Siege of Terra (The Mavrik Woods Series, Book 1) (5 page)

“You know what we are?” He manages to say, reaching into his utility pouch on his waist slowly so he won’t draw any attention.

“We know a lot about you, we have…ssourcess.”

His hand feels a cold object in his pouch; Lorid slowly extracts it out, being careful not to draw attention to his hand.

“Take hiss weaponss,”
 t
he front alien hisses out.

Lorid begins to laugh uncontrollably. Nothing in this situation is a laughing matter. Even though the pain of laughing makes him want to stop he didn’t no matter what. He needed to show them that he’s not afraid.

“Humour won’t ssave you now human.”

“I know, and neither will it save you,” he says. With his last breath he activates the grenade in his hand. He feels the world shift around him, his last sight on this world is of the aliens in front of him scrambling in horror. White light, more pain and then nothing. He is free.

****

An explosion shakes the ground beneath my feet; it marked the passing of a man I’ve known for over a year.

The dust from the cracks in the wall shift as the entire foundation shakes. It almost looks like it was snowing. I’ve never seen real snow before, only in the Holo videos, it’s said to be a beautiful experience though.

I look behind me to see T-Rave and Terein bow their heads in respect; I do the same, taking a moment to honour the dead.

“He must have had good reason to do what he did, he gave us a chance.”

“I don’t meant to sound disrespectful but we should keep moving. We need to get to the main power generation room to see what these things are up to. The security office is directly across the hall from the power room. Once we get there we should try to locate the rest of these aliens and eliminate them,” I say.

“Yes Sir, it should be easy to find both, the power room is directly below us. It was built underground so in the off chance we started a war with someone it would be under kilometer of soil. Although, everybody thought that if we ever went to war it would be with the people of this planet, not some uninvited aliens.”

“Alright, sounds like a plan; let’s find a lift to take us down.”

I lead on through the empty hallways, the farther we go into the building the cleaner it gets. There’s less rubble, but by the looks of it there was a flash fire that had turned the walls and ceiling black. I guess the bomb was detonated prematurely. Or it did exactly as it was supposed to; make entry into the building harder. They must have screwed up that plan though, it was simple to get inside, unless we’re now walking into a well laid ambush, in that case the plan would have been executed perfectly.

“Over here,” T-Rave calls out, his helmet lights shining at a charred door.

“Captain, you do know that those lifts will never work right? The power has been pretty much cut off to all nonessential systems.”

A pause.

“Uh…yeah, I know that, there’s a staircase well directly beside the lift doors. I thought it might come in handy.”

“Uh huh, I’m sure that’s what you thought,” I say.

“Yeah, yeah, I made a mistake.”

I walk over to the door, turn the knob and pull it open; it emanates a sharp whine, as if someone had never oiled the hinges.

“Ah, got to love good old fashion doors,” Terein says.

“Well, in case of power loss emergency doors and similar areas have to be the most basic operating procedure. If these were operated by magnets and there was a fire in here all the people would burn alive, unable to escape.”

“Wouldn’t there be fail safes built into the doors to allow people to get through?”

“You would think, but if someone were trying to get inside then all they would have to do is recreate fire, just enough so the sensors would pick it up.”

“Stop the chatter, we gotta stay focused,” I say, already down almost a whole flight of stairs.

“Right, sorry Colonel.”

We reach the bottom after several minutes; walking down kilometers worth of stairs takes longer than people thought, especially with full military gear.

“How far ‘til we get to the security room?” I ask.

“I thought we were going to the power room?” T-Rave asks.

“We need to see what they are up to. We know the power room is what interests them, otherwise they wouldn’t have chosen this building. We also need to figure out how many there are and where they are.”

“Right, ok, let me think, the schematics for this building said the Security room was fifty meters from the stairwell. And to get there we have to go down this hallway and take the first left, then after that the second door on the right there should be the Security room,” Terein says.

“When did you do all this?” I ask.

“I did it when you were taking your time to get to the briefing room,” he shoots back.

I ignore the remark; even though it was bad to mouth off to a superior officer I let it slide, this time.

We rush through the hallways, now armed with a plan.

“Ok, this should be it, slow down; we don’t want to make too much noise.”

My hand reaches for the security pad on the side of the wall; it was dead. Although it would have been useless, seeing as the door was already open a crack, it might have been just enough to slide my blade through to pry it open.

I reach down to my left hip and grab my secondary blade, it tended to make less noise when drawn compared to the loud
choonk
from my hidden blade.

I slide the blade between the door and the wall, slowly but surely prying it open, millimetre by millimetre the door begins to open.

“Turn your lights off,” I say, I kill my helmet light,“help me out here Captain; let's get this thing open, Sargent you might want to get that rifle ready, we don’t know what’s in there.”

“Yes Sir,” Terein says; aiming is rifle at the closed door, his finger twitching in anticipation.

T-Rave and I wedge our fingers in between the wall, slowly prying it open.

“Humanss.”
A disembodied voice comes from inside.

“Come on, come on,” Terein says, holding his rifle towards the noise.

“You are doomed humanss.”

“Like hell we are,” Terein says, turning on his Helmet light, flooding the room with light and blinding the alien.

