by Aaron Crash
Elle wasn’t about to stop there. “And how many of the spiders on this ship are because you didn’t use fusion weapons to start with?”
“Don’t push me, Elle,” Blaze snapped. “If your voodoo had worked, the brunette never would’ve gotten on board.”
“You mean Selena?” Elle asked.
“That was her name.” Blaze shook his head. Poor girl, he felt bad. If she had been Human, that is. More than likely, with the massive Onyx mojo the breeder demon had, she’d only been a shell, a mask created by the thing’s diabolical magic.
But she had been kind, helpful, pretty—she’d felt good in his hands and smelled even better.
“Oh, snap, Blaze,” Elle said. “The Onyx detection subroutines were switched off. What the hell? I have never seen that. What kind of thing are we dealing with?”
Blaze knew the answer to that one. “Nothing good.”
“Let’s not mess around, Blaze. This is one of the worst breeder demons we’ve seen. Let’s all meet up in the cargo bay. Then we can send these bastards into space.”
“You don’t think you can snare them?” Blaze asked.
“Every single one of them? No way.”
A snare spell would trap the demons in the auxiliary hold. They called it the cellar since it was at the very bottom of the ship and as creepy as hell. It had three airlocks, three rounds of safeguards, to get into it.
A flush spell would blow the demons out into the galaxy, where they wouldn’t be dead, necessarily, but their physical form would be utterly destroyed. It would take a bit for them to rematerialize.
A flush spell came with other dangers, however. Cali was one. The magic would hit every part of the ship, and if it somehow damaged her cell, she might escape. Which would be catastrophic. Another was the cellar. If the flush spell swept through the basement and knocked out the ghoulies down there, they’d have to start their work all over from scratch. The worst part of it all was the toll it took on Elle and the Lizzie Borden. Both worked together in the ritual. Elle could fry her soul or every electrical component on Lizzie. It was some muy dangerous magical shit, all right.
But he had to trust his sister about the flush. A sigh escaped him. “Okay, we flush him. But let’s secure our bounty first. If we can.”
She must’ve reengaged the detection system because red lights flashed, and Lizzie’s voice came over the speakers on all three decks and in every room. “Warning. Onyx energy has been detected. Warning. Onyx energy has been detected.”
On his combat display, a miniature model of the triangular ship winked on. Red lights flashed in the cargo bay, by the bridge, and in several rooms. Spiders were almost everywhere, but he watched as some disappeared thanks to his crew.
Ling came on comms in a buzz of static. The serene Shaolin Meelah was his usual mellow self even though things sounded dire. “The breeder demon is in the cargo bay. It has webs. Oh, dear, it has me. Me. I do believe I shall get to explore death today. Farewell, friends.”
“Shit, that sounds bad,” Blaze muttered to himself. He wondered what the breeder demon wanted. Had it come to sow chaos and destruction like most demons? Or had it come for their bounty?
Why had Ling charged into the cargo bay? Their prisoner was a monster who had taken to hunting and eating Meelah children—why would Ling want to save scum like that? And what had switched off the Onyx detection system?
Yeah, a world of questions, and he would eventually get some answers, but it was time to kick some spider ass.
TWO_
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Blaze told Lizzie to stop with the red lights and klaxon sirens. They knew demons were on board already.
Elle and the Clickers came running down from the bridge. They all collected in front of the cargo bay doors. The spiral staircase continued down to the cellar and Cali’s cage.
Elle had slipped into her battle armor, lightweight nanofiber plates, and if she took any damage, the nanobot tech would harden exponentially. Nanotech involved microscopic robots programmed to follow routines set by their implants. As it was completely malleable and intelligent, they had nanotech around the ship, though it was incredibly expensive. It was vital, however, for armor and spacesuits. And if Elle magicked the hell out of the nanotech? It would make their armor completely impenetrable. Her long red and black hair, tied back in a ponytail, matched the ink on her left arm. His twin sister only had tattoos on the left side of her body. Something about the left side being more sinister. Just witchy clap-trap to Blaze. She too had El Ojo de Horus ink across her heart.
Her bandolier held a mixture of hydrogen shells and leather pouches where she kept her spell components.
