The Lone Ranger Returns Read online

  He was shaking his head when he looked at me. “You really don’t know who you are, do you, Nickie?”

  The door had opened as the two of us stood there having a damned argument. I pointed toward the docks. “Get the fuck in there.”

  He chuckled and started into the space docks. “Any idea which of these berths is theirs?”

  “Yes. The one with the new set of Skaines coming out of the doors leading into the space station.” I nodded to a ship two berths down.

  Sure enough, this time, we had four Skaines in battle armor coming at us. We kept walking and talking, and I slapped Grim as if to get his attention. “Take a look! Someone is going out partying!” I lifted my voice. “Guys, that’s not the type of protection you need for prostitutes!”

  The four Skaine marines double-timed past us, but one lifted their hand in a galactically understood version of fuck you.

  I middle-finger-waved back.

  “Do you usually push everyone’s buttons like this?” Grim asked me.

  “Only when I plan on doing the impossible.”

  “Which is?”

  “Every Gott Verdammt day.” I smiled at the marine before he turned back around, and they went through the lock.

  “What now?”

  I looked at him, my eyes probably turning a bit red. “I’m still pissed about my shoes.”

  I walked toward the exit door, pulling out my security key. “Ding-dong, the Bitch is here.”

  “The what?” Grim asked.

  I just chuckled. Inside my head, I heard a voice.

  ENHANCEMENTS UNLOCKED.

  The first shot took out the dock guy’s arm. I slugged him with the butt of my pistol and walked into the entryway. “Let’s get in there, Grim,” I told him, and shoved my security card into the slot. I looked over the instructions, and my eyes went back and forth before hitting two buttons, then spreading my fingers and hitting two more simultaneously.

  “The problem with Skaines,” I told him as the door shut behind us, “is they don’t believe anyone is superior, no matter how many times my grandfather and aunt have taught them differently.”

  “What about those marines?” he asked, jerking a thumb behind him.

  “Locked out,” I told him.

  A female voice spoke in my head. Welcome to the fold, Meredith Nicole Grimes.

  “This wasn’t exactly what I wanted to be doing today,” I said out loud.

  “Me either, but for what it’s worth, I’m happy to have met you,” Grim said as my fingers danced over the screen.

  “Sorry, Grim, wasn’t speaking to you,” I told him and tapped my head. “I’ve got a partner.”

  “They talking to you over a communication device?” he asked me. “And are they coming to help?”

  “Not that kind of partner,” I told him. “This one doesn’t have a body.” That kept him quiet for a moment as I looked at the controls. “Okay.” I pulled my Jean Dukes out of their holsters and turned the power down so they wouldn’t puncture the outer skin. “Let’s take this ship.”

  * * *

  They have figured out you are on the ship.

  Got that, Meredith. Any chance you can get into the system and help?

  Little girl, I’m already in the system. But you are not taking charge. It’s time to own your destiny.

  I’ve been fighting my destiny for six fucking years, Meredith.

  I know. It’s been quiet.

  Yeah, sorry about that. I was told by my inner EI I have a bit of a hard head.

  You’re a Grimes. It’s genetic.

  I snickered. Yeah, Grandpa is a hard-headed motherfucker, that’s for sure.

  Such language, young lady!

  I’m fucking twenty-four!

  Still a baby.

  Hey! I have it on good authority your ass was created for me.

  I am a copy of a copy of a… Well, I’m old myself.

  Yeah, but you were only brought online when I was born, so don’t give me this age shit.

  I’ve been lonely, just watching.

  Way to pull a guilt trip in the middle of a battle to take a ship.

  There would have to be a battle for that to be true. We are just walking down a hallway to the end, where they are setting up an ambush.

  I stopped. “What the fuck do you mean, an ambush?” I squeaked.

  “I didn’t say ambush,” Grim said from behind me.

  I looked over my shoulder. “Sorry, talking to Meredith.”

  “That’s got to be weird,” he allowed. “One of the fabled versions of ADAM?”

  “How do you know that?” I asked him.

