I have loaded my last magazine, he pulsed to Kier.
I suppose I’ll be on my way to save you shortly, then, came Kier’s reply. The humor on the surface of that pulse could not mask Kier’s underlying fury; the flame in his breast had become an inferno.
Kayl harbored fury of his own, but it was not a barely contained firestorm, was not a star on the verge of exploding. His was cold, a black hole devouring light and heat, hungry but focused on a single point—he and Kier could not die here. Not with the purpose that had driven them for so many years left unfulfilled.
Not until Vrykhan’s body was a smoldering heap of ashes.
Kayl wove around the trunk as he climbed, avoiding the largest branches. The confused calls of the skeks below soon became just another part of the din. Only when he was teetering on the uppermost few meters of the tree did he halt. Between the wind—which was noticeably stronger up here—and his weight, the tree was swaying heavily, its wood creaking.
He looped his tail around the narrow trunk and hooked it back around his waist, leaning back on it to anchor himself in place and free his hands. As he sent another summon signal to the ship, he said, “Yuri? Yuri, can you hear me?”
The commlink remained silent, and his HUD flashed the same message he had been seeing for the last several minutes—NO CONNECTION.
Clenching his jaw, Kayl swung his railgun into his hands and turned his attention downward. The branches below him blocked some of the battlefield from view, and a smoky haze was forming on the ground, but the trees were relatively sparse leading upslope.
The skeks were rushing toward the cave like swarming insects, and the crowd of them at the cave’s entrance—where their movement was restricted by the narrow passage—was growing larger and thicker by the moment. How could Kier and the others stand against that?
But not all the skeks were moving; there were several groups of them hanging back, watching the attack. He swung his railgun toward each such group, expanding the scope feed in his helmet’s display to allow himself a closer look. The optics cut through the haze easily.
Most of those unmoving groups were centered around skeks holding those shoulder-mounted rocket launchers, all of which looked as likely to fire a rocket as explode in their operators’ hands. Each skeks carrying a launcher was accompanied by several of its kind bearing small racks loaded with spare rockets on their backs. From his vantage point, he could see five such groups.
He had the sense that this was not some mindless raid—this had been planned, and it was being coordinated somehow.
Where were the directors of the assault?
Kayl kept his scope in motion, raking it over the battlefield, searching through the jumbled chaos. But it was something at the upper edge of his vision, outside the scope’s feed, that ultimately caught his attention—something not on the forest floor but atop the cliff. He had been at too low an angle in his first position to spot the trio of skeks gathered directly over the cave.
Two were kneeling beside a crude, two-meter-tall device with uneven antennas jutting from its top. The third was a few meters ahead of them, lying on its belly at the edge of the cliff to watch the events below.
Kayl steadied his railgun and exhaled. When the tree’s gentle swaying shifted the weapon’s crosshair onto the base of the device; Kayl pulled the trigger.
Sparks and fire flared from the device’s casing, and the skeks flanking it recoiled.
“—hear me? Is anyone there?” Yuri asked over the commlink, voice high with desperation.
Her words were only just discernable over the battle sounds undoubtedly coming through Kier and Thargen’s commlinks.
“I am here, Yuri,” Kayl replied, releasing the grip of the railgun to press the remote pickup button again. The message on his HUD was quite different this time—INBOUND…19.25s.
The counter was ticking down.
“Is everyone okay? What hap—” She yelped. “The ship’s moving, Kayl!”
“Hold tight, Yuri.”
The skeks beside the broken signal jammer seemed to be arguing with another. The one at the edge silenced them; its eyes were locked on Kayl. It lifted its arm and pointed.
Kayl fired a shot that struck the front skeks between the eyes. Its skull burst apart. As Kayl swung the crosshairs to the next target, Yuri made another startled sound—likely in reaction to the ship suddenly accelerating. He squeezed off another round, hitting the second skeks in the chest. The third was already bellowing a warning as it rushed to the edge of the cliff—a warning that had no business carrying over the battle din.
