CHAPTER TWO
The lancer frigate shuddered again as another mine detonated in close proximity.
“I hope everyone’s deactivated their pain receptors,” Danni shouted over the dim of the alarms. Royals had the ability to turn off their bodies’ ability to feel pain, but it took several moments of practiced concentration.
Priya stumbled to her feet as she raced to the emergency closet on the bridge. Her pulse pounded in her ears over the ship’s alarm. She’d been read in on emergency procedures when she boarded the ship and paid careful attention. She hadn’t expected any danger, but it hadn’t stopped her from worrying.
“Get that suit on, Jennings!” Danni barked.
Priya hurriedly grabbed one of the large white belts within and strapped it around her waist. She activated the control stud, causing the white material to come alive like liquid metal, slithering over to cover her entire body. She grabbed a silver collar from the rack and fitted it around her neck. A touch of the stud on the side extended a bubble helmet from flat-space.
“Break for atmo!” the captain barked at the navigation officer.
“Trying, sir! But we can’t accelerate inside the asteroid field, we’ll be pasted across a rock.”
“Go faster! This boat is not long for this world!”
Priya stumbled to her feet and caught herself against the back of Danni’s chair. “Is there any way this could be an accident?” Not even she really believed it.
“Not a chance in hell,” Danni said.
“Those mines could be leftovers from the war…”
Another vibration shuddered through the ship. “Shields are gone again!” the weapons officer cried out.
“Primitive nuclear mines don’t work two centuries later, Jennings!” Danni shouted.
A large asteroid tumbled in front of their view. “Pick up that tail, lieutenant!” the captain shouted.
The ship powered up its thrust for a moment to shoot ahead of the spinning rock. They narrowly cleared the projectile. The inertial dampeners canceled out the sensation of movement, but Priya felt her stomach dropping anyway.
Light blasted the viewscreen as a nuclear mine set on the side of the rock they had just cleared detonated. The shockwave bucked the frigate to the side, sending it straight into another asteroid.
Priya found herself on the deck and lifted her helmeted head up and took in a shocked intake of breath as she saw the rock fill the screen.
The jagged end of the asteroid tore right through the center of the ship and gutted it from bow to stern. Priya watched in horror as a black mountain smashed through the roof of the bridge, even though it was in the dead center of the hull, ripping it open and exposing them to space.
Priya desperately grabbed onto Danni’s chair, holding with superhuman strength as the atmosphere in the cabin explosively decompressed out into space. She might not be a soldier, but she was still a Royal.
The ship accelerated and spiraled through the field. Black rocks whizzed over their heads through the rent open view to space as they tilted wildly in a corkscrew.
“We’re not going to make it!” the navigation officer shouted into the comm channel. There was no more air on the bridge.
Over their heads two great asteroids smacked into each other and detonated the mines set on both. Their frigate disintegrated in the explosion. Shrapnel connected with the front of Priya’s head, smashing open her helmet and knocking her unconscious.
The Fairhaven secret service rushed into the bedroom with practiced efficiency, ignoring whatever state of undress their subjects were in.
“Mister President, we have a Code Five situation,” the lead guard said.
President Harrison groaned. “Did you say Code Five?”
“Yes, sir. You need to come with us, sir.”
Moments later, the President was seated in his office where a large television screen showed a stern-looking blonde man waiting for him. “Good morning, Mister President,” Kyle Dorian said.
The President rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. “Mister Dorian, what the hell is going on?”
“Sir, at 10:12 this morning we detected an extraterrestrial vessel penetrating the minefield.” As Dorian spoke, a rough computer display provided accompanying visuals. “After broadcasting a full spectrum message disseminated across the entire planet, the contact entered the mine field, where it was destroyed by the nukes. At this moment it’s a dead weight hurtling towards the surface somewhere near Diamond City.”
“Is anyone still alive onboard?”
“Unknown, sir. I’m going to play you a recording of the message broadcast by the aliens.” Dorian played Priya’s opening message to the Haderans. It was in their language.
“Wait a second,” the President said. “What recent technological advancement?”
“We don’t know, sir,” Dorian said. “We were hoping you could tell us.”
“I’m afraid not, Captain.”
Dorian nodded gravely. “That would mean it was them, sir.”
“Wonderful,” Harrison grumbled.
Dorian cleared his throat. “Sir, what are my orders?”
