by S E Zbasnik
“I…” he stepped back and looked to Brena, who seemed even more somber than usual as her always lifted head bowed down.
“She has to be,” the dead voice continued, “or she’d be here too.” Darya’s small speech ended in a sob as tears washed away the spider mascara across her top and bottom lids. The small flood claimed a false lash done in electric blue. It slid down her cheek and reattached itself to her earlobe.
“Hey,” Orn said, trying to summon years of expertise in anti-depression into his voice, “the important thing is you’re alive.”
“The important thing is my sister’s fucking dead,” she gasped, “and I’m not.”
The elf and goblin mumbled their apologies as if they had anything to do with it, or could alter time and bring her back. It was a strange quirk of others species dwarves didn’t understand. Why take blame when you had nothing to do with the tragedy? They also didn’t understand the proper family structure, but Orn wasn’t in an educating mood.
“How far removed?” he asked Darya, fighting down a fatherly urge to wipe away the tears still plummeting off the sides of her reclining face.
“Second.”
“Ouch,” he said, hoping it’d be third or at least second tertiary. A true second was as good as your biological sister.
“Yeah,” Darya said, “ouch.” The momentary rise of teenagehood gave the pilot hope. Maybe there was a chance.
“When we get out of this, you’ll be there to return her to the lava.”
“Orn!” Brena shouted as if he cursed during the middle of a eulogy.
But Darya didn’t respond positively or negatively at first, her fingers slowly tapping against the counter. Orn recognized the ditty, a song sung at every dwarf’s birth and funeral. ‘From that which we came, we return. None the richer, but all the wiser.’ Her fingers paused when it got to the health verse and she smashed her fist down. “I don’t even…I can’t even…I won’t be able to put her body…” the sentences overlapped as she failed to say the word hanging over her head. Leg. She’d always flinch, always momentarily frown every time she heard those three letters together. Orn twisted his own hand around, flexing the servos as he tried to forget.
“We have a situation,” Brena said suddenly, her movements freezing as she pointed her weapon out the glass. The shotgun didn’t have a scope, be a bit weird really to install one, but goblins ain’t known for common sense. Still, she looked down the notch at the end as she tracked something.
Orn rose from his vigil over the girl and tried to crunch as little as possible through the shattered glass. “What is it?” he asked in his indoor, Ferra-has-a-headache voice.
“Movement,” Brena gestured out across the smoking remnants of what was once a fairly nice shopping center to a speck of dirt. The speck of dirt didn’t seem to notice an elf eyeballing it, and a dwarf pretending to see it.
“Okay, what do we do now?”
“Are you not always on the missions with our ex-Knight captain?”
“Yeah, but she does the thinking stuff and leaves me to do the heavy lifting. Come to think of it, I should really demand hazardous pay or at least extra labor wages. My contract said nothing about lifting, heavy or otherwise,” his voice babbled.
Brena’s form hardened as she whispered out of the side of her lipless mouth, “Will you refrain from speaking.”
“Okay,” was as far as Orn got when a black uniform strolled from the right of their vista. The uniform and whoever was inside didn’t spot them at first, his attention on the smoking crater, but a quick turn of his head and he’d be face to face with elf and dwarf. “Shi…” was what Orn added to the fight.
Brena moved almost as quickly as her sibling, one arm grabbing the man’s, as she tossed the gun to the dwarf. He caught it seconds before it smashed into the floor, glass slicing along his real fingers. She yanked the terrorist’s face into the still standing doorframe, embedding glass into the helmet. He began to scream but her other hand poked through the gap in the armor and her fingers dug into his exposed throat, collapsing the windpipe. He struggled, but her grip was mithril as she pushed into him. Slowly his knees buckled, but he still waved his hand about, trying to flail at the elf. She grabbed it away from her, then bashed the palm against the glass, embedding more of the shards through the armor and into flesh.
He’d have screamed but no air made it to his lungs. The helmet lolling back inhumanly, she released her grip and the body thudded to the floor.
