Wings of the Magpie: Space Operettas

by Loch Erinheart

  With one of their number felled, the remaining Bruisers and the two Badgers turned their attention toward Grummand Fifty-Seven and his passenger. Zapgun blasts spit plasma in all directions. Fifty-Seven ducked another rocket, which decimated a bank of vidiscreens flickering behind him, then dove for the closest Bruiser, knocking it down and pummeling its metal countenance with his powerful hands. Sparks and bits of Plexiplast flew as Fifty-Seven battered the Bruiser into submission.

  The four remaining Bruisers closed in, half-surrounding Grummand Fifty-Seven with zapguns and flamers at the ready. The Badgers hung back, a safe ten meters behind the Bruisers. “Yeah, you stewed,” chortled Black and Gray as he hefted his rocket launcher onto a shoulder and pointed it towards Fifty-Seven. Brownface sniggered in response.

  Inside his chest, Grummand Fifty-Seven sensed the girl stirring to consciousness. Her pulse was quick, frightened. He felt the heartbeat rhythm of her fists against the interior wall of his torso, listened to her cries of “help” and “where am I?” As the Bruisers moved forward, Grummand Fifty-Seven displayed a simple, three-word message on his internal vidiscreen, “you are safe.” He released a light narcotic into his internal airfeed, hoping to calm her, subdue her. Her pulse slowed, and she drifted off to sleep. Grummand Fifty-Seven listened to her light snoring, enjoying its peaceful cadence. He raised his arms, displaying his empty hands to Bruisers and Badgers alike, in a gesture of surrender.

  The Badgers cackled. “Drop to your knees,” shouted Black and Gray. Fifty-Seven moved as if to comply, compacting his body down into a squat, his head bowed forward in supplication. The Bruisers advanced, ten meters, nine, eight, seven. When they stood five meters away in a crescent arc, Grummand Fifty-Seven lept into action, and vaulted over the Bruisers in a graceful blur. A rocket harmlessly sailed past, impulsively fired by Black and Gray, and impacted against a far corner of the discothèque. Fifty-Seven landed directly in front of the Badgers, and with a single sweep of his hand, hefted Brownface into the air by his legs, swung him around, then clubbed Black and Gray soundly with his screaming comrade, sending him and the rocket launcher sprawling. Brownface passed out, the blend of inertia, fear, and impact far too much for him to comprehend. Still brandishing the limp Badger, Grummand Fifty-Seven spun to face the Bruisers, their backs still towards him as their simple mechanical minds worked furiously to grasp what had become of him.

  Grummand Fifty-Seven smashed Brownface’s flaccid Badger body against the head of the closest Bruiser, sending it flying into a pile of smoldering bodies. He moved to repeat the gesture with the next closest Bruiser, then realized that, along with the Bruiser’s head, he had severed everything north of Brownface’s waist, converting the Badger’s corpse into a far less effective weapon. Fifty-Seven ducked, then rolled as the three remaining Bruisers turned and fired zapguns and flamers in his direction, avoiding the subsequent barrage of plasma and napalm. Five down. Three to go.

  The Bruisers worked to corner Fifty-Seven, but he gracefully avoided their blasts and firestreams as if executing a complicated ballet of evasive maneuvers. Each zapgun blast, each torrent of conflagration, he countered by throwing shattered chunks of masonry, smoking furniture, and intact (and less than intact) bodies. First one Bruiser fell, its torso crushed by an ornate Corinthian column, next another, head smashed by a marble countertop. Finally, Grummand Fifty-Seven dispatched the last Bruiser, crushing its head with the repeated blows of a fallen Bruiser’s severed leg. His antagonists conquered, Grummand Fifty-Seven glanced around, surveying the carnage. He felt saddened by the needless expenditure of life, by the thousand tragic tableaus spread out before him, by the tangled and dismembered bodies of Sini clutching Konks, of Gnubs holding Gwyndons, of Lizards comforting Humans, in futile gestures of compassion amid incomprehensible violence. Fifty-Seven had experienced battlefields, had heard the dying cries of men and aliens alike, had seen blackened bodies indistinguishable from shredded war machines. This was different, an undeniable evil unhinged from nationalism, false patriotism, and mindless pride. Grummand Fifty-Seven wondered, for an instant, if it was possible for a robot to shed tears, then turned, and started towards the gaping wound rent in the discothèque wall.

