“Might work…” he grunted to himself, rising from the duck-walk. It would be the last thing they’d expect right now, anyway.
In one swift motion, still holding the heavy blaster, Rechs raised it to port arms and ran for the rail facing the hovering sled. Untargeted fire tried to acquire him, but he was moving fast and straight at them…
He leapt out across the void between the two hovering vessels, over the raging mouth of the monster in the watery depths once more. His jets burst, surging him forward, and then sputtered out. A second later he landed on the sled, swinging the empty blaster like a massive club into the chest of a Gomarii slaver, not bothering to watch as the scumbag went over the side and into the death-laden waters below.
A guard tried to strike Rechs with the butt of his weapon, but missed as the bounty hunter moved like a liquid hypersnake and threw himself out of the way. Still holding the empty heavy blaster, he smashed another alien’s blaster-holding claws. The would-be killer watched helplessly as his weapon clattered to the deck. Rechs once more swung the empty blaster, this time right into the beaky face of his latest attacker.
A massive blaster bolt from the maran’s main gun slammed into a lithe sniper standing at the bow of the sled and aiming at Rechs. It was one of the Guri assassins, famed for their ability to shoot down their targets under the direst of circumstances. This one was instantly vaporized by the immense power of the massive bolt that just barely sizzled across the sled’s bow.
Rechs only put it all together after it happened. He’d just been bailed out. Big-time.
Over the comm the Nubarian bot triumphed in alphanumerica that “Boss Captain Rechs” owed it one.
Rechs didn’t take the time to acknowledge. He discarded the empty heavy blaster for the beaked alien’s weapon. It was an old scattergun. Rechs didn’t have the time to figure out how old or what make, just to rack a charge pack and send a spray of energy bolts into the last guard on the sled. The short-range blast did brutal damage to the hired blaster, leaving the corpse draped over the rail. Rechs racked another charge pack and finished off the pilot, whose mouth merely worked in protest at his sudden and unforeseen change of fortune, hands still on the steering column.
Such are the ways of the galaxy. In a heartbeat you can go from winning to dead. And not just dead… scatter-blast dead.
Moving quickly, Rechs made his way to the sled’s controls.
He scanned the skies surrounding the battle over the lagoon. Close by, three sleds were attempting to pull crew and survivors off the maran. Fires had broken out across the pleasure ship, and it was now smoking in a dozen places. But Rechs’s eyes were drawn to the distance, where one other vessel was incoming. A very familiar old light freighter: the Obsidian Crow. She sped across the waters, thundering in with her telltale howl of engines.
“Stand by to get off the ship!” Rechs shouted over the comm to the Nubarian, which was digitally whooping as it blasted one of the transport sleds from the sky in a flurry of concussive pom-pom fire. The sled ruptured along its hull and exploded, raining bodies and debris down along the sides of the burning maran and into the lagoon.
And then a truly amazing thing happened. It was as if the tyrannasquid, an ancient monster with a mind completely alien even to a galaxy filled with aliens, had learned something from Rechs’s impromptu flying counterattack against one of the sleds. Without warning the monster breached the foam-churned and debris-littered waters of the lagoon, flung itself up at the massive floating pleasure palace, and wrapped its tentacles around the hull of the burning ship. Hanging from the pleasure-maran’s underside, the hideous tyrannasquid, like some inscrutable creature from the outer dark, snaked its tentacles into the guts of the ship and pulled out living victims to feast on as it howled and roared in triumph and pain.
08
Rechs tagged the progress of the little rolling Nubarian bot. It had left the forward blaster tower and was on the move to the aft pick-up deck they’d targeted for exfil. Now it was time to take the target into custody. Gat Hathor needed to be ready for a fast departure.
Rechs, at the controls of the captured guard sled, drove the craft toward the upper deck of the monster-embraced luxury ship. Even as he approached, some of the former revelers were now throwing themselves overboard and into the body- and debris-littered sea below. A few even escaped in this manner—for the time being anyway—as even the tyrannasquid could snatch only so many out of the air at once, its tentacles cracking out like a whip and seizing hapless snacks in its clutches.
Flying the sled with one hand, Rechs shot down the defenders atop the third deck of the maran as he closed for approach to the main flight deck. Gat’s guard would have called in an evac as soon as it became clear the maran was going down. But evac wasn’t something they had ever expected to need—a flaw in their security, and part of the reason Rechs had chosen this setting to make his move—and it would take time for even their fastest rescue ship to get here.
Still, time was a finite luxury, and Rechs had burned much of it up just getting this far. His window of free operation was closing fast.
He rocketed the sled at the third deck in what no doubt looked to the remaining guards like a suicide run. Killers and assassins scrambled to get out of the way, suddenly giving up their allegiance to the dread crime prince crocosaur Gat Hathor. Nearby, the
