Brash and the Schrodinger Snare Ch. 09

...right!

No shapeshifting. Buggergar!

We fell into darkness.

The orc smashed his head into my head. The Guard helmet was very tough, and it sent a flare of pain through my brain as the red hit my skin. I shook my head and scowled, then opened my palm. My psi-sword vanished as I no longer maintained it. Without the humming blade aimed at his head, he relaxed his grip slightly on my wrist, readying to shift his grip. I jerked my wrist free, then grabbed at his belt. I found the buckle and yanked it. His armor started to rattle slightly, wind blowing between his skin and the armor plating. This jerked his arms up and let me shimmy down him to his shoes. I yanked one off.

He kicked me in the chest with the other. I went flying away from him in the free-fall we were both plunging in. As I tumbled in the open air, I brought my pistol up, sighted with my HUD, and fired. The grappling spike (hook was kind of an inaccurate term, now that I thought about it) shot into the gap between the gravity-blade and the rest of the skate. I yanked back and fished it right off his foot. The orc shouted something very rude at me in orcish as I started to slide my feet into the gravity boots.

Below me, I could see the bottom of the pit. It was full of water and trash. The orc who had dropped down here before was swimming towards an exit ladder. I got my feet under me and almost broke both of my knees as the gravity-skates kicked on. Then it was as easy as remembering how to roller blade. And just like biking and fucking, you never forget how to roller blade. My feet started to skid along the air as I pushed with my legs. And just as I had expected, going up was hard. My thighs started to burn, but I gritted my teeth.

I just need to get into range.

There!

I fired my grappling hook straight up, then triggered the retraction. I shot up the line and came back to the battle. P90 was spinning in place, slashing wildly with her psi-sword to try and keep the remaining guard at bay. She was doing a good job, despite being outnumbered four to one by orcs on flying roller skates. But then I was there. I let go of my pistol at the apex of my ascent, which sent me flying up in a slight arc. Then I hit the air skating, leaving behind shimmering blue contrails as I skated right at the swirling melee.

"Foooooore!" I shouted.

And I shifted my psi-sword's shape. Cutting to bashing. Heat to concussion.

Blade to blade.

And I swept the legs out from underneath the Guard with the polearm with a perfect slapshot in a game of ice tennis. My ice tennis stick caught his calves and he flipped head over heels all the way down into the trash pit. As he fell, I grinned and then skated hard to the left, actually swinging my legs up so that I skimmed along the wall. I came back at the three remaining Guards, who were all spacing out to come at me. One had those energy tonfas. One of them had the cutlass. The last one had, last time I checked, two energy knives. Well, he was down to one thanks to P90's awesomeness.

I turned my skate into a skid, which meant I came to an immediate stop. Moments before I fell, I swung my ice tennis racket right at the face of the Guard with the single knife. He ducked – which meant that I was able to grab onto his shoulders as I dropped from the air. This brought him into a headward fall. I kicked off of him, got my skates under me, and skated away as the last two tried to come around to me. I deliberately bled off speed – giving my aching thighs some rest – and let the two skaters come closer and closer and-

And then I was at my dangling gun. I grabbed onto it and used the rope as a pivot. My momentum and the rope sent me flipping upwards. I lifted my knees to my chest as I swung above them like a Wrecking Ball. Which happened to be the Nightcore song that had just come on. The two orcs tried to correct, but I was already swinging back down. I let go of the rope, used my skates to skid to a stop, and then slashed out with my psi-sword as I fell.

Their gravity-blades went falling away, smoldering. The orcs fell.

And I started skated upwards, then zipped past P90. She held out her hand and I slapped it as I zipped by.

I skidded around and came to face Lord Darkeye. I beamed at him as I did a little jig, keeping my skates under me and moving them so that I didn't fall into the distant pit. Lord Darkeye was looking right at me. I swung my psi-sword in a slow, twisting arc. "So, what now, you big dumb eyeball? Gonna come out and fight me? Oh! Right, I forgot, Red Sonja ripped out your hovering organs with a knife. I remember reading that somewhere. Or being told it. Or something."

Lord Darkeye chuckled.

