Thorrid
The Sadalmelik System
The Remaining Preenasettians - 2012
THE CAST:
Flight Commander Drango Sin, Flight Commander Karl Sin, Seca Zeck, Bala Stefan, Bala Dall, Seca Watsin, Seca Rase
‘We must pursue the Vercetian sphere, Drango,’ his commander said. ‘We will be back for you when we can, though it may be a while. You still have a job to do. Capture what remains of the enemy. You are resourceful enough and have superior firepower. Good luck.’
‘Affirmative. Sin out.’ Flight Commander Drango Sin sighed. ‘Did you hear that Karl?’
‘Yes,’ replied Flight Commander Karl Sin. ‘They are chasing the sphere, so there must be a Royal onboard. Drango, this rock could be our home for a while if the Vercetian ship has the jump on them.’
‘Let’s keep tracking those vehicles,’ Drango said to his brother. ‘You take the land speeder, and I’ll have the transporter. We can at least remove them from the game, eh?’
Drango went to the lumbering transporter at the mouth of one of the strange thin passes cut into the mountain. This will be touch and go, he thought.
‘Get a move on, bro,’ Karl advised unhelpfully. ‘It’s getting away.’
‘Concentrate on your target, dumbhead.’
Drango hadn’t positioned his fighter, and the transporter was entering the pass. ‘Here goes.’ He fired the ion cannon and a bright red energy globe burst from the ship, a characteristic green tail forming in its wake. His shot was wide of the mark, hitting the rock face. Debris sprayed in all directions, but the transporter was safely away.
‘Well done, bro. You’ve altered the landscape – a bit. Good shot.’
Drango smarted at the sarcasm. ‘Okay, hotshot, let’s see you do better.’ He knew his brother would. The speeder was still out in the open, in perfect position. That and the fact his very annoying sibling was the best shot in the squadron meant this was a walk in the park for him.
A dust cloud from the impact billowed into the sky. When it cleared, the speeder emerged, completely intact.
‘You missed, Karl!’
‘What do you mean?’ he said, disbelief in his voice. ‘That had destruction written on it all the way.’
‘No, mate, you missed.’ Drango was enjoying himself, even if some of their mortal enemies had escaped. ‘You missed. M.I.S.S.E.D, missed.’
Stunned silence from his brother’s ship. Drango had to admit to himself that there shouldn’t have been anything left of the Vercetian speeder. Something wasn’t right.
‘Let’s head north and find somewhere to land,’ he said to his sullen brother. ‘We must start planning.’
Seca Zeck drove the speeder into the old monastery stables, or what they assumed were once stables, parked next to the transporter, and jumped out.
‘They’re trying to blow us to pieces,’ she shouted. ‘The…the…’
‘Don’t say it, Zeck,’ Bala Stefan advised, putting a finger on her lips. ‘We still abide by the Life Team’s tenet of not swearing. We’re stuck on a backwater planet and Prince Ventar is off somewhere with half of our team. We’re still a Life Team and shall act like one.’
‘And do you think that would have stopped Kobios?’
Zeck smiled at the thought of their hotheaded, larger than life, and recently absented chief of security.
‘You win one battle with her and think you can act like her?’ Stefan laughed, the gravity of the moment evading her.
Bala Dall jumped in, ‘Well you’re our chief of security now, and our leader I suppose – so, swear away!’
Seca Watsin sniggered, but Seca Rase refused to be distracted.
‘Look at the transporter, everyone. Tonnes of rock rained down on us and there’s not a mark on it,’ said Rase.
‘We’ve just taken a direct hit,’ said Zeck, sweeping her hand expansively at the speeder. ‘Also, not a mark.’
Watsin changed the subject.
‘Do you think they’ve been left behind, abandoned?’ he said. ‘The Trun fighters, that is.’
‘They must have been,’ Zeck replied. ‘The battlecruiser went after our sphere – and the Prince.’
‘They could be wormhole hopping for weeks or months,’ suggested Rase. ‘It could be a year, or more, leaving the five of us here with a pair of Trun soldiers with a severe attitude problem. To them, the war is still on.’
‘And they have the upper hand when it comes to firepower,’ said Dall.
The five remaining members of Prince Ventar’s Life Team went quiet.
Zeck finally broke the silence, ‘We have something going for us apart from there being more of us, and that’s food. Remember, it took us six months to be self-sufficient on this planet – and taking the combined brainpower of the whole Life Team to do it – and a good portion of the sphere’s food reserves.’
‘Ah…’ Stefan understood. ‘They only have emergency rations. What, two or three days in a fighter ship?’
‘Yes.’ Zeck smiled. ‘They’ll be hungry very soon.’
‘That’s the last of the rations,’ said Drango. ‘We’ll starve before we find food.’
‘The Vercetians have survived here for years,’ Karl moaned. ‘How did they do it?’
‘They probably cultivated these terrible foods and removed the poisons. With time and the right equipment, anything is possible,’ replied Drango. ‘Neither of which we have.’
‘What do we do, then?’ asked Karl.
‘We need to raid their base. That old place built into the side of the mountain. We’ll strike, capture, and kill if we have to.’
Drango and Karl made their way along the pass the Vercetians named after their roving security officer, Seca Watsin. They marvelled at the topographical oddity of the slit cut into the mountain. Well, Drango did. Karl accepted the mundane and the marvellous with identical indifference, infuriating his older brother.
Small white boxes studded the walls every five hundred feet or so. He stopped at one but couldn’t open it.
