Fight Like A Girl

by Juliet E. McKenna

  Another explosion rocked the ship and confirmed Adii’s suspicions. She knew the difference between a cannon blast and sabotage . . . that explosion came from a detonation within the ship, not from an outside assailant. The Dekiyol transport groaned and lurched once more, then all the screaming engines fell silent and Adii was plunged in darkness.

  She waited for the emergency lighting to come online, but nothing, all systems were down. She sensed the air vents closing. Life support was offline. In a ship this size and with a skeleton crew, they probably had a day of breathable air before the atmosphere turned toxic. This was a co-ordinated attack.

  She quieted her breathing. A twenty year military career had taught her battle techniques, but the Thral War had taught her guerrilla tactics, and turned her into a killing machine, driven by grief and rage. Despite her enforced “convalescence’ and the “healing programs’ she had been made to attend after the war, she had never lost her edge, or her rage.

  She sheathed the pulsar gun and took out her killing blade. It was time to hunt.

  Removing her shoes and any articles of clothing that could make a noise, she waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark. She had trained herself in this too. Her night vision was excellent.

  Allowing her body to find its equilibrium, she used what had been the ceiling to swim along the corridor. She sensed no movement, no sign of life. She moved swiftly, following the only muffled sounds to be heard, the faintest echoes from deep in the belly of the ship. Her eyes found the shapes of dead crewmen floating lifelessly in the gloom. Blood drifted in the darkness, globules bouncing against her skin, bursting open in her hair.

  Her senses alerted to a slow moving shadow coming down the corridor. Three shadows. They were walking, not floating. Magnetic boots. Adii floated above their heads, they hadn’t seen her. They headed for the astronaut’s quarters.

  She felt a twinge of regret. This would be over too soon and she wanted it to last.

  She pushed off from the ceiling and headed for the last of the figures. The continued sounds of fighting from deep below told her these weren’t the only traitors on-board.

  She glided down, blade twitching in her hand, wanting its target.

  It found it.

  In one deft movement, she landed on the shoulders of the last man like a black spider, and grabbed the back of his head. She pulled it back before he could react, and plunged the knife through his eyeball and into his brain. She felt the hilt scrape against the bone of his eye socket. Sure it had gone in far enough, she slid it out, wiping the jelly on his cheek as she let his limp body drift to the floor, his boots anchoring him like a piece of waving sea kelp.

  Onto the second.

  She saw the next man freeze and turn. Had he heard anything? Too late. Before he had a chance to call his accomplice, her blade drove deep into his skull. This time, and to Adii’s surprise, a gargled sound escaped his lips. The first figure turned.

  “Quiet!” he hissed, then cursed as he saw the glint of steel in the dark.

  Adii had to move quickly. She saw the gun being raised. She threw the killing blade with deadly accuracy and saw the hand go limp and the gun float away. It was almost comical, even in this gloom, seeing these slumped, swaying figures. Adii drifted over to the last attacker and pressed her foot down on his head, pulling the knife from his skull with an awful sucking sound.

  Three down, but how many more were there?

  She checked them all and stripped them of their weapons. No tags, pilot cards, nothing to identify them other than the universal translator units hidden under their clothes and fixed above each one’s voice box, to disguise their accents.

  She checked the corridor again. Silence. Placing one of the units against her ear, she fiddled with the reverse button.

  “Who are they?” she whispered, and heard the unit repeat the words in a distinctive Oskillian accent. Adii smiled. “Got you!”

  Oskillus was one of Kaelin’s outer colonies, and a sector that many Thral ships had been seen travelling through. Adii had long suspected it of colluding with the enemy. Here was the proof.

  The sounds of battle echoed through the darkness. She longed to join the fight, but clearly the attackers knew about the passengers. She’d killed three, but more would follow. She had to move the humans first.

  She floated back to their quarters.

  “Oskillian traitors!” she whispered.

  “Adii?” She heard Lithir’s worried voice from the other side of the door.

  “They’re Oskillian traitors,” she repeated. “Open the door, we need to move!”

  Lithir hesitated. “How do I know it’s you?”

