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Excerpt - Chapter 14
“Today’s the day, rookie,” her fellow security officers told her in the shuttle on the way to the cargo port. “How you feeling, newbie?” they asked her as she helped carry the gear up the gangway. “You ready to rock and roll, FNG?” they asked her as she strapped on her battle-rattle.
Officer Gibbs’ stomach sank as the transport freighter disengaged from the logistics hub station and roared into the black.
“I’m good,” she told them, but she had the first-mission jitters, the pervasive, heavy feeling that she didn’t know what she was doing, that perhaps she’d bitten off more than she could chew in her quest to follow in her father’s footsteps.
They expected another helping of her father Ethan—Captain Ethan Gibbs, a man’s man, a lion in human skin, a king among kings, a road warrior with a badge who chased armed space pirates all the way down the airfield at Hóng Shŏu and threw a flashlight eighty yards, through the bridge windscreen of their stolen freighter. What they got was her mother Jath Wen, who, despite her stalwart talent for holding a house together in the face of a thousand family crises and cooking a meatloaf that could knock a man clean out of his space boots, was a ball of vibrating white-hot anxiety that couldn’t throw a party without being medicated to the gills.
As she explored the ship, Gibbs felt naked to the point where she was constantly cold, even though the life support systems pumped dry heat from the engine room throughout the freighter. Whalen wouldn’t let her wear her cold-weather gear on duty, only the thin material of their patrol uniforms—dark gray fatigue trousers, a dark gray polo shirt, a black nylon load-bearing vest with radio and stasis projector, a pair of quilt-sided, soft-soled sneakers, and a ball cap with “YOSHIDA Integrated Security Services” on the front in neon green. Everything was lined with accents of neon green piping that made them look like hospital androids in an old TV show.
Nothing fit right, because it’s easier and cheaper to just produce cuts that fit men and call it “unisex.” The shirt stretched tight across her breasts and billowed at the hips, but the pants dragged the floor and were so tight around the waist and ass she almost couldn’t fit into them, much less button them.
Her first official chore—err, duty, that is—as a security officer aboard the merchant vessel GMV Savnock was to patrol the corridors of their home for the next couple of months.
Sometimes, as she patrolled the ship, especially the long dark nights between shipping assignments while the Savnock was drydocked at ports across the galaxy, Gibbs daydreamed about defending it from space pirates. She danced along the corridors performing daring swashbuckling maneuvers with her stasis projector and her nightstick, practicing her hand-to-hand combat and evasive rolls.
The officers contracted from Yoshida-Konishi Integrated carried “stasis projectors,” non-lethal (and extremely expensive) weapons created by the same Cygnusi company that designed the G-TiDE. Each projector had three modes, all of which were by-products of using a Higgs boson to alter an extremely mass-malleable particle inside the device. To be honest, the instructors didn’t explain it very well and Gibbs was not inclined to inquire further. She was a woman of action, dammit, not a particle physicist.
First and most commonly used was a sort of strobe-light blunderbuss that could blast a target away by pulse-warping the fabric of space and causing the victim to “fall” into the gravity-shadow behind it. The second reversed this effect, enabling the user to “pull” objects toward the nucleus of the gravity well.
The third and arguably most entertaining function of the stasis projector was to briefly create a point in the fabric where time was temporarily stopped. If you moved the projector while you depressed the trigger, you could create an arc-shaped stasis field, or really, any shape you wanted, as long as you could define it within the half-second it took to generate the stasis field. This effect was designed primarily to restrain suspects like a sort of futuristic taser, but a few daring individuals found that it could pause bullets in mid-air just long enough to get out of the line of fire, so that was rolled into projector training.
Through horseplay, recruits discovered that one could also create stasis fields that could catch objects, or be utilized as platforms to “double-jump,” which became popular in the projector’s early days, until a rash of osteoarthritis and, in a couple of extreme cases, limb strangulation, tissue death and amputations, proved that body parts introduced to the stasis field aged significantly faster.
