by Jean Johnson
D’kora’s voice cut through their link on the squad channel, echoing Ia’s words. “A Squad, no sign of a bridge on this deck. Proceed downward. Salik designed ships usually have a bridge on the third or fourth up from the bottom. Stay paired; watch your backs.”
“Why would the Salik build a ship and put Choyan numbers on it?” Double-E asked her as she started down the stairs again.
“For that matter, why would the Choya build a ship in the Salik style?” Harkins quipped.
Estes came to her rescue. “You saw the hull. They probably just grabbed an old Salik wreck out of some battle junkyard and slapped together whatever repairs they could manage on it. And then the Salik somehow got a hold of the Choya pirates and apparently cut a deal.”
“Keep alert, meioas,” Ia interjected, easing down another flight of steps, rifle at the ready. There was an eighty percent probability they would make it down the stairs just fine, but twenty percent was still enough to worry. “We’re headed down, and the Salik are built to look up. We need to be ready if they spot us coming.”
Red light lanced down over the railing, blackening a tiny box in the corner of the next turn. “What, like they won’t notice us shooting out their cameras?” Harkins asked sardonically. “They know***ing.”
“Wh**? You’re br***up,” Estes asked. Or tried to ask. A burst of static came across the comm from her link, vehement enough not to need a translation.
Damn, indeed, Ia thought, grimacing. Onboard jammers. That was low on the probability chart. Stopping Harkins on the landing between decks 5 and 4, she beckoned the other two down to meet them. Once Estes and Double-E were in range, she triple-tapped all four of their helms, and triple-tapped Estes’ helm a second time. Estes levered up the silvered outer layer of her faceplate, meant to protect her from laser fire, as did Ia, though neither unsealed their suits. The two women looked into each other’s eyes, Ia’s amber brown to Estes’ hazel green.
“Either they want to overhear this,” Ia stated slowly and clearly, “or they want us to unseal. Stay suited and switch to hand signs. I repeat, switch to hand signs.”
Her helm buzzed faintly with Estes’ reply, conducted between the two helmets. “Hand signs, got it.”
They pulled apart and Ia touched helmets with Harkins, repeating the command to him as Estes did the same for Double-E. Separating, she gestured at Harkins and herself to move forward, further down the stairs. All of them lowered their blast plates, locking them back into place.
The door to deck 3 cracked open. Alien muzzles aimed up in their direction. Ia crouched and shot through the railings while Harkins aimed over their tops. Double-E hurried down half a flight and burned into the metal plate forming one of the steps directly over the hatch. Dark orange ricocheted off Harkin’s silvered armor, scoring a dark line on the plates covering his arm, but not doing enough damage to slow him down. Had it hit the elbow or wrist joint, it might have been a different matter.
Ia fired back, just as Double-E burned through. The armored figure on the other side of the door retreated hastily from the dual attack. Ia didn’t hesitate; punching the air with her left fist even as she moved, she threw herself down the stairs at that door. Jerking it open, she dove through, clanging across the deck in a screeching tumble. Harkins followed a beat and a half behind, obeying her command to charge.
Just like every time she had practiced in the timestreams, Ia blink-opened her holdout gun on her right forearm even as she slammed upright against the far wall, rifle extended as she aimed. A split second later, a single bullet launched itself at the retreating, multijointed mechsuit. Electricity sparked and crackled across the alien’s silvered back.
Red streaked overhead, coming from Harkins’ Heck as he took out the sensor nodes in the corridor. Jerking her rifle back into her shoulder, Ia seared laser fire into the cracked panel, destroying the delicate conduits the splatter bullet had exposed. Based as it was on old, smuggled designs, Salik ceristeel was inferior to modern Terran manufacture, and it showed.
The Salik jerked to a stop, teetered, and toppled. The lumpy oval on its back smoldered, limbs and joints frozen from the destruction of its power pack. Orange light streaked past her left shoulder. Whipping around, Ia fired, scoring on the hock joint of the other armored Salik. That forced the alien to lumber awkwardly back around a corner as it retreated. With everyone armored, only the shapes of the armor and the nameplates embossed on shoulders, helms, and chests identified friend from foe.
