Chapter 10

Esh'lar checked his instruments one more time. He didn't know what had just happened, but he didn't like it. One minute, he had been locked onto his patrol trajectory, six hundred clicks in orbit, and the next thing he knew he had undergone a rather odd experience. On the surface, it didn't seem like much; first, his aural cavities had popped, then he had felt a shudder pass through his body, and finally he had heard a loud humming noise enveloping him. And after all that, he had checked his navicomp only to realize that he'd deviated off course by a whole three degrees. Finding this odd, as anyone would, he had reported it back to the Swift Death.

All in all he was glad to take the Penetrator on a patrol duty. Even though he would not have had to actually join the soldiers in their plan, he had still felt uneasy of taking a dropship down to the surface. Amentoth itself was dark and menacing enough without its Beast presence; he sure as hell wasn't going to push his luck.

Deep down, though he respected all of his superiors (more so in the case of Mej'hol, who frightened him as much as any homicidal megalomaniac,) he was not so optimistic about the success of the mission.

There was one good thing about this scenario, however. Mej'hol had placed his chief advisor, Krek'mar, in command of the fleet, and Vark in command of the Swift Death, two notoriously cowardly officers. At the first sign that the mission has failed, either of them would be quick to sound the retreat command. The thought of leaving Magistrate Klu'koth was not very appealing, he thought, but if the costs were too high, profit was at stake, and they couldn't have that.

Putting his mind back on his job, he checked his instruments once more. However, once more, a weird shudder passed through him, accompanied by an ominous hum. Determined to find out what was going on, he contacted the Swift Death.

"Esh'lar to Swift Death. I have noticed the same anomalous reaction out here, so I'm guessing it isn't me. Permission to break patrol route and investigate."

Vark's voice was garbled. "Could it be some kind of Beast weapon?" he asked cautiously.

Esh'lar muttered, "No, I don't think so. Anyway, I'll…"

He stopped mid-sentence. Vark began to protest, but he switched off his comm. Up in front of him, lying in space, was some sort of odd, flickering light. It didn't look like a cloaked ship, so it couldn't be an enemy trap, and it was clearly natural.

To describe it best would have been to say it was a collection of brightly lit particles, swirling around a supposed base. Whenever a cluster of them concentrated into one point, the whole field seemed to expand, becoming brighter and larger as the Turanic watched.

All of a sudden, he felt truly odd. At first, he thought it was only his eyes that gave off the appearance that the whole of space around him was bending and flexing and twisting, but he realised that he himself was warping, experiencing sharp pains as his arms and legs began to bend in ways that they were never supposed to. He tried to close his eyes before he noted that his forehead was now jutting an extra ten centimetres past his face. He tried to yell, but the sound was also distorted as it came out of his mouth.

By the time his ship tore itself apart, and the concurrent explosion was sucked into an invisible hole in the center of the bright sphere of light, Esh'lar's brains had splattered onto the rest of his body when his head exploded under the stress.

Vark did not like this to happen on his first day as acting-Captain. He replayed the footage from the accident, and he still couldn't tell what was going on.

"Possible theories?" he asked no one in particular.

One of the petty officers answered, "We're reading very powerful gravimetric distortion where Esh'lar's Interceptor was last seen, but I don't know what that means exactly, and I'm afraid to send out a Probe."

Vark suddenly remembered why he hadn't chosen to go into the officer corps of the Turanic army. "Uh, send a transmission down to the Dropship that the Magistrate is in, and request possible courses of action."

"It's too late, sir. They're already breaking the atmosphere."

Despite the officer's warning, Vark had still sent a message to the Dropships, but over all the bucking and howling of atmosphere rushing past the ships, it was a wonder the occupants could hear themselves think, much less a garbled comm. message.

Klu'koth felt very nauseous. In space, there was no turbulence, especially with inertial dampening systems, and he had not been ferried down to a planet in full battle armor in many years, so he felt very out of his element. Agam'nar and Dath'mir were not doing much better either, he noticed.

