Supreme Leader of Anstractor: A Sci-Fantasy Space Adventure (The New Phase Book 3) (16 page)

“Wow, that sounds so cool and evil at the same time,” young Jaden said. “Did you know anyone who refused?”

“No, but I knew people who failed at becoming persons, which is what they used to call a Phaser upon graduation. Look, Jaden, I know that I come off as some sort of superhero to you kids but I want you to really think about it with this Phaser thing.”

“Yes, sir, of course,” he said, but Rafian wondered if he was really heeding his warning.

“Since I took over, I have changed the rules to stop people from losing their life due to failure. You asked me if I knew anyone who refused, but the people who did all that work and made it there still died when they couldn’t pass the final exam. It is the hardest test that you will ever face in your life, and it is a waste of a career to become the best just to die at a spy academy.”

“But you made it, sir, and I aspire to be just like you. I don’t think those people wasted their lives. They did a lot for the Alliance, killed Geralos, and were great officers before they became Phasers. As Phasers you do so much more, so dying to achieve that is still great. At least I think so.”

“You’re wise beyond your years, Jaden,” Rafian said.

The ship passed by many exits before Jaden flew them through one with a glowing ‘X’ above it. Rafian noticed that there were no other transports in the tunnel and he wondered if the captain kept the passageway exclusive to himself. They popped out above a large lounge area. There were officers lounging on comfortable sofas, and a large window that showed the exterior of the
Aqnaqak
where Traxis loomed beautifully, like a big, glowing ball of pink.

Jaden landed the transport near this window and then escorted Rafian up some stairs to a door which opened up to a lobby. The
Aqnaqak
seemed like the imperial palace compared to
Rendron
and
Helysian
, and Rafian was in awe at how immaculate everything was. Jaden stopped in front of the sole door at the end of the lobby and smiled at Rafian, who then touched the door, which opened up to the captain’s quarters.

He stepped inside of a large office where a slight, older man was waiting for him, standing next to his desk. “Thank you, cadet,” he announced. Jaden saluted sharply, then faced Rafian to do the same before walking back to the other end of the lobby.

“Impressive boy,” Rafian said when he left. He walked over to shake hands with the
Aqnaqak
’s captain. “Urlando TYP, I can’t believe it’s taken this long for me to make it here. The last time we met was, what? A year ago in Meluvia?

“My word, Rafian VCA in the flesh.” Urlando laughed. “Yeah, I was wondering when you would come aboard and see the ship. Do you know that your name appears over 150 times in the textbooks of Alliance history?”

“I wasn’t aware but let me say this. The hospitality and love that I have received since coming aboard has swelled my heart beyond capacity. I cannot express my gratitude enough, especially after the hell that I dealt with on Traxis. Thank you, Commander, it is my honor, and I already feel like
Aqnaqak
is a second home.”

“No, you honor us, hero. Please take a seat, and call me Ury. Do you need anything?”

“I have a favor to ask, if you don’t mind. I have a Traxian woman in my party. She’s without money, friends, and family, but I owe her my life due to things that happened down on the planet. I have over three million credits saved up on
Helysian
. I would like to have it transferred here to her account. Could you put her up, get her a handler, and give her a direct access to my comm link?”

“Sure thing, Rafian, it sounds like Traxis was a handful. And here I thought that planet was just a ball of sand. You seem so serious, and it’s made me curious. What have they got going on down there?”

“The lizards have set up feeding camps, Ury. They’re using the vacation hubs as traps. Go down there as a human and there’s a good chance you won’t return.”

“News like that makes me want to launch a few city crushers onto their surface,” Urlando said. “It’s as if we make two steps forward and the lizards just dance three ahead in a circle to keep us in place. Do you do vapors?”

Rafian shook his head. “Vapors are not good when part of your life is running for miles to chase the lizards. I will take a drink, though, my Meluvian friend. It’s been a while since I’ve had a glass of strong Alliance liquor.”

Urlando got up and poured Rafian a drink and set it in front of him. He lit into a cigar and sat back in his chair and inhaled its vapors slowly. “So, Raf, let us speak as friends,” he said in a much more casual tone. “When the door is closed to this place and I’m with a man like you, we can drop the formal pretext and level ourselves. The Traxian, she’s quite beautiful; is she special to you? Do you need me to keep her a secret away from our media?”

