‘You’re sending them over there? I thought you’d send Alpha and keep some loyal blood aboard Arcadia.’
‘I wanted to,’ Idris replied, ‘but I also want Mikhain’s hand weakened a little. I don’t want him becoming a Fleet Commander, just a captain.’
‘Divide and conquer,’ Andaim said.
‘Indeed,’ Idris replied. ‘Now, get over there with your pilots and leave Atlantia to me. While repairs are under way we’ll be vulnerable, so I want a full fighter escort and patrol sweep in action until we’re ready to depart.’
‘Aye, cap’ain,’ Andaim replied, and walked away.
***
XLVII
The Arcadia’s sanctuary was filled with over two thousand souls, Atlantia controlled via the Arcadia’s bridge as the remains of humanity gathered together in one place for the first time since the apocalypse that had enveloped Ethera and the populated core systems.
‘Been a long time since I’ve seen this many people in one place,’ Teera noted.
Evelyn nodded, looking at the sea of civilians behind them, punctuated by the occasional looming bulk of an Ogrin.
She was seated along with the pilots of Reaper Squadron at the front of a raised dais situated in the heart of a tree-lined valley. It was deceptively easy to believe that the horrors of the past three years were all just the remnants of a particularly bad dream and that in fact they were all seated on Ethera on a warm summer afternoon.
Nearby sat the pilots of the Renegade Squadron, along with the entire compliment of Marines under the command of General Bra’hiv. The military contingent was arrayed before their civilian charges, and in front of them stood Captains Idris Sansin and Captain Mikhain. Sansin’s voice echoed out over the crowd as he spoke into a microphone, his words amplified by speakers arrayed around them.
‘Ladies, gentlemen,’ Sansin began, ‘Ogrin, Hybrid and Denesian, welcome. You are slaves no longer, and will be welcome to share with us the freedom of our ships.’
A clatter of applause and a few cheers went up from the gathered civilians as they learned officially that they were no longer subject to piratical tyranny. Evelyn watched them as the captain spoke, but found herself wondering about Commander Andaim and Taron Forge. The CAG was not present, leading a patrol to protect the two frigates, and Taron was already long gone, having blasted off as soon as he was cleared to leave.
‘By now you will all have learned of the major events that have occurred recently aboard Atlantia, and her engagements against the Legion and other species it has infected,’ Idris went on. ‘Our mission is, somehow, to build our strength and take back the worlds that belong to us, to crush the brutal machine that has taken so many innocent lives and ensure that it never, ever happens again.’
Idris looked them over silently before continuing.
‘We have formulated the opinion, based on the experiences of others who have travelled before us, that our best means of defeating the Word is to obtain technologies that it cannot defend against. To do this we must locate and learn to deploy devices that we have never before encountered, and to find them we have no choice but to travel to places that no human being has ever seen.’ Idris paused. ‘We must travel beyond the Icari Line into uncharted space and endeavour to find a way to defeat the Word.’
A rush of whispers and gasps of astonishment broke out among the crowd and a number of voices cried out.
‘You just saved our lives and now you want to get us all killed?’
‘Nobody knows what’s beyond the Icari Line!’
‘They put it there for a reason!’
‘Nobody has ever come back from there alive!’
Idris raised his hands for calm and let the speakers amplify his voice, keeping his tone level.
‘We know all of this,’ he said, ‘and as such we cannot compel you all to follow us. I have been convinced by my fellow officers that as passengers aboard Atlantia and Arcadia, you have a say in what happens to us. If we go into battle, then by your presence here you go with us, and now that need has been addressed. You all have received the chance to vote on a new councillor, a voice through whom you may speak and voice your concerns. I understand that the results of the ballot have been counted. Captain?’
Mikhain stood up, and Evelyn noted a soft but notable ripple of applause from some quarters of the audience for the former XO as he stood and held aloft an envelope.
‘Almost a thousand votes from Atlantia’s civilian contingent,’ he said, ‘each cast for a selected number of candidates. The military and command were blocked from voting, allowing the civilian contingent an unhindered choice of candidates and anonymity in your votes.’
Mikhain ripped open the envelope and retrieved a small slip of paper. Evelyn saw his eyes widen as he looked at it, and then he glanced over his shoulder.
‘The candidate chosen to represent the people of this fleet,’ he said, ‘is Doctor Meyanna Sansin.’
More applause burst out among the civilians as Meyanna got to her feet and smiled brightly, although clearly surprised at being the first choice, and Teera leaned in.
‘Not surprised, she’s been treating people ever since we left Chiron. She’s probably the most popular person aboard Atlantia.’
‘And the captain’s wife,’ Evelyn pointed out. ‘There are going to be some unhappy voters out there.’
As if on cue, a ripple of moans and shouted accusations of vote-rigging tainted the scene. Idris Sansin stepped up to the microphone.
‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘if this vote had been rigged, I’d have rigged it to have anybody other than my wife as councillor. I never get my own way when she’s around, ever.’
A ripple of laughter swept across the gathered civilians and drowned out the complaints with ease as Meyanna approached the microphone to speak softly but clearly.
