by Greg Dragon
“Come with me,” Val said as he grabbed him by his arm.
They ran to the sewer lake and began jumping across, on top of the submerged pieces of building that had fallen from the city above. When they made it to the surface of the cliff, Val led Laern up as they climbed to gain access to one of the holes that the sewage of Dystalis used to flow through. It was a long and difficult climb, but when they reached the nasty opening, Val sat inside the greenish waters and pulled Laern up next to him. “Sideline that Meluvian cleanliness schtill until this is over, Phaser. You got me?”
“Of course!” he yelled back, annoyed.
They began to wade through the massive pipe in search of a ladder. It took several minutes before they found one and Laern offered to take point in climbing up to see what was going on above. He reached for his belt to activate his cloaking device, but found that it had gotten hit by something unknown and was no longer usable. He climbed up the long ladder without it and when he got to the top to look through the grill, he saw a scene straight out of the worst horror vid. The Geralos were butchering people with their las-swords and they were not dressed like the soldiers that he was used to fighting. They were “Crak-Ti,” the military elite forces. He knew that Val’s soldiers were unmatched in warfare but if ever there were a contender to take them down, it would be the bloodthirsty Crak-Ti.
Geralos Special Forces had no interest in capturing aliens to experiment on, or biting brains, or negotiating. They were killers and they were only deployed when the Geralos command expected a city to be completely wiped of all life. It was apparent that this was the case with Dystalis and the Crak-Ti were painting the silver streets red. Laern looked down at Val and shook his head.
“That bad huh, kid?” Val said when he saw the expression on the Meluvian’s face.
Laern thought of all the mistakes he had made since becoming a full-fledged Phaser under Rafian VCA. He wondered what the commander would do if he was there, in that moment, seeing his people butchered by the best the Geralos had to offer. His mind found its way to the memories of his mother and father, and how they had loved and cared for him. He wondered how they would remember him and then, without thinking better of it, he pushed open the grill, climbed out and turned on his las-sword.
All of this took mere seconds to happen as Val Tracker pulled his big body up the ladder to follow Laern, angry that the young Phaser had given him no warning before being exposed. As he neared the top of the ladder, he could hear the electric-like clashing of the lastech weapons and a sense of panic took him. The Crak-Ti were masters of the sword; it was the only weapon they used and it was the only weapon they needed. Laern was good but he was no master. When he emerged from the hole and found himself surrounded by Geralos, he saw the crumpled body of Laern twitching on the sidewalk. He was missing an arm and his sword and the Geralos seemed unwilling to finish him off.
“Val! I’m, so-sorry,” he managed as he cringed from the missing arm sparking numbing shocks of pain through his body.
But Val was not listening. The Vin’yn was in war-mode and he brought up two MCPT-90 pistols that Marika had gifted to him and began shooting massive balls of death into the Crak-Ti horde. There were many who skillfully dodged Val’s shots, but most were hit by the bullets and the shrapnel that exploded upon impact.
“GET SOME!” he shouted as his guns rained death into the hordes of Geralos.
It was a nasty scene and Val stood like a turret, pumping out fire without much care for the las-swords being thrown at him or the suicidal Geralos that ran at him through his shots. When one Geralos got close enough to raise his sword to cut the big man, Val sidestepped the swing while bringing the butt of his gun down on the Geralos’s scalp.
“Laern, get your ass up and give me a hand. Phasers finish the mission right? Well. The citizens of this once-beautiful city need us to remove the Crak-Ti and I can’t do it alone.”
Laern knew that Val was a joker, but this was the cruelest joke. Here he was, missing his arm and a weapon. How could he possibly be of any help? He didn’t like to think of himself as weak, but here he was again on a mission with one of the elite fighters in the galaxy and he had been downed again by the Geralos. He clenched his teeth and tried his hardest to move past the pain. He came to his feet and hunched over, and tears poured from his eyes like hot wax. He saw the fallen las-sword of a Crak-Ti lying amidst what used to be its chest, now open and exposed from a direct hit by one of Val’s bullets. He snatched it up in his weak right hand and moved to stand with his back to Val’s. He turned on the lastech and held the fiery white blade in front of him.
“I’m ready for the lot of you crutas!” he screamed in defiance and Val—who had paused from his slaughter to watch him—smiled.
“Now you seem more like one of your tights-wearing brothers and sisters, Laern. Stay up and stay angry. In about a minute the cavalry will be here. I have about twenty seconds on these guns before they overheat into uselessness, so we need to shoot to keep them at bay, rather than to try and wipe them out ourselves.” No sooner than the words had come out of Val’s mouth that several drop ships appeared above them. A few hundred Crak-Ti fell from the sky, using their rocket boots to slow their fall as they surrounded the pair and made to rush them with renewed gusto.
“Well, kid, the cavalry won’t make a dent in that.”
“So, what’s the plan, Colonel? We go out fighting, or what?”
“You have the privilege of clon—“
“Actually, I don’t. We get one every year or so and I spent my lucky token on Geral. It’s been an honor fighting with the Vestalian Vin’yn, sir. If a Phaser is lucky enough to choose his death, he’d envy me right now, going out like this. I…I am ready.”
