Fire Flare

by Chris Ward

  ‘Captain Adams and his men just so happened to be monitoring the space battle from the ground,’ General Grogood’s head said.

  Beth glanced around. Aside from Captain Adams, the Ween, and the warrior droids, all of the off-worlders in attendance were Lorks, a human subspecies which was much hairier, shorter, and more muscular than its parent species. They were perfectly suited for survival on a moon with heavy gravity.

  ‘We align ourselves with the Defenders of the Free,’ Captain Adams said. ‘We are a small force with more guts and gumption than resources, but when given an opportunity to help out, we’re there with a smile on our faces.’

  ‘When the ship went down, the captain’s men were quick to finish off any survivors,’ General Grogood’s head said. ‘The Evattlans were neutralized by the heavy gravity, and the Shadowmen couldn’t breathe the air. Most of them died when the ship’s systems failed.’

  ‘And those that managed to get to breathing apparatus in time had gone lazy,’ Captain Adams said. ‘They’d relied on enslaved Evattlans for their firepower. They were an easy target.’ He punched one human fist into the other palm, thick muscles rippling. ‘It was a slaughter.’

  ‘Did you take any prisoners?’ Beth asked.

  ‘A couple, but they refused to talk, so we blasted them like the rest and threw their corpses into the nearest chasm.’

  Paul would feel at home among these people, Beth thought. She hoped he was all right, and that Teer Flint was looking after him.

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘We have checked your DNA,’ General Grogood’s head said. ‘And you have come up as a match to a Bethany Lithian, of Rail in the Areola System, who trained at the space academy on Cable, and then signed a pledge to honor the needs of the Defenders of the Free.’

  ‘You can tell a lot from DNA, can’t you?’ Beth said, shaking her head in disbelief. ‘That’s me.’ It had been so long since she had used her full name that it sounded alien, and almost as long since she had thought of her beloved homeworld.

  ‘As a recognised Defender of the Free, your freedom is granted,’ Captain Adams said. ‘However, there is a small problem with your companion.’

  ‘Caladan?’

  ‘We also took the liberty of sampling his DNA. What records exist are somewhat … patchy. He is wanted on thirty-seven planets, moons, and other inhabited celestial bodies for a series of crimes including murder, extortion, kidnap, embezzlement, fraud, impersonation of a political figure, libel, smuggling, and theft, both petty and of entire starships.’

  Beth shrugged. ‘Wouldn’t that make him perfect for the Defenders of the Free?’

  General Grogood’s head did something Beth was surprised it had the ability to do: it turned from side to side.

  ‘I’m afraid not. It makes his character dubious and untrustworthy. He is a liar, and a cheat. He is the exact opposite of the kind of person we want on our side.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘However,’ General Grogood’s head interrupted, ‘we would be prepared to overlook most of those things due to his being part of your attempted rescue mission. That is a quality we cannot ignore … if it weren’t for one thing.’

  ‘What?’

  Captain Adams stepped forward. He leaned back, clenched his fists, then immediately dropped them to the floor as though struggling with balance.

  ‘I have met this scumbag before,’ he said. ‘At a card table in the frontier town of Upton, on Cable. With limited resources, I was attempting to procure a shuttle in order to ferry refugees off the planet. This sorry excuse for a Farsi lied and cheated his way to a win he didn’t deserve.’

  ‘I didn’t … cheat,’ Caladan muttered, head lolling, reminding Beth he was actually awake. ‘I bluffed…. Learn to play cards, you useless … dog.’

  Captain Adams growled and lifted a hand to strike Caladan, but Beth shouted, ‘Stop!’ and managed to lean far enough across in front of Caladan to make the captain pause, sledgehammer-like fist held tantalizingly in the air.

  ‘Save your anger for the ambush,’ General Grogood’s head said. ‘It will be better served there, in battle.’

  Captain Adams dropped his hands, but continued to glare at Caladan. ‘I should have executed you then and there,’ he said. ‘Another criminal the galaxy wouldn’t miss. Think of all those refugees who weren’t saved because of your greed.’

  ‘That shuttle … was a deathtrap,’ Caladan muttered. ‘It would have never made orbit. I only wanted it for … parts.’

