by Nick Cole
“I make my own Black Lotus. It’s good stuff. Primo Locus. Take off your helmet and tune in. No?”
He inhaled again.
“So if you would go on down there and please kill Montraxx, that would be awesome. For us… and you. Because then I can freely tell you what you want to know.”
Silence.
“Listen… you know how this works. We may all be scurvy, craven murderers, but we, like you, are generally the only justice most people are going to get out here on the edge. We got standards, and we’ve done lots of good—relatively speaking. You know the Repub don’t care. So, and believe me, I get that you’ll kill a lot of us, starting with me—I get that. I’m a getter of that. But I will not tell you what you want to know unless the rules are met. You don’t get to be clan boss without following the rules. And even though I freely admit I am a no-good backstabbing piece of Nanga filth… I have standards. As unbelievable as that may seem to you and your little crew, I have them.
“And, I might add, we have a man-portable torpedo system. Got it from a Tellari trader. Not even your armor could stand up to a direct hit from one of those. They’re guided, did you know that? So. Go kill Montraxx for us and we good, bruh!”
Gex stood back and beamed his crooked smile as the tiny joint smoldered between his long dirty fingers.
21
Montraxx batted Rechs across the vast hold deep within the ruin that had once been the armory of the Republic dreadnought. As Rechs flew through the air, knocked nearly senseless, he saw the name of the ship printed in large Repub font along one wall. Justice.
He hadn’t been on this ship at the Battle of Telos after all. He’d been on the Unity.
He smashed into the wall of the hold, and the monstrous Cyclax roared in triumph. It towered a full story above Rechs, its fangs dripping with thick gobs of viscous saliva. It beat its broad gorilla-like chest and rushed forward to rend the bounty hunter limb from limb.
Rechs’s HUD was scrambled and intermittently fritzing out. He smacked his bucket into the wall, and the display centered, aligned, and gave him targeting data on the incoming monster. Which was all but useless—because no bullet or blaster was going to penetrate a Cyclax’s natural plate-armor skin. Rechs knew that, because he’d already tried. He’d put twenty large-caliber slugs center mass, and the thing hadn’t even bothered to wince.
The words “Jump Pack Offline” flashed in his helmet’s display.
Great.
Montraxx grabbed Rechs. Instead of throwing him, this time the beast apparently intended to squeeze the life out of him. Its wild animal eyes filled Rechs’s display as the creature literally tried to crush Rechs’s armor in on itself.
The suit’s integrity warning alarm began to sound.
Rechs tried to get his glove up so he could punch in a command on his left gauntlet interface. But the thing crushing him held him so tight that even this simple action was impossible. In desperation, Rechs switched to vocal interface, which hadn’t worked for years.
“Activate defensive surge measures, set for one hundred thousand volts!” he groaned with what little breath he had left.
And to his surprise, the ancient suit actually responded to his voice command. Somewhere through the years it must have fixed itself, and he’d never known it.
The howling monster shrieked and flung Rechs away like a pitched fast ball. Rechs hit a bulkhead that was designed to stand up even in the case of ship-to-ship ramming, yet his armored suit went through the massive chunk of ceramic-refined hyperalloy like it was some ancient sheet of flimsy yellowed paper.
And the entire deck collapsed into the abandoned recesses of the old battleship’s disintegrating superstructure.
He heard a dull crack within his helmet, or his head, and it was lights out. The last thing he remembered was falling into a deep darkness…
… And then he was back at the Battle of Telos, aboard the other ship that was just like this one. The Unity. When the Savages broke through the line.
That day had been for all the marbles. The last major ship-to-ship action in the Republic’s fight against the Savage fleets. The Savages’ cheap high-firepower cruisers had gone right through the Repub Navy corvettes and straight at the two big shiny dreadnoughts, hoping for a knockout blow.
There had been two dreadnoughts there that day.
Both were lost.
It was a trap!
