by M. D. Cooper
“Huh,” Ashley interrupted.
Vargo turned to the chief. “What’s up?”
She flicked a finger—he wasn’t certain which hand it was on—and an image of three Nietzschean ships appeared on the main holodisplay.
“Seems like these three didn’t get the memo. Every other Nietzschean ship is headed away from Kansas, but these three are on a vector right for it.”
“Have they made any attempts at communication?” Vargo asked, frowning at the three ships—all of which bore the scars of recent combat.
“Not yet,” Ashley replied. “At first, I thought that they were going to join up with those four destroyers we chased off yesterday, but they banked around Kansas’s second moon, and are headed right for us now.”
“Should I be worried?” Senator Naia asked, half rising from her seat.
Vargo chuckled. “Not a bit, you’re currently in the safest place in Blue Ridge. Something’s not right about those ships. See that one in the center? That’s a Nietzschean hospital vessel. An older one, too.”
“Why would they bring a hospital ship into a battle?” Ashley asked.
“Beats me,” Vargo said with a shrug. “Being captain doesn’t make me all-knowing.”
He shifted the Asora’s optics to examine the largest vessel.
“Wait,” Naia said, walking closer to the display and scowling. “Are those…dragons, coming out of the shuttle bays?”
A laugh burst free from Vargo’s throat. “Stars! Bondo’s going to be pissed that someone beat him to that!”
Senator Naia cast him a look that said she clearly thought he’d lost his mind. “Captain?”
“Don’t you see?” He gestured to the display. “Those are mechdragons. Ashley, hail them. I want to see who this is.”
As the hail went out, he wondered if this was a surprise visit Barne and Silva had worked up, but when the response came back, he was the one standing mouth agape.
The woman on the holodisplay was a tall mech, one of the very rare SMI-3 models. An incredulous smile was on her face, and a laugh in her voice.
“Vargo Klen, of all the people I expected to see at the helm of a Nietzschean ship, you were not one! And a mech? Stars, what has happened to you since we last met?”
Vargo was even more gobsmacked than the woman on the display. “Adira? I thought you bought it almost fifteen years ago! How the hell did you get off Lornen?”
Adira laughed and shook her head, her long mane of hair shimmering like a halo. “Well, I can assure you that it wasn’t on a dropship you were piloting. My squad stole a Nietzschean shuttle. Sorta started a trend.”
“I can see that. We’ve taken up the same habit.”
“We?” Adira asked, leaning closer, her expression growing earnest. “Then it’s true? A mech is leading an attack on Nietzschea? We heard about the enemy’s defeat at Thebes, and swung by Sepe where they gave us directions here. We want to join up.”
“With the Marauders?” Vargo asked.
“With New Genevia?” Senator Naia said from Vargo’s side.
Adira’s brow lowered. “Screw all that. We’re here to join up with Rika.”
BACON
STELLAR DATE: 10.17.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: NMSS Spine of the Stars, interstellar dark layer
REGION: Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
Three days after the ship had made its jump, Rika returned to the bridge’s entrance, eating a sandwich she’d prepared minutes earlier in the ship’s galley.
“How’re you doing in there?” she asked. “Getting hungry?”
No response was forthcoming.
Rika took a bite of her sandwich, moaning softly with pleasure. “Mmmmmm, it’s so good. Peanut butter and jelly, one of my favorites. Leslie’s cooking up some bacon for a BLT. Not sure if you know what those are; sandwiches made with bacon, lettuce, and tomato. It’s like heaven in your mouth. I don’t know if you noticed yet, but we cut off the water that ran to the emergency rations station you were using. I imagine it only holds a few days’ worth of food, right? Is it enough for seven? That’s how long it’s going to take us to get to Epsilon, isn’t it? I wonder how many of you will survive. I know! Maybe the admiral will order you to die so he can eat you. Think you’ll all get so far as cannibalism?”
Still no response came from the bridge, but the environmental systems showed that all five people within were alive.
She’d threaded nano through the door seal two days before, and she tapped the optics they provided to see the five figures. Heat signatures matched the environmental readings, showing them all to be alive, but none were moving, each one of them slumped in their chairs.
“Nothing? Not even a twitch?” Rika asked. “What about you, Red? Aren’t you hungry?”
The red-headed man at one of the forward consoles turned to look back at the door.
“There you go. I bet you can just smell it, right? The bacon? I’m sure it’s gonna taste great. I’m more of a PB and J girl myself, but I have to admit, BLTs are a close second. I mean…bacon, right?”
For a minute, no one moved. Then Red made a break for the door. He was halfway across the bridge before the colonel—Sofia, from the records Rika had found on the ship—tackled him, and struck him in the head twice.
“OK, I guess you’re not hungry.” Rika shrugged and walked away. “More for us, then.”
