Shards of Eternity

by John Triptych

  The alert sounded in his ear just as Vega made it to where his bodyguards were hiding. Turning around in rage, he aimed towards the archon’s figure in the distance, but his own combat AI told him he was out of range. He pointed towards his chief bodyguard. “Detonate the explosives in the capsule.”

  “Yes, sir,” Metcalf said as he activated the com-link detonator, only to be nearly deafened by the roar of static audio. “Captain, there’s a problem.”

  Vega was visibly rattled. “What is it now?”

  “I’m getting interference, sir. We’re being jammed!”

  Vega roared in anger. “I want that damned daughter of his dead right now! How can we detonate the charges?”

  “The jamming seems to be originating from specific points,” Metcalf said. “That battle drone the Tiburon spotted is jamming us from orbit, and it released a number of smaller electronic warfare probes to cover the whole asteroid.”

  “Tell the Tiburon to blast that thing out of space,” Vega said. “Let’s head back to the shuttle and see if we can detonate the charges when we lift off.”

  One of the other bodyguards pointed at an object that appeared over the horizon and began to head closer to the group. “What is that?”

  Metcalf took one look before grabbing Vega by the elbow as he activated his battle armor’s jump jets. “Warbot. Move!”

  The warbot that had been released from Karana’s battle drone began firing at the five renegade pirates as they scattered in different directions. One man was instantly cut down as the missiles fired at them detonated and shredded his a-suit. Another of Vega’s men cried out as he lost a leg, his suit instantly applying a restrictive tourniquet to the shattered limb, the bio-gel hardening the moment it was exposed to a vacuum.

  Metcalf had managed to throw Vega into cover, but a kinetic round hit the back of his helmet, and the former Star Force sniper instantly went brain-dead, collapsing face down onto the hardened regolith.

  Vega used his jump jets to propel himself sideways on the ground and managed to get behind some rocky cover as the warbot continued to fire at his team. The hovering robot began tracking him, before being suddenly engulfed in a massive explosion.

  Looking up, Vega pointed at the approaching Tiburon. His own ship had fired a salvo of heavy weaponry to take out the warbot, and it nearly got him too. “Pick me up now!”

  The relentless fighting had severely damaged the battle drone she was riding in, and most of her warbots were already destroyed. Karana opened the rear bay doors and leapt out, using her a-suit’s jump jets to descend towards the planet’s surface. The ground was less than twenty klicks below her, and with some luck she might just make it.

  Baz frowned as he remained sitting in the captain’s chair inside the Tiburon’s bridge. “Where’s Vega’s shuttle at?”

  The tactical officer bit his lip. “One of the warbots from the battle drone damaged the shuttle’s drives before we took it out. Smith is doing his best to repair the engines, but it’s going to take some time.”

  Baz cursed again. He had to make a decision. He had been given two orders: get rid of the jamming or attempt to go in and rescue his captain. Doing both would take time. “Let’s try to get in closer. Can Vega himself make a jump into a higher orbit so we can just pick him up?”

  “Depends on how much juice he’s got left in his Armatus,” the tactical officer said. “He’ll need to be at near full tanks if he’s going to achieve escape velocity from the asteroid’s gravity well.”

  “We got another problem,” the communications officer said. “The archon’s ship is heading on an intercept course towards us; she’s also launched swarmers.”

  Baz let out a stream of invectives before he calmed down. “Tell Vega to hold on; we got to find a way to deal with that damned ship first.”

  “LT, you there?”

  “Reading you loud and clear, kid,” Garrett Strand said.

  “They haven’t detected us yet. Must be because of the jamming and the battle,” Duncan Hauk said over his Armatus suit’s encrypted com-link circuit. “My battle drone has drifted enough to make a run for the hostages in the capsule.”

  “Okay, kid, it’s all yours. I’ll make a drop closer to where Vega is so I can cut off his escape.”

