SkyWake Invasion

by Jamie Russell

  “Get inside the loadout bay!” Casey yelled, dragging Dreyfus with her, gritting her teeth at the jolt of lingering electricity she got when she touched him. The boys didn’t need further prompting, and dived through the blast doors. Cheeze, firing over his shoulder, was the last one in before the heavy doors shut like steel jaws. He blasted the control panel with his gun, sealing them inside. There were muffled thuds and shouts as the Red Eyes hammered on the other side.

  “How long do you think those will hold them?” Casey asked. An alarm sounded somewhere deeper inside the dropship, shrill and insistent.

  “Not long enough,” Cheeze said. He pulled the Arcturian helmet off his head and leaned against the wall, panting. “I’ll be OK,” he told Casey, waving away her concern. “But this suit isn’t designed for humans. I’m really missing my wheelchair right now.”

  Just then, there was a tremor beneath their feet. The ship seemed to rumble and shake and a cloud of green plasma vented from the floors and walls, momentarily engulfing them in its acidic mist. They clung on to whatever they could as the whole ship seemed to lurch sideways. It only lasted a moment, but they all guessed what it meant.

  “Tell me we didn’t just take off…” Fish whispered.

  “This is bad,” Elite said, panicked. “How are we ever gonna get out of here now?”

  On the floor, Dreyfus was just coming to after his shock. He looked pale and weak. Cheeze removed the shock collar from around his neck.

  “Getting us locked in here was your plan?” the soldier asked Casey, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “You should let me take charge.”

  “You don’t know anything about how SkyWake works,” she replied, surprised by the steel in her tone. “You’re in our world now.”

  Casey looked around the shadowy loadout bay, noticing the conveyor belts. She knew from her hours playing SkyWake exactly what lay at the end of them. It was the ship’s central gravity well where the drop pods were prepped before being launched.

  On the far side of the blast doors there was a clatter and some muffled shouts in Arcturian. Then a shower of sparks began to spew from under the doors. The Red Eyes outside the loadout bay were using some kind of plasma torch on it. A hot orange line appeared halfway down and slowly inched its way across the metal.

  “What are we going to do?” Fish asked. The boys looked at Casey expectantly. Dreyfus too. She took a breath. She could do this.

  “If the ship’s already taken off, we’re too late to cut the cooling pumps,” she told them. “We need to get back to Earth.”

  “How?” Fish asked. “Hijack the ship and turn it around?”

  “We’re going to have to hot-drop,” Casey told them.

  “What does that mean?” asked Dreyfus.

  “Trust me, bruv, you don’t want to know,” Elite muttered, shaking his head in despair.

  “The ship’s drop pods are designed for planet fall,” Brain told the lieutenant. “We can blast back to Earth in them.”

  “Not just us,” Casey corrected him. “If we can get control of the pods, we can rescue all the gamers.”

  Dreyfus looked at her in surprise. He seemed almost impressed.

  “I’ll work on overriding the pods,” Cheeze said, heading over to the loadout bay’s control console and grabbing a seat in front of it. He was glad to be sitting down; the alien suit was too uncomfortable. “If I can find the launch command, we can get everyone out of here.” He pulled an Arcturian hacking tool from his belt and got started.

  “What about those Red Eyes?” Fish asked, nervously eyeing the blast doors. The aliens were still cutting through the metal, slowly but surely. Sparks showered left and right, dropping into the floor grilles like glowing orange embers before they cooled and went out.

  “We’ll have to hold them back until Cheeze is ready,” Casey said. “Everyone, grab some weapons.”

  The boys fanned out into the loadout bay. It didn’t take them long to find the bay’s stash of weapons. They ran to the racks and pulled down hardware they recognized from SkyWake. Fish grabbed exo-suits and helmets for everyone as well as an energy shield baton for himself. Brain took an energy sword and a med tool, weighing both in his hands. Elite took a long, narrow sniper rifle that was the length of a broomstick.

  “This is sweet,” he whistled, peering down the rifle’s scope and watching as it synced up to the display on his helmet visor.

