Endeavour (Atlantia Series Book 4) Read online

  Evelyn stood in silence, the arm of a soldier wrapped across her chest as she was led toward the holds, the blade still poking disconcertingly hard into her flank. They reached the entrance, the walls still smouldering from countless plasma round impacts, and then several more black–clad soldiers descended the stairwell from above her, moving as silently as shadows.

  Each was entirely concealed by their combat fatigues and festooned with weapons, but none of them wore protective headgear. Their faces were smeared with black face paint, their features likewise concealed with black bandanas that likely also kept out the worst of the cold. Evelyn realised that they were not using most of the normal equipment used by Colonial Marines, preferring their natural hearing, sight and instincts to standard issue Colonial technology. Only two of them wore eyepieces connected to power packs on their webbing, the small, rectangular lenses providing night vision and other essential combat tools.

  They did not speak, everything conveyed by hand signals or nods of their heads. Evelyn found herself fascinated despite her situation as she was turned and, one step at a time, she was led into the hold.

  She saw Meyanna at once, and then the two Marines guarding her who turned and swung their plasma rifles up to aim at the man holding Evelyn. She felt rather than saw the man holding her shake his head slowly, and then more of the elite soldiers spilled like black shadows into the hold once more, their weapons trained on the two Marines.

  Instantly, Marine Meyer took his chance. Evelyn had barely opened her mouth to shout him to hold fire when he aimed at the first of the soldiers who had entered the hold and fired. The plasma shot flared brilliantly as it illuminated the darkened hold and smashed into the soldier’s chest. Evelyn stared as the soldier hesitated, the plasma rippling across his body like brilliant glowing water, flickering as its energy was converted into heat and dissipated into the atmosphere.

  ‘Don’t shoot!’ Evelyn yelled at their captors.

  She may as well have been talking to herself. A salvo of shots snapped back at Meyer before she had finished the sentence and he was hit three times even as he attempted to dive for cover. Evelyn winced as the Marine screamed and then fell silent as he hit the deck, his body smouldering and his eyes wide in the lifeless grimace of instant death as his rifle tumbled slowly in mid–air above his body.

  Marine J’evel, to his credit, remained in front of Meyanna Sansin and refused to give ground, but he kept his rifle down at port arms as he was encircled by the elite soldiers.

  ‘Lose the piece, pal,’ came a voice from one of them. ‘Nothing to gain by being a hero.’

  The Marine ignored the soldier and instead looked at Evelyn.

  ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘Let it go.’

  J’evel’s shoulders sank in the shame of capitulation as he unslung his rifle and set it down on the deck before him, but maintained his position in front of Meyanna Sansin.

  The soldier who had spoken, his face concealed all but for his eyes, turned and looked at Evelyn appraisingly as he approached her. His eyes flicked across the patch on her shoulder, emblazoned with the Reaper’s logo and the Colonial frigate Atlantia’s name.

  ‘Phantoms?’ he asked.

  ‘Raythons,’ Evelyn replied, seeing a potential ray of light in the man’s recognition of her role within the Colonial Fleet, or what was left of it.

  ‘What are you doing out here?’

  ‘I could ask you the same question,’ she replied. ‘How did you get so far so soon after the apocalypse?’

  She saw a glimmer of confusion cloud the soldier’s eyes. ‘What apocalypse?’

  The sound of distant gunfire ceased and one of the soldiers looked at his leader.

  ‘They’re through,’ he said. ‘They’ll be coming back.’

  The leader looked down at the fallen Marine, and then stormed across to him and tore off the dead man’s helmet. He held the helmet up and spoke into it.

  ‘Listen very carefully, do precisely as I say, and neither of these beautiful ladies will be hurt, understood?’

  There was a moment’s silence and then Evelyn heard Bra’hiv’s voice reply.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘You’re all going to hold your weapons above your heads and you’re going to walk backwards down the corridor to the stairwell, where you will be disarmed one by one. Any of you makes a single move that we dislike, one of the women dies. Move, now.’

  Evelyn looked left and right at the soldiers. Half of them, without instruction, had melted into the darkness, concealing their numbers from Bra’hiv’s men and covering their comrades. Evelyn knew that the general and his Marines had no choice: surrender, or the blade would end up scouring Evelyn’s kidneys and Meyanna would be dead before she hit the deck.

