Chapter 19 Aera
I set us down in the field outside an old concrete bunker with a large tower. Evo is already moving through the cabin, pulling together a pack of gear, weapons, and ammo.
“Looks a lot like an outpost on Ellipsis. If we’re lucky, this one has tunnels or some other way out. Otherwise, we need to make this fast. Then work on that alternate plan.”
I take a Solcrue rifle and extra magazines from the cabinets and follow him down the ramp. “Solcrue are on approach. We probably have fifteen minutes.”
“Battle cruisers?” he asks like he already knows.
“Three.”
“Figured. That means there’s a larger ship just out of orbit. Likely a warship.” Evo hustles across the grass to the cement pad by the door and looks at the screen, but it’s dark. “Hang on. Let me see if there’s another way in.”
Evo jumps onto the roof like it’s not a feat of nature to ascend a structure three times his height in a single bound.
“There’s an access up here.”
I climb the worn concrete and make my way to him just as he breaks free the metal latch and rips the hatch lid off.
He tosses it aside and drops into the room. I peer down at him as he shuffles through papers, tablets, and scans the space with spinning blue lasers that project from his eyes.
“That’s a cool trick,” I call down to him.
“Flash’s skill. Not Flashbomb. Different unit. Decommissioned. But he taught me how to scan a space in a flash.”
He reaches up for me.
I lower myself inside and drop.
Evo catches me and gently slides me down his front, setting my boots on the floor. He’s rock hard beneath his armor, and it stirs lust in my belly.
“Oof. Barely got a taste of that, and I already want more.”
His face brightens as stardust moves into his cheeks. “Later.”
“Promise?”
He winks at me. “Come. I’ve found a passage to another hangar. I’m not sure if there’s anything in there, but there’s another tunnel that leads into the mountains. Hopefully, we can lose them out there. Solcrue are bad Terran fighters.
“What about all this stuff?” I ask, leaning over to study the schematics on the desk. “They look like Titan designs.”
He nods as he grabs a grenade from his belt. “I’ve scanned most of what was on the desk.”
Outside, I can hear the hum of thrusters.
The Solcrue cruisers have found us. And then I see something that draws my attention.
I move the papers aside, exposing a Black List of Creators disowned from the program and the reasons.
“Shit... We didn’t come here by accident.
Toriszi must’ve sent us here. He had to. Look at this.”
Evo scans it. “Recorded. Drop it, and let’s go.”
He twists a grenade and tosses it as he lugs me out of the room. Then he guides me quickly down the hallway, around a bend that descends deep into a cool cavern.
“Did you see that?” I ask.
“Yes.” Evo glances up at the section of path we just descended, then shoves open a set of doors with his shoulder. “Toriszi is a black listed Titan Ship Creator because he tried to give us too much power.”
“Not that,” I reply as we check the ships inside the hangar for anything operational.
The first Omega Force fighter won’t even power up the dash. The next ship is under construction. The last is missing a critical fuel cell.
“Our only chance is the fighter, but it’s no better than the emissary’s cruiser we arrived in,” Evo says. He scours the workbenches for something while I look for survival gear. I think we’re going to need it.
“I meant his connection to Xiphos.”
Evo straightens. “How did you pick up on that? It does not state it on the page.”
His eyes flash like he’s reviewing it again. “I still do not see the connection.”
“Toriszi, Kelta, and Reidar are all pilots, Evo. Toriszi built a portal. He built a fucking portal on his ship. He was quiet the whole time we talked about Xiphos. He sends us here, away from the others. He can’t come here because he has to take care of his family.
But we’re connected. He kept his forearm covered the whole meeting.
I think he’s like Brodin, Steele, and Daken. Or he’s like me.
“He knows what we are. And my guess, when you add those pieces together, is that he is descended from Xiphos engineers. Sure, I’m an original resistance fighter, and taking on Solcrue is in our blood.
But I think we need each other even more now.
He needed us to come here, to find something or see something. ”
“Like this?” Evo lifts a case with another honeycomb chip. “There is a sketch here of a third.”
“Three?” I ask, walking up to him and looking at the chip. When I touch it, it doesn’t light up. “Strange.”
