Ruins of the Galaxy Box Set: Books 1-6

by Chaney, J. N.

  Awen blinked, stretched her neck and arms, and looked around at the green jungle that covered every surface. Gone were the details of the city streets, buildings, and windows. Gone were the doorways, facades, and meandering hallways. Instead, they were standing in the ruins of some ancient temple square, surrounded by monolithic shrines to cosmic gods.

  The three of them had traveled as high as was possible in Itheliana. The far horizon, which she could see between gaps in the buildings, showed alternating patches of blues and greens, signaling vast oceans and wide stretches of lush terrain. All of it was set beneath the now-fading light of a purple sky. She had to admit that even outside of the Unity, this place was spellbinding.

  As Awen turned back to examine the grand entrance of the library, she noticed TO-96’s holo-projection displaying another inscription across a broad arch. “More text?” Awen asked, pointing toward the Novian script.

  “Yes, Awen. It reads, ‘The temple of all we’ve gained, and the cost of all we’ve left behind.’”

  Ezo let out a grunt. “Seems a little ominous if you ask Ezo.”

  “Anything that involves a cost is ominous-sounding to you, sir.”

  Ezo snorted. “You cost me a lot, Ninety-Six. Maybe I’ll trade you in after this.”

  The bot pulled back. “I would like to think that I have more than made up for my compositional expenses, sir.”

  “Some days, I wonder.”

  Awen almost laughed at the exchange, but the weight of the moment kept her focused. “Shall we go in, gentlemen?” She tried to step toward the front doors, but her feet suddenly held fast to the moss-covered ground. She looked down, thinking a vine had ensnared her, but her boots were clear. It was as if something had welded her feet to the ground. She tried budging them again but to no avail.

  Awen glanced at Ezo. To her surprise, he was looking down at his feet too. “Ezo can’t move his legs,” he said, his voice rising in panic.

  “Neither can I,” Awen replied.

  TO-96 looked between them. “I see nothing which would indicate our immobilization,” he offered, pointing to his own legs, “but I am stuck as well.”

  Awen’s stomach caught in her throat. “That’s because it’s not something physical.”

  An all-too-familiar male voice boomed from across the plaza behind them. “Well deduced, young Luma.”

  Awen twisted around. “No!” she blurted.

  So-Elku stood with his head bowed and his eyes closed. Beside him were two other senior elders, their hands tucked in the sleeves of their red-and-black robes. So-Elku slowly raised his head and opened his eyes.

  “No!” Awen said again as her chest tightened. “How are you here? That’s—it’s not possible!”

  “Nothing’s impossible, Awen,” the Luma master replied. “Not in the Unity. You of all people should know that.”

  “I am sorry to interrupt, Awen, but does this man pose an imminent threat to you?” TO-96 asked.

  “Yes!” Awen yelled more loudly than she intended. She could see Ezo struggling to bring up one of the blasters draped over his shoulders. “Very much, yes, Ninety-Six!”

  “Very well.” The bot spun his torso one hundred eighty degrees, and he raised his arm. Before Awen could blink from the blasts, a cluster of microrockets leaped from behind his wrist. The munitions crossed the square and exploded in a sharp burst of red-and-orange fire. Ezo was also able to fire several bursts of blue blaster bolts in the same direction. The concussion blew Awen’s braid off her shoulder and peppered her skin with debris. She lowered her arm from over her eyes to see the smoke clear. So-Elku was still standing, unmoved.

  “Well, that was highly ineffective,” TO-96 said as he examined his forearm.

  “It’s not your fault,” Awen said.

  She was incredulous now. So-Elku must have been the one tracking Geronimo since Plumeria. But they’d switched ships.

  “How did you find us?” she asked the traitor.

  “Yes,” a voice said from another corner of the square. “How did you find them, So-Elku?”

  Awen turned to see an older bald man, dressed in black, stepping into the open. He was flanked on both sides by two dozen troopers in black armor, blasters raised.

  “Kane,” So-Elku spat. “How nice of you to provide those coordinates you promised.”

  “Well, it seems you didn’t need them after all,” the man in black said, motioning for his troopers to fan out.

