Chapter Seventeen
“Talk to us, Aiko.” Nathan turned up the volume on his commect so everyone on the elevator could hear.
“There’s one fugly-ass ship coming our way,” Aiko-One replied from aboard the Neptune Belle.
“Where’s it now?” Nathan stepped up to the glass and gazed toward the sunward dock. He thought he could make out a pale dot moving against the backdrop of the habitat’s pole.
“About halfway between us and the airlock, heading straight for the city.”
“What’s it look like?” Nathan made eye contact with Ret’Su to gauge her reaction.
“Like someone’s weird-ass idea for a ship. It almost looks like a pale, fleshy growth with spikes driven through it.”
“That’s them,” Ret’Su confirmed, and Nathan gave her a grim nod.
“Aiko, get the ship in the air and stay the hell away from that thing. Try to put the deifactory between you and it, at least until we have a better handle on the situation.”
“You’ve got it, Nate.”
“Rufus and Six, how about you two? Where are you right now?”
“We’re still with the raider’s body,” Rufus replied over the same line.
“We can get back to the palace’s front gate easily enough,” Aiko-Six said.
“Then head that way,” Nathan ordered. “We’ll try to join up with you there.”
“Heading out,” Aiko-Six said, followed by the sound of a door creaking open.
“All right, listen up everyone,” Nathan said. “We’ve got ourselves a new plan. First, we’re going to help the locals repel these unwelcome guests. Then, when they slink back to whatever hole they crawled out of, we’re going to follow them. Any objections?”
No one spoke up, either over the commect or on the elevator. Vessani flattened her ears and drew her pistol, her face cold and determined.
You say this isn’t your home anymore, Nathan thought, but I’m not so sure.
“And here I am without my hard suit,” Vessani grumbled.
“You and me both.” Nathan unholstered his own pistol and thumbed the safety off. “We’ll make do.”
“Thanks, by the way,” she added softly.
“For what?”
“For not running at the first sign of trouble.”
Nathan gave her a quick headshake. “You can thank me later. If this doesn’t end in tears.”
“Stick close to us,” Vessani told Joshua, “and keep your head down.”
“Don’t have to tell me twice.”
“You’re welcome to tag along with us,” Nathan told Ret’Su.
“Thank you.” She drew a pearl-encrusted dagger hidden within her robes. “I think I will.”
The elevator reached the halfway point on its way down when the Neptune Belle flew past them, the roar of its exhaust changing pitch. Far below, the palace grounds resembled a kicked anthill, with the dots of people—presumably soldiers—swarming onto the outer walls. Not that fortifications were much use against foes arriving by air, but at least it gave the cat people a better view of the situation.
“Here they come,” Vessani hissed.
The pale, spiked ship shot over the city rooftops on almost a direct course for the palace. Thrusters braked hard, and Nathan winced as the ship plowed through one of the pagodas, reducing the top half to splinters.
“Who taught these morons how to fly?” Nathan said.
The pale ship slowed to a hover over the palace, part of its hull scraping across the decapitated pagoda. A few nekoan soldiers armed with rifles opened fire, the staggered reports of their weapons cracking the air, but their shots ricocheted off the ship’s hull.
The elevator had almost reached the ground, and Nathan could finally gauge the size of the vessel with some accuracy. It was wider and stubbier than the Belle, but similar in overall volume. Maybe three internal levels? He didn’t see any obvious weapons on the exterior, though its spikes might house lethal surprises.
The pale ship reversed thrust and crunched backward across the roof of the palace. An orifice on the base level of the ship irised open, and several burly cybernetic raiders jumped through the hole. The ship continued its amateurish backward slide and settled to the ground atop the gardens and reflection pools in front of the palace. Raiders poured out of the ship. More shots ripped through the air, and nekoan soldiers drew their swords and charged the invaders.
The elevator reached the ground floor, and the glass doors split open. Nathan led the party straight for the palace.
“We still heading for the front gate?” Vessani asked.
“You bet. Aiko has our meanest gun.”
Nathan heard a woman crying out in the native tongue—almost growling at times—from somewhere up ahead. A raider backpedaled across the open archway at the end of the covered path with a robed nekoan woman clutched in his arms. She screamed and kicked but the raider half-dragged, half-carried her along with ease.
