Red Sky Dawning

by Ian J. Malone

  A sudden, metallic shing later, everything changed when forty-eight needles sprang free in a white-hot sear then plunged themselves into his head, back, and spinal cord tissues.

  Until that moment, Danny Tucker had never known what pain was.

  Chapter 36: Imminent Threat

  “Sir!” shouted the Praetorian’s white-haired tactical officer from his bridge-post upstairs.

  “What is it, McLeod?” Katahl called from down front.

  “Admiral, sir, I know you don’t want to hear this,” McLeod said, “but we’ve got incoming.”

  I knew it. Katahl bounded from his seat to the upper level and peered at the commander’s screen. “How many?”

  “LORASS pings forty-one ships, sir,” McLeod said in a tense voice. “Correction: make forty-two…forty-four…forty-five ships in all!”

  “Configuration?” Katahl asked.

  McLeod licked his lips. “The original forty-one register as Alystierian. The others look like those same bastards that jumped us at Kyma 4.”

  “Damn it.” Katahl rubbed his face then spun back to the comm station across the catwalk. “Lieutenant Floyd, has Chief Simpson made it aboard yet?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Floyd, a petite brunette with a ponytail. “He caught a shuttle over from the Bakersmith about twenty minutes ago, and he’s already down in engineering.”

  “Get him on comm.”

  Floyd whirled in her chair and tapped a series of keystrokes into her terminal.

  Moments later, a man’s familiar voice filled the speakers overhead, backed by the not-too-distant blur of sparking equipment, power tools, and barking personnel. “Go ahead, Bridge.”

  “Good to have you back, Chief,” Katahl said. “I know you’ve got your hands full on your own ship today, but I appreciate you handing off to your AC to help us out of a jam.”

  “No worries, Admiral,” said Jon Simpson, the Praetorian’s former assistant chief engineer. “Petty Officer Bekah’s a solid engineer in her own right, and she’ll keep the home fires burning just fine without me. I’m only glad I was here to help.”

  “That makes two of us, Chief,” Katahl said. “What’s our status for FTL?”

  “Not good, Admiral. I’m trying to piggyback what’s left of our drive onto that of the Kennox, but given that she’s a C-100, I’m having trouble getting our systems to interface with hers.”

  Katahl’s nose crinkled in confusion. “The Praetorian is a C-100 ship, Simpson. What’s the problem?”

  “Yes and no. Our hyperdrive is a Gen-One Ester Industries 562, built for the original Horizon-class carriers like us. Granted, the system’s been retrofitted to perform at C-100 efficiency, but at base level it’s still the stock drive. The Kennox, on the other hand, is a purebred C-100 supported by all-new tech. To put it another way, sir, it’s like dealing with an older and younger sibling…they don’t always get along.”

  “Make them play nice, Chief.” Katahl signaled McLeod for a fleet-wide red alert. “We’ve got forty-five enemy ships inbound and closing fast, and four of them appear to be those same aliens that gutted us at Kyma 4. According to LORASS, we’re looking at just over twenty-eight mikes to intercept which means we need to go, and go now!”

  “I’ll get everything I can out of her, sir,” Simpson said. “But bear in mind, even I don’t know these systems like Wyatt does. Old as she is, there’s a reason why the Praetorian is still the benchmark for excellence in this fleet, and that’s mostly due to his work down here.”

  Katahl’s face fell. “Yeah well, Chief Wyatt has helped all he can today, Simpson. That means it’s on you to get this done. Ruah?”

  “Ruah, Admiral. Engineering out.”

  Once the channel had disconnected, Katahl returned to his command chair down front and drummed his fingers on the seat’s arm while weighing his options. “Floyd. Get Hastings, Mann, Baxter, and Summerston on the line at once. Things around here are about to get real hairy, and I’m gonna need my four best LPs on point when it hits the pot.”

  “Right away, sir,” Floyd said then jetted back to her keyboard.

