by C. F. Harris
I looked down at the creature. I'd like to say I didn't feel any satisfaction in the taking of a life, but damn did it feel good to remove a monster like this from the galaxy. It wouldn’t be able to torture any other species ever again.
It was a small satisfaction considering everything I’d been through, but it was a satisfaction nonetheless.
"Went a little overboard there, didn't you?" Dalia asked.
I regarded the burnt out husk that’d been the Klik researcher. Then I shook my head.
"There’s no such thing as going too far when it comes to bringing justice to the Kliks,” I said.
She grinned and held her hand out. I regarded it and she rolled her eyes and let out a disgusted noise.
"You're supposed to slap my hand," she said.
I grinned and reached up to slap her hand. This seemed to be of some sort of social thing with her species. She responded by leaning in and punching me on the shoulder. From the way she smiled I assumed that was another social ritual from her species and not an attempt to attack me.
"I'm proud of you. As far as I'm concerned you didn't take it far enough, but I understand we’re on a tight schedule here."
I blinked a couple of times. For a moment there I'd almost thought she was going to show compassion and mercy. Or at the very least that she was going to admonish me for not showing mercy. The Klik didn't deserve it, but that didn't mean she couldn't show it. It was almost a relief to find she was just as bloodthirsty as me when it came to the Kliks. My face split into a huge grin.
"Maybe there is something to the idea that the Kliks fear your species if you're so ruthless."
"You have no idea," she said. She got serious for a moment. "We've done some terrible things to ourselves, and maybe the Kliks know that and they're afraid of us. But either way, I have to get out of here. I have to let my people know what's going on here. I have to give them a real reason to make the Kliks afraid of us."
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend," I quoted at her.
"We have a similar saying on earth, but it doesn't sound quite right in the Klik language," she said.
"Nothing ever sounds quite right in that language," I said, which felt a little odd since I was saying it in the Klik language. "We should probably get going though. We're going to have guards bothering us soon enough if we stick around.”
"There's just one thing that's been bothering me," she said. "This arena. All the people who were in it. What happens to them after we leave?"
"Does that really matter?" I asked.
"Maybe it does," she said. "I plan on destroying this place as soon as I get into space, and I don't want to kill innocent people."
I frowned, thinking about the feral officer I'd fought. It turned my stomach.
"I'm not sure how innocent the people trapped here are," I said. "But if you feel it necessary to rescue them then…"
I shrugged, making it clear that I would go along with whatever she wanted. She was the one who was going on about how she needed to let her people know about whatever she'd learned here, but I would go where she led.
We’d gotten this far by working together, after all, and far be it for me to split up such an incredible team.
"Good," she said. "We'll do a quick jailbreak and then get the hell out of here. At the very least breaking everyone out will add to the confusion. I’m assuming we’re on a detention level attached to that arena anyway. We didn’t hit any lifts when they took us in here. Might as well stop and let people free while we’re at it.”
20
Dalia
I poked my head outside the control room and several bolts of plasma sizzled past. I frowned and pulled my head back in. I looked at Kir.
"It doesn't look like were going to be getting out that way,” I said.
“They probably expect us to hole up in here and keep our heads down," Kir said. "So we should do the opposite of that."
I looked down and checked the charge on my weapon. Still plenty to go, and I figured I could take one of his plasma rifles if push came to shove.
"I couldn't agree more. There's only one direct route I can think of back into the prison level. Are we going to take it?"
Kir frowned. "I blasted the arena exits when I made our path out of here.”
I looked down at those double weapons. They looked good and threatening. Like the sort of thing I wouldn't want pointed at me in a fight.
"Are you serious?" I asked. "If you blasted the doors shut then you can blast them open again!”
Kir grinned. "Right."
"But before we go, we should probably make sure they're not going to be able to use this room ever again," I said.
Kir responded by pointing his borrowed rifles at the controls and blasting away at them. I turned around and blasted at a control panel next to the door. In my experience that wouldn’t necessarily stop a door from opening like it always did in the movies, but you never knew. Sometimes things worked exactly like they did in the movies.
"Let's go," Kir said.
We stepped out into the arena. It was eerie. The whole place was deserted. No Kliks to be seen anywhere, unless you counted the Kliks lying dead where we’d ended them. Even the doors were shut, though I held no illusions that would last for long.
I couldn't believe we were making our way back down towards the arena after working so hard to get out of there. Yet we picked our way over the rubble and moved down. It was made all the more difficult since we had to watch for slippery green goo that was all that remained of the Kliks we’d killed on our way out of here.
“Tough shit for you," I muttered in my own language. There was something about swearing in your own language that felt so much better than swearing in an unfamiliar alien language that never quite had the same concepts since the language inevitably came from a world and culture that was alien in so many ways.
"What was that?" Kir asked.
“Just remarking on the poor life choices these Kliks made coming to watch an arena battle with aliens today,” I said.