Then his legs retracted up into his armored cybernetic harness with a whirr and a click. Meanwhile, his back unfolded and his arms shifted into a pair of sleek wings. Then, with an explosion of noise and a belching cloud of noxious smoke, Lord Darkeye literally flew at me as if he was a rocket. I meeped and started to skate – but then he slammed into me, grille-like front to tummy. And now I knew why he had a freaking cow-catcher on his face. My back smashed into the wall and I grunted with the impact as his legs unfurled, hooking onto the wall below me, and his wings turned back into arms, planting against the wall above me. His single eye filled my vision.

"You were saying?" he asked.

Behind him, P90 was swinging, clearly getting ready to get onto his back.

With a contemptuous swivel, Darkeye swung one of his eyestalks around. His disintegration ray snicked out and slashed through the cable that P90 clung too. She fell, but as she fell, she fired plasma blasts into his back. Darkeye ignored them with the ease of a real serious Kill Boss.

I gritted my teeth, glaring at Darkeye.

Darkeye grinned behind his cybernetic mask. His teeth were very. Very. Very sharp.

"You don't seem to grasp just how pathetic you are to me, little wyrm," Darkeye rumbled, his fetid breath hazing into my face. "You are nothing. I could rip your mind apart. I could turn you to stone, then turn that stone into powder. The only thing keeping you alive is the fact that with you, I can access treasure you cannot begin to imagine. With that treasure, I will sculpt something new. A Beholder Empire. A kingdom of a thousand eyes, where every lesser creature will scrape and bow to me. Not to some...upstart dragon."

I had put my hands on the grille and was using my arms to keep my weight off the pressure of his cow-catcher. This let me catch my breath and get a word in edgewise. "Uh, Darkeye-"

"Silence!" He bellowed. "Shut up! Be quiet! You pathetic little shit. You have so much power, and yet I've watched you. You follow the orders of women. You leave your enemies alive. You do everything that everyone wants you to do. Do you know how...disgusting that is? You could rule entire solar system by yourself. With an army at your back, your flag could fly above every castle on every planet in the galaxy and the clouds beyond. But instead, you are happy being a...a...a...nitwit child!"

I rolled my eyes. "Darkeye, I-"

"I don't want to hear any goddamn excuses for this weakness, I-"

"There's a FREAKING SPACESHIP BEHIND YOU!" I shouted, pointing with one arm.

Darkeye flipped one of his eye-stalks around, clearly ready to sneer at me for what a bad liar I was.

Except there was a ship behind him.

It was right slap bang in the center of the bridge's forward view - a familiar, conical shape with a familiar front window with a pair of familiar pilots.

The Rusty Dragon hung in the Phlogiston and Kira and Cindi both waved at me. Then Kira lifted up one hand and gave Lord Darkeye what I believe was called 'the dwarven salute.' It was the hand gesture dwarves used to honk off elves. It involved using the middle finger and sticking out your tongue. Then Cindi triggered the spelljamming engines on the Rusty Dragon. And either the Doomship wasn't massive enough to trigger the safety precautions or, alternatively, someone had hacked the spelljamming helm to ignore said safety programming.

End result?

For 0.1 seconds, the Rusty Dragon was going a few bazillion miles a second. Or at least, it was accelerating to that speed. The nose hit the hardened adamant crystal of the bridge's view-port and the crystal shattered inwards as the Rusty Dragon flew at Lord Darkeye the same way he had flown at me. He bellowed in fear and triggered his rockets. He roared to the left – and then I was falling, plunging towards the trash pit.

Several things happened at once.

The Rusty Dragon hit the wall – but it was already turning. Cindi managed to merely scrape the side of the ship all the way down to the water, where the Rusty Dragon impacted with a huge sploosh of water and a spray of displaced trash.

The Phlogiston that was swirling into the bridge hit the thrust plume from Lord Darkeye.

I landed in the water with a bellyflop to end all belly flops.

Kaboom.

The explosion roared straight at me – and a muscular, pinkish arm reached from the water and dragged me underneath. I joined P90 and the Rusty Dragon underneath the water as the exploding superluminal gas smacked into the water. The heat flare and the colors dazzled me as I looked up through the waters. The flames cleared – and smoke roiled above me. I could, through my connection with the computer, see that the localized explosion had consumed itself. The bridge was toast. The corridor connecting to the bridge was toast. And the ship, responding on auto-pilot, had just torn open a hole in the Phlogiston.

We emerged.

***

Dr. Palladium had just gotten her spider-leg underneath the remote.

The entire ship shuddered, then rocked hard to the side.

