Tolby and I tumbled down a slanted wall and ended up in the middle of a large, egg-shaped room. Banks of bio-mechanical contraptions lined both sides of the room, each one manned by a separate Nodari scout, probably three dozen in total. Each scout had a slew of tubes attached to its head and body, wiring it directly into whatever contraption it was seated in front of. Of those three dozen Nodari, maybe six were still alive. The rest were slumped over or sprawled on the floor, many of them being nothing more than charred husks. The ones who still lived didn’t seem as if they fared much better. They barely moved in their seats, offering little more than a twitch at our arrival.
At the far end, the floor ramped up to what I can only describe as a perverse throne built on flesh, resin, and mechanical equipment that seemed more at home in an old steampunk thriller than out here in space. Atop said throne sat a monster who was plugged into the ship like the others, and he, no doubt, was what the boogeyman checked for under his bed, especially since he was far from dead.
The damn thing was over four meters tall, and it stared at us with four milky eyes that were set into a bulbous head. And if the number four hadn’t been used enough in its creation to torment me, it had four arms sprouting from its side, along with a beard of four tentacles hanging from its chin. Four fours. Cripes. Could it get worse? Oh yes. Yes, it could.
Its chitinous armor looked white as bone, though it had some dark purple highlights where the ridges were. And for whatever reason, I suspected that nothing short of a naval railgun would punch through said armor. The look in Tolby’s eyes confirmed that feeling.
“He does not like carrots, does he?” I said, easing back.
“That is a Nodari monarch,” Tolby said, making me immediately wish that he hadn’t. “He doesn’t like anything.”
The monarch stood, and with one sweep of his powerful hands, he tore himself free from his throne and bellowed.
“I suggest we run,” I said.
“I agree.”
I whipped my rifle up and pulled the trigger. My shot zipped through the air and struck it square between the eyes. Under any other circumstances, I would’ve been elated. How often do actually hit what I want with my first shot? Or my tenth, for that matter. Actually, don’t answer that. Anyway, instead of the plasma bolt installing new ventilation in the monarch’s head, it struck a force field that flared momentarily before dissipating harmlessly.
Refusing to believe it, I fired off several more rounds. All of those missed wildly thanks to my typical shooting abilities, but one landed with similar results.
“You’re not punching through that shield, Dakota!” Tolby said. He grabbed my arm and pulled right as the monarch brought up a pair of heavy blasters.
“Look out!” I yelled.
The monarch fired. Two superheated beams of plasma shot forward, one driving for each of us. Tolby bolted behind a console without being hit. I went the other direction but wasn’t quite as lucky. Even though I got behind a console as well, the beam hit my rifle, punched through it, and then took a nice chunk of armor out of my hip. Globs of molten metal went everywhere. Most of it flew away from me, some, however, seared my skin, and it was all I could do not to curl up into a little ball of agony.
“Dakota! Great news!” Daphne said into my earpiece. “I know where you are!”
“Please tell me you can get us out,” I said, trying my best to scamper away while using the consoles for cover.
“Easily!” she replied. “I see you are in the throne room! Did you know it doubles as the bridge? You have to respect that kind of ingenuity.”
Stupidly, I peeked over the edge of the console to see where the monarch was, and he was so close, we practically bumped noses. Well, I assumed it was a nose. He had this stumpy thing in the middle of his face with four pits on each side, like the heat pits on a viper. (And there’s that stupid number four again). He whipped his blasters up, and reflexively I dove to the side while at the same time, telekinetically punching one of them.
Thank my lucky stars my brain went with that plan. He fired a split second later with both weapons and the one I hit sideways ended up frying the other. Damn, I’m good sometimes. Course, the subsequent explosion wasn’t very pleasant, especially the part where I ended up getting peppered with shrapnel. Thankfully, the Kibnali armor I sported deflected most of it.
Unfortunately, whatever super shield the monarch carried deflected all of what hit him. So while I got away with a few minor wounds, he came out completely unscathed.
