by C H Gideon
The Loranian craft righted itself a moment later and swung about, bringing its own guns to bear.
“That is one tough motherfucker,” Tactical admitted, although it was clear he hated saying it.
Return fire crashed into the SD Reynolds’ gravitic shields, shaking the ship even as it withstood the barrage.
“I’m spooling up the ESD. I don’t care what anyone says,” Tactical announced.
Asya didn’t bother to argue. She didn’t figure the Loranian cruiser would stick around long enough for the device to power up and be used, but she could hope that it would.
“Orau fighter-bombers inbound,” Ria reported.
“That was fast,” Asya grumbled.
“I’m picking up six of them. No, make that eight,” Ria corrected.
“It’s going to get crowded up here real soon, folks, so let’s do what we can to kick this fucker’s ass before his friends arrive,” Asya called.
Tactical hadn’t stopped firing.
Back and forth the two ships went at each other, and although the SD Reynolds had gotten the better of the first exchange, it was clear the Loranian ship had been designed to take a beating and dish one out in return.
Its shields held as the railguns pounded them, the weapons only managing to punch through a few times, scoring hits on the hull and leaving scorch marks and warped steel behind.
Unfortunately, the same could be said for the Reynolds.
While their gravitic shields deflected most of the Loranian’s attacks, enough of them got through to do real harm.
Asya kept the ship angled to avoid getting hit in the already damaged section of the hull, which ensured there was no loss of life aboard the ship, but it hadn’t much helped to avoid sustaining new wounds.
Red lights gleamed across the bridge, and although Asya had muted the alarms, those from the lower decks reverberated under her feet.
“This is what a stalemate looks like,” Tactical complained. “I’m not liking it much.”
“Me either,” Asya agreed. “We need to be smarter and stop going at these people head-on. We’re not getting anywhere.”
“Things are about to get worse,” Ria announced. “The Orau are flanking us.”
“Fuck a two-headed gralflie,” Asya cursed. “Bring us up above the Loranian craft, Ria. Try to put their fat ass between us and the Orau ships.”
“You realize the cruiser will adjust and move with us, right?” Tactical asked.
“As long as we get a few extra seconds out of it, that’s fine,” Asya fired back. “I’m buying time.”
“Time to do what?” XO asked. “The ESD is still charging.”
“To strip-mine their shields,” she replied. “Hit it, Takal,” she ordered over the comm.
As the SD Reynolds rose above the Loranian cruiser, the inventor fired a handful of cloaked proximity mines out of the trash chute at the ship below.
The cruiser immediately began to turn to avoid the encroaching superdreadnought, but unable to detect the mines, it turned directly into them.
A line of explosions rippled across the Loranian’s shields. There was a flicker of energy, and then two of the mines struck the port side of the cruiser. Blasts of energy erupted as each collided with the hull.
The Loranian ship shuddered under the assault, the force of the blasts spinning the ship about. Its engines flared, and the craft spun out of control.
“Pound the grease out of that ship,” Asya ordered, blood searing through her veins on a wave of adrenaline. “Take them out.”
Tactical let loose with the railguns again, ripping great gouges in the side of the Loranian ship until its shields flickered to life again and deflected their ferocity.
The SD Reynolds trembled and Asya clasped at the arms of her chair to remain seated.
“The Orau are on us,” Ria announced.
“Of course they are,” Asya spat, but her blood was boiling. She wanted the Loranian ship mounted on her wall. “Stay on the cruiser,” she ordered.
If there was a chance to put an end to this, now was it.
“Hit it with the ESD!” Asya screamed.
Chapter Eleven
Maddox followed the mysterious acolytes through Ocelora, wondering the entire time if he had heard them correctly back at the ramshackle building.
They led him to a quaint part of town where there was little damage from the Orau raids. Not to say there was none, but it was hardly at the level of much of the rest of the underwater city.
It mostly had smaller buildings, and Maddox thought that may have played a factor in its escaping the rampant damage that had happened elsewhere.
In the shadow of the larger buildings surrounding it, the area was in a valley within the city, out of the direct line of fire of the planet from which the Orau launched their attacks.
It made him wonder just why more people hadn’t made their way there.
As it was there were few people on the streets, none of whom made any effort to examine or even look at the two acolytes as they walked by, much like the other passersby had done with Kah Dur, the servant.
Apparently, that’s just how it is here, he thought.
The two strolled along without a care, finally arriving at what appeared to be a small home on the edge of the neighborhood.
The building looked indistinct and plain, and nothing about it spoke of anything nefarious.
Which made it perfect for two murderous acolytes to visit.
They walked to the door and knocked, being let in a moment later by an older female Maddox thought he remembered from when the servants had brought them the carts of food.
He eased closer to the house once the pair were inside and the door was closed again. As much as he wanted to kick the door in and go after the acolytes, he was certain there was more than just the one female in there with them.
Besides, kicking in the door wouldn’t tell him what their plans were or what they intended to do next.
He fought his instinct to barge in and waited.
