The Great Game

by O. J. Lowe

  “Hey, each one you put down is another few seconds you get to live,” Navarro shot back. “Not getting killed works for me in a big way.”

  Alex tried to block them out, focused only on the flying, spinning the Wolf Rose round almost on the head of a pin, a tight manoeuvre in a HAX, she could feel the sides of the albus straining in on her as she pulled it in on this. Controls squealed in defiance, she couldn’t do this again. It’d be a real strain on the systems, she didn’t want to blow something… And yet it had come off almost flawlessly. Now she was locked back in on the airbase, the Eye of Claudia or whatever she’d overheard it being called while in her cell. The defensive guns were firing again, she could see them starting their chain fire, one, two, three, four, all going for the Bounty Snatcher. Five, six, seven…

  “Full thrusters ahead!” she barked. “We need to get on an intercept course, cut those guns off before they build up full power.” Eight, nine, ten, eleven…

  “You want us to speed on ahead and wait for you?” Makeshift Seventeen asked politely. Somehow, he managed to make it sound sarcastic as well and Alex bit back a retort. Now she was holding the rank of Commander, at least temporarily, she had to conduct herself with a little more decorum. She’d find out who he was and kick his ass when they made it out of here.

  What she did instead was divert even more power into her thrusters and felt the sheer force of the movement plaster her back into her seat, shooting straight past all the HAX’s that had moved to overtake her, suddenly she was straight on a collision course with one of the hulls of the great airbase…

  Not quite. She would have had she not reacted, shoved the controls straight up and it was tight, it was oh so tight, she could almost feel the hull scrape against the belly turret, could hear Anne Sullivan swearing angrily, but the upside was that in the sudden rise, the twin turrets did flash furiously and crash out three, four, five of the guns. The fire halted for several seconds before starting once again. Depleted. She punched the air. Now if the rest of them could do their job, they’d be sitting pretty.

  More eaglefighters were closing in on them, she could feel shots suddenly raining down on her shields and she twisted the Wolf Rose away from them, saw the flash of laser screech past her viewport and she accelerated away, daring them to chase her. The guns were firing, two of them exploded into fireballs but more were coming. Makeshift Squadron were already heading for their targets, she was on her own for the moment, no wing support…

  But she didn’t need it. This ship was fast, way too fast for the enemy and so she swung down towards the cannons lining the deck of the airbase, a determined grimace locked across her face. See if you’ll follow me down here…

  The cannons were slowly building up to a head again, the faint glow spilling from them to show that their time was near and she punched it once again, hitting her thrusters to maximum…

  Here we go again!

  … and sped straight past the open mouth of the cannon, three, four, five fighters following her just as the cannons fired. Two of them exploded instantly, one of them lost a wing and spun out of control off into the distance until it was hit by the laser fire of another HAX way out in the middle of the battlefield. She couldn’t think of a worse way to die than that.

  “Commander, we have arrived at our targets, preparing attack runs now,” someone said in her earpiece, she didn’t have chance to work out who it was.

  “We could talk all day,” Caldwell said. “But I’m afraid we have to get going. There’s a nice private cell with your name on it, dear sister.”

  “You’re no brother of mine,” Claudia said, narrowing her eyes at him. “Not now. Not ever again. I renounce you as a traitor to the name Coppinger. When the new world comes, you’ll be the first to be dragged before me and I promise you a very unpleasant death.” She bared her teeth at him as she said it. Caldwell brushed it off without so much as a retort.

  “Did she always go on like this?” Nick asked suddenly. Connor Caldwell craned his head over towards him and gave a half smirk.

  “And you!” Claudia said, jabbing a finger towards Nick. “Don’t even consider where you’re going to be. It’s not too late for you to join me though. Shoot him.” She jerked her head towards Caldwell. “Shoot him and join me and I’ll make you everything that you ever wanted to be. I’ll give you anything you want.”

