Onward blackout book 6, p.1
Onward (Blackout Book 6), page 1
Blackout: Onward
Book 6
Daniel Young
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
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1
EM pulses thumped against the hull, and a giant battleship smashed into the Blackout from starboard. Captain Jackson Keogh gripped his console to hold himself upright. “I thought you said the planet was secure!” he yelled down the bombardment stack. “What happened to that?”
“It was secure when we left it!” Lana hollered back.
“Really? Because I could swear these are Primals from the Keter Legion attacking us right now.” Jackson checked the readouts on his instruments. “They are Keter Legion Primals!”
“I don’t make the rules, all right?” She slammed her ejection block to starboard and plastered the Primal with a dizzying barrage of shots. “I just report what I know.”
“What you know is clearly wrong.” Jackson scrambled through the Blackout’s onboard databases. “We have to find a safe place to land.”
“Lulin is out,” Liri reported from the pilot’s station. “The place is crawling with Legion craft.”
“Head for Lulin anyway,” Lana cut in. “They’re Uzud’s people.”
“Belay that,” Jackson interrupted. “Ships are splitting off to intercept us. They’re joining these Primals to attack us.”
Lana stuck her head out of the block and stared at him. “What?”
Another Legion vessel, a Radical this time, crashed into the Blackout from port. It batted the Rebel back and forth between its hull and the Primal to starboard.
“It’s the Anarchy!” Liri roared over the noise. “The Legion must have recaptured it.”
“Which means the whole insurgence is compromised,” Aitera Detaras added from the tactical station behind Jackson. “Arlyane’s movement failed.”
“Abort!” Jackson ordered. “Break away! We can’t fight all these.”
Before Liri could carry out his order, another ship tumbled into the mix. It dove at the Blackout from above and nearly collided with the Rebel, but it missed by a fraction of an inch and smashed into the Anarchy instead.
Jackson had a split second to recognize the Kalichi freighter carrying the Silden back to Keter. The next instant, both ships tumbled ass over tea kettle into the planet’s atmosphere.
“The Kalichi is dead in the water!” Aitera called. “It’s in freefall over Lulin.”
“Don’t tell me that!” Jackson countered. “Just find me somewhere to land.”
“Head for Doing-Doing!” Lana interjected. “The Bedots will help us.”
“Fat chance!” Liri countered. “If the Legion drove them out of Lulin, the Bedots will be on the run along with Arlyane’s people.”
“I don’t care where it is or who it’s with,” Jackson announced. “Just find me somewhere to land—anywhere.”
Aitera’s eyes glazed over. Her fingers rested on the console. Hundreds of fibers extended from her fingertips and infiltrated the ship’s controls. The ejection blocks not already manned by people spun from side to side under her direction. She cleared the Legion forces, cutting a path for the Blackout to enter the atmosphere.
Files, maps, schematics, and charts whizzed across Jackson’s instruments. Aitera rifled through them so fast that Jackson didn’t get a chance to see them all, much less choose between them.
“The Ghunu are coming in fast!” Liri called over her shoulder.
“Please tell me they aren’t heading for Lulin.”
She shot Jackson a grin. “Uh-huh.”
Jackson grimaced. “A couple hundred Grocit running loose in a Legion-controlled city? What could possibly go wrong?”
Liri laughed, but another assault from starboard cut her off. “You bastards! Back the hell off!”
She jerked the helm hard to starboard and banged the Blackout into the enemy ship. She jostled the Primal away, jammed the helm down with all her might, and dove in a death spiral toward the ground.
“Fifteen more Legion vessels are rising out of the mountains,” Aitera reported. “They’re engaging the Legion craft from Lulin. There’s no way to tell one faction from another.”
Jackson took his eyes off the flickering images on his console. He turned around to confront her. “Did you find a place for us to land yet?”
“Breaking the thousand-foot altitude barrier!” Liri called. “If we’re going to land somewhere, we better do it pretty quick.”
Another series of concussions rattled the ship. They came from all sides, and the Blackout shuddered. The engines coughed.
“Fuel at 30%!” Liri reported. “We have less than five minutes to get on the ground.”
“Do something, Aitera!” Jackson ordered.
She didn’t answer. She stared unseeing at the cockpit window and, without warning, the whole ship shut down. Instruments, helm, throttle, and every control at every station blinked out and went dark.
Liri’s hands flew off the pilot’s station. “What the hell!”
More blasts stuttered across the hull. The light from the cockpit window shone off Aitera’s glazed irises. The next minute, the engines gave a tortured howl and the ship banked hard to port. Every instrument switched back on again.
Liri pounced on her station, but no matter how she scrambled, she couldn’t regain control of the ship. “Helm isn’t responding. Throttle is pinned to the wall. We’re burning fuel too fast.”
“What are you doing, Aitera?” Jackson demanded over the engines’ shriek. “Where are you taking us?”
She didn’t move. She didn’t blink. The ship plunged at breakneck speed across the desert and into a different mountain range. Jackson didn’t recognize it. Outstations and factory sites flashed by in a blink.
