Specter, p.15
Specter, page 15
“I think you, hnn, just want me to breed you,” Da’kota said.
But he was happy to start thrusting again.
***
Da’kota was honestly impressed with how much the suit – once repaired – failed to conceal that Ada had just been fucked and fucked hard. Not only was her hair so bright red now that it was nearly glowing, but her nipples could cut adamant against the skintight fabric. She finished cramming the frills that had restored themselves under her seat when the swirling energies of Hsarb the Dragon’s faster than light field dropped and they arrived at the outskirts of Entzar.
All of Da’kota’s pleasure evaporated.
They had come too late.
Entzar was a rapidly expanding cloud of debris – glowing red and flickering. Surrounding it was a nimbus of desperately fleeing civilian ships, their mana engines flaring, while escape rafts tried to swing clear despite their limited engines. The farcaster hung in the background, still blazing with magical light, as it dropped the second wave of the drow flotilla into local space, to meet the dwarf battlefleet that was arrayed before it.
And between them?
Apocalypse.
Armageddon.
Hell itself.
Wings of chevron-shaped dwarf starfighters swept past debris and dropped entire, rippling waves of short ranged cruise missiles, which streaked out and sought weak points in drow battle-lines. Drow frigates, designed like erratically cut gemstones, tumbled through space to bring their short ranged mana-beams into range, the purple lights lancing out to swat down missiles before they could breach the mana shields and detonate against the skins of larger ships. Knife sharp drow interceptors detached from the hulls of their bulbous, spiderlike carriers, and started to hound the dwarf fighter-bombers. In a few seconds, the space around the goblin settlement was filling with even more debris as scorching rays, magic missiles, fireballs and acid arrows zipped back and froth with abandon.
Two massive drow battlecruisers brought their long, narrow frames to bear, lining up their immense passwall cannons with the broad, hammer-head shape of a dwarf capital ship. The magical retort of several hundred passwall spells flickering on and off in synchronicity screeched through the shuttle, even from their distance. The shots struck the adamant plating of the dwarf capital ship, causing individual plates to crumple around the impact sites, while immense holes were torn from the other side of the ship, the projectiles having fragmented and tumbled, like bullets fire into a human body.
At the same time, the dwarf capital ship released her own broadside, slewing hard to bring huge, tube shaped cannons to bear. Lightning bolts the size of skyscrapers leaped from those barrels, buzzing and crackling as they arced up and down through space, before meeting with an eye searing flare of white light against a drow cruiser’s main shields, overloading them, then leaving the ship a blazing ruin – tumbling, its weapon mounts melted to slag by the wave of planet-cracking energies.
“We’re too late!” Ada said.
“We are the hell not,” Da’kota said, his voice a grim growl. “Ada, if your admiral saw you, in the flesh, he’d call off the fight?”
“W-Well, if we don’t mention some things, yes!”
“Good,” Da’kota said. “Hsarb, hold on!”
“Whee!” the dragon said as the engines kicked on and the shuttle screamed towards the battle.
Da’kota’s fingers flew across the controls as he watched the debris whip past his cockpit. “C’mon, c’mon,” he whispered – but the cipher he sent managed to cut through the haze of mana-jamming that was filling space. A moment later, a tense but professional sounding female voice came through the speakers.
“This is the DIS Darkstar Lustlash, unidentified ship, how did you get this cipher code?”
“This is Specter Da’kota Spiderblood,” Da’kota said, then hissed as he saw a pair of dwarf fighters both peel away from a drow frigate that they had been harrying. They were heading his way – and their scanner beams swept over his ship. He was fairly sure they could detect his drow cybernetics and the emmie a lot easier than they could pick up Ada’s biosignatures. “Patch me into your admiral immediately.”
The communication technician hesitated. He could feel it.
“Hold please,” she said.
Great. Misandery was funny, now it is going to get me fucking killed, Da’kota said as he started to juke his jerry rigged shuttle left and right as the dwarf fighters began to shoot green bolts of acid at him – the acid arrows hissing past the armored hull. He had no mana shields, he had no mana shields, he-
“Admiral Z’anathan Spiderblood,” a gruff, female voice came on the line. “So, you’re the male specter, huh?”
