The Lost Voyager: A Space Opera Novel (23 page)

“What the hell’s happening?” Sanchez said. He winced and looked down at his chest. “What have they done to me?”

Mach breathed a sigh of relief. At least Sanchez’s last action wasn’t dying at the hands of twisted alien scientists.
 

“Easy, Ernie,” Adira said. She grabbed a knife from his utility belt and cut away the restraints. “Lie still and Mach’s gonna pull that thing out of you.”

Before Mach could reply, something jabbed into his calf. He spun around and looked down. A one-foot-tall phane, the same type as the larger one sprawled across the floor in a pool of its own crimson blood, also dressed in a purple robe, held a crooked syringe forward.
 

Mach reached down, clamped his gloves around its neck and raised it off the floor. “Thought you could sneak up on me, eh?”

The little alien squeezed its thin dark green lips together and its four black eyes widened. A stream of sticky saliva sprayed from its mouth and splashed across Mach’s visor.
 

“Kill it,” Adira said. “We need to keep a fast momentum if we’re to pull this off.”

Mach pinned it to the stone wall with his left hand and aimed his Stinger. He’d never killed a defenseless creature in his life, and something inside made him pause as the alien weakly attempted to kick him. Despite the attempt to inject him, it felt like killing a child.
 

The alien opened its mouth wide, baring a set of razor-sharp jagged teeth, and bit Mach’s suit around his wrist. His previous thoughts were quickly eradicated by the painful crushing sensation. He fired his Stinger at point-blank range at the phane’s head and loosened his grip. It dropped to the floor in a heap, joining its big brother.
 

A low rumbling moan echoed along the tunnel outside the lab. Mach swept his Stinger in the direction of the entrance to greet any new arrivals.

Sanchez sat up and grabbed the needle with both hands. He grimaced, slowly pulled it out, and threw it across the room.
 

“How are you feeling?” Adira asked with a look of concern.
 

“Like I’ve just gone ten rounds with a horan bandit,” Sanchez replied. He groaned, swung his legs off the side of the table, and jumped to the ground. His suit lay in shreds in the corner of the room. He kicked it to one side, revealing his bone necklace and rifle.
 

Mach glanced over his shoulder and raised his eyebrows as he watched Sanchez sling his necklace back on and inspect his rifle. The big man moved with all of his usual vigor.
 

“What you looking at?” Sanchez asked. He crouched next to Mach and aimed out of the entrance. “I’ll provide cover. Babs might want to see what they were doing here.”
 

“You seem okay, considering…” Mach trailed off and peered around the lab.
 

“Considering what? Whatever they put in me can’t be any worse than the symbiosite. Let’s get this thing over with.”

Forty brightly lit glass cases, with a small black data screen under each, drew Mach’s attention. He moved toward them and raised his smart-screen. “Babs, are you seeing this?”

A distorted voice, drowned out by a static hiss, replied through the comm.
 

“We’re deep in the mine,” Adira said. “They might’ve taken out some of the transceivers—”

“I’ll capture it. He can view it later,” Mach said. “We’re on our own from here.”

Adira gasped and leaned toward the nearest case. Mach also recognized what they were looking at. Some contained thin slices of tissues that could’ve been anything, but the ten across the top all contained cross sections of different human organs attached between two slides in light blue liquid. Strange data symbols streamed across the screens below.
 

Mach recorded three of the streams and snapped still images of the grisly cases. Sucking a planet to a husk wasn’t good enough for these aliens. They wanted to play the mad scientists too. The phanes couldn’t be allowed a step further toward the Salus Sphere.
 

“Take a look at this!” Adira said. She hunched over two larger monitors positioned on a silver chest to the side of the cases.
 

The left one had ten transparent 3D images of Sanchez’s body at different angles. The extent of the symbiosite’s grip became obvious as Mach inspected each one. A thin worm snaked around the hunter’s kidneys, pancreas, heart and lungs. It continued down around his intestines and ended near the bottom of his colon.
 

