It had to be a tank.
Lightning zipped through the clouds, and in the brief moment that it illuminated the forest, the Drahkori spotted six human soldiers sitting atop the battle tank.
The small creatures hopped down from the armored treads and took out their weapons as they cautiously approached the Drocain pod, quietly muttering to one another. But with all of this rain and thunder, Kenon couldn’t make out a word they were saying through his translator.
The humans walked right by the Drahkori’s hiding place, completely unaware of the fact they were being watched, and then halted when the leading soldier raised a fist. The man called to one of his teammates, who moved forward and examined the downed pod.
Kenon’s heart jumped into his throat when the team’s leader looked in his direction and narrowed a pair of tiny eyes, brow furrowed as if he thought he’d seen or heard something and was now searching for it.
Surely the human hadn’t spotted him? He was well hidden, hadn’t made a sound, and no lightning had flashed.
. . . But there was one other thing that could have been bright enough to give away his position.
Kenon checked his shield status bar and saw it was full. When his shields recharged they would have flickered briefly, but he had been too focused on these humans to take notice.
The enemy team’s leader shouted orders to his men, gesturing to the bushes, and they advanced on the young warrior’s hiding place.
Kenon couldn’t run away from the fight, not when it had come right to him. That would be a coward’s move.
He broke from his cover and snapped out a shock rifle, aimed and squeezed the trigger. The energy ball hit one soldier in the arm and burned her dark skin, but that didn’t stop her.
The humans unleashed a storm of lead bullets and pulse rounds.
Kenon’s shields flared over his body, deflected the lethal shower, and then broke. He sprinted to the crashed pod and dove behind it, clutching his side when it started to sting. Warm blood seeped through his fingers from a gash just below his ribcage. One of the bullets must have grazed him.
The warrior leaned out to see where his targets were, pulling back almost immediately as gun barrels flashed and bullets peppered the pod’s shell. He waited for the status bar on his display to refill, then leaned out again. This time he was ready.
Three more energy bursts left his rifle. One hit a soldier in the leg, the second was dodged by his teammate, and the third round crashed into the chest of the team’s leader. The impact knocked the man to the ground, his armored harness steamed at the point of contact.
The humans cried out in fury and opened fire once more.
After facing them for the first time outside a simulation, he came to the conclusion that he could not take them all on by himself. He hadn’t even taken out a single soldier yet, and only managed to injure three. His best option now was to flee the fight and regroup with his squad at the landing zone.
Pulling a grenade from the clip on his thigh guard, he tossed it over the pod and made a mad dash for the hill when the humans leapt out of the way to avoid the explosion. He slid down the embankment and splashed into the river on the other side, then headed for the city.
Heavy rain continued to flood the streets of Masahi, and by the looks of the clouds swirling above, the storm wasn’t going to be easing off anytime soon.
Yellow and white lights running the length of the streets flickered unsteadily as Kenon made his way through the aftermath of a battle. Collapsed towers that had once touched the clouds lay in ruin all around. Amongst broken glass and chunks of concrete were the bloody remains of human bodies—dismembered, cold and lifeless. The sight made Kenon’s stomach turn.
The silence that blanketed this place was unsettling. He’d come here expecting to hear fighting, to see fellow warriors, and humans—if not soldiers, then at least civilians—running through the streets.
But no one was here. The whole area had already been swept clean of life.
Kenon halted when the haunting cry of a Drocain assault carrier entered his ears and he tilted his head back, looking up between the buildings that still stood. Squinting against the rain, he watched as the Legacy of Night descended through the wild storm clouds, lightning licking at its bow.
Following the carrier was a single human frigate which plunged down past its adversary, smoke billowing from its thrusters and flanks blazing bright with flame. The frigate skimmed over the city and crashed beyond Kenon’s view, sending a shiver through the asphalt road.
“Warrior, there you are!” Levian’s voice came over Kenon’s headset. “I congratulate you on making it this far on your own, but you still have a little ways to go. There is a bridge not far from your location, Alceta Squad is waiting for you there.”
Even though he knew Levian would not see it, Kenon acknowledged the transmission with a slight nod. He looked ahead, down the barren streets, and saw where the bridge stretched out over the river. Its midsection was absent, destroyed, deeming it useless.
Kenon carried on through the wreckage until he found his way to the waterfront where his squadmates had gathered. They had just cleared out the last of the human soldiers when he arrived and were now dumping the bodies in the river.
Phero walked over to the young warrior. “The battle has finished, Drahkori,” he said. “Our mission has been completed, but we are not leaving Anahk yet. We have received new orders.”
“Already?” Kenon asked.
“An anomaly has been detected beneath the center of this city. We are to find the source and retrieve it if possible.”
“When do we leave?”
“Immediately.”
Alceta Squad took a dropship to the heart of Masahi to avoid getting caught in the hectic battles that still raged on closer to the city’s borders. The human forces in the vicinity were beginning to thin, but they were a determined bunch and wouldn’t go down easily. If Kenon, Phero, and Suro were to have any chance of getting to the objective alive, they would have to find a quicker way to exterminate these pests . . . or find a way around them.
