Critical Strike (The Critical Series Book 3) (14 page)

“I think you’re right.”

Layla stood up, leaned her back against the wall and dragged her heel against the slab, producing exactly the same kind of mark.

The image grew in Denver’s mind of his dad being grabbed and dragged backwards into the room.

But how? Charlie was strong for a human anyway, let alone a strong human in an power-assisted suit. He just didn’t believe his dad could be so easily overwhelmed like that.

With his head bowed and eyes focused on the small details of the drag marks, Denver followed them like his beloved dog, Pip, and entered the room. The place was empty. “They’ve taken the food and water supplies,” he said as Layla swept around the room.

She came to a stop at the east wall and looked back at him. The small glowing lights within the suit’s helmet lit up her face, showing her forehead wrinkled. “There’s a door open here,” she said. “There’s no way we would have seen it before; it looks just like part of the wall.”

Denver stepped over and investigated. She was right. He pushed the door open further, revealing a short tunnel a few meters long. At the end, the burning sunset cast a sheet of golden blood into an exit.

On the dirt ground in this narrow tunnel, the drag marks were clear, and they weren’t just Charlie’s. Denver suspected they were Vingo’s, the feet marks too small for a croatoan. Hatred bubbled up inside him as he sprinted down the tunnel and out of the exit, coming out to the rear of the temple.

“It was that damned priest,” Denver growled. “I should have known! How could we have trusted that… thing? When I get my hands on that…”

“Here,” Layla said, stepping ahead of him and crouching to the dirt ground, her visor reflecting the dying sun’s last, weak rays. “Scorch marks. Probably some kind of track from a hover-bike or something similar.”

In the distance, Denver heard the calls of clusps and the howls of some other creature. It wouldn’t be safe for them without Vingo’s guidance, but they had little choice. “We follow,” he said, scanning the suit’s HUD to check the measurements. His filter measurement had reduced to almost half. But that meant he still had time to find Charlie.

“Can I grab one of your spare magazines,” Denver asked, realizing he was out.

Layla unclipped a spare from her suit and passed it to him. He clipped it in and chambered a round.

Denver drew his rifle to the front, fitting the last of his magazines and stalked forward into the deepening darkness, finger on the trigger, night vision assisting him while he tracked the scorched marks that burned a black scar through the monochrome landscape.

“I’ve got your back,” Layla said, following a few steps behind and covering his flanks and rear. “Have faith, Den; we’ll find him.”

Denver grunted his appreciation and stepped over a section of rubble.

The scratches and yowls of clusps and other creatures moving about in the dark increased, giving the planet a truly weird and unfamiliar soundscape.

“We really are no longer in Kansas,” Layla whispered.

“Kansas?” Denver asked.

“Just an old thing from an old film.”

“Did it end well, this film?”

“Yeah, they just clicked their heels together and managed to get home.”

“That would be useful.”

“You’d need red slippers.”

“Power suit boots no good, then?” Denver said dryly as he started to ascend a small mound of rock.

“Maybe eventually,” Layla said with a lack of enthusiasm or hope.

Dull brown grass and spiky shrubs covered the stone in thick bunches, the edges of which showed the scorch marks, but they were beginning to be more and more difficult to find. Still, since they had followed the tracks, Denver had realized they were heading in a single direction with little deviation.

Without any tracks, as long as they remained on the same trajectory, he hoped they would find something, some clue to his dad’s whereabouts.

The planet was in complete darkness a Tredeyan unit later, which Denver had worked out to be about an hour and a half of Earth time. Dense smoke and cloud obscured any starlight.

“We should camp here until we have more light,” Denver said. “I’d rather fight in daylight.”

“Agreed,” Layla said.

They climbed up a steep section of rock until they were sitting atop a small hill, overlooking the surrounding barren lands to their left and a dense wooded section to their right, the features of both now dark shadows on a black background.

Below them, Denver noticed movement—low, deliberate stealthy movement—then the hiss of a clusp. He brought his rifle to his shoulder and sighted through the scope, activating the green night-vision filter.

