Cosmic Savior: (A Space Opera Adventure) (Interstellar Gunrunner Book 3), page 26
He’d twisted the high priestess’ face into a devilish smile.
“See you on the other side, human,” he called. “Don’t forget about those drinks.”
If I had to use one word to describe my epic jaunt back to Stream Dancer amid a universal fate-deciding battle, it would be awkward. See, I wasn’t running for my life. I wasn’t moving at all. I was bouncing around the interior of a bloated, fast-moving parasite that these people evidently used as transportation.
My escort team assured me that we were not only in the prized thoroughbred of the lot, but also in its luxurious third stomach compartment. This did not do much to ease my discomfort. It was still a bumpy, noxious ride plagued by gurgling and various caustic fluids under my feet.
I wish I had more to describe about this moment, I really do, but there is not much to tell. The bone-people warriors and I sat on our makeshift benches, jostling around as we raced through the World Serpent’s mouth. This may sound absolutely bonkers, and it is. But what can I say? I’m not the creator of the universe, just an occasionally regretful inhabitant.
The absurdity of the trip was heightened by the presence of my still unconscious crew members, who were strapped upright in their “seats” and snoozing away. When pressed, nobody seemed willing or able to tell me when—or if—they might wake up. Charming, right?
But eventually, mercifully, we arrived at the World Serpent’s designated “landing strip.” I put this in quotations because any civilized person would probably term this landing strip a tongue. It stretched out before us like a vast, pinkish plain, incessantly rolling like an ocean of muscle. Which it was.
The bone-peoples’ warriors hastily offloaded my crew, slung them over their shoulders, and led me toward the mound in the distance. Stream Dancer, I soon realized. The vessel was eclipsed by the massive teeth surrounding it.
Even this sight, however, was mundane compared to the activity above and ahead of me. Squadrons of bone-people ships detached from the roof of the creature’s mouth like cave bats, streaming out toward the newborn battle. There had to be hundreds, if not millions of gunships stored up around the serpent’s gumline.
Far ahead, these pilots clashed with the Hegemony’s best and brightest. Automated flagship turrets filled the Untraversed with streams of tracer fire. Thermobaric warheads detonated in blinding flashes. Kinetic shields shimmered like soap bubbles. This was not only one of the brightest, largest battles I’d witnessed—it was among the loudest.
Consider this: most space engagements are completely silent. There’s no atmosphere, so no medium in which for sound to be generated or travel. Not so in the Untraversed. It was more liquid than vacuum, and as such, a perfect conduit for waves of every kind. I heard every blast, every screeching engine, every concussive whoomp that the hydrogen shells had to offer. And moreover, I felt them in my bones.
But as we came within a hundred meters of the ship, I lost focus on the battle. My lungs ached from the sprint through those saliva-riddled wetlands, and all I could think about was getting the hell out.
“Fire up the engines,” I wheezed into my transmitter, praying Umzuma would receive the short-range broadcast.
Shockingly, it worked. The underside engines flared to life with cones of blue-white fire.
Not that it mattered, really. Stream Dancer was anchored to the tongue by several squirming parasites, each latching onto its hull with striated tentacles. On account of my initial blindfolding, I hadn’t noticed them on the way in. Probably for the best. The things were easily four times my size, and packing four times as many eyes, too. Some docking mechanism, huh?
Once we’d collectively dashed up and into the ship’s staging bay, the bone-people—in a not-unexpected display of TLC—proceeded to dump my crew members on the same floor grid, creating a fleshy heap.
I cocked a brow as the supersonic blasts grew nearer. “You fellas mind moving them inside? Or am I—”
They halted my question by offering a unified salute, an unintelligible mantra, and, finally, a swift retreat back the way they’d come. A curt goodbye, but perhaps warranted in our situation. Even as I watched them race over the tongue’s gloopy floodplains, they were backlit by constant flashes of light, all of which I recognized far too well: pale fission clusters, greenish sky-splitter rounds, red-and-violet slag streams.
