As much as he wanted this to last, he knew it was ephemeral. It wouldn’t be long before his mission took him away from Orthod, away from her.
“Do you want to go back to my place tonight?” she asked, tracing a finger across his chest.
Yes, this would all end soon. Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not after a week. But for now, he could embrace this moment. Make it last a little bit longer.
“I’d love to,” he finally said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Tag awoke to the sound of an explosion. He blinked past the bleariness, shooting up in the bed he was sharing with Hannah. Nightmares of the Drone-Mechs’ assault on the Argo filled his mind until he remembered where he was.
“What’s going on?” Hannah asked groggily, pulling a blanket to her chest. Tag was already pulling on his clothes. Distant gunshots blasted in the night. There was a beat of silence followed by a chorus of sirens. They hit Tag’s eardrums with an almost-palpable force, and his stomach twisted into a knot. He didn’t know the cause of the sudden racket, but he did know one thing: he missed having his pulse pistol right then.
“I don’t know,” Tag said.
Hannah shook her head, her eyes wide. “Those are the alarms for... for an attack, I think.”
“I’m going to find my crew,” he said, making for the stairs.
Hannah grabbed his hand. “I’m locking down the lab. Whatever’s going on, we’ll be safer here.”
“It’s not my safety I’m worried about,” Tag said, shedding her grip. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go. This was lovely.” He kissed her cheek. It was nothing compared to what they’d shared last night, but he couldn’t stay.
A look of disappointment crossed Hannah’s face as he turned to rush down the stairs. She lived above her lab, and Tag nearly collided with one of the lab assistants, who was peering out a first-floor window. Tag barreled past the assistant, his heart pumping. Colonists were rushing between buildings. Some were screaming, but others moved in angry silence, grabbing any nearby tools they could use as weapons. Tag punched a button on his wrist terminal.
“What’s going on?” he asked over the public comms with his crew.
“No idea,” Bull said. “Lonestar and I are still in the bar. They’ve locked the place down.”
“Coren and I are safe,” Sofia said. “Lucky’s with us, too. We have no idea what’s happening, though.”
Tag’s pulse accelerated as silence wore on the comm line. Three members of his team weren’t answering. “Alpha? Sumo, Gorenado. Report in.”
He looked around wildly. The streetlights cast ghoulish shadows on the street. Cries from panicked civilians sounded in the distance. Tag turned down the street toward the medical clinic.
“Alpha! Sumo! Gorenado! Answer me!”
He started sprinting. The medical clinic was on the opposite side of town.
“Captain,” Bull called. “I’m heading to the clinic. We’ll meet you there!”
“Copy,” Tag managed.
“Us, too,” Sofia said.
Tag tried another contact on his wrist terminal, shouting over the hellish symphony of the sirens. “Governor, what is going on? I can’t raise the medical clinic.”
“I don’t know,” Burton said. “The Fosters are not responding. Before the gunshots, Samuel told me they were under attack.”
“Under attack?” Tag tried, ensuring he heard it right. “From the marines?”
“No,” Burton said. “The Imoogi.”
Tag accelerated, pushing his body to its limits. A coppery taste seeped into his mouth, his lungs burning.
Come on, Alpha. Sumo. Gorenado. Be okay, be okay.
Tapping on his wrist terminal, he made another call. “Lieutenant Cho, the Imoogi are attacking. I’m requesting backup.”
“Is this the same attack on the colonists Burton told me about?”
“Yes!” Tag said. “They need your help now.”
“That’s a negative,” Cho said. “They want to be independent, they can damn well learn how to protect themselves.”
The calmness with which he refused the request stoked the fire already raging in Tag’s gut. “Goddamnit, these are innocent people!”
The comm connection ended.
“Bastard!” Tag yelled.
Frightened faces peered at him from some of the windows. If no one else would help the colonists, it was up to him. He heard another crash as he ran toward the clinic. Up ahead, in the freshly built wall, there was a gap the size of an air car. Rubble lay strewn across the ground. An identical hole gaped in the wall of the clinic. Tag rushed in, grabbing a chunk of broken masonry as an improvised weapon.
