by A K Lambert
Hallot looked at his concealed complement of solders and engineers. He had a total of twenty-four men and women, most of whom were in reasonably well-concealed locations. It was just a case of sitting back and seeing what transpired.
The Engineer reported to Grainter, ‘There appears to be a weak point in the field. I need to get closer to establish what exactly is causing it. The cloaking around our ship is restricting my readings.’
Kam Major cut in. ‘Can you tell if there are any Trun present on the other side?’
‘No, madam.’
Kam Major turned back to Grainter. ‘What are your recommendations, Commander?’
‘We should retreat to a safe distance to avoid vessel detection, and I will lead a small detail to investigate further. There’s a tiny beach landing. The tech can work from there, and we can secure the location. A detail of ten should suffice,’ Grainter replied.
‘Good, I concur,’ said Kam Major. He felt her eyes fix on him as she nodded agreement. A shiver went down his spine.
The hovercraft retreated and released a small, open top boat, through the shield slip cover, which avoided a breach in the vessel’s shield integrity. The men onboard then glided slowly to the shore using a manually steered ghost motor. They landed on the small beach, and the tech started taking readings.
‘The projection over the cave is rendering the force field below it ineffective,’ the tech whispered to Grainter. ‘We either move the force field forward of it,’ he stepped back, imagining the distance it would have to move. ‘That could mean meticulous reprogramming of thousands of hoverpods—a complicated job. The AI relies on us techs to input the change parameters. Or, we can just look into the cave and if there’s a wall of solid rock, leave things as they are. I would need to deactivate three Hoverpods to do that.’
‘We’ll look inside,’ replied Grainter, ‘as we’re here now.’ He didn’t want to load more work onto the already stretched shield technicians. He knew there was a risk that the enemy could be in there—masking their presence—it was a standard military procedure. Mini surveillance drones would therefore be ineffective. He gathered his men and quietly outlined a plan of action.
Commander Grainter approached the cave entrance tentatively, with two men either side of him. They were all armed with laser pistols and had body integrated force fields activated. He’d positioned two on either side of the cave entrance with laser rifles targeting anything that might be of threat within. Their objective would be to light the cave up. He signalled to the engineer to disconnect the three pods. His first officer produced a clamp flare and aimed it where he expected the roof of the cave to be. With a sudden whoosh the flare hit the ceiling, the automatic clamping device activated, and the flash lit up the cave.
The instant the cave lit up, a barrage of fire erupted from inside. Grainter, being in a forward position, took nearly all of the fire. Angry fingers were poking all over his body. His communications transmitter informed him his shield was at thirty percent—dangerously low. He would have been dead if not for the reaction of his adjacent comrades who jumped in front of him and shielded him, absorbing the torrent of laser fire. Modern day hand-to-hand combat was a numbers game. Body armour could only take a finite number of hits from any particular weapon. The more opponents firing at you, or the bigger the weapon, the quicker your shield would fail. There appeared to be more than twice as many Trun as his own team. The Vercetian detail had little choice but to retreat, and quickly.
Some tasty shooting from his peripheral riflemen meant that they were now the primary targets of the unseen enemy, giving Grainter and his four men a brief respite to find cover. They shuffled their way to the left side of the entrance. That provided some shelter. Some revising of the situation was desperately required, and Grainter was hoping that Kam Major would respond sooner rather than later.
Kam Major’s arrival was spectacular. The craft appeared from left of the cave, turning sideways and slamming to a halt as the driver deactivated the hover function. Four soldiers and Kam Major leapt out and started laying down a volley of fire into the cave, giving Grainter and his men time to jump aboard. Two of her men ran to the far side to protect the lone rifleman, and shepherded him back and onto the craft. Kam Major, together with the four soldiers and the remaining rifleman leapt back on, and within seconds the hovercraft was away.
‘Get that shield up!’ shouted Grainter.
A couple of seconds later the engineer replied, ‘Done, sir.’
Mavar Hallot watched the Vercetian craft disappear into the distance and spotted the faint shimmer of the shield reappearing, sealing the cave again. A faint smile crossed his face.
Everything is going perfectly to plan.
His men were congratulating themselves on dispatching the enemy with their tails between their legs.
Hallot raised his rifle and casually shot three who were showboating and gloating. Without body armour activated they were blown off their feet to the ground. Dead. There was silence as the soldiers turned and stared at their commander, uncomprehending. Their hesitation gave Hallot chance to shoot three more before they came to their senses and tried to return fire. But their guns were inactive, as were their shields. Nothing was working. With the force field activated Hallot controlled the only exit. He concentrated his fire on those nearest to him, trying to herd the rest into the middle of the cave. Some ran for cover, while some braver ones ran at their commander, only to be quickly picked off.
The Trun soldiers gathered in the centre of the cave looked on in stunned silence at what happened next.
Hallot activated a device that hovered in midair and bathed him in green light. He felt his uniform and a layer of skin begin to fall away from him. The relief was luxurious. The final step of his transformation was the reappearance of the horns on his forehead and protruding vertebrae. He made a minuscule adjustment in the timeline they were occupying, then bared his sharp pointed teeth at the horrorstruck soldiers.