  Hauk stayed close to the bay doors as he lay nestled inside the rear pod of the drifting battle drone. With everything shut down and using heatsinks to prevent detection, his small craft remained invisible to the chaotic melee swirling all around him. Ordering the battle drone to power up its engines, Hauk waited until the small craft’s AI controller positioned itself to low orbit while preparing to leap out.

  Vega grimaced as he raced along the fields of uneven terrain, jumping from one area of cover to the next. He needed to gain some distance and get to a higher elevation before powering up his jump jets for a full vertical thrust to get into orbit. The shuttlecraft he rode in was in the other direction, and he didn’t want to wait out there. It felt too exposed.

  The incoming message from his com-link circuits didn’t make things any easier. “Sorry, Captain,” Baz said. “We’re too busy fighting off attacks from the archon’s ship to try and pick you up right now.”

  “Just remember,” Vega had told him. “Without the shards, you’ll be hunted out here, so you’d better come get me.”

  He continued to dash across the smaller craters and boulders when his battle computer detected a contact over to his left flank. Crouching behind cover, he attempted to poke his head up to try and identify it, only to be greeted by a burst of pulsed laser fire. Ducking back down, he crab-crawled until he got to the upper lip of the caldera.

  Using the enhanced sight on his helmet, Vega noticed someone wearing a battle suit standing behind a cleft of regolith, observing his previous hiding spot.

  Vega readied a full salvo of missiles and grenades before launching a barrage towards his assailant, even letting loose with his shoulder-mounted gauss rifle, just as the guided ordinance reached his target’s position. The resulting detonations kicked up clouds of dust that hung in the air for a time.

  “Take that,” he said as he kept firing, ignoring his AI’s reminder that he was running out of ammunition for his heavy weapons. Only when he heard the faint clicks of his supply indicator telling him it was empty did he finally relent.

  Standing up, he waited for the dust to settle. His battle computer was telling him he scored definite hits, but it needed some time to scan and assess the damage. Vega remained confident that whoever was inside the suit would surely be dead by now.

  His overconfidence and lack of experience with infantry combat became an issue as a lone figure wearing a skinsuit and helmet crept up behind him and got to within point-blank range. When his suit’s proximity alarms went off, Vega turned in a panic, only to be blindsided by a blow to his helmet.

  The attack nearly caved in the side of his headgear, and Vega tried to pull back, his mind half-stunned by the punch. From the contours of the attacker’s skinsuit, it looked like a woman wore it. Despite his momentary confusion, his mind figured out who it was in a split second. “Karana?”

  Karana closed in and tore the embedded laser from Vega’s right wrist before he could aim it at her. She had gotten out of her own battle suit and set it up as a decoy. The equipment she wore around her skintight mechanical counterpressure suit consisted of nothing more than a helmet and an attached life-support backpack with jump thrusters.

  Vega tried to lay a powered kick on her torso, but Karana sidestepped away and used the low gravity to throw her armored opponent onto the ground. She kicked down towards Vega’s left forearm, crushing the delicate focusing mirrors of his laser rifle. Now all he had left was the enhanced strength of his a-suit.

  With the alarms ringing inside his helmet reminding him that all his suit’s weaponry was either empty or disabled, Vega tried to get up while attempting to pin Karana with his armored hands, but she quickly slipped away from his grasp.

  Karana pi
voted and quickly got to his rear, her powerful cybernetic hands tearing into the back of the armored suit with blazing speed. Smashing the rear panel open, she tore out the auxiliary battery while sending an ECM surge from her fingers into the main power conduits of Vega’s a-suit.

  The renegade pirate captain cried out in frustration as his battle suit’s power supply suddenly failed, and he fell onto the ground on all fours. His once powerful Armatus had become an unwieldy sarcophagus, and now he could only move around like a decrepit turtle. Mentally activating the kill switch he had on her, Vega could only watch in despair as she towered over him, seemingly unaffected.

  Karana’s pained voice came over his com-link. “You left me to die, and you thought I wouldn’t come after you?”

  Vega figured his only way out was to smooth her anger away. “My darling, I thought you were dead. How was I to know?”

