First of my Kind

  I climbed over the debris and caught sight of some movement at the far end of the room. It was several Grawl running like hell to find a place to hide. I was in a big open office area with short walled cubicles everywhere. It reminded me of a maze that mice or rats might run around in. The beast was starting to rage at me as my anger and frustration grew to uncontainable proportions. “STOP WHERE YOU ARE OR I WILL KILL YOU ALL!” If anything my rant made them disappear even faster. I couldn’t take it anymore and fired six explosive rounds in the direction they had retreated to. When the dust and debris settled I didn’t have to worry about crawling through any more doorways because the entire back wall was blown out. I could hear someone screaming and moaning. Working my way across the demolished workstations I found a wounded Murlak thrashing around on the floor. His screeching was annoying so I shut him up with the needle gun. The scene through the large hole in the wall was grisly. There were two dead Murlak mixed in with several dead Grawl. There were weapons scattered on the floor around the corpses. I don’t know if they were trying to ambush me but it was the last thing they ever did. I would continue looking for a guide. Trying my comms again the whistling seemed even louder.

  The wall was blown out into another hallway. I would look for more interesting doors to blow up. The hallway dead ended at a large airlock. It had to be one of the many hangars that dotted the outpost. Rather than just blow it up I tried the cycle control and to my surprise the hatch opened. I stepped into the lock and ran the dozen steps to the next hatch finding the heavy door securely locked. Retracing my steps confirmed my suspicions someone had locked me in the airlock. I had a feeling I was being observed all the time I was running amok. I let the beast rage for a second more but finally came to my senses before shooting my way out. If some fool thought I was trapped, maybe they would make the mistake of trying to come and get me. I decided to play the game a little longer. Jerking my shotgun around towards the door I stepped back to the opposite one. I fired a single round that exploded against the door blasting me with shrapnel. Other than a large blackened dent the door held. I guess it was what Drayen was waiting for because a view screen on the wall lit up with his shifty face. I don’t think he knew who was behind the blacked out visor and I wasn’t going to tell him. The highly modified armor suits would leave most races scratching their heads trying to figure out who we were.

  My shotgun was now of such an exotic looking nature Drayen would not be able to associate it with its Earth origins. I slapped the gun to its mount and faced the monitor without saying a word. Drayen had a puzzled look on his face and just a hint of white to his pallor. I knew what a horror I looked like and it made me smirk to know the Grawl piece of sewage was uncomfortable just looking at me. He found his tongue and spouted his usual superior arrogance.

  “Cease your violence! Your leader has been killed and I have three hundred troops waiting in the hangar to destroy you if you will not listen to reason. I am prepared to pay you and the other two Mercenaries five hundred million credits to stop your rampage and leave this outpost. Your only other choice is death. The three of you cannot possibly think you can take this outpost without losing your lives. You must decide quickly before I lose my patience. What’s it going to be Mercenary, credits or death?”

  It was the same old Drayen all mouth and no ass. All of this talk was not getting me to Tria any faster. I needed a way to force Drayen to give her up without him using her as a shield. The rage within me was tearing at my soul to take action. I was on the verge of giving in to its bloodlust. “The Chaalt are aware you have seized two of their citizens. Our leader was paid a fortune to bring them back. If they have been harmed, we have orders to destroy this outpost and bring you back with us, dead or alive. Turn them over to me now and pay us a billion credits for our trouble and then we shall leave. The pirates who seized them will all die for what they have done. We are prepared to carry out our orders to the death if necessary. Are you prepared to die for two Chaalt citizens?”

  The look of surprise on Drayen’s face was not well hidden. It looked like he would start his rant again but I could tell something changed his mind. The video screen went blank and the airlock door gave an audible click then opened. I pulled my shotgun from its mount and walked out into the hangar. Drayen wasn’t lying about the troops because there were two shuttles with the hatches open and Murlak troops were scattered around the hangar in defensive positions. Several had large shoulder mounted weapons pointed at me. I could feel the rage taking over as my targeting screen picked out the weapons most toxic to my existence. Since I had no idea what Drayen’s intentions were, my rage took the defensible position of kill or be killed.

