The Exiled Earthborn

by Paul Tassi

  Lucas walked over to the large metal door that would lead them further into the compound. Alpha was ready with an entry chip pulled from a dead guard that would open the door, but they needed to know what was on the other side first.

  Lucas looked through Natalie’s scope, which he’d switched into X-ray functionality. On the other side of the door, he could see the skeletons of two Xalans on either side of the frame, facing the other direction. He marked exactly where they were on the wall, and Reyes and Kovaks moved into position.

  The door sprang open, and the two soldiers couldn’t even turn their heads before blades were driven into their necks from behind. The two Guardians dragged the bodies into the room and tossed them onto the bloody floor like rag dolls.

  The group quickly sprinted out into the adjacent hallway, the door closing behind them, sealing Zeta’s two agents inside. They would work to disable security along their route as quickly as possible, but nothing was guaranteed.

  Kiati drew first blood in this next phase when she rounded the corner of the hallway. Standing there were a pair of unarmored Xalans discussing something on a data pad. They had half a second to process that they were staring at a group of Sorans before Kiati’s pistol tore through them. Lucas checked the map and motioned to everyone that their next move was to duck into a room to the right. The door opened without hesitation and they found themselves in some sort of control center.

  Two guards inside the room were the first to go down, both beheaded by Asha with one swipe of her sword. There was another pair on the far side of the room, one of which Lucas took out with a long-barrel sniper shot, and the other sank to his knees with one of Kovak’s small throwing blades embedded in his skull.

  Three seated, unarmed Xalans barely had time to be shocked before they were cut down by Alpha’s rifle. They slumped over their consoles like they’d suddenly fallen asleep.

  As soon as everyone in the room was confirmed dead, Kiati headed over to the central viewscreen, which she promptly smashed with the butt of her gun. She and Reyes began unloading some equipment from their packs, a superheated plasma cutter that would slice through the metal behind the screen like butter. The room’s outer wall was a shortcut to where they needed to go next.

  The cutting tool hissed as a bright orange line slowly tore its way through the wall. Lucas took a moment to collect his thoughts and briefly leaned against a nearby console spattered with the black blood of its operator. He peered at the screen and was stunned at what he saw.

  It was an enormous Xalan fleet, all moving in unison through a field of stars. Lucas saw a familiar green-ringed planet, one he’d seen when they first arrived in the Soran solar system. They were already there.

  “Alpha,” Lucas called out, but across the room he saw Alpha was looking at a similar scene on a larger screen.

  “It appears the invasion force is nearing the Soran homeworld,” he said, confirming what Lucas had seen.

  “There will be massive casualties within the hour,” Zeta said. “We must hurry.”

  “This is as fast as this thing goes,” Kiati called out. The cutter had now completed roughly half of a rectangle on the wall.

  Asha stepped gingerly over a dead guard as she approached Lucas. She’d removed her helmet and brushed the wet, stringy hair out of her eyes. Lucas had already taken his helmet off. His heart hadn’t stopped racing since they first set foot on the planet, and it didn’t seem like it was going to let up any time soon.

  “So far so good,” Asha said, threading her sword over her back. Lucas nodded.

  “The advantages of going through the details a thousand times,” he said.

  Indeed, everything had gone exactly according to plan since they’d arrived on Xala, discounting of course Maston’s untimely demise.

  Then came a moment they had all been dreading. An alarm began wailing at the top of its mechanical lungs. The sound pierced the silence and caused everyone’s eyes to widen and pulses to quicken.

  “[Garbled]” came the sound from Alpha’s translator, assuredly failing to convert some sort of Xalan curse word.

  “Shit,” Lucas said in English simultaneously, meeting Alpha’s startled gaze.

  They would likely never know exactly what happened. It could have been any of number of things that set it off. Perhaps they boarded the interceptor to find a tomb of dead Xalans. Someone could have come across Maston’s carnage-filled escape pod. The blood-soaked checkpoint might have been discovered. Whatever the case, it didn’t matter now. It was bound to happen at some point, and was built into the plan accordingly. Stealth had gotten them this far, but it would take them no further.

