Chapter 39B

  Dalex’s female clone, Dalexa, watched with Seventh as the [probe] packed with fresh {adamantine} drifted into the Expedition 7’s massive hold. Dalexa was excited, but she couldn’t read the [android’s] features well enough to say if he was feeling anything at all at receiving this gift. The [probe] docked in a bay near the bridge where its precious cargo could be quickly offloaded and sent to the [fabricators] that would churn out new vessels and ammunition.

  “It’s a small vessel,” Dalexa said. “How much {adamantine} does it hold?”

  “About twenty-five kilograms.”

  “That doesn’t seem like much. How are we supposed to build a new dreadnaught out of such a small amount of metal?”

  “A dreadnaught would indeed be too much, but small quantities of benefine can be stretched to create much larger equipment. We fill in the extra mass with more common metals and minerals. A dreadnaught would require perhaps fifty kilograms of benefine. With twenty-five, we can perhaps construct three smaller ships and fully arm them.”

  Dalexa glanced at the battle map. For the moment, the enemy {far realmers} were biding their time, preparing their next move in mysterious silence. Their vessels outnumbered hers two to one. Three more vessels would go a long way to filling that gap.

  “Could we make another {void stalker} and two more destroyers?” she asked.

  “Indeed,” Seventh answered. “If you feel that is the best composition to supplement our force, I will begin work immediately.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “About ten minutes.”

  Dalexa had thought she was getting used to the insane technology her benefactors had given her. But three galaxy hopping, world destroying vessels built in as much time as it took to boil some pasta? It was ludicrous and very useful.

  She felt a slight tremor at her feet, but dismissed it as some ambient quirk of the E7. Seventh, on the other hand, went very still.

  “We have a hull breach,” he said.

  “Which vessel?” Dalexa asked.

  “This vessel. Level four hundred and thirty, approximately seventy-five kilometers aft of the bridge. Something slipped past our defenses.”

  Dalexa checked the map again. None of the enemy vessels had fired. They were all still in the same positions, fighting to stay out of the center of the {gravity vortex}.

  “Could it have been stray debris? An asteroid or something?”

  “No naturally occurring object would have the energy required to pierce the hull, let alone the ship’s [forcefield].”

  “But if an enemy weapon— I mean skill hit us, would we even be here anymore?” Dalexa asked.

  The enemy vessels used skills comparable to her own, with their very own version of {solaris nocturne} to vaporize any and all combatants. The blast radius on one of those would easily consume the E7.

  “Precisely,” Seventh said. “Which makes me suspect—”

  Another tremor ran through the floor, this one pronounced enough to force Dalexa to change footing to keep her balance. She recognized it immediately for what it was, an explosion somewhere deep in the E7.

  “Don’t tell me,” she said.

  “The unknown faction has boarded our ship.”

  Dalexa glanced toward the door to the bridge as if an alien were about to burst through it and eat her. “What do we—”

  Seventh grabbed her wrist and pulled her toward the door. It opened they exited quickly down an empty corridor.

  “We’re not abandoning ship, are we?” Dalexa asked.

  “Negative. I do not know how many boarders have entered the Expedition 7, but a stealth craft of the size necessary to pass our sensors undetected would not be able to carry a large complement of intruders.”

  They walked into a room with a circular pad at its center raised a few inches off the floor. Robotic arms surrounded the pad.

  Seventh continued, “It will not be easy, but we should be able to repel the boarders. It is time to armor you up.”

  ***

  In just a minute, Dalexa was shrouded in an invisible shell of {adamantine} armor. She familiarized herself with its systems and capabilities as she rushed through the E7 toward the hull breach. Thanks to her enhanced body and the armor, she would cross the seventy-five kilometers of the ship separating her from the boarders in no time at all. The hallways were wide and long, giving her plenty of room to push her speed.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  But she was alone. Seventh was back on the bridge.

  Another tremor rippled through the vessel, something else blowing up.

  “What are you going to do while I kick out our guests?” Dalexa asked.

  Seventh answered in her ear, “The unknown faction’s fleet is likely to take advantage of their successful boarding action to make their next move. I must be on the bridge to fight them at maximum efficiency.

  “Typical man,” Dalexa said. “Leave the woman all alone to do the hard work while you play with your gadgets.”

  Seventh’s only response was an uncharacteristically baffled, “What?”

  He didn’t even bother to point out that, one, he was not a man, and two, Dalexa was barely a woman. All of her memories were from a fully male perspective. It was only her body that was any different.

  “I don’t know,” Dalexa said. “It just slipped out.”

  The kilometers ticked by. Her armor’s system told her she was only a minute from reaching the enemy’s incursion point. The armor itself fully manifested in its pale blue glory, ready to tank whatever the bad guys shot at her.

  She rounded a corner and came face to face with a gray-skinned naked human man. She skidded to a stop, her dragging feet tearing up part of the floor. The man stared at her. She stared back.

  “Hello?” she asked.

  The gray man let out a moaning, “Breeeeellllluuuuuuuuummmmmmmaaaan,” and then raised a hand. Only then did Dalexa notice he was holding something.