“Gives me something to do. How’re things going with the drive systems?”
Rika took another bite of her sandwich, getting a glob of peanut butter stuck to the roof of her mouth.
“Hmmghhhh, I geubs I shud reawwy be temping the engneers.”
“Well, if that’s a viable play, maybe we should make some more BLTs…or see if this tub has any steak.”
Two hours later, Rika stood in front of the sealed engineering bay doors.
Leslie hadn’t found steaks, but there were trays of bacon, and she cooked up as much as she could, placing the finished product near an air exchanger that Niki had taken control of, ensuring that the smell would make its way throughout the engineering section of the ship.
They’d debated just circulating a toxin instead, but none were willing to take the risk that the engineers had a deadman’s switch on whatever jury-rigged bomb they’d set up with the reactors.
“I know you Niets can hear me,” Rika began. “We have optics in there, and we know the six of you are getting mighty hungry. We saw Blue-hair and Pinkie fighting over the last protein bar a half hour ago, and Pinkie really gave what-for, but I saw that Blue clawed her in the cheek and got the bar for herself. Good on the rest of you guys for staying back; those two girls look vicious. Anyway, I just thought you might like to know that we’ve cooked up a lot of great food. If you shut off the override you’ve got in there, you can come out and have a meal. I give you my word that no one will be harmed…I mean, unless Pinkie tries to go for one of my PB and Js.”
On the other side of the door lay a long passageway with a repair shop on one side, and storage rooms on the other. Beyond that was the main engineering bay itself, a realm of pipes, conduit, and of course nuclear reactors. It wasn’t the sort of place one wanted to lounge around, but it was where the six Nietzschean engineers were all stationed.
Pinkie and Blue, the two women who had fought over the last protein bar, were on either side of the thirty-meter-wide space, shooting daggers at one another with their eyes. Another woman, this one with more natural-looking brown hair
, sat at a console near the center of the space, and the three men, all dark-haired, were playing a game of cards atop a crate near the corridor that led to where Rika stood.
“You guys are tough!” Rika said, commending the Niets. “I don’t know if I could say no to bacon after three days with only a few rations between me and my team. You know we have four more days ‘til we dump out of the DL, right? I mean…you must. You’re the ones running the engines and helm, since we hacked the bridge’s systems and found them already severed.”
At that, brown-hair’s head snapped up, and Rika gave a comforting laugh. “Oh, don’t worry. His High-Muckity-Muckness, Admiral Poopy Pants, is still alive and grouchy on the bridge. He didn’t want any food, either. Leslie and I have a small pool going as to which of his flunkies he’ll eat first. I gotta say, though, betting isn’t really that much fun when you do it with stuff that’s not yours; someone has some pretty nice pink dolls in their room, though, and I’ve put those down on the bet that the admiral eats Red first. That guy is seriously lacking in control.”
Rika saw Blue stand up and glare at the corridor, her fists clenched at her side. A look from brown-hair quelled her, and the woman sat down once more, popping the final piece of protein bar into her mouth, and chewing angrily.
“OK, then,” Rika said as she turned away. “I’ll be back tomorrow; though there will be less bacon. Mechs have demanding metabolisms.”
ACCESS
STELLAR DATE: 10.20.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: NMSS Spine of the Stars, interstellar dark layer
REGION: Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
It took three more days for one of the engineers to crack.
Rika really had expected it to be Pinkie, but it was one of the men, the tall guy with the nearly alabaster-white skin. When the smell of bacon came through the vents that day, he began to tremble slightly. One of the other men put a hand on his shoulder, but white-skin brushed it aside, glaring at the other man.
“We dumped too much fuel…when we get there, we won’t have enough for a runaway reaction, and she’s going to come in here and kill us all. I at least want to die with a full stomach.”
“Fuck, Ched! She didn’t know we’d dumped too much fuel ‘til now.”
Ched swung at the other man, whose name was Bill—Rika knew their names, she just liked coming up with more imaginative ones—with a wrench that appeared in his hand as if by magic. The blow struck Bill in the chest, and he fell to the deck, clutching his body and gasping for air.
“Wow!” Rika called out. “Looks like Bill’s on the menu.”
Ched raced down the passageway, and ducked into the workshop. Rika saw him grab a portable plasma cutter and run to the doors.
“Nah-ah, Ched. You open those doors, and your boss lady is gonna blow the ship,” she warned as the man approached the sealed doors.
Ched turned to see brown-hair—or Chief Emelia, amongst friends—standing next to the override switch on the console that was protected by the EM field.
“Emelia,” he pleaded. “We’re starving in here. We can’t get out; those mech bitches are crazy. But if we turn the ship over, they won’t hurt us. They promised.”
