Apocalyptic Shorts (2 page)

I push down the hoodie and reveal my face. Just as I imagined, they are surprised to see me.

“
Cyders Kaige?
” says the second armed soldier, his eyes wide open. “But you’re supposed to be
dead
.”

“But I aint. I been stuck here three earth years, and it’s time to go home.”

The man standing by the hatchway is now standing in front of me. “Cyders, it is really you. We mourned you. We thought you were dead.”

I take a good look at his face, trying to confirm who I think the voice belongs to. He is Vask Autrazthak, the other man in love with Hanther. “Vask,” I say.

Vask is a highly respected man on Arbitrus, and even I cannot deny that he has my respect. He was responsible for stopping several wars we would have fought in the past. In my world, we call that heroic. But we had a problem. He was in love with Hanther Sunhide, the daughter of Ra Argadus, but she was in love with me.

Back then, I was reckless. I go out every day doing dangerous things, not caring much about my life, but I was damn good enough to make it back home every time. I didn’t care about anything, I didn’t believe in love, but she didn’t care. She saw me for the animal that I am and she loved it, and she tamed it. She chose me, made me a better man, she made me care, but he wasn’t ready to respect her choice.

“You know, we cannot take you with us. We would have to go back and arrange transport for you.”

I nod. “I know, it’s protocol, and that’s exactly why I didn’t come here to join the ride. I came to take it.” I let out a mischievous grin.

“What?”

I briskly turn to the two armed men, they are already raising their guns. In a single move, I draw my knife, power it on and throw at the nearest soldier’s lower torso, cutting through the nano-wires of his bio-suit, a core part of the suit, knowing the suit would induce sleep while it repairs damage inflicted on that part. I lunge forward at the second soldier and grab his gun. We drag the gun for a few seconds, then I drop on my right knee, bend my head between his arms and stomach and raise myself, lifting him with my shoulders and I toss him over. He hits the floor shoulders first. Before he gets a chance to breathe, I follow with an elbow-drop to his throat. He gasps, spittle flying out of his mouth. I claw my hand on his lower torso where the nano-wires are and rip it out, and just like the other soldier, he goes to sleep.

I take the soldier’s gun and jump to my feet. I turn around to deal with the remaining two guys I considered much lesser threats, a thick ball of hot plasma hits me on the chest and send me flying. I fire three shots in midair. As I hit the floor, the two of them hit the floor too. I gasp for air, groaning as the whole of my body shrieks in pain. I sit up and look down at my chest, panting hard. The chest part of my bio-suit has been vaporized, and a small part of my chest with it. I reroute more power to the suit’s repair system so it can repair faster. The two men are down, and are not moving, so I relax and let my bio-suit fixes me. After a few minutes, the repair is done and I am good as new. I hear a sob and I look, Vask is alive, but he is weak. Since he is alive, he would have done the same thing I did––reroute more power for his repair, which means he will recover any time from now. I take a gun and point it at him. He grunts for a while and finally sits up, glaring at me.

“Did you know?” I ask. “Did you know there was vetagem in my ship? Did you know they set me up die?”

He stares at me for a while with a sorry look on his face. He swallows hard. “I knew the real objective of the mission was kept from you, I knew the arbitron gone rogue story was dogshit, but I had no idea they intended for you to die.”

“Yeah? What did you think was going to happen? I was sent on a false mission to unknowingly accomplish another, what did you think was going to happen to me? You knew.” I shake my head. “The you I knew would have warned me, but I guess you wanted me gone anyway, 'cause I’m the only thing standing between you and Hanther.”

“That is not true.” He says it, but his voice says otherwise.

“You see, whatever party you got going here, I’m going to take this ship, I’m going to fly home and I’m going to ruin it for you.” I should yell at him, I want to, but knowing that I will soon be home again overwhelms me, and the words just come out cool and easy.

I get up, pressing my back against the wall for support, I move to him and punch him hard on the face and he blacks out. I open the hatch, remove my laser knife from the sleeping soldier and drag them out in twos. I take off my cape and hang it on a bar. I look around the ship for a moment, admiring its beauty, the closest thing to Arbitrus that I’ve seen in three years. I move to the control chair and seat. I power up the engines and in a few seconds, the ship is ready to go interstellar. My hands on the steering-stick, tapping anxiously. Right now this moment, I miss Hanther and Arbitrus more than I ever have.

