by Jamie Sawyer
“What’s our plan of retreat?” Lopez asked.
“We’ll head for the evacuation-pods,” I said, “and launch one into the belt.”
Feng deployed into the corridor. Lopez followed me out, moving fast but with caution. Through one deck, down a ladder-shaft to the next. Across the crew quarters, picking the right moment to move, hiding when necessary. That was no easy task, wearing full armour. The combat-suit was big, and not made for stealth. It made noise when it moved, from the whine of hydraulics to the thump of boots against the deck. Still, we did okay. The Black Spiral weren’t soldiers, and they obviously thought that they were safe out here, hidden in the asteroid belt. Unless, or until, someone went to check on Lopez and her guards…
A thought nagged me. Riggs might be on this ship. I was almost within touching—killing—distance, and the idea that he could survive this encounter pained me. Almost absently, I realised that I’d marked the location of the medical bay, where the Sons or the Spiral or whoever, had likely set up Riggs’ simulator. Was I going to leave that technology intact? But a glance back at Lopez told me that I had to focus on what actually mattered. Riggs could wait. There would be other chances.
Really? the voice of doubt argued. Because you keep saying that, and Riggs keeps getting away…
“The evac-pod bay is ahead,” Feng said.
The corridor was quiet and still; half a dozen circular portals in the bulkhead, each leading to a pod. I covered Lopez as she approached the first hatch, peering inside the letterbox view-port.
“Open the door,” I ordered, sweeping the corridor with my scanner. “Keep the area covered, Feng.”
There were life-signs around us, but not in the immediate vicinity. Several clustered on the deck above… They’ve found the empty cell, I realised.
Feng sealed the corridor, shutting the hatch behind us. The panel that controlled the lights in this sector was unprotected, and he activated that too: throwing the passage into darkness. Emergency warning labels on the deck lit, providing Lopez with enough illumination to see by. Then Feng took up a position at the neck of the corridor. Ready.
The evac-pod hatch hissed open, producing a warning chime that echoed down the corridor. Although there was no one else around to hear it, the noise made me wince. Lopez reacted in the same way. A wave of stale atmosphere escaped from the open pod.
“It’s clear,” said Lopez.
“Great. Get inside.”
Four plastic crash couches were arranged in formation, facing a basic control panel, and an open view-port. Lopez hustled into the pilot’s seat, pulling at the harness straps. Her breath produced a plume of white vapour as she breathed out.
“Shit, it’s cold in here,” she complained.
“You Proximans are all the same,” I said, eyes both on her and on the scanner on my HUD. “Always with the cold. Just get on with it.”
“Are we compromised?”
Bright bio-signs were converging around us.
“Yes,” I answered. No point in dressing it up. “Initiate the launch sequence.”
Lopez wasted no time. She put her pistol on the dashboard and began to cycle through the launch codes. Military or civilian, evacuation tech worked in much the same way. The pod launched, and then the craft’s transmitter sent out a mayday code to anyone listening. Alliance Army infantry were taught the essentials during Space Tech training, and there was very little skill involved. I could see Lopez checking off the necessaries in her head…
“Seal the pod, Lopez,” Feng said, reading his own scanner. “They’re almost on us. Do it now!”
“What’s the delay?” I asked.
“I don’t know! The launch sequence won’t start!”
Bio-signs were everywhere now. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Voices through the air-shafts. The clatter of boots on the deck. Feng was crouched further up the corridor, covering the approach. I glanced in the other direction, which led deeper into the Iron Knight.
“The launch codes are blocked.” Lopez looked up at me, face grim. She scrambled with the harness again, pulling herself free. “This isn’t going to work.”
I opened a comm-channel to the Valkyrie. “Zero, do you read? Zero, come in!”
“We copy,” said Zero. Her voice was so lost to static now that I could barely hear her. “What’s happening? The Iron Knight’s weapons systems are going active, and her drive is igniting.”
“We’re in trouble. Heavy resistance, inbound. The pod launch is restricted. Can you run a remote override?”
“I can’t do that at this distance,” Zero conceded.
“Just try!” I yelled. I wasn’t losing Lopez on this ship. “Ask Dr Saito for help!”
