by Dark Knight
Somehow that bunny lost her footing and the barrel punched her off their hull. While she was falling down, both commandos grabbed the sniper’s belt and... left his mangled body where he’d fallen, screaming and cussing at them. They then disengaged from the fight, jumping into an open hatch nearby. Nedal’s eyes squinted – mission first eh? Good. Nobody liked inbred noble cunts and certainly he wouldn’t be shedding any tears for the loss of this “officer”.
Instead of smashing into the ground, the small Terran rolled mere seconds beforehand, legs landing first and then... hopped away firing her railgun. From his scanners Nedal heard the unmistakable whine of exoskeleton actuators and snarled angrily. That creature had advanced equipment! Not only that but the nerve wracking sound of that cursed Maen’le’char rifle that he hated with a passion greater than the heat of those two suns. So many taz’aran troopers were killed by Terrans wielding this weapon back on Sirius. The humans had too many weapons – even children were carrying either a laser pistol or this carbine, and fought together with their parents. That name Maen’le’char, did Terrans not know what it meant in fringe speak, or was it used unintentionally? He was told that in their native tongues it sounded different, and its full designation was ’Manlicher G19/50’.
In fringe speak Maen’le’char meant ’Defiance’.
Screaming new orders in his comms, he directed the fire of one PD turret to track, and possibly fry the ’filthy rodent’ alive, as that officer had called her. At the same time something else appeared on his sensor screens. Coming from behind the ridge that was behind their position, it was like a wave, flashing and then vanishing while the scanning beams tried to adapt to its confusing sensor profile. Nedal heard a single, barely legible word, coming from the mortally wounded officer’s comm link. Gargling and choking on his own blood he mumbled:
“Trees!”
Something moved swiftly on his sensor screen and Nedal dodged aside. A huge Carrolan tree swiped its thick branch and almost smashed the gun out of his mecha’s hands! Large heart shaped leaves flew all around in the air following that mighty swing and when some of them touched his machine, instead of harmlessly bouncing off they stuck like spears from his hull! Systems started giving off alarms. Nedal moved back and emptied his entire weapon’s power pack into the tree, burning its corona and most of those dangerously long branches to a crisp. The alien tree slumped to the earth, mortally wounded, greenish juices spewing all around.
Yet the battle was not over – more and more trees lumbered forward and attacked!
It was only because he’d ordered the troopers to entrench earlier, that they managed to hold their own against these monstrous plants. The same leaves that stuck from his mecha’s armorplating sliced troopers to pieces, effortlessly cutting through their suits. The soldiers shot back with their rifles, AFV moved rapidly from flank to flank, unleashing the power of its devastating beam cannon. Trees burned left and right, soldiers screamed in the comms but continued following their orders to the letter. Medics pulled mangled bodies and removed sharp leaves sticking out of them risking their own limbs to try and save their lives. Everybody was scared shitless but continued fighting. From the sections that he was left with the only one without casualties was that shooting like hell from inside the AFV. The troopers who piloted it went above and beyond what one might expect from a taz’aran vehicle crew. They moved and focused fire exposing their vehicle to the tree attacks, giving their medics time and opportunities to pull wounded troopers back, before finally overheating both the beam cannon and their grav-engine. It was a massacre and yet those star troopers held! Something woke up deep inside Nedal.
Wasn’t the reckless bravery of the Terrans, but more like a prideful sensation. A recognition of his own race, a feeling that most taz’arans rarely experienced.
Was that how redemption felt?
Nedal gave the order to retreat behind the fall-back line, heavy particle-beams streaming from that machine gun he’d positioned there beforehand, covering their movements. More trees fell burning to the ground. Suddenly the gun was shot by long range railgun projectile and exploded killing its whole crew. Another sound approached. The loud whistling, rumbling boom of a Terran Tesla engine was rapidly closing and Nedal screamed over the comms, warning his suddenly very precious, veteran AFV crew:
“Abandon your vehicle troopers! Back to the transport, now!”
