Shattered Lamps (Osprey Chronicles Book 2)

by Ramy Vance

  The intermittent rumbling she’d heard over the last ten minutes became a continuous drone suddenly—and it was growing louder.

  Heart thudding, Jaeger shoved herself across the hallway and planted her third bomb. Couldn’t put them all in the same chamber and risk the K’tax discovering all of them at once.

  Something moved in the corner of her vision. A drone crawled around the curve, coming in her direction. She ignored it.

  Fourth explosive. Unscrewed, armed, planted.

  “Dammit,” Toner called over the radio. “We’ve come under fire. Could use a little help.”

  “We’re nearby,” Aquila offered. “We’re on our way—”

  “Negative,” Jaeger snapped. “You make sure those Locauri get out safely. Hang in there, Toner. I’m on my way.”

  Her hands trembled as she pulled the fifth bomb out of her pouch. She thought she heard the distant shrieks of combat. The drone was coming closer, and for the first time, she thought she saw purpose, or at least a sense of urgency, in its waddle. Not daring to take her eyes off it, she thrust the bomb into a chamber.

  Something sharp and brutally strong snapped like a vise over her wrist.

  She screamed. She shoved her weight against the wall and heaved, wrenching her arm free of the chamber with adrenaline-fueled panic. The Creeper nymph latched onto her wrist, massive and hot and reeking of slime, its mandibles squeezing all the warmth and blood out of her fingers. Nothing but the reinforced fabric of her exo-suit kept it from snapping her wrist like a twig. Blind with pain, Jaeger tumbled in the air, wrestling the reeking body as she fumbled for her stunner. The nymph chattered, its short, dagger-sharp legs ripping at her suit.

  Out of the corner of her vision, she saw the larger drone finally work itself into some form of excitement and break into an undulating run.

  Her hand finally closed over the trigger of her stunner. She drew. The nymph lashed, wrenching its weight in one direction, then another, as it tried to rip her hand free of her arm. Jaeger shrieked and doubled over, seeing stars. She jabbed blindly with her stunner until it hit something soft and squishy and pulled the trigger.

  The Creeper thrashed again and let out a thin, whistling scream—the shrill whine of steam escaping from a lobster as it boiled in its shell.

  The sick-sweet scent of bile and gore washed over Jaeger as the creature’s abdomen split. The alien’s mandibles went slack, releasing her wrist as all the life ran out of its body and spilled across her suit in waves of warm guts and viscera.

  Nauseous with pain, Jaeger kicked against a wall and pushed herself away from the oncoming drone—which had worked up an alarming head of steam as it barreled in her direction. There was one more bomb in her pouch, but she didn’t have time to plant it. More shapes were moving farther down the corridor, behind the oncoming drone.

  Panicked shouting filled the radio channel, too chaotic to decipher.

  Jaeger lifted her stunner again and fired wildly. Smoke and sparks filled the air as the electric charges bounced off the walls, obscuring her from sight.

  Kicking clumsily against the wall, she turned and fled.

  “Toner!” She gasped into the coms channel. “Toner, I’m on my way—what’s your status?”

  More yelling, too chaotic to understand.

  Then she heard a distant roar—both reverberating through the radio and echoed an instant later as it swelled up the corridor ahead of her.

  Her blood ran cold. She recognized that primal scream.

  “The first officer is, uh, indisposed,” one of Toner’s team shouted over the line. “He’s engaged with the enemy. We’ve got a man down, and we’re pinned, taking heavy fire.”

  “Set off a locater beacon,” Jaeger cried.

  “My people are close by,” Bufo added. “We’re on our way. Hang in there!”

  Jaeger had been practicing reverse-polarity mag soles. She could zip quite expertly through the outer corridors of the Osprey. However, her ship’s network of embedded ferrous metals was regular and predictable and designed to make anti-grav travel easy.

  The Creepers had done them no such favors—and moving at these frantic speeds, Jaeger careened from one side of the hallway to the other at a breakneck pace. She slipped past a single drone, passing so close she felt its stubby antennae brush across her chest.

