by N. W. Harris
Five metallic clanks came in quick succession from the domed ceiling high overhead. It was the upper hatch, through which the explosion would be directed. Above the reactor chamber, a thick ring around the coliseum floor was rising to the peak of the golden pyramid. It would form a barrel designed to project the blast out and not destroy the rest of the ship. Shane had an intimate knowledge of what was going to happen to the reactor. What he couldn’t predict was how fast the Anunnaki would react. Warning lights flashed, and an alarm sounded.
The shouting engineers rushed toward the reactor control station, waving their hands. Laura looked up from her work.
“We got them,” Shane shouted. “Stay focused!”
He stood next to her, Steve on the other side. The lightning thwack of a plasma rifle firing made him look over at Jake. Two engineers with charred holes in their bodies collapsed to the floor.
He expected to feel sorry for them and get angry with the Aussie for shooting too soon, but he felt a surge of rage and sensed the same anger growing in his friends. Liam fired the next shot, and the engineers fled.
“Second stage completed—two more series to input,” Laura reported. Her hands flew over the control screen even faster.
The ship Kelly, Jules, and the Australians attacked was smaller. They should’ve made it to the reactor controls by now. Perhaps they’d already destroyed it and were joining the fight for control of the ship.
“Better hurry up,” Steve shouted to Laura. “This just got real!”
Anunnaki soldiers spilled into the reactor compartment, genuine Shock Troops leading them.
“I finished stage three, we’re almost there!”
Brilliant pulses from a plasma rifle passed between Shane’s shoulder and Laura’s elbow, melting through the guardrail on the other side of the control panel. He cringed, expecting the next shot to sear through his skull. He turned his rifle on the soldier who’d fired at him and dropped him to the floor.
A yelp came from his left, and one of his friends fell at Shane’s feet. Firing on the charging enemy, he couldn’t look down to see who it was.
“Liam!” Jake shouted, answering the question.
“Damn it,” Shane snarled, taking aim at the closest Shock Troop. He and Liam had become good friends over the last month, and it tore him up that the cheerful Australian now lay dead at his feet. He couldn’t lose anyone else. They had to finish so he could get his team out of here. Anunnaki soldiers kept spilling into the compartment, and they were closing in.
Glancing over his shoulder while firing, he saw Laura was working as fast as humanly possible. But it didn’t seem fast enough. He was afraid to accept it, but it was starting to look like there was no way they’d make it out alive, whether they destroyed the reactor or not. He suddenly felt cold in spite of his nervous sweats, and then a debilitating realization coursed through him. They were all meant to die from the beginning. The rebels had hinted at the fact enough times, but he’d always believed they’d find a way to make it. It wasn’t his imminent death that grieved him. It was Kelly’s. Keeping her safe had been his singular motivation since all this started. He’d failed her. Damn the rebels. He wouldn’t have backed out if he knew this was a suicide mission, but he would’ve done everything in his power to keep her from going, regardless of whether it made her hate him or not.
Laura screamed. Shane spun right and fired a shot at an Anunnaki soldier who’d slipped around the reactor core so close it had to be cooking him. Killed by the blast, the alien fell off the platform into the column of light. His body was burned so fast it looked like a shadow for an instant, and then it was gone.
Shane turned to Laura. She was moaning in agony, and everything below her left elbow was gone. The plasma shot was so hot that it cauterized the wound, so she wasn’t bleeding.
“Get up, let someone else take over,” he yelled urgently, reaching to help her.
“No,” she groaned, sounding like she might pass out. “I’m almost done.”
The armor’s first aid system must have delivered a dose of some heavy-duty painkillers. The stub of her arm hung beside her, and she kept her head faced forward, her visor focused on the controls. Her remaining hand continued its dance across the screen, though not quite as fast as before.
Any doubt he had about the reason the rebels chose her vanished, though he feared she might succumb to her injuries before she finished. He had to leave her to it. It would take too long to relay where she was to one of the others, and he wasn’t sure any of them could do what she was doing anyway.
