Marathon: The Complete Series (Books 1-9) (Complete Series Box Sets), page 107
part #1 of Marathon Series
Mitchell started to respond. That was it. Eckhart had to shut the dipshit up for good.
8
Eckhart shoved Rear Admiral Enoch Mitchell into the lab entrance and received a fresh barrage of laser fire in the face before the assets realized who it was.
Mitchell tried to retreat, but Eckhart hunkered down behind the admiral’s back and let Mitchell take the assault. “Shoot back!” Eckhart roared in Mitchell’s ear. “Drive them off!”
Mitchell squealed, and Eckhart forced the man another step onto the terrace. Namol, Thagmor, and Chemorix lined one side, exchanging fire with assets twenty feet away. Bing, DeWalt, and Innyria braced their guns on the railing across the chasm where they could take cover from the assets’ fire. Ingai floated in a Destrine bubble over the vast, bottomless expanse. He plastered the assets with Destrine, but unlike before, he didn’t concentrate on any one of them.
The assets finally realized who was coming out of the lab, and they cut their fire to concentrate on the intruders.
“I said fire on them!” Eckhart bellowed. “Fire on them now, or I’ll throw myself off that railing and kill myself. Then you’ll never get another DNA sample from me. Is that what you want?”
Words came out of Eckhart’s mouth without any connected thought of his own. He didn’t care anymore what he said or what he did. He had to beat these assholes, and Mitchell was the only way to do it.
Mitchell fired several lasers at the assets. He waved his arms to signal them to fall back. They hesitated when Ingai hit them a few more times, but eventually, they complied. They didn’t leave the terrace, though.
Eckhart stuck his head over Mitchell’s shoulder. “Ingai—hold this guy for me! Surround him so he can’t do anything.”
Ingai reacted instantly. He turned all his Destrine on the admiral and encased Mitchell in an unbreakable prison.
Eckhart raced away. “Bing—come here! Quick!”
Bing kept training his weapon on the assets, but they didn’t attack. Eckhart hustled him into the lab. “What happened?” Bing asked. “Who is that guy? What’s going on?”
“Forget all that!” Eckhart dragged him over to the computer. “I need you to reactivate Dallas. Hurry! I can’t figure this stupid thing out.”
Bing blinked down at Dallas, and then Bing’s face contorted when he saw the screen with Eckhart’s DNA sequence on it. “What the hell is this?”
“Ignore it.” Eckhart flipped to another page with one of the test subjects’ sequence. “These are just samples taken from the assets. Find Dallas’ systems and turn him on. Hurry up, Bing. We needed Dallas back on deck right now.”
Bing pushed his gun into Eckhart’s arms and got to work. He switched back and forth between pages Eckhart didn’t recognize. Bing finally pulled up a similar schematic on Dallas’ systems to the one he’d shown Eckhart on the Atera.
More gunshots echoed into the lab from out on the terrace, but they got farther away. Eckhart sure hoped Ingai was using Mitchell against the assets.
A clank started Eckhart back to his senses. Dallas shot upright into a sitting position, looking back and forth. “Re-initializing…”
“Dallas!” Eckhart squatted down next to his friend. “Are you okay?”
Dallas glanced around the destroyed lab. “We’re on the Stormbreaker. I remember.”
“Great! We need your help against the assets. We can’t beat them without you.”
Dallas stood up. “Something’s wrong with my right gun.”
“It still works, doesn’t it?” Eckhart asked.
Dallas popped open the same slot and fiddled with the Datrium feed. “It’s fine.”
Eckhart patted his big shoulder. “Wonderful. Do you think you could help us out?”
“Of course.”
He trooped out of the lab and cocked his head again when he saw Mitchell hovering in Ingai’s Destrine ball. The admiral’s expression told everyone loud and clear what he thought of this state of affairs.
The assets hung off about thirty feet away. They didn’t attack and they didn’t leave. “What would you like me to do with them?” Dallas asked. “They don’t appear to be a threat at the moment.”
“They might not be right now, but we can’t hold the admiral in Destrine for the rest of eternity.”
“Ingai won’t be able to hold the others at the same time,” Bing pointed out. “We came here to finish them.”
