The searing heat from the barrels and expulsion vents from their pulse guns threatened to burn through their forearm guards. Ignoring the discomfort, they sprayed the entry foyer to the propulsion repair bay with a withering series of blasts. The dockyard security police squad of eight trauma armored officers scattered chaotically, practically falling over themselves in a mad dash to escape the line of fire and get cover.
The Ureeon Security Police Force were used to dealing with unruly, violent drunks and squabbling personal vendettas between motley individuals or very small crews from feuding ships. Most who docked at the facility respected the unwritten code that forbade rivalries and disagreements from turning into blood disputes. The police squad had never before needed to actually go to war against any particular foe. So they'd let their training and tactics become lax, the men ill-prepared both mentally and physically, and they had not updated and practiced their combat drills so they could be ready for an organized counterinsurgency. The mercenary Xar'queyeks had known this and had taken full advantage of the slack, lackadaisical state of Ureoon base security. They knew far in advance that the security team wouldn't have been prepared for a carefully-planned, full-on military assault.
Kedurom Meddo and Grasquan Bregsa had both once been Lancers in the Emperium's Light Infantry before they'd become infected with the Veindyllgoh bacteriophage and become tribal Xar'gueyek sell-swords. They were battlefield-experienced and knowledgeable warriors with deadly skills, despite the sometimes distracting neurological agitation that the bacteriophage caused. Veindyllgoh's Syndrome had been brought back from space during the height of the Great Revocation, when the Emperium's space legion were called back to Teshiwahur after the onset of catastrophic disasters that followed the unanticipated and ruinous incursion of The Wound into Teshiwahur's solar system. Veindyllgoh's had been quickly identified, controlled and managed by the Emperium's Homeworld Health Corp and so there were extremely few future incidents of its recurrence after the initial outbreak many orbital solar heliars ago, but, out in the Badland Wilds and among the more rural villages in the unincorporated territories, the disease still sometimes reared its ugly head, taking residence among those members of the population not inoculated against it. The main symptom of the bacteriophage, other than the eventual agonizing death it caused, was a euphoric mental state of battle-drunkenness... infected warriors were driven to participate in furious battles for the sheer adrenalin-induced joy of killing. Meddo and Bregsa, though both were on high doses of prescribed medication to mediate their battle-lust, were born infected and so were psychologically incapable of desiring to be rid of their bloodthirsty, murderous urges. They simply didn't know how, and had very little experience with, being any other way. Neither man had developed much in the way of a conscience to moderate their urges. And that made them damn good Blood-Haunters. Killing was what they lived for.
There were no less than seven dead bodies lying in pools of cooling blood on the floor below their position when, charging from the corridor behind and to the right of them, Pnoom-Ogg and Pnoom-Aig came upon them.
Kedurom Meddo heard the faintest scuffle of their boots on the metal gangway floor and rose into a half-crouch as he turned, his long-barreled pulse rifle swinging up and around to sight on the approaching target mass ---
Pnoom-Ogg's leg lashed out and kicked the gun's barrel aside just as a blast of ionized, elemental isotope radiation-enhanced light rocketed from out the weapon. The force of the kick traveled down the body of the weapon and transferred its energy to Meddo's body, throwing him into a dizzying, off-balance spin. Moving almost too swiftly to see, Pnoom-Ogg let his momentum carrying him crashing into Meddo's body as he followed up with an elbow strike that caught the mercenary in his face, right on the mandible. Meddo's head snapped back and he was thrown into the railing behind him, hitting it with his torso with force enough to crack three of his ribs and fracture a spinal vertebra.
