Whoever it is must have killed the commander already, he thought when he didn’t hear a response. This is not going to end well.
Shadows appeared in the gateway to the colony. They were out of time.
“Everyone, retreat!” Nuri shouted to the other soldiers. “Don’t let them see us!”
The imperative to keep the Duri name separate from a failed mission had been drilled into his head for years, and it was his primary, reflexive concern when he saw colonists filing through the opening. Now that they had been given enough warning to gather weapons and block the gate, it would be foolish to proceed. Even if the cleansing was successful, the risk that one or more colonists managed to flee before they rounded them up was too great, and if the galaxy heard about the Called making a mistake during the cleansing, it would call their spiritual and tactical authority into question.
Yet the other five Called soldiers in his group were frozen, clearly confused by the lone figure with the smoking blaster approaching them from the rear. They didn’t want to run blindly into the hot point of the weapon, even with the colonists closing in the other direction. It was combat instinct. Facing a civilian with a pitchfork was a hell of a lot easier than a trained killer with a weapon he wasn’t afraid to put to good use.
“Fall back!” Nuri shouted again, trying to rouse them—and himself—from a stupor.
By the time he got his legs moving and started sprinting toward the jungle, the unknown Called soldier had taken aim at Seven without breaking stride.
“What’s he doing?” Nine shouted.
The soldier pulled the trigger and blew a hole in Seven’s helmet. Her body jerked backwards and she dropped in the mud unceremoniously with smoke billowing from her suit.
“Go!” Nuri screamed. He started running then, firing a few wild shots in the direction of the renegade Called soldier—who was running toward the colony with equal determination—that failed to cause any damage.
The four remaining soldiers in Nuri’s group finally took his lead and began running toward the jungle, giving the renegade a wide berth in their confusion and desperation to leave the colony without evidence of their presence. Yet that was a moot point, Nuri realized, since they’d left Seven’s corpse in their wake.
“Damn it,” he growled.
He glanced back and saw that the colonists were in pursuit. It wouldn’t take them long to find Seven’s body, and that meant they’d realize that the Called could be killed. Worse yet, they’d realize that the Called weren’t supernatural beings at all, merely flesh and blood humans that could be defeated with the right kind of weaponry.
“AAAAGGGHHHH!”
He turned just in time to see Eight shot down by the renegade, who was also in pursuit of the remaining Called soldiers and ignored the colonists completely.
Nuri returned fire, this time getting closer to the mark but still flying wide with the renegade anticipating his shots.
“We have to go back!” Eleven shouted to him over the repetitive click of the machine guns chasing them from the edge of the colony.
“We can’t,” Nuri told her, still running. “We’ll all die.”
“We won’t,” Eleven said firmly. “And that’s not what matters.”
Nuri rolled away from the renegade’s aim, digesting Eleven’s words.
What does she mean by that? he wondered.
“We can’t go back,” Ten told them. He’d just about reached the jungle and was trailing fire behind him to ward off the colonists. “We’re done now, either way. We’ve got to call in an air strike to salvage the mission.”
The renegade soldier shot Nine in the back of the leg, then quickly put three blaster pulses through his helmet from such close range that brain and glass sprang into the air and reached Nuri’s suit from two-dozen yards away. The renegade turned to him and they locked stares through featureless faceplates for a moment, then the rattle of gunfire from the colonists became too deafeningly close to ignore any longer.
“Fury, this is the strike team!” Nuri shouted into his comm link once he’d connected to the ship’s frequency. An IED skimmed off the mud towards him. He dove and rolled as far from the object as he could manage, narrowly avoiding the impact. “The mission has been compromised,” he managed to communicate between gasps. “We need an immediate air strike on the settlement. Someone’s gone rogue. They know we’re here. We’ve already lost most of the squad.”
“Understood, ground team. Proceed to the extraction point and the shuttle will assess whether it’s safe to get you out of there.”
