Authors: Aya Morningstar
“They must have received our message,” Aegus says.
Yuri rolls his eyes. “That’s a stretch, but whether or not they did, your plan seems like it will work...given these circumstances.”
That stubborn bastard, Yuri. He disagrees with me just for the sake of disagreeing, and even when he
does
agree with me, it never sounds like it.
“So if Donovan got our message out,” Anya says, “then they’ll know exactly what’s happening when we attack the cities...they probably have some way of backing us up already planned out.”
“And if they
didn’t
get our message,” I say, “our mission is the same. We need to secure control of the oxygen valves as our number one priority. Once we take these, they can’t carry out their threat of sinking the cities.”
Anya nods. “Except Sankt Petersburg. There we need to seize the palace. Bahamut won’t sink himself. Then we get a message up to orbit to let them know that the tribes are securing the cities and that Bahamut is dead.”
“Then your big dicked friends can take over the planet,” Yuri says, “having tricked us fools into what you’ve wanted all along.”
“Yuri,” I say. “Are you serious? Are you really so cynical and paranoid?”
He huffs. “Maybe I am.”
“I’ll find you the most stubborn Marauder woman, Yuri, and–”
“Let’s get out of here,” he says. “We have a lot to do.”
I snicker at him as he walks away, and Anya gives me a look.
“What?” I ask.
“That was mean.”
“
T
he ships will be here soon
!” Yuri barks. “Everyone get ready!”
Irena pulls the top off of a huge wooden barrel and dips her hands into it.
When she removes her hands, they are covered in purple, and she runs the purple pigment all along her body until she’s covered from head to toe.
“There’s a teal one down here,” she shouts. “For the men. A much smaller barrel.”
Everyone starts laughing.
“Why are they doing this?” Aegus whispers to me.
“To confuse them when we attack. It was my idea.”
“Oh,” Aegus says. “Why didn’t you run it by me?”
“I wanted to surprise you,” I say, dipping my hands into the bucket.
I cover myself in the pigment, and Aegus helps to get the hard to reach areas on my back and face.
“How do I look?” I ask.
“I prefer you as you are,” he says. “But you make a good Marauder.”
“Now we will look like you, Yelda!” one of the men shouts, raising his spear.
“Not quite,” Irena says. “He’s called Yelda for a reason.”
The woman all laugh, and the men glower.
“Actually,” Aegus says, “I’ll be fighting like this.”
Suddenly, the small little sphere on his shoulder melts and spreads across his body. It covers all but his head, and hardens into his teal bio armor.
“Shit,” I say. “I should have thought about that. I haven’t seen your stupid suit in so long.”
“Stupid?” Aegus asks, ears lowering down.
“I like looking at you naked,” I say, smiling.
He grins. “Soon enough, Tsarina.”
I realize we haven’t really talked– at all– about what might happen after this battle. We both feel at home in the jungles, but I don’t think I could stay here. My place is in the palace, and I
hope
that Aegus will feel his place is at my side. I’m almost afraid to ask, and there’s so many other things to be afraid of right now, so I push it out of my mind.
“Everyone drink some of this,” Yulia shouts, opening a big iron kettle.
The smell hits me and it stinks like raw sewage. I see Aegus’s nose crinkle up as well, and he takes a big step backward.
“It will protect you from the Imperials’ stun darts,” she says.
Dammit. I’ll have to drink it.
I wait in line, and when it’s finally my turn, I take a big gulp of it while holding my nose shut. Some of my friends laugh at me for doing this, but I’ll be the one laughing when they stick their open nostrils over the kettle and vomit involuntarily.
I swallow it, keeping my nose held closed. I count back from three, and finally let go of my nostrils.
“Not so bad–”
The foul taste rushes up from my stomach and floods my mouth and nose, and I start coughing and retching uncontrollably.
Irena takes a big chug of the medicine, swallows, and smiles at me. “You must be stronger than this, Tsarina.”
“I’ll be strong when it matters,” I say. “I probably just got a thicker chunk of the broth.”
“Yes,” Irena says. “That is a very good excuse.”
Aegus chugs down his dose, and he smiles.
“The smell is bad,” he says, “but the taste is delicious!”
“You have to be joking,” I grimace.
He scoops up another spoonful and sucks it through his lips.
“Ahh,” he says, ears twitching happily up and down.