‘Thank you, everybody, I really wasn’t expecting this. I’ll do my best to accommodate the new role alongside my work in the hospital and speak for you when you need me to.’ She glanced at her husband. ‘And he’s right, I do always get my way.’
More chuckles, and Teera shrugged.
‘I don’t know, I think this could work out really well.’
Evelyn glanced at Mikhain, who was clapping along with everybody else but wearing a thin smile that looked anything but earnest.
‘Yeah,’ she replied. ‘But for who?’
Captain Sansin returned to the microphone.
‘As of now, and for forty eight hours, Atlantia and Arcadia are officially stood-down but for a skeleton crew and fighter patrols. We have a long way to go ahead of us, so enjoy this moment of peace while you can. Dismissed.’
More cheers went up, the captain skilfully winning the majority of the audience to his side as he stepped down and the military contingent got up from their seats.
‘Well, whatever happens it’s going to be new for all of us,’ Teera said cheerfully. ‘Let’s just hope that there’s something friendly beyond the Icari Line.’
Evelyn managed a smile in response, but somehow she felt certain that whatever lay in the vast expanses of uncharted space ahead of them was likely to be anything but friendly.
*
The wind.
It gusted and whirled, tugged and buffeted across the lonely, smouldering plain. Above the roiling pillars of thick oily smoke that puffed from weakly fluttering flames, clouds scudded across a sky awash with glowing watercolour steaks of radiation that bathed the surface in a rippling light as though the air itself were aflame.
He opened his eyes.
The sky looked different, a haze of flickering, monochromatic light. The atmosphere, he realised. The dying star’s raging geo-magnetic storms had broken through and were bathing the planet in microwaves of countless frequencies.
Kordaz heaved in a lungful of air and his colour vision sharpened to reveal the glorious shades bathing the heavens above. He lay for what felt like aeons, just staring upward and unaware of his body. Slowly, fragments of awareness
reconnected themselves like forgotten dreams and he sensed pain in his chest and limbs, a dull, throbbing ache that was not at all unpleasant. The pain of healing surged through his synapses and he breathed deeply again before, entirely on impulse, he sat upright as chunks of broken soil fell from his body.
Around him the pirate’s compound was a smouldering wasteland of churned earth and soil, burning fragments of ships, bodies and weapons twisting pillars of smoke up into the sky around him. Flames licked at the edges of shattered spacecraft hulls as he turned his head left and right to survey the scene.
Soil fell from his head and shoulders as he moved, and he looked down to see amid the dust and grit tiny machines fluttering from his body to be snatched away on the breeze like ash.
Kordaz froze as his memory leaped back to him and he grasped at his chest, then looked down. A clump of long-dead infectors fell away, draining from his grip like black sand between his fingers as he looked down at his chest and saw that the charred cavity where he had been shot was now filled with a metallic sheen, the surface strangely smooth and silvery. He tentatively touched it with one finger and felt it, cold and yet fluid, a metal and yet as flexible as flesh.
Kordaz looked down and saw patches of the metal wherever his body had been injured: lesions sealed, abrasions re-surfaced. Both horrified and amazed, he reached up to his eyes and felt them, sensed beneath his fingertips the metal obscuring his face.
Dead infectors tumbled away like iron filings, and he realised that all around him were Hunters, not burned like those attacked by the Marines but simply devoid of life as though short-circuited. Kordaz looked up to the heavens burning with aurora, and he made the connection. The solar flares had wiped out the attacking hordes before they had been able to infect his mind, but not before they had repaired the damage to his body.
Kordaz slowly got to his feet and stood amid the smouldering wasteland and then he looked up once more to the heavens as images of Qayin and the pilot who had shot him flared as brightly as the dying star in his mind. Betrayal. Anger pulsed through his heart like fire, rage setting his nerve endings aflame. Fuelled by the pain surging through his wounds Kordaz opened his mouth and screamed up at the sky as he searched for any sign of Atlantia.
His deafening roar faded away, snatched by uncaring winds and cast into the distance. It was answered by the lonely howls of beasts that even now were converging on the smell of carrion, the countless burning corpses around him like a beacon for carnivores for countless cubits downwind.
Kordaz searched the smoky gloom around him and there in the distance he saw a small number of abandoned spacecraft that had partially escaped the bombardment. Freighters, a couple of aged interceptors, some old Colonial prospecting craft, all of them leaning at odd angles from collapsed undercarriage and with hulls scorched by the plasma blasts that had levelled the compound.
Kordaz set off toward them and spent several minutes examining them one by one before he selected the craft in best condition. He looked about and saw amid the debris fuel canisters, food packages, water tanks and countless abandoned weapons and plasma magazines strewn across the fields.
Kordaz, revenge poisoning both of his hearts, began gathering the supplies he would need to give chase to Atlantia and settle a score with a humanity he now hated once again with all of his fearsome passion.
***
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dean Crawford is the author of the internationally published series of thrillers featuring Ethan Warner, a former United States Marine now employed by a government agency tasked with investigating unusual scientific phenomena. The novels have been Sunday Times paperback best-sellers and have gained the interest of major Hollywood production studios. He is also the enthusiastic author of many independently published Science Fiction novels.
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Atlantia Series 3: Aggressor Page 34