Mach dived back and rolled down the spiral stairs until he crashed into Sanchez’s stocky frame. The big man stopped him dead. Adira hunched to his side with her arms wrapped around her helmet.
A loud boom shook the tunnel. Dust filled the air.
The triple electronic snap of Intrepid’s lasers firing rang through the crevice, immediately followed by a second explosion.
Three seconds later, metal crashed against rock, followed by silence.
Adira crept up toward the entrance and rounded the corner.
“The heat signature’s stopped moving and intensified,” Tulula said. “Have you got a visual?”
“Hit confirmed,” Adira said. “Nice work.”
Sanchez winced and sat up.
Mach sighed with relief and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Are you okay, Ernie?”
“It’s the damned symbiosite. It can’t even let me go quietly.”
“Babcock’s working on it. Don’t give up just yet.”
“Do you think I want to fail my final mission?”
“That’s the spirit,” Mach said and forced a smile. He hauled Sanchez to his feet and they dusted themselves down.
Through the comm, Adira asked the bridge to send down a graphene line from the drone bay to the bottom of the crevice. She descended straight past Mach and Sanchez and headed back toward the cavern. Mach admired her in hot situations. She was all business and let her actions speak.
They wasted no time getting back to the cave’s entrance. Mach avoided the temptation to take another close look at the disgusting mound of bones. With an enemy on the planet, bigger and worse things could be heading right for them.
The platform lay in a mangled heap at the foot of the crevice. Intrepid’s lasers had punched two black smoldering holes in the top of it. Pieces of twisted metal spread around it where the shots had exited and blown working parts out. Mach scanned it for any visible markings but couldn’t see any through the flames licking around its base.
Sanchez kicked the metal pole that had sent out the cloned signal, but it didn’t move an inch. He looked across and shrugged.
Mach moved over for a closer look. The ground had been bored out around it and a solid white substance held it in place. A carefully constructed trap always sent a shiver down his spine. Tackling the lizardlike horans while fighting for the Commonwealth Defense Force in the Century War was straightforward. They always used brute force. Species that used cunning were always harder to face.
A line dropped through the darkness with an electric whine. The heavy metal base at the bottom of it splashed into a pool of water and thudded against rock. Adira, Sanchez and Mach stepped onto the base and secured their belts to waist-height loops.
“Take us up,” Mach said.
“You got it,” Lassea replied.
The line jerked rigid and smoothly raised them away from the burning platform. Sanchez and Adira pushed against overhangs to avoid any collisions. Mach gazed up at the open doors of the drone bay, fifty meters above the lips of the crevice, and thought about their next move in the search for Voyager.
The base rose above ground, under the shadow of the Intrepid. Mach scanned the top of the sunlit forest of Noven Alpha toward the jagged brown mountain range in the distance. Adira and Sanchez did the same, likely sharing the same paranoia.
“We’ve got company,” Lassea said through the comm. “I’m picking up four light distortions on the scanner, heading in our direction.”
“Get this moving quicker,” Mach said.
The turret housing the Intrepid’s quad lasers swiveled and faced the opposite direction. Mach looked over his shoulder at four evenly spaced tiny black specks on the distant horizon and knew they were coming for them.
Chapter Twelve
Lassea glanced at the tracking screen. The four craft formed a blurred line at a distance of two klicks and were rapidly closing on the Intrepid. Friendly forces didn’t approach using distortion tech, taking away the ability for the weapons systems to auto-fix. She’d never been in a combat situation without Mach by her side but knew what he’d do. If in doubt, shoot first and ask questions later.
A blue glow surrounded the shape of the Intrepid on the holocontrols, confirming a successful deployment of the deflector shield.
Tulula sat by Lassea’s side at the front of the bridge. She had switched the laser controls to the main console and orientated all four toward the enemy.
“Fire as soon as you get a manual lock,” Lassea said.
Tulula gave her a narrow-eyed glance. “I won’t be waiting around. You can trust me on that.”
An overhead viewscreen showed Mach, Sanchez and Adira rising from the ground, still a good twenty seconds away from the drone bay doors. Others gave a full view of the planet and air surrounding the Intrepid.
The door at the back of the bridge hissed open and Babcock rushed in, followed by Squid Two. “What are we facing?
“Take the ion cannon controls,” Lassea said. “Four enemies at two klicks.”
Babcock gazed at the viewscreens for a couple of seconds before scrambling into position. Squid Two attached a tentacle to the socket next to the console and chirped.
“Speed up this damned line,” Mach bellowed through the comm.
“We can’t,” Tulula said. “When designing a non-vital—”
“Screw the design. Have you got a clear visual yet?”
Three of the craft split in different directions: two to the left, one to the right. Lassea’s heart pounded against her chest as she zoomed on the one maintaining a direct course. It was oval shaped and featured small fat barrels at the front and on either side. She resisted the urge to thrust higher into the atmosphere. Moving now carried too much risk with part of the crew dangling below.
“I think they’re platforms like the one in the crevice,” Lassea said.
“Blow them out of the sky,” Mach replied.
