This cleo is not already weakened by Mazu's blade or the detonation force of the line of shock mines. It is virulently strong. Its shell strikes you like a battering ram; you feel the impact of it juddering up through your frame and across your hull, rattling your sensors, rolling through your bones and the meat-jelly in your head and interstices like thunder.
You within your amniote shell are not hurt by this, of course, for the saltwater cushions you, indeed there is no real force being dealt here at all, only the dream of it—but you rock back just the same as though you have been headbutted in the gut. Your thrusters flicker and falter. DEVIATING FROM TRAJECTORY, says your HUD. RECALIBRATING. The alarms already crowding your vision and internals alike hasten, become redder and more urgent.
Around the taste of copper in your mouth you think: I have to move. The beak of the cleo is yawning open; a deep and penetrating roar shudders through you, into the saline and your meat-body. You feel it in the hairs that rise against the skin of your suit. That is real.
Half-blind, darkness clustering at the edges of your sight, you will your arms with their tattered barriers to inch open. This is no easy task. The actuators, you glean from the myriad alarms, have been damaged by the impact; not enough to cease function, but some crucial controller in them is currently rebooting, struggling to claw its way back into stability, somewhere deep in your back that should be well armored by steel and engineered fluids alike but has been jarred loose out of sheer trauma. First anti-megafauna mines, now this. You grit your teeth and hiss. The difficulty in your steel body is mirrored in pain that shivers now up through your bone-spine and into your shoulders, hot and deliciously animal in its rawness.
Cleonicerotids are hard to crack. It is their greatest strength: not their only one. On your HUD, through the swirling murk stirred up by the sheer force of your combined passage, you see the dark line of an arm emerge from the writhing mass. Only it isn't an arm. It's a tongue.
You fumble, find your voice again. "Shit," you say inarticulately to no one. "Helm—dump vents."
Around you the water becomes white vapor. No pressure on you abates. Against your ribcage, through the heat and churn, you feel a wrong-pitched thunk. Fuck.
"Helm," you say, "I need diagnostics—"
You don't need to finish this, as it happens, because it is clear in the next moment: there is a twisting, wrenching implosion in your chest, and then for a moment you think your sonar has failed you, but no, it is just the reflection of all your noise off the plate of your own hull, free and hurtling end over end past your face.
Not good. There are critical systems there you need to keep moving, surface cooling and layered plating, now bared to the abyss. You can feel seawater already rushing into your vent port, drawn by pressure differential alone, pouring into all the little cracks, threatening to tear away the next layer without prompting.
And then there is the pain. You double over and dry-heave.
(We never did fully figure out how to decouple pain receptors in the meat-brain from damage detected to your Titan. It is as deep and instinctual as fear or hunger, and that cannot be divorced from the rest of perception without grave consequences. I can, however, take pity on you and adjust your ox feed to run a little heavier on endorphins—just enough to break you free of your state, to jolt you enough that you won't fall unconscious wholly—so I do.)
Through the haze of your agony you notice a silver flash. Another target, you think, the neoradiodont from your training against the Christchurch target, come to deliver the final blow. After that, you can rest.
No such luck, however, because on your port suddenly comes a great shove, then nothing—then in your ear Debrah Dare says, "Wake up, Tokyo, you're still in the game," and your eyes go wide open, just in time to see Mazu drive her blades into the stem of the cleo's tongue between its thrashing root and the end, where it vanishes into the coolant-weeping hole in your chest.
The cleo keens. It is a shrill, piercing sound that lances through you, right to your bones. You spasm; the barriers wrapped around your arms flare, and then you are drifting back, suddenly unencumbered, the severed end of the tongue waving gently on your visuals and your crippled sonar like some twisted war-banner.
And before you are Fishhawk and Mazu, the former's shields spread wide and full, beautiful and bright, two great wings around the maddened beast. As you watch, Mazu turns on her axis—graceful, inevitable—so that her blades point down at the sea floor, her thrusters trail away toward the sky above, and she is looking, you think, for the weak point among those arms, the beak where Sea Witch had struck last time—but no, she arcs downward and her blades flicker past the swell of the great chamber, and one of the arms lashes out and swipes them away.
A feint, you realize in the next instant, because behind Mazu Fishhawk has been inching close, and in the space between the cleo deflecting Mazu's strike and drawing itself inward to leap away, you see those barriers furl, like petals of a flower, and then—like a tower falling—Fishhawk's vectoring right between them, and the force of the cleo's own outreach has turned it so it faces into Fishhawk's arms, and the great engines flare (bigger than yours, yet somehow graceful) and everything falls into place.
