by Sean Allen
CRACK! A single shot rang out and the sound of her own voice shrieking in pain, followed by the sound of a body hitting the grate floor, echoed back to the alcove behind the outcropping. “NO!” Dezmara screamed. She forgot about the plan and dashed for the main passage. THUMP!
Dezmara collided with something solid as she reached the end of the extension, and she fell hard to the ground. “What the?” a high, nasal voice said.
It was the hunchbacked sailor from Luxon that she had overheard talking about a Human. “Somethin’s a little fishy around here,” he said as he glanced down the passage in the direction Simon had run. “And since I don’t know which little fishy I’ve caught—the one we’re gonna sell at the market or the one we’re gonna flay wide open—I best not butcher you just yet!” He let out a cackling laugh as he tucked his gun back into his belt. His shoulders stooped forward as he lowered his head and looked at her with wild, dark eyes; and then he pounced.
Dezmara put her hands flat on the floor behind her head, coiled her knees to her chest, and kicked up as hard as she could at the attacking pirate. She hit him with a solid blow to the chin, and it stopped his descent but did nothing to improve his mood. He clamped onto her leg with both hands and flung her into the side of the outcropping like a ragdoll. Dezmara crashed into the alloy plates and the metal protested with a deep gong! She hit the floor with her head ringing and her entire arm, from the shoulder to the tips of her fingers, tingling with numbness. The pirate wasn’t big but he was solid and as strong as anyone she’d ever fought. She knew she didn’t stand a chance on the ground so she scampered to her feet before he could lunge in again.
His powerful paw crushed down between her neck and shoulder, and Dezmara could feel the sinews of her muscles begin to pulp and tear apart. The pain was torturous, and she cried out. “What’s the matter, little fishy?” he cackled. “Does that sting a little?” He snickered as he increased the pressure. Dezmara lifted her arm straight up and then turned it in toward her body, hooking the pirate’s arm at the elbow and forcing it to roll over. She clasped her hands together and pulled down as hard as she could. His arm was trapped where he had latched onto her and it snapped with a wretched crunch as his elbow exploded under the pressure of being forced to bend in the wrong direction. The pirate screeched in pain and stumbled away from her.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Dezmara said as she advanced in an attack stance. “Did I forget to mention this little fishy has big teeth and she’ll take a huge bite out of your ass if you fuck with her?!” She blasted her shin against the side of his head in a nasty roundhouse kick, and the pirate crumpled to the floor. His arm would hurt like hell when he woke up—not to mention the side of his head and face—but he was lucky: he was alive.
She touched the button on her vambrace and watched impatiently as the shield expanded. Once the disk was in place, Dezmara sprinted out onto the main passage and had to stop in her tracks once again. She looked frantically, but Simon wasn’t there, only a horde of Gamorotta thugs, with Jomo and the tiny-headed goon leading the pack, surging down the plank and bent on destruction. The front row raised their guns, and Dezmara put the shield in front of her just in time to feel a slew of bullets rattle her arm. “Goddamit, Simon!” she shouted as she turned to the side and galloped awkwardly toward dock nine with her shield covering her escape.
Dock nine arrived, and the velocity magnet had collected its fair share of rounds in the few seconds it took Dezmara to get there. She sprinted down the deck, and there was enough distance between her and the pursuing Gamorotta that she was able to disappear behind the ships moored on docks six, seven, and eight. She lowered the shield, happy to have her arm back and pumping wildly in conjunction with the other as she flew toward the Silverhawk. Her boots clanged on the metal grates as she raced through the stale air of the dockyard. Clang-clang-clang-clang-clang! Fellini’s ship was moored close to the end. Clang-clang-clang-clang! Adrenaline was coursing through her veins and her mind racing with thoughts of escape and Simon. Clang-clang-clang! She was almost there. Clang-clang-clang-clang—KABOOM!
A ball of fire mushroomed into the air several docks over, and the concussion knocked Dezmara off her feet, sending her tumbling across the deck and over the edge. She clawed desperately at the air as she crested the side and her hand wrapped around something solid. Her speeding body pulled taut, and she slammed into the edge of the dock. Dezmara exhaled loudly as she met the immoveable decking. “Thank god for mooring cleats,” she thought as she looked past her boots dangling over the darkness of a bottomless pit below her. “And Haleonex,” she added as she took a quick mental inventory for pain. Her armored ribs took the brunt of the impact and everything else was still in working order.
