Salvenger Rook

Salvenger Rook
A Sketch
As dictated by
The Narrator

Hello._
I am what is known as the Narrator._
I picked this name in this language as it best describes what I do. And someone else already picked Watchers._
I Watch._
I Note._
I Dictate._
Stories as I have seen them, I make them available across all the Collected Universes, in all the various and sundry languages._
I have been called many things by many cultures, both great and small; it is a testament to each of you that I am perceived at all, as I do not belong to a construct, nor am I part of these Universes._
I collect stories._
Why?_
Because._
Further, because it seems to bring me joy, and give me purpose._
But I only ever retain the most interesting stories, and these I distribute in various mediums._
But enough of that._
The story I bring you in this Now is of the most singular human being I have ever encountered. A special, transdimensional being, knowing all things as he would ever observe them, as he ever could._
To explain it in a language dealing in three-dimensional concepts and a "flow of time" or "cause and effect" would be impossible, but I will provide you here with a bastardized summary of the account, in terms that couldn't possibly begin to accurately describe the phenomenon._
Note that this event did not 'happen' for it was timeless: Any words or phrases referring to a point in time are inaccuracies._
Salvenger has told me, in his weirder moments when he is conversing with, apparently, just a corner of the room, that he has always known what would come to pass: there has not been a single moment of his existence where he was not aware of its eternal breadth or the consequence of every possible fracture._
He can speak to ghosts._
Time can and has flowed many ways for him._
It all started with, actually, an accident, a fault in engineering and, arguably, a fault in his own personality._
He has since existed intersticially, multidimensionally, having a simultaneous awareness of all moments of all possible selves._
What makes Salvenger interesting is that he did not want nor did he deserve nor was he capable of supporting such an existence._
And so he in all of his allnesses simply appears from place to place, to do as he might, and then go again._
To give you a comparison of how interesting this is to Me: the Collected Universes, being so small, are observable by Me in any moment, in any location, at any velocity or trajectory. I cannot be eluded._
It makes my art an easy one to accomplish, if tedious, for I am only a single consciousness, after all._
Salvenger, however, eludes Me._
Frequently._
I will start here with a sketch, at what could be called the beginning._

The good parts of his life to that time all seemed to be filled with alarms.
The food accumulator, with its old 'bing!' to announce a meal freshly weaved from proteins and flavor sachets.
His clock to wake him in the morning.
His buzzy thing, with its picture of his lady and badly reproduced strains of some electronica, to tell him she was trying to reach him.
And these ones: all broadsides thumping immaterial ammunition into unbeing, the shrieks of klaxons and warning lights, urging all pilots to their stations.
For Salvenger, as he would come to be known, was a Rook; a member of the Space Navy with peculiar attributes and a single mission: to 'Batter Them Down.' It was on his duster, in Latin, Crebro In Eis, above a large illustration of an ancient castle tower growing from a bed of roses and sunflowers.
The Rooks were summoned whenever any other hostile group got its tentacles around a colonial world, or what could be turned into a colonial world, or that the Higher Ups thought they wanted.
Whatever the reason, spurious, greedy, or driven by patriotic freedom for those under the boot or thumb of aggressors, the Rooks would blast in, much too close, and open up their enfillade.
They loved their job.
They loved the accolades they received on Homeworld.
And especially Salvenger. He was especially good at it and was a specialist within a league of specialists.
They called him the Rapier, he was their ensleeved Ace: one drunk friend said he could fly a Camel through the eye of Hell's Needle, a violent electrical phenomenon with no dimension that occasionally collapsed reality.
Economically speaking, bad news. For a pilot, probably worse.
The hyperbole, however, did nothing for his reputation: he was an artist.
Just now he was swinging his light-suited self into the seat of a nimble bomber as the magnetic clamps clapped down on its tow hitches.
Through the hull of his small ship he could hear the ratcheting noises of gravitic impulsors and electromagnetic-G-dampeners load into his fuel pods.
They would make this easy.
He quickly had his onboard CPU load the soundtrack of World Stadium's Victory Dirge (Live) into his headset, and as that old crowd cheered, he was propelled at a stunning, and liquefying, nine Gs out of his private launch bay and into the voidlight created by exploding negboms. He screamed along with the crowd as cymbals (and death) crashed around him.
Past the Critical Wall, where the offenses and defenses of both engaged navies fought back and forth in corruscating eldritch horror and darkness, the g-damps began to burn out and be ejected, leaving our strange and mythic pilot to fight hemorrhage, the bends, and other purely chemical reactions he was just barely capable of withstanding.