“I have the dwarf princess on my ship, we can end this now. Order your ships to withdraw, do not engage dwarf attack ships!” Da’kota said.
There was a short pause.
“Even if we win this battle, we can’t win the war, Admiral!” Da’kota said, his voice firm.
“Hells,” the admiral hissed.
The drow fleet’s reaction was immediate, precise, and remarkably well organized. Fighters skimmed back to their ships, while frigates pulled away from the battleships they had been harrying. Mana pulses streaked into space, shooting down missiles – but the dwarfs took this as a chance to form their fleet into a new formation as well: the huge hammerhead ships bunched together, their engines flaring brightly. They gathered up speed – clearly planning to close the range, drive the drow ships back against the farcaster.
From there, they could dismantle them in a bloody knife fight.
Da’kota scowled. “I wish someone could get these off my fucking tail!” he said, dodging another few acid-arrows.
“Got it, brooooo-”[1][2]
Hsarb’s cheerful voice dopplered away and Da’kota risked a glance back – just in time to see the dragon smash, bodily, into a dwarf fighter.
Being made of mere metal and hardened composites, it was the dwarf ship that exploded.
Da’kota shook his head.
“I’m going to have to fuck him, aren’t I?” Ada asked, sounding only half annoyed by the concept.
“I will fall on that sword if need be!”
The dwarf ships were looming before them in the cockpit as anti-fighter weapons peppered space around them. The left wing tore off in a scream of metal and the whole ship rocked as Da’kota clenched his teeth, angling the hull up, aiming for a narrow slit on the biggest hammerhead ship’s forward hull.
His shuttle smashed through the bridge of Admiral Yanni Grimstern with an explosion of sparks and adamant crystal.
CHAPTER TEN
The ringing silence after the impact was filled with only the shifting of smoke, and the faint coughing of someone who had picked the wrong time to breathe in. Da’kota waved some of the smoke away from his face as he unstrapped himself, groaned, and fell out of the cockpit and onto the hard stone tile of the dwarven battleship. The smoke coiled around him like snakes, and blew away, revealing that dwarfs built tough. The bridge was a multi-layered castle in miniature, with battlements and revetments that went all the way back to the airlock leading from the command and control center to the rest of the ship. There were crenelations built between the navigation controls, the fire pattern computers, and the central command throne – and the dwarfs were nowhere to be seen.
“Hello?” Da’kota asked.
Every dwarf on the bridge stood from behind their battlements and several dozen glowing red targeting dots appeared across Da’kota’s body as he stood there, hands raised.
“I come in-”
“Open fire!”
Thirty or so fully automatic, armor piercing crossbows started to rattle and clack like a thousand mousetraps going off at once. Da’kota sprinted to the left, kicked off the floor, fired a quick thwip of webbing up to snap onto the ceiling, yanked himself up, and dropped onto the navigation console. Bolts studded out of the tiled floor behind him, but the dwarfs were already re-organizing and retargeting. Da’kota didn’t quite mind, since he was fairly sure that Ada was going to start speaking up - any second now!
The four dwarfs that were standing in the navigation section didn’t throw their crossbows aside. Instead, they flicked switches on them and their bows snapped flush with their hafts and huge, bearded axes burst from their bases, transforming their crossbows into melee weapons in an instant. They sprinted forward, their powered space armor hissing and clicking with spurts of magical steam. One buried an ax head between Da’kota’s legs as he leaped up to avoid the swipe at his belly. Sparks exploded from where the ax smashed into the console. Da’kota flipped over the dwarf, drawing his emmie and snapping it into a runeblade, the edge glowing with purple fire as he parried an ax-blow and then was tackled by each dwarf at once, their dense bodies and thick armor bearing him to the ground before he could do anything fancier. He grunted as his helmet cracked against the ground – and realized that the dwarfs were not planning to restrain him. Instead, two had his arms down and the last had pulled out what looked like an awl, the kind you use for stoneworking.
