by Aaron Crash
The Lizzie Borden entered the vicious ocean of viscous fluid. She moved behind the Clicker ships and entered the flashing brightness of the constant weapons fire. The light was part red, but everything was a yellowish green from the wiggling walls of living liquid around them.
A tentacle reached for the Lizzie, but Ling was there to shoot it away. He’d switched his holographic controls from blue to red, which meant he was in charge of guns.
The Union ships were next, the oldest ones moving in. The newer vessels, those with plasma guns, kept the tentacles off their flank. But Blaze watched as the ectoplasm reconstituted behind them. They’d created a bubble inside the ectoplasm, and if the Clicker guns failed, the liquid would come gushing onto their shields, then their hulls, and then once their hull integrity failed, the ectoplasm would flood every deck, envelop them, disintegrate them, and they’d die.
Flashes from the plasma cannon fire flickered off the faces of his crew on board the Lizzie Borden. Walls of the ectoplasm cave they’d created threatened to buckle and fall on them, but then a well-placed plasma burst knocked the swells away. It was a constant battle to keep the ectoplasm at bay. They started to take casualties.
A long, cylindrical Clicker ship exploded. The plasma guns had gotten too hot and a well-timed tentacle strike destroyed the spaceship. Another ship was encircled by tentacles and pulled into the ectoplasm.
As the minutes passed, fewer and fewer Clicker warships were there to blast back the tentacles or use their plasma cannons to dig deeper through the liquid Onyx.
Blaze felt himself sweating. He thought about joining Ling at weapons control, but the Clicker ships ahead and the Union ships behind were doing the heavy lifting of keeping their bubble in the ectoplasm free of tentacles. Every so often, Ling would trigger a plasma gun to cut away a tendril or keep the floor from rising, or the ceiling from falling.
But as more of the Clicker ships were consumed by the ectoplasm or their guns overheated and exploded, Blaze knew they all might have to work Lizzie’s guns to keep them free. Eventually, if they didn’t reach Elle and the werewolves soon, the ectoplasm would take them and destroy them.
Fernando and Bill were motionless. They watched the Clicker ships explode and the people inside them die with a logical detachment.
Trina paced. Ling was ever vigilant at weapons control.
Cali drifted over and took Blaze’s hand.
Blaze glanced at Trina, to see if it was okay, and Trina just rolled her eyes and nodded.
Cali pulled her body to his. She whispered, “Blaze, we’re almost to Elle and the Onyx Gate. When we close it, I’ll die. I just wanted you to know, before the fight, before I die, that I’m so grateful for the mercy you showed me. And the love you gave me.”
Blaze hugged her close. “I’m sorry for the pain I caused. You got a rough deal, Cali. But you’ve done a lot of good with it. We don’t know what’s going to happen when we close the Onyx Gate. There seemed to be vampires and werewolves before the Onyx Gate opened.”
“But those were different kinds of creatures,” Cali said. “What I am, what Trina is, we’re so much more powerful, and we need the Onyx so much more. I talked with Fernando… If the modified torpedo doesn’t work to close the Gate, Trina and I can fly the ship in. We can help Bill and Fernando trigger the spells.”
“If it comes to that,” Blaze said thickly, “we’ll all be going down together.”
Lizzie burst out in song, something about war and heroics and comradery and tragedy.
“Enough, Lizzie,” Blaze said.
Arlo was strangely quiet, keeping to himself near the back, coughing every once in a while. He watched them all with twinkling dark eyes even as he trembled.
Another Clicker ship exploded. Then another. A Union ship was grabbed by tentacles and was pulled up into the awful acidic substance. The ship’s energy failed. The hull flecked away until the decks were revealed. The people inside wrestled in the goo until they went limp and then their skin and muscles were gone. Their bones remained, but even that osseous material was absorbed into the liquid Onyx.
It took five minutes for the ectoplasm to eat the ship away. The stuff was getting more powerful. Maybe the arrival of the Onyx Gate amplified the power of the liquid Onyx.
“Five minutes to asteroid X,” Fernando clicked. “Elle and the werewolves are there. Lizzie can pilot us in and shoot the tentacles. I suggest we arm ourselves and make for the cargo bay.”
