B00bkll1xi ebok, p.19
B00BKLL1XI EBOK, page 19
Nelson’s seat was deep, wide and angled upwards. It cushioned his body, reducing stress at high speeds and during maneuvers which sent the ship into spiraling spins and death defying nosedives. With a practiced, steady hand, he aligned the ship for another flyby and just as he entered his next loop, a holographic display with Steve flashed into existence over his knees.
“Nelson, the spawns are neutralized,” he announced.
“Good,” smiled Nelson with a sigh of relief. “I guess I can take a little time to find the probe.”
“Um... not exactly.”
“Something wrong?”
“Well Nelson... I’m picking up a signal of a probe trying to hack into the destroyer’s system. It’s coming from about... here plus or minus a thousand miles.”
Steve called up a three dimensional diagram of the signal’s point relative to the Earth and Nelson’s position.
“Steve, I checked that area, it looks all clear,” said Nelson.
“The destroyers have more powerful sensors then you do. Trust me, the probe is there.”
“Can you stop the hack?”
“No idea. The computer is trying, but the probe is using our own command codes, not just trying to break in through decryption.”
“How does it know our command codes?”
“No idea. Please hurry. I can’t command the ship to go after this thing already. Next, I’ll lose weapons systems.”
“What’s the worst case scenario here?”
“The virus over-revs the reactors and sends me barreling into the city below. The ship would basically become an IGF.”
“Shit!” growled Nelson as he started re-setting the course for his bomber. “See this is why the fighters and bombers work on a totally different network then the SBDs. Hold on Steve, I’ll find it.”
He turned off the holographic display and shot towards a much higher orbit, arming his missiles and lasers. His naval training as a human would pay off in just a few minutes.
In the burnt and ravaged street of the Earth’s capital, an alien readied itself to plunge its blades deep into Ace’s chest. The blades were sent at the cyborg with great skill and excellent timing, but the alien felt the blades sink deep into the ground as Ace warped out of focus just a few milliseconds before the blades hit.
The Nation’s robots fired their most potent guns at the alien, but most of their fire missed as the creature deftly dodged lasers and red, churning energy pulses. Only a few lasers and bursts managed to hit it, but the impressive energy they unleashed wasn’t enough to pierce its strong, blue shields.
With a rattle of blades, the alien warped out of view, leaving the robots and Ace looking around in confusion. On the rooftop, Dot and Christine tried to find it to no avail. It was as if the alien vaporized in a flash, never to be seen again.
“Where the hell did it go?” asked Dot.
“I don’t know...” replied Christine with a bewildered frown.
“Just look above,” laughed the alien as it warped back into view right above them, unleashing three blades one after the other.
Each blade was deflected by Dot’s massive sword. Even with an injured leg, she was still fast enough to block every strike and cover Christine from a rogue attack.
“Cheap shot,” she chuckled, straining to hold her sword against the pressure exerted by the alien.
“Oh I can try again,” purred the alien reeling in its blades.
Summoning all its might, the alien shot its blades at full power, a maneuver designed to shatter anything in its way. But instead of the cracking sound of a shattering sword, all it heard was a loud clank. It didn’t feel its blades go through anything either. Just the coldness of another blade.
Dot blocked the alien’s attack, covering her and Christine’s head with her wide sword. Ordinarily, her blade should’ve been broken in three places but Ace slipped his katana under Dot’s sword, absorbing the devastating shock of the triple strike.
“Hey jackass,” growled Ace. “Leave the ladies alone. What’s the matter with you? Nobody ever teach you any manners?”
Sliding his katana from under Dot’s sword, he unleashed an energy wave that nearly sliced the alien in half. As the alien fell back, he grabbed Dot and Christine and quickly descended to the ground.
“I’ll help you handle this guy,” said Dot rising to her feet.
“No way!” protested Ace. “Your leg is still healing. You and Christine need to get somewhere safer.”
“But the robots...” started Christine looking at the machines which mysteriously shut off when the alien attacked her and Dot.
“Move!” barked Ace. “That’s an order.”
With a grimace on her face, Dot grabbed Christine and headed to a nearby high rise where a small team of armed cyborgs surrounded them. Moments later, each of the five dark blades the alien possessed sank into the asphalt, less than a fraction of an inch away from Ace who barely avoided them. Gliding down to the street with an eerie hiss, the creature reeled in its blades, aiming them for Ace yet again.
“Fine,” it spat. “You have my undivided attention. I’ll deal with the females later.”
A strike of its blades immediately followed its words. Again and again, the alien fired its sharp spikes, slicing so close to Ace, it could feel his body heat. Ace managed to dodge every attack, jumping and leaning every which way he could as the alien attacked with ever-increasing ferocity.
After the last shot of its fifth blade, the alien felt that something was very wrong. With a swift strike of his sword, Ace hammered the creature’s blades deep into the asphalt. The chains holding the blades to the alien’s body were tangled in a spiraled mess.
“What the hell...” it muttered. “What did you do?”
“Me?” asked Ace with an innocent expression. “I didn’t do anything to your blades. You were just shooting them like a maniac and see what happened?”
