Terra Prime (The Terran Legacy Book 2)

by Rob Dearsley

  Something crashed against the door behind them. Everyone jumped, weapons turning toward the door as another boom saw it visibly deform.

  Jenna asked, “Will it hold?”

  Sergeant Hutch cut her off, “History would say, no.”

  The deck lurched, throwing them from their feet. Niels could feel the thrumming of the ship's engines through his hands on the deck, and beneath it, the groaning of the space frame. The ship was accelerating hard or trying to.

  Behind them, the bulkhead door bowed inward with a screaming of metal.

  Niels clambered to his feet pulling his rifle with him. The groaning of the ship rose to audible levels.

  “What’s going on?” Jenna asked, stumbling toward the nearest wall.

  Hutch moved toward the curving hallway, his own gun out. “Engines are redlining. It must be the Darkness.”

  Jen’s eyes darted back and forth, a little too wide. “Does that mean it’s in here with us?”

  Niels shook his head. “Not necessarily. They – it could control the engines from the bridge.”

  Another crash almost knocked the deformed door from its runners.

  “We need to keep going,” Valentine said, leading into the corridor. The others fell in around Niels and Jenna.

  The feeling of always stepping down and up at the same time disconcerted Niels. He constantly pushed up onto his toes, trying to see further over the corridor’s horizon.

  They were nearly there. “Next door on the right,” he said.

  Hutch and one of the others stacked up, either side of the door. Once they were in place, Hutch started counting down on his fingers.

  Three, two, one, go.

  He punched the release and they bundled through the door. A moment later calls of “clear” came back. Niels followed them.

  A complex half ring, suspended from gantries dominated the engineering compartment. It disappeared through the back wall. Emergency lights cast a dull red illumination through the large compartment. The room seemed empty, but the tangle of conduits and pipes along the back wall offered a myriad of shadows and hiding places. Niels couldn’t help but shiver.

  The whole room fairly buzzed with power from the engines. The groaning of the ship’s spaceframe had lessened. The ship must be getting up to speed now. They needed to destroy the ship before it reached the jump site.

  Hutch escorted Niels to a console beneath the giant ring. As he got closer, the rumble of the engines was enough to put his damn teeth on edge. He rubbed at the aching wound in his hip, damn vibrations were setting it off.

  “Can you shut it down?” Jenna asked.

  “One way or another, we’ll stop this ship.” Hutch patted a demo charge clipped to the front of his combat harness.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Niels said, flicking his fingers over the console, bringing up the shutdown commands. “We can set the main power plant to overload. It might not completely destroy the ship, but it will take out the engines and the point-to-point drive.”

  “Contact!” Ellis called.

  Hutch and the others spun, bringing their guns up.

  “Admiral, how long do you need?” Hutch asked. Stepping away, ready to do whatever it took to buy Niels enough time to disable the ship.

  He tapped a command, bringing up the power plant controls. “Another-”

  Fire and pain blinded Niels. For a second, he was airborne, then he slammed into the curved deck, bouncing and tumbling until he couldn’t tell which way was up.

  Fragments of his world swirled around Niels, refusing to fall into place. He reached out, groping blindly until he found a wall to push himself up. Sensations started to fall into place, the cacophony of constant rifle fire, searing heat from somewhere nearby came accompanied by the stench of burning flesh.

  “Admiral!” Hutch’s voice, followed by a metal hand clamping down on his shoulder, shaking him.

  The world snapped back into place, singed tatters of uniform still clung to Hutch’s robotic arm. Behind him, flames licked from the console he’d been working at. He’d been damn lucky to survive.

  Hutch pulled him up. “Sir, we need to get out of here.” He turned to fire into another Shadow-form.

  “No,” Valentine shouted over the cacophony of rifle fire. “We have to destroy this ship. Sergeant, get the demo charges on those regulators. Everyone else, hold. Damn-it, we have to hold!”

  A scream cut through the clamour of combat and a Marine tumbled over the horizon of the deck toward Niels, his body limp, limbs broken at odd angles.

