Death system, p.21
Death System, page 21
part #3 of Zombicide Invader Series
“Hey, Nero!” Krait called out. “We must’ve wrangled a new sat link because I’m hearing voices, and it sounds like she’s sitting next to me. I can almost smell her perfume.”
Nero came rushing into the main room. “What’re you talking about?”
“Neera. She wants to talk to you. She says she’s coming to save our asses.”
Nero snatched the headphones off him. He cupped the earpieces to his chest. “When?”
“Now,” Krait said. “Just listen.” He motioned for him to put on the headset.
Lemora exchanged glances with Shawna. “We need to be prepared. Don’t you agree?”
Shawna nodded, watching as Nero talked to his sister. His mouth was going a mile a minute. Despite his high maintenance status, they needed Nero to perform. His contribution was vital to the escape. They’d have to bring Bak-Irp in on their plan. Krait and Too-ahka were wildcards. They were six fugitives against the world if everyone ended up on board.
“I’m with you all the way,” Shawna said. For the first time she noticed the light on PK-L7 changing, getting dimmer. With the heavy cloud cover it was difficult to gauge the shift, if nighttime was still approaching or if this was the night – a midnight sun burning offstage – whether the light faded or not, one thing was certain. Things were getting darker on all sides.
Chapter Thirty-One
The Empress Smighty
The wormhole opened like a sphincter in space. Neera sat in the command chair on the bridge of her ship thinking of the crude comments she could make, smiling to herself as she concluded that silence was the most intimidating posture for her to assume – she didn’t need to talk trash to impress the boys, because every maggot on this ship was subservient to her. She terrified them, and that was thrilling. Small and mighty, the baron had called her when she was a girl. He’d given her a pet name that she hated at the time: Smighty. It didn’t bother her now, she embraced it.
“Awaiting your orders, Your Imperial Highness,” the Caridian said.
Yes, you are, she thought delightedly. And wait, you shall, until I decide when to go.
The Caridian wasn’t piloting the ship. She had a skilled professional whose job it was to perform that task. The Caridian’s role was merely ceremonial, a nod to his contribution to the effort. She gave him a seat on the bridge beside the actual pilot. What an odd fellow Dr Kix was. She didn’t know what made him tick. Other than money, which was no surprise, since everyone had that motivation button built in at the factory. Caridians look like walking locusts, she thought. It wasn’t a compliment. And this locust was bound to be as destructive to the galaxy as the ancient plague was to Egyptian crops trembling in the field. He’d become a symbol of death.
“Stretch out your hand over Egypt so that locusts swarm over the land and devour everything growing in the fields…”
Neera had looked up the biblical quote this morning. Soon she would be stretching out her hand over the Coalition lands and letting her Xenos eat them right down to the bone, unless they paid her ransom demands. She’d break the Coalition financially, and then she’d take them apart with violence, releasing her Xeno armies anyway, opening wormholes and dumping zombies on them like salt on chunks of raw meat. The mold would do the rest, changing non-humans into more fighters for her cause. The Augments would keep the new recruits in line. The Arms Guild would be unstoppable, and she would succeed where her father and brother had both failed. Empress. It had a nice ring to it. Too bad Nero wouldn’t be alive to witness her dominion. She’d have loved to rub his face in her success and make him squirm, thinking about how she’d beaten him. But you can’t have everything. She laughed. Except for me. I can have it all. Neera Lupaster. The Empress Smighty. She sat rigid in her command seat, eyes bright, tail wagging if she’d had one. She’d never been happier, though there was one detail to be ironed out. Nero.
“Let ’er rip, Dr Kix,” she said.
The Caridian nodded solemnly as if he were launching an expedition in unknown worlds.
But they all knew exactly where they were going. The Cybernetics Guild reps looked nervous, quaking and dyspeptic, sipping on their motion sickness tea. PK-L7. Arguably the worst place in the galaxy. Certainly, the most dangerous. A murder farm – they grew corpses there.
The wormhole loomed. It didn’t look like much of anything to Neera. A whole lotta nothing was more accurate. Blacker than black, an empty, beatless heart, or a clean, clean tunnel.
