Agwaren Hellscape
Jennifer Delaney
“It’s alright,” Jen reassured Groddi after informing the Agwarens of the plan. In the past week they’d survived an anti-matter blast that had undoubtedly killed most of the people they cared about, and then a force of space-monsters who’d certainly killed all the rest, but they were still unnerved at the prospect of getting inside a big metal box that floated a foot about the ground without any explanation that could ever satisfy them. Despite everything that had happened to them they were still stuck in the kind of superstitious thinking of Europe’s dark ages.
“It is plainly a thing of monsters,” Groddi replied. “But from the state of our land, I wonder if we have not been saved by an even greater one. Look at the disaster he has wrought!”
There was no denying that the destruction had been extensive; a strengthening wind had stirred the haze from the air, and there were now brief glimpses across a blighted landscape that would not have been out of place in Earth’s most hellish depictions. Outside the caves, ‘Kevin’ was busily getting a tank into position for them to clamber into, and had left Jen with the troublesome task of convincing the Agwaren soldiers that they weren’t about to do something incredibly suicidal.
“I can see it,” she told the Agwaren lord. “I know it looks bad, but I wouldn’t be asking this of you if I didn’t think it was the best choice.”
“You trust that thing, then?” he asked, rather incredulously, “this… ‘Kevin’ creature?”
“No,” she replied without hesitation. “But I don’t think he’s going to kill us. If we stay here we die, if we go it alone we probably die even faster, but if we go with him we might get to live and fight another day.”
Unhappiness clouded Groddi’s face. “That is not very confident.”
“No,” Jen admitted, “it isn’t. But if you’ve got a better idea, then I’m willing to listen.”
“We could kill the ‘Kevin’, and take the floating box for ourselves,” one of the soldiers suggested, to the murmured agreement or contention of his peers. “We’ve got these sorcerous fire swords.”
“And then what?” Jen asked. “Where do we go in this plan of yours?”
No satisfactory answer was forthcoming, and the mood turned to one of very reluctant resignation. “It seems we have no choice,” Groddi said sourly. “I hope this is not another kind of trap.”
So do I, Jen thought, but kept the sentiment to herself. Instead she nodded once, thoughtfully, and then turned to find that ‘Kevin’ had positioned the tank where the group would not have to inhale too much of the acrid smoke before getting inside. Already their eyes were weeping, and the Agwarens were coughing intermittently, but these problems would only worsen if they were exposed outside of the cave.
Clambering out of the tank, ‘Kevin’ approached her and stopped at an awkward distance. “It’s not entirely different to working one of their starships. You shouldn’t have a problem, but it might be a tight fit.”
Jen nodded, and turned to Groddi. “You saw where he came out of, get your men inside. I’ll only be a moment.”
Groddi glanced mistrustfully at ‘Kevin’, but motioned to his soldiers to follow his lead, leaving Jen to converse with the metal-suited man before they could get underway.
She turned the translator off and waited until Groddi was out of earshot before she spoke. “I think it’s fair to ask what your plans with them are,” she said in a low voice.
“Still trying to figure that out,” he replied in his rumbling hiss, but it was lowered to a relative whisper of its normal volume. “I can’t see it ending well for them if I just drop them off somewhere else. There’s still a Hunter fleet in orbit, and there’s no way they’ll let another lot of Deathworlders become a threat. Same goes for the Hierarchy.”
Jen frowned, though it had been a better answer than she’d been expecting. She wasn’t sure what she was hoping for, but from the way he mused over the dangers it seemed the metal-clad man had at least spared the consequences some thought. Whatever his intentions, Jen thought ‘Kevin’ was at least being honest about this.
“That’s something I wanted to talk to you about,” she said, deciding to trust the man a little further. “What do you know about the Hierarchy?”
“Ancient arseholes,” came ‘Kevin’s’ rumbled reply. “Not a fan of humans in general, and of some even less than others.”
“Well,” Jen said, with enough deliberation that the gravity of her words would be clear, “I’ve discovered they wiped out civilisation on this deathworld, and I don’t doubt they’ve done it elsewhere.”
She hurried on before he could make the point that the Agwarens seemed remarkably civilised. “They had digital cameras here in the past,” she said. “I found one. It showed how they died. I’m not sure how, but I’m certain the Hierarchy was behind a nuclear Armageddon.”
“Seems they missed a few,” ‘Kevin’ rumbled reflectively, turning his head to indicate the Agwarens as they slowly clambered into the tank, one at a time.
