Biter was the quickest to react. She flipped from one boot to the next, closing the space between her and the counsellor, and struck the bird in the legs. He went down with a squawk, and with her momentum, they tangled together and slid across the metal decking of the airship.
Long Molly pushed the two remaining soldiers against the railing. They grabbed for their short stunners, but before they had them clear of their holsters, she lifted both men clear of the deck and pushed them backward, tumbling them over the railing. Their screams drifted away as they fell.
The princess ran towards the fallen counsellor in his tangle with Biter, but Molly turned, stepped into her path, and, with two arms, blocked a swing from the princess. With a third hand, she pulled a fletched bolt from her case and drove it at the princess.
Brik stepped forward into the path of the field marshall. The marshall kicked out at Brik, who crouched and braced his armoured shoulder. The marshall crashed into an invisible barrier and staggered backwards. Brik caught him with a rising uppercut. A shockwave cracked the air, and the marshall fell heavily onto his back.
By this time, the girl had stepped up to the old, scarred warrior with the eye patch and had her hand on her crystal staff. With her other hand, she held his arm. She blinked back the tears as he gave her the briefest of smiles.
“In my sash,” he whispered and touched his cloth belt. Two tech cards peeked out of the material, and they glimmered with intricate metal lines embedded in their plastic.
She blinked again. “You fool,” she said. A charge of energy pulsed down the staff. It knocked him off his feet and threw him back across the deck. She clutched the two pass cards as he fell away.
She turned to face the ambassador.
The ambassador was laughing. “You folks are simply marvellous! That was so funny when the one with all the arms tossed the soldiers over the railing. Did you hear them holler? Aaaaahhhh! This is so much fun. Such marvellous choreography, but I must be fair and remind you that it is all for naught. There is nowhere for any of you to go, and you are interrupting refreshment time. I really do insist you stop all this.”
She lifted the point of the staff at him. “Move, and I’ll kill you, just like I killed him.” She gestured behind her to the prone form of the old warrior.
“You know, I’ve been thinking, you really don’t act like a little girl. And this was all quite quick, very well planned, but I did see Ol’ Badger hand you those key cards; I had always wondered who the spy was amongst my staff.” He raised his hands up into the air and grinned. “But I’ll be good. See? Playing along. This really is how I am. Ask any of my friends, and they’ll tell you, you know, they’ll tell you I’m always trying to be far too accommodating.” He turned to take in Long Molly. “But please don’t throw me off the deck. The fall, I’m sure, will be most uncomfortable.”
She glanced at Long Molly. The princess had stepped away from the tall woman, and Molly had taken the opportunity to move towards her.
She held the staff up defensively towards the princess and let a trace of energy run down its length. The princess halted. She held up an accusing finger.
“If you have hurt Old Badger, I will have your skin hung in my tent.”
“The old man is only unconscious,” she said, letting the staff crackle and course with energy. “Take the rail gun out of his holster,” she said over her shoulder to Molly. Molly went to the unconscious Badger. She turned the staff towards the field marshall to where he was climbing to his feet. “You. Don’t move.” A flicker of energy drifted towards him like a spider web in a lazy wind. The marshall held his position.
“The ambassador is right,” he said. “This can only last for a few moments until you are overrun. Stop this now, and I will not have your people too severely punished.”
With a tearing of cloth, Biter ripped open the heavy cloak of the counsellor, leaving him nothing but a naked, black-feathered bird. She spun behind him to avoid the flash of his sharp hands as he drove and scratched his knife-edged metal hands on her forearms, but the blue plasteel remained unmarked.
“Stop struggling or I’ll break your scrawny neck,” she grunted to him, holding him from behind.
“I don’t think you will. You harm him, and I’ll kill half your camp,” the marshall said as he finished climbing to his feet.
“But she’s crazy,” Long Molly said. “She won’t listen. She’s a crazy animal. Remember?”
“Ya. Definitely the meanest of us all.” She let more electricity trace through the air off the staff, closer to the field marshall, and it licked across his shoulder.
