by P. K. Lentz
With a crash, the floor righted itself, and all motion stopped. The engine noise rose to a whine that ended abruptly in a pop, then silence.
“Evacuate!” the driver cried.
In no time, Arixa had Baron S’tanovik on his feet at the hatch, which one of his retainers opened. The muffled bursts of gunfire, now less frequent than they had been moments earlier, grew sharper.
Arixa surveyed the view through the opened hatch. She saw polished floor and a wall of polished pink stone that was freshly pocked and scorched. Flashes coincided with the sounds of blaster and slug-thrower fire, but no enemies were in sight.
The first retainer leaped down, blaster ready. When he wasn’t immediately killed, Arixa followed, gripping the Baron’s arm in her right hand, her vazer in the other. Bowyn stuck close, and behind them, emerging from smaller hatches, came Vaspa, Baako—faceless in their suits but labeled with lit symbols in her suit helmet—and a few Senekeen. They spilled out onto the floor behind Arixa while she peered around a crawler foot to learn the enemy’s position.
A shower of slugs sent her back into cover. Not surprisingly, the Jir were advancing. No more blaster fire could be seen or heard—opposition had been vanquished. Exposing herself briefly, Arixa loosed vazer fire at two clusters of oncoming troopers, sending them rushing for cover.
She released the Baron to gesture with that hand at what she assumed had been the crawler’s destination when enemy fire disabled it.
“That door?”
S’tanovik confirmed it.
“Will it open?”
The Baron tapped a few thin fingers together in a pattern, and the door opened. Before taking hold of him again, Arixa took a second to thumb the catch that released her right suit gauntlet. She yanked it off, and alien metal flowed around the exposed hand.
Memnon and a Senek guard burst into view from around the crawler’s side, joining the rest after presumably having climbed down from the top hatches. They had arrived just in time to avoid being left behind. The upper left arm of Memnon’s dark voidsuit was slick with blood.
“Go!” Arixa cried and launched herself into the open.
Keeping her vazer raised in the enemy’s direction, she sprayed invisible, face-melting beams without letup and ran, pulling the unarmed Baron in her wake. She couldn’t see behind her but knew that the Dawn followed.
The five surviving Senekeen retainers raced, too. Bounding on thin legs, the aliens were faster than the humans and thus overtook them. Because of that, Arixa witnessed it when one’s head burst and body rolled, spraying purple gore.
Slugs hammered the hangar floor and made the air hiss, but the door wasn’t far, and apart from the one dead lizard-man, they made it through.
The runners didn’t slow their pace in the smooth-walled corridor beyond. When she’d gone far enough to judge that the eight behind her were in, Arixa yelled at the Baron, in case he needed to be told, “Shut it!”
By the sudden muffling of the deadly noise from behind, she knew he had done it. Now she slowed and looked back to confirm that all were present: her party’s four plus the Baron and four more Senekeen.
A blast shook the corridor. The door would not hold long. Seconds, perhaps. Arixa didn’t stop moving nor let the others stop.
“Where?” she asked the Baron, dragging him along.
“My wives...” S’tanovik said. His voice sounded... wet.
Arixa took a swift look and saw that his robes were stained dark with blood. He stumbled, and she gave support. He’d been hit.
“Sorry, Baron,” she said with little sympathy. “Where can we meet my people?”
Another blast, then clattering metal. The door, a few bends behind them, surely had been blasted open.
“I have lost all,” the Senek exile lamented.
“Where, Baron?” Arixa pressed.
Suddenly S’tanovik halted, pulling free of Arixa’s grip with unexpected strength. Dawners behind him swerved to avoid collision, then slowed and halted a few paces ahead, bringing arms to bear in either direction. The four remaining Senekeen of the Baron’s retinue assembled around their leader.
S’tanovik seized the blasters from two of them and urged, “Go! I will not be driven from my home.”
With a limp in his determined stride, he headed back in the direction of the pursuing Jir.
“Leave!” he said. “Give my regards to the Shieldbreaker if you see him. Or perhaps I will.”
