Vor’l reached down and picked Khai up by the waist, hanging him momentarily upside down and, with great effort, drove Khai head first to the floor. Khai was able to twist his body in such a way that his upper back and shoulders took the brunt of the impact, but the landing still drove the wind from his lungs. As Khai tried to stand, Vor’l kicked him in the right side, cracking several ribs. Khai growled with pain. Vor’l wound up for another kick, but Khai caught his foot and pushed it up, all the while working his way to his knees and then to his feet. Vor’l’s foot was almost higher than his head when Khai rushed forward, driving Vor’l to his back before his hip was dislocated.
Khai immediately lunged, landing directly on him with fists pummeling. Khai’s fists were bloody from multiple strikes to Vor'l’s mouth, and those teeth were sharp! Eventually, Vor’l was able to block the next set of punches and pressed him off to the side. As Vor’l rolled away from Khai, Khai growled, “Oh no you don’t!” and reached out to grab him. He grabbed Vor’l by one of his ears and jerked him back into a headlock. Vor’l gurgled as he struggled to his feet with Khai hanging off his back. Four or five stumbling steps backward and Vor’l found a wall upon which to smash Khai. Three powerful crashes into the wall and Khai finally released his grip.
They both fell to the floor, gasping for breath. Khai reached up and grabbed the edge of a console to pull himself up, while Vor’l staggered to his feet without aid. The two of them regarded each other for a moment before attacking once again. They exchanged blows with almost thunderous impacts. Khai’s face was swelling up, he couldn’t see out of his left eye and he was bleeding from his nose, mouth, and left eye. Vor’l was not any better; his ear had been ripped clean off, he was missing several teeth, and had blood dripping from his snout.
Vor’l swung a straight right hand, Khai sidestepped it to his right, coming down with his right hand and swinging up with his left. This was exactly what Khai was hoping for. He knew that if it came to sparring, he would rely completely on his reflex package to help him react faster. In one fluid motion, Khai’s hand slapped Vor’l’s arm down, while his left palm struck upward on Vor’l’s elbow—bending it the wrong way until it popped out of place. Vor’l cried out and staggered backward. Khai thought he had him! He lunged forward only to catch Vor’l’s knee right under the chin. Khai saw stars and he hit the floor with a bounce, but was still able to roll out of the way of a fight-finishing stomp that was destined for the back of his head.
Khai kept rolling as Vor’l stomped about trying to crush him. Eventually, Vor’l gave up on that idea and waited for Khai to get to his feet. Vor’l’s arm still hung useless at his side… that was until Vor’l flexed his fist, growled and forced his arm straight. There was another softer pop and the elbow was back in place.
Aww, great! Khai though ruefully.
Vor’l charged Khai. Khai’s reflex package saved him from being tackled by allowing him to leap forward in a front flip over Vor’l who crashed into the computer console against which he had intended on pinning Khai. He spun, drool and blood splattering about, to look balefully at Khai, who invited him to attack again. Rage filled Vor’l’s eyes as he roared, lunging forward. Khai moved with speed that Vor’l had not yet seen and caught Khai’s boot dead center in the chest, stopping his forward progress immediately and sending him crashing to his back.
Khai loomed up over Vor’l’s crumpled form. Vor’l slowly reached behind his back and grabbed a knife all the while reaching out and grabbing a heavy piece of debris with the other hand. He threw the piece of debris with awesome force, and Khai easily dodged it, but the knife was already on its way and found its mark in Khai’s chest just below his left shoulder.
To Vor’l’s horrified realization, the knife bounced off of Khai’s vac suit and fell harmless to the floor. “Well how about that!” Khai taunted. Vor’l then did something Khai did not expect. He produced a gun. Khai ran and dove for cover as Vor’l sent a barrage of laser bolts in his direction.
“You cannot win, General Khail!” he shouted with rage. “You will die in front of your people. It is inevitable!”
