by M. D. Cooper
* * * * *
Sera hovered at the meeting room’s window, staring up into the night sky. Outside the window, Scipian patrol craft kept other ships away from the palace airspace, maintaining a one thousand kilometer bubble around the palace’s spires.
High above the horizon, she could see Kapalicarsi Station glimmering, the lights of ships coming and going flashing in the darkness.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Sera turned to see Prelate Fiona enter the room, slithering forward several meters until her tail passed through the door, and then flicking it shut.
“It is,” Sera replied. “We’re just waiting for Diana. Tanis went to see what’s keeping her.”
Fiona nodded as she moved over to the table laden with food and wine. “I’m in no rush. Have you tried the red brute they’re serving tonight? It has sensational undertones.”
“Sounds like an oxymoron,” Sera said with a smile.
Fiona poured two glasses and offered one to Sera, who drifted across the room to accept the wine from the prelate.
“I’m glad that you agreed to meet with us,” Sera said. “We’re working on an alliance that we think you’ll be very interested in.”
Prelate Fiona turned to Sera, her yellow eyes narrowing. “No, I don’t think I will.”
The prelate’s tail whipped around and smashed into Sera, sweeping her hooves out from under her. Sera flipped over in the air, and Fiona was on her, slashing at her scaled skin with taloned hands.
“Get the fuck off me,” Sera yelled, and slammed a hoof into Fiona’s chest, knocking her back.
The snake-woman lunged forward once more, but Sera rose higher in the air and Fiona missed, smashing into the table and sending bottles of wine to the floor.
Sera swung a clawed hand at Fiona, tearing at the thick skin on the prelate’s back. The tail swung at her again, and Sera leapt backward to avoid the strike.
No response came, and Sera realized that she couldn’t access anything beyond the local network—or rather, she could, but the messages didn’t seem to go anywhere, and she couldn’t connect out to any other systems.
“You’re not going to have any alliances,” Fiona hissed. “She told me to give you a message: tonight, you die…and so does Diana. The Transcend will fall.”
There was only one person on Alexandra that would pass such a message.
Shit! Elena got to Fiona. But to convince the prelate in one day’s time to assassinate me?
Sera knew that Elena must have subverted Fiona somehow; if she could just land a dose of nano on the snake-woman, she could at least shut down the prelate’s costume and figure out what was going on.
Fiona rushed across the room toward Sera, lunging for her neck, and Sera grabbed the woman’s arms, pushing nano out. Then the tail hit her again, and Sera flew across the room, her a-grav generators just barely slowing her before she slammed into the wall.
Next time, I’m not leaving all the weapons with Tanis.
* * * * *
Tanis barreled through a door and onto a catwalk that encircled a service shaft. She peered over the edge and saw a platform descending far below. She gauged it to be over one hundred meters down.
Tanis looked at the walls of the shaft, and took a step back before rushing forward and leaping over the railing.
Tanis slid down the conduit stack, peering at the retreating platform below.
Tanis kept sliding down the conduit, pausing once to work her way around a large junction box.
Just then a shot rang out from above them, hitting the wall nearby, and Angela laughed.
Tanis shifted and fired her cannon’s faux weapon. She saw the attacker above pull back when the strange blue blast came his way.
She looked below again and saw that the pad had stopped; then she watched Diana’s captor hit the empress in the head before pushing her forward. A moment later, they had disappeared through a door on the side of the shaft.
More shots rang out from above, and Tanis leapt from the side of the shaft, glancing up to see that the multiple figures firing on her wore Scipian uniforms. Either they were working for Diana’s abductors, or they thought Tanis was a part of the abduction.
The initial shots had been pulse blasts, but as Tanis hit the platform below, slugs hit the deck around her. One tore into one of her pauldrons and was stopped by the costume before it hit her shoulder.
Tanis nodded as she ran down a corridor and across a small foyer to the exterior pad where an airship was taking off. There were a dozen craft on the pad; most belonging to the partygoers above.
She spotted one that was sleek and looked fast, and dashed across the platform toward it, tearing off her costume as she ran. First the pauldrons hit the deck, then the helmet, followed by the breastplate. It took a moment, but she managed to get the massive cannon off, revealing the barrel of a lug thrower protruding from the flowmetal of her forearm, as well as a charge cylinder for a pulse emitter jutting out of her wrist.
Without questioning Angela, Tanis turned to the other craft—which looked like an ancient replica of an aerojet—and placed her hand on its fuselage, feeding nano into the canopy locking mechanism. A moment later, she was in, staring at manual controls that included a flight stick.
Tanis replied as she struggled with the stick.
<
br /> As the jet fell, its velocity increased, and Tanis was finally able to bring the nose up. She leveled the jet only a hundred meters from the palace rooftops.
“Oh…it’s VTOL,” Tanis muttered as she saw the thrust direction controls. “That makes way more sense.”
A voice squawked from a headset down beside the seat, and Tanis picked it up to hear someone screaming about buzzing the palace and shooting out of the sky.
“Hey, look, sorry about that. I’ve only flown one of these things before, and that was in sims. Your empress has been abducted, and I’m in pursuit of her captor.”
“The what?” the voice shrieked. “Is this some sort of prank?”
