The Great Game Trilogy

by O. J. Lowe

  Not quite. She would have had she not reacted, shoved the controls straight up and it was tight, oh so tight, she could almost feel the hull scrape against the belly turret, could hear Anne Sullivan swearing angrily, but the upside was during the sudden rise, the twin turrets did flash furiously, she saw three, four, five of the guns explode. The fire halted for several seconds before starting once again. Depleted. She punched the air. Now if the rest of them could do their job, they’d be sitting pretty. More eaglefighters were closing in on them, she could feel shots raining down on her shields and she twisted the Wolf Rose away, saw the flashes of laser screech past her viewport and she accelerated away, daring them to chase her. The guns were firing, two of them exploded into fireballs but more were coming. Makeshift Squadron were already heading for their targets, she was on her own for the moment, no wing support…

  She didn’t need it. This ship was fast, way too fast for the enemy and so she swung towards the cannons lining the exterior of the airbase, a determined grimace locked across her face. See if you’ll follow me down here…

  The cannons were slowly building up to a head again, the faint glow spilling from them revealing their time was near, and she punched it once again, hitting her thrusters to maximum…

  Here we go again!

  She swept straight past the open mouth of the cannon, three, four, five fighters following her as the cannons fired. Two of them exploded instantly, one of them lost a wing and spun out of control until it was hit by the laser fire of another HAX. She couldn’t think of a worse way to die. The others lost altitude, crashed hard into the hull to a crescendo of fire.

  “Commander, we have arrived at our targets, preparing attack runs now,” someone said in her earpiece.

  “We could talk all day,” Caldwell said. “But I’m afraid we have to get going. There’s a nice private cell with your name on it, dear sister.”

  “You’re no brother of mine,” Claudia said, narrowing her eyes. “Not now. Not ever again. I renounce you as a traitor to the name Coppinger. When the new world comes, you’ll be the first to be dragged before me and I promise you a very unpleasant death.” She bared her teeth at him as she said it. Caldwell brushed it off without so much as a retort.

  “Did she always go on like this?” Nick asked suddenly. Connor Caldwell craned his head over towards him and gave a half smirk.

  “And you!” Claudia said, jabbing a finger towards Nick. “Don’t even consider where you’re going to be. It’s not too late for you to join me though. Shoot him.” She jerked her head towards Caldwell. “Shoot him and join me and I’ll make you everything you ever wanted to be. I’ll give you anything you want.”

  Nick looked at her long and hard, sighed sadly. “Sorry, there’s only one thing I want, and I doubt you’re able to give it to me.”

  A smug smirk replaced the frown. “Oh, you never quite know. You never know when you might see her again.”

  That caught him with a start, she flexed a hand and hit another button on the remote control. Somewhere in the distance, they heard a roar and a clang, something either way too close or way too loud. They both turned their heads and in that split second, Wim Carson was there, minus a weapon and looking ragged. He brandished a hand at them and suddenly both Nick and Caldwell were airborne, hurled back by invisible force, hitting the ground hard. That moment to recover themselves was all it took, the two of them aboard the shuttle and the engines firing up. Nick cursed, grabbed the blaster pistol and started to fire at it, emptying the power pack into the fuselage but to no avail as it gently rose from the ground and made for the doors at the end of the hangar. More blaster fire behind him, he glanced around and saw Brendan King and co making their way in, all weapons blazing. But even their combined weaponry couldn’t do what his blaster had been unable to, laser bolts bouncing off it. One of Brendan’s golems even launched a uniblast to no avail, the attack narrowly sailing wide, singeing a wingtip but nothing more.

  “Fuck!” Caldwell swore, beating his fist into the ground as the team made their way over towards them. “Where were you twenty seconds ago?”

  “Calm it, Agent Caldwell,” Brendan said dryly. “Stand down, the pair of you.”

  “Oh, he is with us then?” Nick asked. “I thought he was bullshitting her.”

