by Dorian Dawes
“Sh-should we help her?” Snidely said, mouth hanging open.
Up in the skies, Talisha found herself growing weary. She kept finding herself stealing distracted glances down below. It was obvious even from her vantage point in the sky that Bluebird had been hit. She barely knew the woman, but her instincts demanded she do everything to ensure her safety.
More bullets rammed into her armor, sending several alarms screaming inside her helmet. Systems were facing extreme damage. Any further hits would cause the suit to shut down to begin self-repairs to preserve itself. She’d be left defenseless and stationary.
“All right, you son of a bitch,” she whispered, charging another blast.
Direct hit. It went searing through the right wing of the wyvern, causing it to teeter and descend to the ground. She flew down to face it, readying another blast. She didn’t get the chance to even fire. Bluebird had thoroughly finished thrashing and beating every passenger of the last armored jeep bloody and threw herself directly onto the front of the downed wyvern.
She pounded against the heavy armored surface with her fists, denting it. She found where the rivets nailed the plating together and pried them loose, digging her fingers beneath them, pulling the plating apart. Her fingernails were bloodied, and her skin reddened with the amount of effort. She looked on the verge of passing out.
With another roar, she managed to completely rip off the armored plating protecting the cockpit and shoved her fists in to grab the screaming pilot. He had a blaster in his shaking hands and managed to fire a few bullets into her shoulder. She didn’t even wince as she gripped him by the throat and hurled him into the sand. The wyvern collapsed, and Bluebird tumbled into the dust, unconscious.
The bandit who’d been piloting the wyvern attempted to scramble away, planting his skinny little arms in the dirt. His eyes were wide as a frightened rodent, only eager to escape. He hadn’t bothered looking where he was going, too fixated on the giant monstrosity who’d nearly killed him, so he didn’t notice when he ran smack first into Cyrus’s cold metal legs.
“And where were you headed off to, partner?”
Talisha hurried quickly to Bluebird’s side, turning her onto her back and examining her wounds. “How is she still alive?”
Nergal hurried toward her, retrieving several bandages and syringes from within his coat pockets. “Please, allow me.”
Talisha raised her arm cannon. “Not on your life, creep.”
Nergal’s brow furrowed. “As hardy as our bird of song is, without my expertise, she will die. Stand aside.”
“I’m afraid he’s right,” Snidely said, stumbling his way toward them, looking more frazzled and tattered than ever. “I hired him not only for his capacity for violence, but also for his medical knowledge. It seemed fitting to have a healer on this expedition.”
Talisha stood, keeping her cannon trained firmly at his throat. “If you hurt her in any way…”
Nergal rolled his eyes. “I know you may find this difficult to believe, madam, but I’ve never killed anyone without reason, and I don’t intend to start now. Now, please. Let me save this woman’s life.”
Nergal knelt over Bluebird’s body, surveying her wounds with quiet precision. It was the calmest Talisha had seen him. He injected Bluebird’s veins with a syringe full of a neon-green mixture.
Nergal stood and turned to face them. “Help me carry her into the scorpion. The injection will stabilize her, but I need to remove the bullets and we’re far too exposed out here.”
Cyrus shook his head. “Bored now. I’ll let the other guy take over while I nap and replenish my ammo. See ya, partners.”
“Are you serious?” Talisha looked incredulous, but Cyrus had already gone.
The android went silent for several seconds before he placed a frazzled hand to his head. He looked to see the frightened bandit cowering at his feet, then to Bluebird’s unconscious body. His systems scrambled for information, probing within the Cyrus subroutine’s memory banks to figure out what the hell had happened.
“Mother Superior,” Rogers scratched his forehead. “Sorry about that, fellas.”
“Just help already! I can’t carry this big lunk!” Nergal snapped.
“Right-o.” Rogers turned quickly to the bandit. “Don’t go anywhere, I’m a better shot than the other one.”
The frightened bandit shook his head of mud-coated hair. “Okay.”
