Siege of Terra (The Mavrik Woods Series, Book 1) (17 page)

A female voice.

“Shit,” I drop to my knees and rip off a part of her robe. I make it into a rather choppy looking rag. I rap her kneecap up with the rag, “sorry, I didn’t know,” I say.

“
Colonel, what the hell are you doing?! This alien is the enemy!” T-Rave shouts.

“Captain, this is a woman, I don’t care what your opinion is, I won’t harm her, and neither will you.”

“
Colonel, I don’t care if she is a woman or not, you can't let that make you soft. We are here on a mission, if you can't keep the proper attitude towards that objective then there is no point in you being here. This is a war, if you don’t like the methods then tough shit, you signed up for it.”

“I don’t care what the methods are, we are not hurting her!”

“Well you already hurt her, so all we can do now is try to get information.”

It must’ve looked odd on her part, two men standing around and waving their arms around.

T-Rave turns his focus to the whimpering Hakorian.

“Now, I’m going to ask you one more time, you are going to answer, otherwise the next shot will be fired at your skull.”

I turn my back on the both of them, it’s one thing that I couldn’t witness, the strong preying on the weak.

“Did you do that?”

“
Yess,
” she manages to say through the pain.

“How did you do that?” He asks.

There’s no reply; all she does is smile at him with her pointed teeth before hissing.

I don’t have to time to turn around and stop T-Rave.

The sound of a weapon discharging fills the chamber. There are morals that I follow, or rather, I try my best to follow them. One of them is to never harm women. Obviously T-Rave doesn’t have the same guidelines to stick track to.

“See? It can be done; all I wanted was a simple yes or no.”

“Then why did you kill her?” I shout.

“She was a risk. We couldn’t afford to let her go; she might have told someone that we were here.”

A good point. Still, it felt wrong.

“Let’s move.”

Seeing as the fog is no longer here it’s a lot easier to see the inside of the room. Rather bland; the inside has the same material that’s used on the exterior. The wall opposite of where the female Hakorian had been, there is what appeared to be a doorway. Seeing what my scans that I made earlier had revealed what looked like a shaft leading straight down, which then led into a large round chamber.

“Well, seeing as we’re inside it shouldn’t be hard to find a switch to activate this door.” I grope around the wall for any abnormalities. My hand traced up and down until it hit a small square bump.

As soon as my hand touched it the button pressed into the wall and disappeared.

Nothing happens.

“Well, we’re either very clever or very screwed. You think it was an alarm?”

A deep grating sound comes from the wall before I can answer. The door is opening.

“Hmm, well that was easy. You would think that they would have a passcode or something,” T-Rave says.

I aim my rifle at the opening door; definitely an elevator of some kind.

“Wait; give me one of your explosives,” I say to T-Rave, I extend my hand towards him.

“Why?”

“Because we can't go any further without having some type of backup plan. Didn’t the General say plant explosives and then try to negotiate with them? Well, this is what I’m doing, in case the negotiations go to hell, which they will. Then we have a way out, if we make distraction then we might be able to get away.”

“This is all on a bet if we get captured,” T-Rave states.

“Yeah, and you know, it's also common sense to have a backup plan in case the first one gets screwed.”

“Fair enough.” He says, extracting one of the explosives from his breastplate compartment.

I take the explosive from his hand and look for a crevice for which I can place it. I unsheathe my blade and start to poke the wall -I was right- it’s exactly the same material used on the outer walls.

“I’m not sure if that will work, it's just too hard.”

I dismiss his words with a wave of my hand.

I move into the elevator, still poking at the wall. The effect is different in here; in the chamber the wall was hard as steel, in the elevator however it’s almost squishy.

“I think I found an entry point.”

I push my blade through the inside wall of the elevator, it goes deep into the soft material.

I create a little slit in the wall, big enough to be able to slide the cylinder in; but small enough so that it would appear as if there was no gap at all.

“There, just what we need.” I retract my blade.

“Well, pile in, there is only one way to go, down.”

T-Rave follows me into the elevator, “I’m just letting you know, I don’t feel too comfortable with a live bomb in here.”

“Don’t worry, it’ll only explode if I tell it to, I took away the automatic detonation switch. It won’t explode after ten seconds like the other two; this one has to receive a signal from my HUD for it to go off.”

“Well isn’t that a comfort.”

“Relax, it’ll be fine,” I say.

I look for a control panel on the side of the wall. There’s nothing there; just a small room.

“Well, here we are, stumped by an elevator.”

“Shut up I’m thinking.” I say, harsher then I meant it to be, but the man just never stops talking.

These are advanced beings, surely they wouldn’t use buttons for everything.

“My speeder is voice controlled.”

“What?”

“Whenever I want to go somewhere I say the coordinates.”

“On,” T-Rave says randomly.

“Run.”

“It can't be that simple.”

“Apparently it isn’t.”

“Lower, descend, down.”

The elevator lurches.

It feels like my stomach is going into my head.

“Alright, so we got down, and I guess the opposite of down is,” T-Rave points up towards the ceiling, he probably didn’t want to say ‘up’ because the elevator would’ve reversed most likely.

“See, you have to wonder. How could they possibly get all this crap down here? I mean, you said there was a large pocket, or chamber at the bottom, I’m assuming that is where the actual mining is taking place. But how did they transport all that equipment down here, in this lone shaft?” T-Rave says.

