>>Running and dodging would be a good tactic right now.<<
No sooner had ADAM suggested she run than she stepped through the Etheric and appeared near the busted front door.
It taxed her energy to do that, but it was a quick way to dodge the missile.
It showed up in her HUD. It had lost lock on the target and flown up into the air.
She moved quickly into the fortress.
Two of the dead bodies were adult mercenaries, and the smaller body was a short alien mercenary.
So, thankfully not a child!
She strode through the opening, her eyes flicking to the missile tracking in her HUD which still seemed to be unaware of her new location.
She pulled both Jean Dukes, her eyes flicking from location to location as she looked around the area. The sensors pointed out that a massive number of bodies were coming at her from inside the main building. The outside walls were forty feet from the rectangular edifice.
She turned to her right and started running, working her way around the corner. The building was longer on this side, so hopefully she would be able to come back around and attack them from the rear once she had circled it.
After she turned the corner a round ricocheted off the wall ahead of her. She looked up at a Noel-ni who was trying to lead her as she ran. She raised an arm and shot him off the wall.
His body disappeared.
The sensors showed something large producing vibrations at the back of the building.
Rear protection?
“Ahead or go back, ahead or go back,” she was murmuring when a five-foot-wide head peeked around the corner and opened its mouth, tongue slithering in and out.
“THE FUCK!” she screamed and dodged to the right. “WEIGHT!” she yelled as she leapt up and kicked off the wall to her right.
She soared higher and angled up over the top of the fortress.
When she looked down, three more Noel-ni were locking down a substantially larger gun than she had seen before on the roof. “Who the fuck are these guys?” she hissed as she aimed her pistols. “It’s not like a spaceship is here to blow the hell out of them.”
>>Well, technically one did.<< ADAM replied.
“Move the Shinigami away.” She shot twice, hitting two of the Noel-ni. One head exploded, and the other had his shoulder splattered all over the place. Unfortunately, she realized the large snake-looking creature was starting to track her apogee. She aimed her Jean Dukes and squeezed the triggers as fast as she dared.
Inside her helmet her eyes opened wider. “Oh, damn,” she mused. “Scales that work like armor. Fucking hell!”
You could always just let it eat you and kill it from the inside.
Are you fucking with me?
Why would I do that? Also, you might notice that the missile has locked onto you again.
Baba Yaga’s eyes flicked to her HUD as a red dot streaked toward her position.
When it rains it fucking pours. She grunted and, pointing both guns, shot the hell out of the head of the snake-thing, trying to mess up its eyes.
As it dropped past the building the snake creature’s body thrashed around violently, banging against both the walls and the building, rocks and windows exploding as the armored creature reacted to the shots from the Jean Dukes.
She dropped to the ground and turned toward the snake. Holstering both weapons, she ran toward the body.
NOW! TOM yelled in her mind as she reached the snake.
She disappeared into the Etheric, running a few steps before leaping out again.
>>TOO SOON!<< ADAM warned.
But it was too late.
She was caught in the secondary explosion of the missile somewhere behind her. A large chunk of snake body slammed into her, driving her into the hard-packed ground. Her head banged inside her helmet before her body bounced into the air once more. She twisted her body to pull her feet underneath her while meat and rock chunks rained down on her. She started running back in the direction from which she had originally come.
She streaked around the corner and rolled her eyes as she palmed her Jean Dukes once again.
She had run smack-dab into the muscle she had been trying to sneak up on.
Straight into the group that had ducked due to the massive explosion a moment before.
Half of them were covering their heads with their arms.
She blew through them, shooting as fast as she could. “WEIGHT!” she yelled and kicked off the ground, twisting as she soared into the air and raining death on those on the ground underneath her. As she crested the roofline her left arm aimed, and a half second later she took out the third Noel-ni she had seen in her previous leap into the night.
As she completed her twist ADAM upped her weight, so she dropped rapidly back down.
Her arc landed her on the narrow upper walkway of the wall, and she kicked back off and bent her knees to land and roll before running forward through the front door into the main building.
