Dalida: A Scifi Space Opera Adventure

by G. P. Eliot

  How bad was it? Do I still even have a leg? Hank was thinking. He’d been stupid. He’d been too reckless. He should have waited… “Is this what you call generous?” Hank managed to grunt.

  “Shut up,” the Jackal then did something that Hank thought was very, very unnecessary. He very pointedly, and very certainly lowered the hell of one of his metal boots onto Hank’s calf and leaned his weight forward.

  “Arrgggh!” This time, Hank couldn’t stop himself from screaming.

  “Boss–it’s just a flesh wound. My scans say it’s a through-and-through. The shell didn’t even touch the bone,” Ida was trying to calm him.

  “Just a flesh wound!?” Hank shouted out loud, not caring if anyone else knew who he was talking too.

  “Ha. Maybe you do have some spirit after all…” the Jackal sneered, and this time kicked Hank’s leg. It wasn’t a professional-athlete soccer kick, but it wasn’t a tap either. This time, Hank managed to seize onto the pain by clamping his jaw together and hissing it out through his nose.

  “Leave him be. There’s no need for torture…” said a new voice. It was Lory. She must have jumped through the field when I screamed, Hank thought.

  “No, there isn’t. I just happen to like it…” the Jackal laughed, and Hank tensed as he expected another blow to some terribly vulnerable part of his body.

  But it didn’t come. Instead, the Jackal even took a step backwards and Hank heard him sigh with great relief.

  “Now, we can do this the hard or the easy way…” the Jackal stated. If Hank had been in a better mood, he would have pointed out how unimaginative saying that was. But at the moment he was more concerned with how much blood was leaking out of him.

  “I’m adjusting your suit’s internal membrane. I might be able to tighten the webbing…” he heard Ida say, as another lance of pain spread up his calf as his suit’s straps automatically tightened hard against the wound. Hank wondered if it would be enough.

  “I want Professor Serrano. Hand him over to me, and no one else has to die…” the Jackal purred at them.

  “Don’t trust him!” Hank hissed. Why wouldn’t he kill them all now? The Captain knew. The guy was a monster. He gave more thought to what he would eat for breakfast than who he killed.

  There was a strange, mechanical cackling noise from somewhere above Hank’s field of pain–and he realized that it was the Jackal with his new prosthetic voice box, laughing at them. “I don’t give an iota of space dust whether you trust me or not–this isn’t a negotiation!” the Jackal laughed. “Just hand over the Professor, or I will start shooting.”

  “So will we!” he heard Lory growl out. “You may kill me, you may even kill the Captain–but I can take you out as well, Jackal…”

  There was a bored groan from above them. “And then you will lose your message and your Professor anyway; in the firefight which we will win,” it sounded like the man shrugged. “And I am pretty sure, Agent Lory Cox–yes, I know your name–that you will do anything to try and release that message into the wild.” Hank heard the Jackal take a small step towards the Shimmering Path agent.

  “I think that you will even be willing to sacrifice the life of your crew, aren’t you? If it means that your mission would succeed?” the Jackal’s voice went low–somewhere between menacing and seductive.

  “And that is why you won’t throw your life away. Where there’s life there’s hope, right?” the Jackal was saying, and Hank realized that the man was negotiating.

  Private Channel: “Ida-baby? Has Lory got a gun on the Jackal?”

  “Yes.”

  Lory was quick. She must have managed to jump through the force-field in a flash, and raised her pistol to cover the Jackal—

  Private Channel: “Ida. Send the Wolverines position to Madigan and the others. Tell them to be ready.” Hank whispered through his pain. His voice was barely more than a breath, but he knew that his HUD and his personal A.I. in Ida would be able to pick up the speech patterns and modulations of his words.

  “It doesn’t look like we’ve got much hope left anyway…” Lory snarled back at the Jackal as Hank groaned and made ‘futile’ scrabbling movements with his hands.

  “Let’s say you can kill me, Agent Cox. All the rest of you then die when my Wolverines open fire. How is that for a win?” the Jackal was almost purring at her. At his feet, Hank imagined the Jackal stalking forward, his eyes locked on the Shimmering Path Agent.

  Lory opened her mouth just as Hank made his move.

  “Now!” he rolled across the floor, his ‘futile’ scrabbling gestures pulling the suit knife from its holster on his thigh and slamming it into the softer mesh place above the ankle where the Jackal’s metal-laced boot met the soldier suit.

  “Aiii!” The trained assassin’s screech of pain was high-pitched and almost feminine as the Jackal fell to the floor–and all hell broke loose around them…

  10

  “Now!” Lory heard Hank’s voice call over her suit’s pick-ups as well as their secure channel. She didn’t know what the man had planned, but she moved anyway.

  Thwap! As she threw herself to one side, she pulled the trigger on her pistol just on the off-chance that she could take down their nemesis.

