The Marilona

I pulled my hands away from each other as hard as I could, her arms straightening all the way before the flesh and bone of her side parted and broke under the edge of the blade in my other hand. She came apart, more or less, the blade having entered just below her armpit and exiting just above her right buttock, slicing and tearing through everything in between. Through the mess she left behind, I could see the other five, their eyes wide and panicked.

They charged as a group, shoving away from the door and closing the tiny gap between us in no time at all. Most of them had knives, but one held a modified plasma cutter of the variety found on every spacecraft. It was designed to heat up instantly, going from cool to around twenty thousand degrees and cutting efficiently through just about every metal known. His had been rigged to react to anything it touched, a scary, dangerous weapon. I jerked just the right way, changing my angle to exactly where I wanted it.

I wanted HIM to hit me first.

The nozzle of the cutter hit my left arm just below the elbow, his fingers already pressing the trigger. Superheated plasma blasted out at close to the speed of sound, hitting the smart fabric of my suit and flowing around it, dripping off the other side. The suit immediately dispersed the incredible heat, none of it penetrating to my skin, but rolling around my body in a wave across the fabric, making it glow red as it bled the heat off as fast as it could into the air around me.

The temperature in the Javelin shot up to about a thousand degrees in the span of a heartbeat. Luckily for me and for everyone else, there can't be the smell of burning flesh or the sound of screams if there's no atmosphere. No atmosphere also meant that things cooled down very quickly, and I spent a few seconds performing the unpleasant task of finishing off the three who hadn't caught the worst of it.

On the one hand, they could be saved. A StemPod would have them fixed up in a few days' time, little worse for wear. On the other hand, they would writhe in agony for hours before anyone could get them there, and they had been on a crew hellbent on making sure none of us survived. We would need the StemPods for our own. They had made sure of that.

I slapped the command console again, exiting out through the airlock I'd entered less than half a minute earlier, shoving myself toward the archway and the waning battle there. Four of the five crew behind the barricades were down, at least two dead, the others either already there or close enough that it didn't matter just then.

They had sold their lives dearly, taking a half dozen pirates with them, and the last of the five was giving her all to two more.

She was young, around twenty, and shorter than Noala, her limbs, still long and thin, held more muscle, her hair was about a foot shorter and a few shades lighter. Her eyes were shocking green and wild as she fended off the blades that danced and spun around her from all directions. She was fast, graceful, and a natural when it came to hand-to-hand combat; a long, thin blade in one hand, a tapered and sturdy shock baton in the other.

She was losing.

She knew it, they knew, and I knew it. It was only a matter of time before one of them got a blade through or caught one of her arms, and then it would end quickly and messily for her. She didn't care. She fought with everything she had anyway, determined that if they were going to take her life, she would take one of theirs.

I didn't wait for her to lose.

They were close enough to the bulkhead that I was able to grab a handhold and stop myself with one hand, hook a foot under another hold, and grab one of her attackers. I yanked him back by the scruff of his neck, slipping my knife under the homemade armor and his ribs. Her fight halved, the young girl made short work of the last one, jamming her shock baton into his eye and slipping her knife past one of his jerking arms to finish it.

(Thank you,) she signed, shifting her knife to the hand that held the shock baton. I nodded back.

(How many made it past?)

(I can't be sure,) she signed, shaking her head. (Perhaps a dozen.)

I nodded and pushed off hard, rocketing down through the archway. She followed, keeping pace with me like the lifelong spacer she was. I looked back once, catching her eye, searching for any sign that she wasn't ready for what we had to do.

Large, brilliant green eyes, hardened and determined and angry stared back. There was no doubt, no worry, only controlled fear and absolute resolution shining from them. She would do just fine.

We found the first of them plugged into a panel a handful of meters past the big hatch that led to the passenger section, tapping away at a tablet, distracted, focused on the job of unlocking doors or venting atmosphere. I slapped the closing controls as I went by, the hatch sliding closed behind us, atmosphere beginning to pour back in.

I startled him as I sailed past, and he had just enough to time to jerk his head up and focus on my passing form before my companion's knife darted into his neck and retreated like the stinger of some giant scorpion. He was dead before I reached the next hatch.

