The Phoenix Requiem (The Phoenix Conspiracy Series Book 7)

by Richard Sanders

  It took great difficulty, but Calvin somehow found the will inside himself to compartmentalize Miles’s death away, for the time being, and focus on the immediacy of their situation.

  The mission was not over. And none of them were safe. They had to interrogate the prisoner, just as surely as they had to escape the system in one piece. That meant getting back to the Nighthawk, and fast. Calvin knew that.

  They continued, moving swiftly, racing to get back to the pods. Before they reached them, however, they encountered another group of Polarian soldiers; this group seemed less taken by surprise when Calvin and his men attacked. Perhaps word had spread, intruders in the building. Be on alert. Calvin would be surprised if it hadn’t.

  The two groups exchanged fire almost immediately. Calvin was eager to squeeze his trigger—too eager—he didn’t even bother spending the extra second it would have taken to actually line up the sights. Because of this, and his compromised state of mind, his bullets, although rapidly fired, were all completely off mark. When he’d fired his last round and it too failed to strike his intended target, Calvin was swift to drop the magazine, slide in another, and resume his shooting.

  As much as he had tried to compartmentalize away the death of his friend, and as much as his personal survival instincts pled with his mind to pay his full attention to the battle, he could not stop thinking of Miles. And that sent Calvin into a blind, blood rage. It was so intense a feeling, and it took such overwhelming control of him, that when another of his shots missed his Polarian target, he leapt to his feet—having previously been kneeling for cover—and began walking down the corridor, completely exposed, continuing to fire his weapon with every step.

  His men cried behind him, shouted at him to get back or get down, some asking what the hell he was doing. He didn’t really comprehend what any of them said, nor did he allow himself to think any of it through…to him it was white noise. Something that existed outside his world. His tiny, limited, focalized world consisted of the Polarian soldier whom he had selected as his target, and his own insatiable lust for revenge. Retribution. Blood for blood. It was as if Calvin had so wanted to believe that this individual, his target, had been the person who had killed Miles, that he had somehow succeeded in convincing himself of that very fact. And nothing else mattered, nothing but making the bastard pay for what he had done. For Miles’s pointless, utterly senseless death.

  Two beams of energy fired his way. One off target by over a foot, perhaps it had been aimed at someone else; Calvin didn’t know, nor did he care. The second beam proved much more of a threat…it nearly took him in the head, proving to be just off mark by mere inches on his left. It had come so close to striking him that he’d felt the heat of the blast momentarily. It had felt, for a moment, like he had stuck his ear on a frying pan, but the heat and the pain were gone in an instant. And Calvin did not care that he had just narrowly escaped death. It did not matter. All that mattered was exacting painful justice upon this Polarian, his target, so that Miles may rest in peace.

  Calvin fired twice more, both misses, as he continued his advance, still at a walking pace. His eyes never left his target; they were so intensely locked onto the Polarian that Calvin scarcely blinked.

  You will pay for this, he thought. Squeezing the trigger once more, again missing his target, but this time only narrowly. I will make you all pay.

  Then, taking him completely by surprise, he felt a strong hand grip him by the left shoulder and yank him backwards with such force that he nearly collapsed onto his back. The jolt caused him to fire the gun and a bullet struck the corridor’s ceiling.

  Fortunately, Calvin managed to keep standing; even though he was being dragged backward, away from the target he so desperately wanted to kill, a part of him allowed it to happen. And, as more beams were fired in his direction—some very nearly on target, there was a small part of Calvin’s brain that realized that he had put himself into unnecessary danger, and that retreating back into cover was a smart idea. And that small part of him, although distasteful and ultimately unsatisfying, had been enough to keep him from resisting the force of the man tugging him back down the corridor, back toward relative safety, where the rest of his group stood by, each kneeling or standing aside, taking the best stances they could in the situations where cover could not be found.