  “Your words don’t affect me anymore, Toto. I’ve outgrown you.”

  “I saved your life many times,” Vega pleaded. “That ought to count for something, at least.”

  “And I saved yours too.”

  Vega started to weep. “Don’t let it end this way, Karana. I beg you.”

  She had him. Karana could have ripped out the life support system from the back of Vega’s a-suit or just torn off his helmet, but the desire to kill him had suddenly vanished. Her mind became a confused, conflicted throng of choices, and she couldn’t process any of it into a clear-cut decision, despite all her cybernetic enhancements.

  Vega looked up at her, the opaque visor clearing up so he could stare into her eyes. “Just let me be. All I ever wanted was to retire in peace. We’ll never see each other again. I promise.”

  Her memories of their time together alternated between destructive satisfaction and the pained memories of his wrongdoings towards her, and Karana’s thoughts swelled with anger once more. He turned her into a betrayer of their kind, and it was the one thing she couldn’t accept.

  Using her enhanced vision, she detected the container with the shards in Vega’s rear suit compartment. Karana tore the collection of relics loose from his back and held it up. “I’m not going to kill you, but I’ll be giving these back to their rightful owners.”

  Vega feebly held his hand up. “No! Karana, I beg you—please.”

  She began to move away from him.

  “Karana!”

  Placing the collection of shards into a side pouch, she began to calculate how much jump propellant she would need to get into orbit. The other alternative was to commandeer one of the shuttles. Perhaps she might even catch up with the archon, who was still on the ground, according to her last intel.

  The pulsed laser fire tore into her right side, followed quickly by an aimed gauss shot at her helmet. Karana reacted, but it was too late. A second barrage of weapons fire severely damaged her left torso, and she slowly fell to the ground as if in slow motion.

  Vega could only stare in silence as six xtid came out of their hiding places and shuffled over to where Karana had fallen. The tall, spindly aliens wore red bio-armor that looked black in the twilight of space, and each individual carried two pairs of heavy weapons cradled in their four arms.

  After taking the collection of relics lying on the ground, one of the xtid came over to him, his buzzing accent marking their Comm-5 expressions as unique. “Well done, Captain Vega.”

  Vega shook his head. “Y-you were here the whole time?”

  “For a few days,” the xtid said. “Unlike you humans, we can hibernate our bodies yet remain fully conscious and aware of the things around us.”

  “Why didn’t you help me?”

  “It is not in our interests to do so,” the xtid said.

  “I need you to help me get back to my shuttle, please.”

  “No.”

  He could hardly believe it. “No?”

  “We have a pressing rendezvous with our own vessel,” the xtid said. “Since you have lived up to your part of the bargain, I was instructed to leave this with you.” The alien took out another container with the set of five counterfeit shards and placed it on the ground beside Vega. “May you have better fortunes with it.”

  Vega could only gasp as the six xtid turned around and quickly used their jump jets to leap out of the caldera and disappear from view. His one chance now was to reach Karana’s body and hope that her life support pack was undamaged.

  It was a slow, agonizing crawl due to the heavy encumbrance of his dead a-suit. The battle above continued to rage as he finally got to where she lay. Reaching over to her life support pack, he began to undo the shoulder straps from her heavily burned skinsuit.

  “Your death is my gain, baby,” he said as he reached over to disengage the air tube leading up to her helmet.

  Karana opened her eyes, and they locked onto Vega’s own. Both her cybernetic arms had been nearly melted off from the xtid ambush, yet her legs were still working. She twisted her body while wrapping her lower limbs around Vega’s neck and squeezed, applying all the power she had left in her internal batteries.

  Vega screamed as his suit’s armored neck collapsed into his fleshy one. There was a bone-crunching noise as his trachea was broken, and he died.

  35 Choices

  Deep in the bowels of the Wondrous Beacon’s superstructure, the crew inside the command pod roused themselves from hibernation as their bio-ship returned to life. The glow orbs began radiating their bioluminescent auras, and the ship’s systems were quickly reactivated.

