"Thank the Bright Lady that's done with." Lissa leaned back in her chair as the Dream of the Lady came out of the Gate. It had taken four hours to recharge the void suits and get back underway. Accelerating towards the FodderBot fleet and launching the final Cascade Annihilator had gone smoothly, but Yvian had spent most of the time staring at the sensors, looking over her metaphorical shoulder for another Crunch-damned saucer.
"Yeah," Yvian agreed. She listened to the pleasant hiss of atmosphere being pumped into the bridge. "I think we'll take the rest of the day off. Hang out in Enlightened space for a while. Have some beers, sleep in, maybe. We'll go back to searching for the Gate Forge after lunch tomorrow." She turned to Mims. "You should bake us a cake."
"Technically, the mission isn't finished until the Annihilators hit their targets," said Mims. He stretched. "But if those are my orders..."
"They are." Yvian took off her helmet and smiled at him.
"Aye Captain." Mims took off his own helmet. "Chocolate?"
"Chocolate," Lissa confirmed before Yvian could speak.
"Chocolate," Yvian agreed.
"Ok." Mims yawned. "I guess I'll be in the kitchen."
"I'd like a spar once your cake is finished," Scarrend requested. "The Way of the Starfang has come together well, but I think we can improve it further."
"Sorry, Scarrend," Lissa cut in. "I'm calling dibs. I need Mark for a... special project." She grinned.
The human shook his head. "It's hard when you're popular."
"Speaking of projects," Kilroy spoke. "Scarrend Scathach, this unit requires assistance."
"You?" All three of the Vrrl's eyebrows went up. "I've never seen you ask for help from anyone. What do you need?"
"This unit must remain on the bridge," the Peacekeeper explained. "This unit wishes to construct a contingency. This unit requires someone with engineering expertise to fetch materials and assist in construction."
"Interesting," said Scarrend. "What are we building?"
"A mechanical restart system." Kilroy's eyes flashed red. "This unit did not like being shut down. A failsafe is required."
"A dead man's switch?" The Vrrl rumbled thoughtfully. "Something that will notice a power failure and restart your internal reactor."
"Affirmative," said Kilroy. "It will need to be operational without an active power source of its own. This unit is adept at working with existing technology, but designing new devices it outside of this unit's parameters. Will you assist?"
"I will." The Vrrl looked pleased. "It will be a worthy challenge."
"You guys aren't really getting this whole day off idea, are you?" Yvian noted.
"This unit is a Peacekeeper unit," Kilroy reminded her. "Peacekeeper units do not require rest or recuperation."
"And I prefer to spend my time on self improvement," said Scarrend. "If I cannot train the Way Of The Starfang, improving my Mafdet is an acceptable second choice."
"Well it's your free time." Yvian shrugged. "You can do what you want with it."
As for Yvian, she spent the rest of the day in the bathtub. Bathtubs were not common in the void, as they took more space and more water than most ships and stations were willing to part with. Peacekeeper units had added one to her quarters, along with a number of other amenities Yvian had never before seen in person. She loved her tub. It had little underwater jets, and dispensers to add soothing oils and scents to the water. Yvian let hot water soothe and massage her body while she played reruns of her favorite holo-serial on her wrist console.
Yvian got out long enough for dinner and cake, then went back to her beloved bath tub. She brought beer with her. She watched Space Captain explore dangerous exotic worlds and face off against the villainous Lord Evil. A few beers in, she said to herself, "You know, I'm basically Space Captain, now."
The thought made her smile. Space Captain was her hero. Had been since she was a child. She loved his booming voice, his red and gold voidsuit, his bold demeanor. She loved that she'd never seen his face. Space Captain could have been anyone. Any species. Even a pixen like Yvian. He travelled the galaxy righting wrongs, saving the day, and romancing the beautiful Lady Blue.
Yvian finished her beer and sighed. She didn't have a Lady Blue, but she'd done everything else. She'd fought pirates and villains. She'd saved worlds. Crunch, she'd saved two whole civilizations last week. She wasn't as bold as Space Captain, and she'd never be as invincible, but she was closer than she'd ever imagined she could be. She was a hero.
