Vaiega exhaled loudly. “Very well,” he said, standing. “You should know that the folks upstairs think that what your team did back on Pluto was a serious fluke and that you’re too much of a risk to let loose.”
He looked me in the eyes, and said, “But if you can convince the generals that you have half the talent you say you have and that you can work within the system—instead of going rogue at the drop of a hat—there’s a good chance they’ll give you your own command.”
As soon as he said “they’ll give you your own command,” I was afraid I’d actually peed my fatigues—that was what I’d dreamed of, ever since I taped Colonel Hiller’s poster to my wall freshman year. Ignorant of my near-accident, Vaiega stepped out from behind his desk and walked to the doorway, which whooshed open. “I’ll be back in a couple of minutes for your answer.”
As soon as the door closed, I turned and said, “What the hell are you guys doing? This is exactly what we need to make a name for the Scoundrel Force and finally get some respect!”
“Stop saying ‘Scoundrel Force,’” Lopez said through gritted teeth.
Kovac softly shook his massive head. “I don’t know, Walker,” he said. “Patel might sideline us.”
“Not if she knows that the Peacekeeper leadership is watching,” I said. “And she’ll definitely know they’re the ones ordering the transfer.”
I looked to Lopez, but she just stared back at me with dead eyes, daring me to change her mind.
Rand scratched his neck. “That sounds good in theory, but there are plenty of other ways she can make our lives miserable—for instance, I’m fairly certain she’s the wellspring of those ludicrous rumors about your nefarious negligence and your responsibility for the magnitude of the Dominion’s military forces. What guarantee do we have that she won’t orchestrate our failure?”
“We have each other.” I spread my arms wide and said, “Look—if we can fight our way past three separate Dominion armies and take down an enemy stronghold with a only testing rod, a bag of electrical equipment, and a hammer, one measly portal on a single moon should be frakkin’ child’s play.”
A slight grin tugged at Rand’s mustache. “I suppose I do still have that bag of ‘damn equipment’ you were so fond of …”
I looked to Kovac, who was looking at Rand with pursed lips. “Maybe if we promised,” Kovac said.
Lopez piped up. “Promise what?”
Kovac gave a crisp nod. “Promise to stay together. Watch each others’ backs. No matter what happens.”
Three four-word sentences in a row? There’s no way we could fail if Kovac kept this up.
“Great idea, big guy,” I said, extending my hand into the center of our group. “I promise.”
“That is certainly something I can commit to,” Rand said as he reached out and placed his hand precisely on top of mine.
Kovac dropped his meaty palm on top of ours and grinned.
I slowly looked up at Lopez, afraid of getting stabbed with more of her visual daggers. But she was too busy staring past me.
“Um … guys?” Lopez nodded toward the desk, where the colonel’s data pad was flashing yellow and red. I craned my neck to read the text on its surface:
URGENT INTELLIGENCE FROM TRITON. WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT. ACCEPT?
I looked at my team, who didn’t nod, but didn’t shake their heads, either. So I took a deep breath, stretched out a slightly trembling hand, spun the screen toward us, and hit “ACCEPT.”
4
I PROBABLY SHOULDN’T have accessed information meant for a Peacekeeper colonel. But the data pad was right there in front of me and was flashing an emergency alert. My crew was being asked to risk our careers by accepting the transfer to Captain Patel’s command. And, judging by the graphic content warning on the message, there was a good chance we were also being asked to risk our lives by transferring to Triton station. So yeah, I felt justified opening the colonel’s classified message.
I also really wanted to see just how graphic that content was.
The alternating flash of red and yellow on the pad’s surface stopped when I tapped “ACCEPT,” and a vid window popped up. Stark black letters against a white background read “Video footage near UFS Housing Project Misenus, 06:23:2490.” The screen darkened, replaced with an unsteady mini data pad vid recording of a group in dirty gray coveralls walking down a dimly lit street and singing an already bad pop song badly. The videographer was unsteady enough to make me spacesick, and given the loudness and terribleness of their singing, it was pretty clear they were all drunk.