The much older Mej'hol, on the other hand, had never looked so energetic before. His aged, bug-eyed face was filled with a need to shed blood (on that point, Klu'koth wondered if the Beast even had blood,) and the massive gun he balanced in his two arms did nothing to counter that image.

He checked his own assault rifle, and even though it was shaking from the powerful turbulence he noted that both the EMP/viral bullet ammunition and the flamethrower were filled to the max. He smiled inwardly, thinking that this new pair of armor and weaponry could be a truly valuable set of technology. The Hiigarans would pay through the ears to get that technology.

But then, that would mean that they'd have to keep these soldier-Beast alive. Between the two, he'd rather be safe than temporarily rich.

There was a noticeable decrease in the rocking of the ship, and Mej'hol shouted over the noise to his soldiers, "We must have entered the inner atmosphere by now. Once we land, immediately scramble to your designated landspeeders and head for the first rendezvous point."

The Brigand-class corvettes were not meant to be spacious, originally built to accommodate two crewmen with minimal personal space. Now, with a larger chassis and most of the huge engine removed, there was barely enough room for twelve soldiers to sit tightly together. Not exactly the Galactic Ritz, but considering the mission they were undertaking it was pure luxury.

It's all downhill from here, Klu'koth thought.

After a few stomach-lurching minutes, the ship slowed down to a stop, until only a slight shudder was passing through the ship, an effect of the repulsor-lift thrusters. All of the soldiers unlatched their cumbersome harnesses and climbed over each other to get out of the small ship. Klu'koth was the last one to jump off, lingering as much as possible. He closed his eyes and took a leap of faith.

A printout was laid across the war room's table. Aboard the Rusty Hull, Vark, the other acting captains Mey'lar and Trii'fa, and the de facto commander Krek'mar were puzzled over this new development, and without the support of their more proactive leaders they were somewhat at a loss.

"OK," said Krek'mar, believing that, if anyone was to set an example, it was he. "What exactly are we looking at?"

Vark pointed to the picture of the anomaly. "That is an intense gravimetric field. One of my pilots ran into it with some…unsettling results."

"I see…" Krek'mar thought, not sure how to respond. "What do you think it is?"

Assistant Magistrate Trii'fa, from whose ship they'd scanned the anomaly intensively, began nervously, "We believe it is a natural worm hole. A slipgate."

Krek'mar's surprise was kicked up a notch. "A slipgate? Right next to a planet?"

Vark nodded somberly. "It's acquiring mass as we speak. It will go critical and its quantum tunnel will open within fifteen hours."

"…and, what will that mean for the assault team?" he asked tentatively.

Mey'lar shrugged. "We aren't entirely sure. Unfortunately, we're too late to recall them. They've just breached the 500-click attack radius of the Infection Cannon. To ask them to turn back and meet up at a safe place would be wasting time; time we don't have."

Trii'fa elaborated, "We'll err on the side of caution; we've moved out an extra three hundred kilometres away from the planet. The slipgate is so close to the planet that it very well may tear the planet apart."

Mey'lar brandished a holoprojector. When it was switched on, it showed a partial ground-view of the ravaged land of Amentoth. Many hundred green dots were trekking down one way, but an approaching red wave of dots began to close in on them from the opposite side. "Actually, it's all academic. They're about to run into the Beast quite soon."

Krek'mar looked out at Amentoth through the viewport. "Do you think that the Beast could survive the destruction of the planet?"

Vark gripped his shoulder. "I don't know. But our people certainly won't."

Klu'koth sat in the back of the landspeeder. Only hours ago they had unloaded the compact vehicles from one of the transports, and had begun speeding through the landscape to their inevitable challenge.

Their landspeeder was up in front of the rest, holding up the flag of the Gul'daan. The flag flapped in the howling wind, and the speeder's rangefinder cycled down as they drew ever closer.

Klu'koth looked around the plains. Abruptly, one of the speeders in the formation knocked into a large boulder, and skidded into the ground, grinding its thin hull into the black ground.

