Starquest: Scourge of the Spaceways, page 6
Angry Bison raised the pistol he took from the hands of the dead radarman, and fired bolts at the Xiphian, striking his faceplate, and eye-goggles. The great sea creature writhed in mid-air, rearing back to clear his vision. The shots did not pierce his faceplate, but the Xiphian's aim was thrown off. Ethelred crawled under the legs of the cowering blonde, seeking shelter beneath her.
At the helm station, a gill-faced Devonian, who had been staggered to his knees by a tomahawk blow, now rose up, hissing, scalp slick with colorless blood. When Cnut, roaring with battle-lust, stabbed him, the Devonian with a two-handed blow struck the mighty Cromagnon aside, and plucked the knife blade out of his own thick hide, face hideous with mad laughter. Hudd stepped in his way. Hudd stood atop Cnut's prone form like a bull straddling a mewling calf, and flourished a long knife with a wicked edge. Steel clashed. The swamp man's tough skin turned as many knife blows as Hudd's metal vest.
Cnut crawled to one side. He rose unsteadily to his feet, scarred face contorted with shame and anger, and launched himself at the huge swamp-man in a crazed leap, throwing an elbow around his neck, and driving fingers into his sensitive gill-tissue, trying to strangle him. The Devonian was grappling with Hudd, each having seized the wrist of the other, and each trying to twist the other man's blade out of his grasp. Hudd cursed through clenched teeth, eyes bloodshot with rage. The Devonian was stronger, but he was also being choked by the burly Cromagnon on his back.
But these three froze in wonder at the sight of the huge, sleek, spike-nosed, metallic shape hurling gigantically into the air of the chamber, firing as it came. The central holosphere, overloaded from the energy discharges of the battle, flickered and vanished in a storm of sparks, revealing the nine-foot-long, sword-beaked, hot-eyed monster, a thousand pounds of flesh and cartilage wrapped in a hundred pounds of thick steel armor, weapons in four finlike hands bright and roaring with fire.
5. Slaughtered by the Sea Creature
Deep Lake ran along the circumference of the bridge, and broad-jumped toward the back of the Xiphian, war-whooping and whirling his tomahawk. The nine-foot-long fish-creature twisted in midair and impaled the flying savage in midleap. The metal-sheathed bill of Mordax passed through upper ribcage at a steep angle and emerged from lower back in a gushing spray of red.
The warrior's dying howls were cut short when the sleek fish-creature bathed him in blaster rays issuing from guns gripped in his pectoral and pelvic fins. The flames passed along the prow-shaped helmet and sharpened faceplate of the sea-beast, leaving the Xiphian unharmed: but the tribesman was charred to the bone.
While Mordax's vision was partly blocked and his movement partly slowed by the grisly burden of the smoking corpse riding his nose, Tisquantum, with more bravery than sense, also flew through the air and tackled the fish-creature. In the hands of the savage was the space-axe looted from the dead fingers of one of the fallen marines slain by Athos.
This weapon was a two-handed, thirty-pound instrument of brutal death, designed for piercing space armor. A beaked blade of tempered space-alloy jutted from the one side, a stout spike from the other, nestled between barbed hooks for prying open metal joints. It was the combination and sublimation of battleaxe, maul, mace, halberd, and lumberman's picaroon.
Redhawk, with blood from his head-gash painting new crimson streaks across his face, followed Tisquantum to the attack, yodeling and firing arrows as he soared across the weightless center of the chamber.
The two savages grasped the heavily-armored fish-creature closely as it writhed and bucked, whirling madly, rocketing itself against the deck to dislodge them.
During this commotion, Ethelred the Duck scampered out from beneath the First Mate, before she could think to stop him. He was leaping from wall to wall. His race was as flightless as ostriches, but the vestigial arm-wings and ancient instincts allowed him to bound through areas of variable gravity with surprising grace, for a creature so ungainly.
Ethelred reached the airlock, thrusting his knife into a hinge-motor, jamming the inner door open. For good measure, he spat out a gross wad of chewing gum from his bill, and pressed it with a feathery thumb over the mouth of the valve measuring the air-pressure. The safety interlocks would not let the outer hatch open into vacuum, which, now that the valve was blocked, was all it would measure.
No more of the mighty Xiphians filling the ship would be able to enter by this airlock.
