Legend of Alm -The Valor Saga Pt 1 - Falling Star

by Graham M. Irwin

  “Two days,” answered Mills. “Though, that’s only a guess, really, based on the awful meals they’ve been serving us. We don’t get any natural light, so, who knows.”

  “Any of those awful meals left?” Anaxis asked, rubbing his belly and looking around the cell. “I’m starving.”

  “No, but it’ll come soon enough,” said Mills. “And trust me, once you’ve tasted it, you’ll be alright with starving.”

  Four meals later, the three were led out of their cell, through a series of tunnels and hallways, and into the back of a carriage. The carriage was pulled away from the jail by a lumbering gatowat, which didn’t seem any happier about being chained to the cart than those in back did about being held captive in it. It took much prodding on the part of the gatowat’s drivers for the beast to start moving, and once it did, it crept along the street at an extremely slow pace.

  “Just around this next corner ahead,” Maleira whispered. “That’s when we’ll break free.”

  “At this rate, we’ll be to that corner by next year,” said Mills.

  “Get ready,” said Maleira. He unbuckled his belt to pull a small piece of paper out from a secret pocket on its inside.

  When the gatowat reached the corner, it stopped for the traffic running through the perpendicular street. It was then that Maleira made wide eyes at Anaxis and Mills, to let them know that it was time. He folded over the small piece of paper from his belt, and began to rub it between his fingers. The paper started to smoke. It then burst into a bright red flame. Maleira flung the blaze out of the jail cart, at the rear end of the gatowat. The paper stuck onto the beast’s flesh, where it continued to burn with the greater intensity of a bright white heat. This made the gatowat roar and rear up, throwing the cart from its shoulders. As the guards raced around to try and calm the beast, the cart smashed into the ground and cracked open.

  “This is it, boys!” Maleira shouted. “Follow me!”

  He braced himself against one side of the cart and gave a hard kick to the opposite, broken side, which split it apart wide enough for him to squeeze out onto the street. Anaxis and Mills rolled out after, and all three were a block away before the guards realized what had happened.

  “Here, through here!” Maleira cried, ducking into an alley.

  At the end of the alley there was a fire escape, up which through the three escapees ran with all their might. They were nearly at the top of the escape when the first guards entered the alley, shouting to any open windows that fugitives were on the loose in the area.

  The three escapees made it onto and across the roof. Maleira was the first to the edge, and he assessed for the others how far it was to the next building.

  “We’ll jump,” he said to the other two as they skidded to meet him. “We can make it.”

  Mills looked for himself at the huge gap between the two buildings and shook his head. “No, we can’t!”

  “We have to,” Maleira answered. “Back up; we need all the momentum we can get!”

  The three raced back to the middle of the roof, then started again for the edge, just as the first guards made it up the fire escape behind them.

  “Stop!” the guards shouted. “Stop immediately!”

  The three fugitives leapt from the roof in quick succession, to soar through the air and fall, with various rates of success, onto the next roof.

  Mills hit the hardest, without any tumbling to lessen the impact.

  “Wait! I think I’m broken,” he huffed to the others, who were already up and rushing forwards.

  “No time for broken!” Maleira shouted back. “Up on your feet!”

  Mills pulled himself up and threw himself into a run. By the time he made it to the jump for the next rooftop, he saw that Anaxis and Maleira were already landed and turning around a skylight to head south. Mills jumped and stuck his second landing perfectly. He had closed a good portion of the gap between himself and the other two fugitives when a booming Silver rose up from street level. Its shadow fell over the trio and the subsonic vibration from its engines rattled their skulls.

  Maleira slid to a stop, grabbing hold of Anaxis as he did so. The two fell backwards and Mills caught up to them under the nose of the Silver, which loomed steady and menacing in its white sunlight halo. Coming up right behind was a small army of guards.

  “Where do we go now?” Anaxis screamed over the roar of the Silver’s engines.

  “Follow me!” Maleira hollered back.

  He led the boys back towards the pyramidal skylight that rose up from the center of the roof.

