“The impact of that thing’s tentacle just knocked her straight down,” I said. “The only reason her ship wasn’t crushed was because of the Voltec.”
Drasheel’s ship was like a comet, a trail of flame visible behind it. I could feel the heat coming off my own craft as I did everything I could to keep from losing her.
“Kris-10, will the Voltec be enough to keep her safe?”
“The nanobots have enveloped the ship. They won’t let the ship break apart, but the force of the impact may be too much to survive.” Kris-10’s summation of the situation would have been funny if a life didn’t hang in the balance, “she needs to stop falling now.”
“Yeah, no kidding.” I said, exasperated. Drasheel, I called in my mind. Drasheel! No answer. Her ship kept falling.
“Derringer, I think she’s passed out.” The g-forces were making me woozy too, and that metallic shell surrounding the core was coming up on us fast.
“Drasheel! Pull up! You need to course correct now!” I felt powerless. I’d just lost my mentor and I was about to watch a woman I love plunge straight into the planet I was failing to save. I don’t remember if it was a conscious effort, but it felt more like pure will. I just imagined myself reaching out and grabbing her ship and taking it in my hand. I was on the edge of consciousness anyway, and I was on the brink of letting go.
But something inside me was pulling me back. Or I was pulling it. Drasheel’s ship was still in free fall, but my readings indicated that it was slowing. No longer falling like a stone, now its descent started to look more like a controlled burn.
Then, I remembered Kris-10’s words, You are Voltec, and suddenly it made sense. I was able to manipulate the nanobots that clung to the outside of Drasheel’s ship. Not much maybe, but it didn’t take a lot of drag in zero air pressure. I reached out in my mind, trying to slow it even further. Then, WHAM!
My ship went crashing through the metallic exterior shell of Dawn. I was buried in half a second under the surface of Dawn’s metallic shield. But my ship was still intact.
Drasheel! She must have made the same impact somewhere nearby.
“Bre—come——we—” the radio was full of static.
“Harley, is that you?” I called, frantic. But the response was too garbled for me to make it out. I had to get up and out of my ship if I had any hope of getting a workable transmitter.
Securing the oxygen line in my flight suit, I reached over and tried to cockpit release, but it wouldn’t rise. The cockpit was now encased in the metallic space junk that surrounded the core of Dawn.
As I sat there, trapped in my cockpit without any way of communicating outside, I was sure that this was the end. I’d failed to beat off the attack by the Federation, and I was no more effective once the Gix got involved. The love of my life was a monster who turned on the whole human race to help one of the most destructive races in the galaxy destroy my adopted home, and they’d be moving on to Earth soon enough.
I couldn’t protect the women that I cared about. How could I be the chosen one, or whatever? Surely, there had to be another explanation. Maybe the Voltec, Teru, and Drasheel had all gotten the wrong impression of me. They read the tea leaves wrong, or they just mixed up the details. However it happened, someone had made a huge mistake trusting me with anything.
But, even when I was feeling at my lowest, guilty for all that I’d done wrong and let happen, it just didn’t make sense that it was all somehow a mistaken co-incidence. There was something more. My command over the Voltec, all the mystery that surrounded my time in Dawn. I thought back to Teru and the time that we had visited that floating cave that orbited around Dawn’s core. I wondered where there that tea room could be found now. Probably it crashed into the surface shell too, trapped somewhere just like I was.
But the fire burns the same, Teru said in my head. It wasn’t really that cave that held anything special. It was just a lens through which to look at that eternal light burning at the center of Dawn. It was the source of so much trouble. Without that star to build a core around, this whole colony never would have developed. The Gix and Celeste’s breakaway faction would have had no reason to come and everybody could have been spared this fate.
You’ve been here before, Teru reminded me. True enough, I had to concede. I’d experienced this same despair and I’d managed to recover. So why was this time any different? My oxygen level gauge beeped to let me know that my time wasn’t unlimited, so I made the choice to slow down my breathing. I closed my eyes. I saw the light of the core like a distant sun. As my breathing slowed, the sun felt like it grew closer, the warmth of it was growing all around me.
