by J. N. Chaney
Dash grinned again. “And with that, I think I’ll go and fight my way aboard a ship full of hostiles. For some reason, it suddenly sounds safer than certain alternatives.”
“You do that, and have fun.” But her voice turned serious. “All kidding aside, you be careful, Dash.”
“Hey, I’m going to let Benzel and his people do all the hard work. I’m just going along to stretch my legs.”
3
“Just like old times, eh, Dash?” Benzel said, poking his head around a corner and firing his snap-gun. The twin beams were only damaging where they intersected, a point the shooter could slide back and forth on the fly. They were nifty little weapons, intended to minimize the damage to the interior of a ship. They were also harder to use, which was why Dash left them to the Gentle Friends, who were experts with them.
A shout from up the corridor became a scream. Benzel ducked back, though not in time to avoid a slug that snapped off his vac-armor and pinged against the deck. Benzel cursed but escaped entirely unharmed. Their technological superiority continued with the boarding action, the Realm’s vac-armor shrugging off hits that, the last time Dash had boarded a Clan Shirna ship, would have been lethal.
Dash, further back along the corridor, nodded. “Yeah. I’d forgotten how much I missed having kilotons of armor and shielding between me and people trying to hurt me,” he replied.
He’d just finished speaking when a tremendous flash filled the cross-corridor, accompanied by a heavy, concussive blast. Okay, the Glorious Splinter did have one weapon that could cause them problems—a powerful but short ranged plasma-pistol. Dash had carried one for a long time himself, reserving its tremendous blasts of destructive energy for when he really needed them. The problem was that, as small arms went, it was too potent. The splash effect from the blast washed over them, held at bay by the vac-armor, but it would be a different story for anyone caught squarely by a direct shot. The evidence lay right in front of Dash when the blast effect cleared, leaving a faintly glowing cloud of vaporized bulkhead, quickly cooling and dispersing.
“Too many more shots from that thing and they’re going to blow a hole in the side of their own ship!” Benzel snapped.
Whoever was firing the plasma-gun was doing a rather good job of keeping them at bay. Dash looked around, measuring the situation. Further back along the way they’d come, they’d opened and cleared a compartment, but then they just moved on past it.
“Benzel, keep holding the fort here. I’m going to grab your rear squad and try to flank these assholes,” Dash said.
“Flank them? How?”
“I seem to recall that Clan Shirna ships I boarded in the past had a maintenance crawlway right up their centerline. I want to see if we can access it through that compartment back there.”
“You’re the boss, boss. Just be damned careful. If I let you get hurt, Leira’s gonna make it so I can’t have any more kids.”
“Do you have kids now?”
Benzel grinned back at Dash through the visor of his vac-armor. “Honestly, I’m not really sure.”
Dash rolled his eyes, then started back along the corridor, picking up the rearmost squad along the way.
They’d found the maintenance crawlway. A hatch in the side compartment’s overhead gave them access to it. Dash now edged along, trying to make as little noise as possible. It wasn’t easy. The vac-armor wasn’t all that bulky, but the clunk of armored hand or knee against the deck plating was pretty distinct. It forced him to move slowly, almost sliding his hands and knees along a little at a time.
The voice of the squad leader, a round-faced man named Kennedy, came over the comm. “By our reckoning, Dash, another three or four meters and we should be pretty much directly over the idiot with that plasma-gun.”
Dash opened his mouth to reply just as a heavy shock thumped through the structure of the ship around them. The idiot with that plasma-gun had fired again, fixing his location right ahead.
Obliging of him, he thought, then replied over the comm, “Yeah, I think that’s pretty evident. Okay, we should be able to open up the access hatch over the corridor they’ve barricaded themselves into and drop a grenade on top of them.”
“Just watch the yield,” Kennedy replied. “No telling how much damage the shooting has done to the ship’s structure.”
Dash grunted his understanding. Kennedy was one of the few original Gentle Friends, Benzel’s privateer outfit, still involved in active service with the fleet. Most of the rest—those who’d survived this long, anyway—had found their niche as salvagers or construction crew working in the dockyards and on the Kingsport.
