Matt looked at her, his eyes swelling with tears. This was possibly going to be their final goodbye. They both knew it, but neither wanted to acknowledge it openly. It was too soon. There was still so much that needed to be said, and so much that needed to be healed. “I will,” he said, returning the earnest nod.
“Good luck.”
“You too.” Matt swiveled his huge frame around to face the overhead airlock that loomed in the distance. Just beyond the hatch was the cold and endless void. He pushed the rising dread back down his throat with a hard swallow. Cromwell was somewhere out there, lurking on the Moon’s surface, waiting patiently to ambush him.
Once again, he seemed to have Matt exactly where he wanted him.
Thirty
The pistons and gears in Matt’s exoframe purred as he climbed up a twisted walkway that overlooked the hangar’s apron. The walkway ended with a fork that led to another section of the base which may have been some type of living quarters for the monks. That was a loose assumption on Matt’s behalf, as he was uncertain whether Cromwell would have afforded such luxuries to his slaves.
When he cautiously entered through the airlock, two powerful lights on his suit flickered to life, cutting through the icy gloom. While the temperature inside his cab matched his body heat, he could see the corners of his canopy frosting outside. He was nearing the exposed surface of the Moon.
He exited the airlock into the belly of a massive terraforming bay that led directly to the surface. Oddly there seemed to be gravity still in here, despite the absence of breathable air and sound. Matt caught glimpses of enormous vehicles and the machines that serviced them. Giant tire-treads towered above him as he passed hulking shapes and silhouettes, some of which looked terrestrial, and some of which looked completely alien. There was also strange-looking cranes and diggers, and what looked to be dump-trucks of some kind. Matt figured all this heavy equipment was used to build the base. From what his exoframe’s light revealed, it also looked old. Frozen and dormant - everything caked in thick lunar dust and darkness. As he pushed through the vast bay towards the Moon’s surface, his light beam found new horrors for him to ponder.
The mummified faces of dead monks.
There were hundreds of them. Piles upon piles of corpses, neatly stacked along a far wall of the bay, looking like trash that was somehow forgotten to be disposed of. Cromwell’s chosen ones: devoted slaves worked to death then left to rot in the coldness of this mechanical crypt. Prune-shrunken faces stared blankly through depolarized helmet visors, their spacesuits swollen from the bodily fluids and gasses that had failed to escape their protective layers. With the lack of oxygen and freezing temperatures killing off any bacteria, the bodies had been slowly desiccating for years. Centuries perhaps.
Matt trudged past them, a strangely violent coldness washing over him. He was now even more anxious to find Cromwell and bring about his demise. As Matt gingerly stepped out onto the Moon’s surface, permanent night overtook him. He took a moment to absorb the view.
Cold. Remorseless. Desolate. Terribly silent.
The sun’s glare, along with light reflected from the Earth, was not visible on this side during a full Moon. Instead, Matt was enveloped in a brilliant tapestry of stars. For a moment, he felt as if he could reach out and touch every single one of them. He headed out, moving away from the base, his light beam sweeping across the surface. Without any illumination, his path would have been completely pitch-black. To some extent, traversing the lunar soil reminded him of walking across a sandy beach. While the properties differed significantly from any kind of terrestrial sand, the soil’s texture felt oddly similar – even against his mechanical feet.
Matt eventually reached the rim of the massive impact crater the base was perched upon. He stared out at the endless grey sea, noting the canyons of artificial piping hewn across its vast basin. Roughly one-hundred-and-forty kilometers wide, this was the perfect location to construct a staging base for an attack.
Matt turned and looked back at the base, realizing that from above, the bulbous structure would have been lost against the surrounding landscape of smaller impact craters and massifs - hidden in plain sight from any orbiting satellites or probes. As that thought lingered in Matt’s mind, he never heard or saw Cromwell’s attack coming. But he felt it.
By then it was too late.
