I was sure I could not linger here for long. Eventually, those scavengers or whatever was out there, would find it. I also put the dead man’s jacket on, not for warmth, but to disguise my uniform as much as I could, not wanting to be recognized as a Union officer until I knew where I was. He had a sizeable bag of radshield-coated polonium coins with him and a wicked-looking combat knife of unknown origin.
I felt much better, armed to the teeth, boots on my feet. I knew I was somewhere in Free Space, but not too isolated from the Union. Maybe there was some sort of communications center in that city beyond the spaceport from where I could call for help.
The expected fight broke out; I could hear the sharp crack of blaster fire and the deep thud of a grenade launcher followed by a thundering explosion. Through one of the flyer’s viewports, I noticed three distinctive groups battling over the courier ship. The grenade had damaged the second flyer; another grenade came in like a bright blue shining meteor in a steep arc. I was sure it was some sort of Nul Graviton weapon. It connected with the other flyers’ shields, and with a rumbling explosion, it sucked dirt, matter, and two men into a small dense ball and collapsed the last remnants of the fighters’ shields.
Someone used heavy ordinance out there; lingering here any longer was pushing my luck.
Quickly I searched the rest of the flier and the small cargo hold. The hold was clearly designed to hold a prisoner. It was equipped with a stasis box, and there was one of those transparent plastic prisoner suits complete with activation and punishment collar. They sure came prepared to take me to wherever they had planned to take me.
The night had fully set in, and it was quite dark out there, except for the flashing lightning show the battle provided. I hoped they did not have any night vision equipment or at least weren’t looking into this direction.
With good boots on my feet and my Nilfeheim eyes wide open, I sprinted as if I was chased by a dozen hungry Nubhir wolfs across the wide-open patch, past the half-melted tank and past the burned-out wreck the tank had used to hide toward the skyline of that alien city. I chanced and looked over my shoulder. No one was following me, at least anyone I could see.
Hopefully, no one with a cloaking field was on my trail.
This was a landing field of a sizeable spaceport and while there was garbage, debris, and scrap strewn and piled everywhere it had huge wide open areas, and I estimated the skyline to be at least twelve kilometers away. The air above that city was alive with flyers, and even from this distance, I could see aerial dogfights of flyers fighting each other.
Some of the skyscrapers were brightly lit, and I could see colored signs and lights.
Other buildings appeared like dark silhouettes against the sky. One tall scraper had a blazing inferno on what must have been the 200th floor, but I saw no emergency or first responders.
I kept running at a steady pace parallel to the tall wall in a western direction for more than two or perhaps three hours, taking short breaks whenever I found a place that had enough cover for me to feel at least somewhat safe.
I closed onto a group of buildings, what I assumed was the passenger terminal of this spaceport.
It was dark, no lights anywhere and what once were tall transparent wall panels were busted and shattered. Only pieces of the transparent material remained in the frames of these large façade windows.
On the far side of that spaceport terminal was a thick-looking Duro-Crete tower with a massive gun turret on top. Up there, I saw a faint light. The shadow of a man was leaning against a handrail, and he was smoking something similar to Shaka’s cigarettes. Every time he sucked on it, the orange glow illuminated his face. He was too far for me to make out any details but he looked human.
He flicked his cigarette or smoke stick away and disappeared through a thick armored door back into the turret, and it slowly rotated its barrels to the sky.
Now I could make out some of the project-a-signs beyond the wall and the terminal buildings. Some of them in clear Union Lingu advertising casinos, gambling, hotels, and restaurants. The name of the planet was used in many of the advertisements, and I now knew I was on Sin 4, the hellhole where Wetty was born.
The walls of the building before me were pockmarked with thousands of blaster holes and scorch marks.
I had to go through that building, as it appeared to be the only access to the city on the other side.
That strange spaceport ghost building so close to a bustling city felt like a trap as I thumped the safety to off on the H&K missile gun and dialed the mini missiles to bio-track.
