The Battle for the Solar System (Complete Trilogy)

by Sweeney, Stephen

  “Plasma pistol,” she said, turning it around in her hand as she examined it, wandering back in the direction of Estelle and Chaz. “Looks like a high power version.” There was a low, high-pitched whine as she switched it on, a small digital counter on the side lighting up to display the remaining charge in the energy capsule. “Got a full clip, too.”

  “Careful,” growled a voice. It was Chaz.

  Dodds looked over to see that the sound had broken the big man’s concentration, causing him to stop cutting. His hands were even more blood sodden now, covered up to the wrists. He was glaring at Kelly with a look of irritation. He then looked to Dodds and Enrique.

  “What are you two doing?” he growled.

  “Just taking a look,” Dodds said.

  “Then do us all a favour and make sure he’s actually dead!” Chaz said. “Get one of his guns and shoot him in the head!”

  “Huh?” Enrique said. He met Dodds’ eyes.

  Another odd thing for Chaz to say. Dodds glanced about, seeing that all eyes were on Chaz, the three other Knights, like himself, a little bewildered by his strange comment. Had Chaz gone mad? Had he suddenly acquired a taste for blood? Why was he acting so strangely? He prepared to press Chaz further, when a strange noise came from beside him. Something clattered, bounced and then rolled along the floor. It was followed by another very similar sound, and this time the something rolled into his fingers.

  Looking down, he saw a bullet. He picked it up, finding it wet and sticky between his fingers. It was covered in blood, just like his fingers now were. His eyes traced the faint red trail of splotches on the floor from where he had retrieved it, following them back to the soldier’s body.

  “What on Earth …”

  “Oh, hell! Dodds! Dodds!” Enrique cried.

  Dodds snapped first to Enrique, and then to the soldier’s body, in time to see the eyes fly open, focused and bright. A hand shot up and grabbed him tight around the throat. The speed and grip was incredible, and Dodds thrashed and choked as the soldier started easily to his feet, all the while maintaining a tight hold on him. The soldier’s other hand fumbled about his right leg, closing several times around nothing, searching for what had once been holstered there. He cast about until he spotted it in the hands of Kelly. His eyes then flickered to his shotgun, resting beneath a gurney where Dodds had kicked it.

  Dodds thrashed in the man’s grip for a moment, before he managed to coordinate his legs enough to deliver a kick to somewhere around the soldier’s midsection. The man didn’t so much as flinch, and with minimal effort, he threw Dodds away from himself, aiming him directly at Kelly. The small woman reacted much faster to the incoming pilot than she had to the Imperial fighter earlier that day, and Dodds crashed to the floor, skidding along past where Estelle and Chaz stood over Barber’s gurney, still trying to discover the whereabouts of the data card.

  He rolled several times, his world turning over and his body starting to ache in more places than he could count. He heard Estelle shouting to him, and then found her by his side. He tried to pull himself up, but his muscles were already burning and protesting. He managed only to get himself a little more upright, eager to help Enrique, who was now the only thing that stood between the soldier and his armaments, but able to do little else but watch.

  Weaponless, but far from helpless, the soldier fell back on his fists. Enrique avoided the first blow, as well as the one that followed, before returning three of his own, directly into his opponent’s face. It was clear from the speed and ferocity of the strikes that he was holding back none of his power, the blows he dealt enough to floor many of those he had sparred against in the past few years, almost certainly knocking them out.

  The combination over, he hopped back, only to see that his opponent was still standing, the strikes having been all but shrugged off. No blood, no sweat, not even a grunt. The soldier had barely even swayed from the blows, and Dodds couldn’t help feeling that Enrique was – quite literally – punching above his weight. He was a featherweight boxer, pitched against a super-heavyweight.

  It was then that Dodds saw just how large and tall the soldier actually was. He had found little time earlier to appreciate both the height and bulk of the man as they had struggled over the shotgun. Now he could see that he was just as large and stocky as Chaz, though clearly with something else added. Enrique had sparred with Chaz many times, and on more than one occasion the big man had called time out when Enrique had taken things too far. There would be no such call here.

