by Alex White
“Nilah!” Orna cried, rushing to stop her from standing. “That’s it! You can’t walk. You can’t fight. This op is finished!”
Nilah gripped Orna’s collar to hoist herself off the floor. “No. We didn’t come out here to be beaten and abused just so we could walk away without a prize. We have to get Sharp!” She tapped her own comm. “Captain, I know who the double agent is. If we don’t grab him, he’s dead.”
Orna gritted her teeth, the engine wash of the incoming Capricious ruffling her hair. “She’s delirious, Cap, and she can’t even walk. There’s no time.”
The marauder’s searchlights blinded Nilah. Her exit was right there; all she needed was to be carried away.
“Boss here. As much as I hate to agree,” said Cordell, “we can’t win them all, Hunter Two.”
“No,” said Nilah. “I always win. I know how we do this.”
Orna pushed her off to reload the slinger. “Captain—”
“Let’s hear it,” came Cordell’s reply, and Orna flushed pink with anger.
She took a knee to keep the weight off her ankle. “The twins grab Malik and get him to the med bay. I can ride in Charger to go find Sharp, and Orna can provide fire support.”
She glanced at Orna, who looked as though she’d been slapped. Not once in their year-long relationship had Nilah ever ridden inside the battle armor, and she understood why—that bot was Orna’s sense of security. Ranger had been her only salvation since childhood, and she’d be just as protective of Charger. It’d be like reading her girlfriend’s diary.
“If we don’t leave now, that dreadnought will catch up. Prince, how much time do we have to get loaded up?”
“Two minutes thirty seconds,” said Armin.
“No time for a rescue op,” Orna spat. “Now let’s go.”
“What if we reload the jump dump and fire it again?” Nilah asked, and silence came over the line.
“With what?” Orna shouted. “Besides, there’s no guarantee it’d work! Captain, this is stupid!”
“Boots here. The Runner’s canopy is shredded and his systems are all jacked up. He ain’t flying again any time soon. We could gut his eidolon core.” Then, after a pause: “I want this Sharp guy, too.”
“Two minutes,” said Armin. “The estimates are good, but we need a decision, Boss.”
Nilah, Orna, and the twins watched the stairwell for any incoming. The quartermaster’s arms shook with rage, but she held her tongue in wait for the order.
“Do it,” said Cordell. “I want the twins on board yesterday, with Sleepy in the med bay, you hear me? Boots, can you get the core out of the Runner?”
“I’ve got the Rook jacket, remember?” asked Boots. “Pretty sure I’m a certified mechanic now.”
“Stow the stupid jokes, Boots,” Orna snarled. “Just don’t drop anything.”
Orna reached up and removed her circlet with uneasy fingers before settling it across Nilah’s brow. Her lips locked into a scowl.
Nilah looked into her eyes, searching for any kind of sympathy. “This is the only way,” she whispered, but her girlfriend said nothing to comfort her, instead rattling off a list of mechanical peculiarities and quirks of Charger’s systems.
“This isn’t a damned race car, Nilah. Don’t drive it like an asshole.”
Nilah traced her mechanist’s mark and connected to Charger’s circlet. Inside, she found a confused animal, frightened and searching for its master. She smoothed her authentications over its core, assuring it that everything would be all right. Charger knelt, and its breastplate popped open to reveal the scuffed cushioned cockpit inside.
“Hello, Nilah Brio,” the voice of a young boy spoke directly into her mind.
“No questions now,” said Orna, preempting Nilah’s curious glance.
Carefully, Nilah reached out and grasped its waiting talon. She pulled herself upright despite her agonizing ankle and hobbled into the cockpit.
“Don’t break him,” Orna said.
As the armor plates closed around Nilah, she said, “I’ll be careful.”
It smelled of Orna in the best and worst ways. An array of heads-up displays sprang to life around Nilah’s eyes, showing her a world of detail she’d never seen before. It was overwhelming, like trying to count every grain of sand on the beach, and she shook her head, trying to comprehend all the features of the scene before her. Pneumatic cushions swelled around her injured leg, the sensors tuning actuators to baby her wound. A pair of pinpricks stung her calf muscle, then her ankle went cold and numb.
