by Ari Bach
The Unspeakable figures were like a symphony of horror, every limb tweaked to make skin crawl. The burning monster’s arms looked broken, jointed in the wrong places, and pierced with gold rings. Violet fired again with no effect.
Varg ran straight for it and cut it in half with his sword, but not before it had launched a dozen spines into the side of his face. He didn’t stop running as he yanked them out, ignoring the barbs and letting them tear his skin.
He ran to the left of the team as they headed for the rocket, and he got detoured on a ramp. Violet stopped under the end of the incline and linked to Varg that they were right beneath him. He jumped off the incline onto a soft canopy, then adeptly let himself fall onto a soft mound of packaging, and then, less gracefully, facedown into a hard pile of nails.
He didn’t even bother to remove the ones that stuck. He and Violet just started running, and they fell out one by one. Closer to the rocket, Yaks were standing their ground against UD troops, some even charging against them with drawn swords. A fierce battle raged around them as they ran. Flaming Unspeakables unperturbed by microwaves, mutilated Yakuza fighting to the last breath. Total mayhem.
They arrived at the rocket, surrounded by Yakuza. The Yaks ignored Valknut completely. Violet jumped up onto the rocket’s superstructure, a square around the tanks with thrusters at each corner. She made her way inward toward the tanks and caught the first glimpse of the nuclear warhead. It looked simple and downright pretty compared to the monsters that were attacking, something like a cephalopod disguised as a structure across the top of the tanks. It opened its eye as Varg approached, recognizing its trigger.
Violet linked out for anyone who didn’t see it that the nuke was intact. Half the mission complete. Now it was time to sabotage the rocket.
Vibeke was already looking over the thrusters and comparing their designs to records in her partitioned memory. Trying to find a weakness. She was interrupted when a shake rattled the superstructure.
At first they all thought it had been hit by a UD missile, but when they looked for the flames, they found them directly below. And sustained. Coming from the thrusters. They hadn’t been hit—the Yakuza were launching prematurely with a half-finished ship to get the tanks away from the attack. The rocket began to lift.
“Stay or go?” asked Violet.
“We get off and nuke it as soon as it’s in space!” shouted Veikko.
“The Geki would kill us all,” replied Varg.
“We stay and sabotage, crash it before it breaks gravity. Let ’em clean up a kilometer of mud to get the Ares,” voted Vibeke. “Might make it financially unfeasible, and they’ll give up.”
“I’m with Vibs,” called Violet.
“Same,” called Varg.
Veikko cursed and grabbed a pipe leading to the thrusters. “Then we take it down slow, disable one thruster at a time.”
Vibeke called back, “Thick red pipe on each is O2. They’re far enough not to ignite if we cut ’em.”
Varg immediately took his Tikari and brought it down on the nearest pipe. It cracked and pressurized gas spat into the air. The thruster seemed to be working fine, though. He swung again, and the pipe was severed completely. The thruster began to fizzle.
They were already thirty meters up and still rising. The thing seemed fine on three thrusters. They began scaling the remaining scaffold to reach the next. With two down, it would have no way to remain stable. It would crash slowly. They’d just need to jump when it drew low to the surface. Inertial negation fields and low Martian gravity would keep them safe.
Violet reached a catwalk that, though rumbling violently, provided a path to the next thruster. Gravity was increasing with acceleration, and atmosphere was almost gone. Mars was falling away fast beneath them.
Vibeke and the others made it to the catwalk after her. Violet looked back after them. As soon as Vibs was atop the metal grate, she drew her Tikari. Violet didn’t understand until she turned around.
Mishka crouched on the catwalk, microwave in hand.
Mishka drew and shot Violet with a killing beam. It hit her in the center of her chest armor, which absorbed most of it. The remaining sparks burned horribly, as if she’d swallowed acid. She fell to the inner scaffold and clutched her chest, then struggled to pull an internal coolant from her Thaco pocket. She barely caught sight of a melted coolant pack in her hand before her vision began to fade.