The alien struggled to move its blades out of the ground, rattling the chains and growling under its breath.
“You tangled up my claws!” it roared.
“I was going to be modest about it,” shrugged Ace as he assumed a fight stance with his sword. “Now, the more you struggle, the more it’s gonna hurt.”
The alien erupted into its natural form, unfolding its huge, torn, rusty wings, shooting out the extendable trunk with its mouth while it yanked on the chains of the blades attached to its legs. Each blade was in effect, a modified talon connected with a chain that ran deep into its appendages.
Jumping off the top of the stuck and tangled claws, Ace warped out of focus and reappeared right above the alien monster. Surging at full power, he unleashed a devastating shockwave that tore the alien apart, rocking the ground beneath him once again. He sunk his sword deep into the creature’s brain stem, preventing the modified monster from gathering itself back together.
The tangled blades were shot in all directions, embedding further down the street and into the walls of high rises. All that remained of the alien monster was a mutilated, burnt cadaver with pieces strewn across the width of the street. Ace’s sword was stuck under the three antennae that supported the alien’s eyes, behind the fanged mouth on its extendable trunk.
Ace examined the remains with his claws armed just in case, even though the creature was obviously dead. Dot warped into focus behind him. Her leg was already much better and she was almost fit to fight again.
“I was trying to get the robots working,” she said, “but there’s a problem...”
“That’s all right,” replied Ace. “He went down pretty easy.”
“Getting tired?”
“A little bit. Where’s Christine?”
“She’s in a building, working on getting the robots back up and running. She says there’s something wrong with the signal. Some kind of issue in connecting to the SBDs.”
Nelson’s bomber approached an area less than a thousand miles from the surface of the Moon’s dark side, propelled by a small warp bubble generated by the destroyer. Just as he approached the place where Steve detected a possible disturbance, Nelson opened fire with his missiles and lasers. The beams of energy and powerful missiles slammed into the surface of the Moon or shot out into space. Slowly but surely, he worked his way to the center of the inky blackness.
Halfway into his spiraling approach, the missiles found the mark as they struck an alien craft protected by red shields. As its shields lit up, the alien ship lost its cloak. It was a menacing, jet black, shapeless blob wrapped in countless random, chrome spikes. Whatever was piloting this craft shot back at Nelson with a menacing death beam generated between several spikes angled towards the bomber.
Nelson easily dodged the red laser and fired back with just about every weapon in his arsenal. Lasers, missiles and even several hyper-charged electromagnetic pulses stressed the alien blob’s shields, but the shields held as the blob quickly returned fire at the bomber spiraling around it with incredible speed. After a few minutes of non-stop fire, the blob’s shields finally began showing signs of weakness.
“I got you now...” seethed Nelson as the crosshairs on his heads up display locked onto the enemy ship.
The bomber fired the last of its missiles into the spiky blob. Each missile calculated the optimal trajectory for a devastating impact and sent its planned maneuver to it counterparts. With pinpoint precision, the missiles arranged themselves into a cloud which wrapped around the enemy ship and struck at the same exact millisecond, turning the alien blob into black and chrome shrapnel and generating a powerful shockwave which distorted space and time as the alien craft’s black hole engines were torn apart by the blast.
As the explosion settled, Nelson brought up a holographic screen which showed Steve anxiously typing on a computer terminal.
“Steve, the alien probe is done for,” he said. “But we’re probably not out of the woods yet.”
“Tell me about it,” cried Steve. “I lost all weapons systems.”
“That’s not what I meant. While I was fighting with the probe, it didn’t give ground or try to escape. It shot back without changing its angle as if it was in the middle of something. I think there’s another little surprise from the Dark Gods.”
“I need six minutes here to format and reinstall the weapons system and then I could get new sensor data.”
“Let me know as soon as you’re back online.”
“Roger that,” nodded Steve and ended the call.
Nelson caught up with the still stable warp bubble. His sixth sense was seldom wrong and he could feel the familiar chill running down his spine. Something big was either happening on planet’s surface or it was going to happen very soon.
On the broken and battered street, Ace stood over the charred corpse of the alien monster as other cyborgs swept every building nearby for more spawns in hiding. At his side, Dot inspected the weird creature. In her travels she never saw anything quite like it.
“Is that what the Rexx spawn looked like under his cloak?” she asked.
“Yeah, pretty much,” nodded Ace. “He was a little fatter and a little darker in color, but yeah, pretty much the same.”
He yanked his blade out of the cadaver, spraying himself with an orange goop that stuck to his carbon skin and crystalline hair.
“What the hell is that?” wondered Dot.
“Looks like brains,” grimaced Ace. “Oh and this shit is all over my uniform too. Great, now what’s left of my armor is a biohazard. Ah well...”
He tore off his shredded, stained armor plates and wiped them off near the cadaver after running them through his crystalloid hair.
“Note to self,” he scoffed. “Alien guts suck as hair gel.”
The numerous scratches all across his torso were almost healed. Despite the power of the spawns’ massive, shearing claws, the marks they left on Ace’s body were now no thicker than a hair. Inspecting his armor he decided it was clean enough and put it back on.
