Sacred Planet: Book One of the Dominion Series (25 page)

The youngest of them stepped forward. “Engine room,” the pretty girl said with averted eyes.

Kastor nodded at Hendrik. The drop leader pointed at a door marked “Stair C.”

* * *

The Sagittarians surged down the compact, winding stairwell, boots clanging in the echo chamber of tile and fauxwood. A door swiped open at the second-lowest deck and armed servants in crisp uniforms streamed out.

Kastor took aim. “Stop!”

They fired reflexively. As did Kastor. Weak bullets pelted his chest, abdomen, and legs, smashing flat like coins and dropping onto the white tile stairs. Hendrik and a few other drop troopers fired along with Kastor, their rounds shredding the commoner servants, blasting ugly, messy holes through their uniformed torsos.

“Wait!” one of them shouted at his comrades between the hail of gunfire. “They’re offworlders! Stop—”

His pleading was cut short by a bullet to the neck, his blood painting a daisy on the wall. Just like that, within seconds, the servants slid down the stairwell in a lifeless pile. Victims of friendly fire.

Kastor leaped over them and into the room from which they had come—a long lounge with a handful of closed doors along the side, two closed double doors at the far end, and a huddle of lady servants crouching in the center of four white couches. Some gasped and whispered as their frightened eyes fixated on Kastor. He lowered his weapon and raised an open palm, a gesture of harmlessness.

The first door Kastor tried was locked. So was the second.

“Who’s in the rooms?” Kastor whispered to the group of servants.

They stared but gave no response. Hendrik leaned through the doorway, aiming his rifle one way, then the other, then lowered it.

“Kastor.” He jerked his head back for the champion to follow. “Engine room is below.”

Kastor went after him. On the bottom deck, the drop troops crept down a long, narrow corridor of steel, lined with pipes and status screens. At the end, a thick metal hatch appeared worthy of shielding the engine room.

Then the overhead lights went out. Only the pale blue light of the status screens remained. Kastor threw himself against a wall, heartrate quickening as the darkness settled in.

“Visuals up!” Hendrik whispered in a hoarse voice. The drop troops’ face shields slid back into place.

Soft pats of boots continued down the hall. Kastor followed with caution, glancing at the stairwell every few seconds. They were in a bad position. Ahead, he noticed something odd. As he stepped forward, he caught sight of a screen’s light momentarily distort, as if passing through a prism. It took too long to register—only a second or two, but too long all the same. They had walked into a trap.

“They’re cloaked!” Kastor shouted. “Fire! Fire!”

The corridor erupted in deafening gunfire, muzzle flashes strobing air, illuminating each drop trooper recoil and fall, each cammy-armored Upraadi materialize as a round broke their cloaking. Kastor felt a metallic limb hook his midsection and haul him back toward the stairwell. Once they returned to the light, Hendrik let go and slid back his face shield.

“We’ll be able to see them in the ligh—”

Hendrik yelped and lurched forward, one hand clawing behind his back at wherever the bullet had hit. Kastor grabbed him and pulled him up the stairs, moving slower with each step.

“Drop me,” Hendrik said. “Drop me here!”

Kastor eased him down and leaped up another half-dozen steps to lie among the servants’ bodies. Both warriors aimed their weapons at the doorway. Not two seconds later, the air around the opening below distorted. They fired as fast as their guns allowed, bullets tearing huge holes into the door and splintering the fauxwood paneling. One cloaked soldier materialized as he fell. Another, just behind him, materialized and doubled over, holding a knee that had been blown backwards by a rifle round. More gunshots returned from below, making sudden explosions of tile shards and taking out the ceiling lights.

Kastor felt a warm sprinkle against his face. Hendrik had taken hits. After putting down one more cloaked Upraadi, Kastor waited, listened, then leaned forward. Steaming craters peppered Hendrik’s armor, whole chunks of his body gone. The drop team leader had expired in a rain of armor-buster bullets, his blood now trickling down the marble steps, sharp crimson against the white.

Above, a heavy crash vibrated the entire ship, rocking it back and forth, a sound like solid steel being ripped in the hands of a giant. The lights blinked. Dust drifted down the staircase.