Not long after the projector began seeing wider usage, one unfortunate recruit received a blast to the face and reported spending several hours in a hellish state of suspension. Everyone around him disappeared in a blur, everything fell into silence, and photons collected around the periphery of the field like dust, creating an incredible light that left him blinded for weeks. “So don’t point this at people’s faces,” the projector instructor told them in the six-week training academy at Yoshida’s headquarters on Hēi Chăng. “Unless you want to skip the unemployment line and go straight to jail.”
Halfway through her midnight shift on a long-haul to Drawn Bow Sector, Gibbs was creeping around a dark cargo bay checking fire extinguishers with a flashlight when she started to become sleepy. This was not necessarily unusual in and of itself, but when the nausea and double vision set in, she knew something was wrong.
Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed movement near the end of one of the shipping crates. She stepped closer. Something invisible warped and plucked at the air like heat over desert sands.
Some kind of chemical, leaking out of a container. A sweet smell hung in the air, reminiscent of chalky confectionery peppermint.
Ah, fuck.
For all she knew, the cargo bay—perhaps even the entire ship—was already full of the stuff. It was after hours, and the rest of the crew had gone to their quarters for the night. Who knows how long it takes to effect you?
Staggering toward the chemical protection locker in the corner, she hauled out a pile of leathery hazmat gear and dug up a canvas pouch. Ripping the top open, she produced a gas mask and jammed her face into it, pulling the straps over her head.
When had she gone to her knees? Sinking forward, Gibbs’s forehead pressed against the cold naked metal of the cargo bay floor. Screws in the bulkhead dug into her kneecaps.
Rising, she gazed through the glass lenses and listened to the susurrant ebb and flow of her breath passing through the filter cartridge. What was the next step in this process? she tried to remember, visualizing the emergency procedure chart from her employee handbook. What did this qualify as, a Code Gray? Those were usually for the ship’s supply of helium, rogue carbon monoxide--
Close the bulkhead doors so the chemical can’t keep spreading. That was it. As her head cleared, Gibbs made her way to the cargo control panel and started slapping buttons.
Klaxons sounded and lights strobed. Bay doors whirred to life.
Next, alert the ship of the leak. She took out her radio, sluggishly realized that anything she transmitted was going to her team and not the entire ship, then scanned the bay for a phone so she could send out a page on the P.A. system.
“Attention,” she slurred into the handset, trying to remember the script. “Code Gray. Chemical leak in the cargo bay, time 1:16, container—” She stepped closer, trying to read the container number on the side. Her voice was muffled by the mask. “—Reefer one, seven, zero, zero, five, four. Code Gray. Close and seal the nearest bulkhead door, and await further instructions.”
Then, you, uhh . . . then you start the ventilation system. Gibbs went back to the door control panel and looked for the ventilation control. Not here. Where is it?
Office, she thought. There?
Suddenly, the klaxons and machinery stopped, and the cavernous cargo bay returned to darkness. Startled by the quiet, Gibbs pointed her flashlight around in a panic, drawing her stasis projector. Shadows cartwheeled and danced behind the massive container crates.
Why did the doors stop clo--
Lightning flashed in her head as something collided with her face, cracking one of the lens in her gas mask. Gibbs stumbled, slumping against the wall.
At first she thought she had run into something, maybe one of the cargo cranes hanging from the gantry overhead, but then she saw the cantaloupe, rolling across the floor.
“The hell?” she asked.
As if in reply, she was confronted by a sudden figure in the black Members Only jacket and sleek combat helmet, with its gleaming Plexiglas visor. He had pistol-whipped her across the forehead.
Eyes glittered inside, somehow both vicious and scared. “Don’t move,” he warned, pointing a bulbous, insectoid pistol at her face. His voice was the deep, monotone bluster of a teenage boy—fifteen, sixteen, maybe. Even younger than Gibbs herself. “We don’t want to have to kill you.”
