To Walk the Constellations Pt. 14

Mal slapped his feet on the dash, gripping it so he could drag himself to a slightly more upright seated position. "We win, Venn. And that's even before you take into account the torpedo subsystem. I've been digging around, did you know the probe socket is actually multipurpose? I've been thinking, if I dig up the old schematics for an X-ray laser emitter and socket it in, then we'll have..." He waved his hand, like he expected me to finish the sentence. I chewed my lip.

"Uh...shooty probes?"

"Drones," Rossck said, walking past the front door of Mal's cabin. He was shirtless and had a simulated buck deer over his shoulder. Blood smeared on his hands and his chest and he walked with a causal, effortless strength, his tail snapping from side to side. He looked right at me as he stepped past the view of the door. As he left, I ducked my head forward, not even remembering to point out that we had frigging simulated banquets, he didn't have to go hunting.

God. Had to admit.

Got me kind of...uh...

Uhhh.

Of the three, Techne settled in slowest. She paced a lot. Grumble sometimes. Kicked at rocks. I pinned her down after we did the dive into the Primary and emerged, the Tiamat II's ice armor sheeted away and her hull scorched by the time inside of the heart of a star. Her slipdrive meant we had jumped at least ten systems in a go, and Mal and Rossck were both focused on seeing what they could fix and fiddle with while still in the simstim. Techne, meanwhile, sat on a rock and glowered at the lake we'd put near the cabins. Well. That I had put near the cabins.

I walked up behind her, my hands clasped behind my back. "Everything okay, Techne?"

"Yeah," she said. Then. "No."

"Is it the ship?" I asked.

"Yeah," she said. Then, again. "No. I mean. Kind of. Listen, Venn, I didn't become a sundiver because I liked parks. I like spaceships. I like walking around inside their guts and fixing shit with my hands, not teleoperated drones." Her fingers clenched, but I noticed that she was still glaring out at the lake. Her hands slid along her chrome thighs and she didn't meet my eyes as I walked up and set my butt down beside her on the rock. My thigh and her brushed, and she withdrew.

"Okay, and what's the real real reason?" I asked. "Cause, I could fucking sim a ship for you. Fuck, I could patch you into a drone and-"

Techne shook her head.

"What?" I scowled at her. "Are you jealous of my powers?"

"No!" Techne snapped, glaring at me. But I could see she was lying about something.

"Scared?" I asked.

"No," Techne said again, her voice growing growly and low. She pushed herself off the rock and stood, starting to pace away from me. But I got the feeling that either or maybe both of those no's might have been like her yeahs. Reversed and flipped upside down. I stood up and followed after her.

"What is it, then?" I asked. "You jumped the whole Chain to get me, to rescue me and...and now you're not able to say a straight thing to my face?" I grabbed her shoulder. Techne spun.

"I'm jealous of Thale!" she snapped.

I blinked at her.

THICK

"Cause...of Adoran?" I asked, my brow furrowing.

Techne looked up to the heavens. "Jesus Christ, Venn!" she said. "I've barely seen the blond bastard. You cannot be this densely heterosexual, can you?" She asked.

"Course not!" I said, defensively. "I'm not even...I..." I blinked at her.

Oh.

Oh.

"Oh," I said.

Techne shook her head and stomped off.

UHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

It took me a hard reboot -- a good five seconds -- before my brain started working again. I hurried after Techne and marveled at this. For years back on Stumble, Techne had been the mysterious and alluring girl in the second story of Miss Giddy's House of Ill Repute and Licentiousness. I'd sometimes imagined being with her. On the nights where men were exceptionally coarse and crude and ugly and hairy. But now it felt like someone had dropped a solid chunk of Stuff that Worked in my hands...after I'd gotten a damned river of mana and never needed to worry about portions or credits again in my entire frigging life.

I had Thale. I had Adoran, even.

But...

I hurried after Techne. "Wait, wait!" I said.

"What?" Techne asked, turning to face me. She saw my flushed face and sighed. "I'm not mad at you, Venn. I'm mad at myself. I'm, what, a century, two?" She shook her head. "I'm a professional, I shouldn't be this stupid."

I flushed. "What, falling head over heels for some eighteen year old Stumble-"

She snorted. "No, getting jealous," she said, quietly. "You're clearly poly enough for Thale and Adoran. If you...if we are gonna work, then the fastest way for me to kill it is jealousy and anger." She put her hand to her face, rubbing it. "And I'm fucking it up by...storming off, fuck. Fuck. I'm sorry."