Time slowed as the scene before him coalesced. The wailing of the sirens and the voices chattering over his comms seemed to die away. His senses became focused and narrow. First he saw Sumo lying against a wall with singe marks over her armor. Then Gorenado kneeling, his rifle broken into pieces on the ground before him. Gorenado had one hand on his head, the other on his knee. Blood dribbled out of his nose. Empty beds and medical supplies were scattered everywhere. And amid the supplies lay something Tag assumed was a dead Imoogi.
It was a long, slithering beast with six arms but no legs, like a snake. Fins spread from each arm like little wings and down its spine. Brilliant red streaks stained its lips and yellowed teeth, matching the scarlet still throbbing in its globular eyes.
But the doctors were still unaccounted for, and so was—
“Alpha!” Tag cried.
Another section of the wall tumbled down as an Imoogi flailed its muscular tail. Alpha had her silver hands around the thing’s neck. Dents and black gouges marred her chest plate, and wires hung loose from her elbow. Tag threw the chunk of wall he’d been holding at the Imoogi. It thudded against the Imoogi’s head, and its neck twisted to focus those malevolent red eyes on Tag.
Alpha used the momentary surprise to throw the creature into the wall. Tag scooped up Sumo’s dropped rifle and aimed it at the Imoogi. He squeezed the trigger. The alien was faster, curving and curling so rapidly it became a grayish blur. It emitted a series of high-pitched clicks and shrieks. Sharp pain jabbed into Tag’s ears like knives twisting into his skull. He fought the overwhelming urge to drop the weapon and cover his ears.
He fired again, but the Imoogi dashed out the hole in the clinic’s wall. Tag followed it, his eyes aimed down the gun’s sights. He let loose a spray of shots. The Imoogi was too far, and the shots went wide. It crested a hill and then disappeared down the other side, sulfurous steam vents obscuring its escape. There was no way Tag would catch the damned thing.
As he began to lower the rifle, he saw more movement atop one of the hills. He pressed the sights to his eye and zoomed in. Far out of range of the pulse rifle, seven or eight Imoogi were slithering away. They seemed to be holding some kind of tubular weapons. With them they carried four humans—two of which Tag guessed were Samuel and Beth Foster.
“Son of a bitch,” he said. He considered giving chase, but he was outnumbered. His brief spat with the single Imoogi didn’t make his odds seem favorable. He lowered the rifle and ran to the fallen marines.
“You with me? Sumo?” Tag asked as he knelt beside her.
Her eyes, crusted over with blood caked in dust from the rubble, blinked open. She pushed herself up slowly. “Goddamn things got us. So fast.”
He offered her a hand and helped pull her up. She groaned as she took her rifle back from him. Gorenado had managed to lift himself up.
“You good, marine?” Tag asked.
“Took a couple hits, but I’ll live. My pride took the biggest hit.”
“Don’t blame yourself. Those things are faster than a ship in hyperspace. Alpha, how about you?”
“I will require repairs,” she said, “but I am functional.”
“Thank the gods you’re all alive,” Tag said. “I want a full workup on each of you as soon as possible. But—”
“But we gotta go rescue those colonist
s, don’t we?” Sumo asked, brushing bits of broken wall and insulation from her hair.
Tag nodded.
“Good,” Gorenado said, punching one fist into an open palm. “I owe those snakes a little payback.”
Footsteps pounded outside the clinic. Bull had arrived with Lonestar. Lucky was at their heels, hissing and spitting like she was ready for a fight. A few seconds later, Coren, Sofia, and even amateur historian Greg joined them. “Where are the Fosters?” Greg asked.
“The Imoogi took them,” Tag said.
“Gods!” Greg said. He tapped his wrist terminal. “Can you say that again? I wasn’t recording.”
Tag shoved past the man, shaking his head. The Imoogi were still moving toward the shore. An aggressively sharp object jutted from the water like a single rocky outcropping. It looked out-of-place, artificial. If Tag had to guess, that was the Imoogi’s vessel.
