“No,” Kain says. “The biosuit will hear the shot coming, harden itself in the appropriate direction, and absorb the shot.”
“So why can’t you shoot him then?”
“I just told you,” Kain says, ears poking straight up, tight as a drum.
“You can shoot him,” Elise says, “Just not kill him.”
Elise seems to be onto something, but I don’t quite understand. “Explain.”
“When Grius sees his own son shooting at him, he’ll be distracted. And he doesn’t know that you’re even alive still, Ramses.”
“Oh,” Kain says. “This could work. Thinking I am the only threat, I can draw a large number of them toward me. Then you two can go in and take the ship.”
“What about you?” Elise asks.
“I will lose them and loop back around to you,” Kain says.
Bullshit. I start to open my mouth, but Kain shakes his head at me. He’s going to go on a suicide mission...but if it keeps Elise safe, how can I say no? And if I let her know, she’ll refuse.
I’ll do my part to protect her – and our child. And with the bioglove, I may just be able to clear enough of a path for Kain to keep his promise to make it back to the ship.
Elise looks up suspiciously at Kain.
He grins. “A lot of their numbers are Seraphim from Earth. Little babies protected by Harmony – no offense, Elise – with only a crash course in combat training from Darkstar. The less stubborn ones will break and turn tail as soon as they see how bad real combat is.”
“What about the stubborn ones?” Elise asks.
“They’ll fight poorly, and die,” I say.
“Now you sound like a real Marauder,” Kain says. “Let’s move.
The cold has been ever-present since we landed, and my body has almost fully adapted. My dick doesn’t even need to stay fully erect to keep the blood flow going – though with Elise pressed up against me as we walk, it’s hard to keep it down. I feel the cold still, but even if I walked around naked it wouldn’t actively harm me, just give me some slight discomfort.
Elise, on the other hand, is only human. She’s strapped the submachine gun to her back, and she has an arm tightly wrapped around me as we trudge through the windy pass. The snow on the mountain pass is blessedly shallow, but I can see that the cold is wearing Elise down.
We’ll be off this planet soon, and I’ll take her someplace warm. Like Venus. Hopefully she likes walking around naked in the jungle.
“You think the Atlanteans did this to the surface?” Kain asks, looking down at Elise’s shivering.
Elise perks up. “You think they did...what’s the opposite of terraforming?”
“Yeah,” Kain says. “They made their whole planet like Antarctica, then hid under the frozen water.”
“I still don’t see why they’d waste a perfectly good planet,” I say. “This place could have been full of lush and beautiful jungles and forests...and instead it’s creeping with giant spiders and a bunch of grey rocks. And snow...lots of snow.”
“They probably were observing Earth – seeing humans putting down permanent roots on every continent...except Antarctica.”
Elise shakes her head. “We must have really pissed them off if they wrecked their planet just to ditch us.”
“Marauders could live here,” Kain says. His big rifle is still over his shoulder, and he doesn’t turn back to face us when he speaks. He’s always a few paces ahead of us, as I’ve slowed down to match Elise.
“Or Seraphim,” I say. “I don’t think the Atlantians would be too keen on it, though.”
“Maybe,” Kain says. “You’re the only one that’s spoken to them. What did you think?”
“The guy looked human,” I say. “But their technology is advanced, maybe it was like the way a biosuit can make one of us look human? And you’re saying ‘them,’ but I only talked to one of them. One guy. One room. One short conversation.”
“You blew it,” Kain says. “Think of all the questions you could have asked –”
I take a few wide paces toward him and grab his shoulder. “The woman I love was kidnapped. You’d just blown my legs off with that big...compensation stick, and I didn’t have chitchatting with an ancient race of aliens on the top of my mind.”
“I’m just saying,” Kain says, shoving my hand off his shoulder and turning back around, “that I’d have done better. And this rifle is not compensation.”
“If he wants to do better,” I mutter to Elise, “maybe I can shoot his legs off and see if they rescue him.”
“I heard that,” Kain says.
16 Elise
The mountain path turns into small foothills and ridges, and Kain stops walking. “The leisurely walk phase of our attack is over.”
He points ahead into the grey wind.
Leisurely walk? I can barely feel my hands or feet, and despite all the cold, the small of my back is still managing to sweat. I can feel the sweat dripping down my ass, and then it freezes against my pants, making them feel almost crusty.
I cannot wait to get the fuck off this planet.
I’m worried Kain is going to order us to start marching, and that Ramses will not realize just how tired I am.
“So we flank?” Ramses asks.
Kain nods.
“Shouldn’t we get closer first?” I ask. “I still can’t even see the camp.”
“It’s wide open terrain up ahead,” Kain says. “If we knew for certain the wind would hold like this, we could use it to our advantage. But if the wind stopped when we were halfway between the tent and these ridges, we’d become sitting ducks.”
It would almost be worth it, I think, if it meant the awful wind would stop. Maybe the sun could even show up a little? I could squint from the brightness rather from the freezing cold, dry-as-hell air lashing across my face and freeze-drying my eyeballs.
