Jaxx continued his rage fuelled march towards the dazed middle aged woman. He realized that this was not the same person he had expected to see. This woman was much younger. Nevertheless, he still intended to kill her. Somehow, he knew that the strange orange vehicle wasn’t the only connection between these two women. Three fresh bullets slid effortlessly into the Quartermaster’s chambers. His good eye stared at her as he raised the weapon slowly. His cruel, ugly mouth creased into a macabre crooked smile.
Only five metres separated Megyn Alexander from the man who’d killed her once before. She raised her arm, the sleeve of her khaki shirt slipping down from her wrist to her elbow. She looked into Jaxx’s hideous face, spreading the long, thin fingers of her hand out. Jaxx stopped walking. He stood three metres from Megyn Alexander.
“It’s you, somehow,” He said.
She could feel Sloane at her feet. His body was still moving. Twitching and writhing in its death throes. She didn’t look down at him. She kept looking at Jaxx.
“You look different,” She said, “What happened to you?”
The three Spellerans had taken positions on either side of Megyn. They were holding back. Admiral Jaxx wanted his kill. Once he had it, they would move in. The tall woman did not look like very much of a threat, but the Spellerans knew to expect anything. Three high powered assault rifles were aimed directly at Megyn Alexander’s torso and head as Jaxx wetted his rebuilt lips with his tongue and examined her with his good eye.
“I’ve grown old,” he said, “But you haven’t. Yet, you’re different. Not just younger than you should be. It’s been almost sixty five years. What… who are you?
“Seventy years. My name is Megyn Alexander. But once upon a time I went by the name of Carol Hayes. Before you killed me, that is.”
She wriggled the fingers on her outstretched hand, touching the tips against her thumb. She lowered her arm slowly. Jaxx’s weapon continued to stare at her with the same dead gaze that Jaxx’s glass eye had. At her feet, Jack Sloane had finally stopped moving. The air began to show the first signs of the cold night to follow. A gust of wind brought a chill to Megyn Alexander and made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. But she didn’t feel the cold.
“You shouldn’t be able to hurt me now,” she said quietly.
Something inside Jaxx snapped. There was something about the tall woman’s impetuous, nonchalant tone that made him suddenly blind with rage. He had wanted to learn more. He had wanted to say more. But, instead, he pulled the trigger of the customised Quartermaster.
The revolver in his hand wavered just a little. Despite its customisations, it was a heavy weapon. The 12mm, round-nosed metal jacketed bullets weighed slightly less than the .44 Magnum calibre bullets popular on Earth when the gun was first introduced. Enrilean ballistics experts had designed the bullets to be lighter at the front than at the rear, encouraging the bullet to tumble after hitting a target, inflicting much more damage. The ammunition was specially made; a lower recoil charge which gave a reduced muzzle velocity. But the slight decrease in kickback made the weapon manageable for Jaxx’s nerve damaged appendage. It recoiled hard when he fired it, but he held the weapon steady.
The air between Hazer Jaxx and Megyn Alexander hadn’t exactly solidified, but Megyn had altered its density enough to slow down and stop Jaxx’s bullet. The explosive tipped projectile cartwheeled for three turns through the invisible, treacly barrier. The small explosive charge embedded in the tip of the bullet exploded, making a muffled pop and creating a kaleidoscope of fractal oranges, reds and blacks as the energy was trapped within the densely packed wall of air molecules.
“You shouldn’t be able to hurt me,” She repeated, “Now, I think it would be nice if we had a little chat.”
The slightest movement of his head made Matt Silverman nauseous. But he could open his eyes now without the whole world spinning wildly. His head moved slightly to the left and the massive bruise on his temple touched the mattress that he was lying on. Again, the world began to whirl around wildly. Closing his eyes didn’t help. The liquid contents of his stomach retched out of him as he struggled to find the bowl that the metal hand was holding. He spat into it, but there was only a teaspoon of bile left in him.
