by Jake Bible
“Chits? What?” Yellow Eyes asked. “This isn’t all about money, is it?”
“It will be if Bishop doesn’t have my chits,” Roak said. “He stole thirty-five million chits that belonged to me. Not to mention another twenty-five million or so I was owed for the Hammon gig. I’m tacking on ten million just for having to deal with this shit. Yeah, this is about money. Seventy million chits is what this is about.”
“Huh,” Yellow Eyes said. “But we’re still gonna avenge Carla and Taps, right? Even if you get your chits before then?”
“Carla and Taps will be avenged,” Roak said. “Not a problem there.”
“Revenge. Chits,” Mr. Wrenn said then spat. The bloody glob of snot landed on Roak’s left boot. “How basic.”
“You wanted me lured here for revenge,” Roak said.
“True, but I had plans, Roak,” Mr. Wrenn said. “I was going to subject you to a lifetime of vivisection and cerebral probing. Years upon years would have gone by before I finally let you expire. That is so much more than simple vengeance. That is true art.”
“Who is behind this Ha’taka guy?” Roak asked. “Who’s the puppet master pulling the CEO’s strings?”
“I do not know,” Mr. Wrenn said. “My deal was with Ha’taka and his corporation only. If there is a larger entity at work, then I was not made privy to the name.”
“You sure?”
“I am more than sure.” Mr. Wrenn grinned, showing bloody, broken teeth. “Which means I am of no use to you, Roak. Perhaps you should kill me so I may show you what I have evolved into.”
“Fine,” Roak said and slammed his power armored fist through Mr. Wrenn’s head, spraying bone, brains, and blood up the wall. “Come back from that, asshole.”
“Delusions, man,” Yellow Eyes said, shaking his head. “Delusions. Some people get them bad. Never heard of a guy thinking he was reborn when he was really only Monk Whale poop, but to each their own.”
There was a loud wrenching sound, like the tearing of metal and both Roak and Yellow Eyes whipped their heads around to face the closest bulkhead door. The panel of metal up by the corner of the bulkhead that had been tack-welded into place to block what had been the fitting for the air ducts began to bend outward. Small, metal legs appeared around the edges, pushing harder and harder until a bot was able to squeeze through and drop to the floor. The machine was followed by another and another.
“Speaking of poop,” Yellow Eyes muttered.
“Find our weapons,” Roak ordered. “Fast.”
Roak stood and flicked bloody goop from his glove. He looked about the room, which wasn’t really a room so much as part of a corridor that had been partitioned off from the rest of the corridor. Whatever the space was or had been, it was now covered in gore. Yellow Eyes had torn the thugs apart limb by limb. There were appendages strewn about that belonged to many different races. But despite being from different races, they were all the same in the end.
Dead.
“Here,” Yellow Eyes said appearing next to Roak with the Flott five-six and the rest of Roak’s weapons. “Can I have a gun? I’m going to get a gun.”
In the blink of an eye, Yellow Eyes was gone and back. His formerly empty hands were each gripping a plasma rifle. Roak holstered his Flott five-six and grabbed one of Yellow Eyes’ rifles.
“Hey!” Yellow Eyes complained.
“You have plenty,” Roak said then pointed at the bots that were coming at them fast. “Time to use them. Pay attention to where you’re aiming.”
“Pull these?” Yellow Eyes asked, his weird fingers resting on the triggers of each rifle.
“Squeeze, don’t pull,” Roak said.
Yellow Eyes squeezed. Plasma shot everywhere as the force of that many rifles shoved Yellow Eyes off balance and his body began to spin. Roak threw himself to the floor and covered his helmet with his arms and the plasma rifle. A stray blast knocked the rifle from his hands and he started yelling for Yellow Eyes to stop firing.
When the plasma fire finally ended, Roak looked up to see that Yellow Eyes had scorched every surface of the space, but not one of the bots had been touched.
“Dammit,” Roak muttered as he pulled his Flott five-six again and opened fire on the bots.
The cluster spread knocked the bots off their course which gave Roak time to get onto his feet, yank another plasma rifle away from a stunned and confused Yellow Eyes, stomp over to the little machines, press the barrel next to a junction point just at the rear of one of the bots, and squeeze the trigger.
