by Scott Baron
“So they’re getting the pulse cannons and plasma weapons installed without problems?”
“For the most part. From what I’ve seen, though, the AIs we have at our disposal don’t really seem to be the cream of the crop, as it were,” she noted. “All of the top-tier ships and their crews have been off world for months on long-range surveys. Seems to be something they do periodically.”
“Yeah, Cal told me about it. Searching out other advanced races. A needle in a haystack kind of thing, really. But it has to start somewhere, I suppose. The timing sucks, though. I mean, from what we can tell, it looks like the Tslavars are gearing up to make another snatch-and-grab run any time now, and we could really use the extra firepower.”
“But their crews would have been frozen,” Rika noted.
“Well, of course. And that would have sucked, no doubt. But the AIs could have still flown the ships, and that’s really what we need right about now. But we’ll just have to make do with what we have. The cyborgs have been armed with pulse rifles, and we’ve got a cache of them standing by for us when we’re ready.”
The time was coming. The time to strike back. And hopefully this time they would succeed in not only disabling the Tslavar ship, but in rescuing their friend as well. The longer he was in their clutches, the longer they had to do who-knew-what to him.
“You good here?” Charlie asked. “I need to pow-wow with Ara and go over our plan of attack one more time.”
“Yeah. I’m just finishing up coordinating with Cal. Then Leila and I were going to go fire off a few rounds to get her familiar with these new weapons.”
“Should be pretty self-explanatory.”
“For us, sure. And she’s damn quick to learn. But still, she’s from a magical world, so a little extra practice surely won’t hurt.”
Charlie was glad to see the two women become friends. When he’d first rescued Rika from her mind-controlled imprisonment, he had been worried Leila might have some difficulty with a friend from his former life suddenly popping back into the picture.
A female friend, no less, though one he had never had any relations with. Still, they had history––though she couldn’t remember it––and that alone could make some less confident women uncomfortable.
It was a rather symbiotic relationship that had wound up forming between the two very different women, and they really did seem to complement each other’s gaps in skills nicely. That, and it was just nice that any awkwardness was nipped in the bud. Now all they had to do was defeat an invading alien force, and maybe they could all get back to just living their lives.
Eddie had taken a quick flight to visit the Dark Side moon base at Cal’s request, while Ripley was napping, catching up on a bit of sleep after the draining undersea rescue. Like Rika, she was bouncing back nicely, but unlike her new friend, she wasn’t yet used to the strains that wielding magic at that level could put on the body.
And so she crashed for a few hours, during which Eddie had flown to Dark Side base and retrieved the mysterious crates from Hangar Two.
“Cal will know what to do with this,” Sid had said, the moon base’s resident AI fully confident in the city-sized AI’s abilities.
“But what is it?” Eddie asked.
“Something special Cal wanted to add to your existing armaments.”
“Better than the new pulse cannon they installed?”
“I wouldn’t necessarily say better,” Sid said. “Just a little something extra. Just in case the need should arise. I could say more, but I really should leave all of that to Cal. It was his idea, after all.”
Eddie wasn’t about to argue with the military AI. If Sid believed it was best to leave the explanation to Cal, then he wasn’t about to voice an objection.
“Thanks, Sid,” he said once the moon base’s human and Chithiid crew had loaded the crates. “I hope we get this all sorted out. This magic-on-Earth thing is making it rather difficult.”
“You’re telling me,” a gruff man with a ceramisteel replacement arm grumbled. “I was supposed to be meeting my gal for a weekend of R&R, but instead, she’s frozen down there, and my leave got canceled because of these goddamn aliens.”
He noted the look the seven-foot-tall Chithiid standing at his side was giving him.
“Uh, sorry, Apaari. No offense.”
“You are such a dick sometimes,” the alien chuckled.
“And you’re getting better with slang,” he shot back. “Anyway, I don’t wanna wind up a human popsicle, but otherwise, I’d come along with you to the surface. All of us would. It feels wrong sitting out a fight like this.”
“But you would fall victim to the spell enveloping the planet.”
“Yeah, we know. Doesn’t make it suck any less,” he grumbled. “Anyway, you’d best be off. Got an invasion to defeat, after all.”
“Yeah,” the young ship replied. “And if I had fingers, I’d cross them.”
“I’ll cross mine for ya,” the man replied.
“As shall I,” the Chithiid added.
Eddie quietly lifted off and made his way clear of the base, then hurried back to Earth, where Cal’s retrofit team was waiting to install whatever this new toy was.
“I hope it’s something cool,” he said, then plunged through the atmosphere, re-entering his native airspace in a streak of fire.
Chapter Forty-Two
The rag-tag group of modified AI ships and their cybernetic counterparts had just gathered together and run through the most preliminary of tactical plans when word came in to load up and move out. Their quarry was coming ashore, it seemed, and it was time to put a stop to their plans, whatever they were.
Unfortunately for Ripley, her ride was still mid-modification when the call came.
“But we’ve gotta go!”
“I’m afraid I cannot clear Eddie for flight yet,” the AI fabricator unit stated.
“Bullshit. There’s a fight coming, and we’ve gotta be there.”
