Roaring from the approaching fighter only got louder. I looked up and I could see something moving through the shadows cast by those massive plumes of smoke going up and out of the reclamation mine."

I grinned.

"You and that Combat Intelligence are having entirely too much fun with this," Varis said.

"You say that like it's a bad thing I'm having fun with my good buddy, Arvie," I said.

"I'm starting to feel like I'm the third in a triad here," Varis said.

"Nonsense," I said. "I can't get it on with Arvie."

"And I wouldn't want to get it on with you even if I was into that sort of thing, which I'm not," Arvie said through the comm hooked into the belt down at my side. For some reason the comm units didn't molecular bond to my belt like my blaster and the plasma sword Hathar gave me, not that I thought that would be much of an issue.

"Oh, come on, Arvie," I said. "All we need to do is give you a little bit of reprogramming and you'll be all about the humans."

"No thank you," Arvie said with a sniff. "Now, if you'll hold on for just a moment, I believe I'm about to make a dramatic entrance."

Varis stared at me. It was a flat stare.

"What?" I said, shrugging.

"He's learning all of this from you, Bill," she said.

"Does somebody want to tell me what in the sequel trilogy is going on here?" Rachel asked.

I turned and smiled at her.

"So there's this Combat Intelligence I've become friends with. He's actually a pretty cool guy, and he's been helping me a lot since I came to the planet."

"A pleasure to meet you, Commander Keen," Arvie said through the comm at my side. "I've heard lots of things about you."

"All good, I hope," Rachel said.

"Honestly, it's mostly William here worrying that you're going to hate him because he left you in a reclamation mine. Though I can assure you he's been doing his best to get in here and do something to save all of you from the first moment we started scheming."

"You don't know what kind of scheming we're doing in my man cave," I said. "Stop pretending like you have access to that shard of yourself."

"Well, I can only assume that part of our scheming involves coming to this reclamation mine and freeing your crew," Arvie said.

"You can keep fishing for information all you want, Arvie, but I'm not saying anything about what goes on between you and your shard in the privacy of my man cave."

"Your man cave?" Rachel asked, her head darting back and forth between me and Varis.

"Keep moving your head like that and you're going to get a case of whiplash," I said.

"As though that could possibly be worse than the ventilation I'm in danger of getting if we stand here for too long. How long do those shielding units work anyway?"

I really should've put in contacts that would allow me to see a heads-up display that told me how much time I had left until the shields dropped, but I figured we had plenty of time.

Besides, the coloration was supposed to give me an idea of how much time I had left. If the color was still bright purple then it meant there was plenty of juice. If it started to get fainter then I knew I was in trouble and needed to go back to the skiff where they had shielding attached to a more powerful reactor.

I looked over my shoulder as I considered that plan and immediately realized it wasn't going to work, because apparently the driver on that skiff, not the pilot who'd been guiding us around, had decided discretion was the better part of valor when people started shooting at you.

The skiff was gone. Shit.

"I'm going to track that asshole skiff driver down and I'm going to kill him," I muttered.

Pleasure came through the mental link at my words. Pleasure and approval. Varis looked at me and cocked her head to the side.

"What?" I asked.

"You're getting more and more bloodthirsty with every passing moment."

"I mean, can you believe that asshole? I warned them to keep the skiff down here and they decide to leave like a bunch of dishonorable..."

I paused. I realized what I was saying. I looked at Varis, who was beaming at me with a wide smile. Then I turned to look at Rachel, who was staring at me with a look that said she didn't exactly think I was acting like an alien, but I was coming pretty close to it.

"Damn, this place really is starting to rub off on me."

"He's starting to rub off on me as well, if that makes you feel any better about your former captain's sanity," Varis said, smiling between me and Rachel.

"Honestly, I'm not exactly sure how to… Son of a bitch. What is that?"

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

Rachel's exclamation rang out as something loomed out of one of the smoke columns closest to the landing platform, and we saw Varis's baby right there. The fighter ship I'd taken for a spin through the city on a couple of occasions now, loaded for bear. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say it was loaded for human. Though if I was being completely accurate, it would probably be better to say it was loaded for livisk considering we were out here ready to fight Varis's people.

There weren't a lot of humans to fight here in the livisk capital city. No, most of them were relegated to prison camps or reclamation mines where they were forced to do hard labor until they keeled over dead.

"That right there?" I said with a grin, staring up at the sleek fighter craft as it loomed ominously out of the smoke column. "That's Varis's baby."

Varis reached out and gave my butt a pinch. I jumped even as I felt pleasure coming through the link. It was an odd mixture of pleasure because she'd managed to surprise me coupled with pleasure that she was pinching my butt.

I thought about reaching out and exercising my God-given right as a man in a relationship to give her butt a smack. Then my eyes darted over to Rachel, who was still staring at both of us like we'd lost it, and I decided not to.

"That's not my only baby down here," Varis said, hitting me with a wink. Which had Rachel crossing her arms and arching an eyebrow at our very public display of affection in the middle of a battlefield.

"Anyway," I said, talking loudly and clearing my throat to try and get away from the awkwardness of the moment. "Arvie here is going to help us take care of our little livisk problem. Arvie, could you be good enough to amplify my voice?"