This group—probably a bunch of minimum wage factory workers, by the look of their ragged work outfits—drifted to the left side of the street as one of the group yelled something. The shaky recording zoomed in on a dark patch that bordered a run-down park, where a figure loomed in what looked like a long, old-fashioned black coat. One of the flickering street lights reflected on the figure’s pale, bald head. And were those ears pointed?
The man who had yelled at the figure took a few quick, unsteady steps toward it and slurred something loudly that I couldn’t make out. At the man’s sudden approach, Pointy Ears took a step into the street’s dim light. The creature’s bushy eyebrows and hooked nose would have been comical if it weren’t for his dimly glowing eyes. And when he opened his mouth, I heard an involuntary gasp from my crew, who were now all crowded tightly around the data pad.
In a flash, the fanged creature leapt toward the coveralled man, pinned his arms to his sides with a pair of pale, claw-like fingers, and shoved his face into the man’s neck. A moment later, the creature snapped his head back with what looked like a section of a water hose in his mouth. Except it was red. Wait—it wasn’t a hose. It was the man’s windpipe.
Oh my God.
I heard Rand gag behind me as he made the same realization and turned away from the screen. But the rest of us were too fascinated to look away.
In the vid, Pointy-Ears-now-Windpipe-Eater bounded toward the group, who were still making a lot of noise. Only now it wasn’t terrible pop songs—it was high-pitched screams of terror. The creature moved like lightning from person to person, biting and tearing. One by one, they dropped limply to the ground in a series of wet thudding sounds until only the camerawoman was left standing.
Her muttered prayers and heavy breathing drowned out the sound of everything else as the creature twisted his bald head in her direction. His glowing red eyes widened and he stepped over a large, mangled body. As the creature glided along the street toward her, the recording device dropped to the ground and lay there.
From its fallen position, the vid only showed half of the scene. But it was enough. A woman in heavily stained coveralls turned to run from the creature, but he immediately leapt onto her back and knocked her to the ground just in front of the recording device. She let out a bloodcurdling scream as he pierced her neck with his yellowed, crooked teeth and blood spurted out like a synthetic chocolate fountain.
Her cry was soon replaced by a slow, sickening noise that sounded like slurping. As the creature bent over its victim, something slipped out from beneath its coat collar. It was a delicate gold necklace, and on the end was a dark shape that looked like a bird with a long neck, bald head, and a curved beak. A vulture? And as the pendant rotated, I let out a gasp. In its center was a bright yellow jewel, the same size as those fastened to the glove in my pocket.
Yells sounded from off-camera, and the creature’s pale face snapped up. He wiped his blood-soaked mouth with a long coat sleeve and quickly hid the necklace. He lifted the woman—who was softly groaning?!—glided toward the darkness of the run-down park, and disappeared. The vid suddenly ended as it began, with black letters against a white background: “Video footage near UFS Housing Project Misenus, 06:23:2490.”
The office was silent, except for Rand’s dry heaving, which made the sound of the door sliding open that much more startling. Colonel Vaiega walked into the room with a steaming mug and abruptly stop
ped. He cocked an eyebrow as he looked at Rand, who was bent over, hands on knees. Kovac, Lopez, and I were all crowded around the data pad on Vaiega’s desk, our eyes still wide from what we’d just seen.
“What the hell’s going on here?” Vaiega demanded.
We all quickly straightened and returned hurriedly to our position in front of the desk. With only a few long strides, the colonel was back behind his desk and the four of us were standing at attention. Well, I was partially at attention—it was hard to stand still when I was shaking so hard from having Vaiega walk in on us viewing sensitive information meant for his eyes only.
“I … I think I know what that thing in the video was,” I stammered.
“What video?” Vaiega asked as he set his mug down on the table and dropped into his chair.
His eyes shot to his data pad, which was now sitting across the desk, and then up at us and shook his head. “Please tell me you didn’t violate UFS privacy laws during the two minutes I was out of my office.”
