“With that little dagger on your back?” Tyra challenged.
Lucien frowned, wondering the same thing. But still, how much did they know about these Faros? If they were a race of ancient warriors who’d been quantum-jumping around the universe since before humans had figured out how to make fire, maybe it would be better not to goad them. Lucien was about to say as much to Tyra when the alien drew its “dagger.” The blade looked like glass, transparent and shimmering with some kind of energy field.
Lucien backed up hurriedly and pulled Tyra along with him. “Shields up, and weapons out!” he ordered over the comms.
A deep thrumming sound filled the air as they all activated their exosuits’ shields. Mechanical clicking noises followed as integrated weapons slid out of recessed compartments in their gauntlets.
King Faro laughed, his blue eyes dancing with delight. He drew another weapon in his other hand, this one a familiar black coil of rope. It unfurled, slithering out behind him, and ignited with a whoosh that sounded like a gust from a furnace. The stone path sizzled and smoked where the whip lay.
“Everyone fall back! Activate grav boosters on my mark!” Lucien snapped over the comms.
Tyra shot him a panicky look, and he realized she probably didn’t know how to use her grav boosters. Paragons spent years learning how to use them. Grimacing, he locked his arms around her chest.
“Mark!” he called.
They all rocketed off the street, flying backward in assisted leaps that sent them soaring high above the blossom trees lining the river. They touched down at least a hundred meters back the way they’d come. The alien ruler was now a distant blue speck, the luminous golden accoutrements of his attire glinting in the distance.
“We need to get back to our shuttle!” Tyra said.
“That’s the idea,” Lucien replied. “Everyone form up and follow me, double-time!” Lucien set his exosuit’s power-assist to maximum and sprinted back the way they’d come. Scenery blurred around him as he dodged and wove through the crowds of pedestrians on the street. His ARCs clocked his speed at more than 60 kilometers per hour.
“I’m going to tell Pandora… what’s going on…” Tyra panted as she ran up beside him. “Damn it! They’re jamming me!”
“Our comms still work,” Lucien objected.
“They must be jamming us from orbit,” Tinker said.
“What about Brak?” Troo asked. “We cannot be leaving him here.”
“We’ll find a way to come back for him… after we get away,” Tyra said between gasps for air.
Lucien nodded. That decision was already weighing heavily on him, but there was nothing else they could do.
“Why don’t we use… our grav boosters to fly back to the shuttle?” Tyra asked.
“Because we’d make easier targets for ranged weapons. Down here they have to worry about shooting through their people to get to us.”
“I’m detecting an alien life sign up ahead, next to our shuttle,” Addy said.
“Just one?” Tyra asked.
“So far,” Addy replied.
“Maybe it’s Brak,” Lucien suggested as he leapt over a crowd of blue-skinned Faros that wouldn’t get out of their way in time. The others leapt with him, but Tyra barreled straight through the crowd. The Faros screamed as she mowed them down. She tripped and went flying, rolling a few dozen times before bouncing back to her feet. Lucien slowed down so she could catch up.
“You need more practice with your suit,” he chided.
Tyra grunted, but said nothing.
Her gleaming armor was scuffed with dirt, and smeared with a viscous blue fluid—Faro blood? Lucien wondered.
They reached the base of the landing pad and stopped running. Their shuttle was about five floors up, on the platform, and they didn’t have time for stairs.
“Grav boosters!” Lucien ordered, and again wrapped his arms around Tyra’s chest.
“I can do it!” she objected.
He ignored her and blasted off.
They soared above the landing pad and their shuttle came into view. Garek landed with a heavy thud—followed by echoes of that sound as the rest of them touched down around him.
“Who are you running from?” a pleasant voice asked.
Lucien froze, watching as King Faro came strolling out behind their shuttle. His glowing red-orange whip drew a smoking black scar across the landing pad, sizzling as it went.
King Faro stopped a dozen meters from them and brandished his shimmering glass sword with a grin.
Chapter 19
There was no time to wonder how the alien had beat them back to their shuttle.
