When a missile armed, the activation sequence produced an informative beep. For a few moments the whole room was filled with beeping, and then it was filled with silence. Heavy silence.
Nothing moved; they were waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Askit knew that if they detonated, the combined explosion would be larger than he’d ever seen before. Although if he thought about it, he doubted he’d see much of this one either.
“What…” he whispered, afraid that any thing louder might rouse the warheads from their restless slumber, “what did you do?”
Adrian was continuing to stare at his hand. “No…” he said, his voice wavering, “there’s no way this was me. Maybe if it was just this one, but not all of them.”
“Right,” said Askit. “That makes sense.”
“Can you do something about it?” Adrian hissed, the level of his panic clearly rising. He was a human, so of course he couldn’t fully detach himself like Askit could – like Askit had – so it was little wonder that he was shitting himself. By the void, Askit was was a creature of cold logic, and he was still shitting himself; cold logic wasn’t very helpful when it led you to the kind of conclusions that he was making.
“Something like?” Askit asked, uncertainly. He tried his best to think of something he could do and came up short. “I… seem to have forgotten everything I know.”
Adrian cursed under his breath. “Fucking fantastic.”
There was a sudden clunk from the missile under his hand, and they both drew in a sharp breath, staring at the thing in wide-eyed horror.
The noise didn’t replicate amongst the other missiles.
They turned to look at each other, and no words were spoken. Only the sounds of trembling breaths made it over the link, which Askit imagined wasn’t that reassuring for either of them.
At the end of the munitions room there was a smaller door that did not appear to be used for transporting the munitions to anywhere, and Askit supposed that it was used for the crew, if there even were any, to access the room. When that door hissed open, they both startled at the unexpected intrusion, although Adrian’s hand never left that missile.
They turned to stare at the door, and in a bizarre scene a single robot, with what looked to be a basic kinetic pulse gun attached, trundled through. It was such a strange thing to wander into an atmosphere of incredible tension and danger that Adrian wheezed out a strained laugh. “Here we fucking go…”
The robot did not seem to be in any sort of hurry, but Askit was personally grateful for the distraction. The robot could kill him in one shot, that was true, but compared to a room full of live explosives and a psychotic human it somehow seemed an insignificant force.
It parked itself directly in front of Adrian – of course, it was always about Adrian – and the optical sensor looked him up and down.
“Well, well… it seems the tables have turned, human,” it said, although the voice was far too organic to be produced by a machine. “Now it is I who holds all of the gevlpitz!”
Askit stared at the combat robot, wondering who it was on the other side, and wishing that Adrian was there with them. This at least explained the munitions arming themselves, but it seemed a big gamble from someone who was still aboard; only the insane or truly desperate would make that kind of threat, but surely this was too early for this level of escalation?
All the guessing in the world didn’t help, of course; there wasn’t much of a choice being made available here, merely surrender or death, and Askit wasn’t sure that the Hierarchy were in the business of taking prisoners. The alternative seemed pretty bleak though, so maybe it was worth taking the-
“You can shove those gravel-pits up your arse, mate,” Adrian replied, and Askit noted that the waver in his voice was gone, replaced with an edge of anger. “What’s your name, fuckhead?”
“How dare you!” spat the machine. “You are my prisoner, and-“
“Name!” Adrian repeated, his anger rising. “I want to know whose arse I’m jamming this missile up.”
The robot shot Adrian. It did the usual amount of nothing. “You savage beast!” it accused. “How dare you address me in that way! I am Thirteen, for all the good the knowledge will do you-“
Adrian whispered a quick message. “Do your thing mate, I’m distracting this arsehole.”
“Right,” Askit whispered back. He looked around for a hiding place, and of course the only possibilities were behind explosives. That didn’t seem like the wisest of things to do, but it also seemed as though it was going to be that sort of day.
“-and you will listen to what I have to say!” finished the robot. Whoever was on the other end of it had just become extremely angry, and Askit wondered if it had been wise to infuriate him. Surely they were in enough trouble without pissing him off.
“It’s time for the villain’s exposition, is it?” Adrian asked, and not for the first time Askit had no idea what in the void the human was talking about. “Alright, let’s fucking get this over with, I don’t have all day.”
“Even for a savage,” robo-Thirteen seethed, “you are extraordinarily offensive! You are beyond infuriating, and I will take great pleasure-“
“Mister Bond,” Adrian interjected.
