FSE

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Hi everybody, let me know if you like this chapter. Comments are what keep me going on all of this :D I'm a narcissistic writer, you see, and am fueled largely by praise and adulation or something.

Specifically I'd love to get peoples' opinions on how realistic and interesting the characters seem. Feel free to tell me if I need to improve, too - No need to be shy!

Chapter 12

Olliver jerked and yelled out in surprise as Lady Luck was buffeted from above, cursing himself for a fool. Before he could bring the Walker's arms up, a multi-ton plate of transparent aluminum caromed off his head, jarring him sideways in a staggering step that only failed to be a fall because he'd been crouching already. His head whirled, dizzied from the impact, which he took to mean his physical body had just been concussed.

Burning physical discomfort told him that Lady Luck had just been hurt, too, moderate damage to gyros in her joints responsible for balance and suspension. In the split-second between the information registering and him being able to move, two more weights slammed into him, and he heard the gut-curdling chitter-laugh every soldier ever deployed to the Fringe knew to fear.

Then a black shape obscured his eyes, as a third Ix'kat grabbed onto Lady Luck's face, scrabbling claws for purchase and physically blocking his vision. His sensors, however, told him plenty, and as he roared and spun, trying to dislodge the drones that were so strong they were actually slowing down his arm motion, he saw warnings blare to life.

"Warning, high explosives detected!"

"Yes, I am aware! Fuck!"

Yelling out the obscenity, he triggered his right arm's chain gun, hoping against hope the bastard monsters hadn't shoved their claws down the barrel. Such a blockage, before the bullet could reach full acceleration, would cause the round to either backfire or go right out the side of its barrel. He yelped, as the barrel spun up, and belched a dozen rounds that exploded out the sides and top of his weapon, blasting it to a smoking, arcing ruin.

Meanwhile the thing on his face dug its claws in, and he felt as much as heard the armor squealing in protest. Ix'kat claws were amazingly hard, hard enough to scrape coiling bits of metal off his armor, and with enough time might actually be able to burrow through the top hatch into his computer systems.

With a roar of anger, whirling on his agile mechanical feet, he managed to jerk one arm hard, shaking it like a dog with a rat until he could get the other free, then slammed both hands together with a resounding, thunderous crunch. As a reward, Lady Luck's exterior sensors picked up stereo'd furious shrieks of pain, and the squelching sound of crushing carapaces.

Slamming his upper body forward to keep the Ix'kat queen from planting that explosive, he brought his arms apart, then together again, and felt even as he struck the bugs together a second time that both were still determinedly fighting, unwilling or unable to even consider fleeing. The second hammer blow of bug on bug on armored machine was simply too much for even the mighty insectoids. One fell away in two pieces, split apart at the thorax. The other just gurgled, made a liquidy clicking noise, and slumped backwards, limp, its claws jammed to the second elbow in his one un-damaged chain gun.

Snarling, his external speakers activated, he spun, trying to shake the queen off his face. She clung on, unable to let go for fear of being flung free and then squashed, claws almost as hard as diamond struggling just to maintain a grip.

"Get off of me, pest!"

"Warning, high explosives detected!"

"YEAH I KNOW!"

An impact along his back told him he'd finally found the wall, and with a vicious grin, he turned around. Sensing what was about to happen, the Ix'kat queen scrabbled up his face plate.

"Not fast enough, but good try."

Olliver head-butted the wall with a resounding clang and crunch, followed by the screeching keen of an Ix'kat queen in crushing agony. Then he pulled back from the steel bulkhead and whirled around, presenting massive armored limbs in a stance reminiscent of Karate. That second warning had been of another approaching set of explosives, and as the queen pulled her injured lower body up and over his head, he could finally see what he'd been warding off with his whirling and thrashing.

A single wolf, in the camouflaged nano-armor of a Marine, was dancing back as one of his feet lashed out, smashing floor tiles to powder and broken cement as he tried to smash the agile creature. Lurching forward away from the green blood-smeared wall, Olliver swiped again with one of his massive steel fists, pulverizing a support column's outer shell as the lupine threw himself into a somersault and charged forward.

