An automatic alarm began to sound, indicating significant damage had been done to the reactor core. Looking back, Chloe saw jets of steam and plasma escape via bullet holes along the sides of the reactor. There was probably some radiation coming out as well. No time to regroup! she thought and propelled her body to the upper decks of the engine room, escaping through the entrance there with her rifle still in hand.
… … …
Chris spat as he exited the engine room. A strange metallic taste filled his mouth, probably from all the strange gases and radiation spewing out from the reactor. There wasn’t a whole lot of talk going on, just the need to escape as quickly as possible before the emergency containment doors slammed shut. Lucky for him, the damage done by Chloe’s P-4 prevented those doors from closing via the main entrance to the engine room.
Melted chunks of metal, some of it still on fire and glowing red, floated past him as he continued his escape. A pair of burning legs attached to a torso hovered off to his side. Looked like Kasidey and Cartwright got their well-deserved comeuppance. Lights flicked on and off, damaged from the blast, illuminating more charred remains and bullet-ridden fallen crewmen from the initial attack.
He continued to pull himself along by the handles that lined the wall, pushing his weightless body farther away from the carnage. He stopped as he heard a sound among the dead bodies and raised his rifle, expecting an ambush. Slowly and steadily, Chris floated forward, still not taking any chances at what might be a head.
“Chris,” a voice called out to him.
Chloe’s voice, she was in distress. “Chloe?” he softly called back. He followed the corridor toward the voice of the woman he loved and arrived at an intersection. Chloe’s body struggled to remain straight. She held her belly with one arm while her other hand held her pistol. “Oh shit!” he cried.
Was it the radiation? Or perhaps someone survived and got the jump on her? he thought, recalling that Fiesei was nowhere to be seen during the end of the battle. “Hold on, I got ya. It’s going to be all right.”
He strapped his rifle to his back and lunged off the walls to float and catch Chloe’s battered body. He held on to her tightly while brushing her haggard brown hair. “What the hell was I thinking?” she asked. “Running into a situation we had no intel on.”
“You did what you thought was right,” he said. “Let’s see how bad your wounds are.”
A single bullet ripped through his lower groin. With no armor or shields, the pain was excruciating. His body tumbled backward, spilling blood in the weightless environment. He couldn’t quite see what Chloe was doing while he tumbled backward down the corridor.
… … …
Sarah rolled her body out of the engine room seconds before the emergency containment doors slammed shut. She exited via the lower decks of the engine room. Therefore, if Chris and Chloe got out, they’d be above her. She kicked and pulled her way through the corridors, heading toward the nearest elevator to take her up.
As the doors slid shut, she heard a single gunshot; it came from one of the decks above.
Fuck.
The elevator took her to the upper decks, and she recalled this was where Chloe should have escaped to as she was floating high above her and Chris. She didn’t wait for the sliding doors to fully open as she lunged her body out into the connecting corridor. However, she saw nothing, just the floating dead bodies of the crew.
“Boyd? Chloe?” Sarah whispered as she approached a four-way intersection.
“Oh my god,” Chloe’s voice replied from a distance.
“Chloe?” Sarah’s head zeroed in on the sound of her older sister’s voice, and she saw her holding her gut, arms covered in blood that was slowly floating away.
Chloe looked up toward Sarah and cried out to her in pain, “Sarah.”
“Chloe, what happened?” Sarah asked while she kicked and swam toward her. “Oh fuck, you’ve been shot!” she said upon getting a closer look at her.
“Chris too.”
“Jesus,” Sarah said. “Hang on; we’ll get you out of this!”
“Sarah!” a voice called out from behind. It was Chloe’s voice, no doubt about that, but…It had come from behind when Chloe was clearly in front.
Sarah spun around, stared back down the corridor, and laid her eyes on Chloe again. Only she wasn’t injured and had her rifle aimed toward her and the other Chloe. Wait, two Chloes? “What the fuck?” Sarah said, turning back around to look at the wounded Chloe, then once again at the Chloe with a rifle leveled toward her.
