by Aaron Crash
His sister had encased the dragon in layer upon layer of space debris, rocks, buildings from Hutchinson Prime, and huge chunks of salt crystals from somewhere. As it tried to wrestle free, she packed on corpses, both the Humans from the planet as well as the undead dragons. She even threw in layers of ectoplasm, and those tentacles pulled more material to cover the alpha obsidian. At the same time, she was pushing it through space, clearing a path to the coordinates Blaze had given her.
So, she had heard him.
The freezer freighter adjusted its course to follow her. The IPC ships were shooting at her, but the dragons were leaving the Gorebacks alone. Because Chthonic was on board.
“I need every bit of power you have,” Blaze said to Bill in engineering. “We need it fast and now.”
Bill clicked.
“Coordinates set and if you want fast, well, Bill and Lizzie are feeling especially spicy today,” Fernando said.
“Muy caliente,” Blaze muttered. “Hit it.”
Unbelievably, he heard the whine of the SWD engine. The ship lurched on the rising wave of spacetime and then they were thrown forward, passing the freezer freighter, but even as they rode the wave, Bill was dissipating it. The debris in space was pushed away as they surfed down toward the black rectangle of the Etrusca ruin. It was like the ones they’d seen before, three million square miles of black metal six million years old.
Entryways marked the structure, and inside, hopefully they would find things similar to what they’d seen the last time.
Before the spacetime wave dissipated, it grabbed the Gorebacks’ freezer freighter, Elle, and the massive moon-sized shape of the obsidian dragon covered in layers of rock, flesh, and ectoplasm.
All careened toward the mysterious black shape of the Etrusca ruin.
The dragon spasmed in its cocoon of meat, bone, and stone until Elle slammed it into the Etrusca ruin over and over, bashing it all into a dusty pulp. Bone splintered, zombies were turned into veal cutlets, dragons were pulverized. And at the center was the obsidian dragon, its stomach empty and no other creatures around to crawl up into its insides. Elle ceaselessly used her unstoppable power to continue slamming it into the structure.
The Gorebacks flew their freighter over the ruins, trying to get away. Blaze drove the Lizzie into an opening in the ruin, a thousand feet by five hundred feet. “Trina, map out the Etrusca ruin’s interior. We’re going to hit the initiator cube with two fusion torpedoes.”
“Going back to the same old well, Blaze?” Lizzie’s laughter jarred him. “But I see your plan. I can give you schhhematics and chhhart a course.”
Blaze flew too close to the smooth wall and brushed it with a wing. This one didn’t have the friezes of alien faces and tentacles. Sparks flew from the metal on metal action until Blaze corrected his flight to swing more into the middle of the corridor.
Plasma fire from wasps lit up the place as IPC drones came in to destroy them.
“I got them,” Fernando said and used the rear guns to pick them off.
“Goddamn Denning is ignoring the dragons and zombies and only going for us,” Blaze said. “Well, that has to change. Whatever else happens, bringing the Etrusca ruin to life is going to make things more interesting.”
Blaze continued onward, down deeper into the structure. A staircase was below them, like the one they’d descended in the Sargasso Expanse.
Just like before, they hit the landing, and floating in the middle was a cube of interwoven frozen tentacles, five hundred feet by five hundred feet. Faces littered the metals coils, two slits for eyes, a nose, a mouth. While you couldn’t see the bodies of the faces, from previous experience, Blaze knew they were connected to various fish creatures: grouper, lobster, crabs, eels. It was all very strange.
But the strange shit had saved their butts before.
“Are the Gorebacks still above us, flying over the ruin?” Blaze asked.
“That’s an affirmative, Gunny,” Trina said. “They had to turn around, but they are still above, approaching the impact point where Elle smashed up her homemade dragon asteroid.”
Blaze nodded. “Good. Fernando? Do your thing.”
The Clicker spun and fired two fusion torpedoes. They struck the initiator cube and like before, the cube came apart as tentacles writhed into motion and the alien-faced fish creatures scattered. All around them, the smooth metals transformed into miles upon miles of tentacles of all different shapes and sizes.
Some were as thin as spaghetti while others were as thick around as skyscrapers. Others were even larger than that, impossibly huge. All the coils reached out to grip whatever was in their reach to crush it in the metal tendrils.
