by Aaron Crash
Ling patted the IPC security director on his back. “Oh, Alvin, we’re skilled and enthusiastic! At some point, we’ll explore death, but not today.”
Charles was coming around, as was Ambassador Randi. Both were silent. Cali wept even as Trina rolled her eyes at the Mormon girl’s tears. Bill and Fernando clicked quietly to each other.
Blaze moved away from the people coming back to their senses. He went to the window to peer out at the destroyed Promenade.
He couldn’t help but think his sister had been right. She had died down there, and something else, something vile, was using her body. He was going to have to kill his own sister.
Raziel wandered over from somewhere and rubbed her body back and forth across Blaze’s battered armor. He picked up the calico, held her, and felt worlds better.
He just had to hope that, in the end, things would work out.
And that no one would have to explore death any time soon.
TWENTY-SIX_
╠═╦╬╧╪
Three hours later, Blaze and the crew of the Lizzie Borden were surfing down a spacetime wave, hurling across the Huaxia Quadrant toward the Terran system. The Onyx Gate would appear in the middle of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
While the Onyx Gate had started out a black hole, its properties had been altered after the explosion that killed Blaze’s father and hundreds of other scientists. January 1, 2666 had been a bad day for a lot of families.
Denning, who would need emergency dental work since Elle had yanked out his teeth, had insisted they take him back to the Marcus Aurelius. On the Paladin, he could gather IPC resources to join the fight in closing the Onyx Gate. It had become painfully clear to him that Blaze hadn’t been lying all the years they’d been chasing each other.
Ambassador Randi had joined Charles on General Russell’s warship. Both were going to try and convince the Clicker general to join the forces flying on a direct course to the asteroid belt in the Terran system. Randi had already convinced a few older, weathered Union ships to get there as fast as possible.
Randi also reached out to the Meelah ships that had escaped from GaMeSpa to see if they would join the armada en route to the Terran system. The Meelah, however, had to analyze the data and ponder the consequences. That might take the space sloths a bit.
Earth’s own fleet was scarce. Not many people, business people, military people, or otherwise, bothered with the old rock anymore. She might have been the cradle of Human civilization, but now she was a polluted, backwater mess. Still, the gyros, tacos, and pizza there were the best in the galaxy…if you ate locally and avoided the IPC-affiliated chain restaurants.
Twelve hours. They had twelve hours to make the trip. They rode the biggest spacetime wave they could, risking major damage and death, at top speed. The Lizzie Borden was due in at 2:45 a.m., so they’d hit the asteroid belt thirty minutes before the Onyx Gate appeared for its fifteen minutes of fame. Then it would be gone, across the galaxy, at the far edge of known Meelah space on the other side of GaMeSpa. It would take them a week to get there from the ruins of the Promenade.
Blaze had slept a little, but he couldn’t really let himself relax. And he didn’t have a room. Arlo had taken over the cargo bay. Trina had been less than excited about the idea of him sleeping with her in the library. Both the master suite and the weapons locker had been destroyed in their various adventures. That left the bridge. Only, Ling, Fernando, and Bill kept coming in to interrupt him. As well as Lizzie, who seemed overly enthusiastic about being a fully trusted member of the team now.
Finally, Blaze gave up and went to the engineering room. Bill tromped around on his metal leg and worked controls with both his real arms and the prosthetic arms Lizzie had given him. She had repaired the metal and circuitry, so his big fusion cannon arm and little plasma gun arm were operational again. Bill transformed the guns into pinchers to tinker inside an open fusion torpedo lying on a table.
Control screens winked above control boards. The SWD coils glowed purple inside their housing, sending out pulses of lavender light as they thrummed. The engine did double duty. It kept the spacetime wave going and it connected the ship to the wave. To use a surfing analogy, the SWD was the point of contact between the surfboard and the ocean.
Fernando stood next to his brother, holding a snare sphere and a bit of cobwebs.
Both clicked when Blaze walked in. He wore his nanotech gauntlet, but it wasn’t activated. He was in his usual woodland cammies with his fusion ax clipped to his belt. With all the crazy stuff happening, with Nauzea turning members of his crew against him, with Elle gone rogue, with Arlo in the cargo bay, it was better to walk around with a weapon ready.
