Scorched Earth: (The Human Chronicles Saga Book #16) (32 page)

“Then if you don’t mind,” Adam looked at his rag-tag team of Humans, Formilians and mutant, “why don’t
we
do something about it. Where is Synnoc now?”

The Juirean track star stepped forward. “He has cloistered himself in the Pinnacle Room.”

“Good,” said Adam. “Let’s make sure he stays there. Okay everyone, we’re heading down.”

“What about Synnoc?” Arieel asked. “He is located above us.”

“Don’t worry, he’ll be taken care of.”

“How?” Riyad asked.

“Remember the backup generators under the building? They’re fusion powered, right?”

Riyad’s eyes grew wide. “I like your thinking, Captain Cain.”

“What are brew talking about?” Sherri asked.

Lila stepped forward. “I detect the generators, as well.” She turned to Sherri. “An overload of those units—similar to a flash weapons overload—would produce a small nuclear explosion under the structure.”

“You’re going to nuke ‘em?” Sherri’s swollen eye suddenly opened. “And where are we going to be when this happens?”

“Two nukes, actually,” Adam replied. “As to where we will be at the time…. Trimen, you have a ship nearby, don’t you?”

“Yes, at the Council landing field to the west of the building.”

“All right everyone, that’s our goal—to reach Trimen’s ship and get the hell off the mountain before we set off the nukes.”

“You are going to destroy the Malor-Hydon Tower?” Malens asked breathlessly.

“That’s the plan.”

“I cannot allow that. That is too high a price to pay for removing Synnoc from office. We can do that through procedure.”

“You just said he’s gone off the rails.”

“Pardon me?”

“He’s gone rogue, setting up a dictatorship. Your life-expectancy—and that of your fellow Elites—is probably measured in minutes. If I were you, I’d be running for the exits, along with the rest of us.”

“He is indeed a savage terrorist!” declared another of the Elites. “Malens, you cannot allow this.”

 “Maby you shouldn’t have started a war with dus,” Sherri said to the mouthy Juirean.

“I do not understand.”

She jabbed the barrel of her M-101 into the alien’s chest. “Do you understand dis?”

“Adam Cain, I must protest,” said Malens. “There must be a better solution.”

“Yeah, we could wait until the Union fleet gets here and lays waste to your entire stinking planet, but that might get some Humans killed, too. That’s something
I
can’t allow.” Adam was angry. He hadn’t come all this way to negotiate with a bunch of prissy aliens in shimmering blue gowns. He’d come to kick some alien ass. With two juicy nukes sitting only a few hundred feet below where he was standing, he now he had a chance to bring his scorched earth campaign to a close. He wasn’t about to let the opportunity pass by.

He looked at the combination of scared, anxious and angry alien faces. “The way I see it, you guys don’t have much of a choice. Either you leave the building as fast as you can, or you end up as radioactive ash.”

“We shall raise the alarm—”

Adam’s M-101 lit off with a small three-round burst. The bullets tore into the body of Juirean, nearly slicing him in half. “No you won’t,” Adam said to the falling body.

The other Juireans in the room gasped and backed away. All except Malens.

“I see you have made our decision for us.” There was fire in the alien’s eyes. “If the decision is to ally with a beast like you or with Master Synnoc, then nothing he has done—or will do—is worse than this.”

“Malens—or whatever your name is—you forget we’re at war…a war you and your kind started. When are you Juireans going to realize you can’t win every fight and that being arrogant assholes has consequences? I started this campaign to avenge the death of my oldest friend, a father-figure to me, really. For a moment there, I thought you mane-heads were worth saving, and that this was all Synnoc’s fault, just like it had been the Klin’s before that. Now I see I was wrong. You’re all alike.”

“We side with our own kind, just as you do, Adam Cain. I feel no shame for that.”

Adam nodded. “Then neither do I—”

Arieel took hold of Adam’s arm just as his trigger finger tightened on M-101.

“What are you thinking of doing, Adam?” the Formilian asked softly, concern in her voice.

“Either they die now or they die later. I vote for now.”

“And they know our plans,” Sherri added, her own M-101 leveled at the Juireans.

“Should we not have mercy?” Arieel asked.

Sherri glared at her. “Did they show any mercy when then blew off Andy’s head? You were there, you saw it happen. We’re at war, Arieel. We always have been since the first moment the Juireans learned of us. At some point all this has to end. We tried peace and that didn’t work. Frankly, I’m pretty damn tired of playing nice with
these
savages.” Sherri’s lips were bleeding as scabs ripped open during her tirade, but her message came through loud and clear.

Arieel looked at Sherri’s battered face and then at Adam’s manic expression. Then she turned away with a flip of her hand and shrugged. “Perhaps you are right. Okay, go ahead, kill them.”

Sherri and Adam exchanged surprised looks. “Well, maybe….” Adam said.

“Lock them in the side room?” Sherri said.

“At least give them a fighting chance to get away?”

“Yeah, that would be better.”

Adam turned to Malens. “You have Arieel Bol to thank for saving your miserable lives, at least for now.”