  * * *

  Danny screamed in agony as the Kurgorian armor gripped his body, the clamps inside the suit’s extremities squeezing him like a vice. The needles in his back rooted themselves in his spine, sending his entire nervous system into a convulsive state of shock while something that felt like acid shot through his veins. At its peak, the pain became so intense that Danny literally felt like he was on fire, so much so that part of him feared swallowing his own tongue. This went beyond torture. This was the stuff of nightmares.

  After what had seemed like hours, Danny felt the burn in his muscles begin to dull, the grip at his limbs loosening from their previous state of death-lock to that of a firm, yet snug fit as his lips twitched at his O2 regulator.

  “Talk to me, Tucker, you alive in there?” Danny heard from somewhere in the black. It was Briggs. “Tucker! Talk to me!”

  “Yuh-yeah,” Danny managed in between breaths. “Yeah, Briggs, I’m in here.”

  “Dear gods, son, are you even remotely okay?” Zier asked.

  Danny gulped hard then allowed himself a moment while the last of his tears ran free of his cheeks. “Do I really have to answer that?”

  “Can you move?” Briggs asked. “For that matter, can you even see?”

  Danny tried to shake his head now that the needles were out but couldn’t. It was almost as if the armor was in some sort of deactivated lockdown. “No and no,” he replied. “Everything’s dark and I’ve got no movement whatsoever in any of—”

  A tiny tremor rippled through his back as a hollow rumbling sound became a hum in Danny’s ears.

  “Tucker?” Briggs asked with renewed concern.

  “You guys get back,” Danny said. “Something’s happening.” A brilliant flash of light filled Danny’s eyes, causing him to slam them shut. “Ah, son of a…”

  “Tucker, what’s going on?” Briggs asked again as the hum built.

  “Will you please stop asking me that?” Danny snarled through clenched teeth. Then, feeling the pain in his eyes begin to subside, Danny cracked them ever so slightly. When they didn’t burn, he opened them a bit more, then a bit more until finally Danny found himself staring in stunned bewilderment at an entirely infrared landscape before him. Only, it wasn’t through any kind of HUD that he was seeing this, but rather his own flesh and blood eyes.

  “Okay, now that’s pretty damn freaky,” Danny murmured as one of the two multicolor faces before him leaned in for a closer look.

  “Tucker?” Briggs asked.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m not trying to rush you or anything, but none of this works if you can’t move in that thing. So can you?”

  Feeling a bit of sensation returning to his limbs, Danny wiggled his fingers and toes while trying not to dwell on the myriad toxins being pumped into his system through the needle network. “I think so, but gimme a sec to get my bearings before I give it a try.”

  It took him another minute, but something soon began to dawn on Danny. This suit, for all of its massive size and heft, should’ve been nearly immovable by the frail alien he’d pulled out of it. That meant that there had to be some sort of mental component to using it. Then, as if remembering something from a different life, Danny recalled another time when he’d worn a similar, albeit drastically smaller suit with the same operative principles. Only on that occasion, he’d had Jon Reiser and Madisyn there to guide him.

  “Don’t run,” Reiser had said. “Just imagine the act in your mind.”

  Danny felt a wave of emotion at the memory, and only a fool would’ve asked why. I so wish you were here, he thought of the girl with the fiery-red hair, the one he’d practically gone to war with in those early days, only to find himself completely dazzled by her in the years that followed.

  “Move your ass, soldier,” Madisyn would’ve said…if she could have.

  Feeling fresh tears on his cheek, and no
t for an instant mistaking them for sweat, Danny cleared his throat and focused as the hum in his ears built toward its rebooted climax.

  Don’t run, Danny told himself. Think about running. Taking a final hit of his O2, he closed his eyes, imagined himself back in his M-suit, and reached out with his mind to concentrate on one single act…standing.

  “Easy there, Sergeant,” Zier said, lunging in with a steadying hand as Danny staggered to a knee, then to his feet. “We’re not in that big of a rush. Take your time.”

  Danny exhaled a long, hard sigh and reached to balance himself. Thanks for the push, baby, he told Madisyn in his mind. As always.

  “So,” Briggs said. “How’s it feel?”