I staggered backward as the monarch roared. I took that time to put as much distance between myself and it as I could by sprinting for the only exit I saw, which happened to be where Tolby was headed as well.
Long before we got there, a dozen Nodari scouts came pouring in from that precise location.
“Cripes! How many of these guys are we going to run across?” I yelled, vaulting over a console in order not to take the half dozen shots that headed my way a moment later.
“My current estimations of surviving Nodari put the number at thirty-nine thousand, seven hundred,” Daphne replied.
“Is that all?” Tolby said with a sneer. Like me, he was taking cover behind a console, but he still had his rifle, and he put it to good use. In the span of a few seconds, the dozen Nodari numbered nine. A few seconds after that, he brought that down to eight when an overly zealous scout tried to rush his position and had his face melted.
“I don’t care about their numbers, Daphne! Get us out of here!” I yelled.
“Of course,” she said. “We can pick you up about five hundred meters from your position. There’s a sizeable breach in the hull there.”
The room shuddered, and then the walls, ceiling, and floor crumpled together like a giant hand from the outside gave it a friendly squeeze.
“What the hell was that?”
“Didn’t I tell you?” Daphne asked. “The destruction of the interdictor generator has left a peculiar vortex in spacetime that’s currently swallowing the ship. I suggest leaving.”
“We’re trying!”
The monarch leaped over the console, closing the distance between him and me. As he flew through the air, a blade suddenly appeared in one of his hands, and he brought it down in an overhead chop. A combination of luck from Taz’s belly rubs and a telekinetic punch from yours truly kept me from being cut in half.
“Dakota, we’ve got to leave!” Tolby said.
I threw a glance at my buddy, ready to rip him a new one for stating the obvious. My words got stuck in my mouth when I saw the hordes of Nodari that were racing down the corridor and into the bridge. I didn’t need a calculator to know no matter what we did, we’d be swimming in Nodari in a dozen seconds at most.
“Why aren’t they abandoning ship?” I asked, dodging yet another attack by the monarch.
“They don’t abandon anything!” Tolby said. He popped off a few more shots, taking down two scouts in the process. He was forced back when a hail of acidic darts threatened to turn him into a smoldering puddle. He tried to return a few more shots of his own, but they had him locked down under enough suppression fire that even an entire platoon of Kibnali would be lucky to sneeze and not be ripped to shreds. It was a small wonder that the consoles even remained semi-intact.
“Daphne, we’ll never make it out! You’ve got to open up a wormhole for us!” I yelled, feeling my throat tighten and eyes water. God, I was so close to getting out, getting home. I couldn’t believe I was going to buy it here in some stupid alien ship a bajillion years before I was even born. How do you write that tombstone anyway? I mean, those dates would give anyone a double take.
“Power reserves for the portal will not be at high enough levels for operation for another ten minutes,” she said.
“Gah!”
The monarch threw his blade. The thing whipped by, missing my neck by a Planck length. The weapon embedded itself in the wall behind. The attack, however, was still enough to get me off balance. The monarch pounced
, striking me dead center.
I hit the ground square on my back as the thing towered over me like a bear. I managed to get my hand up in time before the monarch drove his full weight through my chest and stopped it with a telekinetic punch. To my dismay, it wasn’t enough to knock him aside thanks to his stupid super shield. So what ended up happening was that he staggered a second before renewing his attack, which was then met with more of a constant telekinetic push from my implants than a strike. Worse, I could feel my arm getting cold, and my energy would be depleted in moments. I tried to pull energy from the air as I had with the water using my left arm, but I don’t think I got much, if any.
“Daphne! Where’s the flotilla?”
“Escaping. Why?”
“I need a full salvo on the bridge!”
“Aren’t you in it?”
“Not for much longer! Do it!”
“Okay, but if you cost me another twenty credits, I’m not going to be happy.”
Chapter Thirty
Another Twenty Credits
Everything exploded.