  The soldier once again swung for Enrique as if nothing had happened. Enrique successfully parried the blow, but failed to land his own counter, the soldier ducking and swerving aside.

  Dodds had to help him. He got halfway to standing before dizziness and a sudden headrush forced him down. He saw Enrique and the soldier engaged in a far more committed fight now, fists flying, legs attempting to connect kicks, grapples made and broken. Though Enrique was usually a very sure fighter, the type that quite often taunted their opponent, on this occasion his face betrayed his rapidly diminishing confidence. He knew he wasn’t going to be able to hold off the soldier for very long.

  “Estelle, shoot him!” Enrique called, ducking under another swing and looking to Estelle for assistance.

  “I can’t! It’s empty!” Estelle shouted back. She looked to the clutter of items next to the gurney, eyes searching for spare magazines. She then did the only thing she could think of, and threw the pistol at the soldier’s head.

  It missed.

  “Thanks!” Enrique said, as the gun bounced off the wall and clattered to the floor. He attempted to deliver a kick to the soldier’s stomach, but the man caught his leg and tipped him over backwards, sending him crashing into the gurney behind, overturning the metal trolley and exposing the shotgun that lay beneath.

  Anticipating the soldier’s next move, Estelle rushed forward, reaching the weapon first and kicking it further up the room, before then attempting to take the man on herself. She didn’t have very much success, a boot to the stomach sending her to the floor.

  The dizziness had finally left Dodds and he sprang to his feet, fighting against the aches in his body. Enrique was up again, but already the soldier was starting to overcome him, landing two successive punches across his face. Enrique stumbled backward, appearing dazed. Dodds started forward. Chaz was suddenly in front of him.

  “What are you standing there for?” the big man shouted at Kelly, who had remained rooted to the spot ever since the soldier’s resurrection. She didn’t seem to hear Chaz, nor be aware of his presence until he wrenched the plasma pistol from her hands, shoved her aside and lined himself up with the soldier. “Enrique, get down!” he barked to the man up front, before discharging the pistol three times. The first bolt struck the soldier square in the face, directly on the nose. The second tore straight through his right temple. The third shot struck the soldier in the forehead, almost taking the top of his skull off. The body tottered for a moment, before slumping down.

  Chaz strode forward, keeping the pistol trained on the remains the whole time. He knelt by the body, inspecting it carefully. Appearing satisfied, he set about looting the man’s suit.

  As Enrique stood, moving to help Estelle who was still trying to draw breath, Dodds found himself unable to do anything but stare at Chaz while he was plundering their adversary. Enrique caught his eye, glancing at Chaz and then back again. It was clear he was wondering exactly the same thing – Where the hell did he learn to fire a gun like that?

  His short-known team-mate had handled the firearm as if it were second nature to him, as though he had used it every single day for years. Whilst Estelle had held Barber’s pistol as though it burned her hand, Chaz had wielded a gun with total confidence. The accuracy of the shots he had fired had more than asserted his marksmanship. He had never been that accurate during firearms training back on Spirit.

  Dodds rubbed the back of his head and studied the carnage in front of him. What h
e had just seen was impossible. Estelle had shot the invader four times, landing each bullet in the torso. Yet, only a few minutes later, the man was back on his feet as if nothing had happened. He spotted one of the bullets resting on the floor, close to the body.

  Had it missed? No, it couldn’t have. Estelle had fired six times. Two had ended up embedded in the back of the locker, the other four in the soldier’s body. There had been blood, the man had fallen. He had heard the cries of pain behind the mask. The man hadn’t even been breathing. The bullet he had picked up had also been sticky with blood and the man’s suit had been torn where the projectile had entered. Surely he couldn’t have imagined all of that.

  And the strength! The man had thrown him across the mortuary with one hand! Had it not been for the pain in his lower back, he might not have believed it had actually happened. Dodds considered it lucky that he could still walk. He felt at his aching throat, where the man had held him. It was painful to swallow. He was certain that beneath the lining of the flight suit there would be some rather pronounced bruising. He thought it quite possible that the soldier could’ve crushed his windpipe with only a slight twist of his wrist.

