CORELINE: Doc Vince 4

The skies above Venus tended to be a fairly busy place, which actually wasn’t much of a surprise to anyone who knew the planet well enough.

The cities which dotted Venus, providing small islands of civilization on mostly untamed world, were all quite a distance from one another, without exception.

Roads linking the settlements simply didn’t exist; even discounting the possibility of dinosaurs or other giant beasts damaging them, it would have taken an unrealistically huge amount of manpower to regularly cut back the Venusian plant life, which was every bit as aggressive as the planet’s fauna, in its own way. That coupled with the dangers of the jungles made travelling across land from one city to another not just difficult but practically suicidal, unless one set out with a *very* heavily armed group.

Traversing Venus’s rivers and seas was possible, but not all the cities had natural waterways between them. Also, since any large body of water on the wild planet was certain to have creatures that could only be described as sea monsters living in them, only those who badly needed to get to a different city but couldn’t afford anything better ever booked passage aboard a boat.

Thus, the process of elimination decreed that the air transport business on Venus was always brisk.

Of course, travel by air was hardly without risk on Venus, even when only natural dangers were factored in, such as the winged giant beasts that called the world their home, or the violent storms that sometimes popped up abruptly with little or no warning. However, it was, relatively speaking, the safest form of travel available there.

When one *did* add the man-made perils into the equation, though… it was still the safest form of transport around, but the margin shrank significantly.

Unfortunately for the people aboard a lone zeppelin (favorites of the low end of the air transport industry, being fairly cheap and having the ability to hover in midair for hours if need be to avoid a storm, and the low tech nature of the things be damned) that was making a run from Callipyge to Victrix, probability was about to fail them.

A huge airship of gunmetal gray metal, its top bristling with massive propellers that labored to keep the thing airborne was making its way through the air from above and behind the zeppelin. The nose of the improbable airship was shaped like a curved beak, and the Jolly Roger was emblazoned on the side in chipped and faded paint, grinning ghoulishly in the wind. The name of the vessel, the “Iron Falcon”, was written beneath the skull and crossbones in dusty red paint.

On the bridge of the airship stood a man of average size in a long coat of blue and red. Looking at the nearby zeppelin, a savage grin appeared on his face.

Turning on the ship’s intercom, he picked up the receiver and started to speak into it.

“Attention, all hands, this your captain, speaking to you *with* my voice,” he began, his words colored by a bizarre accent that seemed to be a mixture of Spanish and French. “Your most glorious leader has just discovered a most puny fat zeppelin ready for the plucking! All hands be reporting to battle stations so we may commence with the looting and pillaging! Chop chop, you naughty men!”

Of course, if just about anyone else had delivered this speech, the people around him would’ve thought he’d gone insane.

However, the crew of the Iron Falcon had long ago grown accustomed to their captain’s many quirks, and they started scrambling toward their posts without complaint. It wasn’t long before the old but still dangerous airship started closing on the zeppelin that the air pirates had decided to prey upon that day.

Naturally, the crew of the much smaller, commercial airship couldn’t fail to miss the approach of the massive, metal beast, and they reacted accordingly. No aircraft on Venus was every completely defenseless, save for things like magnaplanes, which were so fast and agile that they could easily avoid combat all together.

A large door on the underbelly of the zeppelin opened up, and a large hook descended from it. A fighter plane dangled from that hook, and as the pilot started the engine, he triggered the mechanism to release his aircraft. The plane tumbled through the air for a few seconds before it finally got the better of gravity, then it streaked toward the Iron Falcon and the fighters that the pirates were launching. A few moments later, the hook was retracted into the zeppelin and then lowered again with a new fighter on it.

In seconds, a dogfight that wouldn’t have seemed the least bit strange to the WWI pilots of Earth’s past was unfolding over the jungles of Venus. Propeller planes traded gunfire on a world where things like anti-gravity technology and genetic engineering were commonplace.

When you're going after a zeppelin, you wanted something a bit slower and with greater endurance than a modern jet. And if you were a pirate, you wanted to do it on the cheap.

