by Aaron Crash
In seconds, all three commanders of the IPC ships were on external comms.
“Captains Bain, Landau, and Tate. Do you believe in the supernatural?”
Each answered in the negative.
Denning chuckled. “Just as I thought. Prepare boarding parties. Captain Ramirez thinks his ship and most of the galaxy is haunted. We are here to prove him wrong.”
“It’s Gunnery Sergeant Ramirez, you IPC prick. Ling, make ’em believers.”
Ling launched the first and second modified torpedoes. They whooshed through space like miniature comets until they struck the bridge on either ship in front of Blaze’s starship. Screams of terror erupted.
“Captain Tate! Fire!” Denning screamed.
Before the Adamant’s captain could follow the order, Blaze spun the ship around and Ling fired the remaining torpedo. It soared through the air and struck the last vessel, direct hit. A third round of howls filled external comms.
“SWD is online, Gunny!” Fernando clicked. “We have a wave.”
“Surf’s up!” Blaze flipped the switch.
And the Lizzie Borden left civilized space and entered the Sargasso Expanse, speeding away, faster than light.
ELEVEN_
╠═╦╬╧╪
Thirty minutes later, Blaze went to the sickbay to check on the patients and to patch himself up. Elle had healed some of the damage, but he was still hurt. Ling was cleaning up from their most recent battle while Fernando started on the repair work to the bridge. Then he’d go to work on Blaze’s room and the cargo bay. The Lizzie was still a disaster from their battle with the spiders and Xerxes.
They’d also need to slow down and fix the wing. It didn’t matter for SWD travel; the Lizzie had become just a chunk of metal riding on a wave of spacetime. Since friction in space was impossible, the shape didn’t matter at those speeds. But if they hit an atmosphere—and for any kind of battle maneuvering—the wings did matter, at least to Blaze, and he was generally piloting the old girl when evil came to tear it apart.
Bill charged out of the sick bay, stomped up to Blaze, clicked a bunch of shit in his face, then moved off down the hallway, giving the Lizzie loving caresses with his remaining limbs.
“Well, that went well,” Blaze said. The Clicker hadn’t taken a swing at him.
Inside, Elle was awake, sipping water from a bottle and coughing slightly. She gave him an accusing stare. “I heard you used my snare spheres in a rather interesting way.”
Blaze stripped off his shirt, cleaned the blood off him, then grabbed a bottle of synthetic skin and started spraying his many wounds. His shoulder was the worst, but the new synth cells would close it up while taking care of any infection.
“I tried to set them to recapture the baddies,” he said. “So my thinking, the spheres go off, release whatever wicked thing was inside, and thirty seconds later, the snares suck them back in. Should work, yeah?”
She shook her head. “No, probably not. Those auto-snare charms were always really buggy. You let three demons back out into the universe. Do you have any idea what they were?”
“Nope. I was kind of busy avoiding death and chasing after Xerxes.” Blaze sighed. He’d saved the ship and got them out of their fix with the IPC, and here his sister was complaining about the specifics. Xerxes remained on their scanners, at the very edge of their range. But they were chasing after him. And gaining speed.
“Blaze, what if you let Baal loose? Or that scorpion breeder demon? We also have the ghost of Vermillion Singh, remember?”
Blaze felt his jaws tighten. “Those beasties are already in the cellar. I didn’t make a withdrawal from the main hold. It was a few snares outside the third door. Which, by the way, is weakening. It was ghost central reaching for me, and that one dead guy, the one with the long face, I saw him through the door.”
“Well, that makes me feel a little better.” She closed her eyes, swallowing, and winced. She looked like exhaustion would be a step up for her. “I can figure out what you unleashed when we’re back on Fleabugger. ’Cause that’s where they’ll go. To cause all sorts of chaotic shit.”
“So you’re saying I screwed up. That’s bullshit. I make a command call, we get away, and suddenly I’m the bad guy. If we can find the Onyx Gate, and we can close it, then whatever dinky little bastards I let loose won’t matter.” Blaze whirled and stomped to the door.
His sister didn’t say a word. He turned. “Look, I’m glad you’re not dead. And you need to sleep. We should catch up with Xerxes in six hours. If we’re lucky and we don’t hit a pocket anomaly. Then we might end up eating Ling and the Clickers.”
