Chapter 3
I flew through the air for a couple of feet and landed with a thud on the ground. Fortunately, my suit took the brunt of the impact, so I was back on my feet and standing tall in no time.
The same couldn’t be said for the wall beside me, which came crashing down in a waterfall of stone, wires, and stasis tubes. I put my hands over my head and ran out from underneath the falling wall as parts of the building started to rain down on me. Rocks bounced off my arms and back as I raced toward the center of the room, and I just hoped that all the walls didn’t come down at once and crush me.
My head was scrambled and the adrenaline had made my muscles twitch and my mind empty. I hadn’t had a moment to think back there after the rock hit, since I had been in flight mode as soon as I had seen it. My mouth was dry, and I rolled my shoulders and shook my head in order to get my mind to switch back on.
I turned back when I heard something heavy smash into the ground, and I saw the rest of the wall topple down like some enormous drawbridge right on top of the Karaak soldier’s body. Whatever chance we’d had at recovering some of the enemy’s technology was probably destroyed right then.
The enormous object that had come down and caused the destruction of the wall must have been the same thing that destroyed everything on Lilacron in the first place. I hadn’t gotten a good look at it, but from a distance, it had resembled a burning and steaming meteor tumbling toward the planet with precision. Whatever had sent it down had impeccable aim, and there had been no hiccups. The burning ball of destruction had done what it was built to do, and it had wiped out part of the room that I was in, as well as many other parts of the citadel, in seconds.
However, that meant that whatever had shot it was still out there somewhere, and it didn’t take a genius to know who had sent it down. They had probably realized that the citadel was where most of the Lilacrons were and had decided to ensure the area’s complete destruction.
I was a little surprised they hadn’t tried to reclaim the corpse of their soldier just to keep their technology secret, but maybe they figured the attack would solve that problem as well. The strike had been in the exact room where the soldier had gone down, so that made sense.
I couldn’t imagine the whole fleet was still here, but at least one of the ships was, and that was what had sent the flaming, rocky fireball down on our heads. They were brutal. They were ruthless. And clearly, they were thorough.
The Karaak were still here.
Eventually, my brain decided to snap out of the initial shock of the situation, and a sense of panic set into my body.
“Oh, shit,” I gasped. “Rayne? Rayne, where are you?”
She had been right at the back of the room when the blast had hit. I had told her to run, but it was already too late. The walls had fallen in before she’d had a chance to get to me, let alone to get to the exit behind me, and now all that was left of the room was a pile of a crumbled wall, broken stasis tubes, and dust. The other three walls were still intact, but I knew that it wouldn’t be long before they came down too.
I began to hurriedly pick my way back through the room toward where Rayne had been standing. Where the high wall had towered over me and the stasis tube alcoves had lined the enormous room, all that was left now were piles of shattered, dusted bricks. There was no way that I could see the floor anymore, so I climbed over it all and started to scramble toward the back of the room. Rocks slipped out from under my feet, but I didn’t let them slow me down. I had to find her. I couldn’t just leave her here, under all the wreckage. I had to make sure she was alright.
“Will, this is not a good idea,” Francine said. “The room is unstable, and it is unlikely that--”
“I don’t care, Francine,” I said. “Rayne’s in there. I’m going in.”
“But the rest of the building could start to break down at any moment,” Francine argued. “It is not logical to--”
“I don’t give a crap about logic,” I replied as I reached the entrance to the stasis tube room. “Rayne’s with me. She’s here because I brought us here. I’m going to find her.”
“But--” Francine began.
“I’m not leaving her under a pile of rubble!” I shouted as I scrambled through the room. “Rayne?”
There was no reply.
“Maybe she’s unconscious,” I muttered. “Maybe she’s under some stones so I can’t hear her.”
“Will, if one of those walls fell on her, then I do not think she would have survived it,” Francine said.
“Thanks for that, Francine,” I hissed. “Positive as ever.”
Francine didn’t speak again, and I think she realized she had hit a nerve with me. We both knew that if Rayne was dead, then I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself.
I arrived at the part of the room where I had last seen her standing, and I began to pull stones and broken stasis tubes out of the way to see what was underneath. My added strength, plus the help from my suit, meant that I was able to pick up or push the larger pieces of wall without using too much energy. I threw the pieces aside, and I didn’t stop once to catch my breath or roll my shoulders. The less time she was crushed under all of this, the more time I would have to save her.
“Francine,” I said. “Scan for any signs of life.”
“I am, Will,” the AI replied. “But the amount of debris around us is interfering with what I am able to detect.”
“Damn it,” I grunted through bared teeth. “Rayne?”
Suddenly, I was able to see some pale flesh buried underneath some bricks. I threw them out of the way until I was able to free what I discovered was an arm, but as I grabbed hold of it, I realized it was ice cold.
“No, no, no, no, no…” I muttered as I pushed more debris out of the way.
Once I had a better view of the arm, I peered through the shadows, and pulled it upward slightly. In the dim daylight, I was able to see the extremely pale skin and the purple veins that ran underneath it.
