“What happened?” I asked.
Kaya smiled down at me, “You killed the Overseer and probably saved my life. I don’t know why, but phase fire didn’t do a thing against her. Well so much for taking her prisoner.”
“I did what?!”
“Do you think you can get up? It’s time for us to make an exit,” she said kissing my hand and smiling fondly.
I groaned and tried to push myself up, but howled in agony and fell back to the ground as my right arm and shoulder flared with sharp unbearable pain. I gritted my teeth and tucked my fractured appendage against my chest–which brought further flashes of pain–then climbed to my feet. My whole body was throbbing and there didn’t seem to be a single square inch that wasn’t hurting. It really was a wonder I hadn’t broken more bones. The Overseer had been moving at inhuman speeds and our collision should have resulted in much more severe injuries on my end.
I glanced over to my side where the Jahal’s body rested and saw that the table leg had been thrust cleanly through her chest and I shuddered at the sight of all the blood. I looked down at my chest and hands and shuddered anew, much of the Overseer’s blood was all over me. The table leg had made a much better weapon than I’d expected and I wondered if she had been moving any more slowly if my weapon would have been nearly as effective. Then there was the question of her resistance to phase pistols, it seemed so strange that she’d be able to shrug off energy weapon blasts, but not a simple broken-off piece of wood.
Amid all the chaos only one of the Overseer’s personal slaves survived the attack, she was in the corner curled up in a fetal position and no matter how much Kaya’s group of rebel’s tried to coax her she wouldn’t move.
“Damn crouchers,” one of the rebels growled stepping away from the woman in disgust. A croucher was a slang term for a human slave that eagerly served the Qharr because it was said they always waited in a crouched position, ready to serve. I didn’t blame him for using the term, there were few things I disliked more than a croucher. Of course, just a few days ago those same rebels would probably have labeled me one as well even though nothing would have been further from the truth.
Kaya turned to look in the direction of the hysterical slave and planted her hands on her hips. “Leave her, if we bring her along she’ll be a liability and the longer we stay the more likely we’re going to get caught.”
I grabbed Kaya’s shoulder with my left hand and spun her around, “Just where do you think we can go?! The compound is heavily guarded we can’t just waltz out of here!”
Kaya grinned, patted me on the cheek then turned away and started walking toward the set of doors that led out. “Relax Jellfree, we’ve got it covered. Come on, it’s time for us to get going.”
“SHIT!” Kaya yelled and jumped back, a moment later, as a bolt of phase energy splashed against the wall in the space she had just vacated.
I pressed my injured arm against my chest, raised the phase pistol in my other hand and with slow movements peaked around the corner. A half a dozen guards were blocking our path out and I mouthed a dozen of my more choice curses before turning back to Kaya.
“What do we do?” I mouthed the words not daring to utter them out load.
Kaya pecked me lightly on the lips then raised her phase pistol, dove around the corner firing blindly and yelling at the top of her lungs. Jaysen, stared at me with wide unblinking eyes, took in a deep breath, shrugged and dove after her. I watched in utter disbelief as every single one of the rebels went tearing with reckless disregard around the corner after her.
“They’re all nuts it’s the only explanation!” I muttered under my breath, hesitated for just a moment then threw my body into the foray and prepared myself for a fight only to find that the Qharr had already been taken care of.
After, several minutes of sneaking and fighting our ways through the corridors of the compound we found our way outside where the Qharr Jadarr-class craft loomed above us. I swallowed hard as I looked up at the cursed thing. Though a mere transport ship the vessel had the look of a carnivorous beast. At any moment I half expect the fearsome thing to jump out at me and swallow me whole. Like every other Qharr vessel the ship had a streamlined design that from a distance gave it the look of a gigantic insect. When you got closer you could make out the mechanical components that gave the ship away for what it truly was. This particular ship was the Overseer’s personal transport and it was more than large enough for a group our size, but that didn’t matter because we’d never be able to use it.