  Every monitor in the room flashed with a warning indicator as the alarm droned on. Lucas quickly translated it.

  “SECURITY BREACH SECTION SEVEN. ARMED SORANS AND REBEL AGENTS INSIDE. ALL UNITS CONVERGE TO ROOM 1250.”

  Lucas glanced up at a strip of Xalan symbols above the door they’d just entered. 1250.

  “We have to go!” Lucas shouted. Alpha was already heading toward the door leading into the room, where he planted a pair of blinking mines on either side. Kiati was just bringing the cutting tool around to complete the red hot rectangle in the wall.

  “Ready!” she called back, and the group formed up behind her. Alpha tossed out more mines throughout the room, which stuck to various surfaces with their magnetic backing.

  With a hefty kick from Kiati’s armored leg, the metal plate flew into the next area. Everyone froze.

  The room they’d broken into was massive, with ceilings at least five stories high. The far wall was entirely translucent, a curved sheet of glass that revealed an assortment of machinery. They were looking at their final destination. A large set of double doors that led to the communications relay sat at the base of the glass. It was where Zeta needed to be in order to disseminate the message and disrupt comms. The only problem was the dozens of very angry-looking Xalan soldiers standing in their way.

  With a wide sweep of her arm, Kiati threw out a half dozen grenades, mixing explosives with crippling pulse devices. They all exploded at roughly the same time, disorienting and dismembering the soldiers closest to them. It was the last time they could utilize the element of surprise.

  As the grenades leveled the troops in front of them, Lucas heard other explosive thuds coming from their rear. Troops had entered the room they’d just exited and had tripped Alpha’s mines. The guards in front of them had regained their senses from the grenade blasts and all hell broke loose.

  The temperature in the room rose ten degrees in an instant as plasma scorched the air all around them. Both the Guardians and the Xalan guards were unloading on each other while each dove for cover behind anything they could find. In the first wave of shots, at least four Xalans went down while Kovaks took a round in the chest. He winced in pain as his suit rapidly tried to seal the wound, but it was clearly not a fatal hit. Kiati tossed him a syringe that would instantly erase the pain for the time being.

  Lucas had a round whiz by his head at such close range he could feel it singe the hair on his temple. He scrambled to find his helmet, which had been knocked loose, but it was lost in the chaos.

  The guards closest to them had their guns destroyed by the pulse grenades and were sprinting toward them like madmen, wielding razor-thin blades assuredly meant to be a last-resort weapon. One bounded over the console where Lucas was hiding and was blown apart with a shotgun blast from Natalie. The next one over got Asha’s sword in his chest and the soldier’s blade clattered to the floor next to them. Asha kicked him backward forcefully, freeing her sword from his sternum as he crumpled to the ground in a lifeless heap.

  Kiati turned around to lob one more grenade into the hole they’d just emerged from. They were fighting a war on two fronts now, as all Alpha’s mines had been tripped and fresh troops were trying to flank them. The blast caused a shower of black blood to erupt from the hole, and it was clear Kiati had disrupted their entry. Large pieces of debris
fell in chunks over the opening, and it would take the Xalans some time to excavate.

  Shots ricocheted off the clear far wall of the room. Despite being translucent, the material was something far more durable than glass. After all, it did protect the most important communications relay on the planet. They somehow had to get across the room.

  The Guardians, now able to avoid an attack from the rear for the time being, began to press forward. It wasn’t the type of group to hunker down behind cover for long. They were assassins, and Reyes and Kovaks were bounding across the room, dodging shots and killing Xalan soldiers with extreme precision. Asha followed their lead, no stranger to the same style of combat. Her blade whipped through the air as she cartwheeled over stunned Xalans who couldn’t get a bead on a target so small and fast. The sword shredded their armor and the cavernous room echoed with wails of agony. The alarm still blared all around them.

