The Shadow Among The Stars

by Dylan Sanchez

DAME BRYLUEN BRANOK, CSOE OPERATIVE

  CALL SOURCE: CONFIRMED AND VERIFIED

  WARNING:

  VOLUNTARY REFUSAL OF URGENT CSOE CONTACT IS PUNISHABLE BY LAW.

  SEE:

  SECOND TERRAN GRAND CHARTER,

  SECTION 468 – E.

  Soon, the face of the CEO of Qual-Ex Research Solutions appeared on her screen, a professional-looking man in a tailored suit with neatly greased hair. He brushed a hand over his beard quickly, taking stock of the unexpected call. More than likely he was accustomed to any contacts being filtered through a secretary. “Yes, madame, to what do I owe this pleasure?”

  Bryluen tapped a pen on her desk. “Raymundo Texeira? Time sensitive, answers first: I need to know if you’re keeping any odd black rocks in your depot on Tāwhiri.”

  “Um, well, ma’am, let me see what information I can bring up. Black rocks? Anything more I can go off of?” He began to type furiously.

  “Odd relationship to most wave forms, unable to be dated, seems to have some sort of lines or patterns on its surface that defy our attempts to explain them.”

  “Hm, alright. We do seem to possess a similar item. Is there anything about this I can know about?”

  “Nothing helpful. I’m coming to take it. I’ll be on site in a couple hours.”

  “Well, ma’am, if the situation deems it, the CSOE can certainly be given access to the item. As corporate property—”

  “No, sir, this is not a request. I am taking it with me.”

  “Ma’am—”

  “Shhh ...” Bryluen held a finger up to her mouth. Raymundo was clearly shocked. He clearly had not been in contact with the CSOE before, and was unused to being told what to do. “Tell me, Raymundo: how much security does that depot have?”

  “Uh, well—”

  “How. Much?”

  “... around, uh, around fifty guards at any given time. Three light walkers, two anti-aircraft emplacements, and a pair of orbital monitors.”

  “Either I take the Stone off your hands, or you will end up having to write letters to all their families. I’m not the only one after that Stone. I want your men on alert until I leave. They are in terrible danger.”

  “Alright, madam, I mean—”

  “Do not give me shit. Weapons up, I take the rock, and maybe your main warehouse won’t get torn apart by a wave of horrors. Alright, be there soon. If anyone gives me trouble, I will be seeing you in person.”

  The next thing Raymundo saw was the CSOE seal and a temporary contact instance should he need to send Bryluen more information. He sat back at his desk, his eyes rolling around as he mentally looked for answers.

  Bryluen sounded the alarm, and Dread Naught scrambled for their armor. Kirby hesitated for an instant before sprinting to her room for a better-fitting top. Within seconds she re-emerged and joined the others in the entry corridor. Nicadzim’s warning influenced the weapons Bryluen and Runner took with them. Bryluen had her pistol under her arm and her whip at her side as always, but additionally slung a large, chunky shotgun over her back. The two vertically-oriented barrels had vents close to the main body of the weapon. Each barrel appeared to operate off of a separate magazine, and the weapon was particularly wide from several additional internal components and thermal shielding—this was no normal shotgun. Runner brought along his tri-pistols, but also mounted his bulky experimental firearm to his back and brought along a curved hatchet made of a greenish metal.

  The team rushed up the ramp of the Atet and into the same positions inside the bay as before. In slightly less than half an hour the Atet docked with the Compression Harness and rushed through the gate. Projections stated it would take a half hour to reach the depot. As Dread Naught pushed through into the Atua system, Bryluen received a message through the contact instance she left Texeira.

  After reading it briefly, she spoke into the teams’ helmet mics. “We’ve got Dreaded! We’ll be racing them in toward the central high-security chambers to grab our Stone. I’ll keep querying to be sure our landing site stays clear, and I’m sending a response packet to the Marines. Nico: you warned us. You saw the future and warned us, but rather than being early, our timing has instead ended up being perfect.”

  Runner and Vort looked toward the big man in the bay, motionless in his heavy armor. He took a breath. “We will be, I may suppose, fortunate.”

  “Hm. That said, do you think telling us about it may cause the actual outcome of events to differ? Since we would not have known otherwise?”

