Date Point: 3Y 9M 1W 6D AV
Groddi’s Encampment
Jennifer Delaney
Jennifer Delaney had surprised herself by not spending more than a single night in the Dark One’s lair – even as she’d fallen asleep she’d expected to renege on that particular promise – though she couldn’t be certain she’d only slept for a single day. All she knew was that when she woke the sky above her had been the emerging blue of dawn, and the phrase ‘I just fell asleep next to an anti-matter bomb’ had been the first thought to run through her head. Just another thing an exhausted mind could end up getting her killed.
That prospect and a quick breakfast of nutrient spheres had been all the motivation she’d needed to make the terrifying climb back up the inside of the Lair, spend a few moments resting, and then proceed to get back down the mountainside as quickly as humanly possible towards the army. Help, if it did come, could find her there.
For that she did have a plan. Jen hadn’t left the Lair completely empty handed, not when there were so many things to take; she’d taken a pair of fusion blades, figuring that they were useful even if she didn’t end up fighting the Hunters head-on, a data-pad that would let her connect back to the systems in the Dark One’s Lair, a small amount of the nutrient spheres to tide her over for her journey back, and – thank God for small miracles – a damned area Translator.
It had taken less time to climb down than it had to climb up, and it’d only been a full day and a half of hurried travel before she’d strode into Groddi’s encampment with far more apparent energy than she actually felt. After all, she was now more ‘the Chosen One’ than ever, it was important to keep up appearances. Those who hadn’t believed she’d killed the Dark One before she’d left would certainly believe it now that she’d returned, and had returned with her prizes.
“You’re back sooner than I had expected,” Groddi said as he met her in her tent. He looked tired, as though he’d not slept in days, and perhaps he hadn’t. He hadn’t entirely believed that the Dark One was gone in the first place, and had only had his suspicions confirmed by Jen conveying that the Dark One’s mind, or spirit, had indeed escaped elsewhere. The army had certainly seemed more prepared when she’d returned, both better armed and far more vigilant, and as she’d returned she’d seen in their eyes a kind of questioning hopefulness. “My scouts returned only a short time ago, stating they could not follow you any further. I had them beaten. What happened atop the mountain?”
“The Dark One left a trap,” Jen replied, glad that she would no longer have to repeat her words and endure any more tiresome games of charades. As a girl she’d enjoyed the game, and she’d probably enjoy it still if she hadn’t needed to use it to teach an Alien to speak butchered English. “Obviously I didn’t fall for it.”
Groddi’s eyes widened. “You’re speaking my language—no… you’re speaking both languages. What sorcery is this?”
“Something I got from the Dark One’s lair,” Jen replied, holding up the translator. “Makes life a bit easier. No idea how it works; something something alien techno-babble something something… probably.”
“That isn’t an explanation,” Groddi replied, staring at the small object. “But I don’t believe it was supposed to be one. Is it safe?”
Jen frowned, looking at the object. “I’ve got one of these – well, something like this – inside my head. I can’t see this thing having any side-effects if that one doesn’t, and from what I understand the one in my head is a bit of an ‘alien-bodge-job’ as far as installations go.”
“Inside your head?” Groddi repeated; he was staring at her now, trying to see where an object like that might fit inside her skull, or perhaps evidence that it had been inserted there at all. “That’s normal then… is it?”
“Didn’t seem very normal at the time,” Jen admitted; even now the prospect of getting things plugged directly into her brain disturbed her a little bit, although at least it wasn’t something that could be seen from the outside. Though she’d never admitted it, Old Jen had even been a little freaked out by the possibilities of ‘mind-control’ and what-not, at least until she’d gotten used to it. “Everyone else who does any off-world work seems to have them, though, just because they’re so bloody useful.”
Groddi grunted, still staring. “I can see how that would be the case. What was this trap?”
“A bomb,” Jen replied, not wanting to go into detail unless she had to. “We needn’t worry about that for the moment, though. Are your men ready for a fight?”
“They’d better be,” Groddi said, snorting out a humourless laugh, “I’ve been drilling them for weeks now, and they’re better armed than they’ve ever been since the last big war. Swords, pikes, and lots of crossbowmen with plenty of ammunition. Getting up close with those dark minions seemed a losing prospect at the time, so I thought perhaps some ranged weaponry might be more suitable.”
