Weekly Drabble #344: Day Break (Patreon)

This week's prompt comes from Tyronne with "second sun in the west", and the story did go through a few revisions, from a nuclear detonation, to a deadly second star rising and scorching a world barren, and that got me thinking along the lines that led to this chapter. Enjoy!

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Day Break:

Ignore the pain.

Tribunes were one of the most physically resilient species in known space. Their skin was thick, their musculature dense and bones heavy. Their organs were capable of functioning even after suffering grievous injuries, and their nervous systems were capable of overriding shock and keeping them alive long enough to dispatch any threat and seek aide far past the point that virtually any other species was capable of operating at.

As a result, there was more than a grain of truth to the sentiment that a Tribune could survive any injury that did not immediately kill them. It was said by many, and more accurate than not, that you only got one shot to put down a Tribune. If it failed, the saying concluded, you wouldn’t get a second.

That common wisdom was all well and good, Advocate, Submissive Lotol Vinsar Athun, thought. Up until you faced someone who could survive to make that second shot. And the third. And a fourth.

He blink-clicked away another set of warnings from his suit. He was well aware of all the damage both it, and he, had taken. The self-repair mechanisms of even a top of the line suit of Janissary armour were limited, but they were doing their best to keep it operational.

Lotol himself was in worse shape than his suit. His left leg was dragging behind him, more dead than not. There was a cluster of shrapnel in his guts, the pieces working their way deeper through his viscera with every step he took, and the top right side of his helmet had been sheared off, taking most of his right ear with it. Blood still oozed out of his scalp and he was more than half certain that the laceration was deep enough to expose part of his skull. Those were only the most serious of his wounds. He had many more minor injuries. By themselves, none of them meant much. Together, they were as much of a hazard as his crippled leg, slowly-tearing organs and still-bleeding head wound.

His suit’s phylactery was on overdrive, pumping him full of painkillers, adrenaline spikers, healing treatments and a full mix of combat drugs intended to keep him mobile and fighting long past the point at which even his own physiology would succumb to injury.

It hurt. Lotol wished Falk was still alive. Not because he liked the other man, but because he could really use a medic right now. Unfortunately, the medics had been some of the first targeted. Even Lotol himself was the third soldier to carry the package on his back. Its reinforced casing was scarred with shrapnel and splashed with the blood of its last two carriers, but it was still intact.

He still had a chance.

With a hand missing two fingers, the Janissary loaded his tribarrel shotcannon, pulling himself onward. “Is that all you’ve got?” he demanded to the corridor. “Is that all?” Silence answered him. He hadn’t expected a reply. He shouldn’t even be wasting his strength, but that small act of defiance helped numb the pain for several seconds.

Lotol knelt, ignoring the fire that spiked through his crippled leg, the agony dampening somewhat as his overtaxed phylactery responded and flooded his system with another dose of anaesthetic. He picked up Sazhi’s plasma cutter. The other Janissary didn’t need it anymore; the top of her helmet – along with her head – was gone.

Not a single other member of his squad was alive. In fact, Lotol doubted that anyone else on this Triarch-cursed shit-born vessel was. Whether that was true or not, he did know one thing for certain. He wasn’t getting off this ship alive, not that he had anywhere to go to. Forged from Bone

There was something else he was certain of: he still had a mission.

Stop it. Two simple words, yet they encapsulated everything his squad and the other boarder teams had been dying to accomplish. This monster was heading towards Delanna’s sun. Until this assault, he hadn’t thought there was anything that could trouble a star except for another star. Their briefing had been perfunctory, given to them en route, but it had been made absolutely clear that this thing could.

How it could possibly do so was far beyond the Janissary’s understanding and he made no attempt to puzzle it out. He trusted his superiors when they, with desperate urgency, told them that this assault must kill the beast before it reached Delanna.

“You see that ship we’re headed to? Our orders are simple. We stop it.”

Lolot wondered if the Crusader and the other officers had known what was waiting for the strike teams aboard this ship, the slaughter he and his people had walked into. He shook his head, both sights of eyes blinking, one after the other. They’d been warned to expected ‘severe resistance’, but how could anyone have imagined the things aboard this abominate hulk?

They’d lost nearly half their people just fighting to break out of their breach sites and more with ever step of the way. Communications between teams broke down, the heavy bulkheads and thick hull disrupting comms. Lotol didn’t mind the silence. It was better than the screams.

The Janissary didn’t have to wonder what was happening to those shrieking voices; it was the same thing that had happened to his platoon. Gravity plates triggering and crushing soldiers to the floor. Inertial dampeners cutting out and throwing the invaders into bulkheads at speeds that not even their armour could protect them. Defensive emplacements guarding each doorway, rising from behind the walls, deck and walls, their fire wracking anyone in their sight. Radiation pulses that cooked men and women alive inside their suits, and all of that was just the ship itself fighting them. There were many more nightmares within its passageways, all lethal.

Nanoswarm clouds set upon those with breaches in their armour, flooding through their tissues and overwhelming defensive nanites to devour soldiers from the inside out. Skittering insect-like worker drones leapt on you, cutting with torches, vomiting molecular acid, biting, clawing or simply exploding like self-propelled grenades. Snaking, centipede-like things undulated through zero-g decks or raced towards you on their dozens of legs. Crawling arachnid things that ate the dead, assembling and repairing other horrors. Monstrosities like walking tanks. Motile gun platforms. Hunter-killers that flashed through the halls like raptors on the hunt. Others that the advocate, submissive couldn’t even describe.

