With a gasp like a swimmer who has held his breath several seconds too long and finally broken the surface, he sucked air into his lungs. Grinding metallic sliding sounds told him the shuttle shoved still deeper into the building’s upper floor.
It had been his idea to use the ship as a battering ram. He had located a psi-master, and decided that was the place to strike.
No klaxons wailed on their ship. No emergency noises of any kind rang. Instead, the old hetman Yang shouted the battle cry of the Berserkers. At the same time, the bottom ramp made crushing noises as it opened. A billowing wave of choking mortar dust rolled into the shuttle.
Cyrus burst into explosive coughing. He should have thought of that. He yanked the release, and the restraining straps fell away. Feet thudded. Yang appeared in the dust cloud, and Skar and Grinder. Cyrus joined them. Each of them wore body armor. Cyrus had his knife tucked at his side, and he gripped a Vomag pistol in both hands. The others had similar weapons.
“Kill the Bo Taw, Vomags, and Kresh,” Skar said in a loud voice.
Cyrus’s head pounded and he breathed too fast. Jana and Darter remained with the bridge crew, making sure they stayed at their posts.
Choking and spitting dust out of his mouth, Cyrus entered a disaster. Dust drifted everywhere. Men groaned from the floor. Others screamed. Heavy beams, equipment, pieces of flooring pinned humans and Kresh. Some of them looked dead. Others stirred. Twice, Cyrus shot men. Once he used both pistols and slaughtered a helpless Kresh, blasting the alien so flesh and blood spurted like a volcano.
That was for Captain Nagasaki.
Yang, Skar, and Grinder likewise killed the enemy.
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” a man in a dirty white lab coat shouted, staggering toward them.
Cyrus aimed a gun in the man’s face. Blood ran from a gash over his right eye. “What are you?” Cyrus shouted.
“I’m Mentalist Niens,” the man whined. “Are you Klane’s friends?”
“Where is he?” Cyrus demanded.
Niens screamed, clutching his head. “Stop! Stop it!”
Cyrus scanned through the dust. He spied a psi-master with his long head bent and pinned by a broken beam. Cyrus raised a gun—and a mental bolt struck his mind. He heard interior laughter. He vomited, and he emptied a magazine in the psi-master’s general direction.
The mental attack ceased. With blurry vision, Cyrus witnessed the mutilated, lanky body twisting on the floor, still pinned by the beam.
Cyrus dropped the spent pistol and grabbed the front of the mentalist’s coat. “Where’s Klane?” Cyrus shouted. “Tell me before the same thing happens to you.”
Niens stared at him in a daze.
Cyrus shook the lean man, and shook him again, making his teeth rattle. “Talk to me. Where’s Klane?”
“Right here,” a man said.
Cyrus spun around. He saw a man about his height with short hair and open features. His eyes seemed to swirl with power, with hidden knowledge.
“You’re the Anointed One?” Cyrus asked.
“Yes,” Klane said.
“I’m Cyrus Gant from Earth.”
Klane raised an eyebrow.
“I’m also the Tracker,” Cyrus said. “I’m here to rescue you.”
“To take me where?” Klane asked.
“Into space,” Cyrus said.
“You have a ship?”
“You see our shuttle. It’s taken a little damage, but the armor held well enough so it can still fly. I plan to use it again and storm onto an Attack Talon. Then I’ll own a spaceship, yes.”
A smile spread across Klane’s face. “Yes. That will work. Let us leave.”
“Follow me,” Cyrus said.
“What about me?” Niens asked. “You can’t leave me here. The Kresh will torture me.”
Cyrus turned and studied the mentalist.
“He comes too,” Klane said.
Cyrus shrugged. Then he shouted, “I’ve found him! Let’s get back to the shuttle and leave this place. Come on, let’s hurry!”
Antigrav plates hummed. The shuttle slid out of the building, leaving the dead behind. Without fanfare and without challenge they raced upward.
Cyrus stood in the control chamber, watching. The Kresh city dwindled. Soon, so did the canyon and then the wide uplands. Finally, they saw the moon’s curvature as the stars began to appear.
“We’re really leaving this place,” he told Skar.
The soldier said nothing.
The pilot turned to Cyrus with an imploring look. During the attack, the pilots had each been bound.
“Take us straight to Zama Dee’s Attack Talon,” Cyrus said. Niens had given him the Kresh’s name and told them the alien had died during Klane’s rescue. “You know the procedure,” Cyrus told the pilot, “so follow it to the letter.”
“This is blasphemy,” the pilot complained. “You slew Revered Ones, branding us all with certain death.”
“Do you prefer to die this instant?” Cyrus asked.
