Two Bards: The Forum!

“Who the fuck makes robotic bees?”

Vector hoped he sounded a little less bewildered than he felt, but it wasn’t the end of the world if he didn’t. The rest of his team seemed equally off-balance; Sergio was sighting down his rifle at the dark cloud that buzzed ominously outside the windows of the lab they’d barricaded themselves inside. Charming was grooming himself, clever paws rearranging his seriously mussed fur just so, while Addams was taking advantage of the presence of lab equipment and was muttering to herself as she ran the bees’ toxins through some of the equipment.

That was another sticking point. “And if you do make robotic, why in the sweet depths of space would you make them venomous?”

Nobody answered him for a few moments, too absorbed in what they were doing. Sergio finally set down his rifle with a sigh, and looked over at Vector.

“It’s a primarily agricultural colony on a recently habiformed planet. I am given to understand that the use of mechanical insects, though not widespread, is a possible answer to pollinating the luxury fruit the planet has as its main export.” He paused. “Why they were given stingers, however, I cannot speak to.”

“They weren’t,” came Addams’ absent reply, and both Sergio and Vector turned towards her in unison.

She glanced up, and raised her eyebrows. “Well, for one thing the stingers are clearly aftermarket - their style totally clashes with the feng shui of the rest of the design - and for another, this venom? It’s just repurposed Cthlalan toxins.”

At their blank looks she raised her eyebrows and shook the vial she had in hand at them. “Common pesticide on Scrik-controlled planets. The animal it derives from is from their home planet, and the export of it is one of their major industries.”

Vector blinked again. “So…someone added pesticides to mechanical pollinators on purpose?”

Sergio shrugged elaborately - the only way a 9-foot-tall Krasqued could shrug. “Well, we did get word of smugglers on-planet.” He looked at the buzzing swarm and grimaced. “And you must admit, they are very effective at keeping us away from the illicit portions of this colony.”

They were all silent for a moment, Charming continuing his grooming without a comment. Finally, Vector turned and looked at Addams. “Do you think they’re being controlled? Aimed?”

She started, and looked around at the windows, peering at each closely for several moments before switching to the next.

She looked back at Vector and shrugged. “Maybe. Entomology isn’t really my thing - I’m into chemistry, with org chem on the side.”

She shrugged helplessly and Vector paused for a few moments in thought before straightening.

“Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

He brought his communicator up to his mouth. “Maven? Can you hear me?”

“Something you entered
Transcended parameters.
I am listening.”

Vector paused and stared as his communicator for a second while his brain caught up. There was something familiar about the structure, maybe some poetry thing? With Maven, it was usually a poetry thing.

He brought the communicator back to his mouth. “7 out of 10 for style, 3 out of 10 for timing.” He paused, then shrugged. There really was no better way to phrase his request.

“Can you hack a beehive?”

There was a long silence that only grew deeper as Vector stood patiently. It wasn’t until Sergio took in a quick breath that he realized that the silence was getting thicker because the buzzing was dying away. Vector quickly glanced up at the windows, and saw - for the first time since he’d stepped foot in this stupid laboratory - the horizon.

He was about to call Maven again to congratulate the alien when his communicator hummed back to life.

“Ephemeral hive.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams.”

Vector blinked at the scene before him, ears ringing.

He was sat, half-propped against a slab of something - stone, maybe, or one of the innumerable forms of textured plas-tek used by cheap bars all over the galaxy. The lights were dim and off-colored, and there was a haze in the room that probably wasn’t just his eyes when it refused to go away no matter how much he blinked. There was some strangely warbly music playing from something he couldn’t see, and every now and again a spray of sparks would illuminate the scene.

“-ector!”

Vector opened his eyes - when had he closed them? - to Sergio’s worried face. He could tell it was Sergio’s worried face, and not his angry or happy face, because it was maybe three-quarters of an inch from Vector’s and Vector was pretty sure he hadn’t done anything to piss Sergio off that badly in years.

Probably.

His head hurt, and it was hard to remember. He could feel his eyes sliding shut again even as one enormous hand landed roughly on his shoulder.

“Vector!”