“Done,” she shouted.
“Let’s go!”
Keeping his gun leveled at the enemy and firing, he put his other hand around her good arm to help her stand. Laura shrugged him off and grabbed her weapon.
“Where?” Maurice yelled desperately.
A blast of white light hit him in the chest. It melted through his armor and flesh, and came out of the other side without shifting his body off its balance. He stood motionless for a second, a hole the size of a baseball through him and his gun still aimed at his assassin. Already too dead to pull the trigger, the gentle preacher’s son collapsed to the floor.
“Maurice!” Steve shouted.
Overcome with a flash of anger, Shane swung his weapon toward the soldier who’d shot his friend and fired. Steve reached down and grabbed Maurice’s limp arm, dragging him back with them. Worried he’d get shot, he almost yelled for his friend to leave the body. But what if Maurice wasn’t quite dead? Dr. Blain could patch up just about anything, could bring the gentle kid back from the edge if he still clung to life. He suddenly felt guilty for leaving Liam behind at the reactor controls, but the enemy was between them and the Aussie now.
The Anunnaki charged with a ferocity that made him think they might believe he and his friends were part of the rebellion they had so viciously crushed. Shane pulled the trigger down and held it, plasma bursts erupting from his rifle so close together they looked like one solid beam. There was no place for cover, no place for them to hide from his enraged reprisal. Ten of the enemy dropped to the floor, smoking holes through their bodies. Twenty more stepped in to replace them. The charge indicator for his weapon was dropping fast. The reactor core glowed brighter, and his visor became shaded to keep it from blinding him. Even if the enemy didn’t kill the rest of the team, the reactor explosion soon would.
Laura was in trouble. The red helmet covered her face and its mechanical muscles made it possible to fight to her last breath, but she stumbled, and he guessed she was barely hanging on. He had to do something. Continuing to fire his weapon, he stole a glance around the chamber. The enemy was almost surrounding them, blocking all exits he remembered using during the simulations. A line of small, round hatches on the bulkhead to their right was all they could get to.
“The escape pods,” he yelled.
“They won’t work… ” Jake replied, pausing to fire a shot, “… on the planet’s surface.” His voice was ripe with anger and grief.
He was right. The pods were designed for escaping from a ship flying in a planet’s atmosphere or in space. They could be killed if they used them, but death was certain if they didn’t try.
“No choice!” Shane yelled firmly, determined to get someone out alive.
Slipping his free arm around her waist, he steadied Laura, and they backed toward the hatches. Even though she had to be in a world of hurt, her aim was impeccable. Every shot met with alien flesh before finding a home in the thick walls encasing the reactor.
“You took everything from me!” she screamed with agony in Anunnaki and shot the two who were closest to her through their chests.
She resisted him, as if wanting to pull out of his grasp and charge the enemy instead of escaping. Knowing she might be losing it, he tugged at her to encourage her along. She relented, seeming too weak to struggle free. Continuing with him toward the bulkhead, she fired her weapon with lethal results the entire way.
The alarm warne
d the end was near, the rhythm of its threatening notes becoming faster. Some Anunnaki soldiers retreated, shouting frantically as they pushed their way through the hatches that led out of the chamber. A few of the Shock Troops persisted, advancing on Shane and his friends.
The team made it to the escape pods, and Shane grabbed a handle on the first one he came to and jerked it down. The five-foot in diameter hatch opened, and he pushed Laura through it.
“Get in!” he yelled to the rest.
Steve took another shot, killing one of the three Anunnaki left. Then he hoisted Maurice’s limp body up and into the escape pod. The second Anunnaki gave up and raced toward the closing hatch where his comrades had fled. Shane took a couple of wild shots at the last Anunnaki, who ran toward him like she’d decided there was a better chance of survival joining his team in the escape pod. Or she was determined to go with them just so she could kill them all. There was no way she’d make it—she was too far away. Spinning around, he dove into the pod after Jake.
