Eric Olafson Series Boxed Set: Books 1 - 6 (The Galactic Chronicles Series)

by Vanessa Ravencroft

  He intensified his tone of voice, “To help you make up your mind, you need to know that there are four men in Quasimodos on your heels and when they reach you, the deal is off the table.”

  Har-Hi whispered, “If he gets your key and codes and combines it with his key, he can open the Translocator warehouse! You know we must first die before we can have these get into the wrong hands.”

  To Cirruit, I said, “Can you open that door somehow?”

  “No, sorry, that thing weighs a hundred tons or more, made of molecular compacted Ultronit and the power is cut. It would take days to burn through it.”

  Wetmouth pulled her sword and said with a confident tone in her voice, “I can cut it!”

  At the same time, I could hear the heavy stomping of battlesuits from the other side of the corridor.

  “Find cover!” I yelled and threw myself on the floor behind a sofa seat group.

  Cirruit cried, “Holy mother-machine, that sword is cutting the Ultronit like paper!”

  I didn’t turn to look but yelled, “Everyone protect Wetmouth while she cuts!” The doors that sealed the other end of this ground entry lobby and half the wall it was set in shattered as four Quasimodo Suits stomped in.

  Har-Hi said with a calm voice, “Everyone, concentrate your fire on the left one!”

  His strategy made sense; there was no way we could stop fully shielded Quasimodos with one or two blasters, but with all our firepower combined, we could wear them down one after the other.

  I fired and so did my friends. Twelve thermokinetic bolts hammered into the shields of the first suit, due to the fact that we used these old-style super-strong TKUs and Krabbel firing four at the same time, the Quasimodos’ shields were overwhelmed almost instantaneously. The wearer did not use his additional forcefield shield he could have deployed from his underarm and, thankfully, it was not a heavy assault version. The first man died a heartbeat later. If he or the others had been trained marines, we would have been toast by now. But whoever used those suits now had no training and it was obvious they still had even trouble walking straight. As easy as it might sound, it was quite a challenge to walk in a Quasimodo battlesuit, especially in a confined. Every move was augmented and even a little step ended up being a giant stomp.

  A blast roared over my head, missing me by a good five meters. Still, the air became very hot. I fired into the ceiling above, showering the next two with molten metal. One of them instinctively raised his arm to protect his face; it was a reflex even though the metal could not have hurt him.

  It gave me time to send a second blast into the floor. This trick had served me well against the Y’All, and it worked better here. The man stumbled and while he was trying to keep balance accidentally backhanded the one next to him with his left arm.

  Har-Hi yelled, “Everyone, close your eyes and ears!”

  A second later, an ear-shattering boom actually lifted me off the floor, and a stinging hot pressure wave rolled over me, pressing the air out of my lungs. I smelled the distinctive scent of burned hair.

  When I could see again, the rear half of the room was gone. There now was a crater of molten metal and two suited men dying in screaming agony as their suits melted around them. The fourth was still standing, but his neck snapped suddenly inside his helmet, and he collapsed as well.

  Har-Hi said, with an apologetic expression on his face, “Sixteenth of a gram AM Grenade was a tad more than I expected.”

  I said, quite angrily, “You realize that we are on a planet with a hostile atmosphere?”

  He apologized and said, “I calculated the safety margin to the outside walls from here to be adequate. I forgot you don’t wear armor.”

  It actually hurt when I grinned, and I expected to have at last first-degree burns on my face. “Well, it worked, and I should be glad you even have such a thing with you.”

  He said, “I always do. I am Dai!”

  Krabbel assured me that the singed hair of his legs would grow back, and Narth confirmed he was also all right.

  We went back to the blocked entrance and to our surprise, Wetmouth’s sword had cut big chunks out of the several meter thick emergency door. Her mysterious sword sliced through reinforced molecular compacted Ultronit as if cutting butter with a hot knife.

  Barely containing his amazement, Har-Hi gasped, “What kind of blade is this?”

  She had carved a neat tunnel into the metal and now made a final circular cut. She answered without stopping, “It is a very unique sword. I’ll tell you how I got it at a later time.”

