Viridian Wolf Page 4

  The habitation dome – with a huge, glowing holographic sign above it proclaiming it to be The Happiest Place in the Cosmos – swelled and swelled and swelled...and the ship slowed and slowed and slowed.

  “We’re...gonna...make it!” Sarah cried out. “We’re stopping! See!”

  The ship traveled the last few kilometers and punched through the rear of the dome.

  The dome was designed to withstand both the regular X-ray and Gamma ray flares that emitted from Wolf-359 on an hourly basis, and everything up to and including a nuclear bomb. But it was not made to withstand nearly thirty thousand tons of starship punching into it with a narrow edge of gravitic shield providing the knife’s blade. The dome cracked like an egg, and air began to explode out of the dome. The shelters, all designed for this eventuality, began to move along their underground tracks towards the shuttle port. Almost before Sarah was done shaking her head out and rubbing her temples to try and get the ringing to stop, the shuttles were climbing towards the passenger liner that would whisk the thousands of guests home to Earth.

  Disney would, of course, not be providing a refund.

  And in the bar, sitting at his stool, looking at his shattered glass and at the bubbling, boiling Jack Sparrow that had spilled on the ground and now sublimated away in the vacuum, Steve frowned as his nanotech blood switched from stand by to emergency oxidation. He was realizing something.

  His nanotech blood was designed to keep his brain alive if a tourist hacked into his throat or vitals with a bat’leth, until he could be dragged back to the first aid tent, given some medical nano, then patched up and sent back into the field with a minor wound merit on his account. If he got ten merits in a row, he got a fifty I-Cred bonus. Steve shook his head, trying instead to focus on the numbers he had heard during orientation. Your nanotech blood, the instructor had said. Means you can hold your breath for ten whole minutes!

  Steve stood and looked down at Larry – whose head had been neatly bisected by one of the massive spray of debris that had turned the Black Pearl into an abattoir. Steve knew that, once he was out of the eerie calm of the moment, he could collapse into a bubbling, screaming pile of abject terror. But for the moment, he simply felt detached. And heard a very quiet voice, whispering in the back of his mind: One mis-is-sip-ee. Two mis-is-sip-ee.

  He had no idea what a Mississippi was. But he knew he had six hundred of them to…

  Go where?

  He stepped out of the bar and surveyed the corporate town. There were a few other bodies – most of them in Starfleet uniforms – clustered around one of the emergency shelters. The shelter had already dropped into the ground and been whisked away. He was alone. No one was watching him. And there was a massive prow of a frigging spaceship sticking through the dome, just a few hundred feet away from him. A bunch of buildings nearer to the spaceship’s crash site had been utterly flattened, and their exploding frames had been what had struck the Black Pearl .

  Steve picked his way forward, his lips pursed tight, his lung-caps working admirably. His skin prickled, but there was barely any blood to prickle and bust. The vacuum wasn’t exactly cold, and his eyes had been dry and irritated for the past year. He could handle it. He came to the edge of the ship and his heart leaped as he saw the nameplate – or at least the beginning of the nameplate: E-

  Was it…

  The Enterprise ?

  Steve didn’t know, but he knew that he had to get in before his nanotech blood ran out of stored oxygen. And so, he carefully clambered over the rubble, then walked sideways to get out of the dome and onto the surface of DisneyPlanet. The expanse around the dome was vast and gray – blasted by the constant spray of X-rays and Gamma rays that exploded from the small disk of red that was the solar systems primary. Steve started to hustle now, his feet crunching on the silty, grayish sand that was the most common part of the planet’s surface. He came to an airlock on the side of the ship and saw that it was a good five feet above the scraped away chunks of armor. He used his good hand to drag himself up, then pressed the thumb access button.

  The ship paused.

  And Steve realized his mistake.

  This wasn’t a Disney ship – he didn’t see any of the corporate colors. He was a Disney citizen. The airlock didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t open for him. His eyes bugged and panic threatened to consume him – and then the airlock door hissed open. Steve stepped inside, his lips tightening, his lungs beginning to tingle and burn with awareness of the lack of air. He was nearly panicking when the airlock door shut...and then the room hissed and filled with air. Wonderful, precious, 0.5 I-Cred per hour air! He opened his mouth and dragged in a desperate lungful as the inner door opened.