“Again, I apologize, but this craft is simply not flightworthy. His power systems are tied in to the modifications currently being installed. Neither will function without the process being completed,” the AI said, not once slowing in its work. “You have my sympathies, and I will work as quickly as possible, but Eddie will not be able to fly for at least another forty-five minutes.”
“It’ll all be over by then!” Ripley said. “Come on, hurry!”
“Sorry, Rip. I guess we shoulda waited to install this stuff,” Eddie said.
“It’s not your fault, Eddie. We had no idea,” she said, admitting not only to her AI friend, but also to herself, that it was simply shit timing. They were going to have to sit this one out, and no one was to blame.
Meanwhile, the small fleet of modified AI ships swarmed the skies above Long Beach, their cyborg troops ready for action. It seemed the Tslavars had decided to make a move on that soft target after all. And this time the defending forces––with Ara’s senses leading them directly to the ship––were ready for them.
Charlie, Leila, and Rika were geared up, flying in atop the mighty Zomoki. Each was wearing powerful konuses and slaaps in addition to their blades, moderate body armor from one of Cal’s armories, as well as a fully charged pulse rifle slung over each of their shoulders. This time, they were going in prepared.
“You got them?” Charlie asked his winged friend as they circled the shoreline. “I don’t see anything down there. They must’ve gotten their shimmer spell functional again.”
Ara dipped her wing and swooped a bit lower, breathing deeply as she did.
“Oh, yes. They’re here all right. I can still smell my magic on their craft. Have the other forces deployed along the coastline where the main boulevard runs past those canals. Do you see the disturbed section of sand?”
Charlie did. There was no wet spot as before––the Tslavars had apparently learned their lesson in that regard––but the dry sand in one area had the look of being recently moved. Smoothed over and dried.
No one would notice it from ground level, but from above, the pattern of the sand was different than that around it, the wind not having had enough time to blow it in line with the surrounding beach.
“Yeah, I see it. They’re covering their tracks.”
“Indeed. But that was their entry point, and I can definitively place the ship less than a mile inland from that point following the main boulevard. If our troops advance from the shoreline behind them, the Tslavars will be cut off.”
“And, meanwhile, we all come charging in from the other direction, driving them right back into our trap.”
“Precisely.”
Ara soared high, acting as if she was searching for the ship, while Charlie relayed the instructions to the other craft. The AI ships quickly looped out to the shore and dropped their payloads, wasting no time regaining the air and flying to the opposite end of town before soaring high again, keeping the illusion of their confusion intact.
But the forces of Earth were ready this time. And the Tslavars were going to pay.
“Drop me on that rooftop, Ara,” Rika said. “I can take the stairs down and get in position for a crossfire without you having to touch down a street level.”
Ara didn’t hesitate, flapping her wings mightily as she briefly landed on the rooftop, making a show of craning her neck as if searching for the enemy, while Rika quietly slid from her back and darted into the access door. The dragon then dove off the roof and flew wide, again looping over the area.
“I have them,” she said. “Are the others ready to engage?”
“Charlie, to Cal. We have a fix on the ship. Status of the other forces?”
“They are in position. The faster-moving among them have already taken up positions a block behind, and the modded ships are set up on both flanks.”
“Great. When Ara strikes, everyone moves in.”
“Affirmative,” Cal said. “Good luck.”
“Game on, Ara,” he sent to his friend.
She looped then banked, diving toward the cloaked craft. “And so it begins.”
She had just begun spouting flames, the other ships diving in from their positions, when powerful magical attacks bombarded her from both sides.
Charlie sensed them at the last moment, shifting all of his power into his defensive spells, his reflexes the only thing keeping them from being blown from the sky as Ara was thrown sideways from the force, momentarily stunned.
“That was not from the ship!” she warned, flapping hard as she came down atop a building, her legs shaky.
“Are you okay?” Charlie asked.
“I will be. But there are more of them!”
Before Charlie could broadcast a warning to the others, a pair of Tslavar ships uncloaked, their shimmer spells briefly receding as they unleashed a barrage of magic skyward. The incoming ships didn’t stand a chance.
The first wave was torn to pieces, thrown to and fro by the powerful spells. The subsequent ships were able to fire off their weapons and break away, but not without incurring damage as well.
Their shots landed, the plasma rounds and pulse blasts piercing the enemy’s magical defenses. They had been prepared for a conventional projectile attack as well as Ara’s magic, but this new type of weapon had caught them off guard, though the damage was still minimal. At least for the moment.
The question was whether or not the Tslavar forces would be able to modify their defenses against this new means of attack before another volley landed. The ground forces suddenly caught between their original target and the new enemy would play into that equation. They may have walked into a trap, but this time they were armed with pulse rifles.
The cyborgs fired wildly, the rounds taking down several shimmer-cloaked ground troops protecting the ground between them and the ships. A firefight between better-armed cyborgs and camouflaged Tslavars erupted into full force.
“They’ve got ground troops too!” Charlie yelled into his comms. “Cal, this was a setup.”
“I’ve received the real-time feed update, Charlie. There are three vessels and unknown ground forces at your location.”
“Of course,” Leila growled, as she slid off of Ara’s back and began sniping from the rooftop.