  From behind, came a voice, a rasping hiss, crying “Stewed.”

  Grummand Fifty-Seven turned to face the voice and found himself squaring off against Black and Gray, the Badger’s bloodsoaked fur spiked in a dozen directions, one eye a bloodshot mess, his leathers in shreds. The battered rocket launcher pointed squarely at Fifty-Seven’s chest, at the sleeping girl tucked safely inside. “Stewed,” repeated the battered Badger in a guttural slur, his mouth a contorted mess of blood and razor-sharp teeth, his clawed finger twitching at the launcher’s trigger.

  “No more violence,” announced Grummand Fifty-Seven, his electronic voice pure, clean, logical amid the silent dancehall turned charnel house. “No more.” Fifty-Seven dropped the Bruiser’s severed leg. It clattered, metallic, to the floor.

  “Stewed,” hissed the Badger.

  “No.” Grummand Fifty-Seven turned his back to the Badger and began walking towards the hole. Outside, the world was waking up; outside, the planet’s sun had just peeked above its horizon, beginning its climb along the ecliptic.

  The Badger squeezed the trigger of the rocket launcher, setting into motion an unstoppable chain reaction. The shell ignited, then shot along the meter-long tube towards its exit point, surpassing the speed of sound. With only thirteen centimeters left to go, the rocket snagged against a tiny bend in the launcher’s barrel, trapping it within, its kinetic energy left with nowhere to go. “Stewed,” hissed the Badger, one final time, as the rocket exploded, still in the tube, blasting him into a thousand tiny pieces. As shrapnel and fur rained down within the lifeless nightclub, Grummand Fifty-Seven stepped out into the world, the girl still sleeping within his chest. Safe.

  ***

  Later, Grummand Fifty-Seven piloted his flightpack through the clear and unpolluted atmosphere of Aleph IV, flying low and cautious so as not to draw attention to himself and his passenger. He approached a gated manor house, resplendent with its faux-Tudor styling and well-disguised defensive turrets, then landed in the back yard on a secluded wallball court, well out of sight of the proper landing area at the front of the house. A prancing Gwyndon, formally dressed in a long-tailed black coat with a fresh green carnation pegged to its lapel, met him at the pad and lead him silently through a back entrance into a small sitting room. “Drop the girl here,” purred the Gwyndon, indicating a plush fainting couch with a flourish, “and the mistress will be with you shortly.”

  The Gwyndon then left the room, shutting the double-doors behind him. Grummand Fifty-Seven unsealed his emergency transport cavity, lifted the sleeping girl out of his torso and set her carefully onto the couch. Her eyes flickered as if dreaming and a smile crossed her face. Fifty-Seven turned to glance around, noticing for the first time the paintings hung in heavy frames on the wall flanking a tall wooden shelf of leather-bound antique paperbooks. He wondered if they’d ever been read, or if they were simply the required accoutrements of an affluent lifestyle. He briefly considered awakening the girl to ask her, but before he had the chance, the doors opened and a rotund Sini woman wearing a matching caste mark and wrapped in an orange bathrobe let herself in. “Oh, thank goodness you found her,” she trilled, rubbing her hands together as she crossed the room. “Her father and I have been worried sick. That’s the problem with children today, no manners.” She jostled the girl, who awoke with a start. “Young lady,” the woman scolded, “you are oh-so-losing your off-planet privileges, and you’re lucky I don’t take away your Comms unit for a month.” The girl grimaced and blushed a deep vermilion, then looked up at Fifty-Seven and rolled her eyes. “I’ve taken care of the fee with your agency,” the woman continued, not turning. “I assume there were no problems, and that this matter will be handled with the usual discretion. Mister Grieves will show you the way out.” The Gwyndon stood in the
doorway tapping one foot, an impatient expression spread across his muzzle.

  “No problems at all, Ma’am,” answered Fifty-Seven. He offered a brief salute, then nodded to the embarrassed girl as her mother launched into an aggressive tirade. “I’m a Grummand,” he said, turning to follow the Gwyndon, “Your problems are our business.”

  The Pride of the 419th

  As I dropped the GravLif onto the main drag, the painted glass window of one of Port Minéral’s ubiquitous barrooms exploded and a man dressed in mining dungarees landed gracelessly in the muddy street. Corporal Poynter punched me in the shoulder and laughed. “Looks like that’d be a helluva good place to start.”