  Hans stomped against the last piece she just had cut, and a meter thick disc of at least two tons of Ultronit clanged onto the shiny floor of the spaceport concourse, and the way was open. Har-Hi glued something into the breach Wetmouth had just cut, and explained, “Proximity mine, a full gram!”

  We had made it into the base main terminal. Six men, armed but not in battlesuits, were totally surprised by our presence and were burned to atomic ashes before they could send one bolt in our direction.

  Cirruit said, pointing the way, “We have to make it across the main lobby, cut again through one of these Ultronit doors and into the connection tunnel, traverse it and cut into the warehouse section and—” Cirruit collapsed as if someone had cut the strings of a puppet. Simultaneously, all the lights went out! Our weapons went into safety lock and shut down.

  Elfi pointed at a group with a Tech Stop projector across the hall, and three of them struggled to put a P4 Paralysator on its tripod.

  Hans grabbed the several ton piece of metal Wetmouth had cut and threw it like a giant Frisbee all the way across the lobby before the Paralysator beam hit him first!

  The disk hit them with force and destroyed the Paralysator and smeared the three men into stains across the floor.

  The other two manning the Tech Stop projector dropped to the floor with their heads twisted to their backs. Despite the fact that I would have killed them, too, I felt sick to the stomach seeing how deadly Narth’s telekinetics were.

  I shouldered Cirruit, and noticed how heavy he was, and said, “Everyone, see if you can drag Hans!”

  Without Narth, we would have had no chance to get our big Saturnian friend across to the next door. Hans floated behind Narth, and together we made it to the tunnel entrance. Again, Wetmouth’s sword cut through the metal and sliced a big round passage. An enormous detonation rolled across the lobby and Har-Hi grinned, “Amateurs!”

  We made it unhindered through the tunnel. Cirruit was starting to move, and I lowered him to the ground. He sat up in a very mechanical motion, his head turned completely to his back, and his eyes blinked in red and green colors. Finally, his white, expressionless mechanical pupils rolled into their sockets, and his head rotated into the normal position.

  He got back on his feet and said, with a coarse, more-mechanical voice than usual, “Tech Stop does things to me you don’t want to know. Any more of it and I would not be able to get up again.”

  Wetmouth administered a drug into Hans that she had taken out of her small first aid kit. After a few moments, Hans also moved, still groggy but able to get up and walk.

  With our friends back on their feet, Wetmouth cut the next locked door, and I rolled through it first. Again, two men were putting a large weapon together. Too far away to be jumped, my blaster still deactivated, I pulled the .45 and fired. Neither man wore shields but both had armor. One of them I hit square between the eyes, proving that this old chemical slug thrower was still quite deadly. The other was not hurt, as the slugs careened off his helmet, but the impacts of the two shots made him stumble back and a flickering metal streak managed to hit past his raised arms through a tiny opening right into his mouth. One of Har-Hi’s knives, showing only part of the grip, stuck out between his teeth.

  We rushed into the room, and Cirruit said, “Down that corridor are the Cerberus storages.”

  Twenty-five men in battlesuits and a strange six-legged being with purple fur, all heavily arme
d, dropped from the ceiling! One of them was the base commander in a fully operational Cerberus, and by his moves, he knew how to use it. He was, after all, a trained Union officer.

  He held a strange device. “This is a Saresii Psi Seeker. If the Narth even so much as tries a Psionic trick, you all die. Your weapons do not work, ours do! Surrender now!”

  The bearded man we had seen before stepped forward and the purple animal jumped the entire fifteen meters that separated us. I fired the Colt three times, and all three slugs hit their target, and into the belly of the being. I was certain I’d killed it, but my slugs could not stop its momentum and it hit me full force. Something painful stung me into the stomach and chest, and I fell backward, buried almost completely by that purple animal. Everything around me begun to dissolve into a blurred mix of colors and lights, and through this haze, I heard a voice, “The Wurlag stung him; it’s over for him!” And then there was nothing.