“No,” Tanis replied as Angela highlighted the ship they were after on her HUD. “This is Admiral Richards of the Transcend. We’re pursuing a…”
“Gallas 8A19 shuttle.”
“That’s a common model,” the voice said. “How will I—"
“It’s the one I’m pointed at,” Tanis snapped.
Static came over the speaker, then the voice returned. “I’m going to have to check into this. There’s a network outage at the Empress’s party. I can’t verify that she’s not there.”
“Do you think that perhaps that was part of the abductors’ plans?”
“Uhh…hold please. I need to get my supervisor.”
The shuttle containing Diana and her abductor was still a kilometer ahead, and dropping lower, toward the city. Tanis was closing in on it, but soon it would be down amongst the highrise towers, and she would lose it.
She looked at the weapons systems the areojet had and saw that there was a gatling gun on the nose of the craft. She activated the weapon and spun it up, hoping it had ammunition.
Tanis was pleasantly surprised when the gun spat bullets in generally the right direction, and she adjusted her trajectory until she hit the shuttle.
At the extreme range, the bullets were unlikely to do any damage; the shuttle did dip lower, though, angling toward a park one kilometer ahead of the towers that rose up at the edge of the palace grounds.
Tanis followed the shuttle down, and slowed as the vessel began to lower to the ground. The craft was only ten meters above the park’s grassy plain when suddenly it shot away, rising again toward the towers.
The Gallas 8A19 had far better acceleration than the ancient aerojet, and Tanis nearly lost sight of the craft as it raced through the tall structures.
Angela ordered as Tanis raced between two kilometer-high buildings.
Angela nodded emphatically in her mind.
Tanis pulled the jet up, skimming the rooftops, as Angela updated the shuttle’s location on her HUD.
Tanis slowed the aerojet and circled around the building. The landing pad was halfway up the structure, roughly four hundred meters off the ground.
She slowed the jet on approach to the building and tried to use the thrust-angling controls to lower to the pad. Each time she did, updrafts buffeted the craft and she could barely keep it from careening into the side of the building.
Tanis gently lowered the thrust to land the jet on the roof, but at a certain point, it died altogether. The Aerojet dropped the last three meters, smashing a cluster of pipes that rose from the roof.
“Any landing you can walk away from…” Tanis muttered as she pushed the canopy open and leapt out of the jet.
There was a door on the side of the lift house, and Tanis pulled it open to see a long flight of stairs reaching down into the building. All around her, the air was filled with the hum of machinery and the sounds of liquid flowing through pipes.
Angela snorted.
Tanis didn’t waste any time connecting to the ship.
Tanis reached the bottom of the stairs to find herself on a long catwalk, overlooking a series of vertically mounted tanks. She scanned the area for movement and moved onto a lift at the far end of the walk.
Sheeran took a moment to respond.
Tanis returned her focus to the job at hand. Taking the lift was dangerous—too much could go wrong when the doors opened—but she didn’t have time to race down stairs and try to navigate the facility.
She drew a deep breath and stepped into the lift, selecting the level number she believed the landing pad to be on.
Tanis detected a soft glow in the lift’s enclosed space, and realized it was coming from her. She was still wearing the infinity suit; it seemed to have a glow-in-the-dark feature.
“Stars,” Tanis muttered as she quickly pulled the suit off and tossed it in a corner. Then she had a better idea, and hung the suit on the back wall of the lift, then wedged herself in a corner up against the ceiling.
It was as good a plan as any for not getting shot by anyone waiting outside. A few seconds after she got in place, the doors opened, but no weapons fire came in.
Angela said.
Angela shrugged.
Angela suggested.
Tanis nodded as she turned to the stairwell next to the lift and skipped down the stairs to the next level.
As she hit the landing between the floors, she heard a cry from below and dropped a heavier probe over the railing. It fell down the center of the stairwell and caught sight of Diana and her captor seventeen levels down.
“Gotcha,” Tanis whispered and leapt to the next floor down. She hopped from landing to landing, closing in on her quarry, when her probe caught sight of the abductor pushing Diana through a door onto the thirty-second level.
Tanis was at the door twenty seconds later, but paused as she sent probes through to make sure she wasn’t about to walk into an ambush.
The area on the far side of the door was filled with tall tanks that were connected by a maze of pipes. Catwalks crisscrossed the area five meters off the ground, and the ceiling was over ten meters above.
Pumps hummed and liquid sloshed. It would be almost impossible to hear anything, even with her enhanced hearing and nanocloud.
The probes didn’t pick up any IR signatures that matched a human, so Tanis slipped through the door and raced to the side of a tank, scanning the catwalk above, checking for any hidden assailants.
a message came in over the Link. The identifiers flagged the sender as an architect from the far side of the planet named Olly. Tanis didn’t believe for a second that Olly was who she was talking to.
Tanis continued to sweep through the tanks, and periodically heard the sounds of a scuffle, but whenever she moved to the sound’s origin, there was no one there. It felt like the search was taking forever, and her nano had almost suffused the entire floor when an EMP burst slashed through the building.
Her nano, her Link…it was all gone. Tanis and Angela were blind.
* * * * *
Sera lunged forward once more, trying to get her hands on Fiona long enough to deposit some nano for infiltration. The woman’s tail hit her again, flinging her back against the wall, and she felt something sharp between her shoulder blades.