“It know it seems sloppier than you might expect from an ancient alien conspiracy—” Jen began.
“No,” ‘Kevin’ interrupted, “it seems about right. This is all getting very complicated.”
“We can talk about it later,” Jen told him, “I just wanted you thinking about it. Right now we should be talking about how this evacuation is actually going to work.”
“I’ll go ahead on foot,” ‘Kevin’ advised her. “You follow in the tank.”
He raised a hand as she stirred to protest the idea. “The ground is unstable and broken,” he explained, “and I can pick the way more easily by going ahead on foot. It’s nasty down there, and if the tank were to get stuck it’d mean a bad end for all of us.”
“Alright,” she agreed reluctantly. Her main gripe was sourced from her curiosity about ‘Kevin’ and the lack of opportunity to guess at his secrets. Right now the only things she really knew were his gender, his military affiliation, and the indisputable fact that he was a native English speaker from somewhere they said ‘arse’.
“One last thing though,” she said experimentally, “how’s Cimbrean?”
She half-expected him to remain silent, or to pretend ignorance, but he seemed to take the question more casually than she might have expected. “It’s been better,” he told her. “Some dickhead crashed a whole starcruiser into it not long after you left.”
Jen remembered that clearly as the moment she had left Cimbrean: on the face of it she’d only just escaped as the unknown starship had entered the atmosphere. It had been a tense situation at the time, but even the rumble and hiss of the suit could not remove the flippancy from ‘Kevin’s’ tone. Clearly it had not been quite the life or death situation they’d assumed it to be.
“Looks like they’re done figuring out how to climb into the thing,” ‘Kevin’ noted, gesturing towards the tank with a general motion as Groddi disappeared into the metal hulk. “We’re not working with much time here.”
She might have asked more questions, but this wasn’t the time to press for information, and ‘Kevin’ was already making a move towards a position ahead of the tank. Hurrying in order to avoid inhaling more of the filthy air than she had to, Jen crossed the ground between the cave and the tank in a few moments, and had pulled herself up and into the vehicle in a few more, putting her dead centre in a ring of twelve highly agitated Agwaren soldiers who’d just discovered the inadequacy of the seating arrangements.
“This is exceedingly uncomfortable,” Groddi complained once Jen had shut the hatch. “How long are we supposed to be in here?”
“Not long enough to get worried about it,” Jen reassured him, though she really had no basis for the statement. “Stand if you’ll be more comfortable, but make sure you’re holding onto something; I’ve no idea how rough this is going to get.”
Some stood at that, but all of them grabbed hold of something with the firmest grip an Agwaren soldier could manage, and the interior metal of the tank, not intended for use by Deathworlders, groaned sadly as it crumpled into a more accommodating shape; unsurprisingly, this did little to improve their outlook on the situation.
Jen’s attention was more focused on the controls. ‘Kevin’ had been telling the truth when he’d described it as similar to what was found on the Hunter starships. Like every vehicle in the galaxy, they were constructed in a way that was practically fool-proof, with few enough differences that she had the vehicle started and gliding forward in under a minute. ‘Kevin’ was ahead of her, and started walking with surprising speed when he noticed the tank moving towards him, and it wasn’t long before they were making good progress in a generally downward direction.
Once it seemed like they weren’t going to be crashing into anything or driving off any cliffs, Groddi moved himself close enough that he could speak without the content of their discussion being generally known. “I want to know, will this end well? The metal-clad man is unnerving, and as I said earlier, he is possibly more dangerous than the monsters from the stars. I saw the other tanks—burning and destroyed—and wonder to what power we have surrendered our fate.”
“I’ve already told you he’s a human, the same as me,” Jen replied, her attention more fixed on coaxing the tank around the edge of a ravine. The ground was just as broken as ‘Kevin’ had described, and the cliffs here looked new, but the on-board kinetics did not allow it to drift from side to side as she’d feared might occur.
“Imagine that I do not find this particularly reassuring,” Groddi replied dryly. “I do not know him, and I do not know his motivations beyond the rescue of yourself.”
It was too his credit that Groddi was sharp enough to avoid ascribing homogenous motivations to the human race, but it would have made things a lot easier if he had. He had every reason to be concerned that ‘Kevin’ might have no intention of saving anyone other than Jen, and while she was reasonable sure that there was nothing to be worried about, she did her best to put more certainty into her reply. “I discussed that with him already. I don’t know if he’ll help save the planet—it’s probably beyond him in all honesty—but he is definitely not going to kill you or feed you to the Hunters.”
