by Chris Turner
“Are you sure, Colonel?” cried Lexia. “Leave it to these fiends to come up with some demon technology more sophisticated than our own.”
“Ah, people,” said Fenli, “we are like floating in a sea of locusts and Zikri ball crushers here...”
“Evasive action, you fool! Do I need to hold your hand?” said Zaul.
“Roger that,” croaked Fenli. He dialled up the impulse thrusters to max and the Doraxu ripped up and over the box-van to face the incoming swarm. Varon blasted the side plates of the ugly box-van with relish. Return fire rippled by and deflected off their battered shields.
Usk turned the Doraxu ship at a steep angle to the van. Zikri zeroed in on them, both locust and Zikri neither trusting the other and raking each other’s flanks with fire. Miko’s head swam; his fingers fired on anything threatening. The bridge rocked and the ship shuddered at the bombardment and went spinning out of control.
Shields held but Miko’s ship couldn’t withstand the punishment for much longer. A cold knot of fear reached out to clutch his throat. If the gambit failed and the crossfire petered out, it could be the end of the free races as they knew it: locusts and Zikri setting up bases anywhere and everywhere in the galaxy, subjugating the free worlds and peoples indefinitely.
“Where’s Fenli?” Miko called wildly.
“Right here, behind your gyrating tail, Eagle 1,” came the static voice over the com. “Keep at max speed, buddy. It’s been nice knowing you. I’m going in to take out that warp impedance transmitter, before we all die.”
“Fenli, stand down,” ordered Zaul.
It was a move the Zikri guard anticipated and they came at Fenli and Varon with force.
Miko watched in horror as Fenli’s ship, trailing a stream of smoke and gas from a hit to the stern, weaved impossibly in between enemy fire and ships, while Varon yelled at Fenli to retreat.
Fenli paid no heed. Eagle 2’s shields dimmed to a dangerously low level.
“I’ll cover you, Eagle 2,” cried Eagle 3, veering his own battered Doraxu into the maw of the stalking orbs.
“Roger that,” confirmed Eagle 4 and 5. The two Doraxu, driven by Zaul’s special elite op team, were fearless as wolves and swept up and over the raging Orbs, splitting enemy fire between them, raking their enemy with lasers. Their auxiliary shields caught the brunt, but were on the verge of blinking out for good. Two donut-shaped Orbs converged on the Eagle vessels recklessly, one colliding into its stealth partner and both vessels exploded in yellow flames. Five still menaced Eagle 4’s team.
Miko snarled. Twisting in his harness, he signalled to Usk. “Veer toward that junkyard hauler. I’ll scatter its contents, use it as interference. Give me cover, Eagle 4, anything you got.”
“We’ve got too many on our tail, Eagle 1. You’re on your own!”
To port, a Zikri tugship remained oblivious to the conflict. Likely a drone. It hauled a spiked mass of hundreds of ships, probes, space junk and whatever else it had scavenged over the light years, wound together in steel netting. Like a spider towing its egg, it moved slowly towards the box-van.
Miko aimed the rear cannon and tore the belly from out of the netted ball. Junk jetted out into space. Eagle 4 dodged the wreckage but was targeted by the largest Orb. Uro bombs loosed and the Doraxu vessel glowed then yawed.
Eagle 5 gave a warning shout over the com.
But Eagle 4 was doomed. A triumphant Zikri Orb ravaged the glowing craft’s port bow and the vessel erupted in a ball of incandescent gas. The superior firepower of the Zikri bombs was wreaking havoc. The Orb circled in behind to target Eagle 5’s disintegrating shield. Another uro bomb deployed from the forward carriage at sub-light and Eagle 5 was caught broadside and exploded into fragments. It flared in a bright yellow ball, then was gone.
Zaul, observing all from the Kestrel, sucked in a tragic breath, clutching at his hair.
A shudder rocked Eagle 1’s hull; panels flew off the port fuselage and blue smoke rose from the controls at the bridge, knocking Usk out of his seat. Miko swore, stumbling to catch himself as Star was wrenched sideways. A klaxon started to shrill.
Star’s eyes darted in wild terror. She gripped the armrests as if she would claw them off.
“We’re hit, bad!” cried Laren.
“How bad?” Star’s voice cracked.
Miko looked to the smoking console. The escape pod diagnostic showed red. Dead. Ruined.
