Action Figures - Issue Seven: The Black End War

by Michael Bailey

  “It’s been an honor to serve with each and every one of you,” I say. “Let’s move.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Erisia and I pass through the secondary hull and the two levels beyond that before we see any signs of activity. We press to the side of the corridor, invisible to the living and electronic eye alike, as a quartet of Black Enders in yellow coveralls dash by, trailed by something that looks like one of those giant rolling tool chests you see in auto repair shops, except this one hovers a foot off the floor. The thing follows them like a puppy as they duck around a corner.

  “Repair crew,” Erisia whispers.

  The first of many we encounter on that level as they hustle by at a brisk jog, presumably on their way to patch the outer hull. Things calm down after we descend a few levels. We pass the occasional repair crew, a few soldiers in light combat armor, a handful of random Black Enders with no clear purpose, but the ship is otherwise quiet. We put two more levels behind us without seeing another living soul. At this rate, we’ll make it to the main engine room within the hour without a whiff of trouble.

  It can’t be this easy. It never is.

  It takes ten minutes and four more levels for my jinx to kick in. “Sergeant, this is First Rank Mova.”

  “I know it’s you, Mova,” I say. “What’s up?”

  “Something’s wrong. I was able to shut down the safeguards for the slaved reactors and trick the diagnostic systems into displaying a false positive reading, but — well, there’s something strange about the main reactor in the Terminus. The failsafes are completely offline.”

  “Offline? That makes no sense,” Erisia says. “Are you positive?”

  “Yes, sergeant.”

  “Can you order them to stay offline? As long as they’re not a concern —”

  “No, sergeant, there’re not in standby mode; they’re completely offline. I can’t communicate with them at all.”

  “What? But that —”

  “Doesn’t make any sense, yeah,” I say. “I’m getting sick of the questions piling up, Mova. If you have any answers, I’d love to hear them.”

  “I don’t have an explanation, sergeant,” Mova apologizes. “As far as I can tell the safeguards are still in place, which means someone could manually activate them on-site.”

  “Or completely deactivate them.”

  “Correct.”

  “One way or another, we need those safeguards disabled,” Erisia says.

  “Do you know how to do that?” I ask.

  “I don’t even know what they look like.”

  “Me either. Crap. Mova, we’re going to need you with us. You start making your way to the engine room. Erisia and I are going to keep moving and make sure the path is clear. Grun, keep her safe.”

  “Yes, sergeant,” Grun says.

  We resume radio silence and forge ahead, diving ever deeper into the heart of the Terminus, passing through corridor after identical corridor undetected, but I worry that might not last much longer. The foot traffic picks back up again, forcing us to flatten against the walls with increasing frequency, and it soon becomes clear the Frankenship isn’t running on a skeleton crew; this is a fully staffed warship.

  VA Sara announces that we’ve reached the main command deck. I briefly entertain the idea of finding the bridge and blowing it to pieces, but Tosser said warships are designed with multiple redundancies. We take out one nerve center, operations resume in another. Like it or not, this is a case of doing the job fast or doing the job right, and the only way to do the job right is to destroy the main reactor and blow the Terminus across the galaxy.

  I try not to think about the fact we have to destroy ourselves along with it. We still have a long way to go before reaching the engine room, and I can cram a lot of regrets into that time.

  We emerge from the labyrinth of corridors onto a gantry high above a football stadium-sized bay — a staging area for ground troops, judging by the activity below us. We peer over the railing and spare a moment to watch beings in everything from light armor to heavy combat battlesuits to Thrasher-style mechs kit up and check their equipment. An open-platform elevator carries an Olkosian up one of the bay’s sloped walls, a honeycomb of rollaway garage doors. One of them retracts to reveal a mech, its torso splayed open to expose its cockpit. The Olkosian climbs into the mech and seals up the chassis. Neon purple running lights set into the mech’s arms and legs come to life, illuminating its little garage, and a single electronic eye set into the head assembly glows an angry red.

