Vanguard Rising: A Space Opera Adventure

by A. C. Hadfield

  “That’s useful to know.” He thought of how to proceed. It was imperative he stop Luca. He couldn’t divert his attention to deal with the satellite dish, and as much as he wanted to, he couldn’t bring himself to trust Leanne.

  There was only one option: he and Leanne had to deal with Luca, and someone from the Wickham would have to deal with the satellite dish. Given Wilbur was needed to repair the ship, that left Irena.

  He hated the thought of it, but with Bella committed to her brother, they had no other option. Switching over to their comm channel, he spoke again to Wilbur. “How’re things with Irena and Greta?”

  “I’ll patch you through.”

  “Hey, Harlan, Irena here.”

  “Are you okay? How’s Greta doing?”

  “I’m… way out of my comfort zone. Greta is stable, although I’ve had to put her in a medically-induced coma, the same as Bashir, to combat the system shock she’s experiencing.”

  “Stable isn’t dead. You’ve done great. Is she okay on the ship’s systems?”

  “Yes. There’s nothing else we can do for her until we have more time and resources to treat her.”

  “Okay, there’s something else I need you to do.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “On the west side of the castle, there’s a satellite dish that Luca’s using to connect with the QCA. If you can take it offline, that’ll slow Luca down and buy us some time. But make sure you’re suited up and armed—even though we have the scanners running, we can’t be entirely sure it’s safe.”

  “I’ll do it. And don’t worry, I’ll take precautions. The ship’s equipped with gel explosives. That’ll be enough, right?”

  “Yeah, just stand well clear. That stuff has a tendency to create a wide blowback.”

  “Thanks for the tip. But don’t worry about me; just focus on doing what you’ve got to do. I’ve got this.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Likewise, Harlan. See you soon.”

  With that, the comm channel went silent. Harlan switched to the local channel so he could speak with Leanne only. “You owe me some explanations. It’s difficult to tell exactly whose side you’re on these days.”

  She held his gaze for a moment, a conflicted expression passing across her face. “It’s not as simple as picking sides. You’ve lived long enough to know that. Come on, let’s not stand around here going over old ground. We’ve got a madman to stop. There’ll be all the time in the world afterward to pick and poke at our relationship.”

  She had a point. He checked his terminal to make sure the route he had chosen was still the right course of action. When he saw no reason to doubt the choice, he checked his weapon once more and headed toward the rear door of the banquet hall, ready to face his old friend.

  38

  Harlan and Leanne made their way through the castle’s long central corridor and down the spiral staircase. All the while Harlan checked his terminal, watching the time tick down. When they reached a thick steel blast door retrofitted to the castle’s basement entrance, they had less than sixteen minutes to stop Luca.

  In hushed tones, Leanne said, “He’s on the other side, in a lab.”

  Harlan reached for the explosives and placed them at the corners of the door. If the blast didn’t puncture the steel, it would at least crumble enough stone that he could climb through. He turned to Leanne and whispered, “How do you know he’s here? Why didn’t you stop him if you know all this?”

  “Still doubting me, eh? We don’t have time for this.”

  “Humor me.”

  Leanne sighed and pursed her lips. “And you wonder why I left you? You’re insufferable at times, Harlan. Listen, I was kept a prisoner. I didn’t exactly have free rein to go where I wanted. I only got out because Luca’s getting to the sharp end of his plan and took his attention off the castle’s defenses—hence the influx of all the earthers. If it wasn’t for them breaking through the cubicles for food, I would be useless and catatonic, like Gianni.”

  “It still doesn’t explain how you know he’s here.”

  “Because I followed him here a few hours ago, that’s why. But look at this place. There’s barely room for the two of us. With his abbot guard, I couldn’t get down here without being seen—and besides, I didn’t have anything to attack him with. I didn’t find this thing until a few minutes before you turned up—I needed something to use against the earthers. Have you seen outside? There’re hundreds of them milling about the grounds, trying to find their way in. It won’t be long before the whole place is crawling with them.”

