Chapter 10 – Warm Embrace
Wiping sweat from her brow, feeling the Seal-Tech spreading upward over the curve of her breasts and downward over her pubic mound, Shi drew her big boy once again, thumbing the hammer to half-cock and rolled the cylinder. “This corridor…it’s straight above the lower decks’ central corridor, right? Nothing vital between here and the engineering level? Not that it really matters if we’re trying to blow this ship, I guess. If we can just shut the power off, we might stand a chance, though. If not, well…nobody else has to suffer this fate.”
Kaylee shook her head slowly, her mouth working open and closed without a sound. “Y-yeah, just power lines and vents and stuff…” Her eyes went to Shi’s big revolver and somehow got wider. “You’re…not going to…use that, are you?”
Shi didn’t reply as she thumbed the hammer all the way back and began the charge cycle, wincing as it started up. The shot could potentially breach the hull if she didn’t gauge the round’s power correctly. Shi’s grimace deepend as she felt the weapon already pulling on her almost non-existent arcane pool, drawing at reserves of power she didn’t have. “We’re not going to have much time. I’ve got another shot that should do the job if you don’t know a quick shut down process.”
“Your best bet is to eject the power core,” Kaylee said, then gulped. “There should be an emergency eject somewhere around the console where Hilde is… I don’t think you can initiate a self-destruct without command-level authority.”
Shi nodded as the whine of the revolver picked up, spreading her legs to widen her stance as she aimed straight at the floor, then shifted her aim slightly in the direction of the engineering section. Her vision blurred, the corridor swirled, and she nearly fell. “Follow me down the hole if you can. I don’t have anything left in me to soften the landing. For what it’s worth…this stuff won’t kill us, I think. I just…don’t know what it’s going to do to us after it has us.”
Kaylee nodded slowly, closing her eyes, perhaps even offering a prayer to the gods. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to have them on their side. Shi offered her own short prayer to Saressh; she hadn’t been an especially devoted follower in her current lifetime, but the kerryn goddess wasn’t a particularly vengeful one in that regard…most of the time. The goddess had certainly gone on a rampage after she had been freed from her captivity a few thousand years ago during the Kerryn Liberation War, but that was a collection of memories for another time.
Her gun humming, her skin and nerves burning as the big revolver sucked at her very life force, Shi braced herself and squeezed the trigger. She screamed as the accumulated energy flowed into the round and fired. She could feel fire in her veins, almost as if every nerve within her had ignited at once. If her muscles hadn’t seized up where she stood, Shi would likely have dropped the gun and fallen into a quivering mess right there.
The weapon’s discharge roared loudly, meshing with the pounding of Shi’s heart in her ears, as green-white energy slammed into the deck between Shi’s feet. There was no backblast on this shot, instead the intense, nearly blinding light pierced through the metal plating as if it wasn’t there. In fact, it wasn’t there, not anymore. Where the shot touched, nothing remained aside from dust in the air.
New warning alarms sounded, lights flickered and went out, and the ship lurched. Shi saw sparks and steam hissing from exposed wires and pipes as the light from the shot faded, and heard water pouring out from somewhere. There was no rush of air indicating a hull breach, only the perfectly circular holes that had been cut through the decks, angling toward the rear of the ship.
Shi fell into the hole more than she jumped into it, somehow maintaining her grip on her steaming revolver as she hit the deck below on her side, crying out in fresh pain as she rolled over the lip of that hole and fell again. She could feel the gravity aboard the ship fluctuating as the internal sensors tried to make sense of why there were suddenly sections of the ship missing, and thankfully that allowed her some small amount of relief as she stumbled and rolled from one deck to the next. Shi was soaking wet as she rolled through water pouring from a severed pipe, then somehow managed to land on her feet on the bottom deck, though she only remained so for a moment, toppling forward with a loud cry of pain, her everything throbbing with hot agony.