  Lucas followed closely behind her, taking out any Xalan that swung their weapon toward her. They put down creature after creature, and the pair of them were leaving a trail of bodies in their wake as they pressed forward across the increasingly slippery floor.

  Behind them, Alpha was wrestling with a knife-wielding guard when Zeta walked up and put a round in the Xalan’s head. Alpha looked at her appreciatively, but both had to quickly turn and unload at another pair of soldiers trying to line them up.

  Kiati had taken a hit somewhere and blood was dripping from her stealth suit to the floor. It hadn’t slowed her down, however, and she cracked off shots from her pistol toward soldiers attempting to end the acrobatics of Reyes. Kovaks and Reyes, despite their friendly rivalry, made a hell of a team, and the Xalans simply didn’t have an answer for the pair of them.

  Lucas took a grazing shot to his ribcage and doubled over in pain. When he looked back up, the assailant was already dead, Asha’s blade planted in his head while she stood a few feet away. She bent her wrist and the sword ejected itself from the Xalan’s body and back into her hand. She quickly ran over to help Lucas up, and he could feel his suit releasing painkillers into his bloodstream. The wound wasn’t serious enough to call for Kiati’s aid, so he continued forward.

  The troops in the room were starting to thin out and they were able to finally reach the doorway to the comms relay. Alpha set to work hacking through the security, which was on complete lockdown after the breach had been broadcast.

  Reyes was taking a few last shots at downed and squirming Xalans that weren’t quite dead yet. Kovaks was clutching his chest, injured, but functional. Kiati attended to Zeta; a plasma round had eaten through her leg armor near her shin, despite constant protection by Alpha. Lucas wiped away the blood that stained his side, the wound now closed and the pain muted. They were battered, but alive. But there was no telling when the next round of reinforcements would show up.

  Alpha was growing frustrated with the door controls, which were proving more difficult to override than he had anticipated. Lucas surveyed the carnage of the room in a daze; his ears were still ringing from the gunfire, and the alarm wouldn’t cease its constant wailing. Finally he located the source of the sound and fired a shot that made the speaker explode in a shower of sparks. The alarm still sounded elsewhere in the facility, but was mercifully no longer echoing throughout the chamber.

  Asha had her hands on her knees and was trying to catch her breath. Despite the physicality the suits allowed them, combat was exhausting, and Lucas felt similarly winded. Adrenaline flowed through his veins, warding off true fatigue.

  “That was only the beginning,” Asha said, and she was likely right. “The whole planet will be here soon.”

  It was true. They couldn’t kill everyone that was about to come for them. It wasn’t possible. Sora seemed exceptionally far away now. Lucas wondered if the Xalan fleet had been engaged yet. It was entirely possible that millions were dying worlds away from them at that very moment.

  Alpha finally sprang the door open and quickly ushered Zeta inside. Lucas and Asha followed while Kiati, Reyes, and Kovaks remained outside as sentries.

  The inside of the comms relay was like nothing Lucas had ever seen before. He could only see parts of it from outside, but within it was a stunning array of light and metal. Alpha had described the general contents of the room to him on their way to Xala, but failed to mention that it was actually quite beautiful. As they reached the center, Lucas saw a series of crystalline conductors symmetrically arranged in a column that extended far past where the ceiling should be. Rather, there was no roof in the chamber. The Xalan sky was a tiny of speck of light at least a mile up. The entrance was ray shielded, so they couldn’t have dropped in that way without being reduced to ash, but it allowed the relay to broadcast across the galaxy without being overly exposed on the surface of the planet.

  Green and purple electric charges jumped from crystal to crystal while light from the machinery was refracted into multicolored prisms all around them. The effect was awe-inspiring, and the room felt like the inner sanctum of some ethereal church, not merely some communication tool. Zeta had designed all this, back before she’d turned traitor, and it showed she had a penchant for artistry, not just technology.