The remote and the Beast vial went flying. Dr. Palladium's eyes widened and her mouth opened into a perfect, circular O of pure horror.

The vial flipped, flipped, flipped...and hit the ground. And the hardened diamondplast, designed to survive everything up to a direct hit from a railgun, remained perfectly intact. The remote, too, was unharmed. It was just in a slightly farther position from her leg. Slowly, Dr. Palladium breathed out a sigh of relief.

***

I gasped as my head surfaced from the water. A moment later, P90, Cindi and Kira emerged. Cindi squeaked and threw her arms around my shoulders, hugging me. We almost sank again, but I kept my legs pumping until Cindi was drawing back, laughing.

Kira beamed at me. "It worked! It worked, Han you sly dog, it worked!"

My eyes boggled. "You..."

"We attached ourselves to the Doomship's butt!" Cindi laughed. "Just like in Empire."

"Fucking brilliant!" I laughed, splashing excitedly. "Also, ugh, this water smells awful." I coughed and shook my head.

"It's better!" Kira said, grinning. "G282 is on the bridge of the Von Braun. She's been tracking the Rusty Dragon through the Phlogiston and guiding the Von Braun and the Rickenbacker in Subspace. They should be out right about..."

A wailing klaxon started to scream and the orcish version of 'red alert, battle stations' screamed form every PA. I grinned slightly.

"Now," Kira said, nodding. "Lets get our asses to the escape pods!"

I nodded.

***

The UNN Rickenbacker had a simple job in the upcoming space battle. It had been told to fire its railguns in a careful spread. They would have a restored connection to Brash's head computer, so they would easily be able to avoid him and his nearby vicinity with any railgun slugs. But they still needed to do as much damage to the Beholder Doomship as possible – a single Beholder could power a dozen focusing cannons that could turn their eye-beams into shipkilling weapons. Disintegration beams, mind control beams, even petrification beams could utterly devastate either the Rickenbacker or the Von Braun.

And so, when the Rickenbacker emerged from subspace, face to face with the Doomship, her gunnery computers took a tiny fraction of a fraction of a second to target. Aim.

Fire.

Railgun slugs, accelerated to 99.999% the speed of light by magically enhanced magnetic emitters, could either be frangible or armor piercing. Frangible had been decided against. Too chaotic. Too likely to accidentally kill the people they were here to save. And so, armor piercing was the game. Depleted uranium in a ferrous sabot, complete with mystical enchantments to let it pierce through armor rated against non-magical weapons. In sixty seconds, the Rickenbaker had put almost forty of them through the Doomship, stem to stern.

They turned orcs into red mist.

They ripped machine components into slurries of flash-melted slag.

They exploded out of the hull and sailed off into the vastness of space, leaving behind gaping holes that roared with venting atmosphere.

And a single one zipped through the medical bay.

It missed Dr. Palladium. It even missed the remote.

It clipped the vial containing the Beast. The vial spun like a top and glowing red spores scattered across the deck.

Dr. Palladium looked at the spores.

"Welp. That's a fair cop," she said moments before they began to grow exponentially. There was plenty of metal for them to use. And, soon, biomass. Tasty. Tasty. Biomass.

***

We emerged onto a catwalk that surrounded the pit. All the Praetorian Guards were there, their helmets off, their bodies sagging as they leaned against the wall. They looked like a sportsball team that had gotten quite badly beaten up. And singed. And burned slightly. But they were alive.

"Hi!" I said, waving at them.

They gaped at me as I walked past, careful to not step on any of their feet. Then we were at the door leading to an elevator that looked like it was designed to take people from the pit to the bridge. We all crammed in and, as per the demands of the laws of the universe, watched the number tick up as the elevator started to whirr smoothly up. The distant sounds of the space battle felt oddly muted – alarms, bangs, rumbles, and booms.

"So, uh, where's Alex?" Kira asked.

"She's dead," P90 said, grimly.

"She's not dead!" I said.

"She was fed to the Lich King," P90 said, her voice flat.

"Oh by the ancestors..." Kira whispered, sounding horrified.

"She's not dead!" I said, quickly. "Guys! I know my wife. My wife is way too rad to get punked out and killed by some stupid lich king."

Kira closed her eyes. Cindi gulped, then said: "I believe you, Brash."

I pumped my fist. "Two to two! That means the draconic tiebreaker rule is in effect and Alex is fine."

"Democracy isn't binding on reality," P90 snapped.

