Spirit Jericho

Post Reply
User avatar
Siege
Site Admin
Posts: 2563
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 7:03 pm
Location: The Netherlands

Spirit Jericho

Post by Siege »

Something seemed to be missing ;).

For the uninitiated, this is a gift-story written for Artemis' 'verse back when it was still called Growing Pains, once upon a long time ago. Still, should still fit with the setting, I imagine.

Several main characters in this story were not invented by me: Zero Card and Ferro Brass are Artemis'; Kalta is Mobius 1's; John Baylor is - of course - Shroom Man 777's; Pastrix is Ford Prefect's (the latter three were all produced for the old Growing Pains RPG).

Finally, it's called a 'novella in two parts', but there's only one part. The second part was supposed to be called 'Mona' and comprise the last half of this story, but that was changed in editing. For some reason I decided to keep the 'in two parts' bit. Chalk it up to poetic license!


Spirit Jericho

A Universal Constants novella in two parts.

Part One: Dwight



1. Reminiscences


When I was growing up, back on Ceres me and my dad used to go at it almost all the time, over almost anything.

I used to have this really long hair way past down my shoulders. When I was seventeen or eighteen- oh man, he used to hate it. And we got to where we were fighting so much that I’d spend a lot of time out of the house. In the summertime it wasn’t so bad, because it was warm and my friends were out. But in the winter, I remember standing out downtown and I would get so cold… And when the wind would blow I had this phone booth where I used to stand in. And I used to call my girl, for hours at a time, just talking to her all night long.

And then finally I’d get my nerve up to go home and I’d stand there in the driveway, and he’d be waiting for me in the kitchen. I’d tuck my hair down in my collar and I’d walk in. And he’d call me back to sit down with him. And the first thing he’d always ask me is what I think I was doing with myself.

The worst part of it was I could never explain it to him.

I remember I got into a motorcycle accident once and I was laid up on bed, and he had a barber come in and cut my hair. Man, I can remember telling him that I hated him and that I would never ever forgive him.

And he used to tell me ‘son, I can’t wait until the army gets you. When the army gets you they’re gonna make a man outta you. They’re gonna cut all that hair off and they’re gonna make a man outta you.’ This was in I guess ’68, and there was a lot of guys from the neighborhood going off to fight the Klashies. I remember a drummer in the band I was in coming over to my house with his Marine uniform on, saying that he was going, and that he didn’t know where it was.

A lot of guys went, and a lot of guys didn’t come back. And a lot of them that did come back weren’t the same anymore. And I remember the day I got my draft notice. I hid it from my folks. Three days before my physical me and my friends went out and stayed up all night, and when we got on that bus the next morning man, we were all so scared.

And I went, and I failed.

And I remember coming home after being gone for three days and walking in the kitchen and my mother and father were sitting in the kitchen. My dad said ‘where have you been’. I said, ‘I went to take my physical.’ He said ‘what happened?’ and I replied ‘they didn’t take me.’

And he said ‘that’s good.’



2. Ceres


‘You don’t understand what you’re rejecting!’ the Algian chatters frantically. He is obviously frustrated. I like that. Algians are pompous pricks so enamored with themselves, so accustomed to their natural position of authority within the Commonwealth, that they can’t conceive of people telling them to shove it.

But that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

‘I understand perfectly well what I’m rejecting,’ I say, and I gnaw at the stump of my cigar. It tends to intimidate people, particularly those not accustomed to the suffocating smell of the tobacco. ‘You want me to draw your chestnuts out of the fire for you. I’m telling you right now, you and your Tearduct-’

‘Teardrop’ the Algian groans.

‘-to shove it.’ I finish without skipping a beat. ‘I am not doing it. Do your own dirty jobs. I’m not a g-man, I never wanted to be a g-man, and I’ll die before I’ll be a goddamn g-man.’

‘What is a g-man?’ asks the Krioli, who seems to have trouble following the conversation.

‘Never you mind,’ mutters Fleming. The UNIS sector head looks pained. I know he didn’t expect it to be this difficult. Well fuck him too. I’m not his lackey, I won’t click my boot heels and scream ‘yes sir!’ at the top of my lungs the moment United Nations Intelligence asks me to do something. ‘Mr. Johnson-’ he begins, but I cut him off.

‘No. I’m not doing it.’

The Algian shakes his head. ‘You don’t understand. I’m sure you don’t understand. The Spirit Jericho is missing, it has been stolen and we have no idea where it is. Threats have been made, threats against planets! Billions of lives are in the balance- why wouldn’t you want to help us?’

Hot rage boils up inside of me. ‘Hey, do you remember Mars, asshole? Do you remember the threats that you and your buddies here made? Do you remember how you felt good enough to order two sovereign species around? But now some guy stole your toy, turned the tables on you so that now it’s you people that get your cocks threatened with genocide- and you expect me to jump to your defense?’

The Krioli shifts nervously in her seat. ‘Captain, I assure you that at no point we actually considered using the weapon against Mars-’

‘Oh, isn’t that sweet? I fought in the goddamn war! You think it matters what you considered?

She doesn’t get it. Of course she doesn’t- none of them do, that’s exactly the problem, and has been for fifteen long years. She shakes her dreadlocked head. ‘We merely required a big stick with which to convince your two nations to stop their senseless bloodshed. I don’t-’

‘Dozens of my friends died in the war, lady. Thousands sacrificed their lives on the order of people like this bozo.’ I jab a finger at Fleming. ‘And we could win it, we still could, their sacrifices wouldn’t have been in vain… But then you idiots stepped in with your threats and your thinly veiled superiority complex. You forced a peace, except you did it years too goddamn late, and all those dead- all those people I have known, their deaths, their sacrifices, instantly rendered meaningless by your god-damn blustering. Every inch of ground conquered, every body buried- all turned irrelevant in the time it takes to make one threat. Thanks a lot, assholes.’

‘So for this you would risk-’

‘Using the word ‘risk’ presumes that I care.’

The Krioli looks like I just slapped her in the face. I decide to one-up her. ‘Fuck you people, your problems aren’t mine.’

‘You are insufferable!’ the Algian is close to stamping his feet, that’s how frustrated he is. That serves the cocky bastard just right.

‘You’re Commonwealth,’ I say icily as I look him square in the face. ‘Tell me, how does it feel to get your own attitude crammed up your ass?’

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen,’ Fleming sighs and shakes his head. ‘Let’s not go there. Mr. Johnson… Dwight… I’m fairly sure this won’t work but I have to say there is a substantial monetary reward involved.’

‘No.’

‘And you would have the gratitude of not just the United Nations but all civilized people’

‘No.’

‘We could even-’

‘No! Forget it!’

‘Alright, well, let me say up front that I am genuinely sorry I have to do this, because I’d really rather not. You know how we told you we wanted you to contact our agent on Asgard?’

‘Yes? So fucking what?’

‘She asked specifically for you.’

He produces a photograph from his drawer and shoves it across his metal desk. I think I know what it is before I pick it up. It is a picture of a woman, strikingly beautiful, a face and a body far too familiar even after all these years. Suddenly memories of love, hatred and betrayal grab me by my throat. I know I’ll take the job, and I don’t know whether it is to hear her out or because I want to kill this woman myself.

Mona Franco. God damn it.

I close my eyes.

‘I’ll do it.’


3. Voyage


For some reason space travel always brings back memories. Maybe it’s the oddly dreamlike expanse of Second Space outside the windows. That expanse looks the same now, now that the Harbinger safely hugging the belly of the big sprint trader Toronaga, as it did my very first trip to Asgard.

Boy, Asgard. That old rock sure is a bag of mixed emotions.

I grew up on in the sixties, on Ceres, the Coney Island of the solar system. Sure wasn’t much those days, a ball of decay, anarchy and lost glory. Grew up with war on TV every night, a war my friends were involved in.

My old man, he’d lived through food shortages and suffrage riots, he fought Tekk-chasers during the Jovian witch hunts- killed a few too, I think. He never used to talk much about it. And now we were at war with the Klashies. The war, that damn monster was what finally broke his trust in the government. Blind faith in your leaders, he said to me, or blind faith in anything, that just got you killed.

For all his faults my old man was a cynical old bastard. These days I think I’m becoming more and more like him.

Even after all the stuff we’d gone through my dad didn’t want me to leave. Army didn’t want me, he said. Why should I go? Where was I gonna go anyway?

And I didn’t know. But I didn’t want to stay. All my friends were gone. Some we heard had died, for something they didn’t even believe in. And I was just sitting back fixing cars on Ceres. I couldn’t stand just sitting there doing nothing. I had to get off that ball. So I signed up on a privateer as a junior tech. We ran supplies between Asgard, Olympia and Avalon, munitions, rations, whatever. Went well for about a month, then we ran into a Klashie guncutter the way a sentence runs into a full stop.

I couldn’t make it to the escape pods in time. I was still aboard when we hit atmosphere. Lifeboats were useless at that stage. Gravity was failing. Flames were everywhere. I guess I thought I was going to die for sure, screaming my lungs out in terror, cursing myself for not listening to my old dad.

I don’t know if there was anyone else still on board. I don’t really remember impact either. I only recall the blow of a lifetime and the horrifying sound of screaming metal. Sometimes I still wake up with that sound echoing in my ears.

Turned out our old boat crashed right on top a Klashnoi armored column that was about to be ambushed by the resistance. We sure took care of that for them. Why those fighters ever entered that wreck I still don’t know, but they did, and they found me. They dragged me out. She dragged me out.

Mona.

They build you up just to beat you down; I guess is what they say.



4. Asgard


I hate New London. Always have. Always will.

New London. All the worst aspects of human culture packed into a city too small for the squirming masses that it harbors. In nothing does it resemble the city for which it is named. New London, where life is cheap and death is cheaper, where vice, sin and treachery are as easy to find as lice on a hermit and honesty, honor and decency as rare as Sirian feathers. New London- where I fought street to street and house to house at the side of Mona Franco a short lifetime ago. Ten thousand tainted memories. We saved each other’s ass dozens of times. And for what? It’s become a cesspit of villainy. Why did we almost die a hundred times for this place?

I shouldn’t have come back here. I should’ve forgotten this place ever existed.

I’m not alone, my crew is here. I’ve told them the basics, that we’re doing a job for UNIS and that we’re getting well paid. They don’t need to know about Mona. But I think Kal suspects something. She’s always been too damned smart for her own good.

Butch seems comfortable enough, but then again, when didn’t Butch Baylor look comfortable?

‘I like it here,’ he says, unfazed by the chaos of the landing pad. ‘Are those sinhouses?’

Zero Card just smiles. He’s the newest and youngest member of my crew. I don’t like hiring new people, but the man can handle himself under stress. Plus he’s got a reputation and he knows people, all things that can come in handy in our line of work.

The cosmodrome sprawls across the rooftops of several of New London’s highest buildings, a maze of landing pads sprouting from the steel and concrete connected by skywalks, express monos and narrow bridges. Some smaller platforms overlap others. There are dangling cables and hoses and people running, freight haulers buzzing about the pads loading and unloading cargo from a variety of sprinter shuttles. From the streets below, the clamoring of traffic assaults our ears. On the distant edge of the city, the five-hundred kilometer long and five kilometer deep Cirencester Gap is a dark, rough-cut canyon circumventing the city that has sprawled unto its very edge.

‘You know the night market?’ I ask Zero Card.

The man who also goes by the names of Horatio Troubadour, James the Fool, and a myriad other aliases, noms-de-guerre and pseudonyms nods. ‘It’s in the Little Fuji quarter.’

‘That’s where we meet our contact. You take Kal and Butch, be there at eight this afternoon. And be armed. Wait, make that heavily armed- this is a UNIS mission after all.’

‘Where are you going to be in the meantime?’

‘I got to talk to someone else first.’

‘Hey,’ says Baylor. ‘When we’re done here can we check out the sights?’

‘I hope not,’ murmurs Kal. ‘This place sucks.’

‘Does not!’ protests Baylor.

‘This gods-damned hive of scum and chaos is where I lost my fucking legs during the war,’ snarls Kalta. ‘I gave my fucking all for this planet, and look what for, look at what it’s become. It fucking sucks, Baylor.’

Sometimes I forget my pilot and I have more in common than might be obvious at first glance.


5. War


So yeah, we met in the middle of the war. I guess it was inevitable I'd end up in it sooner or later, just like it was inevitable I'd meet my Woman In Red sooner or later.

She dragged me out of a crashed, burning spaceship. What a woman.

Mona... I don’t know what it was that made me love Mona Franco. There sure were enough other women in the resistance, although not many survived long enough to fall madly in love with ‘em.

Maybe it was that special kind of ruthlessness that no-one else could match. Or maybe it was just that she kept living when everybody else kept dying on me. Because despite the glamorous novels and movies they made about it after the war was over, that's what people did the most. Dying.

