by Aaron Crash
FIFTEEN_
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Blaze spun. “Ling, go check on Trina and Cali. They’re in the cargo bay. Elle, check cellar integrity. Tell me we’re good.”
“We’re good.” Elle’s face was blue in the glow of the science controls. “Fernando got the third door open. Not sure what happened. My sealing sigils should’ve failed. But no Onyx energy leaked out. I can use manual sensors to look in the surrounding area, and I detect no Onyx. To scan the entire city, we’d need to bring Lizzie online.”
“Please do!” Lizzie buzzed happily. “I can hhhelp!”
“Yeah, like that is going to happen anytime soon,” Blaze said. “But Lizzie, when you told me before that you put Nauzea in the cellar, you didn’t emphasize your Hs. You said, ‘We put her there, remember?’ What happened?”
“Bill, my love, hhhe took control of my voice. I wanted to tell you. I wanted to tell you everything. But hhhe wouldn’t let me. And now you don’t trust me!” Lizzie began to cry in a very Human way. “And it was me, I kept the Onyx entities trapped in the cellar. But you don’t care about that. All you care about is hhhow I tried to kill you, and that was like one million, one hhhundred and fifteen thousand, seven hhhundred and sixty-seven seconds ago.”
“And it feels like just yesterday,” Elle joked.
“Lizzie, in my dream, Fernando had the snare sphere, but it wasn’t right. Did he leave the ship with a snare sphere?”
“All you care about is Fernando, or my sister, but what about Bill? If I lose hhhim, I’ll die. I’ll die! And you don’t care!” The ship let out a wail of pure pain and then shut off completely.
“Lizzie, come back online,” Blaze coaxed.
“Tell her you care,” Elle prodded.
“I am not going to tell my demon-possessed spaceship’s AI I care about her.” Blaze sighed. “I need to know the truth about Nauzea. Is she in the cellar?”
Nothing responded.
“Oh, this is just perfect.” The gunny gritted his teeth. “Come on, Elle, we need to weapon up and go get Arlo. And warn GaMeSpa authorities two rogue, possibly possessed, Clickers are on the station.”
Elle didn’t move. Fright showed on her face.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I don’t want to die,” Elle whispered. “There’s so much life I want to explore. Like monogamy. I’m really curious about that. And you, I want to watch you become the man you were meant to be, Blaze. Not just a hunter, not just a badass, but a man, with a family.”
Blaze crouched in front of her and held her hand. “We’re going to win this, Elle. Nauzea is worse, far worse than either Xerxes or Chthonic because she doesn’t just go for our throats, she nails us in our minds, our memories, our pain. But you and I, Elle, we’re tough pinche pendejos. We can beat her. And if you die, I die, and there is no way that is ever going to happen.”
A wry smile blew onto his sister’s face. “You’re the pendejo. I’m the puta. And yeah, let’s go. But if anything happens to me, Blaze, I want you to know, I love you. I’m glad we found each other, and I’m super glad we’re family.”
The gunny rolled his eyes. “Super glad? Did you really just say that?”
She stood and punched him gently on the shoulder. “Super glad.”
They hurried off the bridge, down the hall, and took the central staircase two steps at a time, heading for the cargo bay.
Ling came online. “Fernando and Bill hurt them, but Trina and Cali are okay. Trina has injected herself with Granny’s Onyx serum and is healing her wounds. Cali’s arm is broken, but we all know what can be done to fix it.”
Then comms became crowded with the voices of Alvin Denning, Ambassador Randi, and a newcomer to the stage, Mack, the Meelah magistrate on GaMeSpa. All were talking at the same time.
Of course, Denning talked the loudest. “These are wanted IPC fugitives. Their fines alone reach into the billions. They have destroyed IPC property, flouted IPC laws, and time and again manipulated our sensors with their Onyx illusions.”
“Onyx is real, Denning,” “Ambassador Randi said. “How can you and the IPC be such idiots?”
“Where is the science, Ambassador?” Denning shot back.
“I saw video of those undead dragons and zombies that destroyed your starships on Hutchinson Prime. It’s pretty clear that the phenomena are supernatural.”
