All the King's Horses Pt. 10

Wolf-359, Federation Space

The Milky Way Galaxy

2398

Tiff tottered over, then sat her rump down in the swivel chair that served as her captain chair, trying to ignore the fact she was currently naked and still liberally smeared with other people's bodily fluids. She glared into the makeshift screen that showed the bridge of the DeeDee, with Mike Hodges sitting in captain's chair, her boyfriend standing beside him. Sebastian looked well and truly mind zonked, considering how he had a gun pressed against the shapeshifter who she now thought of as Shifter-Tiff.

Tiff leaned back in her seat, then nodded. "Hodges."

"My name is Khan," he said, his voice cold as space -- behind her, she could hear the scramble of the rest of her crew trying to get out of their orgy bed and into their battlespace mindset that they'd need to be.

"Khan, Schman, your name is Mike Hodges and you used to sit behind me in Algebra class and-"

Mike's eyebrow twitched.

"Mark," he said, his voice deathly quiet.

"Huh?" Tiff asked.

"My name...is Mark. Hanson. Not. Mike. Hodges. Mike Hodges was in Algebra with you, I was with you in English class." His hand slammed down. "And neither name is accurate to me! That child died the instant I took my second breath and became Khan."

"You were augmented when you were thirty, dude," Tiff snapped back. "And fine! Mike! Mark! Whatever, what matters more is the fact that you're just one massive dillhead. We live in a galaxy with freaking cyborg-zombie femtotech weaslesnorts and greek god style super computers and fucking killer armadillos, but you? You take the god damned cake!" She stood up, spreading her arms wide. "Like, holy shit, you're not even like, abandoned on a deserted planet! You guys had a nice planet, then you blew it up and went off to sell guns to people for fucking fun! I bet you have a super fucking nice mansion, don't you? Back in Capella? Huh? But that's not enough for Mike Hanson, ohhh noo! You gotta come back and ruin everyone's day on fucking Earth!" She shook her head.

"Shut-" Mark started.

"Oh you are NOT shutting me up!" Tiff said, thrusting her finger at him.

"I SAID SHUT UP!" Mark roared, his caste mark flaring to life -- a golden aura swelling around him as the innate power of his augmentation was pumped into his voice and words. The timber, the tone, the word choice, his face, his eyes, all of it were filled with minute expressions that were designed to function on the human psyche like a visual weapon. Every tiny cue that told a human to shut up, to obey, to cower, was flashed at Tiffany Winters like a nuclear weapon's flash.

It washed past Tiff's face without her even flinching. "Oh wha wha wha," she said, miming a talking mouth with her left hand. "Listen, buddy, I've got the Hunter spirit in me. Immune to mind control. That includes being immune to whiny dipshits who fail upwards by taking vampire bribes." She grinned. "So, anywho, where was I? Oh right! Ah Fuck ahhh youuuu!" She lifted her hands up and flipped him the double bird. "Suck my clit, eat space, and die, you absolute waste of space."

Behind Mark, his night caste assassin, Jade, snorted.

Mark spun around and glared at her. "What?" Jade asked, grinning. "She's an insect and you're letting her get under your skin."

"Actually, I'm distracting you," Tiff said, cheerfully. "See, I figured that a big mad Solar would draw everyone's attention pretty good."

Shifter-Tiff, who had been quietly growing a pseudopod along the ground, slammed it into the console to the left of the bridge. Sparks and plastic went flying while the mind zonked Sebastian kept looking straight forward, clearly having not been given any commands to handle this kind of thing. Chen had explained to Tiff exactly what would happen: Without Kfap to manage the ships internal systems, control on the bridge console would revert to the engineering console, where the sabotage that Shifter-Tiff had wrought earlier would trip.

Tiff didn't see it, but she heard it. The faint rumbling and the slow whine that filled the air through the speakers, transmitted from the Dee-Dee. Then she saw it: The Solars and Shifter-Tiff and Sebastian began to float off the ground.

Deep in the guts of the DeeDee, the vitae linkages to the outer hull's vamptech generators were cut. Repairing them would only take a few seconds of frantic work. But from then to now, the vampire brain tissue that used paracasual effects to transform human blood into the telekinetic force that simulated gravity was cut...and, more importantly, so was the telekinetic fields that most of the galaxy referred to, simply...

As shields.

"Bastola!" Tiff shouted.