Nathan raised his pistol but hesitated. The nekoan flailed in a desperate attempt to break free, and he couldn’t find a clean—
Vessani snapped off two quick shots. The first sparked against the side of the raider’s head, knocking it back, and the second blew a chunk out of his shoulder. He let go, and the nekoan scrambled back across the floor.
The raider faced them without any visible signs of pain or fear—or any emotions at all. He sized them up with a pair of metal eyes, drew a vibro-sword, and sprinted toward them.
Nathan and Vessani filled the space between them with bullets, blasting the raider in the chest, stomach, legs, and jaw. Half their shots sparked against internal mechanisms. The raider lost his balance, collapsed forward, and the vibro-sword tumbled out of his grip, clattering across the stone path.
“You think he’s dead?” Nathan asked, not sure they’d punched enough holes in him yet. Not with that many implants bulking him up.
Ret’Su picked up the raider’s sword and with a graceful, twirling stroke, relieved the cyborg of his head’s burdensome weight.
“Yes,” she declared.
More screams and shouts came from inside the palace, and Ret’Su growled an order to the woman, who nodded and fled away from the danger.
“Come on!” Nathan urged them forward.
They advanced deeper into the palace, pistols raised, eyes alert. Nathan zeroed in on what he thought were the closest screams, turning down a corridor with sunlight streaming through the broken ceiling. The corridor opened at the far end to the dining hall, where he found a pair of raiders. The closest carried a vibro-sword in one hand while dragging Mi’ili by the leg with the other. The second raider rushed them with a polearm, its forked tip blurring at the edges.
Nathan fired, and his shot struck the charging raider dead center in the chest. The cyborg kept coming, seemingly ignorant of the crater in his torso, and Nathan rattled off the rest of his magazine. His target dropped heavily to the ground and slid forward, blood smearing the floor. Vessani fired one more shot into the cyborg’s skull.
The second raider let go of Mi’ili’s leg, gripped his sword with both hands, and rushed them.
Nathan ejected his spent magazine and pulled a fresh one off his belt, backpedaling as Ret’Su dashed past him. The raider took a swipe at her, but she ducked under the clumsy attack and slid across the floor. Her vibro-sword hissed through the air and cleaved through both legs below his kneecaps.
The raider crumpled to the ground, blood gushing from his leg stumps. He tried to push himself upright, but Vessani shot him in the face, and he dropped back down. She emptied three more shots into his back before ejecting her spent magazine.
“You okay?” Nathan asked Mi’ili.
She looked up at him and sniffled, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“That way’s safe.” He pointed a thumb over his shoulder. “Go!”
She sniffled again, then nodded and wiped a gauze sleeve under her eyes before hurrying past Nathan and the others.
Vessani’s ears stood up. “Sounds like most of the action is out in front.”
“Then that’s where we need to be!” Nathan took a wide corridor off the dining hall and followed it to the central hallway that led them to the front of the palace, ending in a pair of wooden columns. Gunfire and the clash of metal against metal rang out, and he stopped behind one of the columns to take stock of the situation.
The pale ship sat at a slight angle with one landing strut sunk into a reflection pool. A wide, oval opening spilled harsh orange light from the ship’s interior, and over a dozen raiders dragged or carried prisoners—and bodies?—back to the ship. Nathan wasn’t sure what to make of it, but they didn’t seem to discriminate between nekoan corpses and their own fallen.
Nekoan soldiers fought back the invaders all across the gardens, their own swords far less effective against the cyborgs than a hail of bullets. A few lucky ones now wielded the raiders’ own vibro-weapons, but most struggled to hold their own with low-tech blades, which the raiders could rend through with ease.
“Dad!” Vessani called out urgently, and Nathan followed her gaze.
D’Miir stood in the midst of the thickest fighting, his sides and back protected by a cluster of four fierce-eyed, grizzled honor guards, one of them holding a green banner aloft. He raised his heavy war hammer and brought it crashing down on a raider’s head, bursting the metal cranium like a melon. Together, the five nekoans pressed deep into the raiders’ ranks, almost reaching the edge of the ship before the raiders counterattacked in force.
Cyborgs swarmed around them, and Nathan held his fire, the melee too thick for him to risk a shot. The king’s banner clattered to the ground, and one of the honor guards fell, clutching at the crimson spewing from his neck.
“Dad!” Vessani cried, then faced Nathan. “We need to help him!”
Nathan raised his pistol and nodded, ready to head out when a new sound pierced the chaos of battle.
