by Sara King
Milar grabbed her by the throat and slammed her into the pillow, his yellow eyes glowing. “I know it’s on this planet or they’d be dead by now. Where?”
Tatiana slapped at Milar’s arm, struggling to breathe, and he released her long enough for her to suck in a breath. She now saw at least six versions of him sitting there, and each one was doing something different. She opened her mouth to tell him to get out of her tent, but what came out was, “Searchie, searchie, fake Patty goes a searchie-searchie, but fake Patty won’t find his brother’s treasure-trove, no siree.”
Milar released Tatiana as if she’d caught fire. “You.”
Tatiana heard herself give a maniacal laugh. “Me. Me, me, me, me, me…”
“Goddamn it, who are you?!” Milar screamed, standing up. “Why are you following me?!”
“Fake Patty plays game of life,” Tatiana giggled. “Fake Patty stacks the deck. Fake Patty uses dirty tricks to win every time. Fake Patty will one day meet his maker. Delay, delay, must delay! Reinforcements!”
Milar snagged a pillow off the bed, white and trembling. “Get out of her.”
Tatiana felt her laughter fade away, her amusement sloughing off completely. “Make me, fucker.”
Milar roared and shoved the pillow down at Tatiana’s face—
—at the same time an adult black jaggle lunged through the dark opening Milar had torn into the side of the tent, landing on his face, sinking its teeth into his skull.
Milar screamed and threw it aside, taking down the tent-poles as the beast rolled back out into the darkness. He reached for Tatiana again.
Babe was there between them, hissing, back arched in warning, silver claws lashing at the air between them. Milar’s eyes narrowed and he reached for the cub.
“Delayyyy!” Tatiana heard herself shriek. She started to giggle again.
The adult jaggle came out of the darkness again, this time hitting Milar hard enough to send them both tearing what was left of the tent completely off the mountainside and rolling down the hill.
“Go,” Tatiana heard herself say. “Go little alien girl. Go go go go go go go.”
Tatiana was shaking all over, but the adrenaline of realizing that Milar had just tried to kill her was enough that some of the fog was clearing. She reached down, picked up Babe, and started down the mountainside.
“No!” Tatiana heard herself scream. “Up! Up, up up up up up up!”
She spun and started stumbling up the hill, panting.
Below her, a big cat screamed.
“Poor kitty, dead kitty, go! Go, go, go, go go!”
Tatiana struggled around the mountainous rocks, bumping and weaving in the darkness, struggling to get up the hill, seeing several hillsides at once, each slightly different. “I can’t!” she whimpered.
“You can! Kitty dead, kitty dead, girly run or girly dead!”
Tatiana started crying in terror, unable to stop herself from speaking, from running. “What’s going ooonnnn?” she sobbed. The darkness of night was all around her, now, with only the silvery light of the void ring to help Tatiana find her way through the boulders. She panted as something heavy hit the rocks somewhere beneath her, followed by a male grunt. “Go go go go go go go go go,” Tatiana kept chanting, unable to stop.
She heard footsteps behind her, now. When she looked back, Milar was rushing up the hill at her, a katana out, blade glowing a sickly bronze, jumping twenty feet in the air as easily as if he were bouncing on a moon.
“Go!” Tatiana shrieked. “You must go!”
Tatiana screamed and stumbled, adrenaline clawing at her veins like talons with every beat of her heart.
“Up, up, up, up, up, up, up,” Tatiana was chanting under her breath, “up, up, up—” Then, like in a horror vid, Tatiana’s foot caught in a crack and she went down, hard, falling on Babe and making the kitten yowl. Behind her, she heard the thunder of Milar’s feet, bounding up the mountain after her. She started to get up—
“Down!” Tatiana howled, as she was violently thrown back to the ground. In her arms, Babe started to writhe and claw at her in his terror, broadcasting images of swords slicing them to pieces. Tatiana screamed and let go. And, knowing Milar was there, only meters away, Tatiana started to get up again—
“Stay down, Captain Eyre!” The woman’s voice shattered the stillness of the dark. A moment later, the skeenk was hurtling past her down the mountain in full combat gear, leaping over rocks twice Tatiana’s height, a katana blazing like a golden sun above her. She slammed into Milar and the two swords clashed with a bone-deep, booming sound like ringing crystal.
