Sacred Planet: Book One of the Dominion Series

by Austin Rogers

  Or, fortunately, how to break those defenses.

  Smaller flares sprinkled around the falling fireballs and crumbling shafts. Titanium bolts, Guarin guessed. Even a meter of titanium, travelling fast enough, could radically reshape Canyon City. They popped like gunshots, blending together into a constant, crackling racket. Flashes and flames strobed the sky almost from horizon to horizon. And still the defense dishes hummed and beamed on, untouched and unperturbed, not letting a single projectile through.

  Then Guarin heard a sound he hadn’t anticipated.

  Thump.

  An impact exploded into a spray of pebbles about fifty meters out. More metal remnants beat down on the ground all around it, then to Guarin’s right and left and behind him. A rain of charred titanium and tungsten, slamming into the rock, splitting solid granite, sending tremors through the ground. Guarin needed to go. Now.

  He drew his shoulders together to dislodge himself from his hiding place and thrust into the open, going straight into a hard sprint. A shard landed maybe ten meters ahead, showering him in tiny, jagged rocks, nicking his skin in a dozen places. Another hit cracked the ground behind him, almost knocking him off his feet. The defense dish was thirty meters away. He pushed his legs harder.

  Little impacts pelted the uneven ground. Then one of the burning hot fragments sliced through the flesh of his forearm. Searing pain burst up to his elbow and down to his fingers, sizzling at the point of impact. He bit his tongue and wrapped his other hand around the newfound orifice in his arm and kept going. Pulses of hot pain flashed around the bleeding wound.

  Just before he reached the safety of the space under the dish, Guarin knelt beside a still-glowing ember. He locked his teeth together, sucked in a few shallow breaths, then uncovered the bloody hole in his forearm and pressed it against the smoldering lump of metal. Scorching pain shot through his arm and to every corner of his body. It was as if every nerve ending had been inflamed. The wound cauterized, he turned his arm to seal the exit hole. It burned like hell, worse the second time—more exposed raw flesh. When he sprang up and rolled under the cover of the dish, his head swam in haze. He thought he might pass out, but he shook his head and forced himself up.

  His forearm had been charred black at the wound and cooked red around it. He squeezed that hand into a painful fist. His muscles and tendons resisted, but he fought through the throbbing stiffness.

  More metallic rain came down outside the safety of the dish. Guarin examined the thick stalk and its steel legs stabbing into the rock. At the top of one leg, where it met the stalk, he saw the contours of a hardware panel door. He planted a boot on the flat top of the leg and started up it.

  How well would the defense array work with one dish out of commission?

  The Transapien

  Chapter Sixty-One

  The defense’s command center—the palace’s old throne room—quivered in collective impatience and anxiety. Maxwell saw it in the Upraadis as they huddled together and whispered. Eyes wide and dialated. Hands twitching. Feet shifting. Even super-powered by mechanical exoskeletons and holding polished foreign weapons, they had little confidence. They did not know what they were doing. Kids trying to make it in a world of adults. Sheep among wolves.

  A cluster of thuds trembled through the dense rock from above. Dust fell into the curiously colored pool around the edge of the chamber.

  The transapien commanders stood on the dais where Radovan’s crumbled throne remained in a pile. They stood perfectly still, thinking, processing information as it streamed into their heads. Abelard and Seraphina waited at the edge of the steps leading up to the dais, no less nervous than the others. One of Abelard’s underlings, who they called Gable, paced restlessly with a deep grimace lining his cheeks and forehead.

  “Would you stop that?” Abelard hissed. “Everyone is watching.”

  It likely did make things worse, based on Maxwell’s assessment of the room, but he suspected the sporadic pounding overhead had more effect. The Upraadis all paced on the inside. But it did seem as if the impacts had gotten harder and more frequent.

  Maxwell, Rumaya dispatched. A problem.

  What is it?

  Rumaya’s blue eyes sliced up at him. Dish Four is offline. The cannon is not firing.

  Was it hit by debris?

  No serious hits, she replied. The cannon pushed away all the big pieces. We’re registering a malfunction in the master processing node.

