by Ian Cannon
Ben flew like a shot across the room, an easy fifteen feet, and smashed against the wall. He slouched, groaning, “Oh-oww, that hurt.” That was like no gut shot he’d ever experienced. He shook his head asking himself if he were bleeding internally. He just might be. No time to ponder.
Ravekk stormed toward him, wrenched him up by the collar cursing, “You Guilder wormdog!” and spun him around releasing him at the zenith of his power—and his power was, unfortunately, a magnanimous thing. Ben smashed into a nearby work desk that didn’t budge. He bounced off it. It rattled his kidneys and he groaned, “Aye-aye-aye, that smarts like a mother.” He would probably have to retrieve said kidneys off the floor later.
Ravekk approached again. Ben was a rag doll in his clutches. He’d shot the man-thing with several blasts at Hominus IV, and it barely put him unconscious. Without his plasma pistols, he was a goner. Ravekk leaned down, picked him up by the neck. Ben’s teeth clenched, face went purple. The man-thing growled, “Guilder wormdog.”
“I—heard you—the—first time!” Ben choked, and kicked him sharply between the legs. It had no affect. Ben’s hope fell away. A man who couldn’t even be kicked in the balls was no man at all. This was something else. Maybe a bio-mech halfsie. Maybe a Minotaur-bot. Or maybe the man-thing just had tough, flubbin’ junk.
“How far out are we!” Tawny cried, eager to get into the fray. The inner-warp tourbillion swirled beyond the viewport like a kaleidoscope, all reds, blues and blacks.
REX said, “Not far. In fact we should be arriving in three, two … one!”
They felt the lurch of an inner-warp dropout, and the view switched to the Mortus moon zooming up at them, going from a gray speck to a big, bloated planetoid. The battle was a speckling of twinkles one second, the next they were amidst it, zipping in between two huge cruisers locked in combat, explosions bucking them around. This was the valley of death.
“Evasive drive!” Tawny called.
“Yeah—” REX said as if through clenched teeth. They hurled through a web work of zipping laser blasts bull-nosing bits of space debris off their bow.
“Hold on!” REX called.
He sidled up against the portside Orbin cruiser dodging structural outcroppings. Everything zipped by in a speedy blur. An explosion rattled them violently. Tawny banged around in the cockpit seat. This wasn’t exactly like tickling the snake.
“Sorry, Boss.”
A flurry of fighters streaked by them from behind at break neck speed, enemies pursuing enemies, some zipping by just overhead, others coming from below. They carried off between the cruisers until opposing cannon decks unleashed a gauntlet of laser fire. The fighter craft evaporated into swirling chunks. All of them.
REX screamed, “We gotta get out of this mess!”
He dipped down and pulled a sharp veer maneuver shifting their position under the cruiser’s fuselage. Belly cannons roared out at a lower target. And below, that lower target sent streams of firepower back up.
Laser blasts pelted at them from above and below. This was no better than the valley of death. It was an endless crossfire. And they were right in the middle of it.
REX navigated a field of evacuating columns of atmosphere from rupture points in the overhead cruiser. Everything bucked and jarred as the artigrav struggled to adjust. Something erupted up ahead. A huge blast of fire emitted. Tawny’s eyes went wide, mouth dropped. It was too late to juke around. They burst through the wall of flame, both screaming. Ahead, the battle only thickened.
“Awe gee—where’s Cap when you need him?” REX cried.
“Just get us to the moon,” Tawny groaned.
“Point A to Point B,” he said and nosedived at a ninety-degree angle. “Uh oh,” he groaned. A Faction gunboat below zoomed up at them. A field of zipper fire burst toward them, red blinding streamers. They split through it and darted past the gunboat, but the parapet swiveled around keeping them in its sights.
“We’re being targeted!” REX screamed. He felt his own bubble turret ignite a stream of laser blasts from its spinner gun. He threw a quick glance behind using his three-sixty optical sensors and watched the parapet burst apart. He laughed, said, “Oh, I get it. Nice shot, Boss.”
