by T. R. Harris
All forty torpedoes exploded at once.
88
Adam had dropped to one knee, his weight resting on the sword he had planted in the ground. His right arm hung limp at his side, blood still streaming from the poisoned wound. Azon had made no attempt to strike him, content to the let the deadly toxin do the work for him.
The alien shook his head. “I truly regret the opportunity not to join you in unblemished competition. Your name has been prominent through all our preliminary plans for the Kac. Yet even as I say these words, I revel in watching you die slowly before my eyes. Refer to me as a complicated being because of my conflicted feelings.”
Adam used the sword to help him struggle to his feet, wobbling slightly as he gained his footing. The blade was now a crutch, not a weapon.
“Well, asshole,” Adam strained to say, “I would really hate to disappoint you.” He pulled the sword from the ground and made a feeble attempt to wave it at the alien. “En garde.”
Azon frowned. “That did not translate. What is the meaning?”
“It means your ass is mine.”
Slowly, Adam Cain straightened his back and squared his shoulders. He shifted his head back and forth, hearing the neck crack. Then he lifted his right arm, using the thumb to crack all the fingers in his hand. Finally, he transferred the sword from his left hand to his right and squeezed hard on the grip. He whipped the blade around using a twist of his wrist—as Azon had done earlier—then brought it straight up in front of his face.
The silly grin vanished from the alien. “I do not understand what has happened but matter it does not. You will die, if not by the toxin, then by my sword.”
He came at Adam, using exquisite steps like those of a dancer. His blade came down in perfect union with his approach. Adam parried the strike, stepping back as he did. Azon continued forward, the arcs from his sword creating circles of light from the reflection off the metal blade. Adam countered each blow, with almost ridiculous ease.
Still Azon did not lose his composure. He continued his dance with hypnotic and fluid motions, his blade now merged with his body and movements. Adam wasn’t so graceful, but he was effective. He didn’t produce any counter strikes during this latest engagement, content to the let the alien wear himself down. After a minute of constant strike and parry, Azon backed off, breathing heavy, a shine of sweat now on his gray face.
“I admit you are stronger and faster than I, of which I’m perplexed. Yet I see you bleed, so you are not a surrogate freak of nature. You can die.”
“That’s right…just not today.”
Now Adam took the offensive. His technique left a lot to desire, but it was effective. The alien was forced back, but unlike Adam earlier, he didn’t simply defend. Every other parry was followed by a strong counter-strike. Adam may be stronger and faster, but Azon was more skilled.
The match was quickly becoming a draw, unless one succumbed to exhaustion before the other. Adam seemed to have the most stamina, even in the heat of late afternoon on Qidos. It was just a matter of time.
The contest continued for another two minutes, before both adversaries lifted their arms to shield their eyes from a blinding flash from above. They looked up to see a brilliant swatch of light covering almost the entire expanse of the sky. The light grew for a moment before slowly shifting from white to red.
The artificial lights in the arena went dark, and an eerie silence fell across the stadium. Azon continued to look upward, his mouth slack, expression conveying confusion.
But Adam knew what had happened. He’d seen it before.
The alien looked at Adam, surprised to see him smiling.
“Well, well, how things change,” Adam said.
“What is it?”
“That, my friend, is a nuclear bloom, a little something I’ve actually had the pleasure to use in the past. It looks like there’s more than one way to skin a cat.”
“I do not understand. What does that have to do with the flash of light?”
“It means we had more up our sleeve than just the beam platforms.”
“Up your sleeve?” Azon shook his head. “It seems the toxin may have finally reached your brain. You are speaking gibberish.”
Adam let out a deep sigh. He’d been looking for a clever way to tell the alien how screwed he was, but it wasn’t working. “Your fleet’s just been consumed by a gigantic ball of nuclear fire. Does that translate?”
“That is not true.”
“Do the Nuoreans have a weapon that can produce such a large explosion?”
Azon’s silence told Adam the alien had finally got the message.
“It matters not. It was but one fleet.”
“Dude, it was over ten thousand ships! I don’t care who you are, but that’s gotta hurt.”
“You do not understand Nuoreans, so I will explain,” Azon began. “I have studied Humans—as well as many other races in the Kac—and I see the same thing. Yes, you have a player class; however, the vast majority of your populations are not fighters. So even though you outnumber us, you do not have the players to match what we have. You fail to realize that, although we are a single race, the Nuoreans live for combat. Every Nuorean is a player—a warrior to you. We have vastly more resources than just those we have brought into the Kac, vastly more.” He waved his sword at the glowing sky. “You may have achieved victory during this one challenge, but we will not stop. Nuoreans accept defeat—just as we do victory—as a challenge unto itself, as an opportunity to create new game plans, new strategies. In fact, without defeat we would not learn and progress. You think you have scared us with your nuclear game plan, and that we will flee. All you have done is firmed our resolve to win the larger game.”
Adam had heard enough of the alien’s bloviating. Sherri and the others were somewhere else nearby, probably in need of his help. Azon was just wasting his time.
