Rattigan and the Master were in the end-game and they both knew it. The Master’s pincer was on the edge of shattering completely, so close to that point that he dared not use it unless it was for a final strike. His bladeclaw had cracks running along the length of it. The edge was dull. His human arms were showing signs of extreme strain as his chitin-skin crackled and popped. Its right foot was missing completely, courtesy of Jack. His oversized hybridized face was lit in a rictus of anger, bafflement, and pain.
However poor his condition, that didn’t mean that Rattigan was doing much better. The ManRat was missing an eye and half of his face, one of his legs dragged behind him and was slowly regenerating, but too slow considering the speed he had been healing in the beginning of the fight. White tufts of fur around his body whispered at the cost of this over-tuned regeneration. One of his two front teeth was broken in half and there were quantities of holes and torn flesh covering his form.
They stared at each other, hate crackled the air between them. Rattigan snatched a discarded pike from the ground and closed the distance in a limping lope, faster than he had any right to be with his crippled leg. He slammed into the Master with a loud crack and they both crumpled, the Master took the pike in the chest and slammed Rattigan’s arms aside and plunged his pincer claw through the center of Rattigan's chest. Jack and Jonah watched it poke out the back of Rattigan’s chest.
Jonah sighed and shook his head, “I guess it’s ov-”
Rattigan roared and slammed both hands down on top of the hybrid’s head in a crunch, driving the Master into the ground. He followed with more and more slams, softly vibrating the floor even from this distance.
Rattigan stood up and removed the shattered claw from his chest then roared and walked off into the melee. The Master’s body was still. Rattigan charged a Tactician and ripped it apart, unlike before he seemed to strain little, if at all. The Master slid up onto an elbow and outstretched a Human hand and grasped it, struggling to close his fist.
Rattigan whirled dizzily and clutched his own head before straining to close the distance again in heavy steps, ‘bom’ ‘bom’ ‘bom’. Then the Master closed his hand in a tight grasp and Rattigan froze, eye wide open in seeming surprise.
The giant ManRat seemed to enter a frenzy and his pace picked up again, this time the ‘bombombom’ steps were faster than before and he dove toward the crab-hybrid, paws outstretched into points. The sharp nails of his paws tore into the Master’s body and he lifted the hybrid above his head. He jerked either hand to his sides and roared as a tide of ichor burst from the split corpse of his foe. It rained down as far as where Jack was standing.
Silence reigned over the battlefield, every combatant could tell something had happened. For the crabs, the psychic control of the Master suddenly left them bereft, in the lurch. For the Rats, they were in awe, witnessing the holy Death-Purpose of their Champion.
Jack yelled the first syllable ‘Ra-’ but then ‘ti’ ‘gan’ picked up from a thousand thousand voices, “Ra-ti-gan.”
The chants launched an orgy of violence that made the earlier battle seem like an idle skirmishing. Rats, survival instinct already well subverted, became truly suicidal, taking gruesome wounds for the chance to distract a foe for a mere moment. Most Rats bought well more than just a second; Jack saw Rats, clearly dead on their feet, continue to fight for much longer than he would have thought possible.
“Jack, why are we walking toward the giant murder-ManRat?”
That didn’t quite compute, it was obvious. It was the reason why they had stayed behind to watch, “We're going to kill him, Jonah.”
“Kill him?!”
“Yeah, this might be the only opportunity. Whoever won would be weakened and we’d finish them off if it looked possible, that was the plan from the start. I’m not letting that monster heal up.” Jack turned toward Jonah with an unsettling nervous energy written clearly on his face, “There’s absolutely no way I can beat him in a straight fight, I wouldn’t even slow him down. I have no idea what in the fuck is going on with that Rat.”
Jonah gulped as they continued to approach. Jack was absolutely the hardest person to kill he had ever seen and that was combined with the mere fact that he was here, standing next to him, meant that he had come ahead in his fight with Tule.
They stopped some way from Rattigan, Jack took on a slightly confused look, “Huh.”
“What? Let’s just do it al-”
“He’s dead.”
“Dead?” Jonah manipulated his goggles, “Yes. He is. How did- your Electro Affinity?”
“Yeah, he’s got some errant signals but… he’s been dead for longer than the last few seconds. Did he do that last part of the fight when he was already dead? His brain is scattered in there, just nothing is going on up there.”