“Get away from her!” demanded the rifle-wielding Chloe.
“Sarah, it’s me,” said the wounded Chloe. “Don’t know who the fuck she is, but I’m your sister!”
Sarah froze, unsure of what to do—help her injured sister? Or listen to a warning from her other sister? She pushed her body off to the side while doing everything in her power to get her breathing stable. This was some kind of trick. A hologram? Whatever the case was, Sarah siding with the wrong Chloe posed a great threat to the real one, whoever the hell she was.
“Sarah, for fuck’s sake, it’s me; it’s a trick!” said the rifle-wielding Chloe. Sarah glanced toward her and noticed that her aim was set up to take a head shot at the injured Chloe and not Sarah, as she had originally thought. That must have meant—“Sarah!”
Sarah saw her own blood project away from her abs as three bullets from behind pierced her. The force of the shot pushed her body forward toward the rifle-wielding Chloe, whose eyes started to fill with tears.
“Hesitation is weakness,” muttered the injured Chloe.
… … …
Chloe’s finger held down hard on the trigger of her rifle after witnessing Sarah get shot. She never let go as bullets sprayed down the hallways toward the Chloe look-alike masquerading as an injured version of her.
“Fuck you!” Chloe screamed. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!” It was quite possibly the loudest her voice had ever got in her life.
Adding to her growing list of frustrations, none of the shots hit. She was firing with rage rather than a tactical sense. The Chloe look-alike returned fire with her pistol, forcing Chloe to take cover behind a wall next to the intersection. By the time she was ready to fight back, the look-alike was gone, and Sarah’s body spiraled motionless down the corridor. She leaped through the zero-g to grab a hold of her body. There was a heartbeat and breathing. Good, but there wasn’t much else.
“Major Vaughan? Where are you?” Michei’s voice called out.
“Michei!” Chloe yelled as her trembling hands held on to her sister’s entrance and exit wound. “Michei, over to me ASAP!”
“I heard gunshots!” he called back.
“I need your help now, damn it! Now!”
Sarah’s blood orbited the two while Chloe did what she could to stop the bleeding; ultimately a barrier cast by Michei was going to have to suffice until they could find a med kit.
“Chloe…why?” Chris’s weakened voice called out from a connecting corridor behind them.
She slowly turned to him and saw he, too, was shot and bleeding. “Chris, holy fuck.” She couldn’t hold back the tears any longer.
Chapter 31
►► ESV John F. Kennedy, Outside Jupiter Orbit
► Sol System
Whigli grimaced upon seeing the John F. Kennedy drop out of sublight speed several thousand kilometers away from Jupiter. His psionic mind detected the presence of the ship’s engines shutting down because of some kind of emergency. This situation quickly turned his grimace into a look of intrigue; there was a rift high above Jupiter. The John F. Kennedy was on a direct path that would have sent it through into that rift. A path nobody had informed him about.
Kasidey floated onto the bridge alone and hovered next to him. “What is that?” he asked and pointed toward the rift seen through the forward windows.
“It’s a wormhole,” Kasidey said. “Recognize the planet on the other end of it?”
Whigli
couldn’t quite make out what was on the other side of the wormhole. His ESP, however, painted a picture for him as his thoughts traveled through. There was another star system on the other side…this was a gateway across the cosmos. A space bridge was present, with a second one being built, and dozens of Hashmedai command ships orbited a familiar world.
“Paryo?” he asked her. “Is that Paryo?”
The two looked at each other face-to-face. She smiled and said, “It is; it is Paryo. I want you to destroy it, Whigli. Burn it to ashes.”
Destroy Paryo? While making the empire suffer for the role they played in Chidorli’s death was on the to-do list, he figured it was going to be something that would take much more time.
And planning.
“But.”
