Darklanding Omnibus Books 10-12: Hunter, Diver Down, Empire (Darklanding Omnis Book 4)

by Scott Moon

  He’d read the Yakti files for hours before making his escape from the research facility. The race that created the monsters was, hopefully, long dead from one of their many experimentations with living weapons. The derelict starship had been the scene of a horrible massacre, requiring two generations of top-level scientists to examine forensically.

  What they came up with was a theoretical construct of Yakti. Facts were scarce, but disturbing. The creatures called themselves Yakti and a name designator, avoided the planet of Glakridoz at all costs, and used organic matter to build—rather than birth—their minions.

  A large wolf-like thing with spider legs twitching along its back jumped down from a building ahead of him. Its fur was a mass of greasy strands that could be more legs or fine, hair-like tentacles. Yellow and green slime oozed from its eyes as though it had been marinating in poisoned blood for thousands of years. Blood dripped from its maw as its lips trembled in rage.

  Proletan reached behind his back and pulled a small knife from a sheath. The four-inch blade would be adequate for piercing the brain if he could thrust through the eye socket. A miss would be a problem. The creature was large, strong, and fast. Built from organic parts from who knew where, the monster might have abilities he didn’t anticipate.

  Give yourself to Yakti-droon, food creature, a voice said in Proletan’s mind.

  “You’re psionic,” Proletan said in fascination. Pain cut through his mind. He fought it off with mental discipline and a few other tricks he had picked up from very esoteric training sources over the years. “I’m not your dinner, Yakti.”

  “Yakti-droon!” it croaked angrily. I am part of Yakti-droon that you may kill me and not affect the master of my fate. That you may feed me and thus feed my creator, that you may die in a spray of bloody misery.

  Proletan would reach the thing in three more steps. At his current speed, this was less than a second of time for the telepathic exchange to occur. Plenty of time, it seemed. Send your master a message, he thought, wondering if the telepathy went both ways—which would mean the thing had to be a mind-reader.

  The creature’s mind was struggling to process this directive when Proletan thrust his knife through the monster’s left eye. At the same time, he swept his left arm in a large circle to deflect dozens of the hair-spine things lashing at his throat. Sidestepping, moving back at an angle, and keeping his hands up to defend himself kept him alive.

  His forearms were riddled with dark, bloody puncture wounds when it was done.

  “That’s the message, servant of Yakti,” Proletan said. “Die.”

  The corpse lay motionless as blood and dark red brain-slime leaked out of its eye socket.

  A scientist would mourn the loss of a valuable research subject. Proletan wasn’t a scientist, he was an assassin with an addiction to reading and asking questions.

  Smaller creatures gathered around the scene. Proletan ignored all but those who blocked his path to the Mother Lode. Mast and Maximus had a decent chance of surviving on their own. Proletan had seen the emotional flaw in the sheriff’s plan immediately. Failure was something a man like Proletan didn’t do. He would go to the Mother Lode, rally the TerroCom Soldiers, and destroy his newest enemy—Yakti-droon, the ancient instrument of bio-war. In short, he would do what he needed to do to emerge victorious, as always. If he should die honorably in that pursuit, so much the better.

  All across the city, the minions of Yakti-droon chattered the name Proletan.

  ***

  Thad hated this plan worse than anything he’d ever tried. Sledge and Proletan were the only reason he finally decided to risk taking three objectives at once. These men were unbelievably determined warriors. He had no choice but to put his faith in them. Now there was nothing he could do but follow through and make it work.

  Nothing I can do? What kind of talk is that. Don’t make excuses for being in over your head, he thought.

  Angry, frustrated, and terrified this would be his big mistake that got everyone killed, he went in search of Shaunte Plastes.

  ***

  Sledge walked toward the shrieking mass of alien creatures. Everyone was running here and there and wherever. Yes, he was in a hurry. No, running wasn’t something he was going to do right now. Not that he couldn’t. He wasn’t as fast as Fry and couldn’t come near matching Proletan, but his conditioning was better than most men. Running ten miles wasn’t that hard as long as he chugged along at his own pace.

