“He’s right,” said Algernon. “I’m trying to assemble a mental model of the ship and its crew, and so far you defy reasonable predictions. A single machine pilot wouldn’t have been able to do what you did. Alas, my crystal-minded kind are not very original at the best of times, and at the worst we tend to favor tried and true methods.”
“Are you saying I flew okay?” said El. She leaned toward the speaker on her console. “Are you trying to give me a fucking compliment? Just say it.”
“You flew well,” said Algernon.
“For a meat sock,” said El.
“For a person of any construction,” said Algernon. “Captain, I posit your crew works better as a team than individually.”
“It’s taken you that long to work us out?” said Nate. “That’s … it. That’s the whole thing, Algernon. We’re best when we’re together. You’ve discovered humanity’s secret.” He ran his golden hand through sweat-slick hair, then pointed at the holo. “Down there, El,” he said. “There, we fight dragons.”
“I’m staying with the ship,” she said.
“I’m counting on it.” He flashed her a grin. “In all the places I’ve been … hell, El. I’ve been to a hundred star systems, and I’ve never seen flying like that.”
She nodded, but he caught the hint of a smile. “Thanks, Cap.”
The comm buzzed. “Fuck’s sake,” said Kohl. “You fuckers finished yet? We almost lost our lunch down here.”
“I lost my lunch,” came Ebony’s voice. “All of it. It’s gone.”
Nate couldn’t help but smile. Impossible odds. Unbeatable enemies. Humanity on the brink. Machines better than they were, holding a gun to their collective heads. But he was here, with his crew. No place he’d rather be.
Together.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
KOHL GAVE A sideways glance at Ebony. This wasn’t easy, on account of the shiny golden armor they both wore. It limited the movement of his head some. “You okay, Drake?”
“I’m gonna hurl,” she said. She, inside her golden suit, leaned against the side of the cargo bay airlock.
“Wouldn’t recommend it,” said Kohl. “Splashes all inside your helmet. Gets everywhere and you’ll never get the smell out. Sold the last armor I threw up in. Had to take a bath on the price, too.”
“Nice talk, boss,” she said. “I don’t feel at all like throwing up now.”
“Really?”
“No.” She paused. “Are we going out there? Alone?”
“Yeah,” said Kohl. “Easy work. There'll be roaches. Focus fire on the big fuckers. Smaller ones come apart no problem.”
“That’s not what I meant,” said Ebony, her image on Kohl’s HUD showing a narrowing of the eyes. “There are two of us.”
“I’m not sure I follow,” said Kohl.
“Let me try this a different way,” she said. “Shouldn’t we protect the emperor and empress?”
“That’s what we’re doing,” said Kohl. “Been here before. All kinds of asshole insects crawling all over the place. The basic plan is, stop the fuckers getting on the ship. That keeps the cap and Gracie safe. Then we crack a couple cold ones.”
He caught her sigh on comm. The Tyche was settling in to land, the clank-clank of skids hitting the crust below them. Kohl barely felt the lurch, his new armor adjusting with ease, almost without his having to think about it. He checked the weapon systems on the new suit. Rocket pods on the back were a bonus, but re-arming them would need some work. Kohl would bet good money on short odds there’d be no resupply on those anytime soon. Maybe Hope could magic something up later, but best keep what he had in reserve. Of more interest were the rotary cannons mounted on the suit’s arms. His old plasma cannon could fire a stream of hot death, but these things were some next level shit. He was sure they could bore through the side of a tank in about half a second. Kohl couldn’t wait to try them out against those crab motherfuckers.
The airlock opened in front of them. Kohl jumped out before the ramp had settled. He didn’t mean to leap so far, but the new armor seemed eager to get the job done. His armor’s systems got to work tagging the hostiles, and it had a lot to work with. His radial terrain map populated with a bunch of red dots, next to a green dot — the Tyche — and a smaller golden dot — Ebony.
Crunching on the broken rock of the Ezeroc world, Kohl paused. Last time he was here, there was nothing but sand. It took weeks to get it out from the joints in his armor. This time, there was a little sand, but mostly rocks. Lots of rocks. The armor told him the rocks were warm, and while it was at it, it told him the air was hot too, gusts and eddies running at over sixty C. Blazing firestorms might do that, Kohl allowed, and figured it fortunate a blazing firestorm wasn’t here right now.