Arieel turned in protest. “I did not do any such thing! I said kill them.”

Adam smiled. “We all know what you were doing, Arieel. We call it reverse psychology.”

“No…I agree with Sherri. They showed no mercy for Andy Tobias. I remember vividly as he was killed. It was horrific and savage.”

Adam patted her back. “You’re a better person than I am, sweetie.” He waved the barrel of this M-101 at the aliens. “All right, everyone in the room.”

“Are you still going to destroy the building?” Malens asked.

“Of course.”

“So you would have remorse for killing us here, yet will incinerate tens of thousands without any such regret?

“There’s another saying where I come from,” Adam said. “
‘Kill one man and you’re a murderer. Kill millions and you’re a conqueror. Kill them all and you’re a god.’
I still working on the god part. Now into the room…move!”

Chapter 37

The team left the conference room minutes later after Lila fused the door controls, locking the Juireans in the small ten-by-ten room. Before they left, Adam assured Malens that the generators could be made to explode remotely, so there was nothing they could do to stop it. That’s when one of the other Elites pointed out that killing the team would be a way of stopping it. The mane-head had a point.

Adam really want to kill the alien for saying that, but compassion overrode the desire. Then he shook his head. Compassion? In a few minutes—if the team wasn’t killed—he was going to blow the whole damn building to bits. The smart-ass alien knew this. Perhaps it would be more
compassionate
to put him out of his misery now, rather than have him spend the next few minutes waiting to die?

Adam was jarred from his reverie when Arieel moved up next to him. “You misunderstand. I wanted the Juireans dead,” she said passionately. “Even now they occupy Formil. My people are in grave danger from them. I thought on it, and realized you and Sherri were right.”

“What’s done is done, Arieel,” Adam said. “Don’t worry. As soon as we get to Trimen’s ship and lift off, all the loose ends will be tied up.”

“That sounds like another of your Human colloquialisms, yet I understand the context.”

They were in the deserted corridor, moving to the elevators. Everyone with an ATD had their scanners going, tracking the progress of Synnoc’s search team. They were about a hundred years down the hallway and well past the elevators.

At the bank of shiny metal doors, they stopped and took up defensive positions. Adam pressed the button and a moment later the doors began to open. Four green-haired Guards armed with Xan-fi’s were in the car. From inside they couldn’t see anyone in the corridor, and wondered why the elevator had stopped. Two stepped forward.

Adam and Riyad rushed in, M-101’s spitting bullets. Moments later, they tossed the bodies into the hallway to make room for all eight members of the team. Adam was hoping for a quick ride to the main floor of the pyramid and then a sprint for the exit doors. There would be a trail of dead aliens left along the way; that was unavoidable. In fact, every time the elevator would stop, more dead Juireans would pile up in the hallways. But now that he had a plan, Adam could see the light at the end of the tunnel. He was willing to make a little noise if necessary.

They started on the thirty-first floor, and by the time the elevator reached ground level, there had been three instances of the door opening followed by dead aliens on the floor outside. There was no pretense now. Other Juireans had tripped the alarms, and a grating noise and flashing lights filled the building.

Confusion was a great place to hide, and that’s what state-of-mind the Juireans were in. They knew something was happening, but in the two minutes it took the elevator car to reach the bottom, no details were known.

The team exited the car, giving leeway to a group of Juireans anxious to board and race to the upper floors. At a time of war, such an alarm could mean a threat on the Elder—or any of the Elites—or an outside threat of some kind. Until more details were known, the priority was to lock-down the building and secure the VIP’s. In the huge open chamber on the ground floor—which soared twenty stories above—hundreds of Guards were running for the wide expanse of entry doors to the building. Many of these doors were closing automatically as a response to the alarm, while Guards took up sentry positions, Xan-fi’s and MK’s at the ready.

Adam hated to do it, but he had to open fire. There was a squad of Guards focused on the team as they moved across the wide expanse of open floor. There was recognition in alien’s eyes. Once he fired, all the other Juireans in the chamber would identify them as the target.

What happened next was a spectacular release of automatic gunfire and alien flash bolts. So much raw plasma was in the air that the inside temperature climbed by ten degrees almost instantly, as the flashes temporarily blinded nearly everyone in the room. Adam and Riyad were wearing their helmets, so the polarizing glass lens saved their eyesight. This allowed them to spray lines of Juireans with lead from the ’101’s. They snapped in new magazines, after cutting down literally hundreds of Juireans in the first few seconds of the battle.

The team continued to move, Humans in the lead with the slower Formilians behind. Lila was close to her mother, taking multiple bolt strikes in her place. The mutant’s body began to glow white and radiate heat from the absorption of plasma charges. The more she took the harder it was for the Formilians to be near her.

This undying and glowing figure soon caught the attention of most of the Juireans in the room. Some paused firing to gawk at the strange apparition, right up to the time Lila lashed out with powerful discharges of crackling blue lightening from her hands. The erratic trails of deadly electricity danced around the periphery of the room, striking bodies and inanimate objects alike.

