Rebirth (Rebel Wars Book 2)

by Michael Andrews

  Yegret had given up all hope of escape until Milor had opened the cell and let her out, in which case she could have kissed him but she refrained. Grabbing as much gear for their soldiers as they could, they stepped out into the hallways and the precision at which the soldiers acted was a surprise to both Milor and Yegret. She hadn’t seen them in action yet, but the usual Rebellion soldier wasn’t the best shot or the most passionate of fighter and she saw both skill and passion in these men. She believed that all of the humans in the Rebellion fought with their all, but they had to recruit as many bodies as they could. These were not bodies, these were expert soldiers ready to go to war. They made their way to the entry level to the brig and recovered their stolen gear, equipping their armor and weapons and locking down the remainder of the brig. More security teams arrived and the fighting got more intense, they had to escape one of them by locking down a crew quarters and another team lost their fight and lay incapacitated or dead on the ship’s floor. Milor was a crackshot with his custom pistol they’d recovered from lock-up and he made sure the security team knew it when he was done.

  Azhulhand wasn’t going to be upstaged by no mechanical human, he thought as he boarded into his missile-barge and looked over the group of men Reinholdt had sent him. Only two of them were of his personal guard and the other 6 weren’t even officers. He supposed he could have been more specific with Reinholdt, he just figured the other Commander would know he’d need those with apparatus’s on the planet! Oh well, he handed a rudimentary set of coordinates to the pilot and gestured for them to be off. The barge thundered down from the mountains and trained its payload on points in the forest that Azhulhand wanted cleared. The missiles collided with the surface and cracked the planet’s crust open to render the foliage to ash. He laughed with every bombardment, this is what he’d wanted from the beginning and he knew why Reinholdt enjoyed being within his ship so much! While dueling and fighting the warriors of a soon to be conquered race had its own pleasures, this was something not to be missed.

  The barge floated down and careened towards a clearing that had been opened in the forest, scorch marks from the bombs forming around a single entrance that had been revealed in the ground. Azhulhand stood at the door to his barge, feeling the air rush into the vehicle and over his armor. He had recharged his suit and was ready to finish what was started. He leapt out of the ship, followed by his soldiers who landed behind him with a thud. The barge pilot was instructed to patrol the area and prevent any more of the Cydrakians from entering the tunnels below the forest, and to persuade them with a volley of missiles should they disagree. He nodded in agreement with the Commander and began his deadly patrol.

  Azhulhand and his soldiers picked their way through the corpses and burnt ruins of the forest, finding the tunnel’s entrance and dropping below into the dark. The lights from their suit spilled over the dusty tunnels, revealing ancient history to the Cydrakians and things of no interest to the Corporation soldiers now traversing the tunnels. An hour of walking brought them deep within the center of the underground structure, or so Azhulhand assumed without having any sort of gear to measure such a thing. The tunnels were not a maze and proceeded in one direction as if it was destined to lead them to the weapon Azhulhand had learned about. This God of Below was a powerful weapon as he reckoned, and he would be honored to present it to HQ when he pried it from the hands of its human defenders. He wanted to beat them there, but if it was one thing that he’d learned about humans it was that they didn’t go with what others planned or expected of them. They had Jin with them too, and Azhulhand had been fighting with Jin for far too long and never managed to kill the skin-walker, but then again the beast-man had avoided direct conflict with him as well. There wasn’t Blood Hunt on his head though, there was on Alice’s.

  The lights that turned on in Lisa’s part of the ruins turned on here as well, revealing that the path they walked on was decorated with signs and warnings. Azhulhand couldn’t read the language, but it didn’t take a linguist to note the signs were cautionary and designed to prevent further passage. He ignored them and ordered his men forward, so far deep into the underground tunnels that they eventually met a massive door that sealed them out from the main chamber. Threw his massive weight against the door, the stone cracking with every blow. His soldiers joined in, adamant that they weren’t going to be slowed down by a block of pretty carved stone. Dust filled the tunnel and was quickly sucked away by a rush of air as the door opened.