The band of resistance fighters that rescued me was slowly whittled away until, two months later, only Mona and I remained. Ed and Donna, Garcia and Jake, they all got shot during raids. We lost Frankie and Susan to Klashie artillery- there wasn’t enough left of ‘em to bury. Vic died of some stupid disease- the damned inglorious bastard was too stubborn to tell us, and by the time we discovered it was too late for antibiotics.

Don’t believe any of that ‘hero’s stand’ bullshit they try and feed you. Heroism is like Mickey o’Leary. We were ambushed. Mickey got shot in the leg and volunteered to stay behind to cover our exit. Heroic last stand, yeah? Well, a Klashie sniper shot him through the stomach. And for thirty minutes Mona and I listened to his screaming over the radio, until it finally went silent.

You know what that’s like? To hear the guy who’s saving your ass screaming and slowly bleeding to death, and you don’t want to switch off the radio because you know his screams will be the last thing he’s ever gonna say, so you could at least do him that last favor and listen?

He was the last one. After that it was just Mona and me.

I guess we could have recruited some rookies to go at it with a new team. In the refugee camps there sure were enough young idiots eager to get themselves shot up for the good of the United Nations. But we didn’t. We could both do without any more friends dying on us. On occasion we’d hook up with other bands to coordinate, sometimes long enough for them to become friends, but it never lasted. Sometimes they got shot; sometimes we just went our separate ways after a while.

At the end of the day it was always just the two of us.

Before every action we would kiss as if we’d never see each other again. And we didn’t expect to. People like us got shot all the time. Why should we be any different?

It’s funny, because apart from the taste of her lips I don’t really remember a lot about her, about what she said and thought and believed. We didn’t have much of a chance to think about how we felt about a lot of things. We didn’t expect to make it out alive.

And I guess in the end I felt cheated when I did.



6. Teardrop


The streets of New London are an ill-planned mess. Roads converge on the edges of where hab-domes were once hurriedly erected by the first colonists, but the hab-domes are long gone. They have been replaced by modern high-rise that sprawls across parts of the old roads, which now lead nowhere or into sudden new alleyways that lead around the new constructs, some of which have already been torn down and replaced themselves. As a result of this chaos the street plan is utterly chaotic. In their haste to claim the system the expeditionary UN hadn’t thought of proper city planning.

The UN not thinking is a recurring pattern when it comes to Asgard.

The governorates solution was a new road plan- an airborne one, a web of walkways and highways so all-encompassing it blocks the sun from entire neighborhoods. Old-street neighborhoods like Fukido are covered in permanent shadow by the sky-highways, as the locals grudgingly call them. Strings of lights hang from the rusting metal grating on the bottom of the highways. Wild, multi-colored Graffiti coats the big ceracrete support struts. Big floodlights illuminate whole swathes of the underground at once. Laundry hangs on lines across the streets. Reggae flares from open windows as groups of people in bright clothes hustle by. Hustlers hastily pack up their illegal merchandise as two policemen pass by; the coppers conveniently look the other way. Street vendors clamor for attention; the scent of their hotdogs and hamburgers and sharp Avalonian mustard mingles with and adds to the aroma of barely contained anarchy.

All said, it sort of reminds of Ceres.

I make my way through the busy sub-street toward an old and inconspicuous lodging in-between two shops brightly illuminated with many-colored neon. Fleming gave me this address, told me to show up and asks for help because he had a hunch I might need it. For once I don’t doubt him. The third floor of the lodging is a Teardrop safehouse.

I walk up the four steps to the door and see that it is open.

I draw my gun. I might not be a g-man but I know doors to secret safe houses aren’t supposed to be wide open. Keeping the presence of the gun obscured with my body, I silently move across the threshold and softly close the door behind me. Then I draw the double-barreled Brawler sawn-off shotgun out from where I kept it underneath my jacket, and sling it over my shoulder.

From somewhere up ahead come cracks that you might mistake for fireworks if you didn’t know what gunfire sounds like. The hallway is shabby, the wood on the floor partially gone. It creaks softly as I move ahead. I raise the gun as I edge forward.

There are doors to both sides of the hallway, forced open. The smell of cordite is thick. Men and women are sprawled on the ground. Some have been raked by gunfire, some have been shot through the chest only twice. All have been shot through the head, and judging by the scorch marks on their skin those were close execution-style finishers.

Whoever did this were cold blood killers. That is bad news. I came here for help, not to help.

At the end of the hallway there is a rickety set of stairs to the second floor. More cracks echo from above. Whoever killed those people is still here. Adrenalin courses through my veins. My brain shifts gears into full-on killer mode. Keeping to the wall I climb the steps. Blood trickles down from a body at the top. It’s a male Krioli, unarmed and dead. Silently I step over the corpse onto the second floor. It’s a close copy of the first: two hallways in a T-shape with rooms to both sides.

The stomping of heavy-duty combat boots alerts me to a presence up ahead. I press my back against the wall. The weight of the shotgun presses reassuringly at my chest. I throw a quick glance. The corridor is the same as the one downstairs, except the front door is replaced with another set of stairs to the third floor.

There are three men in the hallway, standing over several dead Sirian bodies. They are armed; armored too. I catch a glimpse of gray ceramic unpowered armor. Crap. I should’ve brought grenades. Then again there are other ways to kill power-armored enemies- the war taught me that much.

Silently I wheel into the open hallway, gun drawn. The silencer muffles the gunshots into a soft clacking. Two bullets clatter uselessly against ceramic armor; the next two catch the nearest man in the throat and the forehead. Squirting blood the man begins to topple over. I continue without stopping, stepping out of the opening again and pressing myself against the wall on the other side of the hallway. The armored body hits the ground with a dull thud.

One down, two more to go.

The other two are slow to react. They obviously thought themselves safe. That was a mistake, and I fully intend to make sure it was their last. They’re barely finished turning toward their comrade when I move again. I step into the opening again and in quick succession put six shots into the hallway. The first two go wide; the third clatters harmlessly against the armor of the closest man. The next two catch the last man straight in the face. My last bullet grazes the cheek of the front man. I keep moving. Even as the last man begins to fall the first is raising his weapon, a mean-looking automatic rifle. My pistol is out of ammo, but I am not defenseless. The sound of the shotgun thunders through the narrow hallway. I catch him square in the chest with both barrels. The man is briefly airborne and shatters into the nearest wall. He slumps down, dead or unconscious. I don’t care either way.

There’s no way the element of surprise is mine much longer.

As quickly as I can I reload the pistol and scoop a rifle from the floor. Just in time: two men are coming down the stairs behind me. But the thing with stairs is that I can see your legs before you can see my head. With a ferocious roar the rifle comes to life in my hands, blazing out a single stream of shots so fast the gun seemed to spit pure fire. Hot brass shells spray from the side-slot of the weapon into my chest, burning my shirt. Their legs mowed out from under them, the two men lurch back and sprawl, tumbling down the stairs through my line fire.

Wow, nice.

The gun stops firing; the click-click-click of the mechanism tells me the magazine’s empty. I drop it and grab my shotgun, reloading it as I run toward the stairs.

‘Well guys?’ a gravelly voice comes from above. ‘You got ‘em?’

I hurry up the stairs and reply ‘yeah, we got him!’, twisting my voice in a way that will hopefully sound like one of the men I just shot. ‘Sucker had a shotgun!’ I add as I round the top of the stairs.

Either this works or I’ll be dead in three seconds flat.

On the third floor a single man in gray ceramic armor is standing over a twitching ball of black and yellow fur bound with black rope. He wields the same type of rifle as the men downstairs. ‘Nice job guys,’ he says, but the smile droops off his face when he sees me.

‘Yeah, I thought so myself too,’ I reply. ‘Now step away from the kitty.’

The man is fast, I give him that. He twitches and his gun comes up, but I am faster and he’s far too late. I pull the trigger, the shotgun barks and shoots red flames and two cordite-ignited, gauss-accelerated ball bearings blow off his head, splattering blood all over the cheap paint of the hallway.

I raise the smoking barrels of the Brawler shotgun as the Hamechel begins to get up from the floor. Twisting in her bonds she looks more irritated than afraid. I know these guys got the lucky break of a lifetime when they floored her. Too bad it didn’t last for them. She turns my way and I know she recognizes me by the way her ears twist in the Hamechel expression of surprise.

I grin because I know she’ll hate this part. ‘Hello, Ferro. Wouldn’t need a hand, would you?’


7. Brass


Ferro Brass is pissed off alright. I can tell. I’ve worked with her before. The Ivory Teardrop’s best field agent has had a few very bad days, she tells me. First the Commonwealth mission to Asgard got shot up, the entire complex wiped out, with her in it but unable to stop the slaughter in time. She’s remarkably reluctant to give me any details, but I’m impressed all the same. Seizing a Commonwealth compound is a tough job, and yet these people managed it. I wonder why news of the attack isn’t all over the Grapevine.

Then she tells me the invaders were after the compound’s master computer, and I begin to realize why the UN is sitting on this information.

She didn’t know what they were after in there, she tells me. But even if she did there wouldn’t have been anything she could have done about it. The moment the alarms were tripped a distress signal was sent. And four hours later in a gust of Einsteinian radiation the Starcruiser Ji-Zha-Zhi’s Plight bursts from Second Space into Asgardian orbit.

The massive Algian vessel immediately finds itself under attack. Before its shield harmonics can complete the post-transitional realignment the enemy is on them, creeping under the bubble before it can reach full cohesion. These people knew exactly what they were doing, what they were after, and where they could get it.

If I was impressed before, I am now officially even more so, and suddenly this whole thing begins to make sense.

They breach the hangars, in the process blowing more than a hundred Commonwealth engineers and technicians into space. The intruders are vac-suited and prepared for war. They ignore the fighters and the d-ships and corvettes, going straight for their prize of prizes.

The TX-55 Spirit Jericho. Brass tells me that the first such machine was built by the Sirian Technocracy long before it joined the Commonwealth, and the more recent models are the CDF’s ultimate strategic deterrent: a series of autonomous launch platforms, each single one equipped with so much firepower that it can incinerate an entire world. I can’t fathom why the Algian cruiser would carry a TX-55- but then again, maybe its standard procedure for such vessels, after all the Dhaimeio-class Starcruisers are the ultimate Commonwealth warship and, as the Algian Teardrop operative on Ceres had cynically put it, the ultimate peace-bringers.

Anyway, they fucking stole the damned thing.

Sure, I had known the basics since the meeting at UNIS Ceres. But now that Brass fills in the details I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Whoever these people are they must have balls of steel. They nick the Spirit Jericho, and then plant a nuke to cover their exit. It blows through twenty decks, killing hundreds of Commonwealth sailors and gutting the Starcruiser. The ship is critically damaged in the process, all except the most critical of systems are off-lined, and that includes shields and sensors. In the aftermath the attackers escape with their prize.

Planetside meanwhile Ferro Brass finds out she is a hunted cat the bad way: she reports back to the Teardrop from an Asgardian police precinct—and moments after walking out the front door the headquarters is attacked by a strafing black gunship that rakes the building with missiles and autogun-fire. None of the officers make it out alive. For three days Ferro Brass lives as a fugitive on the streets of New London, slipping from safehouse to safehouse, until she finally runs face-first into the heavily armed mercenaries that are now lying dead around us.

We search the lodging for other survivors, but find none. It’s a fair bet they only kept her alive this long to find out how much she knew, and how much she’d told other people. We salvage as much weapons as we can. I pick one of the blood-smudged ceramic armors for myself.

I tell Brass about the meeting at eight. She confirms my fears. If they could listen into Teardrop frequencies when she reported in, they –whoever ‘they’ are- will know where and when we meet our contact.

Yeah, this is going to be messy alright.
"Nick Fury. Old-school cold warrior. The original black ops hardcase. Long before I stepped off a C-130 at Da Nang, Fury and his team had set fire to half of Asia." - Frank Castle

For, now De Ruyter's topsails
Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet -
And this the Dutchmen know!
User avatar
Siege
Site Admin
Posts: 2563
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 7:03 pm
Location: The Netherlands

Re: Spirit Jericho

Post by Siege »

8. Betrayal


As far as I was concerned the war was a simple matter of us versus them, humans on one side, Klashnoi on the other. We humans were in it together; we were fighting for our lives, for our collective survival. But of course not everyone thought about it like that. There are always leeches, rats who try their damned best to make a buck even if it’s their fellow human they have to fuck over.

Manfred DeSoto was one such rat. A scumbag of the worst kind: the kind of man who’d sell his mother into slavery if he thought he stood to profit from it. His thugs terrorized the refugee camps, forced hundreds of dispossessed colonists to work in sweatshops whilst he stole their medicines and rations at gunpoint to sell them for astronomical profits on the black market. He made a killing. Literally.

The army was too busy elsewhere to do anything about it, and the leaders of the resistance turned a blind eye to DeSoto’s thuggery, probably in return for all those weapons he sold them at bottom prices. Like that was a feat worthy of commendation. By that time there were weapons everywhere. There were more weapons going around than food.