"I couldn't agree more," Kir said.
I picked my way carefully over the rubble until we were down in the dirt arena again. The junior Klik researcher sat there in its dead power armor. Though maybe it wasn’t quite as dead as I’d thought. As we walked by one of the arms moved slightly, and I jumped.
Kir looked down at it and grinned. "Looks like our buddy here wasn't quite as expired as we thought. Though that gives me an idea…”
He hunched over the Klik and started messing with something where he’d removed the plasma rifles from the thing. I glanced up to the control room to make sure we didn’t have any company joining us. The coast was clear for the moment, but it wouldn’t be long.
“We don’t have much time,” I said. “Whatever you’re doing better be worth it.”
“Oh this is totally going to be worth it,” he said, turning and hitting me with a rakish grin. “I’m preparing a little surprise for the Kliks.”
I wasn’t sure what the hell he was doing, but he had more experience dealing with these bastards so I figured I’d give him the benefit of the doubt.
“Make it fast,” I said.
“But of course,” he said. “Almost got it. Who would’ve known nearly blowing up my ship a couple of times would come in handy someday?”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to be anywhere near something he’d learned in the process of nearly blowing up his ship, though I also had a pretty good idea of what he was doing now. A big angry red light started flashing quite rapidly on the Klik’s armor.
In my experience big angry red lights flashing rapidly never meant anything good.
“Okay. We need to get out of here sooner rather than later,” Kir said.
“Might’ve been better to wait until we had a path out of here before you went blowing up Kliks,” I said.
“Yeah, well it’s all the more incentive for us to get out of here fast, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Something like that,”
I said.
We moved to the rubble that covered the entrance to the prison area. There'd been a couple of guards coming through there and so Kir absolutely needed to take care of it, but I found myself wishing he hadn't been quite so thorough with the destruction. Guards would be streaming into this room at any moment, that power armor behind us was set to blow, and this was our only surefire escape route.
"Maybe I was a little too eager with this," he grunted.
"You can say that again," I said.
"Maybe I was a little too eager with this," he said.
I stared at him for a long moment, not quite sure that he'd actually just made that a cheesy joke, it could’ve been an example of a lost in translation moment, and then I smacked him as his face split into a grin to let him know exactly what I thought of that cheesy joke.
"Sorry," he said. "I couldn't resist."
He lifted his double rifles again, again looking like an action star out of an ancient earth movie, and fired away. He had a strange gleeful look on his face as he fired those weapons.
"You're having entirely too much fun with that," I said.
"Enjoy your work and you'll never work a day in your life," Kir said.
I heard a hissing up top and wheeled around. I fired at the door that’d opened up there. A Klik who'd been on the verge of stepping inside thought better of it and barely avoided getting hit. The blast went a little wide, hitting the edge of the door instead of going through the opening, but it’s not like I expected to be able to hit something at that distance.
Still, covering fire was enough to keep the damn thing out of the arena for the moment. That was good enough for me.
"You might want to hurry up," I said. "It looks like we’re going to have company soon."
"I'm working on it," Kir grunted, still firing away at the pile of rubble. Most of it vaporized as he blasted, but more came down. Meanwhile I was firing away at any Kliks who were stupid enough to stick their eyestalks into the arena, but I wasn't going to be able to keep them away for much longer.
We were in a race, and we were running out of time.
Finally one of the Kliks up there got brave. They stepped into the arena and aimed their twin turrets at us. I squeezed off a couple of shots which had them skittering from side to side, but that didn’t stop them from raining plasma fire down on us.
“They’re moving in here now,” I said.
“I kinda got that,” Kir said.
He wheeled around with his far more powerful double plasma rifles he’d “borrowed” from the Klik researcher and squeezed off a couple of shots of his own. One of them took a Klik in power armor and sent them flying out of the room.
I glanced down at tha Klik researcher. It was just a tad ominous how that power armor was starting to glow. I figured that meant we didn’t have long.
“Come on,” Kir said as more Kliks streamed into the room.
They were moving fast, but they weren’t firing on us. Maybe they wanted to get a little closer before they fired. Maybe they were moving fast so they wouldn’t present an obvious target. Whatever it was, there were soon going to be far too many Kliks in here for us to reliably take all of them out.
Kir grabbed my arm and pulled me along when it became clear that I wasn’t going to be moving on my own.
For a moment there I’d been too terrified by the sight of all those Kliks streaming into the room to think of much of anything but how it looked like our impending death was finally here. It was something that’d been hovering just over my shoulder since I first ran into this Klik ship, and now it was here.
So color me surprised when we stepped through the rubble and into the long hall that led from the arena to the prison level that doubled as a research area. Kir paused to blast the rubble behind us.
“Run,” Kir said.