Ahead of him, a vast expanse of targets awaited. A low-slung building — an actual, honest-to-God constructed facility — was about three hundred meters away. Next to that, what looked like a pit of despair led into the Earth, no doubt where the Judge lay. He bookmarked that for a later visit, because sure as Christmas, there’d be roaches down there that needed killing.
All over the building, roaches. Small ones. Big ones. Drones hustled with the big crabs. Some of the supersized drones crunched about, doing important drone stuff. The ‘important stuff’ looked to be moving people into the facility. There was a big ol’ container, the kind a dropship might deploy to a planet. The side was open, humans milling about and not looking like they were concerned with the sixty degree heat.
He keyed his comm. “Hope?”
“October.”
“My suit says the temp here is at least sixty.” He eyed an eager drone that was getting interested in them. Ebony crunched up next to him. “Is it faulty?”
“No. Your suit’s right. I’m getting a balmy sixty-two from the Tyche’s sensors.” Hope paused. “Oh. The people. I see. That’s unusual.”
“Did some work in Australia, before anything mattered much,” said Kohl. “One day, it got to fifty. People died at forty-five. Just the frail useless fucks, like old people and kids, but after fifty most people had issues. Even in air-conditioned armor, my balls sweat themselves into shriveled husks.” Ebony’s face grimaced on Kohl’s HUD.
“Sixty is too hot for people,” agreed Hope. “Hmm.”
“Hmm?” said Ebony. “What the hell does that mean?”
“What if the Ezeroc have terraformed people?” said Hope. “The firestorms on the planet might not be leftover energy from our nukes. You know, from before. Actually, it couldn’t be, because the planet was an expanding cloud of dust when we left.”
“You mean when we blew this place to hell,” said Kohl.
“Yes,” said Hope. “Maybe their tech, or whatever we call it, lets them build better humans to live here, and the firestorms are converting parts of the atmosphere to stuff breathable by people?”
“They’ve got tech,” said Ebony, raising a golden armored hand. Climbing out of the pit of despair were machines, five of the Service-class fuckers, and a massive mech like they’d taken out on Mercury.
“Makes sense,” said Hope. “The Ezeroc have a spare planet no one wants to visit. Drag a few rocks together to make a viable crust. Use machine tech to clump it all together, and their terraforming tech, which I believe is our terraforming tech, to make air humans can breathe. In the meantime, make humans resistant to heat. I wonder what else they’ve done to the people?”
“Dear God,” said Ebony.
“Have fun,” said Hope.
“Always do,” said Kohl. He clicked the comm off. “Plan hasn’t changed. I say we shoot at everything.”
“I got this,” said Ebony, like she was trying to convince herself. “I got this.” Her armor’s rotary plasma cannons spun up with a whine, then roared, bolts tracing a continuous blue-white line toward the machines from the pit.
The plasma reached them, deformed, spun, and spat sideways to lance off into the air.
Kohl keyed the comm. “Yo. Hope.”
“Weapons malfunction here,” he said. “Going to make this a harder job.”
“Oh, neat!” said Hope. “The big one has an electromagnet array. It’s shaping and controlling the plasma. Like a reactor.”
“You mean I can’t shoot it?” said Kohl. That would take a great deal of fun out of the day.
“Not with plasma,” said Hope. The comm clicked off.
Ebony’s armor twisted to face Kohl. “Are we gonna die?”
“We’re living on borrowed time as it is,” he said. “I’d say it’s likely.”
“Oh,” she said. Kohl saw her face set, a calm certainty coming over her. “Okay, then.”
“Tell you what,” said Kohl. “We’ll ignore the machines. That’s Al’s problem. We’re gonna run for the roaches and fuck their shit up.”
“What if the machines fire at us?”
“Best plan is to get in the middle of the roaches,” said Kohl. “They’re coming for us now, so I figure that’s a problem that’ll solve itself. Use them as cover. Most armies don’t like friendly fire.”
