Kisa, smiling, moved into the cage with the chee. “We don’t have that long, though,” she muttered as she inspected the mess.
“I can help with that,” Squall said. “I couldn’t do anything before, but I did watch as that—” She bit back several choice words. “That noh priestess pulled Cordelia apart. I know about where everything goes.”
“Her name is Cordelia?” Candy asked.
Squall gathered parts up while Fiametta and Kisa moved to cut the chee’s chassis down.
“Yes. We spoke a little, when we were both conscious.” Squall’s seething anger could have blackened and curled the deck plates. “She was a maid and only recently awakened. She was on her way to see M8 when we hit her ship.”
“The Tranquil Wind,” Candy said. “Alliance Security got the report. Small frickin’ galaxy.”
“And getting smaller all the time,” Kisa said. “Okay, let’s see if we can’t get our friend here working again.”
Chapter 20
Black Spot, secondary cargo hold
Cordelia sat up. Her optical receptors whirred as their lenses shifted through focus settings. She identified dust motes and dead skin. She blinked and readjusted her optics. She had slipped back into cleaning mode; she must have defaulted to that when she shut down. No, she had not shut down, not really. She remembered it, mostly. She remembered the demon, the woman who looked at her like a thing, the claws that cut her metal flesh like silk. Her limbs still ached and burned where the noh had separated them at the seams. The pain came roaring back. Cordelia’s processor cycles spiked, and she felt her cooling system struggle to keep up. Her eyes finally focused, and she saw four women staring at her.
“Um, hello?” she said.
The one in the wizard hat sighed deeply and slumped to her knees. “Oh, thank the gods.”
The shortest one, wearing the tattered remains of pirate clothes, smiled with pure, exhausted joy. “I think—I think she’ll be okay. I thought she was too far gone.”
“No,” the one with multicolored hair said with relief. She sat back and smeared the grease further across her cheek while trying to clean it. “The processors never lost power, so her neural network was constantly engaged.” A look of horror flickered across her face as she realized the implications of that. “But—Ah. But it means that she couldn’t go out completely.” She licked her lips.
“Where—” Cordelia stopped. Her projection settings were all wrong. She did the chee equivalent of clearing her throat, running through a range of timbres and intonations until all the values matched her preferences. “Where am I?”
“In pretty deep trouble, not to put too fine a point on it,” the human with the multicolored hair said. “Can you access the Interspace Network?”
Cordelia tried, failed, and instantly started to shake. The lack of connection to other chee or the vast, comforting sea of information that cradled each consciousness of her race unnerved her more than the memory of the torture.
“That looks like no,” the woman said, clearly concerned. “Okay, we’ll work on that later. For now, we—Hey. Hey.” She reached over and lifted Cordelia’s chin until the chee had to look in her eyes. “Right here. Look right here. Now, you’re functional—not right, obviously, but functional. We’re going to get you out, but you need to walk and probably run. Can you do that?”
Cordelia blinked as the question filtered through her glitched, panicked processing. She ended the failing routines and nodded.
“Good. Good. All right, introductions.” The woman pointed to herself. “I’m Candy. I’m with Alliance Security. The one in the hat is Fiametta, and the tall one with the fuzzy ears is Kisa. They’re from the Doctrine. The short one is—”
“Squall,” Cordelia said suddenly. She blinked at the small woman and smiled a bit. “I remember her.”
Squall beamed and patted Cordelia’s hand.
Candy smiled too and stood unsteadily. “Looks like some of those files survived, okay. She’s ex-Doctrine,” Candy said.
Cordelia detected some reservation or warning in this statement, and she refocused on Squall.
“It’s—complicated,” Squall said, still smiling. “But I also want you to escape.”
“You were—” Cordelia paused to sort through her memory files. They made little sense at the moment. “You were with me. Here. In the cage.”
“We were neighbors,” Squall said, her smiling fading.