Well, as far as I was concerned DeSoto might just as well have been a Klashie. I wanted him dead.

Mona protested. He wasn’t the target, she said. We should be focusing on Klashies and leave the human criminals to somebody else, she said.

I didn’t agree. A bad guy is a bad guy, I argued. We’re fighting for humanity, if we ice this asshole that makes the situation a bit better for humanity. So it’s the right thing to do. I didn’t understand why she would object to killing someone so obviously despicable. I didn’t understand.

We argued over it for two weeks. Hit some other bastard, she said. No, I said. Hit him later, after the war maybe, she said. No, I said. Finally I had told her that I’d do it by myself if she didn’t want to accompany me, and she acquiesced. I didn’t understand the tears in her eyes.

The night before we would hit DeSoto’s place we were lying in the shattered husk of a hab-dome on New London’s edge. I could see the stars through the cracked roof. She lay so close beside me I could feel her warmth. And then she kissed me, and I remember the shock when I felt the scratch of her fingers, and swift paralysis moving through me. I had fully expected to die. She stood over me for a long moment, holding a combat knife in her hand, the same knife I’d seen take the life of over half a dozen Klashnoi. I knew she could do it. Hadn’t we both? So I waited for her to put it through my eye. But she didn’t kill me. She shook her head, kissed me one last time, dressed in her fatigues and disappeared.

I remember the salt of her tears slowly drying against my skin. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t move for twelve long, agonizing hours.

She’d been with him. She’d been with DeSoto all that time.

I guess that explains how she could always find a good gun when we needed one. Maybe Mickey or Frankie or Susan had known who Mona Franco really was. But they were all dead, and I hadn’t. All those months and I had no idea who she was.

I never saw her again.



9. Showdown


Brass and I move through the Night Market making final checks. Everything looks calm. The flames of the gasworks flare, giant prawns sizzle. Little groups of men and women, arriving late from the docks, play six card studs or drink beer and mowa juice at wooden tables. Street girls drift from table to table looking for custom. People spoon noodles from bowls with chopsticks. Radios play drums ‘n’ bass, probably some Krioli station. Over by the vendor stalls a three police officers stand in quiet conversation.

Everything looks peaceful, but we know the shit can hit the fan any second. It’s insane to even have come here, but it’s not like I have much choice in the matter. I can’t let this slide. Not now.

I buy a beer from a stallholder and take a seat on the small wooden bench by a table. My eyes drift around to see if everyone is in position. Baylor is flirting with the street girls, his Hawaiian polo so obscenely eye-catching no-one in their right mind would consider him to be anything except what he looks. Zero Card is sitting wrapped in his trenchcoat at one of the tables at the far side of the market. He is playing a game of Olympian Solitaire. Few people would be able to tell that the cards he is using are all but ordinary.

The rest of the place looks safe, just a mass of stalls selling food, drinks and drugs. The only people are the usual group of night people you’d expect to find in a New London market at three in the morning. Some slumming aristocrats looking for local talent; a tall Hamechel escorting his petite Krioli girlfriend to a nearby table. Brass snorts at the sight of it. Three burly Klashnoi play hookjack at a corner table whilst their eyes discreetly scan for trouble- most likely they are local triad enforcers.

I catch Brass’ unobtrusive glance. I turn to study the entrance arch to the market hall.

It is her, still beautiful. Her red hair braided in a pony tail and dressed like a veteran, exactly the way I remember her, short black jacket over military green fatigues. I’m sure there are weapons hidden there. The rich boys all turn their heads. Her eyes widen when she sees me and she comes down and sits opposite me.

‘Dwight—h-how are you? It’s been a long time.’

I keep my eyes cold. I do not return her smile. For a moment I feel like taking the shotgun and blowing her away. The moment passes. I am a professional. This is a job.

‘I have a car out back. We’re going to the cosmodrome,’ I am proud of myself. My voice is level even though my mouth feels dry. Keep it professional. Take her somewhere safe. Then maybe we can talk, or shoot- I’m not sure yet.

Wait- Brass’ ears twitch. The Hamechel begins to move. Something is wrong. The police officers, they are moving this way, fanning out like they mean violence. Merely ordinary policemen doing their job? I don’t think so. I don’t believe in coincidence. Something is happening, I can feel it, it’s that feeling I get all the time just before I walk into a well-oiled trap.

I feel in the pocket of my coat and find the hilt of the sawed-off Brawler and back sideways but they are going for Brass instead. ‘Out of the way citizen,’ grumbles one of the men. ‘We want to check the xeno’s papers.’

Brass freezes for a moment. It is a reasonable request. If these men are the law, she has to show papers. If they were not…

Oh what the hell.

‘My name is Dwight Johnson, dog! And I don’t like your tone of voice!’

A flicker of recognition in his eyes at the mention of my name, and the officer’s hand flashes for his gun. I am quicker. The shotgun blast thunders through the market and takes the head off the imposter. The others begin to move, but Brass no longer hesitates. A vibroblade appears in her hand faster than I can raise the shotgun I’m already holding. Her blade is a blur, she takes a man’s hand off at the wrist just as my shotgun blasts through his chest; the continuation of Brass’ stroke parts the last attacker’s head from his shoulders.

Suddenly everything is happening at once. The night is filled with violence. People scream. From between the stalls a crowd of men in familiar gray ceramic armor comes rushing. They brandish assault rifles and sub-machineguns as if they know how to use them. Mona topples the table, sending food and beer bottles spinning. I make a grab for her but she’s not there, she’s already ahead of me. A Heckler and Koch Mag-500 has appeared miraculously in her hands. I dream I have a lasergun as I fumble for the assault rifle salvaged from the safehouse and throw myself flat behind a stall just in time to avoid the first salvo’s that shred through the nearest tables.

Like an oversized tiger Brass pounces up a stall, onto a steel column and then down into the group of men. Her blade slashes, decapitating the nearest mercenary in a flicker before he even sees her, then gutting another with a quick cut that slices through his armor like it’s not even there. Before they know what’s hitting them she vaults back into cover behind a set of stalls and out of sight. For a moment the firing falters. That’s all I need. I come up to a crouching position and open fire; the satisfying roar of the assault rifle fills the market. Not even the ceramic armor of the mercenaries can protect against its awesome stopping power, and I within seconds I have cut down three men. Their firing continues but is erratic, the momentum of their attack momentarily sapped.

A stall explodes, showering the market in splintered wood and sheared linen, and something massive lumbers out of it.

An anthrotank complete with turbocannon. Well god-damn, that’s all we need. Somebody somewhere isn’t taking any chances. With a huge roar the cannon erupts into life, hosing the market with brightly colored tracers. Stalls shred, tables collapse, innocent people scream as they are cut down. Zero Card is nowhere in sight. I see Baylor throw himself to the ground, and the line of fire passes over him. He rolls out of the way before it can cut him in two, producing two autopistols with extended clips as he moves.

The fight wavers as the anthrotank steps forward, its feet pounding and shattering the tiles of the market’s pavement. The mercenaries fall back; Ferro Brass uses the diversion to dive behind two of the market dome’s ceracrete support pillars. I see Mona follow her example a dozen meters away.

And I, I lay in a mess of shattered glass and half-frozen hotdogs behind an overturned snack stall and I wish I had a rocket launcher.

For a moment silence reigns, broken only by the startup whine of faraway sirens. Those won’t do us any good. This is the silence of a good old showdown, Bangkok-style. The pounding feet of the anthrotank- oh fuck that stupid bit of old jargon, it’s a damned walker, and it’s scanning for targets, the whine of its targeting servo’s a promise of swift hypervelocity death if it can get you in its targeting reticules.

Then with a whir and a clicking of metal the autocannon spins into action and apocalypse regains its grip on the market. A hail of bullets tears indiscriminately through wood and steel and the ceramic pavement. ‘Christ of Steel!’ I curse as the line of fire passes over me and whittles away my cover into near-nonexistence, but I can’t even hear myself screaming. But then the line of fire jerks away and I hear shots ring out.

‘Get to cover boss!’ I hear Baylor shout, and I get up and dive for the cover of a stone bench. He’s standing in plain sight in that insane polo of his, making pot shots at the machine. His bullets ping futilely off its heavy armor but his diversion works, the walker is turning toward him, its gun roaring to life and hosing bullets in his general direction. And then Baylor is running as fast as he can to avoid the bright line of streaking tracers, staying just a split second ahead of death.

Ferro and Mona are fighting the mob of mercenaries together; Mona is snapping off a steady stream of lethal shots with her big mag-pistol, and Ferro is wielding a stubby sub-machinegun and popping off short salvos. They are keeping each other covered as they retreat through a mess of shattered stalls and benches, pestered by a withering hail of fire from the mercs. I leap forward and join the fray, hosing the mercenaries with the heavy autogun.

Baylor yelps as he dives for cover and the walker fails to compensate in time; the line of fire passes over him again and he gets up and begins to run the other way as the turbocannon attempts to follow him. ‘A little help here would be appreciated!’ he shouts.

‘Keep the ruddy thing distracted just a while longer!’ I hear Zero Card’s voice and suddenly I see where he’s at: the gypsy has climbed into one of the Jugendstil-patterned support columns and is moving along the steel struts that hold up the vaulted roof, trying to get close to the walker. I don’t know what he’s going to do when he gets there, but I’m too busy to figure it out anyhow- the mercs are spreading out with military precision, spraying bullets through the marketplace and forcing me to keep my head down. Without looking I point the autogun around the corner and indiscriminately hose fire back into their general direction until the magazine runs out. I drop it and pull the shotgun, pressing my back against the tattered remains of the stone bench.

I catch movement in the corner of my eye. In a flurry of trenchcoat Zero Card drops down onto the neck of the anthrotank. Briefly a set of tarot cards appears in his hands, to disappear just as swiftly somewhere in the machineries behind the walker’s armored head, and then the rogue jumps off, scooping and rolling away from the machine as quickly as he can.

With a strangely muffled bang and a gust of multi-colored flame the head of the anthrotank implodes in upon itself. Metal shrieks. With a groan of dying machineries the thing comes to a stop. Muted explosions rock its interior and flames and smoke shoot out the top. Still whizzing and coughing as if in protest the turbocannon creaks down to hit the ground with a solemn ker-plunk. The walker is decidedly dead.

Horatio James Troubadour the Third – Zero Card – pumps his fist in the air in triumph. ‘The fool, the hanging man and death, all at once’ he smiles. ‘I’ve been meaning to try that combo for like forever!’

‘You could have tried it a bit sooner,’ comes Butch Baylor’s annoyed voice. Dirt and grime cakes to him and his polo. ‘My shirt is ruined!’

‘If you’re done patting yourselves on the back guys maybe you could lend us a hand?!’ comes Mona’s frantic voice. The mercs have her and Brass pinned down in a corner of the market and despite the loss of their big friend they don’t seem intent on quitting. But now our band comes down on them like a ton of bricks. I pump my shotgun and send waves of buckshot their way. Butch Baylor fires his autopistols Akimbo-style and even sporadically manages to hit something that’s not the far wall; Zero Card has produced one of the biggest revolvers I’ve ever seen—and that’s saying something. Mona is still the brilliant shot that I remember, managing to hit exposed joints, necks or faces with her mag-pistol even from this distance and under heavy fire. Brass is doing a remarkable job with the sub-machinegun even though it must be an unpleasantly unfamiliar weapon to her.

The staccato chatter of gunfire is ceaseless, but slowly the band of mercs is pressed into the defensive and begins to fall back toward the entrance. We follow behind them, exchanging a hail of hot lead that shatters what little is left of the market stalls. At the exit they abandon the last pretense of cover and begin to run; we follow swiftly. Mona manages to hit a last one in the back of the head and then the mercenaries are out, but we are on their tails-

I am the first one to hear the wail of approaching rocket engines.

‘It’s a trap!’ I yell. ‘Fall back!’

The entrance to the market hall disappears in a tremendous explosion and a wave of collapsing metal and stone and we are knocked on our backs. All engines roaring, the black gunship passes overhead and disappears briefly.

‘Everyone okay?’ asks Butch, scrambling to his feet.

‘Does it look like I’m okay?’ groans Mona, her black jacket torn and tattered and smoldering as if it’s been on fire.

‘Kal!’ I shout in the portable radio I’m carrying. ‘You’re on! And make it quick!’

The gunship comes back for a second pass, firing a twin set of big-bore autoguns whose heavy-caliber munitions shatter through the roof of the market, shearing through the ceramic tiles and metal sheets, sending blistering waves of splinters and grime showering down. Missiles streak out from pods slung under its stump wings, blast the roof and a support pillar, cracking it in two and collapsing a good part of the market hall. ‘Jesus jumping Christ on a pogostick!’ curses Baylor as he tries to avoid the tumbling pieces of debris and is narrowly pulled out of the line of fire by Brass. ‘Can’t a guy get a break?!’

