Big Dicker, page 17
Because Delphi doesn’t know where this place is. She told me that much.
A buzzing sound makes my head jerk to the left and there! Flicka is crawling out of the vent near the floor. She beats and flicks her wings, maybe trying to communicate. But I can’t really hear her, and anyway, I don’t speak dragonbee bot.
“I’m glad you’re OK,” I say. Then sigh, because I’m so damn tired from being stunned and drugged. Not to mention the beating my body probably took going through all those gates to get here.
Flicka buzzes again. Flies out of the vent, does a little circle in the air, then flies back towards it and clings to the vent.
I shake my head and whisper, “I don’t know what you’re saying. Hopefully it was, ‘Don’t worry, I got this.’”
Then I laugh. Can’t help it. Because it’s ridiculous. I’m pretty well fucked right now. The little bot is powerful in its own way, and in a swarm the power of dragonbee bots can be downright apocalyptic. But come on. What good is one tiny bot against a whole station of crazy?
I don’t know where I am, how many people are on this station, who’s running the show, what kind of weapons they have, or why I’m really here.
Flicka buzzes one more time, then turns her back and disappears inside the vent. There’s a faint echo of a hum as she leaves me behind, but a few seconds later it fades away and there’s nothing left but the creepy moaning from someone in a nearby cell.
There’s a squeak and then the loud tell-tale sound of a heavy door slamming shut outside. Footsteps. Maybe three or four people. And a scuffing sound. Like someone is being held up and dragged past.
Another squeak of another door, then more shuffling of feet, and finally, whoever is being locked up in the cell next to mine falls to the hard stone floor with a slap.
I cringe, picturing that in my head. But a beeping at my cell door has me scrambling to turn my body towards them as they enter.
Cyborgs. All of them. They remind me a little of the Master back on Harem, but only a little.
They are the same model, I’m sure of that. But unlike Crux’s cyborg master, who has been well-maintained over the decades, these guys are all scuffed and dirty. Their formerly white body armor is a dull gray and one even has burn marks on his arms and legs, like he’s been blasted with a plasma rifle recently.
All of them have one rectangular eye port across the upper third of their faces with one red vision sensor sliding back and forth across the ridge mimicking a nose.
Creepy fuckers to most people. But to me, these borgs are familiar and relatable. I’ve liberated hundreds of them over the past ten years. One even joined Xyla and me on some campaigns, but he met a girl several years back and left the liberation business to settle down and get married. He runs an arcade on Harem Station now. He’s like the poster child for how well assimilated borgs can be.
I have genuine affection for the guy. Consider him a friend. Maybe even a good friend.
But these borgs are pointing rifles at me. And unless their core code has been heavily modified by my brother Tray on Harem at some point, they won’t have emotions like flesh-and-blood people.
They haven’t been modified. I’d recognize them if they had. At the very least, they’d have recognized me. And when an unmodified military cyborg points a rifle at you there is zero chance they will give you the benefit of the doubt if you make a wrong move.
I consider greeting them amicably and maybe doing some name-dropping, then decide against it. Because there’s a chance—a pretty high chance—that the borgs I’ve liberated over the years are probably on their shit list. Probably been tabled as traitors.
People have good reason to fear cyborgs like this. They were originally made as soldiers in the Nickel Wars about two hundred years ago. Whole armies of them were produced, so say the history books. Most were blown up in battle fighting for the rights to a faraway asteroid belt, but about a thousand or so lived through the wars and eventually formed a rebellion and then some spread out as mercenaries for hire, while others settled into humanoid societies.
Obviously these guys are the former variety.
One slings his rifle over his shoulder as he steps forward to mess with the magnetic binding on my ankles, while another one shoves the barrel of his rifle against my head.
The anklets release and the first one pulls me to my feet and shoves me against the wall as he grabs his rifle and resumes pointing it at me.
