The Guardians of Sol

by Spencer Kettenring

  By now, the com channels were bursting with yells and screams and even a little insane laughter, from all of the insertion teams. Squatter blasted an enemy, and one of our frontline Castigars rushed forward to grapple with a man who was about to crush my skull in. Wall plating crumpled under their blows.

  “Fall back! We can’t afford to get cut off in these corridors.” The Castigar went down. I finished off his opponent, and switched to the instructor’s channel. “Meet up in the first mess hall, we can defend better from there.” The chatter cut down as squad leaders acknowledged the order. Now we just had to get to the rendezvous alive.

  Before they started hitting us, I had had five other men with me, including Squatter. I had already lost two of them, and the three hostiles we had taken down failed to make it up for me. We backtracked as fast as we could, though the hostiles kept antagonizing us. Just one intersection before the cafeteria we ran into another group of the dark armored men. They came at us with blades bared. Acting sooner than I could order anything, one of the Castigars pulled out an old arc spear, used by the previous generation of Spartans, and charged right back at our adversaries.

  Electric blue arcs lit up the small space and tore liquid gouts of metal off of power armor. The artificial gravity finally went offline, and the molten globs formed into glowing spheres. Reacting swiftly, my men and I used our momentum to continue forward, bouncing off of walls in ways only possible in zero-gravity.

  The Castigar with the arc spear stayed behind, tearing into the men around him. I checked his IFF signal. “Private Sandsmark, fall back!”

  “Go on Captain, I’ll buy you the time you need to organize the defense.” He stabbed another man through the chest. “I don’t mean to be impertinent Captain, but you have bigger worries than me.”

  I swore. Damn kids. I sent Squatter and the other Castigar on ahead. I activated the mag-locks in my boots and calmly started taking my shots. First was an enemy behind Sandsmark, then I sent one sprawling into a wall. “Sandsmark, the time has been bought; fall back or I’ll shoot you myself. This isn’t a good battlefield to die on.”

  With a sigh, he bounced back to me by bounding off of one of his opponents. Oh, Newton, your third law is so useful. The stricken man became entangled with some of his companions.

  “We’re going to have a talk later, Private.” I told him as we hurried into the protective arms of our fellow Guardians. He just acknowledged me with a quick double click. Bullets flew past us as our comrades tried to cover us.

  Our enemies fell back, for the moment. Haywire and Shot-put ran over to me. “We’ve lost fifteen men, including Nickel. He killed at least six of the bastards before he went down though. Initial estimates are that we’re facing over a hundred enemies. Bad time not to have any decent armor, eh?”

  I swore. “Add two more to that tally. By the Depths, man, how are we supposed to fight off double our number when they’re every bit as mean as we are?”

  “I wouldn’t be the one to say, Captain, but calling us into one area like this was either a very good idea, or a very bad one.”

  I swore again. Then I called the remaining captains together. “Gentlemen, I need options. I’m told we face worse than two to one odds. The other insertion teams are as pressed as we are so don’t expect the cavalry anytime soon. How do we even things up?”

  They did a lot of vacillating; none of us could come up with any ideas that were practical or that wouldn’t end up with all of us dead. A happy cry came from the corner of the mess hall. With a few spare batteries, one of the men had reactivated the computer panel at the end of the distribution line. We walked over and tried to make sense of what he had called up.

  The characters on the screen looked like a combination of English and Russian. But even Captain Petrokov, who hailed from St. Petersburg, couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

  “What good does computer access do us if we can’t understand it? Keep working at it Sergeant, maybe you can pull up a deck schematic. If you can’t do that then get a data dump from it.”

  *****

  It took the sergeant almost half an hour to find what we needed, and to do that he had had to go down to the source code. The enemies outside the cafeteria kept rotating their attacks, and we kept beating them back. With the walls and doors as cover, we were killing more of them than they were us.

  “Captain Castle!” The sergeant at the terminal called. “I found the bridge. Its two levels directly above us. There are access points here, and here.” He pointed to spots on the screen. “We can get there in just a few minutes if we make a break for it.”

  “Good work. We should be able to push through the men on that side.” I turned and addressed the thirty-odd men waiting on my decision. “Guardians, we know where the bridge is. All we have to do is take the two access shafts outside of that doorway. We’re going to plow through the bastards on that side and take the bridge before they know what’s what. This is our only option. The other teams are pinned down even worse than we are. Let’s do this in teams of four. Move out.”

  I was the first out, and was immediately assaulted by a dark armored man wielding two recurved swords. I ducked under his first swipe, and dodged the second one. I rushed in and pressed the muzzle of my rifle against his stomach. He swung again but I caught his arm before firing my rifle. Red blood and milky blue hydraulic fluid spattered my armor.

  The other Castigars had passed me by, surprising and slaughtering the enemy troops. The access hatch had been left open, enabling us to simply bounce through. A few feet away, above our heads, was the second access hatch. There was no one around to stop us on this level. Rather than taking any chances, we continued our headlong rush and jumped up through that hatch as well.

