Dimension

by Shay Zana

  “Deo?”

  Her fingers are prying lightly at his hand.

  He instantly realises that he had been squeezing her hand too tightly, letting go in disgrace of himself. He mumbles an apology and shifts his face away from her view, looking for anything else to focus on in the vegetation.

  “What is it?” comes her soft voice, laced with concern. Actual concern.

  Kitera can see the tension in his body, even through his armour plating. He had obviously been deep in thought, thinking of something that angered him. What does not anger him?

  He had pulled her to the ground a few minutes earlier, shushing her into quiet. She had assumed he had heard something or was communicating with Natheus telepathically, although such contact over vast distances is strenuous.

  What troubles you?

  Before she can voice this, his tension increases and his arm is flung out to press her in even closer behind him, body smacking lightly against his armour. She sees him go for his rifle, right before a fleeting movement ahead draws her attention and stays it.

  Another bezun.

  Its huge, naturally armoured form slinks fluidly, jaws clenched to conceal its razor sharp weapons. Its paws hover before each step, mindful of its placements, claws retracted to reduce snagging, tail stiff in its wake. It is stalking something, but not them.

  This time, Deo will not be stealing its prey as he swiftly directs Kitera to follow him away, his hand once again seeking hers to keep her close.

  Never had she imagined herself holding Deo’s hand.

  “You ever fired a gun before?” he asks her once he is confident they are out of the bezun’s earshot.

  She allows a silence to linger before answering. “No.”

  He gives a grunt, stopping that conversation in its tracks.

  “What troubles you?” she is finally able to ask.

  He slows his pace a little. “Nothing.”

  Nice try. “You are a bad liar.”

  Usually, he would laugh at such a petty insult from her, but instead he just bites his tongue to still a counter.

  “Do not make me ask the Zodiacs to tell me your mind.”

  He stops fully now, twisting his head her way, the breadth of his shoulders blotting out the light from her radiant skin. Had that been an attempt at humour? Or can she actually do that? He just stares.

  “Deo,” she says his name again, almost pleading.

  “Fine. You trouble me. Happy now?” He tugs her along as he moves again, not gently.

  Kitera gives a small grunt as her body is flung onward, shooting him a glare that he does not receive. “You do not trust me.”

  “You don’t trust me either, remember.”

  A pang of regret clamps her heart as she remembers her own words. “I am... sorry I said that.” He eases to a halt once again, his golden face taut in a frown, jaw clenched. His eyes are searching, soft creases framing them in their expression of contemplation. He wears a thick coat of wariness and suspicion.

  “I was angered,” she tries to bypass it. “But that is no excuse for saying such a thing to one’s Paragon.” She witnesses a ghost of a softening in his eyes. So seldom seen. She finds herself searching him now, hopeful.

  Deo continues to search her, silent, just listening. She is actually apologizing, her sincerity real. A Cipher apologising to their Paragon is unheard of. The lament that had been filling his veins is subtly evaporating, and her sincere manner has thrown him. She is actually ashamed, her eyes light and liquid, haunted by the weight of a responsibility so much grander than his own that he cannot even begin to comprehend her task. He searches for patience and finds a small fraction.

  Kitera waits. He does not fill the silence that she has created, so she takes another turn, following a sigh. “I should no longer call myself a Cipher, really.” An embarrassed shrug and a bitten smile of guilt. “My people are very strict in our customs, but I fear I am losing my way... I may already be lost.”

  He glances off, chewing his upper lip. “I’m not exactly the best of Paragons, either.”

  A light-hearted response. Kitera feels her eyes warm up to him in an underlying smile, and he returns it with a twinkle in his eye.

  A shriek ricochets at them from the depths of the jungle, where they had just come from. Following that are the deranged yells of soldiers, but overpowering them are the fierce roars of the bezun, mutilating its prey.

  It seems nature is on their side this time.

  “Come on,” Deo whispers softly and takes her hand once more, his scorn forgotten as he now allows the Cipher to keep up without dragging her. They continue their haste for several hundred metres, the sounds of battle growing more distant in their wake. They must be close now.