But skeks were nothing if not loud, apparently.
“The trees! In the trees! They are—” The skek’s echoing call was cut short by a projectile through the throat that tore its head off.
INBOUND…12.55s.
Growling laughter crackled over the comms, overpowering a series of pained snarls and guttural cries and drowning out the skeks war howls in the background.
“Thargen,” Yuri breathed.
“Fuck yeah, zoani,” the vorgal roared.
We will only hold so long as Thargen is standing, pulsed Kier. He is the only thing holding them back.
For most of his life, Kayl had never depended on anyone but Kier. Together, they had overcome every challenge they had faced. Now, all he could do was hope that Kier had been correct—that the reputation of vorgal vanguards was not exaggerated.
Shouts called Kayl’s attention down again. Several skeks were looking up at him from the ground, calling out to one another.
“Yuri, listen to me carefully,” he said, angling the railgun toward the new targets and dropping a skeks with a snapshot as bullets whizzed and cracked through the air around him. “There is a screen on the console before you. The fourth option down”—he grunted when a bullet struck his shoulder, hitting with enough force to disrupt his aim and make his next shot miss its mark—“accesses the weapon systems.”
An indicator appeared on the leftmost edge of his vision. He fired two more shots, taking down two more skeks, as he turned his head toward the indicator. The HUD highlighted the cloaked ship in orange and tagged its distance from him—two hundred meters and closing fast.
“I’m in. Now what?” Yuri asked.
“Activate the underside cannon turret and place it under manual control.”
The ship came to a sudden halt in the air a few meters away from Kayl, and the plasma cannon turret lowered from its belly. Though the craft was silent, Kayl could feel the hum of its antigrav engines in the air.
Below, two of the skeks rocket teams turned their attention toward him.
Kayl, you need to move, Kier pulsed, likely sensing Kayl’s alarm.
Both rocket launchers angled up toward Kayl.
“A big wraparound holo screen came up,” Yuri said. “I can see the ground below, and—”
“Control stick on the armrest, Yuri.” Kayl’s heartbeat quickened further, but he kept his hands steady as he fired.
His projectile hit the rocket loaded into one of the launchers, triggering an explosion that lit up a section of the forest and completely engulfed the group of skeks that had been around the launcher’s operator.
Kayl was already pivoting to his next target. “Shoot anything moving on the ground.”
Splinters of wood blasted off the trunk, and two more bullets hit his armor. The tree shook more intensely. His next shot missed the rocket launcher he had been aiming for, hitting its bearer in the thigh instead. The skeks dropped, but caught itself on one knee.
“Shoot, Yuri!” Kayl said.
“You got this, terran,” Thargen growled.
The turret dipped suddenly, and big plasma bolts blasted from its dual barrels, casting a new blue-white glow on Kayl and the battlefield below. The group of skeks Kayl was currently aiming at were hit by one of those bolts and were swallowed by an even larger explosion than before.
“Keep firing,” Kayl said as he swung his railgun over his shoulders. He
brought up the remote piloting commands in his HUD, opening the rear entry ramp and angling it toward him.
The cannons continued firing, their heavy thumps echoing off the cliffside as the plasma cut huge swaths through the skeks scrambling below. Now there was gunfire striking the underside of the ship, doing no damage but causing the faintest flickers in the cloaking field around the points of impact.
Kayl did not believe a rocket would be quite so ineffectual, should one strike the ship’s hull.
“This is just like a game I used to play with my brother,” Yuri said. “He always made me play gunner because he had to be the pilot.”
“Excellent,” said Kayl as the ramp drew within a few meters of him. “Utilize that experience.”
Placing his hands on the tree, he unraveled his tail and tipped his weight toward the ship. The tree swayed before rebounding, and Kayl shifted his body with it, seeking that pendulum like momentum that would get him close enough to reach the ramp.
“I was never very good at it. We’d always fail missions because I caused too much collateral damage.”
