Shattered Destiny: A Galactic Adventure, Episode One (13 page)

Again I heard that odd desperate tone.

Before I had a chance to assess it and what
it could mean, he motioned me forward, and I felt compelled to
follow.

There was an opening to the
ruins before us, and the
prince took it cautiously, holding up a closed
fist. He waited a full minute, perhaps using his tactical scanners
to assess the area immediately in front of us, or relying on his
intuition alone.

When he eventually waved me forward, I was
so goddamn tense, if so much as a moat of dust landed on my
shoulder, I would have cracked.

There was something about this place,
something eerily familiar.

It spoke to some long lost memory buried
deep in my heart. The sensation was so intense, it almost felt as
if I’d have a heart attack.

All I could hear – all I was aware of
other than the awful sensations pulsing through my body – was the
prince’s slow, deliberate footfall.

W
e continued down what looked like a
corridor.

I had no idea what the
building
had
been before.

Now it was nothing more than an
interconnected set of tunnels. All that remained was
stone.

If I had to guess, the building had
belonged to an unsophisticated race. As far as I could tell, the
stone had simply been mined from the ground. There were no metal
struts, no circuits poking out of the floor – nothing to suggest
this building had ever been more than a roof over somebody’s
head.

So why the hell was the prince being so
cautious? Why was he so fascinated by this place? Because I could
tell he was fascinated. Even though I couldn’t see his face, I
could imagine it. Almost in perfect detail. Don’t ask me how, but
his visage – those crystalline purple eyes offset by that ice-white
hair – I could see it perfectly in my mind’s eye as if someone had
burnt it onto my retinas.

I blinked several times, but I could not
dislodge it.

We walked through several puddles, dank
brown and green, filled with a mixture of dead leaves and a
particularly virulent kind of moss.

Plants had reclaimed most of the building,
large vines descending from gaps in the ceiling, twisting down the
walls, and pushing through cracks in the floor.

The curiosity got the better of me, and I
took a forced step forward, drawing alongside the prince. Before I
could crack my lips open and ask him what the hell we were looking
for, he thrust out an arm and I walked right into it.

“What
the
—”
I began.

He slowly twisted his head and he stared
at me. “I told you, you remain one step behind.”

There was something about his tone.
Something so goddamn officious. It spoke of his royal heritage. Of
a man who’d been brought up to believe he was better than
absolutely everyone else around him.

I was goddamn sure he couldn’t
see my expression under my helmet, but maybe he could read my mind,
because he tilted his head to the side even further.
“
I've
tolerated your insubordination thus far,
soldier. I will not tolerate it further. You remain a step behind
me at all times.”

I waited for him to add that that was where
I belonged.

He didn’t. Instead he turned around with a
stiff movement and motioned me forward with a dismissive flick of
his hand.

Despite the fact his warning was still
ringing in my ears, it took me a full 10 seconds before I could
force my body to follow his.

We continued down the dirty plant-covered
corridor until we found a set of stairs.

The prince cautiously walked down them,
his fist raised the entire time.

We pressed forward for
God knows how many
minutes.

Eventually my anger at the way the prince
was treating me abated, and in its place, fear churned in my
gut.

Finally we reached what appeared to be a
storage room of some description.

The prince told me to stay by the door.
And there I waited as he methodically checked through the room,
waving his armored hand over old, broken, contorted metal
boxes.

Though I couldn’t see them in full, I could
tell they were worn with more than age.

They looked like they’d been blown apart
by explosives. Powerful explosives. The metal wasn’t just
contorted, it had obviously melted and reformed.

The prince didn’t say a single frigging
word as he worked methodically. Nor did he pay a scrap of attention
to me. It wasn’t until he’d checked the room so thoroughly it was
like he was looking for a needle in a haystack, that he finally
approached me.

Again he dismissively waved me forward.

“You goddamn fucking asshole,” I screamed
as I turned my audio link off.

He strode ahead, reaching the other side of
the room before I’d gotten over my anger enough to follow.

For a man who’d insisted I stay a single
step behind me, he appeared distracted as he continued to march
forward, quickly disappearing through a door.

That’s when it happened.

When I was approximately halfway across
the floor, directly over a strange circular lip of rock, there was
a single click from somewhere above.

I didn’t even have a second to consider
what it could be.

Before the floor disappeared.

It didn’t fall away. It goddamn
disappeared as it were nothing more than an illusion.

I screamed as I fell, arms and legs beating
wildly as my body dropped like a cruiser that had been shot from
the sky.

It felt like I fell for a full minute
until finally my body struck the floor with such a resounding
impact, I cracked the stone beneath me.

My armor kept me alive. Barely.

It couldn’t completely protect me from the
violent impact, and my lips cracked open in a violent cough, blood
splattering my chin.

My eyes were riveted open in surprise, my
breath coming in hard, ragged pants as my mind desperately tried to
process the pain ripping through my body.

I couldn’t move.

My only hope was that the prince had heard
me, and would jump down to rescue me.

While my armor had almost been completely
obliterated by the fall, I was sure his would withstand the near
fatal drop.

I waited five seconds, then ten, then a
full minute.

Nothing.

That’s when I realized as I tipped my head
back and force my blinking, broken visor to lock above, that the
ceiling had reformed.

It was solid stone once more.

….