  Chapter 12: Rewards

  When I came around, I was still lying under that purple thing. The armed and fully armor-suited men were close now, holding their weapons ready, pointing them at my friends.

  The bearded dark-skinned man wearing a battlesuit of unknown origin argued with Cardwell, “I want you to open those Translocator storages now. We do not have much time.”

  Cardwell pointed at me and barked, “I told you that two command codes are needed to open them. The only one able to do that was killed by your idiotic pet!”

  “Be very careful, Cardwell. Your usefulness has ended!”

  The base commander’s Quasimodo hand snapped around the throat of the bearded pirate and he hissed, “I am still the commandant of this base, and I am wearing a Quasimodo. Unlike your goons, I know how to use it.”

  The pirate struggled and coughed. “You are nothing; now unhand me. Do you think I trusted you while you put on that suit? I put a Eugeletrian Sneegal in it while it was still open and it might just crawl to the base of your neck. Not even your Auto-Doc can prevent the effects of those little suckers’ poison.”

  Caldwell dropped the man and opened his helmet, which was my chance. No one paid any attention to me, and I fired my last round. The bullet hit Caldwell right under the chin, and the effect of the heavy lead projectile was quite gruesome. My friends didn’t need more distraction to react.

  Wetmouth’s strange sword sliced one of the men from shoulder to hip, battlesuit and all. Hans hammered both of his fists and all his might on the helmeted head of the third.

  The rest tried to use their weapons, but they did not work. Cirruit said, “Nanites are so useful!”

  The armor of the next disassembled itself and the pieces dropped to the floor, and he stood there as naked as on the day of his birth. Narth’s eyes glowed no longer yellow but deep red, and his voice was no longer recognizable. “You have felled my Hugavh sharer. You have harmed my friend. You shall know and learn that Narth has learned the meaning of rage!”

  Twenty pirates slowly rose from the floor and, with sudden popping sounds, the insides of their helmets were splashed with dark-red matter and they all dropped lifelessly to the ground.

  Several strands of Spider silk hit the bearded man. He was pulled with force close to Krabbel, who turned him with dizzying speed between his hind legs, and Cardwell was turned into a cocoon, battlesuit and all, in less than a few seconds.

  Wetmouth came over and sliced his helmet off.

  I raised my hand and said as loud as I could, “Cirruit, go activate the Cerberus. Do not let anything distract you!”

  Cirruit was a certified Translocator technician. A fact that was not mentioned in the non-classified section of his personnel file and had Blue-Blue-Yellow clearance, I held out my code key and said, “Day code is strawberry.”

  Cirruit ran with machine speed and out of my sight.

  Hans lifted the purple thing off me, and Wetmouth dropped to her knees, examining me. She looked up to the others and said, “The Wurlag has stunned him!”

  I wanted to get up, but I could not feel my legs at all. “Weird, I can’t get up. Is something still pinning me down?” I saw tears in Wetmouth’s eyes. “No, Eric, that’s the poison of the Wurlag!”

  With the weight of the animal gone, I could still prop myself up, and there I saw a beautiful sight! The massive warehouse doors exploded into atomic dust glittering in the air, and the Cerberus IXs marched out in perfect robotic movements. It was a display of Union military might; each of them exactly 350 centimeters tall with four Myomylar-Syntho muscled arms, nearly indestructible, with the firepower equivalent to an entire platoon of fully equipped Marines, the very pinnacle of Terran military engineering. The lead robot scanned the room and approached me.

  With its deep modulated, voice the robot said, “ID verification scan complete. Highest command authority recognized. Your orders, sir?”

  With a relieved grin, I said, “The base is infiltrated by criminals and foreign intruders. There is an alien ship with stolen Mil-Tech. Secure the base by all means necessary and prevent the ship from leaving.”

  The robot said, “Command understood!”

  The robot battalion activated their flying capability and swarmed like gigantic angry hornets in every direction.

  The bearded pirate laughed. “You still lost. The Wurlag poison will destroy every neural path in your body, and there is nothing anyone can do in time. I do have the antidote on my ship. All you have to do is let me go, and it is yours!”