“Come on, sweetie,” a man’s deep, rumbling voice said. “Let’s get you out of here.”
“But Babe…” Tatiana whimpered, looking down at the blood dripping down her empty hand. She’d let go of him in her terror.
“Got him,” the tall, blond man said. He was decked out in black special ops gear, gripping the thrashing, yowling cat by the back of his neck, seemingly impervious to the way Babe was slashing and biting at his wrist and forearm. His eyes, too, were glowing yellow, his skin like a deeper darkness. “Come on!” He grabbed Tatiana by the back of her shirt and hauled her back to her feet like she weighed a pound and a half, then started dragging her up the hill.
He hadn’t gone very far before he shoved Tatiana at a woman decked out in skin-tight black leather. “Get her out of here,” the man commanded. “Kestrel and I will distract him.”
Down on the mountainside below, the crystal whomph came again and again, the screams of rage mingling with the sound of boulders crumbling and rolling down the mountainside in a rush of pulverized rock bits.
“Come on,” the woman in black leather said, grabbing Tatiana under the armpit and hauling her towards a ship clinging to the mountainside. “Let’s get you somewhere safe.” She started leading her up the cargo ramp, but not before Tatiana saw the man reach for something between his shoulder-blades, then pull another one of those shimmering katanas from apparently thin air. This one flickered with orange fire opal flashes of color that lit up the surrounding mountainside. The big blond lunged past Tatiana and took off down the hill at a run, sword out to one side.
Then Tatiana was being boarded on the ship, the ramp being lifted behind her.
“Go!” the woman in leather cried. “They’ve got him on the ground!”
A cute kid from the cockpit turned and looked in at them. “They need help?”
“Doesn’t matter,” the woman said. “We need to get her out of here.”
“Yeah, but that’s Orion,” the man began, “maybe with four of us…”
“I am well aware of who the fuck it is,” she snapped. “Fly. Before he gets in here!” As if to punctuate her cry, something impossibly heavy slammed into the side of the ship, denting it inward. Then a glowing bronze katana rammed through the wall and, with a shriek of metal, began slicing, so close to Tatiana’s face that she could see through the line of holes in the blade.
She screamed and scrambled away.
The ginsu-holed katana started sawing at the wall like a sushi knife attacking a slab of fish. Knowing how hard a ship’s hull was, how much metal stood between them, Tatiana knew she had to be hallucinating. She allowed some of her fear to drain away.
The ship’s engines roared and they shot towards the sky. Tatiana swallowed hard as, even with the ship’s advanced grav system, she felt the Gs flatten her to the floor.
Then she saw the sword retreat, then jam back into the wall of the cargo bay.
“Spin!” the woman cried, yanking a katana of her own from nothingness between her shoulder-blades and stalking towards the sword protruding through the wall, her blade a crimson blaze.
A moment later, the telltale stomach-loops of an out-of-control spin made Tatiana lay flat on the floor and clutch the metal grating—where she found herself face-to-face with the withered old egger from Deaddrunk. His eyes were rolled into the back of his head, and he seemed to be muttering under
his breath.
A few feet away, the woman in leather began slashing at the wall around the glowing bronze sword, taking out whole swaths of the ship’s bulkhead, cutting off electricity to the overhead lights and crash strips as she also hacked through the hull of the ship as if it were made of paper. Immediately, the screaming air of Fortune’s atmosphere began to rip away at the damage, tearing it free. In a moment, the swath of hull broke loose and went careening off into the night, taking the bronze sword with it.
Tatiana had to blink when she realized an enraged, glowy-eyed Milar was somehow still clinging to the tear in the wall, his body whipping out alongside the ship, pounding against the hull like spaghetti caught in a fan. As if to punctuate that, the leather-clad dominatrix made a swift slice of her blood-red sword, cutting off all of Milar’s fingers, sending him hurtling to the jungle below.
This, Tatiana decided, was by far the worst trip she’d ever had.
“You can stop spinning now!” the dominatrix shouted at the cockpit, steadying herself against a wall as she watched Milar fall through the open hole in the ship.
