Black Hole Werewolves Page 11

  And then GaMeSpa came within visual range. GaMeSpa Prime was an ice giant, like Neptune or Uranus in the Terran star system.

  The frozen water, ammonia, and methane gave the planet a cobalt blue color. Around it were five distinct rings and dozens of moons. GaMeSpa had been cobbled together out of starships in the middle of the fourth ring. Access tubes and corridors connected all the vessels. When the spaceport became more critical for trade between the species and a waystation for explorers and travelers, actual structures were built, more and more grand and beautiful. The structures rose from the flat plane of starships, including a glass walkway down the center of the city.

  The GaMeSpa Promenade had become famous for its views of the moons, the rings, and the ammonia blizzards on the ice planet itself. Cathedrals, hotels, and government buildings, all made from gold and glass, surrounded the Promenade, rising up like beautiful mountains of gilded platinum from the dark welded steel of the interconnected starships.

  In the distance, a fleet of Clicker frigates hung suspended in space, guarded by dozens of medium-sized Phasmida warships. All were long, golden, complicated-looking structures, not at all symmetrical. Different sized guns and engines gave each its own distinct look, which was odd, since the insect species did most things exactly the same. But from his experiences in the Bug Wars, he knew each commanding officer was free to customize their ships as they saw fit. Hence, each was different.

  It was the largest contingent of gold-colored Clicker ships Blaze had seen since the Bug War. What was going on? Near it were dozens of blue-tinted Meelah explorers, gently sloped, elegant spacecraft, rounded and welcoming. Whereas the Clickers’ warships had guns stuffed in every open space, the Meelah vessels were mostly windows and observation decks, covered in garden towers growing Meelah leaves.

  Those were a lot of ships to be hanging around GaMeSpa. But then Blaze’s eyes were drawn back to the Promenade. He remembered walking there, perusing the shops. It was a high-end marketplace, devoid of thieves, where priceless objects were brought from all over the galaxy. Human oddities from the five Human Quadrants, artifacts from the Greater Clicker Empire, and lab equipment and brainy science experiments from Meelah Territory. GaMeSpa was far from Human settlements, so the normal trash didn’t venture there. Clickers were too efficient for criminal activity, too much of a hive mind for that, and the Meelah were too interested in learning about the universe to form a mafia. So you had a peaceful colony of wayfarers, explorers, tourists, and merchants.

  The hotels around the Promenade ranged from simple Clicker sleeping tubes to Meelah boarding houses to the luxury of Human suites, three thousand square feet of windowed pretty where you could watch the beauty of the methane hurricanes sweep across the ice planet. The friction could whip up quite a light show.

  Each species had an embassy on GaMeSpa, so politicians and lobbyists also wandered the hallways, talking about how to make the universe better. Ambassador Randi pretty much lived there.

  While the IPC did have a presence on GaMeSpa, they had trouble penetrating the markets in the Meelah territory. When all you eat is leaves and worms, when all you want is to experience life at its simplest and yet most technical, then it’s easy to say no to the variety of products the IPC sold.

  It wasn’t unlike Chinese and European relations back in the classic age of commerce on Earth in the nineteenth century. China didn’t need a thing from the stinky barbarians. That was when the British found that they could make bank selling opium to the Chinese. It didn’t end well for the Chinese. The Opium Wars had been a thing.

  To put it simply, GaMeSpa was a pretty place, peaceful, and cool as hell.

  Blaze had to grin, despite the tension in his gut. “It’s beautiful. Meelah know how to build.”

  Ling shook his head. “It wasn’t just the Meelah. We are explorers, not architects. GaMeSpa is a vision of a future where all three of the sentient species work together. Clickers, Humans, and Meelah built the Promenade and the surrounding buildings. Perhaps what you are seeing is the beauty of such cooperation.”

  Elle was strangely quiet, gazing down at the spaceport built into the ring of debris.

  “What are you thinking, Elle?” Blaze asked.

  “I’m going to die down there,” she whispered. “I can feel it. I’ve dreamed it. And you won’t be able to save me, Blaze. But it’s for the best.”

  “Dreams.” The gunny sighed. “I had a dream. Have you guys ever heard of a Panashoat?”

  Lizzie screamed through comms. The ship bounced and shuddered on the spacetime wave it surfed down. “The hhhunger. The hhhunger of the All-Pig. Panashoat! Panashoat! Panashoat!”