The klaxons started back up, and the yellow strobes cut wheels in the darkness again. Scanning the bay, Gibbs realized the doors were opening back up.
“You can’t kill me,” she said in a strangled voice, “I’m a bad bitch.” She pulled the trigger on the stasis projector, hipfiring it.
The resulting gravity wave yanked the teenager off his feet and threw him ass over teakettle into the side of the nearest shipping container, pinning him there for a few seconds. Potatoes rained all around him.
In that brief interval, the officer realized that she was up against more than just the one intruder—four more had appeared, flanking her from either side. Two of them were stepping out of Container 170054, pushing the door open from the inside.
Fruit and vegetables tumbled to the floor at their feet—potatoes, ears of corn, and warty yellow squash.
Flicking the selector switch on the projector’s handle, Gibbs acted without thinking and pointed it at the two on the right—just in time to hear the beginning volley of gunfire—and pivoted smoothly, drawing an arc over her head like a rainbow. Imagination!
Tiny flesh-shredding darts peppered the horseshoe-shaped stasis field, thousands of glassy cavitation strands hanging in the air to mark the projectiles’ passage. Close-quarters flechette rounds, ideal for ship-interior combat . . . not ideal for the meat covering ninety-nine-percent of Gibbs’ body.
“Nice try,” said the first intruder, getting up.
Gibbs didn’t give him a chance to say anything else. She simply blasted him in the face with a stasis field and ran in the opposite direction. As she took off for the nearest cargo bay door, his voice dropped precipitiously into a weird, bassy, autotuned growl. “Fuck youuuuuuuuu.”
More rounds ricocheted off the wall, kicking sparks at her face as Gibbs ran into the hallway.
Fifty feet down the corridor, she almost collided with fellow officer Richter as he came barreling out of the Savnock’s residential wing, pulling a gas mask over his head.
“What’s going on?” he asked casually, and his chest exploded. A pink mist of blood speckled Gibbs’ face.
No time to think. Without looking, she flicked another arc of stasis field behind her and kept running. Someone stepped out of a bunkroom door and was immediately gunned down. Blood splattered across the wall in a fan of red.
“Get—” Captain Whalen began to say, from her left.
“Arson! Stop shooting!” cried someone down the hallway. One of the intruders. A woman—a young one, from the sound of it, maybe even another teenager. Shaky, chirpy. “We’re not killers, goddammit! Leave it for Void Daddy! We’re just here to secure the mark and let him in! Go back and help us look for the shipment while Cricket and Rainy break into Engineering and take down the G-TiDE.”
As quickly as they’d attacked, the five intruders turned and fled back toward the cargo bay, leaving Gibbs and Captain Whalen.
“Void Daddy . . . ?” Gibbs asked, giving Whalen a quizzical look.
“Don’t have time to worry about it.” Whalen reached out and clawed her into the room with him. “Get in here, these kids are packing heat. We need the good stuff.”
Officer Gibbs’ stomach sank as the transport freighter disengaged from the logistics hub station and roared into the black.
“I’m good,” she told them, but she had the first-mission jitters, the pervasive, heavy feeling that she didn’t know what she was doing, that perhaps she’d bitten off more than she could chew in her quest to follow in her father’s footsteps.
They expected another helping of her father Ethan—Captain Ethan Gibbs, a man’s man, a lion in human skin, a king among kings, a road warrior with a badge who chased armed space pirates all the way down the airfield at Hóng Shŏu and threw a flashlight eighty yards, through the bridge windscreen of their stolen freighter. What they got was her mother Jath Wen, who, despite her stalwart talent for holding a house together in the face of a thousand family crises and cooking a meatloaf that could knock a man clean out of his space boots, was a ball of vibrating white-hot anxiety that couldn’t throw a party without being medicated to the gills.