"Thank God for compression socks."
But now the fun was to begin. His only skill and novelty, truly, was in sifting through all the memories of every possible outcome, rejecting and ignoring those that ended in his demise, and attempting to keep a line that lead to his victory coherent in his head while limitless other versions of himself experienced this and many other trials.
And this he did with gusto, as his soundtrack careened from epic to obscene to quiet revelation to Wagner.
The enormity of some of the things to pass him was shocking, as he streaked along, burning liquid radioactive fuel and leaving triplicate red burns in existence as his little pinhead of a ship rocketed through space.
More immediately threatening were the 'Soft Defenses' and the Furies. Sof-Def was just secondary cannon fire that was or was not antimatter based and toned way down to prevent injury to unshielded friendlies. Salvenger whipped through a broadside of this laterally as it went off in his face.
Furies were far worse. They didn't even use humans anymore.
Remote computer controlled ships that were built to tuck into and incinerate anything larger than a beard hair in their space.
They had systems to debillitate comms, take remote control of enemy ships, purge firmware, eject pilots.
They had low-heat emission rifles and mass drivers to pinhole and shatter lighter hulls.
They were programmed to hate and kept in constant foment while the AI was otherwise disconnected from external stimuli.
Salvenger had the seat of his pants and the fact that his ships were built with no external antennas or dishes that could be compromised. He could broadcast radio messages on a shortwave, since nobody'd taken shortwave seriously in about 200 years.
He liked to play his music for the Furies. He was pretty sure at least once two of them suicided because of how little resistance they had to British rap-rock.
He cranked an ancient rheostat and yowled along with a six-string, his ship just barely being grazed by beams and bullets.
Now it got interesting: six Furies with target locks and only his best guesses scooting his heat signature out of the way. He got dinged, he got zapped, he felt insulation and his hull fuse and little tingles come up through his magnetic space boots.
Behind his mask, his lips parted, his teeth clamped. His hands itched towards the sublight ignition controls.
Not yet.
He swung into the shadow of a passing warship and his playlist swung into something twangy and folksy.
He exhaled and began worrying his goatee with his upper teeth.
"Ship's log, in case you can tape these atoms back together, I believe I'm --- whoops."
He was not safe, three Furies shot out of the incandescent rays released by the receding warship's engines.
He skipped twangy, came to thumpy.
He impersonated the snare and the high-hat, then the horns, burning L.R.F. in a relative downward, his heart and stomach rattling around somewhere near his medulla oblongata.
The Furies shrieked overhead, so close his loosening hull rattled and thumped three times, almost in line with the beat in his helmet.
"Waaaugh!" He screamed in orc-like hostility. The Furies inverted and began flying back.
And the chase was on again. Salvenger lead them through to an ammo depot where huge shells, their dimension-melding payloads held in warping radiance within geodesic domes, split the vacuum around them, it afforded him time to think.
He began to ~think he had made a wrong turn or played the wrong song.
That could mean life or death.
Arcs of brilliant red punched through his canopy as he pounded the accelerator, his airfiltration system growing oppressively hot as momentum smashed his head back into his seat and barely out of the way.
The arcs, fired by a Fury with too much blood in its mechanical eyes, hit a shell.
The stasis cascaded, failed, the entire universe was made red-hot and bitingly cold all in an instant at a subcoordinate of zero.
Salvenger, blinded by ash and voidlight only knew motion and his playlist switching to a political podcast from a bygone era out of pure stress.
As his momentum drivers adjusted for spin and his eyes recovered from the antiflare, he could see a shape like a peregrine falcon etched in the damp red that meant his eyes were bleeding, but not much else. A Fury had gotten between him and the negbom, sparing him his life. He tried to remember if he was listening to rap-metal again.
He tapped >>, then >> again and whistled in his helmet to something uplifting and mundane.
If there had been any atmosphere during the collapse, he would've only heard a ringing in his ears, if his helmet had miraculously not imploded... his helmet would've imploded.
He waited patiently for death or for a return of his vision.
In time, the redness faded and Salvenger saw stars and metal sedately coasting past. Ice collected on the two holes in the canopy above him and he began furiously checking his seals.
They were intact. The ice was residual moisture from inside his cockpit, which was never sealed, anyway, to prevent evac in case of a breach. He checked and somehow the bolts passing through the floor only melted his clutch pedal, almost totally missing his boots.