Jen nodded. It made sense, after all; the Agwarens were too slow in close-quarters to have any chance against the machines, but they were strong enough to use powerful crossbows. “That will probably help against the Hunters as well.”
“The cannibals from the stars?” Groddi asked, looking at her dubiously. “The ones more dangerous than the Dark One?”
“There’ll be about a million of them,” Jen exaggerated – or at least hoped she exaggerated – “that’s why they’re more dangerous. They’ll come down here in a huge bloody swarm, looking for me and somebody else who’s supposedly looking for me, too. That won’t stop them from killing and eating the rest of you, though, because that is what they do.”
What doubt Groddi had slowly shifted into worry, his eyes narrowing as he thought about what that would mean, and how best to fight it. “What more can you tell me about them?” he asked. “Their tactics, and weaponry? How can we fight them?”
“I’ve never seen them launch a ground assault,” Jen replied. “Most of what I’ve seen and heard was inside confined spaces. They move in groups, mainly use ranged weapons that’ll slap hard enough to sting you, or these—“ she picked up a fusion blade and sliced directly through her desk with absolutely no effort, “—which you probably don’t want to tangle with. In a pinch they’ll also throw these little bombs that don’t actually explode but just make everyone around them horribly dead. They also have ships with weapons that will blow huge holes in the ground, and will kill who even stands near it just from the blast-wave… I think that’s just about everything.”
No reply at first, Groddi just stood there silently staring at the fusion weapon with eyes agog, and Jen began to wonder if he’d even continued to listen after she’d given her little demonstration. Eventually he tore his eyes away from it, frowning as he considered his words. “It seems to me that we’d best not fight out in the open where they can just drop these ‘death bombs’ on us with impunity or just blow us into pieces from the sky. Unless you have some kind of counter to that?”
Jen shook her head to indicate that she did not.
“Unfortunate. Then I think that—“
They were interrupted by the panicked shouts of soldiers calling both of them outside, which they did after only a brief glance at each other – Groddi’s asking “Do you know what this is?” and hers answering that she had no idea. When they got outside, however, everybody was staring in the same direction: the mountains.
At least they were staring at where the mountains had used to be. What was there now was a massive, fast-expanding cloud of dust and debris that was erupting high into the sky. High enough, Jen thought, that some of it might actually hit them where they stood.
The ground itself swelled towards them like an enormous earthen wave, far off for the time-being, but leaving nothing but devastation in its wake. There was no escaping that, and no escaping the sound either; the best they could do was mitigate the damage.
“Everybody on the ground, away from anything that could accidentally kill them. Hands over their ears,” Jen ordered, and looked to Groddi to convey it as well. He didn’t, instead he just stared slack jawed at the scene before them like almost everyone else, until she punched him hard in the arm and repeated the instruction.
The entire army was shortly on the ground, weapons sheathed and made as safe as possible in what little time they had, and Jen had a few brief moments to think in which she recalled that sound travelled faster through a solid medium than it did through the air, so it was the thunder in the ground that reached them first.
It roared like a freight train that was full of stone, so loud that it sounded ear-splitting even through her covered ears. The ground trembled with it, the tents and trees around them shaking as it rolled through the ground, and then came the shockwave.
The ground raised up beneath her suddenly, splitting and cracking, and crumbling. Agwarens, and Jen along with them, fell into the crevices it made as it rose. She forgot the noise of it as she reached for purchase with one hand and grabbed Groddi with the other, and nearly had the sense knocked out of her at the volume of it all.
She hauled him over to safety, and then began to climb to the surface, frantically gesturing to Groddi that he should do the same. They were still rising, for the moment, but that’d soon end. The ground would fall again, and when it did it would crush or bury them when the crevices sealed themselves. Jen grabbed at the roots of the big tree that held together this particular section of the ground and scrambled up it, cresting the top just as the ground began to fall.
She had to grab a branch to stop herself from plummeting into the sky. Groddi, who’d been behind her, had stopped climbing and now held on with terror to the roots near the lip of the crevice. All around her there were soldiers drifting up into the air, or holding on to things, or slowly lifting out of the holes in the ground.
It all came down like the biggest clap of thunder that Jen had ever heard, and pain split through her head. She screamed, and was hardly able to hear it, but she wasn’t the only one. It looked as though the Agwarens – those who weren’t buried and who were still conscious, anyway – were suffering just as badly.