  And then that eye, set into a piece of war tech specifically modified to combat the Vanguard, looks right at me.

  “Erisia, we have to go,” I say. “Now!”

  It’s too little too late. The mech points a damning finger at us.

  “Vanguard! Vanguard!”

  A shoulder-mounted mini-cannon springs into position. Erisia and I throw shields up, but they’re unnecessary; the first shot goes wild. A pulsing globe of light sizzles by and impacts the bays behind us. The explosion sends flaming shrapnel and mech limbs flying. I return fire. The blast punches a hole clean through the mech’s chest.

  The gantry to our right shreds with a scream of rending steel as the mechs below us open up, spraying hypervelocity rounds from the guns mounted on their forearms. The ground troops open fire too, but half of them, the half without a handy Vanguard-detecting sensor suite, are firing blind.

  “Grav bomb drop!” Erisia shouts.

  We vault over the railing and plummet to the floor, hypervelocity rounds and energy bolts skimming off our auras. Upon landing, we set off in perfect unison gravity pulses that flatten everyone within a hundred feet — in the case of the goons in light armor, almost quite literally. They’re never getting up again. The rest will recover in time, but they’re not our immediate concern. That would be the Black Enders who were outside the pulse, and they’re not about to give us a chance to pull that trick again. They let us have it full-force, with no regard for the allies they catch in the crossfire. Erisia and I brace against the barrage, a merciless hail of hypervelocity rounds, energy blasts, and mini-missiles.

  Twin beams of blinding light lance down from above like lightning, cutting through the soldiers. Bodies go flying. A mech reels, its arms flailing in a vain effort to keep its balance. The remaining soldiers turn their weapons toward the ceiling, giving Erisia and me the opening we need. Erisia throws an energy wave at the Black Enders while I spray them with a machine-gun volley. Grun generates a shield to protect Mova so she can continue dropping death from above.

  They can’t rally against the four of us. We reduce the bay to bodies and debris within seconds.

  This is what I wanted — to annihilate the Black End, up close and personal. I look around and take in the carnage, the damage I’ve done and the lives I’ve taken, and in one breath, I feel a sense of exhilaration like I’ve never experienced before. In the next, my stomach heaves, and I want to curl into a ball and cry. I tell myself I haven’t killed anyone, not really. They’re not human. They’re targets. They’re The Enemy. That’s all they are.

  “Carrie,” Erisia says. “We need to move.”

  “Yeah,” I say, nearly gagging on the word. My stomach cramps up again. “Yeah. Right.”

  “We’re still a few miles away from the main engine room,” Mova says.

  “And now the Black End knows we’re here,” Grun adds. “They’ll be hunting us.”

  “That’s bad.”

  “Not necessarily,” I say. “If they’re focused on us, they’ll divert their resources away from the slaved ships, which will give the others clear paths. Worst-case scenario, they blow their reactors and the chain-reaction takes out the Frankenship.”

  “Frankenship?” Erisia says.

  “Never mind. Point is, if we can draw the Black End to us, we might be able to destroy the ship without blowing the main reactor.”

  “Might,” Mova says. “Remember, the slaved engines are acting as relays. They’ll go up, s
ure, maybe enough to cripple the, um, Frankenship, but as long as the main reactor is alive —”

  “They’re still in the game, I know,” I say, “but if that’s the best we can do...”

  “The best we can do is fight our way to the main reactor and reduce the Black End to vapor,” Grun says. “With all due respect, sergeant.”

  “He’s not wrong,” Erisia says.

  No, he’s not, but the odds are stacked against us even more than before. If the Black End catches on to our plan, the smart move would be to position their people in our path — and we know they can detect us, so stealth isn’t an option anymore.

  “Mova, is there any way to move through the ship besides the corridors?” I ask.

  Mova wrinkles her button nose in thought. “The atmospheric infrastructure, maybe? The air shafts should be large enough to accommodate us. It’s unorthodox, I admit...”