  Damn Lithir and his protocols, but he was right. With a universal translator you could emulate anyone’s voice.

  “Ask me a question then, but hurry the fuck up!”

  The door opened, and a floating Lithir greeted her, hand trembling. “I knew that was you!”

  Adii checked the corridor again. No sound, no movement.

  “They know you’re here. We’re moving,” she whispered. “Take anything off that will make a noise and take these!” She threw the attacker’s weapons to each of the humans. “Arm yourselves. I’ve deactivated the safety. It’s like any gun so just point and squeeze, preferably not at me!”

  Checking once more, they issued out of the room and into the corridor beyond. Adii deactivated the magnetic boots on each of the dead attackers and pulled their floating corpses into the cabin before jamming the door shut.

  “Right, let’s go,” she said.

  Grabbing onto each other, Commander Nakiri led them towards the rear of the transport. The humans were surprisingly good in the zero gravity atmosphere, floating almost in formation behind her. They might just make it to the cargo deck before being overtaken. Lithir, on the other hand, was conspicuous by his flailing.

  “Where are we going?” Peter whispered.

  “Cargo holds,” she replied, “away from the fighting.”

  Her frustration at hearing the battle raging below was palpable.

  They turned several corners and found themselves in a cavernous space. One of the ship’s main stair shafts, seven decks in all. Explosions echoed through the ship. The glow of fire and pulsar blasts illuminated the stairwell. The cargo holds were down two levels, nearer to the fighting.

  The emergency lighting spluttered into life.

  She preferred the dark. They were an easier target like this, but it was a good sign that the ship was coming under control again. The question was . . . who was in control? Daniel and the other astronauts stared at her; she was covered in blood. More sounds could be heard, coming from behind them, more magnetic boots. Adii hesitated. It was too open here, they needed shelter. She floated across to a store room and over-riding the door mechanism, prised the door and bundled them all in.

  “Move!” she hissed, grabbing Daniel and Michael and pushing them inside.

  The attackers were almost at the human’s cabin now. They would discover the bodies of their fellow traitors any moment.

  She tried to close and lock the door again, but it wouldn’t budge.

  “Damn it! Stay here,” she whispered. “Shoot anything that comes around that corner that isn’t me!”

  Adii pulled out her blood covered knife. She caught the look of horror on Daniel’s face, and it almost made her smile.

  She floated back across the stairwell and down the corridor, reaching the first corner as a hail of pulsar fire blasted into the human’s quarters.

  Hunting time again.

  Slipping around the corner she braced herself against the ceiling, just the other side of a large bulkhead. Wedging herself against the structure and ensuring she kept her legs out of sight, she waited.

  Five sets of magnetic boots ran down the corridor towards her. How she wished the lights were still out! She could surprise one, maybe two in the dark, but not five. She unclicked the holster of her gun, feeling it float in its sheath.

  �
�Find them!” snarled one of the assassins, “They’ve gained the bridge again. We’re losing the ship, we’ve got to find them!”

  She waited as they passed below her.

  Dropping down on the head of the last attacker, she slit his throat in one swipe. He gargled something. The fourth man turned and she plunged the knife into his heart. As she held the blade in place, she pushed off from the wall and kicked the third assailant in the face, sending him hurtling sideways as she drew her gun and shot the other two – one in the head, one squarely in the chest. They fell like scattered leaves, their boots still anchoring them to the floor as if they were sheaves of corn ready to be harvested. Recovering, the third attacker fired back at her. The blast went wide but caught her in the shoulder, throwing her back. With her hand still wrapped around the blade embedded in the fourth man’s heart, she withdrew it and threw it at the third figure, catching him in the throat. He dropped his gun and clasped his gushing neck.

  Adii floated over to him.

  “How many more?” she asked. “Tell me truthfully, and I’ll kill you quickly. Tell me a lie and I’ll gut you like a fish and go after everyone you love, your wife, your children, mother, father, brothers, sisters, everyone . . . so, what’s it going to be?”

  She hovered in front of him, barely aware of the bleeding hole in her shoulder.

  The attacker gurgled.