Miko grabbed the command controls. He cranked the volume on the universal translator to max, yelling words at Usk. “Quick! Down to Kraetoria. The range of the transmitter isn’t infinite. We have a fighting chance if we can escape its reach. That or fight on the ground.”
“Are you crazy?” cried Laren. He glared at the viewscreen full of glowing, hostile ships. He shook his head from its haze.
“They’ll blow us to atoms up here.” Miko twisted toward Usk. “Do it!”
Usk slapped himself back in his seat and clacked at the controls without argument. His pincers danced as if the hot metal pained the tips.
“Dodge them, Usk!” cried Miko. Another blast sprayed the starboard fins but the heavy shields caught the concussion. Despite megavolts of surge absorption, they were getting hammered. If not for the megawatt power of shield protection, Miko and his crewmates would have been dead long ago.
“Zaul will come and aid us,” Laren assured. “We should hold course.”
“The hell Zaul will! You heard him in his briefing. We’re on our own if we get into trouble. Hold where? We’re in the middle of a war zone on impulse power.”
Sket and Berlast were having their own troubles, their craft spinning sideways like a top. Miko caught a fiery glimpse of Fenli’s and Sket’s ships both spinning toward Kraetoria, the dark planet.
“Scatter!” Miko cried into the com. “Don’t let them target you!” But he didn’t know if they heard him. Nor was Zaul communicating.
Miko gazed out into space feeling suddenly sick. Fires raged everywhere and firefly ships hurtled amok through a ruin of metal and debris. More locust and Zikri flocked to the scene. Damn that light drive obstructor! Theirs was still offline.
Usk gave a chirruping cry. Miko craned his neck. A reckless Doraxu craft veered in, blasting a pesky locust tailgater that was stalking them.
Fenli? No, Fenli was hurtling planetside with Sket. Then who? Had the locusts figured out they were being impersonated?
A crippling blast smote the starboard shield. Their defenses came to an abrupt end. The ship shuddered at the stress and slowed.
“We’ll have to abandon ship,” Miko said.
Star hunched in a miserable heap, her eyes wide with fear. One set of fingers clenched the cockpit’s arm rest, another worked the auxiliary guns’ controls. Everywhere she fired was an enemy.
The planet loomed below, an eerie mass of mystery. The ship hurtled on. The curve of the barren landforms was wide enough to span the horizon, a dull brown, and ominous, uninviting black and grey. The atmosphere hit them hard. The whine of air resistance pained their ears and became a loud hiss.
Usk struggled bravely with the uncooperative controls. He chattered locust sounds, evading enemy fire as best he could.
Soon Miko saw craters, mountains, dips in the landscape, massive, slab-sided chunks of long-cooled molten rock. Eerie, arid valleys carved like veins out of a giant’s desiccated limbs.
Twilight was descending over Kraetoria. Under the dim moonlight the barren landscape had a ghostly pallor, like a wasteland upon a forgotten Earth. Shattered rock rose above the jagged ridges, metal structures too; monoliths, huge forks, abandoned communications towers. An ancient settlement? Canyons ribbed the forsaken terrain. There was no vegetation or trees to be seen. Or life. In the skies above, the fireworks raged and only a firefly spray of metal and ship superstructures flaring out of existence. These were the sights crowding Miko’s memory as the ship skimmed over the blasted craters. An unchecked holocaust of anger and violence was unleashed: two warlike races doome
d to destroy each other. Lexia’s mission had succeeded—but at what cost?
A persistent Zikri orb rode their heels even as they plummeted landward. Usk chittered out a curse and skimmed the treacherous surface at a shallow tack, avoiding ripping the underbelly across sharp rock and enormous slanting boulders in a crumbled canyon. Miko manned the guns and shot wildly while Usk dodged the pursuer, a fierce grimace on his peaked face, a fervid fire lighting his eyes. Before Zikri bombs could pierce the hull, he banked left down a narrow gully.
Photon fire rippled on the canyon walls around them, raking the stern rail, almost capsizing the battered L-Doraxu which trailed smoke and fire.
Miko firmed his upper lip. He sent a searing ray out from the rear cannon. One of the enemy ships exploded in a fan of flames. “Take that, you bastard.” Burning hull fragments smashed on the canyon wall and the smoking core rolled in a clattering heap.
