Scava
A lot of people had been First Officers, but that didn’t mean they were any good at it. The duty of a First Officer was to his Shiplord—always—and usually that was as simple as just following orders and making sure everyone else did the same. Things became much more interesting when politics got involved—or in this case, when the human got involved—and everything stopped being so straightforward. Trusting the wrong people had seen Scava burned in the past, and his resulting paranoia and suspicion now gave him an eye for identifying risks and dealing with them before they got too far out of hand. He had recommended against the science mission, and he had been ignored, and he had recommended against the human with the same outcome. Shiplord Jrasic had felt that Adrian Saunders was a potential ally, despite the pointed threats he’d set against them, and had ultimately thought to force the human’s hand. Against a V’Straki it was a sound gambit, but this creature was another matter; watching the recordings of his meeting with Jrasic, it was clear he had known that Scava was hiding in the closet, and had said nothing of it. There was cunning there, and a deceptive nature that Jrasic ought to have taken into account, but that was why Scava was still alive and the Shiplord was decidedly not. Jrasic had thought the human might try and cheat in the Challenge, and had surrounded himself with a small army to manage that risk; he had lacked the imagination to consider just how perverse the alien creature could be.
Even Scava had been taken by surprise, but for entirely different reasons. The Lander was docked, and the Dastasji’s computers should have been running its systems so that nobody could control the turrets even if they were in a gunnery seat. None of them were, and it was only because of Scava’s trust issues that the turret’s movements seemed more than a bit unusual.
Lazh had been standing just ahead of Scava, jeering at the human along with the rest of the crowd, trying to coax it down and into the fight; none of them had realised they were about to get more fight than they could handle.
Scava leapt to the side by instinct, throwing himself behind Lazh as the first Zheron beam sliced through their ranks. It swept the deck in an instant, annihilating crewmen, officers, and the Shiplord alike before the second pair of beams joined them a short moment later. More V’Straki were reduced to piles of goop, guts and body parts with each moment that passed, in the greatest display of carnage that Scava had ever witnessed. If any riflemen had survived the first beam they were not in a position to return fire.
Not that Scava was in much of a position to do anything either; Lazh’s ruined corpse had toppled backwards to land on top of him, spilling his foul insides all over Scava’s crisp uniform, and getting far more intimately familiar with his bits than the Second Officer had any right to be. Hopefully it’d be enough to keep him alive for a few more moments, so that he could draw just a few more breaths in preparation for… for something. At this point anything would do.
Shifting carefully, to avoid the movement being spotted, he activated his communicator. “Oversight?” he whispered, his voice low. “Oversight, do you hear me? This is First Officer Scava.”
Oversight’s response was a welcome relief. “Hearing you, First Officer. What is your condition?”
“Better than anyone else down here!” Scava growled. “Tell me you are doing something about this!”
“A response team is being scrambled,” Oversight replied. “It appears they were already on standby.”
That had been Scava’s doing, when he’d realised Shiplord Jrasic had no intention of introducing suitable countermeasures to whatever treachery the human might have planned. It had been done on the quiet, knowing that there would be disciplinary action if everything went smoothly, but Scava had preferred that to the idea of… well, exactly what had just happened.
“Good,” he whispered. “Am I the only survivor?”
“There are others who are not yet dead,” Oversight replied. They only really knew when a uniform’s biometrics failed to send a response, not the general state of the soldier wearing it. “We have lost visual feed.”
Scava looked around, shifting only slightly to do so, with the intention of relating what he saw around him. He opened his mouth, but found no words that would suffice; it was far too visceral to be described in language, and far too nightmarish for a rational statement. What was there to say when you were covered in the fleshy scraps of your subordinates, peers, and Shiplord? A scream of horror would have sufficed, if not for the doom it would bring upon him.
The movement by the Lander drew his attention away from the gruesome scene; the ramp was lowering, and the hateful human exclaimed something in its mushy native tongue. Scava found his hand reaching for Lazh’s holster, his fingers wrapping around the grip of the Zheron pistol therein, but he could move no further. Anything else would attract attention of the turrets, and he’d have one shot at most before death came for him.
