by M. D. Cooper
“What the?” Leslie whispered.
A boom sounded—one must have accompanied the first shot as well, but she hadn’t heard it—and the Nietzschean’s head ceased to exist.
There was only one weapon she knew of that made a sound quite liked like that: an SMI’s GNR.
Seconds later, Rika raced around the corner, stopping atop the fallen body of the Nietzschean.
“Stars, Leslie, are you OK? You’re covered in blood!”
Leslie stood mute for a moment, gasping for breath, until she finally managed to say, “It’s not mine…well, most of it isn’t, at least.”
Rika glanced back the way she’d come. “Looks like engineering is sealed up. We need to get to the bridge.”
Leslie looked at her commander, the woman who just couldn’t be stopped, and began to laugh, feeling tears stream down her cheeks.
“What’s so funny?”
“You…Do you…” Leslie managed to gasp before gaining a modicum of control. “Do you realize that every time I try to rescue you, you rescue me instead?”
Rika shrugged. “Not my fault you’re the perennial damsel in distress, Leslie. We all have our part to play.”
“Damsel!” Leslie growled as she approached Rika. “I’ll show you a damsel. Let’s go kill some Niets.”
* * * * *
“Gotta love your gumption.” Rika was about to slap Leslie on the shoulder as the woman approached, when she saw the biofoam filling a wound there. “Damn, how many places are you hit?”
“Ummm…four that breached armor,” Leslie counted, glancing down at herself.
Rika snorted as she turned back the way she’d come.
Leslie put her tally on their combat net.
Leslie jerked a thumb over her shoulder.
Niki reported.
It was a hard slog through the ship. The Niets threw everything they had at the two Marauders, eventually venting atmosphere and killing the a-grav across the entire ship. Rika was surprised they’d made such a silly mistake; a mech was just as at home in zero-g as full gravity, and Leslie moved like a ballet dancer, floating through the passageways and holing everything in sight.
Thirty minutes later, they had reached the final ten-meter corridor that ran to the bridge. Executive offices lined the sides, and the last nine enemy soldiers had taken up positions in them, desperately trying to hold off the two Marauders’ unrelenting assault.
Leslie had picked up a chaingun a deck down and was spraying rounds into the corridor with wild abandon, the barrage tearing through the bulkheads and into the rooms beyond.
Niki laughed.
Rika interjected, firing a round from her GNR when her nanoprobes pinpointed another Niet’s location within the offices.
There was a reason people flew out to jump points before transitioning to the dark layer. She used to think it was just the risk of hitting dark matter, but after Tanis had told her about the Exaldi, she had a whole new reason to fear insystem jumps.
Rika cleared the room, finishing off a wounded Niet when he raised his weapon to fire on her, and then took up a position to cover Leslie as she moved to the next office.
After Rika’s shot, Leslie swung into the room and unloaded a kinetic scattershot gun into the space, pumping out four rounds before reappearing in the entrance.
Leslie made a hissing sound at the AI, who laughed in response. Then she fired into the final room after Rika had kicked the door open.
Rika said as she walked to the bridge’s door.
Niki informed the duo.
The colonel sighed.
While Niki did her work, Rika piggybacked on the AI’s tap into the shipnet, and found the control systems for the 1MC. There was only minimal security on the audible comm system, a standard Nietzschean firewall and port intrusion system she’d breached before.
Less than a minute later, she was in.
“Admiral Gideon? Can you come out to play?” she asked with a soft laugh, able to faintly hear her own voice as the ship began to air up once more.
“You think you’re funny, don’t you, mech?”
Rika glanced at Leslie, who only shrugged, and she replied, “Well, I’ll admit that Les and I got a bit riled up, carving our way through your ship. We’re kinda chomping at the bit to get into the bridge and finish things off.”
“You may get through, but you’ll be too late.” The admiral’s voice carried a note of smug satisfaction.
“Too late for what?” Rika asked. “To crush all your hopes and dreams? There’s still time, trust me.”
“We’ve rigged the transition system to hold us in the DL until we reach Epsilon. Plus, engineering is dumping all but our emergency fuel reserves, just in case you manage to get around that plan. Pull us out of FTL, and we’ll just drift in the black forever.”
The admiral paused, and Rika began to calculate if they were still close enough to the Blue Ridge System to jump into escape pods.
“Oh,” Admiral Gideon continued. “In case you were thinking to get off the ship, we blew all the pods and trashed the shuttle. We’re on a one-way trip. Even though you think you’ve won, you’ve still lost.”
Rika fought the urge to fire her electron beam at the bridge’s door ‘til she melted her way through, but after the combat, her internal batteries were perilously low, and she suspected she wouldn’t make it through.
Niki said, sounding dejected.
“Colonel Rika?” the admiral asked, his voice still carrying a triumphant note.
“What?” she shot back.
