A laser blade sprang out of the scepter, slicing through the air where Meg’s face had been before she dropped into a low zenkutsu stance. The blade charred into a trunk several meters behind her. Emnl shrieked. Meg used her momentum to lunge forward under the king’s guard. She swayed aside from his descending blade and pistoned a kick into his knee. Bone popped audibly. The king sprawled on the grass. The laser blade etched an arc of circuit-failure gray across the ceiling.
Emnl flung herself on her father, squealing in the sentrienza language. Meg stood up. The whole thing had taken about three seconds. She had been operating on sheer instinct. She didn’t know what had happened except that the king had tried to kill her. She stepped on his wrist and took the laser scepter out of his hand.
Emnl, kneeling beside her father, turned huge faceted eyes up to Meg. “He says we’re under attack!”
“Oh.”
“He says it’s your people!”
“My people?”
“The humans from the Unsinkable and the Indomitable! They have weaponized the drives of their ships. They were not allowed to bring any weapons into this system! They broke their word.”
Meg looked down at the king. He appeared to be a young sentrienza with a chiseled face and yellow hair, although Emnl said he was hundreds of years old. She hefted the laser scepter in her hand.
The ship juddered again. This time the shock threw Meg off balance. As she staggered, the king shoved his daughter aside, leapt up, and limped away. His Walking Gun—an unusually large and handsome model—raced up and offered him its shoulder to lean on. King and Gun vanished between the trees. A faraway door hissed.
Emnl squatted in the dog-like sentrienza pose. Yellow grass stains soiled her gi. “He was going to kill you.”
“I know.”
“You should have killed him.”
“What?”
“I hate him,” Emnl said. She stood up. Raising her head, she let out a high-pitched call. Her Walking Gun lolloped across the clearing to them. “I told him he must not kill you, because of our contract.”
That damn contract. Emnl brought it up whenever she wanted to nudge Meg back into line.
“Your father probably realizes the contract is meaningless,” Meg said.
“But it is not meaningless. It will be extremely useful to the sentrienza someday.”
Meg stared at her student and realized that she hated her. Hated her elfin face, her lavender braid, her backwards legs, everything about her.
Hiding the emotion, she said, “You said the Unsinkable and Indomitable have weaponized their drives. What exactly does that mean?”
“I’m not sure. Our hull is ... vanishing. It is being vaporized.”
“What? Fuck! The ship’ll depressurize!”
“We will be safe in here,” Emnl said complacently.
But there was someone else who wasn’t in here, and wasn’t safe. “Collie Mack.”
Meg stuck the laser scepter into the belt of her gi and sprinted for the exit.
*
COLM SAT ON HIS COT, listening to distant metallic screeches and thuds. That was either the noise of battle, or the Ruddiganmaseve’s hydraulics were suffering a spectacular malfunction. He wouldn’t mind which, if it meant his captivity was over.
The ship lurched, losing trim. The artificial gravity tried to compensate with sludgy pulses of heaviness.
A white-clad, black-haired figure burst into the outer cell. Bare feet whispered on the floor. “Get down,” Meg panted.
“What the hell’s going on?”
“I said get on the floor!”
He rolled off the cot, face down. Remembered being a kid playing hide-and-seek, small enough to lie down in the heather and just vanish. He remembered his father calling out for him: Colm, where ARE you ...
In the here and now, he smelt burning metal. He raised his head.
“I said stay down!”
An after-image of a dazzling green beam drifted across his closed eyes.
“OK, you can get up now.”
Noxious smoke tinged the air. Meg bounced on the balls of her feet, holding a golden stick. A U-shaped flap in the side of the Faraday cage lolled outward.
“Careful. It’s still hot.”
“How’d you do that?”
She brandished the golden stick. “Cuts through anything.”
Colm scrambled out through the hole. “Fill me in.”
“Later. We have to get to the suits.”
“What suits?”
“Jeez, Collie Mack, just come on!”