Olliver grunted in surprise and kicked backwards, dancing the many-ton death machine away and back with ponderous grace while trying to bring his arms to bear on the closing lupine.

In the Marine's eyes, he saw fury and determination, and in his left paw what could only be the satchel charge Lady Luck was shrieking on and on about. His reticle settled on the wolf's chest and flashed green, but he knew better than to fire his chain gun at this range. Even if the computer could maneuver his arm into the right angle, he'd blow the crotch right off his own Walker.

At the same time, he was able to see form the corner of his vision as the entire enemy force broke cover and sprinted towards the elevator. His dance partner, the angry grey-powdered wolf with the bomb, was very deliberately forcing him away from that door, and there was little he could do but brave the bomb and hope the wolf would break and run from tank shock.

He aimed another kick, and the wolf leapt aside, giving him just the opening he'd sought. In an instant, Olliver went from an awkward dancing kick-fight with a tiny opponent to an all-out sprint toward the swarming column of Marines and high-sec prisoners trying to pile through the automatically-opening massive armored doors.

If they got inside and sealed them, there was nothing he could do. For all their transparency, those doors might as well have been made of bank vault doors, tank armor, and divine invulnerability when it came to his level of armament. He had to stop them, for the sake of his duty, and damn the consequences.

A warbling alarm warned him that he'd made a mistake.

"Explosives attached, explosives attached-"

Thunder filled his brain, as something kicked him so hard in the crotch that he reflexively curled forward even in the electronic dream-space. For a moment, he wondered when the techs had installed jump boosters into Lady Luck, and planned the tongue-lashing he'd give them for going around his head like that.

Then he was slamming back to earth with the force of a thunderous avalanche, rolling, spewing parts as his Walker's mechanical muscles yanked loose of their moorings and lashed about inside her internals like furious anacondas. A terrible sensation, as if someone had grabbed his spine and was yanking it from the base of his skull, overwhelmed his senses, hurling him into blackness like being slammed head-first into a concrete wall.

He woke from the virtual reality, heart pounding, covered in sweat, vomiting hard all over the unconscious doe in his lap. He couldn't breathe, choking on wretch in a cabin full of smoke that sprayed hard through rents in his cockpit's armored hold. In front of him, a mockingly-red ejection handle jutted, glowing from lights within. To pull it would be an exercise in pure futility. It would rocket him right into the nearest wall at hundreds of miles per hour.

The tiny view screen, installed in case of emergency loss of VR control, showed that Lady Luck was lying flat on her back, smoking from a dozen holes in her thorax. Her legs were quite simply gone, blown away by the satchel charge. Standing on her chest, holding a green-blood-soaked explosives pack, that black-grey wolf was glaring down at him with a face full of hate and a pulse rifle pointed straight down at where he knew his only remaining escape hatch to be. The Marine was already moving to plant the second charge. If he did, Olliver knew he and the girl would both be killed by the blast, crushed to goo by insane force in their confined space.

Swearing through the choking and vomiting, Olliver grabbed onto a leverage handle within the cockpit, and tried to pull himself more upright. His dead, atrophied legs held him down, pinned under the doe. The otter looked down, and though his eyes were burning from smoke and vomit reflex, he could see she was bleeding badly from a wound along her scalp.

He punched the speaker button hard, yelling out.

"FUCK! Hrrrkkk! WORK, GOD DAMN YOU!"

After the third hit, the speaker button lit up. From the external feed, he heard a strange whirring clicking noise before the noise dampers kicked in, and then could hear the sound of a huffing, angry wolf cursing as he messed with an explosive.

"Hold it! I surrender! There's a civilian in here asshole!"

He could no longer see the wolf, his external viewer evidently paralyzed somehow. Probably damage to the data lines inside his Walker somewhere. He put a paw against a dead spot on her console, and felt a tightening in his chest. Sure enough, her systems were slowly shutting down, like a dying person's organs.

The voice spoke.

"There's a civilian in there with you? Have him talk so I can confirm, and no sudden moves or I'll blow you to pieces, understood?"

Olliver gnashed his teeth, and looked down again. The blood was growing in quantity, and he wasn't enough of a medic to tell how hurt the idiot doe that had followed him so mindlessly was. On top of that, he realized, the blood wasn't all hers. In the emergency-lit cockpit, he saw his right leg was bent backwards at the knee, the femur sticking through skin and bleeding fast.

