Dalida: A Scifi Space Opera Adventure

by G. P. Eliot

  “Suit impact. Shoulder pad at -15% efficiency.” Hank’s HUD suddenly flashed an alert, helpfully showing him a small digital image of a man with its shoulder flashing red.

  But Hank didn’t need any directions. One of the drones had gotten through the barrage and had landed on his shoulder. It was spinning its mouth blades like saws as it attempted to grind its way through his suit’s shoulder pad. Sparks were flying, as well as stringy coils of the suit’s metal-like threads.

  “Get off!” Hank threw himself against the side of the wall, hearing a whine and a crunch as the thing fell to the floor, twitching, before he shot it where it lay.

  He was just turning back to the fight when he heard Ida call out in his ear.

  “Boss–twelve o’ clock!”

  But Hank wasn’t quick enough. The next drone smacked him straight in the face, and the force of the crash was big enough that it made him stumble backwards, and trip over Steed to land on the floor.

  “Face plate impact—” his suit chimed.

  You don’t say.

  “Helmet at-20% efficiency-25%-30%.”

  The thing had extended its tiny metal legs and wrapped them around Hank’s helmet as it bored at the reinforced poly-glass. Hank had a moment of being able to see the tiny, whirring gears and pistons of the robot as it attempted to saw his face in half.

  “Argh!” Hank put his pistol to the front of his head and pulled the trigger. The thing exploded sideways, but now he could barely see out of the large striated marks of scratches and deep gouges that ran across it.

  The rest of the team were having similar problems. Even though every shot that they fired turned into a kill, the drone critters were moving just too fast, and there were too many of them to not get swamped.

  Hank saw Steed smash his own hand against a wall to destroy one, at the same time he shot down the side of his own leg to kill another. But Madigan had it far worse. Maybe it was because he was such a bigger target–but he looked covered in them.

  “Rargh!” Madigan suddenly threw himself at the wall, dislodging several and using his heavy blaster like a club to attempt to dislodge the rest.

  “Boss, I’ve got an idea,” Ida said, as Hank quick-fire shot at two more of the insect drones as they came screaming towards him out of the corridor.

  “Anything that will keep these little shits off of us!” Hank snarled.

  “Suit impact. Right forearm at -10% efficiency.”

  Hank hammered his fist–and the insect drone–against the rocky wall.

  “Overriding suit power unit,” Ida said. Hank’s ears suddenly rang with the outbreak of alarm bells and on his HUD a red flashing triangle appeared.

  “Suit power unit approaching critical. Advice: Leave suit immediately.” His HUD read.

  Hank didn’t even think that he could manage to disengage all of the suits locks before his power unit would blow. And even if he could, he would only then be asphyxiating and choking horribly to death in the hostile atmosphere outside.

  “Ida, I really hope that you know what you’re doing…” he hissed as he fired again and again, and then kicked one of the drones off of Madigan’s leg before firing again. Still, the corridor ahead seemed filled with the buzzing and angry things.

  “When have I ever let you down, Boss?”

  “That time when we were playing poker of Gerhold 2,”

  “I didn’t know the Gerholdian was running an advanced Gambling A.I! Just do as I say. I’m trying to save your lives–run forward.”

  “What!?” The little red triangle was now flashing faster and faster as his suit was about to explode. Ida was originally a strategic military intelligence, Hank reflected. He wondered if she had decided to sacrifice him for the good of the mission.

  “Just do it!” Ida pleaded with him.

  But she was right, the Captain knew–even if she really was just a collection of ones and zeroes. Ida had never let him down. There had been times when she didn’t have the skills or the programming to deal with a situation–but that wasn’t her fault. Every time that she had given him advice, he had been a fool to ignore it.

  Hank threw himself into a staggering run, vaulting over Steed’s crouching form.

  “Suit impact—”

  “Suit impact—”

  “Suit impact—”

  With him running straight into their cloud, the drones fell on him like a swarm of bees. Hank was covered in a heartbeat. His HUD was ringing with alarms as the things tried to cut and burrow their way through to his soft flesh below—

  “Ida!!” Hank shouted, throwing his arms over his head but they didn’t meet, as they were so encrusted with the thrashing, cutting, robot creatures.

  “Suit power unit at critical” his HUD flashed a warning red, and a new icon that he had thankfully never seen before: a counter.

  3…2…

  “Venting suit plasma. Overriding suit breaker protocols!” Ida said, and suddenly Hank lit up like a human torch.

  At various ports dotted up and down the length of his body, Ida had disengaged the sensitive breakers and allowed the suit’s batteries to overheat. And then, with all of the precision and nano-second timing that an Artificial Intelligence could provide, she released the accumulated energy into the small plasma reactors and released the safety mechanisms.

