I fought to get to my feet, blinking rapidly, but I couldn’t make anything out beyond some shadows flittering this way and that. But what I did hear was Eske letting out a huge battle cry that quickly approached the footsteps running for us, then ended up behind them.
Did she…did she vault the shields?
I wished I could have seen that, but I didn’t have much time to worry about the missed moment. The smoke was beginning to clear just in time for me to hear several blasters discharge and then suddenly, I was fully embroiled in a firefight.
With no gun.
But in a way, I guessed that was alright. I didn’t want to have to kill another living human being. I still had nightmares about the aliens that I had shot out of the sky; I didn’t need to add anymore trauma onto my already sizable pile.
I wasn’t sure why no one was firing at me, but I realized that I had landed by a door that was barely hanging from its hinges, and even though I was on my knees, it was protecting me from their view.
I could easily just crouch there and wait for the battle to end, with other people having the weight of the fight on their conscience, but that just wasn’t my way. Bracing myself, I peeked around the corner and saw that Eske had indeed managed to break their ranks, allowing the others to take advantage of that. Gonzales had ducked into a side room, with only her gun out as she shot at anyone who tried to take any of us out. Fregos had some sort of massive hammer that was crackling with electricity, and he was swinging it back and forth with abandon.
It looked like it had definitely become a melee battle. Sure, people were shooting, but between Eske’s expert staff-wielding and Fregos’s wild movements, this had definitely become a battle of who could smash things the hardest.
That was when I spotted that one of the soldiers had broken away from the brawl and was aiming toward where Bahn and Ciangi were huddled behind a piece of debris, their guns at the ready.
No.
I would not allow that.
I bolted toward him, my longs legs taking me across the hall in seconds. I didn’t know what was guiding me with such certainty, but I didn’t question it.
My thumb flicked over the switch and the next thing I knew, I was slamming it into the leg of the marksman as I slid in beside him.
He fell to the side, but unlike the general, he didn’t drop his weapon. Instead, I found myself staring down the barrel of his weapon.
That was unfortunate.
I took a breath, waiting for my life to end, but two beams of energy slammed into the gun, making it explode into several pieces and throwing me backward once again.
The amount of times I’d been airborne in such a small time was uncanny, yet I still hadn’t nailed the landing. My shoulder hit the ground first, absorbing all the impact and making my head rattle. Then my chest hit the ground and it took all of my effort to get one of my arms under my chin so I didn’t break my jaw slamming into the ground.
I slid several feet, ending up right by Ciangi and Bahn, whose guns were smoking.
“Thanks,” I gasped, sitting up. “Nice shot.”
“I was aiming for his head,” Ciangi said with pout.
Oh…well…
“Not bad, guys,” Gonzales said, walking over and offering me a hand up. It was only just then that I realized the fight in our immediate vicinity had stopped. We had beaten them.
My brow furrowed as I looked over the carnage. Why had it seemed so…anti-climactic? Was it because there was no war to win? Or because I knew there was a whole ‘nother group of people between us and Mimi?
“Fergos, make sure to relieve all the soldiers of their weapons. We’re going to use those to our advantage.” She took a breath, looking to the rest of us, and I was struck by how different she looked from when I had seen her last.
Sure, she was the same Gozales in general, though her bionic eye certainly was disconcerting. But there was more to it than that. The lines on her face was harder, and her normally short, thick hair had grown out considerably. She looked much more muscular than I had remembered, and she was considerably tanner, but it wasn’t that either. It was like something inside of her was different, something subtle, and I couldn’t quite place my finger on it.
“Alright, everyone grab as many as they can and come with me to the last bulkhead before we meet our new friends. I have an idea.”
Whatever your idea is, you better hurry. They can hear that the fight has stopped, and I don’t doubt that that they’ll send another wave soon.
“Good to know. Let’s shake a leg everyone, we’ve got a time limit here.”
“Oh, I thought I’d just do it leisurely,” Ciangi countered. “You know, take my time, stop and smell the bodies.”
“Again,” Eske said, powering down her staff. “I do not think this is the appropriate time for sarcasm.”
“It’s always the right time for sarcasm.”
“It’s always the right time to hurry your butts up and get to picking up stuff,” Gonzales interrupted, tossing a blaster toward the smaller engineer.
She caught it, and then we were all hurriedly picking up as many weapons as we could carry. A minute or so later, we were trudging toward the door, arms full of death and destruction.
When we made it to the bulkhead, Gonzales fixed us all with a serious look. “Listen up, when I open this door, I want all of you to throw these guns as far as you can then dive to the side. You got that?”
“Yeah, but why—”
“Jannin, you know what to do after that, right?”
The smaller woman nodded, still entirely silent, but that seemed to be enough for Gonzales because she was moving to the button that would have the bulkhead slide up into the ceiling.
“Everyone ready? The blaster fire and maybe worse is gonna be coming in hot the moment these gears go off, so be careful.”
There was a general round of affirmatives and Gonzales slammed down on the button like it had done something to personally affront her. The door slid open, thankfully much faster than the doors on Giomatti’s ship had ever moved, and true to her word, a dozen or so bolts fired through in an orange, blue, and red haze.
