by Jamie Sawyer
“Is rescue,” came a basso voice, above the chatter of gunfire.
Novak was braced at the shuttle’s flank hatch, a stolen assault rifle in one hand, an activated mono-knife in the other. He was clearly in his element, indiscriminately blazing away with the rifle, baring his teeth like an animal.
“How the hell did you get this shuttle in here without blowing the hangar doors?”
“Zero give help,” Novak said. “She get doors open. Remotely, or something.”
“Where’s Lopez?”
“I’m here,” Lopez said, appearing beside Novak. She looked about as stunned by this development as I felt.
Novak paused to waste another target. The man clutched at his neck, where Novak had just sprayed a volley of AP rounds. The Russian pushed the body away, and wiped blood across his simulated face. His combat-armour was already drenched in the stuff.
I flinched as slugs bounced off my null-shield, and Lopez momentarily retreated into the cabin. Novak braved the storm, roaring as he emptied the assault rifle’s magazine. The attackers were becoming more cautious now, shielded behind troopers wearing hard-suits, deploying plasma rifles. Fired at close range, that sort of ordnance might be capable of puncturing the shuttle’s hull.
“We need to get Lopez out of here,” said Feng. “This place is hot, and getting hotter.”
“The ship took some damage on the way in,” Lopez said. “Novak isn’t exactly a careful pilot…”
“Is not serious,” Novak shouted, above the din of gunfire. “Shuttle will fly fine. Zero can take control again.”
An icon in the corner of my HUD flashed—CONNECTION LOST—so I couldn’t verify Novak’s intel, but there was no way he had flown the shuttle over here on his own. What really swung me, though, was that there was no time to consider the viability of the plan. Lopez either got into the shuttle and bailed out, or she waited here and died. There wasn’t much of a contest in that.
“Novak, Lopez: get into the ship,” I ordered. “Feng: hold the line with me. We’ll cover their retreat, then double back and search for Warlord.”
“I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” Feng said.
His camouflage-cloak whipping around him as though he were in a high wind, the Warlord of the Drift glided through the abject chaos. Removed from time and space, every plasma pulse and rifle round seemed to avoid him. The dark surrounded Clade Cooper like a shroud; his pet Shard Reapers coiling and recoiling, forming and reforming.
“Lieutenant Jenkins!” he roared, voice a hurricane, amplified unnaturally.
The hangar bay shuddered. Not with any physical, explainable force, but with Warlord’s presence. I recalled the same localised space-time disturbance when we encountered Warlord on Darkwater Farm. Whatever was powering Cooper’s ragged shell of a body had grown in ability since then.
I’d taken cover near the Wildcat’s nose cone. Warlord seemed to spur the tangos on, and the shuttle’s hull rang with incoming gunfire. Plasma pulses scorched the outer canopy.
“Get the Wildcat airborne!” I screamed, into my comm.
The Wildcat’s engine activated, and simultaneously a missile fired from one of the racks beneath the ship’s stubby wings. That exploded against the far bulkhead, showering a dozen Spiral tangos with debris, and catching Warlord in the after-blast. A wave of heat washed over me as a fireball enveloped the end of the hangar. Feng was beside me, an arm up to protect his face.
“… leaving!” came Novak’s voice.
REMOTE PILOT SYSTEM ACTIVATED, my HUD flashed. I guessed that was Zero, taking control of the shuttle. I hoped it was, at least.
“Go, go!” I yelled.
The entire deck listed. The shuttle tilted sideways, metal shearing as it slid. More bodies were crushed. Its thrusters kicked in, the transport pivoting to reach the hangar bay doors—
The Iron Knight’s spaceframe released a tortured roar. Something deep inside broke. The damage caused by the Wildcat’s impact was too much, and her gravity-well was giving up. I’d seen this before: knew the signs of a ship’s demise better than anyone. Next came—
Explosive decompression.
“Novak!”
The shuttle tumbled out into space. The hangar bay doors had given way, and the Iron Knight was breaking up. The unplanned and uncontrolled decompression was enough to do that. She was only a transport ship, after all.
