by Ian Cannon
First, she inspected its armory. Tucked behind the right arm on a swivel hinge was the tri-barrel pounder-gun with a band of munitions looping into a feed box. She gripped it, wiggled it checking its mount. Satisfied, she checked the concussion gun sheathed in its dura sleeve across the battle suit’s back. It was loaded, eighteen penetrator rounds. And of course, for close-quarters hand-to-hand combat—or mech-to-mech—she checked the long, plasma sharpened broad-bladed thrasher weapon slung across the back opposite the concussion gun.
Ready, she stepped into the battle suit sliding her arms into the operation sleeves and closed it around her with a hermetic thud. She initiated its body control feature and stepped off the crane, down onto the bay floor. It was a remarkably easy mechanism to control as it motion-assisted every nuanced action she took, from walking to jumping, crouching to standing still.
She said, “Intellect-connect diagnostic.” Her visor slid down with a click, and the micro-optic overlay opened into view. She could feel the mind window open in her brain giving her immediate, cerebral wherewithal of the suit’s surroundings, including the physical features of the bay, potential dangers as well as multiple target readings happening simultaneously. The thing was ready to go into combat. She was at home in her exo-mech battle suit.
So why didn’t she feel good about what she was about to do? Why did she feel so low?
It wasn’t the Bitch. There was fury and madness there, even hatred. But she looked forward to going into battle against her. She wanted it.
It wasn’t N’halo, either. The little angel had caused Tawny to retouch part of her youth. The girl had given her a deep sense of mission. So, it wasn’t N’halo tugging at her conscience.
But Benji. Where did Benji stand in her spectrum of duty?
She didn’t know how to share her allegiance. There had always been two factions in her life—good and bad. In the war it was her Confederation platoon versus the enemy. In her marriage it was Benji and her versus the rest of the galaxy. She’d never had to choose. She’d always known who to hate and who to love. Third parties were never a consideration. Now it was N’halo versus the Bitch. And Benji was somewhere in the periphery.
She pounded a fist on the wall angrily looking at herself in the reflective qualities of her visor’s inner surface. It was a close look, a deep look.
No! Benji was her man, he was her home. She was right with Benji. He would kill for her. He would die for her. And maybe, he was about to do both.
She looked into her reflection to find tears in her eyes, reddening them. She had to dig deep, find the issue and kill it. There was no time for this. She blinked suddenly, looked up. She wasn’t alone. This wasn’t just her fight. It was theirs. They would do it together, just like they always had.
Her feelings for N’halo and her requisite hatred for the Bitch had distracted her. But not anymore. She could love and protect the girl far better with Benji at her side, than not.
Period.
“Ten minutes,” REX said.
Ten minutes before they dropped out of inner-warp, before they engaged in combat with a wholly unknown enemy in front of them, and an old one raging behind.
Ben nodded in affirmation. The moments before any engagement had always given him a high. It was a combination of terror and glory struggling inside him, amping him up, heating his blood. He always felt so light on his feet, like he could fly faster, fight better, roar louder than anyone else.
So why did he feel so damn heavy, so damn silenced?
This was no way to go into combat.
He heard the lift gate slide open behind him and the iron-on-steel thud of Tawny’s exoskeleton step out into the main hold. He turned to look at her. She was a tower of exo-plates and weaponry, ready to kill. Her face visor was peeled away, and the look in her eyes was telling a different story. They looked directly at him, glistening.
“I’ve been distant,” she admitted lowly.
He acknowledged her with a refuting look. “What—no,” he lied.
“I’ve treated you unfairly,” she said.
“That’s not true,” he said, still lying.
She flared, “Yes I have, dammit!”
Her bellow shut him up. The truth swam in his eyes. She had been distant. He had been very patient with her. He smiled, capitulating, “Okay—but you don’t have to say anything, baby.”
She took a step closer to him—thump. “It’s just … when they attacked Requiem … I knew right then. This isn’t a job. It’s a mission.”
