Deathworld Battlezone
Alpha of the Light Armour Brigade
The Cursed Human was probably dead, the Alpha of the Light Armour Brigade told itself. Almost certainly dead; the fleet above had blasted the surrounding landscape with everything it had, destroying the forest and peppering the ground with small craters. There was nothing in the galaxy that could survive that sort of bombardment, and the Alpha was therefore very hopeful that the Cursed Human was not an exception to that rule.
If the Cursed Human was an exclusion to the rule, their time to find him was limited, and the column of hovertanks was moving with more haste than the Alpha would have liked. The air was full of a haze of ash and dirt that made visual observation an impossibility, and the atmospheric interference to the other sensors was worsening by the moment. Soon they wouldn’t be able to spot the Cursed Human until he was right on top of them, and by then it would be far too late.
The Light Armour Brigade wasn’t even the best choice for the mission, the Alpha fumed to itself, but it had already been deployed and had taken the least damage from the blast-waves of crashing starships and the firestorm that had soon followed, and was still intact enough to be mission-ready. It wasn’t all bad news, though: if it could survive this mission, and if it could manage to find the Cursed Human’s corpse and bring it back to the encampment, there would be no argument against its promotion into the recently vacated position of Broodship Alpha.
+Remain vigilant+, the Alpha commanded, squinting at the visual scanners as it attempted to pick out any movement from the swirling dust. The fusion blades that fanned out from the front of the tanks, intended to cut through obstacles they could not readily hover over, usually made them look wonderfully dangerous. Right now they just produced far more light than the Alpha was comfortable with, and lit the dust around them like a beacon.
There were twenty of the hovertanks in all—that was the number that had remained functional after the firestorm had swept over them—and that was easily enough to destroy any normal enemy. The weapons mounted on each hovertank included several anti-tank guns, ironically useless against modern tanks, and a coil-gun for the main armament. The crews were well aware that this might prove insufficient against the Cursed Human if he had survived this and made it to close range, and they were all ready with their own weapons and environmental protection in case they needed to abandon the tanks in favour of personal combat.
They finally reached the target zone and found it a wide circle of ruined forest, and alarmingly untouched by the massive coil-gun barrage. There were the dead Hunters who had encountered the Cursed Human, but as there was no sign of the Curse Human himself the Alpha was forced to conclude that the Cursed Human, Adrian Saunders, was still alive.
Horrified, the Alpha hesitated as it considered the possibilities. Whatever was going on, the Cursed Human definitely seemed to be on the winning side, and had survived a barrage that had included almost every remaining ship in the planet-side fleet. Now he was out there in the dust and the gloom, either mounting an ambush of his own or preparing to rescue the human female that had baited him here. Either way, the Alpha knew which way it had to go.
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Hillsides on the Battlefield
Adrian Saunders
Adrian had been quite surprised to find himself alive after the events on the hillside. The shockwave had thrown him to the ground, had covered him with a layer of dirt, and might have killed him if he wasn’t wearing the suit, but he’d come through it with nothing worse than some frayed nerves. That had been half the fleet taking a shot at him, he’d reckoned, after the ambush had reported his presence before suddenly going quiet, and attributed the fact that they’d all missed their target to Askit’s timely intervention.
Still, he’d thought, he wasn’t going to give them time to adjust their aim, and he’d dug himself clear and pressed on up the hillside with renewed vigour and twice the caution he’d had before. At least, given the environmental conditions, the Hunters weren’t about to see him; whatever light had been reflected by the dark clouds was now almost entirely obscured by the dust that hung in the air after the bombardment. Broken treetrunks loomed like shadowy ghosts in the gloom, and Adrian wondered whether he might stumble right past the next ambush.
He quickly discovered that that was less of a problem than he might have hoped; the lights of advancing machinery began to cast their diffuse glow into the haze behind him, silhouetting the forms of very tank-like vehicles against the illumination.
Adrian swore; he hadn’t been expecting to fight a group of tanks, and he looked around for the nearest convenient hiding place. In a forest that had been upended by a coil-gun barrage, it turned out that was practically everywhere, and he hurried over to a nearby boulder that had been dislodged from somewhere uphill and slipped behind it before the tanks could get any closer.
