by Paul Tassi
“Want to fill us in here?” Lucas asked Zeta as Maston and Asha drew closer.
“This is the ship in which I arrived,” Zeta said as she observed the craft slowly rotating in the air. “It’s a prison vessel used to shuttle high-risk inmates.”
“How did you escape?” Asha asked.
“After my capture, during transport to sentencing, I overrode the security protocols and released those incarcerated within. We let loose the psychopaths, imprisoned for insanity and violent crimes, who killed the guards. Then my fellow resistance fighters and I killed the surviving criminals. Unfortunately, the plan went awry as the ship was damaged in the conflict. I ended up being the only one to survive the crash.”
She motioned to the largest hole in the roof of the cave where the sunlight came in. It was hard to get a sense of scale, but it looked to be the same size as the ship before them. Lucas could see the sheen of the holographic imagery that shielded the opening from view up on the surface.
“I ended up in the bottom of the lake, and it was a full week before the Oni found me. You have heard the rest of that story already. After we made S’tasonti a permanent settlement, I made sure to keep the ship in working order as best I could, should I ever need it again. It is immune to rust and other maladies, even housed underwater, but it was a challenge to repair the damage from the hijacking and subsequent crash. However, even with everything repaired, its [garbled] core was depleted, and it could never leave the system again. At least not until now.”
“The Spear core,” Asha said slowly.
Zeta nodded.
“You are our unwitting savior, human. With the long-range [garbled] core you salvaged from your downed ship, we now have a chance of returning you to your home, and of continuing on to Xala for the final dispersion of the message.”
The Oni were scrambling to move fishing boats so that Alpha could park the tail end of the large ship on the beach. It was bigger than the Ark, but smaller than the Spear. As it drew closer, it really did look ancient. Lucas’s knees buckled as the metal monstrosity landed with a thud on the sand a short distance away, scattering the Oni.
“There is no way that thing is airworthy, much less spaceworthy,” Maston said.
“For all our sakes, I hope you are incorrect,” replied Zeta.
“And we’re just going to fly this thing out of here, completely undetected by the entire planet that’s hunting us? I’m guessing you don’t have stealth drives in ships a thousand years old,” Maston continued.
“Very astute, though the facilitation of our escape is a problem I was hoping that you could help us solve, commander.”
Maston stayed barricaded in with Zeta, drawing up battle plans, while Lucas and Asha headed toward the Khal’din’s medical hut, where they were to get loaded up and ready to ship out. They weren’t clear on the specifics just yet, but they were told their escape attempt would take the combined might of the surviving Guardians and every Oni who could hold a weapon.
In the tent, the injured and whole mingled as everyone dug through the salvaged supplies to find a collection of armor and weapons that suited them. With adequate recovery time, nearly all the surviving Guardians were now standing, thanks to a combination of their resolute genetics and the healing techno-magic of their caretaker. A few however, were missing entire limbs, an ailment that would need to be remedied off-planet.
Even the Kal’din himself was strapping on a ragged suit of armor, and he wielded a metal and bone scythe taller than he was. He still never said a word nor took off his mask, but seemed ready for a fight as he did last minute touch-ups on the wounded.
Lucas milled through the crowd until he saw a familiar shock of red hair up ahead. Moving his way through Soran and Oni, he gave her shoulder plate a tap. He couldn’t hide his surprise when she turned around.
Kiati wore a bandage wrapped around her head that covered her left eye. Jagged cuts poked out from underneath the bloodied fabric.
“Jesus Christ!” Lucas exclaimed in English, ignoring that she wouldn’t recognize the expression. “What happened to you?”
“Got ambushed returning from hauling back Celton,” she said, jerking her head toward a silver-haired male Guardian a few feet away who was missing most of the fingers on his left hand. “Lost the eye to proto-nade shrapnel. Xalan who threw it lost his head.”
“Does it hurt?” Lucas asked.
“No, it feels like I dipped my face in a cool river,” she snorted.
“I mean, should you be fighting?”
“They’ll grow me another one back on Sora. But I’ll have to fight to make it there first. All hands on deck here, as you may have noticed.”
Lucas fingered the chip in his pocket.
“Look, the reason I wanted to find you was because of … Silo.”
She nodded briskly.
“I already know. I saw the blacklist.”
“Yeah, well, not sure if anyone told you, but I was with him when he died.”
She raised her eyebrows. Well, her eyebrow.
“That so?”
Lucas pulled the Final out and held it in his outstretched hand.
“I figured you could get this where it needs to go.”
Kiati took the chip and tapped it. The list of names came up, including her own. Her eye widened, and she quickly shut the device off.
“Did you watch this?” she asked, her tone arctic.
“No,” Lucas lied. She seemed to relax a bit. “But I know you were … friends. I’m sorry.”
“Stupid bastard was always going to get himself killed one of these days. What’d he do? Eat a poison mushroom?”
“Killed four Xalans with a makeshift pike before they took him down,” Lucas replied.
Kiati scoffed.
“Only four?”
