by Paul Tassi
Waves four times as high as normal crashed over the edges of the docks, drenching the crowd, but causing far less damage than the Xalan ships would have. Lucas collapsed, panting, his mind recovering from what he’d just done. The pain was fading more quickly than ever. He choked back the sick laughter that had found him back on the road. He loved the power, and hated it. His mind felt like it was being torn apart, and he was afraid to see how much of his body was now charred black.
The new surge of waves reached the boat as Lucas opened a hatch. The wall of water washed over the deck, but Lucas kept his feet and saw that clouds were now obscuring the battle above. Lightning flashes and thunderclaps replaced the celestial war. Lucas headed into the blackness of the boat and slammed the hatch shut behind him.
37
The fighter screamed over the forest, just a few yards above the treeline, as they raced toward the mysterious installation known only as “Colony Two.” Erik and Noah had taken the AI craft to try and reach the location as soon as possible while Zeta and Theta followed in a much slower ship, one of the few that had survived the razing of the colony. The remaining Sorans stayed behind to see to the dead.
Noah had told the SDI squadron Asha was sending to head to the new coordinates they’d uncovered, but was worried now that he was hearing bursts of chatter through the comm.
“Arrived [static] black ship [static] ground forces,” said the squadron leader. “[static] engaging, request assistance immedi—”
And that was the last they heard. Noah couldn’t reach the squadron again, nor Kyra and Sakai on their personal comms. He should never have agreed to have them come to the surface yet; it was still too dangerous.
“Can’t this thing go any faster?” Noah asked the air. The air responded.
“We cannot increase our speed further lest we rupture the core,” Natalie chided him. “I am sorry my performance is unsatisfactory, would you like to file a report?”
Noah just rolled his eyes and shook his head.
“Why would they make another colony without telling us?” Erik said. “What’s the point of keeping us all secret and segregated?”
“I don’t know,” Noah said, raising the ship to hurdle a mountain range.
“There could be dozens more for all we know.”
“Theta said there wasn’t any further information, even after she decrypted the entire core. Just this second installation.”
It was a worrying thought all the same. Malorious Auran would know more. He founded the original colony, and surely another one couldn’t have sprung to life without his knowledge. Though he had been retired and in hiding for years now. But whoever was there, they needed help, and so did the already captured Earthborn of Colony One.
Noah swerved around a cliff face and found himself staring at their final destination.
“Gods …” he exclaimed.
The black, disc-like ship of the Corsair was cutting through the air, engaging a host of SDI interceptors. Below the aerial fight, he could see bright sparks of plasma fire on the ground. As the fighter raced closer, he saw that the Xalans were hunkered down on top of a large hill where the massive compound of Colony Two sat with high sloping walls and shattered windows. In the valley below were Soran forces trying to push their way up while under heavy fire. They were failing.
“Shit!” Noah exclaimed. “Why are they shooting at that ship? The Earthborn have to be in there.”
“Probably because it’s shooting at them,” Erik replied, flipping through the various weapons systems, preparing to engage.
Noah surveyed the battlefield, trying to figure out what to do next.
“I am detecting that craft is under automated control, set to a defensive posture,” AI Natalie said, unprompted.
“Automated?” Noah said. That had to mean the Corsair was already inside. There was no sign of him among the cluster of Xalans on the ground. He could be butchering everyone as they spoke.
“Alright,” Noah said, a plan snapping together in his mind. An insane plan, but a plan nonetheless.
“Natalie, listen up. You’re going to lay down some fire and drop us at the top of the hill. Then you’re going to disable that ship without destroying it. Just target its weapons and propulsion. Can you handle that?”
“Of course,” the AI said haughtily.
“Did you say the top of the hill?” Erik asked from behind him. Noah looped the ship around for another pass.
“We need to break their line so the SDI can push through. Got a problem with that?”
“Hell no,” Erik said. “Maybe you are my brother after all.”
