The Naked Weapon Pt. 01

"Private Hatem..." A deep, gruff voice that sounded faintly familiar spoke. "Do you know what it takes to become a real member of PsiCom?"

"Uh..." I paused.

Like a Cheshire grin, a set of teeth spread into a wide smile in the darkness.

"You gotta get at least one of them."

I blinked.

"A kill?" I asked.

"A confirmed kill. And since you're an ass backwards weirdo who decided to hit combat before you even started day one..." the lights flared on and Amelia sat there across the table from me, her hands set on a tray that contained a cake that looked as cheap as it was possible for a cake to look. Considering all the food had to be either grown on the HQ hydroponics decks or shipped here from Earth via the few FTL ships that the PsiCom had access too (the Stargate was a bit too dangerous to leave on for anything but the most emergency of transports), I was actually rather impressed with how good the cake did look.

I was also impressed by the smiling crowd surrounding me.

It looked like nearly every Lance that the ship flew with was here, including Lance-3, all of them giving me huge shit eating grins.

I sagged in my seat, laughing as Amelia spun the cake around and I saw what was written on it.

My call-sign.

Each member of each Lance had a call-sign, given to them once they finished basic braining and got their first confirmed kill. Well, I had finished basic braining. I had gotten a confirmed kill (or two) on the little misadventure that had gotten me and Ali together. And now, I was looking at my call-sign.

PIRATE MASK.

My brow furrowed. "Pirate Mask?"

Amelia held out a knife for me to cut into the cake, grinning. "You stole the heart of a princess. It seemed appropriate."

Neurons fired and my brow furrowed. "Wait...like...Princess Bride? Like Wesley? The Dread Pirate Roberts? Dude in a mask?"

"Yes, yes, now, cut the cake, Mask, we're all waiting," one of the older dudes from Lance-5 said.

I grinned, then held out my palm. "Watch this..." I focused. Honing my telekinetic talents, I created a series of razor thin wires of force, which skimmed through cake and frosting alike, then snatched up the pieces, sending them flying through the air. They slapped into plates and everyone cheered.

Fang grinned as he took a seat on the table, crossing one naked thigh over the other. He, like most people on the ship, ate fastidiously, since getting food on your bare skin was just...weird. But as he ate, he said: "Looking forward to your first mission?"

"Yeah..." I said, nodding. Then, quietly. "I hope Ali doesn't hate me." I looked at the cake.

I suddenly felt rather guilty.

We'd be fine.

I was sure of it.

***

Earlier, I said that there were three things that had drawn me to Ali when we had been stranded on an alien death planet shortly after first meeting. The first had been her amazing body. I could, like, make easily half of each paragraphs of this story about how gorgeous she was and still only get a fraction of the idea through to you. But, uh, I'm pretty sure that I'd start sounding like even more of a creepy stalker then. But the second reason why I was drawn to her?

She was a badass.

That was why, a week and two days after she started basic braining, she passed with every commendation that could get handed out. She took the physical training and adapted to it with the skill of a born predator. She took the psionic training and hit back hard enough that Barry actually needed to bring in other people to assist. She took the military training and absorbed it with the air of someone learning to read Korean after struggling through English.

Yeah, apparently, written Korean is, like, the easiest language to learn in the world?

But after the petrified and highly complex hierarchy of Doyen paladins – who were organized along familial, national, ethnic, and power based lines, with different levels of superiority and rank based off the situation, location, time of day and moods of the participants – the relatively straightforward organization of the United Nations, which was a direct descendant from NATO military organization, was like mana from heaven.

So, she kicked ass, took names, and joined Lance-3. There wasn't any fancy ceremony. I mean, PsiCom was an organization where a good chunk of the active service-members wore nothing. Ceremony wasn't exactly a big part of the organizational byline. But there was a welcoming ritual. We all gathered in the massive hanger bays where Lances launched from when combat was imminent, and all of us watched as Ali swaggered into the hanger bay like she owned it.

They say girls look good in uniform.

Did you know that applied even when said uniform was a color coded bit of paint around the neck and some silvery chevrons daubed onto the shoulder. Ali's hair clicked and clattered together as she walked forward, her generous hips rolling as she stepped up to Fang. She saluted crisply. Saluting did fascinating things to breasts and I did my best to remain at attention. Fang inclined his head.