  The reason he was walking was that he needed to think and be ready for his one chance to do this right.

  “Dixie, do you read me? I need more information,” he said, holding his radio phone in front of his face, looking at it like he might see her through the simple, screen-less device.

  Static.

  He walked faster. Her last location had been very specific—radio tower 1810b. It was visible a few blocks away as a rough outline with a red light at the top. Shadows swarmed around the base.

  “Dixie,” he repeated.

  “I’m here. Stop being so impatient. I had to fish this thing you gave me out of my bra. Have you ever tried to dig something out of your very cute, extremely hard to find in a place like this, brassiere while climbing a radio tower?” she asked breathlessly.

  “You’re on the tower?”

  “I told you I was in trouble. Where are you?”

  Sledge dashed forward, blaster in hand. Gone were his careful plans to slip through the growing horde of enemies and pluck Dixie out of harm’s way undetected. His lungs were pumping air when he arrived at the radio tower. Sweat poured from his skin.

  He slowed to a walk, taking a moment to settle himself and adjust the grip on his blaster. The radio tower was in its own lot. Twenty meters high, it was held in place by eight cables bolted to the ground. Two of them had been chewed through by the spider creatures.

  The sight of them was alarming even to someone like Sledge who had seen it all. He called them spiders because that was the quickest description he could think of. They varied in size and texture. Some were slick as a snake and twisted back on themselves as often as they twisted forward. Most were covered with shaggy, hair-like tentacles, and most had five or more legs.

  That was one of the most disturbing aspects of these things, they often had odd numbers of appendages. Eyes in strange places, pincers, claws, and spikes made them look like something from a mad scientist's nightmare.

  There were perhaps a hundred of the things swarming up the narrow tower after Dixie. She kept them at bay with a small blaster in a purse she swung with impressive accuracy. Sledge realized they were in a hurry because they were bringing the entire tower down. Before long, they would be able to overwhelm her as she lay dazed from the fall.

  Another of the cables snapped as a group of the creatures chewed through a different cable. The sound was like a laser bolt from an action vid.

  A few of them had seen Sledge and started for him. He shot them with his blaster and then put both hands on his hips, including the hand holding the blaster. He needed to catch his breath.

  More and more of the monstrosities flowed off the tower to surround Sledge. He counted them and looked for a way to destroy them en masse. Without a crew-served weapon or a pile of grenades to throw, he was screwed. The terrain was no help; it was flat and open with enemies on all sides. He wasn’t wearing armor and doubted Thad or the others would come to his rescue.

  He wished he knew where the pig-dog was right now. Something Proletan had said during one of their long conversations about life, Darklanding, and everything had made Sledge think these creatures were afraid of the obnoxious mutt. It was the sheepdog versus the wolves analogy. Maximus the sheepdog, the very ugly and rude sheepdog, that was a thought.

  You’re stalling, Sledge. Don’t fear the end. Face it like a man. We all die sooner or later. Right now, all you need to do is make sure Dixie gets away.

  Sledge used all of his blaster bolts. He punched, kicked, and threw the spider things at walls.
Several of the little bastards were fast enough to bite him before he flung them away. Getting knocked down was the worst part. He wasn’t used to it. Each time he staggered to his feet bloodier than before was harder than the time before.

  “Sledge! Are you okay?” Dixie shouted from the radio tower.

  “Stay up there!”

  ***

  Blaster fire and screams resounded from the direction of the Mother Lode. Several citizens and TerroCom soldiers were strewn across the street leading to the place. Proletan moved from shadow to shadow watching the alien monsters surge forward en masse. It was a brute force attack with little strategic subtlety.

  I might've made a mistake, he thought.

  The sound of three grenades, one right after another, bloomed from around the corner. He paused until a new barrage of blaster fire stopped. Someone screamed. A soldier shouted stern commands to fall back.

