More than a thousand people within the dome’s inner circle alone.
Several thousand more in the rings beyond that, with even more waiting to pour in.
This wedding was set to be a major event. INS cameras were already in place throughout.
Floating holo screens to show the ceremony up close to those seated too far away from the center.
At Spacer weddings, the bride and groom only stood up with their chosen best mates. With Naero’s mother gone, and since Aunt Sleak was marrying her best friend and partner Zalvano, she had Admiral Klyne from Intel stand up beside her.
Zalvano’s older sister Zeta flew in to stand at his side. The family resemblance very clear. Zeta had long dark hair like her brother and keen gray eyes. She and her family lived and worked on one of their Clan ships. Zeta a fleet doctor and surgeon, much like Zhen.
Fleets and ships had arrived from all across the known systems for the wedding event. INS and Clan heralds announce the arrival of several dignitaries. Admiral Nathan Joshua from Joshua Tech, resplendent in his dress blues. Mining Consortium leader Nevano Kinmal, without his daughter Shalaen. Much to Tarim’s great disappointment.
Other Maeris Clan fleets arrived, a dizzying array of distant cousins and relatives. Most of which Naero had never met and might not ever see again. Even Aunt Sleak did not know most of them. So far-and-wide were the Clan’s members. And this was just a sample of those who could make it.
Thus Naero and her crew watched her stunning aunt walk up the aisle, lined with Spacer and Alliance Naval officers saluting them.
To be married by one of the last remaining Clan Maeris Elders.
Tamerlane Atani Maeris, said to be nearly one hundred and fifty years old.
Most Spacers went onto the next journey around one-thirty or one-forty, tops. Spacers aged rapidly the last five or ten years of their lives.
The elder looked incredibly wise and ancient. His long blue-white hair below his waist. His deeply-lined, clean-shaven face smiling. Gray-violet eyes still bright.
Naero smiled as the elder spoke clearly, running through the ceremonial words to join the couple together.
Then the overwhelming sense of warning overtook her again.
Here? At the wedding?
Something flickering buzzed near her ear suddenly.
An insect? On a star base? How could–
Then it zipped right into her ear and formed a mental link.
She winced and tried not to gasp, resisting the natural urge to jam a finger in her ear to dig it out.
Naero. This is Baeven. Emergency.
What emergency?
Listen up. They’ve already infiltrated the base.
Who has?
They’re all around you. I’ll adjust your visual spectrum through my emulator drone in you ear. They’re all cloaked.
Who’s cloaked? How many? Where are you?
Close by. Take a look around, but don’t react yet.
Her vision flickered as if she suddenly wore sensor goggles.
Everything around her shaded into auras of multi-colored hues against a dark blue background of visible light.
Naero looked up and nearly gasped.
Four full squads of a dozen hostiles. Cloaked and swooping in with gravwings and heavy assault armor. Still getting into optimal positions to coordinate their fire.
All of them aiming squad-level weapons directly on the happy couple and the Clan elder.
Even the Intel security scans hadn’t picked up the intruders.
Baeven. I see them. Haisha! What do we do?
Working on it. Zipping among them. Quietly attaching disruptor pods. They’ll trigger in seconds. Our unwanted friends will all appear, disrupt, and fall to the ground hard. Then it’s a free for all. Alert who you can. Protect Sleak, Zal, and the elder.
Will do.
She turned to Chaela right next to her. Maintaining her smile as she spoke in a low voice.
“Chae. Cloaked enemy heavies on gravwings above us. Dropping down to attack in seconds. Four dozen. Get ready to fight.”
She turned to Saemar, who smiled back. Her brown eyes twinkling.
“I heard you, sweetie.”
Saemar spread the same message on her side. Hopefully, acute Spacer hearing also let a few others in on the secret.
Not an instant later, loud pops and flashes filled the air.
The surprised attackers disrupted, turned visible, and slammed down into the ground. Just like Baeven promised.
The Spacers who weren’t alerted leaped out of the way of the armored hulks at first.
The enemy cloaking fields still sparked, popped, and dissolved.
A few of the powered armors locked up completely, trapping the stunned assassins inside.
Unlike most crowds, not a single Spacer panicked or ran.
All of them immediately went on the attack.
Spacer dress marines from the honor guard battled the foe directly, gunning down a handful as they tried to rise and cut loose with their heavy weapons.
A four-man enemy fire team flipped on back-up shields and waded through the crowd to get at the bride and groom.
Crew in the audience flung blasters to Sleak and Zalvano.
Both plucked the weapons deftly out of the air and knelt before the crouching elder, shielding him with their bodies. Punching through enemy shields and armor with well-aimed hits.
A full dozen of the assassins tried to charge the right flank.
Baeven appeared, visible for barely the flash of an instant.
Blocking their path.
Green disruptor blades in his hands sizzled and crackled in the very air.
The fools charged forward, trying to mow him down.
Baeven swept right through them.
Blinding fast. No eye in the room could follow him.
He scythed through them. Slicing each attacker multiple times.
The enemy squad’s charging momentum carried them forward.