“They aren’t making it any easier by just standing there,” Dallas added. “It would be easier if they attacked us.”
Eckhart squinted toward the assets. “There are only ten of them here. There must be more somewhere on this ship.”
“What do you want to do?” Bing asked. “How do we finish them?”
“I have an idea.” Eckhart went over to Ingai. Destrine streamed from his eyes and mouth. It twined around Admiral Mitchell and swirled in a glowing blue ball. “Put him down, Ingai.”
“Are you sure?”
Eckhart nodded, put his hand in his pocket, and pulled out the remote control Rixby had given him on the Atera. He pushed the button, but nothing happened.
“You won’t get away with this,” Mitchell snarled.
Eckhart studied the man and still felt nothing for him, not even the desire to kill him. Eckhart only cared about removing this man and all these assets from his path, and there was only one way to do that.
He pulled Ingai away from the others, and when Eckhart was certain none of the others could overhear, he lowered his voice to a murmur. “I want you to go out into space, Ingai. I want you to go back to the Vrali fleet and get your people out. I want you to surround this Stormbreaker with Destrine, and don’t let anything in or out except the Marathon. Do you understand?”
“Of course, Eckhart. You can count on us.”
“Thank you. I really appreciate it. Don’t do anything. Just hold the Stormbreaker in place and protect it so nothing else can get in or out.”
Ingai’s intense gaze probed Eckhart’s mind as never before. Eckhart didn’t have to say what he was thinking out loud. “I understand.”
Eckhart squeezed his friend’s arm. Ingai turned aside, vaporized through the nearest wall, and vanished.
Mitchell grinned at Eckhart when he rejoined his friends. “You won’t be able to do anything to me without him. None of these people can kill me, not even Dallas.”
“Should we test that out?” Dallas slotted out his assault gun and pointed it straight in Mitchell’s face.
“Go ahead,” Mitchell snarled. “Eckhart already tried to shoot me full of all the Datrium you’ve got. It didn’t do anything to me. Ask him.”
Eckhart pushed Dallas’ arm down. “Forget that. Cool it, Dallas. We’ll get this done another way.”
“We’d better,” Dallas snapped.
Eckhart took hold of Mitchell’s elbow. “Come on, buddy. Let’s go.”
“Where are we going?”
“To the bridge.”
Eckhart entered the stairs. Bing, three gang leaders, Thagmor, and the two Earthlings joined them, but the assets didn’t. They stayed where they were.
Thagmor stood guard on the terrace until all the others got into the stairwell. Eckhart lost sight of the assets. He didn’t care about them anymore. The life waiting for him outside this ship overrode everything else. He was finished wasting his time with all these other distractions.
He pushed Mitchell onto the bridge, and Dallas wedged his big body in behind them. Mitchell got a much bigger reaction than Eckhart did. All the officers stopped what they were doing to salute him.
“You can all relax,” Eckhart told them.
The officers looked to Mitchell for approval. Whatever authority they thought Eckhart had didn’t last long with Mitchell around.
Eckhart went over to the controls on the stage. “Are all the civilians off the Stormbreaker?”
“Yes, sir,” Major Rohrbach replied. “They’re all clear of the Keilara system, but three alien fleets are moving in on the civilians. The aliens are arming to attack. Should we deploy Banshees to defend the civilians’ retreat?”
“Let me see.”
The bridge staff brought up a chart showing the Regiment civilians making their last-ditch sprint for Earth, but they were way too far away. They’d never make it with the aliens moving in to wipe them out.
Eckhart pointed to the Atera. “Open a communications channel with that ship right there.”
“That’s an alien ship,” Captain Logan Moyers pointed out. “We don’t deal with them.”
“Open it now,” Eckhart ordered, “unless you want to stand here and watch all your families get slaughtered.”
They went to work. Minutes dragged by while they figured out how to hail the Atera.
Rixby’s face appeared on the controls. She gasped when she saw Major Rohrbach. “Eckhart! What’s going on over there?”