“Charger is helping,” the boy said, his voice cheery.
“With the new plan, you’ve got five minutes to get back,” Armin said, “then another five to secure the jump dump to the main core.”
Nilah grasped Charger’s blade and channeled magic into it, igniting it with brilliant energy. She turned to face Orna, who held her slinger at the ready.
“You loaded up?” Nilah asked.
“Let’s get this clown and get out of here.”
Together, they raced into the bowels of the Pinnacle, where the rest of the cultists surely laid in wait.
Orna crept through the halls, caution in every step, but Charger was considerably louder.
“Turn on walk assist,” Orna hissed, “unless you’d rather just shout our location to everyone.”
Nilah dove through the ambulation menus until she found the AI balancing assistant, connecting the relay.
“Charger will be quiet,” said the boy.
The bot sank low around her, creeping in the direction Nilah wanted, with movements not her own. Actuators doubled in power, taut with menace, never whining. Its silent slink through the darkening corridors both unnerved and exhilarated her, like inhabiting the soul of a great cat.
The battle armor wasn’t simply an extension of her skin, but a transformation into another being entirely. On instinct, she flexed her remaining claw, savoring the clink of regraded steel against fibron.
Nilah could get addicted to this.
Her enhanced hearing detected enemy footsteps. She stopped Charger, halting Orna with a fist.
She gestured to the edge of the corner, holding her claw and stump apart to indicate distance. Orna removed a grenade from her belt and twisted the primer to one second before clicking the button and hurling it down the hall. It bounced down the corridor and exploded in a ball of flame. Cooked flesh and blood rushed into Charger’s olfactory sensors, and Nilah had to stop herself from gagging.
For the universe to live, the Children had to die. Still, Nilah had never wanted to kill anyone.
“Check the body,” said Orna. “Better not be Sharp.”
Creeping to the corner, Nilah kicked over the charred corpse and winced. He didn’t look remotely like Sharp, though it was hard to tell. She was already beginning to regret volunteering for this mission.
With a flash of blue light, two cultists stepped from a tear in space. Lightning crackled from the first man’s fingers, raking over the armor in agonizing jolts. The other cast his teleportation spell, reaching for Charger to drag it away to some distant location—maybe space, maybe solid rock.
Nilah whipped Charger’s blade across the pair, cleanly dividing them in two before staggering away. They toppled like toys, and sickening breath caught in her throat. They hadn’t left her a choice. It was one thing to lock the initiates out in the cold. That had been distant, unfeeling. She’d sensed the blade passing through their bodies like a hot knife through butter.
Orna placed a firm hand on Charger’s back plate, pushing it forward.
“Keep going. Don’t think. Just live,” whispered the quartermaster, a crack of mercy in her tone.
“R … right,” Nilah whispered, pushing onward into the complex.
They came to a junction, and Nilah fired up her active scanners, searching for heat signatures: five in one direction, one in the other. Would Sharp attempt to hide among his false confederates, or would he try to be alone in the hopes of a r
escue? She gestured for Orna to follow her toward the single signature.
It was a faint blur behind several layers of rock, and it could’ve been anything—a generator, an eidolon crystal reserve, a roaring fire. As they crept through the maze, Nilah let out a sigh of relief when it resolved into the shape of a man. They stopped outside a closed door, Nilah gesturing for Orna to take cover against the wall.
She sliced a glowing, molten X through the door frame and kicked the panels into the far interior wall.
She rushed inside and shoved her target against his bed frame. Charger’s stump pinned his neck, and the blade came to rest millimeters away from his bobbing throat.
“Please don’t, please don’t, please don’t,” came Sharp’s frantic cries. He tried on instinct to wrestle her away, but even his champion grappler’s strength was nothing compared to Charger’s motors.
Nilah let him stand, and Orna pushed into the room behind them, sweeping for any hostiles. The quartermaster let her finger off the trigger when she saw him.