  Harlan was unsure if he could completely believe her. He wanted to drill her further and get answers—not just for this situation, but why she had left, why she had worked with Vanguard. Luca presented a more pressing concern, however.

  He finished priming the explosives and brought up the control app on his terminal. “We better get up to the next level to avoid the blowback.”

  Leanne nodded and sprinted up the spiral staircase. Harlan followed. When they reached the top, he went through the ignition sequence and prepared to thumb the activation icon.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “Do it.”

  Bella encouraged Gianni to follow her. She led him up the grand staircase and then up into the castle’s attic space. The roar of the wind and the spray of rain came through the open door. Her body ached from her fight with the earther, but her heart raced with the realization that she had found her brother.

  “Come on, Gi, just one more flight of stairs to go and we’ll be almost there. You’ll be safe again, I promise.”

  He looked at her with a faraway look, his pupils wide and unfocused. She knew that deep down in his psyche he realized what was happening. She had seen that brief flicker of recognition back in the cell. Once she got him back to Atlas, she’d call in all the favors she currently held if needed. Whatever it took to bring him back to his old self.

  With slow movements, Gianni climbed the stairs and exited the door. He barely reacted to the worsening weather beyond shivering against the cold.

  Bella wrapped her arm around his waist and helped him across the slippery gantry of the railgun installation. They passed by the dead abbot and made their way over the landing pad to the waiting SMF gunship. She could barely see it in the driving rain, and thick clouds had almost completely blocked out the sun, turning day into night.

  Gianni’s shuffled steps crawled to a stop. He turned his head to her. His eyes sharpened for a moment, and the micro muscles in his face and forehead twitched, as if to express an emotion. His rain-soaked hair stuck to his face. Bella thought she saw tears flowing from his eyes, but it was difficult to tell.

  She leaned in and turned on her external speakers. “Gi? What is it?”

  His lips moved, but the wheeze-like sounds didn’t come through clearly amid the noise of the wind and rain. She removed her helmet and leaned in, straining to understand what he was trying to say. His gaze focused off into the distance over her shoulder. She was about to shake him, bring back his attention, when, with surprising speed, he reached into his jumpsuit, pulled a knife, and stabbed it through her shoulder.

  Bella staggered backward, unable to process fully what had just happened. She let her helmet and rifle crash to the ground. She screamed with the burst of white-hot pain and slumped to the landing pad. Blood welled around the wound, mixed with the rain. She stared up at Gianni in disbelief.

  He glanced down at her with a kind of inevitable detachment and, with calm, deliberate movements, bent down and picked up her rifle.

  Bella tried to call out to him, but her throat closed. Her head throbbed louder than the rumbles of thunder. A seeping cold flared at every nerve ending. She tried to lift her arms to pull the dagger from her shoulder, but her muscles refused to obey amid the crushing pain that put her body into a slowly writhing knot of anguish. Tears filled her eyes, turning her world into an impressionist painting.

  With horror, she saw the blur
ry silhouette of Wilbur sprint from the Wickham and head toward her. She tried to scream her warning to him, but she could only muster a few croaked words that were cruelly snatched by the gusting wind.

  The rain lashed down with ever-increasing ferocity, and lightning lit up the castle. During the next peal of thunder, Gianni raised the rifle and pulled the trigger.

  Thirty or so yards away, the rounds hit their target. Wilbur’s feet gave out on the slick surface. His body thrashed backward under the assault. This time, Bella’s attempts to scream were successful, but it changed nothing. Wilbur collapsed, his head rolling to the side as he gripped his belly, the blood pouring onto the ground.

  “Why?” Bella managed to blurt as she eased herself onto her side. She tried to reach out for Gianni’s leg. He turned to look at her. His mouth twitched at the corners as if he were going to say something, but then he looked up and past her, something catching his attention.

  Bella twisted her neck to follow his gaze.