  Nick looked at her long and hard, sighed sadly. “Sorry, there’s only one thing I want and I doubt you’re going to be able to give it to me.”

  A smug smirk replaced the frown. “Oh, you never quite know. You never do know when you might see her again.”

  That caught him with a start, she flexed a hand and hit a button on the remote control that had activated the guns earlier. Somewhere off in the ship, they heard a roar and a clang, something either way too close or way too loud. They both turned their heads and in that split second, Wim Carson was there, minus a weapon and looking ragged. He brandished a hand at them and suddenly both Nick and Caldwell were airborne for moments, hurled back by an invisible force, hitting the ground hard. That moment to recover themselves was all it took, already the two of them were on-board the shuttle and the engines firing up. Nick cursed, grabbed the blaster pistol up and started to fire at it, emptying the power pack into the fuselage but to no avail as it gently rose up off the ground and made for the doors at the end of the hangar.

  More blaster fire behind him, he glanced around and saw Brendan King and co making their way in, all armoured up and all weapons blazing. But even their combined weaponry couldn’t do what his blaster had been unable to, laser bolts bouncing off it. One of Brendan’s golems even launched a uniblast towards it but to no avail, the attack narrowly sailed wide, singeing a wingtip perhaps but nothing more.

  “Fuck!” Caldwell swore, beating his fist into the ground as the team made their way over towards them. “Where were you twenty seconds ago?”

  “Calm it, Agent Caldwell,” Brendan said dryly. “Stand down, the pair of you.”

  “Oh, he is with us then?” Nick asked. “I thought he was bullshitting her.”

  “Really?” Caldwell replied. “I know all about you. I’ve been running cover for you since you got up here. Really good plan by the way, Roper. Get yourself captured and brought up here. That’s not at all suicidally reckless, is it?”

  “How is that any different to what you did?” Nick inquired. “We haven’t heard anything from you…”

  “Yeah but I wasn’t a captive. How were you planning on making your report from here? How were you planning on leaving?”

  Nick smirked coolly at him, somewhat aware that the rest of the team was looking at him. “I’d have worked it out.”

  “Wow, that’s reassuring,” Caldwell said. “Some real tidy undercover work here and you all come in threatening to blow it all.”

  “Okay there’s a lot of hostility here,” Tod Brumley said. “Let’s calm it down. Lot of people didn’t tell a lot of other people about what was going on.”

  “We didn’t even know where you’d gone,” Lysa said to Nick, smiling at him. “We thought Ritellia had had you carted off to some… My Divines! You did it deliberately didn’t you? Took a swing at him to get locked up and hope you’d get dragged up here.”

  “They seem to like people who hate it the way it is,” Caldwell said. “Weird like that, but hey, it almost worked.”

  Brendan wasn’t listening at this point, still engaged in communication with someone else, a frustrated look on his face.

  “Listen to me, Admiral,” he said angrily. “You need to intercept a shuttle that’s on the way away from this airbase. Shoot it down, kill everyone aboard! Yes, I’m aware you’re fighting a battle, but the battle is pointless if the people aboard get away…. Yes, that couldn’t be helped. Sometimes you can’t control every piece on the board, Admiral. It’d be an easier job if we could.”

  “Err…” Lysa suddenly piped up. “What the hells is that?”

  Something scarlet was c
oming through the open hangar door, prising the huge metal slides aside with its bare hands, the sound cutting through Brendan’s voice with a wicked screech, the being not so much walking as floating, far away but closing in fast…

  Chapter Sixty-Seven. The Unialiv.

  “And what of life after death? Who’s to say that the dead don’t remain with us in our memories? Because if someone is there to remember them, can they ever truly die?”

  James Michael Tan, five kingdoms philosopher.

  The third day of Summerfall.

  The entire left side of Kyra’s body had gone numb. She tried to move it, felt uneasy about the whole thing and hissed in pain as fire coursed through her. Lucky bastard, just…

  No, a calm voice somewhere amidst the hurt and the rage rationalised to her. She didn’t want to admit that it sounded like her in some of her more serendipitous moments. Not luck. You were sloppy, you thought you’d won it and he punished you. Which is still less than the master will do if he finds out about this whole damn mess.

