by Aaron Crash
Still, ending a life, it had a definite weight to it.
The other Meelah used their concussion staves to knock the consciousness out of any of the Konobi that got close to them.
The way was clear. More Clicker Konobi were coming along with Humans from above, adults only. Thank everything good in the galaxy. Blaze wouldn’t have wanted to fight children Konobi.
Arlo was laughing. “Now, this is some fun right here. Reminds me of the old days huntin’, but dammit, I never worked on a team. I was what you would call a lone wolf. Ahh-wooo!”
“Shut up!” Blaze barked.
“Give me a gun, Ramon.” Arlo’s wrists were still shackled together. He still had his bottle gripped in both hands. The cheroot was still behind his ear. “Sorry, it’s Blaze now. Right. Uncuff me. Let me fight. And let me finish off the last of this Barf Baby. I’m gonna stop drinking.”
Blaze lost focus. Arlo, going on the wagon? He couldn’t believe it. Wouldn’t believe it. But it wasn’t the right time to ponder Arlo’s ill-timed sobriety.
The Promenade, on a full day, probably served about ten thousand people. There hadn’t been that many when Blaze had jogged through it, but there had been thousands. Even if a few had got away, that was still a shit-ton of Konobi they’d have to face. A lot of innocent people who’d been tortured and perverted that now had to be destroyed.
Blaze growled. This was why they had to shut the Onyx Gate. This was why their own lives didn’t matter. No matter what they had to sacrifice, they had to end the evil threatening the galaxy.
The gunny took a moment to grab Denning by the hair. “Look, you motherfucker, look at what you don’t think exists. And this is only the beginning. For three years I’ve been hunting these things and you’ve been getting in my way. Now, you know. And I don’t care about the size of your bank account or how good your career path looks, you are not going to be able to justify yourself after seeing what you are seeing.”
Denning’s mouth was open. His eyes were wide.
“If you survive, that is.” Blaze let him go.
The IPC shocktroopers had gotten to their feet, and they opened fire on the Konobi Humans trying to get down the staircase. Plasma bolts blew out hearts, fried through brains, and sent limbs flying. And yet, when a guy went down, or a woman was killed, there was a look of disappointment and disbelief in their faces. They wanted to torture. They wanted to kill. Anything peaceful or merciful had been ripped out of them by the torment of Nauzea’s cruel imagination.
A Meelah next to Blaze sobbed into his hands. Most of the Meelah had tears on their faces.
Magistrate Mack motioned to the doorway. “We must go. The bluetroopers can hold the staircase while we hurry.”
Denning nodded. “Yes.” He touched behind his ear. “Squiggman, take half your soldiers and hold the staircase as long as you can. Kosnowski, bring the rest with us. We’re getting out of here. If it looks dead, shoot it dead.”
“Yes, sir!” Kosnowski said through the speakers in his blue helmet.
“We should sync up.” Blaze went through his combat display and found the settings to do just that. Everyone with a fifteen-foot radius was now linked to his implants. They could talk, gauge their stats, and find each other.
Blaze saw a flashing icon, a message from Lizzie. He popped it open and grinned. It explained how to use the gun on his left arm. Damn, but he might have to trust Lizzie after all. She’d taken Ugly Betty and merged her with his nanotech armor. She must’ve left the message after she’d helped them, but before comms had been disrupted by Nauzea’s magic.
He fed five shells into a magazine located on his left tricep. When he triggered the gun, a handle with a trigger formed in the palm of the gauntlet on his left hand. Cocking his arm back, a quick punch in the air, and he loaded a hydrogen shell into the chamber. He was locked and loaded.
Lizzie’s genius hadn’t stopped there. He could set the charge to full-on, one-blast nuke, or six smaller shots like it was a fusion pistol. Or any combination. He could even dole out the star energy into micro sixty-blast-a-minute shots. It was mortar shell, shotgun, or machine gun with the flick of a setting.
“Now we fucking take down the bad guys,” Blaze hissed.
While half the bluetroopers kept the Konobi trapped on the staircase, the rest left the embassy and walked into an inferno of pain and horrors.
Lights flickered on and off across the Promenade. The ornate, beautiful entryways into hotels and office buildings lay in ruins, covered in blood, with gore-stained bones nailed into the walls. Every window was shattered.