  On the far side of the castle, Irena was climbing across a long, narrow metal truss that appeared to be holding a satellite dish. With deliberate movements, Gianni stepped over Bella’s form and headed for Irena.

  Bella tried to pick herself up, but every little movement pulled the muscles in her chest and shoulder against the knife blade, flooding her body with yet more pain. She lay back in the rain and tried to steady her breathing, but her breaths came ever shorter.

  She thought of trying to contact Harlan or Irena with the comm channel, but her helmet had rolled away across the roof, and every tiny movement only managed to keep her pinned in place with agony.

  All she could do now was hope that Irena noticed Gianni before it was too late. She knew this was it—her time was up. She had cheated death one too many times, and this was her payback: killed by the very man she had sacrificed everything to save.

  She turned her head to rest on the ground and saw Wilbur’s still form. How had it all come to this so quickly? She closed her eyes and waited for death.

  The blast echoed out. The castle’s walls rumbled, and the force pushed Harlan into Leanne. The air pressure vibrated his helmet even as the internal dampening filter blocked out the majority of the sound.

  Harlan and Leanne shared a quick look before descending the stairs through the smoke and dust. At the bottom, twisted, charred sections of the steel door lay strewn across their path. Flames flickered beyond the aperture between the door frame and the wall. Gripping his rifle, Harlan stepped forward into the smoky breach; Leanne stayed tight by his side, armed with the Vanguard weapon.

  Beyond the door was the lab Leanne had described.

  Harlan’s first impressions were of a man on the opposite side with his back towards them. Between him and Harlan, Fizon was seated in a chair, restraints secured around his wrists, ankles, and neck. A bundle of fiber-optic cabling snaked from the back of his skull to a large rack-mounted set of q-bit servers.

  Leanne stepped forward, but Harlan grabbed her arm.

  The man on the opposite side of the sparse room slowly turned to face them. He smiled at Harlan, then clapped slowly. He looked much older than Harlan remembered. Gone were the rich black locks, now replaced with a close-shaved style of black and white. His face was gaunt, and the blue jumpsuit he wore hung off his bones.

  “Ah, my dear friend Harlan. If I knew you were coming,” Luca said, “I’d have prepared a table and a bottle of scotch for us to share over a catch-up for old times’ sake.”

  “Of course you knew I’d come for you,” Harlan said, raising his rifle. Leanne activated the energy field of her sword. “What else was I to do?”

  Luca shrugged his shoulders theatrically. “Oh, I don’t know. How about fucking die for a change?” His smile twisted into a cruel grimace. “You never could keep your nose out of other people’s business, could you? You have to play the do-gooder. You and your pathetic tutor, Marius. Your lofty ideals. But fuck you and your moral superiority. This time, you’ve lost. You’re too late.”

  Harlan checked his terminal: they still had just over eight minutes. “My calculations tell me otherwise.” He stepped forward. Leanne kept pace with him, protecting his flank. “We can do this one of two ways. I can either shoot you dead right now, unplug Fizon, and stop this madness, or you can surrender, put an end to all this, and maybe you won’t be executed when you face the Supreme Judiciary.”

  Luca leaned casually against a workstation and folded his arms. “Those are certainly two options. But I propose a third: you go fuck yourself, and I carry on as planned.” He glared at Leanne. “When you’re ready… it’s not like we’re on a tight schedule or anything. You’ve done your job. Now end him.”

  Harlan turned to face Leanne. She stepped back, raised the sword, and muttered, “I’m sorry, Harlan.”

  Irena swore as the rain lashed against her helmet, obscuring her vision. Her muscles were cramping and her guts churned with the thought of how high up she was. She kept reminding herself not to look down as she continued to climb the truss toward the satellite dish.

  Directly below her was the castle’s pitched roof and, below that, a drop of such height she couldn’t even come up with an accurate estimate. She continued on, inching her way toward her target, keeping her focus on the dish. The canisters of gel explosive were tightly packed on her suit webbing, but she kept checking every few feet to make sure they hadn’t worked loose. Carrying this much explosive power did not sit well with her.