When he opened his eyes again, he immediately regretted it. There were more lights on now, the almost comforting haze was gone, and his head felt like someone had been using it like a drum kit. The only reason he didn’t immediately close his eyes in response to the spike in his headache was the fact that Sergio was looming over him with hands on both of his shoulders - and, given the size of them, most of his upper chest as well. It wasn’t an uncomfortable grip, just a firm one, but given the krasqued had never grabbed him bodily - not even when arresting him - made Vector shift to push against the hands.

“Wha-”

His mouth didn’t want to work, but it seemed to be enough to get the question across and Addams leaned into his field of vision, her face a sickly moon against the grey of Sergio’s skin.

“Vector, Vector, you’re gonna be all right just - don’t move. Please don’t move. I need - I just - hold him,” that last command was given to Sergio as she ducked down again, and the krasqued’s pressure on his shoulders increased.

“You heard Addams; remain still.”

Vector made a protesting noise - not a whine, no matter what anyone said - and looked down to argue with Addams. His protests about not being able to move died half-formed on his lips.

The long steel bar sticking out of his gut was an excellent reason not to move.

Of course, now that he’d acknowledged that it existed, he could feel it. White-hot agony lanced through his gut and pinned him to the slab, forcing a sound of pain from his throat. Sergio’s hands tightened spasmodically before forcibly relaxing to their previous tension.

“It’ll be all right,” the big alien murmured, patting his shoulder gently. “Addams will have you patched right up. It’ll be okay.”

However Vector might have responded was swept away in a sudden wave of blinding pain, and he felt more than saw himself seize as his vision whited out. Dimly, he could hear Addams yelling for Hotpot, but he couldn’t hear her very well over the sound of someone screaming. It wasn’t until new weight settled onto his legs and the pain in his gut lessened somewhat that he realized he was the one screaming.

The pinprick of pain in his elbow was almost lost to the sea of agony coming from his middle, but the slow slide into oblivion was not.

His last thought before the darkness overtook him was that he owed Addams a drink.

Addams grimaced as she ran a hand through her hair and felt the bits that crackled with dried blood.

The mission had been FUBAR from nearly the beginning. An emergency beacon had drawn the Golden Fleece to the edges of charted space, a small mining station on the moon of a gas giant having apparently suffered reactor damage serious enough to compromise station integrity. Vector had ordered an immediate diversion to the moon, and had commed her in medbay specifically to warn of likely casualties.

They’d arrived in-system within hours, and though there wasn’t a real way to tell how long the beacon had been going on for Addams had set up her best immediate-response kit anyway. Broad-spectrum tranquilizers and anti-shock solutions for the most prevalent species in the galaxy, emergency stimulants, liquid bandages, flushing fluids, antibiotics, some basic chemicals she could recombine into other medications as she needed them, and some good old-fashioned krazy glue - the formula was remarkably inert to all but a very select range of species, and in a pinch could also be used as glue. It had come in hand more times than she liked to think about, and she never went anywhere without it if she had the choice.

Her armored kit looked nothing so much like a backpack, and was extremely heavy when fully loaded - something only partially compensated for by the tiny microgravity emitters in the bottom. Still, she’d rather have and not need, then need and not have. Filling her pack had taken her mind off the maddening wait, too, and having something concrete to do had helped ground some of the adrenaline.

She grimaced as a pained bellow came from her left; she could do with some of that adrenaline now. In the ten hours since they’d landed on the station, things had gone from bad to worse. While the extremely professional group of soldiers who had ambushed them in the bowels of the station didn’t have any visible insignia, Colonel Riggs’ bootprints were all over them.

The emergency beacon had been a false flag; the station they’d touched down on had, by the look of it, been abandoned years if not actual decades ago. Of course, they hadn’t known until the rescue team - herself, Vector, Sergio, and Hotpot - had already been deep in the bowels of the place.

That’s when the shooting had started.

Addams snarled soundlessly when the bellow came again, more strained this time. She was no kind of shot, and she’d used up most of her caustics hours ago, but she wasn’t about to leave Hotpot high and dry either. Thinking fast, she grabbed a tube from her pack, tore a strip off her undershirt, and wrapped the tube in it before cracking the whole thing against the nearby console. She threw it in the general direction of the gunfire, and didn’t wait to see if it would work before she was up and running.