This plan—if you could call hiding behind a big rock a plan—might work if their sensors were as useless as his own. They hadn’t shot at him from where he’d seen them, which was something, but who could say if that luck would hold as they got closer? Adrian had decided that this plan, such as it was, would at best let him know if they were tracking him or if they were just going in the direction they expected he would take. At worst he’d end up fighting an unknown number of Hunter tanks to the death—possibly his own—or running for his life until he found somewhere they couldn’t follow.
Waiting for the answer seemed to take an eternity, during which he realised that the general rumble of weapons and the thunder of exploding starships had come to an end. That realisation would have put the cold knot of dread in his belly if it wasn’t already present, and he now knew that everything that he’d do from here on in would be based on the uncertainty that Spot had disappeared on purpose.
It was not a relief, however, when the tanks drifted straight past him, not even slowing as they passed him by, but they would at least lead him directly to the place he needed to go. He slipped from hiding as the last of them began trailing off into the dust, and with more than a fraction of caution, started to follow the lights.
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Caverns of the Foothills
Jennifer Delaney
Jennifer Delaney, mid-twenties, hiding in a cave on an alien planet, and filthy with dirt and disgusting ichor. Even her extended journey across half of Cimbrean hadn’t seen her this messy, this tired, or this aware of her own mortality. The same was true for the fifteen Agwarens that had survived the journey, who were plainly suffering from the endless danger, the lack of sleep, and the fact that they’d run out of food a day ago. How long would they be stuck in here before the Hunters finally figured out a way to get inside? From the looks of them, at least half their number might be dead of thirst or starvation by the time it happened—hard to think that they’d be the lucky ones.
Groddi sat beside her in their gathered circle, but even though their hearing was long-returned not one of them spoke; they all stared at the fusion blade Jen had stuck into the stone at the centre of their number, the only source of heat and light in what remained of the cave. It had been expansive once, filled with columns and curtains, stalactites and stalagmites, but the anti-matter bomb’s ground-wave had shattered them all and left the cave floor littered with their broken remains. It was quiet, and it had been this quiet any time a wave of Hunters wasn’t trying to force its way down the only tunnel large enough to accommodate them.
The cavernous area Jen sat in was protected by a length of tight tunnel that creatures of the Hunters’ size would have great trouble accessing—a natural formation that had given them whatever peace of mind they still had left—and five of the Agwarens were posted down that tunnel so that they may defend against Hunter incursions, alert the rest of them, and ultimately call for help if it were required.
There was no way out of this situation; Jen had come to terms with that fact not long after entering the cave. There were too many Hunters, no supplies, and no support; she’d racked her brains for hours after getting to the ‘safety’ of the caves but she couldn’t see any way this ended with her getting out alive. She wasn’t alone in this, they’d all seemed to be making their peace with the situation, but all of them, Jen included, intended to make the Hunters suffer for their victory, and by this point every Agwaren who sat with her had killed at least twenty times his number of the foul creatures.
“Sometimes—times like these—I wish I still had religion,” she quietly confided to Groddi, who gave her a strange look in return.
“Is it possible to lose one?” he asked, eyebrow raised.
Jen shook her head. “I mean, my belief, not the religion itself. It’s just hard to reconcile the idea of an all-knowing, all-powerful deity when I keep finding myself up against this kind of shit. Not that I was ever much of a believer in the first place, mind you.”
Groddi simply nodded, and silence returned, broken only by the gentle dripping of water droplets from the ceiling onto the bases of broken stalagmites below. Silent, at least, until all hell broke loose.
It had started with the trembling of the ground, strong enough to bring flecks of stone that had survived the anti-matter bomb showering down upon their heads. They had looked at each other in confusion, and Jen had wondered if the Hunters had finally started to dig them out. A second, stronger wave of trembling had them springing to their feet in time to hear the thunderous roar that swept through the tunnels just a moment later. It was the sound of an explosion that could have rocked the world for all Jen knew, but it was the sound of an explosion nonetheless, and not one that had happened right on top of them. She stared at the others for a moment, then towards the tunnel out, wondering what could possibly be causing such a commotion. Perhaps this was whoever was being drawn to the planet breaking their way through the Hunter blockade, or more likely breaking upon it instead. The skies had held more ships than she’d been able to count by the time they’d reached the caves, and Jen couldn’t imagine anyone getting through that kind of force unscathed.