“Baron, we need your direction!” Arixa cried at him.
“R’akinniz can give it!”
Then he vanished around the first bend in the long corridor, screaming a high-pitched battle cry.
After a moment’s pause, the only retainer whose weapon the Baron hadn’t taken sped after him, leaving three.
One Senek’s garb differed from the others.
“You Raki-niz?” Arixa asked that one, but didn’t await reply before grabbing him.
As they resumed running, there came a sudden and intense eruption of weapons fire from behind—the berserker-style demise of the Baron and one more. The sounds lasted only briefly, and when they stopped, the war cries had been silenced. It could only be hoped that some Jir had died in the exchange.
“This way,” Raki said, skidding to a stop at a three-way intersection before launching down a new, round-rimmed tunnel. Arixa let go of Raki but stuck close to the stubby tail that poked from his trousers.
A short way down the other path, Arixa had glimpsed a few unarmed Senekeen. Now, from behind, she heard shouting in the aliens’ native tongue, presumably one of the retainers behind her calling out warning.
Perhaps she should have sent the Baron’s people down the other path in the hope of splitting pursuit. Too late now.
After just a few seconds’ running, their guide Raki opened a hatch that put them in a large high-roofed chamber full of tables. Lightning-snake banners hung on its walls. A handful of Senekeen present reacted in surprise to the sudden arrival of Arixa’s party.
Raki shouted at these bystanders who, with minimal hesitation, raced off through other doors. Raki, meanwhile, proceeded toward a wall which appeared to contain no exit. Rather than follow him to that potential dead end, Arixa chose to believe he knew what he was doing. She stopped instead in the room’s center to kick over a table and create cover.
The table was heavier than expected, and before she finished upending it by hand, the Dawn arrived to lend assistance and begin adding more tables to the barricade.
A glance behind while they worked informed Arixa that Raki had slipped behind a drapery on the wall. His outline remained visible as a lump in the fabric.
“Secret door?” Arixa asked the sole Senek apart from Raki who had made it to this room.
“I presume,” the alien answered.
“Where’s the other one?”
“He went to warn residents of the Barony.”
“You were the driver.” Though she still couldn’t tell lizard-men apart by sight or sound, Arixa had a vague suspicion.
“Affirmative,” he said. “S’killinik.”
“You don’t have a weapon. Why don’t—”
The door by which they’d entered blew open. Pushing her vazer into S’killinik’s hands, Arixa sent skewering tendrils of bright metal from the ironglove streaming into the blast while the rest opened up with their weapons.
Slug-throwers chattered in return, but only briefly, ending when the invaders withdrew into the hall leaving two Jir corpses on the floor in front of the entrance.
“Raki!” Arixa called out. But there was no reply. When she glanced back she saw dark stains and jagged tears on the curtain and a lump on the floor behind it.
“Baako, is there a way out behind that curtain?” Arixa asked.
The Shadow-man dashed over to pull it back. “Only a panel.”
“Raki couldn’t open it,” Arixa surmised. She asked S’killinik, “Can you?”
“Negative, Captain. I didn’t know it existed.”
Since withdrawing, the invaders outside the shattered doorway had been quiet. But now a voice speaking in the Jir strain of Nexus sailed through the opening.
The voice itself was not familiar. Arixa could scarcely tell one Jir voice or face from another. Even if she could, she didn’t need to see this speaker to know its identity.
“Chiiiigiiiiittttt! Are you in there?”
Seventeen
“Yimri?” Arixa yelled into the breach.
“You remember me.”
“I have rarely regretted a decision in life, but I regret sparing you. I thought your duty was cleaning up spills. What are you doing with soldiers?”
“I’m Sentinel, chigit! And a hero! It’s no fault of mine that the Draugan escaped. I did my part and was promoted for it.” She gave the screech that was Jir laughter. “By the Commodore in whose back your friend left his ax!”
“Where’s Ivar?” Arixa yelled, forgetting all else.
“With Vengra, of course”
“He lives?”
“Arixa—” S’killinik tried to interrupt.
