by S. R. Witt
One by one, the batteries ignited. Hellish red flames erupted as a swarm of missiles took flight.
Chapter 9
“Commander! The base is firing on us!” Ratchet’s voice resonated through the Raptor as a flurry of missiles streaked toward the ship.
“Don’t just sit there you piece of garbage! Move us out of its way!” the Commander yelled back.
Ratchet came around and released the countermeasures. Behind the Raptor, fireworks lit up the sky like it was the moon goddesses’ celebration day, while each flare did its job and destroyed the missiles with finesse.
The Commander called down to the base. “Stop targeting us you imbeciles! We’re here to help!”
The base communication leader responded, “The system isn’t targeting you, it’s targeting the enemies who are attacking us!”
“NO, three missiles just tried to light us up! We had to deploy countermeasures to stop them!”
“That’s impossible! The system knows you’re an ally. It never targets allies, only enemy ships. I can see it now, the enemy ship is closing in on us. You must’ve gotten in the way and that’s why the missiles came toward you. Look around, you should see the enemy ship right behind you. We have an enemy ship on our display right where the missiles were destroyed.”
The base communications leader asked his people to review the telemetry and ensure they were targeting the right ship.
“You idiots! That ship is us! Shut down those batteries before you kill us all!”
“Negative, the system is 100% accurate. Where are you? I don’t even have you on our screen. Only the enemy cruiser.”
“Ratchet, break cover so those idiots can get a visual. Something’s scrambling the friend or foe targeting.” The Captain stood up and walked to the HUD in front of Ratchet to review the area and see if he could find even a blip near them that might be Heck’s ship.
“But, Commander, they’ll fire on us if we get any closer.” Ratchet complained.
The Spec Ops leader had Heck and Hive in his sights and he wasn’t going to let them get away, not when he was so close to annihilating them. All he could see was revenge and retribution.
“No, they won’t. Now do what I said.” The Captain huffed.
“Rivicle Base, hold your fire. We are on approach. Tag us as friendlies. We are coming up over the mount… OHHHHH HEAVENLY UNIVERSES!”
The Raptor crested the peak of the mountain and two J344 Class missiles intercepted them. The last thing anyone on the Raptor saw was blinding white light, then darkness as the ship exploded into hundreds of pieces of molten hot metal.
Chapter 10
The remains of the Raptor tumbled through the sky. It’s shredded shell spewed smoke, fire, and broken bodies into the teeth of the blizzard.
Heck watched it plow into the far side of the base, and pumped her fist at the black sky. Her plan had worked. Hive had convinced the base’s defense grid that the Raptor was Dragora and vice versa. When the Fury batteries fired, they hadn’t targeted the starship, instead homing in on the assault cruiser.
Dragora’s voice broke through the staticky comms. “On approach, prepare to embark.”
Zotz crawled up through the maintenance hatch with Hive on his heels. The technician flopped down in the snow, his whole body shaking from the stress of combat exertion and climbing up and down the ladder. “I’ve never been so happy to hear her voice.”
The drone had reassembled himself, but Heck could see shiny spots where the carbon black paint had peeled off. It was a trick she hadn’t even known he could do. She wondered what else he was holding out from her.
Hive reached down to Zotz with his one good hand. “Thank you for your help. I could not have done that without—“
Antiaircraft fire roared past the outfit. Flak shells erupted above them, showering the sky with fragments of screaming metal and balls of coruscating flame. One of the shots lit up the bottom of Dragora, peeling off layers of ablative armor and sending it burning through the sky like a swarm of fireflies.
Heck screamed into the comms, “Get out of here, Dragora!”
The starship didn’t have to be told twice. She peeled away from their location, suffering more damage to the starboard side as she turned, then rocketed out of sight.
The bursts of shrapnel were too close for comfort. Zotz dragged Heck down into the snow, and stabbed his finger toward the base. “They’re not using the friend or foe systems, anymore. That’s not defense grid fire, that’s manual.”