I sighed, slightly. "I get the impulse, ya know?"

"What, running?" Techne asked. Her eyes were glimmering with whatever she used for tears. Her lips skinned back, showing teeth. It was an almost pained expression.

"Yeah," I said, grinning back at her. Techne's smile grew less pained. I gulped. My stomach felt full of butterflies and I half wanted to step back and let them out with dumb words. But...I wasn't a virgin anymore. Was I? I slid an arm around Techne's neck and drew her in close and planted a soft, warm kiss right on her mouth.

KISSING CHROME

Kissing Techne had a bite to it. Her lips were soft rubber, and her body wasn't yielding like Thale's was -- and Thale was essentially made of hardened muscle and scar. I was perpetually aware of the fact that Techne wasn't your average human. Of course, that just made it more sweeter. When our tongues met, I could feel the tiny articulations worked into her, and they nipped playfully against my tongue as she reached back and cupped my ass. Her fingers gripped me and she held me closer still. Soon, my lungs burned.

Simulated kissing.

Real heart hammer.

I drew my mouth back and Teche breathed out. She didn't need it, but her body was built to do it -- even here. Even in a fake world. "Damn, girl," she whispered. "You've practiced that."

I grinned shyly at her. "Thanks," I said. "I, uh...I've kissed, uh, Thale a lot. And Adoran some. Well. Um. Adoran's, uh, monster body."

"Monster body?" Techne whispered.

"Uhhh-"

Techne's grip grew tighter and she drew me in closer and her voice was a quiet, playful growl. "Oh, you're not getting away without telling me what that is!" Her eyes sparkled. "Monster body. Tell me about your monster himbo."

"What the flying fuck is a himbo!?" I asked.

She chuckled, quietly. "I'll explain later. Tell."

I giggled, a little shy and a little quiet, and then focused. I tried to reconstruct exactly what Adoran had looked like -- the form that my subconscious had constructed for Adoran. The sleek, greyhound body. The long head. The sixform eyes. The furred body. The long, spined tail. The sharp talons and teeth. Teche whistled, slowly. "Way better than the blond boy," she murmured. "Think you can convince him to go in for body modding?"

I elbowed her.

"Still," she said. "A little tame, all things considered.

I snortspluttered.

"I'm serious!" Techne said. "I've been with men and women that don't even have spines. Or DNA." She grinned. "Human is a broad term these days, and you haven't really been with a lover until you've been with a polypsporine in the nerve oceans of Daedalus."

My cheeks flushed and I ducked my head forward. "J-Jesus..."

Techne shook her head and let out a slow sigh. "Course, now, I'm remembering how much fucking younger you are than me," she muttered. "Great."

I elbowed her again. "I'm not that much younger," I said.

"You're eighteen and I'm nearly two centuries," Techne said. "More, actually, I kinda lose track."

I blushed. "Well..." I kicked at the floor. "We can see where we go? There's...no rush. Right?"

Techne smiled at me. "Yeah."

GOING

The rush to Eudaimonia skipped us a lot of the Chain.

The Tiamat II let us skip even more. But it didn't mean we didn't need to stop from time to time. When I dreamed, I dreamed of Thale, and we didn't speak of what separated us. He held me and I held him and we tried to not think of the stars between us.

But when I was awake, I started to walk beneath alien skies once more.

On Diaphorus, Mal and I drove a sheetsled across the vast, artificial glacier that capped the still glowing nuclear reactors on the northern continents, chased each step of the way by whip-spiders and drones sent out by the Warren Kings. I sheered off the sense whips of a dozen spiders before we finally reached where the Tiamat II had landed for reicing, where Rossck manned the X-ray lasers. They scythed across the glacier, sending up shooting gouts of flash vaped ice and snow, more alarming and shocking than actually deadly. The Warren Kings tried to crash the ice beneath us, but we took off with a roar of RCS thrusters and a knife narrow thread of antimatter exhaust.

