“Ah, I see you’ve reset the clock,” Gaffon said with an even crueler smile. “Must be in the mood for additional negotiations.”
“Just curious how you’ve kept your cool this long,” Skyhawk replied. “I’m thinking your bioprinter is so primitive, when it stuffs you into this body, it can’t totally flush out the personality of the one you’re trying to take over. And it’s her cool you’re relying on. Such a fragile, tenuous grip on control of the Tinka. And what, the body you’ve been occupying all these years, is learning how to reject you better and better over time, no matter how you tweak your cloning device? She’s alive, isn’t she, in there?”
Gaffon’s eyes literally glowed red. Her hands cutting into the metal-polymer of her chair, revealing an unexpected strength for her petite body.
Skyhawk nodded with understanding. He’d just been talking out his ass so far, but the more he got a rise out of her, the more he realized he’d guessed right from among any number of explanations for her desperation to get her hands on their bioprinters.
“Looks like your time is running out, primitive.” Her voice sounded less masked, perhaps because the longer she stayed in this body, the more it hacked its way out from under her control, as he’d predicted. The voice sounded filtered through a rebreather now, partly mechanical—like her strength.
Skyhawk took another shot at what was going on. “To hold on to this niche the Tinka have crawled their way into in the universal economy, your race had to find some way of keeping their cool, long enough at least to do their finesse work on the technology they upgrade. Let me guess, this was achieved by contemplating revenge, which, as we both know, is best served cold. You can dial down your rageaholic tempers if you genuinely feel wronged, long enough to exact your revenge. But we haven’t wronged you, have we? No wonder you’re fighting to keep your cool.”
“Listen, you little Rada turd,” she barked, leaping out of the chair, and ripping the lines connecting her head to the ship. She’d lost mind control of her vessel, at least temporarily.
“Now,” Skyhawk said.
Ariel teleported the Starhawk out of the block, coming up behind Gaffon’s ship, and firing at the same time—before Gaffon could bark any orders to her crew.
“You fool!” she shouted as her vessel went up in flames, and she splattered across their windshield.
Another of the Tinka ships decloaked, this one, just to look at it, a clearly more advanced vessel. Satellite was already porting over the specs on it to Skyhawk’s mindchip.
Skyhawk realized his mistake too late. That Gaffon was from the more primitive world that Sonny had visited. He’d been played. The Nautilus that had been keeping a close eye on Sonny, to make sure Leon didn’t get played to get them all this information… And all for what? So Skyhawk could make such a rookie mistake!
The latest Gaffon on the big screen, smiled satisfiedly at him, as her ship’s lasers crippled the Starhawk’s shields before Finesse could jump space. And Finesse couldn’t jump space without her shields. “So nice of you to offer up your bioprinter,” she said.
“Knowing what we know about you now,” Skyhawk spat, “Leon will never let you leave the Gypsy Galaxy with tech that could only serve to empower your madness further.” That was his signal to the Finesse chief supersentience to relay everything going on here to Leon and to all interested parties on the Nautilus crew, if it hadn’t already.
“I think you’re confused about who is letting who do what,” Gaffon said.
Skyhawk, wasn’t it you joking about how Omega Force could never get the most out of a Starhawk? Only the techies of Alpha Unit could possibly… Well, you’re running out of time to put your brains where your mouth is.
“Careful, Gaffon,” Skyhawk smiled back with the same amount of menace. “Wouldn’t want to damage your precious cargo.
He nodded to Ariel. With mindchip to mindchip communication, that’s all he really had to do. Not only did she blow up their bioprinters, Satellite put the video feed on Gaffon’s big screen monitor for her, easily hacking her COMMS.
“I love to win even when I’m losing,” Skyhawk taunted.
Gaffon leaped out of her captain’s chair, shrieking.
“Is that what passes for a primal scream with the Tinka?” Skyhawk laughed.
Ariel tore into the Tinka ship with everything the Starhawk had to throw at it.
“Think fast or die, Gaffon!” Skyhawk laughed.
