Supreme Leader of Anstractor: A Sci-Fantasy Space Adventure (The New Phase Book 3) (19 page)

Yuth lifted him up and exited the bridge, stopping to ask a pallid soldier if he knew the direction of the infirmary. The man led him away as Connie stared on and Phimanila screamed at her to rise to the occasion. Another rocket hit the
Rendron
and the shields dipped low. All of the crew turned around to look at Connie who stood like a statue, unmoving and unaffected by the shouts and words of disappointment that were coming from them all.

This was when Phimanila Dawn picked up the captain’s comm and took her position in the center. “Is the tracer down yet?” she asked, and the weapons officer replied affirmatively. She seemed to consider what to do next but she was at a loss so she stood there, thinking. Multiple battles with Rend had taught her a trick or two, but she was intimidated by the
Serylusk
’s size. “Hey, Mayvon, you there?” she said finally.

“Yeah, we’re awaiting your orders, Phim,” a gruff voice replied.

“Okay, I want you to prime a vacu—”

“NO,” Connie said as she walked over to Phimanila. “A vacuum bomb on that class of ship would be a waste of our munitions at this time. I’m sorry I froze. It took some time to get my senses, but I will take the bridge now, Phimanila. You may return to the helm.”

Phimanila reluctantly gave up the comm and saluted lazily, then jogged back to her seat and plopped down inside of her chair. She commandeered the controls and then turned to regard Connie, who had clipped the comm to her lapel and stood with her legs apart and her hands clasped in the center of her back, just like Rend MEC.

“Miss Dawn, I want you to pull away from the
Serylusk
. Do it at a moderate speed so that it thinks it needs to chase. Once the main thrusters are powered up on that thing, I want you to deploy our fighters and lock a tracer on their hangar door.”

“Aye aye, Captain,” Phimanila said with enthusiasm and pride in her voice. She sent out the instructions and listened for more as Connie spat out orders to every level of the ship.

Soon the space between the two ships were dotted with fighters, tearing each other apart in a series of dogfights. Connie called for precision gunners to fry their FTL while she used the tracer to kill the last of their shields.
Rendron
was in bad shape, taking damage on an enormous scale, but Constance ITO stuck to her offensive and forced the
Serylusk
to swap knockout blows.

When the tracer finally collapsed the hangar doors, the Geralos fighter pilots were left stranded. The captain of the
Serylusk
saw that the tides were turning and began to slowly exit the battle.

“It’s using old Ion technology to take off running,” Connie said. “It has no FTL capability to get away free. Check its trajectory and outline the possible destinations. This will be a long chase and I don’t want reinforcements to arrive before she dies.”

The
Rendron
stayed on the bow of the injured
Serylusk
and Connie ordered the engineers to focus on the ship’s repairs. She knew that the Geralos would be doing the same, but she hoped they would be ready before the
Serylusk
could repair itself. “Deploy our fighters, diamond formation. I want them to shoot plasma missiles at the thrusters. There’s a crack in the hull near where the boosters sit and we can exploit it with enough firepower.”

The Aces of the
Rendron
shot out of the ship and put missile after missile on the
Serylusk
thrusters. Orange light seeped from the widening crack, and before long an explosion occurred that stopped its momentum. The
Serylusk
lay dormant in front of them. Connie called for a tracer to hit the thrusters again and another explosion sent parts of the ship floating off into space.

One fighter flew into the gaping hole that resulted, and before long another explosion bore another hole in her hull. More fighters did the same while the
Rendron
kept firing and soon the Geralos shield was completely out of commission. Connie called the fighters back and sent out a recon team in an armored cruiser transport. The large ship entered the
Serylusk
and deployed these men to take the ship and kill any of the survivors.

Several hours passed while Connie stayed alert, giving them instructions when they asked for it. When she became exhausted, she gave up the bridge and she and Phimanila went to see how the old captain was doing.

“You stepped up beautifully,” Cilas ‘Rend’ MEC whispered as he clasped Connie’s hand in his own. Behind her stood Yuth with his arm around Phimanila’s shoulders, her face puffy from crying as she kept her eyes downcast.

“Just holding the bridge for you, Captain, until you came back.”

“There’s no coming back now, Connie, just time for goodbyes. Listen, the doctor on Meluvia told me that I had another year. It’s been two, and a man can only fight against nature for so long. I’m damn proud of you, kid. You—you remind me—you remind me of Hellgate. She was one hell of a pilot.”

Connie leaned forward and put her head on his chest to cry, and Cilas stroked her hair as he stared up at the silver overhead. “How’d we do, kid? Are the lizards running?” He looked over at Phimanila for the answer.