Matt Silverman was in a nightmarish world of pain. He’d drifted into and out of consciousness many times since the ship had crashed. Now, he was only vaguely aware of where he was and what was happening. He knew that there had been an accident, but he’d forgotten all about Quinn. He viewed his bewildering world through fleeting moments of consciousness. The blood stained, dimly lit room. Grey metal walls. A dead man with a horrific, tortured expression on his face. The smell of death and fear all around. This was the confused terror Silverman found himself a prisoner within.
His head began to hammer like someone was pounding on it with their fist. Everything was moving, but nothing really was moving that much. He fought to stay focussed on the slender, robotic arm that held the shining silver bowl filled with his vomit and saliva. He found a familiar white nurse’s uniform adorning this new metallic thing. The world around him ducked and dived as he followed the sleeve of the uniform to a shoulder and then a stained, grey collar. Then he was looking into the shining, oval shaped face of a robot nurse.
“My head,” The effort was too much for Silverman, “Pillows. Please…”
He was trying to explain to the nurse that moving his head was making him ill. If she’d place a pillow on either side of his head, he would be fine. It was the movement of his head that was making him violently ill. The sympathetic, mechanical face stared at him without thought or emotion.
“When I move my head, I’m feeling sick,” He moaned.
He retched once more into the silver bowl, as if to make his point. The robot nurse held the bowl dutifully. It did not understand his requests for pillows. It had already placed a makeshift bolster under Matt’s head. Again, it signalled for the doctor, but the connection to the hospital server had been down for a long time. Still, the electronic call for help continued. But nobody could hear it.
“Please try to lie still,” the robot nurse advised for the umpteenth time, recalling the appropriate response from her programming, “The doctor will be with you soon.”
TWENTY EIGHT
2195AD - Crantarr.
The arrow was bright in the sky above. The night had come quickly, bringing with it a coldness that even Megyn Alexander could feel. In the space of a few minutes, the sky had turned to a rust hued velvet black. High above, stars she had once struggled to count shone brightly through the thin Crantarrian atmosphere. She looked up at the stars now, ignoring Jaxx and his men for just a few seconds. She closed her eyes for a second, but opened them quickly when she sensed Hazer Jaxx pushing against the air that she’d solidified between them. He removed his hand when she stared into his awful face. The pistol in his strong hand continued to aim directly at her temple.
“That was one of my first tricks. And it’s much more difficult than it seems. But there is a science behind it. I’m holding the air together with a delicate mesh of microscopic electrical circuits. All chained together neatly. It’s not perfect, and it’s not the strongest of shields. But even the thin air here is sufficient. It’ll hold together as long as I need it to. As long as this lasts.”
One of the soldiers was moving. The man on her left. He was moving around her. His weapon was still aimed at her torso. He stopped moving when he sensed her attention was on him. She didn’t turn her head to look at him. She could sense him out of the corner of her eye. It was
“The stars are beautiful,” she sighed, “I’ve seen so many, you wouldn’t believe. No, you might believe. You were always a believer, weren’t you? That’s one trait that you inherited from your father, isn’t it? And you’ve seen many stars too. You’ve travelled far across the galaxy; skipping from wormhole to wormhole. You’ve discovered eight new wormholes all on your own, but none of them came within a thousand light years of the one pla
ce you wanted to get to.”
Jaxx didn’t answer. He explored the fractured air that separated them. There were fragments of the bullet there. Shiny, thin slivers of the metal jacket. Dull, grey particles of heavy lead. Black, smoky dustings of gun powder. It was all suspended in the air and preserved. A minute fragment of time. Something that had happened and should have passed, but was held in an invisible trap. He shifted his good eye to Megyn Alexander’s face.
Crantarr hadn’t always had two moons. Like earth, the third and once most populous world in the Enrilean star system had long ago boasted only one large satellite. It was Crantarr’s original and craterless moon and the dull orange glow of Enrilea’s sunset that now illuminated Alexander’s high cheekbones and her thin, emotionless smile.
“The Apex star,” she didn’t look up at it, and neither did Jaxx, “So near and yet so far. You always thought that it was only a few wormholes away. You always hoped that someday your own command would take you to those undiscovered wormholes. You wanted to find your Gods, Admiral Hazer Jaxx. You wanted to ask them what you weren’t able to find out for yourself.”
“And what would that be?”