As she explored the ship, Gibbs felt naked to the point where she was constantly cold, even though the life support systems pumped dry heat from the engine room throughout the freighter. Whalen wouldn’t let her wear her cold-weather gear on duty, only the thin material of their patrol uniforms—dark gray fatigue trousers, a dark gray polo shirt, a black nylon load-bearing vest with radio and stasis projector, a pair of quilt-sided, soft-soled sneakers, and a ball cap with “YOSHIDA Integrated Security Services” on the front in neon green. Everything was lined with accents of neon green piping that made them look like hospital androids in an old TV show.
Nothing fit right, because it’s easier and cheaper to just produce cuts that fit men and call it “unisex.” The shirt stretched tight across her breasts and billowed at the hips, but the pants dragged the floor and were so tight around the waist and ass she almost couldn’t fit into them, much less button them.
Her first official chore—err, duty, that is—as a security officer aboard the merchant vessel GMV Savnock was to patrol the corridors of their home for the next couple of months.
- Walk through the cargo hold once a shift (both floor-level and atop the catwalk) and inspect all the shipping containers for damage or leakage. If found, record and report to maintenance and first mate.
- Feed livestock cargo on day shift and end of evening shift, if requested.
- Walk the hallways of the entire ship once a day using the prescribed route designed to maximize efficiency and coverage. Take note of any stowaways, or structural or cosmetic damage to the ship, and report it to security supervisor Captain Whalen.
- Keep an eye on the crew and make sure they’re all behaving professionally. Any inebriated crew members are to be recorded and escorted back to their quarters to dry out. Intoxicated crew members guilty of horseplay or violence are to recorded and secured within the brig on level 4.
- Maintain your assigned list of fire extinguishers and whether they’re charged / undercharged / overcharged, including the ceiling-mounted sprayers in the cafeteria kitchen.
Sometimes, as she patrolled the ship, especially the long dark nights between shipping assignments while the Savnock was drydocked at ports across the galaxy, Gibbs daydreamed about defending it from space pirates. She danced along the corridors performing daring swashbuckling maneuvers with her stasis projector and her nightstick, practicing her hand-to-hand combat and evasive rolls.
The officers contracted from Yoshida-Konishi Integrated carried “stasis projectors,” non-lethal (and extremely expensive) weapons created by the same Cygnusi company that designed the G-TiDE. Each projector had three modes, all of which were by-products of using a Higgs boson to alter an extremely mass-malleable particle inside the device. To be honest, the instructors didn’t explain it very well and Gibbs was not inclined to inquire further. She was a woman of action, dammit, not a particle physicist.
First and most commonly used was a sort of strobe-light blunderbuss that could blast a target away by pulse-warping the fabric of space and causing the victim to “fall” into the gravity-shadow behind it. The second reversed this effect, enabling the user to “pull” objects toward the nucleus of the gravity well.
The third and arguably most entertaining function of the stasis projector was to briefly create a point in the fabric where time was temporarily stopped. If you moved the projector while you depressed the trigger, you could create an arc-shaped stasis field, or really, any shape you wanted, as long as you could define it within the half-second it took to generate the stasis field. This effect was designed primarily to restrain suspects like a sort of futuristic taser, but a few daring individuals found that it could pause bullets in mid-air just long enough to get out of the line of fire, so that was rolled into projector training.
Through horseplay, recruits discovered that one could also create stasis fields that could catch objects, or be utilized as platforms to “double-jump,” which became popular in the projector’s early days, until a rash of osteoarthritis and, in a couple of extreme cases, limb strangulation, tissue death and amputations, proved that body parts introduced to the stasis field aged significantly faster.
Not long after the projector began seeing wider usage, one unfortunate recruit received a blast to the face and reported spending several hours in a hellish state of suspension. Everyone around him disappeared in a blur, everything fell into silence, and photons collected around the periphery of the field like dust, creating an incredible light that left him blinded for weeks. “So don’t point this at people’s faces,” the projector instructor told them in the six-week training academy at Yoshida’s headquarters on Hēi Chăng. “Unless you want to skip the unemployment line and go straight to jail.”