Suddenly, the ground began to rumble ominously. A shockwave rippled across the mangled asphalt. Ace froze, his sword pointed at a spot just a few hundred feet away. His sensitive ears detected exactly where the sound originated.
“You have got to be fucking with me...” he hissed.
With a roar, something horrifying tore through the asphalt and shot straight up into the night sky. A giant monster the size of a high rise building now dominated the battered street. Made of jagged rock joined by what looked like fluid spirals of magma, it stood on four legs, its six eyes planted in a domed head emanating smoke and fire. As it armed its immense claws, each as big as a ballistic missile and made from translucent, jet black material, its two massive arms scraped across the buildings lining the street.
“Fucking son of a...” cried Ace, knowing full well that there was no way he could even dent this brute.
“Ace?” started Dot tugging at his sash. “Is there a plan?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Care to share?”
“Yes. I’m going to run as fast as I can and you do the same, heading the other way, yelling at everyone else to do the same.”
The monster spotted them and sank its claws deep into the black asphalt, scraping the walls of a nearby high rise. It missed as Dot and Ace warped out in opposite directions, forcing the monster to choose who it would follow. The creature didn’t even think about its options and immediately went after Ace, trying to smash him. Slamming the ground with an open palm, it generated a blast wave that sent the cyborg’s 180 pound body flying like a leaf in a hurricane.
Ace landed hard, smashing his head into the carbon tungsten bar protecting the third floor of a high rise and falling flat on his back. It was a very painful landing. Every joint and muscle in his body sent a warning to his brain as the deafening ringing in his ears tried to subside. Another flight like that and his back would snap in two. He pushed off the wall and clumsily warped out as the monster tried to sink its claw into him.
With a series of swift and practiced moves, he climbed to the top of a ten story office tower. The monster’s head began just above the ledge of the building. It had no neck, but it easily swiveled its head like the turret of a tank. Its burning eyes locked with Ace’s piercing red gaze. Bursts of fire from the cyborgs below didn’t even phase it.
“Oh, I am so fucked...” Ace sighed.
The giant monster’s forehead lit up with two familiar symbols, a pair of red Shadow runes that ignited for just a few seconds. Mai was watching through the eyes of this hulking brute and she wanted him to know who turned this night on Earth into a bloody mess. And now her seal flashed across the forehead of an alien spawn who was just seconds away from crushing Ace.
Aiming for just a moment, the giant monster plowed its immense claws deep into the wall of the high rise, shattering the support rails and concrete walls. The building folded in and collapsed under the overwhelming stress, sending a wave of dark gray dust into the street below.
[ chapter _ 023 ]
The high rise collapsed in slow motion, its long fall obscured by the cloud of dark gray dust that started as a wave. It splashed into what was left of the street next to it and rose as a dark pillar that shrouded the monster in smoke. Over the roar of the many of tons of concrete falling to the ground, few heard the sonic boom of a bomber coming in from space like a falling star and scooping up a cyborg trapped on the roof of the high rise.
Ace sank his claws into the bomber and hung on for dear life as the craft shot straight up at like a bullet, parting the air above with ease. Inside the bomber, Nelson evened out the machine’s flight path and started circling around the monster a few miles in the air.
His intercom came alive with Ace’s voice.
“Oh thank you, thank you, thank you!” he chanted. “You saved my ass back there.”
“You all right?” asked Nelson carefully watching the irate monstrosity.
“I thought I was going to slice right through down to the engine and fall for a second there, but I’m ok.”
“What the hell is that thing?”
“No fucking clue. Never seen one of those before. We’ll need an assist from the destroyer.”
“Yeah... Well... The probe infected the destroyer with a virus so we can’t get it to fire.”
“Nelson, you’re killing me!”
“No. That thing was killing you a second ago.”
Ace growled in frustration, eyeing the giant monster and sinking the razor sharp claws of one hand deeper into the bomber’s hull as his other hand gripped the sword he sank into the bomber almost to its hand guard. The giant raised its huge arm and spread its claws. In the middle of its palm a glowing, pulsating red-orange circle started getting brighter and brighter as it took aim at the bomber.
Watching the giant on his heads up display Nelson tried to think what he could do. The bomber might handle one hit from something like that cannon in the monster’s arm. Two and it would shatter and this monster was taking its sweet time, aiming like a sniper. Leaving the atmosphere now would leave Dot and Christine defenseless and Ace wouldn’t be able to hold on to the bomber at hypersonic speeds for more than a fraction of a second. In fact, if he went any faster than a few hundred miles an hour, Ace would be permanently parted from the flyer, leaving only a mess of blood and metal on the street below.
“Um Ace...” he said. “I can’t stress enough how much we need a little trick from your alien training right about now.”
“I think I have an idea,” came the reply. “But you’re gonna have to give that thing a good, clear shot at us.”
Nelson shook his head. At least they had some kind of a plan. He set course directly for the giant monster’s head. The giant’s glowing palm ignited with a hellish fire that seemed to consume its entire arm in orange-red plasma. It fired a terrifying pulse at the bomber with a primal roar. The recoil from the shot rocked the monster, its torso wobbling on its sturdy tripod leg arrangement.