We came to the first torus and had a decision to make. I didn't waste much time on it. Even if we picked the stairway furthest from the one the pirates had chosen, we would find them soon enough.

(You have command override for the doors?) I signed. I turned so I could see her, just catching her nod. (Good. We take them one group at a time, lock them in anywhere we can without hurting the passengers.)

We found them quickly, but not quickly enough. Four cabins stood open, bodies of passengers floating in front of three of them, screams coming from the fourth. I pointed at the three and motioned to her. She didn't need me to explain. While she set about shutting the three and overriding the locks, I kicked off a wall and shot into the fourth.

Three pirates had barged in, laying about with their weapons. A young man, rootstock and looking around thirty, struggled to avoid the knife of one pirate while a second held his arms as I flew in. A rootstock woman, young and beautiful and the source of the screaming hid in a corner, clutching a small child, out of room to retreat from the third.

I flipped my grip and hurled my knife like a spear, the point driving into the skull of the lightly armored man clutching the passenger's arms. The force of the throw slowed me enough that I was able to grab the second one under the shoulders, wrapping my arms up and back, locking in a full Nelson even as my legs kicked out and wrapped around the third, drawing him in, squeezing.

I took a deep breath, locked my fingers together, and jerked my arms down and in while my legs tightened. The pirate in my arms let out a wet gurgle that was accompanied by the wet crunch of bones giving in his neck and chest while the pirate between my legs emitted a series of soft pops and got thinner and squishier. I pulled my knife from the first and finished the third before letting him go and pushing off, gliding back out into the passageway, leaving the young family to comfort each other.

"Lock the door behind me," I shot over my shoulder, catching a determined, if frightened nod from the young man.

My companion and I cleared the other three cabins in much the same manner as I had the first one, with me lining myself up before she opened the door, rushing myself in, her following close behind. We were an efficient team, each room taking perhaps thirty seconds of intense, hard fighting.

I took a minor cut to the forearm, my suit flowing back into place and sealing the tears in itself and my skin, stopping the flow of blood. My companion got a nasty cut above her left eye at some point, the lack of gravity keeping the blood flow more or less out of the way until she was able to quickly apply a medfoam spray after the second cabin.

When it was done, I clasped her arm, palm to wrist, and locked eyes with her, giving her a nod of respect.

(If you ever get tired of life on Marilona,) I said, my voice carrying the odd, tinny bass quality that an O2 Thief filters in. (Fleet would fucking love you.)

She nodded back, giving my wrist a squeeze, her O2 Thief moving up with the motion of a smile I couldn't see.

We shoved off and raced for the crew section, ready to lend any help we could.

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I hadn't expected so many bodies.

There were a dozen in the first fifteen meters, crew and pirate both. It had been brutal, desperate, ugly. Blood floated lazily in the air, bouncing and splashing off of us as we pushed through the slowly spinning dead.

More greeted us the further we went. The tide had turned suddenly, horribly, and completely. Crew dead began to outnumber pirate dead, their bodies rent and broken. Few pirates I'd ever seen were capable of that sort of thing, and a sneaking, dreadful suspicion began to grow in my mind.

Atmosphere had returned to the crew section as well, and I could hear the sounds of fighting that is coming to an end ahead of us. We flew through the last hatch between us and the heavy airlock of the command chamber, surprising a trio of pirates who had just finished off a crew member, having toyed with her and killed her at their leisure.

Whatever had changed, they had become careless and cocky, absolutely sure they couldn't lose. My suspicions grew.

The green-eyed lifer shot past me, her rage at what we had seen coming in overtaking her reason. She killed one of the pirates immediately, her knife sliding into his throat and causing a spray of blood as she wrenched it from his neck.

The other two rounded on her, blades flashing, one scoring a deep puncture into her hip as she jerked away from them. I shoved myself forward and snapped an arm drawn back to strike her, my combat blade swinging in a hard arc that met the pirate's shoulder and continued on, ripping out through his chest.