He didn’t have to tell me twice. I turned and pumped my legs as fast as they could go. I said a brief prayer of thanks that I’d bothered to keep up with my exercise regimen even though I’d been all on my own in a scout ship floating in deep space. It would’ve been pretty easy to give into the temptation to let myself get skinny fat, especially with gravity generators on the ship that meant I was constantly operating at earth gravity and didn’t have to worry about some of the debilitating effects of zero g that early space explorers had to deal with.
I’d kept up with my exercise though, and so I was actually able to outpace Kir pretty quickly.
“How long do we have before that thing goes up?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” Kir said, his words interrupted from time to time by gasps as he sucked in lungfuls of air. “It’s difficult to…”
Whatever he was about to say was interrupted as I got the answer to my question in the most spectacular way possible. There was a sound like the world ending from behind us. A sound that all spacefarers had come to loathe. The sound of screeching bulkheads being ripped apart by an explosion.
Usually the source of an explosion like that was an accident. At least that was the only source for Terran ships considering anyone who got in a fight with the Kliks disappeared without much of a trace so there weren’t many people around who could talk about battle experience, but it still made my stomach twist.
It also caused the deck to heave under me, and I was thrown forward. I managed to duck and roll at the last moment, though, and then I was up and turning to make sure Kir was okay.
He’d been knocked to the deck, but he was pulling himself up. It didn’t look like he’d done anything as elegant as a duck and roll, but he kept going through sheer force of will. He also had a limp which didn’t strike me as good, but we didn’t have time to stop and do an inspect.
As much as the thought of playing doctor with this sexy green alien had me blushing and running through a few interesting scenarios in my mind.
“You okay?” I asked.
“I’ll live,” he said. “I’ve had worse, believe me.”
I looked down to the end of the corridor. It was in even worse shape now than before. A good chunk of the hall had been reduced to twisted metal by the force of that explosion, and it was a damn good thing we’d been running as fast as we could go.
“Come on,” I said. “We have to take care of the research area and then get the hell out of here. I’m going to give these Kliks everything they deserve and then some.”
21
Kir
Dalia stepped into the research circle with gun blazing. I probably should’ve been helping her out by providing some fire of my own, but honestly I was so preoccupied by watching her moving along with her mouth open and her miraculous weapon firing that I couldn’t be bothered.
Besides, it’s not like it was strictly necessary for me to fire at any of the Kliks in here. Not when it was pretty clear they were all going down for the count with the fire Dalia was laying down.
She even managed to take out the Klik researchers in here before they could get to a comm unit and let the guards know there was trouble going on in here. Not that I thought that would stop them for long. Eventually some Klik on the security team was going to realize we’d escaped after destroying that arena, and this would be the natural place for us to go.
“We don’t want to spend too much time in here,” I said. “They’re going to be sending company for us really fucking soon.”
“Totally with you on that,” she said. “Get to those controls and see if you can get the cells open.”
I walked up to the control panel and stared at a screen that had a rotating view of everything that happening in various rooms from multiple angles. I frowned as I looked at that. It was one thing to suspect the Kliks had us under surveillance, but it was another thing to have that suspicion confirmed by the evidence of my own eyes.
“Bastards,” I growled.
What was going on in those cells was pretty interesting, too. There were some that contained individuals marking time staring at their cell wall. Those weren’t the cells that were of interest, th
ough.
I hadn’t been willing to take the Kliks up on their offer of companionship in exchange for winning in the arena, but from the view I was getting on those screens it would appear there were others who were more than willing to take the Kliks up on that offer.
And for a surprise it looked like both were enjoying themselves in those cells. Of course it was impossible to tell for sure from a small screen, but it looked like victor and spoil alike were willing participants in the fun going on in there for the cells where it was going on.
I shook my head. I wanted to be mad at the idiots in there getting it on while they were held captive, but then I thought about what I’d do if I were in a similar situation. I’d felt like Dalia and I shared a moment where we’d come pretty close to doing what the people in there were doing, after all, and if we hadn’t beat the shit out of that Klik then been singled out for a unique form of torture then it was possible we’d be doing the same thing right now.
Besides, I’d spent plenty of time in my cell where the only thing to do was stare at the oddly rounded walls while I waited for the Kliks to feed me or escort me to the arena, and I could understand someone wanting to do something, anything, to break up the monotony.
“Looks like some of these assholes aren’t going to be happy about the jailbreak,” Dalia said as she stared down at the screens.
“Maybe not,” I said. “But it has to be done.”
“We could always be selective about it. Leave the people getting their freak on in their cells and take the ones who aren’t,” she said.
“Would you be able to live with them almost certainly getting killed when you get to your ship and blow this thing up?”
“I think you’re being surprisingly optimistic about our chances of getting through a Klik battlecruiser that’s filled to the brim with armed Kliks in power armor trying to keep us from doing exactly that,” she said, then sighed. “But you’re right. On the off chance we do manage to break out of this place I don’t want a bunch of innocent prisoners on my conscience.”