Then the trembling grew worse and larger chunks of rock began to fall, and the cave was filled with the echo of explosion after distant explosion. She waved the Agwarens towards the way out, determined that if they were going to die it wouldn’t be a result of being buried under a million tonnes of rock and stone. The tunnels were smaller, less likely to undergo total collapse, and they only just made it out of the cavern before the entire roof came down and blasted the fleeing group with a wave of dust and broken stone.
Joined by the Agwarens, Jen coughed for a full minute as they cowered in the tunnel, and was almost grateful for the distraction from the constant trembling and rolling thunder. Her name, or at least her title, was being called by the advance guard before she’d finished choking on dust, and she stumbled her way towards their position while still breaking into the occasional coughing fit. She found the three survivors of the five guards fighting their way back to the second fall-back point, chased by a surge of frenzied Hunters that seemed even more desperate than usual. Jen weighed in with her fusion blade, cutting away at the invaders with more ferocity than they could ever muster and twice the desperation. She swept past the Agwarens and into the Hunters, through the Hunters, and kept swinging, hacking, and killing until the tunnel was so filled with the bloated corpses of the dead that the Hunters themselves would serve as a barricade against further assault.
“What’s got them so worked up?” Jen asked, keeping her fusion blade readied for another sudden attack while sparing a quick glance over her shoulder. “They’ve never come at us like this before.”
The Agwarens just stared at her, and she knew that she must look quite the sight right now. Ichor dripped from her body, and she felt about as filthy as it was possible to be, but if she had to die in a fight against monsters underground, then she might as well be thoroughly covered in their horrible blood; if nothing else it might slightly unnerve whichever lucky monster ended up making her its meal. “They were pushing past each other,” one of the guards finally said. “A mad rush of them, all trying to get into the cave. Maybe it had something to do with all the shaking and the noise?”
It definitely had something to do with ‘all the shaking and the noise’, Jen thought. It was just a matter of finding out exactly what it was. “Stay ready,” she ordered, “we don’t know how many more will be trying to get in here.”
Many, as it turned out, or at least there were many at first. They forced their way through the blockade of the dead and found Jen on the other side. Then they died horribly, and filled the tight spaces with yet more bodies, more ichor and the stink that came with it, and… Jen sniffed the air; she thought she smelled smoke.
“Something’s on fire out there,” she said to the Agwarens, turning briefly to find that their number had increased as more had come from hiding back near the cavern.
Groddi was amongst them, and picked up a fusion blade from amongst the fallen Hunters and waved it around in brief experiment. “There’s an entire forest out there,” he reminded her. “Perhaps that’s what’s on fire?”
“Perhaps,” Jen conceded, but she doubted that was all there was to it. That thunder had definitely been explosions of the ‘very large’ variety, and even back on Earth there hadn’t been a forest capable of producing any of those. “There don’t seem to be any more coming.”
“Perhaps you killed them all, Chosen One?” one of the Agwaren soldiers suggested, glancing meaningfully towards the piles of corpses she’d recently produced.
The scent of fire steadily intensified over the course of the next few minutes, though they brought no further Hunter invasions that needed to be staved off. Jen finally turned to the others to advise them of her decision. “I’m going to see what’s going on out there.”
They nodded solemnly, but did not try to dissuade her from going; all of them knew it needed to be done, and all of them knew that Jen had the best chance of surviving the attempt, so there was nothing to argue about. Laughably, Jen found that even knowing this she was still mildly annoyed that they didn’t at least pretend to talk her out of it.
With nothing further to add, Jen made her way back towards the entrance of the cave, picking her footing carefully so that she didn’t accidentally slip on the oozing Hunter blood and impale herself on her own weapon. The whole passage reeked of their ichor with changeless intensity, and the floor felt vaguely mushy where it had soaked into the ground, but the acrid smell of smoke only grew stronger as she neared the way in.
There were no sounds but the roar of battle, and no movement but the gentle tremble and occasional shower of dust whenever a stone shifted. There had been a force of Hunters deployed down here, guarding one of the caverns closer to the surface so that Jen and her group wouldn’t be able to leave, but that cave was empty as well. It was probably those very guards who’d tried forcing their way into the deeper tunnels.
“Whatever’s going on out there,” she whispered to nobody in particular, “it’s got them worried.”
