Warp Wraith, page 29
“Besides,” Brula said with a devil-may-care grin, “it’s got to look desperate for the Theocracy to buy it.” She tapped something and fingerprint-dots formed on the hologram from her end. “We’ll catch them in a cross-fire.”
“And if that doesn’t work?” Venture asked.
Brula nodded, lips pressed into a thin, bloodless line. “The Wraith’s instructions for that contingency were pretty clear. So were Everild’s. We all know it. If it looks like we’re losing the position, and anyone’s left, they’re to preserve their ships and the organization. Burn for the far side of the system and make the hyperjump for Farbanks as quickly as possible.”
Silence met her words. Callisto’s guts burned and twisted to even ponder it. Take whatever you can save and get it out of here, Everild had told him. But the Old Man was on his back in a tube, now. He wasn’t going to have to make that call. And neither was Mal, wherever the hell down on that planet he was. Those of us around this hologram are. His innards squeezed tighter. Wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Brula raised her voice. “But we’re not going to need to worry about that, are we?”
“Hell, no,” Callisto said hoarsely.
“The bloodsuckers are rushing in, like nothing can stop them. It’s careless.” Burla clenched a fist. “We’re going to make them pay for it.”
“That’s right,” Venture growled, the other captains joining it.
“We’ll see you all soon. Come running.” The older woman threw up a casual salute. “Brula, out.”
“Captain Venture,” Callisto called hurriedly as the other globulars began vanishing from the air. “A moment?”
“Yeah?”
Callisto felt the looks from the officers and aides of the auxiliary bridge. And from somewhere, he imagined Malik’s disapproving look. In the Theocracy Fleet, he’d known officers to scheme, sabotage rivals, even plot murder to gain higher command. But he’d never wanted any of that—especially after the massacre on Lydiria. He’d only ever wanted one thing.
“Vengeful needs a commander,” he told Venture. “And I need to lead the Slayers.”
A sigh puffed the other man’s mustache. “You’ve got no one left over there?”
“Just junior officers.” He shrugged. “I’m not much more than one, myself.”
Venture chewed at his mustache a moment, then straightened his beret. “Alright. I’ll transfer over.” He chuckled. “Couldn’t wait to get out of that seat, could you, Dee?”
Callisto knew the man meant it as mostly light-hearted jibe, but felt the teeth of it, too. “Just prefer my own, Captain.”
Chapter 16
“FIVE MINUTES OUT!” Skraar’s voice crackled in Malik’s earbud. “Get ready!”
An alarm sounded and Malik reached for a handhold in the cargo hold of the Scorpiod, gripped it as hydraulics whined. Icy winds drowned that out with a howl as the loading ramp of the Scorpiod cracked and opened to a scene of speeding cliffs and the snow-crusted depths of a narrow gorge.
Dizziness nearly overcame Malik before a centering breath through his mask steadied him, brought the Silence once more. Behind him, Ingrid and the others tensed and made last-second weapons checks. A few shivered, but only at the cold. The berserk was already starting to seize some of the Furies, muscle and flesh rippling under their battle dress. He hoped none of them lost control before they were down.
The roar of the Scorpiods’ engines filled the gorge as they veered through a winding turn, then straightened again. Malik had a glimpse of the morning sky between speeding peaks above; chilly gold striated with redly-lit streamers of cloud. Scattered snow lashed into the hold from outside. It was about an hour and a half after dawn.
The high-pitched yowl of a hoverbike caught his attention and he leaned out a little to catch a glimpse of one. The Hardcases were riding right on the Scorpiods’ tails, almost overtaking them. Malik tried to get a glimpse of Edie on one of the bikes closest, but it was futile.
She knows. He’d seen it in her eyes. He’d seen his own past mirrored in them. She was his vision. She was the thing the Flux hadn’t let him forget across the years.
He thought of that poor witch-girl then, and her bizarre pronouncements about destinies—about him and Edie. That was no coincidence, either. That was the Flux. And he couldn’t deny it—he’d led his Sacred band into that Sisterhood encampment to eradicate all life within it; yet he’d stayed his hand for one.
“Three minutes,” Skraar called across the tactical network from the Scorpiod’s cockpit. “Chief, I’m getting sporadic readings.”
