by T. R. Harris
“You cannot escape.”
“Of course we can. You don’t think we’d go through all this trouble without having a way out, do you? We’re not like the Sol-Kor. We want to live.”
“If you remain in the building you will die.”
“Exactly! So you see, telling us where the females are—the Royal Zygotes—will get us killed. You will be a hero for telling us…so we can get ourselves killed.”
“Your logic is…odd.”
“Can you dispute it?”
“I am not of the class to be able to reason it out completely, yet initially your argument appears to make sense.”
“So tell me where to find them. If you do, it will be like you killed us yourself.”
“I do wish you dead.”
Adam smiled. “So there you have it.”
The alien stared at him with a furrowed brow of gray scales. Then he made a short nod. “They are above us, as you have suggested, at the pinnacle.”
“How do we get there from here?”
“There is a lift at the end of the corridor outside, also a series of stairs if the lift is not working. They are in the nursery.”
“You are a testament to the greatness of the Sol-Kor Colony. Your actions here will be remembered.”
“That pleases me—”
However, the two hot slugs sent into his belly didn’t.
“Let’s move!”
********
At the end of the corridor, the team ran into another dozen SK defenders. They made quick work of them, even though Adam lost Ace Harbison in the engagement—his primary sniper. Like the others, he took a flash bolt directly to the face, which wasn’t very pretty, especially since it was the Sol-Kor equivalent of a level-one bolt.
Reluctantly—as they had with the other fallen—they took his weapon, ammo, and gear, and moved into the elevator.
To Adam’s chagrin, the elevator wasn’t working. A new set of protocols must have been put in place following the unimaginable events taking place within the pyramid. A long, hard-fought slog up the stairs was their only option.
For Adam, this was déjà vu all over again—another Sol-Kor stairwell in another Sol-Kor building. He’d barely survived the last one. He seriously doubted his chances this time around.
Having been alerted to the Human’s movements, the Sol-Kor were positioning defenders at the various exits from the stairwell. The pinnacle atop the Queen’s pyramid was a hundred stories above them—and a Sol-Kor story was about ten meters high.
The M-4 grenade canisters ended up being their best offensive weapon, lobbed into the exit doors at each level they passed. The explosions shattered the SK’s hastily-organized defensive lines and allowed the Humans to climb higher up the pyramid. Soon Adam could hear the sound of pursuit coming up from below. A few strategically-dropped hand grenades quieted their six rather quickly.
Panting from the exertion of scrambling up so many flights of stairs while carrying a full pack, Adam’s last grenade burst cleared their path to the top floor. The men fanned out into the same large reception area they’d been in only forty minutes earlier, and proceeded to clear it of the few hostiles who had moved in to start the cleanup. Even though they’d been warned of the approaching aliens, many of the Sol-Kor chose to stay and fight, armed only with flash handguns, no high-powered rifles.
They didn’t last long against the angry and desperate Humans.
The shattered glass door leading to what Adam now knew to be the nursery was clear of defenders, so the team hustled through and down the corridor. On this level—the nursery level—there were very few guards, especially after the team’s last visit here, and what guards were there retreated down a series of hallways in a frantic effort to protect whatever was down that way. The team followed, more than happy to be led to the nursery.
The commandos picked off as few guards as was necessary, leaving some to continue the tour. Abruptly, the hallway opened into a vast chamber with a domed ceiling and several glassed-in cells along two opposite walls. The guards found little shelter here, and the commandos cut them down in the center of the room.
Adam and Riyad moved up to the first cell and peered in.
A creature resembling a much smaller version of the Queen was inside, although this one was still strong enough to move around on her own two legs. Its double segmented body was better proportioned, and the head—though still small for the size of the body—was more natural looking.
What shocked Adam and Riyad most was the look in the alien’s eyes—cold calculation and intelligence, and coming from a creature that was only a year old.
The young queen contender moved closer to the glass barrier, her voice coming out of embedded speakers in the wall below the window.
“I recognize you. You are Adam Cain and Riyad Tarazi. You are my latest memory, so very strong and vivid. If you are here, the Queen is dead.” The head nodded to the side and in the direction of the other cells. “Now I and my sisters must begin in earnest to fight among ourselves to see who will rise victorious to become the new queen. Yet you intend to destroy us all. That will not be possible. Our chambers are impervious to outside attack, made to protect us from ourselves and from premature battle. So, Humans, your coming here will end in frustration—as well as the loss of your lives. More sons of the Queen will come here to protect us. You will all die.”
“Yeah, that’s what everyone keeps saying,” Adam said. He and Riyad stepped back and leveled their M-91’s at the glass window and fired.
The material chipped yet didn’t break. The men looked at each other and then fired again. Still no breach. The alien on the other side of the window could be seen smiling slightly.
“Take cover! Fire in the hole!” Adam called out. The team fled to the farthest points in the room as Adam cocked his M-4 grenade launcher and released one of his last canisters. The blast was incredible, the heat and concussion spreading throughout the large room. It was almost too much for Adam and his men to bear without adequate shelter.
When the smoke cleared, Adam smiled.