Fernando translated. “Bill cannot say he hates you, not after what we did. Even though the archduchess of torture brainwashed us into joining her, we both feel very sorry for our traitorous actions. We are sorry. Do you accept our apology?”
“I do.” Blaze grinned. “Now, it’s official. Everyone on board this ship has tried to kill me.”
“Family,” Fernando clicked. “It can be a troublesome thing.”
Bill spoke again.
“Now, since you have accepted our apology, Bill is back to hating you. However, he and Lizzie have never been closer. She was able to use her necrotechnology to become the robot who saved us because of her passion for my brother.”
“Can she do it again?” Blaze asked.
“It will depend on the situation and how much love she feels for Bill,” Fernando replied. “But it is possible. And Lizzie loathes her father so much, she might be able to transform again in the upcoming fight.”
“We don’t know anything about Panashoat, do we?” Blaze asked.
Fernando and Bill both fell into clicking the same pattern over and over.
Lizzie broke through comms. “Panashoat! Panashoat! Panashoat! The All-Pig. The hhhunger at the hhheart of life. Hhhell’s eternal lord! Lord of hhhunger! Master of appetites!”
“Uh, stop it,” Blaze said. “It’s embarrassing.”
Bill and Fernando did look ashamed in a very buggy kind of way.
Fernando spoke first. “We have been warned about the lord of hell’s return before. It seems we will meet him. How, I do not know.”
“It could be he’ll emerge from the Onyx Gate. If he is the father of Onyx, the little piggy that went to market, whatever, that would make the most sense.”
“If the Onyx Gate is a gateway to hell,” Fernando said. “That has been our assumption. We have believed that there is an evil dimension full of Onyx energy, a hell if you will, and the demons and other Onyx entities come from there. We might not be correct.”
“Then what is the Onyx Gate?” Blaze asked. “Lizzie, you want to be helpful for once?”
“Hhhell is who we are. On the plane, in the car, hhhell is who we are.” The demon-possessed AI cackled mechanical laughter.
“Yeah, that’s not helpful.” Blaze shook his head and sighed. “Doesn’t much matter what the Onyx Gate is, either a portal to another dimension or the butthole of the Devil himself. We’re going to hit it with that torpedo and close it. You can do the spellwork on it, right, Fernando?”
The Clicker witch nodded. “Yes. Elle taught me the rituals and incantations before I could cast my first shield spell. In case…in case…the unthinkable happened.” Fernando shivered and fluffed his wings. All of his limbs trembled. “Forgive my display of grief. The fact she is gone again, this time perhaps permanently, has left me very emotional.”
Blaze nodded. “Yeah, I miss her too.”
Fernando continued. “There is a chance this torpedo will not work. Bill and Elle’s theory was that we could capture the escaping Onyx energy into a snare sphere, creating a massive overload that would then cause an explosion to seal the gate. The theoretical physics of sorcery is a new science, to put it lightly, so we’re not sure this will work. However, Bill and Lizzie have extrapolated an alternative strategy. A plan ‘B’ if you wi
ll.”
“I love a good plan ‘B,’” Blaze said. “Can’t ever have too many plans.”
Bill clicked for a long time, explaining everything. And when Fernando didn’t translate, the engineer slapped the witch doctor’s arm.
“Yes, Bill, I understand. I can’t tell the primate all of that. He wouldn’t understand. I will do the translating and the summarizing.”
“Don’t call me a primate,” Blaze growled.
“You call us bugs,” Fernando countered.
“Good point. Hit me with the basics.”
Fernando said, “We use the magic of the sphere-to-cellar transference, but we reverse the process on a massive level.”
The gunny thought about it, and he thought he could see where the Clickers were going. “So, when we transfer an Onyx entity from a snare sphere to the cellars, we use magic that manipulates the Onyx on a fundamental level. If you’re saying we use similar logic, but backwards, you’re saying we’re going to try and stuff all the Onyx in the galaxy back into the gateway?”
“Thus clogging the drain,” Fernando said. “The Onyx Gate will not be destroyed, per se, but it will be choked. And there is the possibility that it will explode much like it did when it was the 0n1x singularity.”
“And that would destroy Earth like it destroyed the observation ships around the black hole. That’s a shitty pinche plan ‘B.’”