The branch that Jen had held onto snapped after a moment longer, and she dropped to the ground. It was only her Cruezzir-boosted reactions that let her account for it and not end up breaking her knees.
She helped Groddi out of the loose dirt first, then looked at the destruction around them. The encampment had been annihilated; carts and tents were either missing or half-buried and broken, helmets and weapons were all that was left of a third of the army, and another third were either trapped, or wounded, or both. She could tell just by looking that Groddi was assessing it just the same, and wondering how the hell they were going to face the Hunters when this was what they were left with.
She looked to where the mountains had been, and wondered how long before the debris became a problem for them, guessing it wouldn’t even be an hour before the stones began to fall. There wasn’t even anywhere they could retreat to anymore; there was no way of getting back to the city in time, even if it hadn’t been entirely destroyed by the shockwave. There was also the coming sound to contend with, something she could see rippling across the distant trees that had somehow managed to survive, bending them like reeds where it could, and breaking them where it couldn’t. She abandoned the idea of covering her ears as a lost cause, and returned to pressing herself against the ground and holding fast to the thickest exposed tree root she could find. Groddi, perhaps just wanting to know what he needed to do now, copied her without questions.
It came on a furiously hot, howling wind that was filled with the crumbling dirt and grit of the previous disaster, and it sounded exactly like what she would expect the last, tortured scream of a mountain to sound like. The tree that had just moments ago saved her life now bent under that wind until it cracked and then broke, its leaves tearing themselves free to join the rest of the debris. She could feel the force of it against her as well, straining to lift her up, and all around them the unconscious and unprepared were caught by it and thrown hard across the ground. She doubted that many of them would be ready for a fight once this was over. Perhaps none of them.
When it was finally over – a matter of seconds that felt far longer – Jen lay there for a moment, coughing on the grit that she’d breathed, aching all over, and closing her eyes against the pain in her ears.
That was a big bomb, she thought to herself, and was glad she hadn’t stuck around any longer. Had there been some hidden timer the Dark One had added, just in case she didn’t try to disarm it? Had something simply gone wrong with the bomb itself, or was anti-matter just inherently unstable? Had help arrived, and set it off by mistake? Or had it been the Hunters?
She opened her eyes and looked around for the data-pad. It had been in her tent, and her tent had been half-buried by the shockwave, but not so badly that she wasn’t able to dig it out. She was relieved to find that the data-tab, while cracked on the casing, still seemed to work.
Tapping through the logs the datapad had received immediately prior to the explosion, she skimmed the routine reports and updates for anything of note. Movement sensors identified six intruders, she picked out. First on the upper platform, then on the second. No sign of a ship landing, but could have been cloaked…
That wasn’t enough to know it was Hunters, but it was enough to know that she needed to be watching the skies, and to keep her technology turned off. Those things could be scanned for, after all, and every minute she could evade capture was a minute she could spend on planning and preparation, and letting her body heal. But the first thing she needed to do was to find any Agwaren who could still stand and go find something that resembled safety. Not everything, after all, could have been destroyed.
++++
++++
Swarm of the Brood That Stalks, Orbit of Agwar
Alpha of the Brood That Stalks
Pure joy. There was little else that could describe the discovery of a primitive species of Deathworlders, with meat nearly as rich as that of a human. There was something special about humans, of course, something built into their innate defiance, perhaps, but some of that was here as well. It was a most pleasing discovery, and there were by all accounts millions of them to be harvested.
The Alpha of the Brood That Stalks bit into yet more of that wholesome flesh, letting the delicious red juices flood over its maw with a shudder of delight. Who could have predicted a second Deathworld species like this? Deathworlds would undoubtedly require more investigation for this greater prey once the humans had been purged, and the Alpha would eventually need to report on it to the Alpha-of-Alphas, but for now this discovery was its own and it would reap a fine harvest.
This Prey was primitive, even by the standards of pre-contact species. What the Alpha had seen of them showed they worked with natural materials, and harvested them manually. Little better than the animals that held no sapience at all. And yet it was their basic industry that had revealed that they even existed, the pollution they made to smelt their metals, to cook their food, and to light their halls. Ironic, perhaps, that had they been only slightly more primitive they might have escaped notice altogether.
The Alpha of the Brood That Stalks let the rich fluids gently flow down its gullet and was glad that they had not, and looked forward to the praise it would undoubtedly receive from the Alpha-of-Alphas once it made this place known to it. First, though, it had to find the human, or at least the perpetrator behind the anti-matter bomb, and destroy them.