Chen tapped a single button on her tablet. It didn't seem to be shooty enough for Tiff. But that was when her entire body was flung from the chair by the sudden jerking motion of the Reliant -- propelled backwards by the spinal railgun firing without the same compensation systems normally used on a real warship. The railgun sent a kinetic projectile -- a tungsten slug, really -- through the hundred kilometers that separated the two ships -- at a terrifyingly high velocity. It slipped through moments before the Twilight caste engineer on the Deedee got the vita tubes repaired.

It struck the quantum dyad on the rear half of the ship. The separated saucer-like section of the ship contained a pair of quantum singularities (a dyad) that whipped around one another in a constant orbital pattern. This created the same lunar radiation as an orbiting moon did when it whipped around its planet. That was what allowed the lycanthropic replicators aboard the Deedee to constantly produce everything the ship needed -- from vitae to nuclear missiles.

The tungsten slug punched through hardened armor like tissue paper, struck the telekinetic bottle that contained the singularities, ripped through dozens of lumps of cloned vampire brain tissue, then ripped out the other end of the dyad in a fraction of a second. Earlier ships built by the Federation, at this point, would have been shredded as a pair of rapidly orbiting singularities were flung away from one another at ludicrous speeds.

Fortunately for the dozen Solars and their prisoners, modern Federation design principles were significantly safer. Right after fixing the 'excess energy causes our console to explode', they had made sure to design the failure state on the quantum dyad to something less...horribly ship explody. The end result was that, with the final spasm of telekinetic power, the two singularities were forced together and propelled downwards. The merged singularities managed to exist without outside support for a fraction of a second before dissolving in a haze of fuzzy Hawking radiation.

In a single second, the DeeDee had gone from being the dominant ship on the battlefield to in roughly the same position as the Reliant -- dependent entirely upon their own backup blood reserves.

"Nyaaaa!" Tiff said, sticking her tongue out at Mark. "Later, Hodges!"

Then she cut the link and grabbed onto the chair as Chen programmed in the evasion pattern. The Reliant groaned, twisted, tumbled, and then went dark. The air began to warm as the waste heat they normally vented was instead kept within the internal reservoirs. Tiff brushed her hands through her hair. "Lets hope this works," she whispered.

"We're either going to die in the next fifteen seconds or it works," Bruce said.

Tiff nodded. "Before I die," she said. "I want to say one thing: I regret not fucking the hot shark lady."

Bruce nodded, solemnly. "Yeah, same."

"Wait, you got hit on by a hot shark lady too?" Tiff asked, feeling suddenly far less special and unique. Then she closed her eyes, trying to feel Shifter-Tiff.

And to her shock...

She did.

***

Mark roared as he sprang to his feet, turning to Jade. "What the fuck just happened?"

"She shot out the QD," Jade said as she leaned over one of the consoles that wasn't broken. Sebastian was still standing around, his gun in his hand, aimed at nothing in particular. "Also, the shapeshifter has escaped. Also, also, this only happened because you got fucking distracted by being goaded by a child."

Mark spun to glare at her. "Are you questioning my orders?"

"Yes," Jade said, frowning.

Lisa stepped up, standing between the two solars. "Khan, Jade, lets not fight," she said. "Lets check in on Daedalus to see how bad the damage is."

"Daedalus!" Mark punched up the engineering communication link. "What is going on down there?"

"Well," the slender, pale, blond haired youth that was their finest Twilight -- though, in truth, he had looked like a slender, pale, blond haired youth for nearly three centuries thanks to the regenerative effect of their Solar Augmentation -- rolled his shoulders. "Sabotage took our shields out and in the time it took to get them back up, they shot out the QD. We've got, maybe, thirty minutes of continuous standard ship operations before the vitae tanks run out."

"Thirty minutes?" Mark growled. "Thirty fucking minutes?"

"That's under standard operations," Daedalus said. "If we shut off our shields, the primary and secondary fusion reactors, the warp drive and the missile replicators, we have several days of vitae."

Mark shook his head. "Federation numbskulls."

"It's why the ship's so deadly, sir, they don't have wasted space when they can just replicate it. No need for hydrogen tanks, you have a replicator. No need for remass, you can just replicate it. No need for ammo, you can-"

"I got the picture!" Mark snarled. "Shut everything down that we don't fucking need." Then he turned. "Jade, do we have a firing pattern?"

