Sunrunner
Copyright© 2023 by K. P. Sweeney
Chapter 19
To an outside observer, it might appear that BOB caught the occasional feeling. More accurately, the event might be described as a hunch, or intuition. This was, of course, inaccurate. BOB processed. Input, analysis, interpretation, action—clean and empirical. There was never anything so undignified as a “feeling,” but BOB forgave organics for their need to oversimplify. Their processing power was so limited after all.
An analysis of the data suggested to BOB that, of the three Sunrunner crew taken hostage, only two had significant value: BOB, obviously, and Adam. Odybrix was little more than a nuisance to Remington. A non-vital appendage of the Blue Wings that pecked at the unimportant fringes of the RC empire. Her time with that anti-corp organization had earned her a perfunctory bounty.
BOB could ascertain no value to the corporation beyond having her removed as an obstacle. This meant Odybrix was going to be eliminated. Moreover, given the efficiency Adam’s mother demonstrated, the elimination would occur quickly. Odybrix ranked among the highest in BOB’s personal ratings of organics, exhibiting a delightful mix of forthrightness and initiative, combined with exquisite taste in coffee. Thus, the motivation to rescue her lit up BOB’s circuit board like a thunderstorm.
Fortunately, one of BOB’s less favourable organics had made contact through an admittedly clever channel. Through a string of coffee orders, Hoxley had managed to establish basic communication using the first letter of every order. Through this, Odybrix’ impending peril was relayed, and assurances were given that reinforcements would soon arrive. That only left the matters of escaping the utility closet, rescuing Adam and Odybrix, and escaping the RC vessel.
The anterior plate of BOB’s chassis slid down with a click. Angling themself to the door panel, BOB extended their manipulator arm from its cavity and grasped at the panel’s seam. With a whirr of mechanized power, the plate popped off; BOB placed it gingerly on the floor. A precise flurry of snips and tugs of the internal wiring gave way to the interface. Overriding the lock on the door was simple, so BOB set a less modest goal. The door was networked, which meant it offered limited access to other aspects of the ship. Namely, the lift. Had their captors thought more of BOB, they would have opted for confinement in a brig. Flush surfaces, isolated systems ... that would have been a more appropriate challenge for someone of BOB’s capabilities. Organics were so often prone to underestimation. The door opened and BOB observed the expected surprise on the guardsman’s face.
“Your doorway appears to have had a malfunction!” BOB exclaimed before jabbing the man with the manipulator and channeling 60,000 volts of electricity into him.
“You can’t do this!” Adam cried.
“That is demonstrably incorrect,” Millicent replied flatly.
“I won’t let you,” Adam said in a low snarl.
His mother cocked a questioning eyebrow, as if inviting him to elaborate on how he intended to deliver on that statement. Rather than argue or threaten, Adam spun on his heels and ran toward the elevator. A bridgeman stepped in front of him and raised a hand in a barring gesture; Adam raised his own hand in an unbarring gesture which broke the man’s jaw. Several pistols snapped up and trained on Adam before his mother’s voice rang out.
“Lower your weapons. If he wishes to witness her death first-hand, let him.”
He ignored the words and pushed the possibility that Odybrix was already dead from his thoughts. His mother might speak with unerring certainty, but she wasn’t always right. If there was one person in the galaxy who made a point of defying the odds, it was Odybrix. She’d survive out of spite alone. And if not for spite, there was an unfinished bottle of whiskey waiting in the hold of the Sunrunner.
Adam rounded the corner and came to a staggering stop. A crewman lay sprawled on the floor in front of the elevator. Above the unconscious woman stood BOB, illuminated by flashing arcs of electricity. The pair regarded each other for a heartbeat then quickly rushed into the elevator.
“We have to get to Odybrix,” Adam said, bouncing on the balls of his feet with unused adrenaline, “she’s–”
“Going to be executed!” BOB said, “I have already come to that determination!”
“How?” Adam asked, “You know what, never mind. I have no bandwidth left for being surprised today. We’ll need to commandeer a shuttle after we bring her in. There should be a weapon’s locker in the docking bay. They won’t be letting us off this ship without a firefight.”
“The Sunrunner is presently on an intercept course and will pick us up from the dock!”
“Okay,” Adam said, suppressing the question of how BOB knew that. “Any idea how they’re not going to get blown to bits?”