Harrison’s eyes fell uncertainly. “I’m afraid Clause Five of the Treaty is very clear on the matter, Captain. The aliens are to be exterminated.”
Dorian grew uncertain. “Sir, may I suggest that we’ve been presented with a singular opportunity here, a chance to break the cycle of the past two hundred years.”
“I’m aware of that, Mister Dorian,” Harrison said. “Unfortunately, we have no choice but to enforce the Treaty. If Orland was ever to find out that we violated it…”
“Sir, based on our preliminary readings of the alien ship, they are in possession of technology far surpassing ours. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of years more advanced. If their intentions are true then they could help us, even if we do break the Treaty. I’m sure a hundred worlds could spare for one.”
“You’re probably right, Captain,” Harrison said. “But I also think playing dice with the survival of our people is the height of folly. You are hereby ordered to take command of whatever military assets you deem necessary and exterminate any alien survivors. Is that clear?”
Dorian nodded stiffly. “Yes, sir.”
“I wish there were another way, Captain,” Harrison said softly. “But we must follow the Treaty.”
“Yes, sir. I will, sir.”
“Then get to it.”
Harrison shut off the screen and took a deep breath. He slowly turned in his chair to face the red phone sitting behind his desk under a glass case. With trembling hands, he punched in his security code and lifted the glass case off the phone. He gently removed the phone from its cradle and gingerly placed it to his ear. “Hello?”
Priya snapped back into consciousness as her eyelids burned away. She screamed in shock, though not in pain. She had already deactivated her pain receptors before the ship had been hulled. Her screams barely carried in the thin outer layers of the planet’s atmosphere, but they could not be heard over the terrible sound of her plummet.
Most of her suit had already burned away as her unconscious form raced through the asteroid field and entered the atmosphere. She clamped a hand over her eyes to prevent them from melting away, but she was already blinded by the heat.
Priya’s lungs burned from the super-heated air she had already swallowed, providing her with no oxygen. Her cilia had been ravaged with the first scorching gasp, and her oxygen-starved system struggled to regenerate them.
Priya screamed for help in her mind, not knowing if anyone else had survived. Her healing factor had kept her alive, but she still required air to breathe and her helmet was too damaged to reseal itself. She was too weak to fly… and moments away from death.
A gloved hand clamped onto her arm and stopped her plummet through the sky. It’s Danni, I’ve got you, a voice floated in her head. Priya felt a helmet collar sliding around her neck followed by an intake of fresh, cold air.
Thank you… thank you… Priya lamely returned, over and over.
Shut up, Jennings. Let me work here. Danni flew through the upper atmosphere with Royal speed, holding her breath and protecting them in a TK bubble. She had given up her helmet for Priya.
Priya’s lungs and eyes healed themselves. Her vision had returned, albeit as a blurred mess.
Danni finally descended far enough to start breathing again. She halted their descent to hang in the air. “Are you okay?”
“Better… now…” Priya panted. “You saved my life.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“Is anyone else…?”
Danni grimly shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“My god…” The lancer frigate had a crew of twenty. Twenty lives lost under her command, on a mission she’d been so excited about…
“The ship broke up and you went flying out. I flew after you. The reactor blew after I left… I didn’t see anyone else make it out.”
Priya clutched her arm. “What do we do now?”
“We land. I’m exhausted.”
“Then what?”
“Let’s save the philosophical debate for later, Jennings.”
Priya looked at her exposed, blood-red skin covered with slowly fading burn blisters. She was in shock in more ways than one. Her brain couldn’t yet grasp the full horror of their situation.
Beneath their feet and hundreds of kilometers below, a large city lay sprawled along a river. Danni aimed them towards it.
“Where are we?” Priya asked. She’d had a chance to gather her thoughts and was feeling more coherent and less panicked, though the balance was a fragile one.
“Fairhaven,” Danni said. “The nice one, fortunately.”
“Nice? They blew up our ship!”
“We don’t know who controls the asteroid field, though I imagine it’s both sides in cooperation.”
As they descended towards the city, they spotted the wreckage of their frigate tumbling through the sky with a thick plume of black smoke trailing behind. They watched as missiles screamed through the air and detonated the wreck, blasting it into confetti.
The largest piece of debris plummeted straight for the center of the city. It smashed cleanly through the tallest downtown skyscraper before lodging itself halfway through the next building.