F3L1N scrambled up through the hole, bending the frame with its massive claws to make way for its bulk. Skritch grabbed it by the chin and pulled its head down. “Watch out, big boy, the bad guys are shooting at us.”
Heck ground her teeth as another series of blasts tore apart the sky above her. “Goddammit. Why can’t anything ever work?”
Zotz slithered through the snow on his belly and peered over the edge of the silo. “We can still get out of here. We’re just going to have to climb again.”
Heck winced as lightning ricocheted off the peak above, showering them with steaming chunks of ice. “I don’t give a shit if we have to run a marathon. We can’t stay here.”
Zotz pointed at the peak, “They can’t see the other side of the mountain with the antiaircraft guns. If we get over the top, Dragora can meet us on the other side.”
Heck nodded. “Okay, we can do that.”
Zotz grinned at her, his bat-like noses wrinkling. “There’s just one problem. The transmitter for the explosives won’t work from the peak. The silo shields the transmission crystals from interference, and that’ll block the signal to the detonators.”
Heck groaned. “If you think I’m going to leave you here to blow this place up like some kind of hero, you’re wrong. Give me the detonator.”
Zotz shook his head. “Nobody’s making a last stand on this hunk of ice. The detonator has a timer.”
Heck punched him in the arm. “Why didn’t you say that part first?”
Zotz stared up at the mountain peak, a kilometer up a treacherous slope with lightning raining down all around them. “The timer’s got a maximum length of 120 seconds.”
Heck gritted her teeth and did the math. They’d never reach the peak before the explosion, but they might be able to get far enough away to survive the blast. “Light it up. All for one, and one for all. Good fucking luck, everyone.”
Chapter 11
The Metal Rats scrambled up the side of the mountain. F3L1N paced them, nudging them when they stumbled, lifting them onto their feet when they fell.
Zotz cursed every time he caught sight of the peak, because it never seemed to get any closer. He didn’t dare look at the timer ticking away on the AR data panel, because he didn’t want to know the moment he was going to die.
We’re so close, he thought, but we’ll never make it.
Heck staggered along beside him, the tops of her cheeks flushed. Whether it was excitement, exhaustion, or just the cold, Zotz couldn’t tell. Her eyes sparkled when she looked at him, and said, “This footage is going to be awesome. Your rating is going to go through the roof when the networks get this.”
Zotz opened his mouth to respond, and the world turned upside down.
The hand of God slapped the side of the mountain, knocking the outfit sprawling. A column of red fire roared up through the silo and into the black sky, vaporizing the snow and turning night into day.
Heck landed in the snow next to Zotz and stared at the roiling cloud of fire. “That wasn’t as bad —“
Zotz clenched his eyes and plugged his ears. “That wasn’t the big one.”
The overheated transmission crystals cracked inside the silo, their faceted surfaces shattering into a thousand shards.
The massive energy they contained boiled on contact with the atmosphere, and the whole array went critical.
A lance of white fire took off the top of the silo. Intense heat boiled metal, and spilled out into the base like a tidal wave of
roiling destruction. Buildings vanished in the blink of an eye, their structures reduced to constituent atoms and scattered into the wind. The guards fared no better; their frail flesh burst apart like overripe fruit left too long in the microwave.
The mountain trembled, and Zotz held on for dear life. He waited for the avalanche that would carry them down into the boiling cauldron he’d created.
But when the tremors subsided, he was still alive.
He opened his eyes and stared down into the glowing white ball that was all that remained of Rivicle Base. Over the howling of the wind, he heard a thin, raucous sound.
His sensitive ears tuned in to the noise, and a wide smile split his ugly snout.
It was the miners, safe below the blast zone at the top of the mountain. Cheering.
“You’re welcome,” he said and passed out as a power chord thundered through the comms unit in his skull, and the strains of an ancient anthem followed it.
“We are the champions…”
Chapter 12
Something shook Zotz from the depths of unconsciousness.