The tree creaked, protesting Kayl’s treatment of it, but he pushed on. “Focus, Yuri.”
“Right, sorry!”
Just a little farther…
Kayl thrust his weight toward the ramp one last time—just as an explosion went off at the base of the tree, sending violent vibrations all the way up the trunk. Wood snapped and cracked below him, louder than everything else for an instant.
His heart skipped a beat; the tree was no longer swaying, it was falling—falling away from the ship.
What’s wrong, brother? Kier’s mind-pulse was bristling with alarm.
Kayl shoved away from the broken tree, throwing his arms out. He hit the edge of the ramp with his chest, legs dangling with forty meters of open air between his feet and the ground. He slipped a few centimeters before slapping his hands down. The climbing pads on his palms latched onto the surface, halting his fall.
He released a huff. Nothing, Kier.
Irritation joined the concern thrumming through his empathetic link with his brother.
Do not lie to me, Kayl. I know when you’re lying.
Busy now, Kayl pulsed.
He drew in a deep breath and glanced down. The battlefield was fire and smoke, fraught with shadowy figures and muzzle flashes that were like stars flickering in and out of existence. Projectiles pinged off the ramp and the hull.
Lifting a hand, he quickly tapped the control to put the ship into a holding pattern—at least they’d make a harder target for those rockets if they were moving, and that was the best he could manage at the moment.
The ships cannons were still firing, blasting down trees, obliterating ground and stone, vaporizing skeks. And its line of fire was following the same path the attacking skeks had taken—up the slope and to the cave.
A pair of plasma blasts struck the ground not five meters from the mouth of the cave, annihilating the skeks there and spraying superheated debris against the cliffside.
“Yuri, do not fire too near the cave!” Kayl hauled himself up onto the ramp. “It may cause a cave in.”
“What? Why didn’t you say that before?” Yuri asked hurriedly. “Didn’t you hear what I said about causing collateral damage?”
As soon as he was on his feet, Kayl slammed the button to close the ramp and raced to the cockpit. Yuri was in the gunner’s seat, her hands white-knuckled around the control stick.
Her eyes flicked toward him for an instant. “So you’re taking over, right?”
Kayl leapt into the pilot’s chair adjacent to her and took the controls, disengaging the autopilot. “I need to pilot the ship. I fear we will be able to touch down for mere seconds, at best, before we are overwhelmed. I need you to keep the landing zone clear.”
“You mean, like…right in front of the cave?”
“Yes.”
The holographic view screens wrapping the cockpit—including the floor and ceiling—switched on to display the view outside the ship, creating the illusion that the controls and chairs were floating in open air.
“The cave you told me not to hit a minute ago?” Yuri asked.
“You got this, zoani. Kill all these fuckers,” Thargen growled over the comms. “Just don’t kill us.”
“Thanks, sweetie. No pressure or anything, right?”
Ahead of Kier, Thargen beheaded a skeks with a quick strike, adding to the mound of corpses on the cave floor. Kier fired his blasters simultaneously, hitting a skeks that was lunging over the bodies of its comrades to attack the vorgal. Four plasma bolts to the chest dropped that one; a few of them had taken more punishment than that before staying down.
Kier and the other defenders had already been forced several meters back from the chokepoint where the entry tunnel curved into the main chamber—partly because of the onslaught of skeks and partly because of the gore and bodies. Even Thargen, who had become an unrelenting whirlwind of death, could not maintain his footing amidst that mess. His axes were blurred orange arcs, and the air around him almost seemed misted with blue skeks blood. He laughed, and growled, and roared, daring his enemies to come, and cut down any of them that attacked.
And despite his ferocity, skeks were getting through. He’d been pushed to a portion of the cave too wide for him to fully hold by himself.
For now, it was only one out of every five or six that managed to break past Thargen alive, and all of those had been shot down by Kier, the sedhi, and the azhera, but that number would only grow as the battle lines shifted ever toward the rear of the cave. Kier kept his blasters firing, picking off skeks around Thargen, covering him, but the monsters kept coming.
