Galaxy of Titans: An Epic Space Opera Series (The Augmented Book 3)

by Ben Hale

  Siena eyed Quent and his soldiers, who took up positions on each of the four sets of stairs. Quent opened his holoview and demanded reports from the soldiers outside the building, while Kolas checked his own.

  The quiet was unnerving, and Siena fidgeted. She cast about for a means of escape, but she’d never been out of sight for even a few seconds. The bonds around her wrists were tight, and she subtly tested their strength with her body augment. Too strong to break.

  The shackles had been reinforced with interior shielding, only unlockable from one of the officers’ holoviews. To power it, the bonds had their own gravity drive, a tiny sphere embedded in the seracrete. Maybe Kensen could have hacked the coding, but Siena knew that was outside her ability. Still, the gravity drive showed promise.

  She reached to the small hub of power and felt it spinning inside the ball of seracrete. With her augment, she pushed the gravity into the tiny converters until it overloaded the system. Inside the seracrete, they crumbled from the pressure, and the gravity spilled freely. Left unchecked, it would have caused the drive to implode, but Siena pulled the raw power out through tiny gaps. Then she attached the liquid power to the seracrete around her wrists, redirecting the gravity to pull outwards. At the junction point, the metal emitted a faint groan of protest, then began to bend.

  “Any sign of Malikin?” Kolas asked.

  “Not yet,” a krey next to him said, “but there’s a ship hovering at the edge of our sensors. It might be the Kildor.”

  “Two minutes,” a krey said. “Ragnor-4 is authenticating our codes now.”

  Siena pushed harder on the restrains, willing them to bend. They were thick, but still designed to hold a human. Molecule by molecule, the metal stretched. She kept her head bowed as she worked, and aside from a few curious glances, they didn’t seem aware of what she was doing. But getting out of the shackles would be pointless if she couldn’t escape. She needed a distraction.

  She focused on the sounds of the soldiers muttering to each other, and the whirring of the portable gravity drive. She enhanced her hearing and listened harder. There were roaks in the building, their faint scratches a distinct scrabbling that brought back memories of Verdigris. Easily confused as approaching footsteps—if they were louder.

  She’d rarely practiced with her sound augment, but she’d joined Onis several times when he and other sound augments had been taught by a krey scientist. One of the first things he’d taught was about the nature of sound.

  “Sound waves operate on a measure of amplitude,” the krey had said, using a holo to demonstrate. “If you slaves can increase the amplitude, it will get louder. And since you are all ignorant beasts, I’ll make it simple for you. Stretch the sound and it will make more noise.”

  The krey’s condescension aside, her words had proved to be true, and Siena had increased the magnitude of sound waves coming from a bird to make its song seem like a shriek. Sensing the subtle scratching sounds, she gradually began to up the amplitude. It took twelve seconds for someone to notice.

  One of the dakorians swiveled and raised his weapon to point into the darkness. “Something’s coming.”

  “How’d they get past our defenses?” Kolas demanded, then growled into his holoview, “Outer teams, report.”

  Silence.

  Kolas growled again and ran a diagnostic. “They’ve cut off our communications.”

  Siena hid her confusion. She was the source of the sounds inside the building, but she hadn’t cut the beamcast links. Was it Malikin? Had he come for her already? Risking exposure, she pushed the sounds even higher, and Kolas raised his plasma pistol.

  “Eyes out!”

  “One minute until the Gate connects,” Hoggins said as light began to flow into the Gate.

  “Once we’re through, we’re safe,” Quent said.

  Something in the way he said safe set Siena on edge. There was nothing to indicate the Ranger officer was an enemy, but she couldn’t shake the sense of fear. On impulse, she activated her time augment, and the dank, abandoned building evaporated into the stars of the fate cloud.

  She hadn’t had much time to practice the ability, but she knew that every second in the fate cloud was longer in real time. Knowing she had only moments, she picked up her own star and looked two minutes into the future. What she saw chilled her to the bone, and she extinguished the augment.

  “Ten seconds,” the krey said.

