by Paul Tassi
Up ahead, a few levels down on another rooftop, Lucas could see Axon fighting with a pair of Xalans. He’d dropped his massive gun and was pummeling them with his bare fists. He cracked one across the jaw so hard they could see his gray teeth fly through the air, even at a distance. The second managed to dig his claws into a crack in Axon’s armor, which caused him to roar with rage, and he slammed his hands down onto the creature’s arm, snapping it cleanly and producing howl of agony. Axon finally reached for a pistol and shot the wailing Xalan in the leg, then, as it dropped down to eye level, in its forehead. For good measure he put a round into the unconscious Xalan already on the ground.
“Axon!” Maston called out to him. “Join up!”
Axon turned at the sound of his name and raised his hand toward them. He was perhaps two floors down from their position, but a distance that was easily climbed with the help of mechanized power armor.
Axon took one step forward and was instantly split in half.
A millisecond later the loud, piercing crack that accompanied the shot echoed all around the walled compound like a thunderclap.
Lucas froze, staring at the pieces of the man as blood was spattered in a huge arc around the point of impact. A hole had been torn through the roof just to the left of the body.
Maston was shouting something, but Lucas’s ears were ringing and the words were indecipherable. Suddenly, the entire head and torso of the Guardian next to him erupted, and the blast sent all of them flying on the rooftop. Again, Lucas’s ears could hear nothing but a high-pitched whine, and he looked at the mangled corpse a few feet away, which was now two legs, an arm, and nearly nothing else.
Lucas turned his head and began searching for the source of the slaughter as he scrambled to his feet. With Asha a step ahead of him, they ran for cover behind a large cooling tower. Another ear-splitting shot tore a mammoth hole in the roof next to them, and they were pitched off their feet again. Both landed behind the tower, neither having sustained injury, and Kiati, Toruk, and the other Guardian were already there. But when they turned around, Asha let out a gasp.
Maston lay near the latest smoking hole. His right leg had been blown off and was a dozen feet away from his body. He wasn’t moving, and there was an exceptional amount of blood everywhere, both his and that of the Guardian who had already been turned into pulp a short distance away.
He can’t be dead.
It was Kiati who spoke next.
“Cover fire!” she yelled, and Asha, Toruk, Lucas, and the remaining Guardian snapped out of their daze and started firing anywhere, everywhere they could toward every possible sniping vantage point they could see. It served as enough of a distraction for Kiati, who sprinted out to Maston and pulled his body back to the cooling tower. With his armor, he must have easily weighed three hundred pounds, but Kiati’s own suit assisted her with the weight. Between adrenaline and the armor’s enhancement, she could have pulled a car if she needed to. Lucas stopped firing long enough to peer through his scope, and he scanned the direction the noise of the shots had come from. In the distance, he located a figure perched on top of one of the wall’s defunct auto-turrets all the way across the base from them, but before he could zoom in further, a shot rocked the top of the cooling tower and rained stone debris over all of them.
Kiati looked at Maston’s leg, which was severed midway up his thigh. His pressurized undersuit had already grown over the stump, sealing it up with a combination of heat and med gel. Within seconds, blood had stopped leaking from the gaping wound.
Scanning him with her hand, Kiati checked her wrist display, which showed an image of his circulatory system.
“He’s alive,” she said. The heartbeat on her readout was painfully weak.
But Lucas wasn’t looking at Maston; he was peering back through his scope, focusing on the point in the distance. He increased magnification to twentyfold and saw the figure clearly.
It was the Desecrator, standing atop the turret a solid two miles away, holding a rifle as tall as he was. A railgun of sorts, judging by its devastation. The creature was already lining up another shot.
Lucas shot first, his crosshairs aimed squarely at a point between the Desecrator’s burning orange eyes. After he pulled the trigger, the resulting milliseconds seemed like hours.