The stalls of the marketplace had been smashed. Their wares were spilled out across the mosaics like entrails from slaughtered elephants. Bodies lay everywhere, some merely shot, others ripped open, others the victims of excruciation. Fingers had been yanked off hands. Needles had been shoved under fingernails. Mouths were bloody from where the tongue had been removed. Noses smashed in with claw hammers. Ears excised. Clickers had their mandibles shoved into their eye sockets. Humans had their hands rammed into their mouths. It was a landscape of maniacal torment inflicted upon the innocent.
Any Meelah they saw were dead, however. Nauzea couldn’t access their minds because of their sensitivity and pacifism.
The Meelah trees in the parkways and courtyard at the center of Promenade were bare of leaves. Dead brown leaves littered every surface. Dead branches like crooked forks rose from bloodstained dirt. And from every tree, from every limb, hung corpses on abattoir chains.
Those hooked chains were omnipresent, dangling from the gilded panes high above, hanging from trees, drooping from the ruins of the once magnificent buildings all under the glass and stars and moons above.
In the far distance, in the thickest part of the courtyard, the place with the most Meelah trees, something glowed a pulsating wicked dark green.
Blaze, his crew, the ambassador and the remnants of the Council of Cooperation, the Meelah, and the IPC elite troopers all stopped to take in the absolute carnage.
Behind them came the rattle of abattoir chains, and Blaze knew Squiggman and those IPC soldiers were being torn to shreds by Nauzea’s favorite implement of torture she could magic out of any surface.
Blaze wheeled to help them, but in seconds, all was silent from inside. The Konobi didn’t rush out to attack them. No, the only sounds from inside the embassy were the slow clinking of chains and the sound of blood dripping on the floor.
The smells of gore and offal drifted out.
The whole Promenade fell into an uneasy, diabolical hush.
“Squiggman, report!” Denning said.
That was wishful thinking. Those troopers in the embassy were fifty kinds of fucked.
Arlo bent, set his bottle of malt liquor down, unlocked his handcuffs in a series of jerky movements, and then picked up his Barf Baby. He plucked a fusion pistol from out of the asscrack of his drooping jeans.
“Man, this place is a shithole.” The old man sipped his dwindling supply of booze.
Everyone gave him a long, unbelieving look.
Arlo shrugged. “Hell, I can get out of handcuffs. Goddamn Granny used to chain me down, sex me up, and then leave me stewing in my own juices while she went to the bar to find another schmoe to bang. Ah, relationships.” His grin was part goofiness, part sadness.
“Who is this man?” Denning asked, completely disgusted.
“I have no idea,” Blaze said. “Let’s go. Spread out. And it’s not a matter of if Nauzea hits us with her Konobi, it’s a matter of when.”
“You know what I’m going to have to do,” Elle said. She touched the last Granny syringe in her bandolier.
“Not if you’re good with those fusion katanas.”
Blaze marched forward. Ling and Magistrate Mack were next to him. “Hey Mack, you and your people need to amp up those concussion staves. This is not the time for pacifism.”
“I will not,” Mack said quietly. “These are people. As Meelah, we do not kill.”<
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“But these Konobi aren’t people anymore. They’re the psychotic pawns of the archduchess of torture.”
Mack chuckled. “Haven’t all soldiers throughout your Human history said the same thing? Who we fight, who we kill, they aren’t people. They are this, or that, or animals, or minerals, or evils, or different from us. We Meelah see through that illusion.”
“Tell him, Ling,” Blaze sighed, frustrated.
“Tell him what?” Ling asked. “I agree. Though I have grown to appreciate a certain moral flexibility through our trials and tribulations, I find Mack’s pacifism inspirational.”
“I find it stupid,” Blaze said. “Him and all these Meelah are going to die because of it.”
Mack brightened. “We get to explore death today? How very interesting. And I would be dead soon anyway. At least now I can die a meaningful death and not in some hospital room somewhere.”
“But what about your family, your friends?” Blaze shook his head. “They’ll miss you if you die.”
Mack blinked, not quite understanding. “I’m going to be dead anyway soon. My family and friends will be dead soon. All of this is very temporary.”
