Qayin rushed in toward Andaim, who kicked his foot across the sand at their feet and sent it spraying into Qayin’s face. The convict hesitated, swiping at the sand embedded in his eyes as Andaim rushed in and grabbed the big man’s head in his hands, twisting it sideways with all of his might and pulling downward.
Qayin was yanked off balance and flipped over to crash down onto the sand as Andaim landed on top of him, grabbing the convict’s hands and pulling them inward between them to cross the blades as he leaned down against the convict’s forerarms and pushed them toward Qayin’s throat.
Qayin’s thickly muscled arms bulged as he fought back against Andaim’s weight, his vast chest heaving as he sucked in air to fuel his strength. Andaim leaned further forward and pushed all of his weight across the blades as they sank toward Qayin’s neck.
‘You been looking forward to this?’ Andaim hissed, his voice hoarse with effort.
Qayin’s arms trembled beneath Andaim’s weight, the edges of the blades touching his skin, and Andaim saw his big dark eyes quiver with a brief flare of panic.
‘I ain’t afraid to die,’ Qayin snarled back with the last of his strength.
Andaim saw a red welt appear on Qayin’s neck beneath the blades as they sawed into his flesh. Andaim jerked back and rolled off Qayin, came up onto his feet and walked away from the fallen convict. He stared Cutler straight in the eye before spitting into the sand at his feet.
The cheering crowd of convicts soldiers fell silent and stared in disbelief at Andaim, stunned by his defiance. Cutler’s eyes widened with indignation and he seemed to tremble, his arm quivering with rage as he pointed at Qayin.
‘Kill him!’
Qayin lumbered to his feet, the blades still in his hands as he loomed before Andaim, his face stormy with pain and anger. The lieutenant turned to face Qayin and for a brief moment the huge convict glared down at Andaim. Then, he raised the two blades high above his head.
‘Now!’ Cutler shrieked.
Qayin blinked as something flashed through the air in front of him, an amorphous blob that trailed a sprinkle of sparkling water as it raced past and slapped across Cutler’s bare torso.
Cutler looked down in surprise and then his face collapsed in upon itself in unbearable agony as he screamed, one hand flashing to the curious blob on his skin and hurling it aside as he doubled over in pain.
Andaim lunged at Cutler and grabbed his pistol hand, then wrenched the wrist up and over. The convict spun over as he shrieked and writhed, the pistol dropping out of his hand and into Andaim’s.
Andaim turned and fired the pistol, hitting the convict holding Qayin’s pistol square in the chest. The blast hurled the convict onto his back, a smouldering charred hole gaping in his chest as one of the other men leaped at the fallen pistol and grabbed it.
‘Don’t move!’ Andaim yelled.
The convict whirled and fired at Andaim. The lieutenant hurled himself across the dusty ground and the plasma shot blasted past him to smash into the foliage along the edge of the treeline.
The convicts fled into cover as Andaim aimed at Qayin.
‘Move an inch and I’ll blow you away!’
Qayin remained crouched behind a trunk, and shot a look not at Andaim but past him. Andaim turned saw a bizarre creature standing on the edge of the oasis. He only recognised Evelyn’s face after a moment, partially concealed as it was beneath a dense mess of tangled foliage that likewise concealed her near–naked body beneath. In her hand was a long, twisted wooden staff of some kind.
Another plasma shot zipped from out of the treeline and Andaim hurled himself into cover behind a tree trunk as he looked across at Evelyn, the surprise on her face as evident as his own.
‘Evil Lynn,’ Qayin called out. ‘I had a feeling I hadn’t seen the last of you.’
‘Let Qayin go,’ Evelyn shouted above Cutler’s strained screams, her voice hoarse from dehydration.
‘Why do you keep protecting him?’ Andaim asked, but kept the pistol pointing at the convict.
‘I’ve got my reasons.’
‘What the hell is that thing?’ Andaim asked as he pointed at the strange blob now sprawled on the desert floor nearby. ‘And what happened to your clothes?’
‘I had a few problems,’ Evelyn said as she ducked out of sight as a plasma round blasted the tree beside her.
