PHHZT! A bolt of yellow-orange plasma shot toward the door, but it didn’t come from the raiders on the ground. It had come from above them.
Dalia looked up and saw where the third raider had gone. There was a small crane-like device on the far side of the transmitter, obviously in place to help build the large shell of metals that scooped around the central invention. The third Night Raider had climbed that, clearly looking for a vantage point over the whole site of the battle.
“Urk!” She heard Patch’s groan over her suit communicator. As she glanced toward him, he was tumbling to the floor with the front of his suit smoking and blackened.
“Patch!” she shouted, raising both of her pistols to fire up through the crane floor at the raider above her. It was a sickeningly easy shot, as Dalia fired salvo after salvo up at the exposed raider and made him dance in complicated staccato before flipping over the crane’s edge and plummeting to the floor.
PHZZT! But her rage had taken her eye off the other two Night Raiders—the ones who had shot Patch. One of them had snuck around the far side of the transmitter to fire at her, and his plasma shot hit the shoulder of her suit, spinning her round a full hundred and eighty degrees as it threw her backward.
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You don’t say. Dalia was groaning because her shoulder felt like it was on fire. She was already pushing herself into a scrabbling roll, however, to put the main body of the transmitter between her and her attacker.
“Patch, can you hear me?” Dalia breathed into the suit communicator, her eyes flicking from one side of the transmitter to the other. Oh, for a tactical plasma rifle, she thought. Then she could probably blow bits off the transmitter to fall onto her opponents and kill this blasted field ansible device.
The field ansible that Patch must have been so proud of. Her immediate thought was full of guilt. The young Voider hadn’t known what he was doing, obviously. How could he? And a way to sense, scan, and communicate across far greater distances would have been a benefit to everyone—all races.
“Patch!” she called again, this time she heard a gurgling sound on the other end. Her suit wasn’t a designated superior officer as Anders’s had been. She had no master controls to check his bio-signs, so she had no way of knowing how alive or how near death he was.
But it didn’t sound good, either way.
“D-Dalia?” It was Jake speaking from his suit channel. He didn’t sound good. In fact, he sounded like he was freaking out, which was understandable, if he had just seen one of the few friendly faces he had ever known get shot.
“Jake, it’s going to be fine. Remember to breathe. Find your center,” she hissed at him and tried to believe the words herself.
But lying was never a wise idea to a PK.
“No, no, it’s not going to be fine,” she heard him gasp. “I can’t hold it anymore, Dalia—”
“You have to!” she said back, just as she saw movement from her left.
Dalia was quick, her left pistol firing a shot at the edge of the transmitter. There was an explosion of sparks, but no kill-shot either as the shape ducked back.
Thank the stars these thugs don’t know how to coordinate their attacks, Dalia thought as there was a movement and a flash of orange plasma light from her right.
PHZZT! Dalia dove out of the way, avoiding the blast—which went wide anyway—but she had never been one to like burning gobbets of superheated particles anywhere near her.
Her roll slammed her up against more of the metal-fabric pipes, near where she had started. Instantly, she was swiveling to track back to where the raider had been—
She found him leaping over the body of the first raider that she had killed, blaster in his hands as he roared. He had been in the process of charging around toward her!
Easy. All Dalia had to do was to flick her wrist to send a shot into the man’s leg, twisting him in mid-leap as her other pistol found his chest. The double-shot was enough so that when he landed in a crumpled heap on the floor, he stopped moving.
Just one left. Dalia turned back, her guns held out wide in front of her. Then save Patch. Then save Anders. Then—
“Oh crap.” Realization dawned over the Ilythian’s usually super-fast wits. If Patch was seriously injured, how was he going to disable the transmitter-jammer?
Well, Dalia knew one surefire way to dismantle anything, and she aimed her pistols at the tiny hook-like device suspended at its heart.
Which was right about the time that two things happened.
One, the final Night Raider left in the transmitter room managed to get enough courage to make his own charge toward the occupied Ilythian, firing all the way.
And two, Jake finally succumbed to the dark forces raging through his head.
In short, all hell broke loose at that exact moment.
23
Holding On
Clang! Anders blocked one of Gerhardt’s thrusts by sweeping the salvage-blade across his body. The blow from the heavy double-ended mallet was strong enough, however, that it caused sparks and splinters of steel to break from the sword’s edge.
But polearms will always have the advantage against an edged weapon, Anders quickly realized. The cult-like leader of the Night Raiders merely swapped ends and swung the heavy, bulbous hammerhead made of slag and melted hull plate around in double-time.
Anders didn’t have the speed left in him to duck. He flicked the long sword back up to catch the hammerhead where it met its haft of metal pipe.
As it turned out, Anders also didn’t have the strength left to perform the movement that he wanted to, which was to wrench the entire staff from Gerhardt’s hands. Instead, he managed to raise the hammerhead enough to not be a smashing blow, but as he pushed out with his longsword, the weight of the hammer wrenched painfully at his arms.
“Ach!” Anders tried to maintain a firm grip with both hands on the blade, but it was no good. The weight of the hammer and the force at which Gerhardt had swung it was enough to wrench the sword from his hands and send it spiraling through the air to land with a clatter on the bloodied floor—disturbingly close to where the body of August also lay.