  “Really?” Caldwell replied. “I know all about you. I’ve been running cover for you since you got up here. Really good plan by the way, Roper. Get yourself captured and brought up here. That’s not at all suicidally reckless, is it?”

  “How is that any different to what you did?” Nick inquired. “We haven’t heard anything from you…”

  “Yeah but I wasn’t a captive. How were you planning on making your report from here? How were you planning on leaving?”

  Nick smirked coolly at him, somewhat aware that the rest of the team was looking at him. “I’d have worked it out.”

  “Wow, that’s reassuring,” Caldwell said. “Some real tidy undercover work here and you all come in threatening to blow it all.”

  “Okay there’s a lot of hostility here,” Tod Brumley said. “Let’s calm it down. Lot of people didn’t tell a lot of other people about what was going on.”

  “We didn’t even know where you’d gone,” Lysa said to Nick, smiling at him. “We thought Ritellia had had you carted off to some… My Divines! You did it deliberately, didn’t you? Took a swing at him to get locked up and hope you’d get dragged up here.”

  “They seem to like people who hate it the way it is,” Caldwell said. “Weird like that, but hey, it almost worked.”

  Brendan wasn’t listening at this point, still engaged in communication with someone else, a frustrated look on his face.

  “Listen to me, Admiral,” he said angrily. “You need to intercept a shuttle that’s departing this airbase. Shoot it down, kill everyone aboard! Yes, I’m aware you’re fighting a battle, but the battle is pointless if those aboard get away…. Yes, that couldn’t be helped. You can’t control every piece on the board, Admiral. It’d be an easier job if we could.”

  “Err…” Lysa suddenly piped up. “What the hells is that?”

  Something scarlet was coming through the open hangar door, prising huge metal slides aside with bare hands, the sound cutting through Brendan’s voice with a wicked screech, the being not so much walking as floating, closing in fast…

  Chapter Eighteen. The Unialiv.

  “And what of life after death? Who’s to say the dead don’t remain with us in our memories? Because if someone is there to remember them, can they ever truly die?”

  James Michael Tan, five kingdoms philosopher.

  The third day of Summerfall.

  The entire left side of Kyra’s body had gone numb. She tried to move it, felt uneasy about the whole thing and hissed in pain as fire coursed through her. Lucky bastard, just…

  No, a calm voice somewhere amidst the hurt and the rage rationalised to her. She didn’t want to admit it sounded like her in some of her more serendipitous moments. Not luck. You were sloppy, you thought you’d won and he punished you. Which is still less than the master will do if he finds out about this whole damn mess. She gulped at that thought. It wasn’t a pleasant one. Few regarding the master were. Sometimes she was sure that voice in her head, calmness personified, was something he’d implanted deep into her mind to ensure he could always monitor her, influence her no matter how far away they might be.

  It was ridiculous of course. He didn’t have that kind of power…

  That you’ve ever seen, that same voice reminded her. Maybe it was a side effect of the electrical surge that had struck her. She had only just stopped convulsing; he’d had her dead to rights, just as the reverse had been the case moments earlier. Minus one blade and the one he was using flickering badly like it had been poorly constructed, Kyra had taken the offensive and thrown a flurry of attacks at him he’d struggled to keep from touching him. He was tiring, she’d seen that for a while, his movements growing sluggish and all it
would have taken was one false step, one which had come, granted but not perhaps as fatal as she had hoped for. He’d tried to push her blade back, overreached and she’d danced around it, feeling the potent mixture of both the Kjarn and exhilaration flowing through her as she’d sheared through the top of his weapon, cut the energy flow through it and rendering it little more than two useless pieces of metal, good only for scrap. She’d had him, fresh joy bursting through her like fireworks as she’d raised her weapon to finish him off, she was going to be the first Cavanda for a good few years to kill a Vedo before the bastard had sucker-punched her, pulled her trick back on her from earlier. She’d tried the lightning, so had he. She’d screamed as it had thrown her back, sent her muscles into spasms, leaving her on the floor in a pile of blood and sweat and the contents of her bladder. All he’d need to do was summon her weapon to his hand and bury it into her face and that’d be the end of Kyra Sinclair. Her story would have been closed.

