“We are the Golothan Front of the Guard Imperium!” the voice boomed from the Mark IV’s main hold. It was Sergeant Dannik. He was in fresh form, voice like a club. He addressed his troops. “We move fast! Our meaning is swift! Our resolve, unbreakable!”
Lieutenant Benjar Dash, Mark IV pilot in the Red Guard fliers’s corp, could see the battle rage through the forward viewport way in the distance. Even the dark sky pasted behind the darker landscape couldn’t hide the world-sized scorching that had reworked the battle grounds. Everything was busted by splatter bombing, plasma ripping and concussion blasting.
Lights descended from space in column formation. The Underworld Cabal had arrived at Malum and their endless forces were lowering to the surface. He could see them from here, still fifteen kilometers out. Rocket and plasma munitions flared distantly.
The head of the spear.
And now the sergeant barked their war machine platitudes to his marching dead. What a robot. They were all robots, programmed to go here, stop there, shoot this, blow that up. Dash just shook his head pitifully. It was madness. Shear insanity. But it wasn’t the sergeant’s fault. Two suns. Thirty planets. All at war. A thousand years. Maybe more. How could a sergeant in the Imperium act any other way? It was his job. More than that, it was his life.
But not for Benjar Dash. He’d seen enough. A lifetime of blood had earned him a broader perspective. He wanted out.
He. Wanted. Out.
“Our mission is right, soldiers! It is our will that will be applied today!”
Dash shook his head subtly to himself as he guided the transport craft across the tiny world at speed. Had to stay frosty. There were lives in his hands, like it or not. Their approach had to be fast. Had to be immediate. Dropping reinforcements off in the middle of a combat action was dangerous. Especially on Malum. This moon wasn’t meant for the living. There was no life here, only death.
“We kill everything! I don’t care if it’s one of them Malybrian greenies, Omicron slum rats, pretty little Paxxians or otherwise. If it’s one of them Underworld Cabal types, we shoot to kill! We leave none alive!”
Dash’s trajectory sensors displayed the landscape as 3-D topographical mapping. It flew by below at two hundred feet. He was the third vessel. A dozen others surrounded him in sigma nu formation. Separation twenty meters. Thirteen Y-Tac Mark IVs carrying five hundred and twenty men and women straight into Ae’ahm hell. How many would return was anyone’s guess. The craft bucked independently against the heavy turbulence. Soon, the anti-vessel flak guns would start up. Then things would get real fun.
“We are the fist of Ae’ahm! In his name, we will succeed! We—are the Imperium!”
The troops responded in booming unison, “Ae—AHM!”
“Oh hells,” Dash murmured, eyes growing. Here they came. Flak blasts. He could see them through the windshield. They were on approach—tiny points of plasma light arcing into the sky. Ae’ahm wasn’t going to help with that. He yelled back to the troops, “Incoming! Grav in!”
Sergeant Dannik met him at the cockpit staring through the windshield. The plasma flak multiplied, filling the view and coming at them. A maniacal grin etched across his face. That was the battle-roids talking. “It begins,” he said.
“Sergeant, grav in!” Dash yelled through gritted teeth.
“I don’t grav in for Cabal scum, el-tee!”
BOOM!
The craft bucked like mad, jarred by one eruption then another. Dannik was thrown one way completely of his feet, smashed the wall and bounced back the opposite direction giggling with a mad soldier’s glee the whole time. The sky before them ripped apart. The craft dipped, rolled, banged around.
A voice screamed over the comm, its signal breaking up, “Number two! We’re hit, we’re hit! Oh gods …”
Dash jerked a look to the right. Number Two blew up smearing the sky with stark streamers of flame and charred debris. That was Lieutenant Wentra. He’d known the man for a year. Gone. Dead in the sky with forty troops.
Another flak burst pounded their flight. The lead vessel began to trammel losing big, flaring chunks of its fuselage and peppering Dash’s Mark IV. His windshield showed a long crack, a sever in the dura-glass. An alarm pitched. Dash glanced at the sensor array. Another craft blinked out. Then another. Bi-gods. Four down!
“We’ll never make it through this!” he sneered slapping the course dis-engage nob and throttling forward. The craft peeled to the left dodging a cluster of flak bursts, each jamming their concussion blasts into the ship. “Prep for G’s, men!” Dash yelled into the main hold. He slammed a fist into the gimbal thruster ignition control and felt a serious bang shudder across his fuselage. Everything shot to the rear of the craft as its momentum jerked forward.
More flak explosions … everywhere. Fields of it.