The bot exploded everywhere. Some of it hit Roak’s power armor hard enough that bits of metal alloy stuck straight out. Roak ignored the damage to his armor and went after the next bot. That one scurried away, but Roak moved fast and stomped on its back then gave it the same fate as the previous bot.
There was a clang and Roak stumbled forward as two bots leapt onto his back. He threw himself up against the wall, knocking the bots off of him then he turned and put one down with the rifle while he held the other in place with his boot. Roak lifted his boot and fired, but that one scrambled away too fast and the plasma blast only scorched the floor.
Roak had to ignore the escapee and focus on two more bots that were crawling out from around the panel. They leapt for him as he fired and only one fell. The other landed on his faceplate and immediately tried to activate its cutter and get through Roak’s helmet. Roak head-butted the wall and crushed the bot against his faceplate. A small crack appeared in the faceplate, running diagonally down from right to left.
“Shit,” Roak snapped. “That’s gonna make returning to the ship tricky.”
“I’ll find…some…tape,” Yellow Eyes said as he stood up on wobbly legs. “You know where they keep the tape?”
Then Yellow Eyes screamed as a bot threw itself from the wall and directly at the being, cutter fully engaged and whirring loudly.
Roak flipped his rifle around and swatted the bot out of the air then stomped on it until it stopped moving. Yellow Eyes kept screaming, but Roak ignored him as he turned and opened fire on three more bots. When they avoided the plasma, Roak was ready. He moved in fast and crushed one against the wall while he jammed the barrel of the rifle up against another and fired until it fell. The last bot actually turned and tried to get away, but it caught a plasma blast in its aft end and exploded into a shower of metal alloy and sparks.
Roak waited, but no more bots showed up. Moving methodically from bot carcass to bot carcass, Roak put a couple extra plasma blasts in each just to make sure they didn’t have enough juice in them to self-repair.
Then Roak turned his attention to Mr. Wrenn’s corpse. No reassembly there. The man was dead as dead could be.
“Tanji Corporation,” Roak said.
“Yes, that’s what this says,” Yellow Eyes replied.
“What? I was talking about the corporation that Mr. Ha’taka runs,” Roak said. “What are you talking about?”
“This,” Yellow Eyes said, pointing at a stamp in one of the wall panels. “And this. And this. This here. This too.”
“I get it,” Roak said. “This place was built by the Tanji Corporation. Makes sense. Now we need to get out of this place and get back to the ship so we can go pay a visit to Mr. Dej Ha’taka, CEO of the Tanji Corporation.”
“We came that way,” Yellow Eyes said, pointing at the bulkhead on the side of the room where the bots had been coming from. “You think there are more of those things? I really don’t like those bots, man. They suck.”
“There probably are,” Roak said as he began gathering plasma rifles. He checked their charges and kept only the ones that were close to full. He started handing the rifles to Yellow Eyes. “You hang on to these. Give me one whenever I ask for it. We can fight our way…”
Roak paused. He cocked his head and narrowed his eyes.
“You hear that?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Yellow Eyes replied. “But I was hoping you didn’t. That way it would only be my imagina
tion.”
“What is that?” Roak asked as he took a couple steps towards the bulkhead.
He leapt back fast as the bulkhead shook and huge sparks shot out from the middle as a massive cutter blade sliced through the center of the metal.
“Big bot!” Yellow Eyes screamed. “Big bot!”
The bulkhead was split evenly then the huge cutter blade reversed directions and disappeared. Yellow Eyes stopped screaming. The edges of two pry bars that were as tall as Roak slid into the cut gap then began forcing the bulkhead doors open. Yellow Eyes started screaming again.
“Don’t let the big cutter bot get me!” Yellow Eyes screeched as he ran around in a tight circle.
Roak punched him as hard and fast as he could. Yellow Eyes dropped. His big eyes swam in his head and Roak wasn’t sure what he’d do if he needed to run. The freaky creature wasn’t going to be easy to carry all limp like that. But at least he’d stopped screaming.
Roak’s focus returned to the pry bars as the bulkhead doors were opened a little more with each second. With the gathered rifles next to him, Roak took a knee, switched on the targeting protocol in his helmet’s faceplate, synched his power armor to the plasma rifle in his hands, and opened fire.