She was now close enough to the surface that the haze from outside was beginning to fill this cavern. Jen sniffed the air, and wrinkled her nose at the result: it had the smell of burning wood, molten plastic, and strong hints of copper. Groddi had probably been right; the whole forest could be on fire, and that might have been enough to drive the Hunters down where the air wasn’t deadly.
Jen removed her cloak—which was no longer anything resembling the shades of ‘white’—and tore it into serviceable strips that could protect her eyes and shield her lungs from at least some of the acrid smoke. Another good reason we haven’t joined ‘team nudist’, she thought to herself, wondering again at the casual lack of clothing that pervaded the whole galaxy.
Jen had decided that she needed to see what was actually going on outside; if the Hunters weren’t in control anymore, or were in enough chaos trying to deal with something else, then Jen and the Agwarens could use the distraction to attempt their daring escape. Dampening them in the trickle of water that flowed down the cavern wall, she wrapped one strip of cloth over her face, the other over her eyes, and tied them both tightly behind her head.
She took one step, and the world exploded.
The shockwave passed, but the cavern collapsed, burying Jen and the tunnel she’d just come down in piles of dirt and debris, and it was several moments before she got over the shock of still being alive; something had hit the ground nearby, and the powerful tremor had finally broken a cavern that was already badly damaged. Jen waited a minute, and the sounds of violence evaporated, leaving only the quiet drip of water and the pattering of small stones that continued to fall from the new ceiling.
Though she’d received several nasty scrapes and a few minor cuts, Jen’s quick, instinctive reflexes had allowed her to escape serious injury. She was fine—for a given value of ‘fine’—but it still took her minutes of careful effort with the fusion blade to cut herself free from the rubble, and when she was done she sat atop the pile of earth and broken stone wondering what would happen next. The tunnel to the Agwarens was buried under more rock than a single fusion blade could remove, and although that left the Agwarens stuck down there indefinitely, the reality of their situation was not altogether different to what it had been twenty minutes ago. Jen, on the other hand, was completely fucked. She was stuck in what remained of the cavern closest to the surface, unable to retreat and with nothing but an inferno and several million Hunters outside. Whatever had been distracting them had stopped and was probably dead, so now it was only a matter of time before they got back to the busy task of trying to murder her.
“Oh well,” she said in self-resignation, “it’s not as though I’ve ever cared for just sitting around and waiting for things to happen.”
Though she hated the idea of abandoning them, she couldn’t think of any way to save the Agwarens now, and even though they were only makeshift, the cloth filters could give her a slim chance of getting away. She rose, but she wiped a trembling hand across her face before moving any further, and briefly closed her eyes as she pushed aside the unbidden memories of the last time she’d left someone for dead. She had thought that all that time alone on Cimbrean, then training with the soldiers, and finally setting off on the grand space adventure that had started with becoming an unlikely messiah and ended with her sitting in a horrid cave was the sort of thing that should have changed her. Here she was, though, leaving more friends to their death.
New Jen, she thought bitterly, same as the old Jen.
With her mood truly bleak, Jen finally set off the final length of tunnel towards the distant crack of dim light, and thought that perhaps it was nightfall. It wasn’t until she got close—almost at the opening—that she realised it wasn’t the glow of twilight that lit the sky; it was heavy with clouds, and illuminated in ruddy-red not by the sun, but by an unimaginable amount of fire. The air was filled with gentle drifts of falling ash and a thin haze of dust and smoke, but the cloth filter was working for the moment, and the only side-effects consisted of a bitter taste in her mouth.
She edged towards the cave’s entrance with delicate care, not wanting to draw the attention of anything that might be guarding the area, and quickly discovered that this had been the right call. Outside of the cave there sat twenty heavily armed tanks arranged into a barricade around the cave, with Hunters taking up fortified positions on her side of it. Jen stared at them in confusion, noting that their attention was decidedly not on the entrance to the cave; whatever they were preparing for, it was somewhere out there.
Jen withdrew back into the shadows of the cave, staying out of sight while she considered her options, and quickly came to the conclusion that she didn’t have any. There was no way for her to avoid the Hunters out there, and they’d even brought a load of damned tanks! It really didn’t seem fair that on top of their overwhelming numbers they also had armoured vehicles.