He took a step closer to her. “I believe you.”
“And when …” she paused, said, “and when I saw … her.”
The Bitch.
He nodded with a very sincere look. “Oh—we’re going to kill that bitch together, sweetheart.”
“We have to get that girl to her home, Benji.”
“Yes, baby,” he said.
She took another step closer—thump. “I’m ready to die for it.”
“Then, I’ll die with you.” He stepped closer. “I’ll die twice.”
“Then it’s you and me,” she said—thump.
“And the rest can go to hells,” he said—step.
They stared at each other, tears refusing to dribble down. Her huge armor arms held forward as she said, “I need you on this.”
“You got me. All the way.” He smiled big. “It’ll be fun.” Her line.
“Gods I love you,” she said.
He stepped into her body armor’s embrace and wrapped his arms around the exoskeleton futilely. He squeaked against the might of her hug. Through constricted, painful words he groaned, “Come back. And prove it.”
She chuckled at his reddening face and said, “That might kill you three times.”
He forced a breathless grin and said, “Oh. The bliss.”
She let him go, he stumbled back catching his breath.
REX said, “Five minutes, Cap.”
They shared a moment, and Ben said, “Now go kick the shit out of that bitch, baby.”
Despite the best efforts of the Malice 1 medical crews, Paleron did die. Four ten-inch-deep knife wounds to the gut was enough to get the job done. Every major organ in his body had been punctured or severed altogether. But his brain was unscathed, save the depletion of oxygen it experienced from a pair of lungs drowning in their own blood.
Still, they fixed him.
There was no telling how much of “him” was left in his mind, but that didn’t matter. With a completely computerized new torso that regulated oxygen and blood serum to the brain he could still communicate. At least robotically. He could also follow his Bitch around on little, rubber wheels with the best of them. He sat in her quarters watching her—or at least seeing her—prepare for a fight.
Without moving his mouth at all, he mentioned in his android way, “Reports have not yet gather-ther-thered a full readout of the approaching force, my my Bitch.”
She snatched a pair of Portaxian katana swords and slung them across her back. They were sheathed in an X-shaped harness that she tightened with a buckle at her chest. “There is no single force in the system capable of our destruction,” she hissed.
She activated her armory locker and a drawer slid out. She whipped out her multi-knife thigh strap. The blades shimmered in the light making Paleron offer a digitized, guttural moan. She slung it around her upper leg nice and secure. “Besides, Paleron,” she sneered. “My battle will be with her!”
“Never-the-the-less,” he crooned, “it will ple-ple-please you to know our vessel defensive systems are fully prepared for any on-on-on-slaught.”
Xantrissa strapped a belt low across her hips with two-rear-mounted holsters, each with a hand blaster. “I will deal out an agony she has never known.”
She jerked the pistols up and eyed them with that ever-present half grin. She stuffed them back down held in place at the small of her back and stormed toward the exit. “I will destroy everything she is.”
Paleron spun his rolling
compu-chair in a quick one-eighty to follow her.
As she left her quarters, she swiped her plasma whip from its wall mount and wound it in a loose pattern with a single fluttering motion. “I will destroy everything she has ever loved.”
She hooked it to her hip and stormed out onto the control stage. “And I will destroy everything she will ever be.”
She entered her dais and whisked to its top. Standing over her entire control stage, she called, “Situation!”
Her lead defense automaton turned and called back, “All gunnery crews in place and ready, my Bitch.”
Another followed with, “Swarm drone deployment ready for your command, my Bitch.”
Then another, “Approaching objects are breaking inner-warp at two-ten-degrees, my Bitch.”
She looked up through the membrane. The banding lamina of distant galaxies speckled the space drop distantly. Caught in the thin glow were a tiny series of flashing lights, inner-warp funnels spitting their vessels out into immediate space.
They were here.
