Prime Valkyrie

by Michael-Scott Earle

  “I like it.” He shrugged, but I felt some frustration flow from Madalena.

  “What do you think we should do?” I asked her.

  “Kill one and then interrogate the other. Ask him some questions about the ship’s layout, number of men on board, and what type of weapons they have.” Her eyes met mine, and there was a cold challenge in them.

  “That’s a better plan,” I told her, and I felt a bit of pride flow from her. I was a bit annoyed with myself though. I was beyond exhausted, and my brain was starting to be stupid. I should have thought of that plan and not needed Madalena to remind me I was being stupid.

  But I was glad she did.

  “Just in time, too. There they are.” Mikhael turned his back to our left and then stepped farther out into the street to intercept the returning slavers. I saw two of the red-capped men jogging toward the tube. They both wore light body armor and large pistols on their hips, but one of them held a cardboard box in his hands.

  “Kill the one not holding the box,” I ordered as we walked toward their loading tube. I glanced to my left to check for security guards, didn’t see any, and then glanced to my right. I spotted a group of four security guards some two hundred meters from us, but they were walking away.

  The two red-capped men jogged into the tunnel that connected to their docking tube to the station, and we sprinted after them.

  Mikhael and Madalena were faster than I was, so they made it to the pair of men before I’d even entered the narrow tunnel. The Vaish man sprinted to the right of the man not carrying the box, kicked off the wall, and brought his elbow into the man’s temple. The man bounced off the adjacent wall, and then Mikhael grabbed him by the chin, stepped behind him, and drove his skull into the metal floor. The back of the slaver’s head made a wet cracking sound, and his body began to tremble with death spasms.

  Madalena grabbed the man with the box, spun him around, and then twisted his arm to his side. The man opened his mouth to gasp, but she tugged on his wrist as she stepped behind him, and then expertly flipped him on his back. Her joint manipulation was exceptionally smooth, and the man could do no more than gasp with pain during the ordeal.

  “How many men on your ship?” I asked as I crouched next to his face.

  “Mmmmmm!” he screamed, and Madalena pushed his face into the floor to muffle the cry. I glanced out of the tunnel to the harbor, but the people passing by didn’t pay any attention to what we were doing.

  “Mikhael, check the door to see if it is unlocked.” I nodded toward the door that connected the tunnel to the boarding tube. The man nodded and then dashed over there.

  “Unlocked,” he said as he pushed the button to open the door. “The door to their ship is closed, though.”

  “How many men on your ship?” I asked the asshole on the ground again.

  “Fuck you!” he snapped, but Madalena pushed his face into the floor again. She leaned over his body more to gain additional leverage on his arm, and the man’s defiant voice quickly turned into a whine.

  “She can break your arm in a couple dozen places, or you can tell us.” I grabbed the box he carried and opened the lid. It was filled with small bottles of what looked to be beer, but I didn’t recognize the language on the labels. It was probably some sort of drug-alcohol mixture, and I guessed that the crew was probably going to celebrate.

  There were twenty-four bottles.

  “Where are you keeping the four slaves you just bought?” I asked.

  “In our hold!” he gasped after Madalena twisted his arm more.

  “Which way, left or right when we enter?”

  “Left, ahhhh!” he screeched when Madalena tweaked his wrist down so his palm touched his forearm.

  “How many men on your crew?” I asked again.

  “Eighty--” he started to say, but the Prime Valkyrie just twisted his pinky until it dangled freely. “Ahhhh. Twenty-two! Twenty-two. Fuck!.” he said through gritted teeth,

  “Lift him up,” I said to Madalena as I gestured to the docking tube door.

  The brunette yanked the red-capped man to his feet, and then we moved into the tube.

  “What is the code to get into your ship?” I asked as we approached their hold door. This vessel looked to be in better shape than the Magate Order ship. The paint was fresh, the metal looked to have clean welding lines, and I didn’t see any rust anywhere. I couldn’t see the exact shape of the vessel, but I guessed it to be about the same size as the Magate Order ship and around eighty meters long.