They shot past Baeven in bloody, exploding pieces or armor, flesh, and ordnance.
Baeven vanished again the next instant.
Klyne was also a Mystic. He charged forward and unleashed a mind blast on three of the attackers, driving them back into a wall.
Another foe rose up and swatted him aside.
Chaela froze the face-shield of one attacker solid, leaped on the armored back and stabbed a blade deep into the neck joint.
Saemar attached micro bombs to its rear and abdomen.
A shock-charge from the enemy armor stunned them both briefly, but the micro bombs took out the heavy for good, cutting its hips and legs off.
Tarim activated his personal deflector and began a gun battle with the armored suit on the far right.
Their weapons punched into each other, disrupting both shields.
Several clean hits blasted the head right off the armored battle suit.
Tarim took a blaster shot to one arm and fell back.
Not normally the best of fighters, Zhen bounced a chair off the face shield of another attacker and flung every energized throwing star and spike she carried at the heavy to distract and slow it down.
The small explosions took out the shields, but did little damage otherwise.
Tyber jumped on the heavy from behind, knocking it face down with his collapsible jo staff.
He sprang at Zhen, taking her in his arms, spot-transporting them both away from bursts of auto-cannon fire erupting from the heavy.
Other Spacers swarmed at the foe, cutting and blasting it to pieces where it stood. Point-blank.
Naero charged the leader, expending her shields to get in close.
She jammed one blade into its spinning guns as they attempted to reload. The weapon jammed and tore itself apart.
Naero unleashed a fury of flashing, spinning kicks, battering her opponent, crushing its armor. Shattering and blasting chunks of it away. Driving it back by sheer force and fury.
The leader staggered away slightly, chortling some weir
d kind of eerie laugh.
It raised a blinking fusion bomb in its remaining hand. Already armed.
When it went off, they and half the room would be obliterated.
Naero flip-kicked the leader and shattered the armored face shield.
The snoutface of an Ejjai-alpha snarled back at her.
“Filthy, spack bitch! Let us die together!” She charged straight at Naero.
“Let’s not.”
Naero flipped again, ramming both blades deep into the Alpha’s brain.
Their fight carried them right to the feet of Aunt Sleak and Zalvano, still crouching in front of the elder.
She shouted for all to hear.
“Fusion bomb. Take cover!”
Naero rolled the dying alpha and its battered armor over the device.
Not enough.
“Get down!” she yelled. She sprang at her Aunt and Zalvano, knocking them and the elder onto their backs and carrying them down behind the heavy duranadium dais.
They and half the room were still about to die.
Naero rose up and tried to tap into her lost abilities in desperation.
Tried to summon her third eye.
Nothing.
Baeven appeared right before them. Two blazing silver spheres humming and hovering over him.
He gave one command.
“Protect!”
His white-hot silver emulators flung up visible waves of heavy shield spheres in layers concentrated over the fusion bomb at the last instant.
The device ignited, disintegrating the dead leader.
Layer after layer of heavy shielding collapsed.
One emulator fizzed and went down.
The shock of the fusion blast’s pulse wave knocked everyone else off their feet. Baeven even withstood the teeth of that, full force. Lifting one arm to shield his face.
The other emulator held fast, saving them all from the intense heat and concussion.
Baeven turned around and grinned at them. Tendrils of smoke still roiling off him. He laughed slightly, looking directly at Sleak and Zal.
“I still owe you guys a few. Consider it a wedding gift.”
Baeven vanished, even as the Spacer Marines, Klyne, and other Intel people recovered, spotted, and closed in on him.
And just like that, the attack was over.
Zalvano tucked his spent blaster in his belt, looked around, and started laughing. He took Aunt Sleak into his strong arms. “Well, my love. I guess our wedding shouldn’t be any different than the rest of our life together.”
Aunt Sleak narrowed her eyes to slits and set her stance right beside him. “They’ll never take us down without an all-out war. And I will fight to the death by your side, my heart. Any time. Anywhere. If the bastards want to cut us down, they’d better bring it hard and hot.”
The elder rose up and dusted himself off. He looked shaken and upset. “To screaming hell with this! I am far too old for all of this bullshit. Get me out of here. Haisha! You two kids are married. Kiss and go make love. The fun’s over for this old codger. I need to lie down.”
Aunt Sleak smiled at her new hubby and took his hand again. “For us, it’s just beginning.” After one more long kiss, she fell right back into her Admiral’s voice, barking commands.
“Alright, hop to it and be lively. What are you standing around staring at? Scoop this garbage up and get it the hell out of here. Move it people. Clean this place up. We’ve still have one hell of a party to throw!”
3
Later that night, Naero thrashed around again in her troubled sleep.
Nightmares. About slaughtering people. Not enemies in battle. Random strangers, acquaintances, friends and family. Old, young–even little kids.
Both sick and scary.
Yet she wondered if it was all inside her own bent mind.
Sometimes she couldn’t tell if it was Danner’s twisted, demented laughter echoing in her head…or her own.
Could that sick freak be doing some of this to her, wherever he was?