  PHOOM! There was the sound of a small earthquake roaring behind them as Madigan jumped through the force field, discharging the first barrel of his highly-illegal, cut-down shotgun into the nearest guard, the second barrel into the blonde Wolverine behind that, and then reversing his grip to use the heavy stub of metal as a club as he went after more…

  “Oof!” Lory’s shoulder hit the deck as she rolled, with bullets sparking behind her…

  Thwap! Steed was advancing, assuming a marksman’s stance as he turned on his side to present less of a target. One of the Wolverines on their side went down, and Lory was bouncing up from her combat roll to discharge the pistol into the second.

  A heavy-gauntleted fist backhanded her as she turned against the last two Wolverines. For a moment she saw stars and her vision faded, but it popped back just in time to see the shadow of an attackers’ fist coming screaming towards her face-

  Crap! With reflexes that she didn’t even know that she possessed, Lory managed to turn aside just in time, pushing the Wolverine’s reaching fist aside as she delivered her own blow to where the man’s kidneys should be.

  “Ach!” Her fist connected with the solid metal plate of the man’s soldier suit. Dammit. She knew she was a fast fighter–but sometimes her finely-honed battle instincts worked against her. She had fought in the way that would have won against an unarmored, regular opponent, and forgotten that the soldier suits only really had a few weak spots:

  Neck, Ankle, Wrist, Knee, Elbow, she reminded herself.

  As Steed closed with the other Wolverine and Madigan in a roaring, sweeping combat with a third, Lory squared off with her own.

  He was grinning at her through the face plate of his helmet, clearly enjoying the fact that he was bigger, and better protected than she was.

  “Come here, girly…” the man said, stamping forward with his boot.

  Sidestep. It was an easy move for Lory to avoid, but she knew that it was just the first move of a combination attack. That was what these openers were for.

  Sweep! A roundhouse punch sailed harmlessly in front of her face as Lory waited, jumping backwards as she bided her time. There would be an opening in the man’s offensive. There always would be. No one was that good, were they?

  A small jab–just to keep Lory at bay. What was this guy playing at? the Shimmering Path agent thought. All that he was doing was throwing linking moves. She’d been fighting long enough and knew enough about martial arts to know that he was playing with her.

  Lory’s back hit something hard behind her as she jumped out of the way of another kick, and then she knew precisely what the man had been playing at. He hadn’t been trying to hit her at all, not really, he had been trying to block off her escape.

  With a smooth mo
vement, the man jabbed forward again as his other hand snatched from his suit’s utility belt a long knife.

  Oh no you don’t! Lory had no choice but to go forward, and she lunged–her hands not reaching to hit the man’s face at all, but instead to seize his wrist that held the knife and begin twisting.

  “Ach!” the man snarled in pain–but he was strong, he could hold his arm almost rigid against her ju-jitsu technique. But physics always wins, Lory remembered one of her martial arts instructors, and leaned into the wrist hold.

  Another grunt of pain from the Wolverine assassin and he savagely cuffed her around the side of the helmet. He was stronger than she was, and Lory felt her head rebound against the inside off her helmet as she staggered–but refused to let go…

  Smack! Another vicious cuff to the side of the head as Lory redoubled the pressure. Every time that the Wolverine hit her, she was in danger of losing her lock on the man’s wrist. Something red ran across her vision; she was bleeding inside her helmet.

  Smack! Smack!

  Lory’s ears were now ringing, and she was sure that she could hear her suit’s internal HUD alarms bleeping and blinking at her. If this continued for much longer, then she knew that she was going to lose consciousness. Or be sick. Or both…

  But I can’t lose the Message…! With a snarl of anger, Lory dropped the man’s wrist as the Wolverine swung.

  She stepped out of the way of the rushing fist, and instead snatched her own spare pistol from her holster–it was a small thing, barely .38 caliber–but it would puncture a hole through the mesh at the man’s neck—

  Lory was upper cutting with the pistol straight at the man’s neck intending to fire through his damned Adam’s apple, just as the whole world flashed white and it sounded like the room was caving in.

  A few moments before Lory’s hand-to-hand struggle with the Wolverine; and before Madigan started charging through the other complement on his side like a rhino on a chessboard–Hank was struggling to kill the man who had tried to kill him on many occasions.

  “Aiiii!” The Jackal was still screaming in that insane, high-pitched squeal as Hank wrenched the knife out where he had just lodged it into the man’s ankle and raised it to plunge it down again—

  “See how you like it!” Hank snarled in pain as his own lower calf was now throbbing with pain. He knew that he couldn’t stop to think. He couldn’t afford a moment to assess the damage done to his own body otherwise the shock would take him.

  He plunged the knife down.

  Where it sparked on the solid metal floor where the Jackal had been, and the force of his blow jolted his wrist, spinning the knife out of his grasp.

  Dammit! The Jackal had rolled to one side, combat-crawling to where he had dropped the heavy pistol a moment before.

  Hank saw the Jackal’s prosthetic metal hands reach out for the butt of the pistol.

  No! Hank lunged forward, forgetting the knife as he seized the Jackal’s legs and heaved. Pain rippled through the Captain’s leg and side despite Ida’s ad-hoc tourniquet, and the Jackal’s flailing hands knocked the pistol further away.

