by Alex White
“Don’t stop me.” In the space between explosions, she said, “I need this.”
He released her and took a step back. “Good luck to you, Boots. If you can, get back to the apartments for evac. I’m going to get my first mate.”
She gave him an Arcan salute, and he returned it. Then she looked to Malik, who was being loaded onto a platform by the twins. “I’m sorry.”
The doc said nothing, his breathing too ragged to speak.
Boots turned and ran, following Stetson’s trail of blood deeper into the station.
Nilah had expected the small army of thralls greeting her when she emerged from the lobby door. The surprise had come when a grenade landed in the middle of the enemy forces, scattering them to the wind. Automatic slinger fire sawed through the little group from the mezzanine level, cutting down each soldier with bright lances.
Team Wolf had only just managed to get out of the way when the data center blew behind them, sending a gout of flame pouring into the Central Promenade like a volcano eruption. When Nilah got her bearings, she located the source of the automatic fire: a pair of tripod-mounted slingers on the mezzanine, operated by a snake and a goldfinch.
“Orna Sokol!” bellowed a voice from up top, the flame-horned bull emerging into view. “Drop your weapons and raise your hands! Unless you’re planning on walking back into that burning guard station, that is.”
Another explosion lit the distant Promenade, rumbling through the deck. Nilah craned her neck to see if she could somehow spot Boots and the others through the trees, but there was no way.
The tripod-mounted slingers sprayed the area around them with gunfire, as if to prove a point.
“Hey, Bill,” Orna called back, face twisted with hatred.
“You grew up, kiddo,” said the bull. “If you weren’t so cut up, you’d be a pretty woman.”
“That bull mask is a big improvement for you, too,” Orna replied.
“If you don’t throw away your heaters in three seconds,” said Bill, “I’m going to turn that famous girlfriend of yours into a fine red mist. One …”
Nilah tossed her weapon aside, and Orna did the same.
“Two—”
Aisha snapped up her slinger and put a shot right between Bill’s eyes—or so Nilah thought. With a bright arc, the flame round bounced off and went straight back the way it came, thunking into Aisha’s shoulder. It passed through her with a trail of sparks before splattering against the deck. She fell with a shriek, clutching her smoking wound.
“I told you to drop your weapons! It appears some of you didn’t hear me,” cackled Bill. “That’s called a reflector, and it’s one of the perks of being richer than god.” To his minions, he added, “Light her up so they know we mean business.”
Charger bolted out of the shadows, clanging along on its hands before skidding in front of Aisha. When the volleys came, they riddled its torso, shattering steel plates and spilling lubricants.
“No!” Orna screamed, fetching her weapon, but her finger froze on the trigger. She couldn’t shoot Bill without getting shot in return.
Nilah cast her mechanist’s mark, looking for something, anything to use, but she came up empty. She darted for her slinger, but a line of automatic fire tattooed the deck in front of her, shattering her pistol.
Orna threw the slinger to one side and raised her hands. “Stop, Bill! You got me!”
The bull gestured for his soldiers to stand down and the fire stopped. Aisha shook uncontrollably, balled up underneath the collapsing robot, and Nilah couldn’t make out if she’d been hit again. Charger’s servos whined pitifully as it tried to support its weight with a failing power plant.
“I didn’t like what you did to my wife,” said Bill. “Coming into my house, scaring my kids, stealing my ship.”
“Sorry,” said Orna with a shrug. “At least she was accommodating to us.”
“Not anymore. I don’t brook betrayal, not even from my own woman,” he said darkly, giving it a moment to sink in. “Is that Ranger? God, how I missed that little rescue armor. Needed to pay him back for what he did.”
When he removed the bull mask, Nilah understood exactly why they called him Bill Scar. His face looked like it’d been snatched off and no one had bothered to put him back together. Mottled flesh gave way to soft features and sunken eyes.
“That was a mean trick for a little girl,” said Bill. “Throwing eidolon powder in my injury like that. When I saw you on the news, I hoped to god I’d get a chance to peel your face off like you did mine.”
“Here we are, Bill,” said Orna. “Come on down and do it.”