“-in taking you to pieces!” robo-Thirteen finished. “I expect you to submit, or I’ll be forced to locate any other survivors and perform the same process upon them.”
Askit didn’t much like the sound of that, but the robot was clearly focused on Adrian, so he took his chance to sneak around into hiding where he could work. With Adrian taking care of the talking – something that Askit never thought he’d be truly grateful for – the tension had been cut enough for Askit to remember just what it was that he could do, and he started to do it.
“I don’t think you’ll do that,” Adrian replied, cold and hard. “I think that you’ll be too dead to try it, and do you know what else I think, Mister Thirteen?”
Robo-Thirteen hesitated. “What do you think?”
Askit nearly glanced up at that. Had he heard actual fear in robo-Thirteen’s voice? How was he being intimidated when he was the one who controlled the munitions, the ship, and their fate? He wasn’t even in the same room!
But there were better things for his attention to be focused on; the munitions were wirelessly connecting to the weapons system. Before he’d edited their systems manually to get them to recognise him as their controller, but that wasn’t an option here. He needed to get them all at once, and fortunately it wouldn’t take that much effort to spoof them into thinking his little datapad was the weapons system instead.
“I think you’re afraid,” Adrian told the robot. “I think you know that something like a little explosion won’t stop me.”
“This… this is enough explosive power to destroy this entire ship!” robo-Thirteen protested, his own anger growing. “It’ll certainly take care of a human, even an exceptional one!”
Askit smiled wickedly to himself as the munitions began prompting him for further commands. He had access, and he still had a copy of the configuration files he’d edited earlier. This time, though, he needed to be a little more delicate in the operation. Just a little more time…
“Thank you for the compliment,” Adrian said. “Not every day I get called ‘exceptional’.”
“I wasn’t intending to compliment you!” robo-Thirteen snapped. “It was a statement of simple fact!”
The configuration files looked as though they were written by a Corti. That was good news, Corti programmers were pedantic about impeccable commenting for all code and files, and that made breaking them all the easier. It was very helpful when you wanted to make a bomb appear armed, when it actually wasn’t, and all Askit needed to do was switch some ones for zeros.
“Yeah,” mused Adrian, “I am pretty fucking amazing. You should come down here, I’ll show you how amazingly I can jam this missile up your fucking clacker.”
“I decline,” hissed robo-Thirteen. “And… aha! It seems that you’ve run out of time for this little diversion. I’ll have you know that I’ve transmitted a backup of my mind to Central, and I want you to know that while my body may die, I will live on. I just needed to keep you down here for long enough to finish the job, and now… now I can finally throw everything I’ve got at you!”
Askit distributed the files to the munitions, and as per their programming they began to reboot. But they didn’t beep, they didn’t do anything except look just as deadly as they had before. “Job’s done,” he whispered over the link. “You owe me.”
“I’d like to see you do it,” Adrian continued, not giving any outward indication of having heard. “Why not do it then? Blow us all to pieces?!”
“You’re… you’re insane!” robo-Thirteen spat. “But as you demand it, I will comply!”
There was a pause.
“Nothing happened…” robo-Thirteen said in confusion, apparently speaking to itself.
“Oh, something happened, fuckface,” Adrian replied, removing his hand from the missile and picking up his pipe. “The fucking game just changed.”
+++++
Thirteen had disconnected from the sentry as the human had begun to destroy it, completely ignoring the kinetic pulse shots that would have killed any other species. He was utterly horrified and rendered almost catatonic at the turn of events; he had thought that it had all been going so well, he had used the weapons to pin down the human and its Corti companion, and had distracted them for long enough to ensure his backup completed, but the human had been… so incredibly infuriating, so unutterably obnoxious that Thirteen had made the mistake of forgetting about the Corti.
That mistake had cost him dearly.
Now he took stock of the situation, and he didn’t see this ending without an extremely unpleasant demise. It was true that exploding the ship had been a drastic move, and it had been one attempted in the heat of the moment, but the original intent had always been to limit the destruction to the single missile beside the human. The rest had simply been an enormous bluff that, now that he actually thought about it, may have been obviously excessive.
That was another mistake that had cost him dearly. Why hadn’t he just killed the human as soon as he’d been touching that missile? The other warheads weren’t the sort to explode simply because they were in an explosion, and it would have saved him from this little quandary.
He took a deep breath to steady himself, and reminded himself that not all was lost. There was still the Vulza, and the apparently useless sentry bots… and of course the emergency option.