  An image appeared in his mental subvision of a Skyshield aerial defense dish, labelled with lines running from various parts. One blinked red: Master Processor. The line ended at a point on the stalk, under the protection of the dish. It made no sense. There was no plausible way a piece of debris could have reached that area.

  Want me to send someone up to look at it? Rumaya asked.

  Negative, Maxwell replied. I’ll go myself.

  I have a team directly under the dish.

  Keep them on standby. Someone might be trying to sabotage us. If so, I want to know who. Everyone is clear on their duties. I’m the most expendable at this point.

  You’re our chief commander, Rumaya dispatched, tilting her head for emphasis. We can’t lose you.

  If I’m killed, you’re in charge. But I won’t be killed. Maxwell looked at Abelard on his way down the steps. “I’m going to the surface to deal with something. The plan hasn’t changed.”

  Abelard stepped in Maxwell’s path with commendable eagerness. “I’ll go with you.”

  Maxwell placed a hand on the hooknosed Upraadi’s shoulder and thrust him aside. He tried to be gentle, but Abelard was weak, and Maxwell’s arm held the power of ten men. “Your fighters need you with them, Abelard. Stay.”

  * * *

  Maxwell treaded across the Upraadi surface with immunity. Debris impacted all around him, some pieces the size of coins, others like baseballs. A few the length of his leg smashed into the rocky ground and sprayed umbrellas of pebbles twenty or thirty meters around them. Boulders split, cracks branching out like lightning across their rugged surfaces.

  Every few seconds, a piece hit him on the chest or shoulders, making him recoil. But each hit left scarcely more than a burn mark on his armored body. In this case, freedom from vulnerable flesh was an asset.

  He approached Dish Four and scanned his surroundings. No one in sight. Just a motionless dish encircled by burgundy rocks, a rise of wind-worn boulders behind it, another cluster to his left. About ten meters out, he noticed an open panel in the stalk. Much of the hardware had been ripped out. As he suspected—someone had sabotaged them.

  Maxwell reached the edge of the covered area under the dish when the sound of quick footsteps made him turn. He glimpsed a figure in tattered, foreign body armor before being smacked across the head with a sheet of steel. His brain jostled inside its mechanical cranium, and his feet stumbled sideways, keeping him upright. He raised a hand to shield his head from another strike, but the blow came at his side instead, knocking him the other way. This time, he planned ahead. Maxwell grabbed the steel sheet—the Master Processor panel door, he realized—and swung it away. The attacker went with it, flying under the cover of the twelve-meter dish. One of its dense stabilizer legs halted him.

  Maxwell tossed away the panel door as the young but well-built man coughed inside his breather mask and pushed himself to his feet. One of his forearms had been severely burnt. His earlobe-length blond hair had been scorched black in a few places. By the looks of him and the style of body armor, Maxwell deduced him to be Sagittarian. A nobleman.

  They stared at each other. Maxwell considered what to do. The fight would not be difficult, but did he want to kill this Sagittarian?

  “Who are you?” Maxwell called out, loud enough to penetrate the fracas.

  “Is it for your gravestone, Metal Man?” the Sagittarian shouted back. “You want the name of the one who ended you?”

  “I believe your own gravestone is a more immediate concern,” Maxwell replied, staying outsid
e cover, allowing himself to be struck by more bits of debris. “Were you the one who killed Radovan?”

  The Sagittarian’s face turned sour. “No. That would be an Eagle bastard named Kastor.” He lifted his mask long enough to spit. “Probably thinks he killed me. But it’s not so easy to kill a Swan—as you’re about to find out.”

  He charged Maxwell, darting outside cover to kick a glowing hunk of metal. It launched straight at Maxwell’s chest, but he batted it away. The Sagittarian leaped off a rock and slammed his elbow into Maxwell’s head. With a roll, Maxwell escaped and straightened with metallic fists up. He could have used the guns in his forearms, but the rules of fairness prevented him from doing so. The Sagittarian launched a punch at Maxwell’s side. He deflected it, then another and another. When Maxwell swung back, the Sagittarian darted backwards.