  “No. I was always going to tell you.”

  “Of course, Nico, but I mean theoretically. We’re basically playing with low-key time travel here.”

  “I am afraid you are misunderstanding. The timing was perfect due to what I see being predicated on me revealing the vision. Even before I saw anything, I was already going to tell you all once I did see it—there is no course of events that could alter the occurrence of myself revealing the vision to you.”

  “Do you mean you had seen you were going to reveal something previously?”

  “Well, no.” He sighed. “I will attempt to explain, but apologize for the incomplete fashion in which I must communicate such a … grandiose concept. When I ascertain a vision of the future, the contents of such a vision will not be changed. Call it a feeling if you wouldn’t believe my personal experience would thoroughly prove that fact. I am always going to tell you about this depot just in time for us to arrive and bring The Dreaded to battle. I will never see the depot in time for our arrival and departure to be completed before The Dreaded attack. The way events are unfolding then are the way they would always unfold.”

  The team fell still. Bryluen paused and asked a final question. “… pre-destination, or some sort of inverse observation paradox?”

  “... neither? Our actions are ours, but certain milestones seem to still occur at a certain time and in a certain fashion which remains logically consistent. The reasons or mechanics behind such a thing I did not begin to fathom—after all, there would be no experimenting with results in the case of those temporal happenings.”

  Bryluen let out a breath, suddenly realizing how much of her self-image was tied up in the assumption she wasn’t a cosmic chess piece. “Well, that’s fascinating as hell and will more than likely keep me up tonight. But more to the point, we’ve got a fight ahead of us. There are three Shala Light Walkers down below, and they’ve been diverted to keep the landing pad clear. The rest of the security force is embattled inside the depot itself. The depot is a big structure that includes several warehouses, office spaces, and quarters for the security detail. Those walkers are our only support when we hit the ground, so we relieve them at the landing site and move on in to secure the Stone ASAP.”

  Tāwhiri was a world swathed in long, striated land masses of pale greens, grays, and shades of brown amid oceans of bright blue. Like most worlds in the Atua system Tāwhiri was mainly oceanic, and though almost all of it required chemical separation, filtering, and desalination, the system’s main export was water taken to arid worlds or planets lacking sufficient usable water sources for drinking or agriculture. A world exemplifying the harsh beauty of the sea, all of the land masses and most of the oceans were obscured by dark blue cloud cover that roiled and swirled over the world, unleashing violent electrical storms and repeat lightning strikes at all times. This constant weather pattern is what inspired the world’s name—what better home was there for a god of storms?

  The Atet soon began to burn through the atmosphere, the wonders of aerospace science reducing the catastrophic heat and intensity of such a descent into little more than a subtle vibration and a quiet stream of white noise that could only be heard if you pressed an ear to an exterior bulkhead. As the ship passed into the lower atmosphere, it was immediately targeted by a trio of arcing electric bolts. The meta-material coating of the ship’s exterior, as well as the Faraday shielding that was standard construction, diffused the immensely powerful jolts of energy into little more
than fireworks. From the ground the Atet appeared to be wreathed in lightning, glowing and rushing downward like the incoming fury of Tāwhirimātea himself.

  14. Turmoil on Tāwhiri

  Runner bounced his feet, the lifts on his boots reacting to the motion of his leg muscles with small hisses. He patted his legs to a silent beat with his gauntleted palms. Nicadzim wiped his mouth, having just finished eating a steaming bacon cheeseburger he had definitely not taken with him onto the Atet earlier. Vort, partly suspended like fragile cargo in his custom harness, flexed his wings and rolled his shoulder-equivalents in anticipation. Bryluen bounced a foot as she ordered the nearest Marine patrol to lay in wait for the appearance of the Sjorthursar stalking about somewhere over Tāwhiri.

  Kirby was silent as she guided the ship down, coordinating automated attitude adjustments and assessing potential landing zones on the target land mass with rapid eye and hand motions were second nature. She quietly hummed a popular song and bobbed her head—a harrowing landing always put her at ease, but even so, she was in a particularly good mood today.