“Not funny,” Elle whispered. “This shit is for real. Xerxes isn’t Baal. He’s so much more powerful. I don’t think we can take him down.”
“Well…” Blaze grinned, lightening up. “It got us talking again. So maybe it’s not all bad.”
“Granny used to say that God drew straight with crooked lines.”
Blaze didn’t mention that Arlo would get drunk, go to bars, and beat up Christians. And when that got boring, he’d find an atheist or two to slap around.
Elle took in a deep breath and winced again. She’d pushed herself too far, and he’d done a little of the shoving himself.
Blaze sighed. “I’m sorry we’re taking such a beating this time.”
His sister smiled wearily. “It’s always like this. Only this time it’s more. And, Blaze, we still need to talk to Cali.”
He remembered Cali’s pleas and tears. “Yes, yes we do.”
Blaze left and found the next person on his list to check on. Trina was still in the library room, sleeping on the bed. She’d found one of Elle’s scrapbooks, and it lay on the mattress next to her. He wasn’t sure why his sister didn’t just keep her mementos digitally. She said she liked the feel of the paper and the act of cutting and gluing, but for Blaze, it was just more weight to deal with and more clutter on the ship. They were a hunting vessel, not a craft shop.
He went to turn so he wouldn’t wake the auditor, but her eyes blinked open. She rose. “Are we okay? Did we lose track of Xerxes?”
“No, we’re okay,” the gunnery sergeant said. “But you should sleep. I should too.”
Trina lifted the book. It was of their parents, the little they knew about them. “But I have so many questions.”
Blaze shook his head, chuckling. “The auditing bug must go deep. You are trying to figure us out, I know it, but not for IPC regulations. Out of your own curiosity. You might have more luck with Elle. I hate talking about the past. It doesn’t do much but bring back a whole bunch of terrible memories.”
She patted the bed. “And yet, I’m still so curious.”
“Okay, ask away. Least I can do since I most likely got you fired.” Blaze wandered into the room, despite his own better judgment, and went to the window. Distant stars streamed by, blurred by their speed. Those stars would be long dead. Talk about ancient history. Most of what they saw on a daily basis was the dead light from star corpses.
Trina got off the bed, pulled a stuffed chair near him, and sat down next to a bookcase. Blaze remained standing. She opened the book and turned to the first page. It was their baby pictures, taken when both he and Elle were barely five minutes old in the early hours of the new year, 2666.
“So you were born on the space station which was researching the 0n1x singularity.”
Blaze nodded. “Yeah, and you don’t see my dad ’cause he was at work. And Mom was pretty busted up, giving birth to twins with the space station falling part. The black hole lost stability that night.”
Trina turned the page, and there was a picture of his dad, looking very serious and very Mexican, in front of a view window with the black hole behind him. “Miguel Ramirez, Ph.D. He led the research team. Did he change 0n1x to Onyx?”
“No, that was Granny,” Blaze said. “Or Arlo. One of ’em. It doesn’t matter. After the black hole wrecked the research station and killed my dad, it disappeared
. Gone. From that location.”
“You think the Onyx Gate, which is the source of all evil energy, is the original 0n1x black hole? And it moves around through space?”
“And time,” Blaze added. “Before the 0n1x black hole destabilized spacetime in that area, Onyx energy only existed in rare pockets if at all. Hard to know since if you don’t believe in it, you can’t see. Which really dicks with the scientific method and that quantum observation shit. After the big explosion that killed my dad, the galaxy was flooded with Onyx energy. And then the demons came.”
The scrapbook crinkled and another page greeted Trina. “Your mom. Catherine, holding the two of you.”
Blaze leaned over. He knew the picture well. It was six months after the 0n1x disaster, she was a single mom of two babies, and she looked not only exhausted but terrifically sad. She was under a big-leafed tree, holding him and Elle. It was on Dakota Prime, a nice little planet in the center of the Americatus Quadrant. He’d learned how to walk on green grass with a blue sky overhead.
Pages turned one after the other, mirroring linear time. We read the books of our life a page at a time, and going back is impossible. Birth to death, relentless.
