Jennings lunged.
Regers scrambled on stiff legs. The squid caught his left leg and tripped him. He gave a cursing cry. Jennings snatched up the blaster and targeted the squid before it could glide toward him and crush him as it had the locust. The thing rolled back in a smoking ball, fore-motilators whipping out, chittering and twitching in a most obscene fashion.
Regers grinned as he choked out a mouthful of water. His head rang to a seashell roar. He shook the cobwebs out of his skull and struggled to drag himself to his feet by hooking fingers on the console. The ship’s defense gauge light showed shields dropping approximately to 30%.
He heard a choking cough behind him.
Jennings, scrabbling like a rat, pushing himself between console and locust gore.
“Not this time, Regers,” Jennings rasped. He aimed the gun in Regers’ direction.
Regers squinted, while a shadowy form moved out of the corner of his eye—a snaking tentacle, charred but not quite dead, unfurling out of the dim blue shadows by the artificial grav box.
“Jennings, you dumb fuck, look behind you!”
“Not falling for that trick, Regers. Get over there!” Jennings jabbed the gun, a luminous, blue, baton-like shape at Regers’ chest.
A slithering wisp of movement darted. Then a flick, like the snap of a whip. The squid that’d been gutshot, lifted Jennings in a bear hug and wrapped its two still functional motilators round his middle. Jennings gave a fierce squawk and writhed and thrashed in dismay, his face a blurred, horrified white rictus, feet kicking with all their might, heels slapping on a slime-pocked torso as lower tentacles tightened in their crushing grip. His lumo-weapon went flying aside, firing off a round, nearly taking off Regers’ head.
Regers ducked just in time. He snatched up the fallen weapon. In a wild instant, he blasted the squid, taking out chunks of tentacles, even as Jennings’ eyes bulged and his guts spewed from his mouth under the strangling pressure of the squid’s last death grip.
The thing flopped in a sprawled jelly mass, Jennings along with it.
Regers’ lips curled in a distasteful grimace. That gave way to a savage yell of insane triumph. He was king of this castle.
“Die you motherfucking, shit-eating squid!” In a blind frenzy, he blasted it full of green fire as it danced and jerked, screamed and burned. He dipped both hands in the smoking blood and guts of the open chest carapace and ripped out entrails, and squeezed with all the strength of his metal hand. Black guck ran through his fingers and down his arms. He did a little ballerina twirl, stumbled in his dizziness, fell, ran the warm thick goop over his cheeks while all the time laughing such that tears dribbled down his begrimed cheeks. His eyes glowed pools of dark, blazing madness. “Uncle Regers always gets the last laugh! HAHAHA! Hear me, you fucking squids? Happy birthday, fuckers. You can’t kill me. Try but you can’t, you shitweasels! I’m the big bad horse thistle that keeps growing in your back garden! Try to pull me out! Just try it, you fucks!”
Laughing in senseless glee, Regers stumbled over to the nav panel. He tugged at knobs, hammered buttons, glared, squinted, cursed, as sensor lights blinked with dusky luminosity and squiggles of color, as the battle raged on. LU destroyers went up in flames, and lightfighters, bright balls of crimson, followed suit. Not quite all together, he had no inkling how to work the controls. He puked out more green water, wiped his lips, gave a series of sour belches. But he’d figure it out, Uncle Regers’d figure it out, if he had to raise that ugly squid over there from the dead and force it to pilot this evil vessel. Might even be other locusts on this tub, or even an evac vehicle cached somewhere.
Deakes stared out of the glass like a pickled herring. The thug was still mashed up pretty bad. Better to keep him pickling for a while yet, Regers mused. Green witch water would do him some good. Had some healing power which only the alchemists knew about.
Regers’ left leg was throbbing badly from the fresh glass cut, but he’d suffered nothing compared to Deakes’s injuries, including a leg bent on an awkward angle and his side pretty gouged up, as if his guts’d spill out any moment. Flesh was stitching up nicely though. The miracle water would see to that. He watched Deakes struggle to raise a finger, not nearly succeeding.
Regers wagged a finger of his own. “Yeah, I know, Deakes. Life’s a bitch and then you die. Don’t be a crybaby. Your turn’s coming.”
His eyes sighted once again on the mangled form of Jennings sprawled off to the side beside the dead locust with half its bug head hanging off. The reek of those fetid bodies would soon stink up this crib and toxify it. “Fucking pigshit, cricket-shit mantis. Just a matter of flying this crate out of here. And you, Jennings, a sorry sight. Jiminy, I told you’d get your ass plugged back in a tank and killed.”
There Regers, had your rant. Now settle down and think this scenario through before you end up getting yourself completely fucked. No more Uncle Regers in this world is a sad world indeed. Besides, there’s a little matter of unsettled business to take care of.
Epilogue
Yul looked over the smoking ruins of the slums. Downed alien ships lay in the streets, crumpled Orbs and mantis lightfighters bombarded by enemy fire, their hulls buckled and their dark metal crushing tenements.
A flurry of footfall pounded from nearby. Human militia, dressed in body armor with E1s clutched in gloved hands hastened to gather the living. They rounded up survivors and tended to the wounded. Yul hustled Cloye and Fenli to a dozen aid soldiers stationed between two piles of debris. He volunteered
