by

Yanick Champoux (38%)

Lee Watts (18%)

Josip Nað (17%)

Michel Lacombe (16%)

Dorian (4%)

goldkngt55 (3%)

Andrew Avila (2%)

Marten (1%)

Oliver (1%)

Part 41

Yanick Champoux (20/4/2002)

"Grappling hooks", breathed out Demuel.

"What did you say?" asked one of the two security agents escorting the Wheeler in Reeve's clothing.

They had picked Magdalena as she was leaving Lima's quarters. They told her that they were to bring her to the captain, which was both true and the full extent of their knowledge in the matter. Demuel hadn't liked the sound of it, but as he disliked maiming fellow guilders unless it was absolutely necessary, he had decided to play along. A magnanimity he began to regret the moment the bright white light of the corridors turned into the dim red glow of the emergency system.

"You felt that faint tremor?" Demuel said, louder. "This was grappling hooks. We are being under attack."

The security agent who asked the question, a middle-aged man named Vekken, smiled benignly. "You can rest assured that this is not the case, miss. It was only the result of our engineer restarting the fusion engines. It's an exercise we do every few cruises. Something to do with regulations and maintenance, you understand. Don't worry, everything is fine. The lights will return to normal in a few moments."

This, it goes without saying, was a big pile of lies. Of all of the Comet's history, there was never had been such an exercise. But on a cruise ship servicing a clientele mostly made of nobles ready to go hysteric at the alarming prospect of seeing any aspect of their comfort threatened, there was two kinds of crew members: those who lied, and those who relied on medication.

The problem, however, is that a lie repeated often enough becomes believable to anyone, including to who is telling the lie. Vekken was conscious that something was wrong, but he supposed that it was under control. After all, in his five years of service on the Comet, nothing more distressing than Li-Halan birthday parties had befallen the ship.

And there was nothing to hope from the second security agent, a young lad of the name of Rick. Recently recruited by the Musters, this was his third cruise as a security agent. His brain was entirely devoted to two things: looking crisp, and learning from Vekken, his senior officer. If Vekken said everything was okay, everything was okay. It wasn't really the boy's fault: he was just too young to know worse.

"You don't understand," insisted Demuel, "The main power grid is down and grappling hooks smacked against the hull. Doesn't that tell you something? I'll give you a clue: it has something to do with wooden legs, parrots and a bottle of rum."

Vekken laughed a most polite laughter that Rick immediately swore to work on reproducing when his shift would be over.

"I don't want to sound insolent, miss, but I'm afraid you read too much of that pulp trash the Wordsmith guild is publishing nowadays. There is no pirates in this solar system, nor anywhere closer than three gate jumps from here for what matters." He halted before the ship's main elevator shaft and pointed at the soft light of the elevator's floor indicator. It was moving. "You see? The elevator's still running. If there was a real emergency, it would be stopped." Smugly, he pressed the calling button.

You know, he might be right, thought Magdalena.

Sure, Demuel thought back, and Gannocks might fly out of my butt. Still, he decided to make a last attempt at reasoning the security agents.

"You know as well as I do that the elevators of this type of cruisers can run on the emergency power grid. Hell, man, since when have the Musters' standards fallen this low?"

Vekken frowned. "Now, miss," he said sternly, "there is no need to resort to petty insults. You are going to meet the captain in a few instants, and will then be able to share with him all your worries."

Behind him, the elevator made a cheerful 'ping' noise, which filled Vekken with relief. This young woman was beginning to irritate him, with her pretension of knowing more about Musters in general and him in particular. Ah! As if! He turned to face the elevator's opening door.

And saw his own reflection in the faceplate of one of the two marauders occupying the elevator's cage.

While it always hurt to be wrong, it can be safely stated that Vekken felt his pain more acutely than most as the marauder opened fire and blew out several chunks off the Muster.

The Marauder's gun tilted toward Magdalena. Would had he been interviewed over a coffee in one of those oh-so-chic Thethys' bistros, the Marauder would have said that, in all his years of marauding and shooting peoples up, he came to learn that unarmed civilians of the female persuasion are subject to one of two instinctive reactions when unexpectantly being aimed at with a gun. Either they cower and beg for mercy, or they duck and run for cover. Once in a blue moon, one of them might try to beg for mercy while running for cover, but that was about the wildest kind of deviation to the rule he ever witnessed.

His surprise was therefore understandable when Demuel grabbed the edges of his faceplate with both hands and, with a deafening shriek of raw hatred, hurled Magdalena's forehead against the reflective surface.

The shattering noise attracted the second marauder, who had been until then busy doing bad, belligerent things to Rick. What he saw -- his companion falling on his knees, both hands trying to contain the blood pouring out of his smashed faceplate, and the woman with the murderous eyes that was now holding his gun -- didn't fill him with happy thoughts. He whirled his weapon, his finger flexing on its trigger at the exact same time Demuel's bullets converted most of his upper body in post-modern wall decorations.