  “It’s A, U, P, F, A, H. They are waiting for me, you should fucking let me go, or they will kill you,” the man demanded as he spat out the blood congealing in his mouth, and it landed at my feet.

  I felt Madalena’s anger surge, and she twisted his arm so suddenly, it tore loose with a loud popping sound. He opened his mouth to scream, but the woman immediately yanked him off balance so that he was leaning into the arms she had around his neck.

  She flexed her arms upward, and his neck snapped like a dry twig.

  Her face had shown no emotion, but her anger still ran off her like lava.

  “Guess we don’t need the layout of the hold,” I said to her, but she didn’t answer.

  I turned to Mikhael and nodded at the keypad. The three of us drew our weapons, and then the man keyed in the code.

  “Took you fucking long--” a voice shouted from inside the hold, but Madalena and I were already sliding under the hatch, and his voice cut off when one of her pulse bullets burnt a hole between his eyes.

  The red-cap men’s hold was much better organized than the Magate Order’s. There were stacks of crates, but they were secured to the right wall with loading straps. There was also a small two-person shuttle parked in the far corner. Two men were working on the shuttle there, but they hadn’t yet turned toward us, so I looked for any possible trouble on the other side of the hold.

  The left wall was lined with prison cells. The Magate Order used simple iron cages to keep their slaves, but these useless shitstains had glass and steel units with interior lighting, toilets, and beds. It only took me a glance to realize that setup was doubtless used for selling the women as whores, and I felt the beast inside scream.

  Six men spun when we entered their hold, but they were all clothed only in their underwear and were standing in a line in front of the cells. The four women were each inside of individual cells, and they cowered back against the farthest walls.

  We had gotten here just in time.

  My revolver made a cannon belch when I pulled the trigger, and the fourth man in the line turned into a spray of red paint across the wall. I moved my aim over to shoot the man standing next to him, but Madalena’s pistol sprayed a quick volley of pulse bullets in their direction, and I grunted with surprise when the remaining five men collapsed on the ground.

  They each had a burning hole in their skull.

  The sight nearly made my exhausted brain grind to a halt, but there were still the two men by the shuttle, so I pivoted and aimed my revolver toward them. Mikhael’s pistol was already firing, though, and the two men went down without even screaming.

  “Shit, great shooting,” I said to Madalena as I glanced at the far doors of the hold. I assumed they would lead to the bridge or crew quarters, but no one came out to attack us. We’d probably have a few more minutes before the rest of the red cap crew realized what was going on.

  “I am the Prime Valkyrie,” Madalena replied plainly, but I could feel her pleasure at my compliment.

  “Let’s get these women,” I said, and we ran to the glass cells. There were actually twelve of them, but eight were empty, and four were occupied by the women from Aurain - 15 - b. “Any of you speak English?” I asked as I hit the open button on each of the cells. The women looked confused by my words, but Madalena said a few sentences in a language that sounded close to Spanish, and each of the women nodded. Then they hastily got to their feet and ran out the doors to their cells.

  “Left door,�
�� Mikhael said a half moment before he started shooting. In response to his warning, I glanced across the hold. Someone there had opened the door and was leaning out with a rifle. Mikhael’s first pulse bullet hit the man in the arm though, and he shouted as he pulled back.

  “Time to go,” I said as I pointed my revolver at the other door leading from the hold to the rest of the ship. As I expected, it swung open, and I sent a bullet across the forty meters and into the slaver fucker. His chest exploded, and my bullet also tore the arm off the man running behind him.

  “I’ll cover!” Mikhael said, and the five women and I ran toward the door leading into the station.

  We made it out into the tube in just a few seconds, and Mikhael fell back to avoid a stream of automatic rifle fire.

  “We pissed them off,” he said as he pulled a palm-sized disk from one of his suit pockets. There was a button in the middle of the device, and he pressed it before throwing it back into their hold.

  I punched the button to close the door, and then we backed down the ramp with our handguns trained on the hatch. The space beyond suddenly filled with red smoke as the door closed, and I heard the men yell in confusion.