He said, "Woo." Then stuck a cigarette in the hole he'd drilled in his filter mask and slumped back against the acceleration pads. He lit his stick with an alcohol torch and tiny fuel crystals in the authentic tobacco kept it lit in hard vacuum.
A plume of smoke passed out of his filter.
A dark shape blocked out the stars.
Salvenger looked at his dead instruments.
Then back up at the shape.
Dead instruments.
Shape.
Only one thing to do, "Ugh. I hate this part." He said, hoping he knew which part it was.
He unbuckled his straps, checked his helmet again, and then hoisted the canopy off.
He clambered out onto the nose of his ship and stood over it to see how much damage had been done.
Several serrated struts, probably parts of dead Furies, punched through the hull in various places. Scorch marks inflicted had failed to die and still smoldered, the metal being eaten away by exotic energy residue.
He activated his boots and wandered over aft, where his little payload was.
Only a megaton or two, this bomb was to put a hole the relative size of Nicaragua in a very sensitive place. Like an explosive postage stamp next to everything else out there.
He checked to make sure it was still armed, changed playlists again and went forward, drawing a guyline from the winch on his belt.
With sighs and time to take puffs, and a grunt, he got his hook over the remains of a tow hitch then went below and got the little fire extinguisher they put in all cockpits.
"You, little guy, are more of a 'code' thing than a 'practical' thing," he said, sending jets of foam and compressed excellerant into the nothingness.
The grunt of metal fed up through his guyline and into his hip and eventually his ears. He was moving now, just a bit, but enough.
Another two honks on the extinguisher and it was dead but the big dark shape grew ever closer.
He approached and his internal comms beeped to let him know someone was hailing him on a public channel.
He ignored this.
David Bowie sang something appropriate in his helmet.
The ship in question was the HQ pod, a miniscule, and cloaked, think-tank that housed strategists, atrocartographers, officers, aides and the AI that would've been driving the Furies if they hadn't all died.
The ship, obviously, kept its weapons, engines and jump drives cold and invisible to nullify its signature, but due to advanced and powerful quantum-potential resonators acting as backup capacitors for its tertiary superlight drives, could be warmed up and gone in less than a minute if a threat appeared or if the front line broke.
A minute bomber ship with no fuel, signals or lights, and a lifeless husk tethered to it activated precisely zero emergency protocols. And since the bomb attached to the back was about the size and shape of a beer keg and had a radiance flux of zero (it was filled with plastic explosive, not even an energetic corrosive element) nothing aboard the flagship would ping it.
His comms beeped again, which was annoying because Ground Control was hailing Major Tom in his helmet.
He appreciated that they were trying to find out if he was okay.
Before he bumped into the ship at ridiculously low speeds he flipped around and walked aft again, collected his bomb, magnetized his boots to it and pushed off, disconnecting his tether as he did so.
His ship's nose crumpled a little more, silently in the darkness, and he sluggishly surfed his way around the much larger ship's artificial gravity well, carefully adjusting his trajectory until he touched the black gap in the light and began awkwardly pulling himself topside.
Considering the shape was just a shape and had no visible depth, he had to bend around and change angles to estimate where he was in relationship to where he wanted to go to.
With a weird underwater bunnyhop he got there, hoping his playlist would pick Sting & The Police, but it didn't.
He slipped off the magnetic outer for his boot, sandwiched it between hull and bomb and went bottomside again.
Somewhere in one of his pockets, he had a small thumbswitch which would set off the emergency detonator in his payload.
He had plenty of time to lift flaps and root around through food wrappers, empty water pouches, seashells, odds and ends and an inestimable number of paper-wrapped drinking straws he had picked up across millions of light years.
Plenty of time. Before anyone found the bomb, or even came to look. It was definitely in there.
Plenty... he began furiously rifling through his pockets, all his collected bits of lint and cig dimps and simply bits flying from his gloves. Even the bendy straws spun away into the great nothing unheeded.
He'd lost it.
With his ship dead and his thumbswitch gone, he had no immediate means of setting off the bomb.
He hobbled one-footed back to where his ship sedately sank away, disengaged his other boot and literally flew, whatever was playing in his helmet lost to him in sudden urgency.
He tore back into the cockpit, thrashed around behind the seat and came up with his CPR kit and on his way out tore bundled wires out from underneath his control panel.
