She put her hands on her hips. “Hey, you want my help or not?”
“But we’re just two people, what can we do?”
Ilrica laughed. “No, we are a hunter plus one, which is more than we need. We can aetherically change the layout of the temple grounds, get rid of all the booths, restore the eternal flame, setup the donation urns, holographically project a full choir and dancers, lay out rugs with virtual priests to teach the scrolls for free, set out so much sweet incense that it fills the air. By the time we’re done, they’ll see what a celebration of Soeck is supposed to look like.”
Gerald began to see the grandeur of what she meant. “We can really do that?”
“You can’t.” Ilrica pointed her thumb at herself. “But I can.”
* * *
Gerald lost his lemon lunch into a row of bushes as they touched down outside of a heavily fortified bunker complete with armed guards, laser turrets, and automated sentry drones. Everything about the place gave a clear message that someone was very serious about keeping people out of there.
Ilrica’s eyes glowed with a white light as her claws crackled with energy. She reached into the air before her and burrowed into it with her claws, then tore open a wound in reality. The gray world Gerald had seen before spilled out from it and everything froze in place except for them.
Ilrica grabbed his arms and led him forward through the now thick air.
“Um, this seems a lot more dangerous then you described on the way over here,” he commented as they walked past the frozen guards, advanced pulse rifles held at the ready.
“What are you talking about?” she said, flicking a guard on the nose. “See? They are perfectly harmless. Go ahead, give him a punch in the gut. When he unfreezes, he’ll keel over in pain. It’s pretty fun to watch.”
“I think I’ll pass.”
Ilrica raised up a finger and her claw glowed red-hot, like steel. She slid it down the reinforced door, cutting through it like butter.
While she worked, Gerald looked up at a frozen security camera, pointed right at him. “Are you sure they won’t see us?”
“Not unless you stand in place for five minutes.”
Gerald chuckled nervously. “I’ve been meaning to ask, those creatures your people prefer to hunt...”
“Ruavu Mammoths.”
“Yeah, just how big are they?”
She thought for a moment.
“Don’t you know?”
“Sorry, I can’t link to Central while we’re accelerated, so I had to do the math in my head. About sixty meters.”
“Holy cow, that is bigger than Godzilla. And your people hunt them in packs?”
“Packs? No way.” She glanced over her shoulder at him. “It only takes one Bertulf to take a Mammoth down.”
Ilrica tore the doors open and led him inside. They strolled past a security checkpoint, past statuesque officers, retinal scanners, automated laser turrets, and through weapon detectors as if they were doing nothing more than walking down a grocery isle.
Gerald looked around. The Ssykes logo was everywhere. “I really don’t think we should be here. We should go.”
Ilrica reached out and tipped a guard’s helmet down so that it covered his eyes. “Oh, don’t be such a baby.”
Gerald stopped. “No, I have a bad feeling about this.”
“I’m doing this for you.”
“Yeah, but you made it sound like we’d be breaking into a storage shed. This is a high-security facility.”
“Compared to the places I’ve broken into, this is just a storage shed. Look.” She waved her hand around. “The cheap trogs don’t even have aerosoled nano-tracers to detect temporal displacement. Now THAT stuff is hard to get around.”
Gerald turned around. “I’m going back to the temple.”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
Something in the way she said it made him stop.
“If you get more than a few meters away from me, you’ll decelerate and be stilled like the rest of them. From their point of view, you’ll simply appear in front of them right in the middle of a secure area.”
She elbowed a guard drinking a cup of jaffe in the ribs. “And they’ll think you did that, too.”
Gerald’s face pinched. “You know, I’m getting a little tired of being forced around. You’ve been strong-arming me to do what you want all day.”
Ilrica polished her claws against her uniform. “Yeah, it’s been a good day.”
“No, it hasn’t. I told you earlier that I think of you as a friend, but it’s obvious you don’t see me that way.”
Her ears folded down. “What do you mean?”
“You don’t treat a friend like a pet, or a piece of luggage. That’s not how it works.”
“But... you’re just prey.”
“And that means I don’t have any feelings?”
Ilrica looked surprised, like she had never considered it before.
Gerald rooted himself defiantly. “You can’t make me go with you.”
Ilrica looked away. For a moment, she seemed genuinely hurt. “Fine. Just stay there. It’s not like I care. A hunter doesn’t need friends, anyway.”
She turned around and tried to look glib. “It was only a matter of time before you turned on me anyway. Better to do it now while I’m prepared.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Gerald said. “Because I would never sell you out.”
Ilrica looked up, a strange look on her face. It was as if she couldn’t make herself believe him, but she desperately wanted to. She reached out to say something, but the device on her wrist beeped, grabbing her attention. She looked over and saw a tiny fly stuck in the gray air. Its tiny wings began beating, slowly increasing in speed.
“Frakk.”
She ran over and scooped up Gerald, tossing him over one shoulder.
“Hey, what are you doing? Put me down!”
“Sorry, I’m running out of time, have to do this the hard way.”
She took off running through the thick air.
“This is humiliating! Put me down!” he yelled, kicking with all four limbs.
“I’ll say. If the Bertulf saw this, they’d think we were a couple.”