“But doesn’t seeing all this death and torture piss you off?” Blaze asked.
“It saddens me. It hurts me. Is this what you mean by being pissed off? But what does that have to do with urinating?” Mack asked. “Oh, yes, your people get sexually transmitted diseases. Yes, I can see how that would hurt.”
“Spread out,” Blaze growled. “We’re clumped together.”
He couldn’t help but be a tad bit impressed with the Meelah. They stuck to their ideals to the very end. The space sloths had no word for “hypocrisy” in their slow, singsong language.
Blaze passed a series of 3-D holograms, and all showed the torture and murder that had occurred on the Promenade in the past three hours. It also showed the Clickers and Meelah starships escaping the destruction along with Human families and children. Only the Human adults were left in GaMeSpa’s residential areas. Thank goodness. But what Nauzea had done to those survivors and the unlucky Clickers on the Promenade was horrific. Blaze didn’t want anyone else to see it, so he set his fusion arm gun to microbursts and destroyed the emitters.
The IPC shocktroopers crouched, the Meelah readied their concussion staves, Elle triggered the katanas and Ling his nunchaku. Cali and Trina had plasma rifles.
Arlo took another swig of his bottle. The booze sloshed up and down the sides. He only had a couple more swallows. As if he’d quit. An alcoholic like that would go to the grave drunk. It was in his DNA.
Arlo chuckled. “It’s all right, folks. Blaze just hates the TV. Always did. Never liked books either. He liked to go around fighting bullies and protecting the weaker kids. Didn’t you, Blaze?” the old man asked. Was that pride in his eyes?
“Yeah,” Blaze said uncertainly. “But keep your guns ready. When Nauzea hits us, she’s going to hit us hard. Kosnowski, keep your eyes on our flank. Squiggman and his soldiers are going to come out as Konobi.”
“Roger that, Gunny,” Kosnowski said through comms.
Blaze liked the sound of his rank coming from the guy. It brought back memories of fighting in a well-trained unit of like-minded individuals. It also brought the pain of Ian’s betrayal. And memories of that bad day on Overland Park Prime when he’d had to put down Jameson.
Blaze shook his head. He had to stay focused, but it was hard. It was Nauzea. All the Humans and Clickers around him paused, their faces slack, their eyes lost in the pain of their various trauma.
Cali let out a curse. “Fuck this.”
She opened her bracelets.
Blaze went to change her back with his Cali Bad Dog command, but he stopped himself. He had to trust that Cali knew what she was doing.
When she first shifted, she generally could think a bit, but the longer she was a werewolf, the less Cali she became.
The eight-foot-long werewolf didn’t pause to attack any of them, but loped ahead, going for the pulsating green light by the thickest part of the park.
She didn’t make it to the green glow. Nauzea’s first trap had been set far closer to the embassy.
And Cali triggered it.
TWENTY-TWO_
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The abattoir chains holding the Human corpses to the trees let go. The bodies dropped. But they weren’t corpses. They stood and held the chains in bloody fists.
Behind them, Squiggman’s shocktroopers charged out of the embassy, dragging hooks and chains behind them. They opened fire on their comrades, Kosnowski’s soldiers. The two sets of Humans started to gun each other down. The other tortured Humans tumbled out of the embassy, sprinting toward them, nailed hands reaching out.
Ripped-up Clickers flew out of the windows of the shattered buildings along the Promenade. These Phasmida had their fingers removed and knives stuck through the stumps of their hands.
The four groups of Konobi converged on them. The Humans from the trees whirled their abattoir hooks like Chinese chain whips. The flying Clickers readied their knife-hands. The bloody and tormented IPC bluetroopers raised their plasma rifles. Finally, the tortured Humans and Clickers that had infiltrated the embassy came busting out through every door and every window. There were thousands of the Konobi.
The Meelah formed a skirmish line, giving Blaze, his crew, and the civilians protection to use their long-distance weapons. Kosnowski’s bluetroopers were being dropped, but they were also destroying Squiggman’s Konobi.
Cali, hearing the battle, wheeled, and Blaze grinned. Whips, knives, chains, and even the plasma rifles weren’t going to bother her.
