Star Force: Death Knell (SF26) Read online

  Using it as a lever she redirected her momentum and pole vaulted her body up, over, and around her head until her hand slipped off and she drifted into one of the openings on the far side of the ravine, having killed about half of her momentum with the maneuver. The rest kept spinning her around until she bounced off a side wall slightly before smacking into an archway.

  A palm reaching out to the side cut her reverse momentum, as well as leaving a bloody smear behind. The Archon pushed up off the floor and the wall, moving her further into the short connective tunnel and to the arch where she gripped the edge and steadied herself, desperately trying to blink away the blurriness without success. Still, she could make out the images of Nestafar walkers lined up across the bay in tight rows…with the nearest one floating a few meters off the floor.

  Which way? she thought, having two options. Inset from the edge of the ravine was a narrow hallway running the length and connecting the bays to one another, as well as running across the staggered vertical ‘elevator’ shafts. It was enclosed enough for her to bounce her way down, but which way should she go and was she too high or low to match up with their entry point?

  From her reckoning…which was probably way off…she should have been left of the hangar, so she opted to go right, pushing off from the archway and snagging the edge of the tunnel and pulling herself in at a quick clip, still painfully aware that she wasn’t alone on this jumpship, no matter how deserted it felt at the moment.

  She pushed her way down the hallway, stopping so she could get a look at each bay she passed. They were set well apart from one another, with at least two entrances on the smaller ones, so Morgan did more traveling than peeking as her eyes still did not want to lose their haziness. She passed over several of the vertical shafts, wondering if she should make a guess and head up a little, then every surviving nerve in her body twitched as she passed over one and saw someone below her.

  “Stop!” a booming voice yelled, tossing her into a panicked spin off to the other side. Her hand hit the ground and twisted her around, floating her up towards the ceiling of the tunnel to where she scrambled for traction as a blurry image floated up the shaft and into view.

  “Calm yourself, Human,” a Calavari soldier said evenly as he caught the edge of the ceiling with his upper right hand and killed his momentum. “You are among allies.”

  Morgan bounced off the ceiling, pressing an arm against it to null out part of her spin but the rest sent her slowly spinning back down to the floor as the stress and pain she was keeping contained burst forth in a moment of relief when her malfunctioning eyes and ears confirmed that she was looking at a Calavari and not a Nestafar. Bloody tears gushed out, along with an involuntary sound from her throat that sent her coughing again, spraying the floor with blood as she bounced back off it.

  The Calavari came forward and caught the mess of Human in three arms, trying not to squeeze the bloody thing too hard. Grabbing the ceiling as they went up he pushed them back down hard enough to give his legs a moment of traction on the floor and sent them back towards the shaft where he grabbed the edge and pulled them up it.

  “I will get you to a medic,” the deep voice said from directly over Morgan’s head as she was wrapped up in muscular arms she couldn’t have extricated herself from if she wanted to. “Can you speak?”

  Morgan didn’t try, but she did squeeze his insanely big arm in response, though he barely felt it.

  “Stay alive a little longer, small one,” the Calavari said, pulling them through section after section with Morgan oblivious to most of it. “You are safe now.”

  Some minutes later the trailblazer saw other soldiers flashing past, then large ships that she guessed were the troop transports. She was taken up into one and suddenly felt the crush of gravity on her once again, forcing a yell that came out with more blood splatters as she was laid down on a flat surface.

  The next thing she knew a Human face was looking down at her and a cool numbness flowed into her body, starting at her neck and flowing down through her extremities but she didn’t black out. Instead she watched as she was floated through the decks of a Star Force warship and into a medical bay where she was moved onto a treatment table and at least three medics began cutting off her blood-soaked uniform.

  She heard one of them swear, then a stick was laid on her bare chest that walked out across her body and pinned her in place. All feeling disappeared from below her neck, then one of the little metallic tendrils snaked its way up over her chin and spread out across the left side of her face.

  Morgan knew it had to be the regenerator. One had been given to each of the trailblazers when they deployed into the field, and it was the only one that her quartet of jumpships carried. Two other, smaller models had gone with the rest of her armada, but she’d kept the larger version on the Red Ranger with her…and right now she was very glad she had. She was also glad the techs had learned how to recharge the damn things so they were no longer a limited resource, though they were still precious. If one was lost they couldn’t build a replacement, so they only had the ones originally recovered from the pyramid to work with.

  Never before had she used one that covered her entire body. She hadn’t even known it could branch out this far, though to be honest she wasn’t sure what she was sensing other than seeing a blurry pair of faces at the edge of her vision and a blue light on the ceiling above her…then her left eye began to clear and the faces became almost Human, but still dark. One of them seemed to grow in size and after a few minutes she recognized it as a Calavari standing a short ways behind the medics, looking in at her questioningly.

  She tried her voice again, knowing that she probably shouldn’t, but found that her vocal chords hadn’t been numbed by the regenerator…at least not yet.

