by Shane Black
It’s mouth opened and a chorus of screeching voices filled the air. Iris-less white eyes stared at nothing. Its unusually large skull was hairless and covered in bruise-like veins.
Moody fired again, and again, but the creature simply turned and floated back up the corridor, ignoring the powerful energy bolts it absorbed without reacting. Shadowy humanoids streamed around it and rushed towards Moody. He cut several down with his blaster pistol before he engaged the rest hand-to-hand. The big marine officer was more than a match for the relatively weak intruders one-on-one, and in the narrow cross-corridor they were only able to get at him one or two at a time.
He clocked the first one with his blaster, ramming into its helmet straight-on. The second swung wide and was rewarded with a swiftly broken elbow. After they slumped to the floor, the ones behind stumbled forward. The colonel was having the best of it until one grabbed him from behind. It jabbed a knife-like device into his neck. There was a moment of disorientation and then...
All Moo could say for sure was he was standing on a precipice that seemed hundreds of miles away from what it overlooked. Before him was a gigantic dull green translucent spherical object suspended inside an even larger chamber. If he didn’t know better, he would have said he was looking down on a planet during re-entry. The sight caused a wave of vertigo to rush over the colonel. The distances he perceived were beyond human comprehension. He had never been inside a structure even a tiny fraction as large as this one. It was cold and damp, and not home to anything even vaguely resembling human beings.
Yet somehow Moody could feel a presence at the center of that sphere. Somehow he knew it was Admiral Hughes. An image formed in his mind. He could see a human face staring into infinity, mouth wide open and thoughts of slaughter and conquest seeping from its mind. A thousand chittering sounds stormed into Moody’s consciousness, and over them a voice that was becoming less human by the moment.
“Weakness must be consumed. The strong must aspire to greater things. Else all is lost.” They weren’t audible sounds in the strictly human sense. The words felt like an icy cold wind drifting through the colonel’s soul. The sounds conjured images of graveyards and decay.
“Magnificent, isn’t it? What is born from here will soon be warlord of your reality.”
Colonel Atwell approached Lucas’ vantage point. He still wore the same faded and damaged uniform.
“You weren’t making any sense before, and you aren’t making any now, colonel.” Moo replied, still dizzy from the effects of the transition to Ithis space.
“Nonsense. We have been taught our entire lives how sacred life is, yet we never even once consider the sheer power of anti-life.”
“When I get you back home, I’m going to celebrate your court-martial with a nice thick steak, Atwell. You’re a traitor to your own race, and you’re a traitor to Skywatch.”
“Skywatch is a bacterial colony, colonel. I’m talking about galactic civilizations here. You don’t even recognize what you are seeing. This structure alone is so far beyond the pathetic boundaries of human engineering there are perhaps five men alive who could even understand it! If you flew across that expanse at your ship’s best speed, it would take days to reach the other side. Only three men have ever seen an enclosed space this large in all human history. The Ithis are the stronger species. Why can’t you accept that?”
“If they’re so strong, then why do they need a fleet of our ships to do their dirty work? Why steal our technology and attack our people? What could they possibly have to gain?”
“They want what is in our minds. The more primal and more powerful our emotions, the stronger it makes them. They see us as a source of primitive vitality. It is something they’ve lost over the millennia, but they never lost their craving for it.”
“If they’re that advanced, they can find their cavemen elsewhere,” Moo replied. “Why did you bring me here?”
“To see and experience what Admiral Hughes has become and to consider your own destiny. You will witness the sheer power at his command and you will join us in our great mission to re-invigorate a thousand ancient civilizations with humanity’s one unique spark, colonel. The resulting conquest will be so far beyond anything we’ve dared dream of I suspect none will command the words to describe it.”
“There’s nothing here for you, Atwell. You’ve gone mad and sacrificed Admiral Hughes to whatever is taking place in there.” Moody glanced at the distant structure and again was almost staggered by the sheer volume of visual information he was asking his mind to process. He closed his eyes and tried to regain his composure.
“End this.”
“Turn my back on the greatest discovery in human history? And you’re the one accusing me of madness? Even if we leave aside the fact we could be witnessing what no other human being ever will, what of the technologies these creatures have gathered? They have been traveling space in their dimension for millions of years! They only seek to rule us like they rule every other species they conquer. The Raleo obelisk is only a tiny demonstration of how they can change our entire reality!”
“Which means only one thing, Atwell. We have about as much business here as roaches have asking me about fuel cell maintenance. We don’t belong here! Now send me back to my ship, or I’ll make it clear to the Admiral and anyone else in this circus you aren’t to be trusted! You turned your back on your own species! The more advanced these Ithis are, the more likely it is they’ll recognize your treachery for what it is!”