  Azhulhand and his men entered into the improbable room, somehow appearing to stretch higher than they were deep in the ground. The room was empty in the middle save a jade colored sphere the size of a typical Corporation Heli. Azhulhand gazed upwards at the spiraling ceiling, dark blue lights dancing at the edge of his vision. The walls were lined with alcoves and balconies that held screens and consoles of different shapes and sizes. Whatever this room was, it was the central hub for all intelligence and technology that the Cydrakians had come to ignore and have lost to time. He grinned and motioned for his men to spread out and cover the area, they had arrived first and it was time to set the trap. He could tell by muffled explosions and gunfire that the intrepid humans were nearby and soon his revenge and the Blood Hunt would be satisfied.

  Alice set the smoking gun down, the bullets had done a good job of weakening the stone barrier that was in their way and the launcher had done a better job of clearing much of it. Alice and Jin were the strongest, and they set to the task of clearing the crumbled stone away with the help of a sudden suction of air to clear the dust. The room they looked into was a marvelous specimen of architecture and science, and Lisa had to be urged back to prevent her from running into the room screaming. Her excitement was adorable to Masters, who held his EM rifle up at ready. They had to be prepared for whatever was in this room, and he had a good idea that the green orb that was as large as a vehicle that sat in the middle of the room was the seed.

  He brought the gun up to his eye and swept the room with caution, checking corners and shedding light over any part of the room that was too dark. He was pretty sure he saw something move when a sickening sound of flesh being ripped open caught his attention. His eyes were still open in shock when he hit the ground, smoke leaving the wound on his back as a single slug had torn apart the plates of his armor. He was sobbing through the blood forming on his lips, and Lisa screamed. Jin morphed into action, like a violent shadow ripping through the center of the room. His hand elongated and wrapped around the throat of the Corporation man who’d put the slug through Sgt. Masters’s chest, a ripping action removing his throat from his neck. Before Jin could even drop the corpse, bursts of plasma cut through the air and splayed over his naked flesh. He yelled in pain, Alice kicking off the ground and digging her feet into the stone walls to emerge on the balcony where the Corporation soldiers were raining plasma down on Jin.

  The two heavy guns in her hands slowed her down just a bit, but it wasn’t enough to stop her from hurling the two men down from the balcony and to the ground with a sickening crunch. She propped the two guns on the rails of the balcony and squeezed down on the triggers, sending a torrent of ammunition at another squad of Corporation men who poured in from the opposite side of the room. The men scrambled for cover while some of them were cut in half from the vibrant onslaught of projectiles. Eric, Markus, and Fiora spread out in the room and took individual targets, making their way through what men they found would meet their challenge. Blades sundered armor and bullets ripped through helmets as Markus and Eric formed up in the middle to become a tidal wave of death pushing back against the oncoming soldiers. Lisa ran into the room, unprotected by more experienced soldiers but spurred onwards by the possibility that she could still save Sgt. Masters.

  Shots hit the ground near her feet and yet the tears dripping from her eyes in fear and the agony of loss didn’t stop her. She tried to stay low as she’d seen others doing to avoid the projectiles headed her way, pausing for a moment as Jin ripped past
her and disemboweled an unfortunate soldier who had been advancing on the Paladin Eric from behind. The two exchanged a look, but Lisa missed it as the only one on her mind was the young Sgt. who had saved her life, and saved all of their lives and was laying on the cold floor and taking what could be his final breaths. She couldn’t let him die without trying to save him, and she couldn’t let him die alone failing that. Lisa stumbled as the riptide of gunfire from Alice’s supporting position stopped her advance and took her footing out from underneath her.

