Horseplay

by Cam Daly

  She spotted Mezerello and the damaged Deep Thinker. They were partially hidden in a crater gouged from the side of the ESWAT HQ building, facing her direction. Her combat control system immediately recognized the threat of the Deep Thinker. The firing paths of its plasma cannons were superimposed as bright red lines stretching into the sky above her.

  The flyer should come from above and almost directly behind her. Kery swerved to one side, to give the Deep Thinker a clean shot and insure she wasn’t drawing Photuris rocket fire towards the injured Mezerello.

  The firing path for the plasma cannons suddenly angled lower. The three angry red lines were incredibly fast - the Molu mech controlled their weapon’s orientation with magnetic fields, which meant they could adjust direction in the blink of an eye.

  The lines arced downward like a giant red knife cutting through the sky. They passed the point were she expected them to line up with the Photuris behind her but instead kept coming lower and slewing sideways. Towards her. It should be aiming for the Craven aircraft but instead was about to catch her in the open.

  She flipped in mid-air and dove straight down. The three red lines were meeting at a single point which was almost on her. She was upside down now, trying to get her head lower than its beams could reach, but there was no cover. She wasn’t going to make it.

  Just before the red lines caught her and the golden plasma beams cut her to pieces, she saw a curious thing. A thin green targeting line was just above the ground, right in front of her face. She hadn’t noticed it in her panic to escape the Deep Thinker.

  She had an instant to look back along the path of the green line and see a heavy rifle in Mezerello’s hands. Aimed directly at her.

  Kery closed her eyes so that she wouldn’t flinch.

  Mezerello’s bullet shattered her skull into a million microscopic fragments of alien metal.

  Her body crashed neck-first into the ground of Alcatraz then tumbled end over end like a shiny rag doll. Even before she came to a stop, the Deep Thinker was aiming its cannons up again and unleashing golden fire on the Photuris. The debris which had been dragged along in Kery’s wake caught up to her as her gravitic fields disappeared, peppering the area with rocks and bits of concrete.

  The streams of golden plasma went straight into the mouth of the approaching Photuris, detonating its payload and ripping the Craven machine in half. The brilliant glare of its destruction threw strange shadows through the debris cloud around the Deep Thinker and Mezerello.

  An instant later the shockwave rolled over the pair of figures. Mezerello turned away and the Deep Thinker raised an arm to ward off flying rubble. Keryapt’s headless body was barely visible as it tumbled and flipped the last few meters towards the pair, propelled by the force of the explosion.

  Then, it wasn’t tumbling at all. One more very deliberate flip and she was right in front of them. Keryapt leapt forward and drove the flattened spear of her right hand into the Deep Thinker’s chest with a shattering crash.

  It didn’t have any mechanism to display its surprise. It was just a machine, operating autonomously, so it wouldn’t feel anything like shock that she was still alive or anger that this was unfair. Its control system knew that an enemy which had been thought neutralized was in front of it, and that its plasma cannons would recharge in two seconds. It reached out and grabbed her lower arm with its one good hand. She spread her fingers inside it like a fish hook to make sure it couldn’t easily pull her free.

  Without her head, she was seeing through back up optical sensors in her shoulders and fingertips. The view was incredibly limited, especially with one hand trapped inside the large mech. She didn’t have a mouth now either but could still transmit via radio.

  “Mez, get clear.” Kery brought her left hand over, grabbed her own right arm and used her gravitic fields and pure physical strength to crush the embedded limb at the elbow. The agony was intense for a moment, although not quite as bad as losing her head.

  Mez scrambled sideways and away, leaving the heavy rifle behind as she lunged for cover. Keryapt brought her feet up, planted them in the Deep Thinker’s chest and pushed. With the external armor of her right arm already cracked, it was surprisingly easy to rip the internal components apart and launch herself backwards. Her forearm stayed there with the Deep Thinker clutching it uselessly.

  There was just enough power stored in her arm’s gravitic nodes to perform one last violation of the laws of spacetime. The Molu machine shuddered violently and grasped at its chest. The rubble around it began to accelerate towards it. Then the pinnacle of Molu personal defense, the product of a thousand hours of meticulous assembly in zero-G, caved in like a house of cards.

  Then it too exploded.

  Kery found herself partially embedded in a ruined wall, pain flaring throughout her battered body. She pulled herself free and sat there for a moment as bits of stone and Thinker rained down. Once she was relatively sure that no other new enemy was about to come charging in, she started to probe and peer through her one remaining hand into the ruin of her neck.

  Her winglet finally arrived as Mezerello limped over. “You like where AP’s designs are ‘headed’, huh?”

  Mezerello smiled at the older Active and offered her a hand to get up. “I knew your translation engine knew the other definition, but figured Ormlan was distracted. He radioed and told me to let the Deep Thinker take you out.”

  “So you took me out first. Next time, feel free to blow your own head off instead.”

  “I knew your cranial pod wasn’t in your head.”

  “You guessed that it wasn’t in my head.”

  “Knew, guessed. That’s a chance I was willing to take.”

  “Speaking of taking chances…Ormlan?”

  A lengthy pause.

  “Fleet. Or. Too. Late.”