“You can’t be serious!” I rounded on Kaya who was staring up at the ship with a smirk on her face and though she’d never stated her intensions I knew that look on her face well enough to guess at them.
“Why not?” she replied folding her arms across her chest and staring at me between pursed lips.
“You want to steal the Overseer’s ship! Everyone knows that Qharr technology is keyed to their physiology. It won’t allow for a human or any other species to use it!”
“Jellfree, this isn’t our first rodeo…” she muttered with a shake of her head and ran a hand across my cheek before stepping onto the ship’s ramp.
I watched her walk up the ramp and shook my head in confusion. What on Earth was a rodeo? Jaysen, scrambled up the ramp after Kaya and pulled out a handheld device that looked like that had been dug out from the trash. He lifted up a panel beside the entry-hatch and inserted a wire, fiddling around with his little computing device just a moment before the hatch slid open.
Kaya turned back to me and grinned, “See there’s nothing to it!”
I followed the remaining rebels into the ship and I fought down my sudden anxiety as I stepped inside the hatch. I had this feeling like I was about to step into the belly of the beast, and as the hatch slid shut behind me that feeling only grew more intense. A door opposite the hatch we’d just entered slid open and I scurried out of the confined space and followed Kaya and the other rebels–who took off down the corridor–to large open cabin which I assumed to be the ship’s control room.
Jaysen scurried over to a nearby control panel. “Good, good… the ship’s in standby mode. The Overseer must have planned for a short visit,” he mumbled under his breath scratching at his goatee.
“How long before we can be underway?” Kaya said taking a seat at a station a few feet away from him.
“Oh, I don’t know about five minutes, maybe.” He glanced at Kaya, frowned, and turned his attention back to the console.
“Well, now that we have a few minutes maybe someone can explain to me what the hell is going on!” I screamed suddenly feeling all my frustration and anger come to a boiling point.
Kaya eyed me and sighed, “Oh, Jellfree… There’s so much that I need to tell you, but I guess I can at least get the ball rolling.”
I stared at Kaya and shook my head she’d always had a fondness for strange expressions, but two in one day was unusual even for her. ‘It’s really not important,’ I thought irritably.
“So why exactly did you rebels come to the compound? To kidnap the overseer?”
She grinned then pursed her lips, “You call us rebels and I guess the shoe fits, but we like to think of ourselves as freedom fighters. As for our goals… Our group operated out of the compound, but when we learned the Overseer was coming we couldn’t let the opportunity pass by. If we could capture her and learn her secrets… Well, the things she could have told us would have been an incredible boon to our cause.”
“And I killed her and screwed everything up,” I muttered lowering my head in shame.
Kaya smiled sympathetically, stood up and grasping either side of my head and gently pulling it down so she could look me in the eyes, “Oh, I wouldn’t say our mission was a complete failure.”
I wanted to ask her what she meant, but whatever chance I might have had was lost when Jaysen called out. “Ready!” My teeth started to chatter as the entire ship cam
e alive and blasted into the night sky.
“Shit!” Jaysen cursed just a few minutes into our ride.
“What!?” I asked. “What is it?”
“Qharr patrol ships! They want to establish a communications link!”
“What do we do?!” someone called out, Brendon I think his name was.
Kaya turned to Jaysen, biting her lips as she gripped her hands on the consoles edge. “Any chance we can fight them off?”
“I might be able to get one or two shots off, but I can only get this thing working on auto-nav it won’t accept manual input, at least not from any of us. We won’t be able to dodge their attacks,” he said staring across at Kaya with wide eyes.
“I told you this was a bad idea!” I hissed.
“Not now Jellfree!” she responded before turning to Jaysen and saying, “Open the com line maybe we can bluff our way out of this.”
“Glark bytenk grek menall!” A gruff Qharr voice boomed over the ship’s comm system.