Hand-signing to Harkins and Double-E, she gesture-ordered for both men to go check the downed alien and guard the back corridor. Moving up beside Estes, Ia traded potshots with the alien around the corner, inching forward. This corridor was broad, wide enough for two half-mechsuits side by side, though it would’ve been a tight squeeze to fit two full-mechs. It was also brightly lit, and turned a corner up ahead, angling to the left.
The Salik charged, firing. Estes plastered herself against the wall, scored on her shoulder-joint by the wild laser fire. Ia turned sideways and fired back, a steady stream that targeted the alien’s silvered head. Orange fire scored along her forearm and the black paint of her rifle, scorching it clean. She didn’t flinch. The tip of her Heck wavered in time with the alien’s charging footsteps, searing the left-hand side, until the mechsuited warrior stumbled. Ia swapped her aim to the other side and the alien turned protectively, trying to protect his or her undamaged eye.
Estes raised her right arm and fired a single shot from her forearm gun. The bullet shattered the laser-weakened helm, splatting into the head of the Salik inside. A quick check behind showed Beta Team doing the same with the other Salik, killing the armored warrior to ensure he or she couldn’t squirm out of their armor and attack them from behind.
Inching up to the corner, Ia crouched and peered around it. Nothing but empty muddy beige corridor lit by greenish white light, a couple of cameras . . . and two heavy blast doors, one on the left and on the right, both sealed and secured against entry.
Raising her left hand, she sign-spelled “bridge” for the others, then beckoned them forward. Harkins kept his weapon trained on the corridor behind them. Pulling back, Ia triple-tapped Estes on the shoulder, raised her blast plate, and touched their helms together.
“The Salik always build a false bridge door on their warships. We need to get them to open up the real one. Any ideas?” Ia asked her through the conducting buzz of their touching faceplates.
“They’ll come out for live bait, but I am not un-suit . . .” Estes trailed off, frowned a moment, then grinned wickedly. “I have an idea. Cover me, and be ready to move.”
Nodding, Ia pulled back and lowered her blast plate again. Estes didn’t lower hers. Switching to external speakers, she strolled into the corridor, HK-114 gripped muzzle-up in her right mechsuit hand, left hand on her hip. Ia followed in a half-crouch, her own mechsuit rifle held at the ready.
“Yo! Frogtopuses!” Her amplified voice echoed down the hall. “Are you all so toothless, you have to hide like jellyfish behind those blast doors? What do you do, gum your prey until it dies from laughter?”
Hidden behind the silvered blast plate, Ia allowed herself a grin. Estes was just as inventive in the here and now as she’d predicted the woman could be in the timestreams.
“Were you born with defective flippers? Are you faster on land than you are in the sea?” she scorned, turning around in a circle that took in both blast doors. “Let me guess. You’ve given up on eating flesh and are hiding inside, sucking on roots! You’re not warriors! You’re not hunters! You are food! I could hunt and eat you! Hell, you’ll probably stand still so I can sear off one strip of toadish calamari at a time!—You know what? I feel sorry for you!”
Ia pointed her gun at the ceiling, affecting a bored pose of her own. Her body was on the near side of the right-hand door, blocking its occupants from getting shot by Harkins or Double-E, but that was alright. Her position and seeming unconcern would encourage the Salik to open up and fi
ght.
“Yeah, that’s right!” Estes shouted, turning again and again, facing each door in turn. “You heard me! I feel so sorry for your pathetic frogtopodic asteroids, I’m just gonna stand here until you eat me! You hear me? Eat me!” she yelled at the right-hand door, then smacked her lips together. It was the way the Salik themselves mocked their prey, smacking their lips in chilling pwop-pwop-pwops. She turned back to the left one and smacked her lips at it, too. “Eat me!”
The right-hand door hissed open and a tentacle-hand lashed out, unwrapping and hurling the dark object caught in the purple pink flesh. Ia was faster than that flicking limb. Spinning into the doorway, blocking it from being thrown, she grabbed the alien grenade with her left servo-hand and shouldered the door panels wider with her armored right arm. The doors tried to shut again automatically, but she was too fast, too strong, and already through, live weapon in hand. Everything was perfect, exactly as it should be.
