The black dragon recoiled in pain, flinging Randai into an old coat stand. The creature made one of the most horrible noises he had ever heard as it clawed at the knife lodged in its eye socket. The bloodied blade bounced on the marble floor, and the reptile growled. It approached sideways, its good eye toward Randai and its movements more cautious.
Relentless bastard. They must have starved it. Randai braced for another attack, but the black dragon stopped in its tracks, its long-forked tongue licking the air.
It regarded Randai with its remaining yellow disk as it retreated several feet and waited. He wondered why it didn’t attack, but when he climbed to his feet, realization suddenly dawned. Dizziness flooded his mind and he fought to stay upright. The beast’s bite was venomous, and it was waiting until he succumbed to the poison. Randai punched his SIG controls and pumped his anti-venom shot, but if black dragons were as rare as Mr. Darcy had claimed, it likely wouldn’t work.
Another wave of dizziness swept through him and he tasted iron in the back of his throat. He frantically looked around for anything he could use as an improvised weapon. He looked to the broken coat stand at his feet and lifted the shaft from the floor. The end had snapped off and exposed a metal center-rod, forming a crude spear. Randai’s fingertips tingled as he held the make-shift weapon in one hand and drew his blaster with the other. His vision blurred, and multiple ghost-versions of the wrecked foyer overlaid one another, but he did his best to aim at the creature. If I can only provoke the bastard…
Randai discharged his blaster and decided he must have hit his target when countless black dragons climbed the wall and charged at him again.
As they sprang, Randai pointed the pole in their general direction, knowing deep down that he was about to become pet food. The spear shuddered violently in is gloves, but Randai refused to let go and drove it upward, his vision all but useless.
Eventually, the pole stopped moving, and he dropped to his knees.
The room whirled above Randai like a vortex, and he grew cold. He lost feeling in his extremities, and the numbness spread throughout his body. He expected to go unconscious, but he merely leaned against the weighted pole, his surroundings nothing more than a numb haze. It occurred to him that the creature could have eaten him alive. He remained in his awkward position for what felt like an eternity.
A hundred Mr. Darcys appeared above him, twirling in circles. Randai tried to curse, but for all his struggling, his tongue refused to cooperate.
“So, you really are the Ghost they spoke of back in the day. I always wondered what had happened to you. I admired your style back then, you know. There was something classy about your work. Your attention to detail was impeccable. I mean, what you did to Zargon Two-claws.” Mr. Darcy chuckled.
Randai tried to speak again but only managed a rasping sound.
“Forgive the laughter, but I just realized something about your name,” Mr. Darcy said. “Don’t you Terrans have a saying about the Ghost? Something about him having killed more people than Genghis Kahn?” His laughter became uncontrollable. “Oh, this is just too much…How could I not have seen it? You’ll make a nice addition to my private collection.”
“Kill…you,” Randai managed, sensation slowly returning to his limbs.
The White Dragons boss sighed as a hundred spinning hands wiped away a thousand rolling tears of amusement. “Now that I think about it, do you have any idea what some of my esteemed colleagues would pay to have you as a trophy?” He gasped in triumph. “What about old Mungus? Remember him? He runs an asteroid mine out near Tlalox Prime these days. He ended up out there after that incident on the Brink a while ago. Didn’t you have something to do with that? Anyway, Mungus has made quite a name for himself in the Dagoith system. He’ll pay handsomely to have you. Maybe pay for some of the trouble you’ve caused my clients. It hasn’t turned out to be such a bad day after all. Take him to the chamber. I’m sure the good doctor will enjoy the company.”
42
A Better Gun
Red lights flashed by Clio as she slowly dragged herself across the ground toward Booster, her suit’s dead weight making it all the more difficult. She reached out and was relieved to find he still had a pulse, though one of his arms appeared to be broken. Prodding failed to wake him, and she gathered the puck into the field pack as gently as possible.
Her left leg throbbed and spouted fresh blood. She applied another exogel pack to stem the bleeding, but the wound was in urgent need of medical attention.
