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Sarah had almost thrown-up when she first tasted the Jomanian ale that she had been offered. It was the strongest thing she had ever tried to drink. She reeled back, blinked several times and forced herself to swallow, attempting to make her reaction as covert as possible. Thankfully, the effects of the alcohol itself wouldn’t be a problem. Hammock’s men at Ithguad had given her an inhaler full of nanobots designed to prevent intoxication. So she could act drunk, and perhaps learn things from the partygoers who really were.
After thirty minutes at the party, most of the crew was too intoxicated to carry on an intelligent conversation. Sarah made her way across the room towards the captain, who was downing a longneck. She made sure she walked with a bit of a drunken swagger on top of Kiva’s characteristic limp. She slurred her fake Jomanian accent just enough to appear somewhat drunk to any of the rooms more sober observers. Cortez greeted her with his thick Hispanic accent.
“e’lo Kiva. Howze it going?”
“Fine.”
“What is it that yuu woint? Can I get you a cold-fudge Wednesday?”
“Huh?” Sarah said, just as Cortez went out, falling face first into his plate of Vordlaxian Kioberry pie.
Well. That is getting me nowhere.
Sarah, disgusted, left the mess and headed back to her quarters on the ship. As she got to her room, she ran into someone she had hoped to avoid. Korth Vaster. He had some sort of perverse infatuation with the deadly mercenary, and was constantly attempting to make moves on Kiva, according to the journal. He was a Veijan himself, wearing the custom studded armor of the Vaster clan.
The worst part was that on several occasions Kiva had relented to his desperate pleas for affection. But only when severely intoxicated.
“Hay Kiva!” said the pirate soldier in alcohol-slurred speech. “Can I come in for a minnut?”
“Go away, Korth!” Sarah slurred out, just before she realized it would be to her advantage if he didn’t think she was drunk. In her room, Sarah used the e-wardrobe to remove the dress she wore to the party and replace it with Kiva’s armor, but when she turned to lock the door, she was too late. The massive Veijan had barged in, and now embraced her, and was trying to lock his lips with hers.
Sarah was tempted to kill him, so revolted she was. She imagined John looking down from Earth and crying his eyes out.
Then she felt his hands slide from their resting places in the small of her back up to the fastener of her armor. That was the last straw.
Her knee came up, on instinct, and plowed with Sarah’s part-Veijan might into Korth’s gut. The studs on his armor had the un-expected effect of triggering Sarah’s knee reflex. Her leg kicked out, shin firmly planting into Korth’s groin. He let out a scream and a half.
“OU! What was that for?” he slurred. “I--..”
Sarah knew never to kick a Veijan man there and not follow it up with something definitive. She focused her ki and did a spinning reverse kick, just sloppy enough for any electronic witnesses to think she might still be drunk. Her foot slammed powerfully into Vaster’s chest, knocking him ten feet backwards, the door opening to avoid being broken. Quickly, Sarah crossed the room and slammed the door shut, and locked it. “I told you to go AWAY,” She screamed through the metal with totally real fury, forgetting to slur or accent what she was saying. She hoped twenty-six years of exposure New Jersey, Celistian, and Terrasevenian accents would go unnoticed.
It was several hours later when the battle alarms wailed. Sarah scrambled to her feet out of the bed, activating the quipper that would replace her nightgown with Jomanian armor. She ran down the hallway, following the signs and recalling the maps, until she found Turret number TK421. This was supposed to be the gun that Kiva used during ship-to-ship combat. Unfortunately, the turret was locked. The panel next to the entrance requested the password. Sarah racked her brain, thinking rapidly of what it might be. She entered several things.
Jomanian
Kiva
Andur
Veija
Nothing worked. Sarah was about to panic, when she suddenly had an epiphany.
P-h-o-e-n-i-x, she typed in. As the turret door opened, a violent quake rocked the Iien Blian. Bouncing off the bulkheads of the turret hatch, Sarah made it to the seat of the gun, just as Captain Cortez’s voice came over the ship’s intercom.
“Attention, all hands. We have located the signal, but we didn’t get here first. Be prepared to fight off a small Corisian flotilla.”
Confused, but not deterred, Sarah powered-up her gun and, noticing a ridiculous number of activated handicaps, began flipping switches to remove them. The restrictions… it suddenly became aware to Sarah that Kiva had been a novice at gun-turrets, and actually needed the handicaps. That didn’t matter. The same handicaps severely constricted a more skilled gunner.
The first wave of Coris fighters came in. Sarah began firing, knowing somewhere deep inside, but choosing to ignore that for now, that the fighters weren’t pirates, but actual soldiers from the Coris-Guard. Granted, Coris was governed by a corrupt and evil regime, but it didn’t feel right killing soldiers out doing their job.
Sarah felt strangely invincible in the massive ship’s gun, though she knew that in reality, a well-placed shot would snuff her life out just as quickly as any bullet or sword. Target practice got more serious when the fighters began rushing the manned turrets, and Sarah saw several explode to her left and right, and fired all-the-faster.
It was more than an hour before the shooting stopped, and an exhausted Sarah stepped out of the turret, greeted by Mishi and several other gunners. Mishi herself looked like a wreck, with her fur matted with sweat and her tail rigidly curled around her waist.
“Very nice shooting,” she said to Sarah.
“You too,” Sarah repeated with her fake Jomanian accent, wondering how in the bowels of Slin Mishi could’ve kept up with anyone else’s score and still defend the ship.
“No, Kiva. You were superior to even me today. I suppose I may still be slightly intoxicated from the night before this one. But tell me, how could one get so good so fast as yourself has?” Sarah ignored the question, hoping it was rhetorical, and slinked away, en route back to her room.
