Chapter 70

  Dalexia was in desperate need of more benefine. There were moaning aliens shaped like humans causing havoc all over her ship, and the enemy fleet had taken advantage of their successful boarding action to move their ships in for the kill. Just as she sawed through another dozen of the gun-toting zombies, Seventh reported that another destroyer in the Expedition 7’s fleet had been wiped out.

  Male Clone Seventh still claimed the advantage of extra velocity over the enemy aliens and could generally eliminate two of their ships for every one of his own, but the math wasn’t as happy as it looked. The entire alien fleet still outnumbered him three to one. It was only a matter of time before they broke through his defensive line and escaped the black hole.

  And the zombies had so far done extensive damage to the E7’s critical systems. Dalexia had killed several hundred of them now, but it seemed they had a method of rapidly reproducing. While in one of the E7’s many power plants, she had come upon one of the zombies eating a glowing orb out of the wall. After Dalexia killed the zombie, Seventh had informed her that the orb probably contained trace amounts of benefine that could possibly contribute to the zombies’ ability to multiply.

  This information had helped Dalexia track the zombies better. She knew to look for them around the parts of the ship where benefine was most in abundance. But she still couldn’t keep up with the boarding party’s growth.

  Dalexia broke off her pursuit of the boarders momentarily to duck into one of the ship’s many armories and replenish her power suit’s durability and combat gel.

  “How much longer can you hold out?” she asked Seventh while the mechanical arms of the armory removed damaged armor plates and applied new ones.

  “I believe I can defend against direct assault against the Expedition 7 for another thirty minutes.”

  “Can you keep all of the enemy ships from escaping the black hole?”

  “That is more questionable,” Seventh said. “I cannot cover all avenues of escape. And I thought you were calling it a {gravity vortex}?”

  “All that stuff is too much to keep in my head right now,” Dalexia said. “Besides, sci-fi stuff isn’t so bad. I think I could embrace it.”

  “Hmm,” was all Seventh had to say to that.

  Dalexia finished rearming and returned to the hunt. An explosion rippled through the hull of the E7, giving her an indication of where to go next. The ship’s size worked for and against her. The saboteurs couldn’t do a lot of damage quickly when all of the critical systems were so spread out and redundant, but Dalexia also couldn’t find all of them before they detonated their bombs.

  She showed up to the sight of the explosion to find a huge hole torn in the hull and part of the interior of the ship exposed to vacuum. Her armor protected her from suffocation and cosmic radiation. She caught up with twenty more zombies in a mostly intact hallway on their way to the next target. Now that Dalexia was used to the speed her armor lent her, she managed to saw two of the zombies in half with her chain sword before they noticed her. The remaining zombies turned around and started firing in her direction.

  Dalexia dodged out of the way of the incoming bolts of energy, charging through a wall into another room. She ran along the wall parallel to zombies and then dove back into the hallway and the middle of the zombie pack.

  The pack turned to face her, still shooting their energy weapons. They didn’t aim very well and cared little for friendly fire. In their attempt to gun down Dalexia, the zombies on the outside of the group shot the zombies on the inside. Dalexia danced through the ranks with the chain sword, lopping off heads and cutting gray bodies in half. Some of the leftover halves still held on to their weapons and continued to shoot at her, so, once Dalexia was done with her first pass through the pack, she went back and finished everyone off with quick and messy stabs to their brains.

  Thankfully, the zombies still followed most of the rules of the human body; they died when their brains were destroyed. Seventh suspected the aliens controlling these zombies—assuming the enemy fleet wasn’t fully automated—were not, themselves, humanoid in shape, but that their tools simply mimicked nearby organic material. It didn’t seem like an efficient method of attack to Dalexia, but she wasn’t going to judge the strategies and tactics of an alien civilization she hadn’t actually met yet.

  Dalexia swiped her chain sword to the side, throwing off some of the blood that had congealed in its teeth. Another explosion went off somewhere else in the ship, its tremor carried through the vibrating panel of metal beneath her feet. She couldn’t actually hear anything standing in the vacuum of space. Instead of chasing down the next pod of saboteurs, she stared at the stars through the hole in the ship’s hull. So close to the black hole, their light was distorted.

  “This isn’t working,” Dalexia said. “At this rate, the enemy is just going to slip past us and we’ll only die tired.”

  "I do not see a more viable strategy," Seventh said.

  Dalexia supposed that was why she was on the ship in the first place—to offer a more viable strategy—but she wasn't a battlefield commander. She hadn't read any books by great generals. And even if she had, no one on Earth had ever fought a battle in space.

  But she had played chess a time or two.