She didn’t really hear the improvised distraction hit; it was basically glorified calcium powder, but hopefully the cloud of an unknown white substance would be enough to keep them from shooting her full of holes while she moved. The confused yelling was a good sign, as was the fact that she wasn’t shot into small pieces as she made her way across the clear stretch of flooring between her and the console Hotpot was hiding behind.

Addams threw herself behind the console and collided with Hotpot. The large alien made a strangled noise in response, and grabbed her with two of his limbs to maneuver her into a position that was both protected from the squad that had them pinned, and didn’t let her rest any weight on the leg that sported an oozing gash.

Addams bit her lip at the viscous orange blood that seeped from the wound; Polymanus lacked the aggressive clotting factor that humanity possessed, and traded off by having blood that only dripped from larger wounds. It was hell on wheels when trying to inject them with medicinal drugs, but also played merry hell with recreational substances. Most substances that claimed to be “fast acting” on Polymanus as a species tended to have nanite delivery systems that would carry large molecule payloads regardless of how fast blood was actually flowing.

Unfortunately, she’d used all of hers up.

Fortunately, she still had krazy glue.

Reaching into her pack, Addams removed one of a number of small tubes. The glue would start to cure on exposure to oxygen, so the tube itself was hermetically sealed with a small tearaway cap. Human designers had taken a quiet hand in the making of the storage device, designing it so that it could be opened and applied one-handed. This brand anyway, which was why Addams always made sure to stock up on it when she found it available. The ones designed for other species tended not to be quite so helpful, or were manufactured without the idea that you could rip them open with your teeth if you had to.

She was also out of the topical analgesic that worked on Polymanus, and for that there were no substitutions.

She looked up to meet Hotpot’s eyes.

“This is going to suck,” she said.

A look of resigned acknowledgment rolled over his face.

“Just gotta hold ‘til Vector and Sergio make it back with the crew,” he said through the Polymanus equivalent of clenched teeth.

Addams nodded before sticking the tube cap between her teeth and getting to work. The blood dried in her hair wasn’t here, any of it; the ambush had taken them all by surprise, and their ambushers had brought guns big enough to deal with Krasqueds. Sergio had gone down fast and hard, and it had taken most of her liquid bandages to stop the rush of watery yellow fluid that had been oozing out of him. It hadn’t been blood - its primary function wasn’t to carry oxygen anyway - but Krasqueds had a minimum amount they needed in their body to survive, and Sergio had been nearing that threshold quickly.

Addams always tied her hair back before missions, and just as inevitably it escaped in little flyaway strands that would tickle her nose and ears. She’d brushed a number of them away impatiently before she’d remembered that there was more than disinfectant on her hands. Fortunately the air was dry enough that the stuff crackled instead of oozed, and the bits and pieces of hair she’d brushed back had stayed in place thanks to the gruesome hair gel.

Still, once she’d pumped him full of stimulants Sergio had been raring to go, and he and Vector had managed to break through the line of non-uniform-wearing definitely-military people. They were on an end run to the Fleece, and were supposed to bring the others as back-up to catch the ambushers in a pincer move. Once they’d cleared enough combatants, the Fleece would lift off and engage a random jump to lose any possible pursuers.

But that depended on Hotpot and Addams staying alive long enough to rescue.

Hotpot met her eyes for a long second with a look of perfect understanding, before letting her go and twisting his torso around and firing at the soldiers with two ion blasters. His preferred shotgun was cradled in his other two arms, up and away from where Addams needed to work, and he seemed to be waiting for a clear target before he unloaded with it.

Addams ducked down and pulled her last knife from her boot. She wasn’t a fighter, but the cranky old field medic who’d taken several hours out of his preferred drunken stupor to give her some pointers on how to keep herself and her charges alive while doing field medicine had been adamant that knives of any kind were a medic’s second-best friend. She’d found them useful enough over the years to be grateful for the advice, and tried to keep at least five on her person when possible.

The other four had gone into the bodies of several extremely persistent troopers who’d chased her into a dead end further down the facility; she’d had no time to retrieve them before being forced to move again, and replacing them was going to be a pain. Still, the boot knife was all she needed at the moment, and Hotpot’s pants split easily under the sharp blade.