Groddi seemed unsatisfied, but he also seemed to understand that Jen couldn’t answer his further questions. Right now they were all just hoping that Jen’s assessment would be accurate and that ‘Kevin’ would be good to his word.
There was mostly silence for the remainder of the journey, or at least until it was broken by a shattering boom that split the air from every direction. The sound was loud enough that the Agwarens covered their injured ears in alarm, and Jen jerked reflexively at the controls so that the vehicle suddenly lurched to one side and then the other before finding its balance again. Up ahead ‘Kevin’ did likewise, clawing at his helmet in futility as the deep roar tore apart the sky.
It seemed an eternity before the sound finally ended, though it could not have been more than a minute before it finally ceased, and Jen had no answer to the subsequent Agwaren questions about what it had been. Not, at least, until she saw the glow of flame in the blackened sky, and the shadows of starships that were only faintly visible as they parted the clouds. “Oh shit!”
Up ahead of her, ‘Kevin’ had reversed course entirely, and was legging it back towards the tank as quickly as he could manage. Behind him, in the sky, the first of the Hunter starships was breaking through the cloud layer.
It was small and, from the looks of things, apparently undamaged, but it drove itself towards the ground with purpose. Only at the last moment did it change direction, veering towards them in a sharp ninety-degree turn and cutting it so close to the ground that a swirl of dust raised in its wake.
“Shit!” she repeated, and began refamiliarising herself with the tank’s combat controls. Like the vehicle controls, the weapons systems were almost identical to their starship counterpart, but with a more limited arc of fire.
“What’s going on?” Groddi asked, his eyes widening at the approaching starship. He startled as the tank rang with metal-on-metal: the sound of ‘Kevin’ climbing aboard.
“One of the Hunter ships is coming at us,” Jen said, waiting for the targeting system to lock on; she wasn’t sure the tank could take down the Hunter vessel, but it was smaller than most and would be less heavily armoured, and she wouldn’t know if she didn’t try. “Don’t worry, I’m taking care of it.”
The system locked on, and Jen didn’t hesitate; she pressed the button that fired the main gun and felt the tank tremble from the shot. It wasn’t recoil—the coil-guns were mostly free from that—but a metal slug fired through the air at such high speeds displaced enough air that the tank needed to compensate for the sudden shifts in pressure. Jen’s eyes grew wide as the shot, which should have been dead centre on the inbound Hunter starship, went far off to the right.
“It’s still coming!” Groddi observed in rising panic.
“I can see that!” Jen snapped, reorienting the target by guesswork to try to compensate for the misalignment. Behind the oncoming Hunter vessel there were dozens of larger vessels, spewing flame, smoke and escape pods, turning over as they tumbled free of the clouds, and it was hard not to reason that the sky must have been full of them. Jen tried to ignore that idea as she fired off her second shot, again missing by degrees but in an entirely different direction.
“Shit!” she spat again, hitting the controls in frustration. “Something’s fucking up the targeting system!”
There was pounding on the top of the tank, universally communicated as ‘let me in’, and with a swipe of a button ‘Kevin’ was allowed entry. He didn’t both getting inside before he roared over the howling winds. “Stop shooting at our fucking friends!”
++++
++++
A Bad Place to Be
Adrian Saunders
“You’ve got us! Looks like we’re all good!” Adrian reported as Spot’s kinetics extended to engulf the hover tank, and the starship slowly lifted it into the air. The ship was looking good, as though it had suffered hardly any damage at all, but that spoke more of Askit’s pervasive invasion of the Hunter computer systems, and Trix’s clever flying, than it did of the ship’s own resilience in real combat. They’d been in the middle of sabotaging the Hunter targeting systems with incredible success when Adrian had finally managed to re-establish contact with them, upon which it was observed that he was not well positioned to survive the ensuing devastation and would need evacuation by whatever means possible. With the Hunters still out there, the crew had braked the starship as hard as they dared to make sure that the inertial shock of suddenly adding the mass of a tank to its effective bulk did not immediately kill everybody involved, but had started picking up speed as soon as the connection was confirmed. It wasn’t something that Spot could normally do—there were limits to how much the external kinetics could haul—but it was made possible with the addition of the tank’s own hover systems.
Even so, there were things outside their control that needed to be accounted for—Adrian could already feel the wind resistance trying to tear him from the tank—and there was no certainty when it came to trying to accomplish the impossible. “How far can you get us before this all turns to shit?”