We were outgunned before, but this is so bad it’s not even tragic. ‘We’re in a bit of trouble here Kalta!’ I yell into the radio as I scuttle into the best cover I can find. ‘So ‘now’ would be a good time!’

Then suddenly among the whine of rocket engines is the throbbing hum of old-fashioned Klashnoi gravilifters—the Harbinger of Thunder is on the scene. My old Klashie guncutter arcs over the market with a grace decidedly remarkable for such a blunt instrument-.a sight for sore eyes indeed. Its armored hide folds away in select areas to reveal sets of Olympian quad-laser cannons. Pulsing red streaks after the gunship and the air fills with the scent of ozone as Kalta opens fire, her custom-tailored cybernetics allowing her to act as both pilot and gunner at the same time.

The appearance of the massive guncutter was clearly something the gunship pilot had not expected. The black craft evades the first laser barrage by veering upward and simultaneously tilting sharply to the left, but Kalta was by far the better pilot and she has surprise on her side. The Harbinger compensates and the hissing stutter of the quad lasers sounds again, this time catching the black gunship dead in its flank and melting grievous wounds that lacerate the ship by virtue of its own movement. Explosions rock its interior and it begins to lose altitude. Undoubtedly realizing just how dire his situation is the pilot breaks off the engagement and arcs away between two skyscrapers and out of sight. In turn, the Harbinger swiftly comes down to the ground, the main cargo hold door opening like a lowering jaw.

‘The cavalry’s here boss,’ Kalta Mitchell’s voice crackled over the radio. ‘And I suggest you get on board—the fuzz is about to come ‘round the corner.’

My ragged and tattered band of adventurers hurries out of the ruined night market. Butch is covered in grime. Mona is clutching an arm that is seeping blood; Brass’ fur is scorched in select places. The police sirens are close now, no more than a street or two away. For a moment I bless the chaotic lay-out of New London’s streets. I don’t want to be the one to explain this chaos to the authorities. At least I was right in predicting a mess. It’s definitely time to disappear.


10. Reacquaintance


The galley of the Harbinger of Thunder is small, decorated by Kalta, and therefore very gaudy. Faux leaves of fake gold hang from the steel rafter. There are photographs of various places, all taken from the sky: on Avalon, Olympia, Earth. Not large agglomerations or famous sites, but little quiet and peaceful places. Kal was never into big cities.

An old wooden table stands in the middle of the galley. It is worn and knife-carved, and has probably seen more light years than most furniture see years. Outside the windows stars twinkle in vaguely familiar Asgardian constellations. The Harbinger drifts safely along the relative anonymity of geosynchronous orbit.

The other crew members are tactfully someplace else on the ship. Ferro Brass looked as if she was going to insist on being here, but I think the look in my eyes made it abundantly clear how it was going to be. I can be very convincing if I want to be.

Mona sits on one end of the table. I sit on the other. For fifteen minutes we’ve been looking at each other without speaking a single word. I don’t want to start this conversation. I wouldn’t even know where to begin, or what to say. I purposefully forgot to bring a gun. I feel naked and vulnerable without it, but I wouldn’t trust myself with it where this conversation might be headed.

‘I wasn’t with him,’ she finally says.

Seconds of silence pass. I look at her accusingly.

‘With DeSoto. I wasn’t with him.’

She falls silent again. The clock on the wall cuts away my emotional vacuum in neat, second-long slices.

‘What do you mean,’ I finally ask.

She ignores me, stares unseeing through the window out into space. When she speaks her voice is mechanical, and barely more than a whisper.

‘I considered letting you live my greatest mistake. Years of work risked in a single moment clouded with emotion. We were rigged from the start, Dwight. If I came out alive, you would end up dead. That’s the same thing as me putting the bullet through your head myself. But I couldn’t do it. I think I spared you because you were young and cynical and brave and had seen too much of war. I think I spared you because you were just like me.’

The clock on the wall doesn’t care what I feel. Tick-tack. Tick-tack.

‘What do you mean,’ I repeat.

‘Don’t you understand?’ she sounds pleading now. ‘I’m not with DeSoto. I- I’m with UNIS. I’ve been with UNIS all along.’

She buries her head in her hands. Strands of red hair obscure her face. ‘Dwight, you have to believe me,’ she says. ‘I was so deep undercover you needed a ten-foot pole to dig me out. Leave no witnesses, they said. I was told to try and get into his operation when it was still just starting up. And then suddenly I was in, and I was one of his –De Soto’s- liaisons with the resistance... I’m sorry. I should have told you, but I was young and stupid and I didn’t trust anybody anymore. ‘Cause I knew, Dwight. I knew how the government didn’t give a fuck about what he was doing on the side. He was still an upstart crook, but even then Manfred DeSoto had six ships going back and forth between Olympia and Asgard every week, hauling weapons and munitions the governorate thought critical to the war. They would have never let you get to him.’

‘You sold me out to protect his sorry arse,’ I say. My voice is harsher than I thought it would be, and I realize I’m clenching my teeth. Rage and anguish are vying for superiority inside of me. Fifteen years. Fifteen goddamn years. Wondering and waiting.

Just to find out my old man had been right all along. Blind faith in anything, that just got you killed. Even in comrades. Even in her.

But I know that’s not true. Part of me would like to believe that it is but it’s not true. If it were she’d have killed me when she had the chance. In all likelihood she saved my ass, and she took a big fucking risk doing it. And I’ve been angry with her for fifteen years over it, angry enough at times to have shot her should she have turned up to explain.

And she knows. God damn even after all these years she can still read me like she always could, and she still knows how to rebuke the accusation I level against her. God damn if she hasn’t changed a bit.

‘What do you think I’ve been doing these fifteen years!?’ she blames right back at me. ‘At least you got to live. I haven’t lived in fifteen years. Fifteen years I’ve sacrificed everything to get close to DeSoto. Do you think I’m proud of all the things I had to do to get onto his inner circle? All the people I have betrayed, all for some greater good I’m supposed to still believe in? And why? For what?! Dammit Dwight, it’s not exactly like we were the Peace Corps!’ her voice is twisted with anguish and frustration.

‘At least there was a ‘we’,’ I reply accusingly, then softer. ‘At least we were.

‘We could be again,’ her voice is only a fleeting flurry of air, barely audible. ‘You know… after all this is over.’

I want to shout. I want to bark ‘no’ like I did in the face of Alistair Fleming back on Ceres. I want to spit a retort in her face the way I’ve spat in the faces of dozens of men and women over the years. I want to rail and scream. I want to do anything but sit here and leave the unsaid ‘maybe’, that vulnerability, a weak spot in my armor.

And I can’t.

Fifteen long years I’ve pushed people away. Fifteen years I promised myself never to come here again. Fifteen years of pain and grief and rage.

I can’t slam that door shut.

Even after so many years of shutting myself in I can’t shut her out. For fifteen long years I’ve wanted her.

Fifteen years of mental defenses dismantled in the course of minutes.

Suddenly I’m just tired.

I nod.

She almost-smiles and moans. ‘I’m tired Dwight. Tired and strung out.’

I shake my head. ‘Why are you here Mona. Why now. Why me?’

She sighs. ‘Of all the people on all the worlds of all the universe there was only one man I knew would never be compromised, who could never be bought, who never budged to pressure.’ She looks up. ‘You are that man Dwight. I guess that in a way I used you again, and I’m sorry- but I knew that if you were still alive you could still be trusted.’

Well gee thanks, I guess. But that’s not what I say. ‘So what’s this all about?’

‘You know about the Jericho? DeSoto has it.’

That was so obvious I should have seen it coming, but I was too busy contemplating other things to figure it out.

‘I said I was with UNIS- but I haven’t filed a report in years. You’ve no idea how powerful DeSoto’s organization has become,’ she continues. ‘He’s bought the local governorate years ago—there’s no UN official left on Asgard that I could be sure of he hasn’t bought. But this—this is too big to let slide. I had to get the word out. I had to find someone I could trust.’

‘You shoulda let me kill him after all,’ I murmur. She ignores me.

‘DeSoto’s very old, very evil, very cunning and very rich,’ she says. ‘He’s been building toward this point for years. I know it. He’s planning on using the Spirit Jericho to make sure no-one’s going to pester him when he declares Asgard his private little kingdom. And frankly Dwight I’m at a loss. I don’t think we can stop him.’

‘He’s not omniscient,’ I grump. ‘So let me tell you what we’re going to do: we go in and we blow his shit up. You know where he’s got this damned thing stashed?’

She looks at me with a half smile. ‘Dwight, DeSoto has a thousand men at his command, armed tugs, assassins, mercenaries, gunships- he’s got the local UN in his pocket. He is holed up in a fortress that sits on an underground bunker stronghold. He wiped out the entire Teardrop presence on Asgard. I was there when he revealed his big plan so yes, I know where he’ll have the damned thing stashed, but there’s no-one left to oppose him except we- and we’re just a couple people in a rickety boat. We’re not a threat to him. And there’s no-one else.’

‘No. That’s what you and I got wrong the first time around,’ I say and flicker smile back for the first time, ‘Because there are always more friends.’


11. Friends


It’s been a three-hour wait when, in a blazing torrent of multi-hued radiation, something vast, grey and vaulted erupts from Second Space, followed by five rosettes of smaller but still impressive warships. The gargantuan Carepakeh command carrier lumbers into high orbit, caring not for the alarm signals that flare through the multitude of early warning systems in near-Asgardian space. Customs gunboats, UNMIL pickets and Commonwealth and Klashnoi emissaries scatter in the face of the uncaring titan. The weapons platforms of the expeditionary UN begin frantically shooting IFF codes and threats at the staggeringly massive ship, which proceeds to curtly ignore them all.

Instead, the carrier begins transmitting on a very specific frequency band.

‘We got signal!’ Kal shouts. ‘And I might add it’s on a high-encryption Imperial military feed!’

‘It won’t do to keep old friends waiting,’ I say casually. Mona and Ferro gaze at me as if I just pulled a rabbit out of my hat. ‘Put the guy on Kalta.’

The small imager we use for videophone communications flickers to life with decoding algorithms, and then grants us a spectacular view of the alien vessel’s living heart. The video image is oddly fractured and faceted like a spider’s view, showing us a wide-angle view of the multi-deck Carepakeh command cocoon, which resembles nothing so much as a vaulted spider’s nest interspersed by webbed cables. Serrated command pits are manned by drones cybernetically hooked into the carrier’s computer systems. Then the ship’s commander scuttles into view: huge and spidery like all Carepakeh, and dressed in the ornamental silver cybernetic armor that befits the station of a Carepakeh fleet admiral equivalent.

‘Hello Pastrix,’ I grin. ‘Good to see you again. How’s that royal title holding up for you?’

Broodlord Pastrix Ristrix of the Silken Crimson Snare Brood clicks his mandibles in arachnid amusement. ‘Greetings captain,’ he muses with the long hissed ‘s’ of his kind. ‘I am doing quite well. And you?’

‘Better than ever,’ I throw a quick glance at Mona, who even manages to blush.

After a lengthy stint as a dishonored Ronin drone, Pastrix had been –unexpectedly I might add- rehabilitated by his brood. Not because they acknowledged they’d been wrong all along, mind- they were essentially forced to. He had after all saved the Empire (and by extension the better part of known space) from a brutal war of conquest. Not a word of that is exaggerated, and I can know ‘cause I was there. It was the same messy affair that had acquainted me with Brass. And to think it had all started with a bunch of talking dolls.

Funny how these things go, isn’t it?

Anyway, during our brief stint adventuring together Pastrix has saved my hide half a dozen times, and I’ve returned the favor a bunch of times as well, and that’s about as close as you can come to being friends in my book. We’d done some world-saving and bad guy-busting, and before you know it his queen asks him nicely to please come back and be a spidery-admiral. I guess a queen asking a drone nicely is sorta like God coming down from Heaven and asking you if you’d please come sit right next to His throne. Not the kind of favor you turn down. So he went and became Big and Important, and we exchanged numbers, just in case.

Well, this is about as ‘in case’ as it gets.

‘For some reason, captain,’ clicks Pastrix, ‘I think this is more than an invitation for tea and biscuits, is it not?’

‘If it was, I wouldn’t have asked you to bring your friends along.’

‘Yes, about that. These UN people keep pestering us for orbital access codes. I take it you did not inform them we would be arriving?’

‘I did not.’

‘Then I take it the problem has something to do with them? Maybe… it has something to do as well with the attack on the Commonwealth cruiser four sidereal days ago?’

I have to say I am surprised. Considering how big and in-your-face the average Carepakeh is I guess nobody really expects their intelligence service to be as frightfully efficient as it is. I certainly didn’t.