Stowing it, she grabbed the skin and pinched it closed, holding it with her right hand as her left came up to tear the tube away from the cap she held in her teeth. The glue went on in a thick drizzle, mixing with the orange blood into a disgusting-looking orange sludge, and she smeared it across the tear carefully. She had to get the coat even along the length, or the tear would unseat the glue and the last five minutes would be a damned waste of time.

Finishing, she wiped the excess glue onto the remains of Hotpot’s pants and flinched when he suddenly brought his other two arms around and fired off a blast from his shotgun.

He fell heavily back into cover as a heavy spat of ion blasts hit the very-damaged console behind him.

“Wish he’d hurry up,” Addams half-shouted over the increased noise.

Hotpot laughed. “I think you’re the first female to say so,” he shouted playfully back to her, and she rolled her eyes.

“Still, he’ll be here in time for us,” he continued in a more serious voice. “He’s Vector Raynes.”

“He always does.”

There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The world was silent, save for the whipping of the wind in the flags. Around her, a thousand soldiers stood on stadium risers and watched the scene below. Beside her stood Vector, then Sergio, then Charming, then Sasrael, then Mobius, then Quick, Sneaks, and Maven in an odd sort of pile, and finally Johnny. The air was hot and smelled of dust and sweat.

The focus of the stadium was a yellow field of hard-packed dirt. There was a podium, two equally spaced tables in front of it, a double row of seats off to the side, and an ominous scaffold big enough for one standing behind the tables. The tables and double rows of chairs were filled with soldiers, and a large Bulledin stood at the podium. At one table sat Buddy, alone. At the other sat Colonel Mason Riggs, a triumphant expression on his face.

The Bulledin shuffled some papers, and then pulled one page out of the stack. They read it silently for a moment, before addressing the assembly in a booming voice.

“Corporal Charles Buddell, you stand here today accused of high treason. You were ordered to go to the Gavilon Peribus and execute Krebin Mnev; instead, you saved his life. You are charged with high treason; with disobeying a direct order; with sabotaging military operations; with misusing military equipment.”

The Bulledin paused for a moment. Nothing broke the silence.

“How do you plead?”

Buddy stood up from his table, and did not look towards where the crew was standing.

“I plead guilty on all charges.”

Addams’ heart leapt into her throat. No, no that wasn’t right! They had all decided, together, that Mnev needed to live! She wanted to scream and cry out about the unfairness of it all, but her words caught in her throat. Not a single sound could pass her lips, and none of the others said anything either. The wind was loud in the silence that stretched, until the Bulledin spoke again.

“Very well. The record will show that you, Charles Buddell, have pleaded guilty on all charges, and have offered no defense. The tribunal will render judgement.”

Colonel Riggs stood up from his table, mouth twisted in a smirk Addams itched to slap off his face.

“For the crimes of high treason, disobeying orders, sabotaging military operations, and misusing military equipment, there can be only once sentence.”

He turned and pointed to the scaffold behind him.

“Death.”

The word fell like a stone into the still air; even the flags had stopped snapping and now hung limply from their poles. The Bulledin made a mark on the paper in front of them, before addressing the stadium again.

“Charles Buddell, you are hereby sentenced to hang from the neck until dead. The sentence will be carried out immediately.”

Two MPs with black bands on their helmets appeared from nowhere, and grabbed Buddy by the shoulders. Addams strained every muscle she had, but was frozen in place. She tried to scream, but her voice couldn’t break the silence. She couldn’t even turn to the others, demand they go down and help Buddy, stop this kangaroo court nonsense.

Instead, she could only watch helpless as Buddy was frog-marched towards the scaffold. He held his head high, and didn’t look around. When they offered him a hood, he shook his head and didn’t flinch when they put the rope around his neck. One of the MPs with the black band reached over and grabbed a lever, and-

Addams finally found her voice as she jolted upright in bed.

“NO!” she screamed, the sound echoing off the bulkheads around her.

The person in the bed next to her flailed and fell on the ground with a thump even as Addams panted, trying to calm her racing heart. There was some shuffling, and she flinched when the bedside lamp turned on.

Johnny’s tired face was lit from below by the lamp for a moment, before he hopped back onto bed with a grunt and scooched over to her. There was nothing but kindness in his eyes as she wrapped herself around his bare chest and sobbed.

