by J. N. Chaney
Awen’s thoughts turned to the Jujari. She wondered if they had not inadvertently provoked the violence in the mwadim’s palace. Did Kane approach the mwadim about the stardrive earlier, and did the mwadim see through him and resist? Perhaps the ambush had been Kane’s way of forcing the mwadim’s hand and getting what he wanted.
All this speculation still didn’t help Awen answer the biggest question: why give up the stardrive at all? She didn’t understand why the mwadim would do such a thing, given its clear significance to every sentient life-form in the galaxy. The fact that Kane knew the answer to this question and she didn’t made her nervous. Who knew what that madman, as Sootriman had called him, was capable of.
Awen’s thoughts turned to her parents. The prospect of never seeing them again put a lump in her throat. They’d fought for months before she left to attend observances on Worru. They’d never see eye to eye on the Luma and on what the “proper way” to serve the galaxy was—that much they’d made clear. Truthfully, when she left, she didn’t care if she ever saw them again. But that had just been the sentiments of impulsive youth. Confirming the reality of never seeing them again forever, she was sad—perhaps even afraid. This wasn’t like getting stuck on the other side of a quadrant for a year or two. At least in that scenario, you could send transmissions and share some semblance of life’s happenings. The planet of Itheliana was as removed as two people could be this side of death.
Then she thought of the person she was least expecting to think of: Lieutenant Adonis Olin Magnus. Admittedly, she’d been pretty rude to him when they first met. But her experience with the Galactic Republic’s Marines in the past hadn’t exactly filled her with confidence about their humanity. “Blaster fire and funeral pyres” went the old adage among the Luma, and that about summed it up as far as Awen was concerned. But Magnus had shown more concern than she expected. His kindness had caught her off guard. As did those green eyes and that bearded baby face, she thought. He had, she also reminded herself, saved her life. Though that was a mutually shared gift. She recalled the falling concrete slab and Abimbola’s jail. We’re probably even, she concluded.
Despite her speechless delight at being the first Luma to ever journey to Ithnor Ithelia—and discovering the metaverse!—she had a visceral desire to get back to her native universe as soon as she could. She would return to explore this spectacular new world when she could. Hopefully, the quantum tunnel would remain open for several more years. But discovery paled in comparison to survival, and she had to get back to save her people—and to save the galaxy from whatever So-Elku and Kane were planning.
“We just have to get back,” Awen whispered.
“It’s not looking great for that, love.”
“What do you mean?” Awen looked up.
“Well, it’s safe to assume that Kane was looking for alien tech, probably starships. He’s an admiral, after all.”
He’s an admiral, of course! Why didn’t I think of that sooner?
“No ships, then?” Awen asked.
“Plenty of ships,” Sootriman corrected. “Thousands of ships, actually. Quantity is not the problem, however.”
“It’s quality,” Awen concluded.
“Exactly. As far as Tee-Oh can tell, this entire civilization has lain dormant for more than a thousand years. Maybe much more.”
“They’ve been extinct for over a thousand years?” Awen asked, wondering who else knew about this race. Were we the first to explore the city? Her mind swam with the implications. “So that means the Jujari have had that stardrive in their possession for… for…”
“For a very long time, unless they got it from another species, of course. Either way, it’s safe to say that it was in circulation long before the Galactic Republic, the Sentient Species Alliances, or even the Star Faring Council.”
“So we’re late to the date.” The large room suddenly took on a melancholy air. This place would not yield the discoveries Awen had hoped for—namely, life. There would be no encounters with any sentient species here. No one was coming back to greet them. Awen knew, of course, that there was no price to be put on what they might take away from future archeological expeditions. But in terms of finding sentient life, that hope was gone. “Maybe TO-96 can cobble together something,” Awen said, trying to cheer herself up.
“That’s the hope, yes. But, Awen, you have to remember, a thousand years. The fact that these buildings are still standing is a testament to the Novia Minoosh’s ingenuity.”