“If you walk east for about five hundred meters, you’ll come up on some elevated ground with good cover. Use that to keep your head down and observe. From that elevation, you should be close enough to see them moving out without being seen yourselves. Once I start firing, they’ll form a line to attack me. My father might just try to blow me up, but I’m going to a spot with even better cover than you guys, so don’t worry about me. Just get to that ship.”
“How will you signal that you’re on the way back?” I ask.
Kain and Ramses both give each other a look, and Ramses’s mouth opens, but Kain cuts him off. “You’ll signal me. Shoot some plasma up into the air once you have the ship, and I’ll start to loop around. Get the ship all warmed up for me.”
The two give each a look, again.
“First you guys are butting heads, and now you’re speaking to each other with your eyes. What’s going on?”
“Come on,” Ramses says, grabbing my arm. He looks back. “Good luck, Kain. See you on the other side.”
I’m too tired to fight him, so I shout back to Kain, “Don’t do anything stupid!” and I let Ramses pull me forward. We must have walked over ten kilometers today through horrible, barren terrain. What’s another five hundred meters?
I soon realize that it’s five hundred meters of incline through thick snow. I fall as the slope picks up, and Ramses catches me.
He lifts me up and hoists me over his shoulder.
“Ramses,” I say, my voice worn out and tired. “You don’t have to carry me.”
“I do,” Ramses says.
“So I’m just weak then –”
“You’re not weak,” he says. “Your body isn’t evolved for this. It’s why the Atlanteans did this. You’ve walked further in this terrain than any other human I know could have – except maybe my own mother.”
“Oh,” I say, “so you like strong women because your mother is strong?”
“Don’t psychoanalyze me,” he says, but I start to nod off as his wide steps bump me gently up and down.
I wake up fully when we stop moving. Behind us I can see the steep slope we
climbed, and before us are some scattered boulders stretching out to the ledge. Ramses goes prone onto his belly, raises his white hood to cover his face, and then nods back to me.
I follow him, and as much as I hate crawling around like a lizard, anything feels better than walking at this point.
We crawl among the boulders, and I keep a sharp eye open for giant spiders, though with Ramses’s bioglove now active and charged, I no longer have to worry about him fighting one with a big rock.
When we reach the edge, the boulders form a sharp slope downward, tapering off to pure-white snow. It’s by no means a sheer drop, but if I accidentally stepped off and onto the incline, I’m sure I’d tumble down and bust my head open on one of the boulders. If I did survive that fall, it wouldn’t be pretty.
Ramses points. We’re shoulder to shoulder and only a half meter from the edge.
I squint and make out the closest of the Darkstar tents. They look grey-blue through the wind.
“Couldn’t you just empty your entire glove?” I whisper. “Like use every last bit of fuel to just flood the entire camp with plasma? Kill them all before they know we’re here?”
“It’s basic geometry,” Ramses says, which lets me know he’s about to say something complicated and make me feel like an idiot for not understanding. “The beam forms a circle, and if each square centimeter of its radius consumes one kilojoule of energy, and if each milligram of antimatter provides –”
“Never mind,” I sigh. “I’m guessing that means you can’t shoot out a big, badass beam.”
He shakes his head. “The further away I am, the thinner it needs to be. We’re pretty far.”
“So we wait for Kain?” I ask.
He looks away from me at that, refusing to meet my eyes even when I stare him down. “Tell me what’s going on.”
He still won’t look at me, so I watch the camp.
The wind is dying down significantly, which means it’s good that we didn’t take my advice and walk closer. I can see the wear and tear and other fine details on the closest tents, and I can even make out the details of the ones pitched farther away now.
The ship that we want to steal is parked in the center, its landing struts pressing down into the snow. A ramp from the ship is lowered down to the ground, and I suddenly notice three figures moving down the ramp.
But then one of them...trips? He stumbles and drops limply to the ground. The other two stop walking, look at each other, and then start to run. The second one falls, and when he slides down the ramp, I can make out a faint hint of red.
“Kain is attacking,” Ramses says. His voice sounds on the edge of terror.
“According to plan though, right?” I ask sarcastically. “Though I don’t know what the real plan is, so I can’t really evaluate how well this is going….”
Tent flaps fly up, and coated figures rush out. Some pure purple figures even exit tents – not wasting time to dress before fighting, in true Marauder fashion.
All the figures exiting the tents are holding weapons, and they take cover behind their tents, putting the tents between Kain and themselves.
From the ship, walking down the ramp, I see a bright teal figure. It’s Grius, I realize, fully armed in his biosuit. He holds his arm straight out as he walks down the ramp, and a purple beam lances out across the sky. It’s so bright I can see where it stops: against a sharp wall of stone far in the distance. The rock melts under the beam, and the beam cuts all the way through.
“Shit,” I say. “Kain must be hiding behind the rock, but the rock is fucking melting.”
Ramses grabs my arm. “How much do you like Kain?”
“What?” I say. “Are you jealous --?”
“No,” he says. “Okay, listen. The real plan, the one Kain and I made, is that he will draw them all out, and we steal the ship. End of plan.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “You mean...he doesn’t plan to get on the ship?”