  A locater beacon icon flashed across her heads-up display, and she twisted, turning sharply down a cross-corridor. The walls rattled around her. The sounds of screaming and the high-pitched whine of stunner fire filled the air, along with the faint scent of burning ozone. She passed more drones, ignoring the sluggish creatures. Most of them were moving away from the fighting, anyway.

  “They’ve brought in some kind of heavy hitter,” called Toner’s second-in-command. “Our stunners are useless against the heavy plating. It’s blocking our escape.”

  Jaeger heard a blurt of static cut across the coms channel and realized that someone on the outside was trying to talk to them but couldn’t get through all the layers of rock.

  She turned a final corner and entered a scene of utter carnage.

  Clouds of blood and smoke and the milky white fluid filled the cramped corridor. A massive shape lashed through the haze, filling the passage. It was a collection of sharp edges and thick exoskeleton plating lined with jagged spikes. It stomped through piles of broken drone bodies, crushing their soft bodies beneath its tree-trunk limbs, filling the air with more clouds of milky-white blood.

  Jaeger saw a flash of something pale through the haze. Slashed and bleeding, Toner grappled with the half-ton monster. Scraps of his ruined exo-suit clung to the spikes on its plating. He’d jammed his hands into a plating gap between two main segments of the crab-monster’s thorax.

  “You’re fucking crazy,” Jaeger screamed. Toner didn’t hear her. She barely heard herself.

  The vampire roared again, and she saw the swell and ripple of his normally spindly arms as he ripped into the shell—exposing a strip of the soft, gooey inner body.

  Jaeger didn’t think. She plunged forward, lifting her stunner in her good hand. She slammed into the back of the crab hard enough to fill her vision with black stars. Gasping for breath, numb from the pain in her broken wrist, she forced the muzzle of her weapon into the exposed crack and fired.

  The beast went rigid as wave after wave of high-voltage electricity surged through its squishy innards.

  If Toner heard the good news, he gave no sign. He planted his boots on the crab’s legs and heaved, letting out a primal howl.

  The crab’s abdomen separated from its thorax with a wet ripping sound. Strings of guts and viscera draped across the corridor like a curtain as Toner pulled the body apart. Jaeger caught her first glimpse of the passage beyond. Toner’s team huddled behind the drifting corpse of a smaller battle-crab monster, firing into the smoke.

  “Fall back,” Jaeger screamed. “Exit’s clear, fall back!”

  Moving with coordinated precision, one of the dark-clad soldiers grabbed his injured comrade by the arm and hurled himself through the door Toner had ripped in the crab’s body while the last one laid down cover fire.

  Blind with rage, Toner tore limbs off the battle crab and stabbed it in the squishy bits with its pointy legs. Jaeger wanted to grab him and shake him back into focus but didn’t dare. She didn’t fully trust his neural kill switch to protect her when he was wading in blood like this. All she could do was lay down cover fire with one clumsy, trembling hand, buying the last team member time to turn and flee down the hallway after his companions.

  “Toner. Snap out of it. Toner!” Jaeger kicked backward, beginning her retreat, but unable to take her eyes from the flailing monster of her first mate. A swarm of hard-shelled Creepers rushed up the tunnel.

  Her face stung. Her body burned with exhaustion and panic, from head to toe. She was going to watch him get torn apart, undone by the chaos of his blind battle madness.

  “I will not trust you, I—nor stay longer in your
curs’t company,” she whispered around the lump of leaden terror in her throat.

  The man went rigid as if she’d flipped a switch in his brain.

  “Your hands than mine are quicker for a fray,” he mumbled as the battle crabs swelled up around him, heavy claws reaching out to rip him apart as ruthlessly as he had torn into their companion.

  Then Toner shook himself. “My legs are longer, though, to run away!”

  He tucked his legs into his chin and kicked, hurling himself around the collapsing pile of the dismembered battle crab, centimeters ahead of the oncoming Creepers.

  Like an expert defensive lineman going in for the game-winning play, he tackled Jaeger squarely at center-mass. Arms locked around her waist, they rocketed up the corridor.

  “You okay?” he asked, entirely too chipper.

  How dare you ask me that, Jaeger thought, numb and dizzy as Toner hurled a tight corkscrew around a line of fleeing nymphs.

