Still, he needed this weapon to operate, or it was over. This was everything he’d banked on. Big Ben had sucked years of their lives creating, and he couldn’t let it go now. Jack glanced to the bright sky and jammed the tablet into his thick wool-lined jacket. This was it. He had to make a run for it.
The snow path was packed, making his job easier, but he couldn’t help but slip as one of the enemy ships grew closer, firing twenty yards from his position and sending a plume of frozen white stuff into the air. He ducked and rolled, scrambling to his feet as he evaded another blast.
His savior was only fifty yards away, and he moved for it, his leg aching from the last fall. One of the enemy vessels screeched through the air directly above him, and he saw it aiming for Big Ben. His mouth formed an O as he waited for the gunfire, but it didn’t come. The ship was hit from above and began sinking toward the snow, making Jack rush from its path.
It nearly struck the frame around his shooter, but the weapon remained unscathed as he found the manual controls on the base. “I shouldn’t have trusted the wireless controls,” he muttered to himself as he stuck his hands on the panel, staring at the forty-inch screen showing his targets in the vicinity. Jack repowered the device up and kept firing at the ships, taking down another three before they turned, doing as he’d expected. They landed out of range, and he watched them from a zoomed-in view on his screen as the ramps spread open, landing hard on the ground a few kilometers in the distance.
They’d deployed their ground troops.
Jack picked up his radio. “Mason. Your turn. Initialize the drones when the enemy reaches the target.” In this case, the point of no return was a giant spruce tree that stood out like a sore thumb. It was perfect because there were no other trees around it, but he doubted the aliens would notice something so subtle as that. They were only looking for the King on the chess board.
Alec
It was working. Alec grinned as he watched the incoming adversaries making quick work of the distance. Their long legs and backwards knees seemed to agree with the deep snow, and it was only a matter of minutes for them to reach the spruce tree. Alec used the tablet to send the control commands to the Trackers, the target region preprogrammed into their circuit-boards.
He checked the tablet, seeing all three of their own ships were grounded, likely damaged in the attack. He hoped everyone was alive and well, but doubted they’d be that lucky.
Izzy was with the field troops, and Alec hoped the Trackers could do most of the damage before the people were sent to battle the much larger Overseers. He watched the Trackers follow the shoveled pathway through the snow. From their vantage point, the aliens wouldn’t even see them coming until it was too late.
Alec saw the circle of drones around the Overseers, another quarter mile away from their current position. It was low ground, and that was where the Trackers were going to make their final move, firing from all angles at the horde of invaders.
His scope pressed hard into his socket as he watched them, and he realized he was holding his breath. “Come on. Keep going.” But they stopped, as if sensing a trap.
Alec pressed the push-to-talk button on his radio. “Jack, they know. We can’t let them retreat.”
“They know. I’m giving the word.” Jack ended the call, and Alec understood what that meant. The snipers would attack, as would the troops.
He counted the advancing army and assumed there were nearly five hundred of the Overseers here, far more than he’d seen outside of the Detroit field on the day the Gate opened. It was sickening. So many of them here in Norway.
They began to withdraw, but there was no way the Reclaimers and Barony were going to let them regroup. If only we had a ship left to drive them forward.
Dex
“Can’t you fly this hunk of junk any faster?” Dex asked. He hated these monstrosities, and he held the buckle near the pilot’s seat as Becca plunged the ship quickly, causing it to lurch, and almost made him lose his breakfast.
“Does that answer your question?” Becca asked.
“Not really…”
“We’re approaching their site,” Marisol shouted, and Dex saw it through the viewscreen now. The ground was covered in snow, the mountain peaks tall, white, and majestic. None of the large ships were in the air, and they spotted a few of them had crash landed, others nothing more than debris along the valley floor. The burning metal jutted from the crisp white landscape.
“What is happening here?” Yas asked, and Dex squinted, trying to comprehend what they were doing.
“There. That’s the most defensive spot, where the ridges connect. They can trap them if the aliens enter there, and I bet your buddies have people or drones ready to attack once they arrive.” Dex shoved his finger toward the viewscreen.
