The Exiled Earthborn

by Paul Tassi

  But underneath the Dead City, things felt hardly less imposing. The crater had torn a new entrance to an underground catacomb system built by the original occupants of the city. It smelled of dry mold and everything was coated in a solid inch of dust. Stone tombs stood upright all around them, visages of those within them etched onto the lids. But there was only one coffin that interested Lucas, one made of metal and glowing blue a few feet ahead.

  Lucas quickly scanned the cryochamber and the results matched what the indicator had told him. Despite being battered and cracked, the pod was still intact, and Maston was alive inside it. Lucas used his knife to pry open the stuck hatch.

  Inside was Maston, far too peaceful-looking for the present circumstances. He had dried blood on his forehead and neck, some sort of injury sustained during the crash, but nothing too serious according to the sensors. Lucas fiddled with the controls, which were still functioning. It must have been why Maston was still under while Lucas had been forced awake. Swirling his hand around, Lucas undid Maston’s restraints and an orangish liquid flooded through small tubes into his veins.

  Lucas jumped when Maston’s eyes sprang open, jolted awake by the chamber’s wake-up cocktail. They immediately dilated from the sunlight shining down into the hole, though it became clear he couldn’t actually see much of anything.

  “Who’s there?” he said hoarsely, and Lucas offered him his canteen.

  “It’s Lucas,” he said.

  Maston blinked rapidly, attempting to clear his eyes, and tried to sit up, pushing the water aside.

  “Why are you waking me up? Have we landed yet?” he slurred.

  After successfully sitting upright, his next move was to try to stand.

  “Maybe you better stay seated.”

  Maston remained surprisingly calm as Lucas gave him the rundown of the events of the past few days. He didn’t hyperventilate the way Lucas had when confronted with the enormity of the situation. Years of military training had forged his nerves for moments like this. Or he’d just experienced disaster too many times to be shaken by it now.

  “And this place?” he said when Lucas reached the end of the tale. “What is it?”

  He looked around the crypt and out the sunlit hole in the ceiling.

  “They call it the Dead City. It was a metropolis before the Xalan invasion, a ruin after. But there’s something that lives here now. Something very dangerous, and we need to get the hell out of here.”

  “What is it?” Maston asked, eyeing the Oni and the Xalans suspiciously. Both parties returned his glare. The Corporal nervously glanced at his wrist readout. There was the faint signal of a heartbeat.

  “Something so deadly that two separate civilizations tell ghost stories about it,” Lucas replied. “Can you walk?”

  Maston brought himself to his feet and nodded.

  “Bring anything for me?”

  Lucas motioned to the Corporal who unslung a Soran energy rifle from his back and handed it to Maston. They hadn’t hauled along any armor, so he’d have to make do with just his bodysuit and a spare pair of boots.

  “Use it well, Soran,” the Corporal said coldly. “I hope you prove to be worthy of this much risk.”

  “I am,” Maston replied curtly.

  “Must go,” Toruk said impatiently. He was right, they’d already wasted too much time down there.

  They hoisted each other out of the hole and back into the sunlight, which was already fading at the end of yet another exceptionally short day.

  They were moving much faster now, keeping low and bounding from rock to rock quickly and quietly. Maston was keeping up, and seemed to have lost little of his strength in the chamber. The tall, dark obelisks cast long shadows over the remains of the city. They ran past the crumbling temple and returned to the boneyard clearing.

  The dwarf sun was now directly above the central spherical statue that Lucas assumed was a representation of the moon Mol’taavi. But there was something else atop the stone, bathed in the white light. Something that moved ever so slightly.

  “My prey comes to me. Strange.”

  The voice came from the Corporal’s translator collar, much to everyone’s surprise. It was intercepting and interpreting the brainwaves of whatever lay before them.

  Lucas crept closer, Natalie trained on the top of the sphere. The figure shifted again.

  “An alliance. Xalan and Soran. Perhaps a worthy challenge after all these years.”

  The creature’s voice was low and gravelly, and though its speech patterns were strange, short, and halted, it boomed with a gravitas the Corporal’s did not.