  As Mazayus and Boone continue towards the co-ordinates to the warship, the UEU scout’s words play and replay over in their heads. Serenity cannot be responsible for destroying entire planets just to take out UEU colonies, it is against everything they believe in. And the fact that planets are being destroyed in Serenity territory too makes it even more unlikely. Maybe the Zodiacs are involved, and maybe they are not, but Serenity or the Ciphers surely could not have instigated it. Perhaps this has something to do with why Kitera cannot commune with the Zodiacs as efficiently. She has not mentioned anything about the Zodiacs destroying planets, and she even said that the Zodiacs are not capable of manipulating the physical world.

  Their mission may have just gotten a whole lot more complicated.

  “Have you three run into any trouble yet?” Mazayus asks the others over the team channel.

  “Nothing worth mentioning,” Deo replies, his voice crackling with mild static.

  “Good. Boone and I just had a chat with a UEU scout. According to him, the UEU is here to scrounge up information on some kind of events that are occurring throughout Scattered Planet. Planets are apparently being destroyed, in both our territory and theirs. They believe Serenity is responsible and encouraging the Zodiacs to do this.”

  “That is troubling...” Natheus mutters.

  “Indeed,” Mazayus agrees. “Kitera, do you know anything about this?”

  A short silence exists before her answer. “I do not. The Zodiacs would never bring harm to the heavenly bodies of this universe.”

  “She had a vision this morning of Olympus’ destruction,” Mazayus decides to inform them, believing that keeping them in the dark about this any longer would bring them more harm than good.

  “Oh giggity, and you’re only telling us about this now?” Boone grumbles from behind Mazayus.

  “You needed to focus on the mission.”

  “And my visions are not always accurate,” Kitera adds.

  Fair enough. Nobody argues with that. Not the time or place.

  “We have reactivated the guardian station. It will be online soon, then you can access satellite imagery. The scout claimed he just alerted the rest of the UEU forces about our presence, so be ready. Stay in contact.” With that, Mazayus switches off his earchip and continues forward, trailed by Boone.

  Once the guardian station comes online, they access its network with their datakeys and are able to view birds-eye images of the jungles of the continent, Isis. They discover the warship called the Marauding Exile, examine its design, count the number of capsules parked outside the suspended facility, and with x-ray imagery and biometric tags, they discover that the interior of the facility is crawling with UEU personnel.

  After a tactical discussion, Mazayus attempts to direct an orbital strike against the Marauding Exile with the guardian station, but without workers up there in the station to assist, the Marauding Exile is able to automatically block its location with radar jammers, and even though the warship is clearly still in sight without the use of radars, the guardian station is not able to operate without manual authorisation.

  Although they can no longer locate UEU personnel because of the warship’s radar jammers, this is not too much of a problem as they have already gathered enough
intelligence to help them strategize.

  With that idea disintegrated, Mazayus attempts to contact aid from outside the Messiah System, using the guardian station as a relay. No response. “Looks like we’re doing this the old fashioned way,” he says to Boone.

  Together, the two pick up the pace. As they pull their weight through the jungle, the trees above them suddenly begin to lean and rustle in the opposite direction of the wind. Following this movement comes the unmistakable humming of a V-22 Dagger, a UEU gunship armed with a versatile heavy shard turret on its underside, similar to a Genesis. The V-22 Dagger is constructed of titanium, roughly the same size as a capsule but with two thick and wide spanning wings, and sports a horizontally wide yet vertically narrow windshield over the cockpit. The windshield circles the entire cockpit, giving the pilot a circular view as his station moves to keep on the selected targets. A rotating cockpit.

  “Dagger!” Mazayus springs forward into a roll while Boone stands his ground with an opaque globule of entity.

  In a vicious greeting, the Dagger opens fire with a volley of heavy fire shards. Massive clusters of flaming missiles launch into the jungle, burning anything they penetrate and setting the lush ferns, trees, and exotic plant forms alight in an explosive display. Stray flames lash out at the two Paragons, eating at their entity shielding and gnawing at their nervous systems.