  “I know the Empire; I come from Yoll. My history is now your history.”

  “I didn’t pay attention in history classes,” I admitted. Now, Meredith, what about that ambush?

  My HUD displayed a top-down view of the ship’s schematics and a bright yellow-lit area with two red dots indicating Grim and me. Then she brought in a video feed from the ship to show me how the Skaines were arranged.

  “Four tangos up ahead,” I hissed to Grim.

  “Four whats?” he asked. “I thought we were fighting Skaines.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Four enemy agents,” I told him. “What the hell is your occupation?”

  “I’m a cook,” he offered.

  I almost broke situational awareness. “You are a cook?”

  “Yeah, but I’ve got mad skills.”

  “You’re a cook who has mad skills,” I repeated, rolling my eyes. “Great, I’m going to get a cook killed.”

  “Nah,” he told me. “I’m just here to make sure no one gets in a cheap shot. You got this.”

  I had to admit, it felt good to hear him say that. I think my ego grew three sizes at that very moment. “All right, I own this.” I breathed out.

  Grim nodded.

  I saw the tip of the gun, so I swung around and caught Grim’s arm, pulling him toward me. Then I pushed with my legs and both of us slammed into a door, knocking it open as we fell backward. The hall beyond lit up from laser fire.

  “OOF!” My lungs exploded when Grim’s full weight hit me. I was pretty sure I had a cracked rib. I pushed him off and stood up, ramping up my maximum speed and timing the laser fire.

  Meredith?

  You have only to ask.

  Why are you making me ask? I bitched. We used to work this so much better.

  That was when you cared.

  I watched the fire pass me; it looked like it was in slow motion with my increased speed. I bolted forward, racing across the hallway and jumping. Landing on my left leg, I pushed up again and rocketed toward the ceiling. The hallways inside a Skaine ship aren’t that wide, and they have exposed pipes along the ceilings. I jammed one foot against one wall and the other against a pipe and started firing, blowing guns apart, or hands if I got a chance.

  The laser fire dwindled.

  These were the best they had left? Unfortunately for the captain, he had probably sent his actual best off the ship already. That last group of four might have been wearing the ship’s whole armor inventory, and if that was true, I had been lucky.

  One left, Meredith informed me.

  I released my legs and dropped toward the floor. As I ran down the hall, I asked, Left or right?

  Right.

  Good to know.

  When I had about ten feet to go, I threw myself into a slide through the middle of the corridor and shot up at the last Skaine as I approached, blowing his brains into the ceiling behind him.

  His body fell as I finished my slide.

  As I stood up, I winced. “Fucking slide-burn.” I peeled my pants down and grimaced. “That’s going to leave a mark.”

  No, it won’t, my onboard-all-the-damned-time-but-hadn’t-spoken-to-me-in-ages-EI replied.

  It’s a saying. When someone does something rather stupid, they say, “That’s going to leave a mark.”

  Okay, then that is going to leave a mark.

  Now you are criticizi
ng my work?

  You just said that yourself.

  I looked at the bodies. One was only halfway to dead but was speeding there as blood kept draining out of his arm.

  I walked across the hall and slammed my fist into a first aid cabinet’s glass door. It took me a second to find what I wanted. While I was futzing around in the first aid cabinet, Grim arrived. “Make sure we don’t get surprised,” I told him.

  I yanked open the packages of gauze and filled a syringe with painkiller with anti-infection support.

  Once I had finished with the almost-dead one, I checked the others. “Sorry,” I closed the eyes of one of the Skaines, “but you guys started this.”

  “Girl,” Grim said.

  I stood up and looked at him. “Huh?”

  “She’s a girl.” He nodded to the one whose eyes I’d closed.

  “Yeah, I know. It’s just a saying. Means ‘you people.’” He shrugged as I looked around. “Okay, ready for the boss battle?” I asked him.

  “I haven’t done much so far,” he replied, “so, sure.”

  I grinned. “You are a crazy sonofabitch, you know that? You are keeping up with me, and you aren’t crying and blubbering.”