And I mean everything. The first thing that went was a twenty-meter-wide portion of the wall across from me. It vaporized in a flash, and from the edges white-hot globs of metal went flying. The monarch shielded me from most of it, and in turn, his shields shielded him, too. I did catch a rather large chunk in my forearm, which while painful, wasn’t the most pressing matter. What followed next was.
The next things that exploded were threescore of Nodari as a missile flew through the breach in the hull, sailed past my head, and detonated in the middle of them all. Immediately following said blast was the disintegration of pretty much everything in the bridge. The only things spared were me, thanks to the monarch; the monarch, thanks to his super annoying shields of you’ll-never-kill-me-no-matter-what-you-do (note to self, put in an order for those ASAP); and Tolby, who had four consoles, two bulwarks, and the body of a Nodari scout to keep him safe.
With hull integrity being exactly zero for our location, physics took over and whisked us out into space with a rush of escaping air.
End over end I tumbled, and my head erupted in pain and confusion. I tried to see who was where and what the hell was going on, but everything was spinning so fast I didn’t have a prayer. I tried to scream for Tolby, and then again to Daphne so she could come pick us before we were lost and frozen to the void, but thanks to the vacuum we were in and the fact that my armor was compromised, I had no air. And because I had no air, I wasn’t saying a damn thing.
That said, trying to scream was probably the only thing that kept me from having an embolism since the rapidly expanding air in my lungs could get out. The next few seconds stretched for eternity as consciousness slipped away. My world went cloudy, then dark, then ceased to exist.
The next thing I knew, something large, wet, and scratchy smeared across my face. I open my eyes and found Tolby hunched over me. I was flat on my back in the loading bay of the Empress’s Fang.
Yseri stood next to him, and once I came to, he threw the handmaiden a wry grin. “I told you that would wake her up.”
I brushed a hand against my cheek and made a face as it came back with slobber. I love my bud and all, but seriously, I didn’t need a deluge of giant cat slobber on my face.
“That’s twice now I’ve had to do that,” he said. “Think we could avoid suffocating in space from here on out?”
“I’d be okay with that,” I replied. “What happened? Are we safe?”
“For the moment,” he said. The ship rocked. “And that moment’s over.”
Tolby hoisted me to my feet as I tried to get my bearings. “What’s going on?”
“We’re still in the middle of a Nodari invasion,” he said.
Before I could reply, Daphne spoke over the comm. “Did she live? If so, I could use her help on the bridge. And I could also use another twenty credits, too, due to an unforeseen incurring of debt.”
“Yes, I’m alive thank you! And thanks a lot for betting against me!” I shouted as I ran through the ship. I bounced off a few walls along the way thanks to more shaking, more rumbling, and what I presumed were evasive maneuvers that were keeping us from being annihilated. So I guess I can’t complain that much, but there was no way I wasn’t coming out covered in more bruises than the loser of a twelve-round MMA bout.
When I got to the bridge, both Jack and Jainon were still at their stations. Jack was intensely focused on his screen, flying and working the guns on Nodari drones that were still swarming the area. Jainon, on the other hand, stared at the floor, a hand over one of her ears, as she coordinated chatter between herself and all the other Kibnali ships in the flotilla.
“They’re clear and jumping in ten seconds,” she said, looking up.
“Why aren’t we?” I asked as I staggered sideways thanks to another evasive maneuver.
“Our ship is caught in that spacetime vortex caused by the ruptured interdictor generator,” Daphne said. “Destroying the battleship’s main reactor ought to destabilize its pull long enough for us to escape.”
“What can we do about that?”
“You can get over here and help me shoot,” Jack cut in.
I jumped into my seat, and he transferred some of the gun control to my station. Targeting computers brought to view what was left of the Nodari battleship. Even though we were spinning around it at high speed, I could still see exactly what they were talking about.
