“Our home has been poisoned by the invaders from Rico. Salvation can no longer hold her own in battle. Shields are reduced and our weapons systems have been fully compromised. We cannot retake the planet; there is little hope for survival.
“However, life refuses to quit. Death maybe unyielding, but life is also relentless. I consider it your duty to life to abandon ship. Mars may be an alien world, but there is an old settlement below; it may spawn life anew. We have jettisoned all supplies, rations, and equipment; it should be easy to locate these packages once planet-side.
“I know we’re only dropping you with a promise and a prayer, but it’s the best we can do at this point. We, the remaining Watchmen of earth, plan to take this battle to our enemy. Perhaps we can bloody their nose enough to give you a chance, a new genesis. The Salvation will not survive our next move.
“Man the lifeboats. Anyone left after thirty minutes can plan to die alongside us. Thank you all for your service and devotion; may God help you all.”
***
The Watchmen stood in a half-circle around an open lifepod. They filled it with the last of the weapons and munitions they hadn’t planned on arming themselves with. Guy slapped the release and jettisoned the pod, sending it streaking towards the distant, red planet.
Dekker pulled Guy aside and handed him a data disc. “A parting gift from Doc Johnson. This’s got all the keys, codes, and file backups from Darkside Station. Since the Mechnar ships have all left, you might be able to get in there and find something you can do some damage with. I need you on this one, Guy. I need the biggest explosion you can manage. Do something to take out that alien moon!”
“It’ll be my masterpiece,” Guy grinned, despite the complaint in the pit of his gut.
Dekker walked up the ramp of the Rickshaw Crusader. Vesuvius ran past him and embraced Guy.
“Whoa,” Guy protested. “You guys are acting like we’re not gonna see each other again.”
Vesuvius squeezed even harder. “Just in case.” She turned and walked back up the Crusader’s ramp.
“Later, Red,” he said, the reality of their desperate plans hit home. Later was an unlikely event.
Dekker gave his friend a final, resolute nod, and then closed the boarding ramp.
***
Guy plugged the data disc into the proper receptacle and began scrolling through the files. He nearly jumped at the sound of another voice.
“You need help there? What are we looking for?”
“Doctor MacAllistair? I thought you went with the refugees,” Guy said.
“Refugees? Why would I do that? Dekker said this was a fight for the Watchmen. Well, I’m a Watchman, now, ain’t I?’
Guy grinned. The scientist had a point. “I’m looking for something to blow Osix up with. We’ve got some explosives here, a lot, actually, but we can’t fire them, and it has to be enough to kill that thing.”
MacAllistair sat at the neighboring terminal and joined the scanning process. Precious minutes trickled by and they hadn’t uncovered anything useful yet.
“This place is loaded with all sorts of top secret things, but nothing that will help us destroy a moon,” Guy complained.
“Other than explosives, how else can one kill a planetary body?” MacAllistair wondered aloud. “Spores? Poison? Poisonous spores?”
“Or poisonous explosives?” Guy wondered aloud. “I have an idea. SHIP, I have some coordinates for you. MacAllistair, follow me,” Guy led the Doctor to the docking bay. “Help me program these loader drones. We want them to dump their loads in the bays nearest the rear of the ship.”
Guy and MacAllistair activated the small fleet of mechanical units and laid in the retrieval parameters. They’d just finished programming the units as the Salvation slowed to a crawl, arriving at their destination under SHIP’s guidance.
The vessel stopped at the edge of a deep-space quarantine zone beyond the moon. The Gehenna Waypoint held geostationary orbit with Earth; it had become a hellish, cold-storage dump zone for radioactive and unstable materials. Gehenna Waypoint was the worst sort of interplanetary trash heap where humanity had stored unstable weapons, nuclear energy and fusion experiments, and failed biological research.
Watching on closed circuit video, Guy watched the drones deposit sealed modules containing countless toxins; the containers wore the various warnings of radioactive and biological contaminants. The robotic loaders dropped their cargo with cold indifference. Old warheads and reactor cores lay strewn across the floor as if they were carelessly tossed children’s’ toys.
