“Code accepted. Auto-destruct sequence activated, ten minutes and counting.”
“Now, Trall, time to meet the Founders, you worthless sack of…”
A distortion in space caught Khai’s attention for a brief second. Five black holes yawned wide, spewing forth five Vyysarri capital ships. They instantly started firing on the escape pods. No! Khai seethed. Trall took Khai’s distraction to his advantage and kicked Khai square in the groin. As Khai doubled over for a brief moment, wishing he were dead for that minute, Trall jumped to his feet and sprinted to the wall. He kicked over a bust of some famous bureaucrat and a secret hatch popped open. Trall disappeared inside and the hatch sealed behind him. Trall had escaped.
“You can run, Trall! But you can’t hide forever!” he shouted angrily.
An instant later, the station bucked and rumbled as the Vyysarri ships undoubtedly traced the pods back to the station and opened fire. Khai felt the strong tug of guilt and regret on his heart as he watched as one escape pod after another made the faintest popping flash. All those people—civilians—blinking out of existence in only a second or two, it made Khai’s stomach turn. Then, his stomach really turned. The floor rumbled.
“Computer! Status!”
“Station’s main gravity generator has been hit, loss of gravity in five seconds; critical damage to main engines; station is now in a decaying orbit around Seryys, reentry to planetary atmosphere in ten minutes; structural integrity failing, complete hull failure in seven minutes, thirty seconds.”
“Great!” Khai growled as his feet left the deck and weightlessness took over.
He reached out to the giant conference table and positioned his feet, poised to push off toward the door. He waited for the table to rotate toward the door and pushed off. The mass of the table far outweighed Khai’s solid frame and he quickly drifted for the door. It opened as he approached and he caught the door frame to keep himself from drifting into the center of the command deck where he would have very little to grab a hold of to navigate himself through the dying station.
He glided his way to the lift. The door slid open at his arrival and he flew in. He pressed the button for the main deck and braced himself for the lift’s ceiling to hit him. As the lift moved, Khai repositioned himself within the lift so that when he the door opened, he could push off and glide quite a distance to the service lift that led to the main hanger.
The lift stopped and the lights went out. Khai slammed into the floor of the lift and saw stars for a moment. He activated the entry light on the machine gun that was strapped to his back and shone it around, looking for a way out. It wasn’t hard to find, the emergency hatch was clearly marked. He kicked the hatch out and climbed out of the lift car. He worked his way around the side of the car and started moving toward the main deck, using the emergency ladder along the side.
The station rumbled again. The pressure within the lift shaft changed drastically and a whoosh of air sucked him back down the lift shaft toward the lift car. Suddenly, as if matters weren’t already bad enough, the computer’s voice chimed in.
“Backup systems activated.”
The lift car started moving again. The air escaping the lift shaft and the car moving at him with a high rate of speed, he was about to become a bug on a windshield. He had to think fast. At the last second, he was able to the grab the ladder and pull himself into a nook where the lift would miss him. As the lift passed by, he reached out and grabbed anything on it he could grasp and got jerked off the ladder away from the hull breach in the shaft. The lift came to a stop at the main deck. At that point, all the air had left the shaft and he was blacking out. He barely had the time to crawl back into the lift car and force open the door with what strength he had left.
Another great gush of wind slammed him into the back of the car and threatened to suck him out through the hatch. But now he had air filling his lungs and his muscles were no longer running on only lactic acid. He climbed from the car and hit the manual close button on the outside of the lift. Suddenly, he was free floating again, with oxygenated blood coursing through his veins and arteries.
“The hull has been compromised. Hull integrity will fail in two minutes.”
Shit! Khai scowled. He knew that there were SCGF soldiers stationed on the asteroid station. The SCSCSFSs, or Seryys Combat Self-Contained Space Flight Suits, were standard issue on about any space-faring vessel. He would just have to find them. They were mostly used for orbital skydiving. They were made mostly of a fiber woven with strands of Ti’tan’lium to absorb the heat from reentry. Each suit was equipped with an air supply good for five hours, maneuvering thrusters for limited movement in space and a steel-fiber parachute that would automatically deploy at a 2500 feet above ground level.