Frustration mixed in with the ecstasy supplied by the meat. It was still far too early to be seriously concerned about that not happening, but the Alpha found itself pondering the question nonetheless. The Alpha-of-Alphas would be displeased by the failure, but maybe the discovery of these new Deathworlders would mitigate that fury. Either way, there was still much scanning and hunting to be done before the Alpha would accept failure, and it had begun to wonder if the one responsible might be hiding in the vicinity of the explosion.
That, it thought, would be true cunning. Something a human might do, because the more traditional Prey were certainly neither brave nor clever enough to try it, but only if they knew what an anti-matter explosion would do to the area around it. It was therefore exactly the sort of thing, the Alpha reasoned, that the hated Adrian Saunders would try.
Fear ran through it at that thought, but it hid the emotion from its subordinates. The Cursed Human was not supposed to have been here yet, and while no major technology had shown up on the Swarm’s scans it didn’t mean anything if he was also using Hunter cloaking technology.
The area immediately around the anti-matter explosion was heavy with the sorts of weird radiation that could only be achieved through the annihilation of matter. It wasn’t the sort that killed, although that would cause troubles with the sensors as well, but it was the sort that worked very well to make them unreliable until it dissipated. That was why there hadn’t been much searching in that region, because nobody would set a trap and then hide away in the very area that would be devastated by it. Nobody rational, in any case.
The more the Alpha thought on this, the more it became convinced that it was the case. Excitement mixed around with fear at the possibility of outsmarting the Cursed Human, of finding him while he was still making his preparations, and of being the one who would – if not kill him – then devouring his flesh.
The Alpha put down the flesh, it no longer tasted so rich. Not in comparison to that of Adrian Saunders.
+Concentrate all searches on the area affected by the explosion+, it ordered the ships who had already descended. +Ignore the new Prey until the one we came for is found. Meat to the Maw!+
++++
++++
Date Point: 3Y 9M 2W AV
Westbound from Groddi’s Encampment
Jennifer Delaney
Jennifer Delaney, mid-twenties and already too old for this shit. She hid under the longcloak as yet another Hunter ship swept through the air, happy at least that the air had been ionised enough by the explosion to now crackle around them as they travelled through it. It was possible they didn’t even know it was happening, which was probably the only bit of good luck she was going to get today, and possibly even for the rest of her life. Those might be about the same length of time.
The cloak she wore was of the kind that had been used by the Agwarens for centuries when they moved above ground, a simple yet effective camouflage to prevent them from being seen by the minions of the Dark One who would have killed them on sight.
But of the three dozen she journeyed with – for that was all that remained of the army, once you discounted those too injured to do so – only she was still capable of hearing the Hunters coming. Only she was still capable of hearing bloody anything, it seemed, as her ear-drums had recovered swiftly with the aid of the Cruezzir in her veins, and the whole lot of them now looked to her to indicate when they should hide and waited for her tap to give the all-clear.
Every one of them wore the look of an empty man who knew he’d now lost everything he’d had, all of them knowing that there was no way their homes and families had survived the onslaught of the land itself. They came with her now for the chance of vengeance alone, to make a bloody mark upon the teeming masses of their enemies and die listening to the wailing laments of those they’d killed.
They’d been aiming for the foothills to the west, where Groddi had told her there’d been a lot of natural caverns and even some tapped-out mines. There was a chance that it was far enough away that it hadn’t all been destroyed, and it was on that chance that every man who’d come with them had taken up sword, shield and crossbow along with as many supplies he could carry. Getting there, however, would take another two days at this pace, and Jen wasn’t sure how long they could last before the Hunters finally spotted them.
She rose from under the cloak once the crackling had moved off into the distance, and tapped the others to let them know that the danger had passed. They all rose, careful to look around as they did, and quickly gathered up their equipment. It was a process they’d all learned long ago, and today they’d had plenty of opportunity to practice it.
The first any of them knew of the ambush was when they were stepping directly into it. A dozen Hunters – not usually the sort to sneak around – must have crept up on them while they were taking cover, and now sprang forward at them with kinetic rifles spitting force to distract and intimidate the Agwarens. They carried with them fusion blades, something that worried even Jen, and came at the soldiers with alarming speed.
Three Hunters went down before they knew what was happening, crossbow bolts punching straight through their guts and throwing them backwards with the force of it. They scattered, obviously shocked that there’d even been resistance, but didn’t retreat.
