Chapter 156: Chapter 150

Three days later, I was happily watching Molls sunbathe in her bikini, on the coast just south of San Antonio, Baja Mexico. The situation in Los Angeles had stabilized after my successful distraction thanks to church TV. Dearth hadn’t signed onto our plan to ransom them back their equipment, ports, and secure roads, but they hadn’t attacked us over the theft either.

The most I got was some stern speech from their representative on CTV, while not present, of course. That delf never talked his biggest game when I was in the same room as he was. At least he had better survival instincts than the last group of delves I’d had to deal with.

My troops were able to clear up or chase out the remaining Dearth presence in Baja and establish several forward bases, which were expanding rapidly under Tollya’s creative eye. Axle had the elevator and spaceport under control with a business-as-usual mandate, and morties were still flowing into the affiliate rapidly and steadily. The aquifer had dropped significantly, but hadn’t run out just yet. Our water shipment was also en route from the inner Kuiper belt, and was due to arrive well before our supply ran out.

Axle had also been hard at work getting a Dearth desalination plant up and running. We could use the already established roads to ship fresh water to Prescott. It wouldn’t be enough for our needs at Prescott, even running at full capacity, but it was a damn sight better than paying for water for an entire city.

The reaper hound, or creature I was convinced was the reaper hound, hadn’t made another appearance. We had specialist squads roaming the city, and our rapid response teams had all been equipped with cameras in their helmets.

The thing to worry about down in Baja was Cartel remnants that acted as a sort of roaming bandit force. Dearth had apparently been at war with the cartels, which were no longer in any shape to face my BlueCleave hobbs.

The Dearth Conglomerate South Western Board had spent a lot of resources fighting them for control of the peninsula, and both sides had spent the majority of their forces on each other. Made it easy for me to step in and clean up afterwards.

An unseasonable warm snap hit the Baja coast and we decided to head down with a small detachment for a long promised vacation. Molls had subtle, and not so subtle ways of reminding me that I had promised her three uninterrupted days of ‘us-time’ as she called it, and I wanted any excuse to get her out of Prescott while the creature I had decided to call a reaper hound was still at large.

Three days of alone time with Molls was a promise I was eager to make good on, now that the affiliate was back to running smoothly, and I’d gotten my head screwed on straight again by Morbin.

Life was good, if you could afford it. And I could afford it.

I was rehydrating while Molls sunned herself on the rocky beach, which was quickly becoming our routine between bouts of physical affection. She loved looking over the water and told me her world didn’t have oceans like mine. Just large, hot swamps.

We had a nice tent set up on the beach, away from the water, and filled it with soft pillows and blankets. Molls had even sprung for a tiny sand-hunting drone to ensure a clean interior. It was quite luxurious, and the blue juice Molls kept buying for me was delicious.

She had also paid for my boxer shorts, from a company in orbit that was buying up earth textiles and making fashionable items for the entire BuyMort system. We sold them spider webs, and they turned it into high-end luxury underwear to sell to rich morons who’d never been to Nu-Earth. They say it makes them feel dangerous, and even use the now-famous aggression of Nu-Earth humans in their ads. Whatever.

I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about work. The affiliate, and all its various machinations, could survive without me for a few days while I tended to my budding relationship with an alien snake-woman. So of course I was thinking about work.

The video footage on my device replayed the reaper hound attack on my hobb. I watched him getting torn up again and wondered at the strange effect the camera caught. The light shimmered around its shoulders and head, appearing to flex slightly.

I heard Molls slithering up to the tent in the sand and quickly killed the video, before trying to stuff my device under a nearby pillow.

Before I could put the device away fully, Molls entered the tent and caught me.

“Tyson!” she exclaimed, scales flushed red. “You promised!”

“I’m sorry babe, I really am. I just . . . I can’t get it out of my head,” I said. “I’m not working, I swear.”

“No, you’re just obsessing about work,” the busty reptilian woman sighed. She slumped down on the comfortable blanket beside me, drawing in her tail as she crossed her arms. “Big difference in how your attention is split. You promised time for us.”

“You were sunning yourself!” I raised my hands. “Look, Molls, I just can’t stop thinking about the reaper hound. This thing is super dangerous.”

I sighed and ran my hand over my face, before continuing, “or the sinkhole. We’re running out of water, the aquifer is almost dry. Plus this new Kraken Corp, the whole planet feels like work right now, except for you.”

My Nah’Gh girlfriend narrowed her eyes and met my gaze. Her scales softened in color, the red seeping out of them and being replaced with a light green. Impatience, or more likely frustration, given how much red stayed. I’d gotten better at translating her scale colors over the past month.

“Perhaps we should take my mother’s invitation after all,” she said, after a moment of silent contemplation.

“You should,” I said at once. “It’s not safe on Nu-Earth right now, and I want you safe.”

“But you’re not leaving,” she said. Her tail began to rattle softly from underneath her coils, so I reached out and grasped her hand.

“You know I can’t, Molls.” I met her eyes and squeezed lightly on her hand.

She sighed and her tail stopped rattling. Purple color seeped up her arm from our physical contact, chasing away the remaining green and red. “I know,” she finally whispered. “I fell in love with a leader, and you have to lead.”

