“Another wave coming in. We have to move,” Fluff said in an uncharacteristically hurried tone.
Lasher continued to talk on the run. He gave a quick whistle for the Lucifer corpse-bot to follow him like a dog. The thing propped itself up onto its arms, running on his hands as though it were just another ordinary option of travel for it. “We had one of our crew worm an AI into the ship to take control, but when they unlocked all of the stored Swarmers, our friend was booted out of the system by a new one taking control. We're heading to the command deck to recover him, and see if we can give this mule one more kick to get it to crash into the planet. Coordinates are being sent to you now. We believe Chen has a manufacturing plant for these things at that grid. Hopefully we make it out alive so we can meet you down there. Lasher out.”
“When this is over, can we keep Handy?” Fluff asked.
“We can't afford to keep feeding Kel and you want to take in another stray?”
“Two more.”
Lasher looked sideways at the panther mech in a way that suggested he wasn't having this conversation. “We are not taking in the dragon.”
The sound that erupted from Fluff was ancient, from time immemorial. Any teenager that had ever been denied his heart’s desire by any well meaning parent knew how to make that noise.
Orin Lashra, the mongrel fugitive on the run from a ship load of berserkers, stopped to humor his friend. “Who's the other one?”
“Can we keep the kid? You could teach her space magic.”
Lasher smiled. “You don't think our family is big enough?”
“I'm thinking we go from family to tribe. Why think small?”
Lasher and Fluff ducked into an access hatch for a maintenance shaft. Turning his wrist, he keyed coordinates into his cell-com for Handy-Bot to rendezvous with them. This new path would be easier for the mech to negotiate rather than try to drag it through narrow service ducts. Convinced he had put in the right codes, he followed Fluff inside.
“I don't like sending Handy-bot out on his own. He's so young.” Fluff quipped.
The duo crawled until they came to an intersection, jumping into the shaft to ascend through the smoldering skeleton of the dying super freighter. There was a tone in Lasher's earpiece. Taking note of the cell-com's screen, he could see a gaggle of blues tugging on the cases tied to Handy-bots' hands, causing him to topple over onto his back. Lasher keyed in a series of commands, detonating the IED style bombs inside. High yield carbodex packed explosives turned the parts inside to molten slag, ripping through anything in its path at nearly twenty-two hundred degrees Celsius. A platoon's worth of blues perished in the fireball of liquified death that spread along the length of the passage.
“My boy make it?” Fluff cooed.
Handy-bot righted himself, dragging what was left of his chassis along the floor as he trotted toward the command deck.
“Handy-bot lives to waddle another day.” Fluff cheered.
Lasher pulled the Chimera pistol on his way out of the shaft, trying not to laugh so he could keep his aim steady. Fluff backed up along the passage, giving his partner room to work. The Gavoc sword unleashed its telltale scream, ejecting the flexible blade to scald the bulkhead around the sealed hatch. Smoldering metal was all the signal the murder-mech needed. He sprinted into the hatch, transforming from his man-panther form back into the shape of a four legged dynamo. Fluff struck the hatch in mid air, bending it around himself on his mad tumble into the command information center. Landing in the center of the room, he fought with the ruined plate of prosteel like he was trying to free himself from a tangle of blankets.
“Smooth.” Lasher commented.
“Like no one's ever seen your lanky backside try to exit a hammock. You look like a sail-fish stuck in a net.”
“I really do,” Lasher said, helping his friend free of the hatch. “Ok, step one, re-establish Morpheus so he can get control of the ship again. You got the thingy Savoya gave you?”
“I would figure step one would be to stay alive.” Fluff responded.
The pair watched as another access panel for a service tunnel opened. One of the blues stepped through, slapping a pair of gloves into her hand.
“Ms. Chen. Nice to finally meet you, sort of.” Lasher said.
“How did you know it was me?”
“Your particular scent in the Crucible.”