She coveted the bird in the bush, but the bird in hand was one of the Tinka’s more sophisticated ships and she couldn’t let the Starhawk pick it apart. Her shields would hold just long enough for her to blow the Finesse apart. This was the first time Skyhawk had been forced to experience winning by way of losing. While it was better than simply losing, it left a bitter taste in his mouth. The next bioprinted Skyhawk would carry his memories—including this, the memory of failure, of having his hands forced, of at least once not having walked away from a battle unscathed. What would that do to his ego? He’d never had to think his way out of a trap before except from a place of complete cockiness. What if his font of inspiration dried up the second that confidence was the least bit shaken? And this battle was just getting started. These Tinka bastards were just getting warmed up. He could sense it. They would work themselves into a froth in no time, like rabid dogs. It was who they were.
There was no more time for self-flagellation.
Gaffon, in a rage, had struck back. Screaming like a true beserker the whole time for having to sacrifice her prize. Evidently she didn’t like losing in winning any more than Skyhawk liked winning in losing.
The Finesse blew. Skyhawk’s last image was of the people he loved most in this world, Satellite and Ariel, turning to Roman candles before his eyes. They turned back to face him as if to cement their bond even in death. Techa! That just made things worse. He got to see their eyes jiggling in their sockets before exploding out of their skulls at him. As if Gaffon was determined to use his own people as a weapon against him if that was the only way she could gain satisfaction.
As things went dark for him, Skyhawk could still hear Gaffon screaming in his ear, her outrage unquenchable, and immutable even over the sounds of the exploding Finesse.
***
THE STARHAWK CAPTIVA
“It’s just not possible,” Skyhawk said, bolting up from his captain’s chair. “Someone’s hacked your COMMS, trying to mess with our heads. It’s a psyops game, no more.”
“Nope.” Satellite pressed some buttons on his console and brought up an image of the Nautilus, its entire breezeway wrapping around the tropical jungle in the courtyard turned into an open-air hospital ward. Numerous copies of the nuns were caught up in surgery. Her robots were responding to her downloads on just how to operate on Theta Team’s one-of-a-kind super-soldier bodies. When Skyhawk realized that this scene was repeating on every deck of the Nautilus, he collapsed into his chair.
As if to drive home his point, Satellite zoomed in on a clone of Skyhawk on the Nautilus, on one of the decks turned into a MASH unit. That Skyhawk was bitching from his gurney, in the same state of denial that this Skyhawk aboard the Captiva was now.
***
THE NAUTILUS
DECK 4, INNER MOST HALL PROXIMATE TO COURTYARD
“The severed arm is not real, you moron!” Skyhawk barked at the nun. She looked up from his arm, cut off at the elbow, the blood loss stemmed by the nanites in his bloodstream alone. “You’ve been hacked, you cloistered ninny! We all have! This is all one big psyops game. Wake the hell up!”
“You think I would allow anyone to hack you, precious one, or anyone on the Nautilus?” the nun replied. “It is one of the things I was designed to ensure never happened. When Mother is too preoccupied to handle the job personally, I pick up the charge of her humanoids. Now, shush, and let me do my work. You’re too valuable to us to tolerate having you offline, which is why I’m tending to you personally. I’m afraid it’s right back into the mix you go.”
Skyhawk regarded her with eyes of terror. Techa help him if she was right. He was no soldier, despite all the training they’d tried to inculcate him with. He relied on his genius to keep the war effort well clear of ever doing serious impact to him, keep it at the level of a video game. That was the entire essence of his genius: Refusing to let any of this get too real.
And it had just gotten all too real.
He flared up against the restraints, sitting up, despite the robots gently trying to hold his head to the gurney being used as an operating table. “Do you know who you’re talking to? If I say you’ve been hacked, you’ve been hacked!” He felt the wind go out of his yawl sails. He could hear the last of it escape his lungs, too weak to blow up a child’s balloon. Who did he think he was talking to? The nun was right. On certain matters, she was unassailable.
The more he realized it, the more he fought against the restraints, cursing up a storm.