It wasn't the sort of thing she'd never say out loud. Too embarrassing. But Yvian was... proud? Yes. She was proud of herself. She felt good about the person she'd become. She'd come a long way from the hapless wannabe trader she'd started out as. A lot of that was due to Mims and his training, but she'd worked really hard. She'd done things no pixen had ever done. Just like Space Captain.
Now if only she could find a Lady Blue...
Yvian sighed. Yuriko thought she was dead. The woman had been right to be afraid of loving Yvian. Real life wasn't like Space Captain. Yvian could die. Would die, sooner or later. No wonder the good doctor had kept her distance. Yvian had hoped... Well. It was too late to worry about that now. Doctor Miner might have wanted Yvian, but she hadn't chosen her. Hadn't loved her and never would.
It wouldn't be so bad if Yvian had anyone else to hope for. Yvian would always be a pariah among her own people. Motherless. Outcast. The Peacekeepers had done everything they could to fix it, but the stain of being disowned by her mother would follow her for the rest of her days. No pixen would ever want her. If Yvian wanted to be loved, she would have to look elsewhere. Find more humans like Yuriko. Yvian didn't know if that was a viable option, either. She'd led a war against them, after all.
Yuriko was the only woman Yvian had dared to hope for. Now that the hope was gone, she didn't know what to do. It was gribshit. Yvian had spent most of her life alone. She had more people who cared about her on this ship than she'd had in the entirety of the rest of her life. She had love and trust and closeness beyond her fondest childhood dreams. So why was she so Crunch-damned lonely? Why was she crying again?
Yvian let the tears flow. It was ok. No one would see. At least, no one who'd talk. Kilroy was aware of everything that happened on the Dream of the Lady. It had taken some doing to convince the machine not to remind them of that fact. Privacy was a precious thing on a voidship, illusionary or not. Yvian held herself and cried and wondered how she could feel so lonely when she knew she was not alone.
The answer made her choke out a laugh. It was because Yvian was loved now. She knew what love could be. Knew how it felt. How warm and sweet it was. And that was just friendship. It paled in comparison to the loving romantic relationship between the human and her sister. Yvian had watched Mims and Lissa grow closer and closer, laughing and touching and reveling in each other's company. Yvian wanted a love like that. Wanted it badly. Because she finally believe it might be possible. Even for someone like her.
Yvian wiped her eyes. It was ok, she decided. It wasn't wrong to want more. It wasn't wrong to mourn the things she didn't have. It wasn't wrong. It was just... poorly timed. Yvian was millions of light years away from any woman that spoke her language. She was on a mission to save her species, and maybe the universe. A dangerous mission in a nightmare section of the galaxy. Yvian took a breath and pushed the loneliness back as far as it would go. It was ok to feel it, but she couldn't afford to dwell. It was a problem she couldn't fix. At least, not any time soon. Survival must come first.
Yvian settled back into the tub. She unpaused Space Captain. One more episode, and one more beer. Then it would be time for sleep. She closed her eyes as the theme music played. She let the bold notes wash through her, stirring feelings of adventure and possibility. The notes cut off. Yvian opened her eyes.
It was dark.
"No," Yvian breathed. Her wrist console was dead. The lights were out. Yvian bolted upright. The motion sloshed water and carried her out of the tub. Gravity was gone. Crunch. Yvian groped in the dark, finding the edge of her bathtub. "No." She scrambled, pulling herself towards the deck. Where was her voidarmor? She needed her voidarmor.
White light. It flashed in through the bulkhead, a blinding column of brightness. Yvian swore as her eyes squeezed shut. She forced them open, forced herself to look. There. Her armor was in a careless pile on the deck, just half a meter from her hands. Yvian reached, but she was too late.
Yvian fell. Upwards and to the side. Her fingers missed the armor by millimeters as she was pulled through the bulkhead. Into the void. Yvian gasped. The void closed around her. She forced the air out of her body. Holding her breath would be fatal. The vacuum of space would cause her lungs to expand and explode if she left air in them.