“Then the move to Huaxia?” Trina asked in a murmur.
“Bad timing. The Clickers hit Chiang Mai Prime at the beginning of the war. I was there for the first shots and the last of the Bug War.”
Trina moved back so he could see a picture of him and Elle, at the spaceport, with their mom, before the Clickers attacked. She was holding each of their hands, her face turned, with a smile there. Six years after the death of her husband, Maria Sandra Ramirez-Gutierrez looked rested and happy.
“Why Chiang Mai?” Trina studied his face.
“Granny and Arlo.” Blaze was tired of saying their goddamn names. “They had a line on the Onyx Gate. It appeared in the Huaxia quadrant right at the beginning of the war. And Mom wanted it closed more than anyone. It had taken her husband. But she couldn’t get there in time. It moved on…like it does.”
“Was she a hunter?” Trina asked.
Blaze wrapped his arms around his chest. “There were no hunters back then…except for…” He clenched his teeth. He wasn’t going to repeat their names.
Trina helped him out. “Granny and Arlo. Who are they? Or should I say…who were they?”
“Don’t know if those two putas are alive or dead. Granny took Elle and Arlo took me. They said they were scientists who worked with my dad, but if Arlo had a high school diploma, I’m Satan’s douche boy. Maybe he was a janitor on the 0n1x station…maybe. As for Granny? She was some bit of twisted work. I’d say prostitute, but why would a hooker work on a station with a bunch of scientists, mostly married, researching a black hole? Not a lot of action there I wouldn’t think. And she was a witch before the Onyx Gate opened. Not sure how that worked. Maybe Wiccan? Pagan. And yet she never missed a Sunday of Terran Catholic Mass. Go figure.”
“Yeah, interesting woman,” Trina said.
“Anyway, the Clickers swarmed Chiang Mai, pushing the civilians and everyone else out. Mom was gunned down protecting us. Granny and Arlo knew her, knew us, couldn’t agree on who should go with who, so they split us.” Blaze stopped talking. He remembered the fires, the stink of smoke and ash and burning bodies. Clickers were everywhere, killing everything not bug. Arlo had scooped him up and held him close. For about five minutes, little Ramon Ramirez had felt safe. Then it was refugee camps and lots of cramped freighters and a long trip back to Earth.
“I’m sorry.”
He plucked the book out of her hands. “History lesson is over.”
Apparently, at IPC auditing school, they didn’t teach listening. She went on. “You moved with Arlo to Earth. There you joined the Terran Astral Marine Corps, but you were dishonorably discharged. You killed your commanding officer.”
“We’re done. Drop it,” Blaze growled, trying to keep a lid on his rage. “You know enough, and if you want more, ask Elle.”
The auditor, though, knit her brows. “Your CO, he was somehow connected with the Onyx. Or did a demon possess him?”
Blaze shoved the book back into the bookcase and walked out of the room, breathing hard. She had brought up a world of memories, all of them barbed, and he felt like he’d spent the last twenty minutes chewing on glass.
He needed sack time, though his quarters were still a BBQ pit after the spider fight. He’d have to throw a hammock up somewhere and grab a few winks. But every room on the ship felt haunted. Funny, the cellar was actually haunted, but the real ghosts were inside him. Losing both his mother and his sister within a few weeks of each other. Arlo’s brutal training. After what Arlo put him through, basic training for the Corps had been so easy. He’d been a soldier since the age of six, strong, fast, merciless.
But Blaze knew the hardest fighting he’d ever do was with the voices in his head and the barbed-wire memories of his past. In some ways, the demons were easier to handle. They were hell on the outside, not on the inside. He thought of what Ling always said, that the real enemy is yourself, and yet that was an illusion since all we are is Meelah, Meelah, Meelah, the universe’s oversoul.
A highly suspect notion, or that’s what Fernando would say.
Blaze put an arm against the ship, near Cali’s door.
Like all the other times, she could sense him, but this time, she didn’t call out or even contact him on comms. He tapped his ear, and his implant display showed her VHI, a hundred percent and holding steady.
She was the last thing he wanted to deal with, and yet, Arlo would say “no one sleeps until the shit of the day is done.” And that was a direct quote. Which the bastard had said to a six-year-old orphan.