The plasma rifle ran out of energy before he could do any permanent damage to either of the pry bars, but the metal alloy was glowing hot and Roak capitalized on that by picking up the next rifle and the next and the next until he was surrounded by the spent weapons. Roak stood up, drew his Flott five-six, switched it to concussion blaster mode, and steadied his aim as the doors continued to be shoved open.
From the darkness of the other corridor, the huge bot came. It slammed the bulkhead doors almost fully into their recessed pockets in the walls and yanked itself through the opening. It came at Roak, but the bounty hunter didn’t move. He held his ground, his pistol up and targeted on the bot.
The massive bot was almost on Roak when it stopped short. It made a series of high-pitched noises, which Roak had always thought sounded like bot curses, and tried to gain forward motion once again. But it was stuck in place. The scanner orbs on the top of its fore end swiveled and regarded the issue.
“Welded your pry bars to the doors,” Roak stated.
The huge bot replied with a whistle that would have destroyed Roak’s eardrums if he wasn’t protected by his power armor’s helmet.
“Yeah, you weren’t expecting that were you?” Roak laughed. “It’s going to take you a long time before you can get out of that mess, you lousy piece of…”
The bot strained and strained until its arms tore free, leaving the welded appendages behind. Roak barely dove out of the way in time. Yellow Eyes wasn’t so lucky. The huge bot rolled over the creature, the treads of its tracks pressing Yellow Eyes flat.
“Shit,” Roak said and realized he had one shot at getting away.
A voice inside him, one that sounded suspiciously like Hessa, rebelled and screamed at Roak to save Yellow Eyes. But Roak was already moving to the ripped-open bulkhead and the corridor beyond. Several of the small cutter and injector bots fell onto him, but he threw them to the sides as he sprinted down the corridor to the next bulkhead.
Roak hoped he was retracing his steps to the airlock. With the comm still jammed, he couldn’t call Hessa to get him, so he needed to exit where he’d entered, fingers crossed the ship was still waiting in the same place.
“You left me!” Yellow Eyes screamed as Roak reached the airlock.
The being was covered in injector bots and they were trying to stab through his yellow skin, but the injector needles kept bouncing off, sending the injector bots into fits of robotic, unbalanced rage. Their high-pitched curses were even louder than the huge bot’s had been.
“You left me!” Yellow Eyes screamed again.
“Hold still,” Roak said and didn’t wait to see if Yellow Eyes listened or not. He simply switched the setting on his pistol and fired. The laser cluster spread expertly knocked the bots from Yellow Eyes’ body.
“Get in,” Roak ordered as the airlock opened.
Yellow Eyes didn’t argue. He rushed into the airlock and was already working the interface panel for the outside airlock door by the time Roak was inside and shutting the internal door. The outer door burst open and the atmosphere inside the airlock was expelled, taking Yellow Eyes and Roak with it.
Roak grabbed onto one of Yellow Eyes’ legs before the being could float away from him. Then he activated his power armor’s small thrusters and pointed them both at the waiting ship, hoping his faceplate didn’t shatter in the meantime.
16.
“What did we learn?” Hessa asked once Roak was up on the bridge, Yellow Eyes following right behind him.
“That Roak was going to leave me there!” Yellow Eyes shouted. “He let me get run over by the biggest cutter bot I have ever seen! Then he left me! He left me there to die!”
“Yeah, Roak does that,” Hessa said.
Yellow Eyes blinked a few times, turned to stare at Roak, turned to look anywhere but at Roak, then turned back and stared at Roak.
“You monster,” he said quietly and took his seat at the scanner station.
“So, other than learning that Roak is a massive galactic jerk, which I already knew, what else did we learn?” Hessa asked.
“We’re going to Tanji Corporation headquarters,” Roak said. “Wherever that is.”
“I believe it’s in the… No, that’s a subsidiary,” Hessa said. “Ah, here we go… No, that’s another subsidiary. Headquarters? We have to go to the headquarters?”
“Dej Ha’taka is the CEO,” Roak said. “I would think the corporate headquarters would be the first place to look. If he’s not there, then we ask nicely and find out where he is.”