He pushed off toward the barracks, thinking his best chance would be to find one stowed in a footlocker. He had his eyes on the prize. The barracks were looming up quickly; straight ahead and directly below him. All he would have to do is catch the catwalk directly above and push off in that direction.
“One minute, thirty seconds.” The computer’s voice was breaking up. The station rumbled again and Khai panicked. The impact from the dying Vyysarri warship crashing into the asteroid had caused the station to rotate on its x and y axes. Khai was near the center of the asteroid when the impact happened, and what was directly in front of and below him was now thirty degrees to his left and above him. Khai closed his eyes for moment as the spinning station forced his stomach to turn yet again. He fought off the strong urge to vomit. “Correction: forty-eight seconds until full structural failure.”
Khai hit the wall on the far side and held on while he matched the spin of the station. He then pushed off and headed, once again, for the barracks. He hit the barracks and tumbled along the roof until he found something to grab. Once he stopped himself, he crawled to the main door and it slid open for him. The door slid shut behind him and he went to work checking the rooms for the flight suits. It didn’t take him long to find one.
“Eighteen seconds until structural failure.”
He struggled to the get the flight suit on. It was usually a two-person job, but, obviously, he was flying solo on this one.
“Ten seconds until structural failure,” the computer said. “Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three-”
The computer cut out as the asteroid shook and shuddered. The reverberation resonated in his chest. The door leading out from the barracks flexed outward and then there was only complete silence. Khai knew that the hull had failed and the only thing keeping him from the cold, hard vacuum of space was a flimsy steel door sealed airtight. He scrambled to get the suit on. Once the clasps in the front of the suit touched, they automatically sealed, forming an airtight bond from the helmet to the boots.
Khai floated over to the door and stuck a grenade on a timer to the door and kicked off. The grenade blew and the door blasted out with the last of the air in the barracks. Khai was sucked out into the expanse of the main deck. Khai was right, the hull was compromised. A Vyysarri capital ship crashed nose first into the asteroid. A good two-hundred feet of the wedge-shaped ship was buried into the main deck. It also crashed through the Hammer Cannon, completely destroying that ship and cleaving it in two.
The positive side of the ship careening into the station was that it left a gaping gash in the hull and a direct route out into open space. Using the wreckage as leverage, he pulled himself to relative freedom. As soon as he left the ship, he was smack dab in the middle of a space battle. Raptor-Class dogfighters were chasing down Vyysarri dogfighters and the other way around.
Khai’s attention was immediately drawn to an explosion and he immediately hit the suit’s thrusters. He emerged from the fissure in the hull between a Vyysarri battle cruiser and a Seryysan battle cruiser. They exchanged cannon fire and silent blossoms of molten slag filled the dead, airless space between them. Khai was stuck in the middle for the longest forty seconds of his life. Finally, his thrusters pushed him
up above the ships’ dorsal sides to relative safety. At least that was his hope. Two squadrons of Raptors zipped by so close Khai could see the pilots doing double takes. The engine wash of the ships sent him into an uncontrolled spin away from Seryys.
Once he was able to get himself under control, he watched as what was left of Orbital Station 12 entered Seryys’ upper atmosphere and started burning up. Only the sounds of his breathing and his heart beating were what he heard as the asteroid broke up into several pieces and vaporized in several balls of fire. After the fireworks were over, and the battle above Seryys raged on, he traversed the labyrinth of dead ship hulls and battle formations. After a few minutes, and almost all of his thruster fuel, he started to feel the tug of Seryys’ gravitational pull. He hadn’t made an atmo jump in years. He would only admit to himself that he was a little nervous.
Silence enveloped him.
His heart rate jumped; his breathing accelerated.