While Ebony had been looking at him, the Ezeroc, who’d taken notice of her failed attempt to shoot plasma at the machines, stampeded toward them. Big ones. Little ones. Crabs, too. The little ones were fastest, scuttling over the ground like a bunch of death hamsters. Kohl spun up the cannons on his armor, then jumped forward.
It was another super jump, on account of his armor still being too enthusiastic. He soared over the top of the Ezeroc, some of which turned to watch his flight. Others continued toward Ebony, and by association the Tyche, which wasn’t great. One problem at a time. Kohl fired his plasma cannons, pieces of chitin exploding below him as he sailed in his epic thirty-meter leap.
Kohl landed, impacting on the top of a crab, cracking its shell. The golden armor skidded on the top of the chitin, and Kohl slid to the ground, landing on his feet. The crab took a swing at him, and Kohl thought, what the hell, and leaned into it. Both hands came up, golden fingers grasping the crab’s claw. Rock scraped and chipped under Kohl, but he didn’t get knocked backward. This was a significant upgrade on his last encounter with an oversized roach, when he’d been batted around the inside of an Engineering compartment like a dog’s chew toy.
Ebony was back where he’d left her, streams of plasma erupting from her cannons, destroying Ezeroc everywhere she turned. Problem, near as Kohl could tell, wasn’t that her heart wasn’t in it. It was! She was invested, as Karkoski might have said. No, the problem was she could turn two streams of deadly fire around her, but the roaches were like a tidal wave. There wasn’t enough firepower to solve the problem.
Ebony might die.
Kohl put one of his plasma cannons against the face of the Ezeroc crab, firing for five seconds, at which point the back of it erupted in burning chitin and meat, plasma having bored right through it.
An oversize drone came for him. The swing from its stabbing claws might have caused concern, but Kohl’s armor — almost like it had a mind of its own — sidestepped for him. Kohl looked up at the drone, and said, “Fuck yourself,” and fired both plasma barrels.
There was a more material problem here, again as Karkoski might have put it. Ebony might die with a higher score than Kohl. Sure, he’d taken out two big fuckers, but his HUD was updating with a continuous kill count, and the Black officer was well into the double digits.
Only one thing for it. Change the game.
As it happened, the game changed regardless of Kohl’s view on the matter. The AI machines opened fire on Ebony, railgun rounds peppering the Ezeroc drones, blowing carapaces into tiny pieces. The plasma turrets on the massive one launched the heaven’s own lance of hot death.
Ebony’s golden armor danced her to the side. Also, Kohl noticed, away from the Tyche. No point in drawing attention to the ship.
“Yo. Ebony.” Kohl cleared his throat. “I don’t want to alarm you, but the machines don’t seem to care about Ezeroc casualties.”
“Busy!” said Ebony, her golden armor twirling across the battlefield. She landed, one leg skidding out from under her, which brought her just under the stab of a massive drone. She blew it to pieces.
Kohl looked over his shoulder. “There’s one place these fuckers ain’t shooting.”
“The building?” she said.
“Yeah,” said Kohl. “I’m gonna make a hole.”
“Coming,” said Ebony.
Kohl turned, running toward the low-slung building. He wound up the plasma cannons, carving a trench of exploding, flaming Ezeroc as he ran toward it. His armor noted his ground speed had passed fifty klicks per hour, which seemed crazy, but also explained why he reached the building so fast.
His cannons glowed with heat, barrels spinning. Kohl trained them on the wall of the building, blowing chunks of ceramicrete into the air. A tiny Ezeroc jumped on his arm, trying to stab its way inside, but its stinger skidded off the golden metal.
Ebony arrived, tripped, and swatted the tiny insect aside as she fell.
Kohl stopped firing, on account of Ebony being in front of him now. Didn’t matter anyway, because he’d blasted a hole in the side of the facility. Inside, human-enough corridors, and standing near the gap Kohl had made, a human-enough guy. A crack in a wall behind the human-enough guy showed a construction area, rows of the Service-class machines completed with auto factories building more. They were all dormant, or at least, not leaping into Kohl’s face, which was great.
The Ezeroc had stopped their approach. The machines stopped firing on them. The battlefield fell silent, except for the tink-tink-tink of cooling metal from Kohl’s plasma turrets.