Glowing hot, his beam cannon had to cool off otherwise it would get slagged, or worse, explode in his hands. Nedal picked up the power axe that his mech was equipped with, and after mag locking the heavy gun on his back leaped forward. The crew of his last AFV quickly left the vehicle. They all managed to escape and even dutifully carried their personal equipment with them, as the AFV, battered by tree branches and armor stuck full of leaves, exploded behind them.
Nedal’s arms were shaking and yet he flew forward engines booming, both hands of the mecha gripping the handle of his weapon. The tree that tried bashing his nearby, crawling on the ground troopers was hit in its trunk and collapsed, not able to withstand the force of his blow. It rolled to the side, roots suddenly sticking up from the soil in full view, revealing grappled taz’aran corpses in various states of decomposition.
Blood!
Blood was everywhere and the stunned troopers almost lost their will. Vomiting all over his controls Nedal nevertheless kept enough of his newly-found composure to shout:
“Focus fire the roots! Shoot the bloody roots troopers, with everything you’ve got!”
The order shook his soldiers off the horror they were slipping into and they fired accurately. The troopers simultaneously pulled back, reaching the entrance of their transport and Nedal started stepping back. This time not one, but two, even larger trees, lunged at him, branches swinging. Not only that but the very ground beneath his feet started shifting and he, risking the PA power core overheating, activated the engines, floating off in the air. Flying over to the side Nedal again swung putting all of the mecha’s considerable strength behind the blow splitting one of the attacking trees trunks. Covered with its greenish juices, his mecha floated back, landing on the transport’s ventral hull.
Suddenly everything shook, even the big starship’s landing struts began sinking into the ground. Nedal and all of his surviving troops could now see with their naked eyes what was causing that. Everywhere under them there were huge, twisting roots! The thickness of his mech, they were covered with a mixture of taz’aran and tree ’blood’. Twitching and twisting the roots broke up through the soil, and like a giant skeletal hand reached towards his starship!
“Emergency lift off pilots! I don’t care how you do it! Move the ship or we all die here!” – Nedal’s mind somehow realized that his voice in that very moment was not at all shaky. Without orders his troopers were shooting, throwing what grenades they had left at the huge, bloody roots who were stretching poised to crush their starship. He almost fell from the hull, his mecha loosing its footing Nedal used the axe’s blade and simply stuck it into the armor. Rocking and screaming with one of its main engines burning, his transport lifted up in the air and flew safely away from the giant, bloodied roots. While the hull was lifting, shaking in the air, engines booming and tasked to their limits something fell from the transport and hit the stretched out roots.
The PA scanners were again overwhelmed by the Terran’s cyber attack. Just for a second. Enough for a single RPG missile to hit the aft section of his transport and blow their second engine to smithereens. Veering to one side and dangerously losing altitude his pilots shouted into the comms:
“Everyone grab onto something and prepare for a crash landing!”
Thankfully the vessel had enough power and their dorsal shields were activated. Violently, the transport pancake smashed directly into the rocky ground just a few short klicks away from the battlefield. Shields holding, it did not break to pieces, although the plasma fires that engulfed its engine section were something that he and the rest of his troops had to
take care of immediately. Otherwise the last main engine that they had would be lost and without it they were doomed to stay here, together with the trees.
Commanding his troopers Nedal began battling the fire and yet he couldn’t miss the Spacer shuttle flying away in the air. It soon achieved escape velocity, its silhouette became diminutive, leaving behind it a beautiful blue trail of drive plasma. Instead of screaming something over the comms, Nedal noted this with his mind linked to his PA mainframe. Even if plotting appropriate revenge would take him a decade or two, he would find this bitch, everyone she knew and cared for. They will all suffer before her eyes and then die. This was a time honored taz’aran tradition, and traditions existed not to be changed, but followed. Otherwise, what were you to become, but a rudderless idiot, kicking against those who knew better than you, resisting the wisdom of ages past.
