Again, silver lightning coalesced around two forms in the center of the platform. This time, however, they did not land huddled into helpless balls of misery. At first, I took that as a good sign... and then I realized we had a problem.
I caught sight of hard, grey skin, and I didn’t think any further; I just raised the Blazer and fired at center mass. My first round caught one by surprise, and knocked him back into his partner. From over near the consoles, I could hear Tens shouting, and caught the flash of movement as people dived for cover, and I ignored it all.
I knew what these creatures were, and there was no way either of these fuckers was making it off that platform, alive. The one I’d hit lurched suddenly towards me, as though he’d been pushed. Whatever, after the initial momentum had worn off, he kept coming. I put two more rounds into him, before Tens blocked my line of fire, wading in close with an elongated blade that hummed with electricity and light.
Damn! Now, why hadn’t I thought to get me one of those?
“Don’t leave me hanging, Cutter!”
Right.
I dropped the Blazer, and pulled the machete, running in to where Tens had engaged the closest, injured arach. Beyond him, I could see the other one heading towards Doc.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” I muttered, leaving Tens to his destructive dance.
I’d been good with guns on the combat range, but we hadn’t been allowed to get too enthusiastic with the blade—at least, not after I’d put Ax into a regen tank for the third time. That had also been when they’d started checking my load out, before I’d gone onto the range.
“It’s training,” they’d told me, confiscating my dirtier tricks, while the others had looked on, open-mouthed. Honestly, you’da thought my team mates would have been taking notes, but they weren’t. I’d had to take my blade training off-campus, and in secret. I just figured it would be another way I could protect myself during missions—besides, it meant I could still fight dirty, even with a standard load-out, and didn’t that just impress Ax so much?
Now, it looked like that extra training was going to come in handy—especially since it had involved coordinating blade and gun. I pulled the Zakrava, as I leapt onto the platform behind Tens.
“You put a hole in his ship, and Mack isn’t going to like you very much,” Tens said, as I bolted past.
“He doesn’t like me, anyway,” I shot back, firing the Zakrava, twice, into the arach going for Doc. “Hey! Ugly!”
I slowed my forward momentum, sliding to a half stop, and swinging the machete towards the gap between two sets of its arms, with as much force as I could muster. That actually worked out a whole lot better than I’d thought it would, because the arach turned, and didn’t register the blade until it had sliced across its diaphragm.
I fired under the back-swing, putting another two rounds into its chest, before the blade struck home, and then two more as I ended the swing and pulled the hilt towards me, followed by a final two as I rammed the blade as far into the monster as I could.
It screamed as I twisted the machete, and started to pull it out, but all that did was remind me it had a head. I raised my aim, using the edge of my vision to check for potential cumulatives behind it before I fired.
There weren’t any, but it didn’t matter, because I didn’t miss. Arach might be monsters, but they were like any other monster, I’d ever encountered. You put enough rounds into their heads, and they all fall down.
“And you are on cleaning duty, just as soon as you get back,” Tens muttered. “Congratu-fucking-lations.”
“You could try being grateful,” I retorted, grabbing my monster by the leg, and pulling it off the platform. “Besides, can’t you just teleport the ick right back to Andreus? After all, it is his mess.”
“And you are such a funny fucker,” but he towed his own corpsified arachnid off the dais, and headed back to the console. “You found them yet?”
I put one hand on my hip, and gave him my best “Are you kidding me?” look out from under my brows. He completely ignored it, dropping his arach corpse in front of the console, and heading back around to the controls.
“Nope,” he said, altering a few settings. “I’ve got the coordinates they came in from, and Mack and Delight are going to need their locators if I’m gonna be able to pick them up, again. We’re gonna assume they’re in the same space.”
“What if they’ve been moved?” I asked.
I wasn’t even going to pretend they’d moved themselves. Neither of them would have given up their tracers—not without a fight—and neither of them would have let the arach port out of wherever they were, without warning Tens and me.
“They won’t have gone far. These two didn’t take up that much of our time.”
I heard a snort from Doc, and looked over in time to see him disappear back into the recovery room.
“Who was that, exactly?” I asked, meaning the girl he’d ported up at Mack’s request. “Melari?”
“Good guess,” he said. “Mission was to get her back. It’s why I said the mission was over.”
“We failed on subtle.”
“Subtle went out the window the second the arach turned up.”
“So, we’re retrieving Mack and Delight.”
“Yeup.”
“We gonna get paid?”
“You bet your sweet cheeks, we are. Mack will make sure of that.”
“If we can get him back.”
I had slid the locator bracelets off the arachs’ wrists, while we spoke, and now I moved over to the platform, eyeing the slick of blood and other bits splashed across its surface.
“I can’t port you out on that,” Tens said.
I eyed the mess, and looked over at him. Basics had only lightly touched on the theory of teleportation. It hadn’t gone anywhere near the risks of porting out
