Seeder Saga (22 page)

Infiltrators

Ship number three captained by Jack Mayberry made a bold move. It fired everything it had at the center ship. Ship three’s thrusters moved it to and fro, up and down, as it closed the distance, avoiding too much damage. Some of the rounds pierced the alien hull
, as was evidenced by the escaping atmosphere that looked white and wispy against the black void.

The warship began to turn towards ship three
, so Sarah yelled, “Gunners, hit that bastard with everything you’ve got.”

The alien ship began to take serious damage from both. It
maintained its turn, though, seemingly oblivious to the
Seeder
’s assault.

They closed in on the other ship
; the sirens blared, indicating that the airlock had been opened. Then it blared a second time to let them know it was closed again.

They watched the monitors closely as slow dark human shapes moved towards their intended target. Luckily, their target wasn’t yet under fire.

The
Seeder
lurched and a deafening boom nearly knocked Sarah out.

Molly came back
on-line and said, “Impact to Pod Bay Two. Hull breach has been sealed off. We’ve lost seventeen stasis pods.” Then she went off-line again.

One of her pilots said, “Oh shit.” The ship her infiltrators were going towards had spotted the suited soldiers and it was firing on them. Luckily its aim sucked. A handful of soldiers were hit and tumbled away from the group
, but by then they were already close. She watched as they caught the alien ship and clung on. Then a pinpoint light appeared, the acetylene torch that would cut through the hull already hard at work. Her heart swelled with a kind of species-oriented pride. Those men and women had more courage in their pinky toes than all the occupants of the alien ships combined.

But then a large antenna on top of the alien ship lit up like a flar
e. A spot just a hundred feet from the infiltrators glowed brightly and then went black again. What happened next surprised her. Some of the soldiers were pulled away from the alien ship and floated off into space.

She remembered that Jason had told them about the Velors
’ use of gravity wells. “Fire on that antenna. It’s some kind of gravity generator.”

She watched as the antenna was reduced to a useless nub by her
ship’s guns.

She changed the view in time to see Jack’s ship come under heavy fire. She could barely believe it was still operational. Air leaked like
water through a sieve from pockmarks all across its hull. It wouldn’t last much longer. She ordered all of her gunners to target the ship again and unload, if only to save Jack.

Before she had the chance to ponder where Jane’s ship had gotten to, it appeared in frame, traveling at incredible speed. It went straight into the alien ship attacking Jack’s. The impact was silent as the grave, but incredibly destructive all the same. Atmosphere gulped out of both ships in huge bursts
, followed by flames that licked themselves out.

Her gunners sat in stunned silence.

Sarah swallowed the frog in her throat. Jane was an incredible woman and they’d been through a lifetime of highs and lows together, and now she had made the ultimate sacrifice.

Before the silence became poisonously pervasive, she changed views back to her brave infiltrators. They were cutting through the hull, but some of them were also prying at the metal with their bare hands, and making progress too. One of them disappeared from view, followed by another. Soon, the torch was abandoned and spun away into space.

She quickly ordered team two to enter the airlock and get ready to follow team one inside the enemy ship. The sirens blared and blared again, letting her know they’d launched themselves bodily at the aliens.

She ordered Becky, the redhead mechanic, to go check out the hull breach and see what she could do. Becky took a team of stragglers with her.

Then Sarah ordered the flight crew to find the lead ship on the monitor. After a few seconds of images flashing on and off, Crusoe’s ship appeared. She had expected it to be under fire from the only other ship that wasn’t actively engaged, so she was shocked to see four warships firing upon it. Where the hell had they come from? For the first time, she considered the option that they were screwed.

She felt the ship rock and ordered her flight crew to find the source. They searched the skies and stopped at an image of the ship they’d sent the infiltrators into. It had listed on its side, reminding her of a sinking boat. There were jets of smoky atmosphere erupting from various hull breaches and small explosions that took chunks of it into space. Then, like ants from an anthill, she saw her men and women leave the ship and float back towards the
Seeder
. She ordered the outer airlock doors opened and then she sent a dozen troopers below deck to assist the infiltrators.

She changed view to Jane’s ship again. It was utterly wrecked, everyone
on board surely killed by the impact or the resultant loss of systems.

To her amazement the alien ship she’d dove into was starting to right itself. Slowly but surely, it began to move under its own power. Just as she was about to order all weapons to deploy, Jack’s number three ship came into view and unleashed its entire arsenal on it. Physical projectiles as well as energy weapons blasted the alien ship to pieces. An entire side of the ship sloughed off and shot away under the power of the gushing atmosphere.

Vague shapes floated out of the wreckage. They weren’t human, but from so far away it was difficult to say exactly how different they were. What was clear, though, was that they were all dead.

Everyone in the command station whooped and cheered. Celebrating death still rubbed her the wrong way regardless of whether it was human or not
, so she immediately changed the view, with the knowledge that Jack had it under control.

Crusoe was leading the four warships away from the fight but he was taking heavy damage. The Velors were probably wondering how it was still being piloted when it was clearly long free of any breathable air.

Velor

The sirens blared when the airlock filled with infiltrators. She hated to leave the captain’s chair for even a second, but she had to see that they were alright. She rushed below deck after instructing her people to fire on anything alien.

When she arrived, her infiltrators were being led out of the airlock. There were just a dozen or so of them left
, some of them bleeding from wounds. How they’d managed to hold the holes in their suits shut while still navigating across empty space accurately, she couldn’t even begin to comprehend.

And they had a captive with them. The Velor prisoner was not what she’d expected at all. In her mind
’s eye, she’d expected some kind of arachnid-like beast with horns and claws. Maybe it would slither like a slug, but it most certainly did not look like what her imagination had warned her to expect.