Seven dead guards later, she found the asshole she was looking for and terminated him with extreme prejudice.
Using the .45s.
Baba Yaga, her armor splattered with dust-encrusted gore, considered where she was on the third floor and locked down her .45s in their holsters before pulling her Jean Dukes and turned them both to 11. Aiming them at a forty-five-degree angle, she started firing at the rock ceiling above her, blowing fragments away until a five-foot chunk of ceiling broke free and smashed to the floor.
She heard a scream from below.
Taking a few steps, she pushed off hard and sailed through the hole to land on the roof. “Bring the Shinigami down so I can see it.”
Once she saw the ship, she took a step and disappeared.
13
Planet Devon, Mid-Morning
“I’m telling you it WILL exist on my planet,” the black-skinned female said to herself. Her white hair was flying in the wind as she stepped outside of the main buildings to head for a rumored bar.
She was pissed.
>>I have looked through all the data I can find, and nowhere have I located the correct invoices.<<
“It’s not all about invoicing, ADAM.” She saw three bars. “TOM?”
Bar to the right, TOM replied.
“ADAM?” she called.
>>Why don’t you choose?<< ADAM suggested.
“I’ll take the middle one,” she replied. “It seems like a bar with good taste.”
>>The Unholy Brocken? What is a ‘brocken,’ and why would you believe it has good taste?<<
“What do you take me for?” she hissed, “an alien zoologist?” She looked at the sign again. “It looks like the kind of bar that doesn’t want to make the mistake of upsetting the MOTIP.”
Who? TOM asked.
Me, she replied.
How is ‘motip’ you?
Mistress of the Planet. M-O-T-P, so add an ‘I’ and you get MOTIP.
Why are we doing this? You have plenty of your beverage on Shinigami.
Because they need to learn, and after getting rid of that second group I deserve a break.
I believe it was ADAM who took care of the second group. You just had to stand on the stage and look scary.
How was I looking scary? I was wearing snake guts, for fuck’s sake!
Mission accomplished, TOM replied.
You have any idea how bad they smelled? I don’t think fish offal back on Earth was even close.
Some experiences need to be personal, TOM replied.
Wait a minute. She stopped in front of the bar TOM had chosen. “On Earth you could smell the difference between vampires to figure out who was their parent. Why didn’t you have problems with how I smelled back in the meeting to get those others off-planet?”
I disconnected from your olfactory sense.
Two large Shegalith stepped around the black alien who was speaking to the air. They looked like a cross between an old Earth Sasquatch and a T-Rex.
If either had been nine fe
et tall.
While the arms were a bit stubby, the lower feet had opposable appendages and were long enough to grab items and place them in their short arms.
One looked over its shoulder at the crazy white-haired alien as she waved her arms in the air, still talking to nothing.
“YOU LITTLE SHIT!” she yelled in frustration. “You told me, and I quote, “You aren’t the only one suffering here, Baba Yaga!’”
And you weren’t. I could easily tell about fifteen of the ones who were being sent off-planet were physically ill just from smelling you.
“I thought it was YOU who was sick!”
It seemed like TOM sniffed over their connection. I can’t be held responsible for your leap of illogic.
“How was that a leap of illogic?” she asked, stopping for a moment. “Never mind,” she said, resuming her trek to the door. “I know what you are doing, and it won’t work.”
Baba Yaga ignored the feeling that ADAM and TOM were communicating inside her head.
Outside the Unholy Brocken, Forty-Five Minutes Later
Aert shambled up towards the bar’s entrance. This was the third night in a row he had needed a break after work.
He reached up and scratched the little itch that was behind his carapace. At only five feet, six inches, he wasn’t one of the larger Yollins in his group of friends, but he was one of the strongest.
He sighed. He shouldn’t bitch too much, since he had a job and it paid fairly well. Tonight was a damn sight better than it had been just three weeks ago, when he had lacked a job opportunity.