Immediately, the pilot straightened out and flew as straight and level as a rookie nun.
“Go back to David and Kestrel!” the dominatrix yelled. “They’ll need an evac!”
Yeah, an evac. Tatiana could use an evac, like, yesterday. She started hitting the side of her head.
The leather-clad woman seemed to zero in on her, frowning at the way she was hitting herself. “What’s wrong with you? He hurt you? Touch you in any way?”
“I’d like to wake up, now,” Tatiana explained. She kept smacking herself.
The woman squinted at her a moment as the air howled past the rip in their side, then shook herself and slammed her glowing crimson katana back into nothingness between her shoulder blades. The ship was already landing on the mountainside, and Ms. Dominatrix jumped out the open hole in the ship, calling out to the mountainside.
A few moments later, she and the skeenk returned with the blond man who had saved Babe hunched between them, an enormous gash cutting him from breastbone to kneecap. As Tatiana squinted at it, however, it seemed to be healing before her eyes. “Orion lost his sword!” the dominatrix yelled to them, over the rush of the engines.
“Go!” the man shouted to the cockpit. “Get us over his coordinates.”
“Yeah, yeah!” the pilot shouted back. Then the ship was hurtling skyward again, flying out over the Fortune jungle. A few minutes later, the dominatrix shouted towards the cockpit, “He’s down there!” The ship halted so quickly it slammed Tatiana and the demented egger towards the front of the hold. A hundred meters below, Tatiana could see the jungle canopy lit up by the silvery light of the Void Ring, but saw nothing special about it.
“Northwest three thousand yards!” the dominatrix shouted at the cockpit. “Moving fast! I think he’s headed back for his weapon—cut him off!”
The ship instantly careened around to the northwest and put them closer to a gash that part of the hull had cut into the foliage.
One-by-one, the three drew their katanas again, flashing the inside of the ship with the vivid colors of their glowing blades. Then, as if they were hopping down from a chair, one by one, the skeenk, the dominatrix, and the tall blond angel jumped from the open hole in the ship, falling for several long seconds before she disappeared into the jungle canopy far below. Tatiana cocked her head at that, then glanced at the pilot, who gave her a goofy grin and a salute. “Hey. You, uh, hungry? I know a good burger joint while we wait.”
Wordlessly, Tatiana glanced down at Wideman Joe, who was even then seeming to wake up from his episode. He blinked up at her, his blue eyes looking surprised a moment. Then he grinned. He was holding Babe, who was purring contentedly in the wiry old cretin’s arms.
“Traitor,” Tatiana muttered at the kitten.
“Traitor,” Wideman babbled, grinning like an imbecile as he bobbed his head emphatically, looking at Tatiana. He squeezed Babe harder, until it actually looked like the kitten came in two parts, one on either side of the old man’s arm, but Babe didn’t even utter a yowl of complaint, instead giving Tatiana a smug look with his purple eyes half-closed in contentment.
“I know a great burger joint in Boomberg,” the man insisted. “They make a seaweed-sardine cheeseburger that’s to die for.”
Yep. Definitely the worst trip she’d ever had. “Nah,” she said. “I think I’ll just sleep it off…” she squinted at the young man, trying to place him, and coming up short, “…whoever you are.”
“Chase Belfry,” the kid said, grinning back at her. He got up, leaving the craft in a hover, and came over to her, holding out his hand. “Heard lots about you, Captain. That fight in Sunwash Valley on Muchos Rios—you were the last operator standing. Saved the whole installation, all the civilians, everybody.”
Great. A fanboy. She groaned and started hitting herself again, knowing luckless operators like her didn’t get fanboys. People would much rather admire big, muscly, glittering Nephyrs than they would five-foot midgets bristling with hookups and gaping holes in their brains. Unfortunately, much like that annoying song, this appeared to be The Trip That Would Never End.