  I hit my thrusters hard and shot across the hangar sending a nonstop stream of high explosive shells into the startled troops. Bodies and debris flew everywhere. I landed on a control room catwalk and turned to the shuttles and gave both three shots from my beam weapon. They blew apart in spectacular explosions causing a massive fire. I was taking return fire that was ripping the catwalk to pieces. I boosted across the smoke filled hangar and laid down another barrage of high explosive rounds on the remaining troops. For good measure I came to a stop overhead and turned in several revolutions sending fifty rounds of anti-personnel shells at the scattered pockets of soldiers that remained in my targeting visor. The smoke and flames had the temperature in the hangar climbing rapidly. If any of the Murlak survived my onslaught, they would soon be forced to retreat. From what I could see before my attack they had poor armor and were well armed. I could imagine they were wishing for the opposite. I saw a group of red diamonds pop up in my visor and they ran for the airlock I had abandoned a few minutes earlier. I waited until the last one made it inside and fired a high explosive round into the hatch before they could close it. The airlock hatch went flying across the hangar and landed with a loud clang against the remains of one of the shuttles.

  The temperature in the hangar rose to over six hundred degrees and I could see the flames had spread to all parts of the hangar. There were no life signs evident below me and I jetted over to the control room door. I tried the door control, and it opened. Stepping inside I saw a door in the back of the room. I would continue my search until I found Tria and her father or I would destroy the outpost a room at a time until I did.

  My anger decided to not bother if the door was locked or not. I pointed the shotgun at it and blew it to pieces. Down the long hallway behind the now shattered doorway, was several retreating Grawl with a couple of Murlak at the rear of the parade. They were running hard to reach an open elevator car that sat waiting for them. I was going to tell them to halt but the last Murlak in the line turned and jerked an object off of his armor vest. As he set his arm back to throw I gutted him with an explosive slug. The object he was going to throw fell behind him at the feet of his comrades. There was a fiery red flash and the occupants of the elevator were roasting in some kind of chemical fire. The door of the elevator car closed and took the barbecued agitators to another floor. Wherever they were going might be where I needed to be so I ran the length of the hall and blasted the doors into the shaft with my shotgun. Quickly reloading my slug magazine I switched over to the explosive buck shot. I still had a lot of territory to cover and was expending my ordinance faster than I could cover the ground.

  I tried my comms again, and it was still being jammed. I hoped Coonts and Klutch were uninjured and making better progress than I was. Looking down the shaft I used my low light gear to locate the car several hundred feet below me. I stepped off of the floor ledge and fell to the top of the car catching myself with my boosters. There wasn’t an access panel on the roof of the car so I hit it with buck shot until I had a sizable hole to drop through. Changing out the buckshot magazine I dropped into the hole. The lift car was blackened by the chemical grenade the Murlak had dropped inside. I was standing ankle deep in the jelly like immolated remains of Drayen’s troops. I waded out of the elevator and was hit with particle beam weapons being
wielded by several Grawl. The tube weapons were ineffective and only made my rage a little happier with the thought of killing them all. I came storming out of the elevator car blazing away at my foes with buck shot. They were being shredded and tried to make a run for it. They mostly died tired. The carnage only mildly placated my Oolaran blood lust. I stepped to the corpses and found what I was looking for, a survivor! I pulled the Grawl from the floor and held him in front of me. He was missing his left arm below the elbow and was bleeding profusely. I found his continuous screeching annoying, and I stuck the shotgun in his face and told him to shut up or I would finish the job. He bit down on his screaming and stared into my visor. “Where is Drayen?” The Grawl ground out an answer. “He is on floor sixty six, that is where his residence is. It is twenty seven floors below us!”