“Complete annihilation, Captain,” Phimanila said proudly. “Connie found a vulnerability after our initial attack and we cracked it open and sent the cleaners inside.”

“This is huge,” Rend said, coughing. “Maker, we can actually win.” A distant look came to his eyes as he shook his head with amazement. “If the Alliance can take their planet, the lizards are finished.
Serylusk
was the only thing that we feared up here.

“Listen, Rend,” Yuth spoke up. “I’d like to get you back to Louine. The medical knowledge is a lot more advanced than what you dealt with on Meluvia. Allow me to get you a second opinion, and help you to live long enough to see Anstractor free.”

“When you put it like that, my Louine friend, how the hell can I say no? Plus Louine is the only planet that I haven’t seen up close.” He turned his head on his pillow to face the bulkhead.

“He’s in pain,” Connie said. “The
Serylusk
is crippled and pretty soon it should be completely disabled from the inside. We can salvage her parts in a few days, so there’s time to see what we can do to help him.”

Yuth said, “I need to get to my commander on Geral, and it sounds like
Rendron
will be in this area of space for a while. Could I borrow a cruiser to jump there and meet Rafian? If anything happens to it, the Phasers will replace and repay you and the
Rendron
for the trouble.”

“If something happens to the cruiser, wouldn’t that mean that something would have happened to you?” Connie countered. Her eyebrows furrowed and her mouth tightened into a thin red line.

Phimanila walked over with a damp sponge and sat in front of Rend, where she dabbed him gently on his forehead. “Maybe you two ought to discuss this outside. Captain is in pain and these things will only worry him since he isn’t able to be involved. My services are less needed than yours, Connie, so I’ll stay and look after Captain Rend. Yuth, it was a pleasure to meet you. I would love to buy you a drink as soon as everything is back to normal.”

Yuth said, “I would love that, Phimanila. From what Connie has told me, we two share a lot in common. Please, take care of him and keep him with us. I will have several Louine doctors flown here in order to get him the care that he needs.”

Connie walked over and took Cilas’s hand, then lifted it up and kissed his palm. As she stood up her eyes met Phimanila’s and what she saw there was strength and understanding. She wanted to thank her, to hug her close and kiss her to let her know that nothing had changed between the two of them. But Phimanila Dawn didn’t need to hear it, and this was communicated in that split second when their eyes had met.

“Let’s go find you a cruiser, Yuth. I doubt that you will allow anything to happen to it. If something does, let me know immediately, please, and if you need our help, don’t hesitate to ask for it.”

O
VER TEN THOUSAND troops waded through the tall waters of the Gariland bog, beneath the cover of night. Ahead of them at a mile was Ari Groatrath and his personal guard, who stayed huddled close to him as his hovercraft moved along. For many miles no-one was aware of their presence. They had fought their way through a camp of Casanians and slipped out of the capital without the knowledge of the Geralos military.

All calls that were sent to Ari had gone unanswered. His hackers made up news about the decimation of the Crak-Ti Corps and that had slowed the calls from his superiors since they now assumed that he was dead. He wanted nothing to do with the Geralos command. They were old men stuck in their ways and this was how the rest of the galaxy had gotten the drop on them. But Ari wasn’t old and he had come by way of a secret relic that the Phasers still believed was theirs alone.

He smiled wickedly as he leaned against the bow of the vessel. He could smell the acrid stench of the red ocean, and he knew that soon they would be at the coast. He reached up and touched his wife’s crystal absentmindedly. He was still trying to figure out a plan for its use, but he wanted it to be an impactful feat, whatever it was – something big enough to decimate the Phasers.

“Minister, there is a camp already set up near our area of the beach,” a scratchy voice reported through his comm. He cursed and began pacing, considering his choices on the manner.

“Come on back and prepare for a fight. We need that property more than the worthless grunts they have there. What are they going to do when the bulk of the Alliance army hits that shore? Fire at them with concerted plasma fire? We’d lose Geral by the end of the day. That is Crak-Ti land, and we are all that stands for hope of the Geralese people.”

“But, sir, they are Geralos just like we are,” the voice said sadly.

“This is war, and we are no longer a part of the formalized Geralos military.” He hung up the comm and unclipped his pistol, motioning for the driver to settle the hovercraft down behind a tuft of trees. When she did, he hopped down into the knee-high water.

The fifteen men and women that comprised his personal guard fanned out on all sides and began to march through the tall, spiky reeds. Ari saw lights in the distance and knew that it was the camp. A guilty urge to make an alternate plan washed over him but he quickly shrugged it off. “Take out the scouts and guards,” he ordered several Geralos, then resumed his march, glancing back periodically to see if the rest had caught up to them.