  The tugging on his left shoulder stopped and was replaced with a powerful force downward, making him collapse to his knees. At that moment, something awoke inside him and he realized this was a person who had just risked his life, gone out of cover himself, and, through great effort, actually cared enough to drag Calvin back to safety, away from certain death, and had now just planted him on his knees, making him a smaller target; more or less, this person had done everything possible to protect Calvin, despite great risk to himself.

  Immediately, Calvin felt foolish for what he had done, and ashamed that he had forced someone else to endanger his own life to come save him; but, coupled with those feelings, was also a tremendous sense of gratitude…even awe that someone would do such a thing for him.

  True, others had died for him in the past, or risked their lives to help him, even save him; he could not even count the number of times such a thing had happened—and he still lived with the guilt of the knowledge that it had ever happened, because, in his opinion, his life had not been worth the sacrifices made on his behalf—and yet, though it could be said that this was not the first time someone had done such a thing for him, nonetheless he felt extremely grateful. It was the kind of thing a loyal friend would do, someone with the same kind of loyalty that Miles had. And, as Calvin turned to see the face of his rescuer, a part of him hoped—despite the impossibility—that it would be Miles’s face that he would see. The big man would flash that big dopey grin of his, then he’d make some kind of attempt at a smart remark.

  But it proved not to be Miles. A familiar face, yes, even someone Calvin liked, but still a part of him was irrationally disappointed that it had been Nikolai, and not Miles, who had proven to be his rescuer. Still, Calvin did not allow such irrational disappointment to color his feelings of gratitude toward the muscular, bald soldier.

  Before Calvin could thank him, or say anything, Nikolai spoke. “Come now, old friend,” he said with a crooked smile, “If you wish death, that is no way to have it.”

  Calvin nodded, feeling the return of his senses, his blood rage dissipating rapidly. “Thank you,” he said. Though the words felt inadequate.

  “Is not problem,” Nikolai replied, once again showing off a crooked smile. He then raised his arm and pointed down the corridor, toward the enemy, a small squad of six Polarians that continued trading fire with Calvin’s people. “That,” said Nikolai, still pointing toward the enemies at the far end of the corridor. “That is problem.”

  Calvin nodded. “What do we do?” asked Calvin, knowing that their small arms were about as effective at range as the enemy’s energy rifles, meaning that, aside from a direct charge—which would be bloody—there seemed to be no way to take them out. And going around them was not an option, they were blocking the only way back to the pods. “Any ideas?” Calvin asked.

  Nikolai nodded. “Yes,” he said. Not further expounding.

  “And?” asked Calvin, finding Nikolai’s answer to have been incomplete, at best.

  “Ah,” said Nikolai, again showing his crooked smile. He reached around his other side and pulled something from his belt. As he raised it up for Calvin to see, Calvin could have sworn he saw an honest-to-God twinkle in the bald soldier’s eye.

  Calvin was stunned; he didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected, but certainly it hadn’t been this. To his knowledge they had been forced to use them all, so how did Nikolai still have one, and why did it look different than the others? The color was wrong, it had strange grooves, and seemed larger than normal.

  “We use special grenade,” said Nikolai, holding it in his hand lovingly, as though it were an egg about to
hatch. “We have problem. We use grenade. Problem gone. Simple, yes?”

  “Yes,” Calvin agreed, nodding eagerly, and wondering what the hell they were waiting for if they still had a grenade all this time. He also was curious to know what made this strange-looking grenade “special.”

  “Okay, I go handle problem now,” said Nikolai, and he stood up. The moment he did, he drew fire from the enemy, but the beam rifles proved too inaccurate from this distance, or else the shooters too inept, or, for all Calvin knew, Nikolai somehow deflected the beams away with his sheer force of will.

