by Aaron Crash
Xerxes, though, gasped his fearful bewilderment through comms. “Uhhhhh…ohhhhh…my.”
“Elle, you dance with the hydra-thing, since it’s the biggest, and you’re out of your pinche mind. I’ll take the T. rex with the pincher and the tentacles. Ling, those velociraptors are all yours. Cali, sic Xerxes. Sic him, girl. Sic him.”
Cali’s screaming growls filled comms, making them all wince. She did that on purpose. In her wolf state, she was evil on so many levels.
Fernando’s voice clicked in his ears. “And what shall we do here in the Lizzie Borden?”
“Pick a target and blast the shit out of it!” Then Blaze engaged the T. rex. He dipped his starcycle down in an unexpected move, then jammed it upward. He triggered the plasma guns, peppering the T. rex’s crotch, belly, and chest. Bits of the thing were either turned to slag or were torn off to float into space. At the last second, he fired a fusion blast into the thing’s head. Half of its lower jaw was blown loose as teeth went flying. It still had most of its maw, though. It chomped at Blaze, but he flew through the teeth and swirled up and spun around, on top of the thing’s head.
He whipped Ugly Betty out of a customized nanotech sheath on the bike and blasted a hole in the T. rex’s head. Metal glowed, turning to molten blood. The thing was stunned for a minute, which allowed Blaze to go riding upward and out of range. He slammed his shotgun into the sheath, worked the action, and chambered another hydrogen shell. This wasn’t his first fight on his starcycle, and he’d fiddled with getting the nanotech combat equipment just right.
A tentacle licked up at him. Instead of shooting the twisting limb made from spaceship parts, he snatched up his ax and ignited the fusion blade. He swept the ax through the arm; it was too thick to cut through, but he did gouge out a big chunk.
The pincher claw clipped the back of his starcycle, but he was going too fast for it to do much damage. It knocked him around a bit, the starcycle careening wildly, but the nanotech fused his legs to the cycle, holding him in place. He had to drop his ax, but it stuck to the side of the cycle, the nanobots latching on to it automatically. He narrowly got his bike back under control and sped away, dodging space debris, until he could turn it around.
The T. rex was hurt, but it was swimming through space, coming at him, one-eyed, most of its lower jaw gone and its tentacle barely attached to its body. Still, no telling how much damage Blaze would need to deal out before he disrupted enough of the Onyx energy to turn the thing back into inert wreckage.
He had a minute to survey the battle. A fusion torpedo struck the hydra, blowing off several long tentacles. The engine mouths blew out long streams of blue plasma. Blue-engine breath blasted Lizzie’s shields, leaving her piecemeal hull intact. However, instead of the tentacles being dead, they reattached themselves to the monster as more grew from them. Unlike the T. rex, the hydra monster could regenerate.
Elle on her starcycle turned to the side and sliced a katana blade along the neck of one of the heads, cleaving it in half. She then drove the bike up and around and used her fusion cannon to blow through the head she’d split.
But like the Hydra in Greek mythology, two new heads rose from the wreckage, smaller, but each still had the blue-fire mouths, round and puckered. Both heads breathed fire on Elle, but she was quick with her Onyx magic. The energy of her shield spell repulsed the attack.
If the hydra could regrow limbs…that was a problem. But first things first.
Ling, on his starcycle, had one fusion nunchaku whirling. He struck a flying velociraptor charging down on him, then triggered his cannon. He blasted through another then another. He had the cannon’s settings on multiple attacks, so he’d get six shots out of each hydrogen shell loaded on his bike. Blaze and Elle kept their cannons on single-shot to deal out as much damage as they could with each pull of the trigger on their handlebars.
Blaze didn’t have time to see how Cali was doing against Xerxes. The T. rex was closing in.
He fired his cannon into the dinosaur, blowing a leg clean off, and then the Onyx-infused metal dinosaur was on him, tentacle lashing out, the pincher claw, that huge mouth, and all those teeth coming toward him. Even without a lower jaw, those teeth could impale him.
Blaze used Ugly Betty to blow off the tentacle. Thankfully, nothing new grew back. The pincher chomped down on his starcycle, and this time it caught the back end, crushing the engine.
