Chapter Thirty-One
Reunions
Crush-Cha led the Marshalls toward East Gate- Number 3 through the densely packed street. The low buildings around them were topped with a collection of mismatched and patched-together wind-harvesters. Some were regular-looking windmills, while others looked like metal wheels lined with large, angled cups to take advantage of the constant winds.
Even the pavements on either side of the street were packed with contraptions to harvest the only free resource this wreck of a planet had left. How there was any breathable air left in this world was beyond him. If the Imperium ever did actually move to take over this planet officially, it would effectively be terraforming.
He had brought the full force of the Marshalls with him but no other forces. The locals were apparently loyal, but that was not something he wanted to put to the test by turning his back on them.
“Cara, I want you and Berenice on the roofs there and there,” he said, pointing to the houses overlooking the entrance. There was a good, wide road that ran around the inside of the exterior walls, so they would be far enough back from the gate to get a good angle on things if anything went wrong. “Quad, Tri, either side of the gate. Stay low.”
Quad and Tri ran to the left and right of the high, stone archway that led out into the permanent sand storms that surrounded the city—and apparently most of the planet—before hunkering down and creeping to look around the corners. It was irritating that he still had to keep Tri separated from Quad, but the two came to blows anytime they were even vaguely near each other for more than five minutes.
The Sec situation was casting one hell of a long shadow.
“Prim, Sec, I want you two steps out from me. Stay calm, and do not draw your weapons unless I tell you. Hopefully, we can deal with this calmly. If not, we have four weapons on this guy.” Crush waited for them to move away and then took his stance in the dead center of the roadway.
This was their first time dealing with someone impersonating a Marshall of the Nanite Imperium. Admittedly, they were still a new organization, but it still pissed Crush off. These people and their reputations were a direct result of a lot of hard work. To have someone steal that for their own purposes made his blood boil.
Worse still, he was almost sure this was a group all pretending to be a single person. In this swirling sand, it was easily possible.
The only other option was someone with nanites.
His implant pinged, the gate sensors reporting an incoming life sign.
“Get ready. Here he comes,” Crush said quietly, a lazy smile stretching across his lips as he dropped one hand on his holster and waited.
“Please, please, please,” Sec was muttering.
“It couldn’t be,” Prim said coldly. “You need to let that go; he’s got to be dead.”
“Cut the chatter,” Crush said.
He didn’t blame Sec, not really. Of course Sec would be hoping for a miracle, but Crush had to agree with Prim on this one. The chances of Colby having survived on Sand’s Embrace were low enough. To have made it all the way here and become some kind of knock-off Marshall… Crush wouldn’t bet a single credit on that.
They stopped talking as their sensors showed the telltale energy signature of nanites.
Crush paused, and Prim whispered ‘Colby’ with painful hope.
A shadow appeared in the swirling sand, and Crush even felt himself take a step back as a shape emerged.
A long black coat and hood covered the face, hiding it behind shadows and a mask. Metal gauntlets on both hands caught the sun, and a metal tail emerged from behind, curling up and over the shoulder for a second before whipping back beneath the coat.
“B-B-Banjo?” Sec stuttered the first time Crush had ever heard the Cents glitch in any way.
A second later, the figure passed beneath the arch, emerging into the much clearer air in the city. The illusion shattered as the hood was pulled back, and the mask dissolved.
Everyone stood frozen in shock for a long moment.
Crush stared at Colby, noting one eye had changed from blue to green, and saw one side of his face had skin too smooth for human skin.
The moment shattered as Colby’s eyes fixed on Sec.
“You little son of a bitch!” Colby growled and launched himself at Sec. “I’m gonna kick your ass all the way back to the Imperium!”
Crush moved quickly between the two, grabbing Colby before he could make it to Sec.
The silvered tail flicked out, coming to a stop a few inches from Crush’s neck before it withdrew.
“Easy, easy,” Crush said, pulling Colby back. “Plenty of time for that later. Are you okay?”
“Okay? Am I okay?” Colby glared at Sec. “The crazy bastard put me in a star-damned escape pod! I had to use some cobbled-together AI cube thing just to survive the concussion!”