“Buddy?” he asked quietly, one arm a firm presence on her back and his other hand lightly beginning to card through her hair. She nodded against his chest, throat tight with the leftover dream, and he blew out a long breath.

“Yeah,” he said thickly “me too.”

“W-why he’d have to go?” She asked tremulously, her voice hitching. Johnny always gave the same answer, but she couldn’t not ask.

“Because,” Johnny cleared his throat as his voice caught. “Because he thought it was the right thing to do. Because if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be our Buddy.”

“We could have saved him, broken him ou-out, made him a real pirate.” Her tears had slowed down, but her breath still hitched and came in fits and starts.

Johnny didn’t answer, just started rubbing her back in small circles. It wasn’t long before she slid back into a - thankfully dreamless - sleep.

Vector crouched behind one of the elaborate stone outgrowths that decorated this part of the compound.

Unlike a number of other compounds belonging to rich assholes he’d infiltrated over the years, this one didn’t go in for a lush, decadent foliage of rare and imported plants. Instead, this one emulated what Vector might almost call a kind of desert zen. The ground was hard-packed caliche, and little oases of plants were surrounded by large, artificial “natural” rock formations.

For all the expense that went in to securing a desert vista on a world notable for its high rainfall, all Vector really cared about in this moment were the security drones making relentless sweeps of the area. Maven had managed to introduce a fault into the main set of security drones - the nice ones with the heat-sensor suite on them - so the security teams in the compound had released the back-up set. While not as gifted in the sensor suite department, they more than made up for it by virtue of there being a fuckton of them sweeping the grounds at all times. Their paths were outlined clearly by the spotlights they used, but no patch of ground was dark for more than five seconds.

Fortunately, Vector had planned for this.

Sneaks had been able to smuggle itself in on one of the supply shuttles; its presence inside was the only reason Maven had managed to even get into the maintenance routines for the security drones. The team going in with Vector had been chosen for speed over stealth; the maximum distance between two features was almost fifty meters, and Vector was the slowest on the team who managed it in practice. Somewhere to his left, Quick was hiding in his own patch of shadow; to his right, Charming was doing the same.

Vector eyed the distance between himself and his next chosen hiding place - twenty five meters, no sweat. His destination was the kitchen door almost a thousand meters away; Quick and Charming had their own paths to it, set up and practiced so none of them would accidentally boot each other out from under cover. Vector’s had the most zigzags and least distance from cover to cover, while Quick only had three stops between himself and the objective.

Vector counted down as a beam of light swept towards his hiding spot. Three seconds, two…The light passed over the rock that sheltered him, and he was up and away in an instant. Three seconds of adrenaline-fueled running later, and he slid into place behind his next stop. He had two seconds to breath, and then was away again. The next few went the same way, and he was more than halfway to his goal when the unthinkable happened.

He tripped.

Down he went in a cloud of caliche dust, and it was only the foresight of wearing a particulate mask that saved him from a heavy coughing fit. There was no time to waste being grateful, though; he was still ten meters short of his goal, and he could see the next drone coming towards him, spotlight a merciless white in the dark night air.

He didn’t bother trying to stand up all the way, lunging desperately forward into an ungainly four-limbed scramble. It was faster to run, but he didn’t have time to get to his feet, but if he was caught-!

Vector dove into a roll, coming up hard against the stone overhang that had been his goal. Light shone down on the rock, and he froze for a moment. Two moments. Time stretched, if he’d blown this…

No alarms sounded, and the light continued on. Vector heaved a breath and fought to get his stuttering pulse under control.

That had been close.

Too close.

“Frak!”

Johnny cursed and ducked behind the engineering console he’d been working at as another shot hit the heavy bulkheads over the engineering section. Sparks flew as one of the secondary power couplings tore free of its moorings and thrashed through the air like something actually alive. The emergency lights flickered, bloody red light almost oozing down the walls in an effect Johnny was pretty sure he’d seen in a cheap horror flick once.

Except for the fact that this wasn’t a cheap flick, this was a very expensive flick and his life if he didn’t get the stupid inertia dampeners online. The blood on the walls would become very real if they tried any more insane maneuvers and Newton’s First Law came around to bite them in the ass. He came up from beside the console and hit four more buttons in rapid succession; the feeling of the deck bucking beneath his feet eased, but didn’t vanish and he grimly called up status reports for the main engines. Reactor one was entirely offline, and reactor two wasn’t far behind; the main dynamic coupling had taken blowback and was on the verge of failing, and there were more systems listed in red than there were noted as having taken no damage.