  Calvin watched as Nikolai bent down a bit, held the grenade with both hands, and then began a full out sprint toward the enemy, drawing the pin as he did so. He only went a few steps before throwing it down the corridor, and immediately dove to the ground for cover once the grenade had left his fingertips. Calvin watched it sail through the air, landing almost perfectly in the center of the six Polarian soldiers who blocked their way. Even they seemed not to recognize what it was, or what was happening, until the very last instant.

  Once they did, they immediately scrambled, trying to rush away in all directions, but they had waited too long. The grenade went off in a massive explosion of shrapnel, one far greater than a standard frag grenade would have produced. The sound of the concussion echoed all the way down the corridor, almost deafeningly loud—even from Calvin’s distance. He blinked, in a state of near total disbelief, then saw that, where there had been six armed enemies moments before, impeding their hope of escape, now there was simply a gruesome display of strewn-about body parts; some unrecognizable pulp that, Calvin concluded, must have been flesh and organs; fragments of bones; the tattered remains of uniforms; bits of broken and splintered metal; and, most palpable of all, enough blood splattered everywhere it looked like the owner of the corridor had hired the worst contractor ever to paint the walls, floor, and bits of the ceiling.

  “Problem gone. Let’s go,” said Nikolai, getting back to his feet and waving for the rest of them to hurry along. Calvin made a quick check to see that their captive was still well in hand, his arms bound behind him, and he was. Two of the surviving members of Calvin’s team had a grip on him as they moved, quickly, toward the exploded corpses, in the direction of the pods.

  As he walked through the puddle of blood, trying not to tread on any fragmented body parts, he was even more disgusted by the sight of it—and the smell only made things worse. He resisted the urge to retch as he passed, hoping the image hadn’t been permanently burned into his brain.

  That is definitely something I never want to see again, he thought. As a hazard of working in Intel Wing, he had, in fact, seen even worse displays. There wasn’t much that could top the effects of a grenade on an alien. But the fact that the victims had been aliens, somehow made it a little easier to stomach.

  Even though Calvin would be the first to state that Polarians and Rotham were people just as surely as humans were, all life of such intelligence must be considered a person, he knew that, he believed that, he accepted that, and, on more than one occasion, he’d even preached that while finding himself in an unwanted argument with a human supremacist or two over the years.

  But, despite his liberal nature, open mind, and whole-hearted commitment to equal rights among intelligent, empathetic life, wherever it existed and whatever it was, there was still a part of him that was biased in favor of humanity. And not just politically—which he could justify—but biologically too. He probably wouldn’t admit to it, but he knew, on some level, that, if he had to choose to save a human child or an alien child, he would choose the human child every time. And it was that extra level of attachment he had for human life, that extra sensitivity, that made sights such as this one—despite all its copious blood and gore, with body parts strewn about—not nearly so revolting to him as seeing the same thing with human victims. But even those images paled when compared to the very worst things he had seen. The worst of the worst that he had ever been forced to examine pictures of, for a case, had always involved children, human children—it was those images, and not this kind of stuff, that did sometimes give him nightmares.

  Fortunately, they were able to exit the structure, go into the woods, and find the pods without any further violence. Their group had taken enough casualties that it made little sense to take both pods when they could all easily fit into just one. On top of that fact, the other pilot had been one of the casualties, leaving Calvin as the lone survivor qualified to fly either of the two pods.

  “Okay, everybody inside this one, now. Move, move, move,” ordered Calvin, after unsealing the hatch. One by one they shuffled in: first Nikolai; then the captive was lifted and shoved through; then each of the two soldiers assigned to guard the captive filed in; then came First Lieutenant Ferreiro—who was the last surviving member of the mercenary party Raidan had sent to the Nighthawk; then the remaining seven Rosco soldiers got inside, also one by one; and finally, making sure he was the last left, Calvin climbed in and sealed the hatch.