  “Ee…va…cuate the ship,” she said in the trade language, getting surprised looks from the medics but an intent gaze from the Calavari who nudged his way forward.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Trap…gravity…all dead. Enemy…still alive,” she said, pausing to cough up another weak spray of blood, for her lungs didn’t want to fully function, numb as they were. “Pull…out now,” she warned.

  “You heard her,” another voice said from out of view. “Get your survivors out before they’re counterattacked.”

  “There may be other survivors like him,” the Calavari argued. “I will not leave them to the Nestafar. We will hold the hangar and patrol the immediate area, and see if any more make their way back like this one…but we will make ready to evacuate if the Nestafar come out to us. They have a flight advantage in zero gravity, but still, I don’t see how 10,600 of our men could have been killed. There must be some survivors.”

  “Look at her,” one of the medics interjected. “Her body has literally been crushed. These scans are showing fractures throughout her skeleton and severe internal organ damage. That’s not from combat, that’s from excessive gravity. If the Nestafar cranked it up far enough it will have killed everyone in a very short amount of time.”

  “He survived.”

  “She barely survived,” the medic countered, “and not only is she the strongest Human ever to live, she weighs far less than your race does. Her petite form combined with her strength somehow let her survive, but Calavari mass far more, and in heavy gravity that is a disadvantage, no matter how strong your muscles are.”

  The Calavari frowned. “The jumpship has no gravity at the moment. Why turn it off rather than return it to normal? So they can hunt down the survivors…which means there are still others alive out there.”

  “No,” Morgan said, beginning to lose consciousness as the tendrils on her forehead slowly splintered into dozens more and snaked up into her hair and left ear. “I broke…the gravity generator. If they fix it…they can do it again…evacuate.”

  The Calavari asked her a question but she didn’t hear it. With that final word she slipped into a semi-conscious state, losing contact with the outside world and re
maining only vaguely aware of the damage to her body that the regenerator was methodically eating up.

  10

  “Wake up, Morgan,” the medic said, gently jostling her bare shoulder as she lay on the cushioned table in the med bay. “Can you hear…” he cut off as her left wrist flashed across her chest and grabbed his wrist, then her right came up and grabbed his throat out of reflex.

  As soon as she opened her eyes and saw where she was the Archon relaxed her grip and nervously shook with a twitch-like tremor traveling down her arms and through her body all the way to her bare toes.

  “Sorry,” she said, letting him go and looking down at her nude body…which was no longer bloody or wracked in pain, but it still didn’t feel right. She moved her arms around, then her legs, but she couldn’t get rid of the shakes.

  Another medic walked up with a stack of clean clothes. “We cleaned you up as best we could,” she said apologetically. “Do you want to dress now or use the shower?” she asked, gesturing to a nearby room.

  Morgan squeezed her eyes shut, trying to make sense out of the whirlwind running through her head. “How long have I been out?”

  “A little over four hours,” the man whose throat she’d grabbed answered.

  “I need a comm,” she said, swinging her legs over the side, only to feel crusty, dried blood in her body’s crevices. She motioned for the clothes and pulled on the aqua-colored T-shirt while she was still sitting. After that she stood up and tested her legs, which held firm but felt odd. She couldn’t put her finger on the sensation, but it didn’t instill in her any sense of strength.

  By the time she’d pulled on the matching pair of pants and casual shoes one of the medics returned with an earpiece that the Archon slipped in and adjusted to the appropriate setting.

  “Captain?”

  “Here,” Wilkinson answered. “Good to hear your voice. What’s your status?”

  “Alive…what’s the jumpship’s status?”

  “The Calavari pulled their transports out about an hour ago. Apparently the Nestafar attacked the hangar and they couldn’t hold it with the few people they had left. There’s one onboard that wants to speak with you as soon as you’re able.”

  Morgan closed her eyes for a moment, with the mass losses weighing down upon her. “Give me an hour, then I’ll meet him and you on the bridge.”

  “Very well.”

  “I…did anyone else make it back?”

  “No,” Wilkinson said softly. “I’ve got a dropship sitting just above their hull and it’s picking up their telemetry data, but there’s no response on comms and they’re not moving.”

  “Including mine?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know Rev took his armor off and tried to head back. They may all have when the gravity kicked up.”

  “What happened in there?”

  “An ambush. What’s the highest the Red Ranger’s gravity plating can go?”

  “2.5 if you want to burn the generators out with an overload pulse, otherwise they’ve got a 1.5 max rating. The ones in the training areas go up to 5.0 I believe.”

  “Find out how high the other Alliance races’ go, and while you’re doing that target one of the other two jumpships…they’re still contained, I presume?”

  “They are.”

  “Target one and demand its surrender. When it refuses or ignores you start poking holes in the ship until they come to their senses. Don’t use the rail gun or the missiles.”

  “To what point?”

  “Until they surrender or until they’re all dead,” Morgan said angrily as she walked over to the door and out of the med bay, her legs and arms still feeling the shakes. “If they feel like dying maybe the destruction of one ship will convince the others to surrender. Just make sure you leave their comm systems intact.”

  “They may try to bolt like the command ship did,” the Captain pointed out.