I shake my head at him as I grab my spear and bow. I strap the bow across my purple-painted body, and then strap on the quiver of arrows.
We don’t usually use straps and quivers when hunting, but we’ve trained with them for the past month to prepare for the assault. Usually two or three arrows does the job while hunting, but in a battle, it’s best to have more.
We all begin to walk toward the docking platform; there are hundreds of us. I’ve never seen the whole tribe move together like this, and seeing it, I realize just how much power the tribes truly have. There are thousands of jungles like ours, and though not every jungle has agreed to join the fight, enough have that there will be tens of thousands of us.
And one Marauder with a fully charged biosuit.
When we reach the docking bay, it’s still covered in vines and grass the same as when we arrived, but our ship isn’t there anymore.
“Your ship was too small,” Yuri says, pointing at the much larger ships docked all along the bay. There looks to be at least twenty of them, and each can likely hold several dozen fighters. “We had to move it out of the way.”
“It wasn’t our ship anyway,” Aegus says.
I almost feel bad for Tomas. We did kind of steal his ship. When I take the palace back, I will try my best to find him and return the ship to him.
I get onto a ship with Aegus, Irena, and Yulia. Around fifty other tribespeople crowd onto the ship with us. It’s laid out like a shuttle, but some people have to sit on the floor, almost on top of each other.
“We eat less than the city people,” someone jokes. “The ship can carry us all!”
Each tribe has a few members who visit the deep jungles once a year to fly the ships for training. But I still feel nervous, as
our
pilot has only been down for one training run, and he’s looking down and squinting at the controls.
“Vlad!” I shout. “You sure you can fly this?”
“You think just because I am a man, that I can fly the ship?” he says, furrowing his brows at me.
“...What?”
“No, Tsarina, I cannot fly it! The levers and buttons are all different than I remember.”
I shove through everyone and look at the controls. “I can fly this.”
“Then go ahead,” he says, stomping away from the pilot’s seat and melting away into the crowd.
Aegus has followed me to the pilot’s seat, and he nods at me as I grasp the controls.
“You flew Tomas's ship,” he says. “And it was much older and more difficult to control than this one.”
I squint at all the buttons. Many of them aren’t even labeled. “I can fly it,” I say. “But I’m not sure I can get the docking wires to disconnect.”
“I can,” Irena says, tearing a hatchet out of someone’s hand.
She kicks the door open and jumps down onto the platform.
She swings the hatchet into the docking cables, and they start to sever. She swings again, and again, and again, and they finally tear away in a mess of frayed cables.
“Done,” she says, and jumps back into the ship.
She shuts the door behind her, as I test the throttle. The ship sways and jerks just a little, and I kill it.
I watch in front of me, as ship after ship awkwardly floats up and ineptly flies down the docking bay, into the outer airlock, and finally out into the sky.
Some of the ships even bump against the airlock walls as they exit.
I wait until the ship in front of me is clear, and I push the throttle for real. Some of the tribespeople fall over as I hit the gas, but I manage to maneuver the ship smoothly down the airlock and out into Venusian atmosphere without bumping into anything or killing any of my passengers. I count it as a success.
Unlike Tomas’s ship, these all have navigation systems, so I’m able to set Sankt Petersburg as our destination, then simply follow the map.
We’re travelling at near the maximum depth the ship can handle, and the atmosphere is so thick that I can’t see a thing through the window. The tradeoff is that Sankt Petersburg will have a hell of a time seeing us as we approach. As will all of the other cities we will attack.
All of the Imperial monitoring equipment is pointing up toward orbit, looking for a Marauder-Martian attack from the upper atmosphere. The last thing they will expect is a bunch of tribespeople, painted purple– and teal– popping up right below them.
After a few hours, the map tells me that I’m directly beneath Sankt Petersburg. All I need to do from here is go straight up. Because it’s the capital, we are sending ten full ships to Sankt Petersburg– roughly five hundred warriors.
The attacks on the other cities will have only about five ships each, and they will have to brute force their way onto each of those cities’ docking platforms.
I smile at Aegus as we wait for the order. We will be entering Sankt Petersburg another way.
We have to wait for hours, but none of our warriors show signs of weariness or impatience. They have all hunted their entire lives, and a few hours’ wait like this is nothing to them.
I, on the other hand, can’t help but feel horribly annoyed at the wait. I’ve waited over six months for this moment, and each extra second that I have to wait feels like an eternity.
