Worldship Files: Cityships

by Erik Schubach

  Graz leaned forward, a look of anticipation and anger on her face as the men started firing. I saw flashes of combustion from the barrels of their weapons as projectiles started flying past. Whatever they used to sling the metal slugs seemed to be some sort of percussive chemical reaction that had its own oxidizer to work in a vacuum.

  I roared a challenge as they started to range me, their fire becoming more accurate, but in EVA mode, my armor could handle micro-meteoroids. It still hurt like hells as I leaned into the barrage as they finally had me. It was like being hit by a sledgehammer, over and over.

  One leveled a huge gun at me with spinning barrels and rained down hellfire on me, two of the much larger projectiles getting through, one sending searing agony across my side, and one tearing a chunk out of the armor on my leg, and my thigh. I ignored the pain as the suit's systems sealed the breaches and put pressure on the wounds, as I felt Synth-Skin patches being applied.

  I closed the range to fifty yards, gritting my teeth through the dizziness and nausea, and started firing my MMGs back at them. The Outliers hesitated and stopped firing when three of them started convulsing and went limp as the magic backed stunners did their work.

  I heard over their com channel, “Fuck! Mow her down! We have to buy Richter time.” And the three mining ships rocketed forward, burning reaction fuel at full throttle. I ran faster toward them, holstering my guns as they'd be useless against these ships, I was roaring as I reached into one of my belt pouches.

  Graz was yelling over the music and my challenge to the ships. “Umm, Knith? Knith? Mother fairy humper!”

  I was blown backward, tumbling along the skin by a shock wave when two of the vessels exploded into flying debris after massive electrical discharges hit them from behind me. It was like coherent lightning. I was able to grab a sensor platform, straining my arm until I got my magnetized boots back down to attach to the Skin.

  I spun back to see what hit them, and my eyes widened as my heart started hammering in my chest as I saw the impossible. With eyes glowing with brilliant power, and lightning coursing all around his body, striding forward along the Trunk like some long-forgotten god of thunder come to take the souls of the wretched, was Mac!

  He turned and thrust a hand up, and unrestrained power shot forward, another beam of coherent lightning slashed through space, tearing a mining ship in half that was firing on the B-Ring so far above.

  My instincts had me spinning and leaping at the last second as the third ship that was bearing down on me reached us. Graz was screaming again as I almost cleared the ship, taking a glancing blow that tore some armor off my side.

  I released what I was holding as we slid across the hull of the vessel. Just before we spun off into space, my side screaming in pain as the armor sealed and more Synth-Skin patches were applied, I shouted to Mother, “Lockdown!” It felt like I lost a rib or two as I found it hard to breathe.

  I caught a glance of the mining ship being yanked down to collide with the Skin, all four of my mag-bands activating, pulling down with a combined forty G's of force. And light bloomed as it exploded.

  I got my bearings as we spun. This time, I was prepared for this and was starting to reach for the emergency hyper-compressed gas canister in my belt packs to arrest our spin and guide us back to the Skin, but something grabbed me. My armor was sparking everywhere, telling me it was magic in nature and my Scatter Armor was trying to dissipate the magic, but the source was overwhelming and we stopped spinning and were lowered gently to the Trunk.

  I looked back and Mac was almost up to us. He spoke... we were in a god be damned vacuum, and he spoke, and I heard him clear as day as he said, “I'll clean up out here. You go get that mortal son of a bitch.”

  I just gaped at him, ignoring the projectiles that were zeroing in on us again. Mac was alive... and by what he was doing now, everything I ever thought about him was confirmed. I was excited and relieved and in complete awe because of the power he was wreathed in and how much power he was just throwing around. He had somehow covered thousands of miles of space and was walking along the Trunk in hard vacuum and wasn't freezing.

  Graz whispered in complete awe, “Oberon...”

  I said, knowing Mac could hear me somehow, “There's no undoing this now, no going back. Everyone will know.”

  He looked resigned as he lashed out past me and I heard men screaming on the Outlier channel as the incoming fire stopped. “I know, now go.”

