Page 47 of Shellshock

The fueling station was gone.

Her lift home was decimated.

If she’d been looking for an unambiguous sign of where she belonged, she’d found it. Perched on a high-rise within easy jumping range of the demolished human ships was none other than the gleaming red exterior of Wingless.

* * *

CALIGHER

One ship down. One remaining.

Caligher pushed through bodies to the fault in the window, slipping out into that glorious nothingness and sighting his next target.

They’d made upgrades—this round of humans. They’d hoped they could outfly him this time. They were wrong. Human ships were crude, ugly, noisy constructs with ancient, deafening machines.

Weightlessness hugged him in a featherlight embrace as he hopped across the gap. The remaining ship failed to spot him until he was plastered to its side.

He scaled the grey surface, looking for his way in. Airlock wasn’t in the normal place. He burst through a window instead, killing a small troop of humans. At one point he might have felt bad for their deaths, but their feeble struggles filled him with vindication. Their deaths made him blank.

Door after door, he made efficient work of hollowing the ship out. They set bulkheads in his path. He laughed and shocked them open. It was a simple matter of feeling out the wires behind the walls, getting a taste for their data structures and their dancing encryptions—and unraveling the knot of electricity into one—straight—line.

Another door open.

Wide, fearful faces twisted with pain as their breaths were torn away.

Another door, another tactile puzzle.

A jolt of spark.

Then open.

Shipwrecking elated him. Their pain matched his pain, and this was one of the rare points where Caligher truly felt well-adjusted. Wheneveryonewas hurting.

Would Lucca be impressed with his behavior? Doubtful.

But knowing how barbaric he was being didn’t change shit. He pressed harder into that oblivion until he could no longer feel himself.

Another door—this time he vented the main bridge. Sharply dressed captains and soldiers scattered into the hall, winning Caligher control of the ship.

He floated in the center of the room and felt that chilling inner calm, thinking of Lucca.

When he ripped ships apart, he usually imagined Baade being dragged through the halls, and it never ceased until the noise stopped. But in the final few moments of his latest takedown, that scene played differently. At some angles, Baade became Lucca, dragged away forever.

Eradicating the humans who could take her away brought him stony inner purpose. Every human gone brought him closer to Lucca, in some twisted way.

He scanned his surroundings for things of interest. Clues as to what they wanted. The ships would be brought in and dismantled, but he’d earned first pickings.

Humans had figured out haphazard gravity drives, giving them flexibility in ship design. It didn’t play nice with their computers. Their steering was worse than ever.

Was this their big plan? Send in these little ships and knock out a fuel tower here and there? Lose all those soldiers in the process?

His eyes unraveled the clues until one glowing word stood out more crisply from the rest, flickering from a terminal screen. He approached it.

>Distress signal fromLuccaWatts. Captain and remaining crew unaccounted for. Presumed dead.

For a long, long time he stared at the words, feeling absolutely nothing.

He exited the ship’s remains, spying Wingless above the tallest building. He left it there, ready to go, so Morwong wouldn’t get any ideas about impounding it. Soon it would have another occupant, another prisoner. His quiet elation grew at the thought.

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