Inherited War 1: Retribution (37 page)

“Yea, I just had another info dump to my brain was
all.  Took me by surprise is all.”  Cole got himself back into position and reopened his assault channel.  “The Esii gain sustenance by feeding off the life energy of other sentient beings.  They also gain strength and speed.  After a certain point of energy loss, the victim loses willpower and its body can no longer sustain itself.  It begins to rot from the outside in, until the victim finally dies.  It also becomes addicted to the feedings and will fight to protect its Esii masters.”  Cole paused for a moment.  “They get turned into fucking zombies.  Is that what is in there Hal?  An Esii larder.”

“Yes
, I think that’s exactly what you’re about to face in there.  I see no reason for you to risk your team down there when we can put those poor wretches out of their misery from space.” 

“We don’t know if there is an Esii hiding down there though so we have to clear the area.  We didn’t fight our way down here to give up a
t the finish line.  We move forward as a unit and watch each other’s backs.  We go in with guns first and if it gets into close quarters combat we switch to knives.”  Cole stood up and waved everyone forward again.

They moved forward at a crawl.  They had almost 360 degree coverage from all the weapons of the remaining twenty Worlders.  They found nothing on the stairs so continued all the way to the bottom.  The very bottom of the stairs was
pitch black, even to their multiple vision modes.  Cole popped an IR chem light and threw it through the door into the room beyond.  The light disappeared as soon as it crossed the threshold.  Cole cursed.  He didn’t want to go in blind but he had no choice, something was either blocking the light or absorbing it. 

He walked down the last flight of stairs and crept toward the open door.  Cole’s heart was pounding in his ear and he could feel adrenaline pumping throughout his system.  Slowly he pushed his head through the door frame and into the other side. 
He momentarily lost his sight, but got it back once he made it all the way through the opening.  When it came back he was face to face with a rotted out face of a Thrashodon.  Cole let out a startled yell before ramming his gun into the things gut and repeatedly pulling the trigger.  He cut the disgusting thing in half.  Before he knew it he was through the door and trying to comprehend what he was seeing in the last room of the station.  It was something out of a George A. Romero movie come to life.  Except these were alien zombies and they were moving towards his team.  Cole didn’t waste any time, he started shooting for all he was worth and within a few moments he heard the rattling of twenty or so other guns firing.  Thankfully, these things were not real zombies or they would have had to use head shots to kill them.  These were still living beings and could be readily killed with good body shots.  Cole’s threat sensor counted at least one hundred of the beings present in the room.  The horde was made up of all different kinds of aliens, some Cole had seen, others he hadn’t. 

They had been so focused on what was shambling towards them from their front they were surprised when it started to rain zombies.  Before they knew what had happened
, there were a dozen zombies falling from the upper balcony.  Some of the assault team had to switch to melee weapons to kill the ambushers.  It took away from the frontal suppressing fire and what was left of the horde managed to collapse on the front rank.  Cole dropped his rifle and pulled out his knife just as a partly decomposed Nixa male latched onto his arm.  The god damn things had no weapons so they did the one thing they could.  They started to try and bite the assault team.  Grunts and curses filled the open assault channel as melee combat swirled around the room.  The Worlders broke off into pairs at this point and fought back to back.  Cole felt Split firmly plant his back on Cole’s.  The fight raged for about ten minutes with the zombies making no real headway against the combat armor the team was wearing.  Finally after tugging his knife out of a fresh kill Cole noticed there was nothing else upright to fight.

He scanned the room and
saw the bodies piled all over the place.  He counted his men and saw that one was down.  Cole sent a query to the down Worlders nanites and got a response back in a few seconds.  The Worlder had sustained a compound fracture in his leg.

Cole walked up to the wounded soldier and placed his hand on his shoulder.  “Are you okay?  Can you wait for a
stretcher or do you need to get back to the ship now?”  Cole asked the downed Worlder.

“Shit
, no Sir.  I am fine, I can wait for a ride out.  Plus my nanites have got a nice little painkiller flooding my system, I won’t feel anything here in a moment.”  He then proceeded to straighten out his broke leg without so much as a grunt.