  He became aware that Kelly was talking rapidly and that Enrique was trying to soothe her.

  “That man was dead!” Kelly cried, pointing at the corpse. “Estelle shot him down! How the hell did he get back up?” She seemed hysterical.

  “Kelly, calm down,” Enrique started.

  “Please, dear God, tell me that this concussion is making me see things!”

  “Kelly—”

  “Is he really dead now?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, he is. Now, please calm down.”

  “How do you know he’s not going to get back up again?”

  “I don’t think he’ll be getting up after that.”

  “Yeah, but we thought that after Estelle put four damn bullets into him—”

  “Are you okay, mate?” Dodds asked Enrique above Kelly’s ramblings, stumbling forward to join the two.

  “Fine,” Enrique said, though Dodds saw that his face was just as bruised as his own. “Are you alright?”

  Dodds looked in the direction of the two corpses on the floor by the locker. “I meant what I said earlier – should’ve bloody well stayed in bed!”

  “What the hell was that all about?” Enrique wanted to know, glancing at the bodies.

  “I don’t know. I’ve got about a thousand questions, and a set of answers that I could count on one hand.” He realised his voice was shaking. But then, so was everyone else’s.

  Enrique put an arm around Kelly, rubbing her back. Dodds left them to it and made his way over to where the solider had fallen. He caught a glimpse of what remained of the man’s head, before the sight forced him to turn away. He spotted some more red-stained brass-coloured objects on the floor. Two more bullets. That made three. He had no idea what might’ve happened to the fourth.

  One thousand and one.

  Chaz was still removing things from the soldier. So far, he had collected what looked like four grenades and a fuel cell for the plasma pistol. Other items were being tossed aside.

  “Chaz, where’s the card?” Estelle asked through sharp intakes of breath. “Did you get it?”

  Chaz seemed not to hear her.

  “Chaz?” Estelle asked again, louder this time, still rubbing at her stomach.

  “What?” Chaz roared, looking around at her, anger and impatience clear in his eyes.

  “Do not speak to me that way, Lieutenant!” Estelle said, the stress causing her own temper to flare. “Did you find the data card?”

  Chaz tossed something in her direction. She caught it, wiping it off on her suit, before examining it closely.

  “Looks like it,” she said. “What do you think?”, she added, passing it to Dodds for a second opinion.

  He turned it over in his hand. It was a tiny plastic capsule, stained dark red with Barber’s blood. Inside was something thin and blue, marked with the white crest of the Confederation. That was good enough for him. Right now, he just wanted to get out of there. “Yep, that’s it,” he said, passing it back.

  “Right, we’ve got what we came for,” Estelle stated, stowing the capsule safely in her flight suit. “I think what it might be worth us doing is trying to contact—”

  “What we need to do is get out of here, right now!” Chaz said, snatching up the items he had removed from the soldier’s body and stashing them in various compartments and pockets of his own flight suit. “Enrique, how many more did you see?” he asked, as he set about retrieving the shotgun from where Estelle had kicked it.

  “Four, maybe five,” Enrique said.

  Chaz swore. He then looked around the morgue, his expression becoming quite grim. “Doesn’t look like there’s any way out of here, except for the way we came in.” He glanced at the shotgun in his hand and then turned to the group, his eyes flickering over each of them, before settling on Enrique. “Do you know how to use one of these?”

  “Sure,” Enrique said, “I’ve done my fair share at the shooting range.”

  Chaz tossed the shotgun to him.

  “Magazine holds seven rounds, but that model has a low effective range, so anything over about thirty metres isn’t going to be worth shooting at, especially if you don’t have a steady aim. Don’t waste it on potshots, either; it won’t do us any good. Only use it when I tell you.”

  The tone in his voice told Dodds that this was far more than just a mere suggestion. Enrique nodded as he began to familiarize himself with the handling of the weapon, turning it over and bouncing it in his hands to test the weight. Dodds looked at Chaz in confusion. It seemed that the big man knew a lot more than he had been willing to let on. Quite why, he didn’t know. The once-quiet man was nowhere to be seen and Dodds wondered if they were now seeing Chaz’s true colours.