In the center of the chamber, Tisquantum gripped the writhing, armored body of Mordax with his legs. The mighty savage whirled the space-axe in a massive overhand blow, and drove the needle-pointed spike projecting from the rear of the axe into and through the cheek-plate of the monster, just behind the gills. This he gripped as his anchor. Redhawk clung to the harness straps binding the antigravity cells to the creature.
The men were too close to its body for any blaster fire: the sea-creature's handlike fins grew directly from his flanks, which meant he had no arms to turn nor twist to point his weapons at himself, nor at the targets riding him like rodeo clowns on a bucking bronco.
Sureshot stood, picking up his fellow Iss Takelot, and threw him like a living javelin across the chamber. As the lizardman fell onto Mordax, the Xiphian fired with two blasters. One bolt missed, flying across the chamber, to burn the face of Mr. Speedwell, the Sailing Master, who had just fired point-blank into the belly of Stab Lee. Stab Lee fell, his midriff a mass of blood and flame, but not before planting two dirks deep into the heart and kidney of the smoldering, hairless, and faceless horror that had been the Sailing Master.
The other bolt struck Takelot glancingly, reflected from his scales, leaving an ugly burn down his side, striking no major organs. When Takelot landed on the overburdened Xiphian, he wrapped his limber body and spiked tail around the great armored fish. As it turned out, the armor at the joints was weak. Takelot grasped a fin-shaped gun-hand in his alligator jaws, and spun his whole body in a massive twist, trying to yank the blaster free. The gauntlet did not give way, but the weapon misfired and exploded, blowing Takelot's head into a red mass, and also leaving a bleeding crater in the armored side of Mordax. The armor was breached. Water and viscera gushed out.
Mordax whirled and danced madly. Redhawk, fainting from his headwound, lost his grip and spun away into the air to one side, and the corpses of Takelot and Deep Lake flew to the other. Redhawk was carrying one of the antigravity boxes with him, so he hovered, moving slowly, and did not strike the walls. Before Redhawk thought to release the box and leap free, Mordax shot him with his three remaining blasters.
Tisquantum clung tenaciously to the space-axe cruelly embedded in the cheek of the armored fish, and sank a flint dagger deep into the crater in the armor where the fin had been. He struck through an insulation layer and pierced flesh.
Mordax reached forward with his tail from which tentacles now stretched, seizing Tisquantum by the leg, and dashing him to the deck in a brutal throw. The savage growled, rising to his feet, blood mingling with war paint on his scarred face. The space-axe, picaroon spike slick and bloody, was still in his hands.
Mordax came about to bring his energy weapons to bear on Tisquantum, but was off-balance while maneuvering, because one antigravity box was missing from his harness.
Then a strange thing happened. Mordax started writhing and tossing in midair. Thrusters on his flying harness whined and roared and he tried to stoop or rise. He bucked and spun, as if attempting to throw off an attack. But there was no attack. No beams flew at him, no arrows, no men. He seemed to be fighting the blank and empty air.
Then Athos saw a glittering strand, winking in reflected light, wire-thin, strong as steel, running across the chamber. Then he saw a second strand. Where it intersected the first, Mordax seemed to be battering at them. Athos saw other strands, dozens, a concentric tapestry of clinging death. The fish was caught in the strands of a net.
Or not a net. A web.
A vast, glittering, half-unseen spider web had been placed across a third of the chamber, covering the area all around the airlock. Only when Mordax fell into it, and tore at it, wrapping himself ever more tightly, did it become visible.
Athos felt a spooky horripilation, as if a ghostly hand tickled his nape hairs. He knew what he was seeing, but it was uncanny nonetheless.
The pirates and savages did not know what they were seeing. Half of them cried out in alarm, or begged for mercy — including one or two of Rackstraw's men, Athos noted with displeasure. Tisquantum flourished his space-axe at the webbing, utterly fearless. It was no more strange than the ten thousand things he had seen in the last ten months. Ethelred the Duck also made rude gestures with his feathered fingers. Fuliguline were a stubby and comical race of beings, but few of them surrendered easily to fear.