“Good, you can wait here for a bit while we look the room over.  I will leave someone to watch your back.”  Cole waived over two other Worlders to stand guard over their downed team member, and then he dispersed his remaining teams to search the room.  After a quick search of the largely open area
they regrouped back at the wounded Worlder.

“Anyone find anything?”  Cole asked over the assault frequency.  All he got back was no’s and silence.  “Damn.  Well let’s get a stretcher out and get back up to the
Retribution
.”  Cole silently hoped that Hal and his remaining AI would be able to find something that could point their way to the Sun Eater Ship.

56

“I guess I should be happy right now.  I mean we managed to take out an overwhelming force, successfully breach and board an enemy space station and fight our way through the whole damn thing without losing a single life on our side.  But once again, we left without our primary objective being filled.  Check that.  We lost one life.  Hal’s AI friend that didn’t even have a name.  It has been six hours since we detached and pulled back from the station and still nothing of any significance found in the station’s computer storage that was taken by the other remaining AI.  I destroyed the station with the Retributions main gun, it made me feel a little better.  The Reckoning has a similar attack planned in another few hours.  I hope they have better luck.”  

Cole was ensconced behind his desk on Home.  He was brooding, well brooding was a mild term for how he currently felt.  He was pissed off and ready to tear a new one in the next person that walked through his door.  Three weeks.  That’s how long they had taken to run their missions and the only thing they had accomplished was to destroy a whole lot of Esii hardware and personnel.  That had been the plan from the beginning but the plan had also called for capturing as many Esii as possible and their computers. 

No one expected that the damn Esii were kamikazes when outnumbered or that they were so good at wiping their computers
clean.  When beaten in space they either tried to crash into your ships or just self destructed.  If they got cornered on the ground they slit their own throats.  Both the
Retribution
and the
Reckoning
had performed their individual assigned tasks almost perfectly.  It had only gotten better when they had linked up to assault their final five targets.

They had successfully taken the war to the enemy and had proven themselves as able commanders and as a coherent fighting force.  They had annihilated their chosen objectives even though they had been out numbered
, at times by a three to one margin.  Yet, for all of their effort, they hadn’t come any closer to finding that damned super ship.  Cole was at a loss.  Well not a complete loss, but what he had been contemplating for the last few hours scared him to death. 

His door chimed announcing that someone was waiting outside.  “Come in.”  He barked at the door.  It slid aside and
Thalo, minus Jeth walked in. Well sauntered in, more like.  Thalo was the talk of the base since their return a few days ago.  He had killed more spider fighters in space and Esii on the ground than anyone else.  The wings of his ship were covered in outlines of spider fighters and his rifle was likewise covered in notches.  To top it off, the lucky bastard managed to take out a full cruiser all by himself in the final battle.  With his damn drone fighter.  It was a lucky one in a million shot but he had pulled it off and was the only one, other than the crews of the
Retribution
and
Reckoning
to have a cruiser stenciled on his drone.

“I am not in a good mood right now
Thalo, make it fast.”  Cole said as Thalo took a seat at his desk.  The easy confidence and the always knowing that he was in complete control sometimes irritated Cole.  He knew it had to piss off the Esii.

“Take it easy
, I just stopped by to talk for a minute.  No one has seen much of you the last few days since we got back here.  Don’t get me wrong, we all appreciated the welcome home and good job speech but we were expecting a new plan soon.”  Thalo leaned back and put his feet up on Cole’s desk.

Cole didn’t acknowledge the blatant attempt by Thalo to provoke him.  “Can I ask you a question Thalo?”

“You just did but I’ll give you another one.”  He said with a smile.

“Do you have a family?  A wife and kids?”

“Yes. 
To both.  Why?”  He suddenly sounded a lot more serious. 

“Would you do anything to protect them?  If they were hurt
, would you do anything to avenge them to include putting others at risk?”  Cole leaned back waiting for a response.

“In order to protect them
?”  Thalo repeated before continuing.  “I have not seen them in almost twenty years.  When I was chosen along with Jeth to take over the duty on the Pitt I had to abandon my wife and children.  It was an honor and a privilege to be chosen and I would accept again in an instant.  I would tear the universe itself apart to protect my family and my people.”  Cole didn’t think he had ever heard the Worlder sound as serious as he did in this moment.  “If someone ever harmed any of them I would end all of creation if necessary, to find those responsible.  So if you’re asking me if it’s right for you to be risking all of us to avenge your people than I say not only yes, but hell yes.”