  The Qual-Ex depot sat on the highest point of a relatively small island jutting from the sea. The ocean, a rich color edging toward a cyan or turquoise tone, impatiently thrashed against the high cliffs. The depot overlooked the sea by more than sixty meters, nonetheless the occasional wave hurled itself far enough to spatter salty water across the side of the complex.

  From the plateau the depot sat upon the terrain fell in steps and slopes down to the rest of the island, most of which stood from fifteen to thirty meters above the waves. A thick lightning rod stood at the highest point on the depot, powering the structure by harnessing the constant punishing blasts dealt by the rumbling sky above.

  As the Atet swung in to assess the landing zone, The Dreaded swarmed from the far side of the island. The anti-air batteries had fired upon the black stream when it first descended and began to manifest into a horde of Dreaded, causing great puffs of the dark dust to dissipate into the winds rather than land and create monsters. The orbital monitors had gone to intercept the Sjorthursar at the time it appeared, but had not made visual contact before it disgorged a large number of troops and vanished from sight.

  Now much of the island was covered in a black mass. The swarm was slowly enveloping the complex as the security guards fell back in the face of the onslaught. The Shala walkers stood back-to-back on the neighboring landing pad. They were doing their best to hold back the swarm, but were attacked up close by several individuals at any given time. The enemy numbers were, in a word, overwhelming. Thousands of Dreaded were attacking the complex such that and even the best defensive plan would not withstand the attack.

  Bryluen called over the team’s mics. “Kirby, sweep us in low and slow. Pop the ramp, and we’ll lay down some fire. Vort, can you jump out and get down to those walkers? We need space to land.”

  “I certainly can!”

  Kirby relaxed the throttle and engaged the Atet’s air brakes. The vehicle slowed in a harsh deceleration as the ramp sung open. She guided the craft to within twenty meters over the island, the shriek of its engines reverberating loudly off the barren rock below. Runner, Nicadzim, and Vort magnetized their boots and stood from their harnesses. Runner unclipped his new weapon from his back, while Nicadzim held a lumpy mass of what seemed to be a form of glossy rock. A pentagonal aperture at the end of the roughly oblong shape was the only feature that made it appear to be a weapon of some manner. Nicadzim hefted it over one shoulder in the same way as he would aim an old-school rocket launcher. Bryluen appeared between them gripping a large sling filled with small metal orbs.

  The hordes of Dreaded spread out below them, their swarming mass flowing like an extension of the surrounding waves as they rushed up the island's incline. At least four or five thousand Rabisus alone must have been present, with entire platoons of Gugalannas. The taller En-Rabisus stood out from the swarm in small squads, each armored creature wading through their smaller brethren at waist height. The Dreaded hurled several hundred futile fireballs into the sky after the Atet. The enemy numbers comprised the type of army that would easily have crushed Pisistratus. For Dread Naught, this was unarguably a strike operation where speed was of the essence.

  Kirby counted down over their mics the time until they would be passing the landing zone. “5 … 4 ...”

  Bryluen begin to whirl the sling over her head, building up to a respectable speed. Nicadzim adjusted the strange, heavy weapon on his shoulder. Runner tweaked the dials on his weapon, and it began to hum to life with a high whine and a procession of status lights along the gun's body.

  “3 … 2 … 1 ...”

  Bryluen smiled.

  “NOW!”

  An expanse of concrete passed beneath them, the vast landing pad intended to berth large freighters or masses of smaller transports. The Shalas now held only one corner of the pad with furious weapons fire, not quite enough to allow the Atet to safely deposit Dread Naught. The Atet was currently heading in the direction of the struggling walkers, their supporting fire intended to slow the flow of enemies enough to allow the team to disembark. Bryluen released the sling, its contents flying out the back of the vehicle and descending toward the ground in a wide spread. Among the uniformly sized spheres was a single, larger sphere roughly the size of a golf ball.

  Runner’s weapon roared and unleashed a chaotic, twitching projectile like barely-cohesing ball lightning. The furious spheroid struck home amid a Gugalanna herd below. In a fraction of a second it torched its way through one unfortunate creature's body, before the projectile blew apart in a catastrophic flare of furious power. The detonation licked outward in every direction, instantly reducing all it touched to wispy vapor. The sound was a terrible cacophony of thunder-cracks and a deafening, hissing whistle of pressurized gas. A ten meter scorch mark immortalized the shape of the microsecond-long detonation across the landing pad’s surface, like a massive Rorschach test. Immediately after firing, the weapon furiously vented gases and heat for several seconds out of a front-facing opening.