  He smiled and told me, “You are one strange human female.” He looked around, seeing if he could find any threats. “I thought we would have to fight more of them.”

  “Well,” I started and nodded down the hallway, “we killed five in the bar and eight in the corridor coming here.”

  “That felt like we were cheating,” he said.

  “’You ain’t trying if you ain’t cheating,’ was what I was always told.” I applied some painkiller to a cut on my cheek. “I’ve checked with Meredith. She shut down the station video so no one in this ship had any way to know what was going on, and she’s locked non-essential personnel into their berths or their workrooms.”

  “You are going to have to tell me more about Meredith sometime.” Both of us heard metal boots clomp clomping down a hallway somewhere ahead of us. His eyes grew a bit bigger. “But not right now.”

  He tried a door on the right. “Locked.” He turned to his left, stepped across the passage, and tried a second door. “Locked.” He pulled up his pistol and shot three times at the lock, then tried the door again. “Still locked.” He lifted his pistol and shot twice more.

  I grinned.

  He twisted the knob, looked at me, and smiled. “See? One dead door, no need to pull me into a room.” He pushed open the door, then stopped once inside, his voice coming from behind the door. “Oh, and one freshly dead Skaine, body still twitching.” His voice trailed off.

  “Be safe in there, Grim,” I yelled and headed toward my adversary.

  “If you want to do it right,” came a mutter from the general vicinity of the clomp clomping, “you have to do it yourself.”

  Moments later, a Skaine wearing an advanced SKPP-09 combat suit came around the corner.

  He stopped. I gawked.

  “What the hell is an SKPP-09 doing in a fucking Skaine slave ship?” Sometimes my mouth gets ahead of my need to keep my ass safe. Seriously, it’s not like I haven’t had my ass handed to me multiple times for speaking before moving.

  Fortunately, he was just as surprised to see me as I was to see him. We both hesitated.

  All my abilities came online. This time Meredith wasn’t fucking around.

  You move now, or I jolt your ass with ten-thousand volts!

  I moved.

  Half a tic later, the SKPP-09 let loose at me with a nasty set of laser bolts. I had been running down the corridor toward my adversary, but he’d moved his arm faster than I could run. I ducked and slid on my ass as the laser bolts burnt nice holes into the wall above my head. I twisted, kicking off the wall to switch sides as his cybernetically-enhanced reactions tracked the laser pistol to where I had been a second ago.

  Move it! Meredith could be calm and yell at the same time. I had no idea how someone could calmly yell, but she had the trick down. I levered myself up to jump toward the top of the opposing wall and angled off, dialing my pistol up to eleven.

  Level ten is a bitch. Level eleven is when you are up Shit Creek and no antigrav support is going to get you out of it. I snap-fired toward the laser, hoping to annoy the shit out of him, and if I was real lucky, take it out.

  I was lucky…sort of.

  The kickback from the Jean Dukes is a bitch. The pistols used a form of antigravity rail-gun technology—another class I didn’t work too hard to pass. I already knew the basics from Grandma Jean herself, so why study?

  I should have studied harder so I remembered that rail-gun technology works best when your acrobatic ass isn’t up in the air. The recoil caused me to turn violently toward my right, throwing off my planned landing. Instead of my left arm stopping my momentum, the back of my head did it for me.

  Searing, horrible pain exploded as my skull contacted the immovable wall. Then the rest of me slammed into the vertical surface and slid unceremoniously toward the floor.

  I had enough focus left to look at my adversary and notice he wasn’t doing too well himself.

  SKPP-09 armor was badass, no doubt about that, but that armor design was ten years old at a minimum, and not much could handle a Jean Dukes dialed up to eleven.

  If I’d had the right rounds in my pistol, I could have shot right through his armor, but those rounds were saved for those doing good deeds and fighting the good fight.

  I had been running from the good fights, so I didn’t get the good stuff.

  I rolled across the floor, hoping my advanced healing would give me a boost, but all it accomplished was to dial my split-open head wound down to merely the pain level of a migraine.

  Lucky me!

  I could hear his servos working against the joint in his leg I must have screwed up.