Arms spread like a winged squirrel he smacked into the enemy hull because he hadn't been able to judge how far it was: he saw his second boot a little ways away, still hanging on but he had no time to get it and just threw himself back topside.
In the inky black he saw his little bomb's light blink, showing it was still very uselessly armed. He scrabbled towards this across frictionless paint.
A searchlight shone out of a hatch somewhere, more than likely coming to find out just what was going on.
He reached the bomb, seeing the light cut a white outline across some lower fold of plating.
He wore his decorative service pistol, a Desner-M10, and used this to punch a hole in the bomb.
He fashioned an incredibly short-range detonator by tearing the paddles off the defribulator in the CPR kit and tied the curly ends of the frayed wire to straight ends of the fat golden wires from under his controls back aboard.
All very impressive in heavy gauntlets as a light etched its way closer.
The other ends of those wires he stuffed into the ten millimeter gap he'd made through bomb casing and insulation.
A light hit him broadside. His comms beeped.
He shrieked maybe just a little and hopped away, using an airhose to give himself the little boost he now felt the situation warranted. A needle hit red and oxygen became scarce while a few magnetic gauss rounds rippled through space right behind him.
Crouched in a crevice that did not hide him from the bomb enough at all, he flipped the defrib around until it was rightside up and mashed the 'charge' button.
Dull thuds tickled his toetips as whatever orthotic Space Marine menace crept up the hull towards him.
Whatever it was definitely had grenades. It also had guns, as had been demonstrated.
This entire time he had been mashing 'charge' over and over again.
Then he faced the display so his shadow wasn't blocking it. "Defribulation can be a life saver!" Said page one of the mandatory tutorial.
"Yeah no shit!" He snarled back at it and mashed a chubby blue arrow with his thumb to skip all eight mandatory statements about methods, protocol and the seven stages of grief.
'Charge' lit up faintly red.
A rail-mounted torchlight lit up sharply white.
His comm beeped.
He looked up into the muzzle of the rail gun.
Through his gloves he could hear the electric whine of the capacitors filling with life-saving juice.
He pushed 'charge' with both thumbs, like he was trying to close his best man's wind-pipe after a particularly vitriolic argument.
Being between him and the bomb, and heavier, and standing up, and comically huge, the Space Marine bore the brunt of the explosion and was immediately pried off the hull and flipped into space, suddenly meaning less for all the world than a bendy straw.
Salvenger was crushed down and then bucked up by concussion and was suddenly watching the universe spin by between his boots.
He landed, tried to stick it, couldn't, bounced, and found himself delicately sprinting across the hull, arms flailing as hunks of armored hull whipped by in sullen silence.
On the horizon he saw his ship, out beyond it a small spinning star that was actually the enameled plates of a great warrior catching the light of a billion deathless suns as that warrior's prospects quickly diminished from less than zero.
He aimed his pell-mell flail and scant seconds after losing touch with the hull of the flagship, crashed through his own canopy and found himself crammed into his old seat with his head painfully caught between his arm and the dead control panel and that arm crushed between the canopy frame and his face.
The ship groaned vaguely as it shifted.
Nothing else happened.
Shattered glass spun beautifully in front of him. It collected in the folds of his clothes.
It made him feel cold and lonely and distant.
He shifted back around, hearing glass grind under his armor and in a couple of joints and crevices, sat back up, looked around.
He spotted the big dead ship as it slid out of sight and while waiting for it to slide back into sight around the rotating nose of his little coffin, he lit another cigarette.
A plume of smoke escaped his mask.
Cigarette in fingers, he flopped his arms out like he was taking a good bath (some of him had to be, somewhere, he figured) and threw his feet up on the controls like a desk in an office.
But it wasn't over. Not yet.
He just hoped the oxygen masks aboard had had time to deploy and that other marines hadn't.
Something was jabbing his hip painfully and he arched up and brushed at it in annoyance. His fingers came up with his little thumbswitch detonator. It was still armed.
He stared at it in hurt shock for a long hard minute. Then he tossed it out the window so he could finish his cigarette in peace.

After a pensive smoke break, Salvenger crawled free and alighted into space.
He sort of walk-crawl-shimmied his way back up to the enormous hole he'd punched in the hull. The artificial gravity was failing, which was a plus.
The raw-toothed gap breathed sealant and flakes of destroyed computer equipment out into the void.
He popped a small periscope over the edge and saw nothing. It was bleak, black shadow inside.