No sooner had Miko dispatched the enemy when more Zikri targeted them from above: a torus and two lighter orbs, dropping into the canyon like predatory wraiths. Miko’s heart jumped into his throat. He swore a stray Doraxu was on their tail as well, firing wantonly, killing the Zikri pursuers. One of the orbs went up in flame. Sket? But how? He saw Fenli’s and Sket’s crafts hurtling planetside on a distant tangent. Then again, anything was possible in this firewasp nightmare.
The last of the Zikri vessels fishtailed under rearfire and went crashing to its doom. The locust vessel in close pursuit was nowhere to be seen.
Miko coughed in relief through the dense smoke that coiled in the bridge.
Through bleary eyes he saw the cliff of the shadowy gorge rise high to one side, and etched into its surface, scores of squat, oval holes: honeycomb entrances gaping like fisheyes under the dim light of the fading sun. What could that be? Spiked platforms of metal jutted out at the base of many of the openings like landing pads. One of the larger entrances, high above the canyon floor, loomed closer. A massive air duct? An entrance into some sort of hidden world within the mountain?
“Into that vent,” directed Miko.
“It’s not a vent, it’s a cave,” Laren cried. “Networks of them.”
“Whatever it is! In!” cried Miko.
Usk needed no prompting. He guided the wounded ship into the haven, through a strange, gaping orifice that hung several hundred feet above the desert floor below.
The opening widened, then darkened, as light from the entranceway dimmed. What looked an ancient complex carved out the rock became something more mysterious. Grey command modules, some product of intelligent life, flanked the aisles. The passage kept on straight ahead. A light flickered behind them. The spotlights of a pursuing craft?
Miko cursed.
The ship rocked and jerked along while Usk struggled to control its erratic movements and bring it to a safe speed. The hull grazed off the floor and sheared off plates. It pushed its way through a crudely-carved underground complex. At places, tall, dome-like caverns yawned above them: like cathedrals of ancient stone, at other times the passage narrowed to a forgotten corridor barely wide enough for entry. Miko saw consoles and electrical panels, and strange writings and figures carved into the walls, as if the passage had spanned many ages, from the primitive to the modern. After one bend in the tunnel, a mass of twisted wire and metal stood, along with shredded coils, barrel-shaped solenoids, circuit boxes with innards spewn, obviously blasted in some previous skirmish.
The engines gave a nasty sputter, a rusty whine, then died. The hull’s underbelly raked on stone, skittered to a halt, sparks flying on all sides.
Miko’s neck jarred and his body whipped back.
A hiss of gas came from the cargo port; a faint klaxon beeped in some redundant danger signal of hull breach.
Miko shook the grogginess out of his skull. He peered about, blinking the stars out of his vision. The others stirred, groaned, and struggled to get out of their harnesses.
Laren had a great gash over his forehead. He stumbled to his feet, grunting in confusion, clearly in pain. Miko helped Star out of her restraining straps, coughing from the smoke, his leg stiff and bleeding from a suppurating cut on his knee. No broken bones. But already the air was thinning, getting harder to breathe with that and the smoke.
Usk jerked to his hind feet.
“Out!” Miko rasped, grabbing up a stun weapon from the cockpit and hustling them to the suit racks. “Into the suits! Sensors indicated the atmosphere is breathable, but barely. The ship is obviously leaking air. We can’t take a chance.”
“Out and what then?” croaked Star, nursing her scraped thigh and shoulder.
“We die,” intoned Laren.
XII
Faint echoes of a ship’s engines reverberated through the tunnels of stone. Miko heard a distant blast of laser fire, the cracking of stone walls, a whoosh of flames. Also a strange whistling. He darted his eyes back down the tunnel, turning up his helmet’s audio link. Pursuers were searching for them. Only a matter of time now.
Miko tapped the back of his glass bubble helmet. The air outtake valve must have jammed after the numerous assaults on the ship. He struck it again more forcibly, trying to stop the annoying whistling of expelled air. It began to function properly.
The outside temperature showed minus one degrees Celsius on the side tab of his helm’s display. He turned to Star. Thin jets of grey steam puffed from the nozzle at the back of her air unit. Usk struggled with his own helmet and a film of moisture grew on the faceplate from his heavy breathing.
