Supreme Leader of Anstractor: A Sci-Fantasy Space Adventure (The New Phase Book 3) (4 page)

There was something dramatically different about the sky on this day, however, as she looked up at a patchwork of dark shapes that blocked out most of the color. She shielded her eyes with her right hand, as if this would allow her to see further up at what they were. They had been there for two days now, and at night there seemed to be even more stars than before.

A hand touched the small of her back and she turned slightly to see who it was. Velman, her husband, had come up beside her, his beard so thick that it obscured just about every inch of his handsome face. He, too, was looking up as if he was trying to understand the sky, and when Aurora looked around she could see that several of her neighbors were doing the same.

“We’re about to be invaded, Aury, and none of our friends are here,” Velman said in a voice too calm to match the frightening things he was saying.

“Geralos?” Aurora asked, and he nodded absently.

“We need to get you and Ian to safety. This looks bad.”

Aurora furrowed her brow and adjusted the baby in her arms. “Get us to safety? You forget that I am an officer in the Vestalian marine corps. We aren’t going to hide from any of them. We belong on this planet and I want to help to keep it that way,” she said.

“No one’s questioning your bravery, Aurora, but Ian is just a baby. If you want me to take him to shelter, so be it, but we’re not going to risk his life,” he said firmly.

Aurora started to say something back but realized he was right. She would be putting baby Ian in danger if they stood their ground to fight the Geralos, and that would not be fair.

“I’m curious, Vel,” she said suddenly. “Why hasn’t there been an alarm, or any kind of warning about the invasion?”

Velman was about to reply when he saw the energy field that surrounded Zallus turn cloudy in a translucent mesh and then an alarm was blaring. “Spoke too soon,” he joked, and as a voice on a loudspeaker began to give instructions on finding a bunker, Aurora locked eyes with him and smiled.

“So, husband, is it run to the bunkers to wait out the fight, or do we go to the Phaser agency for a front row seat?”

Vel could see that she was being serious and he didn’t know what to think. The agency would be the safest place in an attack. They could see the Phasers deploy when it was time to fight and there would be chances, albeit brief chances, for them to talk to Aurora’s brother, Rafian.

“Let’s go,” he said and they got into their hover car and sped off in the direction of the academy.

Aurora saw the patterned sky turn translucent again as their car pulled up close to the tall, square building of the Phaser agency. Marian VCA was walking towards them and Aurora couldn’t suppress the happiness she felt upon seeing her.

“Sister!” she yelled as Marian grew close, then handed Ian to Velman and ran out to hug Marian.

“Aurora, sister, I’m so happy to see you! I didn’t know you were living in Zallus—who is that little guy?” Marian inquired, looking past Aurora’s curly Afro to stare at Ian, who was making a fuss.

Marian walked over to the car and reached for Ian, who Velman happily gave up before exiting himself. The baby’s crying died down when Marian cradled him and then he tried to reach up to touch one of her eyes. She dodged his finger and kissed his hand, then lifted his shirt and blew on his belly. Ian loved it and kicked his legs with glee, and Marian began to speak to him softly in the Tyheran tongue.

Aurora watched while all of this was going on, amazed at how natural Marian was with the child. Ian TOR, the galaxy’s most miserable baby, was quite at home with his auntie Marian.

“Aren’t you just perfect?” Marian said. “Take him away, Aurora, take him now. If you let me keep him longer, I swear we’re going to have to cross las-swords over him.”

“You like your pretty auntie, huh, little Ian? Just like your uncle Rafian. I’m guessing this one already has a weakness for tall, pretty girls that like to fight,” Aurora teased and her words were met with a mocking tongue from Marian’s mouth.

“How come you guys aren’t going to the bunkers?” Marian asked, looking them over as she bounced Ian on her arm.

Aurora watched her and felt a wave of sadness. Marian was a natural, but she and Rafian would never be able to have a child of their own. Rafian had undergone the original trials that turned men and women into what the organization at the time had called “persons.” A person was robbed of their reproductive abilities, and even if Rafian had not been sterilized, Marian was an alien woman from a different galaxy, which meant there was a chance that the couple could not reproduce even under ideal circumstances.

She thought about how beautiful their baby would be. He would have his mother’s starry eyes and would share their features equally.

Marian saw the way Aurora was regarding her and looked away. She knew what was going through the tiny woman’s head, and though she had come to terms with being childless, it was still a subject that she did not like. “Aury, bunkers. Remember?” she said and Aurora snapped to attention.

“Oh, Rhee, see, we wanted to ask a favor. I wanted to see if we can hang out in the agency during the fight. To be near family in the end.”