"At ease," he said, saluting back.

Ali relaxed.

Then she smacked me in the face.

I stood there, stock still. Then my hand went to my cheek. "Ow."

"That's for distracting me every single fucking day!" she said, her voice furious. "Do you know how hard it is to do push ups without you sending telepathic pings every five minutes?"

I rubbed my cheek slowly, then said. "Well, I..." I looked at Fang and Beli and Tasmin and Di. Each of them looked a bit apologetic and uncomfortable. Before I could say anything more, though, Ali stepped up and kissed me. Hard. Her tongue thrust into my mouth and uncoiled down my throat, coiling and wrapping around my own tongue along the way. It was like kissing an entire snake, and it set my heart hammering and my pulse pounding. My hands grabbed onto her hips as she kept kissing and kissing and kissing.

Fang coughed. "Ah, we...are technically on duty..." he actually sounded abashed. If I was not currently suffocating in the best way imaginable, I would have been shocked. Instead, my mental thought process was basically: hurrgaghgble.

Fang coughed again. Louder.

Ali drew back, her tongue retracting into her mouth. I almost collapsed onto my ass, coughing and gasping at the same time. As I clutched at my chest, Ali smiled and sent a private emotional ping to me: And that's for believing in me, Abby.

"Yay..." I wheezed.

While I got my breath back, Fang put Ali through one of the last pieces of training needed. It was here where humanity demonstrated why we were able to stand toe to toe with an alien race that had dominated a huge swath of the galaxy for thousands of years. A Doyen Paladin was a killing machine unlike anything the universe had seen, able to move across light years without a single piece of technology and slaughter entire armies of "mindless" (read, non-psionic) enemies with a wave of their hand.

Even with psionic powers, humans should have been out classed ten ways from Sunday.

But here's the thing about humans.

"Assume your warform," Fang said.

Ali shrugged, then slammed fist into palm. Her body flared and suddenly, her fleshy body was suspended in a cocoon of telekinetic force, shaded a shimmering purple-blue by the specific color of her talent. That cocoon was humanoid (well, Doyenoid) in shape, and contained enough raw strength to tear apart mountains. Given time. Warforms were how Doyen Paladins dominated the galaxy. They could outrun a tank, dodge missiles, and cut buildings in half with their huge-ass psi-swords.

"Load her up!" Fang called out.

The crane arms that were suspended across the top of the hanger bay moved. They whirred and groaned, swinging down armor plates and joints and bearings. Technicians swarmed out of where they had been gathering up tools and started to screw and hammer and even weld chunks into place. Once they were done, a crane dropped the main gun of an A-10 Warthog into Ali's arms. That immense mini-gun had been modified, with handles and braces that let someone the size of a small building hold it like a pistol.

I whistled slowly.

Ali had gone from curvy glowing warform to seriously badass battle-mech in one smooth transition. Okay, I lie, it hadn't been smooth. There had been several occasions where technicians had to yank off parts, try new ones, ask her to move her arm, then take off the parts, put on different new ones, repeat. This was her first fitting, and it took the better part of two hours. But at the end of those two hours, the entire team had gotten her measurements down and could put the armor onto her warform in about five minutes.

"Holy fuck."

Her voice boomed from speakers attached to the front of the armor. If we had been suited up, it would have crackled through speakers built into the helmets. And that was how humanity matched Doyen Paladins. Their warforms were stronger and faster and tougher. But ours cheated. We went into battle with radios, miniguns, missiles, and enough armor plating to make a Timber Wolf blush.

Humanity. Fuck. Yeah.

***

The briefing rooms were where the surrealism of humanity's secret war with the Doyen really kinda flicked you between the eyes. Most of the HQ ship was built out of cobbled together pieces from every nation, assembled in space and slowly refined by every engineer who ever got aboard her. This gave everything a nicely kludged together sci-fi look. But the briefing rooms looked as if they could have come from any number of collegian seminars or instruction halls on Earth. They even had overhead projectors and, yes...

They used power point.

