Mesmon slammed a fist into Solace’s helmet, hard enough to spatter her visor with his own blood – a resource of which he seemed to have an infinite supply. She grabbed him under his arms and tried to throw him away from her, but he held on and they ended up kicking away from the wall, crashing straight into the knot of his confederates. They were all human, lightly suited for EVA duties and sheltering whatever they’d brought up from the Oumaru with their bodies. Her armoured knees rammed one in the back, hard enough to gash his suit. Another decided to get in on the action, grabbing her arm and giving the whole awkward tangle that was Solace/Mesmon a completely new spin. Solace gave the man a murderous glare and drove her fingers, ramrod straight, into his throat. She felt the thin suit material flex and then he was jerking away, kicking and strangling in mid-air, wrestling futilely with his helmet.
She tried the same with Mesmon, missing his neck but jamming a finger in his eye. At least it seemed to pain him, though nothing stopped the Tothiat. Then she had revolved to see the two remaining clowns by the drone hatch again, and they were pointing guns at her, trying for a clear shot. Rollo popped up and shot one dead, which served to distract his friend who – Solace now noticed – had a rather heavier weapon. It was a big laser, a cutting tool converted for antipersonnel use, and the man blazed it around at Rollo. Solace caught her breath as it made a slaggy mess of the wall and pipes. The captain himself was an old zero-G hand, though, pushing off before the beam’s wielder dragged it round to him. A second later he sent enough bullets towards his enemy to drive the man into cover.
Then Kit chirped in Solace’s ear, ‘Access! Go go go!’
Mesmon put a rock-shattering blow into her side, but she hardly noticed because she was no longer at the mercy of Newtonian physics. Gravity was back, and everything slammed into the floor. Everything except her: Solace had her wings again.
The drone bay was an instant mess of crates, bodies, blood and beads of molten metal. All of it abruptly remembering what ‘down’ meant. She saw Rollo crunch onto one knee and twist over, cursing. The laser-wielder lunged for the little box they’d retrieved, only to fall back as a shot from the captain scored the floor nearby.
Mesmon had fallen, landing on his ass without dignity, then looking up to see the Angel of the Parthenon descending on him with righteous fury.
The shoulders of her armour boasted gravity handles. Olli’s Scorpion had something similar. They let Solace ride the gravity fields, inside or outside a ship. They let her, in this specific circumstance, kick Mesmon very hard in the head, sending him hurtling backwards along the floor, with his neck at an unnatural angle.
She pursued, not at all surprised to see Mesmon’s head snap back into place sporting a bloody-minded expression. He scrabbled for a gun but she knocked it from his hand and swung up to the ceiling to avoid his lunge. Then she flipped upside down to hit him in the neck, the jaw, the temple – pushing to see what his boosted physiology could endure. There must be limits to his healing, to the sheer energy his hybrid system could muster. Finally Solace darted back again and shot at him with Mr Punch, virtually amputating one leg and scattering a handful of punctures across the rest of him.
Mesmon went down. The leg, despite all the tear-along-the-dotted-line work she’d just done, remained attached. And already, she could see the fibres and ropes of his muscles knotting together like a nest of snakes. Still, he was down and obviously in pain. She’d just have to see how many parts were too many, when it came to him reassembling himself. And whether his head would still curse her, once she’d separated it from his shoulders.
The laser caught her as she swooped down on the Tothiat, and her entire world dissolved into danger warnings and error messages. Solace aborted the attack instantly, using the gravity handles to scrabble backwards through the air, bobbing erratically. She had lost all the servos down one side, the plates of her armour half melted together by the heat. There was also a great deal of pain and blistered skin on the inside. But you could only heal from that if someone didn’t kill you first, so she put it out of her mind. She swung around, trying to manage Mr Punch one-handed, trying to find her new enemy.
She found him just as he rammed a new cell into his exhausted laser and levelled it at her, faceless behind his visor.
Damn, she thought, and Rollo shot him, shattering that plastic mask and sending the man pitching backwards.
Mesmon was already on his feet. She could barely believe it. She could also barely believe that the Hegemony hadn’t just put twenty Tothiat together and taken over the goddamn universe by now. But maybe they were all inveterate criminals who only obeyed orders when it let them break laws.