  Now we met more resistance. Two full squads protected the entrance to the bridge. The rest of them must have either been harassing the other Guardians or stranded back on Pluto. Personally, I hoped for the Pluto option.

  Sandsmark and other Castigars rushed forward with their close combat weapons. With his arc spear, Sandsmark took out two almost right away. That spear was vicious, punching through armor like butter and frying both electronic and biological systems. The hostiles quickly fell to our concerted attack, though they killed three more of my men, and wounded eight more. I fed my last ammo clip into my rifle. My squad formed up behind me, guns ready, and Castigars went to either side of the blast doors sealing off the bridge and dragged them apart.

  The scene on the bridge was not one I expected, to say the least.

  An armored, bestial form held a squirming human aloft with one hand. They were… talking to each other… and from the tone the human was using, the conversation was anything but friendly. The beast glanced over at us, casually snapped the neck of the man it was holding, and stalked over to us. I think we were all too astonished to open fire, to even know if firing was the right thing to do at that point.

  In badly mangled English, the thing spoke to us. “The Captain of this vessel has triggered a cascading failure in the gravity matrix. You must leave now.”

  At least, that was the message we understood after it repeated it several times, emphasizing different words and speaking more slowly after every attempt. It was clear the beast thought we were idiots.

  “You must leave now and take me with you. It is your only chance.”

  A half dozen of my remaining Castigars slid past the beast, the sergeant that had deciphered the programming code earlier looked at several active terminals on the bridge.

  “I don’t know what’s happening, sir, but I can tell that it isn’t good. It might be best if we followed this thing’s advice.”

  “Agreed.” I turned to the thing and turned on my exterior speaker. “Whatever, whoever you are. Thank you for the heads up. We’ll take you into custody now and decide what to do with you later.”

  Two Castigars moved in to restrain the surprisingly intelligent beast. Apparently he didn’t like this plan, moving faster than any of us could
respond, he had pinned the two offending men to the walls with a foot and a fist. He pointed a strange double-bladed sword at me; the two edges came out from the same point, but were probably only separated by a difference of ten degrees.

  “This is on my terms, human. Do not test me,” he literally growled.

  “Alright, we’ll have to deal later. Beat feet everybody. Get back to the shuttles before this cascading failure does something we don’t like.” I switched channels to speak with Christoph. “Sir, we reached the bridge, but according to a prisoner, someone activated a… cascading failure in the gravity matrix. I don’t know what that means but it doesn’t sound good. I’m ordering my men back to the shuttles.”

  Something in my news didn’t please him. His cursing was… colorful, to say the least. “Shit and hell in a hand basket of death! Didn’t you pay any attention in science class, Castle? We all have to hurry the hell off of this deathtrap!” He switched over to the command channel. “All Captains, Lieutenants, and Guardians, this vessel is about to self-destruct. Get your asses out of here.”

  If whatever was about to happen was getting such an unflappable Captain so bent out of shape, you could bet that I was twice as motivated as before to get to the assault shuttles. At some point, the beast had taken point, and his double-bladed sword tore through any Centurions that stood in his way as if they were little more than weeds. He moved too fast to entirely track.

  Regardless of any reservations I might have about him, he did turn a trek that took more than an hour earlier into a journey of only a few minutes, following hidden hallways and access hatches straight to the awaiting shuttles. Before we got that far, I bent down and scooped up one of the Centurion swords left over in the beast-man’s wake. Even if we lost the wreck, I wasn’t going to leave here empty handed. Granted, the data the sergeant downloaded would probably be more useful, but every little bit helped. Maybe. Hopefully.

  It took only minutes more for the shuttles of my insertion team to load up and launch. Spurred by the Shadowstealer’s captain, every shuttle pilot used full acceleration, threatening to burn out the engines. Halfway to the Forge, the shuttle jolted, throwing several men from their feet. I peeked out the nearest viewport just in time to see the derelict consume itself and a lagging shuttle in a miniature black hole that quickly dissipated, unable to stabilize its own mass.

  The shuttle jolted again as the tug of gravity from the anomaly disappeared. I walked over to the beast-man, looked past his silver-grey fur, past the wolf-like head. I looked him straight into his tawny-gold eye.

  “Who or what are you?”

  “I am Vadasz, Herceg of the Farkas. And your world is in great danger.”

  14

  June 19, 2289. The Forge, Block 3

  Vadasz sat calmly across from me, his hands idly scratching channels in the solid steel of the table. He had refused to even speak with the Venators that came in to debrief him; demanding instead to see either me or our leader. Obviously I’m the more disposable of the two of us. The Sentinel was sure to watch the security footage from the comfort of his office when he returned, I am sure. Vadasz was flanked by two Castigars in full armor. I hadn’t bothered – I knew what the man-beast could do.

  “Alright, Vadasz,” I began. “On the shuttle you told me that you are the… Herceg of the Farkas. What is that? And what are you?”

  “I am… A Herceg… a noble among my species – the Farkas. The Centurions invaded almost one of your centuries ago. We had barely begun to experiment with working flying machines. Their technological superiority was telling. We slaughtered their ground troops, so they took our packs hostage from space. My own pack was one of those used as an example. I do not wish to speak more of this right now.”

