The Apex Warriors

by Marc Stevens

  He pushed us in rapid succession into the gate. My stomach tensed. Reliving our escape, brought back the memory of losing Xul. The tension slowly eased as my thirst for revenge strengthened. The Prule exterminated most of the life forms they encountered in our galaxy. We were going to do unto them what they have done to others.

  We settled in for what could prove to be a long journey. This time around, I would not have the companionship of my strike team to make the trip more bearable. I collected my thoughts and focused on my return to Earth. I did not know about my relatives or what has taken place in my absence. I was going to let the governments of Earth know what the perils of the universe looked like. I had no illusions about how hard of a sell it was going to be. When I left the planet of my birth, the world was not changing for the better. Many of the superpowers were once again moving to a cold war mentality. I hoped that I could make a difference. Change would be hard, but it would be necessary for the survival of my homeworld.

  I shook my head to clear my thoughts. I still had to survive the mission before I can think of returning to Earth. Two hours crept by and I nodded off to sleep. When I awoke, I was surprised that almost six hours had passed. The sleep I missed before we kicked off the mission, was officially accounted for. I retracted my helmet and pulled my ration pack out of its storage compartment. I ate lightly and drank some water. Another two hours passed and I was starting to think about another nap. My three-dimensional HUD suddenly appeared in front of me. It was showing a distant fixed target that was not moving with my strike team or the other crap tagging along with us. It was an anomaly that exactly matched our data on an exit point. We were headed directly at it, and my adrenaline spiked when Justice’s subsystem noted our forward velocity was attenuating. We were closing with our destination. A little over ten hours had passed. It had me wondering if we would be back in the Milkyway or another hub outside of it. Justice’s subsystem could not accurately determine our velocity other than to say it was unmeasurable. The distance we traveled was anybody’s guess. The anomaly seemed to leap up at us. I gave my gravity booster on the port side the smallest of burps. My fragment started a slow horizontal spin of about one revolution per minute. I checked my weapons one last time and closed my eyes so my spinning HUD would not disorient me.

  We popped out of the gate to the light of a red giant star. Where ever we were, it was an old system. The local Sun was in its waning years and the planets that started populating my HUD were much too close to it. Their surfaces were molten rivers of lava and rock. The planet count stopped at fourteen. Any life they may have had on them was long dead and gone.

  Klutch’s voice came over our comms. “No hostile targets to report Commander.”

  “Roger that Klutch. Combat formation and let’s make a sweep around the gate to make sure.”

  I got four quick acknowledgments. My HUD showed twenty small green circles stationed an equidistance around the gate. The attack drones were in place. We ditched our host fragments and tucked in behind the Troop Master’s Dagger. He led us out away from the heat and radiation of the red giant. When Justice’s subsystem alerted us we were in the habitable zone of the giant central star, we again scanned for targets. Out in the blackness of space well outside of the red giant’s kill zone, was a small dwarf planet. It was caught up in the gravitational pull of the central star and was made a permanent addition to the star system. Klutch made a course correction and gave us a heading toward the planet.

  I queried Justice’s subsystem. “Have you got a location on us yet?”

  “The star formations surrounding this system have no known mapping references. I am attempting to identify stars by their spectrums. There are more than a billion visible stars around this system. It will require additional time to check them all.”

  “Can you confirm what galaxy we are in?”

  “Not without a full power deep space scan toward the galactic center. I have yet to determine what direction to orient our scans. I am still gathering data and will alert you when a known factor reveals itself.”

  You could tell the AI was heavily influenced by Justice’s human traits. It just politely told me not to bother it until it can come up with some significant evidence of where the hell we were at. I was antsy and on the verge of telling Klutch to kick in the phase drives. I felt we were wasting time on a dead system when we got a target in the low orbit of the planet. We were still too far out to get good definition with our passive scanners. Whatever it was, it was easy to see it was big. At our current distance, our sensors were showing it to be almost a fifth of the dwarf planet’s size. It was metallic in nature and categorized as an artificial construct.

  My HUD beeped at me twice and I glanced at the alert. Two fragments just came through the gate. They were highlighted with green circles around them. The first two torpedos were attached to them. The other ten would not be far behind. My HUD chirped another alert. The metallic construct in the distance flashed red and a box appeared around it. We still had a considerable amount of space to traverse to the target. If we started our phase drives we could cover the distance in minutes, but the drive signatures were like a flashing beacon for all to see. Coasting with our gravity drives was stealthy but slow as compared to the phase drives. At our current velocity, we were still more than two hours away from the dwarf planet. Four more beeps from my HUD indicated four more torpedos just entered the area of operation. I linked to one of them and entered the construct as a potential target candidate. A torpedo blinked and its color changed from green to yellow. A red line extended from it to the construct. I confirmed the target and the line disappeared. My HUD had already determined it to be hostile, so it had to have some known connection to the Prule or other adversary. I was guessing it was the construct’s emissions.

  Something in the back of my mind started yelling at me. It may have been my natural distrust of anything that might have to do with the Prule, but I was getting a whiff of something fishy. The closer we got to the construct, the more bells that started ringing in my head.

