{Enki | Gait}
“Hey, Matt, you hungry?”
The ginger nearly laughed. They broke for lunch only an hour ago. It seemed the faster they hurdled toward Enki’s hull, the hungrier Puk grew. “Sure. I’ll take a snack. Hey, do you have your anti-inertia pack—”
“Yeah, yeah. Can’t eat without taking one. I swear we’ve sped up more than they told us,” Matt’s partner observed.
Astutely.
Indeed, Matt swore the horizon would bend to the sight of that less-distant ocean any minute now. He sat on a concrete pillar which once stood upright and supported a space scraper. In his supplies case, Matt counted three more squeeze tubes of nutrients. They stopped receiving solid food when the speed exceeded seventy thousand klicks per hour. At the rate Puk and Matt were eating, he’d run out of food in a few hours.
“Engineering team. This is Ginger. Come in. Over.”
Puk came over his earpiece then. “Hey, get me some, too. I need about a hundred more charges if they got ’em. I might be done after that.”
“Hey, Ginger. This is Engineering.” Lots of laughter and chatting carried on in the background. “Good to hear from you. How can we help? Over.”
Matt finished squeezing some food into his mouth. At the speed they went, some of it flung away in a weird anti-gravity experience. Wasteful. “We’re running out of food out here. And charges. Can you send some supplies? What’s going on up there? Have you heard from Lucy’s team? Over.”
A span of silence followed. Long enough for Puk to eventually ask, “What do you think is happening?”
“I don’t know. It sounded like they were celebrating—”
“Ginger, Lucy’s team is organizing some nifty drill thing. A Tantamount? Yeah, that’s what they called it. Pretty cool stuff. You should be proud. And of course we can send supplies, but we think it’s almost over. The Primary sent some food and music to our shrine—We’re having a party to celebrate. We’ll save some stuff for when the surface peeps finish. Won’t be long now. Over and Out.”
“Matt. The food.”
Puk’s voice held the appropriate weight. Matt felt it, too. It begged the question. How were he and Puk supposed to get off this rock? Matt said, “Lucy will get us. But you know what this means?”
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The Monarch 3 drone practically nodded on the mic. “Phase III.”
With a Tantamount in the mix, there was no telling how wild this ride might get. The last time Matt was on ground this shaky, Lucy came to his rescue.
Albuquerque, New Mexico CoN compound. The cold of winter. Once the alarm rang and Enforcer turned against Enforcer, things went sideways. Someone shot the water tower with Matt beneath it. The entire thing exploded, and he barely managed to dive out of the way of the worst. Instead, he was shirtless and barefoot in shorts—the Propagation Cycle uniform—on the hunt for anyone that came at him.
A middle-aged Promoter charged at him. Matt easily swung the scythe he stole from the barn and cut the dude in half. Next comer was a Collector with short-man syndrome. He could fight. Rather than blindly tackling Matt, he rolled and took out Matt’s feet. Fucking short people. The scythe was useless in hand-to-hand, and Matt found himself on his back in the freezing mud.
His opponent got in one good punch.
Two.
But a nacre made all the difference. Barely phased by the blows, Matt gripped the enemy’s throat and squeezed until his eyes bulged out. He fell dead on top of Matt, who lay there a second under him. “Good fight, buddy.”
Then a roar ripped through the night, and flames covered the barracks.
No fucking way.
Matt hurried to his feet and ducked behind some cover, searching. When he found what he’d suspected, he gaped for a good minute.
Napalm.
The Justice went and got herself a fire cannon. Now that was impressive.
Matt picked up his scythe and strafed his way from building to building—quickly burning around him—until he was beside her. Without a sound, he rushed into the open courtyard and swung at her. At the last second, she turned and—
Matt never came so close to meeting Eternity.
Thinking quickly, he slid down into the mud at her feet beneath the flames burning above him and hungry for flesh.
Justice Abigail, “But you can call me Abby,” stepped back and aimed the nuzzle at him. “How dare you violate the sanctity of our gods?! You and that whore!” Her finger squeezed the trigger—
Nothing happened.
She tried again, frustrated and panicked—
“Hey, Abby?”
The Justice froze at the sound of a voice Matt would never tire of hearing.
“This whore just killed you.”
Without knowing what she’d intended, Matt burst onto his feet and ran. Hard. He wasn’t sure how he knew Lucy had cut the line to the Napalm tank or even how he knew she planned to ignite it, but once lit, that fucker blew.
It knocked him into a pile of pallets meant for the participants in the Propagation orgy. There were worse and better places, but Matt didn’t care. Especially as Lucy picked her way across the ruined ground to him. He stretched his arms out to her. Not to help him up, but to help her down onto him.
Lucy straddled and kissed him all in one movement. And Matt loved it.
Because he knew she’d always come for him.
The scenery of that derelict compound traded places with the approaching ocean on Matt’s horizon. This mission might be their greatest—
“Was it Volcano?”
Puk gave a disparaged sigh over the mic. “Now, you’re not even trying.”
Matt stood from his break and went back to work while saying, “What? Isn’t that the space movie with Tommy Lee Jones?”
“Elden, this is getting embarrassing. Space Cowboys. Space Cowboys had T.L.J. in it. Fucking amateur.”