  Steve screamed at the monster that looked at him.

  The monster screamed right back.

  Steve and Sarah screamed for about five minutes.

  Chapter Three: Sarah Gets Rushed

  The screaming didn’t stop all at once. Rather, slowly, Steve and Sarah’s screams faded and then finally trailed off as the one realized that the other was not about to attack them. Sarah dropped her arms, regarding the hideous, gray skinned cyborg-zombie that stood across from her in the airlock, whose gleaming red laser pointer eye glinted as he dropped his black clad arms. The buzz-saw that tipped the right arm whirred in the silence of the airlock.

  “You’re not a cyber-zombie?” Sarah asked. “You’re...Steve.”

  “No,” Steve said. “Wait, how did you know that?”

  “Your nametag says ‘Hi my name is Steve’,” Sarah said, pointing at the thing that she really should have noticed before the buzz saw and the pasty gray skin and the glowing cybernetic eye: The bright pink and blue Hawaiian T-shirt that stretched across his armor plated chest. There was a name tag with his unsmiling, cybernetic face on the front.

  “Oh, right. Heh.” Steve coughed.

  “How did you get in here and why do you have a buzzsaw for an arm?”

  “Well, I could ask you why you’re in a spaceship. And...naked.” Steve paused, his eyes dropping from her face to her chest, then back to her face. Then back down to her breasts. “I mean, really, really naked.”

  Sarah crossed her arms over her chest. “And green?” she asked, trying to sound snarky and clever and not just embarrassed. It maybe halfway worked. Her ears perked slightly – half hearing Steve’s response. Instead, she was focusing on the clitter clatter of man ripping claws on the deck plate. She held up her hand to Steve, cutting him off: “Uh, uh, don’t panic, they’re friendly, I swear.”

  “They-” Steve stopped talking and started screaming again as Bitey and Stabby thrust their heads into the airlock, protectively flanking their mistress with snarls and hisses and dripping ichor from their mouths. Their bladed forearms thrust into the sides of the airlock doors, pushing them wider as they snapped and growled at Steve, who screamed even louder and turned, hammering his fist and his useless looking buzz-saw against the airlock.

  “It’s okay! They’re my friends!” Sarah shouted over the screaming, snarling, snapping sounds.

  “They’re murder dogs !” Steve wailed.

  Sarah focused and sent an order to both of her bladelings. It took a bit of effort to connect with them, then send them both scampering towards the bridge – she normally was able to use the communication network provided on Trappist-1a by the massive array of communication trees that the Claw had grown on that thriving biosphere. Here, she only had her own brain, and her own abilities. It was still enough to set Bitey and Stabby scampering off. Once they were gone, Steve stopped screaming and started merely hyperventilating. By then, Tasha and Aiden had arrived – Aiden was wearing a tool harness and Tasha was still holding her plasma welder in her hands.

  “It’s okay, they’re friends. And he’s a...a friend,” Sarah said, helping Steve to step out into the corridor.

  “Euagh!” Aiden yelped.

  “Oh my god, he’s a Borg !” Tasha whispered.

  “Sounds Swedish,” Aiden whi
spered back.

  “They’re from Star Trek,” Tasha said, scowling at Aiden. “You know, the TV show? With the spaceships? And that guy from My Pony Dreamtimes?”

  Aiden shrugged his shoulders. “Listen, I was saving up for HRT on the budget of a technician third class, I didn’t have enough money to buy shows from enemy corporations. They murder you in the cross-national fees, you know.” Then his brow furrowed. “Wait, how did you see Star Trek, if it’s a-” He looked at Steve, checking the nametag’s logos. “Disney show?”

  “Well, I...” Tasha blushed, furiously. “I...okay, I’ve never seen Star Trek. I’ve just had it described to me by that expat in Engineering, you know, who also liked MPD? And he told me all about the Borg. Freaky cyber zombies. You know. Like that guy.”

  “Is that a costume?” Sarah asked, gingerly poking at the metal housing of the buzz-saw arm.

  Steve shook his head. “No,” he said, his voice going grim. “My contract involved giving up my bodily autonomy for ten years.”