Great. At least peace comes before I die, I thought. But this was something more. I could feel the heat radiating from the core below me. I gave myself over to it, letting it draw itself inside of me. It was just like Teru described it, too big to fit inside of my consciousness, and yet I didn’t burn up when I viewed it. It was like Teru’s teachings and the visions I had on Viro were fusing somehow, and I knew without having to open my eyes that this power was taking over.
I saw Drasheel, her naked body approaching me from somewhere behind the horizon of the sun. Then Harley and Kris-10 were there too. You know what to do now.
Yes, I said. Let go, release myself.
My three nude beauties shared a knowing glance, almost a giggle passing through them.
No? I must still have some fight left in me after all. I could feel the icy cold tentacles of the Gix ships slithering from the cold expanse outside. They felt like heartworms inching closer to the heart of the world. I opened my eyes. I was still buried in my ship, but now had another card to play. I took the Voltec nanobots in my mind again and held them. They were spread out all over the surface of the ship, forming chains and invisible fractal patterns that ran all along my Cutlass. I imagined all of them congregating in one spot, forming a ring right above my head. The Voltec swirled in that one spot endlessly, like an unseen tidal pool that had the power of an ocean contained inside of it. The ring became hotter, brighter. The image in my mind was the same as what I found when I looked up. The Voltec bots were forming a superhot halo that was melting the reinforced glass in my cockpit. I took a deep breath just as thoom the seal was broken and the whole cabin depressurized. I unattached my flight suit and let my body pass up and out of the hole.
Success. At least, I was free from a ship that was buried under a layer of twisted metal. But I still had no way out. I scanned the horizon. No sign of the Gix, but I couldn’t see anyone else either. Just an expanse of stars and a gravity field that barely registered.
“Harley,” I spoke into my HUD, “where are you?”
“Derringer? What, did you fall down a well? Get your ass over here. We need you.” With a communication line open, the location jumped into my helmet and appeared in my visor. I raced as fast I could manage, my boots clumsily compensating for the lack of gravity with synthetic pull. I looked ridiculous, I’m sure, bobbing up and down, bounding over the surface of the synthetic crust of the planetoid. But I found Harley, in her space suit, and Kris-10 without any need of one standing over Drasheel’s ship that was buried the same as mine was.
Kris-10 waved as she approached, a little unnerving her complete lack of a spacesuit in open space, especially since to me she could have passed for Harley’s twin. But no matter.
Drasheel, I’m here.
Derringer. I knew you would come.
“I know how to get her out,” I announced. But it’s going to cost the ship. And we’re already down one.
“Looks like we’re buddying up,” said Harley. Kris-10 seemed delighted at the prospect.
Cover yourself, I told Drasheel, then I set to work on breaking her out. Commanding the Voltec proved easier the second time and in a few moments, the glass sang and then shattered.
I reached into the hole in the metallic crust, which was as deep as a three-foot layer of snow. Drasheel took my arm and I pulled her up and out and set
her on her feet. Almost easy.
Thank you, Drasheel said with her beguiling neon eyes. She gave me a kiss through her visor. I ran my gloved fingers down her arm, eager to establish contact but prevented from doing so.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” I told her.
“Me too. But, Derringer in case you forgot, we’ve got a battle to get back to,” said Harley.
“Where’s your ship?” I asked her, scanning the horizon. “It’s there,” she pointed to a point ahead. The outer core was small enough that an object on the other side of the horizon could completely disappear.
“If you say so. Let’s move,” I said, helping Drasheel.
There was no telling what it was like up above. All I could see were stars and the faintest suggestion of fighting when one of those stars would go tearing across the sky, or else when they exchanged tiny blinking rays of light with one another.
“Ted Derringer, what is your plan to defeat the Gix?” asked Kris-10. I honestly had no idea.
