Unsanctioned Reprisal

by Eddie R. Hicks

  “Biometrics,” he said, wincing. “If Foster was here, she might be able to interface with this console.”

  LeBoeuf stood beside him. “So, we’re locked out then?”

  Pierce shrugged and continued to scan and record data. “Pretty much, none of us are Draconian, or have the tattoos. It seems that’s the key to working their tech.”

  LeBoeuf slung her rifle over her shoulders. Her body flashed and glowed with blue psionic energy. Its supernatural glow drew Pierce’s attention away from his scanner, and onto her. The dead Draconian Chevallier put down floated three meters off the floor via telekinesis. Its right hand twisted around and around, making cringing sounds as the bones within it crunched and popped, before it separated from its arm. The steaming hot blood within its arm gushed on to the floor when LeBoeuf released it from her psionic mind and forced the now severed hand to float next to the hologram above the pedestal.

  Pierce’s face turned pale. “Jesus!”

  LeBoeuf snorted. “Mind if I try my key?”

  “Well—”

  “Good, ‘cause I’m ready to go home.”

  LeBoeuf telekinetically forced the blood-dripping severed hand to touch the holographic handprint. Lights around the pedestal flashed on, and the hologram’s display changed.

  The hand dropped at Pierce’s feet, and he felt his stomach turn. “Was that really necessary?” he asked LeBoeuf.

  “If shutting this down gets our comms back online, yes.”

  “Couldn’t you just use your powers to move his body rather than ripping his hand off?”

  “That would require extra effort on my part.”

  Numbers and words written in the Draconian language populated the hologram. Pierce double-checked the settings on wrist terminal. The red circle and ‘REC’ icon continued to flash on its display, as his hands trembled with excitement. He was making history, the first human to uncover raw data from the Draconian horde.

  “Remarkable,” he spoke slowly and softly.

  “Okay, so, we drew a picture of stars and squiggle marks,” Maxwell said drily. “How does this get our comms back?”

  A new screen flashed in front of the projection, it looked like pictures of sound waves next to images of Draconian ships.

  “I guess this is a communication terminal for them,” Pierce said. “Whatever it is they use to transmit signals was interfering with our ability to do the same.”

  “Never had our comms jammed this badly before,” Boyd said.

  “We never had such a high concentration of their forces in one area like this before,” Pierce said.

  Chevallier let out a loud groan. “Can we all just agree that this pedestal is the source of our problems right now?”

  “Yes, it is,” Pierce said. “Give me a moment, maybe I can find a way to shut it down—”

  Pierce was pulled back three meters instantly by what felt like thousands of invisible hands grabbing him. He fell to the floor back first, looking up, he saw the source of the pull back. LeBoeuf stood ahead of him with her left hand glowing brightly with her psionic sorcery. Her telekinetic pull interrupted his recording. The destructive powers of Maxwell and LeBoeuf denied Pierce the chance to return to his scans and recording.

  The pedestal exploded with a thunderous blast, taking the hologram with it, and triggering erratic noises from above. The noise repeated, they were alarms, well the Draconians’ equivalent to alarms at least.

  “Why the hell did you do that?” Pierce spat, coming to his feet with the aid of Miles.

  “Comms are back,” Boyd said. “Nice work, you two.”

  “Thanks, sir.”

  The alarms continued to blare as fear generating red light fell upon the group of human trespassers. The organic pods on the ceilings trembled rapidly, whatever was on the inside of them, wanted out. Large cracks formed at the bottom of the pods, like an eggshell cracking open. The fleshly material the pods were made of peeled open, slime fell from them and splashed into the floor, screaming noises roared.

  Winged creatures dropped from the opened pods, their wings began to take shape as they stood on their feet upon hitting the floor. They looked like oversized bats, bats covered in dragon scales, and fangs on par with the wyverns outside. For a lack of a better term, they were bat dragons, and each pod had two inside. Each pod was an egg.

  Pierce stopped counting at sixteen eggs. Five rifles rose to the challenge, and then lowered as the numbers of the bat dragons increased in a rapid secession.