“How many Phasmida ships are left?” Blaze asked.
“Nine Clicker vessels,” Fernando answered. “And you know I don’t like the term Phasmida. I am not a stick insect. Nine Union ships have survived so far.”
A Union ship’s guns were twisted around by a tentacle while the vessel’s weapons fired. The ship hit its own blue-fire engines with its own plasma bolts and exploded. Shrapnel pinged and ponged off the Lizzie’s hull.
“Make that eight,” Fernando said.
Everyone left the bridge. Some hit their rooms. Some went to the auxiliary armory on the third deck to grab their weapons for the final fight. They were up against one of their own, Elle, who was now not just an Onyx witch, but an Onyx goddess, quite possibly driven insane by absorbing the evil awfulness of Nauzea.
And they’d be facing the five werewolves, twisted creatures, tortured by Nauzea, and filled with a hatred for Blaze.
The gunny found himself on the third deck, shoving hydrogen shells into his bandolier. He glanced to the left. The master suite’s door was open, the smoke damage, the fire damage, all of it visible from where he stood.
The spider demon seemed like a lifetime ago. The demon had told them of the coming of Xerxes, their first fight against an archduke. They’d taken on and defeated three since then. They’d done some crazy stuff, fought some insane battles, but they’d won, time after time. Could they win again?
Raziel meowed. She appeared at the top of the central staircase. She raised a paw as if to tell him to hurry the hell up.
Blaze collected his gear and weapons and chased after her. On the way, he contacted the Clicker fleet. “General Russell, we have twenty-five minutes before the Onyx Gate appears. When we hit that asteroid, where my sister is, we’ll have to hold off the werewolves and her spells for that long. I’m sorry you lost so many of your people, but I hate to say it, you’ll probably lose a few more.”
The Clicker general came on, clicking. While he clacked on and on, his translator only said four words: “I understand the sacrifice.”
“Wait for my signal,” Blaze said.
General Russell replied with one word: “Unlikely.” Then he was gone.
“Crazy pinche bugs,” Blaze muttered.
He hit the cargo bay. Through his display, he saw the Clickers punch out of the ectoplasm. All nine ships roared out, followed by the Lizzie and the eight Union ships behind them. Blaze did a quick scan of the Terran system, but there was no sign of any IPC fleet. Goddamn Denning had let them down. So had the Meelah explorers. He thought for sure they’d join the fight, pacifists or not.
Earth had sent some IPC science vessels to study the ectoplasm filling up the asteroid belt, but those ships weren’t gonna do a thing except take samples and watch in wonder as their samples disappeared in their labs. All studies would come back stamped UNVERIFIABLE RESULTS. NO PROFITABLE ADVANTAGE IN FURTHER STUDY. CLOSING INVESTIGATION. Goddamn IPC.
His crew joined Blaze in the cargo bay. They stood ready in their nanotech armor. Blaze catalogued their weapons.
He had his arm gun, his fusion ax with the switch-blade silver spikes, and a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun on his hip. Good news there. Bad news, he only had six shells full of silver shot.
Both the Clickers had two spears, one fusion, one silver. They also had plasma rifles hanging from their shoulders. Bill’s prosthetic limbs were both restored to shine brightly. Both his big left fusion arm cannon and his smaller plasma gun arm had been tricked out in bright chrome colors.
Trina
had plasma pistols, fusion pistols, and a speargun with three silver spears.
Cali was just Cali. She was her own weapon.
Ling was ready with his plasma bow and his fusion nunchakus. His weapons wouldn’t hurt the werewolves, but they could hurt Elle and whatever else they might face. Ling was grinning, excited about the fight, excited about the possibility of exploring death. The Meelah couldn’t lose.
Unlike everyone else, Arlo wasn’t in armor, but then Arlo wasn’t Human. He was person enough to be shaking, but that wasn’t from fear, it was from delirium tremens. He had one of Elle’s katanas and one of her pistols, both tied to a length of string he had thrown over his shoulder. But the real weapon was the .38 tucked into the waistband of his filthy jeans.