  He recognized the voice of General Adam Quincy. Interesting.

  A woman’s voice argued with him, shot a blaster at the swarm, and argued again.

  Proletan paused for less than a second to access his well-structured memory, an artifact of his spy days. She was most likely Penelope Grigman.

  “You may be the general, but you’re not my boss. I’ll damn well risk my life if I feel like it. Thad’s out there and we can’t do a damn thing about it until we fight these things off,” the woman said.

  “Just stop being so reckless, Penelope. Please,” the general said.

  Proletan returned to the task at hand just in time to stab a large centipede-spider in the eye with his belt knife. It had been too close for comfort. The monsters were everywhere.

  He rounded the corner unseen, moving between two groups of Yakti minions without drawing their attention. The street in front of the Mother Lode was crowded with the things. He slowed his breathing as he searched for the hive queen, the entity that was the brain of this swarm. Unsure exactly what it looked like, he nevertheless believed it was not here.

  He had miscalculated. A human would have assumed the enemy leader was where the strongest fighting force was making a last stand. Apparently, the Yakti creature was cleverer than he had believed.

  A spider-faced dog creature sniffed the air and turned toward him. Proletan snatched it up into the air by its throat and squeezed. He looked into its eyes and saw no sign of intelligence, only hunger and hate. Throwing it away, he retreated back the way he had come.

  His first instinct was to head for Thaddeus's location. The sheriff was the greatest threat, he thought, but immediately realized his error. The sheriff was the only man to ever have beaten him in a one-to-one fight for as long as he could remember. This made him seem like the most dangerous person on Darklanding to Proletan.

  That was not how the Yakti would see it.

  The creature had one natural enemy on the planet, and it was a pig-dog Glakridozian named Maximus.

  I should have listened to the sheriff and gone to help Mast and Maximus, but not for the reasons Thaddeus sent me to their aid.

  These were strange times for an interstellar assassin on parole.

  ***

  “I’m in…” Shaunte’s voice faded into radio static.

  “Say again. You’re breaking up,” Thad said, leaning back against a freight car. Spider mutants roamed the area, searching with their slimy tentacle faces, oddly pincered arms, and other sensory devices he couldn’t quite describe. They were similar to each other, but no two of them were exactly the same.

  This didn’t make sense. The freight car was scraped and battered as though they had attacked it then withdrawn.

  “…I said get away from the freight car. I heard you bang on the door…”

  Thad spun to face the metal box he’d been leaning on.

  “Shaunte!”

  “These things are wickedly clever. If they’re not trying to…their way in…”

  “Just open the door,” Thad shouted into his radio. He pulled on the handle, but it wouldn’t budge.

  “It’s a trap, Thad…”

  He scanned the area around him, noticing a lack of activity. Silence ruled the night like a pre-storm calm.

  “I can open the door, but it was really hard to shut the first time. You should leave me here. Get someplace safe,” Shaunte said.

  Thad climbed onto the roof of the freight car and saw hundreds of spider mutants of all shapes and sizes creeping across the other freight cars on the lot. “Okay, this first part is going to be fun. I brought toys this time.”

  He lobbed a grenade onto the roof of the box with the thickest cluster of monsters, then dropped to his stomach and covered his head with his hands. Closing his eyes and opening his mouth to avoid the shockwave bursting his lungs, he rolled to his feet the moment it was over and hurled two more grenades.

  That left a final two that he needed to save for something special. Stunned, the swarm fell back slightly, then edged forward on all sides.

  The sliding door to the freight car he was standing on slammed open.

  “Shaunte! What are you doing?”

  She pulled herself up the ladder onto the roof. “I’m not hiding in there while you’re out here playing hero.”

  “If you get killed, then this was a huge waste of time,” he said.

  Shaunte answered by firing her small blaster just in time to obliterate a spider leaping across the gap between freight cars.

  “Nice shot,” Thad said. “We better get to it.”

  “I’m ready,” she said, shaking her messy hair and smiling with her grimy face. Her perfectly-tailored business outfit was ripped in places.