The battleship had a massive hole blown out one side, presumably where the bomb we detonated went off. However, the rest of the ship had collapsed in on itself, like it was a submarine far too deep and crumpling from overpressure. In the couple of brief seconds I was watching, the starboard bow folded in on itself and massive gouts of flame shot forth.
“How long do we have?” I asked, grabbing the controls.
“Less than a minute,” Daphne said. “Putting the approximate location of the main reactor on screen now.”
A triangle flashed on to the display, and immediately I went to work swiveling the antimatter cannons around and letting them rip. It didn’t take me long to realize that our target was buried in so much ship, we were going to be sucked in long before we shot our way free. “This is never going to work.”
“Do you have any other ideas?” Jack asked.
“Yeah. Hit the nitro button.”
“This ship is not equipped with nitrous oxide,” Daphne said. “Besides, that only works with combustion engines.”
I smacked my forehead. “It was a figure of speech, Daphne.”
“Oh good,” she said. “Because you’d need a lot more than nitrous oxide to see any sizeable gains in the catalytic matter convertor. Anything short of a finely tuned packet of antimatter or a maybe a Gorrianian resonance crystal won’t produce enough energy.”
“A what?”
“A Gorrianian resonance crystal,” she said. “They are highly prized gems—”
“I know what they are!” I said. In a panic, I ripped off my armor and found the crystal I had stashed away. “Jainon, you’re the Progenitor engineer around here. Catch! Daphne, walk her through the process over the comms! Jack and I will keep shooting.”
I tossed the little red gem, and she snatched it out of the air. “On it,” she said, racing out of the bridge.
“How clever of you to have one lying around,” Daphne said.
“I’ve had it for days!”
“You have? Hmm. Looks like my inventory database isn’t working too well,” she said. “Regardless, perhaps we should stock up on more for just this sort of occasion.”
“I’d love to stock up on more, Daphne. I really would,” I said as I tried not to think about how much money I was about to lose.
Jack and I continued to blast apart the Nodari ship. Tolby strapped himself into his spot in the bridge. I think he was chanting some sort of battle hymn, or maybe it was a final recital their warriors did when they were about to die. Not really sure. Seconds ticked by and
the Nodari battleship grew bigger and more prominent on the view screen.
“We’re about to make out with this thing, Jainon,” I called out. “Need that crystal injected!”
“I’m trying!” she called back. It’s not like throwing a log in the furnace!” she yelled back over the comm.
A klaxon blared. If I hadn’t already had a death grip on the controls, I’d probably have rocketed through the ceiling.
“That sounds like a very bad noise,” Jack said.
“Incoming Nodari assault pods,” Daphne said.
“Assault pods? For us? Don’t they land on planets or something?”
“They land on—or through in our case—anything they want,” Tolby said.
I swiveled my guns around to meet the new threat, and my jaw dropped. It wasn’t just a few assault pods coming. It was a swarm of them, thicker and scarier than any pissed-off hive of killer veloci-wasps. And if you’re wondering, yes, those are the freakish velociraptor/wasp hybrids that got loose on…on…well, whatever the official name of Planet Don’t-Ever-Land-Here is.
I gritted my teeth and blasted away, but for each one I vaporized, two more drew closer. It was like trying to defeat a flamethrower with a garden hose.
“Jainon!” I yelled. “We’re out of time!”
The interior of the cockpit suddenly flared with light, and the guns I was on seemed more responsive and deadlier than ever.
“Power injection successful,” Daphne said.
I didn’t even have time to suck in a breath. Our ship tore free of the tractor beam as the pinpoint stars in the distance stretched into long lines across our view.
Chapter Thirty-One
Fin
A thousand light-years from Kumet, I sat on the bridge of the Empress’s Fang, having one last talk with Commander Ito over the comms while Tolby and his handmaidens were satiating their carnal desires, again.
The surviving ships of the flotilla had made necessary repairs over the last two days, and we’d transferred all but ten members of the Black Talon company over to their ships as well.
So Close to Home Page 26