After a time the troops caught up and Ari waited for his recon scouts to report that the guards had been removed from the perimeter. By the time they got back to him the first light of day was peeking through the leaves, and his patience had gone through several layers before arriving at acceptance. His men were tired and fatigued, but they had risked the march since it had been assumed that they would be asleep in the camp by the time dawn reared its beautiful head.

They waded into the thick clump of trees and then crept through the mud, emerging from the dense forestry to the stretch of black sand that ran for several hundred yards before it met the sea. There were about 4,000 camps in front of them. Ari’s Crak-Ti activated fusion tubes and threw them at the canvas to set the place ablaze. In less than a few seconds the quiet march on to the beach had turned into a full on melee with Geralos on Geralos in a bloody struggle. It would be looked back on as the most disgraceful act of treason despite Ari’s intentions of saving the planet.

Las-swords clashed against las-swords and guns tore into freshly roused bodies. They fought and murdered one another in the span of hours, and by the time it was finished, the black shores gleamed with a sickening dark-red color.

Ari Groatrath’s troops, tired, wet, and fatigued, marched beyond the slaughter to set up camp as far away from it as they could. The mood was somber, and a few of his men vomited audibly, but no-one dared question their minister.

That night they slept restlessly. Not every Geralos was as hardened as Ari, so sleep came hard, coupled with guilt. They had massacred their own people and were now being made to camp on the bloodied rocks where their brothers and sisters fell. There was something that went beyond evil with what they had done, and everyone but Ari felt the tremendous weight of it.

Unlike the rest, he slept easily, face down on a damp cot with his arms hanging off the sides. The hard night became an even harder day, and the Crak-Ti army was sluggish and morose, far different than their usual upbeat manner. Ari noticed it and he understood why. They had been trained on hardcore patriotism and he had forced them to violate everything they knew.

The strong ones will get over it
, he thought to himself,
and
the rest will have to come to understand that their lives belong to me
. He marched through the troops and looked over his men. Their eyes were dead black orbs, recessed into their skulls, and their mood was so dark that he began to worry.

Reluctantly he called Siern to his tent to discuss the situation. He knew that there would be trouble and he wanted to get ahead of the situation. He cleared the table of everything but his war map and set up a bottle of wine with two glasses. Siern came in looking as dead as the rest and bowed deeply before him.

Ari said, “It couldn't be helped, this thing that we did, so why are our soldiers so down?”

“Pardon me, Minister?” the man asked suddenly, as if he couldn't make sense of the question.

“It’s too early in the morning, Siern, for you to play the part of the ignorant bystander with me. I have an army of warriors out there who look as if they are one bad night from suicide. I cannot win a war with men like this, so again I ask, what is going on?”

Siern looked as if he had a sharp blade stuck inside of his stomach. And he didn't know how to answer. “Friends were made to kill friends. Brothers killed brothers, all by your command, Minister. The battle is still fresh, and the men are in mourning. They question whether or not the ancestors will welcome them into the afterlife.”

“And what do you tell them when they start this type of talk? Do you agree with them that I've doomed their souls?”

“Well, I—”

An explosion shook the ground, the wine exploded, and Ari Groatrath was on the ground scrambling to find his sword. Smoke was everywhere, along with the sound of laser fire, so he grabbed a rifle from the rack and slid near the entrance to peek outside. He noticed for the first time that Siern was quiet and he looked down to see that his aide was dead.

Outside the Crak-Ti were fighting for their lives against an ambush of Louine soldiers. They were not doing well after their night of no sleep, and the blue-skinned soldiers were ripping them apart.

A shot hit the canvas near his elbow and he raised his rifle and fired back at the sniper. He hit his mark and then ran behind the camp, where he reached up and touched the crystal that hung from his neck.
I need this to work
, he thought to himself and waited for the gem to feel warm in his hand. He closed his eyes and thought of the human world of Vestalia, then flipped the guard from his area grenade and pushed in the detonation button.

A white light consumed the Geralos near Ari’s location and the remaining Geralos, assuming their leader had died, took flight into the swamps.

From a low-flying ship overlooking the carnage, Rafian looked down at the camp. “That blast is the same one that took me away from Zallus, but it came from the Geralos camp!” he said.

“What would that mean, Rafian?” asked the Louine commander.

“It means that one of the lizards was in possession of our most precious artifact. Damn if the timing of this isn’t the worst. Yuth is in orbit now, trying to get clearance to drop with
Helysian
’s marines. He has what I need to get ahead of the Geralos, but they have our tech and are using it to escape.”