The Seal-Tech on those decks had likewise been disintegrated by her shot, and seemed to be having trouble processing its functions as well, wiggling and thrashing slowly around her, but unable to reform itself properly as it had before. The sound of Kaylee’s launcher firing above her got Shi moving again, panting heavily as she willed herself to crawl, then awkwardly try to stand, staggering unsteadily around the dangerous latex filling the corridor. She could barely see, her vision wavering between extremely blurry and the darkness that came just before unconsciousness. The Seal-Tech upon her body had covered her thighs to the limit of the bodysuit and started toward her knees, as well as reaching her collar bone to begin spreading down her arms. She even felt it creeping down her tail.
Shi gasped for air, stumbled and fell to her knees as a terrible fatigue and burning pain in her nerves overtook her. She caught herself with her free hand, closing her eyes as the agony of firing her revolver with no magic reserves left threatened to fully take her into unconsciousness, if not much worse. She cried out from a more intense pain pulsing through her body, but again willed herself forward, crawling on hands and knees.
Something heavy landed behind her, Kaylee crying out with her own pain. The muscular pilot’s hand wrapped around Shi’s bicep, hauling her upright. “No time to rest, commander! Not a good spot, either!”
“K-Kaylee…you…” Shi forced her eyes open, seeing the Seal-Tech flowing from her arm to Kaylee’s hand. She also saw several splatters of the stuff spreading over Kaylee’s body and face.
“We’re on a tight timeline here, and the natives are pissed,” Kaylee said, managing to force a smile as she started tugging Shi along, walking with a limp, favoring her right ankle. Around them the Seal-Tech finally started to get a handle on itself.
The pair crossed the threshold into the engineering section.
Shi’s eyes immediately went to HIlde, who looked almost like she was cocooned in a way, still stuck to the console where she had sat, though now her form was mostly featureless, smooth, shiny Seal-Tech covering her like a second skin. Though strands of the Seal-Tech held her in place at the console, she still squirmed, and had her arms crossed in front of her, thick rubber straps holding her limbs in place, looking very much like a straitjacket, her neck surrounded by a stout, tall collar to keep her head movements at a minimum. Somehow, even her wide dwarven feet were angled downward to limit any attempts at walking.
Kaylee released Shi’s arm and motioned with her Seal-Tech covered hand to the far end of the console near Hilde, her fingers likewise getting forced into a fist as she pointed. “There! That’s the ejector!” As the sound of rubber squeaks grew louder behind them, Kaylee hooked her useless hand awkwardly through the forehand grip of her launcher and turned toward the doors and the corridor behind them. “I’ll hold them here; do what you gotta do.”
Shi nodded, unable to find her voice, but somehow willing herself to move her legs. Staggering forward, she thumbed the hammer back on the revolver, gritting her teeth against the pain that flared back up as the amplifier engaged again; she didn’t bother with adjusting the cylinder; any of the remaining rounds would do the job. Kaylee fired behind her, the blast rocking her, nearly causing her to fall. She pushed forward, though, breathing through gritted teeth and focusing on the panel that was her destination.
The Seal-Tech lingering around Hilde and splattered on the console didn’t react as Shi approached, perhaps aware that her body was already mostly covered with the stuff. Shi could feel it snaking over her jawline, down her forearms and shins. It wouldn’t be much longer now.
Shi stumbled as Kaylee fired another shot, bumping into the console, nearly dropping to the floor. As she picked herself up to reach for the pin holding the emergency ejection system’s door shut, her eyes went to the screen in front of her. She paused, blinking, not certain she was seeing the text correctly. Her vision hadn’t improved, she could barely focus at all. Her head pounded, her nerves burned, and all she could smell now was rubber.
