One of the natives spoke the secret language of the ancient Earthers! They could understand me. It didn’t matter that she’d thrown a bunch of native speak in at the end. Things were looking up!
“Pick it up and cut everyone free,” I ordered, struggling to my feet through sheer strength. I grunted but got upright. There just weren’t enough Bugs yet to hold me down, at least not right at the moment. Grabbing one (as much for regaining balance as for attack), I tore its arm completely off.
“Do you think I’m a fool? Never!” shrieked the woman in a tone that could shatter glass. I couldn’t see her through all the Bugs swarming to overbear me. I had hoped for a better first reaction when I spoke to her for the first time, to be honest.
“Blast it, woman,” I cursed, pulling another bug off and throwing it to the floor where I crushed it with my boot until it stopped moving. “I’m fighting for my life here, and not just my own life, if you understand what I’m saying!” I bellowed in pain as a bug claw grazed my face, feeling more like a burning razor cut across my cheek than anything else. In the distance I heard the first shriek of pain as the little cutter Bugs reached the one of the prisoners and the native died screaming in agony. “Get over here and help before it’s too late,” I yelled as I staggered and fell to my knees.
“I’d rather die first, you dishonorable swine!” The answer was prompt and even more piercing than the last.
I couldn’t understand it. She would rather die than take up Bandersnatch and free herself and the others. I had let myself be blinded by her beauty. Clearly, the shirtless one was a head case. I shouldn’t have given the little viper a second look. I should have kept my head down and thrown the sword to someone else, anyone else, instead.
I had given up my only weapon when I threw her the blasted sword, and instead of being thankful she- then I remembered how she’d called it cursed. I hadn’t said anything of the kind, unless… Oh of all the stupid superstitious, cave-woman, sun-worshipping, nonsense, I had called Bandersnatch a 'cursed thing' when I tossed it to her. That must be why she thought I was ‘dishonorable’.
“I didn’t say that,” I grunted, struggling to get back to my feet. No rational person believed in actual curses, but maybe she would think I was lying if I told her the truth. She was just a primitive native after all. I hesitated and another prisoner screamed in a far corner of the room.
“Is it cursed like you said, or isn’t it,” she retorted, still sounding resolved but a bit less fanatical about it. I really wished I could look at her while we were talking, instead of shouting across the room as I faced away trying to hold off the Bugs.
I changed my mind about what to say, abandoning the truth in favor of what I thought she wanted to hear. People were dying, and I would say whatever it took to get her to free herself and save them, but when everyone was free and the Bugs taken care of, there was going to be a reckoning. I was seriously considering putting the boots to that crazy head case for letting people die out of superstitious hocus pocus. This didn’t even address how she had managed to successfully ruin my dramatic gesture. One where I had literally disarmed myself to save her and them!
“What I meant to say is that the sword only affects members of my family, The Montagnes,” I gasped, randomly grabbing a leg and crushing it in my grip. “You’ll be fine.”
“You offered me a sword. You’ll have to be more specific than that. What do you mean it only affects members of your family,” she asked, now genuine curiosity in her voice. I still hadn't seen her face.
“What is this, an interrogation about the history of some sword you’ve never seen or heard of before? At a time like this,” I yelled, striking out with my gauntleted fist and being rewarded with the sickly cracking sound of insectoid exoskeleton. I was actually managing to hold my own at this point, even while holding this insane conversation with an ungrateful prisoner.
Then the previously undamaged side of my face felt like it exploded in a crushing, burning sensation as a lucky claw tore through my cheek. I screamed in equal parts pain and surprise. Something had to change or I was going to die, that much had just become certain. “Alright, alright,” I yelled, searching for the words in a language I didn’t normally use conversationally. There was definitely going to be some payback when this was over… assuming we all survived. “Ever since the Founder, any member of the bloodline who’s owned it has come to a bad end. That’s why I was happy to get rid of it. Generals, bodyguards, even wives are okay. Anyone who's only collaterally linked to the Montagnes have gone on to do great things, for the most part.”
“What do you mean for the most part,” she demanded haughtily. The nerve on this woman!
I covered my head with an arm to protect against an incoming claw, and kicked the attacking bug against the wall. “About half the time,” I began, but at this point I was sure my voice was muffled by the floor and all the Bugs around me. I needed to keep this short and sweet. “It’s perfectly safe you crazy, superstitious WOMAN!”
It was at this point that I tripped over one of the smaller Bugs while sidestepping another soldier and fell to the deck. I yelled in surprise, but despite my best efforts, I failed to avoid the tide of incoming soldiers and found myself pinned beneath their massed bulk. I kept yelling until the cutters arrived, along with their crystal tipped cutting wheels.
I screamed as they started cutting on the armor of the battle suit.
Even with their crystal tipped cut-wheels, it took a while to cut through battle suit armor. Long enough that I started to hope against hope that Engineer Spalding had somehow upgraded the armor to the point it was impervious to the little wheels.
