Hand lasers though, were never going to match the firepower of a Pulse Rifle. However, they were better than nothing, especially when your opponent didn’t know you were armed. Or at least, I was assuming this, since no attempt had been made to stop me using them. If it had been me, I'd have tied me to the chair so I couldn’t move at all. Then again, hurrah for arrogance.
The space suit was loose fitting, more or less one size fits all. The way I was sort-of sitting in the chair, I could grab hold of the two thigh guns through the suit, command the removal of the holsters, and move them enough to fire. My combat routines could also reasonably accurately aim them for me. The problem was where to aim. Doing so would blow holes in the space suit and put me on belt suit life support immediately. So holding off until necessary seemed prudent.
Besides, I wanted to know what I was doing here, and who this bozo was.
I undid the strap holding me to the chair, to see if it provoked a reaction. It didn't. The light movement pushed me up out of the chair, and I grabbed hold of the arms and pulled myself upright, and down, so my feet were in touch with the deck. It only needed a slight pressure with one hand to keep me there, and I moved my right hand next to my Long Gun, but resting against the side of the chair to hold me there. The other arm I let drop into a normal hands to sides position whilst standing, which also had it ready to draw the stunner.
My PC let me know when the three guns had been converted. All I needed was a target, and there really was only one which would do me any good, so I set up the combat routines to be ready.
The combat suit remained still. Whoever was in it, had the patience of a predator who had all the time in the world. Certainly one who thought the upper hand was placed differently to what I thought it was. All the same, whoever this was did have the initial advantage. And the long term advantage. I had surprise on my side, and more time to act than was suspected.
"So," I said, finally breaking the silence.
And it was a silence too. There was no sound of any kind.
"Who are you? Why are we here? What's going on?"
There was a booming male laugh from the external speaker of the combat suit.
I gave him the maniac grin. There wasn’t much else I could do, and he must surely be expecting me to be afraid, given I was so apparently helpless.
The laugh stopped.
"I am Palffy. You are here to die."
"That’s a bit melodramatic isn’t it?"
"No. Simple fact. You have less than five minutes air left. As you gasp you're last, I will smash your head in."
"Ah. Nice to know these things." I'd run a quick search, and not found a Palffy listed anywhere. "Do you spell that with one ell and two effs, or one eff and two ells?"
"Why do you care?"
"I'm trying to look you up. I like to know who's threatening me before I end them. It's also a small matter of what you're worth."
The laugh came again.
"One ell, two effs."
I'd already come up blank on that spelling.
"So you don't exist?" The combat suit made a passable nod. "Some sort of spook then? Who for?"
"Shall we just say you made more enemies than pirates when you took down part of the core Mining Industry."
"Ah. So not a spook, a corporate hitman?"
"Yes."
"So you're not worth anything to kill?"
"No."
"Damn."
The laugh boomed again. His five minutes was running out. So was my air. I could already feel it getting thin.
I made ready to move.
As the combat suit took its first step towards me, I grabbed the two thigh guns, the holsters vanished, I let my combat routines aim them, and fired. The space suit blew out where pulses went through, and my belt suit snapped into full space suit and protection mode.
At the same time, I pushed off from the deck with both feet, angling towards the door at the back left side of the Bridge.
My seven pulses hit the combat suit in the face, and the suit momentarily paused.
The holsters reappeared on my suit around the guns, and my hands seized the holes and started ripping the space suit. The biggest liability for me right now was the space suit, and I needed to get out of it as fast as I could.
I was a meter above the deck and half twisted towards the door, when the first Pulse Rifle pulse hit me squarely in the right side. A good portion of the space suit was instantly gone, and my acceleration away increased. My suit handled the blast with only minimal loss of integrity, and the momentum of the energy pulsed out the bottom of my feet. My speed increased slightly again.
The door was a long way away, and I wasn’t going all that fast towards it. I was pulling the space suit off my head when the second pulse took me in the lower back. My trajectory changed, lower now, which was actually a bonus as I had been heading for the ceiling. Now I was going to impact the top of the doorway, which was about what I’d been aiming for.
The space suit was gone from my lower torso area now, and I ripped it off my front, and dragged it downwards, hoping it would gain its own momentum and peel off my legs as I continued forwards. To some extent this happened, until the third pulse took me in the left leg and ripped its way all the way up my left side.
My direction changed slightly, and now I was going to go wide of the door. The last of the space suit now dropped off me.
I shifted into chameleon mode, and vanished. The next pulse took me in the feet anyway, and I was swung into a backwards somersault. Half a revolution later, completely out of control now, my feet smashed into the wall next to the doorway I’d been aiming for. The suit absorbed the shock, and I bounced off, still rolling, and managed to grab hold of the door and flip myself over to land my feet on the deck.
The next pulse missed, and I launched myself down the passageway.
Six
Step one, get away from the bozo. Check.
Step two, find somewhere to hide.