‘On the mark as ever Pastrix: a certain valuable commodity was stolen from the Commonwealth and for reasons I might explain later I feel… compelled to retrieve it. But the guy who has it has quite the army guarding his sorry ass, and we have reason to believe the Asgardian governorate has been compromised. So basically we’re in need of some martial assistance.’

‘Ah, how intriguing,’ Pastrix chitters. ‘I rather thought I saw Ferro Brass standing behind you. Dwight Johnson working for the Commonwealth- I never thought I’d see the day. You have of course realized that an Imperial assault on Asgard could be a mite problematic diplomatically speaking? I wouldn’t want to accidentally spark a war.’

‘You’ve parked a Command Carrier in orbit around Asgard,’ I grin. ‘Aren’t you a bit late to consider that possibility?’

Pastrix clicks his mandibles in amusement. ‘Oh, this you mean? This is merely a Second Space mis-jump captain,’ he says, and gives me a wink with four of his eight eyes. ‘They happen all the time. In fact I’ve been told you Terrans are intimately familiar with such unfortunate events.’

‘Heh, touché.’ With a smile I shrug off Pastrix’ reference to the disastrous event that kicked off the Terran-Klashnoi War. ‘Anyway, I have the backing of UNIS and the Teardrop on this one. And considering the nature of our little mutual problem, when all is said and done I don’t think there’s going to be anyone in any position to complain.’

‘Very well; if you say so that’s all the assurance I need, captain. What did you have in mind?’

‘Let me feed you the information on the place we have to get into,’ I say and begin transmitting the schematics and details that Mona has provided to the Carepakeh ship. ‘As you’ll see the fortress-mansion is quite heavily defended. But not heavily enough- they’ll never see this coming. I was thinking, shoot the place up from orbit, drop in from the sky, take what we want and be home in time for beer and medals.’

‘I see you have not lost your subtle personal touch captain,’ Pastrix remarks bemusedly as he goes over the data-feed. ‘Your enthusiastic plan can carry away my approval—my drones can do with some target practice. We shall commence bombardment shortly. Do you want an escort during your skyfall?’

‘That would be awesome, Pastrix,’ I grin and turn to my little band of vagabonds. ‘People, I do believe it’s time to rock ‘;n’ roll.’


12. Rock ‘n’ Roll


The Harbinger of Thunder drops at an insane speed toward an exploding planet. Golden pillars of brilliant light flicker in the heavens as Carepakeh plasma lances strike, vanish, and strike again. Transatmospheric fighters buzz pas us in tight formations of falling leaves. The defenders’ repeating laser cannons claw futilely at the sky, but only occasionally manage to graze the bugs’ bubble shields in flutters of sparkling magnetism. Salvos of missiles rock up and down, mixing with the hiss of lasers, the dull thud of flak exploding in dirty black clouds, and the roaring of fried air as shockwaves of plasma rock the very air around us. Kal is flying at the peaks of her cunning: the torrents of violence unleashed by the Carepakeh make the atmosphere go all screwy on us. Her face is a mask of tense concentration; her circuited hands grip the flight controls so tightly her knuckles have gone white. All of us are strapped tightly into the grav-harnesses and still I feel the ship bucking and lurching like a crazed mustang. Any lesser pilot would have crashed and burned here, I know that much.

'Dirtside in five!' Kal moans from between gritted teeth. I just hold on to the harness. I can recall only one time I've seen a planetary surface rush up to me faster, and after that I had to be dragged out of a crashing starship. I desperately do not want to repeat that experience- but I don't want to be wasted by anti-air defenses either, and I have the utmost confidence in Kal's flying skills. She's got us out of many tight spots already.

A wave of nimble Carepakeh fighters flits by and drops their ordinance before pulling away sharply. The metal sharks glide downward on ballistic trajectories, detonating a series of grueling explosions in the middle of DeSoto's complex. Mona was right: the place is a fortress. Or ‘was’, rather. It was built so that it could've withstood almost any conventional ground attack for some time, but Pastrix' flotilla is dishing out far more punishment than even its potent magnetic shields and ceracrete reinforcements can handle. Already his warships have blown huge holes in the outer walls; most of the top layer of buildings has been annihilated. Deep gashes in the earth show fires raging in some of the deeper tunnels and bunkers. The Carepakeh are widening those gashes, ripping open the very ground with series after series of explosions. Several of Pastrix’ dropships soar ahead of us, loaded with heavily armed drones. The way the defenders keep shooting back despite the surprise attack on their stronghold tells me we’re going to need all the help we can get once we touch down.

The ship rocks violently as a set of flak shells detonates mere dozens of meters from the hull. For a moment we’re spinning; then Kalta regains control and we level out on our steep trajectory again. ‘Jesus Christ boss did we have to flip out like this?’ mutters Baylor under his breath. ‘I’m going to be sick!’

‘I’ve seen my fair share of roller coaster rides,’ injects Zero Card. ‘But this is really ruddy bad!’ Even his usually calm and collected demeanor is shaken by the chaos; as if to illustrate his words the ship shudders in titanic displacements of air as another series of explosions ripples through DeSoto’s fort, obliterating whole swathes of anti-air defenses.

‘In one!’ yells Kalta, and suddenly the view of the ground is obscured by a rippling fireball as a missile strikes one of the Carepakeh troopships and blows it out of the sky. The next second we’re soaring through a cloud of fire and debris is hitting our hull, and then suddenly there is only concrete and Kalta is pulling the Harbinger horizontal, for a moment g-forces render me completely immobile and then there is a loud ‘clunk!’ and we have touchdown. The grav-harnesses spring open and I jump up. ‘Time to kick ass.’

‘And chew bubblegum?’ asks Butch warily.

‘Always figured you for more of a lollypop kinda guy, Butch,’ smirks Zero Card, who stuffs two packs of tarot cards into his pockets.

‘Shut up,’ I say, and pump my trusty shotgun with a flick of my arm. ‘Stay sharp, stay together, and shoot to kill. Let’s go.’

Kalta has set us down in a jagged crater that was once part of a bunker complex, but now pierces at least five sub-levels of DeSoto’s base of operations. The depth protects us from the worst of the overpressure and the shrapnel waves; still the very air is prickly against our skin.

‘Ah,’ says Mona, and she inhales deeply, flexing her armored khaki fatigues. ‘You smell that? That’s ozone. Best god-damn smell in the ‘verse when it’s your guys that’s toasting the other guy with lasers.’

Butch shakes his head, around which he’s –for some reason- tied a red bandana. His brightly colored polo is gone for once, replaced with a heavy combat vest and two Mexican-style bandoliers holding micro-grenades and extra magazines. ‘Captain- where do you find women like that?’

‘Yeah, do tell,’ says Zero Card dryly, pressing his hands deep into the pockets of his trenchcoat. ‘So I can stay the hell away from there.’

‘Are we here to chat over mowa juice or to actually do something useful?’ remarks Ferro snidely. She is ready for war, having tucked her fur under a black armored bodyglove, and her combat webbing holds no less than four needleguns, plus her vibroblade.

‘If you go down there,’ Kalta injects, ‘I won’t be able to reach you. At all.’

‘Don’t worry, you’ll know us when you see us,’ I mutter. ‘Let’s go this way.’

We enter the wracked corridors of DeSoto’s underground lair through one of the once-subterranean tunnels, cracked open like an egg by the Carepakeh bombardment. Inside the bunker complex there is a low radiance shed by irregularly placed light bulbs in the ceiling. It is warm, and the smell of ashes is pungent and intense. The floor is bare and covered in grime blown in with the explosions; some of the light bulbs have fused and are sparking. The floor is slowly descending downward, sloping into the bowels of the subterranean complex. There is no sign of life ahead; we nevertheless proceed with weapons drawn and safeties off.

‘We should be careful,’ mutters Brass. ‘The Commonwealth compound was attacked by more than just ordinary mercenaries. There were huge black- and red-garbed men, assassins who were phenomenal fighters in hand-to-hand combat. They showed many esoteric abilities, and I think they were Tekks.’

‘Occult Tekk ninja's?’ I snort. ‘That's crazytalk.’

'Suit it yourself,' shrugs Brass. ‘But don’t say I did not warn you.’

After a five-minute jog the corridor exits into a cavernous concrete hall filled with steel machineries: geartrains, transmissions and massive differentials, big pipes and control valves, all of it is probably part of some sort of geothermal-induced mechanical plant. All of it has come to a halt, probably thanks to Pastrix and his bombardment. We fan out between the machineries. Tight corridors wind through the labyrinthine forest of pipes and machinery. Through the gearage and pressure valves I catch glimpses of my comrades in arms. I feel like I’m in a jungle of steel. Control mechanisms on the heat exchangers flash red. Erratic, rattling gunfire echoes through the hall from somewhere up ahead.

Then suddenly we come to the end of the machines. Up ahead, a group of gray-armored mercs are exchanging heavy-caliber fire from behind sets of armored crates and vehicles with a group of Drones trying to enter through a sloping roadway at the side. Baylor calls a word of alarm, and his sub-machinegun stutters, raking fire across the chamber in the direction of DeSoto’s goons. The shots burst crates and machinery, but otherwise do nothing of value- except alerting the mercenaries to our presence.

Return fire comes at us, autogun fire and the crack of gauss rifles.

‘Smooth work Baylor!’ I yell, snapping off two shotgun slugs. ‘Real smooth!’

‘I aim to please boss,’ Baylor yells back and I can’t tell if he’s being serious or not. Bullets wheeze past, but now that the mercenaries are distracted the cybernetically armored drones press their advantage: they scuttle into the hall, brace themselves and raise their plasma projectors. Searing white flashed brighter than the sun blot out the combat for moments; a gust of grueling heat slaps in our faces. When I look again, the drones are already moving deeper into the base, leaving the floor of the hallway molten and glassed, and the mercenaries and their cover completely immolated by star-hot plasma. The remains of mercenaries and their armor are fused together with the glassy concrete and the molten metal of the crates behind which they had taken cover.

‘Ow, that’s gotta hurt,’ says Mona dryly.

‘I got to get me one of those,’ murmurs Zero Card, admiring the drones’ handiwork.

We move onward, into the direction where the drones disappeared. Occasionally the bunker tunnels shake; when they do the lights flicker briefly and dust descends downward. The bombardment is not yet over. The rattle of gunfire and the crackling of energy weapons echo through the long concrete hallways, the sounds oddly disembodied in the underground maze. Sometimes they seem to come from up, or below us, from up ahead or from behind. Occasionally we encounter signs of combat: the molten remains of ceramic armor filled with charred corpses, or dead drones struck by heavy anti-armor weapons, their cybernetic carapace cracked and leaking cooling and hydraulic fluids onto the concrete.

Finally and still suddenly, we stumble across a group of three panicked-looking mercs hurrying outside a passageway just as we’re approaching it. One raises his weapon: without hesitation Brass puts a stream of hypervelocity needles through his face, splattering his head across the floor. That convinces his comrades-in-arms: they make a run for it.

I pump my shotgun and blast a part out of the ceiling above them. ‘Stop running or I’ll shoot you in the back!’ I yell.

One stops and throws his hands into the air; the other keeps running. A magnetically accelerated ball bearing catches him in the back, unceremoniously knocking him to the floor.

‘Nice going captain Spiff Spacehero,’ grins Mona admiringly. ‘You’ve been practicing your aim I see?’

‘Shut up,’ I grin back.

The mercenary turns out to be a relatively young man, with dirty brown hair protruding from under the curved edge of his gray helmet. His armor is battered and he’s bleeding from half a dozen minor cuts: he’s definitely been in a fight of some sort. Whatever’s happened, he lost his fighting spirit, and he’s trembling like a twig leaf when I level the Brawler at him.

‘It’s time to stop shaking and start talking, tough guy,’ I say in my mean-voice. ‘Do you know what we’re here for?’

‘I h-h-have no idea,’ he shakes his head vigorously. ‘You don’t look like you’re with the spiders.’

‘Well honey,’ smirks Mona. ‘We are. Where’s your boss at?’

He points toward the downward sloping hallway from where he’d come. The sound of gunfire and screams echo faintly through it. ‘Down there. We’re being slaughtered- it’s not just the spiders, it’s the cult as well.’

‘The what?’ frowns Horatio.

‘The Cult- the assassins the boss’ paid off? You’ll recognize ‘em when you see ‘em. As soon as the bombardment started they turned on us—I think they’re after the bloody machine themselves.’

‘So it’s here?’ injects Brass. ‘The-’ She’s about to say the damned thing’s name, but stops just in time. ‘The machine you stole, it’s still here?’

The mercenary nods vigorously. ‘Zed- that is, the sarge said it was a dodgy plan from the get-go, but the other lads thought we had a shot. Said we was going to be independent from the UN, that we could own this world, if we could just get our hands on it. Fat lot of good that damned thing did us so far.’

‘Anything else you think we need to know?’ I eye the man suspiciously.