“You probably already guessed it,” the cute hallucination named Chase said, still holding out his hand, “but I’m an AlphaGe—”
“Whatever,” she said, cutting off her delusion. “Let’s talk again when I’m coherent.” Tatiana grunted and lay down beside the greasy old man, guessing he was probably her blanket folded up into a shape her drugged-up mind translated into a demented old egger with missing teeth. Thank God she wasn’t going to remember this in the morning…
CHAPTER 47: Children of Fortune
13th of June, 3006
Rath Spacepad
Fortune, Daytona 6 Cluster, Outer Bounds
“Does that quivering pile of meat look like it’s still alive to you?” The little girl’s voice was almost singsong, and very close, and, in his dying haze, Bagham decided it belonged to an angel. He had expected his men to put him back together as soon as Magali had departed, but they’d left his pieces to dehydrate overnight, instead. Sometime afterwards, not having the same regen capabilities of a true Alpha, Bagham’s systems had failed. In his haze of agony, his eyes no longer able to focus, Steele could nonetheless see he was still alone on the parade deck, abandoned by his friends, waiting to meet his maker. He welcomed that, knowing the end was soon.
“It appears to be alive, though barely,” a man said matter-of-factly. “The crystal solution would have kept primary functions as stable as possible, but eventually, without access to the complete organism, they’ll run out of energy and fail.” He, too, was invisible. Another angel, then.
“Man, Geo wasn’t kidding. He stinks like a dead frog that got hit by lightning.”
“A good analogy,” the second angel agreed. “Definitely unpleasant.”
“Grab it. We’re taking it with us to the Orbital. All of it. I want the meat-piles, too. That’s especially good.”
“I’m not sure the subject will live long enough to reach the Orbital,” the man objected, even as Steele heard him bend down and the wet, sloppy sound of what was left of his body being scraped up and dropped into a plastic bag. As the man did so, the broadcasted sensations of his severed muscles and bones grinding against each other drove spikes of agony through his systems, making Bagham’s lips twist in pain.
“Oh pshaw,” the little girl said. “The head looks alive. If it dies, resuscitate it. As painfully as possible. All we need is brain activity.”
Bagham, not having experienced the familiar sensations of a breath or a beat of his heart in hours, prayed his angel would show herself and take him soon…
Nonetheless, his mouth opened in a silent cry when invisible hands picked him up by his hair and carried him to a huge, blurry object that Steele assumed was a ship. His eyes had stopped watering hours ago, and, thanks to the AlphaGen technology, he could still feel every inch of
his butchered body inside the bag like it was being rasped with salty sandpaper.
He heard the sounds of a ship engine, then saw two shapes coalesce from thin air, invisible blankets getting tossed to one side. Some deeper part of him was relieved the moment they came into view. A child and a man, so blurry in his dried-out eyes that he couldn’t even make out their faces. His guardian angels had finally come to claim him, to take him home.
The smaller one dropped his head beside a bloody bag that contained what was left of his body, making him stare at it. Now Bagham could not only feel every inch of his shredded corpse, but he could see it… Unable to stand looking at the pieces of his own body, Bagham closed his eyes and felt himself start to fade into a deeper darkness even as the ship lifted them skyward.
“Zap him, if you would please? I think he’s running out of juice.”
The adult knelt beside him and, seconds later, sharp electrodes punched through his dehydrating neck muscles, burrowing into his spine, and Bagham’s mouth gaped in surprise. A moment later, his vision exploded in white and black flashes as those electrodes shocked him with what felt like a nuclear power-plant’s seasonal output, reinvigorating his systems.
“See, my little meat-puppet,” the little girl said sweetly, “we don’t want you to die before it’s time. We need you alive to send the proper message.” There was a short pause. “Shock him again, Dobie. I’m not sure he’s listening to me.”
The shock to his severed spine came again, and it kept going until Bagham was working his jaw incoherently. That deep, inner knowing, the feeling that he was finally going home, had been replaced with something horrible. He began to wonder if they weren’t angels, but something much, much worse.
“So,” the little girl continued, “as I was saying, we need you to send a message to your friends back in the Core.” She patted the sack of butchered meat that had been his torso and limbs, squishing it intentionally to make him scream. “Think you could do that for me?”
Steele’s silent, working jaw must have been enough, because she made a pleased clap of her hands. “Great! Dobie, there’s an extra cryo shell in the second docking bay, right?”