The Dead Fields, Sun-Side Plains
Krandermore, Survivor’s Refuge
4453.2.25 Interstellar
Brago strode along the cleared path between the aberrations with his radioman to his right and the other aspirants scattered among the main unit. Another stream of tracers flew off into the mists, answered by the morant’s furious bellows.
This battle was a disaster. Brago hadn’t had military training before he became an aspirant and a champion. He’d been an honest dockworker, like his family had been for generations, not noble born enough for non-com or officer training and not desperate enough to become cannon fodder. Since then, the Cult had put him through several tactical courses—proper Federal Fleet training from before the Second Interstellar War—and he could tell at a glance that the Pugarian mercenaries they’d hired weren’t worth the cost of the bullets to shoot them.
“They’re making a hash of it,” the Motragi sniper said.
Brago nodded. He connected to the unit leaders through his radioman’s back-mounted unit and brought the first and second platoons back into good order. “How many have we lost?”
“Sixty-four,” the Pugarian trapper said, ticking off her mental abacus. “Three to friendly fire, five to vehicle mounted turrets, fifteen to that creature, twenty-four to aberrations, and an even dozen to those four Verazlan rangers. It’s a shame the proto-corp we bought our mercenaries from was able to find out enough about the Combine to think of death premiums without doing more to acquire their martial skills.”
“You get what you pay for,” the cold-sider said, firing off another stream at the now wounded and retreating morant.
“No, it’s more than that,” Brago said, pulling up his map. It was a digital representation of the various squads’ reports, carefully kept up to date by a four-specialist intelligence team that had cost them three times the standard rate and was more than worth it. “It’s like they know where we are.”
“The arbitration committee may have given them a real-time feed,” Wayfinder Tiersen said, and Brago did his best not to lash out this close to victory.
Again, his masters within the Cult had thought they knew better than him and sent machines to do a man’s job.
Again, it was his team who had to clean up for their failures.
There had been no need to use the combat drones. If Invarian and his pet Verazlans had made it through the mined road, a secondary blocking position had been ready to finish them off. Instead, they’d had to run to catch up to the main force because Wayfinder Tiersen and Architect Donnika couldn’t keep their hands out of the pot.
“Sir, we’ve got a problem,” one of his reconnaissance teams reported.
A few minutes later, after following the carefully flagged route around the aberrations, Brago saw he had once again been thwarted. It was an old but intact polysteel blast door, as thick as a combat ship’s armor plating. It had recently been opened from the looks of it, but it was now sealed and locked down. “Did you know about this?” he asked Tiersen.
The Wayfinder looked paler and more robotic than he usually did. “I need to report this to the architect. They should not have been able to enter this facility. It was sealed for a reason!”
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All Brago heard was that he had yet again been let down by his minder’s incompetence.
The truth was, though, it didn’t matter to him. He knew the Motragi and the Pugarian on his team were devout, but Brago’s concern was for the future of his family and his beloved daughter. As long as he followed the Cult’s orders, they were bound to look out for his interests, and while it would have been good to kill Koni Atl-Verazlan before she could have the remaining members of the family executed, she would not be able to render judgment if she didn’t finish the race.
He still had time to fix things, and if the syncopated rhythm of fighting for the Cult and sleeping in cryo had taught him anything, it was that true change happened over time—sometimes generations.
“Honored Champion,” the other Verazlan aspirant on the team said over a private comm. “I have finished interrogating the ranger. He endured honorably and refused to tell us anything about Invarian or their plans.”
“Don’t waste my time with the obvious,” Brago said as if a Verazlan cracking under torture were even a possible outcome. “What about the situation in Veraz.”
“He confirmed what Tiersen told us, that your daughter staged a coup against Atl-Verazlan and failed,” the Verazlan aspirant said, and Brago shuddered. A Verazlan man or woman was nothing without the example of their ancestors at their backs, and the idea of striking against one’s own clan, even through marriage, was something Brago failed to comprehend. How had his poor Citlal grown up to break such a taboo? “One thing struck me as odd, though.”
“What?”
“He told me that Koni Atl-Verazlan actually stopped the execution, not because she wished to witness it, but because she was unsure of the justice of the verdict. It is likely that if we had killed her here and word had gotten back to Veraz, the sentence would have been immediately carried out by the first judge to whom the case was passed.”
Brago was not a cerebral man or an academic. He despised politics and double-talk, but he was clever, and he was fast. In the time it took him to lock eyes with Wayfinder Tiersen, he realized the cultist had lied to him to ensure he wouldn’t hesitate when Koni and her team were in his sights.
Brago rarely hesitated. He wound up like a piston and push kicked Tiersen into the nearest flagged aberration, transmission antenna half-unspooled and flailing as Tiersen screeched and his body expanded, tumors growing as fast as balloons and rejecting the mechanical implants the cultist had installed in himself. Two of the larger blisters popped, and the wayfinder’s drawn-out scream became a muffled gurgle right before he exploded, splashing the ground with blood and bile that immediately started to change colors and writhe with new life.
“That is going to complicate things,” the other Verazlan said.
“I think things just became a whole lot simpler,” Brago said. “Get me the architect on a dedicated channel. We’re done with games. It’s time we renegotiate our agreement.”
***
Janus rested his hand on the inner face of the blast door and waited. He expected to feel it shudder and heat at any moment, but the ancient material whose composition and creation were lost to them remained blessedly still.
“They can’t get through that,” Ryler said tiredly. “Even if the arbitration committee gave them permission, they would need at least plasma weapons or a ship-powered particle beam to cut through it.”
“And if the committee didn’t give them permission?” Janus asked.
“This might be one instance in which even the egalitarians would have them bombed from space,” Ryler said with a grin.
Janus wasn’t as celebratory. He’d appreciated Ryler steering them during their flight from the compartmentalists—it had saved him from hesitating and allowing their enemies to gain on them. Now, inside an ancient facility that Ryler had only been able to access because of their predicament, Janus was starting to wonder if they hadn’t been had.
“What is this place?” Lira asked.
“It’s an old research outpost put here to study aberrations as a possible cure for the plague.”
“The plague?” Janus said, in spite of his misgivings. “That must make it—”
“Thousands of years old,” Ryler said with enthusiasm. “There is data here that even the Cult doesn’t have access to and equipment that will put anything the compartmentalists could throw at us to shame.”
“Hate to break it to you, mate,” Mick said, rapping the polysteel door with his knuckles. “But a fat load of good it’s going to do us if we’re stuck in here.”
There was no deterring Ryler, though. Janus hadn’t seen his friend this excited in a long time. “That’s the beauty of it, though. The scientist who ran this lab didn’t want to have to trek through the Dead Fields to conduct her studies, so she had a mass conveyance system built to move from one location to another.”
“So you can get us out of here?” Mick asked.
Ryler put his arm around Mick’s shoulders, and the Hunter didn’t stop him. “Faster than you can say magnetic-levitation train.”