Assess who among us is the renegade you mean, he thought, or whether we deserve saving after what happened down here. Maybe they’ll blow us to bits with the rest of them.
Nuri staggered to his feet as bullets tore past, spraying the mud around him in geysers. Sooner or later, even untrained colonists would manage to hit the mark by pure luck. He didn’t intend on sticking around to find out how many shots they wasted before finding a target.
“Hurry!” Ten shouted, issuing covering fire for Nuri and Eleven from the shelter of the jungle. “They’re gaining on you!”
Nuri crouched and forced himself to run harder even though his legs felt like they would snap off with another step. Two bullets pinged off the armor plating over his midsection and the impact jolted him sideways, nearly sending him face-first into the mud. Somehow, he held his footing and the suit held together. It was designed to take much heavier firepower than the archaic machine gun bullets the colonists carried, which had somehow survived generations of moon-hopping by colonial vagabonds.
They’re easier to stop than blaster bolts at least, he thought.
When he reached the jungle border, he dove into the brush, swiveling as he landed to return fire for Eleven’s sake. She’d started lagging behind, and that was hardly a surprise. She’d taken more bullets than he had—the holo-display on his faceplate told him so—and it slowed her down considerably. Enough that the renegade was within a dozen feet of her now with his blaster aimed for the kill shot.
“Down!” Nuri shouted into his comm link.
Eleven obeyed without hesitation and the bolt sailed over her head, igniting the mud at Nuri’s feet. Ten turned his attention back to the renegade and began to fire, but once Nuri took his eyes away from the action for a split-second to mark the colonists’ progress, he could no longer tell the two soldiers apart. He didn’t know what to shoot. Instead, he started gunning down the front line of colonists at a feverish pace.
The battle-calm took over. It steadied his hands and focused his shots so he was constantly moving to the next target before the last had hit the ground. He was startled by his own accuracy and precision in the field after training for so long. Exhilarated, even, though he denied it once he returned to his studies on the distant mountaintop and reflected upon the cleansing gone awry.
“Fury, where’s that air strike?” Ten shouted into the comm link. He repeatedly checked the ammunition display on his blaster. His charge had to be running low from laying down such persistent covering fire.
“Everyone fall back now!” Nuri shouted.
He’d oriented enough to the battlefield to distinguish Eleven from the renegade again (at least, he was fairly certain of it), but they were too close together to risk blaster fire. The last thing he wanted to do was drop the wrong target and leave himself at a disadvantage while he sorted it out.
What does it matter? his Duri Master’s voice demanded. Better to kill both and ensure the heretic dies than risk bringing his poison back to the lifeblood of our faith.
Nuri caught the renegade’s helmet in his crosshairs briefly and his finger squeezed on the trigger, then Eleven’s head popped right into his line of fire and he hesitated.
“Damn…” he muttered.
Luckily, the renegade had his hands full for the time being. The colonists nipped at his heels, unaware that he was the very reason they’d survived so far or that he likely shared their views on God and eternity
(which were still a little hazy to Nuri). It was clear that the defector wanted to engage Eleven, but for the moment, he was too busy covering his own flank to line up a shot. That left him exposed to his former squad mates.
“Down!” Nuri yelled again. He recognized the futility of calling out over a comm frequency that the renegade soldier was also accessing, but he couldn’t see any other options in the moment. As soon as Eleven dropped, he squeezed the trigger again, this time all the way down. The renegade’s shoulder and left arm blew off in a white flash, smacking the stomach of a charging colonist five yards away.
“Got him!” Nuri exclaimed, feeling a mixture of relief and sadness as reality sank in. Under other circumstances, he might have joined the renegade’s cause, but the attack had caught him so off guard that he had no other choice.
The renegade staggered drunkenly but kept running, and Ten’s fire into the onrushing wave of colonists inadvertently cleared his flank of any hostiles that might have overrun him.