  I still was able to shake my head. “Sorry, scum. I cannot be bought.”

  He cursed and said, “You fool! I have an even bigger ship in orbit, and it will turn this place to slag!”

  Har-Hi said, “You have no idea what Cerberus robots can do!”

  Through a viewport, we saw Cerberus robots by the dozen fly upward into the gray sky.

  From behind, I heard running boots, but by now, I could not even turn my head. Marines and finally Admiral Stahl came into my view.

  Wetmouth cried, “He was stung by a Wurlag, sir!”

  To hear real concern in the voice of the eternal soldier was not something I wanted to hear in my situation, but he said, “Oh shit! Get that man into stasis at once!”

  I woke and found myself in a med station diagnostic bed and said more to myself than anyone else, “Why is it always me who loses consciousness around here?”

  Wetmouth immediately came into view and with excitement in her voice, she said, “He is awake. Eric is awake!”

  She simply hugged me, and I could feel her tender lips from behind her mask kissing me on the nose on the cheeks and then on my lips.

  Then a warm deep voice said, “It pleases me greatly to see you are well!” Narth came into view.

  Cirruit stood by the foot end and said, “No, you’re not the only one. I was the one hit by Tech Stop, remember?”

  Now a med tech with an MD Snake on her collar scanned me. She was obviously pleased with the results and said, “Welcome to the land of the living, Ensign Olafson. You are now officially the first living being ever to survive a Wurlag sting, Congratulations.”

  I sat up and said, “Can someone please tell me what a Wurlag is in the first place?”

  Narth motioned to Wetmouth, and it seemed they came to a working agreement. She said, “It is a genetically altered life form that was originally stolen from Green Hell about two hundred years ago. It has been bred and changed so it can be held as an attack and guard animal. Its stingers are laced with one of the most complex biotoxins known.”

  The Med Tech said, “You have amazing friends, Mr. Olafson. The Sojonit worked tirelessly for five days to develop an antidote, and this morning she succeeded. Then another Narth showed up, and all the neural damage caused by the poison was reverted in an eye blink.”

  As I turned, I noticed another Narth, and he came closer to the bed. I immediately knew who he was, even though he looked exactly the same as all the Narth I had met before. He put his hand on my shoulder, and I could feel something like electrici
ty pass through me, but it was not painful or unpleasant. On the contrary, it felt uplifting and energizing, and he said, “One could not let the one who shared the Hugavh pass into the beyond. One had to obtain the knowledge of your neural system before we could travel here and aide you in your recuperation. I am the One known as the Narth Supreme and you, Eric, are a child of Narth. Your well-being is important to Narth. I came as soon as I was able, but your friend Wetmouth was indeed able to synthesize the antidote. Her intellect is most noteworthy!”

  I could not help but feel deeply in awe, and I felt my back crawl with goosebumps. Only once had I felt this way, only once, but I could not remember when or where. Something white and huge floated at the edge of my consciousness, and I simply could not concentrate enough to focus and assumed it was an aftereffect of my poisoning.

  I said, “I am deeply honored by your presence, Narth Supreme. Can you make me hear Narth again?”

  He kept his hand on my shoulder and slowly nodded. “Your will is the key, Child of Narth, and your will has done as you wished. One is pleased that Narth has such a friend as you. The concept of friendship has become clear to us through you, and in doing so opened the door to other concepts such as honor, love, and affection. All that is Narth is deeply thankful. Now one must return to Narth Prime. Narth Prime is your home as well and one day you shall come home and Narth will no longer be alien and strange to you.”

  From one heartbeat to the next, the Narth Supreme was gone, but I was certain I could feel his touch a little longer.

  I realized that no one around had noticed or heard what just happened, except of course for my friend. Once more, I could feel his thoughts and hear his words in my mind, and as far as it concerned me, the world was all right again. His voice and presence in me filled a void I knew was there since that time in the Crawler Cat.

  He said, “Time, as you and I perceive it on this plane, has little meaning for the one who is the Narth Supreme.”

  I answered him in the same way, “I am sure glad he fixed that psi shield of mine. I missed your presence in me.”