A fellow survivor was less cautious, leaping to his feet with a cry of defiance and a Zheron pulse that went wide. The response was fast and precise, and left nothing to chance or to inspect once the beams were done; whoever was shooting, it was terrifying how accurate they were.
At this point it was best to wait for the response team, even if they couldn’t manage the task in front of them. They’d be carrying anti-voidcraft weaponry—enough to blow a Lander into small pieces—and that meant they’d be the focus of any exchange. It would be a chance for Scava to escape the flight deck; probably the only chance.
“Update for you,” said Oversight, his own voice low. “You are now the last survivor. The response team is scheduled to arrive in mere moments.”
“Understood,” Scava breathed.
“Get clear in the distraction,” Oversight continued, “it is your sole chance at escape—Artiz has authorised deployment of Scorch Gas.”
Now that was a motivator. Everybody aboard the Dastasji had seen Scorch Gas deployed first-hand, and it was not the sort of thing you wanted to set loose on any ship you might be on. It was intended to be an area denial tool, since the ultra-thermic mix set absolutely everything on fire and was slow to finish burning, but it seemed that desperate times called for desperate measures.
“I am patching you into response team communications,” Oversight advised, and a confirmation noise alerted Scava that it had already been done. “Are you ready to breach, Squad Leader?”
“On your order,” the Squad Leader replied. “Do we have a location lock on the First Officer.”
Oversight confirmed that they did. “That information is being loaded into your visor now. Note visual feed inside the room has failed—no further information can be provided.”
“Understood,” the Squad Leader replied. “Do not worry, First Officer Scava, my team will extract you safely. Move as soon as you hear the bang and run for the secondary doors.”
Scava grimaced, waiting for the noise with no way to protect his ears, and found it just as loud as he had anticipated. There were three entrances to the flight deck, and all of them exploded into the room with a shockwave of flame, force, and obscuring smoke. The Lander turrets targeted them immediately, giving Scava the chance to get out from under Lazh’s remains and scramble to his feet. With the deck so slick with blood, he realised he’d need to tread on the fallen. It was not a pleasant experience.
Zheron beams danced back and forth, filling the surrounding air with the sharp scent of ozone. Attack drones swarmed in, focusing their fire on the Lander, and Scava gave them a wide berth—it was too easy to be shot by either side by going the short route.
Pain flared up his leg as a pistol-sized bolt shot out his knee, sending him toppling back to the deck. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the source: Adrian Saunders was out of the Lander, and had taken the shot while everything else was focused on the Lander.
Scava wasn’t about to stop—he did not intend to die in a sea of his shipmates’ blood—and scrambled along on his belly with his mutilated leg trailing behind him like a second tail. The response team finally arrived before the human could take his second shot.
“Two and Three, assist the First Officer!” the Squad Leader ordered as he followed his team onto the flight deck. Everyone else continue with the plan.”
++++
++++
Darax
The scene that presented itself on the flight deck was as bad as anything Darax had ever led his team into, and with a lot more fellow crewmen—men he knew and had shared his meals with every day; seeing them turned into this mess made it hard to focus on the mission. It was only knowing who was responsible, and that his destruction was their goal, that let him keep it together.
The drones were programmed to converge on the Lander as soon as they’d entered the area, drawing fire and allowing the Response Team to establish their foothold in the room so that the enemy could be destroyed without resorting to dangerous chemicals. Nobody really wanted to see Scorch Gas deployed, especially not aboard their own ship, and the Response Team was the only thing preventing that from happening.
The Shield rolled forward ahead of them, guided by One and Four, soaking up anything the Lander directed at it; drawing power directly from the Dastasji, it had more than enough power to keep everyone safe while they got the job done.
“Moving on the First Officer’s position,” Two reported as he and Three broke from cover as they passed the fallen Scava. Personally, Darax didn’t think much of the First Officer, but with the current state of the ship’s leadership the alternative was having that blue-chip in charge. Collecting the First Officer would be dangerous, and Darax would have liked to have had more men to handle it, but this team was all that could be spared on short notice, and after what had happened on the flight deck it was just about the only team left aboard the Dastasji.