Xiphians were a race also rarely given to fear. Their eyesight was designed to penetrate miles of subsea gloom, and was as nearly as sharp as the vision of Rallines. Mordax sliced through the webbing closing around him with his bill, and freed his fore-fins from being snared. His bulbous sea-monster eyes swept across what seemed to be empty floor surrounding the airlock. Still half-wrapped in webbing, he could not come about to bring all three of his gun-hands to bear, so he fired only with two beams from his lefthand pectoral and pelvic fins.
When the beams splashed off an invisible obstruction, the glittering bolts of the ricochets outlined the bulbous, silent, mid-air shape for a moment, motionlessly balanced on thin threads slung from side to side across the weightless center of the chamber.
Then the veil clouding the visual centers of the brains of the onlookers parted. Like one waking from a dream, or snapped from a mesmeric spell, suddenly each onlooker could see the shape and shadow of Arbogast the Arachnid.
His mastery of the dark art of Incognition was incomplete. He was, at best, a gifted amateur. He was an amateur in that any ordinary mind, once aware of the mental fog, by mere effort of will, could banish it. But he was gifted in that, in this case, he could climb through a hatch, spin his webs from one side of the wide chamber to the other, all unseen, and trap his prey before any were aware.
Such Kirlian arts could not have fooled the security unit called Owen, so Arbogast had waited aboard the Captain's pinnace until the robot guards were too distracted by their newfound free will to hinder him. He had not been limited to smuggled knives or stone-tipped spears and hatchets. Instead, the shining circle of a field-strength portable ray-shield was hovering before him, projected from a generator bolted to an antigravity sled. The bolts from Mordax the Xiphian splashed off the screen in a torrent of light, sparks and stabs of high-energy particles flying in each direction, and heat like a blast furnace. The generator whined ever louder, in ever higher pitch.
The Spider also had a tripod-mounted gigawatt blaster riding a second sled below him, which he operated with his mouth claws. The heavy beam battered the shields of the Xiphian's battle armor, which began to glow first cherry-red, then white-hot. Mordax returned fire. Stabbing dashes of blazing plasma roared and flashed between the two combatants.
Then Ephyra looked to where Vulk and Rackstraw still stood, wrapped in each other's arms, teeth and blades at each other's neck, a mere inch from dealing instant death to the other. "Using land-guns in space?" she cried. "Are you mad?"
Athos did not bother to explain that the heavy blasters were still blasters, and the magnetic sabots of plasma might superheat, but would not hole a hull or bulkhead. Instead he said, "No need to fret. Fight's nearly done."
For Arbogast was in motion, picking his way delicately across the thread he had already prepared, throwing more threads toward Mordax, one after another, like cowboys tangling a raging stallion in a ring of lariats, or airmen struggling to tie down an escaping blimp amid rising stormwinds.
Tisquantum saw what the Spider was doing, and saw what to do. Snatching up a dropped spear, he hurled his simple weapon with all the wild force of his ferocious thews, with all the sharp skill of his ferocious eye. The shields surrounding the Xiphian could stop particle-beams and energy bolts, but a non-magnetic wand of wood tipped with a razor-sharp beak of flint passed through the glowing fields unslowed.
Mordax was struck in the joint where his fin-gauntlet joined the hull-armor of his flank. The heat from the Spider's heavy ray barrage had weakened the space-alloy, and the spear-tip sank into the wrist joint, sending Mordax's weapon flying.
Sureshot, Angry Bison, and Cnut joined Tisquantum, either firing captured blasters or making wild leaps to belabor the trapped Xiphian with captured space-axes. The antigrav boxes were cut from his harness, and Mordax, wrapped in webbing stronger than steel cable, fell heavily to the deck, and lay flopping. Lifegiving water gushed from the rents in his armor.
Vulk pulled his teeth away from Athos' neck veins and shouted, "Enough! Quarter! Parley! Peace! Damn you, Mordax, stop firing! You're beaten!"
The great swordfish spoke only once. A translator box slung beneath his jaw clattered into life, saying, "Death is delicious. Dishonor is gall. No better end to life, when life is loss, and pride is all."
And the great fish continued to shower blasts rebounding from the portable energy-shield before Arbogast, even as the Spider's floating gun-platform crept slowly closer to him, the tripod-mounted siege gun cutting furrows into the Xiphian's thick armor. Surrounded by flying sparks and blasts from ricochets, the Spider remorselessly advanced, landed the platform atop him, reversing the gravity units to bring a crushing weight to bear. The gun-hand of Mordax was forced back into the fin-groove of his streamlined body. Nonetheless, even unable to hit a target, the mighty fish continued to fire, as if trying to melt the platform pinning him in place.