For several long minutes, the sky became a warzone, as clouds of armed gnats traded fire between the pair of lumbering giants. However, the outcome of the battle had been decided before it had truly even begun. The zeppelin could deploy only one plane at a time, taking a couple of minutes each time. The Iron Falcon boasted a double runway on its wide roof; it wasn’t long before the flying carrier had its entire complement of planes in the sky, shooting down the zeppelin’s defenders faster than the commercial craft could launch its token defense force into the sky.

It wasn’t long before the zeppelin was completely vulnerable, much to the pirate captain’s delight.

“Now it is high tide for the real fun to start!” he proclaimed to his navigator. “Scotty, pull up alongside them!”

“My name is Bob,” muttered the long suffering man who was in charge of the controls.

“Be quiet, Scotty!” the captain snapped. “Can’t you see that I am not having time to listen to you now?!”

The navigator just sighed in response, working the controls with practiced ease. Soon the Iron Falcon was right next to the zeppelin, the two air ships separated by only a few hundred yards.

“Ready the harpoon guns!” the captain barked. “Fire!”

A half dozen wicked-looking guns fired huge spears out at the zeppelin, trailing thick ropes. All of them found their mark in the compartment on the underbelly of their victim.

“Boarding party, go!” the captain barked. “Shimmy over to the big balloon and bring back all the shiny, glittery valuables!”

Most of the pirates still inside the Iron Falcon rushed to do as ordered, hooking harnesses they had on to the thick cables that now tethered the pair of airships together. The Iron Falcon had increased its altitude relative to the zeppelin slightly, so the pirates were able to able to let gravity slide them down into the zeppelin filled with relatively affluent passengers and potentially valuable freight.

Watching his men go, the pirate captain smiled, finally managing to appear more sinister than goofy.

“Now is the time for the fun to be starting,” he remarked.



Meanwhile, in the cargo hold of the zeppelin, a certain young blonde was only belatedly become aware of the attack.

Doc Vince had managed to preserve most of her hard won pay from her last job by stowing away on the airship, getting help sneaking aboard by batting her eyelashes at one of the clerks at the airport port and slipping him some cash.

Some people might’ve called that unethical. However, as the air transportation company that owned the zeppelin acted like most big companies on Venus—drastically underpaying their workers while raking in huge profits—the blonde didn’t plan to lose sleep over it.

The cargo hold was right next to the large engines which propelled the zeppelin through the air, and so while not deafening, it was one of the noisiest parts of the airship, and all the racket allowed her to remain quite oblivious to the attack for a long while.

When it first began, Doc Vince was in the middle of doing one-armed, fingertip handstand pushups.

“Nine hundred ninety-eight… nine hundred ninety-nine…” she paused, inhaling deeply through her nose while gritting her teeth, her muscular arm shaking. “…one thousand!”

With that set completed, the good doctor allowed herself to stop for several moments, panting heavily and blinking sweat out of her eyes.

Most people would’ve been extremely pleased with themselves if they’d managed to do a single one of the exercises that Doc Vince had been performing, let alone a thousand of them.

“Pathetic,” the blonde grunted.

Doc Vince was not one of those people.

/Less than a year ago, that wouldn’t have even left me winded./ She thought with disgust. /I swear, the first thing I do once I find that treasure—if I find that treasure—is build myself a damn gravity room./

That decision made (or remade, as the case really was, since the blonde had had that thought many times recently whenever she contemplated how she was in “awful” shape), Doc Vince switched arms with one quick, effortless motion, and started again.

“One…two…three…four…”

It was at that point that the spears from the Iron Falcon’s guns slammed into the side of the zeppelin, causing the whole airship to shake and knocking Doc Vince off balance.

She could’ve recovered and continued on, but something was clearly up; there had been a crash from the far side of the room that she had easily managed to hear over the constant noise of the engine. So instead she gracefully flipped herself over, landing on her feet, and then proceeded to make her way over and around the massive stacks of cargo and luggage that filled the hold.

It wasn’t long before she found the source of all the commotion, spotting where the huge spear had crashed through the hull of the zeppelin’s carriage. Air pirates were already started to spill into the ship through the hole.

/Nothing can ever be easy, can it? Not even getting from Point A to Point B./ She thought with more exasperation that genuine annoyance.

“Is that everyone?” one of the pirates asked, a huge man who was wearing an extremely battered top hat for some reason. How he’d managed to keep from losing it when he made the trip from his ship to the zeppelin, Doc Vince couldn’t even guess.