“We know,” Crush said. “It’s something he is going to be spending a long time explaining and making up for. Listen! Are. You. Okay?”
“I will be,” Colby nodded. “Do you know why he did it?”
“He—”
“Because he thought I was ‘banging’ Prim!” Colby yelled. “I never even slept with her!”
“I know, I know,” Crush said.
“Oooh, but I will!” Colby leaned past Crush. “You just watch Sec; I’ll bang her senseless! I’ll bang your whole family!”
Crush started to laugh at the mental image, and the tension broke.
“Colby,” Sec said, coming forward slowly. “I’m really sorry.”
“Still going to bang your family,” Colby glared.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
“You made it back,” Sec nodded, “For that, you can bang anyone you want.”
Sec grabbed Colby into a hug. “Hell, you can bang me if you want!”
Colby froze for a second as Sec hugged him and cried.
Reluctantly, he patted Sec on the back. “No, thank you.”
/===<<<>>>===\
“Where exactly did you find this?” Crush asked.
“It was in a small bunker at the back of one of the mines. I chased one of the saboteurs into it. She was attempting to destroy these notebooks along with a few loose papers. The papers didn’t survive, but I did manage to save the notebooks.” Colby explained. “I found another room like it earlier, but I was way too late to save anything in that one.”
“I take it the agents involved did not exactly volunteer to be interrogated either.” Crush sighed.
“We didn’t exactly stop to ask those assholes any questions,” Buddy’s voice came from a small speaker mounted on Colby’s shoulder.
“Is that right?” Crush asked, staring Colby down. It didn’t work, which was a first in a long time.
“You freefall through a fucking sandstorm and see how chatty you feel, lizard lips.”
“Lizard lips?” Crush blinked. “Want to say that again?”
“Come in here and get me, ya prick!” Buddy cackled.
“I’m sorry about that,” Colby shrugged.
“No, you’re fucking not, or I couldn’t say it!”
“We really need to get that looked at,” Crush said, mentally pushing the anger away. “Back to the notebooks.”
“I figured they must have not trusted any data storage,” Colby said, flipping through the pages. “You should see this first.”
Crush looked at the page Colby was tapping. It looked like a list of spatial coordinates. His implant kicked on, mapping them out as his eyes slowly widened.
“Yup, that’s what I figured,” Colby nodded. “It’s bad, right?”
“Your implant—” Crush started to say.
“I don’t have an implant, just a mouthy git with an attitude problem,” Colby said drily.
“Oh? Oh? It’s like that? Well, maybe I should talk a little more. Eh? Should I tell them what you thought about—”
Colby ripped the cables from the speaker. Almost immediately, they started to regrow. In a minute or two, they would connect again.
“So, how did you know they were important?” Crush asked, smirking at the display.
“They wrote it in secret notebooks, hidden in a secret room, and died trying to burn it.” Colby shrugged. “So, anything in there is important. The stuff the underlined three times seemed extra important.”
“You might be smart enough to be a Marshall after all,” Crush chuckled.
“That’s the bar? Seriously? Wow, that’s fucking scary.”
“That’s constant, is it?” Crush asked.
“I have my own commentary, yeah,” Colby shrugged. “You get used to it terrifyingly quickly if I’m honest.”
Crush talked with Colby for over an hour before he headed back to the bridge of the Fair Weather. His implant had a scan of every page of the notebooks and was working on connecting it all with the information they had gathered in their time working for the Falling Waters Clan.
Even with how advanced his internal computers were, they were nowhere near enough to sort through all this in the time they had.
In fact, there was only one place in the universe that could do what he wanted in any reasonable timeframe.
“Everyone out,” Crush said because this was a conversation he wanted to have in private.
“What?” Berenice narrowed her eyes.
“That was two words; which one are you having trouble with?” Crush asked with a lazy smile.
“It’s just not a very Crush thing to do,” Berenice insisted.
“Fine, stay if you want,” Crush shrugged. “But remember, I gave you a chance to go.”
