Crossing through the smashed wall, I found myself standing inside the castle garden.
I removed the handjet from my back, and pulled my heatgun from my hip. Yuri did the same, though she was carrying a ray gun. Carefully, we examined our immediate surroundings, and headed through the courtyard into the depths of the castle. The inside of the castle was much more modern looking than the outside. There were illumination panels in the ceiling, and the floors and walls were made of plastic.
Yuri and I walked forward with our bodies pressed tightly against the wall. There was no one else around.
“Which way you thinkin’?” Yuri blurted out. Sometimes her country roots revealed themselves when she talked.
“Hold on!”
From my pocket I pulled out a small, flat device. It was a little thicker than the Bloody Card, but a little smaller. An energy detector. I had brought it along, just in case of a situation like this. It was designed to sniff out locations using large amounts of energy.
I flicked the detector switch on. Beep, beep, beep, beep… it sounded, and lit up. Good boy… I didn’t know where it was, but there was a high-consumption energy area nearby. That’s where we needed to go.
“Yuri, this way.”
I started to move first, and we had to practically crawl to get through the first passageway. Plastic walls and floors may be flexible, but don’t exactly accommodate a quiet passage for people wearing three-inch heels.
We hit a four-way intersection in the passageway. On the wall closest to us was a confusing LCD screen. It looked like a map to every hallway and room, but the surface was covered with so many symbols, I couldn’t begin to make sense of it. On it there were red and yellow lights flashing. I didn’t know what that meant, either. It was clear that my detector was going to come in handy. At this crossroad, the detector indicated left. Right then we were basked in the light of a barrage of laser fire. Black holes were burned into the walls and floor, and sparks were flying off the exposed electrical wiring. It was an ambush. A broadside attack from twenty heavily armed soldiers. One shot grazed my shoulder, and part of my reinforced polymer suit evaporated into the air.
“Yowch!”
I was enraged. You leave a scratch on this body, and there’s hell to pay. Yuri grabbed the belt wrapped around my shorts and pulled me to the wall.
“It’s too dangerous!” Yuri shouted. “Take a look around!”
Indeed, the hallway was full of laser fire. Pyu! Pyu! The LCD display we were just looking at had been blown to bits. It was a miracle I was still standing. I must admit, I owed Yuri one for that. I hate that. Instead of being thankful, I got overbearing.
“You don’t need to tell me that! Instead of blabbering, why don’t you pull out the Bloody Card?! We can’t go anywhere until we clean up that hallway!”
Yuri sulked. “What did I do?” she snapped back. “We gotta get it together, or we are dead!”
Pyu-shun!
The floor in front of our feet was scorched. That was from a powerful energy beam. We jumped and got our backs to the wall. We got low to the ground and peeked around the corner.
Gulp!
I bit my lip.
From across the intersection ten new soldiers were coming our way. Crap! The two of us versus thirty of them were not the balanced odds I was hoping for. On top of that, we are just a couple of weak girls! We could have waited patiently for the United Space Force to arrive, but this was getting a little too heavy.
“Go around the corner and throw to the left!” I yelled to Yuri. We didn’t have time for petty arguments now.
“Hmph!”
With the Bloody Card slipped between two fingers of her right hand, Yuri and I switched places. Laser blasts from the ten troops barely missed Yuri’s body. We were defenseless. All I could do was get down on the floor. Leaning around the corner, Yuri sent the Bloody Card into flight. She was met with dozens of laser blasts, and Yuri quickly rolled back to relative safety.
“Ow ow ow ow ow ow…” she squealed. She must have been hit somewhere. By itself, the reinforced polymer suit wasn’t a great defense. We should have worn our metallite alloy space suits.
“Yuri!” I called to her. She was lying on the floor belly down and controlling the Bloody Card with the handheld transmitter. She was flying blind, so we couldn’t see the results of her efforts.
“Let’s go to the right-hand corridor!”
“Right?” Yuri asked, turning around. We couldn’t counterattack, and the troops were probably only ten meters or so away by now. We had to do something now.
“We go right!” I said while pointing the heatgun at the advancing soldiers and shot. Because the heatgun is a short-range weapon, it would only really serve as a warning. But it was a lot better than nothing.