‘The boss is down there too- he’s been trying to get the machine to work since we brought it here. But if it’s him you’re after,’ he glances at us, ‘and I reckon that you are, then good luck to you. It’s a warzone down there.’

We know everything we need to know. With a word of advice not to try anything funny like coming back to snipe at us from behind I send the guy on his way- he’s too eager to get the hell out of Dodge to waste a bullet on him, and from the sounds that echo up from below we’re probably going to need all the ammo we can spare.

‘There was a time you’d have shot that man,’ says Mona, eyeing me.

‘There was a time I’d have shot you,’ I reply.

‘Good point,’ Mona grins.

We hurry down the hallway the merc pointed at as silently as possible. The sounds of battle grow nearer with every passing second: the hiss of lasers, the scent of burnt flesh, yells and screams and the bark of autorifles.

Then finally we stumble into an open cavern. It is hot down here: I figure we are close to the same source that also powers DeSoto’s geothermal plant. I don’t know just how deep down we are, but in a stark break from the clean artificial lines of the halls and hallways that we’ve passed through thus far this grotto appears to be a natural cavity. A set of prefab concrete bunkers are set into the far wall; the ground is paved with rough ceracrete plates irregularly interspersed with natural columns of obsidian rock. Floodlights hang from the ceiling, casting beams of stark white light down and creating a sharp shadow-play of jagged rock-shadows and bright light.

The cavern floor is a chaotic warzone. There are Carepakeh drones involved in a swirling melee, fighting a three-way battle with ceramic armored mercenaries and black-garbed ninja.

‘What the hell?’ guffaws Baylor. He’s as confused as I am. But after a few seconds the chaotic scene begins to make sense. The mercenaries, overwhelmed and pressed into the defensive, appear to be guarding the bunkers, focusing on an unsightly lump of concrete the other structures seem clustered around. The assassins are laying siege to their fortified positions, and the drones are shooting at the both of them with little regard for what they hit.

‘If I were DeSoto’ I murmur, ‘that would be my hangar.’ And I point at the central structure.

Brass twitches her ears in cat-like agreement. ‘That would be my assessment as well.’

‘How do we get past the pissed mercenaries, the trigger-happy spiders, and the weird dudes in pajamas?’ asks Baylor pointedly.

For a moment I'm at a loss. I have to admit the assassins are good, almost supernaturally so in fact. I say 'almost' because I think superstition is bullshit. If someone's really good, it's because he's really good, not because he's got God, Buddha or the Temple-Maker on his side. Anyway, these shifty bastards are clearly trying to get into DeSoto's underground stronghold. They are leaping catlike from the natural cover of the underworld’s jagged rocks, snapping off lasers and shuriken-like projectiles, and then vault back into cover before the mercs can react- and I didn't notice what they were trying to do until I notice that a group of them is trying to make it to the edge of the bunkers, out of sight of Pastrix' drones and the mercenaries' line of fire.

The adrenalin coursing through my veins makes me reckless. It always did that; even back in the war. Back then I know I did some crazy things I probably shouldn’t have done and only survived because… Well, probably because I always had Mona to pull my ass out of the fire. I didn’t have that benefit for a very long time- but that very long time is gone now, and so I grin. ‘I think I have an idea.’


13. Up


Pastrix’ drone soldiers are too busy snapping off beams of coherent plasma at both the mercenaries and occasionally at the assassins to even notice us. Or maybe they do- yeah, I admit we’re not that stealthy, so they probably do but identify us as part of the good guys.

We sneak up to the cavern wall, well outside the range of the mercenaries who are still exchanging a ferocious hail of fire with the drones in front of us. Then we edge along, creeping forward until we round the corner that takes us out of the drones’ field of fire and out of sight of the mercenaries as well. Now we come into view of the exposed side door that we saw from the top of the cavern. The assassins are gone, and the steel door that protected the entrance has been destroyed, sliced from its hinges by something that must have been at least as hot as a plasma cutter.

Cautiously we enter with guns drawn. The antechamber is shaped like an airlock, with a second door protecting entrance into the bunker proper. The gunslits in the wall, there for easier butchering of unwanted visitors, are unmanned, and the second door has been cut to pieces just like the first. The hallway beyond is dimly lit, but at least the lights are not flickering the way they did in the halls leading down. This complex must have its own generator. The sound of battle is muted here; the scent of rubber and oiled steel is on the air. This smells like a machine shop. It certainly feels like we’re in the right place, then.

There is a guard in the corridor. He is in two pieces, having been cut through from shoulder to thigh. The wounds have been cauterized by something hot; presumably the same ‘hot’ that has made the cut in the first place.

‘Fucking ninjas with fucking lightsabers in their hands,’ mutters Baylor, gripping his pistols so tightly his knuckles have gone white.

‘What?’ asks Brass.

‘No matter,’ I cut off his reply. ‘Be on your guard. Whoever these fuckers are, they are not messing around.’

We move, slowly, through the hallway, and then into another corridor. I’ve lost my sense of time. We no longer hear the battle outside, but the sounds of combat someplace inside the bunkers are growing: the stuttering of machineguns and the hiss of lasers, the shearing of metal, and occasional screams.

Then, still suddenly, they are upon us. Two black-garbed men speed around a corner at speeds I would have thought impossible. Magnetic projectile launchers are mounted on their wrists, they carry silenced pistols in one hand and in the other sharp swords that ignite in bright plasma flame. I barely have time to shout a word of caution and throw myself aside as their pistols stutter. Mona curses somewhere behind me; Baylor shrieks. I bring up the Brawler but Brass moves with sudden catlike speed. The assassins make their move against her: they are quick, and many ordinary men would have died at their attack, but Brass is no ordinary man. Their pistols clack and bullets pierce the air where Ferro was only a moment before, to shatter harmlessly into the concrete wall. Brass is rolling toward them, a ball lightning of musclesuit and fur, and then she lashes out with her blade, severing the first assassins arm at the wrist. She ducks below the second assassin’s kick and puts her vibro-blade through his heart. Even as she rips the blade clear, she catches the pistol that falls from the attacker’s dead hand and puts a neat cluster of bullet holes through the first one’s heart. They topple backward, obviously dead.

I turn in the direction from where the shout had come. Mona is sitting against the wall, clutching a bleeding leg and gritting her teeth. I raise a brow. She scowls. ‘Flesh wound. I’ll be fine- just give me a minute.’

‘Don’t be an idiot,’ I glower, snatch the bandana from Butch’ head, and move over to her. ‘Here.’ It is, in fact, a flesh wound- although I would not trust Mona to tell me if it were anything but. If she could, she’d claim a shot through her heart was only a flesh wound as well. I tie the bandana around her thigh, and she grunts between her teeth as it fastens tightly around the wound.

Butch edges over to the bodies, pistols pointed. The plasma swords lie extinguished beside them. The assassins are dressed in black cloth jackets and breeches, with hooded masks that cover all of their faces save for a slit across their eyes. Baylor carefully removes the mask from one of the corpses. The face beneath the mask is of a color between amber and mahogany, with the sharp features of the Engineered. A Tekk. A gods-damned ninja Tekk. I’ll be damned- Brass was right after all. Yet another team is in on the fuck-over-known-space festival, it seems.

We move forward, and then come up to what the assassins had been guarding. The hallway leads into a broader hall, two stories high, approximately a hundred meters wide and sixty across. Giant tooling machineries are scattered throughout the hall: great industrial cutters, electromagnets, massive clamps and hydraulic presses. Smaller tools, toolboxes and other storage units are scattered throughout them. Valves and regulators are connected to pipes that allow hydraulic oils to flow to machineries. In the midst of the hall a giant metal trapdoor is firmly shut. Around it, a horde of assassins are fighting a tangled mass of mercenaries in a giant, swirling melee. Dead mercs and assassins sprawl across the floor. This must be the heart of the bunker complex.

We stick to the walls and as out-of-sight as we can. Bullets whiz past, the sound of automatic gunfire amplified in the confines of the bunker. Shurikens and silenced bullets rattle back from the assassins, who are attempting to close in on the mercenaries. They are clearly skilled and deadly, but the mercenaries have firepower and superior numbers on their side, using that to match the superhuman agility of the ninja.

‘Do we have to be here?’ asks Horatio.

Baylor shrugs. I look at Brass, who ripples her fur. ‘These people are not fighting here for nothing. See that trap door?’

I eye it, and then look back at the Hamechel. ‘You think the Jericho is down there?’

‘That I do think.’

‘Then we have to find a way to get below it.’

‘Um,’ frowns Baylor. ‘Boss, I don’t know if you noticed, but there’s sort of a fight going on in there.’

‘No shit Baylor,’ I scowl. ‘Now give me some of those grenades and watch the master at work.’

The warring parties are fairly clearly divided: the left of the machine-shop is held by the assassins, who are trying to whittle down the mercenaries holding the right side, focusing their defense around a set of control panels that in all likelihood control the trap door. Like outside, the mercenaries are only barely holding their ground, desperately shooting-and more often than not missing-at the ninja who are simply moving too swiftly for them to accurately target. The air is thick with smoke from the gunfire. The roar of autorifles is deafening. The mercenaries lack the area-effect weapons to properly take out their opponents.

But we don't. The micro-grenades explode in the midst of the melee, a series of dull thuds, indiscriminately blasting those whom they happen to catch backward, or in pieces. Metal shears. People scream. Bodies collapse and blood spatters through the hall. Then we come in with guns blazing, punishing anyone foolish enough to stand in our way with a concentrated hail of firepower. I know we're overwhelmed, but I also know they don't know that, and we have the element of surprise on our hands. If we can fuck enough of these people up in the first few seconds, chances are they'll route without any questions asked. And so we charge for the controls. I wield my autorifle like it's a sub-machinegun; Baylor is beside me, Akimbo autopistols blazing twin lines of fire, brass shells streaming out the side slots. Brass is up on the machinery, needlegun in one hand and her vibro-blade in the other, eviscerating an assassin with a stream of needles through the head and then a single stab through the heart. Despite her injury Mona is right behind me with her big .50 Mag-Shot handcannon, the shrieking sound of the hypervelocity slugs like music to my ears. Zero Card has two packs of cards in his hands and is dispensing tarot cards like throwing knives: when they strike combatants, those collapse to the ground, shivering with epileptic seizures, foam on their mouths. He has stacks and stacks of those damned things, all with different purposes, and these particular cards are psychotropic inductors, products of black market cognotechnology. They hijack the central nervous system and temporarily lock you out of motor control of your own body. Nasty, but they come in quite handy, even if I myself prefer a good old-fashioned gun. But despite his suave brigand demeanor, Horatio has something against killing. I don’t know why- and this isn’t the time to ponder such trivialities anyway.

Well, I certainly don’t, particularly not when there’s fuckers trying to kill me. ‘I’ve had enough of this kung-fu bullshit!’ I bellow, and shoot a stunned assassin in the face with a dual load from the Brawler. It takes off the better part of his head, exposing cybernetics underneath. Oh, isn’t that nice, they are occult Tekk ninja cyborgs. Sweet! This affair is like that old army slogan- join the army. Travel the galaxy. Meet interesting people. And kill them. Guess that means I sort of got drafted into the army after all.

In the past fifteen years I’ve seen my fair share of battles, but I’ve not been involved in one as chaotic as this in years. Bullets and shuriken fly every which way; knives and plasma-blades flash; the roar of gunfire is deafening. Everywhere between the machineries there are targets, fighting not only us but each other just as well.

‘Jesus Harold Christ riding a Harley on the highway to Copenhagen!’ curses Baylor as an assassin’s plasma blade misses him by inches, the wielder struck in the forehead by one of Zero’s cards, frothing at the mouth and collapsing. Baylor follows it up with a triple headshot for good measure.

‘Mona! Keep me covered!’ I shout and make a run for the control panel where three mercs have made an improvised firebase behind a toppled mechanical press. Three of Butch’ microgrenades make short work of that, blasting the top off the press with a dull triple thud and scattering ceramic bits and bodyparts around. But then their friends retaliate in kind: three mercenaries pop up from behind curving thick tubes and spray a hail of hot lead in our direction. I barely manage to throw myself flat on the floor; then a pained yell and I look around: unable to move as quickly on her injured leg a spray of bullets catches her in the chest and she goes down. I curse and leap for her; so does Zero Card, still dispensing cards like pez left right and center.

‘Boss!’ shouts Horatio, kneeling on the steel floor. ‘We’re sitting ducks here!’

I know. We’re out in the open in the middle of the hall, and sooner or later some fucker is going to empty a magazine at us. But I can hardly leave her here, can I?

‘Hold on boss!’ hollers Baylor, and suddenly he’s up by the control panel to the side of a big hydraulic auto-welder. Then he throws a switch, and then the big central trapdoor we sit on suddenly falls away and Mona and Horatio and I are tumbling, but not for long: two meters below we strike a smooth matte-black metal surface. The firing continues, before being abruptly cut off by the closing of the hatch.