  “Why?” Mills begged as the guards now came rushing at them head-on. “Why are we going this way?”

  “Don’t think!” Maleira shouted. “Trust me!”

  He led with a kick when he jumped at the skylight, shattering through the glass as he blasted through its frame.

  “But…!” Mills cried to Anaxis.

  “Don’t think!” Anaxis said, bearing down to jump. “Trust him!”

  Anaxis leapt and then Mills reluctantly followed after, straight through the shattered skylight. Their fall was brief; they splashed down into a large, square pool in seconds. Anaxis was the first to surface, and he heard Maleira shouting when he did so.

  “Watch for the broken glass!” he cautioned. “And, quickly, stay with me!”

  Anaxis and Mills swam to the edge of the pool and pulled themselves up over its green swirlstone lip. They ran for the door Maleira had just slipped through to find themselves at the top of a dark stairway on the other side. They began to barrel down the stairs, slipping and teetering on their wet feet yet somehow managing to stay upright.

  “Floor seven!” Maleira’s voice echoed up through the stairwell. “A left at floor seven!”

  The boys burst out of the stairwell onto the seventh floor. Both had so much speed that they ran into the wall across from the door, before pushing themselves off and lunging onward.

  The door at the end of the hallway opened to another rooftop. Maleira’s speed was starting to sag, and so Anaxis and Mills were able to catch up with him as he raced towards the edge.

  “It’ll be a left once we’ve cleared it,” Maleira gasped through heaving breaths. “And then we’ll head underground.”

  “Don’t we want to get out, not go further in?” asked Mills.

  “Just…” Maleira said, “Just… You’ll see. Trust me.”

  All three barely made it over the gap, with both Anaxis and Mills having to grab for the ledge and dangle above the squealing gawkers below. When the two somehow found the strength to lift themselves onto the roof, they found Maleira kneeling down, heaving and sweating.

  “What is it?” Anaxis asked Maleira as the Silver again peered over the rooftop.

  “It’s nothing,” Maleira said. “I’m just out of shape. No one’s fault but my own. Help me up. We’re almost there!”

  Anaxis and Mills aided the limping Maleira as he barked instructions to a fire escape on the western wall of the building they stood atop. Just as they reached the stairs, the Silver started to emit a piercing whine, as its canons charged. Their fiery blasts came just as the fugitives started their descent, blowing a huge hole through the roof of the building and an even larger hole in the building across the street. The raining debris and destruction was the perfect cover for Anaxis, Mills, and Maleira, whose speed down the fire escape impressed even them. When they hit street level, the crowds were in such a panic that the guards couldn’t tell which way was which. The three fugitives slipped into the mess of confusion for better cover, and wound through it to a tight alleyway. They stole down the alleyway to a barely discernable panel in the ground, which Maleira kicked up using a crusty foot-trigger. The panel rose slowly on its rusty mechanics, just enough for the three to slide under it. Maleira pulled the panel back shut, and the trio was in near-complete darkness.

  “Can we catch our breath?” asked Mills.

  “No,” Maleira said as he activated a glow-band. “It’ll only be se
conds before they’re here. But we’re close! Push yourselves just a bit more.”

  The three ran through the utility tunnel below the city with only the dim glow from Maleira’s wristband to light the way. The tunnel ended suddenly and dramatically when it opened up into a colossal underground hangar.

  “Where are we now?” asked Anaxis.

  “Drone storage,” answered Maleira. “Time to fly.”

  “Oh, no,” lamented Mills. “I hate flying.”

  Maleira stopped at the first craft the three came to, opened a panel on its underside, and started to enter a code into a touch screen therein. The ship’s engine revved to life and a passenger door swung down.

  “In, get in!” Maleira ordered the boys.

  Anaxis dragged Mills in after Maleira, who ran to the cockpit to prepare the ship for take-off. The hangar was flooded by city guardians in streams that nearly reached the airship before it rose up from the floor.

  A door started to open on the far end of the hangar, slowly, as a result of Maleira’s work with the ship’s computer.