I let my arms rest on the plastic armrests of the swivel chair that I had claimed, while Ali experimentally kicked off the floor and gasped in purest shock as her chair whirled around and around and around. Fang reached out with one arm and stopped her progress – leaving her head bobbing from side to side. Her eyes closed and she mumbled: "Thanks..."

Our CO, Lt. Kerensky, looked pained. But this was fairly standard for the people in PsiCom who were clothed. The number of active psionic talents on Earth were limited, and the needs of a military administration were vast and complex. And thus, there were loads of non-psions, who wore their clothes and looked slightly pained about every single one of us dick swinging, tit jiggling psychics. Not that I wanted to see Kerensky naked. He was...not the prettiest man in the world.

He spoke English with a faint Russian accent.

This just added another layer of surrealism to the moment. I mean, you got six naked teenagers or near teenagers (including an alien princess, for god's sake) sitting in office chairs that basically rolled out of Office Depot, looking at a power point run by a guy who sounded like he should be doing the briefing to Red Alert.

The first Red Alert. Before it got super campy.

Yes, I'd played the original Red Alert, it's called Pirate's Bay, look it up.

"Your mission is in the solar system Betelgeuse," Lt. Kerensky said. "Intelligence gathering. A Doyen family rules the sixth planet in orbit around Betelgeuse. There is a hefty supply of psi-crystal there, as well as an agrarian mindless population that we're calling Beta-3 until further designations are available. According to Private Tzali..." he nodded to her and the projector shifted to show a surface projection map of the planet. It looked like it had one huge continent surrounding the northern pole, with a smattering of islands flecking the equator like belly fluff on an exceptionally fat man. Several indicators for temperature and humidity were included.

I whistled. "Holy balls. It's like Florida five years from now."

Lt. Kerensky glared at me.

"Sorry, sir," I said.

Lt. Kerensky pointed with a laser pointer. "The main settlements are along the southern coast of the primary continent. Local wildlife is highly aggressive and mostly kept at bay by psionic impulse crystals crafted by Doyen artisans. The citizenry themselves are split between a landed gentry who are allowed to administer to the rest for the Doyen and the serf-farmers who are among the administered. However..." He clicked the projector forward another slide. This one showed a gleaming chunk of crystal that had been carved into a roughly donut shape. The image was grainy and blurry, like the camera had been flying really fast.

"This is a spy drone snapshot from the center of the capital. This is a psi-gate. A permanent one," Lt. Kerensky said. "Private Tzali, can you enlighten us on the function and methodology of such a gate."

Ali nodded, then sprang to her feet. Her hands clasped behind her back and she thrust out her chest. Her perky tits jiggled and I carefully slid myself so that the table was concealing my lap. I noticed that Fang did the same. Lt. Kerensky just took advantage of wearing pants, the coward. Di looked like she was struggling with some internal jealousy.

"Such a gate is referred to as an Eternal Angst. A Doyen artisan who is near the end of their life can have their mind, uh...severed in half, then tied to both ends of the gate. This creates a permanent portal. Worlds like this, with multiple populations of chattel and psi-crystal mines tend to become nexus of trade between Doyen houses. When not fought over. "

Lt. Kerensky nodded. "This leads to your mission. As Doyen do not know what humans look like underneath our armor, you will drop with your full gear in the wilderness. Stash the gear, then infiltrate in the guise as her retainers." He nodded to Tzali. "There, you will make contact with an organization discovered by Lance-6 in operations in the galactic northwest."

Click. The projector went forward. This time, it showed a symbol that had been carved onto some stone. Ali's brow furrowed. My brow furrowed. It looked like a strange squiggle. But as we looked at it, Fang coughed and then leaned forward. "Tasmin, can you recreate that mentally?" he asked. Clearly, he knew what it was.

Tasmin nodded. Her telepathy felt like one of those ear pokey-looky things that doctors used to peep in your ear holes, but as she formed the symbol in my mind, new dimensions came to life that couldn't be seen with the eyes. I blinked and Ali gasped audibly. She jerked back and exclaimed: "The Event Horizon!?"

"What's that?" Lt. Kerensky asked, his voice sharp. Fang shot a serious look at Ali. Ali actually flushed. But then she firmed her jaw and scowled.

