The diminutive Qharr cocked his head and held up his hand with his index-finger raised indicating that his subordinates should halt. “The Rite of Gauhk? What justifies this call for revenge, hu-man?”
“You murdered my parents in front of my eyes, you enslaved me and my sister, you took everything I ever had away!” I yelled behind gritted teeth.
“Who are you, female, that you should level such accusations against me!?” he answered back with typical Qharr stoicism.
“It’s open!” Kaya suddenly, but ignored her and eyed Duvak.
“You know me as Jellfree Briggs!”
The corrector blinked and let out a long drawn out cough, “You think me a fool, hu-man?” He paused then turned to his cronies switching to Qharr as he bellowing out a command. “Kill them!”
“Shit!” I yelled and swirled around without waiting for Qharr to make their move.
Kaya was the first through the doorway, but Strave and I weren’t far behind. “Move it!” Strave yelled doing a one-eighty and raised the phase rifle as I came tearing through the doorway. I threw myself aside just a fraction of a second before he opened fire on the approaching soldiers.
“Kaya,” he yelled. “Get that damn door closed!”
“Working on it!” she called over her shoulder from a panel just off to the side of the door.
I sprang back to my feet then raised my own weapon and started firing into the doorway alongside Strave. One of the hunters reached the entrance just as Kaya let out a high pitched squeal then the door came sliding out from the slot in the side of the frame trapping the gray-skin’s hand between the door and the frame. Strave raised the phase rifle, tinkering with a little pop-out panel on the side, aimed it at the trapped hand then opened fire. An unusually bright flash of phase energy hit the target and blasted the outstretched appendage blowing it to pieces. The door, snapped shut and I turned to Kaya who was panting heavily.
“Come on,” she yelled. “We don’t have a lot of time left!”
The ship, the one we had captured from the overseer, was waiting for us as we made our way through the launch bay. We hightailed it up the ramp and passed through the airlock then hurried into the command center.
“Jaysen, I hope you got this fucking thing ready!” Kaya panted and collapsed in one of the many chairs strewn about the bridge.
“The Phoenix is as ready as she’ll ever be,” he mumbled. “I bypassed the lockout systems so anyone of us can now directly interface with the ship’s controls, but I still can’t get the damn inertial negator to work.”
“The Phoenix?” I asked with a raised eyebrow.
“Oh,” Jaysen grinned scratching at the back of his head, “That was Mara’s idea. Apparently, a phoenix is some mythological bird that burns up and keeps getting reborn from its ashes or something like that. I wasn’t really paying attention.”
“Fuck!” a voice pronounced. “What the hell is that thing doing here?!”
I gritted my teeth and slowly turned to find Farris with a phase pistol trained on me. I folded my arms across my chest and said the first thing that came to mind. “Funny, I was about to say the same thing about you.”
It really wasn’t the sort of thing I’d typically say, and for whatever strange reason I burst into a fit of laughter after uttering the words.
“You think it’s funny, bitch?! You’re the one who brought those bastards down on us! Because of you Pyr is dead!” He yelled his hand shaking as his voice grew louder.
Kaya rolled her eyes, jumped to her feet then hauled off and decked him across the face. Farris’s eyes rolled into the back of his head, he toppled to the ground and Kaya shook her head. “We really don’t have time to be fucking around.”
“Jaysen,” she said. “Where the hell is Mara?”
“Uh… she left?”
“She left? Shit! Well, where the hell did she go?”
“I thought I’d see if I could pick up a few stragglers,” Mara said, stepping into the control room with the doctor, Marta and Nate trailing behind her.
“Jaysen, get us the hell out of here!” Kaya yelled then swirled around to face me. “You think you can pilot?”
I blinked. “Well, if you don’t mind Khala taking the controls.”
“Is that such a good idea?” Nate protested. “How do we know that thing in her head isn’t what brought the Qharr down on us in the first place?”
Thing in my head? Khala wasn’t in my head… was she? I gritted my teeth and let out a long sigh Khala’s physical location in my body didn’t matter at the moment. I opened my mouth to say something, but Strave came to my defense first.
“It wasn’t her! Dammit how many times are we going to have to cover this? I was with her all night. With Felix and the others trailing her all the time she really hasn’t had any opportunity to contact the gray-skins,” Strave protested.
Mara slowly shook her head. “We don’t have time for petty recriminations! Jellfree take the helm! I hoped that creature inside of you can be trusted otherwise this is going to be a short ride!”
I nodded, then bowed my head, closed my eyes and called to Khala. ‘You know what to do.’
My eyes snapped open. Without another word the K’teth took control of my body and moved to the nearest control console.
“As much as I hate to question what must surely be the obvious. I seem to recall it being mentioned to my host that this facility is located deep underground. How exactly is that you plan to use the Het-” she paused mid-sentence then corrected herself, “the Phoenix as an escape vehicle if that is the case?”
Jaysen looked over at Khala and grinned. “The engineer who designed this place most have been some kind of mad genius. He prepared for the eventuality of a quick escape. There are a series of retractable tunnels that lead to the surface.”