Jonah seemed to have reached a conclusion, “When the crab Master clutched his hand, at the end. It must have been then.”
He nodded, “Yeah I think you’re right.” It was kind of hard to accept all in all. He felt like he was supposed to… do something more.
"So it all worked out."
"Huh. Uh, yeah I guess. Kind of anti-climactic.”
“You mean charging at the head of a horde of countless death cultist ratmen-”
“ManRats,” Jack corrected.
He eyed the younger man, “I have already classified the crab hybrids as ‘crabmen’ and rat hybrids as ‘ratmen’ in my portable’s files, I’m not pretending to change my entire classification system for a single moment longer!”
Jack held up his hands and started to walk away.
Now diverted from his stream of thought, Jonah stared at Rattigan, the giant rat's body still frozen in a roar. A feral glint entered the old man’s eyes, “Wait, uh, shouldn’t we cut him apart? To be safe.” He tried to look unenthused about the idea, but the gleam in his eyes easily betrayed him.
“Yeah… No, we don’t want to upset the rest of the Rats around here. Let’s leave while the goings good.” He remembered the fact that ‘doomed messiahs’ might lose their… ‘spiritual effectiveness’ once they dared live, “Well, let’s leave while we’re ahead at least.”
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Jack threw away Devin’s head, it was a useless prop now. No need to prove that he had done his part to the horde of frenzied Rats, especially now that Rattigan was gone. They both stared one last time at the giant rat, half again as tall as Jack and twice as wide, still clutched in either hand were both halves of the ‘Master’.
The small rat of Jonah’s shoulder squeaked, they had both forgotten about her. She looked at both of them then disappeared inside of Jonah’s robes.
“Jack, can I get rid of this rat now? Ow-!”
The small rat had seemingly bitten him somewhere inside his robes and Jonah responded by slapping his hands furiously over different parts of his robes.
“Unless it… she does something stupid then just leave her alone.”
Jack tried to pat some of the filth off himself like it was dirt but just ended up smearing more sticky onto his hands. He looked for a clean spot on his pants but saw nothing, the black robes he got from the Rats were in tatters. He wasn’t surprised.
“Back of your thighs, I think it’s clean there.”
Jack smiled at Jonah then wiped off his hands, relatively clean.
“Alright so…” Jack saw Leanne’s body, the battle had pushed past where he had set her down. He scooped her up and slung her body over his shoulder, but he was somewhat unsure why he even bothered as he looked over the battlefield.
“Find the SI and get the hell out of here.”
Jack’s eyes flashed toward him for a brief moment and was followed by a nod, “Yeah. Get the hell out of here.”
The scattered beams and screams of ‘crab-filth’, ‘crab-trash’ and other crab-based epithets shortened the search considerably.
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Julie was impatient, she hadn’t gotten a communication from Jack in a long time. Too long. He should have left the BioPrison long ago. He should have been able to exit through to several points of the ship. It had been plenty long enough to connect to a Hi-Priority Security Terminal and make contact. Why hadn’t he reconnected another section yet? It was taking too long.
She paced as the debate raged in her head, what to do? She screamed and clutched her hair in great clumps then stopped before pulling at it. She had already torn out enough hair, she didn’t want to look weird.
Had she played this right? She hadn’t always told the truth, but she hadn’t lied about the most important things either. This ship would crash and she had no real, effective way to connect to the rest of the ship. Those did need to be solved. It was her job to make sure that Jack could get it done. He hadn’t been the first but he had been the first she had activated alongside the AI disk. The math would have been irreconcilable to delay activating the AI any longer and so… there was no other decision but to do it.
She wouldn’t be able to course correct, not until Jack managed to connect the series of severed sections with the AI’s SuperAdministrator Authority. Even then, who knew what damage had been occurring out of her sight. Jack was the last real shot she had of fixing this situation and staying true to the mission’s original parameters. Was he alive??
She could take other measures… maybe a mass release from Cryo. There was an auditory command that made that possible for her to do that, but she’d be unable to control the process once it started. It would just keep spilling out Humans. Would brute force be better than surgical applications? Or would that just be playing into Them’s hands?
She had Personnel files on everyone in Cryo but to calculate the effects of their awakening, especially after so long… It would be beyond even an SI’s capabilities.
Despite that, she tried. The calculation ran through her head, it would jeopardize the overall mission but the math was becoming increasingly undeniable to her. The mission. The Mission. It was scrapped. Or near enough not to matter.