The Clickers weren’t in their armor, though their chitinous pale yellow-green exoskeleton was thick enough to protect them from most things. Both Bill and Fernando were a foot taller than Blaze, both as thin as one of his thighs. Clickers were more like stick insects than anything: two bug legs, two long slender bug arms connected to their shoulders, two smaller arms tucked into their thin torso. Each hand had four long fingers and a thumb just as long. Triangular praying-mantis heads complete with bug eyes and mandibles topped their slender bodies. Their translucent wings were closed on their backs.
Bill refused to let them put implants in him, unlike Fernando, who was far more cooperative. Both had the same weapons. Two of their long-fingered hands gripped plasma rifles and the other two held flamethrowers. Fusion spears hung from their backs.
Bill clicked away. Fernando translated. “Bill would like you both to know he despises you.”
“We know Bill hates us,” Blaze muttered. “You tell us every time you see us.”
“Enough!” Elle shouted. “Ling’s in there. His VHI is plummeting. We have to get in.”
“What spells are you packing?” Blaze asked.
Elle quickly gave him the list. “I have snare, exorcise, ice, shield, fire, and a cure light wounds. Of course, I have the flush ritual ready.”
“Good. But also download a tongues spell.” Blaze ejected the half-used hydrogen shell out of his ax and fed more shells into both his ax and Ugly Betty. “We’ll try the snare, but first I want to talk to this fucker. If things go south, we’ll do the flush!”
Elle paused to download the tongues spell. With the nature of Onyx magic, she had to swap out spells, or she’d fry her cerebral cortex and shatter her soul. And her soul was already so damaged.
Fernando chittered laughter. “I see what you did there, Gunny. It’s a breeder demon, so you called it a fucker. Very funny.”
Blaze ignored him. “You clean the rest of the ship, Elle?”
“Yeah,” Elle said. “And the cellar is secure.”
That made Blaze feel better. If the breeders had broken the cellar’s warding sigils, they would have had a whole host of horrors to fight.
“Remember, don’t hit the flush until we secure the prisoner. I want the full price for him.”
Elle nodded.
Blaze triggered the door, and it slid open.
The entire cargo hold was full of webbing. That was all they could see at first. But then, it was clear the webs weren’t empty. Fifty horse-sized spiders clung to the strands, and in the center was the skull spider. It had grown into the size of a Terran truck, filling up the space.
Ling was nowhere to be seen.
Blaze fired Ugly Betty’s sunlight blast into the center of the enormous spider. “Lizzie, disengage fire suppression systems.”
The two Clickers hit the webs with their flamethrowers. The silk went up in a hiss of spiders and fire.
Elle waded in, triggering her fusion katanas, two of them. She sliced through legs, cephalothoraxes, and abdomens. Various parts of spider anatomy dropped to the metal flooring in gouts of black blood and poison. More BBQ smells assaulted their senses along with the stench of flamethrower propellant.
One-handed, Blaze reloaded his shotgun, working the action using gravity. In his right hand, he wielded his ax. He swept the blad
e through a spider reaching for him and chopped the head into two, like splitting a hairy cantaloupe. The wound cauterized immediately, stopping the breeder from spewing any more spawn.
Bill and Fernando used their spears to open wounds and impale demons while their flamethrowers gushed fire. Webs burned all around them.
Blaze fought his way into the cargo hold. Their bearded, tattered bounty was still encased in the energy prison near the back hatch of the bay, down from the five starcycles and the nanotech port. The man’s eyes rolled white with terror. The son of a bitch deserved to be afraid.
An elephant-sized tarantula rushed Blaze, and he put a hole in the thing with his shotgun. Through the sizzling guts, he saw the inert form of Ling, webbed up, lying in front of the skull spider.
The master demon opened its mouth, six feet wide, and spewed acidic poison at Blaze. He ducked and rolled away. The noxious liquid ate into the steel floor, but the cargo bay had the thickest metal in the ship. It wouldn’t get into the cellar, or so Blaze hoped.
Elle screamed in frustration through comms. “I’m trying the snare spell, but the snare sphere can’t draw on the Onyx in the room. Too many signatures. We’re either going to have to find a way to kill it, or we flush it.”