  “It will buy us a few minutes,” Mikhael said. His voice was calm, but I could feel a slight sensation of satisfaction come from him.

  “Adam,” Madalena said, “we must return quickly. We are breaking the loose laws of Red Eye - 13, and the armored security will not be so easy to kill.”

  “Got it,” I said as we moved back out of the loading tube. The door to the ship had closed, but Mikhael was right, it would only take them a few minutes to get out and come after us. We’d killed a bunch of them easily, but we had caught them by surprise. I didn’t want to have a drawn-out gun battle inside their ship when they could easily just radio the station’s security for backup.

  Mikhael closed the door to the docking tube, and we walked out into the harbor with the four women.

  Right into six black armored Red Eye - 13 guards.

  “Drop your--” one of them began to say, but Madalena’s blue energy bullet left a hole in his helmet where his eye socket should have been, and he died before he could finish speaking.

  Then chaos erupted in the harbor.

  One of the guards swung his shotgun at me, but I stepped into him, held my left hand out to check the weapon, and then pushed my revolver into the chin area of his armor. I didn’t know if the bullets of my weapon could pierce the bulky armor he wore, but even if my bullet didn’t pierce, it should still hit him in the chin like twenty donkey kicks.

  I pulled the trigger, and the thumb-sized bullet tore through his chin, skull, and then came out the top part of his armor like a flaming red geyser.

  I shoulder checked another guard who was swinging his shotgun toward Mikhael. The Vaish man’s gun was quicker though, and his energy bullets punched through the black guard’s chest armor at the heart.

  The crowd in the harbor roared with the unleashed violence, and everyone around us drew their weapons. For half a moment, I thought we were about to become the targets since we were fighting with the guards, but that wasn’t the case.

  Everyone began shooting each other.

  “Shit!” I shouted as bullets sprayed across the crowd. One of them whizzed by my ear, but I was too busy lining up the next shot. One of the Red Eye - 13 guards shot at Madalena, but the woman twisted her hips and stomach out of the way. My bullet took him in the back of the head, and he went down while the Prime Valkyrie spun to fire her pistol at the two remaining guards. Her bullets tore into them easily, and they died before they could use their big shotguns.

  “Let’s go!” I shouted at the four slave women, but as I turned toward our destination, I saw the flood of violence in the harbor. It was a fucking free for all, and there was no clear path that didn’t involve getting punched full of bullets. Even standing where we were was fucking crazy since bullets were flying in every direction.

  “The next tunnel!” Madalena shouted, and my eyes focused through the chaos to find the next port tunnel. It was some fifty meters away, which seemed like it would be a suicide run, but ducking back into the tunnel where we currently stood also didn’t make much sense. We’d just end up pinched between the chaos of the harbor and the pissed off red hat slavers.

  “Go!” I shouted as I moved toward the far tunnel.

  I made it in five steps, turned around to see if the slave women were following me, and then felt a bullet slam into my shoulder. It knocked me around with unexpected force, but I didn’t feel any pain in my arm. I guessed my armor had absorbed the hit, and I pointed my revolver in that direction as my eyes searched for the asshole who just shot me. There was a man on the far side of the harbor lane aiming a pistol at me. His eyes opened wide when he saw the size of my weapon, and his head exploded an instant after I pulled the trigger.

  I spared the millisecond to load my revolver, and used the first bullet to punch a chest sized hole into a slaver who was in the way of our escape. His limbs flew out in each direction, and his free-spinning head bounced into the mass of fighting fuckers.

  I shot four more bullets before I made it to the tunnel, and each one separated a man from his life with a violent crack of thunder and blood.

  As I ran into the side of the tunnel, I cracked open the massive revolver’s cylinder and ejected the brass. A second later my speed loader had inserted five new rounds in, and I pushed the revolver closed in time to sidestep a knife swing from a tattooed man. His blade missed my armor by a few centimeters, and I tilted my revolver out a bit toward him before I pulled the trigger. My bullet removed his left leg in the middle of his thigh, and he let out a blood-curdling scream before collapsing to the floor.