“Could you try another pod?” Zero suggested.
If that had ever been a practical solution, it wasn’t any longer. Warning lamps flashed above each pod, text blinking in red LED. ACCESS RESTRICTED. No prizes for guessing what had happened there. This was the only way off the ship, and the Spiral knew it. The ship’s AI began to broadcast a message: “This is a security lockdown. Transport on or off this vessel is now prohibited.”
There was hammering on the hatch at the end of the corridor. Yelling.
“They’re here,” Feng said, cutting short any further suggestion that we might be able to get out of this by stealth.
“Stay in the pod, Lopez, and keep trying,” I said. “Feng: provide covering fire.”
The hatch at the end of the corridor opened, and Spiral spilt in. Four targets, armed, armoured.
Feng answered their intrusion with a volley of plasma bolts. The energy discharge seared the area, killing two tangos before they had a chance to evade.
A third yelled “Dominion come!”, and opened fire with an assault rifle. Rounds bounced off the deck, ricocheting in the closed environment. My combat-suit’s null-shield activated to repel some of the assault.
“Lopez, stay in the fucking pod!” I ordered.
Lopez ignored me. She was at the open hatch, shooting with her stolen pistol.
“If we’re dying here, this is my call, ma’am,” she said.
I shook my head. “You’re too stubborn for your own good.”
“That’s what Daddy always tells me.”
The gunfire intensified. In the flash created by muzzle-flare, bodies advanced towards us. The distance wasn’t great—maybe twenty or thirty metres—but the tangos were paying for it in blood. Screams accompanied the report of guns firing, the hiss of plasma tech. I snapped the activator on my grenade and hurled it underarm in the direction of the attackers.
“Fire in the hold!” I yelled.
Feng scrambled to safety.
The frag grenade detonated. The corridor shuddered and bodies were thrown in every direction by the blast. My null-shield flared brightly—a sphere of blue energy forming around me, ablating the incoming frag. The noise was deafening.
Another null-shield—the same as mine—lit at the end of the corridor.
“What the actual fuck are you doing here, Keira?”
The voice pierced the racket, scything through me like a mono-knife. The distinctive outline of a body in a Class III combat-suit advanced through the smoke and debris. An identifier tag danced over the newcomer.
CORPORAL RIGGS, DANEB.
EXECUTE WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE.
“Holy fucking Gaia…” I whispered. “Feng, take Lopez.”
“Ma’am…” Feng started to argue.
“Now!” I yelled. “Get her out of here!”
Feng didn’t argue with me any more. He grabbed Lopez, and hauled ass down the corridor. Riggs let them go. I was quite sure that wasn’t out of any sense of decency. Rather, I was his focus. He wore no helmet, but he was in a sim. His eyes narrowed and jaw set; determination etched into his features.
“No fish to protect you this time?” he said.
“I don’t need anything, or anyone, to protect me from you.”
“This won’t—”
There was an ear-splitti
ng crunch throughout the Iron Knight’s hull. The deck underfoot quaked violently, the ship’s spaceframe vibrating just as furiously. An emergency lamp in the deckhead began to strobe, filling the corridor with red light.
“What the fuck have you done, Keira?” Riggs asked.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
END OF THE LINE
I managed to remain standing, which was a minor miracle given the force of the impact that the Iron Knight had just suffered. A ringing filled my ears, which resolved into a voice.
“I am in hangar bay,” said Novak. “Am here to help.”
Novak’s vitals were resurrected on my suit-sensors. He’d made transition again, and was back on the Knight. How and why he had done this would have to wait.
“Feng, get Lopez to the hangar bay!” I shouted, overloud, to compensate for the other noise.
I cancelled a dozen warnings that filled my HUD, searching for only one: Lopez’s life-signs. She and Feng were further down the corridor. Intact. That was a better result than I’d expected.
“Solid copy,” Feng answered. “Lopez, run!”
Lopez recovered her composure fast and began down the corridor, to another hatch at the far end. Feng popped his Widowmaker pistol to cover their retreat, while I faced off against Daneb Riggs.
Riggs bolted, snarling at me as he gained speed, the strength-amplifiers in his combat-suit whining as they took his weight.