Her attention had wandered, but was quickly returned by the sudden commotion from outside; the Hunters were moving around frantically, and there was the sound of machinery that could only have come from the tanks. Jen peered around the edge of the cave once again, and noticed streaks of bluish light slicing through the sky. Two of the tanks exploded, and she saw that the strange energy was slicing through the tanks and Hunters as well. The Hunters were in a panic, their tanks peppering the deeper haze with kinetic weapons and coil-bolts. They seemed to be aiming at random, hoping to hit whatever was out there, but the blue energy kept claiming one tank after another, and didn’t seem to come from the same place twice. Whatever that was, it wasn’t a human weapon, and it wasn’t like anything she’d ever seen in her travels.
The Hunters outside the tanks were moving around now, trying to get clear of the energy beams and explosions. Those inside the tanks had begun piling out in raw panic, and all of them were slowly backing away from their vehicles and moving in the direction of the caves. Moments later the tanks had fallen silent, and dozens of Hunters were moving in Jen’s direction.
They weren’t the only things moving towards the cave; out of the haze came a shadow, blue-light spitting from its arms in short, efficient bursts. The Hunters, protected from the environment by their personal force-fields, found them far less effective against this new weapons technology, and seemed to burst, melt and burn as the strange energy hit them. The shadow resolved into the outline of a humanoid, which further resolved into the shape of a large metal man. It was smaller than the Hunters, but no less hideous, and its metallic features were rendered into a horrifying reptilian visage.
It closed the gap with ponderous movement, taking what cover it could behind the very tanks the Hunters had abandoned. The Hunters edged closer to the cave—Jen’s eyes narrowed and she gripped her fusion blade with white knuckles as they drew near—and took up defensive positions from which they began blasting the tank with all the firepower they had.
Something shot out from behind the tank that looked entirely like some sort of missile—or perhaps a balloon—but rather than flying like a rocket it bounced across the ground as it made its way towards them. Fearing the worst, the Hunters scattered in all directions, and Jen braced herself for the explosion never arrived.
What did arrive was more of the blue energy as it blasted through the surprised Hunters with pinpoint accuracy, and the metal monster swiftly advanced across the clearing with both arms raised. The Hunters returned fire, shooting randomly to try and delay its progress so that they could retreat into the only place they had left: the very cave where Jen was hiding.
They poured into the narrow space of the cave, almost fighting each other for precedence, and none of them ready for what was waiting. Jen’s fusion blade flashed through them as they pushed each other in, killing them before they had a chance to face this surprising new menace. She had a dozen down before they even had any idea anything was going on, and three more before they got a shot off.
The fourth brought its gun up, firing off shots as quick as it could, and clipped her in the shoulder with enough force that she lost her footing and tumbled back down the tunnel in a sprawl of limbs, many of which were not her own. She slid all the way down to the cave, her body made slick with fresh ichor, and rolled aside as the space opened out.
Three Hunters had skittered into the room after her, and had already found their footing on the uneven floor by the time she had regained hers. Jen still had her fusion blade despite the fall, and her back was facing solid rock, but they had her now and they all knew it.
“Fuck that,” she growled, and lunged at the nearest, dodging their shots and the defensive movements of its own blades, and cutting upward through two of its limbs before passing the blade through its upper torso. But that strike brought her to a moment of natural stillness, and that was when they hit her.
It felt like being kicked by a horse, or at least how Jen imagined being kicked by a horse might feel, and this time the shot was dead centre in the side of her ribs. She felt her ribs crack, toppled, and fell back onto the stone with the wind knocked out of her.
The one that had fired the shot then rushed her while she was down, but with the last of her strength she hurled her fusion blade at it in a spinning arc of raw heat. The blade cut right through its chest, carrying with it enough force to knock the corpse backwards even after it had passed through the other side. She let out a wheezing laugh through her gasps for air, watching it fall, and then eyed the last Hunter as it regarded her with a pleased, predatory twist to its maw.
“You are meat!” it hissed in twisted English, as it came at her with its fusion blades swinging for her limbs; clearly it meant to taste her flesh and relish her pain before it died to the metal monster, a task it suddenly found much more challenging with a missing head. The blue light flashed quickly through the room, melting a hole in the rock wall after it completed its passage through the Hunter, and Jen quickly jerked her valued limbs away from where the deadly weapons fell.
