by Logan Jacobs
“Okay, that is not as bad as I feared,” Grizz said as he rubbed his chin in thought. Now that we were in the gym he seemed to have calmed down quite a bit. “Let’s do a mission briefing when everyone is ready.”
“Copy that,” Artie said very formally. She was already getting into her Mission Control mode. She tapped a few buttons on the computer and there was a slight hiss in my ear. “How’s this? Can everyone hear me? The upgrade allows me to beam the comm-link directly into everyone’s nano-chip.”
“Loud and clear, Artie,” I said.
“Five by five,” PoLarr replied.
“You sound like an angel, sugar,” Aurora responded.
“Your voice is of an adequate volume in my ear canal,” Nova said to round out the affirmatives.
“Great,” Artemis bubbled, very pleased with herself, “first job as mission control, you all have Excelsior Magna-Rail Security Guard uniforms in your lockers. That is what you will be wearing for this match.”
PoLarr, Nova, Aurora and I made our way to the locker room and opened our respective lockers. The uniform inside was pretty plain. A light gray, long-sleeved shirt, that was somewhat form fitting, dark gray BDU style trousers, and a short-waisted dark gray jacket. Once everything was on, I glanced at myself in the mirror and I looked like a cross between an armored car security guard and a rent-a-cop. There was also a Sam Brown style utility belt with a sleek, tactically modified pistol in the holster.
Once everyone was dressed, we met back out near the Command Center. Well, everyone but Aurora.
“Where is Ms. Starfall?” Grizz asked as he gave us all the once over.
“I am not coming out there like this!” She yelled from behind the locker room wall. “The outfit is ridiculous. And hideous.”
“Um, we’re all wearing it,” I said as I smoothed out some of the wrinkles.
“You all are used to wearing horrible looking attire that makes you look ridiculous,” she grumbled the backhanded compliment. “I am not.”
“Aurora!” Gizz bellowed. “You need to put your ego aside and join us.”
“Fine,” she said, none too happy about it and walked from around the locker room wall. I expected her clothes not to fit, or for there to be some missing article, but she looked just like the rest of us. She kept yanking on the shirt and tugging on the jacket. “It is so hot with so much of my skin covered. How do you all survive like this?”
“The struggle is real, Aurora, very real,” I joked. I had to admit that seeing the normally incredibly cock-sure seductress uncomfortable was kind of a treat.
“Why have we all been given stun pistols?” PoLarr asked as she took the gun out of her holster and examined it. “I was hoping to take my Equalizers.”
“Since this is a non-lethal match,” Artemis explained, “everyone has stun pistols. You will also be teleported out if say, you fall off the train and are going to fall to your death. All your mods and upgrades have been boosted to Platinum level if that helps.”
“It does,” PoLarr said, disappointed. “I guess a TecRev H-9 is better than nothing. Each power pack, of which we have four plus one in the pistol, is good for fifteen shots. Getting hit will short-circuit the opponent's central nervous system for ten to twenty minutes depending on their physiology.”
“Nice, PoLarr,” Artie said cheerfully. “Sweet weapons briefing.”
“Yes, thank you, PoLarr,” Grizz said. “Let us continue with the mission rundown, Artemis.”
“Right--”
“All champion’s to your teleportation tubes immediately,” the female announcer voice said over the loudspeakers as a red light began to strobe throughout the gym. “The next match will begin in ninety seconds.”
“Wait, what?” I said, surprised. “I thought we had like another two hours?”
“Poop on a roof!” Artemis exclaimed, just as surprised. “They must have moved it up to keep us on our toes.”
“Can they do that?” I asked. My alliance mates and I began to walk over toward the large tubes at one end of our gym. They were made out of clear cellophane-like plastic and were how we “jumped” into whatever twisted landscape where everyone and everything usually tried to kill us. As we stood next to our respective tubes, a six-foot tall opening seemed to melt into the plastic as if someone had held a match to it.