This weapon did not fire beams or rays but small rockets, each with an armor-piercing ceramic tip of monofilament sharpness and a few grams of a very potent explosive. Each of these little rockets could be programmed to do a variety of neat tricks, like follow the neuro-impulse pattern of a specific individual, linger in midflight for several minutes until the target appeared or explode behind or above a cover to shower anyone below with deadly shrapnel.
That was the good part. The bad part was you needed a Neuro Jack and a data brain or a combat helmet to access and use all those wonderful abilities of the weapon. The man who took it had the Neuro Jack; I did not.
Inside the building, it was even darker. The exit doors on the other side were about 500 meters away.
The interior of the place stank of feces and urine, but mostly of decomposing flesh, the stench of death.
I stayed as close to the walls as I could, picking my way slowly and as silently through the trash and debris that littered the floor. I almost stepped onto the rotting corpse of a semi-humanoid life form. Much of its head was gone, and so were most of its clothing and the flesh of its upper torso.
As I stepped over the badly mangled corpse, I knew I was not alone. There were others hiding between stairwells, behind columns and underneath the trash. I heard a whispered word, just a few hissed syllables, but enough to know it wasn’t vermin or the rustle of paper moved by a draft.
Something grabbed my left leg just as I stepped over the body.
I looked down, and a hand-sized spidery thing that looked almost like the bony claw of a skeleton scurried up my leg!
I fired a three-round burst into the direction of the whisper, drew the large knife, and used its blade to cut that thing in half.
The smart little rockets homed in on infrared signatures and exploded with force, killing something or someone. The flash of light of the explosion revealed six beings standing close by and hundreds of these bony spider things.
One of the beings, I think, was a Spindlar and the others could have been Ogahr. The light of the explosion was there for no longer than a fraction of a second. I didn’t waste the opportunity however and fired six times, this time in optical recognition mode, and ran as fast as I could to the exit. As I ran, I crunched and crushed several of those spiders beneath my feet, and I felt a stinging pain in the calf of my left leg just above the boot.
With horror, I tried to shake one of those whitish spider things off. Even in this light, I could see pencil-sized needle-sharp fangs burrowed into my own flesh.
I swiped the knife, cutting the parasite away, but its fangs remained stuck in my skin. I had to ignore the pain; I simply had to, and with five more steps, I made it through the doors and into the streets of Sin 4.
A being with four arms and the general shape of a Shiss, wearing golden shimmering, truly vintage-looking battle armor, hovered only 200 meters from me in the air and yelled, elated. “I found him first! He is mine!”
Both of his arms ended in weapons and he fired. He was obviously not the sharpest harpoon in the boat. First, he advertised himself by yelling in a gleaming golden suit and then he fired.
The blasts hammered into the dirty Duro-Crete where I had been standing a heartbeat before. I was rolling shoulder-first down the five steps that led to the spaceport entrance and fired a quad burst after him. The little rockets exploded and engulfed him in a billow of fire and smoke, and I could see the b
right white lightning spider webs of a collapsing shield.
I invested four more missiles and was rewarded with a shower of body parts and pieces of golden armor.
He was out of the equation, but he had not been alone. His triumphant yells of finding me had been directed to two similar floating and equipped beings in the distance. I limped across the plaza before the spaceport and beyond a mind-numbing steel, light, and Duro-Crete canyon of sky bridges.
The pain in my leg turned to a burning sensation that spread slowly like the pain of a Galler-goob sting; those beautiful, brainless, almost transparent umbrella-shaped life forms that appeared during short summer in the Uhim grounds back home. The spider thing had injected me with a poison or venom, and I hoped I would last.
The second armored flyman had spotted me and circled around in a tight loop, only to get a well-aimed rocket into the exhaust of his turbine, the only place that could not be shielded.
I did not wait to see and dove sideways into an alleyway. The alley was a narrow, concrete canyon between very tall buildings; I did not have to stretch my arms to reach both walls.
I stumbled over something and slipped through a broken grating into an empty foul-smelling wet basement.
The tumble had stunned my left shoulder and scraped a patch of skin above my left temple right of my skull. I thanked Odin for making that skull of mine thick enough to not break after that sudden fall into that hole I was in now.
