by Tim Marquitz
“I…uh…”
Vort shook his head. “Your lack of tactical acumen disturbs me, Furlorian.” He tapped the monitor in front of her. The two destroyers that had backed off seemed to be closing on the Paradigm again now that it had stalled, a third, smaller ship leading the way. Vort pointed out the lead craft. “That’s another leech craft, as I noted. It will attach itself to our port side, complementing the one on our starboard, and it will flood us with more soldiers than we can hope to repel or avoid no matter our understanding of their tactics. And should that fail, the destroyers will do their part and lay waste to us while we’re dead in space.”
A shudder ran through Taj, setting her hackles flaring. “What are you suggesting?”
“Not suggesting anything, Furlorian, I’m telling you what must be done. Simple fact, we push through the nearest boarding tube and the men defending it, and we surprise them by taking command of the leech ship. It’s the only way we’ll survive this. You do want to live, don’t you? I know I do.”
“You have got to be kidding,” Torbon said, having come up behind them.
“Have I shown you anything that suggests I have a sense of humor, Furlorian?” the captain asked.
Torbon sputtered, but Taj could only find herself agreeing with the alien captain. He hadn’t once hinted at being capable of humor.
“We’re so going to—”
“Don’t gacking say it, Torbon,” Taj told him with a growl. He raised his hands in surrender, unwilling to brave the fiery weight of her glare.
Right then, the clatter of footsteps filled the hall. Cabe stumbled onto the bridge, out of breath and clutching his ribs.
“We’re all here, in position,” he said through deep gasps, gesturing behind him with a thumb. Muttered conversations filled the corridor outside the bridge, the remainder of her people crowding the halls and preparing to repel the invaders.
Then another siren erupted in their ears.
“The enemy is piercing the hull at all the tube locations, cutting their way through,” Lina shouted right after killing the alarm.
Vort jabbed a long green finger at Taj. “Amass a fire team at the tube entrance nearest the bridge and ready your people to cross over.” He turned around and glanced off in the direction of the nearest boarding tube. “If we do this quickly enough, we can capture the bridge and disengage the tubes before the ship’s captain realizes what we’re attempting and calls his men back to reinforce the one we’re traversing.”
“That’s the plan? Traverse boarding umbilicals under fire and switch ships, all while hoping no one notices what we’re doing?” Cabe asked. He shook his head, his shaggy fur flying about like a lion’s mane. “I’m starting to think we should have stayed on Krawlas.”
“You’re more than welcome to remain onboard to greet your new overlords,” Vort told him. “I wouldn’t expect much in the way of kindness, however. If you thought I was cruel to your people, you should…”
Cabe sneered at the captain. “Keep talking about what you did to my people, and I’ll launch you out the garbage chute in tiny little pieces, Wyyvan scum.”
“Enough!” Taj yelled. “We don’t have time for this.” She yanked her bolt pistol from its holster. “Vort’s in this as deeply as the rest of us, so do as he says, for now.”
Taj grabbed her pouch, which she’d hung over the back of her seat, and flung it over her shoulder. She then pushed past Cabe and stormed into the corridor, marching down to where the Wyyvan leech ship’s crew had already begun to cut away the hull.
“Keep some guns trained on the corridor behind us, and a couple on Vort and Dard, when he gets here, but I want everyone ready to charge the boarding tube when I give the okay. We need to push through hard and fast, giving them no chance to realize our intentions.”
Right then, on the hull, a spark burst, the laser cutters on the other side beginning to break through the heavy steel armor of the freighter’s hull. Taj slowed her breathing and watched as a molten red line appeared and slowly circled. It was time to lead.
She waved people to the side of what would soon be a makeshift opening in the Paradigm’s hull, ensuring no one was injured when the door exploded inward, and gripped her pistol tight enough to make her hand ache.
“I hope you’re right about all this,” she told Vort as Commander Dard and the blind Wyyvan, S’thlor, were led through the crowd to stand alongside the captain. Ironically, Torbon’s aunt, Jadie, helped guard them alongside Kal. Taj offered Jadie a quick smile, but Vort’s roughened voice pulled her focus away.