Talisha looked down at the kid with pity. He couldn’t have been older than nineteen. A scraggly unkempt youth so skinny you could see his ribs; likely turned to robbing and fighting other gangs over scraps of food, water, and fuel. There weren’t bad people on Archimedes IV, just desperate people in bad situations.
Together, Rogers and Talisha managed to hoist Bluebird gently up to carry her into the back of the scorpion. She was too large to lie on the seats so they had to figure out the best position in which to not aggravate her wounds. In the end, they could do nothing but place her on her back between the seats on Rogers’s poncho. Her shoulders still managed to be a tight fit, so she was propped at an awkward angle, partially on her side
Nergal stared, caught somewhere between legitimate concern and wry amusement. “If she manages to survive this, I’ll consider apologizing to her for my remarks.”
Talisha ignored his comment. She gave Bluebird another once-over to make sure the woman was still breathing and then went to check on the bandit. To the boy’s credit he hadn’t moved from his spot, still sitting there and shaking with terror. There were bruises around his neck from where Bluebird had strangled him.
“If she dies, it’s your fault. You know that?” Talisha said, removing her helmet.
He shrugged his shoulders. “You fired on us first.”
“And you wouldn’t have?”
“Oh, we certainly would have. A scorpion would have been ace to have, but still. You fired on us first.”
“All right, you made your point. How’d your people get a hold of a couple of wyverns, anyhow?”
“The Mother gives,” the kid said with a shrug, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
“Please, get in!” Nergal called from the Scorpion. “I thought you were concerned with saving her.”
Talisha nodded and grabbed the bandit by his arm, yanking him to his feet. “Gonna have to ask you to come with us, kid.”
He made a passive blank stare in her direction, eyes devoid of any emotion. “Okay.”
Talisha would have been unsettled had she not seen stranger things in her line of work. The Mother seemed to be a reference to a deity. She’d heard these kinds of platitudes before. Bandit camps devolving into religious cults was nothing new. Her more immediate concern was how a group of zealous scroungers had managed to get a hold of IGF property when this planet was far outside their jurisdiction. There were a few possible explanations, none of them comforting.
She hauled the boy into the scorpion and kept him sitting by her side. “Blake, got any provisions?”
“You didn’t bring any of your own?” Snidely was examining the front end of the Scorpion, horrified at the initial damages caused by Bluebird’s little stunt.
“‘Course I did, but seeing as you’re responsible for this trip, you should be responsible for feeding the prisoner.”
“We’re taking prisoners now?” Rogers said. “Can’t say I approve.”
Talisha sighed. “Only alternative is leaving him to die in the desert and that’s not particularly humane either.
“All of that can wait! Let’s get moving!” Nergal barked. “The serum will only last so long. You! Boy! Are there any caves nearby where we can find shelter?”
The bandit kid shrugged and pointed east toward a ridge of mountains. “Some caves out there, but I wouldn’t. Lotta critters out and about.”
“We are fully equipped to deal with critters,” Nergal said bluntly. “Snidely, please. Take us to that ridge. We’ve wasted too much time chitchatting.”
“Last time
I checked, I was the boss here,” Snidely muttered under his breath.
If the others heard him, they were clearly ignoring him. He grumbled a bit about that as he climbed into the front of the scorpion and made a course for the ridge. He rummaged around in his coat pocket for a pair of protective lenses as the sinking sun forced the searing rays directly into his eyes.
Talisha looked at the boy with the wild hair sitting next to her. “What’s your name, kid?”
“Jefferson,” he said blankly.
“I’m Talisha. Now, tell me about the wyverns. Where’d you get them?”
“I told you, the Mother—”
“Cut the crap, where did she provide them exactly? Those types of machines aren’t exactly common around these parts.”
Jefferson turned away from her. “In the woods, there was a crash-site, a gift to us from the Mother. We’ve been able to salvage most of it for scrap and oil, though the wyverns weren’t damaged at all.”