Sergei Visarionovich Godunov was still sipping some vodka, but was now sitting on the couch throning in the main room of his suite. Outside his suite, he could hear the harsh bark of firearms and the high-pitched screams of the cattle getting butchered. A pleasant music for a Decados' ears.

One would have assumed that Sergei would feel smug and satisfied, and would be basking in the rotten-sweet warmth of an an evil deed well done. Yet, there was something nagging him, something preventing him of savoring the fruit of his labor to its fullest. Could it be a sense of guilt caused by the casual slaughtering of hundred of innocent peoples?

Sergei dismissed the possibility. Since his thirteenth birthday, occasion that Sergei's father had celebrated in the traditional Decados fashion by offering to his son the ritual kitten and jar of lubricant, his experiences of sentiments such as guilt, doubt and regrets have been scarce and far in-between. Beside, after the previous night's performance at the golden room, the ship-wide massacre could arguably be labelled as an act of mercy.

No, it was not it. It was like there was a little detail he was forgetting. But what? He couldn't put his finger on it, and that was definitively spoiling his fun.

Demuel wiped some of the blood that was running down the gashes on Magdalena's forehead. He noticed with alarm that her hand was shaking.

"Oh no, don't you dare to fall into shock!"

Magdalena whined weakly. Demuel felt their stomach heaves, the sour taste of bile filling their mouth.

Dem, we've been shot at!

"I've noticed, thank you. But it's only a flesh wound. Nothing, really. And, to be honest, I was felling uncomfortable in a body with no scars."

Magdalena's head slowly moved from left to right, from right to left. She wasn't hearing Demuel's words. The throbbing pain in her head was too much. So was the warmness spreading at her side. So was the mutilated bodies of the Marauders Demuel had killed. That she had killed. He had been at the commands when he killed them, but she had felt Demuel's immediate and all-encompassing outrage at the threat, she had tasted his cold, reptilian desire to kill before being killed. She had felt echoes of the same sentiments rise in her own soul. It was Demuel who had shrieked in defiance, but it was Magdalena who had grunted in satisfaction as the first Marauder had went down, his face ruined by the jagged shards of his faceplate. It was Demuel who had fired, but Magdalena's spirit had roared as the bullets tore into the flesh of the man who had tried to kill them.

Horror washed over Magdalena.

LISTEN!

Demuel's inner command felt like a slap. Magdalena attention snapped away from her horror and toward the man that was haunting her skull.

"Yes, it's bad, but before it's over it will get worse still." Demuel was speaking quickly, sharply, not leaving any time for Magdalena to relapse into horror. "Those two fuckers aren't alone, Maddie, and they are far too well equipped to be pirates. If you fall into hysterics, we are dead meat. I need you to be strong. Or I will have to get you off the commands and stick you in a far corner of our mind until this is over."

Magdalena's eyes widened. You wouldn't do that! You said you wouldn't do that!

"I lied. I would do that. If that's what it takes to protect you. And Lima."

Lima. Magdalena had forgotten about her. And Toast, and even Byran. They were all in danger. There was not much she, Magdalena, could do, but Demuel was a trained killer. He could do something. If she let him.

All right, I'll behave.

Demuel's lips twisted into a sly grin. "It's not behaving I want you to do."

The grin blossomed into a smile, full of nascent fierceness.

I'll misbehave, then.

"That's my girl."

A loud gasp put an end to the discussion.

It was Lima. She was staring, disbelieving, at Magdalena and the four cadavers at her feet.

"Maddie?" she asked meekly.

Magdalena and Demuel flashed Lima a feral grin. "I was Maddie. Now I'm Madder." Magdalena kneeled beside one of the dead Marauders and began to search him. "Go in the elevator," Demuel commandeered, "under the button panel, there is a small terminal. I'll give you the standard security codes in a second, and then we will see how good an engineer you are." With a smooth motion, they pulled out their spleen-jack and stabbed it in the Marauder's communication pack. "But before, there's a phone call we need to make..."

Sergei Visarionovich Godunov snapped his fingers. He had found it.

The initial plan was simple and elegant. While Bolshoi Batiskii's men where supposed to kill everyone on sight, Elena's commandos were to snatch the kid away. But Elena's commandos were now pursuing a new career as planetoids. Which means that if he didn't intervene, the marauders that had no way of knowing who the kid was could very well kill him and jeopardize the whole mission.

Right on cue the airlock of Sergei's suite hissed open and a marauder stepped in. Sergei rose to his feet and opened his arms. He was to greet the man from Bolshoi Batiskii when a thought crossed his mind.