  Sure enough, it was. Once we got inside the beer-soaked tavern, we discovered that Gunny was, as usual, at the center of attention, repeatedly smashing a man’s head against an upright piano to the cheers and jeers of the amassed crowd of nearly-identical miners. Poynter and I watched for a few moments; after all, it’s always a pleasure to watch Gunny do what Gunny does best, but at precisely the instant when the jeering miners seemed ready to rally to the defense of their battered comrade, Poynter and I decided to intervene.

  Ozone sizzled as we powered up our Crowd Control Sticks, and the miners turned as one to silently scrutinize this new threat. “Gunnery Sergeant McGill,” I barked. “You are hereby requested to drop that piece of company property and return to the ship immediately.”

  Gunny grinned, then walloped the man’s head against the piano one last time before dropping him onto the sawdust-covered floor, where he lay, groaning. “Evening, ladies,” growled Gunnery Sergeant McGill, pulling a half-smoked cigar from the pocket of her flak jacket and placing it between her chrome-plated teeth. “I assume my chariot is waitin’.”

  Poynter saluted. “Ma’am, yes ma’am.” Suckup.

  Gunny sauntered towards the door, stopping at the bar for a moment to down a shot of glowing green liquid. She coughed, wiped her mouth with her sleeve, then dropped a handful of copper coins onto the bar. “Keep the change,” she said, and headed outside. By the time Poynter and I got to the GravLif, Gunny was already sitting behind the controls, motor chugging away. “Don’t think I’d trust you two knuckleheads to drive in your condition,” she laughed. “Get in, time’s a wasting.”

  I took shotgun and Poynter climbed into the turret. Gunny slammed the transport into gear, looked over her right shoulder, and the GravLif shot straight up into the air, terrifying a flock of local birds as it ascended. Gunny quickly managed to wrestle the GravLif into a woozy semblance of control, then turned to look at me. “Refresh my memory, Magpie,” she asked. “Where in the blinding blue blazes did we park the boat?”

  ***

  We dropped the GravLif at the motorcade, checked the CC Sticks at the armory, and caught the first shuttle back to the Tiptree. On the way home, Gunny regaled us with tales of the evening's adventures. “Typical mining clones,” she laughed. “Give ’em a little bit of flirtin’ and encouragement and they get all hotheaded, start throwing punches. No manners at all. Sure sign of testosterone poisoning. You’d think they were batchbred on this godforsaken rock; you’d think they were raised by robots. Oh, wait, they were. Give me a couple of nice, strapping, natural-born farmboys and a few cases of beer over these neutered knuckleheads any day of the week, and I’ll show you how to have a good time.”

  At one point, Poynter was laughing so hard I was half-convinced she'd crack a rib. By the time we finally hit the cramped and sweaty ready room, it was 0900 hours, and our squad, the Seven Deadly Dames, the Pride of the 419th, was fully assembled. We settled in, made small talk, and began to engage in the personal rituals of pre-Slipspace preparation.Gunny pulled chin-ups while telling dirty jokes to anyone in earshot, “…if a kid is born, it’s gotta be raised a Zoroastrian.” Emerald, our sniper, cleaned her sidearm and laughed heartily, while Mills and Lawrence, the bonded pair of sappers, shaved one another’s heads. Pax, the heavy gunner, fingered her beads and quietly chanted, the compound bow of her upper lip quivering slightly as she pronounced the ancient syllables “Om saha naavavatu… Saha viirya-m karavaavahai… Maa vidvishaavahai. May we be protected together… May we work together with great vigor… May no obstacle arise between us.” Our resident hacker, Poynter, as usual, read a musty old paperbook, this time something called Starship Troopers. Why bother reading, I wondered, when the text doesn’t even move? Why bother reading about something that you live every day?

  I sauntered over to the exercise-bar next to Gunny, and began pulling chin-ups as well, enjoying the endorphin rush that came as my muscles strained against the Tiptree’s artificial gravity. Gunny grinned over at me, cigar clutched in her gleaming teeth, and began pulling faster, competitively. She always managed three for every two I pulled; still, it wasn’t the challenge that I relished, but the camaraderie.

  “Hey, Gunny,” shouted Mills from across the room as she cleaned her razorblade in a nearby bowl of water. “Any idea who or what we’re going up against?”

