by Ben Wolf
“A Code Ebony is no joke,” Justin said. “We have to be prepared.”
“But he was so insistent on staying aboard that colonist ship until we found whatever it was he was looking for,” the soldier on the right said.
“Yeah, but he wasn’t going to tell us what he was looking for, either.”
[You can’t delay, JB,] Keontae warned. [Once the chain reaction starts, it won’t stop until it can’t go on anymore.]
“Gents, I’ve got to be off now,” Justin broke into their conversation. “Have a good one.”
“You mind explaining why you’ve got a pulse rifle slung to your back, sir?” one of the soldiers asked. With their face shields down, Justin had no idea which of them was talking unless they moved, and none of them had.
Each of the soldiers held pulse rifles as well. Justin nodded toward them. “You’ve got yours, and I’ve got mine. God forbid we should need them, right?”
The soldiers looked at each other again, this time quiet.
“Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to—”
Three quick blasts took down two of the soldiers from behind, and the third went down after another two. Val stood behind them with her pulse rifle in hand.
“We don’t have time for this,” she said. “Let’s go.”
“Hey! Over there!” A group of soldiers from back the way Justin and Val had come pointed at them and started to run over with their rifles raised.
“Shit.” Justin raised his pulse rifle and rattled off a barrage of blasts at the approaching soldiers. Some of his shots hit, and some flew wide.
Val fired, too, and her blasts seemed to hit more than Justin’s did. In any case, several of the soldiers went down, but the commotion only attracted more of them, and there were plenty more in the docking bay who could come over if they wanted.
“Shit!” Justin kept firing, trying to make his way closer to the ship. If he could just touch near the door, Keontae could get it open and up and running for them.
But the soldiers were too many. They were going to pin them down in a matter of seconds… unless the antimatter missiles detonated first.
Then, from behind Justin and Val, a guttural roar sounded, followed by the trill of accelerated pulse rounds searing the artificial atmosphere. A swarm of pulses tore into the approaching soldiers, tearing them apart despite their armor.
When Justin looked back, he saw a blur of chrome flying over his head toward the soldiers. He tried to trace its movements and eventually caught sight of what appeared to be a mech suit bulging with a large man inside.
The mech suit had thrusters in its feet, and it streaked through the air and across the surface of the docking bay floor. It smashed into soldiers with its alloy limbs, leveling them with extreme prejudice, all while firing occasional shots from the plasma cannon mounted on its left shoulder.
Justin finally caught sight of the pilot an instant before he lurched toward another group of soldiers and began shredding their ranks.
It was Bear.
He’d mentioned something about being useless without a mech suit, but Justin had never imagined he’d be this fierce and effective while wearing one—almost like a real bear.
Next, a pair of familiar voices shouted from behind Justin—Zed and Ritz.
“Take that, you traitorous bastards!” Ritz’s bug eyes practically spun in circles as he fired a pulse rifle of his own into the mass of approaching soldiers.
“Yes. Die now,” Zed added loudly, yet without so much as a hint of emotion. He, too, fired a pulse rifle at the soldiers.
Where they’d come from, Justin had no idea, but they’d given him the opening he needed. He rushed to the ship and smacked his hand on the hull. No tingle, so he moved it around until Keontae finally found purchase and zapped out of Justin’s metal arm.
The next moment, the access door to the ship hissed open, forming a ramp.
“Val, let’s go!” he shouted as she continued gunning down soldiers. “Hurry!”
He didn’t think Val had heard him over the ruckus, but she turned around and dashed toward the ship. Ritz followed, running with his head low, and scampered aboard next. Justin didn’t care—they’d saved him, so they could come.
Zed tossed a grenade toward the soldiers, and when it detonated, rather than an explosion, it left a huge cloud in its wake. Then Zed hustled on board, and soon after, Bear’s mech skated out of the smoke, zipped across the docking bay floor, and clomped up the ship’s boarding ramp.