  Another scream. Jenna, eyes wide in panic, backed across the compartment. Mac screened her, his rifle keeping up a constant chatter. Niels had to help her. He scrabbled at the floor, searching for his lost rifle. Stars please, he couldn’t watch her die.

  Another shadow-form leapt at them, knocking Mac to the floor, and enveloping him in shadow.

  Valentine and Ellis kept up their fire while Fyffe pulled Jenna free and Hutch ran for the main power-plant.

  Ellis was right, they were all going to die here. But it had to mean something. Whatever happened this couldn’t get back to colonised space. Saving the universe wasn’t a bad way to go.

  He moved to join Jenna and Fyffe on the firing line. “You good?”

  “Nowhere I’d rather be,” Jenna said, sparing him a quick glance.

  ◊◊

  You are alone.

  Hale tumbled through darkness. All sense of up and down was gone. She flailed against it, trying to push back the dark, break free. But it was no good. The Darkness was everywhere, all-encompassing.

  Memories of her lost friends flashed through her mind, Matthews, Jim, her captain. All long dead. The darkness was right. Everyone had left her.

  Tears rolled down her cheeks. At least she thought they did. They would have if she had cheeks at all. Had any sense of physicality.

  The presence pressed in on her, cloyingly close. Join them in the endless void.

  “Why don’t you sod off back into the void?”

  A bitter laugh rolled through her mind and cold knifed through the back of her neck, leaving her breathless and dizzy.

  Wait. She had a neck.

  She continued to fall, but some sensation of her body returned. It was the way Dannage had described the ship-link.

  Light flashed, blinding.

  She was on the Folly’s bridge, crammed into one of the too-small chairs. The dull hum of the engines and the shifting blue light from the windows told her they were on a slipway.

  She knew this moment. It had been weeks after the battle of Pyrite. Dannage and the others were on their way to see the new memorial world. A small moment of perfect happiness.

  At the front of the bridge, Dannage and Luc were recanting an old adventure. Arland sat in the chair opposite Hale, most of her attention on the boys’ story.

  Dannage’s voice crescendoed. “… So, I try to explain to him that Recoup won’t pay up if he trashes the damn ship.”

  “But of course, that doesn’t stop him,” Luc cut in. The story had been bouncing back and forth between the two men. There was a rhythm to it that appealed to Hale as much as the story. “Only reason we got away was that his piece-of-crap CAF can’t make orbit.”

  “If it only operates in atmosphere, it’s not a Combined Air-Space Fighter, it’s an Atmo-Fighter,” Arland said, the small grin at odds with the faux disinterest in her tone.

  “Oh, it can operate in space.” Dannage turned to address Arland. “It just needs a bit of a push to get there.”

  Hale joined in the raucous laughter

  Moments of ungraded mirth like that were too few far between. Just thinking about it made her chest ache at the loss.

  She wasn’t alone. Dannage, Luc, Arland. They were her friends, her family.

  They will all fall to darkness.

  Maybe. But the X-minds had thought themselves undefeatable. Another memory flashed around her.

  The Folly’s cargo hold, Dannage standing ove
r a crumpled man, as Gypsum burned beneath them.

  Dannage stepped back, eyes rolling, spittle flying from his lips as he screamed, rage and loss burning away his sanity. “By all the stars in all the heavens, I will find you and I will end you!”

  And he had.

  Something shifted in the dark around Hale. She could feel its uncertainty.

  The fall ended. Hale slammed into cold hard metal. Before she could think, something heavy pressed into her, pinning her, crushing her.

  Then you will simply die.

  She tried to push whatever it was off, but it was too big, too strong. She could hardly take a breath. Damn it, she wasn’t going go out like this. Not after everything.

  She was a survivor.

  Laughter crashed through her mind. Survival was easy. A single action wrought in desperation with the singular objective of not dying. Living with those actions after could be much, much harder.

  “Get out of my damn head,” Hale growled, heaving with all her failing strength.

  Pieces of the Feynman’s bridge resolved around her, the rough texture of the deck plating, the holotable, and beyond, Captain Rossini’s glassy eyes stared back at her. Hale crawled toward the captain’s outstretched hand, her arm was shattered, but her fingers still clamped around a metallic cylinder.

