Survival Aptitude Test: Rise (The Extinction Odyssey Book 3)

by Mike Sheriff

  Six mongrels lay among a carpet of shattered glass, bodies torn and shredded. Twisted chunks of black nullglass jutted from the surrounding consoles and littered the deck—the remnants of the window frames riven free by the ferocious overpressure.

  Five feet away, Massum rose to his feet. He scanned his limbs as if to confirm he still possessed them, then took in the carnage. He took a moment to find his voice. “Damage report!”

  Julinian crawled past him, skirting the largest blood pools and smallest slivers of glass. She angled toward Itta, who lay against the forward bulkhead beneath a row of shattered windows. “I’ll attend to Itta. You confirm the plasma-beam is still functional.”

  Massum nodded, eyes swimming with shock, and staggered aft. Julinian reached Itta. Aside from a superficial cut to her forehead, she appeared uninjured. “Lie still,” Julinian said. “I’m here to help you.”

  Itta propped herself up on her elbows. Julinian pushed her back down and gauged the crew’s level of attentiveness. All appeared preoccupied, assessing damage to the gondola’s consoles or attending to their comrades’ gruesome wounds. Massum stood twenty feet away at the aft bulkhead, his focus on the plasma-beam console. She’d never get a better opportunity.

  Itta tried to sit up again, cursing under her breath. Julinian shoved her down, this time with enough force to drive her head into the bulkhead. Itta yelped and squeezed her eyes shut. Julinian snatched a tapered nullglass shard off the deck.

  Itta opened her eyes—they burned with rage. “I don’t need your help, damn you!”

  Julinian placed her free hand over the wound on Itta’s forehead. “Oh, but you do.” She craned forward until their noses touched. “You need my help crossing over to the Great After.”

  Itta’s eyes bulged. If she realized what was coming, the understanding came a moment too late.

  Julinian drove the nullglass shard into Itta’s neck, threading the gap between her twin hair braids. Warm liquid sprayed her fingers—she’d found the carotid artery.

  Itta’s mouth stretched open, but no words escaped the maw. Her whistling breaths pulsed against Julinian’s lips.

  “Bleed out, Penumbra,” she whispered, twisting the shard. “Soon enough I’ll be sending more mongrels to join you.”

  Itta’s eyelids drooped. Her breaths ceased.

  Julinian placed her other hand over the wound. The blood flow slowed and stopped, but it lent both hands a convincing coating. She stood as Massum came forward. He halted and gazed down at Itta’s body.

  Julinian raised her blood-soaked hands. “I . . . I tried to stem the flow, but the wound was too severe.”

  If Massum mourned his colleague’s passing, he disguised it well. “It’s lucky we all weren’t shredded by the blasts.” He glanced at Julinian. “The plasma-beam is still functional.”

  She wiped her hands on her tunic, smearing its lapels with Itta’s blood. “Then let’s avenge her death.” She turned to the aft bulkhead. “Charge the beam!”

  The Asianoid-Slavv tapped a screen. A low-frequency hum emanated from the bulkhead. It grew louder, triggering sympathetic resonance in the deck’s tiles. Thousands of shards jounced and clattered. Every active console in the gondola flickered and went dark.

  “It’s blinded our sensors!” a crewman said.

  “You’d best shield your eyes,” Julinian said, “lest they be blinded as well.”

  “The beam is fully charged,” the Asianoid-Slavv at the aft console called out, voice raised to compete with its volatile hum. “Ready to fire on your order!”

  She raised her hands and shielded her eyes. “Standby . . . fire!”

  A savage glare swelled. Its luminance blotted out every object inside the gondola.

  CANG BLINKED, STRUGGLING to process what she was seeing.

  A luminescent yellow beam pierced the sky, emanating from the nose cowling on one of the cullcraft. Its brilliance approached that of the swollen sun as it drilled into the gas envelope of Commander Eshan’s aeroshrike.

  At his nav console, Jiren Yongrui covered his eyes. Beyond him, Jiren Bhavya rose from her seat, face bathed in a fiery glow. “What in Sha’s name is that?”