“And do it now,” Sanchez added.
A bright flash came from the platform on a direct approach. An energy reading appeared on the tracking screen. Lassea braced. A white-hot ball of energy roared directly below them, passed the ascending crew, and zipped into the distance.
Tulula locked on and engaged. Two of the laser beams struck the distant platform, turning it into a ball of flames. It veered down and crashed into the forest. Thick black smoke belched through the canopy. She spun the lasers toward the other moving targets on the viewscreen.
Both platforms that split to the left fired. Their bolts crashed against the portside deflector shield. The Intrepid juddered under the force of multiple strikes.
Lassea checked the shield’s reading and sighed with relief at the still fully operational vestan-built technology. CWDF shields usually degraded after taking a hit. She peered back at the viewscreen showing the crew being raised. Mach, Sanchez and Adira swung at the bottom of the line and fired their weapons. An almost pointless act, but there was little else they could do in their position. They only had five seconds to wait before reaching the safety of the docking bay.
The thump from the Intrepid’s roof-mounted ion cannon filled the external speaker. Babcock turned in his chair. “Two down. I’ll orientate to the west.”
“I’ll take the last two,” Tulula said.
The vestan engineer smoothly handled the laser’s control symbols with speed and dexterity. Lassea admired her calmness and slick moves under pressure, but Tulula remained distant. It was probably her culture, but it had a habit of making things feel awkward between them.
“Are you back in the bay?” Lassea asked through the comm.
“Just about,” Mach replied. “We’ll close the doors from here. Thrust after thirty seconds.”
On the overhead viewscreen, two of Intrepid’s lasers stabbed through the clear blue sky and destroyed a third platform. The remaining one changed course and headed toward the distant mountain range, racing at low level over the thrashing canopy.
“Don’t think you’re get
ting away that easily,” Tulula said.
All four lasers fired. The platform exploded into hundreds of pieces.
Lassea checked the tracking screen for any signs of activity and let out a deep breath. They were safe again for the moment.
***
Babcock moved over to the comms console and sat in front of the black screen. He brought up all communications on the galactic distress frequencies from the last thirty minutes.
The cloned signal dominated the data and was the only strong unbroken signal, but there was something else: a weak distortion below it and three corrupted packets. Squid Two chirped over his shoulder.
“I don’t think so,” Babcock replied. “Even the most bizarre natural interferences wouldn’t form something like this.”
He downloaded the data to his smart-screen and ran it through his decryption software program. The results showed a period and three numbers.
Babcock activated the holopad on the console.
“Have you found something?” Lassea asked.
“I think it’s part of a payload, showing a partial location, but I can’t be sure.”
Lassea frowned. “A payload?”
“The cargo section of a data transmission. I’m going to block out the real-time cloned signal. It might give us a chance to trace it.”
Babcock activated the comms scanner across the console’s screen and configured it to ignore the consistent flow coming from directly underneath the Intrepid. He leaned his chin on his right knuckle and peered down.
A small green blip flashed in the top right corner. Squid Two extended its tentacles. The blip appeared again several times, not consistently, but enough to tell Babcock that something was attempting to transmit on the other side of the planet over the distress frequency, despite the corrupted nature of the newly received data.
“Carson,” Babcock said, “I think we have a potential location for Voyager.”
“Thrust and send out a fighter drone,” Mach replied. “We’ll dust ourselves down and be back at the bridge in a few minutes.”
“I’ll take us up,” Tulula said.
The Intrepid’s engines whined and the ship ascended away from Noven Alpha’s surface. Lassea manipulated the drone fighter’s holocontrols. It shot out of the bay and headed in the opposite direction.
Chapter Thirteen
Mach needed a shot of stim. A shot of anything to numb the anxiety that ate away at him like ancient wood lice chewing on the dead husk of a tree. His body vibrated with tiredness that often came after an intense bout of adrenalized fighting.
He was slumped with his back against the cool wall of his captain’s quarters as he rested on his bed. His breathing was deep, rhythmic, and followed old hard-wired neural networks generated from years of training in the CW infantry. The room was cool, set exactly to how he liked it. Shadows tinted cobalt blue gathered thickly around his bed and the corners, conspirators shrouding him from Adira’s gaze. Her silhouette hovered at the end of his bed, her back against the wall, arms crossed around her chest.
She wore just a tight-fitting bodysuit, both of them having stripped from their layers of protective suit as soon as they were hauled up from the planet’s surface. Sanchez had made his excuses and retired to his berth to recover.
Mach picked up the squeeze bottle of nutrient-rich liquid, and swallowed half in one deep gulp. It tasted of limes, the flavor created by the combination of replacement electrolytes, salts, and his special mix of painkillers and stimulants.
He held up the bottle to Adira and raised an eyebrow.
Adira, as ever, stood calm, a statue of elegance. Her lithe limbs moved with grace as she approached Mach, taking the bottle from him, her fingers brushing, lingering against his. She drank slowly, noiselessly, before placing the bottle on a shelf that contained a digital image of Mach as a young CWDF officer in the days before he had known Adira. He looked so naïve then, smiling with the excitement of an impending battle for which he had no frame of reference or prior experience to realize that the CWDF’s propaganda recruitment drive was completely incongruous to the horrors of war. There was no glory, excitement, or victory; there was just unending loss and tragedy for all concerned.