My mind could not catch up. Couldn’t
comprehend what the hell had just happened.

While the new galactic empire possessed
holographic technology, it wasn’t nearly sophisticated enough to
produce a hologram that could truly fool someone.

The floor above – which couldn’t have been
real – hadn’t just fooled me, it had been solid, and supported my
weight, and the prince’s too.

I waited. And waited. The prince didn’t
come.

I couldn’t tell how many minutes passed.
Soon enough, however, I began to realize that if I wanted to live,
I would have to save myself.

I began moving my fingers, then my toes.
Carefully, one digit at a time. I had to push my mind into the
action completely.

After my toes and fingers, came my hands
and feet.

One after another, I managed to move my
body.

Don’t ask me where I found the strength to
push past the pain. I could be doing my already damaged body
irreparable injury, worsening my internal bleeding – it didn’t
matter.

I had no goddamn choice.

As I shifted up, finally pushing into a
seated position, my chest plate fell from my body, clanging against
my armored knees and practically disintegrating against the
floor.

Using everything – every last goddamn
scrap of determination and power – I pushed to my feet.

I swayed badly, feeling like a broken sail
flapping in the wind.

But with a lurch that felt as if it would
tear my jugular from my throat, I began to walk.

I clutched a hand on my chest, heaving
through every movement.

I coughed, blood splattering over my chin
and lips.

I reached up, took my helmet off, and
thumbed it off with a shaking hand.

As soon as I touched my helmet, it fell to
pieces.

I swore. Then I moved forward. One aching
step at a time.

…

Mark

I pushed back from the communication device,
ticking my head to the side in a violent move.

I brought a hand up and locked my sweaty
palm over my face.

Soon the anger burning through my gut got
the better of me, and I balled up a hand and struck it against the
wall. Without armor to protect my knuckles, they began to bleed,
red specs transferring over my swollen, pulped flesh.

I closed my eyes and bared my teeth.

“What more do they want from me?” I spat,
shrieking at the room.

But the room couldn’t answer.

Neither could I.

When the resistance had approached me, I’d
been too filled with hope to think things through. I needed them to
be the force of hope that could finally free the galaxy.

They weren’t.

They were a bunch of amateurs. Mere
civilians who’d been pulled into the cause by nothing more than
passion and nothing less than complete idiocy.

I ground my bloodied hand into the wall
beside me, not caring as my knuckles grated up against one another,
my already torn flesh getting even more of a beating.

“You goddamn bastard,” I spat under my
breath. “This isn’t over,” I said darkly as I reached a hand up and
pressed a button on my arm.

It immediately activated my sophisticated
Arterian armor, and it sprang into place over my body. As soon as
the metal encased my hand, it began the quick and simple job of
healing my flesh.

I smoothed my calm back into place and
walked out into the corridor.

I swore at that goddamn asshole once more
in my mind, then I continued my job.

…

Oil refinery facility, Argoza
sector

The foreman strode across the main
compound, kicking up great wads of dust with his large worn
boots.

An unannounced cruiser was
pulling into land. He hated interruptions, hated to pull people off
the main pumps to get them to refuel
vessels which had wandered off course and needed emergency
refuelling
.

There was a fuel station a sector away,
and unless you were in a great deal of goddamn stress, most people
could just refuel there.

Not this guy, he’d contacted from orbit, a
real nice asshole who’d demanded immediate refueling.

The foreman brought a hand up and pressed it
over his eyes as the cruiser swooped in low to land.

Its glowing neon blue directional
thrusters lit up the dying sky like a fire from the
gods.

As he squinted against the thinning light,
his knowing gaze assessed the cruiser, and he quickly realized it
had some significant modifications. It appeared to have some kind
of retracting armored hull plating, and that wasn’t to mention the
rotating ion blasters at the front and back.

He clenched his yellowed teeth and whistled
through them, a few grits of obligatory sand getting sucked into
his mouth.

You couldn’t do anything on
this planet without getting a
mouth
full of
dust.

The foreman waited there for several
seconds, tracking the cruiser until it finally hovered in to land
and disappeared behind the primary facility building.

He turned and began the slow march back to
the facility.

He didn’t reach it before his com line
crackled.

He cleared his throat and brought his wrist
up, thumbing a button on a white metal band that had been grafted
onto the bone.

“Foreman here,” he said with a guttural
rumble.

“Sir—” one of his workers said.

“Yes?”

Nothing.

The audio feed ended with an ominous
click.

His hackles rose as a sharp, bitter tasting
fear rose through his mouth.

He brought a hand up and quickly swiped the
sweat from the top of his brow.

He found himself hurrying, faster now,
faster again, until his thick, heavy, dust-clogged boots
reverberated over the ground with an ominous drumbeat.

By the time he reached the facility, he knew
something was wrong.

It wasn’t just his thundering
double
-time
heart
beat
– it was the blood
that covered the walls, the floor, too. He brought one hand up and
pressed it over his mouth as he clutched at the blaster always
holstered at his hip.

He yanked it out and approached
cautiously, the tread of his boot transferring great clogs of dust
and dirt onto the blood-splattered floor. He barely made it a few
meters before he heard something clang on the floor behind
him.

The foreman had been a hard man
for years.
He specialized in surviving on dirty, violent, nasty
outposts just like this. So he knew what was coming long before he
felt something slice into the soft flesh below his neck.