“Thank you!” Ia finished her spinning dash and her speech with an elbow-check to the Salik’s head, ripping the grenade free . . . which yanked up on the activation button as the sucker covering it was jerked free.
Behind her, Estes jammed one armored foot in the doorway, poking the muzzle of her rifle into the opening, giving her some cover. Once she was out of the way, first.
Ia had half a second to pick the largest group of bodies, some wearing their own versions of pressure-suits and others clad in their deliberately damp version of uniforms. Some were Choya, thin and yellow-skinned, moisture-packs strapped to their chests and throats; the rest were Salik, who didn’t need to keep their gills constantly wet.
Several had laser pistols in their hands, but her entrance had rattled them, and none scored a hit on anything vital. Tossing the grenade to the right of the biggest knot, she sidestepped to her left, away from the sudden scramble of bodies desperate to get away from the weapon. It exploded in a spray of fiery shrapnel, shredding through five or six bodies and wounding a handful more. Blue hemocyanin from the Choya mixed with red hemoglobin from the Salik, painting the front half of the bridge in disturbingly colorful ichor.
Even knowing it was coming, Ia flinched as a chunk of something struck the right side of her faceplate, along with a peppering of shards and fluids. It plopped onto her right shoulder and dangled halfway down her back, caught on her armor. She didn’t bother to wipe it off. Darting forward, she dodged a couple of wild shots from deeper into the bridge, with its workstation seats canopied in overhead screens better suited for Salik-style vision and control panels designed with buttons meant to be pulled as well as pushed.
Her goal was a keening, grey-mottled, multi-armed figure strapped to one of the chairs flanking the captain’s station. The Gatsugi prisoner, captain of the Clearly-Standing, was a bloody mess, with chunks of flesh literally bitten out of his limbs. The bloodied lips of the Salik captain proved who had been feasting on this particular war-prize. He hissed at her and charged in a near-horizontal leap, yanking something from his belt. Ia dove forward, hitting the deck in a clanking skid that flipped into a roll, using her momentum to twist up and around onto her feet, facing the landing alien.
Behind him, she could see Harkins and Double-E prying open the blast doors wedged open by Estes’ foot, and see the red streaks of the other woman’s weapon, tagging and scorching the few surviving unarmored occupants of the bridge standing up to take potshots at the Human in their midst.
“Hhheww die, Hhhumans!” Hissing the words through both his broad mouth and his nasal flaps, the captain whipped around, grenade caught in the curled-up vee of his front microjuncture. The moment he faced Ia, he lashed the supple, cephalopodic limb at her. Ia, ready for him, clamped down hard with her mind. Startled, the alien stared at his limb, still tightly curled around the now charged device. Telekinetically curled. Crushed, almost. Gurgling a curse, he frantically shook his limb, then turned and scraped it against the nearest workstation seat, desperately trying to release the explosive.
She had just enough time to step between him and the Gatsugi captain, shielding the wounded alien, before the captain exploded, spraying crimson chunks across the back half of the bridge. Dripping with blood, Ia brought up her rifle, aiming it at a pair of Choya crewmembers who were hesitantly rising from behind a computer console, weapons in hand.
“Surrender and live; fight and die,” she warned them. One of them, a female by the duller yellows and browns of her skin, hastily tossed her gun onto the ground and crossed her arms over her chest, webbed palms cupping the moisture packs over her neck gills in symbolic surrender. The other gave in, dropped his weapon, and copied her move. On the other side, the three remaining Salik charged, firing. Ia whipped her gun around and shot one of them in the upper knee, toppling him with a screech; Estes shot the other two in the chest, slicing a sustained pulse from one alien to the other.
The corporal hurried inside, gun trained on the downed Salik with the injured knee . . . but the alien was faster. Still holding his pistol, he—or she, it was hard to tell with their species, particularly as they could literally change genders when needed, though the male form was generally preferred—turned the weapon on himself and seared his own brains. So did the two remaining injured Salik by the now closed entrance, startling the trio of Marines. Death before capture, indicating this was no ordinary Blockade breakout. Which Ia already knew, but now Estes and the others did, too.