“I think the priority now is trying to get as many evacuated as we can.” We’d planned for this possibility. The real target had been the planet’s core. Once it was breached, I hoped that the Federation would be distracted enough that the civilian ships could make their escape.
“You’re giving up?” Harley asked, incredulous.
“I’m shifting priorities. The whole plan was built around taking out the Titan and scattering the rest of the fleet. We didn’t plan for the combined forces of the Gix too. We just don’t have the ships to mount a counter assault.”
What happens to Dawn?
“What’s already happening. The colony’s fracturing. They’ll regroup at the rally point and begin looking for a new star system.” I could read the disappointment on their faces, but there was nothing that I could do to resolve it. “Guys, come on. I know it’s a loss, but we knew this was a possibility.”
“Says the guy who cost us the advantage,” said Harley. She was right, and I knew it.
“That’s not fair,” I contested anyway.
“Fair? What’s fair about what happened back there? You were ready to sell us all out and give yourself over to that psychotic bitch. What exactly is fair about that?”
“Well, forgive me my human frailties,” I spat sarcastically, “but that was someone that I loved back there.”
The reminder pained Harley, I knew. Even though I couldn’t see her face through the visor of her suit as we walked along the Dawn outer core, I didn’t really need to. “Look, I’m sorry for what happened. I’m sorry that I don’t have the power to fix everything. I didn’t ask to be some kind of savior. I never even believed in any of that stuff. I just wanted to fly fighters. That’s all.” Of course it was a cop-out. I didn’t even know if being a pilot was even what I wanted or if it was just the dream the Federation had given me so I could serve their ends.
There was a silence for awhile, then, “I said I was sorry.”
“Yeah, we heard you,” Harley barked. “It what you said right before all that other self-pitying crap about how you didn’t ask to be anyone’s hero.”
“Yeah,” I said not really sure what else to add that would make me seem less childish and defensive.
“Friends!” Kris-10 exclaimed. I turned to find her pointing to something unseen. She’s found the ship, I thought. But as we approached, I could see that it was actually a hole similar to the one I had found in the side of that satellite I had walked on with Teru. The connection was eerie, and I knew better than to ignore it.
“I’ve seen one of these before. I think we can enter it.”
“Are you insane?” Harley asked. “If we’re just going to write off Dawn as a lost cause, we could at least—”
“I know, I know. It doesn’t make sense, but I think it’s a sign and we’re supposed to follow it.”
“Why? What’s down there?”
“If experience is any teacher,” I said, “It’s probably some kind of psychedelic substance that offers me some kind of spiritual communion and a glimpse at some kind of deeper truth of existence.”
“Having a lot of those lately, have we?” Harley asked ironically. Maybe it was a sign that things were starting to thaw between us.
“You have no idea.”
“Ted Derringer, spiritual warrior. Who would have guessed it, the famous Clockwork—”
“—okay, okay. Let’s just see what’s inside. Maybe I’ll gain some kind of knowledge that will help us turn the tide.”
The interior that we crawled into looked nothing like Teru’s tea room. Instead, the walls gave off a strange greenish-yellow light that danced on the white stone tiles which dominated the space from floor to ceiling. It looked like it had once been a stop in a subterranean subway station, but there was no sign of a train. Inside, Kris-10 checked the environment and confirmed that the pressure seal was holding in an atmosphere that was breathable, so we removed our helmets and looked around.
“What is this place?” asked Harley aloud.
We will be safe here, Drasheel said.
“We can’t be sure it’s safe. Watch yourselves,” I warned my little party. “Just because this part is safe doesn’t meant that whoever built this just laid out the welcome mat.”
The hallway gave way to a tunnel. On the walls were some kind of pointalist art, each dot forming images: a woman in a shawl, a radiant sunburst, an ocean scene. Far from being the evidence of some kind of ancient civilization, it looked like the space had once been commercial.
“You think this came from Earth?” I asked aloud.
“Earth?” Harley asked incredulously. “What would it be doing here?”