The Republican Navy, under Admiral Caspo, had been lured into the fight at Telos. Caspo had fallen for it for all the wrong reasons, and the main one had been his own firm conviction that the Republic was weak. That only he knew the way out of the galaxy-wide quagmire that was the Savage Wars. A thousand little wars flaring up everywhere because of some anomaly in man’s ancient history of starflight. The galaxy was aflame because… because Caspo, a man Rechs had known well, had been very right. The Republic was dying, feeding on itself to support an elite class that cared little and invested less.
Caspo had hoped a decisive military action would change all that. More power would be given to the military to right the wrongs and set straight the things that very badly needing setting straight. The ruling council and the House of Reason would see that the path they were headed down led only to madness and destruction, a galaxy-wide dark age.
But instead the mass-production cruisers of the Savages, armed with every conceivable weapon they could stick on them, came in hard behind a ragtag fighter wave larger than any Rechs could ever remember seeing. He’d been on the bridge that day, and he saw the first waves come streaking in. Turret fire barely made a dent in their numbers.
“Rechs,” Caspo had said to him. “Today we finish the Savage Alliance, old friend. Once and for all. Today we save our Republic.”
Already the hammerhead corvettes were engaged and getting chewed up. Fighters were buying time for the motley collection of Savage Alliance cruisers to move in close enough for ship-to-ship volleys of heavy turret fire. Soon both fleets were engaged in short-range heavy fire on a massive scale. At any given moment shields on some ship would collapse, and targeted fire would hole the vessel in several places. Command structures and engineering sections went up in sudden explosions, never mind the wholesale death going on in a thousand raging dogfights along the hulls. The bridge aboard the Unity was alive with the names of ships suffering catastrophic damage.
“There goes the Daring!”
“We’ve lost Discovery!”
“Constellation is reporting reactor cascade in progress. Requesting permission to abandon ship?”
“Corvette Admiral Husla has been rammed. Casualties on all decks. She’s dead in space.”
“The Republica is abandoning ship!”
Enemy fighters streaked in to hit key system targets on the heavy capitals. Republican fighter screens attempted to take them out before the torpedo bombers could deliver their strikes. But there were too many.
“Concentrate fire on group alpha,” Caspo ordered. He turned to Rechs one last time. “We’ll need the legionnaires, General. Board that big ship there.” He pointed toward a massive Bulari command cruiser, bulbous and long like a flattened football with a dorsal torpedo turret hanging from underneath its mass. She was lumbering in toward a burning Republican cruiser, closing in for the kill.
“What about the Unity?” Rechs asked.
“We can handle anything that comes at us. You and I both know we’ve been through much, much worse. Knock out that ship, and we can jam the rest of their fleet comm and traffic.”
Out there on the line, the aft reactor on a hammerhead corvette exploded, taking a squadron of fighters with it. The explosion rippled up along the spine of the corvette, and the forward command section lurched away. Then the rest of the ship was gone. No survivors.
“Assault shuttle loaded and ready, sir!” announced the Repub deck officer in charge of boarding ops.
Caspo cast a long glance at his old friend Rechs.
“We’ve got to win this one today, Rechs. If w
e don’t, then everything we’ve built is lost. The Council of Reason and the rest of the Republic will see… this is the only way now. It’s either that, or the galaxy surrenders to savagery, even if we still do win the war somehow.”
The two of them were the senior-most officers on the field that day. They knew more than anyone what was at stake.
“Admiral!” shouted another deck officer at a bank of monitors along the upper level of the command bridge. “Another fleet dropping out of hyperspace, bearing one-eight-zero from Unity. More Savage cruisers and a full carrier group. Fighters incoming!”
“Knock out that ship, Rechs. Now more than ever,” said Caspo one more time. One last time, really.
And then he looked away from the projected tactical display inside the command bridge. He stared straight at Rechs.
“Things never change, Rechs. The names may change, but even you’ve come back around to your own true name. Remember Mars? Remember the day the Uruguay went down in the sand? That was a bad day, and we came through that hell six months later. We’ll come through this too. Go now, General. And make it back safe, my friend.”