Hubrez, the Louine commander, looked back at Rafian. “You mean THE Yuth Varience?” he asked. When Rafian nodded the man spun around and fired up his comm. He spoke at length to someone in Louine, then turned again to the Phaser, his skin a brighter blue than before. “Yuth is on the drop, Raf. He should be on the ground in a day or so, somewhere near the northern shores of the country of Lox.”

“That isn’t far from here,” Rafian said. “Could you tell him to meet us at this location?”

“I was going to fly us over there,” the man said quickly, but Rafian had already walked over to the hatch with his las-sword out.

“Thanks, Hubrez, I appreciate everything that you have done for me and for allowing me to join your squad. I've never seen the Louines in action before and now that I have, I think that there's plenty the Alliance can learn from you.”

“Thank you for saying such nice things, Rafian, but where will you go once you're down on the ground?”

“I want to bloody my blade and help your team, and then I want to conduct an investigation into the lizard that had my crystal. Once I'm done, Yuth should be here and then I can safely contact home.”

“Alright, Phaser, I bid you good luck. I will see you on the ground when the dust has cleared.”

“You be careful up here, protecting our top. The lizards are sneaky, so watch your flank and shoot first, always.” He touched the button near the hatch and it slid back slowly, revealing the fighting that was going on below him. There was a clear glass that was airlock sealed for space to ground operations, and he clicked the button to open that one, as well.

“It will only stay open for ten seconds,” Hubrez yelled over the screaming alarms from the hatch.

“I only need one,” Rafian shouted back, then stepped and fell through the hole where he phased immediately to an area outside of the fighting.

* * *

It started with that familiar rippling, which most assumed signaled an incoming Phaser. But what poured out from the atmospheric tear was an army of Geralos, dressed in black and blue. It was so sudden and unexpected that most of the citizens froze.

Screams of terror became the chorus for Ari Groatrath's emergence and he walked through the chaos, absorbing it all. It was a song that he was so familiar with that it brought a smile to his lips. “So this is Vestalia,” he said to himself, and then pulled on his mask. The rest of his men did the same, with the exception of a few who attacked people without any thought to their health.

Ari lifted his hand to shield his eyes as he glanced up at the sun. The jump had only taken 204 of his 12,511 men, but in a city of civilians they were more than enough to do what needed to be done.

His hand found its way down to his las-sword and he pulled it out and ignited the edge, looking for anyone who dared come close. He caught a glimpse of a female wolf amongst the sheep that his men were cutting into. A Phaser woman, tanned with her dark hair whipping around frantically, held down several Crak-Ti as one fell dead from one of her unorthodox strikes.

He admired her bravery and waded through the crowd to the area where she fought. She dropped another Geralos, whose slash at her throat was answered with a las-sword through the glass of his mask. Ari wondered if the way she fought was a hidden technique from another world. He had heard of Rafian’s alien fighting style and it seemed to him that this was one of his apprentices.

“Tend to the town. Leave her to me!” he screamed at them and they left him alone to fight her. But from out of the fray, splattered with blood, came a taller, darker woman. Her entire demeanor was of an unchained animal with the smell of blood driving her mad. He regarded this woman with intense curiosity because she was killing his Crak-Ti with knives.

The first woman, Dott Toga, brought her las-sword up towards his chin but didn’t commit the swing. Ari read into this and he let her feint go unchecked, then when she spun and brought the las-sword down, he shifted and swung, knocking the blade away. Without hesitating he threw up a leg to knock Marian—the second Phaser woman—from out of the air.

The fight became a blur of action as they pressed their attack on Ari Groatrath, but he was a master, a las-sword saint, and his unmatched fighting kept the two women at bay. Soon enough, Camille and Frank came in to join Marian and Dott. Ari slid back into his Crak-Ti, where the Phasers couldn’t surround him, and they had to fight him one at a time while contending with his fellow Geralos.

The citizens of Zallus did not fare so well. Over 50 people were butchered as they tried to escape, and the ones who made it home were under siege by the bloodthirsty Geralos. Aurora SYN, who was still at the base, had seen the Geralos appear. When it became obvious that they weren’t Phasers she had clutched little Ian and ran inside the Phaser agency to warn everyone, including her husband.

Val secured the doors of Marika’s room and grabbed her plasma pistol. Aurora stood at the entrance waiting for him but he motioned for her to get inside and wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Lock yourself inside of the agency and send out a message to Tay. This isn’t the time to play brave, Aury. I know that you want to help, but what we need right now is for you to protect that boy,” he said. “Send word to
Rendron
; she’s still in our orbit. Tell them we need help down here on the ground.”

Aurora nodded and ran back inside, and Val cocked his pistol and jumped on a bike. A number of recruits had come out of the barracks and he motioned for them to follow. There were fifteen in number and Val led them out into the grassy expanse that separated the agency from the city.