The human-enough guy stepped into the light of the Ezeroc system’s star. He was a mean looking fucker, near as Kohl could judge, with hard eyes, and a sneer that seemed to be a part of his jawline. He wore the old white uniform of the Intelligencers. The guy held two swords, like that Abel asshole back on Earth. His belt held two plasma pistols. The somewhat alarming part that made him human-enough as opposed to human was a scaling of chitin that crawled down the side of his head. It started about where his crown would be — Kohl didn’t have the time or inclination to check this in detail — and descended over where one ear would be and down the guy’s neck. Also, he wasn’t wearing a ship suit, just that uniform, suggesting he didn’t mind the sixty-degree heat.
Kohl wanted to punch him, a kind of visceral reaction. So, he leaned in, as Karkoski would say, and swung. It was a good punch, nice and fast, nothing showy in it.
He missed.
He missed not because his aim was off, but because his armor had been shoved back five meters. That punch-inducing sneer deepened on the asshole’s face. “You’ve come, just as he said you would.”
“Can I check something,” said Ebony. “Do you mean you, as in October Kohl, or you, as in the Emperor’s Black, or you, in a general sense, like humans?”
The man in white didn’t face Ebony, but her armor lifted off the ground, flung away by the force of his mind. Kohl heard a squeal from Ebony as she flew, then the sound of her hyperventilating.
He watched her tumble through the air. “I don’t want to know the answer to any of that.”
“Oh?” The man stopped. “What do you want to know, October Kohl?”
“I want to know if you want to die pretty, or die ugly,” said Kohl. “Basic two-path situation here.”
The asshole laughed. “I won’t die. You will die. These,” he gestured at the Ezeroc, and the AI, “serve me. I have an unbeatable army. You’ve come on an aging starship with five souls. You can’t win.”
Five. That’d mean his intel was a little short on detail. Kohl shrugged his shoulders, armor keeping pace with the motions. “I figure I’ve had worse odds. Was a time on Ganymede—”
“I don’t care,” said the man. “Where is the Engineer?”
“The Engineer,” said Kohl. “Not Gracie?”
“Grace Gushiken isn’t a problem I need
to solve,” said the man. “She will do our work for us. Grace won’t be able to help herself. She will run after Kazuo Gushiken, drawn to him like iron to a magnet.”
“Or plasma to a magnet,” said Kohl.
“I … it doesn’t work that way,” said the asshole. He looked at the giant mech, which responded by walking forward, the earth shaking beneath its massive legs.
“I just saw it happen,” said Kohl. He felt like this was an important point. “Look, you can’t rule the universe if you fail to recognize the evidence of your own two eyes.” He switched to the Tyche’s internal comm channel. “Al? You’re up.”
Algernon’s voice came over the comm. “Who is Al?”
“You’re smart, you’ll work it out,” said Kohl. “Could use a hand.”
“Coming,” said Algernon. Kohl switched the Tyche comm off.
The asshole’s eyes widened, like he was experiencing a radical rewiring leading to surprise. “It’s a wonder you haven’t killed yourself by accident,” he said. “No matter. I’ll solve that problem, here and now. I have the tools,” again, that gesture to the surrounding army, “and my personal skills far exceed the empress’s.”
“Okay, sounds like you want it ugly,” said Kohl. He was about to atomize the asshole in a blaze of plasma, when his armor was lifted, tossed aside like a balled-up piece of paper. He tumbled through the air, landing in the middle of the Ezeroc army. Hundreds of insect eyes turned to face him. “Hi,” said Kohl. “How you guys doing?”
He spun up his plasma cannons, firing. The Ezeroc horde rose, crashing down like the sea in a hurricane.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
NATE WAITED, BLACK blade in hand, blaster in the other. Grace stood to his right, ship-forged sword low and ready. Algernon was in front of them both, ready to join the melee. The machine held Kohl’s laser carbine. Algernon, being a machine, had no ship suit, the two holes in his torso clear for all to see. One of those was made by human treachery, the other by a machine. Nate wondered what it had taught the AI.
Grace had her black ship suit on, as did Nate.
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