He desperately wanted to wipe the sweat off his forehead, but he’d put his envirosuit on when the first shot had hit the shields; call him a pessimist, but in Johnny’s experience engineering usually ended up with one or two atmo-sucking holes in any given conflict and hard vaccuum wasn’t a fun experience. He’d talked Vector into splurging for heavier shielding on the section, but the Golden Fleece wasn’t some gigantic turtle of a ship to take every licking and keep on ticking.

Still, it did mean he didn’t have to use the (currently inoperable) shipboard intercom. He reached up and keyed the communicator on his helmet open.

“Vector! We take any more hits like that last one, and we aren’t going to have an engineering section anymore!”

Static answered him, and he felt a cold hand grip his heart. Still, he had to try again.

“ Vector, you space-sucking son of a bitch I know you can hear me! Just tell me what you need, whatever crazy fucking maneuver you’ve pulled out of your ass this time!”

Static.

“VECTOR!”

The answer, surprisingly, didn’t come from his communicator, but from one of the few systems on the ship that still worked. Then again, it was the sort of system that was specifically hardened to work in every emergency.

“All hands, abandon ship. I repeat, all hands, abandon ship. This means you, Johnny! I’m not peeling your sorry carcass off a bulkhead!”

The emergency intercom system flattened Vector’s voice to an almost comic point, but there was nothing fucking funny about the message it was sending. Johnny felt his hands convulsively close on the edges of the engineering console. The Golden Fleece was his home and lifeblood; he’d gone through every single system on the ship at least once when she’d first come under his care, and multiple times since then in repairs and refits, in maintenance and machinations. This ship was probably the closest thing to offspring he’d ever have, and Vector was just going to abandon her?

Not on his watch.

Johnny’s hands danced over the console, heedless of the spitting cable that still danced wildly just over his head. He had to get reactor one back online, stop the feedback from blowing whatever remained of the buffer coils, reroute power to shields and whatever weapons systems were still in a shape to take the enemy out of the sky. He just needed to make some adjustments, work the impellers to jumpstart it, and-

“Johnny!”

This time, the shout came through the short-range communicator in his suit, and Johnny looked up in surprise.

Vector stood in the doorway of the engineering section, his face obscured by the mirrored faceplate of his envirosuit and that apparently the starboard gravitic impellers had caught fire at some point when Johnny wasn’t looking - probably when he’d overloaded them in an attempt to bump reactor one back online. The flames were pretty impressive, and Johnny jabbed at the non-responsive engineering fire supression systems in the vain hope that the manual prodding would bring them back online to do their void-slagging jobs.

They failed to do so, and Johnny cursed as he abandoned the fire suppression system in favor of the rapidly-failing reactor two. Someone had apparently just put a hole in the coolant housing, and the temperatures were beginning to redline.

“Johnny!”

This time, Vector’s voice was accompanied by a hand grabbing the epaulet-handhold of Johnny’s suit.

“Johnny, we have to get out of here!”

“I’m not leaving!” Johnny roared back, grabbing desperately for controls that were flickering and fading even as he tried to work with them. “She’s my ship, I can still bring her ‘round!”

“I’m not leaving you! There’s too many of them, and the Fleece isn’t going anywhere anymore!”

A strong yank on his suit only made Johnny grip the failing console harder. Sparks shot out from beneath the surface, and the display itself began to flicker and fuzz in and out.

“No!”

“Johnny! I have a plan, but I need you! We need you! Quick, Sneaks, Addams - all of us! I’m not letting anyone else go!”

Johnny’s breath froze for a long moment as a handsome, black-eyed face flashed before his eyes. Buddy was…Buddy had been…

He cursed and let go of the podium even as it eploded in a shower of breakaway shrapnel that pattered against the front of his suit. Vector tugged on him again, and together they began to run through the fluctuating gravity field towards the last of the lifepods. Behind them, the fires in the engine room roared into an inferno and the Golden Fleece writhed in its death throes.

Neither man looked back.