"Most of our sensors are down," Jade said, frowning as she tapped at the tactical console. "We're just on opticals and radar -- and our radar sweeps are being disturbed by waves of hard radiation from the sun."

"What happened to the other sensors?" Mark asked.

"I believe..." Jade hissed. "Something's keeping them off line. It's the AI."

"How did she get out?" Mark growled. "Daedalus!"

"Do you want me to FIX the SHIP or do you want me to listen to you screaming, Khan?"

Mark clenched his teeth, then shook his head. He sat down in his seat, glaring at space through the forward view screen. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Lisa and Sebastian were standing aside. He frowned at both of them. "I thought you said the psychological stress of seeing her undead pet dancing to your tune would be worth the time we spent indoctrinating him."

Lisa spread her hands. "I was wrong. I expected the Ensnarment and the natural affection this Winters shows towards vampires -- odd, considering her chosen occupation -- would have more of an effect. You can't always be right when you play this kind of game." She smiled, caressing Sebastian. "Though...Sebastian, dear..."

She paused as the floor groaned and they began to float into the air. Jade strapped herself down as Mark sighed loudly, strapping himself in.

"Sebastian, dear, do you know where the shapeshifter might have gotten too?"

Sebastian shook his head. "No..." He frowned as he floated in the air, his voice sounding dreamlike and disconnected. "But I do know that the shapeshifters are able to disperse themselves into the air. Like particulates. Also, I would be wary of an attempted boarding. Tiffany...she is very good at hand to hand combat. Less good at space...warfare."

Mark grinned, leaning back in his seat. "This is my arena, Winters." He nodded. "Jade...scan 334.908, you're going to find their ship there..."

***

Tiff murmured, quietly. "They're scanning at 334.908, whatever the fuckery that means."

"Okay, we can evade their scanning beams -- we just need a few kps of Delta-V. Tap the tanks," Chen said as Bruce and Bryce, both of them dressed in their paladin battledress, hooked up another vita tank to their jerry rigged systems. The engines puttered softly, sounding more like a series of loud hammering bangs than actual engines. "Okay...now we drift..." She bit her lip, looking back at Tiff.

"What's the game plan now that we've poked them in the eye? Any shot to the ship's going to have just as good a chance as hitting our own guys."

"I have a scheme," Tiff murmured, quietly.

"Is it to sneak close and board them?"

"That's exactly what Mike expecterates," Tiff purred, her hands rubbing together. "We're not even gonna get fuckin' close. We have the whole designios of the Deedee, right? We know where to poke em where it puckers."

Chen grinned, slowly.

She turned around her tablet, pointing down. "The railguns are here and here. They're in enclosed areas, so...if the ship turns the right way, we can gut one. Or both, if we're lucky."

"Ayyyy!" Tiff snapped her fingers.

The two ships, moving in their spaced orbits, must have looked quite odd to any outside observer. Groping blindly with radar sweeps -- turned into a raw, hissing confusion by the hard radiation pumped out by the sun, confused further by the efforts of a seriously pissed off shackled AI -- they circled around one another, both captains looking intently through their forward view screens, as if they had any chance, any chance at all at seeing another ship, at a hundred or more kilometers against the vast, endless nothingness of space.

And yet...

Both did.

Tiff pointed. "There! Shooty shooty back bang now! Gimmi!" She snatched the tablet from Chen's hands, making her yelp.

On his bridge, Mark's solar enhanced vision sharpened more. "There!" He pointed. "Jade, frangible shot!"

Replicators on both ships whirred. Limited supplies of vitae dropped. The dorsal railgun on the Reliant didn't fire -- even as both railguns on the Deedee spoke. Tiff, holding the tablet, bit her lip. "Kapbow!" she whispered, feeling her hunter's instincts scream at her that the moment had come. She tapped the fire button and the entire Reliant reeled and shuddered -- but not as the railgun fired. Instead, the shredder missiles launched into space and were detonated within a fraction of a second later, Tiff hammering down on the button to do so so fast that she almost broke the screen.

Shredder missiles were a brutally simple design created by the K'na'Ngork. They were, in effect, a fusion engine strapped to a dense chunk of exotic matter synthesized with atom smashers that the K'na'Ngork normally used to create antimatter fuel for their fast attack fighters. Antimatter, though, was considered too unstable for weapons. Instead, they used this exotic matter -- which they had, with standard K'na'Ngork creativity, named Exotic Matter D. EMD, when it was struck with sufficient physical force, disassociated into a rapidly expanding cloud of dark matter, the same invisible material that made up the majority of the unobserved universe.