Fortunately, it didn’t take long before the door opened again.
Maddox watched from across the street, still cloaked, as the two acolytes exited the house, although they no longer wore their robes.
Instead, they were dressed in suits of dark-blue powered armor and carried their helmets under their arms. The person who had let them in came out next, dressed the same way. A dozen more soldiers filed out after a moment, sealing the door behind them.
A hovercraft pulled up in front of the house and the small group piled into it, the vehicle rocking as it adjusted to accommodate their armored weight.
Maddox cursed under his breath.
As much as he wanted to take these militants down on his own, he knew better. Instead, he reached out over the comm to the SD Reynolds.
The silence that came back unnerved him.
Shit!
He tried again with the same results.
Then the vehicle started off, and Maddox knew he didn’t have time to wait for anyone else to back him up.
Still, he knew better than to take on the vehicle and its occupants with the minimal equipment he had.
Carrying nothing more than a pistol, he was ill-equipped to take down a couple of soldiers, let alone an armored squad.
Rather than be stupid, he followed the vehicle. If he were right about what they intended from the snippet of conversation he’d overhead, he knew there’d be an army to stand against these soldiers once they arrived.
And if he were wrong, he’d worry about that when they got there. He focused at running full speed in the hovercraft’s wake, hoping the power surge wouldn’t degrade the cloak. The longer he stayed invisible, the greater the chance that the cloak would fail and he’d be seen.
Sometimes being right didn’t make it better. It brought him no comfort when the vehicle parked a short distance from the presidential compound and the soldiers exited, piling up on the deserted street,
Maddox realized then w
hy the acolytes and the others had chosen now to invade the compound.
In the wake of the bombing, all the guards who had been stationed on the walls were absent, likely tasked with protecting the president and the elites in the hidden bunker.
That meant security in the compound was at its weakest.
The soldiers donned their helmets and headed toward the servants’ entrance Maddox had seen Kah Dur leave from, and it struck him that he hadn’t seen a single guard the entire time he’d crouched in the bushes outside it.
That meant the would-be assassins would have direct access to the compound without having to battle their way in.
“Damn it!”
He needed to stop them before they got inside if he were going to avert a massacre.
Then it struck him.
Why the hell are they hitting the place now?
He’d already determined that the guards were at their lightest, stationed elsewhere, but he’d just realized that the situation gave them easier access but also robbed them of all their targets.
No guards meant no one to guard.
Maddox stumbled to a halt as the soldiers filed inside the servants’ entrance, disappearing from sight.
“What the hell could they want?” he asked himself.
Does it matter? he answered.
If they had gathered in their safehouse, armored up, and driven here, they had to have a plan. There had to be a reason for it.
Rather than sit outside wondering, Maddox checked to make sure he was still cloaked and raced in after the squad of soldiers. There were a few servants in the halls once he was inside, but they didn’t look any worse for wear.
Maddox ran down the hall, catching up to the soldiers before they’d gotten too far. They marched forward as if they belonged there, not expecting any challenges.
As it turned out, they were right.
Not a single guard approached them or activated an alarm as armed soldiers strolled through the nearly barren presidential palace. Maddox followed silently, wondering more and more what they were up to.
It wasn’t until he recognized the path they were taking that it clicked.
Shit!
The soldiers passed an empty guard station at the end of the hall and made their way to a door in the middle of the corridor. They lined up outside, making ready, weapons raised, then one of the acolytes kicked the door open.
The squad of soldiers stormed the now-open room, weapons free and firing, filling the room with blaster fire.
It was the same guest chambers where the crew had stayed until the bombing.
Maddox growled low in his throat at seeing the soldiers piling into the room where he and the rest of the crew had been just hours before.
An uncomfortable thought slithered into his mind as he listened to the destruction being wrought on the other side of the wall.
The acolytes hadn’t come here to assassinate the president.
They’d been sent to kill Reynolds’ crew.
Chapter Twelve
On the surface of Krokus 1, the crew disembarked from the still-cloaked shuttle, leaving San Roche behind with orders similar to those that had been issued to L’Eliana: stay put, guard the shuttle, and be ready to provide support as needed.
On an unknown hostile planet, the crew would need all the support they could get.
The shuttle from the Loranian ship had landed a short distance ahead of them, and the crew had filed out and marched toward the ramshackle compound where the Orau had made their home since they’d taken over the planet.
Seeing the barren soil and dusty ground sickened Jiya as they left the shuttle behind and started after the Loranians. Dust kicked up in their wake, but she doubted anyone would notice. The steadily whipping wind made the place a brown swirl.
Jiya was spoiling for a fight as badly as she knew Ka’nak was.
Worried about the crew stuck on the SD Reynolds, reports of the battle with the Loranian cruiser and Orau fighter-bombers filtering down to them, she wanted this confrontation over so they could get back into space and rejoin the fight.
Still, she had a mission to accomplish and she’d finish it first, no matter how badly she wanted to take part in dismantling the Loranian cruiser that had been stalking them.