“Hard to say,” Askit answered. “There are too many variables to account for. What’s your estimation, Trycrur?”
“Not far enough to be safe,” she replied. “I predict that the impacts will produce severe shifts in the wind, so we will have to set you down just beyond the zone of absolute destruction.”
Adrian grimaced. When it came to things like ‘zones of absolute destruction’, he typically preferred to be as far away as possible. “Just get us as far as possible, Trix. Somewhere we can find shelter in the terrain, there’s got to be something like that around given how fucked up the whole place is.”
“I’m not going to apologise for my glorious victory,” Askit interjected. “When you think about it, it’s the Hunter’s own systems programmer who should be apologising for putting together such an easily circumvented weapons system. Besides, I never thought you wouldn’t make it.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, mate,” Adrian replied sourly, “but next time we’re fighting a fleet of Hunters, it’s not okay to drop the whole fucking thing on my head!”
The Corti hacker snorted. “I’m going to hope that this doesn’t happen often enough to warrant a general plan.”
Any further response they might have had was drowned out by the first of the ear-splitting booms. Behind them and to the south there had been a large Hunter starship, at the upper end of what could enter an atmosphere, and it had finally finished its methodical drift towards the ground with a sudden impact. A million tonnes of metal screamed as it twisted under its own weight and the force of its momentum, and a massive burst of flame lit the cloud of debris pulled up into the backdraft.
It was not done with its thunderous groan before a second starship slammed into the ground nearby, small enough to be engulfed and swept aside by the pressure wave of the larger ship’s demise.
“Adrian Saunders,” Xayn called out, his voice faint over the cacophony. “I have located a meadow shielded behind a steep hill. This is our intended drop zone. Prepare yourself for further combat.”
“More Hunters?” Adrian asked, though there was no chance of it being anything else. “How many?”
Xayn hissed with predatory amusement. “Many! We detected a ground force withdrawing in this direction during the course of our exchange with the Hunter fleet. There should be thousands of them to slaughter in the region.”
“Great,” Adrian said wearily, though that small part of him remained as eager for conflict as ever; the rest of him could have happily gone without seeing another Hunter for the rest of his life. “Don’t suppose there’s another hill where I don’t have to fight anyone at all?”
Xayn advised to the negative. “Not within the distance required. Do not worry, however, as you will not be fighting them alone. We have a plan.”
“Few things can chill a man more than those four words, mate,” Adrian told him. He’d used those same words himself, when he’d been the one making up the half-arsed plan, and was very familiar with exactly how long a plan survived contact with the enemy.
Without compromising his grip, he shifted his position on the tank to gain a better vantage point of the oncoming terrain. Visually it was still impossible to see anything through the haze that blanketed everything, but the suit was now receiving sensor information from Spot’s records, and the visual display was overlain with a mesh that shaped out the obscured terrain. Their destination was marked—they’d be there in under a minute—and Adrian took advantage of the spare moments to check the Zheron cannons were still in good order, fully cooled and without errors. So far, so good.
“What the plan doesn’t include,” Askit added, “is what we’re going to do with the twelve natives you’ve picked up. This starship might have had the space for them before you filled up all the extra rooms with redundant systems, but as it stands we do not have the supplies nor the beds for such an increase in crew.”
“I haven’t had time to consider all the problems, Askit,” Adrian replied, “let alone their solutions. They’ll just have to stand around until we sort something out.”
They were close enough now that the hill had resolved from the haze, although much of its shape was still defined by the mesh overlay. It was large, as Xayn had said, and its incline sharp enough to protect whatever was on the other side from the worst of it. On the ground below them, however, there were markers that indicated the current position of Hunter ground forces, and though these were still too far from the hill to be considered any real threat, Adrian judged it unlikely that at least some of those forces hadn’t already reached that position in search of their own shelter.
“Great planning all around, then,” Askit rebuked. “Don’t forget that if we weren’t all protected by the implants, these disease-ridden Deathworlder primitives might kill us all just by breathing. Speaking of which, I expect you’ll tell them not to kill any of us.”
Adrian cleared his throat awkwardly; he’d forgotten all about the issue of disease, but that really wouldn’t do. Without the disease suppression implants to protect the galactic community, a single Agwaren could cause an outbreak of plague the likes of which the galaxy had never seen. He only needed to remember the outbreak that had killed the alien crew who’d first taken Jen aboard—Christ… that seemed so long ago—and there was no chance he was going to allow the same to happen on a wider scale; once they’d been aboard Spot the whole ship would need to be thoroughly sterilised before it could dock anywhere important. “Add that to the list of shit we’ll have to deal with.”
