It was a gamble, ultimately. A jester held in the place of an ace up his sleeve. He was many times weaker, slower and punier than even the least of their number. In a fair contest the average Leaper could eviscerate him in moments, and Rene knew it.
But the enemy didn’t. That was the key. They saw in him a being who could call down blasts of kinetic destruction with but a gesture of his metal hand, a demented shrike that decorated its lair with the spitted corpses of their brothers. And so they wilted before his headlong rush, falling all over themselves to get out of the reach of his pointy stick. Unwilling to meet him head-on, they arched their backs and sprayed him down with webbing from a distance, countless unyielding bands winding round and immobilizing his legs.
Rene hopped after them in impotent fury, knowing that if the momentum of his assault died, then he would too in short order. Their fear of him was his only advantage.
But then the Gallivant brushed him rudely aside and dove into the center of the pack, and Rene realized just how wrong he’d been.
It was Zildiz who was the true object of their terror, not him. She went through them like a cyclone down a wooded valley, strewing wreck and ruin in her wake. Belly-down on the dirt, Rene stared openmouthed as she bulled into a knot of Leapers, sword arms pumping as she placed thrust after thrust into black-furred flesh, ignoring the cost to herself as their claws tore off whole segments of her armor and exposed her gel-beslimed innards to the elements. But the tactic was far from mindless; like a boxer crouching low against a taller opponent, Zildiz was fighting too far inside their lengthy reach to allow them to deliver truly fatal damage. For every blow she received Zildiz disabled an exomorph with surgical strikes into key tendons and nerve clusters, leaving its owner writhing in their final death throes. The wiser ones took to their heels and fled right into the benguet pines. Rene spitefully applied the laser designator to a concealed mine.
Zildiz let out a piercing giggle of delight as a rupturing tree sent a foot-long splinter through the back of a Leaper’s head. Rene shook his spear after the rest, railing at them:
“That’s right! You’d better run! This woman’s as mad as a bag of hammers, and she’ll only get meaner!”
She dragged herself over to him, one arm ripped down to the bone trailing behind her limp and useless, her backplate sloughing off and clattering to the ground. She freed him with a careless flick of her sword then leaned on the bespattered blade, chuckling breathlessly.
“I do believe you’ve scared them off,” Rene congratulated her, “Well done.”
Zildiz looked up sharply. She must have found the sight of Rene’s grimy face amusing, for she pointed at him and broke into a fit of throaty laughter.
“What’s so damned high-larious?” Rene demanded to know. In reply, Zildiz fell back upon a pile of Leaper corpses and lay there, shrieking with uncontrollable merriment.
“I say, are you alright?” he asked of her, his peevishness replaced by a mounting concern. Zildiz was chortling so hard that she was having difficulty breathing. It wasn’t until she clapped her hands round her throat and her legs started kicking out in wild spasms that Rene finally understood what was happening: Zildiz was exhibiting the middle-stage symptoms of oxygen narcosis.
He rushed to her side as her laughter dried up into a frantic choking, her eyelids fluttering as she slipped rapidly into unconsciousness.
“Zildiz,” he shook her shoulders in an attempt to wake her, “Zildiz! Blast and damn it all.”
He was an idiot for not having spotting it sooner. Her bursts of irritability should have given it away, although perhaps he could be forgiven for that—as a rule Zildiz’ s attitude was about as uniformly pleasant as an ingrown toenail.
She hadn’t shown any of the usual preliminary effects like dizziness or nausea which he’d observed in other people. But one also had to consider that Zildiz was not your average person. There was no telling how her altered physiology would cope with abnormal partial pressures.
“How much longer, Exar?” he said, searching the skies for a sign from the almighty.
“T-minus thirty-four minutes,” went the disappointing reply, “It would’ve been here sooner, ‘cept the bird had to stop and refuel. Its onboard computer and I have been chatting and apparently, it’s the exact same shuttle that was dispatched to retrieve your safety pod. Heck, it’s still carrying the cussed thing strapped to its belly—lazy, dumbass technicians back on the station didn’t even bother to unhitch it. We sure could shed that extra weight. Say, why weren’t you in it? Its standard company procedure to await rescue in the pod.”
“I had an emergency,” Rene said, too embarrassed to tell Exar the truth, which that he’d abandoned the vessel to go skinny dipping.
“Oh, okay. Well in any case, central ops has ordered it to circle all the way around the planet to pick us up again. Don’t understand why those chowderheads couldn’t just reroute another bird. It’s not like they’ve only got only one operational shuttle across this whole doggone rock, amiright? Maybe they’re all busy hauling freight, and this one's particular flightpath does have the quickest turnaround. What are the odds?”
“Better than hers, I reckon,” Rene eyeing Zildiz morosely. She would not survive another half an hour. He left arm was convulsing (It always started with the left arm. Why was that?) and even more worrying, a frothy brown liquid was bubbling out the sides of her mouth.
“No, no, no,” Rene murmured, cradling her head with his knees and turning her over on her side, slapping her on the back to expel the fluids before she drowned in them. It wouldn’t be long before the alveoli in her lungs collapsed and her neurons would begin dying en masse.
The sight of her helplessness stirred something within him, dissolving the wall of mutual distrust and antipathy that had sprung up between them.
However brief the struggle had been, she had fought alongside him and shared the same dangers. Amid the rumblings of the god unleashed they had huddled in the same foxhole and had witnessed the awesome spectacle of the Storm Catcher. He had fed her and carried her in his arms when her strength had given out. Gradually and without quite intending it, the Gallivant had become more than just a burden to him. By the immutable laws of human nature, for better or for worse, he and Zildiz were now a unit of two.
The space behind his eyes was full to bursting. The hole he’d dug in his heart was no silent grave, but rather filled with the sound of fingernails scrabbling desperately at the insides of their coffins.
He could not bear it after all. He had been born weak, and it would remain that way until he died. No way around it. There was only one option left to him now.
“Oh blessed ancestors,” Rene prayed, peeling off his facepiece and strapping it onto her, “I have seen and committed so much destruction in your name. So many souls condemned to the lightless void—is it too much to ask that you spare this one? Let me save this one life. Just one. Is that too much to ask?”
He sucked in the unfiltered air and let out a sigh of resignation. Now his lifespan would number in the minutes.
“Erm, chief?” came the sphere’s tentative voice.
“I’m a little occupied here, Exar!” Rene shouted back distractedly.
“I know, I know,” Exar said, trying to appease him, “Just thought you’d want to know. We got bogeys converging at twelve o’clock.”
“How many?”
“Looks like all of em.”
This is a pickle, and no mistake, Rene thought. I guess we aren’t going to the moons after all.
#