“You mean shoot people until they tell you where he is,” Yellow Eyes grumbled as he sulked in his chair.
“Or stab them. Or punch them,” Roak said, ignoring Yellow Eye’s tone. “Or kick them. Or throw them down a lift shaft. There are a lot of options.”
“Dej Ha’taka is no longer CEO of Tanji Corporation,” Hessa announced. “He succumbed to a mysterious illness two weeks ago and died before the med pod could treat him.”
“That’s not good,” Roak said. “Who’s the new CEO?”
“A Maga Zxixwell,” Hessa said and a holo projection of the woman appeared in the center of the bridge.
“Can you show me her actual size?” Roak asked.
“That is her actual size, Roak,” Hessa said. “She is six and a half feet tall, human, single, and the bright red hair and deep purple skin are real. Her file says she only has a comm implant and basic wrist implant for holo projections and some protocol interfacing. Other than those modifications, you are seeing her how she is.”
“Minimal implants,” Roak said. “Is she former Galactic Fleet Intelligence? A lot of spooks like to keep it simple with their tech implants.”
“Her file does not list Galactic Fleet service, no,” Hessa said. “But if she was part of Intelligence, then that omission would not be out of the ordinary.”
“Pretty lady,” Yellow Eyes said and sighed. “Roak will probably kill her.”
“Shut up,” Roak snapped. “Hessa? Is she at the Tanji Corporation’s headquarters?”
“She is not,” Hessa said. “She is currently on vacation.”
“Don’t say it,” Roak said quietly, hearing the tone in Hessa’s voice.
“Say what?” Yellow Eyes asked. “What’s wrong with saying where she is?”
“She’s on Ballyway,” Hessa continued.
“Eight Million Gods dammit,” Roak swore under his breath. “Back to Ballyway?”
“Back to Ballyway?” Yellow Eyes exclaimed. “We just left Ballyway! I don’t want to go back there! How can we go back there? Roak is banned! I go back and, oh man, it is not going to be good. It’s going to be bad.”
“Wendell is dead and Wendell’s boss is dead,” Roak said. “We’ll forge some landing docs and ev
erything will be fine. I don’t have implants other than my comm, which can’t be detected, and you don’t have any implants. We can’t be tagged or traced that way. If we keep a low profile, then it’ll be all good.”
“A low profile?” Hessa and Yellow Eyes asked at the same time.
“What?” Roak said.
“I should have stayed on that broken asteroid,” Yellow Eyes said.
“We can arrange that,” Roak replied.
“We will do no such thing,” Hessa said. “And I am almost to the wormhole portal. It would be best if the both of you strapped in. This portal is rougher leaving than coming.”
“How are we almost to the wormhole portal?” Roak asked, checking the control console. “You’re pushing the engines hard, Hessa.”
“I would like to leave this system, Roak,” Hessa said. “So we are leaving. Once out of the nebula, the risks to our engines dropped significantly. I am gambling that no residual influence by the nebula’s gasses will affect the engines.”
“You? Gambling?” Roak shook his head. “You were meant to return to Ballyway.”
“Is no one listening to a damn word I’m saying?” Yellow Eyes shouted. “I do not want to go back to Ballyway!
“Tough shit,” Roak snapped at the being. “The new CEO is on Ballyway. We’re going to Ballyway.”
“It is a good thing we are flying in a Borgon Eight-Three-Eight stealth incursion ship,” Hessa said. “That will make things much simpler.”
“You want us to go in using stealth instead of forging some landing documents and bribing the hangar officials?” Roak asked.
“I believe stealth is the better idea,” Hessa said. “I can drop you off in one of the lesser populated areas then return to orbit and await your comm call to pick you up.”
“Something you aren’t telling me, Hessa?” Roak asked, suddenly suspicious. “You want us to be partners then you’re gonna have to be straight with me.”
“I have a feeling,” Hessa stated after a long pause.
“Yeah, I’m sorry, but what did she say?” Yellow Eyes asked. “Did she say she has a feeling? Hessa, you have been very polite and kind to me, so I apologize for what I’m about to say, but, uh, you’re an AI. AIs don’t have feelings.”
