Space Witch: A Paranormal Space Opera Adventure (Star Justice Book 2)

by Michael-Scott Earle

  The missile smashed into the rock above us half a moment after we entered, and Z yanked back on the controls of the craft. The forward thrusters fired like mini-suns, and the cavern lit up with a blue color that reminded me a bit of the lights on the suits we wore. Everyone sitting in a chair was pushed violently against their harnesses, and the men in the rear all fell to the floor and slammed into the backs of Eve and Jatal’s chairs.

  The nose of the shuttle was only five meters from the back wall of the cave. If Z had braked a half second later, we all probably would have died.

  “Good flying,” I said to Z after everyone let out a painful exhale. “I don’t think we really need to hire a--”

  “Yes,” she whispered. I noticed that her eyes were closed, her face was pale, and her hands trembled on the controls. “Yes. We really do need to hire a pilot.”

  Chapter 19

  “Rojar and I have planted the explosives,” Gaul reported twenty minutes later.

  “Can you get out of the blast radius?” Jatal asked

  “I can try, but I don’t want to risk a signal interruption. We’ll do our best.”

  Jatal didn’t say anything for a few moments, and the dark-skinned man closed his blue eyes. “Thank you,” he said at last.

  “We knew what we were getting into,” Gaul replied. “One-way trip. Hey Adam, you there?”

  “Yeah,” I replied into my transponder.

  “Give them hell for us,” he said.

  “You got it,” I replied.

  “Let me know when you are ready and we’ll blow the tunnels,” Gaul said.

  “Should be a few minutes,” I said.

  We had just flown Persephone toward the western point on the map. The miner there had driven toward us in his truck, and we picked him up. We were now using the vehicle to approach Alloprize’s camp. About a tenth of their forces were chasing Gaul’s truck that we sent eastward, and another small unit was positioned around the truck we left at the southern point.

  “Any movement?” I glanced over my shoulder to look at Z.

  “No, they have to know we are driving toward them, but they are busy shelling the tunnels where Jatal’s people are. They are probably more worried about our ship and shuttle than one of their own vehicles. Hey! Will you watch the road?”

  “There isn’t a road,” I answered as I turned back to look out the windshield. The trucks had meter high all terrain wheels and tons of torque. They’d probably bounce off anything I could drive into.

  “Well, still. Don’t crash. I don’t want to be running back to Persephone,” Z said.

  “How close are we?” I asked.

  “Four kilometers.” Z’s voice was tense.

  “It will be fine. These warriors are arrogant. They still believe they have us beat, even though we have destroyed their entire space fleet,” Eve said from the seat next to Z.

  “I still don’t see how this is going to work. You are assuming that they aren’t just going to shoot us as soon as they see us driving toward them.”

  “We’ll be on foot,” I answered.

  “Even crazier.”

  “I will attempt to conceal us,” Eve said.

  “How can you do that?” the hacker asked.

  “I am not sure. My fire magic is an illusion I created when I felt the need. I might be able to do the same with the three of us.”

  “But you have never done it before?” Z asked.

  “No, but I never did the fire illusion before I thought of it. If the army is distracted by the cave in, my chances of the witchcraft working will be higher.”

  “We might not even need to go into the camp,” I said. “If all the missile launchers end up in the collapsed tunnel, we won’t need to do anything more than make a few bombing passes with Persephone.”

  “We are at two kilometers,” Z said. “The satellite shows two vehicles leaving the main group and heading our way.

  “Tell Gaul to blow the tunnel,” I said to Jatal.

  The blue-eyed man took a deep breath and then spoke into his transponder, “We are ready for the tunnels.”

  “You got it,” Gaul said.

  Then the ground rumbled, and a dozen cracks appeared across the surface of the moon in front of us.

  “Shit!” I shouted as I slammed on the brakes to the truck. We all leaned forward, and I tried to turn the wheel so we wouldn’t plow into the ravine that suddenly formed five meters ahead of us. The brakes didn’t stop the truck quickly enough, and the front tire skipped over the edge before it slammed into the lip of the cliff the lower side had once been connected to.

