Critical Strike (The Critical Series Book 3) (12 page)

He turned to help Layla, but the scion prism hovered just in front of his head.

The glowing blue line around its surface grew brighter until Denver had to hold his hand in front of his visor to block the blinding light. With a series of whumps the prism’s glowing light ebbed to a dull pulsating beat.

The smell of cooking meat wafted through his external sensors.

Through a cloud of smoke, he saw the clusps laying still… dead.

“Layla!” Denver rushed forward to her prone form. He kneeled over her and placed his gloved hands on the chest of her suit. He shook her and cleared the blood and dust from her visor.

She blinked up at him. “What the fuck happened?”

The answer came from the scion prism. It floated down, hovering just a meter above them. A thin green laser shined down onto Denver and made its way up to his visor. He tried to close his eyes, but the laser struck his right iris and he became still, unable to move, as the prism seemed to scan him.

As soon as it started, the laser shut off, the prism spun on its axis and sped off behind a distant hill.

“Den, are you okay? Can you hear me?” Layla’s voice was hoarse over the intercom. “Den!”

He looked down at her, finally able to move. His throat was dry and his words croaked out. “I… can hear you…”

“What did it do? Are you okay?”

He checked himself over to make sure he was actually alive and this wasn’t some weird post-death dream. The bodies of four dead clusps, still steaming from being superheated with lasers, confirmed he was still alive, and more bizarrely, they were saved by the scion.

Denver’s entire body ached as he leaned down and helped Layla to her feet. They retrieved their rifles and staggered away from the scene of death and the strange structure. With the scion prism nowhere to be seen, Denver said, “We should get back to the temple… shit, wait… Dad? You there? You should have heard all that; where are you? Dad?”

No response.

“Of course,” Layla said, realizing too. “We’re on the same channel; he should have heard everything. Charlie? You copy? Charlie!”

“Damn it… back to the temple right now.”

With a renewed hit of adrenaline, Denver sprinted back toward the temple, and right into the path of the largest clusp he had seen yet. He assumed it was the parent of the ones that the scion killed.

“Oh, just fuck off!” Denver yelled, raising his rifle and emptying the magazine into the beast’s face as its tentacles tried to whip out. Layla also opened fire, cutting through the scaly hide of the whipping limbs.

With the magazine empty, Denver grabbed his knife and launched at the creature that, despite taking over sixty rounds, was still thrashing for its life. Denver collided with it full force, yet its squat, powerful hind legs dug into the ground. It was like running into a tank.

The suit absorbed most of the impact. He used the momentum to run the nine-inch blade right into the beast’s throat. The blade pierced a soft part of its hide and plunged in with satisfaction.

The clusp hissed and tried to bite Denver, but its jaws were too weak to get a grip on his arm. Denver pulled down with all his strength and the suit’s capacity, dragging the blade down its throat, cutting the creature in two.

A host of organs fell out of its split neck and the damned thing finally collapsed.

Layla helped Denver to his feet as they continued on to the temple. They both slid through the front door into the main area only to discover the place utterly empty save for the scion machine.

“Dad!” Denver yelled, the sound from his external speakers reverberating off the temple’s walls. Both he and Layla rushed further in and searched every nook and room. But it was no good.

Charlie was gone—along with Vingo and the priest.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Charlie struggled in his suit but couldn’t move an inch. He gazed up at the clear orange-tinted sky. A tredeyan and scion fighter roared overhead, engaged in a dogfight of rapid low-level twists and turns.

The scion craft fired what appeared to be a heat-seeking missile. Its vapor trail looped around and it struck the underside of its target. The tredeyan fighter’s red engines cut. It veered into the side of a sunlit mountain and exploded in a ball of flames.

Blue scion engines dominated higher in the sky and streaked across Charlie’s restricted view in an arrow formation. From the brief snapshots of fighting since leaving the caverns, the tredeyans seemed to be losing their planet.

Vingo lay motionless next to him, on the back of a hover catamaran.

Both were strapped to a mesh deck between the two dull metal supports with thick red cable. They were piloted away from the forest, just above rocky ground, bumping through the turbulent air. Charlie thought back to how he ended up here, working out where the priest might have gone wrong, giving him a way out.