“How many shots do you have in that junk gun?” Blaze asked.
“It’s a priceless Rohm Jennings pearl-handled .38, asshole,” Arlo snapped. “And I got one bullet. Silver. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know the score. I’ve done this before.” The old man paused, his sobering mind working overtime. Then he fished into his pocket and held up another silver bullet. “Make that two bullets. No, I might have three. I thought I had four, but it’s hard to remember. Chronic alcoholism totally dicks with your memory.”
Blaze made a face. “Why don’t you chamber all the rounds you have?”
“Unlucky,” Arlo growled. “You just figure yer own shit out. I got my ways.” He unscrewed the cap of the now very warm malt liquor, which by the smell of it was about to turn. Blaze thought he was going to take that last swallow, but in the end, the old man thought better of it, and he capped the bottle with shaking hands. What in the hell?
The Lizzie Borden roared around and landed on the plane of Elle’s asteroid.
The cargo bay doors opened.
And the final fight began.
TWENTY-NINE_
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Blaze and his crew ran out of the cargo bay and onto the asteroid. The strange energy that created the bubble inside the ocean of ectoplasm around them had given the asteroid gravity and a strange kind of atmosphere. Blaze did a quick analysis and found there was some oxygen, not much, and other gases. Sound waves could travel through the thin environment, though losing their suit would still expose them to cosmic rays that would kill them immediately.
It was a strange sight, being surrounded by the rippling yellow-green substance undulating around them. The stuff amplified the light from Earth’s sun, so everything was cast in a sickly yellow-green light. Blaze couldn’t tell if the bubble they were in had a diameter of ten thousand feet or ten thousand miles. Distance, all of reality, felt like it was being reshaped by the ectoplasm, the coming of the Onyx Gate, and Elle, an evil goddess of unimaginable power.
She glowed a dark scarlet from the magic powering every one of her cells. She was barefoot on the rock, in her black dress, her hair a mixture of ink and blood, just like the black and red tattoos covering the left side of her body.
Across her chest was her black leather bandolier full of pouches and pockets for her spell components.
The five tormented werewolves slunk around her, adding to her savage, alien, monstrous appearance. She looked like an evil goddess worshipped by monster wolves.
Each still sported the torture Nauzea had inflicted on them. Ian had been skinned alive but raw Onyx energy held his innards inside his abdomen. Tanner had healed his brain damage, but various knives remained shoved through his muzzle and acted as teeth. Chase’s hands hadn’t healed, but the butcher knife was gone. Cylindrical metal objects had been stuffed through the stumps. What were they? Most of Jared’s needles were back, but he also had patches of gray fur. The molten silver covering Logan had hardened into a second skin though his flesh smoked and wept under the onslaught of the metal. He smelled like cooked meat.
All the werewolves had the lunar rocks shoved into their skulls. Those stones fueled their maniacal savagery and kept them locked in their lupine bodies.
And all the werewolves had been enhanced, thanks to Elle, no doubt. On their ankles, they had miniature blue-fire engines, and on their wrists they had fusion claws, except for Chase. The cylinders in his stumps fired and he had fusion daggers now, crackling with star energy.
The gunny glanced at his display. They had twenty minutes before the Onyx Gate appeared.
Arlo came limping out of the Lizzie, limping because he was shaking so much. But that goddamn bottle was glued to his hand. He held the string connected to the katana handle and the fusion pistol with two fingers.
He walked across the rock on cowboy boots. Might as well have been walking into a dive bar in East Topeka.
He wasn’t breathing. His eyes were freezing. Yet his hangover made him look more miserable than anything space could do to him. Goddamn Arlo.
Elle’s power flared. Her wolves howled.
Her voice broke through comms. “If you try and close the Onyx Gate, I will kill you, Blaze. Leave. Now. I will open a channel for you.”
She raised her glowing hands and made a fist. Above her in the ectoplasm a channel opened, and it was like Mexican chica Moses parting the pinche Red Sea.
“Go. Now. Please,” the Onyx goddess begged. Yeah, she was begging them. Her voice had changed.