Blinking several times, Shi could finally make out the text. It was a series of status logs from the ship’s computer. The warnings from the damage she’d caused with her last shot had been canceled out. She hadn’t realized it before, but the klaxons had gone silent. Power was being shut off or rerouted along alternate routes by the ship’s systems. The TK-drive was nearly at full power and ready to jump. Coordinates had been set…no, they had been set and changed from their original destination. But the startup command…no, that couldn’t be right. Shi blinked again, re-reading the section again as Kaylee fired, then screamed, a trio of softer pops from her pistol ending a moment later, as did Kaylee’s defiant scream.
According to the readout, the rapid startup command sequence was an executive level override, higher up the chain than even the ship’s captain at a classified level, and had been transmitted from the Stalker, along the very hardline Hilde had set up to allow them to remain in contact with the ship. Shi’s eyes played over the screen rapidly. A default set of coordinates had been activated and adjustments calculated by the ship’s computer, some unknown destination listed as a DSM research station. Who had triggered that startup command? Was someone on board working with DSM?
“No…it couldn’t be…” Shi muttered. The captain had said he’d been in contact with someone about the ship…had DSM bought him off? Had it been someone else with ties back to that company?
Reading over the logs again, something had changed the coordinates, once Hilde had managed to get access into the system…was it the Seal-Tech that was doing all that?! The command had come from somewhere else besides engineering…one of the labs, it looked like. Was it…that device she’d seen on the screen above? Some kind of AI inside it that had activated when they had hooked it up to the ship’s power? The coordinates…Shi thought on them for a moment…yes, they were definitely inside dark elf space. Communications logs indicated that most of the ship’s communication equipment had been shut down, though once the new coordinates had been set, a hypernet burst transmission had been sent to someone to alert them of the ship’s pending arrival at its new destination.
Someone on board the Stalker had betrayed them. They had triggered that startup and gotten the Seal-Tech moving again. Was it some kind of containment process, maybe? A security feature built into the device that DSM had been studying? Was everything the Seal-Tech doing preprogrammed instead of actually being truly intelligent? A protocol designed to contain and stop anyone from studying its nature and discovering its secrets? Had Captain Maerill been offered a payoff to let the Seal-Tech resume its activity and allow the ship to fall back into DSM’s hands?
Too many questions flooded into Shi’s mind, and she was far too drained to ponder them now. As what little energy she still possessed quickly burned away, she sighed and dropped her head. She eased the hammer down on the revolver, feeling the accumulated energy dissipating with a hiss of escaping steam. She turned around, wincing and groaning in pain as she slid to the floor next to the console. The TK-drive thrummed louder, and Shi felt the ship rumble as it transitioned into hyperspace.
Shi also felt the Seal-Tech upon her body snaking itself between her fingers and toes, flowing upward over her cheeks and toward her mouth and ears.
“This stuff kept the crew alive for some reason…I’m not going to kill us all…” she muttered, grunting with pain as she forced herself to raise her arm and reholster her revolver. “And I’m sure as hell not letting DSM get hands on this ship if some asshole on our ship got paid off to sell us out.” Wherever they were going, Shi was certain their odds were better than with DSM, even if it was to the dark elves and their shady prison system. At least they might be willing to make a deal.
Shi closed her eyes as the Seal-Tech flowed over them, tasted rubber as it filled her mouth and formed into a large ball between her teeth. The sounds of the ship faded as Seal-Tech flowed over her ears, and she let her fingers curl into fists without a fight as her toes were likewise completely covered. Shi could feel the suit begin to reshape itself over her body as she let another darkness consume her, that of her exhaustion.
For a wonder, her intense pain seemed to lessen, the Seal-Tech, despite the growing tightness of its restraints, seemed to be easing her discomfort. The warm embrace of the Seal-Tech actually felt rather good as Shi drifted off into a much needed slumber.
Whew, what a ride that was! At least our girls made it out alive, if not entirely free! Plenty of mysteries abound as this story comes to its end, and Shi gets some much needed rest.
But it’s not quite over yet! Stay tuned next week for the final chapter of The Black Ship, the epilogue!
Until then, Urban out!
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