“A soldier, an engineer, and...” Evo shrugs. “I think it’s probably for another bloodline we have yet to encounter.”
He opens his armor and presses the chip into his side. It absorbs inside him. “I’ve scanned about everything I can. There aren’t any other anomalies, nothing else we can use except maybe this tent.”
He slings a bag over his shoulder. “We need to move out in case they make it through the rubble.”
Evo takes my hand and leads me through a dark passageway.
“I can’t see.”
“I can,” he says. “Just say with me.”
We sink deeper into the rock until the air grows damp and the ceiling drips.
“Solcrue ironically don’t like tight dark places. They won’t traverse this,” Evo says with confidence.
We walk for what feels like an hour before I get a glimmer of sunlight. Evo peeks out at the end, holding me back. Then he sneaks outside and pans his rifle over the mountain we’ve descended.
“Okay, it’s clear. But we have to stay in these rocks. The heat will help hide us during the day. We’re going to need to find a cave for the night, or they’ll find us.” Evo motions me outside.
As I follow Evo through the rocks, I keep my hands steady on my Solcrue rifle. “You said you could replicate blood.”
“I did so with Leah’s.”
“Then map mine, just in case.” I don’t know what that’s going to take. But I’m willing if it helps keep Xiphos safe. Evo is more likely to survive capture than I am.
“No.”
“Why not?”
He smirks when he glances over his shoulder at me. “Call it life insurance.”
I scoff. “Fine. But I’d love to know why Solcrue don’t seem to care about protecting their own. I mean, I’ve seen their command sacrifice many of them just to win a battle. They keep showing up like their numbers are endless.”
“That’s what they want you to think,” Evo huffs.
“It’s an intimidation tactic as much as it is a win-by-masses strategy.
They have mating ships where the only job of females is to produce more Solcrue.
They have growth chambers where they speed up the process to get them to adult stages within a year.
Haven’t been on one of those, but I’ve seen holovid conferences with the mating ship command staff. ”
“You’re serious?”
“Yeah. The females believe it is an honorable way to live and to die. One of our plans is to find and ground these vessels on a planet so that soldiers are forced to stay close to their females.”
“Sounds like a good idea.”
“We have no intention of harming the females,” Evo quickly adds. “We’re not that sadistic. We don’t want genocide. We just want them to stop killing us and our humans.”
We hike into the evening hours, and I’m starting to think we’ve finally slipped the Solcrue.
Evo motions to a crack in the mountain. “That’s a good spot to hide.”
As I hike after him, I notice movement at the top of the hill. It just barely registers in my periphery. “Nine o’clock!”
Evo looks just as a laser grid paints my shoulders in green light. My scalp prickles under the drone of Solcrue engines.
A gravity beam draws me upward. “Evo!”
He runs back toward me, jumps off a boulder and tries to snag my ankle. “Aera!”
But the ship is too fast and too strong. Metal doors close beneath me, and the beam cuts off, dropping me to the floor like a sack of rocks.
I scramble up and reach for my rifle when a warm gun barrel nears my temple. I can hear the high-pitched whine of the igniter, smell the hot metal dust, and see the green glow in the corner of my eye. I release my weapon and lift my hands. “The fuck do you want?”
“Your blood. All of it. Aera Nova.”
“You have that wrong. My name is Aera Nereus.”
“They’re both hazardous names.” The male Solcrue picks me up by my throat and pins me against the wall. “And I know who the fuck you are.”
I stare in horror at the officer I shot in the side years ago.
“Funny thing about being an important rank in our empire,” he says, casually waving his gun around as he talks. “We get these cool little machines that can heal us from death. We’re basically immortal. So let’s try this again, Aera. Where is the human’s backup defense system?”
He inhales a breath near my face like he’s trying hard to catch my scent when he never will. “If you don’t tell me, I’ll just drain that blood out of you and hack the nanos myself. So be good and tell me.”
I spit in his face. “Fuck off, snake. If I knew, I wouldn’t tell you because you’d be dead, and we wouldn’t be here, would we?”
His hand tightens around my throat. “That was your last mistake.”