Protector

by Luke Norris

  “No,” Shael cried openly, as the green-clad figure pointed the blaster to Oliver's chest.

  To her surprise, the robed second-stager hurriedly, almost protectively, pushed the pistol away. They were arguing. Shael knew in her heart the blaster would have been a mercy. Look what that man had done to Arif! Arif was an awful man, but to see the once terrible and powerful zewka baron a mindless slave reinforced the power of this adversary.

  Shael was vaguely aware of the soldiers filing into the landing craft.

  Something clicked in her brain, and she was suddenly furious at Oliver. “Damn that man is so puffed-up sometimes,” Shael said half to herself, then turned to the other two. “He is self-important, his head is swollen to the point he thinks he’s the only one who can take the fate of this world on his shoulders. Why? It’s our home. We need to do something about it. I’m not letting them take him.” She looked sternly at Krin and Eorol, and realized they were standing waiting for her.

  “I’ll get the wasp,” Eorol ran towards the ladder. “You coming too?” he asked Krin

  “Readiness!” the gangly man responded with a salute, holding his fist up.

  *

  Oliver couldn't move. Each breath was labored and painful. He coughed blood again. He couldn’t prop himself up off the ground with his broken arm. It was likely that a bone shard from a broken rib had punctured his lung. The ratio of saliva to blood did not look good.

  But these people knew they could stretch Oliver’s body far past its natural limits and still keep him alive. Besides, the one called Seth wanted him. He had stopped the woman, Li, in the combat suit from shooting him. To be honest, he would have taken the blaster, if he had the choice.

  “I’m telling you, Li,” Seth said standing between Oliver and her blaster. “I can learn a lot about driver theory from this one. I’m not going to tell you again, put that blaster away!”

  As he said it, Arif let go of Oliver and left him lying battered on the ground. He walked instinctively around to flank Seth. Li flinched back slightly.

  “You don’t tell me anything, Seth.” Li said, “I’m your blazing captain.”

  Oh god, the pain! Oliver could not see Li’s face through the tinted helmet visor of her combat suit, but her posture said it all.

  She is afraid of the driver, Oliver realized dizzily. There is clearly some powerplay happening here.

  Seth broke the tense silence with a swift instruction to his driver. “Take her weapon!”

  Quicker than an eyeblink, a cold bionic arm shot out snatching the weapon from the captain. In her shock, she attempted to get a shot off at the driver, but even boosting she had not been prepared and the energy blast left a crater in the ground next to the driver’s foot. Concrete and stone shrapnel sprayed Oliver. Li gave a small gasp as Arif twisted it from her hands.

  “Cut it out, Seth!” The third figure in a combat suit had her weapon pointed straight at Seth.

  “Triton swallow you, Seth!” Li said bitterly. “You don’t have one single friend among the crew. If you’re planning some sort of mutiny, you’ll be crewless.”

  That gave Seth pause. “Give our captain her toy back, Arif!” He said patronizingly. “But know, Li, my drivers, have instructions, should anything happen to me. There are eighty drivers here and more upstairs.” He nodded consent for her to take her pistol back. “Don’t forget it.”

  Li snatched the blaster back from Arif angrily. “You think I don’t know that you sack of Terrasian manure.”

  The altercation seemed to have de-escalated. Was this kind of quarreling and dissension typical among these crews? It sounded like Seth’s behavior bordered on sedition! The power play was becoming more evident to Oliver, Li had the crew’s loyalty, but Seth somehow had control of all the drivers. One thing was certain, Seth had won this little powerplay, and would have his way with Oliver. The quicker, more merciful, death from Li had eluded him.

  “Bring the new driver!” Seth said walking back toward the main transport. The other two, wearing the clunky green armored suits, followed talking amongst themselves.

  Oliver’s fighting spirit had been snuffed out. There was no more struggling required, he had succeeded. Shael was safe. Some part of him hoped his mind would allow him to simply detach, a kind of insanity to protect him from the coming torment.

  He groaned, an inhuman sound, as Arif took hold of his foot and dragged his clobbered body across the yard, a predator hauling its prey to the lair.