  “I think we are stuck,” I said as I put the truck into reverse. The front wheels just skidded across the sand on the rock but didn’t find purchase. I leaned my head out of the window and looked at the back wheels. They were wedged between the rocks there, and I didn’t think the back tires would be able to claw the truck backward unless the front end was lifted a bit.

  “We are running the rest of the way,” I said as I opened the door. The crack in the rock seemed to drop into a dark infinity, and I swung my legs to the side so I could step on solid ground.

  “Watch your step,” I said to my friends as they climbed out of the truck. A few moments later we were standing by the anchored front of the vehicle.

  “Can you get it loose?” I asked Jatal. “I recall seeing block and tackle in the trunk.”

  “I can get it free, but you don’t want me to come with you?” he asked, and I had trouble identifying if he was happy or dismayed.

  “No, your people need you to lead them. We can handle this on our own. Get the truck ready so we can make a quick escape.”

  “Will do.” He nodded and then moved to the rear compartment of the large truck.

  “Let’s go,” I said to the two women. They both nodded, and we turned to run toward the enemy camp.

  There was a giant plume of smoke climbing into the purple sky, and I took it as a good omen.

  Eve didn’t seem to have a problem matching my running pace, but Z wasn’t much of an athlete, and we had to slow a bit so the blonde hacker could keep up with us. It probably didn’t help that the purple ground was really broken up from the tunnel’s collapse, but I figured the terrain would make it difficult for Alloprize to chase after us.

  After a few minutes of running, I began to hear screams and shouts coming from the campsite, and I raised my hand to signal for us to slow down. As soon as our run turned into a quick walk, I heard another set of screams from a chasm to our right about ten meters. I motioned for my friends to hold their position, and I crept to the side of the chasm. It tore across the surface of the moon like a jagged cut some ten meters across, and I saw that a trio of the Alloprize trucks had fallen down a good fifteen meters. Some of the men appeared to be alive, but I moved away from the edge before they noticed me.

  “Those were probably the soldiers they sent for us,” I told Eve and Z. The women nodded, and we continued on the path toward the main campsite.

  I took the lead and switched the shotgun I normally used for the rifle on my back. It was the same weapon that was issued by the scientists who had enslaved me, and I was familiar with every centimeter of the weapon.

  The route ahead of us began to slope upward, and I guessed from the smoke and sounds of screaming that the main camp was on the other side of the ridge. I gestured for my friends to follow me, and we crawled the last ten meters to the lip of the valley.

  As soon as I reached the top of the slope, I realized that this area probably hadn’t been a valley a few minutes ago. It had been a hill, and the collapse of the tunnels below dropped the whole camp down a good thirty meters.

  It looked like a sloppy bowl of gumbo, with a mixture of rubble, truck parts, bodies, and broken fighter craft. I saw one missile array half submerged under thousands of kilograms of rubble, and while it might be able to shoot a few warheads out of its exposed part, I doubted the weapon functioned.

  The tunnel collapse had worked
much better than I planned, and while I did see a hundred soldiers trying to dig through the rubble, I didn’t see any useable equipment.

  “There is an array on the far side of this bowl, opposite to where we are,” Eve said.

  “I don’t see it,” I replied as I looked where her finger pointed.

  “Many of the soldiers below are thinking of it. They are worried we might attack, but the crew guarding that launcher was not caught in the collapse. There is also one more launcher that went eastward after the truck.”

  “Let’s head over there,” I said as we crawled backward away from the edge.

  “Did you mind-read that guy to know how many assholes would be guarding the missile launcher?” Z asked Eve as we jogged around the perimeter.

  “I did not get that information. I am sorry,” Eve apologized.

  “Hey, no worries. You can read people’s minds. I’m just happy we aren’t getting shot at--”

  “Get down!” I shouted at them as soon as I saw a flash of light across the bowl of the campsite.