“As do I, Furlorian,” he told her. “Perhaps things would be better were you to give me a—”
“No guns for you, Vort.” Taj cut him off with a wave. “Not gonna happen. Not now, not ever!”
He shrugged as if he’d expected that very answer and looked back toward the weakening hull. “Then I suggest you make ready. My former compatriots will be through the hull soon. Then the fun begins.”
The ring of fire continued on its way, burning through the ship’s side and hurling sparks at the waiting Furlorians.
There isn’t anything fun about it, she thought.
Taj kicked herself mentally, wondering why she was standing there, following the alien captain’s suggestion. He was a liar, total scum who cared about nothing but himself.
And that was exactly why it made so much sense.
His people hadn’t shown the slightest interest in him or Commander Dard or any of the Wyyvans who might have survived the fight with the Furlorians.
At first, she’d thought they might have tried to contact him, letting him know what they were planning, but then Taj remembered Lina had salvaged the communication systems of the Monger and had been listening in, hoping to get a heads up when the Wyyvans would arrive. Had they bothered to reach out to Vort, Lina would have intercepted the transmission, and the Furlorians would have realized they were coming.
That was the biggest factor in keeping her in place, heeding his advice.
Entirely clueless to what had gone down on the planet, Vort’s defeat and subsequent capture, the Wyyvan grand admiral clearly didn’t give a damn that his soldiers were aboard the old freighter. For all he knew, they were alive and well on the planet, mining the Toradium-42 for their empire like good little minions, awaiting his arrival. The fact that he opened fire from space without hesitation told Taj he was even worse than Vort, and that he’d murder anyone who got in his way.
That reinforced her decision to remain steadfast. Vort had proven he’d do anything to stay alive, and that obviously included offering up Wyyvan secrets when it best suited him.
Taj gripped her bolt gun even tighter as the last of the hull was cut away and the molten-edged slab of steel fell away from the hull and clanged heavily into the corridor. Even if she’d wanted to change her mind, her decision had been made for her right then.
“Now!” she screamed. “Hit them hard and don’t let up until we’re through!”
The crew aimed their weapons down the boarding tube and fired without hesitation, following her lead. Bolts of energy screamed down the umbilical, met by surprised shouts and screams and a smattering of return fire.
All three of those wavered and faded away moments later.
Taj bit her lip as the sudden flurry of battle died away, the enemy falling back for cover. The coppery taste of blood filled her mouth, and she thought about casting a prayer to Rowl, then thought better of it. For better or worse, this choice was on her, and Rowl sure as gack wasn’t going to help her make up her mind.
“Follow me,” she hissed and clambered over the cooling steel of the makeshift doorway. She shot off down the tube, gun blasting, never slowing.
Pride filled her as the Furlorians spilled into the tube behind her. No matter what happened on the other side of the umbilical, they were in it together. She yowled and pressed on. Near the end of the short tube, she spied the scattered movement of hostiles, readying to meet her and the charging Furlorians
. The barest of grins brightened her lips.
She’d thought long and hard about what she’d do if Vort was leading them into a trap, and she’d come prepared.
Her free hand dug in her pouch and pulled out a silver device. It sat heavily in her palm for a moment. Memories of Beaux lingered at the touch, him clutching two of the devices that ended his life, before she jerked her arm back and let it fly, sending the grenade flying down the tube and into the hallway beyond.
The surprised shouts of alien soldiers met its unexpected arrival. Terrified shouts sounded about a second later, the scuffle of boots following in its wake.
“Grenade!” she heard one scream, and all the dark-helmeted aliens who’d been crouched at the end of the boarding tube disappeared in a hurry, leaving the passageway clear.
Taj chuckled and bore down, running even faster. She burst from the tube as the aliens scattered, running for cover, their backs to her and the device bouncing across the floor.
The device she’d purposely not triggered before she threw it.