She didn’t try to move any further as the clunk of metal footsteps approached the cavern—she could barely breathe from the pain and exertion and there was nowhere to go—and she made no moves to pick up the fusion swords at her feet. There was no fight left in her anyway, and she sincerely doubted the metal monstrosity would go down as easily as the Hunters had. Better to appear unthreatening in case it was friendly, or to spring an attack on it when it thought it was safe, or failing all that, to let it kill her quickly and get it all over with.
It stepped into the room with one arm raised, and while its size was imposing from where she lay, she guessed it could be no bigger than the most sizable humans she’d ever seen, and for all the gleaming metal it moved too organically to be nothing more than an extremely deadly robot. Somebody, or something, was inside it.
Whoever it was spent the next moment sweeping the room with their eyes before resting their gaze on her, and the dreadful reptilian visage seemed all the more wicked when lit only by the fiery glow of fusion blades.
Jen swallowed hard, feeling her heart pounding in her chest; at least she wouldn’t need to pretend to be afraid. “Are you,” she started, and hesitated as her voice began to waver. She decided to try again. “Are you going to kill me as well?”
The metal monster just stared at her for a moment, as if considering its words carefully, and finally opted to answer with just a single word spoken in a harsh, rasping voice. “No.”
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In a Cave, Underground
Adrian Saunders
Adrian looked down at Jen, his eyes running the length of her body. Her head was shaved down to a thick scarlet fuzz, her mouth and nose were protected by one strip of cloth, and a second was pushed up above her brow-line, but he couldn’t mistake those eyes or the lightly freckled cheeks under them. His brain had frozen up when he’d seen her, and he’d forgotten to re-introduce himself, then she’d asked him if he was going to kill her, and he’d taken his sweet fucking time answering in the negative.
She looked up at him in surprise. “You… argh”—shit, she was hurt!—“… you speak English?”
Yes, he thought, and I also happen to be Adrian Saunders, here to rescue you from this horrible cave. I know we haven’t seen each other for a long time, but it’d be great if we could go do something that didn’t involve anything trying to kill us for a while.
“Yeah,” he said, and immediately rolled his eyes in self-exasperation; he was almost glad she didn’t know who he was so that she wouldn’t realise he was actually a complete idiot. “You’re hurt?”
She nodded, wincing as her attention was drawn to the pain. “Hunter got me with an anti-tank gun. I think some of my ribs are broken, or cracked at least, but I should still be able to walk.”
With a look of determination, she immediately set out to prove her words, putting one hand to the side of the cave while the other arm held fast against her ribs, and pulled herself slowly to her feet. Adrian had to hand it to her, she was a lot tougher than the last time they’d talked.
“There,” she said as she stood, exhaling sharply from the effort, “no problem whatsoever! Do I get to be rescued now?”
Adrian wished he knew for certain, but he hadn’t heard anything from Spot in ages, and with Jen injured any attempt to follow the plan meant he risked taking her outside to try reaching an evacuation that might not exist. He sucked on his gums, trying to find a way to explain it without sounding too pessimistic, but Jen seemed to take his prolonged silence as all the answer she needed.
“That bad, then,” she guessed, closing her eyes and gently exhaling. “You really know how to get a girl’s hopes up, do you know that?”
“Sorry,” he apologised. “It’s a difficult situation.”
She regarded him with one very sceptical eyebrow raised. “I think I might have you beat on that number. Anyway, if we waste any more time without introductions, things are going to get awkward. I’m Jennifer Delaney, but I’ve a feeling you might already know that.”
“Yeah,” Adrian replied, and cursed his mind for its sudden rebellion against providing his own name. He’d come halfway across the galaxy to find Jen, had slaughtered his way through a Hunter fleet, and had probably permanently damaged this planet, and yet he was panicking now that he’d finally found the woman.
Her eyebrow arched slightly higher. “This is usually the part of an introduction where you tell me your name.”
“Maybe later,” he diverted, wincing in disgust at his own incapacity to deal with this situation like a rational human being. “Right now we’ve got to focus on getting you out of here.”
“Oh come on,” she complained. “It’s not some kind of secret, is it? You’re not by any chance a member of the Special Boat Service?”
“I’m not quite that well-trained,” Adrian admitted.