“If so, he must wish otherwise!”
“Arixa, that exit over there can take us quickly to the surface,” S’killinik said, pointing away from the enemy’s position. “I suggest we—”
“No!” Arixa said. “They have Ivar! We’ll—”
“We won’t, Arixa!” Bowyn said. “Ivar’s not here. Why are we still talking? S’kill, lead the way!”
“We’ll get Ivar back, Captain,” Vaspa urged. “But not today.”
Memnon reminded, “Leimya needs you first.”
Raising an arm over the barrier, Arixa loosed both a war cry, which hurt her ears inside the helmet, and a half-dozen silver wires which sped through the blasted doorway to probe blindly in both directions in search of alien flesh to stab.
Following her example, the others leveled their weapons at the entrance and fired a heavy barrage that gouged and melted walls.
The razor-thin metal tentacles snaked back to Arixa’s hand. She said bitterly to S’kill, “Lead the way.”
Bowyn said, as they ran as one behind the Senek, “I can’t raise the Branch, Arixa. I don’t know why.”
“S’tanovik’s counter-measures,” S’kill explained. “Summon your ship from the surface.”
Arixa sped through the exit, followed by Bowyn and Baako. Just as the last two made it, the room behind erupted in a firestorm of flying slugs. Memnon tumbled into a wall, was dragged to his feet by Vaspa, and the party raced on into a smaller, deserted room of more utilitarian nature.
Crossing it, S’kill stopped at an open hatch and waved the others through before sealing it. From there, hearing the muffled sounds of pursuit, the six sped down two more corridors and through a heavy, airlock-style door beyond which the lighting became dim and the walls were of rough rock instead of artificially smooth.
They followed S’kill for long minutes, clambering over rocks until they reached a primitive technology which Arixa recognized: a ladder. She took the lead in the climbing its full sixty feet, and the rest followed in even spacing, leaving Baako as the last keeping watch at the base. No attack came. All made it safely to the top, and the Senek resumed leading them.
During the trek, Arixa deactivated her ILA, exposing the bare skin of her right hand. She briefly felt the stinging bite of extreme cold before making the metal flow again.
“Don’t you need a suit?” she asked the bare-headed Senek.
“Not nearly as much as you do.”
“Do you have a family, S’kill?”
“Negative, Captain.”
“Well, you’re now my favorite lizard. Senek. If you want it, welcome to the Dawn.”
“Much appreciated, Captain,” S’kill replied. “I’ll consider it after we find out what awaits us on the surface.
What awaited them, they learned a few minutes later on reaching a crack-like opening, was the Jir forces’ lander on the rocks a hundred yards away. More Pentarchy troops stood guarding it, but by their passive posture, they hadn’t been warned to expect fugitives.
“Contact the Branch,” Arixa instructed Bowyn.
“No,” S’kill contradicted. “They will detect the signal and be right on us.”
“Then we need to attack before Yimri and the rest get here.”
“Still no sign of pursuit,” Baako observed.
S’kill started, “They are likely exiting by anoth—”
He stopped when the troopers guarding the lander visibly reacted to something approaching from out of sight.
When the something came into sight, it turned out to be the force from the Baron’s bunker.
“I count nine,” Vaspa said.
“Me, too,” Arixa concurred. “It’s time, my darlings.”
“You don’t mean—” Bowyn started.
“If you’re staying then give me your weapon.” She snatched the blaster from his hand.
One lesson Arixa had learned this day was to temper the volume of a war cry when her head was inside a shell. So she did now, as she began firing and charged out over pink crags. The members of her war band, plus one, followed, their blasters and vazers discharging ceaseless streams of energy at the unready enemy.
Unready as they were, the Jir were warriors. Within a beat, they sent back a hail of slugs that dug holes in the strange rose-colored rock formations which the Dawn used for cover. A slender lash from the ironglove darted into the enemy’s midst to tear weapons from hands, and in one case, hand from wrist.
She searched the enemy for a figure that might be Yimri in order to target her, but all the aliens looked alike, particularly from a distance.
