“What, it’s like the year 3550 out here, at least, I’m sure. Who doesn’t have a universal translator?” Deadthrall protested.
“So long as you can fight and foreplay at the same time, what do I care?” Donovan snapped, sending a proton torpedo at the female Macoon Deadthrall had sent the GNOC text to. To both their surprise she was actually getting naked on camera, as asked.
Deadthrall made lewd whistling sounds that were interrupted by her fighter exploding. “What the hell, man?” he bitched at Donovan.
“They’re hoping to distract us long enough for one of their weapons to reach us,” Donovan explained. “And in case you haven’t noticed, Rake is tiring. And no one is as fast on the wheel as she is. And then there’s that Macoon pulling the vessel apart…”
“Yeah, yeah,” Deadthrall grumbled. “Sorry, babe,” he said, pressing one of his firing options on the one he’d texted CU46. Her vessel exploded moments later. That had to hurt.
Donovan checked his grim façade. “We cool?”
“Gucci.” Deadthrall wiped his snivels.
Rake shook her head slowly at Deadthrall. “We’ve really got to get that kid laid.”
Donovan dispatched the femme fatale Deadthrall had texted, “Let’s smash after.” She wouldn’t be doing any smashing anytime soon, unless her exploded body parts were autonomous and self-piloting. A pleasing thought to end on, as he shifted his attention to the latest incoming craft.
“Um, those upturned, twirling fan tails aren’t exactly part of their mating ritual, are they?” Rake said.
“Nope.” Donovan took a second to figure out what they were exactly. “Those are energy weapons firing up. Lasers with the diameters of cannon balls. Plasma bursts bigger than this ship. And a host of other delights, judging from the dance of lightning across the blades of the fan tail.”
“But you’re just guessing!” Deadthrall said.
“If you want to be technical, yes. If you want to be realistic, the truth is probably worse,” Donovan replied. “And while I hate to dwell on a sour point, we’re kangaroo hopping out here on nuclear fusion bursts, our light-speed still off line.”
One of the fantails fired. The laser beam was bigger than cannonball-wide, more basketball-wide. It knocked an asteroid chunk into another, shattering both, even as the beam kept boring toward the rapier. Thus, in one blast it had blocked most of the escape vectors open to the rapier even as the Macoon vessel kept its deathray focused on them.
“Lovely,” Rake said, trying to figure out how she was going to get them out of this one. “Let’s hope Patent is doing better.”
***
“Remind me, why we’re so determined to kill these Gypsy Galaxy humanoids again?” Ronos, the Macoon pilot of the Iso, asked.
“No idea. I have no clue who the hell they are or what role they play in things,” returned the pilot of the Araki jet fighter.
“It’s The Collectors, varda!” shouted the team leader. “They’re inside our heads with a signal they’re emanating, driving us out of our skulls. Surprised my symbionts haven’t popped.”
Ronos was still a relatively young Macoon pilot, and a young Macoon. It took decades for the smartest of them to master their own language. But he was pretty certain “varda” translated to something like “dumbass.” As to who The Collectors were, he needed no explanation there. The shivers running up and down his spine did the translating for him. As to his symbionts not losing it, as far as he was concerned, Dargas had spoken far too soon. Ronos’s symbionts couldn’t get away from him fast enough.
Rule 1 about being Macoon: Never piss off your symbionts. No matter what the cost.
Ronos, along with the others, was now officially violating his species’ prime directive. Even without being told, this rookie knew there would be hell to pay.
***
Patent had his hard shell backpack on, so he wasn’t hurting for weapons. The thing was outfitted with space-warping technology, salvaged on The Star Gate mission. He could stow more shit in there than a clown car could cram clowns.
The elevator was heading down. Well, technically, sideways, as this rocket-shaped rapier was hardly standing vertical relative to the ground. The elevator shaft was surrounded by stockpiles of weapons solutions on all sides. And the peel-back plates of the rapier’s outer hull would be between the sections housing the weapons silos. But however you looked at it, the second the Macoon pilot was inside and Patent and him were going at it, they were basically roughhousing in a live-weapons storage shed that was already lit at the rapier’s tail. Never a smart location for a wrestling match.