Eckhart shoved Rohrbach out of the way. “I need you to take the fleet to the—” He checked the civilians’ position. “To the Trolquals system. A bunch of Regiment Banshees are under attack by aliens. I need you to intervene and stop the attack. Flex your authority if you have to.”
“If aliens are attacking Regiment Banshees, shouldn’t we let them?”
“Just go, Rixby! It’s an emergency. You can promise the aliens I’ll personally guarantee their revenge, but not like this. Go! You have to stop them.”
“All right, Eckhart. I’ll—”
“Your days of being an alien hero are over, Eckhart,” Mitchell interrupted. “This won’t work.”
Eckhart ignored him and cut the channel to the Atera, but the ship was already racing away out of range. He dragged his attention back to Major Rohrbach. “Does this Stormbreaker have a self-destruct mechanism?”
Rohrbach didn’t answer. He only nodded and glanced over at Mitchell again.
“That won’t work,” Dallas interrupted. “The assets can just fly off into space.”
“Not with the Ihi holding the Stormbreaker. Look. Here they come.”
Eckhart’s fleet streaked away to keep up with the Atera, but the Vrali destroyers waited a little longer. Thousands upon millions of tiny blue lights drifted through the destroyers’ hulls and swirled through space. They drew closer to the Stormbreaker and formed a halo around the ship.
“Are they dangerous?” Rohrbach asked. “They aren’t attacking.”
“They aren’t dangerous,” Eckhart replied. “Show me your self-destruct system.”
Moyers brought up the same floor plan of the Stormbreaker, but this one had been updated to show the blown-out sections where the Datrium cistern had exploded. “We have four other cisterns. The system is connected to them all.”
“This won’t work, Eckhart,” Dallas interrupted again. “If you set off the ship’s self-destruct system, they’ll just deactivate it as soon as we leave. We need another plan.”
Eckhart smiled at him. “We aren’t going to set off the self-destruct sequence.” He turned away. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Eckhart!” Mitchell called after him. “You don’t have to leave. You’ll never find any other place out there. This is the only place anyone will ever understand you.”
Eckhart grinned at him, feeling a flood of happiness for the first time. “I hope you’re right. I really do.” He touched Dallas’ elbow. “Let’s go.”
9
“What are you up to, Eckhart?” Dallas muttered under his breath.
“Keep quiet. We can’t beat these guys the old-fashioned way. You heard what Admiral Mitchell said. Not even you can kill him.”
“So what are you going to do?”
They stepped out onto the terrace outside the bridge. Eckhart took one last, long look across the chasm at a view from his visions. He would never see this place again—the place where he’d met his destiny.
“Are you okay, Eckhart?” Bing asked. “What happened in the lab between you and Mitchell?”
Eckhart didn’t answer. He’d take that secret to his grave. He made up his mind right then and there. He’d never tell anyone the truth about himself. He didn’t have to. It made all the difference to himself, and that was enough.
Not even Ingai could see it when he’d looked into Eckhart’s eyes that last time. Eckhart had locked his secret away in a box at the very darkest bottom of his soul.
He’d never wanted to hide anything from Ingai before. Now he realized that he could hide this. Ingai could look into Eckhart’s mind as much as he wanted. He wouldn’t be able to see the truth if Eckhart didn’t want him to find it.
He turned around to face his friends. They all studied him with curious, searching expressions. They didn’t need to know. This little gem was just for Eckhart. He’d cherish it in his heart forever. It freed him of everything and left the open road clear before him. He just had to follow it.
He started to say something when a whoosh of engine noise made him face the chasm again. The view across the expanse shivered with energy as the Marathon floated out of the void.
It turned in space, but the ship was still several floors below the crew. It had come to the spot where Eckhart had activated his remote control.
He took a step toward the stairs. “Come on. Let’s go.”
Dallas caught up with him. “You still haven’t told us how you’re going to destroy the Stormbreaker. What’s your plan?”
“My plan is to get back on the Marathon. After that—”
A deafening crash cut him off, and then a million shots smashed the terrace right in front of the friends. The assets exploded out of the shadows and opened fire on the fleeing crew.
Eckhart shoved Clifton and DeWalt in front of him. “Go! Get down to the ship!”