  "They're trying to take our king," she said. "What if we return the favor?"

  "Are you suggesting an assault on the unknown faction's flagship?"

  "I've heard a good offense is the best defense."

  "I believe this strategy has viability," Seventh said. "If you were to leave the Expedition 7 to assault the enemy directly, I would be able to do a biological purge of the ship."

  "Oh," Dalexia sang, "even better. Would that kill all the zombies?"

  "Most likely. I was not able to offer this solution before, as the pruning is totally lethal to any life form within a light second of the ship."

  "How do I get to the enemy flagship?"

  "Visit your nearest armory," Seventh instructed. "I will take care of the rest."

  Dalexia ran through the ship until she found an intact armory. She wasn't sure what she expected. Her plan—only a rudimentary outline, really—had started with hopping on one of the remaining cruisers or destroyers and making a run at the enemy flagship, but it seemed Seventh had something else in mind. As Dalexia stepped up to the pad with the mechanical arms, the ceiling retracted and a whole new suite of arms appeared to begin outfitting her with a new, much larger suit of armor.

  The more the arms worked, building the suit around her, the more excited Dalexia became. She knew where this was going.

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  "Oh, Seventh," she crooned. "You shouldn't have."

  "I apologize," Seventh said. "I understand this does not match your preferred aesthetic."

  "No, no. I'm coming around to it. Who could say no to their own personal battle mech?"

  In less than a minute, Dalexia was sitting in the cockpit of a deadly looking mecha. "Can this suit make it to the enemy flagship? Is it really that mobile?"

  Seventh explained, "Super heavy benefine armor is capable of faster than light travel. Your speed still will be restricted by the battlefield buoys, and the black hole will disrupt the armor's full potential as well, but with the appropriate mental stimulation, you will be capable of handling this machine."

  "Mental stimulation?" Dalexia asked, just as a nodule on the inside of the cockpit popped out of the wall and jabbed her in the back of the neck.

  She felt something chilly flood into her body. The slick substance moved through the veins of her neck, and she felt it even when the stuff entered her brain, which was odd, because she didn't think the human body was capable of experiencing that kind of sensation. She had been injected with a lot of different chemicals and drugs before she finally succumbed to Owen Little's disease. She had never felt them moving through her this clearly.

  Time seemed to slow down. An elevator lifted her starmech out of the armory and pushed her into space. She saw the stars and light flooding into the black hole at the bottom of the well below her. Suddenly, she knew exactly what every part of the singularity was and how it was affecting space around her. She knew where the enemy ships were as well as her own, and she felt like she could reach out and touch them. Her starmech wasn't a shell encasing her, but a second skin through which she felt space and the push and pull of the universe.

  "It tastes like quarks," she mumbled.

  "What?" Seventh asked.

  "Nothing. Where is—? Never mind, I see it. Once I'm clear of its range, start the bio purge."

  Dalexia put out her hands and found a set of controls that hadn't been there before. She wasn't sure they were there now, either, or if they were some creation of her mind’s eye, but she grabbed them anyway and pressed forward, igniting the starmech's light speed engines and zipping away from the E7 faster than normal thought could comprehend. Behind her, the E7 blossomed with pulsing pink fire, but she was no longer thinking about her own ship. She saw her target clearly through the haze of the black hole's warping influence. The enemy flagship stood out like a lighthouse on the foggy shore.

  She would reach it in no time at all. On the way, she passed a skirmish between one of her destroyers and a smaller enemy ship. They were circling each other at near light speed, firing calamitous weapons back and forth. At the same time, they shot out small missiles to intercept each other’s weapons. As Dalexia swiped by, she reached out a hand with the starmech and pointed at the enemy ship. Combat gel spread over the mech’s arm, forming the appendage into a cannon that let loose a single continuous beam of purple energy. Dalexia dragged the beam across the side of the ship, slicing it in half from bow to stern.

  It all happened in less than a fraction of a second. Despite flying past the skirmish at almost the speed of light, she had been able to see, analyze, and react to help her own ship take the day. The enemy ship hadn’t seen her coming. Dalexia knew intuitively that the starmech was coated in the same substance that covered the stealth frigates. Seventh didn’t have to tell her. For some reason, she just knew she would not be easily detected.

  As she raced closer to the enemy flagship, her brain began to ache. It came in waves. One moment, she was blissfully engulfed in the effect of whatever drug Seventh had given her, seeing the universe as it was in real time. The next, it felt like someone had stuck a hot iron in her frontal lobe. Dalexia’s brain wasn’t designed to work at these speeds. Whatever drug Seventh had given her, it was clearly a temporary boost, probably just enough to help her reach the enemy flagship while still maintaining control of a light speed capable craft.