Grasquan Bregsa still on his knees and facing forward, flexed his powerful thighs and launched himself backwards away from the railing overlooking the propulsion repair bay foyer. He slid nearly five feet away from his former sniper's position and rolled to his right side, bringing his pulse rifle to bear on the approaching form of Pnoom-Aig. But the female synthetic gene 'bot was already out-of-target position and had hurled herself into a distance-devouring, forward somersaulting roll that put her under Bregsa's gunsights. She came up on her knees facing the Blood-Haunter while her arm simultaneously shot out to slap the barrel of his weapon high. Bregsa immediately let go of the gun and it flew away, tumbling end-over-end past the railing into space. He jumped to his feet and pulled his sonic knife from its sheathe on the side of his calf, the foot long, curved, saw-toothed edged blade oscillating at a harmonic velocity strong enough to slice through steel as if it were porridge. He jabbed at Pnoom-Aig, spun and slashed first in one direction and then swiftly in the other, trying to catch her off-balance. Fast as he was, he moved like he was swimming through molasses relative to Pnoom-Aig. She hit the man in the chest with the flat of her hand, once, and, even through the protection of his torso's trauma armor, his breastbone shattered under his skin. He staggered, dropping the sonic knife. He died coughing out a thick gout of blood.
Unhurriedly emerging from the corridor and scanning the immediate vicinity for more attackers, Emaris Staurqe jogged over to where the two Xar'gueyeks lay and, swiftly bending down and grabbing each by his webbed utility belt, effortlessly picked them up and threw them over the mezzanine railing to fall three stories to the hard floor below.
"You two work too hard," Staurqe said. "You should have just let them shoot you. You could've withstood the pulse bolt impact without sustaining any damage. I doubt it would've even slowed you down. Thereafter, you could've just broken their necks."
Pnoom-Ogg sighed. "Yes, but getting shot would've hurt. A lot. And, though it would not have been enough to cripple or impair us, the pain would've been very distracting. Neither of us especially like pain."
Staurqe harrumphed. "Sad. You should've been trained early on to ignore pain. Your battle mentors were obviously lacking in thoroughness."
"Can we perhaps engage in a more productive exchange of information?" Pnoom-Aig chided. She found Staurqe's persistent pessimism aggravating.
"If the attack force follows standard insurgent infiltration-assault strategems, you'll likely find more Xar'gueyeks gathered some fifty-eight steps near the eastern debarkation passage leading to the Visitors' Hall down below," Staurqe said.
And without another word, he leapt up and over the mezzanine railing and dropped down to the debris and body-littered lower level, landing lightly. His descent was deceptively slow, as if he were floating, defying the pull of gravity. He landed without a sound and with no visible sign of inertial deceleration. He then looked up at his two less-advanced gene-'bot comrades and impatiently waved them down.
"Well, that's not going to happen. From this height, my body mass will cause me to strike the floor with almost the force of an artillery shell," Pnoom-Ogg remarked dispiritedly. "I could damage myself."
Pnoom-Aig looked over at her fraternal twin and said, "I suspect he can fly. Now that's not something we can do. As a matter of fact, that's not something I've ever seen any humanoid being do."
The twins briefly looked at one another, nodded together, and then spoke in-tandem. "Stairs. Move real fast."
They raced to the metal stairwell to join Staurqe below.
* * *
"Protect the ship, she says. Keep the parts-stealing scroungers away from the engines, she says. Don't let the damned mercs get too close, she says..., I'm depending on you," the red-haired freebooter snarled, recounting his captain's orders. "Well, just look at the frut-jagging mess we're in now! Thanks for nothing, yer stinkin' Highness!"
Durkka-jan's forearms and shoulders had begun to ache and he was breathing like a winded bull. Another armored figure leapt at him from the gloom cast by the crisscrossing struts of one of the dock's massive auto-crane arms, the helmeted, visor-masked man wielding what looked like a bulky, dual-ammo clip repeater pistol. The hand weapon fired a streaming fusillade of vibra-nails, titanium-jacketed projectiles that vaguely resembled Earth-style bullets but were actually slim metal stakes with pre-perforated jackets around an explosive core. Eight rounds slammed into the wall of the receiver bulkhead behind him as Durkka-jan ducked and swung the long magna-oar he'd pulled from off the ship's external housing for the propulsion drive-engines. The magna-oar was a reserve accessory of the propulsion unit for use in times of emergency, capable of creating an intense, radioactively-excited electromagnetic field that could be used to keep the airship aloft upon the failure of the Aerieakon's Wavehammer Engine thrusters.