“Arriving in five,” Trix intoned as she began her countdown, just as they were about to crest the summit of the hill.
They passed the summit, revealing burned out wilderness and inky blackness on the other side. There were markers to indicate Hunter presence throughout the hillside, and across the meadow’s flat. “Four.”
The ship changed course, matching the diminishing elevation of terrain and slipping out of direct sight of the fiery starship graveyard behind them. “Three.”
A blast of debris burst over the hilltop behind them, dimming the orange glow from beyond. “Two.”
They reached the flat of the meadow and started to slow, dipping low towards the ground in order to release the tank. Adrian tightened his grip for the inevitable moment. “One.”
He felt the release of kinetic force before Trix finished her countdown, letting the tank rush forward of its own accord across the blasted terrain. It braked gently as it whooshed past, and in many cases through, the blackened remnants of vegetation, only slowing to a stop after several rough moments.
“Away!” Trix announced triumphantly as the starship once more struck skyward, aiming its coil-guns downward and starting its cannonade. Coil-slugs pounded the ground around them, dust and ash burst from the ground in plumes of debris, and guttural screeches of pain told Adrian they were hitting home.
The ground was thick with fallen ash, and he raised a small cloud of it as he dropped from the tank. The haze had been lighter here, perhaps most of it had already come to rest, but it was rapidly beginning to thicken once again. Distantly he could hear—and for that matter, feel—the rumble of starships crashing into the surface, and the black sky reflected a dull red light that diffused into the haze.
“How do things look from down there?” Askit asked through the communications link. “The debris is full of particulates from the anti-matter blast, and we’re starting to lose tracking on you.”
“I’d be a lot fucking better if we were loading into the ship,” Adrian growled through clenched teeth, his eyes fixed on the shadows in the haze. The data feed that he’d been receiving from Spot was now broken, and he was down to relying only on what he could actually see, which wasn’t very much at all. “I thought we’d be doing that right away.”
“Have the occupants of the tank disembark,” Trix instructed. “I do not want Hunters to find us while landed, so we’ll descend once that is done. Xayn will continue laying down suppressive fire in order to give you the time you need.”
“Would have been nice to know that earlier,” Adrian muttered to himself, and climbed back onto the tank. He paused intermittently to give his surroundings a quick sweep, and to make sure that the shifting of shadows in the gloom wasn’t an incoming squad of Hunters, but he soon made it to the top and found that the hatch opened without him even needing to knock.
“Alright,” he said, speaking quickly from the opening, “this is it. Everybody needs to get out as quick as they can. Grab your weapons; there are Hunters fucking everywhere so you might need them. The ship will land when you’re out.”
Quick on her feet, even by his own memory of her, Jen rose from her seat and clambered up the ladder to get close. “This is a bad idea!” she hissed, loud enough to be heard over the shrieking winds, rumbling explosions, and thundering cannonade. “I can barely see in that mess; these guys can’t see at all! How are they supposed to defend themselves?”
“It’s a shitty plan,” Adrian admitted, “but it’s also all we’ve got. The ship is laying down suppressive fire for us, and that’ll help keep them off. I’ll protect you from the rest of them.”
Jen looked far from reassured by that, and more frustrated than anything else, but eventually she seemed to make her choice, and exhaled sharply through her nose in displeasure. “Fine, but if it all goes to hell, then I’ll have told you so in advance. Give me two minutes, and I’ll have them out.”
She didn’t wait for a response, and dropped back to the floor to start giving orders to the space-yetis. Any questions he might have had were answered a moment later when the fusion blades blazed into life, and two of the natives busied themselves cutting a makeshift door where Jen had indicated. Normally that might have taken some time, but they were strong, and easily overcame any resistance the tank’s armour might have given them. Less than two minutes later, when Adrian was back on the ground, Jen kicked out the makeshift door and slid down it as though it were a ramp, though the Agwarens followed her somewhat more cautiously.
Adrian hailed Spot as they filed out and huddled around the tank’s exterior. “We’re good to go. Let’s do this quick.”
“That was much faster than expected,” Trix replied with surprise. “We’ll be with you shortly. We detected heavy weaponry to the north and needed to destroy it, but we’re returning now.”
“Hurry it up,” Adrian demanded. “We’re totally exposed out here.”