“And maybe it will be that way for the starships they find too.”
Sootriman looked out the windows. The white purplish light from the sun was growing stronger, marking the beginning of the alien day. “I hope you’re right,” she finally said. “I really do. But a thousand years is a long time for anything to sit dormant and deteriorate, love. I think you need to prepare yourself for what we’ve already accepted.”
“And that is…?” But Awen already knew the answer.
“We’re going to be here for a very long time.”
MAGNUS and ARWEN will return in GALACTIC BREACH, coming AUGUST 2019.
For more updates on this series, be sure to join the Facebook Group, “J.N. Chaney’s Renegade Readers.”
Read on for a bonus short story.
The Night of Fire
Magnus should have been more concerned with the blaster bolts flying over his head than he was with what his drill sergeant had called “the weaknesses of the flesh.” But he wasn’t.
Incoming blaster fire was still a problem. A big one. The enemy was holed up in a small mountain in the center of the island. Routing them out was going to take all night. But right then, Magnus’s body was complaining more about an entirely different enemy. No, it wasn’t the sand and salt that had managed to find their way into every crevice in his armor; parts of him that he didn’t know could go raw were chafing. He was tired, sore, hungry, and done with being shot at. But none of those were as bad as the enemy currently wreaking havoc in his gut. No amount of discipline, armor, or team readiness had prepared him—or any of them—for the squirts.
When the waterborne virus first started hitting the Marines, Magnus had been concerned with manners. They all had. His unit had dug small latrines and tried giving one another some privacy. But as the days turned into weeks and the infection spread, they’d abandoned all sense of decorum. Now the Marines went whenever they had to, most going right in their armor if they were in a firefight. Like they were right now.
“Splick! There I go again,” Chico yelled over their TACNET fire team channel. “Dammit!”
Private Miguel Chico was stacked up behind Magnus, along with two other members of his newly formed fire team: Private Michael Deeks and Private Allan Franklin. The four of them had taken cover behind the remains of a bamboo hut on the south side of the island.
Magnus had been given command of the fire team after Sergeant Cartin took a high-energy blaster round clean through the helmet the night before. Magnus could still see the wisps of smoke around the hole floating up through his memory. Cartin had been one hell of a Marine, taking out his share of ’kuda before meeting his end, even saving several lives in the process. As a corporal, it was Magnus’s job not to get blasted in the head—and to try to keep his guys safe while staying on the mission objectives.
“Wash it out when the sun comes up, Private,” Magnus replied.
“Yeah, but just don’t do it upwind of me again, would ya?” Deeks asked. “You nasty, boy.”
Chico punched Deeks in the shoulder. “Not as nasty as what your mom said to me last night.”
“I swear to all the mystics, if you talk about my momma one more time, Chico…”
“You’re gonna do what?”
Magnus had to break it up; he knew where it would go. That was part of why he was growing to love these guys so much. They were fast becoming like brothers to him. And he didn’t need to lose any more of those in this war.
“Who’s ready to make a run with
me, boys?” Magnus asked.
That got their attention. Almost.
“Chico doesn’t need to,” Franklin replied. “He’s already got plenty of runs of his own.”
Chico stiffened. “I swear to all the mystics, Franklin…”
“Tighten it up, boys,” Magnus said, muting their respective TACNET channels. If these three guys weren’t the most aggressive fighters he’d seen in Bravo Company yet, he would have asked to be reassigned. As it was, they were crass smack-talkers who had terrible comms discipline, which verged on being belligerent. But they could fight; that was for damn sure. Magnus had already watched them put down more ’kudas individually than most fire teams were doing collectively. And that was just the kind of fire team he wanted to lead.
“We have orders to get this island cleared by sunup, and I don’t want to disappoint First Lieutenant Vanderbilt when he comes walking down the northside beach head.”
Magnus saw a comms request icon in his HUD coming from Deeks. He opened the channel.
“With all due respect, Corporal, but ain’t no way I’m interested in impressing the LT,” Deeks replied.