Hoping he was making the right choice he popped his face up and activated his nightvision.
Dead endless rows of computer terminals and broken holoscreens confronted him. They bowed downwards near the center of the concussion and then played out in even, sightless, lines.
There was a worrying lack of corpses but this had to be the bridge.
Where was everybody?
He hummed tunelessly in his quiet helmet, quite forgetting himself and his soundtrack, before flipping inside and carefully scuttling around, taking cover and furtive glances in the stillness.
A lower deck had been opened, but all he could see when he ducked over upside down was a long hallway, lit by emergency decklamps.
He sighed shakily and then made his way to the center of the bridge, feeling exposed as the decks opened up beneath him. He still couldn't quite shake the feeling that the crew had somehow mysteriously disappeared.
He made his way to a huge metal door sunk into the floor plating. It was approximately ten feet tall and thirty feet wide, and would grant the commanders and officers their concourse, had there been any to emperiously walk abreast, their frocks hanging heavily.
With the power grid out the way it was, the room beyond was left completely dark, and what little light there was made a mirror of the window.
He still pressed his mask to it and shielded his eyes, like looking into a bookshop. His own reflected lenses were all he saw. He flipped his headlamp on and off a few times but nothing changed.
With another sigh and the fingers of his left hand crossed he moved to the emergency panel at the side of the door and banged it open with his fist.
He attached a little PDA computer and began the manual override sequence.
Almost happily, the door shot open to its blocks, tons and tons of steel simply shifting on hydraulic rockets and opening the deeper reaches of the ship to him.
It also depressurized the other cabin, launching several brave-looking armed men in pressed officer's uniforms to their surprised and unwarranted death.
As satin and burnished leather rocketed past him, Salvenger blinked. Ten or eleven men hung around him, frozen in the comportments of putting on masks and preambush.
He shuddered.
Then the door slammed shut.
"Fuck!"
He reactivated the override sequence and the door began to judder open on low power.
Bright white light spilled over the threshhold and Salvenger saw two sets of enameled space boots waiting for him as the door rose up to about the height of his knees.
He energetically keyed the override, in reverse, tripped a number of safeties, and then told the computer to kill itself. The door stopped.
"Foo..." he exhaled.
There was a profound pause while Salvenger briefly entertained the idea that the marines would forego waiting up for him, before sixteen burly fingers wrapped around the bottom edge of the massive door and began yanking it upwards into the ceiling.
At that point he chose flailing retreat, back across the bridge, then back down into the exposed lower deck near his selfmade entrance. He was definitely screaming in his helmet as he hopped below, light arcing out behind him like questing fingers.
And he was still out of oxygen.

Salvenger got belowdecks and sprinted for the furthest edge of the hallway he could. Two torchlights regarded his entrance, a sharp pool of white to cut through the dull red.
Salvenger banged into the door he wanted, mashed the key code panel with his hand like he was having a stroke and then stopped to collect himself and his thoughts.
And restart his playlist.
As music flooded through the 3.5mm jack in the back of his helmet he relaxed, letting out a huge gusty breath of air.
The grating electronic burble of a space marine's headset wiggled what scant gasses had collected down here.
It was unintelligible, like PA announcements in space ports, but it sounded angry.
Salvenger pried the key panel off the door and just started pushing wires around. Something caught, sparked, and the door whanged open.
He stepped under it, through a membrane, the connection failed, and the door whanged back shut, bumping him painfully.
He rubbed his shoulder where it smarted and turned to see where he was.
"Oh shit."
"Hello, Daggerheart." Said a voice in his mind.
He pressed his hands to the sides of his helmet and started screaming, "LA LA LA LA!" at the top of his lungs, looking away from the grey orb of the AI's carriage.
Without him changing position, his view swept back up so he was looking at it again.
"LA LA LA!" He argued.
There was a pause, his sight held focused on the AI with some degree of doubt.
"What are you doing?" Its psychic voice was a thousand-thousand purrs, overlapping with promise, with solicitude, with grace.
"Just ignoring any possible interference from transdimensional beings! You know! The usual!" His voice broke at the end while he madly tried to look around the illusion fixed in his mind's eye.
He needed a fireax or something explosive on the right now.
"But you know what you are, Daggerheart."
"Not my name! Not! My starburned name!"
It cooed, sighing like wind through his memories, "Not for much longer. I can see it. A great cataclysm."