“The HWS Terror is escorting them!”
The floor pressed into Adam’s feet as it slowed to a stop, and he mused aloud, “It’s good to have friends.”
“Friends with guns are even better!”
A warning on the heads-up display inside the pressure suit flashed an urgent red. The oxygen reserve inside the suit plummeted from ninety-eight percent to seventy-five in the span of a handful of seconds. There were no indications of a leak in the suit, and if there were a rupture it would have been excruciatingly obvious. The most likely conclusion was that someone had remotely triggered the oxygen to vent into space.
“Fucking lying, murdering, corpo fucks fucking fucked me!” Odybrix screamed, uncaringly using what little oxygen remained.
Her head twisted to the docking bay, opened and promising safety. She knew that a barrier stood between her and that safety, like a gate to keep out the riff raff. If she weren’t about to fucking die, she might have likened the nearly invisible forcefield to any number of socioeconomic barriers that kept the poor from attaining any reasonable means of security. Sadly, she was about to fucking die, so she fixed her eyes on the dwindling oxygen supply—fifty percent and falling—and thought of something stupid to do.
The air grew thin in the suit, and she took what might have been her last breath. With a determined sneer she pointed the ion scrubber at her neck and mentally reached for her psionics. It was like her spinal cord was wired to a generator and some asshole flipped the switch. Pain tore through her body like an arcing lightning bolt and orbs of white popped at the edges of her vision like fireworks. Through the torment ripping through her nervous system, she willed her finger to squeeze the trigger.
The blast cut through her suit and into the control collar. The impact on her throat made her choke and cough, but she never let go of her psionic grip. The fatal pull of the void around her was blocked by a barrier of faint pink light. She had made a psionic seal around the suit to prevent its rupture from killing her, and had stopped the O2 being vented out.
Her lifespan had just extended from seconds, to maybe minutes. She had an unbidden, giddy thought that the assholes aboard the RC ship could have rigged the suit to explode, but hadn’t because ‘why waste a suit when suffocation had the added benefit of torturing your prisoner?’ She gave her head a shake, which hurt, and angled herself toward the docking port. As her psionics pushed her toward the ship, a flash of light bloomed in the void above Hearthlight. The cavalry was coming, and she hoped to the dead gods that they didn’t incinerate her with a plasma cannon.
“The Terror’s weapons are hot,” Hoxley called out from behind Zenith. “They’re on course to intercept before the RC ship can jump.”
“Away team,” Zenith called out over comms, report.”
Buddy’s voice was tinny over the speaker, “Uh, looking good, I think.”
“Now is not the time for apprehension, Buddy.”
“No, I got it. Everything is similar enough to a regular mech. It’s just weird that my brain didn’t click when I got in the seat.”
“Sturdy?” Zenith said.
“Ready for launch.”
The plan was this, the Terror would engage the enemy, block their retreat, and throw down heavy fire. The Sunrunner would get as close as possible and take evasive maneuvers until the shields went down. At which point, Zenith would dart toward the enemy docking port and jettison the super mech and dropship. The low energy profiles of the smaller craft, combined with a timely engine venting, would buy them the time they needed for Buddy to cut into the port with the mech’s monstrous beam blade. Then it was up to the two of them to accomplish the nebulous task of finding the crew and retrieving them. The mission outline had a familiar, unhinged quality that made Buddy feel confident about its success.
“We’re receiving a message from BOB,” Hoxley said. “They’ve spaced Odybrix!”
A moment of stunned bewilderment passed over Buddy as she sat in the mech. Hot tears welled at the corners of her eyes. She blinked and her face resolved into a wrathful grimace. Somewhere inside her another, angrier, person was waking. Her hesitation about operating the new mech melted away into a pure, focused desire for revenge.
“I want eyes on the dock, Hox!” Zenith yelled.
“Working on it. There!”
A live feed popped into the crews’ feeds. In it, a shimmering rectangle of light glowed outside the massive bulk of the RC ship. Against that light, a small pink dot resolved. She was alive. Somehow, she was alive. But she wouldn’t be for long.
“We’re going in!” Zenith yelled, wrenching the ship into full thrust. “Tell Kron to hold fire on the aft dock!”
As the words left her lips, so too did a barrage of plasma fire spill forth from the Terror.