Kaya winced and closed her eyes then yelled back. “Tryvet venn benarr!”
“Benarr!? Golgak stemm! Beyar ghel beet amar!”
Kaya stared at me with wide-eyes as the comm line closed. “Shit! They didn’t buy it! They know about our attack on the compound!”
The ship rocked and I was thrown against a nearby panel and the strange crawling feeling on my chest exploded. The pain was excruciating I felt like I was being consumed by thousands of tiny insects. I struggled to gather air into my lungs and my whole body tingled and pulsed. A shadow seemed to fall on me as strange alien presence overwhelmed my senses.
“The inertial negator is offline!” Jaysen screamed.
I tried to brace myself to move in some way, but my body wouldn’t respond and I just flopped around on the floor. Another blast rocked the ship and I was thrown against the wall unable to brace myself against the impact. My ears were buzzing and the sound was growing more intense by the second until it was all that I could hear. Something was wrong, and I fought with every fiber of my being to stay awake as a pit of emptiness suddenly threatened to consume me.
‘Jellfree,’ a soft feminine voice whispered in my ear somehow cutting through the torrent of sound that had overwhelmed everything else.
I gasped and tried to respond, but no sound came from my throat.
‘Jellfree,’ the voice repeated. ‘Saved… they can be saved, but you must take the controls…’
Again I tried to say something, anything in order to respond to the strange voice, but my vocal cords failed me.
‘Jellfree! YOU MUST OR THEY DIE!” The voice yelled urgently seeming to rattle around inside my mind.
It didn’t make any sense! How could I, a human slave, operate a Qharr ship? It defied logic and yet the voice seemed to think I could do it. I don’t think I was entirely lucid because never once did I think to wonder who the voice belonged too or why it seemed to come from nowhere. What did it matter, anyway? We were all going to die!
“NO!” I screamed out in sudden defiance as control of my limbs suddenly returned to me.
Maybe it was futile, but I wasn’t going to lie down and die! I had to do something! I wasn’t going to give the Qharr the satisfaction! All my life I’d let them control everything I said and did! No longer!
I scrambled to my feet with renewed energy and lurched across the teetering control room and flung myself at a nearby control panel. The previous dark surface flared to life and I gripped at the side of the panel as the ship quaked again. I tried to decipher the Qharr characters that appeared on screen, but I had no idea what any of them meant. The Qharr went out of their way to keep their human slaves from learning their language and I’d only ever learned a few of the symbols.
“Give me the body!” the voice–which now seemed to have become a presence in the back of my mind–said.
A very large part of me wanted to resist, to tell the presence no, but I knew that if I did I’d die. Shit, what did I have to lose any way!? I closed my eyes and let my resistance to the entity fade away. Seeming to take on a mind of their own, my eyes snapped back open and I watched my unbroken hand fly across the console in a furious blur of motion. Abruptly, the ship stopped rocking and righted itself. My hand zoomed across the panel’s surface and the ship spun around in response, turning to face the quartet of patrol ships.
“Jellfree! What the hell… How are you doing that!” Kaya’s voice demanded, but the being didn’t answer and I seem to have lost the ability to do anything but watch.
Very few Qharr transports were a match for even one patrol ship, but this one was different. It was the Jahal Tkyr’s personal ship and besides having enhanced engines and maneuvering capability it was also armed to the teeth. I don’t know how I knew that. The knowledge was just there waiting in my head without any understanding on how it had gotten there. My right index-finger mashed down on a small button on the panel and the ship rocked slightly as a missile went flying toward the nearest patrol ship. The missile struck home and destroyed its target in a brilliant cloud of fire and debris.
“He’s destroyed one of the patrol ships, but there are still three more on our tail!” Jaysen called over his shoulder.
The entity continued to manipulate the controls and since the inertial negator was offline we felt every twist and turn with the full force of gravity’s pull. Several of the rebels had collapsed unable to bear the pressures of gravity acting on them, but Kaya and Jaysen at least seemed to be able to withstand it. My body stood erect as the being battled against the Qharr ship despite the overwhelming pressures of inertia acting against me.