“Go!” Justin yelled, and someone—either Keontae or Val—launched the ship out of the docking bay, through one of the entry shields, and into space.
When Justin made it to the cockpit, he saw Nidus’s flank fast approaching. But why hadn’t the Avarice gone down yet?
If it didn’t happen soon, the soldiers could just board transports, chase them back to the Nidus, and finish the job.
How much longer was the explosion going to take?
The sewers beneath Nidus City weren’t at all what Hallie had expected. She’d imagined rivers of sludge flowing toward some sort of automated processing plant, accompanied by the foulest stench imaginable.
Instead, she found soft blue track lights running the length of the sewer ceiling and down every corridor. Rather than an ever-flowing stream of filth, chrome pipes carried the waste along the upper edges of the walls, leaving them ample room to walk freely down the corridors on clean, smooth concrete. And the smell, while evident, was far from overwhelming.
The one thing that made the entire situation nearly unbearable was the temperature. For whatever reason, the sewers vacillated between tropical-paradise-warm and planet-that’s-ventured-too-close-to-the-sun-hot at all times.
Sweat beaded on Hallie’s forehead and tingled at the base of her neck. She considered peeling her outer layer off but opted not to in case they had to run or otherwise move quickly.
She guessed the temperature stayed high because the ship was burning the waste wherever these pipes came to an end. That heat and the resultant energy could’ve been repurposed to generate electricity or utilized as-is to warm up the city.
Whatever the case, the uncomfortable warmth and the extra perspiration were small prices to pay to evade contact with the soldiers combing the streets above.
Hallie shifted the satchel on her shoulder. It felt heavier still in the heat, though she couldn’t conjure any scientific explanation why that would be the case aside from feeling more fatigued with each passing step.
Bryant walked beside her on her right, and Luke followed them by a few steps on Hallie’s left. Every so often, access doors punctuated the walls. At one point, out of curiosity, Hallie got one of them open and peeked inside.
She found tools and equipment, but more interestingly, she found dark, narrow pathways connecting the equipment rooms to each other behind the sewer’s main walls.
Hallie grinned. Whoever had designed this ship’s infrastructure had done a pretty killer job. If a pipe ever burst, workers could use these access doors to quickly get through the sewers without slogging through sewage spills. Clever, yet simple.
As they approached a junction in the sewer passages, Bryant held out his free hand toward her. “Seriously, Hallie, I’m happy to carry that for you.”
Hallie shook her head. “You’re sweet to offer, but I haven’t been taking AstroFit classes for the last three months to give up now. Sure, it was only one class every two weeks, and I missed a couple of those, but I really learned how to push my limits.”
Bryant grinned and didn’t lower his arm.
“That was code, in case you missed it,” she said. “I’m good, Bryant.”
And she was, too. It wasn’t like he was any better off, carrying Justin’s pulse rifle and his own pack. And he was sweating just as much, if not more, than she was. If anything, she might’ve been better suited to carry the satchel than him.
Bryant lowered his arm. “If you say so.”
As they approached the junction, Hal
lie noticed that the lights in the corridor branching to the left were out. The path straight ahead remained lit, as did the path that led to the right.
“Which way are we supposed to go?” Hallie asked. “For all my beauty and genius, I’m not great with directions.”
Luke chuckled as they passed by the dark corridor. “It should be straight ahead for awhile longer.”
“Does anyone need a rest?” Bryant began to turn back to check on the others, and Hallie turned back as well. “Captain? How are your people holding—”
“Ghk!”
The sound came from Luke.
Hallie’s head spun toward him, and she saw a spike irradiated with red light protruding from Luke’s chest.
Not a spike.
A blade.
Luke’s body lifted off the ground, inch by inch, as the blade lifted up. All the while, Luke gasped and tried to clutch at his wounded chest, but as he did, the energy blade seared away the flesh on his desperate fingers.