Rechs had gone. He’d boarded assault Shuttle 218 and led a strike against the Savage cruiser Agamemnon. The big Bulari command cruiser. On board, the fighting was brutal. Legionnaires were going down all around him. But they took the strategic interface command deck and downloaded a standard Repub hunter-killer infowar algorithm.
Even so, the battle was lost by then. The massive fleet they’d first engaged above Telos V had been just a feint. A soft jab. The knockout punch came from another direction altogether, and it hammered the Republic fleet senseless.
When the Repub Navy was fully engaged in ship-to-ship combat with the Savages, that’s when the privateers joined in. Almost every national system fleet had contributed these ships to aid the Savages—and they targeted the Unity with overwhelming firepower. It tried to get in close to the atmosphere to keep the continuous waves of fighters off its collapsing shields and burning decks. But when the engines went down and it hit the atmosphere, it took Rechs’s oldest friend and ten thousand crew with it.
They’d had their differences. Rechs and Caspo. But they’d been together from the very beginning in one name or another. And they had seen the Quantum Palace inside the Dead Space. Two of only three who’d made that journey and lived.
Now Rechs, on the Truth, was in command. Fires were out of control in the main reactor when he gave the order for all Repub ships to evacuate the system. He barely got out alive that day. He and the 131st, or what remained of it, had to fight their way out by hijacking a Savage frigate and forcing the crew to execute an uncalculated jump away from the battle.
But all that—Caspo, Telos, and even the Quantum Palace, which hurt his mind to think about—all that had been a long time ago.
Now the Cyclax was hauling itself down through the ruined wreckage of the decks above where Rechs had finally come to rest.
It was coming for him.
He looked around. Suit diagnostics were booting up and scanning for damage. Nano-repairs were being effected as best they could.
He’d come to rest near the skin of the ship, deep inside the ship’s destroyed targeting processors. These processors had once crunched the numbers to keep up accurate turret firing solutions across the vast volume of space. Th processors were close to space so the computers could more easily burn off the incredible heat they generated.
“Use that,” Rechs told himself as he struggled to his feet, searching for some kind of weapon. The Cyclax was just two decks above and crawling down through the exposed decking. Rippling muscles in its powerful arms flexed as it pulled itself downward at him like some kind of horrible two-story-tall spider. Slavering jaws opened and shut as the thing roared in anticipation.
Rechs got to his feet and felt a swift moment of vertigo as he struggled with his balance. He cleared all the warning messages in his HUD. When had he ever paid any attention to those?
Now the beast was just above him. Maybe fifteen feet. Rechs stumbled away just in time.
The thing dropped onto the deck, causing the ruin to rumble and shake. More debris fell from the ceiling above. Rechs pushed his way through the long-dead stacked processors that rose up into the thermal venting. The Cyclax lumbered after him, sweeping away the processors as though it were harvesting some sort of strange black metallic and gray plastic wheat in some dark hell that had never seen the sun.
Rechs came up against the hull and ran his hands along it. No doubt this was only the inner hull, but it would have to do. He pulled a thermite grenade from his belt and dialed it to max yield, minimum spread. Then he slapped it on the hull and slammed his mailed glove against it, instantly detonating the small bomb. There was no time for anything else—the monster had closed the distance and was reaching out for him.
The blast tore through the inner hull. The outer hull was already exposed to deep space, thanks to the many rents and wounds in the dreadnought’s skin.
The atmosphere vented like a violent cyclone, and Rechs was sucked out into the shadowy and forsaken place between the hulls—or, he thought as he spun and twirled away, between the hells. His suit assured him it had integrity in zero gee, as well as some oxygen. Montraxx, on the other hand… not so much.
But the massive creature refused to die so easily. It grabbed onto the gaping wound in the inner hull for all it was worth. Precious oxygen rushed past it.