The window had cracked in several points, with a meter-wide opening in the glass. The creature on the other side of the glass wasn’t smiling anymore. She backed away from the window, her eyes wide.
Adam strolled leisurely up to the broken window. “So much for impenetrable cells,” he said. He stuck the barrel of his M-91 through the hole and pulled the trigger, ending the life of one of the Royal Zygotes. One down, twelve to go.
Anderson and Riyad moved up beside him. “We can’t very well blow open every cell, not with us in the room,” Anderson said. “Besides, I don’t think we have that many canisters left.”
“Company’s coming!” Kaczynski called from the entrance to the nursery. There was no cover in the room, and with only one way in or out.
“Stand back,” Adam ordered. And then he set about shattering the rest of the glass window with bursts from his assault rifle.
“MacTavish, four of us are going in here. Once we’re in, take out another window and then the rest of you take shelter in the cell. I don’t want us all to be in the same cell. We’ll provide cover from here.”
Moments later, another massive explosion filled the room, and the life of another baby queen came to an end. MacTavish and three other commandos climbed into the cell. Now the team had cover, and pretty substantial cover at that—all except the gaping openings the windows once filled.
Battle was joined. Enemy flash bolts streaked through the air. Adam’s men, from opposite sides of the huge, round chamber, did their best to keep the Sol-Kor soldiers at bay. With no cover inside the open expanse of the room, the SK failed to gain any significant ground, yet with each sacrificial foray, more bodies fell to help form covering mounds for the slowly advancing natives, and the Humans were burning through their ammo at an alarming rate.
It was a given that there were a lot more Sol-Kor than there was ammo for their weapons, making it only a matter of time before the
y were overrun. Adam felt sick, considering how they’d only managed to kill only two of the thirteen young females. After the team was gone, a new queen would be crowned, and the assault on the Milky Way would continue unabated. Coupled with the excruciating headache he was suffering from the blanketing suppressor beam, it almost made him vomit. He had led his men to a literal dead-end, and with nothing lasting to show for it. They were going to die, right here and in a far-away universe, alone and—
Chapter 10
A tremendous quaking shook the building; the domed room was engulfed in a thick cloud of choking white dust. Adam and his men fought for breath, placing portable respirators over their noses and mouths as the visors they wore struggled to see through the dense haze.
“What happened?” Riyad cried out, barely visible although he was right next to Adam. Carefully, Adam stood up and looked over the sill of the broken cell window. He couldn’t see much, but then his view began to clear, and as more of the dust cloud was sucked upwards, he got a pretty good idea of what had happened.
The roof at the far end of the dome had collapsed, opening the room to the outside of the pyramid. The falling debris had blocked off the entrance to the nursery, either obstructing the advance of the Sol-Kor, or burying them under tons of rubble.
“Everyone, take what grenades you have left and pulverize those glass panels. Here’s our chance to take out the other females. Call out your intentions!”
“Kaczynski…fire in the hole…cover!” And then a massive explosion.
Adam rose up from the wall of the cell. “Cain firing. Cover!”
And so it went, with commandos calling out just before unleashing their grenades.
“We’re out down here,” Lieutenant Johnson called out from the cell with Kaczynski. “But we’ve opened six of the cells.”
Adam and the men in his cell had shattered the windows on four of the other cells on the other side of the room, leaving only one cell intact. By now, most of the cloud from the collapsing roof had vented through the huge hole in the ceiling, though it remained full of the residual smoke from the grenades.
The men climbed out of their hiding places. Adam sprinted across the room just as one of the females burst through the shattered window of her cell and landed on the floor in the middle of the room. She carried a look of shock and worry on her ugly face, her movements confused and unsure.
She might have been a worthy adversary for her sisters, but to the eight remaining Human commandos she was a symbol of all the terror and tragedy that had befallen the Milky Way galaxy. Adam wasn’t the first of the men to unleash hell on the alien. Her body was shredded by no less than twenty-five rounds from their M-91’s.
“There are still ten left to kill. Let’s not overdo it, okay?” Adam said over the din of more gunfire. Others on the team were firing through broken windows at the trapped Sol-Kor females, and soon only the one intact cell remained.
The team gathered before it.
The last Sol-Kor female, sensing that something was wrong, moved from the back of the room toward the glass. She studied the bloodied and bruised Humans dressed in faux Sol-Kor armor, all in various stages of degradation.
“You appear to be out of explosives,” she said as none of the men aimed their weapons at the glass. “It only takes one queen to keep the race going. I will be that queen.”
An idea was growing in the back of Adam’s mind, and as soon as he let the frustration of the moment pass, the answer came to him. He smiled at the queen.
“It’s not over until the fat Sol-Kor bitch sings,” he said. He stepped away and climbed over the huge pile of debris blocking the entrance to the nursery, to where a dozen Sol-Kor warriors had been buried. A scorched and bloody arm was projecting out from the rubble, still gripping the handle of a Sol-Kor flash weapon. Adam reached down and pried it from the alien’s cold, dead hand.
The commandos knew what was coming, and they bailed for the farthest open cell from the one with the living queen. The female watched with concern as Adam stepped up to the glass.