The admiral was chuckling over the comms as he replied, “Don’t think you can breach the bridge or engineering, either. You come through either of our doors, and engineering blows the ship. They’ve got the reactors ready to go at a moment’s notice.”
Rika glared at the bridge’s sealed door. “Fine,” she called out over the 1MC. “Have it your way.”
Activating her lightwand, she drove it into the bulkhead, melting it to the bridge’s door in four locations, and sealing the admiral and his three or four compatriots in the bridge.
“Enjoy your tomb.”
Leslie chuckled, pushing herself off the bulkhead.
Rika grinned, though Leslie couldn’t see it behind her helmet.
As they walked back down the corridors, Rika couldn’t help but wonder what Chase and the rest of the Marauders were doing. She felt as though her mad rush to capture the Nietzschean commanders had let them down.
I sure hope they’re managing OK back on Kansas.
VISITORS
STELLAR DATE: 10.14.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: MSS Asora, in orbit of Kansas
REGION: Blue Ridge System, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
“Captain Klen,” Senator Naia said as she entered the bridge ahead of Glen. “Thank you for allowing me on your ship. It’s…a bit strange to be aboard a Nietzschean vessel, and know it was one of the vehicles of our deliverance.”
“I’m very glad to meet you,” Vargo said, rising and offering the senator his hand, which she stared at for a moment, before recovering herself and shaking it.
“Um, yes. I have to say, Captain Klen—I hope this doesn’t come across wrong—I’m surprised that you’re a mech.”
“If you’d met me a month ago, I wouldn’t have been one,” Vargo replied with a wink. “Got an upgrade after trying to plumb the depths of a gas giant.”
A look of confusion came over Senator Naia’s face. “I’m sorry?”
“Got injured in a battle,” Vargo explained simply before turning to Ashley. “This is my second-in-command, Chief Ashley.”
To her credit, the senator handled Ashley better than she had Vargo, shaking her hand with only a look of mild consternation on her face.
“I’m sorry that this probably sounds improper to you, but are all Marauders mechs?”
Vargo gestured to a seat near his, and the senator smiled in thanks as she took it.
“No,” he replied. “Most of the Marauders are not mechs. However, this is Colonel Rika’s battalion, and in Rika’s Marauders nearly everyone is a mech.”
“The Nietzscheans always said they killed the mechs…yet you said you just got made into one?”
“They didn’t get them all,” Vargo replied with a lopsided grin. “A lot got away—they let some go, too, like Rika. And she found even more not long ago, in a place called the Politica. Freed them, and has been building up a force to hold back Nietzschea. We hooked up with the Scipio Alliance not long after, and they upgraded our old GAF mechs to 4th Gen, and let anyone who wanted make the change as well.”
>
“And you opted for mechanization as well, Chief Ashley?” Senator Naia asked. “I don’t recall seeing any four-armed mechs during the war.”
“Opted?” Ashley asked as she flipped through displays on two separate consoles. “I leapt at the chance. We’re spread a bit thin when it comes to shipboard operations, so Finaeus offered a set of mods to our minds and bodies that makes us able to multitask a lot better. I’ve always really liked being able to manage a lot of things at once, so it was a no-brainer for me. Plus, I can kick serious ass.”
“Finaeus?” Naia asked.
“Finaeus Tomlinson,” Vargo Klen explained, enjoying name-dropping on the senator more than he should. “The chief engineer on the Tardis, the second FGT ship to leave Sol.”
This time, Senator Naia’s mouth hung open for a full six seconds before she recovered. “The FGT?”
He nodded while giving a commiserating laugh. “I’d best start from the beginning; then we can talk about how to make things better for Kansas and the Blue Ridge System at large. Would you like something to drink? I can have a servitor bring it.”
The senator gave Vargo the first genuine smile he’d seen since she entered the bridge. “I’m on a Nietzschean destroyer with a pair of newly minted mechs, who are about to tell me how the FGT upgraded them to take the fight to Nietzschea. Yeah, make it a whiskey.”
Thirty minutes later, Vargo had related the bulk of Rika’s story and the amazing events of the past few weeks to Senator Naia—who had eventually dropped into stunned silence, limited to sipping her whiskey and nodding periodically.
“And that brings us up to our visit here,” he finished, leaning back in his chair and lacing his fingers behind his head, before remembering that the last time he’d done so, it had been surprisingly difficult to get them separated again.
He carefully disentangled them, and set his arms on the chair’s armrests.
“If I hadn’t seen your five ships defeat the forty Nietzschean vessels orbiting Kansas a few days ago, I wouldn’t believe a word of it,” Naia admitted quietly. “But it’s hard to deny reality—not that I’d want to, in this case. In all honesty, your story sounds like music to my ears—which is not something we’re used to around here. The resistance has fought a losing battle against the Niets for years; to see you knock them down like it was nothing—”