  She thought she could fight me, too.

  “She still can.” Hale closed her fingers around Rossini’s, triggering the flash-bang.

  The Darkness screamed through her mind as the blast shredded it, and the pressure on Hale abruptly ceased. She pushed up and bolted for the door. A glimpse of Valentine’s command code had been enough. Shadow-forms closed in as the darkness surged for her again in a wave of animalistic fury.

  She pushed her way through the doors and hammered the emergency close as shadow-forms charged her. Finally, the doors hissed shut cutting her off from the bridge. Something thumped against the door.

  What if they had seen the code the same as her. What if it had reached into her mind and stolen the codes?

  She ripped the access panel off and tore out the control circuitry. Nothing was getting in or out ever again. A tomb to their endeavours.

  Shaking off the maudlin thoughts, Hale started toward the lifts, she had to find the others. Heck, she had to find a weapon.

  ◊◊

  Niels backed up, Fyffe and Jenna on either side, firing with grim determination. Tracer fire cut into the shadow forms, but for every one they drove back, another was ready to take its place.

  “Hutch, how long?” Valentine shouted from the other side of their short firing line.

  “Nearly there. Oh crap.”

  Niels spun to see a huge shadow-form – not even human looking – dropped onto the marine, shadow engulfing him. He fired into the hulking mass, tracers ripping into the shadows to little effect. No, damn-it he wasn’t going to lose anyone else.

  Jenna turned, her eyes widening in horror. She pulled a single-use flare gun from Fyffe’s thigh holster and fired.

  For a moment the distress flare painted the compartment crimson, then it hit the shadows like a falling star blowing them apart in brilliant incandescence.

  Niels rushed forward, grabbed Hutch and pulled him away before the creature could reform.

  “Status?” Valentine called.

  Hutch shook his head and opened his hands. Niels could see the demolitions pack was gone.

  “It’s over,” Niels shouted. “We’ve lost the demolition charges. We have to get out of here.”

  “No.” Valentine turned to face Niels, his eyes alight with grief-fuelled anger. “We have to stop this. We hold!”

  “There’s no bloody point,” Ellis said, falling back toward Fyffe and Jenna. “We should make for the escape pods.”

  “You will follow your Stars-damn orders!” roared Valentine. “If we leave, we’ve failed.”

  Niels grabbed Valentine’s uniform jacket, pulling him close. “If we’re dead, we’ve failed. If we're alive we’ve still got options.”

  Valentine glared at him, his hands tightening around his rifle, the threat of violence palpable. “What are your orders, Admiral?”

  Niels looked at the others. “Go for the escape pods, in section four-alpha. Let’s move, people.”

  They ran a rolling retreat from the engineering hull, firing in short bursts to conserve their dwindling ammo reserves.

  “Next right,” Hutch yelled, throwing out his last grenade. They’d lost the last of the light drones before they’d even got clear of engineering and were now fighting in the dwindling light of their torches.

  They reached the escape pods. Niels pulled the hatch open and helped Jenna and Fyffe inside. Niels followed, as behind them dozens of shadow-forms bore down on Hutch and Ellis, who fought a desperate holding action.

  “Go. Launch,” Hutch snapped.

  “We can’t just leave you.”

  There was a thunderous roar as light and fire ripped the shadow-forms apart. Niels whipped his head around. Hot-damn.

  “Get in the pods!” Hale shouldered a heavy machine gun – the kind normally mounted on fighters – and fired another burst of tracer fire into the darkness. The heavy rounds tore up the bulkheads as the Terran advanced toward the escape pod.

  Hutch leaned out of the hatch to cover Hale as she dropped the heavy munitions and jumped into the escape pod.

  Something screamed from the darkness and wrapped around Hutch’s arm, pulling him away.

  Both Niels and Hale reached out, grabbed the marine by the back of his harness and pulled. Hutch let out a cry of pain. Metal and carbon plating crunched within his arm. The darkness surged up it, splintering the metal apart in its rush to reach the human organic part at the other end.