Hot fire in my leg followed by a terrible ripping and grinding sensation gave the lie to that pipe dream. Then there was nothing I could do but scream.
I was still screaming when a great wall of fire erupted all around me and I was forced down into the floor by the force of an explosion nearby. The force of the blast must have knocked the wind out of me, because while I still felt like I was screaming, no sounds came out of my mouth. A moment later, a great metal boot landed in the middle of my back, slamming me deeper into the floor. The burning bug carapaces that covered me made it impossible to see what was going on.
“The tracking device says we’re right on top of him,” said a voice I didn’t recognize, but he had a Caprian accent. “Do you think he’s up a level or down?”
“We’ll tear this ship apart until we find the Admiral,” said a voice I did recognize, it was Gants. “I don’t care how many Bugs we have to squish along the way. Remember Tomias!”
I struggled to lift my hands and wave them in the air. Was it the Armory crew come to save me? Don’t ask me how they managed, because I couldn’t imagine how they located me, let alone executed a plan which led them to, literally, my exact location. They had somehow survived and come down to get me.
“Tomias!” shouted several voices over their external suit speakers. I had no idea who Tomias was, but he obviously held some significance for the members of the attack team.
“Let's find the Admiral,” roared Gants and the weight on my back let up.
By now Bug remains and Bug fluids hot enough to boil started pouring down my neck and on my head. I had to get out from under the pile of Bugs I was covered in.
My screams were muffled by the smoking remains of a bug leg that got caught in my mouth. For some reason I couldn’t spit it out. Grunting, I gathered myself to heave my way up out of this smoldering mess, but another armored boot landed to push me back down.
“Good grief, Gants! There’s women in here,” exclaimed one of the armory crew.
“That one doesn’t even have a shirt,” remarked one of the men in what he probably thought was a quiet voice. However, he was wrong and the sound carried, even down under the pile of insect remains I was unable to extricate myself from.
Sweet Murphy, they were probably ogling that red headed pit viper while I was buried under burning Bug remains. Anothe
r series of heavy battle suit boots trod on me, pushing me further into the floor.
“Keep your tongue in your head, Oleander. These are probably the native prisoners the Bugs were planning to use for food,” growled Gants, “and get ready to blast a hole in the ceiling. But no more plasma grenades while there are unarmored civilians present.”
I squirmed and bucked as more boiling hot bug remains made contact with my exposed body. I hadn’t realized we’d brought along Oleander, the only man in the armory who managed to set off a sonic grenade by accident.
“I got a live one under here, Gants,” said another one of the armory crew. “It must have been shielded by the bodies of its friends.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll squish it for you,” said the voice of Oleander and a series of metal shod blows rained down on me as the Armory hooligan gave vent to his enthusiasm for bug killing.
“Blazes,” said another one of the crew, “One of the natives has a vibro-weapon."
“She’s hot,” said one of the armory crew.
“I always liked a woman with a blade,” said another.
I was completely disgusted. Here they were kicking their commander while he was down and drooling over that pit viper in human form, who had stood by and deliberately let that same commander get in this very position in the first place. That red head wasn’t a beautiful young woman, they were wrong about that; she was an insane, superstitious and primitive succubus who only waited until I was down to take action. They might not be aware of any of this at the moment, but they would get an earful as soon as I got out from under here.
“Hey! That’s the same vibro-blade I gave to the Admiral," remarked Gants, something between hope and fear in his voice. "He’s been here already!”
“Well, where is he now,” asked Oleander, pausing in his bug stomping assault. I was just lucky that so far he’d stomped my armored arms and body, not my head. If he had it would have been game over.
“Maybe they know,” said Gants.
The ensuing babble that followed masked my screams as I slowly hauled myself out of the pile.
For her part, the red headed demoness spoke to my men in the same secret Earther language I knew, but they couldn’t understand a word she said. I, on the other hand, could understand her just fine.
“I assume from your armor that you belong to either the same or a rival war-band. I hope you’re a rival band. Did you know there’s a warrior under that pile of dead monsters? You probably killed him when you made the big white fire. Although, if he somehow survived, he was almost certainly killed by all that stomping you Hoplites did to that pile of burnt monsters,” she said conversationally. “We should check, just to make sure of course.”
Oh, that witch. There was no way I was letting her ‘check on me’ with Bandersnatch. I didn’t care if Oleander started stomping again.
Adrenaline rushed through my body, dulling the pain and giving me strength. I slowly forced my way up.
Oleander must have been too busy ogling her assets to notice, because no one started stomping right away. Last time they started in as soon as I began to make progress. I still had hope as I poured every ounce of power-assisted muscle I had into the task of forcing my way out of the pile of corpses. I imagined that I appeared like some sort of macabre insect-man crawling from a womb-sac. Knowing it was a Victory or Death situation, I refused to give up and slowly pushed my way out of that pile of still burning bug remains.
