by Scott Moon
“He was on his way here.”
“Why?”
“I think he wants to make a truce. Get the Reapers and that other thing off his ship, then renegotiate.”
Kin thought about it but said nothing.
Ceana squealed as Rebecca fastened the second set of quadriceps and hamstring leg plates. “That is very tight and private.”
Rebecca shook her head. “I will adjust it, big boy.”
“Hurry,” Kin said.
“KIN Roland, you son-of-a-bitch,” Major Eagle said as he entered the room. He looked at Kin’s motley armor and chuckled. “Did you come here to make fashion mistakes?”
“I came to kick your ass back to Crashdown,” Kin said.
“And steal armor so you can fight Droon and his friend? Admirable. I would have given you the armor, had you asked and agreed not to return to Crashdown.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Eagle. Your boss wants me to go to Hellsbreach and die with the Reapers.”
Eagle shrugged. “The Ror-Rea princess will send you.”
“She will send away the Warlocks,” Ceana said, testing his new gauntlets by opening and closing them.
“The High Lords will demand she send Kin after them,” Eagle said.
Kin stared at the man.
Rebecca strode toward Eagle with a wrench in one hand. “You made a deal with them! You backstabbing asshole!” She slammed the wrench on his helmet, which closed a second before impact.
“Your new supervisor in maintenance will mark you down for your persistent and offensive use of profanity.”
“Eat me,” she said.
An Earth Fleet squad leader stepped forward. “The Mazz forces have shut a large group of Reapers into Echo Sector and are advancing on the Bridge.”
Eagle shoved Rebecca. When she didn’t fly backward as he expected, he moved laterally. “Help me defend the Bridge and clear the ship of this freak show and I will provide you with armor better than anything you can imagine.”
“That’s a deal. Let’s move,” Kin said. He formed his own squad to include Rebecca, Dogface, Mikey-Danny, and Ceana. Each of them outranked him, except for Mikey-Danny, whose rank he didn’t know. They moved like a team and allowed him to take control.
“You are so lucky I enjoy committing treason to save your butt,” Rebecca said.
“Absolutely no argument there,” Kin said.
Room to room, they supported Eagle’s tactical squads. Kin noted how they moved and communicated. He didn’t like the idea of going up against them in the near future. They barely used the radio or even hand signals. Eagle’s personal guard moved as though they had been training together for most of their lives. They anticipated what the rest of their unit would do and how they would react to any situation.
I got to give it to you, Eagle. You know your stuff.
A tingle ran up the back of his neck. Kin-rol-an-da. Droon’s voice roared in his head, then faded away. The Reaper King had been close and was now moving down a different corridor. Kin thought about attempting to look through the monster’s eyes as though he were a command unit slaving an FSPAA camera but decided against it. All he needed was to have a seizure and start bleeding out of his nose.
After three scrimmages and a quick, bloody fight, Kin found another person he recognized.
“Captain Trak, I order you to stand down,” Kin said.
“Wouldn't you just shit if he obeyed that order?” Rebecca asked. Mikey-Danny and Dogface laughed without looking away from their zones of responsibility.
The tall figure in Mazz armor shook his helmeted head slowly. “It is not good to see you, Kin.”
“We shouldn’t be fighting,” Kin said. “Droon and his strongest Reapers are tearing apart the ship.”
“I know. He has killed many of my soldiers,” Trak said.
“Let’s work together,” Kin said.
“Do not trust the Earth Fleet major.”
“Awkward,” Dogface said.
Rebecca stepped forward, weapons ready. “We don’t trust anyone, Trak. Listen to Kin. He has tried to fight this new monster once, by himself.” She faced Kin. “How did that work, Kin?”
Earth Fleet units took possession of all connecting corridors. Trak commanded an equal number of Mazz forces, but they were bottled up behind him in one hallway.
“Listen, Trak. I promised Eagle I would defend this ship. I don’t want to fight you, despite everything that has happened between us. Help me push out the Reapers and destroy the Slomn-Reaper. After that, who knows?” Kin moved beyond cover to negotiate, feeling naked and vulnerable. Ceana yanked him back with force that surprised both of them.