Tawny had slipped below and manned the bubble gun. She laid down a stream of laser fire pivoting the gun back and forth wildly, clearing away anything that might be behind.
They approached the moon descending through the combat zone.
An alarm sounded. Tawny saw the problem before REX did.
There were two of them flying in tandem, coming right at them.
REX said, “Boss, we got a—”
“I know!” she screamed. “Push it, REX!”
A Faction battle cruiser had spotted them on a course for the lunar surface and deployed a pair of seeker missiles.
Seeker missiles.
They were known to lock onto a target and never let go. It had been reported on many occasions that a seeker missile would pursue for hours through open space at long distance. Rarely, they’d even caught up to targets that had escaped through inner-warp days later and destroyed them. They were patient things. Deadly.
Tawny put the near one in her sights and fired. It was a good shot. Pure talent. The blasts bounced away harmlessly.
Yep—she was afraid of that. They had shields.
“Rex,” she said. “We’re in trouble.”
“Hang on, Boss,” REX said. “It’s about to get real bumpy.”
They sank into the moon’s thin atmosphere. Everything quaked and rattled around her. She never took her eyes off those missiles. They were big, relatively slow moving, but persistent. She murmured, “Those missiles get much closer, and we’re going to find out what bumpy really is.”
Ravekk hurled Ben across the room again. He smashed into a tray full of operation tools. med canisters and suture kits and bandaging fell down around him. So did a steel scalpel. Ben picked it up pinched between thumb and finger, looking at it miserably. The thing was puny. But he’d take what he could get.
Ignoring his pain, he launched himself at Ravekk leading with the tiny knife. It sank into the man-thing’s neck making him growl and thrust Ben away. He pounded into a bracket of steel rods that clattered down around him. He threw the scalpel away, grabbed a rod—three feet of deadly leverage. Or maybe just painful.
Again, he’d take what he could get.
He charged at Ravekk poised for a shot. He swung like a madman. Ravekk absorbed the shot with his head and sent Ben far away, yet again. He smashed into a tall locker crashing it open. Debris fell down around him, namely his plasma blasters. He laughed in a serendipitous way and discarded the pole for a blaster.
Ravekk reacted quickly, unsheathing his scythe weapon from his back and flipping it around, going into an attack posture. Ben pointed the blaster and unleashed a volley. The blasts sluiced off his armor in a shower of sparks. It did nothing.
Armor upgrades.
Ben looked at the gun in his hand, aghast.
Ravekk lunged forward, his scythe held up in a death strike. Ben fired a final, desperate shot. If he couldn’t kill his attacker, maybe he could disarm him.
He was right.
The shot pinged off Ravekk’s hand in a blossom of sparks, loosing the scythe from his grip and sending it flying through the air. Even Zelit had to duck from it, flinging his arms defensively. It hit the ground and slid to a stop at the far end of the room.
Ravekk hesitated, supremely angry. His eyes slid over to Ben, mean and bloodthirsty. Ben shrank back. This was going to hurt. Ravekk charged. The man-thing was on Ben before he could fend him off, picking him up and throwing him across the room. As Ben sailed through the air, the strangest thought passed through his mind, full of odd tranquility—Well, here I am again… airborne.
REX scissored back and forth through the black mountaintops. The rockets pealed after him. They looped and spiraled, veering apart, avoiding the natural landscape, then closing formation, always blasting f
orward.
The ship dropped in altitude entering a deep, broken valley, weaving and bucking. The rockets followed, pinned in, constantly approaching, then falling back, avoiding obstacles, always resetting and continuing their pursuit.
REX heaved his way around a huge mountain formation following its curvature in a tight, looping path. One rocket followed, the other split away taking the opposite approach. REX read his sensors well, saw the second rocket taking on a collision course. It startled him, gave him the most scurrilous and intriguing sensation.
It irked him.
“Trying to outsmart me, eh?” he said, and jerked into a ninety-degree climb. There wasn’t a second to spare. The first rocket read him, followed. The other sensed REX evading, extrapolated a second object approaching—its counterpart rocket.