He left his battered, leaf stabbed PA, stumbling and choking from the fumes, uniform spacesuit covered with wet vomit. The star troopers under his command were not faring any better, some had lost limbs and moaned in agony while desperately trying to contain the plasma. Not waiting to see what their reactions would be, he grabbed the closest extinguisher from the fire control locker and started plunking stasis blobs, stifling the towering flames. Embroiled in a struggle against the fire Nedal failed to see what was happening behind him.
The wounded and other star troopers were saluting him... and yet there was one of the pilots who, hands twitching, almost reached for his sidearm. Looking at Nedal’s back, the taz’aran was tempted to act but he stayed his hand. Right now if the pilot were to shoot commander Nedal, he himself would be promptly executed on the spot. No matter what his Lord Captain Omasa had ordered him, the navigator would’ve gladly murdered Nedal had he found a way to conceal the act.
Vengeance had to wait for a moment more opportune.
________________________________________________________________________________
With waning sight and other senses all but non-responsive, the broken taz’aran noble still held his ornate family rifle in hand. Couldn’t feel his legs though and neck twisting he forced a glance down. His terrified, helpless wail, echoed underground as blood soaked roots were crushing the bodies of other taz’aran soldiers, feeding the trees above. Rifle fired its last shot before slipping of his shaking hand, muddy earth covering his soon-to-be-dead body. Nearby smaller roots pierced the invader from skull to guts, quickly reducing everything into food because the closest tree needed nourishment for its corona to grow back. Soon the Mumpa trees settled themselves, roots connected with each other they suckled on the bountiful juices coming out of those who came here once to destroy them. They knew of the small one and her kin, who were good to the Green and gave as much they took. It was now as much part of them as she was of the Flesh and their branches shook, waving with their green leaves.
The grateful Green sang a song of remembrance and marked the small one’s Flesh into their collective memories. They would wait for her to return. Her and her kind they would breath with together, share water and aid the growth of more, smaller Green. But only them and nobody else! The ground of Carrola shook mightily again. Roots stretching, searching. Leaves flying on the wind and spreading seeds. IT would find the invader, sooner or later, and no matter where they hid or what their Flesh did, devour them whole.
Chapter 10
False flag
Captain Anit’za stood up between his telepath and the newcomer, that space biker Lilly called Mack. Both were almost ready to start shooting at each other in his hangar, and as a dutiful leader he couldn’t allow something like that to transpire. Moreover, his starship was damaged enough and more blown up or disintegrated bulkheads would neither shorten the already long repair time, nor lessen his crew’s already considerable workload.
“What seems to be the problem, gentlemen? Isn’t it the very first time that both of you see each other’s faces?” – with his head between the barrels of a disruptor on one side, and a heavy railgun pistol on another, the dzenta’rii felt a little bit concerned. But only a little. Both of them turned at him simultaneously shouting back:
“He can’t be trusted! He is dangerous!” – before shutting up confused, since they were unintentionally parroting each other, and with perfect sync even.
“I think we can all agree about the dangerous part.” – and Anit’za slowly pushed both barrels away from them and his own head. The two men continued looking at each other with distrust.
“Criminal!” – murmured Boris while finally holstering his disruptor under the troubled gaze of his wife.
“Government lap-cat!” – retorted Mack, and spat on the floor-plating, putting the Colt Exterminator back in his mag-lock holster.
Both were licking parched lips, and his keen hearing couldn’t miss Mack’s stomach loudly rumbling.
“Well, I am the captain here” – he slowly tapped his chest theatrically – “Master and commander. I say we will all think better with bellies full of delicious food and drink! But first; Navigation, change our course adopting the new operational parameters that I am now sending to your station.”