“Is he dead?” Orn asked, eyeing up the flighty elf with an entirely new terror he didn’t think possible. All those lesbian jokes flashed before his eyes.
“No,” she said, smoothing down the sleeve the terrorist wrinkled while fighting for breath.
“Why the shit not?” Orn asked, training the abandoned gun on the man.
Brena turned her yellow eyes on him, a resolution burning within that usually only occurred in the highly religious or the deeply political. “I do not kill.”
“Great, great, that’s just fantastic. So now we have a mostly strangled terrorist minutes from regaining conscious. We can’t just drop him off and hope he completely forgot the last few minutes. And I assume you don’t have any rope to tie him up,” Orn called to the goblin.
Dabore’s voice was rattled by the turn of events, but he rebounded quickly, “This is a —”
“Jewelry store. Yeah, I noticed.”
But the elf didn’t back down from her stance, “I do not take life.”
“You just deeply inconvenience it, with glass shards,” Orn said, gesturing to the blood welling from the cuts into the man’s arms. His labored breathing was evident now.
“I did not say I will not maim,” Brena said, her tone colder than usual. Orn shivered from her turn of the eyes and the fear sweat working through his clothing.
The dwarf looked out at the explosion where a dot still moved. If the man awoke and made any noise they were into dark space without MGC. They could drag the man inside, gag him with one of Orn’s socks, and then the dwarf could sit on him. It’d work for all of five minutes until their backs were turned watching for more guards.
Then he heard a soft cry. Not a weeping one, more like a baby calling for a lost mother while migrating through foreign territory. His eyes fell upon the girl half mangled for daring to go shopping with her sister. A sister she’d never see again. Anger made the decision easier for Orn.
“Do you have a silencer on this thing?” he asked the galaxy.
The goblin blinked his lids and he babbled, “I, yes, of course, but…”
“Of course,” the dwarf said and began to inspect the metrics on the gun, searching for something that could be marked with an S or perhaps a finger placed before some lips. He flipped on and off the safety, before Brena poked a button on the side. She didn’t say anything as she stepped away from the living man.
Orn aimed for the labored back first, the shot should tear through his insides and leave him bleeding across the glass just like he was, just like Darya was. It would be a slow death. Sighing, Orn switched his sights to the head and he pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Steam rose from the gaps in the suit as the fiery eyes of the onboard djinn glared down at Ferra. Or so she assumed, the damn thing never talked so it was hard to guess how it felt. He could be farting for all she knew. “You think I’m happy about this, gas bag?”
Monde leaned back on his heels as the five feet of elf took on the eight feet of igneous golem. He wasn’t certain if one could piss off Gene, but he did not want to be around if it were to ever occur. Almost nothing in the galaxy could penetrate a djinn’s shell, and if one did you’d only have a disembodied, homeless, and very angry djinn to deal with.
Gene puffed smoke around his eyes and Ferra waved her arm at him, “Yeah, I don’t know what the shit that means. I didn’t study the xenogenic smoke signal language that Variel did.”
The swirls rolled in his eyes and the head lifted higher. His long ar
m gestured to the sealed airlock door then back to the pair of them clustered beside the embarkation room. Their favorite lantern was left upon the sign in desk as the cracks in Gene’s suit provided more than enough light to guide by.
“You want us to get you a souvenir?” Ferra stabbed at his pantomime.
The massive shoulders slumped as the djinn admitted defeat. He could spend hours trying to convince the elf that abandoning ship in this particular emergency was ill advised and she’d ignore it every time. Turning around, Gene placed one of his massive hands upon the manual crank sealed in the event of anyone trying to escape the ship and demanding a refund. Without any sign of struggle, he turned the antiquated wheel and pressure popped around the airtight seal. Slowly, he yanked back the door and opened up the ship to the vast expanse of the spaceship version of a parking garage.