I stepped out in front of my crew and answered. “It was me sir—I saw an urgent video message come in from Triton and thought my team should see it before agreeing to the transfer.”
Vaiega let out a heavy sigh. “It’s exactly this sort of reckless disregard for protocol that worries the generals.”
My cheeks burned and I wrung my hands behind my back. “I’m sorry, sir. I just wanted to help.”
The colonel leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. Then, after a few moments, he leaned forward, grabbed the data pad, and played the video.
I could tell the exact moment Vaiega saw the torn windpipe. For the next several seconds, he stared unblinking at the screen, eyes bulging. When the video was over, he kept staring for a few moments, then looked up at me.
“Now, Sergeant, you say you know what this … this monstrosity is?”
I felt my face cool and stood a little straighter. “Yes, sir. It looks like a pretty standard-issue vampire.”
“Vampire?” Vaiega asked.
“Yes, sir. Creature of the night, lives off of human blood, and can control humans. Oh—and if they eat garlic, they sparkle. Or they projectile vomit. One of the two.”
At the phrase “human blood,” Rand gagged involuntarily.
At the word “garlic,” Lopez did, too.
“Sounds like something out of a nightmare,” Vaiega replied.
“It is, sir,” I said. “Especially the sparkling. But the good news is, I think I know how we can defeat it.”
Vaiega narrowed his deep green eyes. “So, does that mean your team accepts the transfer to Triton under Captain Patel?”
I looked back at my crew. They were all a little paler than normal, but when I met their eyes, they each nodded.
“It does, sir,” I said. “But we’ll need permission to bring Panthra along.”
Vaiega hesitated. “That giant tiger-shaped piece of Dominion weaponry? There’s no way the folks upstairs will let that … thing … out of its holding cell while they’re still performing tests on it.”
I swallowed hard. “Sir, I promise that she is absolutely necessary to defeating a vampire.”
The colonel looked at me for a moment, then shook his head. “I really don’t think they’ll go for it. Those robots—”
“Battlecats, sir,” I interrupted. “They’re living creatures. And Panthra’s bonded to me, now that I have Craniax’s philosopher’s stone.”
Vaiega scowled, then continued. “I would need to be certain the—what did you call it? The Battlecat—is mission critical and that you have it under your complete control.”
I turned to Rand and gave him a slight wink. He nodded and said, “Sir, it seems clear to me that the Battlecat is, in fact, crucial to combat this new creature.”
Rand swallowed. “And, from a technical standpoint, I can testify to the fact that she is under Walker’s control.” He smiled faintly. “She certainly won’t listen to anyone else.”
Vaiega looked at each of us, then shook his head slowly. “You’d better be right about this, Sergeant. Because if you blow this, you’ll all either be sent back to maintenance duty—permanently—or you’ll be dead.”
I nodded quickly. “Understood, sir. I can’t thank you—”
A loud beeping erupted from the large monitor on the corner of Vaiega’s desk. It was turned so I couldn’t see the image, but the hurried voice told me everything.
“Colonel Vaiega, this is Triton command. We’re detecting atmospheric anomalies in the same range as those experienced on Pluto. If you’re going to deploy that team of yours, you’ll need to do it immediately.”
5
NOBODY WANTED TO talk in the loud, dim interior of the heavily-armored ground transport on our way to the “atmospheric anomaly” in Kalliste. Even though the Dominion called it an “oculus,” part of me wished the Peacekeepers would just call it what it was—a magic rainbow portal to another dimension. But “magic” was basically a curse word nowadays, and the quickest way to get uninvited to a party was to show interest in anything that was even remotely related to fantasy. I know—I didn’t attend my first party until well into university.
But enough about my incredible popularity as a child. There we were, rumbling along the streets of Kalliste—the economic center of Triton. It was a sprawling city with massive, squat buildings, most of which were factories or warehouses. The industrial buildings were kept in decent condition, but the low-income housing units that broke up the landscape looked like infected wounds.