  The women glanced at each other in puzzlement.

  Kery ordered her remaining winglet to grapple on to Mezerello’s back.

  “Kery, you should-”

  It yanked her off the ground and accelerated south, away from Alcatraz.

  “What are you doing?”

  “We need your biolab intact. I’ll meet you in Dallas, if I can.” And this way, if there is actually a bomb in the Interloper, it won’t take us both out. Because who knows if Ormlan is still making decisions?

  Kery rose and flew wobbly towards the ESWAT HQ building, left hand reaching ahead with fingers spread wide. She did it to give her fingertip cameras a clear view, but it looked as if she was reaching blindly for someone to take her hand.

  “Open up, Ormlan. It’s time that you and I sat down face to face. Or, I guess hand to…faces. We both just want to save our children.”

  #

  The Molu bunker under Alcatraz was more extensive than she expected. And much too quiet.

  The exact layout wasn’t obvious at first, as the entire space was filled with a three dimensional maze of fluid filled tubes. They ran between dozens of large tanks occupying spaces between various human scale work areas. This was where the Molu lived and worked and played outside of their familycraft. Whole sections were shrouded in darkness. Kery couldn’t tell if that was a result of the battle above or a deliberate attempt to conceal the facility.

  “Ormlan?”

  She was without most of her ranging and detection gear, lost along with her head, so she had to rely on the visible light of the cavernous bunker to figure which way to go. A catwalk led to a flight of steps down, a path intended for the familycraft, and she followed it. There were gaps between many of the tubes and she was able to slowly build a composite picture of what awaited her below.

  The central nexus of the tubes seemed to be a platform larger than any other near the center of the maze. A half dozen beds or operating tables were at the center of the area. As she walked cautiously towards the central platform, she realized the tables had glass sides and were filled with water. That would allow a familycraft to be immersed while the Molu swam around and worked on t
hem.

  Two were occupied, but neither was Ormlan or Farley. One was a naked female form with a blank face. The other looked like a very muscular dark skinned man, but his arms were partially disassembled and held in place by tiny scaffolds.

  “Where are you?”

  “Down. Below. Craft. Yard.”

  One of the work tables had been smashed open. A mix of clear fluid and crystalline shards trailed from there to a stairway down, where more of the ubiquitous tubes had been cracked or broken. There had been a battle here, between two equally matched combatants. They hadn’t used any advanced weaponry, but had wrestled back and forth until they broke through the surrounding structure and fell down…there.

  In the half-shadowed space below, she could see that Ormlan’s pinstripe suit was torn and disheveled, but he had apparently won the fight. Farley’s body lay under him, impaled by some sort of heavy tool but still straining to move. His head was partially severed but his eyes still moved, turning to stare at Keryapt’s form. They spasmed from side to side as she watched. Ormlan didn't look up.

  “Help. Hold. Then. Can. Talk.”

  The cramped space was less a room and more an opening between tubes, tanks and equipment. She had hoped to find a way to get them both out of the bunker entirely before negotiating but using her gravitic fields in a place like this might result in massive damage. She didn’t know the state of the individual Molu in either craft, either. It could all be a trap to get her in close again, but she saw little choice in the matter. She dropped as delicately as she could down into the space.

  Farley tried to jerk free of Ormlan as she landed, but she let the two wrestle back into their stalemate. “If either of you initiate contact with me, I will destroy you and everything in here. Clear?”

  Ormlan glanced at her for the first time. “Under. Stood. Hold. Arm.”

  She reached out with her remaining hand and pinned Farley’s left arm. Ormlan sat up farther, shifting his weight to keep Farley down but freeing his own right hand. Without warning he savagely punched himself in the stomach twice. A few seconds later he spoke, his voice back to normal.

  “They took control of our internal communications and repair systems. I’ve stunned them and now we have them secured. But Farley…they have converted more than half of them, and are holding the others hostage. You have the power to rescue them. For that we will give you the human field generation technology.”

  “We have the data from the collider, plus Sousa and Park. For me to save you and your children, you have to give it all to us. The complete details on how to use the human field to locate tanglecomm technology.”

  Ormlan looked down at Farley. “So you do know. We suspected as much. We love our family, Fleet, but we will not give you that. We dare not. For too long we have negotiated with the Craven and others like them. To share worlds, to compromise our future. This will finally give us the power to be free of them.”

  “You would fight them all? Attack them first, without warning, as the Craven have done to us?”

  “Of course! It is nature of civilizations. Kill what you hate. Hate what you fear. Fear what you don’t understand. We will never fully understand what it means to be them, or you, just as you will never understand us. But we know you, Keryapt Zess. We know that you will kill us for this, and when our ships from other parts of this system get here, you will find some way to survive them. You kill to survive. That is your nature.”

  She was quiet for a few seconds. “That is certainly the way I used to be. Kill, destroy, whatever it took to survive a little longer. I was trying so hard to be like that.”

  “But…what? Are you going to tell us that you’ve changed?”

  “Tell you? No. Words wouldn’t mean anything at this point. But I’ve realized that not killing can sometimes give you opportunities you wouldn’t otherwise have.”

