Deep Space
Uhlek Badlands
ISS Belfast Windfall

Commander Grx’Bzzgah leaned left on the rudder grip, coaxing Windfall into a port bank, then rolled just the right fraction of power into the larboard engine well to align the caravel with the looming G’Nunk warship ahead. Grix glanced over to Mack’s console. The Thrynn were choppy, but still holding in trace. Barely.

“Grix, how much time?” said Biggs, eyes fixed on Regepple and her swiveling missile launchers. Too much.

“Fifteen Seconds,” said the navigator. Way too much. Biggs looked over to Mack and waited for the call:

“Jesse James! Jesse James!” called Mack, taking a breath to rattle off the rest: “Single launch, missile inbound, bearing three six zero mark 2, class 10, impact in five!”

Biggs didn’t have time to say it, but he didn’t really have to. Grix was already pulling the rudder grip up to his chest.

Thrynn Frigate Jussru

Captain Rssa swore into the stale, recycled air on his bridge and watched the missile streak under ISS Belfast Windfall and over his own ship, no more than a meter or two from his shield perimeter. A proximity fuse would have made all the difference. Somebody on the G’Nunk Warship ahead was thinking, but perhaps too much. Rssa unclenched his fists, withdrawing his claws from his chair’s lacerated armrests and shot an unnecessary look at his tactical officer. They were close enough.

“Sssir, we are in firing position,” said Lieutenant Nruus. “Deflection is refer, quadrant is two six seven. Ready number two.” Rssa closed his eyes and ran the solution through his mind, then opened a channel to the Human vessel.

“This is Jus – ” the ship rocked as the missile detonated far abaft. “This is Jussru. Standby for warshot,” he said, then waited for a beat of his heart. “Fire it.”

Number Two Gangplank Breacher

The Royal Marines were packed like a nest of vipers into the breacher torpedo, close enough for Venn’Bk to feel the warm, moist exhalation of the rest of the squad, to smell the tension and the sweat and the metal. For thousands of years they had fought thus, back to back, the soul of ferocity, shadows behind the gleam of bayonet-swords.

Venn’Bk closed his eyes and breathed in the staleness from their lungs, listened to the quiet rumble of their respiration, the staccato clack of claws on the metallic restraints that pressed them all to the bulkhead. Venn’Bk drew a breath.

Three quick beeps were followed by a continuous fourth as the blood red lights dimmed. The gangplank breacher spit out of Jussru’s small hull and the Marines quickly blacked out under the ruthless propulsion force. Regepple’s hull was twenty seconds away: the breacher’s life support system was already pumping ammonium carbonate into the cabin to revive the Marines before impact.

G’Nunk Warship Regepple

In a rank cloud of narcotic smoke and hormonal secretions the G’Nunk raged mindlessly over the baptism deck, marveling at the light show above them, a holographic picture of the battle howling around their ship. Dozelord Gannuzo’s eyes bulged wide to the strobes and pulsing sonica as the torpedo shot out of the Thrynn ship toward his own.

Gannuzo shrieked with maniacal laughter amid the rippling sea of bionics and flesh, watching as the weapon honed inward. A lone missile was pathetic, a pitiful offering to G’Naen Sh’Gar, and her servant-suitors on Regepple would swat it away like so much rotting flotsam; the shielding would activate and vaporize the weapon before it reached its terminal phase. Mere moments.

Gannuzo’s gyrations slowed and he became oblivous to the rabid raving around him as the critical moment neared.

Any second now.

The breacher passed through the shielding perimeter without tripping the mechanism. Gannuzo watched in lusty disbelief as the breacher sailed past the secondary shielding picket and through the deflector backstop. He thought for an instant, then turned his eyes to the right. There on the far bulkhead.

A grin. Test us, O Great One!

With the sophistication of a battering ram, the Thrynn breacher burst through the metal skin of the warship, sending razor shrapnel slicing through the tangle of G’Nunk on the baptism deck. Before they could splatter on the deck, the spilled blood and fluids were blown toward the punctured hull. Several spasmodic G’Nunk were already wedged between the breacher and the jagged wound it had wrought. After several seconds of howling pressure loss, the breacher’s composite sealant had restored the hull’s integrity.

Stunned, unsure of what had happened, still entranced by the deafening music and swirling lights, the drugged, dizzied G’Nunk turned their hazy attention to the breacher protruding through the hull into their baptism deck. It met their curiosity with a volley of fragmentation grenades that ripped through the throng of grotesque organisms. Dozelord Gannuzo was blown back under a pile of dead husks and limbs, pinned to the deck. He poked his head up in time to see the breacher’s ramp lowering and the red lights within.

All at once the Thrynn shocktroops poured down the ramp, blasting away with their bayonet-sworded reverb rifles, close as an ancient phalanx. In seconds the baptism deck was a living, murderous rumble.
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Next: “Iron Dragons”

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