  Zeta was already hard at work on the central console of the room. Surrounding her was a complete circle of floating code that she was frantically trying to slice through to achieve the ability to broadcast simultaneously on every piece of Xalan technology with a screen. Just when she finished one section, another would appear. Alpha was trying to help share the load, but she was moving at three times his pace, well-versed in what was being displayed. It was clear that anyone else attempting the same feat probably couldn’t do it given months, while she was trying to get it done within minutes.

  Though Lucas was enraptured by the scene in front of him, he was jolted out of his trance by gunfire coming from the other room. He and Asha dashed back through the relay to find the Guardians unloading at a fresh collection of troops trying to pry their way through doors on either side of the room. Grenades blew apart the tightly packed soldiers in the entryway, but they were starting to run low on that sort of ordinance.

  And then, silence. The Xalans suddenly stopped trying to enter the room over the mangled corpses of their fellow soldiers. Had they been scared into submission after witnessing the complete devastation in the room? That didn’t seem likely. Unless it wasn’t them the Xalans were frightened of.

  There was a loud crash as debris rained down from the ceiling far overhead. A blur fell from the rafters and landed in front of them with such force it nearly bowled all of them over.

  It was him.

  26

  The Desecrator slowly rose from the ground, a dozen feet tall with a wingspan even wider. His wings retracted into his back. His eyes darted across theirs, and no one dared to fire the first shot.

  His chest plating had a large circular dent hammered into it by the explosive round he’d taken from Zeta’s prison ship back on Makari. Around his neck was one of Alpha’s translator collars, damaged, but still intact, it seemed.

  “You invade the homeworld,” he mused, his deep voice echoing around the chamber. “Same as me.”

  Everyone was silent, speechless. Reyes and Kovaks wore looks of astonishment, having only seen the creature in video feeds. He was much larger and more nightmarish in person.

  “You will die now,” he said calmly, flexing his mammoth claws, “like you should have in the jungle. You will answer for your crime.”

  “For what?” Lucas called out. “Killing your father?”

  The Desecrator paused.

  “I’ve read his journals,” Lucas said. “I know what happened to you.”

  “You know nothing,” the Desecrator scoffed.

  “Your father was a warrior, like us. He died in battle, honorably. It was not murder, only war.”

  “The two are one and the same,” the Desecrator said. “I have wanted no part in this war. The fight was not mine. A struggle between nations means nothing
. Blood. Blood means everything.”

  He took one step toward them and everyone raised their weapons another inch.

  “There will be no honor here today,” he growled.

  Lucas couldn’t even blink by the time the Desecrator drew a weapon from his back. He felt warm blood spray his face before he even knew where it was coming from. Next to him, Kovaks lay sprawled on the ground, his head completely blown apart by the Desecrator’s first shot.

  The entire group shattered into every possible direction. Lucas rolled left and returned fire. The Desecrator dodged and fired again, this time his round taking a chunk out of Kiati’s shoulder, which flung her into the wall. Asha was firing fission shots from her Magnum, but the creature dodged them all with ease. Finally, one caught him in the chest, but it was obvious he had survived much worse. She had to dive out of the way from a shot that would have cut her in half.

  Lucas had been waiting for this. After reading Omicron’s journals, he had had Alpha equip Natalie with one more special function. One he prayed would work now.

  Natalie shot out a blinding beam of white light that caused the Desecrator’s fiery eyes to visibly shrink into pinpoints. He howled in agony, dropped his gun, and tried to shield himself from the light. Lucas walked slowly toward him, unloading carnage blasts from his gun that knocked the Desecrator back a few more feet with each burst. Asha and Reyes converged on him, blades drawn. Lucas felt a small smile creep across his lips as he got close enough to take aim at the creature’s head.

  He missed.

  The Desecrator ducked under the blast, almost going flat to the floor. In an instant, he lunged at Lucas and sank his claw directly into Natalie’s scope, killing the shining light instantly. Tearing his claw up, the Desecrator ripped the entire scope off the weapon altogether. With the metal plating shorn away, the gun’s power core was exposed. Lucas fired another blast, the weapon mercifully still working, but the Desecrator was already three feet to his left.