The remaining wasps were seized and destroyed by the Etrusca tentacles. Any zombies still clinging to the Lizzie were ripped off and squeezed into jelly.
Blaze saw his course out of the structure and jammed down on the throttle to open their blue-fire engines up.
“Keep those tentacles off us,” Blaze said to Fernando at the red weapons’ controls. The Clicker fired plasma bolts into the coils and they were forced away from lashing out and grabbing the starship.
Down they went, hit a hard right, and then streaked toward the surface as the entire structure came apart in a mass of waving metal tentacles. As the Lizzie broke free from the chaos of the ruin, Blaze spotted the freezer freighter below, trapped by two long tentacles. But the ocean of ectoplasm had drifted near as well, and the liquid tentacles of the supernatural sea were reaching for the metal coils of the ruin.
Blaze blasted his engines. The Lizzie Borden careened through the growing tangled forest of metal coils. The Etrusca tentacles whipped out and found the ectoplasm tentacles of the evil ocean above. Both sets of coils grabbed the other even as IPC ships and undead dragons fought in the shrinking space between the Etrusca metal and liquid Onyx. In the distance, the yellow sun was dimming as it succumbed to the dead star destroying it.
The debris from the butchered stars and chopped-up planets was at least kept at bay, hitting the ectoplasm but getting stuck there or banging into the Etrusca tentacles and either being batted away or seized and crushed.
But they weren’t going to have much time to get to Chthonic aboard the freezer freighter. The ectoplasm ocean and the Etrusca ruin would pull themselves into each other in less than fifteen minutes.
Blaze found Ling’s signature. The Shaolin sloth had survived both the IPC ships and the dragons and was flying his starcycle toward the freezer freighter.
“Ling!” Blaze yelled. “You still have Granny’s body?”
“I do,” Ling said. “Would you like to meet me on the freighter?”
Security Directory Alvin Denning broke through comms. “We’ve leaving, Ramirez. I don’t know what kind of sick madness this all is, but there is no way you’re going to survive these creatures, these fucking tentacles, and, uh, dead people. Hutchinson Prime and this entire star system is lost. May you burn in hell, Blaze Ramirez!”
“Damn,” Blaze said, “but if I had a nickel for every time I heard that. You still think there’s no such thing as Onyx energy?”
“I don’t know what I think, but fuck off, Ramirez. You fuck right the fuck off.” The security director was riding that fine line between loose-bowel terror and sphincter-twisting rage.
Blaze knew how that felt. “Come on, Alvin, we need your help. Be a man for once in your life and face the facts. There’s evil shit in the universe that doesn’t care about IPC profits or the Union bureaucracy. Help us fight it.”
But the remaining wasps were already pulling back, running from the dragons. The obsidian dragons had torn one of the Cavaliers apart. A quick check and it was the Inspiration that was no more. The two Paladins, however, had the firepower to repulse both the dragons and the meteoroids, but both huge triangles were moving away flanked by the Vespula and the two remaining attack ships, the Relentless and the Adamant.
With the IPC ships fleeing, the undead dragons refocused their atten
tion on the Lizzie Borden.
Hundreds of the winged monstrosities flew in, dodging the tentacles warring around them. Mouths opened to breathe dark death—acidic, high-velocity viscera—upon the hapless Lizzie Borden.
“The fun just don’t stop,” Blaze said. He checked his display, looking for Elle and Cali.
Elle had finished smashing the alpha obsidian dragon into the Etrusca ruin, killing it and creating a layer of both organic and inorganic material on the surface, so thick that the Etrusca tentacles couldn’t pierce the crust. She had soared away and was above the ectoplasm ocean blasting the crap out of the dragons around her while Cali was soaring in from Hutchinson Prime, heading for the Lizzie Borden. The werewolf wasn’t alone.
Behind her…something…lots of somethings…showed up as dark shadows on his display. Nombre de Dios, there were a lot of them.
Whatever they were, most likely, they were just more poundage of manure headed for the fan.
TWENTY-FIVE_
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An enormous Etrusca tentacle lashed out and circled the tip of the IPC’s lead Paladin. The ship’s blue-fire engines roared but the tentacle had them. At the same moment, the ectoplasm ocean circled the entire thick body of the other Paladin. The merciless coil was a mile thick and strewn with bits of plants, animals, Human corpses from Hutchinson Prime, and dragon bodies from the space battle.