  “You two ready?” he asked over his shoulder into the ship’s cabin.

  “No!” Mills shouted back.

  “We’re ready,” answered Anaxis.

  “Here we go!” Maleira announced, before launching the ship forward.

  The force of takeoff blew the guardians below the ship around like tumbleweeds. The craft was at the exit to the hangar in an instant, just as the doors were reversed and starting to close again. The ship barely made it through the thin gap the closing doors afforded it, and then Maleira kicked the engines into high gear. The craft screamed as it jetted over the water in the bay that divided Gnirean from the mainland. Soon, the fugitives were over Exile, and not long after, Gnirean had faded from view.

  A fleet of drones busted out from the city after the stolen ship as soon as the doors to the hangar could open again.

  “We’re not free yet,” Maleira said to the boys in the cabin, now through the intercom system he had brought online. “We’ll have the whole drone force after us soon enough.”

  “Silvers?” Mills asked Anaxis. “We’re doomed!”

  “They’re powerful, but not that bright,” Maleira said. “Let’s not count ourselves out, just yet.”

  He took the ship north, into an off-shore archipelago where towering limestone pillars and tiny islets topped by forest rose from emerald waters. The drones followed in close and orderly pursuit, whipping up a trench of watery spray beneath them. Maleira wound the long string of drones through tighter and tighter turns and squeezes between the archipelago’s islands, but could not manage to slow them down.

  Anaxis crawled up into the turret on the second level of the ship to get a better view, leaving Mills alone shaking and wide-eyed in the cabin.

  “I can’t lose them. This isn’t working,” Maleira mused to himself in the cockpit. “We need something more drastic.”

  “More what?” Mills asked from the cabin.

  “Drastic!” Maleira answered. “In three. Two. One.”

  He pulled the ship around an impossibly tight turn, looping over a skinny column in a helix pattern before continuing on. The maneuver so confused the tightly-formed drones that several of the ships crashed into one another as they followed after. They soon recalculated and corrected themselves, but not before losing a small portion of their fleet.

  “That took care of a few of them,” Anaxis said as he watched the drones scramble to reorganize.

  “We need to take care of a lot more of them,” said Maleira. “Why don’t one of you boys crawl up into the turret…”

  “I’m already here,” said Anaxis.

  “Well then why aren’t you using the cannon?” asked Maleira.

  Anaxis noticed the controller for the cannon just below the rim of window.

  “Should I?” he asked Maleira.

  “Now would be a good time,” Maleira said. He wound the ship through a maze of limestone, using such twists and turns as to nearly cause Anaxis to fall off the ladder he was perched atop. Anaxis grabbed the cannon controller to steady himself. Once he had, he moved the controller around to see how the weapon mounted to the roof outside reacted. When he had a good feel for it, he shot off a quick round. The first shots hit forest, shaking trees and causing an explosion of leaves, and then Anaxis took aim at the nearest drone.

  “We’ve got a decent stretch of straight flying here,” called Maleira. “Do what you can!”

  The ship roared over the pristine bay, the screaming drones behind it matching its every pitch and dive perfectly. Anaxis pulled the trigger on his cannon controller and a stream of fiery cannon charge started to flow. The stream rose up to meet the nearest drone, and carved a great hole through its exterior. The ship ripped in half and fell into the water with a great splash.

  “Got one!” Anaxis cried.

  The next nearest drone fired a rocket, which Maleira ejected a bit of deterrent waste into the air to explode.

  “You got one, but now they’re going to fire back,” he said. “Now they’re escalating.”

  Anaxis managed to explode the next rocket fired at the ship.

  “Okay, here’s a chance to lose a few more,” Maleira said of an upcoming cave. “It’s going to get dark!”

  The huge cave swallowed the ship and dozens of drones behind it into its watery depths. The dark grotto trembled with the noise and force of the craft blasting through. Bright explosions of fire occasionally lit up the cave when one of the drones would careen into the walls or off one of the rocky mounts that jutted up from the choppy waters below.