As soon as the Drahkori set foot on the ground he sprinted to the nearest source of cover—a concrete wall sitting in the shadow of a warehouse. He crouched low and armed his repeater, poked the barrel through a hole in the wall and took out one target.
The soldier dropped to the pavement, the grenade he’d been about to throw blew up in his hand.
Kenon rose and peered over the top of the wall, waiting for the dust to clear. Then he heard a cry. A human jumped on him from the warehouse’s second story window, causing him to stumble forward into the wall.
Digging his heels into the small of the Drahkori’s back, the man clung to his enemy’s combat harness with one hand, and went for the knife in his holster with the other. As he tried to drive the blade into the warrior’s neck, Kenon reached up, grabbed the soldier by the collar of his uniform, and threw him.
The man barreled into one of his comrades and they rolled across the asphalt.
Kenon resumed his stance, crouched in the dirt just below the top of the wall, and scanned the battlefield for his squad. There was no sign of them, and when he tried to make contact by radio, all he heard was white noise.
Where could they have gone? They were with him only seconds ago!
A pair of Skysealers screeched overhead like two speeding missiles, swooped low over the streets and unleashed a shower of superheated crytal upon a handful of soldiers cowering behind barricades—burning holes in their armor and leaving craters in the roadway.
The aircraft veered right to come back around for a second assault.
“Valinquint,” Phero said over the radio at last. “Make your way to the underground tunnels. We’ll meet you on the other side.”
“Understood, Captain,” the Drahkori replied. They must have lost sight of him in the chaos and decided to carry on ahead rather than search him out in the midst of the battle. Looking around for an entrance, Kenon caught
sight of a stairwell leading down through the sidewalk.
A way into the tunnels?
It was his best shot. The young warrior slipped out from cover and darted toward the stairway, keeping his head low and weapon at the ready.
Chapter
———THREE———
0940 Hours, December 01, 2438 / Masahi City, planet Anahk, Subway tunnels
First Lieutenant Lance M. Knoble led the men of Alpha Team and a ragtag group of civilians through the dank subway tunnels of Masahi City. The team had been traveling for over an hour on a path that would take them to a Falcon—a UNPD heavy-lift dropship. The aircraft was waiting for them outside Central Station.
Lieutenant Knoble had been assigned a mission to pinpoint the location of a device being used to send unauthorized transmissions off planet, and the only lead they’d been given was that the signal was coming from somewhere beneath the city’s center. But when he and his team had come across a cluster of civilians hiding out in a department store, they couldn’t pass them by—even though it meant sacrificing their mission.
Every life mattered.
The Lieutenant looked over his shoulder at the group shambling along behind him. He could see they were tired, growing weaker and weaker from dehydration and hunger. He raised his hand and signaled for everyone to stop.
“We’ll rest for five minutes. No more, no less,” he said, not particularly happy about stopping. But he was sure that if they kept going, they were going to start losing people. He couldn’t let that happen.
“Lieutenant, sir?”
Knoble turned his head when he heard the concern in Corporal James Bennett’s voice. The Corporal was kneeling on the railway beside a woman and her two kids, the youngest of which she held in her arms. They were sitting against the tunnel wall, the mother sobbing and trying to comfort her children.
“What’s the situation, Corporal?” Knoble limped over. He’d taken a hit to his knee earlier in the day and it still ached when he moved.
Bennett rose, his exhaustion clear in the way he stood. “The kid’s not doing so hot. His vitals are fading fast,” he reported, downhearted. “We can’t do any more for him here. He needs proper medical attention.”
The boy, who the woman cradled gently, was suffering from severe crytal burns that covered the majority of his body. It was a wonder he was even still alive.
Knoble couldn’t help but sympathize with the boy’s mother, having lost his wife and daughter five years ago during an attack on one of Anahk’s larger capital cities. He knew all to well what it was like to lose a child and he wanted to prevent this woman from having to go through the same pain.
Burying those thoughts in the deepest, darkest crevasses of his mind, he approached the woman and crouched down in front of her.
“Please, Lieutenant,” she cried, face wet with tears. “Isn’t there anything you can do to get us out of here faster? I need to get my son to a hospital! I can’t lose him!”
“Listen to me,” the Lieutenant said softly, then motioned upward. “There’s a Drocain ship parked three hundred meters above the city and it’s been shooting our evac birds out of the sky all morning. Now, I dropped my mission so I could try and get you out of here, and that’s exactly what I plan to do.” He caught the woman’s eyes and she went quiet. “Am I understood?”
She bit her lip and nodded slowly, then Knoble helped her up and drew his gaze over the rest of the group. “Let’s get a move on, people!” he ordered with a wave of his hand, signaling for them to follow his lead.
As they continued down the subway tunnels, the lights on the ceiling began to flicker, threatening to black out and cast them all into the darkness.
Knoble was beginning to have doubts that the dropship would still be waiting for them at the station. The battle was intensifying, he could hear it above. The Falcon could have been blown up for all he knew, and to make matters worse, he couldn’t contact anyone—whatever equipment the Drocain were using was screwing around with the radio frequencies.