  The sniper bullet grazed the armor on my shoulder as I dove to the ground. I could feel the kinetic energy of the thing threaten to tear through the armor, but it hit me at an angle when I dropped and hadn’t penetrated the plates.

  “Ugh!” Z moaned.

  “Are you hit?” I asked as I turned my head to look at her.

  “Oh, no. Just upset that I opened my damn mouth and talked about how I was glad we aren’t getting shot at.” Z rolled her eyes as she shook her head.

  “Crawl to your left,” I instructed our friends, and they followed my order so that they were farther away from the lip of the bowl.

  “Can you use your witch powers on them?” I asked Eve.

  “No. They are much too far away,” she replied with a frown.

  “I am going to move on ahead,” I said. “Follow at a safe pace. I’ll try to distract them and take out as many as I can. Try and push toward the missile launcher. If the soldiers down below know what we are up to, they might climb up the sides, and we’ll have a real problem.”

  “Are you going to--” Z started to say, but a bullet passed over our heads, and she gasped, “--change into your kitty form?”

  “Yes,” I said as my body began to shift.

  My vision got blurry and then shifted to a more yellow spectrum. My spine cracked as it expanded its length by destroying and rebuilding the discs. The blood flowing through me felt like it was boiling, and my muscles tore against the growing bones. My human teeth popped out of my mouth and were replaced with the sharp tiger set.

  The scent of blood filled my nose until it was all I could smell, and the beast roared with its release.

  “That really looks like it hurts,” Z said.

  “It does,” I growled. I could hear both of their hearts beating in their chests. Eve’s as a calm tempo, but Z’s was the frantic flap of a humming bird’s wings.

  “I will ggggggggo kill.” I turned away from them and then let the animal that filled my soul have command over my muscular legs.

  I was low enough on the slope not to worry about catching a bullet, but there were a few long cuts in the rock to my side, and the sniper that had me in his sights was talented enough to fit a bullet through each one when I ran across them. He was still too slow to hit me, but his accuracy, especially at what I guessed was a good four hundred meters, made me mix up the pacing of my run prevent him figuring out how to get a lead on me.

  I rounded the crater and saw a trio of soldiers taking cover behind a short boulder. They knew I was coming, and they all leveled their weapons at me. There was nowhere for me to take cover, so I increased my running speed and made a zig-zag movement across the ground. It was a strategy that I would have been insane to attempt as a normal man, but I could run much faster than most people were used to, and I felt the first salvo of bullets fly behind me when I pushed my legs to sprint.

  I would only have a few seconds of lead against them though. They would eventually figure out how to predict my speed, and the zigzag strategy wouldn’t keep me lucky forever. Still, it was hard for most shooters to hit a target that was running toward them in this manner.

  Especially when the target was a giant tiger-man with a big fucking rifle shooting back at you.

  My first burst of bullets slammed against the purple rock that they hid behind. They ducked further behind it for more cover, and the motion gave me a few seconds of reprieve from their fire. I used the opportunity to sprint straight at them, and I closed the distance to about thirty meters.

  The soldier on the right side of the boulder popped out to try to take a shot, but I strafed to the left, and he had to lean out too far. His bullet went wide to my right, and I heard him yell at his partner to try and shoot me. I expected this outcome, and I leveled the red dot of my sight on the spot where I thought the fucker’s head would pop out.

  I took the shot as soon as I saw his helmet appear. I’d always been accurate with firearms, and I seemed to be able to hit most targets even when I was on the move. My bullet hit him under the rim of his helmet, punched through his face, and spread his brains across the dirt behind him.

  The other two men screamed with surprise, and I changed my running trajectory so that I ran toward them again. They were too concerned with not getting shot to realize what I was doing, and I made it to the boulder without them preparing.

