“In position,” Euk said over the comms. Forge hunkered down and lifted his forearm, then activated the cloak field on his vam. The field, primarily a jamming signal, gave them all an opportunity to lend their own inner power to the guidance of a device, giving that device a power it could otherwise never harness. And so, the photons viewed by others would pass through the Harbingers within the field so long as they limited their movements.
When Forge first presented the device to Harbinger Command, he had never felt more useful or satisfied. Many an op had been completed with ease that would otherwise have been a struggle.
“The kzin have a new slave race,” said Ishtar.
Forge, hidden in the basement sub-level under the capital building, could only see what was fed from the recon cameras he’d quickly placed and the other skullforts. So, he listened intently, monitoring his equipment to keep his family safe.
“Describe them to me,” said Cat.
“Small,” said Ishtar, “lanky, somewhere between a hominid and a weasel. Clothed. Five feet tall when upright.”
“What are they using them for?”.
Forge had always relied on Catalyst’s calm, reasoning voice. This day, he was searching for another rock to stand on.
“My guess is scouting,” said Ishtar, “but it’s hard to say. They keep dropping to all fours and crawling around. I can’t tell if they’re sniffing… Damn it. They’re… I think…”
“Come on, Corporal.”
“They’re tekes.”
Forge sighed. He checked his equipment nervously, guessing that the amount of time on their readouts was now effectively halved.
“What are they doing?” came Euk’s confused frustration.
“They’ve gotta be looking for us,” said Forge.
“We’ll see,” said Cat.
So Forge waited anxiously, feeling the cool mist of his sweat being evaporated by his skullfort’s climate control suite. He occupied the worried part of his mind by trying to analyze the nervous tinge to Cat’s voice. The calm would normally come naturally. But now it was forced.
Forge couldn’t stand not knowing if he could trust his timers, so he searched through his pack and found his three seeker drones. He set them on patrol mode, rigged to blow at maximum yield when signaled or fired upon, then reported the action to Catalyst before sending them.
“Do it,” said Cat.
The drones lifted noiselessly and floated through the nearest three air vents, opening their grates with their kinetic filaments.
Forge waited as calmly as he could, but he couldn’t help worrying about the tekes. They could blow the entire op, and they would return to Albion with nothing to show for their effort. With the reform Sensus was working towards, a failure like that would be devastating. The last thing Forge wanted to do was set the captain back. Especially with all the attention drawn by Solomon’s return.
Solomon. Forge sighed, checked his vam, then waited.
“They’re blind,” said Aster. “One passed under me, and I got a good scan. Their eyes are vestigial. They sense heat and movement and use a variant of sonar. Why’d you say they’re tekes, Ish?”
“I saw one move a crate without touching it.”
“Okay then.” Aster’s voice was almost whimsical. Forge felt a little eased.
This has to work, he thought. We need to bring something concrete back. In truth, he needed to see that there was something concrete to be brought back. Everything said by or about Solomon had seemed too sensational to be true, but the others were buying into it, especially Cap and Cat, so Forge was deeply hoping that Solomon had not simply gone insane from his proximity to the Verge.
“Well,” Aster had told Forge back on Albion, “he was telling the truth about Haleon’s forces invading.”
“He said ‘Ulro’, Aster. Ulro. I can buy an invasion, but I could never get behind Sol constantly making things religious.”
The presence of actual biological tekes would help, as would a fantastical explanation for the bizarre kzinti behavior.
“I see one now,” said Euk. “I’m not reading any tech. I think you’re right, Ish. These things are Bona fide tekes.”
“What did you see one do?” Cat asked.
“Blink through a wall.”
“Red, you copy?” said Cat.
Red Ten responded like a juvenile, with none of the underlying humility that made Revol’s manner excusable.
“Roger dodger,” he said.
Idiot.
Cat paused long enough to let Red know he wasn’t amused. “Are you seeing these creatures?”
“We are, and we can verify Ishtar’s hypothesis.”
“Copy. Forge, I’m in position.”
“On three,” Forge replied.