Rafian sipped at the brown liquor. It stung his tongue, causing him to make a face. “Whoa, this is Meluvian honey,” he said. “I’ve always heard about it but never tried it. This is a shot of fire to my tongue and throat!” Urlando laughed loudly at Rafian’s expression, and the Phaser tried to keep his cool despite the fire in his mouth. “Whew, okay, so Jinay – my Traxian friend. No need to keep her a secret. If I were you, I would keep her close and take care of her. The secrets of that
schtill
going down on the surface are known to her and just about every citizen down there.”

“You rescued Tim and Vessica from one of the Geralos, right? They attacked
Aqnaqak
family members, so that means we have to handle them. You do understand this, right?”

“
Aqnaqak
’s reputation is well known, Ury. Why do you think I talked Jinay into staying here? I knew that you would need to talk to her, since I have to get back to Zallus. The lizards have a primitive setup there to match with Traxis society. I won’t tell you how to do your job, but you have veterans on board that could do a lot of damage in a short time. Set them loose in the desert and I bet the lizards will be jumping off the planet with haste.”

“How are you going to get back to Zallus? That’s a week’s FTL jump from here. We have most of our dropships tied up on Geral, and I don’t know if—”

“No, no, no worries Captain, we have our own means of travel,” Rafian said. “I just need to use your secure comm to connect to the Phaser agency.”

T
HE MASSIVE CRUISER floated down through the black clouds of Geral like a shark, dipping low into the deepest recesses of the ocean. Rafian VCA stood in the center of the cockpit with his hands on the pilot seats for balance. He watched the clouds darken as they broke through them, and then everything went black.

“Sure you don’t want to strap in, Commander?” the slender, dark-haired pilot asked as he reached up to turn on the emergency lights as turbulence took hold and they began to rock violently.

“Nah, I like this part,” Rafian replied and planted his feet firmly. The co-pilot typed commands into a tablet near his left side, and then sirens started to blare all over the ship.

The clouds broke away to absolute chaos as the landscape showcased chasms spewing with molten rock. Geralos and Alliance fighters were ripping each other apart in a deadly dogfight, and Rafian found himself becoming excited. It had been ages since he took part in a fight like this and he wished that he were down there with his phantom.

A tracer shot towards them from a large building and the pilot banked them hard away from it. “
Schtill
!” he exclaimed and looked back at Rafian to see if he was hurt. But the Phaser was still in the center, standing and observing the war.

“I see a field over there, amidst the trees,” he announced. “Set us down there, Cory, and tell the marines to hop out with their guns blazing.” He flicked something on the sword that slung from his waist, and the pilot tilted their nose down in a sharp decline, taking them to the area where Rafian pointed.

With the Geralos under attack they had grown desperate, and many soldiers were having their minds invaded. Intel had gotten compromised, which put everyone on edge, and a call to Vestalia was something Rafian wouldn’t do. If a corrupted officer were to intercept his call, the Geralos command would learn about Zallus.

What Rafian figured out about their earlier attack was that it was an unsanctioned strike, backed by one of Maes Van Senthyn’s powerful friends. If Geralos command had known the location of their city there would have been a constant flow of attacks on their locale. The force they encountered must have been rogue, and they were fortunate that Tayden’s explosion had obliterated the threat.

The safest place to make contact would be from inside of the Geralos planet. The lizards had bigger problems here than worrying about a sole Phaser, Supreme Leader or not. So when he found out that
Aqnaqak
was sending soldiers down to the fight, he jumped at the chance to join them.

The trace laser stopped tracking them as soon as they broke the tree line, and the cruiser flew to the center of the green expanse of wet grass and landed. The alarms were silenced, and he could hear boots echo across the metallic floor. Over one hundred
Aqnaqak
marines jumped from the low hovering ship into the swampy field. Rafian tapped the pilot on the helmet then donned his COREX mask and marched towards the rear door. He slid it open, and secured it behind him, then moved on to the pressure lock that separated them from the deployment chamber. He twisted it, then pulled it open.

