Energize (From the Logs of Daniel Quinn Book 1)

by Thomas R. Manning

  “Laraar, have you ever flown a ship before?” I looked back towards him. He nodded, though hesitantly.

  “Many of us . . . when life force was young . . . flew our ships,” he said.

  I asked him to stand behind me and gave him a quick crash course in piloting the Belle. I showed him the navsphere and how it worked, how to punch the throttle or hold it back, and also how to engage the weapon systems. There wasn’t time to explain everything about the tactical console, but locking onto a target and firing the forward plasma guns was a simple process. The most important thing right now was to keep it simple. I handed over the reins.

  “Why?” He asked me. I couldn’t exactly distinguish anxiety or nerves with their song patterns, but I thought he looked a little nervous to handle my ship.

  “You’re going to drop me off about 70 meters from the side of the lake. Once I’m on the ground, you need to take the Belle to the mountain and blow up those shuttles. I think there were four of them. The only downside is my weapon systems can’t lock onto that many targets. You have the ability to take out two ships at once, but then you’ll need to swing back and take out the rest. If we destroy their shuttles, they’ll have no way to fly back to the village or their ship.”

  “What happens when shuttles at village contacted to come?”

  “Let’s just deal with one thing at a time. Take these ones out and go from there. Okay?” Laraar nodded. “Great, let’s do this.”

  Laraar set the ship close to the ground as we neared the forest that bordered the mountain opening. I educated him as he manipulated the controls. Overall he didn’t do a bad job. For a second time I explained the weapon system, which buttons to completely ignore and which to focus on. After a couple minutes I was only delaying the inevitable. I touched his shoulder, giving it a squeeze, then exited heading back to the bay. I waited until the door was halfway open then reversed the lever and ran like hell. When I jumped from the closing door the ship was about twenty feet off the ground. I dropped the rifle and used the inertia to drop into a roll to minimize any damage done by the long fall.

  As soon as I was safely on land I looked up to watch the Belle take off toward the mountain. I may have imagined it, but I could have sworn I saw her wavering a bit. I hoped that Laraar would be able to control her. There was so little time, but Erebos and King weren’t exactly going to wait for me to give Laraar a flight exam.

  I checked the status of my rifle then set the rounds for plasma burst. I winced as the gun’s charge read 100%, knowing what firing plasma would do to a person, but I didn’t see any alternative going forward. EMP rounds would be useless. They could be used to back up Laraar if he failed at taking down the shuttles, but an EMP would only disrupt the power for a time. I needed the ships to be destroyed. Stun rounds could potentially work, but I had to face the possibility that Erebos and King had used the empyreus to energize themselves and I wasn’t sure stun rounds would bring them down.

  Moving quietly through the trees, I heard the first and second explosion.

  Yes! Laraar had done it. A lot of shouting and screaming followed, all human. With the thundering noise of the shuttles exploding I sped up my advance into a sprint. The lake was just ahead.

  “Quinn!” I heard King shout. I raised my gun and spun around in a circle, looking for her.

  Idiot, she thinks you’re on the ship, I thought.

  I moved forward reaching the end of the forest and planted myself behind a large tree. Looking around the side of the tree I saw a large fire and debris where the shuttles had been. A number of men were scrambling around the wreckage. I couldn’t tell if they were looking for something or just freaking out. When three Dawnians pounced on them from between the wreckage, I confirmed it was the latter. Chorta, that wonderful son of a bitch was still alive and kicking. Literally.

  My attention was quickly distracted by activity at the lake. A number of humans were at the shoreline. I saw King, but not Erebos. He could have been inside the mountain. What drew me to her and her cohorts were the large, seemingly heavy objects they were pushing into the lake from the larger transport ship. That and one other shuttle were all that remained. I was at a terrible vantage point to see what those shapes were, but knowing what Cessa kept with her on my ship it couldn’t have been good.