  “I hope it’s Lizards,” interrupted Emerald, then, affecting a cartoon voice, added “I hates Lizards.”

  “Unknown,” answered Gunny, turning her head towards me without missing a beat. “You pickin’ up anything from the Vat-Brains?”

  I dropped from the bar to the floor, then tuned my Comms implant to one of the Vat channels and listened to the chirps and hums of the ship’s cybernetic pilots. It took several minutes of negotiating my way through their coded electronic communications and weird humor, but eventually, I found an answer. “We’re headed out past Echelon IV towards the Buffer Zone,” I volunteered. “We’re going to rendezvous with the Russ and the Butler. Sounds like we’re intercepting an encroaching Badger worldship, so odds are they’re just bringing us along to mop up.”

  Gunny grinned. “Ooh-rah,” she interjected. “Another beautiful day in the Corps.”

  ***

  At 1100 hours, the ship’s bells chimed, alerting us that it was time to climb into our suspension couches for the jump to Slipspace. Until we reached our destination, the thousand swabs and Marines aboard the Tiptree would rest enveloped in the dreamless morphinic arms of hypersleep, trusting the Vat-Brains to do the flying. Each of us stripped down, then clambered into the private metal wombs that bore our names. As I mounted my own suspension couch, I touched the stenciled block letters of my name, Mary “Magpie” Mayr, for luck, then closed the glass hatch and connected the familiar umbilical cables to the ceramic ports implanted into the back of my neck. Finally, I stared at the vidigraph of my daughter that I’d taped to the glass, realizing that, thanks to the peculiarities of hypersleep and FTL travel, when I finally saw her again, she and I would be the same apparent age. For now she was safe on Terra with the rest of the girls in her nursery group, but by the time we returned, she would have already gone through her first breeding cycle and started her own term in the Corps. I kissed my fingertips, then pressed them against her infant face, and whispered a silent prayer that we would be friends. A scent like gin-soaked flowers swept over me, and then, the universe winked…

  ***

  The eternal whispered whiteness of Slipspace gave way to blackened starlit void as the Tiptree shimmered back into existence, its massive streamlined hull cautiously maneuvering between two equally hulking starships, the Butler and the Russ. In tandem, the three ships moved along, their Vat-Brains chirping digital greetings to one another along with ponderous electronic puns regarding the vast navigational numberstrings involved in post-Einsteinian physics. Cold blue fusion drives pushed the ships forward, screaming through lightseconds in nearly real time. Within moments, their quarry sighted, the three ships slowed to cruising speed.

  The Badger worldship, gleaming silver and moonsized, dwarfed the three Terran warships. Crimson fire belched from its engines pushed it along, leaving behind a glowing radioactive wake. Plasma cannon covered its surface, and, as the three Terran ships approached, erupted into a deadly fusillade that outshined even the br
ightest stars.

  It was the Butler, in her position as pack leader, that caught the brunt of this salvo. Unable to react in time, her hull cleaved in two, vomiting hundreds of pink and brown bodies into the cold and unforgiving void. The Butler’s Vat-Brains screamed, then fell silent as vacuum encompassed the ship, turning her instantly into a charnel house. Horrified and mournful, the Vat-Brains aboard the Tiptree and the Russ pressed on in spite of the tragedy and their own damage, and moved immediately into evasive action, launching dozens of Tac-Nukes towards the Badger ship.

  As the Nukes impacted, flowers of silent orange flame covered the invader’s hull and several plumes of pale atmosphere vented into the void, dissipating like steam erupting from a teakettle. The Vat-Brains chirped and hummed in unanimous agreement; it was time to send in the Marines.

  ***

  …then just as quickly, opened her eyes.

  I awoke to red emergency lights and the shrill voice of emergency klaxons. Outside, I guessed, a battle was raging. I pressed the release on my suspension couch’s hatch, simultaneously disconnecting myself from the umbilicus cable, and tumbled out onto the metal deck. I tuned my Comms implant, hoping for news of our victory, only to discover that we’d lost the Butler with all hands, and that both the Russ and Tiptree had taken fire and suffered heavy losses. The Badger ship was crippled, burning, and leaking radiation. We were being sent in, along with a cadre of Grummands for fire support, to blow the main reactors and finish the job. This wasn’t going to be a mop-up, this was going to be messy.