The remaining pirate rounded on me, his knife flashing towards my face as he tried to sneak a shock baton into my ribs. I caught the baton in my hand, the voltage ripping around my suit and flowing back into him through the blade, jolting him and rendering him senseless for a few seconds. More than long enough to slide my blade between his ribs.

My green-eyed companion floated close by, curled a little bit around her wound, one long fingered hand pressed tightly to it. I gently pried the hand away, taking her little canister of medfoam and spraying it straight into the wound. She bit back a scream as the foam filled the wound, expanding into every small feature of it.

I placed a hand on either side of her face and looked into her eyes, full of pain at her wounds and the loss of so many friends. She would be alright, in time, but she was done.

I turned and pressed the release on the command deck airlock, the heavy steel sliding open onto a scene that confirmed every horrible suspicion I'd had since hitting the crew section.

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Jovian genetic modifying is a wondrous thing, but it wasn't perfect from the start.

The first couple of generations were fine specimens, but unstable. Early versions of our genecode had us larger, stronger, but prone to problems. The DNA tended to break down after a few decades, massive bodies slowly tearing themselves apart as lipids and proteins lost cohesion.

A few tweaks here and there and the problems were corrected, but the early generations had inherited their ancestors' stubbornness, and some of them had left the Grid before the problem was solved.

The captain of the Javelin was one of them. Early generation Jovian, he was three meters tall and probably four hundred kilos. He had to have been close to nine hundred years old, an age that wasn't so unusual, really, but something of a horrible miracle when applied to an early gen Jovian.

A tank at his back hissed and wheezed, a heavy, armored glass tube full of the neon green gel-like fluid that filled a stempod. It pushed through tubes woven through with some kind of high-test wire mesh that anchored into his skin at various points. A constant, steady flow of stempod regeneration flowed through his blood stream. I wouldn't have been overly surprised to find out that WAS his bloodstream.

He wore armor that had been custom made, probably printed from an industrial or military grade composite printer. It was beautiful, ornate, and probably added a hundred kilos to his mass. Skulls and screaming faces were moulded into every flat surface, bits of bone and leather floated free from it at various places, little pieces of rib or whole teeth clicking together as he moved. In one hand he held an axe that would have looked ridiculously oversized in the hands of a rootstock, but in his giant hand it looked like a hatchet. The other hand gripped a laser cannon, the kind of thing normally found mounted to a vehicle, that had been heavily and expertly modified to function as an oversized pistol.

His eyes were the worst part. Sometime in the last nine centuries, he had gone completely, utterly mad. Maybe it happened before he left the Grid, maybe it happened sometime after, but his sanity was as far away as the stars. Sadistic glee burned in those unnaturally bright green eyes, the neon of the stempod gel tainting them away from whatever color they had once been.

(What is this?) he asked. His voice was a grating, gurgling rumble, and his Gridkippen was so archaic I almost didn't understand the words.

I didn't bother to respond. There were dead and wounded all around the command deck, and stopping to chat with him was pointless. He didn't want prisoners, he didn't want to take the ship. He just wanted to kill and take whatever was left.

I launched myself at him, vaguely aware of a scream off to the side but shutting it out. I needed every bit of focus, every bit of skill, and every bit of strength.

He was blindingly fast.

I managed to twist my body at the last second, the blast of the laser cannon missing my vitals but scoring a hard, nasty hit to my shoulder. The shipsuit was a great piece of tech, but it could do little against a cannon. Even its normal ability to close up a wound was hampered by the blast, cauterizing not only my flesh but the suit itself. I had a hole through my left shoulder, clean and smelling of grilled meat.

It didn't slow my advance, just made it a lot less graceful.

I plowed into him hard, weightlessness letting me tackle a monster that in normal circumstances could probably have braced and sent me bouncing away from him. We thundered into the bulkhead behind him, steel denting and consoles shattering under the force of the impact. If they were smart, the crew would be running, getting the fuck out of the enclosed space where either one of us might crush them purely by accident.

He swung the axe, a wide, sweeping arc that would have been fatal if I were a little further away from him but that merely rocked my entire body as the sharp bit missed entirely and the haft slammed into my ribs. I felt reinforced bone give, knowing that one of my lungs was probably punctured.