I get a signal from the ships attacking Novo Siberia. “We’re here. Everyone ready?”
“That’s the last city,” Aegus says. “We’re ready.”
“Yes,” I say. I wait for hundreds of other ships at dozens of other cities to sound that they are ready. Once everyone is checked in, we sound the attack.
I hit the lever and begin to climb. The map shows that the other nine ships coming with us to Sankt Petersburg are less than one hundred meters away from us, but the atmosphere is still so thick that I can’t see them. When we’re about one kilometer below Sankt Petersburg, I finally see the other ships’ lights through the haze.
“Visibility is getting high,” Aegus says. “That means the Imperials can see us...if they’re looking.”
Three hundred meters. 200. 100.
Sankt Petersburg is directly overhead, and we soon hit even altitude with the bottom of the city. I keep climbing, up along the dome.
“Ready, Aegus?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says. “I’ll try to make this brief.”
He raises his teal-armored hand toward the windshield, and his hand and entire arm begins to glow purple.
“You’re sure the glass isn’t going to shatter all over us?” I ask.
“It will melt,” he says.
And then a thick beam of plasma blasts a hole through the windshield. It hits the dome, and about a half-second later, the dome melts apart. Aegus squints, and the beam grows thicker along the dome, and the hole widens until it’s twice as wide as our ships.
He cuts the beam off. “Go!”
The Venusian atmosphere is leaking into our ship, and it’s still cold this high up. I try not to breathe it in, and I hit the gas.
We fly through the hole in the dome, and I move aside and cut the throttle so that we are hovering just inside the dome.
The other nine ships begin to roar in behind us, but they don’t stop like we did. They fly across the skies of Sankt Petersburg, heading straight toward its heart: the palace.
When the last ship is through, I adjust our course until we are pointing back at the big hole in the dome.
A portion of Aegus’s suit melts off into a sphere, and he throws it at the broken edge of the dome. The material begins to melt around the edges, and slowly the hole starts repairing itself.
“It will seal,” he says. “Go!”
I turn the ship back toward the palace and fly.
I
feel
my stomach churn as Anya races the ship down toward the palace.
A number of our ships are already lowering, making their final descent next to the palace under the shadow of the statue of Bahamut.
A few reach the ground, and I can make out faint purple dots pouring out of the ships the moment they make landfall.
But then I see a rocket launch up from the ground, and it slams into one of the ships before it can land.
There’s a huge explosion, and debris and flames rain down on the surface just outside the palace.
“Anya,” I shout. “Land! Now!”
“We’re still a few kilometers away–”
I shove her out of the seat and crank the lever down.
More rockets fly toward the hovering ships, and a number of them explode. I doubt anyone inside survived.
I see one ship dodge the rocket, and arrows fly down from the windows.
Anya is trying to shove me back out of the seat, but I hold her back with just one arm.
We’re about to slam into the surface, but I jerk the lever again at the last moment.
Everyone starts to fall over, but as I close the last few hundred meters to the ground, a rocket blasts from the palace, and it zooms straight toward us.
I throw out a sphere of super-hot biomatter through the hole in the windshield.
As the sphere rises, so does the rocket.
Our ship touches down, and the rocket explodes into the hot sphere, maybe fifty meters in front of us. I can feel the heat from the explosion on my face.
“Out!” I shout. “Now!”
Anya puts her hand on my shoulder, and I look up at her. “Sorry for shoving you, but–”
“No,” she says. “You were right. I wasn’t thinking. I won’t make that mistake again.”
Everyone rushes down the exit ramp with their weapons drawn.
We step out onto Nikolai Park. Anya told me that she played here as a little girl, though surrounded by guards and cut off from the regular people.
There are huge screens showing General Bahamut sitting on the throne, shouting loudly. His voice rumbles across the entire city. “These rebel forces, and anyone who aids them, will be killed without a trial. I still control this planet, for the Empire…”
Now the park is swarming with purple-painted tribal warriors, and the regular people who were relaxing in the park are now screaming in terror.
I run through the park, shoulder-to-shoulder with Anya. Irena is in front of us, Yulia behind us.
A man and a woman scream and drop their ice cream cones to the ground as we come into view.
Ice cream...so delicious...and such a waste of good food.
They fear us, but that will keep them away. Anya was wise to have all the humans paint themselves like this. If they weren’t so afraid, they would end up in the crossfire, and innocent lives would be lost.