The dozen Vespula stayed back, controlling the drones from a distance, but no way would the IPC leave those two Paladins behind. The Cavaliers strafed the tentacles with missiles and plasma fire, and while the ectoplasm was blown apart, the goo reformed to keep the huge triangular ship stuck. The evil liquid Onyx even turned the Paladin around so the ocean could wash onto the tip of the ship and eat away at the metal.
The Etrusca tentacles holding the other Paladin wouldn’t relinquish the massive spaceship. While some of the coils held the IPC vessel, others lashed out to deflect the plasma blasts and theta-particle beams.
Denning’s voice erupted over comms. “What is the meaning of this, Ramirez! Call off your…your…whatever is eating my ship! And that Etrusca ruin, we’ve never seen such anomalous behavior. What have you done?”
“Unlocked the mysteries of the fucking universe for you, bitch,” Blaze snapped back. “Now, help us with the dragons!”
“Never!”
Blaze growled. “Good. Then die, Denning, you bastard.” He turned on Trina. “You and me, let’s go get Chthonic and end this.”
Trina grinned, showing her fangs.
“Fernando, the ship is yours. Keep her safe. She’s our ticket out of here.” A fusion torpedo exploded in front of them, taking out a few drones and a big photon dragon. The splintered remnants of the beast’s vertebrae ticked across the hull like ossified raindrops.
Blaze and Trina hurried back down the corridor and into the cargo bay. The starcycle was where they had left it. Blaze triggered his visor and helmet and scooped up a fresh bandolier of hydrogen shells hanging on a hook near where they used to have five starcycles. They’d need a hefty paycheck to buy more.
The cargo bay door was ripped open, and a mouth the size of a mechanic’s garage sprayed acid on them. It was one of the undead dragons, huge, the inside of its mouth crawling with maggots as long as Blaze’s forearm.
The starcycle was hit in the gush of sizzling acid, and the nanotech as well as the titanium frame smoked as it was reduced to goo on the floor. Blaze’s armor would be as effective as newspaper against the stuff. More of the acid gushed forward and at the last second, Trina leapt in front of Blaze and took every ounce of the acid on her back, her legs, and her head.
She opened her mouth to shriek as the acid ate through skin, muscle, and bone until she was reduced to a scarecrow of a woman…a scarecrow that had been burned to cinders.
Through her open mouth, Blaze could see the dragon. The acid had eaten through her brains, and yet her eyes were still in their sockets, hard and black and defiant. She had enough of her lips left to smile. “Look at me, Blaze, being a hero and saving your life.” And then the acid went through her throat and ate through her voice box.
Her legs crumbled to dust underneath her.
Blaze whipped out his ax and shotgun. With Ugly Betty, he fired down the gullet of the thing, cauterizing closed the dragon’s throat. He waded forward and sank his ax into one side of the jaw, then the other, severing its hold on the ship. He reloaded Ugly Betty and lobotomized the dragon with fusion energy. An IPC wasp fired into the charred dragon, sending it hurling away through space, not quite dead, but so FUBAR it couldn’t fight anymore.
Blaze spun and ran back to Trina, who lay on what was left of her back, which wasn’t much. The acid had eaten through her blouse and jeans and she was in full vampire mode, her skin translucent so he could see her heart. Nombre de Dios, thank everything holy that she still had a heart.
But how could she heal herself back to life without a brain and with only bits and pieces of flesh covering her bones? Both arms, both legs, were gone.
He bent and closed her eyes for her. Dammit, but losing her hurt. When he’d first met her, she’d been some IPC paper pusher who hadn’t believed in evil. Yeah, she’d been tough, but oh so naïve. Yet the minute she saw the true demonic energy in the galaxy, she left everything behind to try and end it. And when she’d gotten bit by a vampire, she’d fought the transformation and clung to the goodness in her heart for hours upon hours. And she’d continued to fight the evil inside her, and while Elle’s magic had helped, Blaze knew it was because Trina was such a badass.
“Sleep, tough girl,” Blaze said, grief choking him. “Sleep. You deserve it.”
“Blaze, hhhowever sad you are feeling now, you still have a job to do,” Lizzie said. “We are over the freezer freighter. This is your chance to get to my brother.”