  “Did you not read the small print?!” Sarah exclaimed.

  “No!” Steve’s voice was filled with long held, long festering bitterness. The kind of bitterness that only comes with someone who had done something really monumentally stupid and has been asked ‘wait, you did that?’ by literally every single person who has ever learned that he had done it, and has had to examine his own decisions again, under a fresh light, for every single day of his entire life. Sarah winced, her hands sliding into her armpits as she covered her chest again.

  “Hey, it’s okay,” she said, quietly. “I got tentacle fucked by an alien. It turned me into this.”

  “Wild,” Steve said into the silence.

  “Wait, how did you get into the ship?” Aiden asked, pointing at Steve. “You’re a Disney citizen. This is StarCon property, as we have all be reminded so fucking forcefully.” He kicked at the wall angrily, then stepped away, scowling at his own foot. Steve was beginning to look at Aiden out of his right eye – and Sarah saw that he was beginning to realize that Aiden was not just a normal guy. He was beginning, in fact, to see that Aiden was also a sexualized, alien-human hybrid like hers. Steve opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, raised his finger to point at Aiden, looking at Sarah, then back at Aiden, then back at Sarah again. Before he could muster up the question, Aiden finished glaring at his foot and said: “The airlock should have left him outside.”

  “I let him in,” a cheerful, female voice spoke from the ceiling.

  “Who is that?” Steve asked.

  “Oh, that’s Hailee!” Sarah said, grinning. “Thanks, Hailee!”

  “No, it is I who must thank you,” Hailee said, her voice growing even more chipper. “If you had not removed my hobble, I would have had to leave Steven to die horribly in the vacuum of DisneyPlanet’s non-existent atmosphere, as only StarCon citizens or people in the company of StarCon citizens are allowed to set foot on the Excalibur . But instead of having his one remaining eyeball explode as the internal pressures of his boiling blood ruptured freezing ocular jelly into a billion pieces, I got to save the pathetically short, infinitesimal moment that is a human life!”

  Silence.

  “Yippie!” Hailee sang. “Oh, also, a NovaDyne fast attack cruiser is coming in out of the plane of the ecliptic and looks primed to drop a Commander on our heads in the next fifteen minutes.”

  ***

  “Kellen Grant,” Tex said, pronouncing the name with the same dismissive attitude that Sarah was pretty sure he’d be aiming at her just a few days ago. His arms were crossed over his chest as he leaned back in her chair on the bridge, while the forward holographic projectors showed an image of a smiling man with a shock of brilliant white hair, midnight black skin, and a large visor over his eyes. He was dressed in what was basically a banana of white fabric that clung to his crotch, two huge gloves, and huge boots, making him look more like a cartoon mascot than a human being. He was, in the holo, leaning against the leg of his Commander armor, which looked to be the same size as Tex’s, but more angular, black, and skinny.

  “Is he good?” Sarah asked.

  “I mean, if you’re fine with being beaten by a shoe salesman,” Tex said. Sarah coughed and kicked the back of her chair. “Right, sorry...uh, Kellen Grant is a rusher, born and bread. He doesn’t deviate, he doesn’t flex, he rushes. His primary skill is in targeting resources. Metal mines, radioactive extractors, he’ll smash them up with his fast attack units while his squads of smaller units harry your frontlines. Basically, he’s like trying to fight five kittens in a sack.”

  “Who’d want to fight five kittens in a sack?” Tasha asked. “That sounds awful.” Her brow furrowed. “I mean, those poor kittens...”

  “Ten minutes until battle is joined,” Hailee said, her voice singing the words out. “I detect no functioning Commander suits in this vehicle. Though, we do have enough spare parts for fifty six percent of a Commander suit, if you do not mind lacking a B-gun and life support.”

  “Wait, do we have a maker?” Sarah asked.

  “Yes!” Hailee said. “A class I combat ready nanolathe without DRM or restriction. It can build anything from a Tokamak to a solar power plant to a fission plant to a petrochemical power plan to non-power plant related things that I’m sure it’s programmed for.”

  Sarah nodded, then clapped her hands together. “Tex! I want you, Tasha, Aiden and Synth to work on getting the Maker prepped for me to use.” She grinned. “Why not use both kinds of tech?”

