That is when I realized there are no rules when you are fighting for your life and took it to the next level. With the only hand I dared free up, I leaned forward and sought his face with my fingers. Finding an eye, I started to dig in while he tried to shake me off, to no avail.
John Henry changed his tact, as the torturer drove the syringe toward my face, rather than the Tracto-an’s leg. I strained all I could to hold him off with my fingers dug into his eyes, but there was nothing I could do to stop him.
Neck muscles standing out like cables of pure steel, the Tracto-an bared his teeth. His arm muscles flexed impossibly, and he gave a sudden jerk to the side as the syringe plunged toward my face, causing me to flinch as I prepared for the worst.
There was a sickening crack and just before the syringe could find my eye, I jerked to the side. The needle struck me, but it merely scored a cut across my cheek deep enough that I could feel the blood trickling. John Henry sagged in the Lancer’s grip, and the massive native dropped the assistant to the floor.
Totally and utterly spent, it took me a moment to realize that this part of the fight was over. With a sigh, I let go of his arm and let my head fall back to the floor with a painful thump. I figured my unexpected defender would have to carry the water from this point forward; my heart was pounding in my chest a mile a minute and my breath just would not catch.
Unexpectedly, there was a click and I could hear a neural whip buzz. The Morale Officer must have realized we had killed his assistant, and decided to risk using the whip while we were still in a pile. I guess he had decided it was either that, or accept the certainty of death at the hands of the Tracto-an.
Justin Suddian began shrieking, and I couldn’t help myself from smiling savagely; the sound was sweet music to my ears. The strange, keening sound, like that of a wild animal caught in a trap, which was coming from my unexpected prison-breaking partisan…not so much.
The Commander, for all his calculation, had made one crucial mistake; while the three of them were currently touching each other, and therefore collectively subject to the whip’s vicious agony, I wasn’t…touching them, that is.
No sooner had the keening of my sworn warrior reached my ears, than I found a reserve of strength I didn’t know I had. It was a weary, molasses-like strength rather than real muscle power, but it was something, and it was there.
On my hands and knees, I moved toward the eight inch long grip of the whip, which was the only safe part to touch. It was difficult to avoid touching any part of the now jerking and seizing trio, but I managed to do it. Reaching over carefully, I lined up my fingers and stabbed at the button, even though my hand balked at doing as it was told. Eventually, I was rewarded with a click, as the whip deactivated.
John Henry’s movements stopped immediately, but my lancer and the scum-of-the-spaceways Morale Officer kept twitching. Suddian also kept moaning and calling out; he was much louder than my Lancer, who was doing his best to keep his teeth locked over what I suspect he considered to be a humiliating sound.
“Shut up, Suddian,” I hissed, leaning over the man. But if anything, his jerking increased and he almost rolled to his side; as he did so, his moans gained in volume.
I might not have had much strength, but against a man whose muscles no longer obeyed him it was more than enough.
Using my entire body, I rolled him onto his back and slapped him in the face. “Be quiet!” I snarled, but he only thrashed his head from side to side frantically. “I didn’t want to do this,” I growled, and it was even true after a fashion. The thought of wrapping my hands around the Morale Officer’s neck and squeezing had haunted my every waking moment of captivity, and I was afraid I would take entirely too much pleasure from the act.
I was wrong on so many levels. It was much harder to throttle someone than in my dreams, and it wasn’t fun at all. Worse than not fun, it made my stomach tumble like an afternoon at an anti-grav amusement park. I held on grimly, pressing all of my weight down on the cartilage of his neck until the noises he was making ceased. When I was convinced those noises would not resume, I released my death clutch.
With a weary sigh, I rolled onto my back. I could hear an involuntary gasp of air from beside me, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I wasn’t a monster after all, to revel in the pain of another person, no matter how awful that person. I wasn’t a heartless Montagne butcher. I closed my eyes and let my body press against the hard metal of the decking.