He swung right. Missed, the Xar'gueyek soldier danced away from the heavy oar's arc. The man fired another five round burst from his sidearm and Durkka-jan dropped to the ground, swearing a bitter streak of invective while he rolled over and over as the vibra-nails slammed into the spot where he'd been. The noise of the rapid-fire multiple hits was deafening. The burly ship's battle-captain lifted up to one knee, lunging, and swung the cumbersome magna-oar again, this time catching the man at his hips, slamming into him with all the considerable muscle the thickly-built, muscular freebooter could muster. The man screamed and literally flipped cartwheeling through the air, falling off the gangplank and tumbling to his death several stories below.
Durkka-jan was about to utter a particularly vile remark to commemorate the man's violent demise as a stream of pyrotechnic liquid fanned out over his head, its heat searing his skin even though it missed him, as another attacker took the fallen Xar'gueyek's place. The man wielded a portable inferno-gun.
"One of you lazy, inbred good-for-nothings had better get your greasy asses in gear and DO something about that!" he bellowed to what remained of the airship's crew.
A glowering, exceedingly tall man in a form-fitting, textured rubber and leather tunic stood up from just past the Aerieakon's foredeck wing-juncture and loosed a blinding series of concussive blasts from a scratched and dented, twin-muzzled bolt-rifle, the long gun's gyro-missile ammunition punching through the air at subsonic velocity to punch a bloody, pumpkin-sized hole through the man with the inferno-gun. The tall crew member was named Muragint'Paen and he was from a distant, peninsula-based, tropical nation of heavily-tattooed and body-pierced warrior-mystics.
"So does that make you happy now, you miserable, loud-voiced little bastard?" Muragint'Paen growled hoarsely.
"Good job, you insubordinate prick!" Durkka-jan yelled in rejoinder, giving the crewman a thumb's-up sign.
And then one of the mercenaries threw a triple-packed, multi-charge hand explosive called a "diskripper" towards Durkka-jan's position and the world erupted into fire and thunder...
* * *
"How many did you count?" she asked while they jogged down a dimly-lit, tiled service tunnel that ran a winding underground path through the middle of the volcanic mountain on which Ureeon was built. Their footfalls echoed eerily as they moved, quickly but with disciplined precision, past the pale lights inset into the tunnel's curved walls. The facility's maintenance crews used the tunnel during their evening ministrations to the dockyard's assorted halls and workrooms, moving garbage and trashed electronic waste to the elevators to the Recycling Center installed at the base of Terash Munyatt.
"Not counting the four you and I disarmed at the terminus-conduit's entrance, six," Baron Farhoon answered, anxiety coloring his voice while he ran. "They're configured for remote detonation. No timers. I can well imagine he has the whole sub-structure mined with wraith-cannon shatter-charges."
"Dammit! They HAD to have had inside help to accomplish this so quickly and so quietly. And Kroule has a reputation for espionage and terrorist subversion... How could we not have expected this?" she said bitterly.
"There was no way to predict this. Hellclown's Guts, Rae'vynn, we didn't even know Kroule was due to come here until this morning," Farhoon said around a series of deep breaths. For once, he was glad of the facility's strange architecture. It could be used to their advantage against an invading force, even if that force had somehow gained access to Ureeon's structural blueprints, since the maintenance tunnels were on a separate set of blueprints under a different file name in the network computer's local database. Only someone who had spent a lot of time wandering the base, physically traversing it's intricacies from one end to the other, above the surface of the volcanic mountain and within its stone interior, would know of the existence of some avenues of its more obscure egress.
"Ssshhh --! We're almost there..."
Rae'vynn and Farhoon came upon an upwards canted tributary off the main maintenance corridor. It led to an arched opening in front of a latticed grate into which was set an oval glass door. Farhoon squeezed past Rae'vynn and held up his hand with a pair of fingers extended up towards the tunnel's ceiling. This opening led out, meaning back into the main interior of the facility. He wanted her to hold up and keep her present position while he disengaged the security locks. She nodded.
