Voidhop - Chapter 6 - Firefight (Patreon)

Branx didn’t bother turning around. He could remember where everyone was. Even if his memory had been faulty, some of the crew were so ripe on the nose they’d need more than a bath to stop stinking.

That was one of the downsides of being a dulophant. They, and he by inclusion, had big noses. Not prissy, thin, delicate noses, or attractive noses like the avians or humans. Dulophant noses were too flat for that. Smart people had initially assumed that the Dulophant species evolved from a species that liked to butt their heads together.

That had never been the case. They had just never found where the other species considered the ‘attractiveness tree’ that others were described as falling out of.

Branx didn’t like to smell his crew. He especially didn’t like the way they crowded around him. Standing wide enough apart that there were gaps but also close enough to have their scents overlap.

That didn’t bother him too much. With blasters, the first few seconds of a fight were crucial.

He was objectively in the worst position he could be with his enemies at his back with their weapons already drawn. They likely already had him sighted.

He should be dead to rights.

“We had a good run, Branx, but you—” Branx didn’t wait for Shirel’s speech to get to the point. He let his hand fall to where he had his blaster in his jacket.

He didn’t grab it. Instead, he merely wrapped his hand around the trigger.

He made sure to shoot first.

All that claptrap about superior position? Boxing in your opponent that he’d had drilled into him? Having better or more weapons? That only mattered if you were alive to use it. Shooting first determined more in the void than anything else.

A shriek informed him that he’d hit someone. He didn’t spin about to mount some ‘heroic last stand’. Heroes ended up dead way more often than stories let on. He had a shield, but that didn’t stop idiocy. Plus it wasn’t that good a shield.

Instead, he did one of the things dulophants were best known for. He leapt to the side and rolled for all his squat little body was worth.

He tumbled away to the sound of blaster fire near where he had been. Thankfully, the engine was situated at a T intersection and his fast roll had carried him just out of sight. He flopped out of the roll, landing on his gut as he drew his weapon.

One of the crew members came around the corner, gun raised up to their shoulder in a standard firing position.

Branx shot him in the gut from the ground with his very much nonstandard position. Then he rolled down another gangway, this time like a pop bottle. Unlike the perfectly manufactured pop bottles, Branx was no cylinder. Instead of rolling smoothly, his gut swung around and made a dull thumping noise with each rotation.

Branx rolled four times before giving it up as a bad idea. He vowed to consider going on a diet if he survived this. It was shameful having a gut get in the way of his roll. Before he could make another diet promise he never intended to keep, blaster fire streaked overhead.

Glancing around showed that he was near a door leading out of the engine room that was beginning to pulse with light as more systems lit up. Small computers around the room pinged online.

[Diag #%T@ Sys@#(@]

Branx felt a small twinge in his head but didn’t stop to check if he’d been hit. Instead, he got out of there.

“All members of the crew! Branx is trying to sabotage us! He’s stolen something from us and just killed two of the crew! If you see him, shoot on sight!”

Branx frowned as Shirel’s words fed into his ears. Shirel apparently didn’t have complete control of the boarding party. If this was true for them, the same was likely true for the people back on the junker. People that he couldn’t call through to unless he got off the ship.

Branx kept moving. If he was fast enough, he could make it to the airlock and get out before he was cut off.

“Bridge team! Sweep down and secure the airlock!” Shirel commanded.

Branx shut his eyes for half a heartbeat. “Gorram it Shirel.” He keyed his mic, “Really Shirel? Mutiny? You know, I’m actually not surprised!”

“But you didn’t do anything about it did you, Branx?”

“I was really hoping I didn’t have to.” He shouldered up to a wall and peered around the corner. “You’re being idiotic.”

“From my perspective, you’re the one being an idiot. But that’s not surprising to me either. You always were an idiot that thought himself too big even when you were a street calf.”

“Cut me deep with them words Shirel.” He glanced at his wrist-mounted datapad. On it he saw a ping coming in, which made him roll his eyes. He changed directions and began to type furiously on his wrist.

When he next keyed his mic to call across everyone in the ship’s transceiver. “Hey I’m pretty sure most of you are in on this, but anyone wanting to join the winning side, I’ll set you up with personal bunks and double pay.” He paused for a second, “for life.”

One of the avians warbled something back that the transceiver translated as ‘Go lay eggs in a storm’. Others just laughed at him. Branx sighed. “Alright then punks, I guess we’re doing this the hard way.”