Captain Kobol’s team used various pieces of machinery and equipment as cover, but they had sustained heavy losses. Not exactly a great time to be calling for a medic.
Red plasma blasted into the ground next to her, and she looked to the crane. There was no way she’d make it to shelter at her current pace. What else can I do?
Clio rolled over and crawled regardless, leaving a red streak in her wake. Enemy fire hammered down next to her and one bolt hit her shoulder blade. She feared for Booster. A direct hit in the back without her barrier would mean an instant end to the puck.
Suddenly the room spun, and Clio slid across the hangar floor as something pulled her by the ankle. Her neck strained with the effort of looking up. Someone in a Fleet TEK was dragging her in the direction of the crane.
They reached cover, and Riley O’Donovan looked down at Clio as she struggled to prop herself up against the vehicle. He pulled a massive machine gun from his shoulder and leaned over the crane’s body. The weapon roared, spraying spent shells. Riley took cover next to her as the Chits returned fire. “For a second there, I thought we weren’t going to make it.”
“That makes the two of us,” Clio said, chest heaving. “Thanks.”
“Family’s gotta look out for each other.”
“Yeah...” Clio moved her stiff arms and checked her field pack. She was relieved to see Booster curled up in a ball, still breathing.
“That wound looks nasty.” Riley eyed her thigh. “Your TEK dead?”
Clio nodded. “I can barely move.” She mustered her strength, drew her sidearm, and slowly leaned out to fire the last of her rounds in the Chits’ general direction. She shuffled back to her spot next to Riley as enemy fire smashed into the concrete wall by the crane. “I’m not much use moving this slowly, and I’m out of ammo.” Clio looked at him abjectly.
“This is my last magazine too.” Riley clipped it into his gun before unstrapping the Chit weapon on his broad back. She’d noticed the weapon before but hadn’t had the chance to ask about it. “You’re smart. Maybe you can work out how to use this thing?”
“You’re the weapons expert,” she said, slowly opening her palm in objection.
“Still.” Riley shrugged. “It’s worth a try.”
Clio accepted the unusual gun, resting it across her lap. She’d grown used to the heavy rifle from the bunker armory, but the Chit weapon was almost twice as heavy again and having to wrestle with her TEK didn’t help matters. She checked the gun as O’Donovan exchanged fire with the enemy again. She couldn’t figure out how a solid chunk of metal without a trigger, or any other moving parts that she could see for that matter, was supposed to fire.
O’Donovan fell back against the hangar wall.
Shit! Not Riley.
The Chit rifle vibrated in her hand as it sent a bolt of red into the wall next to O’Donovan’s head.
“I see you got it working.” Riley climbed back onto his knees. “Probably best to point it at the Chits instead, though.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’ve taken worse beatings. I’ve got a few bullets left. A little help keeping them at bay would be nice. Hopefully Captain Kobol can come up with something.”
Clio tried to work out how she’d gotten the weapon to fire the first time. It had discharged when she reacted to Riley being hit. Does it respond to emotions?
She aimed at the wall and thought about the little screaming girl the elite had carried away as its prey. A surge of anger
filled her, and she imagined it channeling into the rifle. The gun jarred her as it fired several bolts much stronger than the first. She looked at O’Donovan in shock. “I think I’ve got it.”
Clio gritted her teeth as she lugged the weapon onto the back of the vehicle and sent a volley of plasma tearing through the advancing Chit ranks. Three elites dropped with gaping holes in their chitinous armor.
“Jesus, that thing’s shredding them.” Riley fired his last few machine-gun rounds and drew his blaster.
Marine reinforcements appeared along a production line to their right and drove the elites back further. Clio opened fire again, and one Chit went down after another, the weapon cutting through their kinetic shields, allowing Marine fire to finish the job. The Marines drove forward, and the elites fell in their dozens.
Something moved in Clio's periphery, and she looked down. Black forms slithered from under the crane. It took her a moment to recognize them as tentacles. She and O’Donovan shuffled back against the wall as the winding limbs wrapped around the crane, crushing it like a can. The tentacles flung the wreck onto the bay floor beyond, leaving them both wide open to the enemy.