"She's unconscious from the blast. Hit her head. I give you my word as a Whip, Marine. I surrender, now help me the fuck out of here!"

For a few heart-pounding seconds, he knew somehow that the wolf was about to kill them both. It would be easy - All he'd have to do is set up the explosive, walk back a few feet, and push a little plastic button. All that would remain of Olliver and the doe would be people soup. For most folk, this would be the time to panic, beg and cry. For Olliver, it was a time to glare at the view screen and wait, while trying vainly to clamp a paw on the bleeding girl's scalp to staunch heavy bleeding.

"Pop your hatch. Are you wounded?"

"I'm...Yes, my legs."

The wolf's voice sounded suspicious. Olliver didn't blame him. There wasn't pain in his voice, which was probably setting off warning bells in that Marine.

"Hold on. Corpsman! Private Marrin, Private Gutierrez, get over here and help me!"

Thirty seconds later, Olliver blinked, eyes tearing up as light streamed into the darkened, smoky chamber. Covered in vomit, sweat, blood, and an unconscious secretary with her clothes all askew, he didn't exactly give off an air of regal nobility. It was with an aggravated sense of gratitude that he met the swirling blackness that washed over him.

Derry had Clicks over his shoulder in a fireman's carry. She wasn't moving, not even breathing so far as he could tell, but the four Corpsmen knew nothing about Ix'kat anatomy, so as he carefully laid her down inside the orbital elevator's main lift chamber, he had no way to know whether she was alive or not.

The bug queen's faceted eyes were open and staring, but being that their lids were pretty much invisible, that didn't mean much. Lack of motion could just mean unconsciousness, and he remembered vaguely from some e-book he'd read that their respiration was completely different from that of a human.

Putting a paw on her chest plate, he started looking over her injuries.

Her forehead was missing a chunk of chitin from just above her left eye, probably from bashing into the Walker's armor when it had slammed her into that wall. Likewise, the main plate and subplates on her back were shattered, spider-lined and splintering, and oozing greenish goo he knew to be the closest thing Ix'kat had to blood. Staunching that leak seemed like a good plan, so he pulled out bandages from the spare med kit the Corpsmen had left with him, and began packing wounds as best he could.

The wolf didn't bother to look at her legs. They were smashed, having been caught between the Walker's main shoulder armor and the similarly-armored wall. Even Ix'kat chitin was vulnerable to that much impact, as the two dead drones attested. Neither had been salvageable, both clearly little more than grease stains contained in broken carbon-fiber and keratin shells.

Sudden motion from one of her smaller sub-arms gave him hope, and he reached down to touch it. The claws wrapped around the side of his paw and squeezed hard enough to make him wince. Her voice sounded guttural and sluggish.

"Drones...Dead?"

"Yeah. Sorry, Clicks, but they went down fighting."

"Good."

Her mandibles shifted into the bug grin that had, until recently, unnerved him every time. She spoke again, in ratcheting whispers growing harder to understand.

"My body...Fail soon. Not worry, rkkktch...Take br...br...skull meats...Is egg...I re-grow...Kttch..."

He blinked at her, then glanced at the crown of her head. The plates there were cracked, separating slowly, mucous slime sliding from inside. Derry's stomach clenched, in some combination of grief and disgust.

"What?"

"I kicked...Walker...Ass...Hehe. Spin-kicks..."

With that, the claws clenched around his gloved paw went slack, and her skull case simply slid open. The chunk taken out of her by that impact must have broken the fusion of her skull plates, Derry realized, and swallowed a muzzle-full of bile. Then, he nearly spat up when one of the plates came away completely, and a white blob the size of both his fists slid out, slopping into his paws as he lunged to catch it.

The blob was oblong and segmented like a giant maggot, writhing wetly in his paws as his fingerless gloves immediately began to soak up the goo. Derry gagged, and fought it down again, forcing himself to stare in horrified stillness at the wriggling bug-brain.

When it made a soft burping sound, his brain finally clicked back on, shattering the glass picture of horrified disgustingness and turning him back toward problem-solving thoughts.