  A flash distorted her vision. Something hit her in the chest and knocked her back down the hallway. She landed on the floor and slid to a stop, traveling fifty yards. Her armor threw up an alert:

  “[Scattergun]!” she shouted. She hadn’t had time to come up with new names for her sci-fi weapons. [Multi-use combat gel] rushed out of her armor to form a large-barreled gun. It fell into her hands already tuned to maximum energy output.

  “Don’t worry about breaking anything,” Seventh’s voice popped into her head, and Dalexa let loose, opening fire down the hallway toward the last place she had seen the strange man.

  She pulled the trigger five times. Each blast of the [scattergun] sent a plasmic pulse downrange that consumed most of the corridor. Bolts of energized electricity arced through the air ahead of her. The walls burned and melted. Globs of molten metal dripped down from the ceiling.

  When she stopped shooting, most of the interior of the ship in front of her was slagged. There was no sign of the intruder. Had it fled, or had she blown it out of existence?

  “What was that?” she asked, feeling goosebumps at the memory of the gray man. “It looked human, but sounded like a zombie.”

  “It is difficult to say,” Seventh answered, “but sensors detected a similar energy signature that I have noticed in the unknown faction’s fleet. It was not human.”

  She shivered slightly. “Is it dead?”

  “Before it melted, one of the ship’s [cameras] recorded the destruction of the intruder. However, there are more ahead. Many more.”

  “Great,” Dalexa said. She inspected the [scattergun]. After firing so many devastating energy blasts, she was a little worried the barrel might have started to wear down, but, as far as she could tell, it was undamaged. “How far to the closest of them?”

  “My scans are unreliable. Expect further contact in as few as one hundred yards. Make sure your [forcefield] is on the highest setting. It will likely not block an enemy weapon, but it should diminish the damage done to your armor.”

  Dalexa did as he suggested, and a blue haze briefly filled the air around her. Her [forcefield] had been at roughly fifty percent power. Now it was radiating at its maximum limit.

  “Again,” Seventh continued, “no amount of damage you might cause using your suit can meaningfully harm the Expedition 7. Be liberal with your weapons.”

  That seemed like a dangerous suggestion to Dalexa, but she supposed it was a big ship with a lot of empty space. She advanced down the hallway more carefully this time, pushing through smoke and stepping over gouges in the metal where the [scattergun] had laid waste to the ship. This time, she would get the drop on her enemy, not the other way around.

  She summoned a second [scattergun]. Her armor made her strong enough to wield two at the same time without worrying about balance or recoil. Given the wide spread of the weapon, accuracy wasn’t an issue.

  At a junction in the corridor, Dalexa heard a scraping sound around the corner. Knowing that Seventh was far away on the bridge and that Dalexa was all alone, she slipped up to the edge of the junction and poked the barrel of one of her guns around the corner. She fired twice and then rounded the corner, letting her unseen enemy have it with both barrels.

  She walked into a scene of fire and mayhem. There were perhaps ten of the strange humanoid beings in the hallway with her. A few of them were already in pieces, torn apart by the plasma shots of her [scattergun], but several had survived the blast. They raised their weapons, small pistol-like objects that fired bolts of light. She dove to the floor, continuing to pull the trigger. Several lances of pure white light passed over her head, carving away pieces of the hallway behind her.

  Despite their nakedness, the strange gray men—and women, Dalexa was noticing—were not instantly atomized by her fire. Something invisible protected them, perhaps their own [forcefields]. It took a couple of shots before Dalexa’s weapons could do any damage, and then a single blast of plasma was only enough to blow away a limb or a chunk of flesh, which did not stop them from fighting as it would have stopped a normal human being.

  Dalexa could hear them moaning over the weapon discharges and plasma detonations. It was as if they were trying to mimic human speech and failing. She wondered briefly if this was their attempt to communicate, but, if it was, she didn’t think it was to request a parlay. They had fired the first shot, after all.

  Despite her enemy’s durability, Dalexa cleared the hallway of all ten intruders before they could deal any damage to her armor. They weren’t crack shots, and they mostly just stood in the open rather than moving or seeking cover.

  But how many more were, in Seventh’s words, “many more?”

  “Where to next?” Dalexa asked, getting to her feet and continuing down the hallway.

  As if in answer, the wall to her right, barely holding together at the seams after the pounding she and the intruders had given it, collapsed, revealing thirty more unnaturally gray humans, all moaning in a discordant chorus.

  They stared at her with slack jaws and dead eyes as she raised her [scatterguns] to fire into them. She got off a shot from each gun before the horde of intruders jumped on her. A few were blown away, but a fair number seized hold of her by the arms and legs.

  Dalexa was strong enough to rip her arms out of their grasp straight away, but gray zombies piled on top of her, making it difficult to move. One of the [scatterguns] fell out of her hands. She fired a few more times with the other one, but she couldn’t tell what kind of effect it was having.

  With the weight of so many alien bodies pressing down on her, she decided to change tactics. A new weapon popped into her mind, one that she wasn’t even sure the [combat gel] could create. But, the moment she thought of it, the [gel] made her intentions into reality. Into her hand fell a chainsaw on the end of a sword handle with a trigger. It rumbled and spun, hungry for {far realmer} flesh.

  Dalexa pulled the trigger and nearly drowned in gray blood.

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