Inside the transport, the parallel, inward-facing benches had a little more padding than what we were used to on Nix station, but not by much—the farther you got from UFS headquarters on earth, the more expenses they spared on Peacekeeper units. And right now we had two units from two different planet and planetoid systems, facing each other with their knees knocking together as we cruised down one of Triton’s poorly-kept public roads.
We hit a pothole, and as my left knee slammed into Kovac’s massive thigh, I noticed a small spot of dried gravy on his fatigues. My crew hadn’t had the luxury of changing our uniforms before we were herded onto a shuttle and sent to join Captain Patel at Triton station. And now we were on our way to a where we believed a portal from another dimension would soon open and out of which would probably tumble at least one full Dominion army, intent upon our utter annihilation.
It was our lucky day.
Back on Nix, only one oculus had opened. But on Charon, there had been two oculuses. Oculi? And on Pluto, there were close to a dozen. Given our recent defeat of the Dominion’s armies, I tried telling Captain Patel that we’d need more than just my crew and a single squadron of Peacekeepers. She laughed and said that if we were as good as the Peacekeeper leadership thought we were, she was already wasting the time of her single squadron. When Patel left, Kovac had to physically restrain Lopez from charging after her.
We weren’t off to the greatest start.
Because we knew Patel didn’t like my crew, we figured a transfer to her command would mean we’d either be sidelined from the action and forgotten, or put in an impossible situation with the bare minimum of resources in the hopes of embarrassing us. At this point, it looked like she was aiming for the latter.
I wasn’t about to let that happen, so I needed to take charge of the few resources Patel had given me. The squadron that she had so graciously bestowed upon us was small—only eight soldiers, including the driver. And all of them had chosen to squeeze together on the bench opposite my four-person crew. The women wore their hair in messy knots that peeked out from under the irritating helmets covering the top half of our heads and the men wore thick, dark stubble. Most of them were grumpily chewing on something—probably a gross stimulant like Blue Heifer.
“So,” I said as casually as could. “Any of you fight a Dominion army before?”
Nothing but blank stares. Instead of fiddling with the holster of my plasma pistol like the other soldiers, I reached behind me an
d played nervously with the handle of my rod-sword, which was tucked into its sheath and slung across my shoulder.
“Okay … then you’ll need to stay close and follow my lead once we get to the portal.”
More blank stares. Then, a woman across from me in light green infantry fatigues and a thick, (hopefully) arrow-proof vest—which Rand had engineered—spoke around her wad of stimulant. “Nope. We follow our lieutenant.”
She nodded to the end of the bench at the rear of the transport, toward the only soldier who wasn’t slouching. The tall man in maroon lieutenant fatigues sat alert with his hands folded over the plasma rifle on his lap, positioned exactly between his hip and his knees. A couple of other green-clad soldiers in the transport had rifles and were leaning them casually against their legs as we drove, but not Lieutenant Harry Stanton—he had a reputation for being the most precise soldier this side of the Asteroid Belt.
“You mean you’d rather listen to Lieutenant Autobot over there than someone with actual experience fighting the Dominion?” I said.
The woman chewed her stimulant loudly as she stared at me for a few moments. “Well, we didn’t receive those orders from Captain Patel, so we ain’t about to follow them.”
She bit down hard on her wad of stimulant, then said, “Not from someone who leaves Peacekeepers to die because he’s gunning for a commendation. And definitely not from the asshole who pissed off the Dominion enough to quadruple their forces because he couldn’t keep his magic stones in his pants.”
I rolled my eyes—exaggerated enough to rival even Lopez’s best—and turned to my crew for support. To my left, Kovac was slowly spinning his vibro-hammer in his hands, eyes closed. He was probably remembering what it felt like to bring his weapon to life. It had been your standard heavy-duty maintenance tool until Rand had fitted it with the same sort of small philosopher’s stone that powered my rod-sword. I didn’t feel like such a freak being around someone else who used a magical weapon. But right now, Kovac was lost in thought, maybe composing poetry in his head secretly. For get the Dominion—Kovac would be the greatest threat to my health if I ever outed him as a poet.
Crimson Strike Page 3