The tall one—Kisa—had not more than glanced in Cordelia’s direction since she awoke. Cordelia had not met many tonnerians and was struck by Kisa’s feline features and grace. Kisa turned and regarded all of them now. “Listen, ladies, I’m glad we’re all so friendly and resolved and such, but we’re also on a tight schedule. That monster’s going to get some of her friends, and Mihos is detecting large numbers of people approaching this hold from three different directions. We’ve got to go right now.” She strode forward and extended her hand. “It’s faster if you ride with me.”
“Or me,” Candy cut in, her voice going hard.
“Not now,” Kisa said. “We’re leaving on my ship, all of us, no matter where we end up. We can argue about that later.”
Candy hesitated, nodded once, and stepped back toward a sleek, gangly machine that looked like a blend of construction mecha and hoverbike. Cordelia took Kisa’s hand. The tonnerian hauled the chee to her feet and indicated a feline mecha that crouched close by, watching the door and swishing its tail. “That’s Mihos. He’s not friendly, but he likes you. Mount up, buttercup.”
Cordelia had no sooner clambered onto the relic than Kisa leapt aboard ahead of her and got the machine airborne. They twisted easily, the mecha matching its mistress’s dexterity. Candy and her relic sped off ahead to do a circuit of the hold. Fiametta and Squall moved as fast as they could. Candy circled back to them and seemed to want to put Squall on her relic. Before they could, though, the far bulkhead doors hissed open. Pirates in Golden Vance’s livery poured in.
“Hang on!” Kisa pulled Mihos into a looping turn.
They spun through the hold as pistol shots whistled past them. Kisa twisted them onto their left side, so that the relic would take any hits, and aimed for the other bulkhead door. Below, Cordelia saw Candy swing her relic’s sword at a group of especially fast pirates closing on Fiametta and Squall. She cut down two and sent a huge, ugly chee sprawling back into half-a-dozen more.
Something hit Mihos like a meteor. Cordelia heard the relic yowl in pain, and the impact shook loose some of her internal systems. She scrambled to hold onto Kisa, but the actuators in her arms all froze, and she slipped away from the Knight. She fell, tumbling and screaming, until her jump jets engaged—mostly. She stopped falling and started flying and spinning completely out of control. A floating skull cannon in the open doorway fired and hit Mihos again. The mecha spun away and slammed into the far wall; Kisa narrowly avoided getting crushed against the hull.
Cordelia’s self-repair routines finally sorted out the problem with her jump jets and got her stabilized. She raced to a catwalk that circled the hold on the uppermost deck and dropped out of the air. Pistol shots pinged off of the decking under her. Her jets had almost no fuel left, and she realized that she had no idea where to find Kisa’s ship. She swore, trying to expand her gun. The vacuum extension appeared just fine, but the connections needed to turn it into a weapon simply did not mesh.
“Going to have to get someone to look at that,” she said as she rose to a crouch. A quick diagnostic showed that her legs had almost full function. “Okay, so, I do this the old-fashioned way.”
An explosion from below drew her attention. She stuck her head over the edge of the catwalk to see that some of the very few crates in the hold had disintegrated under a shot from the cannon. Fiametta and Squall were picking themselves up after the blast, both a bit worse for wear. Candy circled around to cover them, deftly avoiding a hail of corsair fire, and raked her attackers with a parti-colored cannon beam. Candy swung back, her
giant sword vanishing in a cloud of esper, and scooped both of the other women into her relic’s great hands. She zoomed off toward the cages and twisted around the angle projecting from the left-hand wall to gain some cover. Cordelia rolled back as more pirates flooded into the hold, Golden Vance striding among them.
A boom from below and behind her signaled Kisa’s return to the fight. Mihos roared, and Cordelia could track his movement by the great thuds as he bounded across the deck. She glanced down in time to see the cat machine, trailing smoke, duck into the same cover as the others, almost exactly across the entire hold from her. Something below her hissed, but she could not identify that sound.
“You’re trapped, my lovelies,” Golden Vance called with an esper-enhanced voice. “I’ve got your ship cut off. You’ve nowhere to go. But I’m an accommodating man. I’ll let most of you leave. The chee and Squall stay with me, though.” Cordelia shuddered at the nastiness in his voice.