  He backpedaled to the entrance. “Guys . . . this construct isn’t just a base,” Pierce said. “I think it’s a hatchery, the dragons are breeding.”

  “And we just fucked up their nest, eh?” Miles said.

  “Indeed. Okay, so, maybe we should run?” Pierce suggested.

  The first of the awoken bat dragons flapped their wings and took to the air, displaying their flesh and metal ripping fangs.

  Boyd joined Pierce.

  “Yeah, let’s do that.”

  This time, Pierce lead the charge, taking the group back into the halls, past the smoldering Draconian corpses into what he hoped would be freedom. Miles, Boyd, and Chevallier shot their rifles as they ran when they could, though their aim is off. Maxwell and LeBoeuf unleashed their psionic powers, creating psionic barriers to slow the pursuit of the scourge of bat dragons or using telekinetic powers to push them to the floor. It bought them a little bit of time, but not enough, the gap between the fleeing humans and bat dragons closed with each passing second.

  They would be surrounded completely soon and would have until their shields failed before they met their end. Too bad Pierce didn’t have personal shields, he was an explorer, and came armed with his blue jumpsuit uniform, wrist terminal, and a pistol. A pistol he lost hours ago he concluded, after finishing a quick pat down of his belt.

  He had doubts the military personnel around him were going to take the extra time to protect him, let alone his wrist terminal. Not good, given the intel he collected. The words seen on the hologram could be translated by Odelea. What he discovered could be the final clues to where the Draconians dragged the Abyssal Sword. He didn’t know for sure of course, and if he failed to make it out with this data, nobody ever would.

  “What’s our exit plan?!” Maxwell yelled while they continued to run toward a source of natural light emitting from a doorway up ahead.

  “Our forces are ready to withdraw,” Boyd yelled back amidst the sounds of his rifle shooting blind shoots behind. “There’s too much enemy fire power.”

  “In other words, they aren’t picking us up?”

  “The Draconians left this place unguarded.” Boyd quickly created a three-dimensional hologram of the construct they were in and the surrounding mountain region. Flashing dots were scattered across the projection, most of them were red. “The dragons are coming back, if this shit behind doesn’t get us, their reinforcements will! Our forces are going to have to deal with a lot of resistance just to punch through to get us.”

  “Not right now they don’t,” LeBoeuf said. “Those dragons are still a few minutes out.”

  Boyd quickly adjusted the hologram to show the upper atmosphere of the planet and a scattering of blue dots. “Same with our fighters.”

  “Less talk more running!” Chevallier roared, silencing the group.

  The cloudy skies of the outside world raced over the top of the six as they bolted out of the construct. Pierce took a moment to catch his breath, huffing and puffing. His sights remained low to the ground, and then looked up slowly when faint shadows of wyverns appeared. The skies were slowly darkening with them.

  “Can’t you guys just teleport us out?” Pierce said, turning to face Maxwell and LeBoeuf.

  “Did you not see what we had to do just to keep those things off us?” LeBoeuf said after catching her breath. “I don’t have it in me right now, maybe in three minutes—”

  The thumping sounds of fluttering wings and high-pitched screeches came from the entrance
to the construct. The bat dragons were catching up. LeBoeuf flicked her wrists at the door, as the glowing visage of the bracelets around them turned red and spun. A lavender-colored psionic shield sealed the entrance seconds before the swarm bat dragons arrived. The shield flashed its vibrant colors rapidly with each collision the bat dragons made, none got out. And if what Pierce suspected was true, neither would they as both psionics used the combined force of their powers and mental concentration to strengthen the shield.

  “I guess that teleport in three minutes or so is off the table?” Pierce said to LeBoeuf.

  “Ya think?”

  They were trapped, yet again having escaped from one horde of deadly dragons, only to be exposed by another group that took to the skies and plunged toward them. Teleportation was not an option, and neither was creating a protective dome to deflect the incoming wyverns, and UNE fighters, were still too far away.