Step three…
Forget the steps. I had life support for half an hour. Palffy had ten times as long. This ship was dead. There were only three sources of life support on this ship, and I was using one of them already. The second was the combat suit, and the third was whatever ship had brought us here, assuming it was still here. The problem was, I didn't know where the ship was. Which was why I needed to hide, so I'd have time to figure it out.
The biggest fear I had at this point was finding the ship was more than half an hour away, minus however long it took me to find out where it was, assuming I could.
The clock was ticking. Seems like an obvious thing to say, but I made a point of reinforcing it. I wasn’t in a smashed up ship this time, and there wasn’t a constant reminder I was on a deadline. All the same, dead was the end of this line.
There was an alternative, but I'd already dreamed this scenario once before, and it really did scare me. BigMother wasn't all that far away. If I could get outside, and push off hard enough in the right direction, I could sail across the void, hoping Jane would pick up my life sign, and send an SR droid to pick me up. If it didn’t reach me in time? I wasn’t going there!
However, this did beg the question, why was I still here alone? Where were my team? I'd obviously been gone a long time now, and they should have been looking for me. Two life signs on a dead ship should have been a beacon for Jane, and help should have been on the way. Maybe it was. But I couldn’t tell.
For the moment, I was ballistic down a corridor, and unable to do anything except float along. My proximity sensors were working, the position of the combat suit was marked heading towards the doorway I’d just left, but nothing else was showing. I should have been receiving full scan data from BigMother. I wasn’t.
So, some sort of dampening field was in operation to keep my people from finding me in time, with the side effect of keeping me relatively blind as well.
Which meant…
I sighed. Of course it did. I had no way of determining where t
he ship was. There were two flight pods, and I had a fifty-fifty chance of picking the right one. If I was wrong, I'd be out of life support long before being able to get to the other one.
And the sail across the void idea wasn’t going to float either. Enterprise had been sealed shut by her failing systems. There were two entrances cut for tourist entry, down in each flight pod, and that must be where the ship was.
However, in vacuum, with a killer tracking me, I had no chance of getting to either of them in time.
No ship. No void crossing.
There was only one option left.
I slammed into the bulkhead at the end of the corridor.
As I bounced off, I used my hands to flip me over, and downwards, and flailed desperately at the deck for a hand hold. The deck covering was long ago decayed, and I managed to grab hold of tufted bits of frayed carpet still lodged between the deck metal, and get finger purchases on the metal itself. I lay there for a moment, before starting to pull myself along, following an arrow on my PC, leading me to where I hoped I could hide up for long enough to form a plan.
The arrow led me to the central stairwell. The Explorer ships had travel cars of a sort, going up-down and along the length of the ship. But since they'd originally been designed from twentieth century building elevators, they had not been considered reliable enough to not have staircases to back them up. Down the centuries, they had been updated many times, but the staircases remained. Even my ships had them, showing just how little ship designers had relied on technology to get around when the lights went out.
I pulled myself over the central shaft, and launched myself down, glad I had all the experience of BigMother's access shafts. After five decks, I pulled myself out, and headed further into the ship. The combat suit was no longer pinging my proximity sensors. I stopped myself at a door, kicked it open, and bounced off the wall opposite which sent me inside the room. I smacked into the remains of a lounge chair, stopped myself with the expedient of grabbing it and allowing my body to fall over it; and after I stopped movement, I eased myself over to a hard chair which had survived intact.
At this point, with twenty five minutes life support left, and being tracked by a homicidal maniac in a combat suit, in the gravity-less vacuum of a long decayed hulk, I needed a miracle.
Now was the time for some serious handwavium.
This was the desperate point in any hollo, where the hero pulls a rabbit out of his arse, and saves himself. Unfortunately, attempting to do anything with my arse would result in frostbite to said anatomy, and a rabbit wasn’t going to be much use to me anyway. For a moment I wondered if my air supply was gone already, and my thought processes breaking down. But no, I was fine for now. Just a matter of watching too many flat screens and hollo's.
Create what you need.
What? How?
You carry my Sceptre.
And?
You have not learnt to use it.
Use it?
Wield the Sceptre.
Huh? Like a sword?
If such is how you perceive it.
Are you saying I can think myself up a sword?
Not just any sword. The ultimate sword.
I sat there, thinking about every sword I’d ever seen or read about, across history and fiction.
I felt something settle across my back, and the suit change to create a holster for it.
Over my left shoulder was a handle. I carefully drew it out, revealing a sword roughly resembling a Japanese Katana. It wasn’t one though, as the blade was straight instead of curved, longer, and bladed on both sides. The tsuba was ornately carved with images of Kali, which would probably have scandalized any samurai who saw it. The blade had a slight shimmer to it. It looked solid, but it also had the look of a laser sword from fiction. Laser swords were one thing which had never been successfully developed, in spite of a lot of trying. The good old blaster had been easy to do in comparison.
My left hand moved towards the blade.
Do not touch the edges. They will cut everything except the sheath.
I rose gently so as not to bounce myself off the deck, and placed one edge of the sword against the remains of the lounge. Almost no effort sliced all the way through it.
