The Goddess Gambit

by B Michael Stevens

  "I was handling myself fine thank you very much!" she screamed down the hallway at Carbine, who was lowering the rail gun and approaching the scene, Jon right behind him. "You were some help," Lucy sneered at Jon, who chose not to take the bait. The surviving guard was crawling across the floor trying to reach for one of his fallen comrades’ weapons when Lucy pinned his hand to the floor with a blade protruding from the tip of her tail. She straddled his lower lumbar and slid her tanto under his chin where the gap in his armor was.

  "Tell me where the prisoners are kept."

  "You'll never get out of here alive!" the man bravely—or foolishly—retorted.

  "You’d better talk, bud. The lady means business," Jon said as he approached and stood over the scene. Carbine maintained a lookout and sheltered the smaller figures of his companions from any potential attacks from farther down either hallway of the intersection.

  "Fuck you," the man cursed at Jon defiantly.

  "Alright, have it your way," Lucy said, flicking her wrist, changing the angle of the knife. She held the back of the man's head down with one hand and pulled up on the knife with the other, peeling the side of his helmet off, from the bottom opening to the top, taking his ear with it. The man screamed in agony and wiggled in vain trying to free his arms from the grip of Lucy's thighs while his blood spilled out onto the rubble-covered floor.

  "It goes downhill from here," she said.

  "Okay! Okay! Arfgh!"

  Jon flinched at the man’s pleas. He firmly believed in their mission, but he was still very uncomfortable with Lucy's style.

  "End of the hallway, take a left. That will take you to the cell blocks. But you'll never make it," he groaned.

  "Let me be the judge of that." She placed the BFG on the back of what remained of his helmet. Jon put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed. She couldn't feel it, but her body’s sensors told her that he was squeezing hard and he now possessed the strength to pull her off of the man if need be.

  "No, Lucy. He is defeated. He is unarmed," he told her calmly.

  "Like I care," she scoffed but hesitated to pull the trigger.

  "I mean it. Let him go." She looked up into his face and studied him for a moment.

  "It's your lucky day, pig." She pulled the gun back and stood up.

  "Thank you! Thank you!" the man blubbered. Then Lucy flicked her foot out and struck the man on his now exposed temple, knocking him out cold. Jon frowned at her.

  "Well, we can't have him following us or shooting at us, now can we?" She smiled and took off running down the hallway towards the cell blocks.

  "If that guy was telling the truth, the cell blocks are on the other side of those double doors." Jon pointed up ahead.

  "I'm pretty sure he was properly motivated," Lucy replied. "Be prepared to meet resistance."

  "I am. But the real resistance is when we try to get outta here. Shooting our way in is one thing. Shooting our way out is another," Jon warned. "The frigging Army will be on this place in another couple of minutes or so. We've been doing great against these guards so far, but Mecha units are going to be a lot tougher." The real firepower of the Republic would be outside, in the more open grids of the Ziggurat, the plazas, and byways. By now, the Social Purity facility would already be on lockdown, with snipers and Heavy Infantry taking up positions at all exits.

  "That's where Ratt's plan comes in. We will use his holo-projector to draw the attention of whatever resistance we meet. While the enemy is focused on fighting ghosts, we can make our escape." She looked over to Carbine and added, "We may have to ditch the suit, though. Not really the definition of sneaky, now is it?"

  "Oh man," Carbine groaned. "You're killing me."

  Brushing off his complaints, Lucy signaled for him to take care of the obstacle ahead. Carbine swung his suit around and fired a single round downrange, blasting the double doors to shreds.

  “If we run into Scrubbers, leave them to me,” Lucy said. “My brain case is shielded against their Strange tech.”

  Jon nodded his understanding.

  Lucy sprinted down the hallway and tossed a handful of micro grenades through the dusty hole where the doors had been. Jon could see a series of flashes go off from beyond the smoke right as Lucy disappeared into the cloud.

  Jon followed immediately behind her and went far enough into the cloud to catch Lucy just before she catapulted herself over a railing and drop down into the belly of the prison below. When he reached the railing, he glanced down, tracking Lucy's descent. She had dropped roughly ten meters into a pack of Scrubbers, Handler, and Sniffers.

