Three Against the Stars

by Joe Bonadonna

  With the barrel of the tazer, Akira jabbed the surviving guard in the back of the head.

  “I think you know what this means,” she said.

  The tigerman moved shakily as he stood and raised his arms over his head.

  “You will never leave here alive,” Vash told them.

  “Then neither will you,” O’Hara said. “Now move!”

  O’Hara and Akira shoved Vash and the guard toward the door and out into the corridor. Makki slung his medikit over a shoulder and followed them. Cortez brought up the rear, juggling the three grenades.

  Makki and the Marines hustled Vash and the Khandra guard down the corridor. Luck was with them: the corridor was empty—not a sound, not a soul . . . not even a shadow. When they reached the elevator, Cortez clipped the grenades to his war belt and cradled one of the tazers in his arms. He caressed the weapon with loving tenderness.

  “Where does that elevator lead?” Cortez asked Vash.

  “To your doom,” the tigerman growled.

  O’Hara turned Vash around and nailed him with a haymaker. Vash staggered backward, and his knees started to buckle. O’Hara grabbed him by his uniform jacket, hauled him up, spun him around and put the choke hold on him again.

  “My friend asked you a question,” he said.

  “To—to the hangar,” Vash told him.

  The elevators suddenly slid open, and five Drakonians armed with zapguns emerged. They drew their weapons, but when they saw Vash they restrained from firing.

  “Kill them, you fools!” Vash shouted in English. Then he slammed the back of his head against O’Hara’s face.

  O’Hara groaned, dropped his knife and fell backward.

  Vash broke free, ran forward and pushed the Drakonians aside. He raced down the corridor and disappeared around a corner before anyone could take a shot at him.

  Akira shoved the Khandra guard at the Drakonians. “Hit the deck, Makki!”

  Makki dropped to the floor as Akira fired her tazer rifle and wasted three of the Drakonian warriors. One of them tumbled into the elevator just as the doors began to slide shut, his body preventing them from closing. The remaining two Draks opened fire at once, but succeeded in killing only the tigerman. Cortez quickly tossed a tazer to O’Hara, and together they fried the lizardmen with blasts of green tracers.

  Retrieving O’Hara’s knife, Makki handed it to the Irishman and offered a paw to help him to his feet. O’Hara grinned and pinched Makki on the cheek.

  “Now what?” Cortez asked. “Vash will no doubt sound the alarm.”

  “And we can’t count on your message getting through, Seamus,” Akira said. “We have to find another way to warn the regiment.”

  “Got any ideas?” O’Hara asked.

  Cortez and Akira exchanged glances. Then Makki grinned and sprinted to the elevator. He held the doors open and kicked the dead Drakonian out of the way.

  “Going down?” he asked.

  444

  With tazer rifles locked, loaded and fully charged, eight Khandra leopardmen waited patiently in the Level 2 corridor as the elevator slowly made its descent. Rhajni and Drakonian personnel hurried past them, obviously afraid to even glance at the fierce warriors.

  The elevator stopped and the doors slid open.

  The Khandra raised their weapons.

  The elevator was empty except for a single grenade lying on the floor.

  The leopardmen screamed—and the grenade exploded, destroying the elevator and tossing the Khandra and their body parts all over the corridor.

  444

  Alone in the medical lab on Level 3, Doctor Morgele rose from his desk as the force of the explosion from the level above shook the walls and ceiling. A moment later, the main doors to the lab rolled open. Makki, Akira, O’Hara and Cortez rushed into the room with weapons charged and ready to blast anything and anyone that crossed their path without permission.

  Makki leapt over the desk, grabbed the doctor, slapped him around and pointed to the doors leading to the stairwell. “Talk English! Where do stairs take us?”

  Akira picked up a roll of surgical tape and began to unroll it. The doctor glanced nervously at her. “If I were you, I’d answer him,” she said.

  444

  The Marine convoy rolled forward and turned toward the mouth of Jaipur Pass. The early-morning clouds had begun to evaporate as the heat index rose. It promised to be a glorious day, with the sun lighting up the stratosphere.