It was the roar of an automatic weapon.
Aiko-Six sprinted past the open gate and pelted the closest raider with rifle fire. A mix of explosive and incendiary rounds blasted the cyborg’s chest open and blew half his face off. His implants caught fire, and he dropped to the ground in a limp, burning heap.
Aiko-Six raced across the gap, then leaped up the full height of the stone wall and caught the ledge. She hauled herself over the top one-handed and landed in a crouch. A nekoan struggling to reload his rifle flinched back at her sudden appearance and fumbled his handful of cartridges.
“Hi!” she said brightly, then shouldered her rifle—a Jovian sinspike that dated back to her days as a commando, a weapon she’d maintained and customized with all the doting care of a mother.
The three living honor guards had formed a triangle around their embattled king, but those defenses wouldn’t hold out long against vibro-blades. Aiko switched to burst fire, picked a target about to lunge at one of the guards, and pulled the trigger. The trio of explosions ripped through the raider’s back, exposing his artificial organs. He burst into flames and crumpled. She sighted on the next and fired again. The rounds blew the top of his head off, and he stumbled forward before pirouetting to the ground.
“And there’s more where that came from!” Aiko shouted.
Wordless speech rippled across the raiders, audible to her Jovian receivers. It came across as a low electric hum that escalated into clicking and buzzing. The contents made no sense to her, being unlike any wireless language she’d ever heard, but it must have contained some form of information. The raiders responded to the bizarre transmission, and soon those assaulting the king abandoned their target and charged toward her position on the wall.
“That’s it,” she whispered. “Line up for me, you half-and-half bastards.”
She waited for the raiders to pull away from the nekoans, then she switched to full auto and emptied the rest of her magazine. Two more raiders fell, and another dropped to the ground, missing half a leg. She reached for a magazine but was interrupted when one of the raiders hurled a vibro-spear at her.
The spear punched through her chest, and she staggered back.
The rifleman next to her regarded the injury with wide-eyed horror, his mouth agape.
“Be honest with me,” she asked him. “How bad does it look?”
She didn’t wait for his response, because the raiders had nearly reached the base of the wall, which featured convenient stairs up to her position since this was the inside of the wall. Instead, she let her rifle dangle from its strap, then forced the spear all the way through. She spun the spear around and launched it with enough force to skewer a pair of cyborgs.
Aiko grabbed her rifle again and was about to slap the full magazine in when a sword came scything through the air and buried itself in her right shoulder. It didn’t cut all the way through, but it might as well have, because her fingers on that side twitched and then fell limp.
“Oh, come on!” she shouted. “Now you’re throwing swords at me? Who said you could do that?”
A raider climbed over the corpse of his impaled brethren and rushed up the stairs to her. She yanked the vibro-sword out of her shoulder, and her arm fell off.
“I’m sorry,” she told the charging cyborg. “We haven’t been formally introduced.”
She blocked the raider’s attack, disarmed him at the shoulder—literally—then cut off his head and kicked the body down the stairs.
“The name’s Aiko! I’m an ex-commando!”
She advanced down the stairs at a leisurely pace. The vibro-sword was single-edged, with a thick, sturdy back to the blade suitable for blocking other vibro-weapons. Another raider swung at her, but she parried his attack and slit open his belly. Blood, guts, and plastic tubing spilled out. She swiped the blade through his chest three more times, each stroke higher than the last, then swept his feet out from under him. He collapsed onto his side and rolled down the stairs. The next raider leaped over his body.
“It’s so hard being this popular.”
Their blades clashed, and another spear struck Aiko in the shoulder. She backpedaled, but the raider used the opening to cut up through her chest. Sparks flew, and her vision blipped as her internal systems rerouted power.
The next thing she saw was a sword rushing in toward her neck.
The world spun away until everything turned upside down. Her head clonked against the stairs and began bouncing along. It rebounded off another step, hit a blood-drenched body, then rolled off the side of the stairs.
“Typical,” she huffed, moments before her face hit the dirt with a thud. “And I was doing so well, too.”
Nathan fired at the raider who’d taken out Aiko. Two of his three shots hit, but the raider didn’t go down, instead leaping off the stairs and racing toward the pale ship. He hated to see Aiko lose another body, but her efforts had put a substantial dent in the raider forces, and more of the cyborgs pulled back to their ship, carrying whatever corpses they could grab along the way.