“Oh yeah?” Dash sneered and yanked the flight control to his chest. The vessel nosed into a ninety-degree skyward climb leaving a contrail of billowing smoke from a rip in the engineering. He was getting these men away from this field of erupting flak bursts. They were going to reach their LZ alive—in one piece or not.
The craft hit four thousand feet altitude in seconds dropping the whole world below, then slowed to a labored halt, engines sputtering, and began to descend, falling. Everything shifted. Gravity changed. The troops felt the plummet deepen. A few began screaming.
Dash primed the booster’s manual control jerking frantically on the handle. It hitched, got stuck. He tried again. Wouldn’t budge. He gasped, “Bad. Very bad.” This sputtering booster was going to get them all killed, atomized in a nose dive.
Three thousand feet.
Roaring out, he lifted his foot and slammed the control. The housing wrenched away exposing the stuck gear.
Two thousand feet.
He kicked it again. It loosened, so he reached down and yanked on the primer lever one last good shot.
One thousand feet.
The thruster boomed knocking him back into the chair. It stabilized. He looked up through urgent eyes. They still dove toward the ground.
Five hundred feet.
He wrenched back on the flight control. They leveled, but there was zero lift. They were still going to crash belly first into lunar rock at terminal velocity. Dash punched the mag-drive at wide open.
One hundred feet.
The big, underside mag discs bawled out loud and immediate locking the craft against the moon’s natural polarity as they slammed to a stop thirty feet over the surface. A huge wash of sand erupted into a massive circumference a thousand feet wide. The soldiers groaned out, their spines compressing.
Then the mag discs cut out, and the ship dropped straight down from a stand still.
It smashed into the ground flat, throwing rubble in all directions. It settled in a steaming pile of junk with bits and pieces falling off of it. Dash exhaled a breath he’d been holding and slumped back in the pilot chair blinking, reeling. “Alive,” he murmured. “We’re alive.”
Dannik picked himself off the floor still grinning and rubbing his elbow. He spit a streamer of blood from his lip and said with great celebration, “The first blood of the day, boys and girls! Grab your noxide gear and let’s haul narse!”
Dash heard a storm of boots hit the drop ramp, and within seconds all was quiet, save the thrumming of his gimbal boosters in idol. It was a miracle they still worked. A hand pounded him on the shoulder. He jerked with a start. “Nice piloting, flyboy!” Dannik yelled through his noxide mask. “You gonna be able to get this hunk’a junk back to operations?”
Dash glanced across his controls. Everything was nominal, or at least minimal, but still operable. He nodded. “Yeah, should be fine.”
“Too bad!” the sergeant barked. “No Ae’ahm hell for you today, sir!” He burst into laughter holding his combat pulsor rifle high and charged down the ramp after his men. “Let’s go you magnificent bastards! Let’s go, move move move!”
Dash still caught his breath. He looked out at the LZ. Distantly, a group of Imperium tanks were spread across a vast ridge spitting hot plasma rounds across a lunar flatland. Columns of men stormed across the bleak lunar tundra as returning rockets streaked overhead. Blaster fire lit the grounds streaming en mass through both directions. The Underworld Cabal was way out over the horizon coming this way, and the two armies were moving to engage. The whole world was at war. It was going to be huge, lots of carnage. Ripe for guys like Sergeant Dannik.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Above, a Mark IV came wobbling to the ground spitting flame and smoke. It was one of Dash’s group. They’d made it through, but the damage looked severe. It shuddered to the ground with its engines dying as soldiers started fanning out on the charge. A second Mark IV scored with flak bursts emerged from behind. It pivoted around and landed, steaming from its hull. That was it. That was all that made it through the field of flak. Three quarters of their flight group—all dead.
Dash sighed deeply, shaking his head. This was no way to win a war, no way to fight one. He looked into his palm. He held a small silver device. An auto-key. He still couldn’t believe it. What luck. He’d never even heard of this happening to anyone. But here it was. An auto-key sitting right here in his hand. This was his key to freedom, etched with the marking—RX-111. This was how he would get the hells out of this conflict. Criminal. Deserter. He didn’t care. He’d transported enough men to their deaths for the aimless campaigning of an eternal war. And he’d shed enough blood. Planet after planet. Moon after moon. He was done. Decision made. This had been his last mission, and he’d just completed it. It was time for him to run.
With a sudden new mission emerging in his eyes, he shoved the auto-key into a pants pocket and muttered, “I’m getting the hells off this rock.”
