Idle Hands Pt. 04

"Very good," a deep, guttural, inhuman voice spoke from above her.

Dey groaned and lifted her head.

She saw fat. Thick rolls of fatty, brown-orange flesh strained between chitenous plates and armored skin. But mixed among the fat was hard muscle, creating a grotesquely distended and obese body builder crossed with some kind of alien armadillo. If she hadn't been so fucking confused and in pain, his species name would have come to mind almost immediately. She opened her mouth, closed it, then managed to get the word out.

"Yahaag?"

"Indeed, Captain Gallagher," the Yahaag said.

I'm sending a com to the others, Loki said, his voice tight.

"Your artificial intelligence has already failed," the Yahaag said.

The man with the shotgun grinned down at her. "Yeah. Those alien fucks are going to the bottom of the ocean." His foot stomped on the deck. "And you, you transie bitch, are going into the hold. Get her down there, Pod."

Kuz grunted. He grabbed Dey by the back of the neck, hauled her to her feet, and started down the corridor. Dey closed her eyes – her head a wash of pain, her body depowered, a dozen tiny cuts from the buckshot that she hadn't managed to reflect aching and stinging. And for the moment, she just let herself be led along into the hold.

Into the darkness.

###

Dey leaned her head back against the hold's wall as the boat rocked gently on the waves. She could hear the faint sounds of an electrical generator and the occasional stomping footsteps of the Yahaag. The human was small enough that he couldn't be heard through the deck. She frowned and closed her eyes.

[Okay. What do we got?]

A Faraday cage, Loki said, sounding bitter. But we have an ID. That asshole? His name is Paul. Paul Railey. Lance Corporal, United States Marine Corps. He was considered for specialist training, but got drummed out when he was caught promoting extremist antitranshumanist viewpoints and posting on a blacknet antitranshuman page with links to Stormfront and the New Celtic Cross.

[Holy shit.] Dey opened her eyes and sat up. [All that was in our memory storage?]

Well, to be fair, the big news from the USMC takes up less than a tenth of one of our memory cells, Loki said, sounding amused. Moors Law and all that. But wait, it gets better.

Dey groaned.

That Yahaag? He's not in corporate colors.

[Which means?]

He's either a rogue, meaning he's a member of the most capitalist species in the galaxy that has higher ideals... Dey shuddered at that thought. Humans whose ideals went higher than their personal interest were scary. The idea of a Yahaag, with a commensurately higher level of ideological fanaticism, made her skin prickle in a way that being in the cell of a noted bigot didn't. And that was saying something. Or, Loki continued. He's part of the Fiscal Regulatory Commission.

Dey pursed her lips.

The Yahaag Corporatocracy made humanity's long and extremely complex history with corporations look like a bunch of sunshine and daisies and workers rights. The FRC was supposed to be the only part of the Yahaag Corporatocracy that was interested with the future of the Yahaag race as a whole. They were a bit like the CIA crossed with M16 crossed with the fucking Masons, with a few shakes of the Illuminati and the MIB thrown in. Majestic 12 wished they had the FRC's control over their civilization.

"Great," Dey said. "Is there any way in which I am not fucked?"

The door leading to the cell opened. Kuz stepped into the room. Unlike the last time that Dey had seen him in a room like this, he was wearing pants. She frowned and crossed her arms over her chest as he sat down a MRE. He tugged the plastic strip that started off the chemical fireworks inside of the MRE that turned inedible bricks of various colors into (from the smell) a bunch of delicious fried chicken and mashed potatoes. He turned to walk out.

"What got you, Kuz?" she asked. "Please don't tell me it's because of the divorce."

Kuz's back tensed. He turned to face her. "There are two things that a Shockpod is born with, DeShane Gallagher. The urge to fight and the urge to mate."

Dey's brow furrowed. She grabbed onto the wall and shoved herself to her feet. As she did so, she noticed the light coming from overhead wasn't entirely from the ceiling lamps. There was a thin slit of a window that showed the vast sea and the white clouds that still hung overhead. She could see the fine mesh of the Faraday cage that cut off her communications. Course, calling it a Faraday cage was a bit grandiose, considering the fact it looked like a chicken coop.

"If you needed to get your dick wet, I think-"

"Not fuck!" Kuz said, holding up his hand, stopping her. "To mate. They have a female Shockpod, Dey. I..." He looked to the side. "I cannot. Ever since my tribe broke free from our Gods, we have grown but slowly, our females few and far between. Sometimes, they die, though we treasure them greatly." He sighed. "If I bring back this female to my tribe, I will have saved them to live another ten, fifteen generations."