  All of this meant that blue, green, and orange flame burst from Hank’s suit like he was a human firework. The plasma had an explosive force and a consistency all of its own, crushing the cloud of drones against the walls and ceiling at the same time, and coating them with the long-burning flame.

  “Roll forward boss, roll!” Ida said, and Hank threw himself forward as gobbets of still-burning green and orange plasma–now dotted with drone parts and legs and wings–fell back to the floor.

  “Ugh…” Hank lay on the corridor floor, his entire suit steaming for the second time that day. But at least he wasn’t dead.

  With the vast majority of the drones now dead, Steed and Madigan made short work of finishing off the rest, before carefully jumping through the burning, explosive patch to reach the collapsed Captain.

  “Wow, sir,” Steed said admirably. “I didn’t even know that this generation of suits had that function built into them.”

  “I rather think that they don’t.” Hank groaned, accepting Madigan’s hand to help him off the floor. He brushed off the last few bits of torn and shredded suit plating and looked at his team. Both were in a similar state of disrepair. The Captain groaned.

  “I was about to tell you two that we all need to be careful, now that our suits armor plating is compromised, but…” Hank shrugged.

  “We haven’t got the time to be careful,” Steed said grimly.

  “Exactly,” Hank said. “Ida? What’s our countdown looking like?”

  “Less than five hours until Miss Cox wakes up, sir.” Ida said.

  Hank looked down the tunnel ahead of them. His environmental suit lights only penetrated so far, before being swallowed by the pitch black. The Captain had no idea how long it would be before they found this power source, or how many more strange enemies that they would have to face in order to retrieve it.

  “Behind me,” he said grimly, raising his laser pistol and starting to jog forward into the dark.

  28

  Hank ran ahead of the others, and the corridor remained, maddeningly, the same. The Captain started to wonder if he was losing his mind.

  But the three men hadn’t been running for that long. Hank knew, because he was checking the time display on his HUD every few seconds, apparently.

  It was at this point that his foot slipped on the stone floor. Only it wasn’t slipping, was it?

  It was falling.

  The floor of this section of the tunnel appeared to be hinged, as it was lowering itself down from one edge, and taking the Captain with it…

  “Jump, Boss!” Ida advised.

  The rest of the tunnel was rising fast in front of Hank as he fell, he kicked off with
his feet, having to drop one of his two laser pistols as he reached out for the lip of the floor.

  “Urgh!” Hank hit the lip of the tunnel with a thump that hurt his chest. His arms were scrabbling on the rock floor, but it was too smooth. He slid backwards towards the edge.

  “Captain!” Madigan bellowed. He didn’t even slow his pace. He took great, bounding steps right to the edge of the falling ramp and leapt like a professional athlete. There was a thump as he landed with a skid on the tunnel ahead of his Captain, falling to his side and reaching back out towards where Hank hung.

  But it was already too late. Hank was holding on with nothing more than his fingertips, and they had given way.

  “Aiiii!”

  “Boss? You still with me?” whispered Ida in his ear, cooing over him.

  “Huh?” Hank awoke to an almost-complete darkness. Almost, because the lights of his suit sent up thin shafts of blue light straight upwards. Right up there, at the very limits of the bluish haze he thought he could see the dull glint of stone.

  It was a long way away.

  “Did I really fall all that way?” Hank whispered. Just about everything was hurting.

  “You did, Boss. Splat. Straight down. It’s a wonder that you didn’t break your back,” Ida said. “But luckily for you, I think you landed on your head.”

  “Ha. Very funny.” He said.

  “Well, we both know that I’m the brains of this operation, right?” Ida said.

  Hank knew what she was trying to do. “You’re trying to cheer me up. Or make me mad.”

  “Any way that gets you back on your feet is fine by me,” Ida said to him.

  “Why do we always end up in situations like this,” Hank sighed as he sat forward, his head pounding as if, well, he’d been dropped from a great height.

  “You mean just you and me against the universe?” Ida said. She sounded positively cheerful about the prospect.

  Maybe she has a right to be proud, Hank thought. If, that is, Ida could even get proud. He wasn’t so sure. But she was right that he had relied on her for a long time to help get him out of terrible situations just like this.

  “You and me, Ida-baby,” Hank said with the ghost of a smile, and checked his HUD. He thought he should probably at least try and find out what his suit sensors thought of his condition. Did he have concussion? Was there any blood loss?

  Only to find that his HUD wasn’t there.

  “Huh?” Hank said for the second time.

  But the reason was painfully obvious why his HUD wasn’t there. It was because his entire helmet was cracked open like an egg, leaving just the collar seal around the base.

  “Ah.” Hank turned, and the inset lights just under his collar revealed the gigantic shards of the helmet scattered around him like egg shells. “You weren’t lying when you said that I landed on my head, were you?”