“Enemy is concentrating fire on the Shield,” One reported, though it seemed unnecessary given the sudden increase light blazing against the Shield’s defence-matrix. “We are seeing some stability issues.”
“How severe?” Darax asked.
One shrugged, expressing uncertainty. “We should still have time to finish the job.”
That was no good at all; this whole plan was the normal response to an enemy gunship, and applied the normal expectation that the attack drones would draw initial fire. That way the Response team had time to set up the Vryx Cannon before the Shield was ever at risk. “Get that cannon into position!”
Five and Six were responsible for that, and set to work immediately on getting the cannon fully deployed and hooked into the Dastasji’s power conduits. Everything was moving as fast as it could, but it would still be down to the wire. There had to be something they could—
“Two is down,” Oversight reported with the usual lack of emotion. “Now Three.”
Darax swore, whirling around in search of the cause. The two soldiers had already crumpled to the deck alongside the First Officer, and the human was standing beyond them.
“Shit!” he swore again, pointing out the new threat. While they’d been busy pointing the Shield towards the Lander, its most dangerous occupant was roaming freely and picking off drones and soldiers alike. “Over there!”
Another Zheron bolt peeled off towards the First Officer, ending with Oversight making one more addendum. “First Officer Scava. Secondary mission objective failure.”
“Send in more drones!” Darax demanded. “Target the human with everything…”
“Already done,” Oversight replied. “They should be with you soon; Artiz has made the necessary tweaks.”
It couldn’t happen soon enough as far as Darax was concerned; he couldn’t risk shifting focus while the Lander was still laying it on thick, but it wasn’t as though he was being given a choice. The Lander, for its part, was more than enough of a problem, and chose this time to blast out the docking clamp that held it in place. Free to move, it rotated to face the Shield with its hardened frontal armour; evidently they had no experience with what a Vryx cannon would do to them. “How is it looking?!”
“Cannon in place!” Five reported. “Charging is in progress. Sharing counter to all Visors.”
A progress icon appeared in the bottom-left of Darax’s personal display, and was not filling anywhere near fast enough for his liking. “Lock the Shield here,” he instructed, “and set the cannon to auto-fire on charge. We cannot wait for the drones to deal with the human.”
That was less because he felt exposed—although he did—and more because the power conduits presented an easy target for an opportunistic enemy. If the human were to make a shot on either of them out it would mean the end of the mission and the start of Scorch Gas deployment.
The squad broke from behind the Shield as instructed, and as they’d been trained to do in the face of the enemy, even though this whole situation seemed balanced on a blade’s edge. Whatever the human was, it was competent enough to kill the Shiplord and threaten the entire crew of the Dastasji, more than the Igraen Alliance had never achieved in all of their encounters combined.
That much was proved once again as One, who was first out of cover, went untargeted by the Lander only to be shot through the face by a Zheron-bolt. The weapons were well-known for their pin-point accuracy, given enough time to aim, but Adrian Saunders was proving to be a distressingly quick shot.
“Scatter towards cover!” Darax ordered, unrelenting. Part of their training had been against liberated Alliance automatons, and relied on random movements to throw off the predictive algorithms. It didn’t always work, but the tactic was just as effective against a sharpshooter; it was just a pity that the human immediately began to match them, and struck for the cover of flight-deck equipment that was already on fire.
“Drones almost there,” Oversight relayed. “Continue with your current approach.”
Darax didn’t think they needed to be told that, but it was reassuring to know that they didn’t need to hold out much longer. Pushing for cover, it was only Five who didn’t make it. Taking a Zheron-bolt to the hip, he toppled into the blood and muck of the dead with a scream of pain and horror that broke into gagging. Horrid though it might have been, he was going to have to stay there and wait for the fight to be over. That or burn to death in Scorch Gas, but any sensible soldier would turn his gun on himself before letting that happen.