“Let’s go,” the third one in back says. He has no weapon so he must have rank over the other two.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
He tilts his head at me like he’s not used to being questioned. “You have three seconds to comply, then we stun you.” His one racing red eye light scans me then stops dead center of his faceplate and blinks once. That’s military cyborg speak for, Don’t fuck with me.
I raise both my bound hands, palms out, and say, “Relax. I’m coming.”
I end up in a shower, of all places. Pretty sweet one, too. Not a prison shower, that’s for sure. And the clothes waiting for me when I’m done aren’t prison garb.
“What’s is this?” I ask the cyborgs. They don’t even acknowledge me with an answer. The leader just glares at me with that red light of his and points to the rack holding black trousers and a black, double-breasted jacket with ruby-red military buttons. There's ceremonial ornaments too. Small, ruby triangular medals attached to the cuff of the coat with an eagle heat-pressed into the gems and gray epaulettes on the shoulders.
“What the fuck?” I mutter. Because even though being kidnapped by a ship and ending up on some lair run by a psycho-woman called the Loathsome One is pretty out there as far as odd days go, the fact that she’s cleaning me up and dressing me in a weirdly familiar ceremonial suit is just… well, as I said. It’s all very, What the fuck?
But, not seeing any other choice, I put it on, then drape a creepy red sash with dark gray fringe across my chest and pull on the highly-polished, black, knee-high boots.
There’s a mirror on the far side of the room and I catch a glimpse of myself and suddenly remember where I’ve seen this uniform before.
Crux. More than twenty years ago. That night we made our escape from Wayward Station he came to me in the middle of the night and said we were leaving. He was wearing this exact suit.
At first I thought he was out of his mind drunk or something. But he was talking fast and searching my room for weapons. And what he told me was enough to make me get up, get dressed, and then steal into Serpint’s father’s quarters and grab that little brat right out of his bed, still sleeping.
We went and got Draden, Luck, and Valor after that, while Crux got Tray, and less than an hour later we were shooting Princess Corla though the nearby spin node, had stolen a ship, and were on the run from the entire Akeelian Navy as we made our way towards ALCOR’s station gates.
Yeah, I have a pretty solid idea of what’s happening here.
“Let’s go,” the cyborg leader says. His two thugs jab me with their rifle barrels until I start moving and then we’re walking through the station.
We pass dozens of other cyborgs, but no other flesh-and-blood humans. Whoever this Loathsome One is, her army is all made up of mercenary borgs.
That gives me a little hope because turning cyborgs and bots into dedicated Harem Station loyalists is what I do, right?
But it’s not a lot of hope. Because this situation is nothing like the typical ones I navigate my way through when I’m on the job. The bots and borgs I usually approach have all been conscripted against their will. I find them in ones and twos, mostly. Sometimes as many as half a dozen. But not an entire fucking army.
But then again… sometimes all it takes is one or two. Xyla comes to mind. Her story started out something like this but it ended with the deaths of millions of people on ALCOR Station and she pledged allegiance to the AI who killed them.
So… just keep cool, Jimmy. You got this. And hell, there’s always the off chance that dragonbee bot will come up with a plan, right? And Queenie. She made me an offer. One that’s looking a lot more attractive in this moment than it did when she proposed it.
Yeah. I need to make a deal with that ship. Get me out of this crazy clown show and back to Mighty Minions to pick up Delphi and Dicker. Then grab Xyla off Blue Sand Beach and go home. Queenie won’t be easy to make a deal with, but there is a deal to be made there. She’s the one who offered, not me.
She might even be on my side. My mother’s side, at the very least.
I’m still thinking about that when we turn a corner and come to a massively tall, steel double door.
One of the borgs pushes me off to the side and bangs a metal ring acting as a knocker three times. The knock is inappropriately loud and echoes through the hallway.
On the other side I hear a feminine voice say, “Come.”
And the door opens.
Inside, predictably, there is a Cygnian woman. A silver, like Corla. She is tall, and shapely in her long, white and gray gown. Her hair looks like thin strands of silver metal, but I’ve touched the hair of a silver princess before, and I know it’s not real silver. It’s soft and pliable.