  Adii bent closer. “Sorry, your lungs are filling with blood. I didn’t quite catch that. How many are there?”

  “T . . . wenty, twenty,” he choked.

  “In total?”

  He nodded.

  Eight down, only another twelve to deal with.

  “I was forced . . . I . . .”

  “I’m not interested in excuses. You’re a traitor to your own people. I don’t care if the Thral have your family hostage, you never betray your own people.” She slid the knife from his neck and plunged it, hilt deep, into his stomach, cutting upwards.

  He screamed as the air turned red.

  Let this be an example to the others. Betrayal will get you butchered.

  A noise behind her made her turn, just as a pulsar blast fired. A sixth man collapsed. Adii looked up to see Daniel floating there, gun in hand, a startled expression on his face. She straightened up, a horrifying figure with wild eyes, utterly drenched in blood.

  “I told you to stay,” she said.

  “I thought you might need help . . .” he muttered.

  The gravity drive engaged. Everything crashed to the floor. The corridor resembled an abattoir.

  The com system crackled into life. “We have regained the ship, we have regained the ship!”

  Adii recognised the voice as D’nor, the vessel’s navigator. He was trustworthy. “The Thral agents have been neutralised. We’re sweeping the ship for any others. All other personnel, report to the bridge immediately!”

  Adii sighed. She’d seen situations like this spin out of control, whole ships overrun or even destroyed. Pirates and raiders were mostly to blame, attacking transports to steal cargo or assassins infiltrating a crew to complete a contract, usually on the captain. But Thral spies amongst a trusted Dekiyol crew? She’d never heard of anything like that. How the hell did they know about the humans? That meant at least one conspirator on the bridge, inside the control deck, neutralising the pilots and auxiliary crew and gaining full access to the ship’s records, including its passenger manifests.

  “Traitors!” she spat.

  Daniel stood quietly, his back against the frame of a door.

  “You look shocked,” Adii commented.

  He blinked. “I suppose I am. I suppose . . . I just, I’ve never seen someone killed before.”

  “And?”

  “You appear to get pleasure from it, from killing.” Daniel sounded accusatory, whether he had meant to or not.

  Adii stared at him. “I suppose I do,” she replied bluntly, deliberately using his wording, “I suppose that makes me a monster in your eyes, probably in most people’s eyes.” She sighed and relaxed a little. “Lithir says I have rage issues. He’s right. I’ve had a belly full of traitors in my time, who betray their own people for what? For money, for power?” She shook her head. “Traitors who slaughter thousands. They’re a cancer. Those “people’ -they deserve my rage. So yes, I enjoy killing them, not just because they deserve it, but because it’s one less traitor who can slaughter someone else.”

  It was an ugly truth which when laid out for all the world to see, made perfect sense. Whether it was Vichy France, Ukrainian troops betraying their own country for a slice of mother Russia, or the traitors in the Mars conflicts, selling out their neighbours and union allies for a pot of money, war was always brutal.

  Adii was just a blade, used to cut out the cancer of treachery, and an effective blade at that.

  She watched the sour expression on his face with some delight. Conflict, death, was distasteful and ugly.

  For all his bravado, this human man was an innocent, as Lithir had said. After everything she had been through, everything she had seen and done . . . there was something beautiful in that.

  Unnatural History

  Danie Ware

  The thing was huge. It filled the pale stone of the old hall from floor to broken roof. It was a monstrous ripple of texture and colour, glinting and seething, pulsing with hunger. It had consumed everything, accepted the building’s long history as fuel for its size and might, and now it rose before us, looking down at our foolishness with a wide and mineral grin.

  There you are, it seemed to say, come to Me at last.

  Huddled behind me, the group from the old train weren’t fighters. They’d heard the bike engine and spilled out from the abandoned station at South Ken – they’d greeted me like some street-hero of old, patting my arm and babbling horrors. They’d pointed at the rifle over my back and then vaguely, helplessly northwards. They’d known it was there, known it would come for them, known it would roll forward over the overgrown ground, and leave that wide swathe? of desolation behind it . . .

  They’d known they could do nothing to stop it.

