Randolph Lalonde - Spinward Fringe Broadcast 08 - Renegades (57 page)

Alice fired on her own
target. To her surprise, it took several concussive shots to blast
her Edxian’s legs to pieces and send it spiralling towards the
thruster wash, where it was incinerated.

She whirled toward the
Edxian who killed Timmerman and opened fire. The rest of her troops
followed her example, opening up on all the Edxians scrambling along
the hull. Her shields took several hits from the seeker discs, and
she let her tracking system guide her aim towards one. It was on its
way towards her when the secondary beam weapon on her rifle cut
through it. She barely dodged before it struck the hull and exploded.

Her teams’ excursion
onto the hull had turned into a full-on shooting match. She opened
fire on the next Edxian as it blasted roughly in her direction. If
she hadn’t already been moving, she’d be missing limbs or worse.
Her rifle tore the Edxian to pieces, but not before it landed a few
hits of its own, reducing her shielding down to three percent and
scarring her armour with what her tactical system identified as
super-heated microparticles.

Another strike caught
her in the back, doing severe damage to her outer armour, but
Havernash gunned her assailant down using heavy explosive rounds. She
felt several ice-cold pinpricks on her skin, indicating that her
armour had been breached. The inner layer of her armour repaired
itself in seconds, re-sealing her from the vacuum of space. By then
her rifle was trained on one of the two remaining Edxians, and she
fired at what she thought was a head, a rough protrusion from the
middle of its torso. “Kill him! Kill him!” shouted Nesh Samo as
she fired at the Edxian, several discs closing in on her position.

“Stop firing and
move! Those things can’t track you if your cloaking systems get a
chance to work!” Alice shouted, only too late. The discs closed in,
firing white-hot beams at the soldier then exploding all around her.

Seconds later, the
battle was over. Two Edxian corpses were still attached to the hull,
the rest were confirmed dead and had either drifted towards the
compression wall and torn apart or were somewhere ahead of the ships.
The corpses would be ripped apart as they reached the forward edge of
the wormhole where space was being compressed by the Warlord’s
systems.

She took a good look at
one of the largest black-clad attackers. There were no life signs,
and the main body of its armour was open to space. The shape of their
armour brought back the memory of delivering stolen Edxian eggs to
Zarrix. She could recall his corpulent form, scarred exoskeletal bone
and leathery flesh, joints that didn’t seem to bend the right way,
and long, weapon-like appendages. The armour these creatures wore hid
much of that detail, but they were still almost three metres tall,
hunched down, with similar limbs.

Alice recalled recorded
images of the other Edxians that were on the hull and lined them up
at the top of her heads-up display. Some of them had two long arms,
others had multiples of varying lengths, and with those multiple arms
came a multitude of unfamiliar tools and weapons. They used some kind
of thin black material to create three bubbles against the hull,
shielding them from intense external scans while they did their work.
There was a lot of new information to process, and they didn’t have
time.

“Okay, we have to do
a detailed scan of the hull from the outside so Finn can have a clear
picture of the damage,” Alice said. “Then we get these corpses
inside.”

“Inside? Are you
kidding?”

“Yes, inside. Their
tech is inert, they’re dead, and we have a lot to learn. These
things took more than one shot from our weapons on their highest
setting and killed two of us. We need to be ready for war with them.”

“What the hell are
you talking about? We’re not at war with the Edxians, these guys
must be some kind of Order supporters. No one’s reporting any other
Edxi attacks.”

Alice touched the dead
Edxian towering over her. The black outer armour was highly flexible,
but her sensors read that it was almost as dense as her own armour.
There were new, unknown materials at work. “The captain just told
everyone what’s really going on aboard that destroyer. We’re only
fighting the Order because they’re in the way of the real war.
There’s an invasion coming, maybe it’s already started. We’ll
be seeing more of these.”