Unease tickled Malik’s blood at the sound in the pilot’s voice. “What is it?”
“Blaster fire,” the Fenreir replied. “And comm link signals, lots of chatter; all of it a mess.” He paused. “It sounds like a fight already underway.”
Malik shot Ingrid a look over his shoulder. “How can that be? Local resistance?”
“I can’t tell anything,” Skraar said. “Like I said; a mess.” Another pause, this one heavy with meaning. “Shall I proceed?”
Ingrid’s eyes flashed brightly back at Malik. She’d do whatever he said; they all would. Uncertainty swirled in his core for a moment before he banished it with Silence. Centering his mind, he tried reaching out for the Citadel with the Flux.
Violence and terror vortexed in the near-distance, buffeting him with the winds of its ugliness. He felt minds locked in horror. He tasted thoughts drenched in savagery. They shook him, displaced him. For an instant, he wasn’t in the hold of the Scorpiod; he was in his past, breaking out of the Citadel, wounded, burned horribly, but the only one who’d fought clear from the prison the Theocracy had locked him and his bitterly betrayed Sacred Band survivors within.
“Chief?” Skraar pressed through the fog of Malik’s turmoil.
“Stay the course,” he replied. “There’s no turning back, now.”
The whine of the Scorpiod’s engines changed in pitch, wound up to an ear-biting howl as the shuttle decelerated and then lifted its nose. Mountain faces whipped by to starboard, shockingly close, then dropped away as the ship banked and climbed violently. Malik bent at the knees, clenching at the handgrip tighter while his guts flopped.
The Scorpiod rushed skyward with a cliff lashing beneath its belly. The rocks fell away abruptly and the shuttle shot up into the sky. A wobble in midair turned into the nose dropping. Malik’s stomach shot up into his throat as the ship plunged. Engine squall swallowed the yowls of the Furies behind him—a mixture of exaltation and fright.
Cyan crashed through the space the Scopiod had just dropped through. More blaster bolts licked out from a fuming black artifice atop a mountain ahead. There seemed to be little aim or control to the ground fire. Straining his eyes, Malik began to see why.
The Dark Science Citadel bled a smear of black smoke across the morning sky. Flames and lightning guttered amidst its coiling mess. Billows of it obscured much of the lower tiers and the great spire stood out above the fumes like a block of obsidian.
“What the hell?” Ingrid cried from beside Malik.
The Scorpiod swept in towards the burning structure with its sister ships howling up on its flanks and the swarm of the Hardcase hoverbikes following. More blaster fire ripped out from the Citadel, scattered, but starting to be aimed. The Scorpiod to starboard shook to a glancing hit. Malik traced the shot back to its source, found Shock Troopers scattering out onto the landing pads from a fuming entrance. Some looked to be trying to board the shuttles parked there.
“Targets!” Malik snarled. “On the pads! Take them out!”
The Scorpiod’s overhead “stinger” cannon thundered, sending a bar of hellfire down onto the landing pad. Where it touched a shuttle jumped off the tarmac in a spray of slag, upended, and crashed down upon its neighbor. Blasts from the other shuttles followed the first in, gouging the pad and spinning wreckage into a maelstrom of fire and shrapnel. A few Shock Troopers aimed for the sky vainly only to be swept away.
Smears of green fire leapt from boxy turrets on the highest of the lower tier battlements, at the base of the spire. Bolts crashed off one of the Scorpiods to port. The shuttle bucked, shedding one of its lander legs and wobbling away from the stream of fire. Trailing smoke and debris, it swerved below Malik’s ship to be lost from sight.
“Get us down!” Malik hollered to Skraar. “Forget the batteries! The landing pads will be too low for them to traverse!”
He wasn’t exactly sure that would be true. But it didn’t matter. A second later, the sky around him filled with the insect-drone of dozens of hover bikes, anti-gravity motors straining at the highest edge of their altitude tolerances as they raced passed the combat shuttles. Firefly patterns of heavy blaster bolts strobed out from their undercarriage weapons, starring the Citadel’s armaments in chains of explosions. One of the turrets flashed from within, then belched smoke and a splutter of debris.
“Down!” Malik repeated. “Land us!”