  Captain Adams turned back to General Grogood’s head. ‘See? A liar as well as a cheat. You have made the right decision, General.’

  ‘What decision?’

  General Grogood’s eyes flicked towards her. ‘Dynis Moon is dying,’ he said. ‘With the damage to the orbiter, the weather systems will soon throw the moon off its rotation. We’re trapped here in this downed ship, so there is little we can do to change that. We could have survived a while longer, were it not that the entire ship lies across a mega-volcano, a magma pool covering several square miles, less than five hundred metres below the surface. The heat is slowly liquefying the ground above it, and soon the whole thing will blow, destroying everything on top of it, including this ship.’

  ‘As Defenders of the Free, we have made a pact,’ Captain Adams said, thumping his chest hard enough to crack a skull. ‘We will take as many of Raylan’s men with us as we can.’

  Beth grimaced. ‘And … how are you planning to do that?’

  ‘Seek-and-destroy teams comb the moon’s surface,’ General Grogood’s head said. ‘They’re looking for me and for any other survivors of the battle. They’ve ignored this ship so far because it’s one of their own, but soon they will come.’

  ‘And when they do, we’ll be waiting,’ Captain Adams said.

  Beth gave a little shake of her head and smiled. ‘And do you have any more details than that?’

  ‘We planned to offer the general in sacrifice,’ Captain Adams said. ‘Even when we wanted the general to command us, to give us strength as we stood to face our deaths. However, now … we can do both.’

  The Ween suddenly appeared behind Caladan’s chair. Its catlike face gave a mischievous grin and it held up something that buzzed.

  A razor.

  Caladan’s eyes went wide. ‘Noooo,’ he moaned.

  ‘It will take little to alter this thieving fool’s appearance so that he might resemble the general,’ Captain Adams said. ‘Then we will offer him as sacrifice in the General’s place. When they come for him, we will be waiting.’

  17

  Paul

  Something truly alien.

  There was no better way to describe the creature he had seen as it raged at the toiling heavens. Even as lightning struck the misshapen silhouette of its body, the creature stood defiant, absorbing the blinding bolt of electrical power, before waving its twisted limbs in anticipation for more.

  Aware that if such a creature got close to Beth, her life would be in danger, Paul had taken his chance to get off a few shots, but the earth had shaken at the exact wrong moment, throwing off his aim as it knocked him to the ground. When he climbed back to his feet, the monster had gone.

  Now he hunted it, moving slowly through the wasteland, battered by sleety snow, shaken by a relentless wind and the rumbling of the ground beneath his feet. Through breaks in the sleet he caught sight of distant, raging volcanoes, mountains that were folding in on themselves, rivers of magma cutting like crimson snakes through the landscape. He held Flint’s blaster close to his face, keeping his own as a spare, moving as quickly as he could, aware that Beth’s life could depend on it.

  Apart from the creature courting the lightning, he had seen nothing on this lump of hellish rock from some demon’s asshole except his own companions. As Dynis Moon’s air began to lighten, approaching something like daybreak, however, he finally spotted distant figures moving between the rocks and the fallen trees, observing him, backing away. They were clearly hostil
e, so he fired off a couple of warning shots to send them scurrying for cover, just in case they got the wrong idea and foolhardily tried to engage him. Whether they were spies or unarmed savages, he couldn’t get close enough to see. It crossed his mind that the rip in his suit might be letting in chemicals that were messing with his vision or even throwing up hallucinations, but he attempted to blast them, just in case.

  ‘Hold on, Beth,’ he growled under his breath as he moved from one covered position to the next, a gut-wrenching frustration building up inside with each minute that passed. He should never have let her go; Caladan would pay for this if anything happened to her. The girl was a hothead and had no little skill in a firefight, but she was still a girl, and a girl needed to be protected, by muscle, by blaster, by whatever it took.

  The sleet had turned to a thick, mulchy rain, as though the dying trees were evaporating and falling as precipitation. Paul wiped gunk off his body with a clenched fist, pausing just long enough to identify the best way forward. The land was sloping upwards, and with the lightning storm having moved east, a ridgeline up ahead looked safe.