  But he hadn’t. She still couldn’t work that out as he’d studied her thoughtfully, just for a second and then he’d turned to run, straight back into the hangar. Already she knew what it meant, failure on her part. She could already picture herself bowing before her master, explaining how it had all gone so badly. She could hear the coldness in his voice. So, he’d say, not only did you get yourself captured by powers unaligned to our own cause, but you revealed said powers to those individuals. And with those individuals having a Vedo amongst them, you have also revealed yourself to them. Now they may be few, but it doesn’t mean they’re gone. Never underestimate an enemy faced with extinction. We might be many, and they might be few, but things change. Once the reverse was true. How long before they now work out we are still out there? Align themselves together once again to hunt us down?

  That voice was cold and all too real in her mind, nor was it pleasant. She really didn’t want to go back to him but at the same time, what choice did she have? If she ran, he would find her sooner or later. And if it was later, Divines help her. At least if she went back to him, he might find it somewhere in his black heart to grant her a quick death for complete and utter abject failure. Dress it up however you like, that was what it was and that was probably what it would remain. No way of redeeming this situation.

  Gingerly, she flexed her muscles and though they were still horribly sore from the current that had raced through them, she was lucky to be in one piece. She’d seen people rendered horribly deformed by pure Kjarn lightning, seen bones contract and flesh melt from the muscles, they looked like nothing more than huge candles by the time the full force of energy had been ripped into them. Those that were lucky died before the pain became indescribable. She’d never forget the screams of those who were still alive, hoarse and cracked through sheer power of a force they couldn’t hope to stand against. The man had been a Vedo and a poor one, no doubt. Not a killer instinct in him. A Cavanda wouldn’t have left her alive. It probably wouldn’t have been a quick death either. Excruciating most likely.

  Any threat her master might be able to bring against her wasn’t worth considering, at least not for the moment anyway. As she stood up, she realised that, taking in her surroundings. She still had to get off this damn ship anyway before that could happen. If she died doing that, at least it’d solve her problems of dying sooner rather than later.

  “Wolf Rose, Commander Nkolou, do you receive?”

  That was Criffen’s voice again and Alex subconsciously sat up a little straighter in her seat, wishing he’d picked a better time to get in touch. The bombing runs were going well, the newly fashioned together Makeshift Squadron doing their jobs across the killing fields the outer rims of the airbase had slowly become. Before, there had been many guns across a plateau of supposedly unassailable metal. Turned out it wasn’t so unbreakable after all. You just had to focus your firepower.

  She knew this for she’d blown a hole in it with one of her missiles earlier, something telling her that it was important to hit that precise spot. Who or what or why had remained a mystery but she’d flown by, fired the ordnance into it, watching as the hole had been blown into it, not as grand or majestic as she’d have liked but satisfactory. Several moments later, she could have sworn someone had fallen through, but she couldn’t be sure. Still her feelings told her the situation was resolved. After that, she’d given the whole thing no more thought.

  “Copy, Admiral,” she said. “Reading you.”

  “There’s a call come in from that thing, there’s a shuttle out there that needs intercepting. Bring it down. Just tracking it… Data should be on your screen in moments. Unisco high command demands that it be shot down.”

  She nodded. “Understood. Makeshift Squadron stay on the mission here, I’ll be back in a…” She frowned at the data, saw the shape on her tac-reader and flexed her fingers. Two of the Makeshifts were closer, they could swoop in and blast it from the sky without a need to deviate from her course. That was the beautiful thing being in command, she could delegate the task. It was something that felt alien to her, she liked to do it herself, but at the same time she could get used to it, given the chance. “Makeshift Five and Six, deviate from your task and shoot down that shuttle. Now!” She added a touch of authority to her voice, aware it might need it. The people in those gunships didn’t know who she was, they didn’t know what she could do or that she had apparently only gotten her temporary rank because of her positioning in the battle. But they needed to be professional. If she gave them the order, she expected it to be obeyed. And obeyed it was, the twin HAX’s moving away from their bombing run and towards the shuttle.