  Cang recognized the telltale glow from Pyros’ air-burst transmission. She now knew what had brought his aeroshrike down. She now knew what had culled Radan. Learning the answers brought no satisfaction. “Sensors, confirm you’re recording this?”

  “Confirmed,” the operator said, voice taut with awe.

  One thousand feet to port, Eshan’s aeroshrike yawed to the right. The armored panels beneath the beam glowed yellow, then orange, then red. . . .

  Cang swallowed a clot of rising panic—a hull breech was imminent. “Helm, come hard right! All engines ahead at full power! Get us clear of his vessel!”

  The deck heeled as the aeroshrike veered to starboard. An orange flash lit up the bridge a second later. An ear-splitting report followed.

  The forward section of Eshan’s aeroshrike disappeared behind a dense plume of flames. Shattered armor panels spiraled through the air. The remaining gas envelope convulsed and plunged from the sky, trailing twin columns of smoke and fire.

  “Continue the turn!” Cang said. “Dive and break contact!”

  The bridge angled downward, still canted to the right amid the violent turn. The maneuver placed the mongrel cullcraft high on the port quarter. Cang stooped and locked her gaze onto the nose of the nearest cullcraft—the one that had fired the mysterious beam. She held her breath, petitioning Sha for good fortune, but waiting for the inevitable.

  She didn’t have to wait long. The cullcraft’s nose emitted a blinding flash.

  “Brace for impact!”

  No impact followed, but the weapon’s effect was immediate and devastating.

  The light beam raked the aeroshrike’s port quarter, aft of the airscrews’ swept mounting. Panels beneath the beam flaked and ruptured as the beam skittered forward. It sliced through the mounting, ten feet aft of the airscrews’ attachment points.

  Cang looked on, helpless, as three airscrews dropped away in a radiant shower of sparks, their contra-rotating blades still whirling at full speed.

  The damage-control console issued a jangling chorus of alarms. “Port engines offline!” the operator said. “Ruptures in hydrogen cell’s sixteen through twenty. Make that sixteen through twenty-four!”

  Cang spun to the comms console. “Ready the air-burst transmission to Commander Hyro. Send tele-optics, audio, telemetry, everything!”

  “I can’t, sireen,” the operator said, face as white as sun-bleached sand. “The primary and secondary transceivers are offline.”

  She cursed under her breath. Before she could utter another word, the aeroshrike moaned and shuddered. A low-frequency vibration rattled the deck.

  “Was that an explosion?” Bhavya asked, voice pinched with alarm.

  “That would be a good guess.” Cang waited for a damage report, but none came. She turned to the damage-control console.

  The operator sat with his hands pressed against the side of his head. Amber and red lights flashed on his console, announcing cautions and warnings. The strobe effect was both mesmerizing and overwhelming.

  Another powerful shudder rocked the gondola. The bridge pitched upward, the angle increasing from thirty degrees’ nose-down to thirty degrees’ nose-high within five seconds. Deck tiles warped and buckled. Airspeed bled off. The lone thrust vector from the starboard engines induced a counter-clockwise spin.

  “Helm is unresponsive!” the helmsman shouted. “I’ve lost altitude control!”

  Cang clutched the arm of her command chair to keep her balance. “Shut down all engines!”

  “All engines shut down!”

  The absence of thrust and nose-high attitude induced a nauseating tail-slide. The flutter of uncontrolled descent welled in the pit of Cang’s stomach. The aeroshrike was dropping tail-first from the sky. It wasn’t free-fall, but it was close. She glanced out a window.

&nbs
p; Five hundred feet above, the remnants of the mongrel fleet seemed to rise in unison. None of the cullcraft lowered their noses to pursue, nor did any of the harassing gyroblades. They appeared to be rejoining the formation to continue their journey south.

  The sickening plunge had one advantage—it allowed them to break contact. Whether that was beneficial depended on their ability to slow the aeroshrike to a survivable rate of descent. They needed to shed weight. “Balance and trim, blow ballast!”

  “Forward or aft ballast?”

  “All of it!”

  Twelve muffled thuds echoed in quick succession as twelve scuppers opened along the lower gas envelope. High-pressure air began ejecting sand at a rate of four-hundred pounds per second.