His fate did nothing to slow the others down, but Darax noticed that the human’s own crew were in full retreat from the rear of the Lander. Maybe they did know what the cannon would do, and were trying to get some distance before it happened, though they’d need to reach some cover before everything on the deck was showered with flaming debris. Hopefully it would give the Response Team the element of surprise against the human, and they could take their time putting the lesser creatures out of their misery. They just needed the progress meter to fill before the Shield collapsed; the lives of the crew depended on it, and their honour demanded it.
“Hold here!” Darax ordered as they made cover just in time. “Cannon to fire in five… four…”
It doesn’t matter how large a starship is, crashing it into any kind of plan will usually force a new strategy. The Dastasji’s Landers were designed for combat roles, carrying heavy armour and armaments with a speed that similar vessels could not match. Even a fully charged Shield would not have been able to stop that much mass, and the collision consumed Lander, Shield, and Vryx cannon in an overwhelming display of fire, metal and mayhem. Any energy left in the Shield and Lander crackled out into the air in a thundering tumult of lightning, ended only when the fully-powered cannon blasted a hole straight through the flight deck and sprayed absolutely everything with high-velocity bits of steel. The convenience of auto-pilot seemed less advantageous now, and it really was the most unfortunate time for the replacement drones to arrive.
A spinning shard of steel spiked into Darax’s visor, a hairs breadth from his eye, while another sliced a bloody path across his back. He pulled the visor away by instinct, and it was only by luck that he avoided the Zheron-bolt that crackled past his head.
“Squad Leader!” One cried out, hauling Darax into cover before a follow-up shot could correct the error. “Sir,” he said, removing his own visor, “we’ve lost the Feed.”
It looked like they’d also lost Four and Six, with neither anywhere to be seen. “That pulse probably took down communications. False God, who would have imagined this shit-storm happening on board our ship?”
One nodded earnestly. “This is worse than anything we saw at Arbataz. It looks like our backup was blown up along with everything else.”
“Yeah,” Darax agreed; that was going to cost them. “This mission is a failure, Fenn.”
“I know,” said Fenn, not pleased at being called by his name in a time like this—that was the sort of thing you did when you thought you weren’t going to survive. “We can still make it out of here before the Scorch Gas comes in.”
Darax doubted it, but he was willing to try. If it were his command, he’d have started pouring in the gas as soon as it all went sideways. “Where are Four and Six?”
“A reinforcement bar hit him square in the back,” said Fenn. “I do not know where he fell, nor do I know where Six ended up. Five is… under all that.”
Darax nodded; that was why he hadn’t asked about Five. A sudden shriek of agony was enough to tell him that Six wouldn’t be coming along either. “Just us, then. The nearest way out is Door Two. Standard evasion movements, and do not stop.”
“The human is in that direction,” Fenn pointed out. “I do not think he will just let us leave.”
“Then we do not give him a choice,” Darax replied firmly. “At least that monster will only kill us—I refuse to let Artiz cook me to death.”
Nodding in complete agreement, Fenn checked his guns over one last time before they made their move. “Alright then, just like the Command Centre on Arbataz.”
Darax concurred. “Just like it.”
That was not a good memory by any measure. Arbataz had been a protectorate world of the Empire, and had thus been fair game for an assault by the Igraen Alliance. It was intended to be a demonstration of force to break the will of the other Protectorates, and the assault had come hard and fast. The Dastasji and Egrema had been the first ships to respond, and had engaged the Alliance warfleet in a battle that had lit the night skies. It didn’t matter, though, because the Alliance had already gained its foothold, and the engagement degenerated into a bitter war of attrition that consumed city after city. Years of brutal back-and-forth fighting only stopped when Scorch Gas had been deployed to finally destroy everything the Alliance was using for war materials. The Burning of Arbataz was a necessary crime, but the evacuation had been swift and poorly managed, and the experience had scarred every soldier who’d served there.
“Go!” Darax urged, shoving Fenn on towards the exit and breaking away at a separate angle. Zheron bolts darted past, too close for Darax’s liking, but the evasion footwork was still as good as ever, and the look on the human’s face was one of surprise. Fenn had been right, they were going to need to go right through him, and now was the chance Darax had been waiting for. He fired bolt after bolt in the human’s direction, sending him scurrying for the nearest cover, which was as much as Darax had been hoping for. The last few strides were made with dagger in hand, and with one final lunge he struck around the corner at where the human should have been.