“Everyone with this group, yes,” another answered him.

That was all that the good doctor needed to hear. Retreating back behind a particularly tall stack of crates and luggage, Doc Vince put her shoulder against it and pushed hard.

“Look out!” one of the pirates shouted, but he was too late. An avalanche of boxes came crashing down upon the boarding party, burying them instantly.

“If only all my fights could be so easy,” Doc Vince remarked to herself as she walked closer. “Though if they were, I might be in even worse shape than I already—”

Her musing was cut off as the particularly huge pirate burst out of the pile of fallen crates and suitcases with a wordless roar of rage, advanced toward her with murder in his eyes.

Doc Vince didn’t flinch at his approach. Instead, she lashed out with a low kick, knocking his legs out from under him. Before he could hit the ground, she landed another kick that sent him flying through the air and crashing into a nearby bulkhead. He let out a soft groan as he collapsed to the floor and then went still and silent, down for the count.

“I’m not *that* out of shape, pal,” she said, before going over to the hole the pirates had made and poking her head out. “Oh crap,” she grumbled as she saw the multiple cables connecting the two airships.

This wasn’t going to be as easy as she’d hoped, she realized.

/Well, nothing to it but to get started./ She decided, as though she was contemplating an unpleasant but mundane task, such as taking out the garbage, rather than something like fighting off a pirate attack.

Looking around, Doc Vince quickly spotted a small blow torch sitting in the corner, which the crew of the airship probably used to make minor repairs. Picking it up, she clipped it to her belt, and then grabbed hold of the cable connecting the two airships with both hands and started to make her way across.

Of course, it didn’t take long for the pirates to notice that someone was trying to board *their* ship.

As the blonde watched, another of the pirates donned a harness and attached it to the cable she was trying to get across, then let himself go and began to slide toward her.

His obvious plan was simplicity in itself. Gravity would send him crashing into her at high speeds, and she would get knocked off the cable and plunge to her doom.

Doc Vince’s plan to avoid that fate was almost equally simple. With a small grunt, she heaved herself to the side and let go of the cable, sending herself careening through open space.

Then she grabbed onto the cable next to the one that led into the zeppelin’s cargo hold. The pirate that had come after her went whizzing by harmlessly, giving her a shocked and grudgingly impressed look as he went.

Once he was past her, Doc Vince leaped back to her original cable and then reached down with one hand, grabbing her blow torch and turning it on. The two airships needed to be decoupled if this whole incident was going to end in anything other than a complete win for the pirates. She had hoped that she wouldn’t have to do it this way, but that clearly wasn’t an option.

Meanwhile, the pirate who had come down the cable after her belatedly realized what she was doing and quickly started scrambling to get into the safety of the zeppelin. He just made it.

Maria leaped across to the next cable again just before the one she was holding snapped. Of course, this time she was holding the blow torch with one hand, and as luck would have it, she ended up snagging the still intact cable with the arm she’d just tortured with a thousand push-ups. The fatigued limb almost gave out, and for a second Doc Vince thought that she was really going to go crashing down to the ground.

Then she managed to stabilize herself, and she let out a sigh of relief.

/I really have to get back to my old self as soon as possible./ She thought. /This kind of stuff can actually be pretty dangerous when I’m not in tip-top shape./

Filing that away for later, the blonde continued to destroy the cables one by one, leaping onto the next whenever one was about to go. Of course, the pirates tried to stop her the whole way, but fighting someone crazy enough to dangle so high above the ground with no harness was something they just weren’t used to dealing with. Shots they took at her from the safety of the Iron Falcon missed by a mile, and any pirates that tried to come out after her met with about as much as success as the first one.

Of course, she eventually had to come to the last cable, which presented a bit of a problem, since she couldn’t leap to another one once she cut it. Nor could she really expect to climb up it and onto the Iron Falcon afterwards, as the pirates would doubtlessly cut their end.

She could take hold of the end connected to the zeppelin and climb back onto it, but with the Iron Falcon still perfectly fine, there would be nothing to stop the pirates from trying again.

“Nothing can ever be easy,” she grumbled, applying the flame to the rope.