Still inserted into her exo-frame, Ally stomped over to a group of terrified monks who were all wide-eyed and huddling against the wreckage of a collapsed mezzanine. “Any of you know how to pilot that craft?” she asked, motioning to the parked Death Pony sitting a short distance from them. “Put your hand up, if you do.”
After a moment of confused silence, one of the monks gingerly raised their hand.
“Good, because you’re going to take your friends and fly back to what’s left of your monastery.”
As the pilot monk stood without questioning her, some of the others also followed his lead.
“Uh, ah. Not so fast. First, you’re going to help me.”
“May I ask, with what?” the pilot monk asked meekly, his voice brittle and weak.
Ally studied his pathetic demeanor with genuine pity. Without Cromwell’s direction, these men were nothing but empty vessels. Apostles with no purpose other than to serve a deranged despot. To take a group of innocent human beings and reduce them to doddering avatars unable to think for themselves, just made the Wraith’s enhancement procedures seem all that much crueler. With her giant right-hand pincer, she pointed to the stockpile of missiles behind them. “I need all the missiles you’ve loaded into that bay taken out and replaced with as many unprimed warheads as you can possibly fit. You’ve got ten minutes. Suit up.”
There were hushed whispers as the monks all traded confused looks. The pilot monk simply turned to the rack of exoframes hanging nearby. Ten minutes? he thought. He then turned back to Ally, convinced something was not right with his mysterious new commander.
Ally watched them all quickly rise and get to work before taking a much-needed moment to examine the bleeding gash under her bottom left-hand rib. Making sure none of the monks were looking, she gently lifted her jacket flap and winced at the sight. The cut was long, and some small shrapnel fragments were still lodged deep inside it. “Ah, crap,” she muttered to herself. “This is gonna complicate things.” She powered-down her suit, popped the cab’s canopy, and slowly climbed out of her exoframe, headed for the belly of the Wraith Interceptor.
By the time Matt realized he’d been struck by one of Cromwell’s javelins, he was already spinning wildly over the lip of the crater. With no air resistance and unable to alter his course, he felt trapped in an eternal tumble dryer as he drifted out towards the center of the basin like a frisbee.
Aside from Matt’s panicked breathing, the only sound inside his cab was a bleating alarm on his console. Unable to focus on anything outside, his vision became a dizzying panorama of streaky stars as his exoframe’s light swept the darkness like a lighthouse beam stuck on fast-forward. He couldn’t see him, but he knew Cromwell was somewhere out there on the carter’s rim, watching him grow smaller-and-smaller with every rotation. He also knew Cromwell would waste no time returning to the base to finish Ally, so he needed to find a way to cancel this reckless spin and get back up there.
In a futile attempt to gain some type of bearing, he craned his neck out and looked down over the lip of his canopy, the abyss-like darkness he was rapidly whirlpooling into, greeting him. The lack of sunlight and normal gravity made it difficult to calculate his rate of descent and distance but judging by the view he took in while standing on the rim moments earlier, this particular crater was massive. That meant he could have been in the final stages of a five-kilometer spiral to the basin. Possibly deeper. He had no real way of telling until he hit the surface.
Suddenly, a holographic icon of what looked to be a tethered harpoon began flashing across the canopy glass. It was as if the icon was suggesting he touch it, so he did. Matt
felt a jolt as a puff of gas exploded from the hip of his exoframe. The harpoon sailed across the airless void and slammed into the crater’s terraced inner wall, immediately halting Matt’s spin, but not his descent. Then, as if on cue, a series of tiny thrusters on the underside of his elbow and heel fired in successive bursts, keeping him elevated while canceling his drift. Once he was right-side-up again, he scanned the crater’s rim line above him. Using his eye against where the base was located, he figured he was roughly forty-degrees off his original position, and at least half a kilometer out. Unsurprisingly, Cromwell was nowhere in sight.
Now anchored to the side of the crater, the tethered safety line began reeling him in. Matt could only float there as he closed the distance, gripping the triggers of his cannons, waiting any moment to see javelin tracers erupt from the darkness somewhere above. But they never came.