Even the Tracto-an propping himself against the bulkhead as he stood didn’t rouse me; I was resting the rest of the just. When he stepped beside me, I didn’t do more than crack an eyelid to give him a quick glance. Reassured that he hadn’t gone kill crazy and come for me as well, I drooped back down.
When his good foot came down with a sickening crack on the neck of the Morale Officer, I’d like to say I didn’t so much as move. But you try being in a fight for your life and then have a sudden sound go off right in your ear; you’d jump too! But that’s all it was: an animal reaction. For the death of that evil, sadistic torturer, I felt nothing…absolutely nothing.
Chapter 11: A Blaze of Glory?
“Warlord,” a hand shook me from my grogginess. “Warlord Jason Montagne,” a voice said again, and this time the shake was strong enough to rattle my teeth.
“Let me be,” I grumbled, but shaken out of my haze, I picked up my head and looked at the Lancer quizzically.
“If we are to act, it must be now,” said the man leaning against the wall. I could see that one of his legs was so badly broken that he couldn’t use it for support, and his other leg and side was soaked with blood, due to a plethora of stab marks. I’d like to think I could have kept on trucking after John Henry stabbed me a few dozen times with a six inch syringe and shot me full of happy juice, but I think it’s safe to say I wouldn’t have.
I started to shake my head in negation. I mean really, what could the two of us do? I should have still been in a Tank, and he looked like he was worse off than me! Then a sudden idea occurred to me, and I sat up with sudden interest.
“There’s an escape plan?” I asked eagerly. The thought of breaking out of the Brig and fighting my way off the ship wasn’t something I was looking forward to, but maybe there was a better plan in place and we could actually sneak out of here!
“We can free our ship-brothers trapped in this prison, and retake the ship by strength,” the Lancer replied, his eyes burning with passion.
For a moment, I could see it: open the doors of these prison cells and burst out of the Brig with a righteous fury. We would take them by surprise! We could storm through the ship! We—then cold, hard logic crashed into my optimism like a glacial tsunami, and my excitement waned.
“There’s only room for fifty to a hundred prisoners in the Brig, and my cell wasn’t doubled up. Was yours?” I asked, running the numbers.
Heirophant narrowed his eyes at me, and then turned his head to look down the corridor. I could see cheek muscles bunch as his jaw worked.
“No, it was not,” he said.
“Well then, less than a hundred men to take on a ship filled with something on the order of thirteen thousand parliamentarians,” I muttered, figuring the whole argument was academic. What were the odds that no one manning the monitors could see two escaped prisoners standing outside their cells, with a pair of high level officers sprawled out dead on the floor? Although, referring to Mr. Eden as high level was more than a stretch, but I figured he’d earned it after all his bloody work on members of my crew.
“Less than that, after we cut our bloody swath through them!” the Lancer said, turning his burning eyes on me.
This was one Lancer who looked like he was about to explode; I knew it was best (and safest) for all involved to take this thing slow, and let him down easy. “Look, not everyone in these cells is a Lancer like you—”
“Gunnery Department,” he said.
I blinked. “Beg your pardon,” I said, taken aback.
“It
was the Gunnery Department that rose against the Captain and his Parliament, when the other departments cowered behind their consoles or under their beds. It was we,” he slapped his chest, “who roared through this ship like an angry Stone Rhino behind the Mighty Strike Lion that was our Chief Gunner. I am not a Lancer, and have not been for some time, Warlord Montagne; I am a Gunnery Rating,” he pronounced, laying claim to his new title with stiff pride.
I paused and swallowed. For once, the lump I felt in my throat was not because of damage done by my Uncle, or Commander Suddian’s horrid tonic.
“I wasn’t aware,” I rasped, blinking my eyes furiously. “What happened?”
The Lancer shrugged. Oops, former Lancer, I reminded myself. Tracto-an’s can be easily offended sticklers if they proudly proclaimed themselves a new title, and you made a mistake later on.
“What always happens when an unarmored, untrained, enthusiastic person goes up against a well-trained man in battle armor,” he answered.