Danni pointed at the smoking chaos below. “Let’s go there. Anarchy loves company.”
They landed on the tip of the spire extending far above the skyscraper. Diffuse plumes of white smoke with black coils running through wandered up from the smoking hole fifty stories below.
Danni steadied herself on the maintenance ladder rungs set into the spire and peered over. “We’ve left quite a greeting card.”
“God, this is horrible,” Priya said. She dreaded to think how many innocent civilians had died from their ship crashing into the city. This was beyond any worse-case scenario she’d gamed out. “All those people on both sides, dead. What chance do we have for peaceful relations now?”
Danni shot her a look. “They’re the ones who tried to kill us, Jennings.”
“I don’t understand why!” Priya said with frustration. “Nothing from signal intercept said they would be so xenophobic.” Any thoughts of her ruined moment had gone out the window the moment a human life was lost, her only anger for the tragedy of others now.
“Reason has little to do with how people behave.”
She was always disappointed when Danni’s bitter worldview was validated. “I suppose you’re right…”
A faint roar reached their ears. A trio of jet fighters appeared in the distant sky on swift approach.
“Here comes company,” Danni said. “We need to get as far away from the crash as possible. They’ll be looking for us.”
Kyle Dorian peered out the window of the VTOL jet and pointed at the black plume rising from the skyscraper.
“Put me as close as possible,” he said into the helmet mike. “Tell the regional commander to meet me there with everything on hand.”
This was a situation he’d hoped to never experience. Hunting extraterrestrials had always seemed a far-fetched scenario at best. His private worry had always been executing innocent people who wandered in with the best of intentions. But now Diamond City was burning and who knows how many people had died. The time for second thoughts had passed.
An ominous shudder ran through the concrete at their feet, closely followed by a low-pitched rumble.
“The building’s going to collapse,” Priya said with concern.
Danni smiled. “Good. We’ll ride it down.”
The VTOL kicked up a maelstrom of debris as it hovered to a stop twenty meters above the elevated highway running alongside the twentieth story level of the downtown city.
The jet bumped clumsily as its rear wheels hit the pavement then gently touched its nose gear. The engines had begun to cycle down when the cockpit popped open and Dorian leapt out, running with his head low.
“Captain Dorian?” a uniformed man called out over the roar of the engines.
“That’s right,” Dorian yelled.
The man shook his hand. “Corporal Silas, sir, in charge of the 5th Reserve Regiment.” Silas was a mountain of a man with crew-cut black hair and an unfriendly countenance. Dorian did not know him, but could instantly tell his sort. The kind of soldier he wouldn’t want to have a drink with, to say the least.
They jogged together towards a collection of police and military wheeled vehicles, including a pair of large green tanks. The VTOL jet increased its roar as the pilot cycled up the engines and slowly lifted off into the air.
“What’s our situation, Corporal?” Dorian asked as the sound of the jet slowly diminished.
“I’ve got two hundred men on the ground with three hundred on the way. Thirty tanks are in a covering position on the building with another sixty on approach. We’ve got a dozen fighter jets on CAP awaiting your orders.”
Dorian could tell the other man was much too enthused about the level of force on display. “Good work, Silas. Keep the jets in position for now. I want any collateral damage kept to a bare minimum.”
“Yes, sir.”
Dorian strolled up to the lip of the el-road, planted his hands on the railing, and stared pensively at the smoking crater in the skyscraper. “Why are we so far away?”
Silas stepped up next to him. “Structural integrity’s gone, sir. Building’s going to collapse any second.”
Dorian nodded. “We’ll have to sift through every pound of wreckage. At least we shouldn’t have any survivors to worry about.” It was early morning on a weekend and this was an office building, so it should have been nearly empty when tragedy struck. A small miracle on a dark day.
Another loud series of cracks sounded beneath their feet.
“Why aren’t we flying away?” Priya asked. Intellectually, she knew she could fly or float and shouldn’t be worried. But she still panicked every time the floor shifted anyway.
Danni was hanging her head over the edge and staring at the smoking hole beneath them. “This’ll be the perfect cover to exfil.”
Priya felt a sudden swell of gratitude that Danni was with her. She would have been hopeless alone. She probably would have surrendered to the authorities and hoped to talk her way out of it.