“It is the Aetherons, they can do whatever they blasted well please,” Grizz barked. He was as surprised and pissed off as we were. “What have I said? The only thing you can count on in the Crucible of Carnage is that you cannot count on anything. Now, go and give them hell.”
“And then some, Grizz,” I nodded at my trainer. He stood before us with his hands on his hips, his chest rose and fell as he took deep breaths and met each one of our eyes in turn with a small nod of his head. For all his bluster, and gruff exterior, I know having to watch us jump into danger without there being a single thing he could do to help was hard on him. As scary as it was to be the one always in danger, I don’t know how I would stay sane if I had to watch everyone I cared about going to almost certain doom.
Artie came up to me just before the doorway melted back into place. This was the hardest part of any match. The goodbye. Would it be our last? Not if I could help it.
“Come on, guys,” I quipped. “Why so glum? At least we know nobody is going to die, right?”
“Noun,” Artie said and kissed me. I inhaled the fresh, clean scent of her hair which still smelled of shampoo. “Talk to you in a few.”
Artemis backed out of the tube and the opening closed.
“Let’s go kick some ass,” I growled from deep down in my chest as the first tingles of adrenaline and anticipation raced through my blood.
A second later I was bathed in swirling, multi-colored light, and my atoms were ripped apart and beamed to the arena.
In a nano-second blink of a mat-trans eye, my particles reformed and I found myself standing in a train car that rocketed down the tracks at close to five-hundred miles an hour.
The car rocked back and forth gently like we were on a boat. I looked around as I wiped the cobwebs of the mat-trans from my brain. The inside of my head felt like scrambled eggs, but it was a familiar sensation. It usually took ten or twenty seconds to collect myself after a jump. Having every molecule of your body ripped apart and then glued back together tended to have that effect on me. I was in one of the cargo train cars. Crates lined the gray titanium walls and ran in a line down the center of the fifty foot long by twenty-foot wide car.
“Team Havak, do you copy?” Artemis’ voice asked across the comm-link. It felt strange to have her sound so close. “Everyone sound off with your location.”
“Nova, fuel tanker just behind the engine car,” I heard Nova say as loud and clear as if she were standing next to me.
“Aurora here, sugar,” Aurora sounded off. “I believe I’m standing right next to the Vexar Power Cores. A whole bunch of tiny little cylinders that glow blood red that are stacked in a big, clear glass, refrigerator looking box.”
“PoLarr,” the Val’Keeyre grunted through the comm. “I’m in some kind of guard stand that is in the space between cars. We are going very fast.”
“Havak here,” I said and looked closer at one of the crates. “Cargo car full of medical supplies.”
“Okay,” Artemis said. I could almost see her as she sat at the Command Center in the gym as she absently bit her lip. Her brain running at a million light-years a second. “There you all are. I have all your signals now.”
“What’s the plan, boss lady?” I said as I walked to the back of the train car to look through the small, oval-shaped window in the door that led to yet another train car.
“Oh, I kinda like that,” Artemis bubbled and then got right back to business. “Nova, take a position in the engine room. In my simulations that is where the other team concentrated their attack over seventy-five percent of the time.”
“When the heck did you run simulations?” I asked. Other than my
little excursion with the POTUS we’d all been together for the better part of the last three days.
“Um, constantly, in my brain,” Artie answered with a definite “no, duh” tone.
“How many simulations did you run?” I followed up and looked out the tiny window. From my angle, all I could make out was the next car over as it rocked gently from side to side.
“Two hundred fifty-four thousand six hundred and two times,” she replied.
“Jesus,” I exclaimed. Sometimes I forgot that inside her sexy exterior was a highly complex computer algorithm. Her IQ was probably like three hundred or something stupidly high.
“I know, I should have done more,” she chided herself. “Can’t get that mouthwash back in the bottle, though. Come on guys, the clock is ticking, and we don’t know when Hann-Abel is going to strike. You all need to get to your positions.”
“Which are where, again, sugar?” Aurora drawled in my ear.
“Actually, Aurora, you’re perfect,” Artie responded. “Find a good position and then veil yourself.”