Nothing with bones should have been able to move the way that Adrian Saunders did. The blade should have struck true, and the human should have been dead where he stood, but this was a creature that defied expectations. Twisting around the blade, the human drew in rather than sensibly retreating, fire bolt after bolt into Darax’s torso while driving the dagger around and into his opposing shoulder. He held the blade there as Darax staggered, and shoved him against the flight-deck machinery. Darax had time to gasp—once—and then Adrian Saunders shot him through the temple.
++++
++++
Adrian Saunders
The Dastasji’s flight deck was one huge fucking mess, and he didn’t think that a mop and bucket was going to cut it. Sure he’d expected some bodies, but this kind of scene was straight out of a horror movie. A sea of corpses was spread across the deck, their blood still spreading, and several things were on fire, and then there was the ruin of the Lander and whatever the fuck those V’Straki had brought with them, and Adrian was pretty sure the flight deck now featured direct access to the level below. With any luck he’d be able to patch it all back together with the Fabricator, because he was getting really tired of inheriting broken-as-fuck ships.
He let the corpse drop as the sole remaining member of their… whatever they were… decided to stop running away and start shooting wildly. Adrian pulled back into cover as he peeled off a warning shot, but the sound of footsteps warned him that the soldier had not slowed down. Tearing the dagger from the dead V’Straki’s shoulder, Adrian pounced the moment the soldier threw himself around the corner with gun already firing.
It was the way he held it that decided things—loose and away from the body instead of close and controlled—and Adrian was past the barrel before the shot went off. Driving it away to the side with his body, he brought the dagger up and past the V’Straki’s defences, lodging the blade in the creature’s throat. While he wasn’t familiar with their biology, there was enough blood to know he’d put it somewhere important.
He drew the blade away as life left the creature, absently wiping it on his trouser leg before knocking the gun a safe distance away. “I guess they both got the point.”
“Cutting wit you’ve got there,” Laphor replied dryly. “Don’t you have more important things to do than wordplay?”
“I’ll have you know the one-liner is a time-honoured tradition of all great action heroes,” Adrian returned, but he was already making his way to where the mercenaries stood; mercy knew they wouldn’t have much time before more bullshit arrived. “What else am I supposed to do?”
“Get over here and help get this panel open?” Laphor suggested. “Contrary to what you said, the thing won’t budge!”
“On my way,” Adrian replied, breaking into a jog. “I look forward to your plan on cleaning up this—”
He broke off as a resounding clunk sent a small tremor across the flight deck, and the great doors began to close. With no idea of what was going on elsewhere in the ship, it looked very much like the V’Straki were sealing them in; whatever they had planned, it involved keeping the intruders where they were. “We need to get out of here.”
Mando voiced their collective agreement. “No shit? Well if all else fails, we can always jump into that huge hole you guys made.”
“That we made,” Adrian corrected, “and maybe we should keep that as our backup backup plan, since I’m pretty sure it’ll kill us. What’s the problem here?”
“The panel is stuck in place,” Laphor replied, repeating her previous diagnosis. “What else do you want?”
Adrian took a look at what they’d done. They’d been working on the flight-deck control terminal, and had been able to remove the façade, but the protective panel underneath was another matter entirely. There’d been screws, but they’d already been removed, leaving no obvious reason for the panel to stay where it was.
“Ah,” he said, grimacing as he realised what was going on. He’d come across this on the Zhadersil, and had discovered it was a safety feature designed to prevent accidental access to powered-up components. He’d turned it off for the sake of convenience, and had nearly electrocuted himself half a dozen times. That was exactly the sort of thing that never needed to be talked about. “I guess I can just try and shoot it open…”
“You told us you were an engineer,” Laphor reminded him. “Why do you keep trying to shoot the technology?”
“Mainly because I’m an engineer,” Adrian joked, and cleared his throat when nobody was amused. “Look, I’ve got no fucking tools to work with, so…”
Mando handed him a screwdriver. “Will this help?”