Since he wasn’t into politics, he hadn’t understood why he had been fired from his job. The rumor was that, as a Yollin, he was untrustworthy. The owner wasn’t fond of the Empire. Now not only was he trustworthy, but he was being sought out explicitly because he had been fired.
Being born a Yollin was so damned weird.
His feet made a clunk-clunk-clunk noise on the street as he stepped to the entrance to the bar and shoved the door open.
He stopped in shock, his mandibles splayed wide as he stared at the view that met him inside.
The raspy voice issued from the red-eyed, black-faced, white-haired individual in the middle of the room. There were at least three tables broken that he could see as he looked around the sixty-foot by eighty-foot establishment.
Everyone except the vicious lady in the middle was either up against the wall or laid out on the floor.
She pointed her finger at Aert. “You!” He pointed his finger at himself. “Yes, you! Don’t move.” She turned her attention back to the ones standing against the wall.
Her voice was dark, sinister, and annoyed. “All I wanted…” she said, her red eyes spearing each of the twelve, “in fact, all I asked for was a Gott Verdammt COKE!”
She lifted a drinking glass in her left hand, which Aert hadn’t seen when he came in a moment before. “And you give the Mistress of the Planet thisssssss?”
“It’s, uh…” The Torcellan barkeeper swallowed as the eyes came to rest on him. “It’s, uh, Pehpseh.”
“No!” She crushed the glass and liquid dribbled from her hand. “It’s a Pepsi,” she corrected, voice dripping with annoyance. “It is the vilest of all the concoctions we humans brought to space, and when I want something refreshing after a night of cleaning up the trash, I don’t want Pepsi in the fucking morning. I wanted a damned COKE!”
She looked down at the sticky liquid that was all over her hand disgustedly. Her head swiveled to the spectators. “I’m not done with this planet yet.” She stepped over to a table and calmly picked up a cloth, and after wiping her gloved hand she continued to consider those watching her carefully. “The next time I am in town there had better be a drink worth a damn in this place or I won’t be so patient, do you understand?
Twelve heads nodded vigorously. One of the green aliens had liquid trickling down its leg.
She turned and walked towards Aert, whose Yollin eyes opened in alarm. However, she just held out the rag as she approached. “Take this,” she commanded, dropping it into his waiting hands as she walked past him and through the door.
No one moved for a few seconds, not sure yet if she was coming back or not.
When the door opened again a few seconds later, Aert, who was straightening his back, heard a high-pitched voice ask, “What the hell happened in here?”
The green alien against the wall moaned, rolled up its eyes, and dropped to the floor with a crash.
The voice behind him said, “Okay, no one’s talking. Fine.” When the figure from whence the voice issued passed him, Aert saw what was basically a stick gliding along on four legs. “Can I get a Pehpseh?” it asked as it made its way to the bar.
Twelve voices plus Aert’s yelled an answer.
“HELL NO!”
QBBS Meredith Reynolds
Admiral Thomas used the stylus to scratch an itch behind his ear, then looked at Bobcat and William on the right side of the table and Marcus and Tina on the left before glancing back down at his tablet.
“That,” he said, pausing a moment, “is a lot of fucking lasers, folks.”
Bobcat opened his hands wide as Admiral Thomas looked at him. “Well, you have a planet that is twenty-four thousand miles around. Then,” he opened his hands wider, “you have the first protection field at something like thirty-six thousand miles. That is just a spit away from the planet. Then,” he opened his arms as wide as he could, “you have your secondary field at hundred thousand miles. That is your main ship-perimeter protection field.”
Bobcat looked at William. “Some help?” William snorted and held out his right arm on the opposite side of Bobcat, who turned back to the Admiral while keeping his left arm up and hand in place. “Then we need to get outside the moon’s orbit at approximately two hundred and thirty-eight thousand miles, and outside of the gravitational pull of the moon and closer to the gravitational pull of the sun. If they were all equidistant, we would be placing the satellites at about 1.5 million kilometers.”
Admiral Thomas whistled. “So, lots of area to cover in a sphere around the Earth?”