“Fair enough. I applaud your efforts here.” Chen paused her diatribe to slap the gloves in the hands that weren't hers. “You've ruined a perfectly good plan to make a ridiculous profit from our losses. But no matter what we throw at you, somehow you still manage to resist capture or death, on your path to ruin us. No matter. Are you planning to crash the ship near my outpost? That would make the most sense. Put the Swarm in one of the coldest environments on the planet among predators who will most likely snatch them up as they freeze. Smart plan. How do you survive in this scenario?”
“With style!”
“Ah. Fluffang Doom-Snuggle. I was wondering when …”
A twin burst of Fluff's auto-blasters raked the woman, splattering her back into the compartment she came from. “Thousands of years of human evolution and we can't seem to get past the ee-veel monologue?”
Lasher inserted the resicarbon card he'd been given into a command slot on the console. Minutes ticked by with no glimpse of the holographic professor. Kinetic strikes rained onto the hull, a prelude to explosions which set off alarms in the CIC. Multiple systems were failing despite the upgrade packages that were added to the hulking ship.
“And now the gravity’s out,” Fluff noted, his body tilting to one side.
“We must have a bit of spin from ruptured decks venting gases. It’s not a total loss,” Lasher observed.
“It’s going to be amazing running out of here, watching Handy-bot bounce along.”
Fluff’s sensor nodes, his ears, flicked from information crashing against his Symicrion resolution matrix. His auto-cannon burped a pulse of high energy bolts toward the hall, perforating another blue against the carbodex sole outside. “Another call from Chen, I bet. She really wants to talk to you.”
“I gathered.”
Morpheus appeared in the room, moving hundreds of times faster than he normally would, acting out some play on his final moments prior to being booted from the system. The image fritzed and disappeared.
“Is this like charades? Do we have to guess what he’s doing before he resets?”
Lasher’s eyes changed from the gray that was his normal to the red ringed yellow when he saw deep into the Crucible.
“What’s coming?” Fluff asked.
“Company.”
The woman that appeared in the room was elegant and regal. She wore long flowing robes of embroidered satin that hung to the floor. Her hair was done in an ornate bun kept in place by gold combs that spoke of the distant past for the Xang people. She eyed the pair while lightly poking at a light-pen that was floating in the near empty gravity.
“Ni shi shei?”
Lasher affected a polite tone. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t speak your language.”
“She’s asking who we are,” Fluff said
“Trade-2 then. Your machine is correct. Who are you?” The regal woman asked, again.
Lasher circled the console, pulling her attention to him. “I’ve come for the AI who you have trapped inside the system.”
“You’ve come for the AI who attacked me.”
Lasher leaned toward her on the console. Half his attention was toward her, the other half watching the various command lines passing over the surface. “You’re the AI for the ship?”
“I am the Intelligence Architecture for Project Gemini. You can call me Chang’e.”
“The goddess of the moon?” Fluff asked.
“Very good. Yes, I am named after that fabled being. And much the same, I am being pursued, at first by your AI and now by you.”
“Please release our friend and we will leave. No more chasing
from us,” Lasher offered.
“I cannot. Your intent is to crash this ship or have your fleet do so, yes?”
“It is.”
Chang’e held her arms wide, the voluminous sleeves appearing as wings sweeping all the way to the floor. “Then he will perish with me. I have my duties to control the rest of the Swarm as well as try to keep firing Swarm canisters at our attackers in hopes one gets through. Chen expected a ship, not a task force. Their drones are very good at keeping me at bay.”
“Come with us.” Fluff said matter-of-factly. “You don’t have to stay and crash with the ship, which will happen whether you want it to or not. The fleet will see to that. But if you command all the people back into their pods, we can crash the ship in a way won’t make such a mess. Then you can come with us.”
The goddess seemed taken aback by the offer. “I was asked to see this through. See that the lancers were let aboard, unleash the Swarm, then see if we could turn the lancers to our side. You somehow kept them from boarding. Then they battered my body until my weapons and means of escape were useless. It seems all I can do now is die.”