“Firing now,” the tactical officer of the Fury announced just as Eleven reached the jungle border.
A blinding, white-yellow beam of energy thundered down and struck the heart of the colony. The walls exploded outward, sending a shockwave that catapulted Nuri, Ten, Eleven, the renegade, and a half-dozen angry colonists deep into the jungle. The rest were killed instantly.
When Nuri landed in a bed of giant, pink-petaled flowers, he scrambled to his feet and dropped the remaining colonists that pinged a pulse on his sensors. Like most Called missions, the work was so easy that he felt guilty doing it.
It’s better than dying.
His suit had taken the brunt of the shockwave in addition to dimming the visuals, but the colonists would have been as good as dead from the radiation, anyway. He’d just spared them a negligible amount of additional suffering.
He checked his sensors again to be sure no other colonists had survived in his immediate proximity, then cautiously approached the remaining life-sign readings for his squad. There were three others, meaning the renegade was still alive even with his left arm gone.
“Ground team, any survivors should proceed to the extraction point immediately. We’re leaving the system in ten minutes with or without you.”
“Understood,” Nuri replied, eyeing the dazed Called soldier before him in the thick jungle with suspicion until he realized she still had both arms.
The soldier noticed him appraising her and nodded slowly, rubbing at her lower back even though there was no way she could reach the source of her pain through the suit. “Eleven reporting, sir,” she said weakly.
“Get up, Eleven. We’ve got five minutes to make the extraction point or they’re leaving us.”
“Yes, sir.” She started running without him, glancing back once at the settling cloud of mud and debris that had splattered their approach vector and covered the corpses.
Suddenly, a clamor rose from the bushes directly behind Nuri and she froze in place.
“Behind you, sir,” she said calmly.
Nuri turned and watched the renegade soldier stagger toward him, right hand pressed against the hole where his left arm had been moments earlier.
“Twelve,” he wheezed.
Nuri scowled and raised his blaster.
The renegade fell to his knees in the mud and hung his head. “I thought you would join,” he gasped. “I thought you would listen.”
Aware of Eleven watching him and Ten somewhere nearby, Nuri ignored the comment and advanced on the unarmed, injured traitor. Once he was within reach of the dying soldier, he knelt beside him and replaced his blaster in the holster on his back.
“Why did you do it?” he whispered.
Ten stumbled into view opposite Eleven and froze, watching the two soldiers kneeling in the mud.
“I thought you would help,” the renegade mumbled, his head lolling from one side to the other. “I didn’t save them.”
“Why did you want to save them?”
The renegade paused, slipped lower in the mud. He was clearly losing consciousness, but Nuri needed answers before that happened.
“Why did you want to save them?” he repeated.
Slowly, the soldier removed his trembling hand from the cauterized skin at his left shoulder and pressed the release button on his faceplate.
Nuri winced. Eleven gasped. Ten cursed.
“Commander?”
The commander grinned wide, looking every bit the Devil that the Duri painted him to be in the aftermath of the disaster with fire from the air-strike glowing beneath a gas giant on a jungle night. “You don’t know what you’ll see. At least I listened,” he said.
Then, in one motion, he pulled the blaster from Nuri’s holster and blew his own head off, leaving nothing of his face for the Duri Masters to identify to ensure his memory was sufficiently desecrated. As long as no one was able to pinpoint who had committed the treason, the commander was just another unfortunate battlefield casualty who’d died in honorable service to the Divine Infinite. A fate to which all Called soldiers aspired, even those who’d failed the trials.
The three remaining soldiers stood in silence for a moment, staring at the smoking hole where the commander’s face had been while trying to digest the impossibility that he’d willingly turned against the Duri and his Called brothers and sisters.
“We’re going to miss extraction,” Ten piped in after several seconds had passed.
Nuri nodded, retrieved his rifle, and led the other two soldiers to the extraction point. Later, he learned why the commander had turned. Aside from the hysteria brought on by his failure during the trials, he’d also lived among that group of colonists before being abducted as a teenager.