Then… a burst of sound so loud, his ears rang. That was reentry. Suddenly, his innards did backward handsprings as he hit the mesopause of the atmosphere. The noise only increased as he hit the mesosphere and his suit began to heat up. Though the suit was insulated and protected by the Ti’tan’lium, he was not immune to the effects of dropping at several hundreds of miles per hour.
Almost entering the troposphere, he hit supersonic speeds. The sonic boom was the worst part. In his youth, he would be whooping an exhilarated cry to buffer his ears from the pop. Now all he could do was think, I’m getting too old for this shit!
At five thousand feet from the ground, the remaining thruster fuel kicked in to bone-jarringly slow his descent enough for his chute to do the rest. At that point, he was only falling at terminal velocity and could relatively control his descent. He knew that the shield was still up and he would most likely be vaporized on contact. He spotted a good, safe drop zone between the city and Kal’Hoom Canyon. At 2500 feet, the chute deployed jerking him around a bit.
Everything was going smoothly until a lingering fragment of Orbital Station 12 came burning down and clipped his chute. Subsequently, he went spiraling out of control toward the canyon, his strings hopelessly tangled. He pulled up on the chute and he was able to regain some semblance of control, at least long enough to ditch the chute and pull his back up.
He swiftly fell into the canyon.
He hit the rock wall, rapping his helmeted head on the red rocks and his world went dark, slipping into the unknown oblivion.
It had only been twenty minutes since Joon had relayed Khai’s “not coming back” message. He was sitting in Med’s clinic getting his innards sealed up with a tiny surgical laser that mended individual capillaries and organs. Bria was awake and mostly on the mend from her wound at the hand of the mysterious woman that shot her. The assassin’s voice was eerily familiar, though. He knew he’d heard it before. He just couldn’t put his finger on it.
“I’m sorry to hear about your friend,” she said softly. “Really.”
“Thanks,” he said. “It’s weird, we only knew each other for a couple months, but…”
“But it’s…”
“Yeah,” Dah said, sadly. “Ouch!”
“Well,” Med admonished. “If you would stop moving…”
“Okay. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Med said as he leaned back wiping off his blood-covered, gloved hands with a rag. “You’re done. I want you to stay here tonight, but you should be right as rain tomorrow.”
“Thanks, Doc.” He rolled over on the bed to face Bria. “So, uh, when do you get out?”
“Tomorrow,” she said, blushing.
“Yeah?”
“Mm-hmm. Why?”
“I thought, maybe, you and I could, you know, go have a… drink or something.”
“I suppose that would be the least I could do for my rescuer.”
“Yeah? That’s great! Ooh!” He winced in pain. “Guess I should take it easy for the night.”
“See you in the morning?”
“Yeah. Night.”
“Night.”
“Dack?”
“Yeah, Bria?”
“I’m glad you went to the SCBI Building to find Ran.”
“Me, too.” That was it! The SCBI Building. That voice! It was the receptionist at the front desk. That was the voice of the woman who tried to kill them both! “I gotta go! I know who she was!”
“You’re not going anywhere,” Med remarked, filling Dah’s IV with a strong sedative. “You need to rest. Whatever it is you were going to do, it can wait!”
“No, I need to go back… to…” He was out.
“What’d you give him?”
“Oh, just a sedative… that’s used on desert bulls.”
Chapter Nine
An explosion rocked the ground under his feet. He dropped to the ground, covering his head as bullets whizzed over. It was only the two of them left. Two lone soldiers out of two hundred that landed on Planet 128 facing an entire legion of Vyysarri troops, it seemed like impossible odds.
“Corporal!” Ralm’Es Ra shouted. “Where do we go from here?”
“I don’t know,” Khai admitted, another volley of bullets chewing up the dirt above his head.
“We’ve got to get to the command center,” Ralm shouted.
The command center was once in the possession of the Seryys Armed Forces, but in a recent skirmish, the Vyysarri proved to be a violent and unwavering force. Planet 128 was a Seryys colony, a stronghold and a military complex/staging ground for the Seryys Combat Expeditionary Naval Fleet, or SCENF.
“I realize that,” Khai yelled back. “Maybe you didn’t notice the hundred-or-so Vyysarri troops surrounding it!”