“Shut that schtill up, boy! I have some of the finest Casanian chierne waiting for me back at Zallus. I intend to die old, or in the arms of my red-skinned goddess. Move like a Phaser!” He snatched Laern up by the belt and threw him into the hole they had emerged from before joining him with a leap, clipping the edge as he fell down. The blow knocked him unconscious as he splashed into the sewer water. The flow of the stream pushed their bodies back towards the exit above Garse, and Laern worried about the infection that would come from his open wounds coming into contact with the toxic water.
A noise brought him around and the figure of Maes Van Senthyn stepped from out of the shadows. He walked in, slow and menacing, keeping his eyes on his enemies as he held his humming las-sword by his side. The two men were unable to fight and Maes smiled at his good fortune, since he recognized Laern’s uniform as that of a Phaser. He walked over to where they lay, ready to deliver the coup de grace, but a bright light shone on him from the corner and Dott Toga stepped through a tear with her las-sword powered on and ready.
Maes could hardly believe his eyes as the female Phaser came at him; she was one of the ones that had revealed him to the commander on board Helysian and he never thought that he would get the chance to repay her for stabbing him. He blocked her swing with his own sword and then paced around her as she bounced up and down excitedly, showcasing her combat stance.
“I remember you, human, but you probably don’t recognize me.”
Dott looked around to see if anyone else had heard the lizard speak and then shook her head as if to clear it of the illusion that the Geralos spoke her language.
“Dott… that is what the white-haired one called you. Dott!” He said her name with a tone that could be best described as fascination. She stopped bouncing and stared at him, but made sure that she was ready in case he tried anything.
“How is it that you are able to speak like us, lizard?”
“You used your knife on me, Dott. Where is your little knife? Can you use it on me now, when I am not pinned down on the ground and helpless?” He spun and swung the las-sword at her throat and she barely dodged it as she met his request by pulling her knife from the small of her back. She feinted to his left and swung the knife at hi
s face, cutting into his jaw and causing him to retreat while holding it.
“You aren’t as smart as you think, lizard—or that fast, really. I was sent to find you. I knew that if anything I would find you in the sewer, since it’s about as close to your toilet of a home planet as Meluvia can get.”
He spat at her to show his disdain at her insult, then flicked the sword this way and that, hoping to frighten her into a mistake.
She kept her intense gaze on his face and resumed the bounce that complemented her knife training. “You’ve maimed one of my brothers and now I am going to take those cybernetic parts away from you,” she said. She darted in to stab him in his abdomen before retreating out of the reach of his sword counter.
“How are you moving so fast?” he asked, confused and frightened by Dott’s ability to wound him at will and his helplessness in countering it. If he knew about the crystals he would understand, but what he was seeing was a strange woman whose fighting prowess defied everything he believed to be true about Vestalians.
“The time for talking is over,” Dott announced and moved in to take out a leg with her sword.
But Maes had not risen to the top of the military ranks by chance. He was ready for her and as soon as she telegraphed her move, he stepped forward and spun with his las-sword out. The acrobatic spinning was a fast and unpredictable move that Dott did not see coming. She launched forward to cut his leg and the las-sword caught her shoulder where her armor started. It split in half, causing her chest plate to hang uncomfortably off her body. She bounced back out of the deadly vortex to throw the armor off and as Maes came out of his spin, she darted back in with the sword to stab him. They began to fence as strikes gave way to counters and counters riposted as they danced the waltz of the warrior in the wet tunnels of the Dystalis sewers.
It was thanks to providence that Dott found Maes when he was part machine. The warrior had been an unmatched practitioner of the las-sword—back when he’d cared about that sort of thing—but now he was a wounded man trying his best to adapt to a cybernetic body. He could tell that Dott was a new Phaser and her unorthodox swordplay was not so much a brilliant creation as he suspected but more raw effort borne from desperation and the fighting spirit. They clashed and parried for long minutes and as they did this, the wounded Val Tracker opened his eyes to see the bone jutting out of his leg and the young Dott Toga losing ground to a swordfight. He tried to reach for his gun, but he couldn’t move for some reason. The fall had been bad and he wondered if it was paralysis. Laern and his broken body was near him and not moving, so he tried his best to talk, calling his name to wake up and help Dott.
The fight was going on too long and Dott’s arms were on fire as she reduced her counters to merely blocking, trying her best to stay alive, looking for an opening to get him off of her. It was no use; Maes’s strength seemed to be increasing with every strike and hers was blinking away. She saw her life pass before her eyes, an honorable death to the wicked sword of a superior warrior. Camille and the VCA’s would be proud of me, she thought. Rafian had always told them of “a warrior’s death” in their training and she had wondered if she would be so lucky – especially if cloning was off the table and a true death were imminent. She stepped in to catch him as he swung his sword, but the fatigue was too much and she miscalculated. He tripped her and brought the hilt down on her skull out of instinct and she was down, the murky water of the sewer splashing across her face.