He punched the mag levs making the discs glow. The Mark IV lifted, creaking and groaning. The gimbals were loosey goosey. But they’d do. All he needed to do was get back to operations. At three hundred feet altitude he pivoted around, nosing back toward home base thirty tiny kilometers away. He could smell freedom. Before he could hit the forward thrusters …
A whine emitted loud and sharp. It stopped his blood as he looked into the overhead display.
Incoming tacticals.
Rockets!
The Cabal had spotted him, probably through some long-range targeting computer. Troop transports were nice, fat, slow-moving targets. And they tended to bring reinforcements to any given battle. Mark IVs were sitting ducks.
He groaned, desperately pitching the thrusters into a yaw. One rocket seared by just beneath his starboard belly. A miss! He yanked the lever to dip oppositely so, but …
Too late!
The second rocket slammed into the port outrigger. The jolt knocked the entire vessel into a skew as the left side of the hold seared away, steel ripping off the craft. Night sky suddenly filled the compartment with a rush of wind, and Dash’s ship began to spin. Klaxons wailed. Buzzers sang the song of panic. The sky outside went into a dizzying blur. He fought against his own flight not knowing what sudden new trajectory he’d taken on. The world below passed in a rush. He was shooting off in the wrong direction.
The colliding armies went by below him, probably watching him spin out of control like a blaster rocket across the sky. Next, he was beyond them shooting over a long lunar plane, then a low mountain ridge and off toward some dark no man’s land. With hands fighting the control stick, the ship leveled out. He kicked the throttle lever at his feet. No use. It was locked down, damaged in the blast. He was picking up speed. And somehow, he was gaining altitude. He gritted his teeth knowing it wouldn’t last. He’d fall out of the sky like a rock at any minute—become stranded only gods-know-where.
And then something horrible stopped him cold. He was over the crater yards—a fluctuating landscape of deep bowls and razor-sharp crests. Thousands lay dead down there. Hundreds of thousands. The Dark was here. It was everywhere.
Not the Dark …
And then everything stopped. Power died completely. The starboard booster nacelle went silent. His controls flickered off. Everything went black. The sound of rushing wind changed as he felt himself pitch helplessly earthward.
“Oh, no …” he moaned. “Oh, no …”
He wheeled himself into the copilot’s seat, punched the small cargo box and floundered for the noxide rig. There was a click and one last beep. He knew what that meant. Cockpit ejection. Dash heard himself scream as he threw himself back into the pilot seat and a boom ignited all around him. The pod separated from the cargo hold and was thrown sky high. The force pinned him down as the cargo section tumbled away, started falling empty and broken toward the surface. He couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe under the inertia. Then everything released slowly as the ejection pod slid through its arc in the sky and began to fall. Suddenly—
WOOSH!
A pair of parachutes popped out, caught the sky, yanked him violently to a stop. Dash tumbled forward into the windshield and it shattered. Screaming, he slid out onto the nose of the craft clawing for a hold. Found one! But the noxide mask flittered away into the night, disappeared. His feet dangled high over the land as the whole thing continued gliding to the ground. He looked down. The dark world down there loomed up at him—a jagged, craterous vision of Ae’ahm hell.
A far distant flash of bright, orange light snagged his attention. He looked over—a plasma blast. Someone took a shot at him. It seared a path over his head, snapped the lines to parachute one and sent the ejection pod into a canted angle. The chute detached and furled away, caught on the high wind. With one chute gone, Dash’s plummet picked up speed. He looked down. He was about to get deposited on the downward slope of a crater bowl, hard.
Another flash—another plasma shot. He groaned not waiting for the strike, and let go. He slid from the pod’s nose and out into completely negative space. His final plummet began. The plasma shot came railing in igniting the pod into a ball of flame. He felt the heat, sensed the energy burst all around him. He screamed as the ceiling of fire expanded over his head. Wind rushed in his ears. He looked down in his freefall wide-eyed, terror beyond his reach. The ground came at him at increasing velocity—“ayeeehawww.”
He smashed down into loose, knee-high lunar soil that exploded under his impact. The decline was severe. He Tumbled forward head over heals crashing, banging, summersaulting down the hill, faster, faster, perfectly out of control until—“Umph!”—he jarred to a stop.
Dash groaned half relieved, half terrified. He was alive, but he was alone. On Malum, that meant one thing: death.
He turned over to inspect his surroundings. Something had broken his barrel roll, something vaguely cushiony. He jerked back, everything running cold like ice in his veins. A body. An Imperium soldier by the uniform, a low-ranking noncommissioned officer, much like himself. It had been mutilated by munitions fire. He squinted at the wounds. They weren’t overly fresh. This body had been here for days, but they were still clear enough to analyze, even at a glance. There was no scorching on these wounds. These were rips, not holes. This person hadn’t been killed by munitions.