“Then why can’t we examine this so-called ectoplasm? We have samples in our lab, but under microscopes, we see nothing. Nothing is there. So, it must be an illusion.”
“Like with quantum mechanics, the observer affects the observation. You have to believe in Onyx to see it,” Ambassador Randi said. “The Union has proof that is incontrovertible.”
“Oh, you’d like nothing more than to waste galaxies full of money on this Onyx nonsense. Our IPC consumers have spoken, and they would rather get rich than be fooled by this hoax perpetrated by the Union in a pathetic grab for power!” Denning was screaming at this point.
Ambassador Randi was the very essence of calm. “What if we are right about the Onyx energy? What if the threat is as great as we think? Logic would dictate that being cautious makes sense. If we don’t take the evil seriously, we might be overwhelmed by it. How can the IPC increase their profit margins when all of their consumers are dead?”
“Spoken like a true bureaucrat,” Denning spat. “You’ll leash up our free economy, get rich on taxes and tariffs, and use this Onyx bullshit as an excuse. All because you think we should be afraid of ghosts. Ha.”
Mack broke into the discussion. “Metaphysics aside, Captain Ramirez and the crew of the Lizzie Borden are under our authority now. Their ship is in our hangar.”
Denning tried to get a grip on his shit. His voice turned softer and more professional. “Magistrate, Ambassador, IPC shock troops have infiltrated GaMeSpa under my authority. They are there for the sole purpose of arresting Ramirez and his band of outlaws. If you get in our way, they will take action against you.”
Blaze and Elle reached the cargo bay doors, but both spun around. The IPC was coming for them, on board GaMeSpa, which violated like every treaty ever. Brother and sister charged back up the steps toward the third deck and the auxiliary weapons closet hidden there. The real armory on the third deck had been destroyed during their last fight with Xerxes before the demon merged with Lizzie.
“You can’t be doing this,” Ambassador Randi said in disbelief.
“That is a rather daft move,” the Meelah magistrate added.
“I am doing this,” Denning said. “It might mean my career, but I don’t think so. I think the good people of GaMeSpa will move out of our way, we’ll get Ramirez, and we’ll be off the station before your Clicker friends send troops of their own. The Union doesn’t have a military presence on GaMeSpa. Where does the Union have a military presence, Ambassador?”
Randi was quiet. Then she said, “We’ve had personnel issues.”
Yeah, the Union’s forces were few and far between. They had trouble recruiting because the IPC, which owned the Astral Corps, made their officers into billionaires.
The three continued to argue and fight, but Blaze and Elle had made it to the third deck. He tuned them out as he prepared for battle. Another fight was in the air, and he was glad to be doing something. Nauzea really was worse than either of her brothers. At least with Xerxes and Chthonic, it had been a straight-up tussle and none of this spiritual war shit. Leave it to the archduchess of torture to play mind games with them. It was like this crazy-ass woman he’d dated off and on during his time in the Corps. She used words like daggers and emotions like shotgun blasts. No thank you.
At the auxiliary weapons closet, Blaze snatched up a nanotech gauntlet and activated it. Armor covered him, but something was odd about the configuration. The left arm had a gun barrel on it. Weird. His combat display flashed as it synced up with the armor, and he saw a new setting, but didn’t have time to ponder it.
IPC shocktroopers were coming, and Bl
aze wasn’t going to go down without a fight. Since Ugly Betty had been destroyed by the succubus, he took two fusion pistols and slammed one on either hip. The nanotech seized them and held them in place. He had his ax and he grabbed the fusion flail.
“Are we using fusion against the IPC shocktroopers?” Elle asked. “It’ll be fun to kill people again.”
“You don’t mean that,” Blaze said. “And no, we’re going to use training shells, tweaked to a full charge. It won’t kill them, but the training charges will smoke their nervous systems.”
“Like a pack of LeMacs,” Elle said, working the action on her own fusion pistol. She had another pistol as well as two fusion katanas. She loaded one with a blue training shell and the other with a red hydrogen shell. Hopefully, in the heat of battle, she wouldn’t confuse the two.
Blaze went the same route, though. His ax would have the real thing, and his flail would be for knocking IPC shocktroopers on their butts. One pistol he loaded with leaded and the other got unleaded. They changed the power settings of the training shells to max and then they were ready.