  Alex would have been lying if she said she wasn’t enjoying this whole thing in its entirety. People might be dying but being back in the cockpit meant she could do something about it. If they failed, how many more would die? She honestly didn’t know. Maybe she didn’t want to know.

  “And here they come,” Claudia said, glancing out the viewport at the two incoming ships. It wasn’t a surprise. She’d been expecting them, surprised it had taken this long for them to notice her. Next to her, Wim Carson was piled untidily into his seat, soaked in sweat and stinking the place up something rotten. Shuttle was handling a little sluggishly, no doubt a result of that attack that had clipped them before she’d gotten them out of the hangar. Still that Unisco team and her… No! She wasn’t allowing herself to think like that. He was no brother of hers. She’d disowned him. She wouldn’t even think his name any more. Only when it came to kill him, would she acknowledge him as what he was. Traitorous bastard.

  Maybe he was already dead. She’d set the unialiv on them, it should already be tearing into them right now. Nothing could prepare them for that creature, one of her synthetic spirits. Letting it free had been a tactical gambit, one she’d needed to make and one she would again in the same circumstances. It could have backfired, it still might but if she remained alive, her decisions were sound ones. Death was not an option she’d have to regret.

  She heard the computer trill out a warning a weapons lock had engaged, that the two aerofighters were moving into position for the perfect shot.

  “Don’t you have weapons?” Wim groaned. He looked more than just tired, he looked both physically and mentally exhausted, his clothes burned and torn, his wrist bent at an unnatural angle. He’d lost his weapon, she smirked at that, he was one to talk about them.

  “Only automated cannons for repelling boarders,” she said. “We’re not going to win a fight with those. Can’t do too much here and now about that. I was hoping you could.”

  He stared at her long and hard for a good few seconds, his eyes narrowing deeply suspicious at her. “And what exactly would that be?”

  “I’m sure you’ll think of something,” she said breezily. “Given we’re going to die in the next thirty seconds unless you do.” She leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs, fighting the urge to whistle jauntily. Now the end could well be imminent, she was surprised to find herself not sad or scared but rat
her tinged with regret at what could have been.

  His glare at her grew but she couldn’t find it in herself to care, not as the weapons lock warning turned into a missile incoming warning, she blew on her fingernails and wondered if she had time for a last drink. And then Wim Carson rose with a look of deep loathing on his face, craned his head about, narrowed his eyes and then threw out a hand. She imagined it must have looked exceptionally strange to the naked eye, on the tac-reader the missiles simply ground to a halt themselves and then exploded way short of their target. Looks like she might have time to put those regrets right after all. “And the pilots,” she said. “They need removing from the equation. Unless you want them to keep on trying to kill us.”

  Alex saw it and couldn’t believe her eyes as the two Makeshifts she’d despatched towards the shuttle were flying normally for a moment and then everything changed, one of them suddenly jerked wildly starboard-side and crashed hard into its wing mate, both fighters going up in a sudden eruption of fire and debris. First the missiles, an unexpected occurrence in isolation, and now this?

  “What the hells just happened to them?!” Navarro yelled. “Never seen any idiot fly like that before. Straight into the side! Some people just shouldn’t be allowed in a cockpit!”

  Either way, it looked like her mind had been made up, regardless of Navarro’s rantings. She jerked her control stick about, drove the Wolf Rose after the shuttle, already plotting an intercept path in her head. At this rate, she’d be on them in moments and then they’d be hers. It was something that needed to be done and she was going to damn well do it right.