Was this a big enough emergency to employ that? He wasn’t sure; the human was still mostly unarmed, and the Vulza still had a chance. He just had to make sure that the fight wasn’t in a place where the human could use a missile. It was a basic plan, an easy plan, it was the sort of plan that actually seemed like it might have a chance.
And then he wouldn’t have to use the emergency option.
+++++
Adrian was towing another missile along, the same one that had made that worrisome clunking noise earlier, and was moving so quickly that Askit had been forced to ride the thing. Somehow riding it through corridors seemed that much more terrifying than riding it through open space had been.
He’d named it Betty; apparently it was another ‘Flintstones’ reference, whatever that was, and had informed Askit that he was hoping to make good on his promises to the mysterious Thirteen.
Askit wasn’t really sure how an object this large could be inserted into an anal cavity, but a small part of him was morbidly curious.
He was also beginning to worry about the human’s state of mind; Adrian normally calmed down after destroying whatever had pissed him off, but right now his anger only seemed to be growing, and Askit worried that the human might actually have finally broken.
He had just been attacked by three sentry bots at once, and had proceeded to use one as a bludgeoning instrument against the others, laughing madly as he brought them together in a shattering of metal and polymer.
“Adrian,” he ventured carefully, “are you alright? You seem… terrifying.”
“Sorry, mate,” came the terse reply. “Need to keep pumped. That fucking cyber-dildo is around here somewhere, and I need to be ready to take it out.”
“You mean the cyber-Vulza?” Askit asked. “You’re probably right. Thirteen must know we’re coming for him.”
“We also need to get to that fucker,” Adrian agreed, bringing a foot down on a sentry bot that dared to continue moving. It stopped after that.
“If I were him, I’d be trying to escape,” Askit pondered. “Surely he’d be getting to a lifepod?”
“You heard him,” Adrian said, continuing on his way. Askit wasn’t sure how the human knew which way he was going, or if he was equally as lost as Askit himself, but he didn’t seem to hesitate or show any sign of being turned around. “He already escaped. Sent a copy of his fucking brain back to HQ, so as far as we know he’s got no stake in keeping this ship in one piece. For all we know, he’s started the self-destruct to blow us all to fucking hell.”
Askit blinked. “A self-destruct to what?”
“You guys don’t have those either?” Adrian asked. “Good to know.”
“We have self-destruct systems,” Askit said, “but they only false-fire the FTL to disintegrate the structure; that’s why marines wear the vacuum suits. Are you suggesting that humans have a mechanism to explode their ships?”
“Some ships do,” Adrian replied. “I don’t know what the story is with our spaceships, but I’m guessing a small nuclear warhead might do the trick if we get our hands on some big ones.”
“Nuclear… warhead?” Askit asked. “But fission technology is unstable and highly radioactive, too dangerous to use, despite the power it yields!”
“Yeah,” Adrian said, turning to look at him with a grin. “They make a pretty big boom.”
Humans continued to prove themselves psychotic, Askit thought. Had they actually used these weapons on each other, he wondered, although it seemed like a silly question when he thought about it. Of course they had, they were psychotic.
“Do your people have a lot of these… nuclear weapons?” Askit asked conversationally.
“Thousands, maybe?” Adrian answered. “Not really sure, mate. They come in a lot of different shapes and sizes.”
“Why do you have so many?” Askit asked in growing horror, visualising the possibility of these… missiles armed with nuclear warheads. What could possibly stop that sort of weaponry?
“That’s a long story,” Adrian replied. “Let’s just say that there were some different people who wanted to make sure they were really fucking thorough if World War Three kicked off.”
Completely psychotic.
+++++
Vulza-Thirteen was in place, it looked as though the sentry bots had given him the time he’d needed to get where he needed to be, but that had been tricky. The human seemed to be randomising its path through the ship in a completely unreadable way, further proving its surprising cunning.
That had only served to delay it, however, and now there was no way for the savage creature to get to him without finding the Vulza in its way. This time there wouldn’t be any mistakes, there was no way that Thirteen wasn’t going to let the creature try and act on its own when its predecessor had done such a poor job of it. It was said that Vulza were intelligent for beasts, but there hadn’t been much intelligence in getting hit by a missile.
He was tracking the human’s progress, poised for that perfect moment in which to strike from a side passage. A flanking attack that would be perfectly executed with a barrage of anti-tank blasts followed by a savage rending of flesh. It would be a horrible way to die, and it would still be too good for it.
