by Tim Waggoner
“Hold Gerhard for me,” she told Hastimukah. She took Mudo’s helmet in her hands and raised his head so she could look into the scientist’s face.
“Gerhard, I need you to do something for me.”
Mudo’s eyes opened the merest slit and he mumbled something that sounded like, “Too… tired.”
“Just one last thing, and then you can rest.” She felt tears threaten as she thought of how permanent that rest might be, but if Mudo didn’t come through, all three of them would die. “Let the symphysis go again, Gerhard. Only this time, send it at Memory. Tell it to heal her mind, just as it was going to heal the Prime Mother’s.” She had no idea whether the symphysis would work on a positronic brain instead of an organic one, but it was the only chance they had.
“No!” Memory shouted. “You cannot!”
The pressure in Kyoto’s head suddenly became unbearable, and she thought her skull was going to explode. But she forced herself to keep talking.
“Gerhard, please… You’re our last hope.”
Mudo struggled to open his eyes wider, and he gave her a smile. “All right, but next time… you carry the psychic bomb.”
Kyoto smiled. “Deal.”
Mudo closed his eyes and frowned in concentration. Then, just as before, multicolored light blazed from the top of his helmet, only this time it raced toward the two starships, splitting into twin streams. One struck the Janus and the other the hit the Defender. Both vessels were engulfed by bright flares of light which quickly dimmed and faded. Free of the symphysis at last, Mudo’s head lolled and he went slack in Hastimukah’s arms.
There was silence then. Kyoto waited to see if her plan had worked. Even the Prime Mother had paused in her descent and was gazing intently at the two ships.
“Mei?”
“Yes, Memory?” Kyoto held her breath.
“I’m back online and functioning within normal parameters, and so is my little sister on the G-7.”
Kyoto whooped in triumph. “Target the Prime Mother with fast-locks and fire!”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT
Memory was quick to respond to Kyoto’s command to fire on the Prime Mother.“With pleasure, Mei.”
The Defender angled its nose upward and a pair of fast-lock missiles streaked toward the Prime Mother.
“Get down!” Kyoto grabbed Mudo and Hastimukah and fell to the floor with them just as the fast-locks struck the Prime Mother and detonated. There was no sound, but Kyoto felt the vibrations of the explosion through the floor.
She looked up and saw the Prime Mother was still hovering in the air above them, but she was listing to one side, and there was a large wound in her flank where the missiles had hit. Greenish black muck ran freely out of the wound, splattering onto the ground not far from where they lay.
Kyoto sat up, realizing as she did so that the pressure inside her head was gone. “How badly is she hurt, Memory?”
“Not badly enough. She was distracted while using her psychic powers on you, and the fast-locks were able to get past her personal defenses. She won’t be so careless next time.”
Kyoto thought fast. “Bring the Janus down. I want you to get Gerhard and Hastimukah to safety. And tell your little sister to pick me up afterward.”
“Acknowledged, Mei.”
Both ships began to descend toward them at once.
“We can’t leave you here!” Hastimukah protested.
“Who said I’m staying? I’ll be right behind you.”
“Like hell you will! You’re planning to cover our escape!”
The Janus turned until the open cargo bay faced them. Kyoto glanced at the Prime Mother. She had righted herself, and the wound on her side was rapidly healing. They didn’t have much time.
Memory deployed the cargo ramp, and Kyoto helped Hastimukah carry Mudo on board. She then jumped back outside. “See what you can do for Gerhard, all right?”
As the cargo bay door began to close, Hastimukah said, “Don’t worry, I’ll take good care of our friend, Commander. Good luck to you!” The door sealed shut, and the Janus rose and started toward the Crèche’s exit, picking up speed as it went.
Kyoto turned just as the Defender came flying toward her. She ducked as the starboard wing passed overhead, then she turned and grabbed hold of it. The grav attractors in her gloves hadn’t been designed to attach to a starfighter in flight, but Kyoto had saved numerous Colonists this way. Now it was her turn to take a ride.
The Defender followed after the Janus, Kyoto holding onto the wing, her feet trailing behind.
“You with me, Memory Junior?”
