King Killer

by Michael-Scott Earle

“A few hundred. More will be coming, but they are still in hyperdrive. Admiral Birger’s fleet was the fastest, and he was not the only one submitted to my father. I would expect him to have a few hundred.”

  “So we need to move quickly,” I said.

  “He knows that his fleet has left,” Madalena said. “He will be ready for an attack, or thinking about escaping.”

  “How will security be?” I asked. “Will there be door locks? Terminals controlling security systems? Will there be drones?”

  “My father was never fond of drones, but there will be some, and there will be locks on all the doors in his estate.

  “Which one of those buildings is his hangar?” I asked as I looked at the five structures. “Is it that one in the bottom right? It looks like it might have a roof that opens.”

  “Yes,” Madalena said. “That would be where Valravn is.”

  “We need to take that building out so he cannot escape,” I said as a plan started to form in my mind. “Persephone can swoop in, we’ll unload on the building, and then drop into the--”

  “Uhhh, Adam,” Kasta said, and I turned to her. “Look at this. Those are big ass cannons and missile launchers.” The screen shifted down the view so I could see what she was talking about.

  “Intacall Warhead launchers and Forlock cannons,” Madalena said. “Persephone might be able to fly by, but a shuttle will not be able to outrun the missiles.

  “That’s just one of eight,” Kasta said, and the map outlined red circles at seven more locations.

  “Shit,” I growled. “He’s really dug in there.”

  “Persephone will not be able to fly by eight of those weapon clusters,” Nikki spoke up. “We will get chewed up and not be spit out.”

  “So we are stuck up here, and that fucker is stuck down there?” Zea asked.

  “Yes,” Madalena answered. “And every hour which passes will mean more of his allied admirals will arrive here in their slower ships.”

  Chapter 14

  “So, how are we going to do this?” Zea asked.

  It was a damn good question, and I looked back at the map on the screen as my mind danced through the possibilities. Fuck, who was I kidding? My mind didn’t “dance” anywhere. I was a tiger-man Marine that could only think of shooting, biting, or fucking. I kept thinking about a way we could fly Persephone and a shuttle in there, but we would only end up with a face full of missiles.

  Thinking about the missiles did give me an idea, though, and I turned back to Kasta. “Are there more of these surface-to-air clusters anywhere on the planet?”

  “I’m scanning.” her fingers had started moving as soon as I started speaking, so I guessed she knew what I was going to ask.

  “What is your plan?” Madalena asked.

  “We can drop a shuttle off a few kilometers outside of the missile and cannon range, then hotfoot it to his fortress. What do you think?”

  “Intacall Warhead launchers have an effective range of twenty-five hundred kilometers.”

  “Twenty-five hundred kilometers?” I felt my stomach drop.

  “Yes,” Madalena nodded. “They can target us if we are in low orbit.”

  “Nikki, you aren’t in low orbit, are you?” Zea snickered to the pilot.

  “No,” Nikki answered flatly.

  “It was a joke. I know you aren’t in low orbit.” Zea sighed.

  “I know it was a joke, this is my joking face.” Nikki turned to Zea, but her beautiful face looked exactly as it normally did.

  “Kasta?” I asked the android.

  “I’m not seeing anything within a few kilometers outside of the perimeter of the other arrays,” the android said. “But it sounds like that doesn’t matter. We’ll have to land a shuttle on the other side of the planet. The king will die of old age before we get to him.”

  “Wait, this doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Zea said. “I’m just a computer hacker, not a weapons expert, but how in the hell can those missile launchers see twenty-five hundred kilometers away? The planet has a curve to it.”

  “There will be relays spread across the surface,” Madalena said. “They will provide advanced radar feedback to the launchers.”

  “Prime Valkyrie,” Lux spoke from behind us, and we turned to face the black-haired woman.

  “Yes?”

  “I have documentation for the weapons in question loaded into Persephone’s databanks.”

  “I want to look at it,” Kasta said, and then she raised her mouth and shouted for Paula.