She is pretty. Actually, she is beautiful. Not quite what I was expecting with the nickname Loathsome One. But whatever.
“Leave us,” she commands the cyborg guards.
I pull my eyes away from the princess just long enough to look over my shoulder and see them back out the doors the way they came in. But my attention returns to this woman before the doors close with a bang.
She smiles at me. Clasps her hands in front of her and says, “Jimmy Yates. I never thought I’d see this day.”
“Yates?” I ask. That word again. A name, obviously. But not one I’ve heard before.
The princess waves a hand in the air and says, “There’s time for that later. But first… How are you?”
“How am I?” I scoff. “Are you fucking kidding me? I was kidnapped by a deranged ship, drugged, taken prisoner in this insane asylum, and then dressed up in this truly evil-looking fucking suit and brought here to this creepy lair to—oh, I don’t know. Just taking a wild stab here—be bred to… whoever the fuck you are. That’s how I am. How the fuck are you?”
She smiles at me, looking almost amused at my outburst, then says, “Don’t worry about the ship. I took care of her.”
“What?” My heart beats fast at this revelation. Because ten seconds ago that deranged ship was my only way out of this shit show.
“Queenie?” she says. “She was a traitor from the start. A running joke around here, in fact. We all knew she was concocting up some silly plan to kill me and take you back to Harem. I admit, I didn’t expect Delphi to fail though.” She takes a moment to exaggerate a frown. “I had high hopes for her.”
I let out a long breath and wonder where Delphi is now. Is she still back at Mighty Minions? Where does Dicker think I am? How will they find me?
Will they find me?
Maybe not.
“What happened to her?”
“Delphi? I have no idea. I have to face facts. She’s not one of us. She is something… other than us. Which could’ve come in handy, I suppose. But it was never likely. They did let her escape, after all. And that would not have happened if she had promise. I imagine that’s why everyone has moved on to stage two.” She waves a hand in the air like she’s trying to wipe away the image of Delphi.
My mind yells… WHAT?
But I force myself to focus and say, “No. The ship. Queenie.”
“Oh, her.” The princess laughs. “We blew her up after we got you on board the station. She’s been… how’s that phrase go? Scattered like dust into the galactic wind.”
Fuck.
“Oh, please tell me you didn’t fall for her spiel? That whole mother thing? Please. Such utter bullshit.”
But I don’t think it was. I think she was telling the truth. That talk about my mother might’ve been the only honest thing that ship said to me.
“Of course not,” I say. “But it was an interesting tale.”
The princess huffs out a grunt. Like… If you say so. Then she takes a deep breath and says, “Hello, Jimmy Yates. I’m Princess Veila. It’s so very, very nice to meet you.”
“Veila?” I say, too loud. “As in Queen Corla’s little star-bursting partner?”
Corla is frozen in a cryopod back in a Harem security beacon because she and her princess partner, Veila, were made into explosive devices so powerful, they could blow up planets.
“The one and only,” Veila says.
I almost sigh with relief. Like for two whole seconds I think, Thank the fucking suns! This isn’t what I thought at all! Veila's on our side!
But then Veila says, “Fucking queen bitch. She was always the one thing standing in my way.”
And all that momentary hope disappears.
CHAPTER THIRTY - DELPHI
Our plan to get through the Lair Gate and make it to the actual station is iffy, at best. But what can you do? When the Loathsome One is holding your soulmate, your bot, and your brother captive you pull out all the stops and go balls in. That’s all there is to it.
Once I told Dicker what I wanted to do her huffy attitude faded and she became a little more amicable. Maybe because it made this whole crazy scheme a little more even.
She is, after all, risking her life just by going through the gate. And that new cloaking device she’s been going on and on about is pretty cool, but it’s by no means a guaranteed win. We need to be sneaky about this.