The sensor decoys activated, and Forge watched intently on his PIP as Cat snuck into the control room, silent and swift, and copied the kzinti hard drives onto the compressed storage device Forge had a hand in designing.
On his PIP, he saw through Cat’s eyes. The decoys had lost their luster, and already a kzinti soldier had come back to the control room. Cat ducked behind a desk, just a hair beyond the exo’s field of view, and sat completely motionless while the data copied over.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
Forge dared to draw the cloaking field away from his position and extend it over Cat, but it was a tricky maneuver, and he almost gave Cat away. The soldier who’d come back to the control room saw an alert on one of their monitors. Fortunately, Forge had finished moving the field by the time the exo checked their screen and all they saw was that there had been a blip. Still, the man was more alert, and looked directly at Cat twice.
C’mon, Forge thought. Whatever the kzin were doing, it was big. The device was copying and compressing copious amounts of data, and as fast as it worked it felt to Forge like it was moving intolerably slow.
Two more kzinti entered the room. Cat ducked a little further into the cloak field, moving like a shadow and keeping his eyes on his opponents. There was a loud noise in the hall outside and the soldier went to check. In the corner of Cat’s view, made small to fit inside Forge’s PIP, he saw the soldier drop to the ground. Before either of the two in the control room could activate an alarm, Red Ten moved in and threw a knife in each of their throats. He then ducked behind a bay of consoles and trained his rifle on the door he’d just come through.
C’mon, Cat! Forge could no longer keep his anxiety at bay. Unplug it and go with what you got.
Cat finally did stop the device and he and Red moved out of the room. Two kzin came around the far corner. They dropped one quickly, as he did not have his helmet on, but the other donned theirs quickly and ducked back around the corner. Forge dropped the cloak field and turned up the jamming signal to where it would delay any alarm activation. In the meantime, Cat and Red caught up to and dispatched the other kzin.
“We gotta move,” said Eukary. “I count twenty closing in on the control room.”
“Clear a path to extraction,” Cat commanded.
Forge activated every signal jammer he had, then detonated the drones in the hall where the largest patrol was moving. Two of them were injured, and the hall was turned to rubble, slowing their pace by more than half.
Red’s team then formed up and they were unstoppable, taking down the kzin with brutal efficiency. Forge began packing up his gear, then signaled Aster to be ready for him. The blow came from behind and sent him sprawling. As big as he was, he was smaller than the smallest kzin, and the one attacking him was the biggest he’d ever seen. He threw a fusion grenade. It stuck on the kzin’s pauldron, so it tore the top off a steel counter and held it between his shoulder and face. The grenade disintegrated the steel countertop and singed the kzinti’s mane.
It jumped with a roar, clearing the space between him and Forge in less than a second. Aster was in the room firing her weapon, but her bullets tinked harmlessly off the juggernaut’s thick plate armor. Forge drew his sidearm and fired at the beast’s head, but it donned its helm
Before the bullet could hit. He turned and swung at Forge again, but this time Forge ducked. He fired his revolver again, emptying the cylinder. The juggernaut kicked him as it pulled a long, broad-bladed sword from a sheath on his back. Aster kept circling and firing, gradually weakening the armor around the monster’s neck and visor.
Forge holstered his sidearm and unslung his heavy carbine. It whined as the four barrels began their spin, then it sprayed radiant bullets at a dizzying rate. He chewed a hole in the juggernaut’s breastplate, but the kzinti blocked the vulnerable spot with his sword and closed in again. Forge stepped back, blasting away the kzin’s armor while Aster did the same from behind, and soon their foe was exposed from the collar bone to the waist. What their weapons did to his unarmored torso was an act of butchery.
They left the sub level in a hurry, stopping only once to avoid another encounter. They grouped up with the third Harbinger team two levels up, but when they got to the lift where they were set to meet with Euk and Ish, a dozen or more kzinti ambushed them. Forge killed three with a blast of radiance, sending an orb that grew in size and heat as it flew. Aster thinned the left flank with her own light, sending an orb that shrunk as it flew, then ignited after imploding to a near quantum point. But the kzin were a tough species and wore the stuff of ship’s hulls for battle dress. They may as well have been battling with a half dozen tanks.