“And they have survived all this time? Impressive. You humans are nothing if not resourceful. It is a shame that the masters invaded this world I think there is very little limit to what your kind might have achieved,” she muttered then turned to Jaysen. “I am ready.”
Jaysen nodded, pulling something out of his breast pocket fiddling with it for a moment before turning back to look Khala in my eyes. “Take the opening directly above us.”
The Phoenix lurched into motion and the ship went soaring into the opening above.
“Ah hell!” Jaysen yelled suddenly as we emerged from the long tunnel. “There are two destroyers closing on us fast!”
“I see them!” Khala yelled back sending the ship serving to the side.
“They’ve launched two squadrons of interceptors!” Jaysen yelled.
“Fuck, they must really want us dead! That’s overkill even by Qharr standards!” Kaya screamed.
I felt a sigh escape my lips then Khala spoke. “I might have been able to outrun the destroyers, but those fighters are designed for speed they will quickly catch up to us and when they do they’ll blow us out of the sky.”
“We’re screwed then!” Nate yelled collapsing to his knees as the foremost of the fighters opened fire.
“No!” Khala screamed defiantly and lunged at a nearby console. “There’s a small chance… It’s not something I would normally consider advisable, but I believe it is as you humans say desperate times call for desperate measures.”
“What are you doing?! You’re not actually thinking about activating the leap-drive, are you?! Leap blindly and the ship could wind up inside a mountain!”
Khala sighed, “I am aware of the risks, human! The gray skins and by extension the K’teth were using FTL drives before the human race had even invented the wheel! Now be silent so that I can properly calculate the leap vector!”
“Missiles incoming! Better grab onto something we’re in for a rough ride!” Jasyen screamed just before the ship suddenly lurched forward.
“The FTL rings are charging the ship will leap once it’s ready.” Khala proclaimed then jumped
back to the first control panel.
Khala pounded down on the panel, launching a missile which detonated against the oncoming barrage of projectiles. The force from the resulting explosion was such that the ship was sent lurching violently forward. My fingers scrambled across the control panel’s surface as the symbiote fought to gain control of the ship, but despite her best efforts it continued to lurch and spin erratically.
“Dammit! That blast took out the aft thrusters!” Jaysen yelled. “You better brace yourselves ’cause the Phoenix is going down.”
“No, it can’t, not yet,” Khala shook my head just moments before the front view port suddenly flared with blinding bright light.
I heard Kaya let out an earsplitting shriek then everything seemed to freeze in place as the light flared and seemed to encapsulate everything. We were the light, it was a part of us, and we a part of it. The ship shook, Khala blinked, and just like that the illumination was gone, but the ship was still careening wildly toward the ground.
“Prepare for impact!” Khala called. She closed my eyes and clenched my teeth bracing us just before the ship went plowing nose first into the ground.
Infiltration
Everything had fallen to pieces, and we were on the run for our lives after the Qharr had discovered the location of the resistance’s secret base. There was every reason for us to give in to despair, but not all was lost. We soon found ourselves on a quest to uncover a secret which could bring about freedom for all the people of Earth.
Chapter One
“Ohhhh God,” a voice groaned just a few feet away and my eyes flew open with a start.
I sat up with a soft groan of my own, only registering that I’d regained control from Khala after I did so. “That you, Kai?”
“Yeah,” she coughed. “God, just promise me we’ll never do that again.”
“Not if I can help it. You alright?”
“I think I might have a few cracked ribs, and more than my fair share of aches, but other than that I’m just swell. I’ll probably be a mass of bruises soon enough. How about you?”
“Fine,” I paused suddenly realizing I didn’t hurt at all, in fact I felt perfectly fine. “I think Khala somehow shielded me from the impact.”
“God, aren’t you the lucky one? Check on the others would you? I feel like my fucking head is about to implode.”
“Alright,” I responded climbing to my feet and started to sift through the debris.
‘You did shield me didn’t you? How does that work?’ I thought at Khala.
‘It would be difficult to explain. I’m not even sure I understand how it works myself, but needless to say I possess the ability to create and manipulate fields of gravity. It requires a massive amount of power so I do try to reserve it for the most dire of circumstances unless I have a large amount of energy stored up.’
‘Search over there where that pile of rubble is in the right corner,’ she added with a sudden shift in tone.
I nodded and moved over to the general vicinity of where she had indicated. I knelt down picking through some of the debris, and uncovered a hand as I moved away a pretty sizable slab of metal. The hand very obviously belonged to a woman and I knew immediately it must have been Mara’s due to the age lines on the palm. I called up the superior strength made available to me by Khala and started tossing large pieces of wreckage aside in a hurry to free my aunt.
It took a few minutes, but I finally managed to free away enough debris to reveal her still open eyes, arms and most of her torso.
“Doctor!” I called out once I got a good look at her blood-stained chest.
Vakrexid did not reply and felt a lump form in my throat as I reached down to check Mara’s neck for a pulse and found nothing.
“Oh, God!” I screamed throwing myself away from the body unable to look into those unseeing eyes.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” Kaya demanded suddenly.
“It’s Mara, she’s…” I trailed off feeling hot tears sting my eyes. “She’s dead.”