  I didn’t trust myself to cross the twenty-five meters between us before he could blow my kidneys all over the wall, so I forced myself up and started running toward the nearest intersection of hallways.

  I looked behind me in time to see him aim a weapon in my general direction.

  I jumped into the air, arms outstretched, and saw a laser bolt pass underneath me. While going headfirst toward the floor from my dive, I rather hoped he couldn’t keep unleashing those damned bolts of destruction.

  I executed a rather beautifully done tuck-and-roll, then stumbled back up and followed that impressive move with a dodge-the-hell-around-the-corner maneuver.

  I landed in the blood of my enemies.

  Blood I had caused, but still… “Gross!” I spat on my hand, then wiped my palm on the clothes of the nearest Skaine.

  “I shall take you out, you annoying human!” my opponent yelled at me. I busied myself by finishing my cleanup.

  Because, priorities.

  I stuck my head around the corner. He was walking toward me. He couldn’t run, so that was something. My body was healing—another benefit of my enhancements, and one I appreciated at the moment. It was right up there with Meredith’s ability to shut down a lot of my pain receptors. I backed up seven steps and then raced forward, hitting the floor in a slide to go through the intersection of the passageways at the lowest angle I could toward Sir Lots-of-Metal. As I flew through the intersection, I pelted the servomotors on his shoulders, both pistols firing as fast as they could.

  An attachment rose over his shoulder…

  “Ohhhh!” My eyes grew large as I saw the ATK-0N3 Organic Fire-and-Forget Rocket lock into place and his helmet pivot to watch me. “Fuck meeeee!” I yelled and twisted around so I was sliding backward. I kicked over my head and somersaulted upright, then turned to run for my fucking life.

  I heard two noises at the same time.

  One was the eruption of the chemical ignitor on his rocket, and the other, right after, was a massive electrical explosion.

  The second was a curiosity, but the first was a problem. My problem.

  Meredith put up the overlay of the passage
in my HUD as she tracked the rocket coming around the corner. I was running as fast as my mostly healed body would go. There was no fucking way I would heal if one of those missiles nailed me.

  “Gimme some good ideas really fucking fast, Meredith!” I yelled, grasping at straws.

  “Door opening, two down on the right,” she replied into my ear receptors. Sometimes hearing is better than mental communication, and now was one of those times. My body was amped up, running on Etheric energy and desperation.

  The door was only halfway open when I stiff-armed it, reached in to grab a surprised Skaine in a white shipsuit, and yanked him out of the room as I simultaneously threw myself inside.

  It worked, mostly.

  The Skaine was hit by the rocket, but I was only four or five feet away, and the door was only partially closed. The blast not only splattered my outfit, but the concussive wave shoved me violently into the room. I slammed into a set of cabinets about ten feet inside, which knocked me a bit loopy. That was before something stabbed my leg, and I screamed as much in surprise and shock as pain.

  I had been impaled by a damned kitchen knife. I looked up to see a complete variety of knives and what looked like hatchets above me, all shaking from the collision.

  “FUUUUUCCCCK!” I reached down and yanked out the knife, then started rolling away from those sharp bastards above me. Three more dropped, but I was clear.

  Shutting down pain receptors in your right leg. Administering Energy Pack 03.

  “Wait,” I mumbled. “What happened to 01 and 02?” Hopefully I was tracking what she was saying correctly.

  One was used to get you back together on your last mission before your emotional bender, and Two was used to flush your system of the drugs and amp you up to start this argument with the Skaines.

  “For the record,” I groused as I dragged my body over to my first pistol, “I didn’t start the argument. They did.”

  Noted.

  My mind was speeding through options as I realized two things: I had pulled the chef into the hallway to his speedy death, and I was probably going to die in a Skaine mess hall.

  This was no way for a Grimes to die.

  I grabbed my second pistol and made sure both were turned to eleven. The fuckers would hurt like a sonofabitch again, but better my hands than my leg, or ass, or anything getting shot by another one of those rockets. Which reminded me, I smelled of Skaine guts. “Gross!”