“I like this armor!” Ceana said.
Kin struggled to his feet as Eagle led his troopers against Trak’s Mazz units. High velocity rounds hammered Kin’s armor. The impact was less noticeable than he expected. The FSPAA-IIA lived up to its reputation, even though the unit he had stolen was on the small side and not optimized for his offensive and defensive style.
“What do you want us to do?” Rebecca asked from a bulkhead.
“Fight,” Kin said. “I gave Trak a chance. Now it is what it is.”
Bullets and energy beams ripped across the short distance between the two forces. Trak’s soldiers took heavy casualties but pushed out of their bottleneck as Kin knew they would. Pieces of ship debris flew through the air and cluttered the deck. Anti-fire foam sprayed them and was whipped into a frothy pink slime from blood and other wound tissue.
There were no Reapers here, but Kin felt Droon’s approach at least once. If the Burning One came through any of the approaching hallways, the monster would drive the body count higher.
“Delta Squad, advance!” Eagle marched tracer rounds across the room toward an intersecting hallway, shifting his aim just ahead of Delta squad. It looked as though Eagle was leading his men to their objective, but in reality, he was clearing the way for them to move. The Delta Squad leader ran inches behind the barrage of gunfire, confident his major wouldn’t shoot him by accident.
“Nice,” Rebecca said over Kin’s squad level link.
Dogface grunted over the same channel, then bolted forward to take the position Delta Squad had abandoned when they moved. Kin gave hand signals to advance the rest of his team.
“Ceana,” Kin said, glad he could finally communicate with the Winger during a fight. “Don’t get carried away.”
Ceana didn’t respond. He could move the armor and do battle, but radio communications and how to use them was much more alien to him.
“Mikey-Danny, pair up with Ceana,” Kin said.
“Married to the Winger,” Mikey-Danny said. “Till death do us part.”
“A strange thing to say!” Ceana yelled over the radio.
“Ahh, please. Don’t do that,” Kin said, ears ringing from the amplified Winger voice.
The battle continued and people died. It had been a long time since Kin was responsible for troopers at the squad level, up close and personal during room to room and hallway to room fighting. He kept his friends alive and mostly undamaged.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Saving Ceana
KIN-ROL-AN-DA!
Kin signaled a halt as soon as Droon reached out to him. The Reaper King sounded injured and angry.
“Roland to Eagle, respond,” Kin radioed.
“Go,” Eagle said. He was in another room and the link was scratchy despite being boosted by the Earth Fleet ship.
“I need to peel off and address Reapers and other nasty things,” Kin said.
“Copy that. Thanks for the help.”
Kin led the way down a hallway that angled lower and lower into the bowels of the ship. “There are Reapers engaged in a hard fight this way. Look sharp.”
“I don’t want to know how you know that,” Dogface said.
“Two by two, let’s cross these next three intersections.”
The squad moved forward, operating as a team and making Kin proud. He had forgotten how good it felt.
“Give me some information, Kin,” Rebecca said.
“I think Droon and his creatures are faced off against the Reaper-Slomn. The Burning One. If that is what we find, the priority target is the big, nuclear-fucking monster Droon calls the Burning One. I need acknowledgment from everyone on the team.”
One by one, they radioed their understanding of the order. Kin was breathing a sigh of relief that each of his squad seemed on board with his plan when he found the hole burnt through the wall — burnt or clawed out, or something equally disturbing.
“I don’t like that,” Rebecca said.
Kin rushed through the gap, scanning left and right until Dogface and Rebecca came in behind him and assumed responsibility for their fields of fire.
The Burning One pulled back from a jagged opening to the exterior of the ship and the Ror-Rea beyond. First, it twisted its head toward its shoulder, eyes burning like small suns searching to destroy worlds, then turned its body. Standing half a meter taller than Droon on a good day, the Burning One stared at Kin with eyes too bright to look at.
