Kara King & The Beyonders: The Nightwind Glyder Heist

Chapter Nine:

Fixer

Time to Supernova: 7h 42m

Zee Berstol

Everything was dark save for a dim green light. There were voices but they were mostly muffled. Suddenly there was movement. The green luminescence changed to a blinking yellow light indicating it was unsafe to push the button. The darkness moved from one entity to another. The tone of the voices changed. He could feel the darkness move a long distance with various sounds muffled around him. The beat and hum of music. People singing. Then the quite of a hallway. He could barely make out the sound of a door wooshing open and a nearby voice say, “Just put it over there.”

Zee felt his box get tossed onto a table or some flat surface. Go time, he thought, but just as the box seemed to have landed flat on side he felt the whole darkness flip over itself. Now Telothian’s didn’t have the same sense of up and down as other humanoid species but you could tell when things moved and right now he could tell the box was upside down. When the box was tossed. The light when from a blinking yellow, briefly to a soft green, and now it rested simply on a bright red. Dang.

Two Hours Pass

Muffled voices seemed to move around him for too long. Zee had already gone stir crazy. He thought up at least twelve ways to blow up the entire ship, that was if he could just get out of this upside-down box. A woosh sounded nearby. The sound of a commotion. Not a scuffle but a commotion. Zee thought this was his ticket out of here, and he was right. He felt the box lift and flip over. Zee moved to push the button but a sequence on the outside of the box beat him to it. The lid of the small arcane chest-like device opens with two panels folding inside itself.

A nasty looking human man looked down at Zee. He had wrinkles the size of canyons and a red cybernetic eye. He wore a sneer that seemed to fit him so comfortably it must have been the first thing he did every day. The man would have been looking down into a bod filled with a yellow-green goo with four blue lights looking back up at him. The man was clearly the shoot first aim later type. He punched his fist into the box without even considering if it was some kind of acid, perhaps he had already met a Telothian before.

The punch pushed any air inside Zee out of the box. It felt about as good as it does for a human to get knocked square in the stomach. Nevertheless, Zee held on. When the man pulled his hand out of the box the sluggish ooze came along with it.

The man swung his hand around trying to fling Zee off but he couldn’t shake the Telothian. His next tactic was to slam his fist down on the table several times which, to his credit, did hurt Zee. He just gave up on the tactic too quickly as other guards in the round room began to gather. The man held up his hand so that the goo was as far from his face as possible, giving Zee a great view of the room.

The area they had been in must have been on some end of the Nightwind Glyder. It was a half-circle room with a communications array, reception desk, and worktable in the middle of the room. Around the curvature of the room were four detention cells, though only one was occupied. It had been filled with a variety of gifts. Zee noted that it had been secured with a shield and set of bars. What would have been the flat side of the semicircle room was a large set of sliding duranium doors. Those could be an issue, he thought.

“Drop your weapons!”

The nasty man he had been attached to lowered his hand. There were seven other guards in the room. One guard had lowered his laze pistol long enough to assist in removing the mysterious goo from his superior officer’s arm. Zee was feeling very full now with two fists filling his form. Both men pulled away from each other and Zee let go of the first causing them both to stumble back. Zee had hoped for a more comical smack into the second guard but instead the pair of them just stumbled in the center of the room as the superior officer stepped to the side.

Zee’s new host looked down at the goo attached to his hand and asked his superior, “Now what?”

The response was a smoking laze gun. Zee and the now dead guard spiraled to the ground as the superior officer came in closer to fire several rounds at Zee in front of the reception desk.

“Damn that was cold.” The other guards stood shaken at the edges of the room, echoing silently Zee words.

“I’d ask what business a Telothian has sneaking onboard The Nightwind Glyder but I imagine it cant be any good. Would you prefer the airlock or the trash compactor when I’m done with you?”

Just then the large duranium doors slid open with a woosh. The scene was a rennaisance picture of the cyborg chief of security looming over one dead body, a cowering Telothian, and three terrified guards in the background. The viewer of this picturesque scene was Morae holding a woman over one shoulder and a massive black box in the other hand.

“Oh, I’m glad I didn’t miss this.” Gamlok jumped to action. Gamlok threw the woman from over his shoulder toward the chief of security who instinctively went to catch her. Leaving the chief no space to think, Gamlok ran toward the chief with a wide open arm, clotheslining him across the nose and sending Throck Morton down to the ground with him.

The chief’s gun clattered to the ground. Zee didn’t hesitate for a moment. The slug-like creature quickly hovered over the weapon and began his ascent up the reception desk. As he turned around to face the room of guards, Gamlok was already on his second one using him as a human shield. That left leaving just four. The laze gun inside Zee had just appeared to be floating aimlessly in an amorphous autonomous mold of Jello. Now it faced outward with its barrel sticking just outside the Telothian.

Zee started blasting wildly. Firearms were not particular his forte, but he had fun with them. “HAHA! Yeah! I hope they put your coffins upside down!” He landed a single non-lethal shot out of the volley.

Gamlok let out an exacerbated sigh when he realized his meat shield couldn’t take anymore hits. On top of seeing the mess Zee had gotten himself into, it was time to get out of the position he was in. Gamlok threw the slag covered, burned, guard at the three firing at him. One dodged, the other went to the ground but would be up in a moment’s notice.