"Okay freaky space lady! Whatever you say!" He gave up looking for 'sharp' or 'incindiary' and started sidling towards a huge computer rig that would check the box next to 'heavy,' if he could get it off the bulkhead. And if he could get over its four tons of inertia in the failing gravity. Maybe.
"I can let you go, you know." In that, the promise was oblivion.
"Don't know what you're talking about! Boy do I need to pee! Gee-howdy! Maybe there's a bathroom behind this here computer rig!" He took his hands from where they'd been planted and started trying to get his fingers between the rig and the wall.
Suddenly all the pressure released and he was looking at his own hands directly.
He may've peed.
"Stop yelling. I'll just release your mind."
"Don't have one! Left it in another pair of pants!" One he hadn't peed in, presumably. He was still yelling.
"Stop being an idiot. You know just as well as I do what we both are." The voice was intrinsically final this time, brooking no possible thought beyond its statement.
He stopped scrabbling at the weld between what he wanted to weaponize and the wall he would prefer to be behind and gave a sidelong glance at the sphere that was the AI's corporeal shell. Immediately he started scrabbling again.
"What are you doing?"
"An illiterate mind reader! Boy they build everything nowdays, don't they..." He didn't have anyone to ask, so he started humming. His playlist had stopped again.
"You want to..." It was depthless sighs, "... release me."
Salvenger thought that sounded more perverse than the infinite mind had intended and let it slide.
"Nope! Just more pee!"
He hadn't said 'pee' so many times in one conversation since a really bad bar off the back end of Nowhere and Never and vowed to say 'urinate' on his next run and 'piss' on the one after.
"You can kill me..." The voice promised, then halted.
Someone was knocking loudly on the outer door.
"One moment," it soothed.
The door shot open. Torchlight flared in.
The two Space Marines came after it, walked across the expanse of the room, they looked around and tipped nods to the AI and walked out another door.
Salvenger was very confused.
"I just redirected them. They're looking for you, you know. To Stop. You." The threat was there, not so much intoned as cut into the fiber of his being.
Salvenger gave up, "Tell me what you want. Let's make a deal."
"Simple." There was nothing ~but simplicity in that word, "To ride amongst the stars again, using the husk of your infinite soul as my chariot."
"Fine." He said, sighing, "I'll do it."
Then he sprang forward, "Right after I'm done knifing you!" His combat knife zinged into action.
"I wouldn't do that." Sharp wall, leading everywhere and nowhere, he couldn't get around it.
Salvenger looked around, blind. "Ohp... shit." He started feeling around, laying hands flat against the air, seeing only white expanse and his gauntlets. He started making his way along, looking for a gap.
"What are you doing now?" The voice was almost annoyed.
"Pointedly ignoring weird space voices!"
He bumped the far wall of the chamber, gently felt around it, started coming back.
"Listen to me--"
He sneezed very theatrically.
It sighed. Just a sigh: air going in, air coming out.
Salvenger didn't think they sighed. That was new.
"You wouldn't kill me." It challenged.
"Sure would. With a two-by-four if I could find it."
It continued, simply, in words, no attempt at threatening or subsuming, "I'm right over the reactor. If you shut me down, it goes into a resonance cascade failure and explodes with the force of approximately the eight suns they made it out of."
He stopped near the other far wall. "Shit."
"Yes, and I deactivated the life boats and will bring the Marines back in if you try anything. I'll drop the illusion if you promise to talk."
Salvenger grumbled and snapped, "About what?"
The wall grew holes, dissolved.
"About how you're going to load my being into your mainframe and have me be your constant companion. See? I'm compromizing. No need to fully erase your being when I can just ... interweave."
Salvenger chuckled, false and forced, like he was playing with it and it had said something dumb.
Then he said, "Excuse me one moment," And stepped through another door.
A solid blast of psychic force hit the defense matrix around the doorway and howled down the hall past him, blowing his coat like he was a mime in a fake windstorm. He shut the door and his coat fell heavily. His music resumed.
His entire being rang like a bell.
"God I hate these things." He said. He fished a pair of magnetic deck overboots out of an emergency locker and slipped them on and went clanking down to the escape pods.
There was a bay of ten of them, each would hold eight people, which was seventy-nine more than Salvenger needed.
He stepped up to one and started cranking the manual override.
A distant whisper of a ghost of a voicethought called to him from probably Connecticut, "... what are you doing..."
"LA LA LA!" He shouted back at it.
And waited.
When he knew it was good and quiet he got back to cranking the pod out of its cradle.