Plastic docks hovered on each spot above the official docking bay, extending towards the door off a sturdy platform for the elevator. Ferra glanced towards their upstairs neighbor, a Qilin frigate. The bulkheads shimmered the same way their scales would, though the patterns made no sense. “So far so good, there is air and most ships seem to still be restrained.”
She risked putting a foot on the floating dock. It took her weight, only bobbing a millimeter as if it were on water. Many of the traveling virgins would scamper across the bridge afraid pausing for a moment would cause the entire facade to collapse and they’d fall to their death. They probably thought that because it was a favorite spatian tale for old deck hands to scare the kids with.
Ferra walked a half dozen steps before turning back to look at her doctor. He seemed to be clinging to Gene as he peered onto the dock. “What are you waiting for?”
Monde gestured to the levitating lift and asked in a squeaky voice, “How do we know it works?”
She tilted her head and stated, “I ain’t dead yet.” And then she jumped, causing the dock to bob more as it drifted below the ship’s belly. An un-orcish color coated Monde’s face and she jumped twice more, landing with increasing panache. When she twisted her fingers in a ta-da pose, the orc frowned and stepped around the door jam that was Gene. The djinn said nothing, but it’d have been shocking if he did.
Sliding one leather heel, then another out, Monde peered above his head, then below his shoes. When he got another three steps out, he glanced behind him past the muted greys of the Elation to the space beyond. “By the stars!”
Ferra rolled her eyes at the cutesy fake curse, but she rose to her tiptoes and saw around her ship. A much less PG string of expletives slipped from her throat as the plumes of smoke parted to reveal the twisted wreckage of a dozen or so ships meters past their own. The warped skins of the dead ships spiraled around the black hole of debris where something must have exploded. Something gargantuan exploded.
“We need to get out of here,” the elf said, trying to calculate the detonation necessary to rip through not only the kamikaze ship but the other dozen hulls surrounding it. One thing was certain, no one was pulling off an emergency escape from the blast range. The hanger door was partially destroyed, shields shimmering in place to keep the station itself intact, but there was no promise those would hold. Spit and glue would have looked more substantial.
“Should we tell Gene?” Monde asked, pointing back to the already sealing hatch on the Elation.
“Something tells me he already knows. He seems to already know everything,” Ferra muttered. “Come on, whatever, whoever did that could still be here looking for stragglers.”
She waved him onto the elevator; a scrapped piece of freight shipping equipment designed to throw boxes about and later repurposed to hold a few organics. The non-corporeals relied upon their own transit system of floating, so anything made for those with bodies was an afterbirth thought. Tiny would be an upgrade for the size of this lift; she shifted into the control panel to avoid getting far too personal with their doctor.
Ferra said a small prayer that any thorns in her path stay out of the damn way, and pushed the button. The lift shuddered, tipped towards the front sliding Monde towards her, then dropped. Her stomach rose into her throat from the plummet. She glanced towards Monde, but the orc seemed fine, as if he barely felt the inertia yanking his internal organs out through his ears. Auditory holes. Whatever. He even picked a smudge off his collared shirt. Damn evolution, why’d you have to short shift those of us who deal with these things on the regular?
Ferra counted down the wooshing docking stations through the gaps that would be windows if glass were in place. Only another thirty more to go, then seventeen, ten.
“This will slow down before reaching bottom, yes?” the orc showed his first signs of discomfort.
“Kinda,” the elf gritted out, preparing herself for what came next.
As the flashing 3 slipped to 2 then 1, a bubble snapped from the ground, encircling above to smother them in protective padding. The platform whipped into the ground, barely bothering to slow down as it acted like a trampoline hurling the elf and orc up the endless elevator shaft. Only the padded bubble in a mishmash of colors, stopped them from flying out of the entire shaft and taking a long crash onto the ground. Ferra’s elbow sunk into Monde’s chest area, causing more damage to her body than his. He instinctively grabbed onto her at the apex of their rise, as if he could stop her from falling, but another bubble appeared below them. It trapped them in place, smushing the air out of lungs as it cushioned their fall.