“And we’d have to sacrifice the Lizzie Borden to do it,” Fernando finished. “However, there is a good chance Earth would not be destroyed. We don’t know the extent of the explosion.”
Lizzie piped up. “The risks to Earth are minimal. But it would require me to die. I am ready to give up my life, Gunny, as long as Bill dies with me. Both of us, going out in a blaze of glory, if you’ll excuse the use of your name in the colloquialism. It will be grand and tragic and romantic. And it will strike a dagger into my father’s, the All-Pig’s, heart.”
“Bill, no, we can’t lose you and the Lizzie,” Blaze said to the engineer.
Bill clicked, and Fernando translated. “My brother says, and I beg your pardon, to shut the fuck up. It is his decision. He doesn’t much like the galaxy, or the people in it, but he has seen how the demons hurt spaceships. He won’t let the brutality continue.”
“Brutality against spaceships,” Blaze said, frowning.
“Correct.”
“Crazy pinche bug.”
“Sex-obsessed, violent primate,” Fernando clicked. Then laughed in his clicky clacky way. “Of course, I can’t lose my brother after losing Elle. I too would sacrifice myself to the cause. For this magic to work, two living entities must be onboard to trigger the proper spells at the proper time. Lizzie has set up special processes on the bridge, but she can’t do it alone. Bill and I will join her to close the Onyx Gate.”
“Goddammit. You Phasmida are always so willing to die,” Blaze hissed in disgust. “During the Bug War—”
“Do you mean the War of Monkey Aggression?” Fernando interrupted.
“Whatever. I watched Clickers die by the thousands in suicide runs. There’s so many of you, and you procreate so fast, I guess the individual doesn’t really matter. But I value the both of you. If we’re running kamikaze into the heart of the Onyx Gate, then we all go down together.”
Fernando again ruffled his wings and shook. Before he knew it, Fernando was hugging him, and then Bill was hugging his brother, and Lizzie said in a weepy voice, “If I had arms, I would hhhug you all too. And we shall all go down together.” The crazy computer sang that last sentence.
Blaze patted the Clicker. “Yeah, Fernando, I understand. Still a little emotional over what happened to Elle. But it’ll work out. We just have to make sure that magic fusion torpedo does the job so we don’t have to make any kind of suicide run.”
“Elle will be there to protect the Onyx Gate,” Fernando said. “After our night together, I will always love her, and I can’t fight against her. I’ve scanned for any sign of her signature, but of course, I can’t find her. But she’ll be in the Terran system. She’ll fight on the side of the All-Pig to stop us.”
Blaze turned away. “I know. And I know what I have to do.” He left the engine room without another word. Dammit he hated the idea of losing his ship and two of his crew, so that pinche torpedo would just have to work.
As he walked out into the main hall and started up the central staircase, the doors to the cargo bay opened. By themselves. As if by magic. Could Arlo cast spells? It seemed so.
Arlo’s voice drifted out. “Blaze, I need to talk to you. Do you have a minute?”
Blaze did, but he didn’t want to give the drunk old man another second of his life. Arlo had taken too many of his minutes already.
Now that they had the information from him, they didn’t need the bitter old bastard.
Still, out of a sick habit of listening to his foster father, or out of sheer curiosity, Blaze turned around and walked into the cargo bay.
Which was a mistake. No matter which way it went with Arlo, the old man was bound to piss Blaze off.
TWENTY-SEVEN_
╠═╦╬╧╪
Arlo had found a place in the far edge of the cargo bay right next to the doors that allowed him to smoke. Butts littered the floor around him. His fingers were a bright yellow and he was squinting against the smoke of the LeMac pinched in his lips. His leathered, wrinkled face looked as worn as the unwashed denim on his legs. He’d pushed up the sleeves of his cowboy shirt to reveal the sinewy muscles of his overly large forearms.
The hilt of Elle’s fusion katana and one of her fusion pistols lay on the floor next to him along with the .38.
Raziel sat in the old’s man lap, purring loudly. Arlo ran his thick-knuckled fingers through the calico’s fur.
And while dozens of people had died in the Promenade fight, that green bottle of Barf Baby had survived. The last swallow still sat at the bottom.
