Siege of Terra (The Mavrik Woods Series, Book 1) (24 page)

He chuckles, “you never could drop the formalities could you? Oh, and it’s Major now by the way.”

I grab him by the shoulder, a look of urgency gleaming in my eye, “my wife, what about Syreena, were the medics able to resuscitate her?”

He unseals his helmet.

“Easy there,” he shrugs off my hand from his shoulder, “yes, they did manage to revive her.”

There, that’s the best thing that I’ve ever heard in my life, it’s the only thing that I could ever want to hear. My heart leaps back into action, I feel the pace quicken almost instantly. “Don’t be too anxious though to get back.

My heart skips several beats, “why, why shouldn’t I be?”

T-Rave opens his mouth a tiny bit, searching for words that’ll have the softest effect.

“The medics did revive her yes, but she’s been in an extremely fragile state. She hasn’t awoken from her coma since she got into the hospital, it’s almost like she has just lost the will to live, the medics have no idea what's wrong with her,” he looks at me; his expression has a look of sadness and concern.

T-Rave reaches over his shoulder and unclips a rifle from his back plate; I catch it as he tosses it to me.

“Now, why don’t we get you home?” T-Rave seals his helmet back on and turns around and starts to head out.

“How long have I been gone for?”

“It’s been over two cycles.”

My mouth drops open, “Syreena’s been in a coma for
two cycles
?”

“Well, I’m not sure how she is doing now, I’ve been away for so long in the attempts to make it out here, it took quite a while to reach you Colonel.”

“So you’re saying that she might not be in a coma still?”

“It’s possible; the flight to get out here took us over twenty days.”

Something doesn’t add up there, “you’re saying that it takes them nearly four times as long to traverse the distance that we can make?” If so, that is a huge advantage on our part.

“Yeah, that’s why they need the Thopium, to increase the energy output of their engines. We already have that kind of technology, just nowhere near the speed of light.”

“How do you know all this?”

“You’ve been out of the loop for quite some time Colonel; we have learned a great many things in your absence. I won’t get into the details now, we should really get going.”

We go as fast as we can through the dark corridors. After we exited the room in which I had been held in, everything seemed exactly the same. Dark and foggy. It smelled very bad as well, As if some form of creature had died and they didn’t bother cleaning it up.

There is little resistance as we go along, Hakorians died by the multitudes; they aren’t exactly expecting to be attacked in their own base of operations in the middle of deep space.

I tap T-Rave on the shoulder, signaling him to stop and take a rest, my body has the feeling that it’s going to fail on me, right here and now.

I look at my surroundings. There are several dark hallways that fork off in multiple directions. A
panging
sound is coming from one of the corridors. “Did you say that you came here alone?”

“I never did.”

“Do you have a whole squad with you then?”

“Almost two.”

“Really? The General spared two squads to come and get me?”

“Pfft, not just for you,” he scoffs.

“What do you mean?”

“This is not a prisoner ship, it’s a cargo ship. We ran trace scans when you were loaded up, this place is full of Thopium tanks.”

“You saw me get loaded onto here when I was still on Terra?”

“Not with our own eyes, we were tracking your movement through satellite. By the time we got to your location you were already deep in space.”

All the bits and pieces of information that I’d received in the twenty or thirty minutes since I’d escaped are beginning to fall together into one big picture.

“Get down!” T-Rave shouts.

Too late though, he didn’t say it soon enough. I feel immense amounts of heat radiating from my left shoulder blade.

Pain follows soon after.

I look over my shoulder, what I see shocks me, a large chunk of flesh is missing, in its place is a black cauterized mess. My body’s screaming out in agony, my vision goes blurry, my knees weaken and I fall to the ground.

I look up from the ground in time to see T-Rave swing his rifle around towards the Hakorian. I can't hear as the rifle discharges. The Hakorians chest bursts into light. What remains of his stomach is a gaping hole that you can peer through.

Next thing I know is an arm wrapping itself around my waist, trying to hoist me up from off the ground. My eyesight is getting even blurrier; eventually I can't see anything clearly beyond the reach of my arm. “Don’t worry; you’re going to be fine Colonel,” I hear T-Rave say.

Everything goes black, I know what’s coming next, my mind has a split second to register that my body’s going to fail on me.

****

Day 26: Cycle 3: Period 2: Year 2397

My eyes slowly open; my head’s throbbing yet again, as if someone’s been trying to hammer nails into my skull…with a spoon. I look around the area that I’m in, I’m lying on a grated floor; rubber padding covers most of it.

I blink hard several times in an attempt to get rid of the silver spots that are drifting all over my field of vision.

“Where am I?” I manage to slur out. There’s no response.

Pain shoots up my arm.

There’s something taped to my shoulder. I reach around with my good arm and feel my wound gently. Someone had bandaged it up, probably moments after I’d gotten shot and then blacked out. I test the range of motions that my arm’s capable of.

 I shout out in pain as the charred skin under the gauze rubs up against more damaged skin.

I prop myself up using my arms -trying my best to ignore the fresh wave of pain- I see what’s leaning up against the wall opposite me. Gun racks.

Wherever I am, it’s definitely not a hostile environment, no captor would be foolish enough to hold their prisoner in the armoury. I take a quick glance around the room, looking for an exit of some sort; there’s a door to my left that connects to a hallway. I walk towards the door, as I walk the ground begins to shake. I stumble and grab the wall beside me to stabilize myself. The lights flicker around me for a second or two before shutting off completely. “Emergency lights activated,” a female voice says, it echoes through the hallways.