Khai reached back for the laser pistol he took off the dead F’Rosian earlier. When the gun wasn’t there, it occurred to him that that was probably the gun Vor’l was using. “Shit!” he whispered to himself. His only chance was to keep him talking and chasing him around the bridge until he could get back to either one of his knives or his gun. He risked a look around to see where Vor’l was. When he didn’t find him, he almost panicked, almost. Then he felt the hot muzzle of a laser pistol burn a circle into the back of his neck. “Man, I am slipping!” he growled, raising his hands.
“On your feet,” Vor’l commanded. Khai complied. Vor’l led him to the center of the battle-ravaged bridge directly in front of the camera. He pushed Khai down to his knees facing the camera. “Have you any last words for your people?”
“Don’t worry, Brindee. I’ll be home in time for supper.”
Vor’l actually laughed. “Such arrogance! It does not matter, though.”
For the camera, Khai grinned. He couldn’t have asked for better circumstances. Vor’l was just about a foot behind Khai when he pulled the trigger.
The following events seemed to happen in slow-motion. Khai heard the faintest click of the trigger being depressed. In the time it took for the circuitry to register the trigger being squeezed, to the time to it took for the energy to be discharged through the barrel and out the muzzle, Khai had already leaned out of the way and the laser bolt passed harmlessly over Khai’s right shoulder.
Khai continued to move the same direction, swinging a left backhand that slapped the gun from Vor’l’s grip. Before Khai could get up, Vor’l literally picked Khai up off the floor and threw him to the back of the bridge where he collided with instrumentation. Sparks flew and Khai grimaced as he hit the floor on all fours. Vor’l was on him in a flash, kicking him in the other ribs and breaking more. The force of the kick caused him to tumble over the dead body of a F’Rosian—the one Khai had killed with his knife.
Khai pulled the bloody knife from the dead body and flung it as quickly as he could at the approaching F’Rosian.
Vor’l was not expecting the knife whirling at him. In a split second, the knife struck him in the neck. He stopped, his eyes wide with surprise, not pain, as he didn’t feel any. He dropped to his knees trying to speak, but all that came out was a gurgling whine. The last thing to go through his mind was that he never did a memory transfer to his offspring meaning that all of his knowledge, all of his ancestors’ experience would die with him and that was a fate worse than death!
The bridge around him faded into a black oblivion and then, nothing…
Khai slowly stood up and stumbled over to the main viewer that showed the concerned faces of his enemies. “Stand down, or be destroyed!” Khai growled, blood seeping from multiple places on his face. “Now!”
The enemy ships stood down as ordered. Ryynaall couldn’t believe what his eyes were seeing! They’d won! They’d won!
Prime Minister Puar stood from his seat and addressed the situation room. “Once again, we as a people have survived insurmountable odds to overcome adversity. With the aid of our Vyysarri allies, we will no longer fear the unknowns of the galaxy! Good work, people!”
The floor of the bridge came fuzzily into view. The view of his own blood pooling out was the last thing on his mind. He had one final surprise for Khai. He removed the lid of a small, cylindrical device to reveal a red button. With monumental effort, he depressed the button and suddenly alarms went off.
Alarms started going off all over the bridge. Khai’s stomach tightened with fear. Suddenly the screen went from F’Rosian faces to a bright red flashing screen in a language Khai couldn’t read, but the glyphs counting down was enough to know what was coming.
“Sibrex!” Khai yelled. “Get the hell out of here! Don’t wait for me!”
Khai fished his helmet out and got it on just before the
first explosion rocked the bridge. A large, gaping hole now existed from where the main viewer used to be all the way up the center to the top. Khai held on for dear life as the air was sucked from the bridge. Once the vacuum had taken hold, Khai relinquished his grip on the bulkhead to which he was clinging.
“Well that wasn’t so bad,” Khai said to himself.
