The Nine

by Molles, DJ

  “Shortstack?” Stuber murmured around a beard speckled with vomit. “Is that you?”

  “Yeah, buddy, it’s me.” Perry managed a smile but wasn’t sure Stuber had the focus to see it. “We got out of there, okay? We escaped. We’re on a skiff.”

  “Oh. That’s great.” Stuber rolled onto his back again, then tried to get up onto his elbows, but they didn’t seem to want to support him. “My body’s not working. I feel terrible. The fuck did they do to me?”

  “Don’t worry about what they did to you.” Perry had the feeling he’d recall it at some point—and wish that he hadn’t. “They patched you up again. You’re all better.”

  Stuber raised his head again. His eyes looked uncharacteristically childlike. “I don’t feel all better. I wanna see my wife. Where’s my wife?”

  Perry had no idea what to say to that. “Uh…um…she’s…not here right now, Stuber.”

  “Oh. Shit.” Stuber brought a hand up and stared at it like he wasn’t sure if it was his, and then he clapped it to the side of Perry’s head, and roughed him like he’d do when he was drunk. “You. You’re a good guy. I like you a lot. Can I tell you something?”

  Perry glanced up. He wasn’t sure how long this was going to take. He needed to figure things out. He needed to talk to the others. He hadn’t realized he was going to get into a heart-to-heart with Stuber. “Yeah, Stuber. You can tell me something.”

  Stuber pulled his head down, a bit of his strength making itself known again. “I know you fucking hated me. But I only wanted to be friends with you.”

  “Okay, buddy,” Perry patted him on the shoulder.

  “Are we friends?” Stuber demanded suddenly. “We are friends, aren’t we?”

  “Yeah, we’re friends.”

  “You don’t hate me anymore?”

  “No, Stuber. But I need you to let me go.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  Stuber released his grip on Perry’s head, and Perry righted himself. The ex-legionnaire melted back into the deck, eyes staring up at the clouds around them as the skiff began to descend. “This is all so out of control,” Stuber observed, frowning. “We’re in the fucking sky.”

  “Alright,” Perry gave him a final pat and then rose. He sidled over to Whimsby, who knelt beside Teran and Sagum.

  “All your biometrics look normal,” Whimsby told her. “You’ll begin to gain more feeling in your legs once the pain block they put into you starts to fade.”

  “How long will that be?” Teran asked, looking at her legs like they’d betrayed her.

  “Not long,” Whimsby assured her.

  “Hey, Whimsby,” Perry tapped the mech’s bare shoulder, near to a ruined bit where it looked like a bullet had skimmed his steel joints. “You fully operational? I mean, they didn’t fuck with any of your abilities or anything?”

  Whimsby blinked. “No. All my systems are operating as I expect them to. Why?”

  Perry lowered his voice so that it could only be heard by Whimsby’s enhanced hearing over the roar of the wind. “We need to hijack this skiff. We need to get Mala and Callidus out of it. Then we’re going to the East Ruins, as planned.”

  “You know they’ll pursue you.”

  “Yeah, I know. But we’ll have to figure that out later. Right now, we need to hijack the skiff.”

  Teran and Sagum leaned forward, trying to hear the murmured conversation.

  “You have a plan?” Whimsby asked, his eyes glancing up over Perry’s shoulder.

  Perry followed his gaze and caught sight of Mala, standing at the controls. She seemed focused on piloting. Perry turned back. “Um…kind of.”

  “How can I assist your kind-of-plan?” Whimsby asked.

  “Do all skiffs have gun lockers like the one we stole earlier?”

  Whimsby nodded.

  “Okay. When you see me make my move, get into that gun locker and…uh, start shooting at bad things.”

  Whimsby frowned. “That is a very kind-of-plan.”

  “Best I can do on short notice,” Perry admitted.

  “What can we do?” Teran asked.

  “Get guns,” Perry answered. “And help Whimsby. And don’t die. That’s what I need you and Sagum to do.”

  Sagum bobbed his head. “That’s do-able.”