Then, the soldiers. Blindingly fast and hellishly accurate, their every shot seemed to find weak points in armour; seams, visors, speaker grilles. Every bullet and beam that couldn’t breach the Janissaries’ armour was placed with merciless precision. Others appeared from nothing, from recessed shadows and clear corners, men and women screaming as they were lifted off the ground, skewered by unseen claws whose bearers only became visible as their victims’ blood gushed over them. Others had blank, featureless faces upon which images of the ship’s previous victims were projected – including others among the strike team.

More and more and more. Every deck, every corridor, ever corner revealed some new horror. Lotol’s team had bled relentlessly, fighting through the assault only because so many other sites on the vessel had been struck and the monstrous intelligence that laired within this thing had to divide its resources. At least, that was what he assumed. Some of the platoon had said they’d broken through its defences. They and their optimism lay dead in the beast’s blood-soaked halls. Whatever the reason for their success, they’d been making progress. That was all he cared about.

Lotol didn’t even feel the weight of the package on his back. He continued to limp forward, plasma cutter mag-locked to one thigh, shotcannon held ready, but nothing else was moving. Ahead lay the round double doors of the ship’s bridge. Upon them was emblazoned a winged sigil he didn’t recognize, with alien text he couldn’t read.

The package was a customized mindkiller. He didn’t know Delanna had had any, but the garrison had had several. This one had been hastily modified to be man-portable. Other teams had carried megaton-yield nukes. Minimally effective against the ship’s outer armour, but inside they would rip through the internal structure. He didn’t know if any had gone off. He hadn’t felt the reverberations that a city-killing bomb should have sent through the length of this vessel, but he couldn’t worry about that. His team had been commanded to detonate the package inside the bridge, and as long as he still drew breath, that mission hadn’t yet failed.

To either side of him, holed by wild fire and partially or totally collapsed by explosions, thrown bodies and the fury of the last, frantic battle, were ranks of suits. They ran the gamut of ramshackle civilian EVA gear to military powered armour much like his own. Some were decades, possibly even centuries old. Others looked as if they could have been plucked from a modern armoury.

A traitorous part of the Janissary wondered if his suit would have the honour of joining all these other failed attempts to kill the beast. He dismissed it. His team – the ragged remnants of a platoon, now down to whoever had somehow survived the fight to get here – had been wiped out by an ambush. More phantoms hidden among the suits, and things within the suits themselves. They’d struck when the Janissaries were half-way down the hall.

Crusader Vorses had been the first to die, followed instants later by the vanguard and rearguard soldiers. In seconds, the survivors had been penned into a cage of hateful, killing metal. When it ended, Lotol was the only one standing.

“Was that it?” the Tribune demanded to the air. The machine hadn’t deigned to speak with them since they’d landed. “Was that all you have?” He shouldered the tribarrel and pressed the cutter against the metal. These doors were made of the same material as the outer hull and inner core, thick enough that setting the package off out here wouldn’t work. He had to get inside. He was so close. These doors were the only thing between him and victory. They weren’t going to stop him.

“You didn’t stop me!” he shouted. “You killed everyone else, but not me! If you want me, you’re going to have to do more than that!” He would have to work quickly. The machine would be racing reinforcements to this position, and it might have additional defences on the other side.

Whatever was there, he’d deal with it. Lotol’s finger tightened on the cutter’s trigger, ready to burn a path to victory.

Before he could press the trigger, the doors parted opening with a speed and silence that belied their bulk. Off-balance and putting too much weight on his crippled leg, Lotol fell. He rose back up to his knees, but before he could climb back to his feet, he felt something cold slide through his back and into his guts. He looked down. Four bale-claws just like the ones that had murdered his comrades were sticking out of his torso, the disruptor fields upon them hissing and sizzling as the gore upon them was burnt away.

A voice whispered in his good ear. It was that of a young woman, smooth and silky soft but laden with hatred. “As you wish.”

He tried to fight, but he couldn’t find the strength to rise. His phylactery flatlined, its dispensing tubes cut. Even a Tribune’s body had limits and he had finally reached his. The threshold to the bridge lay less than a foot in front of him. Lotol’s outstretched fingers strained, but he couldn’t even reach across the threshold.

He could feel things crawling on him, ticking and clicking. More of the little machines, disarming the mindkiller. “No,” Lotol growled, trying to pull himself off the impaling claws. “This isn’t over. It’s not over!”

“You’ve had a long night,” the beast whispered sveltely, but there was nothing gentle in its tone. “It’s time to rest.” Lotol shuddered as he felt the claws in his torso withdraw and he fell to the deck. He couldn’t feel his legs. Medical alerts flashed across his HUD in dire orange, but overwhelming that was the glow filling the hallway. More of the killing machines stood to either side of the open doors, but he could barely see them for the light filling the room.

The star Delanna shone before him, filling the ship’s empty bridge with its light. On the main monitor, an inset image showed Delanna One, calculations and text he couldn’t read rushing by. “But don’t worry,” the machine spoke again. This time its voice didn’t come from the phantom standing over him. It came from the empty chamber ahead of him, awash with the light of a star.

On one monitor, he saw a countdown begin.

“You’re just in time,” the young woman’s voice echoed through the empty room, still thick with malice, but now also excited by whatever she was counting down to, “to see day break.”