Yvian braced herself, expecting the terrible prickling of infinite cold. It didn't come. The column of light must be protecting her somehow. She risked a breath, and found air. Her wet skin picked up a slight chill, but it wasn't any different than what she'd feel climbing out of her bathtub in a warm room. The panic of imminent painful death receded. The dread of upcoming painful death took its place. She looked up.
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
It was a Saucer. Of course it was. Yvian was falling towards it, wrapped in the strange beam of light. She saw three more beams, each abducting another member of her crew. Below her was the Dream of the Lady. Unmoving and without power. To the side was the back of a Great Gate. The back of the Gate was a massive expanse of alien metal. The sight of it jolted a thought into Yvian's adrenaline addled brain.
The Saucer was bigger than the Gate was.
The silvery disk floated above Yvian. Above the Gate. Not all of it was visible. A quarter of it was obscured by the JumpGate. The rest loomed over Yvian like an angry god. Or a world. The Saucer was wider than most planets. It didn't look like the previous Saucers. The strange alien alloy was still there, but there were also sections of dark material. Pulsing, almost organic. Bright dots of light blinked in odd patterns across the Saucer's surface. Yvian guessed each individual light was larger than the Dream of the Lady.
A steady string of terrified curses reached Yvian's ears. The curses were her own.
Yvian fell faster and faster. The Saucer was far away. Much further than Yvian had guessed. By the time Yvian was halfway there, the fear had faded a little. In its place, anger blossomed. Those motherless sons. They thought they could fuck with Yvian? With her crew? They'd come three times, and three times Yvian had killed them all. Well. Technically Kilroy had killed them all, but it amounted to the same thing. What would it take to make those motherless sons leave her alone?
Yvian didn't know how long she fell. Two hours? Three? Without her wrist console, she had no way to tell. Eventually, she felt herself slow down. The beam that held her reversed its gravity. By this point, Yvian was livid. She bared her teeth in fury at an expanse of silvery material that stretched as far as she could see. She slowed down for a long time, but she was still moving quickly when she crashed into the bottom of the disk. She raised her arms defensively, but she passed through the metal without feeling it.
Yvian fell up through the ship. She saw an enormous hanger, with Saucers and Disks stretching as far as she could see. She fell through corridors and rooms. Finally, she fell into a large chamber. Yvian came to a stop, floating in the air a meter above a metal floor. Mims and Lissa floated next to her in beams of their own. Scarrend was a little further away. He had Kilroy's motionless form clutched in two of his arms. A third arm was holding the Peacekeeper unit's hat.
The chamber was spherical, with a large flat space in the center. The columns of light were coming from glowing orbs in the chamber's ceiling. More orbs were scattered around the chamber. The chamber was dim. The only light came from the various orbs and the columns restraining Yvian and her crew. It smelled terrible. A pungent, alien musk burned Yvian's nostrils. As bad as the smell was, the things the smell came from were worse.
There were a lot of them. The chamber was filled with hissing creatures. They were roughly pixenoid, but small. Chest height on Yvian. They had grey skin and bulbous heads and large black eyes filled with hate. Their hisses and screeches revealed small mouths filled with needle sharp teeth. They were naked, but the males were indistinguishable from the females in shape and build. Yvian made the mistake of looking lower and seeing the difference. Most of the males were disconcertingly excited.
Mims swore. Yvian was about to echo the sentiment when the feelings hit. Outrage. Contempt. Hate. A faint undertone of fear lacing a cold, vicious rage. A wave of eager anticipation and cruel glee. The creatures. Yvian could feel them.
"Does anyone else feel that?" Lissa asked.
"They're psionic," Scarrend rumbled.
"They're assholes," Mims corrected.
"Dead assholes," Yvian agreed. She didn't know how yet, but they were. Yvian had killed Xill and Vrrl and the Enlightened. She'd be damned if she'd let a bunch of little grey sadists bring her down. Especially not with her crew nearby.