They both relaxed into the silence for a moment.  “Then I will have a plan by tomorrow morning.”  Cole said almost in a whisper.  “I want the ships prepped and ready to leave in twenty-four hours and the men ready in forty-eight.  They can have the rest of tonight and tomorrow to relax.”

Thalo looked at Cole expectantly, but if he was waiting for Cole to reveal his plans to him he was severely disappointed.  “Go have some fun, Thalo.  You will find out at the same time as everyone else.”  Cole spun his chair around to face the wall behind his desk.  Thalo took that as his cue to leave and did so.

Cole took a deep breath to steady his nerves before calling out to Hal.  Hal made his presence known and Cole immediately went into great detail about his upcoming plan.  It only took a few minutes to lay out the basics to Hal but that was enough.

“Are you serious Cole?”  Hal asked.  “I mean you can’t really be serious about this.  It’s a joke right?  Just pulling my leg, as you humans say?”

“It is the only way Hal.  I have worked it from every angle and
it’s all I can come up with.  If you have a better idea then let me know, otherwise, it’s what we are going with.”  Cole waited while Hal ran every program he had trying to come up with a better solution. 

“It’s not fair
Cole, you know I am horrible at tactics.  You need to run this by Commander Fury and see if he can come up with anything better.  There has to be another way.”  Hal was almost pleading and in fact he materialized his avatar on the wall screen so Cole could see him do just that.

“Damn it
, don’t you think I want to, but I can’t.  If anyone else knew about this there would be a mutiny at the very least, a murder at the worst.”  Cole looked right at the screen and the image of Hal inside it.  “By the way in case you were thinking of telling someone I forbid it.  For this plan to work everyone else here needs to be completely unaware beforehand.  If someone knew what was really going to happen, we couldn’t sell it to the Esii.”

“I don’t like it but I understand.”  He paused for a second then got serious.
“What do I need to do?” 

“Buddy
, you are the linchpin of the whole plan, and for it to work you have to do your part flawlessly.”  Cole leaned close to the screen and started to go into great detail with Hal as to what he needed to do to prepare himself and the ship for the next attack.  They spent the next several hours going into as great of detail as possible so that all their bases were covered.  “I think that will just about do it, unless you can add anything we missed.”

“I didn’t like this plan when I first heard it and I like it even less now, but it just may work.  I will start things going on my end and should have everything ready in time for the attack.  You should go spend some time with Sky before we leave.”  He didn’t wait for a response from Cole, Hal just disappeared.  Cole understood his need to get started on the preparations
. Cole didn’t want to dwell too long on the next few days either.  He queried the base computer and found Sky’s location.  Med bay on the
Retribution
, probably checking on the still as yet unknown astronaut.  Cole passed a few crew members on his way to the ship.  They genuinely looked happy to see him.  They probably wouldn’t be as happy in a few days, especially if they ever found out what he was about to do to them all.

Cole lay on the bed not allowing himself to go to sleep.  Sky was pressed up against him blissfully unaware.  He gently stroked her hair as she slept, and she occasionally made quiet noises of pleasure, as he did.  He hated himself right here and now.  He hated what he was about to do and what it would mean to his relationship with Sky.  When she found out she would probably hate him for the rest of her life.  The old Cole would have never taken this chance and put his relationship with a beautiful women, alien or not, at risk over revenge, but this was the new Cole.  He knew what he had to do.  If it meant sacrificing his future with Sky, then so be it.  As he admitted this to himself a calm state settled over him and he felt ready to do what had to be done.  He gently slipped out of bed and got dressed.  He bent over Sky’s still form and gently kissed her on the lips and whispered close to her ear.  “I’m sorry.”

He quietly left her room
, returned to his own and lay down to try and get what sleep he could before morning.  He ran through in his head what he was going to say to his subordinates a few times until he was satisfied that he had all of his bases covered before turning in for the night.  He fell asleep fast but was soon tormented by the Esii that haunted his sleep.