Valhalla was half an astronomical unit away. They were in space already, and even if they could get back to Mars, she was doomed without a coolant pack. As her vision flickered, Varg arrived with his own and forced it into the Tikari slot on her chest. Nelson ducked out of its way, butting into her xiphoid process. The coolant field activated, and the relief was phenomenal. A soothing feeling like nothing she’d felt before. Varg hit her with an adrenaline syrette, and her vision returned.
“Stay down, you can’t move yet,” he said. She could hear Vibeke and Mishka fighting on the catwalk. She tried to prop herself up to see but couldn’t move without pain ripping through her chest. She was forced to lie down as Vibeke fought her nemesis to the death.
Vibeke drew her microwave and fired a wide beam at Mishka. She countered with her own. They knew it was a stalemate and ran for each other, beams conflicting and sparking.
Vibeke kicked Mishka’s microwave from her hand, off the rocket and into the Martian sky, then readied her microwave to fire the final beam. Mishka grabbed her leg and threw her off the catwalk. Her microwave fell from the rocket alongside her. Veikko tractored her back in place before she fell away, then switched back to kill, ready to take any shot at Mishka that came clear.
Vibeke and Mishka fought in a barrage of slugs and kicks that betrayed their precarious, shaking spot. Gravity was growing less and less now, acceleration altering to freefall. Vibs got a kick in that nearly sent Mishka into the void, but she caught a pipe and scaled back down.
A fistfight was hopeless in zero-g. Both would be thrown into space. Mishka clawed her way to the other side of the rocket and locked herself to the scaffolding with a diamond filament tether. She checked her oxygen, 90 percent. She had almost two days left. If they docked with a larger craft, she’d be fine. If they headed for Earth, she’d scale the rocket and drag Vibeke into the void with her.
V team regrouped. Vibeke was on top of her rage and didn’t waste a second finding Mishka. The thrusters were off. Gravity was over, she and Violet tied into the catwalk, Veikko and Varg to the scaffolding. They all checked their O2 constructors and vacuum shielding. All working at maximum capacity. They could last almost a month at regular metabolism. Over a year if they took internal cryo-tabs.
But the mission had failed. They were on their way to Earth with the Ares water.
Veikko linked, “Don’t worry, I won’t nuke us in space.”
“As if I’d let you.” Varg tightened the trigger around his neck.
“What are we gonna do?”
“We can’t risk sabotage between planets. If the Ares falls into the sun, it ends the solar system. We need to get off when we get to Earth and nuke it there.”
“That will cause a war, without question.”
“We cannot allow the Ares to exist on Earth. It’s not an option.”
“I disagree.”
“Well, we have a month in space to argue about it, Varg.”
Enyo appeared overhead, first as a bright dot, then as an asteroid, technically Mars’s smallest moon. They could tell on approach it was only a bit larger than the rocket. It had a hatch carved into its side.
The docking procedure was simple and smooth, and the five apparent corpses latched to the rocket were ignored. As the rocket docked, they got a better look at Enyo. It was fitted with one massive thruster on one side and a tiny cockpit on the other. A cheap interplanetary craft, but it would do the job.
As the rocket passed through into the hollow rock, Mishka detached and pushed out against the rocket, hurtling into space.
She h
ad only one chance to survive, and she took it, aiming for the cockpit. Her jump was spot on. She was obscured by the door to V team and went unseen. The cockpit slowly loomed closer and closer to her until she approached the ties holding it down and caught in their web. She held on to the thickest line of the bunch and pulled her way toward the cockpit. All over its side were handholds leading to the airlock.
She felt around for active links inside and found two. She broadcast.
“Sanchita Patel, Havildar CMP for Bharatiya Sthalsena, on your hull.”
A Yak ran to the cockpit side window and looked out. Mishka smiled and waved with her free hand.
As soon as the massive door closed, V team began scouring the rocket for Mishka. First in the darkness, looking for light, then in the dim light of their Tikaris, then in the bright light of their uniforms. After seven hours of searching, they determined she wasn’t there.