They both could hear the faint murmur of voices. Kroule and his Xar'gueyeks. They sounded upset, aggravated and Rae'vynn could pick out the different and distinct vocal pitches indicating there were at least five men present. In the muted and indistinct illumination in the tunnel, she checked her weapon's ammo stores. The power gauge was amber and flickering. She was light, maybe having under half an energy-generator charge left in her thermalwave pulse- rifle. She tossed an apprehensive look to Farhoon and the Baron frowned, his lips compressed into a thin line. He indicated that his own weapon was low on ammunition, as well.
Didn't matter. Couldn't be helped. They had to do with what they had and make every shot count.
Baron Farhoon closed his eyes for a moment while his fist wrapped around the handle of the door. Rae'vynn squared her shoulders and drew in a deep breath, bringing the muzzle of the rifle up in preparation for target acquisition...
Together, they charged out into the light.
* * *
Bracketed by his two top sergeants, Sergeant Pyn'kethin and Special Officer Z'ree-Neth, and in the company of three other of his most proficient battlefield soldiers, he savored the moment. His triumph was only moments away. He'd lost some of his men, but that was anticipated. Truth be told, they lived for battle. Some resistance had to be expected at a place like Ureeon. There were too many soldiers and ex-soldiers and outlaw raiders who used the facility for his team not to have encountered any resistance. Moreover, the chaos he'd created filled the damaged and mangled dockyard base with a jagged-edged, ominous and bombastic energy that infected every human being inside its walls. He felt like he was standing in the middle of a whirlwind, bathing in the power of the storm, and it was exactly the type of feeling he cherished. It left him feeling high and supercharged. Irregular Forces Infantry Commander Layvis Kroule spread his powerfully-muscled arms and smiled like a homicidal wolf just before the kill.
Ureeon base rocked as a distant bomb blast shook the walls and floor. It sounded like the explosion came from topside, where the towering mech-aerocranes loomed over the skyport landing platforms. Someone desperately defending their ship and crew had no doubt encountered counter-resistance from his assault force team. That was most likely the sound of them dying.
So far as Kroule was concerned, the spilling of blood in large quantities was always a good thing.
He was just opening his mouth to speak, to wax eloquently about the day's dark deeds, when he heard the voice...
"Well, well, look at you. Now this is truly a surprise. I had never thought to see you again, old friend. What tragic set of coincidences finds both you and I in the same geographic location after all these solar heliars?"
Startled, Kroule turned his head to look over his left shoulder and his eyes widened as Emaris Staurqe strode from out the shadow-draped opening to one of the three corridors intersecting at Kroule's impromptu command location.
"No, this cannot be," he breathed. "This is not possible. This is madness."
Kroule's men had reflexively raised their weapons to target the source of that voice, but were uncertain what to do when they saw their leader's reaction to the calm and self-assured intruder in their midst.
"Number 67. That is you, isn't it? Surely you remember me. I was once known as 'Number 77'. Brother Kodespawn, is this any way to greet your Matrix-progenitor?"
"IGNORE HIM!" Kroule commanded, fists balled up at his sides. "THESE ARE LIES! ALL LIES!"
"What's he saying, boss?" Sergeant Pyn'kethin asked as he peered down the sights of his gun towards Staurqe. "Why did he call you 'Number 67' and what's a Kodespawn?"
It was Special Officer Z'ree-Neth who spoke, his eyes suddenly regarding Layvis Kroule as if he were some vile and nightmarish creature from myth. "He's saying that he recognizes Infantry Commander Kroule as a fellow non-human, synthetic biological variant. He's saying that Kroule is a fabricated person, a gene'bot, and that he and this big armored sonuvabitch were born from the same artificial matrix on the moon, back on Pex'Insava."
"The Commander isn't even human? Gods be damned," Pyn'kethin said wonderingly, momentarily lowering his gun. "Kroule's a gene'bot?"
"More than that," Z'ree-Neth said. "He's a damn Alpha Progenitor."
At that moment, Pnoom-Ogg and Pnoom-Aig slowly emerged from the same corridor as Staurqe.