The haze had deepened in the minutes that had passed, thanks to the combination of the coil-gun cannonade and of what was being blasted over the hilltop. He could hardly think of a worse escort environment, where visibility was practically zero and the enemy was everywhere, and his fears were borne out a moment later when a pair of shadows resolved from the haze mere metres from his position.
Two hunters hefting anti-tank cannons opened fire as soon as they saw him, and Adrian took the hits. They’d positioned themselves so that dodging the shots would have meant exposing Jen and the Agwarens, forcing him to decide to either block the shots or to allow the wounded and weary natives to suffer further injury. The first two blasts knocked him back, shaking the suit with the sudden burst of pure force. The third took him in the leg and sent him to the ground, but not before he’d fired off a chain of Zheron energy to cook the two hunters where they stood.
He kept the momentum going, using the motion of the fall to roll first to his side, and then into a crouch. Not fast enough to bring arms to bear on the third now emerging from the haze, its hideous form lit only by the white-hot glow of fusion blades.
Quicker than the Hunters themselves, Jen was on it almost immediately, her own blade slicing clean through it like an arc of light, and when the second loomed from the shadows behind her she twisted her body and followed through in a single movement. He stared a moment, but rose to his feet as he did so, and swept the haze with an exploratory burst of Zheron energy that would either kill or ward off any nearby threats. Shadows he had taken as natural formations fell, screeched and burned, and the purple-blue glow backlit several more in the deep gloom. A second sweep took care of them.
That was a stalling tactic at best; they needed Spot here, and needed to get the fuck out of Dodge before they were entirely overrun.
“They know we’re here!” he relayed to the crew. “That means they all know we’re here! I hope you’re almost fucking back!”
Three more emerged from the gloom near Jen, lighting their fusion-blades at the last moment in order to remain hidden. Adrian took the legs out from one, and Jen followed through on its torso with the killing strike. She sprang to the side as the fusion blades came down, and lashed out violently with deadly precision.
“Landing shortly,” Trix assured him. “Be ready.”
“We were ready two fucking minutes ago!” Adrian growled, and shot the head from a fourth Hunter that had risen from the gloom behind Jen, attempting a strike while she cut down its kindred.
Lights overhead, and the sudden rush of air that followed, indicated that Spot had finally arrived, and the sensor feed reconnected to reveal no less than three dozen more Hunters creeping through the haze. They moved to scatter, but they’d already been detected, and nothing could escape the sweep of Zheron that Adrian sent after them.
That blast was matched from the descending ship itself as purple-blue shots spat from the airlock where a solitary figure stood. Xayn hit the ground before the starship did, wearing combat goggles and a respirator, and brought up a fresh pair of Zheron-pistols to keep firing while the others cooled.
“Get inside!” Adrian roared to the crowd of Agwarens as Spot finally touched down. “Jen, get in there and look after the situation! Don’t let them kill the Corti!”
Jen hesitated only a moment, but soon powered down her fusion blade and did as she’d been instructed. Compared to a human, a Hunter, or many other Galactic species, the Agwarens moved with a painful slowness that did not seem to reflect the urgency of the situation. He and Xayn took up position behind them to recover their retreat, firing at the groups of Hunters who were detected by the sensors.
“Enjoying yourself?” Adrian asked as they closed together.
Xayn laughed heartily, or at least as heartily as a V’Straki was capable. “I have made my father proud this day! Our victory will be glorious!”
“Right,” Adrian replied, less enthusiastically. “I’m thinking we can’t leave these arseholes just running around on this planet—” he cut a line across an advancing vehicle of some sort, stopping it with a satisfying explosion “—so I was wondering how long it would take you to get the bomb in this suit working again.”
Xayn was silent for a moment longer than Adrian liked; exactly the kind of moment that preceded news that was as immediately obvious as it was unpleasant. “Adrian Saunders,” he said awkwardly, “There is a deception I must confess.”
Adrian exhaled. “You motherfucker.”
Ignoring the comment, Xayn continued his confession. “I did not actually disable the detonation system.”
“I told you to disable the fucking thing!” Adrian shouted at the V’Straki. He had a sense of mounting horror as he recollected all the very dangerous situations he’d been in over the course of the day, including the one that was still happening right that minute. “This means I’ve been walking around all this time wearing a big fucking bomb! Why the fuck would you leave it armed?!”
