Jormungandr's Venom

by Kal Spriggs

  ***

  Bob wasn’t sure how he was alive. He was hanging upside-down, cocooned in safety foam. He couldn’t move, could barely breathe. Maybe the safety features on this thing aren’t so bad, he thought to himself.

  That was, until he found himself staring down the barrel of a weapon.

  “Sir,” a voice barked, “we found the pilot.”

  Bob blinked and forced his eyes to focus. The man holding the weapon could have been of just about any ethnicity. His face was perhaps just a bit too angular, though. His chin a bit too narrow and the back of his head a bit too rounded.

  The armed man stepped back, out of the way, and a different man stepped into Bob’s view. Son of a…

  “Hello,” “Mister Bhutto” practically purred as he stared up at Bob. “I should have known it was you.” The Chandral gave a pleased smile. “Well, it looks as if this wasn’t entirely fruitless. I have some questions to ask you. Starting with where you got your information, where you learned things you shouldn’t have been able to learn.” He waved a hand at one of his people, “Cut him down.”

  Bob tried to struggle, but the safety foam held him too securely. He couldn’t manage to wiggle a finger, much less to get to his gun.

  The henchman came up, grabbing onto the jagged edge of the broken canopy with one hand and effortlessly lifting himself up into the cockpit itself. Chandral… shit. He’d drawn a knife and begun cutting through the foam, tearing out great chunks of it.

  As he did so, though, Bob was finding he was getting a bit of movement on that side. As a big chunk of foam tore free, he was actually able to pull his arm back a few centimeters. Then again. And this time he drew his arm back to the point that he could slip it into the gap between the foam and his chest.

  Of course, it wasn’t like he could do much, not with the Chandral so close to him with the knife.

  Bhutto looked impatient, “Hurry up, we need to move.”

  The one with the knife looked down at Bhutto and that was just enough of a distraction. Bob’s hand tugged on the grip of his BFR 25mm and the heavy pistol slid out. The Chandral below him seemed to sense the movement and his head snapped around. Bob let gravity assist as he punched the heavy revolver forward half out of the foam as he squeezed the trigger, the barrel almost in contact with the Chandral’s chest.

  The recoil and hydrostatic shock blasted foam and blood in all directions. Bob didn’t hesitate, he squeezed the trigger again.

  The noise and shock in the confined space overwhelmed his senses. For a moment, he thought his head was spinning, until he realized that the gun firing inside his foam cocoon had actually shattered it and he was actually falling.

  Bob let out a shout of fear and panic as he toppled head first out of the upside-down cockpit and barely got an arm up before he slammed into the ground, rolling from the impact until he lay, dazed, his feet up in the air.

  “That was unfortunate,” Bhutto muttered. “Get him up.”

  Two more Chandral caught Bob, one by either arm and lifted him up. He looked around, blinking, trying to find where his gun had got to, but he was having trouble focusing. Too many knocks to the head…

  For some reason, he found that hilariously funny and he found himself laughing.

  Bhutto didn’t seem to get the humor. “Filthy little apru, you think this is funny, do you? You have no idea how much I’m going to make you suffer…”

  “Uh, excuse me,” a confident voice spoke from behind him.

  There was something familiarly irritating about that voice. The arrogance that was almost equalt to what a Chandral had. Nah, it couldn’t be… Bob forced his eyes to focus.

  Brian stood there, a blonde woman next to him, both of them with weapons aimed at Bhutto and his people. “I hate to interrupt, I’m sure you all have a great reason to kill him, but I’m going to have to ask you to put my friend down.”

  ***

  Brian hadn’t really known what to expect as he and Yewell came up on the wreckage of the shuttle. A bunch of goons holding Bob Walker by the arms and waving weapons around certainly wasn’t it.

  As he gave them his ultimatum, however, two things happened to further make things interesting. The first was that the four men in the room moved fast. Far faster than even Brian could follow. The second was that he and Yewell opened fire.