  The wind still rattled him but the air had cleared. A distant line of volcanoes spat red fire at the sky, the rumble of continuous earthquakes relentless underfoot. Paul half ran, half crawled through the remains of a forest and up to a rocky outcrop. Keeping his head down against the tallest rocks, he scanned the landscape below, frowning at what he first thought was a jumble of rocks, but then realised was the remains of a settlement nestled among woodland. It had taken a total beating, with barely a single building left undamaged, but among the collapsed ruins people moved about, mostly trying to shelter from the weather while carrying supplies from one building to another. They were a mixture of humans and off-worlders, many of them squat, powerful Lork. Their clothing was ragged, and even over this distance he could hear their cries for help.

  ‘The downtrodden,’ he growled, then clenched a fist and held it against his chest. ‘I signed up to serve you, hot damn. With every press of my finger, I send another blast of sweet retribution into Raylan Climlee’s soul-sucking ass.’

  It took him a minute to realise what they were doing. A small, square transport shuttle sat among rocks at one end of the settlement. Even from this distance Paul could tell it was barely flightworthy, scorch marks on its hull the scars of a recent firefight, and a tree had even fallen against its hull. These people were desperate, taking their last chance to get off Dynis Moon before the disrupted weather systems tore them off its surface, but the shuttle looked like a suicide mission. Even if they were lucky enough to get out of the moon’s atmosphere, Raylan’s forces would pick it off like a duck sitting on a wall.

  ‘You have no choice, do you?’ he said, looking up, into the green-brown stretch of forest beyond, seeing something else there cutting a scar through the vegetation, a downed space battleship of immense size, one large bridge section joined by an elongated tube to a rear section which housed the stores and the propulsion systems, enough power to bring it to the Seven Systems from a distant galaxy. Even though its central section was bent to indicate it had crash-landed, Paul felt a tingle of fear.

  Shadowmen.

  He spun his blaster on his finger, aimed it and then made a couple of bleeps in the direction of the downed ship.

  ‘I’m coming,’ he whispered.

  He was about to start moving along the ridgeline, intending to skirt around the village to see if there was anything he could do about the downed ship, when something moving across the sky caught his eye.

  Three spacecraft, one larger gunship accompanied by two fighters.

  A seek-and-destroy team.

  And the refugees were out in plain sight.

  Paul grimaced. A slaughter was coming.

  The seek-and-destroy team began a wide arc, the larger ship staying low to the surface while one fighter went out wide, the other staying on the inside, moving slower. It was a couple of miles to the south, making a gradual sweep. In moments it would spot the refugees out in the open, and it wouldn’t take much strafing to turn them into mincemeat.

  Paul drew his other blaster, holding one in each hand. The guns didn’t have enough power to take the fighter down, but he could attract its attention.

  The ridge on which he stood was south of the refugees, to the north of the sweeping fighter. As clouds rolled in, putting the other two craft momentarily out of view, Paul saw his chance. Aiming with one eye, he fired two shots, one directly at the fighter, one just in front.

  The first missed, but the second found its mark. With nowhere near enough power to cause much damage, the blast nevertheless achieved what Paul had intended. The fighter broke from its flight pattern, cutting north, heading right for the ridge. Paul ducked behind an outcrop of rock, waiting until the fighter was almost upon him. Proton blasts made a mess of the hill as the fighter blasted the spot its systems had identified as its attacker’s location. Paul stayed down, but at the moment the firing stopped, he stepped out of his hiding place, pointed his blasters upwards and fired.

  He timed it perfectly, getting two direct hits on the fighter’s underside as it flew directly overhead, so close he felt the heat of its thrusters on his spacesuit. As it flew on, leaving a trail of smoke, Paul gave a whoop of delight. He’d managed to hit one of the lowered gun emplacements, the complex systems weaker than the surrounding armor. Not enough to down the ship on its own, the pilot would at least have a problem on his hands.