Amazingly, despite only a day’s practice, her shots were flying true, leaving more than one Tslavar uncloaked and dying in the street below.
“Now it makes sense,” she said, her next shot flying true, right into another Tslavar mercenary.
“What do you mean?” Charlie asked, taking up a position next to her.
“How they were able to cover such vast distances in so little time without being seen. It was never just one ship. That’s how they did it. Multiple ships snatching people from around the globe.”
“Shit,” he grunted as he fired off a burst from his rifle. “And we can only track one of them.”
“Allow me,” an angry voice rumbled from behind them. Ara rose to her full height, magic crackling from her body. She was tapping into her core power, the deep magic of thousands of years. And she was pissed.
In a flash, she leapt into the sky, her plan of attack shifted from assisting Earth’s forces to simply spraying everything with her magical flames, the power of the spell she had layered into them permeating the crafts’ structures, marking them with her smell while ripping away their defenses.
The lead ship had already sustained damage from her first run-in with it, and with this attack its magical integrity failed immediately from the intensity of the hit, driving it into the ground, disabled and broken.
The other two ships had been prepared, however, and despite the sheer power of her attack, had managed to come out relatively unscathed.
From their vantage point on the rooftop, Charlie and Leila saw a lone figure racing toward the downed Tslavar ship.
“Rika? What the hell is she doing?” Charlie said, watching his friend take down a pair of Tslavars with brutal efficiency before breaching the ship.
“She’s getting our friend back,” Leila replied, firing off another burst, cutting down the alien trying to follow Rika into the ship. “Now stop gawking and help me cover her back.”
Chapter Forty-Three
The explosive impact that had driven the ship into the ground had broken apart a great many sections of the Tslavar craft’s interior. On top of that, the sheer force of Ara’s attack had ripped much of the vessel’s magic asunder, leaving a terribly damaged, unflyable wreck in her wake.
Fortunately for Bawb, the holding area was designed to keep the prisoners far from escape. That meant well-insulated from the exterior areas of the ship, where the most damage had been incurred. While their compartment had been hit hard as well, it was nowhere near as bad as the rest of the ship.
“Tim, are you all right?” Bawb called out through the smoke to the cyborg prisoner.
“Still in one piece,” the cybernetic man replied. “Though not for lack of trying of whoever did this.”
“Ara,” Bawb replied. “My friend. She struck this craft down.”
“She could have killed us.”
“Perhaps. But she is old, and very wise. And she undoubtedly knew, as I would have, that we were almost certainly held in a secure central area of the ship.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning we would be protected,” he replied, gazing around the wrecked compartment as the smoke thinned.
Humans and Chithiid lay dead, as did several Tslavars. It seemed they had not been quite as protected as he had initially believed, though the force of the attack hadn’t felt so extreme. Still, he’d lost consciousness for a moment, and the destruction in the Zomoki’s wake was incontrovertible.
Bawb yanked hard on his restraints, and this time his right arm abruptly swung free, a chunk of the ship’s hull tearing away, dangling at the end of his wrist restraint. He quickly undid his other bonds, then ran to his cyborg friend, freeing him as well.
“We must release the other survivors,” Tim said.
Bawb noticed
the magical attack seemed to have snapped them out of whatever daze they’d been in. They were not fully themselves, he could tell, but the men and women were definitely coherent enough to realize the danger of their situation and the need for a rapid egress.
“You take that side. I’ll free the others,” Bawb directed, then set to work releasing the prisoners’ bonds.
In short order the human guinea pigs were fleeing the room, scurrying for safety like rats from a sinking ship. And that wasn’t so far from the truth.
Bawb was attempting to follow, pulling the chunk of metal still dragging behind him. While he’d freed himself from his other restraints, the damaged one on his right wrist was, unfortunately, stuck shut and would take quite some time to get open. And time was something they simply did not have.
He hefted the piece of metal, cradling it in his arms as best he could.
“We need to move, Tim. Are you ready?”
“Yes. Everyone is freed,” he replied as the last prisoner scurried out the chamber door. “But do you really think there are any more Tslavars aboard? Wouldn’t they have abandoned ship by now?”
Why did he have to say that? Bawb silently lamented, fully expecting the mysterious entity Charlie called Murphy to make an appearance, having been offered so tempting an invitation.
“It doesn’t matter, Tim. We must run. Now!” Bawb called out, bolting into the corridor.
The cyborg followed close behind as they navigated the twisted remains of the ship’s interior hallways. The spell had done a number on it, no doubt, and there was no way this craft would ever submerge beneath the waves again, let alone travel aboveground.
A glint in the smoke caught Bawb’s eye, and he lunged aside just as a wicked-sharp blade sliced through the air where he’d just been standing. Two more weapons joined the mix, the light reflected from them visible before the Tslavars wielding them were.
Bawb’s reflexes kicked in without him even thinking about it for a nanosecond. Decades of training in the deadly arts of his sect took over despite his exhaustion and disadvantaged state. In a heartbeat, he had tangled one of the blades in his remaining restraint, wrenching it from the attacker’s hand and promptly driving it through his chest.