It juked trying to avoid and went spinning away, out of control and tumbling through the night.
REX exploded up above the mountains, leveled off and came back down. The rocket tracked him well and followed tightly.
REX said, “I think we shook one of them.”
Tawny, who was still down in the bubble turret, looked hard. She couldn’t see the second one, but the first was still hot on their trail. “It’s better than nothing, REX, but we still got…” Something stole her attention away, made her scream.
A hot-white, laser-straight blast of light came at them from the pitch-black mountain face. It struck the fuselage and exploded. Tawny winced. REX bellowed in pain. He started vibrating, lights blinking off and on. Sparks Shot up from Tawny’s gun panel making her yelp and jerk back. She looked out the bubble window, saw where that blast had come from. She knew that weapon. She’d seen it before.
Rogan’s sniper.
He or she, or it, or whatever it was, was still operating out there in the night. Probably a robot with one thing on its mind: kill Tawny Dash. And now she knew where it had come from.
“Boss!” REX hollered. “We’re losing power.” His engines sputtered.
Tawny looked out fraught with desperation. That rocket. It was gaining now. Gaining fast.
She scurried up the turret ladder and into the cockpit, throwing herself into the pilot’s seat.
Gods, Benji baby, I need you now! Take my hand!
She snagged the two-handed control stick and screamed, “REX, give me control!”
“Take it, take it!”
She slammed the thruster control forward. She could feel the catch and go of a sputtering engine. It was better than nothing. She pealed into the tightest, fastest arc she could muster, U-turning toward that mountain peak, and straightened out. The rocket followed suit, constantly gaining. It moved closer—a hundred feet. Seventy feet.
That mountain neared, grew through the viewport, a big black world of death approaching fast.
Fifty feet. Thirty.
REX screamed in a panic, “Boss, we’re gonna die!”
Twenty feet.
“Ahhhh!”
Ten feet.
Tawny wrenched the vessel to the port like a mad woman. The rocket attempted to adjust. Too late. It struck the mountain.
REX boosted off leaving an exploding mountaintop lighting up the whole area with a blinding, dazzling show of fire. His engines kicked back on and they sailed away.
Tawny sighed huge and sank back into the seat. A moment of satisfaction enveloped her. She got that little narse-headed jackwad. No one could survive that. Not even an android. That whole mountain started coming down, avalanche style. She heard herself laugh…
Then the proximity alarm rang.
She sat back up, looked down through swollen, panicked eyes. The other rocket had reacquired. Distance: a hundred and fifty meters.
They pealed over the flatland at low level, leaving a twin rooster tail of sand in their wake a hundred feet tall. The rocket followed.
“REX,” she cried, “show me the complex!”
His digital map holo-zipped into view. She read it. Eighteen degrees west. She veered toward it watching the far mountain range approach. She pulled back on the thruster control.
“Boss, what’re you doing?”
“I’m going to let it get closer.”
“Closer! You’re always getting closer!” he wailed.
“It throws off their timing,” she said.
“Oh—then we explode?”
“There!” she cried pointing through the viewport. The flatland sped by beneath. The mountains approached. The lights of the complex were visible tucked away in areas of utter dark, miles away. “We’re going to hit it.”
“Cap’s in that place,” REX said.
“We’re not doing him any good out here,” she rebuked.
“Are we going to do him much better blowing the place up?”
“If my baby needs our help, this is the only way he’s going to get it.”
Ben clenched his teeth, eyes like slits, face turning purple. Ravekk had him pinned against the viewport with both hands around his throat squeezing. The man-thing was unstoppable. A machine. A force of nature. And it seemed it deeply enjoyed inflicting pain.
Ben wondered how much more a throat could take? This was it. He was going to die. He knew it.
He looked defiantly into Ravekk’s basilisk eyes. The man-thing returned a look that was both mad and gleeful. Suddenly, those yellow lizard eyes looked away, saw something through the window, something way out across the lunar landscape. The creature gulped, eyes went wide.