If it were anyone else, Marian would not have it, but she knew Aurora and understood her need to be around them. “Get inside, you hyper little bug,” she commanded and shook her head at the skip and dance the woman did in response. As he followed his wife, Velman rested a hand on Marian’s shoulder and mouthed the words, “Thank you.”

When they were gone Marian looked around at the Phaser grounds and the buildings in the distance. It was quiet in a way that made her skin crawl, and instinctively she brought up her rifle and walked with it at the ready. In the distance a loud BOOM broke the silence as Yuth’s whyte—a Louine ship that resembled a manta ray from the sea—lifted off the ground and rocketed skyward towards Rafian’s phantom.

“Well, now it begins,” she said under her breath and skipped over to the entrance of the Phaser agency. She pushed open the doors, ran to her right, and descended the ramp to reach the war room. Standing in front of a large, floating hologram of the planet was Dott, her feet shoulder-width apart and her hands in the small of her back like a commander at the helm of a massive destroyer.

“Don’t you look the part,” she remarked at Dott who unconsciously placed her feet back together. She slammed her fist above her heart and bowed her head in a salute. Marian returned the gesture and said, “I count over two hundred of those
crutas
waiting us out.”

“Way too many for seven soldiers, that’s for sure,” Dott said, her voice carrying a solemn tone, as if she expected the worst.

“Seven soldiers, Dott? Not quite. Up there flies my husband, our Supreme Leader. He singlehandedly won us this plot of land against hundreds if not thousands of Geralos zip ships. Yuth Varience is regarded as the greatest Louine warrior that has ever lived. You know his records; the man could fly circles around anyone in both this galaxy and mine. Then you have Tayden, who is known as the second coming of Hellgate—”

“And Camille YAN,” Dott said quickly. “I called Rafian my hero, but Camille is the woman that every girl in the Alliance wishes to be when she grows up. I’ll never forget watching her run on the Geralos city of Heron. Seems like ages ago, back when I was a green cadet, just trying to be the best soldier that I could be.”

“But then you proved to be better than anyone else in your troop, didn’t you?” Marian said. “It is why we brought you here to become a Phaser. We were all soldiers at one point in our careers, Dott, but that is not our reality now as Phasers. The closest things the Geralos have managed to match our mettle, is the Crak-Ti. So don’t look at the odds as if they’re so heavily out of our favor.”

She turned her attention again to the map and looked at the varying models of ships. “This one here’s the mother ship,” she pointed out. “They intend to drop brain-biters on us while Rafian and the fighters are shooting it out with their distraction drones. Does he know—”

“He has the same map as we do, Marian. The Commander is on his game.”

Marian stood for a time, watching the map, and trying to calm her nerves over the entire situation. “I like you, Dott,” she finally said.

“I like you too, Rhee, and, I’m sorry. We’re all on edge over this invasion, but the Commander will come through. He always does.”

C
AMILLE YAN powered up her engines and took her phantom out of idle mode to drift ahead of the other Phaser ships. They stood as an arrowhead facing the Geralos fleet and were awaiting an order to move in. Rafian had come up and he hadn’t uttered a word as he stood at the head of the arrow, waiting. Camille flew beneath him, rolled masterfully, and then turned her phantom around to face him.

“Isn’t this special, Commander,” she began. “The last time I flew wing to you, we were both marines on
Helysian
. Feels like several lifetimes have passed since those days, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” Rafian replied. “I miss those days. Back then, innocence and ambition clouded our minds to the impending doom of Anstractor. Hell, the only thing that was on my mind was”—
thyping you until we were barely able to move
, he thought—“being the best pilot in the Alliance.”

He forced his mind to focus on Marian, and he thought of how perfect she’d looked in her 3B suit while they fought the Crak-Ti on Meluvia. Camille’s ship hovered in front of his but he was no longer seeing her. All he could see was his Marian, smiling the way she did whenever they were together. He saw the smooth caramel skin of her face and the perfect white teeth that were barely able to hold in her teasing red tongue. He felt weakened by the love he felt for her and—

“Raf, when are we going to do this thing?” Camille asked impatiently. It took Rafian a few more moments to realize that she had been talking to him.

“Fall back in line and calm your nerves, Phaser,” Rafian ordered, and Camille made a mock salute and did as she was told.

Rafian was worried, and he was trying to remove this worry by focusing on his wife. He wasn’t worried for her safety or for the safety of his men. He was worried about failing and the fallout if the Geralos were able to commandeer their sanctuary.

As a married couple, he and his wife had been on the frontlines since the last day of their honeymoon. He wanted a break: a week, just one week with her, with his Marian, away from everything.

He closed his eyes and concentrated on the blackness of nothing, then opened them to exhale in the Mera-Ku way.