  Siena lowered her voice. “Kolas, how much do you trust Quent?”

  “Shut your mouth, slave,” one of Quent’s companions growled, moving to backhand Siena. She braced for the blow.

  “Wait,” Kolas said, and the soldier stopped. His gray eyes were fixed on her. “What are you talking about?”

  “Do you trust him?” she repeated.

  “She’s trying to turn us against each other,” Quent grunted. “It won’t work.”

  “Why do you ask that?” Kolas demanded of Siena.

  “Gate’s connected.” The krey stood and deactivated his augment. “They’re waiting for us.”

  “Wait.” Kolas didn’t look away from Siena. “Answer the question.”

  “Just…” Siena struggled with what to say without betraying how she knew it. Then she spotted a faint symbol on Quent’s holoview. “Is he supposed to be jamming your communications?”

  Kolas turned toward Quent. “Lieutenant, show me your holoview.”

  The dakorian scoffed at the order and reached for his wrist. “You’d listen to a slave?”

  “Do it,” Kolas commanded.

  The tension in the room spiked, and all the Rangers subtly lifted their weapons. Siena held her breath, her eyes flicking towards the hole in the stairs. Three steps and she would drop into the opening. Being trapped in the building wasn’t freedom, but it was a start. Then Quent drew his plasma pistol from his thigh and pointed it at Kolas. In a burst of speed, his other four dakorians pointed their weapons at the undercover officers.

  The Rangers fired in what seemed like a single burst, and all four fell, their bodies hitting the floor in a thump that made Siena flinch. Light from the ion bolts danced across her eyes, and she regretted looking at the bodies. Kolas clenched his fists, but slowly lowered his own pistol.

  “I’m sorry, Captain,” Quent said quietly. “I had hoped to avoid unnecessary bloodshed.”

  Kolas didn’t move, but his gray eyes darkened. “I’m assuming you work for Malikin?”

  “He pays better than the Corps.”

  “Where does the Gate connect to?” Kolas asked.

  “The Kildor,” the krey next to Quent said. “It took us a few minutes to bypass the protocols.”

  “Which explains the delay,” Siena said.

  Kolas eased his hand closer to his holoview, and one of Quent’s team scowled.

  “Don’t do it.”

  Kolas lowered his hand. “You’re more clever than I gave you credit,” Kolas said to Quent.

  “I thought so,” Quent said. “I’ll make sure you get a medal for your service.”

  “And I’ll make sure you pay for your betrayal.”

  Quent laughed and pointed his weapon at Kolas’ head. “Defiant to the end. You really should have learned when to quit—”

  Kolas abruptly grabbed for his belt and activated a det. The ball exploded into blazing light. As the entire team shielded their eyes, Quent fired, the ball of plasma arcing over Kolas’ shoulder. Covering her eyes, Siena heard the ricochet of a metal det bouncing on the floor and then felt a krey hand grab her wrist. In three steps they reached the hole in the stairs. Kolas shoved her through the opening and followed, the two landing on a pile of debris.

  Siena landed hard on her side, where a rock dug into her shoulder.

  Kolas was on his feet and dragged her up. As Quent bellowed in anger and barked orders, Kolas dragged her down a side hallway, hissing into his holoview, “Command, Quent has betrayed us. I need reinforcement and I need it now.”

  Silence. The Ranger tried again,
and then a third time, but there was no response. Siena realized Quent had probably jammed the beamcast going out of the building. They were on their own. Abruptly the krey captain pulled her around a corner and shoved her against a wall. Their faces were inches from each other.

  “How did you know?” he hissed.

  “I saw his holoview,” Siena sputtered.

  “A lie,” he said. “You asked if I trusted him before you looked at his holoview.”

  She grimaced and shook her head.

  “After them!” Quent’s roar reverberated off the walls of the station.

  Kolas pulled her away and dragged her down the corridor. “You want to live?” he said. “You stay with me.”