  “Fair enough. So why is my world in danger?”

  “Because the Centurions are here to conquer it! They are here to do to you what they did to us. To use you and enslave you. To make sacrifices to their god of blood,” he replied with great bitterness.

  “And you want to stop that,” I replied, puzzled. His English was getting better every second, as well. “What do you expect to get out of it?”

  “I do not care as much about your people as you might wish to think. I have known only pain and sadness from humans, but your group does seem different, and this was my best chance to strike back against the enemy. I want… I need help to liberate my people. The Centurions will assume that I am dead. We will use that, if you will help me.”

  “After seeing what you’re capable of, I’m inclined to help, but that’s out of my hands. I’ll relay your offer to my superiors. That’s the best I can offer right now.”

  “Then for now. It will have to do.”

  Just then, Christoph walked into the interrogation room with a pad and a miniature holo-projector. The Farkas’ eyes narrowed in suspicion, but Christoph was just as unarmored as I was. He didn’t even have a pistol or sword handy. My fellow captain assessed Vadasz. The Farkas’ armor had been taken away to be analyzed, but it appeared to be simple and barbaric; something that offered basic protection from weapons and nothing else. The wolfman himself stood a half a head taller than his guards, wore nothing but a loincloth, and had massive muscles masked by his shaggy grey fur. He cut a truly intimidating figure. After a few moments of silence, Christoph called up an image on the projector.

  “What can you tell me about these? Are they more of your people that are being used by these Centurions?”

  The image, obviously captured by the Shadowstealers’ combat recorders, showed a massive brown beast that did indeed bear resemblance to the Farkas though it lacked all of his grace. Vadasz tensed, filling with an emotional turmoil of sadness and anger I can’t even imagine. The table crumpled where he held the edges in his massive hands. His guards tensed themselves, but I waved them down.

  “That is Serult…” the beast admitted. “The Centurions took our children and members of our lower classes. They took their nobility and twisted them and bred them in their labs. They are no longer Farkas. They are little more than animals anymore.”

  “We captured one of them. I was hoping for some tips to keep it docile once we let it wake up.”

  “It needs space to run. Keep it well fed. Those will help. Let none of your people get close to it without adequate protection. The Serult are even stronger than I am, and I could crush your body with little effort. The Serult do still acknowledge their superiors. If you cannot tame it on your own, consider letting me interact with it.”

  “Thank you,” Christoph replied. “I couldn’t help notice that you called the Centurions human earlier. Are they all human? Where did they come from? Are there other species among their ranks?”

  “The Century Empire spans many inhabitable planets. Many of those host intelligent life. A few are home to humans as well as others. I do not believe that this fleet has any troops other than humans or Serult. More than that I am not sure of. Mine has not been an honored position within the empire.”

  *****

  I hurried to Chief Ruiz’s engineering bay first thing in the morning. This still only allowed me to get about two hours of sleep. After the debacle with that enemy ship, the lengthy debriefing of Vadasz and every surviving member of the scouting force there just hadn’t been time. Christoph told me his own story about Pluto, and rumor had it that a Venator had returned from Saturn with news of his own. The Sentinel had been told and was rushing back from the summit in Japan.

  I sighted Ruiz as he looked over some blueprints. “I need that armor, Chief. Tell me it’s done.” I told him, there was no joviality in my voice.

  “Give me an hour and it will be,” he replied just as seriously, picking up on my mood. “We just have to put some finishing touches on a few of the hammers.” He indicated a bench where half a dozen greenish-blue hammers lay half assembled, and the technicians working on the weapons. A short-lived smile passed over my face when I saw that Rachel was one of them.

  My disgruntled disposition returne
d as soon as I looked away, however. “Thank you. That’s a lot better than I was expecting. One more thing, I lost Nickel last night. With any luck I’ll be sending his replacement in this morning, how fast can you re-fit that suit?”

  “Now that it’s completely assembled it shouldn’t take any more than half an hour. If you don’t want him messing with the settings for hours on end then have him bring in the data crystal from his current armor, most of the data will transfer right over.”

  “Thanks again, Chief. Nothing is probably going to happen until the Big Boss gets back, but I want to be ready. I’ll see you in an hour or two.”

  “It’s no problem, Captain. My whole job is making sure you guys are battle ready. I’ll get techs on the final inspections ASAP.”

  I nodded to him on more time. On my way out, I went over and gave Rachel a hug and a kiss. She almost immediately sensed that something was wrong, but knew better than to ask right now. We would talk later. Hopefully.

  *****

  “Sandsmark!” I called out when I entered the Green Dragon’s dormitory. The young man jumped at the sound of his name, and he failed to cover his shock when he saw me.

  “Sir yes sir! What can I do for you, sir?” he said, automatically saluting me. Under normal circumstances, I would have laughed at that, not one of my own men ever saluted me seriously. As it was, his discipline was refreshing and I saluted back.

  “Sandsmark, you got my attention last night. You probably took down more Snappers than any other man in my group.”