Legions of Orion (Star Crusades Nexus, Book 1) (30 page)

“
This is the
Captain, all crew are to secure wards. We are setting an escape
course to the first planet. This is not a drill. We will engage
main thrusters in sixty seconds for emergency burn. To your
stations!”

The nurse reappeared
along with another. They pulled themselves inside and proceeded to
pull down the magnetic seals around the beds that would lock the
patients into position
, prior to igniting
the engines. Jack saw her approaching and leaned back and into the
correct position. He reached up and struck the lock button. A
semi-circle seal came down, and he felt as if he was being strapped
to the bed. She checked the seal.

“
I knew you wanted
to strap me down,” he said, followed by a wink. The nurse smiled
and moved on to the next patient.

“
Nice moves!”
laughed Wictred, who then moved to one of six transit points to
pull a series of thick belts and seals around his great torso. The
second nurse pulled herself down to him so that she could
assist.

“Thirty seconds till burn!” came
another slightly muffled message over the speakers. This time the
Captain’s voice seemed less confident. Jack could feel a vibration
coming through the metal of the ship and then as though he was
becoming heavier.

“We’re under fire, engines activating
now!”

The two nurses flew
from the middle of the ward to the ceiling with a sickening crack.
The nurse from before, Anne, managed to lift her hands in time, but
the second slammed headfirst into the metal surface. Jack was
certain the impact had broken her neck. After twenty seconds, the
engines were still burning, and the ship continued to
accelerate.

Whatever is going on out there, it
means trouble!

Then the lights cut,
and a series of sparks rippled through the ward. They were mainly
from the destruction of electronic components, but he also noticed
a strange vibration working up through the structure of the ship.
He felt weightless again but not a single piece of equipment seemed
to work. For a second, he worried that he had been blasted out into
the void of space. That couldn’t be true because he could breathe,
and the temperature of the ward was exactly the same as before.
There was a hissing noise, followed by a clump sound. At the same
time, the emergency lights partially activated. He reached out to
find Wictred’s arm pulling him from his bed. His face appeared
massive in the low light, and only his crooked teeth showed
up.

“
Power’s
g
one. We need to find a lifeboat. This is
an attack!”

Jack looked at his
in shock
.

“An attack, by whom?”

Wictred turned,
pulling himself along the wall with Jack right behind
him.

“
Who cares?
W
e need to get off this ship,
fast!”

The tube in his arm
ripped out, and blobs of fluid drifted aimlessly inside the
gravity-free confines of the ward. Jack could see the shapes of the
other patients struggling as they floated about near their beds.
The young nurse was trying to help one of them. Jack grabbed a
handrail and stopped his movement for just a second.

“Hey, Anne. We need to get out of
here.”

She turned around,
trying to find the source of the sound, and then she saw the two of
them.”

“No, my duty is to all of our
patients.”

She then looked back
at the man she was helping and continued to work on his torn
bandages that must have come free during the burst of acceleration.
The main lights flashed as if they were about to come back online.
One managed to say active, but the others flickered and stayed off.
Jack pulled himself towards her and instantly felt a surge of pain
like a knife being stabbed into his ribs. He groaned, but with all
the noise, it wasn’t noticed. Wictred stopped and look
back.

“
Leave her, Jack. We
have to go!” he snapped at him.

“
No, I’m not leaving
her!”

“Anne, there isn’t...”

He was cut short as
part of the ward started to glow red. They could instantly feel the
increase in temperature. Jack grabbed Anne and yanked her from the
patient and towards the door. She spun out of control, shouting
wildly at him until Wictred caught her foot and pulled her out of
the main doorway. Jack followed close behind and made it through
the doorway in time to see parts of the interior furnishings begin
to melt. Wictred grabbed the metal rod that was the emergency door
override, a standard design fitted to all compartments in the ship.
He didn’t even hesitate and forced it down, even as a patient tried
to make it to the frame. Anne pulled at him, trying to keep the
door open.

“
Bastards!” she
screamed.
“Open it, now!”

The tiny porthole in
the door flashed blue, and a flood of energy washed about inside
the compartment, instantly vaporising anything other than the
bulkheads and heavy equipment. The patients caught fire before
being sucked out of the gaping hole in the side of the ship. Jack
pulled her close so that her bruised face was only inches from
his.

“
Anne...Anne!” he
re
peated, trying to calm her down. “We
had no choice. They are attacking us. If you stayed, you’d be dead
as well.”

Wictred reached out to her.

“If you want to live, follow us.”

Wictred pulled
himself through the main shaft and Jack followed. They travelled
almost ten metres before he looked back to see what the nurse was
doing. To his surprise, the young woman was directly behind him,
pulling herself along with surprising speed and efficiency. The
speakers crackled, and a high-pitched whine screamed down the
system.

“Large formation...abandon ship,
boarding on the...” then it continued as nothing but noise. Wictred
reached the first junction and checked his friend was still
there.

“
We’re under attack.
I
f they board us, we’re finished. We need
to get off this frigate and join the fight!” he said sternly. Jack
looked to Anne, expecting her to argue yet again. Instead, he saw
nothing but resolve on her face.

“Don’t wait for me, come on!”

The religious artefacts that
appeared after the Hyperion Incident quickly turned from the
mythical and into the biomechanical. Just seven months after the
end of the fighting, a suicide cell was captured and interrogated.
Amongst their weapons and explosives were a dozen small metal
objects, each one the epitome of the half woman and half snake
Echidna. This time, however, the snake was fully mechanical and the
resulting creature was some foul mixture of the two. Over time, the
last Zealot cells disappeared with most returning to their families
and societies as before. With the link to Hyperion gone, so went
their strategy and support. It should have been obvious; with
hindsight, it couldn’t have been more straightforward.