‘I’ll keep hanging with you,’ Qayin called to her with a bright smile, ‘just as long as you keep running into problems.’
Evelyn stared up the steep hillside to where the pillar of smoke and cloud was writhing as flashes of light shimmered violently within it.
‘The core is intact?’ she asked.
‘We don’t know,’ Andaim said as he glanced at Cutler writhing on the ground nearby. ‘We haven’t been up there yet.’
‘The fusion core represents power,’ Evelyn said. ‘If Cutler or the convicts get hold of that thing first, they’ll use it against us instead of against the Word.’
Andaim turned to look at Cutler again in time to see the old man hobbling away out of sight through the oasis, clutching his wounded chest. Andaim gestured to the corpse of the convict he had shot.
‘You’d better put on his fatigues,’ he said to Evelyn. ‘And then we have a mountain to climb.’
Evelyn heard the faint drone of turbine engines somewhere high above her in the sky. The haze and scattered cloud hid the source of the noise enough that she could not pick out where the craft was, but her first thought was that it sounded remarkably like a shuttle. Small engines, not those of a fighter aircraft. She craned her neck up to the sky, searching for the shuttle. If it was heading down to the surface and was nearby then there was a chance, however slim, of making it back to the ship.
‘Bra’hiv!’ she shouted with clairvoyant certainty.
From the dense foliage came a terse shout as Cutler found his voice again.
‘You go up there, you’re all dead!’
***
XXXI
‘Damn it!’ Andaim snapped.
Cutler’s men were recovering from the shock of Evelyn’s surprise attack and were re–grouping. As Andaim moved to climb the hill, a shot cracked out and crashed into the rocky hillside above him and forced him back into cover.
‘They don’t want to go home,’ Qayin called. ‘They’d kill themselves sooner than be put back in chains.’
‘Maybe,’ Evelyn replied. ‘But this place isn’t friendly and we have no resources. We won’t survive here.’
Qayin frowned. ‘You want to make it back aboard too?’
‘It’ll be the only chance we have to board a shuttle. Why, you think it’s going to be better for you down here with the new natives?’
‘I ain’t a prisoner down here. Not right now, anyways.’
‘And what happens when the Word arrives and finds humans populating this planet?’ Andaim challenged. ‘You think that it won’t seek to destroy each and every one of you too?’
‘Ain’t my problem,’ Qayin muttered. ‘I’ll be long gone.’
‘You sure will be if the Word finds you.’
‘We don’t have time for this,’ Evelyn said as she searched the turbulent sky overhead for the shuttle. ‘If that’s Bra’hiv, his men will set down on the plateau above us, secure the fusion core and be gone as fast as they can. If we don’t move now we’re going to become permanent residents.’
Andaim checked his pistol and nodded.
‘Go, I’ll cover you. Now!’
Evelyn leaped to her feet and ran up a steep gulley, probably carved over millennia by the run off from heavy rains that may once have fallen upon the parched deserts. Qayin lurched in pursuit as they heard Andaim open fire on the treeline, searing plasma blasts hitting trees and foliage and starting small fires amid the bush.
‘He’ll start smoking them out!’ Qayin warned.
Evelyn kept moving but glanced over her shoulder to see Andaim firing as he retreated up the hillside behind them. Shots zipped out from the
trees in reply, shattering rocks around Andaim as he turned and fled in pursuit of her.
The swirling mists were being drawn up the hillside past Evelyn, a gusting breeze that broke over the ridge and swirled upwards in a spiralling vortex of vapour that enveloped the top of the plateau above her.
The whine of ion engines howled above the infernal thunder of the fusion core as she clambered up the hillside, her breath sawing in her throat and her legs throbbing with exhaustion.
And then she heard the screams.
She turned and saw a man burst from the dense foliage of the oasis and run for the hillside, and behind him lunged a huge carnivore. Evelyn felt a pulse of alarm as she recognised one of the big animals that she had escaped by the shore, its fearsome jaws and yellow eyes blazing as it loped after the fleeing convict and hurled itself upon his back.