Dash resumed his way forward. Two meters to go. And then one. He saw the access hatch just ahead. Hopefully, it would be as simple as just dropping the grenade, then pulling back and letting Benzel and the other two squads mop up, before opening the final passageway to the bridge. The alternative, trying to pile everyone down through the access hatch and straight into battle, was very much a distant plan B.
Dash reached the hatch and unclipped a grenade from his tactical harness. He confirmed it was dialed to its lowest yield. That would reduce its effects to mostly variations on stun, but it should also minimize the risk of further damaging the ship, or even breaching the hull. If that happened and explosive decompression carried any of them out into space, it wasn’t likely to be lethal—it would mean floating about in vac-armor until rescued. But it would still be inconvenient and would generally suck.
Dash glanced back again, or as best he could in the cramped confines, anyway. “Everyone ready?”
A moment passed as Kennedy checked in with the rest of his squad. “We’re a go,” he finally said.
“Roger that. Here we go.”
Dash gripped the lift handle on the access hatch, then turned it and lifted. The hatch smoothly opened. Through the gap, Dash could see Clan Shirna—or, apparently, now Glorious Splinter—soldiers beneath, exchanging desultory fire with Benzel and his people, who were somewhere well off to Dash’s left. He saw the plasma weapon, too. It wasn’t a pistol but a full, rifle-sized gun, cradled by one of the enemy soldiers. They all crouched behind a makeshift barricade of various types of furniture laid across emergency structural braces that had been pressed into service as an expedient fortification.
Dash snapped off the grenade’s safety, triggered it, then dropped it and slammed the hatch shut.
A few seconds passed, then a flat, heavy thud rattled the ship. The deck under Dash lifted, shoved from below, though only a little—
And then collapsed, pitching Dash straight down into the corridor amid a tangled mess of debris.
Dash slammed into the deck below in a shower of overhead components, sparking conduits, and loose junk. More crashed down on top of him. The vac-armor protected him from any serious injury, although his sudden stop when he hit briefly knocked the wind from him. He frantically thrashed about, trying to recover, to arm himself, to do something to protect him from the Glorious Splinter crew he’d fallen on.
His fumbling glove caught on something—the holster of his mag-pistol. He yanked on it, trying desperately to draw it, but a fallen deck plate jammed the weapon in place. Cursing, he struggled to get back to his feet, but the tangled debris prevented him from doing that too. A sudden irony, so bitter it was almost hilarious, slammed into him. He’d started his tenure as Messenger facing Clan Shirna, and now he was about to end it the same way. There had to be at least a half dozen of them within arm’s reach, and the vac-armor was good, but it wasn’t impervious to harm.
Something snapped overhead. Again. An instant later, a ferocious firefight erupted, beams and projectiles filling the air less than a meter, and sometimes just a few centimeters above him. Okay, he couldn’t have ended up with a more ignominious end if he’d planned it. Lying on his back like a helpless turtle, partly pinned under debris, struggling to free himself, while a battle raged all around him, shots cracking past less than an arm’s length away, and often much
closer.
Dash—grinned. And then started to laugh.
How couldn’t he? This was funny. Utterly absurd, in fact. Any second, he was going to take a plasma blast to the face, and even the tough vac-armor wouldn’t be able to stop it.
Well, if nothing else, he’d be long remembered for the chump way he died—
Silence. The firefight had stopped. A figure suddenly loomed over him.
Benzel knelt beside him, grinning through his visor.
“Um, Dash? When you said you were going to outflank them, I envisioned something a little different.”
Dash sank back in his armor. Okay, them winning the firefight, and him not dying after all had been a definite possibility too. He did his best to shrug inside the armor and look all cool about it. He opened his mouth but winced and closed his eyes as the dangling end of a joist finally let go, and it crashed into the scrap pile right beside him.
He opened them again and looked straight at Benzel.