  “We have no issue with you,” Lucas called out without thinking. He was shocked the beast could speak. Judging by the bones around them, he was expecting something snarling and savage. This creature was neither. Not yet, at least.

  “The voice,” it said. “The face. It is you. One of the three.”

  Uh oh.

  “Searched the stars for you. Yet here you are. The others not far behind assuredly.”

  It was him, then, the Desecrator. Alpha’s worst fears realized. Lucas took a dangerous step forward and the sun dipped below the trees. He could now make out the figure before him.

  The creature was indeed a Xalan, of sorts. He was perched on the stone orb like a coiled snake, ready to spring. Even at this range, his massive size was apparent. Rather than select patches of armor plating across his torso and shoulders, he appeared to have natural protection everywhere, even down his arms and legs and creeping onto the sides of his face. He wasn’t wearing a shred of artificial armor, as he presumably had no need for it. There were no weapons in either of his hands or on his person, but his claws were jet black and a solid foot long on each of his three-pronged hands and feet, triple the size of a normal Xalan. A parted mouth revealed similarly enormous teeth. Most notable of all was his coloring, a shade of dark, hellish crimson Lucas had never seen on another Xalan before. His eyes were black with rings of fiery orange that flickered in the dying light. This was no Shadow. This was something … else.

  “Red demon,” Toruk muttered. “Old evil. Great power.”

  “What are we waiting for?” Maston growled at Lucas, his own rifle raised. “Shoot it.”

  “It can reason, it would be a waste not to try,” Lucas whispered back to them fiercely.

  The Corporal was having none of it and took over his collar with his own voice again.

  “This is an abomination!” he roared. “Another of the Council’s wretched creatures.”

  The voice switched back.

  “Fool. I am a creation of gods.”

  “Of devils!” the Corporal shouted.

  The creature leapt off the sphere and landed with a crunch on the carpet of bones. Standing up straight, Lucas’s suspicions about his size were confirmed. The creature towered over them. While most Xalans were seven or eight feet tall, this one was easily twelve.

  “I am the future,” it purred. “I am what is to come.”

  “You are mad,” said the Corporal, holding both of his guns outward. His hands were trembling slightly.

  “I know you’re an outcast,” Lucas called out to him. “Your own people want nothing to do with you. You don’t have to do their bidding.”

  The Desecrator turned toward Lucas.

  “I serve no one!” he snarled. “But your actions demand vengeance.”

  He flexed his lengthy claws outward and a low guttural sound rose out of his throat.

  “You killed him,” he said. “Share his fate.”

  So much for reason.

  The Desecrator bent down and his armored muscles bulged. Something long and almost transparent sprang out of his back.

  Wings.

  He shot up into the air just as Lucas regained enough composure to pull his trigger. The rest of the group followed suit, but the Desecrator wove around in the air, dodging every round with ease.

  “What the hell is this thing?” Maston shouted as he unloaded a stream of
plasma into the sky. The Desecrator’s wings were almost insect-like. Far above them, they fluttered so fast they were a complete blur in the air. Suddenly they stopped vibrating, and he started to fall. More accurately, he started to dive.

  “Concentrate fire!” Maston yelled, back in commander mode already. Everyone obeyed, but even in his breakneck descent, the Desecrator was able to duck and weave around the incoming fire. A few rounds did manage to strike him, but appeared to glance off his plating harmlessly. In an instant, it was too late to stop him.

  He crashed into the middle of their line, slamming into the Corporal with such force Lucas could hear bones shatter, and bowling all of them over. As Lucas scrambled to his feet, he saw the Desecrator swing his right claw upward. With it came the Corporal’s head, dripping blood onto the already red arm that held it.

  One of the Oni warriors leapt bravely toward the Desecrator, swinging a large axe in a downward arc. It found enough of a gap in his armor to draw blood as it crunched into his collarbone, but the Desecrator quickly countered with a forceful kick. The three enormous claws buried themselves in the Oni’s chest and gut. From the placement, it looked like they’d gone through both lungs and his stomach. Blood spurted out of his mouth and the Desecrator wrenched his foot to the ground, the man underneath it. More bones cracked and the Desecrator launched back up into the air on his wings as the rest of the group opened fire.