“That is not what I meant! This is embarrassing, now let me go!”
Ilrica reached a circular staircase and slid down the handrail. “You’re a man aren’t you? Deal with it.”
“You know, I hate that phrase. ‘Be a man’ is just code for ‘your feelings don’t matter.’”
“See? You do get it.”
Ilrica ran through a honeycomb of crystal cores, then finally found what she was looking for. She ran into a small control room and dropped Gerald down on the floor. She pulled a plug out of the console and jammed it into the back of her neck.
Gerald looked out the windows into the empty adjoining rooms. “I kind of expected there to be more people in a place this big.”
“Weird, huh? It’s almost like everyone is out dealing with a collapsed hotel or something.” She pulled her glowing claws apart and created a sphere of color within the gray world, around the podium she had linked with. The strain seemed to hurt her physically, and she nearly keeled over, blood trickled out her nose. The podium came to life, and a three dimensional model of the temple grounds came up before her. She quickly imputed the changes.
“Just, finish up what you are doing and let’s get out of here,” Gerald said, leaning up angrily against a gray circuit box.
“Done,” Ilrica announced happily, unplugging herself.
There was a spark and a whiff of smoke behind Gerald. He turned around, and the circuit box he had leaned against burst into flames.
“Whoa!” he said, backing away.
“What did you do?”
“N-nothing. I barely even touched it.”
Distantly there was an explosion, and the floor beneath them shook so violently they nearly lost their footing.
“But how?”
The
gray melted away from the circuit board and it exploded, throwing Gerald back against the wall. Little flaming bits landed all over the control room, and everywhere they touched, color soaked into the material around them, soaking into everything.
“The room is decelerating!” Ilrica brought up her claws, but another explosion, this one much closer, threw them both off of their feet. The podium exploded and the halo lights above soaked up the color just in time to shatter, leaving the room in shadow. Ilrica’s claws glowed brightly in the darkness, illuminating her wolf-like face, but when she plunged them into the air, something gave out in her body and she slumped over in pain.
The color was now spreading everywhere. It traced over the nearest crystal core, and it sprang to life, releasing an emergency siren and calling out commands.
“Oh great.” Gerald tucked his head underneath Ilrica’s arm and helped her to her feet. With a heft and a shrug, she was on his back. He tucked his hands under her legs, and moved as fast as he could out of the control room.
“You’ll have to outrun the deceleration,” she said painfully. “Before the automatic forcefields kick in.
Gerald shook his head and doubled his efforts. By the time he reached the spiral staircase, the color was already spreading two stories ahead of him.
“Faster,” she coughed as he ran up the stairs.
“This isn’t easy you know? You’re pretty heavy.”
She pouted. “Don’t you know you should never say that to a girl?”
Gerald gave it everything he had, his muscles straining, his heart pumping. There was another explosion, and the staircase came apart around him. He had just a moment to look down seven stories to the ferrocrete below when Ilrica held out her hand, and he fell sideways into the wall. Ignoring the protests of his inner ear, which said this was impossible, he instead trusted his eyes, picked himself up, and ran straight up the wall. It felt like being in a cartoon, but the spreading fires from an exploding tank made him move too fast to care.
With a heart-bursting effort, he caught up to the spreading color just as they passed through the security checkpoint. They ran past a guard just as he slumped over in pain, clutching his midsection, his jaffe spilling everywhere. They ran past a guard as he fumbled about, disoriented by the helmet covering his eyes.
As they approached the entrance, Ilrica lost consciousness, and the gray world began disintegrating everywhere. Gerald yelled in pain, his powerful leg muscles taut to bursting as color crept over the field emitters around the front entrance.
With a pop in his leg, he jumped through just as the emergency forcefield sprung to life behind them, sealing the reinforced doors that Ilrica had cut through.
The two of them landed hard on the ground, just as the guard on the left bent forward, cupping his nose and yelping in pain.
There was a flash of light in the sky above them. At first, Gerald assumed it was the fireworks, until a beam of light rained down from the sky and consumed the laser turret near the bunker.
The shockwave lifted him off his feet. He and Ilrica rolled, the world spinning over and over, until they came crashing into the bushes.
He sat up and checked to make sure she was okay, blood trickling down his face. He was relieved to find her still breathing. Then he noticed that he had landed in his own vomit.
Another beam of light came down from the sky and another defense laser was destroyed. Gerald looked up and saw a dark ship in the sky above the city. Like a blade it hung, black even against the night sky.
Gerald had seen it before.
It rained down destruction as it descended. Beam after beam tore apart every defense turret, every field generator. All over the city, pillars of smoke rose up, but no defenses fired back. The entire city had gone black. The pirate ship opened up like a pinecone, and hundreds of pirates sailed out on long smoky contrails from their maneuver packs, firing their weapons and cackling above the chaos as they descended on the nearby temple complex.
* * *
The Soeck temple was a perfect display of traditional Eldireer Festival worship. It was also a perfect display of chaos. People ran screaming in every direction as pirates zipped about in the air above them, descending like carrion on the wealthier patrons, stripping them of everything of value.