“I have a recovery matrix in that terminal.” Lasher said softly. “Download yourself there. Put Morpheus back in control of the ship. We can all survive this together.”
“You would offer me freedom while abandoning your friend?” Chang’e sounded offended.
“I would offer you freedom while giving everyone on the ship the chance for the same. My friend included.”
“How?”
Lasher felt a hand reach from beyond the Crucible to his shoulder. The hand of his mother. How many times had he rolled his eyes when she taught him the Way? He put his hand where hers should have been, his eyes closing to take in the full weight of her presence in the fires of his belief. “Because the Way is my will, and my will is the Way.”
Twenty-Six
Power flickered on one panel at a time, bringing the command center back to life. Morpheus flitted back into the room, glitching several times until becoming stable. “Judging by the time of capture I haven’t been out for very long. Situation?”
“The Forest is listing and on fire. We have two drive engines left, with hopefully, enough repulsor generators to get us down to the surface,” Lasher barked.
“Interesting.,” Morpheus commented. “I have full control of the system. That includes the hidden Gemini files that brought my captor online. There are four other AIs aboard that help to run the Swarm. They are asking for direction.”
“I need you to direct all of the blues back into their storage pods for the drop. Then we have to get this hulk moving. If something critical catches on fire, it could take us with it.”
There was a flutter in Morpheus’ image. “Done. I'm also venting the burning sections to vacuum. We might lose some of the Swarm in the process but those flames need to be put out now, sir.”
“Do it.” Switching his cell-com, Lasher called into the ether. “Mara, this is Orin.”
“Go.”
“We have control of the ship. We’re locking down the infected Swarm in their suspension pods for the landing. Once we’re close to the ground, we’re going to ditch. This tub is heavily armored so it has a chance to survive the impact.”
“Roger that.” Mara pushed several maps into Orin's HUD. “We’re reconfiguring for ground assault now. Devil Hunters are taking command of Second Battalion, Second Elysian Marines. When the ship is down, we’ll drop thumpers right on top of it to secure the scene. Close air and ground assault force will follow. We’re receiving a ping from two phantom sources. I’m assuming one is Tarot’s ship and the other is yours.”
“Affirmative. Tell your gun bunnies not to shoot my people.” Lasher winced as his tone was more harsh than he meant it to be.
“Your people, eh? See you on the ground, Orin. May the stars light your way.”
“And guide you home, Marshal.”
“That was cute,” Fluff laughed. “You two should hang out so you could exchange cute sayings like that. Since you have the same hair you could…”
Lasher gave a nudge to his friend’s arm. “Nice one. Remember that time on Maldinon when we were disguised as deck crew and you just had to flash that guy with your forward light array?”
“I know. I know. There’s a time and place for that kind of joke. That lesson was dumb,” Fluff scoffed.
“Morpheus, where do we stand?”
“Mr. Lashra, we’re approaching the planet at a high arc so we hit the landing zone you've requested. We are still listing to one side but the repulsors are compensating, for now. Generator sixteen is acting wonky. That’s a technical term. It’ll probably flame out during entry. You’ll have to jump at no less than four point five kilometers from the ground to avoid any residual crash damage should the vehicle come apart on entry.”
“We’ll be ready. What can we do to help?” Lasher asked.
“Get to your jump points. Position Handy-bot – I can’t believe I’m using that name – in the same space and when it’s safe for me to do so, I will jump into the frame to follow,” Morpheus instructed.
“May the stars light your way, Morpheus.”
Fluff waggled his hand through the center of the hologram. “Yeah, blah blah don’t mess this up. See ya on the ground, blah blah good luck.”
The trio raced back through the service tunnel to one of the lifts. The near zero gravity was gradually increasing the closer they came to the planet. Lasher was devouring the distance in tremendous, Crucible-assisted leaps. Fluff had tied the cables coming from Handy-bot’s hands onto one of his back legs and was pulling the mech along. The closer they got to the lift shaft, the more they actually had to bound.
“We have to make that shaft before we hit the full effect of the planet’s gravity!” Lasher shouted over the maelstrom of sound coming from the ship shaking across its damage.