“You must be Sharp,” she said. “If you want to get out of here, you come with us right now. Try anything, and you’ll be a carbon paste faster that you can say ‘scumbag cultist.’”
“Charmed,” Sharp replied, dusting himself off. “Did you bring me a slinger, too?”
“We brought you a rescue, so keep your mouth shut and let’s go,” said Orna.
“We’ve got to move,” said Nilah, her voice filtering through Charger’s speakers to make ripples and eddies over the scene. “Vraba’s ship is in-system.”
“How close?” asked Sharp, eyes widening.
“In orbit,” said Nilah.
Sharp poked his head into the corridor before returning in a panic. “He could flood this base with shadows and butcher everyone inside. His powers are—”
“Shut up. What’s the fastest way out?” asked Orna.
“Up top,” said Sharp. “Or the front door.”
Nilah detected a faint howling on the other side of his bedroom wall. “Or through there,” she said, pointing to a blank patch of rock. She sliced apart his wall, along with his bed, a writing desk, and all his clothes, and it fell away into the wailing wind beyond.
On the other side was the canyon: a sheer drop of a thousand feet.
“Prince, you see that new hole in the side of the Pinnacle?” Nilah asked, swallowing hard.
“We see it,” said Armin.
Charger’s powerful hearing detected another noise, too: the shadow song of Izak Vraba.
“He’s coming!” Sharp called, peering down the corridor, and Nilah saw writhing shadows extinguishing all the lights.
She yanked her companions back under her arms. “You’ve got two seconds to get the ship in front of that hole, Prince. I’m jumping.”
“What?” Orna cried, but Nilah was already setting up her leap into the great, open space beyond.
“There’s nothing out there!” Sharp protested.
Charger’s heads-up display lined up the angle, and Nilah swallowed hard.
“No. No. No. No!” cried Orna, struggling in Charger’s grip.
Charger bounded twice and leapt through the blast hole, and for an oddly serene moment, the only sounds were the wind and Orna’s sustained scream. They sailed out into the night, the distant floor of the ice canyon ready to swallow them whole.
Then came the thundering engines of the Capricious, searchlights and solid hull under Charger’s feet.
Charger’s claws hit the ship wrong, and the trio of them bounced across the roof, sliding toward a deadly fall. Nilah lost her grip on both of her passengers, and they went rolling off in different directions, both struggling for any handholds—Sharp toward the comms array, Orna toward the hot wash of the main drive.
Nilah’s claws caught purchase, and she jerked to a halt for just long enough to register her girlfriend’s trajectory. “Aisha, pitch forward now!”
The ship swelled under her feet as the thrusters roared to double output, and Orna was launched into the air like a ball from a racket. Charger snatched the quartermaster to the deck, using its prehensile toes to secure purchase on the dish from the wide-scanning array.
Nilah looked down the ship’s length to find Sharp, white knuckles around the comms antennae. She had trouble making sense of what she was seeing, but he screamed as something attacked him. Charger’s sensors grasped the shape of a long tentacle, stretched thin from where it’d followed them out of the hole in the Pinnacle. It stabbed at Sharp with a dozen knives, and his leg was already a wet mess.
“We need shields up here!” she cried.
“Stay low,” said Cordell. “Don’t want to knock you off!”
A dome of soft blue light swept over them like a sunrise, slamming into the tentacle and severing it. The shadows coming from the Pinnacle reared back in a massive spike and assailed the shields with sparking attacks. Each strike resounded like a tuning fork.
“Hunter Two, is everyone aboard?” Armin demanded.
If you can count hanging on for dear life while you’re bleeding to death. The shadow hammered the shields hard enough to shove the ship off course.
“Just get us out of here!” was Nilah’s response, and the thrusters roared around them, rocketing the Capricious upward.
At this altitude, the moon stretched before her, and Vraba’s ship was a distant glimmer of light. Its dozen engines fired in pops to control its approach to the moon’s gravity well. Shadows tore through the Pinnacle, prying it apart, destroying everything inside for a mad grasp at Nilah and her friends.