The Scorpiod banked sharply to port and came in low, its side-mounted secondary blasters opening up in twin sprays of brilliance. Explosions walked along the landing pad, nearly to the entrance to the fortress. The shuttle followed these in, its arachnid lander legs whining as they extended, then groaning as the ship settled upon them.
Malik jumped from the ramp before the shuttle was fully down and was sprinting for the pad’s far side. Smoke swirled around him. Wreckage and crimson-clad bodies littered the tarmac at his feet. Blaster pistol was out in his left hand; force sword crackling to life in his right. Heart slammed in his chest.
This is it. After all these years. I made it back.
Fumes parted ahead of him as he neared the black wall of the Citadel. Smoke boiled out from the open double-doorway into the ground level. Shock Troopers sprawled outside. Some looked to have been brought down by blaster fire. Others had succumbed to terrible rents in their suits—torn to shreds, as though by the Furies.
Doesn’t matter, he thought with manic glee. Whatever has happened, I’m back. I’ll get them out, whoever is left. And, together, we’ll show the galaxy.
A twinge of Flux pierced his seething mind, a warning his body heeded, even if his mind was a fraction of a second behind. He lurched to the right, narrowly dodging a spray of blaster bolts from within the smoldering entrance. Left arm shot up and his pistol barked.
A Shock Trooper staggered out of the smoke, a hole burnt into his chest plate, and flopped onto his knees, then his face. As Malik slammed into the wall to the right of the doorway to avoid further fire, a second Trooper stumbled out. But rather than turn to the shots coming from outside, he spun and aimed his rifle back the way he’d come.
A great screech ripped out from within the Citadel. The Trooper fired just as something winged and leathery streaked out of the smoldering dark. The shape slammed into him and dropped him to the tarmac where he stood. Together, they rolled once, twice, then settled with the wildly thrashing form on top, pummeling and slashing.
Malik didn’t know what he was looking at. The thing was an amalgam of spines and bat-like wings too small and deformed for flight, and claws and fangs. The latter skirled through the Trooper’s armor as though it was tin foil and found the very mortal flesh within, rending in ruby sprays. The Trooper’s helmet speakers distorted with the screams within as he fumbled vainly to defend himself.
In revulsion, Malik put a blaster bolt into the thing’s knobby spine. It shrieked and flinched backward off the gory ruin it’d left of the Trooper. Looking up over the corpse at Malik, its face was almost all fanged maw. But a single eye blinked from a knob on its forehead. It was rheumy with mania—but somehow human.
Malik froze, locked in place by that unnatural stare. Flux fluttered out from it; the remnants of a presence, a soul somehow vaguely familiar. There was pleading there, too, and anguish and misery. But those quickly congealed into a feral hate for all things and another scream erupted from that gigantic mouth.
A blaster bolt shattered the hideous face in a spray of fire and fang splinters. The thing slumped onto its side and Ingrid appeared from the surrounding haze to pin what was left of it to the pavement and put another shot into its smoldering mass.
She looked up at Malik. “What is happening here?”
He shook his head, thoughts spinning. Past and present swirled together in his skull. The Flux unraveled from him; he could feel it. He couldn’t find Silence. He couldn’t find control. That stare. That eye. That had been a person. He gave himself a shake but that only made the vertigo beginning to seize him worse. Was that...one of them?
Ingrid rushed to Malik’s side as the rest of the Furies took up positions outside the doorway. The other Scorpiods were coming in, weapons ablaze. The air shook with coherent light and thunder. The fight for the Citadel was still very much on.
“Mal?” Ingrid put a gauntleted hand on his shoulder, gripped, and shook him. “Wraith?”
The violence of her motion jarred Malik partially from his stupor. He had slumped against the wall, hadn’t realized that he’d nearly slid to the ground. Numbly, he forced himself back to his feet.
“Are you hit?” Ingrid had to yell to be heard over the din.
He shook his head. But his eyes darted once to the remains of the thing.
Following his gaze, Ingrid then locked eyes with him. “What was that?” She gave him another shake. “This is all wrong, Mal!”
Her last jostle shook him hard enough to pop his neck. The twinge of pain cleared his thoughts enough to birth a hard knot of composure—and anger. He shoved her back looked around at the others.