A beautiful sight, to those uninitiated in interstellar wars. Even more beautiful to those who funded and supplied those wars. But not to this arms dealer. Each burst of color represented not only another bundle of lives snuffed out, but another bundle of lives I’d personally played a role in ending. Some of those weapons had been engineered by yours truly. To this day, I’d bet my last dollar that many of the devices on those flagships had, in fact, been produced in one of my assembly lines.
No time to sit and sulk on that, however. There was an escape to be made.
“Showtime!” I transmitted to Umzuma, already hustling to drag each of my crew members back inside the ship proper.
I worked my way through the pile, sorting my evacuees from lightest to heaviest. That meant Gadra first—even gunrunners know children are priority number one—and Tusky last. By the time I’d hauled Chaska, my third pick, into the corridor, my back was begging for relief. My lungs, too.
But we had bigger problems than my ailments.
Glancing up from my body-haul-a-thon, I discovered that we were neck-deep in the battle. This should have been obvious from the ear-shattering concussive waves and blinding strings of particle-beam fire, but adrenaline-fueled tunnel vision is a hell of a thing.
Missiles streaked by in twos and threes, and flocks of gunships whirled about like schools of fish in a feeding frenzy. Flaming wrecks tumbled and vaporized. Flagships careened past us with autocannon batteries ablaze. To top it all off, the insanity beyond the staging bay literally spun and flipped. Umzuma’s evasive piloting at work.
All that aside, what stunned me most wasn’t the battle—it was the fact that we were still flying. Last I’d seen it, we’d been burning the reactors down to their last tarry bits of crizzum. And our current maneuvers were fuel hogs, to say the least. There was no way Umzuma would be tapping out the engines this early in a fight this massive. Unless…
After double-timing my relocation of Tusky—a feat that my herniated discs remind me of to this day—I sealed the outer doors and ran (limped) to the bridge.
The battle beyond the main viewpane was as bombastic as I’d expected. The bone-people had apparently deployed thousands upon thousands of new vessels, flooding this region of the Untraversed so thoroughly that I could hardly make out its purplish ether. And judging by the plumes of smoke and fire bursting throughout the Hegemony flagships, the natives had some distinct advantages here. They were being incinerated in huge quantities, yes, but they were giving the enemy a walloping they couldn’t ignore. Swarms of puny, biofilm-coated vessels circled the Hegemony behemoths, stinging at them like insects challenging an apex predator. The perks of training for combat in a non-vacuum environment, I suppose.
“What’s our fuel level?” I called to Umzuma as I rushed to his pit. “You think we’ll—”
Umzuma’s relaxed, borderline lazy demeanor cut me off in my tracks. At first glance, I worried he might even be dead. His puckers and milky arms drifted about, disconnected from the various neural input ports around him.
He wasn’t flying the ship.
The somebody—or rather, something—that was became apparent a moment later. Just outside the viewpane, suctioned to the ship’s main modules by some nebulous organic adhesive, were the parasites that had kept us anchored to the World Serpent’s tongue. They expanded and contracted in tandem, puffing out their slimy gills for propulsion and “steering” using networks of spiny feelers.
This network of biological autopilot wasn’t just pushing us through the Untraversed, however—it was navigating it like a pro. Better than a pro. Our parasitic engines seemed to detect each incoming blast, bullet, and beam long before it reached us, banking out of harm’s way with uncanny precision.
I returned to Umzuma’s pit, still gazing at the chaos. “Are you doing any of this?”
He grunted what I took to be no.
“Figures.” All I could do was stand there like a dolt, too baffled to even experience fear. “You, uh, know what they’re doing?”
In response, Umzuma slid one of his tendrils into a neural port and activated a projector cone. The resulting image was that of a stereotypical space tomb, right down to the hexagonal shell and gyroscopes.
“You really think they’re taking us to the tomb, then,” I breathed.
Umzuma grunted again, this time in the affirmative.
“Huh. Just our luck.” Then, despite the mass-casualty battle raging outside, a thought struck me. I rounded on Umzuma with knitted brows. “Wait a moment—you could talk using images all this time, and you didn’t? Just played mute?”