“Oh, wonderful,” Aurora said with delight. “I do love lying in wait, ready to pounce when prey arrives.”
“Okay, that was disturbing,” I mumbled.
“Marc, you need to head toward the caboose,” Artemis asserted. “You can watch the rear.”
“Yay, my favorite,” I giggled into the comm despite myself. “I’d watch your rear all day long, Artemis.”
“You know the rest of us can hear you, Marc,” Nova said with what I was sure was one of her patented eye-rolls.
“Yes,” I answered with a big grin. “I also enjoy watching theirs too.”
“Let’s focus here, guys,” Artemis said sternly. “PoLarr, you’re roughly at the halfway point of the train. Keep your position there. You should have a good vantage point from there for any potential aerial attack.”
“Affirmative,” PoLarr responded. “Stay frosty everyone.”
“At the train’s current speed you will pull into the next station in exactly thirty-two minutes,” Artemis said. “That will effectively end the match. If Hann-Abel hasn’t attacked before then, we win by default.”
“Let’s hope he forgot,” I threw out as I opened the door of the train car.
Wind buffeted me immediately and almost took my breath away. The rush of the train was like a roar in my ears as I stepped out onto the tiny walkway that was over the mechanical coupling between the cars. A magnificent mountain landscape flashed by in a green tree and gray rock blur. The train wound down through the mountains like a lazy snake. I looked down and saw a blue glow from the undercarriage. Thousands of powerful electromagnets propelled the locomotive down the tracks. Without the friction of wheels on a thin steel track, the train could move almost impossibly fast and handle twists and turns that no train on Earth would ever dream of navigating.
While not freezing, the wind outside the car had bite, and I quickly opened the next door and walked inside the connecting train car.
What I saw inside stopped me dead in my tracks.
It wasn’t another cargo car.
This train car was full of people. At least fifty olive-green skinned humanoid aliens huddled together on the floor of the car. They were dressed in dirty and torn clothes that were little more than rags and were thin and malnourished. Men, women, and children all looked up at me with desperate, fear-filled eyes.
“Oh my god,” I whispered. The aliens shrunk from my presence like beaten dogs. “Um, Artemis, we have a problem here.”
“What?” She responded immediately.
“There are people here,” was all I could think to say.
“What?” She repeated incredulously. “Hold on, I’m going to tap into your Occuhancers. Just need to reroute the feed… Oh my god.”
“Yeah, I already said that,” I said. “What the hell is going on? This wasn’t in any of the briefings we went over.”
“I know, I know,” Artie said, and I could hear her fingers as they flew over her keyboard. “Jesus. These are Samarian refugees. The planet where they mine the material for the Vexar Power Cores has been in the middle of a brutal civil war for the last two years. These people have been caught in the middle.”
“But, they’re just constructs, right?” I asked breathlessly.
“No, Marc, they are not,” Artemis whispered. “This match isn’t a construct. You were teleported to the planet Vexar. Those people are as real as you and I.”
I looked down at the desperate, scared faces that stared up at me. They had the hollowed out look of those who had lost everything to a war they did not fight. Casualties in other peoples bloodshed.
“Balls,” I said.
And then the train was rocked by a giant explosion and everything went black as screams filled the air.
Chapter Fourteen
Red emergency lights illuminated the train car making the faces of the refugees look like skull apparitions. People cried in fear.
“Hey, hey,” I said gently. “It’s going to be okay. I’m not going to hurt you.”
They just stared back with unbelieving eyes. They’d probably heard that a lot right before they were subsequently terrorized.
“Artie?” I called into the comm and picked my way across the refugee littered floor of the train toward the other door. “What the fuck is going on? What was that?”
“Incoming,” she said and there was a blast of static. “...they’ve… communications… getting… online…”
“Shit!” I cursed, opened the train door, and I stepped out into the whipping wind. The next car was the caboose. I rushed into it on my way to the very back of the train. “Nova? Aurora? PoLarr? Does anyone ready me?”