They must have used a plasma grenade. Realizing this, my blood turned cold. If I hadn’t been shielded from the main blast by all those Bugs, I would certainly have been dead without my helmet.
The battle-suited figure I took to be Oleander was indeed ogling the tall red head alright. Only she didn’t have the sword on her. Superstitious to the bitter end, apparently. At that moment though, I didn’t care what she had done with it. I would deal with her later.
I hauled back and slammed my fist right into the side of Oleander’s helmet. He staggered and fell to one knee, but thanks to his helmet he wasn’t as affected as I’d hoped.
Using my armored foot, I knocked him over and started stomping on him while he used his arms to try to cover himself. I put the boots to him good and hard, ignoring the shouts of the armory crew as first they must have thought I was another Bug and then realized they’d just found their Admiral and he was in a murderous mood after having been stomped flat several times.
I put it to him until the burning pain in my leg registered, but it wasn’t half as long a thrashing as I wanted to deliver. His armor protected him from the worst of my blows, but as the pain in my leg registered, so did the terrible burns to my face and I slowed to a stop.
I stood there panting and heaving for air, while my men stood around me in a semi-circle. Through their face plates I could see open mouths.
“Are you done now,” asked the same female voice that had refused to cut herself or anyone else free unless I could convince her Bandersnatch wasn’t cursed. I had failed. Then I saw she had obviously changed her mind at some point, because I could see Bandersnatch out of the corner of my eye. She had probably grabbed it up as soon as she was certain I was down for good. I bared my teeth and growled in nearly uncontrolled fury.
Breathing hard, I looked over at the owner of the voice and was stunned. It wasn’t the well-endowed red head I had thought it was, but instead the golden haired ice maiden who hadn’t bothered to ask for help. And now that I could accurately put face to voice, she was the one who had tried to refuse it for her and everyone else. I realized I had been so focused on the red head that I'd ignored the possibility it could have been her blond haired wall-mate I’d been talking with.
“He’ll live, and so will I,” I answered her in the secret language of Earth. The sound of that hateful voice brought me out of the haze of intense pain I had just begun to feel.
She looked down at Oleander and back up at me. She grimaced in distaste as her eyes searched my face. “More’s the pity,” she said finally.
“We all have to live with our little disappointments,” I replied. If my eyes came equipped with laser beams, she would have been nothing but a smoking pile of human body parts right now.
“If you live, you’ll be horribly disfigured for the rest of your life,” she said harshly. “But it’s no worse than you deserve, deliberately offering a cursed sword like that.”
“Lady, in the name of every one of Demon-Murphy’s angry mechanical imps, you did not just say that,” I growled. Right at that moment I wasn’t an Admiral. I wasn’t a Governor or a Prince of the realm. I was just a very badly injured young man, one who had tried to save her ungrateful little life and this was how she repaid me.
“A demon summoner as well,” she said scornfully. “I should have expected it from a man like you.”
I tensed and almost raised my fist to punch a hole right through her head. I paused and grinned as I imagined that she might prefer to taste the same boots I had just put to Oleander instead. If there was one thing my Royal Vekna cousins had taught me, it was when you fight you have to put them down fast, and once they are down keep kicking until they beg for mercy.
At that moment I might as well have been back on the playground facing my old nemesis. This blond icy maiden might be the complete physical opposite of cousin Cordelia in just about every single way, but to my eye this woman had the same hateful demeanor and a willingness to kick a man when he was down. I recognized this as my chance to return the favor. My cousin might have had four years on me when we were growing up, but right now I was in battle armor.
It wasn’t any sense of chivalry that stopped me at the last moment. It was the realization that this wasn’t my cousin, combined with the knowledge that with the strength inside this armor I would only get one blow and then it would all be over. I took a deep breath, and as I calmed down I wasn’t even sure this evil witch, this pit viper in human form was worth the price of murder, but I was certain that using battle armor would make whatever I eventu
ally decided to do over too quickly.
So instead, I said the most hateful thing I could imagine right at that moment.
“I see you finally decided to use Bandersnatch after all,” I said, allowing a brief pause for the dig to sink in. Now was the time for the heavy artillery. “Was that before or after the Bugs stopped killing your people,” I asked, gesturing to the other natives.
First she went red and then white at my words. I savored every moment. “You’ll bleed for each of those words,” she breathed. Whatever else she was, she appeared to be brave enough to threaten a man in power armor.
She shook herself and half turned away. When she turned fully back to face me, she had her icy exterior on again. She had been trained, apparently.
“I should have known your accursed sword would have a name as well,” she said, holding herself rigidly erect. “Only the greatest of Evil Blades survive long enough to have names.”
Admiral Who? (A Spineward Sectors Novel:) Page 24