  “On second thought,” he said, squeezing her tight into his chest as he banked a sharp turn up a side tunnel. She gasped as her stomach dropped through her feet. “You relax and let me focus on driving. Damn. I feel good enough to pull an Initiative Seven maneuver. Wanna give it a shot?”

  “Hell,” Jaeger mumbled. “I’m in hell.”

  “I’ll follow thee and make a heaven of hell!” Toner cried cheerfully.

  “Your suit is ruined.”

  “That’s the wrong line.”

  “We need to have another talk about boundaries.”

  “That is the wrong line, Captain!”

  “To die upon the hand I love so well,” she grumbled.

  “You said it. Not me.”

  “Bufo, do you copy?” With her good hand, Jaeger jammed her commlink as the exit-hole came into view. The cold blue light shimmering down from the improvised entrance flickered as a black-clad figure, the last of Toner’s team, disappeared up the icy tunnel ahead of them. “Do you copy?”

  The voice that answered was clear—close by but so soft she could barely hear it over the rumbling and the screaming. “We encountered some resistance.”

  Toner hauled them to the hatch, shoving Jaeger ahead of him. She shook her head, bracing her good arm against the wall to hold herself back. She gestured frantically for Toner to go on ahead.

  “Bufo,” she called again. “Where are you?”

  The silence stretched long and deafening.

  Then something moved into view up the tunnel. A single, squat figure in a dark suit, swimming clumsily through the air. One of his legs dangled uselessly behind him, bent in all the wrong places.

  Jaeger scrambled forward, ignoring the stab of pain each time she moved her broken wrist. She grabbed Bufo by the elbow and hauled.

  “Where’s the rest of your team?” she demanded.

  The squat man only shook his head. Toner grabbed and heaved him into the airlock, once again grimly silent. She couldn’t see his face beneath the dark plate of his thermal hood.

  “Shuttles powering up.” Static distorted Portia’s voice.

  “Get the Locauri out of here as soon as they’re on board,” Jaeger breathed. “The rest of you will catch a ride on the second shuttle.”

  She stared around the darkly flickering hallway of the base—for a moment existing on the sharp knife-edge of hope that Bufo’s straggling crew would come surging out of the shadows.

  “Jaeger!” Toner roared. “Pull your head out of your ass!”

  She shook her head and tapped an activation control on her computer. Somewhere far overhead, on the asteroid’s surface, the Alpha-Seeker began a warm-up sequence.

  Forgive me, she thought bitterly, fishing into her pouch for her last bomb. She flung it down the corridor and lifted her good hand. Toner snatched her hand, and with Bufo in one arm and Jaeger in the other, he shoved against his mag soles and shot up the tunnel. The airlock door slid open automatically to release them into cold space—half a heartbeat before Toner would have made a new door with his skull.

  A shock of cold hit Jaeger like a gunshot as they broke into cold vacuum. Little vents of atmosphere and pressure hissed out of a thousand micro-tears in her suit, which was in worse shape than she’d realized.

  That was nothing compared to what had happened to Toner’s suit. Beside her, she saw a crust of frost forming over the slashes in his bare chest. He grunted as if something had kicked him in the gut.

  “Occy,” Jaeger barked over the open coms channel the instant they were clear of the asteroid. “Send the warning message to the Creepers. They have five minutes to clear out before this place turns into slag.”

  “Aye,” Occy whispered, sounding distant—and shocked.

  The original plan had called for a ten-minute evacuation period. Then again, the original plan hadn’t involved discovering a dozen Locauri being eaten alive.

  Darkness ate at the edges of her vision as they soared out of the primary access tunnel. In the dim, shifting light, she could just make out the tail of engine flares as the first shuttle rose from the chasm and shrank to a pinprick against the distant slash of stars. The second shuttle hovered over the rock, rear airlock chamber hanging open.

  “Brace for impact,” Toner shouted. Jaeger barely had time to consider the command before the man gave a mighty heave and flung her face-first toward the Alpha-Seeker.

  For a few seconds, Jaeger hurled through empty space, dizzy, helpless, and utterly certain she was going to smash into the hull with nothing but her skull for cushion.