I grinned, and then was serious again. I had a sword to counter a Pulse Rifle. I should have thought up a cannon of some sort. I waited to see if there was some response to this thought, but there wasn’t. I guess I’d waved my hand, and now I had to work with what I'd thought of.
Handwavium always seemed to generate the right thing in hollo's. I guess I'd not been paying attention to the mindset behind it. Maybe next time. If I had a next time.
I raised the sword tip back over my left shoulder, wondering how to get it back in the sheath, and without any effort, the sword smoothly sheathed itself.
The combat suit pinged back onto my proximity sensors, now showing Palffy to be on the same deck as I was.
I needed an ambush point.
The corridor and room layout popped up as a hollo display, and I saw a good enough corner. The problem was going to be how to spring an ambush when the opposition can also see exactly where you are.
I also needed to get there first. I pushed off gently towards the doorway, and swung myself out into the corridor, angling down so my hands would come into contact with the decking once more, after which I started pulling myself back the way I’d come.
At the corner I'd chosen, I once again drew the sword, and stood there, just far enough back to not be seen by Palffy coming the other way. He knew exactly where I was of course.
I waited as he drew near. He was walking deliberately, his suit using magnetics to keep him upright. Five meters back from the corner, he stopped.
"Come now Hunter. So you have one of those new belt suits, and a couple of pop guns. You cannot hurt me, and all I really need do is wait out your pitiful life support capability."
"So why don’t you?"
"Where's the fun in that?"
"Come and get me then."
His suit sprang to one side, away from the wall, giving him more view of the corner.
As soon as he moved, I changed the sword to my left hand, and drew my Long Gun. It was no use against his suit, but there was a place where it could do a lot of damage with a single shot.
As the Pulse Rifle became visible, I aimed very carefully, and fired the Long Gun. The pulse hit the Rifle exactly at the point where its own pulse was emitted, turning the emitter into molten slag, just as the energy of its own pulse arrived. The end of the Rifle exploded. I needed to thank BA for drilling in the fast aim at small targets, during our training sessions.
Palffy roared, but instead of jumping forward to attack, he sought the protection of the wall first. The remains of the Pulse Rifle clattered to the deck in the middle of the corner.
So, he was more assassin than mercenary. Used to deliberate killing rather than fighting.
My proximity sensors showed us to be within a meter of each other, on each side of the corner.
I holstered the gun, and shifted the sword to a right handed stabbing grip. I took a second to check the right place, and drove the sword into the wall, all the way to the hilt.
Palffy screamed. He jerked away from the wall in an uncontrolled movement which brought him around the corner into view. The sword cut through the wall, and emerged, still buried in the combat suit. I pushed it all the way in, and dragged it out of his right side.
The blade came out cleanly, with no blood stain on it. Blood however spurted out of the hole in the side of the combat suit.
Palffy wasn’t done yet though. Even though he must have been seriously wounded, the combat suit's left arm swung at me, and the hand took me in the side of the head. My suit anticipated it, increased the protection there, took the force of the blow, and the momentum lifted me off the deck, bouncing me towards the ceiling. The right hand took me in the left midriff area, staggering me sideways, and changing my direction. In seconds, I was out of
range of the combat suit's arms and trying to control where I bounced to.
By the time I had myself under control again, the combat suit had stopped all movement. My proximity sensors registered the suit, but no life sign.
I pushed myself off gently towards the combat suit, and grabbed hold. My suit immediately connected with the external air-port, and in seconds, I had full life support again.
I sheathed the sword, and took stock of my situation.
My immediate life support need was provided. But it wasn’t mobile. Yet. I sent an override command to the combat suit, seeking to take control of it. It refused. For a moment I thought about why, until it registered there was someone still in it, even if that person no longer had control. I pulsed an emergency open command to the back of the suit. It stayed closed. No real surprise, as my own suits couldn’t be opened by anyone else either. This had killed me once, but I hadn't changed it after.
I brought up the specs for this model, and hunted around for the life support. And wouldn't you guess it, it was spread around most of the suit, ensuring the person inside still had life support regardless of where the suit was damaged. Only when the controller nodes were destroyed would life support completely cease.
This was good and bad news. It meant I could cut my way in, but each life support node I destroyed shortened the amount of life support it would give me.
After spending a good five minutes looking at the specs, I drew the sword, and cut out a square from the lower back down to just above the bottom of the torso section. This gave me the view of Palffy's arse, and the back above it, where his clothes were soaked in blood. I paused, considering if I really wanted to do what had to be done now. I didn’t. But I had to.
Now it got really icky. I cut across his body in two places, and pulled out the cut out section, throwing it away into the corner, where it bounced around a bit making a horrible mess. His upper body squelched down into the same place, and I repeated the cut, remove and throw. The next cut dropped his shoulders and head into view, and I pulled those out as well, not bothering to look at the face as it too went into the corner.
Hunter Legacy 8: Hero to the Rescue Page 4