by M. D. Cooper
“All in a day’s work,” Sera replied.
Tanis’s IFF systems scanned Sera and showed the woman to be a mass of wounds and trauma.
“Was that a voluntary alteration?” Tanis asked, pointing at Sera’s exposed glossy skin.
Sera’s face reddened. “I was always a bit jealous of Rebecca’s outfits, so I tried one on. The crazy bitch booby trapped it, so this is my new skin for now.”
“You’d fit right in with Jessica, one of my team on the Intrepid,” Tanis said with a smile. “If you can’t get squared away before we get there, our docs could fix you up without trouble.
“Not sure I want to be fixed—I think I rather like it,” Sera said with a mischievous grin.
“Now you really remind me of Jessica.”
“Maybe we should discuss mods and fashion later,” Flaherty said. “We still have a ship to secure.”
“That we do.” Sera picked up the mysterious case in one hand and pulse rifle in the other. “Compliment on this ship is twelve. Angela tells me there are only nine in the galley, so we’ve got some fun ahead of us.” Sera suddenly stopped and turned to face Tanis.
“What did you do to my ship?” she asked with eyes wide.
“Angela shared that tidbit, did she?” Tanis replied with a smile.
“You added ten offensive beams and rail guns? Where’d you get the money?”
“We sold some nano to S&H,” Tanis said with a shrug.
Sera turned to Flaherty. “And you let her do this? It could destabilize the regional economy.”
“It’s alright,” Flaherty replied. “The stuff she sold them is not replicable with their current levels of technology. They don’t have the ability to produce the nano sized stasis fields without the Casimir effect collapsing their containment. It’s essentially useless.”
Tanis was dumbfounded. How did Flaherty understand that, let alone know it was a required component of the technology she had sold S&H. Sera saw her confusion.
“I’ll explain later, once we deal with these pirates and set a course for Bollam’s World and the Intrepid.”
Sera sent a broad message on Sabrina’s ship-wide net.
A chorus of voices cried out Sera’s name before a round of expletives and questions flooded the comm.
“Flaherty,” Sera directed. “Cover the hatch, they may make a break for Sabrina and it’ll be a good place to corner them.”
Flaherty nodded and left the bridge. Tanis couldn’t even hear him as he slid down the ladder.
“How does he move so quietly?” she asked.
“Honestly? I have no idea,” Sera replied. “Helen usually has to use probes to hide my ruckus—though not anymore, I guess.” With that, she threw off her long coat and slipped out of the bridge in her whisper-silent skin.
Tanis and Sera checked the two cabins on that level. They appeared to belong to the captain and the first mate—both empty. On the next level, the rest of the crew cabins also checked out.
“You have no idea how good it is to hear that again,” Sera said aloud to Tanis.
“You have no idea how good it is to hear them say it.”
Sera cocked an eyebrow. “They hold together ok?”
“Better than a lot of other crews I’ve seen when their leader is captured,” Tanis replied as they slid down a ladder.
“Good to know I trained them well.”
Trained, Tanis added that to the long list of mysteries surrounding Sera.
The two women reached the freight deck, with Angela coordinating probe coverage as they searched for signs of the missing crewmembers. The search turned up nothing and they proceeded down the ladder to environmental.
Just as their feet touched the deck plate, the life support equipment wound to a halt.
Environmental was clear and they worked their way aft toward waste reclamation and engineering.
Tanis pivoted and peered over her cover. The motion shifted the deck plate beneath her and gave a low groan. Moments later the waves from a pulse rifle tore through the air over her head. She ducked and Sera rose from cover, firing shots at the attacker.
He ducked down before the waves reached him. Tanis tossed Sera a conspiratorial smile, before slipping out from behind her cover into the next row of tanks, sneaking toward the enemy’s location.
As Tanis moved, Sera supplied cover fire, keeping their opponent pinned. Tanis crept within two meters of the last tank at the end of the row. She steadied herself for a second, and then, in one swift motion, leapt over the tank, twisted mid-air and landed a meter from their attacker, weapon leveled at his head.
“End of the road bub.”
His back was to her—he was peering around the other side, trying to get an angle on Sera. He turned slowly, lowering his rifle with one hand, while raising the other.
A half a second before his weapon reached the deck, a series of shots rang out over the waste reclamation equipment, and Tanis heard Sera let loose a string of curses. The man in front of Tanis took advantage of her momentary distraction to raise his weapon and fire a shot off. It struck her square in the chest, flinging her back against the bulkhead. She squeezed off two shots after she hit, but the man had already ducked out of view.
Tanis saw Sera pull two slug throwers from holsters on her legs and let loose a volley of her own, the bullets ricocheting off the tanks across the room. Tanis used the distraction to launch herself from her position against the wall. She leapt onto a tank and fell upon the man on the other side.
While not exceptionally graceful, it had the advantage of total surprise. He had been peering back around the tank, his weapon pointed to where she had been. Her elbow slammed into his stomach and she drove a knee into his crotch before smashing the butt of her rifle against the back of his head.
Tanis crept along her side of the room, and then moved even with Sera’s position.
Tanis saw one of Sera’s shots catch a man at the end of the room in the shoulder. He spun sideways but still managed to fire a few bullets in Tanis’s direction. She responded with a series of blasts from her pulse rifle, all missing, but it was enough to force him behind cover.
Tanis replied as she swapped out her rifle’s energy coil.
Sera and Tanis worked their way closer together and then down to the location of the man Sera had clipped. When they got there, they saw that he had cracked his head on the tank and was out cold.
Tanis shook her head.
Shots rang out from their right as they stared down at the fallen pirate. One hit Tanis’s chest armor and she swore as the impact caused her to stagger.