“No!” Kaya wailed suddenly shouldering past me and collapsed at her feet next to my aunt’s dead body. She took one look at Mara’s body then palmed her face with both of her hands and started to weep. I reached over to put a hand on her shoulder. She jerked away and swirled around to look me in the eyes.
“You remember when I said that an older woman nursed me back to health after my sister betrayed me?” she asked her voice almost completely devoid of emotion.
I met her gaze, nodded, and placed my hands on her shoulders.
“The woman, it was Mara,” she whispered and started to sob again. “Now I’m truly alone. I’ve lost everyone I ever cared about. When you were transformed by that thing I told myself it couldn’t get any worse, but now with Mara gone I don’t know if I can do this anymore. What do I have left to fight for?”
“Fight so that future generations can be free from the Qharr’s tyranny. Fight for our child,” I whispered reaching down to touch her belly.
She nodded and wiped her tears away. “C-come on. We don’t have time to stand around. We may have bought ourselves some time by using the leapdrive, but the Qharr are bound to come to investigate.”
“Are you going to be, okay?” I asked squeezing her shoulder.
She bit her lip and I could tell she was fighting to keep herself from bursting into tears, “I have to be. I’m Mara’s second with her gone I’m in command.”
She stood there for just another moment staring down at Mara’s remains then with tears glistening in her eyes she turned around and started routing through debris. I joined her and together we found Jaysen who had been pinned under a collapsed console. He was unconscious, but didn’t appear to be seriously injured. We found the doctor soon after that, he too was unconscious, but one of his facial tubes had been broken off and another had been bent at an odd angle. We didn’t do anything for Vakrexid mostly because his physiology was so strange that we had no idea what could be done.
Strave, and Farris were both fine, but when we finally found Marta and Nate they were both dead. Kaya took both deaths in stride, but I could tell that their passing, Marta’s in particular, bothered her.
“Damn,” a voice abruptly pronounced and Jaysen sat up clutching at his head with both hands. “I guess this means we escaped?”
“Yeah, but…” Kaya trailed off choking up.
“But what?” he groaned.
“There were more deaths,” I finished for Kaya having a hard time not choking up myself.
Jaysen paled and swallowed hard. “Who did we lose?”
“Mara, Nate and Marta,” Kaya answered quietly.
“Jesus! Not Mara!” he exclaimed letting his hands drop away into his lap. “I-is everyone else okay?”
“Farris and Strave are alive. They’re unconscious, but seem to be fine. As for the doctor your guess is good as mine,” I replied shaking my head.
“Jaysen,” Kaya asked suddenly her back to us both. “Do you think you could blow the ship up?”
He blinked. “Easily, why?”
She spun around and there were just the tiniest hint of that familiar manic fire in her eyes as she spoke. “I think I know how we can get another ride.”
“This is insane!” Farris protested standing over the doctor’s still inert form after he had finished moving the Dexagarmetrax out of the ship.
“Suck it up, Farris,” Kaya growled. “Mara’s gone that means I’m in charge and I say we’re doing this!”
“And what about that thing!?” He sneered and pointed a finger at me. “I still say we slit its throat and leave the corpse for the Qharr to find.
“Just shut the fuck up and do as I told you!” Kaya yelled.
Farris glared at me one final time before moving away to do as he was instructed.
“Did you get it?” Kaya asked turning to Jaysen.
“Yeah,” he said holding up a small rectangular object about the size of his fist.
/> “I thought it’d be bigger,” Kaya eyed it then reached out to touch it.
Jaysen shrugged and pulled it away before her hand could reach it. “Careful, it’s pretty delicate.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s the ship’s transponder… I figured out how to modify it so that it sent out a false signal. It’ll trick any Qharr satellites who receive a signal from it into believing it’s something innocuous like a bird or a communications relay. It was pretty difficult work, so it’s easier just to bring it with us instead of reconfiguring another one. ”
“And the other item?” Kaya asked quietly.
“Yeah, I got that too,” he replied holding out a cylindrical tube which I recognized as my uncle’s biometric key.
Kaya nodded then tucked both items into her pocket. “Good work. I sent Farris into the ship to get things ready. Why don’t you go help him out?”
Jaysen frowned, but nodded without another word and made his way back into the wrecked Phoenix.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” I asked hopefully.
Kaya shook her head. “It’s probably a bad time, but I’m not sure there are going to be many good times from here on out.”
“Kaya, what’s this about?”
She pursed her lips and shook her head. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about Strave.”
I blinked. “About Strave?”
“You kissed him right before you challenged Duvak to that rite of whatever, remember?” She folded her arms across her chest.
“I-I… you see the thing about that is…” I trailed off feeling my cheeks burn.
“You slept with him, didn’t you? That’s why the two of were together all night.”
“Yes,” I admitted with a shudder.
“God, Lexa! Didn’t I warn you about him? He and I had a fling a few years back, and let’s just say it didn’t end so well. Strave isn’t the type to get involved in a serious relationship. He’ll fuck you until the next pretty face shows up then he’ll dump you like a sack of potatoes. My advice is to end it before he breaks your heart,” she muttered glaring at Strave who was working just a short distance away.
Battle For Earth Page 15
