The Chronicles of Soone - Warrior Rising Read online

It looks like a ground army and their moving toward the southern valley, too!”

  “Orin to Saberhawk, dust off immediately! I say dust off immediately!” Orin commanded. “Enemy forces are closing rapidly on your position!”

  “We’ve got to get down there to them!” Tiet shouted. He scrambled out of the room and down the corridor.

  Orin followed, still trying to get through to the ship.

  “Millo to Orin…are you there?”

  “Yes, Millo! I hear you! You’ve got to get out of there now!” shouted Orin into the headset as he tried to keep up with Tiet through the corridors leading to the surface.

  “I’ve got them on scans already. Shields are at maximum and weapons systems have been armed. I’m trying to lift off but some of those drones are already within visual range and closing fast on us.”

  “Do your best. We’re on our way!”

  ☼

  When Tiet and Orin reached the main gate, they found it blasted almost completely away. As the pair emerged into the open air, they heard the noise of battle in the valley below. Many of the spheres were already attacking the Saberhawk. The ship was pinned down by a swarm of drones strafing at it with their energy weapons.

  Another group of spheres landed in the valley and began a terrible transformation. Long arms emerged from their sides lifting their bodies and acting as legs to carry them and fight with. Blasters popped out of the tops to lay down laser fire against the masses of Horva.

  The pass from the north to the southern valley was flooded completely with ground forces that appeared to be Horva, but Tiet noticed that these were different. They were dark skinned men like the Vorn and Horva he had seen, but they were an organized fighting force—not like the brutes they had encountered back home at all.

  The Horva drove forward by the thousands against the large robots, who in turn were spraying them with wave after wave of laser fire. Tiet saw the Horva using the same electromagnetic shield generators he and Dorian had on their uniforms. Laser fire sprayed into Horva ranks, but killed very few.

  They moved in close to engage the sphere robots with larger pulse cannons mounted upon hydraulic arms attached to their vests. The pulse cannons did damage to the hulking robots. It seemed to Tiet that the pulse wavelength modulated continually to match the shield wavelengths of the robots, allowing them to penetrate.

  All the combatants laid siege to the Saberhawk, even though the Horva and the sphere robots were more interested in one another.

  ☼

  Tiet ran down the main path of the city toward the valley with Orin following hard after him. The Saberhawk hovered forty feet off of the ground, but the sky above them was too congested with enemy vessels to get clear of the battle. Tiet saw the Saberhawk returning fire in all directions, but it was greatly outnumbered. He knew their shields must be losing power reserves fast at this rate. Before long, they would be taking hits directly to the hull. Then it would all be over.

  Tiet ran with all his strength trying to get to Dorian. He had to protect her. He leaped away from the path at a nearby ledge overlooking a thirty foot drop down to the fighting already raging below. Tiet landed right in the middle of a group of clones firing on a nearby robot. The dark skinned clones immediately reacted to his presence, bringing their weapons to bear on him.

  Tiet’s kemsticks leaped to his hands from their leg clips as he landed among the men. He sliced one rifle in two, while deflecting another shot at point blank range. He swept his body downward under the barrel of another clone who fired and killed a fellow soldier standing ready on the other side. With a complete sweep of his kemstick, Tiet cut the man down at the knees. He wasted little time dispatching two others then quickly ran off to reach the Saberhawk.

  ☼

  “We’re the biggest thing out here!” Millo complained.

  Dorian blasted away with the Saberhawk’s weapons while Millo looked for a clearing in the congestion overhead.

  “If we’re so big, can’t we just plow through those other ships?”

  “After seeing those spheres ramming into the Vorn ships I’d rather not take any chances. I’m going to try and move us out of the battle at this altitude.”

  “Well, you had better hurry. Our shields are already down to thirty percent power!”

  The battlefield was overrun with Horva warriors, fighting furiously against the robots. Although the Horva were taking losses, they continued to blast away at the automatons. For every ten Horva getting killed, a robot was brought down.