The Blackout rocketed into a trackless wilderness of canyons, wastelands, and barren gorges. Aitera dropped the ship into a sheer gulch miles deep. The Blackout hurtled around corners, through narrow defiles, and down steep chasms where the Legion dared not follow.
The pursuit broke off long before the ship slowed. “Fuel is at 5%!” Liri reported. “We have to land.”
Jackson couldn’t tell if Aitera heard or not. The ship slowed its headlong run. It swerved around another treacherous corner and entered a flat-bottomed riverbed. The water flowed in a rocky course, with wide, dry mudflats on either side. The Blackout powered down, and Aitera set the ship down on the hard-packed mud.
Liri slumped over the pilot’s station. “Let’s not do that again.”
“Where are we?” Jackson asked.
Aitera blinked and shook herself. She took her hands off the tactical console. “We’re in the Badlands.”
“That doesn’t tell me anything,” Jackson pointed out. “Where are we, exactly, compared to where we want to be?”
“You said you wanted to land somewhere safe,” Aitera said. “That’s where we are. We’re in the mountains across the continent from the Legion and the Krakzid and everyone else that might be hunting us.”
“Unfortunately, we’re across the continent from Arlyane, the Bedots, the Grocit, and everyone else that might be able to help us, too. We’re also across the continent from another source of fuel.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.” Liri swiveled her chair around and stood up. “We’re smack dead in the middle of the Barbarians’ territory.”
“Who are the Barbarians?” Aitera asked.
“They’re another Votek faction. They have their own leader, and their own mythology about who will free the planet from the oppressive alien invaders.”
Jackson covered his eyes and groaned. “Just what we need.”
“Actually, it is.” Lana strolled up the stack to enter the cockpit. “The Barbarians have their own Smiasmiam sources. We can get fuel from them. It isn’t acylated, but we can still use it. We’ll burn it faster than acylated Smiasmiam, but it will get us back to Doing-Doing or somewhere we can get the higher-quality stuff.”
“How do you suggest we get it?” Jackson asked. “Don’t tell me you two are members of their movement, too.”
“No, we aren’t, but we have something they want.”
“I can’t wait to hear this,” Aitera interjected.
“We have weapons,” Lana replied. “We can trade them for fuel supplies.”
“We’d leave ourselves unarmed—or under-armed,” Jackson pointed out. “I don’t want to be either of those in the presence of anyone who calls themselves Barbarians.”
Lana shrugged. “If you don’t want to trade weapons for fuel, we have something else the Barbarians would love to trade for—something they value more than weapons.”
“What is it?” Aitera asked.
“We have Urvals. We have a whole bunch of Urvals on board this ship. The Barbarians would give a lot to acquire Urvals. The Barbarians grow food in aquaculture beds in these rivers.” Lana pointed at the waterway across the mudflats. “They need plenty of slave labor for that, and they don’t get many captives out here.”
Jackson’s jaw dropped. “You’re suggesting we sell these Urvals as slaves? These Urvals are warriors from the highest strata of their society, a nd besides, they’re volunteers. They came with us as a matter of honor to repay us for driving the Krakzid out of their system.”
“I’m just saying,” Lana replied, “if you want to trade for fuel—or anything—you can’t ignore a prime resource like that.”
“Forget it,” Jackson fired back. “We aren’t selling these Urvals as slaves.”
“You wouldn’t have to sell them as slaves,” Liri added. “You’d just have to convince the Barbarians that you’re selling them as slaves.”
Jackson spun around to face her. “What? How do you figure that?”
“It’s simple. You explain the situation to the Urvals, and they agree to go along with the deception. You trade them to the Barbarians for whatever you want—fuel or protection or whatever. Then, when you’re finished and we leave in the Blackout, the Urvals break out and leave.”
Jackson ran his fingers through his hair. “I can’t believe you’re actually suggesting this.”
“If it gets us what we want, what difference does it make?”
“As a matter of fact,” Aitera cut in, “I think it does matter. Jackson represents Zenith. We don’t know which factions will be left in control of Keter after this is all over—if anyone is. He can’t afford to alienate anyone with a shady deal like this. If the Barbarians held any position of power in post-war Keter, they’d never trust Zenith again. It could spoil any diplomatic relations in the future.”
“Then Jackson won’t deal with the Barbarians. Lana and I will complete the deal. You can come with us, Aitera. You can make yourself look Keteran. Besides, we’ll all be hooded on the ground. The Barbarians will never see our faces. All they care about is their prize. If they think they’re getting a better deal than we are, they’ll jump at the chance.”
“Just like the Pateras?” Jackson asked.
Liri grinned up at him. “I learn from the best.”
He shook his head. “For this to work, the first step will be to convince the Urvals to go along with it.”
“Good luck convincing Quort of that,” Aitera added.
“I think you have a bigger problem than that,” Liri countered. “Look.”
She pointed at the cockpit window. Beyond the glass, a squad of enormous creatures advanced with weapons raised. They emerged from hidden crevices in the vertical chasm walls, and these creatures looked nothing like normal Keterans—or what Jackson considered normal Keterans.