"Now whose being unAmerican?" I asked as the door opened and we stepped out into the blasted, smoldering ruin of the bridge. The floor had been donked. It had been burnt up and smashed and generally messed up. That meant huge chunks of the floor hadn't returned. The bits that had returned looked like they were ready to collapse into the pit below us. The open window had been sealed off by an emergency force field, which meant we didn't get sucked into space. And I could see that the space-battle was going full freaking tilt.

The UNN Von Braun was at a good distance, while the Rickenbacker was right up close. Right now, the Rickenbacker had turned its broadside and was firing laser beams into the side of the Doomship. The Von Braun had launched fighters, and those fighters were zooming around, doing strafing runs on the Doomship, blasting away at the turrets with machine guns and missiles. Lasers criss-crossed in the air and the whole thing looked...really damn pretty, actually.

"So, Brash, where are the escape pods?" Kira asked. "P90 said you hacked the map."

I tried to respond. Instead...my eyes were focused on something in space. It looked like a swirling mass of stars. Like someone had decided that all those white dots would start to spin around a single dark blotch. It was...beautiful. The stars swirled faster and faster and faster. Then I felt hands on my shoulders and arms, tugging me to my stop. I yelped and saw that P90 and Cindi were holding me fast. I realized I had taken a few steps forward.

"Okay! That's wiggy!" I said, nodding.

"What is it?" P90 asked.

"It's the gate...the gate to the Quantum Hoard!" Kira whispered. "We must have reached it before the ship dropped out of the Phlogiston!"

I blinked slowly. "S-should we go for it?"

"Ab. So. Lutely. Not," Kira snapped. We all turned around – even if P90 had to shove me a bit to get there. We all started towards the stairs heading out of the bridge. We got to the elevator. The door opened and I leaned over the edge, frowning slightly.

"So, we just need to..." I paused. "Anyone else see that?"

The elevator shaft was empty. Since, well, they had dropped the elevator while P90 and I were in it. But there was a glow at the bottom of the shaft. A reddish glow. My brow furrowed and I wished I had zoomy-eyes like I normally did. Instead, I just had to narrow my eyes and crane my head slightly. All my girls did the same.

"Did a fire start down there?" Cindi whispered.

"No," P90 said. "We'd be smelling smoke. And there'd be fire alarms."

"Well, actually, I turned a lot of the alarms off," I said, nodding. "When I was putting in the soundtrack." I beamed. "Let me just see what...what..." I trailed off, my eyes bugging. "Oh muffins."

"What?" Cindi asked.

"Uh, hey, remember those evil machine consuming, mind controlling spores that I was infected with?" I asked as I turned and started to double time it away from the door. P90 and Kira started after me and Cindi looked back over the edge of the elevator, then turned to run after me too.

"Yes!" Cindi exclaimed.

"I think they're eating the ship," I said as we came to the bridge. "So, we just need to, uh, escape. Fortunately, I can..." I paused. That required shapeshifting. "FUCK! I hate not having powers! I hate it! I am so freaking sick of not being able to use my sick rad powers to save people!" I kicked at the floor in fury – and my foot went right through.

"We just need to find some other option," Kira said. "Maybe we can get the Rusty Dragon working again?"

"I have an alternative proposal."

We all spun.

Lord Darkeye, his entire left side looking slightly singed, his eye reddish from exposure to smoke, stepped from the shadows. His digigrade mecha-feet made the floor under my feet rattle alarmingly. His eyes covered us and his arms were crossed over his cow-catcher.

P90 snapped up her pistol. Cindi pulled out her wand. Kira lifted her fists. For punching, I guess. And I summoned my psi-sword.

"Fighting seems like an exceptionally bad idea in this situation," Lord Darkeye growled. "Considering how I can vaporize half of you before your Brash can even get to me." He swung his eyes around to angle at Cindi – whose basically a level 1 commoner, so even a tiny bloop would totally fry her. I gulped and shifted ever so slightly, trying to cover her more.

"Okay," Kira said, her voice tight. "What's the plan?"

"I need Brash to access the Hoard. The Hoard, it is said, contains magical items along with its treasures. I'm sure that will be enough to help put paid to the Beast. The Beast threatens all of us, including those two human ships." He bobbed his eye at them in a Beholderish nod. "And if we waste time fighting, then the Beast will get us all. And so...get. In. My. Ship."