Gamlok ran and dove over the reception desk, picking up zee along the way. Neither Zee Berstol nor the guards expected what Gamlok would do next. He popped up over the threshold with both hands inside the blob of goo firmly wrapped around the laze gun with perfect posture.

“I don’t like the feeling of this Gamlok. I- I think maybe we can come up with a better-”

The Morae fired the gun through his ally’s discrepancies. Two shots landed clear on the guard fastest to pull up his gun. Gamlok fired two rounds at the other well-off guards to suppress any action and sidestepped a shot he saw coming from the guard Zee had wounded earlier. Gamlok looked down at the slug. “You gotta finish the job bud.”

“No. No please,” Zee begged as Gamlok pulled the gun out of zee with one hand and held onto the Telothian with another.

“Yeah. Its gonna happen,” Gamlok threw the blob across the room smacking the wounded guard across the face like a wet weighted blanket.

Zee, Telothians rather, could apply pressure and articulate some parts of their form, not a lot. This is one of those moments where Zee wished he could snap the guy’s neck or do anything really to make it quick. Instead, he wrapped his entire form around the guards head, cutting off any oxygen.

“Oh god. Gamlok, make it quick. This is disgusting.” Zee gagged. “Don’t laugh! How would you like someone breathing right into your mouth? Its kind of like that.”

Gamlok took a couple of grazing shots but otherwise made short work of the other guards with well-placed laze gun blasts in the chest. The last piece was the unconscious chief of security Gamlok had to leave him. It was good business. Gita and Max wanted them to leave some survivors if they could. If not for their Commander’s wishes, then at the very least for the free publicity. Nothing was more inaccurate and flattering as the survivor’s tales. Still, Gamlok wasn’t going to leave the guy in there with his credentials or weapons and he wasn’t going to leave him without having a little fun.

When Zee was positive the man was dead, he slithered to the reception desk and pushed out any of his filthy final breaths. “Sorry. I know it sounds gross but I’m not going the rest of the mission with tuna salad breath he had lingering inside me.”

“No worries. I’ll tidy up here if you want to get ready.” Gamlok took the black box off a magnetic plate attached to his belt’s backside.

Zee pushed a sequence of hidden buttons on top of his more ornate silver box and it began to unfold. The boxes were discrete suits for him when it was all said and done. The silver mark III was slim and just about as bare bones as he could get. Zee then took the black box and clipped it to a magnetic component on Zee’s chestpiece. When he input another sequence of buttons, the box recognized his suit and began to decompress into an added layer of armor and additional functional pieces. Zee was now a set of blue eyes within a mysterious yellow fog hidden behind a thin piece of tempered glass affixed to a bulky silver and gold power suit just shorter than Gamlok.

When Zee turned back to focus on Gamlok again, the Morae had stacked the dead bodies in one corner of a cell and the one unconscious chief in the other corner of the same cell. Zee looked into the third cell, “Throck Morton on this one too?”

“Yeah, but she shouldn’t be that much of a problem anymore.” Gamlok said as he pushed a button which lifted the bars of each cell into place and shielded them.

Zee was rummaging through reception desk drawers till he found what he wanted. “Oh, did you get that guy’s security pass?”

Gamlok dangled it from one hand. “That’s not all.” Then he opened his palm to reveal the cybernetic eye.

“Ha! That’s devious. I love it.” Zee snatched the pass up in his metallic hands and inserted it into the appropriate slot near the reception computer. Five quick inserts later and they had security passes of their own. They weren’t anything that could get them into the Emperor’s lift up to his room, but it was good enough for their needs.

“Soooo are we good to go now?”

Zee ignored his friend and kept typing. “Damnit. No.” Zee pulled up a small holographic schematic of the ship near the reception desk display. “Okay, so we need to go to a larger security node. There’s one on the way but bound to be packed with guards.”

This didn’t phase Gamlok at all. In fact, it excited him. He turned around to the cell filled with gift to the emperor. “I’m gonna look for some weapons sent by Artificed Intelligence or some armor from Soorseweave. Lets see if these companies have anything good worth looting.”

Morae’s laugh was what Zee imagined he sounded like on Christmas when he opened up a variety of armaments.

Just then a call came in on his tech, “Fixer, Siege. Are you coming or what?”

Zee chimed in but just as he did so a blast fired off in the other room. He looked over at Gamlok who was looked down the barrel of a gun that had fired off a scorching chunk of plasma now burning the ceiling behind him. He’d gotten lucky and put the gun down in search of another weapon to take with them. Zee responded, “Yeah uhh sorry about that, just a slight weapons malfunction but we’re all good here.” Kara didn’t respond. “So how are-”

“We’re waiting on you! Get here.”

“Will do, were on our way. Just have to make one stop along the way at another security node. Twenty minutes tops.”

“Make it ten.”

Zee looked over at Gamlok who was kitted up. “Nine minutes tops.” He chimed out.

Gamlok looked over at Zee and handed him a pistol. “Speed run?”

Zee nodded.

“Try not to shoot me.”