The palace is in view as we exit the park. It’s only a few blocks away, but armored Imperial soldiers rush out from behind a barricade as we approach the gate to the palace. They are armed with assault rifles, and escorted by the spider-dog drones from the jungle.
I blast a burning-hot beam of plasma directly at the barricade. It melts into molten concrete, and I see dozens of soldiers screaming and falling over as it melts totally away– all over them.
A handful of soldiers cleared the barricade in time, and they open fire on us.
I stand in front of Anya, and a bullet hits my chest. My armor absorbs the impact, and I fire another– much smaller– blast directly at the shooter. It melts through his helmet, hair, and skull, liquefying his brain.
He collapses, and we take cover behind a line of parked cars.
More soldiers appear from behind the gates, but the warriors have already nocked their bows. Anya included.
They all let loose in unison, and a rain of arrows flies up into the sky.
The soldiers shoot each other confused looks, and they start to run as the arrows begin their downward arcs.
Arrows cut into dozens of them, and at least half of the squad falls down. Some are dead, but others are writhing and trying to pull out the arrows.
“Again!” Irena orders.
Another volley fires, but the soldiers have mostly taken cover between the pillars of the gate.
I charge up both hands, and I blast two pillars at once.
The Imperial soldiers have learned their lesson by now, and they scatter immediately, which brings them right into the path of the arrows. Almost all fall, and the few remaining turn their backs and run back into the palace.
“That was
amazing
!” Anya says. “I can’t believe we–”
“We haven’t won yet,” I say, killing her enthusiasm. “Never celebrate until you’ve won.”
She bites her lip and nods to me.
“Good call on the purple war paint,” I say. “They won’t know that I’m the only one here who can fire plasma. They must have no clue what’s going on.”
Anya grins, and I’m very tempted to kiss her right in the heat of battle, but I remember my own words about not celebrating until we’ve won.
Irena points, and we run past the line of cars and take cover behind some of the remaining pillars of the broken gate.
“On three,” Irena says. “We breach where Yelda toasted the pillar.”
She counts down, and on three we all run full speed past the gate and onto the main lawn of the palace.
The statue of Bahamut is towering above us, and we enter into its shadow.
There is burning wreckage of ships all along the palace lawn, and dozens of dead and charred bodies are strewn across it.
I remind myself to later say a prayer for our fallen comrades, but for now I focus fully on protecting Anya.
There is no further resistance on the lawn– the Imperials must have decided my plasma attacks are too powerful on open terrain– and they want to try to force me into close-quarter combat.
I grin. Wait until they see what my suit can do up close.
When we reach the palace walls, we find a gaping hole where the doors were. One of the massive wooden doors is lying flat on the ground,full of arrows.
I see several dead Imperial guards lying in the hallway. Yet I also see more fallen comrades. We don’t have enough intel to know how many soldiers Bahamut had in Sankt Petersburg. It’s quite possible the bulk of his forces are boarding ships waiting to intercept an attack from space, and they could come back at any time when they realize the attack came from below– from the jungles.
We need to hit hard, and fast. If we take Bahamut down and seize the capital before reinforcements can arrive, they likely will give up their attack and surrender.
We move slowly through the palace hallways. I stand in front, shielding the rest of our warriors– but Anya most of all– from any potential attacks. But from behind me, Anya shouts out where we should turn, as she knows the palace better than any of us could.
“Turn left up ahead,” she says.
I sniff, but the palace is too full of the smells of battle. I can’t tell if the hallway ahead is clear based on scent alone.
I stick my hand out around the corner, and gunfire erupts. I feel a bullet slam against my armored hand, and I bring it back in.
“Let us fight, Yelda!” Irena says.
“I can clear this hallway alone,” I say, stepping forward. “No need to risk yourselves. Just cover me.”
I step around the corner, and the soldiers all unload their guns into me, but just as fast as their bullets, my suit forms seven sharp tendrils– one for each shooter– and they lash out from my body. Each tendril impales one of the shooters through his heart, and when I pull the tendrils back, every single one collapses dead onto the ground.
I hear Anya and Irena shout behind me, and I hear the telltale
thunk
of bow strings being letting loose.
I turn around and see two shooters with arrows in their chests, and their guns drop to the ground.
Anya and Irena are holding their bows up, pointing toward the dying soldiers.
“Good shots,” I say.
Anya smiles.