Atlantia Series 3: Aggressor (43 page)

More cheers went up, the captain skilfully winning the majority of the audience to his side as he stepped down and the military contingent got up from their seats.

‘Well, whatever happens it’s going to be new for all of us,’ Teera said cheerfully. ‘Let’s just hope that there’s something friendly beyond the Icari Line.’

Evelyn managed a smile in response, but somehow she felt certain that whatever lay in the vast expanses of uncharted space ahead of them was likely to be anything but friendly.

*

The wind.

It gusted and whirled, tugged and buffeted across the lonely, smouldering plain. Above the roiling pillars of thick oily smoke that puffed from weakly fluttering flames, clouds scudded across a sky awash with glowing watercolour steaks of radiation that bathed the surface in a rippling light as though the air itself were aflame.

He opened his eyes.

The sky looked different, a haze of flickering, monochromatic light. The atmosphere, he realised. The dying star’s raging geo-magnetic storms had broken through and were bathing the planet in microwaves of countless frequencies.

Kordaz heaved in a lungful of air and his colour vision sharpened to reveal the glorious shades bathing the heavens above. He lay for what felt like aeons, just staring upward and unaware of his body. Slowly, fragments of awareness reconnected themselves like forgotten dreams and he sensed pain in his chest and limbs, a dull, throbbing ache that was not at all unpleasant. The pain of healing surged through his synapses and he breathed deeply again before, entirely on impulse, he sat upright as chunks of broken soil fell from his body.

Around him the pirate’s compound was a smouldering wasteland of churned earth and soil, burning fragments of ships, bodies and weapons twisting pillars of smoke up into the sky around him. Flames licked at the edges of shattered spacecraft hulls as he turned his head left and right to survey the scene.

Soil fell from his head and shoulders as he moved, and he looked down to see amid the dust and grit tiny machines fluttering from his body to be snatched away on the breeze like ash.

Kordaz froze as his memory leaped back to him and he grasped at his chest, then looked down. A clump of long-dead infectors fell away, draining from his grip like black sand between his fingers as he looked down at his chest and saw that the charred cavity where he had been shot was now filled with a metallic sheen, the surface strangely smooth and silvery. He tentatively touched it with one finger and felt it, cold and yet fluid, a metal and yet as flexible as flesh.

Kordaz looked down and saw patches of the metal wherever his body had been injured: lesions sealed, abrasions re-surfaced. Both horrified and amazed, he reached up to his eyes and felt them, sensed beneath his fingertips the metal obscuring his face.

Dead infectors tumbled away like iron filings, and he realised that all around him were Hunters, not burned like those attacked by the Marines but simply devoid of life as though short-circuited. Kordaz looked up to the heavens burning with aurora, and he made the connection. The solar flares had wiped out the attacking hordes before they had been able to infect his mind, but not before they had repaired the damage to his body.

Kordaz slowly got to his feet and stood amid the smouldering wasteland and then he looked up once more to the heavens as images of Qayin and the pilot who had shot him flared as brightly as the dying star in his mind. Betrayal. Anger pulsed through his heart like fire, rage setting his nerve endings aflame. Fuelled by the pain surging through his wounds Kordaz opened his mouth and screamed up at the sky as he searched for any sign of Atlantia.

His deafening roar faded away, snatched by uncaring winds and cast into the distance. It was answered by the lonely howls of beasts that even now were converging on the smell of carrion, the countless burning corpses around him like a beacon for carnivores for countless cubits downwind.

Kordaz searched the smoky gloom around him and there in the distance he saw a small number of abandoned spacecraft that had partially escaped the bombardment. Freighters, a couple of aged interceptors, some old Colonial prospecting craft, all of them leaning at odd angles from collapsed undercarriage and with hulls scorched by the plasma blasts that had levelled the compound.

Kordaz set off toward them and spent several minutes examining them one by one before he selected the craft in best condition. He looked about and saw amid the debris fuel canisters, food packages, water tanks and countless abandoned weapons and plasma magazines strewn across the fields.

Kordaz, revenge poisoning both of his hearts, began gathering the supplies he would need to give chase to Atlantia and settle a score with a humanity he now hated once again with all of his fearsome passion.

***

Dean Crawford is the author of the internationally published series of thrillers featuring
Ethan Warner
, a former United States Marine now employed by a government agency tasked with investigating unusual scientific phenomena. The novels have been
Sunday Times
paperback best-sellers and have gained the interest of major Hollywood production studios. He is also the enthusiastic author of many independently published Science Fiction novels.

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