“It’s a Lilacron,” I sighed. “It’s not her.”
I put the arm back down carefully and took a deep breath. Half of me was filled with relief that the body hadn’t been Rayne’s, but half of me was still racked with worry about where she could be. There was no way I would be able to move all of the rubble out of the way to make sure I had checked every inch of the room before the Karaak returned for another attack.
“Ow,” a voice said suddenly just up ahead of me.
“Rayne?” I shouted as I hurried toward the source of the sound.
I ran around one of the larger chunks of the wall, and I let out a huge sigh of relief when I saw her lying on the floor behind it. She looked groggy and a bit disoriented, but she was alive, and that was all that mattered.
“I think I flew,” she giggled as I helped her to her feet.
“So did I,” I chuckled as I pulled her in for a quick hug. “Thank God you’re okay.”
“I saw you fly through the air,” she said as she put one hand to my cheek. “I didn’t know what to think.”
“Are you hurt?” I asked as I pulled away and started to examine her face.
“I’m fine, Will,” she said with a smile.
“Okay,” I sighed happily.
“Not to ruin the mood, but you should probably get a move on,” Francine said.
“Mmhmm,” I replied quietly, not wanting to look away from Rayne’s green eyes or break out of the relief I felt that she was alive.
“Francine’s telling us to move, isn’t she?” Rayne chuckled.
“Yeah,” I sighed.
“Then we should probably listen,” she said.
“Yeah,” I replied.
“Only trouble is…” Rayne said as she turned to look at the ship. “How do we get to the ship?”
As if on cue, I heard another rushing sound that was just like what I had heard before the first of the Karaak’s fireballs had hit. The rest of the room and the three walls that were still standing began to quake, and I saw more cracks beginning to form along the walls. I turned back to look at the passage we had entered the room through, but there was a load of rubble in front of it, and there was also no way we would be able to reach it before the rock got to us. We needed another way out, and we needed it now.
“Francine, where’s another exit in this room?” I asked.
“In the very back corner,” Francine replied.
“Then that’s where we’re going,” I said, and a newfound determination set into my mind as we pressed on.
I grabbed Rayne’s hand and together, we started to sprint as fast as we possibly could toward the back of the room. As I ran, I pressed the neckline of my suit. The headpiece began to grow up my neck, over my face, and sealed itself at the top of my head, which meant that now my entire body was protected by the alien material.
However, before we could get there, I looked up and realized that the giant rock was almost on us.
“Get down!” I told Rayne.
She ducked, and I folded myself over her to protect her.
The rock ripped through one of the other walls and then came to a halt when it powered into the floor by the passage that we had entered through. If we had started running back that way, then we would have been like bugs on a windshield underneath that thing. It was a good thing that we had started to run the other way.
The impact caused the ground to shake, and the rock itself had gone through the floor like a hot knife through butter and was embedded about ten feet down into the earth below the building. Rayne and I almost lost our balance, but eventually, the shaking stopped enough for me to get off her. We both stood up straight and got our bearings.
“Thanks,” Rayne said in response to me acting like her human shield.
“I’ve got a suit, you don’t,” I replied.
There was a loud rumble as the rest of the walls started to break down. The room started to fill with a thick fog of brick dust, and pieces of rubble that got increasingly bigger started to fall down from the collapsing walls toward us.
“Will--” Francine began.
“I know,” I sighed. “Time to go.”
I grabbed Rayne’s hand again and we started to run toward the back exit again. I looked up at the sky, thanks to the missing ceiling, and I could see the brick dust billowing up and fighting against the ash cloud coming down. I tried to spot the ship that had shot the space rock at us, but so far, I couldn’t see anything.
My foot slipped on a rock, and I turned my focus back to the ground, and to getting us to that exit. It was hard to think with so much happening at once, so I didn’t. I just kept running. I felt rocks under my feet, I heard the crunch of glass as I stepped on it, and I winced whenever my feet stepped on something soft, since there was only one thing that it could have been. I just hoped that Francine hadn’t noticed me treading on any of the Lilacron bodies.
“Will, above you!” Francine said, and I looked up to see a massive rock hurtling down toward me.
Rayne looked up as well, and her eyes widened. We both leapt forward and rolled down one of the hills of rubble, and a second later the rock smashed into the ground exactly where we had been standing. It sent smaller rock pieces flying all over the place, but a couple of bricks hitting me was definitely a better option than being buried by an entire section of wall.
Another smaller piece of stone started to fall toward us as I sat on the rubble, and I aimed my gun upward and shot a laser through it. It shattered into hundreds of tiny flakes of stone that simply bounced off my protective suit and hardly touched Rayne at all. I pushed myself back up onto my feet, helped her up, and kept moving. I watched two of the walls start to topple down, and as they went, they crashed into one another and created a sound as though a huge thundercloud had rumbled overhead.
