Unsung Heroes

“Are you ready?” Loralona asked.

Tola smiled. “Don’t tell me you’re worried about me.”

Loralona hesitated. Was he just flirting with me? she wondered. Perhaps I’ve had more of an effect on him than I thought.

“I was worried about the explosives,” Loralona replied, though she smiled as well. “I don’t want them to go off in your pouch just because you’re clumsy.”

“Clumsy? Why, I’m the smoothest guy I know! And the most humble.”

“So I see. Now if you don’t mind, let’s get on with this.” Loralona broke into a jog, leading the way across the ashen soil toward the row of Coalition vessels.

The battle was still in full swing. Varrcaran reinforcements marched out of the factory in droves, determined to help their comrades. The Coalition ranks were equal parts soldier and Biomancers. Red and blue plasma beams lanced through the gloom of night. Grenades of all kinds detonated in the thick of combat, taking down Coalition and Varrcaran troopers alike.

Though most of the struggle was taking place in an open field, many smaller skirmishes had broken off near the lava rivers. Varrcaran soldiers had set up sniping positions along ridges, picking off unsuspecting enemies engaged in melee combat.

Amid the chaos, Loralona and Tola skulked undetected to the first Coalition vessel. It was a dropship, designed specifically to protect and unload ground forces. The bulk of the Coalition armada was made of dropships, but there was one frigate and seven snub fighters.

“What’s the plan, Gorgeous?” Tola asked, removing the first plastic explosive from his pouch.

Loralona was given pause; initially she had been the only one to show romantic advancements—now it was the reverse.

Why the sudden change?

Tola raised an eyebrow. “Well?”

“You’re a skilled mechanic, right?”

He nodded.

“Good. See what kind of trouble you can cause with this ship. But don’t start the fun until I get back.”

“All right, but whe—hey!”

Loralona snatched his pouch of explosives and darted to the adjacent ship before Tola could protest. Watching intently, she waited until the guards aboard and around the vessels were all too preoccupied to notice her. Between the cover of darkness, the chaos of battle, and the thick ash in the air it was almost too easy for her to sneak around. Priming the charge, she attached it beneath the twin engines, then dashed for the next target.

The frigate, being a small capital ship, was more heavily guarded. Loralona counted eighteen soldiers before she finally stopped and decided to call it a boat-load. A diversion was what she needed now.

Reaching into her satchel, she plucked out the sound replicators and tuned them to a high-pitched sizzling sound. With luck, her enemies would assume one of the ships had somehow caught fire from all the embers floating through the air.

She placed the device on the vessel adjacent to the frigate, in a small groove where the wing met the hull of the cockpit. Giving it a ten-second delay, Loralona scurried off, careful to cling to the darkness. Her hand drifted to the camouflage generator around her waist. The crackle of something burning reached her ears.

“Hey, what is that?” one of the Varrcaran soldiers asked.

“Uh, I don’t know,” his friend said stupidly.

“It’s coming from over there, I think,” said a third, more collected than the others. About half of the troopers scampered toward the dropship to investigate.

Once they were past, Loralona activated her camouflage generator and dashed to the frigate, careful to roll the balls of her feet to stay as quiet as possible. The generator powered down just as she reached the other side of the ship, making her visible once again. Loralona attached some C4 to the vessel’s hull, right above one of the fuel tanks.

“What was that?” one of the soldiers croaked.

Loralona ran to the next ship, melting into the shadows before anyone could investigate.

Six more to go.

Through his heightened senses of sight and smell, Dex surveyed the carnage of battle all around him. It had been years since he’d been around so many Biomancers at once. To his surprise—and disappointment—Janus was not among them.

It’s just as well, Dex thought. This gives me more time to find the chink in his armor. Until I have that, I don’t have a chance at killing him anyway.

The human bounty hunter, Terrik, was two paces in front of him as they hurried toward the factory. Dex didn’t trust him, but he had to admit a grudging amount of respect for the warrior’s abilities. Until recently Dex had viewed those without powers with contempt; they were inferiors. If nothing else, Terrik had taught him not to underestimate normal soldiers.

With the massive battle underway, Dex knew the facility would be in lockdown. The main entrance, a reinforced titansteel door large enough to house a starship, looked to be the only way in.

“I don’t suppose you brought a lasertorch,” Dex muttered.

“No. But even if I had, I wouldn’t be foolish enough to use the main door. By the time we cut our way inside, every soldier in the building would be waiting for us.”