The Barbarians stood head and shoulders taller than any Keteran human, and they wore no hoods. Their heads and bodies resembled distortions of humanoid forms, but so changed that no one would mistake them for the same species.
Their heads came to a point at the skull’s peak, and widened into a broad base where the neck should be. Instead of a neck, the wide skull merged with the blocky body. Arms grew from the thick muscle tissue just below the mouth.
The nose slits, the mouth opening, and the eyes lay flat against the head. Shaggy mops of hair grew from the conical skulls and hung to the creatures’ midsections. Thick carpets of hair covered the Barbarians and made them look truly feral.
Stout, shaggy legs protruded from their solid bodies, and hair covered the feet. The Barbarians shuffled along the ground, training their weapons on the Blackout.
Their weapons appeared to be the same make as the Keter Legion EM pulse weapons. Jackson could well imagine where the Barbarians got them.
They ringed the ship, and one big bruiser bellowed at the top of his lungs. His mouth opened in a huge hole, and his booming voice echoed off the chasm walls.
“He’s speaking a strange dialect of Vaiki,” Aitera reported. “He’s calling you to come out and face them. He says that if you don’t show yourselves, they’ll open fire and destroy the ship.”
2
Jackson shoved Liri and Lana down the stairs. “Get down to the discharge ramp—quick! Hood up! Hurry!” He waved Quort and Roy forward. “Arm up—all of you! Quort, get your people disarmed and ready to deploy.”
“Disarmed!” Quort snapped countered. “You mean armed.”
“I mean disarmed! I don’t have time to explain. Just do it.”
Quort growled something under his breath and stomped down the stairs. Aitera brought up the rear. She’d erased the Shimmai features from her face and ears and changed her skin color to the translucent flesh of a normal human Keteran. She looked like a completely different person.
“Remember what I said,” she told Jackson. “You can’t show yourself, or you’ll discredit Zenith.”
“I’m not going to show myself. You are. Get to the discharge ramp and get hooded up with the twins. You three can negotiate with the Barbarians while I do my best to convince the Urvals.”
“If they don’t agree, we’ll be hard-pressed to find something the Barbarians want as much.”
He planted his hand on her back and propelled her forward. “Will you stop arguing? Go!”
Jackson dove down the stairs behind her and hurried to the crew quarters. He didn’t relish the conversation waiting for him with the Urvals.
Quort waited in the corridor outside the Urvals’ quarters. His warriors surrounded him, all talking at once. Not one of them had disarmed. Quort didn’t appear to be pressing the point too hard.
They fell silent and scowled at Jackson when he appeared. “My people refuse to disarm in a hostile situation,” Quort rumbled. “We see those monsters waiting for us out there. If the Blackout crew is going to fight them, we will fight as well.”
“I don’t want you to fight them,” Jackson began. “We need you to help us avoid a fight—for now, at least.”
“Explain yourself,” one of the Urvals boomed. “We’ll go nowhere without a good reason.”
Jackson turned toward the voice and recognized Ogul, one of the Urvals he met in the capital city on Apra. His friend, Ugor, stood at his side.
“We want you to pose as slaves.”
“Slaves!” Quort thundered. “Do you have any idea what we suffered all these centuries at the hands of—”
“We want you to pose as slaves, not become slaves in fact. We want you to let us trade you to the Barbarians in exchange for enough fuel to get us out of this wasteland and back to the battle. As soon as the Blackout leaves, you can rise up and break free. I’m sure you can defeat these Barbarians easily.”
“How will we do that if you disarm us first?” Quort demanded. “How will we escape without a craft to carry us?”
Angry murmurs broke out from the assembled Urvals. They nodded and grumbled to each other.
“You don’t need weapons, because the Barbarians have plenty. All you have to do is steal the Barbarians’ weapons. And as far as transport goes…” Jackson trailed off. He hadn’t thought out the plan that far in advance.
“Yes?” Quort prompted. “As far as transport, what?”
Jackson pulled himself together. “We’ll give you a transmitter. As soon as you’re free, you can signal the Blackout and we’ll come back to pick you up.”
The Urvals exchanged glances, but they didn’t reply. Even Jackson heard how flimsy that plan sounded. The Urvals would do anything to avoid even the pretense of becoming slaves again.
In the best possible scenario, the Barbarians wouldn’t realize the ruse. They would treat the Urvals as slaves for as long as the pretense lasted—which, when Jackson thought about it, was just as bad.
“We won’t do it,” Quort snarled. “We’ll find another way to get the fuel we need.”
“I’m all ears,” Jackson replied. “The only other option is trading our weapons, and I don’t want to weaken our position any more than we already have.”
The Urvals exchanged glances. No one said anything until footsteps approached from down the corridor. The door slammed open, and Roy Rawles barged in. “Lana says to send the Urvals out. The Barbarians agree to trade.”
“It’s only for a little while,” Jackson murmured to Quort. “If this works, the Barbarians could become our allies. They could help us against the Krakzid, and we need all the friends we can get.”
