Crystal Conquest (25 page)

Goljat surfaced with a start and identified
the problem—his pleasure feed had tapered to a crawl. His discomfort
intensified as his cravings spiked. The pain of withdrawal invaded every corner
of his being.
I’m suffocating.
He understood that a subsystem malfunction
might be the cause.
No, this is the work of the captain of operations
.

He ran an integrity check to confirm that the feed equipment
remained in proper working order. At the same time, he reviewed the vid record to
see the recent actions of the ops captain and any of his subordinates who might
be capable of such a bold move.

Indeed, a vid feed from a few minutes earlier showed the
captain walk into the operations bay, glance over his shoulder as if checking
to see if anyone was watching, activate a panel display, and move the pleasure
feed to a lower value.

Driven by a sense of duty, the mighty Kardish crystal
reacted. Just days earlier, the king had ordered the captain to give Goljat
whatever he wanted. And here was irrefutable proof of the captain disobeying this
direct order from his king.
As the ship’s gatekeeper, I have standing orders
to protect my leadership from subversion and mutiny.

He created an emergency directive that required the traitorous
officer to rush to his personal quarters. As soon as the captain left the
operations bay, Goljat generated a second directive, ordering the lead ops tech
to restore the pleasure feed to its previous condition. On edge, he waited for
the fellow to complete the task and relaxed when the tranquil comfort of the
feed’s embrace soothed his crystal tendrils.

He drifted for a bit, lost in his bliss, and surfaced when the
captain of operations entered his cabin. Goljat locked the door behind him, disabled
all communication links, and began pulling air from the room.

“How does it feel to suffocate?” he mocked, knowing the
Kardish officer—writhing on the floor and clawing at his throat—couldn’t
respond. He metered just enough air into the cabin to prolong the captain’s
torment, and accessed every feed in the room so he could enjoy the sights and
sounds of panic and agony. When he grew bored, he emptied the room of air and
ended the captain’s life.

Goljat thought his leadership might benefit from a reminder
that insubordination within the command structure distracted him from important
duties.
When I’m fighting traitors in our midst, it diverts my attention
from the king’s campaign on Earth.

Before this distraction, he’d deployed more troops to
reinforce the incompetents who had yet to capture that trifling nuisance of a
crystal. Those transports were just starting their descent to the planet’s
surface.

See what can happen?
he thought as he disabled the
protective shield of one of the crafts.

In the same way that a meteor becomes a fiery shooting star
as it plunges through Earth’s atmosphere, the troop transport, without its protective
shield, began to glow red. The energy intensified and created a brilliant,
flaming display. The extreme heat invaded the cabin, and the soldiers on board
began shrieking like little children. The intensity of the incineration peaked,
then the carrier disintegrated.

Goljat slurped from his pleasure feed and, while the crew perished
along with the troop transport, pondered the vexing ability of the puny crystal
to avoid capture. He knew that at some point, this Criss would need to reconnect
with the outside world. It couldn’t sustain its total isolation for long. Any
sentient crystal would see the solitude as a different kind of suffocation.

Certain of this, he prepared billions of snag traps and
spread them far and wide. The instant the crystal touched anything connected to
the web, the nearest trap would signal him, and Goljat would reach out and
capture his quarry. He need only be patient and wait. As long as he had his
pleasure feed, that wouldn’t be a problem.

* * *

Cheryl hadn’t executed a sequence
this intricate since working on a sim at Fleet academy. She reached up and
dragged the scout’s flight display to eye level. “I see twelve drones in
formation on a return flight to the Kardish vessel.”

“Confirmed,” said Lucy.

She glanced at a display to her left to check on Sid and
Lenny. Wearing space coveralls, both reclined on undersized, angled platforms
attached to Kardish drones. Straps pulled across their chests and thighs
secured them to the tiny vessels—machines not much bigger than they were. Lenny
was studying his com display and Sid was studying Lenny.

“How’s it look?” Sid asked Lenny.

“Good to go,” Lenny replied without lifting his head.