Tight-lipped, the pilot maneuvered toward the Attack Talon, opening channels and following procedures, as Cyrus had ordered.
Klane, the Anointed One, sat in a chair. He had been silent since boarding the shuttle. He glanced at Cyrus, saying, “The Attack Talon lacks Bo Taw. This could work.”
The ship assault proved anticlimactic. Seventeen personnel were aboard Zama Dee’s Attack Talon. With Klane’s psionic help, Yang, Skar, and Cyrus moved from compartment to compartment. They disarmed the few Vomags and put the techs in what passed for the brig. There were no Kresh aboard, thus none were slain.
“We won’t be able to hide our vessel for long,” Niens told them an hour later.
“Why?” Cyrus asked.
The mentalist threw his hands into the air. “In case you failed to notice, the Kresh have more than one Attack Talon. They have hundreds. They will track us down no matter where we go.”
“I have the null,” Cyrus said.
“What is that?” Klane asked.
Cyrus explained it, how it had hidden them from psionic tracking.
“I can expand on that,” Klane said, shortly. “It will make us invisible. Yes. I’m beginning to perceive the way.”
“How about you explain it to us,” Cyrus said.
Klane studied him, finally saying, “Wait a few days. Let us see if we can disappear. Then I will explain what I’m thinking. I don’t want to risk capture and losing valuable information to the Kresh. I know they’ll never pry it from me.”
Cyrus put it to a vote, and they decided to trust the Anointed One. On low power and with Klane providing the null, they piloted the Attack Talon closer to Pulsar.
It was a massive gas giant, twice the size of the solar system’s Jupiter. Pulsar emitted intense amounts of radiation and heat, which would help cloak them.
After discussing it for several hours, Klane and Cyrus agreed that near-Pulsar orbit would be the easiest place to hide.
Days passed as Klane informed them of frantic psionic activity, searching for them. Later, radar sweeps bounced against the ship, but they were not found. Klane locked himself in a wardroom, and didn’t emerge until several hours later.
All he would tell them was, “I took care of it.”
“I don’t see how that’s possible,” Yang said. With his transfer knowledge, he diligently began studying astrophysics and other space-related sciences.
“I don’t understand it, either,” Cyrus said. “But I believe he has the ability to do it.” He recalled how psi-masters had fashioned laser-resistant shields with their minds against Discovery. Why couldn’t Klane have figured out a way to thwart radar pulses?
Niens began to interview the captured crewmembers. “I’m a mentalist,” he told Cyrus later. “Give me enough time, and I will turn them from Kresh lov
e to Humanity Ultimates.”
“You’re going to brainwash them?”
“At first, perhaps,” Niens said. “In time, they will understand it was for the best.”
“Very well, proceed.”
Five days after leaving Jassac, the Attack Talon entered into close orbit around Pulsar. With careful piloting, they brought the vessel down to the highest atmospheric clouds, the antigrav plates working overtime.
Only then did Klane bring Cyrus, Jana, Yang, and Skar into his wardroom. It was lit with a single lamp on a center table, showing pen marks of odd symbols on the plastic top. Klane had listened to Cyrus’s story some time ago and gone over it with him in detail.
“We are hidden for the moment,” Klane said. “I have ranged with my telepathy, searching between here and Jassac. Your null was a brilliant idea, by the way,” he told Cyrus.
“I can’t take credit for it,” Cyrus said. “I learned it from a lady on High Station 3.”
“That’s interesting,” Klane said. “In any case, my point is that as long as our antigrav plates last—and with constant tinkering, they should—and enough food and water remain, we can stay here, hidden from the Kresh.”
“How does that help us free humanity?” Cyrus asked.
Klane grinned, and it made him seem like the young man he really was. “There is a war coming to the Fenris System.”
“Do you mean the cyborgs?” Cyrus asked.
“Yes,” Klane said.
“You had a clairvoyant dream about them?” Cyrus asked.
“No,” Klane said, “nothing like that. I went to their fleet and spoke with their leader, the Prime Web-Mind.”
Cyrus paled. He knew his solar system history. That’s what the cyborg leader had been called: the Prime. “You went to their fleet?” Cyrus asked. How was that possible?
“I think it’s time I told you what happened to me,” Klane said. For over an hour, he spoke about the singing gods in the caves, his attack in the demon city, the Kresh response, his consciousness fleeing his body and his dreadful visit to the Chirr hive, and later, the cyborg fleet.
“So you see,” Klane said, at the end of his tale, “the Chirr are going to launch their war fleet soon enough. They have hundreds of thousands of vessels. They have planned the attack for generations. It will be a bloodbath in space.”