Adira captured graphs and data from the right screen and glanced across to Mach. He struggled to maintain a neutral expression after getting his first view of Sanchez’s ailment. The images stirred a mix of sadness and repulsion, and for the first time, he understood why the big man seemed content to be resigned to his fate.
 

“Something’s coming,” Sanchez said. “Get your asses over here.”

Mach and Adira rushed across the lab and knelt by the side of the entrance.
 

Dark shadows flickered along the carved ceiling of the dimly lit tunnel. Arachnid legs tapped against the stone floor.
 

Mach grabbed the edge of the hovering metal table and flipped it over. It attempted to correct itself, but he held it in place and pushed it across the lab’s entrance. Sanchez leaned against the left edge and aimed over it. Adira shoved her shoulder against the right side and extended her laser. Mach crouched in the center and peered through his sights.

The movements ahead stopped. Mach’s heart thumped against his chest as he waited. A low electronic whine increased in pitch to an earsplitting whistle.
 

Two shiny orange orbs bounced around the corner and rolled to a stop three meters ahead of the table.
 

Mach ducked behind the makeshift barrier and tensed. The other two followed suit. A horan grenade that size wouldn’t be big enough to take them out, but he had no idea what kind of tech they faced.
 

Two hollow pops split the air followed by hissing. White smoke collected around the top of the tunnel, increasing in thickness, and billowed into the lab.
 

Sanchez bolted up and fired. Mach edged up but could hardly see past an arm’s length.
 

The electric whine gained in volume. Two blue beams stabbed through the shroud and moved around at different angles, like the crappy disco lasers in the Nebula Bar on Feronia Prime, although these were probably searching for targets.

“Fire at the source,” Mach ordered.
 

Adira’s laser zipped four times, creating a thin red glow in the smoke around her beam. Sanchez let off two shells. A talon lashed out and disappeared. Mach aimed at its former position and fired.
 

A bright projectile shot out of the gloom, smashed through the table between Sanchez and Mach, and exploded against the far side of the lab. Shattered glass and small pieces of electronic debris sprayed against the back of Mach’s suit.
 

“Away from the entrance,” Mach said.
 

Adira sprang to her feet and ran for the stacked row of metal boxes. Sanchez followed, showing no ill effects from his phane-administered injection.

Mach let go of the table and backed away, maintaining his aim at the tunnel. The table flipped up, correcting itself. The projectile had blasted a neat circular hole through its center.
 

Both of the light blue beams settled on Mach’s chest. He ducked to his left and scrambled behind the boxes.
 

“Whatever’s coming, I don’t fancy our chances in a shoot-out,” Adira said. “We need to find a weak point.”

Sanchez nodded while loading his incendiary rounds. Adira, with a laser in each hand, silently disappeared into the gloom.
 

“Never say I don’t know how to show a girl a good time,” Mach said.

She didn’t reply from her new unseen position. Mach could always count on her bravery, professionalism, and full use of her skills in situations like this.
 

A dark mechanical arm thrust through the entrance and punched the table out of the way. It clanked against the opposite wall and dropped to the ground.

Mach switched the sights to heat-emission mode and peered through the scope. A figure stepped into the lab in a plate-armored exoskeleton suit. Both beams came from the top of its helmet. A hot barrel was attached to its right arm. Two arachnid phanes scuttled on either side.
 

The figure swept the barrel around the lab and turned its head back and forth, casting the beams around the room.
 

“Spiders first,” Mach whispered. “Fire and move. Then all in on the suit.”

He received two clicks through his speaker in reply: an acknowledgment from Sanchez and Adira. A procedure they used to avoid chatter when facing something searching for them at close range.
 

Mach positioned the legs of the right arachnid in the center of his sights. The plan was to knock it off balance to expose its softer underbelly. He took a deep breath and fired on automatic, and one of his tracer rounds struck the rear joint of the back leg.

Sanchez’s rounds burst on impact against the left creature, coating it in white-hot flames. It dropped to its side and writhed on the ground.
 