Pale red lights come on and illuminate the hallways to some degree; it has an eerie look to it, as if the hallways that I’m walking down are from some sort of horror movie. I hear shouting ahead, someone’s giving out orders of some kind, I’d need to get closer though to distinguish the voices. I know now that I’m on a military vessel; I recognize the female voice that had come over the intercom. That could only mean that after I blacked out T-Rave had gotten me to safety, and that I’m now on a ship headed home.

That doesn’t explain why the ship’s rocking all over the place, making it almost impossible to walk in a straight line. Even though it’s a military vessel I had never before seen the likes of it. If I had indeed been rescued in this particular ship than it’s capable of space travel, which most vessels I’ve been in are mainly just gunships, none were ever able of leaving atmosphere. Much must’ve happened since I’d been captured.

I stumble upon a closed door; I look around the side for a latch or button of some kind. As I run my hand down the side looking for a button a panel chirps at me and the door whizzes up. The two people that are in the room turn their heads and look at me, “good to see you up on your feet Colonel.” The person’s obviously male, it was hard to tell at first, seeing as they’re in gear from head to toe.

“How did I get here?” I ask, even though I’d already put most of the pieces together.

“The Major carried you here, after he dropped you off he ran to the turret controls, seeing as we have dozens of
Execution
Class scout ships on our tail.” The other one says, however this one’s female.

“Name and rank?” I ask both of them.

“Major Zoë Foxx, hundredth and fourteenth battalion,” the woman says.

“Sargent Daniel Watts, hundredth and fourteenth battalion.”

“I’m assuming you already know my name?”

“Indeed Sir, we were sent to rescue you, you would think we would know everything about you, well, anything that could give us an advantage.”

“An advantage in a rescue mission? That makes little sense.”

“You know what I mean. Sorry to cut this short, but we need to get back to dodging enemy fire,” Major Foxx says.

“
Get back to
? I never stopped Major.”

I turn around, before I leave the cockpit I say, “is there anything that I can do to help?”

“Yeah, go down that hallway and take the second left, there you will find a room where the turret controls are. Good luck.”

“Right back at you Major.”

I leave the cockpit and go down the hallway that the Major told me of. The emergency lighting is still on, making it a little bit harder to navigate through the tight corridors. I run my hand down the same spot that I had on the cockpit door, the door opens up to a room filled with monitors and chairs.

“Colonel, you shouldn’t be here! You need to rest, don’t worry about us we have got everything handled,” T-Raves voice comes shouting out from behind one of the consoles.

“I’m not sure that you can order me around Major.”

“Sorry, forgot to add ‘with all due respect.’”

“In any case I’m fine enough to help shoot stuff down, just point where you need me.”

“There’s a terminal over there that’ll reroute the power from the destroyed turrets, energy is still getting to those turrets, but it’s useless and a waste of energy. I would have done it myself but if I leave this console then we will get overrun.”

“Where will the power get rerouted to?”

“The active turrets and the engines, we need all the speed and firepower that we can muster. After you’ve done that come and take a seat at one of these empty consoles.”

I run to the other side of the room, I look at the terminal that I’m supposed to be flipping switches on. There’s no switches however; it’s just a thin screen that’s leaning up against the wall.

I tap the screen with my index finger, everything comes to life. Menus, options, video logs, the list is endless. I find the search feature in one of the scroll down menus, I type in power distribution.

More options come up.

I scan through them quickly. My eyes glance over Turret control, it must’ve been the correct option, after I tap it another menu appears, this one shows all of the turrets and their placement on the ship. It’s the first time I actually got a rough outline of how big the ship is and the shape and structure of it.

A long nose protruding from the front; wings come off the nose, and a single engine in the back, in between the edges of the wings, giving it the appearance of an arrow head. I’m not sure if the color is accurate to the representation on the screen, if so the ship is black.

The turrets on the screen are labeled and numbered to specify their location on the hull; almost half of them are outlined in red to designate them as inoperative.

I tap one of the dead turrets, the menu zooms into a picture of the turret and several options. I hit the deactivate button. The menu zooms out; a second later that same turret that I had hit goes grey. I repeat the process until all of the turrets that were destroyed are all grey in the menu.

I go back to the search menu, I hit power distribution again. This time I go to the engine screen. The engines read that they are operating at a hundred and sixteen percent.

“Major, is it wise to push these engines further?”

“As long as they have the proper power then it should be fine, it was designed to handle lots of stress.”

I hit the calculate power button on the engine screen, from all the power that I’d stored in a buffer from the deactivated turrets there’s enough power to boost the engines another twenty three percent. I hit the button that’ll transfer the energy from the buffer into the engine power lines. The sounds of the engines roar through the ship as energy floods the system.

“This is Major Foxx; whatever you did down there is working. Keep up the good work,” her voice comes over the intercom beside my head.

“Good job Colonel, now get over here, we aren’t out of the woods yet,” T-Rave only gives a moments worth of praise.

I notice a hot liquid running down my arm. I look down quickly and notice that blood has managed to seep through the gauze pad.

“Shit, Major is there a med kit in here somewhere?”

“Yeah it should be in the locker by the terminal over on that wall.”

I run over to the locker that T-Rave indicated and open it up. I grab the med kit and set it on the ground.

I grab the edge of the gauze and rip it off in one quick motion, my eyes water slightly as bits of charred flesh come ripping off due to being almost fused to the gauze.