  Oliver hardly felt the sharp jolting of his head bouncing off the concrete, as he was dragged carelessly to the landing craft. It didn’t matter to Seth, he would just fix Oliver later. Somewhere in the back of his concussed mind, he could still hear Shael’s voice, small and distant, calling him, urging him up.

  Oliver, get up and fight damn you.

  Fighting would doom them. He’d saved them. The fact his final act on this planet had saved her was his last solace, and the thing he would hold on to when Seth cut him open.

  Oliver, I need you to get up!

  Her voice was still faint in his imagination, yet it yelled at him. Couldn’t the memory of her be kinder? He didn’t need her fantasy scolding him. He wanted to remember her in the warm and tender moments.

  Don’t you dare let them take you. Oliver Mckenzie! Screaming. The voice was louder now or was it closer.

  Suddenly, the thundering roar of straining turbine engines blasted them as the wasp slowed its descent with tremendous sudden deceleration. It fanned hot, smoky air over Oliver, causing him to groggily open his eyes. Eorol’s wasp! It hovered meters away, and the passenger doors were wide open. Was that a person? Yes! Standing precariously on one of the landing skids, one hand holding the railing and the other a blaster gun, Shael clung, poised like a trapeze artist. Black hair strands whipped across her face. Her mouth was set and determined, and her yellow eyes were bright and fearsome.

  “Oliver, get up!” Shael screamed at him over the engine noise. “I’m not letting them take you.”

  She’s formidable, Oliver wondered light-headedly at the aberration. Beautiful.

  “Stop being a royal pompous plonker and get up right now!” She pointed the handgun at Arif.

  The driver dove to the side instantly, letting go of Oliver’s leg and avoiding the shot. Arif transferred his weight smoothly into an expert forward roll as he hit the ground. In the same motion he drew his own weapon, so he was armed as he rolled into a crouched position.

  The crack of the pistol being fired snapped Oliver out of his detached reverie. Shael! What the hell was she doing here? She was meant to be far away in the mountains, safe. But of course, she’d been here hiding. Shael was too damn headstrong in her resolve. He should've known when she said she wasn’t going to leave him that she would not go to the monastery with the others.

  There was a distraction out of his peripheral vision. He didn’t want to take his eyes off Shael, but instincts forced him to train his eyes around. Somebody was running from across the yard. If you could call it a run. It was more of an ungainly urgent scuttle, of somebody attempting to run in a potato sack. It was Lenat! He’d left the safety of the drainage trench, and was making a solitary charge. The timid man had been possessed! His voice carried across the yard for all to hear. It had surprising conviction.

  “Save the king!” he bellowed.

  Everyone seemed to stop what they were doing and watched in utter disbelief at the foolhardy overweight man. He wildly yelled “chaaaaarge”, but the word quickly became a prolonged noise without meaning. To compound the absurdity of the moment, Oliver realized Lenat, in his moment of berzerker passion, had left his pistol behind.

  He was running wildly toward Oliver—completely weaponless.

  Bless his heart. He’d be cut down any second now, but Oliver praised his sacrifice. Lenat’s wild lone cry was unexpectedly joined by another voice, then another. The attention of Oliver, Arif and the three second-stagers were drawn to the perimeter as a hundred other men scr
ambled up from their cover to take up the charge with Lenat. It was a rag-tag group of scientists, guards, cooks, and house staff with military face paint and basic weapons. Useless weapons.

  Oliver was vaguely aware of the second-stage language being shouted by Li. “Seth, call your drivers back out here now, and have them take care of this!”

  They were all doomed. But bless them for trying. Oliver couldn’t take that from them.

  Drivers began to file out of the transports they had just entered. Seth had given the orders for them to engage.

  “Get in the wasp, Oliver,” Shael wasn’t seeing the danger. Her eyes were on him. Brimming eyes, full of hope.

  Please just look up, he willed her. Arif was already turning toward her.

  Arif was on the opposite side of him with his blaster on Shael’s chest. Strength that Oliver thought had been completely spent and beaten out of him surged through his limbs, traveling to his fingertips.