“And then some,” Marcus confirmed as the other two guys dropped their arms. “We can mitigate some of the effort by building three smaller versions of the ESD laser on the moon, and then we have to build one on a floating platform on the other side of the Earth from the Moon.”
“Wouldn’t want a laser to have to shoot through the moon to hit oncoming enemies,” Admiral Thomas agreed. “So we need to figure out how to minimize the smaller weapons for production issues, and the larger ones?”
“How many devices do you want to place on a rock the size of the moon which might explode, ripping the moon apart?” Tina asked. “I imagine the gravity of the Earth would pull quite a few chunks down.” She created an explosion with her hands. “Kiss the Earth goodbye.”
Admiral Thomas rubbed his jaw. “Ships?”
“What about them?” Bobcat asked.
“I’m hearing a few disgusted noises from Lance and his team. Those who are willing to move to a Federation are hoping to strip us of our ships.”
William asked incredulously, “Lance is ok with this?”
“Why would you think Lance would ever be okay with someone taking away our weapons?” Admiral Thomas replied. “Hell, he’s Army, but even I give him that much credit.”
“How would you man them for a thousand years?” Marcus asked.
Admiral Thomas shrugged. “EIs?”
“Not a good idea,” Tina replied. “Have you checked up on Ricky Bobby emotional progress lately?”
“Our fighter EI.” He put up a hand. “Sorry, AI—that was spying on the Leath?” He shook his head. “No, I haven’t.”
“Yes, him.” she agreed. “I’ve talked with Julianne, and he’s pretty messed up from being in solitude like he was. Are we thinking of maybe providing EIs with top-of-the-line military ships right outside Earth’s perimeter?”
“For thousands of yea
rs maybe?” Bobcat added.
“We can always come back and replace them,” Thomas said, considering the possibility.
“How about we don’t plan on gates blowing up and shit? Not that I would ever say it could happen,” Bobcat offered.
William cut in. “I’m thinking we can use the ships as mobile defense platforms, but we need something pretty damned awesome to run them.”
“That won’t go crazy,” Tina added.
“Should we ever leave it alone for too long,” Bobcat finished.
This time Admiral Thomas reached up with both hands and rubbed his face. “When you give me the insufficient with requirements making it improbable, you finally admit you think it is impossible to accomplish.”
“Is that a Navy quote?” Tina asked.
Thomas grunted. “It’s a Bethany Anne quote.”
“What does she say next?” Tina asked curiously.
“She doesn’t,” Thomas admitted. “Dan Bosse will usually pick up the phone and start the conversation with, ‘So and so, grab two bricks…’
Tina stared at him. “That wouldn’t be my problem.”
Thomas chuckled. “Yes, but these guys are flinching,” he said, pointing to Marcus, William and Bobcat.
She looked at her teammates and snickered. “Sorry, poor organic anatomical design. Sucks to be you, guys.”
“Shows God was a female,” Bobcat muttered, “and hated men. Practiced on our design first, then looked down and thought,” ‘Wow, let’s make this super-sensitive and not place any protection around it at all. In fact,” he raised his hand, one finger in the air with his eyebrows and eyes open in glee, ‘why don’t we make it easy to locate as well? That should do the trick.’ He placed his hand on the table and leaned towards Tina. “Later, when she woke up after drinking too much, she looked down at her clay creation and thought, ‘Shit, let’s do version 2.0 and fix this mistake.’
Tina shook her head in sympathy. “Don’t worry your little head about—” She didn’t get another word out before the snickers hit her ears. She stopped for a moment and closed her eyes, tapping the table. “Okay, poor choice of words, and pun not intended.” She elbowed Marcus, who was laughing a little too hard. “Now that we all agree God is a female…”
Kurtherian Gambit Boxed Set Three: Books 15-21, Never Submit, Never Surrender, Forever Defend, Might Makes Right, Ahead Full, Capture Death, Life Goes On (Kurtherian Gambit Boxed Sets Book 3) Page 128