by M. D. Cooper
Rika saw Blue stand up and glare at the corridor, her fists clenched at her side. A look from brown-hair quelled her, and the woman sat down once more, popping the final piece of protein bar into her mouth, and chewing angrily.
“OK, then,” Rika said as she turned away. “I’ll be back tomorrow; though there will be less bacon. Mechs have demanding metabolisms.”
ACCESS
STELLAR DATE: 10.20.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: NMSS Spine of the Stars, interstellar dark layer
REGION: Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
It took three more days for one of the engineers to crack.
Rika really had expected it to be Pinkie, but it was one of the men, the tall guy with the nearly alabaster-white skin. When the smell of bacon came through the vents that day, he began to tremble slightly. One of the other men put a hand on his shoulder, but white-skin brushed it aside, glaring at the other man.
“We dumped too much fuel…when we get there, we won’t have enough for a runaway reaction, and she’s going to come in here and kill us all. I at least want to die with a full stomach.”
“Fuck, Ched! She didn’t know we’d dumped too much fuel ‘til now.”
Ched swung at the other man, whose name was Bill—Rika knew their names, she just liked coming up with more imaginative ones—with a wrench that appeared in his hand as if by magic. The blow struck Bill in the chest, and he fell to the deck, clutching his body and gasping for air.
“Wow!” Rika called out. “Looks like Bill’s on the menu.”
Ched raced down the passageway, and ducked into the workshop. Rika saw him grab a portable plasma cutter and run to the doors.
“Nah-ah, Ched. You open those doors, and your boss lady is gonna blow the ship,” she warned as the man approached the sealed doors.
Ched turned to see brown-hair—or Chief Emelia, amongst friends—standing next to the override switch on the console that was protected by the EM field.
“Emelia,” he pleaded. “We’re starving in here. We can’t get out; those mech bitches are crazy. But if we turn the ship over, they won’t hurt us. They promised.”
“Put the torch down, Ched,” Emelia replied. “You can’t trust Genevians. Especially mechs. Those things are stone-cold killers. She’ll rip you limb from limb.”
“I won’t,” Rika told them. “I promise. I’ve actually ripped very few people limb from limb.”
“You realize that for most people, that number is zero, you psycho!” Brownie cried out.
“Yeah, well, you haven’t met some of the people I have,” Rika countered. “They were all very bad. Either way…you can starve to death, blow us all up, or have a good meal. I know which I’d pick—especially if my CO was that coward, Poopy Pants, up on the bridge. Did you know that they’ve taken to drinking their piss up there? They must have some decent mods to stave off kidney failure for this long. Well, except for Red; they had to kill him yesterday. He just kept screaming. I probably would have killed him, too—though I promise it would have been humane. No limb ripping.”
Her lips twitched into a grim smile as she saw something that Brownie did not: Pinkie holding a rather large, metal prybar.
Ten seconds later, the engineering chief was down, and a pool of blood was growing on the deck around her head.
“It’s over!” Pinkie rasped as she toggled the reactors into a standby mode, their rods in and lasers offline.
“I just need that EM field off, then it’s bacon for everyone,” Rika said. “If you open the door before that, though, you’ll all just end up eating my e-beam.”
The other engineers looked at one another, and then Blue sighed. “Do it, Sandra. You’re right. We’re done.”
Niki laughed.
An hour later, the engineers were locked in the ship’s cells, hooked up to IV drips with crackers and jelly. Though they were all ravenously hungry, they were smart enough to know that eating a big meal right away would go badly.
Once the engineers had settled in, most falling asleep, Rika and Leslie took a leisurely walk up to the bridge. When the two women arrived at the sealed door, Rika leant against the bulkhead, and breathed a long sigh.
“Sooo…we took engineering. You can’t blow the ship anymore. What happens over the next ten minutes is entirely up to you. Let me know if I need to start up with the whole ‘hard way/easy way’ speech.”
Leslie snorted.
Rika decided to ignore Leslie and Niki, instead focusing on what was happening on the bridge. Its occupants had spoken very little over the past four days—excepting during the death of Red—though Rika assumed that what conversations they had partaken in occurred over point-to-point Link connections.
Now, however, they were speaking aloud.
“I’m done,” Colonel Sofia said, rising on shaky legs, and staring down at Admiral Gideon, who hadn’t moved from the captain’s chair in over a day. “Engineering missed the last two check-ins, so you know Rika’s not lying.”