  While they tooled up, Cheeze tapped away at the alien console, trying to decipher its strange glyphs. Dreyfus hung on to the back of his seat, still groggy from the electric shock. He watched as Cheeze pulled up screen after screen of data then stopped in surprise. The gamer took a deep breath.

  “Casey, you need to see this…”

  On the screen was a map of the drop pods in the ship’s hold. It showed the banks of pods, each with a soldier inside. Vital signs – heartbeat, rate of breathing, brain activity – scrolled across the screen alongside a pod symbol marked with the gamertag of the person inside. One pod flashed red: CASEY FLOW.

  “It’s Pete!” Casey cried, excited. “He must still be wearing my ID badge.” She stared at the screen, unable to believe her eyes. “Is he OK?” she asked. “Can we speak to him?”

  Cheeze didn’t reply.

  “What is it?” Casey demanded, scared. She could sense something was wrong. She looked again at the screen. The flashing red drop pod symbol suddenly seemed ominous. None of the other pods were flashing like that.

  “There are no readings coming from his pod,” Cheeze explained. “No heartbeat. No vital signs. Nothing.”

  “But that means he’s…” Casey couldn’t finish her sentence. She flushed, angry. “No! It can’t be. There’s just a problem with the system. A glitch or something.”

  She looked across the loadout bay and started to head out to find her brother. Cheeze tried to grab her arm, but she shrugged him off.

  “Don’t let them inside,” she ordered her teammates, indicating the blast doors where the Red Eyes were still cutting through. “I’ll be back as quick as I can.” She caught Dreyfus watching her and expected him to try and stop her. But he didn’t. He just nodded.

  “Good luck,” he said.

  Casey turned on her heel and ran. The shadows engulfed her instantly.

  28

  HIDE AND SEEK

  The great thing about the exo-suit, Casey realized as she ran, was the way it augmented your body. Everything still moved just like it always did, but the suit’s metal rods and joints made her faster and more powerful. The plasma rifle in her hands no longer felt too heavy for her, and when she vaulted over a railing that separated the loadout bay from the gravity well, it was totally effortless. The exo-suit’s servo-motors gave her added power to make the jump while its inbuilt dampeners cushioned the impact as she landed.

  The well sat in the centre of the dropship on the far side of the loadout bay. It was a vast circular funnel that ran five storeys deep, through the belly of the ship. On the curved walls of the well, stacked in rows, were hundreds of drop pods. Each held a single gamer, kitted out with an exo-suit and weapons. The kidnapped kids stood motionless, their faces blank and their eyes glassy as marbles. If any of them noticed her approach, they gave no sign.

  As Casey took in the sheer scale of it all, a huge robot arm moved gracefully across the well. It placed a final drop pod in position, slotting it into a gap between the others. Casey knew that when the time came, these pods would tumble like counters out of a Connect 4 rack, dropping from the ship’s belly and into the atmosphere of whatever planet lay beneath them. It was a formidable assault strategy, and if the game’s backstory also turned out to be true, it had allowed the Red Eyes to invade planet after planet.

  Cheeze’s voice crackled in her ear, coming through the comms system in the helmet of her exo-suit. It was like being back in game chat.

  “You should be able to see Pete’s location on your mini-map,” he told her.

  In the corner of her helmet’s
visor display, she saw a map like the ones in SkyWake. There was something comforting about its familiarity. The location of Pete’s drop pod was a flashing red dot.

  “I’ve got it,” she replied, running down the metal stairs that ringed the circular walls. Pete should be at the very bottom of the well. She dashed past the other pods, thinking of all the other shopping centres around the world that had been targeted today. The Red Eyes must be building a global army to attack the Squids’ homeworld. A final push to take over Hosin once and for all.

  As she sprinted along the final walkway on the lowest level of the well, she hurried her step, watching the countdown on her helmet visor as it tracked the remaining distance to Pete.

  Ten metres, five metres, two metres … here!

  The visor silhouetted the pod in front of her, highlighting it so she couldn’t miss it. She hammered her fist against its side.

  “Pete. I’m here. Pete!”