Noah nodded and checked his readouts. They were making a beeline straight for the fight again.
“I’m giving you control, Natalie,” he said, secretly guessing he barely ever had control in the first place.
“Orders locked, the enemy craft will be neutralized shortly.”
Such confidence. Noah hoped the computer was up to the task.
“Releasing pilots in three …”
They sped toward the Xalans, and a few turned their way.
“Two …”
A missile shot out from underneath the fighter, and dove toward the Xalan soldiers.
“One …”
Noah barely had time to remember to grab his hammer from the cargo compartment. As soon as he did, the floor beneath him opened and he was falling. Erik was floating next to him a split second later.
The missile exploded, and the air turned into a furnace momentarily as flames leapt toward them from the ground. The Xalans in the impact zone were vaporized, and those around them were scrambling to recover or full of mortal wounds.
The fall was over three hundred feet, and Noah had never tried anything over a hundred in power armor. The data said the shock absorbers should do all the work, but the data wasn’t comforting as his stomach rose into his throat.
As he approached the ground, he turned the grips on the warhammer. The spheres in the sides of the head glowed. He raised it over his head.
He looked over at Erik who was already shooting at Xalans with both of his pistols. The ground rose to meet them at last.
Noah and his hammer slammed into the ground with meteoric force. Three Xalans disintegrated immediately and a dozen more were knocked over by the ensuing shockwave. Erik’s armor formed a smaller crater nearby, and he was upright and shooting again within seconds. Noah’s legs throbbed with pain, but he could stand. He could fight.
The rest of the Xalan line had recovered from the blast and turned their attention toward the new arrivals. Noah recognized the sleek, black armor of the Paragons, their faces hidden behind demonic helms with glowing eye slits.
Noah plowed into them, determined to keep close to avoid rifle fire. A few tried to get off shots, but the weapons, and their arms, were cracked and broken from his next few hammer blows. He drove the top spike of the hammer into an armored chest, and bent down to send hydraulic kick into the helmet of a Paragon behind him.
A gold laser shot by, cleaving another Xalan in half. A pair of booming shots from Tannon’s hand cannon decapitated two Xalans taking aim at him from behind. His brother was a blur, dancing through creatures who were all nearly three feet taller than he was. They couldn’t touch him.
Noah cried out as a blade was driven into his shoulder. He spun around and snapped off the shortsword at the base with his armored palm, then erased the Xalan’s jaw with a thunderous uppercut from the hammer. He looked down and realized he’d taken a plasma shot near his ribs, and once he saw it, felt the hot burn eating into his flesh. He saw Erik take a savage claw strike to the arm and barely dodge a shot that would have taken his head clean off. But as soon as he did, another plowed into his hip, the armor only partially deflecting it. This was a mistake, Noah thought. These were Paragons. How stupid was he to think that he and Erik could ever—
Suddenly, he heard a low cry coming from behind the Xalans.
The SDI had charged up the hill nearly as
soon as the first missile struck. The Xalans had been distracted enough to let them reach higher ground. Noah breathed a sigh of relief and locked the pain away and swatted a confused Xalan as the SDI armor smashed into the Paragons.
Above him, an SDI interceptor screamed as it plunged to the earth, fire venting from every port, one of its wings missing. It slammed into the hillside and erupted in a fireball. Through the smoke, Noah could see Natalie dueling with the dark ship, ten times more agile than she’d ever been with Noah at the helm.
The prototype fighter twisted and turned to avoid the dark ship’s ordnance, sending shots back in return that seemed to cripple whichever weapons system had just fired. Noah cringed as the white-and-gold fighter took a glancing blow from an autocannon, but the ship righted itself and continued flying, even as it started to smoke.