  She tried to reach out to the soldiers.

  ‘You’re Colonial too,’ she said. ‘We’re on the same side.’

  The man did not look at her as he replied, his gaze fixed on the stairwell outside the holds.

  ‘Who said we’re on anybody’s side?’

  ‘We’re human beings,’ Meyanna said, speaking for the first time. ‘We’re all on the same side now.’

  ‘Since when?’ asked another of the soldiers. ‘And what was that about an apocalypse?’

  ‘Silence,’ the leader snapped.

  Evelyn bit her lip and decided to say nothing more. The soldiers remained absolutely still until Bra’hiv’s men emerged one by one into the stairwell, surrendering their weapons and being made to kneel facing the wall. Evelyn saw Bra’hiv emerge last and he was manacled but allowed to remain standing, the elite troops clearly recognising his senior officer’s insignia.

  ‘A general,’ exclaimed the leader of their captors in surprise as soon as all the Marines were secured, his troops guarding them. ‘The Marines must be even shorter of decent officers than we thought.’

  A grim chuckle swept through the troops as General Bra’hiv turned to face the soldiers and looked them over with interest.

  ‘Specialist Tactical Squad?’ he enquired.

  ‘None of your business,’ the leader snapped back. ‘State your intentions and give us a reason we shouldn’t just seal you in the hold and leave you.’

  ‘General Abrahim Bra’hiv, Fourth Marines, CFS Atlantia. We encountered this vessel and identified it as Endeavour, then performed a tactical boarding before searching her for supplies and evidence of what happened to her.’

  The leader glanced at Evelyn’s shoulder patch. ‘Atlantia. What’s a frigate doing all the way out here, beyond the Icari Line?’

  ‘We are conducting a mission to seek out new forms of technology with which to fight the Word.’

  The troops exchanged glances at that, and their leader once again conveyed some confusion. ‘Why the hell would you be fighting the Word?’

  Bra’hiv stared at the soldier for a long moment. ‘How long have you been out here?’

  ‘That’s classified,’ the soldier repeated.

  Bra’hiv frowned. ‘Damn me, you haven’t had contact with the colonies for over three years, have you? You can’t have.’

  ‘Our purpose here is classified,’ the leader snapped again. ‘Your presence compromises our mission and may force us to silence all of you.’

  Evelyn put two and two together and came up with the kind of answer she knew would have caused a storm back on Ethera.

  ‘A government sanctioned Special Forces mission beyond the Icari Line,’ she surmised.

  The leader whirled and aimed his rifle at Evelyn.

  ‘And you,’ he snarled. ‘You want to tell me why the hell you’re in two places at once?’

  Evelyn took a moment to realise what the soldier meant.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘We only just got here ourselves.’

  The soldier watched her as though attempting to figure out whether she was telling him the truth or whether this was all some sort of bad dream he was having. He whirled back to Bra’hiv.

  ‘Who’s your comman
ding officer? Who sanctioned your presence out here?’

  ‘Captain Idris Sansin,’ Bra’hiv replied crisply. ‘There was no sanctioned order. Atlantia was a prison ship, and we were far enough away from Ethera when the Word struck to escape unharmed. Though I hate to admit it, we’ve been on the run ever since.’

  The soldier, still aiming his weapon at Bra’hiv, spoke again. ‘Escape unharmed from what?’

  ‘You really don’t know, do you?’ Evelyn uttered in amazement.

  ‘Would I be asking if I damned well knew?!’

  ‘Ethera is gone,’ Bra’hiv said simply. ‘So are all the core systems. The Word manipulated a swarm of militarised nanobots to infect the population of the core systems over the years, and less than three years ago it gave a unified command. The result was the deaths of billions of human beings. We don’t know how many remain, or how many of those remain uninfected, but right now the Word and its Legion, as we call the machines, are pursuing the remnants of humanity wherever they find them and slaughtering them wholesale.’

  The soldier stared long and hard at Bra’hiv as though his brain could not process what he was hearing.