I pull the steering-stick and the ship is supposed to lift off the ground, but instead, an alert pops up on the screen, saying the ship cannot fly unless the active mission's primary object is onboard. Mission primary object, Ra Argadus.
Damn!
Just when I thought it couldn’t get any harder. Moving the bodies out of the ship would have alerted the area security. I didn’t care because I thought I would be off this planet by now. I display the outside camera feed. I see armed men in military uniform coming out of the pyramid.

Now, I have a problem. They know something is up, and Ra Argadus, my get-off-this-planet card is not coming out until he knows that the threat has been neutralized. I hate that it has come to this. There’s only one way about it now;
I go in, get the bastard and drag his butt back to the ship.
I can't say it will be easy, but
what’s an arbitron to fear on an army of human soldiers?

I power down the ship, enter the life chamber and recharge my bio-suit to maximum capacity. I take a gun, put my ragged cape back on and open the hatch. From the pyramid, twelve armed men are approaching tactically. I move toward them. They stop when we are about hundred and seven meters apart, but I don’t stop. They start yelling at me to stop and identify myself, but I keep moving. At fifty meters, they open fire on me, and I quickly raise my hand up to protect my face. A light-construct shield extends from my forearm and covers me from the bullets. I remain still as they continue to fire for the next one minute. They stop. In a sudden move, I retract the shield back into my suit and charge toward them, firing innium bullets. Innium bullets are weightless, self-propelled and controlled by the will of the person that wields the gun that fired the bullets, which means I decide how fast the bullets go and where it goes.

Three of the soldiers drop dead, and the rest resume fire, but not coming closer. I leap as if the law of earth’s gravity does not apply to me. I land among them and engage the nine soldiers in close combat, but they don’t stand a chance, especially when it is close combat. I swipe my gun slightly above the sand, clearing two pairs of legs off the ground. I turn and weave a shiny silver knife coming at my face. I grab the hand holding the knife and swing the body that belongs to it, knocking down three soldiers with it. I let go of the body, and it flies at another soldier. I turn and fire blindly, knowing someone is coming from behind me. Two soldiers drop cold. I turn again and hold the mouth of a gun about to fire at me. I look into the eyes of the soldier holding the gun and see fear and sweat. He squeezes the trigger and watches as the shells bounce off my chest. I pull the gun, bringing him closer, I move my upper body back just a little and thrust it forward, running my forehead at his. His body shoots back and drops, his forehead broken and his face covered in blood.

My cape is pulled off from behind and a hand wraps itself around my neck, and then I feel a sharp object press to my back. The soldier moans as he struggles to drive the knife into my back, but it won’t go in. Two soldiers in front of me move back, creating enough space to fire. I grab the hand around my neck, jerk forward, bending my knees slightly, and I throw the hand, and the body it belongs to flies at the two soldiers in front of me. Their shots kill the soldier before he hits one of them, then I fire a plasma blast at the other, making a big hole through his chest. The force of the blast knocks him down right after the plasma had gone through him. The soldier on the ground tries to get up, but hot plasma hits his side, vaporizing half of his stomach and waist through. I turn around, a small black ball with tiny blinking lights rolls to a stop between my feet.
Shit! It’s a grenade!
I throw myself back just as the grenade goes off and I activate my force field shield. I hit the ground on my back, face up to the clouds. Bright blue light flashes past me at the speed of sound.

I spring up, no damage, my shield protected me. I look ahead, the four soldiers at a few meters away start to shoot at me. I raise my hand and the light-shield expands from the forearm part of my suit and covers me from the projectiles. For another three minutes, they continue to turns, taking turns to reload. After a while, they stop, but I remain behind the shield. After a few more seconds, I retract the shield and see one of them with a launcher, raised toward the sky. He fires and five rockets whistle up to the sky, spreading out. These grenades cannot kill me, but will sure do enough damage to get me captured and stripped of my bio-suit, and then I will become just like them, fragile, and just a bullet to the temple will get the job done. I could let my force field take all the hit, but that much blow will drain my bio-suit of power, and I have no idea what awaits after I’m done with these men. The rockets from five different positions descend toward me. I raise my gun and fire two shots. Two rockets explode in the air and my gun hisses when I squeeze the trigger again and again. The gun is out of juice, and I was stupid not to take at least an extra power-cell with me. I drop my gun, turn and run, glancing over my shoulder from time to time to see how close the rockets are.

The rockets are getting closer and my heart is pounding. I am afraid. But even though the rockets scare me, I still know that no matter how this go, it ends with me proceeding into the pyramid, leaving the four soldiers so-dead corpses behind.