It was half way to Kiva’s room before Ishori spotted her favorite bloodthirsty killer in the hallway near the Phoenix’s quarters. Truly, doing so well since failing at Texas, Kiva now deserved her call sign more than ever. Kiva, not wanting to show emotion, fought a smile as Private Ishori greeted her.
“What’s up, Kiva?”
“Just doing what I’m paid for,” Kiva returned.
“It’s what you’re best at,” Ishori countered. Kiva nodded, reflective for a moment. The effects of failure hadn’t washed off entirely. Or maybe it was just the alcohol. Kiva had drunk enough to make a Kedilian giant plastered for hours. “Do you want to go see the spoils?” Ishori said with a cheerful smile, thankful for the antidepressants added to the ships ventilation before and after ever battle.
“Why not,” said the merc. “I need a break from lying around in my room. I’m getting bored. Can’t wait for another job.”
“I wouldn’t get my hopes up, Kiva,” said the sensible science officer. “Cortez is still not sure what to make of the reports of your death, and stuff.” The truth was, that Privaate herself had plenty of doubts about Kiva’s honesty. Some things just didn’t seem right: her sudden introspectiveness, her newfound skills at the gun turret. Even her accent didn’t seem quite right at times. But when not brooding, she acted so much like Kiva. The worst-case scenario was that Kiva was really dead, and that some sort of android or clone was taking her place. But that was ridiculous, right? The Empire didn’t have that kind of technology. Did they?
It was a fifteen-minute walk, Kiva remaining mostly silent, and Ishori doing most of the talking. The doors opened into the shuttle bay where Lyberia, along with Constance and Sleeping Bull were docked. Constance was currently unloading the cargo of the day, the things they had gotten from the raid on the Coris ships.
Mostly just money, or other things of monetary value, but the real target was just then coming down the ramp as Kiva and Ishori arrived at the shuttle.
“What is it?” Kiva asked.
“Remember that weird little machine emitting the homing signal that we picked up right before you left?”
“Um… Yeah”
“Well,” continued Ishori, “since then, we have found two others. This one makes four. We still cant’ figure out what they do, aside from that they aren’t bombs, but that is about it.”
“That is more than a little on the weird side,” said Kiva. She and Ishori walked over to the piece, and studied it. It was still cold, meaning it hadn’t been retrieved from space long before the Iien Blian got there. Sarah didn’t know what to make of the object. It was a spherical head, with large plates on five ends. The sixth end had a group of thick, rigid cables protruding from the sphere, and attached to one side of the cables was a set of triangular panels that looked like solar arrays. It was really a boring object, Sarah thought. Her attention was more acutely focused on the fighter across the bay.
A Zeven PT-OT it was, code named Phoenix-class. It also had the emblem of that fiery bird rising from its ashes painted across its port wing, erasing any doubt that it belonged to Kiva Andur. Sarah marveled at the sleek design, the quad-firing blaster cannons and wing-mounted phase batteries, and the triple-layered particle and energy shielding. Then she wondered why Zeven only sold it’s best stuff to criminals while continuing to only let the Imperial Space Navy only buy the outdated Axel and Dragon class fighters that had been so cutting-edge 200 years ago.
A sudden surge of energy caught the notice of her Veijan sensory powers, and she saw a power conduit located above her fighter activate, sending energy into the mechanism that closed the shield doors of the hanger bay. The energy felt a little funny, but nothing to be concerned about….
“Are you ready to go?” Said Ishori, snapping Sarah out of her reverie.
“Where to now?”
“I thought we’d go exercise or something. Wanna play a little Sordid Combat? One on one?”
“Sure,” Sarah agreed, and the women left, leaving Thex, Korth, and the other men to unload the cargo.
The holo-game Sordid Combat had always disgusted most of Sarah’s peers, but Sarah had taken a liking to it in the slum arcades of New Jersey City. The premise was simple. Pick from an assortment of strange otherworldly characters, and trans dimensional freaks, and beat the holographic snot out of your opponent, with an assortment of stances that caused “special attacks” to happen. Or just use your fists. Or knock them into their doom in the pit of a deathtrap. The “Sordid” part was that all the stages were full of sharp objects that caused injured players to ooze and gush holographic blood.
Of course, after several kids had been injured by over zealous opponents, the liberals and concerned parents had pushed really hard and gotten the game banned. Last Sarah heard there was also a movement to get bikes, hover-boards, and mountain climbing banned as well. They all could be dangerous to one’s health.
Ishori, disguised in the avatar of Zero Kelvin, a white ninja with the ability to freeze people solid, rushed forward, swinging low, reversing high. Sarah blocked the blows, then deflected two more sideways, and returned with a flurry of her own, all countered by the skilled Vurkan.
Sarah was using her favorite character, Wow Ming, an incredibly tall Korean man with red pants and the ability to throw fireballs and steal souls. She let loose a restrained flurry of kicks at Zero, not wanting to hurt the Vurkan on the receiving end. Her opponent backed up and through a ball of contagious ice at Sarah, who barely dodged with a twisting side flip, and countered with a great ball of fire from in the air. It missed, and Ishori’s ninja-clad hands flung another ball of ice—this one at Sarah’s landing-place—destabilizing her landing beyond repair. Just as Sarah fell, the white blur flashed across the level, planting a foot firmly into Sarah’s midsection. She audibly exhaled, unable to steady because of the slippery surface. After a long slide across the platform, Sarah found her avatar impaled on a convenient wall of spikes, oozing red, even as the Game Over appeared in front of her. Crap, she thought, I am losing my edge.
The holo-room deactivated just as Sarah felt the ship drop out of hyperspace. Unfortunately there was no time for congratulations; an immediate violent shake told Sarah that all was not well. Alarms began to wail again, this time because the Blian was under attack.