  No, not one pack, but two.

  Jon's first instinct was to drop down there himself and help the outnumbered warrior-woman, but upon a second-long visual assessment of the situation, decided that Lucy could handle herself against the Scrubbers and that he should take advantage of the distraction and find Maya. The packs were still reeling from Lucy's flashbangs, and she wasted no time tearing into them with wanton bloodlust. She showed the cyborg animals and their pseudo-human controllers as much mercy as they typically showed the Unpure and Invasives that they routinely shredded to pieces in the Shanty.

  Hands still clutching the railing that wrapped the landing, Jon scanned the scene. A massive open space opened up before, below, and above him.

  Rising like towers on the three sides of the room facing him were stacks and stacks of holding cells. From bottom to top, Jon guessed that the holding chamber took up the entire vertical footprint of the Ministry of Social Purity, and that the interrogation chamber he had been in back when he’d reported Maya must be in another grid, somewhere on the outside perimeter of this penitentiary portion of the complex.

  Jon called to out to Carbine to cover him as he made his way around the perimeter of the courtyard on the catwalk. The metal grating walkway ran the entire circumference of the cavernous room, breaking here and there to reveal landings with stairs going both down, to the open courtyard area where Lucy and the Scrubbers performed their dance of death, and upwards for several flights, allowing access to identical catwalks that ran along the walls and in front of the individual cells holding those unfortunate few that the Ministry kept alive to torture instead of put down in the streets. Jon hesitated for a second, not knowing if he should go left or right, then threw caution to the wind and just went. He knew that time was of the essence and they couldn't afford for him to waste time searching in the wrong area, but it could take even longer for him to locate a terminal and then attempt to access a prisoner roster. He allowed himself to trust the same instincts that had helped him find the hammer and took off running.

  Carbine entered the prison proper and took up position near the entrance. He stood slightly to the right of the wrecked double doors, so as not to provide an easy shot at his backside. From his vantage, he could see the entire courtyard and the levels of cells reaching up to the ceiling. He alternated between making sure that Jon had a clear path ahead of him and glancing downward at Lucy to make sure that she was doing okay with the Scrubbers. He wanted to assist her by taking out some of the Sniffers with his railgun, but he dared not hit her, and she was constantly moving in and around them, flowing like possessed quicksilver. Carbine had seen her in action a bit before, but nothing like this. They didn't even land a scratch on her. It seemed as if every move of the melee had been masterfully choreographed. She was a performance artist, a painter, a poet, an avenging angel of death, one wing dipped in the blood of her enemies.

  “Wow,” Carbine mumbled, drawing the word out slowly. “I’ve never seen anyone or anything fight like that before.”

  One of the Handlers was the first to go. He lay on the floor, a pillar of smoke and flame rising from the shattered faceplate. The other had smartly retreated and was psychically aiding the Sniffers in an attempt at a coordinated attack against the jaguaress. What was remarkable, however, was that Lucy herself was a coordinated attack. She fought as if every one of her extremities—her two legs, her four arm
s, and her tail—each had a brain. No, better, for although they could act separately, they worked together, like a hive mind. The arm wielding the BFG moved and blasted away at anything that moved, hitting its mark with every shot, even though two other arms carrying Macuahuitls were busy slashing, parrying and ripping at anything that came too close. And the whole time, blended seamlessly with her deadly attacks, her body twisted, rolled, and ducked out of any and every attack that managed to get off before she ended its progenitor. Only the Handler that had backed away avoided a quick death; at least, that was until Carbine spotted him leave the fray.

  "Making it easy for me," Carbine chuckled to himself and announced his presence to the Handler with a sonic boom.