“Let’s go!” he yelled. “Get to the ship. We won’t catch them on foot.”
The group charged out of Orthod and toward the Argo. Once aboard, Lucky instinctively ran to her cage as the others ran to the bridge.
“Grav impellers, shields, weapons, and sensor arrays online,” Tag ordered. He had no idea what they might face under the water, but he had long since learned that whether it was ice gods or Dreg, being prepared was never a bad thing.
“Sofia, you know what to do,” Tag said after securing his restraints.
“You got it, Skipper.”
Groans echoed throughout the bulkheads. The Argo lifted slowly, and Sofia tilted the controls, the ship following her movements. The distant shoreline appeared in the viewscreens, past the hills and steam vents. Sofia pushed the throttle forward, and they exploded toward the sea.
“Alpha, anything on sensors?” Tag asked.
“Negative, Captain,” she said. “I am uncertain as to why the...”
Her words trailed off as she tapped across her terminal. Sparks flickered from her busted left arm, and Tag hoped she would hold together, praying he wasn’t pushing her too hard. A few minutes later, they reached the shoreline, but the Imoogi vessel had already disappeared underwater.
“We’re going under,” Sofia said. “Brace yourselves!”
Frothy water rose to meet them, glowing green in the beams of their forward lights. Then the Argo broke through, plunging into the unknown.
At least four colonists had just been abducted. Tag guessed this was the fate shared by the other missing people, colonists and marines alike. They must be feeling lost, hopeless, unbelievably frightened, yanked from their homes and pulled into the ocean like this. A voice nagged at him, telling him this was a waste of time, that he hadn’t come to Orthod to solve these people’s problems. This was a distraction from his real mission.
But that sort of thinking made him sound like Lieutenant Cho. He wasn’t going to save the colonists. Governor Burton couldn’t even if she wanted to. The captives would be lost, devoured or killed or whatever the Imoogi were doing with them. Tag found he couldn’t live with that.
Saving lives was why he had joined the SRE, why he’d become a scientist. A doctor.
Through his mind’s eye, he saw the Imoogi again with their mouths painted crimson.
We’re coming for you, assholes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Darkness swallowed them. Strands of dense seaweed swirled around like the winding tendrils of a hurricane. The forward lights blasted into the black, but light couldn’t move the seaweed and sand. They might as well have been flying through mud.
“Alpha, I need a ping on those Imoogi,” Tag said, trying not to sound too panicked.
He imagined the terror in the captive colonists, and the crooked, red-tinged grins of the Imoogi. Burton’s words rang in his head like a distant death knell, sounding more haunting and wrong than ever before. We made peace with them.
How could anything that looked like that—acted like that—have made peace with the colonists? What reason did they have to tear innocent people from their homes, their workplaces?
“Alpha, come on!” Tag said more forcefully.
“I am trying, Captain,” she said. “But whatever their ship is made of, I cannot seem to find it via radar or lidar. There is a high probability it is constructed of similar material as the reef structures.”
“Reefs?” Coren asked.
“Yeah,” Sofia said through gritted teeth. “The big spiky things all around us.”
Sofia wasn’t using the viewscreen to guide them; instead, she was studying the holoscreen. It displayed a three-dimensional view of her surroundings, recreated by the radar and lidar pings. Mountainous shadows of reefs and rock jutted from the ocean floor, and the holoscreen beeped each time she brought the Argo too close to a towering underwater stalagmite. He thanked the gods for having a pilot as good as her, someone who could see the world clearly even through a lousy holoscreen recreation like that.
“Look for whatever’s moving out there,” Tag said.
“Yes, Captain,” Alpha said. She tapped on the terminal.
The holomap at the center of the bridge exploded with red markers indicating moving objects. Every goddamned bit of seaweed and sea creature around them had been tagged.
“Alpha!” Sofia yelled as her holoscreen became cluttered with flakes of red.
Alpha tapped on her screen again. The red haze vanished, replaced by dozens of dots instead of thousands. “I have made the dimensional selection range more precise. According to my sight-based analysis of the Imoogi vessel, it should be within these parameters.”