Dex felt his blood boil. “Watch what you say to me, human. We may be allies, but we’re not friends.”

The bounty hunter shrugged. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. What I meant was set your eyes on the sixth floor window instead. That’s our ticket in. But first, we’ll need a distraction of our own.”

Without waiting for a reply, Terrik activated the annihilator beam on his left gauntlet. Highly concentrated unstable energy erupted from his wrist, blasting a tiny hole into the adamanticrete wall west of the entrance. Cracks shot out like a spiderweb around the puncture, severely weakening the integrity of the wall.

“If you would do the honors,” Terrik said.

Dex snarled and made his way to the ground-level wall. Gathering the awesome powers within him, he thrust out his open palm, and blew open the rest of the wall. Screams and shouts poured out from the devastated interior, followed by the loud blare of alarms.

“They expect us to enter here. Instead, we’ll slip in on the sixth floor, and thrive on the chaos,” Terrik told him.

Dex looked up at the sixth floor window and raised an eyebrow. “Maybe I didn’t tell you: I forgot to bring my trampoline.”

Without warning, Terrik took hold of Dex and activated his jet pack The Latoroth was so stunned he didn’t even react. Terrik carried him up to the glass window on the sixth floor, when Dex suddenly realized his plan. He shattered the window with his detonating ability, and the two of them dropped inside.

“We’re in,” the bounty hunter said into his computerized gauntlet, notifying the others. “Now to find the armor’s blueprints.”

Dex scanned the room they were in. It was the mess hall, unlikely to have what they’d come for. Neither of them knew the layout, so he simply picked a door at random and activated the white currents running though his electrical whip. The flexible blade snapped across the door, bisecting it vertically so Dex could trudge through.

Two Varrcaran soldiers were scrambling up a stairwell. From their shocked reactions it was clear they weren’t ready to face the intruders. Summoning his powers, Dex thrust out a hand against a nearby vending machine, propelling it toward the troopers. The first smashed into the wall, her neck snapping from the sudden impact. The second rolled with the momentum surprisingly well and landed on one knee, sighting in with his pistol. A plasma beam fired, but it was Terrik who shot first, ending his life.

With a moment to breathe, Dex systematically assessed the new room they were in. It was a lounge, also an unlikely place for what they sought. It was only now that Dex realized the full extent of the problem at hand: the base was nearly ten stories tall and two kilometers long—by the time they searched every chamber the battle outside would be long over and the Coalition would already have seized control of the facility. If he and Terrik didn’t accomplish their mission quickly, they would be overwhelmed and slaughtered.

The sound of plasma fire made it difficult for Tola to concentrate. He had carved a hole into the ship’s outer plating with his lasertorch, and was now attempting to hot wire the vessel. The process was significantly more difficult than it sounded. Modern vehicles were standard equipped with anti-theft security systems programmed to subvert power to a different part of the ship if the access codes weren’t recognized.

Tola, however, was a master at this sort of thing. Safety measures were also installed to open access in the event of an emergency, and with a bit of careful tweaking Tola managed to trick the computer into doing just that. From there it was a simple matter of hacking past the additional security.

With full control of the ship, Tola still wasn’t sure what sort of “trouble” Loralona expected. Did she need a diversion? An attack? A makeshift bomb?

Tola didn’t know but he decided it was time to do things his way. Operating the vessel remotely would be ideal, but he didn’t have the hardware necessary. His smartphone was top of the line but it wasn’t designed to handle complex programs. But the ship’s computer was designed for just that. With a little configuring he could queue up commands set on a timer. After two minutes the ship would execute his instructions, with Tola safely away from the rogue vessel.

After loading the specifications, Tola took his equipment and scurried away from the vehicle. He didn’t see Loralona, but that was to be expected if she was doing her job well. The battle was still in full swing; Varrcaran commandos clad in power-immune armor were fighting toe-to-toe with Coalition troops. One in particular was more than a match for even the Biomancers.

Retrieving his binoculars, Tola took a closer look. This elite Varrcaran soldier looked to be a Noulator—a green skinned humanoid race with subtle reptilian qualities—female equipped with electrostatic gloves. Tola watched as one of the Biomancers slashed his chainsword at the female Noulator in a two-handed descending chop. The woman caught the blade with one armored hand, her other slamming into her foe’s abdomen. Electrical currents sparked and crackled from her electrostatic glove and through the Biomancer’s body, scorching his skin instantly.

