Voltron: Legacy

Chapter 15

Two days later, the five of us were sparring in a practice room when Emma came in. She yelped as Leilah’s staff stopped just in time to keep from slicing her arm.
“Whoa, sorry. You okay?” Leilah asked.
“Yeah, although I almost lost Bernadette.”
“Who?”
Emma laughed. “Not who, what. This.”
She pulled off her lab coat. Underneath, she was wearing a simple black tank top, showing off a full sleeve tattoo of a pretty, dark-haired human girl whose lower half tapered off into a huge galaxy-patterned fish tail. She was topless, smiling, and holding a crescent moon in one hand.
“This is Bernadette. A long time ago, human sailors used to get tattoos of mermaids, sometimes with the faces of women they cared about. When I decided to become a scientist for the Garrison, I thought since I was basically going to be a star sailor, I should get a tattoo. She’s my good luck charm now.”
“And you named her?” Xaroc asked, curious.
“Yup. I named her Bernadette after my sassy old granny.” Emma said with a laugh.
Leilah snorted.
“You’ve got one too, huh?” Emma asked.
Leilah smiled. “Uh-huh. My jida can talk somebody down to size almost as well as she cooks or snores. Those are her top three talents.”
“That and whacking you with a wooden spoon when you try to sneak a bite of whatever she’s cooking. She is fast.” Jason said.
“You were totally asking for it both times.” Leilah retorted.
“So why were you coming to see us?” Linnea asked Emma.
The scientist struggled back into her lab coat, then said, “We might have found the coordinates to another major Archanai base. And if we did, then we really need to go there.”
“Why?” I asked, already heading for the door.
“They’re making Voltron-size robots.”
“Hold it, what?” Jason said, at the same time as Linnea yelped and said, “Robots, plural?!”
Emma nodded grimly. “That seems to be the only place where they’re being built, thank goodness. We have a couple schematics that Jason should look at with us, we might be able to figure out what their weak spots are ahead of time. We already told Shiro.”
“Do you know anything about who’s building them?”
Emma cocked her head. “How do you mean?”
“Like whether it’s just Archanai or whether they have slaves doing some of the work? If there’s prisoners like there were on Narilex-E5, we can’t just go in and smash everything.”
“There aren’t any prisoners as far as we can tell. There are people piloting the ships, though, and judging by the size and shape of the seats and controls shown in the plans, they’re not Archanai.”
“What are they then?”
Emma shrugged. “Who knows? Something a bit smaller, a bit more humanoid. We can’t get much more specific with so little to go on. They might not even be all one race, anyway.”
“Fair point.”
When we reached the lab, Shiro and Katie were looking over a 3D hologram projection of the enemy robot.
“See, based on the robeasts we’ve fought, there’s probably a weak spot somewhere around the main weaponry. Something that could maybe be attacked right after it fires.” Shiro said.
Katie shook her head. “It doesn’t look that way to me. Remember, these are built by an entirely different civilization.”
“What would you suggest, then?”
I walked over. “I’d suggest that if we’re still in the dark about how these things fight, we do this a slightly more old-fashioned way.”
“What do you mean?”
“Bring up a hologram of Voltron too and look at the differences. Size them up like you were deciding which one you’d bet on for a wrestling match.”
Shiro shook his head. “Karah, I don’t think-”
“Do you have a better idea?” Katie interrupted.
He sighed. “No.”
“Then we’ll try Karah’s.”
She brought up a hologram of Voltron, and I started walking circles around the two robots, thinking out loud as I analyzed them.
“Okay, they’re pretty evenly matched when it comes to size, for starters. But they have really different body shapes, different kinds of weaponry. That means different fighting styles. Looking at Voltron, even without having used it, I could probably tell you that it’s built for power strikes, direct attacks, basically a really straightforward fighting style that involves just full-out overpowering your opponent. This guy, on the other hand?”
I took a moment to really take in the slender, sharp lines of the other robot.
“It’s built for speed, evasive maneuvers. It wouldn’t withstand a lot of direct hits from something like Voltron, but what it probably can do is outfight us with strategy. Feints, dirty tricks like tripping us up, and just straight-up outlasting us. This thing is going to be darting around like some kind of dragonfly, being really hard to hit and doing a bunch of little attacks to wear us down. I’d bet my life on it.”
Shiro and Katie stared at me.
“How did you extrapolate all of that?” Katie finally asked.
I shrugged. “Common sense and a lot of experience being in street fights. I didn’t win a lot of the time, but I always got out alive, and I learned a lot about how different people fight.”
Shiro peered at the robots, then at me.
“You know, I’d have to come to the same conclusions. From what we can tell, they only have two of these finished so far, but that still means you’ll be outnumbered. Since this isn’t a stealth mission, we’ll be coming in with you for backup this time.”
Xaroc grinned, rubbing her hands together. “Okay, so when do we get there? I’m ready to see what these things have got.”
Jason rolled his eyes. “I can’t believe you’re excited about this.”
“I can.” Leilah and Linnea chorused.
I shook my head at them, then turned to Katie. “Do you guys have the coordinates?”
“Yeah, we do now. It shouldn’t take long to get there, we’ll probably arrive by dinnertime.”
“Good. We should go get ready then. C’mon, guys.”
As we walked out, I was pretty sure I heard Shiro say to Katie, “She’s getting better at this.”
The door closed behind us, and I felt a little glow of pride in my chest, as well as a bit of confusion that he hadn’t said as much directly to me.
He probably didn’t want it going to your head and making you careless. I thought sternly to myself. So don’t let that happen.
I knew I couldn’t afford to get cocky, especially not now, when we were on the brink of facing our biggest challenge yet. We were going to need every little bit of smarts and courage we could get for this.