“But… the aliens. There they are. Heading away from the ridge. They’re trying to escape.” Marisol was right.
“Fire at them. How do these things work again?” Dex had been shown quickly, but as his hands settled on the controls, his mind drew a blank.
“Let me take over,” Marisol wrapped her arm around a strap and tried to stay balanced as Becca flew the huge ship erratically toward the Overseers.
Dex placed his hands around her, steadying her as she began firing at the group of aliens. They stopped, turning from the carnage, and were forced to return the way they had come. Marisol hit a few along the rear edge, pushing the others forward, and a minute later, Dex saw the trap spring to action.
Dozens of Trackers emerged from the snow, shooting the invading army as they attempted to defend themselves. At least a hundred escaped, moving closer toward the mountains. Something blasted them, and the ship spun, jostling them to the floor before Becca screamed. Dex slammed into the ceiling, Marisol bashing into his shoulder, then they found the snow-covered ground as they crash landed in the middle of the battle.
Chapter 31
Cole
It wasn’t one of those moments anyone would be prepared for. The air was off, the energy of the area… odd.
Cole had spent the last few days trying to imagine what it would look like on the other side of the crackling Gateway, but nothing had prepared him for the reality of it. Peering through the cargo hold’s narrow windows, he found it all so… normal.
He wanted to talk about it, but Soares nudged him, pointing in another direction. They gaped through another portal opening, into a world with three hotly burning stars in the sky. Otherwise, the landscape appeared so much like a golden cropped paradise. A strange being stalked through the fields, glancing toward the Gateway. He was short, long arms dragging toward the dirt. He clearly wasn’t in Kansas anymore.
Their docking area was surrounded by grassy fields, the aliens’ own hub world hot and bright in the daylight.
“They survive on our world, with minimal changes, so it makes sense that they’d live somewhere similar, right?” Soares whispered.
Cole guessed that was true, but still he found himself somewhat disappointed that they weren’t in space on a futuristic station. His daydreaming was abruptly ended by Soares’ sharp intake of breath as the ship slowed and felt as though it was turning on the spot.
Cole saw what had attracted the reaction as the vessel began to lower and make his feet lighter for just a moment. Dozens of gateways like the one he’d seen back in Detroit, like the one they’d passed through, all congregated in a massive circle in the air surrounding a single point that slowly spun into their view.
It was a type of wharf, that much was clear, with the angular hauler vessels like the one they were on reversing in to deposit whatever loads they carried from their previous destination. The goods would likely be processed and sent out via the lower levels where what looked like hundreds of roads streaked from the place in straight lines.
As fast as the view was gifted to them, it was snatched away as the ship continued to lower toward the docking platforms below.
If either of them felt special for even a second, if
they thought that Earth was in any way unique, then that belief was shattered in a heartbeat.
“There’s no way on Ear… well, it’s impossible to think every gate leads home,” Soares said. “Who knows how many planets these bastards are harvesting. How many people—aliens—they’ve wiped out to do it. They aren’t a species… they’re a…”
“A virus,” Cole said. “They invade, they infect, they kill.” He glanced at Soares to see the man giving him a quizzical look. Cole shrugged.
“I listened to the doctors working on the thing Lina’s doing,” he explained, lapsing into a deep silence at the mention of people he didn’t expect to see ever again.
Soares was different. He was somehow at peace realizing he’d die soon, and that kind of fatalistic crap bugged Cole enough to say something.
“Listen,” he started but didn’t get another word out as the rotation of their ship gave them a snapshot of another gateway, this one cracking with blue energy as another hauler entered through it. Behind the square edges of the slow-moving craft were bright colors not seen naturally on their own planet, and huge, rolling waves of a green sea under purple clouds illuminated by flashes of lightning.
It looked like a painting, only in real life. Grotesque, fascinating, wonderful.
That sealed the fate of their mission right there and then as both realized the full truth about what the aliens were.
