by Mark Wandrey
“Knocked out twice in an hour might be a personal best.” The ache in his brain was real, not artificially created by the suit’s internal systems. That worried him. How much permanent damage was he doing to himself? He needed to get moving; Sato was out there somewhere, possibly alive and in trouble. When wasn’t he in trouble?
He’d lost one of his leg fans. Of course it was the right leg. He kinda hoped Sato was alive so he could fix him up later. One fan out wasn’t a huge problem. It degraded performance, sure, but he could still maneuver. Rick moved into the wrecked room. There wasn’t much left of the Peacekeepers. They were tough, but not invulnerable. Confined spaces were devastatingly damaging. He’d just eaten a hatch to prove it.
Rick got the hatch on the opposite side of the Peacekeeper room open and moved down the connecting corridor. This one looked more like a personnel space, while the earlier ones had a more utilitarian feel, mostly from their size. His navigation system was still working, so he knew he was going deeper into the hulk. Something told him whatever was going on would be deep inside the base.
Then the corridor turned and appeared to be heading back out instead of deeper. He traveled for 200 meters, and the trend continued, so he turned back. Arriving at the point where it turned, Rick floated and considered. The corridor was smooth, with no indications of a hatch nearby—nothing to let him turn in the right direction. He shrugged.
“Okay, time to make my own.” He used his new skills to bring a laser online, his head throbbing slightly from hard concentration, and quickly cut an Æsir-sized hole. Without waiting, he rammed his shoulder into the smoking plate, shoving it through ahead of his progress. He found himself in what was obviously a squad bay stuffed full of opSha, all armed and staring at him in rage.
“Hey, guys!” he said and opened fire.
Rick emptied the machine pistol in one long burst, working the gun around the room. At 750 rounds per minute, the 60 round magazine was empty in under 5 seconds, chewing a dozen or more of the surprised opSha to bloody rags.
His arrival was met with wild laser and slug weapons fire. Many of the opSha were armed with short shotgun weapons, ideal for defending close quarters like their base. Unfortunately for them, the titanium pellets were less than useless against the Æsir, whose armor shrugged off the attack like it was rain. The lasers could have done damage if they’d been held on a point. However, the beams were wavering and wildly aimed. It would have hurt bare skin or even light combat armor. All it did was score the matte paint on the Æsir’s armored surface.
Some of the survivors reloaded, a few moved for more effective weapons, and others ran. Rick didn’t want to give them the chance to turn the tables, so he flew into their midst. He holstered the machine pistol, sensing the mechanism in his thigh reloading it for him. As soon as an opSha was within reach, he grabbed the screeching alien and crushed its neck in his hand, then flung it aside.
His position was completely unstable. He spun like crazy. He didn’t care. He caught another pair, one in each hand, and smashed their heads together with a satisfying crunch. He released them, and they floated away, spewing blood and brains. One of the opSha landed on his back, and he felt a knife scrape across his neck, searching for a weakness in the armor. It kinda tickled.
He laughed out loud, grabbed its hand, and crushed it to pulp until the knife handle shattered. The surviving opSha fled—or tried to. Rick didn’t let them. He stabilized his flight, brought both lasers online, and killed every one of them within view. He was getting the hang of the natural weapon interface instead of pinplant control. Point and kill. Nice.
The salvaged Peacekeeper battery was depleted, and he released it as he floated toward the door out of the compartment. A heavy laser beam skittered off the dome of his helmet. “Ouch, fuck!” He snarled and reversed course. Poking a hand around the corner, he used the simple thermal sensors there to see what it was. A squad of opSha had a crew-served laser set up, like the kind he’d seen once in the Winged Hussars. In fact, he’d had an arm severed by one in his CASPer. If they’d been a little more patient, waiting until his entire head was out, they could have done him serious injury.
“Too hasty,” he called out.
“To entropy with you!” a tiny voice called back.
Rick searched the room for something useful. Maybe a heavy steel plate to use? He was about to take the wall section he’d cut, when he saw something much better. He maneuvered the heavy crate to just inside the doorway and attached a short power cable he’d found to one of the crate’s securing points. Next he opened the crate and set about preparing. A moment later, he had the lid back on and was ready.
Moving quickly, he secured the power cable to a handhold inside the door, pulled the crate back inside as far as he could, moved it away as far as the cable would allow, braced his legs against a wall, and pushed the crate as hard as he could.
The crate rocketed away from him, and the cable kept it from simply bouncing around the room full of dead opSha and gore. The cable acted as a pivot point, spinning the crate around a 270-degree arc, out into the hallway and toward the heavy laser. Rick used a tiny low power laser pulse to sever the cable just as the crate was aimed down the hallway, setting it loose.