I paused to digest this. What he was saying made a sickening kind of sense, since Gunnery was just about the only department next to the Bridge Crew and the Lancer Contingent that hadn’t been stripped of most of its men at Easy Haven. They had remained mostly free of the ‘reinforcements’ Heppner had brought.
“That sounds a lot like what would happen here,” I said after a moment of reflection. “Even if everyone in the brig right now was a trained Lancer in a battlesuit…” I trailed off regretfully.
“At least they would feel it before we were done with them,” cried the former Lancer, swaying against the wall. He had the sound of someone repeating a quote they whole-heartedly believed in.
I looked down at his ruined leg and his blood-soaked clothing doubtfully. “We’d have to free the other prisoners, break out of the Brig—something this place was designed to prevent—and head for the main cargo hold, which is the only place large enough to house what remains of our allies,” I concluded, as I thought about where they could store a large number of crew who were still loyal to me. “I doubt if the full measure of loyalist crew could hold the ship, or that our decimated ranks will be able to retake it,” I spoke thickly, as the reality of my situation came home with punishing force. “Maybe we’re in an inhabited system, and could make a run for it?”
I looked up hopefully, as if this native warrior from the Gunnery Department would have any more answers than me after days locked up in the Brig.
The Tracto-an shook his head disgustedly. “You sound as if you would only fight so that you could run away,” he said.
I wrinkled my brow. “The only reasons to fight if you know you can’t win are: to buy time for something good to happen, to cover an escape, or to prove a point,” I explained, ticking off the three reasons I could come up with off the top of my head.
“Either our Lancer forces were also defeated, or they are already so far away from us that they can’t help. By the way this ship’s been shaking several times a day, I’d say the loss of our rear shield generator has been making our point transitions hazardous in the extreme, meaning we’re long gone from the Omicron System,” I said, the hopelessness of it all pressing down on me with crushing force. If I had ever been anything close to a real Admiral, I realized in that moment that I wasn’t—at least, not any more.
“I have never heard such defeatist talk from a Warlord before,” growled the native.
“What’s your name, gunnery rating,” I demanded, my voice cracking with authority.
“Heirophant Bogart, Grease Monkey, Gunnery Department,” the native, this Heirophant, replied stiffly.
I blinked in surprise at the man’s second name; it was the same as the old Chief Gunner’s. I knew the warriors would take on a second name when they felt they had accomplished a great feat; take Nikomedes-the-no-longer-Minos, as an example. He had adopted the moniker after successfully retrieving a Dark Sword of Power, and he had abandoned that same name after I had taken it from him during our first encounter on Tracto.
Taking my surprise for something other than what it was, the former Lancer glowered at me.
“Where were you when the Clover was being taken, and my Department was burning like oiled kindling?” Heirophant said in a low voice. He sounded a lot more demanding than most of my natives. Of course, I had just lost the ship and gotten a lot of good men killed.
I suppressed a pang as another thought occurred – if I could believe a single thing out of the mouth of the now-deceased Morale Officer, my wife was numbered among those who had died because of my ill-conceived plan to take on my Uncle-turned-Pirate Lord.
The pain of loss was thick, so instead of speaking and saying something I would later regret, I reached up and angrily undid the latches of the neck brace I was wearing. Prying it open, I let it drop to the floor.
“Courtesy of my Uncle, the Pirate,” I practically spat, “I’m told I should have died, and most of the time I find myself wishing I had. The last thing I remember, the Vineyard had been taken and we were sending the Lancers over to take the Armor Prince in order to stop their broadsides. Suffice it to say, my Uncle shot me, fighting broke out on the Bridge, and then everything went dark until I woke up here.”
I was fudging a little bit. I had the sensation of some movement and the memory of trying to strangle Dr. Torgeson, something I had never actually done in the past, but it didn’t make nearly as good a rhetorical point as saying ‘I woke up here.’
The Tracto native looked at me with an entirely different emotion in his eye. “Quite sickening,” he remarked with fascination, as he reached out with his fingertips to touch the side of my neck.