“We’re almost there,” Gideon rasped.
“We’re almost dead,” Sofia retorted as she walked to the door.
Rika watched her key in the access codes—not that it was necessary; Niki had long since breached the door controls. Only the threat of the ship exploding had kept them out of the bridge.
Rika used Ched’s plasma cutter to slice away the sections of the doorframe that she’d melted seven days before. When she pushed the door aside, Sofia was sitting on the deck, looking like she wanted to cry, but was likely too dehydrated to form tears.
“You win, mech.”
* * * * *
“Well that was anticlimactic,” Leslie said from the passageway outside the cells.
Rika nodded. “A bit, yeah. Going to take a while to get them rehydrated enough to eat. They’re a lot worse off than the engineers were.”
“Especially Pinkie,” Leslie said with a laugh. “I’m pretty sure she still had some food tucked away somewhere, but she was just as thirsty as the rest of ‘em.”
The two women turned and walked past one of the cobbled-together automatons that they’d built out of galley servitors and Nietzschean powered armor. Another stood at the far end of the passageway; while they wouldn’t stop a truly determined enemy, they were more than enough for the dehydrated, half-starved Nietzscheans.
“So I guess we go to the bridge?” Leslie suggested. “Is it reconnected to the navigations systems?”
“I vote we fly the ship from engineering,” Rika said. “It doesn’t smell as bad in there; Brownie only got killed today. On the bridge, they took Red out two days ago, and it stiiiinks.”
Niki informed them.
“A bot’s work is never done,” Rika said with a laugh, as they turned down the corridor that led to engineering.
“Or a mech’s,” Rika added, then glanced at Leslie.
“Don’t look at me,” Leslie said, licking the back of her hand and running it over her head. “We cats never work. Just lounge and play.”
“Sounds about right,” Rika said, as they reached the central console in engineering. “OK, so we’re seven hours from dumping out of the DL
. What say we tweak that and come out right about now?”
“Yeah, but we can get a visual on what we’re getting into, and then go back into FTL and—”
“A year on this tub with those Niets, and we’ll see that scene from engineering play out again,” Leslie warned. “Only I’ll be playing the part of Pinkie.”
Rika laughed. “Noted, though now I’ve just pictured you as a hot-pink kitty cat. You’d be so cute!”
Leslie flashed her a glare. “I think the smell is getting to you. I’m pretty sure I didn’t hear anything about me being pink.”
“I guess that’ll do,” Rika allowed. “Of course, you know what that means.”
“What?” Leslie asked.
“Means we have another damn day of waiting on this ship! Chase is going to kill us when he finally catches up.”
EPSILON
STELLAR DATE: 10.21.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: NMSS Spine of the Stars
REGION: Epsilon, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
“Well this isn’t what I was expecting at all,” Rika said as she watched the holodisplay in the engineering bay render their ship’s destination. “It looks like a crappy Serenity.”
“Serenity?” Leslie asked, an eyebrow cocked as she glanced at Rika.
“Yeah, it’s a place out in the Perseus Arm. Big gas giant with five terrestrial-sized moons around it in a klemperer rosette,” Rika explained.
“Was that one of the places that general of Tanis’s visited? The purple one?”
“Jessica, yeah. She told me about it when I ran into her in the I2’s mess a few weeks back. She’s an unusual woman.”
“Purple’s not that weird,” Leslie replied with a shrug. “I once knew a guy who was colored like a kaleidoscope. Gave you a headache to look at him for too long.”
Rika laughed, wondering if Leslie was pulling her leg. “She’s not unusual because she’s purple, but because she’s part alien.”
“What!” Leslie exclaimed, her mouth hanging open. “There are aliens, and you didn’t tell me? How could you not tell me about aliens!”
Rika was tempted to reach out and smack her upside the head. “Not sentient aliens. She has alien microbes in her body. Part of a marketing stunt, from what she said.”
Leslie whistled. “That’s some weird marketing stunt. I didn’t even know the ISF did marketing.”
Rika’s eyes narrowed, and Leslie’s lips split in a toothy grin.
“Asshat, you knew all about Jessica’s alien microbes.”
“Uh huh, but messing with you is fun.”
“Stars,” Rika groaned. “We’ve spent far too long on this ship. We need to get off.”
“Well, that’ll happen sooner or later,” Leslie said, gesturing at the holodisplay. “Not sure that we’re going to get a warm welcome there, though.”