Words caught in his throat as something the shape and size of a manta ray slid out from a shadow and wrapped its leathery form around a mid-sized clusp. The creature’s membranes enveloped the cusp completely, dampening its cries. Within seconds the clusp was still and the black creature undulated. My god, Denver thought, the thing was… absorbing its prey.

Whispering, although his external speaker wasn’t even on, he said, “We do not move and do not sleep until the sun comes up. We sit back-to-back, rifles ready. You understand?”

“I hear you,” Layla said, the back of her suit already pressed against his. “What did you see?”

“You don’t want to know.”

So they sat there, together, two humans on a distant planet while its wildlife devoured itself beneath them, a war in the sky and on the land, and a fight for survival for all concerned—just another day in Denver Jackson’s cursed life.

***

For three Tredeyan units, equal to four and half Earth hours, Denver and Layla had rotated a schedule of thirty minutes rest and thirty minutes lookout via their night-vision scopes.

Denver took over from Layla and let her snooze. He scanned the landscape with his scope, looking out for any potential threat. Although they were elevated, and thus potentially exposed, most of the creatures on the planet seemed to stay on the ground, or under the land.

He’d seen only a couple of birdlike animals, their forms silhouetted against the flashes of war in the sky. That had only increased in activity, although thankfully further out so it sounded like distant thunder with the lightning flashes of destruction coming seconds before.

At one point he thought he had seen a small group of three bipedal creatures clambering over a distant formation of rocks and down to the shore of a lake, but as they approached the water, they didn’t stop but kept going until they were no longer visible. There was something peaceful and graceful about them, Denver thought, which made a nice change from what he had seen earlier with that black… thing devouring the clusp.

As he was thinking how oddly peaceful it was up on these rocks with Layla beside him and the stars clear between thin clouds—the dust of war—movement on the horizon caught his attention.

He zoomed the scope in and brightened the night vision until he saw a light glowing and becoming larger.

Was there noise too?

He turned up the volume on his external mics. Yes, it was the sound of a hover engine, and identical to the ones he had heard in the command center when the tredeyan forces were preparing for battle.

Tracking the movement for a full minute or more, the object had sharpened until he could clearly see that it was a catamaran and contained a single driver: the croatoan priest.

“Layla, we’ve got company,” he whispered over his intercom so as not to startle her.

“Eh?” she said, her voice drowsy and confused.

“The priest, she’s coming this way on one of their catamarans.”

Layla was fully alert then, sitting up from her slouched position and kneeling next to Denver. They both leaned up against a rock in front of them, where Denver had his elbows rested to support the rifle.

Layla brought hers around from her back and looked through the scope. “That’s definitely her,” she said. “I’d recognize that ugly face anywhere; even among croatoans, she’s an especially foul-looking specimen.”

Denver smirked and continued to watch the priest draw nearer in the dark. The movement scattered animals across the rocky and dusty surface. Larger forms that Denver couldn’t make out burrowed quickly beneath the ground.

The way the engine impacted the surface beneath told Denver it was more than likely the source of the tracks they were following: a single anti-g field was difficult to confuse with any other kind of track.

When the craft was less than a hundred meters away, Denver saw a number of straps flapping wildly on the netting between the catamaran’s hull sections. Attached to one of the straps was a small pouch that Denver recognized as belonging to Vingo.

“It was her,” Denver growled. “The beast took Dad and Vingo.”

Layla was mid-question when Denver’s finger pulled the trigger.

Denver fired once, sending a slug into the low windshield of the vehicle.

The priest jerked the controls and slid the catamaran to a stop. She looked up and around, presumably thinking she got shot from a scion ship in the air, but the battle had moved away.

“I’m going down. Cover me,” Denver said, vaulting over the rock in front of him and sliding down the slope of the mount until his feet struck the ground. He detected movement off to his right side from behind a copse of spiny gray bushes but ignored it and sprinted toward the catamaran.

Two gunshots fired out from behind him, then another two. He didn’t look around, knowing Layla was on the case, taking down whatever thought it had a chance of a snack.