He held out his arm, gesturing to the others, and shouted, "HALT!"

All of the speeders stopped, and Mej'hol, confused by the unexpected change, turned around to examine the situation. Klu'koth stared expectantly at the pile of twisted metal, where a few disoriented soldiers were crawling away from the wreckage. However, as he watched in horror, a large, deformed Taiidan soldier jumped them from behind, and began to rip open their body armor to expose them to its infectious biomass. As the three exploded into red viral tissue, Mej'hol cocked his gun.

"ATTACK!"

The thing looked up, and Mej'hol fired off his new toy. Several shots punched easily through the soft flesh, and a split second later it was writhing on the ground, its nanoprobes burning out from the EMP bursts. After its throes had been reduced to twitching, its body seemed to change to a rather sickly green, after which it exploded into a harmless mass of dead cell matter.

This brief moment of excitement had not worn off by the time several dozen more of the distorted monsters appeared over the horizon, and the area was overcome by fierce combat.

As the Turanic weaponry rendered the Beast army down to piles of inert biological goo, so the Beast fired back with their own guns, which were grafted onto their arms and shoulders. Klu'koth fired at two of them, ducking behind a large rock to hide from their fire. After the first fell down, he sent the other one packing, thrashing in agony at the hands of this horrible, unknown weapon.

From behind, he felt something jump on him, which began to claw at his suit. In panic, he aimed his gun behind him, and let the napalm fly. He turned around hesitantly, and saw that the horrible mutant was now charred from the waist up. The rest of his body was very much alive, but he quickly remedied that with a good helping from his flamethrower. The creature stopped moving, and he thanked the designers of the Hazard Suit that it was not built to allow smells to seep through, because he had a hunch that that carcass was rank.

He looked back at the ground zero of the battle zone. There was now a significant Beast presence, but as he raced over to help out he noticed that they were not doing so badly. Unfortunately, he knew that this wouldn't last; the Beast was known to adapt to combat any new weaponry. Which meant that they had to act fast.

The Protector rocked from another impact. "Ensign," the Admiral addressed a petty officer, "If you can remind me never to piss off another Unbound race again, I'll give you a captain's position on one of my frigates."

He barely listened to the enthusiastic reply; he was too preoccupied with the ensuing battle. The T-mat force was a significantly small one-only one Megaship and a smattering of Frigates-which was the only reason they were still standing. One of his Destroyers was almost completely gutted from energy blasts, he'd had to order the evacuation on one of his Ion Frigates, and two of his Collectors were gone.

"What's our current hull integrity?"

"Uh, seventy-five percent, sir. Unfortunately, our engines are offline, so we're not going anywhere."

Damn. For the past three hours he had fought it out with the T-mat, and despite his luck and considerable fleet he knew he couldn't hold out for very long. He still burned from his defeat by the Turanic-he assumed they were in one of the other projected systems; Nucckh'man, perhaps-but that was not his main concern now.

Right now, he had to get rid of those Unbound there. A few of his more sceptical bridge crew advocated an apology and surrender. He merely laughed at them. Ha! Who shied from battle, especially in an Avatar-class cruiser, the most powerful ship ever built? Certainly not this prideful Admiral. No, he was going to stick it to them, and peace treaties be damned.

He ordered, "Lieutenant, engage the Megaship, full Ion Cannon barrage, and have Alpha Wing distract its turrets while we get there."

The conn officer, confused but obedient, turned the ship about to face the large ship. Bigger than three Carriers, it had no construction capabilities, yet was well crewed by Unbound warriors, and its weaponry could easily target the nimblest fighter. Nevertheless, Admiral Liir Hra was determined to get the upper hand.

"All Ion Cannons fire at will!"

The blue beams chewed into the amber-colored hull of the Megaship, and the large Heavy Guns on the ship smashed smaller holes into it. Yet it persevered, and fired back. With a very large shake, a ruptured coolant tank began to shoot out super-freezing gas into the bridge, sealing a few officers permanently to their chairs.

He gripped his armrests. This was not going very well.