Magnus had a mischievous tone in his voice. “I know that, Deeks. And you know that. But Chico and Franklin are still hoping he’ll ask their mommas out on a date.”
“Corporal Magnus for the win!” Deeks said, punching Chico in the side of the arm.
“Punch me one more time, Deeks. Go ahead.”
“Let’s stay focused,” Magnus said, smiling through the sand, salt, sweat, and splick filling his helmet. “We have a job to do.”
The jabs at Lieutenant Vanderbilt weren’t completely misguided, though they certainly would have been met with severe consequences had anyone been listening over comms. Vanderbilt had made some seriously boneheaded decisions over the past several weeks, at least as far as Magnus was concerned. The officer had ordered Marines into some downright asinine scenarios that could have easily been avoided. The one they were in right now was a great example.
The small island of Mo’a Ot’a had a small mountain summit in the center, leftover from some ancient volcano. All approaches to the summit consisted of a gentle rise through a lush jungle. That was, of course, except for a ravine carved by a mountain stream that ran down the south side. As was to be expected from the lieutenant, he had ordered Magnus’s team to move up that very ravine. Magnus had tried to protest—respectfully—but Vanderbilt had “no time for the backassward opinions of grunts.”
Magnus swore that if he was ever promoted to the position of an officer, he would treat the Marines under his command differently. He wouldn’t play with their lives over some vain attempt to impress his commanding officers.
The worst part, at least as far as Magnus and the others were concerned, was that none of the islands could be strafed by fighters until after they’d been cleared. A lot of good that does us, he’d thought when he heard the news.
Apparently, islanders were reported to be dug into the hills in an attempt to wait out the fighting. And since sensors were having a hard time distinguishing between friend and foe, the Marines had to sort the good from the bad. This meant liberating survivors and dominating the enemy. But so far, in over six weeks of intense fighting, Magnus hadn’t found a single islander—at least none who were alive.
“Three ’kudas moving along our left flank!” Deeks yelled.
“And I got two more converging on our right,” Chico said.
The battle was getting hot. They’d made plenty of progress, bounding from boulder to boulder, fighting a true uphill battle with every step. But the ravine’s steep walls gave the enemy a clear tactical advantage. The best Magnus and his fire team could do was to catch the ’kudas before they flanked his team from above.
Magnus’s helmet AI identified the targets with compass-heading indicators and distances. He used his eyes to select the next nearest one behind Deeks’s target and sighted in along the barrel of his MC90 blaster. The Repub had promised that a new neural interface was coming down the pipeline for their helmets. The tech claimed to rid operators of the optic command protocols that they’d mastered in basic training.
Wouldn’t that be nice, Magnus thought. The Marines on the ground had yet to see anything in the field, but he looked forward to the day that the new interface was a mainstay in the Corps.
Thirty-eight degrees up and to his left, Magnus zeroed in on a ’kuda taking cover behind a palm tree. His helmet’s red-hued thermal-imaging system was working like a charm, showing the enemy combatant as a white blotch resting its back against the trunk. The ’kuda seemed to be fiddling with the battery pack for its main weapon. Magnus put the reticle in the dead center of the tree trunk and squeeze his trigger.
A single blaster round flashed in his HUD as the bolt streaked up the ravine. It split the trunk in two, shooting splinters in all directions. Magnus ducked under return fire from other elements but managed to watch the combatant he’d hit slump on the far side of the tree. It collapsed in a heap with its weapon and battery falling from two scaly hands.
“Scratch another one for me,” Magnus said, recharging his MC90 and sighting in the next target. The MC90 wasn’t the latest or greatest in the Repub arsenal, but it was standard Marine issue for a reason. Magnus had grown to appreciate its ruggedness and subsequent reliability. Other blasters promised to offer better fire superiority and more features, like the prototype MAR30 that the spec ops Marines were said to be getting in a few years, but that was a long way off. And as far as Magnus was concerned, the MC90 did just fine at killing ’kudas.