Her face remained stern, but Lucas could see wetness creeping into her one visible eye. Tough talk wasn’t enough to block the grief within. Lucas didn’t feel the need to give Kiati the full rundown of his involvement in Silo’s last moments, at least not right now.
“We should have gotten out after Golgath …” she muttered, mostly to herself.
“Golgath?” Lucas pried, recognizing the name Silo had mentioned during his message to her.
She looked up at him.
“Never mind,” she said. Whatever had gone on between them, Lucas wouldn’t hear her side of it here or now. He turned to leave.
“Thank you,” she said after he’d gotten a few steps. Lucas turned back and nodded before continuing on. She tapped the chip and stared at her own name in the list.
16
Lucas tapped his foot nervously as he sat in one of the prison ship’s turret chambers. Nearly a half day had passed before Maston and Zeta finally got their plan of action together, and Lucas could hardly believe it when they’d told him.
There were many obstacles standing in the way of leaving the planet alive, but the most immediate was a Xalan spaceport located near the coast a short distance away. Lucas had seen its lights from his earlier trek through the jungle, and it was reportedly quite a sprawling facility. If their escape in the prison ship sounded any alarms among the Xalans, that base would be the closest one launching ships to pursue them. Simply put, it needed to be wiped out completely in order for them to make it to the outer atmosphere safely. If they could do that, there was a fair chance they could reach the edge of the system and activate the null core to head home. After the spaceport was gone, the rest of the fleet in the area would be scrambling to figure out just what the hell happened, and they likely wouldn’t notice a simple craft such as theirs passing through so many others like it. Prison ships were all over this planet, as resistance troops and Oni were constantly being rounded up and transported for questioning, sentencing, and execution. Zeta had one of her undercover Xalan resistance agents activate the prison ship using his biology so it wouldn’t be flagged or tracked by her or Alpha’s traitorous signatures. A lengthy hack had made the process permanent.
After the ships were crippled, they’d need to destroy the rest of the base to ensure they didn’t call for help. Zeta asserted that she could block their communications temporarily, but the equipment and personnel needed to be decimated so reinforcements would be delayed after they left.
On the ground, Zeta’s undercover agents inside would open the main gate, letting the Oni troops flood in from the jungle and seize the base with the help of Guardians dropped from the prison ship into the higher levels of the base. Hopefully all of this would be enough to overrun the spaceport completely, and with no ships to chase them and no one alive to call for help once they left, they could cause enough of a delay to get away cleanly.
As mad as it all sounded, it wasn’t a hard sell to the Oni, who were eager to help their newfound warrior brethren by eliminating an installation that had plagued them with a constant supply of Xalans in the past. They’d never be able to take a base this fortified by themselves. Equally raring to go were the Guardians, who desperately wanted to leave Makari and return to Sora. The fact that the way to get there was to plow through a battalion of Xalans was a bonus, as there were many, many dead to avenge littered throughout the forest.
Lucas’s seat rumbled as the prison ship’s engines fired up. They slowly rose from the beach inside the cave, and Lucas could see the remnants of the Khas’to tribe assembled to see them off. Only the very old and very young remained. All other members of the village, men and women old enough to wield a spear, were already armed to the teeth and sprinting through the forest outside en route to the spaceport.
As they reached the ceiling of the enormous cavern, the figures below became mere insects. Lucas saw a flicker of light as they passed through the opening at the top of the cave, and then immediately the holographic barrier resealed itself, a perfect image of rocks and brush to hide the gap from above.
They struck a leisurely pace over the jungle toward the spaceport so as to not draw suspicion. Algae and barnacles had been scraped off the ship so it didn’t look quite so decrepit, but most prison transports were pretty battered anyway. From his perch, Lucas could seen dozens of drones strafing the jungle, still hunting for them. For the moment, it looked as if none had noticed their emergence from the cave, a move that had been carefully timed by Zeta after analyzing their patrol patterns.
Down in the jungle below, Lucas saw a trail of green specks through his window display. It was the Oni, tagged and visible only to them so they could monitor their progress. They were nearly to the spaceport, having left quite some time ago so the assault could be properly coordinated. Toruk was communicating to them from the ground, and relayed that they’d already dismantled four Xalan patrols they’d come across, all quickly enough to ensure the troops didn’t broadcast their position back to base.
Lucas brought up a series of three-dimensional displays that rotated in front of him. One was of a large Xalan capital ship, three of which were docked at the spaceport ahead. Alpha had highlighted the engine power nodes in red. If they were destroyed, it would disable the vessels. A few other images showed a couple of smaller single-pilot fighter and bomber variants. Some were housed in the ships themselves, others would be out in the open and needed to be eliminated. If not, even without white null cores, they could chase them into the outer reaches of the solar system, and the prison ship would likely not survive their pursuit.
Lucas’s leg still hadn’t stopped shaking. It didn’t matter how many battles he’d lived through, fear wasn’t something that could be erased when there was this much danger present. Days like these were why he still jumped at shadows each night. Not knowing whether he would survive the next day, the next hour, took a toll on his mind, which felt like it was fracturing a little more with each new upheaval. The luxurious comforts of Sora seemed so far away now. Earth was so distant it didn’t even feel real anymore. He brought up a monitor and saw Asha staring at her own display.