“This ship, like all human ships, is armed with enough nuclear weapons to render a planet uninhabitable for centuries,” Kasidey whispered into his ears. “I promised you the chance to strike back. That blow against the Radiance fleet was the first!” She held his sweat-covered hands. “Now it’s the empire’s turn. Nuke it, and let them feel your wrath. Do it for Chidorli.”
He shut his eyes to focus; the mind shield was still down. Thus giving his Hashmedai psionic mind full access to everything, including the nuclear launch codes and targeting and launch systems.
“Yes, use your mind; force the computers to launch the warheads,” she said while he felt the texture and size of her hands change.
“Do it, please, Whigli. Do it for me.” It wasn’t Kasidey’s voice that spoke those words, nor were those words spoken in English; they were spoken in Hashmedai.
His eyes opened, and his sweating doubled, and it wasn’t because of the heat aboard the ship. A young Hashmedai woman stood next to him holding his hand. She had green hair and soft light-colored skin and had donned psionic implants visible from her revealing dress. It was Chidorli. Kasidey was nowhere to be seen, but Chidorli was.
“My…I, I,” Whigli mumbled.
She looked the same way he remembered. She held on to his exposed and fit abs and looked up into his orange eyes with her red ones. “Please, Whigli,” she said again. “Do it for me.”
Her voice, it had been so long since he had heard it. It filled him with the will, the determination to finish the launch sequence. “It is done,” was all he had to say as a group of eight nuclear warheads was seen propelling toward the wormhole. Its destination, the imperial capital of Paryo.
Whigli waited for the next set of missiles to load as he and Chidorli’s form embraced and their tongues interacted with each other’s lips and necks. She stopped suddenly and pulled away, lost in thought.
“Change of plans. We need to leave,” she said.
Her body distorted unexpectedly. It was as if she was melting away into a liquid. Seconds later, Kasidey reappeared in place of Chidorli’s body.
… … …
Whigli’s blue teleportation light filled the cockpit of the mysterious ship Kasidey and Fiesei had been operating. It was still docked within the flight deck of the John F. Kennedy as the two emerged from the dimming bright light. Kasidey took a seat and interacted with the ship’s forward computer terminal. A hologram of Fiesei loaded in front of her. He appeared to be floating through the corridors of the John F. Kennedy.
“Fiesei, we must leave!” she said to his hologram.
“No…not without her,” he replied. “Give me a few minutes. I can’t lose her again!”
“As you wish,” Kasidey said and shut off the hologram.
… … …
►► Interstellar Space
► Uemaesce System
A large drone that extended its shields to protect warheads always joined nuclear missiles launched from UNE ships. The purpose of the drone was twofold: one, it prevented enemy targets from shooting down the missiles before they got to their intended targets, and two, it was constantly sending back battle data to the ship that had launched it. Given the massive distances battleships could possibly face during interstellar combat, there were times when it might have taken too long for the UNE ship to receive the data.
If a target were at distance of two light minutes, it would take two minutes for a scan from the ship to ping an enemy ship and another two minutes for it to return. A total of four minutes could pass before one would know if their nuclear payload was delivered or not. The drone cut back on this time by constantly sending battle data right up until the nuclear devices exploded. The crew aboard an attacking UNE would receive word if their target was destroyed the second they saw the light from the explosion. A psionic could relay that information, but during the heat of battle especially one that required the use of nuclear weapons, a psionic would most likely be over tasked with other duties.
That very same type of drone prevented Hashmedai interceptor fighters from shooting it and its eight nuclear missiles, which propelled toward the icy world Paryo. Several ships from the orbiting fleet started to deploy after learning that the shields protecting the nuclear missiles still held. But given the distance between them, the gap closing between the warheads, and the fact that they waited until the last minute to deploy, there was still a good chance a solo missile might slip through, turning the imperial capital into a radioactive wasteland.
The arrogant Hashmedai admiral that ordered the fleet to hold position and the let interceptors deal with it was probably going to lose his head should the empress survive...
