LotS/The Story/Puny Human Birthdays II/MazelTov
"This is Captain Atter of the Centurian vessel Hammerstrike. You will surrender immediately and submit to boarding."
"Screw you, captain."
Atter's entire countenance seemed to twitch. The young woman on the screen in front of his chair laughed. It was a girlish, musical sound. The Chinese dragons tattooed on either side of her face, one red and the other green, joined in. Their mouths moved in harmony with hers as their long, sinuous bodies swam and danced on her pale skin.
"Surrender or we'll destroy your vessel!"
"Oh, yeah? Go ahead."
Atter glared.
"I'm waiting!" she said. The tattooed dragons turned to one another, then turned towards Atter and giggled. "We both know you won't blow us up. Not when we've got your nerds onboard."
"You admit to kidnapping our scientists!"
"Damn straight. But hey, the Black Hole Buccaneers are reasonable people. Just offer us more than anyone else does, and we'll sell them right back to you."
"Your actions are illegal under-"
"Duh! We're space pirates!" Her dragons rolled their eyes along with her. The effect was almost disorientating. "Illegal's kind of what we do!"
Captain Atter slashed his hand through the holo-screen as though it were a blade slicing through the pirate's neck. The image vanished, the connection severed even if her head wasn't. He made another gesture and a new one replaced it. This time it showed the grim grey face of a heavily armored helmet.
"Storm Sergeant Veck," Atter said, "is your squad in position?"
"Yes, captain."
"The pirates' leader refuses to surrender. Commence the rescue operation."
Stealth and subtlety were important. Veck understood this. He was no fool. Without those essential tools of war, his squad's craft wouldn't have made it into position undetected -- relying on the Hammerstrike to mask the far smaller ship's presence.
But they weren't a storm squad's natural element. So when the tremor announced impact, a thrill ran through his powerful body. The subtlety was over. It was time to do what they'd been trained for.
The exit hatch flew open and Storm Sergeant Veck strode out into the enemy vessel, purple-blue energy crackling around the multi-bladed claw at the end of his left arm. His squadmates followed. Behind them the boarding craft's body and projected field plugged the gap in the pirate ship's hull, securing their foothold and providing an avenue of retreat. None of them expected to require it.
A four-man storm unit against perhaps two dozen space pirates. Acceptable odds for the Collective.
A man sporting a foot-high green mohawk appeared in the doorway ahead of them. He didn't even manage to raise his rifle before Veck's pistol blew the top of his head off -- removing half his brain and all of his hairstyle.
"Storm!" the four of them chorused when they reached the corridor.
Then they separated. Krall remained in the corridor, protecting their exit point. Tuller and Plask headed towards the rear of the ship. Veck made for the flight cabin.
A brawny Snuuth appeared in front of the sergeant, blocking the doorway to the room beyond. The alien brandished a big, bulky minigun -- a weapon that promised to flood the corridor with streams of gunfire. Veck shot him through the heart before he could pull its trigger.
He stepped over the Snuuth's body, into the ship's recreation room. Two pirates were crouching behind one of the pool tables. They rose at the same moment, rifles in their hands. The sergeant fired twice and dropped them both. Then he span round, in time to see a third pirate leap off another table and fly through the air towards him -- a laser-edged axe in her hands, raised high above her head.
Veck's claw slashed a savage arc, each blade leaving a glowing trail in its wake. The axe fell from the pirate's hands. Her shredded intestines hit the floor an instant before the rest of her.
"We've found the scientists," Plask said over his helmet's communicator. "Facing heavy resistance."
"Do you need assistance?" he asked.
"No, sergeant."
He heard her weapon roar.
"The hostages will be secured shortly," she said.
"Understood."
Storm Sergeant Veck entered the stretch of corridor between the recreation room and the flight cabin. Two pirates, a human man and a Piscarian woman, opened fire with their blasters, trying to keep him from his goal. A swipe from his claw opened the former's ribcage. His pistol split the other's head.
The door suffered no better when it tried to bar his path. His blades penetrated it in a series of parallel diagonal lines, burning and tearing their way through its entire thickness. Then he drove his heavy armored frame at the damaged portal. Slabs of mutilated metal gave way with a long, drawn-out screech.
There was only one person in the flight cabin -- a young woman with a stylish mop of short pink hair, and a Chinese dragon tattooed on each cheek. She stood between Veck and the pilot's chair she'd just vacated, her arms raised to display empty palms.
"I surrender," she said.