  Blaze, Elle, and Ling were tossed to the floor.

  The Lizzie Borden careened toward the space station, not slowing down.

  “Bill!” Blaze shouted into comms. “You’ve got to dissipate our wave and get Lizzie under control.”

  Bill clicked. Fernando translated. “Bill hates you. Lizzie loves him. But she is not cooperating. We’ve alerted the authorities we are having engine trouble. I don’t think we can trust the ship. The merged Xerxes/Lizzie entity has become unstable.”

  The gunny pulled himself into a chair and triggered the gold command control holograms. Bill clicked, and even as he clacked into comms, Fernando translated. “Bill will not let you touch Lizzie, Gunny. He will handle this. You need to stop.”

  Blaze laughed and sweat dripped from his face. “This is my ship. And this is my mission. And we aren’t gonna stop until we get to Arlo. And if you want to stop me, come to the bridge.” He punched off comms and initiated the AI sequence he’d managed to hide in the heart of Lizzie’s subroutines.

  Lizzie sighed. “Thank you, Gunny. I hhhate to say this, but Bill and Fernando are compromised. Hhhowever, you can trust me completely.”

  “Switching to manual modes,” Blaze said. “Lizzy, at this point, I don’t trust anyone.”

  “But you can trust me. I hhhave information. For example, Bill and Fernando hhhave been accessing my database on hhhow to build a demon generator.”

  That wasn’t good. Demon generators collected Onyx energy and turned creatures around it into demons. Blaze had fought a greater demonic cybernaught on Cheyenne Prime that had an army of demon ants. Once they’d destroyed the demon generator, Elle was able to snare the demon cybernaught.

  Ling and Elle had climbed into chairs and strapped themselves in. GaMeSpa was coming up quickly, and if Blaze didn’t apply some major evasive maneuvers, they would crash directly through the windows of the Promenade.

  “What about me?” Elle asked. “You trust me, right?”

  “Onyx addict and evil goddess,” Blaze muttered. “Not really.”

  The spacetime wave they were riding had dissipated, but they were still coming in too hot. They sped over the fifth ring, over a small moon, but continued to surf toward the space station.

  “Do you trust me?” Ling asked.

  “You tried to kill me on Hutchinson Prime. You would’ve eaten all of the Meelah worms in your room. And, buddy, it’s like with serial killers…it’s always the quiet ones.”

  From behind another moon, two familiar IPC attack ships, the Adamant and the Relentless, opened fire. Golden theta-particle beams buzzed in front of the Lizzie Borden, but they were just warning fire. The Cavalier-class attack ships had top and bottom fins as well as long extended wings, which, when not in battle, could be folded into the main body. The fins were out and loaded with plasma turrets and theta-particle cannons. Those gunners could come loose from the main ship in a fight. The wings had a mixture of nuclear torpedoes and slapper missiles, which could disable a ship by disrupting electrical current.

  Blaze knew that if they had fired shots across the Lizzie’s bow, they would use those slapper missiles next.

  “Ling, guns!” the gunny ordered.

  The red combat controls appeared in front of Ling, while Elle activated the blue science controls.

  The bridge doors opene
d, but Elle was quick with the manual controls to lock them. From on the other side came angry clicking sounds. Bill and Fernando were wanting to make an unwanted house call.

  “You are right not to let them in,” Lizzie said in his ear. “But me, I can hhhelp you. Give me control of the ship.”

  Blaze didn’t respond. He was too busy avoiding the platinum panes and crystalline glass of GaMeSpa’s Promenade. A thousand people inside, Human, Clicker, and Meelah, all looked up in wonder as he buzzed them. But he’d pulled out of the dive.

  A voice came on comms. It was the annoying, ever familiar, ever despised bureaucrat Blaze loathed. “Captain Ramirez, this is Security Director Alvin Denning aboard the Marcus Aurelius. As a representative of the Interstellar Presidential Corporation, I am placing you under arrest for damages to New Oberlin Docking and Supply Harbor, failure to comply to IPC regulations, trespassing in restricted space, and being a general pain in the ass. Stop your engines, drop your shields, and come with us. We will take aggressive actions unless you surrender immediately.”