It lasted ten seconds, maybe more, not stopping until the soldiers must have wondered why no one was coming in. That was when Eske and I took our chance, chucking our armful of guns forward.
They didn’t make it far, maybe ten feet or so, but it was enough to get the folks behind the barricade firing again.
They lasted a lot longer this time, nearly a minute, but none of them seemed to dare to come closer. Either they were just that terrified of Gonzales and her friends, or they were in such a superior position that they didn’t want to give it up. Either way, I hoped our weapon engineer’s plan worked.
But eventually their fire wound down as they realized they weren’t hitting jack diddly, and the remaining people tossed their weapons in. Of course, Fregos made it the farthest, nearly skittering to the barricade of debris and energy shields.
That was when Jannin rolled into the doorway, pulling two somethings from her bandolier and throwing them inside. I barely had time to blink before she rolled back to safety and Gonzales slammed the button to close the door.
“Everybody duck and cover!”
We did so, huddling into a pile, and the entire hall was rocked as an explosion sounded just on the other side of the wall. If it hadn’t been a room built specifically with a reinforced bulkhead, we would have been toast. But even with all of the extra precautions, chunks of the ceiling fell on us, and the blast of heat was incredible. I was absolutely sure I smelled burning hair, but I didn’t dare to let go or raise my head from our cocoon.
The blast lasted a while, with dozens of mini-eruptions that told me whatever bombs Jannin had tossed in there were overloading the cores of each blaster. Clever, and I couldn’t help but both admire and be intimidated by Gonzales’s quick thinking.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the maelstrom faded and there was nothing but smoke an
d terrible smells left. We uncurled slowly, taking inventory of the hellscape of our own making.
“Well, that was fun,” Gonzales said, dusting herself off. “Let’s go find your girlfriend.” She pressed the button to open the door, but instead of sliding upwards, the thick square of metal just fell forward, slamming into the floor with enough impact to make my ears ring.
“Yeowch,” Eske murmured.
“Don’t worry, there’s room for a lot worse for our way up once we have Mimi,” Fregos said, his voice low but with just enough tone to know that he was joking.
Maybe.
We moved forward, picking our way over the mess we had created. Smoke, rubble, and bodies laid everywhere. With all the carnage, I couldn’t help but wonder if we were the good guys at all. Sure, everyone always thought they were on the right side of things, but it was hard to keep believing so when there was so much death all around us.
I didn’t want our legacy to be this. I didn’t want to kill. I just wanted to live, and help the mimics live. How had our path ended up so dark and awful?
Greed. That was what happened. And the stupid coup. If it wasn’t for them, none of this would have happened. But as long as they were around, people were going to be hurt, imprisoned, abused, and killed. They had to be stopped.
“You okay there?” Eske asked as we passed the burned and broken remains of the shield generators.
“Yeah,” I answered quietly. “Just thinking.”
Before she could ask me what exactly I was thinking about, we reached a large, metal box in the middle of the room with only a single door.
“I think we’ve found her,” Gonzales said, smiling brightly. “I’ll get the door.”
She pulled out the same disc she had used earlier and placed it on the entrance. It went through the same show, then suddenly, the door was blown off its hinges and we were in.
There were only two things in the room, one being a console, and the other being a massive containment vessel that was about as tall as two humans and just as wide. In the center of that container was a roiling, spikey ball of blackness floating in limbo.
“Mimi,” I whispered, hardly believing it.
After nearly a month, it was finally her.
Now we just had to get her out.
12
Reunions All Around
I couldn’t believe it. I stared up at the constantly shifting mass that was the creature I loved. Even if she wasn’t human right now and didn’t have any discernable features beyond her constantly reforming spikes, my heart was still soaring to see her.
“It looks like they have her in some sort of lockdown,” Gonzales remarked. “I’m not sure I want to monkey with it if I’m not certain what to do.”
I got it. Give me just a couple of seconds and your lady love will be freed.
“You can remote access it from where you are?”
Sure, just hook your comm up to the output. I’ll take it from there.
“Whatever you say.”
Gonzales pulled it from her wrist and connected it to the console. There was a whole lot of buzzing and beeps, then finally, the liquid inside started to drain while the fields around it powered down.
The black mass reacted instantly, shooting outwards violently. The glass—or whatever the material of the chamber was—never stood a chance, shattering and falling to the ground in a shower of materials.
Then, finally, after everything that we had survived, everything that we had gone through, she landed on the ground in a spikey black amorphous blob.
“Mimi!” I cried, running toward her.
Her form didn’t react at first, still roiling without control, but I didn’t care. I fell on my knees in front of her and pressed my hand into her cold, hard flesh.
“Thank God,” I murmured. “I missed you.”
She let out the slowest warble I had ever heard her utter, and then her form began to slowly draw inwards, rippling and changing colors as it shaped itself into something somewhat resembling a human.
“Hig…gens…?” she wheezed, her voice jumping through several different pitches before settling on the one she normally used.