It was thin and tall, bipedal like a humanoid, with a thin layer of gray fur covering it head to toe. It had just one eye in the front and center of its face. If the eye w
ere situated a little higher up, it might have reminded her of the Cyclops of legend. Its mouth was an oval that closed like a butthole and it had no nose at all. If it had hearing apparatus, it wasn’t obvious on first inspection. Its head was overly large, barely held up by a thin, wrinkled neck.

But the most ridiculous thing about the creature was its attire. It wore loose robes colored pink and black. The robes had tassels dangling with what looked like tiny dead insects fastened to the ends of each. Its feet
, or hooves, or whatever the heck it possessed, were hidden by boxy looking footwear, multicolored and gaudy. But the footwear didn’t appear to be made of anything pliable. It looked to be painted metal or stone. Its hands had five fingers with a thumb-like appendage on either side that acted like pincers. It had no nails but each finger had an ornate, brightly-colored gem embedded into each knuckle.

When Jason had taken human form, he’d truly altered everything about himself. The Velor before her wasn’t ugly per se
, it was just kind of silly looking.

Sarah’s first impression of the Velors was that they were a race of beings so bored and decadent that they tried just about anything to spruce their image up and stand out. But she reserved the right to change her mind when more information became available.

The creature began to gasp for breath. None of the infiltrators had provided it with a suit or helmet during the spacewalk.

Robert Smith stood by her side
, panting. “We think that guy’s the commander, that’s why we took him. Maybe we can use him to negotiate.”

The thought of negotiating had not crossed her mind
. She hadn’t thought they’d find themselves in such a favorable position. She thought they’d all be dead by now. “Leave him in the airlock for now. You guys take a rest. You’re heroes in my book. I’ll send down a half dozen men to guard him.”

Robert laughed and then a few of the others joined in. He finally said, “These guys are wimps. You could probably send the weakest, smallest soldier down here, and that would be overkill. If not for their weaponry we would’ve killed them all in record time.”

Sarah nodded and watched as the pathetic Velor was dragged back into the airlock.

Apparently Jason had misled them regarding the might of his people. Maybe that was why they never fought a fair fight.

Obliteration

Sarah took her seat and watched in awe as her gunners enlarged the gaps in the hull of the ship the infiltrators had just wreaked havoc on.

She made them stop when she realized it wasn’t worthwhile
. They were only shooting off in celebration of their victory.

But there was little cause to celebrate yet. There were still four warships to contend with. She changed the view on the monitor just in time to see the lead ship captained by Crusoe crash right into and then through one Velor ship
, and then just seconds later, tear into another one.

Jack was there now too, emptying his guns into the front of a third. She zoomed in enough to see several small figures floating towards the fourth ship
— infiltrators from Jack’s ship about to deal death to the aliens within.

She had a gunner aim at that alien ship
's gravity generator and take it out before it had a chance to do to these infiltrators what that other ship had done to her men.

Crusoe’s ship was in pieces by the time it was done tearing through the two warships. Its thrusters went cold and it floated aimlessly, out of control. She zoomed in on his airlock and waited with bated breath for him to come floating out.

After a full minute, she saw a lone silhouette launch itself into space, but rather than launching himself at the
Seeder
or Jack’s ship, it threw itself at the wreckage of the closest enemy ship.

Crusoe
disappeared through a gap in the hull, and Sarah could only imagine the carnage that awaited the poor survivors of the crash. They’d never seen a destructive force like Crusoe before.

The fourth ship was doing nothing to help its failing comrades. Its Velor captain was clearly scared stiff.
Then, in a single mighty explosion, it tore itself apart. The shockwave rocked the
Seeder
and Sarah had to hold on to the sides of her chair so she didn’t hit the deck.

When the wave passed, there was an eerie silence as her crew mourned the deaths of the infiltrators who had no doubt caused the explosion in the first place.

In the bottom right corner of the monitor, she saw Crusoe’s tiny body leap from the alien wreckage to the next closest wreck. He found purchase and disappeared within. He was taking a hell of a risk, but he was clearly still furious enough at the Velors that the rewards outweighed the risks.

The ship Jack was firing at burped out all of its atmosphere at once, blowing it clean in half. The two halves spun away from each other quickly. Dead Velor bodies floated off into space.

Jack’s beat up ship turned towards them and his head appeared on the monitor.

He said, “We should wait here for Crusoe.”
Jack was bloody and bruised and his crew numbered just half of Sarah’s own. But then again, he’d thrown himself and his crew into the fray with gusto, so damage was to be expected.

He said, “The
Seeder
looks good, Admiral. I can’t believe she held up.”

Sarah wanted to say something poignant or memorable
, but she just started to sob.

A Plan

Crusoe was soaked in Velor blood when he boarded the
Seeder
. The blood was pink, thick and oozy, and it stank of burnt hair.

He said, “Holy shit
, Sarah. We did it.”

She wrapped him in a hug. “What do we do if they send more ships?”

“Those guys are cowards of epic proportions. There’s no way they send anything but their entire fleet at us, and I’m guessing that’ll take some time to put together.”

“So what’s next? We can’t go to the seed planet
. They’ll just attack us there when we least expect it.”

“Don’t worry, I have a plan. We’re still colonizing the seed planet. We didn’t come all this way for nothing.”

Sarah stared into the empty airlock behind Crusoe. “What happened to the Velor I was holding captive in there?”

Crusoe smirked. “He must have jumped ship.”

“Uh huh.”

“Don’t worry
. He didn’t feel a thing. Probably.”

“Well
, there goes our hostage.”

“The winners don’t need hostages.”

When he said that, Sarah realized for the first time that they had succeeded. After all they'd been put through, it had all been worth it. They had taken on a race of warriors that always won and they'd beaten them easily. But what did that say about the human race?