  “Altitude one thousand feet and falling,” Yongrui called out from the nav console. “Rate of descent is one hundred-twenty feet per second. Now one hundred feet . . . now ninety feet . . .”

  Cang’s stomach agreed with his reports of a slowing descent rate. She breathed a sigh of relief—a descent rate of less than seventy feet per second would be survivable. Continuing to blow sand ballast should be enough to prevent a catastrophic—

  Two more explosions tore through the air. The deck seemed to drop away as the aeroshrike nosed over.

  “Hydrogen cells twelve and fourteen have ruptured!” the damage-control operator said. He leaned to the side and retched onto the deck. “If . . . if we lose another we’ll be in free-fall!”

  Cang’s throat clamped shut. Not that it mattered. Nothing she could say or do would prevent another cell rupture. Their fate was in Sha’s hands.

  “Five hundred feet and falling!” Yongrui shouted, voice an octave higher than normal. “Rate of descent is increasing!”

  Cang clambered onto the commander’s chair and cinched its shock belt across her lap. She fumbled to reach the twin shoulder belts.

  “Three hundred feet and falling!”

  She fought off the urge to close her eyes and shifted her gaze to the bridge windows.

  “One hundred feet and falling!”

  The desert rushed up to meet her. “Brace! Brace! Brace!”

  Her heart barely had time to palpitate before—

  8

  The Opening Salvo

  DAOREN PACED ACROSS the wall’s upper battlement with Commander Hyro at his side.

  To their left, an ad-hoc command post occupied a hundred square-feet of the open walkway next to the watchtower’s stout base. Five Jireni manned a mobile-comms console under the stern gaze of Commander Slabidan. While a tenth of the size of the console array in the outpost, it provided crucial data links to the watchtowers and other defensive positions spread across the wall’s breadth. Minute by minute, hissing static and crackling voices announced status updates from the various outstations. Minute by minute, a layered defense was forming around Daqin Guojin.

  Hyro hummed to herself as she walked. The melody carried an upbeat undertone.

  “You seem at ease,” Daoren said.

  She glanced at him and shrugged. “The sun is shining and my stomach is full. What’s there to be uneasy about?”

  He shelved the obvious response and surveyed the immediate area. He’d been briefed on the wall’s construction not long after assuming the duties of Unum, but this was the first time he’d stood upon its battlement.

  Its crystalline walkway spanned forty feet between the chest-high, crenelated parapets demarcating the wall’s northern and southern faces. A passageway in the nearby watchtower allowed for unimpeded lateral movement, as well as access to the elevating chambers and stairways that led to the wall’s base.

  To the east and west, Jireni squads manned an array of crew-served weapons; mainly chain guns of the sonic and kinetic variety. Scores of automated weapon systems rounded out the arsenal; quad cannons, single-barreled thump guns, thunder mortars, and more. They perched atop muscular nullglass pedestals, anchored in fixed positions every fifty feet. Gimbaled mountings permitted them to train and elevate in any direction. At the moment, they all pointed north.

  He clenched and unclenched his hands, hoping the gesture might alleviate the tingling numbness in his extremities. An eerie calm had descended over the city-state, abetted by the easing wind and Hyro’s persistent humming.

  Fifty-five minutes had passed since they’d viewed the opening salvos of Commander Cang’s aerial battle with the mongrel fleet. The final air-burst transmission received from her aeroshrike conveyed ill news; her vessel had been struck by at least ten gyroblades. The resulting damage had severed the transmission; for all he knew, Cang, Eshan, and their Jireni crews had perished high above the northern desert.

  Daoren halted before the northern parapet. His gaze settled on the dunes below. The perspective helped distract him from the questions over the city-state’s fate.

  The vantage point from three hundred feet above ground level provided a bracing view of the crop circles. They stretched more than five miles to the north. Sixty Hexalite levicarts had been deployed along the approach—though the vehicles proved difficult to spot thanks to their dispersion and concealment. Crews had dug the hullforms into the sand dunes interspersing the crop circles, leaving little more than their turrets and spindly sonic cannons exposed. They, too, trained in one direction.

  Toward Havoc.