In the fractured sky of Kataclyzm, we wove through the thriving shard-cities that orbited around the glowing mantle and cherry red core of the dead world. The chatter of a thousand different tongues swept over our ship and we marveled at the continent sized adverts for new sundiver components and advanced polymers spun out by the Kultos, the alchemists of the polar fortress. Here, we had to evade Hegemonic bounty hunters by stealthing our ship, quieting our emissions, and floating among rock and rubble, while the four of us went crazy without the sim-stim to escape into. In the end, the high speed orbital battle with a Hegemonic skiff was a relief, even if we nearly burned out the clavegun ammo replicators shooting down a dumbfire torpedo before it smashed into a shard-city, killing millions.

In Shutter, we spent two weeks waiting out the orbital dance between Shutter's primary, her immense supergiant secondary, and her pulsar tertiary, waiting for the one week where the supergiant would cast his massive shadow across the inner system and we could dart into the primary for our next jump without being fried.

During those two weeks, Techne and I had two dates. The first was in the simstim, with a fanciful banquet and a fireside chat that let us both so tongue tied and stupid silly that I almost want to bash my face through a bulkhead to even think about it. The second was in Skultrope, the capped chasm in the tidally locked world of Tropethor, the only nominally habitable world of the Chain. There, we walked down the narrow streets, past tall, skinny, gaunt humans with four arms and black eyes, who offered us goods with wordless crooning and their sign-speak, translated by a retired sundiver we had hired as a guide.

That date was much better. We kissed on the elevator rising up out of Skultrope, illuminated by the killing light of the pulsar, protected by a ten meter thick chunk of transparent alloy and an EM shield powered by the core of the planet.

In Biohell, I drank from the wrong cup and woke up in the guts of the Stumbleworm, a vast city-sucking monster that had been burrowing beneath the Brain Sea for centuries, swallowing up entire towns with its feeder tendrils. Cutting my way through it had ruined my boots, stained my hair pink for a week, and got me to the brain stem, where a single half-mad automaton had faced off against me with a rapier of jacketed probability fields, which danced between universes with every swing -- a feature that meant that half the solid hits that he scored left me feeling only faintly disorientated rather than, ya know, dead.

Between each world, there were the dead systems. The crashes. The screaming, voidlike silences.

And finally...we made it.

THE GUARD

"Oh we're hosed," Rossck muttered.

The four of us were clustered in a simulation of the Tiamat I's bridge, looking at the console. We were in the final link in the Chain before We Made It -- the third system. The third place that humanity had ever colonized, the third place that the children of Home had seen. It felt like it should have been more impressive. But as it was, we came to find a system of rubble and howling silence -- the only worlds that were here had been scoured clean by centuries of hard radiation, their atmospheres boiled away and their oceans turned to so much ice.

I had no idea what had done that to these worlds.

Natural events?

War?

Some...fucked up experiment?

I had no idea. And honestly, I was more focused on the sixteen Worldkillers in orbit around the primary.

We'd come out, as we usually did, tumbling and spinning and confused. The only thing that saved us was the fact we were in a Hegemonic stealth ship. The detection pinged back and their IFF chimed the right way. So, we weren't obliterated by a shower of antimatter missiles...but then, by the time we started to right ourselves and place ourselves in the system with a parallaxing sweep of all the tiny dots, the Hegemonic fleet had started to chatter to one another -- audible to my talent.

They knew we weren't supposed to be here.

"I thought your boyfriend was supposed to be running the Hegemony by now," Rossck muttered.

"It hasn't exactly been that simple," I said, frowning. Then I hissed and Mal yelped -- the console he was manning flared with dozens of red telltales.

"Missile lock!"

"How many?" Techne asked.

"Six thousand," Mal said.

"Jesus Christ, we're a single corvette!" Rossck said, then glanced at me. I thrust out my hand -- and felt the missiles arcing towards us -- jetting forward with all their reaction mass aglow and their furiously simple minds focused on a single thing. They weren't even antimatter warheads. They were dirt simple flack warheads, designed to go real fast, blow up in our general direction, and shred us with sheer kinetics. And at the speed they were going and the numbers we were looking at...

I tried to steer a few into one another. Fifty eight smashed together, mangling and grinding and crushing themselves. But then my mind screamed out in agony. Something else slammed into me. I clutched at my temples and gritted my teeth. "Fuckery!"

"What is it?" Techne asked.

"Evasive maneuvers," Mal said. "Programming the river of mana to start cranking out antimissiles." He tapped a few buttons. "Antimissiles away!"

I shook my head. "There's a Liminal Knight on that fleet."