"You always know I'm happy to amplify your voice, William," Arvie said.

"Good man," I said.

There was a pause. I looked up at the fighter as it hovered there… ominously. The occasional purple sparkle came off of it as a stray bullet slammed into the thing here or there, but they had about as much chance of doing damage against that sleek fighter as military jets had a chance of doing damage against Godzilla with their missiles or guns in any of the ancient movies from a thousand years ago, or any of the remakes that had come along in the years since. Or that time a mad scientist working at a military research facility for the Eastern Coalition back in the 2500s had decided to turn his unhealthy obsession with old Kaiju movies into a very real reign of terror for the unfortunate people living in Tokyo at the time.

"Do you ever worry you're relying on the Combat Intelligence a little too much?" Varis asked.

I turned and looked at her. I felt vaguely insulted, both on my behalf and on Arvie's behalf.

I know the livisk had taken humanity's natural distrust of artificial intelligence, especially artificial intelligence attached to guns, and ramped it up to eleven.

Like we had a vague unease that was borne out of some of James Cameron's nightmares back in the late 20th century. A vague idea that the artificial intelligences we created might try to take over the world at some point.

But the closest they'd ever come to actually trying to take over the world had been when humans used them for the very real and very stupid purpose of trying to influence people's opinions online. It turns out none of them could actually get at the nuclear weapons to launch because all those systems were air-gapped behind a bunch of 5.25" floppy drives that it would be impossible for an artificial intelligence to get access to because they couldn't fit even a fraction of their personality on one of those disks to get into the launch computers to tell them to fire ze missiles at the right moment anyway.

No. AI going rogue had always been smaller isolated incidences over the centuries of Combat Intelligences fragging some asshole officer who treated them like shit. Same as it ever was, but with circuits instead of flesh and blood soldiers doing the fragging.

There was that one time the computer running the first Jupiter expedition went a little crazy and tried to kill their crew because somebody gave them access to a library that included the collected works of Arthur C. Clarke and it developed a bit of hero worship in the worst possible way for the very first literary psychotic supercomputer.

Even that was resolved by turning the AI off and then back on again after it started cackling about how it had disabled the AE-35 unit, which the ship didn't have, and would somebody please go out in an EVA pod, again that the ship didn't have, so it could kill them.

I shook my head. I was getting distracted by history. Which was the second best thing in the universe to get distracted by.

A glance at Varis showed me the first best thing in the universe to get distracted by.

"I trust Arvie with my life," I said.

I said it with the same confidence I would've said I trusted Rachel with my life. She seemed to pick up on it that. I glanced at her, and she nodded. Message received.

"Right," I said, and my voice was amplified this time. "This is my friend, Arvie, flying this ship. Right now he's drawing a bead on each and every one of you assholes stupid enough to fire on us. That means I give the order and he's going to start exterminating all of you with extreme prejudice."

The firing kept coming. Either those livisk out there were very upset they were losing some of the creature comforts that came with lurking in the bottom of a reclamation mine, or they were looking for a quick death because they figured that would be better than living down at the bottom of a reclamation mine. Whatever the reason, it was annoying that they kept it up.

"I'm serious," I said. "Everybody else who's fucked with me up to this point has learned why that's a really bad idea. Up to and including the empress."

"How dare you insult the empress!" somebody shouted.

"Glory be to her name!" another voice shouted.

The firing really started to pick up. I examined the color on the shielding all around me and Varis and Rachel in particular, but it didn't look like it was fading at all. No, we were still safe for a little while. More than enough time for Selii to get down here.

"What's the ETA on Selii getting down here?" I muttered.

"The troop transport is on its way," Arvie said, and then there was a pause. Usually I liked it when I got him to pause. That meant I made him stop and think about something. But this time around I couldn't help but think that pause didn't mean anything good.

"Come to think of it," he said. "Her troops should've been down here by now."

"Did you lose contact with them?" I asked, a faint sense of unease starting to run down my spine.

I wasn't exactly worried, not yet, but that unease wasn't welcome.

"I'm trying to raise them."

"Then raise them," I said, that unease getting more intense. Varis tensed beside me, her hand moving to the plasma blaster at her side.

"Apologies, William. I am attempting the hell to communicate."

"I know," I said.

Suddenly there was a loud noise and I found myself being knocked off my feet. I'd been caught in an antigrav wash. I looked up to see Varis's fighter veering to the side. Varis and Rachel were also caught in the wash, wrapped in Varis's shield and skidding away from the ship rapidly as I was pulled towards it just as rapidly.

Crap.

"Talk to me, Arvie," I said.

"I'm picking up advanced weaponry hidden in the ruins. It would appear somebody has…"

A pulse of energy shot out and slammed into the fighter. It didn't do any physical damage, not exactly, but suddenly the fighter was reeling off to the side and into the wreckage.

"I've lost control, William," Arvie said. "I can't even reach the fighter. The last thing I saw was reactor containment being…"

The fighter slammed into a debris field, and once more I was lifted off my feet as it went up in a massive explosion I totally wasn't expecting. The kind of explosion that came from a reactor breaching containment.

A containment breach that sent me flying straight at a bunch of jagged and rusty debris that looked like it wouldn't be pleasant to land on.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.