But at that distance, Lucas had overestimated his marksmanship. The round actually struck the railgun itself rather than the creature holding it. The shot knocked the Desecrator off balance, though he immediately attempted to return fire. Through the scope, Lucas could see smoke erupt from the railgun’s barrel, but no shot fired. Frustrated, the Desecrator threw the weapon down with a pantomimed roar, and managed to dodge Lucas’s second shot by launching himself up into the air. Lucas lost track of him. He dialed back the magnification on his scope, but soon saw his wings buzzing as the creature burst through a column of smoke. He was coming.
“We need to move,” Lucas said, turning back to the group huddled behind the tower.
“We have to get him back to the ship,” Kiati said. Maston was still unconscious at her feet. The other Guardian had now removed his helmet to reveal a brown-skinned man with a shaved head, blue eyes, and blood streaming from his ears. Lucas was surprised to find his own were bleeding as well.
“What was that?” Asha asked.
“You’re about to find out,” Lucas said.
With the ability to fly at blinding speeds, the Desecrator had already reached the rooftop. He skidded to a halt on the surface, his claws tearing through the metal as he came to a stop. His wings fluttered, then retracted into his armored back.
“Holy shit,” Asha exclaimed when she saw him.
The Desecrator let out an ear-splitting shriek. The creature scratched his neck and Lucas saw that there were a pair of scars on the armor plating there. Fang marks from Toruk’s brave bloodwolf, he assumed. But there was something else on his neck. A collar with a little blue light on it.
“Useful device,” came the deep-throated metallic voice projected out of it. “The races have not spoken in so many years.”
“Yeah,” Asha called out. “And what do you want to talk about?”
The creature looked surprised.
“It is you. The other. Something so small. So dangerous. Intriguing.”
Natalie’s barrel never left the creature’s head, and Asha had her Magnum pointed in the same location. Kiati and the other Guardian circled around to the sides of them, their own weapons drawn. Maston’s leg lay a few feet in front of them like a fallen tree branch.
“Your assault here was brave. Foolish,” the creature rumbled.
“Foolish?” Lucas said. “We’ve won the battle. Look around you.”
It was true. In the streets below, the last of the Xalans were being systematically butchered by the Oni and the remaining Guardians. Some of the troops were fleeing out of the central gate, chased by a pack of bloodwolves, but an Oni sniper who had climbed the wall was picking them off as they reached the entrance. When he turned in their direction, Lucas could see the warrior wore the familiar carved mask of the Kal’din.
The Desecrator snorted.
“So long as I live, no battle is won.”
“Well then,” Lucas said. “We’ll have to see about that.”
He reached down to his belt and pressed a button on the detonator clipped there. He’d pulled the device off Maston before he’d emerged from behind the tower.
The charges in the comms hub detonated, and the entire building buckled from the blast. The Desecrator was momentarily thrown off balance by a section of the structure caving in near his feet. The fireball dissipated just as it reached him, but by that time, a hail of plasma was already heading his way from the four of them. He caught a few rounds in his armor plating before launching back into the air. His hands went behind his back and returned clutching a pair of enormous pistols, which discharged rounds at them at a furious pace. They were forced to roll out of the stream of shots and return fire as he loop
ed around in the air, flying high over the street.
The Desecrator was now drawing fire from not only them but the other troops below. He turned his weapons toward the ground and shredded a pair of Oni leveling shots at him with ancient-looking power weapons. Curving around, he took a shot in the arm that caused him to drop one of his two guns. But with the second pistol he lined up a shot and blew the head off a Guardian on a second-tier rooftop.
His flight path shifted and became a beeline straight toward their group. In an instant he was on them, and Asha rolled just under his hooked claws as he passed by. The brown-skinned Guardian next to her wasn’t so lucky. The claw caught him in the shoulder and he was hoisted off his feet and into the air as the Desecrator arced upward. A few flashes of movement several hundred feet up in the air, and the Desecrator released the soldier. His body eventually landed on the roof, deeply cratering the metal. His head followed a second or two later, and cracked the way an egg might if tossed from a similar height. Lucas felt a surge of nausea.