  Chorta and his men were beating down on the humans by the shuttle debris when reinforcements ran up from the two remaining shuttles. Chorta didn’t see them. I made my move as they crossed my position. My bionic eye counted four men, all armed with weapons. I ran behind the first two and bashed their heads together, sending them quickly to the ground. The third soldier turned and aimed at me, but I swung out with my rifle and knocked his out of his hands. His eyes widened as I followed through with a kick to his chest. He fell into the soldier behind him who had aimed and pulled the trigger of his gun, but the impact caused his weapon to misfire into the sky. As his comrade fell on top of him, I leapt toward him and smacked him in the head with the butt of my rifle.

  “Quinn! Well done, well done!” Sarah King bellowed from the lake. The two soldiers who were assisting her previously now had me at gun point and I had them in my sights as well. Sarah was unarmed, an easy target. I considered the thought of putting a plasma round in her. The soldiers would retaliate quickly and kill me, but at least she would be dead and people like Ashley would be avenged. No, that wasn’t right. Erebos was still here and these people were still in danger.

  “Get to the shuttle. Go back for more soldiers,” she ordered her two lackeys. The two of them crossed in between us, their guns trained on me the whole time.

  Come on, just shoot them. If you take them out then you won’t need Laraar to destroy the shuttles. What if he isn’t making the return trip? And if he does, he’ll just be doing what you failed to by destroying the shuttles. Do it! Now!

  I shook my head violently trying to get rid of the morbid thoughts. I had to trust Laraar would be back. My job was to contain the people on the ground and I couldn’t risk being shot. I let them pass. King laughed at me.

  “Oh Quinn, how can you be so impressive one moment and then ridiculously stupid the next? My men are about to go for reinforcements and you refuse to stop them? Where is the sense in that?”

  “Sense has nothing to do with it King,” I said to her, screaming over the thrusters of the shuttles. It’s just that my reinforcements are here before yours.”

  Don’t fail me now Laraar!

  The timing couldn’t have been better. King was processing what I said, wondering what the hell I was talking about when two green plasma blasts hit the shuttle and the transport ship, followed by an overhead flyby of the Belle. The shuttle spun out of control and crash landed out of sight. The transport ship was instantly engulfed in flames. I slowly advanced on King, a smile playing on my lips. Chorta and his men joined me. We finally had her. Erebos would be next.

  “Give up Commander! You’re alone now! Get on your communicator and order the men to stand down!”

  “Or what?” she asked incredulously. “You don’t exactly excel in killing people. Besides, I’m a Captain now and with that rank come the benefits befitting of that rank. I’m the one in charge and the one who calls the shots.”

  As she spoke the lake rippled and I noticed small forms rising from it. I saw heads, shoulders, bodies, and was rendered speechless as I realized King pushed humans into the lake to energize them. Stars above… my confidence level went down a couple of notches as they walked out of the empyreus.

  Upon closer inspection as they drew near, I saw what they really were. They weren’t humans. At one point they may have been, but these things behind King were vile monsters. Metallic plating and mechanical devices coated various parts of their body. It fused so flawlessly into their skin that it looked natural.

  Sarah King had created her own fluxing cyborgs. She knew what the empyreus did and immediately took advantage of it. Merging machine with human wasn’t anything new. Hell, my eye had been installed
in my retinal socket years ago, but no one had ever found the trick to making the transition smooth and painless.

  That wasn’t the worst of it though. As disgusting as these things were, nothing prepared me for what came next. One of the cyborgs approached us stopping beside King and I studied the human aspects of him, the light brown wavy hair and green eye. His jaw was a hard line and his eyebrows were bushier than any average man’s. Only three quarters of his human face remained. Half of his jaw and his right eye were replaced, but I could close my eyes and easily picture him. He had saved my life.

  I was looking at a cyborg created out of my best friend, Jason Hobbes.

  TWENTY

  All I could feel in that moment was the tearing of my heart. Heavy tears formed in my eyes, quickly dropping to the ground. All these years I hoped beyond hope that Jason survived somehow, whether he got away or made up a convincing enough excuse so he wasn’t labeled a traitor. Never in a million years would I have believed that Sarah King had kept him as a prisoner and experimented on him. Now having bathed in the empyreus, the machinery and cybernetics attached to him had bonded with his physical body making him a cyborg.