Holy Icons

Spartan drove as
quickly as he could from their encam
pment
without tipping the Bulldog armoured transporter over. It was a
large six-wheeled vehicle with four exit doors and a single
top-mounted turret position. Although it was mainly designed for
the military market, this version of the Bulldog was the civilian
issued version, and therefore not equipped with weapons or
countermeasures. At least, that was how it had been before the APS
Corporation had got their hand on a dozen of them in the military
surplus market. Now the vehicle was fitted with what looked like a
cage around its hull to trigger explosive charges before they
penetrated the hull, as well as a modified ‘v’ shaped hull and
reactive armour. They struck a ridge, and the vehicle left the
ground for a short time before crashing back down.

“Hey, nice driving Spartan!” snapped
Gun.

In the back of the
vehicle sat the small group of Jötnar, as well as Teresa and two
APS operatives. Everybody was armoured, and with just a few minor
changes, they could easily have been a Marine Corps unit from
twenty years earlier. The vehicle was specifically designed so that
it could be driven and operated by personnel in full PDS tactical
armour without compromises. Teresa sat directly behind Spartan in
his driving position and tapped the side of his helmet. Both of
their visors were open, and it was surprisingly quiet inside the
armoured hull.

“How much further?” she asked
nervously.

They hit another
bump, and only the gas suspension and magnetic seal for each of the
passengers stopped them from coming to harm. The Bulldog settled
back down, and Spartan was able to turn back for just a
second.

“Over the next ridge, then we circle
down three hundred metres to the excavation site.”

One of the APS
operatives, a middle-aged man called Issac Ocano, sat at the bank
of computer displays and controls. He was a senior Team Leader in
the Corporation and the controller for some of the most violent APS
teams in the Alliance. Today, however, Spartan had given him
tactical command. There had been protests, but Spartan needed his
skills and experience to control what could become a very messy
operation. From inside, he had access to all the remaining data
feeds. The most prominent was from the high-level security drone
that was monitoring the site from above. There were also two active
data streams coming back from the two APS teams near the area who
were also moving in to assist. Issac was one of APS Corporation’s
most successful commanders, and with a violent reputation. He had
already redirected seven reconnaissance assets as well as all
available APS units to the area.

“
Spartan, I’ve
managed to get a signal out to ANS Dragon. Their real-time streams
are being hacked, but it looks like something is going on up there.
The data indicates something has entered the system and is
blockading the Spacebridge.”

“Something?” growled Gun.

He was well known
for being short of temper, and one thing he disliked more than
anything else was ambiguity. Instead of saying more, he checked the
hilt of his weapon. It was an odd device, similar to the glaives of
the Jötnar, but with a shorter shaft that could be wielded in one
hand. Spartan was busy controlling the vehicle, and it was taking a
supreme effort to keep the thing on the roughly cut track. The only
times in the last few weeks he’d done this same trip had been at no
more than a quarter of his current speed. Even so, none of the
passengers complained, other than the occasional sarcastic comment
from Gun.

“
Nearly there!” he
called out, and with a sliding turn, they finally reached the peak.
The vehicle lurched slightly as it changed its orientation and
started the winding descent down to the dig site. With the worst of
the drive out of the way, he spoke through the Team Network that
connected them all, both visually and orally.

“Whatever is happening in orbit and
beyond is out of our control. Our job is to protect our people. We
will assess the situation when we get there. Our priority is to
keep the workers, engineers and security teams safe.”

“
What about the
site?” asked Hunn, the young Jötnar warrior.

Spartan threw him a
quick look and turned back, shaking his head.

“To hell with the site, the people come
first. I warned them to not touch anything. Have we learnt nothing
from these places? Didn’t they see what happened when Jack and
Wictred activated the machines down there?”

Gun and Khan both
looked at the young Jötnar with amusement. Khan leaned in slightly
and thumped him playfully in the chest. To a Jötnar it was nothing,
but for anyone else it would have broken bones.

“
Like I told you,
Spartan is his own man. There’s only one human who hates the feral
Biomechs more than us.”

Khan nodded towards Spartan.

“
It’s him. If you
want the taste of battle, then listen to Spartan.”

Gun nodded in agreement.

“True. Spartan always finds the best
fights.”

Teresa watched and
listened to them all, but she was more interested in the aerial
video streams than their macho posturing. The low level drones kept
being disabled, but the high level drone was still transmitting. It
showed a number of fast moving machines that seemed to be hovering
about two hundred metres from the surface. The dark shapes
surrounding it by a myriad of paths and tracks, easily identified
the dig site. Then she spotted movement in the lower
left.

“Look!” she cried.

Issac Ocano
had already seen it and enlarged that segment to
show a group of five people sheltering behind what appeared to be
rubble, or perhaps a broken wall. They were firing their weapons at
something near the artefact. Then a blue pulse tore at the ground
around them, knocking them back. Incredibly, all of them returned
to their feet and continued to move away from the object. Teresa
sat up straight and stared at Issac.

“
Is it me, or does
it look like something is trying to get them away from the dig
site?”

*
* *

Jack and Wictred had
reached three evacuation points on the stricken frigate, and still
there were no available lifeboats. In their journey through the
ship’s hull, they’d come across multiple bodies but no
survivors.