by Aaron Crash
Blaze snatched up his fusion flail. Elle still had the fusion wakizashi. He also grabbed two plasma rifles, fully charged and ready to rock ’n’ roll. He gave Elle one, shouldered the other, and plucked a box of hydrogen shells off the shelf—only five rounds, sadly—and stuck it to the thigh of his armor. Nice thing about nanotech, you could customize it with a thought. The nanobots created a perfect pocket for the box.
Armed and armored, both sped toward the top hatch. Above them, a klaxon alarm went off, jangling Blaze’s nerves. The demon had hit the impound lot, and the diarrhea had just blasted into the fan.
Elle went first, climbing fast, with Blaze at her heels.
They burst out of the Lizzie Borden’s airlock and into the hallway of the impound ring. The hall led to the main tower. Emergency lights flashed, and the sirens shrieked. The place was wrecked, raw space exposed in huge gaps in the walls. Luckily, the emergency shielding seemed to be holding.
A new wave of mech-shambles scampered toward them. These creatures were caterpillar shaped, and built haphazardly from sections of wall, coils of wiring, and the electronics of the station.
“Formation!” Blaze yelled.
He and Elle took their places like they’d practiced. He towered over her while she knelt, their guns thudding. Plasma blasts burst from the muzzles of their rifles, slamming into the whirring legs and gnashing mandibles of the caterpillar shambles, until a dozen of the creatures lay on the floor, wriggling spasmodically in their death throes.
Xerxes paused in the entryway of the main tower, which led to the moon itself.
The spiked fleas were still repairing him, but Trina’s attack had left large parts of him smoking, half-melted, and continuing to drip red slag from his steel body.
Elle let her rifle fall on its strap and yanked her fusion pistol out of her holster. She chanced a shot but missed. The round blasted a fist-sized hole in the ceiling; the metal around the puncture turned red-hot, sagging down as bits of molten steel dripped to the floor. The slag landed with a splat and a sizzle. “No wonder these things are illegal,” she quipped.
Xerxes screeched at them, “Come, my friends, come, get me! My hhhellish father will love the stories I will hhhhave to tell!”
“Your father or your lord and master?” Blaze yelled.
Xerxes only laughed maniacally, before bolting into the main tower, quickly vanishing from sight.
Blaze and Elle charged after the demon-possessed robot.
Blaze glanced at his display. Battlefield awareness was always a must. His crew was still in range, so he could check their VHI. Stable, for now, but unconscious. He had no idea if Trina had managed to quit throwing up. She wasn’t implanted and paired with them. Talk about being an outsider… Both he and Elle were doing pretty well physically, though not at a hundred percent. Blaze felt blood on his chest, fresh but dried, as well as on his side. And that Onyx lightning still tingled, and not in a good way.
“How you holding up?” he asked Elle as they sped toward the impound tower.
“I’m fine, brother dear,” Elle snapped. “Don’t you go worrying about me now.”
“No, I meant, your spell energy. You good for a couple more tricks?”
“I’ll have to be,” she said.
They didn’t run straight into the tower but slammed to the walls on either side of the entryway. Neither had any idea of what fresh nightmare Xerxes was brewing up inside. Elle held up a little mirror and checked the corridor.
Her voice came over comms. “It’s clear.”
Blaze went into the tower, plasma rifle first. It was a simple hallway, a few doors, a large maintenance elevator, and a large staircase at the other end. Most of it was concrete and ceiling tiles, but technology would be in the walls, and Xerxes could use that to create.
Elle followed him. “Stairs or the elevator, Gunny?”
Blaze paused by the maintenance lift, but no way would he get inside a metal box with Xerxes around. The elevator dinged to a stop. A light flashed. The doors slid open. Blaze spun, as did Elle, both their rifles raised.
Inside were twelve New Oberlin security guards, all armed with plasma rifles. Most likely, they’d been sent to collect the crew of the Lizzie Borden and to investigate the weapons fire on the docking ring.