  Wait, so… So-Elku wasn’t tracking us, but this man was? Or, maybe they’ve been working together.

  Suddenly, Awen felt So-Elku’s grip loosen around her feet. She closed her eyes and entered the Unity. Sure enough, the Luma master had diverted his attention to this new man. This new threat. The man called Kane.

  “I thought we had a deal,” So-Elku replied. “But I’m beginning to wonder if that was ever your intent.”

  “Perhaps if you had been more patient, you—”

  “You would have looted the place yourself and left me with nothing,” the Luma master spat.

  “Conjecture,” Kane said with a flick of his hand.

  “And in exchange for what?” So-Elku demanded. “My betrayal of the entire order?”

  “Come now, I think you did that a long time ago, So-Elku,” Kane replied.

  Awen opened her eyes and noticed Kane’s troopers spreading around the perimeter. She looked at Ezo and then TO-96. “Hey,” she whispered. “Let’s make a break for it. Inside the library. You ready?”

  “Ezo still can’t move his feet,” Ezo said.

  “You will.” Awen closed her eyes and reached for Ezo’s legs. She gently moved So-Elku’s power aside. She did the same for TO-96 and then herself. The master was clearly focused on Kane and his men. Awen noticed that the entire plaza’s life force had changed from peaceful green, pink, and white to angry red and white hues. Whatever was about to happen wasn’t good.

  “Now!” Awen shouted.

  At that moment, the first barrage of blaster fire lit up the square like a fireworks display.

  35

  Magnus was off and running before he had time to see what the Jujari would do. Hopefully, their drunken stupor would lessen their reaction time, and with any luck, Magnus could get to Piper first. Why the girl had screamed he didn’t know, but he feared the obvious: they’d been discovered. Or worse.

  With his MAR30 back in his hand, Magnus pumped his legs, brushing past fabric walls and beating a line toward the skiff on the outskirts of town. He could hear the Jujari barking orders and saw several new torchlights flicker to life around the tents. Magnus sprinted across the first street and was about to cross the next when he slammed into a Jujari warrior coming out of a tent. Magnus toppled over the mutt, and both rolled to a stop in the dust.

  It was the sleeping sentry from earlier. Magnus noted the sniper blaster in his paw and the binoculars around his neck. The beast seemed just as surprised as Magnus. His eyes widened in disbelief and then suddenly narrowed to those of a hunter. But before the warrior could even raise his blaster, Magnus fired a short burst of blaster bolts under the Jujari’s chin from his MAR30. The point-blank rounds severed the brainstem and produced a shower of gore that sprayed onto the tent fabric nearest them. But it also gave away Magnus’s position. If the revelers weren’t roused from their campout at that point, they didn’t deserve to be among the Jujari’s warrior class.

  Back on his feet, Magnus bounded out of the settlement’s last row of tents and through the gap in the wall. He skirted the well, dashed behind the metal in the orbital-strike crater, and neared the overturned skiff where he’d left Valerie and Piper. He prayed to whatever deity was left in the galaxy, hoping the women were still there—or at least still alive if they’d been captured. He would find them, and he would save Piper.

  Magnus slowed to half pace, flicked off his safety, and stalked around the obstruction with his MAR30 pointed on target. His halo-sights were ready to acquire whatever beast stood behind this obstacle and
send them back to hell. As he rounded, he saw a pair of upraised hands. Human hands. Then another and another.

  “Don’t shoot!” whispered a familiar voice. “It’s just us.”

  Magnus lowered his weapon to see Dutch, Haney, Gilder, and Nolan hunkered behind the skiff along with Valerie and Piper.

  “Is that why you screamed?” Magnus asked Piper, running to join them.

  The little girl nodded sheepishly. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Lieutenant Magnus, sir. It was an accident. They startled me.”

  He wanted to tell her off, tell her she’d just alerted the Jujari, but he knew it was pointless. Anything short of a grasshopper would have made the poor kid scream in these conditions. He could dress down the other Marines instead, but their approach had probably been as careful as they could make it. The most important thing was that more of his people had survived the Bull Wraith, and now they needed to prepare for a fight.