“Affirmative, Mei. And on behalf of my sister and myself, I’d just like to say how sorry we are that—”
“Forget about it. Neither of you could help it. Can you open the cockpit for me?”
In response, the G-7’s canopy popped open.
“Do you need me to slow down?”
“No, I can handle it. We used to practice this maneuver at the academy.” She didn’t tell Memory that she’d never tried it in a combat situation before. Using her grabbers to pull herself onto and across the wing, Kyoto made her way to the cockpit and crawled inside. As Kyoto settled into the pilot’s seat, Memory closed the canopy and locked it tight.
“Pressurizing cockpit and turning control over to you.”
The holoscreen flared to life, and Kyoto took hold of the joystick. Damn, but it felt good to be back in the saddle again! “What’s the Prime Mother’s status?”
The G-7’s alarm system shrieked a warning, and Kyoto yanked the joystick and the Defender veered hard to port. Energy erupted in a bright ball of glowing fire where the ship had been an instant ago.
“The Prime Mother is fully operational.”
“No kidding.” Kyoto set the holoscreen to split view. The left side displayed an image of where she was headed, while the right showed the Prime Mother. The wound on her side was fully healed, and the torn tendrils had sealed over and begun to regrow.
Kyoto brought the Defender around until both sides of the holoscreen showed the Prime Mother. She wanted to keep the gigantic Manti busy while the Janus put as much distance between itself and the Weave as possible, and she could think of no better way to do that than by those two words so near and dear to a fighter pilot’s heart: frontal assault.
The Prime Mother’s nine eyes began to glow, and Kyoto knew she was preparing to unleash another energy blast.
“Weapons check.”
“Pulse cannons are holding steady at seventy-three percent of maximum, but we’re down to our last four fast-locks.”
Kyoto wished she had a few hundred more missiles. Hell, while she was at it, she wished she were piloting a Battleship right now. But she’d make do with what she had, as if there was a choice.
The glow from the Prime Mother’s eyes became more intense, and Kyoto knew she was about to fire.
Time to give the inertial dampeners a workout, Kyoto thought.
Just as a torrent of crackling energy erupted from the Prime Mother’s eyes, Kyoto pulled back hard on the joystick. Maneuvering thrusters fired, and the fusion engines whined in protest as the Defender’s nose lifted and the starfighter shot straight up toward the ceiling of the Manti dome.
The energy blast missed striking the Defender’s tail by centimeters.
As the G-7 hurtled toward the ceiling, Kyoto targeted the remaining four missiles and fired. Three of the missiles struck the ceiling and exploded, while the fourth curved downward, headed for the Prime Mother. As chunks of biomaterial rained down, Kyoto activated the pulse cannon and vaporized the pieces falling toward the Defender. On the split screen, she saw the last missile detonate in the Prime Mother’s face. Kyoto didn’t think the fast-lock would hurt the Prime Mother, not if she’d been prepared for it, but it wasn’t supposed to injure the Manti, just slow her down for a few crucial seconds.
Hoping the other missiles had knocked a hole in the ceiling—or at least weakened it enough
for the pulse cannon to finish the job—Kyoto accelerated to full speed and roared toward the area of the missile strike, cannon firing the whole way. She gritted her teeth and braced for an impact that never came. The G-7 soared through the newly made opening in the Manti dome and out into hyperspace.
Outside, Kyoto’s holoscreen shifted to full view once more, and a scene of complete chaos appeared before Kyoto. Manti were everywhere: they choked the strandways and filled the sky, firing energy blasts and projectiles in all directions. High above the Weave was the Eye of Dardanus and, heading toward it at top speed, the Janus, its energy shield activated to protect it from Manti fire. The Dardanus was letting loose with everything it had—energy weapons of various kinds, several varieties of missiles, and small orbs that looked like doppelgangers, though she didn’t know how the Dardanus had come by them. Manti died by the dozens, but as impressive aa display was, she doubted the Residuum starship could keep up this level of attack for much longer before its artillery was exhausted, and no matter how many Buggers were fragged, there were thousands more to take their place. It wasn’t a question of whether the Dardanus would lose the battle, but rather how long it could last.