“Here we go,” Steve shouted, sitting up at the controls.
The controls to the hatch had been hit by a plasma blast, and it couldn’t be closed. He braced himself for the pod’s launch, wrapping his arms around a seat near the back.
At the exact moment the pod detached from the reactor chamber and accelerated toward the surface of the ship, a blinding light poured from the reactor’s core. It lifted the last Shock Troop, slamming her through the open hatch and over Shane’s head. A white-hot fireball filled the passenger compartment, and even through the protection of his armor, he could feel the heat of the explosion. It threatened to cook him like a lobster in its shell.
The pod shot out of the ship into the air, and the fire was sucked out of the rear hatch. Shane’s eyes were glued to the fireball erupting through the golden pyramid’s hull after them, afraid it would catch the tiny craft and burn them all to a crisp.
After rising up away from the ship for a long instant, the pod tumbled. His body slammed against the floor, ceiling, and walls, the craft trying to buck him out. In one of his airborne moments, he saw two of the passengers slide past him in flashes of red. The centripetal force flung them out of the open rear hatch, and then smashed him down onto the metal floor.
Kelly slowly opened her eyes, focusing on a metallic gray ceiling. She lay on her back on something cold and hard. A metal table perhaps. That deeply rooted instinct, the voice all animals shared that warned them a predator was nearby, told her to keep still and quiet.
A youthful man in white clothing stepped into view. His face was soft, like he couldn’t grow a beard, yet he looked to be at least thirty years old. His brown eyes focused on her shoulder. The memories of everything that happened in Cairo returned to her in a flood, but she was stunned and confused over how she’d gotten here.
Keeping her eyes pointed at the ceiling, she perceived a blue light passing over her wound, the pain vanishing. Acid flooded her stomach, and it felt like her heart turned into a block of ice in her chest.
She was in the Anunnaki ship! The fog cleared from her mind, and she remembered entering the vessel with the possessed teens. She’d been so delirious from her injury that she could hardly believe she’d made it so far. But then what happened? She must’ve passed out, and they brought her here.
Her instincts were correct—laying still was the right thing to do. Hoping she hadn’t done anything to give herself away, she congratulated herself for making it into the vessel. With any luck, the rest of her team was already in the reactor compartment.
Unable to look around, she wondered if she was alone with the Anunnaki doctor. She couldn’t hear anything, but there could be rows of operating tables on either side of her, Anunnaki quietly working beside each one.
Her bloody tank top stuck to her chest, tugging uncomfortably on her skin as it dried. At least he hadn’t needed to cut her shirt away to treat her. She’d be forced to strip out of her clothes in front of the aliens soon enough. Meanwhile, she had to resist the urge to reach up and tug the material away from her body, no matter how irritating it became.
The doctor standing over her was the first of the enemy she’d encountered. While she’d feared the Anunnaki since meeting the rebels, she’d also fantasized about taking revenge. She suppressed a desire to attack him. If they were alone, she was certain she could kill him. The neural upload had furnished her with hundreds of ways to take lives with her bare hands. It would happen so fast that he’d barely have a moment to be surprised.
Unfortunately, until the reactor was shut down, she had to pretend to be one of the possessed teens. He finished treating her, and the table tilted upright. A footrest at the bottom kept her from sliding off.
Once she was in the vertical position, she discovered she wasn’t alone with the doctor. A line of teenagers with slack expressions walked by in front of her. Nervous that the alien who’d just treated her was watching, she stepped forward and turned left into the line. She kept her eyes glued on the kid ahead of her, following the other human slave patients. In the periphery of her vision, she saw injured teenagers enter from the other side and step onto the tilting examination tables after the treated ones stepped off.
The line turned out of the brightly lit healing factory and took Kelly down a darker passageway. It opened into a large holding chamber filled with possessed teens, probably the one in which she’d passed out earlier.
