The Exiled Earthborn (46 page)

“Strange,” Alpha said, tapping a floating screen that was completely blank. “The optical link down in the bay is malfunctioning.”

“You’re saying you don’t have a visual on cryo?” Maston asked.

“I did until a few minutes ago,” Alpha said. “I have been preoccupied.”

“Goddamnit,” Maston said.

“As you can see, the crew is—” Alpha motioned to the blinking red readout before Maston cut him off.

“Zero unnecessary risks,” Maston said. “We need to watch them die.”

Alpha considered that.

“Agreed. Ensure all are exterminated by the time we arrive planetside at 28:40.”

Maston tapped Lucas on the shoulder plate.

“Let’s go. The rest of you get down to the docking bay and prepare for rollout.”

Everyone started to move, but froze when they saw what was in the viewscreen as Alpha veered the ship around to starboard.

It was Xala. The sphere was unlike any planet Lucas had seen, and the holograms didn’t do it justice. It was largely brown, red, and black. There were small strips of green and blue running through it, along with a few wisps of white clouds amid the smog, but it looked almost worse than Earth when they’d left it. Yellow lights burned brightly on the surface, even at this distance, and Lucas couldn’t tell if the effect was from a geological disturbance like lava flows or structures the Xalans had built themselves. The sight of the planet was chilling, and it was likely they were the first non-Xalans to lay eyes on it in thousands of years.

A few minutes later, Lucas and Maston entered the cryochamber with weapons drawn. Alpha had relayed that nearly all of the captive crew had been killed by the gas, and only a few were still clinging to life.

The lighting was dim, and Lucas felt hairs involuntarily standing up on his neck inside his suit. They were creeping through a graveyard, after all. As they kept moving through the rows of pods, Lucas saw one Xalan twitching feverishly. Lucas stopped and watched as his movement slowed, then ceased altogether. Another green light had turned red.

Lucas jerked his head to the left when he heard the sounds of crunching glass. Maston looked down at his boot, which had just turned a shard lying on the ground to dust. Further up, there were more chunks littering the floor.

“Oh shit,” Maston said breathlessly as he sprinted around the corner into the next row. Lucas followed him and skidded to a halt when he saw the source.

Glass was scattered in a wide radius around the destroyed door of a pod. Lucas and Maston shared a look as they realized which pod it was.

“All units converge d—” Maston’s transmission was stopped short as he was flung into a nearby wall. Lucas whipped around to find the culprit in the darkness, but he felt claws sink into his chest before he could even pull the trigger.

Lucas hit the floor and gasped for air. He looked at the Shadow looming above him. He was thin without his armor and was covered in rough patches of burns that had singed his black skin to an even darker shade.

Lucas wrenched his arm up and managed to detach the creature’s claws from his chest. The armor had stopped the black daggers from going too deep, but they’d definitely punctured his skin, and pain radiated through his chest. His undersuit was already attempting to seal the wounds.

A voice in his head. The Shadow’s.

“
Insect
.”

The Shadow raised another claw, but winced as a blast grazed his arm and he stumbled backward away from the downed Lucas. Maston had picked himself up off the floor and the end of his energy rifle was smoking.

Fury blazed in the ice-blue eyes of the Shadow as he thrust his arm forward. Lucas watched in astonishment as Maston’s rifle was wrenched from his grasp despite the Shadow being a solid twenty feet away.

Telekinesis.

The creature flung his claw backward and the rifle launched across the room, where it shattered the glass of a closed pod.

From the floor, Lucas brought Natalie around, but another twitch from the Shadow and the gun spiraled out of his hand and cascaded across the room. Immediately Lucas and Maston both drew their sidearms, only to have them also torn from their hands. This time, the guns floated in the air, moving slowly toward the Shadow. They hung there, suspended, rotating. The Shadow cocked his head and the two weapons were instantly crushed into balls of metal and circuitry through unseen psionic forces. The compressed clumps leaked liquid plasma and finally dropped and bounced on the metal grating.

“What the hell is happening down there?” came Asha’s voice screaming in Lucas’s ear. He could hear metal footsteps; she was running.