My eyes are still adjusting to the new darkness when Horatio speaks up. 'Captain?' says Zero Card. 'I think I've found the Spirit Jericho. You see- we're sitting on it.'

Mona whimpers, her injured leg folded below her. The body-armor she wears has absorbed the mercenaries’ bullets, but I bet the impacts still hurt like hell.

Suddenly there is light and movement in the darkness. A side door opens, and a dark figure appears backlit in the doorway. In the yellow light we are treated to the outline of the Jericho: the craft is sleek like a black mirror, some sixty meters long, ten wide and maybe a good story high. We are sprawled on its very top in what appears to be a hangar of sorts.

‘Is something wrong?!’ barks a rough voice from behind the man in the doorway. ‘Do you see anything?’

‘That’s DeSoto!’ whispers Mona.

Instinctively, I fumble for the shotgun.

‘Nah,’ says the bulky man in the doorway. He steps forward. In his hands is a H&K laserrifle. He wears the same ceramic armor as the other mercenaries. Maybe this is the sarge the merc we interrogated was talking about. ‘I can’t see shit out here. Are you getting us out of here or what?’

‘Almost there, almost there,’ replies the gravelly voice.

‘Good,’ says the mercenary. ‘I’m coming back in. It’s darker than a black bull’s asshole out here.’

‘Here goes nothing,’ I whisper, and jump on his neck.

That doesn’t quite go according to plan. With a whir of servos the man whirls around whilst I’m still somewhere in mid-air- and instantly I realize my mistake. He isn’t bulky- unlike the regular mercenaries this guy is power-armored. His gauntleted hand hits me like a ton of bricks, slapping me out of the sky like an annoying fly. I slam into the ceracrete floor with a dull thump that wrenches all the air out of my lungs. I fumble for the Brawler but it’s gone, and before I can grab one of Butch’ remaining grenades the guy picks me off the floor. I look into a round yet boney face scarred beyond almost all recognition.

‘You are one ugly motherfucker,’ I huff.

‘At least I’m not dead like you,’ smirks the mercenary evilly, and with a faint whirring of servos he throws me. It feels like I’m airborne for seconds, then I land back-first on the ground again and only the padding in my body-armor saves me from breaking some important bones. As it is, it only makes me wish I had died. I grab a micro-grenade, thumb the ‘arm’ button and toss it weakly at the mercenary. He grins and brings up an armored boot, kicking the thing out of the way so that it explodes harmlessly somewhere against a wall.

‘You’re not one of the clan,’ the merc grins. ‘That’s too bad. I’d have liked to kill one of those dirty abominations.’

‘What the fuck are you,’ I huff. ‘Some kind of Jovian fundie asshole mercenary variant?’

‘Something like that,’ he smirks.

‘That’s good,’ I huff. ‘I’d hate to have the death of someone who isn’t total scum on my conscience.’

The merc sergeant smiles. ‘You’re a funny guy. Humor me. How do you think to kill me then?’

‘Oh, it’s not me that’s going to kill you,’ I smile back. ‘It’s the guy with the hand-cannon behind your back.’

The wet crack of the Mag-Shot is like thunder in the darkness. The round punches through the sergeant’s half-open helmet, blowing off the front of his face. I’m splattered with grey goo that was once the sergeant’s brain. His body topples slowly, revealing Zero Card behind him, holding Mona’s giant pistol clasped in two hands. He has a look of immense distaste on his face.

‘Fucking guns,’ he spits. ‘Don’t make me do that again boss.’

‘Trust me- I don’t intend to,’ I scoop the Brawler off the ground. ‘Now hurry- let’s get inside the damned ship.’ I point to the ship and move over to Mona. She’s limping and visibly in pain, and I offer her my shoulder.

‘Don’t mind me,’ she groans. ‘I’m not going anywhere- Get on the damn ship and shoot his face off for me.’

‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ I hiss. ‘Do you see those Vero drives? Once this baby goes to ignition burn everything in this room gets pulped into subatomic goo.’

‘Oh. In that case, let’s hurry,’ she frowns as I wrap her arm around my neck and lift her off the ground. ‘Ow,’ she grimaces. ‘Just like old times, hey Dwight?’

‘Just like old times,’ I grin.

The airlock doors of the Spirit Jericho, as well as its corridors, are of odd proportions, having been designed for the convenience of Krioli and Hamechels and Algians, rather than humans: they are broad, low and fashioned of some spectacularly bright white plastic substance I do not recognize, but which is undoubtedly of Sirian make. The ship vibrates almost imperceptibly and the distinct soft hum of starting enginery is on the air. I think we’re just in time.

We’re no five paces beyond the airlock when a man stumbles into the corridor. He’s at least in his fifties and his hair is graying. He wears the dirt-brown muscle-suit uniform of a colonel in the Asgard Rifles, an old native combat unit from the war. I recognize him immediately. From the first time I’m face to face with Manfred DeSoto. Asgard’s penultimate kingpin looks confused. ‘Who the fuck are you people supposed to be? And where’s Zed?’

‘Zed’s dead, honey,’ Mona hisses from between clenched teeth. Her warmth and weight is a reassuring burden against my side.

‘Mona?’ DeSoto recognizes her. ‘Ah, there always was a certain something about you. I might have known you’d be the one to fuck me over. You’re with this guy now?’

She smiles. ‘I was with this guy all along.’

‘Well he don’t look like much. Tell me, new guy. What do you think you’re going to accomplish here?’

‘Oh but Manny, I’m not a new guy- not by a long shot,’ I say and grin wickedly. ‘In fact I’m fifteen years overdue—but now I’m here to fuck up your shit!’

‘Is that the truth?’ the mobster sneers. ‘You and this band of salvation army rejects? Try me!’ And then he slams the door to the cockpit shut with a clicking sound that I want to bet means really tight locks.

‘That was a real swish move, boss,’ Zero Card rolls his eyes. ‘What with the macho testosterone talk and all.’

‘Shut up-’ I want to say more, but then the Jericho suddenly lurches up. Our stomachs knot briefly when the ship’s artificial gravity asserts control. Behind us, the airlock doors automatically snap shut with the hiss of hydraulics. The holographic windows flicker to life. The outside world is a blur of canyon walls. We catch a brief glimpse of the aftermath of the battle outside as we accelerate out the hidden garage, drones herding mercenary prisoners along the way. Then we are out into the system of grottoes that belies what remains of DeSoto’s fortress, wicking and weaving between thick pillars of granite at a dazzling speed. I hope we’re flying on auto-pilot.

The speaker system crackles to life. ‘Welcome to DeSoto Tours,’ comes the manic voice of the kingpin. ‘The only touring agency in the galaxy possessing unlimited firepower! You have been chosen from among thousands of applicants to watch how I incinerate this puny little world! Why do I do this? Because I can! You fuck me over, I fuck you up! That’s our life’s motto here at DeSoto Tours! So, take a seat, welcome aboard, and please keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle. It’s going to be a bumpy ride!’

‘Alright- That man is mad as a hatter,’ frowns Horatio.

‘You don’t say,’ says Mona dryly.

Then suddenly the scenery outside changes as the Jericho propels itself out of the caverns. The ship lurches upward on a blue flash of Vero engines, toward and into an equally azure blue sky in-between two walls of solid living rock. I realize now where we must be: this is the Cirencester Gap, and DeSoto’s mansion sat on a series of grottoes leading from its very edge land-inward- the perfect place to hide a stolen worldbuster. The machine swivels as it shoots into the sky, rapidly accelerating out of the canyon. Briefly I see the outline of New London shining below me, an agglomeration of white towers and multi-colored light, and fleetingly I admit to myself that from up here it doesn’t look all that bad.

‘You know,’ comes DeSoto’s voice again. ‘I was going to rule this world. I had the governor in my pocket, and most of the colonels of the UNMIL expeditionary on my payroll. We were going to declare independence and anyone trying to contest it would get their shit blown up from orbit. Nice plan, I thought. But then you assholes had to fuck everything right up to hell. Well, guess what. If I can’t have it, no-one can! It’s only a short ride to orbit in this sweet ride, and once there we’ll see what this baby can do!’

Zero Card looks at me. ‘That jackass is really going to do it! Boss, we have to get into that cockpit, and fast too.’

‘Thank you captain obvious,’ I grunt. ‘Any clever ideas on how we’re going to accomplish that?’

‘Trust me,’ says Horatio slyly. ‘I have a cunning plan.’


14. Down


Zero Card begins fumbling with the door, producing an impressive-looking electronic lockpick. I hope it works on military-grade Commonwealth locks, but somehow I doubt it. Outside, the blue slowly turns to black as we’re rocketing up through the consecutive layers of the upper atmosphere. Asgard curves below us, partially obscured by dark clouds.

Then the ship bucks wildly and the three of us are thrown flat on the ground. Carepakeh fighters flit past a window, their plasma cannons flaring briefly. The ship rocks again as the bolts slam into the hull. ‘Don’t do that dammit!’ I shout as if they can hear me. ‘We’re in here!’

‘Ah, our little eight-legged friends are here!’ muses the radio. ‘You know- the fun thing is that once I have burned Asgard to a little barbeque crisp, I bet the UN are going to blame the Empire for it. Who knows, it might even spark a new war! And war means profit. You may have done me a favor after all, new guy!’

I curse loudly. So does Mona. Maybe it’d be better if Pastrix’ drones blow us out of the sky after all. The Jericho rocks again, and somewhere machineries begins to whine the way they always do when something critical has gone abruptly broken. The ship hesitates, bucks a few times, and then continues its ascent, only to be roughly shaken as by a giant’s hand. Carepakeh missiles blossom into miniature stars around the ascending ship. ‘Iron Mercy Buddha fuck!’ I shout as the artificial gravity briefly shuts off and the Jericho goes into a sickening roll. But then gravity reasserts itself and the ship climbs again, higher and higher. Stars blink outside. The sun of Three Paradises is a faraway disk of fire. More fighters flit around us now, weaving around us and firing their cannonry in repeating blasts hotter than the sun.

Then, a gust of multi-colored light, and the door abruptly swivels open. Horatio shakes his fist in triumph. He has a deck of cards in his hand. ‘I couldn’t choose between the Chariot and the Wheel of Fortune,’ he explains. ‘Ultimately I just went with The Devil- et voila.’

‘How fitting,’ I snarl, and bring up the shotgun. The cockpit is a semicircular room filled to the brim with buttons, levers, flashing displays, virtual heads-up and two chairs, one of which occupied by DeSoto, who is flying the Jericho with the stick mounted on the left armrest of his chair.

‘Get away from those controls you asshole,’ I growl. The Jericho shivers under another Carepakeh salvo.

‘Why don’t you make me?’ taunts DeSoto. ‘One flick of my hand and the second space drive rams us straight into the planet. Just think- eighty tons of Commonwealth spaceship slamming into Asgard at 98 percent of C…’ the bastard even manages to grin. ‘I don’t think there’ll even be cockroaches left after that!’

‘I’ll blow your head off before you can even think about doing it.’

‘If you coulda, you woulda,’ sneers DeSoto. ‘So why don’t you shut up and enjoy the thermonuclear fireworks? I’ll even let you pick the first city I blow up.’

‘Uh boss-’ says Zero Card and points at something, but I’ve seen it already. A flight of Carepakeh fighters races at us in a classic diamond formation, the nimble pod-like craft bobbing as their internal missile bays shad their ordinance. Briefly the missiles flicker through space, homing in on the bridge, and then a set of titanic, silent explosions shatters the silence of space. For a brief instant the bridge shields protect us but then the titanic forces unleashed by the Carepakeh warheads rend the magnetic shields apart and rock the Spirit Jericho. DeSoto is strapped tight into his command chair, but we are unceremoniously thrown to the deck, but then the gravity fails and micro-gravity reasserts itself before we can hit the plastic floor.

The ship shivers and begins to roll around both its axis. The view in the mirror shifts as we roll 180 degrees, and suddenly we can see just how steeply the ship is dropping planetward. We’re not out of its gravity well yet, and now that our engines are failing, we’re beginning to drop. Fast.

‘Oh bugger,’ mumbles Horatio, who floats freely in the midst of the cockpit before Mona can grab the doorpost and pull him toward her by his flapping brown raincoat.

‘No!’ screams DeSoto. The kingpin is frantically pushing buttons in order to regain control of the battered Commonwealth warship- but the only thing he succeeds in is igniting the Vero drive mounted in the back, and now rather than falling for the planet we are actively powering toward its surface. Suddenly the outside world is wreathed in flame as we begin our sudden re-entry.

‘Oh bugger!’ says Horatio, more forcefully now.