The Akuda were a native species of Caledonia—just not the ones that lived on land. While the planet’s islands’ inhabitants consisted mostly of humans and other humanoid species, its underwater citizens were what the Marines called “fish with an attitude problem.”
The attitude-ridden aquaticans preferred to live underwater, but they were able to extract needed respiratory gases from both water and air. This, combined with powerful hind legs that had evolved over the millennia, allowed them to move on land when the need arose. And, apparently, the need had arisen when the Akuda decided they wanted to be the only species to inhabit Caledonia.
Because it was a member of the Galactic Republic, the planet’s civil war required the Repub military to be called in. At first, every Marine had relished the idea of deploying on the paradisiacal planet. The elite came to Caledonia to bask in endless sunsets and get drunk on fifty-credit cocktails. But any dreams of sunbathing and frolicking in the surf had disappeared when the Marines realized just how badly the ’kuda wanted their genocide.
Magnus squeezed his trigger again, taking out the third fish Deeks had spotted. Chico and Franklin cleared the right side, then Magnus gave the order to leapfrog farther up the stream. Each Marine took a turn advancing, dodging incoming enemy fire, then hanging back to cover the others.
Their boots—standard issue for Mark IV armor—did little to help them along the wet rocks. They slipped constantly, bashing their knees and wrists on the rounded rocks. The ’kuda, on the other hand, moved at a dizzying pace, gliding across the rocks with the ease of Tanglothian banshee lizards.
“Incoming!” Franklin was on point and leveled his MC90 on a pair of ’kudas that leaped off a short waterfall at him. Despite their speed, the fish lacked fire discipline, and their blaster bolts went wide. But what Franklin lacked in agility, he more than made up for in blaster superiority. Magnus watched him aim, squeeze, and follow through. The Marine turned to the next target—still in midair—and repeated the pattern. In less than a second, two scaly bodies crashed in the shallows beside Franklin and rolled to a stop.
“No time to take pictures, boys,” Magnus said over TACNET. “Let’s get over that waterfall.”
The four Marines helped one another over the rock ledge and onto the next landing. More boulders provided cover while the sides of the ravine grew taller and steeper.
“Gettin’ pretty tight through here, Corporal,” Dee
ks said. “Did brass give you exfil coordinates yet?”
Magnus shook his head. “Not yet. Trust me, you’ll be the first to know when I do.”
Chico spoke up next. “It’s just we’re getting pretty deep up here. Grid shows…” Magnus could tell the private was checking the TACNET map. He knew it didn’t look good. “Splick, it shows us pretty much out here on our own. The other fire teams are well to the west and east of our position.”
“Copy that,” Magnus replied. “I see it too.”
“No backup then,” Franklin concluded.
Aren’t you just Captain Obvious today, Magnus thought, holding his tongue. Best to save insulting these noobs for after they survived this. “No backup,” Magnus repeated. “Which means we gotta own the field, Privates. You copy?”
“OTF!” they repeated as one.
Magnus tapped the side of his helmet. Five more targets flickered to life on sensors, way too close for comfort. Apparently, his rig needed a tune-up.
“Contact!” Magnus barked. “Five, coming right down the stream!”
His Marines took cover, leaning around boulders with their MC90s charged and at high ready position. Approaching like blue wisps of water vapor, the ’kuda materialized ten meters ahead, weapons blasting water and rocks on full auto. Magnus pulled back, narrowly avoiding a blaster bolt to the head. Then he leaned out again and targeted the nearest fish. His blaster bucked against his shoulder as the bolt sizzled through the damp air and struck the enemy in the throat, flipping it backward. The ’kuda corpse splashed into the stream and flopped around in death throes.
Deeks took out two ’kuda that tried running up the side of the near-vertical ravine. They made it high enough to turn and point their weapons at Deeks. But that was all they got to do. The Marine fired a short burst of full auto, stitching the side of the rock wall and tearing both fish in two.