Double-E finally looked up across the carnage, spotting Ia. “Oh, holy . . . Ah, Corporal,” he called out hesitantly, “you, ah . . . have . . . Oh, God . . . body parts on your . . . uh . . .” She was well aware of just what, exactly, dangled off her
She was well aware of just what, exactly, dangled off her shoulder plate and clung to her torso and helmet. The part of her that dealt with her nightly nightmares had locked down her emotions the moment the first bodies had splattered across the room. As much as she wanted to scrub and scrub and scrub until she was clean . . . she didn’t have time. That was the worst Ia had to face. She did not have the time.
“Unseal your helmet if you’re going to vomit, Private,” Ia told him. “If you’re not, help Estes disarm and secure the prisoners. Strip and zip. Don’t forget to check the Choyas’ gillpacks. If they resist or fight back, shoot them, but try not to kill. Harkins, your file says you have field medic training. Tend to the Gatsugi captain and make sure he doesn’t die from his wounds. Keep your armor clean around him; I don’t think he’s too mentally stable right now.”
“What are you gonna do?” Estes asked her, aiming her rifle in wordless threat at one of the three shrapnel-wounded Choya bleeding in blue streaks at the front of the room.
“I still have the sucker hand, and some rudimentary knowledge of Choyan and Salikha,” Ia stated. “I’m going to see if I can figure out the bridge controls so I can get those doors open again. If they’re code-locked, we might be stuck in here for a while. That, and see if I can do anything to cut the jammers and maybe help the others on the ship.”
“Just don’t blow us up by suckering up the wrong keys,” Harkins muttered, fetching a set of plexi ties from one of the small compartments built into his thigh armor.
Stowing her rifle behind her back, Ia stepped away from the whimpering Gatsugi. She eyed the chair at the captain’s workstation, then sighed and crouched, pulling her weapon forward again. A bit of lasering broke the furniture free from the floor, allowing her to toss it aside. Bits of the dead dropped from her armor with the move. Mouth tightly clamped shut, she inhaled the self-contained, relatively clean air of her suit in slow, deep breaths, grimly mastering the urge to be sick.
Once it was out of the way, she had room to step under the overhead screens and crouch down. Locking her armor into a balanced crouch with another blink-code, she unhooked the sucker hand from her shoulder slot and studied the console with its splayed buttons and controls. The combination of having to look up to see the alien characters and symbols displayed on the screens just above her forehead
and needing to look down to see where to put the sucker-lined device was going to be a literal pain in her neck.
As much as she wanted to cheat and just go straight to the ship functions she needed to access, she knew she had to make a show of hunting for and suckering up each command. Quick checks of the timestreams allowed her enough knowledge to position the hand over the correct controls on the console, bringing up the current operations controlled by the bridge.
Ia took her time puzzling through the alien script, double-checking the timestreams not just for the language, but for the next four hours, making sure everything was on track. Only then did she unlock the door. By that point, she also had the commands for the ship’s internal comm system figured out.
Activating the comm, she broadcast to the whole ship. “Attention, Salik and Choya. Your captain is dead, his top crew have been captured, and the bridge is under Terran control. You are accused of interstellar piracy, and in violation of Alliance Blockade Sanction against the Salik government, all of its citizens, and any other persons assisting them in breaking those sanctions. Blockade law is strict, but fair. Surrender and live; continue to fight, and die.”
“Human/Terran/Female . . . My ship/vessel/crew?”
Ia looked down from the overhead screen. The Gatsugi captain had recovered somewhat. His skin was still more a mottled grey than any other hue, his dark, round eyes wide with shock, but Harkins had used the emergency first aid kit all mechsuits carried on the alien, binding his wounds against further blood loss. He gestured with one of his two unbitten arms, gesturing her closer, a faint brownish flush coloring his four slender fingers.
“Captain,” Ia acknowledged. “We don’t know/are blocked from communicating/finding out, but/yet the Marines have boarded/are helping your vessel/crew. Are you/will you be alright/functional/stable?”
Gatsugi almost never approached a conversation in Terranglo with a single set of terms. Their language was literally an amalgamation of language, gesture, and skin-changing colormood. It was an awkward way to talk, and a bit lengthy, but diplomatic. She knew the alien was on the edge of his version of sanity, given what he had just endured.