“Oh, they already understand it, colonel. They just don’t care. You can bark at them if you wish. If they don’t kill you outright they’ll simply empty your mind and consume what is left of you for heat. It’s not a pleasant process. If you like I will introduce you to the humans its been performed on. Have you ever seen a man or woman with literally no mind?”
“Then what are you waiting for, colonel?” Moo growled, his muscles trembling with a barely-restrained rage.
“Once the two human fleets have destroyed each other, the Core will be unprotected, and our rulers can enter our existence to take what is theirs. Hughes is simply giving the Ithis the savage impulse to invade and conquer. And when the admiral’s mind is gone, yours will take its place.”
Atwell turned to leave. “The overmind will turn man’s flawed nature into his extinction, and we’re going to start with Captain Jason Hunter.”
Epilogue
Not far away from where Moo was abducted, Lieutenant Tixia was holed up in an alcove with one of the intruders’ communications devices. In her lap was a fully armed blaster. She was hard at work trying to figure out how the device functioned so she could listen in on the enemy’s communications, but the mechanism and circuitry were totally unfamiliar to her. The strangely shaped device seemed to be designed to wear on the side of the head near the ear and also seemed to have some oddly biological components of some kind. In fact, it had changed shape at least once since she retrieved it from the intruder she had shot. She was certain it had something to do with their ability to teleport as well, but that was a secondary concern. Right now, she just wanted to listen in.
A row of yellow lights lit up one side of the device, which didn’t tell the young signals officer much. She was just about to give up when a chorus of dissonant sounds came from it. They sounded like screams of pain and only lasted a few moments. Then it was silent again. She turned the device over and continued trying to get it to work.
All at once, the ship’s power shut off completely. The entire deck was plunged into darkness. Even her blaster pistol indicators went dark. Sparks and flashes from the damaged electrical junctions continued for a few moments and then even they were gone.
As she experienced the loss of artificial gravity and felt herself float up off the floor, Zony heard something. It was coming from the device she had commandeered. It sounded like the radio transmission of a creature of some kind breathing. It grew louder as she listened. Finally there was a voice. It made the hairs on the back
of her neck stand straight up.
“You were all warned, lieutenant.”
To Be Continued in the Adventures of Captain Jason Hunter and the Bandit Jacks Book Seven: Echelon of Fire
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“I think I know where you’re going with this, Zony,” Hunter said with a twinkle in his eye. “Go on.”
“Well, sir, you know how the old Bearcats used to have those enormous shielded magnets bolted to the undercarriage of the wiring harness?”
“They dumped that whole assembly when the Wildcats replaced it with the carbon lattice circuitry, didn’t they?” Annora asked.
“Exactly,” Hunter said.
“Yeah, and that left this big hole because the Wildcat hull is just a Bearcat hull without the external capsule reactor mounts. So I took a broken EW package from the spare parts depot, mounted a really crappy battlecomp component on it and wired it up with those amps and ran some frequency tests on it and I think I invented a new ship.”
“So it’s a fighter with all radios and no weapons?” Moo asked.
“It would be if it weren’t for the Two-Gen datalink,” Zony said, almost bouncing in her chair and trying to contain her excitement. “Normally if you just fly the thing out there it’s a Nemesis without the really advanced gear. But a Nemesis can’t lash up with a Yellowjacket datalink because--”
“Because it would give away their position,” Yili said nonchalantly, still drawing little imaginary designs on the table with her finger.
“Right!” Zony exclaimed.
“So what happens when you put this ship of yours in a squadron datanet?” Annora asked.
“You get a whole squadron of nasty little flying point defense emplacements with exactly the same fire control circuitry as an anti-missile frigate,” the Signals Officer replied proudly. “Right down to the model numbers on the components.”
“Interesting...” Moo exhaled.
“Are you suggesting we convert a battle squadron of fighters to missile defense?” Hunter asked, bringing the conversation back down to Earth.
“No sir, you don’t have to do anything that drastic,” Zony replied. “All you have to do is add the radio ship to the formation and let them pick their own targets. They don’t have to stop being fighters. They get advanced missile defense capability without losing a thing.”
“And that means we could put three ‘anti missile frigates’ on our perimeter as part of our combat space patrol,” Annora said. “Not exactly a battle group, but impressively close.”
“What do we call this thing again?” Hunter asked.
“A Jackrabbit, sir!” Zony announced, clearly just as excited about the name as she was about the invention itself.
“Alllllright, have Buckmaster modify one Yellowjacket for each squadron with your circuitry.”
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Battle Force
Shane Black
10.0 Copyright © 2015
Palace in the Sky Productions LLC.
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No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher:
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