Dey looked to the side. "And the alternative is..."

"To kill a god?" Kuz asked. "To betray my people? It breaks three of my hearts to do this, DeShane Gallagher. But I must."

Dey stuck her tongue out of the corner of her mouth. Her mind worked the angles. "You know what they're doing? Why they want me alive?"

"No," Kuz said. "But I did hear the human say that they were getting close to the Titanic-"

"Wait!" Dey held up her hands. "Wait just a fucking second. A goddamn ex-Marine and a member of the Yahaag Gestapo are working together to raid the fucking Titanic?"

"I do not know why," Kuz said, his great head hanging forward. "But I do heard them also speak of..." he paused. "The others."

A sudden rattle of gunfire – attenuated and thin thanks to the distance – drew Dey's eyes back to the window. She saw a sleek, short ranged boat sweeping around the Enterprise. A sudden glare of orange light billowed from the deck and she grabbed onto the wall, her eyes widening.

"No!" Dey said, unable to stop herself.

The Enterprise cracked in half as an explosion rose from the deck. The surviving chunks of the ship bobbed in the waves, burning and sending up a slurry of black smoke. The smaller boat whirred as it banked around and shot back towards the ship that Dey was on. She pushed herself from the wall, her eyes closed, her head ducked forward.

"I am sorry," Kuz said.

He turned to go.

"Kuz," she said, her voice soft. "When you have a moment...there's a historical documentary I want you to watch."

Kuz grunted – standing in the doorway, he looked like a fridge shaped slab of muscle and tension. His hands were on the door frame, and they clenched tightly enough to make the plastic trim creak ominously.

"Historical documentary," he said, his voice hollow.

"Yes," she said. What was the name? It was one of those old actors, who had three names. She racked her brain for it. The first name that sprang to her mouth, though, made Loki snort and cut her off. He whispered the right name in her ear. She blushed. "Uh, search for Richard Dean Anderson's documentary about the air force."

"I...see." Kuz stepped out.

This plan is insane, Loki said, quietly.

[Hey,] Dey said, her stomach filled with ice. [It's the best chance we have.] She looked back at the burning wreckage of her ship. She bit her lip slightly.

Who wants to bet they survived?

[Loki!] Her brow furrowed.

The last civilians you hooked up with survived worse.

Dey opened her mouth. Closed it.

He had a point.

###

Color.

Darkness.

Light.

Xee's eyes opened slowly and she shook her head from side to side. Something was wrapped around her trunk and her belly and her shoulders and her breasts. She blinked, then looked down at her chest and she saw...

Tentacles?

A strange silver curtain rippled overhead. She had never seen anything like it. She was floating through some kind of fluid medium that- then all the memories flashed back into her. She was on Earth. They had liquid ice on Earth. They had great vast oceans of liquid ice on the Earth. And there had been that other ship on the ocean, coming towards them. She had seen the weapon. Then...

She had hit her head.

And then she was down here.

"Xee? Xee?"

The voice that her suit picked up and translated was felt all through her body. It made her buzz and she resisted the urge to moan – the vibrations set off delicious harmonics in her sensitive places. She shook her head and knew that her facial emoticon had shifted to show her blush. She clicked her mandibles, then started speaking, trusting the suit to translate and emit the sounds in a way that Skylar could understand it.

"I'm okay! What happened?"

"We got fucking whacked," Sky said, sounding bitter. "And my submarine is over there, with the pirates."

"Well, hey, my suit can produce atmosphere from this fluid!" Xee said. "And you breathe it naturally with your gills. So long as they don't know that we're down here, we are fine!"

A hissing, fizzling tube with a glowing top drifted down, right about at her eye level.

Now Xee understood that oddly cynical human way of looking at the world, which only cropped up in the most experimental of Huntress fiction, like the words of Rech'Ta'Kra and her Endlessly Repeating Failure arc. But when you had a world like this, where people dropped bombs on other people who were already sinking in the ocean, why would you not also assume that everything that could go wrong would go wrong?

All this crossed through Xee's mind – buzzing along nerves that were more similar to superconductors than the squishy gray matter of human brains – before the bomb even reached her breast-line.

Then she knew what she had to do.

She pushed every iota of strength through her body and sent the bomb flipping away from her, spinning through the water. It turned out, flinging objects with warp fields was a great deal easier while you were working with a thick, easily compressed medium like wa-

The bomb went off.