The floor dropped out from beneath them. Priya shrieked for a moment before stopping herself. The top half of the structure snapped clear of its structural supports and smashed through the missing gap into the rest of the building below.
Danni punched a hole into the concrete wall next to them and stuck Priya’s hand into it. “Hold on!”
The top structure leaned to their left as its base crumpled into the lower half, slowly collapsing into itself level by level.
“My God,” Silas muttered.
They watched the hundred story building slowly implode, only to be replaced by a blossoming cloud of white dust.
“At least it’s the weekend,” Dorian said. “The building was all but empty.”
Dorian and Silas rode on the exterior side of a tank in towards the crash site. Though they stood twenty stories above ground level, thick plumes of white dust continued to roll by and clouded their vision.
“Almost there, sir,” Silas shouted.
The tanks rolled to a stop, closely followed by military jeeps packed with troops. They stood at a curving track of the el-road parallel to the wrecked structure only fifty meters away offering them a clear view below. The last curls of smoke rolled past them, revealing what remained of the building.
What had once stood a hundred stories tall was now closer to twenty, though little remained save a few broken panels stabbing up into the sky. Powdered concrete blanketed the area.
Soldiers piled out of the transports and took up flanking positions around the tanks, pointing their rifles alertly at the wreck. A second team moved in tandem with them on the surface.
Dorian spoke into his mike. “This is Captain Dorian. I want the rules of engagement to be clear; nobody fires without my express permission, unless to defend yourself. If there are survivors, I want to talk to them first.”
“Talk to them, sir?” Silas asked uncertainly. “What about Clause Five?”
“We’ll be following it,” Dorian said. “But nowhere does it say we can’t interrogate the intruders first.”
“Sir, I don’t think that’s a very good idea.”
“That’s why I’m in charge, Corporal.” He’d have to keep a close eye on Silas. The man was clearly incapable of higher thought. And Dorian wanted answers as to why these aliens were here before he performed his required duty.
“Yes, sir,” Silas said stiffly.
Dorian reactivated his mike. “Move forward with caution.”
On the surface level troops slowly began to advance through the remaining traces of dust clouds, followed closely by the tanks. Dorian watched their progress from above with a pair of binoculars, though visibility was difficult through the dust.
A clatter sounded from within the ruins below. The lead soldiers held up a right fist; everyone froze. “Movement, we have movement,” a voice whispered onto the radio channel.
A pair of women stumbled out of a gaping hole in one of the remaining walls, clutching loose-fitting coats to themselves. Both were badly burned, though one was much the worse for wear. The soldiers aimed at the women’s chests.
“Hold your fire!” Dorian shouted into his mike. “They’re civilians. Get them out of here.” His heart swelled to see survivors, but it in turn raised the grim question of who else might be trapped.
The closest soldier dropped his rifle and jogged to the two women. “Are you all right?”
They stared at him uncomprehendingly. The soldier repeated himself. The two women shook their heads and pointed to their ears.
“They’ve been deafened by the collapse, sir,” the soldier reported.
Dorian stared at them through his binoculars. He noticed a glint of reflected sunlight off the woman with fewer burns. “Wait, that one is wearing a space suit!”
The soldier stepped back hastily and brought his rifle back up. The woman lurched forward, moving faster than humanly possible, knocking away his weapon with ease and ensnaring him with a tight grip around his throat.
“Hold fire! Hold fire!” Dorian shouted into his mike. “Get me on the loudspeaker.” Not only did the aliens appear to be interchangeably human, but they had physical abilities beyond Haderan capability. Even with only two of them, the threat level was unknown and thus potentially catastrophic.
Armed men surrounded Danni and Priya shouting orders in an alien language they didn’t understand.
“What are you doing?” Priya hissed at Danni. Her greatest gift was in negotiation, dialogue, empathy… but Danni had detonated any hopes of a peaceful solution.
Danni tightened her grip on the soldier as he attempted to wring his way free. “Keeping us alive.”
“You’re holding one of them hostage…”
Danni squinted at the shouting aliens. “What do you think they’re saying?” They did not have the innate ability to understand alien languages and had planned on relying on their tech to translate. People within the GA used Trade as the common tongue, so language barriers were usually not an issue.
“How should I know? My Wrist burned up alongside everything else on my body. Yours did too?”