“You wanted to ask them what the truth was. Because you never believed what your father told you – even though he believed it himself. And you’ve never believed that there even were Gods.”
“Until you tried to kill me,” Jaxx interrupted, “I never believed any of it. I admired my father for his adherence to the old ways. For five years I even thought that he was just playing a role. The Empire is a strong one,” he spoke quietly, not wanting the Spellarins to hear him, “It’s an Empire based on an idea. The preservation of the strong and the subjugation of the weak.”
“Or the elimination,” Alexander whispered, matching his tone, “Or the extermination of those you’d deem as weak. Perhaps someone like me?”
Her eyes became cruel. He saw the change come over her subtly yet absolutely.
“A delicate and helpless woman like me?”
Jaxx almost smiled. She could see it in his mean eye.
“I would not, for one moment, consider you a delicate or helpless person.”
“And you’d be right not to,” her voice held a hint of icy danger.
“Our Empire has existed for over a thousand years. Without civil conflict of any kind. It is the strict adherence to the ancient ways that has allowed it to do so. We have lived at peace for a thousand years. We will live at peace for a thousand more.”
She laughed quietly, dryly. She forgot, momentarily, about Supreme Leader Kapp Gapp and his high powered rifle. He had moved further to Megyn Alexander's left. Closer to the car that she'd brought halfway across the galaxy from her home on Earth. She could see him now, out of the corner of her eye. His rifle was still aimed directly at her, but the invisible shield would not protect her if he fired. The middle aged Enrilean soldier crouched behind the front of the modified Triumph TR7. She frowned as she watched him lean on the paintwork.
“Try not to scratch my car. It’s a classic.”
She wanted to raise her left hand, but she felt that to do so would cause the broad shouldered soldier to fire even before she could begin to erect a new force field. Instead, she sent a brief telepathic message to the car itself without even twitching an eyebrow.
The TR7's petrol engine did not start. Instead, the silent and vastly more powerful altered momentum drive surged the car forward. Gapp never knew what hit him. The heavy bumper of the car crushed Gapp's stomach, pelvis and spine in a fraction of a second. Gapp didn't have time to react, but his finger tightened on the assault weapon's trigger. A single bullet zipped towards Megyn's face. She turned her head away at lightning speed, but only just managed to get out of the way of the bullet. It ploughed through the air a hairs breadth from her right cheek, embedding itself in the solidified air in front of her.
Jaxx fired instinctively. His revolver bellowed and a plume of fire lit his demonic, atrociously deformed features. The bullet plunged into the wall of air that Megyn had created between her and her nemesis. Jaxx did not know or realise that this second bullet had travelled much further than his first shot. He couldn’t see, either, the damage that the explosive bullet had caused to Alexander’s air shield. The light was fading. It was not possible for Jaxx to see that the bullet had all but completely fractured Megyn’s shield. He stepped back, moaning loudly, as the blast of his own weapon assailed his ears.
The other two soldiers held their fire, but they moved suddenly and quickly. Megyn’s right hand moved across her body. She concentrated her energies. One of the Spellerans opened fire, shattering Megyn’s shield with his first shot. If Jaxx had realised this, his Quartermaster would have killed Megyn. But he was staggering backwards, blood trickling from his damaged ear. He didn’t realise that the shield had been destroyed, and nor did the two remaining soldiers. The Spellerans fired again, missing Megyn as she moved swiftly to a crouched position. She pushed both her hands outwards, solidifying the air yet again. But the Enrilean assault weapons hammered against the thickened air faster than she could assemble the complex layers of the energy bound air shield. Some of the bullets hammered into the wall of air; others smashed right through it.