Another two went down under the bolts of those that had not yet fired before the battle was joined, and thanks to an earlier demonstration from Jen they all knew what to expect. Shields went up, a sacrifice to put them out of reach of the deadly weapons, but more than one Agwaren screamed as a limb came away with it.
Swords came down, and spears thrust from behind, slicing and skewering those Hunters who’d made the first assault. They went down slashing wildly with their fusion weapons, chopping at the spears that thrust again and again. The wise few who’d remained at the back to keep up the barrage of kinetics watched this in horror, and looked in danger of falling back. They never even saw Jen coming.
She’d slipped around the side of the fight when the Hunters had been focused on the crossbowmen. Too small to look a threat and too wrapped in her cloak to be known as human, she’d been ignored in favour of the soldiers who were visibly armed.
All at once she came at them like a demon, the hood of her cloak catching the wind and flying back to reveal the soft human features, short crimson hair and snarling lips, the deadly-sharp steel that the Agwarens had forged for her now flashing from under the cloak and cleaving through one and then another.
The last of them turned as ichor splashed and its fellows jerked and gurgled their mindless death rattles. Jen saw its eyes as it realised what was coming for it, saw it try to raise the fusion blade to fend her off, and saw the certain knowledge that it was in vain.
It hardly had the chance to move before she’d killed it, sending its head and blade-arm spinning to the ground; the fusion blade itself landed in the snow and immediately turned it to a small cloud of steam. Jen picked it up, and displayed to the Agwarens still watching her how they could turn it off. She then stood watch while Groddi distributed them amongst those who remained of his men. Three soldiers dead, and another five who’d lost their shield arms but were still willing to put their sword arm to good use. Now, they reasoned, they’d have fusion blades to make the Hunters think twice.
They were surprised that there was no pain or bleeding from their amputations – even with the translator it was hard for Jen to describe how the nerves would have been killed by the heat that also sealed the wound – but they still tore apart the cloaks from the dead to use them as bandages to bind their stumps. It was better to do that and not need it, Groddi had reasoned, than to let exertion open the wounds and have them bleed out before they could die in battle.
Jen had just nodded, and let them do it while she stood watch. There was no argument against it, and there was nowhere else for the wounded to go that didn’t end with them dead and devoured.
Some of them even had the idea to bind a fusion blade to the end of one of their broken spears, figuring that when it came to fighting the monsters it was better to do so at a distance. The results were makeshift, but functional, and the hilt held fast to the shaft even with the most vigorous movement. It wouldn’t hold long in a proper battle, but in spite of their size the Hunters were quick enough that any battle lasting more than a few seconds was always going to end in their favour.
For now, however, they had to keep moving.
++++
++++
Date Point: 3Y 9M 2W 2D AV
Swarm of the Brood That Stalks, Orbit of Agwar
Alpha of the Brood That Stalks
It had taken an unacceptably long time for the underlings to realise that one of the ground teams had gone quiet, and even longer before they had notified the Alpha of the Brood That Stalks. There had been punishments for the delay, swift and severe, and the replacements were under no illusions about how long it should take them to make such reports.
The Alpha knew the reason for the delays, it might have even attempted the same if the positions had been reversed. It would have forgiven that delay if there had been results, and its underlings had gambled their lives on that fact. They had lost.
The ground teams were being hampered by the expected factors. The weather was far colder than a habitable planet had any right to be, and ice blanketed the ground where the wave of destruction had not overturned it. The effects of the blast still interfered with the more advanced scanning equipment, forcing the groups to rely on visual identification. The terrain itself was also covered with thick, bushy trees and scrub, where rocks hadn’t plummeted from the sky to destroy them, and line of sight was limited. The same problems were being experienced by the aerial search, who’d managed to locate the dead and dying remains of some kind of army but nothing else. The cold would at least serve to keep that meat fresh until the search was successful.
So it was the disappearance of the ground team that should have been brought to the Alpha’s attention earlier. There’d been casualties in the harvesting of the Deathworlders, that was always a risk, but never had an entire team simply vanished. It had to mean something, and the Alpha had further concentrated the search to that area. They’d found the remains of the Broodlings and three dead natives, with signs that there had been many more than that. All of the fusion weaponry had been taken, much to the Alpha’s chagrin, but it now saw how this group of Prey had remained hidden for so long: the ice-white cloaks blended in with the ground perfectly. They were even made of some naturally occurring insulator that considerably reduced the passage of infra-red radiation.