The three Humans fell to the floor and slid behind a solid stone block where an indecipherable stature of some kind sat on top. The bolts hit the metal of the figure, melting parts while causing the rest to burst into pieces of white-hot shrapnel.

A strange stillness spread over the room. Adam risked a peek over the top of the stone block and saw Lila was standing about fifty feet away, breathing heavily and still glowing white-hot. Her clothing had burned off yet her features were obscured by the brilliance of her skin.

Arieel and Trimen were on the floor twenty feet away, arms lifted to shield their faces from the intense heat. The other two Formilians were lost somewhere in the graveyard of dead and dying littering the floor of the chamber.

There were still Juireans alive, yet not nearly as many as there had been a minute before. Most stood on the wide catwalks at various levels above encircling the room, mesmerized and perplexed by the glowing figure below. They had lost interest in the rest of the team, confused as what to do next. This thing could not be killed.

Adam watched with fascination as Lila lifted her arms above her head and clasped her hands. A powerful stream of energy then shot from her body, aimed at the ceiling far above. Three seconds passed, and as the discharge of blue-white electricity left her body, the glowing subsided. When the beam faded and she lowered her arms, the radiating heat had dropped to a tolerable level and color returned to her skin.

Arieel jumped to her feet, pulling a blue cape from the body of a dead Overlord beside her. She draped the cloth around her daughter’s naked body.

Lila smiled. “Yes, mother, I must maintain feminine decorum when killing our enemy in public.”

Sherri heard the comment and turned to Adam. “She has your wry sense of humor, doesn’t she?”

Adam stood up. “Hurry, to the doors!”

His words echoed in the strange silence—which was suddenly overcome by a loud, thundering thud. He turned to where the bank of exit doors had once been, light from outside flooding in. Now a wall of metal faced him and the room was nearly dark. Huge barriers had dropped from the ceiling above the exits, effectively locking everyone inside.

There was a commotion from the other side of the room. Another twenty or so Juirean Guards came sprinting across the stone floor of the chamber, armed with long round canisters.

The surviving members of the team knew what the canisters held—liquefied gas, the only thing that could stop a creature like Lila. Freezing was the only defense against her, and as another squad of aliens appeared not too far from Adam, it was obvious the word was out and a strategy was being implemented.

Off to his right, Adam saw an open doorway with stairs inside.

“C’mon everyone! To the stairwell. We’re going down!”

Now another round of flash bolts erupted, and the six remaining members of the team raced across the open floor, dodging them the best they could. Lila was behind Trimen and Arieel, her arms spread and hunched over the running pair. A bolt hit her. The cape burned through at that point and a bright light shined through.

Another bolt struck at Sherri’s feet; she hurdled the small explosion with the grace of a person with firecrackers in their pants. She managed to keep going, with only a loud ‘muck’ escaping her lips. At least it sounded like
muck
to Adam. 

They barreled into the stairwell. Adam and Riyad took up covering positions on each side of the door as the rest of them ran down the stairs.

“Where are we going?” Trimen asked as he raced by. “Can we get to my ship from here?”

“I think we just lost your ship as an option. There’s another way out.”

“Down here?”

“Yep. Move!”

Adam cocked the M-4 grenade launcher; Riyad saw him do it and mirrored the action. Moments later, they were spitting deadly canisters into the huge room. Multiple explosions now rocked the huge chamber.

Adam and Riyad took to the stairs.

“How far?” Trimen yelled from below.

“All the way down, twelve stories.”

Before they reached the bottom, flash bolts began streaming down from above, traveling through the open center column and striking stairs and railings. The team fell against the outer walls to avoid the flying sparks and plasma splashes while continuing to take several steps at a time.

When there were no more stairs, Sherri put a shoulder against a grey metal door and crashed through into a wide hallway. “Is this where the security vault was?” she yelled back as Trimen and Lila joined her. A moment later, Riyad and Adam burst through the doorway.

“Is this where Hydon’s vault is?” she repeated.

Breathless, Adam replied. “Yeah, to the left…hurry.”

Sherri’s eyes grew wide, or as wide as the left one could. “The tunnel! We’re going to the tunnel!”

“Bingo, baby! Follow me.”

The door to the vault was still unlocked. Adam led the way through.

“Damn, this place looks different,” Sherri said.

“No time for a tour. Riyad, take them to the tunnel. Lila, I need your help over here.”

The team split up and Adam led Lila into the room with the huge back-up generator.

“This is it,” he said to his mutant daughter. “There’s another one just like it on the other side of the building.” He took off his helmet and inhaled a deep breath of fresh air. It was a relief.

Lila didn’t need an ATD to scan the inner components of the machine, she was beyond artificial means to access her powers. She found the contact points and the fusion reactor, as well as traced the lines to the second unit. “I will have to do this, father,” she stated. “It is more complicated than a simple flash weapon. And the other unit will require even more expertise since it will be done remotely.”

“That’s fine. You’re not going to hurt my feelings if you make the nuclear bombs instead of me. What kind of control will you have over the timing? We have to get out through the tunnel before they explode.”