Jaxx was reloading his pistol. She moved her left hand in his direction. In the moonlight she could see his milky, cold stare. But only for a moment. A dark shape moved between them, blocking Jaxx from view. Bullets were still coming at Alexander from her right. The two Spelleran officers were shooting their weapons empty into the fragmented, crumbling air shield that she continued to rebuild between them. She brought her left hand back to join the right, making the air shield stronger. With a sudden burst of intense concentration she surged the densely packed air at the nearest of the two Spellerans. On her left, Jaxx was firing his big hand cannon. The bullet exploded hard against whatever object had placed itself between them. Meanwhile, chunks of Megyn’s disintegrating air shield slammed into the stomach, shoulder and temple of Lieutenant Commander Hunn. Hunn’s lightweight body armour absorbed the heaviest of the invisible chunks of debris, but his exposed forehead cracked open as a smaller, cricket ball sized, piece of hardened air spilt his brains all over the dry, brush covered ground. Hunn didn’t even see the barely visible crystalline structure that killed him. Commander Muffa, caught a glimpse of the blood spattered fragments of air as they flew past his left shoulder, carrying with them chunks of his comrade’s skull and brain.
Muffa screamed defiantly as he emptied his automatic weapon at Megyn Alexander. Alexander had run out of air to solidify, but Muffa’s bullets hammered against the black shape that now moved between Alexander and the blaze of leaden gunfire. Then, the weapon was silent. The dark shape moved to the right, strange and minute flickers of light twinkling as it disappeared from view. Megyn glanced towards Jaxx, who was preparing to fire again. She was close enough to touch him now and sent him spinning backwards with a bone breaking thrust from her left hand. Muffa was charging with a screaming, rage fuelled charge. He reloaded his weapon furiously as Megyn Alexander started her sprint towards him, crashing through her own now flimsy air barrier. Muffa clicked the new magazine into place and levelled the weapon. Alexander was just a few metres away when he fired the first few shots. The rough terrain slowed her down, but Megyn moved like a blur. Muffa’s carbine chattered in full auto mode, lighting the night as the bullets whizzed past and through Megyn Alexander. One passed through her left earlobe. Another tore into the muscles of her left shoulder, taking a chunk of bone with it. But she continued to run. Muffa kept firing. Another two of his bullets hit the running woman, one shattering her left hip and the other passing straight through her abdomen wall and into her lower intestines.
Her momentum carried her forward onto the Spelleran officer, but she was collapsing in agony as the hard wedge of her right forearm hammered into Muffa’s throat. Somewhere, deep beneath the pain, she realised that she hadn’t hit the last soldier hard enough to stop him getting back up. An
d she knew that the injuries she’d sustained meant that she wouldn’t be able to continue to fight.
Then, she was not able to think clearly at all. The pain was overwhelming. She couldn’t block it out. She couldn’t hide from it. She couldn’t scream out, the agony overloaded every fibre of her being. Muffa pushed her body from his own, but Megyn was only vaguely aware of it. She rolled on the ground, her right hand reflexively holding in her intestines as her life blood flooded the dry ground, mixing with Jack Sloane’s. The Enrilean officer was on his feet now, his weapon aimed down towards her. He was shouting something. She could feel her stomach escaping through her fingers. Everything was turning black. The dark shape had appeared again. This the dark mass vaguely resembled a quavering, deformed but definite humanoid shape. And it was no longer totally opaque. Megyn watched Muffa’s terrified expression distorted through the glassy figure. Then the crystal entity moved one of its limbs towards the Enrilean special forces commander. Sharp-edged, rugged digits seemed to grown from the blocky stump at the end of the figure’s arm. A hand was forming. Five fingers, totally transparent now, spreading out. Muffa raised his weapon. The crystal entity moved its hand in a delicate, twisting motion.
Commander Muffa’s pelvis snapped as his hips began to twist around. His stomach was squeezed tight as the bones of his lumbar and thoracic spine detached from each other. At this moment, the spike of intense pain experienced by Muffa ceased. His expression was frozen in a confused and terrified mask as his body continued to twist around, squeezed by the unseen forces generated by the crystal entity. His lungs were squashed flat and his ribs snapped one by one as his body twisted like a wrung out washcloth. He was dead by the time his heart popped like a fat, blood filled balloon. The monstrous twisting continued as Muffa’s brain began to realise that the rest of his body was no longer in one piece. His neck was wrung to the size of his wrist. His shoulders were forced backwards, bursting open his chest so that the mess of his ruined heart and lungs began to spill out. With a loud crack, the Enrilean’s skull cracked open like an egg.
Beyond the Starport Adventure (Bullet Book 1) Page 52