  Then the fighter’s hatch swung open, and she tumbled into the familiar confines of the cockpit.

  The fighter door sensed her very abrupt arrival and snapped shut again. There was a whoosh of generators as atmosphere, blessedly warm and breathable, flooded the cabin.

  Trembling, Jaeger righted herself in the pilot’s seat. Out of the front window, she saw Toner twist, banking his mag soles against the body of the Alpha-Seeker. Together, he and Bufo vanished into the airlock of the second shuttle.

  “Shuttle two, up and away,” the pilot shouted as the chasm lit once more with engine flare.

  “I sure hope you’re conscious, Captain,” Toner called.

  She was—barely. There was no time to dwell on the numb shock creeping up her arm. She lashed herself into the harness, feeling the ship come alive around her as the cerebral link activated.

  Up and away, she told the ship. Get me the hell out of here.

  As she hightailed it out of there, she allowed herself one glance back. Creepers flew out of the asteroid like wasps fleeing a nest. The last of them were caught in the blast of the asteroid finally coming apart.

  Chapter Twenty

  Entering the asteroid belt had been a slow, laborious sequence of carefully camouflaged movements. Exiting the asteroid belt was a bit more like kicking a beehive and trying to run away before getting stung to death.

  A squad of Creeper fighters was on them before they cleared the ring of space around the asteroid cluster.

  “I’m getting a hail from the Creeper base,” Occy babbled. “They’re answering our timer warning.”

  “They are?” Jaeger was surprised. Based on the raiding habits of the Creepers, it was obvious that the aliens had a rudimentary understanding of the Overseer language. Jaeger had crafted her warning message to the Creepers using Virgil’s haphazard understanding of that same language.

  The result was a far less than ideal game of deadly interstellar telephone, but she’d told herself it was better than nothing. She hadn’t expected the Creepers to bother responding to it. Certainly not so quickly. “What are they saying?” she asked.

  Occy hesitated. “Um. It’s a whole bunch of bad words.”

  Energy lances sprayed from pursuing Creeper fighters sliced across Jaeger’s viewer screen.

  “I’m hit,” Portia cried. “Navigation arrays destroyed. We’re flying blind!”

  Jaeger bit back a string of bad words. A storm of flung asteroids and energy-lance pulses spun around th
e Alpha-Seeker. In response, the fighter’s rudimentary AI took over and began a series of evasive maneuvers, banking first one way, then another, hard enough to make Jaeger’s vision blur. “Alpha shuttle,” she ordered. “Assume remote control of Gamma. Get her out of this mess!”

  “Will do,” Toner acknowledged. “That’s going to slow us down, Captain.”

  He was right. The enemy fighters already had the edge over the shuttles in terms of speed and maneuverability. Autopiloting the damaged shuttle would place even more strain on Alpha’s sluggish systems.

  “Cut your losses,” Seeker suggested, for the first time speaking over the comms channels. “Focus on the ones you can save.”

  “No,” Jaeger snapped, and not only because the rescued Locauri were on the very shuttle Seeker had so brutally condemned. Her people were on it, too. She didn’t know their names, but they were her people. Even more importantly, they were people.

  “I figured you’d say that.” Seeker sighed. “Well. Since you’re stubborn, this might be a good time to push the big red button.”

  Jaeger swallowed, but there was no time to waffle. “Just get moving,” she ordered Toner as she flipped up the protective casing covering a particularly large red button on her command console. “I’ll cover you.”

  Ignoring the warning flashing over her bio-sign display screen, she punched the button.

  The cerebral diode attached to the base of her skull contracted, injecting a carefully measured dose of epinephrine directly into her blood.

  Instantly, the mind-bending pain radiating up from her broken wrist faded into the background. Her head cleared. Her heartbeat became a deafening pulse shaking her to the core of her being.

  Alive and on fire with chemically supplied ecstasy, she howled a wordless war cry.

  The neuro-stimulant coated her brain and the chaos of the Creeper swarm and the flying asteroids resolved into something orderly, predictable, slow. Practically boring.

  She almost felt good enough to try an Initiative Seven maneuver herself.