CHAPTER 15: IF IT AIN'T BROKE,BREAK IT FIRST
The cube warriors split into their formations as the Dreads launched to face them. Without any of the leaders, the task of carrying the flag fell to Dita, stationed in the powerful Dread Wind. Magno cursed the fact that her weapons specialist, vice captain and helmsman were all missing. She slammed her fist on the control button as the first shots rocked the ship. Dita skimmed the battlefield, hosing the cube stations with the blue beam while the Dreads gave her cover. Returning Dreads and the egg carrier soon joined the battle, helping out with the flanks.
On Mission, Rabat was still pointing his gun at Sarah, the ersatz leader of the Mission colony. BC and Bart slowly got up, though Bart needed a shoulder up from the vice captain.
"Sarah, that is so dirty…very unlike you, dear."
Sarah seethed with anger, still gripping her wrist. Of all the people!
"I suppose...we...should thank...you?" BC was still hurting from battle.
Then, someone in the crowd screamed, dragged down by an unseen force below the flooring. Everyone looked up and around, looking for the assailant as another spectator was suddenly dragged down.
"To the upper decks! Hurry!" Rabat yelled, waving towards a door. He picked up Bart and slung him over his shoulder, running for the door. BC ran towards the door as well, picking up her whip on the way. She was worried about Bart, who was losing blood quickly, having already lost consciousness shortly after the second person was dragged down. She held her own bruised gut as well, dragging herself towards the door. Utan was sighing in relief as the attackers were not able to penetrate the metal floors, though large bumps indicated that they were getting closer. The party continued to run towards what Rabat called the center of the colony.
Down below, the two teams were seeing the attackers face to face, shooting relentlessly at them. They resembled jelly-like beings, absorbing all the energy the teams shot at them. Barnett was the only one having any success, her solid bullets slicing through the jelly warriors who thankfully did not reconstruct. Ed threw his Mejale fork aside and fired his Berettas, getting the same result with a lot less noise. Jura flailed with her ring blasters until she hid behind the trigger-happy Barnett. Meia and Hibiki also holstered their energy weapons and sliced through the opposition. Gascgone whacked the jellies with her pipe, slugging like any pro batter would. Still, they were coming in droves despite the team's best efforts.
"Invader Slugs!" Ed yelled over the gunfire, "They're made out of energy! The Techno Guild's little present for the locals, I take it!"
"We have to get to more open space!!" Meia yelled back, spotting Barnett's team who were closing in on them. The teams stood back to back and slowly made their way to the upper decks. They ended up in the arena, where the three gladiators' corpses were being dragged down by the Jellies. It was rather gruesome, as the already bloodied gladiators were sucked dry, their skin peeling off before burning.
"Open area my ass!" Jura wailed, swinging wildly with the gladiators' hammer. "This is just as bad! We should go to the center or go look for our Dreads!"
" Center!" Gascgone yelled.
"Dreads!" Hibiki answered.
"Definitely Dreads!" Ed yelled. "I can figure out some way to get rid of these Jell-O gunk things!"
Everyone looked at Meia, who was slicing left and right with her blades.
"Center it is!" Barnett loaded another magazine into the M-600. "I think we can contact the ship from there! I've spotted some kind of blueprint!" she pointed to a dim schematic on the wall. Everyone was too busy to argue, simply rushing for the door. What a surprise to find everyone else huddled in there as well!
"What are you doing here?" BC and Meia asked each other.
They were all thrown aside by a giant impact as Dita misdirected her DW beam towards a colony support beam.
"What is he doing here?" Hibiki asked, spotting Rabat.
"We shoulda gone to the Dreads!" Ed cursed, loading his next clip, waiting for the assault on the closed doors. "Hey, what happened to Bart?"
"He…he was injured in the arena." BC looked him over.
"Shit luck."
"I just wish we knew how to beat those jelly things for good!" Hibiki gritted his teeth. He wanted to be out there with Dita, but the jellies were top priority.