From the long dark alcoves bit deep into Fishhawk's ulnars the barriers emerge: first a crowning, and in your dizziness you think Fishhawk has been hit, that the tongue that no longer exists—tipped with a barb as sharp as steel—has cut into it. But that is impossible. The edges rise straight and tall and bright. In the next moment they are like sails, and they are so big that they look like glaciers coming down from a mountain, even though those tips might be moving fast enough to break sound.
In the next moment the shock hits you. You reel back and are picked up bodily by the wake. On sonar you see long wedding-veil sheets coming off those glorious barriers, and then they split and become long lenticular segments, just as the shields themselves have, and the ulnars that bear the shields split, too, yaw away from Fishhawk's arms proper, and spread wide to embrace the Meg.
Mazu moves now. It is like a dance, these two, like tides, thoughtless and effortless. They don't even have to speak. Fishhawk cants sideways and Mazu moves into the space, easy as breathing; the displacement between the two of them remains perfectly unchanged; each must know where the other is—helmlink, the doubling of awareness through their nerves directly. A strange twinge runs through you, a taste like ozone or bile.
They are circling now, the cleo between them, Fishhawk at its head, Mazu below and behind, pointing toward the back of the shell. As you ride out the wake of Fishhawk's erupting deployment you see the blades come out of Mazu's sheaths once more, their edges gleaming wicked-sharp; they fan out in a single smooth movement, and while Fishhawk wraps the churn of legs and smothers them in her barriers, each finger articulating to stretch the membrane close around the beast, Mazu rallies her thrusters and leaps upward from the sea floor, aiming straight and true for the soft vent at the back, which Fishhawk has pulled free of guarding arms.
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Her strike lands. Cryobloom floods the water. The cleonicerotid screams. You think it does not sound so unlike the mourning cry of a whale, but deeper, more awful, grinding through your teeth, grating across your beleaguered nerves, underlaid by some infrasound pulsating like the drums of ancestors.
You're not done. "Tokyo," says Fishhawk, "vector to your six, as much power as you can. Can you do that?"
You find your voice, key the mix. "Yeah," you say, "I think I can do that."
How much? She didn't give you a number, a threshold. Your core primary cooling loop is gasping, weeping temperature where the hole in your chest lets it out between the gaps in underlying stacked plates. The auxiliary is already kicking in; you don't know how long it'll last. Your barriers—you try not to think about those. Collision with the cleo took them down further. You must have thrown them instinctively across your chest when the barbed tongue came out because the fraying along what is left of their edges mimics the melting shapes there.
Through the pain that still beats through your body you experimentally surge power to your thrusters—just the big ones, no attitude ports, your shoulders and back and calves. They tremble in answer. You throw them into full reverse and feel your weathered body shift, vector back and away, toward the mines behind you.
"Attagirl," says Fishhawk, who must have seen the flare from your engines. Then she lets go of the cleo.
The cleo surges forward. Though wounded, still pouring cryo from the gash where its vent used to be, it is still alive, therefore still a threat. Without thinking you open your mouth—mean to warn Fishhawk—but of course she knows, she has planned this, stupid—her engines go dark and she falls like snow, right out of the path of the cleo.
And there is Mazu, rising from below to take her place. With her left arm she folds her blades tight into a single shining wedge, angles it so it is nothing so much like a karambit, held blade toward body, a grip meant to anguish, not just wound. And in her rough hand the other set of blades wings out, hard and bright, a promise.
Cleos have pinhole eyes big enough that a man could comfortably stand in their openings. This one's catch the light of Mazu's headlamp and the reflected gleam of her blades together, so you see when they shift down and capture Mazu flying up toward the cleo's exposed head.
It has aimed itself already at Fishhawk, and now, having missed its mark, it faces a quandary: which way? You see now how beautifully they have planned this. Forward, the cleo will be flung into the mines. Above is the edge of the sea, beyond which none of you can go. Below is Mazu, and her blades. Fishhawk, falling like a stone, bleeding a white stream of ballast as she goes, is the bait. Even a Meg can see that.
You already know what will happen next. The glittering eyes vanish. The arms seem to collapse in on themselves. In another second the cleo has withdrawn wholly into its shell, tumbles directionlessly through the space between sky and earth.
Mazu sees this. Her engines flare brighter, and she strikes.
The reverse-gripped blade sinks into the shell and holds there like a talon. The shell is thick; the concretion of it is probably as hard and wide as the retaining wall of a nuclear plant, so your classes have taught you. Her blade won't even scrape the soft squirming innards. But she isn't going for the kill in one hit, you see, because then her other arm comes up and bites into the shell, and you see the many parts of the blade flicker and understand that they are moving, sawing, fluttering at hummingbird speeds.