Danni nodded tersely. “His mind is too alien. I can’t read it. I’ll need to dig in further.” High-level Royals had telepathy, but could not read alien minds like the Baraki or the Ronains. The Haderans were just different enough to be a similar problem.
“No!” Priya shouted, running forward to wring Danni’s shoulders around to face her. “You will not invade his mind! We’ve done enough damage as it is. If he fights too hard you could cause permanent harm.”
“How else do you intend to communicate?” Danni asked icily.
Priya’s mind raced. She was out of her element. Unused to being in danger. “I don’t know. We need to go into hiding and plan our next move.”
“Just what I was thinking.”
“You need to let him go, Danni. We’ll lose any hope of making peace if we take a hostage.”
“You’re on, sir,” Silas said.
“This is Captain Dorian addressing the two intruders. We’re willing to hear your terms for surrender.” Dorian watched the two women cock their heads and look at each other in confusion. “I don’t think they understand us,” Dorian muttered to Silas.
“Not terribly advanced, then, are they?” Silas said derisively.
Dorian swallowed what he wanted to say. “They spoke our language on the broadcast. They survived an atmospheric re-entry without a ship. Maybe their translator’s broken.”
“Let him go!” Priya said.
“Fine,” Danni said testily, and pushed the soldier free.
One of the surrounding troops fired off a single round by accident.
“Cease fire, cease fire!” Dorian’s voice immediately screamed over the radio channel.
Danni and Priya both flinched, but the bullet froze in place one meter away. Danni waved her hand and the bullet fell. She’d had the instincts and concentration to catch it with her telekinesis; Priya would never have been steady enough.
The ground thundered as the closest tank fired. There was a faint breeze as the dust pushed away from Danni’s hands, leaving small bubbles of TK shields surrounding her forearms.
Danni punched the cannon shell which deflected away and impacted against the neighboring building.
“I said cease fire!” Dorian screamed.
Three more tanks fired anyway.
Dorian leaned over the railing, watching shell after shell bounce away from the aliens and impact against the surrounding buildings. The woman with the short hair was a blur of movement, her arms moving faster than he could see, smacking away the tank rounds with her bare hands. Dorian watched in shock as the burned woman’s brown hair regenerated before his very eyes.
“What are they?” he muttered. A single woman was holding off a military assault with her bare hands. What if there had been a hundred of them?
The el-road shook beneath Dorian’s feet as one of the deflected shells detonated against the support beam.
In the distance he watched a large section of the elevated highway collapse from the tank barrage. Sunlight twinkled off metal cars as they plummeted twenty stories, the screams of their passengers lost in the roar of the battle below him.
“Those monsters!” Silas cursed.
“They’re not doing it, we are,” Dorian said. Was Silas truly that deluded, or was he trying to sound tough? “All hands, cease fire! We’re only harming ourselves.” Reluctantly, the tanks ceased fire. “Call in the jets.”
Danni lowered her hands which were held up like a boxer’s.
“The tanks… they’ve stopped,” Priya said in a haze. Watching Danni’s martial prowess both awed her and put her into a bizarre sense of unreality.
“What are you, the narrator?” Danni snapped. “Let’s get moving before those jets get here.”
“What jets?”
“Just listen.”
Priya noticed a faint scream in the air. “Where do we go?”
Danni pointed at a small collection of men looking at them from an el-road. “For starters, let’s go grab the CO.”
Dorian watched the jets approach under the el-road level, shooting through the city street between skyscrapers. They fired a missile salvo at the base of the ruined building then peeled off into the air for another pass.
Any concerns for civilian survivors in the collapsed structure had come and gone. The aliens had incredible powers, the limits of which they didn’t know. Dorian’s wish to speak with them was no longer plausible. It was time for brute force.
An explosion blasted apart the base of the building right where the aliens had been. Dorian saw them disappear in a blur of motion just before the hit.
“Where did they go? Did anybody see?” he asked on the radio.
“They’re heading right for us!” Silas shouted.
A wave of air rushed at them from below as the two aliens passed overhead. Silas screamed as some invisible force grabbed a hold of his legs and dragged him down the street. He desperately clung onto the tire wall of a jeep, crying for help, before he was sucked into the air and disappeared.
“Silas!” Dorian shouted. “Hold your fire! Where did they go?”
The aliens and their hostage had disappeared right before his eyes.
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