I slammed my combat blade into him, jamming the long blade in between his neck and his armor, driving it down into his chest cavity. On any other man, even on me, it would have been the end of the fight, blood would fill his chest cavity, his lungs would be unable to pull in air, it might even have reached his heart.

He actually fucking laughed.

(I haven't had a good fight in centuries,) he hissed, thick spittle flying from his lips to splash onto my face or float away in viscous globs.

Already, the gel was pumping through, closing the wound like it had never been there. I wrenched the blade free, seeing no blood come out, and swung hard at his neck in the same instant that he swept the hand with the pistol across his body, clubbing me in the face with his weapon.

My blade sliced into his neck, carving through skin and muscle before stopping short at the vertebrae, the shock of the impact running up the blade and into my arm at the same time that the ridiculous mass of his arm and weapon crashed into the side of my head.

My cheekbone shattered, bits of orbital bone speared into my eye, blinding me on one side as blood began to float from my face. I barely retained consciousness, the vision in my remaining eye swimming as I heard hammers in my ears and fought the urge to vomit. The force of the impact threw me back, and I flailed for purchase on something, anything at all.

I got tangled in the tubes. My hand went between two of them and somehow became wrapped in both, tethering me to him as he drew back with his axe to finish me off. I tried to yank my arm up, to block the blow with my arm, knowing full well I would lose it, but the tubes held fast and rather than pulling my arm up, the motion jerked me down.

It didn't get me completely out of the way, and I felt the axe bite into my side, ricocheting off of ruined ribs and taking a chunk out of my hip bone. I kicked out, slamming my foot into his ribs and shoving hard with my remaining good leg, just trying to get him somehow off balance. It didn't work exactly as I'd planned.

The tubes ripped free, pulling first from his arm then tearing from the tank at his back as I shoved backwards. Stempod gel flowed freely, big globes of the stuff jittering and wobbling away as he let out a scream of rage and rocketed forward, the axe swinging through a wide, backhand arc that could only end in my skull. I arched my back hard, knowing it wouldn't get my body out of the way, but it might protect my head.

The blade bit into my side right under the pectoral muscle, glancing off the ribs and blazing through, shaving the muscle away from the bone before exiting and leaving me with a heavy, bleeding flap of muscle that floated free from my body, tethered only by the little bit of undamaged connective tissue that led to my shoulder. I slumped in the air, my body beginning to lose too much blood to stay awake, too much damage to stay alive.

He threw both weapons down and charged in wildly, intent on murdering me with his bare hands for ripping the tubes from his skin, stopping the regenerative fluid from constantly pumping. It probably put him in considerable pain, the fluid no longer preventing his own DNA from falling apart and tearing his body down. He threw his arms wide, ready to pull me into a vast bearhug and squeeze until something else inside me broke or popped or simply stopped.

I stabbed him in the throat.

The combat blade tore through trachea and muscle, the point finding that little seam between the vertebrae and driving through with the force of his advance more than my arm. It erupted out the back as his eyes registered surprise for the first time, globs of stempod gel and a tiny bit of blood dribbling out of his mouth and quivering in the air.

I watched life leave his eyes, staying conscious just long enough to know he was dead.

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You don't sleep in a stempod. You're unconscious, certainly, but it isn't sleep. It's this sort of silent, undreaming limbo where your brain isn't sure what is happening, or if it needs to function, or if there is, in fact, anything left in the universe. There is no orientation, no thinking, no passage of time for you in a stempod. You know time is passing, but cannot know how much. Sometimes it feels like seconds, sometimes it feels like forever.

You never know which, and you only remember the vaguest impression of being lost and not exactly floating.

The gel is thick, viscous, and all-encompassing. For most treatments, you wear a mask that provides sweet, fresh oxygen to your lungs and makes you feel downright comfortable.

When the stempod has to essentially rebuild your body, though, you don't get a mask. The gel goes into your lungs, oxygenated and regenerative all at once. It can even breathe for you if need be, until your body recovers to the point where it can do it on its own. Intensive stempod treatment is unpleasant, at best.