When the next explosion rocked the station, a voice told them the reactor was breached. A hideous shuddering traveled up the Central Promenade, and Nilah could swear she saw it swaying like a bamboo reed in the breeze.
Bill shook with laughter, nodding his head. “Okay, Orna. Okay, yeah. But I’m not going to take your face. I’m going to slide this knife into your belly until I feel better about what happened. Then I’ll take Miss Brio and leave you here to bleed out. She’d be worth a lot of money to the right people. How does that sound?”
“Sounds like you need killing, Bill,” said Orna.
Nilah inched toward the safety stripe around a nearby platform and shouted up to Bill, “Or you could walk away. We’ll even let you live.”
Bill cocked an eyebrow, such as it could be called.
Nilah dropped to her knees, placing her palm to the ground and psychically wending her way into the platform circuits. The platform shot upward underneath her, and she adjusted the angle to send it flying toward the nearest turret. A hail of spells sizzled through the air, but she kept to a low crouch, using her vehicle as a shield. When she was over the mezzanine, she leapt, fanning her arms and overcharging the strobes in her tattoos.
She rolled her landing and came up in front of one of the autoslingers, sinking a boot into the snake gunner’s groin. When zie doubled over, she rammed her fist into zir throat and hip-checked zir as hard as she could. The gunner went over the railing, unable to scream through the impending fall.
Nilah spun the gun on Bill, but remembered the reflector before she pulled the trigger. With all her strength, she picked up the tripod and charged him with the legs. With a shout, Nilah shoved him into the other gunner, toppling that tripod, too.
Slinger bolts tore into the goldfinch goon from the ground below, and Nilah glanced down to see Orna, slinger in hand and fury in her eyes. The gunner collapsed dead, leaving Nilah alone with the slaver who had ruined her fiancée’s childhood. He made to shoot her, but she easily dodged away, closing the distance with distracting flashes from her arms. In the blink of an eye, she’d seized his arm and twisted his slinger free, hooking his trigger guard and breaking his index finger in the process.
“You want to hurt Orna?” growled Nilah. “Go give it a try.”
She ripped the slinger away and clubbed him with it across the temple. Blinding him with a spray of light, Nilah smashed his knee sideways and took hold of his arm. She twisted his wrist up over her head and brought it down, snapping his elbow and hip-tossing him over the edge.
Bill screamed all the way to the bottom.
When Nilah peered over the edge, she saw a broken man, blood streaming from his nose and mouth, shivering and struggling for breath. And like a spreading forest fire came Orna, tossing the slinger to one side to free up both of her bare hands.
Nilah didn’t need to watch, didn’t wonder what her fiancée might do to the monster of her nightmares. It wasn’t her revenge to take.
Even though every muscle in her body ached, Nilah rushed to a mezzanine platform and took it down to Aisha and Charger. The bot was critically damaged, and her heart thumped in her chest at the thought of losing another one. When she pulled Charger aside to find Aisha, the pilot was intact, though shaking and sweating, pouring blood.
“Okay,” she whispered, turning Aisha over. “I’ve got you.”
; “I know,” whispered Aisha. “I wasn’t worried.”
Nilah dug in Charger’s utility belt, but his first-aid pack had been ruptured, styptifoam pouring out the side in a hardening white lather. She scooped up some of the fresh, sticky suds and slathered them across Aisha’s wound. Though Nilah tried to shake away the excess, the foam hardened her fingers into claws, and she had to smash them against the deck to get free.
“It’s fine,” grunted Aisha, trying to stand up. “Flame rounds mostly cauterize and—”
She slumped into Nilah’s arms, barely hanging on to consciousness.
“Orna!” Nilah shouted, turning to face the quartermaster. She found her straddled across Bill, thumbs pressed into his eyes, and turned away.
“Orna,” Nilah repeated more calmly and waited.
After a moment, Orna joined Nilah at her side, hands slick with Bill’s blood. “Thanks.”
Nilah nodded at Charger, whose power banks had failed. No longer did its rib cage carry the hot flame of a heart; only cold shadow. “I’m sorry.”