Umzuma projected a crude image of Chitta Mini, then books, then a man sternly lecturing.
“He taught you,” I said, nodding. “Well, keep practicing that. Unless you want to complain. Then stick to your silent routine.”
His final projection was that of a hand waving at Chitta Mini. Waving goodbye, I realized.
“I know, pal,” I whispered, kneeling down to pat Umzuma on the head. All that did was tease out a menacing growl and a flurry of tendrils. Taking the hint, I stood and crossed my arms. “Don’t count him out of the fight just yet. We might see him again… if, you know, we survive this.”
I gestured lamely at the ever-growing engagement playing out around us. Given the scale of the destruction—the ships detonating in the thousands, the countless missiles and drones lancing past, the nonstop blossoms of high-yield warheads—it seemed almost comical that we remained untouched. Hell, I couldn’t even see more than half a kilometer in any given direction. We were weaving through a forest of steel and flame.
And given all that, what chance did Chitta Mini really have of making it out? The mere thought bruised my heart. Sure, the little lump had been a master-class manipulator, not to mention supremely invasive and even annoying… but he’d also been a friend to me. He’d put everything on the line for freedom, for adventure, for ice cream. He was a being I could understand, and not only because he’d copied my neural pathways. In many ways, we were kindred spirits. Brief but timeless allies in the struggle against obedience.
“Godspeed, Mini,” I said under my breath as Stream Dancer swooped toward a gargantuan Hegemony flagship. “I hope we meet again.”
Not three seconds later, my wish was granted. Well, after a fashion.
Like some vengeful force ripped straight out of a cult’s Guide to the End Times, a long, striated beast spanning some two thousand meters in length tore up and through—yes, straight through—the belly of the flagship before us. The World Serpent punched up and out of the hapless vessel’s uppermost module like a seismic nail through paper, leaving only a spray of shrapnel in its wake. Then, as abruptly as it had appeared, it vanished above us.
My jaw dropped, totally slack, as sub-explosions rippled through the dying vessel.
Suddenly yet predictably, the flagship’s reactor imploded. Instant death for those aboard, but a slow, lagging thing at a distance. It began with blue-white fusion cones shining through the punctured hull like flashlight beams. Then the outer panels vibrated, cracked, and splintered. Umzuma had the presence of mind to engage the viewpane’s ultraviolet screen the moment before it all went to hell. Subatomic hell, that is. The entire vessel exploded in a supernova of light and radiation.
Now, I’d seen plenty of ships go kaboom in the vacuum, but being able to actually experience such an event in a fluidlike medium was something new. Something bone-rattling. The shock wave hit Stream Dancer so hard I experienced a conscious brownout—standing one moment, scrabbling on the floor panels the next. By the time I’d gotten to my feet, we were already zipping through the post-blast haze.
The parasitic engines were darker than before—a combination of heat and nuclear scorching, I’d imagine—but they chugged on nonetheless, accelerating through patches of glowing dust and charred debris. Dimly, I realized the combat was fading around us. Aside from a few stray volleys of anti-gunship flak or wayward missiles, we were in the “clear.”
Stumbling over to the simscreen banks, I pulled up a feed from the rear cameras. Sure enough, the battle was receding, still in full swing.
Moment by moment, the details of flagships and gunship flocks became harder to discern. But not the World Serpent, also known as the high priestess, also known as Chitta Mini. My cerebral friend was still a colossus among colossi, still paying the Hegemony back in spades for its recent massacres.
I watched, wordless and tight-throated, as the great serpent lanced through ship after ship, triggering reactor meltdowns that formed a string of deadly pearls. But it couldn’t go on forever. There were too many ships, and even now I could see the gashes and burns covering the serpent’s flesh.
When we’d put ten thousand kilometers between us and the battle, a moon-sized flash blinded the cameras. It wasn’t a miniature singularity, but it was damned close. I knew that because I’d built and sold it.
