’s not going to hurt anyone else. I promise. We can work through this the right way. You don’t have to be a killer. Honey, please. Let him go.”
Slowly, one millimeter at a time, the tentacles slackened. “Okay,” Occy said, sounding dubious. “Since you promised.”
Seeker slumped, limp and still in the air. His neck and face had become a patchwork of bruises and burst vessels.
“Damn.” Virgil sighed.
Occy climbed through the hole in the wall, a fragile boy, bloodless and pale and trembling. Most of his tentacles were missing, but at least the medfoam had stopped the bl
eeding.
Toner surged forward to bind the unconscious man in every spare cord, tether, and plasticuffs he could find. He was breathing hard. “I need something to eat,” he said through a clenched jaw.
Jaeger pushed herself toward the fabricator and fumbled to punch in every raw organ recipe she knew. “Virgil,” she breathed. “Status report. Now.”
“I’ve changed our trajectory away from the wormhole, Captain.”
“The saucers?”
“Oh, they’re in hot pursuit. I imagine they’ll start firing on us at any second.”
Chapter Forty-Two
There wasn’t time to scramble back to the control center, so when the sleepy Occy assured Jaeger they could run a remote CnC from the nearby engine room, she jumped on the opportunity.
Or, more accurately, she limped and hobbled to the opportunity.
The first wave of emergency caffeine and painkillers was just starting to hit as she, Toner, Baby, and Occy spilled into the generator bay.
That was also when the first enemy energy lance grazed the Osprey’s hull.
“On screens,” Jaeger cried as the generator bay trembled around them.
A series of holo-screens flared to life across the workstations. A star map displayed the Osprey gliding through the solar system's outer edge on full thruster power with two flying saucers in hot pursuit.
“They’re focusing fire on No-A again.” Toner slung himself into one of the workstations.
“Occy,” Jaeger said. “Can we outrun them?”
Occy towed himself to the largest consul and stared, bleary-eyed, at the dozens of engine readouts. He chewed his lip. “Um. I don’t know. I don’t know enough about them. But if they can keep up with us and keep firing, we’re dead. I can’t run the shields for light-speed and combat at the same time.”
Jaeger cursed as another energy lance burst rattled the bulkhead. “Virgil! Curve our trajectory and take us through the wormhole’s accretion disk. It should muck up their sensors and buy us some room to maneuver.”
“Take us to the wormhole, Virgil.” Virgil sighed. “Take us away from the wormhole, Virgil. No, no, Virgil, take us back to the wormhole—”