I forced myself to stay still, when all I wanted to do was lean out of reach and kick him in the jewels for laying hands on me. Two things stopped me: a sense of duty that I owed him and the rest of the crew for my failures, and the certain knowledge that in my current condition, he would mop up the floor with me if I tried.
Heirophant jerked, snatching his hand away from my neck.
“By the Demon Murphy, it moved,” he said, shaking his hand as if bitten.
I could also feel something moving in the right side of my neck—the same side Jean Luc Montagne that murdering pirate had shot.
Quickly, I bent down and worked to put the brace back on. My inexhaustible holo-vid knowledge told me that it might be some exotic symbiotic organism, and that by removing the brace I was encouraging it to explode out the side of my neck, killing me in a spray of ugly gore.
Intellectually, I knew there was nothing like that in our medical unit, or I would have heard something by now…an official report, a rumor, wild speculation, something! But in my current, heightened emotional state, I wasn’t about to take any chances.
I lodged the itchy contraption under my chin once again, since I suspected there was a good reason the brace had been placed initially…so it was only logical to put it back in place as soon as possible. Right? Right. See, I am a creature of reason and logic, not base emotional responses. Reassured of the rightness of my actions, and when nothing felt like it was about to explode out the side of my neck, I let out a quiet breath in relief.
“We need to get you out of here,” I said finally.
The Tracto man shrugged. “If I die, I die,” he shrugged again, “I will fight death with every breath in me, but so long as I have lived—truly lived each and every moment before the end—then that is what matters,” he said. The man sounded a lot like my wife; he felt what he was saying, and very strongly, but there was a big cultural disconnect which I had never fully bridged.
“So long as I have acted with honor, then that is all that can be asked of me,” the Tracto-an gave me a pointed look. “I do not love my life more than my soul, and fighting with every breath does not mean I will stoop to the coward’s path.”
“He who fights then runs away, will live to run another day,” I mumbled under my breath. In theory, I saw nothing wrong with holding tight to this ‘coward’s path,’ so long as it help
ed keep me alive. In practice…I sighed. As long as I had honor-bound dunderheads like this one around me that option was effectively off the table.
“What did you say,” asked the Tracto-an.
“Nothing, I was just commenting that it’s a false path, and tempting at times,” I allowed, “yet ultimately, it is a tree that bears no fruit.” What I didn’t say was that at least the tree was still standing afterwards, and that the only reason it bore no fruit was because of honor-bound idiots like this one here.
He looked at me as if trying to decipher the hidden meaning of my words, and that simply would not do—not at all.
“Look, my enemies won’t realize the error of their ways and just kill themselves for me, and I can’t run around bringing them to justice if I’m already dead. We have to husband our strength,” I explained, hoping I had recast my proposed course of action in an appropriately honorable light.
“Running away is still running away,” he said flatly.
“A tactical and strategic withdrawal, forced on us by our enemies,” I countered, then tried to use a little verbal judo, “one does not hunt a beast by stomping around in the bushes and scaring it away. Stealth, surprise and the sideways strike they don’t see coming. Those will be our weapons, out of necessity,” I said, putting as much passion into my words as I could.
What I didn’t say was that this was our only course of action, as long as crewmembers like him thought I was an Admiral worth following, instead of the proven failure I actually was. The sooner they disabused themselves of that notion and gave up on me as their leader, the better off we’d all be. My only hope was that I could shield some of these people from the consequences of their actions. I would take the fall for all of them if my jailors let me, but I didn’t think that was very likely to happen.
“Pretty words do not make the stench of retreat smell any better,” Heirophant grumbled.
I threw my hands in the air.
“All right, look, if we can get you out of the brig without having to fight anyone, then we’ll go with my plan,” I snapped. For the first time, I wondered if the mysterious ‘benefactor’ Bethany had spoken about cared two figs for my native cohort. I was willing to claim I killed this pair of torturers all on my lonesome; it would add to my reputation as a man not to cross, even here in prison, which might translate into fewer beatings. At the same time, it should shield Heirophant, and whatever poor crewman the pair had visited last from an angry parliamentary reprisal.
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