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 42

Michel Lacombe (28/4/2002)

Marauder Evgeni Denkov laughed when the lights went out. His three companions chuckled nervously after a moment of hesitation. What women they were! Their helmets' infrared imaging was practically as good as daylight, and they had fought more zero-grav sim scenarios than he could count. He kicked himself ahead against the walls and figured out how many children he still needed to kill to beat Nikolai's high score from last mission.

The woman flew downwards into view at a 45 degree angle left of vertical, straight out of a vent shaft, grabbed Denkov's shoulders, and vomited all over his faceplate. He opened fire reflexively, silenced shots soon buried by his companions' screams.

Skull had always found zero gravity made hand-to-hand much easier. The battlefield becomes a volume instead of a surface. No more up or down, so you're no longer limited to having those referrals in common with your adversary. Anything you throw will fly straight.

The Marauders didn't follow the paradigm shift as well as Skull did. He was careful not to breathe in any floating droplets of their blood as he cracked open the door to his nephew's room. There was no one there.

Skull started skimming through his internal recordings of the ship's sensor flow for possible escape routes. As this week's room service menu flashed through his awareness, Skull regretted not having Migite within comm reach to filter his data for him.

Marauder Denkov wiped his faceplate with the back of his glove and stared at his dead companions. He realized he had shot them himself as the woman behind him twisted only his head around this time.

"So that's how it is, eh?"

Byran glared at the Bolshoi Batiskii from the first class dining room Toast had dragged him to two hours before. Toast had been staring at the stars with obvious angst long before the Decados galliot had appeared and injected its murderous cargo into the crippled ship, and Byran was beginning to credit the idiot with some sort of prophetic sight.

He was trying to see if there was something floating around he could arm himself with (and lying to himself that the lowering of the air's oxygen count didn't make him drowsy) when it started getting darker. How could that happen? He was already seeing only by the light of the stars. He glanced out the window again and forgot about weapons entirely.

Toast started moaning plaintively.

The bodymates were very cold now. It was all Demuel had been able to do to keep that load of puke in long enough for it to be useful, and now there was cold sweat running down Maddie's arms, and he could hear some of Brittleneck and the Swiss Cheese Triplets' friends maybe two minutes away and closing. He didn't understand. He hadn't done the body that much damage, surely? And why did he have trouble breathing? This was his environment, he had called for Lima to modify it for his greater comfort, left her in that stalled, sealed elevator with its own atmosphere and went to war on his own terms, he was Void-born, damn it, and...

And Maddie wasn't.

The Vau just augmented her as much as he had been augmented, they couldn't carry over his innate specs.

Maybe cracking his own head open just before formulating his plan hadn't been such a good move after all.

Byran stared out the window at the rift in space spewing out Maddie's nightmare. He could see it was very far behind the ship, but already the Kraken eclipsed most of the stars.

Toast was crying now.