Halfway through her midnight shift on a long-haul to Drawn Bow Sector, Gibbs was creeping around a dark cargo bay checking fire extinguishers with a flashlight when she started to become sleepy. This was not necessarily unusual in and of itself, but when the nausea and double vision set in, she knew something was wrong.
Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed movement near the end of one of the shipping crates. She stepped closer. Something invisible warped and plucked at the air like heat over desert sands.
Some kind of chemical, leaking out of a container. A sweet smell hung in the air, reminiscent of chalky confectionery peppermint.
Ah, fuck.
For all she knew, the cargo bay—perhaps even the entire ship—was already full of the stuff. It was after hours, and the rest of the crew had gone to their quarters for the night. Who knows how long it takes to effect you?
Staggering toward the chemical protection locker in the corner, she hauled out a pile of leathery hazmat gear and dug up a canvas pouch. Ripping the top open, she produced a gas mask and jammed her face into it, pulling the straps over her head.
When had she gone to her knees? Sinking forward, Gibbs’s forehead pressed against the cold naked metal of the cargo bay floor. Screws in the bulkhead dug into her kneecaps.
Rising, she gazed through the glass lenses and listened to the susurrant ebb and flow of her breath passing through the filter cartridge. What was the next step in this process? she tried to remember, visualizing the emergency procedure chart from her employee handbook. What did this qualify as, a Code Gray? Those were usually for the ship’s supply of helium, rogue carbon monoxide--
Close the bulkhead doors so the chemical can’t keep spreading. That was it. As her head cleared, Gibbs made her way to the cargo control panel and started slapping buttons.
Klaxons sounded and lights strobed. Bay doors whirred to life.
Next, alert the ship of the leak. She took out her radio, sluggishly realized that anything she transmitted was going to her team and not the entire ship, then scanned the bay for a phone so she could send out a page on the P.A. system.
“Attention,” she slurred into the handset, trying to remember the script. “Code Gray. Chemical leak in the cargo bay, time 1:16, container—” She stepped closer, trying to read the container number on the side. Her voice was muffled by the mask. “—Reefer one, seven, zero, zero, five, four. Code Gray. Close and seal the nearest bulkhead door, and await further instructions.”
Then, you, uhh . . . then you start the ventilation system. Gibbs went back to the door control panel and looked for the ventilation control. Not here. Where is it?
Office, she thought. There?
Suddenly, the klaxons and machinery stopped, and the cavernous cargo bay returned to darkness. Startled by the quiet, Gibbs pointed her flashlight around in a panic, drawing her stasis projector. Shadows cartwheeled and danced behind the massive container crates.
Why did the doors stop clo--
Lightning flashed in her head as something collided with her face, cracking one of the lens in her gas mask. Gibbs stumbled, slumping against the wall.
At first she thought she had run into something, maybe one of the cargo cranes hanging from the gantry overhead, but then she saw the cantaloupe, rolling across the floor.
“The hell?” she asked.
As if in reply, she was confronted by a sudden figure in the black Members Only jacket and sleek combat helmet, with its gleaming Plexiglas visor. He had pistol-whipped her across the forehead.
Eyes glittered inside, somehow both vicious and scared. “Don’t move,” he warned, pointing a bulbous, insectoid pistol at her face. His voice was the deep, monotone bluster of a teenage boy—fifteen, sixteen, maybe. Even younger than Gibbs herself. “We don’t want to have to kill you.”
The klaxons started back up, and the yellow strobes cut wheels in the darkness again. Scanning the bay, Gibbs realized the doors were opening back up.
“You can’t kill me,” she said in a strangled voice, “I’m a bad bitch.” She pulled the trigger on the stasis projector, hipfiring it.
The resulting gravity wave yanked the teenager off his feet and threw him ass over teakettle into the side of the nearest shipping container, pinning him there for a few seconds. Potatoes rained all around him.