  Three more drones smashed into the top of the cave exit when Maleira pulled his ship up along the edge. He wound up the mountain atop the cave three times until he reached its forested peak, and then began to cruise down over its back side. The drones spun up in a neat spiral after the fugitives, and followed after them back into the maze of islands.

  “We’ve got to hold back on cannon fodder,” Maleira announced to Anaxis. “We need the energy for flying. I have no idea how long they’ll sustain pursuit.”

  “I’ll hold off,” Anaxis retorted. “It seems as if the drones may be, too, for some reason. They’ve stopped firing.”

  “No, they’re just waiting,” Maleira said. “Or, worse, getting ready to use the ray.”

  “Ray?” Mills said.

  “Evanescence ray,” explained Maleira. “Much less exact than cannon or rocket but much more devastating. Actually, it’s worse than devastating, it’s disintegrating.”

  “What’s that mean?” asked Mills.

  “Careful!” Maleira blurted out.

  A thunderous boom echoed around the bay as a red flash lit up the sky. In an instant, a gaping tunnel appeared clear through a stretch of islands.

  “They ray is operational!” Maleira cried.

  He steered the ship into a tight circle, stringing the following drones into a tight coil, and then fell out of the circle just as another blast of evanescence ray lit up the sky to disintegrate ten of the drones that couldn’t escape its path.

  “There are less than half of them left, now,” Anaxis said.

  “That’s stilll too many,” said Maleira. “Let’s see what some speed can do.”

  He pushed the ship as fast as it would go, off the ocean, over a wide beach, and onto a low, flat plain. Grass flew up from the low-flying craft as the water had under its force in the bay. The three dozen or so drones now remaining spread out into a wide V across the plain, a massive sweeping arrow after the lone refugee ship.

  The land started to hiccup in short little hills over which Maleira hovered closely. He dipped down over one of the mounds and managed to skip a few of the drones off the ground, but the effort wasn’t enough. The ships kept closing in, fast.

  “I’m out of tricks,” Maleira said despondently. “If we go down, if we survive…”

  The drones suddenly unleashed their cannon fire all at once, which tore the land underneath
the fugitives’ ship asunder.

  “It’s over!” Mills shrieked.

  The ship bounced and pitched around exploding hills and mounds of flying dirt and grass.

  Just before the concentration of dronefire reached the ship’s tail, two new ships appeared, moving against the direction of the others. They began firing at the arrow of drones, picking several off easily before the others were even aware of their presence.

  “I think we’ve got help, boys!” Maleira whooped.

  “Help?” Anaxis gasped. “From who?”

  “From Haven!” Maleira cheered.

  The two new ships to the scene came in tight on either side of Maleira’s ship. He managed to regain control and pull the ship up at a sharp angle.

  The ship soared up, around, and back down into firing position along with the two new allies from Haven. The three blasted at the approaching drones, exploding more than half of the remaining fleet. Their success was short-lived, however, and the still-overpowering drones brought down one of the new ships. Maleira could not avoid the drone fire, either, and lost one of his engines. He started to crash as the other aid ship escaped.

  “We’re going down!” Maleira cried to Anaxis and Mills. “This could be the end!”

  Mills looked up at Anaxis, who was scurrying back down from the cannon turret into the cabin.

  “Is that it?” Mills asked in a quiet voice.

  Anaxis took a seat right beside him and said, “Could be.”

  “That was a lot of fun, anyways,” Mills said, leaning over onto his friend’s shoulder.

  “Best time of our lives,” Anaxis agreed.

  Maleira brought the ship down as gently as he could with an engine missing. The drones knew they had destroyed the craft, and so left to pursue the remaining ship from Haven.

  The fugitive’s ship started to skim over the tall grass. There was nothing Maleira could do now, so he released the controls. The ship met the ground and slid along for quite some time, until it struck a large boulder. It continued to slide over the grass, but now with a wobble. The wobble got so great that the ship’s wing dug into the ground, which added a spin to the expending momentum. The ship spun and wobbled for a short distance further, before coming to a gentle stop.