Immediately the Desecrator was diving, and swooped down toward them once more. This time, Asha was ready with her sword. The creature saw the blade at the last second, and swerved right to avoid it. He crashed into Kiati, who was pitched backward and tumbled off the roof. As the Desecrator flew away from them, Lucas and Asha rushed to the edge, breathless for what they would find. The adjacent building Kiati had landed on was only a few stories down. She was stirring, her armor apparently absorbing most of the impact, and in flash there were Oni swarming around her, attempting to help her up. Asha turned to Lucas. The pair were now the only ones left on the roof.
The Desecrator had landed in front of the cooling tower and now stood between them and the downed Maston on the other side. Their backs were to the edge of the rooftop, and a short ledge was the only barrier between them and a fall far worse than the one Kiati had just endured.
In a flash, the creature drew his remaining pistol like an otherworldly gunslinger. Lucas and Asha both fired a shot, their weapons already raised. Her revolver round went straight through the barrel of his weapon, causing it to explode in his hand. Lucas’s shotgun blast peppered his torso at range and propelled him backward into the crumbling tower. Smoke rose from the smoldering spheres across his body, and the explosion of the gun had taken one of his fingers off.
“Enough of these toys!” he roared through his collar and thrust his wings forward with an incredible amount of force. Before either of them could get off another shot, they were flung backward through the air from the resulting gust. Lucas threw his arm out to catch Asha, who went diving off the roof, in the process dropping his rifle, which bounced away from him. They locked hands and Asha crashed against the side of the building, hanging over the edge. Lucas swung her upward, and the collective strength of his suit and muscles propelled her back over the lip and onto the rooftop once more. Looking down, Lucas saw that their guns were a solid five feet away. The Desecrator was already airborne and hurtling toward them on furiously beating translucent wings.
But there was something else flying toward them. Toruk hung suspended in midair, having launched himself out of his hiding place inside the destroyed cooling tower. He’d disappeared when the railgun first opened fire, but Lucas hadn’t noticed until this moment. And neither had the Desecrator. As the red demon lunged toward them, Toruk leapt onto its back, driving his black-bladed spear down all the way through the creature’s chest. Blood sprayed out of the armor plating as the Desecrator let out a piercing howl. He crashed to the roof and, as he did so, flexed his wings, which launched Toruk forward. Lucas reached for him, but the warrior sailed over the edge and dipped down out of sight as he fell. A scream was caught in Lucas’s throat.
Asha was already on her feet and sprinting toward the Desecrator, who was struggling to get to his feet. She lunged at him with her sword, and he rolled to avoid the swing. Standing upright, he pulled the spear all the way through his chest and then whipped it around so that Asha barely had time to deflect it with her blade. He thrust forward and she backflipped over it, cutting off the head of the weapon. The Desecrator now held a rather useless metal pole. Lucas was on his feet and rushed over to see where Toruk had fallen.
Toruk was there all right, standing on top of the hull of the now functional prison ship that had caught him. The craft was rising quickly, and as it shot over the edge of the rooftop, its shadow engulfed all of them. The Desecrator looked up in surprise.
The foremost turret of the ship fired a blast that hit the creature directly in the chest. The resulting impact launched him off the far side of the building and he tumbled into the gray smoke below in complete silence.
Asha was knocked backward by the explosion, but she quickly regained her footing and ran with Lucas to the other side. The structures below were ablaze, and they couldn’t see anything through the smoke.
“Is he dead?” Asha yelled over the roar of the prison ship’s engines.
“I don’t know,” Lucas shouted back. “But we don’t have time to find out.”
That displeased Asha, who continued to scour the area, but there wasn’t a trace of the beast.
Alpha broke through on their armor comm.
“Has the issue been dealt with?” he asked, as though he were troubleshooting a tech support call.
“For now,” Lucas said.
“Come,” Alpha continued. “It is time.”