  In a leap of agility, Mazayus’ skills activate. His feet carry him off a rock to ricochet over several tree trunks, electrical arcs blazing from his weapon barrels before he has to withdraw aim for aerial balance. He soars above the hunkered Boone, catching onto the Dagger’s cockpit and issuing a crack to the heavily reinforced glass visor. The gunship’s attention is ripped from Boone, instead refocusing on shaking an attached Paragon. Mazayus can feel its shields pushing at him, attempting to burst out at the foreign mass, and he knows his time is limited before it evolves to do just such. With a highly concentrated introversion, the Paragon coils his alien energy, emitting a small, illuminated implosion. With release, his entity fragments like a miniature solar flare, burning off the Dagger’s shields in a disruption of radiation.

  With his environment popping and entity hibernating, Mazayus negotiates his way off the recoiling gunship and recovers through a roll. “Take that thing down!” he yells at Boone, opening fire on the Dagger with his dual weapons.

  Boone complies and swaps his Phoenix for his Genesis in a swift practised motion, morphing it to unleash heavy explosive rounds. But before he can fire, the Dagger opens fire again, this time distributing a thick stream of flames.

  The Paragons once again are forced to dive for cover, but the flamethrower of the Dagger is tenacious, dragging along the jungle behind the two fleeing men, who are relying solely on Boone’s entity to protect both of them. The soaring fire envelopes them, giving them only a limited amount of time before Boone’s entity fails from the extra strain.

  Chancing it, Boone blindly fires into the air with his Genesis one-handed, the other curled into a tight fist as he concentrates on his shielding. The heavy blast marks fatal impact, adding to the inferno for a moment before the Dagger stutters. Free, together the two lay down explosive fire on the Dagger, ripping through its titanium armour plating easily and battering the pilot around in his seat. With their combined fire, it is like a continuous barrage of fragmentation grenades are impacting the gunship, though Boone’s Genesis is inflicting much more damage than Mazayus’ weapons, with nearly ten times the radius and force.

  Unable to stabilize his Dagger, the pilot bails, launching himself from the top hatch of the gunship and high above the burning treetops of the jungle.

  The Paragons watch as the Dagger begins to spin erratically and dive nose-first into the flaming foliage below, its armour plating fracturing upon the impact and the fuel inside the tanks erupting in a blare of force that threatens to whisk them off their feet.

  The pilot is nowhere to be seen, and to stop the fires from spreading any further over the jungles, Boone lobs a large crystallized icy fragment into the air, watching as it successfully impacts amongst the flames and generates a thick sheet of ice over the now burnt vegetation. The fire is doused, but the Paragons know this is just the beginning. The UEU are known for being relentless, especially when they want something.

  Mazayus and Boone flee from the concluded battlefield, now on edge and alert for anymore UEU welcoming surprises. The pilot must have zeroed in on the origin of the signal they sent to the guardian station.

  "Did we make a mistake trying to order an orbital strike?" Boone asks Mazayus, clutching his Genesis in awaiting assault as he follows with heavy footsteps behind the more light-footed man.

  "It was a gamble yes, but it was worth a try. If there had been anyone up in the station at all, then an orbital strike would have been well worth giving our location away. At least now we know that the station is just as deserted as the planet," Mazayus replies.

  “You think everyone up there is dead?” Boone now asks with a hint of melancholy.

  “I hope not.”

  They push ahead, and as they do, the sound of distant battle grows louder. The UEU forces are awakening.

  MOBILIZE

  Rockland narrowly pushes past a cluster of soldiers, his eyes livid. Stomping with haste, his legs carry him across the command deck, heading toward the bridge. The minty-green terminals painting the walls of the deck flash in a welcome to his presence, joined by the nods and informal salutes of the navigational officers and cyber warfare technicians who operate the terminals.