The sedhi was already showing signs of fatigue, no matter how determined her expression remained, and the azhera looked unsteady on his feet.
The situation was not ideal. Kier and Kayl had been at this hunt for slavers—for Vrykhan—for a long while, and he couldn’t recall another time when things had gone so quickly and immensely wrong. They’d fought a lot of slavers and pirates, but they had never fought an army. Now, all these captives were in grave danger, and the main reason Kier and Kayl had traveled all this way and undergone all this trouble was at the bottom of that damned corpse pile.
Kier accepted that frustration, that hopelessness, and channeled it into his movements; his blasters were but conduits for his wrath, and the skeks who had denied him precious information on his prey would suffer it.
Stones rattled at the back of the cave, but the noise of the screaming enemies, firing blasters, and thumping plasma cannons outside made it difficult to focus on so small a sound. Kier kept shooting, firing at everything around the blue and orange blur that was the blood-soaked vorgal and his dancing weapons.
That clatter of stones came again, more insistent and prolonged than before. After a brief lull, it resurged, becoming a clamor loud enough that it might have been a landslide.
“Kier?” one of the captives behind him called fearfully.
Kier looked over his shoulder, past the huddled survivors and up to the ledge beyond them just as a dust-covered skeks emerged from the passage.
Throat constricting, Kier spun toward the back of the cave. The skeks charged toward him—with a second one rushing out into the open behind it.
The creatures filled the cave with their unnerving howls.
Kier opened fire on them, already running to meet the new flood. The lead skeks reached the edge of the ledge before a pair of Kier’s plasma bolts took out its eyes. It toppled forward and crashed in a heap amongst the captives, all of whom scrambled away save for the unmoving volturian. Kier was certain that someone—the kaital, perhaps—was wailing, but he brushed the sound aside as he put a burst of plasma into the next skeks’ chest.
More of the beasts were storming out of the passage.
Bit of a problem, Kier pulsed to his brother. They’ve reopened the rear tunnel.
Kayl’s concern flowed through their empathet
ic bond, but his mind-pulse was calm when he replied, We should have clearance to descend soon. Hold out a little longer, brother.
Behind Kier, Thargen was still roaring and laughing, taunting the skeks, and the sedhi and azhera’s auto-blasters were firing in short, erratic bursts. Thargen would hold; though Kier had not known the vorgal for even a full day, he was confident in that. And Kier would not die here. He refused to accept death while the pirate Vrykhan still drew breath.
Kier and Kayl had lost a link in the chain leading to Vrykhan today, but they would lose nothing else.
He planted a foot on the fallen skeks’ back and vaulted up onto the ledge, firing half a dozen shots before his feet had even touched down.
Kier followed the ledge back toward the passage, blasters spitting plasma into every skeks in his path. Each bolt was driven by his willpower, a messenger of his rage. Skeks fell before him, smoke curling from their plasma wounds, and he moved over the corpses like a rising tide swallowing a beach. Within moments, he’d closed to melee range with the invaders. The snarling skeks attacked him with clubs, axes, and rifle stocks.
Gritting his teeth, Kier dodged and swayed, avoiding the blows without slowing his rate of fire, and lashed out with knees, elbows, and feet whenever there was an opening. His body was the weapon; his blasters were merely an extension of it. Centimeter by centimeter, he pushed toward the passage.
All the while, he sensed his brother, just as always—Kayl was a steady, solid presence no matter the situation, no matter his own underlying emotions. Kier could feel his brother’s concentration, fear, and anger, but it was all wrapped in cold, hard tristeel.
“We will only have seconds for you to board,” Kayl said over the comms. “Be prepared to move.”
The plasma cannon thumped just outside the cave. The ship was close.
Not quite so simple as that, brother, Kier pulsed.
It must be, Kier. The skeks are scattering but not withdrawing. The ship will be an easy target for them when we land.
Savage Desire (The Infinite City Book 4) Page 38