The croatoan had snuck up on him while he was watching the door for any scion or other threats. She had attached some kind of device to his arm-pad, which paralyzed the suit’s system. Charlie only managed a quick gasp before Denver’s and Layla’s voices cut from the intercom. The digits in his visor flickered and his suit froze rigid. Thankfully air still flowed into the helmet, telling him she clearly wanted him alive—for whatever reason that might be.

With Charlie paralyzed, she had ripped off Vingo’s helmet tube and gassed him from a small silver canister. He couldn’t put up much of a fight, immediately passing out, crumpling into an unconscious, or perhaps dead, heap.

He could still see the croatoan priest’s foul spit covering his visor, a simple gesture of her disdain and hatred for him.

The way Charlie ended up in this situation made him fear the worst. Perhaps the priest was a spy from the croatoan council, and he would face their justice.

He clenched his teeth and tried to raise his arms. The once comforting feeling of the internal inflated shell sapped his energy as he fought to find something, anything that would get him moving again.

Denver and Layla provided the only crumb of comfort. He knew they wouldn’t rest until finding out his fate. But as the catamaran covered more distance away from the temple at a fast smooth whine, the chances seemed less likely.

After what he had assumed was a good hour or so of travel, the craft slowed and tilted to the right. It swept around the edge of a vertical cliff face and passed over pumice-littered black volcanic sand. A light blue croatoan shuttle, with only a hint of its former cobalt exterior, sat at the bottom of a crevice. Its side ramp extended out, but he couldn’t see any aliens around.

Sunlight turned to darkness as they entered the mouth of a large cave and the catamaran bumped to the ground, skidding to a stop on the soft sandy surface. Waves crashed against a shoreline to his right.

Metal gates screeched open and the croatoan clicked a few times. A tredeyan replied and footsteps closed in. Charlie could only see the ceiling and Vingo, still unconscious or dead.

Two tredeyans, without helmets, climbed onto the back of the craft and stood over him. They were both dressed in faded purple robes with black belts fastened around the waist. One slipped a knife out of his belt and worked on the cables strapped around Charlie’s suit. The other leaned toward him, positioning his semitranslucent face six inches from his helmet. His breath condensed on the exterior of the visor, joining the dried smears of the priest’s saliva.

After freeing the cables, they rolled him off the side. He bumped visor-first to the ground. The landing felt heavy, but the internal shell protected him from an impact injury.

They raised both of his legs and dragged him across the sand for several meters, scraping onto solid rock. The feeling of uselessness grated on him, building into an impotent fury. He tried to calm himself, keep his breathing ordered and his mind alert. That he was still alive told him he would be presented with a chance at some point.

A number of hands grabbed the side of his suit and flipped him onto his back. Two solid metal poles rose immediately to his right. One of the tredeyans wiped Charlie’s visor, peering in at him with no emotion present.

They lifted him to a standing position and he tilted back a few inches. He guessed they had him on something similar to a luggage trolley. The tredeyan gripped both poles on either side of him with its greasy-looking hands. The croatoan priest and another scruffily dressed tredeyan pushed Vingo off the side of the catamaran and pulled him out of view.

The trolley wheels squeaked and juddered along uneven stone as they headed toward a dull gray metal barrier deeper inside the cave. A solid door screamed on its hinges and swung open, revealing a slim seven-foot-tall alien in angular dark green body armor. It waved the tredeyans along with its leathery mitten. Charlie hadn’t seen the square helmet with a midnight blue visor before.

Spotlights beamed down from the top of the roughly carved tunnel. He squinted against their glare and tried to recognize the route they were taking. If he did manage to escape, and it seemed unlikely, he didn’t want to run into a clusp down a dark passage. The tredeyan guard behind the metal door would be enough to cope with.

Vingo’s trolley wheeled past him. The priest grunted and shoved, picking up speed down a slight incline. The ceiling opened up to a large cavern and the area filled with wails, cries, and mixed alien chatter.

Two clusps guarded either side of the entrance. Both jumped forward and chains around their necks twanged rigid. The one on the left lashed out a tentacle that flicked the edge of Charlie’s chest plate. The tredeyan shouted at them and they both retreated to a pile of unrecognizable organic matter.