  The command deck is dimly lit, giving a calming atmosphere to help the bridge officers keep focused during heated naval combat, and the ceiling is slanted toward the centre line, with structurally strengthening panels tiled in the nikita. In the centre of the command deck, behind the bridge and command terminal, is a low dipping section of the floor, enabling interaction with the stargrid, setting destinations or just scrolling for guidance.

  The commander keeps at a brisk pace past this stargrid. He recently received an urgent transmission from one of his scouts, learning of Lieutenant Morrison's death and the deaths of all of her fireteam. The confirmation of a Paragon presence has sent his nerves into a flurry, he needs to stop them before they can reach the facility and destroy everything they have done here. They need that data desperately, and although he regrets his decision, he knows that every crew member of the Marauding Exile is expendable in exchange for the intelligence from this research data, even his own life.

  Upon the news from the one remaining scout, Rockland immediately had every able-bodied soldier assembled and ready to set up a defensive perimeter, sending out several more gunships and infantry fireteams in a gamble to snuff out the Paragons before they can reach the facility, weakening the defensive force around the Exile and the facility, but worth the gamble if the Paragons are killed before coming this far.

  Outside the Marauding Exile, Rockland can see multiple V-22 Dagger gunships mobilising from out of the narrow view from the bridge. The Daggers are constructed of titanium alloy instead of nikita because nikita only responds in a morphing ability to a light energy power source, which the Daggers do not use due to the lesser power output that light energy provides. Instead, Daggers use mined oil, providing more grunt than light energy. If the Daggers were in fact constructed of nikita without a light energy power source, the nikita would not be able to morph, regenerate, or have the same density and strength.

  This is where UEU and Serenity technology went separate ways after the split alliance, with the UEU focusing on power and grunt rather than clean energy and fusion like Serenity. Where the UEU has better infantry soldiers due to genetic therapy and augmentation, and faster and more powerful vehicles, Serenity has powerful minds due to biological melding technology such as telepathy and telekinesis.

  "Commander, we just intercepted a signal ordering an orbital strike and have blocked our location with radar jammers. It appears the guardian station is partly back online
and responding to Serenity biometric readings. We were able to triangulate and locate the origin of the signal, coming from a few kilometres east of here. Shall I send the co-ordinates to our infantry and gunships?" asks a cyber warfare officer, sitting in front of many green kinetic terminals to the right of the helmsman of the ship.

  "Do it," Rockland answers instantly, glancing at the readings for himself. "Has an orbital strike been launched?"

  The officer shakes his head, his fingers rushing through the readings on his terminals. "Negative, sir, without direct authorisation from an operative aboard the station, they can't order a blind strike."

  "Good," Rockland sighs in relief. He now places his hand on the shoulder of Flight Lieutenant Dylan Zee, the helmsman of the Marauding Exile. "Charge our shields to maximum and divert power from all systems to provide full strength, but be ready to take us off the ground if the shit hits the fan."

  Zee acknowledges and adjusts the shields of the ship. "Done," he says sharply, also adjusting his uniform as if he is preparing to fly the ship with his entire body. Zee is young, short, and blessed with the most striking blue eyes to unnaturally contrast his dark skin pigment. A result of genetic therapy in the womb, a common procedure that allows the unborn to be just as the parents wish. He has a tendency to swear profusely while under pressure, but Rockland has learnt to let it slide as the young man’s piloting performance is above excellent when faced with extreme pressure. It is just his mouth that cannot cope.

  Zee has enough enthusiasm to account for the entire crew. He has earned the nickname of ‘Hypo Hamster,’ due to his energy and size. Rockland is fond of him, though he does get on his nerves at times. When the crew are off duty, they have formed the ritual of gathering in the cargo hold and switching off the gravity panels to play some zero-gravity rugby. Zee is a natural at the sport, a little shit to catch when he has possession of the ball, and he does not waste any opportunities for bragging rights.

  Giving the young and eager helmsman a firm pat on the shoulder, Rockland paces from the bridge, chiming his earchip and contacting Chief Lander. "You gotta speed it up, Lander, things are getting tense down here."