As Luke’s body ascended, the blade carved upward, toward his shoulder and neck, the result of the blade cutting through his flesh and bone against the pull of the artificial gravity aboard the ship. Then Luke’s eyes rolled back, his hands went limp, and the blade sizzled through the top of his shoulder.
Luke’s lifeless body smacked the sewer’s concrete floor, eliciting a series of gasps and shrieks from the rest of the group.
But they couldn’t see what Hallie saw.
They couldn’t see the face staring back at her, illuminated only by the red light from the blade extended from the fiend’s right arm.
They couldn’t see the reflection of the red energy dancing in his void-black eyes or the bitter scowl he wore.
Then he emerged from the darkness, a violet-skinned phantom headed straight for Hallie.
19
Vesh had found them. He’d already slain one of their number—one of the men. Now about a dozen others remained.
He’d been right to head toward the flash of orange light, and when he’d picked up their trail and ascertained their most likely path through the sewers, he’d been right to advance beyond their position, faster than their pace, and cut them off.
Now he stood face-to-face with a blonde woman. She carried a satchel over her shoulder that, by Vesh’s calculations, had a 67% chance of holding the item he’d been sent to retrieve. The blonde woman stared up at him with horror etched on her face.
Good. If they feared him, that was to his advantage—not that he needed any more advantages. They couldn’t kill him, not with the three pulse rifles in their possession or any other weapons they might’ve been carrying.
He retracted his energy sword into his wrist and drew his pulse cannon from his back.
“Run!” the man standing behind the blonde woman hollered as Vesh reached out for her. His Coalition uniform and his stature conveyed his status as a trained soldier—but he hadn’t been trained like Vesh had, and he didn’t have Vesh’s augmentations.
Then the Coalition soldier raised his pulse rifle.
The latent protective shield built into Vesh’s skin augmentations tingled, activating as the barrel of the pulse rifle rose to point at him. By the time the pulse rifle fired its first shot, the woman had darted out of the way, and the shield had fully activated.
The shots pattered against Vesh’s shield like raindrops on a puddle, dissipating into small ripples of pink energy. The impacts danced across his skin, harmless.
Behind Vesh’s eyes, the familiar sensation of burning began anew, and he blinked hard and fast to chase it away. Now was the worst possible time for any distractions. He was there. He’d found his target. He was about to complete his mission. He couldn’t let anything get in his way.
As the burning fizzled to nothing, Vesh lifted his pulse cannon and took aim at the Coalition soldier.
Hallie dared to look back at the thing that had just killed Luke. Instead of following her as she chased the Viridian’s fleeing crew and the two scientists on her team who remained alive, the large purple man took aim at Bryant with the massive pulse cannon in his hands.
Not a man. A monster.
A revenant.
A titan.
All of those things in one.
Captain Marlowe and Arlie had already taken up positions nearby, rapid-firing pulses at the titan, but every shot just splatted against some sort of invisible energy shield that coated his whole body and rippled with pink light wherever the pulse rounds hit him.
Bryant’s shots hadn’t killed the titan, either. Hallie marveled at the science behind it even as its ramifications horrified her.
What did that mean? Who was this guy?
Instead of the massive pulse cannon shearing through Bryant’s body, Bryant charged forward and jammed his rifle against the pulse cannon, forcing its barrel toward the ceiling. It trilled with blasts of pink energy, which tore into the sewer ceiling, shredding the concrete overhead. Parts of the ceiling fell in small chunks, and concrete dust trickled down onto them.
As soon as Bryant did it, Hallie knew he was only forestalling the inevitable. The titan twisted and jerked hard, pushing Bryant away. Then, with one mighty kick, he sent Bryant flying into the far wall of the perpendicular corridor, which he hit with an audible smack. He slumped to the floor, motionless.
“No!” she yelled.
The titan’s attention turned toward Hallie and the fleeing crew of both ships. It leveled its pulse cannon at them and opened fire.