“But you are a military man,” Jen quickly surmised, eyeing him sharply. Had she been that perceptive when they’d last been together? Adrian didn’t think so. “That explains why you came to get me. Did you know there would be Hunters?”
“We were hoping to beat them here,” he said grimly. “Clearly that really didn’t work out as planned.”
“Tell me about it,” she muttered bleakly, not really directing the comment at him. She raised her eyes a moment later, a question burning in them. “Do you think you can dig a hole with that thing? Some of my friends might still be alive down that tunnel”—she pointed at what he’d taken as a collapsed section of cave—“and I’d like to get them out if possible. I don’t want to leave them to die.”
Adrian looked at her quizzically, though she had no chance to see the expression. “Friends?”
“Deathworlders,” she replied, somewhat proudly. “I found a whole other planet full of Deathworlders right off the bat. Not bad work for an I.T. girl from Belfast.”
“Not bad at all,” he said, and stepped over to the indicated area to investigate it more closely. It looked as though the tunnel was still in good condition, and that most of the debris was from the cavern, but there was no way to be certain until he’d started clearing some of it away. “This may be possible, if I’m very careful.”
“Then be very careful,” she replied, and began stepping gingerly over the fallen rocks to have a look at what he was doing.
Adrian raised his hand sharply, bidding her to stay where she was. “Don’t come over here! The suit will protect me from the fumes and any further collapses, but you’d be in real danger.”
Jen looked as though she was fighting down an argument, but relented shortly thereafter and returned to her position against the cavern wall. Adrian, all too aware of her piercing gaze, began targeting the rubble with brief blasts of Zheron and letting the stone burn, melt, and vaporise until a damaged section of tunnel revealed itself.
He drew back and turned to her. “It looks stable, as far as I can tell.”
Now Jen did step over, and looked down the tunnel. “I can’t see anything,” she said, staring off into the darkness, “but they weren’t that close anyway. I’ll have to go down.”
“You’re hurt!” he objected, raising an arm in front of the hole to bar her way. “I’ll have to—”
“No,” she said sharply, “it has to be me. They know me, they’re simple people, and quite frankly you look scary as shit. I can’t call out, thanks to my ribs, but the tunnel is wide enough that I’ll be able to reach them without any issues.”
She waited for his further objection, but he didn’t voice it. She was right, and she’d still be right even if he were to unmask himself right then and there, and go down that tunnel in his regular clothes.
“Don’t worry,” she reassured him, “I’ll come right back and get you if there are any problems.”
Adrian let her go, and then he stood there watching, listening, and waiting. He didn’t think a few minutes had ever seemed like such an eternity in his life, but eventually he saw the light of fusion blades making their way down the tunnel, and quickly glanced to ensure the automated defence matrix was still disabled; Jen would not be happy if the suit started murdering all her companions just because they’d gotten a little too close with a dangerous weapon.
He made sure to give them plenty of room to exit the tunnel, taking up a position that was near the exit to the cavern, and observed them as they clambered free. There were thirteen of them in total, they were covered in hair, like Bigfoot or Chewbacca, but wore more clothes than either, and they regarded him with untrusting eyes. One of them helped Jen from the tunnel, proving he was strong enough to be a Deathworlder, and then turned to glance between the two of them.
“This is the one you spoke of?” the Deathworlder asked.
Jen nodded. “That’s armour, I don’t think he really looks like that”—she turned to face him—“do you?”
“I’d bloody well hope not,” Adrian confirmed.
Jen nodded slightly, perhaps a little approvingly. “He doesn’t seem to want to reveal very important secrets such as his name, however, so we’re going to call him ‘Kevin’. Kevin, this is Lord Groddi and all that remains of his army. Whatever your escape plan is, it’s going to need some adjusting.”
Adrian’s lips thinned into a narrow frown. In no universe could he imagine fitting all these people aboard Spot, if he could even get them there in the first place. He looked at her, and saw the worry present in her eyes. It wasn’t possible, and she knew it, but she was hoping for some kind of miracle and he didn’t really want to completely disappoint her immediately after turning up.
He sighed. “Alright.”
Jen seemed surprised. “Really?”
“Really,” he confirmed. “But I can’t do this on my own. How do you feel about driving a tank?”
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END OF CHAPTER