  “What?” the engineer shouted back as she walked over.

  “Lux is going to give us some weapon stuff to look at.”

  “I like weapons,” Paula said as she sat in the officer chair that Kasta normally used.

  “How else can we get down there?” I asked the women. Zea and Nikki shook their heads, Eve shrugged, and the twins were busy looking at the weapon information on their terminals. Lastly, I turned to Lux and Madalena.

  “I can send a destroyer back to the armada and order them to send heavier vessels,” Madalena said. “Then we can bombard the planet’s defenses and the hangar where Valravn is being kept. My father will be unable to escape at that point.”

  “How long will it take for them to reach us?”

  “Two or three weeks,” Madalena replied.

  “And you’ll lose those ships from your armada for twice that time,” I said.

  “Yes,” Madalena nodded.

  “And he could escape at any time,” I mused.

  “It will be hard for him to do it while we are here,” she said.

  “But his backup is going to show up at any moment. We’ll tangle with them, and then he can get out.” I stood up and started to pace the deck between the officer’s chairs and the three pilot stations.

  “It is not the best plan,” Madalena agreed.

  “Lux?” I turned to the other woman, and she raised her eyebrows a bit.

  “You would like my idea?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “What do you have? Crazier the better.”

  “Crazier?” The corner of her mouth turned up a bit.

  “Yeah.”

  “I believe the scanners will not pick up craft or forms under a certain volume,” she said.

  “Two-tenths of a cubic meter!” Kasta exclaimed from her seat. “I just got there in the specs.”

  “I think I see where you are going with this,” I said to Lux.

  “It senses heat, so our thrusters will alert the system,” Lux continued, and I felt pride come from Madalena.

  “So we need to parachute in,” I said.

  “But an open parachute will probably provide too much for the radars to bounce off,” Madalena said.

  “Yes, we will have to open up the chutes below the effective targeting range,” Lux said.

  “That’s one-hundred meters,” Paula groaned as she pointed at her terminal screen. “We’d all break our legs when we landed.”

  “Or worse; our vaginas,” Kasta whispered with feigned terror.

  “I don’t think you can break a vagina,” Paula moaned.

  “Do you want to try? I don’t.”

  “Can you turn on your wing-thrusters below the one-hundred meters?” I asked Madalena and Lux as I patted the back of my shoulders. “Would the missile launcher see it?”

  “No. I think they would be fine,” Kasta said after Lux looked at her.

  “Zea, back when we were on Gliese 876 - B - iv, you managed to override the programming on one of the portable Alloprize missile launchers.”

  “Yeah,” she replied. “I have a feeling I know where you are going with this.”

  I turned back to Lux and Madalena as I put together the rest of my crazy scheme. Madalena was smiling a bit, and I guessed she could feel my excitement.

  “The four of us jump, open our parachutes before we hit the ground, and you use your thrusters to slow us more. Then Zea hacks one of the missile launchers, and we use it to take out the others. Persephon
e flies in, shoots down the hangar, we find Madalena’s father, and I put him in the ground.”

  “I like this plan,” Lux said.

  “Uhhh. Wait, I’m not so--” Zea began to say, but Madalena spoke.

  “You are forgetting that the missile launchers can reach up to twenty-five hundred kilometers. We won’t be able to make an atmospheric skydive.”

  “Oh, thank god,” I heard Zea mutter.

  “We could do an orbital drop,” Lux said.

  “Wait, is that outside of the atmosphere?” Zea asked.

  “You would need to wear your spacesuits.” Lux shrugged.

  “It won’t work,” Madalena said. “We would need to use our thrusters to descend into the atmosphere, and the missile launchers would see us. Not to mention we will burn up when entering the atmosphere.”

  “This is a bit of an emotional roller coaster,” Zea huffed.

  “I have an idea,” Paula said, and we all turned to her. “We have those new fighter drones. We could do a drop straight down into the atmosphere, and they can act like the brakes and heat shields. Then you jump loose and let the missiles take them out. It might work even better because the system will think you are shrapnel. It actually has programming to ignore bits and pieces of craft it has just eliminated.”