Ben gave the thing a curious look—Uh oh, something bad is coming…
Ravekk threw him down. Ben landed, choking and rasping at his neck. A roar came from the distance, growing into thunder. Something big was coming, fast. Ben shot a glance up through the viewport. REX screamed by hardly twenty feet over the complex making the entire prisoner bay quake. Ben gave a triumphant howl, fist in the air, “Yeah, Tawny!” Following closely—way too closely—the seeker rocket streaked after REX in hot pursuit, missing the viewport by only feet, and Ben froze looking a bit horrified. “Oh hells …”
The rocket skimmed over the upper command deck. REX banked straight up at break neck speed. The rocket slammed into the mountain with an earthquake explosion. The mountain shattered into huge streams of rubble throwing tonnage into the sky like geysers.
The whole complex shook with enough violence that Ben came up off the floor. Even Ravekk lost his footing. And then the whole superstructure began splitting away from its rocky foundation.
Ben looked up through the enormous viewport. The whole building began to tilt underneath him. Iron moaned. Steel wreaked in agony. Huge pylons began twisting, snapping. The floor took on an increasing decline. The lower mountain rose up to meet them.
Ben’s eyes went huge, his face spilling terror. They were about to go tumbling down the mountainside—prisoner bay, upper command terrace, east wing, west wing, everything.
He grunted, spun around and assessed his shifting surroundings. Everything began sliding across the tilted floor—equipment lockers, chairs, big pieces of furniture. He found himself dodging them as they tumbled passed.
Rogan, still strapped to his execution table, opened his mouth and wailed a high-pitched scream of terror. He couldn’t see a thing. But he didn’t have to. He knew what was happening. He could feel gravity begin pulling him into an unnatural decline.
Ben’s tumble began as the floor dropped away beneath him. He grabbed for the nearest stationary object. A table. He held firm feeling his weight begin to pull him down. Ravekk went by, wind-milling his hands at him trying to grab him. He missed and plummeted through the room. The man-thing crashed down on his back against the viewport. Free falling debris pelted down around him.
A tremendous jerk ripped Ben’s grip free. He fell, landed hard on the forward viewport next to Ravekk. The entire building jolted to a stop. The right side viewport showed the leeward command center had slammed into a mountainous outcropping, jerking the whole operation to a halt. But only momentarily. The superstructure out there began
peeling away in tremendous heaps of rending tonnage—superstructure being reeved apart by the mountain.
Ben’s jaw dropped as he spied the destruction taking place. Those people were getting their narse cheeks kicked over there.
The prisoner bay began swinging over. Gravity shifted. Inertia switched. Now everything began sliding to the left. Ben floundered for something to grab.
Rogan’s scream took on a whole new pitch, still trapped on his table as junk and garbage rained down on him.
Ben went into a headfirst belly slide, completely out of control. He found himself slipping across the slick floor underneath the torture tables, passing beneath them faster and faster, trying to avoid smashing headlong into their leg supports. Somewhere in his split-second periphery, he saw one of his plasma blasters go sliding by. He grabbed at it, missed. “No no no…” he moaned.
Then, Ravekk’s scythe weapon caught up to him sliding across the floor, about to pass right by. He reached for it, grabbed it.
Yes! I got a weapon!
He streaked past Rogan’s table. The man’s screaming came and went, fading away as he slew by. The scythe weapon caught one of the table legs, ripped from Ben’s grip.
Gah! There goes my weapon!
He went into full plummet and landed hard against the far wall at the bottom of the room trying to catch his breath.
Ravekk ended up in the corner growling defiantly as stuff pounded down on top of him. Everything crashed to a stop as the building hard-landed at the mountain base and came to a rest.
Everything went sill, breathless.
Ben opened his eyes. What would have been like looking across the lengthwise direction of the prisoner bay was now like looking straight up. At the very top of the room, Zelit clung desperately to a pipe. He hung perfectly vertical, his arms extended over his head, his greatcoat waving around him. His face was tight under duress, the fear of falling painted all over him. It would be a hundred foot fall straight down.