“It’s a breakout,” he told them. “I don’t know how...maybe the distraction of the invasion...” The fog began to cloud his thoughts again and he rolled his head, cracking the joints to maintain focus. “But we’ve arrived in the middle of it!”
“You mean...” Ingrid stepped closed to him. “It’s a jailbreak. The prisoners...” her eyes shimmered as she glanced over at the abomination she’d slain “...your comrades...?”
Malik grabbed her face and made her look at him, only him. “There were always many experiments, many torments going on down here. The bastards had horrors from all over the galaxy.” He didn’t really believe that; he’d seen—he’d sensed. But he needed her here, now.
He looked around at the others. “Save anything human you find. But do not restrain yourselves. There will be things down there you can do nothing about but slay.”
The Furies growled and, as they did so, began to transmogrify. With howls, the once-human-now-beasts rushed forth into the smoldering Citadel. That they were just more freaks, like the thing Ingrid had just killed, was not lost on Malik.
We’re all freaks. That’s all that’s left to any of us.
Ingrid, notably, hadn’t shifted into her beast form, appeared to be fighting the urge. Sweat stood out across her face and muscles twitched under her flesh. But her eyes remained clear and locked upon him. “I’ll stay with you.”
He nodded wordlessly and readied his weapons. More Furies from the other Scorpiods were converging on them.
Malik led them in.
“GOT SOMETHING.”
Callisto jerked awake from the doze he’d drifted into, waiting in the silent cockpit of his Slayer. A blink and a shake reoriented him.
His starfighter drifted amidst a cloud of debris smeared across the blackness of space. To either side, seen through his canopy, other Slayers floated, motionless and powered-down. They’d arrived here thirty minutes before, killing their engines after meticulously taking up places, now imitating hunks of space rock.
Callisto’s console flared to life, showing him a short-ranged passive scan of the surrounding space. Smudges representing the widely-dispersed dust clouds and asteroid clumps formed an irregular band across the middle of the display. The blue icons of the Revenant fleet shined brightly from its lower side. On the upper, contacts began to form and turn crimson.
“Do you see?” Kreeve’s voice whispered in his earbud.
Callisto smirked at that—like we’re playing hide-and-seek. But in all reality, they were, hiding out till the bloodsuckers gave them an opening. “I see ‘em.”
And what he saw cooled his blood. The Theocracy relief force was coming on in two groups, each aiming for a different gap in the debris. They’d decelerated from their earlier hell-bent speeds, knowing the damage even a micro-meteor could do their shields at full speed. They probably could have skirted the belt, but that would have cost them time and Theocracy doctrine was always to follow the most direct route. They could afford that kind of thinking; they had the ships.
Eight, Callisto counted. Nine. His eye locked on one in particular, a massive contact, flanked by a pair of Manglers. His war book computer highlighted the Ravager-class dreadnought and detailed its long, stiletto-like, turret-studded hull—essentially a more massive sister to its Mangler consorts. That one gets special attention.
The telltale swarm of lesser contacts fogged the space around the capital ships, dozens of starfighters—at least six squadrons. Callisto swallowed back a surge of bile when he couldn’t count them all. They divided as he watched, more than half of them pushing forward into the debris belt.
“Here they come,” Kreeve said.
Callisto clenched his teeth. His connection to the younger man’s fighter was a low-power line-of-sight laser, nearly impossible to intercept. But Callisto already had enough nerves. “Cut the chatter, Slayer One-Two. We stay where we are.”
On his display, the lighter ships were beginning to pull away from the heavier ones, corvettes and destroyers entering the field ahead of their larger kin, following the Orloks. Their sensors suites would be drinking in data from their surroundings. The Theocracy commander was no fool; they could already see the Revenant capital ships they’d chased for hours, waiting on the other side of the belt.
They already smell a trap.
Sweat chilled against Callisto’s flesh, dampening the liner of his flight suit and causing it to paste to the skin. He itched all over and suddenly regretted the decision to give up the huge armored cocoon of Vengeful for the fragile frame of his Slayer. But, no, it had been the right call. Hadn’t it? He couldn’t send Kreeve and all the others into this alone.