  “Stars above,” I whispered. “Jason, damn it. Oh damn, what did she do to you?”

  Jason and the other cyborgs stood in front of the four of us as their bodies, clothes, and cybernetics absorbed the powerful energy. I was on my knees, my hand free of its weapon. I must have dropped it when I saw my friend’s intense eyes burning anger and hatred into me. Chorta was breathing heavily, his hand pressed against his hip where a discharge had burned him. We were exhausted and the sight of Jason made me want to throw up and just give up altogether. Horku and a third Dawnian were both hunched over. Sarah King laughed.

  “My scientists weren’t sure the specimens would make it here alive,” she said to me, walking up to her cyborgs and weaving through them. “These two here,” she pointed to the two cyborgs behind her who I didn’t recognize. “They are volunteers of the program. Jason however was very resistant . . . at first. I persuaded him.”

  “You bitch . . . you fluxing bitch!” I screamed at her. “How could you do this?”

  How did she even know it could be done? I watched in horror as more cyborgs rose up out of the empyreus lake. Eight of them now stood in front of me. I started to dry heave and choked on my own saliva. I’m not sure why, but during my episode I thought of the energy and how it was known as a myth throughout humanity. Then I thought of Laraar telling me his people have been among the stars before. I couldn’t be positive, but usually if I have a problem answering a question I just pick the simplest answer.

  “You found one,” I croaked. “You found one of the Dawnians in space didn’t you? That’s how you found out about this place, about what the empyreus can do . . .”

  “Well done!” She said excited. “Quinn, I have to be honest, I never thought you were this bright yet here you are solving all these little mysteries. It’s exciting isn’t it? I thought the same thing when we stumbled upon our little alien friend. When we tore his ship apart and found out how it was powered we were astounded. Then when we tore him apart and found the same fuel. Well, we knew this was priceless, absolutely priceless.”

  I was told during my incarceration on the Echelon that the mind does strange things when it hits its breaking point. Sometimes it just shuts down, but sometimes it goes into a sort of overdrive mode, lashing out at the first thing it can. In all of a few seconds my mind sorted through various images from Ashley’s dead body, to leaving Jason on the Echelon, to a dead Dawnian opened up on an examiner’s table. Then it returned to the form of Jason, but mutated into a machine. At the center of it all was Sarah King who was standing right in front of me.

  Something inside of me snapped, like someone flipped the light switch from on to off. Suddenly, like entering a dark room, I had no idea where I was going, only that I was stepping through the door. It just so happened to be the door to hell. I didn’t care anymore about anything. I didn’t care if I died or what the outcome of the battle was. Now that I think about it, I’m not even sure I was in complete control of my own actions. It felt more like my body went into autopilot. My rifle rose up before I realized it and in the blink of an eye I pointed my gun at Sarah King and opened fire. One of her cyborgs stepped in front of her and took countless plasma shots through the chest. When I saw him still standing there heavily injured and still functional, I couldn’t believe it.

  “Kill him!” Sarah shouted, and then eight cyborgs, one heavily wounded and leaking blood or oil, came rushing at me. Even Jason ran toward me. I opened fire again and unleashed a hell-storm of discharges at every cyborg in my sight. With empyreus fueling my weapon, the plasma banks never dropped. I kept shooting until my arm was numb and my shoulder ached. Two of the cyborgs dropped to the ground, one whose head had been vaporized. The other one, the same one that protected King was motionless.

  Stars above, I just killed them. The worst part was how I quickly resumed firing at every single body I saw in front of me. I relentlessly unloaded multiple discharges while the cyborgs charged, piercing their human skin, denting their metallic plating. A loud, angry screech of fury was carried on the wind. I realized it was me making the noise and it was nearly inhuman.

  The cyborgs were almost on me. Then a large, muscular shape jumped in front of me wrapping its arms around three of the cyborgs and tackling them to the ground. Chorta’s team screeched out a sound of fury much like my own, probably just mirroring me, and ran to engage the cyborgs. I joined them, screaming out as much frustration and anger as I could.