And here was the danger. If it let go, it would smash into Rechs and probably punch through the outer hull with enough momentum to take them both out into deep space. Rechs’s jump jets would never get him back inside the ship. And no one would come looking for him out there. He’d disabled his tracking firmware years ago.
He hoped the jump pack would work despite the earlier “offline” message. He checked its reserve power level—below fifty percent.
“That’ll do,” he growled.
He pulled his carbon-forged diamond-edged machete from his back, fired the jets—they still worked—and drove straight at the monster.
He passed between the Cyclax’s bulging arm and massive leg, and he forced the wicked blade of the machete straight through Montraxx’s gigantic bicep. The monster howled—an inhuman cry of pain that sounded like thunder even through the suit and the windstorm of deep space’s insatiable demand for all your oxygen. And then the howl was gone—as was Montraxx. It was sucked out into the airless void between the hulls. Never to return.
It would gasp and explode out there in the cold. Its frozen body would rattle around between the hulls until one day the old dreadnought finally camp apart at the seams and drifted into some gravity well.
Rechs’s jump reserves were dropping like a rock. He pushed the thrusters hard to reach a bulkhead he could hang on to. The jets finally gave out just as he grabbed it.
He waited for the tornado to die, hoping the superstructure in this portion of the ship wasn’t so damaged that it would just give way and tear itself off into space. As he held on, he could hear the smashed debris—the debris of the battle he’d lost long ago—still endlessly striking the hull like small micro meteorites doomed to forever live out a melancholy destruction of bare white noise.
***
“We watched you on closed-circuit!” Gex erupted when Rechs came back up onto the deck in a lift. “Saw the whole fight! Thought you were dead for sure. But we was wrong! See?”
Rechs looked at the Crow, and saw the wobanki up in the illuminated cockpit canopy. The cat gave him a paws up. Rechs had told Skrizz to take Prisma inside the ship and lock the hatch while he was gone.
“Goth Sullus,” Rechs said. He turned his gaze to the wiry man in the bathrobe bouncing from foot to foot in front of him. The slime devil swept his dirty dreads to one side and smiled. His teeth were rotten near the gums.
H8-user, thought Rechs. Teeth like that were a dead giveaway. Should’ve noticed earlier, he admonished himself. Should’ve known he’d double-cross m
e. H8 users were like that. Zero reliability. Zero credibility.
“Yeah… about that,” Gex said. “Remember when I told you it’s not like we have a portable ship-to-ship torpedo launcher that your… your suit wouldn’t stand up to even just a little bit?”
Rechs looked around. The hangar deck was dark and empty save for him and the weasel. Rechs switched the armor’s imaging systems to IR. Off in the darkness of the upper decks he saw the rest of the six hundred hired killers, minus two, in position with weapons pointed straight at him. They were everywhere. His HUD began to tag all their weapons—including several ship-to-ship launchers.
Gex, sensing that Rechs understood the game, smiled. Like he’d won the junkie lottery of all time. An old Mark I was a name-your-fortune price in the black markets of Denebia. Everyone knew that. But Gex had gained more. He’d salvaged an old piece of Mark I, gotten rid of Montraxx, and would be collecting on the most wanted bounty hunter in the galaxy—making this the best day ever in Gex’s miserable life.
“Remember when,” said Rechs. He knew his armor projected his voice with a ghostly sound, and he could tell it gave even the creepy Gex the willies. “Remember when I didn’t tell you that if I die, my ship explodes? Romula nuclear space mine hooked up to the micro-reactor. Callisto Wars. Very old school. Found it a long time ago. Rigged it to the suit telemetry. They’d don’t make ’em that big anymore. The Romula nuclear space mine, that is. Back in the day it would’ve vaped a dreadnought like this, no problem. Remember, Gex? Remember when I didn’t tell you that?”
The sleazy crime lord swallowed hard. It looked as if he were about to choke on his own bile. He was understanding the game more fully now than when he’d first begun to play.