  He pointed at the body. “Chaz, that guy—”

  “Do you really want to stand around and talk about it now?” Chaz said.

  Dodds didn’t.

  “Right, everyone ready?” Chaz asked as he started off to retrieve his equipment. “We’re not exactly going to have an easy time getting out of here in one piece.”

  “Lieutenant, what the hell?!” Estelle snapped, a furious expression on her face. “Don’t make me remind you who is in charge of this mission, Mr Koonan! Aside from the fact that Commodore Parks charged me with seeing this task through to completion, you are also ignoring the chain of command! I am a first lieutenant, you are a second lieutenant. I am the wing commander of the White Knights and I won’t have you giving orders to my team whilst—”

  Dodds reached out and took a grip of Estelle’s shoulder, prompting her to stop talking. “Estelle, look,” he said, “it took five of us to take down that one guy, and we barely managed that. If there really are several more of them outside, then right now I really feel that we should be listening to Chaz.”

  Estelle glared at him, before her eyes strayed to the body of the dead soldier on the floor. She stood in silence for long moment, looking from Dodds, to Chaz, to the body. She then shrugged Dodds’ hand from her shoulder.

  “Fine, we’ll follow your lead, Chaz,” she said with clear reluctance. “For now. But the minute we all get out of here, you have a lot of explaining to do, mister.”

  Chaz acknowledged her with a mere nod of his head, before the party retrieved their gear and started out of the mortuary. The big man paused as the others left, returning to Barber’s gurney. He picked up the linen sheet off the floor and carefully spread it back over her body, bending down to gently kiss her on the forehead, before covering her completely.

  Dodds studied him as he did all of this, but Chaz offered up no explanation for his actions. And neither did Dodds seek to ask.

  XXVI

  — The Fate of an Empire —

  The infirmary lay still and quiet, and as Dodds continued his slow, crouched w
alk towards the main door, he was confident that they were alone. At Chaz’s request, he and Enrique had sneaked forward, heading up the group’s journey to the exit. Chaz had covered their backs, keeping Estelle and Kelly with him.

  Dodds noticed as he approached it that the light on the door control panel was blinking on and off, and guessed that the lock he had engaged earlier was no longer in effect. Judging by what had just happened in the morgue, it probably wouldn’t have stood up to anything more than a shove from their attacker. That whole sequence was still quite vivid in his mind. Had it really happened? Were they all really here, crawling out of a morgue where they had just cut open a dead woman and fought a man who had somehow come back to life?

  No, he hadn’t come back to life. That was impossible. He had just been playing dead.

  Both Dodds and Enrique moved to either side of the door, Dodds indicating the circular window at the top. “Was this where you were when you saw them?” he whispered. Enrique nodded. “Let me take a look.” Dodds stood cautiously and peeked out the window. The central hall appeared a great deal darker than when they had first arrived, but also quite empty. Aside from a mass of randomly scattered bags and discarded items of clothing, there was nothing else. No movement, no sign of any soldiers. Even so, he chose not to linger by the window any longer than necessary, and ducked back down, signalling the all-clear to Chaz, who hurried forward with Estelle and Kelly in tow.

  “See anything?” Chaz asked, keeping his voice low.

  “Nothing,” Dodds said, “but it looks like a number of the lights have blown.”

  “No,” Chaz shook his head. “The soldiers have probably shot them out to make it harder for everyone else to see where they’re going.”

  Dodds only nodded. At this point, he was willing to accept just about anything Chaz told them. Questions could wait until later.

  “Take a step outside for a better look,” Chaz said. “And be very careful. Keep low and don’t make any noise.”

  “Okay.” Dodds pushed at the door, but found it almost impossible to move, as if there was a great weight in front of it. Enrique came to his aid and between them they managed to open the door just wide enough for Dodds to squeeze through, the bulky propulsion pack on his back making the task more awkward than it should’ve been.