Laren moved to switch on his headlamp, but Miko pulled his arm away. “Let’s make do without them. We don’t want the enemy sniffing us out. There’s some dim light coming from the tunnels we passed through.”
Laren nodded in agreement. They groped their way along the deserted passage, wandering deeper into the complex. Their light grey suits made small, swishing noises. The tunnel seemed naturally made, smoothed as if from ancient running water, but cut roughly in other places, as if from intelligent hands. The material appeared as a sort of hard limestone at first glance. But the colour, as Miko recalled when the light shone, was a cobalt blue, not a whitish grey. The slightly lower gravity and padded suits did not help navigation. Each step brought an overreaching stride that seemed to end in an ungainly hop. With his throbbing knee and nervous impulse to seek safety, Miko brushed against the walls, sometimes bumping into Star or Laren.
“Watch where you’re going, ox!” chided Laren.
Usk chittered his offence at Laren’s abruptness, which Laren patently ignored.
Slowly they left the crippled ship behind, Miko leading the way to avoid bumping into the others. They made some progress despite the gloomy uncertainty.
Glass crunched under Miko’s boots. He came to a halt, briefly shining his light. Strange crystalline wires and crushed circuits, disturbingly reminiscent of the sinister stoppers of the Mentera tanks, lay strewn across the passageway. Desiccated bones jutted up from the rubble. Some struggle had happened here. What had come of the residents of the tanks, if tanks were once here?
At various intervals, recesses appeared off to the side of the tunnel, housing transparent cocoons, inside which nestled single, dried-out organisms, appearing neither human nor animal. Repulsive things—which had more the semblance of humpbacked shrimp creatures, with tiny skulls and too many eyes.
Star wrinkled her nose and shivered. “What is this place?” came her croaking gasp through the com.
Laren muttered, “Early explorers believed the Zikri and locusts populated this planet aeons ago. For whatever reasons, I shudder to guess. As for these things...” His eyes flitted restlessly over the cocooned bodies, then came to rest on the strange, disturbing faces carved in the walls. Miko saw them too, shadowy figures with peaked heads and elongated necks surrounded by locust motifs: antennae, wings, crudely drawn, as if from an emerging race. He traced a finger across the wall, feeling the grooves of crude-cut eyes and locust parts carved in the rock.
“
Now I wish I had studied this planet’s history,” hissed Laren. “Damn that Zaul! Always pushing to get things done. If he had briefed us properly on what to expect on the surface...”
“None of us could have known we’d be stranded here,” grunted Miko.
“One thing for sure, we can expect no mercy from the Mentera should they catch up with us.”
“We can—” A burst of lumo fire ricocheted off the walls and sent rocks tumbling. Laren’s foot slipped as the surface spidered with cracks.
Miko staggered sideways, his fingers snatching at the ledge that opened up at his feet, but that too crumbled and he plummeted into a dark space.
He thumped awkwardly on his side.
Miko swore and rolled himself upright, groaning and nursing bruises. Usk was swatting away the dust, Star gasping wildly in the darkness. Miko looked up. They’d fallen about fifteen feet, into an underground pit or tunnel. Luckily the lower gravity had reduced the impact of their fall.
Red lumo fire burst across the gap from where they had fallen, cascading jagged streaks of light. Locusts! The fiends must have spotted them. How the devils snuck up on them so stealthily—
Laren lifted his stunner. Miko slapped it down. “No,” he hissed. “Don’t alert them. Quick! Out of sight.”
Miko shoved them forward, away from the revealing crack, his heart pounding, breath rasping, wincing from his bruises. Teams of the Mentera must be out on foot looking for them!
His eyes gradually discerned the details of crude, bare walls, a pebbly expanse underfoot, like an ancient, dried up stream. Where were they? Clearly in an underground tunnel, running parallel to the one in which they had been in. Shadows and dust-motes wound off into the gloom. Laren, fingers fumbling on his helmet to turn the light to its lowest intensity, pointed a shaky hand ahead, where the dim light revealed a metallic sheen.
They stumbled on for several hundred yards over tumbled rock and ancient debris, only to stop before a sealed metal door with a round ring a foot in diameter. Laren wrenched at it, but could not open it. Miko and Usk lent aid. The silvery metal gave way inwards with a popping of sealed air. They plunged through.