It wasn’t perfect; the crate did rebound a bit, but it was still propelled directly at the enemy and at a good clip. He’d guessed on the timing, but to be safe, he went back the way he’d come. Being concussed twice today was quite enough.
Laser fire erupted from the enemy, aimed at the crate, naturally. They hit it on the third shot, and Rick heard them scream as the crate shattered and the dozens of grenades it held were scattered like seeds in the wind. The screams were cut off as the grenade he’d set on a 20-second fuse detonated, setting off all the rest. The blast was quite spectacular and rang the station like a bell.
“Now we’re cookin’!” Rick laughed. A secondary explosion went off, much bigger than the first, and the room shuddered and deformed. “Maybe I got a little carried away?” A wave of super-chilled hydrogen flushed though, and was ignited, turning everything into a flaming nightmare.
* * *
Every time Sato had gone into combat mode before, he’d blacked out. As the fight began, he finally understood. The training and conditioning that let him fight was compartmentalized within a section of his Mesh. It somehow linked in with his body’s own learning, creating a bridge between muscle memory and mental conditioning. It was like synergistic lightning in a bottle.
The opSha fighters moved in what looked like slow motion to him. He shot five of them before they’d moved a meter or cleared weapons from holsters. He marveled at having to wait for the GP-90’s bolt to finish cycling before firing again. His actions were faster than the gun’s bolt.
All the opSha armed with guns were killed in a second; the rest came at him drawing blades or reaching with their bare hands. He got two more before they were within arm’s reach, and he clubbed one’s skull open with the gun. Seven sets of hands clawed at him.
The danger was getting covered in opSha. The biggest risk was if they could isolate his arms or get a blade on his neck. He disarmed the first opSha, appropriating his little blade, and used it against him. Sato got his first cut only a few seconds into the battle when a blade scored across his right forearm as he stabbed one through its eye, and the second, moments later, penetrated his left bicep.
Sato had learned to compartmentalize pain early in his training, taking note of the wound and any reduction in ability. Neither injury was dangerous nor debilitating, so he didn’t change his fighting style.
A blade going for his neck was deflected, cutting his ear and scoring along his skull. He opened the attacker from crotch to neck. Another knife punched a wound into Sato’s abdomen. The pain was deep, back in his stomach, which meant it might have found intestines. He clenched his core muscles, trapping the blade. The alien looked triumphant until it realized it couldn’t pull the blade out. Sato used the edge of his left hand to crush
its esophagus.
One of them came at his face. Sato clubbed it aside, but the alien bounced off the wall and came back immediately. The blade it carried punched into Sato’s left kidney. A gasp of pain escaped his lips. The alien jerked the blade out and stabbed a second time before Sato could reverse his own knife and slash its throat.
That was the last opSha. The rest were either dead or dying. Sato clamped a hand over his left side and felt a pulse of hot blood. That’s a bad one, he knew. The room was a chaos of dying opSha and a thousand globs of spinning blood. Fighting in zero G sucked that way. He was freely bleeding from five wounds, two of them bad.
The kidney was by far the worst, with the head wound producing the next largest amount of blood. The gut puncture wasn’t bleeding much; they never did. He was more concerned about sepsis from that one. Then a little laugh came out, making him double up into a floating fetal position. As if he’d have time to die of sepsis! Pulling into a ball caused the blade aimed at the center of his back to miss and instead skate off his right scapula.
“Die!” the Flatar screamed, then growled in rage as he bounced off his target instead.
Sato couldn’t take his left hand from his side. He was slowing the blood loss, but he could already feel himself weakening. Instead he swung his right, which was still holding a blade. The somewhat wild slash knocked the Flatar’s blade away and stabbed into the alien’s own back with a solid chunkt! sound.
The little alien cried out in pain, but then amazingly jerked free of the stab, causing blood to fountain from the wound, grabbed Sato’s wrist, and pulled itself along his arm. Sato tried to flex the arm and stab the alien again, but the Flatar was just as fast as he was, and it reached Sato’s neck, where it sank its razor sharp teeth.
“Little bastard!” Sato screamed and grabbed the Flatar by an ear. He couldn’t jerk it free; the alien would take an artery with it. He pulled his blood-soaked left hand from the wound in his side and plunged it into the bag around his waist. He clasped the first thing his fingers touched, a glass vial. The Flatar ground its tiny teeth, tearing, seeking. It was trying to find purchase with its arms to rip. Sato smashed the vial into the Flatar’s face.