“Well, maybe they have the same technology that we have.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, the really compact kind, I have a hut for two strapped to my leg pretty much. Scientists and engineers are just making stuff smaller and smaller these days.”

The elevator stops abruptly.

“What? We can't be at the bottom already; you said it was almost two kilometers down,” T-Rave says.

“I did, and we have no idea how fast this thing can go.” The elevator door that we entered through doesn’t open, instead the wall behind us opens up to reveal a long corridor.

“Hmm, well, let’s get on with this then,” I say.

The corridor’s easily a hundred meters long, not the gloomy type though; well light and bathed in orange and red light, the source of the light is unknown.

“This place gives me the creeps,” T-Rave says, probably just to break the silence.

“Yeah, welcome to the club.”

We reach the end of the corridor; a door blocks the rest of the way.

“Scans showed that that chamber is on the other side of this door, now; I have no idea what to expect, the scans only show the terrain.”

“I get the idea,” T-Rave says tersely.

I raise my rifle at the door with my right hand, using my left to scan the surrounding wall for any notches or latches that could open the door.

“Got it, here we go,” I say, I press the knob that’s protruding slightly from the wall.

The door opens.

A massive cavern lies before us.

We only have a second to register it before a huge snarling Hakorian blocks our path.

T-Rave and I react instantly by pulling the triggers on our guns, the energy blasts rip right through the abdomen of the Hakorian, essentially severing it in half.

“Ok, time to go, and go fast!” I yell.

Being discovered the second we get inside hadn’t been the ideal plan.

“Do you think it sounded an alarm?” T-Rave asks.

“How could he? We killed him almost instantly,” I say.

Nothing left to do now but run. Run in the hopes that the Hakorian didn’t sound off the alarm before he died. How could he though? He had no time to react when the door opened. Unless their species are telepathic, if that’s the case we’re screwed.

“He? How do you know it’s a he?”

“Well, seeing as we know what females look like now I think it’s safe to assume that that one was male,” I say.

“Stop for a second, we need to figure out where we are.”

I look around; the chamber is filled with machinery that looks like cranes and drilling tools. No shock there, the Intel did say that this is a mining operation.

“How many of those explosives do you have?”

“Well, you used one of mine, and you used two of your own. There are supposed to be four in each suit,” he catches on, “so…we should have enough to blow this place up, if we use them on the right equipment that could cause multiple chain reactions.”

“Hmm, alright. Let’s find where they’re storing the Thopium they mined, if we blow that up this whole place will light up like a match.”

“We would only need one or two though to accomplish that,” T-Rave points out.

“Yeah, we’ve got five left so let’s use them wisely.”

“Down!” I whisper, although it’s useless gesture seeing as we have private intercom, I could scream as loud as I want and no one would be able to hear me.

I crouch behind a large crate, two Hakorians pass without noticing us.

“We need to get out fast; we probably can't stay hidden for much longer.” At that precise moment a blaring sound echoes off the cavern walls.

“You just had to open your mouth didn’t you?”

“Sorry boss.”

“Let’s just find what we need to find and get out.” I stand up and look around for anything that’ll make a nice boom.

“Over here.” I say, I spot what looks like a tank at the far end of the cavern.

The alarm is getting louder and louder, “
we have intruderss, find them!
”

“Where’s that coming from?”

“I don’t know; they must’ve installed speakers or something in here,” I say.

We reach the tank without anything seeing us… hopefully. It looks like it’s a fuel tank, “Thopium is a gas right?” I ask.

“When it’s mined it is, it can be infused into certain stuff like our guns, why?”

“I think I found its container.”

The contained looks like just an ordinary box; on the top there’s a small nozzle device. That might be how they get the gas inside.

“Hand me on of your charges,” I say.

One of the cold cylinders falls into my outstretched palm; I fumble around the bottom of the tank, looking for a spot that’ll conceal it.

“Ok, I think that should do the trick. This is device number two, the one attached in the elevator is one, make sure we don’t mix those up, otherwise if we blow the wrong one we might be stuck down here.”

“How long do you think we have?”

“I don’t know, they are going to start setting up patrols now, it shouldn’t take long for them to find us,” I say.

“Weren’t our orders to try and negotiate with them?” T-Rave asks.

“We can't negotiate with them; you were there for the last mission weren’t you? They made their intentions pretty clear.”

“The General won’t appreciate you disobeying orders again.”

I walk in between a crane and more tanks.

“Yeah well, last time I didn’t follow orders I saved lives. So maybe if I repeat my actions then I can save our sorry asses.”

“Good point, but we should at least try.”

I take out one of the metal cyclinders, turning it over in my hand, trying to think of a good place to put it. I look up and inspect the crane, if the support beams fall it would cause major damage to the equipment and the people operating them. The perfect spot.

“Alright, that should do nicely, take however many you have left and just throw them.”

T-Rave looks at me.

“Did they fill your water tank with alcohol?”

“You think I’m drunk? Trust me Captain, you would know if I was drunk; I get really loud and laugh a lot…never mind… just throw them. They won’t explode when they make contact with the ground, instead their on a timer.”

“Oh, that makes me feel so much more comfortable to the fact that I’ll be lobbing a bomb.”