“You’re clear,” Layla said. “I’m right behind you.”

The power-assisted suit helped Denver close the distance quickly. Within seconds he was jumping toward the catamaran, the rifle held out in front of him. As he sailed over the priest, he fired once, catching her in the gnarled shoulder. She cried out and collapsed with a twist into the front cockpit.

Denver landed on the rear bench seat with a heavy thump, but the suit cushioned the impact. He spun round and saw Layla closing in, her rifled trained on the priest as she sat up and mewled something unpleasant in her native language. Denver picked up his rifle and brought it over the priest’s head until the barrel was under her chin. He pulled back, choking her, pinning her in place.

Layla leaned in and angrily spoke in pidgin croatoan. Denver barely recognized the words, but the priest sure did; she spat at Layla and thrashed beneath Denver’s hold, but he just held firm and squeezed tighter until she could no longer talk.

“What did you say?” Denver asked.

“I told her we’re going to kill her if she doesn’t tell us what happened to Charlie. She told us to die in a particular way of her kind.”

“Shoot her in the leg and ask her again,” Denver said.

Without hesitation, Layla leaned the rifle over the low, now-broken windshield and fired once into the croatoan’s thick leg. The thing yowled and tried to grab Denver’s face with its stubby arms, but she couldn’t reach far enough back.

“Ask her again,” Denver said.

Layla did and got the same reaction as before.

Denver swore. This was wasting too much time. He was thinking about what to do when a stealthy shape slithered from the darkness behind Layla. He let go of the rifle around the priest’s throat, brought it up to his chest and fired a three-round burst as he screamed, “Layla, behind you!”

The priest took her chance and vaulted over the windshield, but the wounds to her shoulder and leg stopped her from clearing it. She clattered into Layla, knocking her to one side, and they both hit the dirt.

In a split second, the black membrane form, the same as the one he had seen before, enveloped the priest, muffling her screams.

Layla gasped as she scrambled away from it, kicking up dust and stones. Denver fired again into the writhing mass; the flash from the barrel lit it up, showing the shape of the priest stretching against the unnatural form.

Layla rose to her knees and they both fired into the mess, emptying their respective magazines. When the smoke settled, the form no longer moved.

Leaping off the catamaran, Denver pulled the blade from the socket on the side of the suit and buried it into the hide of the hideous black creature. Up close, it didn’t resemble a manta ray as much as he first thought.

The initial shape was all the two creatures had in common. This one had thousands of razor-like teeth, black and shadowy like its body. It flopped over, dead, its corpse cut into shreds by the rifle fire.

So too was the croatoan priest, and with her still form the chance for Denver to get the truth about his dad’s whereabouts bled out onto the alien planet’s dusty ground. Denver collapsed to his knees and roared as he pummeled his fist into the croatoan’s corpse.

***

Denver had barely spoken a word during the entire journey. Layla had figured out the basic controls of the catamaran, having recognized that it was actually croatoan technology and not tredeyan, and therefore somewhat similar to the craft they had brought to Earth. For another hour they had journeyed in the opposite direction to that of the priest, using the night-vision scopes on their rifles to stay on track.

It was undeniable that the catamaran was indeed the vehicle that created the marks on the ground that led away from the temple. Layla had also confirmed Denver’s suspicion—that the pouch was one that had belonged to Vingo.

And so they drove into the night, beneath the skies where even now the scion and tredeyan-croatoan craft fought in a ceaseless battle. The constant rumbles of gunfire and missile blasts had dulled to a permanent roar in Denver’s ears, even with the sound dampening of the suit’s microphones.

At least the vehicle kept any other creatures at bay as they travelled across the rocky, barren ground. Occasionally they would navigate through small wooded areas of sparse, spindly trees with triangular leaves. Despite looking out for them, Denver never did catch sight of those other strange bipeds he saw going into the lake.

The ride became bumpy, jarring Denver in his seat. He leaned across to Layla to ask if everything was okay when suddenly the ground disappeared, the front end of the catamaran nose-dived, hurtling them down a steep slope into darkness.