Yeah. Except it’s for my eye socket, Da’kota thought, hazily – his hand clenching on his emmie, keeping it latched.
“Wait!” he said.
“Die, spider-fucker!”
“I wouldn’t if I were you!” Da’kota said, then jerked his head to the side – and the dwarfs looked over.
His emmie had shifted to a man portable tactical thaumonuclear disk bomb launcher. The kind that, in training, he had been told needed to be fired on a low-G planet to ensure the disk could get beyond the safe blast radius. It was aimed at the sparking, hissing navigation console. The dwarfs looked from it to him.
“You wouldn’t,” the one with the awl whispered.
“You’re right,” Da’kota said “But it made you fucking listen, didn’t it?”
“Everyone please! Calm down!”
They all snapped their heads around at the voice calling out from his shuttle.
Emerging from the cockpit was Princess Adamant Gemglory, dressed as best as she could be considering she had taken off her enchanted spacesuit helmet. Without the goblin-crafted magic that clothed her, she had needed to use the fabrics inside the cockpit to fashion a rather simple toga, which she held clasped to her body with one arm as her other arm waved at the dwarf bridge. “Admiral! Admiral Grimstern!”
“Princess?” A female voice – husky, throaty, the kind of voice that denoted age and experience, or fleeting exposure to vacuum and shoddy healing – called out from the central battlements of the dwarf bridge. A moment later, a silver-gray head of hair peeked over the crenelations and Admiral Grimstern frowned down at Ada. “What in the nine hells are you doing here?”
“Trying to stop this stupid war!” Ada said. “I was not kidnapped by drow. In fact, it was a drow who saved me from being obliterated by a pulsar. Da’kota Spiderblood has been nothing but heroic and gentlemanly, even when... when we... uh, that is, he has been entirely... a hero.”
Great job, Ada, thank you, Da’kota thought dryly.
The dwarf with the awl lowered it slowly and the others let Da’kota stand. He twirled his emmie, shifting it from tac-nuke to pistol and holstered it.
“How the hell do you have enough magic to even fire a thaumo from a handheld?” the awl-bearing dwarf asked as the communications crews of the battleship got to work – sending out signals that, on the central holographic display that the admiral had been using to direct the battle, made weapon fire indicators wink out one by one, the guns going silent in the empty void of space.
“I don’t,” Da’kota said, flickering a grin at him. “It was a double layered bluff.”
The dwarf looked, through his faceplate, as if he wanted to get the awl out again.
***
“Drowish decadence,” was the first thing stated in the antechamber of the battleship IDS Requirements of Emergent Political Friction and it boded well for the rest of the diplomatic meeting. Da’kota, having exchanged his sparrowhawk powered scout armor for a set of neat and professional drow suits, pursed his lips and lifted one subtle hand to quell Admiral Spiderblood, who had started to glare daggers across the room at the dwarf officer who had muttered ever so slightly too loudly into his beard. In the dwarf’s defense, Admiral Grimstern harrumphed as she grabbed onto the joystick controller of the long, stick-legged walkers that dwarfs used when out and about among taller species. She turned to face her officer, and glowered at him – an effect enhanced by the hissing, thumping sound of her harness moving around under her.
Da’kota, who had seen the interior of the dwarf battlecruiser, bit back his immediate reaction. They had gemstones every five feet, gold on every other surface, and enough nearly naked statues of buff dwarf men and curvaceous and buff dwarf women to make a drow…
Well.
Feel perfectly at home.
“Admiral Spiderblood, this is Admiral Yanni Grimstern,” Da’kota said, gesturing between the two officers. “I believe that we can put all this trouble behind ourselves and focus on the real threat that both of our people are facing.”
Admiral Grimstern grunted, then worked her walker forward with a single twitch of her wrist, coming to stand face to face with the tall, slender Admiral Spiderblood. The two women exchanged the steely looks of women who were used to being obeyed.
“Your fleet fought well,” Admiral Spiderblood said.
“For dwarfs?” Admiral Grimstern shot back, growling.
“No,” Admiral Spiderblood said. “You simply fought well.”