The creature’s jaws closed around the convict’s head as he screamed and with a sickening crunch they crushed his skull like an eggshell. The convict plunged face–down into the dust, the animal dwarfing him as it crashed down upon him with its jaws still clamped around his shattered skull.
A chorus of panic erupted from the treeline and dozens of convicts sprinted into view as from behind them lunged several more predators, their silky flanks shimmering in the light and their eyes wild as they took down two more victims to hellish screams of pain and fear.
‘What the hell are they?’ Qayin murmured, apparently immune to the bloodshed but curious about the beasts.
‘They’re the problem I had,’ Evelyn replied with a curse. ‘They must have tracked me.’
Evelyn saw Andaim shift his aim and fire upon one of the creatures. The plasma blast hit it square in the side and it roared loudly enough to be heard over the din of the fractured fusion core. The animal rolled over in the dust as it released its victim, who began crawling toward the hillside as the beast, its flanks charred with a smouldering wound, scrambled to its feet and roared in outrage.
‘We can’t leave them down there,’ Evelyn said.
‘Andaim thinks otherwise,’ Qayin replied.
Andaim scrambled up the hillside as he shouted to Evelyn. ‘I’ve only got three rounds left! They’re on their own!’
The convicts streamed to the hillside as the huge beasts ran among them. Evelyn saw one of them sprinting toward the hillside with a pistol in his hand. The convict fired at the nearest creature, catching it a glancing blow as he ran and setting the thick shaggy hair around its head aflame.
Evelyn looked up and spotted the shuttle as it descended in a wide turn to land above them on the plateau, it’s metallic surface flashing against the apocalyptic sky above.
‘Go!’ Evelyn shouted to Qayin.
‘What are you going to do?’ the big man challenged. ‘They’re not worth the risk!’
‘We need every man we can get!’ Evelyn shot back. ‘Good or bad, the more people we have to fight the Word, the better!’
Evelyn shot past Andaim as he reached her, the lieutenant staring at her in amazement as she snatched the pistol from his hand and hurried down the hillside, leaping from rock to rock as convicts flooded in the opposite direction past her.
Evelyn hit the dusty earth and looked straight into the eyes of a carnivore, its teeth stained red and a ragged piece of a convict’s fatigues caught between them. It growled at her and coiled its legs to attack, but Evelyn aimed and fired a shot straight into the beast’s face.
The plasma round smashed into the animal and fused its face in a mass of cauterised tissue, blinding it in an instant. The animal howled in agony and staggered sideways before it collapsed dead on the ground.
Evelyn leaped past it and saw the armed convict running toward her, the pistol still in his hand.
‘Get up that hillside!’ she yelled. ‘Leave me the pistol!’
The convict made to run past her, holding the weapon out of her reach. Evelyn jumped left and brought her knee up into the man’s belly with a satisfying thump that blasted the wind from his lungs. The convict doubled up and slammed onto the ground in a cloud of dust as Evelyn stamped down on his wrist and wrenched the weapon from his grasp.
‘Don’t shoot!’ he pleaded, his eyes wide with panic and his hands raised.
Evelyn did not dignify him with a reply as she whirled and fired at the animals attacking the convicts. The blasts forced them back as the fleeing men charged past her and scrambled up the rocks. Evelyn retreated a few paces, and then she saw Cutler.
The old man was clutching his wounded chest where he had been stung, dust clouding his vision as he staggered into view. The beasts spotted him and turned to attack.
Cutler’s features collapsed into panic as he realised that he was cut off. She saw him shout, but the cacophony of the fusion core and the shuttle landing above them was too loud to hear what he was saying. Evelyn waved her arms in the air and Cutler saw her as she hurled her spare pistol toward him.
The pistol arced through the air over the creatures arrayed before Cutler and the old man reached up and caught it. He turned the weapon in his hand and fired at two of the beasts, the blasts sending them howling away as the pack scattered before him.
Cutler half–ran, half–limped toward Evelyn as she held the other pistol and fired two or three shots to keep the animals at bay. Cutler struggled past her and clambered up the hillside as Evelyn retreated from the animals and turned.