  “Do you have weapons, and can you move?” he asked the newly assembled team.

  “Affirmative, LT,” Dutch said, holding up her MX13. “Thirsty, some heat exhaustion, but otherwise ready to kick some Jujari ass.”

  “Copy that,” Magnus said. “We’re looking at a bad stack-up, maybe six to one, and we’ve lost the element of surprise.” As if to reinforce his point, a few bloodcurdling howls went up from the village. The Jujari were mustering. “You’re each going to have a field of fire. Dutch, I want you here in the center with the Stones. Nothing gets to these civilians, copy?”

  “Copy.”

  “Gilder and Haney.” Magnus pointed to their far left. “I want you behind that boulder to cover any attempts to flank us. Nolan, I want you to the right, behind that half wall, same thing.” Each of them assented and prepared to break. “I’m on point behind that obstruction,” he added, indicating the metal heap in the shallow crater. “Nobody—and I mean nobody—shoot me, copy?”

  “We won’t let you down, sir,” Dutch said.

  “What about me, Lieutenant?” Valerie asked.

  Magnus eyed her. “Can you shoot, Mrs. Stone?”

  “I know my way around that MZ25 in your chest plate well enough.”

  She seemed confident, and Magnus didn’t have time to argue. If they were all going to die, each of them deserved to go out with some measure of dignity. He pulled his Z from its holster, flipped it around, and handed it to her. Valerie grabbed it and pulled her dress off her leg as she assumed a shooting stance. She checked the magazine and charged the weapon. Then she selected the single-shot mode with her thumb, pressed the Z out from her chest with a nearly perfect two-handed grip, and aimed at something in the distance.

  Satisfied, she returned the weapon to low-ready position, double-checked that the safety was still on, and looked at Magnus. “I’ll make these Jujari work for every meter they want to gain on us.”

  If Magnus had had the time, he would have left his jaw on the sand. Instead, he closed his mouth and charged his weapon. “Listen up, everyone. This is about to become a danger area. You wait for me to fire the first round. Then pick your targets. Squeeze, don’t jerk. Stay in your assigned fields of fire. And for the love of the galaxy, don’t shoot your point man. OTF.”

  “OTF,” the Marines replied.

  The cobbled-together fire team broke for their respective positions, and Magnus raced out to the front of the line. He didn’t like the odds, not one bit. But the fight’s not over till you’re dead, and you have a lot of blaster bolts to burn before then.

  The Jujari snarls grew louder until Magnus was aware that the warriors had started filing out from the walls and into the open. He selected wide displacement on his MAR30, knowing he’d only get one chance to use it to the greatest effect, and brought the weapon to bear around the edge of his cover. He flicked off the safety. No less than eight Jujari warriors with blasters extended moved toward him, completely unaware of what was about to happen. He’d hoped for more, but eight was what the dealer dealt.

  Magnus squeezed the trigger and absorbed the recoil. A wide blast of blue light swept across the sand, lighting up the wall and tents beyond like a bolt of lightning. Jujari bodies flew back, their blasters and swords blown out of their hands. The report was deafening and succeeded in disorienting the rest of the enemy.

  All at once, the night air was on fire with blaster bolts, the first volley coming from over Magnus’s shoulders as Dutch and Valerie unloaded on three Jujari who were just outside the blast radius of Magnus’s first shot. Next came bursts from Nolan on the right, followed by Gilder and Haney on the far left.

  Magnus selected the MAR30’s high-frequency setting and used his holo-sights to zero in on two Jujari who’d taken cover behind the small well. He squeezed off two bursts and watched as the dogs fell backward, one spinning from a strike to the shoulder. Their hulking bodies were ill covered and exposed, making them easy targets.

  Nolan picked off one more Jujari who was ducking for cover. The blaster bolt from the warrant officer’s weapon caught the enemy in the soft tissue beneath his chin, snapping the beast’s head backward, feet thrown toward the sky. Nolan might have been a sailor, but the man could shoot.