Her bolt pistol barked, ripping holes in the spines of the enemy soldiers desperately fleeing the grenade they didn’t know was inactive.
Then her crew was there alongside her, firing their weapons the opposite direction and taking out the remainder of the soldiers tasked with guarding the tube. Seconds later, all the Wyyvan soldiers were dead, smoldering husks littering the floor of the leech craft.
“Kinda surprised Vort told us the truth,” Torbon muttered, having edged in close to Taj so only she could hear him.
“Give him a gralfly for his honesty later, we’ve got more of his people to take out,” Taj told him, snatching up her unexploded grenade and slipping it back into her pouch. “Which way to the bridge, Lina?”
“This way,” the engineer said, pointing ahead of them, her weapon held high. “I think,” she added in a mumble.
Taj’s people spilled into the leech ship, Vort, Dard, and S’thlor in their midst. The captain offered Taj an arrogant smirk of satisfaction at having been right.
“Get these tubes disconnected as soon as all of my people are aboard, Vort,” Taj told him, turning away when Kal grabbed the captain and pressed him to his task. “Cabe, Torbon, take enough people to clear the ship from bow to stern. I don’t want any surprises popping out at us.”
The pair gathered a group of armed Furlorians and darted off toward the rear of the craft while Taj collected others and stormed toward the bridge, leaving Kal and a few others with Vort and Dard. “Don’t let them do anything stupid, Kal,” she called back over the personal comm to keep the captive Wyyvans from overhearing.
He muttered an affirmative.
A short distance ahead, outside the bridge, Taj and her people ran into resistance.
Blaster fire seared down the corridor to greet them, sparking off the walls and floor. Taj and the others dove out of the way, pinning themselves against the wall and making themselves as small a target as possible. Bursts of green energy illuminated the hallway, a desperate ploy to keep them at bay, and Taj heard the howl of the wounded on both sides.
She watched as one of her people was shot in the arm. The Furlorian stumbled into the corridor and was shot again, a great black hole welling at his chest. He slumped without a sound, collapsing to the cold steel floor, dead before he even stopped moving.
Taj hissed, feeling her hackles rise. She’d seen far too much death of late, too many of her people being ground down beneath Wyyvan bootheels without a care. To see one more person die was more than she could handle.
“Incoming!” she screamed, digging out her confiscated grenade again. She figured, if it worked once, the ploy could work again. The enemy had no clue the Furlorians were there to steal the ship as opposed to simply clearing or disabling it. “Heads down!”
Taj made a show of the grenade, making sure the Wyyvans saw it, and slid it across the floor, angling it to slip past the feet of the enemy soldiers in order to keep it out of the range of the blaster fire going back and forth. The last thing she wanted to do was have the device set off by a wayward gunshot.
That’d change the narrative in an ugly way.
She held her breath as the grenade skittered and bounced through the door.
Like before, the alien soldiers reacted as she’d hoped, screaming and scattering, several scrambling to corral the grenade and throw it back down the hall before it could explode.
“Idiots,” Taj muttered and broke from cover, closing the distance between her and the bridge. Her people stomped after her, trusting she knew what she was doing.
She hit the doorway, crouched low and fired at the discombobulated Wyyvan soldiers. Lina came in behind her, followed by a half-dozen of the younger Furlorians. The Wyyvan crew barely even noticed their arrival, focused as they were on the grenade.
A moment later, they were nothing more than broken corpses scattered about the room.
Taj sighed and flopped into the captain’s chair after pushing his slumped body aside. He’d held his post to the very last like a good soldier. Now he was just another dead soldier.
“Seal the bridge, Lina,” Taj ordered.
The engineer scrambled to a seat, plopping down hard only to stare wide-eyed at the console. “Uh…we have a problem.”
“What’s wrong?” Taj asked. She rubbed at her temples. Now was not the time for more problems.
“I don’t have a clue what any of this says?” Her hand hovered over the console, finger poised. “It’s all in Wyyvanese, I’m guessing. Looks like a bunch of snakes crapped on the console and slithered through it. Maybe they call that a language.”