Frack. Anders saw the blade slide to a halt in a split-second moment of slowed time before he raised his head to see Gerhardt’s victory sneer.
And then the stocky, bald man was moving, using the two-ended mallet like a hammer, this time as he jumped forward, raising the weapon overhead.
No time to counter. Anders just had to dodge out of the way as the hammer crashed to the metal floor with a thunderous blow that Anders could feel through his feet.
The ex-MPB officer struck out with a fist, knowing that the man’s swing would take time to recover from. Anders moved as fast as he could, but he was far too injured and fatigued to perform the blistering set of palm and knuckle-point strikes that he would have wanted to.
Instead, Anders managed a good, solid jab to Gerhardt’s face, to hear a satisfying crack and feel something shift in the man’s jaw.
But the leader of the Night Raiders hadn’t got to where he was by being nice to people and making them tea. He was a brawler who had clearly been in more than his fair share of fights. He grunted in pain and staggered back, spitting blood and a tooth as he dragged his mallet with him, before raising it again.
However, that small window of pain was what Anders needed to close with him, being on the offensive for the first time this fight. The loss of the sword seemed to have freed up Anders’s options, since he was a man much better with his fists than with handheld weapons anyway.
Anders jabbed again, his blow missing the spot that he had been aiming for—Gerhardt’s nose, which looked as though it had already been broken multiple times but would still hurt and make his eyes water if Anders had struck.
Instead, Anders’s jab skittered across Gerhardt’s cheekbone, rebounding his head as the stocky man pushed out with the mallet to give himself room to swing.
/> I can’t let him do that! Anders knew that he would be a dead man as soon as Gerhardt had the room to move the weapon as much as he wanted to. Without thinking, he seized the steel haft outside of Gerhardt’s grip and started to wrestle for control of the weapon.
“Policeman!” Gerhardt threw his title at him—his ex-title, that was—like it was an insult.
Anders wrenched at the weapon as Gerhardt pulled back, and Gerhardt was nowhere near the shape that Anders was currently in. Anders had already been slammed and crushed between hull plates, fallen from a gantry, been in a fight with the most feared fighter the Night Raiders had to offer, and had lost enough blood to drench his chest in red.
Gerhardt shoved, and the haft batted Anders back, almost making him fall over, but he clung on for dear life. Like a dog playing with a toy, Gerhardt started to pull and twist the weapon in Anders’s hands.
“Let GO!” he screamed into Anders’s face.
And then Anders saw his only option. Gerhardt wasn’t shirtless like he was. The raider leader hadn’t undergone the same ‘sacred preparation’ that all the other contestants in the Death Palace had. He still wore his suit, and he still wore his utility belt.
And he still had a knife in a sheath just above his hip.
Anders waited for the next shove, tightening his grip but relaxing his arms and shoulders so that it would be like pushing jelly for the man. The haft of the mallet thumped him painfully on the chest, once again making him stumble.
Gerhardt pulled back, ready for the next round of pushes and pulls.
Anders let go, falling forward with the momentum onto Gerhardt as one hand found the handle of the man’s knife and slid it free.
Gerhard was already roaring as he pushed out with the mallet once again, and Anders felt it hit his chest—
—as he plunged Gerhardt’s own knife into his neck.
There was a gurgling scream of outrage as the leader of the Night Raiders completed his shove despite having his neck half-severed, and Anders was thrown to the floor, letting go of the knife as he did so.
For a truly horrible moment, Anders looked up from the bloodied floor to see Gerhardt standing in place with his knife sticking out from under his jaw, looking suddenly confused as he dropped the heavy mallet, took a step forward, and collapsed to the floor.
The leader of the Night Raiders shuddered his final breath and died.
Leaving Anders exhausted, injured, and gasping as he looked around at the horde of incredulous onlookers, to see a few hundred eyes gleam as they sought him out. Their voices started out as a low murmur, but quickly rose as they were joined by the voices of the guards as well.
“KILL! KILL! KILL!”
Oh frack… Anders gulped, just as a wave of terrible emotions rolled through him, full of pain, torment, and terror.
24
Stairs
Time seemed to slow as the bolts of plasma speared through the transmitter room like glowing rain, all around Dalia.
It would have been beautiful, were it not for the fact that any one of those elongated darts of fire could permanently give her a bad day. But strangely, as the last remaining attacker charged, bounding over the pipes and firing wildly at her, Dalia wasn’t afraid.
Well, not of him, anyway.
In truth, Dalia was terrified, but not of the enraged man in front of her. Instead, it was of the wave of dark and terrible emotions flowing from the PK youth at the doorway and expanding like an invisible supernova to fill the room.
Pain! Torment! Terror!
Dalia couldn’t even move her hand to fire at the man coming toward her. The fear that clutched at her insides was so great that she felt frozen. It was like there were a thousand screams racing through her mind. A thousand wails of agony. Again, the Ilythian wondered:
How could one young human contain so much pain?
The answer was, quite clearly, that he couldn’t. It spilled out of him as he staggered to the doorjamb, sinking to his knees.
