“Plan?” Ayna said. “Is there a plan at this point?”
“Find him, kill him,” Saketa said. “The details depend on what kind of precautions he has taken. You all may help me deal with the latter, but striking down the Exile will fall to me.”
“Simple. I-”
The girl was interrupted by a ground-shaking boom.
“I like it.”
Fredrak cleared his throat.
“Perhaps you’d best peel away once we stop the car,” he said. “And find shelter for the rest of us. An actual underground shelter would be good, but a nice, empty expanse of land would do almost as well. Some place with nothing for anyone to target, and perhaps a bit of cover from debris.”
“As in hiding?” the Dwyyk said, her voice high. “Yeah. Yeah. I can do that. The best use of my talents, probably. There is OH SHIT!”
A ship crashed in front of them, hitting the ground at an angle. It burst apart, and a piece larger than the car bounced their way, wreathed in flames. Losan wrenched the wheel to the right, Saketa’s seatbelt bit into her, and the left-side wheels seemed to lift off the ground for a moment. They made it around the rolling ship-section, but a smaller piece was travelling in a slightly different direction and Losan swerved to the left. The piece continued on its way, screaming the way tortured metal did as it passed by, and Losan finally took them around the main wreck.
Then he put them back on course.
“Whoa!” Ayna shouted. “You are amazing and kind of cute!”
“I was trained for urban warfare,” the man replied evenly.
Saketa caught a moment where Vanaka seemed about to put a hand on her bodyguard’s shoulder. But the Vylak stopped herself, and she let the man focus on his task.
The estimate reached forty minutes, and shortly after Losan drove onto a road leading straight to Unnu and gained even greater speed.
Thirty minutes, and the sky continued to burn and the ground continued to shake. They passed through a minor urban area, and the car’s lights hinted at destruction, though it all went by too fast to be more than a blur.
Twenty minutes, and the rain of debris was actually letting up a bit, replaced by a more steady stream of incoming plasma, as the Alliance hammered away at entrenched Authority positions.
And this was it. The energies that had been prepared were finally drawn on. Up ahead an enormous purple-tinted bolt of lighting shot upwards. There was another, and another, flying about in the initial wild burst of power.
Saketa clenched her fists around the sword hilt as forces the others couldn’t feel filled the air. The tower was visible in brief flashes as more strands of power crackled up, until the sky filled with a hideous spiderweb of tendrils.
She lowered the window on her side and stuck her head out, but the wind hit her eyes too hard to glean any new information. As she retreated back inside there was a pulse of energy from the tower, and it found a target somewhere up in the sky. There was the distant but massive explosion of a large warship being destroyed by a single hit.
“Th-The… the s-shooting has stopped,” Vanaka stammered.
“He has paralysed their electrical systems,” Saketa said. “Ships not in orbit will start to come crashing down. The rest will simply be destroyed.”
There was another pulse. It passed from the tower and into the dreadful web, setting it aglow for an instant as the attack travelled far out of sight to strike at some other target.
“And this is planet-wide?” Fredrak asked. His face was under control, but he couldn’t quite keep stiffness out of his voice as he faced a situation his training had never accounted for.
“It is.”
There was another pulse. It was clear that the city was now right in front of them, but not a single electric light still shone. Not at the heart of the Exile’s operation.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
“How many…” Vanaka said. “What is the fire rate? How… how long can he keep this up? Can he just keep blasting?”
“You are trying to think in terms of numbers,” Saketa said. “I assume you all are. But what you are seeing is a matter of will, not math.”
There was another pulse, and somewhere another ship was destroyed.
“This car can’t go any faster,” Losan said stiffly.
“Neither can I,” Saketa said.
She simply couldn’t Shift. Not through all the disruption Avanon was causing. Even if Nara and Pietr made it to the planet in time to make a difference, they wouldn’t be able to make it to the surface.
“I have an idea!” Fredrak said, and took off his seatbelt. He clambered to the front, and Saketa did what she could to accommodate him.
“Open this!” he said, and tapped a part of the dashboard.