  Losing its flight path, the fighter flew headlong into a rolling gray bank of cloud farther north. Lightning flashed, then the fighter reemerged, heading back in his direction, moving slowly, jerking from side to side. Paul dropped to a crouch and aimed, but no further shots were needed. An explosion came from the fighter’s thrusters as it dropped in a sharp incline towards the ground, landing heavily in the churned scree of the valley floor below.

  With the wind at his back, Paul raced down the hill, keeping the stricken fighter in sight even as the rain came in around him. Blinded, he misjudged its landing spot but almost ran into the crash path it had gored in the ground as it came down. He turned, scrambling over the churned muck and ice, and found the fighter lying up ahead, one thruster still ignited, pushing it in a slowly circle, its front end embedded into a huge pile of rock and mud.

  Finding cover, Paul blasted out the remaining thruster, ducking behind a rock as an explosion rocked the ground. When he looked back, the fighter’s rear was a smoldering ruin, but the front end still remained embedded in the muck. He hurried over, blasters in each hand.

  It was a three-man piloted Shadowman interplanetary fighter, an elongated triangle with two protruding rear thrusters and a raised navigational cockpit on the upper surface. A side hatch was open and two bloodied, dead Shadowmen lay nearby. Paul kicked them as he stepped over, training his weapons on the narrow space leading inside.

  He didn’t have to wait for long. A third Shadowman appeared, bent like a dying ant on hands and knees, body all oily curves and angles. He was dragging a transmission device over his shoulder. Without noticing Paul, he slumped down against the fighter’s side and pulled the transmission device onto his lap.

  Paul took a step forward. He had never realised before that the Shadowmen were covered with black fur. Nor had he realised how scuttling, cockroach-like creatures crawled through it. As he stared in disgust, one jumped off and scuttled away into a patch of grass. Where it moved, the grass turned black, the fronds crackling and dying as though poisoned. As the bug approached Paul’s foot, he stepped out and crushed it, twisting his foot to make sure it was dead.

  The pilot, fiddling with the transmitter, still hadn’t noticed him with the lashing sleet and buffeting wind. Paul was able to literally crouch in front of the Shadowman before the off-worlder looked up, upright slits of eyes opening in surprise.

  ‘It’s not your lucky day, scumbag,’ Paul said, pointing one blaster at the Shadowman’s head and one at its crotch. ‘Which do you like bett
er, your brains or your balls?’

  The creature hissed at him, viciously enough to make Paul take a step back. A couple of the bugs leapt in Paul’s direction, but the wind knocked them away. The Shadowman reached for a blaster attached to a belt that looked ridiculous around a waist that was barely thicker than Paul’s wrist, but its hand slumped forward, uselessly striking the ground.

  Paul grinned. ‘This gravity’s not working too well for a spindly little asshole like you, is it?’ he said. ‘You need to get your scumbag ass in the gym and do some pull-ups. Go on, call for help. I’m waiting.’

  Adrenaline pumping so hard it made Paul’s back tingle, he watched the Shadowman hiss something into the transmitter. Then, as though the sheer effort was too great, its head slumped forward onto its chest, its spine curving behind it like the stalk of a dying, monstrous flower.

  ‘Hey, look at me,’ Paul said. He stuck out a foot and nudged the Shadowman, whose head slowly lifted, clearly at great effort. ‘Look at me, scumbag. I want to look into your eyes as I blow your goddamn head off.’

  The creature’s face rose a few more centimetres. Up close, the Shadowmen were as nightmarish as they were from a distance. Like elongated black-furred skeletons but half as tall again as a human, their faces were overlarge for their heads, their eyes upwards slits that opened and closed like the curtains of some miniature haunted house. Their noses were just two holes, but their mouths were like buckets, stretching the width of their faces, opening unnaturally wide as though they feasted on airborne krill. As the pilot lifted its head, its mouth stretched open in a hideous silent scream, unable to beat the gravity pulling its jaw down. Paul shivered, sure he wouldn’t be able to sleep for months. Then, as it made a sudden upwards jerk, as though to attack him with its last breath, he blew its head off. Dark grey brains made a pattern on the shuttle’s hull as the creature slumped forward. The bugs from its body immediately began to consume it, but as Paul watched with horror, they became slower and slower, eventually keeling over, symbionts that couldn’t survive without their host.