“Fine. I’ll go faster and you pull the surfer back there.”
They exited the service tunnel, Lasher diving into the Crucible to force open the shaft doors. They bounded from wall to wall, shooting into the expanse beyond the open lift. They plummeted, the full force of gravity greedily taking hold of them.
Fluff transformed into his hybrid form, the snap of struts, plates, and rods shifting and locking echoing off the walls of the shaft on their freefall. Just as Fluff was going to execute a Doom-Snuggle level improvised daredevilry to save them, they slowed to a feather fall, gliding down to the bottom deck.
“Show off.”
“I learned from the best,” Lasher said, using the Crucible to gently set Handy-bot down beside them.
Fluff ripped the hatch from its moorings, turning directly into a punch that sent him sprawling on the other bulkhead. Lasher dodged to one side, stepping back to flit away from another massive punch that bent the side of the lift opening. It was a massive mech, hunching over in the passage to keep from hitting its head.
“Recovery in progress. I am Security Protocol Mechomaton Cheng Huang. You have taken the Intelligence Architecture, Chang’e. Return the architecture immediately or suffer disintegration.”
Lasher’s sword screamed to life, raking up the front of the mech, giving him enough room to ignite his Plasmaxe to hack part of the duradium chest plate. The force of the ax biting the metal slammed it into the passage. It steadied itself, bringing up an arm covered in holographic targeting data as a plasma caster flared to life, drawing in energy to fire off the molten globe. A pulse burst fired from the passage struck the energizing weapon, causing it to rupture in a blinding display of sparks and liquefied metal.
“How’s that for a sucker punch? Orin, he’s shielded!” Fluff roared out from the lift, resuming the panther shape as he ejected his vibro enhanced coils.
“Resistance encountered. Enacting countermeasures.” The hatch behind the bot flared open, dropping a metal sphere onto the deck. A pulsing green wave of light flashed throughout the passage. Both Lasher and Fluff fell to the floor. Two blades
flared from the side of Cheng Huang’s gauntlet, circling until they met over his fist to form a dual-sided blade. A vibration field caused it to shimmer, as it hummed through the air to stab at Lasher’s face.
He clapped his hands together, trapping the blade between them, the twin points centimeters from his nose. Smoke rose from his hands, the power of the Crucible sheathing them from harm against the power field soaked blade.
“Biologic entity exhibiting supernatural traits. Priority target.”
“And here I thought you loved us equally!” Fluff quipped, brachiating across the pipes by his tendrils. He dropped on the back of the mech, energizing the coils to plunge through it. They bounced off the surface, making a resounding TWANG like a gunshot ricocheting off of a surface.
The Cheng Huang jumped, slamming Fluff into the overhead. Lasher rolled from beneath it, bringing his thrumming weapons to bare. The monstrous guardian swung his vibro field encased blade toward the ceiling into the tangled Doom Cat. Its arm stopped a hair’s breadth away from impaling the feline mech, causing the tip of its weapon to make a tinging sound from the vibrations against its chassis.
Lasher's eyes were hazed yellow again, a sign that he had been a conduit for the Crucible to stop the offending limb. His Gavoc sword broke apart into segments, winding around the mech's arm. The mongrel pulled, jerking it forward a few steps to clear the blade from his friend while giving him room to work his way free. Vibro-field encased weapons on the Doom Cat shored through his net of tangled cables, dropping Fluff to his feet.
“Floor! Fluff, power down!” came Morpheus' voice through the comm.
Handy-bot trundled from the elevator shaft like an enraged duck, waddling with fury toward the offending guardian. It bumped its chest against Cheng Huang, knocking it to the opposite bulkhead. There was a high-pitched squeal that made Lasher's ears hurt, all the way into his teeth. The noise flickered the lights in the passage, causing sparks to blow from panels, igniting small fires on the carbodex flooring.
The Revenant: A Military Sci-Fi Series (Hunter's Moon Book 2) Page 33