Dark gray metal bars ran around the edge of the wide space divided into forty cells. Only half were occupied, mostly with naked tredeyans. Some sat on the spartan stone with their heads down, seemingly resigned to their fate. Others pushed their faces between the bars and shouted at a group of blue-robed tredeyans who surrounded a wooden table in the middle of the cavern. A hunter-sized croatoan in graphite armor stood amongst them and turned to glare at Charlie.

A tredeyan from the central group approached and held a raspy conversation with Charlie’s chaperone. It fingered a tablet, peered around the cavern and pointed to a cell at the far end.

Charlie was wheeled past the group and the central table. They drank transparent beakers of root wine and pointed to different locations on a holographic cube. It wasn’t just a map of Tredeya. The croatoan ran his gloved finger between two planets.

A bar dropped from the HUD filter measurement. The tredeyan tipped Charlie out of his trolley and his suit crashed against the back of the cell wall. The priest dumped Vingo in the sitting position, slammed the cell door shut and peered at Charlie through the bars.

She returned to the table, and another croatoan handed her two full sacks.

“Vingo,” Charlie said, keeping his voice low.

His helmet twitched.

“Vingo. Wake up.”

A small cream-colored alien with deep blue eyes, dressed in sackcloth, waddled across and croaked something through the bars of the adjacent cell. It poked its three spindly fingers through toward Charlie.

Footsteps slapped across the cavern. A croatoan from the central table must have seen it. The little alien shot back into the opposite corner of its cell. The croatoan ripped open the door and thrust its heavy boot into the smaller alien’s chest. It dropped to the dirt and whined.

“Typical croatoan behavior,” Charlie said, unable to conceal his contempt.

The croatoan ignored him and returned to the conversation around the table.

A thought struck him. It was the first time he felt sympathy for an alien. Charlie never experienced it killing or watching harvester drivers or surveyors dying on Earth. They would often be tormented and kicked around by the guards or hunters. Back then they were all just the same—an invading force that murdered and oppressed humanity.

Vingo raised his helmet. “Charlie, I’m sorry.”

“Can you move?”

Vingo got to his feet and glanced around the cavern before turning to Charlie. “They have my villagers too. It’s all over.”

Charlie struggled to move again, but it was no use. “What’s all over? Who are they?”

“Slavers. If we’re lucky, we’ll spend the rest of our lives on a mining planet. Our quest on Tredeya ends here.”

“It doesn’t end until I say so,” Charlie said. He wasn’t ready to give up and let the slavers ship him off to a distant planet. Death was preferable over a life as an alien slave. Rage bubbled inside. If he was going down, some of them were going with him. “Can you remove this thing on my arm? We’re not surrendering to anyone.”

“If the croatoan sees me do it, he’ll kill me. He has a different motivation for capturing us.”

“Which is?”

“He works for the croatoan council and tracks betrayers and terrorists.”

“Is he hunting me or you?” Charlie said, curious about Vingo’s choice of words. “You don’t seem like the terrorist type.”

“I am trying to secure information to gather allies. The situation is complex, but my work makes me a target.”

“Are you telling me you’re a traitor?”

“Would you class yourself as a traitor if the work involved ridding Earth of the croatoans? Galactic politics are beyond your comprehension.”

Charlie suspected Vingo was up to something, but it didn’t matter at the moment. The immediate priority was to engineer a chance to escape. “Whatever. Just do as I say and we have a chance.”

Vingo’s eyelids fluttered over his black beady eyes. “We will die.”

“If we die, we die trying. Now take it off.”

A tredeyan approached their cell, holding forward a rod. Electricity crackled between the two prongs at the end of it.

Charlie bucked in his suit. “Vingo, take the damned thing off my arm.”

The cell door swung open.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Gunfire crackled outside. Augustus bolted up, threw his bearskin blanket to one side and reached across for his radio.

A loud explosion shook the rafters in his bedroom. The camp was under attack. Augustus jumped off his bed, hastily dressed, and ran through the compound until he burst out of the doors into the night.