The shell bears even this. You count the seconds in time with the throbs that ripple through your body: five, ten, fifteen. Then a hum in your ear makes you open your eyes again: for a moment you see nothing, and then the sea groans, and all at once you see a seam open itself—as though drawn on with an ink brush—and the whole thing gives way, comes apart like a mouth opening.
Finish it! Finish it! you think. Then a gout of water erupts from the wound, and it catches Mazu square in the chest and shakes her like a rag doll—she hangs gamely on, but the leaves of her manifold blades shiver in the wake of it and you know in another moment she'll lose her grip. The wake is too strong.
Your radio crackles. In your ear Enika says, "Hey, Shirley, heads up."
A thunk sounds off the other side of the cleo, reverberates through the water into you. The thing screams. Then it jerks suddenly, away from Mazu, into the roiling darkness.
Your headlamp flashes over the tumbling silhouette. There's a line, you see, sunk into the other side of the target; that's what's dragging it, spewing trails of cryo into the sea as it goes. Before you can key the mic Mazu beats you to it: "No no no," you hear her cry, and then, "Sea Witch, advise, you're in det range—what the fuck are you doing—!"
"That's the idea," says Sea Witch. "Stand back, please." And then you see that the line is shifting, twisting around itself end over end, and there is Sea Witch herself, emerging like a meteor from the minefield: she is a dipole with the crippled Meg, and in the next moment you are rocked by a sudden quake, and the water goes wild.
She's swung it into the minefield, you realize as your visuals flood white with cryo. On your radio you hear a brief burst of Cantonese—cursing, maybe—and then, "That's not going to finish it, Venkatesh, what the fuck!"
"This will," says Sea Witch, and you see the bright hard gleam of her engines flaring momentarily: then another quake wracks the sea, sharper and smaller this time, and you see that the harpoon is snaking free, now, trailing chunks of flesh as big as houses through the water, and the mines—still shivering from a cascade of explosions—are swimming with them.
Mazu is still spinning. There's Fishhawk: rising, wings spread, to catch her and arrest her tumbling spiral away from the target. Is the target dead yet? You can't make out the shell amid all the cryobloom; wouldn't matter if you could, anyway, since they can survive without them, the Ceylon Cleo did in '87, and god you hurt everywhere right now.
Somewhere amid the swirling tones of ochre and umber and bruise and white you think you see movement. Something is calving away from the rest of the sea, moving swiftly, sleekly. Then a mine trembles, and whistles, detection radius violated, and you realize all at once—
"Sea Hawk," you say, "advise, live target six o' clock."
"Move," says Mazu. And she throws herself free of Fishhawk, twists sideways—that scratch on her shoulder gleams purple with shed Karman vortexes on your sonar—and revs her engines, which on your wireframe shows her to be on a direct interception path with the second cleo, who, still alive, still despite the many ragged and bleeding stumps of its arms, has dragged itself right into the mines.
The mines aren't meant to kill, just hinder—maybe they were meant to kill thirty years ago, when the biggest things awake were all class As, child-sized to Titans. But the damn thing is half-dead already. A few detonations and the other half will surely follow suit. Mazu doesn't need to do anything, you realize. So why—?
All at once you realize what is going to happen.
"Mazu," says your radio, "Shirley! Get the fuck out of—"
Too late. You see, as if in slow motion, Mazu's blades come out of her gauntlet-sheaths, flare wide; she drifts gracefully into striking range and sinks them into the meat of the cleo's exposed and reaching body, right behind the frantically twitching eye, and a moment later the mines behind her announce their decision with a dull ear-popping bwomp. For a heartbeat everything holds its breath. Then the sea explodes.
Momentarily your sonar is overwhelmed with the sheer amplitude of noise coming back at it; I choke it and modulate your visuals likewise for you, so the outpouring of energy doesn't wreck your camera-eyes.
"Shirley!" You wonder briefly, terribly, if your sword had called out with the same panic in her voice when Rachel died. "Oh, fuck. Yen, no. No."
Because, yes, there in your HUD is the blinking red light, here, then extinguished; and then the solemn white text:
FIGHTER OFFLINE
Superhero Sci-Fi
The Old God's Game
Superhero ? Sci-Fi ? Psychological ? Action ? Space Opera
When you’re trying to save your world, the last place you want to be is behind a desk.
What to Expect
- Slow-burn mid to strong progression
- Long-form and character-driven plot
- Intern to hero arc
- High-Stakes and OP Antagonist
- Superhero action and office slice of life
- Multiple POVs with unique voices
- Romantic subplots with no harem
- Especially for fans of Dispatch and Invincible
Updates Wednesday and Saturday
Evolving Powers ? Space Combat ? Found Family
Targeted damage or total catastrophe?
Someone has to decide.