Adrian stabbed it through the display and worked it until the hole was a useful size. “Looks like it. Now, I just need to find the right wires and—”
The great doors finally clanged shut.
Adrian continued. “—and then I—”
Mando tugged on his shirt. “Adrian… do you know why parts of the room are setting themselves on fire?”
Adrian turned and followed Mando’s protruding finger, back to where the major part of the wreckage lay smouldering. At first he’d thought that maybe it had all just combusted for no apparent reason, but a cursory examination suggested otherwise. A river of flame spread down the wall, over the corpses and around the wreckage before eventually flowing into the hole. Even in space, this was not normal behaviour for a fire. “No.”
“No doubt this is why our hosts closed the doors,” Laphor concluded. She shared a meaningful glance with Adrian. “I take it you have no idea what this actually is?”
He shook his head. “None at all.”
“Nothing has changed,” Mando interjected, “you still need to get that Rauwryhr plugged in, only now instead of soldiers killing you it’ll be the lingering effects of strange poisons. This actually works out better for those of us wearing vacuum suits.”
Mando made an excellent point, and Adrian could already smell the heavy acridity in the air. There was, as Mando had suggested, no time left to fuck around. “Right,” he said, “back to it then.”
The display was easy to pry out once it had been sufficiently destroyed, and that left the guts of the terminal within easy reach. From this angle it was impossible to determine what connected where, which meant that Trix would have to work with whatever she got.
“Keep an eye out while he works,” Laphor instructed, “we don’t know if they’ll try coming in wearing protection.”
“Just more fire,” Mando noted, pointing to another stream of flames that was much nearer than the first. From this distance it was plain to see it was flowing from a vent. “Judging by that, I’m guessing it’s some kind of gas.”
“Great,” griped Adrian as he slotted the last few wires into Trix’s data device, “I love gas. You there yet, Trix?”
“Wow,” she replied, “I take it Plan B went poorly?”
“I’ve got you plugged into the flight deck control system,” Adrian informed her, “and I need you to open the door or… fucking do something before the burny gas kills us all.”
“Very poorly,” she corrected herself. “I don’t have access to the main door from here. Someone plugged me into the environmental systems instead of door control, and it looks like the whole flight deck is sealed off.”
“Yes, we’re across that,” Laphor replied irritably.
Trix ignored her. “The vents have been hardwired, but I do have access to pressure equalisation.”
“And what does that do?” Adrian asked.
“It does that thing where I turn it on and now the lower level is flooding with the ‘burny gas’,” she replied. “Judging by the screams, they really weren’t expecting that.”
Whether by coincidence or consequence, the spread of flames on the flight deck observably slowed a moment later, until the fires remained steady and stable.
“Looks like that worked,” said Adrian. “What else have you got?”
Unprompted, she laughed. “Oh… oh… yes. Adrian, you’ve just killed every senior member of the Dastasji’s command pool.”
That had been the aim. “Yeah, it was on purpose.”
“Right now there is nobody in command of this starship,” she continued. “All you need to do is lean a little closer to the microphone and repeat after me.”
Leaning in, Adrian did so, albeit with increasing awkwardness with each passing word. “Initiate Command Transfer: Shiplord Oh Fuck Adrian Saunders.”
“So let me get this straight,” said Laphor, once the process was done, “all he needed to do was say those words, and now he’s in control of the whole ship?”
“You mean after having his brain scanned and killing everyone who might normally take over command?” Trix asked. “Because no, that was just the first step.”
Adrian felt as though that should have been the last step. “What else comes next? Do I need to keep using that name?”
“Only if you want to,” Trix replied with too much cheer. “But while you don’t have total control, you still have more control than anyone else, and that means we should be able to get things done.”
++++
++++
Laphor
“What kind of things?” Laphor demanded, not seeing how this really helped them if a bunch of gun-toting lizards came barrelling through the door. “I mean, these guys aren’t giving up just because you’ve got a rank in their computer system. Especially not with this whole… scene of nightmares?”
Adrian nodded. “She’s right, Trix, and you kind of sounded like you had a plan.”