Feng hung on to a cargo rail, his rifle still in his gloved hand. He’d had the foresight to remain sealed into his suit. I thought-commanded my mag-locks, and ducked low. Debris slammed into me and a blizzard of bodies whirled by. Some alive—equipped with respirators or sealed suits—but many more dead. Already feeling the frozen kiss of vacuum. Eyes boiling, air pulled from their lungs. Sucks to be Spiral.
An alert flashed on my HUD. Among the blackened mess that was the end of the hangar bay—where the Wildcat’s ordnance had impacted—something persisted.
“… readings!” came Zero’s panicked voice. “Still alive!”
Warlord emerged from the tangled mess of girders and fused steel. He lifted his corpse—that was surely all that was left of him—from the deck on a tide of black energy. The Reapers whipped around him, forming into the faces of everyone I’d lost during this fucking war. A sphere of nano-particulate shaped in front of him, and he hovered there, surveying the devastation.
“Oh come on!” I yelled. “Just die already!”
Warlord’s exo-suit was self-repairing. Shadow matter crept over the armoured plates. Where external extenuators and man-amp cabling had been damaged, the Shard made good. Energy crackled over the dead man as he rose from the wreckage. He swept his gaze in my direction.
“Dominion comes, Jenkins,” he said.
Doom and horror dwelt within his dead, dead eyes. Warlord’s voice was majesty. The hangar was a whirlwind of debris. The Iron Knight was breaking up. Hot and cold washed over me. Friction.
“… Iron Knight is going down!” screamed Zero, as though she were living it herself.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
DEEPER STILL
Beep. Beep. Beep.
TAKE EVASIVE ACTION. TAKE EVASIVE ACTION. USER EXTRACTION IMMINENT. TAKE EVASIVE ACTION.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
The warning chime sounded through my earbead. Words scrolled across my HUD, and were communicated via the neural-link.
The Iron Knight had crash-landed.
No, that wasn’t right. Not crash-landed. Crashed. Taken a direct nosedive into the planet’s surface. I moved my arms and legs, and realised that I was still operational. All four limbs worked, although my left leg was partly crushed, and sharp pain vibrated all along my left side. There was more where that came from; just breathing sent hot splinters across my chest.
I’m on Ithaca Prime, I realised. I’m actually on the Krell homeworld.
I lay on my back, and through a thatch of hull ribs and assorted debris the sky—a strange, alien sky—was visible. Something had fallen across my body, partly pinning the combat-suit. Testing my suit’s man-amp, I lifted the twisted metal spar and sat up.
The wreckage of the Iron Knight was all around me. The ship had come down hard and fast, and broken up during atmospheric entry. The heat-shielding had taken the worst of the friction, and some damage had probably been avoided by the null-shield as well. Still, the simple fact that her energy core hadn’t cooked off was impressive. My position was open to the elements, and a light wind stirred fires among the wreckage, columns of smoke polluting the horizon. It was something like local daytime, and Ithaca Prime’s sun was breaking through the clouds. Despite the apparent hour, several multi-hued moons—the Jagged Moons—were visible too.
I staggered to my feet, careful not to place any weight on my left leg. Fuck, my head hurts, I thought. My armour automatically administered combat-drugs and an almost suicidal dose of analgesics. But if it kept me going, I was good with it.
The Knight had made planetfall among the Great Nest, the biggest Krel
l conurbation on Ithaca Prime. The ship’s innards trailed maybe a kilometre across a landscape consisting of bio-structures and coral spires. The Knight’s main bulk had impacted a dome-like structure that was so big I couldn’t make out the outer perimeter. I recognised this as much like the nest we’d assaulted on Vektah Minor, except on a bigger scale. Across the Great Nest, Krell were rousing from hiding, coming to investigate the noise and confusion.
A living city spread around the foot of the dome, wreathed in dense mist, reaching as far as I could see. Swamp, kelp-beds and spawning stations interspersed the apparently random terrain. This was a Krell city, but the term meant nothing to a species that shared a collective consciousness. Things like jellyfish floated across the sky, fizzing with bio-energy. Spires of coral and bone jutted from the swamp-lands at the edge of my vision. I was sure that to something, this all made sense, but certainly didn’t to me. The alienness of the bio-scape was disorienting.