The beautiful, scantily clad Nah’gh woman smiled at me gently and slid a few of her coils across the tent to rest on my torso and legs. I welcomed the pressure and heat.

“But I still have you for two more days, you promised,” she said, moving her tail just right and making me squirm.

I grinned up at her, grabbed her hips, and pulled her closer. She smiled softly and pressed down on top of me, bringing our faces close together again. “Did you drink your juice?” she asked in my ear, softly.

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Holding up the half-full bottle, I shook it back and forth. “Nope,” I said, smile firmly in place on my lips.

Molls shrugged and turned back to close the tent flap, before unhooking the catch on her bikini top. “Ah well, you had your chance,” she said, her smile growing wider.

Before her gyrations could undress me, something tore through the tent, wrapped around her arms and chest, and yanked her back out onto the sand.

“Molls!” I shouted, jumping to my feet. The atomic breakers appeared on my hands, deploying from their extra-dimensional hangars embedded in my body, and I charged outside.

Something splashed from the water off the coast, and a small, dark shape headed my direction. I summoned the helmet an instant before the incoming projectile deployed sword-arm wings and slammed into me.

The bladed missile hit me so hard it drove my body down into the sand. The blade caught on part of my suit, and the rest of me just went along for the ride. My suit deployed tendrils and got to work, immediately sawing through the weapon, and repairing me as I hauled my way back up out of the sand.

Molls was limp, in the clutches of a large metal arm on a cable that was dragging itself back to the gaping mouth of a craft at the edge of the water. Its rear engines were already engaged and hauling it backwards as it swallowed Molls and the edges closed behind the tip of her long tail. Frogmen in black diving suits followed, long-barreled rifles facing back behind me.

On the ridge at our backs, a line of my hobbs lay in the sand, unmoving. Our escort had been taken out as they tried to respond to my initial shout.

The silver, cigar-shaped craft reversed faster as I ran toward it, just in time to get another sword-missile to the chest. There were no explosives in the weapon, just a massive, heavy hit that put me down hard enough, and long enough, for them to escape.

I climbed my way back up from the sand, choking and gasping as my guts were torn out and replaced for the second time in as many minutes, and watched the last of the diving suited enemies vanish into the water.

My first thought was to panic, but the same cold twist in my chest that wouldn’t let me cry anymore shut that down quickly. I ran forward, splashed into the water, and dove beneath the waves.

Several small submarines were fleeing away from the coast, out toward the open pacific. My helmet targeted each of them with a faintly glowing outline, something it called ‘fairy fire.’ It also filtered oxygen and nitrogen from the water so I could breathe.

It just called that water-breathing, but I know it meant a magic spell, and it annoyed me anyway.

My strokes slowed as I realized my chase was hopeless. There was no way I could catch them. Instead, I went into ad space and pulled up my item reward coupon from Teslak. The words it input in my BuyMort search bar to find the affiliate again confirmed my suspicions.

“Primary Starfish, second upgrade, destroy BuyMort.”

The ad space took my mind and cast it through the BuyMort system. I landed in Specter’s storefront, hidden in the accretion disk of a black hole. Time ran differently in ad-space, but I’d never gotten a clear picture of exactly how differently, so I ran up to the counter and engaged the hologram.

“Welcome to the Teslak-” he started.

“Yeah, tell me what I got!” I shouted.

The hologram flickered. “Very well. The Starfish extreme environment suit has three main upgrades available, and I see you already have the first tier for advanced charging. Would you like to chose-”

“Mobility!” I shouted, cutting him off again.

“Very well, the starfish gravity harness will ensure freedom of movement in any environment, and charges exactly the same as the base suit,” Specter said. He turned and waved a hand as the upgrade materialized. A large, squat starfish shaped chunk of metal appeared and spun slowly behind him.

Each arm was heavily plated, but the center was a smooth chunk of metal with a gleaming black surface in the center of it. The underside of the starfish was covered in small arms that would hook onto my already present suit.

“Yeah, I want that, ring it up!” A moment of guilt flashed through me for yelling at the hologram, but then I remembered he was likely dead ages ago. I was being impatient with a clever recording.

Specter flashed to his other side, a beaten and bloody version of himself wearing charred and torn attire. “This one is easy. Just focus hard enough on something, will yourself to it, and the gravity drive will do the rest,” he said. “Works exactly the same in gas, liquid, and vacuum. Just don’t try it through anything solid. The drive can fall through anything, by force. You, presumably, cannot.”

The projection flicked back to spotless Specter, who smiled and rang me up. My coupon drained of morties, and I bailed on the ad space.

“BuyMort!” I shouted, treading water. “I need that delivery RIGHT NOW!”

A pod flashed in at my side and dropped a cardboard box into the water. I ripped into it with my bare hands, grabbing the new piece to my suit as it started to sink. Without bothering to really look at it, I swung the starfish over my head onto my back, where it instantly grasped the suit.

I ducked back under the waves and stared into the inky darkness ahead. My helmet painted a trail of fairy fire, where the subs had gone. I growled and focused on the trails, hard.

Something changed, and I plummeted forward, following the trail of fairy fire in my helmet down into the inky depths of the pacific.

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