The Loathsome One is a seasoned pro. She’s been on the run for two decades. She knows exactly what she’s doing. She’s seen more action than Dicker, Jimmy, and me put together. This plan has to be insane for the sheer fact that if it’s not, she’ll see through it immediately.
What we need is a little bit of skill, a little bit of luck, and a whole lot of lying. Heavy, heavy emphasis on the lying part. Because that’s the clincher.
“You let me know when you’re ready,” Dicker says.
We’re floating about half a million klicks away from the last gate before we jump into the Lair Station neighborhood.
I’m still strapped into Xyla’s exoskeleton, but I’m also hitched to Jimmy’s nearly-worthless Palladium bot.
Because that’s my plan.
Dicker told me the whole Bull Station story as we made our way through stealth gates to get to this last one without being noticed. She told me how Lyra saved Nyleena by using her bot to shuttle her through space to Nyleena’s cryopod and how ALCOR pretty much did the same thing on some other bot to infiltrate and destroy the Cygnian warship.
And hell, it’s a damn good idea. I’m not sure it’s one you’d choose if you had better options because you can get lost in space pretty fucking quick when you’re nothing but a human-sized anomaly with barely a blip of heat signature to track. And I gotta say, being lost in space and dying slowly as you freeze to death and run out of oxygen is a pretty fucked-up way to go out.
Yeah. Not my number one choice. Just the only one I have.
But here’s the thing. Us Cygnian princesses? We’re mastermind plan-makers. Like this is just something we can do. That’s how we all escape. We’re just good at this shit. You know your plan is amazing when it’s stupid crazy. It’s like the defining factor for success.
So I was like, OK. This plan is awesome. I can use this stupid Palladium bot tagging along as my shuttle, right? Infiltrate the Lair Station, kick some ass as a souped-up, exoskeleton-equipped, Mighty Minion princess girl, then find Jimmy, Flicka, and Tycho, get back to Dicker, get the fuck out of here, and start a brand-new life on Harem Station.
What could go wrong?
OK, maybe there are a few snags to work out. Like for one, Dicker’s new cloaking device only gives her thirty-seven seconds of non-trackable heat signature. Which means that once we get through the gate I have thirty-seven seconds to launch myself out of the airlock and get far enough away from Dicker so when Lair Station finally sees her, they don’t shoot me in the process of trying to shoot her.
Because they will shoot her.
I was a little bit worried about that, and said so. But Dicker just got all huffy and said she can take care of herself and I should just concentrate on my part of the plan, because that’s the part that matters.
She’s right. So I let it go.
You do you, Dicker.
The other obvious flaw is that this plan depends on me becoming that kick-ass souped-up exoskeleton Mighty Minions princess girl. I’ve been inside the Lair Station so I know it’s big and filled with borgs and bots that are way stronger than little ol’ me. But this suit is kind of amazing. I really feel like I can pull this part off. I have some moves in my back pocket. I might be small, but I’m three sun-damned meters tall inside this freaking exoskeleton and I have body parts that shoot shit like plasma streams and shrapnel grenades.
I feel like it’s probably gonna be a pretty even match as long as I don’t get overrun by a mob.
Then, you know. There’s the whole getting off the station. That part really depends on Dicker. Somehow she needs to find a way to dock. Preferably a dock that’s not in vacuum so we can like… you know, get to the ship without suffocating. Either that or find Jimmy a suit along the way, but I feel like stumbling upon some random environmental suit as we escape is pretty absurd.
Again, this is Dicker’s problem and she gets huffy every time I bring it up.
“Any time now,” Dicker says. If she were human she’d make a big production of twiddling her thumbs.
But I don’t have the privilege of being annoyed. There’s too much at stake. “OK,” I say. “But you’re going to get me as close to the station as possible, right? I mean, it’s a long ways out. It would really suck to run out of oxygen before I even reach the ship.”
“You’ve complained about that seven times now and each time I’ve told you the same thing. I’m handling it.”
