The Turquoise Queen, page 33
part #1 of Coalition Series
Except she knew it wasn't almost dawn, but a few hours past dusk. That tunnel should've been crowded with people going back home or leaving to have a drink or party with friends, or a dozen other things.
Then Irshte crossed paths with a lone woman or man, arms curled in front of their chest, looking at their feet as they walked, and was further reminded of the state her homeland was in.
After a few turns, she arrived at a monorail station, it's walls framed by thin, intertwining golden vines. She could count in her head the people waiting for the train, a feat impossible in the Sirpratl she remembered, even later in the night.
She looked for a discrete corner and put on contact lenses, which gave her the yellowish green eyes of some other woman whose name she would repeat if questioned. This was in case the Sencris had installed biometric scanners on the platform, or somewhere else along the way. Before boarding a tram, she also applied a generous layer of specialized makeup, manufactured to confuse facial recognition systems.
The tram delivered her to a residential area. There, Irshte saw her first Sencris since entering the city. A solitary lancer, standing watch at the station's exit. She walked past him, looking no different from any of the other, scarce civilians. All the while, her left hand was ready to reach for the concealed pistol in a flash. It was already at the maximum setting, so that, at point-blank range, one shot would be enough to pierce shields and armor.
From there she headed to a vast artificial chasm, all its walls lined with the windows of an apartment complex. Above, starlight poured in through a distant, circular shaft. She couldn't see the bottom, but for the little lights of the residences below.
An elevator took her downwards, to one of the complex's lowest floors, where direct sunlight seldom touched. Not as much of a deal breaker for a Raiac as it would be for most other species, but the darkness did drive these floors' prices down, compared to the ones closer to the surface.
Down there, Irshte scanned the hallways until she found the door with the number she'd been provided. After making sure she hadn't been followed by person or machine, she rang the bell and waited for an answer. Such a quaint gesture. The usual thing would be to just contact the person inside via communicator, tell them you were at the door. Under the circumstances, however, it felt best to avoid the communicator as much as possible. Fortunately, houses continued to have bells to ring, as they had for centuries, as a failsafe, or for the benefit of the occasional unexpected visitor.
She didn't have to wait long. The door opened and a slender, cobalt hand rushed her in, wordless.
What she saw inside looked no different from any average Raiac's living room. There was ornate furniture. Two white armchairs and a couch. A round table and chairs, made of dark blue wood with silver framing and details. A chandelier, shaped like the bulbous bodies of two narochrrandos, bathed the small space in warm tones. All very inviting.
The large, green-eyed man standing before her didn't wear armor, but a loose purple tunic with an orange triangle pattern stamp. As they bowed to each other, with hands behind their backs, she remembered she wasn't in her usual, plated and shielded trappings either. Disguised as harmless, they both were. To her, it was uncomfortable not to feel the armor against her exoskeleton, like something was missing.
"Colonel Inakshtir, of the Sirpratl defense force. A pleasure to meet you ma'am. Pardon me for asking, but are you sure you weren't followed?"
She introduced herself and assured him that yes, she was sure. She had avoided patrols and used a scanner to make sure no spy drones were nearby. Not an insulting question, his concern was understandable.
He gestured for Irshte to take a seat on the sofa, and sat in an armchair opposite her, as if she were an average houseguest. She wondered if he'd had to assume a false identity to avoid prison, or if simply pretending to comply with the occupation had been enough. Were his eyes really green, or hidden by contacts like hers? There'd be time for that sort of question later.
First, they had business to tend to. Inakshtir told her how many troops he still commanded, what sort of equipment they possessed. At that, she passed him the coordinates of her landing site. Their first priority would be to send someone to retrieve the weapons stashed there, before the imperials found them.
"I'll have a group pick them up before morning," he said.
"How?" She asked. "That's a lot of heavy equipment, you'll have to get past the guards at the city entrance too."
She stared at him for a while, as if demanding an explanation.