"It's a fairy story. A silly nonsense legend shared among children," she said, tossing her head. "Or as a way to excuse some mistake made by a scout who warped into a neutron star or tried to land on a gas giant."

"The Doyen Empire is thousands of years old and has an extraordinarily spotty history keeping service," Lt. Kerensky said, his voice a tightly controlled growl. "Every legend must be treated as being a potential risk."

Ali looked like she wanted to argue. Instead, she sighed and leaned back. "That symbol is supposed to represent the Event Horizon. As a black hole swallows all, some Doyen say that there is a distance that swallowed all. Traveling further than six hundred zun leads to the Event Horizon swallowing a Doyen whole." She paused. "I believe that's six hundred and twenty five of your light years."

I frowned, slightly. "Isn't that nearly the exact size of the Doyen Empire?"

Ali opened her mouth to respond.

Then she shut up.

"Huh," she said.

"Well, that's unsettling," Di said, frowning.

"I never thought I would be so happy our warpers cannot get very far," Lt. Kerensky said, frowning.

"Sir," Fang said, leaning back in his seat. The office chair squealed under his bulk. "Where did Lance-6 find this symbol?"

Lt. Kerensky frowned. "Burned into the bedrock of a Doyen world that had been attacked by the Doyen Household known as Fenzor. The Fenzor had burned the local castle into the bedrock, then smeared that symbol..." he nodded to it. "Across five square kilometers."

Okay. So, it wasn't a cave wall. It was a planetary surface. I shuddered as my mental horizons were broadened by that vista. I tried to imagine the pyrokinetic power it would take to render a Doyen castle – which, I remind you, is made of pure telekinetic force – into bubbling slag. Pyrokinesis, more than any other form of kinetic manipulation, came from rage. Hatred. Fury. The mental image of a Doyen that mad gave me what I believe the doctors called the shit-yourself shivers.

"Well, then," Fang said. "If the Doyen are scared of them, they may be an ally. Remember, the enemy of our enemy-"

"Is still, sometimes, our enemy," Beli said, her voice soft. Mysterious sounding. Then she brightened. "Still, this does mean I get to bring out the gold bikini!"

Ali looked completely baffled.

This gave us all the tertiary objective of ensuring that she sat through the entire Star Wars series.

***

It was possible for a human being to wrap themselves in a war-form, armor up, then just jet through warp portals. But that was very tiring for the humans in their war-forms and for the warper, who was also in a war-form. And since Betelgeuse was nearly a hundred light years away from the HQ ship, we instead got to watch as our armor and weapons were loaded onto one of the many secondary ships that PsiCom had built in space. The entire military industrial complex on Earth was a terrifying thing, when you thought about it, and with even a tiny fraction of material and men siphoned away from the wars on Earth, we had enough spare parts to...spare.

That was a terrible sentence, I should feel bad.

Thus, we all got to cram our butts into a massive barrel of liquid hydrogen and oxygen with a spinal column of living quarters that the PsiCom admiralty called a "scout ship." The main living deck was built into the very nose, with the floor facing the engines. Calling it a living deck was kind of like calling the paint that we were daubed in cold weather gear. My thighs were mashed against Ali's thighs and against Beli's thighs, and I couldn't lower my arms without bumping their tits. This would normally be fine, but each of us were also crammed into seats with life support webbings, com units, and straps. All of the shit was designed to literally tear away into strands if a simple chemical spray was activated by the ship computers.

That was so we'd all be buck naked if, say, a Doyen cut the ship in half and we needed to warform up in a hurry.

Now, don't ask what we'd do if the hydrogen and oxygen mixed too fast and the entire ship exploded like the Challenger. Which was a terrifyingly likely possibility, considering the tech in the ship was only slightly more advanced than the Challenger's. It had only been thirty years, and most of those years had been spent making our phones swanker, not getting better spaceships, because humans have fucked up priorities.

The only one of us who wasn't strapped down was Di. I was trying to find a place to look that wasn't Di's incredibly tight rump, because she was standing in the center of the ring of seats, her arms braced against the ceiling and the floor. She was as close as it was possible to get to the center of mass on the ship. She'd feel acceleration the least, and she had the least amount of anything touching her skin.

"This is Flight-com, do you read me Angel's Grove?" Flight-com's voice crackled through the speakers.