At least he’d died with his family.
13
Before the first volley of blaster bolts whizzed past his head and scorched the tombstone behind him, Nuri drew his rifle and took shelter behind an imposing crypt with alien script chiseled across its walls.
This is a waste of time, Colt told him. You’re taking lives for the sake of taking lives.
They’re the ones shooting at me, he protested, creeping his blaster rifle around the edge of the structure and dropping two alien soldiers in fast succession. I don’t have a choice. If I don’t kill them, I won’t make it out of here alive.
You are Hidria. What is death to Hidria?
He grimaced as a blaster bolt glanced off his forearm plating and made his bones ache. A useful occupation.
The alien commander shouted in a coarse tongue and the remaining soldiers fanned out to flank him, advancing in turns while others covered their movement. Nuri emerged from the crypt to return fire, but the barrage was too heavy for him to get a look at how far the aliens had advanced, let alone fire an accurate shot.
What now? he wondered.
He may not have gotten a precise read on the soldiers’ positions but they hadn’t been far off when the shooting started, so even though he’d cleared enough of a path to buy himself some time, he knew they were close. In fact, when he held his breath, he could hear their movements in the squelching soil. In a matter of moments, he’d be surrounded and they’d either kill him or take him captive. He couldn’t spare the time for either fate. Even if he made it out of the trials alive, at this point, he’d likely be insane by the time he reached Prime and beheld the face of God.
And then what?
All at once, the blaster bolts ceased, followed by several seconds of silence. Nuri’s pulse pounded in his throat.
Now! his Duri Master said. Attack now! Kill these heathens!
But Nuri knew the element of surprise would only last a split-second if it emerged at all, considering the soldiers expected a counterattack.
They’re probably baiting me out, anyway, he worried.
Yet it didn’t seem likely considering how easily they could have surrounded him. Perhaps there was some sort of barrier preventing them from doing so, but he sincerely doubted that was the case, either.
&
nbsp; “Lay down your weapon and come out,” the commander said.
It’s a trap. If I go out there, they’ll shoot me on sight.
“You will not be harmed if you come quietly.”
Nuri stood from his crouch, frowning, and holstered the rifle. The crypt still shielded him from enemy fire so he had a moment to collect his thoughts. He hadn’t completely made up his mind whether he would oblige the alien officer, but the break in active shooting at least gave his legs some respite from crouching against the stone.
The aliens whispered to each other in unsettling hisses. He didn’t understand their language, but occasionally he caught the word Hidria falling from their lips and knew they were either mocking him or expressing disbelief that he truly was a member of the fabled, indestructible fighting machines. For that, he didn’t blame them. He’d declared himself Hidria and then promptly backed himself into a corner, only managing to drop a half-dozen alien soldiers in the process.
I still thinned their numbers though, he thought, reminding himself that they wouldn’t take the losses kindly. Come to think of it, the invitation felt less and less like an invitation to parley with each passing second.
What choice do you have? Colt asked. If you will not attack and you can’t find another way to move on, then you must play their game. They won’t just leave without dealing with you properly. No warrior is stupid enough to expose his back to a threat.
Nuri knew she was right, but he still hesitated before finally emerging from the crypt’s shelter with his hands in front of his chest to show he was unarmed. He was also testing whether the movement drew any fire. It didn’t, and that made him feel slightly encouraged about trusting the alien commander’s word. It appeared he would allow Nuri to speak with them again without immediate retribution, after all.
“I’m coming out.” He edged into the open aisle, bracing himself for another attack. He was confident that he could retreat behind the crypt again before sustaining too much damage as long as they didn’t manage a headshot, but considering how many soldiers had blasters pointed at him, he thought the chance of at least one blowing a hole through his temple was too high.
Colt: The Cosmic Prayer (Hidria Book 1) Page 13