The figure aimed its barrel at the boxes. Mach and Sanchez split in opposite directions. An explosion ripped through the central section of the wall. The force split the other boxes apart, exposing Mach’s position.
 

Two lasers flashed above Mach’s head. The right arachnid hobbled through the smoke and howled. He fired at its snarling face until his rounds ran dry and reached down to his belt for a fresh magazine. The rounds checked the creature’s movement, but only for a moment.
 

The arachnid reached within two meters, raised a talon and hunched down. One of Sanchez’s incendiary rounds hit the side of its torso. The temperature reading in Mach’s prosthetic eye rose considerably as the creature burst into flames.
 

Both of the blue beams cut out. Through the flickering flames, the exoskeleton thrashed around. It fired and the projectile slammed against the ceiling. Adira clung to its back and repeatedly shot her laser into the base of its helmet.
 

Sanchez raced through the smoky air, skidded to one knee and fired. Green fire flashed from his muzzle, a sign he’d switched to armor-piercing rounds.
 

The high-pitched electric whine decreased, like a winding down fusion motor of a CDWF shuttle after landing. The suit had jammed in position as if it were just about to throw a punch.
 

Mach reloaded and edged forward. Green blood and chunks of matter spattered across the inside of the visor. Adira drew her knife and jabbed it against two smoldering thick cables at the side of the neck. Sparks crackled out and raced across the floor.
 

The room fell silent. Sanchez thrust his boot against the chest plate of the exosuit and it crashed to the ground.
 

Both arachnids twitched on the ground.
 

“You’re moving well for man at death’s door,” Adira said to Sanchez.
 

“Being attacked has a funny way of putting a rocket up anyone’s ass” he replied. “Nothing changes.”

Mach took a deep breath and checked his smart-screen. “We need to find that bomb before an army descends on us. Let’s move.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Mach followed Adira and Sanchez back through the tunnel. The smoke thinned as they neared the open cavernous space of the feeding chamber. Mach arced his Stinger from left to right and covered their rear, training it at small dark passages on either side, expecting something to scuttle out at any moment.
 

“Through here,” Adira said and headed right through a narrow gap in the wall.

“They took the bomb this way?” Sanchez asked.

“No. We got sidetracked after you wandered off. It’s a short cut to the western section’s transport route. It leads to the mineral face where the
Voyager
team planted the device.”

“Makes sense,” Mach said. “If they didn’t destroy the planet, at least they’d obliterate the deposit. Do you think the phane even know about the bomb?”

“What makes you say that?” Adira asked.
 

“It feels like we’re being treated as a minor inconvenience. If I were in their shoes, claws, pincers or whatever, I’d throw everything at us.”

“We’ll soon find out,” Adira said. “The route is around the next corner. It’s half a klick from there.”

Mach edged sideways through the thin gap and flashed his helmet strip around the rough dark brown walls on either side. They rose up as far as his beam’s range and had the appearance of a natural fissure, rather than an OreCorp-made tunnel.
 

The walls widened out to a cave bathed in a light green glow from light shining in through its mouth. Adira crept to the edge and peered around the corner. Mach moved to her side. Equally spaced luminous blocks lined the two-lane road in either direction in the square-cut tunnel.
 

“Looks like the phane have quite an operation going on down here,” Mach said. “Perfect for when we detonate the bomb.”

“Which way is it?” Sanchez asked.
 

“Left to the mineral face,” Adira said. “We can follow the transport route back. It’ll take us out on the other side of the mountain.”

“Seems straightforward. I’ll lead the way.”

Adira glanced across to Mach and raised an eyebrow. He also wondered about the hunter’s vitality since being injected in the chest, especially as he no longer had the breathing support from his suit.
 

Sanchez shouldered his rifle and moved forward in a series of short sprints, hugging the side of the green glowing wall, aiming from side to side.
 

A faint whine of machinery echoed along the tunnel. The group paused. Mach peered through his scope and searched for any heat signatures. The only ones he could detect were from the luminous blocks. A light flashed around the distant bend and the whining increased in volume.