“Okay we’re doing this on my count,” he spoke loudly into his comm. “Tayden, you and Yuth are paired up. I want you to push through to their rear, put plasma on that main mothership, and keep moving until you reach the other side. Cammy, you head north and wipe out everything that comes at you; Klemise, you stay tight on her tail. I will take it south and we will swap sides on the mothership and then rendezvous with Tay and Yuth on the back end.”

“What about me and Rentrout, Commander?” the nasally voice of Erlaine asked.

“Erlaine, drop 10,000 feet and hover. Your job is to pick off any would-be raiders that would use this fight’s distraction to do a bombing run on our beloved city. Rentrout, fly up near the atmosphere; I don’t want any of them trying to leave while we’re killing their friends. By the time we start, this thing is going to turn into a maelstrom. Do what you do and we will reconvene on the other side, got it?” he asked.

“GOT IT!” they echoed in unison and then sat silently as Rafian took a few more moments to clear his head. “Okay, let’s remove these
thyping crutas
from our air space, Phasers. Get ready on my count! Three, two …”

As soon as he reached “one,” Rafian’s black phantom—whose familiar shape had become somewhat of a legend to the Vestalians—rocketed forward. It was loud and violent in its sudden movement, and to the people on the ground it sounded as if an explosion shook the heavens.

The thoughts of Marian, the memories of Camille’s sweet touches, and the worry for relaxation after so much war was gone from Rafian’s mind. All he could think about was the sound of his engine, and his body and mind became one with the phantom as it put laser fire into the hull of the nearest ship and sent it toppling to the ground.

The Geralos ships, powered by android technology, switched to defensive maneuvers and made to guard the mothership. It was as Rafian predicted, and the hundreds of tiny ships began to shoot at them with deadly intent as they in turn showcased some of the finest flying.

Yuth and Tayden made the pattern of a vortex as they pulled off some of the most difficult maneuvers in synchronization. The Geralos ships could do little against this attack. The Phasers were too fast and too elusive for their laser fire to do much damage.

A few of the Geralos ships shot one another as they reacted to the invasion of the phantoms and whytes. A few took to missiles that could lock on to the Phasers for better accuracy, but Tayden and Yuth were bobbing and weaving within their fleet and the missiles missed and clipped some of the meandering android ships.

Camille YAN, arguably the top ace of them all—though Rafian would say differently—had her thrusters maxed out as she shredded their perimeter. Her phantom was a silver bullet, leaving fiery explosions in its wake, and the inexperienced Klemise, a Meluvian recruit, did his best to stay with her, his eyes so wide with horror that he dared not blink for fear of crashing into one of them.

The Geralos command was familiar with the air superiority of the Alliance military. They had found ways to counter their skill in outer space, but on Vestalia it was different. Gravity, the difference in munitions, and the lack of cover from a battleship made things difficult. They had amassed their invading air force from numerous territories that they owned on the planet, but the Geralos that piloted them were not on the level of the seven aces.

Rafian was almost to the mothership when he saw a missile catch Tayden’s phantom on the tail and send her spinning out of control. Several zip ships convened on her to finish her off, but Yuth Varience circled back and knocked them out with a scattering of kinetic gunfire. This observance took only a few seconds to see but Rafian knew that he mustn’t worry for his sub-commander. He picked up speed to gain the mothership and tried not to worry about Tayden Lark.

When the missile clipped Tayden she knew that it was over. There was only so much a Phaser could do at that height and in the midst of so much aggressive fire. She could eject and risk being shredded to pieces by precision android laser fire, or she could try and land her ship, then run back to the city to help out on the ground. Even if she could break off to attempt a landing they would pick her apart. The only thing that had kept them alive so far was the speed at which they were flying through the nest of zip ships.

A thought crossed her mind that she knew was mad, but considering the low odds of anything that was available to her at the time, she reasoned she had little choice in the matter.

“Yuth, stick to the plan,” she commanded. “Klemise, break off of Camille and join Yuth in the middle. If I don’t see you all on the other side then I will be in the cloner, and if the cloner fails, then on another plane,” she said.

“Quit the morbid
schtill
and finish the mission, Phaser!” Rafian screamed at her, and she blinked out a tear as the emotion overtook her amidst her increasingly smoking ship.

“These shields have always been questionably weak,” she lamented as she maxed out the thrust on her boosters until the computer was screaming at her. The mothership loomed close as she spiraled towards it, and several ships came up behind her, peppering her already damaged tail with even more fire. “See you on the ground, Raf. Give them hell,” she said, and as her phantom became completely engulfed in flames, she pulled off her helmet, grabbed the necklace around her neck, and squeezed the crystal that hung from it.

The explosion from Tayden’s phantom was unlike anything anyone had ever seen or heard before. It wiped out anything that was close to it, and the ship seemed to evaporate instead of falling apart like it should have. This was when he knew that something was wrong. White crystal light emerged from the wreckage and consumed them all, and no ship was spared from it.