Then the floor beneath his feet began to rumble, increasing in intensity with each passing second as explosions rocked the spine of the ship. Suddenly, Khai remembered how the last ship went up and he knew that his problems had just begun. The final explosion in the engine room felt like a distant quake. Then the lights went out and they were adrift. Artificial gravity failed at that point and Khai’s feet weightlessly left the floor. He knew that his exit was a quick one: straight out through the hole in the roof. Then, to his horror, he saw Seryys looming up in front of him.
The ship was caught in Seryys’ gravitational pull and what was worse was that he was floating in the middle of the bridge with nothing to use as leverage for a good push-off. The ship once again began to rumble as gravity began doing its job. What started as a gradual slope into the planet’s atmosphere abruptly turned into a bone-jarring lurch forward followed by a deep rumble that he felt more than he heard. As the ship picked up speed, Khai was sucked into the back wall of the bridge.
The ship began breaking apart around him. His mind raced as to how he was going to make his escape before the ship crashed and became his grave. Suddenly the wall behind him gave and he went flying end over end, crashing into several things he couldn’t even see, before reaching out and grabbing a metallic pipe that was jutting out from a wall. He could see the fire flying by another breach in the hull. Not even he was strong enough to keep himself rooted there long with multiple g’s tugging the skin tight across his face. Just then a little voice inside the helmet chirped, “Leak detected.” That’s when he remembered the blast he took in the shoulder just as his grip faltered and, yet again, he went tumbling back into the bowels of the ship, colliding with numerous unseen obstacles on his journey.
He wasn’t sure if it was a good or bad thing when he came crashing to a stop against a solid wall. For a moment, he was hopeful that he would just tumble all the way through the ship and come out on the other side before crashing so he could deploy his chute. As he forced himself to stay conscious, the long, twisted corridor through which he had just tumbled vanished before his eyes to reveal Seryys’ horizon line looming ever closer. Had he not been at death’s door, he might have thought about how beautiful the sight was. He had broken though the atmosphere and was now in a free-fall, he could still see the curvature of the planet as the sun had just set behind the horizon, casting a bright orange glow across the landscape. If these were to be his last moments, he could die knowing that he had seen some pretty incredible things!
He had jagged walls on either side of him, and a stub of a floor before him. He looked up and saw that the ceiling above him was completely gone. He thought that maybe if he could get close enough to the ceiling that he might be able to deploy his chute and it would pull him free of the wreckage before impact. He placed a firm foot against the wall, he pushed and was able to roll himself to his stomach. From there, he scooted along the wall on his stomach as if crawling underneath enemy fire until he got close to the edge.
His vision was narrowing with each passing second from the leak in his suit; his body ached from the unreal amount of pressure he was enduring. With his last conscious moment, he hit the chute deployment button and felt the violent jerk of his chute catching the wind. Then, all he could do is hope that he didn’t break every bone in his body when he landed… if he landed.
Khai came to. He was still falling. At first he thought maybe he was dreaming. But that dream quickly became a reality as his head cleared. He was definitely falling, but not as fast as a free-fall. He was spinning like a top and felt nausea tugging at his gut. He looked up and realized that, though his chute deployed it was now hopelessly tangled. He would not survive the landing. To think, he made it this far to die because his chute was tangled! In most cases, he would cut the line and pull the reserve, but as he went to pull the reserve chute, he realized he was on the backup. Things just went from bad to worse…
Suddenly, he felt a huge impact on his back right side and heard, “I have you! Cut your parachute, quickly!” Sibrex shouted.
Moving quickly, reached for his knife and realized that it was buried to the hilt in Vor’l’s throat. “I don’t have a knife!” Khai shouted back.
“You normally have two,” Sibrex pointed out. “What happened to the other one?”
“Look, we don’t have to time argue!” he shouted. “You cut it!”
“I have no more knives!” Sibrex yelled back. “I used my only knife to cut your first parachute!”
“Great!” Khai screamed as he twisted back to grab the ultra-thin lines that tethered him to the useless chute. With a roar, he pulled at the lines. The woven fibers began to separate.