Instead of an answer, the suit sounded a siren, and identified eight small discs that streaked out of the haze and fell towards them. “Nerve-Jam!” he shouted, bringing up both arms to try to blast them from the air.
He only got two of them before they landed.
++++
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Alien Battlefield
Xayn
Never before in his life had Xayn moved with the speed he did now. He had been about to answer Adrian Saunders’ question when the Nerve-Jam grenades had been detected, and every survival instinct had swung into motion. He had sprung back with a single, powerful kick that had flung him into the back of the last retreating native, sent them both tumbling through the door, and had almost prevented him from activating the airlock door before it was too late.
He pulled himself free of the antagonised native, and snarled at it in anger; these creatures had been slow, and now Adrian Saunders was probably dead because of it. And if Adrian Saunders was dead, then they were all dead, because there was no way for them to escape the anti-matter explosion that would follow.
The native had the temerity to roar back at him, and Xayn was halfway to a swipe with his claws when the human female caught his wrist mid-strike and twisted it around painfully. He snarled again, this time in a mixture of pain, anger, and outright surprise, but stopped when he locked eyes with the human female they’d come all this way to save.
Her eyes were a cool blue, and her gaze as hard as her grip. She stared at him intently, and held a determination that suggested intense study rather than a will to continue the fight. “You,” she said, “are a V’Straki.”
He withdrew, and she let him recover his wrist. “I am Xayn,” he told her. “Son of Xagh. And we are not yet destroyed by an explosion.”
Her eyes narrowed, and her lips drew tight, presenting an expression that Xayn interpreted as anger. “Was that likely to happen?”
Xayn remained silent—he had learned that sometimes it was better not to answer questions where the answer was apparent, especially when the other person was already angry—and turned his attention towards the pistol he’d dropped on the floor. He ejected the power-cell, and then in direct contravention of its instructions, re-inserted it backwards.
They had not died, which meant that the suit had protected Adrian Saunders from the worst of the Nerve-Jam. Now all that remained was the need to recover whatever remained of Adrian Saunders, and to produce enough of a distraction that the Hunters would retreat for long enough to let him do it.
“Stay in here,” he instructed Jennifer Delaney, and any native creature that was capable of understanding. “And clear the area.”
He hit the airlock button again without waiting for an answer, and readied himself to see the fallen body of Adrian Saunders on the other side of the door. Instead it slid open with a quiet hiss, and revealed that the human was still fighting, and no longer retreating, under withering fire from a new Hunter onslaught.
“Xayn!” Askit shouted into his earpiece. “What just happened?! I registered three blasts of Nerve-Jam outside the airlock, and our human is no longer responding.”
“I am busy!” Xayn replied abruptly, and ended the communication. He reached Adrian in three long strides, firing off one of his unmodified pistols at any Hunter who came too close. There were hundreds of them registering now, vehicles included, and soon the ship itself would be at risk.
“Adrian Saunders!” he shouted over the steady ‘thwack, thwack’ of kinetic gunfire. “You must come inside! We must go!”
He initialised the sabotaged weapon, hurled it at the bulk of the Hunter forces, and tugged on Adrian Saunders’ arm.
The metal suit turned to regard Xayn in a way he didn’t entirely like, and even through the suit’s vocaliser the monotone was apparent in the human’s voice as he refused. More apparent, and vastly more surprising, was that he spoke his refusal in perfect V’Strak. “We must fight.”
Xayn reeled backwards at the ancient key-phrase. “How can this—”
He was cut off by the sudden detonation of his pistol—a titan explosion for a weapon of that size—that lit the haze in a fountain of purple-blue light that brought down a hail of grit and body parts, and knocked the two of them from their feet.
“What the fuck was that?” Adrian Saunders asked, groping around for purchase on the ashen ground. Whatever had held him was gone for the moment, and could be reflected upon when they weren’t in immediate danger.
Xayn rolled to his feet, and helped Adrian to his own. “Not important. Now is the time to leave. Into the ship! Faster! Faster!”
Still dazed, Adrian Saunders at least allowed himself to be pulled along to help speed the process, and Xayn was pleased to find that the natives had been filed away from the airlock and that only Jennifer Delaney now stood there. She grabbed the other hand of Adrian Saunders and pulled him inside while Xayn hit the button to close the door.
“We are good,” Xayn hissed into his communicator. “Get us up high. We must now drop a package.”
“So I heard,” Askit replied—naturally he would have been listening in on a conversation not intended for him. “We’ll ascend beyond their range. All you need to do is drop it out the airlock.”