“Elle, you’re in there, I know you are,” Blaze said. “We’re not leaving you. And we’re not leaving without closing the Onyx Gate.”
Elle laughed, and as she did, the werewolves joined her in howling. Impossibly, the sound echoed across the asteroid and made the ectoplasm ripple, however far away it was. Clicker ships and Union ships circled above them.
It seemed General Russell was waiting for Blaze’s signal, as was Ambassador Randi. Thank all that was holy for that. Their chances against the Onyx goddess and the tricked-out tortured werewolves were slim, but Blaze didn’t want the cavalry hitting just yet.
“You have no chance against us.” Elle had read his mind. Her power seemed infinite. “And we are not alone. Behold. Panashoat!”
All the werewolves chanted in bestial voices; everyone on the asteroid plane except for Blaze, Ling, and Arlo chanted. The gunny was pretty sure the Clickers and the Humans above in the starships chanted along.
“Panashoat! Panashoat! Panashoat!”
A long, dark rectangular shape made from black metal moved down through the open space Elle had created in the ectoplasm. It was the Etrusca ruin that had been moving through the solar system. Goddamn, but the pinche thing must’ve put the pedal to the metal because it had arrived years ahead of schedule.
“Panashoat! Panashoat! Panashoat!”
Four other channels opened in the ectoplasm, thousands of miles wide.
The four Etrusca ruins they’d triggered before moved through the corridors Elle had created in the liquid Onyx. Most of the structures were tentacles of various shapes and sizes waving and writhing, but there were sections of smooth metal. In seconds, Blaze saw that those sections of the four structures could be joined.
Among the tentacles, like clown fish among anemone, were the alien-faced sea creatures. They were so far away they appeared like smoke or mist, but Blaze knew what they were. Millions if not billions of strange fish, crabs, sharks, whales, lobsters, whatever, and all made from the strange metal.
Blaze took a minute to do some math. If each ruin was the size of Australia over on Earth, that meant whatever it created would be massive, incredible. Australia was about three million square miles. If all five Etrusca ruins joined together, it would create something the size of the moon, fifteen square miles of tentacles and whatever Panashoat turned out to be.
All five of the massive shapes were right above them. Ectoplasm tentacles reached out but the Etrusca tentacles smacked them away. Those metal coils from the four ruins gripped the untriggered Etrusca structure and ripped open a section to reveal an initiator cube inside. Nothing good could come from star fire hitting that cube of tentacles. So far away it looked tiny.
“Five of five and we’ll all die.” Blaz
e grinned. “Well, now it’s a party. And I thought this was hard before.”
Elle laughed. “You should’ve left when you had the chance. You could’ve flown right by my father’s armor.”
“Not your father,” Blaze said. “Dad died because of shit like that.”
“My father! The father of hunger. The All-Pig!” Elle whipped out her fusion pistol and fired. The ball of energy shot toward the initiator cube.
Before, they had used the structures to help them. However, now they knew they’d been playing into the demon king’s hands the entire time.
Ling whipped out his bow and sent a plasma arrow through the fusion bolt. Both exploded.
“That last ruin is not gonna be triggered,” Blaze said.
“Triggered!” Elle screamed. “Do you want to see triggered!”
The shit then hit the fan. She flung out a thread-covered magnet and barked Onyx speak. A wave of telekinetic energy dropped them all to the ground. Even Arlo. His bottle went rattling and sloshing off across the plane.
This is the end of you, Blaze. Ian’s voice filled his head. We’re coming for you and the fuck-ups you ride with.
Blaze got to his feet and snapped out the switchblade silver spikes on his ax.
Jared and Logan took off into the air, riding the blue-fire engines strapped to their legs toward the fifth Etrusca ruin. The initiator cube had come loose and was floating down toward the asteroid.
Up close, the five-hundred-by-five-hundred-foot squares of tentacles and alien faces had been imposing. But one dropped from a continent-sized structure didn’t look like much. It was moving fast, though, either pushed away by whatever force ruled the ruins or by Elle and her telekinesis spell. Either way, the two werewolves had fusion-powered claws. One swipe and it would activate the last of the ruins.