“Vance,” a new voice called out, musical and lilting, “you’re a bloody fool.”
A new group of pirates, dressed in different colors, approached from almost underneath Cordelia’s hiding place. A woman riding a tall, gangly relic adorned with figureheads strode into view.
“You hand over that chee now, and I might decide to let you keep your ship along with your life.”
Cordelia slipped slightly back to stay hidden. They thought she was in the corner with the others, she realized.
“Hah!” Vance barked, though he sounded less confident. “This is nothing to do with you, Kate. This bloody mess and idiotic idea of attacking Ulyxis is your fault and your problem. The chee is my prize and my concern.” He pointed a blunt, mechanical finger at the Pirate Queen. “By the terms of our agreement, you get a percentage of my plunder, but I decide which plunder you get.”
“The agreement also says that you don’t make deals behind my back or plot against me,” the woman said venomously. “What did the noh offer you, Vance? Did they promise you a fleet?”
Cordelia saw the shock on Golden Vance’s face. “How did you know—”
“I didn’t,” the woman said. “But I do now.”
Vance roared. “To hell with you, Calico Kate. And I’ll take you there myself.”
“Ten of you wouldn’t be enough,” Kate shouted back, and then she called to her crew. “Gold and grog to whoever brings me that chee alive!”
The two pirate bands whooped and charged each other.
Chapter 21
Ulyxis, Forsyth River district
Shock and pulse rifle fire ricocheted off the ruined statuary around Marikan To as she sprinted to cover. The fighting in this section of Ulyxis’s capital had turned quickly from ranged sparring to close-quarters brawling, something that berserkers thrived on but she and other Sarva disliked. The Alliance had clearly prepared very well for their arrival, and she cursed the need to search the sector for the artifact instead of scouting this target to learn its weakness. Again.
Shock rounds tore through the remains of the ground cars that had sheltered her a second before. The shots also punched through the two Sarva accompanying her, who had not gotten away fast enough. Marikan To closed her eyes for an instant. With so many prophecies coming to pass in the last two centuries, she wasn’t exactly tripping over recruits. Too many felt drawn to the priesthood. But she could take no more time to mourn. She spun smoothly from cover and sent an explosive arrow arcing into the gutted remains of the office tower behind the shock cannon’s position. As she slipped back, rubble rained down on the Alliance soldiers. The lack of recruits only makes my duties harder, she thought with a rueful frown.
She scrambled deeper into the damaged city and looked for angles to destroy the Alliance’s entrenched positions. The warlord had called for his few berserkers and several of the gigantic, feral war beasts called dahon, along with many of his best warriors, to join him at the House of Speakers. Resistance was toughest there, which suggested to Marikan that he ought to go around, but she felt sure he had a plan. Likely he wanted to confront the mercenary Relic Knight who was holding that position and vaporizing their warriors almost with impunity. Marikan had seen the armored Black Diamond shuttles come down close to that point, which likely meant they had concentrated where they had the best fields of fire. She had expected the enemy’s line to break quickly, but the warlord’s call meant that it had not. That they fought on with no apparent thought of retreat raised her hackles, though she could not say why.
She sent another enchanted arrow into the first floor of an ornate building with all its windows blown out. Her missile’s piercing shriek echoed out of the confined space and sent the defenders scurrying away from the sonic pain. She cursed again when she saw no noh troops rushing to take the building, and yet again when she looked around and saw her friendly lines several blocks behind.
Tahariel slipped lightly into cover beside Marikan To and smiled at her.
Surprised, the noh smiled back. “Where did you come from? I knew you were on-planet but not where.” She glanced past the strange woman to the silent, swift warriors in black and bone-white armor flitting into place around them. “Who are your friends?”
“My pinions,” Tahariel said, glancing out at the street. “A gift from my superiors for use in unusual circumstance.” She grinned. “They wanted to stretch their legs and shed some blood as much as I did.”