KABOOM! Another explosion erupted from somewhere above her, and her legs swung back from the rattling dock in the shockwave as she held fast to the tarnished cleat in her hand. “What the hell?” she said as she swung her other hand up to the dock and gripped the ledge. She pulled herself back up to semi-solid ground and crouched low to keep from being knocked back by another detonation. She knew Feleon had no respect for the Gamorotta, and apparently, he wasn’t afraid of them either. The Triton was blasting ships in the dockyard with its powerful cannons, but Dezmara didn’t understand why. She studied as much of the flaming, smoking hulks across from her as she could, but she couldn’t see much. The two ships were obscured by the rest of the Gamorotta fleet hovering on the docks between her and the pirate ship—and then she noticed the wrecks’ positions. The decimated vessels were directly in line with the Silverhawk. The Triton was clearing the line of fire for a clean shot!
“Why don’t they just loosen the mooring lines and hover for a clear shot?” she thought while she dashed for the end of dock nine. “Maybe it has something to do with the fairings you and Rilek shot to shit!” she answered herself, and she couldn’t help smirking a little as she charged on. CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! She could hear the zip of bullets cut the air around her, and she knew the Gamorotta thugs had turned the corner and now had a straight shot at her back. The Triton was on the inside of dock twelve—three docks away—and had already destroyed two ships, which meant there were only two more left between the Silverhawk and an open nautilus door packing some serious firepower. KABOOM!
Dezmara wasn’t knocked over this time; something about the arrangement of the ships between her and the explosion had diverted the concussion in a way that spared her. But she was forcefully pushed to the left as she ran. She watched in horror as two ships in front of her to the right tilted violently up onto the gangway. The dock groaned as it twisted, and Dezmara tiptoed along its shaking edge past the wayward craft with only half of her boots on the grates and the other half floating dangerously over the abyss. The good news was that the blast had leveled most of the Gamorotta behind her; the bad news was only one more ship remained between the Silverhawk and the Triton.
KABOOM! Dezmara jumped for the open side door of the Silverhawk as it careened over the top of the dock, swept sideways like a feather caught in a tempest, and her chest slammed into the bottom of the opening. Dezmara clawed at the slick floor, but the pitch was too steep and she slid out, catching herself on the bottom lip of the portal and dangling above the dock. An uneven clang sounded from the deck, and she looked over to see Jomo’s ghastly figure limping quickly up the gangway in pursuit. Blood was streaming from his leg—from flying debris, most likely—and his dreadful lips were scratching at the air in anger. Jomo was the last Gamorotta she wanted to have a close encounter with, and Dezmara was about to pull herself up when she noticed something. The blast had shredded the dock around the mooring cleat: it was hanging on by a thread.
She hoisted herself into the Silverhawk and scrambled to her feet. It was a two-seater and she was practically sitting in the cockpit when she stepped through the door. The engines were already warmed up and she grabbed the yoke in both hands. Dezmara veered the craft right; then she hit the throttle and yanked the controls hard to the left. Th
e powerful, hand-made turillian engines bit into the air, and as Dezmara whipped the machine over the dock to break the mooring line, something thudded into the doorway. She turned around to see the horrible head of Jomo in the exact position she had been in just seconds ago, his arms clawing frantically to get in. She looked around for anything she could find to repel boarders. Fortunately for Dezmara, Leonardo Fellini was a dangerous man, and she found a loaded pistol under the low-slung pilot’s seat.
She spun around in her chair, took dead aim at Jomo’s revolting mouth and pulled back on the trigger. BOOM! The Silverhawk rocked back and tilted on its side, jarring the gun from Dezmara’s hands as she fell toward the open door and Jomo’s waiting jaws. The beast reached out with a shiny, armored claw and grabbed her around the neck. She waited for her throat to be crushed or to be dropped to her death in the chasm below the docks, but instead of squeezing, the claw became warm and furry and started pushing to hold her up. “For bloody hell’s sake, do somethin’, luv!” Simon shouted. Dezmara looked down, and Simon was staring at her with terrified, yellow eyes.