A shout echoed down the expansive chamber beyond the threshold of the elevator. Two guardsmen waved their arms at the barrier separating the dock from the void. A pink dot appeared and grew in the vast blackness as it approached the force field. One of the men jogged to a terminal beside the entryway and keyed in a command. With a grinding metallic groan, the docking bay doors began to close.
Adam sprinted fifty meters in the span of three seconds. In the time it took for one of the guardsmen to look up and begin raising his rifle, Adam had already leapt off the deck and planted a boot squarely in his chest. The momentum of the kick sent the man slamming into the forcefield, creating an iridescent shimmer that rolled out in waves. With a startled yell, the other guardsmen drew his sidearm as the first bounced off the barrier on staggering feet. Adam gripped the unsteady man with one hand and, with the shove of a hip, threw him at his partner. In the intervening moments before BOB trundled up to reverse the doors, Adam had viciously bludgeoned both men into unconsciousness.
“A tremendous display of violence!” BOB said, accentuating the compliment by playing an audio file of a crowd politely clapping.
Odybrix arrived at the dock seconds later and bounced off the barrier like a fly hitting a window. She mouthed a “Fuck you,” and began waving her arms frantically at the pair of crewmates.
“BOB, switch the shield to permeable.” Adam said, gaping at the tear in her suit “she hasn’t got any oxygen! Hurry!”
“There has been a system override from the bridge!”
“Can you bypass it?”
“Yes!” BOB said, ripping the plating off the terminal with a manipulator. “There is more bad news!”
“What could be worse than this?”
A brief, blinding flash of light preceded the impact of a plasma cannon striking the RC’s ship’s shields. Stark dread mirrored in the faces of Adam and Odybrix. Had the shields not been up, a wave of obliterating plasma would have swept over them like wildfire. Even if the blast hit a different section of the ship, radiation or superheated shrapnel might still kill them.
“That! Oh, and your mother is on her way!”
“Hold fire!” Hoxley cried out over a tight beam to the Terror. Then to Zenith, he said, “That was a full salvo from their weapons battery. RC shield status is between sixty to sixty-five percent. They’re taking evasive manoeuvres and diverting power to shields.”
A response buzzed in from the attacking ship, “This is lieutenant Ash of the HWS Terror. Confirm hold fire request.”
“Confirmed lieutenant,” Hoxley said, “Friendlies on the aft side.”
There was a brief pause before the lieutenant came back on the line, “Sounds like things are moving ahead of schedule. Redirecting fire to the bow.”
“Looks like they weren’t expecting that level of firepower,” Zenith said, scanning readouts for any target locks on the Sunrunner. “They either don’t see us yet or are more concerned about the big dog that just took a bite out of their energy reserves. Get ready, I’m taking us in.”
Buddy punched a command into the super mech and felt the vibration of it magnetically gripping onto the deck of the dropship. A small corsair class vessel like the Sunrunner didn’t have the dock space to accommodate an aircraft, so, like many mercenary craft, it made do. A retrofit had incorporated the dropship into the profile of the vessel, allowing it to “dock” by latching onto the hull over an escape hatch. It was ideal for quick deployments and lethal in combination with an atmosphere-rated ship like the Sunrunner. What it didn’t account for was a secondary deployment from the dropship itself.
Buddy would need to fly the hunched mech out of the ship as Sturdy approached their target. No problem for her inside the mech, but the tiny ship didn’t have an atmospheric barrier. When the door opened, the insides of the ship would be subjected to the brutal pull of space. Only a thin pressure suit and chair harness kept Sturdy safe from the void.
She figured he’d be fine. He always seemed to have a firm grasp on whatever was happening and wouldn’t have agreed to the mission if he couldn’t handle it. She, on the other hand, was slowly losing focus to the angry voice inside her head. The report of Ody being jettisoned into space had awoken a violent sensation in her that demanded to be resolved. News of her friend possibly being alive did little to shut the voice up.
In the wide display of the mech, the Sunrunner’s feed showed the glittering pop of plasma colliding against plasma. They raced up to the enemy vessel and strafed the ventral hull. A cannon erupted in a burst of light a split-second after they crossed its mouth. Buddy’s stomach rose into her chest when Zenith spun the ship in hard barrel roll, narrowly avoiding a shot from the RC’s laser defense system. They reached the aft section in a blink and Zenith flew as close to the enemy shields as she dared before giving the command to launch.