The counsellor’s eyes were shifting in those weird goggles, looking for a way out. Biter held the bird against her chest.
“Stop struggling!” Biter growled at him. He continued to slash and cut at her with his hands, but they only scoured her blue droid forearms.
Long Molly had the rail gun out of the old man’s holster and levelled it at the field marshall.
“Very well done! Stalemate!” The ambassador exclaimed and clapped his hands. “You have overpowered my entire team. I didn’t think a girl child and three of your people could do that. Now, if you don’t stop this, I’m afraid the marshall will get his anger up, and he’ll take it out on your people. The whipping. He always starts with that. And I do always find the screaming quite unsettling.”
“He won’t harm anyone if he’s dead,” Long Molly said. The mag gun began to hum and vibrate in her hands pointed at Field Marshall Daktor.
“Yes. That gun on a full charge like that will definitely put a hole in him! Even right through all that glorious armour of his! This is going to be absolutely spectacular. Brace up, Field Marshall!”
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“I’m going to crush you!” the princess said from beyond the dancing web of electricity.
“No, Daughter.” The ambassador had his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t waste your time. They have no place to go. Once we have them submitted, we’ll let the field marshall question the girl on how she’s using the staff. Wouldn’t you like to know that? I would like to know how she’s producing all that fine energy from it. What a wonderful morning we are having!”
“Everyone is ready. Do it,” the girl said. Long Molly took a step closer to the giant man, weapon braced and aimed at his chest.
The field marshall turned his head slightly with a wince. “My men will act on my behalf once I am gone. There will be no end to their vengeance.” His hand came up reflexively.
Long Molly fired the gun, and the field marshall groaned, but she had fired above them, straight up. The blast thumped through the gauze curtains and the superstructure. The deck lurched.
“You missed,” the princess said. The deck canted further, and everyone staggered.
With twin jet blasts from her boots, Biter jet jumped into the air. With her, she took the arms and the metal ring necklace they were attached to off the bird. She disappeared over the railing in a jet of air.
“Let’s go!” the girl yelled. She threw her staff to Molly and started to climb beside the woman. Once the two of them were clear of the deck and well up into the superstructure, Brik crouched at the base of their climb, turned, and activated his shielding.
Both the field marshall and the princess rushed at them, but the marshall halted the princess with a hand to her chest. “There is no way through that shield.”
“They are getting away,” the princess replied.
“And again, I must insist on asking, away to where, exactly, my wonderful daughter?” the ambassador said in his voice full of mirth. “Stop this foolishness,” he called up to them. “I’m sure the counsellor will be all right. Once we find that nasty cat woman, we’ll have his arms put back on. I’ll talk to him and persuade him not to have your heads removed. We’ll just have you give us that wonderful crystal staff in trade.”
The counsellor was scurrying from one edge of the railing to the other, having been reduced to a frightened wild bird wearing a pair of goggles.
From below, they could hear the ship platform being raised. Soldiers would be arriving at any moment. She climbed alongside Molly to the very top of the listing airship until they reached the halo of metal that held the escape pods.
She took her staff from Molly, who pointed the mag gun back down at the marshall and the princess. She let arcs of energy trace down towards the lower deck as Brik began his climb.
“You hear the platform rising. How much time do you think you have?” the ambassador continued. “Ten seconds till the soldiers arrive. Come down from there this instant.”
“You. Tall one. That weapon is slow,” the field marshall said as Brik climbed towards them.
“Go ahead, try it,” Molly replied. The woman and the girl had both their weapons trained on them.
“Go! Go!” she said to Long Molly and handed her one of the keycards from her sash. “Try to open that one.”
Slowly, they each backed toward a pod. She took one, and Molly, with Brik, cleared the top railing on the far side. When they next glanced down, the princess was gone.
“Where did she go?” she yelled to Molly.
“I don’t know!”