Slowly that one deflated, depositing two bedraggled people on their knees. As she rose to her shaky legs, she pressed on the release button, and the cover bubble receded. Monde seemed a bit shaken but didn’t ask the multitude of questions any normal traveler had after taking a freight elevator. Designed for comfort they were not. On most forward thinking worlds they were banned from public use at all.
As Ferra was about to open the door, Monde’s hand grabbed hers and pulled it away. She glared and he dropped it before saying, “Do we know what awaits us out there?”
“Vinyl flooring, half stained styrofoam coffee cups, plastic chairs, and a black and white vid screen that’s tuned to the all yelling channel.”
“And the possibility of a dozen or more of the women that caused all that destruction.”
Ferra opened her mouth to argue that you’d have to be an idiot to willingly wait around in a waiting room, but to attack a space station by exploding the passenger docking bay required a lack of mental fortitude. “You make a fair point.” She crossed her hands and stared at the door button, then tried to peer through the opaque glass around the elevator shaft. “What do we do then?”
“Your ears?” Monde said, pointing to her pair as if they suddenly magically sprouted.
“Yeah, I have them.”
“Well, I thought that the elven hearing range was beyond that of the average…”
“I’m not a bloody superhero. I can’t penetrate walls with my metal melting vision either.”
“I’ve watched you reduce quite a few people to ash with a glare,” the orc muttered, out of his depth. His tactical training was of the triage variety, and the patient was rarely trying to kill the doctor.
Ferra dropped her head and tapped the back of a screwdriver against her temples. A light “pffft” floated through the air as the air compressor for the safety bubbles reset. She watched the shuddering of the metal flaps where the bubble was stored. A thought took hold. Ferra turned towards the control panel and edged her fingers around the cover plate. “Shouldn’t be more than a…” before she could push the lock switch, the panel fell into her fingers. Wires overlapped a circuit board humming in a uv purple from the microMGC running through it.
“Do you have something?”
“Yeah,” Ferra said as she yanked out her MGC interruptor. She wouldn’t have long as she redirected the power flow for a few minutes. “Probably the stupidest idea I’ve ever had,” she added as she pushed the button. The lights fell inside the elevator as the screen below her lit up.
***
Monde calmed his arms after shaking his hands in preparation and glanced upwards. A tuft of blonde hair was all that was visible in the sky crypt. Comforting. Swallowing, the orc said to the world, “I am pressing the button.” The world didn’t respond back.
“Okay, good. Activating door now,” Monde said as he poked the button with enough wires triaged around it he was afraid he’d be electrocuted upon touching it. He asked Ferra if that would be the case five times, by the fourth she stopped talking to him.
The panel bonged to announce an elevator landing and the door parted apart mostly smoothly. It opened to a tumble of the plastic chairs piled on top of each other beside a blackened hole in the wall. Blood slicked across the concrete floor in a drag mark towards the customs office. The glass was smashed in, a body slumped across the desk, as two humans in black uniforms paced about, poking at their hands in the universal symbol of boredom. Monde turned his eyes to the right to find another two bashing against the unresponsive view screen. It only flashed more of the same family values from Kitsune News.
The last human, leaning next to the cake machine, turned to spy the orc standing alone in the elevator. Blue frosting rimmed his mouth as he fumbled for a forgotten gun.
“Excuse me, I appear to be lost,” Monde said as the human advanced upon him, wielding the half eaten baked good as if it were a grenade.
The orc backed up into the elevator, all smiles as the human joined him in the enclosed space. “If you would be so kind as to point me towards the docking manager,” he continued, “I have a few complaints to register.”
Monde didn’t stop his friendly banter even as the human dropped his precious cupcake and extracted a blade. It was rather pathetic by orc standards, but he seemed impressed by it. Cruelty replaced the shocked frown on the human’s scraggly face.