  Meanwhile, Jon had reached the first landing, and not knowing exactly why, began to run up the stairs rather than continue around the upcoming corner. He’d gone up two flights when his gut told him to break off and start around the perimeter. As soon as he did, a Ministry fire-team guard sprang out from a small alcove between storage lockers. The guard, a low-level soldier, not a Handler, identical to the kind he and his friends had faced earlier in the hallway, clutched a shotgun in a white-knuckle grip. Obviously nervous, he was nevertheless ready and determined to try to stop Jon. The nature of a shotgun being what it is, the man didn't have to aim much, so he just pointed the barrel in the general direction of Jon and pulled the trigger. Still, even with the added benefit of a well-timed ambush, the shotgun blast was no match for the newly heightened reflexes that Jon now possessed.

  Just as the man appeared and pulled the trigger, Jon thoughtlessly threw all his weight off the last step he had taken and hurled his body, cartwheel style, off the stairs’ landing and over the railing. The steel buckshot missed him entirely as he swung out into the open space above the courtyard. As he fell, he controlled his tumble through space and reached out for the edge of the stairwell’s flooring. Jon flexed his fingers, and they wrapped around the toe-board of the landing like hooks, causing the trajectory of his fall to change sharply, swinging him first under, and then into the bottom of the catwalk upon which the dumbfounded guard stood.

  Time seemed to slow, and Jon could see that in the blink of an eye he would crash into the bottom of the floor above him. He jerked the hand clutching the pommel of his hammer, hyper-accelerating the head upwards, past him and into the grating above. The catwalk exploded moments before Jon crashed into it. Shrapnel flew up into the guard's line of sight, effectively both blinding and disarming him, for he let go of his shotgun, raising both hands instinctively to cover his face from the torrent. The move cost him dearly. Jon had released his fingertips and thrown himself up through the hole his hammer had made and sailed upwards towards the guard. Jon's knee contacted the underside of the man's jaw, and he heard a loud cracking sound. The man sailed backward off his feet and bounced off the wall behind him, stumbling back towards the spot where he had previously stood—the spot now occupied by Jon.

  Not willing to give ground, Jon met the stumbling man with a swing of his hammer. This time, when the guard struck the wall behind him, he did not bounce off of it, for he was embedded in it several inches. Jon took no pleasure in the man's gruesome death. It was only a necessary evil, one that he regretted deeply.

  Banishing the thought-sparks which threatened to kindle a fire of guilt in his mind and heart, Jon continued in his urgent quest to rescue the goddess.

  Down below, Carbine had picked off the few fire-team reinforcements that had shown up from the far side of the courtyard through a massive service hatch that looked similar to the one they had entered when they first took the lift to the complex. Carbine wondered if it was, in fact, a lift, and whether if they hadn't been only guessing, they could have in fact picked a lift that would have brought them directly here. And if that were the case, would this one here also go down to the lowest level of the Zigg? Would it stop near a trash dump station?

  He intended to investigate the possibility as soon as possible, but after the second wave of reinforcements was wiped out by his super-sonic sniper rifle, the powers that be must have had a change of heart, or of strategy. For instead of opening to reveal yet a third wave of armed men, a thick, shielded door, up until now stored in the walls unseen, slid down into place over the service door, trapping Carbine and everyone else in the massive holding cell chamber, making their only way out the way they came in.

  What's their game? Carbine mused, glancing down at Lucy, who was presently dispatching the very last Sniffer with a cleaving blow from her Macuahuitl. Seeing that the battle was done, or at least pausing to catch its breath, Carbine scanned the upper levels for Jon. Finding him, he watched as Jon made his way across the catwalk, running at Olympic speeds, then slow down, as if in thought, and then take off running again. He was wondering how his lifelong friend knew where to go when a voice of his own told him to watch his back.

  Carbine willed the Mini-Mech to spin about, and he scanned the hallway behind him with every optic sensor at his disposal. His timing couldn't have been more perfect. The military had just arrived. A squad of Hoppers was quickly bee-lining straight for him.

  Hegna?

  Shit. Carbine squeezed off a round from his railgun into the lead Hopper and then quickly ducked the Mini-Mech behind the cover of the entry frame.

  "We have company! Hoppers incoming!" he shouted over the commotion. Carbine's hunch proved to be correct when upon recognizing Carbine's voice, one of the incoming Hoppers opened up dialog through its speakers.