  Brian’s lips drew back in a happy smile as his target dropped. He hadn’t messed around with them, he’d put three rounds through the man’s face. But even as he spun to fire on the next, his opponent was already there, catching hold of his weapon and ripping it away from him with surprising strength.

  Brian’s smile drew back in a predatory grin, kicking out with a foot that blurred faster than even his eyes could follow, knocking his opponent back and buying him space to go for his sidearm… but his opponent darted back in, every bit as fast, possibly faster than Brian.

  They grappled at each-other, Brian smiling while the other man strained, his hard, angular features determined. “Who are you?” Brain panted. Ounce for ounce, the man matched him for strength.

  “You are of another House?” The other man asked. “Who sent you, one of the Heirarchs?”

  “I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about,” Brian smirked. He shifted his weight, in a motion that he’d used against the cybernetically enhanced, but his opponent compensated and then they were back in balance, Brian. Could sense Yewell and another of the men struggling, but he couldn’t see what was going on, or if Bob was still up. He couldn’t afford the distraction. How very exhilarating.

  “You’re good,” Brian smiled, testing the other man once more. This time, his opponent dropped back, almost pulling Brian off balance.

  “I should have known the apru was a trick, a lure,” his opponent hissed. “Who among the Hierarchs is behind this? They sent me to—”

  He didn’t get the chance to finish. Bob Walker’s massive hand cannon roared and a huge crater opened up in the man’s side, the bullet screaming past Brian close enough that the shock of its passage sent him stumbling back.

  His opponent didn’t go down, though. Even as Brian stumbled back, the man spun, faster than any normal human should, faster than Bob’s next shot, which ripped through the air between Brian and Yewell. In a flash, the man was gone, racing away at a sprint despite the gaping wound that Bob’s handgun had blown out of his side.

  Brian almost raced after him, his face flushed, feeling more alive than he had in… hundreds of years. That was a challenge, a real challenge, a foe every bit as fast and dangerous as himself.

  Yet the sounds of fighting turned his head. Yewell was fighting with not just one, but two of the other men. One of them was wounded, blood running down from several bullet holes in his chest, but he showed no signs of slowing. The other was swinging a knife, darting and thrusting in a blur.

  But it was Yewell who held Brian’s undivided attention. Her long blonde hair flashed as she darted and spun, blocking blows and delivering solid strikes against both opponents in a smooth, unnervingly beautiful movements. Brian’s jaw dropped as he watched her spin and twist, shattering the kneecap of one opponent and then snapping the elbow of another. Before Brian could so much as intervene, she caught one opponent around the neck and twisted so hard that Brian could hear the vertebrae crackle like a bag of marbles, the man dropped, internally decapitated, his head flopping around as his body twitched and shuddered. The man with the knife lunged at her and to Brian’s surprise, she stepped into the strike, then brought her knee up in a smooth powerful blow that shattered the man’s sternum and drove his own ribs through his heart and lungs.

  The man she’d just killed still tried to come at her, but Brian had seen enough. He stepped up, caught the dying man by the shoulders, and slammed him, backwards into the ground, shattering his skull and spine.

  Panting, Yewell shot him a glare, “I could handle him myself.”

  “Of course,” Brian smiled at her. “But I thought, since we had so many other pressin
g issues, I could speed things up a bit.” He coughed delicately, “Uh, you have something,” he pointed at his own shoulder.

  Yewell looked down and flushed. “Oh, right.” She reached up and felt at the hilt of the knife. “Just through the meat, I’ll be fine.”

  Brian decided to be a gentleman, “Can I help? I’d hate for you to knick something taking it out. Always a hard angle to draw a blade out, you know?”

  She shot him a genuine smile, “It is, you know?”

  Bob Walker gave a snort of disgust, “God, you two get a room, will you?”

  For some reason, Brian and Yewell found that incredibly funny.

  ***

  Chapter 18

  Time: 0630 24 February 292 G.D.

  Location: Vagyr System, Harlequin Military Sector, Guard Space

  Mel chewed on her lip as she watched the imagery from the planet. Things had gone to hell quickly. She’d picked up the rest of Agent Scaddeb’s transmission, but they’d lost comms with their people on the ground… well, other than Swaim. He had a directional receiver and their transmissions were making it to him, but nowhere else.