  “I never lie,” Ida said.

  “I’m not entirely sure that’s true…” Hank said.

  “It is impossible for me to lie, but I may utilize tactical misdirection at key moments in time,” Ida said.

  “Liar,” Hank laughed. Until he realized something. “Wait a minute. I’m not dead.”

  “You were never the sharpest tool in the box, boss,” Ida observed.

  “No–I mean the atmosphere. The Dalida said that the atmosphere was unbreathable.” Hank said. Was that another way that this strange planet had fooled them all?

  “I can confirm that the atmosphere on the surface on the planet was indeed inhospitable for human life,” Ida said.

  “You’re beginning to sound like Serrano.” Hank said.

  “It must be catching. You’d have puked your own lungs up.” Ida translated.

  “Much better. But how come the same isn’t true for down here?” Hank muttered. Wherever ‘here’ was. He turned in his seated position to see that he appeared to be in perfectly square pit.

  That didn’t bode well. Why would someone create a trap door and a perfectly square pit underneath it–and one that didn’t lead anywhere at all?

  “In answer to your previous question; it is impossible to verify. But there are two possible options…” Ida said. “One is that we are in a small pocket of unique geological chance. Perhaps the rocks here exude oxygen and have become trapped over time. But that is really unlikely. It is far more likely that…”

  “That whomever sent the Message at least had a biology similar to ours,” Hank considered. He frowned deeply. If he didn’t know better, and if he had been facing anything like this while still a Union Marine–then he would have said that this whole planet was a trap.

  And as if to prove his point, the walls of the pit started leaking water.

  “Ah, boss?” Ida said

  “I see it,” Hank growled. He’d already managed to stagger to his feet as the ripples of water started to spread across the surface of the room.

  “Well, the rate that water is spreading–I can predict that it will fill this entire room in under ten minutes.” Ida said.

  “Just. Great.” Hank growled. The ironic thing was, if his environmental suit still had its helmet, then he would have been able to filter his own oxygen and stay alive under water for almost three hours.

  Hank Snider was starting to wonder if the universe just hated him.

  29

  “Steed to Captain, Steed to Captain!” the Confederate General said for the third time as he tapped the intercom button on the inside of his wrist.

  Still no answer.

  The two men stood in the tunnel, looking down at what was once again a perfectly flat, and secure floor. The only sign that it had ever moved at all was a fine hairline crack at either end.

  They had tried running across it to activate it again–but it remained stubbornly closed. They had also tried jumping up and down on it–which was saying something as Madigan was a very large man indeed.

  Still the ramp wouldn’t drop down.

  There was only one option left; the Nuclear Option.

  “Right. We just better hope that we don’t drop a few tons of rock down onto the Captain’s head,” Steed sighed, and then nodded over at Madigan. “Light her up.”

  Both Madigan and Steed pressed the triggers of their blasters. From Steed’s medium blaster–which was still a large and black weapon that looked a little like a fattened rifle–came a pulsing bolt of thick orange laser light. It slammed into the hairline crack that marked where the ramp should close, and the rock started to blacken and smoke.

  Madigan’s weapon, however, was far more impressive. His heavy blaster threw gobbets of burning iridescent light down at the same spot. Every time that Madigan’s fire hit, Steed got painful after-images until all he could see was the surreal shape of burning colors in his eyes as he blinked.

  Together, their pounding of the floor made the tunnel start to shake underfoot. Steed couldn’t tell precisely how much damage that they were doing, but he was willing to bet that it was a lot.

  “Enough,” he said, and clicked off his laser beam.

  Madigan kept firing.

  “Enough!” Steed had to shout in order to be heard over the roar. Madigan looked up, blinked, and clicked off his weapon.

  “Sorry, did you say something?” he said.

  But Steed wasn’t looking at him. He was looking at the blackened scorch mark on the floor. “Yeah,” he muttered irritably, hopping forward to gingerly kick and scrape at the black material. Underneath was pristine and bare rock.

  They hadn’t even made a dent in it.

  “Ida? You know you said that you were the brains of this operation?” Hank was saying as the water started to creep higher and higher up his body. For the most part he couldn’t feel it thankfully, but he imagined that as soon as it topped his broken collar it would be as icy and as cold as a deep-space asteroid.

  “I’m not a miracle worker, boss,” Ida said.

  “Well, maybe that is precisely what we need!” Hank was saying in alarm.

  Even
though the surface of the water appeared to ripple at a constant rate, it was actually flowing deceptively fast. Hank could feel the strong currents hitting his legs, and the pressure of the liquid rising inch by inch. He wasn’t sure if it would even take as long as ten minutes to get to his collar.