“J-Ja-Jake…” Dalia hissed through shaking teeth, but it was no use. Whatever words of advice she could offer were like pebbles thrown into a storm.
Dalia realized that, even though she felt like she was dying, she was in fact still very much alive, and that the plasma rain had stopped. She turned her head with great difficulty to see that the raider was on the floor a few meters in front of her, huddled in a ball and whimpering from the psychic onslaught.
The Ilythian agent didn’t blame him. It was all that she wanted to do too, and it was only the fact that she had received PK training as a part of her normal Ilythian upbringing that kept her safe.
Breathe. Find your center, she counseled herself, forcing the fear out through tight, hyperventilating breaths. Her bio-readouts on her HUD were high and erratic. If she didn’t get it together, she was liable to blow a blood vessel or have a heart attack!
These feelings aren’t me. I remain myself, as everything passes over and through.
The Ilythian’s breath deepened and slowed a fraction, and her readings fluctuated and spiked a little less, but only a little. It was enough. With joints and limbs that felt tight, she managed to push herself up from her seated position to all-fours.
But what now? Her thoughts were still a jumble. The transmitter was still ahead of her, but Patch was dying behind her, and Jake was going mad a few feet from him.
I’ll be no good if I’m a jabbering wreck, she told herself, turning to start crawling toward the door.
The ground ahead of her was cracked and blackened with scorch marks as she moved, hand after hand, and the light in her eyes flashed orange, off, orange, off. One of the raiders must have triggered Bonetown’s internal alarms, she thought with a grimace. The only saving grace was that unless the Night Raiders had any similarly PK-trained operatives on board, no one would be getting anywhere near them through Jake’s waves of terror.
She reached Patch’s body to see that the front of his suit was a smoking ruin, his face was pale, and his eyes fluttered behind his helmet.
Y’creel! V’ceet! Bahaba! She used every Ilythian curse word that she knew as she wrenched a hand to her utility belt, hoping that these suits came with some kind of medical kit.
They did. She found what she thought was a dispenser of ampules. Some were stimulants, some were narcotics, and some appeared to be basic gene-repair serums. She gave Patch all of them, finding the small port below the lip of his helmet and inserting each ampule into its rubber seal.
“Please let his suit be working enough to accept them,” she prayed, and for once, she was in luck. She saw a flash of a dim green light reflected over Patch’s ghastly face as his HUD tried to alert him that it was deploying medical systems. She imagined that the suit must have internal needles or touch-sensitive membranes located here and there.
The suit’s system worked, Patch’s breathing eased, and a bit of color returned to his face. His eyes stopped fluttering, and instead closed in a sedated sleep.
“It’s the best I can do for now,” she whispered as another wave of psychic torment washed through her.
Next: Jake.
She clambered over Patch’s body toward where the boy was huddled by the doorway, clutching onto the still-shuddering door for dear life.
“Jake!” she called, reaching out to grasp his shoulder. She didn’t know what she could do to help him, given she was no master of the PK arts, but just her presence was enough to make the emotional storm that raged around him ease a little.
I can breathe, she thought, moving toward Jake and putting her other arm around the youth, hugging him to her as if she could push his mind back together with her nearness.
This close made the feelings like a torrential river, but Dalia clung on, and after a moment, Jake’s hands reached up to clasp her back. This simple act of support lessened the storm dramatically, and Jake was gasping for air as if he’d been drowning.
“I got you,” Dalia found she was saying, over and over. “We’re going to get o
ut of here.” Somehow.
“Patch?” Jake said in a shuddering voice.
“I’ll carry him. If we can get him to a medical unit, he’ll be okay,” Dalia said as she opened her eyes to see that she was looking over Jake’s shoulder, directly at the transmitter.
I can still do this, Dalia thought. Even without Patch to help me.
But first, she knew she had to secure the escape of her two wounded comrades. They had already sacrificed much to be here. And then, when these two are safe, I can come back and destroy this thing, and then go back for Anders, she promised herself.
Dalia knew of only one way to get the humans out safely, and it couldn’t be the way they’d come in, because Patch’s suit was ruined. She just hoped that the creature at the other end of her suit communicator would listen to her.
“Moriarty?” she whispered to the simulated intelligence’s currently in charge of the Nova. “I need an evac as close to my position as possible for Jake and Patch. I don’t know if you can hear me, or if you can even dock nearby, but it’s our only chance.”
A small green ‘M’ appeared on Dalia’s HUD. “I can hear you, and yes, there is an airlock nearby.” The S.I. gave her the directions to the airlock that was merely across the hall from her current position.
“You can dock? No shadow-craft coming for you?” Dalia said as she grabbed the cumbersome form of Patch and heaved him over her shoulders, staggering a bit.
“All of the life signs about Bonetown—including their craft—appear to be in a state of shock,” Moriarty stated unemotionally.
“Holy stars.” Dalia looked at Jake. Had the boy’s psychic blast been enough to do all of that? It showed that he wasn’t just powerful, he might be one of the most powerful PKs she’d ever heard of. “Come with me,” she muttered as she took his hand, and he got to his feet.
Night Raiders Page 12
