Spitting river water from her mouth and brushing her silver hair out of her face, Keryn clutched her bruised backside and gasped for breath.
“What the hell was that?” she screamed after finally taking in a lung full of air.
“I tried to warn you,” Adam replied, swimming over to her. “Apparently the surface tension on this planet is significantly higher than anywhere else we’ve been. I found out the hard way too,” he finished, showing the spreading bruise on his ribs.
“You could have warned me just a little sooner instead of just…,” she paused, “staring. Now you owe me one.”
Adam covered the rest of the distance between them in a couple powerful strokes of his arms. “However can I make it up to you,” he replied in mock penitence. He stared deeply into her eyes, his blue reflecting in her deep violet eyes.
A coarse laugh caused them both to turn. Penchant stood on the embankment laughing. Though capable of changing forms at will, the Lithids could do nothing to change their voices, which remained rough and gravelly.
Keryn narrowed her eyes and stared at the bearded persona Penchant had adopted. “Don’t start laughing now, Lithid. This isn’t just a social stop along our way. You may not have sweat glands that excrete body odor, but the rest of us smell terrible and are going to scrub thoroughly before getting dressed. I’m not spending a few days in close confines with us smelling that bad.” She turned to Adam, who had inched closer through the dense water. “That means you, lover boy.”
Dejected, Adam swam away and began scrubbing some of the grime that had collected over their months of travel. Penchant moved around the edge of the water, keeping watch over the two as they washed.
As Penchant stood on the far shore, staring at the encroaching wilderness, Keryn finished her diligent washing and walked onto dry land. She stood, letting the hot sun dry the beads of water that rolled down her naked back, down her strong legs, and pooled on the ground at her feet. Tilting her head, Keryn began ringing the water from her hair.
Glancing over her shoulder, she called to Penchant. “Gather our clothes and come across. Give us a quick recon of the area ahead, while we get dressed.”
Penchant turned and disappeared down the far shoreline just as Adam emerged from the water, shaking himself dry like a dog.
“Are we sure we’re up for this?” he asked, the flirtatious humor now replaced with deadly focus.
“Unfortunately, no,” she replied, frustrated. “We know Cardax won’t be alone within the city, so we’ll have to be careful. On Pteraxis, he didn’t know what we looked like and it still ended badly for us.” Penchant approached them from out of the jungle. He dropped their gathered belongings at their feet and both Keryn and Adam began dressing.
“Aside from his crew, we have to assume that Cardax came here because he knew he was being followed and could find sanctuary. That means we are definitely walking into a trap. What we don’t know is how many men he’ll have waiting.”
“So we go in, guns blazing?” Adam asked, excitement reflecting in his blue eyes.
“No,” Keryn said, firmly. “We aren’t carrying enough firepower to bring down an entire city and, for all we know, Cardax has the entire city supporting him. No, this mission is going to take a level of stealth.” She glanced over at the Lithid. “Penchant is our ace in the hole. He’s the one face Cardax will never recognize, no matter how many times he sees him.”
“Stealth,” Adam grimly echoed. While an exceptional fighter with both firearms and hand-to-hand combat, Adam had never excelled at stealth. His towering frame and Terran features made him easily recognizable in Interstellar Alliance space.
Keryn sympathized with Adam’s frustration. She would have preferred to enter the city with guns drawn, firing round after round into anyone stupid enough to ally themselves with Cardax. She still reveled in the memory of destroying one of Cardax’s two escaping ships at Pteraxis. But, even as skilled as they were, they simply didn’t have the firepower to win an extended war with Cardax and his cohorts. The enemy had the option to win the war simply through attrition.
Buttoning her pants and pulling her shirt over her head, Keryn turned toward her two patriots. “Knowing Cardax, he’ll be near the spaceport, so we’ll start our search there. My worry is that even though we’ve looked at the map so many times my eyes feel like they’re going to bleed, we don’t know the city. Cardax does. We don’t know how many enemies we will face. Cardax does. We don’t even know where he’s hiding inside the city, even though we know where to start. What I do know is that the course of the war with the Terran Empire hangs in the balance. If we succeed, we can defeat the Terrans once and for all. If we fail, it will be more than just our lives lost. If that isn’t enough to motivate you, than ask yourself one important question.”
She paused, smiling wickedly. “If you’re dead, how are you going to be able to take your revenge on Cardax, one broken bone at a time?”
Adam and Penchant both laughed maliciously, knowing what she was referring to. Both had gone through the same special operations training that Keryn had, to include interrogation techniques. Clipped to the belts of all three of them was a small pouch, which contained a small rock hammer and a pair of serrated scalpels. When it came time to gather information from Cardax, it would not be a pleasant experience for the Oterian smuggler.
Keryn latched her belt around her waist, adjusting her sidearm on her hip, and pulled on her coat. Adam strapped his tinted goggles onto his forehead, his blond hair jutting over the top of the round glasses, and tucked his modified rifle firmly against his side, allowing it to virtually disappear beneath his loose jacket.
“Alright you two, let’s get going,” she said, turning toward the humid jungle. “We’re burning daylight.”
CHAPTER 3:
As Doctor Solomon’s pre-programmed speech played, the gears and hydraulics controlling the dozens of satellite dishes whirred to life as his computer program ran though its start up protocols. Each dish moved independent of one another, each finding a programmed target in Earth’s orbit. As they clicked into place, one after another, they began broadcasting the same signal.
The data bursts leapt from the Earth, striking seemingly dormant satellites in Earth’s atmosphere. The long- range telemetry satellites, finally glowing with previously latent power, fired small maneuvering rockets, realigning toward their remote targets. Firing massive bursts of energy and encoded data, the signal launched into the void of space.
The signals traveled, unhindered, through the vacuum of space. Invisible to the naked eye, the signals passed within mere meters of traveling ships and crossed over heavily trafficked trade routes.
For some signals, the journey lasted mere hours before reaching their targets. For others, the journey would take months of near light-speed travel before it would reach the receptors that remained angled toward the distant Earth.
The signals with the shortest distance reached their targets before anyone knew of the danger. They struck their target with such speed that warning sirens were never raised. Silently, their untimely death traveled through the void, intent on their demise.
The first signal struck a small heat-shielded ship, which hung in a low orbit around the sun of the Protagon Galaxy, which was inhabited by a race of amphibians that had supplied minor military support to the Interstellar Alliance. Though unmanned, the ship received the signal and altered its course. Dipping its wings, it began a haphazard decent onto the surface of the sun. The metal plating on the ship began to bubble as it entered the sun’s atmosphere. The damage to the ship increased as friction and heat from the surface struck the hull in waves. Strips of metal began to run like wax under the intense heat and panels broke free and disintegrated under the assault.
Through the waves of ambient heat, the ship continued its suicidal decent. The nose of the ship broke apart, exposing the alloy girders that formed the framework of the craft. Fire and acrid smoke filled the cabin of the shuttlecraft, setting fire to the minor furniture that decorated the stripped quarters. As the ship neared the surface of the sun, the last of the metal plates on the exterior of the ship melted away. The girders themselves began to twist and bend under the temperature and pressure, exposing a single black canister that seemed impervious to the