“Well, that’s just craptastic.” Blaze reached the unconscious Ling. The Meelah was a little over five feet tall, shaped like a sloth, with three-fingered hands and three-fingered feet. The black and white fur of his pointed, wet-nosed face was visible in the webs. His golden eyes were closed.
Blaze jacked another shell into the shotgun and blew a piece of the skull spider away, giving him a minute. He then used his ax to carefully cut some of the webs away. Ling’s nanofabric tunic, woven with the same tech used in Elle’s armor, had taken a lot of damage but had protected him. Several large patches of it had sealed, turning the ivory to black. Ling moaned. Across his body, he wore his bandolier of hydrogen shells as well as his plasma bow. In a pink hand was one of his fusion nunchaku, its energy depleted.
The nunchaku was a strange weapon—a bastardized mishmash, equal parts oriental marital arts and medieval flail. One side of the weapon was a plain silver handle, which housed the hydrogen shell. The other side, attached by a long silver chain, was twelve inches of pure fusion energy. Every time Blaze saw Ling use the odd weapon, he envisioned the monk slicing off his own hand by mistake, yet the Meelah never made such a mistake. Never. Ling said the weapon helped keep him in the moment since even a momentary lapse in concentration could be lethal. And he was damned good with it—and even more baddass? The Meelah fought with two of them.
“Hit Ling with a cure, Elle,” Blaze shouted.
His twin sister charged over, her katanas swirling around her in glowing dark red arcs of death. She plucked a little piece of honeycomb from a pouch on her bandolier and tossed it onto their fallen comrade. The sticky comb caught in Ling’s fur. Her voice grew gravelly with demonic power as she used both the physical spell component as well as Onyx speak to channel energy to heal Ling.
The Meelah’s eyes blinked open.
Blaze didn’t pause. He saw Ling’s VHI spike, so, thank God, the poor sloth would be okay. For now.
Blaze hurled himself in front of the big daddy spider.
The thing slashed at him with two razor-sharp legs, but Blaze ducked the attack and severed both limbs with his ax.
Another spider, poodle-sized, landed on his back. Blaze whirled and managed to dislodge the arachnid. He brought his ax down on it. The skull spider used that instant to lash out a leg. It pierced Blaze through his chest, above his heart, below his collarbone. He was caught.
The gigantic daddy lowered his mouth to rip off Blaze’s head.
A glowing length of fusion energy flashed above his head. The thrown nunchaku struck one of the beady black eyes of the skull spider and lodged there, swinging on its chain. The spider demon screamed in fury and pain.
Ling leapt onto the head, free from the webs, healed. He brought his other nunchaku down onto another eye, carving out a grilled chunk of arachnid that smacked the floor. The skull spider wrenched its leg out of Blaze’s body to try and spike the sloth. Ling was too fast. He leapt into the air, somersaulted, caught the nunchaku still stuck in the demon’s eye socket, and landed on his feet next to Blaze. Both nunchakus whirled in wheels of blinding light.
Blood ran hot down the gunny’s chest. Blaze hardly felt the wound. Too much adrenaline flowed through him.
A mass of spiders still on the webs above their daddy threatened to come falling down on Blaze, Ling, and Elle.
Ling coughed. A spider tumbled from his mouth. Grimly, he crushed it under a pink three-fingered foot.
Then Blaze saw it. While the Meelah had been unconscious, the skull spider had laid eggs inside him. The skin under his fur was literally crawling with tiny arachnids eating their way out. The pain must’ve been unbelievable, but Ling was one tough Shaolin sloth bastard.
Elle whirled and tossed a silver cross at the Meelah. Again, her voice turned into the diabolic growl of Onyx speak as she cast her exorcise spell. Typically, she used it to pull demons out of people and demolish them. This time, it destroyed the spiders inside Ling. The Meelah was tossed back from the power of the magic. He slid across the deck, unconscious again. The Clickers had cleared the front part of the cargo bay. Bill and Fernando seized Ling, pulling him back.
Fernando clicked, “It’s time for the flush spell, Elle. We can get Ling out of here.”