It was then that the importance of this moment hit me. Perhaps I’d been wrong about something, I realised. Maybe moments weren’t just for politicians and senior brass. This was my moment. This was the first time a human had set foot on Ithaca Prime. The Krell homeworld yawned before me. I allowed myself a short sigh of relief.
The face-plate of my helmet was badly damaged, and a web of fractures divided my vision. I cancelled the medical alerts and focused on dragging myself out of the burning wreck. Through the maze of twisted metal to higher ground. My Pathfinder suit was barely functional. Many armour sections were dented and concave, and that left leg was history. I dragged it along behind me. Looking back over the wreckage, I decided that only a simulant could have survived a crash like that. Several bodies—Black Spiral tangos, their suits adorned with intricate eternity swirls and scripture—lay among the remains, but none of them gave off a bio-sign.
“Feng?” I called, using my suit-speakers. “You still operational?”
I found his body torn in two by a piece of jagged hull plating. His PPG-13 plasma pistol was still holstered at his thigh, and he had two grenades in his chest webbing. I pocketed those, for no reason other than routine. I was probably going to have to extract myself, so they might come in handy.
A new alert flickered across my HUD. UPLINK DETECTED, my suit told me.
“Do you read me, Zero?” I asked. “Defiant, come in. California, in the blind.”
No reply. I tottered onwards, pistol in hand.
I reached the edge of the crater and looked out across the city. The Krell were streaming from their positions now, flooding the lower echelons of the Great Nest. Huge weapon-emplacements were visible at the perimeter of the bio-dome. They still pointed into the sky, watching for what might fall from space next.
“Do you copy, Zero? California transmitting. We’ve won. Warlord is gone.” No one was listening, but that was fine. I was content to reel off my story, while the swell of pain built in my chest, and I came to terms with my next extraction. “Maybe you should call down an anti-viral warhead on my position, just to be sure. Tell Secretary Lopez he can thank me later, and that I accept cash payments as well as medals.”
I winced as a burst of white noise filled my earbead.
“… receiving!” came Zero’s panicked voice. “… boarding ship! Don’t know… can keep you… operational!”
A Krell tertiary-form lay dead on the ground beside me. It was massive, uninfected, and wearing ornate bio-armour. Carrying a stave-like weapon that was coated with black blood… The alien’s big, blank eyes glanced back at me, reflecting my battered image, and—
A flicker of movement behind me.
I rolled sideways, barely evading the spear of black light that sliced the air.
“You have got to be shitting me!” I screamed.
Warlord rose from out of the wreckage. Palms open, messiah-like, his helmet gone now.
“You killed Daneb Riggs,” he said. His voice was dry and rasping, each word on the verge of descent into a coughing fit. “He was like a son to me.”
“You fucking lied to him!” I shouted. “You turned him against the Alliance, and all for nothing!”
An explosion bloomed overhead. The Krell weapons emplacements around the Great Nest opened fire, sleeting living ammunition across the horizon. Shrieks and booms filtered up to us, as activity erupted in the lower regions of the city, and around the foot of the bio-dome.
Warlord snarled. “Marbec Riggs was my brother. He would forgive me for what happened. He would understand, even if you don’t.”
Warlord moved so fast that he was almost a blur. He was out of the Knight’s wreckage, and over me. Automatically, I turned aside, rolling across the broken surface of the bio-dome. Warlord’s powered fist impacted the ground beside me. The coral surface cracked, and Warlord’s hand went through it. Again and again, he slammed his gauntlet into the ground, with more force than his damaged exo-suit could generate. Shard nano-tech infused his every move.
I got to my feet, and through the jagged splinters of my visor, aimed my pistol. Fired, just as the bio-dome gave way. Warlord and I collapsed through the ensuing hole. The structural damage Warlord had inflicted on the dome’s outer surface was enough to create a wider fissure, and a huge chunk of the Iron Knight’s hull came down too.
“Zero!” I yelled, as I dropped into the nest. I took the fall on my hands and knees. I surely wouldn’t forget the pain that lanced through my left leg any time soon. “If you can hear me, fire the anti-viral!”