Here in the almost completely dark basement of some kind of building, I found myself completely and utterly exhausted. My swollen leg throbbed in pain, my bruised shoulder badly hurt in competition with the leg, not to mention the dripping blood from the wound on my head.
I listened, trying to hear if someone was up there looking for me, then with shaking fingers, I pulled the fang pieces of the spider thing out and opened the first aid kit. It was a very rudimentary kit, not an Auto-Doc, but it was still Union, and lots of thought and planning went into this little accessory of the Enroe Daihatsu flyer.
A little light came on as I opened the lid of this brick-sized box. A sensor on the little box, reacting to the lack of light, turned it on.
This simple little light that shone over neatly packed and labeled things somehow filled me with a sense of hope that things would turn out all right. I used some Derma Glue and a spray bandage, swallowed a broadband anti-infection agent, and applied a painkiller patch to doctor me up as good as I could.
This was all I could do for the moment, so I wadded the jacket I had taken from the dead man under my head to find a little rest.
I feared if I would sleep now and let the venom of the spider spread, I would not wake up again. I had no Auto-Doc, and there was nothing in the kit that could be used to counteract an unknown poison. I’d never felt as exhausted as now.
Sleeping a little was not giving up, now was it? All I needed was a little rest.
Chapter 3: Sin 4
The poison had not killed me, but the pain that came from my swollen leg made me almost wish it had. I was terribly thirsty and wondered if I had ever felt so miserable. I was able to answer my own question—yes, I had. I’d had it much worse back on the Burg of my father, and back then, I did not see any chance of escaping, but here I was not out of options. I was still alive, and I had weapons.
I used the little light of the first aid kit to check out the room I was in. It was not as empty as I had thought. There was a pile of garbage and waste in one corner, and a rusty metal door.
Something between the dark plastic film bags and discarded boxes moved. I was certain I had seen a pair of shiny eyes. I thanked Odin for watching over me while I was out and nothing decided to have me for dinner while I was sleeping.
I cut the leg of my pants open. My calf and thighs were swollen, and there was an unhealthy looking white blister around the area where the spider thing had bitten me. There was no other way; I had to cut it open. Part of my training was first aid, and I had served a spell in sickbay; combat and emergency aid was a subject they stressed.
I disinfected the sharp blade of the combat knife and my leg with a disinfectant spray that was part of the first aid kit. I put the blaster in reach of my hand, eyed the pile of garbage one more time, and then bit down on the sleeve of my jacket so I would not cry out too loud. I cut the wound open. It was not as bad as I thought; I was already in tremendous pain, so a little more did not really matter. Puss and blood drooled down on the wet and dirty Duro-Crete floor. I had to let it bleed out a little, but make sure I would not lose too much.
Again, the pile of trash moved, and I readied the line blaster Whatever it was, was big enough to move the sacks of waste. “If you are sentient, say something. If not, I am going to shoot!”
Even though I was ready for some reaction, I was completely surprised as something jumped out of that pile in an explosion of garbage. A dark shadow catapulted itself toward me. All I really saw was fangs, gleaming eyes, and claws. I fired but did not hit it, and that shadow of fangs and teeth collided with me. Needle sharp claws penetrated fabric and skin. My eyes were still blinded by the bright bolt, but I saw the outlines of a humanoid face, and a large obscene mouth filled with teeth snapping after my throat. I hammered my left fist across that face and tried to bring the line blaster in line with that monster. My blow connected and whipped its head back; it screeched, and I could not tell if it was a human voice or the sound of an animal. Claws raked over my shoulder and face; my eyesight sight was clearing, and I managed to get my right arm free enough to move. I pressed the muzzle of the blaster against that furious thing and fired. This time I could not miss and burned right through its chest.
It gurgled and collapsed. The stench of burned flesh mingled with the foul odor of waste and the reeking smell of this creature.
In the dim shine of the first-aid box light, I examined the creature. It was humanoid in shape but was partially covered with fur; its face looked as if a human had been merged with a deep-sea fish, with bulging eyes and a huge maw.