  So far, by Magnus’s count, they’d taken down no more than sixteen enemy combatants in the first few seconds of the fight. As good as that was, he knew the enemy had walked into this fight blind and would regroup quickly. Magnus’s fire team’s positions were no longer secret, and the Jujari were natural hunters.

  The enemy returned fire as they found cover, some mutts dashing back into the safety of the village. Blaster rounds seared the air above and beside Magnus; he could see his other team members being pinned down behind cover as well. This was a textbook return assault. The next step was for the enemy to flank their positions under suppressive fire. Which was exactly why Magnus wanted to be forward of their line.

  He looked right and left to see which side would send scouts first. He spotted two enemies to the left. Gilder and Haney were pinned down and would be easy targets if they didn’t spot the enemy. Magnus sighted in the beasts and fired four bursts. The staccato groupings peppered the Jujari, striking legs and arms and catching the far one in the head. The bodies tumbled and sent up a plume of sand and blood. Magnus looked over his shoulder in time to see another warrior advancing along the right flank. He swung his weapon around, sighted in the Jujari headed toward Nolan, and squeezed. The burst formed a tight grouping on the combatant’s bicep and drilled sideways out the other shoulder, searing both the lungs and heart.

  Magnus pressed his back up against his cover and paused long enough to see the energy indicator on his MAR30 replenish, ready for another big draw. That was when he felt something bump against the other side of the metal heap. The enemy. He could hear Jujari cackling to one another. They were going to try to jump him.

  He selected Distortion on his weapon and heard the side mag plates spring outward. The helmet’s AI made this sort of shot so much easier; without it, Magnus was only using the holo-sights along with his best guess. Still, a good guess is better than the shot you never take. He stepped away from the metal heap, turned toward it, and squeezed the trigger.

  The distortion field the MAR30 produced was not visible to the naked eye. Instead, it reached through the inanimate metal and found the Jujari’s living matter on the other side. In less than a second, the wave was separating molecules, bursting blood vessels, severing nerves, and disrupting tissue. Magnus heard the Jujari howling as their bodies disintegrated in what was arguably the most painful death possible.

  When the round was spent, Magnus turned back to cover and toggled the weapon to High Frequency. He noticed that Dutch’s skiff had absorbed so much blaster fire that it was glowing orange from the heat. Likewise, Gilder and Haney’s boulder was red and getting chewed apart. Nolan’s cover wasn’t much better.

  Magnus realized that if the Jujari couldn’t outflank them, they were going to try to flush them into the open by concentrating fire on their protection. It was a brutal strat
egy and a costly one in terms of munitions but effective nonetheless. If Magnus’s team didn’t have cover, it didn’t matter how destructive his MAR30 was; there was no way he could protect them all.

  Magnus chanced two more glances downrange toward the tents, but the blaster fire was growing so steady that he risked being picked off. The angles of attack were also changing, which meant the enemy was taking cover in the town and spreading out. Magnus cursed and cursed again. There were too many, and they were outmaneuvering Magnus’s unit.

  Someone screamed. Magnus looked over and saw Gilder drop to the ground. Haney was on him instantly. Nothing like getting shot next to a medic. Gilder was still in the fight, however, because he was swearing at Haney to get off him and tried to raise his MX13 around the boulder. That’s how we take it. OTF. Magnus peeked around the corner of his emplacement to pick off an enemy.

  Magnus noticed three warriors trying to advance toward Nolan again. The warrant officer was lying on his belly now, trying to stay as low as possible under the withering assault. Magnus suddenly wondered if maybe he should have taken the right flank instead; it had the weakest cover. Consciously putting Marines in harm’s way was the worst part of being a commanding officer. It was the part of the job no one ever told you about, recruiters never warned you about, and your family never asked you about. It was also something you tried to forget but couldn’t.

  Magnus removed his remaining frag, pressed the one-second timer with his thumb, and pitched the ordnance at the advancing Jujaris’ heads. As soon as the grenade left his hand, Magnus dropped to the ground. A beat later, the frag exploded, drilling down on the enemies with a barrage of superheated metal and razor-edged ceramics. The beasts were thrown to the ground from the blast as their bones shattered under the impact.