Outside, the Nirvana was fighting a losing battle against the cubes , as their egg carrier had arrived. Minus Bart and the Dreads, they were dead meat unless some kind of help arrived. Dita was doing more worse by the minute, not having Ed to target the beams for her. Dread squadrons broke formation just to avoid her beams. It wasn't lack of skill, but rather focus. She imagined what Hibiki would say to her at that moment. 'Stupid'? 'Clumsy'? No. She imagined him saying her name instead, instantly scoring a hit on the egg carrier. She kept on thinking of him as more cubes came in. Magno stood as the ship began to move by itself, its shields totally up.
"What the…?! Report, somebody!"
Belvedere and Ezra shook their heads, wondering what the heck was going on. The helm station was glowing, but without Bart the ship should have stayed stationary. Parfait called, saying that the Pegasus was acting weird again. The glow was heavy, present in all the indicators on the ship.
We're moving in to save them! Magno thought .What a ship!
The ship fired its blue threads, cutting open a section of the egg carrier, bending to avoid friendlies and twisting to perform maximum damage to the enemy ship. The enemy ship exploded in a ball of fire, scattering the cubes .To everyone's surprise, the threads lashed back towards the Mission, imbedding themselves in the structure. The threads pulsed through the wiring and circuitry, bathing them in a strange turquoise glow. The entire colony lit up as the Nirvana 'assaulted' it with its entire weapons cache.
The center room, crowded with the spectators and the unwelcome visitors, felt the impact of the Nirvana's actions, hearing shrieks of pain from the previously silent Jellies. Sarah slunk in a corner as the screams became louder but got right up as a jelly squirmed through a crack in the wall. She screamed, as did many of the others. Then a blue thread caught up with the Slug and burned it away, a worm of light tearing into the energy fabric of the Invader Slugs. Everyone quickly opened the doors, seeing that the Invaders were all burned to a crisp. BC breathed a sigh of relief, coiling her whip.
"OK, get the injured to the Nirvana!" she ordered.
"I'm fine, vice-captain." Bart surprisingly got up, seemingly uninjured and not wounded. Aside from the tears in his uniform, he seemed completely unfazed, even cracking his knuckles and whirling his neck around once.
"What the hell…?" Hibiki and the others looked at him.
"I don't know, Hibiki." Bart shrugged. Nobody seemed to notice the flash of light in his eyes.
"We're OK now, I guess," Rabat sighed, grabbing a gun (emptied ,of course) from Utan' s hairy hands. "What?" he stepped back as everyone eyed him suspiciously.
"Alright, alright…I live here."
Magno stepped onto the colony floor of the central room, followed by Dita and some crew members. BC stepped forward to greet her, with Bart closely behind. Dita instantly ran towards her Mr. Alien, who blushed and tried to run away (yet again). Sarah slowly shuffled towards the pirate leader, Rabat prodding her forward with Utan' s help. Magno' s face curled up as soon as she saw the self-styled colony leader.
"Sarah ..? Or rather Sera Thomason?" she looked her straight in the eye.
"Magno Vidan…"
"You have a lot to answer for back on Mejale, young woman. I rather expected you to be in a place like this."
"Who is this, Boss?" Jura asked.
"You are all too young to remember, I suppose…ah, young Edward. Do you know anything about Sera?"
Ed shook his head. "Should I?"
"Oh yes, that was twenty years ago, not thirty. My apologies, Edward."
"I know!" Pyoro jumped up and down.
Everyone sat down and watched as the little robot projected several newspaper articles from Mejale.
17- YEAR OLD IS YOUNGEST PERSON IN SPACE
PIRATE ATTACK! MAGNO STRIKES AGAIN!
YOUNG STARLET KILLED IN PIRATE ATTACK- A WORLD MOURNS
NO TRACE OF YOUNG,BRAVE SERA
Pyoro shut his projection off. "I'm kinda old myself, if anyone recalls."
"I thought you were alive, hiding out. I lost my honorable reputation that way. Now you're here, Sera. I was there too. I saw you escape from the space station with my own eyes. Everyone made us out to be murderers. Even the Talark took that opportunity to make more lies about women. So why?"
"I…I didn't mean to shame you, Magno. But I…" she looked at Rabat, " I fell in love with someone…someone… un-female. I didn't know what to do, so I wanted to leave the station. But you attacked just as I left, so…"
"We were barely able to escape ourselves, really." Rabat joined in, "So we ended up here."