“No,” Ramses says. “And this is it. This is our chance to change the plan. I can go in on them right now, but we’re back to your forty against three scenario then. We won’t be able to sneak off with the ship if I intervene now.”
“We can’t just let Kain sacrifice himself for us,” I say.
“He’s not doing it just for us,” I say. “For Earth, too.”
I think it through. When trying to make a difficult choice, I used to pretend I was Harmony. How would a super-intelligent computer handle the situation? What would the best call be, setting my emotions aside? But Harmony is the problem, I realize, and Harmony would certainly leave Kain for dead. But I’m not a machine.
“We save him,” I say, standing up. “We fight.”
Ramses nods. “I’m going to try to ignore Grius, pick off as many of the easy targets as I can while they are super exposed like this. Just, uh, get down.”
“I can fight –”
“Not from this range you can’t. Get down!”
He props his biogloved hand on a rock to steady it, and his hand begins to glow. It fires a blast of purple plasma toward the Marauders and Seraphim who are taking cover behind their tents.
I haven’t obeyed Ramses’s command to get down, and standing up I have a clear view of what his bioglove can do.
The Darkstar army is all ducked down and positioned so they are difficult targets for Kain, but Kain is on the other side of the tents. Their sides and backs are fully exposed to us, and as Ramses sweeps his beam across, dozens fall down one by one.
But then Grius spins toward us and raises his arm. This cues me to actually listen to Ramses, and I hit the deck.
Ramses falls down just after me, and the purple heat blasts above our heads. I try to get even lower, as I feel the burning heat come close to my body. I should never have complained about the cold – this is what I get.
Then the beam lowers down, and I see it splashing off the boulder in front of us.
“Shit!” Ramses shouts. He jumps in front of me and holds his hand out toward the boulder, as if he were a traffic cop politely asking it to stop.
The boulder explodes open just as a teal shield forms from Ramses’s hand. I hear and see parts of the boulder slamming into the shield, and Ramses stumbles backward with each impact. He crouches down in front of me, shielding me, as well.
“Start moving backward, stay right behind me,” he says. “And listen this time!”
He starts stepping backward, and then I see purple light radiating out across the boulders to the sides of us. I realize that Grius’s beam is focused right on Ramses’s shield. His shield and the energy used to sustain it are the only things keeping us from being vaporized.
I grip his forearm as we both step back, and soon we are down the slope enough that when Ramses falls prone, the beam shoots past and above our heads.
He sighs loudly. “Ready to use that gun?” he asks me.
“You think Grius will come for us, or for Kain?”
17 Kain
I re-aim through the scope and fire. I see the bloody hole pop open against the Seraph’s chest, and he crumples down onto the ramp.
Two down.
I see Marauders and Seraphim rushing out of their tents. Some are armed and ready to go, but others are confused and naked. I shoot one of the armed Marauders – prioritizing the most threatening targets – and he falls dead.
I keep a mental count of my ammunition: seventeen shots left in this magazine. Plenty.
I hit another two Marauders before they manage to figure out what direction the shots are coming from and cower behind their tents.
And then, from the corner of my eye, I spot something teal moving down the ramp of the ship.
I swing my rifle around and sight through the scope, and I see the teal, armored legs stepping down the ramp.
My father, fully suited and ready to fight.
I put the crosshairs right on his legs, but I feel my chest tighten. I know it’s the plan, and I know the shots will barely even slow him...but it still fee
ls wrong to fire at my own father.
And then his face becomes visible. I put the crosshairs right on his chest, and I summon the steel resolve needed to –
Without warning, my father raises his hand toward me. It’s already glowing.
“Shit,” I whisper.
He knows the terrain. He knows the kind of spots I like to snipe from. He knows exactly where I am.
I pull the rifle away and roll back behind the rock wall.
Just before I reach cover, I see the flash of purple on the edge of my vision.
The wall is thick, but it won’t hold forever against plasma fire. In a one-on-one battle, my father would need to conserve his energy. Using huge amounts of antimatter to melt rock is anything but efficient, but when he has an entire army that is likely fanning out to flank me and flush me out, melting rocks and destroying my cover suddenly becomes very efficient.
“At least I’ll die without shame debt,” I mutter to myself, holding the rifle across my chest as the beam slams into and melts the rock. “I finally acted on my convictions...disobeyed my father. I helped save an entire planet, that’s got to erase the shame debt of betraying family, right?”
The beam cuts off abruptly.
I risk a peek up, expecting another beam to blast out the moment my ears poke above the rock.
But instead, I see something that really pisses me off. My father is blasting a beam right toward where I told that asshole Ramses to go.
“Trying to one-up me?” I ask, adjusting my aim onto my father once again. I see charred bodies littering the ground and tents on fire. Ramses seems to have cleaned up a good portion of the pincer squad.
Now, instead of dying without shame debt, I might have to live with so much of it that it will take a lifetime to clear. “Fucking Ramses.”
I fire at my father’s chest, and the moment I pull the trigger, I see a shield materialize, blocking him from my view. The bullet hits the shield – doing almost nothing. I fire again, but with the same result.
I risk taking a look down, and I see men with rifles crawling out toward better cover. Ramses didn’t kill all of them, and they’re still coming for me.
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