“And the cyborgs?” Cyrus asked.
“They have five ships tougher than Doom Stars,” Klane said. “Are you familiar with those?”
“I’ve heard of them,” Cyrus said.
“Doom Stars were dangerous?”
“Extremely,” Cyrus said.
“Well,” Klane said, “those two coming attacks are the cornerstone of my plan. That means we have to wait until the Chirr strike and the Kresh bring their Attack Talons and other craft to Fenris II. Or we wait until the cyborgs arrive and begin their gruesome procedure. That, too, will occupy the Kresh.”
“Okay,” Cyrus said. “And then what?”
“Then we attempt to slip near High Station 3 and rescue your Earth crew and the Teleship,” Klane said. “That will radically alter the equation.”
“Equation?” asked Cyrus.
“Of man’s standing in the Fenris System,” Klane said.
“Okay . . .” Cyrus said. “I have a question. What if the cyborgs begin winning their war? That would be a disaster for the humans. The cyborgs will strip their flesh and give them metal bodies and programmed minds. That would be worse than being a Kresh’s slave.”
“It will be a bloodbath,” Klane said again, his features hardening. “Many will lose their lives. Remember, I have been to the hive and I have been to the cyborg fleet. I have a good idea of what is in store for humanity. Millions of humans will die. We’re not fighting to save them. We will be fighting to save humanity from extinction. We will be fighting to give our kind a future in the universe.”
“You think it’s going to be that bad?” Cyrus asked.
“I see two possibilities. No, three,” Klane said. “We can throw our lot in with the Kresh. That may be the most reasonable, but it would be fraught with the peril of them coming out on top.”
“You’re talking about them and the solar system humans, too?” Cyrus asked.
“Of course,” Klane said.
“All right,” Cyrus said. “That’s one possibility. You said there are three.”
“The second is that either the Chirr or the cyborgs prove victorious,” Klane said. “Neither side will allow humanity to live. They will exterminate us root and branch.”
Cyrus flicked out a second finger, waiting for the last one.
“The last possibility is that humanity wins,” Klane said. “Then we survive to populate the stars as our own masters.”
Cyrus nodded. “Which do you believe is the most likely outcome?”
“Given the odds,” Klane said, “either the Chirr or the cyborgs win. That means the end of the human race.”
Cyrus sat back. In time, he took Jana’s hand. The stakes were still astronomical, weren’t they? They had a bigger ship now, and more people, but the odds had turned grimmer. Yeah, the Anointed One was right. They had to get Discovery’s crew and get out of the Fenris System. But what about the millions of humans here?
No! There had to be a better way than fleeing back to Earth. He’d met Skar, Yang, and Jana. There were millions more like them in the Fenris System. They had the Anointed One, likely the most powerful psionic around. They had mind transfers and exactly one military vessel. Was there a way to start a mass rebellion as Spartacus had once done in Italy? That was worth some careful thought and possible planning.
Cyrus stood up, and he went to a port, staring down at Pulsar with its banded colors. For the moment, he was safe. Soon, though, he would have to enter the fray again. It was going to get hairy all right. Cyborgs, Chirr, and Kresh—this was proving to be a deadly, dangerous universe.
Jana came and stood beside him. He put his arm around her. Tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, he would marry her. He had found his woman, but he had yet to find a peaceful place to live.
I wish we really had discovered New Eden here. Yeah—that would have been a thousand times better than these grim alien shores.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you, David Pomerico, for wanting to see the Doom Star universe continue in a new series. Thanks, Brian Larson, for giving me advice during the writing of the story, and thank you, David VanDyke, for the first round of editing. Thank you, Jennifer Smith-Gaynor, for you excellent editing advice. I’d also like to thank my copy editor Michael Townley for her hard work. A hearty thanks to the entire 47North team. You are an easy and enjoyable group of people to work with. Thank you, Evan Gregory, for your advice on the business end. And I want to give a special thank you to my wife Cyndi Heppner and to Madison and Mackenzie: two of the nicest girls in the world.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
2013 © CYNDI HEPPNER
Vaughn Heppner is the author of many science fiction and fantasy novels, including the Invasion America series and the Doom Star series. He is inspired by venerable sci-fi writers such as Jack Vance and Roger Zelazny, as well as by The Nights of the Long Knives by Hans Hellmut Kirst. The original Spartacus movie and its themes of slave rebellion color much of his work. Among his contemporaries, Heppner counts B. V. Larson’s military science fiction novels as the most akin to the Fenris series. Canadian born, Heppner now lives in Central California. Visit his Amazon Author Page.
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Alien Shores (A Fenris Novel, Book 2) Page 30