  Madame Zoe's words echoed in my head. The father is exposed. And it still freaked me the hells out.

  I nodded once to him, looking into eyes that seemed to have no end, magic crackling in their depths. Then I turned away and started running toward the airlock, my mag-boots clumping, a smile growing on my lips. Mac was alive!

  Graz kept trying to look behind us, but the visor wouldn't let her. She seemed to sigh in resignation and then turned her attention to the task on hand. She looked up at me one last time and asked, “Umm... Knith, did you really just takedown a whole spaceship with those souped-up restraints of yours?”

  I nodded. “Uh-huh.”

  She grinned up at me. “You really are a special kind of crazy.”

  “That's the general consensus.”

  A man stepped up out of the airlock and started to raise one of those multi-barrel weapons. I grabbed a baton from my hip and tossed it cross-hand with all the augmented strength my arm and suit could muster, and hissed, wincing in pain, my ribs and arm twinging from the effort. A moment later, the baton smashed the honest to goodness glass of his helmet, cutting short his gurgling scream as his air vented.

  I grabbed the baton from where it stuck out of his helmet as we passed, his flailing arms going still, then I slid it back into its place on my hip. Graz whistled. “Crazy, and sort of scary.”

  I flipped us down and around using the grab rails inside the airlock then cycled the doors shut. Once the space was pressurized, my armor reconfigured to its default form, and my visor snicked up, Graz flew out and drew her pointy piece of metal alloy she used as a knife. I checked my vitals. Between the Underhill and the Outliers on the Trunk here, I was pretty beat to shit. But Richter wasn't going to wait around while I whined about my injuries.

  With a nod to Graz, which she returned, I cycled the inner door and we moved out into the aftermath of a battle. Bodies and blood were floating around in the corridor everywhere.

  I asked, “Mother?”

  She played the footage of boarding parties being fought in the stacks and here in the trunk. The Worldship had been taken completely by surprise and there weren't many security personnel down here, and the Outliers just laid waste to the workers and civilians in the space... even the Humans. So much for their edict about not harming their own when they were this close to their goal.

  I watched them using those damn EMP grenades before the few Brigade personnel had known what was going on and their armor powered down. They hadn't stood a chance when Richter's small army started spraying projectiles indiscriminately. Oberon's balls!

  Mother highlighted a few Outlier corpses in the macabre scene floating before me, then displayed numbers. They still had fifty-five men leading the mutineer captain. It infuriated me that they had played us so well, and had used the Underhill as a troop transport. Of course, our scans of their gear hadn't reveled their weapons, since we scanned for energy weapons, not something as primitive and dangerous to a space vessel as projectile weapons.

  I shuddered to think about the damage to the world I had seen outside, and prayed to whatever deity might be listening that we could recover from it. Images of the people in the Cityships sparked through my thoughts.

  I grabbed a handrail and yanked myself forward at a faster pace than I could run with my mag-boots. A streak of dark light and dull dust at my side. I've never seen Graz so incensed before. I asked, “You got your head screwed on straight? We have to go into the fight with a level head.”

  She growle
d through clenched teeth, “Yeah, yeah, I'm good. But, these fairy brained jerk holes are gonna pay.” She pointed around at the bodies we passed. “They're killing my Bigs, and nobody kills my Bigs!”

  You would think that such a tiny, lesser Fae, making threats like that would be comical, but... I swallowed. I knew what sort of damage she could do with that little blade of hers, and admitted that it was a good threat.

  I drew my MMGs and checked the charge. One was fritzing a bit. Probably because of the EMP grenade. It was a little wonky up on the Skin too, but it looked to be bleeding power. Maybe I can check with Magi-Tech to see if they can imbue a charm in them and my armor to withstand an EMP in the future. Not that it would ever be likely to ever happen again.

  Though that was the point, what were the odds it would ever have happened this time? Just because we played by the rules, didn't mean everyone else did.