“What about the prisoner?” Blaze yelled, but he knew their bounty was going to die. The wave of spiders broke, sending a million of the things down onto their squealing father. They tumbled over the master demon and hit the floor in a sea of writhing, wiggling, eight-legged bodies.
Elle slammed her katanas into their sheaths and raised a hand holding a bloody piece of silk. Her blood marked the cloth. “Lizzie!” she snarled in her demon-tinged tongue. “Flush!” The flush spell was part Onyx voodoo and part computer subroutines. Normally, she would’ve used her snare spell to capture the thing and imprison it in the cellar. But the breeder demon had bred the spiders too fast for that.
The cargo bay ripped open, sending their bounty spinning off into the vacuum of space. The giant gas planet, Decatur V, filled the entire opening, painting everything in a fiendish crimson light.
“So much for talking to it…” Blaze turned and sped out of the bay to join the others in the hall before the depressurization sucked him out into space. At that moment, channeling such powerful Onyx energy, Elle wasn’t bothered by such a mundane thing as physics.
From the entryway, he and the Clickers watched as black clouds swirled around Elle. The spiders were caught in the whirlwind of Onyx energy coalescing around Blaze’s witchy twin. She looked like a goddess right then, a vengeful goddess that nothing could destroy.
Blaze wondered, not for the first time, the price she would eventually pay for wielding such unholy power.
Even the skull spider was taken up into the winds of black magic. Blaze liked the fact that the thing was screaming. Its few remaining legs flailed as the wounds from Ling’s nunchaku wept yellow pus.
In the hurricane of evil energy, the skull spider squealed, “One is coming. One is coming more powerful than me, than my unholy self, Arachnarax. One is coming that will end you all! All hail Xerxes. All hail the Necrotechnical—”
Before the skull spider could finish, Elle dropped her arms, and every demon on the ship was sent speeding out toward the twin suns in the distance. In the vacuum of space, their bodies, big and small, turned to dust and disappeared. The breeder demon had lost his physical shape, but the essence of his energy remained. Which was why Blaze wasn’t a fan of the flush ritual.
The cargo bay doors closed with a hydraulic hiss. Elle fell to her knees and then slumped down onto her belly. Blood dripped from her nose.
Ling sat upright and spit a dead spider from his mouth. “It’s a shame about our prisoner.”
Blaze had to chu
ckle at the Shaolin sloth. The gunny marched into the empty cargo bay, making sure the acid hadn’t eaten into the cellar. A spectral white hand, fingernails black and rotted, reached up from the hole, but then the powerful warding magic sucked it back in. That was a close one. Still, they would have a world of welding work to do to fix all the holes in the starship.
The flush hadn’t broken the cellar’s containment field, so he hoped Cali, in her cage, would be okay.
He turned on his sister. “Dammit, Elle, couldn’t you have waited for the thing to finish that one goddamn sentence?”
“I’m not talking to you, remember?” she huffed, then wiped her nose, picked up her katana hilts, and strutted out the door.
Fernando stepped forward, clicking. “You know, my darling Elle is still mad at you about that whole werewolf affair.”
Blaze sighed. “It’s her damage, Fernando, not mine. And you have got to get over this crush you have on her.”
External comms beeped in his ear. He knew who it would be. He answered the call.
This is an automatic message from Security Director Alvin Denning of the Interstellar Presidential Corporation. You have caused severe material damage to the New Oberlin Docking and Supply Harbor, and you have violated IPC law. An auditor will be in touch. Do not attempt to flee.
“I hate the IPC.” Blaze sighed again. “I’d much rather fight more demons than deal with pinche bureaucrats.”
“Demons are preferable to the government,” Fernando agreed. “The IPC will not relent in their paperwork.”
THREE_
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The Lizzie Borden was impounded, their travel papers frozen, and an IPC senior auditor was on her way. And it was a woman—someone named Katrina O’Reilly—they didn’t know, so they couldn’t pay her off.
And since hydrogen shells were highly illegal, they would confiscate those and hit Blaze with thousands of dollars in fines and possibly jail time. They had spare shells and weapons secreted around the entire vessel, but losing the illegal fusion ammo was a big deal.