Kastor hopped to his feet, averting his eyes from the muddle that used to be Hendrik, and rushed back up the stairs to the floor above. Radovan wanted any invaders on his ship to think he’d holed up in the engine room. But he hadn’t. Kastor saw that now. He’d have multiple traps set up in the lowest deck to ensure all invaders were consumed in the belly of his ship. He wouldn’t trap himself with no easy escape. He would hide in a much more conspicuous place.

Kastor stepped into the lounge again and pointed his weapon at the huddle of lady servants. “Which door is Radovan hiding behind?”

Their eyes grew wide, their faces steely. The huddle rose and split, pulling hidden handguns from their skirts or under cushions, firing immediately. Kastor crouched, shielded his face with his forearm, and took potshots. Their shots slapped his nanoflex, while his ripped through couch fabric and shattered glass vases and split polished tables. But his shots weren’t hitting his targets.

His gun clicked empty, and he tossed it at a nearby servant girl, cracking her square in the sternum. Kastor slashed out his blazer and throttled it to life. He rolled, blocked a shot with his forearm, and sliced through a servant’s abdomen, not cutting all the way through as the blade hadn’t fully heated.

A thick-necked commoner girl wailed in shock and anger and charged Kastor at full speed, discharging a stream of rounds into the nanoflex-armored forearm covering his face. Kastor yanked his blazer in her direction, sending the body toward the oncoming servant, distracting long enough to leap in a zigzag pattern and burn his blade into her rib cage. He felt the vibration of his boron nitride nanoblade sever her spinal cord before she collapsed.

Kastor wheeled around and slashed his blazer down, missing his next target, charring a black line through the white couch instead. His blade whisked out in time to block an incoming bullet, its path and timing predictable by the aim of the gun and the servant woman’s scrunching face as she prepared to fire. He flinched to block another and another until he’d edged close enough to hack through her leg above the knee and snatch her handgun.

From there, Kastor needed only to drop to the ground while twisting himself to face the other servants.

PAH-PAH-PAH
.
PAH
.

His third shot hit the woman in the hip, so he fired off a fourth, thunking into her head and knocking her backwards. Sudden stillness filled the room. Six corpses littered the fine, plush carpet.

Back on his feet, Kastor stood in front of the double doors, waiting, catching his breath.

“Radovan! Come out. It’s only me. Or do I need to spill more Upraadi blood before you’ll face me?” Silence hung in the air. He waited. Patience thinned. “I’m
tired
of killing. But if that’s what you want . . .” He stepped to one of the locked side doors, where more noblemen undoubtedly hid—the noncombatants of Upraad’s court. “Perhaps I could finish off the others in here.”

The double doors swung open. Two enormous, armored brutes emerged, brandishing double-bladed spears. Helmets presented their faces as eyeless black skulls. As they separated, the Frontier Lumis himself stepped between them, wielding a pair of curved blazer hatchets—ancestral weapons. Radovan powered up their heat, and his personal guards heated their weapons alongside him.

Kastor squared up with them, dragging the tip of his blazer through the carpet. A black, charred path snaked behind him, adding the smell of burnt garments to the odor of burnt flesh.

Kastor met Radovan’s stony eyes. “It’s too bad so many of your people had to die. I thought you were supposed to be a kinder lumis, caring for your subjects.”

“I mistook you as well,” Radovan said, voice small but steady. “I thought you might’ve had some soul left to preserve. Seems you’ve sold it wholly to Zantorian.”

A twinge of guilt flared in Kastor’s chest. No, not guilt. Regret. Merely an echo, bound to die out soon. That’s what Kastor told himself, commanded himself to believe.

“Not to Zantorian. To his title. To his glory.”

Radovan heaved a laugh, sweeping his gaze over the landscape of tattered bodies. “Is this the glory he promised you? Slaughtered servants?” His white eyes came to rest on Kastor again. “Was it worth it?”

Kastor thought of Guerlain, of Guarin, of Hendrik, of all the faces from which he’d taken life or watched it fade. He thought of the horrible sacks of blood and bone and muscle that people became when life fled the body—puppets cut from their strings.

He thought of Pollaena as the life drained from her. Her agonized eyes, laced with pain deeper than a blazer wound, searching him as her final moments ran out. The memory refused to fade, an image burned into his brain as vividly as Radovan standing before him.

All for glory.

Kastor raised his blazer and gripped the hilt with both hands.

“
Yes
,” Kastor said. “My answer is yes.”