He had taken over Janner’s mind from afar, eventually.
But the two of them were twins, and twins were always linked in weird ways.
How much could a wretch like Danner really affect her directly, and were there ways to defend against stuff like that?
So much Naero did not know–but needed to.
She didn’t even have her full abilities back. So how could she defend herself against mind attacks even if she wanted to?
Coupled with her other growing problems, the entire mess made her increasingly jumpy and very nervous.
And there were still other times where she either dreamed about or had visions involving Janner and Danner being tested, tortured, or both by those who held them prisoner. Probably one or more of the Gigacorps, who strove to learn their secrets and then use them as some kind of weapon against the Clans and the Alliance.
She didn’t even know if these visions and dreams were real or just imagined, but they still tore her heart out.
Jan cried out repeatedly for the torment and agony to stop, but his faceless handlers ignored his suffering.
Some even added to his pain out of their own sick desire for pleasure.
“You like that one, spack? Here. Suck on this one. How does that feel?”
Naero couldn’t do anything to help him or make the torment stop.
At other times Danner just glared straight out into the void. Drooling and insane, as if he stared right back at her.
Right flipping into her.
The utterly weird creep.
Maybe he could somehow.
Dark eyes filled with oceans of the deepest, darkest hatred. His very look threatening the worst revenge possible.
She had other, still unrelated visions out of the black, where she saw multitudes of normal people and creatures on countless worlds. They carried within them what seemed to be secret, glowing parasites or seeds of some kind of dark Cosmic power deep down inside.
Like a hidden danger or a plague just waiting to erupt.
Most others couldn’t see it.
When those horrifying powers awoke within them, these people and weird aliens lost all control and went mad, glowing and pulsing with strange, violent Cosmic forces that they could not control, transforming them into lethal killing machines.
Ravenous, dangerous foes immune to most normal weapons, nearly impossible to put down.
Until the destructive energies that fueled their raving rage burned out the host, leaving behind a charred, blackened shell or skeleton.
What in the hell was all of that?
Was she envisioning any of this real time? Was it actually happening now? Or perhaps some time in the future? She just did not know, and that drove her crazy as well. How could she make sense out of it all?
What was real?
What wasn’t?
Naero awoke abruptly back on her own ship late that night, gasping, shaking, and sweating as if from a fever. Her head whoozy from her earlier bouts of celebratory drinking.
Plenty of potent Spacer poteen to go around for all at first.
So delicious.
Until it flattened you on your ass like a punch from a mek.
Naero still did not consider herself a drinker in any shape or form, but it had been a happy occasion after all.
She suddenly blinked and stared around as her holo zilk sheets and her nanoroom slowly hued up the lighting.
Her captain’s quarters. Completely trashed. Almost everything ripped apart. Equipment shattered and disrupted. Scorch marks and deep gouges in the hull itself.
One of her paintings and a smaller, glowing figurine. Ruined.
And this wasn’t the first time.
Awww…she had even broken up her Spican walnut table and chairs into splinters. Where was she going to find another?
Naero stood her favorite knife-fighting-girl statue back up and secured her again. Thankfully, she was okay.
How in the blazing hell was she doing
all of this in her sleep if her powers were still blocked?
Incidents just like this discouraged her from inviting any handsome guests to stay with her overnight.
How could she ever love someone or ever hope to have a relationship?
What if she killed someone?
Naero shuddered and felt sick just at the thought.
What if she lost it and murdered her lover in her sleep, without knowing it?
Woke up to him dead in her room next to her, or torn to pieces like her table?
By her own two hands.
No. No way in hell. She couldn’t live with anything like that.
Maybe she did drink a little too much at the reception party. Maybe that added to her loss of control.
Was Om trying to contact her?
She just didn’t know. And it was all really starting to drive her bonkers.
But the wedding party had been great fun.
Despite the small matter of the enemy assassination attempt.
A quiet alarm activated on her private com.
From a secure channel. One that almost never sounded.
A priority call directly from Spacer Intel.
Most likely Admiral Klyne.
She sighed and blew out a deep breath.
Good. Now she could inquire again about arranging that long-delayed testing with the Spacer Mystics. That became increasingly vital.
She’d never find the Mystics on her own. The hidden locations of their heavily-guarded homeworlds remained deeply protected secrets, entrusted only to Shadowforce and the Clan Elders.
Naero went over and sat down before her private com array. At least she hadn’t trashed that.
Just before she opened the link, it dawned on her.
Uh…Still naked.
She activated a nanowall panel and called up a random storage bin.
One where she pitched some of her gag-gift sleepwear. She reached in and dug around with one hand.
Blazing white push-up bra? No.
Hot pink corset? Nah.
Klyne might enjoy the corset, but then again…maybe not.
He was decidedly stuffy.
Ahh, finally–a glittering blue pajama shirt, nearly a robe on her petite form, set with holographic dragons flying and either fighting or mating across it. Too hard to tell.
That would do. She slipped into it and wrapped it around her. Anything to cover up with.
Spacer Clans Adventure 2: Naero's Gambit Page 2