  The Marcus Aurelius, the Paladin-class combat vessel from the Hutchinson Prime battle, shot out from the dense atmosphere of the ice planet below. The tip of its triangular shape had been melted away by the ectoplasm ocean. Methane and ammonia gases drifted off the command towers and gun stations dotting the surface of the massive starship. Around it also rose the last remaining Vespula, a perfectly round mothership full of wasp drones it could control. But there had to be less than a hundred of the wasps left. That Hutchinson Prime fight—a battle the IPC officially denied ever happened—had cost the IPC hundreds of ships.

  Trina had accessed the report, and it blamed the loss of ships and life on a weapons malfunction. Sure.

  Hatches opened in the Vespula’s surface, and black-and-yellow wasp drones took flight. Wings whirred on their backs. Their arms and legs were plasma guns and blue-fire engines, pushing them through space.

  More clicks from behind the bridge’s door. Sparks from a cutting torch hit the bridge floor. Bill was going to cut his way in.

  Two slapper missiles erupted from the Cavaliers, headed toward the Lizzie. Ling fired and missed one, but hit the other. Blaze ducked the Lizzie down and roared past the corridors and tunnels connecting the Promenade to the welded spacecraft city.

  The slapper hit an old Terran exploration vessel and knocked the energy out of it. The city shook from the impact.

  Sparks flew from the door behind Blaze.

  His to-do list had suddenly filled with unlikely tasks. Get away from Denning and his IPC attack ships. Stop the Clickers from breaking into the bridge. And find some way to get onto GaMeSpa when the authorities there were probably locking the place up tight. Oh, and find Arlo, somewhere, in that mess.

  “Trina, Cali! I need you to disarm the Clicker brothers and get them under control. You can use the training hydrogen shells. Crank up the wattage, and it should put them down without killing them. Do you read me?”

  Bill clicked through comms instead of either the vampire or the werewolf. This time, Fernando didn’t translate.

  Lizzie did. “Bill hhhates you, Blaze. And I doubt this encounter will improve your relationship any. Hhhe’s jamming comms and limiting your display.”

  The gunny checked, and yes, he couldn’t find Trina or Cali on the ship. He wasn’t sure if they’d heard him or not.

  Blaze darted through a small opening that took him into a series of narrow alleys between spacecraft of the city. Through the windows, he caught glimpses of green towers and Meelah faces watching him fly in wonder.

  Left, right, down, he buzzed his ship between the structures. The Cavaliers and the Paladin were far too big to give chase, so the wasps took up the task, spinning down, but not firing. The IPC knew that on the far edges of the Huaxia Quadrant, even its might and influence were limited.

  And there was both the Meelah fleet and the Clicker fleet to consider. The Clicker war machines could put a dent in the IPC armada if pressed.

  Breaking through comms came a new voice to add to the drama. “This is Ambassador Rajanigandha Randhawa of the Terran Union of Interstellar Systems. We request that the IPC ships call off their aggressive attack and that we meet on GaMeSpa to discuss the situation. Alvin, this is the wrong way to handle this. We need to talk.”

  Denning spat out laughter. “Randi, you don’t know who you are dealing with. Blaze Ramirez and his band of outlaws are wanted criminals and responsible for the death of hundreds if not thousands of valued IPC consumers. He doesn’t understand talk.”

  Blaze spun out from under the city. The wasps opened fire, but Ling was there to shoot the closest ones into debris. The Lizzie Borden was forced away from the city, under the ring of rock, dust, and ice crystals.

  “Attack ships are on an intercept course,” Elle said. But those Cavaliers would have to fly around the ring. They couldn’t go through it. It would be like high-diving into water through a thick layer of sand at terminal velocity.

  And still the sparks from Bill’s cutting torch rained down. The clicking had stopped, though. Bill was still cutting through the metal, but what was Fernando up to? Had he left?

  “I’m going to Onyx up and deal with the Clickers,” Elle said.

  Blaze glanced at her. Her face was shiny with sweat, but sallow and pale. That was fine, they were all stressed. But her dark eyes glittered with anticipation. She wanted to use, not to save them, but to get her fix.

  “No,” Blaze growled. “Trina and Cali can stop them.”

  He switched to comms. He didn’t trust Ambassador Rajanigandha Randhawa of the Terran Union of Interstellar Systems. Not at all. She’d sent them into the arms of the archduchess of torture, which had driven at least two of his crew insane. But he had no choice.