  There was no answer. Panicked, she wiped the frosted condensation that had formed over the pod’s viewing window and peered inside. He had to be alive. He just had to be. She let out a strangled cry of despair.

  “It’s empty!” she yelled into her helmet mic, her chest heaving.

  “It can’t be,” Cheeze’s voice said. “The system says—”

  “Then the system’s wrong,” Casey snapped. “He’s not here.”

  She checked the pods next to the empty one, and recognized some of the kids from Strike Force.

  “Xander!” she screamed, hammering on his pod. “Where’s Pete?”

  The YouTuber didn’t respond. His eyes were glazed. Casey wasn’t even sure if he knew she was there. She looked back at Pete’s empty drop pod, unable to believe that the whole of this had been for nothing. She’d come all that way to find him! Maybe something had happened to him. Maybe he was already dead.

  She steadied herself against the empty pod. She felt as though she was going to pass out. She hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast and her body was telling her it couldn’t go on much longer.

  No, she told herself, this isn’t over. There hadn’t been any vital signs on the system because her brother wasn’t in the pod. If he wasn’t in the pod, he must be somewhere else.

  She was jolted back to the present by the sound of Cheeze’s words crackling in her ear again.

  “Casey, we need you! They’re coming inside.”

  By the time Casey got back to the loadout bay, the Red Eyes had finished cutting a rectangular hatch in the middle of the blast doors. As the last of the sparks died and went out, there was an ominous silence.

  “What are they waiting for?” Fish snapped.

  A few seconds ticked past. Still nothing.

  “How long until we can release the pods?” Casey asked Cheeze.

  “Five more minutes,” her teammate called over his shoulder, his fingers clattering over the console’s keyboard at lightning speed.

  “You’ll never hold them that long,” Dreyfus said flatly.

  “Yes, we will,” Casey told him firmly. “We just need to play our game roles. Fish, get your shield up. Brain, be ready to heal. Elite, find a sniper spot.”

  The team rolled into action, buoyed by the authority in Casey’s voice. There was something familiar about it, something that they recognized from the hours they’d spent playing SkyWake together. Looking at her, though, her teammates could also see how different she was. She was no longer the same girl who’d arrived in the shopping centre that morning too shy to reveal herself for fear they’d reject her.

  If she felt the change in herself, Casey didn’t show it. She was consumed by a million different thoughts, her mind racing to form a strategy before the Red Eyes breached the doors. If the Ghost Reapers couldn’t keep the enemy soldiers back, there was no way she would ever find Pete.

  She looked around, considering the best position to take up. There were four metal pillars opposite the main doors that would give her good cover. She ran behind the first one, her plasma rifle poking around it. She was surprised to notice that, for the first time today, her hands weren’t shaking as she hefted the gun.

  She was ready for this.

  The boys followed her instructions to the letter.

  Fish stepped forward and activated his shield baton. A horizontal rectangle of blue energy extended out in front of him, creating a barrier between his friends and the blast doors. He planted one leg behind him like a taekwondo fighter in standing stance and heard his exo-suit’s servomotors whizz and whirr as they tightened, rooting him to the spot. He felt as immovable as an oak tree.

  Behind the shield, Brain stood ready with his energy sword. Dreyfus crouched low by a stack of supply crates. Brain had shown him how to use a plasma pistol and he pointed the strange-looking weapon on the blast doors. Meanwhile, Elite was climbing a ladder onto a gantry above the loadout bay. The height made it the perfect sniping spot.

  “It’s just like last man standing,” Elite whispered on the comms as he lifted his scope to his eye and watched the blast doors.

  No one replied, too focussed for chit-chat. The silence seemed to stretch on for ever. Then, all of a sudden, there was a heavy clang as a Red Eye boot kicked the door and the rectangular panel toppled forwards. It hit the floor and lay there like a tombstone.

  “Here they come,” Casey said into her helmet mic. “Make every shot count.”

  The shooting started immediately as a squad of Red Eyes blasted at them from the corridor. Fish’s shield crackled and rippled as it soaked up plasma damage like a sponge. Elite’s sniper rifle cracked in intermittent bursts as he lined up his targets, moving in and out of the shadows between shots. A Red Eye went down, his armoured helmet smoking.