“Kinrolanda!” The sound of its voice grated on Kin’s senses. Even through the FSPAA-IIA noise filters, it was too loud. The monster laughed, chest heaving up and down, causing Kin to remember that a true Slomn could crack open the chest cavity to release a plasma blast.
“Spread out,” Kin said.
“Move to cover,” Rebecca added.
“There is no cover. This is like playing Rus-Caintoin Roulette.” He wanted to curse Droon. The Reaper King was making a habit of abandoning him to fight this beast. He wondered what he had ever done to the Reaper besides nuke his home world and try to kill him a couple of dozen times.
Ceana jumped over Kin and the others, spreading his unarmored wings as wide as the passage would allow as he expanded his metal- and ceramic-covered chest to meet the expected counter attack. He crossed the room in an instant, crashed into the giant Reaper mutant, and drove it through the hole in the ship. Kin and his squad followed.
The Burning One raked Ceana with claws edged in fire, then head-butted him so hard that he flew into Kin and the others, knocking them down. By the time Kin regained his feet, the Burning One was fleeing across the Ror-Rea.
“Why is he running?” Dogface panted.
“He has about three Clingers stuck to him and probably doesn’t know what to do with them,” Kin said. “We need to get Ceana to Clavender.”
“What about Major Eagle and the armor he promised you?” Rebecca asked.
“Not high on my list of priorities right now.” Kin examined Ceana’s armor, then tightened several clamps to restrict blood flow, and leaned down with all of his weight for added effect. Portions of the wounds remained open where the armor was gone, so he patched these with clotting gel and lifted the Winger onto one shoulder. Mikey-Danny took the other side.
“I have the rear guard with Dogface,” Rebecca said.
Slowly, Kin and his battered squad mates traveled toward the heart of the Ror-Rea.
Two communication request indicators flashed inside of his helmet.
“Rebecca, are you getting communications requests?”
“No.” She was moving backward and had her back to him. “I assume that you are.”
“Yeah. I have a blue light and a gold light.”
“One is Earth Fleet. The other must be Mazz.” She chuckled. “If you went to basic training today, you would need to start from the beginning. After Hellsbreach, there were a lot of additional security measures put in place. Once you leave a ship without authorization, all of your radio traffic is monitored by the AI and blocked unless you have the correct clearance.”
Kin shifted his position under Ceana’s arm — causing Mikey-Danny to stumble — then readjusted his grip.
“Looks like your buddy Major Eagle didn’t take time from his busy schedule to give you and that ridiculous montage of parts you assembled a mission profile. No profile. No clearance. No talking to anyone inside the ship.”
“Great.” Kin looked over his shoulder. Individual Reapers were bolting from access bays and rents in the exterior of the ship. Droon’s Kindred found it difficult to fight in a group for long. They were a horde of individuals. That was why Earth Fleet took such a lackadaisical, and ultimately fatal, attitude about fighting them. Sure, the Reapers were deadly one on one, but how could they stand against a modern military?
A Reaper squad leader cracked the air with a lightning whip, something Kin had not seen for a long time. The smell reminded Kin of his first planetary assault. He focused on his present situation and tried for forget the terror of long ago battles.
“I am going to try to answer,” Kin said.
“Then try. I’m not your mother,” Rebecca said.
Dogface and Mikey-Danny laughed, although the latter grunted under Ceana’s weight.
“We need to strip him out of this armor,” Mikey-Danny said.
“Not yet. We are still in line of sight of hostile units on the ship. We could get shot at.” Kin doubted himself. Leaving armor in place had always been the best practice during his time in the Fleet. He didn’t want Ceana to be injured further. At the same time, he didn’t imagine Earth Fleet or Mazz forces leaving the ship just to take pot shots at them.
“Kin Roland to Earth Fleet. I am receiving a communication request.”
Nothing happened.
“Why would Eagle signal me and then block my reply?”
“Maybe he’s dead,” Rebecca said.
Kin wasn’t certain how he felt about that. Mike Eagle had never really been a friend — more of a comrade and peer who rose high in rank. Even now it was hard to see him as an enemy. He was dangerous. Kin needed dangerous people on his side.