  Siena hurried to keep pace as they slipped into the darkened hallways of the labyrinth. But as she ran next to the krey, a slight smile formed on her lips and she pushed the last of her bonds apart.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Siena scrambled to keep up with the Kolas as they swerved down shadowed corridors and through dingy rooms. Functioning lights were sporadic, the imbued filaments in their tubes flickering, dim, or dark. Their flight was made hazardous by the piles of rubble from where the ceiling or walls had given way to age. Shouts and barked orders echoed from multiple angles as their pursuers began to hunt.

  “Stay with me,” Kolas hissed.

  She cast a look over her shoulder and spotted a dakorian shadow appear and then shrink as he turned a different direction. The outline of his powered hammer lance reflected on the opposite wall.

  “How old are you?” Kolas asked.

  “Seventeen.”

  “What planet were you born on?”

  “You want to know that now?” Siena hissed.

  Kolas caught her by the elbow and pulled her into a set of stairs going upward. There he spun her back against the wall and reached for her bonds.

  She pulled her hands apart to show they were already open. “They broke when we fell through the stairs.”

  “A fall broke reinforced seracrete?” His expression was dubious.

  She shrugged, uncertain what to say.

  A shout came from down the corridor, so Kolas tapped his holoview and the rings around Siena’s wrists fell to the floor. Then he cocked his head to the side as he took in Siena’s tense posture and hardened gaze.

  “You really have been in combat,” he said.

  Realizing too late that she’d shown her true self, Siena opted for a shrug. “In House Bright’Lor, conflict is rather frequent.”

  Kolas smiled faintly. “And here I was trying to keep you talking so you wouldn’t panic.”

  “I’d rather talk about how we get out of this alive.”

  She knew she was revealing too much, but it seemed the only way to survive the encounter. Kolas was an ally of circumstance, and although he would arrest her if they got out, for now they needed each other. And she still hadn’t shown her augments.

  Kolas nodded to himself and took the stairs two at a time. “Did you really kill dakorians on the Korgith Station?”

  “Let’s just say that I’m not afraid of them.”

  Kolas paused at the top of the stairs and looked down the dim hallway. “You should be. These are not normal Rangers. Quent is TOR captain, one of the best.”

  “Tactical Offensive Ranger.” She eyed the other end of the corridor. “I know the name.” He gave her an appraising look, and she rolled her eyes. “I’ve watched the vids since I was little. Just because I’m human doesn’t mean I’m stupid.”

  “Clearly,” he said dryly. “TOR teams are comparable to the military Shard teams. Augment or not, he could snap your spine like a twig.”

  “My spine isn’t that breakable.”

  He snorted with amusement and crossed the hall into an empty office. When Siena followed, he shut the door behind them. Then he opened his holoview and expanded it to show a three-dimensional map of the building. He tapped several symbols that Siena recognized as a hacking code, and a moment later a series of moving dots appeared on the map.

  “Looks like he’s called in reinforcements,” Siena said.

  “Still not afraid?” He chuckled as he worked the map to find an exit. “Ero certainly trained you well.”

  “Do we have a way out?”

  She considered just slipping away from Kolas and leaving him to fend for himself. It would probably make things easier for her, especially because she would be able to use her augments to get outside the closing net and escape. But she found herself hesitant to abandon the Ranger captain. She couldn’t explain why, but it felt wrong to leave him behind.

  “Standard flanking formation,” he said, eyeing the holo. “They’ve blocked off the exits and are sweeping upward floor by floor. They’ll drive us until we’re trapped.”

  “Then let’s hunt them,” Siena said as she pointed to the closest two dots, which were working in tandem to search a corridor a short distance away.

  “You want to attack?” Kolas asked.

  “You said it yourself,” she replied. “They’ll keep shrinking the net until we are surrounded. If we can eliminate those two, we can slip outside their net.”

  “Only if we can kill them before they report to Quent.” Kolas dismissed the holo and drew his plasma pistol. “If we fail, it will give away our position.”

  “If you can handle one, I can handle the other,” she said.

  “With your augments?”

  She extended her right hand and summoned the subdermal energy blade. The seracrete molecules flowed from her pores and into her hand to form the hilt. She activated it with a touch, and the purple blade shimmered to life.