  I was still running, and I set my right foot on the edge of the boulder. My left caught on the surface above my boot, and I used my momentum to spring into a front flip while aiming my rifle straight ahead. The spin carried me upside down, and I squeezed the trigger on my rifle as soon as I saw the armored bodies of the surprised men. They died before they could even scream, my flip completed its spin, and I continued my run.

  Then I saw the missile launcher.

  It was positioned beside another boulder some three hundred meters away. There was a truck parked beside it, and I saw a few soldiers taking cover behind the vehicle. The men were pointing their weapons in my direction, and I sprinted to the left with the hope that it would be harder for them to hit me from their position.

  Then I felt the sniper’s shot stab me right in the back.

  It seemed as if my armor almost stopped the slug since I was thrown forward through the air like a rag doll. Pain exploded through my spine and stomach, and I landed on the purple dirt as if a cannon ball had sucker punched me.

  I couldn’t feel anything but my face for a few moments, but I knew that taking any time to analyze the damage done to me would just result in the sniper putting another bullet in my body. I had to move, or I was going to die, so I pushed against the ground with my left hand and rolled myself over like a barrel.

  A sniper bullet smashed into the dirt where I had just been laying.

  I twisted on the ground again and tried to get my legs under my stomach so I could stand. The limbs refused to move, and a quick glance down confirmed that I had a giant fucking hole in my stomach. The bullet had probably cut my spine in half when it passed through.

  I hissed and punched my elbow into the dirt to help roll me again. Another bullet buzzed past me, and I knew that I was going to die here. I had healed from some critical injuries before, but I never had a bullet rip my spine in half or punch such a big hole through my stomach. I figured that the only reason I wasn’t feeling any pain was because of the gallons of adrenaline flowing through my blood.

  And most of that blood was pouring onto the purple tinted dirt.

  Another bullet sped across the whiskers on my face. I guessed it had missed my skull by only a few centimeters, and I tried to twist again. I just couldn’t move though, and my brain began to warn me about the agony coming from my stomach.

  I could only look at the hillside where I knew the sniper lay in position. His next bullet would put an end to me, and I guessed that it would come in the next few seconds.

  But it didn’t come. Instead, I heard screaming from where the sniper lay and
shouts of surprise from the men behind the truck. I turned to try and find the sniper on the slope of the bowl, but I only saw Eve walking down toward me. Her hair seemed to float behind her head as if it decided it could ignore gravity, and the tight suit around her perfect body flickered with the red flame power of her magic. She looked like a dark angel, and the edges of my vision began to get fuzzy as I watched her come to me.

  Or maybe she was running toward me, but everything was moving really slow.

  “I think I’m hurt,” I said with a cough.

  “I was too slow, my love.” I felt her hands run along the fur on my face, and I realized my head was lying on her thighs. She was cradling my head in her lap, and I never wanted to be anywhere else.

  The pleasure of her touch couldn’t overcome the endless torrent of agony coming from my body though.

  “I can’t feel my legs. I don’t think I’m coming back from this one. It was a good run though,” I coughed, and blood poured out of my mouth.

  Damn. Looks like Z was right, I was eventually going to run out of my nine lives.

  “She is not right. You will recover. Let your body heal you.”

  “I don’t think that--”

  “Do you love me?” I heard her whisper.

  “You know I do,” I said with a cough.

  “Then fight. Use your anger. There are more people to help. There are more who need you. Not just Z and I, but people that have lost hope. People like Jatal, who would be dead without you. There are millions of them. Billions of them.”

  “Too many,” I said with slurred words. I couldn’t feel anything but the pain. I was so tired. I wanted the pain to go away. I couldn’t save everyone. I was just one man.

  One man that was really a monster.

  “You have saved me, and Z, and Jatal, and you will do so for countless others. You think they turned you into a monster, but they are the real monsters. The faceless men and women who believe they can take what they want because they have the power. I heard your screams in the jail cell. I have felt your rage and your honor. This is not your end. You cannot die because I am not dead, and we are the same. Please fight for me. Force your body to heal.”