Back on the ground, Xalans and Sorans were slaughtering each other. Erik was still fighting but was bleeding freely from the gouges in his arm’s plating. Noah picked up a rifle from a dead soldier nearby and emptied it into the backs of the Paragons who had turned to deal with the SDI racing up the hill. Noah tightened his grip on the hammer and spun it around with his free arm. The glowing head slammed into a Xalan charging at him with a long pike, and the force of impact was so great the creature was reduced to little more than a loose collection of bones, skin, and metal by the time he hit the outer wall of the compound, cracking the smooth stone.
Another SDI ship was sliding sideways in the air in a flat spin, smoke pouring from its engines. The ship careened into the forest further down the mountain, with only a few Sorans managing to spill out the sides before impact. Looking up, Noah saw that the dark ship was vomiting silvery smoke from cracks in its armor. The AI fighter still zoomed around the larger craft at lightning speed, pelting it from every angle. The dark ship was slowly losing elevation. It brushed a rocky cliff face clumsily and sent an avalanche of dislodged rocks cascading down the side. Natalie was damaged, but relentless. Finally, after one last hull breach, the disc ship dropped all the way to the forest floor a half mile away, and the entire area shook intensely. Lucas held his breath for an explosion that never came. The AI had done her job, as promised.
The battle on the ground was all but over. The SDI had suffered heavy losses but overwhelmed the Xalans thanks to him and Erik breaking the line.
An SDI commander pulled off his helmet and Noah saw a young man he didn’t know with dirty-blond hair, brown eyes, and a pointed beard.
“Thanks for the assist,” he said solemnly, eyeing his dead troops. Medics were attending to the wounded. There were maybe only a dozen Sorans left standing. “Who’s flying that thing?” he asked, motioning to the pearl fighter streaking by above them.
“You don’t want to know,” Noah muttered. The ship set down at the base of the hill, and was soon joined by another craft. Noah recognized the transport Theta and Zeta had taken from the colony. It landed gracefully next to the fighter.
It was only then that Noah saw new figures approaching. Sakai, Kyra, and Malorious Auran were marching up the battle-scarred hill toward them with a small contingent of soldiers. Noah smiled, but winced as he remembered the blade still stuck in him and the fire gnawing at his ribs. But there wasn’t time for hugs and kisses. He pulled the shard of metal out, teeth grinding as he did so, and flung it to the ground. Kyra and Sakai both looked worried when they saw the state of him.
“We need to get inside,” Erik said, shooting sealant gel into his arm wounds. “The Corsair is in there.” He motioned toward the towering complex. This wasn’t like their colony; it appeared to be one enormous, interconnected structure rather than a spread-out encampment.
“Send a squad to the black ship,” Noah said. “Pry it open and find the Earthborn. They should be inside.”
The commander nodded and motioned toward the five escort soldiers, who started jogging north toward where smoke was rising from the forest.
“You should never have come,” Noah said, turning to the two girls and the old man. “I’m sorry to have put you in danger.”
“We can make our own choices, same as you,” Kyra said smartly. Noah noticed she had a scattergun on her back, and as the wind blew her sleeve to the side, he saw a slender silver knife strapped to the inside of her forearm.
“They’re my family too.” Sakai nodded, gripping her pistol a little tighter.
“Keeper Auran,” Noah said, dropping the issue. “What is this place? What can you tell us about it?”
Auran shook his head.
“This was erected after my tenure with the program, I’m sure of it. I’m afraid I can’t tell you what this place is, other than I assume it is another facility like the one I helped build to raise the lot of you. Let us hope we can save more of your brothers and sisters from this damnable creature, if that is the case.”
The central doors of the main entryway were already flung open, the metal warped and contorted by psionic force. Erik and Noah led the SDI in, weapons at the ready. Theta and Zeta had now scaled the hill and joined up with the girls in the back. It was strange to see Theta clutching an oversized Xalan energy rifle, presumably looted from a dead Paragon. She looked mortified, and Kyra was trying to comfort her. None of them should be here, Noah thought as he crept through the dark hallway. But he knew they would need every man, woman, or Xalan they had to confront the Corsair. Too many SDI had died outside. This is a mistake, Noah thought again, unable to shake the notion. He considered telling everyone to turn back, load up in the transport, and get out. He didn’t know these other Earthborn, what were they to him? Why should he risk his life, and the lives of all those he cared about just to save them?