He drew closer, massive blocks of pulverized ejecta coming into view as his light beam strobed the ancient walls. He felt about as large as an ant floating over an enormous sinkhole. He would still need to reach the top somehow, and despite the advantage of low gravity, that task alone was going to cut into valuable time. He may as well have been scaling some treacherous cliff face back on Earth.
Then without warning, the javelin tracers Matt was expecting to see moments earlier, finally came. Using his stabilizing thrusters, he windmill-swung out of the direct line of fire, but one had already severed his safety tether. Now he was spinning off into the ether again, desperately trying to correct his course.
Cromwell afforded him no such luxury. He swooped in from above like some famished vulture closing on its prey, pumping rounds at Matt. Spinning in freefall, Matt was immediately blinded by the brilliant chrome spears of light that raked him mercilessly. Using his own thrusters, Cromwell sling-bladed around Matt and began to bash his canopy. The attack was fast and brutal – every blow landing with laser precision - every advantage taken, no matter how cruel.
In the chaos and confusion, Matt knew his canopy would ultimately crack at any moment. That was the idea. And once it did, Cromwell would have won. In Matt’s mind, that was simply unacceptable. While there was a part of him that had been ready to die for some time now, he sure-as-hell was not going to die in the freezing darkness of some moon crater.
The moment Matt and Cromwell landed at the basin; a giant puff of lunar dust washed over them like the blowback of some silent explosion. With no wind, the particles were sharp and abrasive as the cloud lingered weirdly in front of them, obscuring their vision as they float-staggered through dense mounds of powered regolith. When the dust dissipated a little, Matt settled into a defensive position and waited for his enemy. Further out, his light beam found Cromwell’s cab. Inside, Matt could see Cromwell’s cruel smile twist into a venomous sneer as he hurled himself towards him and opened fire.
The first exchange was a violent squall as javelins of lightning silently strobed the ground in front of Matt. Inside his pressurized cab, Matt heard grains of lunar dust blast his canopy like he was caught in the clutches of a blinding sandstorm. Rather than go through it to reach Cromwell, he decided to go up, leaping over Cromwell’s line of sight while simultaneously aiming down at him to return fire. Cromwell saw the maneuver and leaped out of the way just as a volley of javelins peppered the surface, his thrusters blasting like afterburners.
As the fight raged in cold silence, they began to mirror one another, neither one gaining or losing ground until each saw the opening they needed to take. They were two rabid dogs searching for the other’s neck. When they finally met again, cab-to-cab, they simultaneously delivered a thunder-packed punch that sent both exoframe’s flying backward.
Cromwell flipped over-and-over several times until he landed gracefully, while Matt skittered into the powdery blanket of fine grey soil, another massive cloud mushrooming around him as he began to roll. He used his thrusters to stop his acceleration, growling in frustration. In this low gravity, every move seemed to carry unwanted results. Matt bent his augmented knees then fired out, hurtling through the airless stretch between them. Cromwell performed the same move. They collided hard, two equal and opposite forces slamming together like atoms. They remained suspended high over the basin as they began to spin uniformly in a wild melee battle, huge pincered fists cracking into each other at particle-accelerator speed.
Matt had found his groove in the near-vacuum, fighting with focused precision. But Cromwell was overwhelmingly powerful and skilled in his exoframe. A Jackhammered blow sent Matt’s frame sailing back once again, but this time Cromwell grabbed him by the leg and spun him like a crazed decathlete in a hammer toss before releasing him.
Matt was hurled higher than before, eventually plowing into the side of the crater wall like a bullet. A seismic blast of rock and debris shattered parts of his frame, the tiny pieces of steel glittering in his light beam like glass crystals. Matt barely had time to recover before Cromwell was on him again, pummeling his exoframe with wrecking ball force. It was almost impossible to see anything in the darkness and the lunar soil that was now pouring on top of him. When Matt spotted an opening and went to swing a haymaker, Cromwell clamped his arm and twisted it off in one clean move.