  “They call me sniper elite, cos I can’t be beat,” the boy’s voice rapped over the comms. “One shot in the head and you’ll be dead.”

  “Stop showing off,” Casey warned, crouched behind her pillar. She released a barrage of fire through Fish’s shield, distracting the Red Eyes from zeroing in on Elite’s position. She heard the pop, pop, pop of a plasma pistol across the loadout bay and guessed that Dreyfus was doing the same.

  “Shield’s at sixty per cent,” Fish warned, clocking the flashing counter on his helmet display as the shield took hit after hit.

  Casey fired again, dropping another alien who tried to breach the doors. The Red Eyes had cut it small and it was hard for them to get through without being hit. The alien’s comrades pulled him back into the corridor to get patched up by the medics. More quickly arrived to take his place.

  Casey wondered if Scratch was back on her feet yet. Would she come through the door looking for revenge? She pushed the thought out of her mind.

  Without warning, there was a lull in the shooting. Casey and the boys instinctively took the opportunity to reload, all except Fish, who kept his shield up in case it was a ploy by the Red Eyes. The shield would recharge if he deactivated it, but he wasn’t about to chance it. Not just yet.

  “How much longer for the pods?” Casey yelled, looking over at Cheeze. He still had the hacking tool in his hand, its beam scrambling the console’s systems as it tried to gain full access.

  “I’m on the last layer of security. Just hold them back a little longer.”

  “Any sign of Pete?” she asked, although she knew what his answer would be.

  “Nothing,” Cheeze answered, shaking his head. “It’s like he’s vanished.”

  “He must be here somewhere,” Brain said over the comms. “How many hiding places can there be on a ship like this?”

  Casey exhaled hard, trying to fight back her panic. “He’s been running away from me all day,” she whispered, remembering how the day had started. “He didn’t want me to babysit him at the tournament and I almost lost him in the crowds when we first got there. He’s so small he can wriggle his way into all kinds of…”

  She stopped mid-sentence.

  “All kinds of what?” Elite asked.

  “Small spaces! He’s
great at getting into small spaces. He even does it in SkyWake, on this map.”

  “And…?” prompted Fish.

  “Last man standing is his favourite game mode,” Casey continued, her voice rising as she joined up the dots. “He goes into the vents with a psi grenade…”

  “On it,” Cheeze replied, catching on. “Scanning the ventilation system now.”

  Casey held her breath. If Pete had disappeared once he was inside the dropship, he had to be in the vents. He knew every centimetre of them from the game.

  “I’ve got a heat signature,” Cheeze shouted. “It’s in the cooling tower above the loadout bay.”

  Casey couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Was it possible…? But she had no time to give it any more thought as the Red Eyes opened fire again from the corridor. Casey saw that they were now being led by Scratch, who, back in fresh armour but without a helmet, was shouting instructions at them in her alien tongue.

  Everyone in the loadout bay ducked for cover, except Fish, who stood firm with his shield protecting them all.

  “I’ve got to get Pete!” Casey yelled, glancing at the gantry above the loadout bay. The cooling vents were situated up there, above Elite’s sniper spot.

  “Shield’s going down any minute,” Fish called as the energy field cracked, flickered and began to die. He didn’t want to get stuck out in the open when it went offline. Casey dived low as a blast of plasma fire ate into the pillar she was hiding behind.

  “We can’t hold them back without you, Casey,” Brain shouted. “We don’t have enough firepower.”

  He was right. They needed an assault player down here. If Casey abandoned the boys, they’d be overrun. But if she didn’t reach Pete now, she’d never get him to a drop pod before their escape.

  She felt a wave of despair.

  How could she choose between her brother and her team?

  “Yo, Casey,” said a voice over the comms. “I’ve got you.”

  It was Elite. Her scrawny teammate had climbed up towards the ceiling of the loadout bay. At first, Casey thought he was trying to get to higher ground. But then she saw that he’d set his sniper rifle aside. He ripped the cover off a vent hatch, ready to scramble inside.