But then he turned the corner, and knew they had to press on.
The room before them was brightly colored and the walls were painted with cheery suns and green planets. The floor was littered with an assortment of toys ranging from simple holoballs like the one Noah used to have a child, to plush pillows in the shape of spaceships. There were tiny chairs next to the tiny tables playing muted holographic cartoons. On animal-themed placemats sat small, neatly cut sandwiches, half-eaten.
They’re just children, Noah thought. Sakai let out a gasp behind him, and he turned around.
In a shadowy corner of the room, there were two bodies slumped against the wall. Two young women, probably not much older than he, lay bloodied with gaping wounds in their chests that made it look like half their organs had simultaneously exploded. Zeta peered at the ID badges they wore.
“Caretakers,” she said. “Soran.”
“Where are the children?” Kyra asked, turning away from the horror.
“I’m getting a reading further in,” said the SDI commander. “A large cluster of life readouts.”
“Come on, they’re still inside,” Noah said, leaving the playroom through a door on the opposite side of the room. He ducked under a banner that said “Happy Birth Day Jericho!” in rainbow-colored letters.
There were more dead lining the halls, limbs torn, heads missing, chests ruptured like the girls they’d just seen. Noah held his breath each time he saw a new body, sick from each, but relieved none were children. Scans revealed all were Soran. A more brightly lit room loomed up ahead through another pair of destroyed doors.
This was a larger chamber. It lacked much color at all, and there were certainly no toys to be found. Rather, the floor was filled with small pods that Noah recognized as a birthing tanks. Noah was the only one in the room who hadn’t been born in such a device.
But the tanks were empty. All of them. Some were a bit dusty and appeared as if they hadn’t been used in a while. But others were broken open, the glass shattered and the holographic readouts blinking with strongly worded warnings.
The SDI fanned out, guns at the ready. Sakai lowered her pistol and ran her fingers through one of the displays on the tank. Theta and Kyra joined her.
“LYON/VERIA: EXT. 21.19.10237,” she said, frowning.
Kyra looked a
t the tank next to her.
“KADOMA/HERAKLION: EXT. 13.01.10237,” she said.
“What?” Erik asked. “Why are they labeled like that?”
Noah looked over at Malorious Auran, who had lost all the color in his face. Noah’s stomach started to churn, though he didn’t understand why.
Noah looked through the empty tanks, seeing more and more of his friends’ names. His heart stopped when he saw his own.
“NOAH/SAKAI: EXT. 3.38.10237,” it read.
It was Auran who finally spoke.
“Extraction. My gods. They went ahead with it. I strictly forbade it! It had to be with consent! And you were not ready.”
EXT. Extraction? And that was a date, all within the year. Noah saw Erik standing next to him, staring at a shattered tank that read:
“ERIK/PENZA: EXT. 30.12.10237.”
“What is this?” Erik said, backing up. The girls were now racing from tank to tank, hands over their mouths. Noah finally put it together.
“They’re ours …” he said, turning to Auran and Erik. “They’re our children.”
Auran’s silence was all the answer he needed. Erik’s eyes widened.
“That’s not possible,” he said, turning frantically to Auran. “They said it wasn’t possible.”
Sakai had now reached the tank with her and Noah’s name on it and let out a half scream, half sob. She frantically raced through the readout to find out more details, more answers, but to no avail.
There was a soft, wet cough from the center of the room. Every rifle flipped toward the direction of the sound.
Noah moved through the tanks and saw the blood before he saw the woman. She came into view, propped up against a central console. Her face was heavily lined, and she looked ancient. Through the blood Noah could see her ID, which read “DIR. TARLA.” Auran gasped as he saw her. So did Theta.