  For over two centuries, the Great Northern Border had constituted Daqin Guojin’s first and best line of defense against mongrel incursions. In that role, it had served the city-state well—no incursion had ever breached the wall. Daoren petitioned Sha that they might uphold the tradition today. He turned from the desert and took in the vast panorama south of the cull zone.

  Nansilafu Cheng’s sprawling spectraglass structures glistened, their myriad geometrical shapes reflecting a smear of orange, red, and purple hues. Toroids constituted the most dominant shape—Slavvs tended to associate the torus with the divine. Blue, crystalline transways intercut the colorful edifices. Unlike the meandering transways in Zhongguo Cheng, they limited their orientation to strict north-south orientations.

  Two miles south of the cull zone, four aeroshrikes orbited at one thousand feet above the district. The vessels stood poised to close the border upon his order—either to destroy the cullcraft that approached the wall or to halt the advancing shocktroops. If any mongrels set foot on the cull zone, they would encounter an interlocking field of fire from the weapon systems atop the battlement. As a final protective measure, Commander Slabidan had deployed hundreds of Jireni squads in and among the structures abutting the cull zone. In all, it made for a formidable layered defense . . . but would it be enough?

  Slabidan paced over from the command post and bowed from the neck. “We’ve received the last status update, Unum. The border is manned from the Western to Eastern Seas.”

  “Have all the denizens been relocated south of the wall?”

  “Yes. I’ve also tasked a hundred Jireni to evacuate the structures closest to the cull zone.”

  “Evacuate them to where?”

  “Outside a two-mile buffer zone,” Slabidan said. “If the mongrels start lobbing nullglass projectiles or sonic rounds, it will minimize collateral casualties.”

  “That’s good thinking.” Daoren turned to Hyro. “How will the mongrels stage their attack?”

  Hyro scowled as she mulled the question. “Difficult to say. They’re not the most tactically gifted opponents, but they make up for it with their ferocity.”

  Daoren absorbed the vague comment. “Is that it?”

  “We can anticipate a mix of direct and indirect fire,” Slabidan said. “They’ll want to probe our defenses before committing to a ground assault.”

  “And once the ground assault commences?”

  “We should expect a mix of mounted and unmounted shocktroops.”

  “Mounted shocktroops?”

  “Bowpods,” Hyro said with a hint of impatience. “Their primary armored carrier.”

  Daoren tilted his head back and nodded. In tr
uth, he’d never even heard of the conveyance. His ignorance brought a dull regret into sharp relief; he should have spent more time since his ascension studying the mongrel’s offensive capabilities. Domestic matters like crop cultivation, Jireni reform, and dismantling the grooll mill had consumed his attention. In hindsight, the preoccupation could prove fatal if he made the wrong decision based on imperfect knowledge. “Will they strike along the breadth of the wall?”

  “I’ve seen them stage attacks across a wide front before,” Slabidan said, “but the strategy has always proven ineffective. If I was their commander, I’d throw overwhelming numbers of shocktroops into a more focused frontal assault. Employ sheer manpower to overwhelm our defenses.”

  Hyro grunted. “An assault of attrition would make the most sense.”

  The callous calculation made Daoren shudder, but he masked his revulsion. “If they decide to use attrition, how long could we hold them off?”

  “That depends on their numbers,” Hyro said. “But the mongrels aren’t stupid. If we make them pay for every inch of ground, they’ll think twice about pressing home the assault.”

  “Then we must make them pay.” He surveyed the crew-served weapons along the walkway. “Do you think we have enough—”

  “You can let go of my arm, thank you!”

  Daoren pivoted to the all-too-familiar voice emanating from the watchtower’s base.

  Heqet emerged from its passageway with a burly Slavvic Jiren at her side and four more to her rear. She shook her arm free from the Jiren’s grip and strode closer. Her clipped pace and balled fists spoke volumes about her mood.

  Daoren primed his lungs to shout his indignation. He corralled the impulse, but couldn’t mask his shock. “What in Sha’s name are you doing up here?”

  The Slavvic escort caught up to his charge, breathless. “Forgive me, Unum, but Zhenggong Heqet demanded we bring her back here.”