"I'd rather not say. When you're fighting clandestine, sharing details without necessity can get your friends killed," he explained. He must be worried about capture and interrogation.
They had dinner. Crunchy narochrrando spores that he cooked himself, dipped in sweet and sour sauce. These were bite-sized, hollow violet pellets, as delicious as she remembered them being. As a side dish, a steamed algae of some sort that she'd never tasted before.
"Not bad," Irshte said as she chewed on a leaf of the stuff, her hand already reaching for another. It really wasn't bad, just weird. The texture in particular, stringy.
"No need to be polite," he retorted. "Food from the homeworld is beginning to get scarce. Unless we do something about that blockade in orbit, soon that algae will be all we have to eat. That and other garbage imported from the Empire."
It was late night when they finished their meal and went to bed. He let her have his guest room, for as long as she needed it.
She spent the next morning waiting, as her new ally's anonymous soldiers retrieved the precious cargo she'd smuggled onto the planet. They hauled it to a safe location in the city's darkest, deepest tunnels.
"Plenty of obsolete tram tunnels and secret chambers the Sencris have no way of knowing about," her host explained. At that she smiled in agreement. She knew about some of those places, though surely not all of them. Just as he wouldn't know all of her childhood hideouts.
At noon she met some of his soldiers. They started showing up at Inakshtir's doorstep, always several minutes apart, never in groups of more than four. Most were young women and men with the same posture and built, wiry physique Irshte possessed. Military, plain to see, though they'd no doubt disguised it under plain clothes on their way there. The most careful might even have learned to slouch, when walking the city's tunnels during the day.
She also spotted a very civilian looking middle-aged woman coming in, and a trio of boys not yet out of their teens. In total, she counted twenty-seven new arrivals, packed tight in the small living room. They all stopped to greet her, thankful for her presence, and that of the commandos assisting the other resistance cells. However, she also detected some disappointment in their voices, that these few fighters were all the help the central government had sent their way.
From the weapons stash, they brought Irshte a proper, heavy energy pistol, which she configured for sniping. In this mode, the weapon emitted a very brief, very high powered burst when fired. Deadly, and it didn't produce the visible flash of a typical shot. But it consumed more power and required an interval between shots. She kept her small concealed pistol too, just in case.
The afternoon they spent plotting. This group already had plans for the immediate future. Lacking the means to strike a larger target, they intended to do the same thing they did every evening. To ambush and murder lone imperial soldiers, then steal their gear so they could do it again.
With the hours passing fast, they resolved to do just that. Despite the newest addition to the team, and the new tools available, they all agreed there was no time to plan anything more complicated for that night.
They split into teams of three or four. One or two to serve as bait, the others to do the rest. Irshte took one of the boys and the middle-aged woman, the least experienced of the bunch. Taking a few minutes between groups, they emptied the colonel's house and went out hunting.
Irshte's trio wandered the tunnels until they spotted a pair of patrolling Sencris. She hid in an alley, while the boy and the woman started a loud argument, feigning inebriation. From their expertise, the free flow of clumsy words, it was clear they'd put up that act many times before. They kept at it for a while, started pointing fingertips at each other's throats, until the two imperial soldiers had to move in, stomping hard with their encounter suits' metal legs.
They started shouting that the two Raiacs needed special authorization to be out past curfew, that they'd have to be taken to headquarters for questioning and so forth. The boy raised his hands, looking scared all of a sudden, while the woman pretended to ignore the soldiers and kept shouting at him.
As the argument escalated, the side of one of the Sencris' helmets cracked open with a faint clank and a burst of colorful flames. Released from control, the legs of his suit went limp for a moment, before a pre-programmed instinct kicked in. Then they started skittering back, frantic, as the suit tried to drag its unconscious passenger to safety.
While her gun's capacitor recharged, Irshte rushed in, closing the distance to the second soldier. Having found where the shot had come from, he was turning to point his lance at her. She touched the barrel of her pistol to his head and pulled the trigger.
