Shattered Destiny: A Galactic Adventure, Episode One (14 page)

His gaze jerked to the side, and he saw a
standard dirt pick sticking out of his neck.

He fell down to one knee, but wasn’t allowed
to fall to the other.

A h
and locked on the dirt pick and held
it in place.

He screamed, the noise splitting from his
lips with such ferocity, he could have ripped them off.

“What do you want?” he
hollered.

The hand on the dirt pick said nothing.
Instead it twisted and twisted until burning, hot, deadly pain
snaked into his head.

He thought he’d lose consciousness. He
wasn’t provided that opportunity.

Something was injected into his neck. It
wasn’t hard to realize what it was. A fast acting stimulant, one
designed to keep him alive and cognizant just long
enough.

He pressed his blood covered lips together
and cracked out an insult.

The hand twisted the dirt pick further.
“You will answer,” it said in a strange tone.

It took his spinning mind a second to
place it.

An
Arterian assassin. Legendary, the
kind of stuff nightmares were made from.

Sure enough as a figure walked in front of
him and leant just before his kneeling, shaking form, he recognized
the Arterian uniform. A purple and gold cloak hung so low over the
face it obscured everything but a stiff set of lips. “You will
answer,” the Arterian snapped once more.

“Ask your goddamn question,” the foreman
managed, every word exacting a painful cost from his broken
body.

The Arterian reached into their cloak and
pulled something out.

It was a slim, silver oblong disk, looking
like nothing more than a circle of metal.

They clutched it in their hand, swiped
their free palm over it, then shifted back.

A hologram appeared over the disc.

A perfect hologram.

It didn’t flicker, didn’t shake as moats of
dust fell through it.

It was indistinguishable from reality.

The foreman didn’t have the opportunity to
revel in its perfection.

The Arterian assassin pushed further
forward, head tilting to the side, their cloak always covering
their identity. “Where?” the woman asked, speaking through pared
back lips.

Though the foreman’s brain was rapidly
running out of blood, he guessed it was a she.

From her rounded, shapely lips alone, not
to mention her figure, only partially obscured by her cloak, he
knew it was a woman.

“Focus.” The assassin clutched hold of his
chin, yanking it to the side and jerking his head down until he
faced the hologram.

Though his bleary eyes could barely see
any more, as the woman tugged his face ever closer to the hologram,
he focused long enough to realize he recognized the
image.

One of his workers.

“Where is she?” the Arterian hissed, her
plush lips drawing so thin they looked like nothing more than red
lines slicing through her chin.

“.. Shar,” he managed.

“Where is she?” the woman snapped,
enunciating every word with a deadly tone.

“Gone. Taken.”

“By whom?” The woman pressed forward until
she and her spinning hologram were right by his face.

As he took his dying breath the woman
clutched a hand to his chin, her fingers digging right down to the
bone.

“Tell me,” she snapped.

He felt compelled. His dying brain could
pick that up. His lips parted, the truth forming in his mind and
readying on his lips. Despite the fact he fought to keep his
goddamn lips closed, he couldn’t. “Space. Gone to
space.”

“Where?” the assassin’s voice rattled with
so much gravitas she sounded like a god who’d fallen to earth.
“Where?” She shook his chin violently until it felt as if his head
would be wrenched off.

That compelling force grew stronger until
he could fight it no longer. “Arterian war cruiser.”

She dropped his chin, took a step back, and
turned the hologram off with one hand.

With o
ne final beat of his heart he watched
her ball her fingers around that hard metal disc and strike it
against the center of his head.

He died.

Instantly.

Splatters of his blood mixed with the
rust-red sand and scattered over his well-worn boots.

The assassin walked away,
wiping the foreman’s blood off her holo disc
and
returning it to her pocket.

…

Prince Xarin

She was nowhere to be seen. She’d simply
disappeared.

When I realized she wasn’t following, I
doubled back, but I couldn’t find her anywhere.

An odd sensation was pushing through my
gut, alighting over my back like insects climbing down the
skin.

Fear.

True fear. Not the hood of anxiety that
covered me these days, but goading desperation that dug deeper into
my stomach with every violent second.

I
ran back into the storage room, but
as I pushed my on-board scanners to full, they still couldn’t pick
her up.

I
ran into the center of the room, that
desperation still goading at my heart. For some reason it was even
getting hard to breathe.

…
Call me mad, but it suddenly
felt as if two hands clutched around my neck.

The hands came from nowhere, just ghostly
apparitions with the force of a real man.

I
staggered down to one knee, then the
other, until I had to flatten a hand against the floor to stabilize
myself.

That’s when my scanners picked something
up. Through the stone.

A life sign
. Waning. Getting weaker by the
second.

I
lurched down until my stomach was
practically pressed against the floor, flattening both hands until
I picked up the life sign in full.

Don’t ask how, but I knew it was her, just
as I knew she was running out of time.

As a scream tore from my throat, I
collapsed one hand into a fist and utilized the full force of my
armor.

Then I thrust back on my knees, brought my
arm back, and slammed it down into the floor.