After securing that door so the Geralos atmosphere would stay out of the cockpit, Rafian walked over to the area they had designated was his and pulled a single-shot scout rifle from the wall. He had picked it out from an assortment of weapons and had chosen it due to its light weight. It was black and sleek, and the barrel extended into the shape of a triangle, where two metal attachments hung below it at angles—for snipers who could use the extra support when laying prone. He thought that the gun looked like a long, elaborate starship, and it was love at first sight when he first touched it.

Jumping down behind the slowly expanded circle of marines, Rafian lifted the scope to his eye and started moving forward slowly. All of a sudden, the Geralos were on them, some running at the soldiers, shooting recklessly, while others sat back and picked them off one at a time. Rafian returned fire on these would-be snipers, and several of the marines stepped back to do the same.

Aqnaqak
marines had a reputation in the Alliance, and this was reinforced by what Rafian saw in this fight. They were surrounded on all sides by the enemy, so the soldiers began to stagger their lines. The lower-ranked snipers knelt in front of their superiors, providing a shield and a shoulder for the more accurate shooters. Many took direct hits to their bodies but many more Geralos died from the shots that were volleyed back from the protected marksmen.

Two young men, barely past their cadet years, ran up and knelt in front of Rafian with their pulse rifles raised, firing blindly into the trees. Rafian didn’t like this but decided against arguing. He instead took advantage and began sending bullet after bullet into the dense, dark trees. Geralos snipers began to fall like old overripe fruit, and before long their line of attack weakened under the
Aqnaqak
response.

The marines reformed their line, but this time in a staggered pair of rings. They began to rotate men in and out in a complex spiral of shoot and move. The casualties lessened and they made it to the trees, where they convened on the area where the other Alliance soldiers were fighting.

This series of events took over two hours, Vestalian time, and the
Aqnaqak
warriors suffered over fifteen losses during the entire thing. Rafian looked back sadly to see the corpses in the swamp, but he caught a glimpse of Cory picking them up and dragging them back to the ship. “May you all return as kings,” Rafian muttered and refocused on the march. He shouldered his rifle and pulled out the las-sword, then ran ahead to the front of the line.

“How many scouts do you have out?” he asked the commander.

The redheaded woman flashed him a worried glance through her blood-spattered facemask. “We have three out, Commander. They say the Geralos are still running. Turns out that the ones here were not soldiers. Yeah, these were citizens of this country, trying to protect their homes. How’s that for irony, right? We’re now the invaders.”

“
Thype
them,” Rafian replied. “They don’t have to worry about us biting into the heads of their daughters.”

He touched her on the shoulder to give her some reassurance, then took off in front of them to do some scouting of his own. It had been a long time since Rafian played the part of a recon warrior, so the familiar feelings made him warm inside. Phasers had missions, not unlike the military, but as Supreme Leader his missions were mostly at the table with Alliance command, moving troops along on a strategic board.

He didn’t dislike his position, but there was something more real about playing in the dirt. He relished this chance at playing at scout, and he took it all in as he surged ahead of the company. Through the COREX mask he saw the splattered neon-colored blood of one of the scouts. Blood always glowed to warn the wearer, while everything else glowed a bright yellow or cyan.

The COREX mask on a well-trained Phaser made it impossible for the enemy to hide or escape, and Rafian took full advantage of this by doing a crouched run towards three glowing characters that were up in the trees. In the older days he would be in a 3B suit, with a cloaking device attached. Now he was in a borrowed pilot’s jumpsuit, and could be easily picked off just like that dead scout.

Rafian leveled his rifle at a branch, and took a shot where it connected to the tree. One of the Geralos snipers perched atop it fell to his death. As soon as he fired he darted for the tree and several shots tore into the ground behind him. He got to the trunk and phased high into the leaves, appearing on one of the topmost branches.

He waited silently as the snipers scrambled, trying desperately to find his body. One of their number sprayed the ground beneath the trees, killing a few unsuspecting animals that had scampered out of their holes at the sound of the excitement. Rafian switched the gun’s mode to silence, which was a less-lethal shot but deadly without the penalty of being too loud. He found one of the eyes of the Geralos shooting and put a bullet through it.

A shot hit the branch near where he sat and Rafian slipped and fell through the leaves to another. More shots were sent his way but he couldn’t see the person firing, so he flattened himself out on the branch and waited.