“Just so we’re clear—I meant to do that.”
Benzel coughed politely. “O’course, boss.”
It only took a moment to free Dash from the tangled rubble, by which time the Realm boarders had pushed on and secured the bridge. Dash picked his way over the bodies of the defenders behind their barricade. Apparently, besides collapsing the floor under him, his grenade had actually done the trick. It had killed or wounded enough of the defenders that Benzel and his people had been able to seize the opening, and the initiative, and make a rush at the barricade. In another ironic twist, the barricade had actually likely saved Dash because he’d fallen immediately in front of it, out of the line of fire of the Glorious Splinter troops.
Whatever works, he thought.
He entered the bridge, to find a half dozen of the lizoid Clan Shirna personnel under guard, kneeling, their hands behind their heads. A seventh, though, large and powerfully built, still stood, stubbornly refusing to drop to his knees. Two patches on the sides of his scaled neck flared a bright, almost incandescent crimson, meaning his anger hovered on the brink of unbridled fury. Before he lost it entirely and the Realm soldiers trying to corral him were forced to kill him, Dash waved them aside. They reluctantly pulled back but kept their weapons firmly trained on him. Still, it was enough of a de-escalation that he simply drew himself up to his full height, leveled his eyes on Dash, and waited.
“I’m guessing you’re the Captain,” Dash said, holstering his mag-pistol.
“Although I do command this ship, the Judge of Cowards, I am no mere Captain. I am Sklaris Vec, High Prelate of the First Legion of the Glorious Splinter.”
“Ah. Okay, then. Well, I’m—”
“I know who you are,” Vec snapped. “You are the Nemesis. Your crawling obeisance to the corpse aliens, the Unseen, is enough to demonstrate—”
Dash held up a hand. “Now I remember why I hated dealing with you guys so much. It wasn’t the attacking and the fighting and the killing, it was all the pretentious bullshit. I mean, seriously, who actually says things like crawling obeisance?”
“I will not stand here and grace your insults with—”
“Yeah, actually you will,” Dash snapped, stepping closer to Vec. “I don’t know what scary stories you tell your kids about me, the big, bad Nemesis, but I hope they include the fact that I like cutting right through the crap and getting to the meat of things. So, let’s start with this. You were fighting with us, against the Deepers. And then you turned on us at the first opportunity, even though you had to know you didn’t have a chance against us. Why?”
“You are the Nemesis. As soon as we saw the Dark Avatar, we knew it was you.”
“The Dark Avatar? Oh, you mean the Archetype.” Dash smirked. “Hey, Sentinel, what do you think of that name? Dark Avatar?”
“It does roll off the tongue. However, it might be somewhat on the ominous side for everyday use, unless we choose to celebrate that candy feast you love, Halloween, more often.”
“Zero cavities yet no matter how much candy, and don’t you forget it,” Dash said, smiling broadly. “Yeah, I’d imagine that introducing you to a new race as the Dark Avatar might set the wrong tone. We’ll stick with Archetype, I think.” Dash took another step closer to Vec so that he stood face-to-face with him. He actually had to look up slightly to make eye contact.
“If what you’re telling me, Vec, Prelate of whatever, is that you will always attack us, on sight, because of who we are, then we don’t have much to discuss.” He glanced at Benzel. “Come on, let’s head back. We’ll finish blowing these assholes into wreckage, then go and talk to Disraeli and her people—”
“Wait.”
Dash turned back to Vec, eyebrows lifted, and waited. As he did, he watched the crimson flare of Vec’s neck patches fade to more of a somber brownish-red.
“Will you end these alien interlopers the way you ended our clan?”
“You’re damned right I will. The more important question is, are you going to stand in my way?”
Dash could see Vec struggling to answer the question. He’d probably held out some secret hope, a fantasy that one day he’d get to face Dash again in glorious combat. That he’d slay him in some suitably spectacular and decisive way and finally realize vengeance for his fallen Clan.
When he finally answered, though, it was with a flat, weary tone of defeat.