  Thad adjusted the grip on his blaster as he studied her resolve. “We work as a team. You don’t have much ammunition and your weapons lacks the knockdown power of a combat piece. So stay close to me and only fire when I’m reloading.”

  “I can do that.” Shaunte aimed her weapon at the swarm, ready for her turn to kill them.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: The Last Hurrah

  Mast yanked his head around when he heard Maximus squeal in pain. Until now, the pig-dog had only issued muchly disturbing growls, snarls, and a nearly supersonic shriek that drove the creatures back like he was brandishing fire. This new sound alarmed Mast. If the pig-dog went down, they were done for.

  “Are you okay, Maximus?”

  “Aroooh. Snort, snort.”

  Mast rushed toward his animal friend. Despite his enthusiastic noise-making, the pig-dog lay on his side.

  “You don’t look injured. What’s the matter? Get up. We need to fight. The monsters are muchly gathering for another attack.”

  Still stretched out on his side, Maximus slapped the ground with his tail. “Snort.”

  “Are you smiling?”

  “Snort.”

  Mast became greatly angry and frustrated. “Did you eat one of them!”

  “Snort, snort, snort!” Maximus thumped the pavement rapidly with his tail.

  “I hope you get muchly bad indigestion. Mast Jotham was worried about you,” Mast said.

  Maximus lumbered to his feet, staggered as though drunk, and shook his head.

  Mast waited, sensing there was something horrible to come. He imagined his animal friend retching up one of the fifteen-legged things. It would be too much. Mast Jotham had certainly experienced enough of this nightmare in Darklanding.

  Horrible sounds crawled up from Maximus’s throat. He groaned, staggered, and rolled his eyes in misery—or maybe ecstasy, it was hard to say for certain—and belched with hurricane force.

  “That is muchly rude, pig-dog.”

  “Snort.”

  Alien shrieks whistled through Mast’s brain. He wanted to curl up in a ball and sleep until the attack was over. Senseless words whispered in his mind. Something was different. There was an intelligence behind this attack.

  His hands trembled. His vision blurred. Everything seemed far away and right on top of him at the same time. Words began to coalesce and make sense.

 
“You must kill the Glakridozian. Destroy the filthy creature. We hate it. You must hate it. You must kill it and open the way to the galaxy,” the voice said.

  “Who are you?”

  “I am Yakti-droon. Serve me, and I will consume you. I will use your bio-mass to make a more perfect killing machine. Your essence will be muuuuchhhly used to swarm the galaxy and feed me for eternity,” the voice said.

  “I do not like that plan.” Mast studied the horde of monstrosities surrounding him. One seemed likely to be the leader. It was larger than most, but not the largest. He thought it was watching him and when it moved, the crowd of spider-mutant things maintained the same distance around it, radiating out like the arms of a living spider web.

  “Maximus, kill that one!” Mast fired at what he thought was the owner of the psychic voice. The blaster bolt winged the creature before it hid behind its minions.

  “Kill the Glakridozian!” Yakti-droon raged. The telepathically invasive words hurt Mast’s head. The guttural sound of its actual speech sounded like jagged aluminum being dragged over a chalkboard.

  The swarm surged toward Mast and the pig-dog with unstoppable force.

  ***

  Maximus howled at the Darklanding moons. “Aroooooh!” He didn’t know what had taken his Unglok friend Mast Jotham so long. Of course the hive queen-father needed to die. “Snort! Snort! Aroooooh!”

  He charged into a mass of five-kilo spiders, bowling them aside like splakri-garzs.

  ***

  Proletan saw the surge and restrained himself. He wanted to pump one victorious fist in the air but suspected the gesture could be very premature. There were too many of the Yakti bio-constructs to count. Whatever had just happened had changed the spacing of the Yakti minions. Where they had radiated through the area in a rough, hard-to-attack circle, they were now focused on the Unglok and the outcast guardian of Glakridoz.