The grey things picked up on their defiance. The hisses grew louder. The feelings intensified. Four lights rained down on the section of floor in front of the prisoners. Tables rose from the deck under the lights. There were restraints attached to the tables. An idea filtered through the feelings of the greys. A word laced with laughing, terrible purpose. Playthings.
"Anyone got grenades?" Yvian asked. Their blasters would be dead, but anything that didn't rely on an active powersource should still work. Mims, Lissa, and Scarrend were in their voidarmor. Yvian was the only one who was naked and unarmed. Damn it.
"I got it," said Mims. He was glaring around the chamber. The tables were most of the way up. Yvian followed the human's gaze. He was picking out the aliens that were touching spheres. The spheres must be control nodes of some kind. The human moved in a blur, launching five small objects towards the controllers. A knife followed. The knife impaled the hand of the closest Grey touching a node. The creature screamed. Hundreds more screamed with it.
Mims tossed another object into the air. The five grenades he'd previously thrown exploded into balls of yellow plasma. The greys screamed louder. The columns of light did not flicker. Yvian was still stuck. The sixth grenade exploded with a fwump and a burst of blue light. Ion. The lights on the ceiling cut out. The column holding Yvian disappeared. She fell to the deck.
A roar crashed through the chamber. It froze Yvian's blood. Scarrend. The Vrrl leapt into the closest group of greys. He didn't bother with the Way of the Starfang. Scarrend swatted the creatures with Kilroy's rigid form, flinging crushed bodies with every swipe.
Yvian climbed to her feet, fists up and ready. A shout caught her attention. "Yvian!" She looked up in time to see Mims tossing her a knife. She fumbled the catch. The handle of the knife bounced off her fingers. Oh, right. She was still a little drunk.
Yvian scooped up the knife just in time to meet a tide of screaming hissing limbs. The creatures gave off a storm of hate and offended fury. They could not abide that playthings had hurt them. Yvian got the impression their outrage at the idea was not new. That the grenades were just the latest in a string of offenses the Greys wished to avenge.
The Grey Ones were stronger than they looked. Not quite as strong as Yvian, but close. They slapped and punched and scratched. Yvian got to work with the knife. She slashed and elbowed and kicked and threw, using everything she'd ever learned to keep from being overwhelmed. Needle teeth tore chunks out of her flesh. The fury of the things escalated. Yvian turned frantic. She couldn't keep this up for long.
A roar echoed through the chamber. Everyone froze. Scarrend's voice nearly shattered Yvian's ear drums. The sound had a paralytic effect, freezing everyone in place. Yvian recovered a little faster than the Greys. She killed two and hacked off the wrist of another. The knife Mims had given her was drained or power, just like the rest of their equipment. It wouldn't pierce shields, and its edge didn't hum with the molecular rotation it used to slice through tungsten. Still, it was sharp. Sharp enough to sever bone with little effort. A pile of bodies and dark green blood was growing around Yvian.
A new edge tinged the fury of the Greys. Fear. The Greys didn't know how to fight. They were used to hurting others. Loved it, in fact. They were not used to being hurt themselves. Not used to pain. Not used to dying, or seeing their comrades die. Yvian kept fighting. In a few more moments, Mims and Lissa were beside her. The other two were in much better shape than Yvian. Bare hands and teeth were useless against voidarmor. Mims held out a hand. Lissa handed him her spare knife.
With the three of them together, Yvian calmed down a little. That didn't make the fight any less desperate. Mims and Lissa guarded Yvian's flanks, butchering the aliens as efficiently as they could. It wasn't enough. The Greys swarmed them, tried to bring them down with numbers. It worked. Lissa went down. Yvian yelled, tried to get to her, but she was already fighting as hard as she could to keep the things from taking her down, too. Mims swept past her, his knife a blur. Aliens fell apart in his wake. Others shied away, fearful of the fury of the human. It gave Yvian a moment of space. She didn't waste it.