The technician bolted awake, panic spiking adrenaline into his system. It took him a long moment to remember he wasn’t waiting for death at the top of that snow-covered mountain. He was snug in his bunk inside Dragora, headed back to some semblance of civilization.
Heck grinned at his surprise. ”You’re going to sleep through the whole party.”
Zotz yawned, and rubbed his aching shoulders. There wasn’t any part of his body that wasn’t bruised. The concussion from the explosion of Rivicle Base had flattened the outfit into the mountain like an angry giant’s fist. “I don’t feel much like partying. I feel like sleeping for another week.”
Heck rolled her eyes and dragged him out of his bunk. She threw a friendly arm around his shoulders and pushed a drink into his hand. “That’s not how Operators celebrate a big win. You’re not even going to check your score?”
She pulled up the Umbra game’s AR screen and shared it with him. “It looks like people really dig that reluctant hero shtick you’re going with.”
Zotz’s eyes bugged. This couldn’t be right. He was a technician, not a front-line Operator. Nobody gave a shit what techs did. And yet, there was the evidence right before his eyes.
..::||//UMBRA SCENARIO REPORT BEGIN
RIVICLE BASE SCENARIO COMPLETE!
Outfit Aggregate: 5000 points
Play of the Scenario: Zotz (2000 points)
Fan Favorite: Zotz (1000 points)
Congratulations! Your rating has improved. You are now a Level 3 Operator.
Your new level entitles you to the following:
1 software upgrade (Class III or lower)
1 hardware upgrade (Class II or lower)
.::||\UMBRA SCENARIO REPORT END
..::||//UMBRA NETWORK MESSAGE BEGIN
You have received one message from an anonymous sponsor:
Hey! Good work with those drones. Check your account when you get a chance, we think you’ll be very pleasantly surprised.
.::||\UMBRA NETWORK MESSAGE END
Zotz drained his drink and pulled up a private screen to check his account. The bonus from his anonymous sponsor was nice enough to make his cheeks hurt from grinning so hard, but it was the hardware upgrade that made him whoop. He was getting a set of shiny new eyes as soon as they docked somewhere with an Augmentor.
Heck grinned and punched him in the arm. “How’s it feel, hero?”
“Pretty good. Pretty damn good.”
Heck laughed and steered the technician toward the ladder to the upper decks. “Don’t get used to it. The crowd’s fickle. A week from now they’re going to forget what you did down there and start bitching about how you aren’t blowing up bigger mountains. For now, though, it’s time to drink.”
Zotz followed his leader down to Dragora’s mess hall, his heart soaring and his pulse pounding. He guzzled rum with the rest of the Operators and soaked up his moment in the limelight. They all thought he was proud of what he’d done, proud of what people thought about him.
But none of it, the money, the upgrade, or the new sponsors meant as much to him as what he’d heard after their escape from Rivicle Base.
Zotz smiled because he remembered the sounds of the freed miners.
He smiled because after all this time, he was finally able to do for someone else what Heck had done for him.
He’d set them free.
Thank you for reading!
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this story as much as I did writing it. There’s plenty more coming in this series, and I hope you’ll stick around for the wild ride ahead!
Please leave a review!
Reviews are so important when it comes to making sure other readers can find my stories. And if you’d like to tell me directly how you feel about—good, bad, or ugly—you can drop me a line at [email protected]. I read and respond to every email I get!
And as a very special thank you for reading, I’d like to offer you some free stories. Just hop on over to http://srwittwrites.com/free-stories/ and I’ll send ‘em right over.
Books by S R Witt
The Gamer’s Universe Series
Operation: Catspaw
Operation: Snowblind (with J.L. Hendricks)
Operation: Pirates vs. Drones (with J.L. Hendricks)
The Electric Shadows Series
Dragon Web Online: Inception
Don’t forget - you can get free stories and other cool stuff from me, just by signing up for my email newsletter.
Go ahead, do it!
http://srwittwrites.com/free-stories/