The K'na'Ngork didn't have any idea what it was. That wasn't exactly their wheelhouse.

But they knew what the effect was: Clouds of impenetrable, invisible material that filled a few dozen kilometers of space in a matter of seconds. The dark matter decayed with shocking speed -- something that the Federation scientists would have recognized as being a part of the laws of the conservation of mass/energy. But in the few seconds where the dark matter clouds existed, they were as real and as sturdy as solid neutronium.

Tiff, of course, didn't understand this either. Chen had just explained it to her like this: "They make big clouds of invincible material. If they hit a ship, they rip it up."

And if they were in space, they made...

The two railgun slugs struck the wall of dark matter and stopped dead in their tracks.

"Pew pew pew!" Tiff said as she tapped the controls to expel some of their precious reaction mass downward -- which sent their ship upwards, clearing the momentary wall of nearly invisible dark matter. Tiff tapped the fire button.

The Reliant rocked.

"How the-" Mark whispered.

The tungsten slug that struck the Deedee hit the left railgun and ripped through it at an angle -- tearing two ragged holes in it and filling space with debris. Doors slammed shut and red lights flared. The slug that struck the right railgun, seconds later, was more direct. It managed to rip out of the back, bleeding air and spare vitae into space. It was as if the more advanced ship was bleeding.

"Wow," Jade said. "You just got out shot by-"

"SHUT UP!" Mark roared. "FIRE NUKES! ALL OF THEM!"

"I-" Jade stopped. "I've got a target lock."

The reason why she had gotten a target lock was simple: The Reliant had just gotten a great deal brighter, hotter, and larger -- at least, according to the Deedee's sensors. The reason why was because the third slug, in total, had been the final slug that the railgun could bare. The K'Na'Ngork built their guns to be securely housed in big, chunky starships. Not spot welded to a several century old derelict. The railgun was now tumbling away from the Reliant, while Chen was frantically trying to patch up the tear in the ceiling as air roared past her head. Tiff jammed on her helmet -- her hunter's instincts screaming at her.

"Come on! Go! Go! Go!" She shouted. "Grab a vitae tank and go!"

Chen, swearing, pushed herself away from the hole. She snatched up one of the tanks they had prepped, while Bryce and Bruce snatched up theirs. Tiff shoved them out of the airlock that hissed open, more air roaring past her, then grabbed onto her tank. They tumbled away from the Reliant and into vast, empty space -- and as she looked back, she saw that the whole top of the ship was one big glittery mass of reflective metal chunklets that were spreading outwards.

"Bye bye, Relianto. You kicked ass," Tiff said, waving at the ship.

This had kind of always been part of the plan. Or at least, one of the possibilities. Abandon the Reliant -- since it was a big, honking, obvious target.

She looked up in the vague direction she knew the Deedee was in. Once again, her Hunter enhanced eyes saw the tiny pinpricks of light sweeping away from the ship. "Uhhh, nukes?" She asked, her helmet tight-beaming the message to her fellows, who were still drifting.

"Inverse square law means each meter we put between the Reliant and us makes us one fourth less crispy!" Chen said. "Lets get jetting."

She held her vitae tank and turned on the tiny clump of cloned vampire brain tissue she had affixed to the bottom of the tank. A telekinetic field needed something to push off with -- there was no such thing as a free lunch, after all. Chen, though, had gotten the idea from some old course she had taken back in How To Become Badass school: Use vitae to push vitae. The end result was that the telekinetic fields created tiny spouts and accelerated tiny bits of vitae out of the bottom of the tanks. It meant they burned up blood twice as fast as they normally would -- but it imparted a definite acceleration.

The four of them clung to their blood tanks like SCUBA divers holding onto self propelled engines. Tiff tried to not think about the fact that, about half a centimeter below her head, a tiny jet of hyper-fast blood was being jetted out into the big black empty and if she angled it wrong at any second, it would slice into her helmet like a fucking hydraulic saw made of blood. Which, admittedly, would be a metal way to die.

A few seconds later, a series of brilliant, pinprick flashes appeared behind them. Tiff looked back -- and she didn't even see a big old orange fireball or anything. It had just been a tiny flash and the nuclear bombs had wiped the Reliant completely out of existence. She pouted.