It was mortally wounded, but not quite dead. From the garbage pile it had come, I could now see a rugged hole in the wall that led to even deeper regions of this place.
At this moment, the rusty steel door flung open with a creaking sound, and a muscular Ogahr-like creature appeared, holding a Kartanian Flamer. It stomped past me, held its weapon toward that hole, and fired a stream of superheated plasma. A chorus of high-pitched screams and the sizzling sound of fire-consuming flesh echoed from below.
The being cursed in Squawk, “Damn Subzombs, I knew they had a hole coming in somewhere.”
He turned and said, “We don’t like Skath squatting in our basements either! You are certainly not a tenant.” The being stomped his heel on the skull of the dying Subzomb I had fought moments ago, and it crushed with a sickening sound. “Get up and get out of here, before I change my mind and have you for dinner.”
I struggled to my feet, gathered my meager belongings and put the jacket back on. The being said, “For a Skath, you are well armed. I wonder where you got that Union Fleet uniform.”
“I am on my way out; I fell through that busted crating up there.”
“I don’t think you need all these weapons and that nice first aid pack. It’s way too good for a Skath and seeing you fought a Subzomb, you don’t even know how to use them.”
Like all Ogahr, he was almost twice my size, and I knew how strong and tough they were. I had seen Az-Az in action. Still, with all the energy I could still muster, I kicked his gun arm. Putting weight on my bad leg was a bad idea; it sent waves of pain up my spine, but I had no choice. With all the pain and misery, I was getting angry, and I felt my own rage coming up like a storm surge. He yelped and dropped his weapon, and I pointed the line blaster right at his broad nose. “I am new on this rotten planet of yours, but one thing I noticed is you all talk way too much and think you are all so tough. So far I am not impressed.”
He howled, “You aren’t a Skath! You’re Union! I rip yo
u to pieces!” He raised his massive arms, and I fired.
I hissed, “Yes, I am Union and proudly so!” I watched as he fell backward with a burning hole where his nose used to be.
He didn’t wear much in the way of clothing, but I took his wide utility belt, slung it over my shoulder, and used its pockets to arrange and carry my small arsenal and to holster the flamer.
He carried a handful of dark gray coin-like discs, some kind of metal with a plastic coating and number symbols embossed on them. I remembered in xeno class that this was physical money. Even on Nilfeheim, everything was paid for by Union credits and transfer strips, so this was the first time I’d seen real money. Well, he didn’t need it anymore, and I was certain it would come in handy.
Not wanting to make this wet hole my permanent home, I finished bandaging my leg and took another painkiller. I’d had only four painkiller patches to begin with and was now down to two. By the rate I was getting hurt and attacked, it seemed to be a good idea to hang on to the rest until I absolutely needed them.
I limped to the open door and looked down a sparsely lit corridor with a dozen doors like this one and a steep flight of Duro-Crete stairs leading up at the far end. While I wondered what kind of building this was, I heard the wailing of a baby from one of the doors. It was not closed completely, so I peeked through the crack. There was a woman, and I was certain she was human despite the rag she had slung around her head.
She was nursing a baby on her thin empty-looking breasts, while another kid not much older sat by a smoking little fire. The smoke escaped through a metal-crated shaft, similar to the one I had fallen through. With this, I realized this wasn’t a basement for storage. Those were rooms, apartments for the poorest! The kids and the mother were filthy; now I noticed a third kid banging with a hammer on a piece of metal. A pile of bowl-shaped metal pieces on its side.
I should have gone on and left this depressing scene behind. The money I had taken from what perhaps was the landlord or rent collector would be invaluable to me, but I could not. I opened that door wider, and the woman wrapped her arms around the baby she was nursing even tighter and stared at me from underneath that rag she wore with a hollow, haunting look of fear, hunger, and resignation. I could only imagine how I looked to her, blood caked, dirty and bandaged, armed to the teeth.
Eric Olafson Series Boxed Set: Books 1 - 7 Page 55