"Corpsman, do you have an insulating blanket?"

The armadillo next to him, who Derry suddenly resolved to buy some drinks for, or learn his name or something, offered him a metallic-colored thermal blanket, then wordlessly continued working on someone's broken something-or-other.

As he wrapped the strange bulbous egg-creature up, the elevator made a low chiming sound that rang from all around. Then, an uninflected female voice spoke.

"Engaging lift. Your travel time is approximately ten minutes."

Ten minutes...God, if you're listening, please tell me that virus worked.

The orbital elevator, a marvel of technology, began moving with a soft lurch and rolling of his stomach. Derry grimaced, and looked to the side, out the great transparent glass walls that rose for miles into the sky. For the moment, all he could see was smog and the blurry outlines of a tank column, with dozens of cannon pointed right at them, not daring to fire for fear of wrecking the planet's single most precious and irreplaceable piece of infrastructure.

From next to him, the armadillo spoke.

"Gordon's going to live."

"Huh? How do you know?"

Niece was halfway across the chamber, which was itself the size of a large warehouse, in the middle of a triage for the seriously injured. All four Corpsmen were working feverishly, including the one next to him, who'd been assigned to this particular triage group.

The armadillo tapped his ear.

"We're in constant communication. She's got three broken ribs and they just pulled two bullets out of her. Assuming the ship's got a plasma synthesizer on board, she'll live. If not, you and her have the same blood type if your records are any indication."

The rush of relief made his head swim, and Derry found himself sitting down, hugging Clicks' brain to his chest like a newborn baby. It certainly wiggled like one.

"Shit, doc...That's great."

Why am I crying? Fuck.

Hot tears were sliding down his face, and the wolf was shaking like a leaf, all his hard-faced poise gone in an instant. His chest constricted, and started to heave, as he realized what he'd just done - Charged a Walker, one of the most lethal military weapons in the modern arsenal. He'd fought and killed dozens of people, bashed someone's skull in with his own forehead and bare paws, ordered good Marines to fight and watched them die, and gone through hours of combat in which he could have been dead at any moment.

Now, he was holding the squishy, wriggling brain of a friend in his paws, hoping he'd understood her right and that she'd somehow magically re-grow from this squirming disgusting thing. A friend he'd been frightened of and vaguely disgusted by when they had first met just a few months ago, back in boot camp on his home world.

Meanwhile, their rag-tag band of prison jumpsuited Naval crew and officer-less, combat-exhausted Marines were rising on a massive glass plate thirty feet thick through a tube tens of thousands of feet high towards a captured cruiser they were going to have to steal back in order to get off this hell-hole of a planet. He was suddenly too exhausted to think about the next step after that.

A paw landed on his shoulder, and Derry looked up. Standing over him, silhouetted by the still-rising sun, for a second he could swear old Mr. Tenh was here with them, and the thought gave him a strange sense of pride. He'd never asked exactly what branch Mr. Tenh had been with, but he liked to imagine it was the Marines. There'd never been any doubt he had served, given his level of knowledge and the similarity between his training regimen and what Derry had to go through in boot.

Staff Sergeant Herrin nodded at him once, firmly, and Derry felt another twinge of pride as the tears stopped falling. He'd just gotten the hard old Sar'nt's nod of approval. The lion knelt down next to him, close enough that Derry could hear his knees pop.

"Hell of a fight, Blake. You did good, son."

"Th-thank you, Staff Sar'nt." Derry managed to choke out the words. Evidently the lack of new tears didn't mean the heaves in his chest were done, and he flushed with embarrassment. Either the Staff Sergeant didn't notice or didn't care, though, as he gave none of his usual stern mentions of anything that was 'unbecoming of a Marine.'

"Are you going to be up to storming that ship when we get topside?"

The wolf rubbed his face against his sleeve, and looked down to see he'd left behind a trail of blood and grey concrete dust. There, under the slurry of blood cement, his urban camos looked back at him expectantly. He raised his head, and met Herrin's dark eyes with his own.

"Yes, Staff Sar. I'll be good to go."

"Good. Hand the queen larva off to your civilian friend."

Shit, the wolf thought, she must have been scared out of her mind...