They dove for the stairwell, but Eckhart hadn’t gone more than a few steps before he realized the assets weren’t missing anymore. They fired directly at the Marathon crew, and one of their shots hit Thagmor.
It would have obliterated him, but the shot hit one of his guns. The weapon detonated in his hands, and the second blast flung him into the wall.
Namol and Eckhart rushed over to him. Bing started to turn back, but Eckhart waved him away. “Go! Get out of here!”
Bing and the two Earthlings reached the stairwell first. They barely entered it before the assets unloaded on the whole structure with merciless precision. They bombed the terrace to powder, and the stairwell started to cave in.
Eckhart had one second to recognize Admiral Mitchell fighting with the assets. Then he and Namol hefted Thagmor to his feet. “We can’t go that way!” Eckhart yelled. “We have to find another stairwell.”
Innyria and Chemorix turned in front of him. The two gang leaders laid into the assets with guns blazing while Eckhart and Namol dragged Thagmor away.
As soon as they started moving, the assets ignored Bing’s group and turned their attention on Eckhart’s party. Eckhart didn’t want to think about whether the other three were okay.
The assets demolished the terrace on all sides, and the floor cracked beneath Eckhart’s feet. He stumbled one way and Namol stumbled the other. They almost went down, and the whole structure swayed and groaned underfoot.
“Over here!” Chemorix bellowed, and bolted into one of the neighboring rooms.
Eckhart didn’t see any way out of there, but he trusted Chemorix. Eckhart and Namol tilted in that direction. Thagmor tried to walk, and failed. His weight strained Eckhart’s every fiber, but they just had to keep going.
They entered the room, but Eckhart didn’t see Chemorix anywhere. The continuous bombardment outside built to a thunderous din. Eckhart glanced behind him in time to see the terrace crumble. The floor fell away, crawling one torturous inch at a time toward the room.
The walls gave way as successive blasts decimated the structure. The floor under Eckhart’s feet trembled and started to tip at an angle.
“Chemorix!” Namol roared. “Where are you?”
Eckhart tried to turn back, but at that moment, the floor dropped beneath him. He didn’t see Dallas or Innyria. Lasers twirled through the front wall, and then unseen crashes devastated the whole front half of the room.
“Chemorix!” Namol thundered. “Chemorix!”
Another catastrophic blow struck the room, and gravity caught Thagmor’s body. He roared and pulled out of Eckhart’s grip, but Eckhart had enough to worry about trying to stop himself from falling through the imploding structure.
Namol yelled in alarm, and at that moment, Chemorix charged out of the mayhem. Eckhart didn’t see where he came from.
Chemorix collided with all three of them and kept on going. He ran full tilt into the assets’ fire, through the dust cloud of erupting walls and plaster, and straight off the edge of the destroyed terrace.
It ended inches beyond where the wall had been. The assets hovered there, pelting the whole area with fire. Namol roared some inarticulate protest, and Eckhart cringed for the blow that ended all their lives, but Chemorix completely ignored them.
He took a running leap off the edge and dove, with his many arms pinning Thagmor, Namol, and Eckhart against his giant body.
His move took the assets completely by surprise. They didn’t fire on him. Instead, they whizzed aside and he plunged straight between them.
The Marathon’s upper fuselage tilted before Eckhart’s eyes, and then the ship rushed at his face as the four friends started to fall.
Namol bellowed again. Chemorix rocketed straight past the ship in a downward arc across the chasm. Eckhart couldn’t watch, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away, either.
The assets realized a second too late and opened fire again, but Chemorix was already past them. He tucked his legs, tumbled in space, and then aimed his head straight down into the bottomless pit.
He streaked past the Marathon, and all the assets’ weaponry struck the ship. Deafening crashes echoed through the chasm, and one of the engines erupted in a blazing fireball.
Eckhart winced. Had he made a mistake bringing the ship here?
The ship took the brunt of the assets’ fire. They couldn’t hit the friends here. Chemorix plunged between the Marathon and the tiers on the far side. He shot out one of his massive arms, caught hold, and swung the friends onto an undamaged terrace. He buckled next to Thagmor. “Can you walk, my friend?”