Rika nodded as she turned back to the display. The ship’s destination was a barely perceptible blob in the darkness. Around the blob were six equidistant points, each glowing faintly in the darkness of interstellar space. “Welcome to Epsilon.”
“Brown dwarf, or just a random rogue planet?” Leslie asked.
Leslie snorted. “You’ve been around the ISF AIs for too long. These are Nietzscheans, not the FGT. No one here has the tech to suck that much mass off a brown dwarf.”
“Not only that, but you’d have to do it really carefully to keep masses balanced and the rosette stable,” Rika added.
Leslie chuckled. “Look at you. Get a bigger brain, and now you’re all ‘Professor-of-Orbital-Dynamics Rika’.”
Rika scowled at Leslie. “I run a fleet of ships, you know. Understanding this stuff is a part of my job. What’s with all the ribbing, by the way?”
“Dunno…like you said, we gotta get off this ship. Too much proximity to Nietzschean assholes.”
“OK, then.” Leslie turned to Rika. “What’s the plan?”
Rika pursed her lips as she watched a higher-resolution visualization of the rogue planet and its six moons load on the display. “Well, Tanis did tell me that Admiral Gideon was known to be involved in some special projects. It was why she sent me his location. Looks like this might be one of said projects.”
“Imagine if we’d pushed past this location, and they hit us from behind with a fleet of that size…” Leslie said. “We owe Field Marshal Richards a beer for this one.”
“Don’t plan your celebratory drink just yet,” Rika cautioned. “We’ve just found it; now we have to do something about it.”
“Meaning?” Rika asked.
Rika pulled up the EM data, and overlaid it on the display, looking at the planet’s van allen belts and the moon’s positions.
“Looks like the moons must have been pulled within the place’s magnetic field,” she commented. “Makes sense; you’d want to keep as much interstellar radiation at bay as possible.”
“Which puts the moons up close to the planet, and gives them a lot of velocity,” Leslie added, earning her a sidelong look from Rika. “What? We live in space, of course I also know orbital dynamics. Plus I’m fricking old. Don’t forget that.”
“I guess cats age well,” Rika said with a laugh. “OK, seriously, let’s talk options.”
“Fission?” Leslie shook her head. “Barbarians.”
“Ever wonder how backward we all must seem to the ISF and Transcend?” Rika asked as she stared at the holodisplay, willing it to give her some sort of answer.
“Very.” Leslie’s tone was resolute. “Very, very. You know what’s great about them, though? I mean, you could tell that, for their level of tech, making mechanized warriors was something they’d only read about in ancient history. But when you all said you wanted to remain mechs, they didn’t bat an eyelash. In fact, Finaeus got a team to work up how to give you the best of both worlds.”
Rika nodded slowly. “They’re pretty decent folk, that’s for sure. Could really use their help right about now; I’d kill for a set of girly legs.”
“Still a no-go on your interstellar brain radio, eh?” Leslie asked.
Rika snorted. “That was your best one yet—and no, it’s still registering as ‘initializing’.”
“Can you have solid holes?” Leslie asked, laughing. “OK, OK, I’m getting my shit together, I swear. It must be all the bacon, gave me a chemical imbalance or something.”
“I bet Tanis would disagree,” Rika replied with a wink. “So, task one is to spin around and begin our braking burns. Meanwhile, we have to concoct some sort of story about why we’re here. Easiest one there is the truth; Kansas was attacked—though we may need to tell them it was by a huge fleet, so they believe us. We can use the Nietzschean defeat in the Albany System to back up our claims of general loss and destruction.”
“If we can convince one of the Nietzschean officers to play along, that’ll help,” Leslie said. “Sofia—though she seems to be constructed of granite—is a realist. Maybe I can wear her down.”
“You gonna curl up on her lap and purr?” Rika asked with a snort.
“Think it’ll work?”
“Well, I’ll try a few options. Everyone has a price; let’s just hope hers is payable in tender we possess.”
“Sooooo,” Rika hesitated. “If we don’t get blown out of the black while docking, how do we pass muster after docking? Like I said, neither of us look much like Nietzschean officers.”
“No,” Leslie shook her head. “Not even a little bit. If we were docking under normal circumstances, I imagine we could get by without too much scrutiny, but you know we’ll be under a microscope. And there’s the part where we have a ship full of Nietzschean prisoners.”