  Every time I shot my revolver, the crowd battling in the harbor flinched. Fuckers should have been avoiding us, but they must have seen the four women we escorted and figured that the slaves would be up for grabs if they killed us.

  The monster in my stomach wiggled up to my chest, and he roared to be released. I knew I was too tired to control him, so I forced him back down.

  We reached the next docking tunnel, and I covered everyone moving around the corner. Half of the people in this area of the harbor were dead now, and the floor was covered with a lake of blood. I considered waiting here until the violence died down, but then I saw a wall of black armored guards running toward the battle. They were still three hundred meters or so from the red cap slaver’s gate, but I didn’t want to be anywhere nearby when they got here.

  “We need to move!” I shouted back to my entourage, but then a bullet ricocheted through the tunnel where we took cover, and all four of the women screamed.

  I aimed my revolver toward the man who had shot at us, but he dropped back into one of the tunnels leading toward the bazaar.

  “We can clear the harbor,” Madalena stated authoritatively. “It will be easier to fight our way through than run.”

  “There are a lot of--” I started to say as I turned to her, but the words caught in my mouth when I saw that they were both wearing their crazy wing-etched magical power armor. Madalena’s face looked like a screaming banshee with a winged crown, and the eyes of her helmet glowed the same blue color as her pistol shots.

  “Alright. Do it,” I said. “Cover the rear, and we’ll move forward.”

  Madalena and Mikhael stepped out of the tube and began spraying the crowd with their pistols. They had fired just a few times when we made our way from Persephone’s tube to our current position, but those shots were only targeted at men trying to shoot us. Now that I’d given them the order to slaughter everyone, I saw how effective the two warriors were with their weapons.

  It was akin to a tidal wave of energy bullets. The shots poured through the harbor without mercy, and scores of assholes were killed. There were some slaves cowering in the middle of the conflict, but the pulse shots all missed them and found targets amongst the men who captured them.

  Some of the slavers shot back a
t the two Vaish warriors, but they either missed, or their bullets bounced off the crazy armor.

  “Let’s go,” I beckoned to the four women, and they moved out of the tunnel. There wasn’t much to worry about in the direction we were traveling since Madalena and Mikhael had just mowed down everyone, but I spared a glance behind us and saw that the mass of dark-armored guards was still running in our direction.

  There must have been forty or fifty of them, and while I thought Madalena and Mikhael might be able to kill all of them, I didn’t want these women to be anywhere near the conflict. I also didn’t know what was up ahead, and I preferred for the two Vaish warriors to escort them through the blood filled harbor.

  “Madalena and Mikhael, Let’s go!” I shouted after we’d moved fifty meters or so ahead of them. They both turned and then jumped toward me. The purple wings on the back of their armor sprung to life, and they covered the distance in a single bound.

  “Damn. You’ll have to show me how that works,” I said to Madalena when she landed next to me.

  “I will teach you how to use your Aegis after you complete your rite of passage,” she said.

  I thought about telling her that her rite could fuck off, but we had other shit to worry about. The part of the harbor up ahead was devoid of people, but I didn’t want to get ambushed from anyone hiding in the side tunnels.

  Madalena seemed to understand my worry, and she moved to take the right point position. Mikhael stayed at the rear position, and I moved to the left side of the women so I could protect them from anyone who might shoot from the tunnels leading to the bazaar.

  “Madalena, tell the crew we are leaving. We are going to use the folding drive to--”

  “My lord, please do not use the folding drive,” she said, and I felt a strange surge of emotion come from her.

  It was fear.

  “Uhh, why not?” I asked as I scanned the side tunnels up ahead. We were running as fast as the four women could, but it wasn’t nearly fast enough for my tastes.

  “May we speak of it later? I recommend that we--” A pair of pistol-wielding men popped out from one of the tunnels, but Madalena’s reaction was much faster than theirs, so the men died before they could get a shot off. “Hyperdrive toward your destination until the warpdrives reset, and then use the warpdrives the remainder of the way,” she finished without much of a break in her sentence.