Both encased in nanotech armor, they stormed back down the stairs and burst into the cargo bay. Trina was vamped out, every black vein visible underneath her translucent skin. But that had healed the wounds she’d gotten from the Clickers. Her VHI was zero, but that made sense since she was in vampire mode.
Cali was holding onto Ling, her face pale from the pain. Her VHI was twenty percent and plummeting.
Blaze still couldn’t believe the Clickers would hurt any member of his crew. But Nauzea had gotten to them. Somehow, the archduchess had driven them insane. He could only hope that the process was reversible.
Lizzie had said the Clicker brothers had been researching demon generators. With Bill’s technical skills and Fernando’s witchcraft, they could create such a device. But what kind of army could they fabricate on a space station like GaMeSpa? Demon generators didn’t work very well on sentient life. What other animals were around?
Over comms, they got their first introduction to the manager running the IPC shocktroopers. “This is Assistant Manager Gary Park. Come out with your hands up.”
“Lizzie,” Blaze said, forgetting he wasn’t on speaking terms with their ship.
No response.
He switched over manually to the Lizzie’s outside cameras. The smashed-up hangar was full of white-armored troops, in nanotech, like them. But the shocktroopers had corporate sponsor logos covering them. Their weapons, though, the MG6ers, fired pure, deadly plasma. This seemed like a wanted dead or alive situation. Yes, some of them had the big-mouthed stunners, in both pistol and rifle form, but not one shocker was holding one. The shocktroopers were crouched behind the various ships Blaze had destroyed on his suicide run into the hangar. Some of the starcycles, though, were intact. That was a very important piece of information.
“Assistant manager?” Blaze smirked. “Or is that assistant to the manager? Who’s your manager, Gary? And why didn’t Denning send in his bluetroopers to get us?”
“I don’t have to answer your questions. Come out, now!”
The gunny wasn’t going to waste his time with this low-level douchebag. The shocktroopers were those poor bastards who had washed out of the IPC-owned Astral Corps. The bluetroopers, however, were the elite soldiers the IPC handpicked from the Corps and all of the other branches of the military.
Blaze connected his comms to the ambassador and the magistrate. “Randi, Mack, we can deal with these IPC dickbags, but we might have bigger problems. Two members of my crew, my Clicker doctor and my Clicker engineer, have left the ship. I’d consider them a bigger threat than the IPC or us. They might have the archduchess of torture in their possession.”
“That sounds like very dire news,” Magistrate Mack said calmly. Such a Meelah.
“Archduchess of what?” Ambassador Randi asked.
“Torture,” Blaze said. “I have to go. Find them. Detain them. But where’s Arlo?”
Comms filled with static. Assistant Manager Gary Park told them why. “No more communication with the outside. We are jamming your signal. We are coming in.”
Blaze saw two shocktroopers approach with cutting torches. A hundred guns were trained on the cargo bay doors of the Lizzie Borden. If they went out there, they’d be cut down.
Surrender was out of the question. Gary Park would take them all to Denning, who would whisk them away to IPC prisons where they would work as free labor for the giant corporation.
Their chances of getting to Arlo and closing the Onyx Gate would be lost forever.
“Damn,” Blaze said. “We’re in a tight spot.” He saw Cali staring at him.
“Let me Onyx up.” Elle motioned to the three Onyx syringes on her bandolier. “I cast a shield, protect us, and TK the crap out of them.”
Again, that shine her eyes. She was just looking for an excuse to relapse.
“No,” Blaze said.
Cali, the quiet Mormon woman, closed her eyes. “Send me out there. I’ll get away from this awful pain, heal up, and clear a path. You know I can.”
“Hate to say it,” Trina said, “but she’s right. We’ll both go out and take the fire for you. You follow up and get to the exit.”
“Agreed,” Blaze said. “We need to get out of this hangar and get to the Promenade. The shocktroopers aren’t going to fire into a civilian crowd, and the market stalls on the Promenade should be packed. If they do start shooting at us in a crowded place, those Clicker battleships are gonna come in.”
“Will it start another Bug War?” Elle asked.