Saketa summoned strength, dug her fingers into the plastic, and tore the covering off. Fredrak took out a multitool of some sort and started working on the exposed wires.
“What are you doing?” Losan asked.
“Disengaging the engine’s built-in limits,” the agent replied. “If this works it will allow you to completely overclock it. I was taught this on different vehicles, but-”
He fell silent for a few seconds as he engrossed himself in the task. Then a bit of a shudder went through the vehicle, followed by a jolt of speed and an unpleasant straining noise.
“It will burn out in minutes, but minutes is what we have!”
He retreated back to his seat and put the belt on. Losan struggled with the wheel for a few seconds as the estimate dropped from seventeen to fourteen minutes, but regained control.
The audible strain continued, getting louder and more distressing by the second, and an alarm went off on the dashboard. Losan ignored it. His entire focus was on maintaining a steady course, and everyone knew better than to distract him, even for a moment, as the environment whizzed by them like a hail of gunfire.
Fourteen became thirteen, and then abruptly dropped from there to twelve, as the tortured engine picked up even more speed. The web of tendrils rippled wildly, and framed against the display was a large ship on its way to the ground. It came in at an angle from the east, and Saketa had just enough time to recognise it as a troop carrier before it smashed into Unnu’s outskirts. It didn’t explode or fully break apart; those things were built to account for crashes. Instead it slid along the ground for a few hundred metres, tearing through buildings and infrastructure as it went
Twelve, eleven, ten, and Saketa simply closed her eyes, seeking out one last moment of calm before reaching the heart of this storm. She touched Pietr’s pivasi. The ground shook, the car engine screamed in concert with the alarm, the corrupted energies swirled all around, and Saketa simply ignored it.
She opened her eyes as the car finally slowed and a sudden turn pulled her harshly to the left in her seat. They were in Unnu’s outskirts, on a broad main street. The crashed troop carrier was maybe three kilometres away, and it and the surrounding area were lit by an intense firefight. At least there was every sign of the city being largely abandoned.
“Almost here,” Losan said absently, still engrossed in his task. “Two minutes to that…”
Another turn brought them upon a pile of smoking debris, twice the height of the car.
“Three minutes,” Losan amended as he turned again. “Three minutes to that tower.”
The car was whining in true distress at this point, and Saketa doubted it even had much more than three minutes left.
“Ayna, you have your task,” Fredrak said, and seemed to be back in full control.
“I do. I, ah-”
“They would be fools not to have guards to protect their secret weapon,” the agent went on. “We must go in fighting.”
“Kio will be there, guarding his master,” Saketa said.
“But there may be soldiers as well,” Fredrak added, then held his breath a moment as Losan steered them into another hair-raising turn on Unnu’s deserted streets. “But we have no time for clever tactics.”
“Do you want him all to yourself as well?” Vanaka asked Saketa.
“I will spearhead that attack, at least,” she replied. “Just do not try to fight him by yourself.”
They drove along one of the few relatively tall buildings in Unnu. It blocked their view of the tower, but the first strands of the spiderweb could be seen above the roof, crackling and moving about.
“Good luck, you guys,” Ayna said, with high-voiced sincerity. “Come back alive, all of you.”
“I will give my life if it means striking the killing blow,” Saketa replied plainly.
The Dwyyk clearly didn’t know what to say. Saketa caught Vanaka’s reflection one more time, and saw how badly the girl wanted to protest. That insidious venom was still in Saketa’s system, tempting her to play things safe, because that was what Vanaka wanted.
But no. Saketa’s life did not matter, nor did Vanaka’s desires. Not in the face of what was happening.
They rounded the building, and there it was, up close: The Tower of Kanato. It was probably the tallest structure in Unnu, and currently its only source of light aside from flames. Tendrils emerged from the top of it, swirling up above and spreading out to form the centre of the web.
As Losan brought the dying car to a stop there was yet another pulse, and the immediate area was for a moment bathed in that horrid shade of purple. It illuminated the impressive stone wall that surrounded the tower grounds, as well as the arched entrance some distance away.