“Fire!” Lucien ordered. Bright red lasers shot out of his exosuit’s gauntlets, hitting the alien square in the chest. Crimson light flashed all around him as the others fired, too. None of them missed, but the alien remained standing, and uninjured. He became suffused with shimmering light as the energy from their weapons converted the air around him into superheated plasma.
“He’s got a shield!” Garek said.
“Keep firing!” Lucien ordered. They’d deplete that shield before long. Most personal shields could only take a few shots.
But King Faro weathered the assault, making no move to run or dodge their fire. The Faros’ technology was obviously a lot more advanced.
Their weapons overheated and vented clouds of coolant gas, forcing them to stop firing.
King Faro laughed. “Is that it? My turn,” he said.
“Secondary weapons!” Lucien ordered, and drew one of the non-lethals from his equipment belt—his grav gun.
The alien leapt toward them, impossibly far and high, as if his strength were somehow augmented in ways they couldn’t see. He covered the distance between them in an instant, flicking his whip in their direction before he even touched the ground. It flashed out, sizzling and crackling like a severed electrical conduit. The whip raked across Tinker’s exosuit with a shower of sparks. It overloaded his shield with a loud pop! and left a smoking black furrow in his armor. Tinker screamed and collapsed on the landing pad, writhing in pain. The alien touched down in their midsts, and they all grav-boosted away from him—all except for Tyra, who remained standing where she was.
The Faro turned to her with a smile. Lucien ran back into the fray, aiming his grav gun at the hilt of the alien’s whip, hoping to rip the weapon out of his hand. He fired, but the Faro was ready for it, and he braced himself against the sudden tug of the grav beam. Then he wrenched his arm back suddenly, pulling Lucien off his feet with surprising strength.
Lucien hit the landing pad with a clatter of armor. He heard lasers screeching as the others began firing again, and he bounced to his feet just in time to see Tyra diving away from the Faro’s whip.
Tinker was up in a sitting position now. He had his grav gun out, too. He held it in both hands for extra leverage and fired, using his back and the augmented strength of his suit in an attempt to pull the alien off its feet, but the Faro weathered the strain with a grin, muscles bulging visibly under his flowing gray robes.
Lucien blinked. This was impossible. Biological strength was no match for the augmented mechanical strength of their exosuits—unless the Faros weren’t entirely biological.
The alien tossed his sword in the air, high above his head, and thrust his palm out at Tinker. A dazzling ball of plasma flashed out, slamming Tinker in the chest with a thunderous boom. Tinker flew backward and over the edge of the landing pad, tumbling lifelessly as he fell.
The shock wave hit the rest of them a split-second later, staggering them, and blasting them with a stifling heat that Lucien felt even through his exosuit.
“Keep firing!” he ordered, holstering his apparently useless grav gun to fire his lasers again. The alien stood in a glowing cloud of plasma, flicking his whip at them and making them dance.
We have to be draining his shield, Lucien thought as he jumped over a sweeping lash that had been aimed at his ankles. The whip skittered by belo
w him, trailing sparks and black scorch marks across the landing pad.
A muffled roar split the sky, loud enough to be heard over the noise of lasers screeching, and the sizzling of the alien’s whip. Lucien looked up and saw a big armored bulk drop from the sky.
It was Brak. He landed right behind the alien with both of his razor swords drawn and glowing with a fuzzy blue light. Brak swung his blades, one low, one high, and everyone stopped firing for fear that they’d hit him.
King Faro spun and blocked the high blow casually with his sword, and the low one with his golden gauntlet.
Brak hissed, trying to overpower the Faro.
But their strength was evenly matched. Lucien couldn’t believe it. He’d never seen anyone who could match a Gor’s physical strength, much less augmented strength, but this alien did so with apparent ease, despite being at least half a foot shorter and a hundred pounds lighter than the two-meter-tall Gor.
Brak gave up and shoved away from the alien, his blades flashed back in for another strike, and again the alien blocked it, this time catching both of Brak’s swords with his one.