  The motions of Shael and Arif became slower for Oliver, as the shot of adrenaline let him boost deeply. All Arif had to do was pull the trigger. Oliver called upon the last vestige of energy in his being and pushed himself up. Ribs cracked and ground where the cartilage had torn. He sprang. His arm was extended as if to catch Arif’s shot in his hand. Boosting meant his effort sent him farther than he expected, so when Arif fired his blaster gun the energy pulse didn’t hit Oliver’s hand but tore through his shoulder.

  Oliver had never been shot directly by a driver-issue blaster before. He’d been wounded by a knife, experienced blunt force trauma, had solid projectile bullets wound him, but not a blaster. In a detached moment of driver thinking, he realized why these weapons were so effective. The pulse from Arif’s blaster gun had the energy transfer effect of a cannonball. Oliver’s left arm simply obliterated. It was there one moment, gone the next. Even the blood had been vaporized by the heat, partly cauterizing the brachial artery, but there was still the regular pulsing of arterial blood.

  Shael’s scream was a drawn out, jittery, and distorted sound to Oliver’s boosting ears.

  “I said not the driver, you steel brained gar!” Seth yelled at Arif, running over to Oliver to inspect the damage. “Blazing hydrons, Arif. This driver is worth more than you, and you may well have ruined it. Do something useful, and stop that prehistoric transport there,” he pointed to the wasp where Shael clung in the door.

  No sooner had Seth finished speaking than Arif lept toward the aircraft with a driver’s agility. His steel fist was cocked back. Oliver watched him deliriously. His peripheral vision was dappled with black clouds that seemed to be closing in. Lightheadedness, a symptom of extreme blood loss. He couldn’t protect Shael like this. God, he could hardly move.

  Arif sailed through the air and crashed into one of the huge turbines on the wasp. Those turbines would tear him to shreds, wouldn’t they? He mounted the metal shroud that housed the deadly spinning rotors. Then, without a moment’s hesitation, he tore away one of the steel sheets exposing the turbine blades thrust his arm into the moving engine.

  The black iron steel in the wasp’s turbines was no contest against the second-stage alloy composite Seth had created for Arif’s bionic arms. It had the effect of a crowbar being thrust into the cogs of a mill. Sparks, smoke, and the sound of tearing steel accompanied the wrenching halt of the engine. Arif continued to tear at the craft like a hunting-dog harrowing its quarry. The wasp lurched, and the corner hit the ground hard.

  The impact flung Shael violently from the aircraft. She rolled across the concrete tarmac and stopped like a limp doll in front of Li. Her pistol skidded to a stop an arm's length from Oliver. The second-stager, indestructible in her suit, raised the blaster to Shael. Even if Oliver could reach Shael’s handgun, an arm's length away, it would be ineffectual against the body armor.

  Oliver forced himself to stay cognizant. She was too far away for him to reach. Besides, he was dying. He could feel it now, his lifeblood draining from him. Seth completely ignored Oliver lying inert on the ground, but the words he’d spoken to Li earlier resounded in Oliver’s mind in a moment of lucidity, ‘But know, Li, my drivers have instructions, should anything happen to me.’.

  What did that mean? That if something were to happen to Seth the drivers were programmed to attack Li? Oliver couldn’t hurt Li, but Seth was wearing simple robes and was right next to him.

  Oliver grasped the pistol. His hand was shaking, and he did not believe he could lift it.

  Around him, drivers began opening fire on his foolhardy brave friends who’d come to rescue him. No! They would be cut down. He watched blurrily as some of his men fell to screams of pain. He watched as Li’s blaster raised over Shael’s chest. Everything had collapsed. It was chaos.

  So this was it? These would be his last memories, his friends being slaughtered, his lover being killed. Would he wake again in the ship? Resurrected by Seth? Maybe he would be lucky and die right here.

  Oliver’s hand shook violently under the weight of the pistol. He did not think he had the strength to pull the trigger, and the deafening crack of the shot surprised him. Seth looked at Oliver with a mixture of befuddlement and surprise, as a red, coin-sized, splotch appeared on his white Sharian robes, and quickly expanded to cover his entire front.

  The heart shot did its work quickly. Seth collapsed beside Oliver, his blue eyes staring fixedly at Oliver’s face. His thin jaw hung slack against the ground.