“We’re cut off,” Aster said over the comms, “two levels down.”
“We are coming to you,” said a human voice, slightly distorted by the environmental filter on their combat helmets.
“Who’s this?” Forge asked.
“Patal?” He heard Ish say.
“The same. Attack Group Five is at your service.”
“What are you doing here?” asked Cat, clearly upset.
“Disregarding your orders, sir, with the utmost respect.”
The time for explanations would come later. Attack Group Five, comprised of a mixed group of thirty men and women in state-of-the-art combat hardsuits, emerged from the lift behind the kzin and the exo force was caught between two fronts.
“Thank you,” Aster said when the smoke cleared.
Captain Patal bowed, then they were all quickly on their way upward, where several small patrols had engaged their team. Red Ten was leading his team up a catwalk where kzinti snipers were rushing like cockroaches into position. Red sent a shockwave of energy with an exaggerated arm movement. Two snipers went down, and his team all lashed out in suit, halving the number of opponents they faced before opening fire with their rifles.
Forge lobbed a scatter grenade in the middle of one patrol. One went down, one turned to fire at Forge and Aster, the other two kept advancing on Euk and Cat. Patal sent half his troop forward, and with the rest he formed a line in the middle of the cargo bay where they were to extract from the roof. The other half of his troop took up position behind a row of crates and opened fire with explosive ordinance, making a wall of smoke and flak between the teams and the kzinti.
“We don’t have room for you on our ships,” Cat shouted.
“We have our own extraction plan,” Patal replied.
Once he said that, Forge began moving rapidly towards their own point of egress, dispatching kzin as he moved. By the time they all rose to the roof of the warehouse, kzinti corpses were heaped on the floor.
“So much for the quiet extraction,” Forge said when they were strapped in and heading towards the stratosphere.
Speck artfully dodged the kzinti SAMs and an hour later they were completely clear of their opponent’s reach.
“They really didn’t want us to get away,” Euk said.
“They don’t want us to know what they were doing,” said Cat.
“Don’t be too mad at Captain Patal,” said Aster.
To that, Cat rolled his eyes. “It doesn’t matter how mad I get. He’ll hide behind the Quorum.”
“He saved us,” said Aster.
Cat shook his head.
“I’m with Aster,” said Forge. “We don’t follow orders blindly. If we see an opportunity to gain or regain a tactical advantage, we take it.”
“I wanted them gone,” said Cat. “I can’t plan ahead for resources I don’t know I have.” Then he sighed and shrugged. “But they did get us out of there. I hope they made it out as well.”
“Yeah,” said Forge, remembering the time he’d found evidence that confirmed the rumors of how kzinti treated their POWs. “They don’t deserve to be eaten alive by kzinti kittens.”
“You were in that control room for a while, LT,” said Euk.
Cat nodded. “Solomon wanted...”
Cat’s straps came loose, and he was flung upward into the roof of the jump ship. He came down hard, unconscious, his head bleeding. The rest were all instantly on their feet, but their attackers were too quick to see. They could hear them darting and slithering, but before they could lay hands on them, they’d slip away. Aster was the next to be slammed into a bulkhead and knocked out. Euk back up to Forge and they stood facing away from each other, knives out and ready. Forge heard Euk growl angrily as she was flung upward. It wasn’t enough to knock her unconscious, so she was thrust into the floor just as hard. That gave time for Forge to throw his knife into the haunch of one of the tekes. But there were two others. They lifted him in the air, and he screamed as he felt his ribs separating,
The tekes had reared to their full height, stretching out their spindly bodies. Their vestigial eyes, large, vacuous sacs, glowed red. They began a chant that came in phlegmy whispers from deep inside their chests, heaving with their breath and spraying spittle on the ground. With each chant Forge’s skeleton came a little looser. The teke he’d injured howled and flailed on the ground. It slid backward, then turned sharply and then it quivered in a pool of its own milk white blood. The other two turned and Forge fell on the ground. A distortion clouded around the tekes and their death screams were quick.
Solomon is sacred, said the Shadow Child.