It snapped, and Maria hung on for dear life, allowing the blow torch to go falling down to the ground far below. She swung so far on the rope that she neared the underbelly of the Iron Falcon, and just as physics was about to send her the other way, she let go of the cable and went flying without wings once more.

This time she managed to grab onto a bit of landing gear that apparently didn’t retract. Barely.

“Nothing’s ever easy,” she grumbled again as she got herself more securely situated on her perch.

Once she was confident that she wasn’t about to fall, she reached up, grabbing hold of a maintenance panel and tearing it off, displaying a strength that most would’ve believed impossible for a woman of her size to possess.

Ripping out some of the wires and removing the protective insulation, she crossed them. There was a spark, and then the Iron Falcon’s considerable bomb bay doors started to swing open.

Grabbing onto the side of the moving doors, the good doctor easily hoisted herself into the bomb bay, finding herself face to face with a single, shocked looking air pirate.

“Hello, there,” she greeted him casually, running a hand through her long blond hair, which was quite the mess, thanks to all the wind. She’d really have to cut it or put it into a plait or something, if this kept up. “This tub wouldn’t happen to be going to Victix by any chance, would it?”

The pirate just gaped stupidly at her for a few seconds. Then he seemed to remember what his job was; drawing a short knife, he charged at her.

Doc Vince smoothly got out of the way, and the pirate went tumbling out through the open bomb bay doors.

Or he would have, if the blonde hadn’t grabbed the back of his shirt and pulled him back inside, flinging him against a bulkhead in the process.

“Th-thanks,” he stammered, looking pale and a little green after his brush with death.

“Welcome,” Doc Vince replied, before bringing her fist up and knocking him out with one hit.

She quickly searched him for weapons but found none on him. The knife he’d tried to use on her had apparently gone tumbling out to the ground below when he nearly had.

“Figures,” she grumbled to herself, before heading deeper into the Iron Falcon.

Fortunately, the vast bulk of the large airship’s crew was involved in the attempt to the board the zeppelin, or flying one of the fighter planes. The few people she did encounter were mostly the crew members who usually didn’t have anything to do with the fighting, like the ship’s cook or the mechanics. These she was able to incapacitate with ease, not even letting them slow her down.

Eventually, she came to the Iron Falcon’s engine room, finding it in the kind of haphazard state that one would expect from a group of pirates. The place was an absolute mess, with bits of machinery strewn everywhere. Apparently, the mechanics and engineers onboard had also decided to make the place into their personal workroom, because sturdy but battered tables were present, as well as an array of tools.

Doc Vince was delighted. In moments, she had gathered together everything she would need to make a crude bomb and was hastily assembling it. The explosive wasn’t going to be powerful enough to destroy the entire airship, but it would at least force them to retreat so they could effect repairs. If she was lucky, it might even cause the Iron Falcon to crash and end their piracy for good.

She was very nearly done when she heard the door to the engine room open.

“Ah-ha!” a man’s voice cried out triumphantly, colored by a very peculiar accent. “I have at last tracked down the sneaky sneak who dared to scurry onto my beautiful Iron Falcon!”

Turning to him, Doc Vince frowned. “Who are you?”

“*I* am the el capitane  of this ship, Don Chaos! Scourge of the skies over Venus!” he proclaimed. “And you are weak little girly girl with no choice but to surrender to me now.”

Doc Vince gave him a look. “Yeah,” she deadpanned. “I made it this far being a helpless little damsel in distress.”

With a growl, Don Chaos drew the cutlass he had at his hip.

“You’re taking this whole ‘pirate’ shtick way too seriously, you know that?” the blonde asked.

Unfortunately, she didn’t have a gun on her, preventing this fight from being laughably one sided. Instead, she was forced to pick up a crowbar as Don Chaos came at her.

“Ha! Do you really believe you can stand up to me with that thing?” Chaos demanded as his sword and her makeshift weapon clashed with a shower of sparks.

Doc Vince didn’t reply, instead focusing on the fight. For all his obvious eccentricity, Don Chaos was a good swordsman, and she *was* at a disadvantage for not having a real weapon at her disposal.

“Did you truly think in your stupid, not very smart head that you could simply waltz over here like a little dancer and cripple the Iron Falcon?” he demanded.

Again, she ignored him.