“I’ll find my father, Jenkins,” he chanted, voice roaring from the external speakers of his armour. “He isn’t dead! You’ll see!”
“All this is to prove a point?”
I bounced off the wall, using my EVAMP to gain momentum, and collided with Riggs. Armour on armour, our bodies pirouetted together.
In a sim, Riggs was just as fast as me, but nowhere near as angry. He had his plasma pistol up. Fired. A bolt of blue energy lanced past me, barely missing my head as I turned it aside. I slammed into Riggs’ body with my shoulder, driving all of my weight into the impact.
Riggs grunted. He tumbled away, an arm out to break his fall.
“Oh no you don’t,” I said.
I grabbed him, and pounded my fist into his face. He wore no helmet, and there was a satisfying crunch as something broke. Blood droplets poured from his face, tiny red marbles spraying the walls of the chamber. He yelped in pain. His nose was broken, and probably his jaw too.
He lurched towards me, throwing a backhanded blow at my head. I dodged again, and he hit the wall. Gravity was scrambled now, becoming twisted. Riggs’ shoulder-guard smashed against the bulkhead. One arm went limp, and Riggs’ howl suggested the pain was intense. I lurched over him, slamming a fist into his stomach.
The armour plating of Riggs’ suit gave beneath my powered blow, and he jerked away again. Trying to put distance between us, Riggs spun backwards, bouncing off the far wall, making the most of the fractured gravity.
“I’m done here,” he growled, through a mouthful of blood. Reached for a mono-knife sheathed at his chest, and put it to his own neck. “Be seeing you, Keira.”
I let him draw the knife over his own flesh. His eyes widened, mouth slackening. Life left him, in the instant, and his corpse went limp—drifted off the deck in the fluctuating gravity.
That was a classic Sim Ops move. Extract from a damaged body, in order to make transition to another skin.
But the tactic only worked if you had more sims.
There had been operational cryo-tech in the Iron Knight’s storage bay. Riggs’ skins, on ice. Probably stolen from Sanctuary, during the Spiral’s raid.
We’d purged those bodies. Killed them in their tanks.
That was my penultimate gift to Riggs.
I had one more gift to give him before we parted ways for all eternity.
I hoped that he enjoyed it.
The Iron Knight was moving.
I could feel its operational drives vibrating underfoot. On a proper military ship, that wouldn’t be possible. But the Knight was a converted hauler, and despite the aftermarket upgrades, nothing would change that fact. The sudden acceleration accounted for the shift in gravity, as the internal damper and artificial-G fields failed to compensate.
“Novak? Feng? Do you copy me?”
I yelled the words over the comm, as I ploughed onwards through the ship. Was Lopez safe? Had the Jackals already reached Warlord? I hoped so, but there was no telling. P was still ignoring my attempts to communicate as well.
I’d have to search the place myself. The bridge would probably be too well defended to take on my own. That was what I told myself, at least. I stormed through the decks, heading for a different target.
The Iron Knight’s medical bay was exactly where it was supposed to be. I slaughtered my way through every compartment and corridor, dispatching Black Spiral wherever I found them. Doubtless, the tangos would bring heavier weapons to bear soon enough, and with numbers on their side they might take me down. I knew that I wasn’t invincible, but it didn’t really matter. Novak and Feng were both operational. That gave Lopez the best chance of escape possible.
I had a different job in mind.
I vaulted off another corpse, towards the open hatch that led to Medical. With my improved hearing, even over the disarray that was enveloping the ship I could pick out a voice. I’d never forget it, for as long as I lived—in this body or the next.
“What do you mean, we can’t make the uplink?” Riggs screamed. He was panicking, and it was delicious. “Get me into a new body now, you fuck!”
“There are no bodies left!” came the strangled response.
Some higher force guided me. Maybe it was P. Maybe it was just pure determination.
“Hold!” shouted a tech in a dirty-looking medical smock. “You can’t be in here!”
“Negative,” I said.
I slammed the figure aside. The medic—a man with a face full of tattoos, wearing a black plastic smock that suggested a career involving backstreet bio-enhancements and illegal body-mods—was unarmed and unarmoured. He hit the far wall so hard that his ribcage cracked. With a wet sigh, the man collapsed; bio-signs snuffed from my HUD.