“I have some of a plan,” she admitted, “but it begins with turning on vocal controls. You’ll be able to give the ship commands by speaking into any microphone and identifying yourself, and can redirect controls where needed.”
“That’s good to know,” said Adrian. “It would have been even better to know aboard the fucking Zhadersil.”
“Two things,” Trycrur replied. “First, I don’t think it would have worked there for a number of reasons. Second, let’s focus on the current mess.”
“Fair enough,” said Laphor, glaring meaningfully at Adrian. “What are we currently up against, and how do we keep it from killing us?”
“There’s only one serious threat right now,” Trycur explained, “and that’s the last of the attack drones. You’ve already destroyed the rest, so I doubt this is anything more than a delaying tactic, but Adrian could just… expand their targeting parameters a bit.”
“You mean, turn them against the V’Straki?” Adrian inferred, and broke into a wide grin. “I like it.”
Laphor liked it as well; there was a certain level of poetic justice in destroying a genocidal military regime with its own weapons. “Step him through it, we’ll keep an eye out for anything else that crops up.”
Trycrur got started on helping Adrian through the complex verbal interface required to reprogram the drones while the mercenaries turned their attention outward to survey the room. The flames were dying slowly, and there was no sign of a surviving V’Straki, yet Laphor felt unpleasantly exposed; their weapons were not rated for Deathworlder.
“We can’t be stuck here like this,” Laphor murmured to Mando. “The first V’Straki through those doors will shoot us dead, and we won’t be able to do anything to stop them.”
“I was thinking the same,” he agreed. “I have a cloak emitter here, but I can’t be sure it’ll be effective against their technology. Fortunately there are quite a lot of spare guns just lying around.”
“Get them,” Laphor ordered her crew, sending them scurrying for the dead. “Anything you can. Mando, you go too—I can set up the emitter.”
He smiled and passed her the emitter. “I’ll bring you back something pretty, Shipmaster.”
She watched him hurry away for a moment before turning her attention to the device she’d been handed. It wasn’t the sort of thing that you normally found on the outside of a Hunter corpse, and there were a few indications that the previous owner had still been alive when Adrian had laid claim to it. This had a very ‘refurbished junk’ style to it, reminiscent of everything that Mando worked on, and there was no guarantee that it’d even work properly. This was, however, the only thing they had.
She got it working just in time for her crew to return, and for Mando to hand off a weighty pistol. “What now?”
“We’ll need to move in close to Adrian if we want it to cover all of us,” he replied. “These are normally intended for a single Hunter.”
He pressed in against Adrian’s leg, drawing the human’s immediate attention. “You alright, mate? I’ve had girlfriends who didn’t get that close.”
“It’s the emitter,” Mando quickly replied. “The maximum range is less than we’ll find comfortable. Look, now we’re all inside.”
It was just in time as well, Laphor noted, because it was only a moment later that a large V’Straki fighting force finally arrived. Dressed in a hodgepodge of environmental gear, it was clear they’d been hastily assembled, and judging by the blood and much on their uniforms they’d already seen some action. Their reaction to the scene in the flight deck was one of great horror, suggesting that they’d not been prepared in the slightest, and the immediately lost any cohesion they might have had.
Regardless of their expectations, there were undeniably a lot of them. Hopefully the cloak worked as well as Mando said it did, because otherwise they were looking forward to a short gunfight and an ignoble burial. “You’re sure this thing works, right?”
“They’d have shot us already if it didn’t,” Mando replied quietly. “Just hold still, and stop making noise.”
“We’ve suppressed the scanners in here,” Adrian added. “Last time they needed drones to see through a cloak, right now they’ve got nothing.”
That was somewhat reassuring, Laphor thought, but it looked as though the V’Straki had better things to do than look for hidden enemies. Once they’d scouted out the room for an ambush, they were far more interested in the two remaining Landers; it looked as though they were intending to use them. “I think they’re running away. In ships we still need.”
“They won’t be running far,” Adrian whispered back. “The door is locked shut, and the Landers are locked down.”
Judging by the eruption of angry shouting, the V’Straki appeared to have come to the same conclusion, and abandoned the Landers with obvious disgust. Huddling together beyond the sea of blood, they began arguing about what they should do next.