  Pierce activated the communication functions of his wrist terminal, now that his hands weren’t flailing about from a massive run. “Pierce to Johannes Kepler, come in.”

  There was a long pause before he heard an answer, communication delay. The Johannes Kepler was still in orbit, five light-seconds away. “Pierce, you’s alive?” Foster’s voice spoke.

  “Not for long,” Pierce said, looking up at the wyverns flapping their wings, growing in size in the skies. “We need a lift out of here now, if that is even remotely possible.”

  11 Foster

  XSV Johannes Kepler

  Jacobus orbit, Kapteyn’s Star system

  October 13, 2118, 16:41 SST (Sol Standard Time)

  Doctor Pierce was shaking in his boots. Foster could tell by the jittering holographic imagery his shaky hands created when he aimed his wrist terminal to his face, transmitting it to the bridge’s view screen. Pierce’s face faded away from the screen as the transmission ended, replacing it with what the forward external cameras of the Kepler saw, being the horizon of the yellow hazy planet.

  Foster sat back in her captain’s chair. “Alrighty, Chang, you heard the man.”

  Chang nodded and swiftly put his hands to work at the helm. “Changing course now.”

  Foster’s mind relaxed briefly as Johannes Kepler began to dive toward the planet. Pierce’s communication was the good news she and the crew had been searching for over the last few hours since he and the Marines had gone missing. It was the sole reason they hadn’t left the system, despite having an uncountable number of rescued colonists aboard, crowding every free inch of the Johannes Kepler’s interior, that needed to be taken to safety ASAP.

  Fiery dots flashed in and out of existence as they neared the planet, while lines of white and red zipped about. Every Draconian ship in the system was alerted to them and the presence of the UNE fleet. The battle was slowly turning into a repeat of the encounter at Earth, nuclear missiles being exchanged for tachyon beams, fighters engaging in a deadly dance with wyverns.

  It was time to go, but not without their missing personnel.

  Thick yellow clouds of the planet obscured the view screen two minutes after their reentry began. Foster faced the communication officer’s post and its many floating holo screens. “Odelea, is the UNE giving you troubles?”

  “No, Captain, they have dispatched several fighters to assist with our rescue.” Odelea updated the view screen. A tactical hologram appeared over it, showing the Johannes Kepler’s location and several blue dots approaching it from all sides, and a blob of red dots ahead.

  Once clear of the cloud coverage, the view screen’s magnification forced the top-down view of the rugged terrain to enlarge. Pierce and his company could be seen at the entrance to the Draconian construct, the two psionics with them were busy keeping a psionic barrier up to prevent something inside the construct from escaping.

  Random wyverns obscured the view, flying in and out of sight from the screen. They were closer to Pierce and his friends than the Johannes Kepler was. What they needed was a teleport out. The wyverns before the Kepler were on the verge of making their strike.

  “Chang, shields at max and push through,” Foster said. “Get us there in one piece if you can.”

  Chang nodded, made the appropriate adjustments in the Kepler’s descent to the surface. “You got it, Captain!”

  Pushing through to the surface wasn’t going to be enough. Foster went to put the rest of her team to work.

  “EVE, you got weapons, Nereid take over as lead shipboard psionic duties, Tolukei get down there and give them a hand.”

  The players in Foster’s plan were set in motion. Tolukei’s body flashed away with illuminating teleportation light down to the surface. Foster was able to get a better glimpse via the view screen why the UNE avoided sending rescue transports down, or psionics. There were enough wyverns to darken the hull of the Kepler with their shadows, the risks were too great.

  EVE controlled the Kepler’s weapons, bringing them online and ejecting rail gun rounds that tore apart a number of wyverns. The fighters alongside them did the same, then scattered when angry ones came about to take aim. A full-blown aerial fight in the hazy clouds commenced, one that Foster hoped would reduce the number of wyverns swooping down.

  Foster had Odelea establish a comm link with Tolukei after confirming he had arrived. “Are you able to get them out?”