Four Jir troopers fell, maybe more. Arixa lacked clear line of sight on all of her people separated over the jagged terrain, but she had heard no human cries of pain—which she realized, like war cries, would be contained in suit helmets anyway.
She could hardly be certain, in this breed of battle which was new to her and against an enemy she still didn’t know well, but it appeared the Dawn possessed the advantage—for the moment.
Before it faded, advantage must be put to good use.
Looking at the lander, a thought struck Arixa with violent force. She spoke the syllable which activated her suit comm and broadcast to any Gorosian who remained alive inside his helmet to hear.
“Take the ship! Ivar might be inside!”
She sent the ironglove’s tendril chasing after a Jir, who tried to swat it away with his weapon and then shot at it, sending slugs skyward as the liquid metal pierced his suit visor and face.
First Baako and then Vaspa emerged from concealment to join Arixa in firing nonstop and advancing on the lander. From some rocks behind, Memnon gave covering fire.
When she paused briefly in the cover of a depression beside Baako, she caught sight of a black shape in the lavender sky. Her eye was accustomed enough to her new reality to recognize it as some variety of skyboat. Not a familiar one, though. It wasn’t the Branch.
For an instant she felt despair, all hope of victory melting away as the attack on the lander became instead a last stand.
But despair had no place in her heart, not even on the Moon of Sorrows.
“Destroy that craft!” she screamed at Baako, and joined him in lifting her vazer skyward to take aim.
Bowyn’s voice exploded inside her helmet: “That ship’s not Pentarchy!”
Just in time, Arixa lowered her weapon and gestured at Shadow-man to do the same.
The craft’s form was that of a black disk edged with green and two blunt, horn-like protrusions rising from opposite sides of the circumference. It sped closer, swooping low over the Jir lander’s position. As it passed without slowing, bolts of brilliant green light slashed down from its belly into the very spot on the rocky ground where the Jir lander stood.
In a blinding fla
sh, the lander was obliterated. Dark-suited troopers went flying along with chunks of stone and metal debris.
“Noooo!” Arixa screamed.
If Ivar was aboard...
Then he was dead now. There was no surviving this.
The new craft soared higher, departing. Wasting no time for grief, Arixa strode out from hiding, commanding the Dawn, “Finish them. Disarm and maim only. I want prisoners! One in particular.”
Behind her, the Dawn fanned out across the area around the twisted carcass of the lander. Two Jir fired on them and were unavoidably killed, but the rest were barely moving lumps with cracked suits. Arixa and the others fired wounding blasts into legs and arms, seizing weapons and tossing them safely aside. Memnon, who—to his shame—had experience in the minding of hostages, oversaw the tossing of the Jir survivors into a naturally formed pit in the rocky terrain, where he kept watch over them.
When the area had been swept, the pit contained about ten Jir, most wounded to some degree. Standing on the pit’s edge, Arixa called into it, “Yimri!”
One replied, “Chigit.”
It was difficult to ascertain which of the helmeted aliens had spoken, but when a seated Jir stood, Arixa decided this was Yimri. The leg of her suit was torn open, and blue-black blood seeped out.
“Where is Ivar?”
Bowyn arrived beside Arixa at the pit’s edge, having finally emerged from safety now that the battle was won.
Overhead, the unknown craft that had intervened in the battle circled back and descended, landing nearby on the barren landscape.
“He is Vengra’s guest on the Monument!” Yimri answered her.
“Where is the Monument?”
“You will be a guest on it soon enough, chigit!”
Arixa addressed the remaining prisoners: “Tell me, are any of the rest of you important heroes like Yimri?”
In the answering silence, Bowyn said, “I can’t reach Cinnea. We better go find out who—”
Ignoring him, Arixa continued speaking to the Jir in the pit. “A final honor awaits you!”
“Arixa, you—”
Surely Bowyn sensed what was to come.
“I sacrifice you in the name of the great goddess Tabiti,” Arixa intoned, “the Sun Mother whose light one day shall burn your homeworld.”