Maes looked down at her with admiration. He hadn’t expected her to have that amount of fight in her and he did the warrior ritual across his chest to honor her. He went to take her head to complete the ritual when the blast from a rifle knocked him on to his side, where it burned like hell beneath his ribs. He looked up to see Laern Cobo, sitting up and looking wearily at him. He laughed at how pathetic the Phaser was and then struggled to his feet and jumped from the sewer’s exit to the lake that lay below.
“I’m alive!” Dott shouted in a frightened sort of exasperation that shook the dying Val Tracker back awake.
He looked over at Laern and a wave of sadness came over him. The Phaser was slumped over and no longer breathing. “You Phasers…are—” he tried to say, but couldn’t finish as the pain wracked his body and he regained some feeling in his limbs. “Tough crutas. You’re all alright.”
Dott ran over to him and examined his leg. Then she went over to Laern and looked at his arm. They were all bruised and battered from the attack and it didn’t look like they would be able to stop the Crak-Ti from taking the city over. Where were the reinforcements? She helped the men out of the sewer water and onto a raised area that was dirty and dry. She then opened a tear with a crystal and dragged Laern through it before reemerging with a medic and a droid. Phasers were not allowed to jump directly to the base without express permission from the top three, but Dott took the situation as above the law and before long, Val Tracker was in a hospital bed alongside Laern Cobo.
After a few hours had passed, Tayden Lark showed up at the hospital.
“Dott, what’s the situation?” she asked.
“Tayden! There’s so much to tell. We have a problem. A half cyborg Geralos did this to us. The boys did us proud, but right now Dystalis is in flames. If we cannot help them to get those murderers out of their city, it could turn into a bigger issue for the entire Alliance.”
“We have it under control, but I was worried about the three of you since you went off the grid.” She walked over to the screen that floated next to Laern’s bed and flipped through it while furrowing her brow in apparent disgust. “Where were you guys fighting, in a toilet?”
“That wouldn’t be far off the mark, to be honest with you, Commander. We were in a sewer.”
“A sewer and you encountered a lizard in metal?”
“Yes, ma’am. He’s the same one that Cammy and I discovered on Helysian. They had him in the brig, but he must’ve gotten out somehow because that was him. I’m not sure why we weren’t told about this… ugh, Helysian has so many issues as it is. But in any event, he got himself patched up with cybernetic enhancements and had parked out in Dystalis for a long time.”
“How do you know all of this?”
“The ship we saw in Marian’s hologram was his, and he had a bit of a makeshift home in the sewer. Oh, and one other thing. He was skilled, not like the Crak-Ti or other specially trained Geralos, but he spoke in the Vestalian dialect of my ancestors. He spoke to me in Crian.”
“Crian? How would he know that you’re a descendent of Cria?” Tayden asked as she looked over Dott’s bruised and battered face.
“I don’t know…I would say research. He was pretty twisted up about what Camille and I did, so he would have obsessed. Camille and I have unique enough looks to pinpoint our race on Vestalia, so he would have looked into it. He fought like a machine, Tayden. It’s going to take Raf or Yuth to take him out if it’s close quarters combat. He infiltrated Helysian, got close enough to Aurora to learn a lot about Rafian, and he knows about the Phasers.”
“Sounds like he needs to die.”
“That’s where I was going with this. If he knows, then the Geralos know, and before long they will be training their soldiers to avoid us or to counter our maneuvers. Part of our ongoing success with missions is due to the enemy’s ignorance of us. If he were to learn about the cryst—“
“Stop. Who knows what else a lizard so slimy has up his sleeve. You could be transmitting a message back to him through a bug or something. So keep the things we protect to yourself. Now let’s get you cleaned up and I will see what Rafian is up to.”
Memory 12
Mera-Ku monks healed the body and the mind through intense meditation that could go on for days sometimes. Rafian had jumped to Luca—the galaxy where he’d met his wife—and had come back with the mastery of the monk’s martial arts and their warrior code. He knelt in silence in the center of the small cruiser as Marian flew it through the cloudy skies of Meluvia tow
ards Dystalis, where a small war had broken out between the alliance of Anstractor and the seasoned Geralos elite. He opened his eyes after a time and stood up, testing his limbs before pulling his arms back into a stance and letting the blood course through his body. It all felt good and he looked out the windows at the tall skyscrapers. He knew he would be fighting within a few minutes. He ran to the cockpit and hopped into the chair next to Marian.
“Well, look who’s out of the world of peace and nothingness,” Marian said with a wink, as he planted a kiss on her cheek and shifted her face so that he could put one on her lips. She smiled at him doing this because it was one of many similar gestures he had exhibited since coming out of his coma. She wondered how long it would last before he reverted back into the focused warrior with little to no time for affection, but she put it out of her mind, wanting to enjoy it while it lasted. “You seem ready, Rafian, but I want you to be careful. The Crak-Ti are masters of the las-sword from what I was told, and they use it as if it were an extension of their arm.”
“I look forward to facing them. Samoo LES and the alliance military taught me how to fight. By the time I was seventeen, I could hold toe against a lizard using their own technology. None of us fear death; we don’t have to fear the Crak-Ti.”
“Well... the hero of Vestalia is back, ladies and gentlemen. Let’s give him a round of applause.”