  There it is: the plucky, intrepid action heroes are going to sneak past the bad guys by crawling through the ventilation shafts. Matt would be laughing his head off right now.

  “Looks like we’re Die Harding it,” I say. “Mova, find us a way in.”

  ***

  Now it’s the action movie genre’s turn to be exposed as a big fat liar, but this time around, it leads to relief rather than disappointment. The ventilation shafts aren’t cramped tunnels we have to crawl through on hands and knees; they’re tall enough to stand upright in and wide enough for us to fly side-by-side. There’s no chance of walking into a Black Ender in here, obviously, and there are no security cameras or sensors, but we do periodically hit these substations (Mova calls them atmospheric processor nodes) that are responsible for taking in stale air, scrubbing it, and sending it back out as breathable air. The only way past them that doesn’t involve leaving the shafts is to briefly shut them down with a focused electromagnetic pulse, climb into the maintenance access hatch on one side, and pop out the other. My hope is that if anyone notices the outages, they’ll be written off as a system glitch, perhaps resulting from battle damage, and they won’t realize that this series of temporary processor node failures originated around the area of the staging bay and is heading directly toward the main engine room.

  As we skulk through the shafts, the other teams report in. They keep it short and sweet as ordered, confirming that they’ve arrived at their objectives and will wait for my mark.

  “Mova, how much farther?” I ask.

  “We’re close,” she says. “Ten more minutes at our current pace.”

  We bypass one more processor node and enter a long shaft with no branch passages. The air current here is especially strong, warm, and humid. It feels like a summer wind on Cape Cod.

  (No. Do not do that. Stay focused, Carrie. There is no past. There is no future. There is only right now. Stay focused.)

  The shaft ends at a grating that looks out over the main engine room, a round, high-ceilinged chamber that echoes with the low hum of machinery in action. A cylinder maybe ten feet tall sits on the floor below us, blazing with the purest white light I’ve ever seen. Uniformed techs attend a series of workstations set up around the plasma core, though I can’t tell from this distance exactly what they’re doing. Monitoring the engine, I’d guess.

  Or maybe not. “This is wrong,” Mova says.

  “I’ll say,” Erisia says. “Where’s the engine?”

  “Uh, down there?” I say. “The glowy thing?”

  “That isn’t the engine,” Mova says, squinting at the mystery machine through the vent. “Not like I’ve ever seen, anyway. A Terminus runs on a five exatick plasma fusion reactor. That would just about take up this entire chamber. Whatever that thing is it’s some sort of retrofit, a containment chamber with —”

  “Who cares what it is?” Grun snarls. “If we blast it, will it go up?”

  “I don’t know. I need to take a closer look.”

  Which means exposing ourselves and taking time we don’t necessarily have to figure out whether this was a totally wasted effort. I don’t know why I’m surprised our mountain of crap keeps getting higher...

  “If we go down in full stealth mode, take out the techs as quietly as possible,” Erisia suggests.

  “Or we could just blast it,” Grun offers.

  “We’re taking a chance either way,” I say, thinking out loud, “but I say we err on the side of caution. Let’s go.”

  It all goes so well. After slipping into stealth mode, Erisia and I carefully melt a hole in the grating. We float down and zap the techs, knocking them out with no more noise than their startled, strangled yelps of pain. Mova jumps onto one of the terminals to work her magic.

  “No alarms,” Erisia notes.

  “Yet,” Grun says.

  “Sergeant, this is — I don’t — I have to confirm —” Mova stammers.

  “Use your words, Mova,” I say.

  “These readings make no sense. The energy signature is —” She shakes her head. “It’s identical to ours. To our astrarma, I mean.”

  “That’s impossible,” Grun says.

  No, it’s not — not if the reactor isn’t a mechanical creation but a biological one, a single being infused with the power of two dozen astrarma and hooked into the Frankenship to act as a living engine.

  A living engine named Galt.

  TWENTY-SIX

  “That’s impossible,” Grun repeats.