As they flew into the void, she put on her mirrored shades. The last time she rode the space worm she dreamed about the strange colors for weeks, streaks and waterfalls flowing like blacklight rainbows; it made her queasy just thinking about them. She’d felt nauseated as if she were following a druggy headquest to other dimensions, out-of-body metaphysical shit, experiencing the skin-crawling heebie-jeebies without any of the euphoria or mind-blowing insights – she hated it. Consequently, she closed her eyes this time, but she didn’t want them to see her not looking, especially the Cybernetics reps. Those three geeks better be right about controlling the Xenos. So far, they’d been a great disappointment to her, and she didn’t take kindly to being disappointed. Sure, the Augments managed to kill a couple of well-armed convicts. But they didn’t wipe out the crew, and her brother was still out there, probably more alert than ever. If he was on to her schemes, he’d make his move on PK-L7 after he had her ship. He probably suspected she was up to something by offering to help him, but he would just as certainly underestimate the scope of her strategy, given that he always assumed he was bigger and better at everything. But this time she had him beat. She was sure of it.
The ship began to move in a sort of swimmy fashion, which meant they were in the hole. Neera grabbed the armrests, her long, pointed fingernails digging into the foamy, black pads.
After the last screwup, Neera felt she had to be more hands-on. No more murder by proxy. She’d rounded up a rock-hard crew of her most loyal guards, mercenaries who’d served in the GDF Special Forces. Ex-Black Ops types who weren’t shy about what team they played for. A dozen of them were hiding in the guts of the ship, waiting for her to announce, “Go-time.”
If you wanted something done right, then you had to do it yourself.
Her plan was simple. They’d pop out of the wormhole, land on the mining station’s runway, and open the air hatch for Nero and his jailhouse buddies. When Nero got close, the kill team would take them out. She wanted Nero’s dead body. It was the only way she’d believe he was really gone. She’d played games for too long, hiring goons to assassinate Nero in XSecPen. Every attempt to kill him went sideways, and now he had that Thassian ex-bounty hunter watching his back. It should’ve been like shooting fish in a barrel. One goateed, smartassed fish.
Oh, well. She’d get the last laugh. Not only that, but she’d also enjoy the pleasure of seeing her brother finally get his due, kicking his corpse, and making sure he was forever in her rearview. The ship stopped the wavy, bouncy, unmoored business. It was back under control.
They had arrived.
She opened her eyes.
PK-L7 was as ugly as a busted toe. Who knew there’d be so much treasure buried inside such a dried-out hard turd of a planet? She took in the minefield sights: swarming drones and sentry guns. Her ship’s cloaking was state-of-the-art; she wasn’t worried about them. She might even leave the antique defenses running after she put down the Coalition. They’d protected the place well all these years, even if they hadn’t been good enough to keep her out.
“Shall we initiate landing procedures, your Imperial Highness?” the pilot asked.
“My brother can see us, correct?”
“There’s no mistaking a wormhole appearing in the sky,” the Caridian said, chirping in.
“I concur,” the pilot said.
“Then let’s wait,” Neera said. “I want him eager and racing into my welcoming arms.”
“As you wish,” the pilot said.
I do wish, she thought, with no small degree of satisfaction. And my wishes all come true.
Chapter Thirty-Two
A Long Walk
“Why’s she just sitting there?” Nero said. He crawled up on the work counter, pushing aside computers and cables, plowing through a layer of dust that probably hadn’t been touched by human hands for hundreds of years, so he could scoot up to the glass, pressing his face to it like a little boy searching the heavens for Santa Claus. Krait watched him the way a snake watches a mouse, and Lemora didn’t like that. She knew she was smarter than Krait, and it helped that Krait thought he was the smartest person in every room he entered. It gave him a blind spot.