Even now, after all these years, Mach wondered just how important stopping this weapon was. What if it did fall into the wrong hands? What if trillions of people were wiped out? That was still a small insignificance to the chaos of the universe.
“You fought well out there,” Adira said as she crawled onto his bed, on her hands and knees, a predator stalking its prey with slow, deliberate movements. Through his prosthetic eye, he could see her body temperature remain consistent, barely changing despite their proximity. His, on the other hand… it always rose a few degrees when he and Adira were this close.
They were like magnets, he thought, a powerful force that repelled as much as attracted. Although these days, there were fewer incidences of repulsion. It would be too crude to say danger made him horny, or even that Adira made him horny, that was for teenage boys. No, with her, it was something else entirely, something primal, something that defied a natural, logical explanation.
Even when she was contracted to kill him as part of her previous career, he still couldn’t resist her. His body responded to her movements, his muscles tensing. He reached out for her when she was close. She lay down beside him and propped her head up on her hand. Her left leg entwined with his. Her sweet musky scent made his heart rate increase.
“What now?” Adira asked, looking up at him with those gorgeous, unreadable green eyes of hers. That was one of the things that had stopped him from committing more to her; he just couldn’t tell what she was thinking. When she wanted to present an opaque barrier, no one could read her.
He leaned back and relaxed, enjoying the stillness of the moment, the light pressure of her body against his. He reached his left hand down and draped it over her shoulder, resting his hand on her back. Her muscles shifted beneath her skin, firm and trained to perfection.
“Well? What now?” she asked.
“We rest for a moment,” Mach said. “Let the drone get to the location.”
“Is that all you want to do?”
“Want doesn’t come into it,” he said, running his hand to her lower back. “I can’t… not now; it’s not the right time. I’m worried about Sanchez and the others. This mission has gone to shit… and then there’s you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m… afraid of losing you. If we complete this mission, you’re not going to stay with us on the Intrepid, are you?”
Adira’s face changed, her lips softening and her eyes growing slightly wider. She focused on him intently, saying, “I truly don’t know what I’m going to do if we succeed. The thing with Sanchez… and… well.” She trailed off and looked away into the cold gloom of the small room.
“You want to go back to your previous career, don’t you? You still have contracts you want to complete, is that it?”
She shrugged and sighed. “It’s not as binary as that.”
“I can’t lose you,” Mach said, quickly adding, “If I do lose Sanchez, I need another good fighter on my crew.” Although it was quite clear it wasn’t just her skills he would miss.
“I offer more than that,” she added, sitting up now.
“Listen,” Mach said, reaching for the words that he had struggled to find since he accepted the mission. “I’m sorry I got you and the crew roped into this. I didn’t mean to lie to you. It’s just… it felt… important.”
Adira pulled her knees up to her chest and languidly placed her forearms over her knees, letting her hands dangle freely.
“I’m not judging you,” Adira said, waving her hand nonchalantly. “I mean, our lives, they don’t mean a great deal in the scheme of things. We’re all just a collection of particles, after all, just stardust, nothing more, and nothing less. If our lives help keep the status quo of the Salus Sphere, who are we to say no to that? But it would have
been nice to have had the option.”
“I’m sorry,” Mach said, dropping his head and taking a deep breath. “Really. It wasn’t a decision I made lightly. But I needed you and the rest of the crew on side. I couldn’t just go out and find another team that I could trust to do the job. And it’s not a done deal here. We can still find the bomb and get off the planet safely.”
“What will be, will be,” Adira said. “There’s nothing to be gained by going over this again and again. My feelings for you haven’t changed one way or another.”
She stared at Mach now, an intensity he hadn’t seen since… well, since they were together years ago, since before she had a contract on him, since before she had willingly accepted a life sentence of solitary confinement on the Summanus prison planet. His thoughts wandered back to those days, of who Adira was—what she was. Not just an assassin, but also one of the most efficient killers in the whole Sphere. Did she really have much of a heart beneath that beautiful, deadly exterior of hers, or were her words just rote, an illusion?
Adira’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “Are you listening to me? I have a stim shot if you need it,” she repeated, nudging him in the shoulder.
“Oh, sorry, I was just… it doesn’t matter. No, you keep the stim for yourself. I’m okay, really.”
“You look like hammered shit.”
“This is no time for sweet talk,” Mach said.
“I’m serious,” Adira said, leaning closer to him. “I’m worried about you. You don’t seem yourself lately.”
“Can you blame me, after what I’ve got us into? What we’ve seen? There’s something bad about this whole setup, and I’ve got you lot stuck right in the middle of it. Not much of a captain of a freelance outfit, am I? The first code of a freelancer is supposed to be one has to look out for one’s crew at all times. And yet, I’ve gambled with all of our lives.”
The Lost Voyager: A Space Opera Novel Page 10