Colm had been unconscious when they brought him aboard, so the interior layout of the Ruddiganmaseve was a mystery to him. Meg seemed to know her way around. They jogged through gloomy, uneven-floored corridors. Red and yellow stripes meandered along the walls like stryolites in a cave. Rubbery, living stalactites hung from the ceilings. Colm wondered if the sentrienza might originally have been a cave-dwelling species. Not that it mattered. All he cared about right now was escaping.
A wind blew from a cross-tunnel.
“Ship’s depressurizing,” Meg said.
“What happened? Accident?”
She flashed a brief grin. “Yeah, an accident called Homo sapiens.” The grin vanished. “Can you do anything to save us? Like ... magic?”
“I would if I could, Meg.”
“Oh well.”
Colm’s thoughts pinballed from escape to death and back again. The wind whipped Meg’s hair around. She dashed it out of her face and turned away, bobbling the golden stick in her hand.
Colm caught up with her in two strides, spun her around and kissed her on the mouth. The impulsive action took him by surprise as much as it did Meg. Her body stiffened for a split second, and then she threw her arms around his neck, kissing him back. He gathered her closer, squeezed her bottom through the stiff karate gi.
She pulled away, a smile glowing in the near-dark.
“I’ve been wanting to do that for years,” Colm said. “I just never realized it.” He reached for her again.
She danced back, still smiling. “Stay classy, Mackenzie.”
“Sorry.”
“I’m not sorry. That was lovely. But you have to go. Now.” She gestured down the cross-tunnel. “If there are any EVA suits, they’ll be down in the hangar. If the hangar’s still there.” Her face turned serious. “You better make it, Collie Mack.” She took off running the other way, bare feet silent on the spongy floor.
“What about you?” Colm yelled after her.
“Got something to take care of,” she shouted without looking back.
Colm hesitated, feeling like he should go with her. But he was wearing boxer shorts and a t-shirt. He had no weapon. And Meg had made it clear countless times that she could look after herself. The best thing he could do for her and for himself right now was find those EVA suits.
He ran towards the hull breach.
CHAPTER 53
MEG EDGED TOWARDS THE last bend in the corridor that led to the blister. The reflected blue light of Juradis spilled around the corner.
Colm’s kiss lingered on her lips. His words burned like a little candle in her heart.
For the first time ever, she couldn’t detach from the grisly busness before her.
A Walking Gun trotted out of the blister. It stopped in front of Meg. Its jaws yawned.
She stabbed it in the maw with the laser saber. Its electronics smoked.
It tried to scythe her legs off, anyway, as she tiptoed past it, so she cut it in half. Its metal guts spilled out, coolant gushing like blood. The whine of expiring solid-state effectors sounded like a death rattle. Meg felt a pang of pity, although she knew it would’ve murdered her on command.
“Hello, Megumi,” said a buzzing, fluting voice from within the blister. “Do come in.”
Meg gave up any pretense of stealth. She walked into the blister and stopped in front of the throne that occupied the center of the room. It was a towering pile of skulls. On top sa
t a sentrienza female in a ragged pale gown so long that its skirts hung halfway to the floor. Meg had been introduced to Emnl’s mother before, and had been as polite as she knew how. This time, she did not curtsey. For one thing, she was dressed wrong.
“My daughter was right about you,” said the queen of Betelgeuse. “You do have hidden talents.”
The king sat beside the queen. The leg Meg had injured stuck out straight in front of him, splinted. He scowled at her. She smirked. “Want this back?” she said, holding up the laser scepter.
“I’ll have your head for my lady’s chair,” he hissed.
“Vengeance will not save us,” the queen chided her consort. “Megumi, instruct your people to cease and desist, ere they incur the undying wrath of the Sentrienza Emperor.”
“Cease and desist from what, exactly?” Meg said.
The queen gestured at the panoramic view of Juradis. It flashed and skipped back to the same view, an hour or so ago, judging by the position of the terminator.
Two ships inched across the dark side of Juradis.
“This is footage from an observation satellite in a higher orbit,” the queen said. “The larger ship is the Unsinkable. The other is the Azimaladruth, one of my frigates.”