Adam came at him, stabbing with deadly thrusts of the blade. Azon reacted quickly, returning to combat mode. During his short speech, he’d recovered from the fatigue and was more effective with his parries and attacks.
That changed when Adam smashed down with a powerful two-handed hit with his sword. Azon’s grip on his weapon broke away and the sword flew off to his right. The alien shuffled back, assuming a defensive hand-to-hand combat posture—or at least what he thought was a defensive hand-to-hand combat posture.
Adam laughed, his long-held suspicions now confirmed. The Nuoreans—both in their personal challenges and immunity contests—fought only with swords…or spaceships. They didn’t have any experience with fist-a-cuffs, since all animosities were settled in the arena, assuming there were any animosities between the Nuoreans. He hadn’t heard of any. This was great. Riyad had told him about Azon’s encounter with a Human shoe salesman. Now he was about to find out what it’s like going up against a SEAL—yes, an aging SEAL, but still a SEAL.
Adam tossed his sword aside.
Azon straightened up and cocked his head quizzically. Then he reached behind his back and withdrew the small, curved blade he’d used to slice Adam’s cheek. The alien assumed a different stance, this time one featuring the deadly knife.
Adam wasn’t expecting that. He looked to where he’d thrown his sword, but Azon jumped before he could find it.
The Nuorean was easily eight inches taller than him and with an arm reach clearly beyond Adam’s. But Adam was quicker and stronger, even with the weight-belt locked around his waist. The combatants came together, with Adam slapping away Azon’s knife hand, just as the alien laid a shoulder into him. Adam was knocked off his feet, but he continued to roll backwards and popped back to his feet just in time to avoid another swipe of the Nuoreans’ blade.
Adam stepped in and grasped the wrist of the alien’s knife hand. He brought his other hand onto the forearm and turned, forcing Azon onto his back. Then Adam bent over, sending the Nuorean tumbling over his shoulder and to the ground. Adam maintained his grip on the wrist as he placed a foot on the a
lien’s chest and continued to twist his hands until the knife fell away.
Azon closed his body, bringing his long legs up planting a pair of huge shoes into Adam’s face. He stepped back, barely maintaining balance; but still held onto the wrist. Adam began dragging the alien through the dirt, until he managed to regain his footing and ran forward, tackling Adam around the waist. Adam clasped his hands together and brought the balled fist down on Azon’s back. The alien’s body was ill-prepared for the impact. He dropped to the ground, stunned.
Adam took Azon by the shoulder and flipped him over. He straddled him, knees pinning the alien to the ground. A quick right cross rattled the Nuorean, while another sent eyes rolling back in his head.
Adam Cain was feeling no mercy at the moment. He reared back with his right fist and slammed it straight into the center of Azon’s face. As had happened many times before, alien bone succumbed easily to Human power, allowing the fist to break through to the depths of the Nuorean’s skull. There wasn’t much recognizable when Adam withdrew his fist. No amount of reconstructive surgery could fix the mess Adam just made.
Adam climbed to his feet and stared down at the dead Cadre player. It took a moment for him to draw his attention away from the body, but when he did he noticed two things.
First, there were explosions and the sounds of flash weapons being discharged coming from the direction of the barracks. Someone was putting up resistance, hopefully under the leadership of his friends.
The second thing he noticed was the ethereal glow shimmering in the early evening sky. The Qidos sun had set only minutes before and now a waving wall of green, blue and red light painted the heavens. Radiation from the massive nuclear explosions in space were creating aurora the likes of which had never been seen on the planet before.
And with all the lights out in the arena, it was a good bet that a powerful electromagnetic pulse had impacted Qidos, along with the beautiful lightshow in the sky.
Adam let out a sigh of relief. He was fortunate he wasn’t trying to land a spaceship at the time. Having all your electronics shut down—if even momentarily—was never a good thing when making a landing approach….
89
“Regain power!” Kaylor shouted from the pilot seat. He held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. There was nothing he could do until then.
“I cannot override the emergency protocols,” Jym cried out. The air in his lungs was being pulled out from the sudden drop the Najmah Fayd was experiencing. Although the ship was the most-advanced in the galaxy, it still fell like a rock when the power went out during the landing approach to Qidos.
Their only hope was that the automatic trigger responses to an electromagnetic pulse would disengage before they hit the ground. All their screens were down, and all the two occupants could see was the brown landscape racing toward them.
In that fleeting moment, Kaylor thought maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to go out looking for Adam Cain after all.
With no message coming from Qidos, Kaylor and Jym had grown restless. They were in the Najmah Fayd at the Krone spaceport, waiting for the telepathic link from Adam, calling for the ship to come pick him up. The hours passed, and still no launch.
Then news came of a major battle taking place in the space between Castor and Qidos. Every vessel in the spaceport bolted for space, either to assist in the battle or to run away. And still the Najmah Fayd sat.
It was Kaylor’s idea to use the confusion of the massive space battle to slip into Qidos space and search for Adam. The ship could leapfrog the battle and appear unscathed in the atmosphere, ten miles above Adam’s monitored location. And then if the area was too hot to land, they could jump out without too much effort. It sounded like a good idea at the time.