“A lot of what these outer-world colonies were made up of was salvaged whole-cloth from existing structures on older planets. This whole thing could have been picked up and moved, or maybe copied somehow.”
“Perhaps it was reused, like Voltec,” Kris-10 offered.
“Blue water, yellow sun, I think I’ve seen that statue of a green woman with buildings around her somewhere before.
“Derringer, even if it’s too late to save Dawn we’ve got to do what we can to save Earth.” Harley said.
I nodded. “We’ve got to warn them. They Earthers may be decadent, but Celeste is insane. I just hope we can reach the planet in time to warn them.”
Boom! A sudden crash, and I was thrown hard into the wall I’d been standing beside. I crumpled to the floor, clutching my forehead reflexively, touching the deep red blood that was flowing there.
“Everyone okay?” I asked, making a quick check.
“Yesss” called Drasheel.
“I am undamaged,” Kris-10 confirmed.
Harley coughed, clutching her ribs. “Well, I think we know what the Gix are up to there.”
“They’re getting closer to the core,” I agreed.
“So, we should go back and take the fight to them. Or at least get the hell off this lost cause,” Harley argued. It made sense, but I had the opposite opinion.
“We should keep going,” I insisted.
“What? Why? We don’t even know what’s ahead of us.”
“I know, but I feel that whatever it is it’s important somehow. Teru was worried that the Gix would reach the core. It’s more than just a source of raw power. It’s, I don’t know, mystical in a way.” Another rumble and we were pressed against the wall once more. The automatic gravity unit was malfunctioning since the whole place was getting split apart by the Gix. “Take my hand,” I called. Harley took it. The girls made a chain and we pressed on for another few hundred feet until we reached what looked like some kind of elevator.
“We should not go this way, Max Derringer,” Kris-10 concluded.
“We can’t trust the elevator, but maybe we can crawl down the chute.” I said.
“What?” Harley balked. “We don’t know where it leads, and we’d be climbing around in the dark.
“We’ve gone too far to turn back now,” I said, “Can you hack into the panel
and send the elevator car down the chute?” Kris-10 nodded, pressing her hand to the control panel. The panel glowed as Kris-10 reached into the elevator’s rather simple computer system. After a moment, I could hear the car being pulled horizontally down the shaft. I reached into the space between the doors with my fingers. Graah! I grunted as I pulled the doors open. They yielded and I climbed into the shaft, switching on my headlamp.
“Looks good,” I reported. I helped each of the girls in and we proceeded to walk down the sideways elevator shaft.
“You’re sure the gravity isn’t just going to turn back, right?” Harley asked.
“Not really,” I admitted. She started walking faster. Probably better for us all to pick up the pace. We passed by doors that from our new orientation were on the wall. Something inside told me to keep going, that what we were looking for lay deeper.
“We’re getting warmer,” I announced.
I feel it too, Drasheel said.
I smiled. “No, what I meant was—” but then I realized that I was feeling warmer. As we made progress the temperature change was palpable. It was like an inviting fire that was always just beyond where we were standing. Harley and Kris-10 could feel it too. I saw a kind of satisfaction, of peace that passed between the two of them.
Then, I felt a pull coming from the ceiling. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. “Hold onto me!” I yelled, grabbing Harley and Drasheel. Kris-10 wrapped her arms around my shoulders just as we went into free-fall. We were falling together, but I was toppling end over end, struggling to keep any kind of up-down orientation in my head as I saw lights passing in front of me.
Scrreeeach! The falling stopped, and I was hanging upside down. I looked up and there was Kris-10 holding onto the elevator’s cable, her hand still smoking from the friction. Harley had me around the middle and Drasheel was holding onto her, her legs wrapped around Kris-10’s torso. I breathed a sigh of relief, until I heard the clacking of the elevator car. It was coming down on top of us!
“Derringer!” Harley yelled.
“I know, I know!” I fumbled, reaching desperately for the elevator door in front of me. “Swing me closer!”
Alpha Wing Page 19