  Colonel Dakota fidgeted in the back seat of her armored jeep. “Corporal, any signs of intelligent life on the other end of our transmissions?”

  “Sorry, Colonel,” the young corporal replied. “Still no communication with the Iwo Jima. Maybe they’re having problems.”

  “That always a possibility aboard that old derelict of a ship,” Dakota said. “Have you tried to contact Lord Chanori or Chancellor Ginjua?”

  “Yes, Colonel. But there has been no response from either of them.”

  Dakota began to worry. “Pull ahead of the convoy and come up alongside the communications van. I want to discuss this problem with the tech-heads.”

  “Aye, Colonel. Hang on!”

  The armored jeep broke rank and raced ahead, kicking up sand and dust in its wake as it passed the other vehicles in the convoy and headed for the large communications vehicle.

  With her stomach griping because she had neglected to eat breakfast, Dakota’s belly would have tied itself into knots were she able to see the hundreds of Khandra warriors manning gun emplacements and lying in wait high in the foothills at the mouth of Jaipur Pass.

  444

  “…cut this idiot down before he vomits…”

  Except for a chorus of electronic blips and beeps sung by computers, diagnostic equipment and a vast array of gadgets and gizmos that would be the envy of any mad scientist, the Khandra medical lab was silent. In the hallway beyond the lab, heavy boots pounded an underlying beat to this chorus of technology.

  A note of discord suddenly interrupted the electronic harmonies as the main doors slid open and Vash stormed into the lab. Weapons drawn, charged and ready for action, over a dozen Khandra warriors rushed in behind him.

  But all they found was Doctor Morgele, bound and gagged with surgical tape. He was hanging upside down between the same two petal posts that had been used to torture Makki. The doctor struggled helplessly like an insect trapped in a spider’s web.

  Vash looked around at the empty lab, and then turned to his warriors. “Find them!” he growled. “And someone cut this idiot down before he vomits all over the floor!”

  444

  The stairwell ended in a tunnel that was deep in the subterranean catacombs beneath the Khandra fortress. Makki, Akira, Cortez and O’Hara raced past the ancient bones of countless Rhajni. The costal remains of the dead were housed in circular niches carved out of the walls on either side of a long, serpentine passageway that wound its way through a series of caves and grottoes. Cables of fiber optic lights hanging on the walls guided their path. Water dripped from the ceiling which, like the walls, was formed of some green, quartz-like substance that was as hard as granite. Stalagmites and stalactites gave Akira the impression that she was walking straight into the jaws of a Valkarian dragon.

  One of the grottoes held an ancient statue, similar to the one in in the Luzsaran temple back in Tantrapur. But this statue was missing its arms, and it was badly chipped, cracked and burned, as if it had been used for target practice.

  Makki stopped and knelt before the statue. Bowing his head, he touched his brow, his lips and his heart with two fingers of his right paw. In a soft voice he chanted a quick prayer.

  O’Hara rubbed a hand over his face. “Hurry it up, Makki!” he said. “If we don’t get outta here soon, you ain’t gonna be sayin’ no more prayers—you’ll just be playin’ a harp!”

  Hopping to his feet, Makki bowed again to the statue and turned to his friends. “All done,” he announced. “This one prayed for a quick and easy escap
e.”

  “That don’t look too likely, mate,” O’Hara said, shaking his head.

  “The Maker will provide and protect, the Sybil will guide and light the way,” Makki said.

  With a grin, he dashed ahead, taking the lead.

  After about a hundred clicks or so, more artificial illumination from a large chamber shed cold, white light on a huge stack of plasteel crates. Another tunnel branched off to the left, and the noise of engines and humanoids at work was a cacophony that bounced off the walls and reverberated throughout the tunnel. About thirty yards ahead, the tunnel widened and revealed itself to be the entrance to an underground hangar.

  The four companions paused and concealed themselves behind the crates.

  Akira discarded what was left of her cigar. “I think we’ve arrived,” she said.