When Tayden grabbed her crystal, she had intended to make a blind jump on to the mothership. She wanted to escape her phantom, teleport onboard their ship, and kill every lizard that occupied its interior. But the explosion had caught the crystal mid-transit.

No one would be able to explain what happened in that explosion or why the crystal particles did what they did. The Geralos, for the most part, disintegrated. With no training in the crystals they became like ship parts and were blown to bits. A few made it to the ground inside the city walls, bloody and dying but determined to take as many humans with them as possible.

As to the Phasers, Rafian VCA vanished into thin air. For many months following the incident, the Phasers would speculate as to what really happened to him but he was gone and no one knew where.

Tayden Lark's plan ultimately failed and sealed the fate of a number of her Phasers. The crystal didn't jump her onto the Geralos ship and she didn't die. Instead, she found herself wet and partially buried on the beach near Zallus, with the cold water licking at her face. Camille found herself on the dock of
Helysian
, which was the last place she would want to be.

Yuth's entire ship was teleported a few feet above the ocean where he tread water and went below before reacting to the change in location. Klemise, who had flown behind Camille, was thrown from his ship and struck by fragments of a Geralos zip ship as he fell to his demise. The other two recruits were not close enough to the explosion to be affected but had seen the strange white light that threw their teachers and killed one of their friends.

For anyone outside of a bunker, the debris, like raining metal chunks from hell, put a strain on the shield surrounding the city. It would have been enough to destroy Zallus if not for Dott Toga's quick command to power it on before the explosion. It would be a day the Phasers would never forget.

* * *

By the time Tayden made it back to Zallus, there were Phasers running all around looking for the missing pilots. A rush of panic struck her as she neared the gates, and though the guard recognized her and let her in she stood frozen thinking about the battle and what had happened up there. “Please be alive,” she whispered to no one in particular, and then stepped inside where one of the men handed her a bike.

“Thanks, Corporal,” she said in a flat voice, and then mounted it quickly to get back to the base. There were so many citizens standing around looking up at the sky that it made the mood even more forlorn for Tayden. Her mind was on Rafian, and she wondered if he was back at the base since her comm had been lost back inside the explosion.

When she arrived at the agency she parked the bike and slid off of it smoothly to enter the command center. Inside were Dott and Marian, talking frantically, and she avoided their eye contact and ran to the comm to try and call her fellow Phasers. She reached Yuth and the recruits that had made it out alive, and when she learned of the random teleporting that her crystal had caused, her heart sank with fright.

Eventually she was able to reach Camille, who told her that she would be back on the planet within a month. Her mood was lifting and she made to try Rafian again when—

“Where’s Rafian?” Marian asked suddenly. She had been standing back and watching Tayden panic as she called up all the Phasers to learn of their whereabouts. When she had tried reaching Rafian it didn’t seem as if anyone answered. Marian had noticed this and the stars inside of her pupils had become bright, white fire. “Tayden, where is my husband?” she asked again, and the tiny woman turned slowly and stared up at her as if she were fighting the urge to fall to her knees and beg.

“I’m … I’m sorry, Rhee. He’s not picking up,” she whispered.

“He’s not dead!” Marian yelled at her. “We can’t fall apart just because he’s not here.”

Dott looked at them as if she was stuck in a vid, unable to participate or affect change on the outcome. Tayden was only one step below the Supreme Leader, yet she was acting as if she were the grieving widow, while Marian was commanding her to get up off the ground and take command. Bizarre just did not cut it with what she was witnessing and it dawned on her that this was Marian at her most frightening.

“Dott, please run a scan on our cloners to see if any new data has been processed,” the tall, dark woman commanded and then stepped forward, past Tayden, to pick up the comm.

While Marian tried to reach her husband, Dott Toga scanned the systems for new data and breathed a sigh of relief when she saw that there was none. If Rafian had died the systems would have been going crazy, rebuilding him and looking for what would be the leader’s life force to guide it back into a new body.

“Nothing, Commander, he's alright. I know the Supreme Leader, he doesn't go down, and he doesn't falter, ever.”

You didn't see him a few months ago when he was in my arms lying comatose
, Marian thought, but Dott's words inspired her, and she knew that she was right. “Let's get a checkup going on our territory, and work on getting those stranded Phasers back home,” Marian said.

Dott walked up and stood next to her at the console, and even though Marian’s fingers were typing rapidly, she placed her hand on her forearm. This contact was all it took to break Marian, and she turned and embraced the young woman tightly and bawled into her shoulder. Tayden saw this and got to her feet, but instead of joining them she walked outside and cast her eyes to the sky.