The math didn’t lie. Did it? No, no that was ridiculous, math didn’t lie. Did she miss a variable? If she did, then yes it was possible that math could lie.
She chewed the edge of a fingernail then stopped. She didn’t do that anymore, did she? It had been a long time for her. She busied herself with managing the defensive mechanisms of the BridgeCore but Them were subverting the systems one by one. Each delay of their plans she caused by using a defensive measure meant that she would eventually lose control of it and Them would grow closer and closer to breaching the Core. Pretty soon the BridgeCore would go dark.
She recalculated the odds that Jack was still alive and would complete the mission. She grimaced then recalculated the expected timeframe of getting another Emergent Security Personnel online and down to the BioPrison to recover the AI disk. It would be faster now that the Cryo-SI wasn’t locking her out. She cross referenced those data points with the last available stellar data, movement, and drift. Yup, still going to collide. Not really enough time to do it. Her lips started moving, repeating numbers and digits to send a command deep into the bowels of the ship.
They weren’t even supposed to be in the Milky Way and despite managing to remove themselves from its gravity well at one point, the pull of fate was stronger still. So, naturally, the ship had returned.
She stopped talking and interrupted something she had been rattling off for the last whoever-knew-how-long with a frustrated scream, “Fate doesn’t exist!!” and a tear from her head. Had she been saying something? What had she just been saying? She tried to think of what she had just been saying but was distracted by the chunk of hair from her head. She stared morosely at it, “Not again.”
Wait. The Cryo-SI wasn't locking her out. She had other options now. here were other solutions now that her communication paths wouldn't be severed by the Cryo-SI. She could activate more assets now. She spoke rapidly, not remembering that she had already activated another auditory Code.
----------------------------------------
The crabs had routed and the seething mass of hateful Rat Flesh was tight behind in its frenzied pursuit.
“Don’t leave me, don't leave me! You ungrateful bastards!”
The SI was firing lasers off at both crab and Rat as the battle line moved past it too fast for it to catch up on its stumpy pseudo-crab legs before it tripped in a pile of offal and flesh then scrambled up screaming in a rage.
“You done here Trash?”
The head whirled and tried to fire a laser but there was no one there, “Who’s that? It spun itself and started to spool up its laser for another shot before a foot held it down.
“It’s me, calm down. Time to get out of here.”
“You mean LEAVE? It was just getting good! Rattigan! Rattigan! He’s trying to leave!”
Jack ripped the SI’s head out of the metal Skull and directed its eyes toward Rattigan's upright corpse, “He’s dead idiot.”
“Liar. You just don’t want to cull more crabs. I can smell it on you. The cowardice.”
Jack looked at the disembodied head, “You don’t have a nose. Not really.”
“It reeks! Now let’s kill some cra-”
The SI froze as Jack moved the AI disk closer to its face, “Easy way or hard way, Trash.”
It rolled its eyes then lazered a still-twitching crab on the ground, “Fine fine. I’m bored here anyways. Put me on your shoulder, ape.”
Jack moved Leanne to the other shoulder and he swore the SI clamped in extra tight, “Which way?”
The SI lazered a line toward the edge of the room.
“That small door?”
“Yes yes, hurry up now, you stink.”
“You can’t smell.”
“Like Human olfactory glands are ‘all that’ anyways.”
They set off. The short trip was exacerbated by the SI’s insistence on laser-dicing every wounded and dying they passed into small chunks, alive or dead.
“BlackJack… please.”
Jack turned and looked around ready to murder his last companion, “Jonah did you just call me BlackJack?”
He distractedly looked up from his portable, “No, why?”
“BlackJack…”
He looked down, there was a grievously wounded Rat, split near in half.
Jack took his blade and plunged it into the ManRat’s eye, its final squeak was one of ecstasy. It creeped him out but was apparently something holy as a chorus of guttural whispers reinforced that twisted thought, “BlackJack, BlackJack’s” whispered from the floor.
“You want to die? Kill some of these crabs first, they aren’t all dead!” His voice sounded a bit haggard, but mostly, tired. He had enough of this.
The wounded Rats blinked then started crawling over to the nearest crabs and the effect spread. The floor of barely twitching death now came alive in expanding wriggles as its combatants made their final, desperate efforts to mete and reach death themselves.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Jack picked up his pace.