The blue shields rushed away, swinging under the ship to protect its belly. The Capricious swelled under their feet as spike after spike lashed out from the surface like ferrofluid, smashing into their defenses. Nilah made sure Orna was secure, then staggered toward Sharp across the bucking Capricious.
She reached him as his strength failed, and he slipped free of his purchase, sliding toward the void below.
“Gotcha!” she said, grasping his hand with her manipulator. He was ragged, but conscious for the moment.
“Hey!” Orna called to them. She’d gotten the roof hatch open, and Jeannie poked her head out, ready to assist.
The ship yawed violently to avoid a cataclysmic strike from the growing shadow creature. The Capricious fired pinpoint barrages at its spikes, blowing them off course. The shadows were now at least a hundred meters in height, swinging hungrily for the ship.
Nilah stumbled over the roof with Sharp in tow, praying with each step that the ship wouldn’t be struck hard enough to fling them into the great beyond. Upon reaching Orna, she shoved her charge into the hatch, where Jeannie caught him, then she dove in after.
“We’re in,” Orna said, then looked to Nilah. “We’ve got a lot of work to do. Jeannie, can you get him to the med bay?”
“On it,” she replied, and Alister came to help her carry Sharp deeper into the ship.
Nilah popped open Charger’s armor and hopped out, handing the circlet back to Orna before she was even asked. The quartermaster wordlessly donned the circlet before marching in the direction of the cargo bay, Nilah following after.
The pair bounced along in the weak combat gravity, leaping down entire flights of stairs.
“We’re going to harvest the electricals from the jump dump, but nothing else,” said Orna. “The battery chamber is just going to be melted crystal.”
“We can wrap the core from the Runner in spare shielding panels. That’ll—”
“Hang on to the railings when we’re in combat grav.”
Right on cue, the ship took a hit, and it was like the wall jumped out and smashed Nilah’s nose. It wasn’t a catastrophic blow, but when she brought away her hand, she had the slow drip of blood.
“Keep going,” said Orna. “We’ll deal with it after.”
They reached the engine room, where Boots awaited them with a mag-locked dolly and a glowing pink core. They all three paused a moment to look over their potential
salvation: an antique fuel cell from an old fighter, unhooked and delivered by a totally unqualified technician.
Nilah traced her mechanist’s glyph and laid a palm across the safety housing on the top. She closed her eyes, feeling her way through the system distributors and link cables.
“This looks good,” she said. “Shall we get to work, darlings?”
Boots was out of her depth. The mechanics popped up tiny diagnostic spells left and right, linking with their tools, speaking to each other in a language that sounded like Standard, but with a lot more numbers and acronyms.
There was a strange iciness over Orna when she’d arrived, but as long as they could get the jump dump working, it didn’t matter. The two mechanists swarmed over it like a pair of Arcan lemurs, so it was as under control as it could be.
“Boots,” said the captain over the intercom, “you’re needed on the bridge, now.”
“On my way.”
Boots launched down the hallway and onto the bridge, where she saw explosions across their bow.
“I need help down here!” Aisha shouted over her shoulder, slamming the stick to one side to force the ship into a hard, dipping bank.
Boots maneuvered down the terrace, past Armin with his face locked in concentration, to arrive at the pilot’s side. “What do you want me to do?”
“They’re launching long-range missiles,” said Cordell. “Missus Jan can shoot them down, but she’ll need all of her concentration.”
Aisha gave her a brief smile. “You’re going to be taking my seat, ace. Guess we’ll see if you’re cut out to be a zipperjock like me.”
She jumped up from the controls, and Boots had no choice but to scoot in and grab the stick.
“This is a terrible idea,” Boots grumbled, eyes frantically scanning the controls for familiar surfaces. “I ain’t even close to certified on this thing.”
Nothing immediately jumped out at her other than the throttle and the joystick—and the lock alert light flashing by her side.
“Incoming!” shouted Armin.
Aisha reached over Boots and trimmed the two-seventy, sending the ship into an off-axis roll. On the projector, a single red missile glanced against Cordell’s shield and smeared a flaming comet across the sky.