None of them would have the chance. The metal walls of the elevator buckled like a living membrane, then punched inward. Cables rammed through the roof, caught two of the hapless guards, and crushed them. The control panel sparked before a fist of wires removed the heart of another guard. One of the guards managed to fire his rifle into the control panel, but then he was shredded by more junk. One man lost his head, and a woman had her spine ripped away in a spray of gore. Then both of her arms and legs were plucked off by a storm of tech.
The doors slid closed even as the screaming inside continued.
“Stairs are definitely a better option,” Blaze muttered, his stomach twisted by the slaughter he’d seen.
Elle was speechless.
Both sprinted away from the carnage in the elevator.
Blaze and Elle hit the stairs and kept on running. The concrete steps and metal guardrails descended floor after floor downward. They saw Xerxes in the center slowly drifting down using a levitate spell. How he could be building whatever abomination was in the elevator and cast spells to get away was beyond Blaze. This thing was tough.
Down Blaze and Elle went, the tromp of their boots echoing. Both were soon sweating and breathing hard.
Elle gasped out, “Well, guess I’m getting my cardio in for the day.”
Blaze, equally out of breath, wheezed, “I hate running.”
Closer and closer, they neared the bottom of the stairs. They must’ve run down ten flights of steps, but finally, they hit the ground floor. It was a large open bay full of small impounded spacecraft. Each ship lay on its landing pad in small concrete stalls. The entrance to the hangar lay far in the distance. The huge doors leading to Fleabugger proper were nearer and to the right. The elevator was to the left.
Xerxes drifted away, floating a few inches off the ground, then turned in front of the huge doors leading to the moon’s population.
Elle fired her fusion pistol, but the P13rce unit dodged the bolts.
“You both are so spry to take the stairs. Worried about your hhhealth? Well, you shhhouldn’t be. For I doubt you’ll be in possession of your lungs and other internal organs for very much longer.”
Blaze and Elle jogged toward the demon. All of their senses were on full alert. At any minute the robot could magic up a creature out of the spacecraft around them.
But the problem wasn’t in the impound bay.
The elevator dinged. The doors slid open.
At the last minute, Blaze realized what that meant.
He grabbed Elle and made her duck. Tentacles lashed out of the elevator doors, reaching for them even as an octopus shamble rolled out. The entire elevator shaft had been destroyed to make the monster. The tentacles were fashioned from cables, wiring, carpet lengths, Human legs still bleeding, and arms showing exposed cartilage and bone. In the main body of the beast, a few glassy-eyed heads with tongues lolling were mixed in with large shards of metal taken from the elevator.
As the thing rolled toward them, it drew spacecraft to it, doubling in size and lengthening its tentacles.
Elle went right, while Blaze darted left.
Thirty feet tall, the tentacles almost twice that, the octopus shamble screamed in a vibrating mechanical voice.
Blaze brought up his rifle, white fury filling his head. Those guards—men and women from New Oberlin’s civilian security force—had been killed to make the oozing octopian cyborg mutant in front of them. The place smelled like a slaughterhouse mixed with a CPU-processing plant.
He fired into the thing, as did Elle, but the plasma bolts did little damage. Pieces of the thing were blown off, but new tech writhed into place to fix the wounds. No, fusion power was going to be a lot more effective.
Blaze let his plasma rifle drop on its strap and triggered his fusion flail. The hydrogen shell in the handle of the weapon winked on. The emitters on the ends of the three short lengths of chains screamed to life, creating three glowing balls of pure star-energy. It was like Ling’s nunchaku, only more medieval. If he lost control of the flail, he could easily decapitate himself.
And yet, the centripetal force of the three glowing balls of fusion made the weapon devastating against a creature the size of the bloodstained octopus.
Elle had a pistol in one hand, her wakizashi glowing scarlet in the other.
The tentacles descended.
Blaze whirled his flail and sent the three star-fire orbs into one of them. It removed the limb instantly, sending it clattering away on the floor. The smell of cooking meat smoked into the air.
Elle deflected an incoming blow of a tentacle with her wakizashi, flipped over another one, and sent three shots of fusion energy into the beast.
Xerxes, behind them, laughed.