“Form on me! Grav guns out!” Lucien ordered over the comms as Brak and the Faro went on parrying each other’s blows. “We need to destabilize him!” It was all they could hope to do without risking friendly fire.
Garek, Addy, Jalisa, Tyra, and Troo all clustered around Lucien, aiming their grav guns two-handed, and bracing their feet.
“On my mark…” Lucien said. “Mark!”
They all fired and wrenched their guns toward them at the same time. It worked.
The alien went flying, but he used the momentum to his advantage, somehow springing up at the same instant and landing on his feet behind them. The fingertips of his free hand glowed brightly. There was no time to react. A ball of plasma flashed out, heading straight for Lucien’s chest.
Troo jumped in front of him, hissing with feral fury, and firing her lasers at the Faro. The world flashed white and a deafening boom shook the landing pad as that ball of plasma exploded. Troo slammed into him, knocking him over. Lasers screeched around them, but Lucien could see nothing past the smoking bulk sprawled on top of him. His heart thudded in his chest as he heaved out from under Troo to check her injuries.
Her helmet was shattered, the alloy melted and deformed around her head. One of her protruding fangs was missing, and her big green eyes were dim and squinting with pain. But a far more serious injury lay below her neck: Troo’s chest was caved in, scorched black and glistening with dark red blood.
“Troo!” he screamed, as if his voice could call her back from where she was headed.
Her mouth opened and shut like a guppy’s, trying desperately to suck a breath into her collapsed lungs. Then her squinting gaze found him, and he heard her voice inside his head, the words stilted, but clear.
“Now we is… being even. You can be… thanking me on Astralis.”
“Troo! Wait!” He thought back, but her green eyes slid up and stared fixedly at the sky.
Lucien jumped to his feet and spun around, visions of vengeance burning in his brain.
The Faro was locked in another duel with Brak, parrying blows effortlessly, and backpedaling around the landing pad, laughing in the Gor’s face.
Lucien mentally scrambled for a new tactic. The Faro had to be parrying Brak’s strikes for a reason. Perhaps his shields were tough against radiant energy, like lasers, but weak against kinetic strikes. Lucien’s mind flashed back to all the razor-swords, projectile weapons, and explosives they’d left in the weapons lockers back on Inquisitor, and he suddenly wished they’d had the foresight to bring some of those along. Tyra hadn’t wanted them to look like an invading army when they met with the Faros for the first time.
The alien warlord slipped his shimmering, transparent sword past Brak’s increasingly desperate attacks, and the Gor’s hand fell off with a thump, taking one of his swords with it. Brak’s agonized scream was at once terrifying and sickening, equal parts pain and fury.
Blinded with rage, he slipped past the alien’s guard and grabbed the Faro’s sword-wielding arm behind the wrist. The alien calmly resisted Brak’s attempt to rip off his arm, bracing his feet against the heavier Gor. Muscles rippled and bulged as the Faro resisted. He put his other arm behind his back and smiled up at Brak.
The alien was toying with them.
Brak hissed all the louder.
“Help him!” Addy screamed, already running toward them.
Garek beat her there, but Brak had already found an advantage. Both he and the Faro were obviously incredibly strong, but Brak weighed over three hundred pounds, while the Faro had to weigh less than two hundred. Brak used that extra weight to give him leverage, and he picked the alien up by his arm and began swinging the Faro around his head.
Brak let go and the alien went flying off the edge of the landing pad, robes fluttering around him as he fell.
“Let’s go!” Tyra urged.
Lucien hesitated, glancing quickly at Troo, but there was no point in taking her body with them. She’d get a new one when they returned to Astralis.
Everyone ran for the shuttle. Brak clutched his scorched black stump as he ran. They pounded up the ramp to the airlock. Tyra waved it open and they ran straight inside. She waved the doors shut.
Through the closing doors, Lucien glimpsed his alien namesake come floating impossibly back up to the landing pad, uninjured despite having fallen five stories to the ground. The alien’s gray robes flared out around his knees as he landed. As soon as his feet touched ground, he thrust out a palm and sent a dazzling ball of plasma flying toward them. The outer airlock doors shut just in time and received the blast with a deafening boom!