The shots came closer and he began to worry. Somewhere there was a cloaked Geralos that had a general idea of where he was. His eyes found the tree line and he sighed in relief as several bright yellow shapes glowed on the far side of the field. The sniper shot again, this time clipping the barrel of his rifle, but in response the marines sent a hailstorm of deadly fire his way. Rafian saw the cloak malfunction as the Geralos screamed and he fell dead to the grass where he once stood, invisible. He slipped down to the floor, dropping from branch to branch, then was back amongst the company who had picked up their pace considerably.

“The snipers here got your scouts,” Rafian announced to their commander. “They seem pretty well trained for poor farmers protecting their homes.”

“I don’t care what they are, they’re all going to die. I don’t know how many we would have lost had you not pushed forward, but I thank the Maker that we have you here,” she said. “One of our guys made it through and reported on the other side. The Alliance holds the cliffs on the edge of this forest. About 10
klicks
that direction and we should be with friends.”

Rafian nodded at the woman and drifted back amongst the ranks. His eyes stayed focused but his mind became a spiral of unnerving concern. He had been phasing a lot since the day he returned from Luca and as a result, his pupils had begun to take on properties that were beyond human. He worried that the crystals would change a lot more than his appearance after a while.

Still, he had found himself phasing whenever things seemed hopeless. He phased when it looked certain that the cats on Traxis would rend his flesh clean from his bones, and he phased when the snipers had him in their sights just now. If he really tried, he knew that he could find other times when phasing had gotten him out of tough spots, but now he worried that he was changing, and he wondered if his clone would return from death with the changes his body had undergone.

Rafian was not sure if he wanted to revert the changes that had occurred to his physiology. His pupils made him appear cybernetic and that was not something he was excited about. But he was lighter, quicker and stronger, and this went beyond the physical conditioning that made the Phasers who they were. The crystals, jumping, and his continued exposure had made him into a demi-god. The others hadn’t experience combat with him to notice it, but the enemies that died beneath his blade surely had.

He thought back on how easy it was for him to track down and slaughter over twenty-five people on Traxis. He knew that the boy he spared would sing nightmares of his wicked hunt, but he wondered why it didn’t bother him.

“A Phaser,” someone said, and he glanced to his left to see that a tall, slender soldier was keeping pace with him. “So, what’s that like, being able to wipe out armies with your bare hands?”

Rafian regarded the young man for a time before saying, “Do you really believe that, or do you want me to start bragging to convince you?”

“No, sir, I really do want to know. We hear so much about the Phasers, but I thought that it was all lies – until I saw you picking off those lizards.”

“All of us were chosen because we were the best on our respective ships. A collective of fighters like that, and you’re bound to see some impressive things when they take the battlefield.”

“Name’s Kotar LAR, Commander. It’s an honor to fight next to you. I’m not the best, but I made Staff Sergeant faster than anyone else in
Aqnaqak
history.”

“Is that so?” Rafian said, genuinely interested.

“Yes, sir. Captain TYP himself pinned the planets on my chest. I’ve been studying your Phasers since my time as a cadet, but I never thought that I would meet one, let alone Rafian VCA!”

“Pleasure’s mine, Kotar. I am more at home down here with you all than you would believe. I was a marine once, ambitious and ready, just like you are now. But one thing you Alliance soldiers tend to miss is that becoming a Phaser is not a prize that any young person should aspire for.”

“Why not, sir? The Phasers make a difference. We grunts are sent in with specific missions, which we carry out and leave. Phasers get to be a part of the actual changes. I would love to know that I’m making a difference beyond being a good soldier and following orders.”

“But you are making a difference, Kotar. Phasers are nothing without the military out here fighting the actual war.”

Kotar’s redheaded First Lieutenant trudged over to where they were, and leaned in close to Rafian. Kotar backed up in deference and Rafian looked curiously at the woman as she whispered through her headset. “Got a moment, Commander? I have Captain MEC of the
Rendron
on the comm.”

“Rend!” Rafian exclaimed with surprise, and the happiness in his voice surprised the woman. They had just broken past the line of trees to a burned-out plain where hundreds of tents sat beneath a force field near a tall, black-faced cliff. Scouts were sent forward to warn the soldiers that they were friendly, and the marines picked up their pace even more.