The dragon tattoos stretched themselves vertically on either side of her face as though standing upright, nodded, and raised their forelegs -- mimicking the placatory gesture.
"Order your men to stand down," he replied.
"Green or purple?"
"What?"
The sergeant tried to level his pistol at her, recognizing the question for what it was in the next instant. A distraction, something to engage his mind for a second and lower his defenses. But by then it was too late. Her eyes glowed like twin purple stars, and psionic fingers stroked his thoughts.
"There are three more of you on my ship." Her voice echoed in the middle of his head, as though his brain had evaporated and left the inside of his skull hollow. "Kill them."
Images flowed around him. His claw buried in his Plask's chest, the crackling blades piercing her armor and her heart. His pistol's blast smashing through the eye of Krall's helmet. Tuller dead on the floor, a mass of bloody metal and flesh.
Veck tried to focus, to push back against her and shove her out of his mind. He'd been trained for this, trained to-
Purple eyes blazed in his consciousness. Two oriental dragons -- one green, one red -- danced around them, their sinuous bodies twirling and coiling.
"Struggle if you want," the purple eyes said. The dragons echoed each word, forming a chorus. "In here we have all the time in the universe."
The dragons giggled. Then they dived.
Her fingers clawed deeper, reached further. Veck knew what that meant. They were groping for the roots, trying to dislodge his mind at its core.
"Ah..." Her musical laughter and the dragons' guffaws encircled him. "Today's your birthday."
The storm sergeant tensed. Birthdays... anniversaries... Occasions that linked to strings of memories, provided pathways which ran through a person's life -- streams for psionic intruders to navigate.
"Veck... No, you weren't always Veck..." The purple eyes flashed. The dragons licked their lips and salivated as they tasted the suppressed remembrances. "Liveckstein."
The dragons swam on. The eyes probed deeper. Veck was drawn along in their currents. Or they in his. All of them splashed and tumbled through his memory, until something solidified around them.
Another birthday. He sensed that even before he comprehended the confusing scene.
A woman is sitting in a chair, next to her baby's crib. There's a book in her hands. Not a datapad -- a true book, an old thing with a solid, leather-bound cover and pages yellowed by age. The text on those pages is strange, its characters both alien and hauntingly familiar. An ancient language that tells ancient stories.
The woman speaks, reading from the book. She knows her infant son is too young to understand, but these stories are important. And in time they'll have to be hidden from him, when intelligence and comprehension grow but are accompanied by a careless childish tongue. So now she reads and speaks and tells, wondering how long it will be before she can do the same to an understanding ear, secure in the knowledge that he'll keep their secret.
Those stories, which had once slipped uncomprehended into Veck's infantile brain, now burst into existence on all sides. A great flood drowning the wicked... A nation wandering in the desert... Kings living and warring and coveting and sinning and dying...
Purple eyes widened. Draconic mouths gasped -- overwhelmed either by the unexpected torrent or in psychic sympathy with the man whose mind they touched and thoughts they shared.
Then something else flowed, a dark river which swept all that aside and crashed around them.
A man and a woman are being dragged from their home by callous hands, yanked away to face punishment for traditions and practices that are now crimes. For the books of strange script and ancient tales. The woman shrieks and cries, but not for herself. Her red, wet eyes are fastened on a boy who stands some distance away. He's sobbing as well, though the man standing next to him in a steel-grey uniform tells him that no harm will come to him -- that his parents have done a very bad thing, and must be taken away.
The psionic fingers trembled. The purple orbs were weeping too, just like the boy's and his mother's.
Veck blinked. Reality returned.
The pink-haired woman's eyes weren't purple now. But they were still crying. Tears streaked her cheeks, glistening over the dragons' scaly bodies. Those mythical monsters were weeping as well, afflicted by the long-forgotten sorrow they'd shared and experienced as a fresh wound.
"I'm sorry..." she said. "I'm so sorry..."
Then it was her turn to blink, to see a big armored man standing where a weeping child had been. Their gazes met.
Her eyes flashed. Psionic fingers groped to reestablish the severed connection.
Storm Sergeant Veck raised his pistol and fired. Crimson erupted from her chest, burst from her ruptured heart. Red, wet eyes stared into his as she crumpled.
He looked at her body for a long moment. Then a voice came over his communicator.
"The hostages are safe. Do you have the flight cabin, sergeant?"
A second drifted by.
"Sergeant?" Plask repeated.
"Yes. The flight cabin has been secured. I'll contact Captain Atter."
Veck looked away from the corpse and opened a channel to the Hammerstrike, so he could report the victory.