  She gulped at that thought. It wasn’t a pleasant one. Few regarding the master were. Sometimes she was sure that voice in her head, that calmness personified, was something he’d implanted deep into her mind to ensure that he could always monitor her. That he could always influence her no matter how far away they might be.

  It was ridiculous of course. He didn’t have that kind of power…

  That you’ve ever seen, that same voice reminded her. Maybe it was a side effect of the electrical surge that had struck her. She had only just stopped convulsing; he’d had her dead to rights…

  Just as she had to him moments earlier. Minus one blade and the one he was using flickering out badly like it had been poorly constructed, Kyra had taken the offensive and thrown a flurry of attacks at him that he’d been all on just to block away from touching him. He was tiring, she’d seen that for a while, his movements were growing sluggish and slow and all it would have taken was one false step…

  Which had come, granted but not perhaps as fatal a one as she had hoped for. He’d tried to push her blade back, overreached and she’d danced around it, feeling the potent mixture of both the Kjarn and exhilaration flowing through her…

  And sheared through the top of his weapon, cut away the energy flow through it and rendering it little more than two useless pieces of metal, good only for scrap. She’d had him, fresh joy bursting through her like fireworks as she’d raised her weapon to finish him off, she was going to be the first Cavanda for a good few years to kill a Vedo…

  Bastard had sucker punched her, pulled her trick back on her from earlier. She’d tried the lightning, so had he. She’d screamed as it had thrown her back, sent her muscles into spasms, leaving her laid on the floor in a pile of blood and sweat and the contents of her bladder. All he’d need to do was summon her weapon to his hand and bury it into her face and that’d be the end of Kyra Sinclair. Her story would have been closed.

  But he hadn’t. She still couldn’t work that out as he’d studied her thoughtfully, just for a second and then he’d turned to run, straight back into the hangar.

  And that was it. Failure on her part. She could already picture herself bowing before her master, explaining how it had all gone so badly. She could hear the coldness in his voice. So, he’d say, not only did you get yourself captured by powers unaligned to our own cause, but you revealed said powers to those individuals. And with those individuals having a Vedo amongst them, you have also revealed yourself to them. Now they may be few but it doesn’t mean they’re gone. Never underestimate an enemy faced with extinction. We might be many and they might be few but things change. Once the reverse was true. How long before they now work out we are still out there? Align themselves together once again to hunt us down?

  That voice was cold and all too real in her mind. She could hear it and it wasn’t pleasant. She really didn’t want to go back to him but at the same time, what choice did she have? If she ran, he would find her sooner or later. And if it was later, then Divines help her. At least if she went back to him, he might find it somewhere in his black heart to grant her a quick death for complete and utter abject failure.

  Dress it up however you like, that was what it was and that was probably what it would remain. No way of redeeming this situation.

  Gingerly, she flexed her muscles and though they were still horribly sore from the current that had raced through them, she was lucky to be in one piece. She’d seen people rendered horribly deformed by pure Kjarn lightning, had seen their bones contract and their flesh melt from the muscles, they looked like nothing more than huge candles by the time the full force of energy had been ripped into them. Those that were lucky died before it finished. She’d never forget the screams of those who were still alive, hoarse and cracked through sheer power of a force they couldn’t hope to stand against.

  The man had been a Vedo and a poor one, no doubt about that. Not a killer instinct in him. A Cavanda wouldn’t have left her alive. It probably wouldn’t have been a quick death either. Excruciating most likely.

  Any threat her master might be able to bring against her wasn’t worth considering, at least not for the moment anyway. As she stood up, she realised that, taking in her surroundings. She still had to get off this damn ship anyway before that could happen. If she died doing that, at least it’d solve her problems of dying sooner rather than later.