“No,” Trina said. “Not officially. The Phasmida have become so entrenched in IPC economics, a war between the Clicker government and the IPC would hurt everyone’s profits. We’re dealing with a bunch of greedy buttmunches on both sides.”
Elle shook her head. “Unless the Clickers are thinking of a hostile takeover of the IPC. Remember, the Clickers know about Onyx energy. They’re just waiting for the demons to take out most of Humanity. They think they can fight the Onyx better than we can. Maybe they can. At least they don’t have idiots who doubt it exists.”
The shocktroopers had reached the cargo bay outer doors.
“Enough!” Blaze growled. “No time for interstellar politics. Those assholes are about to put a hole in my ship. We go with Cali’s plan. But we don’t murder Humans. I’ll be ready for the Bad Dog Command, Cali. You get near a Human, I’m shutting you down.”
“Affirmative,” Cali said quietly.
“So I’m thinking I eat three of those guys,” Trina said. “After taking plasma fire, I’m going to need a full meal.”
“Oh, no! No pinche way!” Blaze thundered.
Sparks from the cutting torches sprayed across the cargo bay floor. Goddammit! His ship! Another hole? More patches. Goddammit! And his ship already looked so ghetto.
Elle came to Trina’s defense. “She just wants three. There’s like a hundred of those guys. What’s three or four shocktroopers?”
“Now it’s four?” Blaze asked in disbelief.
“How about I just do two, but I only drink a little of their blood?” Trina asked.
Blaze checked her Onyx levels in his display, and the vampire was below fifty percent. Healing herself had drained her of energy. No wonder she was trying to bargain over Human life.
“One small nip, Trina,” Blaze said, “and you infect the poor bastard with vampirism. We’d have to put him down anyway. No blood. Once we’re done with the fight, hit yourself with an Onyx syringe.”
Trina sighed in teenager-like frustration. “Fine! Whatever!”
“Gary!” Blaze shouted through comms. “Stop cutting up my ship. We’re coming out. Back them off.”
“Carl, Phil, they’re coming out.”
“Yes, Mr. Park.”
Blaze shook his head. Mr. Park. These guys were civilians dressed in nanotech armor, sponsored by Zero G Cola, a subsidiary of the IPC.
They were about to get a
n awakening.
The cutting torches pulled back. Part of Lizzie was still online because hoses from the ceiling spayed hullfoam over the glowing lines of melted metal.
Blaze opened the cargo bay doors. Automatic stairs descended to the ground of the hangar bay. The smell of the cutting torches mingled with the metallic stink of the ripped titanium of the floor and the damaged ships around them.
Trina offered a hand to Cali, but Cali glared at her, limped away from Ling, and staggered out the door. Her hands were up, and tears were on her face. “Please, don’t shoot. Please, step back. Please, for your own safety. Please.”
Her voice showed how shattered her heart was over what could possibly happen if Blaze wasn’t fast enough with his Cali Bad Dog command.
A few of the shocktroopers stepped back. Others came forward, almost as if they wanted to put her down or do worse. Good. If they couldn’t show this limping young woman some mercy, they deserved a good clawing.
Trina rolled her eyes, mumbled, “This is so unfair,” and swayed her hips out of the ship. In full vampire mode.
“Mr. Park,” one of the shocktroopers burst out. “That woman is wearing makeup, or something is wrong with her. No, she’s not right.”
“Steady boys,” Assistant Manager Park said to his nervous troops.
Blaze turned to Ling and Elle. “Ready?”
Ling held up two fusion grenades, one in each hand. Others were clipped to his nanofiber tunic. His nunchakus were at his side. “This should be easy.”
“Five against a hundred?” Blaze asked.
“Fairly easy?” Ling asked.
Elle smiled. “Let’s get ’em. And I promise I won’t kill them. Much.”
“Good enough.” Blaze triggered the Cali Bad Dog command.
From his vantage point, the gunny could only see Cali’s thin legs below her blue dress. He watched those legs thicken, fur out, and then he heard the howl.
“What in the holy fuck of all fucks!” Assistant Manager Gary Parks lost his shit.
SIXTEEN_
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Every gun opened fire on Cali, hundreds of bolts of plasma energy hitting her in seconds. The smell of her fur burning became a cloud of choking smoke.