The sound of the human came into earshot, its chatter incoherent with the Vulza’s lack of a translator implant.
Vulza-Thirteen’s reptilian lips drew back in predatory anticipation. It didn’t expect a thing!
But then it suddenly came to a stop.
+++++
Adrian had stopped moving the moment he had seen the Vulza-shaped shadow stretching out onto the main corridor. It wasn’t a deep shadow, the lighting around the corridors was pretty decent, but it had been dark enough for his subconscious to mark it, and from there his danger senses had started tingling.
He’d stopped just before the side corridor, and when he listened he could hear a heavy breathing.
“What’s wrong?” Askit asked softly.
“Cyber-Vulza,” Adrian whispered back. “Stay clear…”
“Don’t you need the missile?” Askit asked, readying to clamber off.
“You stay with Betty,” he replied, taking off his left glove. “I’m going to try something different.”
Askit paused before he started taking Betty backwards. “Don’t die.”
Adrian nodded absently. He was getting pretty fucking tired of these motherfucking space-dragons on this motherfucking spaceship, but with a little help maybe he could turn it to his advantage.
Margarita was dead, but she still had one last card to play.
+++++
Vulza-Thirteen was considering what to do if the human didn’t come around the corner. He was straining his senses to hear what was going on, and that wasn’t giving him anywhere near the amount of information he would have gotten from the Elinee’s internal sensors, but he couldn’t get that without disconnecting from the Vulza.
The main question was whether or not the human knew he was there. He didn’t know how it would be possible, Vulza-Thirteen had taken great pains to remain as motionless as he was able in the moments before the human had arrived, and there was no way for the human to catch the Vulza’s scent through the Vacuum suit.
It was possible the human was just taking a short rest after breaking so many things, so Vulza-Thirteen continued to wait for the perfect moment to strike.
That was when a human arm appeared around the corner – minus the glove from the Vacuum suit – its fist pointed in Vulza-Thirteen’s general direction.
The brief moment during which Vulza-Thirteen considered whether to try shooting such a small target passed quickly, and was ended by the agony of lasers being shot into both of its eyes.
Thirteen was very glad that the link did not transmit the pain itself, only the indication that the Vulza was experiencing it. It was, however, experiencing a lot of it.
The Vulza’s body recoiled instinctively, reacting to the pain and to the sudden blindness that had darkened its world. Thirteen drove the control unit with all he could to try and get its thrashing under control, but he didn’t get long.
Something hard and metallic hit the Vulza in the side of the head, knocking all of the sense out of it and disrupting Thirteen’s control.
Then it hit it again, and the Vulza was out. Even with a control unit, there’d be little Thirteen could do to get it back into the fight now that its senses were so addled, and so he sat in the darkness of its mind for a while.
There was nothing more for it, he realised. He had to deploy the emergency option after all.
+++++
“Take a picture,” Adrian said, one foot atop the fallen Vulza and the metal pipe over his shoulder. He had taken his helmet off for the request, and was grinning like some kind of idiot.
Askit obliged without argument; it wasn’t every day someone subdued a Vulza after all, especially not with something as basic as a metal pipe to the head, even if he had managed to blind it first with the ‘Bond-watch’.
“Good picture,” Askit replied. “Maybe you can hang it on your wall, assuming you ever get a wall.”
Adrian grinned. “Good man, now help me figure out what we can do with this thing.”
“Kill it?” Askit suggested. “I’m not sure what else you could be suggesting.”
“This thing was here, laying in wait for us,” Adrian explained. “It was definitely under some kind of control. Can you imagine getting one of these snarling fuckers to do anything you told it to otherwise?”
Askit couldn’t, and he inspected the fallen beast more closely. There was a lot of grafts there, weapons mostly but also some sort of harness that only looked like armour. There had also been something done to its skull.
He checked his datapad for network devices, and found one.
“It’s got a computer inside of it,” he said. “It’s broadcasting as ‘Vulza Two’. I can… probably take control of it… and I have taken control of it.”
“It doesn’t even have a name?” Adrian asked. “Let’s go with… Barney.”
“Renaming the Vulza as ‘Barney’,” Askit replied. He wasn’t even going to try passing comment on this one, and in any case the man who beat the Vulza should be able to call it whatever he liked. “What would you like Barney to do?”
Adrian sat down atop the Vulza. “I think I’d like him to take us to his leader.”
+++++