  Fiora grabbed Lisa’s hand and pulled her into cover, sparing her a moment’s look before leaping over the barrier and clashing blades with a man clad in golden armor and glowing with a yellowish energy about him. Lisa stopped watching when the man dropped Fiora to the ground with a boot to the legs and raised his blade to finish her off. She wanted to help, but her eyes were so filled with tears and the gun in her hands trembled far too much. She crawled forward towards the downed Sgt, Eric a deft force running past her as he deflected the Commander’s finishing blow against Fiora. Markus joined in with the clash of blades and soon the Commander was busy fighting all three Paladins. The shattering of metal as his sword broke their blades and the cries of pain as Markus took the Commander’s blade to his knees filled her ears. They were so strong, and yet they were all going to die down here.

  She made it to Sgt. Masters, his beautiful blue eyes looked up into hers, blood dripped from his lips and he reached his hand out to hers. She grabbed his hand and planted a kiss on his forehead, the gaping wound on his chest was leaking blood steadily, so she dropped the gun and pulled the kit from her bag. The kit contained a bandage, she pressed it gingerly against the wound and let it absorb the blood as he said nothing. He didn’t stop looking at her and managed a sly smile through the crimson that crusted his lips. She was angry, and she suddenly hated everything about this whole stupid war and she couldn’t believe she was kneeling on the cold stone floor watching a handsome young man die over what? A seed? Another weapon capable of doing this to even more people? No wonder Tilly had removed herself from the game, was there anything worth this? They wanted freedom and yet they were throwing their lives away to get it and what was the point of that? Wasn’t it better to live a slave than die a victim to such ferocity as this? She moved with as much medical precision as she had to try and stop the bleeding, to seal the wound and yet she could hardly see through the sorrowful tears. She knew that in that moment, that fighting for what was right was worth dying for. Sgt. Masters believed it, and so did Markus and Eric and Alice and Fiora and even the alien Jin.

  She looked over to watch as the Commander brought a heavy blow down to Eric’s head, blood spilling to the ground but unable to tell if it was a fatal one. Markus was down on the ground, his eyes were closed and his leg was bent the wrong way. Fiora parried a blow with her broken sword, catching the Commander’s arm with her free hand and trying to wrench it away. He laughed at her and threw her down to the ground, bringing his blade around for the execution when the avenging angel herself-Alice- landed on the ground next to him.

  “Stop it. Come and fight me coward. Or are you scared?” She mocked him in the best of her ability, and the fury in his eyes was beyond words. He kicked Fiora away and turned to face the inhuman challenger at his back.

  “Oh that’s funny coming from you. Alice, consider the Blood-Hunt on, and by Hunter’s Law you will die.” He said, lowering his blade and stepping into a duelist’s stance.

  “If you think so Azhulhand. Let’s see if you’re able to back that up.”

  Alice had sprayed until the ammunition had ran out, then she’d dropped to the ground and joined the others in the melee that was happening all around them. There were more soldiers than she’d anticipated and more weapons than she thought. They had brought weapons of every kind and filled the area with bolts of plasma, arcs of lightning, solid projectiles, flames, and even laser weapons. She had estimated taking down nearly ten men on her own, not including what her allies had managed to do. Azhulhand had taken more time to set-up on them than she anticipated, she knew they had beaten her there but not by that wide a margin. The balconies were filled with snipers and heavy weapons troops raining their own forms of hell down upon her allies and friends. She and Jin had maneuvered together to take them out, before hitting the ground once more and splitting up.

  Alice had worked with the Paladins and covered Lisa as she made her way to the downed Martian man. She could see the tears in Lisa’s eyes and she could feel the desperation coming from the young girl. Her circuits had started to seize when something occurred to her, the data banks in her mind responded to emotions by filtering them out and deleting them as they occurred which created a flood in her system and caused her to lock up. She grabbed cover and thought heavily, manipulating the way her mind handled those emotions. Project warned her that if she didn’t let the systems automatically delete the information it could result in tremendous overload on her circuits, and though Project was an expert he had missed something. In her current state every sort of thought and emotion was nothing more than an electrical signal firing somewhere that her body was unable to deal with and thus it caused her circuits to overload and seize up.