The entity fired off the ship’s phase cannons and the lead ship’s side burst with explosions and went careening into the earth below. My hand danced across the control panel in amazing display of fluid grace then pounded down on the panel loosing another volley of missiles on one of the patrol ships. Like the previous one this projectile hit its mark and again the intended target burst into a cloud of flames and debris.
That left one last patrol ship and the thing in my head didn’t waste any time as it brought the ship around for another attack. It dodged a barrage of phase cannon fire from the smaller ship then again looped around coming along the enemy’s rear. Phase energy blasted out of the transport’s front cannons and the patrol ship darted and dove in increasingly futile attempts to dodge the transport’s weapon fire.
A blast from the phase cannon hit the underside of the patrol ship’s fuselage, and another hit it’s left wing. It put out a trail of smoke a sharp contrast to the clear blue sky and started to lose altitude. My fist pounded down on the control panel one final time and another missile shot out and slammed into the other vehicle blasting it into oblivion. A sense of relief flooded through me and I abruptly regained use of my limbs.
I turned and looked around at Kaya and the other rebels, well, those that had remained conscious during the battle. They all stared at me with wide-eyed disbelief and I shrugged and looked back at them unable to offer up an explanation. What the hell had happened? Some strange consciousness had awoken within me and despite that it saved us it scared the shit out of me. What if the being woke again and tried to take control permanently? It was a scary thought and I didn’t know if there was anything I could do if it did.
‘The transponder shut it off. If you do not… the masters they will hunt us,’ the voice in my head whispered.
I bowed my head feeling suddenly very tired and weak, “The ship… find transponder… shut it down or they’ll… find us.”
Each word was harder to get out than the last, and I collapsed to my knees when the final syllable left my lips. On some distant level, I remembered Kaya coming over to my side and screaming my name, but whatever else she said I didn’t comprehend. I had just enough strength left to look over my shoulder and see Jaysen scrambling out of the control room presumably to find the transponder and shut it down. Then everything came crashing down around me and I was lost
to the dark.
Chapter Four
‘We must speak,’ the void itself said.
“Where am I?” I asked, my voice echoing through the emptiness.
The air a half a dozen feet in front of me seemed to ripple and where there had been nothing a woman appeared, but a woman like none I had ever seen. Her hair cascaded down her face in dark-blue colored ringlets, and her eyes were strange whirling disks which seemed to rotate endlessly. She was tall for a woman, standing at close to five-nine, and she had the look of a predator ready to spring. She was one of the most beautiful creatures I’d ever laid my eyes on, but there was an inhuman quality about her that almost made her seem repulsive.
“This place… it is in your mind, Jellfree.” She smiled and tilted her head at an odd angle.
“My mind?! So I’m not conscious? And what are you some sort of figment of my imagination?” I stroked my chin, somehow I didn’t doubt any of it.
“Wait I know you! You’re that voice… that thing in my head that piloted the transport ship!”
The woman eyed me with almost inquisitive expression and nodded. “Correct.”
“Damn… What the hell are you?”
“I am K’teth.” She didn’t blink or move a muscle as she studied me.
My jaw dropped and I stared at her with eyes wide. “K’teth as in… Edant K’teth?”
She shook her head, “I am K’teth. The Edant… they are the Qharr masters. You are not Qharr therefore we are not Edant K’teth. We are something… different.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I am K’teth. You are my host. We are joined.”
I swallowed hard and tried to wrap my head around what she was saying, “Your host… So you’re some sort of parasite?”
This seemed to offend her and she responded with a very loud and very angry “NO!” before settling back down.
“If not a parasite then what are you?”
“I am K’teth! We are joined! The words they are difficult… Your mind is strange.”
Battle For Earth Page 3