There were crew quarters placed on floors between the silos. Skyhawk was in one of them. Mother would have thought to design the crew quarters to survive any blasts; they’d be jettisoned into space where the occupants inside could be salvaged later. And if by later he was talking millions of years, the crew quarters would have come with cryogenic and hibernation options. Skyhawk would no doubt be delighted to hear he’d slept through it all, the conquering of the multiverse, after numerous setbacks.
Patent heard a sound coming from above. He stopped the elevator and headed up a floor. And he pulled out the hose nestled along his right leg in a u-ring, not unlike the ones upright vacuum cleaners used.
The Macoon was preparing to rip open the elevator shaft when the doors opened in his face and Patent sucked one of the critters nestled on his body right off him, one of the sea urchin-looking fellas. He quickly reversed the suction on the hose and sent the bioweapon straight back at the Macoon pilot. Under the brute force of those needles impacting him and whatever they were injecting into his face, he staggered back, dazed, groggy, and swiping blindly at the play of light and shadows before him.
For his part, Patent’s nanites ensured he wasn’t overly impressed by being exposed to the vacuum of space now that the hull had been breached. As to how the Macoon dealt with the situation…Zero-atmosphere survival another perk granted by one of his symbionts?
As much as Patent would have enjoyed mixing it up with this guy, the ship was stalled. He could feel it. Never a good thing in the middle of a dogfight. He pressed the button on his belt buckle and his hard shell backpack converted to an autonomous robot, unfolding its legs and arms and detaching from him. Its AI would know what to do with the weapons inside the space-warping cavity of its beetle-like shell. Patent left the autobot and the Macoon to it.
As it just so happened, Patent was on Skyhawk’s floor. So Patent opened the elevator on the other side and stepped into the circular hall aiming himself at Skyhawk’s quarters. Judging from the Macoon outcries coming from behind him and the recognizable vacuuming sounds, he felt confident his robot, Pack-Man, had felt no need to veer from Patent’s strategy of sucking the synergic lifeforms off the Macoon and using them against him. Apparently, so long as the Macoon didn’t piss them off, they did fine together. But once jostled, the symbionts proved very unhappy campers indeed.
Patent stepped through the sliding doors to Skyhawk’s chambers to find him tucked neatly into a queen size platform bed. Patent barely had time to entertain his sour expression. The ship took a hit that would have sent a smaller man flying. He bent over, yanked the bed off its hinges, tilted it up. Skyhawk, not surprisingly, slept soundly through the jostling.
Patent strapped the bed, frame and all, to his back and hiked off with it in the direction of the elevator shaft. Once inside he turned to the panel, and pressed the button for the bridge.
***
Skyhawk opened his eyes on a Macoon warrior and Patent’s robot-pack going at it in the hall outside his suite. Convinced he was in a bad dream, he closed his eyes, rolled over, and promptly went back to sleep, paying no mind to the straps keeping him vertical and from sliding off the bed.
***
The Macoon pilot, too doped up on the secretions of his own symbionts, now turned into angry parasites, to do anything but succumb to gravity, buckled at the knees.
Before he could hit the
ground, Pack-Man kicked him out the hole the Macoon had made entering the vessel. The Macoon’s scream was silenced by the vacuum of space. But the noise in his wake was no less screechy. That was the complex metal polymers being bent back into shape by Pack-Man, using his laser vision to soften the panels back into their original shape. The memory metal would take it from there, and the nanites at the seams would finish completing the seal.
***
“Light speed is back on line,” Donovan informed his copilots.
Then he and the others turned at the sound of the elevator doors parting, fearing the worst.
Patent came hiking in with the biggest backpack anyone had ever seen. He dropped it on the floor and swiveled it about.
There was Skyhawk, stuck snugly in bed, still sleeping.
Patent ripped off the blanket to reveal the safety belts, three of them, strapping him securely into place.
“Skyhawk!” all the copilots shouted at once.
Skyhawk did not respond.
Patent came back around and held his eyelids up with the index and middle fingers of his right hand.