The T. rex opened its mouth. Though half of the lower jaw was gone, there were still enough teeth left to chomp Blaze in half. A viscous fluid, black and tacky, leaked from various severed hoses from the thing’s damaged jaw. The liquid formed black bubbles in space.
Staring down the throat of the beast, Blaze saw Human bodies twisted into the wreckage. He remembered the New Oberlin security team who had been caught in the cyborg octopus back in the impound tower. An arm dangled from pinched metal. A bloody torso had metal shoved through where the belly button should be. Half a face was split by the metal from a starship. One dead eye looked down on Blaze. The corpse’s mouth was open as if it wanted to warn Blaze of what was to come.
People had been in the starship graveyard orbiting the caged neutron star. Were there any still alive? Obviously not in the creatures that Xerxes had created.
Blaze abandoned his starcycle and climbed into the mouth of the thing as the jaws came down. Metal plunged into his armor, driving sharp steel through the nanotech and into his back. Pain blocked his vision for a minute, but this was not the time to lose consciousness. Ax in hand, he triggered the blades. Right-handed, he maneuvered until he had enough room to get a good chop. The glowing yellow-white crescents came crashing down to slice through the remainder of the lower jaw. Now the T. rex had only the top part of his mouth, but a stalactite-like tooth punctured Blaze’s armor and stabbed into his shoulder. Before it could tear his arm off, Blaze flipped around, got his feet on the roof of the beast’s mouth, and kicked away.
Floating in space, he worked the action of the shotgun and Ugly Betty did the rest. Direct hit, the fusion blast tore through the head of the T. rex, decapitating the beast and doing enough damage to kill it. The legless, tentacle-less hulk went silent as it knocked into a random ship and other debris. Dead, the T. rex floated away.
The nanotech armor covered the puncture wound, so Blaze’s suit wasn’t depressurizing, but his starcycle had been destroyed, leaving him stranded in space.
He could move short distances using the CO2 tanks in his suit, but he had to get back into the fight. He did a quick check of his team’s VHI. All were at a hundred percent except for him. That was good news; he didn’t mind taking all of the damage as long as his crew was safe. An explosion sent pieces of debris flying from the battle with the hydra. Elle’s VHI dipped below fifty percent. Dammit, now his sister was hurt.
Xerxes must’ve been having a hard time with Cali because his velociraptors were running instead of fighting. The archduke must’ve lost control of those creatures. Ling chased after them, blowing them away one after another.
A long piece of cable from the innards of the ruined T. rex floated close, and Blaze latched onto it. A crazy idea formed in his head. Crazy ideas were the very best kind of ideas to have in battle.
“Ling,” Blaze said into comms, “can you drive those velociraptors toward me?”
“Affirmative, Gunny. I would imagine you would call this in Terran terms, ‘shooting skeet.’”
“Pull, pendejo,” Blaze said, smiling.
Ling turned his starcycle and herded the fleeing velociraptors toward Blaze. The gunnery sergeant, floating, took out one with Ugly Betty. He jacked another hydrogen shell into the shotgun and took out another, then another. His empty hydrogen shells tumbled, weightless, around him.
He then let one of the beasts come close, and he lassoed the cable around the thing’s neck. Partially running, partially venting gas, the man-sized metal lizard took off, taking Blaze along with it. He managed a kind of rein for the thing, pulling this way and that,
and managed to get the creature to drag him toward the hydra. More than a dozen heads, all tipped with round blue-fire breathing engine mouths, sprouted from the thing. Maybe a hundred metal tentacles had grown from the round belly of the foul beast.
Elle’s starcycle had been destroyed, and she floated in front of the thing as the Lizzie Borden strafed it with her theta-particle cannons. Trina and Fernando were aiming for the space between the heads and the tentacles, scoring the metal and doing damage without creating new heads or limbs.
Blaze blew the head off the velociraptor in front of him and drifted next to Elle. She turned. Blood covered her face from a cut on her forehead.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Right as rain,” she replied. “I keep trying to cast my stasis spell, but the monster thing keeps wrecking my concentration with engine blasts and those goddamn tentacles. Can you cover me?”
