Rikas Marauders
Page 164
“I’d rather have you alive, Rika, but if you grab your rifle, these fine folks will all open fire. You’ve some impressive armor, but trust me. You won’t last a minute.”
“Emperor Constantine,” the man said as he turned away from Rika. “You should direct your people on the Pinnacle to arrest two engineers named Jeremy and Annie. They were the ones to solve the issues with the ship’s engines. However, they also planted a backdoor in the system that will allow them to destroy the ship, plus any other craft the NSAI upgrades are installed on.”
“Who the fuck are you?” Rika yelled, realizing that somewhere along the line, she’d been played and had run headlong into a trap.
“Why, my dear Rika. I’m surprised your Tangel didn’t tell you about me. My name is General Garza. Of the Orion Freedom Alliance.”
Rika tried to shrug, but the a-grav field had tightened further, and she could barely manage the movement. “You must not have been a big enough deal to mention, Garza.”
“Yeah.” He winked. “I get that a lot.”
“We should kill her,” Constantine said as he approached cautiously. “Those things are monsters.”
“Oh, she’ll die soon enough,” the general said with a nod. “But unless I’m wrong, this mech has ISF nanotech, and her ships have stasis shields. Our little Rika here is a prize unlike any other.”
There was no response.
ESCAPE
STELLAR DATE: 05.07.8950 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Capeton Command, Capeton
REGION: Genevia System, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
She turned to see Keli standing in the middle of the concourse, partially visible due to scoring on her armor. The mech’s GNR barrel was resting on the deck, and her shoulders were stooped.
At first, Keli didn’t even stir, but then Kelly grabbed her arm and pulled hard, almost toppling the other mech over.
Keli finally seemed to shake free of whatever had her riveted in place and nodded, following Kelly as she ran to door that led to a maintenance shaft.
* * * * *
She was watching the engineering teams pass around drinks and flasks as they congratulated one another, when something suddenly seemed wrong to Leslie. It was a slight change in the room’s atmosphere. A tiny dimming in the excitement.
Then she spotted it: two Nietzschean MPs had just entered through a door on the port side, while three had come through on the starboard end of the room.
Shit, Leslie thought and passed a marker to the pair.
The MPs were just wearing regular ship uniforms, which meant they were lightly armored. Helmets rested on their heads, but the face shields were pulled up as they moved through the crowd, closing on Jeremy and Annie.
Sucks to be you guys, Leslie thought as she took aim at the two MPs on the port side. She released a slow breath and pulled the trigger, then shifted a centimeter and pulled it again.
The pair of soldiers crumpled, each shot through the eye.
Leslie slid off the cabinets and dropped to the deck, gliding through the crowd as carefully as she dared, but not worrying about bumping the odd person as she moved toward the two engineers in her charge.
Jeremy nodded, and Annie took his hand, pulling him through the crowd. Her touch caused him to stumble, a look of near fear coming over the engineer, and he struggled to keep up as they passed by a group of his teammates, who stopped talking to stare at the pair.
Annie glanced back at Jeremy and gave an encouraging smile. “A little special reward for all your hard work.”
One of the men called out, “Booyah!”, and Jeremy proceeded to turn beet red.
They skirted the crowd that had formed around the two downed MPs, making it to the door just as an alarm blared and the exit began to close.
She reached the door and threw a shoulder into it, slowing it just long enough for the two engineers to get through before the portal slid shut.
She turned to see the pair rushing toward the networking closet. Jeremy held the door open for Annie and then stood looking around for Leslie.
He ducked inside, and she followed, pulling the door closed behind her.
“What the hell is going on?” Jeremy asked. “Were those guards dead?”
“Sure hope so,” Leslie said as she materialized before them. “Strip. Fast.”
“What?” Jeremy asked as Annie pulled down the fastener on her shipsuit.
“Naked,” Leslie insisted. “Fast! Go!”
He complied, albeit sluggishly. By the time he was still only half-done, Annie was buck naked and giving Leslie a curious look.
“What next, Les?”
Leslie reached into a pouch on her lower back and pulled out a small canister. “Press this against your sternum.”
Annie complied and gave a small gasp as the cylinder began to melt against her skin, flowing across her body, coating it in a matte-grey material.
“What the hell is this stuff?” she asked, and Jeremy glanced at her, blushing at her half-naked body.
“Stars, Jeremy,” Leslie muttered. “You need to chill out. Here’s yours.” She glanced back at Annie, who was looking a little concerned as the coating moved up her neck. “It’s flow armor. Like what my skin is made out of.”
“Wait…your skin is made out of this stuff?” Jeremy asked as he held his canister to his chest.
“A better version, but yeah. It has about as much protection as light armor, better against beam weapons than kinetics. You’ll have the same stealth capabilities I do, as well, though you don’t have nanocloud tech, so your audible stealth won’t be as good as mine.”