Marikan To saw a spinning sphere of darkness form in the center of the ring on Tahariel’s staff. Wisps of violet and crimson esper whirlpooled around its edges as it grew. The alien stood, rising further on the lift circles attached to her boots, and hurled the black orb down the avenue. It seemed to pick up speed and size as it flew until finally detonating at the far intersection. Screams drifted to them on the flame-tinged breeze. “Where were you, anyway?” she asked as she sank back down. “I was looking before we attacked, but all the Sarva said was that you had another mission.” She nudged Marikan To’s ribs with a conspiratorial grin. “So? Spill.”
Marikan To sighed, still conflicted about the whole affair, and made a show of looking back for any advancing noh troops. She did spot one of her teams creeping through the rubble half-a-block away and across the street. Random pulse fire pinged around them. “I . . . She shook her head. “I smelled something. A trail of esper. So I followed it.”
“Smelled?” Tahariel thought for a second. “That sounds exactly like you. You’re a tracker, a huntress. It makes sense that you would not see esper in a traditional sense. So? What did you find?”
Marikan To shrugged and waved at the other Sarva. Vathra To, one of Marikan’s more aggressive guthrra, acknowledged and moved her sisters closer. “I don’t know. The fact is—” Marikan To hesitated. “It just sounds worse every time I say it out loud. I found something—someone, really—that just radiated esper.”
Tahariel whole body came to attention, and her expression turned serious.
“As I think back, she did have some kind of glow, like she shimmered,” Marikan continued, watching the street and the approaching noh. “But mostly I could smell and hear the esper. If flowed out of her like water, like she was a fountain.”
“A source?” Tahariel asked, her voice taut.
Marikan To looked around sharply at her friend.
“Like a source of esper?”
The Sarva leader hesitated again and then nodded. “Yes. That’s a good description, actually.”
Tahariel grabbed her upper arm. “Tell me where. That’s the artifact, the thing we sought. Tell me where it is.”
Marikan To had never see the alien so intent or serious. That alone made her reluctant, but something also called her back to the chee. She stared at Tahariel’s eyes for a moment before she felt Lakmi land on her shoulder. Esper flowed from the cypher, and Marikan felt calmer at once.
She smiled lopsidedly at Tahariel. “No. But I’ll take you there.”
The alien woman blinked twice, caught off guard, and then nodded with a grin.
; Marikan turned and waved Vathra To closer. The guthrra led her team across the ruined street and into cover.
“We need your rift generator,” Marikan said.
Her subordinate nodded and unslung the device from one of her huntresses.
Marikan took the generator and began adjusting its settings. “Get your pinions together,” she said to Tahariel.
A few seconds later, a rippling, shimmering tear in reality hung before them. The cool smell of the starship’s air mixed with the pop and ozone of weapon discharges wafted out.
“We’re late to the party,” Marikan said.
Tahariel chuckled and followed her through the rift.
* * *
Cordelia lay on her back on the catwalk with only the thin deckplate between her and the swirling melee below. This was absolute madness, and it was probably going to kill her. All she wanted was to see M8 and find her place in the galaxy.
Her olfactory receptors signaled something, and she sat up. She sniffed again and identified the scent as ozone and incense. All her processing cycles spiked as she recognized the smell. A sickening, wet tear opened in the air before her.
Cordelia scrambled back as three noh women in the scant robes of priestesses stepped through the rift with their curved blades drawn. They lunged for her. She rolled off the catwalk without a second thought, and her jump jets sputtered to life. She could just see half-a-dozen or so other rifts opening around the room, and a mixture of male and female noh rushing through into the melee.
Her jets would not stay lit, so she could only partially control her fall. She managed to land on a small knot of Vance’s pirates. Though they failed to get to their feet and grab her, she scrambled upright and stumbled clear just in time. She raced through the chaos toward the far corner where she had last seen her new friends, but the roiling fight slowed her. She heard a roar, and glanced left to see Vance lunging for her. She put more people between them, but he tore across the hold like a bulldozer.
Darkspace Calamity (Relic Knights Book 1) Page 17