  Without pause, the blond warrior leaped off the steel stabilizer leg, trying for another elbow attack. Maxwell saw it coming, grabbed the Sagittarian out of the air, and used his own momentum to smash him into the ground, shoulder first. Something cracked.

  The warrior yelped and tumbled away. That arm went limp, only twitching at the fingers. It took surprisingly little time to recover before he charged again, shoulder lowered, driving straight into Maxwell.

  The Sagittarian picked up the transapien and hauled him several meters before bodyslamming him into a boulder. That same edge of the elbow beat against Maxwell’s head again and again, blurring his vision and restricting his concentration. Had to focus.

  His hands felt for the Sagittarian’s ribs then punched repeatedly. Harder each time until Maxwell felt bones crack like glass against his knuckles.

  The Sagittarian gritted his teeth and groaned in desperation. He got off one last elbow shot at Maxwell’s face, doing no damage to the metal but rattling the transapien’s brain painfully. Anger fueled Maxwell’s punches, made them harder, stronger. Another solid hit, then another. Finally, the Sagittarian cried out and lowered his arms to shield his sides. Maxwell used the opportunity to headbutt him squarely in the nose, crushing the plastic mask and making blood burst from his nostrils.

  The blond menace moaned and rolled away. Despite the hit, his crumpled mask had not been punctured. Once Maxwell’s vision straightened from the headshots, he stood up and looked down on the pacified warrior. The Sagittarian had taken a surprising amount of damage and now inched away pitifully. Blood filled his mask, hindering his breathing.

  As far as Maxwell could tell, this one had acted alone. Probably a survivor of the commoner uprising. If there was not a bombardment going on, Maxwell would question the Sagittarian, find out who he was and what he knew. But alas, no time. And no one to spare for guard duty.

  Maxwell grabbed the Sagittarian’s collar and dragged him across the covered space toward the canyon ridge. The warrior struggled vainly as his legs scraped across sawtoothed granite and smoldering embers. Falling shards peppered his back, hips, and thighs. A decent enough distraction for the trip to the ridgeline.

  “Stop!” the Sagittarian begged once he had glanced ahead. He threw his fist against Maxwell’s arms, a quarter the strength of before. “Wait! Listen to me, you bastard!”

  His desperate pleas kept on as Maxwell peered over the edge of the cliff. It dropped off at a satisfactory angle. Not ninety degrees, but close enough. Maxwell heaved and swung the Sagittarian’s body into the air. He plunged in freefall a few seconds before pounding against the rocks and rolling out of sight in a blur. Maxwell kept watching in case the body emerged in his line of sight again. It did not. It had disappeared.

  Maxwell, heads up, Rumaya said through dispatch.

  He looked up, toward the plains on the far side of the canyon. A haze shimmered in the distance between the mesas, but he saw nothing else. Then the booming eruptions in the sky cut off—all at once. Residual echoes faded into an eerie silence. Silent enough to hear the wind blow. That high-pitched hum of flowing air. It picked up. Shifted. Solidified. Maxwell realized his sensors were not detecting wind. None at all. That sound was not wind . . .

  Windshieldless lancer drones expanded in the distance across the plains, flying low. A handful. Then a dozen. Then two dozen. Then too many to count. Maxwell zoomed in his visual field and focused on one. Long fuselage coming to a sharp point. Swivel gun underneath. Slender double-wings forming a sideways V-shape from the front, single-barreled guns lodged between them. Some strange symbol plastered against the sides of the body. A white bird with an extended, arcing neck and black beak. No bird native to any planet Maxwell had visited. Definitely Sagittarian.

  Phase two of the assault had begun.

  All Section One teams to the surface, now! Maxwell dispatched across all channels. They’re coming.

  The Loyalite

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Upraad orbit . . .

  Captain Tielo clutched the bar at the cockpit-end of the landing shuttle, looking across the spartan interior fuselage. Damn near fifty brothers and sisters sat, waiting. Four rows, side by side, everyone facing each other. Knee to knee. Gun in one hand, helmet in the other. The gleaming armor of Swan made everyone the same size, same shape. Same haircuts for everyone, male and female—shaved clean on the sides and a shallow strip of hair running from the back of the neck to the tip of the forehead, rounding off like a beak. The Swan emblem repeated itself down the line of shoulder pieces, one after the other.