  She turned off the programs that were rapidly deleting all of the would-be emotions that she was feeling and all at once it was like a hammer of electrical energy hit her body. She implanted a process to the best of her ability that siphoned that energy to her waning charge packs instead and into her servo-motors. She didn’t know how smart it was but for once in a long time she could feel everything. Alex’s death was in her mind, Sgt. Masters and Lisa’s tears. She finally could feel the despair and the sadness at her own attempted execution and the damage done to both Hero and Milly, and finally she could feel the rage that she felt towards the Corporation. The theory was that her human anatomy allowed emotions to be processed through the body and that’s why a heartbreak felt painful or rage could spur the muscles beyond their normal limits. Now she was siphoning all of that data and electrical signals into her own power supplies and she was burning hot.

  Her alarms went off and alerted her that she’d have to burn through the energy soon and she gave into them, making her way through the Corporation soldiers and spilling bolts of heated light from her emitters. Now she stood face to face with the Corporation Commander Azhulhand, his arrogant grin upsetting her further. He had his sword drawn and she had no weapons available to her beyond the emitters that lined her body and even many of those had been damaged. Jin had disappeared, but the rest of her party had been taken down by Corporation men or by the Commander himself and now it was up to Alice. The line had been drawn and both of them were standing as equals, squaring off against one another. Azhulhand struck the first blow, the power of his apparatus enhancing his speed and strength full tilt with every strike. He pushed forward, lunging out with the sword and withdrawing it by dashing backwards and charging at her from a different angle. Every time he charged she deflected the blade with a proper tilt of her metal arms, the kinetic dampeners firing on over-time to reduce the impact of his blade against her.

  He dashed forwards and backwards, and she maneuvered around him with leaps and flips to avoid the hits. He was gaining momentum and soon would overwhelm her, her own energy sources filling from the emotions she was finally allowing to benefit her. She poured the energy outwards in a full-powered blast against his charge, the wave of heat tearing at his flesh and pushing him backwards. His momentum kicked off in response and he was sent spiraling to the ground. She rushed forwards and brought a heavy foot into his chest. His free arm whipped out one of the ancient looking plasma casters from his shoulder and spat forth a beam of plasma, knocking her backwards. She climbed to her feet, the melted metal on her chest screaming alarms in her head. His blade careened towards her again, bolts of plasma proceeding him as she spun through the air and twisted to avoid them. She dropped low and connected a kick with his knee, sending him forwards over her. He caught
himself with his other leg and slashed outwards, the blade piercing through her side and ripping open the metal implant that Lisa had given her.

  Alice reached forward and grabbed his arm that held the plasma lancer, knowing full well that he wouldn’t be able to use his full power with only one of his arms free. She bent it downwards and backwards, satisfied to hear the bones snap and freeing the plasma emitter from his hand. His sword arm was entangled with her other arm as he struggled to impale her on his blade. He shouted in pain as she snapped his wrist, freeing his side as he redoubled his efforts and brought the blade into her stomach. The energy field around the blade displaced her metal flesh and gave the blade full penetration through her back, a satisfied smirk appearing on his face. Her blank features felt no pain, but she did feel the energy draining rapidly from her and the circuits that powered her motion were dropping responses quickly. She brought the plasma lancer against his smiling face, his eyes narrowing in sudden horror as she pulled the trigger and spat the super-heated plasma against him. She saw something cover his face in the seconds before the plasma would, but she doubted it would do any good in saving him. He screamed in pain and fell backwards, revealing that indeed his mask had gone up in time before the plasma blast hit. She dropped to the ground, and he crawled over to her, the mask being thrown from his face to reveal shiny flesh that had been significantly burnt from the blast. He grabbed his other emitter from his shoulder as she aimed the weapon at him and they both opened fired.