  “Keep enough ships around all three to make that costly for them, and see if you can’t poke their gravity drives with a cleansing beam or two. I think they figure that if they can hold us off long enough they’ll get reinforcements. Make it clear that their jumpships are not going to be used to further this invasion, one way or another.”

  “I understand. If they capitulate how do you want them removed from the ship?”

  “The Calavari have a lot of empty transports,” Morgan said morbidly.

  “I’ll take care of it. Just get yourself patched up. Everyone up here is overly relieved you came out of there alive.”

  “So am I,” she said meekly before shutting the earpiece off with a touch of a button as she headed through the ship’s corridors in her aqua medical uniform and shoes. She got a lot of odd looks along the way, but didn’t understand why until she got back in her quarters and looked in a mirror.

  Her irises had changed color from a dark brown to some sort of twinkling gray, almost as if they were glowing with sparkles. Morgan blinked several times, finding the sight unnerving, both by the unnatural look and the level of damage that must have been done to require that much restructuring. For a moment she wondered if the regenerator hadn’t added some mechanical components, but a close inspection showed Human iris tissue, just in a bizarre color.

  She didn’t know why it would change, but it somehow seemed appropriate given how close to death she’d come. With her eyes a constant reminder and the privacy of her personal quarters lowering her mental barriers, she clutched her arms around her chest and slid down to the floor, leaning against the wall as another round of shakes overtook her, followed quickly by tears that she couldn’t suppress any longer.

  What she had gone through was bad enough, but her mind kept focusing on the 10,000 dead Calavari…ten thousand! All killed in a matter of minutes by something as pathetic as a gravity field. She’d requested their help taking the ship and now they were all gone, save for a handful that had survived in the hangar bays, though why they hadn’t been affected was beyond her. She was glad a few had survived, but she felt responsible for the others even though she hadn’t been leading the assault. She’d been there to assist, but the mission was her stupid idea and they’d paid the price for it.

  Worse than that, she’d lost 13 Archons. They may have been smaller in number, but their value to her was worth far more than the Calavari, as insensitive as that thought seemed. Archons weren’t supposed to die. They’d lived and trained for over 300 years…to what? Get smashed to death on some stupid enemy jumpship whose worth was minuscule in the grand scheme of things. Their lives had been wasted, as hers nearly had been, all because of a mistake.

  She blamed herself for the failure, but knew the mistake was not hers alone. In all of the material the Alliance had provided Star Force they’d never so much as hinted at using gravity generators as weapons against the lizards. Star Force models weren’t even designed to push to lethal level. Such things could be built, of course, but they’d been specifically designed NOT to in case of a malfunction or overload. They didn’t want someone dying because of an accident, and she’d assumed all the other races would have had similar safeguards in place.

  The fact that they hadn’t mentioned cranking up the gravity as a potential defense had seemed to reinforce that assumption. Had she assumed wrong or was this disaster of some other making? If the Nestafar had built their ships with this capability she had no doubt Star Force’s techs would find a way to defend against it, but there was no undoing this debacle. Live and learn, she reminded herself, but there was no way she was simply going to be able to let this failure go.

  On top of that she was still freaked out by her own near death. Though fully healed her body still didn’t feel right, even after the walk back. It felt half alive…maybe that was due to all the new tissue that had to be regrown, or maybe it was a mental side effect of the shock she’d suffered.

  Or maybe it was because it had only happened hours ago...though Morgan still wasn’t sure how many. Most of the post-generator part was a blur and
she figured her mind still hadn’t caught up to the fact that she was alive…and she certainly didn’t feel like she should be.

  The trailblazer waited out the tears and shakes until they gradually faded away, letting the emotions bleed out until she was ready to clamp them back down again. When she did she got up, wiped the tears away, then stripped off the medical uniform and washed the remaining blood and grime off her body in the shower tube for a few minutes but chose not to linger, despite the fact that the warm water was eating away at the odd feeling throughout her body.

  10,000 Calavari and 13 Archons were dead, but the fight wasn’t over and she certainly wasn’t going to spend time relaxing in the shower. The Nestafar had invaded this system, intent on eradicating the Calavari, and they’d just killed a good number of them along with her own brothers and sisters. They were the aggressors, not the victims, and Morgan needed to avenge those that had been lost. To push it aside and continue on like nothing had happened would have been akin to treason in her mind.

  She wasn’t going to turn into a savage and kill them all out of spite, but the kid gloves were coming off. If they wanted to surrender she’d give them that option, but if they didn’t she’d blow them to hell along with the jumpships.

  Morgan had told Wilkinson to start with one of the others because as much as she wanted to blast the jumpship she’d just been on into pieces she couldn’t bring herself to abandon all hope that one of the other Archons had survived. Maybe even some of the Calavari, if they’d stumbled across one of the Nestafar safe zones…for she didn’t believe that all of them could have been flying around in the main chamber.

  She didn’t think anyone else had survived, and she knew in her gut they hadn’t. That wasn’t the point, though. She was going to give them the chance, just in case they had survived against all odds, for she couldn’t live with herself if they had clung to life, only to be killed by a subsequent attack on her orders.