  “Si,” said Cortez. “There it is.”

  He pointed to the hangar, where Drakonian ground crews and Khandra pilots readied three squadrons of jet fighters for takeoff. Parked in a corner at the far end of the hangar, as if it had been tossed there as an afterthought, were Cortez’s rented skycar and airbike. The service entrance in the center of the main hangar doors was standing wide open.

  “Is that our only way out?” Akira asked.

  “Maybe not,” Makki said, pointing to another tunnel on their left.

  The sound of tramping feet suddenly echoed in the tunnel behind them. An alarm shrieked a warning with a sound akin to a wailing banshee with a nasty hangover.

  Makki, Akira and Cortez turned to O’Hara.

  “Oh, bloody hell!” he said.

  A dozen Khandra warriors rushed toward them from the direction in which they had come, firing blasters and tazer rifles. Green tracers ricocheted off the walls. Violet rays from hand blasters sliced into stone, sending quartz dust and rock shrapnel whistling through the air.

  “Hit the deck, Makki!” Akira shouted.

  Makki ducked below the top of the crates and dropped to the floor of the tunnel while his friends took cover beside him and opened fire with their stolen tazers.

  Three Khandra warriors went down screaming with holes burned through their torsos and faces. But the remaining nine rushed forward like Antarian berserkers, their blasters, zapguns and tazers shooting violet, blue, and green energy beams all over the subterranean passageway. Chips of hot plasteel exploded from the crates and zipped through the air.

  The three sergeants had to keep low as they fired back, unable to lift their heads long enough to site their targets. O’Hara cursed and fired around the corner of one crate, missing a Khandra by the width of a cat’s whisker. Cortez wasn’t having any better luck, his shots going wild, zinging off the walls and ceiling.

  Akira wiped sweat from her brow and kept firing her tazer, hoping to hit something. She glanced over her shoulder to make sure Makki was all right. Lying there while his friends did all the fighting, Makki appeared as calm as a Marine in a bar brawl.

  At the sound of stone grating against stone, Makki lifted his head and glanced toward the hangar. Huge doors made of solid rock began to slide shut, closing off the entrance to the hangar. Makki grabbed O’Hara and pointed to the tunnel on their left.

  “You escape that way,” he told O’Hara. “This one will try to warn the regiment.”

  Before O’Hara could bark or growl a reply, Makki leapt to his feet and ran toward the sliding doors as if his life depended on it. He dived between the doors only a second before they slid shut and cut off all access to the hangar.

  Akira leapt to her feet. “Makki!” she shouted.

  A green tracer screeched through the air and burned her leg. She screamed and started to collapse, but O’Hara caught her before she hit the ground.

  “Go!” Cortez told them. “I will be very close behind you.”

  O’Hara half-carried, half-dragged Akira into the other tunnel amidst a flurry of tazer and zapgun rounds that exploded all around them. Cortez covered their slow retreat with a rain of tazer fire, and then removed the two remaining grenades from his war belt.

  “Go!” he urged his friends.

  Priming the grenades, Cortez chucked them at the Khandra, then followed O’Hara and Akira into the tunnel. He didn’t even bother to plug his ears.

  Two seconds later, the grenades exploded, showering them with dust and pieces of quartz. The Khandra warriors screamed as the concussion rocked the tunnel and blew them into a bloody mess of body parts. Then the roof caved in behind the Marines, burying what was left of the Khandra beneath tons of rock and gravel that sealed the entrance to the tunnel.

  Akira, O’Hara and Cortez were trapped.

  444

  Makki raced through the hangar like a cat with its tail on fire.

  A squad of Khandra guards caught sight of him and brought their weapons into play.

  Blue zapgun bolts charred the stone floor at Makki’s boot heels. Needles of green tazer shots scorched the air around him. A violet beam from a blaster scored a lucky shot when it grazed his left ear and singed his fur. He winced but kept on running, ducking and dodging enemy fire with the luck of O’Hara’s Irish ancestors riding on his shoulders.