The Unsinkable’s engine bells glowed dull red, then white. Meg expected it to surge away from the smaller ship. But that wasn’t what happened.
The gouts of exhaust from the Unsinkable’s engine bells separated into asymmetrical streams. These plasma ribbons bent outwards, then converged back to parallel beams. Widening slightly, they lanced across the void to the sentrienza frigate. They scribbled over its hull. Yellow-white arcs of ionized atoms leapt between the contact points. Vapor clouds bulged from the frigate’s hull.
The view skipped again. A few large pieces of wreckage drifted behind the Unsinkable.
“They have weaponized their drives,” the queen buzzed. “I suspect they installed drive magnets on the exhaust, separating the plasma into two streams: electrons in one, positive ions in the other. Even primitive drives like yours emit an exhaust plume that is very fast and tightly collimated. The magnetic field bends it into cones hundreds of klicks long. These exhaust cones are now impinging on the hull of the Ruddiganmaseve, generating arcs that vaporize the hull plates.”
Meg wanted to jump up and down cheering. Fierce pride in humanity filled her. The only problem was the Unsinkable and Indomitable’s assault seemed likely to kill her and Colm, too. The deck wobbled under her feet. She sidestepped to keep her balance, and imagined the ship literally disintegrating around them.
“We were not prepared for such ingratitude,” the queen said. “Our targeting capacity was destroyed within the first few seconds of the attack. You must talk to them, before we also lose our comms capacity.”
“But Your Majesty, what should I say?”
“Tell them that we love them.” The queen’s face brightened. A membrane slid over her eyes, hiding the facets, presenting the appearance of lustrous blue orbs. A sweet smile completed the angelic transformation. “Have we not carefully nurtured humanity for hundreds of years? Have we not risked much to raise you up from your primitive state? When our researchers dwelt in mounds on the surface of Earth, guiding your progress along the road of civilization, you called us faeries. You were properly grateful then.”
Meg’s jaw dropped. She stared in shock at the smiling sentrienza.
At the faerie queen.
It all made sense now. The mounds. The gifts. The obsession with repayment.
“So ...” she said, weakly. “Why don’t you just, like ... magic the hull back together?”
The queen’s mask of sweetness made the buzzing timbre of her voice even more grotesque. “There is no such thing as magic.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” Meg said.
“Oh, it was easy to make you believe, in your primitive state, that a nano-assembler was a magic cookpot, or that electroplated straw had turned into gold, or that a trip to another planet was a journey to faerieland. But it was not magic. It was only technology beyond your ken. When we re-introduced ourselves as aliens, you happily adopted the same technologies under different names.”
Meg said, “So why are you so scared of ... ssguriybats?”
The king said, “Scared? My forebears slew many a ssguriybat.” He smiled with nostalgic pride. “We hunted them down and wiped them out to the last man and woman.”
“Except you didn’t,” Meg said, finally understanding why the sentrienza had put Colm in a Faraday cage. “A few of them escaped, didn’t they? And their descendants are still alive today.”
The queen dipped her head. “The universe is unpredictable. No one, not even us, foresaw the Ghosts. Now, the last surviving ssguriybats represent our only hope of containing the Ghosts before they consume the galaxy.”
“So even you can’t stop them?”
“Oh, we could annihilate every world they have occupied. Including Earth. Is that how it is to be, Megumi? Is that what you humans want? It is what you will get, if you do not cease your stupid, impetuous rebellon! You have only glimpsed the little finger of the sentrienza’s power. Our empire spans a hundred thousand light years. We could turn Earth into a radioactive wasteland. Even then, I fear, the Ghosts would escape, and reappear elsewhere, like a pestilence. But humanity would not. Humanity would be a fading memory, a cautionary tale for our other client peoples. Is that what you want?”
The queen’s rage battered at Meg like a gale. And then the gale dropped to a melancholy breeze.