MacAllistair joined Guy at the monitor and watched the progress. The drones worked quickly and efficiently, pulling the worst remnants of the last three-hundred years into the cargo bays. Two mechanized units worked in tandem to drag aboard the earliest unsuccessful models of a thumper drive system: an FTL engine that initiated Faster Than Light travel through contained and directed nuclear fusion detonations. The initial prototypes killed thousands before suitable fail-safes had been developed to contain failed fusion reactions and safely implode them without consequence. The current models, such as those on the Salvation, were hardwired against such failures.
Guy nodded, pleased with the progress. “Doctor, you’re not going to like what comes next.”
“How so?”
Guy placed Dekker’s tome, the sacred text that the order had protected for thousands of years, into MacAllistair’s hands. “Hold this.”
MacAllistair hugged it to his chest. Guy grabbed him suddenly and forced him through the door of the nearest escape pod. MacAllistair banged on the window while Guy sealed the door; it would stay sealed until the pod landed planet-side. “You can’t do this to me! I’m a Watchman, too!”
“Yes,” Guy replied. “After today you will be the last one. If hope exists beyond today, this will be your duty! Protect the book; share the words. It’s what Dekker would have done.”
Guy slapped the release and the shuttle shot off, bound for Mars. If any hope remained in this reality, it would land upon the red planet after a few hours. Guy didn’t know if he really believed that hope remained, but duty certainly did.
Hope or no hope, he knew what needed doing. What little time was left he dedicated to a purpose far beyond himself.
***
The Rickshaw Crusader looped far around in a wide arc. Timing was imperative to their descent. A straight flight would have been quicker by hours, but would have opened them up to attack by the arbolean ships. Their descending arc put them on an arrival course with Jerusalem as the curvature of the Earth eclipsed Osix. It left them free for atmospheric insertion before their enemies could respond.
As the clock ticked down, the restless Watchmen eagerly anticipated planet-fall. The irony didn’t escape notice: so eagerly they rushed headlong into certain death.
They’d just broken the apogee of their arc and began suiting up. Vesuvius, always favoring speed and aggression forwent heavier armor and finished quickest. She’d strapped a blaster tightly to each hip and slung on her pair of matching swords, the set Muramasa had passed to her cousin, Shin, and finally to her, the last Muramasa—the last Briggs. She reflected momentarily that being the last of something was not all that special; for all she knew she might be the last living human female on Earth.
Her mind raced with a million things; she glanced at Dekker who strapped weaponry to his body, methodically preparing for the battle. It might be the last of their moments together; if so, she wanted to tell him how she really felt. How did she really feel?
She walked over and cinched his gun belt for him, double checked the straps on his light body armor. A bandolier of canister explosives hung across his chest and she helped him throw on his dark overcoat, the duster that had always been his trademark feature.
Dekker threw his satchel over his shoulder and strapped the reliquary after that. Over the other shoulder he hung a beautiful broadsword his friends had never seen outside of Dekker’s collection of artifacts. A bri
ght jewel glowed on the pommel.
He noticed Vesuvius jealously eyeing the weapon. “It belonged to King Solomon who gave it to Benaiah when he formed the true Templar corps. The jewel came from Solomon’s ring and was rumored to have power over demons. But… how would Ezekiel put it? ‘Myths and Kabbalistic hooey?’”
Vesuvius stood on her tip-toes and kissed the tip of his ear. “We may be dead within the hour,” she whispered. “I think I might love you all the same, Dekker Knight.”
***
MacAllistair had tracked his progress as the escape pod hurtled towards the red planet. Fiddling with the systems had allowed him to pick up the transponders signals from the other lifepods. For some reason, they hadn’t descended, but hung in Mars’ orbit.
As his craft turned enough for a visual check, he watched out a glassine porthole. The elliptical edge of the world rotated into view. Light reflected off the day-side of the planet, illuminating the nearer regions, but MacAllistair couldn’t spot any life vessels.