When I turn, they turn. I run here and there, as fast as I can, while the four soldiers stand there, waiting for the rockets to take me out. I see a gun beside a dead soldier, I swerve toward it. The rockets are just behind me now. I dive for the gun and roll on my back. The rockets are now a few meters away from me, all faced down at me. I release a force blast at the ground, and it thrusts me up so high. The rockets are going to turn and follow me, but all I need is for one of them to get close enough to hit the ground. One of rockets touches the ground and explodes, catching the other two and all three rockets explode beneath me. I sail through the air for a moment and then begin to fall. My eyes find the soldiers and I fire. Bullets go through their heads. One immediately after the other, their bodies slump to the ground, but I continue to shoot till the gun clicks and clicks. At a few feet from the ground, I let out another force blast, jerk up a bit and come down easy on my feet. I walk on toward their corpses, pick two guns and proceed into the pyramid.

Entering through the main door, three thuds fill the air in a lasting echo and two bullets hit me on the face and one on my chest. For a moment, my rings heavily, but the bullets don’t penetrate, they bounce off. I shake my head as the pain fades, I shoot the soldiers that fired the shots and move on. The deeper I go into the pyramid the more it appears like the inside of a ship. Something about the design feels familiar.

I walk through a long passage, the walls are made of solid metal. The passage leads me into a three hundred feet deep room. Steel walk-way spiraled along the wall from the top to the bottom, and steel cross-overs that run across the empty space between. I have no idea where to go from here, so I take a minute to evaluate the situation. Two bullets hit the wall behind me, and then more bullets. For another five minutes, I exchange fire with a group of soldiers. I kill them all.

Nothing will stop me from reuniting with Hanther.

I randomly choose a path and move along it. I climb a stair, turn a corner, climb another stair and turn another corner. I have no idea where I am going, I just let my gut drive me. I go through a door that leads into a hallway. On the other end of the hallway are two people, a boy and a girl. They can't be more than eighteen, and they are unarmed.

They begin to walk toward me as if coming to attack, but they are just kids and they are not even armed. I lower my gun and slow down. I squint, trying to figure what these kids are up to. I’m a threat, and they know it, so unless they are a pair of dumbasses, they undoubtedly have a plan, I just have to figure what it is.

They are coming faster. The boy strikes a blow into the air, as if aiming to hit me, but he is far away, and there is no way his clenched fist can hit me from that far. I am wrong. An invisible force hits me so hard it sends me sprawling back a few meters before I stop. I roll up, ignoring the pain in my back and chest, and the tingles in my right knee. I try to explain to myself what just happened.

Humans are older than arbitrons by several million years, but our technology is way way ahead of theirs, and even
we
, have no means of doing what this kid just did without an enhancement, like a handheld weapon or a suit. How did he do it? My mind winds back two years earlier, when there were rumors of new advanced specie emerging from the human population, and then the news faded, and everything about it was forgotten. Seeing this kid do what he did, I know now that the rumor was true, and the evidence must have been covered up. I get up, guns no longer in my hands, I dropped them when the force knocked me over.

The two kids continue toward me, a little faster now. The girl suddenly vanishes and the boy starts to run. I start to run too. I find one of the guns that fell out of my hand and kick it with the tip of my boot-toe, making it fly up, I grab it without breaking speed and fire at the boy, but he deflects every shot by swiping his hands at the air. Something hits me from behind, knocking me off my feet toward the boy. He clenches his left fist, and it ignites in flame, he pulls the flaming hand to his back and rocks it forward as if throwing a ball. A fireball shoots from the hand and hits me in midair, sending me back again. I hit the floor and the gun flies out of my hand again. I activate my force field to keep the fire out. In seconds, the shield is covered in flame coming from the boy’s hand. I get on my hands and knees, covered in sweat, trying to breathe. The fire stops. The boy stands over me, grinning down at me. I turn off my shield and throw myself at him, my shoulder to his gut. I take him off his feet and slam his back to the floor. He groans loudly, air knocked out of his lungs. I kneel over him, about to punch him to death or sleep, whichever comes first. He raises his left hand and sends a telekinetic blast at my face, I dodge it, push his hand aside and squeeze it hard till I hear his wrist bones break. He screams in pain and raises his other hand at me. A hand grabs me from behind and yanks me off him. I hit the floor, slide and stop. I get back up in time to see a ball fire ball flying at me. I roll away and draw my knife. I get up and run at them, now beside each other. The girl tries to grab me with her telekinesis, but I swerve here and there, dodging her grips. The boy sits up and uses his one uninjured hand to shoot fire at me. I throw my knife through the flame and dive for the gun on the floor. By the time the fire clears out, the girl is down on the floor, my knife in her chest. I take the gun and shoot the boy before he can throw any more fire at me.