“Sure can,” he said. “But I’m a little worried that our fusion weapons aren’t putting the damn thing down. Usually, Onyx shit doesn’t like it when we hit it with star power.”
“Different ballgame,” Elle spat. “This is an archduke of hell we’re fighting, and he’s imbued this puta with a ton of Onyx.”
Six of the hydra’s heads whirled around it, acting as the engine as the other six swiveled to face Blaze and Elle. The creature’s tentacles, a hundred at least, flapped once then clapped down on the hydra’s sides, making it streamlined as it ripped through space focused on Elle and Blaze.
Two fusion torpedoes hit the thing in the gut, and more tentacles sprouted from where they’d hit.
“Elle!” Blaze pushed her back and hit his CO2 tanks which sent him zooming toward the oncoming horror.
Most of the thing’s tentacles were scraps of metal, but a few had been wired together from severed Human, Meelah, and Clicker arms and legs. Cables attached different-sized legs to a variety of arms, but all had Human hands at the end of the nightmare lengths of cobbled-together flesh.
The crimson eyes on all the dragon heads narrowed on Blaze.
This was it. He was going to be toasted into a crisp by the engines and mouths, but if Cali got to Xerxes, and if Elle could cast her spell, it would be worth it.
They would get the location of the Onyx Gate, find Granny and Arlo, and restore peace to the galaxy by shutting off the Onyx energy gushing into the universe.
His sacrifice would be worth it.
The fleshy tentacle yanked Blaze’s shotgun out of his hands and sent it swirling away through space. Blaze lifted his ax in both hands, going to meet the thing fusion blades first.
Elle growled out a spell behind him, and the power of it sent a shockwave of energy through him, into the hydra, and in a heartbeat, the blue-fire engines blinked off, and the thing went inert. Dead, it struck Blaze, but he was able to walk across the metal and bodies until he was standing on its back.
Elle sighed. Her voice was weary. “Holy mojo, Blaze, that hurt, but I froze it. For now.”
All of the blue-fire engines had been extinguished, but a few of the faces trapped in the metal were moving, eyes blinking, mouths opening and closing, nostrils flaring. Some of the arms moved of their own volition. A tentacle made up of Meelah parts lifted, gathering strength.
Vibrations shook Blaze through his armored feet.
“Not dead, Elle,” Blaze said.
“Trapped. In stasis.” Elle paused to cough. She muted it but then turned her volume up to gasp, “Inside it. Onyx energy inside it. It’s how it’s regenerating. Gotta get to the middle of it.”
While the thing was paralyzed, they had a chance. If it came alive again, however, he wasn’t sure Elle could cast another stasis spell.
Blaze lifted his ax and brought it down into the hatchway. The door split open in a sizzle of metal. He jumped in. The hole stopped in a tangle of crossbars. He hacked his way through there and found another corridor, this one a little longer. He floated down past corpses, parts, and starship junk—even saw some children’s mutilated faces in the mix.
That bastard. That demonic bastard. But had the kids been dead before Xerxes got to them? Blaze thought of the ghost guy in the relic, his wife, and his daughter. They had been research scientists. Most likely, the dead people had been dead a long time. But the way Xerxes was using them, it was just plain sick.
Blaze ejected the used hydrogen shell from his ax handle and shoved in another. He was back to hacking through metal and corpses, going for the core of the thing.
The insides of it were moving now as the hydra fought Elle’s stasis spell to come back online. Blaze was thrown to the wall and into the pliant flesh of a woman long dead. He tumbled forward and away. An elevator shaft angled down into darkness.
Blaze paused. He had no idea what was below. His helmet lights didn’t do squat to help him.
His sister’s voice erupted in his ears. “Blaze, the blue-fire engines are lighting. If you’re gonna get there, you need to get there now and put your ax through its heart.”
Blaze punched his CO2 exhaust tanks and was blown down into the tunnel, ax out in front. Arms—at least a hundred of them—blocked his way, covering the hole. Children’s arms, big meaty hairy arms, the slim arms of women with wedding bands on fingers and tennis bracelets around wrists.
He wished he had his shotgun. His ax would have to do.
The arms were animated, reaching, clutching, sticking out from the walls. Below them was a glowing red pulsating blob of pure Onyx energy. If he sank his ax into the shimmering jelly-like mass, it would kill the hydra.