  ☼

  Vale and his doubles were fiercely engaged in the ground battle. The three androids moved swiftly through the battlefield toward the position of the Saberhawk. Vale remembered his defeat by the Barudii warrior on the same vessel. There was little doubt he could acquire his target there again. The triplet androids moved independently as though separate beings, yet all were under the control of Vale and the Sphere.

  Vale noticed the ship veering away from the fight and heading toward their position.

  Vale-one and two pulled hypermagnetic grapples and fired them at the ship as it passed low overhead. Vale-three was still fighting with a Horva warrior as the hull-implanted grapples pulled the other two androids up and away from the battlefield. Vale-one and two retracted their grapple cables until they reached the hull.

  Activating the hypermagnetic discs beneath their android skin, they each clung to the hull of the Saberhawk. The ship’s shields did not prevent them since they were designed only to repel energy weapons. The two androids avoided any attempt to cut through the hull with Barudii blades as it would cause a repulsion charge from the shields and vaporize them. They crawled across the hull on their bellies, as the shields snapped back energetically above them at the incoming pulse blasts from the battle.

  Vale recalled the entry code for the outer hull hatch and keyed it in. The outer hull door obeyed, and both androids entered the ship without incident. Vale recognized the cargo hold as the place of his defeat at the hands of the Barudii warrior.

  The robots walked to the doorway of the cargo hold and found it locked. Vale-two used his blade to cut a portal through the metal door. The pair proceeded down the corridor toward the bridge, even as the ship shuddered under enemy fire raining upon it from all directions. The android’s heard voices beyond the locked bridge door—a man and a woman. They sliced through the door with Barudii blades.

  Dorian whirled around in her chair at the weapon console, hearing the crackling of molecular bonds bursting. She threw a spicor disc toward the android coming in through the cut hole. Vale-one caught the spicor disc in the upper torso. The tightly controlled burst pattern vaporized all but its arms above the waist and left the lower body hanging in the door.

  Dorian pulled her blade as the second robot moved in fast over its fallen twin. She felt the pressure and pain building in her fractured arm as she brought it to join her other arm on the hilt of her sword.

  ☼

  Millo looked back from the controls, as he heard the spicor explode behind him. The ship was taking a beating from the sporadic weapons fire erupting from the battlefield below them. There was no way he could leave the controls. The android grabbed a pulse blaster with its free hand and sprayed laser fire in all directions across the bridge. The electromagnetic shield on Dorian’s forearm repelled the incoming blasts.

  Millo held the controls of the Saberhawk as the firestorm swept across the bridge. Several shots pierced his flight chair and his body. He arched in pain for a moment then slumped forward over the controls.

  The ship lurched upward and back, causing Vale to stumble a moment. As he brought the blaster back toward Dorian, it met her blade in flight. She sliced through both the weapon and the android’s hand. With no notion of pain, Vale brought his own blade down upon Dorian’s shoulder, only to find her weapon barring the way. With Millo slumped over the controls and many of the flight controls destroyed by laser fire, the Saberhawk turned backwards from its course, descendi
ng clumsily toward the battlefield.

  ☼

  Tiet saw the Saberhawk under fire from both the battlefield and the sky. Millo drove the ship hard away from the fight. Soon Dorian would be safe. In his heart, he urged the ship on. He and Orin had been separated by a small distance and were furiously battling clone soldiers as they tried to get through the congestion.

  The entire valley before Mt. Vaseer blazed with laser fire. Overhead a multitude of aerial combatants tore each other out of the sky. Wreckage dropped onto the battlefield at regular intervals as the Sphere drones and the Vorn attack fighters with clone pilots exchanged weapon’s fire in a chaotic dogfight.

  A Horva warrior strafed at Tiet with his pulse rifle. He deflected several blasts with kemsticks as he spun them around his body then Tiet let one stick fly toward his attacker. It caught the Horva’s gun and proceeded to swipe across his chest and cut him down. The kemstick rebounded back to Tiet’s waiting hand in time to block an incoming battle staff in the hands of another clone warrior. He dispatched his opponent and kept going.

  Tiet kept a visual on the ship. Its path was leading it off the battlefield to the east and he was glad Millo was getting them out. The ship slowed, arching nose up then it came back around from its present course. Something was wrong. Tiet’s heart sank when he