Beyond Antares Dimensional Gates
Page 28
Pushing Lydiana ahead of her, Alkasta rushed back to where they'd left the spotter probe. From outside they could hear Therik voicing the Ghar demands. With every word he now spoke, the man appeared to falter, to lose a little more of his savaged vitality.
“Those who capitulate will be spared. Those who hesitate will... be des... destroyed.”
Alkasta drove the Ghar threats from her mind. There could be no dealing with such creatures. Not peacefully. She took one of the grenades from Lydiana. “Watch me and do what I do,” she told her. “There won't be time to explain it again.” Actuating the magnetic clamp on the grenade, Alkasta slipped it underneath the probe, fixing it to the machine's carapace. Watching her, Lydiana repeated the procedure. Sharing the grenades between them, the two women soon had six charges planted underneath the probe.
Reaching to the first grenade she'd placed, Alkasta adjusted its setting, changing it from timed detonation to a reactive detonation. The grenade was now a proximity mine with the rest of the ordnance slaved to its settings. Significant motion would cause it to explode and initiate a chain-reaction.
“Don't move and you might yet make it out of here alive,” Alkasta warned Lydiana.
“To what purpose?” Lydiana asked. “Undari won't just let me go.”
The sound of Ghar cannons boomed from the corridors behind them. Outside, Therik struggled to say the words his captors were feeding into his brain. “Whatever Lord Undari decides, it will be better than ending up with them.” Alkasta smiled when she saw Lydiana slowly nod in agreement.
Alkasta gave the spotter probe its final command. Urged to full speed, the probe shot out from the hole in the outpost wall. The Ghar reacted quicker than she'd expected. One of them launched another of the electrified grapples, the clamps slamming against the probe's carapace. Sparks flew from the machine as it shuddered and crashed to the ground, its transmissions to the combat shard abruptly stifled.
Cold fear raced through Alkasta's mind. The grapple had disabled the probe. If it had also disabled the mines, then her plan was through. She held her breath as she watched the Ghar advance toward the fallen machine.
Her fears vanished in a blinding fireball. Alkasta was knocked back by the blast as the mines reacted to the approaching Ghar. The sound was deafening, an elemental roar of violence and fury. Shrapnel clattered against the walls, several shards spinning through the hole and missing the two women by only fortune's favor. As the debris clattered across the hall, Alkasta recognized pieces from Ghar battlesuits.
Undari and Gravikk came racing out from the darkened corridor. The explosion had been the signal to make a run for it and this was a part of Alkasta's plan neither man was going to question. Gravikk barely paused long enough to shout at her. “They're right behind us!”
Alkasta and Lydiana followed the reptilian mercenary and the merchant-lord through the hole. Outside, all that remained of the probe and the three Ghar was a blackened hole and a field of debris. If Therik had still been alive when the Ghar came for the probe, he hadn't survived the shower of shrapnel that savaged his body.
“The others?” Alkasta gasped as they hurried through the debris. Undari simply shook his head.
Shots dug at the ground around them as the Vardosi tried to reach the cover of the rocks. The spotter drone, left behind in the outpost, relayed images of the two remaining Ghar as they came to the hole in the wall. One was pulling back the torn edges to expand the gap so that its battlesuit could fit through, while the other aimed the petals of its cannon through the existing hole. The progress the Ghar was making with its claw left no doubt it would soon accomplish its purpose.
Alkasta thought at first it must be some flaw in the transmission, some disruption of the shard, when the spotter drone showed something moving above the two Ghar. It was a black, nebulous shape, like some manner of crawling liquid. Then, as if registering her bewilderment, the thing became more distinct. It was a tide of crawling black arachnoids, each about the size of her thumb. She watched as the flow reached a point just above the Ghar that was expanding the opening.
What happened next was inexplicable. The swarm of vermin seemed to congeal, each tiny body fusing with those around it to take a greater shape. Instead of a flood of small arachnoids, they merged into a single massive, spidery shape. Two long legs reached out from the central mass, poised above the Ghar. Suddenly the clawed tips of the legs came snapping down, crunching into the battlesuit. Dark flecks went spinning away, individual arachnoids that had been killed by the vicious impact. In death, however, they'd made a rent in the armor, a hole in the flexible join between the articulated head and the bulky body.
Through that rent, the spidery mass streamed into the battlesuit, cascading down into the armor like a black flood. Panic must have seized the Ghar within as it found the arachnoids inside, for the stricken armor lashed out frantically.
The unafflicted Ghar ignored its efforts to expand the hole. Turning about, it thrust its cannon toward its comrade. Its own panic must have exceeded even that of the besieged battlesuit's occupant, for from a recessed discharger at the center of its cannon, the Ghar fired a devastating explosive straight into its companion. An explosion that nearly matched that of the spotter probe filled the confines of the corridor as the plasma reactors that powered each battlesuit detonated.
The aftermath of the blast was unknown to the Vardosi. The drone was caught in the explosion, its transmissions ended in the fiery carnage. Alkasta didn't think the Ghar could have survived such violence. She hoped the same applied to whatever had so abruptly attacked them.
“What... what was it?” Undari asked, staggered by the images the shard had shown him.
“The reason the Ghar were so desperate to leave this place,” Lydiana said. “Some alien horror. Perhaps a remnant of whatever built those ruins.” She pointed at the megalithic structures beyond the outpost. “Perhaps even a bio-weapon left behind by the Tsan Kiri.”
Alkasta gave the scientist a sharp look, then turned to Undari. “Whatever it was, my lord, we had best be gone before it or more of its ilk takes an interest in us. If there are more Ghar around, now we know they'll stop at nothing to take over the Revenger.” She waved Gravikk to accompany Undari. “Take the doma back to the ship. I'll be along in a moment,” she added when she saw the concern in Gravikk's serpentine eyes.
Once the two men were out of sight, Alkasta turned on Lydiana. “You brought Lord Undari here to kill him,” she stated. “This entire affair was at your instigation. Why?”
Lydiana glared at the champion. “You wouldn't understand. What would you know of a mother's loss? My son challenged Undari's honor. You were the one who answered that challenge. You were the one who killed him.” She stared at her hands. “I couldn't do anything on my own. I don't know how. But this... this offered me a way to get you both.”
“You failed,” Alkasta thrust the words at her like a knife. “But you won't answer to Lord Undari's justice. That wouldn't go nearly far enough to answer for Kashar and all the others lost to your intrigues.” In a blur of motion, Alkasta brought her plasma pistol from its holster and fired at Lydiana. The shot was low, searing through her ankle and spilling her to the ground.
“I'm leaving you to the mercies of this world,” Alkasta growled at the fallen scientist. “Whichever finds you first, the Ghar or the spiders, I'm satisfied that your finish won't be pleasant.”
Alkasta turned and walked away, heading toward the Revenger. Behind her, she could hear Lydiana screaming for her, begging for mercy, pleading for a quick finish. Any compassion she might have felt was blotted out by the faces of Kashar and the rest, the knowledge that she would have condemned all of them to a similar end.
Lydiana's screams were only so much silence in Alkasta's ears.
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Table of Contents
Titles
Beyond the Gates of Antares
An Introduction
The Magpie
Trials of Necessity
Hard Truths
Yesterday's Battlefield
A Bountiful Harvest
Antidata
Papa
The Hunted
Psychosis
A Scream in Silence
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