“The Shadow—” was all Lucas was able to get out before the creature flashed in front of him and delivered a kick that sent him flying toward Maston. The wind was knocked completely out of him and he couldn’t elaborate.

Maston launched himself at the creature, wielding a knife as big as his arm, but was caught in midair and flung backward with a wave of the Shadow’s claw.

After doing so, however, the creature doubled over, coughing painfully. Even if the toxin had woken him instead of killing him, it appeared to have had some crippling effect on his insides.

Lucas took the opportunity to dive for Natalie a few feet away. He grabbed the rifle’s grip and rolled into an upright firing position on one knee. This time, the Shadow couldn’t react physically or mentally. He caught a trio of plasma rounds across the chest, with a fourth barely missing his burned face. He stumbled backward, but even stripped of armor, his enhanced natural plating had cushioned the blows, which would have killed any other Xalan. Lucas attempted to continue firing, but felt himself lifted from his feet and flung upward into the ceiling. His head felt like it had split open when it connected with the metal, and he was nearly knocked unconscious when he slammed back into the floor a second later.

As Lucas’s vision faded back in, he saw Maston and the creature circling each other. They were at the far end of the room now, near a row of doors. One led to the upper decks, the other two Lucas couldn’t place. It was then that Lucas saw Asha’s face through the window of the first door. It slid open for a millisecond but was then thrust shut by a wave from the Shadow. A twist of his wrist and the controls sparked, then fizzled out completely. Mechanisms groaned from within, and it became clear the entryway was completely jammed. Lucas could hear gunfire from the group outside now attempting to blast their way through.

“I’m coming around,” Asha said in his ear, and he could hear more running. Lucas was too dazed to respond. The only other entrance to the cryodeck was on the opposite end of the ship.

Lucas searched for Natalie, but the gun was nowhere to be found. Hopefully it hadn’t been crushed into scrap. Instead, Lucas drew his last weapon, his knife, and raced toward the creature. He leapt at it, his armor allowing him an eight-foot vertical, but he was met with a whirling slash of claws that sent him sprawling to the floor with fresh wounds. He watched as Maston attempted to lunge with his own knife, but was telekinetically thrown backward into a door, which buckled on impact. He crumpled into unconsciousness.

The Shadow turned back toward Lucas. He scrambled for his knife on the ground, but found himself rising uncontrollably away from it as the Shadow turned his palm upward.

“You would ambush my ship?”
he growled, the voice echoing in Lucas’s head.

“You would keep me captive for months?”

Lucas struggled against the Shadow’s influence but continued to rise.

“You would execute my crew?”

The wounds across the creature’s chest were already starting to heal. There was no stopping this monstrosity. It would kill him, then tear the entire ship apart.

“You were about to do the same to us,” Lucas choked out as he hung suspended in the air. Plasma was starting to eat through the door and he could see Kovaks attempting to cut through with some sort of tool, but it wasn’t working quickly enough. Still no word from Asha.

The creature coughed again. His lungs wheezed audibly, but he didn’t lose his concentration on keeping Lucas afloat.

“What is your plan?”
the creature asked, narrowing its eyes.

Lucas remained silent. The Shadow could see Xala out the viewscreen to his right.

“What is your plan?”
came the voice again. Lucas suddenly felt his back arch violently, far past its intended contour. Pain exploded up his spine and coursed through his body. The noise he made defied description, but it wasn’t the answer the Shadow wanted to hear.

“Very well.”

Lucas quivered as he felt his arms and legs begin to bend backward. His bones flexed and his nerves screamed out in agony, as did he. His teeth clenched so hard from the pain he could feel a pair of his molars split in half. He was about to be ripped into a thousand pieces.

Maston’s knife flashed briefly before it dove toward the creature’s neck. With supernatural reaction time, the Shadow jerked to the left, and the knife sank into his collarbone instead of his throat. The shock caused him to drop Lucas, who hit the floor with his bones and flesh still joined.

With every ounce of strength both he and his suit could muster, Maston wrenched himself backward as the Shadow howled and flailed his arms. Maston’s feet left the ground as the Shadow attempted to summon psionic energy, but Maston kept his grip on both the creature and the knife, and fresh pain caused him to lose focus. Maston pulled him back through the now open door behind him. Lucas saw what was on the other side now.