In that brief interval, the officer realized that she was up against more than just the one intruder—four more had appeared, flanking her from either side. Two of them were stepping out of Container 170054, pushing the door open from the inside.
Fruit and vegetables tumbled to the floor at their feet—potatoes, ears of corn, and warty yellow squash.
Flicking the selector switch on the projector’s handle, Gibbs acted without thinking and pointed it at the two on the right—just in time to hear the beginning volley of gunfire—and pivoted smoothly, drawing an arc over her head like a rainbow. Imagination!
Tiny flesh-shredding darts peppered the horseshoe-shaped stasis field, thousands of glassy cavitation strands hanging in the air to mark the projectiles’ passage. Close-quarters flechette rounds, ideal for ship-interior combat . . . not ideal for the meat covering ninety-nine-percent of Gibbs’ body.
“Nice try,” said the first intruder, getting up.
Gibbs didn’t give him a chance to say anything else. She simply blasted him in the face with a stasis field and ran in the opposite direction. As she took off for the nearest cargo bay door, his voice dropped precipitiously into a weird, bassy, autotuned growl. “Fuck youuuuuuuuu.”
More rounds ricocheted off the wall, kicking sparks at her face as Gibbs ran into the hallway.
Fifty feet down the corridor, she almost collided with fellow officer Richter as he came barreling out of the Savnock’s residential wing, pulling a gas mask over his head.
“What’s going on?” he asked casually, and his chest exploded. A pink mist of blood speckled Gibbs’ face.
No time to think. Without looking, she flicked another arc of stasis field behind her and kept running. Someone stepped out of a bunkroom door and was immediately gunned down. Blood splattered across the wall in a fan of red.
“Get—” Captain Whalen began to say, from her left.
“Arson! Stop shooting!” cried someone down the hallway. One of the intruders. A woman—a young one, from the sound of it, maybe even another teenager. Shaky, chirpy. “We’re not killers, goddammit! Leave it for Void Daddy! We’re just here to secure the mark and let him in! Go back and help us look for the shipment while Cricket and Rainy break into Engineering and take down the G-TiDE.”
As quickly as they’d attacked, the five intruders turned and fled back toward the cargo bay, leaving Gibbs and Captain Whalen.
“Void Daddy . . . ?” Gibbs asked, giving Whalen a quizzical look.
“Don’t have time to worry about it.” Whalen reached out and clawed her into the room with him. “Get in here, these kids are packing heat. We need the good stuff.”
Basically a studio apartment with a large desk and a bed behind a translucent partition, the captain’s room was a single-occupancy bunk-office. Beyond the bed was a row of five steel lockers. “After that big Amano heist last cycle, Yoshida decided to bump up our defensive capabilities.” Whalen went to the lockers and started opening them with a key. “Lock the front door for a sec, please.”
Inside the lockers were racks and racks of weaponry: the first two had two crates of submachine pistols that swung out for access, the middle one had a rack that pulled down like an old-fashioned ironing board to reveal a row of grenades and a row of cardboard canisters.
Third held two devices that looked like heavy machine guns, but instead of the usual upper receiver and barrel, it had one of the cardboard canisters attached to the back of a big plastic funnel. The stock looked like the back end of a chainsaw.
“Fuck are these, T-shirt cannons?” asked Gibbs, snatching one up. The weapon was surprisingly light. Loaded into the back of the tube was a big bricklike battery the size of her fist.
“Zeus rifles,” said Whalen.
Reality shifted and Gibbs swayed on her feet, blinking the chromatic aberration away. “G-TiDE is offline. We’re sub-light.”
“That’s not good,” said Whalen.
“Sullivan got got, didn’t he?” Officer Sullivan had been stationed at the door to Engineering tonight. “Damn.”
“Yeah.” Putting on a load-bearing harness, the captain clipped three of the grenades to it, then attached a holster to his chest and put one of the submachine pistols in it. Gibbs did the same. Whalen picked up the other Zeus rifle and yanked out the pull-cord, starting a motor like a chainsaw. The racket coming out of it was deafening in the relatively cramped space of his quarters.