At least down here, there was a chance she could find out the information they wanted. All they had to do was capture one of the Loranians. Or all of them. She was indifferent to the total.
She wasn’t much for torture, but that didn’t stop her from imagining what would happen to the Loranians if the crew caught them alive.
A shudder ran through her at the thought, and she pushed it aside.
She wasn’t a murderer, but she’d damn well do what was necessary to make sure none of her crew or any more innocents were hurt by the Orau, marauding slags that they were.
“They’re not far ahead of us,” Geroux reported, tracking the Loranian crew with a program she’d whipped up as soon as she climbed aboard the shuttle.
It wasn’t exactly a tracker, seeing as how they hadn’t been able to tag the Loranian crew. It functioned more like a predictive algorithm.
As Geroux explained it, the program accumulated the local geography such as building locations, street layout, and the basic blueprints of the Orau outpost and ran it through the system, making a best guess as to where the crew might be headed.
Had they been in Ocelora or another large city the program would have been a waste of time, but since the outpost was simplistic and the nature of the larger buildings obvious, Geroux predicted the algorithm was ninety-eight percent accurate.
That was good enough for Jiya, even if she could have guessed where they were going without a program’s aid.
She didn’t care how they found the assholes as long as they did.
“I’ve got an idea,” Reynolds said as they neared the Loranian shuttle, its hatch sealed against the nasty weather.
“Does it involve blowing something up?” Ka’nak asked, glancing at the shuttle.
“It does indeed,” Reynolds replied, grinning.
“Then I’m in,” Ka’nak announced. “Let’s do this.”
Jiya shrugged. She knew the shuttle was empty, all the crew having left it; that intel had been confirmed by the SD Reynolds and Asya before they engaged the Loranian cruiser. As such, it didn’t hurt to make it harder for the Loranians to get back to their ship.
“How about we rig it and wait?” she suggested.
“Where’s the fun in that?” Ka’nak asked.
“It’s less fun but more prudent,” she replied. “If we blow this thing up while we’re chasing its crew they’re going to know we’re here, killing whatever surprise we’ve acquired by flying down here cloaked.”
“Logic sucks,” Ka’nak muttered.
“For sure, but Geroux will set it up so the explosives are on a trigger,” Jiya explained. “I might even be able to convince her to let you push the button.” She glanced at her friend.
“I guess.” Geroux sighed, winking at Jiya when Ka’nak wasn’t looking.
“Fine,” he mumbled, stomping over to the shuttle, the crew in tow.
Reynolds handed him the explosives. “Don’t use all the explosives, and don’t blow yourself up either,” he warned.
“The longer I hang around you people, the more I want to,” he told them, dropping under the shuttle and crawling across the ground to find a good place to plant the explosives.
“I sometimes wonder if he’s serious,” Geroux stated.
“I keep saying we need to schedule psychiatric tests for the crew before we take them on,” Jiya argued.
“Then there’d be an empty ship floating in space somewhere without a crew,” Reynolds replied. “Or an AI,” he added before the others could.
Geroux giggled and Jiya swallowed a laugh, stepping away to look down the road toward the outpost to make sure no one was watching them.
Nothing indicated they had been seen.
Still, she
stood guard impatiently until Ka’nak was finished connecting the explosives and Geroux had synced them to her computer.
“Anytime we want, the shuttle goes boom,” Geroux told them with a smile.
“Maybe we should wait until the crew returns and blast them then before we go home?” Ka’nak suggested.
“And miss out on capturing one of these assholes?” Jiya asked. “No fucking way. I want one of these guys alive.”
“You going to be the one to interrogate him?” Ka’nak wondered.
She shrugged. “Probably not, but I will sure as hell watch and bet on how long he lasts.”
“I’m starting to think I’m raising a crew of miscreants,” Reynolds mused.
“We get it from you,” Jiya fired back, chuckling. “A soldier is only as depraved as his command system.”
“Which explains so damn much.” Ka’nak laughed.
“Come on,” Reynolds told them, cutting the banter off and ushering them down the makeshift road toward the outpost. “We need to get to these scumbags before they complete their dirtside mission, whatever that may be.”
“I’m not sure it really matters since these guys aren’t making it back to their ship,” Ka’nak countered. “Even if they come back with more people or weapons or whatever, they’re going boom the second they climb into that shuttle.”
“As satisfying as that might be, it leaves too many questions hanging,” Reynolds replied. “I’ll gladly nuke them once we know what they hope to accomplish here, but I don’t like not knowing what they’re up to.”
“Then let’s stop chit-chatting and find these fucks,” Jiya said, pressing ahead, her weapon out and at the ready.
She was dying to vent her anger on a living enemy.
A short distance down the road the opportunity presented itself.
Three Orau soldiers in dusty black and red armor stepped from one of the smaller huts near the edge of the outpost. They stumbled to a halt as they spied the crew advancing toward them. Their weapons whipped up immediately.
“So much for stealth.” Reynolds sighed, firing on the Orau before they could shoot the crew.