  A low voice crackled in the collar wrapped around the newly headless body of the Corporal.

  “Blasphemer.”

  A bloodied axe clattered to the ground from on high, having been dug out of his armor. The Desecrator looped around again and this time the dive was more of a line drive as he skimmed just a few feet above the ground. As two of the Xalans fired away, he caught one with his right claw and the creature spun around awkwardly, cascading into a nearby bone pile with a deep slash across his throat. The Desecrator landed next to him and ripped the energy rifle from his claws. Aiming quickly, he put down the second Xalan with a round to the skull. Maston tried to dive out of the way but caught a blast in the shoulder. From the ground he returned fire and grazed the creature’s neck plating, causing him to leap backward behind one of the colossal skeletons for cover.

  Lucas saw an opportunity and tossed a pulse grenade over the top of the skeleton. They hadn’t managed to salvage any explosive grenades, but he’d learned the electric killing power of the pulse variants could wreak havoc on a nervous system. Lucas followed it up with a shotgun blast that tore an enormous hole in the skull. It propelled the Desecrator backward just as the grenade exploded. A blue sphere of energy and light consumed the creature and made Lucas’s skin prickle, even at a distance.

  The Desecrator was disoriented and Toruk took advantage of the moment of weakness. He sprinted forward, leapt up and over the skull, and jammed his black-tipped metal spear into the Desecrator’s chest. The rare metal cut through the armored plating and hit its intended target. The creature let out a roar that the collar couldn’t translate, and he violently whipped his arm around, catching Toruk with a backhand that sent him flying all the way back to the central statue in the clearing. The effects of the pulse grenade were only temporary, it seemed, and the creature stretched out its wings and hovered a few feet above the ground. He dodged an attempted sniper shot from Lucas and ripped the spear out of his chest. Whirling around, he slung it at the final Xalan resistance fighter, who took it directly in the heart, the force of the throw pinning him to the ground.

  Before Lucas could even blink, the Desecrator had flown over to the two other Oni warriors who had been firing their appropriated energy weapons, hitting mostly air for the duration of the fight. Lucas winced as he saw them dismembered almost instantly by the fearsome razor claws of the creature. Limbs and organs dropped unceremoniously to the ground. One man lay in pieces while the other was on his knees. The Desecrator hoisted him up, two claws hooked under his ribs, and as Lucas watched in horror, he sank his teeth into the man’s face. Wrenching backwards, the Desecrator tore the man’s head from his body before he let the skull and attached spinal column drop to the ground, joining the sea of bones at his feet.

  A dazed Toruk had a fury in his eyes when he saw what the demon had done to his men. He turned to charge once more, but Lucas called out.

  “We need to get out of here!”

  It was the first time Lucas had felt the need to flee from a fight in a long while, but it was clear they were grossly outmatched by this monster. He turned to Maston who nodded in assent, clutching the black burn on his shoulder. He was a soldier smart enough to know when to retreat.

  Lucas had to physically intercept Toruk as he raced toward the Desecrator and drag him toward the wall of the city. The creature stood over the butchered corpses of the two men and roared so loudly a plume of black birds shot out of the nearby trees. He sprang into the air, and his wings hummed as he raced toward them. It seemed that even if they wanted to escape now, they couldn’t.

  In desperation, Lucas flung the last pulse grenade toward the Desecrator as he sped toward them. He attempted to spin out of its radius, but when it erupted, the energy field consumed him once more. His flight pattern became erratic and shifted hard left. Maston turned and fired a trio of rounds that hit his right shoulder and threw him further off balance. He was unsteady, but still in pursuit.

  The three of them raced through the destroyed houses toward the wall, but the jungle likely wouldn’t save them; they were simply moving out of the creature’s home and into its hunting grounds. Lucas heard another sound from up ahead. Snapping twigs and crunching leaves. Something else was coming.