  ‘This is some kind of test,’ he replied finally. ‘HQ are pushing us to see if they can break us.’

  Bra’hiv sighed softly.

  ‘I wish that were true,’ he said. ‘If it were we’d all have homes to go to, but we don’t. We’ve all been on duty for just over three years and we have nowhere to run. It is our captain’s long term plan to attempt to return to Ethera and retake it, but right now we do not have anything like the strength to do so.’

  The soldier stared at Bra’hiv down the barrel of his rifle, and then he scowled beneath his thick black combat paint and he swung the weapon around to point at Evelyn.

  ‘The truth, now, or I’ll blow her away!’ he yelled.

  Bra’hiv opened his mouth to reply, and then suddenly a blinding flash of light and noise blasted through the stairwell. Evelyn felt the soldier holding her turn away from the blast and the knife in her side vanish momentarily and she moved without conscious thought. Evelyn spun around and rammed the point of her elbow into the soldier’s throat as she hurled herself away from him and grabbed one of the Marine’s rifles leaning against the wall.

  A burst of plasma fire crackled out as she saw Andaim crouching amid the smouldering clouds of smoke in the for’ard corridor as he fired controlled bursts through the hold entrance at the Special Forces troops holding Meyanna. His blasts forced them aside and Meyanna hurled herself clear. The Marines beneath the stairwell ploughed into their captors with brute force as they used their body weight to force their way past the stunned and blinded troops and grab their weapons, men growling and yelling as they fought for their lives in the dim light.

  Two of the elite troops hiding back inside the holds opened fire from the darkness, their shots zipping by Evelyn as she whirled and returned their fire. Her shots blasted their position and forced them to duck down out of sight as half of Bra’hiv’s Marines thundered into the holds amid a blaze of gunfire.

  ‘Find cover!’ Bra’hiv yelled.

  Evelyn dashed into the hold and threw herself to one side as a salvo of plasma shots crackled back and forth through the darkness, and she saw multiple rounds shatter wall panels and start fires. Showers of sparks spiralled down and several pipes hissed vapour into the darkness, further obscuring their enemy as they hid.

  Andaim hurled himself down alongside her, his pistol in his hand and a curiously maverick grin on his face.

  ‘Not bad, huh?’ he beamed.

  ‘We’re pinned back in the hold again, separated and surrounded by an enemy that’s really pissed at us now,’ Evelyn replied as she peered into the darkness. ‘Good going, hero.’

  ***

  XX

  Endeavour’s hold was filled with a fine haze of smoke, showers of sparks raining down like burning waterfalls from shattered power conduits and thick cables that lined the walls and dangled from the ceilings.

  Evelyn, her back pinned to one of the capsules, smelled the acrid stench of burning metal and circuitry as she sought for some sign of the elite troops. The Marines were all around her, tucked in against hull braces or pinned down against capsules, some of which were leaking thick pools of per–fluorocarbon onto the deck plating.

  ‘There’s no way out,’ Bra’hiv whispered urgently. ‘We can’t make the exit without being hit, half of their team can’t get past us without exposing themselves and the other half are stuck out there.’

  Evelyn nodded, still searching this way and that for some sign of the troops.

  ‘We’ve got to do something,’ Lieutenant C’rairn hissed.

  Evelyn looked across at C’rairn, who was crouched down behind a huge metal corner brace in one corner of the hold to her left, virtually invisible in the shadows and the smoke. He was looking back at Evelyn and beside him crouched Meyanna, now the Marines’ number one priority to protect.

  ‘There’s no way out!’ yelled the elite commander from outside the hold. ‘We have several of your men at gunpoint out here and you’re cornered!’

  ‘So are your men behind us!’ Bra’hiv shouted back. ‘You leave us here, you’re abandoning your own people to die!’

  Evelyn was about to suggest that Andaim or C’rairn make a dash for the door under covering fire, as they were the closest, when a new noise caught her attention. A faint humming sound was beginning to fill the hold, and she craned her neck back and looked up at the ceiling as she searched for the source.

  ‘What’s that?’ Andaim echoed her thoughts.