Xantrissa called, “All command operators … get out.” Everyone got up and left, moving to the rear of the hub and to the tube rail.
She heard a robot voice say from below, “My matriarch?”
“You too, Paleron.”
“Yes, my my Bitch. My ever endearing love goes with with with you.”
It made her grumble pitifully as she heard his little buggy zip off. Endearing love. Undying loyalty. Ha. She was alone now. She needed no one. All she needed was the self.
She straightened, looked forward. She wanted the stage empty as she felt her bloodlust rise hot under her skin. She grinned wildly with death and malcontent gleaming in her eyes. This fight would be intimate, private. It would be between she … and her.
Chapter Seventeen
“We’re dropping in, baby!” Ben yelled through the inner-ship comm.
“I’m set!” she called back, meaning she was staged in the cargo bay over the airlock, prepared to drop over Malice 1.
The inner-warp gyre peeled back through the viewport, became a deep star drop. Malice 1 zoomed toward them very rapidly, growing to an immense, surprising size. It made Ben hold his breath, eyes wide.
Big, closeup objects blinked into his peripheral vision taking up his entire viewport. He looked right. There was a large, angular attack corvette to the starboard dropping out of inner-warp right next to him and swallowing REX in its shadow. Its exposed swivel cannons were low-topped, dark and squared, in suit with the hull and command deck, all a deep space blue. Very Cabal. Ben looked left. Another corvette zipped into view. Space shadows hugged him. The towering mothership zipped into battle space right behind with its broad forward wedge design looming over them. It dwarfed the corvettes, which dwarfed REX. He was among their battlefront moving toward the enemy, tucked between their numbers. It made Ben grin nervously.
“Great, now we’re in the Cabal,” he muttered to himself.
Immediately, a field of stark red laser strikes crossed the gulf in columns and streamers coming right at him. Space flak erupted all around. It was a blinding, sudden foray that pounded REX with expanding spheres of energy. Those were the bulk-light defense batteries talking.
“We’re going in!” Ben cried out and punched the accelerator console shifter forward. Boosters kicked hard. From behind, the Cabal returned fire, each corvette sending waves upon waves of laser fire into the gulf. They were picking up speed, charging ahead.
Malice 1—it wasn’t really a ship, but it wasn’t like any space station he’d ever seen, either—approached in the viewport. Explosions sprinkled across the forward impermeable membrane causing ripples and fluctuations. REX came in fast closing the distance.
“Tawny, that’s your drop point,” Ben yelled into the comm.
“Preparing.”
“No, not yet!” There was way too much laser activity over the control stage, too many strike points and explosions. The corvettes were bombarding the ship at distance, hitting the forward membrane with too much firepower. “We have to let them get closer; they’ll concentrate their fire on those underside gun ports.”
He was upon Malice 1 zipping like a flea around that forward head. The rear city hub came into view in the faraway distance as he rounded the forward control stage, and the thing was so big it moved with parallax compared to the forward command stage.
The big corvette gunboats were close behind, one of them already crippled and burping explosions up from its keel. Malice 1’s guns sent blasts sidelong down the entire length of her port side, increasing their own forward battery. REX slid under the train rail letting the blasts skip by, but the corvette took the brunt. Its forward decking shattered in a series of eruptions, and it lurched toward the command stage out of control. It hit the membrane. Big ripples expanded over the surface. The ship bumped and skipped along, blowing up and pounding the membrane in exploding wreckage. When the fireball evacuated in space, there had been zero damage dealt to Malice 1. Not one scratch. The membrane had held.
And Tawny had missed her jump window.
“Benji?” she cried through the comm.