Skyhawk got a look at the portal screen. “Shit, I thought I was dreaming this.”
“No, bud, that’s the rapier’s AI keeping you abreast of what’s going on,” Donovan explained.
“Wonderful,” was Skyhawk’s sarcastic assessment of the situation. “So, light speed is back on line, but the fantails still have all escape vectors blocked with their game of asteroid billiards. We should have thought to use this trick when crashing planets together back in the When Galaxies Collide era.”
“Anything for us besides 20-20 hindsight?” Donovan asked.
“Yeah, put the damn thing in reverse,” Skyhawk intoned.
“It’s a glorified rocket, dude, not a train with a caboose at either end,” Donovan shot back impatiently, as he was doing most of the firing. Rake was doing most of the dodging of asteroid debris exploding their way from the fantails’ firing options, and the still-intact asteroids blowing their way from the asteroid storm, probably explaining her silence. You could judge how serious a situation was by how quickly the banter fell off around her. The others gave off no such cues.
“Hitting reverse is like pulling a ripcord, dude,” Skyhawk explained. “It shuts down the light-drive engine, engages warp, or two times light speed, the energy shielding that pops up is more than enough for these asteroids. No escape vector needed.”
Donovan nodded. “Sweet. Provided you’re right.”
“Who do you think gave Mother the specs for this ship?” Skyhawk said. “She’s too logical to build a ship like this without my security clearance overriding her common sense.”
“Dude, check out the female Macoons.” Deadthrall put up the close-ups of several of them, splitting the split screen on the left into smaller partitions.
Skyhawk nodded. “Nice.”
“And can you believe this dick is making us blow them up?” Deadthrall asked.
Everyone glared at Donovan, Skyhawk included, shaking their heads, and saying in sync, “Emo.”
Skyhawk returned his eyes to the Macoon females. “What are they, like living coral that walked out of the sea, with their symbiotic lifeforms attached?”
“Looks that way,” Deadthrall said. “Their ships look rather deep sea inspired too. Their fantails and their fighter jets are transparent and lit up, like deep-sea jellyfish that have been weaponized by altering their material science some.”
Donovan had engaged reverse thrusters.
Just like that they were tearing through the debris field at warp factor two. As a bonus, the wake created by the retreating rapier sucked the fantail ships straight into the debris field they themselves had made an even more complicated mess of. The explosions behind the rapier made it look as if they were blasting off instead of slipping out of standard space-time.
Patent’s Pack-Man returned to him, folded itself back down after hopping onto this back. Patent shouldered the straps.
“We’re getting distress signals from Omega Force,” Patent announced responding to the red alert beacon on his wristwatch.
The Alpha Unit cadets shook their heads with impatience.
“Why are we not surprised?” Skyhawk said. “Wake me up when we get there.” He turned over in bed and promptly went back to sleep—standing up.
The Rapier dropped out of warp speed moments later. Patent, as sour faced as ever, used the same two fingers to pry open Skyhawk’s eyes. “Omega Force grabbed the Starhawks!” Skyhawk blurted. “There’s a chief AI on each of those things whose brain is like a hundred times the size of this rapier. It comes with a fleet of its own fighters and can do up to warp twenty. A two year old could fly out of a collapsing universe in one of those things! The dinosaurs!”
“Stow that shit,” Patent said, trying unsuccessfully to repress his smile and his pride in his boys and girls who had finally come of age, born to the Gypsy Galaxy as if they had been bioengineered for it.
Skyhawk sighed. “Take us in for a look see.”
“Yolo.” Rake twisted the wheel and used light speed to close the gap in seconds.
“Hit the brakes, bruh,” Skyhawk instructed. The rapier slowed to a still. It was their eyes looking to jump out of their eye sockets. The Starhawk was trapped, all right. “That’s a Macoon minefield.”
“Yeah, how is it I know that?” Rake asked. She noticed the sweat on her palms as she took her hands off her joy sticks, and used it to straighten her hair.
“Because I programmed the rapier AI to stuff our brains with transgalactic space battle techniques while we sleep,” Skyhawk replied, “tapping the galaxies in The Collectors’ Menagerie.”