The old man glanced over as Blaze walked in. “Thanks for not tossing my ass out of the airlock. Wouldn’t kill me, but it would make travel kind of a bitch. Might have to call Granny to come rescue me…speaking of bitches.”
“Nice trick opening the door like that,” Blaze said, walking over. He squatted down on his haunches. “Can you cast spells? Any other abilities I should know about?”
Arlo took the roach of a cigarette out of his lips and dropped it with the others. From his shirt pocket, he retrieved the LeMac package and the Tommy Tata’s Tavern lighter and lit up another one. “Ain’t no magic in opening a fucking door. There is magic in having a pack of smokes that never runs out.”
“And no sign of emphysema.”
“Fuck that health shit,” Arlo cursed.
Blaze motioned to the pistol. “I know you have silver bullets for that thing. Why didn’t you use it against the werewolves?”
“Why? Didn’t want to waste my good silver bullets on those assholes. It wasn’t that bad.”
Blaze let out a long breath. “We were fighting five werewolves, thousands of demon caterpillars, hundreds of the Konobi, and the archduchess of torture. We almost died.”
Arlo mimicked him. “Oh, we almost died. Wah, wah, wah. Fucking pussies. I shouldn’t have even been in that fight. I got better things to do than work with scared little pussies.”
“Like what?” Blaze asked.
The old man didn’t respond right away. He petted the cat, then shrugged. “Nothing comes to mind. It was simpler when I was training you, hunting demons, being awesome.”
“How come you stopped?”
Arlo inhaled the smoke and held it in his lungs. He let it out slowly. “You took over the family business. And I lost hope. Again. That’s the problem with living so long…you don’t get to win for long. You can win, hell, me and the old lady thought we’d won for centuries, but then we both tripped, got lost in the despair, chose the despair after a while, until we hit bottom and started it up all over. It’s why we took you in, ’cause we thought we could play
the messiah game again.”
Blaze felt every drop of his acid in his stomach. Talking to Arlo sickened him, but it was also fascinating. Like the cat, Arlo was a mystery. Not a demon, not a Human, so what was he? “What messiah game?”
Arlo grunted. “Oh, this guy will save the universe. This chica’ll restore balance to the galaxy, or whatever shit is hot at the time. The chosen one. The chosen people. Destiny’s bitch. Fate’s cocksucker. It’s all the same in the end. Over and over. Gets tired and sad. Like me.”
Blaze straightened. “I’m not a messiah. Neither is Elle. But we’re going to close the Onyx Gate. Our plans aren’t pretty, but we’ll make do. Just don’t get in our way. You can stay on the Lizzie, you can come fight with us, but don’t get in my way, or I will put you down, immortal or not.”
“Now that is badass,” Arlo gruffed. “Goddamn, but I made you tough. Mission fucking accomplished on my part. But you won’t see it that way. All you’ll do is whine and complain at how hard it was. Well, fuck you, Ramon. When billions of people, trillions if you count the Clickers, get to breathe without a demon up in their many butts, what I did to you will have been worth it.”
Blaze unclipped his fusion ax. He wasn’t going to use the silver spikes, nor was he going to use the fusion blade, but he was going to use the lead weights at the tip of the superlight haft to beat Arlo senseless.
The old man squinted up at him through the smoke. Raziel stopped purring, stood up, and leveled her gaze on the gunny. Damn cat didn’t move, and Blaze knew she wouldn’t. The cat was protecting the old man with her own body.
“Fuck you, old man,” Blaze spat. “If that cat wasn’t in your lap, I’d bash your pinche skull in.”
Arlo trembled as he took the cigarette from his mouth. His arm shook, and it was probably only going to get worse. It was the beginning of the DTs. “Raziel. That’s what you named her, right?”
Blaze didn’t answer. He was using every bit of his will to not hit Arlo, calico cat or not.
“Naming a thing like her is tricky. It’s an all or nothing game, like the messiah game, and Raziel knows all about that, don’t you?” Arlo turned soft and scratched the cat under her chin. “What do you call a forest fire that cleanses? What do you call a long sleepless night of pain and misery, either because of a birth or a death? What do you call a day where everything in your life changes? Words fail. At the infinity of it. The eternity of it.”