The deck shuddered under their feet.
Tyra cycled the airlock. Crimson lights snapped on and the decontamination alarm blared. Jets hissed, and clouds of moisture glittered.
“Come on!” Tyra screamed, impatiently banging on the inner airlock doors with her palms.
The crimson light vanished, and they heard fans whirring to equalize the air pressure.
This was a fine time to be stuck waiting for routine safety procedures.
Another boom sounded as plasma hit the rear doors. This time they could feel the shuttle slide a few inches across the landing pad, and rock on its landing struts.
Lucien glanced back to see the outer airlock doors glowing a molten orange.
“We can’t take another hit like that!” he said.
The inner doors slid open and they darted inside just as the outer ones exploded with a burst of heat and shrapnel. Lucien felt himself carried into the cabin on the shock wave. They landed in a heap, their armor clattering noisily on the deck.
Lucien was pinned under Brak and Garek, but Jalisa broke free and ran for the cockpit. “Get us out of here!” Lucien called after her.
The alien strode casually toward them, as if it had all the time in the world.
Toying with us again, Lucien thought through gritted teeth. Brak and Garek got up and began firing at the alien as he approached, but their lasers were still having no effect.
A roar of engines sounded and the shuttle shot straight up, leaving the landing pad and their alien adversary behind. Good job, Jalisa, Lucien thought, still lying on the deck. He propped himself up on his elbows to look out the open airlock.
Tyra was busy with the control panel, trying to manually shut the inner doors. They should have shut automatically when the outer doors had blasted open. The fact that they hadn’t meant the explosion must have damaged the mechanism.
“I’m going to have to crank them shut!” Tyra said, her arm already working the crank. The doors began inching shut with a screech of metal scraping metal.
The Faro came floating up to the airlock and grabbed one of the zero-G safety rails to swing inside. He brandished his sword with a grin.
Brak and Garek fired once more, but they should have known better by now. Lasers were useless.
&n
bsp; Lucien eyed the zero-G rails to either side of the jammed airlock doors, and lunged to reach them.
The Faro didn’t appear to notice. He was too busy being smug.
Lucien grabbed one of the rails in each hand, straddling the open doors; then he jumped up, aiming his feet at the Faro’s chest.
Now the alien noticed him. He cocked his head and narrowed his glowing blue eyes in confusion. Lucien was obviously too far away to deliver a kick.
The Faro’s eyes flew wide as he apparently realized Lucien’s intent, but he was too late.
Lucien fired the grav boosters in his boots at full strength, blasting the alien warlord out of the airlock. Lucien screamed as his shoulders both popped out of their sockets. He’d only fired the boosters for a second, but holding onto the rails while he’d done so had funneled all the force along his arms. He released the rails, his hands suddenly numb and sparking with pins and needles from pinched nerves.
“Feet clear!” Tyra warned.
Lucien managed to tuck his legs up to his chest just as Tyra finished cranking the doors shut.
“We did it…” she breathed.
Lucien lay there gasping in pain. His head lolled to one side, and he caught a glimpse of Garek crouched beside Brak with an open medkit. The veteran first sprayed Brak’s stump with disinfectant, and then with synthetic skin.
Lucien felt the pain from his dislocated shoulders abate as his exosuit pumped an analgesic into his system. Finally able to breathe, he craned his neck to see what Jalisa was doing in the cockpit. She was clawing for space and flying evasive at the same time.
The hull shuddered with an impact.
“Keep your helmets on!” Tyra warned on her way to the cockpit. She walked easily up the steep space-ward slope of the deck thanks to the shuttle’s artificial gravity.
“Anyone else injured?” Garek asked.
“Me,” Lucien grunted.
Garek crouched down beside him next. “Where?”
“Both shoulders. Dislocated,” Lucien breathed.
Dark Space Universe by Jasper T. Scott Page 12