  “Coonts, Sael, get some scans of the two planets closest to the gate. I am getting a bad feeling about this.”

  I got two quick confirmations and they turned hard back toward the gateway.

  Tria commed me. “Nathan, do you think this is a baited trap?”

  “I don’t know, but I am not feeling good about not seeing any Prule activity. We know that some of the ships that escaped the hub would have come this way. I find it hard to believe they are all docked at that construct.”

  Klutch gave us his thoughts. “I concur, Commander. It is far too quiet here. The Prule may be hidden on the backside of the planet or that construct is a lot more than what our passive scanners are showing us.”

  The planets I sent Coonts and Sael to investigate were now between us and the gateway. Our cursory passive scan didn’t reveal anything other than very hot dead planets. If the Prule were hidden somewhere below the surface, we would have missed them. We had encountered similar traps before. I didn’t like it then and to have it done to us again would be a foolhardy step on my part.

  “Coonts, I want you and Sael to take low-level scans. Report anything out of the ordinary.”

  “Roger that Commander, vectoring now, ETA seventeen minutes.” He replied.

  I watched as Coonts and Sael split up and headed for the planet closest to them. They disappeared from my scan field when they dropped low to the surface. Six more beeps from my HUD verified we now had a dozen planet killer class torpedos at our disposal. The way things were shaping up, I hoped we would have enough if we had to shoot the place up.

  Klutch, Tria, and I were still an hour from the construct and were starting to get some good definition on our scan returns. The oval-shaped artificial satellite was roughly two-thirds the size of a supercarrier and emitting a lot of heat and noxious gases. We had seen emissions like this before. It was at an underground Prule manufacturing facility. In that case, they were building the mechani
zed hulls of Prule Hunters.

  We started picking up structures on the planet’s surface. As the aspect angle to the target changed, our scans revealed eight huge umbilicals tethering the construct to the planetoid. The surface targets weren’t emitting telltales like the construct. We were seeing another well-established underground operation. If it was some kind of manufacturing facility in orbit, it made sense that the subsurface operations were supplying the production materials.

  Sael came over the comms net. “Commander, I am detecting a large cavity below the planet’s surface. While there is the possibility it may be a natural formation, I am getting some strange readings in and around it. I speculate I am seeing some kind of shielding effect.”

  “Roger that Sael, add it to the torpedo target list.”

  She acknowledged my call and I saw one of the torpedos blink and turn yellow. A red line extended from it to the planet’s surface. Sael confirmed the target.

  Coonts called a minute later. “Commander, I just made a low pass by what appears to be a very large dormant volcano. When I made another close pass, I tried to get a reading on the depth of its cauldron. I cannot scan any deeper than one hundred feet. All my passive scans are being deflected by something below the cauldron’s lip. My guess is that something is being purposely hidden.”

  This was looking more and more like a manufacturing location for Prule assets. The longer they operated, the more of a threat they would be to our galaxy. “Add it to the target list.”

  A torpedo blinked yellow. “Done Commander, should we check out the next planet?”

  “Yes, if you find additional targets, prioritize them and you can make use of two more torpedos.”

  “Affirmative Commander. Moving to the next target.” He replied.

  Klutch, Tria, and I were just coming around the curvature of the planetoid and a target appeared. It was another large tethered space station. This one had Prule ships of every description gathered around it. My targeting computer stopped the count at seventy-seven. Red boxes appeared around them.

  My Dagger’s AI chose that moment to give us a heads up on our location. “Commander, all my astronomical observations and measurements indicate we are in an uncharted sector of the Milkyway Galaxy.”

  It was hard to say if that was good news or not. It meant that the gate we entered was a stepping stone to our galaxy. Even though we ended up back in the Milkyway galaxy, it opened the possibility that one of the other gates at the hub was a way to reach Andromeda.

  I had bigger fish to fry and was deciding how to proceed. The Prule were trying hard to hide the operations in this sector. Our scans were not detecting other gates, so there was only one highway in and out of here. When we changed the direction of the gates we denied the Prule access to a means to fast-travel their ships to other places. If they wanted to leave this location, they had no choice other than to make hyperspace transitions that could take weeks, months, or years, depending on where they wanted to go. They also had to know that someone else could control the gates. That was information the Prule would need to get out quickly if they had the means to do it.

  I started wondering why we were not detecting other gates. Depending on the age of the gates, it was possible that there were others, but they fell prey to the central star’s expansion into a red giant. If that were the case, the gates could be billions of years old. Either way, we had a target-rich environment and they have yet to detect our presence. Tria targeted the station with a torpedo and the ground installations with another. So far, there was little activity to be seen. The distinct lack of any comms chatter among the Prule ships was giving me pause. We had no idea how long they had their comms blacked out. For all we knew, they may have taken this posture ever since we gave them a bloody nose back at the hub. I personally hoped that was the reason, and not because they were suspicious of the amount of debris coming through the gate.

  Klutch was getting bored with our inaction. The Tibor was in the mood to kill something and let me know it. “Commander, the longer we loiter in the area the more likely we will be detected.”