  She slowed down as she approached the flagship. It saw her coming, despite the stealth coating on the starmech, and fired interceptor missiles at her. She dodged around them and used her particle cannon to shoot a few others before they could get too close. The enemy flagship began to move, shifting course in an attempt to avoid her, but it was slow to pick up speed. For now, Dalexia had no trouble keeping up with it.

  She knew the ship was protected by some kind of forcefield. Normally, a fusion disruptor or a few anti-ship torpedoes would be enough to defeat the shield, but the starmech didn’t carry those weapons; they took up too much space. But while the drug in Dalexia’s system lingered, she could see little imperfections in the forcefield’s surface. Near the side of the ship closest to the black hole, parts of the field were being pulled away toward the event horizon, leaving little gaps in the defense.

  Dalexia circled around the ship until she found a serviceable glitch in the shield and fired the particle cannon into the gap. Most of the beam’s energy splashed off the shield, but a narrow slice of light shot through and impacted against the hull of the enemy flagship. The shield flickered but then returned to full strength, even the black hole-induced glitches vanishing for a few seconds. Then another gap appeared.

  Dalexia fired the particle cannon over and over again until the shield collapsed for a few seconds and she was able to dart in past the field. She blew a hole in the ship’s hull and flew through it, diving into the guts of the ship.

  Once inside, she spared no time to look around. Instead, she let loose every weapon in her arsenal. The space around her turned into a terrifying inferno of energy blasts and shrapnel. Secondary explosions rippled through the flagship, tearing up kilometer after kilometer of its structure and hopefully wrecking tons of important systems. Dalexia didn’t actually know what she was shooting at, especially as the drug began to wear off. Her mind dulled and her reaction times slowed. Luckily, she didn’t need the same mental agility anymore. She wasn’t moving at light speed when compared to the velocity of the flagship. All she needed to do was rampage through the interior of the ship, causing as much damage as possible.

  But the enemy flagship was massive, even bigger than the E7. Dalexia quickly ran low on ammunition and combat gel. A few minutes into her frenzy, she could no longer fire the particle cannon. Other weapon systems went offline, and she was relegated to using the strength and mass of the starmech itself, punching through walls and tearing apart what seemed like strategic rooms with her robot hands.

  Using so many weapons in close proximity to her own metal shell had not left her unscathed.

  It was probably best she ran out of ammo, lest she kill herself in bringing down the flagship.

  Seventh did his best to direct her to the spots of the ship he suspected to be most sensitive, but his communication was slow and his guesses weren’t accurate. Dalexia didn’t know how much damage she was actually doing.

  Seventh reported that the effectiveness of the other enemy ships had dropped since Dalexia started running amok. They were still active and fighting, but he was having an easier time defeating them. Whether it was an artificial intelligence guiding the enemy fleet or a crew of living aliens, Dalexia’s attack was giving them grief.

  Dalexia tore away an interior wall and bulled her way into a new room. It looked the same as all the other rooms, but this one had an occupant. For a moment, Dalexia didn’t think the little man she was looking at was real. She assumed he was just a delusion created by the withdrawals of the mental stimulation drug.

  But he looked solid, and he didn’t vanish when Dalexia blinked several times. Unlike the gray zombies that imitated human shape, this person looked like a normal living being. He was quite a bit shorter than the average man, but he had weathered skin, bright eyes, and curly red hair on both his head and face. He also let out a convincing scream upon seeing a giant mech burst into his space. It sounded nothing like the moaning Dalexia had heard from the zombies.

  Dalexia stopped and watched the little man for a moment.

  “Bat wit ta!?” he shouted up at her.

  She didn’t understand what he was saying, but it sounded like an actual language. She thought for a moment that he was a child, but now Dalexia guessed he was close to her age. She also noticed he was carrying a small backpack with various tools hanging off its straps, including what looked like a pickaxe.

  “Who are you?” Dalexia asked, her voice projected through emitters on the exterior of the starmech.

  “Ah fadreyd, gerr chailed!”

  “Seventh, do you have any idea what he’s saying?” Dalexia asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Seventh said. “Keep him talking. He does not match any characteristics I have identified as belonging to the unknown faction.”

  “Do you have a name?” Dalexia asked the stranger.

  “I apnek se em fiy name a?”

  “I think I understood ‘name,’” Dalexia said.

  “Yes, my name?” the little man asked. “I am called Pelp.”

  “Are you translating, Seventh? That was impressively quick.” Dalexia turned her attention back to the little man. “Well, Pelp, who are you and what the hell are you doing on this ship?”