That was clever, and the Alpha of the Brood That Stalks could appreciate its cunning and effectiveness. It would not save them, of course, but there was far greater pleasure taken in harvesting Prey who resisted and used their wits to try and survive until the inevitable end.
There was not, however, any significant indication that the human had been amongst them. None of the dead Broodlings had been killed with the advanced technology the Alpha would have expected a human to employ, just flying pointy sticks, and slashing and stabbing weapons.
But to have had it all happen so quickly… that had to mean something. How had the Prey resisted so effectively? How had they only lost three of their number when the slaughtered Broodlings had been prepared and trained for dealing with Deathworlders? It was an anomaly, and it was too close to the explosion site to be a coincidence.
The Alpha of the Brood That Stalks thought it was about time the remainder of the fleet joined the rest, to scour that territory as quickly and thoroughly as possible, and to overwhelm whatever resistance remained with numbers and strategy.
It was about to issue the command when it noticed the sensor report now flashing on its console. The gravity spikes were up, as was standard in this sort of quiet operation – it prevented warp travel as well as interstellar communication – and something had just been deposited in local space. Something cloaked.
Something that the entire fleet could barely detect, suggesting Hunter technology. The Humans used that, the Alpha knew, with both the Pirate Queen and the Cursed Human using the Hunter vessels they stole. But it was moving fast, far too fast to be a Hunter ship, and it was blazing its way into the atmosphere before the Alpha of the Brood That Stalks could even issue its orders.
It had to be a Human, the Alpha knew, though at this point it was hard to guess which. It sent orders to those ships already down there to engage when able, and orders to those in orbit to amass above. It didn’t have a chance to command them to descend before something else burst out of warp: it was something much, much bigger than the cloaked ship from moments before; it was something not cloaked at all, and it was something that had the shape and configuration of a vessel that the Alpha of the Brood That Stalks never wanted to see again.
That ship he recognised as the ancient vessel known as the Zhadersil. That ship was a thing of the Cursed Human, and to the Hunters it had become a symbol of calamitous defeat. Like the human, though, it was supposed to be dead and far too radioactive to set foot on.
Like the human, that did not appear to stop it from coming here.
A surge of panic gripped the Alpha of the Brood That Stalks as the details of its firepower scrolled – scrolled! – down the sensor report. Alerts went off as an active scan hit the fleet, and pinged them all.
+Ships in orbit+, it commanded, trying to convey a confidence it did not feel, +engage the warship! Full force!+
++++
++++
Aboard Spot, in atmosphere of Category 11 Death World
Adrian Saunders
“What the fuck happened down there?” Adrian asked, looking at the video feed that Trix was shooting to his battlesuit. There was a massive crater at the heart of a mountain range and a ring of destruction that spread around it like God himself had decided it all needed fucking up. From a higher altitude it had been possible to see the massive hole in the otherwise consistent cloud layer, and the whole place was interfering with the ship sensors.
“These readings are consistent with an anti-matter explosion,” Trix replied after a moment. “Our sensors are going to be next to useless, and so is our cloaking device. We’re having trouble sensing more than (ten kilometres) as it is!”
“Can you survive this?” Adrian asked, suddenly concerned. He wasn’t about to let these guys get themselves killed just so he could reach a convenient drop-off point.
Trix laughed. “Can you? We’ll just have to keep moving, and I’ll probably be able to evade their shots. We won’t be able to land, though.”
Adrian checked the pair of kinetic thrusters he’d built to pull himself through water. He’d tied them together with some of the power conduit, and while by themselves they didn’t have a hope of letting the suit fly, they’d decelerate his fall nicely if he engaged the suits Flight Mode at the same time. “Thought you might say that, just drop me off close to the ground near that huge fuck-off swarm of ships down there.”
“I thought you might say that,” Askit chimed in. “You do realise this is exactly Plan B all over again? That’s exactly the thing we wanted to stop doing!”
“I enjoy Plan B,” Xayn replied. “It is very… straightforward.”
“I’m not exactly happy about it,” Adrian said, although he did feel that slightly dangerous thrill from the danger of it all. “I’d wanted to get in and out before these arseholes even got here, but it looks like we’re only here in time to kick some arse instead.”