Kelly fell in the ranks behind the patient ahead of her, waiting for the power failure that would set these slaves free. She prepared what she’d say to the teens to get them to attack the Anunnaki. It wouldn’t take much. Pointing out the aliens as the ones who’d killed their parents ought to get quite a few of them fired up in a hurry. With any luck, too much time hadn’t been lost while she was unconscious, and she’d get her armor before the reactor was shut down.
An alarm sounded and lights started flashing overhead. Excitement surged in her veins, and her mind grew clear and focused, as it did when she was attacked by the skin-faces. Kelly kept her eyes forward and her face slack, knowing she had to appear possessed until after the power was cut.
Surveying the closest soldier in her peripheral vision, she planned her attack. The Anunnaki were weaker than humans were. In spite of the armor, her target appeared smaller than she did. Kelly was confident she could take the soldier’s weapon. Then she’d turn and fire on the Anunnaki on either side of her. She would show no mercy. The aliens were responsible for the death of her family and of so many other families on Earth and across the galaxy. How many innocents had they slaughtered? How many teens of different species had they turned into slaves? She let the anger grow in her, ready to fuel her aggression when the time came for attack.
Hopefully, one of the teens would come out of it fast and, without much effort, she could convince them to pick up a rifle and join the fight. She’d never liked how so much of the mission seemed left up to chance, but she came to terms with the odds being against them early in the brutal training.
“Man battle stations,” a female voice said through the intercom at a pause in the alarm. “Emergency lift off.”
What was going on? The ship trembled, and she guessed it was breaking away from its pyramid docking station. Panic gripped her, though she managed to keep the dazed expression on her face. The Aussies must’ve failed—the ship was flying away. She studied the kids around her. They were still in a deep trance—no chance she’d recruit them to fight. She couldn’t let the ship take off—she had to attack. But she was unarmed and the Anunnaki soldiers had full power to their suits. Probably given some command through the speakers in their helmets, they lifted their rifles to their shoulders and took aim at the slaves.
Was the rest of her team dead? Had they been captured? Nothing in her training prepared her for this. Kelly focused on her breathing to maintain a calm demeanor. It was nearly impossible for her to keep still and not do something, but she’d be blasted if she made a move. The ship trembled a final time and beca
me stable. She sensed it was airborne. It was carrying her away from the Earth, away from Nat.
Her eyes grew moist with frustration, but she accepted there was nothing she could do right now. She’d have to bide her time and hope the rest of her team had not been discovered.
“The other ships were attacked and disabled,” a quiet voice to her left said.
In the periphery of her vision, she saw an Anunnaki Shock Troop soldier had stepped out of a narrow passageway and was speaking to another soldier who stood guard by the wall of the chamber.
“Rebels?” the soldier being spoken to asked incredulously. “How is that possible?”
“We’re going to run neural and biological scans on every recruit,” the Shock Trooper continued, ignoring his subordinate’s question. “Keep your people on high alert. Assume there are enemy insurgents on this ship.”
“Yes, sir.”
Kelly’s blood ran cold. She and her team were trained to pass the general inspection that all the slave recruits endured, but they couldn’t hide that they weren’t under the influence of the slave gene if the Anunnaki subjected them to a closer examination. Terror and panic washed over her, but she kept her head. She would do her best to stay undercover. She sure as hell wasn’t going to give herself away by freaking out and attacking the enemy too soon, though that was what every cell in her body wanted to do at the moment.
Without the flow of energy from the ship’s reactor, the armor lost most of its strength-enhancing capabilities. When Shane bashed against the other side of the tumbling craft, his arm landed behind him, and he felt it snap, pain exploding through his shoulder.
A millisecond later, he was levitating in the center of the pod, looking up at the moon through the open hatch and expecting to die. He was aware the instant the craft hit the ground. It stopped moving in less than the blink of an eye, and he slammed down onto the control panel, into darkness.
Waking with a stunning headache, he opened his eyes to a blurry warning flashing inside his helmet on the narrow display just above his visor.