The nun just nodded at her robot operating assistant, looking like an animated Swiss Army knife, to inject him with a tranquilizer.
***
THE CAPTIVA
Skyhawk gulped. He could read the face of his clone on the gurney aboard the Nautilus being operated on by the Nun; he knew the reason for the terror as if he lay sprawled on that gurney himself.
“No more time to catch you up, buddy,” Satellite said. “We’re under attack. You’ll never guess by whom.”
The Starhawk lurched back and up, as if caught in a tsunami, only they weren’t at sea, throwing everyone from their seats.
“Get me the stats on that ship!” Skyhawk blurted. “Or at least what it was designed for before the Tinka got their hands on it.”
He should have known better to just save his breath. Satellite had already downloaded the this latest Tinka ship’s specs to his mindchip.
Lovely. It was every bit the match for the Captiva. And that was before the Tinka figured out how to upgrade it further. What’s more, The Captiva’s chief super-sentience had been ordered to power down by Mother, since the mission of ship and crew was to buy time for Leon’s big move; that was all. For once, Skyhawk was paying for his cockiness. No doubt Leon thought Alpha Unit could handle whatever came their way, supersentiences be damned.
“Let’s not hang around waiting to be fired on!” Skyhawk blurted.
Again, he could have saved his breath. Gabriel, another Alpha Unit techie, manning the navigation console, was peeling the Captiva away. Motown, on weapons, was firing back at Gaffon’s latest ship—a Wasp she’d managed to get her hands on from the Klash—the entire time.
It was surely more advanced than the ship that took out the Starhawk clone, the Finesse, Skyhawk had seen get blown to hell on his smart-screen portal to the stars.
“What was that sound!” Skyhawk recognized how unglued he felt just by the loudness of his voice.
“Numerous disks have magnetized to the hull,” Ariel explained from her science station. “Mines, perhaps?”
“Nope,” Satellite said. “They’re Robot warriors, unfolding origami-like. They’re breaching the hull, no doubt intending to do the same with us.”
Motown swiveled in his chair toward Skyhawk. “Em, we brought that big hulking guy, Patent, along, right?”
Skyhawk sighed and collapsed into his captain’s chair. “No, we did not.” He knew what they were thinking. Even with their nano-enhancements, and the hive minds that included combat protocols, no one beat Omega Force for hand-to-hand combat. There might be some Alpha Unit cadets who could put on a good show, but Skyhawk had no idea if they were aboard and if there were enough to do the trick. His split-second mindchip data mining of the issue suggested: maybe.
“I doubt we’re going to live long enough for them to get to us,” Ariel said, watching the breaching of the hull put up on the big screen. “They’re being very judicious about tearing through life support systems, weapons systems… they know our vulnerabilities.”
“Thank you, Captain Obvious!” Skyhawk shouted. Then in the lull following the wave of emotions, before the ocean of his feelings could dump another wave ashore… “Wait, fire the tachyons!”
“The what?” Motown asked.
Satellite echoed the sentiment. “You know they’re just theoretical particles, right? Just because the math says they’re possible…”
“Mother and I built a device to see if there was anything to this line of pseudo-science b.s. I guess we’re about to find out.” Skyhawk realized he didn’t sound any more confident than they did. “Fire the tachyons! I’ll be damned if I’m done in by a foldout dinette set!”
The robots did look bare bones, and as if they couldn’t possibly fit much programming inside their heads besides the one objective they’d been given.
“Firing tachyons,” Ariel said, sounding as if someone was asking her to get back in the boxing ring after taking the beating of her life—without the gloves on, and fighting blind with two puffy eyes.
They watched the film rewind on the big screen monitor. “Now, fire whatever we’ve got that will blow that ship to hell,” Skyhawk screamed, “right through the tachyon burst!”
Ariel did as requested.
Skyhawk couldn’t believe his own eyes. The tachyons—only speculative up until now—really did travel faster than light—which meant they traveled back through time, allowing their Starhawk to mortally wound Gaffon’s vessel.