Vessani hurried to her father’s side, while Nathan hung back, reloading as he checked the overall situation. He was worried the enemy’s ground team losses might lead the ship’s pilot to take more extreme measures, but nothing of the sort happened. The last raider clambered inside, the hatch contracted shut, and the pale ship lifted away from the garden. It rose about half a kilometer straight up, spun around, and then sped away toward the sunward airlock.
Nathan let out a long, slow exhalation, his pulse racing, blood thumping in his ears. He holstered his pistol and walked in the general direction of D’Miir. Vessani helped her father sit up, and he winced. An ugly gash cut across his forehead, and blood matted his hair, but his eyes burned with fierce determination.
The roar of the pale ship’s engines faded away, and absent the clashing of swords and the cracks of rifles, the cries of the wounded rose to prominence.
Nathan keyed his commect. “Rufus, you nearby?”
“I’m outside the palace gate. Aiko told me to stay put until it was safe.”
“Get in here. Vessani’s father and a lot of other nekoans are hurt.” He eyed the fallen honor guard, the grass underneath him soaked in scarlet. “Or worse. Do what you can for them.”
“Right away.”
“Joshua?” Nathan glanced over his shoulder to find the engineer trailing close behind.
“Yes?”
Nathan tossed him the vehicle key, which he caught two-handed.
“Bring the rover around. We need to get moving if we don’t want to lose sight of that ship.”
“You’ve got it.” Joshua hurried toward the gate.
Nathan planted both hands on his hips and let out another slow breath. It wasn’t so much the violence that bothered him but how pointless it had all been. What did the raiders expect to gain from this? Why throw themselves at the most heavily defended part of the city only to pull back with a few captives and corpses? What were their goals?
He didn’t understand. Not that understanding would have made the bloodshed any less horrific, but at least it would have made sense in his mind. He could predict a foe he could comprehend, but these raiders?
He didn’t have a clue.
Nathan keyed the commect on his belt. “Aiko-One, you there?”
“Sure am. Hovering behind the factory.”
“Set the ship down on the landing pad. We’ll head your way as soon as we’re finished here.”
“You’ve got it, Nate. Heading that way now.”
Nathan craned his neck to see the Belle ascend over the pyramid’s peak and fly toward the city’s outskirts.
“Also, I have some news,” he added.
“Good or bad?”
“Little bit of both.” His eyes fell on Aiko-Six’s beheaded body, now splayed across a set of stairs leading up the outer wall.
“What’s the good news?” she asked.
“You really tore those raiders a new one.”
“Nice! And the bad?”
“You’re down another body.”
“Wonderful,” she moaned. “I need to be more careful.”
“It was worth it, though.”
“If you say so. Guess that means I’m Aiko-One-and-Only now.”
“We’ll buy you some new bodies after this job, I promise.”
“At least there’s that to look forward to. See you at the pad.”
“See you.” He switched off the commect.
Joshua pulled the rover in through the main gate, and Nathan waved him toward the stairs with Aiko-Six’s body. The engineer parked the vehicle along the wall and climbed out.
“What next?” Joshua asked, handing back the key.
“We need to load what’s left of Six onto the rover. Give me a hand, would you?”
“Sure thing.”
“Nate?” came a muffled voice. “Hey, is that you? Can you hear me?”
Nathan paused and looked around. “Aiko?”
“Yeah. Over here.”
He turned around in a circle, unable to pinpoint the source of the voice.
“Over where?”
“How should I know? All I see is dirt.”
“There!” Joshua scurried over to an object glinting beside the stairs. He picked it up and presented it to Nathan with outstretched arms.
It was Aiko-Six’s severed head.
“You’re holding me upside down,” she grumbled.
“Sorry!” Joshua turned the head over.
“I’m about to run out of juice,” she told Nathan. “Make sure you pick up all my bits, okay?”
“We will. No need to worry.”
“Don’t forget my right arm. I think I dropped it somewhere up top.”
“We’ll find it.”
“And my gun. The sinspike. I’m not sure where it went.”
“Would you calm down already? We’ve got this.”
“Okay. Just wanted to make sure. You know I love that thing. Shutting off.”
Her cameras irised closed.
Joshua blinked down at the mechanical head. “Should I . . . um?” He cleared his throat. “What do you want me to do with this?”
“Stash it in the back of the rover, then come help me with the body.”