  A new idea flowered in Perry’s head. He snapped his fingers as his half-formed plan began to play out in his head. “Whimsby. When you get a gun up, start firing on that other skiff. You gotta keep up a near constant rate of fire, because we need the paladins on that skiff to keep their shields up so they can’t shoot back at us. Then…” Perry took a breath. “Then I need you to grab the skiff controls.” He considered this for a moment, then nodded to affirm himself. “Yeah. That’s what you need to do.”

  Whimsby turned to Teran. “Mistress Teran, can you very quickly reload magazines for me when the shooting starts?”

  Teran glanced at her dead legs. “Yeah, I can do that.”

  Perry stood up from the huddle. All around them was misty gray, shot through at points with beams of sunlight. They were inside of a cloud, and still descending. When he looked forward, the skiff ahead of them was invisible, lost in the gray ahead.

  He needed to wait until visibility cleared.

  He looked to the aft. Mala watched him now, and he couldn’t tell whether her eyes were narrowed in suspicion, or because of the misty wind that blew in her face.

  Her attention made his heart start pounding again. He looked away, then slid up to the siderail of the skiff, trying to look natural, though he wasn’t quite sure what natural looked like anymore. He went with goggle-eyed-peon-guy-impressed-by-what-was-around-him.

  The skein of clouds began to thin. It wasn’t sunshine that met his eyes, but instead a threatening charcoal sky. The mist of the cloud turned into pelting raindrops.

  The skiff dropped out of the cloud, and for a moment, Perry didn’t need to act impressed. All around them a storm slashed the air with rain, blotting out the sun and causing every direction to be streaked with gray. In the far distance, Perry saw sunlight beaming down through a break in the clouds near the horizon line. Underneath them, as far as the eye could see, there was only turbulent, white-capped ocean.

  He imagined his kind-of-plan going kind-of-wrong, and them crashing into the sea below. The thought sent shivers up his back, and it wasn’t helped by the cold, driving rain that had already soaked him through.

  Death was death, whether you crashed into a mountainside or the ocean. And yet Perry was someone who had never seen the sea. His only experience with bodies of water had been the underground river that had taken them to the Glass Flats.

  The sea below them looked treacherous and terrible. Cold and hungry.

  Perry would have much preferred to crash into a mountainside.

  Or, better yet, I nice, sandy, familiar wasteland, far out west.

  “Perry!”

  He looked over at Mala.

  Yes, that was definite suspicion in her eyes.

  Perry pointed down at the waters and forced a smile. “I’ve never seen the ocean before!”

  Mala’s lips turned down at the corners, but she at least seemed less suspicious.

  Perry watched her for a moment longer as her attention turned forward again. The rain had slicked her braid into a sodden rope, but she kept her hands on the controls and blinked it out of her eyes, unperturbed by the discomfort.

  He looked ahead, feeling his gut tense. The lead skiff was visible now. And not too far out in front of them. Its stabilization fins off the rear of the hull created misty contrails through the rain. Distances were difficult for Perry to judge while in midair, but he figured it at a few hundred yards. Maybe less.

  Whimsby can handle that distance. That won’t be a problem.

  “Perry,” Stuber’s voice hollered.

  He turned and found the man up on his elbows now, head back, tongue out. He smiled when he saw Perry looking at him. “The rain tastes great!”

  S
o this was good. A half-dressed mech, a thief with dead legs, a tinkerer with questionable courage, and an ex-legionnaire, high off his ass on pain meds.

  And a halfbreed runt.

  Fantastic.

  But doubts be damned, Perry was already in motion. He’d already broken intertia. He’d already told his plan to Whimsby and Teran and Sagum, and he felt their attention on him, waiting for him to make his move.

  There was no going back. No matter how rag-tag his team was.

  Perry looked over the side again, as though the view fascinated him. Truth be told, he felt a little nauseous looking at it. He held the longstaff so that the muzzle was low, and hidden mostly behind his legs.

  Callidus was in the weapon controls, facing forward. He had yet to look back.

  Perry blinked through the rain, and breathed through pursed lips. He felt the connection to the longstaff, and he eased into it, slowly, just a little bit of himself at a time.

  A sidelong glance to the aft.