  “All right, gentlemen,” said Calvin, taking the controls. “Let’s get the hell off this rock.” He retracted the landing grips, set the stabilizers to their proper position, activated the Ops display next to him, set it to automated so it would alert him to any objects in their flight path, should any appear, and did one quick pre-flight check—knowing that if something seemed wrong with this pod they could simply take the other—fortunately everything looked good. “All right, everybody hold onto something,” said Calvin, and he engaged the thrusters.

  With a surprisingly eager lurch, the pod leapt into the sky and ascended rapidly through the lower atmosphere into the higher atmosphere.

  Calvin had only minimal knowledge of pods such as this one, but he had always sort of written them off as amateur star craft. But suddenly he found himself rethinking his opinion. It was comfortable; much roomier on the inside than one would assume from the outside; the top-half of the circular wall surrounding them was all windows, so you could admire the sights; even the ceiling was windowed, so, once you had freed yourself from whatever planetary object you’d been stuck on; it was all stars and open space, everywhere you looked, except at the floor. Unfortunately, by necessity, the bottom of the craft could not also be transparent. Most of all, Calvin liked the amount of power the designers had packed into such a tiny vessel. The thing really moved. It was almost fun, though he was loath to admit it.

  As an added benefit, there was no sky traffic to compete with whatsoever and no possibility of a mid-air collision. He could maneuver the craft as directly, or as wildly as he pleased, and there was no danger at all. He supposed that was one advantage of flying away from a planet so reclusive that its name was literally The Forbidden Planet—or whatever the Polarian equivalent of that was.

  Feeling the pod climb ever upward, and the amount of thrust hurtling them away from the ground at such intense speed, not to mention the excitement of the winds buffeting the craft around, jostling it just enough to remind you that you’re alive…this is what piloting was, Calvin thought. True piloting. It should feel free, and liberating, and light-hearted, and even a bit dangerous. This reminded him of so many years ago, when he’d begun his training as a pilot, and why he had done it in the first place. And, though there were many reasons, perhaps the most important one had been that he’d expected piloting to be, well, a lot more of this. Not the kind of boring, button-pushing, joyless experience you got helming a starship. That robbed the profession of all its simplest and purest pleasures. There was no wind throwing you about, no storms to fight, no gravity to wrestle with, no sense of orientation to ever make you question whether or not you were upside down, no sensation of danger that any given flight might be your last because your vessel could actually fall. No, starship piloting was all about minimizing risk, following exact procedure, and never, ever, feeling that surge of adrenaline you get when you punch the thrusters on a little craft like this one to escape a planet’s gravity. Sure, a starship
could go unfathomably faster than a tiny planet-going pod such as this one, but in a starship, even at full speed, there was nothing there to make you feel like you were moving at all.

  Calvin let out a sigh, enjoying the moment, trying to forget—just for an instant—the dreaded weight of the recent past, and its many losses…Miles, Rain, and probably Rez’nac too by now, not to mention the soldiers who had fought and died alongside him in the Alcazar. Though he tried to steer his thoughts toward something less miserable, whether it be simple emptiness, or perhaps something positive, it didn’t work; the less he tried to think of the tragic and the grim, the more his mind became fixated upon it.

  He simply could not stop thinking about Miles and Rain, and, as his thoughts wandered, he even thought of Monte, the old doc, and the times they had shared together…the list of friends and loved ones he had lost in the recent past seemed kilometers long.

  And, to top it all off, he still had no answer for his mother’s disappearance. Although he clung to hope that she remained alive and well, somehow—perhaps she’d met someone, fallen in love, and spontaneously and deliberately run off with him, or something like that, something happy—it nonetheless bothered him, in part because he had learned never to assume the best when the evidence implied the worst, and secondly because it ate at him inside not to know the answer; not to know what had truly happened. Had she been taken? If so, by whom? Was she still alive? If so…where was she? And how was she? Did she need him? It positively destroyed him inside whenever the thought crossed his mind that she could still be out there, somewhere, alive, but in desperate need of his help, and, because he had no knowledge of any of it, he was powerless to come to her aid.