  She straightened and stepped forward, putting her left foot on Farley’s arm instead of her hand. In the same fluid motion she brought her right foot to Ormlan’s chest, then used one of her gravitic nodes to drag him back and pin him against a wall. The tubes behind him cracked and a fine spray of water fanned across the three of them.

  Kery pulled the tool free from where it impaled Farley’s body, studied it, then flung it down through a gap in the floor with all the force she could generate. It smashed into something down below, sending a shower of sparks cascading across a nearby control panel.

  It was time to make the situation clear to everyone involved.

  “Connor - do it.”

  He had been connected remotely, awaiting her command. She could make out part of what he said to Sousa, and Sousa’s half of a phone conversation.

  Ormlan didn’t understand at first. “What do you mean by this, Fleet? What can you hope the humans will accomp…” His voice changed to a shout. “What have you done now? How?”

  Tanglecomms were back. Sousa had convinced his European counterpart that they had to shut off their systems or face the same fate as the collider facility in Texas. Unfortunately her relays in the Observatory and Factories were gone, so she still had no connection to Fleet Four.

  “The real question, Ormlan, is ‘why’. And the answer is…Broaalg? Are you there?”

  The Craven’s voice was like a chorus of chainsaws on violins. “We are here, Zess. Hello, Ormlan, our former ally! How many of your children have joined our eternal army, I wonder?” Video imagery caught up to the audio stream that Keryapt was transmitting. Broaalg was at the center of a vast gathering of Tumorish.

  Ormlan didn’t understand at first. “We saw you die! She brought your tower down!”

  “Ha! Only enough of it to fool you. You underestimate my ability to survive. She agreed not to kill me in exchange for what we knew of the human field.” Ormlan didn’t know it but the winglet sending the message still carried the antimatter storage unit from the collider. That was the only thing which kept the Craven from escaping.

  Ormlan turned his attention back to Kery. “This changes nothing. My family will not join the eternal. We will die together, then.”

  Nothing happened. Ormlan looked around in confusion, then turned back to Keryapt for an explanation.

  “You changed the self-destruct codes for your base when you realized there were Tumorish in Farley, but you forgot that they still knew where it was located. I cut the wiring a minute ago.” She actually hadn’t been sure her aim with the wrench had been accurate enough until that moment. The Tumorish in Farley had signaled the information to her by twitching its eyes. That was the first time she had ever knowingly trusted a Tumorish, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

  Ormlan sighed in resignation. “So, what now? Broaalg is alive, as are you and I. We still will not give you that which you seek. You have no way to force it from us.”

  “You’re right that I, myself, don’t. But we, together, do.”

  “We? ‘We’ who?”

  “You were wondering why we wanted tanglecomms back. This is why. To get the data from you.”

  She gave Ormlan a moment to realize her intent.

  “‘We’…no! You mean you and the Craven? Working together? You would not…”

  “Yes, I will. I'll rip open your familycraft and pluck you out one by one. Then I will let the Tumorish have you. One. By. One. And once you are all converted, you will explain everything to Broaalg and I. To the Craven and the Fleet. We both get the human field ship location technology, at the same time, together.”

  Even without her full set of sensors, she could hear the tiny screams of despair from Ormlan’s body.

  “You would give it to them? With their armada on your doorstep?”

  “I would do anything to protect my people. My family. I am betting that the Craven won’t be willing to get into a fight when the rules have just changed. Your decision now is whether Fleet and Craven both have it, or just the Fleet.”

  “We have worked for decades, through entire generations, to reach this point. And no
w you steal the fruits of our labor even as our children succumb.”

  She knew that Ormlan had been correct, before. She would never understand his family and its bond. She would never value a Molu family, or human or any other species, above her own. But she knew that they felt the same way about her.

  “We will never forgive, or forget, what you have done.” There was a pause, as if some internal debate was occurring. “There will be a reckoning.”

  Kery waited. She didn’t know if the old Keryapt would have made the same choices, but was certain that she would have gladly paid any price to protect her own.

  “Stand by to receive data.”

  “You must have a tanglecomm connection to Ruut, in our Labworld Command. Order him to relay the data and surrender himself. And then connect me to my Shadow.”

  “That will take a few seconds. Once you have it, will you do us one kindness and kill that Craven?”

  An entire orchestra of tortured instruments sounded from Broaalg. “Zesssss! We had an agreement! You swore you would not harm me!”

  “I won’t. I promised you that.”

  An audio link became available to Kery through the Molu tanglecomm relay. She switched on the highest level of encryption possible and was grateful when Shadow confirmed the link from the other side.

  “Kery? Is this data collection what it looks like? But - how are you connecting through Ruut’s private system? He’s right here…”

  “He’s a Molu agent! Don’t let him-“

  “He’s a-“ A brief moment of silence. “Wow. He’s down. The Admiralty took over my Interloper. How did you…how are you? We lost connection…I have orders for you to fire Stopgap.”

  “Stopgap’s gone. The rest can wait. I have to know right this second - is the data complete?” Her winglet in Las Vegas showed the crowd of hundreds of Tumorish bursting into motion. Broaalg’s failure had been broadcast, and he was bankrupt.