Fall of Icarus

weapons toward the thick hull of the Destroyer. Slamming her fist onto the console, she cursed loudly to herself, her voice echoing through the cockpit.

Moving her hand aside, Keryn saw the blue dots held in a state of suspended animation as she waited for the next update to arrive. The signals from the radar that did slip through the hull were frozen moments in time, no longer displayed as an up to date real time analysis. As she watched, the screen flickered again as another signal burst was uploaded to her computer system. Keryn exclaimed as the blue dots ceased to be the only images on the screen. Hugging the north end of the screen, in the direction that the team had been moving, nearly a dozen red dots had appeared. More disturbing to Keryn was the image that appeared between the Cair Ilmun and the boarding team. Doing a quick mental count as the image shifted again, Keryn counted over thirty red dots, signifying Terran soldiers, moving into a flanking position behind Yen’s team. She reached so quickly to the microphone at her throat that she had to cough roughly from the trauma to her neck as she violently pressed the microphone activation button.

“Yen, this is Keryn!” she yelled anxiously into the microphone. “Yen, come in!”

She waited, but the only response was the white noise of building static. Either they had moved too far away to get a clear signal or they were too engaged in a battle to answer the radio. Either way, they had no way to know that they were in trouble.

You could warn them, the Voice offered.

“The hull is blocking the signal,” Keryn said out loud, her voice sounding fretful in the empty cockpit.

The hull is. But there isn’t a hull in your way if you go onto the Destroyer.

Keryn’s eyes drifted back to the sealed hatch just inside the crew compartment. The boarding tube was still attached and granted access inside the Destroyer. The radar hadn’t shown any signals close by yet, which meant she would have time to warn Yen before they triangulated her signal and began moving in her direction. It could be done, but she’d have to move now.

With little more than a thought, Keryn leapt from the pilot’s chair and rushed back to the hatch. Flipping the locking switches to the side, she pulled back on the large door. As the hatch finally opened and locked into the upright position, Keryn was able to peer into the darkness beyond the flexible tube keeping the Cair Ilmun attached like a parasite to the Terran ship. She knew that the radar could have been wrong. The Terrans could be waiting in the dark room below, ready to ambush her as she recovered from disorientation after dropping into their artificial gravity. Still, the ache in her chest reminded her that Yen was in trouble. With only the briefest pause to pull her pistol, Keryn stepped over the ledge and dropped into the hole.

As she became weightless, her braid of silver hair floated behind her as she dropped. The change from gravity to weightlessness was disorienting, as though she had plunged from a dock and was now submerged in frigid water. For a moment, she struggled to take a breath as she was overwhelmed by the sensation of drowning. As quickly as the feeling began, however, it disappeared as her lower half entered the Terran’s atmosphere. The artificial gravity within the Destroyer yanked her downward, where she fell and took her first full gulp of breath. As her heart slowed its erratic beating, she keyed the microphone.

“Yen,” she whispered, fearful of disrupting the still silence around her. “This is Keryn, do you copy?”

The reply was more than the harsh static she had been hearing. His reply, though still broken, was also punctuated by sporadic gunfire. “… read you,” Yen yelled over the radio. “…busy… now.”

Frustrated, Keryn moved into the hall, trying to get a better reception. With the Cair Ilmun unguarded, she didn’t want to wander too far for fear of it being destroyed or, worse, boarded by Terrans. Still, her priority remained warning Yen and the rest of his team of the danger maneuvering behind them. She moved stealthily down the silver-walled hallway, slipping from alcove to alcove as she headed deeper into the heart of the Destroyer.

“Yen, do you read me?” Keryn tried again over the microphone.

This time, his reply was only slightly distorted, though she could sense the irritation in his voice. “I read you, Keryn, but we’re a little busy right now. I don’t really have time to talk…” The rest of his sentence was drowned out by nearby gunfire. “We’ve run into some stiff resistance.”