Whether the man survived the initial strike was rendered moot an instant later when the Noulator smashed her fist into him again, this time striking his head. Electricity flowed off of the Biomancer’s spasming body as he crumpled into a heap on the ashen soil.

Her armor is immune to powers and her electrostatic gloves can resist the strongest melee weapons, Tola thought. Whoever this is has been trained specifically to kill Biomancers.

Suddenly a nearby ship rose into the air. In all the excitement, Tola had forgotten about the diversion he programmed. Hovering only a few meters off the ground, the vessel opened fire across the battlefield.

The tactic wasn’t meant to cause any real damage, only to draw attention away from Loralona. But Tola knew he didn’t want to be this close to the mutinous ship when the troopers came to stop it.

Taking off around the cliff side, Tola worked his way toward the massive factory, hoping that everything had gone well with Loralona’s scheme.

Chamber after chamber, Terrik and Dex mowed through Varrcaran soldiers, relentlessly searching for the armor schematics. Easily thirty or more had already fallen to the deadly pair, but they were still no closer to their objective. Five more soldiers occupied the next room. As Dex implanted hallucinations in the nearest trooper’s mind, Terrik waited for them to panic. It only took a moment of the woman’s screaming for them to look wildly around the room in search of an enemy that wasn’t there. Throwing open the door, he fired a single concussion grenade in their midst, killing all five in the blink of an eye.

He and Dex checked each of the rooms branching off from this one. Three were dead ends but the last was a long corridor with more diverging paths. Side by side Terrik and Dex marched down the hall, their weapons at the ready. All at once, four soldiers emerged—two in front of them and two from behind—in a coordinated ambush. Terrik gunned down the first before he could fire. The second got a shot off, the plasma beam glancing off the shoulder plate of his Kyronade armor. Without slowing, Terrik fired again, killing the second trooper.

A single glance behind him was all it took to confirm that Dex had dispatched the other two soldiers. Terrik was unimpressed with the Varrcaran militia. It was clear from their uncertainty and lack of discipline that they had not been properly trained. He’d hoped to face a more worthy foe, but he couldn’t exactly seek one out given the time constraints they were under. What the Varrcarans lacked in fighting experience they certainly made up for in sheer numbers, however. But facing down a hundred soldiers at once was not the type of challenge Terrik was looking for.

“Look,” Dex said, pointing a meaty scarlet finger.

“I see it, I see it,” Terrik replied. A set of massive steel doors were before them, undoubtedly leading them out of the barracks section of the facility. He tried both doors, only to find them locked.

“Clear out,” Dex told him. “I’ll handle this.” The Latoroth swung his electrical whip toward the center, where the two doors met. After three lashes, the bar holding them in place melted, and Terrik pushed his way through.

Finally, Terrik thought with a grim smile.

They entered a massive construction room, easily fifty meters long and wide. Smelting pots were systematically poured into cooling basins, then loaded onto a series of conveyor belts, where the material was shaped and molded. To Terrik’s surprise, however, it wasn’t the armor they were producing but something else . . . something he couldn’t identify.

One of the technicians in the room was screaming, but oddly enough, not at the pair of warriors who had just entered. Rather, he was trying to get away from what appeared to be escaped prisoners.

Slave labor, Terrik realized. Choakins renowned for their great strength. They must have seized on the pandemonium to make their escape.

Suddenly four Varrcaran soldiers entered on the opposite side of the smelting chamber. But these weren’t the common riffraff they had fought so far. Two of them Terrik recognized as fury commandos—members of an elite unit trained to quell uprisings. Garbed in black armor, the fury commandos were infamous for the pistols they used: sonic accelerators. Instead of plasma beams, the handguns fired magnetically accelerated particles at a velocity just below the speed of sound. The weapons were notoriously powerful and difficult even for Biomancers to stop.

The other two soldiers were known as magmatroopers. They got their name from the powered battle suits they wore, which were reported to withstand a complete immersion into magma unscathed. The dark gray armor was bulky and cumbersome, but to offset this each magmatrooper carried a plasma cannon into battle.

“Kill them!” the technician screamed over the wailing alarms.

Looks like I’ll get my fight after all, Terrik thought.

The prisoners, though unarmed, each shouted a war cry before throwing themselves at the four Varrcaran soldiers. Dex nodded to Terrik, and the pair jumped in to help them.