Sera dashed down the row of tanks, throwing caution to the wind and Tanis saw her boot lash out, sending a weapon flying. A second kick elicited the soft crunch of breaking bone. There was a third kick as Tanis reached her, weapon at the ready.
The man on the floor was down with a long gash across his face, as he rocked side to side, moaning and clutching his chest.
“Last one then?” Sera asked out loud.
“Should be, nine and three is twelve last time I checked.”
“Good, all that cat and mouse stuff was starting to get on my nerves. I want a hot meal and a bath.”
“Do you even need baths now?” Tanis smiled.
“Probably not, but I’m going to take one anyway,” Sera groused.
Tanis laughed, but her voice caught at a familiar sound from behind them. Angela cried out a warning, but it wasn’t fast enough. The high-pitched whine of a rail weapon echoed through the chamber and Tanis felt a stinging sensation in her chest.
Sera had both of her handguns out, shots ringing from each as she fired at a figure racing past a nearby tank. A shot hit him in the side and he staggered forward; then fell to his knees. Sera kept shooting as she advanced, the man collapsed, his body twitching as Sera emptied her clips into him.
“Aww hell.” Tanis said in a strained voice, catching herself against a tank. She wheezed as Sera turned, her face a mask of horror, and rushed back.
“You’ll be okay. We’ll get you patched up in no time.” Sera caught Tanis as she slid down the tank and pulled her up into her arms.
Tanis looked up at Sera and tried to speak. No words came out, but she tried to sound jovial over the Link.
Sera grimaced, pulling Tanis close, and, calling on some untapped reserve of strength, heaved her up and stumbled toward the closest lift. Tanis was wheezing more than breathing and knew that in any moment she’d go into convulsions. The armor was trying to seal the wound to stop the blood from flowing out, but couldn’t deal with the massive hole the rail gun had torn through Tanis’s chest.
Right through her heart.
UNBREAKABLE
STELLAR DATE: 07.27.8927 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sabrina, Interstellar Dark Layer
REGION: 72 Light Years Core-Ward of Ayrea
It was that reoccurring nightmare again. Something was chasing her through the dark corridors of the Intrepid where there was no power, no lights, no Link. It was gaining on her, no matter how hard she ran, it grew ever closer, its clawed feet scraping the decking, the sound echoing around her. Tanis was sick of these nightmares, she wanted to wake up. She was done running.
Repeating the mantra over and over in her subconsciousness, she felt herself rise from the mire, from the darkness, moving to the light, and gradually come awake. The light pressed against her eyelids. It was going to be bright again. Steeling herself, she cracked one eye and then the other. She seemed to be in some med lab, not on the Intrepid, that much was for certain. Her chest hurt; hurt a lot.
Angela sounded concerned, but not alarmed. Tanis knew that was a good sign; Angela wouldn’t hide her condition if it were bad. She concentrated for a moment, and the memories slowly trickled back; the escape pod, the abduction by Padre’s pirates, Sera saving her, and then her saving Sera. She took a deep breath and smiled. They’d be on their way to the Intrepid now. This leg of her journey was finally coming to an end.
“We seem to be making a habit of this,” a nearby voice said.
Tanis turned her head to see Sera sitting beside her, a look of concern mixed with relief on her face. She handed Tanis a bottle of water with a straw, and Tanis took several long pulls, washing the moisture around her parched mouth.
“We do seem to be,” she agreed when she had finished. “Thank you for patching me back together again.”
“Nance and Angela did most of the work. I’m all thumbs when it comes to hooking up artificial hearts and then growing new organic ones.”
“Heart?”
“When that guy shot at us with the rail gun, I thought he had hit me at first. I figured if I was still standing, I was going to take him down. Later, after I got him, I realized what I thought had been the railgun slug hitting me was a piece of your rib cage. It punctured my right lung, but my fancy new skin sealed around it and kept me breathing.”
“Good to know my impending death didn’t inconvenience you too much,” Tanis smiled. “I did notice back on the ship that you had replaced your skin with some sort of polymer, glad to see it proved useful.”
Sera looked down at herself and smiled. “I was saved by fashion. Anyway, when you tried to speak, I turned and…well, let’s just say it wasn’t pretty. Angela is really the one who saved you. She sealed up your arteries as fast as she could, and managed to keep most of your blood in while we got you on a medical stasis rack and raced y
ou back to Sabrina. The pellet the rail gun fired was soft and hollow. It mushroomed inside your chest and ripped your heart apart. The mass hit the inside of the armor on the back, and the shockwave rippled back through the rest of your torso. It did a number on your internal organs.”
“Better than the last time I got hit by a rail,” Tanis said with a weak smile. “Thanks for keeping me together again, Angela.”
Sera continued, unaware of Tanis’s private conversation.
“Nance got you hooked up to a circulatory machine while she picked bits of shattered bone out of your chest. We fed Angela so much silicon she could have made a replica of you, and Sabrina helped make raw, unprogrammed nano as fast as she could. They shored up all of your internal bleeding and slowly re-constructed your organs. Some of them we ended up having to grow fresh—you don’t have a bone ribcage anymore, though Angela says she’ll slowly replace the artificial one with living tissue over time.”
Tanis chuckled. “Also not the first time.”
“Sounds like there’s a story I’d like to hear when you’re not lying here in recovery,” Sera said.
“It’s a good one, I’ll be sure to swap it with one of yours—I see it’s only been five days since we took the Dawn. That’s quite the medical feat you all pulled off, Ang,” Tanis said with a yawn.
“It sure was,” Sera replied. “Did you used to be a doctor?”
“I guess that makes sense,” Sera said.
“So, how long am I bedridden for?” Tanis asked.