Her pissed-to-all-hell countenance came on the big screen. She ripped out the captain’s chair she’d been seated on and threw it at the big screen, killing the COMMS view. Skyhawk figured that was her way of telling her COMMS officer that she really didn’t want to look at Skyhawk’s mug right now. Maybe if he were smiling less…
“That bitch isn’t the type to take anything lying down. Get us the hell out of here!” Skyhawk barked.
“Getting us the hell out, warp factor 10,” Motown replied.
He’d just tapped his console to activate the skip drive. But it coincided with an explosion to their rear. Satellite threw up the image on the port screen of their engines being blown to hell.
“How…?” Skyhawk asked.
Satellite was already playing it back in slow-mo. The solid shell—and who the hell fires solid shells in space anymore—passed straight through their energy shield as if it hadn’t detected it. Upon exploding… Shit! It was a nanite bomb. The damn thing was eating through the rest of the ship. Not only weren’t they going anywhere, they’d be spending the rest of eternity drifting in space in their nanite-enhanced bodies that could keep them alive forever, providing it slipped their bodies into a near-coma. Skyhawk had heard stories about this “miracle tech.” Among the many rumors: you remained fully conscious the entire time in the semi-coma, even if the body was largely shut down.
“Hell no! We will not be left to drift in space for all eternity!” Skyhawk blurted.
“Ah, but you will.” Gaffon’s smug face projected itself on their big screen, her ship exploding piece by piece behind her. “If I can only win in losing, so be it. I hope you enjoy losing in winning nearly as much.”
Shit! Skyhawk realized that somehow, the various Gaffons shared learning across the clones—in real time. Despite such primitive clones? How was this possible? Then again, that’s what the Tinka were known for, making more with less. He didn’t have time to ponder the point now. The realization, what’s more, would soon be painfully apparent to all opposition forces, whether Skyhawk sent out the debrief or not.
Satellite killed Gaffon’s breach of their COMMS—for now, removing her picture from the portal to the stars. Though the replacement images of what was happening to the Captiva was hardly less egregious.
“Find me something that can neutralize those nanites!” Even as Skyhawk shouted that, he sicced his mindchip with his own proprietary algorithms at the task, and started fiddling with his PDA. It helped him to think. He was one of those thinks-better-with-their-hands types. He knew if anyone was to come up with an upgrade to the nanites infesting the S
tarhawk’s hull in time to shut down the parasitic nanites, it was likely going to be him anyway. But the others could piggyback on his thinking, possibly fast-track it enough to…
Skyhawk was still working on the problem, lost in thought, when he found himself drifting in space. The ones he loved most, drifting away from him.
The Captiva had been entirely consumed by nanites that couldn’t wait for him to solve the challenge they posed.
The sight of Gaffon’s exploding, appropriated Klash ship, as satisfying as it was, sent a concussion wave and shrapnel toward them that just pushed the bodies of Skyhawk and his crew further apart. And with the amount of inertial force, and no friction from an atmosphere to break them, they might well be orbiting some sun in another solar system before rescue arrived, if it ever arrived. There was a war going on. Such a rescue mission would not be prioritized when it would just be easier to print new clones.
So, an eternity of hell-in-space it was.
As losses go, Skyhawk, I think your screw-up puts the other Skyhawk clones to shame. You should be proud of that.
He was sobbing. His nanites were kind enough to simulate the sound for him that would not penetrate space.
As he slipped into a coma, his nanites shut down most of his body to keep him alive longer, possibly indefinitely. He was horrified to realize that not only was he conscious, he could still hear the voice in his own head. So, for added shits and giggles he could berate himself for all eternity. Maybe the self-flagellation was some kind of escape for him. But what of the newly printed clones of him, that would carry this new propensity with them to berate themselves at every turn?
***
THE NAUTILUS
Skyhawk woke up in the Nun’s hands aboard the Nautilus. Not surprisingly, she was operating on him. “What Skyhawk am I?”
“You’re newly minted, updated with the intel of the copy of you floating in space and fully conscious, possibly forever.”
“Then why are you operating on me?”
Moving Earth Page 85