The GN56-O, known colloquially as a sun-swallower, was one of the few weapons the Hegemony itself had outlawed in bipartisan arms treaties. But there it was, roiling bone-white in the darkness. I switched off the cameras, already knowing Chitta Mini’s fate, and sank down in the nearest chair.
From here on out, we were on our own.
Seventeen
It took the crew a full seven hours to wake from their artificial slumber. I spent the majority of the intervening time prowling around the bridge, staring at the increasingly dense fields of wreckage, and pondering my life choices. Seeing as I’ve already forced you to wade through the swamps of my mind several times, however, I’ll spare you the navel-gazing.
When the first yawns came over the bridge’s speakers, I hustled to the meeting module and took my seat. My dear comrades awoke at roughly the same time—with the exception of Ruena, our eternal sleeper, who only snapped into consciousness after a few (not so gentle) nudges.
I’d taken the liberty of arranging them in the module’s other chairs and dimming the overhead lights, hoping to make their transitions as comfortable as possible.
This was not entirely successful.
“Where the hell are we?” Chaska blurted out, furiously wiping the drool from her lips. “Did you drug us!?”
Tusky swung about, disoriented, eventually focusing on the chitta’s former canister. “Where is he?”
“Are you gonna kill us now?” Gadra asked.
“Bodhi,” Ruena growled, “you have some explaining to do. As usual.”
I just sat there as the bewildered questions rolled in, back straight and hands steepled. Only when the general mood had shifted from anger to confusion did I begin.
“Friends, colleagues, crew,” I said calmly, “much has happened in the last few hours. And I’d like to explain it all, start to finish, without any interruptions. I will take questions afterwards. Does that sound agreeable?”
Despite a few collective grumbles, they agreed.
And so I delivered my account of recent events, beginning with my wake-up call in the triage module and leading up to our current meeting. I spared no detail, even offering a word-by-word replay of the drama in the bone-peoples’ “courtroom.”
“There you have it,” I finished. “That’s where we’re at.”
Chaska narrowed her eyes. “Bullshit, Bodhi.”
I just about fell out of my chair. “Excuse me?”
“You really expect us to believe that?”
“Yes?”
“Oh, come on,” Chaska said. “A mysterious pulse that knocked us all out? A giant snake with a civilization in its mouth? A bunch of offshoot inustrazans sworn to protect the Maker’s tomb? Your chitta controlling the snake in a battle with millions of ships? And, to top it all off, that we didn’t wake up while any of this was happening? Why are you lying like this?”
“I’m not lying!”
“Then show us the simscreen vids.”
“I can’t. The archives got wiped when the sun-swallower went off.”
“Oh, of course,” Chaska said, glancing at each of the crew members, “the sun-swallower. Very convenient.”
“I can’t believe this!”
“Neither can we.”
“I have to admit,” Ruena said softly, “it does sound far-fetched. We’re in this mess together. There’s no reason to hide what’s going on.”
“How many teeth did the snake have?” Gadra asked.
“Teeth?” I said. “I didn’t exactly count, Gad. Bigger things to focus on.”
She rolled her eyes. “Uh-huh. Sounds fishy… can’t even remember how many teeth…”
“You all must’ve had your brains cooked by that pulse.” I looked at Tusky, only to find he was actively averting his gaze. “You believe me, right, Tusky? I wouldn’t make this up.”
He rubbed his shoulder, head lolling side to side in indecision. “It’s hard to say, my friend. It just sounds so… fantastical.”
“Of course it does!” I shot up from my chair in a flash. “This entire thing has been fantastical. But this is reality, not some story I devised to impress all of you.” Although I let those words settle, nobody spoke up or even glanced my way. “I might stretch the truth from time to time—”
“You mean lie,” Chaska cut in.
“If you prefer that crude term,” I said, shrugging. “But in this instance, I’ve done nothing but convey the absolute truth. I’d swear on any holy book to affirm that!”
“Good way to burn your hand off.”
“Ridiculous. I offer you all the facts, and this is what I get?”
“We just want to know what really happened,” Ruena said. “What happened to the chitta? He was one of our best resources.”