The pinecone-clusters eyes of Arbogast saw the whooping savages with space-axes and spears eagerly belaboring the bound and fallen foe. Spiders were an unwarlike race, and Arbogast had no desire to butcher the helpless, but likewise had no sense of chivalry or courage which might make him voice an objection.
So he left the platform where it was, and, picking up the energy shield generator to keep the shield between himself and any threat, retreated with delicate step from thread to thread into the center of his web in the center of the room.
Athos and Vulk had released each other, and both shouted at Mordax and at the savages butchering him to cease. Their orders were ignored.
With a huge, convulsive motion in his dying moment, Mordax ripped free of the webbing, flopping and flipping in gross awkwardness, and yet he thrust his sword-bill up and into the throat of Angry Bison, killing him instantly. At the same moment, Tisquantum and Thunderwind, both leaning on the same spear, pushed the razor-sharp flint spearhead deeply enough into a breach in the Xiphian's armor to find his great heart, and pierce it. Angry Bison was screaming, and Mordax was unblinking, as they went into oblivion together.
Chapter 3: Pirate Commodore Rackstraw
1. Surrender Terms
Vulk turned his ruby eyes around the chamber, which was splattered and stained with gore. "Enough! This is madness! I yield! Call quarter!"
Athos was staring with pity halfway across the chamber at Stab Lee, who had been eviscerated by a point-blank blasterbolt through his belly. It was a wound too severe for any surgery of the younger races to cure. The man had been practically cut in half. The pirate was curled in a ball of agony on the deck, amid a spreading pool of red, crying out. "Brother! I come! I join you!"
And he stabbed himself in the throat. Whether this was to escape the pain, or done out of pride, or madness, no one would ever know. Stab Lee would not speak again.
Athos turned to Vulk. Vulk drew a blaster from his holster, and presented it, butt-first, to Athos. "Captain Rackstraw! Parley! Quarter! Spare my men! You said you would!"
Athos took the weapon, and, raising his voice, ordered Tisquantum to help Greedy Hudd and Thunderwind back to the sick bay aboard the Devil's Delight.
He turned to Vulk. "Captain, I grant you quarter during parley. I guarantee your safety. While we talk, please have your ship's surgeon report to my sick bay. At the moment, I have only a medicine-man." White Smoke Rising was a tribal elder who knew many dances and chants to encourage healing, but rather little about subcutaneous micro-robotic surgery and cellular reconstruction.
"Tell your wounded to report to my sickbay as well. I would prefer not to lose skilled men." For only three of Captain Vulk's bridge crew were still alive. One had knife wounds in his side, and the other had a bleeding and broken shoulder from a brutal blow from a tomahawk. The final crewman was Ephyra, the shapely First Mate, who was unharmed at the moment. But Athos did not much like the way Ethelred the Duck was eying her.
Vulk was thoughtfully wiping the blood from his fangs with a handkerchief. "You prefer not to lose my crew?"
"Your crew is my crew. Now."
"You are a strange one. My one Xiphian killed four of yours dead as moondust, and in less time than what it takes to puke a pint. I have a hundred like him aboard on the water decks. And on the dry decks, I ave robot soldiers by the score."
At that moment, an alarm whooped and wailed, echoing strangely from deck to deck, muted by the chambers and corridors filled with water. Athos turned. "Report, Ethelred!"
The Duck, who was perched on the security console, saluted smartly, "Yes, sir! Oh Most Behemothic Bigshot Blackjack, sir! Rung the pressure breach alarm, as ordered, Cap'n, and battened down all the blast doors, dogged the hatchways — motorized ones, that is. Crewmen are scurrying to get to their suits — so they'll be bothered and befuddled for a bit. We have control of the ship. It won't last."
Athos looked at Hob, who also saluted. "Sir! All communication dishes are locked down. Local electromagnetics are jammed."
Athos looked at the flybot, his pilot. The ball-shaped robot beeped and spoke: "The robotic complement has retired from the profession of arms, and will slay intelligent beings no longer."
"Impress the robots into duty as stretcher bearers, and have them tote Thunderwind and any of Vulk's wounded who cannot walk to our sickbay."