The fleeing encounter suit had put some distance between itself and the scene by then, but not enough. She gestured for her partners, who had drawn their own pistols, to hold back. Calmly, she took aim, squeezed again, and the machine fell to the floor, spasming like a dying arthropod.
When it was over, she realized her breath was heavy. The trio fled before other imperials arrived, to repeat the ambush elsewhere. Those suits gave off automated distress signals when stricken, she explained to her partners, forgetting for a moment how much experience they must have with the matter.
Irshte killed again a couple times, over the next hours. In the three nights that followed, she went out hunting again. Never with the same companions. The others looked forward to their turn working with the Raiac military's elite. Now and then, one of the youngest resistance fighters mentioned how exciting it all was, always to be reprimanded by her. They should not enjoy taking lives. Yet she could not deny how exhilarating these nocturnal duels with Sencris patrols were. Much more so than her usual work guarding Erchtria, to be sure.
Every afternoon, however, the group worked on their bigger plans. Because Irshte's cache of heavy weapons allowed them to aim higher than they ever had since the Empire's arrival.
On the first day, one of the boys had suggested they go for the occupation forces' provisional command center. They might even find Dagedriom there, put an end to him. His palpable hatred for the admiral had echoed across the living room. Their reactions all but confirmed the rumors she'd heard about his brutality. It made Irshte wonder how many of these people had already lost someone close in this war.
That idea, however, had been shot down right away, by someone more experienced. Far too ambitious, and the admiral, if he was planetside at all, would probably be in the Tcheerazeen capital, deep underwater. That day would come soon, Irshte reassured the boy, remembering her true agenda on Sirpratl. To create chaos on the day of Erchtria's main counterattack. She kept that to herself though. Like Inakshtir had warned, divulging information without necessity could get people killed.
In the end, they settled on assaulting a landing pad. They'd sneak in, plant explosives, detonate them when an enemy transport approached. Doable, now that they had the proper equipment, and simple enough for a team their size to accomplish without support from other cells.
Before heading out, they stopped by their stash. The entrance to the abandoned tram tunnel wasn't far from Inakshtir's home. To get there, they took an elevator to the apartment complex's bottom floor, below where anyone lived. From there, they followed a long, narrow, dimly lit passage, its walls made of bare, uneven rock. It led to a much wider tunnel, with a single, crumbling rail running along its ceiling. Below, sitting inconspicuous in a dark corner, the crates smuggled from Sharizinar.
The group came out of there sporting full body armor, with tunics thrown over as a bit of unconvincing camouflage. Any Sencris that spotted the whole pack of them walking down a tunnel would be alerted regardless of what they wore, and would need to be dispatched as quick as possible. Not that they planned to march to the landing pad in a single group of almost thirty, but even half a dozen armed people were more than suspicious enough.
They moved during the morning, when uneven light seeped in from above, casting darker shadows than the neat fixtures on the ceiling would. In the morning, there were crowds for them to blend into, yet no more guards than there were for the night's empty tunnels. In groups of no more than five, they flowed through the narrowest streets they knew, unseen, to rejoin a few steps from a small tunnel mouth opening onto the surface, and their target.
There were two circular landing pads, each wide enough for a shuttle or corvette. A little over three meters from that, in every direction, the clearing gave way to thick jungle. Opposite the tunnel exit stood a single control tower, blue and silver with narrow windows at the top. A Raiac facility, which the invaders still had to wear encounter suits to operate, even all these days after arrival. Eighteen soldiers they counted. Six guarding the entrance, twelve patrolling the perimeter. No challenge, Irshte thought as she gave the others the signal to begin.
At that, Inakshtir led the bulk of their forces charging at the tunnel exit. Guns out and set for free fire, they sprouted from every tributary of the main path to the surface, noisy and angry.