  I decided we needed to pay Drayen a visit. I leaned down and ripped a small cable loose from a shattered workstation and grabbed the Grawl’s wounded appendage. The Grawl howled in pain as I wrapped the cable around the end of his severed arm and tied it tight. “Take us down to Drayens residence and I will let you go free!” I could tell by the look on the Grawl’s face he would rather do anything else in the universe than go see Drayen. “Mercenary, if we go to Drayen he will have both of us killed!” It wasn’t like Drayen hadn’t been trying to kill me anyway so I pushed the Grawl towards the transport car. “It’s the price of your freedom” The Grawl grudgingly moved into the car and stood amongst the incinerated guts and debris from the blown out ceiling. “The damage you have inflicted on the transport car may spell our doom even before we make it to Drayens floor!” It must not have translated well when I told him that if it does, at least I won’t have to put up with his bitching anymore. He was just staring at me with an incredulous look.

  The Grawl pushed the control mechanism, and the car dropped fast enough the pieces from the hole I had shot through the ceiling floated around and exiting out of the overhead. Then the strangest thing happened, in the back of my mind I imagined hearing a voice I had been missing for a very long time. I heard my grandmother’s sweet voice giving me a small dose of her real world observations and philosophy. “Nathan if you think you are having a bad day don’t be shocked or surprised if it gets worse before it gets better” I slowly cracked a smile and it almost brought tears to my eyes thinking about my grandparents. I missed them so much it hurt but there was no real way of easily fixing that problem. Then like a bolt from the blue the true meaning of what my grandmother’s simple saying meant. It hit me like a brick to the head! I hit my thrusters and blasted up through the hole in the ceiling.

  36

  I glanced down as I accelerated full thrust up and away from the falling car. I could just make out the Grawl my thrusters had knocked sprawling into the mess on the floor of the car.

  My helmet suddenly blacked out. I felt like the hand of God reached out and slapped me with a vengeance. I went flailing out of control bouncing from one of the shaft walls to the other. When my visor cleared and I could see once more, I was surprised by the mutilated upper torso of the Grawl cartwheeling by me. I could swear the look on its face was “I told you so.” I looked down the once glassy smooth shaft and was stunned by the devastation that Drayen’s explosive trap had wrecked on it.

  There was a massive cavity that encompassed at least ten floors in the shaft. My hasty retreat forced Drayen to prematurely detonate his device well below the transport car. I knew from my previous visit only about twelve percent of the huge asteroid was actually the outpost the rest was solid rock. The percentage that was habitable was quickly dwindling. At this rate it shouldn’t be hard to find Drayen because there wasn’t a lot of the outpost left to hide in. All the debris that had flown past me had reversed course with the pull from the artificial gravity and was falling into the dark misshapen shaft below me. Common sense was telling me Drayen would have been nowhere in the area of his explosive trap when he set it off. He had to be deeper in this rat’s nest so I flew down to the next undamaged floors. There was a good chance Drayen would not know the extent of the damage his weapon would unleash. It made sense to go down at least ten levels below the damaged floors and look there. I could always backtrack but felt it wouldn’t be necessary, I already knew what kind of coward Drayen was. He embraced the Grawl doctrine of leaving the dying to someone else to its fullest.

  As I passed through the devastated area in the shaft, I knew Drayen was pulling out all the stops in his quest to elude capture. Destruction of this magnitude was most probably the result of a sizable anti-matter charge or even a missile warhead. My Oolaran rage was almost at a boiling point and it was taking a massive effort to reel in my desire to continue the destruction Drayen had started. The only factor that tempered my rage was the thought of possibly injuring Tria or her father. I would have to contain my rage and redouble my efforts to find Tria and her father. When they were safe, I would find Drayen and do what should have been done a long time ago.