  Niels pulled harder as Jenna played her flashlight over the darkness. It didn’t do any good.

  Damn it. The darkness crawled further up, more metal giving way against the crushing force. Niels groped for his or Hutch’s dropped rifle. Anything.

  “Knife.” Hutch ground the word from between clenched teeth. His eyes, full of pain and fear, flicked down to his belt.

  What the hells was a knife going to do against something like this?

  Before Niels could think, Hale pulled the knife. Darkness surged toward them.

  Hale drove the knife down into Hutch’s shoulder joint and twisted. The mechanical arm broke away in a shower of sparks and they tumbled back into the escape pod.

  The darkness rushed forward. Niels kicked out at the release lever and the door slammed shut. For a second the rush of acceleration pinned them to the wall, then it was over. They were clear.

  “Like I said,” Hale said, breathing hard. “Bigger guns.”

  ◊◊

  Lloyd banked the Hound, spinning away from a stream of tracer fire.

  “Why is the Feynman shooting at us?” Arland asked.

  Damned if he knew. He swung around again, dodging a spray of flack fire. He had to get clear and, hope to hell that it was only the close in guns. Well, that and the engines. The ship almost seemed to ripple under the force of acceleration.

  Alarms chirped. Lloyd swung the Hound clear of another burst of fire, as the com cracked.

  “Admiral Niels to all stations. Abandon ship. Repeat, abandon ship.”

  Stars, it must be bad in there for them to abandon the ship. Was this the virus? Or was Niels trying to overload the engines?

  Another spray of tracer fire skimmed past the Hound. No, they weren’t in control of the ship anymore. This was bad. How would they even get home without the ship? He didn’t relish the idea of being stuck in the Terran system for the rest of his life. Although, between the remaining Turned and this new enemy, the rest of their lives might not be that long.

  “Look,” Arland said.

  “You know I can’t see when you point.” He spun the fighter away from a spray of close quarters fire.

  Above them, a volley of escape pods blew away from the Feynman in a cloud of aerosol propellant
. The squat cylinders rocketed away from the ship.

  The Feynman’s CQC guns fired again, ripping two of the escape pods apart.

  Hells. No. He froze, his hands white-knuckling the controls.

  Before he could snap out of it, the close-in guns fired again shredding the remaining escape pods. This time close enough that he could see uniformed figures spinning through the cloud of shredded metal and flash frozen atmosphere, still gasping, clawing for just one more breath, one more second of life.

  Stars.

  “Lloyd,” Arland said from behind him. “Four o-clock.”

  More escape pots jettisoned into the storm of flack and tracer fire. He couldn’t just stand by and watch more helpless people die. Not again. Never again.

  “Hold onto your hat.” Before Arland could respond he threw the Wolfhound into the storm.

  The squat fighter was a tough old broad. Hounds were known as brawlers, and after watching those men die, Lloyd was spoiling for a brawl. Flack pinged off the hull as he dodged and wove between bursts of tracer fire.

  Artillery cannons keyed in on the escape pods.

  Not a chance. He hit the weapons and the Hound’s cannons raked over the turrets ripping two of the three apart.

  The third got a shot off before the Hound’s tracer fire reduced it to slag, but the shot fell short of the retreating escape pods.

  More pods launched and more turrets turned to track them. The hound danced between streams of tracer fire.

  The first weapons module blew apart under Lloyd’s fire and he turned his attention to the next. Midrange launchers spooled up, their long angular barrels tracking the escape pods. The Hound was still at extreme range.

  Lloyd hit the trigger anyway, tracers pinged off the weapons module. The launcher bucked twice and a pair of shells crashed through the escape pod.

  The long barrel swung toward the next pod. Lloyd pushed the Hound faster, ignoring impact warnings and letting out another blast. This time the weapons module broke apart under the onslaught.

  Another module came online, this one even further out. It was like they knew what he was doing and were trying to draw him out.

  He brought the Hound around, firing again, cutting furrows into the larger ship. More escape pods jettisoned.