“Neera’s probably getting the lay of the land,” Krait said. “She doesn’t want to walk into anything.” Krait had that semi-auto shotgun with the drum underneath the desk. She saw him sneak it from the supply closet like nobody was paying attention. She’d found her own good fortune in that closet, a box of grenades, the kind that looked like shaving cream cans. She had the cans laid out on the table in front of her. A big gob of mold sat in a plastic container next to the bombs. She’d scooped it from where it dripped through a seam in the module by one of the doors they weren’t using. The window in the door was covered in mold as if someone had hung a thick, wet, black blanket over it. The mold had a mildewy smell like a dirty shower. She collected enough for her purposes, dividing it into marble-sized balls with a spork from a drawer she’d rifled through earlier. She had to keep it away from Bak-Irp, but the rest of the team were immune. He’d been wearing his gas mask whenever he removed his helmet, but she’d seen him slipping it off now and again to breathe the module’s scrubbed air.
“She’s icing me,” Nero said. “It’s a taunt. She can’t resist pulling a power play.”
“I think you’re paranoid,” Krait said, hanging a little soft laugh on the end of his comment to take out the sting. “Neera’s here. Where you asked her to be. It’s a matter of time.”
“Time for what?” Nero said sharply, because he was on edge.
“Until she makes the pickup and flies us out of here. We’re practically home free.”
“Bullshit. It’s a provocation. I know her,” Nero said. But he slid off the counter into a wheeled office chair. “Do you know my sister?” He narrowed his eyes at the smuggler, entertaining new treacheries, double-crosses springing up everywhere when he was like this. Lemora clenched up. They needed to stick together and work as a team against the Xenos and Neera. She wondered if Nero was starting to suspect Neera more now that her arrival was fast approaching. Pushing off with his boots, Nero shot in the chair across the floor, catching hold of Krait’s arm. “I asked you a question. Do you know Neera?”
“I’ve never had the pleasure of making her acquaintance.”
“Then leave her character analysis to me,” Nero said. He spun off, turning in circles.
“Sure thing, boss,” Krait said, making the boss sound like an insult.
Nero jumped up on his feet and came over to Lemora. “What’re you two working on?”
Lemora had asked Shawna to help her top off the mold bombs. The lids were unscrewed, and Lemora dropped mold deposits into half the canisters. Shawna found a dried-out inkpad and added water to it; she was stamping the mold-containing grenades with blue thumbprints to tell them apart.
“Prepping,” Lemora said. “The Xenos will attack again as soon as we leave the station.”
“What’s the mold for? They’re already infected,” Nero said.
“Who knows who’s riding with Neera?” Lemora figured she’d play up Nero’s lack of trust but keep it directed away from his sister. “There’s a Caridian, you said. He gave her the wormhole tech. Well, Caridians can be infected. This’ll give us something to threaten him with.”
“Why would we need to threaten the Caridian?”
Lemora shrugged. “I hope we won’t. The grenades are still grenades. We can use them on the Xenos, but this way we have options.” Shawna tilted an open can toward her. She sporked a dollop of mold into it. Shawna then screwed the lid down. “I like having options. Don’t you?”
Nero nodded, but he seemed like he wasn’t entirely satisfied with her answer. “As long as they work on Xenos, I’m cool with it.” He looked like he had more questions, but Bak-Irp cut in.
“Ship’s coming down,” the Thassian said. “They’re kicking up dust with their thrusters. We aren’t going to be able to see shit. It’ll be like walking in a sandstorm till it settles.”
“I’m not waiting for the dust to settle,” Nero said. “It’ll cover us the same as the Xenos.”
“I was afraid you’d say that,” Bak-Irp said. “I’ll remind you that we’re two guns down.”
Nero glared at him. Losing the Silvas hurt their chances of survival, hurt his chances. He didn’t need reminding, and Lemora would’ve advised Bak-Irp not to say anything. Getting on the bad side of Nero was a deadly mistake, but Bak was a big boy who could take care of himself.
“How d’you want to do this, boss?” The Thassian was carrying a machine gun and a shotgun strapped to his back. He’d loaded up with as much extra ammo as he could carry.
Nero snapped back to the matters at hand. He said, “You and Fuzzy take the point together. Him with the flamethrower, you keep us on track to Neera’s ship. Krait and I will be behind you–”
“I don’t like him where I can’t see him,” Bak-Irp said.
“Too bad.”
“I resent that, Bak,” Krait said. “I’m part of this team whether you like it or not.”
“Well, I don’t like it.”