She sprawled her legs out and reached for the sides of the door. The ship righted itself with a circus of beeps and warnings from the instruments, and Dezmara grabbed Simon’s shirt and hauled him in. “Don’t know if I’ll fly this airline again if that’s the way you welcome your passengers aboard.” Simon was breathing heavily and clutching his bloody leg. It had a bullet wound in it where the pirate had shot him. “Quick, get me up an’ strapped into a chair. I’ve a feelin’ I’m gonna need it!”
“Don’t be silly!” she said sarcastically. Dezmara pulled him into the copilot’s seat before another explosion sent her tumbling backward into her own chair. “What the shit are those bastards tryin’ to do?!” she hollered as she buckled her harness and punched the throttle.
The mooring line dangled helplessly from the hull of the Silverhawk as the cleat, damaged in one of the blasts from the Triton, peeled away from the dock like the top of a can. Dezmara nailed the throttle and the ship flashed to the outer wall and then cut a sharp turn. The Silverhawk was the fastest thing she’d ever flown and Simon could almost smell the excitement radiating from her.
“Hand me that access box, would ya? And don’t get all crazy on me just yet, luv,” Simon said with a concerned look as he snugged his harness as tight as it would go.
“I would never,” she said with mischief in her eyes. She handed him the device, and as Simon worked on opening the two sets of air-lock doors in sequence—inner followed by outer—Dezmara sent the Silverhawk screaming around the yard to make the ship a more elusive target.
CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK! Machine gun fire rapped the Silverhawk’s hull. Having lost their chance to destroy their quarry’s only mode of transportation, the pirates were trying to wound the ship before it passed through the spreading air-lock door above. A few of the Gamorotta goons left on the burnt, smoldering docks below joined with a smattering of pot-shots from their guns, but the majority of the small army now piling into the smoky yard were concentrating their fire on the gleaming hull of the Triton, whose crew had retreated inside the flying fortress to take up the fight. The Silverhawk didn’t have heavy armor or a powerful arsenal, and every bullet that struck the hull—including the small arms fire—could have brought Simon and Dezmara crashing back down into the clutches of Feleon Gulkar and the Gamorotta. But what the Hawk lacked in armored defenses and formidable weaponry, she made up for with blinding speed.
Dezmara goosed the throttle and swept over top of the Triton. Tracer rounds spat from the pirate ship’s guns, but the bullets might as well have been gathered up by the crew and thrown at them as the projectiles glowed orange through a stretch of dockyard air long deserted by the nimble Silverhawk. “Got it, luv!” Simon shouted.
Dezmara twisted the yoke and pulled back hard, and the ship blasted off in the blink of an eye, twirling and slipping through the small gap in the inner air-lock doors, and then disappeared as Simon abruptly closed the barrier behind them.
The outer air-lock flexed open in massive, triangular shapes that separated at their tips. They darted through the small hole, and Simon aborted the opening process. They were free. Dezmara turned her customary victory rolls in a small celebration before righting the ship, but her smile didn’t pull out of the maneuver: it had twirled off into space somewhere and was lost.
“I don’t know how long we’ve got until they come after us,” she said as she tried to remain calm. She looked over, and Simon was still tapping away at the top of Fellini’s access box. “What are you doing with that thing?”
Simon slid the device into his jacket pocket and sighed easily. He leaned his head against the back of the stiff racing seat behind him and turned to face Dezmara with a wide grin that showed his pointy teeth. “They won’t be followin’ us for quite some time, luv.”
“What do you mean? What’d you do?”
“I jammed the outer air-lock door open. The inside’s programmed never to open when Trillis isn’t in a breather and the outer’s popped.”
“When it’s not in a what?” she said with a confused look.
“Atmosphere, luv, atmosphere—anyway, according to Fellini’s little black box here, there’s not even code in the mainframe to bypass it. Take ‘em weeks, it will, to sort it all out!” Simon turned back to look out the front viewing panes with a proud smile still stretched across his lips. “Where to, luv?”