The werewolf leapt into the air and snagged a flying Clicker. He tried to ram his knives into Cali’s skin, but the steel couldn’t pierce her flesh. She chomped him in two. Landing, her fusion claws glowing, she shredded abattoir-chain Humans, then sped toward the line of Meelah.
At this point, she’d kill whoever was in her path.
“Trina,” Blaze called through comms. “Keep Cali focused on the Konobi.”
“Great! You’re giving me animal control?!” Trina complained. But she took a running jump over the Meelah and landed in front of Cali. She decked the wolf, and when Cali shot forward, Trina ducked. The wolf landed, spun, and tried to eat Trina again. Again, Trina was fast enough to avoid both fangs and claws. Cali soared over the vampire and into more abattoir-chain Humans, who attacked her.
She attacked back. With bloody, flesh-rending results.
A Meelah had his face ripped off by a hook. His staff fell from nerveless fingers. Elle sprang forward to fill the gap. Her fusion katanas flashed, breaking through the gloom. While the Meelah immobilized their attackers, Elle cut them into tiny squirming pieces that eventually lay still.
Ling’s dual nunchakus were too chaotic for him to be anywhere other than in the thick of the action. He was out front, cutting through chains, cutting through necks, ending lives. Once he cleared the area around him, he plucked his plasma bow off his back. Hooking a claw around the simulated string, he sent three fusion arrows through three Clickers fluttering overhead. Their bodies came crashing down. Cali, in a bloodlust, chomped through their bodies. The crunch of their bones reminded Blaze of when he’d eaten softshell crab in the Carolinas back on Earth.
Arlo walked through the battle as if it were a Sunday morning and he was wandering around a park, hungover. He sipped his bottle, gunned down Konobi, and when anyone got close enough to do damage, he weaved, ducked, and stepped away so they missed him by inches. It was like he could anticipate every attack. A Clicker flew up from behind him. Arlo casually shot him in the chest. The blast of fusion turned the insect’s abdomen into sizzling nothing.
Cali got distracted, but not for long. Trina kicked her into a dozen women who had spears protruding from their bellies. They were alive, in horrible pain, and they fell on Cali to spear her. She snapped through their spears, ripped their intestines out of their bellies, a
nd finished off the death Nauzea had been slow to give them.
With the front of their forces holding their own, Blaze turned to make sure Kosnowski’s soldiers held their flank.
He kept his arm gun on microbursts. The tiny bits of star-fire energy were enough to puncture lungs, puncture hearts, puncture brains. The holes they created were tiny, only a few centimeters big, but the damage they did was evident.
Golden light flashed from Blaze’s left arm barrel. The fusion bits tore through the IPC troopers, ending their pain. In his display, he watched the hydrogen shell’s power empty like a timer ticking down, dropping second after second until he was out. He cocked his arm, jacked out the used shell, and jacked in a new one. He was ready to go again.
Kosnowski laughed. “I’ve got to get me one of those guns, Gunny!”
Blaze smiled. “You have to somehow tame the archduke of necrotechnology first. He’ll make you one.”
A nail-fisted Human rushed up to Blaze, and he hacked him apart, shoulder to hip, with his fusion ax. Then he finished off the corrupted bluetroopers. Squiggman and his soldiers were dead, but Kosnowski had lost half of his bluetroopers. Only twelve still stood.
They turned to take out the Clicker Konobi dive-bombing Ambassador Randi, Denning, and the other civilians in the middle of their phalanx. But Blaze, Kosnowski, and the surviving bluetroopers were too late.
A demented Clicker drove his finger knives through Linus’s throat. Ambassador Randi’s aides and assistants were scooped up or stabbed. Those that found themselves in the clutches of Clickers soon were let go over trees. The sharp limbs impaled the hapless Humans.
Only Randi, Denning, and Charles, the last of the Clickers, were left standing from the brutal attack. Each had a plasma rifle, but it was clear they weren’t going to use them. Too afraid. Too shaken up. Not used to the violence and adrenaline socking it to their glands.
Kosnowski, Blaze, and the other bluetroopers opened fire on the flying Clicker Konobi. Plasma fire torched wings, sending flyers smashing into the garbage-strewn mosaic floor. Blaze machine-gunned down five, tearing up their thoraxes, their wings, and their heads with micro bits of fusion energy.