  The echo of the shot still reverberated around the yard in a moment of suspended time. The instant Seth’s eyes waxed over, and attained that vacant glassiness, Oliver felt the change in the air, like a wave that had been rushing up the beach and suddenly began sucking back out with all haste.

  Seth’s death triggered something in Arif, and he abruptly stopped his rampage on the wasp. Blackness was crowding Oliver’s sensibilities, but he could see the moment Arif broke through the wasp’s cockpit glass, and his steel arm froze inches away from Eorol’s terrified face.

  Eorol studied Arif’s metal-plated face in anticipation, as the driver stared blankly ahead. The objectives and programming in his singular focused brain were being rewired. Come on, thought Oliver, there’s no more time.

  Arif’s spear-head tackle carried Li clear three meters through the air. The shot intended for Shael’s chest missed by feet. As the driver and Li struck the ground, the sickening sound of the impact was like an iron rod striking concrete. Remarkably, Li picked herself up. Her combat suit had absorbed the impact of the bionic steel without any great difficulty. The suits were mining suits designed to protect the wearer from blunt force impact from boulders, even from high-speed space dust on asteroid operations.

  Oliver heard Shael groan and saw her roll over. She was safe! For the time being. The sound of cumbrous clanking steel ensued, as Li engaged the driver. It was plain to Oliver that the driver couldn’t hurt Li in the high tech suit. But Arif’s body, on the other hand, apart from his arms was vulnerable.

  Oliver closed his eyes. His mind began jumping through events in his life, there was no chronological order to them as if time was compressed into a single point. Flashes of New Zealand were interspersed with Shael’s face, which morphed into Lego’s small orb-like body. A deep sense of peace replaced the physical exhaustion, and agony, of his broken and ruined body. In the back of his mind, he knew this was what people referred to as your life flashing before your eyes.

  Oliver hardly felt the booted foot of the other second-stager roll him over. This one was also wearing a green armored suit with the bulbous alien visor like Li.

  They still consider me a threat, Oliver thought, I can’t even move.

  She bent down and picked Oliver up easily with one hand. The suit bestowed upon her strength many times that of her own. She lifted him high off the ground. Oliver couldn’t see through her tinted visor, but her head was tilted to one side as if she were considering Oliver curiously. He hung limp in her grip and simply waited.

  It was Lenat’s desperate voic
e that caused Oliver to drowsily look up.

  “Krin!” Lenat called to his friend, as he reached Oliver. “The maneuver. Now!”

  The maneuver? Oliver looked at Lenat with bemused admiration, as his body sagged helplessly in the vice grip of the reinforced combat suit. The second-stager also looked at the puffing sweating man running toward them, with the same questioning head-tilt she had given Oliver. They watched Lenat, both slightly bewildered at his audacious entry into the middle of their quandary.

  “Now Krin!” Lenat called again.

  For the first time, Oliver noticed Krin, Lenat’s lanky comrade, by the downed wasp. He was holding the cheap sword replica Oliver had seen earlier. With a small unnecessary flourish, Krin tossed the weapon toward Lenat.

  Both Oliver and the second-stager watched intrigued, as the glinting blade rotated slowly toward them. It spun, handle over tip, whirring.

  Miraculously, a hand snatched the sword from the air by the handle. Lenat caught the sword beautifully, marvelously. And then, in a moment of uncharacteristic gracefulness, spun it three sixty degrees in his hand, and brought it crashing down onto the arm holding Oliver.

  “Release him, you extraterrestrial scum!” Lenat delivered the line as though he’d practiced it one hundred times. The intonation was perfect.

  The sword clanged harmlessly off the armored suit, naturally. But a reactionary instinct caused the second-stager to flinch back, and release her grip on Oliver. He crumpled to the ground temporarily forgotten. Lenat and the second-stager faced one another. Although her face was not readable through the dark visor on her combat suit, it was clear she was just as astounded by Lenat’s reckless daring as he was by his own audacity.

  Realization dawned across Lenat’s face—he had just become the primary focus of this deadly impervious foe. Fear replaced his bravado, and he was frozen in place. The second-stager struck him down, her gauntleted fist opening a long gash across Lenat’s right eye. It gaped open instantly and gushed blood across his cheek. She stepped over him.