  I slapped the weapon on my leg and the charge went up to ninety percent. Ok, not good to be wielding a weapon that may or may not give out on you in a firefight. I holstered it and pulled out a baton, snicking it out to full length. Sometimes low tech is the best tech, nothing to go wrong.

  Graz asked as I floated down the Trunk, “What would it take for an erstwhile Sprite to get a miniaturized MMG?”

  Snorting I told her, “Graduate the Brigade Enforcer Academy. Otherwise owning one would see you bound by law and working the mines. Energy or weapon possession is a felony unless you're a palace guard in the Seelie or Unseelie courts.”

  She parried, “Oooo that Enforcer stuff is for you Bigs, but a palace guard? I've got connections now.”

  “Your only connection is Rory, and she's my connection, not yours.”

  “Potato banana. It's all semantics.”

  “It's potato potahto you flying pain in my arse, and... I can't believe I'm actually having this conversation with you. Mother forging your private investigator license was bad enough, now you want to be armed?”

  Mother said, “Hey now, Knith. I can run verification on her papers if you want.”

  I sputtered, “You're the one who wrote them so of course, you'll verify. I can't believe she talked you into one of her schemes. I thought you were supposed to be the most intelligent person on the world.”

  She reminded me, “I 'am' the world, Knith. And I like Graz, she talks to me like you do.”

  Graz chirped out with a smirk, “Stow it, you oversize tin can, I can fight my own battles.”

  I muttered to the air, “Children.”

  Then as we passed someone in a fleet support uniform floating past us with a gaping hole in his chest, blood globules trailing behind the Satyr, my eyes looked to the bulkhead reflexively. “Mother, can you raise Myra?”

  The last I had heard from her, she had to leave our space convoy to round up the stray ships. That put her almost two hours out of position. And that's when they hijacked the Underhill. I was relieved when a familiar voice hissed then said in a distracted tone, “What's up, Fae lips? A little busy here.” I heard an explosion as she cursed under her breath.

  I was relieved she was still alive. “Oh, nothing, just taking a stroll in the Trunk. Just wanted to check up on you and your wingman.”

  She growled then said, “They lured me out of position, to where I was behind their main formation where their engine radiation was jamming my coms. When my scanners showed debris from Ready two, and what I thought was debris from the Underhill, just for the computers to identify them as bodies, I thought you were dead Knith. I couldn't warn the Leviathan because of how they had maneuvered me.”

  She sounded as if she blamed herself for everything. “Hey Kitty Cat, this was not your fault, they had fooled us all.”

  She muttered as I heard her pulse lasers firing, “It was a rookie mistake. Never leave your wingman.”

  Graz was repeating, “Hi Myra, hi Myra, hello Myra.”

  The woman responded, “Yes Graz, I hear you. Hello. Now, ladies, I've got some mutineers to mop up, stay safe.”

  My Sprite companion said, “Stay safe? I'm with Knith, she's charging right in on...”

  “Goodbye and good luck, Myra.” Mother cut the link.

  I sighed and said, “She's ok.” At the rate we were moving I still had two or three minutes before we reached the blast sphere and flight control. Then I asked, “Mother?”

  She said, “Already connecting.”

  As much as I had worried about Myra, it had felt as if I had an anvil resting on my heart after I saw the damage to Beta-Stack's A-Ring and the hull breaches. I was a little occupied fighting for my life to find out if the woman who held my heart was ok.

  “Knith? Oh, thank Mab you're ok. I heard the Underhill had docked with a boarding party. I feared the worst.” She grunted and a huge amount of static filled the channel for a moment before she was panting and gasping. She called out to someone, “Ok, that should hold. Get me to the next one.”

  Then she said, “Just a second Knith, we'll lose coms during transport.”

  Transport? What did she... my thought was interrupted by heavy static then a spinning connection icon before the channel was clear, showing her location was no longer Beta A. She was in Gamma B now. She said, “Hang on Knith.” Then she said, “I've got this, mother needs transport.”