  A figure burst from the brush ahead of them. It was Toruk’s giant bloodwolf, sprinting straight at them at an incredible speed. Lucas had to veer to the right to avoid colliding with it, and it shot past him without so much as a glance. Lucas turned to watch the wolf leap up onto the roof of a nearby house, then launch itself into the air. After a few seconds suspended in flight, it crashed into the Desecrator, latching its jaws around his throat, and the two of them tumbled to the earth with a thud out of sight.

  “Naali!” Toruk cried as he stopped and turned around.

  “No!” Maston shouted. “This is our shot, let’s go!”

  Lucas looked at the rage and sadness in Toruk’s eyes, but nodded in agreement with Maston.

  “We’ll all die,” he said solemnly.

  Toruk turned back and sprinted toward the jungle. Lucas and Maston followed and a painful howl could be heard echoing out of the city behind them.

  It was hard to tell when they stopped running. The sun had gone down and hours had passed before they finally ran out of adrenaline. Toruk had years of conditioning in the jungle, Lucas had his stealth suit to aid him in recovery, and Maston seemed to be driven forward only by pure force of will, despite his severe plasma burn. Lucas almost doubted whether he didn’t have Guardian tank-bred genetics buried in him somewhere.

  Eventually they came to a halt deep in the forest and Lucas almost collapsed when the fatigue caught up with him. They hadn’t seen the Desecrator since the bloodwolf had intercepted him, but it was likely the creature, however brave, couldn’t have slowed the monster down for long.

  “Must stop,” Toruk said, finally showing signs of being winded. “Make camp fast, go home. Hidden for now.”

  He tapped on the metal disc on his arm. Maston had been tossed one as they ran and he too was now undetectable by traditional Xalan biological tracking. Though Lucas wondered if the Desecrator had more primal means of finding his meals.

  Soon they had a small white fire burning, and Toruk had killed and descaled a nearby tree octopus, which he called lo-bai, and was handing out samples to the pair of them. It tasted vaguely squid-like, but seared in the fire it wasn’t half bad.

  “What’s your wolf’s name?” Lucas asked. Toruk looked confused.

  “Your vornaa?” Lucas clarified.

  “Naali,” he said, his brow furrowed. “Belo
ng father. Wise vornaa. Old vornaa. Fierce vornaa.”

  “Fearless vornaa,” Lucas said.

  “Naali alive. Red demon no kill.”

  Lucas nodded silently, keeping to himself the fact that he very much doubted that statement.

  “What a goddamn mess,” Maston said, rubbing his head. “We should have known they’d figure out a way to detect their own damn ship. This mission was idiotic.”

  “We reached our objective, now we just need her to complete her end with the transmission and we can get the hell out of here,” Lucas said, attempting to keep the faith the way Alpha had.

  “Get out of here?” Maston said, eyebrows raised. “Our ship is in a million pieces, as is most of our crew. Sora literally does not have a vessel that can reach this place within several lifetimes. We’re castaways in this hellhole.”

  “Saato aid brothers,” Toruk said confidently.

  “What the hell is he talking about?” Maston asked.

  “It’s a long story,” Lucas said. “The Oni believe we come from their moon, Mol’taavi, to aid them in their fight.”

  He pointed upward to the huge shining orb above them. Maston just shook his head.

  “I don’t even want to know.”

  The fire flickered and Toruk was busy finishing off a lo-bai tentacle. A large welt had formed across his chest where the Desecrator had struck him. He threw some gristle into the fire and climbed up a nearby tree to keep watch.

  “So who did we lose, specifically?” Maston asked, his voice growing quieter.

  Lucas pulled up the terrain map on his wrist display. The forest was filled with only black dots now, and there was a larger green cluster in the village. He was elated to see Asha’s name among them. He turned the readout toward Maston, who scanned through the names of the deceased.

  “Jano, Yuttori, Moloy, Wrev, Tuya, Corvin,” his voice trailed off as he read the names.

  “Silo?” Maston said, spotting the dot.