Da’kota breathed an internal sigh of relief. He wasn’t sure if the admiral was trying to help because she wanted to avoid more bloodshed, because she was impressed by his deeds thus far, or simply because they were part of the same clan, under the same Matriarch. He decided he’d rather not know for now. Instead, he gestured to the table that he had carefully laid out in the center of the chamber. The drow and dwarf officers took their seats, with Princess Gemglory taking her place of honor next to her admiral and Da’kota sitting across from her. She flashed him a shy smile, while the walkers lowered down to bend their knees almost entirely in half – the dwarfs used them in lieu of chairs. Da’kota smiled thinly, then launched into the first part of his prepared speech.
He laid out the faked dragon kidnapping, the betrayal of Z’illa, and how the internal drow politics were going to get rather snarled before they figured it out. “But figure it out we will. The Empress does not take well to this kind of... adventurism in her underlings, no matter how well trusted.”
A wet, damp nose bumped against his ankle. Peeking down with a flick of his eyes, Da’kota saw that Hsarb had decided to arrive. He had quietly slipped into the room in a small, kittenish form, and was now nosing curiously at Da’kota’s ankle. He turned his head, saw Ada and Admiral Grimstern’s shapely legs, and practically buzzed with excitement. Da’kota kept talking while - with a left hand hidden under the table - he flashed a quick hand signal to the star knights who were standing guard at the wall.
“We are willing, of course, to take any steps required to prove our good will – perhaps your clan would be interested in sending diplo-” His foot caught on Hsarb and he shoved back, sending the dragon skidding arcing up into the air like a football. The warned star knight lifted one hand and caught the dragon in her metal gauntlet, before lowering her arm subtly. “-mats.”
“Hmm,” Admiral Grimstern said, unaware of how close she had gotten to a dragon humping. “We will, of course, demand proof that your word can be trusted.”
“Of course,” Da’kota said, while the drow bristled at the very idea that a drow might not be entirely trustworthy. “How might we prove ourselves?”
“Well, your culture and ours are quite different,” Admiral Grimstern said. “We know your debauched rites-”
“Ahem!” Ada said, loudly.
The tough, older dwarf woman coughed and tugged at her collar. “I mean, you peculiar elfin customs are very different to our own. So you are likely to balk at the requirements of the dwarf custom of Chiseled Stone and Forged Steel.” She lifted her chin, her eyes flashing with pride her people’s unique customs. Da’kota was mentally cursing the drow so called spymasters. They hadn’t mentioned the hair thing, they hadn’t mentioned this custom. Still, part of the training of being a silverhawk had involved…
Flexibility.
“I’ll be happy to partake,” Da’kota said. “If it will prove our goodwill.”
“Specter,[3][4][5] are you sure about this?” Admiral Spiderblood whispered, leaning in close – Da’kota tried to not let the fact she was using his first name rather than his rank rankle him. “Who knows what this perverse dwarf mockery might be.”
“I’ve had worse things happen to me than whatever the dwarfs can dream up, I assure you,” Da’kota said, dryly.
The dwarfs were nodding and stroking their beards – those that had beards at least – while Admiral Grimstern pushed her walker to stand to its full elevation, allowing her to step from the harness to stand on the table. Her hands went to the collar of her tough dwarven uniform and she yanked it open, sending a few medals jingling and clacking as they swayed in their rows and columns. Da’kota’s eyebrows shot towards his bangs as the muscular, scarred dwarf woman pulled and peeled her skintight jumpsuit down to her belly, her hips, her ankles. She kicked it free and stood before him – her head only a few inches above his even with the table as she cocked her hip.
“We shall have sex to cement this temporary alliance,” she said, her voice cocky, confident. “You and me.”
“Dwarfen perversion!” one of the drow officers snarled, springing to her feet. “You cement your diplomacy with sex?” She paused for just a tiny beat. “With men!?”
Da’kota held up his hand and stood. “Lt. Commander D’tata, this is not the time,” he said, his voice icy cold. Internally, he was trying to transmit every feeling he was having right now to his girlfriend, Ophelia. She had enough distance to laugh herself sick at the irony, he was sure.