Further on, a funny six-legged creature came into view. Large eyes either side of its head seemed to hold up the copious folds of skin sagging from its jaw. Standing on four rear legs and reaching with its front two, it attended to one of the boxes. Karl tracked it with his pistol, but it left without appearing to notice them.
The brothers looked into the box that the insect had abandoned. The front panel was gone, exposing a number of small dials arranged around a large central dial labelled with glyphs: to the left, a mountain, to the right, a tall building. The arrow on the dial pointed left, to the mountain. Drango moved the dial to point at the building and the wall of rock in front of them disappeared.
A vast megalopolis appeared where the mountain had been. But the brothers didn’t have time to admire the view, they were too busy being attacked by the Vercetians.
Zeck, Watsin, and Rase had been waiting in ambush at one of the many tangential passes leading away from the main corridor and onto the lowlands. They reckoned this would be the Trun’s approach, and they were correct.
The Vercetians may have had the jump on the Trun, but their advantage wouldn’t last long – they were woefully underpowered. They each had handheld oscillating shields, the force fields fanning out in all directions. The field weakened toward its perimeter; they needed to be careful to stay behind it. Reasonable shield technology, but in the fourteen years they had been away from Preenasette, things had moved on – assisted by external influences. The brothers possessed the very latest.
Zeck was first to register a direct hit on the taller of the two Trun. But rather than seeing the classic lightning fork radial distribution, she only observed just a small white circle of light that immediately disappeared. ‘What happened there?’ she shouted to the other two over their helmet intercom.
‘Search me,’ replied Rase, ‘I’ve just scored a direct hit, and nothing.’
‘Whatever it is,’ said Watsin, ‘it’s new to me. Back!’
The Trun had organised and evaluated the situation and moved directly toward them, firing volleys from their laser pistols.
As to fighting tactics, there was little to help either side – just one vertical rock face, used by the Vercetians for cover. They should have had the advantage, but the Trun, confident in their firepower and shielding, were evening things out.
‘What’s the plan?’ shouted Rase.
Zeck took a moment to reply. ‘Have you seen the mountain? It’s an enormous city!’
‘I know,’ said Rase. ‘But first, let’s stay alive.’
‘Let’s rush them,’ Watsin suggested. ‘What else can we do?’
‘Agreed,’ Zeck replied. ‘On three… Three!’
As one, the three Vercetians leaped from their cover, rushing toward the enemy, all bent slightly to get themselves into the optimum position behind their shields. Their weapons were held so the blasts passed through the weakest part of the shields. This compromised accuracy, so the closer they could get to their target, the better. The Trun brothers had kinetic pulse body armour with projectile sensing, so they could fire unimpeded and with more accuracy. Any Vercetian fire would be sensed by the shield, which would activate only at the point of impact.
As they got closer to each other, the crossfire got heavier and the shields lit up continually. The Trun weapons recharged faster, and more than made up for them being one man fewer.
Zeck was sure that their own shields would fail first.
Their shields did. The brothers closed in under the protection of their shielding. They fired, but something strange happened. The laser beams swerved around their targets – somehow disobeying the laws of physics. The Vercetian fire still found its targets. The Trun shields held out much longer, but ultimately failed. It was then the turn of the Vercetian fire to bend mystifyingly around the Trun. In the end they stood face to face, no more than ten feet apart, and no one could hit anything. This went on for more than a minute, shots veering around their targets, nobody registering a direct hit.
Karl Sin was first to stop shooting in the face of fire coming straight at him and veering away to one side or the other. He threw his gun to the ground and reached for his Taserblade, drew it and activated it, and ran at Rase. Rase had nothing with which to defend himself. The Trun came down on him and he flinched, awaiting his fate. But it never happened. Sin’s blow hit what felt like a wall of stone six inches away from the Vercetian’s head, and he bounced off, falling to the ground.
Hand to hand fighting broke out, but it was a fight no one could win. No blow could be landed, be it from a weapon, a boot or a fist. It felt to Zeck as if they were puppets at a children’s party, controlled by a master puppeteer. Eventually, the fighting petered out. Drango, in a fit of rage, tried one more time to land a punch on Zeck, only to end up on the ground again.
‘Stop it. Stop it!’ cried Zeck. ‘Can’t you see? We can’t hurt each other. Something, or somebody, is preventing it.’
Drango picked himself up and glared at her, accepting the stalemate.
Watsin was appalled at the ferocity of the two Trun. ‘Why do you still hate us so much?’
‘We never really did,’ replied Karl. ‘Not until you began your campaign of targeting our civilians and our families.’ Still breathing heavily, he jerked a thumb at his brother. ‘My brother Drango lost his wife and child to one of your bombs, rigged to go off in a crowded civilian marketplace.’
‘We have never, would never, resort to such tactics.’ Zeck was mystified but held back from calling him a liar.
‘How long have you been here?’ asked Karl.
‘Fourteen years,’ replied Watsin.
‘A lot has happened on Preenasette over that time.’
‘What about that?’ said Rase, pointing up at the huge city glinting in the sunlight. ‘That’s been a mountain for the last fourteen years. Did you do this?’
‘Possibly,’ Drango said, calmed down somewhat. ‘I turned a dial on that panel.’ He pointed to the wall opposite them.
Seca approached it. ‘We’ve never been able to access one of these.’
‘What do we do now?’ asked Karl. ‘We can’t hurt each other. Do we ignore each other?’
‘You’ll probably starve,’ Zeck said. ‘It took us months to make this planet’s food fit for consumption. We can give you food, and shelter, if you want it.’
The Trun brothers consulted with each other, Karl finally replying, ‘That is acceptable to us. For the time being.’