“Put the torch down, Ched,” Emelia replied. “You can’t trust Genevians. Especially mechs. Those things are stone-cold killers. She’ll rip you limb from limb.”
“I won’t,” Rika told them. “I promise. I’ve actually ripped very few people limb from limb.”
“You realize that for most people, that number is zero, you psycho!” Brownie cried out.
“Yeah, well, you haven’t met some of the people I have,” Rika countered. “They were all very bad. Either way…you can starve to death, blow us all up, or have a good meal. I know which I’d pick—especially if my CO was that coward, Poopy Pants, up on the bridge. Did you know that they’ve taken to drinking their piss up there? They must have some decent mods to stave off kidney failure for this long. Well, except for Red; they had to kill him yesterday. He just kept screaming. I probably would have killed him, too—though I promise it would have been humane. No limb ripping.”
Her lips twitched into a grim smile as she saw something that Brownie did not: Pinkie holding a rather large, metal prybar.
Ten seconds later, the engineering chief was down, and a pool of blood was growing on the deck around her head.
“It’s over!” Pinkie rasped as she toggled the reactors into a standby mode, their rods in and lasers offline.
“I just need that EM field off, then it’s bacon for everyone,” Rika said. “If you open the door before that, though, you’ll all just end up eating my e-beam.”
The other engineers looked at one another, and then Blue sighed. “Do it, Sandra. You’re right. We’re done.”
Niki laughed.
An hour later, the engineers were locked in the ship’s cells, hooked up to IV drips with crackers and jelly. Though they were all ravenously hungry, they were smart enough to know that eating a big meal right away would go badly.
Once the engineers had settled in, most falling asleep, Rika and Leslie took a leisurely walk up to the bridge. When the two women arrived at the sealed door, Rika leant against the bulkhead, and breathed a long sigh.
“Sooo…we took engineering. You can’t blow the ship anymore. What happens over the next ten minutes is entirely up to you. Let me know if I need to start up with the whole ‘hard way/easy way’ speech.”
Leslie snorted.
Rika decided to ignore Leslie and Niki, instead focusing on what was happening on the bridge. Its occupants had spoken very little over the past four days—excepting during the death of Red—though Rika assumed that what conversations they had partaken in occurred over point-to-point Link connections.
Now, however, they were speaking aloud.
“I’m done,” Colonel Sofia said, rising on shaky legs, and staring down at Admiral Gideon, who hadn’t moved from the captain’s chair in over a day. “Engineering missed the last two check-ins, so you know Rika’s not lying.”
“We’re almost there,” Gideon rasped.
“We’re almost dead,” Sofia retorted as she walked to the door.
Rika watched her key in the access codes—not that it was necessary; Niki had long since breached the door controls. Only the threat of the ship exploding had kept them out of the bridge.
Rika used Ched’s plasma cutter to slice away the sections of the doorframe that she’d melted seven days before. When she pushed the door aside, Sofia was sitting on the deck, looking like she wanted to cry, but was likely too dehydrated to form tears.
“You win, mech.”
* * * * *
“Well that was anticlimactic,” Leslie said from the passageway outside the cells.
Rika nodded. “A bit, yeah. Going to take a while to get them rehydrated enough to eat. They’re a lot worse off than the engineers were.”
“Especially Pinkie,” Leslie said with a laugh. “I’m pretty sure she still had some food tucked away somewhere, but she was just as thirsty as the rest of ‘em.”
The two women turned and walked past one of the cobbled-together automatons that they’d built out of galley servitors and Nietzschean powered armor. Another stood at the far end of the passageway; while they wouldn’t stop a truly determined enemy, they were more than enough for the dehydrated, half-starved Nietzscheans.
“So I guess we go to the bridge?” Leslie suggested. “Is it reconnected to the navigations system
s?”
“I vote we fly the ship from engineering,” Rika said. “It doesn’t smell as bad in there; Brownie only got killed today. On the bridge, they took Red out two days ago, and it stiiiinks.”
Niki informed them.
“A bot’s work is never done,” Rika said with a laugh, as they turned down the corridor that led to engineering.
“Or a mech’s,” Rika added, then glanced at Leslie.
“Don’t look at me,” Leslie said, licking the back of her hand and running it over her head. “We cats never work. Just lounge and play.”
“Sounds about right,” Rika said, as they reached the central console in engineering. “OK, so we’re seven hours from dumping out of the DL. What say we tweak that and come out right about now?”
“Yeah, but we can get a visual on what we’re getting into, and then go back into FTL and—”
“A year on this tub with those Niets, and we’ll see that scene from engineering play out again,” Leslie warned. “Only I’ll be playing the part of Pinkie.”
Rika laughed. “Noted, though now I’ve just pictured you as a hot-pink kitty cat. You’d be so cute!”