One strike, then another. I used my full
power.

It should have been enough to completely
obliterate the floor. It should have been enough to break my way
past a cruiser’s external hull.

And yet the floor did not shift. Did not
splinter. Did not even shake.

I
jerked up as I realized something was
fundamentally wrong.

I
shifted backwards, wary gaze locked
on that section of floor until my back jammed against the far
wall.

Without another moment’s hesitation, I
activated my armor’s guns.

Both palms suddenly shifted, metal plating
furling back to reveal two white-hot pulsing guns.

Pulling my stiff lips away from my teeth,
I began to fire, not at the floor, but at the ceiling. At a single
point on the ceiling far above. A small rotating metal
disc.

How I hadn’t noticed it before, I didn’t
know.

My
gut lurched once more as desperation
punched through it.

Finally
my shots were enough to destroy
the metal holo disc.

It ruptured, sending splatters of molten
metal spitting out onto the floor.

Or at least it should have.

For at that exact moment, the floor
disappeared.

It didn’t break apart. It simply stopped
existing. It was nothing more than a hologram.

I wasted no time.

I thrust forward, pushing into a jump.

I tucked my legs up as I sailed right
through the hole in the floor.

And I fell, and I fell, and I fell.

100 meters, 200 meters, 300 meters, then I
lost count.

It took too long to hit the stone floor
below, but finally I did. I landed on it with such impact my
armored boots split the ground, breaking several meters of black
stones and sending fine rock chip up around me in a
halo.

I
remained there with one hand pressed
into the floor for a single second before jerking up.

I
twisted my head to the side and saw
the blood splattering the ground.

The chunks of armor, too.

A
standard
issue
Arterian
soldier's
breastplate was
lying by my feet.

A few meters from that was a helmet.

I
dashed over and plucked it up,
turning it up until I could see the insides.

That’s when I
saw
her blood.

It covered the inside of the visor, the
electronic screen now completely cracked.

As I jerked my head up, I saw
blood-splattered footprints pushing through the room.

I
followed them.

Again my heart beat, pounded in my chest,
reverberated like heavy footfall.

Don’t ask me how, but
I
knew she was on the edge of death, wherever she
was.

As a full member of the Arterian Royal
Family, I shouldn’t care.

What was one more soldier sacrificed to
the cause?

I
’d been taught not to be precious about
people.

You had to sacrifice to win at war. And if
you did not win, the effects would be ghastly. The modern Milky Way
would fall.

So why did I care so much about this one
soldier?

For that matter, why in God’s
name had
I
brought her aboard?

Though her skills in combat were truly
impressive….

I
thrust away my warring
thoughts.

They would do me no good.

The further I travelled, the more
impressed I became. Though she was clearly on the edge of death,
she knew how to push past pain.

I
’d come to this planet on a slim hope. To
find more Illuminate technology. It would give me the edge I needed
against not just the Zorv, but the wolves howling at my
door.

So why couldn’t I fix my mind on that as I
pressed forward, throat dry, mouth feeling as though it were full
of barbs.

The only feeling I felt was clawing
desperation, and with every second, it got worse.

“I have to find her,” I
found
myself
saying before I could press my lips
closed.

I
forced forward with all the speed I
could muster.

…

Shar

I walked along with one bloodied hand
pressed against the wall for support.

Long ago most of my armor had fallen
off.

The only thing that was left was one arm
piece and one boot.

It
contributed
to a strange clicking footfall. One step would be
accompanied with a bloodied groan as my bare foot struck the cold
stone while the other rang out with a resounding click of
armor.

I had no idea where I was going.

Forward.

That was the only concept my broken mind
could manage, anyway.

I came across strangely solid patches of the
building.

I would walk from one ruined corridor into a
room that looked as if it had been untouched.

I began to appreciate the
architecture. What I had once thought were nothing but old
ruins
constructed by
an uncivilized
race
were
actually
much
more.

I continued to move through the corridors,
bloodied hands locked on the wall.

It became harder and harder as more and more
fatigue wrapped through my body. Something else did at the same
time.

This burning white-hot determination. I had
no idea where it came from.

It was like a hand that always guided me.
It seemed as if it came from beyond. Not just my body… but somehow…
the universe.

I gritted my teeth, my gums bloodied and
sore.

A distant part of my mind realized it was
unlikely I would get through this.

I would have terrible internal bleeding, and
though I could move, I was likely only speeding up my inevitable
death.

But could I stop? Could I reason with the
compulsion pushing through me?

No chance.

I started to mutter to
myself
, speak in low, quick, desperate tones. I was
barely aware of what I was saying, couldn’t even recognize the
language spurting from my lips.

But whatever force was pulling me forward,
did so with more and more force, until I finally pulled my hand
from the wall and staggered forward with all the speed my broken
form could muster.

The further I travelled into the building,
the more sophisticated the architecture became. I was now certain
that this building had belonged to a once-great civilization.
Though my mind was addled from pain and the fear of dying, I could
appreciate what that meant.