The Loathing Of Beasts

The mines of Coba were
endless. It was easy to see why the rebels in the Pionero System
would dig into the caves. Clark Patterson didn’t enjoy his Beast
persona often, but when he was surrounded by brainwashed Order of
Eden soldiers, he enjoyed how they made every effort to avoid his
gaze and stay out of his way. They were all around him as he moved
through the large cavern. He could feel the gravel crunch underfoot,
but the sound was drowned out by the noise of firing rifles. He left
the Order Knights behind, and brought one of their heavy rifles for
himself instead.

The soldiers around him
in their dark green armour believed that it was a privilege to be
chosen for the excursion. In truth, Clark couldn’t stand any of
them. He chose them because they were the least intelligent, the most
easily brainwashed, and the most firm believers. To them, he was the
hell-spawned master on a mission to punish those who would resist the
authority of the Order. They fought well and Clark understood how
useful they could be, but he couldn’t stand a mindless zealot.

The ground vibrated for
a moment as the heavily armoured shuttles behind them finished
landing around his vanguard ship. There were another eight hundred
well-equipped, trained soldiers in those ships, and they would finish
clearing the tunnels or die. He wouldn’t be sending another wave,
not to these caves.

The large central
chamber had makeshift tents crammed with cots, a kitchen made from
parts of a crashed ship’s galley and scavenged things from across
the nearly uninhabitable surface. The cavern’s top was somewhere
far up in the darkness above, the broad shafts made for working
transports were their only convenient way out. Clark hoped the Order
Knights he’d left to defend the openings would succeed in keeping
the rebels from collapsing the entrance. Tunnels led outward from
there in all directions. Capturing or killing every group of rebels
would take weeks – perhaps months – without using powerful
explosives. It was an option, no one would blame him, and absolutely
no one would question him if he cratered a large percentage of Planet
Coba, but he wasn’t interested in resorting to the same murderous
tactics as the governors he just replaced. Besides, there were so
many different types of precious dense metals in the ground at their
feet, destroying that section of the mine would come at a high cost.

A group of rebels
revealed themselves momentarily, firing bursts at the soldiers
deploying behind them from one of the upper cave entrances. Several
detonations from repurposed explosive charges erupted amongst the
troops. “They’ve made some kind of rocket bombs out of the
charges left behind by the miners!” shouted one of the sergeants.

Clark fired his rifle
towards the small cave opening, super heating the stone and driving
the rebels back. “Use seeker rounds,”
you
idiots,
he thought, but refrained from adding. This
wouldn’t go well; Clark had the distinct feeling that he was
wasting his time. “The rebels still think they have a chance. Some
of them are close enough to the central caverns that we have a chance
to catch them. The rest are escaping further into the caves. Break up
into squads, send sensor repeaters so you can scan as much of the
cave network as possible, and figure out how many of them there are.
Chase after the closest. Now, go.”

His communicator
indicated that the message he was waiting for had arrived, and Clark
Patterson mentally activated the hatch to his personal drop ship and
walked towards it, pushing his way through the crowd of soldiers
moving around him. He couldn’t help but curse himself for handling
the minutia himself. He wanted a distraction, and though taking
direct command of a platoon seemed like a good idea at first, he
found himself becoming more irritated by the second.

He needed something to
do while he waited to hear the fate of the Fallen Star, however. The
signal from Shozo had come through; she’d somehow managed to make a
workable deal for her people.

Clark gave his heavy
rifle to an awaiting service bot as he stepped onto the platform that
would lift him into the passenger section of the shuttle. “You are
ordered to pursue and capture rebels if possible,” he told the
lieutenant in charge of the cave skirmish through his communicator.
“Kill them only if you are left with no other choice.”

“What do we do with
the prisoners?” asked the lieutenant in a surprisingly appealing
female voice.

“Put them in stasis
and load them onto the next transport to Upello. They’ll find
plenty to fight there,” Clark replied, knowing that Upello was the
next to be used as an Edxian brood world. In less than a month, it
would be swarming with their hatched young, mindless hunters who
would be hungry for the better part of three decades.

“Understood, Sir.”