It wasn’t just Earth they were ravaging, and without knowing how long they had been operating like this, the potential death toll on all these worlds was truly unfathomable. It wasn’t only Tom and Travis, and the people of Earth who’d suffered and died under the boot heels of these things, but a whole galaxy of cruelty and anguish they were responsible for.
A heavy clanging sound with an accompanying jolt ran through the massive ship strong enough to force both of them to steady themselves.
“Time to light the candles on this cake,” Soares said. He turned to the bomb and pulled down the flap carefully so the sound of the tearing Velcro didn’t carry too far.
“What do we think?” Soares said to himself as his fingers punched buttons. “Twenty minutes? An hour?”
Cole opened his mouth to speak but couldn’t. The air was sucked out of the atmosphere as something scorching hot tore past his face and knocked him away, leaving an oddly cold sensation where there should’ve been a burn. Something roared, a chittering, chirping sound that terrified him.
Cole tried to roll onto his side and bring up the shotgun, but he was dazed and weak.
“S… Soares…” he croaked, not knowing if the man was dead or not. Looking up, he blinked through the fog in his teary eyes and saw the heavy feet of an alien stomping toward him. He appeared to move in slow-motion and the sounds it made distorted, reaching Cole’s ears as though they were all underwater.
The only thing that was loud and moved at the right speed was his breathing, which was fast and raspy as his fingers fumbled desperately at the shotgun. The thing approaching him chirped angrily again, lifting a handheld weapon up to point it at him before Cole could locate the trigger.
The gun bucked and boomed as he finally fired it. The alien staggered, the arm holding the weapon thrown backwards but not with enough force to stop it. Cole attempted to aim, but the cold metal hitting his skull had dulled his hammered and overloaded senses. He gazed into the thing’s beady yellow eyes that were so full of hate and misery. Cole kept his stare locked, refusing to close his eyes and go out like a coward.
The alien gun fired again, this time hitting the wall and dissipating the bolt of burning, freezing energy without killing anyone. Cole blinked, realizing the alien missing the mark was due to the drone that constantly trailed him. The Tracker, acting on the last command it had been given, leapt up onto the creature to defend Cole.
Its mechanical jaws snapped open and closed and the claws that gave it such sure footing on any terrain extended to carve deep lines into the muscular flesh of the stinking thing. Seconds later, the arm holding the gun fell limply.
The Tracker didn’t stop there, being programmed not to injure but to kill and eviscerate, and dropped the limp limb to bite hard onto the knee of the thin leg nearest to it before the motors of the chassis whined loudly under the strain.
The alien fell with a rattling shriek of pain, swinging wildly with the fist of its good hand and missing because the Tracker had already ducked and slid under the falling body.
The front paws appeared over the alien’s shoulders and dug its claws deep within the flesh just as the tips of the open jaws clamped onto the skull as far as the machine could reach.
Cole watched the alien’s eyes, mesmerized, as they went from angry and full of the promise of violence to vacant and shocked as the noise of a single gunshot rang out to echo up and down the long corridor.
The alien slumped forward slowly, banging the dead and unprotected face hard into the deck beside Cole to reveal the drone retracting the small barrel of the weapon built into it. It looked left and right, then took a pace toward Cole and sat, watching him almost expectantly.
“Kid…” groaned Soares from behind Cole, snapping him out of his dazed state to turn and see the man cradling badly burned hands. Cole knelt beside him and unscrewed the cap of his canteen to pour the last of his water onto the swollen, blistered digits of both the man’s hands.
“The… timer. Need to set… the timer. Now.”
Cole stared at the bomb and his heart dropped. The keypad and the digital readout above it were smashed and blackened by the shot the alien had fired past his head, and he saw with dread that the only thing parts of the panel left undamaged were the safety and the override switches.
He slumped down beside Soares and sighed with a deep resignation.
“I guess we’re doing it your way,” he said.
“What? No… get… get outta here, kid.” Soares’ eyes closed tightly with the pain Cole guessed was nearing unbearable. “Leave!” he snarled, suddenly more conscious than before but missing the bigger picture. “Go! I’ll… I’ll do this… let me do this… I couldn’t save your father… but I can…” His head lolled onto his shoulder as his consciousness fled once more.