  “I hope you have a permit for that,” he said, his gray eyes amused.

  “You’d have to ask Ero.”

  He chuckled and reached for the door. “You take the one on the left. I’ll take the one on the right. They have jawbone cortexes that link to their wrist holoview. All they have to do is speak, and the entire team will come running.”

  “Then don’t let them say a word.”

  She stepped out the door and darted into the darkness. She’d seen enough of the map to know where to go, so she advanced across the room, down another corridor, and into another room. She slowed when she heard the approaching footsteps of the dakorian. She activated her sound augment and tightened the amplitude of the sounds coming from her own feet, the scrap of her soles dissipating to disturbing silence. Smiling to herself, she hurried across the room and, with a body augment active, jumped the fifteen feet into a hole in the ceiling. There she crept through a cramped accessway to the next corridor.

  “Hallway forty-seven clear,” the dakorian whispered. “Moving to hallway forty-eight.”

  The dakorian swung his hammer lance left and right, using the empowered head to shine a light into the neighboring rooms. Siena held very still and dropped her sound augment. Then she activated her rarely used coding augment. Kensen could probably have just disabled the jawbone cortex, but Siena didn’t have the talent to do something that required such finesse. Instead, she pulsed the coding and held her breath.

  Just beneath the skin on the dakorian’s left jawbone, the cortex brightened white hot. The dakorian cursed and instinctively rubbed the embedded cortex, but it burst from the skin and scattered sparks on the floor. The dakorian touched his cheek and his hand came away bloody. He stared at it in confusion.

  “Captain?” he called. “Lieutenant? My communications cortex seemed to have…failed.”

  Distracted, he didn’t see Siena drop from above his head. Her blade pierced his back as she passed, and he bellowed in pain. With instincts born of thousands of hours of conflict, the dakorian savagely spun his hammer, intent on crushing her to pulp. But with her body augment active, she ducked under the swing and slashed twice, once at each heart. She leapt back and tightened the amplitude of his shout so it came out in a croaked whisper.

  Goggle-eyed, he fell to his knees. “Impossible,” he said in a subdued groan.
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br />   “I’ve heard that before,” she said grimly.

  The dakorian’s eyes drooped, and he fell on his chest. Siena stooped and tapped the rune on the handle that dissipated the kinetic energy of the hammer. As it darkened, she retreated into the dim hall and crossed to the next. There she found Kolas standing over another dead dakorian.

  He was accessing the soldier’s holoview and linking it to his own. “You’re alive,” he said upon spotting Siena.

  “Don’t sound so surprised.”

  “You’d be surprised too, if you found a roak had sprouted an energy blade and killed an elite soldier.”

  “So I’m a roak?”

  “I mean no disrespect.” He finished his hack and stood. “I’m just impressed. And I’m not easily impressed.”

  “I don’t usually meet krey that are kind to humans.”

  He stood as shouts came from the nearby stairs. “Maybe if they were, you would never have been created.”

  They retreated from the impending attack, the two threading through the mazelike network of offices, hallways, and storage rooms. Dozens of directions led to dead ends and cave-ins. Kolas opened his holoview and plucked a small audio tag he’d taken from the fallen soldier. Quent’s voice came through sharp.

  “How did a krey and a human kill two of my best?” he growled.

  “I’m not sure,” came the reply, “but Sergeant Belvin appears to have been killed with an energy blade. Whoever used it was proficient enough to kill him in three precision strikes; the last two went straight to his hearts.”

  Quent’s growl made Siena smile. “The Kildor will be on the roof in six minutes. Then we’ll have a hundred soldiers to flood this building until Kolas is dead and we have the augment.”

  “What about the Rangers outside the building?”

  “I reported Kolas and the human gone,” Quent said. “The escort has already departed.”

  “Then we’ll keep the exits closed and box them in,” a lieutenant said.

  “No,” Quent snarled. “I’m not getting beaten by a krey and a human. Teams of three. Eyes up and out. Sweep them into the south corner. And change beamcast in case Kolas hacked our channel.”