  I was startled by two loud beeps and two blue diamonds on my HUD’s display. Klutch and Coonts were rising rapidly up the wrecked lift shaft. My crew was safe and obviously on the prowl trying to determine if I was the source of the massive explosion. I tried to contact them but only got a garbled whistle. There was a good chance we could communicate when we were closer together. Boosting harder I closed the distance and got some burn through on our comms. I could hear both of my crew members trying to hail me and determine if I was injured. The jamming was down to a dull hissing whistle and we could now communicate between ourselves. “Commander it is unwise to dismantle this sewer unless you have already found Tria and her father” I frowned and looked at Klutch. “It was a trap Drayen tried to spring on me and it almost worked.” Coonts crowded in close to us. “Commander we obtained information on the location of where they keep detainees. We were going in that direction when our path was blocked by debris that fell down into the lower transport shafts. We were hoping Drayen had not angered you enough to destroy possible evidence where Tria and her patriarch might be.” Well it was pretty much out in the open now my crew knew what I was capable of doing if I was really pissed off. They were here to help me put a lid on my lethality and their presence temporarily calmed my destructive urges. “Lead the way Coonts, let’s find Tria and get out of here before I manage to do something really stupid.” Klutch’s helmet cleared, and I saw his usual big toothy smile flash at me. He winked with both of his lizard like eyes and I was my old reasonable self once more. His helmet blacked out, and he turned away jetting down the dark shaft just behind Coonts. These two weren’t just my crew they were my brothers and we would make it a family affair kicking Drayen’s ass for screwing with the wrong clan.

  I caught up with Klutch and Coonts as we dropped ever deeper into the dusty smoke filled shaft. Coonts slowed then came to a sudden hover causing me and Klutch to rotate and booster brake to keep from colliding with him. He called to us. “The door on this level is heavily reinforced and looks much different from the one we were told was the detention level. The Murlak we had questioned told us the prison level is three levels down from this one. I suspect he was purposely misleading us or trying to lure us into a trap. This is the only door opening that looks like it would be a security entrance.” I looked at the door closely and had to agree with Coonts assessment, none of the other doors looked as heavy as this one. “Let’s back up the shaft to a safe distance and hit the door at an angle with our beam weapons. That should keep the damage to anything behind the door to a minimum. Hopefully the glancing beams will slice the door open and send most of the debris down the shaft.” I thought about it a little more and changed my plan just a little to allow for any surprises Drayen had waiting for us. “Coonts go up high and try to cut the door out. Klutch and I will drop below you enough we can get an angle into the doorway in case there is more bad news waiting on us.”

  I thought I had all the bases covered when Coonts went weapons free. His beam weapon struck the door and continue
d down through it and blew a huge hole in the threshold. What Coonts’s HUD determined to be a safe distance for him proved to be marginal for me and Klutch. We were both blasted back against the shaft walls by large pieces of debris. My brilliant ideas were going to get someone injured. To make matters worse, before either one of us could recover four combat drones of considerable size started shooting at us through the hole in the door. Large explosive projectiles were striking the shaft walls all around us as we spun down the shaft head over heels trying to right ourselves.

  The only part of my plan that survived contact with the enemy was Coonts being able to shoot down onto the drones and give us some covering fire. He destroyed two of the drones outright before he himself was forced to retreat up the shaft wildly jinxing back and forth to elude the drone’s firepower. Klutch recovered from his archaic tumble before I did and boosted up the shaft so hard all I saw was a streak on my helmet display. I yelled at him to stop but his vector intercepted the lower of the two drones. I saw a flash of sparks sliding up the shaft wall and I stopped to pick off the other drone pursuing Coonts. My shot had to be perfect or I would risk unintended collateral damage by injuring Coonts. In a stroke of luck which I would consider my second acorn for the day, the combat drone pursuing Coonts came to a sudden halt and was attempting to turn back to aid the other drone Klutch was tearing the main weapon off of. Firing my beam weapon I showered Coonts with bright droplets of molten slag from the disintegrated combat drone. I would have to assume he was grateful for the helping hand because he didn’t say a word about the hot shrapnel bath.