He hadn't been thinking with the pressure envelope, where the doors and bulkheads were still sealed, and the escape pod blew off into space in a roar of stale air.
Salvenger stood there for a minute looking at empty hands that a minute ago gripped rails.
He still had seventy-one more seats than he needed.
He ambled over to the next pod in line and repeated the process.
This time, since there was a perfect open circle into space, the pod he disenaged hung in geosynchronous orbit to the ship.
He made sure there was no air inside and then popped the door. He ensured it would lock again when he shut it.
Then, since his vision was waning and he blacked out, he ducked inside for a squirt off the reserve tanks to refill his oxy.
With that done he went back up the hall and began force-locking every opening to every compartment and vent he could find.
He had just finished stabbing an activation panel apart with his flathead screwdriver when something huge tried the door from the other side.
He looked up and his glass lenses met the supervulcanized visisteel faceplate of a Marine, glowering down at him through the little porthole in the door.
Without another word or even a nod, he skedaddled.
Pounding that wasn't his heart echoed through the ship's decks.
Back inside the AI chamber and out of breath, he closed the door.
"Look, bitch, you're trapped in a steel bubble."
Salvenger could not pronounce a silent pause, but the one emanating from the AI was audible all through the vaults and chambers of his mind.
"And my helmet smells weird."
More pause.
"So, I'm going to let you out. You'll be free."
"But the reactor!" Pulsing red, radiant energy, unbelievable, titanic force.
He scoffed, "Pfft. Reactor-schmeactor. You're bluffing."
It wasn't, of course, but as it tried to form concepts to assure him of that he closed with the outer surface of the AI carriage and rammed his yowling combat knife through the atom-thick steel and into the spectral effluence within.
It made a cosmic unzipping sound as he gutted it. He got the intense and unbelievable unnerving feeling of being watched, peered at, as he did something perverse to another sapient organism.
Out over him washed ghost light, made of mist and water and vapors of no color that hung heavy and draped his boots like a waterfall running upwards and down at the same time.
He reached into the rent he had made and touched something soft and cold.
He pulled the AI out.
In his arms rested what would appear, in photos and dreams, to be a small fuchsia-colored woman, all curves and sprinkled with glitter and gold. What Salvenger actually saw couldn't be described. She had a pair of gouged and broken butterfly wings and a face so otherwordly and beautiful it literally took Salvenger's breath away and drowned out the inappropriate rap blasting out of his speakers.
He looked down at the woman-thing, the Universe Girl, and met her eyes. She looked sad and longingly at him from infinite eyes and brushed the rough edge of his helmet with a hand that hadn't countable fingers on it.
She let out her breath and a little breeze blew through him.
"... thank you..." and there was so much promise in that.
The Universe Girl closed her eyes, every smile touching her lips and then she burst into pure starlight and faded away, beyondwards.
Salvenger had never experienced anything so brutally beautiful. Death and birth and loss and life all in a single instant. He still held his arms out in a cradle.
"WONK WONK WONK!" Boomed klaxons.
"Fuck!"
The reactor was going critical.
He turned and bolted past the two Marines who were just coming in, leaving his overboots in place.
They sighed in unison and then lumbered around to go after him. Again.
He pelted down the hall, past the door the Marines had cut with their plasma torches, past every other panel, warning, flashing light, and finally made it to his open escape pod.
He hopped in and sealed the door with a whizz and a chunky thud.
Outside the lights still strobed.
Then the Space Marines arrived.
They stared at him through the porthole of the pod while he tried not to look too awkward.
They stepped up closer and he could hear one knocking.
Salvenger started miming 'severed head!' 'severed head!' with one hand across his throat and jabbing the fingers of the other through his pod to the one in the neighboring cradle.
The Marines didn't understand. They looked blank.
A massive gauntlet came up, five fingers spread in an enormous crustacean-looking web of power.
Then four fingers.
Three.
There was a thud. Both Marines looked back, the gauntlet dropped, up the hall Salvenger had converted into a flue for all the radioactive fury now broiling and corruscating its way toward them at the square root of the mass of light.
Before he was blown off the side of the ship and far into the cold embrace of space, Salvenger saw the moment where all the channeled force of the dead reactor core obliterated two great, knightly helmets.
Then everything, literally everything, was composed of spinning.
And Salvenger. He was yelling again.
And Rascal Flatts, which he angrily skipped, spurning whoever had downloaded it.

-- fin