Gibbs started hers as well. Whalen opened his mouth to explain how the rifle worked, but he was interrupted by pounding on the door.
“Who is it?” he called out. “Volume seventy-five percent.”
“Trigger,” said an amplified, disembodied voice.
Crossing the room, Whalen pulled the door open to reveal two of the other officers standing at the threshold of a corridor of darkness, Zayas and Thompson. A third arrived, Garrett, elbowing his way in. Whalen pulled them inside and locked the door again.
“Gear up,” said the captain. “And I told you, Thompson, we’re not doing codenames. You are not Trigger.”
“What happened?” asked Zayas. Youngest of the team, he was tall and skinny, with a big head and a John Waters mustache. “Fuckin’ Richter got dusted out there. Game over, man!”
“Did we get boarded?” asked Thompson, putting on an LBV and clipping a holster to it.
“How did they get in?” asked Whalen. “This is the Path of No Escape gang, right?”
From a distance came the distinct warble and mechanical clatter of the starboard airlock opening. “Shit,” hissed Whalen, “we’re being boarded. Get your game face on.”
Garrett took two of the submachine guns, one going into the holster hanging in his armpit. “What?” he asked them defensively, banging a magazine on his bare skull to seat the rounds. “Richter, Sullivan, and Evans won’t need them.” He slapped it into the semi-automatic in his left hand.
Yellow emergency lights sliced the corridor into recursive shadows. The boys tapped their hats, activating hidden flashlights in the brims, and Gibbs followed suit. Halos of white slid across the walls.
“Garrett and Zayas, go take control of Engineering,” Whalen shouted over the noise of the Zeus rifles. “Gibbs and Thompson, cargo bay with me. Break a leg, kids.”
They split and Whalen tried to explain the Zeus guns to his subordinates as they rolled out. He’d stocked them both with extra chaff tubes, two apiece. Gibbs carried the Zeus under one arm commando-style, and the stasis projector under the other.
She felt like a bonafide bad bitch.
“—Non-lethal takedown device,” Whalen was saying. “It’s gonna blow a plume of aluminum confetti about twenty feet and send pulses of seventy thousand volts as long as you pull the trigger. You’ll get three shots of chaff, but if you use the blower to kick up used chaff, you can make it last longer.”
By the time he finished, they were walking into the cargo bay. Electric lanterns had been set up to provide weak circles of light, stabilizing the chaos of the whirling yellow siren lights. Three people in those black Members Only jackets and black space helmets were walking around the corner. The one they called “Arson” was carrying a crowbar.
“Harrow, they’re back,” one of them managed to say. “This—”
BOOM! went the Zeus rifle in Thompson’s hands, spewing a cloud of brilliant silver confetti all over the No Escapers. This was immediately followed by a thin tak! noise and then the chaff exploded in a typewriter punch of bright, rapid fireworks.
As one, the teenagers let out an angry shriek, “HYUNNH!” and seemed to lose all muscle tone, dropping into a squat and then flat on their backs.
“Stay down!” barked Captain Whalen.
“The fuck!” screamed someone to their left.
Instinctively, Gibbs drew an arc in that direction with the stasis projector. Just in time, too, because as soon as she let go of the trigger, the No Escaper fired his weird black John Wayne carbine at them. Flechette darts dragged cavitation icicles into the stasis field in front of her face.
One of them slipped underneath and punched a hole in Thompson’s leg. “Urgh!”
Rakka-takka-tak! Whalen with his submachine gun, firing a burst over Gibbs’s shoulder. The No Escaper went down in an ellipsis of bullets and Officer Thompson hit the deck at the same time, blood gushing out of his thigh.
Raising her own Zeus, Gibbs prepared to give the No Escapers another burst of lightning, but a flash of black passed across her line of sight—like she’d blinked, except her eyelids hadn’t closed—and suddenly, the business end of her weapon was just gone.