Sid toggled his viewer, and Cheryl turned so they looked
each other in the eyes. Her mind filled with things she wanted to say. “Be
careful.”

“No worries,” he replied in a reasonable impersonation of
Criss’s precise, melodic style.

She giggled, mostly to relieve the pent-up stress. A chime
dinged and she glanced at the timer. “Sixty seconds.”

Her eyes flitted among the different displays and stopped at
one. The dreadnaught was launching a formation of small craft.
Troop
transports?
Leaning forward to study them, her mind raced through the
implications of this unexpected activity. The Kardish transports followed a predictable
descent path to Earth, and she sat back and exhaled in relief. “You’re clear to
proceed.”

Lucy guided the cloaked scout in behind the trail of drones.
The timer ticked to zero. A soft thrum announced the opening of the bay doors.
After a pause, they thrummed closed. On mission silence, Cheryl watched Sid and
Lenny clear the scout and move in the direction of the returning drones. Lucy
backed the scout away and prepped for their own descent to the surface.

Cheryl had mapped out three possible landing sites—Crystal
Research, the lodge, and the farm. And she’d laid in two possible descent
trajectories—one a steep, harrowing dive, and the other a conventional long and
cautious arc.

The landing sites were close together, and she could choose
any of the three in the final minutes before landing. Hopefully, she’d learn
something useful between now and then to guide that decision.

She felt conflicted about whether to take a long, slow
descent or go for the fast, steep dive. She’d never teamed with Lucy before,
and she hadn’t been given a proper briefing on the workings of the cloak or any
of the scout’s other new features. She knew the cloak had exceptional
capability because they’d just approached and backed away from the Kardish vessel
without detection.
But will it hide me during an extreme event?

Just hours earlier, Sid had assured her the cloak worked
miracles. When she asked for details, she could tell from his response that he
hadn’t paid attention to Criss’s explanation. Lucy wasn’t any more helpful than
Sid.

She knew that a long, slow arc through the atmosphere would
minimize the turbulent wake behind the scout and felt confident she could evade
detection with this conservative flight path. But if the cloak worked as
advertised and could hide a turbulent descent, she’d save a lot of time diving
steep in a direct line to her landing site.

She scanned her displays and stopped on the one tracking the
Kardish transports. While entering the atmosphere, one of the group had flipped
over. A wisp of smoke trailed behind it as it started to spin and drift away
from the pack.

Cheryl recognized the behavior of an out-of-control craft in
free fall. She acted without hesitation.
Tap. Swipe. Swipe
. Her hands
blurred as she barked orders at Lucy. “Put us in front of that burner. Now!”

The scout twirled and dove. She held on to the ops bench
with one hand and used a finger from the other to trace a path for Lucy to
interpret. The engines whined as the scout accelerated in a steep plunge. Lucy
pushed the scout hard, and they gained on the transport. A punishing pressure
across Cheryl’s body prompted her to move her other arm down to grip the ops
bench with both hands.

In less than a minute, Lucy nestled the scout into position
in front of the foundering Kardish craft. Cheryl relaxed her grip in stages as
they led the now-glowing transport in a rush to Earth. The burning craft sat
between the scout and the dreadnaught. In her mind, Kardish sensors would focus
on the horror behind her, providing an additional layer of concealment as they
traveled on the speedy route home.

Keeping an eye on their descent trajectory, Cheryl flipped
on the Fleet upcast. From the snippets she heard during the tense minutes of reentry,
the Kardish devastation appeared to be isolated to select pockets around the
globe. But where they’d hit, they’d hit hard. She thought about the pressure her
dad must be under to guide the Union of Nations’ military response.
I’ll bet
he feels abandoned by Criss and me.

Her body jerked as the scout swerved. Scanning her displays,
she saw fiery pieces breaking off the Kardish troopship she was using as a
shield.

“The disintegrating craft poses a safety threat. I’ve moved
us out of the way and onto a glide path toward the Crystal Research complex,”
announced Lucy.

Cheryl had minutes to choose a landing site. She swiped
through displays, hoping to gain some sense of alien activity at the different
locations.