  Danny scanned the room with his IR vision. “Weird,” he said, flexing his fingers and hearing his voice echo in that same low, modulated baritone as before. At that point, something else hit him…Huh, I wonder if I can…And just like that, the faceplate of his helmet split in half then retracted into the cowl.

  “Good to see you again, son,” Zier said.

  “Good to be seen,” Danny said, this time in his normal voice as he wobbled about the cabin on his first few steps. A solid sixty seconds later, he was able to do so without much of an issue. The initial feeling of awkwardness, however, never truly went away. It was almost as if the armor were resisting him somehow, like it viewed him as an intruder, and the severe lag times in his arms and upper legs were definitely showing that.

  “Okay, so I hate to be pushy,” Briggs said. “But can you move or not?”

  Danny leaned down and looked himself over. “Yeah, I think so. Don’t get me wrong, this thing isn’t short of glitches, and I’m definitely not running a marathon in it. But as long as I don’t push the envelope too much, I think we’ll be fine.”

  “How’s your air supply?” Zier asked.

  “Crammed up my armpit like the head of a Louisville Slugger, but it seems to be functioning since you cut out the onboard. How long is one canister good for?”

  “About six hours,” Zier said. “You can probably stretch that to eight, if you’re cautious. Just try to avoid opening your faceplate if at all possible. That way, the O2 from your regulator will stay sealed inside your mask and help stave off the effects of the native air outside.”

  “All right then.” Briggs rubbed his whiskers. “As far as I can tell, that just leaves us with one last tiny problem to iron out.”

  “Which is?” Danny asked.

  “What do we say if someone wants to know why our previously three-man engineering team is now down to two and an escort?”

  Zier scratched the side of his face. “That’s actually an excellent point. Perhaps our man fell ill due to the air and had to stay behind on the shuttle?”

  “That’s a plausible story all right,” Briggs said, “but I wouldn’t put it past security to come looking to make sure it’s true. If that happens, they’ll see the shuttle’s empty. And then what?”

  Danny pondered the problem while his eyes drifted to the alien corpse at his feet, then to his vacated enviro-suit in the corner, and finally to the cart of fully-charged electrical gear on the wall to his right. “Huh. I don’t suppose either of you guys saw Weekend at Bernie’s, did you?” He got two blank stares in response. “Yeah, didn’t think so.”

  * * *

  Pulling the enviro-suit’s hood over the dead alien’s face, Briggs hunched the corpse forward in the pilot’s chair so as to rest it face-down in a sickly pose on the dash. Giving a final keystroke to the controls, he retracted the shuttle’s blast-shield, thus exposing the cockpit-view to the bay outside, and moved to the rear of the cabin where Danny was already standing.

  “Weekend at Bernie’s, huh?” Briggs asked at seeing the alien’s shoulder twitch on-cue with the timed electrical device taped to its inner right palm.

  Danny grinned in response.

  “Not bad,” Briggs said. “Chancellor, you set?”

  “Indeed, Captain.” Zier emerged from the back with a pair of data tablets and handed one to Briggs.

  “What’s this for?” the captain asked.

  “Did you leave the shuttle’s sensor systems online as I asked?”

  Briggs nodded.

  “Good,” Zier said. “As long as we’re aboard, we should be able to access that data remotely using these tablets. I figured that might be handy when and if we do take the CIC.”

  “Nice thinking,” Danny said. “Will they allow us to take control of ship’s operations, too?”

  “Unfortunately, no. We’ll still have access to basic ops here on the shuttle, but those of the Axius we’ll have to figure out on our own. At least this way, though, we’ll have real-time telemetry that we can actually read to help guide us if we do.”

  “Fair enough,” Danny said. “Out of curiosity, you care to tell me what else you were doing back there?”

  Zier looked puzzled. “I beg your pardon?”

  “While you were in the back.” Danny gestured in that direction. “I could’ve sworn I heard you talking to someone.”

  “Oh, that,” Zier said. “The comm systems in these suits have a built-in short range emitter that allows them access to the Alystierian buoy network. Honestly, I didn’t think I’d get a signal out this far, but apparently we’re still close enough to the border that I was able to send a message back to my daughter.”

  “I’m sorry, you did what?” Danny protested.