"Them I recognize as gene'bots," Pyn'kethin remarked, seeing the pair. "They have that weird see-through metal sheathe for skin. But the Commander looks, sounds and smells human."
"Don't stand there talking, you ridiculous ape! SHOOT THEM!" Kroule roared, pointing at the outcast-fraternal twins, twins who were amongst the Otherkin royalty of Ometh Nastreq and who were known as the 'Duality of Kohra'andum'.
"A goddamned Alpha Progenitor," Z'ree-Neth repeated, shifting the aim of his own weapon from off Emaris Staurqe to abruptly point directly at the seething face of Layvis Kroule. "A lying, degenerate, mutant bio-android who thinks, no -- who is absolutely convinced -- that he's better than we humans are. The same breed of experimental, cybernetic, synthetic robot who murdered nearly three thousand people in their sleep on Pex'Insava. Murdered them for no reason other than they didn't meet the Progenitor's standards of excellence for sentient life forms."
"What are you telling me? Are you saying he's not what he says he is? Are you telling me he's been lying to us the whole time?" Pyn'kethin said through a surly growl. "I've been risking my life all this time for a damn vat-grown fake human, taking orders from some ... thing ... that doesn't even have real blood in its veins?"
Layvis Kroule stared evilly at his team's Sergeant and sneered, his face wrinkling in a feral expression resembling that of an angry wolf.
"I apologize, Number 67, I did not realize you had abandoned your birthright and were now living under an assumed false identity," Staurqe said, deliberately and unhurriedly drawing closer to the band of confused Xar'gueyeks. "A terrible mistake on my part. So tell me, old friend, whatever will you do now?"
Layvis Kroule's furious facial expression then underwent a dramatic change. Where before there had been shock, rage and indignation, there was now reflected in his features an expression of regret, disappointment and weary acceptance. His powerful shoulders dropped and his usually erect posture sagged. When he next spoke, his voice was cold and unfamiliar to his men.
"What are you doing here, Kodespawn 77? Why, of all the climes abroad this massive world, would you be here, in this place, now? And what are you doing in the company of those inferior, clockwork toy-people? They are not like us. They are evolutionary cast-offs, imperfect, inadequate and insufficient. Barely an improvement over these crowing, howling primates who serve me. Why couldn't you have remained hidden behind your mask of normalcy, why couldn't you have just kept up the pretense?"
His brow wrinkling in concentration, Kroule tilted his head back and closed his eyes, extending his arms...
The telekinetic bolt that emanated from his mutant mind ripped into Special Officer Z'ree-Neth like a rocket's blast, knocking the man off from his feet and throwing him back across the floor. His skull was set aflame. Simultaneously, another blast of psychic energy seized Sergeant Pyn'kethin in an unbreakable, white-hot grip that lifted him from where he stood and crushed him, like the huge coils of a powerful, invisible constrictor serpent, his bones audibly cracking and splintering.
Seeing this, and recognizing it to be the horrible betrayal that it was, the remaining three members of Kroule's Xar'gueyek crew began firing wildly at everyone else in the open concourse.
And, at that moment, Rae'vynn Wynng and Baron Farhoon erupted from hiding, their pulse weapons crackling as they discharged round after lethal round.
Spinning around away from facing Layvis Kroule, Staurqe reached out and grabbed Pnoom-Ogg and Pnoom-Aig, lifting them off their feet as if they weighed only as much as small children, and he launched himself up into the air, impossibly defying gravity, to hover several meters above the ensuing firefight.
Rae'vynn and the Baron's pulse blasts ripped into mercilessly Layvis Kroule and his men repeatedly, the energy beams caustically searing their flesh even as they sliced through their armor and their bodies. Kroule jerked and stumbled, staying on his feet long after his men fell dead, and then he, too, succumbed to the withering energy assault. He dropped to his knees, arms still thrown wide, bleeding and burnt, and then hissed as he died.
It was over in a handful of seconds. And, though damaged and smoldering and mangled, Ureeon Dockyard naval port still endured.
* * *