Idle Hands Pt. 01

"Girlfriend, if you can believe it," Sky said. When she opened her eyes, she saw him wringing out his tentacles. "I've always had a thing for human girls, and she -- well, we hit it off, and only after I touched her back did, uh..." He coughed. "Well, it triggered the same reaction. But holy shit, she wasn't strong like you."

Dey tried to smile. It came out jagged. "I do got guns."

"She told me about it when she was ready. And, hey, we're not even friends," Sky said, pushing himself to the tips of his tentacles. Dey wondered if it hurt him to do that -- or if he just liked demonstrating his physical prowess. "We're business partners. But I'm also, you know, not an asshole. So, like, if you want to talk...ever? You can just say so."

Dey laughed. "It was..." she paused.

You don't have to, Loki said, quietly.

Dey clenched her jaw. [Yeah, I don't have to. But you know what? Fuck this trigger, fuck Mordin, and fuck him controlling my fucking life.]

That's the...spirit? Loki sounded bemused. His arms enfolded her -- virtual simulations and far more real than any lover caressing her had ever been for Dey. Loki was always with her, always there. For some people, that'd have driven them utterly insane.

But they don't let those people become Devil Troopers.

"I was raped," Dey said, the words blunt. "By an alien. He also had tentacles. But he wasn't a Squid."

Sky nodded.

"And then I ripped him apart with my bare hands," Dey said. "Loki helped."

Sky paused.

"So, that's one of those things that...uh...is awesome in theory, but now I am suddenly very nervous," Sky said, sounding like he was trying to joke but wasn't entirely sure he had managed it. Dey grinned, feeling a slight weight slipping off her shoulders. She sighed. "Now, I'm going to charge up my implants and say hi to a civilian submarine."

She grabbed a mouth breather from the supply locker, slipped it into her mouth, plugged her K9s into the charging port. They were military grade batteries, but at the end of the day, all batteries worked on the same general principle: The charging port literally just used the solar energy to run an electrical engine that could wind the cable inside of the K9 to maximum tautness. In some way, knowing that she was using technology that was in part older than everything else on the boat and using it to do the closest thing humanity had gotten to magic made Dey feel...happy.

Dey grinned at Sky. He waved a single tentacle in her a salute.

"Sure you can reach them by swimming?" he asked. "I mean, I know you're a scary badass special forces, but-"

"Whoever said I was going to swim?" Dey asked.

Loki activated the DV generators implanted on her back. Electrical energy surged through them and space warped -- making the distance between her and the sub following them vastly shorter. It felt a bit like stepping through a thick curtain, as the atmosphere between the two of them was compressed as well. Then Dey was through and dropping into the water. She arrowed down and fired off her grapnel. The grapnel was slowed down by water -- but less than one might expect, due to its arrow-like design. It thudded into the side of the submarine as Loki painted Dey's vision in blurry false-colors. He was basing the image off the sonar signal from the Enterprise and the Cthulhu, augmenting Dey's vision.

She slapped her palm against the submarine.

And that was easy, Loki said, laughing as he sliced through the firewall on the submarine. Most things were networked. Civilian things, at least. With a military sub, they'd have had to find an access port.

The submarine surfaced a moment later, Dey already standing up as water sluiced off her body. She yanked the breather out of her mouth, blinking salt water from her eyes as the hatch sprang open. A pair of hands thrust from it and one of the sailors from the red team stuck their head from the hatch. He was one of the Cubans, Dey thought.

"Sorry, senorita!" he said, laughing. "I, ah, didn't know you were so, ah..." he coughed. "Sorry."

Dey crossed her arms over her chest. "Let me guess...you're after the Titanic 2...too." She paused, wondering if there was a better way to phrase that.

"Whaaat?" he said, with an exaggerated look of innocence.

"How many others?" Dey asked, leaning forward to look down at him. Looking past him, she saw that the inside of the civilian submarine had been filled with DV storage lockers. He was packed with enough gear to last him as long as his batteries wore out. And considering he had an RTG packed back there, it was going to be a very long time.

"No one! This is a solo boat, senorita!"

"No, how many other people are also going for the T2?"

He looked uncertain.

Then, smiling. "Six other boats, senorita. Seems Penny checked the source El Calamar was spitting about, and she got convinced. And, well, hey..." He shrugged. "Why not?"

Dey laughed. "It's a race, then?"

"Si." He nodded.

Dey looked at the sky. Then she held out her hand.

"It's a race," she said, shaking his hand. "Send a ping to everyone else. Lets set up some ground rules..."

###

"Huh," Paul said.

"Hmm?"

The Yahaag spoke remarkably good English. He also filled half the heavily modified personal yatch that Paul had borrowed quietly from the New Miami docks some months before with his bulk. The Yahaag were polar opposites of the Shockpods they had designed. Desert creatures, covered with armor plating and thick fatty folds that stored water as greedily as could be. According to rumor, they had once been svelt creatures. But moving en mass off a desert world and to worlds rich with water and building space stations on comets and drinking their fill, their desperate, never ending fill...it had made them into a race of obscenely bloated creatures.

It hadn't made them any less deadly.

"Oh, just," Paul said, tapping the screen. "It seems the transie bitch thinks this is all fun and games."

The Yahaag looked at him with those four slitted eyes.

"Why do you always refer to her as that?"

"She's a transhuman augment," Paul said, shrugging. "She, and the rest of the Devil Troops..." He spat the words. "They take the human form and they fuck it out of commission. They stick inhuman AIs in their brains and we're supposed to fucking look up to them?" He shook his head. "Fuck no. Fuck that."

The Yahaag inclined its head.

"Well," Paul said. He turned on the laser com to one of the tiny chunks of debris that floated in Earth orbit. There were entire companies who were built around moving and collecting space trash, to keep the space lanes free. But there were literally millions of humans traveling from Earth to the greater galaxy every single day. They'd never run out of trash, and they'd never find the tiny, fist sized com-sats that Paul had made sure would be orbiting before the plan started.

Once he got a message linked in, the screen filled.

Ex-Gunnery Sergeant Thomas DuBois scarred face looked back at Paul.

"What's up?" he asked.

Paul grinned.

"You'll never guess whose coming to visit, Gunny."

TO BE CONTINUED