“Keep going!” Sibrex encouraged.
The lines were digging into Khai’s hands causing them to bleed, but he didn’t stop until the fibers snapped under the strain. “I’m clear!”
Sibrex pulled his chute and they almost stopped their fall instantly, replaced by a gradual descent for only about ten seconds before they crashed into the planet and tumbled in a heap of arms and legs, groaning in pain and cursing softly. Seconds later, Vor’l’s ship rocketed overhead trailing a tail of black smoke and debris. Sibrex jerked Khai to his feet and started running, despite his body’s protest, as a large piece of hull came crashing down, flattening the spot where they were laying only seconds before.
“That’s two I owe you, now,” Khai said breathlessly.
“In a matter of a few seconds, at that,” Sibrex added.
“Boy, you really are keeping tabs, aren’t you?”
“No, not really,” Sibrex admitted. “I just enjoy hearing the different ways you like to say ‘thank you’ without actually saying it.”
“Huh,” Khai said. There was a silence for a moment. “Thanks.”
“You are welcome.”
“So, when you got up today, did you think you’d be fighting dog-men aliens, sabotaging two ships, jumping out of a falling ship and saving your best friend from certain death?”
“Yes,” Sibrex said, “to saving my best friend from certain death. That was a given.”
For two seconds Khai wore the angriest expression, which morphed into a smile followed by a full-bellied laugh. They both lay in the grass laughing so hard that tears were rolling down their faces. That was how Dah and the others found them when they arrived.
They loaded up and got underway.
In the situation room, Prime Minister Puar was standing in the center of the room with Braac and Chuumdar when Khai, Puar, Dah, Kay, Brawl and Brix entered. The hundred-or-so people there stopped what they were doing and gave them a standing ovation. The Prime Minister strode up the staircase to the lift landing, gave his little brother a ferocious hug and shook the hands of everyone else. He then escorted them down the stairs to the center of the situation room where Braac and Chuumdar were standing. Pleasantries were exchanged.
“Ambassador Khail,” Chuumdar addressed Khai. “It is good to see you. Well done.”
“Thank you, Prefect,” said Khai with a cordial bow.
Chuumdar moved onto Sibrex. “Commander,” Chuumdar said, extending both hands. Sibrex took them and they touched foreheads affectionately. Everyone exchanged confused glances. This was the first time anyone—other than Braac, who was apparently unaffected by this intimate exchange—had seen either of them show such affection toward anybody.
“I told you not to come yourself,” Sibrex said both with anger and relief. “That there were other people as qualified to command the fleet.”
“I’m sorry, father,” Chuumdar said. “But as the leader of our people, I felt it imperative to be here.”
&
nbsp; “I know,” Sibrex said. “You are my son, through and through. And… well done. You’ve made me very proud.”
“Thank you, father.”
Everyone stared in complete disbelief at the exchange.
“Wow,” the younger Puar brother said. “You learn something new every day!”
“Indeed,” Sibrex said.
The Prime Minister cleared his throat to get everyone’s’ attention. “I also have a proposal for you, Chuumdar, if you permit me. Ambassador Braac and I have spoken about this already, and I wanted to extend the invitation for you and your people to come home.”
“What do you mean?” Chuumdar asked, clearly confused.
“I’m inviting your—our—people to come back to the Seryys System.”
“Where would we live?” Chuumdar asked candidly.
“Seryys Seven,” Braac answered. “It does not spin on an axis so one side of the planet is always dark. It is several times bigger than Seryys, has a breathable atmosphere and plenty of life to sustain us.”
“Also,” the Commander in Chief added. “If some of your people are reluctant to leave their drifting colonies, we are willing to bring them to Seryys Seven so that they can orbit the planet, but not live on it.”
“You would do this for us?” Chuumdar asked, amazed.
The Seryys Chronicles: Steel Alliance Page 24