  “I think we can strip out the armoring, make a mounting,” Tasha said, rubbing her chin.

  “Wait, you want to strap a fucking Commander scale maker to your arm ?” Tex asked. “That thing weighs five hundred pounds, even if you strip out the armoring and the power conduits and the...”

  Sarah walked over to the wall as he continued to renumerate, then punched it as hard as she could. The wall squealed and bent inwards, spraying sparks and hissing smoke as she punctured the conduits underneath. A few screws went flying through the air and Steve, who had been standing in the corner of the room like a nervous girl at a frat boy’s party, leaped down and threw his misshapen arms over his head. Sarah smiled at Tex, who shrugged.

  “Okay, we’ll get to work. What are you gonna do?”

  “Do what I do best,” Sarah said, cracking her knuckles. “Command.”

  “Sarah, you’re a biologist who has only fought in one battle, against a guy who had every reason to underestimate you, on your home turf, with four days to build up,” Tex said, his voice brutal.

  “Fine!” Sarah cracked her knuckles again. Louder. “I’m going to do what I do best: Panic and fake it until I make it or until I fucking die.”

  ***

  Stepping out onto the surface of Wolf-359A – also known as DisneyPlanet – was a revelation for Sarah. She hadn’t felt a single iota of fear, in the deep recesses of her brain. No instinctive, panicky voice screamed out the words hey, wait, you need air to breathe and pressure to keep your eyeballs from exploding and all the other things that a career of working in deep space had trained in her. Instead, she had stepped into the airlock, engaged the airlock, and then hopped outside to land on the silty, crumbly gravel of the planetary surface. She stood there under the glittering stars, her arms stretching behind her back, her spine popping subliminally in her ears as she flexed herself, and smiled as she looked out at the stars.

  Droney bumped against her thigh, hovering out of the airlock after her and doing a quick caper around her. Sarah watched Droney float in his circles, thought the words ‘huh, his agrav crystals work just fine in a vacuum’ and then paused.

  In a vacuum.

  In a vacuum.

  In a vacuum.

  In a flipping fuckmothering vacuum!

  Sarah clutched at her throat, her lips opening, her hair-spines flexing and thrusting wildly into the air as they grabbed for air that wasn’t there. She stumbled to her knees, and Droney bumped up against her side, rubbing a broad wing
against her shoulder – and Sarah realized that she wasn’t suffocating. There was no roaring in her ears. There was no hissing bubble as the fluid she secreted from her every pore every second of the day sublimated off her body. Indeed, all she felt was a kind of calm happiness at the peace and quiet surrounding her.

  Sarah rubbed her throat. “Wow,” she said, aloud. “I the- what the fuck !?”

  She sprang to her feet, her eyes widening. “Droney, did you hear that? Bob if you heard that!”

  Droney chittered at her, bobbing in the conspicuous lack of the air, brushing his belly along the ground. Sarah put her hands over her head and screamed – a short, sharp harsh scream. “What the fucking flippery fucking fuckeroo ?”

  Droney brushed against her again. Trying to be comfortable. A voice cracked in her head – the radio transmission from Tex coming through clear as day: “What’s wrong out there Sarah?”

  “I can talk! In a vacuum! With my mouth parts!” Sarah said. “And I can-” She grabbed a chunk of rock off the ground, then threw it. It sailed in a smooth parabola, before coming to a rest a good distance away, puffing into the ground with an audible rain of particulates. Sarah screamed again. “I can hear stuff! In a fucking vacuum!”

  “Well, you were adapted to fight in any environment the Claw would have sent you into,” Tex said, his voice matter of fact. “That’d have to include some means of communicating and utilizing your primary communication methods – and audio is a hugely important facet for human sensory awareness. Also, uh, you have...six minutes before Kellen Grant drops on the planet.”

  “Right,” Sarah said. “Droney! Get to work.” She clapped her hands twice. Droney started away, burbling happily to himself. Sarah bit her lip. “Wait, Droney, come back!”

  Droney hovered back to her and she petted his head gently. “You’re a good drone. The best construction drone ever, you’re so cute, yes you are!” She cooed.

  “Sarah!” Tex snapped.