  “Randi,” he said, “can you give us dock, and can you give it to us quick? You’ll have to evacuate that area. It’s gonna be messy, but the IPC isn’t going to back off. Once we’re inside, we are officially in a neutral space.”

  “We don’t care about laws and such nonsense!” Denning shrieked. “We own the laws. You are already in neutral space and that doesn’t matter. Our consumers demand we deal with scum like Ramirez by any means necessary!”

  Randi’s voice seemed very serene after that outburst. “Coordinates coming to you, Blaze. We’ll have an armed escort waiting. If the IPC wants a fight, we’ll give it to them.”

  Blaze spun downward, avoiding a Cavalier that rushed toward him, and Ling destroyed three more wasps with the plasma guns. The Meelah then shot a fusion torpedo but manually deployed the payload directly in front of the IPC attack ship. The Relentless had to dodge the fusion energy, and it gave Blaze the edge he needed.

  He blasted through wasps flying out of the alleys he’d navigated. Randi’s coordinates took him to the main docking ring directly underneath the Promenade. It was a gutsy move, but the Adamant was coming in fast, and there was the Marcus Aurelius to consider. Those Paladins had massive tractor beams that would grab hold of the Lizzie Borden and stop them in their tracks.

  While normally Blaze would’ve docked his starship on an arm, Randi was opening a hangar for him. But he couldn’t wait for it to split wider. The IPC was on his ass, and his Clicker friends had turned on him. The time was now.

  Denning’s laughter broke into Blaze’s ear. “Grappling beam will be in range in ten, nine, eight…”

  The gunny didn’t bother to turn off comms. Let that pinche pendejo count. He was going to make it into the hangar no matter what.

  “Blaze, I can hhhandle my own body better than you can,” Lizzie hissed. “You will never make it. Please, trust me. I am not your enemy. And I need hhhelp with Bill. He hhhas gone insane, and our love is being tried like never before!”

  Denning continued to count down: “Seven, six, five…”

  “Nombre de Dios, Lizzie,” Blaze said. “I’m wiping you clean once I get you landed. Sorry, but I knew having a demon as a computer was a terrible idea.”
<
br />   Lizzie’s next words chilled Blaze to the bone. “Fernando, hhhe’s in the cellar. Hhhe’s going to open it and free all of the Onyx entities there.”

  “One thing at a time,” the gunny growled. He gave his blue-fire docking engines a little spice. Ling worked the left, right, and rear plasma cannons, and wasps had their gun arms sizzled off or their blue-fire legs destroyed.

  The hangar door was opening, but slowly, so pinche slowly. Blaze knew it wasn’t wide enough, but he also knew he didn’t have time to quibble about physics or probabilities.

  “Three, two, one!” Denning finished victoriously.

  The Lizzie Borden bashed through the crack in the docking bay, removing inches of steel off both her top and bottom as well as denting the doors themselves.

  Blaze fired the reverse thrusters, but it wasn’t going to be enough. He slammed into a Union shuttle sitting on struts, then into a Meelah lab tech vessel, and then finally through a dozen starcycles, owned by private citizens no doubt. He thought maybe he could buy some of the less destroyed ones.

  The Lizzie, sparking, spitting, and screaming metal on metal, finally slowed and bumped the hangar wall. Behind them was a smoking scar of destruction from the crash landing. The hangar bay doors closed.

  Blaze unbuckled himself, leapt from the chair, and went for the door to confront Bill. The doors slid open, a molten circle nearly completed in the middle. Bill wasn’t on the other side.

  The gunny checked his combat display. Trina and Cali were in the cargo bay, but their VHIs had dropped below fifty percent and their vital signs were sketchy. They’d taken damage.

  Neither Bill nor Fernando were on his bashed-up starship. They’d escaped. And Blaze had a feeling they had taken Nauzea with them.

  FIFTEEN_

  ╠═╦╬╧╪

  Blaze spun. “Ling, go check on Trina and Cali. They’re in the cargo bay. Elle, check cellar integrity. Tell me we’re good.”

  “We’re good.” Elle’s face was blue in the glow of the science controls. “Fernando got the third door open. Not sure what happened. My sealing sigils should’ve failed. But no Onyx energy leaked out. I can use manual sensors to look in the surrounding area, and I detect no Onyx. To scan the entire city, we’d need to bring Lizzie online.”