It was as if a curtain had been yanked off his eyes. He looked around for the first time since arriving on the lift, at the confusing maze of hurried activity. Medics had arranged their positions, sectioning off several areas for the wounded, others for the combat-ready Navy staff, others for the Marines. Dead in the center, the only three civilians among their three hundred or so-person group were clustered, two conscious, one not. Off to their side, a Corpsman was finishing the wrapping on that otter's ruined leg.

To Derry's blinking amazement, the fur showed no sign of pain or discomfort, though he was pale as a ghost under his sleek coat of grey-brown fur. At some point, he'd regained consciousness, and was now making gestures with one paw while laying flat, being attended to and guarded by Corpsman and naval security respectively.

He seemed more nonplussed than frightened by the half a dozen rifles that were pointed at him.

"Y-yes, Staff Sar. Uh...What are we gonna do with him? We can't carry the guy into a firefight can we?"

Herrin shrugged, and patted Derry's shoulder before standing again, straightening his uniform as he went.

"Walker pilots are high-value personnel. Most likely he's got a lot of intel locked up in his head even he doesn't realize is important. Besides which, he could have hit the self-destruct in that thing and killed you, himself, the Ix'kat, that doe girl, and mess the rest of us up pretty bad. But he didn't, and I'd like to know why."

Derry frowned, but nodded, realizing the SSgt's logic was good. It didn't make him any less willing to kill the bastard, for what he'd done to Clicks. With steely determination, he pulled both feet under his rear and carefully stood, trying not to jostle the larva.

"Understood, Staff Sar'nt. Mind if I sit in on the interrogation?"

"Doesn't bother me, but I doubt it'll be happening until we're back with the Fist."

"Yeah."

Walking seemed to help, his steps getting less wobbly with post-battle adrenaline as he went. When he was just a dozen steps away, Jenny seemed to notice, and turned around. The little grey cat girl's face went from pale and frightened to happy in an instant, and she surged to her feet and towards him, only to pull up at the last second when she saw the bundle in his arms.

"That's...Oh. Oh Derry, I'm sorry..."

"Is she...?"

"Um...No not really, she's not dead."

He handed the bundle over, with great care, into the much smaller woman's careful arms. She wasn't shaking like he'd been, and he saw no sign of tears. Derry tilted his head, the mental image of the tiny woman stunned and cuffed helplessly to a bench in one half of his mind, and this image of the confident and cool-under-fire woman in the other.

Not noticing his stare, her eyes on the larva as she unwrapped the blanket to examine it carefully, Jenny went on to explain.

"Um...Xenobiology isn't my specialty, but I did take a few classes on Ix'kat biology. The queens really aren't what you think they are. The um...The female you know as Clicks is just an exoskeletal symbiotic creature. Basically queens are two or more Ix'kat sharing a body. The outer shell is another male, modified to hold a queen in its skull case, and differentiated by appearance and structure for...Societal reasons? Something like that."

Derry blinked at her. The idea was a bit alien, but then again so were the bugs.

"So...Clicks is that white wriggling thing? Can she hear us?"

"Yeah, she is. And not exactly, no. The queen-larva can't really hear or see. They rely on the drones to move them from one body to another when the time comes. She must really trust you...Most Ix'kat queens that lose an exoskeleton when there aren't drones around just let themselves die. It's considered wrong in their society to let someone who's less than fully trusted even come close to touching a queen."

"Uh...What about you? You're touching her?"

"You handed her over. Which means since she judged you trustworthy, and you judge me trustworthy, that she judges me trustworthy. The Ix'kat aren't as individualistic about their opinions as we are...Um...Things go in chains? I don't really know how to explain it right now."

"Uh...Right."

Derry flopped down next to her feet, looking outside as they rose above the smog layer. As Jenny moved to sit next to him, thigh against thigh, he slipped an arm around her, and watched the sun rise a second time over a sea of brown. This time, instead of an angry red demon eye, it showed golden, over a sea of dusky filth, burning pure and clean in a sky of the most beautiful light blue.

She kissed his cheek. He laughed, and felt a surge of certainty. They were almost done. He'd get the chance to rest when they had retaken the Starlit Maiden.