Blaze ducked, spun the flail around, and brought it crashing down onto another tentacle. One of the spheres slammed through the floor, creating a glowing track of molten metal, but the other two spheres struck home and reduced another tentacle to a stump.
Xerxes appeared near Elle, a hand reaching for her wakizashi. Damn, but a teleporting demon was never a good thing.
A tentacle wrapped around Blaze’s leg as another threatened to grab his throat. His ax would’ve been so much better for such a situation, but oh well. He whirled the flail to bash off the tentacle above. It was a good hit, but one of the orbs bounced back onto his armor, scorching it.
The steel coils around his leg squeezed, and the pain was sharp and bright. It wanted to add his leg to its collection of Human limbs. Blaze swung the flail around and whipped the tentacle off his leg. Free, he rolled away.
Elle had cast a shield spell, and while Xerxes couldn’t get to her, she could fire point-blank into the P13rce unit. She put a six-inch hole through his chest, driving him back. The spiked fleas got to work fixing it and numerous other wounds.
The robot fell back toward the door, on the run again.
Blaze dodged a swiping coil, leapt over another, and charged the head of the octopus, a beak made from rebar fused together. The beak clanged together over and over. The noise hammered into Blaze’s skull, it was so pinche loud!
Annoyed and pissed, he roared and waded forward, whirling his flail left and right, bashing through tentacles of steel and ripping through coils made of Human meat.
Finally, he brought the flail down onto the beak of the thing, silencing the noise. First one tentacle dropped to the floor and split apart into its components. Then another fell to pieces. Blaze continued to slam the fusion orbs into the body until it tumbled into scrap around him.
Either Xerxes had lost power to control it or Blaze had dished out enough damage to undo its magic. Whatever. The octopus shamble was dead.
Never in his life had Blaze fought something that big. Xerxes wasn’t the run-of-the-mill demon to create such a huge horror show. No, Xerxes was a big-league hitter.
If Xerxes could turn the impound tower’s elevator into a tentacled monster built of tech and body parts, what could the evil bastard do to a whole moon?
The hydrogen shell fueling his flail was running low. He ejected it and inserted a fresh one.
He heard the thwock of Elle’s plasma rifle. She was firing on Xerxes, but the robot had cast a shield spell of his own.
Blaze ran over to her.
The demon let out a howl of giggles, the scarlet goat-horned jackal face with donkey ears giving them a leer before the thing disappeared through the enormous doors to Fleabugger’s market street, the central corridor of sin and shopping, which led down to the heart of the moon.
And that’s where the demon was heading.
Elle spoke over comms. “We better take him down before he builds something even bigger.”
“And he’ll do it using our friends,” Blaze said. “He could kill tens of thousands of people.”
“You don’t have that many friends,” Elle said.
“Funny.”
Then both of them were hurtling toward the fifty-foot steel doors, which thankfully weren’t turning into some kind of demon-magic monstrosity. Not right at that moment.
Human screams and Clicker clacking erupted from inside the moon.
Blaze and Elle broke through the doors and into chaos.
Humans, Clickers, and Meelah fled from the massive robot as it staggered down the main walkway of the marketplace. Corridors split from the street, leading to various sections of Fleabugger. The boulevard was wide and the ceiling tall, showing moon rock fifty feet above. Strips of light in the stone removed the gloom.
Stalls were lined up on either side selling fried foods that would kill you sweetly, guns that might or might not work, hoverbikes, appliances, and furniture. There was even an old motorcycle stall, though the bikes would be electric and not gas fueled. Tattered canopies covered the shops, though they didn’t need to block out the sun. They did give the avenue a certain grimy charm. And the artificial gravity worked well. As did the fake atmosphere giving them all oxygen.
The demon robot kicked through a stall selling toys. A kid dashed away before the metal foot could squish him. A woman snatched up the boy and fled.
Two security officers rushed Xerxes, but the thing plucked their plasma rifles out of their hands. Spiked fleas leapt and smacked both guards in the face, piercing their brains. Both fleas dropped back to their master. Xerxes turned and fired both rifles at Blaze and Elle.