  “Wolf Rose, Commander Nkolou, do you receive?”

  That was Criffen’s voice again and Alex subconsciously sat up a little straighter in her seat, wishing he’d picked a better time to get in touch. The bombing runs were going well, the newly fashioned together Makeshift Squadron were doing their jobs across the killing fields that the outer rims of the airbase had slowly become. Before, there had been many guns across a plateau of supposedly unassailable metal. Turned out it wasn’t so unbreakable after all. You just had to focus your firepower.

  She knew this for she’d blown a hole in it with one of her missiles earlier, something telling her that it was important to hit that precise spot. Who or what or why had remained a mystery but she’d flown by and crashed the ordnance into it, watching back as the hole had been blown into it, not as grand or majestic as she’d have liked but satisfactory. Several moments later, she could have sworn someone had fallen through it but she couldn’t be sure. Still her feelings told her that the situation was resolved. After that, she’d given the whole thing no more thought.

  “Copy, Admiral,” she said. “Reading you.”

  “There’s a call come in from that thing, there’s a shuttle out there that needs intercepting. Bring it down. Just tracking it… Data should be on your screen in moments. Unisco high command demands that it be shot down.”

  She nodded. “Understood. Makeshift Squadron, stay on the mission here, I’ll be back in a…” She frowned at the data, saw the shape on her tac-reader and flexed her fingers against each other. Two of the Makeshifts were close in, they could swoop down and blast it out the sky without a need to deviate from her course. That was the beautiful thing being in command, she could delegate the task. It was something that felt alien to her, she liked to do it herself, but at the same time she could get used to it, given the chance.

  “Makeshift Five and Six, deviate from your task and shoot down that shuttle. Now!” She added a touch of authority to her voice, aware that it might need it. The people in those gunships didn’t know who she was, they didn’t know what she could do or that she had apparently only gotten her temporary rank because of her positioning in the battle. But they needed to be professional. If she gave them the order, she expected it to be obeyed. And obeyed it was, the twin HAX’s moved out away from their bombing run and towards the shuttle.

  Alex would have been lying if she said she wasn’t enjoying this whole thing in its entirety. People might be dying but being back in the cockpit meant she could do something about it. If they failed, how many more would die? She honestly didn’t know. Maybe she didn’t w
ant to know.

  “And here they come,” Claudia said, glancing out the viewport at the two incoming ships. It wasn’t a surprise. She’d been expecting them. She was surprised it had taken this long for something to sweep down towards her shuttle. Next to her, Wim Carson was piled untidily into his seat, soaked in sweat and stinking the place up something rotten. Shuttle was handling a little sluggishly, no doubt due to that attack that had hit them before she’d managed to get them out of the hangar. Still that Unisco team and her… No! She wasn’t allowing herself to think like that. He was no brother of hers. She’d disowned him. She wouldn’t even think his name any more. Only when it came to kill him, would she acknowledge him.

  Collison, you absolute traitorous bastard!

  Maybe he was already dead. She’d set the unialiv on them, it should already be tearing into them right now. Nothing could prepare them for that creature, one of her synthetic spirits. Letting it free had been a tactical gambit, one she had needed to make and one she potentially would again in the same circumstances. It could have backfired, it still might but if she remained alive, then her decisions were sound ones. Death was not an option she’d have to regret.

  She heard the computer trill out a warning that a weapons lock had engaged, that the two aerofighters were ready to fire on her, moving into a firing position already.

  “Don’t you have weapons?” Wim groaned. He looked more than just tired, he looked both physically and mentally exhausted, his clothes burned and torn, his wrist bent at an unnatural angle. He’d lost his weapon, she smirked at that, he was one to talk about them.

  “Only automated cannons for repelling boarders,” she said. “We’re not going to win a fight with those. Can’t do too much here and now about that. I was hoping you could.”

  He stared at her long and hard for a good few seconds, his eyes narrowing deeply suspicious at her. “And what exactly would that be?”