  Klutch had barely finished his sentence when a ship popped out of the space station. It joined up with the rest of the fleet above the planet. I was going to comment, but another ship exited one of the many large round ports on the station. It too joined up with the fleet. Upon closer observation, Tria pointed out that the two ships had similar lines to the Heckler warships we encountered over the Scrun held planet. Now that she mentioned it, they did look very similar. My HUD identified six others of the same class. My guts took a twist. We may be looking at a Prule prototype manufacturing facility. It also dawned on me, you can’t just build ships without having crews to operate them. The Prule had to be producing others of their kind somewhere close. The temperatures radiating from the vents of the space stations and ground complexes below them were more than three hundred degrees. We knew from past experiences, the Prule biomass containers were manufactured and stored below one hundred degrees. Once the Prule entities and their biomass were inserted into their mechanized bodies, they could tolerate anything from vacuum to several hundred degrees.

  Coonts commed us the results of his and Sael’s scans of the second planet closest to the gate. “No anomalous detections to report Commander. What are your orders?”

  “Join back up with us. We are going to strike the Prule fleet while they still have their shields down.”

  “Roger that Commander. ETA twenty-six minutes.”

  I sent Coonts and Sael the coordinates of a rallying point. It was near the planet’s surface and in between two huge mountains. The location would shield us from both space stations and it was just over the horizon from the Prule fleet. We started working on our target lists. The five Daggers combined, carried one hundred and twenty missiles. We would hit each of the ships at least once, and all eight of the Heckler clones with two. I instructed Justice’s subsystem to make sure everything hit at the same time as the torpedos. As soon as we launched the missiles we had to get clear of the planet. The last Prule manufacturing facility we destroyed was a powder keg. I didn’t have any idea what the Prule were doing underground but had a feeling the torpedos would trigger some major secondaries. My HUD showed me a simulated attack. The AI programmed our missiles to hug the planet’s surface and transition to their targets seconds before the torpedos arrive. They would never know what hit them. If the planetoid blew apart from the torpedo attack, there was a better than good chance the debris would take out any survivors of our missile attack.

  Tria commed me. “Nathan, the targets on the planet closest to the gate may be the Prule facility that is producing new crews for their ships. As far as I know, they need a source of biological materials for their entities to survive. That could mean they have prisoners to supply those materials. At the very least, it could mean they have stockpiled large quantities of biological materials at that location. The question is, what are we going to do about it?”

  Klutch pointed out the obvious. “Commander, if they are still holding prisoners, it is going to be hard to shut down the operation without killing a lot of innocent victims.”

  Klutch was right. If we torpedoed the base we could be killing a lot of prisoners. The chances were good we would be doing them a favor, but I couldn’t just arbitrarily kill them. I reviewed the scan data from Coonts and Sael’s Daggers. No emissions were coming from the planetoid closest to the gate. The planet with the tethered stations was a blast furnace. I canceled the torpedo strikes on the first target. As much as I didn’t like the idea, we needed to take a look at what the Prule were doing. If there were civilians present, it was our duty to help them if possible.

  Klutch led us down to the planet’s surface. We zig-zagged our way through the mountainous terrain to the rendezvous point. Coonts and Sael joined up with us minutes later. Justice’s subsystems synched our targeting parameters with the torpedos, and we launched the strike package. Klutch took us away from the planet on a cours
e that would keep the planet between us and the targets for as long as possible.

  “Klutch, take us to the volcano Coonts scanned as a potential target.”

  Klutch confirmed my order and made a course change. Our strike package would arrive on target in another sixteen minutes. If the Prule were hiding something on the planet near the gate, they were bound to react to our attack. No matter the response, we would be there to greet them.

  The timer wound down. At one minute till detonation, I turned my scanners back to the target. After a brief time lag, a brilliant flash momentarily washed out my HUD view. When it reset, I saw the planet coming apart. The torpedos exploding in the heart of the underground complexes was more than the little planetoid could take. We just executed an entire planet. A sick feeling came over me. If the Prule found Earth, the same thing could happen to my homeworld. We scanned for survivors. The results were just as grim as the job we had done on the planet. The tethered stations were clouds of metallic confetti and the planet was a much smaller misshapen blob of rock. The red giant was going to be eating its remains for an undetermined amount of time.

  I turned my scanners back to the planet near the gate. There was no point in hiding anymore. “Klutch, let’s pick up the pace.”

  The Troop Master acknowledged my order. “Engaging phase drive.”

  We were closing with the planet at a leisurely pace. When we activated our phase drives the planet suddenly filled my scan field. The Dagger’s AI shut the phase drive down. We had to use our gravity drives to retro brake or we would overshoot the planet and end up back near the gate. Klutch nosed us over into a tight turn. The course correction put us on a low-level approach to the large volcano Coonts had listed as a potential target. To our surprise, a large cylindrical-shaped spacecraft popped up out of the volcano crater. It had its shields up and was accelerating hard away from the planet. It didn’t look like any Prule starship we had encountered before. Klutch didn’t hesitate and hit its rear shields with his main beam weapon. The ship’s shields flared brightly but held. Tria and I fired simultaneously. We hit its aft shields and they partially failed.