Riley dragged Clio beyond the reach of the tank’s appendages, and they dropped behind a flimsy tool rack. From their new position, they continued to fire on the retreating elites and tentacles, lending support to the Marines. Clio dropped behind the rack as a volley of red plasma blasts sailed overhead. Without her shields, one well-placed shot would finish her.
43
Experimental Implant
Marine gunfire rang out, and Grimshaw opened his eyes to find Sergeant Lynch and his Marines standing where the elite had been. Lynch approached, offered a hand, and pulled Grimshaw to his feet.
“Glad you could join the party, Sergeant.”
“It wasn’t as if someone else was going to save your hairy ass, Commander.” Lynch checked his SIG. “Scanners keep coming and going. The tank appears to be disrupting signals worse than the elites. It’s not looking good. The civilians are with Wallace’s team. We have to execute plan B.”
“There’s a plan B?”
“There will be once you tell us what to do. The Captain’s squad is taking a beating. They won’t last much longer. It’s just a matter of time before the buzzers make it through that fire too.”
Grimshaw looked from behind the crates and checked the tank. Blood pumped from the deep wound Nakamura had inflicted. It seemed slower than before, but a dozen tentacles still lashed at the Marines out on the bay floor.
A glimmer caught Grimshaw’s attention and his eyes were drawn to Nakamura’s SIG. The Aegis’s upper body lay approximately fifty yards beyond cover. The tank was preoccupied.
Further to the left, Evans and O’Donovan fired on the enemy from behind a flimsy stack of shelves. Evans shooting a Chit rifle took him by surprise.
Grimshaw knew what he had to do. “We need to clear a path for Wallace and the civilians. Our only option is to take that tank down.”
“It’s not really much of an option, is it?” Lynch looked at Grimshaw like he’d gone crazy. “How do you propose that we do that? Our weapons are useless against that thing from this range, and you saw what it did to the Aegis.”
“Yes, but Nakamura wounded the bastard. If I could just get to that wound.”
“With all due respect, Commander. What makes you think you could do what an Aegis couldn’t?”
Grimshaw opened a hidden program on his SIG and entered a command he hadn’t used since the Battle of Gorthore. “How much do you know about the Fury Program, Lynch?”
The Sergeant looked at him confused. “Never heard of it, sir.”
“The Aegi aren’t the only ones with tricks up their sleeves.” Grimshaw activated his fury implant, and delicious heat blasted through his veins, threatening to overwhelm him. He fixed Nakamura’s angel-class SIG in his mind. Get the SIG and use the blade. Get the SIG and use the blade, he kept telling himself.
He had less than a minute before the fury took over and enhanced his body at the expense of relinquishing control over his mind. The implant was a crude version of modern Aegi technology—an old experiment gone wrong—but it was all Grimshaw had left. The heat swelled to a burning fire, and he doubled over in pain.
“Is everything okay, Commander?” Lynch asked, worried.
“Just cover me, Sergeant,” Grimshaw growled. “I’ll take care of the rest.”
“You can’t seriously think—”
Sergeant Lynch’s words faded as Grimshaw steadily became a mere passenger inside his own body. Blood and electricity in the air tickled his nostrils, like someone else’s senses had been plugged into his brain. He was a third party left to observe, unworthy of participation. Lynch and his Marines stood before him.
Puny Terran men.
The sounds of fighting registered, pleasing him, causing his blood to flow faster.
“Cover…me…” Grimshaw grunted through the mire. His attention turned to the tank and his body drew a deep breath, the surging heat lending strength to his joints and limbs. Like heartbeats, gunfire pounded behind him, and he sprinted for Nakamura’s SIG. He sped past Evans and O’Donovan, sliding under the crossfire and springing to his feet without stopping. A stream of plasma bolts cut through his path like gelatinous, blobs of blood. He vaulted over them and rolled next to the dead Aegis.