Berenice blanched and hurried out of the room.
“Sec?” Crush called.
“Yes, Boss?” Sec replied, sticking his head back round the door.
“I need that report on the thing you made,” Crush said before he forgot. “The one you stuck Colby with.”
“That might take a minute,” Sec waivered. “Can’t we deal with—”
“The one that called me Lizard Lips,” Crush raised one eyebrow.
“You will have that report in less than one minute; patient, kind, and forgiving Boss!” Sec ducked away.
Crush chuckled to himself, pleased to see a bit of the old Sec coming back every hour since Colby returned.
The uplink fired up, and the ship's lights dimmed as it punched through the atmosphere, then Transit Space, and all the way back to the relay network in the Imperium.
“What’s wrong?” Nellie appeared as a full hologram in the center of the bridge. She scanned the room quickly, noting he was alone. “Shit, who’s dead?”
“No one,” Crush said quickly. “But we have a big problem. One I need to talk to you about alone.”
“Alone?” Nellie asked.
“Well, Queens only,” Crush shrugged.
“Let me get—”
A holographic Lucy appeared on the bridge.
“I’m here,” Lucy said. “What’s wrong?”
“That was quick,” Nellie smiled. “How did you—”
“For the last week or so, you started sharing your thoughts with me again,” Lucy said shyly. “I think—”
“That’s a big step!” Nellie smiled. “And it happened automatically. So that means—”
“That you are starting to really, deeply trust me again,” Lucy beamed.
“This is adorable, really,” Crush said with a heavy sigh. “Finishing each other’s sentences and everything. But I called for a reason.”
“Sorry!” They both replied at the same time.
“I’m sending you some data recovered by Colby,” Crush started.
“Colby?” Nellie asked. “The I.P.A. guy?”
“That is a whole other issue,” Crush rolled his shoulders to ease the tension. “First, look at the coordinates contained in the data burst I just sent,” Crush said and waited while both queens had the same reaction he had already been through. However, Nellie’s was admittedly much louder and more descriptive than he had been.
“How?” Nellie growled, her hologram conveying her agitation with worrying realism.
“We still don’t know,” Crush admitted. “But what we do know is bad. At this point, I need to note that we did manage to introduce a nanite ball into their attempted build of an Imperium Class ship. So, there is that.”
“What else?” Lucy asked.
“We have detailed scans of seven systems within Confed space—details of several defensive emplacements, scans of many of their cruisers and capital ships, and a nearly complete map of their supply chain.” Crush was proud of that. His people had done great work.
“This is a lesser of two evils conversation at this point,” Nellie said, her hologram’s eyes moving as she scanned the information he had sent.
“If Cyrus manages to pull off even half this stuff, millions will die.”
“Billions,” Lucy corrected.
“But if we want to prevent this…”
“We would have to do something nearly as bad.” Lucy nodded. “The fallout could lead to almost as many deaths unless we are extremely lucky.”
“That is why I wanted to talk to you,” Crush said hurriedly. Both the Queens were given to resorting to absolutes, but he wanted to go another way with this. Now that he thought of it, that was probably one of the things that made them such a matched pair. Lucy was literally binary, and she followed that in her thinking. Things were ones, or they were zeros—no in-between. Nellie had a tendency to ACT in ones and zeros. She seemed incapable of half-measures. If she decided something needed to be done, it would be done with all haste and overwhelming force.
It was a great way to scare the shit out of your enemies, but it would only leave them with two choices, and none of them were good.
Crush believed in absolutes. He believed that there was right and wrong. More than that, he believed in RIGHT and WRONG. Things were one or the other, but your response should never be that straightforward.
“I have another way of approaching this, but it will be bloody, dirty, and in no way noble,” Crush said, leaning forward with a lazy smile stretching across his face. “If we go with my idea, I think we can drastically reduce the number of deaths, but… we won’t be the good guys in this. Doing the right thing and the good thing sometimes just don’t meet.”
He watched Nellie and Lucy exchange a look that he was sure contained more information than he could possibly understand.
“We’re listening.”