“He’s fine, the big baby,” said Orna, walking over to the bot and taking hold of its skull. She wrenched one of the plates free and pulled loose a data crystal, holding it up. “Just a little smaller now. After Ranger, I … I was more careful. Let’s go.”
They gingerly loaded Aisha onto a nearby platform and took to the skies. The forest, which had been so verdant and lovely, was now ablaze. No sprinklers triggered to fight the fire, since all station defenses were down. Sparks flitted through the starry atrium like fireflies. The world below raged out of control.
Orna followed Nilah’s gaze to the inferno and said, “Good. Burn it all.”
“Yeah.”
Then the Scuzzbucket came into view, its frame damaged and hull breached in so many places. There was no way it would be spaceworthy again.
Nilah’s heart sank as she set the platform down before Cordell. “Oh, my god.”
“Armin!” Orna cried out, leaping the last meter to the ground.
Cordell greeted them, nodding to the twins and Aisha. “It’s bad. I can’t raise him, and we can’t get in.”
“Leave it to me,” said Orna, rushing toward the downed yacht.
“Vraba?” asked Nilah.
“Just a stain on the front of the Scuzzbucket,” said Cordell.
“Boots?”
The captain grimaced, as though swallowing a bitter pill. “On her own.”
Gravity shivered as the central drive began to fail, and Nilah’s stomach lurched.
The station voice came again. “Attention all celebrants: an enemy warship is targeting the Masquerade. All point defenses failing. Please report to your rooms for immediate—”
“Okay, so it’s worse,” he said. “They’re not going to risk letting us get off the station with Vraba dead.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Last Dance
Nilah hoisted Aisha over her shoulder, carefully moving the downed woman toward her husband. The twins had found a medpack in one of the emergency sconces, and they were pushing gouts of bloodstained styptifoam into Malik’s gut.
“Malik … baby …” Aisha moaned at seeing her husband’s sorry state.
Then a lone figure stepped out into the Promenade before them. Nilah recognized the scales of the goldfish glinting in the firelight. A pair of tube launchers glinted in either hand, their barrels aglow with the light of the grenadier’s mark. If he fired, he’d vaporize them and probably melt a sizable hole in the station, too.
“You!” bellowed the concierge. “This was my life’s work!”
Aisha let go of Nilah and gently slipped the slinger from her holster at her back. The pilot was scarcely able to stand, much less cast—but Nilah heard the whisper of a glyph forming behind her. She only hoped the concierge wouldn’t notice.
“Don’t bother with the marksman’s glyph,” cried the fish, “unless you want another hole. Half the people on this station have reflectors.”
Nilah sneered. “I take it they were on sale, darling? Get lost.”
“We were the elites!” zie screeched. “We were the chosen! The true power brokers of the galaxy! We were the star around which the rest of you trash orbited! And at the center of it all, I was the fusing spark that—”
“Cool,” Aisha interrupted, firing.
Except she wasn’t aiming for the concierge. The spell bolt struck the mooring anchor of a chandelier high in the atrium, and the assembly came down on zir like an ice floe breaking from a glacier.
Aisha watched bitterly as a mountain of glass crushed the fish, then she fell unconscious once more.
“She’s lost too much blood,” said Nilah, scooping her up, surprised at how light the pilot was. She set Aisha down before the twins. “Take care of her. I’m going to help Orna open the ship.”
“Get him out of there as fast as possible,” said Cordell, catching her arm. “I want us in those rooms in the next three minutes.”
Through the atrium’s magnified starfield, Nilah spied other rooms, detached from the Masquerade, launching into the great beyond, Vraba’s black warship looming over all of them with every cannon ablaze. Swarms of fighters tangled overhead, and anti-ship rounds flitted through the skies like fireflies. Then one of the escape apartments went up in a fiery explosion. Then another.
The enemy fighters were targeting the fleeing revelers.
“Captain,” said Nilah, her voice almost a whisper, “even if we get to the room … without air support …”
He nodded at her. “One problem at a time, Miss Brio. I’ve still got my mask, so we’ve still got an escape pod.”
Nilah rushed through the shattered scene to Orna’s side. The quartermaster had already traced her glyph and had her palm pressed to the Scuzzbucket’s dented airlock.