  Mala, looking down at her controls now. Perhaps reading the scanners, or trying to get a fix on their location.

  His mind moved down the length of the longstaff, just to the edge of it, and then he pulled back against it, as the power stretched him, wanting him to release. But he didn’t let the bolt of energy go. He held it there, straining against it.

  A ball of light began to glow at the muzzle of his longstaff. And grow.

  Staring down into the abysmal waters below. Letting that bolt of energy keep pulling more of himself into it, but not letting it fly, like it so badly wanted to do. Holding it. Nursing it.

  He saw it out of the corner of his vision. At least a foot in diameter, and swelling rapidly.

  “Perry!” Mala’s voice again.

  She’d seen the bolt of energy growing on his longstaff.

  Perry pointed down at the ocean again, praying for confusion to be his ally. “There’s something down there!” he shouted. “You see that?”

  It was the oldest trick in the book. Perry was so shocked when Mala actually leaned out of her controls to look over the edge, that he almost lost control and fired the bolt straight into the deck.

  Mala frowned at the waters. “I don’t…”

  A fraction of a second of realization.

  Perry spun. Thrust the longstaff out, one handed, and let the enormous ball of green light fly.

  Mala’s longstaff was still held between her legs. She could not use it to deflect this time. She issued a single cry and seized her longstaff, her shield blooming in the air in front of her in the shape of a disk—

  The bolt slammed into her shield in a gout of sparks, and sent her flying backwards off the skiff.

  Perry’s heart lodged itself in his throat. Everything in him now bore down to its center, clenching hard. He turned again, his longstaff in both hands, pointing at Callidus…

  Who had already turned out of the weapon controls, locked onto Perry, his teeth bared, his eyes fierce.

  Perry fired another shot, this one weaker and smaller than usual, as though he’d been used up.

  Callidus still had a shield, and he activated it as he charged across the deck, absorbing the single, weak bolt in a crackle of electricity.

  Perry tried to summon another bolt, but there wasn’t time. He activated his shield instead, and planted a foot behind him to receive the coming blow.

  Callidus slammed into him, their shields sparking, and Perry left his feet with a cry and then landed on his back, his shield reforming into an oval the size of Callidus’s shield as it pressed against him. The two shields were now matched flat against each other, neither fully encompassing its owner but leaving their backs exposed as they fought for dominance—which shield would go out first?

  “You backstabbing little runt!” Callidus spat. “I’m going to—”

  And then Callidus tumbled over the side of the skiff. He screamed, catching a hold of the siderail, but so did his shield, and it sheared it clean off in a spattering of molten metal. And then he was gone.

  Stuber lay, still on his back, with one boot outstretched in midair. He let it flop to the deck. He grinned and laughed. “I kicked him overboard. Did you see that?”

  From the front of the skiff, gunfire erupted.

  Whimsby stood with two rifles outstretched, one in each hand, firing one then the other in a constant stream of lead that crackled across the back of the skiff ahead. An energy shield sprouted off the backend of the skiff absorbing the incoming fire.

  “Keep shooting, Whimsby!” Perry yelled, running to the front.

  Teran sidled up on mushy legs, stationing herself to Whimsby’s right, while Sagum wrenched a series of magazines out of the gun locker and sent them spinning across the deck to Teran.

  “Ready!” Teran called, holding a mag in her grip.

  Whimsby fired the rifle in his right hand until it went dry, dropped it in Teran’s lap, and began emptying the rifle in his left.

  Teran snatched the empty mag out, seated the new one, and thrust it up into the air. “Sagum! Get up here and grab this rifle!”

  Perry and Sagum both charged to Whimsby’s side, Sagum grabbing the rifle out of Teran’s hands and Perry levelling his longstaff at the skiff ahead.

  “Whimsby, get to the controls!” Perry bellowed.

  Whimsby finished emptying the rifle, tossed it to Teran, then sprinted for the aft controls.

  Sagum got off a smattering of rounds and Perry prepared to let loose a bolt from his longstaff, when the skiff ahead of them banked sharply to the left and dropped altitutude. Perry attempted to track with it, but it zoomed beneath their own skiff, continuing to drop.