A tiny explosion of clear crystals flew from the broken glass. They cast a rainbow hue as they scattered into the Flatar’s eyes and were sucked into its nostrils as it inhaled from the sudden impact. It gave out a surprised “Ghagk!” sound, and its mouth opened as a tidal wave of pleasure crashed through its brain. The vial of Sparkle contained enough of the drug to get a hundred Humans insanely high. The Flatar weighed maybe 15 kilograms.
Sato pushed away from the Flatar, holding his breath and wiping both hands on his clothes before covering the side and neck wound. The blood flowing from his neck lacked an arterial quality, though he could feel air bubbling out. A torn trachea wasn’t fatal; he removed that hand.
The Flatar spasmed and pumped blood. Its death was far too pleasurable for Sato’s liking. Yet despite his efforts, some of the Sparkle was in his body, too, so he was having a hard time staying angry. He looked around and moved toward the far wall.
When he’d first arrived, he’d immediately noticed a computer interface and an array of Tri-V screens. The Flatar had been interacting with them when Sato arrived. Now that he didn’t have to worry about fighting, he turned his attention to them. He’d lost an immense amount of blood and was only in complete control of his faculties due to his intense training. Even so, he didn’t have much time. It was ironic. All those years as a proctor, he’d never been seriously injured. Not even once. He gave a little laugh and almost passed out from the pain.
He floated to the displays, colliding with a dozen globs of blood in the process. Two of the opSha were, amazingly, still alive. One spun against a wall, gurgling from a slit throat and bleeding its last. The other just floated in the center, mewling piteously, its eyes closed as it tried to hold its guts in. They were none of his concern.
The console had a dizzying array of controls and functions. He wasn’t interested in any of them. Instead he reached out a blood-covered right hand, ignoring the pain from the slash there, and grabbed the little monitor, pulling it toward him. It revealed a simple switch behind it. He flicked it. The wall clicked, and the console split in two, opening to reveal a room.
Unlike the salvaged starship interior, this looked like it had been cut from stone, as he knew it would. In the center was a two-meter-tall metallic column, with vertical grooves, and a glassy section near the top, similar to slates. The grooves were glowing ever so slightly, like the nucleic glow strips.
“Hello, Saisho,” he said.
Sato took the bag from around his waist and secured it to a handhold that had appeared when the door opened. He noted the cableways cut into the living rock and access points for power and data. “Your efforts to hide here were impressive.”
“I was drawn back by fate,” Sato said, controlling a coughing fit which threatened to make him pass out. “The fate you set me on. You sabotaged our expedition? Manipulated everyone, even killed my wife to make me…what?”
“Dangerous to what? We only want to survive.”
“Humanity has never destroyed itself before; we wouldn’t do it now. We had the opportunity and came back from the precipice hundreds of years ago.”
“Who gave you the right to decide how sapient beings live their lives? You’re just a computer. A damned AI.”
“Did you?” Sato asked. His pulse was pounding in his ears. Despite that, he’d detected the sound of air jets, the kind a Peacekeeper would use to move about in zero G. He put a hand on the metallic column. It was warm. He pushed back from it and caught the door’s handhold. He fumbled and almost lost it. His hands were sticky with blood, and he felt cold. So cold.
“Grateful,” Sato said, his wife’s face as she died hovering before his vision. “Interesting choice of words. Well, time to say goodbye. Do you have a name?”
“It’s later than you think,” Sato said. He could hear the Peacekeeper right behind him. “Goodbye.” He moved his hand in the bag, pulling the Enigma free and pressing it against the exposed data terminal.
* * * * *
Chapter Thirteen
All Rick could guess was that he’d somehow breached a fuel tank with his little bomb present. But as the hallway flooded with liquid hydrogen, he knew he had mere seconds of life remaining. As miraculous as the Æsir armor Sato had designed might be, it couldn’t be submerged in a liquid at 33 Kelvin without freezing the biological components inside. The cold hit him like being backhanded by an Oogar.
But a split second later, a wave of fire followed, and the entire station shattered, sending the liquid hydrogen, air, fire, and Rick jetting into space. His suit’s internal heating system consumed power and converted it to heat to stabilize his temperature. It was a narrow thing, and he was
left shuddering in shock from the proximity of frozen death.
“What in the fuck was that?” he wondered.
The transmission came through the radio attached to his pinplants. A computer-generated voice.
Rick had luckily ‘held his breath’ before the hydrogen bath, or he’d be dead anyway. Stabilizing his flight was easy. He had plenty of air, both in his lungs and compressed for cold gas thrusters.
Rick examined the remains of the battleship/base. It had been split nearly in half. One part was slowly breaking up from internal explosions. That was the part he’d been in. The other half was tumbling and now falling into the gas giant’s atmosphere.
And here I thought I did that.