  A moment later, the small orbs Bryluen released struck the ground. Each was an electromagnetic device—the single large sphere emitted a violent jolt of electricity. The electric pulse promptly routed itself to all the nearby spheres in a rolling reaction that formed an electric net, paralyzing and frying everything crossing between any of the spheres. The energetic reaction lasted several seconds and spanned a wide area sufficient to neutralize several dozen Rabisus.

  Following closely on the others, Nicadzim unleashed the power of his latest mind-construct. A series of spinning lumps of matter spat from the weapon in rapid succession, each leaving behind a twirling trail of colorful shards of stone-like glittering confetti. The sound of each lump was a constant, musical howl like an out-of-tune brass band. The group of projectiles found targets and danced toward them in arcs. The cluster of objects struck home and burst into dense, razor sharp flurries of colorful stone like that which trailed behind them. The result was like a belt of frag grenades exploding, The Dreaded within the blast radius instantly assuming the condition of fruit that had been dropped into a blender.

  Bryluen motioned, and Vort tucked in his wings and sprinted off the end of the ramp as the Atet pulled up for a second pass. He plunged downward rapidly, then extended his wings and pulled up gracefully. The efficacy of the trio’s shots had been notable, the unending wave of Dreaded slackening around the landing site for a moment. This allowed the Shalas a chance to rebound and reclaim some space. Vort came in low, loudly unleashing a storm of blue fire in a wide pass ten meters from the walkers.

  Flying as quickly as possible to avoid the storm of fireballs aimed in his direction, he pulled in low for punishing attack runs of lightning and fire around the perimeter of the landing zone. His lethal barrages allowed the damaged and limping Shalas to regain control of the area, their blood-slicked blades and glowing gun mounts finally allowed the occasional rest.

  After
another barrage from above, the Atet swung down and planted its feet. Bryluen, Runner, and Nicadzim disembarked, quickly changing their weapons and assuming partial cover behind the formation of walkers. Nicadzim fired his needle-cone while Runner redialed his weapon to fire bursts of small energy blasts fit for direct fire. Bryluen unslung her shotgun and racked the slide. A number of fireballs struck the Atet, but other than leaving ashen residue on the paint even such a small starship would scoff at most infantry-portable weaponry. Fortunately for the harried walkers the majority of the attacking Dreaded were intent on entering the depot, lessening the pressure on the Shalas’ task of maintaining the landing zone. Regardless, enough fireballs filled the air in an attempt to destroy them that Dread Naught needed to find cover soon.

  Each Shala was four meters tall and crewed by two people. Developed for closer range combat, the walkers toted a pair of flak cannons, a single seeking rocket launcher, auto-cannon, and bladed armatures at the bottom of the cockpit that scissored back and forth as foes approached. Lastly, taloned feet that allowed them to lash out like ostriches. They were small enough to navigate streets or alley ways, and could easily out-pace most forms of transport in dense or difficult environments—including the ability to outright sprint unlike their larger cousins.

  Bryluen rapidly assessed the situation as Kirby came stomping down the Atet’s ramp, flak cannons clanking and filling the air with rattling shrapnel. The jockey remotely instructed the Atet to close its ramp and take off into a holding pattern above as she laid down fire alongside the larger walkers. In such an exposed situation, Kirby’s armor and Vort’s flight abilities were clearly the most ideal.

  Bryluen decided she, Runner, and Nicadzim would move together through the corridors and rooms of the depot to the Stone, equipped as they were for close combat. She queried the depot’s central systems for a report on the security personnel.

  The remaining guards fought at third and final set of bulkheads on the approach to high-value storage, where the Stone was kept. Twenty-two guards had fallen since the first Dreaded reached the facility twenty five minutes ago, even though their practical formation and use of the facility’s layout gave the guards the best chance possible. Even then, Bryluen knew the goal of The Dreaded was not to kill the guards: it was to acquire the Stone. If anything the situation had been as beneficial as it was going to get for the guards.