… … …
►► Ancient Temple, Paryo
► Uemaesce System
Word of the impending doom began to spread throughout the streets of the city, prompting a massive evacuation, one that would not succeed. There just wasn’t enough time or ships. The evacuation news filled Noylarlie’s raging feelings with more regrets than anger.
“Well...” Noylarlie said. “My wormhole might have just contributed to the end of Paryo.”
“No, this was foreseen,” Fahia said. “This is the reckoning, this is the test, this is the reason the gods sent you two!”
“Forgive me for not sharing your optimism,” Noylarlie said.
“You both have the gems,” Fahia said, pointing toward Noylarlie and Kroshka. “Both of you attuned to them. Noylarlie, you’ve proven you have psionic gifts stronger than any Hashmedai psionic with the creation of that wormhole.”
“I can’t close it! Even if I could, it’s too damn late!”
“It is not,” Kroshka calmly said to Noylarlie. “Take us aboard your ship, Archmage.”
… … …
►► Crimson Arrow, Paryo Orbit
► Uemaesce System
Both Noylarlie’s and Kroshka’s bodies rematerialized within the cockpit of the Crimson Arrow. The shift from gravity to zero-g had the long hair from both women floating while Noylarlie’s mind took control of the ship’s systems.
“What’s your plan?” Noylarlie asked.
“Get us closer,” Kroshka said, pointing toward the windshield. “Focus with me; make your thoughts one with the gem.”
The Crimson Arrow left Paryo’s orbit on a direct course toward the eight atomic missiles and their protective drone flying in the center. Far behind the Crimson Arrow were the many Hashmedai capital ships that took too long to act, still flying over the white horizon of Paryo.
Noylarlie’s mind joined with her gem as per Kroshka’s request. The world of Aether Space opened up into her thoughts and enhanced her psionic mind. She could hear voices, too many of them all speaking in unison.
“We must take down the shields protecting those warheads,” Kroshka telepathically said to her.
Noylarlie felt her body…no, her mind leaving her body, then the Crimson Arrow, entering the space around the ship. She and Kroshka’s thoughts became one, pure psionic energy capable of so much. It was hard for Noylarlie to process it all; it was as if the voices from the gem were telling her everything she could do in this form. But as before, there were too many all speaking over one another. “Take down the shields.�
� Right, if the shields protecting the atomic weapons can just vanish.
Their two minds joined together and surrounded the shields of approaching shielded warheads, draining it of all its power; it flicked blue several times, then vanished. “There!” Noylarlie’s mind echoed. “I’m redirecting them back toward the humans.” She stopped after noticing the wormhole had evaporated.
“Your focus here must have closed it,” Kroshka’s mind said. “No matter, they are no longer a threat.”
All eight missiles changed course, veering off in random directions into the great expanse of space, leaving behind trails of exhaust almost as white and fluffy as the clouds of the world they had just saved. Noylarlie’s vision returned to normal, she was back inside the cockpit of the Crimson Arrow her mind was back in her body. Kroshka too seemed to have returned back to normal.
She had no words for what her body and mind just experienced, becoming pure psionic power with another, draining the shields then forcing the atomic missiles away, and then returning to her psychical form. According to the clocks on the Crimson Arrow, three seconds had passed since she joined her mind with the gem.
They saved Paryo in a period of three seconds.
Three seconds. How?
Slowly Noylarlie’s face turned towards Kroshka. “When did you learn how to use this?” Noylarlie asked her.
There was a long pause leading to her reply before she revealed. “When I was a child.”
… … …
►► ESV John F. Kennedy, Outside Jupiter Orbit
► Sol System
Michei’s teleport resulted in him, along with Chloe, Chris, and Sarah, appearing within the John F. Kennedy’s habitat ring infirmary. His telekinetic thrust cleared two operating tables before forcing Sarah’s and Chris’s bodies to float down and rest on top of them as Chloe’s hands and feet frantically grabbed a canister of medical foam from a med kit.
Uprising of the Exiled (Splintered Galaxy Book 2) Page 45