“No more skins, huh, Riggs?” I said. “You can thank me for that.”
Riggs’ simulator-tank sat in the centre of the chamber. Surrounded by an ad hoc neural-link set-up, doubtless made up of stolen tech. The tank itself glowed blue.
Riggs’ eyes flared in disbelief as he saw me.
The simulator’s canopy lifted. Fluid poured across the deck.
Riggs was out of the tank. Naked. Vulnerable. He reached for the bench immediately beside his simulator.
Gun.
I launched across the chamber. Grabbed his shoulders with both hands. I knocked the pistol on the bench away from him, out of harm’s reach.
“What do you mean?” he gasped.
“I killed your sims while they were still in cryo.”
Riggs looked genuinely amazed by that—why would you do such a thing?—and tried to squirm away from me. He was physically as slippery as he was mentally.
“Don’t do this, Jenk!”
I hurled him against the wall. Riggs, unlike the medic, didn’t break. But he did make an almighty crash, and released a satisfying cry of pain. He was a broken toy. I bounded towards him.
“Please!” he squealed. “I only ever wanted to know where he’d gone!”
I held my pistol to Riggs’ head. Drove the weapon’s muzzle into the flesh of his temple, felt the gun meet the resistance of his bone structure. This would be it. For ever. After all this time, it felt so damned good that it was almost unreal. Adrenaline and rage washed through me. My skin was flushed, my heart a trip-hammer.
“I never meant to hurt you!” he wailed.
More than anything I wanted him to feel what I felt. Wanted him to know what he had put us through, but also that all of this had been in vain. That his father really had died in that nest on Barain-11. The emotion and hurt poured out of me. I don’t know how it happe
ned, why it happened, but we connected in that final moment. Whether it was the Aeon, P, or something else: Riggs knew. Riggs finally knew. His eyes became dark pools.
“No comebacks, Riggs,” I snarled. “This is final.”
“I know that you won’t actually do this, Keira, and—”
I fired the gun, and Riggs’ head exploded.
Daneb Riggs, former Jackal, traitor to the Alliance and Black Spiral terrorist, was dead.
I had no time to enjoy my victory. Another rumble sounded through the deck. Spend enough time on warships, and you develop an innate danger sense: an ability to distinguish whether damage is trivial or significant. The enormous, bell-like boom that echoed through the Iron Knight’s spaceframe was very clearly serious. The Knight wasn’t coming back from this.
“Hold firm,” came a rasping voice over the ship’s PA. “Dominion comes.”
Warlord.
Bio-signs rushed across the ship, converging on the main hangar at the aft of the vessel. I followed the flow and did whatever I could to hold the Spiral off. My communicator was showing an error message—I’d damaged it during the fight, or the Iron Knight was causing local disturbance: either was a possibility—so I was in the dark. All I could tell with any certainty was that Lopez was still alive. I only got the basics—heart rate, respiration activity and so on—but that was good enough. She was in the vicinity of the ship. Feng and Novak were still operational too. That was less important, because they were skinned, but it meant Lopez was protected at least.
The corridors were filled with Spiral. Most were wearing armour now, carrying heavier weapons, chanting hymns and war-cries. I popped a few on the way, but received little in the way of return fire. They were focused on what had happened in the hangar.
As I cleared the last corridor, I could see exactly why that was the case.
A shuttle had collided with the Iron Knight. The Wildcat Mk 2 armoured personnel shuttle—one of the mainstays of the Alliance fleet—had come to rest at the near end of the hangar. Memories flooded back to me again. Warlord, escaping from Daktar. Now, of course, it looked very different.
The Wildcat’s skids were deployed, but whoever was responsible for piloting the ship hadn’t done a very good job, and the landing gear had carved three deep grooves into the Iron Knight’s deck. Cargo crates, miscellaneous supplies and even a couple of maintenance vehicles had originally been obstacles in the Wildcat’s path, but—along with a half-dozen Black Spiral in space armour—they had been crushed beneath the shuttle’s bulk.