He cross-checked the transponder reports on his scanners. The signals were there, but no pods. MacAllistair squinted, trying to make out the craft that hovered in the distance. It glowed at the rear as engines lit and it moved, coming for him.
Scanners indicated that he would pass close to another of the escape pods. A brief grating rattled from the shell of his lifeboat, like he’d briefly passed through a rain shower. He recognized it as the sound of atomized debris.
MacAllistair suddenly understood. He watched the Mechnar missile-boat as it approached fast from behind an asteroid. Mars had never been a good option; Austicon’s hunters had been secretly deployed to pick off any stragglers before the skirmish had even begun and ensure that the arboleans had no chance to impregnate the vestiges of humanity with their next generation.
The scientist clutched the book tightly. “Protect the book; share the words,” he said aloud and watched as the torpedoes streaked towards him.
Closing his eyes, he offered up a little prayer for his fellow Watchmen. The book would not survive—its message would only continue if there was a survivor and the death of his teammates meant Austicon would win. MacAllistair hoped that mere survival would be sufficient.
MacAllistair blinked against a bright light, then, the missiles struck his craft and everything ceased.
***
Dione, no longer Prognon Austicon, sat within the ancient starship submerged below the shaggy soil. This craft had been hidden for thousands of years, the remains of the arboleans’ first encounter upon Earth—an encounter that had ended badly for his former masters. Dione suspected that the ship still worked, even if it was not still structurally stable.
Eons of struggling had passed. She’d finally come into her own and transcended her earlier incarnation—finally free and imbued with superior physical form. She could not help but wonder what The Light Bringer thought of her now; would Asmodeus be jealous?
Trapped in her form of Prognon Austicon for so long, she’d not been capable of these thoughts for millennia. But now, her demonic heritage flowed strong and imbued her with power long muted by the arbolean genetic material.
Dione could read Leviathan’s mental projections—thoughts and images of the desolation on Rico and the consumption of her enemies. His thoughts pleased her and she replayed them in her mind as she climbed up to the surface. The beetles rapidly multiplied, breeding and reproducing with such rapidity that they would completely devour their foodstuff within days.
On the hillside nearby, a group of mechnar troops held down an arbolean drone as it struggled against their vice-like grips. It was the new variety of hybrid, the kind that linked body and mind to one of the black-leaved trees of Rico—this man had underwent a very similar process that the terrorist had once underwent which connected Dione to the barren tree of the Arbolean Council. Somewhere on Rico, a tree had become sentient, mobile, and experienced momentary freedom before the painful throes of death and devourment sank its teeth in via the arbophage scarabs.
The victim’s inhuman shrieks made Dione smile. Screams reached fever pitch and the victim’s appendages flailed as its body was overrun with arbophage scarabs. The hybrid’s demise would be undeterable and excruciating. It would, however, be far too quick. A handful of scarabs could chew through an entire drone’s arbolean lignins within a matter of minutes—these creatures were worse than any locust plague Dione’s enemy god could ever devise.
Dione examined a datapad she’d patched into the planet’s sensor array. Seventy percent of Earth had been exposed to the ecological weapon. She grinned again; everything she’d worked for would soon come to fruition. Everything had a contingency plan. Nothing could stop the demon avatar—Baal Dione. Humanity teetered on extinction and the Watchmen would be destroyed within the hour. The divine machine, her former home, would finally break.
She shook her fist at the sky in defiance. Not even God could stop her now, she issued the bold challenge, and the rage of the Arbolean Council was laughable.
Suddenly, the ground quaked, rocking her and shaking her footing. The air crackled with raw kinetic power. Booms like thunderclaps rent the sky and the crust moaned. Vibrations shook the gravel, jostling it about.
Looking to the horizon, Dione spotted the source. Osix’s massive tendrils had latched onto Earth like stingers from an angry jellyfish. The grappler vines threatened to break the world apart. For this, Dione had no contingency. The message was clear. “If we can’t have the planet and its people, then we will destroy it.”