Adrian translated once they’d come to a resolution. “Not good, they’ve decided to guide the ship into a slow crash.”
“Can they do that?” Mando asked. “You’re supposed to have control.”
“Maybe,” Adrian admitted, grimacing. “They’ll need to work it directly from the sub-light drives.”
Laphor thought that concept seemed ripe for disaster. “That sounds a lot like one of your plans. How much time do we have?”
“And how do we stop them?” added Mando. “I don’t have much left in the way of useful junk.”
“We can’t,” Trycrur replied. “Not in the usual way. The crew suffered serious casualties from the drones before they managed to rally. We haven’t got much left in automated murder-machines.”
“I don’t want to go with ‘Plan B’,” Laphor told them. “I just want to put that out there ahead of time, because I am not enthusiastic about the idea of fighting Deathworlders in the corridors of their own ship. What do we have left?”
“A better plan,” said Trycrur. “It may still involve fighting in corridors, but the target is the Command Deck.”
Laphor wanted more information if she was going to drag her crew into more unpaid danger. “And what happens when we get there?”
“You plug me in and enjoy the view,” Trycrur replied.
Maybe it was something that happened with prolonged exposure to the human, but Laphor was beginning to wonder if there was some kind of psychological conditioning that Adrian had forced on his companions; getting details about plans was like squeezing water from a stone. “What happens then?”
“Then I take the ship into orbit, disable the artificial gravity, and vent the atmosphere,” Trycrur finally revealed.
“Ah,” said Adrian, “that old chestnut.”
“You’ve done this before?” Mando inferred.
Adrian shrugged. “I’ve done something like it a few times before. Look, they’ve given up on the Landers so if you don’t want to come along, maybe you can just wait inside one of them.”
Waiting for death versus active participation—truly a timeless question. “We’re coming.”
“Good,” he said, and unplugged Trycrur from the wiring. “Let’s get moving.”
Laphor frowned. “You know the way?”
“They gave me a tour,” he replied with a laugh, and stepped out of the cloaking field. “You can move in there alright, yeah? I’ll move just ahead, keep any heat off you.”
“Fine with me,” she said, happy to avoid Deathworlders shooting at her. If it came down to it, they were all armed with the V’Straki weapons, and could probably launch a decent surprise attack, but the weapons were somewhat cumbersome, non-modular, and were clearly designed for solely them to use.
Giving the strange flames a wide berth, their path skirted the remains of the initial exchange, giving Laphor an uncomfortably close view of the carnage they had wrought. This large smear of flesh and blood had been a small army of Deathworlders, and Adrian’s plan had seen them dead in mere [seconds]—sure, it had been Trycrur doing the actual shooting, but that was just the job she’d been given. There were stories about the Human Disaster, and she’d heard quite a few of them before taking Zripob’s contract, but those had been surprise attacks on poorly equipped targets. Had she actually understood the human’s capacity for killing and destruction, Laphor would have directed the brain-bugged Chehnasho to employ one of her competitors. This gloopy mess could just as easily have been Laphor and her entire crew, had they not become allies of convenience instead.
“Stay sharp,” Adrian whispered as they entered the corridors. “We don’t have Trix tracking their movements right now.”
Laphor reckoned that went without saying: any group as small as theirs had no right to become complacent while storming an enemy warship. “Don’t worry, we’re mono-molecular here.”
It was strange going from the wrecked flight deck into polished and pristine corridors, but they soon gave way to more familiar appearances. Walls full of small holes—dead V’Straki full of the same—and the sputtering, smoking ruins of the attack drones; it was a theme that repeated itself as they progressed through the ship.
“I don’t care much for the décor,” Mando joked as they hurried along, “but it’s better than if they were still around to shoot at us.”
It was clear that the sudden treachery of their own weapons had taken the V’Straki by surprise, and many of the dead were sprawled around with no evidence of resistance. Now and then there were improvised barricades, where the crew had made valiant last stands against the machines, though it looked like this tactic had produced mixed results; the survivors they had seen were probably from the more successful locations.