  Our two groups reached each other and all hell broke loose. Jason threw a punch to my chest. I intended to block it, but he was too quick. The hit connected and I flew backwards, my chest erupting in pain. My armor was designed to take physical attacks, but not one that felt like a spaceship had just hit me. I couldn’t breathe for several seconds and Jason leapt toward me, his knee bent, intent on smashing into my face. I rolled out of the way as the ground beside me shook from the impact. I quickly swiped my leg under him trying to knock him over, but when my leg connected with his, it felt like hitting a metal bulkhead. I howled out in pain, wondering if I just cracked the bone.

  Jason took that moment to grab me by the throat and lift me off the ground. I grabbed his arms and tried to push against them to ease the pressure, but he kept squeezing. With his immense strength, it would be a matter of seconds before he broke my neck.

  “Jason, it’s Daniel,” I said hoarsely, calmness breaking through my mental breakdown. “Jason, please…”

  There was no recognition in his eyes. They didn’t waiver or hesitate. Whatever she did to him, he truly saw me as his enemy. He had been left behind and paid for it with his life. I wondered if somewhere inside that body the real Jason was somehow trapped within his subconscious.

  I told myself whatever I needed to for motivation. I had to keep living, stop Erebos and King and find a way to reverse this monstrosity that was once my friend. I allowed more of the anger and hatred that was flowing through me to come to the surface. I grabbed hard at his wrists, planted my feet against his chest, and kicked hard. If I couldn’t release his hands at all the move would break my neck, but luckily I parted them just enough that I kicked him away and fell to the ground. I had seconds to see that the Dawnians were not doing well. The cyborgs had the clear advantage and were landing punches and kicks, completely overwhelming them. I admired their dedication and honor, especially Chorta. Every time he was knocked down he kept getting back up no matter how hard he was hit.

  There wasn’t really anything I could do. The cyborgs were pumped up on empyreus and we were tiring out. We wouldn’t have the time to throw ourselves in the lake and absorb the energy. There was no way I could think of to power these bastards down.

  Wait . . . yes there was!

  Jason rushed me again, and I pushed myself out of his path and ran for my rifle. I dove on top of it as if I was sacrificing mys
elf by jumping on a live grenade. I rolled to my back and entered a code onto the side panel. Before I could complete the sequence Jason was on me again. His knee thrust into my groin, causing me to cry out. His hands grabbed at the rifle and pushed it down to my neck, trying once again to choke me to death. With my peripheral vision, I caught sight of the other five cyborgs fighting around us. We were all in close proximity to one another. I turned my head to the side to get a better view of the weapon’s panel. With my vision starting to turn red and my lungs unable to pull in any air, I used my last moment of life to finish the sequence with my pinky finger.

  This is going to suck, was my last coherent thought.

  The rifle had been a gift to me from my former Captain, Greg Smithson, the same man who was betrayed and went into exile to keep himself and ESA secrets safe. He had entrusted me with Al and helped me modify the weapon to access the various ammunitions. I hadn’t used it all that much, but when I did it got the job done. The problem with the rifle was due to its multiple rounds, charges, and technology; the weapon could overheat if used too much and go into overload. I could only imagine what would happen if the empyreus-powered device was manually set to overload, and therefore self-destruct. After I managed to finish the sequence, a red warning message blinked, and I was about to find out.

  I used every last ounce of energy and adrenaline I had and kicked against the ground to roll over on top of Jason. I let go of the gun as a high pitch noise began to reverberate through my ears and it came smashing into my face, which hurt like hell, but it also knocked me off of Jason. I braced for the explosion and when it came, a wave of energy passed over me and jolted my entire system. My body shook violently and an electric current traveled along my nervous system. I couldn’t move or breathe. All I could do was lay there, my mind registering that my entire body was in agony.

  When I had the ability to think coherently again, I was on my back and could only see through one eye. The EMP overload had knocked out my bionic one. Everything else about me seemed to be functioning for the most part. I could feel all my limbs and I was breathing. Every part of my body was in some type of pain, but nothing I couldn’t handle for the moment.