  Now, they cowered in front of it like acolytes. I was their Priestess, their scarred Goddess of Dirt and Boots. The doorway and the long steps down to the derelict street were behind us, but nothing lay that way, only the endless creeper, and the corpses of long-forgotten cars.

  In front of us . . . by the Rotting Gods, this monster wasn’t the first of these things I’d seen, but it was easily the biggest. It blocked the mighty hall like a lump in its throat. It bulged across the floor and obscured the stairways. Ash-grey light fell from the ruined roof and glinted upon its shoulders.

  “Katja! Katja! Kate!” The train group’s leader was calling me. He was an older man, savvy enough to survive, to watch – I could feel he was gesturing, but didn’t dare turn and look. My eyes were on the monster. On the history of the world held within its body.

  You, I told it silently, are as dead as this bastard city.

  I cocked my father’s old bolt-action, that satisfying “ker-chank, ker-chank’ that I’d learned as a teenager. The thing rippled again, stretched as high as the roof, the light dancing, the movement smooth and fluid. There was bone in there, sucked in and held in suspension – it was dark with age, huge pieces of it now broken into filthy shards. Some of it was still pierced though with twisted, rusted steel. There were bits of animal and crystal, stone from the walls and floor, metal from the bannisters, old wood from the last of the furniture. The broken glass of the shattered windows made its eyes, and they glittered with the remnants of the patterns within.

  When it moved, it rumbled like a building coming down.

  But I didn’t care. Rotting thing. With tight focus, I put the old rifle’s butt against my shoulder, sighted, took one glass eye clean out of its head. It rocked back, keening, then its face inverted and opened again like some blossoming of urban debris. And the eye was replaced, winking at me.

  Shit.

&nbs
p; Somewhere behind it, the weed-grown staircases joined at a single white statue – the head of an old man who watched the scene in silence, his judgment withheld. Whoever he was, he was unimpressed by my shooting.

  The train people were crying out now, instructions and fear. Their leader shouted at them to stay quiet, his voice firm. I cocked the rifle again and took a second shot, this time at the monster’s grinning mouth. It swallowed the round whole, spitting tiny fragments as if it would belch in satisfaction.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  Not wasting more ammo, I slung the rifle and ducked to pick up my old shield. I’d made this when my father died, from a dustbin lid and an old road-sign – made it the day I’d held to my promise and gone to find other survivors. I’d been nineteen, and my father had been my everything – parent, trainer, insight, courage. Gods and Rot, he would’ve known how to deal with this bastard thing. But he’d been dead twenty years – more. This was my world, now, the world I’d made my own.

  The beast shuddered with textures, they ran over its surface like water. It lowered itself to a bulbous fatness, and eyed me with its vast head cocked to one side. Cold grey light flashed from its movements, made me blink so I almost missed it – the bulge that was one flank exploding into a huge, uncurling tentacle. It threw it out at me, scattering pieces: hard edges of bone, fragments of the little stone creatures that had once clung to the walls. I blocked it with a crack that skidded me backwards, slashed down at it with my heavy old Bowie knife, the blow brutal. Crippled, the tentacle crashed to the stone floor, twitching, but a slurp of the beast’s underside simply sucked it back up again.

  Rotting hell.

  I’d no idea how long this thing had been in here, seeping through doors and levels, swelling as it absorbed every artefact and memory—

  It shuddered, making the old walls shake. Pieces of the roof fell to shatter before it, and it rolled forwards, picking up the bits as it came. A second tentacle, this one with a claw-tip, like some huge and scrabbling insect. It clacked shut just short of my blade-hand, withdrew, but not fast enough. A flashing over-and-backhand with the knife and the end clattered, severed, to the floor. I kicked it away before the beast could roll forwards again. But this wasn’t good enough, just wasn’t taking enough of its body mass. The little ones exploded from a well-aimed round of .303, or they fell to pieces if you hacked hard enough – but not this thing, it had to be ten times the size of anything else I’d seen. I felt a tremor that might’ve been panic, dismissed it. And as it rippled again, I could see now – there were bodies in there too. Pieces of human life that may once have lived or visited here, or taken refuge in this great hall when the end of the world had come.