  “Okay, wait, just stop for a second.” Zea waved her hands, and we all turned to her. “So you want me to ride a drone into the atmosphere, jump off before a missile hits it, open my parachute one-hundred meters from the surface of a hostile planet, and then hope that my lover’s wife catches me before I slam into the ground and break my vagina?”

  “I will catch you,” Madalena said with a firm nod.

  “This is fucking crazy! This is the craziest thing we’ve ever done, and we do fucking crazy every fucking day!” Zea threw her hands up. “I like Madalena’s plan. Let’s call for backup and wait this fucker out.”

  “We don’t have time, and we need you to take care of the missile launcher,” I said. “You’ve done it before.”

  “Ugh.” Zea covered her face with her hands and then peeked out at me from behind her fingers. “Don’t look at me like that! You know I can’t say no when you look at me like that.”

  “I can ask one of the Vaish crew if they’ll come instead of--” I started to say, but Zea interrupted me.

  “Fine! I’ll go, but I want ten fucking spa days in a row, and you are going to be the one massaging me every day. Got it?”

  “Yeah, I’ll do it,” I said. “Let’s go put on our suits.”

  “We’ll drive the fighter drones,” Kasta said as she gestured to Paula. “And we might need to make some modifications to the drones. We’ll look at the blueprints and then join you all down in the hold once you have your space suits on.

  “Sounds good,” I said.

  “This doesn’t ‘sound good.’ This sounds like all kinds of stupid,” Zea sighed.

  “Think about the ten spa days,” Lux said with a shrug of her shoulders.

  “Whoa, did Lux just make a joke?” Kasta asked.

  “No.” The dark-haired woman shook her head, but the corner of her mouth curved up a bit, and I could feel her mirth through Madalena.

  Eve stood and walked with Zea, Madalena, Lux, and I to the elevator. The five of us didn’t speak during the lift ride, or as we walked to the hold, but I could feel that the riskiness of this endeavor was starting to weigh on everyone’s mind.

  “Lux and Madalena, may I have a few moments alone with Zea and Adam?” Eve asked when we reached the airlock doors and the wall of space suits.

  “Yes,” The Prime Valkyrie said. “We will meet you by the drones.”

  “I wanted to wish you both luck,” Eve said.

  “We are going to need a lot more than luck for this,” Zea sighed as she ran her fingers through her hair.

  “I believe in you,” Eve said. “This will work, you will program the missile launcher, and then you will punish this man for trying to kill Adam.”

  “You sound confident. Want to go instead of me?” Zea laughed, but I could see her hands shake as she reached for one of the suits.

  “You don’t want me to go,” Eve said. “You are looking forward to having Adam alone with you in the spa for ten days.”

  “Maybeeeeee. Okay, fucking mind reader. I’m like shitting myself, but yeah.”

  “We’ll get through this,” I reassured the hacker, and she sighed again as she stepped into the space suit.

  “Kiss me before you leave?” Eve asked, and I turned toward her. Her face was emotionless, but her words made me think that she was apprehensive about our mission.

  I am, my love. This is risky, but the best course of action. I am confident you will both return to me, but I want one last taste from each of your lips.

  I wrapped my arms around Eve’s waist, pulled her against my armored chest, and kissed her full lips. We swayed together for a few moments as our tongues explored each other, but then Zea cleared her throat, and we turned to see her grinning at us.

  “Give me some of that,” she said and then Eve and Zea kissed. The two women moaned softly when their lips touched, and Zea dropped the edges of her space suit so she could run her fingers through Eve’s long hair. The sight of my two women enjoying each other made my head spin wildly, and I wondered if I could pause this mission, carry them into my room, and ravish both of them for an hour.

  The women stopped kissing each other with a gasp, and then Zea reached for me. Eve touched us both while we kissed, and then the three of us held each other for a few moments.

  “I will see you both after,” Eve sighed as she stepped away from us, turned, and walked back toward the elevator.