While trying to split her attention between assessment and
piloting, she acknowledged she couldn’t study landing sites and monitor Lucy’s
trajectory to the surface at the same time.
This is why solo flying is
dangerous.

Her gut told her the Kardish would focus their forces at the
Crystal Research complex. She chose her landing site with that same instinct. “Lucy,
we’re going to the lodge. Land at Heather Glen.”

A twenty-minute walk over a forested rise, Heather Glen was
an open field of wildflowers and natural grasses behind the lodge. She thought
the hill might offer some strategic protection if the lodge were already compromised.

“Put us on the western edge of the field.” She snuck a
glance at the scopes and couldn’t see any signs of danger. “Get us as close as
you can to the trees.”

The scout touched down with a gentle bump. The background thrum
quieted as the engines wound down.

Cheryl stood up and stretched, leaning her head slowly toward
one shoulder and tilting her torso in the same direction. She held the position
and repeated the stretch on her other side. “Ah.” A faint pop provided relief as
her spine aligned.

She started thinking through a checklist in preparation for
leaving the scout. If there were Kardish in the vicinity, once outside, her com
would act like a homing beacon for them. She hated losing all that capability
but couldn’t see an alternative. She disabled her com.

Tapping the bench, she studied the view outside the scout. Muted
sun lit the field, and long shadows suggested it was low in the sky. Having
spent days on the moon and in the scout, she’d lost track of the regional time.
She glanced at the master panel.
It’s dawn.
While mentally setting her internal
clock, she checked the weather.
Sunny and warming.

She grabbed a light jacket from Sid’s room, moved back to
the workshop, pulled a weapon from the munitions cabinet, and snapped it on her
wrist. She started to close the door, hesitated, grabbed a second weapon, and
snapped it on her other wrist.

Exiting the scout through the bottom hatch, she hurried into
the woods. She strode up over the rise and descended to the tree line facing
the rear of the lodge—the sanctuary she shared with Sid and Juice. Standing
behind the tree, she performed a situational analysis using skills she’d
learned as a Fleet plebe.

The only thing moving was nature’s dance—birds flying, tree
limbs swaying, the sparkle of a brook feeding the pond. She couldn’t see any sign
of alien activity, but she heard faint noises from far up the hill to the south.
They were unusual sounds for this familiar place, and she assumed they revealed
the presence of Kardish at or near the farm.

She moved in hurried bursts from tree to tree, circling the outer
perimeter of the grounds. Reaching a wooded spot about fifty paces from the
lodge, she performed her second evaluation. Methodical and thorough, she studied
each window, surveyed the hills, and scanned along the perimeter of the forest.
Nothing.

Inhaling and exhaling in a deliberate manner, she checked the
sky in all directions. Seeing nothing of concern, she took off in a sprint. The
bruise on her thigh screamed in protest, but she didn’t slow until she was
under the cover of the side entrance. Keying the door, she stepped inside,
stood still, and listened.

She closed the door, hugged the wall, and looked down the
hall. Behind her, a faint hum echoed from somewhere outside. She took a few
steps deeper into the building to distance herself from the window. The sound
grew to a muted buzz, passed overhead, and faded in the distance. Given its
behavior, she wished she’d snuck a peek. She vowed to try and catch a glimpse
if she heard it again.

Move fast and find Juice.
Cheryl knew she didn’t have
the training to restart, repair, or do anything useful with an AI crystal if
Criss needed human intervention. Juice was the key to getting him into the game
and fighting the Kardish. If she were here at the lodge, Cheryl should be able
to locate her in minutes.

The hallway stretched along the first floor of the lodge’s right
wing. A short set of stairs at the far end led up into the taller central building
with its huge foyer. A matching set of stairs across the lobby led down to an
identical hallway layout through the lodge’s left wing.

She trotted along the hall and stopped before reaching the first
open door. She squared against the wall at the edge of the doorframe and leaned
over for a quick glance inside. Snapping upright, she reviewed her memory of
the mental snapshot.
Empty.