“Shut the hell up,” Nero said. “Both of you. Bak, I’m behind you with Krait. I’ve got his ass covered, and I’ve got you covered. The ladies will have the grenades and come out last.”
Lemora sliced a canvas hammock into strips. She and Shawna wore the strips in “X” patterns across their armored bodies. The grenades clipped to the strips where they rattled like tree ornaments tossed out with the trash after the winter solstice holidays. They were noisy but easy to access. Lemora kept her fingers crossed that the explosives weren’t unstable after all the time in storage. The fuses looked fine, but you could never tell. She didn’t want to blow herself to smithereens. You don’t fight battles with the weapons you want but the weapons you have.
“Toss those bombs far ahead of us. I don’t want to get fragged,” Krait said.
“Don’t worry, honey.” Lemora leaned in close. “If I want to frag you, you won’t see it.”
“But I’ll feel it, right?”
“Not for long.”
•••
Bak-Irp was impatient to get things going. Waiting was fraying his nerves, making him jumpy.
“They landed.” Krait pressed the headset to his ears, battling the roaring thrusters outside.
“How close? Sounds like they’re putting down right on top of us,” Bak-Irp said.
“Close is good,” Nero said. “I don’t want a long walk.”
The dust masked everything in a yellow-orange fog. Bits of gritty sand ticked at the viewport glass like hailstones. The air boiled with mini blooms and dust devils whirling about.
“Can’t see shit,” Bak-Irp complained.
“They want us to come out,” Krait shouted. “They said, ‘Now.’ We should go now.”
“What?” Nero said. He pointed to his ear inside the helmet, indicating he couldn’t hear.
“They’re waiting for us. The air lock is open. Ramp deployed. They said to run for it.”
Bak-Irp unsealed the module’s doors. The jetwash from Neera’s thrusters raged. Whoever was piloting that ship was gunning them, stirring up debris. Clouds of loose soil swirled inside. It felt like they were standing at the back of a troop transport, ready to parachute blindly into the murk. Bak-Irp didn’t like it one bit, but he wasn’t giving the orders. He started stepping down. Until Nero snagged his elbow, hauling him backward.
“Hold up,” he said. He turned around to address Krait. “Tell them to meet us halfway. I want to see my sister before I go anywhere. Say that I want a visual of Neera or the deal’s off.”
Krait relayed the message. Then he was shaking his head, pursing his lips. “They said, ‘No way. Come now or forget it. She won’t take that risk.’ What should I tell them, Nero?”
“If I don’t see Neera in the flesh, I’m not budging. Let them fly away. I want Neera.”
Krait repeated what Nero said into his mic. He clutched his headset, twisting the knobs. “It’s dead. I’ve got silence,” he said. Yanking off the headset, he tossed it down in disgust. “You blew it.” Krait stomped off into the far reaches of the module, toting his shotgun.
Nero didn’t respond. He stood braced in the doorway, feet apart. The dust was already building up on the module’s floor behind him, a carpet of sharp silicates that sparkled in the harsh fluorescence of the overhead lamps. “C’mon… c’mon… show your face…”
Bak-Irp said, “I don’t think she’s coming.” He withdrew, grabbing the handle to seal them in again. He put his head down as he swept the threshold clear with the edge of his foot.
“There!” Nero pointed into the obscurity.
Bak-Irp jerked his head up, squinting, trying to see what the arms dealer saw. The ship thrusters quieted to a low, chest-vibrating hum. The churning particles thinned. A yellow-orange wall of airborne debris became a series of veils, peeling away. Standing amid the turmoil was a figure wearing royal purple armor, with a submachine gun slung over one shoulder, resting jauntily on its hip. The figure stuck its arm out toward them, lifting its hand higher and higher.
“She’s calling us out,” Bak-Irp said. He didn’t like the situation. It felt funky, off-kilter.
Nero barked with harsh laughter. “No, she isn’t. Neera’s giving us the finger.”
“What do we do?” Bak-Irp braced for the worst. His job was to follow Nero’s orders and try to keep the man alive. Sometimes it was hard to do both at the same time.
“Why, we go to meet her, my Thassian friend.” Nero ducked inside. “Fuzzy, you ready?”
