How I Helped My Smokin' Hot Alien Girlfriend Conquer the Empire

2-12: Cartoon Coyote Impressions


I flew through the air, flipping ass over tea kettle. I had a view of the explosion from Varis's fighter craft. She was going to be really pissed off about losing her baby. I flipped and saw those two support beams that had been resting up against each other since the last time an atomic war came through here.

Only apparently the explosion was enough to cause them to go flying. They went spinning like massive multi-ton lawnmower blades. Though thankfully they weren't flinging those multi-ton lawnmower blades in my direction.

Screams echoed all around me. Screams that were cut off as the fireball presumably reached them. At least I assumed that's why they cried out and were suddenly silenced.

Then I was flipping around again, and suddenly I was facing a giant pile of debris. It looked painful, it looked sharp and pointy. I knew it wasn't going to be any fun when I hit that shit.

Son of a…

I suppose the only good thing about the situation was I'd been thrown out ahead of the fireball that rose from the fighter. I wondered where Varis was. I could feel her through the link, but otherwise I had no idea which direction she was because I was flipping like a character in a poorly coded video game, ragdolling in the most inappropriately hilarious way possible.

I slammed against a much smaller beam sticking out of a debris pile, and then I fell towards a bunch of sharp shit.

The shield around me activated, but it was sort of like the situation when I walked up and hit that prince consort empressfucker right in the nose. The shields were there to protect me, and they activated as soon as they felt something pressing against me, but there was a moment where they had to adjust for the forces that were pushing against me.

Which meant they pressed in whenever something hit me, and it hurt like a motherfucker each time.

It was the kind of damage that would've killed a normal person. It was the kind of damage that almost had me wishing I wasn't linked in a battle pair with a crazy livisk alien general and noble all wrapped up into one. Because then I could just die like a sensible sapient, and not have to worry about the horrible pain that was going to be greeting me when the adrenaline finally wore off.

Instead I continued falling through the debris. Doing my best impression of a cartoon character falling through a tree and hitting every branch on the way down. I didn't dare squeeze my eyes shut though. No, I needed to see everything, try to remember where I'd landed in relation to the landing pad, even if it hurt like a motherfucker.

A large wall of metal loomed in front of me. I slammed into it and went tumbling around again.

I suppose if I wanted to keep the comparison to a cartoon character going, then it was a little funny to spin around and have a momentary glimpse of a Bill Stewart shaped hole in the wall I'd just flown through. Also? As long as I was trying to look at the silver lining to my situation, slamming into that wall had arrested my momentum by quite a bit.

But I was still flying through the air. I could hear secondary explosions as bits of the munitions in the fighter started to cook off after the initial explosion. I wondered what those assholes had hit the fighter with in the first place to cause it to blow up like that.

That wasn't the kind of behavior you usually saw in a fighter of any sort. At least not modern fighters that ran on antigrav.

Sure, a crash like that would've been a death sentence back in the days of fixed-wing aircraft that used chemical propellants to fling themselves through the air using nothing more than Bernoulli's principle and a pair of giant brass balls. But that wasn't how things were supposed to work today with your modern starfighter.

Even the livisk with all their obsession with honor and dying an honorable death in combat and all that bullshit had been pragmatic enough to put in limiters that shut down the fusion reactor if it looked like things were about to go pear-shaped. Otherwise, every time a ship went up like that there was the very real risk of a mini nuke going off. Which could be a danger to way more than the pilot.

This didn't feel like a mini nuke, though. There was something odd about the explosion. Not that I had much time to think about it as my body slammed up against the side of an ancient livisk skyscraper that looked like it had more than a little bit of art deco styling to it.

Funny. I guess that was a phase every civilization went through when they got to the point of building skyscrapers but they still mostly made everything out of stone.

I slid down the thing. The number of times I was doing my best impression of a certain cartoon coyote going about his daily business of trying to catch a meal was starting to get really unpleasant. And painful despite the shields. I didn't want to think of how many things I'd broken slamming into all this stuff despite the shielding.

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The only thing that was missing was me holding up an umbrella to keep some debris from falling on me, and I sure as shit wasn't going to give voice to that thought.

No, I'd done that often enough lately and tempted the universe to raise a middle finger at me.

Finally, I came to a rest at the bottom of the skyscraper, and my tailbone hurt like an empressfucker where I hit. I tried to move, but most of my body was refusing to move properly.

"Varis," I muttered.