“What are you doing? The discharge from that weapon cannot penetrate the window.”
“Not its individual bolts,” Adam said as he gripped the metal barrel of the weapon and bent it easily using his Human strength. “But an overload of the charge pack has been known to create quite a wallop.”
The flash gun was already at the highest setting, and the power indicator showed a sufficient charge. Adam casually fingered the trigger and then set the now-whining device on the ledge of the window. He took a moment to smile at the alien, before sprinting for the far cell, diving headfirst through the broken window just as the high-pitched squeal reached a crescendo.
The weapon exploded with all the force of an M-4 grenade.
Adam’s ears were still ringing when he poked his head above the window sill. The explosion had done even a better job than the Human grenades. The entire window was now missing, its frame nowhere to be found.
The team rushed to the cell, weapons ready. But the blast had smashed the last queen of the Sol-Kor against the back wall, deforming her head into a hideous mass of flesh and bone, deflating the bulbous body, leaving a puddle of red and yellow slime on the charred floor.
The men could preserve their ammo with this one.
The gathering of Humans stood silent in the rapidly dissipating cloud of the explosion, listening to the still falling roof debris from the collapsed dome, each lost in their own thoughts. They had accomplished their mission—and more. It had always been assumed that another queen would take the place of the old one, but now they could see a time when the Sol-Kor would be sterile, unable to reproduce. It was a sobering thought that a race of a trillion individuals could be set on a path to extinction, and all because of what a handful of Humans had done this day.
The other sobering thought was that they were all going to die. The Sol-Kor would eventually make their way inside, and with barely a hundred rounds left between them, the commandos wouldn’t last fifteen minutes in another all-out assault.
Something fell from the roof and hit Adam in the head, breaking his reverie. His side still burned and the pounding headache from the continual bombardment of the Sol-Kor stupor beam was barely tolerable. Now this rain of debris from the ceiling…
Adam looked up. It was early evening on Kor. The sky above was turning a dull reddish brown from the setting sun and the pollution in the air. He sensed Riyad standing next to him, looking up as well.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Riyad asked.
“It’s a stepped pyramid, isn’t it?” Adam said. “So why not take the steps down to ground level?”
The rest of the team now caught the spirit. “We’re going to need a way to get up there,” Chief Foster said. “Anyone still have their grapples?”
Each team member carried a small, compressed-air-propelled grappling hook and cord. It was small, with a range of only thirty meters, but that would be plenty to reach the top of the shattered dome.
Five of the eight remaining team members still had grapples. The thin cords were strong enough to hold them, but they weren’t made for straight-up climbing—rather for assisting with scaling walls and other barricades.
Neo Anderson was the first to attempt a shot. He took aim through the opening and then pulled the string at the end of the air canister. The dart-like metal hook shot out and through the opening, trailing cord behind it, and he began pulling it back in, hoping the three-pointed hook would catch on something outside. After a few seconds of pulling, the hook reached the opening and fell to the floor.
“Try over here,” Riyad said. “It’s closer to the edge of the dome.”
The chief was next, and his hook also failed to find purchase. Kaczynski tried after that, and this time his hook caught something. He gripped the cord, testing it to see if it could support his weight. The hook held.
“Okay, get up there as fast as you can, and take the other grapples with you,” Adam ordered.
“And hurry, I’m sure the Sol-Kor have something like a helicopter, and may be planning to get at us through this same hole in the roof.”
Donning government-issued gloves, Kaczynski started the arduous task of climbing the thin cord. It bit into his hands, even with the gloves, but he managed to make it to the top of the dome, some twenty meters above, after about a minute of effort. He disappeared over the edge, and a moment later two other lines came cascading into the room.
Riyad and Chief Foster grabbed them, and with Adam and Rock Johnson holding the ends taut, they began to climb. Anderson and Connors teamed up on Radzinski’s third line.
The forty-three year old chief warrant officer made it to the top several seconds ahead of Riyad, and then reached out to help the old man over the edge.
Four men were now on the roof, with another four to go.
MacTavish stepped up to a line next, grabbing it with his gloved hands. Adam looked at the two-hundred and fifty pound hulk of a man and grimaced. “I hope the cord can support your incredible mass of lard, Ensign.”
“You know it’s against regulations to insult another officer on account of his weight, sir.”
“So report me.” Adam grabbed the line to hold it tight.
With a grunt, Mac began the climb. He was definitely strong enough for the task, and with the light gravity of Kor assisting, he made it to the top with little effort.
Connors and Johnson went next, leaving Adam the last to leave the nursery.
On top of the dome, Adam was accosted by a strong, chill wind sweeping over the dark pyramid, seven thousand feet above the vast plain below. From here he could clearly see the huge spaceport, as well as the true expanse of the Sol-Kor settlement, its lights just now snapping on as the sun sank lower. Off in the far distance he could see other lines of settlements, undoubtedly even more pyramids to house the vast Sol-Kor population.
The roof was pitched at a dangerous angle, forming the very peak of the structure, its surface slick with dew and the accumulated droppings of native birds. The commandos gripped the edge of the broken opening, seeing where huge panels of metal had been warped by the collapse, and where the grapples were attached.