“Back to Clara to patch up the Ghost. Rilek left some supplies we can use to get her runnin’ again.”
“Rilek?” Simon said, turning to face her again. “He’s alive? You met him?”
“I did. Almost killed him—he almost killed me.” Dezmara gave an awkward laugh of disbelief as she thought of everything that had happened up to now. “But that’s a story for a different time. Right now…” She turned to Simon and gave him a hard stare.
“Right, luv. S’pose it is a long run to Clara. Where should I start?”
“Suppose you start with the…” Dezmara reached across the gap between them and wiggled her fingers as she waved her hand up and down from Simon’s head to his feet. “Are all Kaniderelles…” She didn’t quite know the word, so she raised her eyebrows.
“Simulmorphs? No, not all of us. Some have the gene and some don’t.”
“So what can you do? I mean, can you turn into a ship and fly away or something?”
“The rules, so to speak, are simple for a simulmorph. No machinery—nothin’ with movin’ parts. I can do props—guns and the like—but anythin’ mechanical won’t work.”
“That’s why you didn’t have a stump when you morphed into Feleon!” Dezmara said.
“’Xactly, luv. Couldn’t mimic that hoverin’ support of his.” Dezmara was nodding her head in understanding, and then a look of mild terror danced across her face.
“You mean those guns wouldn’t have fired?”
“Not in a million years, luv.”
“What about powers? Would you’ve been as fast as Feleon?”
“Nope,” he said, “it’s all for show. Which brings me to the next rule of morphin’—touch.”
“Touch?” she said with confusion.
“Can’t shift into anythin’ less I’ve touched it first. You an’ I are more than a smidge lucky he grabbed me with his tail when you tossed that chair.” The smile vanished from Simon’s face as he thought about how close Dezmara had come to taking his life. “You almost killed me!” he said.
“You almost deserved it,” she said with more hurt than Simon was ready to own up to, but he took it anyway.
“I’m sorry, luv.” Simon hung his head a little.
“Are there any more rules to—morphing?”
“Last one. Rule number three—size. Can’t change me body mass. I can shift into any living thing—I’m pretty sure—but I’ll always stay the same size I am now.” He looked over at her and could see she was processing everything that had happened over the last three years they
had been together, trying to make sense of it all. “Surprised you didn’t notice that I was quite a bit shorter than ol’ Four Guns Feleon there.”
“Hard to pay attention to the minor details when somebody you thought you knew does something like that.” Dezmara didn’t mean it in a hurtful way—it was the truth—but the pain returned to Simon’s face. “Sy, I gotta ask—did you ever change into me when we were flyin’ together?”
“Never once, luv!” His face was solemn and his big, yellow eyes were intense with truth. “Back there in Trillis was the first time, ‘onest!”
“Did you ever morph into Doj?” Simon frowned and turned away from her again.
“It’s okay,” she said sincerely. “At least now I know how you kept this whole thing from me for more than three years. I was starting to think that I was losing it—that I was thick or something if I couldn’t catch one spy that never left my ship. It feels good to know the truth.”
“For me too,” Simon said, turning to face her again. He was smiling a delicate smile and Dezmara pressed on as gently as she could.
“So how’d you come into the employ of Four Guns Feleon Gulkar, the notorious pirate?”
“Well,” he said after a moment’s pause, “you and I are alike in a lot of ways.” Dezmara shot him a puzzled look, and he put his paws out as if to say to be patient. “Where you’re lookin’ for any one of your people, I’m lookin’ for a partic’lar Kaniderelle.”
“Someone you lost because of the Durax?” Dezmara said.
“Yes, in a manner of speakin’. They took somethin’ from me. Naturally, I’d be wantin’ it back, an’ when Feleon—or Mr. Felix Grinnik—posted the need for a mechanic on a runner ship, I was more’n happy to see what it was all ‘bout—gettin’ to fly the universe more than most these days an’ all. But when I found out he wanted me to hire on with a ship that wasn’t his, to do intelligence work—he called it—I nearly walked. Then he told me the person he needed me to keep track of took somethin’ from him nearly five years ago an’ that I’d be helpin’ return it to its rightful owner an’ all that bollocks.