Hallie dove for cover, lucky to find she’d stopped near one of the access doors set into the concrete corridor. She went flat against the concrete adjacent to the doorframe as pulse blasts stabbed at her cover.
“Fall back!” Captain Marlowe shouted from ahead. “Retreat!”
The barrage of pulse rounds coming at her stopped, and she stole a peek ahead.
The titan still stood in place, but now he fired on Captain Marlowe and Arlie’s position where they hid near an access door on the opposite side of the corridor. The pulse rounds ate into the concrete, tearing red lines into the wall that soon darkened to black scars. A weapon of that power could shred their concrete cover and reduce it to dust in a matter of minutes.
Hallie could see Arlie, and Arlie could see her. Their eyes met, and Hallie had an idea. With the titan’s focus on the others, now was her best chance to try it.
She lowered her satchel and its precious contents and activated the screen to open the door. Like the last one she’d tried, it didn’t require any sort of identification to get inside. The door slid open from bottom to top, and she picked up her satchel and ventured in.
The same blue lights swelled to life above, revealing a room full of familiar-looking tools and equipment. None of it would help her. Even if she managed to get close enough, what was she going to do? Hit him with a big wrench?
Hallie discarded the idea. She had a different plan—a better one.
As with the other access room she’d visited, a narrow pathway ran between this one and the two adjacent rooms, one on each side. Without so much as a second thought, she headed down the one toward the titan and the junction.
Power conduits and smaller pipes lined the inner walls, all of it undoubtedly essential in some way to the city’s functionality. More than once, spiderwebs clung to her face and tangled in her hair. She tried not to think about it, but perhaps the old adage was right—no matter where you are in the galaxy, you’re never more than five feet away from a spider.
She shuddered, wiped the sticky netting from her face, and continued down the path.
It ended at a wall, but it banked to the right at a ninety-degree angle. Even through the concrete, she could hear the roar of the titan’s pulse cannon incessantly rattling. She took the right turn and soon ended up in the next access room.
Hallie exhaled a long breath. If she was going to do this, she had to be quick about it. There was no turning back.
“Captain Gable, sir,” a familiar voice said from behind G
able.
Disdain filled his chest. He turned back and found Commander Falstaff standing aboard the bridge, saluting.
“Commander.” Gable saluted back and then lowered his hand. “I thought you would have stayed at the admiral’s side like the pet you are.”
Falstaff didn’t even acknowledge Gable’s barb. It gave Gable all the more reason to hate him. “I come with strict orders from Admiral Sever, sir.”
Gable sighed. “Very well. Let’s hear them.”
“All combat personnel are to return immediately to the target ship. The search is to continue as before.”
“And why hasn’t the admiral conveyed this order to me personally?” Not that Gable cared. He would comply as he always did. What other choice did he have?
When Admiral Sever was aboard the Avarice, he commanded the ship. When he left the Avarice, he and Commander Falstaff commanded ACM’s forces, leaving Gable to sit in the bridge, unaffected by it all. He was all but useless in either situation, so what did it matter?
Never mind that he had more training, more experience, and more brilliance than Commander Falstaff. But then again, why should Sever hear from someone who might actually challenge his ideas?
The whole scenario disgusted Gable, and he didn’t mind showing it.
“His comms are malfunctioning. No messages are getting through.”
Gable waved him off. “Fine. He’ll have his men as soon as we’ve sorted out what’s happening with this order. Our systems are scrambled, too. Go sort it all out on the ground level, like you always do.”
“Thank you, Captain.” Falstaff saluted and started to leave, but First Officer Reyes’s fearful voice seized the entire bridge.
“Captain?!” he called. “Everything’s back online, and all of our sensors seem to be functioning normally…”
“But?” Captain Gable faced him, unnerved by his frantic tone. He couldn’t solve the problem until Reyes told him what the problem was. More importantly, he didn’t want to look weak or inept in front of Commander Falstaff, either.