A gasp rose from him—a shot of horror in the night.
This was the Dark.
This person had been torn apart by … others.
A sound snagged his attention away. It was loud, encumbering. He looked up. The remaining fuselage of his ejection pod hurled down from the sky completing its plummet. Flames rimmed its cylindrical body eating its outer shell, the remaining parachute now a long whipping tail of fire. It slammed down on the earthy decline sending geysers of soft dirt into the sky and began tumbling toward the crater.
Dash’s eyes went like moons and he grunted something like, “Whoa whoa whoa whoa!”
It hurled down the hill directly toward him, a few tons of burning metal and alloy bellowing painfully as it clamored and banged toward the pit. He got up and struggled over the loose ground. There was no traction, just large, cushiony obstacles that tripped him, slowed him down. He couldn’t get very far very fast, so he shot a glance over his shoulder. That big flaming steamroller continued toward him, getting closer. Determination penetrated him like a spear and he forced himself upright, stepping light and fast, dislodging the ground beneath him but making headway. He looked down hunting for solid footing and couldn’t believe what he saw.
Dead bodies. They were everywhere. An entire landscape of them. Hundreds. Thousands. Hands reaching laxly up at him. Arms at canted angles. Faces pallid and impassive. He stepped on them, ran over them, bowled them out of the way.
In his scurry, he shot a glance to the left, the right, back forward. All around him was the crater’s wall standing black in the night. He was in the bowl filled with the dead. He knew this place. The crater yards. He’d heard about it in strategy groups. Scuttlebutt was thick with tales of the Dark seeping up from the deep crater impacts, oozing invisibly up between decaying bodies and filling the craters with its odorless brain toxin.
Not only that, the entire place was spotted with auto-sentry plasma sniper cannons set on tripods eternally surveying the land. They hunted for motion, detecting the slightest hint of survivors with their light array scopes and air micro current detectors. A sneeze, a burp, a fart in the air was enough to grab the attention of their high density targeting features. Anyone who entered the bowl … was dead meat.
And here he was stumbling across the dead like a madman.
He was in trouble. Big trouble.
The fuselage slammed to a stop at the bottom of the decline fifty feet behind as its reserve oxygen tanks ruptured. The explosion was big. The impact blast lifted Dash off his feet and hurled him through the air. He was easily ten feet above the surface at thirty kilometers an hour when the first auto-sentry fired at him. It had spotted him, swiveled around to target him. The bolt came from the east a thousand feet away, zipping by below him. A miss. His flight deteriorated, and he came down with a bounce, slamming between bodies and dislodging them from their forever sleep. Now fully amongst them, he tumbled to a stop laying prone, flat on his belly, cheek in the thick soil. The dead were everywhere.
His impulses screamed …
Get up and run!
But his senses screamed …
No, stay down!
He clenched up.
Don’t move!
He gasped for air.
Don’t breathe!
He mentally checked himself for injury.
Don’t look!
Dash slammed his eyes shut waiting for another sniper shot, hoping beyond hope it wouldn’t come.
Just lay still. Collect yourself. Think.
He settled into position feeling his body slowly go lax. He was at rest, but he knew the score. There was no escaping this field of doom. A move, a twitch—and zap! He couldn’t get up, couldn’t run. There was no outrunning an auto-sentry. But the longer he stayed here, the more the noxide toxins would invade his body, infest his mind, turn him … Dark.
Sudden anguish gripped him and the sickening knowledge that he’d come so close to freedom broke him down, tore him silently to pieces. So close. One last jaunt back to Forward Ops was all he had had left. Then, it would’ve been taking the RX-111 and being gone. Simply gone.
And now this. Death all around. Death just in front. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do.
He wanted to scream and roar and pound his fist into the mud. But he couldn’t. Not yet. So instead, he exhaled … and opened his eyes.
They stared back at him. Not two feet away. Big glistening eyeballs looking at him through a mottled mask of gray mud. They just looked at him dead as yesterday, stared right through him. A soldier of the Cabal, gray, soiled hair crisscrossing its face. One of the nameless goners. Those eyes reminded him of his own fate—just another body piled among so many others without motion, jammed into an endless grave, open to the skies. This was his death bed. This was where he would join the rest of them in a tragic, fitful end.
As those dull, sow’s eyes stared back at him, a knot grew in his gut. They were the last real things in his life, forever.