Time to make this a little more interesting.
He reached down for a weapon attached to his belt. The touch of a button and it extended, not once but twice, to become an evil-looking sword. Two soldiers seized the initiative and tried to overwhelm him, but within seconds one was dying on the ground with a wound to his heart, and the other was looking confusedly at what had been his arm, now lying on the ground.
Hallot roared!
The sixteen remaining men and women gaped at the terrifying creature.
‘Deity help us,’ one of the solders whispered.
And the mayhem began.
Supreme Commander Zander walked into the cave and stared. His furrowed eyebrows nearly covered his eyes, such was the carnage he was facing. Thirty men and women slaughtered by the Vercetians, and only one survived. Commander Hallot.
Commander Mancer followed him in, stopping dead in his tracks.
‘What the hell happened here?’
They both moved slowly through the sea of bodies. Phaser burns were evident, but most died from swords. Hands, arms and legs lay scattered apart from their bodies, exaggerating the gruesome aftermath of the slaughter. It made no sense. And why were there no signs of Vercetian casualties?
They approached Hallot, who was still receiving treatment for his extensive, though superficial, injuries.
‘What happened here, Commander?’ Zander asked.
The medic gave them both a curious look, as he was still tending to the wounds. Hallot shrugged him off and answered the Supreme Commander.
‘We were investigating an anomaly in the shield as per our mission plan. Engineer Cobb accidentally triggered a sensor, so we thought that Vercetians coming to investigate was possible.’ He leant forward holding his head, dizzy for a moment. The medic tried to attend to him but was waved off again. ‘I’m all right. We called it in to headquarters, and to be honest, my men and women were looking forward to a skirmish with the enemy. They turned up late afternoon and positioned themselves on the beach landing.’
Hallot got to his feet unsteadily, and moved slowly into the centre of the cave. ‘My troops took up positions around the cave. We could see them through the shield, about ten of them, moving into attack positions. At that stage they shouldn’t have been aware of us due to the pitch black and the shield. We thought to have the advantage.’
He seemed to be moving remarkably well now, Zander observed and gave Mancer a sideways glance—one eyebrow raised. Mancer’s face was unreadable.
‘They deactivated the shield,’ continued Hallot, ‘and sent in a flare. The battle started then. We had superior numbers and better cover. Their shields should have given out long before ours. They should have been turning tails and running, but they didn’t. Their shields showed no sign of weakening, especially the forward three Vercetian soldiers—they seemed invincible. They must have been the cyborg super-soldiers that Premier Gor mentioned. We had no answer for them.’
Hallot stopped and leant forward, hands on knees. A mixture of fatigue and emotional despair? Zander wondered. Or a damn fine performance? He had no trust for this man.
‘Our shields gave out, and my troops started taking full-on laser fire, many of them were killed. Then the super-soldiers stopped and took out swords, of all things. They took on my men and women in hand-to-hand combat. We didn’t stand a chance, and they seemed to be enjoying it. I was manhandled by one of them and was knocked out.’ He pointed to his head wound. ‘I don’t know why I wasn’t killed; perhaps I was just overlooked.’ He sat down again, head in hands.
Zander and Mancer moved back into the cave. Mancer leant towards him. ‘This doesn’t feel right. In all my years in the military, I’ve never seen anything like this. We need to put a lid it while we investigate further.’
‘Too late,’ Zander replied. ‘The images of this are already back in the capital. The news corps were surprisingly close. We weren’t the first here.’
‘Deity knows what Gor will do at this news,’ said a deflated Mancer.
Chapter 16
The Mole
Earth - The Republic of Ireland - 2005
* * *
The walls around him were slowly shifting and warping. Nothing would stay in focus. He drunkenly tried to head for the door, but when he reached it, it folded into the wall like a strawberry sinking into custard.
The voices appeared again. Bodiless heads surrounding him, facial features always just out of focus.
“You are no Trun. The KBS is ashamed of you. You are a failure!”
“I’ve tried my hardest. You don’t know what it’s like.”
“A failure, you should be ashamed.”
“No. I’ve tried and tried.”
“You aren’t a failure—we are all the same. Trun and Vercetian, we are no different.”
“I know that now. I think I’ve always known it.”
The voices from unknown faces bombarded him from both sides. He tried to cover his ears, but his hands didn’t reach.
“Leave me, leave me alone! Leave me!’
He woke with a start, the memory of his dream staying with him for a few seconds before fading away. He didn’t need to remember it, though, it just reflected how he’d felt for a long time now.
Being deep undercover wasn’t easy. Not having family or other members of the Knowledge Base Society helping you wasn’t easy. He was isolated. He’d trained from birth for this, it was his vocation, but it was hard to distinguish between enemies and friends when they were one and the same. Back on Preenasette, he had regular contact with his Trun friends and family, and they would remind him of what the Vercetians had done to them. How they had betrayed them in an unimaginable way.