Glowing blades whirled like lightning in a tornado, slicing burn marks into the carpet. Kastor dodged backward with their every swing until he ran into the couch and leaped backwards over it. One of the Upraadi brutes backhanded the couch, flipping it through the air. Kastor ducked to avoid it.

Their powered armor yielded startling strength. It could pulverize his ribs with a direct blow. The brutes moved swiftly despite their size, whipping their spears with seasoned finesse. Kastor kept his distance and searched for patterns but found none. These two must’ve trained at an academy. One did not become this proficient at any weapon aside from expert training.

Kastor rolled backwards across the slick coffee table to avoid a downward slash as it splintered the fauxwood. The bodyguard’s heavy boot crushed a corner of the low table as if it were paper, making a loud, splitting crack. The blazer spear twirled vertically, chipping shards of wood at Kastor, who flicked his sword to block them. Fauxwood vaporized into smoke as it hit his blade.

Then he went on the attack, leaping to the right to isolate one of the bodyguards. Spear and katana blades collided in a hail of sparks. Another blade swung from below. Kastor blocked and jabbed, but the brute struck away his sword. Glowing blades blurred all around as he dodged and rolled away. Instinct took over. His childhood of training had formed well-trod neural pathways in his brain. Each snap of the blade was thoughtless, reflexive. Amid the interplay, an old melee tactic began to take shape.

Kastor buckled his knees after a hard block, grunted, feigned weakness. An even harder swing came in from the side, but Kastor was ready for it. He ducked and thrust himself—and his sword—forward into the brute’s bulk. The blade crunched uneasily through thick, graphene-coated armor, broke through the inner layer of nanoflex, and lodged in place. The brute groaned and stumbled backward as the blazer sizzled in his armor and his flesh, sticking halfway out his body.

The brute took one hand off his spear to grab hold of the katana hilt, letting the spear burn a line into the floor. Meanwhile, the other brute mashed down the back of a couch with his steel-knuckled fists enough to step over it.

Kastor was unarmed. He dashed for the wounded brute’s spear, yanked it away, and slashed through the stocky armor on the creature’s leg, making him plunge to a knee. Kastor whipped the heavy spear powerfully in his hands.

The second brute surged forward, spinning his spear like a helicopter’s rotor. Kastor held his ground, driving the blade of his spear into the fray, disrupting the spin. It took the brute off guard. For a series of contacts, they fought as equals, each focused only on where the other’s next blade strike would come from. Then the brute forced the tip of Kastor’s spear into the ground and kicked his mighty boot against the champion’s chest, sending him flying backward.

Kastor smashed into polished fauxwood cabinets full of liquor bottles. They shattered and sprayed him with sharp-smelling alcohol. When he fell, he left a crater in the cabinets and wall. With the air knocked from his lungs, it took a moment to reorient himself. First, he threw himself out of the way of the oncoming Upraadi. The brute’s spear minced the floor where Kastor’s head had been a split second before.

A handgun lay on the carpet between Kastor and a dead servant girl—a fortuitous find. He grabbed it and fired a salvo. The brute blocked half the shots with his quick spear. The other half simply bounced off his armor.

Kastor saved the last two shots, beginning to panic as the armored monster closed in on him. He searched for any sign of vulnerability

There
. At the knee joint.

KAH
. The brute locked his knees and froze in place. The bullet bounced off his thigh plate. Both of them waited. Tense seconds passed. The brute growled and lunged forward.

KAH
.

The shot made a different sound than the one before—deeper and duller. Still metal against metal, but not the same invulnerable armor plating that covered the rest of his body. It only halted him a moment, but it was long enough for Kastor to dash past and yank his blazer sword out of the other, still-groaning brute.

Another exchange of blows, crackling clangs of blade against blade. Then Kastor tossed a mostly intact bottle of cognac straight into the Upraadi faceplate. The effect wasn’t blindness but visual distortion. Their next round of contacts were sloppy as the brute twirled his spear without precision.

All it took was a quick feint to the left and a roundhouse spin to land a hard strike on the right. Kastor’s blade sunk into the brute’s shoulder with a hiss. The muted scream from inside his helmet still had enough volume to deafen Kastor in one ear. His sword swished out and blocked an immediate counter, slashed at an armored wrist, and cut halfway through the Upraadi’s forearm.