  “Grargh!” A grunt of fury from his would-be killer as the Jackal kicked and stamped with his metal boot–the blood from the man’s own wounded ankle spraying across Hank’s helmet face-plate at the same time as his boot hit, knocking Hank aside.

  “You’re done, Snider!” Hank heard the Jackal say as he drew something from his utility belt.

  What was it? Hank couldn’t see, the Jackal’s own damn blood was in the way! It looked like a small black tube of metal, as innocent as a pen.

  But what the Jackal held was no pen. He twisted the top ‘cap’ and flung it at Hank. As it pin wheeled through the air and Hank’s battle-instincts seemed to make time itself slow down, the Captain clearly saw the blinking red light on the end. It was a micro-explosive–deadly in enclosed spaces.

  “Hell!” Hank batted at it with his fist in the moments before it landed, only to see it cartwheeling through the open air of the room…and then explode.

  PHA-BOOOM!!

  Hank’s eyes saw nothing but glaring white after-images, and then he felt the crunch of metal as he was thrown against one or other of the computer consoles. Even though his ears were ringing, and he could barely even feel his body anymore from all the abuse that he had given it–nevertheless a small, cold part of his mind was shouting. The Jackal used a damned micro-explosive! In an enclosed space! Right where his own guards were! Did the Jackal not care for his own safety or that of his team?

  Clearly not.

  Warning! Multiple Suit Impacts!

  Suit Armor Effectiveness-38%!

  At least Hank’s HUD was working, the Captain groaned as he tried to rub the thick layer of white dust from his eyes. Clank. Oh yeah. The dust wasn’t in his eyes but on his helmet’s face-plate.

  When Hank had managed to squeak his hand across his own helmet, he saw that billows of thick white smoke were still hanging heavy in the room–although they were starting to diffuse–and the almost-hidden lights and blips of the consoles started to glow through the fog.

  “Boss? Boss–your heart rate is erratic, and your blood pressure is falling…” said a worried female voice.

  “Ida-baby,” Hank thumped his head back down on whatever bits of debris that it had been resting on. “Am I glad to hear you…”

  “Come on, get up. We need to get you to a medical bay…” Ida was saying.

  “Why? What’s the point?” Hank murmured. His suit’s microphones were picking up noises, but he wasn’t sure that in his current state he could care. He was done. He had lost too much blood…

  And my oxygen is about to run out anyway… Hank looked at the readout.

  Suit Oxygen Levels: 0%

  “You see, I’m going to asphyxiate, Ida…” Hank said. He wondered if it was going to be painful.

  “You know Boss, you’re the best human I know, but sometimes I want to run off with a toaster,” Ida said skeptically.

  Huh?

  “This facility is under a force dome, you idiot,” his personal artificial intelligence said. Hank wondered if A.I.s were even allowed to insult their humans. Just my luck, in my dying moments that I have got the only personal A.I. that doesn’t give a cat’s whisker whether its owner lives or dies… The Captain thought mournfully. But then Hank registered what she had said.

  “A force dome?” he whispered. He felt like such an idiot. It was of course standard protocol with those habitats on hostile environment worlds to either have a series of airlocks or use a force dome. The dome would be a weakly-charged forcefield that held inside of it any oxygen that the habitat could produce through Air Processors, giving it a human breathable biome. As an added benefit, the force dome could polarize the gravitons field to whatever setting you wanted, meaning that the Union could effectively create gravity.

  “That’s why you weren’t bouncing around out there on the surface,” Ida scolded him.

  Oh yeah. Right. Hank considered. “But I’m still going to die of blood-loss, right?”

  “You’re going to die of a kick to the head if you don’t get up!” murmured a new female voice–the very angry Lory Cox, seizing the Captain by the shoulders and hauling him to his feet.

  “Urgh.” Hank said. “This is mutiny. You can’t treat your Captain like this.”

  Lory ignored him as she levered him none too gently down to the floor again, somewhere flatter, and suddenly the warm rush of painkillers flushed through his leg as he was injected with something.

  “He’ll need a proper medical bay,” Hank heard Steed say, “but we can stop him from dying, at least.” There was an uncomfortable–but not painful–sensation of his leg been pushed and twisted this way and that as they must have sprayed coagulants and insta-prosthesis on his wound. Hank started to feel immediately better, especially when Steed murmured,

  “Here,” and a third and final injection sent a zing of electric energy up his spine.

  Battl
e-stims!

  “I’m good, I’m good…” Hank waved them off.

  “No, you’re not…” Ida suggested to him, but he ignored her.

  “The Jackal?” Hank said as he sat up. The Message Center was in shambles. Half of the computers around the room were dented and burst open, revealing complicated guts of wires and processing boards. Sparks fizzed and dropped here and there onto the floor.

  “Gone,” Lory growled. “And the one I was fighting. They left their dead, and must have used the explosion to cover their escape…”

  “Next time,” Hank said, his heart sparking with fury just as much as the wrecked computers.