  Perry lurched over the siderail, trying to see where they were going. The skiff completed a 180-degree turn, but didn’t come back towards them. It screamed in the opposite direction, fading rapidly into the driving rain.

  “Where the hell are they going?” Perry yelled as the skiff vanished from sight. On the one hand, he was glad to be rid of them so quickly. On the other hand, he highly doubted they’d just cut and run because of some rifle fire.

  Whimsby’s amplified voice came over the wind: “They’re likely going back to try to pick up Mala and Callidus.”

  Perry faced the mech in the back. “Then punch it! Fast as this bucket can go! Get us the hell out of here!”

  Whimsby nodded. “To the East Ruins, I presume?”

  Perry struggled along the wet siderail towards the aft. “Yes! The East Ruins!”

  “Very well. Everyone, you may want to hunker down. The wind and rain is going to get uncomfortable.”

  Perry thought he might stand up to it—like a hardened battlefield commander in the face of bullets—but as Whimsby banked them to the right and accelerated, the pelting rain began to feel less like water and more like pebbles hitting his skin.

  Stuber had managed to roll onto his belly and hunkered down as the wind whipped gales of rain into his face. He put his arm up over his head to shield himself.

  Perry reached out, grabbed ahold of Stuber’s wrist, and pulled. “Come on you big fuck! Get to the front with me! Use your legs!”

  The scouring rain felt like it might rip the flesh from the back of his neck.

  Stuber managed to get to his hands and feet and crawl towards the front of the skiff, where the nose cone had a steeper slope and created a dead zone in the wind, shearing it off from hitting them and creating a gray-white plume of moisture that hung above their heads at a forty-five degree angle.

  Into this slight buffer, Perry, Stuber, Sagum, and Teran, all scrunched together with their backs plastered against the front. Stuber had to duck low to keep his head out of the slicing wind.

  “What happened?” Stuber said, frowning at the people on either side of him. “One second I’m drinking the rain and the next everyone’s yelling and shooting and paladins are flying every which way.”

  “Perry had a plan,” Teran answered, shivering as she pulled her arms tight around her.

  �
��Oh.” Stuber nodded without any apparent comprehension. “Good plan, Perry.” He sounded genuine. Then he reached out and grabbed Teran by the thigh and shook it. “Hey. Teran. Why are your legs so floppy?”

  “I’m still getting the feeling back in them.”

  “Great! I threw up.” There was a long pause. Stuber breathed heavily, his face paling. “I’m gonna do it again, too.”

  Perry pulled his legs back in time for Stuber to splatter more bile across the deck.

  ***

  Mala floated on her back. All around her, like a translucent shell, her shield shimmered. She felt the heat of it radiating through her back, but it would not touch her. It encapsulated her as she floated on the water, pouring up steam as it superheated the water beneath her, and sizzled the rain falling from the sky.

  She stared straight up into the cloud of rising steam. Saw nothing but gray.

  She was angry. That was a given. But it was a cold, introspective anger. She ran it over and over in her mind, wondering where she’d gone wrong, what she could have done differently, and how she could correct it in the future.

  Despite her anger, she was not furious with herself. She had accepted the risks of working with the halfbreed. Those risks required a certain amount of trust be placed in him, and a tacit acknowledgement that that trust might be betrayed. It irritated her that it was betrayed, but she could not have done anything about it.

  Should she have not looked over board? It was easy to say that she’d been stupid falling for that trick. But if the halfbreed had really spotted something—like skiffs pursuing them from The Clouds—then she’d have been stupid to ignore his warning.

  Should she have not given him the longstaff and shield? He was a headstrong little runt, and Mala had no doubt they’d still be stuck in that cell, arguing about it.

  Could she have used the Immobilizer on him? Perhaps. But she’d been trying to establish a bond of trust. She’d never had an Immobilizer used on her, but she understood that it wasn’t a great way to make friends.

  There were a hundred things she could have done differently, but that was all hindsight. She’d made the decisions that she’d made because they were the best options at the time. Sometimes it just didn’t work out.