An escape pod.

Maston kept pulling until the two of them hit the viewscreen on the opposite end of the small compartment. Lucas had gotten to his feet and was sprinting toward the pair of them. Kovaks had broken in through the door at last and he, Reyes, and Kiati were right behind him.

Blood sprayed across the viewscreen inside the pod. Red blood, not black. Maston had taken a savage strike across the neck. The Shadow started moving toward the open door, but Maston brushed off his injury and leapt on him once more. The knife was still embedded in the creature, and Maston used it to throw him back to the rear of the pod again.

This time Maston didn’t lunge for the creature. He dove for the door controls. The escape pod’s hatch slammed shut in an instant a second before Lucas could reach it. He hammered on the metal with his fist and caught Maston’s gaze through the porthole. Lucas could only describe the look on his face as … acceptance. As the Shadow started to rise once more, the blood-soaked Maston entered one last command into the control cluster.

And then he was gone.

The pod rocketed out of the departure bay at hypersonic speeds, knocking Lucas back. Its engines burned blue against the vacuum of space, and the sphere of the shuttle became smaller and smaller until it was no brighter than the stars that surrounded it.

Everyone stood speechless, staring at the empty port. Alpha’s mechanical voice was in his ear.

“Lucas, what has happened? Why was that pod jettisoned?”

Lucas couldn’t speak.

“Lucas, respond. Anyone, respond.”

“Where are they?”

It was a new voice, behind him. He turned to find Asha standing in the row of pods, out of breath. She clutched her revolver in one hand and the other was on the grip of the sword on her back.

“What the hell is going on?” she demanded angrily.

“He’s gone,” Lucas finally said. He looked outside through the airlock door. No blue lights shone out of the blackness.

“We have to go back for him,” Asha pleaded with Alpha who was gazing sternly out the viewscreen.

“Go back for what?” Reyes said. “He launched himself into space with a Shadow in a ten-by-six tube.”

“With grievous injuries,” added Kiati.

“He saved us,” Lucas said firmly. “That thing would have murdered us all if he hadn’t gotten it off the ship.”

“As much as I appreciate Commander Maston’s noble sacrifice,” Alpha said, “we cannot alter course to retrieve his probable corpse. I have already reported the ejection of the pod as a mechanical malfunction.”

“What?” Asha said.

Zeta spoke next.

“We are close to Xala now,” she said, gesturing out the window. The planet loomed large in front of them and ships far bigger than their own were clustered all around them. “We cannot turn back.”

“He could still be alive,” Asha said firmly.

“He isn’t,” Lucas replied. “I was there. I saw his wounds, I fought that … thing. It isn’t possible.”

“Life readouts indicate no signatures aboard the vessel,” Alpha said. “Though I have disabled its controls and blocked communications from the pod in case the Shadow survived and attempts to contact Xala.”

“Unblock it,” Asha said. “Your readouts could be wrong. Mars could be alive.”

“We cannot take the chance,” Zeta said softly.

Lucas knew she was right. If anyone had survived in the pod, it was far more likely to be the Shadow. Given the first chance, he would hail the closest ship and everything would fall apart. The look on Asha’s face said she was coming to the same realization.

“We may now put this to rest,” said Alpha solemnly, looking up from the ship’s controls wearily. He gradually brought over a small floating window from his own display module and transferred it to the viewscreen.

“I have made a visual connection with the vessel.”

The shot displayed was a wide angle of the inside of the escape pod, which made the tiny space look larger than it was. The scene was grisly. Black and red blood stained nearly every inch of the walls. The Shadow lay sprawled against the back of the central chair meant to pilot the pod. The handle of Maston’s large knife rose out of his chest, and the creature was completely still.

A few feet away was Mars Maston, seated, leaning up against one of the curved walls. His chin was on his chest; wet black curls obscured his face. The front of his armor was covered in blood. He too, was unmoving.

“Unblock communications,” Asha said.

Alpha didn’t move.

“Do it!” she ordered. “The Shadow is dead!”