Despite her own onrushing demise, the only thing Nilah grieved was Orna. Her mind kept turning the problem over and over, trying to imagine a way to save her fiancée from all of this. Orna didn’t deserve to die on the Masquerade, surrounded by the lavish wealth she hated—not after the burden of her childhood. The quartermaster had suffered enough for ten lifetimes, and a measure of happiness should’ve been her reward—not being swatted from the skies like a pesky wasp.
“The damned door is jammed!” Orna shouted. “And the power is still online. If there’s been a breach, the engines could go up at any second.”
Nilah traced her glyph as well and slapped her hands to the hull. She wound her way through security, past the critical systems, to the control surfaces … and found someone giving them inputs.
Without warning, the Scuzzbucket lurched backward, screeching against the demolished wall. Nilah and Orna leapt back as its maneuvering thrusters fired once more, lighting up the deck with gouts of hot gas.
The pair rushed back to a safe distance and Orna tapped her comm. “What the hell, Armin?”
The maneuvering systems brought the yacht to an unsteady level, where it listed to and fro like a drunkard. With a whine, the Scuzzbucket’s main engines kicked on, twisting the Promenade smoke into cyclones, and it swiveled to face the far docking bay from whence it came. A long strand of twisted metal moored it to the wall, and it pulled the wreckage out like ripping a seam. Lights flickered inside the ship, spilling out through its numerous wounds. The bridge lit up, and Nilah spotted Armin’s tiny silhouette inside.
“Get him out of there now!” shouted Cordell, but the ship hovered five meters out of anyone’s reach.
“Don’t bother, Captain Lamarr,” said Armin. “I’m busy.”
Cordell’s face lit up. “Armin. Oh, thank god! Come down so we can get to—”
“I don’t think so, Captain,” Armin cut him off, his voice ragged. His silhouette disappeared from the window as he headed for a different console. “It’s time we deal with that warship.”
The hairs on the back of Nilah’s neck stood up, and she cast her glyph. Even without touching the ship, she could feel the power of what was happenin
g inside. She put a hand on Cordell’s shoulder, and he wheeled on her in confusion.
“Not right now,” he growled. “Armin, do as I say, damn it!”
“He’s spinning up the jump drive!” she cried.
The captain’s face contorted in surprise. “What? No!”
Orna took a few hesitant steps toward the unsteady ship’s hull, staring up at it like a child left behind. “Listen, Armin. Listen to me. You and the captain rescued me, so now I’m going to rescue you. Do not do this. You’re family, all right? Just—”
“I know, Orna,” he said, quiet and calm. “That warship. Those fighters. They’re going to kill all of you. I can take them down. Break their ranks.”
Orna ran her fingers through her hair in frustration. “But their defenses … They’ve got serious firepower, and your ship—”
Armin cut her off. “Those won’t stop a jump. I’m not going around their defenses—I’m shooting through them. I can hit their reactor.”
“You’re not a pilot!” Cordell bellowed. “You can’t possibly do this alone!”
A long pause followed, and the jump drive’s whine grew loud enough to be heard by the naked ear. Arcs of pink energy crawled across the hull as the ship’s reserves filled with power.
“Armin!” called Cordell, fury in his eyes.
“I am a datamancer,” said Armin. “I know the odds. And furthermore, I am the commanding officer of this fine vessel, and I demand your respect, Captain Lamarr.”
“If you jump in the atmosphere, we’re all dead,” Orna begged.
“I’ll get outside the shields—even with the holes in my ship. I won’t have to hold my breath for long,” said Armin.
“It wasn’t supposed to go down like this,” said Cordell.
“What we want doesn’t matter,” Armin replied. “They have us walled off. This is the only winning play in our game.”
Cordell nodded bitterly. “And what are the odds, Mister Vandevere?”
“Sixty-eight percent. Two out of three.”
The Sunspray yacht pulled free of the tangle of debris, shearing off even more bits of its fragile hull. It wasn’t spaceworthy—it wouldn’t even hold pressure—but it didn’t have to if it was only jumping a hundred klicks. It lazily roved away down the Central Promenade, barely scraping past all the damage it had done on the way in.