The Spacer was already in her chair on the bridge, making course corrections and plotting a hyperspace jump to the outskirts of Pion system. She was using the data that Mack had so graciously shared with her while they were flying back to Starshatter. Immediately after landing Vasilisa passed through their medical bay, checking up on her husband’s health. Awake and deathly tired, he gave her one of his grim smiles, sending her away to do her job. The woman was already told that he’d almost fallen, shot to near death by some pirate bitch from clan Aleska. Vasilisa was fuming with rage. Had Boris not used his telepathic powers and battle skills to their maximum... No matter. She would meet the cunt sooner or later and rip her apart to little pieces! Nobody harms a Terran woman’s husband and then lives long to brag about it.
Vasilisa managed to slowly calm herself down while their ship’s hyperdrive was spooling. It was always strange when one thought about how hyperspace “worked”. It wasn’t that the ship itself was moving, but in actuality it was a “piece” of space-time itself, that remembered what was, is and would be, before the craft had entered it. The starship then slipped into a place called hyperspace, where simultaneously it was moving with its own “time” wrapped around itself. Hyperspace physics was something that even accomplished navigators like her had to commit most of their lives to learning, and even then reach just a partial understanding of how it all worked.
In hyperspace, which was the unseen flesh of the Universe itself, time was space, yesterday was both now and tomorrow. Time had both a beginning and an end in the outer world, yet the now was set and unchanging. Meaning that you could travel half the galaxy and eventually after sliding out of hyperspace, your time-frame would’ve remained the same compared with the rest of the Galaxy. It made ordinary physicists tear what little hair they had and wallow in depression for the rest of their meaningless lives. No theories of “relativity”, special or otherwise, that tried including the movement of objects away from the now could explain it. Astronomers who hailed from technologically primitive worlds and had no knowledge about hyperspace, had always came into the wrongful conclusions that their observable universe was “expanding” without end. The error was known to all warp capable species, and navigators called it the “Hyper curve” – meaning the observable effect caused by the very existence of hyperspace on the visible Universe. While it was grand, yes, visible matter was only a tiny part of its body – the outer skin so to speak. What lay underneath was its flesh, with the time-space flow aptly named the Universe’s blood.
Confusing as they were, hyperdrives actually emulated the minds of telepaths. One of their greatest powers to be exact, which only but a precious few possessed – warping space-time itself. Nobody knew who, or how they’d replicated this by using technology, yet whoever succeeded in doing so must’ve vanished many Galactic civilization cycles ago.
Millions of years ago to be exact.
Spacers were mostly explorers and they have visited many a distant world, ventured deep within ruined halls pre-dating the earliest human civilizations by tens, and even hundreds of thousands of years. Ravaged hulls of ancient derelicts, whose long deceased crews were part of races vanished from collective Galactic memory, all held secrets that most people were not yet ready to know of.
The ancient sites all spoke of the Old ones, those who pre-dated everything and it was they who had most probably fashioned the hyperdrive. Known to most xeno-archaeologists as the Precursors, they were venerated and even worshiped by some of the older races. The enigmatic peoples had left behind very little to be discovered, and even less to be researched. Even the knowledge that current Galactic civilizations had of their language was but partial. Not to mention the way that they looked – nobody knew anything. What statues archaeologists had found were all ground into fine dust. Murals? Blasted to ash with disruptor weapons. For all of these hundreds of thousands of years since current galactic civilizations knew of their existence, not one xeno-archaeologist had found even a tiny surviving strain of DNA. One of the greatest mysteries of the current Space Age, billions of sentients were scouring around the galaxy in search of ancient, forgotten ruins. The vain hope that in one of them, they might find something, anything, that could help answer the thousands of questions about Precursor civilization. Anyone who called himself an explorer at least once in their life had to investigate a planet, or the vastness of space between stars, in search of obscure Precursor knowledge. Artifacts who people claimed belonged to their race, were either fakes, or precious few and badly damaged items, their original purpose unknown and lost to time. Vasilisa yearned for the day when her future children would grow up enough, so that she could venture forth and explore the vastness of Fringe space, together with her husband. For now dreams had to wait, because nobody could have everything at the same time in their lives, no matter how strong you wish it to be so.