Nothing but static answered me. They must have figured out a way to jam the comm-link signal.
I opened the caboose door and stepped out onto the metal platform and stared into the cannons of a gunship. It looked like a mix of V-22 Osprey VSTOL aircraft and the Quinn Jet from Avengers. With very big guns that were pointed right at me.
The dark green skinned amphibian pilot, Muerdock sat at the controls. Her six arms moved over the crafts controls effortlessly. She smiled and waved at me.
I waved in reply and then dove back through the door into the caboose. I rolled immediately and lashed out with my foot to close the door just as a blue blast of energy slammed into the metal.
Even though I knew this was a non-lethal round, I really did not want to find out how it felt to get hit with a howitzer blast of stun energy. I grabbed my H-9 pistol from its holster as I got to my feet. The sights came up in front of my face on instinct, and I was going to shoot through the window at the aircraft that just hovered behind the train like a silent predator. Then I looked down at the size of the gun versus the eight-inch diameter cannons under the cockpit.
“Show off,” I said to Muerdock despite the fact that she couldn’t hear me.
The static in my ear let me know that comms were still down for the time being, which meant that I needed to get visuals on my teammates.
I ran back through the caboose and out the door. There was a small ladder that ran up to the roof next to the door. With a grunt, I swung out onto it and climbed up.
The slipstream nearly knocked me off as soon as I shoved my head over the edge of the car. My eyes watered immediately and blurred my vision. The Occuhancers worked overtime to correct for the wind, which made it a little better, but everything still had a rough edge.
I glanced back and, to my surprise, I couldn’t see the gunship behind the caboose. I leaned up further and sure enough, it was still there. It just hovered inches from the ground so that it couldn’t be seen unless you had a high enough angle. Muerdock was one hell of a fucking pilot to keep the craft that close to the deck at five hundred miles per hour as the train made S shapes down the mountain.
With almost Herculean effort I turned my head back into the wind, my eyes closed to slits. My vision was shit, but I was still able to make out the brigh
t blue angel wing exhaust of PoLarr’s jetpack. She hovered twenty feet over the roof three car lengths in front of me, but her attention was on the front of the train where a thick plume of smoke streamed from the engine car.
“PoLarr!” I shouted in vain. There was no way she’d be able to hear me over the roar of the wind without our comms. I had to figure out some way to get her attention.
I pulled my H-9 and fired off a blast that shot past her shoulder. She spun with her own stun gun in her hand. Her reflexes were the best in the galaxy because once she registered that it was me she holstered the gun and flared her wings. In a blink, she’d reached my position and expertly flew down into the space between the cars.
“You are very lucky I didn’t shoot you,” she yelled to be heard over the rush of wind.
“So are you,” I yelled back. “That shot was supposed to go way wide. This train is a bitch and a half.”
“Word,” she confirmed. “Do you know what the fuck is going on?”
“Um, we’re being attacked?”
“Havak, now is not the time for jokes,” she said sternly. Warrior elite PoLarr was in the building, apparently.
“No, the only thing I know is that there is a mean looking gunship hanging out behind the train,” I told her. “My guess is that it’s waiting back there until they secure the power cores and then they are going to use the ship to haul them away.”
“Probably,” she nodded. I could see the wheels spinning in her brain. “Any idea what is up with our comms?”
“I assume that they are somehow blocking the transmissions,” I guessed.
“Any way I can see that gunship?” PoLarr asked.
“Yeah, follow me,” I said and beckoned her to follow me into the caboose. “Stay low so that six-armed frog can’t see us.”
I opened the door back into the caboose and we hunkered down low until we got to the little side windows that flanked the back door. I motioned with my head that the craft was just outside. PoLarr nodded and peeked her head past the edge of the window.
A second later there was a thump-thump sound as blue energy splashed over the outside of the caboose. Shards of it blew through cracks in the doorframe and shattered the window that PoLarr had just been looking through. We ducked down as the glass sprayed out over us. Not needing any further encouragement we made our back to the other door and out into the relative safety of the space between the cars.