  But needs must… Needs must.

  The thunderstorm continued its rage. A deep rumble exploded directly above her, making her snatch at the truss with a tight grip. Her body vibrated as lightning arced out in forks across the dark layer of cloud. She silently prayed to any deity that was listening—preferably not Thor—to ensure the lightning did not strike the dish or the truss; otherwise she’d be fried like a BBQ chicken.

  She tried to activate her comm channel, but the storm appeared to have scrambled the signal; all she could make out was static burbling from her internal speakers. She turned it down, refocused on her task at hand, and continued upward. There would be time enough later to check in on the others once she had disabled Luca’s connection to the QCA. She snatched a brief glance at her terminal: she had about five minutes left. It seemed like the time had slipped away at twice its normal pace.

  Using that as motivation, she willed herself to move faster.

  In under a minute, she reached the dish. She threw an arm around one of the metal stabilizing rods and with her free hand began to spray the gel explosive around the secure box that held all the electronics and steel-covered cabling.

  She had emptied two canisters and reached for a third when a sudden spark a few inches from her face caught her attention. There was a hole in the dish. She turned her head back to the landing pads. At the base of the truss where it joined the castle’s roof, a man in a ragged blue jumpsuit aimed a rifle at her.

  This time she heard the gunshot in a lull between rumbles of thunder. She jerked with the sound and ducked below the dish as the shot went wide. For a brief moment, she was taken back to her time at Station Nord, and her body froze, every muscle tensing as she gripped the dish’s stabilizing rods.

  With the catalyst compound still within the canister, she couldn’t activate the explosives, but she also couldn’t stay here and get shot to death by whoever it was on the roof. She looked closer, informing her view cam to zoom the view.

  At first, she thought it was another of Luca’s abbots, given the faraway gaze and unmoving expression, but then it came to her, having remembered his face from the photos Bella had shown her: it was Gianni.

  What the hell was he doing?

  He shuffled his feet, re-aimed, and prepared to shoot again. Irena found herself stuck within the dish’s superstructure, caught between the desire to flee and the responsibility to finish the job. She had less than three minutes to go and no weapon with which to fire back.

  She tried to crawl behind t
he large box containing the dish’s computer, but there wasn’t enough space. The shot rang out, this time striking the back of her helmet. It jerked her head and skimmed off the armor plate, embedding into the dish once more.

  Gianni stepped onto the truss, re-balanced, and aimed again.

  Irena tried to move around the dish, to get as much of the metal frame between them as possible, but her frantic movements only resulted in the right leg of her suit getting snagged, pinning her in place.

  Gianni raised the rifle once more.

  She stared in horror, unable to move.

  39

  Leanne held the sword high, staring into Harlan’s eyes. He gripped his rifle, prepared to swing it up and fire in a single arc. But her right eye twitched, giving away her intention. Her lips stretched with an almost imperceptible movement to form a smile. Then, with a whisper, she said, “Shoot the bastard.”

  Harlan spun to face Luca on the other side of the makeshift lab, raised the rifle, and fired a couple of shots. One hit, winging his old friend in the shoulder and sending him crashing to the ground with a scream and a blast of expletives.

  Leanne lowered her arm and deactivated the sword. Harlan wanted to press her on what had happened between her and Luca, but a quick glance at his terminal told him that’d have to wait. At the same time, Irena’s panic-soaked voice crackled over the comm.

  “The son of a bitch’s shooting at me.”

  “Who is?” Harlan asked, keeping a wary eye on Luca as he rolled around in agony.

  “Gianni—he’s trying to kill me. I’m stuck up here on the satellite dish. I’m trying to finish, but I’m coming under fire. What the hell’s going on down there?”

  “Wait, you sure it’s Gianni? Where’s Bella?”

  “I don’t know, and yeah, I’m sure. He’s only twenty feet away. I recognize him from Bella’s photo.”