“That is not what we want, Megumi. We had such high hopes for you. With our help, you could have risen high in the Emperor’s favor. You are creative, cruel, spiritual, individualistic, ambitious—you already surpass the mara and shablags, and could have surpassed the queazels in another century or so. You were to be first among our protégés. The only hitch was that little matter of the ssguriybats ... but even they could have become an adornment of the Emperor’s court, once they were properly controlled. Will you throw away this future?”
Meg breathed deeply, drawing on her karate training to center herself. The queen was terribly persuasive. It wasn’t magic, of course. Just practice.
But Meg had her own practice, and now she invoked the confidence that karate gave her, the awareness that she was complete in herself, without the need to lean on any alien benefactor, or any man. She straightened her spine.
“Your Majesty,” she said, “we have a word for what you’re offering. It’s called enslavement. And I can confidently speak for my whole species when I say: Go fuck yourself.”
She thumbed the laser scepter on, and hurled herself towards the throne. She still believed in honor, justice, and all that good stuff.
CHAPTER 54
THE SHIP WAS COMING to pieces around Colm. Rubbish blew past him down the twisting corridor. He didn’t have an EVA suit, and he suspected the hangar Meg had mentioned was long gone. An evil yellow-white glare flashed in the darkness ahead.
He clung to pitted bumps on the wall. Hauled himself back the way he’d come. Tried to ignore his shortness of breath, the panicky feeling that he couldn’t fill his lungs, the increasing pressure in his ears.
His fingers found a door. A valve.
He clawed at it until it parted, spilling him onto ...
... grass?
Air roared over his back. Straining against the gale, the valve managed to close itself.
Colm lay on his face, panting like a dog. After a while the black spots cleared from his vision.
He sat up.
Yellow grass. Gray trees. Gray sky. Toadstools.
Toadstools?
Something like that. Pulsating red growths around the roots of the trees.
“Jesus,” he said aloud. “I’m loving this ship more and more every minute.”
“Really?” said a sentrienza voice. “I hate it.”
A small, grayish face peeped between the tree trunks. The body that belonged to it wore sti
ff white pyjamas. For a second Colm hoped the sentrienza was wearing an EVA suit. Then he saw it was just a karate outfit like Meg’s, with a green belt instead of a black one.
Long shivers rolled through the Ruddiganmaseve. Leaves and twigs fell.
“Love it or hate it, it’s falling apart under us,” Colm said. “Do you know if there are any EVA suits? Or better yet, a survival capsule, a lifeboat, that sort of thing?”
The little sentrienza’s face set in a pout. “We will be safe here.”
Colm had seen this kind of denial before, on Ghost-besieged worlds. Colonists had been told they would be safe if they stayed put, and so they stayed put until the Ghosts came for them. Colm no longer feared the Ghosts the way he used to. But he did fear space. The implacably hostile vacuum. The cold. He had always had a horror of dying in a decompression event.
The sentrienza edged closer. A Walking Gun followed at her heels. “You’re the ssguriybat, aren’t you?”
“The what?”
“The magician.”
“No,” Colm said with a sigh. The Walking Gun circled him, hackling.
“My mother says there used to be a lot of ssguriybats on Earth, but now there are very few. She thought there were none. But I knew what you were. I got frightened and sent you away. She was cross with me for that.”
“I know, I know, everything’s all my fault.”
“And in the end she caught you, anyway. I am sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry for, lass.”
The ship shook violently. The little sentrienza lost her footing. She landed on the grass beside Colm with the first stirrings of terror in her eyes.
“This room may be specially shielded, but it isn’t going to hold out forever,” Colm shouted, over the groaning of stressed metal. “Is there no emergency kit at all?”
The sentrienza girl pointed. Colm dashed that way, pinballing off the tree trunks. He reached the wall. The ship bucked, throwing him around like a rat in a bucket. He saw a promising hatch and battered on it until it gave.
A first aid kit. Jesus, that was a lot of help. Bandages, quick-clotting gel, suture packs, single-use syringes, folding splints ...
The Chemical Mage: Supernatural Hard Science Fiction (The Tegression Trilogy Book 1) Page 32