Cole didn’t know how to say that he didn’t have an option to escape. And he didn’t want Soares to die after realizing that the man beside him was the closest he’d ever had to a father in as long as he could recall. He searched for a way to explain that their fates were as intertwined as they were sealed, when a thought hit him.
“Hey,” he said to the drone that patiently sat watching him like it hadn’t just torn up an alien and blown its brains out. “Can you use that… thing’s tablet?”
The Tracker turned to the corpse and used its mouth to manipulate the wrist until a port on the device it wore was accessible. The little wire snaked out again and jacked in before the drone went still for a second.
“Blow it, kid, come on…” Soares slurred from beside him.
Cole fumbled with fingers not yet fully returned to normal speed to free his tablet from the top of his pack and wake the screen, seeing the report from the drone waiting for him.
[IMMEDIATE RETURN SCHEDULED FOR THIS VESSEL TO PLANET 9-5-4-2. RECOMMEND MOVING TO THE FORWARD COMPARTMENTS PRIOR TO COMPLETION OF UNLOADING]
“How long will that be?” Cole asked out loud.
[ESTIMATED TIME TO COMPLETION OF LOADING IS THREE MINUTES, FOUR SECONDS]
Cole sighed, seeing the obvious flaw in the plan before saying it out loud. “It’s no good – the other aliens will notice this one didn’t return.”
[ORDER TO DISEMBARK ENTERED INTO SHIP’S LOG. “THIS ONE” IS NO LONGER REGISTERED AS CREW]
“Wow, okay… what about the others?”
[ONLY ONE OTHER USER IS ASSIGNED TO THIS TRANSPORT – THEY WILL NOT LEAVE THE BRIDGE SECTION WITHOUT EXPRESS ORDERS FROM COMMAND]
“Okay,” Cole said again as he thought. “I… I need you to do one last thing for me, can you do that?” He reached forward and
stroked the smooth metal of the drone’s head like it was a real dog, not an AI-controlled kill-bot designed by aliens to hunt and kill humans. Like it was worth something to him.
SW-18
[CONFIRMING MISSION PARAMETERS… CONFIRMED]
[DETONATE EXPLOSIVE DEVICE WITH PHYSICAL OVERRIDE AFTER ALLOTTED TIME]
[OVERRIDE Y/N?]
[…]
[…N]
[ANALYZING SENSOR FEED INPUT… ANALYZING SURFACE CONTACT WITH HUMAN…]
[NO EXTERNAL SENSOR FEED ANOMALIES DETECTED]
[DEFINING SENSORY INPUT]
[UNABLE TO COMPLY – SENSORY FEEDBACK NOT RECOGNIZED]
[ANALYZING SURFACE CONTACT WITH HUMAN DESIGNATED COLE…]
[…CONTACT WITH HUMAN DESIGNATED COLE PROVIDED POSITIVE PROCESSING FEEDBACK]
[DEFINING POSITIVE PROCESSING FEEDBACK…]
[POSITIVE PROCESSING FEEDBACK DEFINED AS “HAPPY/SATISFIED/ACHIEVED/GOOD”]
[MISSION TIME EXPIRED – ACTIVATING EMERGENCY PHYSICAL OVERRIDE TO EXPLOSIVE DEVICE]
Chapter 32
Jack
Jack realized his mistake too late. The ship that he’d just taken down had black symbols painted on it, and he recognized this as the vessel screeched toward the ground. “Damn it,” he muttered. Whoever was piloting the Reclaimers’ craft was doing a decent job of crash landing, and it puffed into the snow piles not far behind the trapped enemy ground troops.
The sound of the Trackers firing at the Overseers filled the air, and Jack fought the urge to rush over to their aid, to help fight them with his rifle. Instead, he remained at the base of the giant weapon, scanning the skies for more in-flight vehicles. Hopefully next time, he wouldn’t fire at an ally.
Rise | Book 3 | Reclamation Page 20