“You alright?” he asked through a private channel. She looked at her monitor when she heard his voice.
“This is no Kvaløya,” she said. It was true. They were assaulting a secure military installation, not some run-down Scandinavian fishing village. The only things working in their favor were Zeta’s inside men and the element of surprise. Lucas flipped to another feed, where Maston was in a cell block going over assault tactics and blueprints of the compound with the remaining Guardians. There were so few of them now. They’d lost, what was it, 70 percent of the squadron between the crash and the jungle? And most of the rest were injured or ill. It was time to see what a few trillion in government-grown genetics actually bought.
The ship rounded the side of the mountain and the spaceport could be seen up ahead. It really was enormous, and Lucas nervously eyed defensive gun turrets pointing out from various corners of the outer wall. Zeta said her spies would be able to deactivate the automated defense systems of the facility, leaving them to deal with organics only, but that was a hard gamble, which made Lucas uneasy.
The dwarf sun was starting to set now, and the light refracted off the ocean behind it. This place did have a certain beauty to it at times, but while it was still populated by bloodthirsty Xalans, there was no chance to return it to its untainted former glory. They’d have to win the war and then some in order for Toruk to get his planet back.
The central comm channel started to light up with untranslated Xalan hailing requests as they approached the station. Though Lucas couldn’t understand the growls, they were clearly inquiring as to why an unscheduled prison ship was arriving at their base. Zeta spoke back to them in Xalan, reciting her practiced story about capturing a troupe of Oni warriors, explaining all the Soran life signatures onboard. After much debate, Zeta convinced the operator to allow them entry to the hangar area to set down and discuss the miscommunication in person.
The ship slowly glided toward the hangar area where Lucas saw the large capital ships looming. On the deck below, there was a long line of fighters with Xalan pilots milling about. Lucas gripped his controls tightly and shifted in his heavy armor plating. No stealth suit this time; this was an all-out assault that would require his armor to catch a plasma round or two (or dozen) on his behalf. Natalie was hooked to his chair and his pistol and knife were strapped to his chest. He put on his helmet and a litany of display readouts sprung into his line of sight, attempting to work in synergy with those of the Xalan turret in front of him. The combination was a garbled mess, and he decided to remove his helmet for the time being to avoid confusion created by the pairing of two different technology systems. They hadn’t had time to retrofit any of the Xalan readouts on the ship to Soran other than a few key words. FILTER switched in and out of thermal and infrared views. FOCUS cycled through potential targets on the viewscreen. FIRE was self-explanatory.
Alpha broke in on the central comm.
“This is it,” he said solemnly. “Fire on my mark.”
The prison ship was starting to dip low, though Lucas knew it would never touch the ground. In his viewscreen, the engine compartments of the capital ships in front of him were highlighted, and his fingers hovered over the turret’s dual triggers.
They were only a few dozen feet from the surface now, and Lucas saw a Xalan pilot staring up at him from the ground. Was the glass opaque enough to obscure him from the outside? The Xalan tilted his head, then turned to shout something to the other pilots nearby who gathered around him and also looked up at his turret bay.
“Alpha …” Lucas said as commotion started breaking out on the ground below.
> “Engage,” came the mechanical reply.
Lucas swiveled the turret down toward the cluster of pilots that had assembled at the behest of their colleague. His first pair of shots liquefied most of the group, as armor-piercing artillery turned on organics was like emptying an Uzi into a box of crackers. He kept firing until nothing stirred in the smoking hole, and then pivoted upward to tear into the cockpit of the nearest fighter.
Behind the line of planes on the deck, the three docked capital ships were being lit up as the other five turrets focused their fire onto the highlighted compartments, which had been opened up for maintenance and were particularly vulnerable. Two ships had been crippled in the first few seconds with targeted strikes, and now the third was attempting to take off under fire. Lucas turned his turret toward it and let loose on the engines. The ship got about five hundred feet in the air before a huge explosion inside the hull shorted out the lights of the engines, and Lucas watched as the massive craft fell back to the hangar floor, almost in slow motion. When it hit the ground, it didn’t stay there. The gigantic ship tore through the metal floor and sank deep into the highest levels of the base. With a painful groan, it pulled much of the hangar bay down with it, and the smaller ships parked on the deck began to slide down the newly sloped surface and into the jagged hole the ship had created. Pilots scrambled to stay on their feet, but many were leveled by their own ships and equipment and were swallowed into the pit. The two other capital ships that had initially been disabled tumbled off the edges of their platforms and landed with deafening crashes in the jungle below, shaking the entire facility. Nothing was going to be taking off from the hangar now, as that entire section of the base had ceased to exist.
Alarms sounded all over the spaceport. The prison ship rose up from the collapsing hangar and turned toward the center of the base, where troops were starting to scramble. They rained down fire on all the Xalans they could see, and Lucas breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that the defensive auto turrets remained still. Zeta’s inside men had done their job. Well, one of their jobs at least.