“Your whole world must be built on a crazy fantasy land!” he went on, much to her annoyance. “To believe for even one moment that you could defeat the magnificent Don Chaos in a fight with swords without a real sword is just so incredibly foolish that I cannot be—”

He was abruptly cut off as the blonde managed to use the curved part of her crowbar to hook onto his sword and yank it from his grasp. The blade went sailing across the room, landing well away from the two of them.

Suddenly finding himself unarmed in the face of the “weak little girly girl”, Don Chaos chuckled weakly.

“Now, now, let us not be being too hasty to—”

Doc Vince hit him hard in the head with the crowbar, and he collapsed to the floor without another word.

With that problem taken care of, the blonde quickly started the timer on her bomb, then place it as near to the main engine as she dared. Once that was done, she took off running for the airship’s hanger bay, finding no one in her path.

Most of the planes were gone, having already been launched to engage the zeppelin’s now downed defenders, but there were a few left. Doc Vince quickly climbed into the cockpit of one of the remaining propeller planes and started up the engine. In seconds, she had departed from the Iron Falcon and was in the clear blue sky above Venus once more.

“Leader one to new fighter, over,” a gruff voice crackled from her radio. “What the hell are you doing here? Can’t you see that we’ve taken out the enemy fighters already? The boarding team is the one that needs help.”

Ignoring him, Doc Vince got one of the pirate’s fighters in her crosshairs and squeezed the trigger tighter. Her plane’s guns spat bullets, and the other aircraft soon started to spew smoke and crash toward the ground.

The other air pirates reacted immediately. They didn’t know how an enemy had managed to steal one of their planes, but they didn’t care. In seconds, the air around Doc Vince’s plane was filled with bullets.

However, Doc Vince was exceptionally good at a huge number of things, and piloting aircraft was definitely one of them. Additionally, she had one advantage; the plane she was in looked just like the one her enemies were all using, so they often became confused as to which one they were trying to hit.

The blonde exploited that one edge mercilessly, getting closer to her foes than would ever be advisable and flying in all kinds of crazy patterns to disorient them and make them grow confused. The air pirates quickly became overly cautious, fearful of shooting down a comrade, and the good doctor picked them off one by one, gradually clearing out the skies.

Finally, there was only one other fighter left in the air with her.

“Just you and me, big boy,” she muttered to herself.

Unfortunately, she was almost out of ammunition by this point. By her estimate, she had enough for just one more brief burst of gunfire, and then she would be defenseless. So she had to make it count.

The two fighters looped around one another, engaging in crazed maneuvers in the shadows of the zeppelin and the Iron Falcon, both lumbering giants and dangerous obstacles so high up.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, Doc Vince managed to line up a shot. She squeezed the trigger, and her guns sounded one more time.

Only for the other fighter to pull out of the way at the very last moment. The blonde cursed, even as she rapidly began to formulate her next move.

*BOOM!*

She never got the chance to come up with something. A portion of the Iron Falcon chose that moment to explode, far more powerfully than Doc Vince’s bomb alone could’ve accounted for.

/It must’ve ignited one of the fuel tanks, or something./ She thought, amazed at the devastation.

Flaming wreckage went flying through the air from the airship’s destroyed section, and the Iron Falcon itself started to list badly. By some miracle, none of the burning detritus hit the one fighter plane that had survived Doc Vince’s attacks, but the pilot put so much effort into avoiding them that he neglected to pay attention to the Iron Falcon itself. The huge metal airship slammed into the plane, shattering the much smaller craft.

Doc Vince had the advantage of being further away from the Iron Falcon, but not by much. Gritting her teeth, she grabbed the control stick with both hands as she struggled to avoid getting hit by anything.

In the end, it proved impossible, even for her. Something struck the propeller, and her plane started to descend. The blonde gripped the control stick as the aircraft started to shake violently, fighting to maintain some level of control, even as she acknowledged that a relatively soft crash landing was the best she could hope for now.

/Here we go./ She told herself as her plane entered the canopy of trees that covered most of Venus.

The shaking grew worse as the plane started to plow through branches, and Doc Vince found herself blinded by the thick green leaves that were smacking against both the plane’s windshield and her face.

Then there was a great impact, and she knew no more.