Yvian slashed, severing the spine of a Grey on top of Lissa. She worked quickly, trusting her sister's voidarmor to keep her safe from Yvian's blade. A few more strokes, and the creatures clinging to Lissa were dead. Yvian hauled her sister to her feet. Together they turned back to the horde to find it had stopped. The greys hissed, but kept their distance. Mims stood before them, drenched in ichor. Dead and dying greys were scattered around the human. He stood motionless, feet spread, knife and fist raised, a specter of death.
Rage and fear warred within the Greys. A third roar from Scarrend tilted the balance. Anger fled in the face of terror as the Vrrl crashed back into the crowd. He was a wrecking ball of fists and claws and feet, ripping and tearing and crushing the aliens faster than they could run from him. Fighting him would not be an option. The Greys were too slow, too weak, and too unarmed to hurt a genetically engineered killing machine like Scarrend. The Vrrl had always considered themselves Apex predators. Yvian could see why.
Yvian spared a glance around the rest of the chamber. Greys were crowded around the remains of five of the control nodes. They were trying to repair them, but it would be a while. Three more of the things had pulled the knife out of the sixth node. They had their hands on it, but the sphere appeared to be dead. Frustration and fear pressed into Yvian's soul.
White light erupted, encasing Scarrend. Frustration changed to glee. More beams encased Yvian and Lissa. Mims rolled out of the way of his, but the beam tracked and caught him. They were coming out of the ceiling on the other end of the chamber. Mims hucked another ion grenade, but it was too far. The grenade detonated, but failed to disable the source of the beams.
Scarrend roared again. The Greys froze, then shied back. Then they laughed. A vicious sound. Amusement and anticipation rolled through the chamber. The Greys would make Yvian suffer. They would savor her screams.
Movement caught the corner of Yvian's eye. A tall figure stood. A sharp suit. Glowing red eyes. Kilroy. A cord was sticking out of the Peacekeeper unit's side. The other end of the cord was jammed into a cable sticking out of a hole that had been torn in a wall. Kilroy surveyed the chamber as he slowly placed his fedora on top of his head. "Greetings, meatbags."
A column of light descended, but Kilroy wasn't there anymore. A line of pulped Grey Ones was the only indicator of where he had gone. The other end of the chamber. There was a fwump and a flash of blue light. The beam holding Yvian flickered out.
Yvian landed on her feet, savoring the feeling of shock emanating from the Grey Ones. She raised her knife and let out a primal scream. Lissa screamed with her. Mims simply moved forward. The Greys backed up. Mims moved faster. Yvian shared a look with Lissa. They charged, too.
They needn't have bothered. The Greys they were facing exploded into chunks and green mist. Peacekeeper unit Kilroy moved through them at a speed of over two hundred kilometers an hour. A few seconds later, there wasn't a single Grey left alive.
Kilroy appeared in front of Yvian. He was soaked in dark green blood. "This unit detects three billion, four hundred ninety three million, six hundred eighty six thousand, one hundred and twelve hostiles. This vessel's technology is not familiar to this unit, but this unit suspects there will be additional defenses. What are your orders, Captain Mother Yvian?"
Yvian looked at the others. Mims, Lissa, and Scarrend were unharmed. Yvian herself was hurting, but functional. She'd taken over a dozen nasty bites, and the one on her left arm made it hard to use her hand. She was losing enough blood to cause problems if she didn't get first aid soon. She was also bruised, scratched, and beat to Crunch.
Between the five of them, they had four knives, a stock of grenades, and a bunch of guns that wouldn't work. Their armors were unpowered, which meant a hard limit on air and no additional functions. Getting back to the Dream wouldn't be an option. At least, not yet. Even if they could repower their suits to make the trip, there was no way the Greys would let them go.
The chamber was clear of hostiles and defenses. More Greys would come, probably armed, but Yvian could spare a few minutes to regroup. "Keep an eye out for reinforcements," she ordered Kilroy. "Everyone else, take a look around. I want weapons and anything we can figure out about this ship on short notice. We'll reconvene in two minutes."
"Then what?" Lissa asked.
"Then we do what we do best," Yvian told her. "We fucking kill them all."