“You hacked Mother?” Donovan exclaimed. “Better hope that bitch doesn’t hold grudges.”
“Nope, I tapped the Akashic Fields.” Skyhawk talked keeping his eyes on the port screen, assessing. “Not even Mother has access to this information.”
“The Akashic Fields?” Deadthrall needed more convincing. “As in God’s memory? As in Ervin Lazlo was right?”
“Apparently. I’m not sure how I did it. Hell, I’m not even sure I initiated the download,” Skyhawk confessed.
Donovan sighed. “Great. There’s been enough talk of Leon becoming Hell’s bitch. Of course, he could be channeling God’s, I mean Techa’s fury. Who’s to say? But now, you too? Who’s the next puppet on a string doing the bidding of nebulous and nefarious parties? I thought that was the whole point of this insurrection—to free us from entities like that.”
For now, no one was inclined to discuss the matter further.
“If my Akashic memories serve me correctly,” Skyhawk said, “this minefield was deployed long before the Gypsy Galaxy thought to interject ourselves into these galaxies’ pissing matches with one another. Just our dumb luck to have The Collectors set us down in a spot in their Menagerie that had been previously mined.”
He was done assessing. “No wonder they’re stuck. If that Starhawk’s AI fires up its big brain, the energy burst will be felt by the mines, and kaboom.”
“The Starhawks’ supersentiences are super-cooled, and super-conducting. I’m putting out more heat bitching at you,” Donovan squawked.
“Yeah, but those mines don’t give a shit about you. They were programmed to feel for ships like her,” Skyhawk said, still staring at the screen, contemplating options.
“We used light speed to get here,” Rake said. “Why didn’t they come after us?”
Skyhawk groaned. “Does anyone pay attention to their dreams around here?”
“Oh, yeah, I remember now,” Deadthrall said. “They don’t care about small fry ships, just the big bounty ships.”
“Signal the Starhawk chief supersentience to use its space-warping capabilities,” Skyhawk instructed, “shrink itself down to our size, and blast the hell out of there.”
His fellow copilots all swiveled toward him at once. “You’re shitting us, right?”
“Yea
h, yeah. I had Mother add that option to all the Starhawks. The biggest problem is shrinking the humanoids down. Space warping for living organisms is a lot more complicated. But that AI is big enough to upload them and just reprint their bodies when they’re on the other side of this.”
Donovan nodded. “The resulting energy burst?”
“Let’s hope the AI’s reflexes are faster than the ones in that minefield,” Skyhawk said somberly.
His copilots rubbernecked his way again, unsure about putting Omega Force lives into their hands with this level of certainty. They shifted their gaze to Patent for the okay. Patent nodded. “All right, Pops, for the record, this one’s on you,” Donovan said, and transmitted the instructions.
Donovan stared at the port screen and gasped. The minefield had erupted. “Shit! Was I too late?”
“Nah. Like Mother, that ship’s chief AI thinks in Singularity Time,” Skyhawk explained. “Your upgraded nervous system is processing ancient history as far as it’s concerned.”
Ajax’s voice came over their COMMS. “Thanks, guys. Hey, I got one for ya.” Switching into his characters’ voices, he said, “‘Do you think there is intelligent life on Mars?’ asked John. ‘I sure do, replied Bob; you don’t see them spending billions of dollars to come here, do you?’”
All the Alpha Unit cadets shook their heads slowly and groaned. “You really need to update your material, dude,” Skyhawk said.
Ajax sighed. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. I must have been feeling nostalgic after that close call.” He signed off the COMMS, mercifully.
Skyhawk craned his head to his left where Patent was still staring at the screen in amazement. “Where to next, Pops?”
Patent tapped his watch and threw the coordinates up on the big screen. “Great,” Skyhawk said looking at the plotting. “That’s a Vibran minefield. Even worse. Those bastards are the best at getting space-time to bend to their will. This is going to be ugly, I’m telling you from now.”
“How does he know this stuff?” Donovan complained. “And don’t say ‘the Akashic Fields.’ That talking point has been beaten to death already.”
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