“Before the hallway to the right you can see where Lovely Angel’s missile hit. It’s all falling apart. If we can jump into there, maybe we can hold out until the Space Force arrives.”
“Huwaa!”
Yuri was frantically pushing buttons on the transmitter. Streaking a faint silver tail, the Bloody Card flew around behind the advancing soldiers, and then came back toward us through the troop.
The moment the blood started spraying and we heard astonished shouts, we jumped up from the floor. We pitched forward across the corridor and rolled. Since the Bloody Card had disappeared, the survivors in the left-hand corridor returned, recklessly shooting off their lasers. I borrowed Yuri’s ray gun and returned fire. I couldn’t get a clear shot, but it had a better range than the heatgun. We rushed down the right-hand corridor to a small electric car turned on its side. Behind it was a mountain of rubble. In other words, we were in a dead end. So this would have to be our final fortress. By my calculations, the United Space Force should swoop in to rescue us in twenty maybe thirty minutes tops. An hour might be tough, but for half that time we could conceivably make it using the electric car as a shield. Damn… even doing that, if Mugi could cover us, this battle would be a little easier… Oh, I shouldn’t complain!
Yuri briefly called back the Bloody Card. Living up to its name, the card was dripping red. It looked like it really gave its all.
“This is a problem…” said Yuri. “There are still about fifteen of them left.”
“This could be it for us…”
Typical of me, I adopted Yuri’s pessimistic outlook. We were short on equipment, Mugi wasn’t here, our positioning was terrible—it was not an enviable situation. At least we couldn’t be attacked from more than one side, if that’s your idea of good news.
“Kei!” Yuri tapped me on my back.
“They’re coming!”
“Uwaa!”
Hiding behind the electric car, I quickly peeked to see. Hya! Bad guys crawling toward us. Hey, you are going to get your clothes dirty! Stop it!
“They’re not going to stop, stupid!” Yuri called from behind me. I guess I said my thoughts out loud. No, they weren’t going to stop, were they?
“They’re too low for the Bloody Card to work,” said Yuri. “We are going to have to get them with our ray gun and heatgun—”
“Can we take another thirty minutes of this?”
I adjusted the settings on the heatgun.
“Let’s just do whatever we can!”
Yuri’s ray gun sent out a flash. I also pulled the trigger. Lying on their stomachs, the soldiers also shot their laser guns blindly.
It turned into a fierce shoot-out. The ground was blackened, the walls melted in places, the electric car was torn to pieces. We had the enemy where we wanted them, in a defenseless position, but they seemed to be wearing some kind of special uniform. It resisted high temperatures. We could still use the ray gun, but even a direct hit from the heatgun was meaningless in this battle. Another check against us.
After ten minutes the battle still carried on. We had cut down ten of their soldiers. However, the space between us and them was down to less than ten meters, and the electric car could barely be called a shield any longer.
“We’re in deep trouble…” Yuri tossed out.
“This is it…”
I stopped shooting.
The soldiers seemed to notice this, and pulled their laser guns to their hips and started to stand up. We could probably shoot and kill two of them now, but that would be it. They lumbered closer. Then, two or three loud bangs came from the light panels above. They were burning and coming loose. The soldiers stopped in their tracks.
Then all of a sudden something strange happened.
With a mighty roar, the ceiling came crashing down.
Spouting surprised shouts, the soldiers moved back. But they were too late. Six or seven of them were hammered by falling chunks of concrete, knocking them to the ground. The two or three standing soldiers tripped and fell over the fallen blocks. There was a giant hole in the ceiling, and the ground was covered in debris.
“What in the world?” Yuri and I said at the same time. It was still too early to expect the United Space Force. Two shadows jumped down from the hole in the ceiling. Both were wearing black space jackets.
“Thunder! Lucha!” Yuri said in an encouraged voice. Our brother and sister team were back. But weren’t they riding in the submarine jet? How did they get here? First they disappear, and then reappear. Something about it I didn’t like. I mean, weren’t we supposed to be the stars of the show?!
Lucha and Thunder collected the surviving soldiers and injected them in the arms with something from a pistol-shaped needleless injector. The soldiers went limp. Some kind of anesthesia it seemed. They then picked up a couple of dropped laser guns and tossed them our way.