They split, Elle ducking into a food stall and Blaze finding cover behind a motorcycle shop’s metal sign. Plasma bolts struck the steel, and glowing red slag dripped down.
“Can you get a shot at him?” Elle asked through comms.
“Not a good one. If we miss, we might hit the crowd. But I have an idea.” Blaze glanced at the dark-skinned shopkeeper. The whites of his eyes showed panic. “Can I borrow one of these bad boys?”
The shopkeeper nodded.
Blaze swung an armored leg over a Streetsinger and fired up the throttle. The battery growled, and he threw the bike into gear. He whizzed out of the shop and streaked toward Xerxes. Plasma blasts pocked the scored and blackened iron ground. Blaze swung his fusion flail down, handling the bike with one hand.
He zoomed up, whirled the flail around, and struck Xerxes with a blow that removed a long-fingered hand, a couple of spiked fleas, and one of the plasma rifles’ barrels.
Blaze streaked away after dealing out the damage. People in another food stand, this one selling fried Meelah worms, pushed and shoved each other out of the way. Blaze turned the bike around, letting the wheels spin under him, fighting for control, one-handed. The bike had some anti-gravity technology, because he didn’t go down, but spun around on one wheel, then sank down on both spinning tires, smoking away, heading back toward the teetering demon robot.
Yes, they had this douche. Elle could snare the demon, and they could end this. An interrogation could happen with Xerxes tucked away in Lizzie Borden’s cellar. It was why God invented tongue spells.
Elle charged up to Xerxes, her fusion wakizashi flashing red in one of her hands, while her other held a snare sphere. She hacked through the other plasma rifle and then slammed the orb onto the belly of the P13rce unit.
“Foolish witch,” the demon wheezed, that pinche dog face still grinning, “your tech is mine to do with as I will.”
The sphere morphed into a living flat piece of metal and sprang from the demon back onto Elle. It smashed through the visor of her helmet and wrapped itself around her face. She dropped her wakizashi to grip at the steel mask suffocating her.
That bastard. Blaze readied his flail, streaking toward the demon.
Then the motorcycle betrayed him. It buckled under him and then twisted as Xerxes worked his necrotechnical magic on the bike. The Streetsinger grew arms and
legs, the mechanisms on the bike altering even as Blaze sat astride it.
He slid off the transforming bike and bounced across the street, grateful his nanofiber armor was taking the damage and not his skin.
Standing above him, the bike still had its wheels spinning, but they now made up the new creature’s groin and head. Strong arms gripped Blaze, and the motorcycle shamble slammed the wheels down onto Blaze’s armor. Rubber screeched across the nanotech as the nanobots hardened to withstand the pressure. The bike demon fell on top of him. His vision only showed a wheel trying to shred his visor as the other wheel tried to rip through his armor to castrate him.
The stench of the burning rubber was stifling, the smoke blinding. His armor integrity dropped to seventy-five percent, then fifty, and a second later, twenty-five percent.
The motorcycle shamble’s metal arms wouldn’t let him go.
Xerxes’s voice came over comms. “Your armor is failing, Blaze, but I do not wish to wait. It’s a pity that your armor likes me more than you.”
The nanofiber began to shrink from his body, the nanobots smoking into the air and then coalescing around the bike. His armor was leaving his body, and it was only because the nanobots were hardened where the screaming wheels touched him that he wasn’t at the mercy of the relentless spinning. The rubber was gone, and the spinning, smoking steel rims closed in on his flesh.
He could hear Elle still struggling with the mask her snare sphere had become.
And soon, the rims would knife through his skull and rip away his junk.
Losing his head wouldn’t mean much to Blaze, but his peen?
Now that would be a goddamn tragedy.
SEVEN_
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Being killed by a motorcycle wasn’t all that far of a stretch for Blaze since he’d grown up on Earth with Arlo, dirt biking and street biking across the North American Empire. He’d sped down the highways of Colobraska and Wyotah. He’d gotten dirty, flinging mud, on the tracks of Dakotasota. Arlo had warned him about the dangers, but then, Arlo figured the only death worth dying was at the hands of some piece of Onyx trash you were trying to dust.