“I know, baby, we’re circling back around,” he called back. REX slammed forward escaping the havoc of the erupting gunboat, slipping around the huge, circular command stage and straightened its flight, speeding along that endless mag train rail. The city hub approached in the distance. Its membrane bent the starlight in streaking, fluorescent droplets. The aft gun ports engaged them from below the city, laser strikes coming at them from seven miles away and streaming by, too close for comfort. Aphrodisia neared as they closed the distance, fast—six miles, five miles, four, three, two …
REX veered back up in a circular course around the city. Glancing below, Ben could see the building spires of Aphrodisia through the membrane, streaming by. The enormous ribbed structure of the sky frame reached up at them, and Ben spotted several cargo runners, black market freighters and small bounty vessels parked over the city.
REX was in the clear, for now. With Malice 1’s gun ports and cannon barrages concentrating on the encroaching battle group toward the front, they were able to slide high over Aphrodisia and come down on its opposite flank. The massive ion thrusters passed by, steel caverns big enough to swallow small moonlets.
“Gods, that thing’s big,” Ben groaned as he leveled REX’s flight and headed back toward the forward control stage way, way ahead. But their path was blocked.
Half the Cabal corvette column had positioned their flight pattern to slide along Malice 1’s starboard side exchanging blows with the leviathan—six big gunboats coming straight for them. A collision course with the Cabal.
“Hang on!” Ben said straightening their flight and peeling between the first two, then swinging over the third, under the fourth, their bulk roaring by. Lasers crisscrossed back and forth, explosions marking hits. A crossfire!
The Cabal was positioning each of its pieces in surrounding fashion. REX sped away in the opposite direction, returning to the forward command stage up ahead.
Way in the distance, something parted from the control stage’s lower platform and scooted out from beneath. It was a space farer of some sort, maybe an evacuation shuttle, rectangular and long, studded with round, convex shapes, like humps. Lights suddenly activated on each of those shapes like eyes blinking open. There were hundreds of them, thousands. Ben jerked a look at it and said, “What is that thing?”
REX answered, “Beats me, but I don’t like it, Cap.”
“REX, target that thing with the upper cannons and get ready to—wah!”
The thing pivoted around and slid through the vacuum coming right at them. It was charging.
“Fire, REX, fire!”
REX’s upper cannons spit twin barrel streams of condensed light blasts right into it. The shot was true. It couldn’t have been better. And it missed.
The thing flew apart into a cloud of separate pieces, each identical to the others. They all flew i
n a coordinated spiraling formation like a flock of Molosian cave bats forming a dizzying vortex of motion. The laser strikes passed right through. The—things—engulfed REX in their churning flight forcing Ben to throw his arms over his head defensively. In seconds, they zipped away to join the battle.
Ben released the breath he’d been holding, shocked. His eyes blinked bringing him back. “Oh, I see,” he moaned. “Swarm drones. Got it.”
REX approached the control stage. Beyond it way across the battle space, that immense Cabal support carrier loomed large overhead, spanning a few thousand feet in width. Several lit windows appeared along its frame—bay doors opening. Condor fighters came spilling out in hoards, their boosters glowing hot. The fight was about to get extreme.
“Tawny, I’m moving you into position!”
“Copy.”
REX veered up over the forward membrane. Proximity buzzers sounded. Ben looked over and his blood ran cold. The swarmers had looped around in their layered formation and were steaming this way to engage the fighters. They were about to be in the thick of a massive dogfight.
“This is bad,” he groaned. “Baby, I can’t slow down. You’re going to have to go, now!”
“Okay—see you after!” Tawny initiated the lower airlock. The atmosphere evacuated and the hatch auto disengaged, slid open. Directly below, Malice 1’s massive, round control stage slid into view. That was her drop point. Her battle suit’s intellect-connect feature populated in her mind. She knew immediately—4,000 feet at 17 degrees.
She took a breath, closed her eyes. Her nerves tried to swell inside her, but she beat them back with determination. This was the mission. Destiny had brought her here. Failure was no option. Neither was fear. Her eyes opened sharp.
Here’s where the fun begins.
“Launching!”
Her suit boosters flared and she ejected from the airlock. REX fell away overhead in a blink, became lost among the starscape. Skies were clear below, and then …