“Didn’t you figure all that stuff out with the command cube you took from the Monger?”
Lina shook her head. “That was all mechanical work, connecting circuits and whatnot, following the current. Didn’t need to know what anything said to make it work. For this, though…”
Taj growled, triggering her comm. “Kal, as soon as those tubes are disengaged, get those gacking lizards in here. We need them right away.” She hated saying the word but, while the primitive translators embedded in their head were a miracle when it came to understanding speech, they didn’t do anything to help translate the written word.
The young Furlorian muttered something she took to be an affirmative, and Taj cut the connection, shifting the channel to reach out to Cabe.
“Status report,” she said. “Give me some good news, Cabe.”
“All clear,” he replied. “Had a few stragglers in non-essential areas, and they put up a token fight, but they’ve been dealt with and now we have a collection of dead lizards in the hall.”
Taj let out a satisfied sigh and lifted her gaze to the view screen. While she, like Lina, had no clue what the text said, she didn’t need to know the words in order to recognize the three pursuing ships closing on them. As if to emphasize the point, an alarm sounded, and the room was suddenly bathed in iridescent red.
“I can’t be certain, but I’m thinking that means we’re being targeted,” Lina said with a shrug.
“You think?” Taj mumbled, her eyes desperately scanning the console for some symbol or shape she recognized. “Today keeps getting better and better.”
The console swam before her eyes, and it was getting close to having to just guess what sequence would engage the engines and turn on the shields and hope for the best because if she waited any longer, the Wyyvan destroyers would start using their stolen ship as target practice.
Kal and the captive Wyyvans burst through the open doorway to the bridge right then. Vort grinned at seeing their bewildered expressions as they stared at the foreign consoles.
“Having problems?”
Taj leapt from her seat and jabbed her bolt pistol into the captain’s face. “Now is not the time for your smart tongue, Vort. You got us into this mess, so sit your tail down and get us the gack out of here before your admiral finishes the job he started on Krawlas.”
“No need to be aggr
essive, Furlorian,” he told her, wandering over to the pilot’s seat and plopping down. Meaty fingers flew across the console, tapping keys. He smiled as he worked, and Taj felt a twinge of panic in her gut. No matter how much he wanted to survive, her mind just wouldn’t let go enough to trust him.
All she wanted to do was blast a hole between his eyes for what he did. Still, she understood the consequences of that and kept her cool.
If only for a second.
There was a sudden burst of energy outside, and the Paradigm glowed in the wake of it. Debris pattered against the stolen leech ship’s hull, the wreckage obscuring the view screen for a moment as what he’d done started to seep into her head.
“What the…?” she cursed. “Why did you do that, Vort?” Her teeth clacked together as she screamed.
The leech ship’s engines purred, and the alien craft shot off behind the cloud of wreckage that had, up until moments before, had been the Paradigm.
“A distraction, my dear Furlorian, nothing more,” the captain replied. “The fleet has yet to realize we have commandeered their vessel and still believe us to be aboard your aged craft. They will think their leech ship was forced to fire to keep from being destroyed. That gives us a few extra moments to maneuver into a better tactical position before the ruse is discovered.”
Taj watched as the old freighter listed and spun about without control, hurtling through space toward the two destroyers and the other pursuing leech ship. Her heart sputtered, beating an angry tattoo against her ribs at what Vort had done.
The ship was the last memory of Felinus 4, the final remaining piece of history of their home on Krawlas and all who had come before. Now it was nothing more than ruined junk floating lifeless in space.
Soon, it wouldn’t even be that.
“Best strap in, Furlorian,” Vort told her. “I’m about to engage the drives. Wouldn’t want anything…untoward to happen to you, now would we?”
Taj bit back her reply and did as he’d suggested, making sure the rest of her people on the bridge did the same. Then she cast one final glance at the view screen as the destroyers drew closer and opened fire on the drifting Paradigm. A low groan escaped her as momentum kicked in, her senses coming alive as she pushed deeper into her seat in defiance of the ship’s atmospherics.