  Legs pumping, chest heaving and heart pounding, Makki charged through the hangar, crouching as low as he could and keeping his head down. When he spotted two more Khandra guards ahead of him, he increased his speed and slammed into them, knocking them down.

  Without bothering to look back, Makki raced on.

  The Khandra were in hot pursuit now. A zapper bolt grazed Makki’s left leg, but he didn’t let it slow him down. The young corpsman knew his goal, and nothing short of death was going to stop him—and maybe not even that would do it.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Valley of Death

  Back in the tunnel, Akira wondered if she and her two buddies would make it out alive. More ropes of fiber optic light illuminated the passageway and guided their way as Cortez and O’Hara dragged her along, her arms wrapped around their necks.

  “Come on,” O’Hara urged his mates, “I think I see daylight up ahead.”

  Being in hopeless situations like this was something Akira and her two buddies were accustomed to. But now her main concern was for Makki. She shook her head and struggled to break free of her friends. But they held onto her, refusing to let go.

  “No!” she said. “We have to go back for Makki.”

  “We can’t, lass, and that’s God’s own truth,” O’Hara said gently. “Makki’s following his own road now, and may Heaven and all the angels be with him.”

  “But he’s all alone!” Akira protested, struggling in vain.

  “He’ll be just fine,” O’Hara tried to reassure her. “After all, you and Cortez trained him. I think the lad will do you both proud.”

  “Have faith, Claudia,” Cortez told her. “Makki is beyond our help now. We can’t go back. The tunnel is blocked. We must go on and hope this way leads us out of here.”

  Akira felt tears welling in her eyes. She lowered her head and clung to her friends.

  Slowly, they made their way through the tunnel.

  444

  Makki ran a gauntlet of flashing and flaring weapons that lit up the hangar like a fireworks display. He ran as if he had wings on his boots, almost flying through the air with incredible speed and agility. All the long hours of practice and training with Akira and Cortez were finally paying off. He dived to the tarmac, rolled forward, leapt to his feet, and then jumped over the heads of two startled Drakonian mechanics who were crouched over an engine lying on a small table. Makki felt unstoppable, invulnerable—but he was wise enough to know not to get cocky, and to keep his head down.

  Leaping over crates and other packing containers, Makki raced toward his objective, evading enemy fire. He had to make it to the airbike; the skycar was too big for what he had in mind. But more and more Khandra warriors joined the chase, closing in on Makki from all sides. Confusion reigned as even the Drakonian mechanics, armed with various tools, joined in the
hunt to bring down the lone Rhajni storming through the hangar like a madman.

  As Makki neared Cortez’s abandoned airbike, he increased his speed and leapt into the air, scoring a perfect landing on the seat of the flier. As the Khandra tightened the circle around him, he set the controls, pressed a button—and the airbike took off, soaring over the heads of his foes, and heading toward the main doors of the hangar.

  Scores of Khandra slid to a halt and raised their weapons, taking careful aim at Makki.

  Angling the airbike upward, Makki steered it in a zigzag pattern in order to evade the fresh onslaught of sizzling needles, bolts and energy beams that flashed all around him like the Devil’s own Hellfire. A zapper bolt grazed his arm, but he didn’t let it deter him.

  He was only about twenty-five feet in the air when he saw Vash, Flix and a dozen Khandra warriors crossing the tarmac.

  “Stop him!” he heard Vash yell out in Rhajni.

  The warriors drew their weapons and sprayed the air with an array of hot energy beams.

  Makki tilted the airbike left and right in an evasive maneuver but kept flying in their direction. This was a chance to nail the traitors who had killed his parents and nearly destroyed his planet.

  Turning the nose of the airbike, Makki dived and headed straight toward his foes.

  Vash and the other Khandra leapt aside. But Flix froze like a Terran deer caught in the headlights of a groundcar.

  Makki yowled with glee and increased his airspeed.

  Flix screamed louder than a cat whose tail had just been stepped on. He tried to dive out of the way of the airbike, but he was too slow. The nose of the flier slammed into his shoulder, spun him around and knocked him to the tarmac.