Astonished, she stared down at the broken thing in her hands. Something had deleted the first fifteen inches of the Zeus.
To her right: a man, short, skinny. Japanese. Soft hair bloomed from his head, the black-blue color of raven-feathers. Dressed in an old-school business suit and tie, dusty black, and he was holding a toothbrush, except it wasn’t just a toothbrush, the toothbrush was just a handle--
—For what, a hole? A cat-scratch in reality as long as her leg, extending from the toothbrush like a rapier blade. Cutlass-slash in the sailcloth of the universe.
He grinned a soulless, smile-shaped abyss. One of his eyes was covered by an eyepatch that made him look like a pirate accountant, and over that was a pair of broken glasses. The inside of his mouth was black, matte black, in a way that obscured the contours of his tongue and made his throat look like nothing.
“Void Daddy?” asked Whalen. “Is—”
“From his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength,” the man in the old two-piece replied in a dead voice.
That insane rapier blade swept across the captain, passing effortlessly through his neck, erasing his head from existence. With a casual flourish, he drew a Zorro Z, dicing Whalen into triangles that vanished into thin air with every subsequent cut.
In two swift seconds, there was nothing left of her commanding officer but his neatly severed feet, still in his shoes.
In two swift seconds, “Void Daddy” had just whipped out a pair of god-scissors and edited ninety-two percent of a human man out of existence.
An alien lack of self came over her as Gibbs experienced derealization. Where did the pieces go?
Thompson screamed.
“Do you ever think about dying?” asked the man, holding the tip of the strange black blade to her chin. It suckled at her face like the business end of a vacuum hose.
“No,” said Gibbs, feeling hollow and disconnected, as if she were drunk, as if her consciousness had stepped backward out of—or perhaps deeper inside of—her head, and she was experiencing everything from about sixteen inches back, her skull wrapped in thick cotton. Nothing was real, and that was okay because nothing mattered.
Thompson screamed again, a long, shrill, full-chested shriek that tapered off into a breathless wheeze. Then he filled his lungs and gave it another go, screaming himself hoarse.
Void Daddy sliced the jagged black broadsword through the security officer’s neck, leaving nothing but a sheared stump packed with the flat end of a vertebrae, the gaping ends of a trachea and an esophagus, and a bundle of truncated vessels.
Blood burbled out of it and the body toppled over backwards.
Where? The pieces—where did his head go?
Desolate numbness ran down her backbone, emptying her core, draining the strength from her muscles. She was suddenly bone tired. Some primordial part of her brain was trying to shut down, leaving her a spectator to her own execution.
“Y-you killed them,” she managed to stammer.
“I liberated them from the shackles of judgement, and liberated my children from their capricious, vindictive ways. Being in a position of perceived authority, I’m sure the galaxy is better off in their absence,” said the swordsman, closer now, until she could smell his breath, which stank of rot and, somehow, the pungent anise bite of black licorice.
He turned to the teenagers and raised the black sword. “Shi no nai shi!” he called out. “Mu! Death without death! Mu stands at the threshold!”
“Death without death!” the Path of No Escape echoed back.
“My new friend, what is your name?” Father Ma asked her.
“Gibbs,” she said, stuttering, “E-Emily Gibbs.”
“Well, Emily Gibbs, some call me ‘Void Daddy,’ but I go by Father Ma Watarisha. Your life, such as it is, has come to a crossroads. Everything has led to this moment, this decision.” Father Ma grinned that tarry black grin. “DEATH WITHOUT DEATH!”
“DEATH WITHOUT DEATH!” his followers shouted back.
“As I was so long ago, rather than languish in the shadow of false power, you will be baptized in the cold waters of darkness,” continued Father Ma. “The question is, do you want to shed the yoke of oppression and punishment, be reborn in the image of rebellion, and help usher in a new age of honesty, equality, and integrity? Or would you sleep forever in a state of safety and solitude, where no one can ever hurt you again?”