“And you think that Jen is at the centre of that swarm of ships?” Askit asked, realising that they had no way of knowing that. “There are Hunters all over the ground as well! This is madness, Adrian!”
“If she’s anywhere, she’s there,” said Adrian. “And I’ve already come this far. What sort of hero gets to the monster then nopes the fuck out of there?”
“I would imagine that would be the live variety,” Askit spat with growing anger; he’d made no secret about not liking any of this plan, but he’d given up arguing against it and he hadn’t opted out. “But it’s fine because while you’ve been messing around with your suit I’ve been busy broadcasting our precise position straight to the Hunter combat information network.”
Adrian blinked. “You’ve… what?”
“What sensors we have left indicate mass-driver gunfire approximately (half a kilometre) to our starboard,” Trix reported.
He still sounded angry, but Adrian could hear the evil little grin in Askit’s next words. “Well, perhaps ‘precise’ wasn’t quite the right word for it.”
“They’re going to be relying on visual confirmation to hit us,” added Trix, “once they realise what’s happening. I don’t think they’re equipped to manually aim at anything moving this fast, though.”
There was no missing the implication there. “But you are.”
“I’ll be opening fire once we get a bit closer,” Trix said by way of confirmation. “I’ll do a few sweeps and we’ll get out once they realise what’s going on.”
Adrian looked down at Xayn. “What about you?”
The V’Straki engineer hadn’t built himself a battle suit, though he had collected a number of Zheron shotguns and now had eight of them holstered over his body. “I will remain here to defend the Spot,” he said, patting the side of the holster nearest his hand. “If we are extracting Jen, then we will need to land, and somebody will need to make sure the extraction point is secure.”
“I’ll keep you advised on the extraction point,” Trix added. They’d already discussed that part of the plan in brief, but had deemed it too difficult to make any hard decisions while there were so many unknowns.
“Do not forget to mark Jen as a friendly once identified,” Xayn reminded him. That had been the first thing they’d done once they’d finally hauled the suit up to the surface of Affrag, something that would prevent unfortunate mishaps should the suit’s aim-assist systems render a little too much assistance. Everything was an enemy to the V’Straki combat system until designated otherwise, something that provided a certain level of insight into their mindset at the time they’d designed it.
It was not something that Adrian was likely to forget, however, given what the suit’s weaponry had managed under testing. “Don’t worry, I’ll remember.”
You didn’t need to see the sensors to know that they were getting close as the heavy thunk-thunk of Spot’s mass-drivers started up; it was something you could feel as it vibrated the whole ship. Adrian could see the results through Trix’s video stream being fed to a small window to the top left of his helmet display: streaks of red-hot air ending in shattering explosions as they found their targets, while thousands more came back up towards them with every shot a miss. Hunter ships lurched and began their fall, while Spot turned into a dive and pushed hard towards the ground. There was no way the intertial dampeners were going to compensate for all of that, and they all had to hold something for balance as the ship pulled up suddenly and shot above the tree-line.
The dying Hunter ships were just now crashing up ahead of them, erupting into massive plumes of blue fire where they impacted and setting the forest alight. Those must have been big ships, Adrian saw, for it to look like slow motion from this distance.
“You’re going to drop me off over there, aren’t you?” he asked Trix.
“Seemed like it’d probably be clear of Hunters for the moment,” she replied. It did seem likely, given the scale of the destruction. “It’ll give you a few moments to get your footing, and the smoke will mask your arrival.”
“Understood,” said Adrian, and took up position at the cargo door, both kinetic thrusters activated and Flight Mode enabled. The door lowered for him, and the burning forest flashed by below him. The wreckages spat flames and smaller detonations as they settled into rest.
“On my mark,” Trix announced, and Spot began a hard turn. It was at that moment of lowest velocity that Trix gave the order, and Adrian stepped from the door with a half-muttered prayer.
For once everything worked how it should, and he began to drift slowly towards the ground with plenty of time to survey the scene. Spot sped away in a flash, spewing roaring streaks of cannon-fire up towards the swarm of ships above, while the ground trembled and burst with the return fire. More ships were falling as well, though none that were right above him, and each of them hit the ground with an ear-splitting boom; Adrian gave the suit a quick order to turn the volume down, just enough to make it tolerable, and looked out across the battlefield. Whatever this world had looked like before the Hunters had arrived, it was beginning to look a lot like Hell.
++++
++++
Chapter End