“And how the hell do you know what a wyvern is?”
“From the ship’s database. It’s still functional. No one was interested in it, so I make trips back there to check it out. I’ve learned a lot.”
Talisha leaned back in her seat, rubbing her hand over her jaw. “Interesting.”
Rogers turned his head in her direction. “Something on your mind?”
Talisha leaned forward, steepling her fingers. “The IGF were definitely on this planet. I want to know why. Jefferson, can you take us to these woods?”
“Got any food?”
“Of course.”
“Then sure.”
Snidely interjected quickly. “Excuse me, I am paying you lot for a specific extraction mission. The Temple? The key? We still need to secure the key, remember?”
Rogers leaned back in his seat and tipped his hat over his face, letting out a pre-recorded sigh to express his displeasure. “Those wyverns were a pretty nasty shock there, Blake. Don’t ya wanna know if we’re due for any other surprises? More we know, more we’re all likely to walk away from this alive and a whole lot richer, comprendé?”
“You are a coolly logical one despite that ridiculous affectation,” Snidely admitted.
Rogers tipped his hat politely and curled his legs beneath him, perching in a childlike manner.
“A strange lot we are,” Nergal said quietly. “Never quite seen such a collection of misfits and freaks.”
“Blame the company man,” Talisha said. “He hired us.”
Nergal looked at the driver, and his voice fell low so that he wouldn’t hear. “I wasn’t excluding him from that description. Did you see the way he manned those turrets?”
“Think he’s in the wrong line of work?” Talisha smirked.
Nergal stared at her, his face grim. “It takes one to know one, and that man is a mercenary through and through.”
“Not much difference between a mercenary and a corporate toady,” Talisha said, shrugging her shoulders. “Capitalists with malleable ethics.”
“And you don’t put yourself in that boat? Too good for the likes of us?”
Talisha glared at him. “I’m doing what I can to help people. It’s always been that way.”
Nergal gave her a wide grin. “That’s not what they said about your mother. Heard every mission left thousands of bodies in her wake.”
She turned away from him, folding her arms across her chest. “Yeah well, I’m not my mother.”
“So I’ve heard.” Nergal leaned back in his seat, still smiling. “So I’ve heard.”
Chapter Three
RED FLAGS UNFURLED from the schooners quietly skimming over the sand dunes like a vast ocean. Like the rest of Ching Shih’s fleet, the sails were coated in the same nanite substance capable of transmitting a virus into any machine that dared photograph or scan them. Cutting-edge technology and unheard-of designs had once made Red Flag Solutions a devastating competitor in the corporate world. Those days had long since passed.
In those days, she’d worn fine gowns with large collars wrapped around her head like a halo. The back of her tresses would sweep along the floor in shimmering scarlet and gold to create a grand spectacle. The technology that now protected her fleet and opened their victims to attack had been used to line her clothes in brilliant holographic displays that wrested the attentions and pocketbook of everyone in the room. She was a much younger woman then, every bit as bold and daring, but her priorities had shifted.
Ching Shih was heavier now. She often wondered if getting fatter as you got older was just the weight of the years transferring itself to your body. She didn’t mind it, of course. The way the fat had settled around her cheeks gave her the hardened jowls of a bulldog and made her far more intimidating than the waifish pixie look of her youth. It was a trade up as far as she was concerned.
She stood at the edge of the schooner and wrapped her birdlike talons about the railing and surveyed the barren wasteland. Her brow furrowed, remembering when she’d been here as a girl, back when it’d been covered in luscious green. Hard to believe it was the same planet.
Ching Shih still wore expensive gowns, but they had an altogether different function. She’d swapped out the brilliant colors for black silks threaded with protective armor. Even her makeup was intended to frighten and intimidate; pale and ghoulish, with lips the color of blood.
“Ching Shih, we’re nearing the rendezvous point!” One of her officers barked over the comm-line.