The inside of the nest was a warren of passages and chambers. It would’ve taken a normal human decades to map them out, and to decipher the route through to the lower levels. The biological madness of the Krell wasn’t prone to rhyme or reason. Then again, neither was Warlord. As the ship’s hull settled around us, the nest creaking and groaning, Warlord knew exactly what his target was.
“Stop this!”
Warlord slammed a fist into the floor again. Shard Reapers danced around his torso, and slid through the deck. As Warlord withdrew his fist from the damaged coral floor, I was reminded of just how dangerous he had become. His abilities had been growing, developing, shifting ever since we’d first faced off on North Star Station.
I scrambled left. Whirled about-face to take on the man who had decimated the Alliance, and would decapitate the Krell. The man who would bring back the Shard, and the Dominion. Here he was, as vulnerable as he was ever going to be. I fired the pistol.
Of course, “vulnerable” was a very relative description.
Warlord snarled—more animal than man—and twisted aside as plasma seared the spot where he had been standing. The speed at which he moved was impossible, incredible. He was everywhere, and nowhere. His ragged cloak swirled around him, the camo pattern spilling darkness, shedding viral cells. I could feel his illness, and this close I could see it too. His haggard, scarred face was twisted beyond recognition: a man consumed by what he had brought back from Barain-11. Silver flecks danced beneath his skin, warping the flesh.
I fired my EVAMP. Surprisingly, that worked, and I powered closer to Warlord. I threw a fist into his face with enough strength that it would’ve killed a warden-form. Warlord merely took the blow, and tumbled through the network of living passageways we found ourselves in.
Attracted by the intrusion, Krell primary-forms spilt from the shafts at the edge of the corridor. They wore heavier armour, their limbs weaponised to perfection. Aware that I wasn’t the danger, they ignored me and headed straight for Warlord. A dozen of them descended in a tide of razor-sharp talons.
Warlord merely raised a hand. A black spear erupted from his palm, puncturing the first attacker in the head-crest. The body whirled about, soundlessly. The next attacker almost reached Warlord, but he slammed a fist into the creature’s face. The third was stabbed by more dark light. Streamers of black oil filled the air, comprehensively demolishing the Krell attack.
Onwards through the nest we fell. Coral growths randomly sprouted from the walls, from the ceiling
. Everything here was alive, organic. Corruptible. The walls were ribbed, dripping with moisture, fleshy coating covering every surface. Pools of stagnant briny liquid, squirming with Krell fry, pocked the uneven floor. The further we descended, the darker it became, the structure lit only by the dim glow of fungus.
I bounced after Warlord, taking pot shots with my plasma pistol. The Krell kept coming, sending more and more against Warlord. He tossed corpses aside, besting everything the Collective had to throw at him.
Then he fumbled. The ground was wet here, and a secondary-form blazed Warlord with a shrieker. The pitched wail of the living flamer unit filled the air, and Warlord was a second too slow to avoid the wave of napalm. It kissed his torso and face, and he roared in anger and pain.
I took my chance. I slammed a powered foot into Warlord’s shin. His own armour clattered noisily, and he yowled again, stumbling back. It was satisfying to know that for all of his power, all of his strength, he still felt pain.
But he recovered fast. His armour still burning, Warlord scrambled away from me. The Krell warrior saw an opportunity too, and aimed its shrieker, the muzzle of the bio-weapon dripping ichor and flame. Warlord nonchalantly threw his hand in the alien’s direction, and it was decapitated by a Shard Reaper that sprang from his palm.
That was the last of the opposition. Warlord paused, evaluating his surroundings. Satisfying himself that this was his objective. He knew this place, and I did too. Knowledge unpacked itself in my head.
“This is the resting place of the Deep Ones,” said Warlord.
We were in a cavernous chamber. The ground was uneven and irregular, but it gradually declined towards a pit. That was maybe thirty metres in diameter, and filled with impenetrable darkness. Without even trying, I knew that no physical illumination would cancel that dark. The lack of light was a deliberate concealment, because what dwelt at the bottom of that pit didn’t want to be seen. Couldn’t be seen.