I could still feel her out there. She was still alive. That was good. If she was still alive then she was still in the fight. If she was still in the fight then she was going to bring the fight to me and I'd get rescued.

Meanwhile, I concentrated on my lungs. More specifically, I concentrated on the muscle around my lungs. Not the kind of thing I concentrated on all that often, but they weren't working quite right. No, there was a deep, shooting pain every time I tried to take in a deep breath.

So I settled for taking a bunch of shallow breaths instead. It wasn't doing me much good hyperventilating like that, but it was better than the alternative.

"Arvie, can you hear me?"

I tried to move my right hand down to the comm on my belt. I really should've gotten that implant Arvie kept trying to encourage me to install in my brain. Then I'd be able to keep in touch with the computer whenever and wherever, but of course I didn't want the implant. Implanting myself with a livisk computer seemed like a monumentally bad idea.

I didn't know if somebody could hack that. I didn't know if the machine would try to take over my mind. And I felt like all kinds of an idiot for being out of communication because I let a bunch of fears left over from the late 20th and early 21st century regarding artificial intelligence guide my decision-making process.

I had to move my left hand across my body to the comm. Only when I reached the spot it was supposed to be on my belt? It wasn't there. The thing must've flown off at some point while I was flying through the air.

I heard screaming off in the distance, along with the telltale signs of a bunch of those primitive guns going off. It suddenly wasn't nearly as cool being in the middle of a cyberpunk situation like this as it had been moments ago when I was safe with my shields up around me protecting me from those bullets.

I was going to have to look into personal shielding and see if there was something with an inertial dampener built in. Or maybe a good old-fashioned shield bubble. Better to bounce around inside a bubble than feel a toned down version of every hit I took on the way down.

I hadn't thought I'd need inertial dampeners or antigrav here, damn it. I got cocky and confident and now I was paying for it. We should've just worn the power armor.

I tried to take in another deep breath. It was easier this time around. Almost like my body was healing up.

I wondered if that was something to do with the battle link. I'd had the shit kicked out of me a couple of times when we were sparring and I seemed to recover from it a little more quickly than I had any business recovering.

If my body was healing faster than it should then I'd let it heal. So I just sat there. I listened to screams off in the distance. I looked at a massive column of smoke where the starfighter had gone up.

At least there hadn't been anybody in that starfighter, only Arvie, but he was merely projecting a bit of his consciousness into that thing. It wouldn't have hurt him any more than it would hurt a drone pilot when they lost a connection.

The point is, that bucket of bolts was probably safe out there somewhere. The question was how quickly he'd be able to get Selii and the rest of the troops rallied.

Though that rescue wasn't coming in the immediate future. I needed to take care of myself right now. I tried to lift my head. I looked around and I patted myself, and then I immediately regretted that decision as pain shot through my body. Though my breathing was getting easier.

I really hoped that was because I was healing up. That this was another advantage of the whole battle pair thing I was discovering.

I took another deep breath, and then I heard something moving through the rubble somewhere nearby. It was a faint trickle of something that had been disturbed.

I immediately stilled myself. I stopped my breathing as much as I could.

Which wasn't a pleasant feeling. I had to hold my breath, and it was upsetting a broken rib or something like that in my chest. I looked around, trying to figure out the source of that noise.

Were there predators down here? It stood to reason that something that had been abandoned by livisk civilization up above would be the kind of place where they had a whole ecosystem with nasty animals with sharp claws and teeth running around looking to take a bite out of somebody's ass. That seemed like the perfect thing for the livisk Undercity.

I reached down to my side and felt at the sword Harath had given me once upon a time, and then over to my blaster. Both of those had stayed attached to me. They were bonded to my side at a molecular level, which was way better than the comm clipped to my belt.

I should've done the same thing with the comm, damn it, but I'd been so cavalier about this whole trip. And now I was paying the price for it like an idiot.

I didn't pull either of them out just yet though. I didn't want to move any more than I had to. I didn't want to make any more noise than I had to.

Not that freezing ultimately did me a damn bit of good.

Shadows resolved out of the darkness all around me. A bunch of tall assholes wearing bandanas that covered their faces.

Okay, not good, but I'd been in worse scrapes lately.

One of them stepped forward and cocked his head to the side.

"I don't suppose you're Olsen?" I said, knowing all these assholes were too tall to be human.

The man reached up and pulled his bandana to the side, revealing a livisk with a sparkly face that looked like it'd been punched a few times over the years. He grinned down at me.

"I don't know this Olsen guy you're talking about," he said. "But I do know somebody who's been looking for you."

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