Grimshaw was relieved that his body had chosen to do as he intended. He repeatedly recited the steps required to kill the tank as if the part of his mind now in control of his body would listen. He ignored a nearby spray of plasma as he fitted the SIG to his right arm and entered Nakamura’s access codes. A white button appeared on the interface, and he pressed it, making sure to keep the tool pointed away from him. A long white wave flowed from the Aegi weapon and settled in the rough form of a shimmering blade, radiating immense heat.
Grimshaw sped toward his target, blade at his side. The tank spotted him, and an enormous serrated leg descended. His body leapt into the air and swung his arm. The white energy sliced the limb below the joint, and the creature howled as its face crashed into the ground.
Before it could recover, Grimshaw scrambled up its armored head, slashing as he went. It surged forward and almost flung him free, but he clung to a ridge tightly with his left arm. He pulled himself on top of the Chit’s head and found the wound Nakamura had made. Holding onto the rim of the tank’s damaged armor, he rammed the white blade into the exposed flesh. Grimshaw drove the starblade until he was shoulder deep in Chit brains.
White and purple liquid bubbled and spat from the gaping hole. The tank’s remaining limbs thrashed and buckled, and it crashed to the ground, the force flinging Grimshaw onto the concrete floor. The back of his head struck the ground, and the fury’s heat leaked from his muscles, a freezing cold rushing in to take its place.
The Chit lifted its head above him, and its mandibles parted as if to strike. Grimshaw could hardly believe the beast was still alive. The glow in its eyes faded, and white liquid poured from its black beak as it let out a pitiful gurgle and slumped forward. The mandibles crashed through the concrete only feet from Grimshaw, propping the tank’s head up above him. He forced his head to turn and found that the tentacles had gone limp and lay curled on the hangar floor.
Grimshaw used the last of his strength to reach for Nakamura’s SIG and activated Project Zero’s ramp. The white blade fizzled out of existence, and his consciousness followed suit. The expected darkness came much more swiftly than he’d expected, and as hard as Grimshaw tried, he couldn’t hold it back. Just as the last wisps of light were taken from him, he lurched forward, coughing and gasping for air.
A new fire flared within, and the darkness scurried away as warmth seeped back into his bones. He shivered wildly as someone lifted him out of the puddle of Chit juice. Sparks erupted like dreams, and he saw that Kobol and Lynch had formed a wall before the Chits as the civilians ran for Project Zero.
Grimshaw looked to one side and
found that O’Donovan was dragging him toward the ramp with one arm, while supporting Evans with the other. The Ensign clutched a bundle of familiar serum medshots in one hand and smiled at him.
Two Marines hurried past them, carrying a man missing both legs below the knees. Grimshaw barely recognized his battered face, but it was Wallace. He couldn’t tell whether the Sergeant was alive.
Sadness swept over Grimshaw, and the darkness threatened to retake him, but he forced it back as O’Donovan dragged him up the ramp and onto the ship.
Elderly folk, women, and children stared at him as O’Donovan pushed through the crowd. Their faces were filled with fear, yet a faint glimmer of hope also shone in their eyes. They had made it against the odds. They had survived. If Grimshaw wanted to survive too, he had to hold on a little longer. He wanted to reach out and help the crestfallen colonists, but all he could do was hope that the fury poison would pass and that he would come out the other side with his sanity intact.
44
En Prison
Randai looked around at the bare concrete walls dripping with green slime. Four warrior-class Varg guards stood in each corner, heavy rifles in their arms. The place smelt rancid, and without his TEK, Randai gagged as he drew a breath. Unpleasant instruments had been laid out neatly on a workbench before him. It wasn’t the cleanest torture chamber he’d ever been held in, but then it was in the Underways.
Mr. Darcy’s cronies had bagged his head while transporting him and only removed the cover after he’d been undressed and strapped to the sloped operating table. He was relieved when the venom wore off and his faculties returned, though his body burned from the beating the black dragon had given him.
The Galactic Sentinel: Ultimate Edition: 4 Books with 2000+ Pages of Highly Entertaining Sci-Fi Space Adventure Page 29