  Executor Zytll opened his eyes, his mind quickly recalling what had transpired before he began his dream-state. The soft chimes coming from his tactical interface meant the ground teams on the planetoid had at last recovered the artifacts from the human pirate and needed to be extracted from the surface.

  The battle master was the first to speak. “It seems we have woken up to a conflict, Executor. The archon’s ship and the pirate vessel Tiburon are engaging each other.”

  “They do not concern me,” Zytll said. “What of the ground teams?”

  “Our team has recovered the artifact, Executor. But they have run into some opposition on the planetoid’s surface.”

  Zytll tilted his head up in surprise. “The archon’s forces?”

  “I am … not sure,” the battle master said. “The enemy seems to be equipped with warbots and Union tech type battle suits.”

  “It must be the pirate then.”

  “Our team reported Vega as disabled when they took the relic from him, so it’s possible his crew is out for revenge.”

  Zytll made a quick scan on his virtual map. The two opposing ships were dueling near the planetoid’s orbit and would be in the way if he decided to pick up his ground team. “It is time for us to reveal ourselves. Activate our radiators and power up the drive.”

  “Very well, Executor,” the travel master said.

  The battle master clasped both his upper hands together, indicating a question. “Executor, if any of those ships attempt to oppose us, what are your orders?”

  “Attack anyone in our way,” Zytll said. “I must have those shards at all costs.”

  Less than two hundred thousand klicks from the planetoid in question, the Wondrous Beacon began shedding her fake outer layer of space dust that was carefully layered over her outer hull. The xtid warship had been masquerading as another lifeless asteroid for a number of days after deploying their teams to the planetoid, and now their presence was revealed.

  Duncan Hauk winced as the heavily damaged battle drone he was riding in barely dodged another passing kinetic ordinance. The battle in high orbit was raging, and the two ships involved were firing at everything they considered a threat. Checking his small craft’s electronic countermeasure suite, he felt a tinge of regret as it came back with a negative reading. Those explosives on the hostages’ capsule could detonate at any time.

  Banking his craft along the cosmic winds of the planetoid’s almost non-existent atmosphere, he observed a battle occurring on the
ground as well. The archon and his forces were desperately trying to reach the grounded capsule containing his captive daughter, while the newly revealed xtid were doing their best to stop him. Hauk wondered why the strange-looking aliens even bothered to fight against the archon’s people, since they had no apparent stake in this conflict.

  Maybe those xtid just don’t like humans of any kind, he thought.

  Another glancing blow rattled the outer hull of his battle drone. Hauk’s damage control indicator chimed in, telling him the small craft’s radiators were starting to fail. Opening the rear bay doors, the boy prepared to jump out using his suit thrusters. I’m about fifty klicks up from the ground, he thought. I’m going to have to time this well or else I’ll be a sitting duck going down.

  Garrett Strand’s voice crackled in his helmet’s audio speakers. “Kid, what’s your status?”

  “My drone is heavily damaged, LT,” Hauk said. “I’m going to have to make a drop. All my warbots are busy providing orbital support.”

  “Have you heard from Karana?”

  “Negative, LT. I lost her signal when the fighting started. It looks like she ditched her drone and went straight for the ground.”

  “Dammit,” Strand said. “I just sent word to the archon and told him to stop shooting at us. He told me that we need to leave or else he will treat us as another enemy.”

  “I’m flying just above where the prisoners are, LT. Do you want me to have a go at it?”

  “Go for it,” Strand said. “I’ll try to keep you covered from orbit as long as I can.”

  Hauk didn’t get the time to answer him as his battle drone began to melt when a laser battery from one of the three ships above began tracking him and opened fire. The boy used his a-suit’s jump jets and leapt out of the dinged rear section, just seconds before the drone imploded behind him. Hauk jackknifed his body into a dive as he began his descent, using the debris from his destroyed small craft as cover.

  Here we go, he thought. Twenty seconds till I get down there. Here’s hoping I don’t get hit before it happens.