"Greaaaaat!" Rossck muttered. The antimissiles on the screen intercepted the front waves of the incoming flack missiles. A lot vanished. But a lot from a fuckton still left a fuckton. We had flipped around and began to accelerate away -- shooting as far and as fast as we could. But missiles always won in the fight between accelerations, even with our advantage of flying in a soup of acceleration gel and grav-fields. But each second we bought ourselves bought the missile fabricator time to spit out another four antimissiles.

I tried to brush into the antimissile comptech. It was like hitting a wall.

"Who the fuck is this guy?" I growled. I thrust myself at the missiles again, then again.

Missiles drew closer.

I bashed my mental shoulder against the code. Then, skittering to the side, I slammed a mental shiv into somewhere else. I'd touched Worldkiller programming before. I had found the Victrix Imperiata's targeting computers. I found the computers in these Worldkillers and I triggered their AMS systems. In about fifteen seconds, hundred of antimissile lasers burned out hundreds of enemy flack missiles.

I snapped out of the connection, blood dripping from my nose. "Fuck you!" I snarled.

"Only twelve missiles left!" Mal said, his fingers dancing along the console. "Antimissiles and-"

The whole ship shuddered and shook so hard that I felt it in the simstim, the induction helmet not able to quiet down the strain our bodies were smashed into. Aches flared across my body, but then faded away into nothingness. Then the simstim winked out. We floated in blackness, the mechanical pumps filling the small, narrow cockpit with a gurgling, whirring, clunking sound. Soon, we were breathing with our lungs and vomiting out the acceleration fluid that was still in our guts. Mal coughed and wheezed as he sat up, the interior lights winking on.

"Okay," he said, raspily. "We might all die."

"What happened?" Rossck growled, yanking the tube off his thigh socket. He kicked his leg up into the air, flexing his toes to get his claws to snick out. "Did you fake our death with a fabbed explosive and wreckage?"

"Yes," Mal said.

"So, you literally used the oldest fucking trick in the book on a fleet of Hegemonic worldkillers?" Rossck growled. "A fleet that has a Liminal Knight onboard?"

I had gotten to my feet. I saw that Mal was blinking and looking a bit like he'd been whacked in the side of the head by a large club.

"Fuck," he hissed.

GLOATING

"Fuck this..." I growled, glaring at the wall. My talent grabbed and hooked onto the radio transmitter in our ship. Flicking it on, I spoke again. "Hey! Whoever is out there, you know who I am, huh? Lady Venn of Stumble. I'm the bad bitch who cut your Emperor completely in half with a monomolecular wire and, ya know what? I got horny doing it."

"Venn, what the fuck are you doing?" Techne whispered.

"So, you know, you could fire another six thousand flack missiles my ass. But without a body, who are you going to crucify on trans-planetary holovid? Who are you going to march up to your Lord Drak in chains? Huh? So, if you really want me...come and fucking take me, Knight to Knight, you fucking coward."

Silence.

Mal fumbled around in the bridge until he found the real world computer shunt that Rossck had set up for when they weren't in the simstim. He tapped at it, then whistled. "Okay," he said. "You've gotten more areospace fighters coming towards us than at the Battle of Gem. Good job, Venn. What's step two of the plan?"

"I'm improvising," I whispered.

"Goodie," Techne said.

It took an hour for the oncoming Hegemonic forces to match our orbit. The fighters were all escorting a single shuttle. The shuttle was nearly the same size as our corvette -- meaning it was packed enough a platoon of shocktroopers, or two if they had stripped down to subtech armor and guns. Which, considering I was a Liminal Knight, would make a huge amount of sense. But they didn't come close, not before the fighters carefully targeted our weapon blisters and slowly, carefully lasered them off at range with their com-lasers. The sounds that our hull made -- groaning and creaking -- as heat stress rippled through it made me wince.

Once we were toothless, save for our torpedo tubes (which they couldn't easily laser into bubbling slag), the shuttle approached.

"So, they're total fucking cowards, good to know," I said, trying to cover my nerves.

The clunk and groan and hiss of the airlocks connecting made my teeth ache. Techne and Rossck and Mal all hurried to stand between me and the airlock. I scowled and started to shove at them when the airlock door exploded inwards with a roar and a flash. My head reeled and my friends cried out in alarm -- and then, stepping through the smoke, came a heavy, digitigrade figure. A swirling cape caused the smoke to ripple and a glowing, whirring axe made of holographic light and suspended mono-molecular wire filled my gaze.