The gunny spun about and headed ax-first into the arms.
Most of the dead fingers on the hands skittered harmlessly off his armor. A few seized plates, and he had to cut them off with his ax. But there were too many, too strong. He was fixed in place, and he couldn’t move. He thrashed as much as the hydra itself, coming back to life.
Fusion bolts fried flesh, one, two, three blasts. Ling in his diminutive armored spacesuit was at the top of the elevator shaft. Blaze was freed long enough to get his ax around. He poked the twin crescents of sun-fire energy forward, cutting arms, hands, and fingers off the mindless clasping limbs.
And then he was free to shoot down and take out the core.
But something else was there already.
Cali slashed through the shuddering ball of red jelly with her claws. The hydrogen shells in her bracelets had lost power—or maybe she had closed them—but her natural talons were enough to shred the core and kill the hydra.
Then the fury in Cali’s gleaming golden eyes locked onto a new target. Blaze. She knifed forward, pushing off the round heart chamber of the hydra. She streaked toward him, claws first. Most of her fur had been burned off, showing pink skin underneath, but other than that, her flesh was intact. Spit flecked her gleaming white fangs before turning into floating bubbles in the vacuum.
Blaze’s heart stuttered to a stop in his chest. Cali would leave him in tatters, probably gnaw off his flesh to the bone. Unless. He saw the Cali Bad Dog trigger and activated it. The bracelets overrode Cali’s manual controls and snapped shut.
The energy in the moon rocks couldn’t irradiate her cells, and so Cali immediately began to change. She began to shrink, and the fur on her body disappeared even as her hands shrank from rending claws to normal Human fingers, nails clipped short. Her pointed face relaxed into her slightly upturned nose and the full mouth that had such a cute crooked smile. She wasn’t smiling now. Her eyes went from gold to green, and the tears started.
The nanofiber recognized the danger she was in and spread across her body, covering her until she was back in her armor, complete with helmet, visor, and boots. She was back to being a young woman when she reached Blaze.
Blaze held her while she sobbed, the horror of the transformation, of being an unstoppable lycanthropic monster, overwhelming her.
“It’s okay, Cali,” he soothed. “It’s okay. Tell me you tore Xerxes apart. Tell me you left him so wounded that he can’t mo
ve. We took care of his necrotechnical shit. So give me good news.”
Cali quieted and then whispered, “I’d rip off an arm, and he’d build a new one. He cast every spell at me, and some hurt, but not for long. He didn’t have any silver. He’s awful, Blaze. Whatever Xerxes is, at its core, it’s awful. Touching him made me sick even as I clawed him. And then when I was about to bite off his head, he teleported away. Gone. I heard Elle’s call to help, and I still had a little control, but not much. Blaze, if you hadn’t closed my bracelets, I would’ve killed you. I wanted to kill you. Part of me still does. Keep me caged, Blaze. Keep me caged on the Lizzie so I don’t hurt anyone. You should just kill me. Or I should kill myself.”
Cali had full comms on, so everyone heard what she had said.
Blaze changed a setting so it was just the two of them talking.
Without the Onyx energy keeping the hydra’s body together, it was slowly coming apart, unraveling into starship debris, trash, and corpses. The arms from the elevator shaft drifted away.
Ling saw they were having a moment, so he jetted off using his CO2 exhaust tanks.
Blaze felt his heart ache at the idea of her suicide. “No, Cali. We need you. It’s not easy…what you have to go through…and I’m not sure I could do it, but we need you. And we’ll keep you caged. And we’ll keep you safe. We can figure this out. You’re a part of my team, maybe the most important part.”
“Team?” Cali asked quietly through comms. “Or family?”
There was that word again. “Let’s say friends for now. You’re a part of us, whatever the ‘us’ is called. We need you. Please, stay strong. If we can close the Onyx Gate, there will be less evil energy around, and your transformations will be less frequent and less intense. And Elle just might find a spell to cure you. Anything is possible.”
Cali was still in his arms, letting him hold her. The crying was over, and now she would sleep. The energy expenditure of becoming a wolf, fighting like Satan himself, and then transforming back into being Human took a deadly toll on her.