Lucas and Asha left the edge of the roof and ran back toward Maston, still sprawled unconscious behind the cooling tower. Lucas hooked his armor onto his back and carried the man like a rucksack as they walked toward the ship, which was now slowly turning around and lowering its exit bay ramp. Inside were a dozen or so Guardians, including the banged-up Kiati. They were the few who had survived the assault.
As they made their way inside, the ramp was raised and they started to ascend. Lucas peered out the window and saw the spaceport in ruins below. The hangar was completely annihilated. The other structures within were almost entirely consumed in flame. The Oni swarmed the street like ants and would mop up any remaining troops before anyone discovered they’d taken the base, though the smoke would soon be spotted now.
Reinforcements hadn’t come. They’d pulled it off. The loudest covert assault of all time.
The forest disappeared beneath them and the curved edge of Makari could soon be seen from the viewscreen as they continued to rise. Kiati was tending to Maston, and Asha had passed out sitting against the bay doors. Lucas felt like he was about to collapse as well.
In the rear of room, he saw Alpha playing with some controls with Toruk next to him, having slipped inside the ship after he landed on it.
“What are you doing?” Lucas asked.
“Sending our friend home,” Alpha replied, typing coordinates into the display in front of him.
“You don’t want to come back with us?” Lucas asked, turning to Toruk. “To Mol’taavi? You could help us.”
Toruk shook his head.
“Khas’to need Toruk. Oni need Toruk. Must protect. Must protect until big Mol’taavi army come. Kill all sky demon.”
Someone had filled him in on their plan. Lucas was worried the Oni would think they were abandoning them by leaving.
“We will come back, Toruk. Thank you for giving us your White Spirit. She will be the one to help us end this. She will give you your planet back.”
Lucas didn’t have the heart to tell him it would be a full decade before anything resembling an army could even reach Makari because of the time it took to synthesize new white null cores. He wondered if he’d ever see the man again.
“You not fail. I know you secret,” he said as the door slid up in front of him and he ducked into a cramped-looking cockpit.
“Another secret?” Lucas asked with an eyebrow raised. “What have you figured out this time?”
Toruk smiled.
“Goodbye Saato. Valli keep you strong,” and he nodded toward the sleeping Asha across the bay.
&
nbsp; They weren’t emissaries of the gods. They were the gods?
Lucas turned back to say something, but the door had already slid shut. Toruk was gone.
Alpha tapped a few more virtual keys, and with a muted whooshing sound, the escape pod was jettisoned from the ship. Its engines kicked in a few thousand meters out, and it sped toward the jungle.
“A champion of three planets now, it seems,” Alpha said, turning toward him.
Lucas smiled weakly, but felt so dizzy he almost fell over on the spot.
“You should attend to that,” Alpha said, motioning downward.
Lucas followed his finger and saw a smoldering hole in the plating of his leg armor. He’d been shot? He hadn’t even noticed. Once the injury was spotted, his brain forced him to feel the pain, and he sank down to the ground. He was tired. So tired.
17
The trip back was far less intense than the journey to get there had been. They had to fend off a pair of reconnaissance fighters near one of the outer planets that spotted their escape, but true reinforcements couldn’t reach them in time before the null core was fired. Zeta’s men on the ground reported that it took a full hour for the rest of the planet to realize the spaceport had been wiped out. They were long gone by that time, lost in a tunnel of space-time on their way back to Sora.
When they finally managed to get long-range comms back online, they got word to Tannon Vale about the relative success of their mission, and that they were en route home. He told them that they’d been presumed dead for weeks, though that information had been kept private. Back home, the planet was still reeling from the Xalan assault on Kollux, and intelligence indicated they were keen to strike again soon. “Hurry back,” he said. There was much to do.
There were only Xalan sleeping pods onboard. Those were declared strictly off limits after Asha recounted her side-effects from prolonged use of the devices, and they made do on the floor with fur blankets provided by the Oni as parting gifts.