I don’t reply, but instead lunge for the control chair. The cockpit controls are now suddenly down as the planet’s gravity once again becomes stronger, and I briefly batter into the back of DeSoto’s chair, grabbing at it as my body rolls off. Below me, the planetary surface is rushing up to embrace us through a field of flames conjured up by our very passing through progressively denser layers of atmosphere. My face is only inches away from that of the kingpin, the man I’ve dreamt of killing for fifteen years. Memories of the previous time I entered the Asgardian atmosphere this way surge through my mind- déjà vu all over again. Strangely enough, I feel oddly elated. If I die this time, at least this fucker here will die alongside me.

‘I’ve been here before asshole!’ I bellow at DeSoto, who is desperately grabbing at the pilot’s chair. ‘How ‘bout you!?’

‘I’m the king of the world god-damn it!’ screams DeSoto, who is desperately ramming his fists into the controls. ‘It cannot end like this!’

I’m about to attempt to punch him in the face when the ship suddenly lurches up- and gravity angles again, and now suddenly I’m falling, and I hit the command chair and roll off it. DeSoto’s scream of victory almost instantly becomes one of frustration as the ship begins to shake uncontrollably.

‘You fucking idiot!’ I hear Mona shout. ‘You’re fucking up our entry vector! We’re going to break into fucking pieces!’

Sure enough the ship begins to fall apart, flaking black plates of metal, shedding its shiny exterior skin like a Sirian in Sarya’s late autumn. And then we’re falling again, tumbling down and then another wave of Carepakeh fighters whip over like pack predators smelling injured prey. A shuddering of explosions and suddenly there’s a hole where the cockpit wall was just seconds before and the oxygen in the cockpit is sucked out at huge speeds.

‘Oh-’ begins Horatio who is hanging vertically from the chair with his feed dangling toward the hole, but Mona interrupts him, screaming her lungs out over the escaping oxygen whilst she holds onto the doorpost for dear life: ‘We get the idea!’

I’m lying at DeSoto’s feet, between the command chair and the cockpit controls, and desperately trying not to get sucked out the ship whilst I roll myself around, lunge and grab Horatio’s wrist. For a moment we hang on as the pressure inside the Jericho begins to reach equilibrium with the thin atmosphere outside. Then I catch Horatio looking at something behind my back, and I try to turn.

‘I just wanted to conquer the planet!’ screams DeSoto in utmost frustration over the hiss of the last of the escaping atmosphere. ‘But no, you assholes just couldn’t leave well enough alone!’ His webbing is unfastened, he is rising from the chair and for a brief instant I see the unusually thick golden ring on his right hand and I know what’s going to happen, but Mona screams as the DeSoto engages the particle blaster weapon that’s built into his ring, and she flings herself into the way of the coherent bolt. It takes her square into the chest, blasting her back into the cockpit controls. Her body goes limp; her chest smolders.

I scream with murderous rage. ‘I’m going to fucking kill you, you fucking piece of shit!’ With a mighty roar I let Horatio go and propel myself against the floor up as DeSoto is turning the ring on me. I desperately swing my right arm and manage to deflect his hand, and the second bolt goes wide and through the hole in the cockpit wall. I make my left hand into a fist and deliver a hammerblow to DeSoto’s chest. ‘You fucking asshole!’ I scream, and deliver a blow to DeSoto’s face that sends the kingpin to the floor. ‘You hear me? I’m going to fucking kill you!’

But the kingpin is more resilient than I thought, and catlike he crawls back to his feet and launches himself head-first into my stomach, sprawling us both to the floor dangerously close to the hole in the wall, behind which the empty Asgardian sky howls as we slide through at hundreds, maybe thousands of miles an hour. The air is flapping about us. DeSoto is delivering a series of blows to my midriff that drive the air from my lungs, but then I push him into the wall and scatter to my feet. For a moment I think I am going to lose my footing and tumble through the side of the cockpit but then I manage to grab DeSoto, I swing him around and use the centrifugal force to pivot around, placing the hole in the cockpit wall between him and me. The wind shrieks about me, tears into my clothing. This is it. This has to be it.

‘Hey King Manny!’ I shriek in DeSoto’s face, and only the closeness prevents the howling winds from blocking out the sound of my voice. ‘You hear that sound? You know what that means?’ I grin wickedly. ‘It means you’re shit outta luck!’

This close I can’t quite kick him in the groin as I intended, but I can bring up my knee into his belly with as much force as I can muster. His face flushes red; oxygen escapes with a puff from his lungs. For a brief instant he reflexively relaxes his grip on the door mechanism. That’s enough for me. I wedge my knee against his wheezing chest, and I recklessly push, using the momentum to drive him backward whilst propelling myself backward but I slip, and yet I still manage to plant my left foot in Manfred DeSoto’s chest. That finally tips him over the edge. With a final scream of feeble rage he loses his grip, and is instantly sucked out of the cockpit to make the deadly final plunge.

Part of me wants to believe he lived long enough to meet his messy end at the bottom of that ten klick drop. And I’m sure I’ll be only a second behind him, because I’m still slipping, flailing like a slow-motion karate kid in the winds that pull at my clothes and I wheel around, and I feel Horatio’s hand fumbling on my shoulder, I see him desperately screaming something I can’t hear, but no matter how much I like James I don’t want him to be the last person I see. I’m already falling toward the hole when my eyes turn toward Mona- and she looks back at me with big eyes, live eyes, she fucking lives and for a precious millisecond I thank Steel Jesus for that body-armor even if I know it’s not going to save me. Well fuck that, she lives and that’s good enough for me- and then I’m falling but there is something big and black and suddenly it’s dark and the wind is a distant thing, and the Harbinger of Thunder is suddenly all around us. It’s the most exceptional feat of flying I have ever seen, but Kalta Mitchell pulls it off, and with its cargo bay doors open the Harbinger swallows it like the whale swallowed Jonah.

And I’m still falling, out of the hole but onto the familiar metal grating of the Harbinger’s cargo bay, and the gaping mouth of the bay is already closing, snap-locking with a ringing metal clang, finally shutting out the wind.

Only then do I realize I’m laughing. Laughing hysterically as the withering blue glare of the Vero engines dies a sputtering twilight death somewhere behind me, a manic, barking laugh that reverberates through the metal innards of the cargo bay and against the matte black of the Spirit Jericho. I stop for a moment to draw a panting breath, seeking to steady myself against the wall, fail, and collapse onto the metal grating. ‘He shoulda kept his arms and legs inside the vehicle!’ And then I laugh again, mad with adrenalin, subsiding fear, the sensation of ultimate victory and the rush of a fifteen year old grudge finally settled once and for all.


15. Epilogue


Manfred DeSoto's fortress-mansion is a series of smoldering glassed craters and ruined, half-buried ceracrete bunkers. We stand on its edge. The lights of New London glitter in the distance. From here, it looks as if nothing has transpired on Asgard. I know better. We all know better.

‘Now that the Muamar al Fais and its Marine Corps contingent are finally here we’ve begun our purging of the Asgardian governorate,’ Fleming says and looks admiringly at the Carepakeh handiwork. ‘That’s probably going to take a few years, unfortunately. Just to find out who was bought and who wasn’t… It is a daunting task. Sometimes I wish we could all do our work as expediently as you do, Mr. Johnson.’ He smiles a genuinely pleasant smile.

His Algian and Krioli partners seem a bit more reluctant. Moreover, they seem obviously discomforted by the presence of a cybernetically armored broodlord. Pastrix’ armor is indeed even more imposing up-close than it was through the viewer aboard the Harbinger. There are symbols engraved in the silver- the Carepakeh equivalent of poetry, or so I have been told. Poems, written on combat armor. Sometimes I wonder if those spiders haven’t gotten it right after all. ‘I trust,’ he speaks, and clicks his mandibles. ‘That our… help… will have no further effect on our prolonged friendship?’ he directs his question at Fleming, deliberately ignoring the Commonwealth representatives.

Fleming shakes his head. ‘Rest assured Mr. Pastrix, that the United Nations greatly value your contributions as an, ah… Somehow ‘private citizen’ doesn’t do it justice, does it? No indeed, it will not do at all. Well, I’ll be sure to mention the word ‘allies’ a few times in my report. That should get the point across.’

‘That would be most satisfactory,’ Pastrix clicks his mandibles again, then bows his head. ‘If you will then bid me leave? I have a report to my Queen to dictate. Captain? We’ll be in touch,’ He scuttles off to join his drone bodyguards who have remained at a respectful distance.

The Krioli twists his ears in obvious relief at the disappearance of the gigantic spider.

‘We are indebted to you,’ the Algian says reluctantly. ‘Are you and yours all well?’

I eye Mona, whose chest is still strapped with anti-burn bandages. ‘We’re fine,’ I grin. ‘We’ll consider our injuries… Penitence for our sins.’

Mona scowls at me, shaking the cane she uses to relieve her injured leg in my direction from behind the Algian’s back. The Commonwealther doesn’t notice. He nods solemnly. ‘Most pious. Most pious indeed.’

'Mr. Johnson, one more question...' the Krioli injects. 'The Spirit Jericho. Where is it?'

'Oh, you mean you wanted it back?' I say with fake surprise, and then I grin evilly. 'I didn't think it was that important… I let the Carepakeh have it. I told them to see it as a token of your appreciation.’

The Krioli and the Algian look at me, then at each other, as if they see water burn. Fleming is doing his best to suppress an obvious chuckle.

‘Anyway,’ Mona tactfully changes the conversation. ‘I heard there was a substantial monetary reward involved in this affair?’

‘Quite substantial indeed,’ Fleming nods fervently. ‘Enough to comfortable retire in fact- although I have a suspicion none of you are actually going to do that.’

‘Gee, how’d you guess?’ I smirk.

‘I’m a galaxy-class spymaster,’ says Fleming dryly. ‘I know such things. So what are you going to do with the money?’

‘The Harbinger’s been pretty messed-up, isn’t it Kalta?’

Our pilot shakes her head mournfully. ‘Those Vero drives reduced half the ship to molten slag. We were lucky to reach a spacefield in time. I dunno if we can repair her- I don’t think so, in fact,' she sounds genuinely sad. ‘She might be a total loss Dwight.’

'Doesn't matter,' I say confidently. 'It's just a boat. And with the money we're getting paid for saving this little planet and everything on it we can buy the swishiest spaceship in the galaxy.'

'Yeah?' asks Kalta hopefully.

'I was thinking of one of those new-fangled Olympian hotrods,' I grin.

‘That would be nice,’ there’s the beginning of a smile in the corner of her lips.

‘I hope that leaves a bit of money for the rest of us buggers,’ murmurs Horatio. ‘I owe a couple people money on Avalon. Thought I’d pay ‘em back now that I could. Before you know, the past comes around to bite you in the ass?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, James,’ I smile and wink at Mona as I gently offer her my arm. God-damn, I’m at risk of becoming some fashionable gentleman if I don’t watch out. ‘The past coming back to bite you in the ass? I don’t know anything about that sort of thing. You’re not leaving the crew, are you though? ‘Cause you know I need you if we’re going to beat the house at cheating in New Vegas next month.’

‘I’ll be back for that,’ Horatio Troubadour the Third smiles. ‘I like your style captain.’

‘Good,’ I smile back. ‘That’s good.’

‘I wonder where Baylor’s at?’ Mona frowns. The cane and the contracting of her brows somehow only make her sexier.

‘I think I saw him trying to sell some of those plasma blades he salved to a street-side antiquities dealer,’ says Kalta dryly.

‘And if he’s not there we’ll find him at the nearest street vendor selling sweets,’ I grin. ‘Come on, let’s go blow some of our hard-earned money.’

We turn and leave the triad of secret agents alone at the side of the crater. The towers of New London flash their lights in the distance. For once, the anarchic chaos of that big city seems thrilling and enticing, a theme park attraction, an adventure waiting to happen. Asgard seems like it’s been reborn before my very eyes. I’m with my crew, my comrades-in-arms—my friends. And I’m with the woman I love.

Mona squeezes my hand. I squeeze back. I haven’t felt this alive in years. Everything is going to be great.

This time, everything’s going to be great.


Fin
"Nick Fury. Old-school cold warrior. The original black ops hardcase. Long before I stepped off a C-130 at Da Nang, Fury and his team had set fire to half of Asia." - Frank Castle

For, now De Ruyter's topsails
Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet -
And this the Dutchmen know!
User avatar
Artemis
Global Mod
Posts: 392
Joined: Thu May 22, 2008 3:31 am
Location: Savannah, Georgia
Contact:

Re: Spirit Jericho

Post by Artemis »

This is still in my top ten Best Gifts Ever, Siege. Damn its good to see old Dwight on the screen again :)

For anyone reading this new to Universal Constants, this story, aside from being damn good, is a really nice intro piece to the universe. Recommended reading.
"The universe's most essential beauty is its endlessness. There is room and resources enough for all of us. Whether there is room for all of our passions is the question, and the problem that we work tirelessly to find a solution to."

-Qhameio Allir Nlafahn, Commonwealth ambassador, during the signing of the Kriolon Treaty.
Post Reply