  “Have you identified the source of the jamming?” Mel demanded.

  “I have,” Fenris growled back, highlighting the position of the two shuttles that Admiral Mizra’s people had unloaded from. “It’s jamming equipment consistent with what the Mercenary Guild has encountered on joint operations with Guard Fleet and Marine Corps elements in the past six months. Someone’s dialed it up with additional power. Short of taking out the jammer, I don’t know that I can push through to our people on the ground.”

  “Swaim doesn’t have the equipment to relay, either,” Mel scowled. In the future, she’d need to add that to the list. “How did a renegade Harmony force get top-line Guard equipment?”

  “I don’t know,” Fenris answered, “But I—”

  Mel felt her stomach flutter as he cut off. “Fenris?”

  “We have a problem, Captain,” Fenris’s gruff voice showed just an element of shock. “Apparently we’re being boarded.”

  “What?” Mel demanded in shock.

  “I’m not sure how, but there are personnel coming through the second deck, forward airlock.” Fenris answered. “They put my local sensors in a recursive loop, I only noticed because I was doing a routine power evaluation and noticed power going to the airlock while the airlock indicators and sensors showed no activity. The airlock has cycled six times to date. I’d estimate twenty-four personnel have come aboard over the past twenty minutes. Should I go to lockdown?”

  Twenty minutes, Mel felt her face go wide with shock. That would mean people had been coming aboard since only a few minutes after their shuttle had landed on the planet. She didn’t want to think how far those personnel may have gone in that time.

  “Lock us down,” Mel snapped. She unbuckled from her command chair. “I’m headed to the armory, tell Tank to meet me there.”

  ***

  Rawn bit back an oath as the security door ahead of him slammed shut. As he’d feared, the ship’s layout didn’t seem to match up to the plans they’d had of the original Tenacity. He and his advanced team hadn’t made it very far as they’d had to double back as the corridors they followed led away from where the lifts should have been. The weird thing was how the corridors had a worn look in some areas, areas which didn’t match the plans.

  The thing that Rawn couldn’t shake was that the ship just felt oddly… familiar. It wasn’t any one thing he could pin down, granted. All ships shared similarities. This forward section, though, seemed to be devoid of living spaces.

  Focus, Rawn, he reminded himself. The security doors would only be down if someone had noticed they were here. “Looks like somebody realized something was up, anyone have eyes on crew?”

  He listened as the other four-man teams chorused negatives. “What’s the status on the airlock?” he asked.

  “It’s powered off,” his second in command responded. Her voice was bitter, almost accusatory. “We’re cycling it manually, though and we should have our wounded inside.” She clearly didn’t like being left behind.

  “Should we begin explosive breaching?” one of his people asked.

  “Negative,” Rawn answered. “Use the programing override I gave you. We start blowing doors open and they’ll know where we are right away. The hacking programs I gave you should open the doors without alerting them.” He’d used some of the same coding he’d developed when they’d boarded the Fenris. If it had worked against an AI, it should work just fine with merely human opposition.

  Fenris… He thought and he barely repressed a shiver. For a moment, the corridors of the ship looked way too familiar and he had to fight a spurt of panic. Don’t be dumb, Rawn, he reminded himself, Fenris was destroyed. Yet as he looked around, he couldn’t help but notice similarities. Eerie similarities, like the lighting of the access corridor and the style of fittings…

  He banished those thoughts. Rawn wasn’t going to jeopardize the mission because he was a little spooked. A dozen or more of his people had already died, he owed it to them to finish the job.

  Rawn connected his datapad to the security hatch’s dataport and initiated the program. It took a few seconds, but then the door slid open. Rawn disconnected and gestured at his team to move through. They had a ship to capture.

  ***

  Marcus Keller was not a happy man.