“Kin Roland to Eagle,” he repeated.
Pushing the FSPAA-IIA armor hard, Kin and Mikey-Danny moved Ceana over a rise in the landscape and down behind it.
“Rest,” Kin said. He left Ceana with the trooper and crawled to the crest of the hill. “Kin Roland to Eagle.” He cursed under his breath until he saw a Mazz officer step onto a deployment ramp slick with blood and blackened with fire and impact marks.
“Kin,” Captain Trak said. “I have no time. We are being pushed back into our ship. Eagle and I agreed to pass this message. I was the first to fight free of Droon’s horde.”
“I hear you loud and clear, Trak. Give it to me.” His description of their radio link was exaggerated. Static crackled around every word and the volume of Trak’s voice fluctuated.
Static.
Hissing.
Chopped up syllables.
“Well?” Rebecca asked.
Kin shook his head. “I need to go down there.” He cursed under his breath. “Earth Fleet and Mazz forces want to fight each other, but when it comes down to having your face eaten by Reapers, we end up on the same side.”
“For about ten seconds,” Dogface muttered.
In the distance, Trak performed a Mazz salute, turned, and rejoined his soldiers. Reapers surged into the bay that had been empty except for Trak, moving from a hallway or neighboring launch bay that Kin could not see from outside of the ship. There were so many they bumped each other and caused smaller Reapers to tumble out of the openings. It was like rats crawling over a corpse. The scene reminded Kin of Hellsbreach birthing pits where he had been healed for several weeks.
“That’s a lot of Reapers,” Dogface said.
“Were we up against that many?” Rebecca asked.
“Damn it, Trak!” Kin said.
Rebecca, Dogface, and Mikey-Danny faced him. Ceana turned his helmet, but not far enough to make up for the angle of his prone body. His wings twitched and faded in places.
“We couldn’t hear what the Mazz officer told you,” Rebecca said.
“It was Trak, and he told me exactly nothing,” Kin said. “Except that he and Eagle agreed to pass me a message.”
“What was the message?” Rebecca’s annoyance made her sound younger and on
the brink of profanity.
“I couldn’t understand all the words.”
“I hate you, Kin Roland,” she said.
Kin smiled and shook his head. “You and God and Earth Fleet, apparently.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Shadow
“HOW can there be so many Reapers?” Rickson asked. His only companion, a battered and tattered mutt that had seen more weirdness and horror than all the Crater Town people combined, refused to answer.
He could be like that.
Rickson had tried to join the other humans in their Ror-Rea camps. They never accepted him on Crashdown, not really. Why did he think this exodus would change anything?
Reapers poured from both ships. The Earth Fleet vessel was where Kin and the others had gone in. Rickson was miles away, too far to get there before it was over. He stayed on the top of a hill without too many of the straight Ror-Rea trees to block his view. The rest of the people he grew up with — or grew up wishing he was with — moved on with the largest group of Wingers, some of whom were not warriors. On the second day after the pass, locals came to greet the returning army as it moved toward the center of Dax’s kingdom.
He counted the Reapers by five because it seemed they had trouble remaining in larger groups. During the Battle of the Bleeding Grounds, they washed over the landscape in waves, but that was Bloodlust. According to Kin, Bloodlust was the most dangerous time to face a Reaper. They did things they wouldn’t normally do and didn’t stop to eat what they killed.
There were fewer of the monsters than there had been on Crashdown, but a lot more than he expected to see here even after learning they slipped through the passage to the Ror-Rea behind Dax’s army.
“I wish we were there with Kin,” Rickson said.
Ogre loped toward the ships in the distance but looked back, turned around, and cocked his head at Rickson.
“It’s too far,” he said. “We are supposed to look after Clavender.”
Huff, barked the dog.
Rickson understood the dog’s frustration. None of the Wingers, including Clavender, had time for him. It was the same old story. He was just a shepherd boy on an adventure — an annoying burden to everyone.