New tentacles broke through the atmosphere; tearing up the sky, they stirred volatile thunderheads. Those not long enough to reach the surface dangled and hung ominous in the sky. The arbophage insects would eventually eat through even those enormous tendrils, but not before Osix ripped Asia apart. If mechnar units were capable of fear, they might have lost heart—but their programming prohibited it.
Dione clambered into a small speeder craft. She had guests to greet at Jerusalem; all else were mere distractions.
The quaking continued as Dione laughed at the moon’s futile attempt to rob the demon of her victory. “I am ageless!” she screamed. “I am deathless! You only hasten my victory, you fools. It doesn’t matter if I kill my prey at Jerusalem or in the cold of space; the Watchmen will perish—the Holy Words silenced, and then—then God will die!”
***
Salvation’s engines pushed hard. Already weakened from the previous battle, they groaned as Guy ran the engines harder than they were built for. He had to overdrive them in order to push the enormous Class G to the speeds he needed. The old thumper engines in his hold had given him the idea. He could push the ship to the speed he needed by disabling the safeguards that protected each system from catastrophic failure.
Disengaging the precautions, he’d successfully gotten one of three forward railguns online. Guy didn’t know if it would fire or tear off the front end of the massive vessel. As a precaution he’d moved to the rear engine room and utilized SHIP for all guidance and piloting. He didn’t know how to drive a capital ship anyway—but he knew how to make a big bang, and that was the plan.
He saw Osix loom large on the screen. The living moon grappled with Earth and clung to her, threatening to rip the planetary crust wide open. Osix’s backside was left exposed where the former mining colony was once located. Even at this distance Guy could see the canyon Dekker had split open when he’d fired a double-load into the planet, busting it open.
Guy planned on jamming the Salvation directly into the schism with all speed possible, firing the railgun at close range. If he was lucky, he’d split the moon with the force of his impact and the railgun’s deep impact. If he was even luckier, he’d survive at the rear of the ship where he’d used the foaming shots from his phlogiston gun to embed a lifepod between the engine drive turbines. If his luck failed, the impact would kill him and the bays he’d rigged to open would still unleash all manner of pestilent and biological terrors on the living moon, poison
ing her. Regardless, he would kill this moon.
“SHIP. Engine status?”
“Engine output at one hundred twenty-three percent of maximum safe output levels. Velocity is one hundred seven percent typical max speed, non FTL,” SHIP stated in a flat, mechanical voice.
Guy ignored the caution message SHIP automatically followed the report up with. A rolling audio loop played every fifteen seconds with the same warning message due to the disabled fail-safes. He learned to tune out the annoyance after the first couple minutes.
Scanners showed two Valkyrie units angling for an intercept course as the moon loomed ever closer. He couldn’t risk losing any speed in his desperate gamble.
“SHIP! Can we pour any more speed into the engines?”
“An additional increase of three percent is possible,” SHIP responded. “Increase of two percent will incite a chain reaction and detonate our fuel cells within an approximated thirty seconds. Warning—precautionary systems have been compromised. Imminent danger certain.”
“Then give me one percent!” Guy had hoped for even more speed—this would be too little. “Shield status, SHIP!” he demanded.
“Thirty percent strength, evenly distributed.” The systems had been drained when he redirected the bulk of the energy to the engines. SHIP repeated her boilerplate warning, “Warning—precautionary systems have been compromised. Imminent danger certain”
There was no indecision, merely a lack of options. Guy bit his lip and watched the first Valkyrie draw close. The grappler cord shot out and seized the front of the Salvation. At full speed, the smaller Valkyrie couldn’t stop the momentum but veered the Salvation off course.
“SHIP! Cut starboard engines to forty percent!” Guy felt the immediate shift underfoot as the two tethered ships began a circular spin, connected at the bow by the prehensile cord.
Guy anxiously double checked the systems and prayed that the sudden change of plans would succeed. As the two ships hurtled towards Osix in their wild spin, the second Valkyrie sped to her sister’s aid.
The Last Watchmen Page 26