The downside of easily compressed mediums showed up a moment later. The shockwave slammed into her and Skylar, sending them tumbling backwards. Pain exploded through Xee's body, like she had been rung like an ice bell. She screamed inside of her suit and Sky clung to her tightly.

How had they dropped that bomb right on us!? The thought wailed through Xee's brain. They were easily a hundred feet down. She had seen the ocean from the surface, there was no way they could be easily seen. Fortunately, she knew that they had been blown away from their initial sinking point, right? They'd have to be throwing blind now. Right? But when Xee looked up, her suit sensors detected faint motion and predicted that the boat was right over head.

Another bomb was being readied, fuse measured, lit. She saw it starting to drift down towards them, fizzling and hissing as they sank. But it sank faster, its body aquadynamic and weighted.

"It's like they can track us," Sky whimpered.

Xee shook her head slowly. "But, but, but-" She shook her head faster now. "That's impossible! They'd have to be able to detect radio waves to do that!"

Sky was silent.

"Since, my suit emits radio waves by downshifting the thermal radiation from my cooling systems," Xee explained.

"Shut it off!" Sky screeched.

Xee gulped. The thermal insulation in her suit was rated to keep her alive in the case of a power outage for an hour. The oceans were warm, but they got colder the further down you went. They were sinking fast. The bomb was getting closer. She sent the mental key-word to her suits interlinked computers, then countermanded it. An idea sprang to her head. They continued to float down and she lifted up her palm – sending a subtle pulse of warp energy along her fingertips. The compressed water buffetted the bomb upwards.

It exploded. They were once more buffeted about by the shockwave.

But as they rolled and tumbled, Xee sent the signal.

###

Charlie sighed. "Damn shame."

"Huh?" Robbie asked, looking at him. The drone was still holding the third explosive.

'The radio transmissions cut out. That suit's toast," Charlie said. He scowled. "That fucking xeno better pay us the same we'd have gotten by selling that Huntress suit."

Robbie bobbed his head and tossed his bomb back down. The merc on the engine took hold of the rudder and soon the whole gang was roaring towards the Yahaag's ship. The wind in Charlie's face felt fresh and new. His ancestors, back in merry old England, had sent out ships that had sailed the seas and built an empire. He could see a tiny fraction of that empire in his palms already. The Yahaag were all rich. Everyone knew it. He'd get the dosh for whacking the alien and the squid. He grinned at the thought.

They came up alongside the other ship. The door flung open and Charlie turned to face it.

The railgun tore him into small red chunks. The other mercs went flying backwards, their bodies ripped apart by bullets accelerated with magnetic rails. Robbie went down last, his plastic and metal body turned into so much scrap. The boat started to sink, the rubber hull holed three dozen times by the accelerated chunks of metal.

Kuz lowered the railgun that Paul had given him.

"Much cheaper," Paul said, grinning and slapping Kuz on the shoulder.

With that, the ship turned and started to putter towards the east.

###

The sun was dipping towards the horizon.

"Will anyone come to pick us up?" Xee asked, her arm wrapped around one of the few remaining pieces of the Enterprise. Skylar floated next to her, his tentacles spread as wide as they could. He sighed softly.

"I don't know," he said. "We need to wait until they're far enough away that your suit doesn't get them running right back to riddle us full of holes."

He spoke carefully, his beak clicking and clacking in the air as his translation bracelet bobbed around his midsection. If he spoke while it was too submerged, Xee wouldn't be able to hear him with her head above water. The bracelet wasn't extremely intelligent, it was having a hard time keeping up with the changing mediums as it was.

"Do you hear that?" Xee asked.

Sky paused, then thrashed his tentacles. He bobbed upwards in the water and clenched his hearing diaphragm, trying to draw it as tight as it could. But once he did so, he could hear the low, whining noise in the air. His eyes widened and he thrashed his tentacles around as he saw a dart-like black shape flying down from the sky. It shot towards them, then stopped so suddenly that it had to be using some hard-core DV emitters to keep the crew from being splattered. The water bowed under it, parting like it was had Moses strapped to the grill like a hood ornament.

The craft turned to the side and opened up, revealing a quartet of burly looking men and women in USMC gear, aiming fluxguns at the duo.

IN the middle of them was a man in a sleek black body suit, a rifle slung over his shoulder. But what really drew Sky's attention was the tiny gridlike patterns around his eyes – so fine that only a squid's eyes could pick them up at this distance. They were the same pattern that Dey had.

"So," Major Moon Two, DeShane Gallagher's commanding officer, said. "What exactly is going on here?"

TO BE CONTINUED