She could have fallen, but somehow they all knew she’d made it to the cockpit. She didn’t have Valhalla’s armor anymore, only Bharatiya Sthalsena space capables. She couldn’t live in deep space for months. She had to stay indoors.
And V team had to stay inside of Enyo. The door was closed, and no exit presented itself. A stalemate. The Valkyries tied themselves to the innermost scaffolding in the rocket. They took a month’s worth of their cryo-tabs and their metabolisms slowed for the ride back to Earth.
VIOLET COULD feel the cold, inside her and out. Her suit was sealed for prolonged space travel. It didn’t grow fur or cycle heating elements. It was designed to be used in conjunction with cryo-tabs, to let her freeze. The cryo-tab included analgesics, so it didn’t hurt, but it still felt cold. An overwhelming cold, a deep cold unlike anything else. It also carried with it a strange sense of calm. Coupled with the vacuum silence and darkness of the Enyo interior, it felt far more deathly than any time she’d died.
Their links still functioned in low power mode. They could still talk and still see time pass one distorted second at a time. Mercifully with their bodies working at 1/30 of their usual speed, time felt fast. Hours felt like minutes, minutes like seconds. The trip would feel like a day.
All four went into deep immersion. There things seemed almost normal, though the net was far away, and all they had was each other. In their lucid dream, they plotted ways to kill Mishka, ways to destroy the Ares, all the relevant mission issues they could think up. But there was little resolution beyond their admission they’d have to ask Valhalla to advise once they got in range.
Before long Varg receded into his porn partition and Veikko started playing solitaire, leaving Vibeke and Violet just as they were on the trip to Mars and inside the guardthing. Alone together.
In her few waking moments outside the link, Violet was completely aware of her proximity to Vibeke. Though there was no light and no air to convey warmth, she could feel Vibeke centimeters away from her, floating before her. Through the cold vacuum, Violet swore she could feel heat radiating off of Vibeke’s back, an impossible feeling yet more real and urgent than anything else in the ship, more intimidating than the mission ahead and more intense than the shaking thruster behind them, rushing to Earth on a constant burn. They were willing to melt the thruster to get there fast.
She let her suit illuminate a sliver of light and stared at the back centerline of Vibeke’s armor. Run a finger down the seam to unzip the back, peel off the front to expose the chest, pull that down, the metal all falls off, and the rest just slips away. Vibeke did that every day they were home, she thought, every time she jumped into the showers, every time she undressed to wander the ravine in a thin shirt and shorts (And how cold she looked in that shirt). Mishka undid Vibeke’s armor once too, on some hot day in a distant jungle. And they did more. All the things Violet would never do. She should have tried on that night in the monster. Gross, covered in gore, the least romantic setting imaginable would have been better than the nothing she’d have now. She couldn’t open Vibeke’s armor now without killing her.
So she just crouched there behind her, doing nothing. Thinking everything. Indulging memories of brief glimpses of a bare breast or a towel that shifted to reveal another stretch of skin. Imagining sex with Vibs in comically exaggerated fantasy.
“It doesn’t feel like space without the stars,” linked Vibeke.
“I wasn’t thinking about stars,” Violet replied.
“What were you thinking about?”
She was thinking about bending Vibeke over the scaffold and fisting her up to the elbow.
“Potatoes,” she replied. “I haven’t had potatoes since before I came to the ravine.”
“You had chips just before we left.”
“Chips are potatoes?”
“Yeah, crisps too.”
“Wow, you learn something new every day,” she chirped. A few seconds passed, nearly an hour in reality.
“What are you really thinking about?”
“Zero-g sex.”
“No wonder you can’t read. Your brain only has one compartment.”
“I should have fucked you in that guardthing.”
“You would.”
“I almost did.”
“Thanks for restraining yourself. You’re a real mensch.”
“So you can never love me. I’m fine with that”—she wasn’t—“so we have nothing to lose. Why not just feel good together? Friends with benefits.”
“Because we are friends. Maybe you don’t value that, but I still do. But keep it up, that might change.”
“And then you’ll have sex with me?”
“How do you even remember to breathe?”
“Around you, sometimes I forget.”
“How sweet.”