Blaze whirled and ran from Trina’s body and dove out into space.
He was greeted with a sight that defied all explanation.
The derelict spaceships from Know Return’s air force base had followed Cali up from the surface. They were the shadowy blips he’d seen on his display.
The wrecks had joined the fight, though that was impossible. Old, rusted junkers that shouldn’t have been able to leave Hutchinson Prime’s atmosphere darted around dragons, unloading plasma blasts into the rotting flesh and desiccated bones of the undead beasts. Theta-particle beams from crippled attack ships, some with half the decks showing, sizzled through ectoplasm tentacles reaching for IPC wasps that were battling away to try and free the Paladins. A wrecked Meelah explorer dove suicidally into an obsidian beta that clawed at the Lizzie Borden.
A Clicker frigate blasted by him, but blue-fire engines weren’t powering the thing. What looked like black-fire erupted from the rear exhaust ports. Some of the ships had working blue-fire drives but those that didn’t seemed to be running on Onyx energy.
“Ghost ships,” Blaze muttered. “Pinche ghost ships. But how?”
The Clicker frigate took an acid blast from a mummied acid dragon, and part of its hull crumbled in. But it was still operational, turning, coming for Blaze.
In front of him appeared the girl in the yellow dress, and she was making gestures with her hands, not her game of church and steeple, but the intergalactic sign of okay. A smile was on her face.
She was right there, in front of him, looking happy.
And there, in the window of the frigate, was her father, the colonel, standing on the bridge. A second later, the yellow-dress girl stood next to him. Was there a calico cat in her arms? Yes, Raziel had hitched a ride off Hutchinson Prime while bringing the cavalry.
The ghost ships fought the undead dragons even as IPC drones flashed around also going for the dragons. But the space between the ectoplasm ocean above and the Etrusca tentacle forest below grew smaller and smaller.
An ectoplasm tentacle snared a spectral attack ship and drew it inside the liquid Onyx ocean. An Etrusca tentacle squeezed the head off a large
photon dragon and then more tentacles appeared to squash the rest of the overgrown lizard.
The Clicker frigate dove toward the freezer freighter held by the Etrusca coils down on the ruins. Dragon meat, planet detritus, and zombie bodies from Elle’s homemade asteroid had clogged up the tentacles underneath the ship. The freezer freighter was right above that flat plane of yuck the size of a football field. Not even the alien-faced fish creatures could get through the layers of dragon, zombie, and rock Elle had created when she slayed the obsidian alpha dragon.
Blaze caught hold of a docking ring on the frigate, and he rode it down until he could push off and spin through space to get to the freezer freighter.
A slash of his ax and he melted the hull where the butchered bodies hung. He let the oxygen vent from the freezer compartment and then he flew in. He vented his oxygen reserves and his carbon dioxide to maneuver through the bodies. His fusion ax gave him light. The butchered Human bodies floated on their hooks, drifting every which way. The corpses still had their upper arms and legs, but their heads, forearms, and shins had all been chopped off. The Gorebacks had emptied out their abdomens, and yet those hunks of hanging meat were still Human-shaped.
Ha, and he had to push his way through them. More nightmare fuel, for sure. What did normal people have nightmares about?
Blaze glanced at his display. Ling was coming, but so was Cali. She hit the back of the freezer freighter and started smashing through, running toward him.
The automatic hullfoam systems came online, closing the breach he’d created to get inside as well as slamming closed emergency airlocks to keep the oxygen inside. Those doors would slow Cali down, but they wouldn’t stop her for long. She might break her teeth and snap off her claws to get through the metal, but then she’d just grow new ones.
Emergency lights flashed, alarms sounded, and oxygen hissed back into the freezer compartment. With an atmosphere back inside, the bodies snapped to the ends of their hooks and Blaze landed on his feet on the floor.
A second later, the door to the bridge burst open and Calhoun Goreback thundered laughter. “Y’all are tough motherfuckers, Blazer Boy! Coming for us even though the sky is falling, there’s dragons and ghost ships and IPC dickweeds everywhere. And those goddamn meteorites hitting us.” Somehow, the clown-worshipping psychopath had arms and legs and he also had an ancient M134 minigun. It was the great-great-great-great-grandfather of the plasma minigun they’d lost.