Inside his cab, Matt’s ears were greeted with a loud metallic pop as debris and wires shattered in front of his canopy glass, swirling in an airless cloud. Despite his alarm, Cromwell ripping his augmented arm off was not his main concern. The loud hiss of leaking O2 was. He could see it being jettisoned from his cab in a needle-thin plume of white mist. Now an entirely new symphony of warning alarms blasted his ears as the cab immediately started to depressurize.
With a victorious smile, Cromwell mercifully ceased his attack to give Matt a moment to comprehend the dire situation he was in while keeping him pinned against the crater wall. “Can you feel it, Matt? The inevitability of it? At last, your destiny has arrived.”
Matt looked at Cromwell and said nothing. He would not give him the pleasure, even when facing death. His expressionless mask was enough to annoy Cromwell and cause his upper lip to curl. “Everything you have done has brought you to this moment,” he sneered. “I told you what would happen. Now you must accept it.” Then, Cromwell saw Matt’s eyes flick to something behind him and brighten. He whirled around to see a pinprick of marbled light streaking over the crater at great velocity.
The Death Pony with the fleeing monks inside.
At that same moment, something else caught their attention.
In the distance, on the crater’s adjacent rim was a massive explosion. It blossomed slowly, beautiful, and ferocious, thick gouts of fire lighting up the Moon’s surface for miles. The explosion was made even more bizarre by the complete lack of sound.
Cromwell’s base had just been destroyed.
Unable to believe his own eyes, Cromwell screamed and let go of Matt, firing on the escaping Death Pony. A volley of tracers arced over the crater, missing it by a matter of inches. It was traveling too fast for Cromwell to get a lock. It disappeared over the horizon like a shooting star, headed for Earth.
Before Cromwell could return to finishing off Matt, something else appeared against the black sea of stars, headed straight towards them.
It was another, much larger craft.
Matt couldn’t help but smile.
Cromwell’s brittle teeth clenched with anger.
Ally was piloting the Wraith Interceptor down to their position inside the crater. She stood at the controls, gripping the steering horn with awkwardness. She had figured if Matt could fly one of these things without any experience, she could too. That theory seemed a lot more logical until she tried taking off. Fortunately, the pilot monk had given her a quick rundown of the basic controls. She knew enough to accelerate, decelerate, and fire the ship’s weapons. Landing? Well, that was something she was not intending to do. Despite the crude bandage she had managed to wrap around her wound, she had lost a significant amount of blood. If all went according to plan, she would be li
ght years away from the nearest medical help, so based on that, she estimated it was only a matter of time until her wound became infected. How long she would survive after that was anyone’s guess.
Lowering the rear ramp that was airlocked between the ship’s cargo bay and main fuselage, she vectored the huge alien bomber towards the four tiny strobes of light nestled against the enormous curvature of the crater wall. From her angle of approach, they looked like gnats, floating weirdly in near-zero-gravity by the side of a large mountain. The steering horn began to shudder from the large array of engines spooling down underneath her, each one the size of a Winnebago. The rattlesnake chittering noise that emanated from them was strangely unnerving, reminding her these engines were completely alien and nothing like any conventional propulsion system. While there were no warning icons flashing or alarms bleating, the strange chittering did not indicate whether the engines were under any type of unusual duress from her rapid descent. From her understanding, even in the vacuum of space, bombers were not designed to perform low altitude dives. “Come on, baby,” she said nervously as if the ship was somehow listening to her. “Don’t shit the bed on me now. Nice and easy.”
With his cab’s oxygen supply now only moments away from being depleted, the diversion of Ally’s approach gave Matt the opening he needed. He was having difficulty breathing, so it was now or never. He kicked Cromwell off him and leaped up, firing his thrusters in unison.
Cromwell spun around and titled his remaining cannon up, firing as Matt rocketed towards the rim of the crater above them. “Where do you think you’re going?” Cromwell howled. He fired his thrusters and took off after Matt, his soulless eyes now glaring with primal violence.
The Revered (The Earth Epsilon Wars, Book 3) Page 22