If the marauders couldn't tell the kid of any other civilians, was it possible that they could also...

The marauder, grim as death itself, raised his weapon and aimed at the general direction of Sergei's vital organs, suggesting that, indeed, they could.

"Oh, what a lovely bardak..." Sergei muttered philosophically, before leaping behind the couch as the stacatto of the Marauder's weapon filled the suite.

Boyard Atanasov was comfortably seated in the Galliot's captain chair, enjoying a tall glass of vodka chilled to perfection. Yet another mission that would turn out to be a walk in the park. A park full of muggers, murderers and rapists, that is. His boys, he pondered with relish, he did taught them well.

The intercom chirped loudly. The boyard had the time to see his communication officer frown.

"Howdy, you bunch of wankers. Demuel's speaking. I'm pissed. You will all die. This is all."

The intercom chirped a second time, signalling that the communication had been broken.

Atanasov was bemused. "What was that?"

The communication officer shrugged and was to say he hadn't the foggiest when an engineer cut in.

"Uh, Boyard, the sensors are reporting that the Comet has turned all emergency lights off." He paused, "The gravity grid has been deactivated. The... I don't understand, the oxygen level is dropping everywhere."

The Boyard makes an annoyed sound. "Let's me reformulate my question in a slightly different way. What is this?"

"A killzone."

It was the pilot who had spoken. A renegade Charioteer who, at some point of his career, had opted for a lucrative alliance with House Decados. His face, the Boyard observed, was anormaly pale. Which was saying a lot coming from a man whose crew was used to spend months parsecs away from the nearest source of solar radiation.

"A killzone?" repeated Atanasov, "What do you mean, a killzone? There is seventy eight of my men in there. If anyone is making a killzone out of that tin can, it's us."

The pilot shook his head. "Demuel is a Void-born. Your Marauders have been trained to fight in space, this man has been raised in it. He's turning the Comet into the environment he's the most comfortable in."

Atanasov didn't understand why the pilot was so grave. "So? He's only one man. What can he possibly do?"

The pilot shrugged and unholstered the pistol hanging from his belt. Without a single trace of hesitation or doubt. He tucked the barrel of the pistol under his chin and fired.

A short silence followed the bark of the weapon.

The Boyard was contemplating the little bits of red and grey stuff that was slowly sinking in his vodka. Charioteers. They were such a melodramatic bunch.

"Now that it had been established that he might prove to be a pain in our collective pidzy, could someone please tell me who that govnuk might be?"

"Demuel Hubbard," said Winthrop, "Protégé -- if such a term can be applied to someone with his flair for effective violence -- of Ezekiel Moerae. Charioteer of guild, rumored to be Killroy. Might be true, considering that someone that know the security codes hacked in the main system and managed to locked us out. In all cases, his military and intelligence skills are honed to lethal perfection and, like his mentor, his fighting methods makes Ukari pit fighting looks like amiable tussle."

The old captain was still on the bridge of the Comet, along with Jackson and a handful of crew members. The rest of the bridge crew had been sent to protect the passagers. As Demuel's message had been broadcasted on both ships' communication systems, he had heard it at the same time than everyone else. He was also painfully aware of the havoc played on his ship's systems. It was hard to ignore, really, since he was now floating weightlessly in an atmosphere that was growing colder and thinner by the seconds. Just like Boyard Atanasov, the engineer had asked who Demuel was. Unlike the Boyard's pilot, Winthrop hadn't blew his head off -- he was keeping his rounds for when the fiends who were attacking his ship would attempt to take the bridge. Instead, he had calmly given a succinct summary of Demuel's bio.

Jackson politely coughed. He was a mere silhouette, barely visible in the weak light of the engineer's computer console.

"Sir, don't think that I'm ungrateful for such a gratuitous piece of exposition, but can I be so bold as to inquire how you came to know so much about this man?"

Winthrop almost smiled. "I happen to have been a close friend of his mother. She was a remarkable woman. Unfortunately, her career took a turn that was making it politically difficult for us to keep contact."

"She married a noble?"

"No, she turned her back to the Empire and made a foray into Kurgan territory where she offered a minor Sultan her services as a warlord. Last time I heard, the Sultan was not so minor anymore and the Al-Marik had put a hefty price on her head.

"Ah, an assertive woman, I see," said Jackson. "Should I therefore assume that the presence of her progeny on this ship is of good omen for us?"

"Not exactly," said Winthrop. "I have followed the boy's career, and met with the Moerae himself a few times. Having one of those two men get involved in any situation is like seeing your mistress step into the bedroom holding a pair of handcuffs. It could be very good news as well as it could be very bad news. There only one thing that can be sure: whatever happens, it's unlikely we will get out of it unscattered. However, there is a comforting thought."

"Which is?"

"Neither will the bastards that are attacking us."