  Tielo felt a wide grin split his cheeks. He popped another piece of gum in his mouth. The last had gone stale.

  “Brothers and sisters!” he shouted over the hum of the engines and airflow vents. “The time has come to prove ourselves.”

  “Loyalite,” some called him when they thought he wasn’t listening. Tielo didn’t mind the name. His brothers and sisters used it as an insult, lips curled in disgust as it rolled off their tongues, but it was no insult. Not if they knew better. Tielo embraced his role as an honorable one. A necessary one. Lord Velasco had only a few thousand like him—lowborns who had sworn lifelong loyalty. Tielo’d found long ago that the highborns wanted loyalty and respect more than anything else. More than hard labor. More even than the lion’s share of the produce. When a common man such as himself gave them what they wanted, the nobility gave him what he wanted, what he craved.

  Dignity. Authority. Sway.

  That’s all it meant to be a highborn, really. To be dignified and authoritative—that’s all that gave them power. None of that DNA hocus-pocus. That was just to make the nobles easier on the eyes. To solidify their status. Make the lowborns feel their lowliness every time they looked in the mirror. All Tielo had to do was show loyalty and respect, and then he became like one of them. All that power his fellow lowborns wanted was within their grasp—all they had to do was reach out and take it. But they didn’t, and he did.

  “Don’t be afraid!” he called out to an audience of wide eyes and leaning faces. “To obey our lord is virtuous. To kill for our lord is pure. To die for our lord is glorious. Yes, brothers and sisters, we have only one path to glory, and it awaits us on the planet below. Do your duty today, and you will earn your title as Sons of Swan.”

  The time to be skeptical or bitter had passed. They’d already been conscripted. They’d already been trained with a gun and outfitted with armor and stuffed inside a carrier ship. They already sat inside the belly of a landing shuttle, awaiting their order to descend. Soon they would leap into battle, where they might be shredded to bits. Or they might shred his lordship’s enemies to bits. Either way, the time for outrage had gone.

  A bright orange light blinked overhead, and the ship let out a string of klaxon blasts. Sudden gravity pulled everyone toward the ceiling as the shuttle ejected from the carrier ship. A gasp spread around the cramped lines of soldiers, who remained snared in their restraints.

  “This is it, brothers and sisters! It’s time to win our glory!” Tielo unsnapped his helmet from a clip on his suit belt. “Helmets!”

  Armor clacked against armor as
everyone followed their captain’s lead, lifting helmets and stuffing their heads inside. Once snugly inside his own, Tielo found the forward strike group’s objectives in green on his faceplate.

  —Destroy or Disable Anti-Bombardment Dish 1

  —Destroy or Disable Anti-Bombardment Dish 3

  —Destroy or Disable Anti-Bombardment Dish 5

  —Secure Western Embankment in Sectors 2 and 3

  —Dig In and Hold Ground

  Tielo grinned. Fancy words for “Blow shit up and slaughter the enemy.”

  He looked past the transparent green commands on his faceplate at his four rows of subordinates. Faces hidden now. Each armored body identical to the next.

  Just a few shots fired in their direction, and they’d all be loyalites.

  The Transapien

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Now!

  Maxwell thrust upward, exposing his shoulders and head from the trench drilled into the rock and snapped the reticle of his combat rifle at the first lancer drone he saw. Forty other transapiens along the line did the same, and a fraction of a second later, they fired as one. Forty-one mini-rockets blasted smoke trails at the oncoming mass of flyers and exploded together. The lancers jerked away but not in time. Too many explosions at once.

  Fireballs of pressure and shrapnel minced the forward lancers. Wings pinwheeled downward as tattered metal frames sunk to ugly crashes. Ammunition caches blew up and sent engine parts skipping over granite.

  More lancers tore through the panorama of thin, gray smoke. Twenty, then forty, seventy. They angled down on the transapien teams, swooping like hawks, and opened fire. Maxwell and the others ducked behind cover as copper-alloy bullets peppered the ground around them.