The boy who takes it is a little kid. Maybe nine. Maybe ten.
But in Akeelian years, he’s more like a four- or five-year-old in maturity.
He looks at me with wide eyes as we run.
I say, “Just hold it for me, OK?” And he swallows hard and nods his head.
I want to get him out of here. I want to save him. Hell, I want to save them all. But half of them are already dead and almost all the others are wounded and falling fast.
What a complete fuck-up of a rescue.
I look over my shoulder and watch as the asshole kid stops when one of his friends falls. He screams something incoherent at the approaching borgs, firing his plasma rifle with precision. Then he grabs his friend and starts dragging him along the hallway.
“Leave him!” I scream.
He doesn’t hear me. Or maybe he ignores me. Because he stops in the hallway and stands over the body of his clearly dead friend, shrieking as he fires a stream of plasma in a sweeping arc.
We round a corner and he disappears from sight, but the barrage of destruction that comes after tells me all I need to know about the fate of asshole boy.
We stop at a door. My boy opens it, then we all rush through into the inner docking bay.
Dicker is landing.
And then things go from almost good, to very bad, to worst-case scenario in the span of two seconds.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE – JIMMY
Dicker is landing, but she’s three docking bays to my left, which is not close enough to us to make this easy. Borgs come up from behind us and then, on the other side of the airlock windows, I see more borgs streaming in from every docking bay entrance there is. Rushing towards Dicker and taking position between her and us like they’re a fucking wall.
And that’s when I realize… I made a big fucking mistake back in that control room.
I didn’t stick around to lock the docking bay back up. And now it’s in total vacuum and none of us have suits.
We can’t even go out there.
I look at Delphi and feel heartsick. She’s holding the hand of a very small, very young Akeelian boy who’s holding a rifle to his chest, and he reminds me so much of Serpint and Draden when they were young, I have to turn my head away.
But then the little kid is rushing forward towards the fight, shooting a too-big plasma rifle as he screams, “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”
Delphi’s boy reaches out as he passes him, grabs him by the scruff of his shirt, and the little one is yanked off his feet, rifle skittering away across the polished metal floor.
But he’s still screaming. He’s kicking Delphi’s boy, and scratching at his face. “I hate them!” he yells. “I fucking hate them!”
This is what that bitch did to these kids. This one right here is all you need to see to understand the damage she’s been doing.
I want to go back in there and kill her myself. I want to pick her up by her silver fucking hair and squeeze her neck until her eyes pop out.
But there’s no chance of that happening now.
We’re done.
We made it all this way. Dicker is literally just two hundred meters to my left, and we’re done.
We’re all going to die here today.
Just as I turn to Delphi to tell her I’m sorry, there’s another barrage of plasma fire at the end of the hallway we just ran through.
But it’s weird. Because the plasma fire is taking out borgs.
And then, like the sun-fucked, golden light of luck he is, my brother Luck appears with Cha-Cha and the asshole boy. And every single borg between us and them goes down in a matter of seconds.
“Cease fire! Cease fire!” I yell at our few remaining boys. They are so stunned to see the splendor of a fully enraged, shirtless Akeelian male and a souped-up sexbot come to their rescue, they actually listen.
Another barrage of fire comes from behind us, and this time when Delphi and I turn around we see Xyla and her friend Ladybug. Full fucking exoskeleton suits on, coming out of Dicker and charging at that wall of cyborgs in the docking bay like this is the goddamned sexbot apocalypse.
I look back at Luck and smile. You sneaky little motherfucker. I could hug him right now.
“So,” Luck says, hugging his rifle to his bare chest and letting out a sigh. There’s still a shit ton of fire happening out there in the docking bay and his side has a black scorch mark across it like he took a hit, but Luck acts like this is no big deal. He’s all good and he’s sent the girls in to clean up the riff-raff. “You uh… need a hand here, Jims?”