“How—” Annie began to say, but suddenly closed her mouth and eyes as the armor flowed up over her face.
“It’s OK,” Leslie explained. “It’s not going to go inside you, though it’s going to coat your eyeballs, which always feels strange.”
“O
K…” Jeremy said as he watched Annie disappear. “This stuff’s amazing. Can we keep it?”
“Let’s just worry about staying alive for now.”
A minute later, a pair of Nietzschean soldiers yanked the door open, swept the barrels of their rifles side to side as they checked over the empty space within, and then closed the door.
Leslie replied.
* * * * *
Heather’s eyes grew wide as she turned toward Chase. “They got Rika.”
“What?” He instantly forgot what he was doing and strode toward the captain.
She passed him the comm message that had just been relayed through the Undaunted. It was from Shoshin.
“Shit,” Chase muttered, feeling a tightness form in his chest. “If that was a trap…”
Heather nodded vigorously. “Then we have to assume that it was leaked from the resistance…who knew that Rika was going to be on Capeton Command?”
Chase placed a hand on the console, trying to order his thoughts, when all he wanted to do was tell Heather to fly the Fury Lance to Capeton and fire on everything in sight until they turned Rika over.
“Wieck, Lieutenant Gary, probably everyone on Gary’s team,” Chase said. “It was pretty clear that this was a critical part of the plan.” He looked up at Heather, meeting her eyes. “Shit…I…what do we do?”
“Then our plan to take out most of the Nietzschean fleet has failed,” Heather said, a long sigh slipping past her lips. “Those fuckers…we were so close.”
“We need to call Admiral Carson,” Chase said. “Get a fleet of ISF ships on Rika’s position. We’ll get her out and still take out the emperor. Then we’ll slug it out with the rest of the Niets the old-fashioned way.”
“Fire away,” Heather said as she strode to the main holo, pulling up the fastest route for the Lance to reach Capeton.
Chase gulped a deep breath, mentally chastising himself for forgetting that.
“OK…right, but I’m still not going to sit back and trust that Tangel can drop everything to save Rika. We’re still going to Capeton.”
“I’ve just sent out orders for all our ships to switch to backup idents that we didn’t get from the resistance,” Heather said. “So far from what I can tell, no one’s been fired on, but with light lag…”
Chase nodded. Rika’s plan had placed Marauder ships all over the Genevia System, the idea being that when they began to attack, the Niets would all make their best speed to the Marauder ships, and that would trigger the engine failures.
However, the dispersal also meant that the smaller Marauder ships—particularly the destroyers—would be vulnerable if enough of the enemy converged on them.
“What sort of activity?” he asked.
Heather looked at Chase, their eyes meeting as the ship’s captain smiled. “Then they know about the vulnerability, just not exactly what it is.”
“Damn,” Chase whispered. “If we can trigger the update, then we can still take out the fleet.”
Potter said.
“How?” Heather asked.
“OK. Send the message,” Chase said to Heather. “Tell them to get to the datastore and secure it. If I were the Niets, I’d be off-lining that thing yesterday.”
* * * * *
Rika watched with impotent rage as the Niets erected a mobile frame around her, complete with powerful a-grav generators that continued to hold her suspended in mid-air when they switched off the ones hidden in the concourse.
During the process, the Orion general prowled around her cage, an almost feral grin on his face. The Nietzschean emperor stood further back, watching with a dispassionate expression on his face.
“She’ll be quite the prize,” Garza said as the cage lifted off the deck. “I’m looking forward to bringing her back—”
“Nowhere,” the emperor cut Garza off. “You’ll not bring her anywhere. Rika is a prisoner of the Nietzschean empire.”
“Captured by me,” Garza countered, turning to glare at Constantine.
“I saw my guards shooting at her in my station,” the emperor replied. “Yes, you gave them orders without my authorization, but it’s a slight I’m willing to overlook. I’ll even share what we learn from our mech here, but you’re not going to whisk her off to Orion, only to dole out what you’ve acquired in dribs and drabs.”
“You know,” Rika called out. “If you’re not sure what to do with me, you can just let me go. I wouldn’t want to cause a lover’s spat to flare up, here.”
Garza tossed a sour look her way, then turned back to the emperor, the pair now staring silently at one another.
Rika nodded absently, still more worried that something had happened to Tangel, wondering what could possibly have knocked her out of communication. The whole idea behind quantum entanglement was that it worked anywhere in the universe. Tangel shouldn’t be able to go anywhere it wouldn’t connect.
Niki snorted.
Niki laughed.
Rika didn’t speak for a moment, considering her options, then said,
The AI sent a languid wink into Rika’s mind.