  “Take it easy, Sergeant, I used a delay command. That packet won’t reach Alystier for at least six hours, at which time you, Captain Briggs, and I will be long gone, one way or another.”

  “Forgive me, sir, but I didn’t think you were on speaking terms with her,” Briggs said.

  “She’s my daughter, Captain. She needs to know I’m all right.”

  “And your wife?” Briggs asked. “You send her a message, too?”

  Zier’s lips made a line. “Why in the gods’ names would I do that?”

  The chancellor’s face filled with relief, and the two-time divorcee in Danny knew exactly what that meant. “Crazy-ass old lady at home, huh.”

  “Sergeant, if you only knew.” Zier grabbed his toolbox. “Now come on. We have work to do.”

  Sealing the shuttle’s hatch so as to ensure that no one would question the ill crewman inside, Danny—now operating somewhere around sixty-eight percent of the armor’s peak efficiency—raised his Kurgorian weapon and descended the ramp behind Briggs and Zier, each of whom continued to show as multicolored blots of thermal light before him. Soon after, the group made its way back into the first round of tunnels. It was there they passed the first of several security stations to come—this one manned by only a pair of centurions. They acknowledged Danny with a nod as he passed, and he threw them one in response.

  “Sure would be nice to get a heads-up on those checkpoints before we reach them,” Briggs muttered once they were out of earshot. “I can’t see a damn thing out here until I’m right on top of it.”

  “Yeah, that would be—” Danny broke off when a small cluster of dots appeared in his right eye’s lower field of vision and began shifting along lines in what looked like a floorplan grid. “Oh, now that’s pretty sick.”

  “What?” Zier asked, a touch of alarm in his voice. “Is something in the suit making you ill?”

  “Oh, no. Sorry, Chancellor, it’s a figure of speech,” Danny said. “I think I just inadvertently happened across some kind of HUD in this thing.”

  “How?” Briggs asked.

  “Well, I was just thinking about how nice it would be to have one, and then it magically appeared.” Danny began tinkering with the grid settings, flicking from level to level and region to region with a series of eye movements, and all the while watching as the dots on each view varied in position, quantity, and color. Some of them were red, Danny saw, like the aliens’ skin. Others were black like his armor. I’ll be damned, he thought. Wonder if blacks are centurions and reds are officers? Seeing a centurion pass throu
gh the corridor ahead, Danny toggled back to his current level and spied a lone black dot moving in that direction. Awesome. There was something like battle telemetry, too, but it was all written in that same glyph-script from earlier.

  “Tucker, you still in there?” Briggs asked.

  “Yeah, I’m here.” Danny studied his weapon.

  “Don’t suppose you’ve got any clue where we’re headed?” Briggs asked. “All these odd tunnels look the same to me.”

  “Yeah, I think so,” Danny said, seeing a random light spike in his upper-left field and wondering what it meant. “According to this we’ve got two more junctions to go, plus a handful of turns before we reach the lift. After that, it’s up twelve levels to the top floor where I think we’ll find their CIC.”

  “You think?” Zier asked.

  “Educated guess based on one of the other centurions from earlier,” Danny said. Part of him expected another snide comment from Briggs but it never came.

  “Very well then, Sergeant. What precisely is your plan after we—” Zier averted his gaze when two centurions and a Kurgorian officer in black garb passed them by. “After we hit the CIC? Mind you, that’s bearing in mind that neither myself nor Captain Briggs are presently in disguise. I’d think that would raise access issues for us, yes?”

  “All we’ve got in a fight are sidearms, too,” Briggs added.

  “That might be an issue, yeah,” Danny said. “But they’re not looking for us, either, which gives us the advantage. Couple that with my ability to see through walls in this thing, and that’ll hopefully be enough to give us the drop on any resistance we might encounter if, of course, we can’t avoid it.”

  “That’s leaving a lot to chance, Tucker,” Briggs grumbled upon reaching the lift. “Especially considering that they’re probably gonna have a fit when one of their own, you, shows up with two unauthorized personnel, us, at one of the most heavily restricted portions of their ship.”