When the trans-dimensional starship materialized in the upper atmosphere of Qidos, all hell broke loose. It was hit with a massive pulse of electricity. EMP’s are common in space, so all ships are equipped with automatic shut downs to protect vital circuits from overloading. Once the EMP passed, the systems would reboot.
Normally, a momentary burp in energy supply wasn’t a problem. For ships in space, the worst that would happen is they would fall out of a gravity-well, but then re-enter a few seconds later. The only time an EMP shut-down became serious was when a ship was in an atmosphere and under the influence of a planet’s gravity.
Such was the case at Qidos.
Starships—including the Najmah Fayd—were not designed to be aerodynamic. They didn’t need to be, so the ship was falling through the atmosphere, rocking back and forth, subject to the air currents it was experiencing. Kaylor’s fear was that the ship would tip over and begin tumbling. At that point it would be impossible to regain stability, even if the power came back on.
They’d reached the point where individual buildings could be resolved on the surface, these being the huge grand arenas of the Nuoreans. If they were getting this close, it wouldn’t be long now….
The screens suddenly flickered on and the hum of the generators vibrated through the hull.
“Power!” Jym cried out.
Kaylor didn’t respond. Instead he activated the chemical landing jets at the same time he created a small gravity-well above the ship. His actions had the desired effect…times two.
The ship screamed to a stop, every joint and weld straining to stay together. With the compensators slow to reboot, the two aliens were slammed into their seats, with every last iota of breath forced from their deflated lungs. Blood rushed to their eyes, blinding them temporarily.
Then the ship was moving again, but this time up, not down.
Kaylor still suffered from the effects of the sudden stop, lacking the awareness to control the jets or the gravity-well. As a result of both systems being engaged, the Najmah Fayd was now racing for the heavens, and heading out into space toward the distant roiling mass of radioactive debris racing at the planet.
The massive nuclear bloom had covered an area of two million miles in diameter, but that wasn’t the full story. All the explosions that created the gigantic sphere had taken place along the outer edge and were expanding outward, as well as inward. Several of the huge explosions occurred only eight hundred thousand miles from Qidos, which meant the light took a little over four seconds to reach the planet. The EMP took a little longer, and the radioactive cloud would take weeks to cover the distance.
But Kaylor and Jym were well beyond the atmosphere by now and speeding at near light-speed toward the mass of deadly radiation.
Jym was the first to recover. He was in the co-pilot seat, and barely able to see through his blood-shot eyes. At first the screens made no sense; he was dazed and confused. But then something made him take notice. His senses returned…along with the panic.
“Kaylor, wake up! Wake up!”
Kaylor moved in his seat. “What happened?”
Jym didn’t answer. Instead he reached over to Kaylor’s panel and shut down both the chem and gravity drives. The gas cloud was still hundreds of miles away, so that crisis was averted. However, now they were sitting in space making them an easy target for any Nuorean warship in the area.
Jym took the controls and sent the ship bolting for the surface, this time under control and with full power.
“What happened?” Kaylor repeated.
“EM-pulse, long one,” Jym answered.
“From what?”
For an answer, Jym switched the forward viewscreen to a rear view. A thin line of yellow and white stretched across the expanse of space. “That is what happened.”
Kaylor studied the line. It was too far away to make out any movement, but it was definitely not normal. “Is that a nuclear explosion?”
“More than one, maybe hundreds.”
“What caused it?”
“I would place a bet that the Fringe is now clear of Nuorean invaders, at least for the time being. It would also be clear of allied forces, as well. Nothing could have survived that.”
“And Adam?”
“I do not know, not until we reach the surface.”
Kaylor’s senses returned. He checked his screens and found the beacon for Adam’s ATD. Most of the landscape below was dark, having had circuits tripped by the EMP. Automated systems had come back on, while those requiring manual operation were still down.
There was a huge building below; one of the grand arenas. Kaylor used the camera to zoom in on the area below. His attention was drawn to flashes off to the right of the stadium, with tiny dark dots moving in chaotic fashion. There was a battle taking place, and it seemed to be moving toward the huge arena. Kaylor should have guessed Adam’s presence would initiate such an event. Anytime aliens and Humans mixed there was bound to be trouble.
He shifted the camera to the interior of the arena. There were four beings laying prone on the surface, with only one was still standing. As the ship dropped lower, the solitary creature looked up and waved.
A speaker on the bridge cracked. “Kaylor, what are you doing here?” Adam’s voice was being received through his ghosted ATD aboard the ship and then feed into the comm system. Kaylor flicked on a microphone at his station, not knowing if Adam would hear him.
“Can you hear me?”
“Yep, just fine.”
“We took a chance and came looking for you. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Do you see the battle taking place outside the stadium?”
“Yes; it is headed your way.”
“Thanks. There’s an area beyond the set of four white buildings. Set the ship down there and wait. Don’t let any Nuoreans get near you.”
“Were you able to locate Riyad and Sherri?”
“And Copernicus?” Jym added.
They heard Adam laugh, a mental expression translated by the computer. “Yeah, all of them. They’re in the fight outside the stadium.”
“Of course they are, where else would they be?” said Jym.