  “Clearly it isn’t,” Erisia says.

  “But why this? If the Black End wanted a doomsday weapon, Galt would be much more effective in direct combat.”

  “Not necessarily,” I say. “Mova, am I right thinking the ship’s systems are drawing and regulating Galt’s power output?”

  And, I’m betting, somehow shielding his energy signature from the rest of the Vanguard. I can’t think of how else he could have avoided our sweeps.

  “Yes, sergeant,” she says, “quite efficiently. As best as I can tell, Galt could keep the, uh, Frankenship running at full power almost indefinitely.”

  “Instead of getting one or two devastating attacks out of him before his physical form burns out,” Erisia says.

  “Exactly,” I say. “And, added bonus, I bet this is how the Black End planned to get back to Alliance space.”

  “All the more reason to wipe this thing out of the sky while we can.”

  If we can, and I have my doubts. Killing Galt would disable the ship, definitely, but Vanguardians don’t blow up when they die. Then again, Vanguardians aren’t normally packing multiple astrarma, nor are they normally hooked into a warship’s heavily cross-wired power infrastructure. Maybe his death would generate a power surge that’d fry the entire system and cause a chain reaction that would destroy the ship?

  Or maybe not. I have no idea; I’m just making uneducated guesses. Let’s ask the expert about it, shall we? “Mova?”

  She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t get the chance. An energy beam engulfs her, erasing her from existence before she can react, before she can scream. I doubt she ever saw it coming.

  Grun does see the next attack coming and he brings up a shield in the nick of time. It prevents him from getting disintegrated, but barely. He bites back a howl of agony and drops to his knees, glowing vapor wafting off his body like smoke.

  “All units!” I say, but that’s all I get out before Galt fires off an EMP that fries every piece of electronics in the chamber, including our comlinks. They’ll reboot in a few minutes, but that’s a few minutes we might not have.

  Erisia moves toward Grun, spraying energy blasts at the glowing hulk stepping out of a puddle of slag that used to be a containment chamber. I lay down cover fire to draw Galt’s attention to me, which isn’t hard at all. His eyes, two pitiless black holes in his skull, lock right on me.

  “You die last, little girl,” Galt rumbles.

  “Yeah, screw you too!” I say, and I let him have it. I pour everything I have into a single focused blast — and the monster takes it without flinching.

  “Carr
ie!” Erisia shouts. “Fall back to the secondary engine room!”

  I think I know what hye has in mind, so I don’t question the order, I just throw enough energy to light up Boston to keep Galt’s focus on me.

  He flicks his wrist like he’s shooing away a bug. A wave of energy hits me in the gut, lifting me off my feet and knocking the metaphorical wind out of me. I hit the floor hard. A painful tingling sensation radiates through my body from the point of impact. Someone shouts my name.

  Roaring, Grun grabs one of the unconscious techs and hurls him at Galt. The body bounces off him harmlessly, but it takes me out of his crosshairs.

  “Go!” Grun says.

  “Grun, you can’t —!”

  “I said GO!”

  Grun’s aura ratchets up to white-hot intensity, and he launches himself at our enemy. My instinct is to join him, help him put down Galt for good. It takes every ounce of will to resist that impulse. He’s sacrificing himself to buy us time. All I can do is make his sacrifice count.

  I’m so sorry, Grun.

  According to Sara, the secondary engine room is approximately two miles away, toward the back of the Terminus. With the need for speed outweighing the need for stealth, Erisia and I fly through the Terminus as fast as we can — which, unfortunately, is not very fast. We’re zipping around a maze of hallways, not the open sky. We overshoot a turn or run into a sealed door and we’re dead.

  Sorry, Mr. Reaper, we have to die on our schedule, not yours.

  Black Enders, clearly on Team Reaper, take potshots at us as we rocket past. Most of them don’t know how to lead their targets and miss us entirely. Their shots tear up the ceiling in our wake. The few blasts that connect sting way more than they should. We’re losing steam fast.