A high voice piped up from behind the Lieutenant: “You know, this whole thing is pretty unbelievable if you think about how we’re fighting giant lizards from space! They came down, guns a blazin’—kinda like a video game. We can take comfort in that, right?”
Knoble stifled a laugh, a smile pulled at the corners of his mouth. Private John Sevadi, or “Sparky”, as the Lieutenant had nicknamed him, was the optimist of the group—a constant flow of positive energy. He was a little trigger-happy, the youngest on the team with only two years of service, but he was a good soldier.
The Private chuckled and carried on, likely trying to cheer up the few children in the group. “Everyone used to be all like, ‘Oh, aliens don’t exist! Don’t be silly!’ But hell, were they wrong! And these aren’t even the little green men people expected—they’re lizards! Goddamned lizards! And they . . . they . . .”
All heads turned when a shuffling sound started up in the ceiling. Worried murmurs spread through the civilians.
“What is that?” Sevadi asked.
The Lieutenant’s gaze followed the noise as it continued traveling overhead, then he noticed the hole that’d been blown through the ceiling, leaving it wide open to the ventilation shaft above.
“We’re about to find out,” he said. “Move the civilians back!” Knoble unslung his M5C, retreating with his team to put a good few meters between himself and whatever was about to join them.
A dark shape dropped onto the tracks, landing hard on the gravel. Spreading sinewy arms, the alien flicked its wrists, and from its gauntlets came a pair of blue blades that sparked with energy.
“Back, back, back!” Corporal Bennett shouted, waving his hands and urging the civilians deeper into the tunnels away from danger. They were screaming now, crying out in fear.
Knoble repeatedly squeezed his assault rifle’s trigger, releasing short, controlled bursts. He was trying to take down the alien’s shields, but that only seemed to make it angrier.
It charged at him.
He swore and kept firing, holding his position. It would be pointless to try and outrun the damn thing.
Then when the armored warrior came far too close for comfort, he sidestepped—only to be kicked farther aside by his enemy’s clawed foot. He hit the wall hard but managed to get straight back up.
It seemed luck was on Knoble’s side. Just as the Drocain warrior launched itself at him, the lights went out and the tunnel fell into darkness, allowing Knoble to dodge unseen. The lizard, however, was still ridiculously easy to see due to the bright lights on its armor.
Knoble took a hesitant step forward and began to make his way around the back of the warrior, who stood unmoving. The Lieutenant was about to whip out his combat knife when the lizard spun around to face him.
The illuminated ripples his footsteps made in inch-deep puddles had given him away.
“Shit—” was the only word Knoble could get out before the alien knocked him flat on his back and planted a foot on his chest, leaning over him. The warrior’s weight shoved the air from his lungs, making it increasingly difficult to breathe.
But he wasn’t lying helplessly under his enemy.
Knoble had very quickly snapped out a pair of pistols from his thigh-holsters just as the alien had drawn back his arms, preparing to drive his blades into the Lieutenant’s head.
“Did you miss me?” Knoble grunted sarcastically when he realized this was the same warrior that’d attacked his team before daybreak on the outskirts of the city.
The alien bared sharp teeth and a low, menacing growl rumbled in its throat, but it didn’t move. Knoble could see the cogs turning in its head as he tried to find a way out of this situation alive.
The Lieutenant’s focus was then drawn away from the long face looming over him to the three long tubes protruding from the armored plate on the alien’s neck. Blue liquid flowed steadily through them.
Blood? Humanity had already crossed paths with the blue-blood
ed Leh’kin, so for another species to share that trait wasn’t entirely out of the question. But still, he’d never seen a device like this. It looked important.
With that thought in mind, Knoble readjusted his aim and brought the barrels of his M7B’s up against the black plate where the central tube was connected. He was sure he saw a look of panic sweep over the warrior’s features. More weight pressed down on his ribcage.
“Only one of us will survive this,” the lizard hissed. “I will kill you.”
You’re a weird one, aren’t you? Drocain warriors rarely spoke to soldiers, and when they did they usually spat out comments about how weak humanity was in comparison to their own empire. They were an enormously arrogant bunch.
“If it means saving those civilians, I’m all for it—but you’ll die with me,” the Lieutenant replied firmly.
The warrior’s glare softened to a more curious look as he studied the soldier beneath him. Then a shrill noise burst through the warrior’s headset and drew his attention away.
Seizing the opportunity, Knoble fired his pistols, and at point-blank range the alien’s energy shields broke within the first couple of shots. The bullets then peppered the black plate and tore through the central tube. Blood spattered the ground, the warrior jumped up instantly and dashed through a hole in the tunnel’s wall, disappearing into the shadows.
Lieutenant Knoble got up, inhaled deeply and doubled over coughing. When he’d gathered himself, he picked his rifle up off the floor and headed back down the tunnel to regroup with his team.
“Sir, you wanna tell me why you’re not dead?” Sevadi asked Knoble a while later, giving his rifle’s stock a couple of hits as if it were loose. “I mean, you didn’t kill it, so what happened?”
The Calypsis Project Page 4