  He’d recognized the jamming deployed against them. It had been developed by Guard Intelligence, it actually came from a program that Aldera Kynes had been working on. Sure, Guard Intelligence had loaned that equipment to the Guard Marine Corps and certain elements of Guard Fleet, but they’d only be using it in conjunction with authorized Guard Intelligence operations.

  Which told him that his former protégé was playing games. He hadn’t been cut off, he’d cut his transmission exactly where he planned. Which also meant that he’d wanted to the ground team split.

  And since Marcus’s bomb was rigged to detonate off his radio transmissions, he wasn’t going to be detonating anything. Not unless he wanted to be on top of the bomb when it went off. Scadden must want Rao alive for some reason… or else he wants Admiral Mizra to get ahold of him?

  He had no doubt at all that the “mystery” shuttle would turn out to be a Guard Intelligence drone. Agent Scadden had suckered off half the ground team to check it out. Which left Marcus as the fall guy when Guard Intelligence operatives showed up to pick up Rao.

  Marcus shot a glance at the Harmony Protectorate officer. Rao wore a resigned expression, almost as if he knew what was happening. Who knows, maybe he does. “What do you think about all this?”

  Rao looked over at him, “I think your Captain has done an admirable job, but things may have spiraled out of control at this point.”

  That was more honesty than Marcus had expected. His eyes narrowed as he considered that. “What would you do, in my position?”

  Rao gave a snort, “I don’t understand you position. I don’t know you… though you’ve made it clear you’d gleefully shoot me out an airlock if it would save you.”

  “Not me,” Marcus snarled, “it’s not about me.” This was about Mel. She always found ways to stick her neck out for people who didn’t matter, whose lives didn’t matter. I have to protect her, I owe it to her.

  “Well, then, to preserve your fellow crew who you care so much about,” Rao flashed Marcus a smirk. His smile faded. “Really, it doesn’t matter. Admiral Mizra’s people or Guard Fleet, they both want me dead.” The officer’s gaze went distant. “Maybe it would be best.”

  “In that I’ll agree,” Marcus snapped. His thoughts shifted as he made up his mind. Scadden wouldn’t want Mizra’s people getting Rao. He’d probably have his response team in position soon to take Rao. But Marcus needed a reason not to be here when that team came in. “I think I see movement south of here. I’m going to check it out.”

  He jogged off in that direction, weaving his way through o
ld, rusted industrial equipment. He shouldn’t have to wait long. Scadden’s people would be in position and they could take Rao and then—

  He rounded a corner and slammed headlong into someone. Both of them stumbled back, but Marcus was bigger, so while his opponent fell back, Marcus just stumbled a bit, even as he brought his rifle up into the ready position.

  There were ten or fifteen armed men and women. They didn’t wear uniforms, most of them had coveralls or jumpsuits, with a miss-match of weapons, gear, and equipment. They weren’t professional soldiers or security. They had the look of pirates or maybe even terrorists. His brain was cataloging what he saw, even as his body reflexively centered the sights of his rifle on the lead man in the group. He squeezed the trigger, shifted targets, fired again. He’d killed five of them before any had the chance to start bringing up their weapons, but by that point, Marcus had backed up and then spun around a corner out of their line of fire.

  Gunfire started up, at first from the group he’d engaged, but then from all around him, bullets buzzing past like malignant hornets. Apparently, he’d found the force from the south. The only problem was, they weren’t Admiral Mizra’s people.

  A dozen thoughts raced through his mind, even as he relocated, engaging and killing two figures trying to flank him even as he rolled into cover behind a heavy industrial motor. They might be pirates, but Admiral Mizra was supposed to run a professional force. Even though the Guard had technically backed Rao’s coup, Mizra would still hesitate to use pirate auxiliaries on this kind of operation. There was too much risk of that backfiring.

  Now, if he’d allied himself with Guard Free Now… well, that would foot the bill.

  Marcus swore as gunfire roared around him. If Guard Free Now were here, there was a chance that Rawn was here. That meant that Marcus had to do his damnedest to kill all of them, preferably before Scadden’s people arrived and started taking them down, or worse, started taking prisoners.