“Yes, it’s me,” I said, pulling her tight to me. Before I could stop it, tears were rolling down my face and sobs wracked my chest. I was just so relieved, so happy to have Mimi back in my arms again. With her, I knew that we were doing good. Because if evil could ever be a person, Mimi was the antithesis of that. She was light and kindness and a type of fortitude that I could never hope to have.
“I…I’ve been gone a long time, haven’t I?”
I could tell she was still quite confused, and I internally cursed the generals and all of their men for holding her so unnaturally for so long. Surely that had to have been less than ideal for her mental state.
“About a month. But we’re being rescued now, so we gotta go. Do you think you can get up?”
She nodded, her features almost back into place. Sure, her hair was the wrong color, she was missing some teeth, and her nose was too big, but none of that mattered. No matter what form she took, my Mimi was still my Mimi.
And I was hers.
“Here, let me help,” Fregos said, offering his arm. Mimi took it, and he got her to her feet in no time.
We hobbled off, Gonzales putting her comm back on and everyone spreading out in case of attack.
Hey, not to crash on this happy reunion, but they know you’ve got her free. Soldiers are abandoning our distracting fights and converging down the lifts toward your floor. I’m having the lower level operatives that are still alive sabotage the staircases, but I’m not sure how you’re gonna get out.
“Well, you better think of some way, otherwise this entire mission is toast and y’all gonna lose a bunch of figureheads.”
Crap. Alright. Gimme a second. It’s just, if there’s any sort of way to get out of here, I guarantee you that soldiers are now crowding it and chock-full of weapons.
“Come on, there’s gotta be something.”
“What about any building ports?” I said, something clicking in my mind.
“Building ports?” Gonzales asked.
“Yeah, this place is really far underground, so there had to be tunnels and areas where workers could move between levels as they fabricated them. When buildings are built upwards, they’re always taken down because they’re eyesores. But underground? You can just cover them with dirt or concrete and not really worry about it.”
Whoever this guy is, I like him. Let me change the settings of my scanner and see what I can do.
“Alright, we’ll keep moving forward. I get the feeling that staying still is not the best idea right now.”
“I…I don’t understand how we got here,” Mimi murmured from beside me. “We were talking peace, their ship was too small to overtake us…”
“Do you really not remember?”
“…give me a minute. It’s coming back. Everything is just so fractured…and mixed together. It’s like one of those ancient Earth puzzles in your sims.”
“I gotcha.”
Bingo-bongo, I found it! Go back to the staircase and there should be a panel you can blast out of the wall. From there, you can take it up two floors, then hop into another one close to an emergency fire tunnel, then hopefully make a break for the bay.
“The bay, that’s where we’re going?”
Yeah, your ride is comin’ in hot, so try to make it in ten minutes.
“And if we don’t?” Gonzales asked.
Then it might just get shot out of the sky before you have a chance to get onto it and all of this will be for nothing.
“Right. So, no pressure.”
Nope. None at all.
“You heard her, guys,” Gonzales said, turning to us sheepishly. “We gotta find an access port.”
“No argument here,” Ciangi murmured, looking back at Mimi and me.
We hurried along, tensions high. Any moment, we could be overridden by soldiers and decimated. Our fre
edom was hanging on a thread, and it was fraying at the middle.
Somehow, we reached the staircase, navigating our way through the mess that we had caused, and Gonzales used her wrist-comm to find the panel we were looking for. I found myself alternating between holding my breath and panting, sure that at any moment, we would be dead.
Except we kept surviving. We tumbled out of one of the tunnels into what looked like a processing room, then kept going to the next one.
The sounds of firefights were no more. There was only the gentle thundering of hundreds and hundreds of pairs of feet as they tried to get to us. How big could this coup be? Did they have the entire military at their discretion? Or just a good chunk of it? There were so many questions I had, and I could only hope that they would be answered by the crystal chips still slung across my back.
We made it out of the second tunnel, covered in dirt and grit and waste castoff that I didn’t even want to think about. But we made it.
“I’m definitely going to need a shower after all of this,” Gonzales said, looking down at her comm. “This way.”
We followed, picking up our pace as Mimi got more control of herself. I could see the massive doors of the hangar, way down the hall, over bodies and dropped weapons and the rest of the aftereffects of a gunfight.
We were almost there! While all of the soldiers were rushing to corner us in the bottom floors, we were going to slide right out from above them!
“Mimi!”
We all skidded to a stop, that familiar voice filling me with a sense of dread and rage. Turning, I saw none other than Mari in the center of the hall.
“I don’t know how you did it, and I don’t really care why,” the small girl said, advancing toward us. “But I can’t let you go back to our planet.”
I felt Mimi pull away from me. I tried to hold onto her, but she slipped from my grasp. “Why have you done this? You’re my sister.”
“No, I’m your underling, just like all of the other mimics who are okay with your subjugation.” She sneered, and her cute features seemed a whole lot less adorable. “Why do you get to rule over us all? You weren’t the one in slavery for generations! You got to live out your little life on that stupid little comet and you would have stayed right there, doing nothing, if the humans hadn’t stumbled across you! You’re a usurper. A pretender to the crown! You didn’t suffer like we did, you just swept in and took over!
Mimic Betrayed (Space Shifter Chronicles Book 6) Page 8