“I know, damn it!” Keryn yelled, her own irritation growing. “But you’ve got more heading your way!”

“Say again?” Yen replied, his voice finally reaching some semblance of clarity.

“There are nearly thirty Terran soldiers moving around to flank you while you’re busy with the group in front of you. You need to get your team out of there now.”

There was a pause over the radio; a nerve-wracking silence that stretched longer than Keryn would have liked. She hoped she hadn’t waited too long before notifying Yen. Finally, to her relief, he replied. “How long do we have?” Keryn noted a gratifying lack of weapons fire in the background.

“A few minutes,” she answered as she approached a hallway intersecting the passage she moved down. “Maybe less depending — “

She was interrupted as two Terrans stepped around the corner, as surprised to see her as she was to see them. Their weapons still hung at their side as both sides stared at one another.

“Keryn,” Yen’s worrisome voice called over her radio. “Are you there? Are you okay?”

In a surprisingly calm voice, Keryn replied. “I’ll be with you in a second.”

As the front most Terran began to raise his weapon, Keryn lashed out with the pistol in her hand, stabbing forward with the barrel as though it were a knife. The heavy barrel struck him between the upper plates on his body armor and the visor on his helmet. She felt the muscles in his neck tighten as he exhaled loudly and began gasping for breath. The Terran’s eyes widened as he noticed the calm, calculated look in Keryn’s eyes as she squeezed the trigger. Leaving the barrel at point blank range, the bullet tore into the soldier’s neck, shredding through muscle and trachea. It passed unabashed through his carotid artery before ripping out the back of his neck, only barely missing his spine. Gurgling as blood poured into his crushed throat, the Terran clutched in a steadily weakening attempt to stop the jet of blood that smeared across the silver wall.

Before the front Terran could collapse to his knees, Keryn launched a roundhouse kick that knocked aside the second soldier’s rifle, jarring it free from his hands. Disarmed, he reached forward, his thick hands closing around her neck. Shifting her weight backward, she drove the heel of her left foot into the Terran’s kneecap. With a satisfying snap, she heard the bone break. Howling, the Terran dropped to his knees, his leg no longer able to support his weight. Keryn broke free of his grip and leapt in the air, bringing her heel around in a spinning kick that landed solidly on the Terrans plastic visor. As it shattered, shards of the visor flew into the Terran’s eyes and bit into his flesh. Keryn watched him only momentarily, reveling in the blood seeping from his ruined face and running between his fingers, before drawing her knife and driving it into his chest. Twitching once, the Terran laid still. She didn’t have to bother turning toward the other soldier. His destroyed windpipe had allowed blood to pool in the depths of his lungs. The amount of blood that had poured from his body coated the ground, leaving it tacky. Looking down, Keryn wasn’t sure if the soldier had asphyxiated before dying of blood loss. In the end, his means of death mattered little.

Leaning down, Keryn rolled the bloody Terran over so she could see his face. A deep seeded curiosity filled her as she knelt beside his body, running her hand over his strong features. Though she had spent enough time around Adam, her former roommate Iana, and the other Pilgrims onboard the Revolution to not be surprised by the appearance of the Terran soldier, it felt different to stare into the face of an enemy. She had never seen a Terran so close before, though she had heard more than her fair share of stories of the atrocities they committed during the Great War. She couldn’t help but associate the ideal of the Empire with violence and aggression. Growing up, the Terran Empire was the antagonist in all her childhood bedtime stories. But the face before her didn’t seem as demonic as the stories had always described. In his death, the Terran almost looked at peace.

“Keryn, are you there?” The radio broke her from her meditations. “Talk to me. What’s going on?”

Keryn keyed her microphone. “I’m fine,” she said calmly, before remembering why she came aboard in the first place. “You need to get your group out of there now, Yen. They know where you are and are closing in on your position.”

Suddenly, the lights went out, casting the interior of the Destroyer into impenetrable darkness.