A shot fired directly into the head of the alien, it almost sounded like thunder as it broke all silence in the hallway, not that there was any noise in the first place.

“Awe, now why did you go and do that for?” T-Rave says, “we could have used him to gather some information.”

“He spooked me, so I reacted.”

“What do you mean reacted? What if your kid snuck up behind you and spooked you?”

“Guys, knock it off, we need to stay focused, and I’m sure there are plenty more where they came from.”

I walk past the corpse; its head still smoking.

“Ok, this is good; we still have power to these main systems. Captain, I need you to start searching for the power room camera feed. Sargent, use that trigger-happy finger in case anyone comes looking for their pal here,” I say, gesturing at the smoking body.

“Yes Sir,” they say in unison

I walk over to the corpse, searching for anything useful; I notice an emblem on the shoulder pads of the tunic the alien is wearing.

“This one has an emblem on his shoulder, so did the other one, but they aren’t the same. Maybe one was a higher rank, or designation.”

“Maybe, hey come here. I think I found something,” T-Rave says.

I stare at the console screen that he pulls up, “is that the power room?” I ask.

“Pretty sure, the back portion of the screen is where the generators are, that’s the power room all right; I’m more concerned about the dozen or so aliens in the room,” T-Rave says.

I sigh heavily, “alright, we need new orders, we can’t go in there without having some authorization on what to do.”

“Wait, they’re speaking.”

I listen intently for any noise whatsoever to come out of the receiver.

It’s mostly just hissing and clicking; of course they wouldn’t be able to speak our language.

“The dead one spoke our language though, that makes no sense, where did he learn those words?”

“Look,” T-Rave says, pointing at a group of figures on the screen.

“Ah shit, that’s going to make our job a lot harder.”

“Yeah, there were not supposed to be any civilians here, I thought you scanned and it showed up as negative?”

“I did scan; they must have brought them here after we scanned the place. Plus we’re almost two kilometers down.”

“What do we do then?”

“We contact the General; see what he thinks on the matter.”

“Alright, I’ll set up a link to HQ.”

Having civilians come into the equation just made my job a lot harder, we were originally supposed to breach the building, gather Intel and then bug out. With civilians added to that list it made it a lot harder to get out without engaging the enemy. Which at this point the rest of my team and I know that that wouldn’t be an option anymore.

“Colonel, the General is on frequency three point seven. He’s reminding us that civilian rescue is not our primary mission, we are still to gather as much Intel as possible on the hostile forces,” T-Rave says.

“Let me talk to this prick,” leaving men behind was not in my vocabulary. Major Lorid was the one exception, I didn’t want to leave him to die; he wanted it to happen though. He knew that he wouldn’t have made it out alive either way.

“General, I take it the captain has informed you of the entire situation?”

“Yes Colonel, your orders remain the same, get Intel on those enemy soldiers and find out why they are here. Do not compromise the mission to save civilians.”

“But Sir, we can’t leave them behind.”

“Orders are orders soldier, I will not allow insubordination. Now, get back out there and get me some hard Intel we can use, understood?”

“Yes Sir.” I say.

“General Anders out.”

There is only one way to vent anger and frustration; a shower of sparks light up the room as my fist collides in the middle of the screen. The security room used physical monitors instead of Holo technology.

“Sir, we need to keep moving, we need to gather that Intel,” Terein says.

“Right, let's move out,” I say, turning around and walking back through the door into the hallway.

“You said that the power room entrance was right across the hall from the security room right?” I ask Terein.

“Correct, it should be that door over there,” he says, pointing to a door at the far end of the hall, technically across from the security room.

We slow down the closer we get to the door; we wouldn’t want to alert our position to the aliens.

“Damn, this door is different than the security door.”

“How so?” T-Rave asks.

“The power is not dead on this one,” he says simply.

“Can you slice into it?” I ask.

 Terein is already one step ahead of me though. He’s already taking the security pad off the wall and cutting some of the electrical wires that disappeared into the wall behind it.

“I’m surprised that a building like this is still using wires,” T-Rave says.

“Older technology always seems to work better than the new stuff, I guess that’s why they have screens in the security room and these wires; I guess they are easier to maintain and control.”

“There we go Colonel, the door is working,” Terein says, the door making a faint
whirring
as it opens.

“Nice job Sargent. Ok, let's get moving. In and out as fast as we can, I don’t want to be down here any longer than I have to.”

Past the door is just another dark hallway, a cold shiver runs down my spine, it almost feels like we’re walking to our doom.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

“Yeah, me too.”

Day 7: Cycle 1: Period 2: Year 2397

The rest of my team and I continue to go deeper into the power room. Walking down corridors where lights were flickering. Good thing we have night vision, it enabled darkness to have a less creepy feel to it.

“Sir, what are we going to do once we get there?”

“Well Captain, we are going to find a nice place to camp out and do a little recon, and then we are going to find a way to free those civilians.”

“I thought the General said to leave them behind?” He asks.

“I’m not leaving them to die by the hands of these things, it's not their fault that they’re here, so why should we make them suffer for something that they didn’t do?”

“Good point, but the consequences will be big.”

“I know that Captain, there is little use in reminding me of my actions.”