He stopped typing on his datapad before smiling. Then he drew his second blaster as he ran towards the hanger bay that Shirel had described to him, his plan already forming.

The trick in a firefight was to cheat better than your opponent, and Branx was a born cheater of fate.

                               ________________________________

Shirel walked sideways down the hall in a crouch. She was wise to Branx’s preferred position of going low to the ground and shooting up. Most people were trained to walk and sweep the room. Sadly, this meant Branx had half an instant on them as they normally had to drop their aim while he only had to twitch upwards.

She’d seen him do it multiple times. It looked ridiculous, but it damn well worked for the fat waste of a being.

She paused before signalling forward with her hand.

On the transceiver, Branx continued to ask if anyone wanted to ‘join the winning team’ every little while. Then he would fall back to offering absurd deals. Still, Shirel kept half an eye on the beings around her. It didn’t pay to get sloppy in this business, as one of her men had already learned. Learned in the sense that the lesson had punched through his guts, leaving him with half a second of ‘Oh, I shouldn’t have done it that way’.

“Spa days in the Secilia system! They have the nicest girls there! With the pay we’ll bring in from this score, we’ll be rich! And you guys want to fight for it?” Branx said over open comm lines.

Something about what Branx was saying twinged in her mind. She pushed it to the side, it was the usual drivel he liked to spout. He even had a damned video of his ‘best moment’s where he had won a score, or made what he must have thought to be an inspiring speech. The man was a damned fool, with a head too swollen to be her co-captain. He risked too much without enough return.

She’d always known how he’d been but as the only people to space out of One-oh-oh-six-oh mid-north gang, she had… well she’d hoped he’d die far earlier, honestly.

Yes, the debt would have passed to her as a co-signatory but corporations bargained for such things. They always hedged their bets. Branx didn’t know it but most co-signatories for ships typically lasted a cycle before one of them died. It was practically expected. The corporation had worked out early on that she was the safer option and set her up as the crew’s point of contact. Shirel got most of her jobs this way. She didn’t have to slum around or visit old haunts to learn of far-off maybe’s that most of the time never turned into anything.

She glanced down the bronze hallway. But then he did come through. She smirked, a final vruth plant unearthed as his likely dying gift. She just had to make sure to stick him in the ground first off.

“—and then it will be adventures! Adventures you will never have even dreamed of!”

One of the crew side-eyed her. Shirel turned one of her eyes towards the boy. “Keep your eyes forward!”

“Sorry, it's just… Branx is a bit of a windbag.”

“Yeah, he loves the sound of his own voice,” said another, older crew member.

From in front of Shirel, a broader, if naive man glanced back. “He’s always this bad?”

Shirel watched as a few of the crew looked at the walking flesh shield and shrugged or scoffed. They’d learnt not to stand in front of Shirel after the first security run after she determined that they were worth a damn. This rookie would serve her needs for this fight. He was obviously unaware of how his positioning set him up to be used but she hadn’t hired smart crewmen.

Smart crew tended to think they were worth more.

Lives were cheap in the void; in firefights, some of their worth was only in who they were blocking.

“Got him up in the room above,” her new partner said from further back. His eyes locked on the datapad that they were using to close in on Branx. “Idiot’s been running around the hanger bay. Think he’s trying to open the bay doors to get back to the crew.”

Shirel clicked her beak. She didn’t like that at all. While she had complete control of the boarding crew she might not have the loyalty of all the ship’s crew. She would need to get her story out first. Thankfully, this old ship was a transceiver dead spot. No messages in or out.

“Think he might be able to set up a barricade in the hanger?”

Shirel recalled her memory of the hanger. It had been an open space with plenty of room for a small squad of fighter ships or cargo. At the moment, only one ship was actually in the hangar, but it was loaded into a strange apparatus. If it had been loose, she might have worried. Branx would have been able to turn things around with access to a fighter, but even his luck couldn’t be that good.

…

“Move faster! I want his ratten cooked!” Shirel screamed, unwilling to give Branx any more time.

She’d lost in dice enough times to know you didn’t give him too much time when gambling. Somehow the longer he had, the better his odds got. It was some weird fact for that bozo.

The group closed in on the door. Shirel once again positioned herself behind another crewman. Then she looked to the Bosun. “What’s his position?”