Men screamed and women cried. Amid the confusion, a holographic choir sang praises to Soeck, oblivious to the carnage around them. Laser blasts and shrapnel passed right through them. As a holographic priest offered to teach lessons of peace, a pirate knocked a woman to the ground right in front of him and yanked her purse away from her, obscenities dripping from his foul lips.
Miss Stubbs cowered beneath the overturned remnants of the offerings table. Around her neck she wore every kind of good luck charm available, and was rubbing each one in turn, chanting “everything breaks... everything breaks...” to herself, over and over again.
A donation urn exploded as Tomar ran for his life, a fresh fertility statue clutched in one hand. He stopped as a barrel leveled itself in his face. He looked down its length and saw the filthy man at the other end. Cruel eyes stared out from beneath matted greasy scales.
Tomar’s face was a mask of shock as the man pulled the trigger, then something collided with the pirate, knocking him over. The rifle went off in his grip, piercing a hole in Tomar’s earlobe as the pirate was thrown to the ground by a dainty little girl, who expertly wrenched the man’s arm into a lock, then pinched the pressure point at the base of his neck, knocking him unconscious.
Tomar couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He looked up to see Trajey, her uniform torn, her doting eyes full of relief.
“Trajey... you... saved my life,” he stuttered.
She looked around and led him to safety inside the Xovot. The statue fell away from his hand and was left behind. “I’m just glad you are okay,” she said.
“Thank you.”
She noticed the nick in his ear. “Oh, here, let me get that.” She pulled out her medkit and applied a patch of synth-skin to his wound. The patch went hot as it sealed, and he flinched, his hand coming up, grabbing onto hers.
“Oh, sorry.” She tried to pull her hand away, but he kept his hold on it. She got a little embarrassed and looked down bashfully.
“No, I mean it... thank you.”
Blushing, she looked back up at him, and they looked deeply into each other’s eyes.
* * *
High Priest Soa’Kal fell on his fat haunches, his jowls shaking pitifully as he backed up against the base of his golden throne. Lyssandra Bal loomed over him, her pistol whirring to life in her grip, her bewitching blue lips in a superior smirk.
“Please spare me,” he said pitifully. “I’ll pay you twice whatever you are being paid.”
She leveled her pistol at his face. “Wow, you really don’t put much value on your life, do you?”
An oracle opened up, revealing a hidden barrel and spat out a beam of energy. Without looking up, she held up her hand, and the beam reflected off the device she held, shooting back where it came from and destroying the oracle.
Soa’Kal licked his parched lips. “Okay, five times... NO! Ten times.”
A guard ran up and fired at her from the entryway. She spun below the beam and threw out another device which unwraveled itself, binding the man with hundreds of cables. He fell struggling to the floor, hopelessly bound.
Lyssandra set her weapon to the maximum setting and pointed it at the high priest. “Goodbye.”
“A hundred times!”
She lifted up the barrel. “Ah, so you do want to live after all.”
He wheezed in fear.
Her glowing golden eyes were humorless. “Show me.”
He reached over and put his clubbed fingers over the latinum bust of Soeck and pressed on the tongue. With a metallic clack, the wall behind them unlocked and opened, revealing a room practically bursting with credit chips.
Without taking her eyes off the priest, she raised her fist, and the pirates st
ormed into the room and pounced upon the money like starving jackals. She didn’t seem to care at all, however, and kept her gaze fixed on the simpering priest as she knelt down to his level.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’ll take the money. Wars are expensive, after all. But you’ve sorely misjudged me if you think I am being paid to do this.”
She grabbed his hand and removed the ring from his finger. “My men need drink and food and pleasurable company to keep them motivated, but all I need is this.”
“My ring? But why?”
“Because unlike you, I am a true believer. I fight because it is the right thing to do. The universe is broken, and I intend to fix it.”
“What are you going to do?”
She gave a smug smile as she rose back up to her feet. The rest of the pirates flew away laden with everything they could carry, leaving her and the priest alone.
“General, patrol ships are inbound,” came the report from her communicator.
“Prepare for dust-off, sixty seconds.”
She turned around and found Gerald blocking the doorway, cradling a branch from the Y’tzuma tree in the courtyard that had been destroyed.
“Lyssandra Bal, this is a holy place,” Gerald said boldly. “You are wrong to defile it with violence.”
She rolled her eyes and pointed her pistol at an amber statue of Soeck. Firing off a blast of crimson energy, the statue exploded.
“Oh, no! Now Soeck is going to curse me,” she taunted. She stood there for a moment, arms outstretched, as if waiting for something to happen. Nothing did.
Her head snapped up. “See? Your gods don’t dare stand against me. And do you know why?” She licked her blue lips. “Because the last time I faced the gods, I killed them. Every single one that opposed me is now dead.”
Gerald swallowed hard. He had seen the footage fragments in the archives.
She flicked her tongue at him. “The rest of the gods know that. They won’t intervene, they’ll hide in the shadows like the cowardly rats they are.”
Gerald dropped the broken branch. “Then I will stand against you.”
Her mouth fell open and she couldn’t help but laugh. “I remember you. You’re the kid from the starliner.”
Kharmic Rebound Page 34