'Why the gladiator games then?" Bart hissed.
"One thing at a time, Bart," Magno waved for calm, "Why didn't you return to Mejale then?"
"I told you, I fell in love with a man…and I tried once, to see my Ouma mother. She shot me in the leg." Sera pulled her pant leg up to show a gaping hole, aided by prosthetics.
"You're not the only one, sister!" Jura jumped up, only to be elbowed by Barnett.
"What the hell are you saying?" she harshly whispered.
"So you came here and started ruling people like you were some sort of queen. And the rules seem to be kill or be killed?" Magno stared at Sera.
"It's all we can do to survive out here!" one of Sera's lieutenants burst in the conversation, "We're mostly refugees from worlds Earth has already conquered….you don't know how hard life is for us here!"
"I've been leading them to other worlds…so they don't come here!" Rabat pointed to the table.
"You still have no right to rob people of their belongings, pirate or not. Those cubes from the day earlier weren't following us- they found you. Who needs survival of the fittest when everyone can survive together?" said Ed.
Everyone from Mission gasped, with children holding their parents in fear of losing the only home they ever had. Gascgone saw the 13 year old that had subdued her earlier now crying in her father's embrace. She wanted to hug the child herself, seeing how vulnerable she was now. Dita was in the crowd trying to calm more children while Meia tried soothing a baby, snatching it from an ecstatic Jura.
"They didn't find us…they were on their way to Soul Point to investigate what happened to their pickup squadrons. It's all right here on their transmission codes," the lieutenant handed Magno a file. "Jammers make it difficult for anyone to find Mission, hence our refugee status."
Magno looked over the lieutenant and saw that he was wearing a Talark uniform.
"I see Talark has a representative too. You guys make the best jammers and mines around," Magno grinned.
"I left of my own accord. Or rather, escaped from prison. When you're falsely accused, bad things still happen to you in court." He smirked.
"I should say my goodbyes , then , "Magno stood up. "There's no use to staying here- we still need water."
"We have lots of water- it's ice, but we have plenty to spare." Sera offered, "All the time, ice asteroids come in from a nearby belt."
"Why thank you, Miss Thomason. We'll accept that offer. Do you…want to give me anything? I'm on my way to Mejale."
"Yes, Magno. I want you to give my mothers this," Sera pulled out a disk, "if they're still alive, that is."
"They're alive, I know so. I'm 108 myself, you know."
The Nirvana left the port, sailing off into the stars like a Noachian ark heading for the flood. As the final lights from the ship dimmed, Sera turned to Rabat and put her back to the window.
"How do you know those people? And why didn't they just shoot you?"
"Shoot me? I'm smarter than that, Sera."
Rabat was alone for once, with Utan relegated to listening from the outside.
"I've known you for 20 years, Rabat. This relationship we have...it's strange. Off and on, off and on. Why are you always here to mess things up? Shooting me like that. Makes me want to plug you right now."
"You would have made it boring. Besides, I want that ship to survive with this crew intact…you have no idea what they're up against. The meanest S.O.B s in the universe- Earth."
"Rabat, I want you to promise me and everyone else one thing. Break it and I'll see to it you and that monkey of yours end up selling bread on some god forsaken asteroid."
"What is that thing?"
"Don't lead the Harvesters anywhere else…just stay here with me.." she clung to the one eyed Rabat.
"I've still got to put food on our tables, Sera. Like it or not, I'm gonna have to ship out and get us some goodies from time to time."
"How about that monkey?"
"She'll shoot out my wallet if I gave her the ship!" Rabat laughed.
"That's it!" Sera snapped her fingers, kissing Rabat on the cheek.
"Er, that's it…?" a confused Rabat scratched his head.
"That ship of yours- it's from Earth, right? Let's call in the Smugglers Union! We can make this place the greasiest outlaw spoon in the galaxy!"
Rabat and Sera laughed heartily, tapping their wine glasses.
"We'll set up a boxing racket, too!" Rabat suggested. "And a betting parlor!"
Bart stood in his helm circle, eyeing the green Pegasus in front of him while displays flickered and blinked.
I can feel you, he thought. Teach me more about yourself. I have the time.
A new feeling came over him with that thought. Bart Garsuss smiled.