“Oh, I did. Just didn’t think that was the problem,” Ralm retorted, firing back at the Vyysarri.
“You didn’t think that... that was a problem?” Khai said, pulling the pin on a grenade and tossing into the mass of Vyysarri troops. “You’re a cocky smart ass, aren’t you?”
“Guilty as charged, sir,” Ralm gave him a mock salute. “Captain Smart Ass reporting for duty, sir!”
As Khai saw it, he had two options: sit there in the ditch and die, or charge the castle, retake the command center and die. A Vyysarri dogfighter came blazing into view and crashed, leaving a large dust cloud and digging a deep crater just outside the front entrance to the complex. Khai wondered how the battle was going topside. He gathered his courage and loaded another magazine into his machine gun. They nodded at each other, knowing exactly what the next step was, the crater.
“Okay, Smart Ass, you first!”
“That’s Captain Smart Ass to you… sir.”
“Fine, Captain. Go!”
“With pleasure, sir!”
After a mortar shell exploded on the ground, Ralm made his move. Khai provided cover fire while Ralm ran for the destroyed hulk of a load hauler. Then, while Khai ran for cover on the opposite side behind a leveled building, Ralm laid down a consistent rain of fire. Khai looked over at Ralm and he nodded his head toward the grenade in his hand. Ralm nodded and grinned, pulling out his grenade.
Khai mouthed a countdown, then together they threw their grenades. The combined explosion took out several Vyysarri and in the confusion they ran like crazy to meet up on the far edge of the crater, closest to the front doors. The Vyysarri recovered quickly and started pouring fire into the crater trying to hit them.
“So what’s out next move, Corporal?”
“Get in, or die trying?”
“Sounds… inevitable.”
The word inevitable was about as close to correct as possible, especially when a grenade landed right at Khai’s feet.
“Ah, crap! Run!”
They scurried out of the hole and ran headlong straight at the Vyysarri, firing their guns and praying to the Founders. What transpired next was nothing short of miraculous. Another Vyysarri dogfighter, its angular features gave it the look of a jagged tooth, crashed into the ground killing the res
t of the Vyysarri that stood in their way. The mangled doors lay open before them, smashed off their slides and still smoldering.
They pressed on.
Covering one another as they had many times before, they were able to communicate without using words. They moved quickly and quietly through the dark and battle-damaged corridors of the complex, sweeping their weapons from left to right, scanning the immediate area for enemies. It didn’t take long to for them to find some. A squad of troops came out of the shadows, not wearing protective helmets and masks, their pale faces, long fangs and red, light-sensitive eyes gave them a truly grotesque visage.
The Vyysarri running point caught Khai almost flat-footed. The monster actually sunk his teeth into Khai’s neck, it was the first time that had ever happened to him. He had heard stories about it from other, less fortunate soldiers, that it was not a pleasurable event by any stretch of the imagination. That was the understatement of the century! The venom contained within their saliva felt like acid running through the veins in his neck, spreading both up toward his head and down toward his shoulders and arms. His body was gripped in spasms from the paralytic nature of the venom.
Khai yelped. Ralm moved into action. He crushed the butt of his rifle into the base of the attacking Vyysarri’s skull. He crumbled to the ground like a card house. The others attacked with the ferocity of Canyon Sabercats. One pushed the dazed Khai to the floor while Ralm started firing his weapon at point blank range at the remaining Vyysarri. Each Vyysarri took several rounds at that range before they finally went down. But the victory did not come without a cost. Ralm took a jagged knife to the gut. Rather than pulling it out and bleeding to death, he broke the knife off inside him and then used a surgical laser to cauterize the wound around the knife. It hurt like hell, but it was better than the alternative.
“Thanks,” Khai said, as Ralm helped him up.
“Hey, even the great Corporal Khai needs some help sometimes.”
“Don’t let that get out,” Khai grinned. “Got a reputation to uphold.”
The Seryys Chronicles: Death Wish Page 13