But that was nearly three hundred years ago. A memory that was fading into the archives of time, becoming a scary children’s story rather than a rallying cry for vengeance against your archenemy. The Vercetians he now lived with rarely mentioned it. They had archived it. Moved on. On the rare occasions it came up, they appeared ashamed of that part in their history but felt they had atoned for it by introducing the current ruling system, which wouldn’t allow those mistakes to happen again. A fact he was all too aware of after having lived with them for so many years on Verceti and Earth.
He’d done his job. He would have been expected to take the action he had. His original mandate had been specific. When he had secured selection on the Life Team seventeen years earlier it was clear. His primary role was information gathering. The Vercetians must never discover his identity and purpose; this was the strength of the KBS on Verceti. “If the war turns for the worse, you will need to keep your options open, even if that means killing the Princess. You must make that call as you see it. But they must never discover you.”
He’d made an attempt on the princess’s life. They had gone to extremes to hide her, protect her from the Trun. It had been the right call, but he was glad he had failed. He was fond of her. Who wouldn’t be? He’d been close to her through the magic years of childhood and had watched her blossom into a charming and engaging seventeen-year-old woman. The act he was about to perform would be his final one as a KSB spy—to dispatch a message globe revealing their location and wait to see how the Trun military would respond. Would they even be interested?
This moment had been years in the planning. The failed assassination attempt had made him extremely careful. Everyone watched everyone else. During the escape from Preenasette, Prime and Temper had kept the details of their plan secret. The flight of the Life Teams had caught them all off guard. By the time he had realised they were escaping with the Princess, it was too late for him to send a message without being completely compromised. They were all shuttled onto a Delta Sphere and were only told about the actual nature of the mission once in space.
But careful planning had gotten him this far.
He was well outside of the security dome that protected Harwood Hall, at a spot he that was a favourite place to visit—a clearing in the woods, a natural amphitheater where he could look at the stars at night. Two and a half years of coming here, just to mask this one moment.
He held the small metallic device that would travel across solar systems in his hands and activated the preset guidance system. He thought he heard a noise behind him and turned, listening intently before dismissing it as nothing. He released the globe and watched it disappear into the night sky.
He sat there a while longer, pondering. He had come to love this hollow in the woods and enjoyed remembering his home and family. He missed his mother and father much more than he ever thought he would. How was the war going? He wanted to see an end to it and wanted to go home to Trun Rizontella. He’d never been there. Neither had his mother, father or grandfather, none of his family. Deep cover in Verceti was nearly a religious calling. The five years on Earth had had a profound effect on how he viewed his world. Preenasette was divided into just two cultures, the Trun and the Vercetians, compared with the multitude of differing cultures on Earth. His planet’s differences were minor compared to here.
Trun was the harsher continent, with a severe climate and little arable farmland. Throughout their history life had been tough, but that made them strong and durable. Verceti had a temperate climate, and any crop could grow in the verdant soil. Life was easier for them. They had time to study the arts and philosophy. The Trun had the majority of the planet’s metals and precious stones, but they had to mine it from some of the most desolate parts of their world.
Their societies grew up out of drastically differing backgrounds, but the similarities between the two races were also so obvious when viewed from afar, and Earth was far. In appearance there was no difference, apart from variations in the shade of their blue skin, but these changes occurred in both cultures. Their love of music, humour and art were nigh on identical.
He didn’t want the two races of his world to be apart now.
He’d seen the conflicts at all levels between the races and religions of Earth: the constant wars, atrocities, the bickering. But someho
w they seemed to remain pure in a way he couldn’t understand, and shouldn’t have been able to comprehend. Amidst the anarchy, there always seemed to be an act of kindness stubbornly pushing its way through.
He was confused, but he knew Preenasette could be a better world. He wanted the war to end.
* * *
He was also in love! And that complicated everything even more.
Chapter 17
May Day
Earth - The Republic of Ireland - 2006
* * *
After the very memorable summer of 2002, the children had met up during most of the school holidays for the next few years. Mandy’s parents, Prof. and Mrs. Walker, were still crucial to the Vercetian Life Team, carrying out varied and often mundane administration duties for them.
As Grace’s skills developed further, she began practising her Extrasensory Perception (ESP) on Mandy and Jon. She helped them try to access a part of their brain that in most humans was almost entirely unused. It wasn’t long before she could get into their heads to communicate. Mandy was very receptive and after about a year could string sentences together back to her. Jon, on the other hand, struggled and never really got past the odd word. Mandy and Jon tried to communicate with each other, but without Grace’s help, it was a lost cause.
But in general, life was pretty normal. The Vercetians wanted to keep a low profile, but not to the extent that the locals would think of them as reclusive. As they perfected the holo-imaging that created their enhanced facial changes, sharpening their appearance, their confidence in their ability to appear normal grew and they began venturing out and mingling with the community. They enjoyed the local fairs and markets, immersing themselves into the simple life of rural Ireland. The younger Team members, Peter and James in particular, enjoyed visiting the pub, favouring the universally renowned Earth speciality known as Guinness.