“One more thing,
Lieutenant Turney. You will not receive any further reinforcements
for this operation. If you lose over eighty percent of your forces,
you are to retreat. I will not allow this operation to become a
protracted engagement.” He closed the channel and stepped into his
private chamber as the lift platform sealed to the centre of the
deck. His personal communications and command system sent information
to the circular chamber so it could display everything he wanted to
pay attention to. The chamber filled to his chest with water as his
ship began rising up out of the cavern.

He looked around the
room at all the holographic projections. It was as though all aspects
of the Eden War were around him, even more so since he was closer to
the Iron Head Nebula, closer to many hidden hypertransmitter nodes. A
new transmission addressed to all Order Of Eden personnel appeared.
It was marked by Eve as mandatory viewing. He looked at the details
and discovered that it was recorded while she was on her way to the
Sogarian System on an extended recruiting mission. It was central to
the opposite side of the Iron Head Nebula, had over six billion
people – many of whom were starving – and it was the perfect
place for her to feed her saviour complex. That was the notification
his comm sent him, not news from the Fallen Star.

Clark checked on the
status of his tall, spike-shaped landing craft and saw that his
pilots were guiding it back to the Overlord as expected, then he
activated Eve’s speech. The chamber’s walls disappeared behind a
holographic projection of an amphitheatre decorated with wood, gold,
and crystal chandeliers in the twenty-first century Earth fashion. He
knew this was a place she‘d had built aboard the Liberator, her own
command carrier. The ship had finished crossing the Iron Head Nebula
and was in its deceleration cycle. The large domed windows overhead
shed a ghostly blue light on the two thousand attendees.

Dressed in a long gown
that flared out at the bottom and the top, she gracefully walked to
the centre of the stage. The mix of light and dark greens on her
dress reflected against her face and the skin exposed by the slit
down the front of her outfit, giving her a strange colouring. All the
jitters she suffered from when she first started appearing publicly
were gone, as evidenced by her easy smile and how her gaze swept from
the front rows to the back and across the audience.

“It is known that the
fate of the Order of Eden is set, to join together and evolve past
the rest of humanity. It is also known that it takes individual
sacrifice and service to elevate to the exalted ranks and receive the
gift of immortality. So many of you are on your way; I am so proud of
the growth I’ve seen since terrorists killed our Child Prophet.”

Clark couldn’t help
but scoff at that lie. Five months before, Eve and he agreed that it
was time for the Child Prophet to be retired, and they leaked fake
footage of him being killed in a bombing during a small rally. They
treated it like a tragedy and allowed the Order of Eden to mourn with
Eve appearing often to console them. After a week, they turned his
death into a rallying cry for more Order of Eden followers to abandon
the pacifist path and join the military. Enlistment surged past
capacity, and there was a waiting list of volunteers ever since.

Eve went on, as she
often did. “That was such a barrier to overcome, and we are
stronger than ever. That is why I know that we will overcome this new
threat I’m here to tell you about now. It is so small compared to
the loss of our Prophet, but it represents a disease that plagues the
rest of humanity, a disease that we will cure. I’m afraid one of
the Order’s oldest enemies has come to threaten us once again. The
terrorist Jacob Valent has led a band of pirates against a small
training ship and revealed his true nature. I warn you that what you
are about to see is quite graphic, but we must be exposed to this so
we know how to defeat it. The stage was overwhelmed with the image of
a starship bridge. Jacob Valent was pictured holding a weapon to a
young crewman’s head telling him, “We’re going to play a game,
it’s called Chinese Whispers.”

The way the holographic
image of the bridge lined up with the stage set the scene out like an
old fashioned play, but Clark suspected no playwright would ever pen
such a rage-fuelled gore show. He flinched when the young crewman
almost finished counting down from ten and Jake fired his weapon.
Clark couldn’t help but be shocked as Jake made sport of killing
crewmembers. After killing one of the crew, Jake retracted his
headgear, and in the light of what Clark was seeing, how unhinged
Valent seemed, he couldn’t help but think it may be time for him to
die. Something had driven the hero Clark Patterson once worshipped
out of Jacob Valent.