Jennifer Delaney was examining the filth-covered armour with some concern. “What’s happened to him? I’m sure I heard something about Nerve-Jam?”
“He was subjected to three Nerve-Jam devices,” Xayn informed her, and gave a slight nod of approval as he felt the coil-guns start up their barrage again. “You will remain—”
“How is he even alive?!” Jennifer Delaney demanded, aghast.
Xayn narrowed his eyes into slits to convey annoyance at the interruption. “He was protected. Remain here, we are not yet done.”
Ignoring any further protestations, he led the way down the corridor towards the cargo section in the rear of the ship. It was by far the largest open area of the ship, though that was not saying much, but given the current crowding of the vessel it seemed considerably more expansive than it usually did. Xayn even hissed with relief as the door closed and separated them from the others. It was something that he would have to learn to deal with, as having spent most of his life in relative isolation had not prepared him to deal with so many people at the same time, but self-improvement could wait.
“Get out of the suit,” Xayn instructed as they found some open floor, and waited while Adrian Saunders pulled himself free of the battered armour. The human staggered, but Xayn caught and steadied him, and soon he was sitting, half-slumped, on the nearest crate at hand. He did not look well, with both eyes wholly bloodshot, and every vein rising obviously from bruising skin; Adrian Saunders had not escaped the Nerve-Jam unscathed, and it remained to be seen whether he would recover.
But those concerns were for later; now there was the mission, and Xayn forced his attention onto the suit. Fortunately it did not take long to activate the bomb, and with the assistance of Flight Mode it took him even less time to shove it out of the cargo-bay door.
“The parting gift has been sent,” Xayn reported to the command deck as the door closed back up. “I suggest haste.”
“Already getting up to speed,” Trycrur responded, and Xayn noticed a slight shift in artificial gravity to indicate heavy acceleration.
“How’s our human?” Askit asked, now that they were able to switch focus back to the condition of Adrian Saunders.
“I do not know,” Xayn admitted, “but I do not think he is very well. It is not possible for me to know whether he has any mortal injuries.”
“I’m fine,” Adrian Saunders groaned, rather unconvincingly, and he didn’t even seem to be able to believe it himself. He amended his statement a moment later. “I’ll be fine. What happened?”
“You survived three Nerve-Jam grenades,” Xayn reported. “You must have destroyed the other five before they activated.”
“Then I should be dead,” Adrian Saunders surmised. “That was good armour. Pity we turned it into a bomb.”
“It is far too late to decide otherwise,” Xayn replied. “But the armour could not normally prevent such an intense burst, and I believe environmental factors played a part. You displayed a strange manner afterwards, before you were jolted back to your senses by an explosion.”
Adrian Saunders frowned deeply, an expression that made him look hideous when combined with the bloodshot eyes and bruising skin. “It hurt like fuck, I remember that… I guess I was just operating on auto-pilot afterwards. Some sort of weird shell-shock thing.”
This was not what Xayn had been expecting, but he did not allow himself to show he was disturbed. What he had seen had, without a doubt, been a manifestation of V’Straki combat programming, something that had been designed to help soldiers maintain focus and banish fear in the midst of combat. It was designed specifically for the V’Straki brain, and it was impossible to say how it could or would function in anything else, but that it had even been possible for a human brain to receive the imprint explained how Adrian Saunders had come to command the Zhadersil in the first place.
For now he decided it was better to keep the matter to himself; there was nothing to be done about the imprinting, and so far it had only appeared to help the human fight when he would have otherwise been easy prey. Even so, it would be best to know if it reappeared unprompted. “Advise us if you have any further shell-shock things.”
Adrian Saunders waved him aside. “Yeah… no worries. What’s next?”
“There are the natives,” Xayn replied, gesturing back towards the corridor, “and Jennifer Delaney.”
Adrian Saunders groaned. “Mate… this feels like the hard bit already.”
“There is also the Hunter fleet still in orbit,” Xayn added.
“While technically true,” Askit broke in, sounding deeply worried, “it appears to no longer be a threat. They’ve… actually all been destroyed.”
“That’s convenient,” Adrian Saunders replied, and traded a significant look with Xayn. “How?”
“There’s a new ship out there, Adrian,” Askit explained. “Incredibly huge and over-gunned, and it’s asking for you.”
Adrian arched an eyebrow. “The ship is asking for me?”
“Correct,” Askit affirmed. “And it’s saying it’s the Zhadersil.”
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END OF CHAPTER