Little needs to be said to such men. They nod their heads and grin. We depart. I fly thirty meters upward on my gravBoots to land atop of one of the four clawDrills we confiscated from the platinum mining company in the inner asteroid belt. They stand in a row on the hangar deck, each fifty meters apart. Like grasping hands, the cockpit where elbow would be, the dozen drill bits on the deck where fingers would reach. Each is retrofitted by Rollo to have thrusters on the back and thick plates of armor extend down the sides. I slide into the cockpit, enlarged for my frame and armor, and slip my hands into the digital control prism.
“Fire them up,” I say. A familiar thrum of energy goes through the drill, vibrating the glass around me. I grin like a madman. Perhaps I am one. But I knew I could not win this battle without altering the paradigm. And I knew Roque would never be driven into a trap or lured into an asteroid belt, for fear of exposing his larger force to ambushes. So I had only one recourse: hide my ambush in a flaw of character. He always preached for me to step back, to find peace. Of course he thought he knew how to beat me. But I’m not fighting as the man he knew today, as a Gold.
I’m a bloodydamn Helldiver with an army of giant, mildly psychotic women behind me and a fleet of state-of-the-art warships crewed by pissed-off pirates, engineers, techs, and former slaves. And he thinks he knows how to fight me? I laugh as the clawDrill shakes my seat. Filling me with a dormant, crazed sort of power. An enemy boarding party breaches the hangar from the same gravLift we took. They stare up at the huge claw drills and evaporate as Victra’s shuttle fires a railgun at them from point-blank range.
“Remember the words of our Golden leader,” I say to the Helldivers. “Sacrifice. Obedience. Prosperity. These are the better parts of humanity.”
“Drills hot,” I order. They echo confirmation one by one. “Helmets up. Let’s burn.”
I flip the rotation toggle on my clawDrill clockwise. Beneath, the drill whirs. I plunge both hands forward in the control prism. Existence shakes. Teeth rattle. The metal deck sags under me. Molten metal peels back. I lurch ten meters down into the ship. Carving through the deck in five seconds. And the one after that. I sink again, falling through the floor of the hangar bay completely. Chewed metal around the cockpit. Then the next deck goes. Then the next. Heat builds along the drill as I slam through more of the ship, leaving the Valkyrie behind. Slow, the drill jams, slow and you die. And this speed is the pulse of my people. Momentum flowing into more momentum.
My clawDrill is building up a hell of a pace. Slamming through decks. Murdering metal with molten tungsten carbide teeth. I glimpse fractured sights of the other clawdrills ripping through the heart of the ship as we fall through the dimly lit barracks. Each drill glowing with heat and then slamming into the next deck. It is a glorious, horrible sight. Going through a mess hall. Through a water tank, then a hallway where a boarding party stumbles back from the debris and stares at the megalithic drills carving through the ship like the molten hands of some hilarious metal god.
“Don’t slow,” I roar, entire body convulsing in the seat. I’m out of control, going too fast, drill too hot. Then…nothing. I breach the belly of the
I can feel the confusion in the enemy gunners. I’m in the center of their leechCraft assault teams. They can’t fire. Their computers won’t even register the vessel classification. It’ll look like a hunk of debris shaped like an arm from the elbow down. I doubt the bridge will even know what it is without seeing it with their naked eye.