Taken by surprise, two Sencris were peppered with energy beams before the rest could react. The guerrillas took cover behind the same dark corners they'd come out of, and kept firing.
As predicted, most of the patrols left their posts to assist the tunnel entrance guards. From her hiding place, Irshte saw an imperial get shot in the arm, but for the most part no fighter found their mark, because both sides were well entrenched. She flinched when a Raiac got hit, though, again, not a fatal wound. Through it all she kept quiet and waited. Her whole little group did.
After a short while, Inakshtir decided they'd made it convincing enough, and signaled his troops to retreat. They scurried back into the narrow tunnels, with the Sencris on their tail, their commander shouting at his communicator for reinforcements.
At that Irshte snuck out, a bag full of explosives slung over her shoulder. In single file, she and four others clung to the tunnel's east wall, cloaked in the black shadows cast by the morning sun. Once out on the surface, they fanned out and went to work.
While the others went in pairs to rig the landing pads themselves, Irshte took care of the control tower, where two of the three remaining patrols stood, sonars and eyes on high alert.
Once they'd planted the explosives, they'd run for the tree line and wait, detonators in hand, for a ship to approach. That was assuming none of those patrolling Sencris spotted them first. If that happened, they'd just shoot everyone and settle for destroying the landing site itself.
Before placing the last charge, Irshte heard the familiar, distant hum of an engine, and smiled. It seemed she wouldn't have to wait long for her prey. Making sure the guards remained oblivious, she attached the explosive to a corner of the tower's base and switched it on, ready to leave. Then she noticed it wasn't just one engine's hum she'd heard, but several.
In the sky, in all directions, six gleaming golden shapes were closing in fast. Stepping as lightly as she could, Irshte ran for the trees, pushing her way past the tall, translucent grass that grew between their thick trunks.
Behind her, she heard loud, strident zaps, the kind railguns made, but when she turned around she saw nothing but dense vegetation. Then another, fainter, well-known sound, growing closer all around. Dry leaves cracked under countless tiny metal feet. She drew her pistol, made sure the power cell was full, cranked up its settings. No point being subtle anymore. She pressed her back against the thick trunk of a leafless tree with branches thin and numerous like capillaries. No feather fruits dangling from it though. It wasn't the right season for that.
A moment later, a mechanical face popped out of the tall grass in front of her, eight glassy beads inset on a mask made of interlocking metal plates. Her first two poorly aimed shots burned against the Sencris' shields, the third punched a hole in the center of his helmet. All in the time it took him to aim and fire his lance. His flechette smashed against the tree bark next to her head.
His gills still heaved when he hit the ground, where a regular soldier would've been twice dead. Special forces, she deduced from the thickness of his defenses. These weren't the reinforcements the garrison commander had called for. And now all the others knew exactly where she was.
Two more came along. Irshte managed to take one by surprise, then slid sideways along the tree trunk, an instant before the other's shots found her. She took a long breath, listened for the telltale clicking of mechanical legs, popped out of cover pointing at where she thought she'd heard it, fired. Three shots, another Sencris down. But this one managed a hit at her chest. Enough to bring her own shields to less than half strength.
Rustling in the grass. Four more she counted, closing in from the other side. They wouldn't make the mistake of tackling her alone again. She considered making a run for it, but heard more faint clicking ahead, too. She took the power cell from her other pistol and connected it to her shield generator. She reckoned she'd need that more than the extra gunshots.
The battle lasted longer than the imperial forces imagined it would, no doubt. Her timing was impeccable. She sprung from behind the tree, fired, ducked away, again and again, until of the four, only half remained. Wood splinters piled up around her, the thick trunk she used as cover mangled by flechette impacts. These were talented Sencris though. It took all Irshte had and more to outfight them. Even with the extra juice, her shield generator had given out. Her pistol, being cranked to its maximum setting, was running low too. She could hear them skittering around to flank her, while their other friends closed in for the kill.