“Damn it,” Sofia said. “There’s still too many.”
“Pick the one going the fastest,” Tag said.
Sofia sucked in a breath. “All right, here we go.”
Tag was pushed back into his crash couch. The hum of the engines rose to a crescendo, and bubbles swarmed around them. Clumps of seaweed stuck to the outer cams of the Argo, clotting the viewscreens. All Tag could do was watch the holomap. They were closing in on the closest red dot, which Alpha had optimistically labeled “Imoogi Vessel.”
Between more columns of rock and curtains of underwater plant life they wove, carving intricate paths through the water. The more they curled and dove and ascended again, the more Tag thought they had the right target. Whatever they were chasing was trying its damndest to get away.
Has to be them, he thought.
Soon they came upon an underwater plateau. The seaweed streaked across their viewscreens, and hulls began to clear. They were in open water. Schools of fishlike creatures darted away from them, some spinning in their wake. Ahead, Tag saw a glowing spot of red, like an ember burning in the distance.
“Coren, can you get a weapons lock? I don’t want to fire on the craft because of the hostages, but do what you can to scare them. They need to know they aren’t getting away.”
“Done,” Coren said, tapping on his terminal.
“What do you want me to do now?” Sofia said, nudging the Argo forward, closing the distance between them and the Imoogi.
Tag hadn’t really thought that far ahead. Maybe the Imoogi would give up, run out of fuel or... gods, supplies? How long would they continue this chase?
There had to be a better way.
Then it hit Tag.
“Alpha, you remember that time we dragged Bracken and the Stalwart through hyperspace?”
“Yes, Captain,” she said. “I have perfect recall. I engaged the grav tether to tow them behind us.”
“Good. You think it’s possible to lasso these guys with the tether?”
“Lassoing implies a physical—”
“Figure of speech,” Tag said. “Can you halt the Imoogi vessel and drag it toward us?”
Alpha was quiet for a few moments. The only noise at her station was the clack of her metallic fingers on her terminal. “It is certainly a possibility, but the odds are—”
“What do I usually say about the odds?” Tag asked.
The Imoogi vessel grew l
arger in the viewscreen.
“You do not want to know them, Captain.”
“Right,” Tag said. “You just get ready to make that tether connection when we get close. Whatever the odds, I know you can do it. I know that you will do it.”
“Yes, Captain.” Alpha’s beady eyes narrowed as she hunched over her terminal.
Without the underwater forests to hide behind, the Imoogi vessel sprinted across the open ocean floor. Not much ground was left between the Imoogi and the Argo. Sofia shoved the throttle forward. A stream of bubbles from the Imoogi craft poured around them as they surged through the waters. It took mere seconds for the Argo to catch up.
“Alpha, tether!” Tag said.
Sofia maneuvered the Argo deftly, following the Imoogi’s every move. Coren’s finger hovered above the countermeasures controls, but the Imoogi didn’t fire. Had the alien race become so isolationist that they neglected to arm themselves? Tag would’ve expected a barrage of pulsefire or torpedoes. But so far the ship had done nothing.
Strange, he thought.
“Tether initiated!” Alpha said.
The Imoogi vessel jolted as the tether took hold. It swerved like a fish caught on a hook and line.
“Reel her in!” Tag said. “Sofia, put us at ten percent power. Apply reverse thrust, and shake these assholes up.”
The Argo decelerated immediately, and the Imoogi vessel snapped to a standstill. Bubbles streamed from the thruster ports on its stern. The vessel could do nothing to escape the hungry grav tether dragging it in.
“Alpha, try hailing them,” Tag said. “I want to give them a chance to release the colonists.”
Alpha worked the comm channels, broadcasting a public hail. It went unanswered. “They have either not received our message or have chosen not to respond, Captain.”
“Fine, then,” Tag said. “They want to make this difficult.” He selected the private channel for the marines. “Bull, prepare for a boarding mission. EVA suits and all.”
“Yes, Captain,” Bull responded.
Rebel World (The Eternal Frontier Book 4) Page 16