She saw the animal from the corner of her eye, huge and fast as it lunged from the treeline. Big, fearsome yellow eyes were framed by a smouldering mane of thick hair and huge yellowing fangs as it sprinted toward her, trailing blue smoke.
Evelyn aimed fired, and the pistol clicked.
‘Cutler, I’m out!’ she yelled as she looked back at the old man.
Cutler looked down at her, his grey eyes cold and without emotion, and then he turned and ran up the hillside with the pistol still in his grasp.
Evelyn whirled as the huge beast charged at her, and in desperation she hurled the weapon at its terrible face. The pistol bounced off its bloodied and scarred snouth as it leaped into the air toward her, its fearsome claws extended.
The plasma blasts hit it across the face and chest as Evelyn crouched down before it, smashing the huge creature aside. It slammed into the ground alongside Evelyn in a cloud of dust, and she turned to see Andaim and several marines standing on the edge of the plateau above, their rifles smouldering from their shots.
Evelyn jumped to her feet and ran at the hillside as more plasma shots kept the rest of the animals at bay, leaping up through the deep gulleys as she climbed toward the sound of the fusion core and the shuttle’s whining engines. The wind howled past her, her long hair rippling in front of her eyes as with the last reserves of her will she struggled to the plateau. Andaim reached down and grabbed her arm, helping her up the last few steps.
She staggered onto the plateau and saw a group of marines standing with their weapons aimed at the convicts, Cutler and Qayin at their head. Behind them, some thirty cubits away and enveloped in a terrific vortex of vapour and swirling cloud, was the fusion core.
The jagged outer shell of the core lay upon the rocky outcrop and was blasting a slim ray of tremendous fusion energy upward into the swirling vapour clouds. Evelyn figured that the core had fractured a tiny hairline crack in its shell, enough to blast off half of the slightly weaker outer shell but not enough for the core to explode completely. The ray of light, she knew, was many thousands of degrees in temperature. One false move in securing it and everybody would be incinerated.
‘Nice of you to join us again!’ Bra’hiv shouted above the noise. ‘I believe that this is yours?’
The general handed her the pistol that she had thrown to Cutler. She took the weapon back and looked at the old convict, who stood once again with his wrists manacled and watched her with a nervous expression. The wind howled around them as above Evelyn heard a crackle of lightning. The sky seemed to shake around her as thunder rolled across the plains below.
‘If you want to finish him off,’ Bra’hiv said, ‘now would be a good time. I and my men would not blame you, and with all of this noise and cloud I doubt we’d even notice.’
Cutler’s face twisted with a sneer that she could tell veiled true fear. The wind howled past Evelyn, her hair whipping around her face, and the heat built up around her as the leaking energy from the core seared it. She paced toward Cutler until she was standing right in front of him, the light from the setting sun framing her wild hair with a fiery halo, and with one hand she pressed the muzzle of the pistol against his belly.
Cutler swallowed, his eyes fluttering and sheened with clear fluid.
‘You’re scum!’ Evelyn shouted. ‘The worst of the worst, barely a human being at all. There is nothing redeeming about you at all Cutler, not a single thing.’
Evelyn activated the pistol and felt the energy contained in the plasma magazine vibrate. Cutler’s legs buckled a little, his grey eyes fixed upon hers.
‘Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you here and now,’ she demanded.
Cutler’s jaw quivered, and he coughed his reply.
‘I can’t.’
Evelyn stared at Cutler for a long moment, and then she lowered the pistol and turned to Bra’hiv as she gestured at the core. ‘Can you get that thing secured and aboard?’
‘We brought the container, but we’ll have to let the robotic arm load the core!’ Bra’hiv shouted. ‘You’d better let us handle this!’
Evelyn looked at Cutler and a cold little grin formed on her features.
‘Maybe they should do the heavy lifting and earn their damned place!?’ she shouted, her voice almost drowned out by the roar.
The marines, working in a team of eight men, carefully rolled a container out of the shuttle, a massive box with sides lined with hull–plating. One of their headscarves was torn away by the force of the gale and flashed toward the pillar of energy, and Evelyn saw it flutter into the light and vanish in a flash of embers.
Atlantia Series 1: Survivor Page 21