The Bosun licked his lips, eyeing the pad. “He’s on our right. Should be behind those empty crates. They’d make a good barricade.”

Shirel grunted. “Alright.” She pointed to the meatshield and the man that had stood next to him. “You, and you. Sprint across the hangar to those machine parts we saw rolling cover fire. When you’re in position, you then fire on the barricade so the rest of us can move in.”

The two men shared dubious looks, but when Shirel adjusted her pistol, they stiffened and turned to the doors, checking over their own weapons.

“Go!” With the order given, both men opened the door and sprinted. Both guns fired together, and Shirel put her secondary tentacle on her head, pinching at her eyes.

“Idiots are firing together; they're both going to overheat at the same time…” she said, fully expecting the cries of pain as their guns burned their hands. She listened carefully, waiting for the inevitable blaster fire to drop them, but it never came.

Ten seconds later, the crews' pistols had cycled through the heat and began firing again. Still not timed properly, though. Shirel gestured to the next two.

“You’re next, then we’ll advance on the barricade when you’re halfway into the room! Go!” This time she didn’t give the men the chance to grasp that they’d be in the worst spot possible. They dutifully ran into the room with pistols blazing causing the sounds to pick up in intensity.

Shirel was about to point at two more people only for a bolt to shoot into Gedo, her lover’s back. She saw a flash of static over his form before he locked up his eyes rolling up into his skull as he flopped to the ground. She whirled around, pistol raised to find Branx not in the hangar but actually in the hallway behind them. His pistol was raised, and she could see it arcing towards her. A steely glint in his eye promised the next shot was hers.

Shirel grabbed the nearest body and shoved it in front of her. The man grunted in pain before slumping. Shirel tossed herself back into the hangar as Branx unleashed his pistols after her. The last pair that had run into the hangar turned towards the door in shock at the turn of events.

“He got behind us!” screamed Shirel as she threw herself away from the door. Her voice was lost over the sounds of the other pair of crewmen blasting away at the barricade they thought Branx had been behind.

It took precious moments for her to scream for their attention; by that time, the blaster fire from outside had died off. Then Shirel saw Branx peek in with a grin as he shut the door. The door itself turned transparent a moment later.

“Got you Shirel,” said Branx teasingly.

Shirel glowered. “There’s still more of us than you Branx!” she said scathingly. Her eyes searched for the other exit. There had to be one if Branx of all people had gotten behind her.

“Yeah, well not for long,” he said as he glowered at the wall.

His fat fingers danced on a section of the wall and Shirel scoffed. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Keep getting this feeling… sorta like.. Ah!” he said as part of the wall lit up and he grinned viciously. Shirel felt her heart plummet only for her logical, cold-blooded mind to perk up.

“You’re bluffing; there’s no way you know how to open the hangar doors and drop the void shield!” she screamed into the comms.

Branx grinned that idiotic grin. “Nope! I have no idea what I’m doing, but I only have to push buttons! Buttons and lights do things, you know?” he said as he tapped away at the panel obnoxiously.

Shirel felt her heart drop when, on one side of the hangar, a split appeared as the doors swung open. It was almost worse that they did it completely silently.

“Branx! You shit! Don’t you dare void me!” she said shrilly. “Think of all the cargo you’ll lose! This machinery is worth thousands! No! Millions of credits!”

Branx shrugged. “Ain’t worth having you on this ship a moment longer.” He moved to tap a green emblem only to pause and shift towards a red one.

Shirel had a moment to turn to her fellow crew. “Get your encap on!”

She slapped the side of her neck and the emergency feature activated causing the system to shoot up and around her head guaranteeing she’d survive. She just wouldn’t be up for fighting any time soon.

The doors opened barely a metre and a second later, Shirel saw a glow vanish outside in the void. Then she blacked out as she was sucked through the gap. She came to and found herself floating in the void. Around her various pieces of the rest of the crew floated. She grimaced. They’d likely hit the door while being sucked into the void. Shirel checked herself over and exhaled when she came away uninjured if extremely sore.

The comms sparked to life.

“Captain Shirel? We just got you back on comms?”

She blinked blearily. It took a moment to recall that, being outside the ship, she now had access to her own ship. She licked her lips as she felt her mind revolt at being awake while in this much pain.

“Branx has betrayed us! Don’t let him escape with our prize,” she said spitefully before she passed out.  Branx might have won that first hand but she’d be damned if she didn’t beat him with the next hand by cheating harder!