“Keep straight ahead,” she responded. “The only source of greenery left on this planet lies before us, crew. Be on your guard. The wars here left it vengeful and mean. The leaves themselves grew teeth and a desire to devour those who would destroy them. Sounds like we have something in common, eh, boys?”
That put a fire in them. Blasters raised high and a chorus of cheers echoed into her headset. She allowed herself a bemused smile watching the looming darkness of the trees near. Their branches were as gnarled and twisted as the stories claimed, rising into the sky like gothic cathedrals, and pulsing with their own unnatural heartbeats. She wondered if they really bled when you chopped their branches.
Black vines coated in ichor spilled out into the desert like veins. Ching ordered the schooners stopped before they got too close. Her eyes narrowed, watching the vines with repulsed fascination. She could see tiny motions of something being pumped through them. It looked for a moment as if cracks of red lights could be seen flashing angrily behind their pores.
Sounds of rumbling engines and crashing undergrowth filled the air. Several mechanical creations stumbled out of the forest with whirring saw-blades and flamethrowers. They traipsed about on multiple legs like giant metal spiders caring little for the terrors of the trees. Their blades cut the tongues that shot out from the cavernous maws of trunks and bark. Their flames purged the vines that sought to entangle them.
Ching Shih pursed her lips in silent approval.
The machines stopped just at the edge of the woods. Smoke from their exhaust pipes choked the air. The largest of these vehicles moved to the front and center of the line and a hatch opened in the top, allowing a burly white-skinned man with a beard the color of fire to emerge.
“Corporal Melanson,” she said with barely a nod. “You’ve chosen a tactical venue for our meeting. I admire that.”
Melanson was large in just about every sense of the word. He was a hairy portrait of old-world masculinity. His long ginger hair billowed behind him in a thousand different directions. His beard, dotted with several gray hairs, flowed all the way down to his hefty muscle-gut. His shoulders were just about as wide as he was tall, and he was well over six feet. He wore only a set of tight overalls, faded and tattered with time, and he smelled of grease and cinders.
His fat stomach shook as he let out a deep, rumbling laugh. “Corporal? Haven’t heard that title in years. Guess what they say about you is true, you’ve a way with secrets.”
“It was a compliment, Corporal.” Ching Shih remained completely stoic,
hands wrapped tightly behind her back. “My fleet outnumbers your band ten-to-one, so you’ve forced us to meet in territory where we’re put to a significant disadvantage should you choose to retreat behind the trees.”
Melanson’s grin took on a menacing quality. “If you know my old post, then you must also know my tactics.”
“I’m sure I read something about Melanson’s Massacres somewhere.” Ching Shih smiled. “But I hope it won’t come to that. We’ve too much to gain and so little to lose. For now, though, as a sign of good faith in our partnership, I want to see the key.”
His thick eyebrows furrowed together. “All right.”
Melanson vanished inside the scrap-metal monstrosity. The night drew on while Ching waited patiently for his return, eyes locked on the other members of his party. One of her hands moved to the blaster on her hip. It wasn’t a nervous or paranoid gesture. These bandits had little to fear from a fat old woman with a blaster on her hip. Just a reminder of where they stood, and who she was.
Melanson returned several minutes later, opening the hatch with a rusty creak. He held in his dirty palms an object covered with black sackcloth. He held it aloft for her to see aboard the schooner, then lifted the cloth to reveal a large black pyramid covered in the engravings and runic cuneiform of an ancient alien tongue. His hands were large enough he could hold it in his palm.
“I can’t let you touch it of course,” Melanson said, his eyes fixated on the pyramid. “No guarantee your people won’t run off with it.”
“Oh, I can assure you that’s exactly what would happen,” Ching Shih said with a cackle. “We’d wrest that thing away from you and be off in a heartbeat.”
“Bit strange to be giving away your intentions like that,” Melanson said, rubbing his chin. All the same, he covered the pyramid with the sackcloth and placed his arm behind his back.