Elle came out of the sick bay, limping. She lost her balance and fell, but Blaze caught her.
“Thanks,” she muttered. “You think we should talk to Cali now or later?”
“I was thinking we’d do it now,” Blaze said, “but you look like yesterday’s oatmeal. You need to rest up. We’re going to need spellwork, sooner rather than later.”
Her sister titled her head. “Ain’t no rest for the wicked.”
“Don’t say that,” Blaze said. “You’re not wicked.” Ironic he’d say that since he thought she was wicked most of the time.
“But I am. The wicked witch of the Americatus Quadrant. I use demonic energy basically on a daily basis. And it’s eating at me, Blaze. We need to get the gate closed soon, before…before I lose it.”
Blaze didn’t like seeing his sister so weak. He scooped her up and carried her up the central spiral staircase. “You won’t lose it. You’re one of the good guys.”
“Power corrupts,” she said thinly, letting her head fall to rest on his chest.
“You don’t seem so powerful now.”
“That’s just it…the more I use the Onyx, it weakens me, but then I come back stronger than before. It’s like a muscle, and I’m getting full-on pumped. It won’t be long before even the hardest of spells won’t do anything to me. What if when the time comes, I don’t want to give up the power? If we close the Onyx Gate, I’ll just be some dumb ol’ woman again. Just Human.”
Blaze didn’t know what to say to all that. How come women always wanted to complicate things? First things first, get some rest. Then they needed to get to Xerxes and kick his ass. Not sure how to accomplish that, but they could worry about that when the time came. Lastly, get Xerxes to tell them everything he knew: about the location of the Gate, Blaze’s and Elle’s future, and any intel on Granny and Arlo. If only for Blaze to kick Arlo directly in his nutsack.
The door to Elle’s room slid open, and Blaze gently settled her onto her bed into her silks and furs. “I’ll sleep,” Elle whispered. “When I wake up, I’ll feel better. And we’ll talk to Cali.”
“You’re going to have to tattoo Trina. We can’t have her getting possessed on us.”
Elle smiled a little too broadly. “That is going to be my pleasure. She is pinche gor
geous, bro.”
Blaze’s sigh turned into a growl. “I don’t care about you being an all-powerful Onyx witch. I care about you stealing my girlfriends.”
“But forbidden fruit is always the sweetest,” Elle managed to murmur, and then she was fast asleep.
Blaze spun on his heel. Just when he thought he might rekindle some brotherly love for his sister, she reminded him how evil she could be, Onyx or not.
He retrieved his gear from the bridge and strung a hammock up in the weapons locker on the third deck. Yeah, he was close to the cellar, which would trouble his dreams, and Cali was right down the hall, no good there, but at least he was close to a whole bunch of guns. His ax and his shotgun were ready in case hell came knocking while he got some rest.
When he eased onto the soft cotton fibers, the MH3 hammock read his spinal position and rotors whirred as it adjusted to his weight, giving him support, but not too much. That was the point of sleeping in a net: the sag curled you into a ball, and it was like a mama’s womb. The slight swing of his bed, the smell of the gun oil, the raw ozone stink of plasma and fusion, it felt like being back in the Corps, aboard Harriers, storming Clicker strongholds. Scenes of chaos came back to him: the green blood, the clicks and clacks, and an enemy you could kill.
The Bug War seemed easy compared to hunting the hosts of hell. Just like basic training had seemed easy after Arlo’s grueling combat regimen.
Blaze yawned. He’d ordered Ling to bed, Elle could hardly function, so his sister was out, Trina better be sleeping and not perusing Ramirez family scrapbooks, so most of his crew would be resting. Bill and Fernando didn’t need much sleep, so they’d watch over the ship, start the repairs, and generally be useful. Bill might hate everyone and everything not metal aboard the Lizzie Borden, but that Clicker loved the ship like Granny loved Jesus.
Bill would get the ship running, Fernando would keep everyone alive, and things would go well with Xerxes. The archduke had flipped out when Elle tried her exorcise on him—and she hadn’t been at full strength. A fully healed Elle might just rip the archduke out of the P13rce unit, and they could shove it in the cellar after pumping it for info.