  Then she was back with me as I heard magic crackling like it did when she was winding up her power to do something big. She said, “I have this last breach to seal. Titania has been transporting mother and me around through the entire attack. Ready Squadron says they are just mopping up some strangler ships. They are babbling about some sort of doomsday weapon that was batting the enemy from the sky.”

  She grunted and there was static. Then she was yelling, “That won't hold long, get those blast doors operational and get the people out of their quarters now that we have an atmosphere.”

  Then she was back with me. “I was so worried. And...” I heard her winding up again.

  I found I was smiling and I said, “Well it sounds like you're a little busy. I have a little something I have to do to, so how about dinner?”

  “Sounds delightful. Be careful.”

  Graz chuckled. “Careful? She's hunting the ringleader of the Outliers now, alone. And...”

  I made a zipping motion over her lips then blurted, “Love you, Rory.”

  She responded in a tone full of suspicion. “Love you too, Knith Shade of Beta-Stack C-Ring.”

  Mother closed the channel and I reached about to drag a hand on the handrail until we slowed enough for me to lower my feet to the deck and let the mag-boots clomp down on the deck. The blast sphere that housed Mother's data core and flight control loomed ahead of us. The entire expanse of the huge corridor was tinged by a red mist that partially obscured the scene.

  It took me a moment to realize what I was seeing. I heard my detached voice saying, “Gods.”

  And Graz turning her head away and saying, “I'm going to be sick.” Then she spewed.

  It was blood. A thick mist and floating globules of blood and carnage that made what we left behind look like a kindergarten party. Some of the corpses floating through the space were literally torn in half by what had to have been high powered weapons. There had to be at least thirty or forty Outlier bodies.

  And against the bulkhead was a Megolith. One of its arms looked as if it had been chewed off... likely by sustained fire from one of those spinning projectile weapons. And there was a hole blown through its chest, the data overlay Mother was feeding me showed residue from some sort of chemical explosive. A spent EMP grenade was spinning lazily nearby.

  I whispered, “Space me now... they had incapacitated him, then they tore him apart with their weapons even though he was helpless inside.”

  Graz growled, “These Outliers are nothing but animals. They don't see anyone who isn't Human as people, just as roaches to be exterminated.”

  I looked around scanning what looked to have been a one-sided battle un
til they used the EMP grenade to turn the tide. I was asking, “Where's the other...” when Mother highlighted something next to the blast doors. It was the other Megolith-Suit, on its back.

  Running along the deck, I ignored the body parts and gore floating around us until we got up to the relatively intact suit. The main canon looked to have been melted somehow, more of that residue on it, and the access door to the pilot's rig was open, the pilot was missing.

  I glanced at the blast door again. The driver would be cleared to raise the series of doors. They kept him alive to gain access to the blast sphere. How had they even gotten this far?

  Stepping up to the door, I tried my bio scan and quantum encrypted codes. Access denied. I tried coms to warn our people in case the Outliers weren't as far ahead as I thought they were, “Flight Control, this is Shade, badge alpha three four eight niner. Come in? You have incoming hostiles.”

  Mother said softly, “Knith...” Then showed me a live feed of the control room. There was a battle raging in there as I watched.

  I pounded on the door in frustration, then remembered Rory's magic overriding the door. I put my face right in front of the access terminal. The blew gently across my lips. Magic started to light on the runes for a few feet around the access pad, then receded. I punched the door in frustration, the magic wasn't powerful enough.

  Then in a moment of inspiration, my eyes darted down to my gear pouches and I jammed my hand into one, feeling around until my hands closed around a piece of cool metal. I pulled it out and looked at the spelled harmonica Mac had given me in what seems another lifetime ago. It had amplified Mab's magic to help me stop Lord Sindri.

  My hands shook as I brought it to my mouth. Then I blew out a solid, silvery, perfect note that seemed to shake reality around us, fire and ice exploded from the instrument, twisting and twirling around each other like the dance of long lost lovers as the magic amplified by an order of magnitude, then hit the access pad.