“No—we will not. There is no point. We have nothing. We are nothing.”
“You don’t have Clan Shirna anymore, that’s for sure. I defeated it. That must mean something to you guys, right? No shame in being defeated by an honorable enemy, right?”
Vec’s eyes narrowed. “No. All that matters in defeat is honor.”
“Do I strike you as the dishonorable type?” Dash gestured around at the other Realm personnel gathered on the bridge. “Do any of us?”
“No. You fought well and could have destroyed us. But you didn’t and came here to face me.”
“And there you go.”
“What do you want from us?”
“You said you’re nothing because you’re no longer Clan Shirna. But that doesn’t mean you’re nothing now. Do something useful, something positive. Help the other people in this part of the arm guard against the Deepers.” Dash leaned in. “And don’t do it because your Nemesis is demanding it. Do it because the Messenger of the Cygnus Realm is requesting it.”
Vec said nothing.
“Live in peace, Vec.” Dash started to turn, then stopped. “Oh, and if you live in violence instead, if you cause harm and strife for the people and races around you, I’ll come back. And when I do, it will be as your Nemesis. Do we understand each other?”
Vec finally nodded. “We do.”
“Oh, one other thing.”
Vec tensed but said nothing.
“You said you’re the First Legion of the Glorious Splinter. How many Legions do you have?”
Vec glared at Dash for a moment, then his neck patches turned purple, heading for blue, which meant humor.
“Counting this one?”
“Yeah.”
“One.”
His neck patches turned fully blue. Dash gave a small smile as he turned away. “Thought so.”
“So Benzel tells me you used some sort of cunning strategy to defeat the Glorious Splinter,” Leira said over the comm.
Dash flexed his arms and legs, settling himself into the Archetype’s cradle.
“You might call it that.”
“It was a most cunning strategy. It involved intricate maneuvering and split-second timing,” Sentinel put in.
Dash scowled. “Okay—”
“Oh, really? Was it a masterstroke of tactical genius? Is it something we should from now on call the Dash Maneuver?” Leira went on, her voice as sweet as syrup.
“Hah, and to repeat so you grasp the depths of my good humor, hah. I would point out that while it might not have gone exactly according to plan, it did work.”
“Not exactly according to plan?
How many variations of falling out of the ceiling are there?” Sentinel asked. Leira just laughed.
“I fell with a lot of elan,” Dash muttered, which only made Leira laugh harder.
“Elan is a fancy word,” Sentinel said. “And yet it’s accurately placed, unlike you, when you fell to the deck.”
“Only half of my action was—off. I didn’t stick the landing. But for two meters, my form was perfect,” Dash said.
“That is both creative and true, Messenger. You win this round,” Sentinel allowed. “Chief Proctor Disraeli has requested a meeting with you aboard her ship. She wishes to discuss what happens now.”
“That’s a good question. We’ve still got no clear idea why the Deepers were here,” Leira said.
Dash had looped Benzel and Jexin into the comm channel, the latter speaking up.
“I don’t think it was an accident. I can’t imagine that those gates just happened to lead here.”
“Which means they still have some sort of control over the gates we don’t understand, since there is no apparent Radiant Point at either gate location,” Tybalt put in.
Dash grimaced at the operational display. It was barren of data since their only sources for it were what their fleet could immediately scan and detect. Its emptiness didn’t really matter, though. There could be only one reason for the Deepers to suddenly be interested in this part of the galaxy.
“I think it’s pretty clear why the Deepers were here. They want access to the Pasture. They somehow snagged some data from us that’s pointed them in this direction,” he said.
“So you think they’re after whatever secrets the Unseen might have left in the Pasture?” Benzel asked.
“Well, it was where Leira found the Lens and I found the Archetype.”
“We definitely don’t want the Deepers getting their hands on something like the Lens,” Leira said.
“No, we sure as hell don’t,” Dash replied, thinking of the sort of terrible havoc the Deepers could wreak if they were able to start blowing up stars. Just the idea of it made him shudder.