“It doesn’t matter!” she said. “Brik, watch for the princess. I think she’s climbing towards us. Molly, I’m going in this one. You two take that one!”
She extended the card to the touchpad. The pod came to life. Lines of faint blue light traced along the surface of the pod in fine geometric shapes. She thrust her staff between the pod and halo to strike at the tethering cables. The wrist-thick cables pulsed with charges of electrical energy from the staff, and they melted and broke away.
The decking lurched as her pod came free. The doors to the pod swung open like the wings of a beetle to reveal a plush round interior inset with an illuminated control panel.
A crash of metal resonated through her boots. The metal gauntlets of the princess gripped onto the support below and pinned one of her feet. Brik and Molly had made it to the other pod, and their pod door was open. Molly was firing the rail gun at the thick cables securing the blue capsule, and the pod on that side broke free, causing the airship to drop violently.
“Go!” she yelled. The tethering tower collapsed in a squall of bending metal around them. The airship fell away from them as she grabbed onto a door. The princess had her by the ankle and another hand she had on the sill of the opening.
The pod lurched and canted, twisting the position of the desert floor in her vision. It was difficult to tell which way was up anymore. She glanced towards the others to check their progress.
She saw as Brik dove into the far pod with Molly, and the doors on that pod closed.
The princess piled into her, and they tumbled into the depths of the capsule. The hatches slammed shut, sealing out the sunlight. The capsule tumbled them like kittens in a sack. The princess was somewhere in the darkness with her, struggling and grunting to get herself upright and fight against the spin of the pod. They crashed into each other once as they tumbled in the darkness. The padding she clambered across felt alien, strangely cool and smooth. She realized the princess had become still. The pod had stopped tumbling. She stilled herself and tried to control her breathing. As long as it remained dark in here, she thought.
Yellow light pulsed from a rectangle in the wall and cast the interior with a foggy glow. She could see the princess crouched on the opposite side of the capsule, glaring back at her like a predator.
And then an electronic voice, “Outside atmosphere detected. Recalculating Em-S-L. Descent override. Two lifeforms detected. Warning: oxygen not charged before deployment. Calculating time until asphyxiation. Initiating life preservation protocols…” The glow changed from yellow to red. Their individual faces, staring through the dimness at each other, bathed in red. “Asphyxiation unacceptable. Initiating capsule decent and cargo sleep sequence.” Suffocating smoke boiled in on them.
Darius was holding hands with Nova and Brock. Badrik was sitting across the circle from him. They all sat cross-legged on the stone floor of the diner. The café tables and chairs were all pushed back around them to provide the space that they needed.
“Did everyone see that?” Badrik asked.
They had. They all had. Darius somehow was aware that they saw what he had just seen as some type of memory, some type of movie, even as Nova and Brock let go of his hands.
The single candle that Badrik had lit flickered and shimmered its light in the darkness of the diner.
Shutters were closed on the tall glass windows of the Diner—thin slivers of sunlight filtered in through gaps in the metal.
“Is it the past or the future?” Brock asked.
“Neither, or both. As Darius and I explained, these are only memories. Through hypnotization, the crystal shares the pertinent memories with us. The artificial intelligence decides what the key memories are.”
“Are there more? I want to know if everything becomes ok,” Nova asked. “The girl that is not a girl. She has loved the old warrior long ago, and he is spy… the cat girl with the jet bots…, she is cool. I don’t like the big giant man.”
“I’m sorry, but Darius can only show you the memory that was selected. I will keep trying to find more consecutive ones if time permits, but I think we are shown what is necessary,” Badrik replied.
“Bing! Bing!”
“What is this noise?” Nova asked.
“The gas pumps. Someone must have just driven in for fuel,” Darius said.
“They have found us,” Badrik added.
“I thought the game was on time out?” Brock asked.
“Yes. Dominos not yet in game?”
“In some type of astral plane?
“Yes. We are. Many other types of beings also have the ability to travel here,” Badrik replied. “So let’s go see who has found us.”