  The hum grew a little louder, and to her right the pool of per–fluorocarbon leaking from a capsule grew larger, the silky surface reflecting the dim hold lighting as it expanded. Evelyn felt her blood run cold as she saw new pools of the fluid appearing beneath capsules all around her, the humming growing ever louder. She glanced upward at the damaged electrical cables and power conduits, and suddenly she realised what had happened.

  ‘The stray shots have broken the power supply to the capsules,’ she gasped, loud enough for everybody to hear.

  Bra’hiv and C’rairn looked at her sharply as the noise grew ever louder, and several Marines squirmed in discomfort as thick fluid spilled past their boots where they crouched.

  Evelyn, her back to the capsule, felt something bump with a dull sound inside. Fear crept up the skin of her neck like lice as she turned and clambered upright, hugging the surface of the capsule as she peered into the viewing port.

  The interior of the port was fogged with moisture, and for a moment she thought that there was nothing inside. A heavy thump sent a shockwave through her heart as a face slammed against the port with fearsome eyes wide open, the hooked fangs of some kind of quadrupedal animal glaring out at her.

  Evelyn jerked away from the screen as the sound of movement within the capsules all around them began to overwhelm the sound of sparking cables. She called out instinctively to the troops pinning them down.

  ‘Something’s happening to the capsules,’ she yelled. ‘We need to get out of here, right now!’

  There was no reply from the soldiers, but Evelyn noticed that although the Marines were backing away from the capsules and thus exposing themselves to enemy fire, the troopers were no longer shooting at them.

  The sound of breaking glass shattered the air near Evelyn and she heard a hellish, rasping, screeching noise like a bird of prey tearing at a victim. She looked left and saw what looked like some kind of roiling, ghostly white tentacle probing out of a broken viewing port on one of the capsules nearby, fragments of broken glass spinning away from it through the air like rotating diamond chips.

  ‘The capsules have gone into rehabilitation mode!’ Lieutenant C’rairn cried out. ‘It must be automatic when the power supply is disrupted!’

  The Marines were backing toward each other now, rifles pointed not into the darkness but at the shuddering, clattering capsules as more of the species within
them began to awaken and thrash to escape.

  ‘Time to leave!’ Bra’hiv called out into the darkness at their harassers. ‘You can damned well shoot us if you want to, but I don’t intend to stay in here a moment longer than I have to! Bravo Company, on me!’

  The Marines shot into position around their general, rifles pointed outward at the capsules that were beginning to hiss as seals were broken and the lids began to click open.

  ‘Let’s move, now!’

  Evelyn saw Andaim and Meyanna leap from cover and make a dash for the hold exits as the Marines began falling back protectively around them. Evelyn backed up hurriedly with them as she saw the lid of a capsule fall slowly away in the zero gravity and a bulky, squat creature with bulbous eyes and a mane of writhing tentacles around its thick neck stumble out onto the deck on six short, muscular legs that scrambled for purchase as it struggled to adapt to the zero gravity. The beast coughed a lung full of per–fluorocarbon across the deck and shook itself free of the fluid as its cruel eyes settled on Evelyn’s.

  The creature snarled and launched itself toward her as she opened fire. The plasma blasts smashed into the creature and it howled in agony as it skittered along the slippery deck, smoke pouring from a wound slashing its flank where the shot had streaked past it.

  The animal regained its balance and wailed with fury as it charged again, but this time a larger shape lunged from the interior of another capsule and snatched the animal up into mid–air with one thick arm as a massive, bulbous head lunged out of the capsule and a pair of giant fangs sank into the smaller creature’s body to the sound of crunching bones.

  ‘Retreat, now!’ Bra’hiv yelled.

  The Marines fell back through the hold exits, several of them firing as they went on the menagerie of bizarre and lethal creatures that began emerging from the various capsules, some of them toppling over and smashing onto the decks as others rocked and shuddered as whatever horrific species was trapped within attempted to escape.

  Flashes of rifle fire illuminated the darkness and the carnivorous features of animals pouring from the capsules as Evelyn fired randomly into their growing ranks and stepped back toward the hatchway. As the Marines around her fell back she glimpsed one of the capsules opening, and she gasped as within it she spotted the masked woman, blinking as though coming awake from a bad dream, unsteady on her feet.