The sky was filled with deadly Manti energies, and while Kyoto was no stranger to avoiding Bugger weapons fire, she’d never had to deal with so much of it at once. She darted between bolts of energy, dodged rocketing projectiles, and when she couldn’t escape, she let the G-7’s energy shield take the impact as best it could.
Kyoto eased up on the acceleration and looped the Defender around until the G-7 was pointed toward the Manti tower once more. The dome had a large jagged hole in its surface; she’d hoped the missile blasts would destabilize the entire structure and cause it to collapse. But instead of growing wider, the hole was becoming smaller—the Manti tower was healing itself. One of the advantages of building with biomaterial, she supposed.
“Let’s see if we can do anything to slow the tower’s recovery,” Kyoto said. She targeted the hole’s edge and fired her pulse cannon at full power. Waves of blue-white energy shooooomed into the dome, and cracks began to spread outward from the hole. Kyoto kept up the bombardment, and the cracks became fissures and spread farther and more rapidly. Chunks of the dome started to detach and fall inward. The tower began to tilt, and Kyoto swooped around the dome and concentrated the pulse cannon’s fire at the tower’s base. A little more and the dome would collapse, and the entire tower would come crashing down on top of the Prime Mother’s oversize braincase.
As Kyoto brought the Defender around the dome for another attack run, the two shock towers that flanked the entrance flared crimson and unleashed gouts of raging red energy from deep within their furnaces of death. She managed to dodge one crimson stream, but by doing so she flew directly into the path of the other. The G-7’s shield struggled to turn aside the shock tower’s blast, but copious amounts of the deadly crimson energy got through. Ship alarms screamed and the holoscreen flickered as power systems fought to remain online. Just as Kyoto feared the Defender would drop out of the sky like a very large and useless rock, the alarms fell silent and the holoscreen image stabilized.
“Our shield handled the blast—barely—but it’s down to two percent of maximum now. I suggest you try to avoid flying into any more energy streams until the G-7 is returned to GSA headquarters for maintenance.”
“Thanks for the advice,” Kyoto said wryly. She targeted the leaning main tower once more and fired the pulse cannon. Slowly the tower began to fall, and Kyoto stopped firing and soared off to a safe distance. She brought the Defender around, fired maneuvering thrusters, and hovered in place. She watched the tower break in half as it fell, smashing into the dome and crushing it, destroying the two shock towers in the process. There was no sign of the Prime Mother.
“Hot damn!” Kyoto yelled. “Got you, you ugly alien bitch!”
“Mei…”
The wreckage of the dome exploded outward, and the Prime Mother, wreathed in swirling, crackling energy, rose toward the Defender, her nine eyes blazing with hatred.
“Or maybe not,” Kyoto said.
“Doctor, can you hear me?”
Mudo lay on the floor of the cargo bay, Hastimukah kneeling beside him. Before the Janus had left Mars, the cargo area had been refitted as a launch bay for Kyoto’s Defender ship, and power cables, diagnostic, and maintenance equipment now filled this section of the ship. All this technology, Hastimukah thought, and every bit of it is useless right now. What he wouldn’t give for a fully equipped Residuum medlab.
Mudo’s eyes were closed, skin pale, lips gray. Many species in the Residuum varied their coloration according to moods or environmental conditions, so Hastimukah didn’t have a clear sense of whether Mudo’s pallor was normal for his race. His instincts told him it was not.
“Memory, what is the state of Dr. Mudo’s health?”
“He is dying.” The AI spoke these words without obvious emotion, but Hastimukah’s nanocolony gave him extremely sensitive hearing, and he detected an undercurrent of sorrow in her synthesized tones.
The ship suddenly swerved, and Hastimukah, grav boots firmly planted, grabbed hold of Mudo to keep him from sliding across the floor and slamming into a piece of equipment.
“What’s happening?”
“Just avoiding Manti weapons fire. Nothing to worry about.”
“Nothing to worry about, she says. Are there medical facilities aboard?”
“There are first-aid kits and some basic medical supplies, but nothing that will help Gerhard. The Janus was designed to be a test craft, not a warship.”
