‘Kit, can you give me gravitic access?’ Her own voice was commendably calm in her ears, even as she scrabbled for purchase against the wall. She would have been a sitting target for those shooters at the hatch. Instead, Mesmon slammed physically into her. She saw two holes in his stolen suit, evidence of Rollo’s marksmanship. They hadn’t slowed him down at all. His mottled face, through the cracked visor, was all eerie calm.
She clamped one boot to the wall for purchase and flipped him, slinging him across the drone bay. He somehow kept his orientation, levelling a hand-cannon at her and hitting her with another two shots. Each bullet exploded on impact. Unarmoured, she’d have been a bloody mist by now. As it was, she felt the impacts like sledgehammer blows, bruise-makers every one. Her heads-up was giving her all sorts of warnings about ablative tolerance and stress fractures. Partheni battle armour was good but there were limits.
So: return the favour. She levelled Mr Punch and did her best to cut the Tothiat in half the hard way. One pellet did actually catch him in the leg as he bounced back from the wall, spoiling his return leap for her and spinning him away. She tried to track him, but he swung himself off in an unexpected direction, one hand hooking around the drone bay’s empty control pod. Then he was speeding back at her from the other side almost faster than she could register. Right little zero-G ballerina, aren’t you?
This time she didn’t throw him off, but grabbed him when he came in, with the full intention of breaking his neck. Contrary to popular opinion, Partheni weren’t superhumanly strong. Raw muscle wasn’t usually needed, except, it seemed, for brawling with renegade Hegemonics. However she had the assistance of her armour’s servos and decades of muscle memory.
She got a hand on his helmet and wrenched at it, yanking his head to one side. He stuck a boot to the wall behind her and used that purchase to hammer down a blow where her neck met her shoulder. Stupid infantile move, except she felt it, and her armour’s stress warnings redoubled. She felt the first worm of worry creep in through the cracks. She could see he’d hit her so hard he’d broken his own wrist, the hand bent at a crippled angle. Even as she registered his injury, the joint snapped back into place, the damage repairing itself before her eyes. Through the rents in his mangled glove she saw skin seal and bones realign even as he came in to hit her again.
Need to update our database on Tothiat. She gave the servos all the reserve power the armour had, went for his neck, and felt something give with a satisfactory snap. When his next monstrous blow came in, she realized she’d actually heard the seal of his helmet give way. It came away in her hand, leaving his face pressed right up close to her own visor. His next blow was too much for his boots’ magnetic seals, and he fell away from her, levelling his gun. She threw his own helmet at him, bouncing it off his forehead. ‘Gravity any time now, Kit!’
‘Working working working,’ in her ear from the Hanni.
Mesmon’s next shot blew a hole in the wall past her helmet, the propulsion sending him rocketing away from her across the room. Grimly, she lined up Mr Punch and put a dozen pellets in him before he could change his course. The force spun him around three times, leaving a spiral of holes all over his body before it bounced him off three walls.
And now to end the others, she thought. Because surely they’d done for Rollo already, and would be coming for her next.
Yet Rollo was still over by the pipes, exchanging inaccurate fire with two hijackers while a third brought something up out of the Oumaru. The gangster was handling his find as gingerly as though it were a bomb rigged to blow. The other thugs moved to cover him. Despite all the fighting around them, apparently this was their priority.
Then Mesmon was back, notwithstanding all the holes in his hide. And she realized she had a bigger problem herself.
Idris
‘Kris,’ Idris said. ‘There’s a fold-out seat behind mine. Get it out, strap in.’
She was already on it as she asked, ‘What now?’
‘I’m going to push the tolerance of the ship’s dampeners. I don’t want you thrown around.’ He had the grabby drive reaching out for the universe again, dragging them at a tangent to the Harvest interceptor, which was lurching towards them in turn.
Let’s see what you’ve got. He fired their accelerators towards the Harvest craft, burning through a hundred fist-sized pellets from the magazine, each one spun up to a speed beyond the dreams of ballistics. Their opponent was already using its drive to bend space about the vessel, so that every shot, still going subjectively straight, just swerved away. So far, so much as expected. Then the return fire was incoming, trying to track the fleet little Partheni package runner as Idris threw it through a series of abrupt changes of heading. You couldn’t dodge something as fast as an accelerated round, any more than you could see a laser before it hit. But you could well and truly mess with your opponent’s targeting. Plus the void was very big, and the Dark Joan was a very small target.