“Yeah, Vibs, it is sweet. And it’s not just sex. Maybe you think you’re incapable of love, but where do you get off denying mine? If I just wanted to fuck you, I would have the second you said it. I didn’t because I’m not after your body. I mean, I am but not only your body. I want the girl that disemboweled Veikko on her first sparring match. The one who killed her father and survived prison for it. The Valkyrie who fought by my side, the woman who stood angry next to me in Cato’s office. The smart one who actually gets that Cloutier shit. Cuz I sure as hell don’t. It’s fucking gibberish half the time, but I packed a series of it because I feel closer to you when I load it. That’s not sex. It’s love. And it’s not my fault they come packaged together.”
Days passed. Vibeke’s mind cycled through an impossible loop of love, and even lust, for the woman behind her. And hate for the way she could act.
“Isn’t there anything that could make you give up this stilted bullshit and just… give in?”
Vibeke gave it genuine thought. “Only if we could go back in time and make Mishka never happen. Or if you were no more than an AI, programmed never to betray me. If you were subhuman, if you belonged to me.”
“I’m willing to belong to you.”
“You’re a Valkyrie. Not a slave. I’d rather have you as a warrior friend than a love slave.”
“I’d trade.”
“I know.”
“I’d leave the team for you.”
“I know.”
“I’d give up Wulfgar. The thrill of any mission. There’s nothing on either planet I wouldn’t do for you.”
“Except shut the fuck up.”
Violet stopped talking. She’d happily prove that one. She wouldn’t talk the entire way home. If that’s all it took, it would be the easiest day of her life. But that’s not what it would take, was it? Vibeke was only kidding. The best she’d ever get was a grope or maybe on some lucky day another kiss on the cheek. Vibeke was a waste. She’d be better off tying Gabrielle to a bed. At least that was a person she could stand to hurt. Or worse.
She had to push Vibeke out of her mind, somehow. To give up. Move on. She’d done it before, for a while. Pushed Vibeke out of that part of her mind. It worked for months. With practice she could do it for good. Violet had no experience with any ot
her addiction, but the sort of mind that can stay calm through murder, through torture, through the worst the world had to offer wasn’t completely helpless against a schoolgirl crush. She knew what she had to do. Abrupt withdrawal. Immediate cessation of all action, all thought, all talk. Vibeke told her to shut up, and that she would do. She’d do it better than Vibs ever imagined. She’d never speak of it, nor feel it again. It was over.
Or not.
“How about online? We could just have sex online, you know.”
“Shut up, Violet.”
CAPTAIN PRESTON got his dream job. Delivery: 1 crate. 88kg. From Sidi Bouzid Spaceport to UNEGA 07. Payment: 1,375,000 euros. It would keep him alive for years, a massive paycheck just to stay on retainer for a few days in August. He hired on Burke and Samno for the trip. He didn’t need them, but he owed them, and it was the best way to pay them.
He kept thinking it would fall through. It was too good to really happen. But it was happening. Launch date approached, and just as they said they would, Underwood/Dawson LLC delivered the crate. It looked like any other crate, hardly worth what they were paying. But he didn’t question a thing. They paid him what they paid him because word got around—he didn’t question. He didn’t care what he was delivering so long as it paid enough. And 1,375,000 euros was more than enough. For that kind of cash, he’d deliver the crate if it were screaming that it were only a child.
He fired up the main engine on the Lampyrid and took off with the crate in the high security hold. From there the computer took over. It sorted out his place in traffic, it secured the right orbit, it adjusted toward UNEGA 07, and the rest was a matter of what to eat on the way.
He ate some extra spicy chili garlic jerky.
UNEGA 07 came in to view. Preston told his men to get to the cargo bay. He stayed for a moment in the cockpit to see the station. It was a beauty. Forty years in the making for a slick silver crystal in space. Not a ring or a clump of modules but a genuine Gehry VI design. Ruined, of course, by the dozens of shuttles and ships stuck to its exterior but an astounding sight nonetheless. He turned over his controls to UNEGA 07 to dock him where they pleased.