  "Holy shit. Is that you, Rene?" The question was followed by the disturbing and familiar laughter of the bully Jon and Carbine had suffered their entire lives in the Academy. "So, the Meals-on-Wheels reject traded in his bicycle for an antique suit of power armor? Why not show it off, buddy? Stop hiding. Come on out and play!" Hegna taunted.

  Carbine knew that the Mini-Mech's black mirror armor could reflect the plasma discs that Hoppers generated, and was pretty stout overall besides, but he also knew that Hopper units were all equipped with several salvos of mini-missiles that would have no trouble at all destroying his suit...

  "Or this wall!" The thought crossed his mind just in time. Carbine put his suit into a stride and leaped from the landing down to Lucy just as a volley of missiles struck the corner of the entrance he had been hiding behind. The explosions erupted behind him while he was in mid-air, sending a wave of concussive force and debris into him, knocking his otherwise perfect leap into a spiraling fall. The Mini-Mech plunged to the ground, tearing up a considerable portion of the floor as it landed.

  Jon heard the explosion, which sounded very different from the near-constant booms of his friend's railgun and became concerned. Stopping his search to investigate, he looked down in time to see Carbine face-plant his Mech into the floor. Lucy was nearby, standing in the center of a field of dead Sniffers. She looked like she was about to make her way over to Carbine when four Hopper units flew into the room from the blasted, smoking opening from which Carbine had just jumped.

  Jon watched as Lucy, not missing a beat, tracked one of the Hoppers as soon as it entered and dumped round after round into it with her oversized pistol. The barrage knocked the Hopper around slightly as the slugs embedded themselves into the armor and exploded. The Hopper was taking a punishing, but the armor proved too thick for even the BFG's rounds to penetrate.

  By the time she had dumped her clip, the rest of the Hopper squad had circled into position and began to return fire, forcing Lucy to leap and roll.

  Jon was no coward, but he saw that he hadn't been noticed by the Hoppers yet, and only being armed with a small pistol and his hammer, he saw no reason to draw attention to himself yet. He ducked into a nearby alcove and concentrated on discovering Maya's whereabouts. Something had been pulling him in this direction, and he needed its guidance now more than ever.

  He closed his eyes and at first, could hear nothing but the sound of fresh battle and the Hopper units’ roaring engines. Then, as he focused more
and more on the sensation of his breathing, those sounds sounded further and further away. Soon he found himself in a dark, silent place. There in the dark, a solitary light appeared from above, spotlighting a young, adorable girl, kneeling on the floor like a small, crumpled mess. She held her hands together as if in prayer and began to sing a soft song of emotional beauty in a foreign tongue. Jon opened his eyes, and the sounds of battle returned, but still, in his mind’s ear, he could hear the song, and he followed the voice.

  He ran along the catwalk and stopped in front of one of the doors. He could hear the song in his mind coming from inside the cell. He cocked his hammer back and swung with all his might. The door ripped apart as easily as the last one, reinforced jail cell notwithstanding.

  The girl inside the room was not startled in the least. She had been expecting her rescuer and his entrance. Jon stepped in and held out his hand to the Hispanic woman he had seen before on stage and more recently in his mind's eye. Maya looked up at him and smiled tenderly. Without a word, she nodded and stood to take his hand.

  "My name is Jon. I'm here with Lucy; we have to get you out of here."

  "I know, silly. We talked before in the Wayak’ Lu’um, remember?" Her smiled broadened.

  "But I thought that was pre-recorded—?"

  "No time to explain, okay? We need to get out of here!” Peeking out from behind Maya’s small frame, Jon spied a young girl, considerably younger than Maya, a child really, presumably Wyntr. Jon called to her and reached out his hand as he had done to Maya, but the girl was frightened and did not move. She had been through a lot and lacked the cool confidence of a goddess. He watched in wonder as Maya turned, knelt before Wyntr and whispered something in her ear, and then hugged her. The girl relaxed and was visibly more at ease. The hug lasted another second or two, and then the girls rose together, hand in hand, and Maya said to Jon, "We are ready. Let's go get your friend and Lucy."