  Zea and I continued to put our space suits on over our armor. The complicated sequence was way easier to do with hands, and I showed her how to trigger the suit’s compression function so it would be snug around her body. Then I helped her put her helmet on, donned my own, handed her the rifle she had carried down from the bridge, grabbed my shotgun, and held her gloved hand as we walked back toward the two Valkyries.

  “We’re ready,” I said.

  “Good,” Madalena said as she pointed to the drones. They were a little over two meters long, black, and in the shape of bottom-heavy diamonds. “We are discussing the best way to attach ourselves to the units. There are not any handles.”

  “Darn, looks like we’ll need to figure out another way down. I’m gonna get this suit off and go curl up in a ball in the corner of the room.” Zea pointed back over her shoulder at the space suits.

  “Paula and Kasta will figure it out.” I reached for the suit button that connected to Persephone’s transponders, but I saw the twins walking across the hold toward us. They both looked deep in discussion, but then they smiled at us when they neared the drones.

  “You figure it out?” I asked them.

  “There are firm points on the wings that we can drill into for handles,” Paula explained as a trio of worker drones rolled across the floor of the hull toward us. A service arm also descended from the ceiling and attached to the top of one of the drones so it could be lifted.

  “Who is controlling them?” Lux asked as she stepped back from the sudden appearance of the robots.

  “I am,” Kasta replied as she reached for one of the repair drones that stopped between her and Paula. The robot looked like a tool chest, and its top popped off to expose an array of power drills.

  “That is useful,” Madalena said, and we watched the twins each grab long drills and move to stand under the wings of the first drone.

  The blonde engineer and her android sister worked without speaking to each other, and their beautiful faces took on an emotionless appearance that reminded me of the Vaish crew. There was an eerie synergy in the way they moved around each other; as if the two worked with one mind.

  “This handle should hold,” one of the twins said after she attached a long bar to the bottom part of the wing. It took me a moment to realize it was Paula
who spoke.

  “Should hold?” Zea asked.

  “Yep,” Kasta replied as she started to drill the next set of holes in the opposite wing.

  “Ugh,” Zea groaned.

  “You should be more worried about the suits burning up when you enter the atmosphere,” Paula said as she moved to help her sister drill.

  “Wait, I didn’t think about that. Are these suits going to burn up?” Zea turned to me.

  “No,” Kasta said. “We checked the specs in the Elaka Nota database and know the heat sensitivities. You’ll be fine as long as we fly the drones in at the correct speed behind the one we have set up as a heat shield.”

  “Oh, thank the stars,” Zea sighed.

  “We just have to hope the missiles don’t get to the drones until after we have entered the atmosphere,” Paula said.

  “Not helping!” Zea moaned, and the twins chuckled.

  “You’ll be okay as long as the chutes open and Madalena catches you,” Kasta said as she moved to grab the long metal bar they used as a handle.

  “Yeahhhhhh,” Zea said as she glanced at Madalena.

  “I will catch you,” the Prime Valkyrie reassured.

  “I will catch Adam,” Lux said as she looked at me.

  “Uhh, maybe it should be the other way around?” Zea asked.

  “The Prime Valkyrie is much more talented than I am,” Lux said with a shrug.

  “Shouldn’t she catch Adam then?” Zea sighed. “After all, he is her--”

  “No,” I said. “If Lux and I crash into the ground, I’ll heal. If you die, we won’t be able to hack that missile launcher and our mission will fail.”

  “Okay, okay.” Zea’s face looked a bit relieved. “We are good, except I don’t know how to turn on the parachute.”

  “It will go off automatically,” Kasta said as she commanded a blow torch drone to work on the sides of the first bar where they attached.

  “Soooooo, I don’t have to do anything? I’m just along for the terrifying ride?”

  “We are going to lock your arms to the bar with this,” Paula said as she held up what looked like a metal arm harness. “Your elbows will rest inside, and then you can hit this button to release it.” The engineer turned over the contraption to show where Zea’s hands would rest, and there was a switch located where her fingers would be.