  “Not at this rate, Captain,” Tolukei’s voice played over the bridge’s speakers. “The battle grows more intense with each second.”

  “We’s tryin’ our best up here—”

  “Talking to me will reduce my efficiency, Captain.”

  The comm line was cut.

  The best Tolukei could do was support them with a protective barrier. Sending him down to help was a risky gamble, as there was a high chance Tolukei wasn’t going to be able to focus and teleport them to safety. He was a combat psionic, not a support one. Fighting was his expertise, not large-scale escapes.

  Foster groaned. The psionic duo with Pierce used their powers to buy them time, Chang taking the Kepler into the thicket of the wyvern’s formation, bought them time, Tolukei teleporting down to assist, did nothing but buy time. She had enough. It was time they started buying a solution to the problem.

  “We’s gonna have to make a landin’” Foster said, amidst the growing sounds of the ship rumbling.

  Chang shook his head and checked his instruments. “We need to punch a decent-sized hole in the formation to make that happen.”

  “So much for this being a mission of peace,” Williams said from his station.

  He wasn’t wrong. The Johannes Kepler’s mission was to find the homeworld of the Draconians, make contact with their leaders, and convince them to stand down as the conflict was a misunderstanding. Killing dragons was by no means the most ideal way to make peace, but what other choice did they have? They needed to protect themselves, and allies.

  “Odelea, relay a message to Tolukei,” Foster said to her. “Have him conserve as much of his psionic power as possible.”

  She nodded “Understood.”

  “Nereid,” Foster called out, giving the mysterious girl from Sirius a look at the psionic workstation. “Give the overshields everything you got, tap into your Voelika’s power if you must.”

  “So, what’s the plan, Captain?” Chang asked. “Just gonna plow through?”

  “Ya damn right we are,” Foster said, grabbing onto her chair’s arms. “Push down like they ain’t anything in front of us, Chang.”

  “All right, everyone; hold on to your butts!”

  Chang pushed the Kepler into the cluster of wyverns blocking their path to the construct. The UNE escort fighters broke off, seemingly uninterested in the suicide run. They were on their own at that point. Wyverns eclipsed everything on the viewer, clawing at the ship as its overshields rippled purple and lavender colors, and spewing a torrent of plasma from their breath attacks.

  It reminded Foster of old zombie movies she watched when she was younger. People would plow through streets full o
f zombies in a car on a desperate struggle to get past, ignoring the fact many of them had clung into its sides. The Kepler was in the similar situation, charging down from the skies with angry wyverns attacking every inch of the ship.

  Tactical overlays over the view screen reported a quick and troubling drop of the overshields’ strength with every breath attack, or wyverns that were hit head-on. Nereid clasped her Voelika staff within her hands. Its radiant orange glow enhanced her psionic gifts, providing the overshields the ability to take a few more hits.

  The percentage of the overshields jumped around on the tactical overlay, 23 percent one second, then 34 the next, only to dip back to 23, then 10. It went back up to 34, then a barrage of tachyon fire, in conjunction with jets of plasma from the mouths of wyverns, brought it to 0. Nereid screamed in agonizing pain, holding her head as she fell forward. Her Voelika crashed onto the floor and rolled away, her hands struggled to keep her up as she hit the computer station ahead of her. The Kepler’s primary shields were exposed. It was their last layer of defense.

  “Nereid?” Foster called out to her with concern in voice.

  EVE calmly walked to Nereid, helped her up, and scanned her condition with her android eyes. “This act may have been taxing on her brain,” EVE revealed.

  “Get her to sickbay when clear,” Williams said.

  Foster’s gaze returned to the viewer and grimaced as new data appeared on the tactical overlay. The primary shields of the Kepler were now exposed and dropping.

  The surface neared, as did the sight of the dome barrier Tolukei created to protect Pierce and his friends. The landing was hard and fast, sending a brief and sudden tremor across the ship. Chang didn’t take the time to find a suitable landing zone, let alone slow down. Foster couldn’t blame him, she’d have done the same.