There was no other choice, then. Hastimukah removed Mudo’s right glove, and then took off his.
“What are you doing?”
Hastimukah clasped Mudo’s hand and held it tight. “The only thing I can do—giving Dr. Mudo an infusion of nanoparticles.”
Grayish slime oozed from the pores in Hastimukah’s hand, slid over to Mudo’s, then slipped easily into the human’s flesh and was gone.
Hastimukah released Mudo’s hand and sat back. He felt lightheaded and weak, but he would recover as soon as the nanocolony that shared his body had time to replenish itself. He just hoped that Mudo’s injuries weren’t too severe for the particles to heal him. He watched Mudo’s face for several moments, and though he wasn’t certain, he thought the man’s color had improved.
“Memory?”
There was a pause before the AI replied. “Sorry, but there’s a lot going on outside. The Manti are attacking the Dardanus, and there’s weapons fire everywhere. Makes flying more than a little tricky. I wish Mei were at the controls. She has a finely honed instinct for not getting blasted into oblivion.”
“About the doctor…” Hastimukah prompted.
“His condition is beginning to improve. It’s going to be a near thing, but I believe you got the nanoparticles into him in time.”
Hastimukah sighed in relief. He slipped Mudo’s glove back on, and then donned his own once more. “Now, if you can just get us to the Dardanus in one piece—assuming it isn’t destroyed by the Manti, of course—all will be well.”
“About that,” Memory began. “I have a slightly different plan in mind.” The Prime Mother’s nine glossy black eyes seemed to grow larger, until they had merged into a single obsidian orb that gazed directly into the depths of Kyoto’s innermost self.
Kyoto unleashed a blast of pulse energy at the Prime Mother, then started to jam the joystick forward, intending to get the hell out of there, but she felt a strange tingling at the base of her skull. Her vision grayed, and she could no longer feel the joystick in her grip. Cool air caressed the skin of her face, as well as her bare arms and legs, and she realized she was no longer wearing a vacc suit. This should have panicked her, but it didn’t. It felt normal, felt right. She breathed in the mingled scents of dozens of different flowers and plants, blended with the rich smell of men’s cologne.
“Hello, Mei.”
Her vision be
gan to clear, and she saw the blurry outline of a face looking at her. But she didn’t need her vision restored to recognize who it was. She knew him by smell, by the half-amused, half-melancholy tone of his voice.
“Wolf?”
She reached out for him, stumbled, and he caught her in his arms.
“Whoa! Looks like your stabilizers are out of alignment, pilot. You’d better sit down for a minute.” He led her to one of the arboretum’s many plasteel benches and they sat. He took hold of her hand and began to lightly stroke the back of it with his fingertips.
“I know you don’t want to hear me nag you again, but maybe now you’ll believe me when I say you’ve been working too hard lately. You should take a couple of days off, stay home and rest.”
Her vision was improving, but slowly. She was able to make out Wolf’s features, but only as splashes of color. The black of his hair, the pink of his skin, the white of his smile.
“You know me,” she said. “I’m not really good at resting.”
He shrugged. “A vacation, then. We could go to Europa for a week or two. Hell, we could stay a month if we wanted to. We both have enough accumulated leave.”
Kyoto frowned at Wolf’s mention of Europa. There was something about it that bothered her… something about the zoo… but she couldn’t think what it was.
She shivered then, and Wolf put his arm around her.
“Getting cold?”
“I’ll be all right. I should’ve worn something a bit warmer than this dress, though.” Ever since her time in the refugee camps on Rhea, she seemed to catch a chill easily. It was almost as if she carried the eternal numbing cold of the ice moon with her wherever she went, and she’d never be free of it.
Rhea… there was something that bothered her about this thought, too, but she still couldn’t…
“Tell you what, we can worry about the details later,” Wolf said. “Why don’t you just lay your head on my shoulder and rest here for a while? You know how the arboretum soothes you. You always sleep better here than anywhere else.”
Kyoto was tempted. She was tired, and the arboretum was one of her favorite places in the Solar Colonies.