I shot lasers whenever the bricks in front of me were too large, and I powered my way through the room as fast as I could. But I could feel the walls creeping up behind us as they fell piece by piece, and we were only just outrunning the collapse. At one point, one of the falling pieces hit the heel of one of my feet, so I picked up the pace until I was running at a full sprint toward the way out.
As we got closer to the back of the room, I was able to see the very top of a doorway. It was filled to the brim with rocks, but I could see a faint light through the open crack at the top of the doorway. That was enough to fire both of us up. We reached the doorway and began to clear the rubble until there was an opening that was big enough for us to fit through. I helped Rayne through it, and then she disappeared down the pile into the passage beyond.
Then, it was my turn.
I slid through the gap and down the pile, followed by chunks of brick and mortar, and I found myself in an extremely tight hall and some very unstable walls on either side. There were more cracks along them than whole bricks, but somehow the walls were still upright. Still, I made sure not to brush against either of them, since by the look of it, even the slightest gust of wind could send the two walls crumbling to the ground.
Still, this part of the building was somewhat still intact, which gave me hope that we would be able to make it out of here alive.
I turned back to the doorway of the stasis room that was filled up with chunks of wall and ceiling. The gap we had squeezed through had already been filled up by pieces of what had once been a very grand room, and which was now just a collapsed remnant of what it had been just a few short moments ago.
“That was close,” Rayne panted.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I mean, it was exciting,” she said. “But close.”
I put my hand comfortingly on her back for a second, and then together, we walked down the passageway we had found ourselves in until we came to a T-junction.
“Okay, where now, Frankie?” I asked as I reached a T-junction.
“I would suggest you turn right,” Francine said, and I looked down the left passage and saw that it had fallen in.
“I would agree with that suggestion,” I replied. “Right it is.”
We turned right and hurried down the passage. We quickly found ourselves in a smaller room, equally destroyed, but with tons of broken hard drives all over the floor and other computer bits scattered across the ground.
“What a treasure trove,” Rayne said as she took in all of the destroyed tech.
“This was one of our central information storerooms,” Francine explained. “We kept medical information on each of our creators on the drives. All of their brain activity was monitored and recorded on the drives as well, every second of every day.”
“Damn,” I said. “That’s quite the operation.”
“It was our job to protect them and keep them alive and well,” the AI said with a hint of sadness in her voice. “We succeeded until today.”
There was an awkward pause as neither of us knew what to say next.
Suddenly, I heard the same rushing sound that I had heard earlier.
“Shit!” I shouted as I crouched down and braced for impact.
The next flaming rock smashed into the other side of the building. I braced myself and looked up at the sky and saw pieces of roof and wall flying through the air as the Karaak’s rocky cannonball powered into the citadel, and a second later, the whole room began to shake. We fought to stay on balance, and so did the walls, but it wasn’t long until I found myself feeling an immense sense of deja vu as the walls began to disintegrate around us.
We hurried through the storeroom and out into another hallway. We were thrown between the walls of the corridor as we ran, which sent pieces of plaster and brick falling to either side. However, we weren’t crushed under some heavy load just yet, so Rayne and I still had a chance to get out alive.
Then, another shot hit. And another. The second one was so intense that I was thrown forward onto my knees, and I planted my hands on the ground to stop myself from face planting. Rayne grunted as she was thrown onto the ground from the force of the impact, and we both struggled to get to our feet as we tried to balance on the floor, which shook like a paint shaker.
There was no doubt about it anymore. This place was going down.
I got to my feet, and so did Rayne, and we started to run. Francine told me which turns to take, which doorways to pass through, even as they collapsed above me, and which passages to avoid. At one point, we had to turn back as the passage suddenly collapsed right in front of us when another giant rock pounded another section of the citadel. It wouldn’t be long until the whole building, which I could tell had once been a grand and monumental place, had been turned completely to dust, and I just had to make sure that we didn’t end up being part of that dust pile.
Eventually, after tripping on loose stones and leaping over jagged pipes, we emerged into the main entrance hall of the citadel, where we had first entered, and which hadn’t been hit by whatever it was that had plummeted from the sky yet. There was even more destruction now, but we still had a chance to get out. I turned back to the doorway we had just come through, but before I could even stop to draw a breath, I heard a crack as the doorway itself started to crumble.
I turned back to the exit, through which I could see my spaceship. I looked up at the sky to see if the ship had come back for another shot, but I couldn’t see any sign of one, or even a shadow being cast by one at that moment.
We raced toward the exit and stepped out onto the doorstep. I looked down and saw that same flower on the floor, now crushed, and a vision of both of our crushed bodies came into my mind. It appeared that my imagination had decided not to be a friend to me today, but at least reality had. We were alive and in one piece, and all we needed to do now was get across the town center to the ship.
I looked up at the sky, and I was just able to faintly see a speck in the distance that had to be the Karaak ship. I could see more of the stone death-balls coming down toward the planet, and I just had to cross my fingers that one of them didn’t come down on our heads or my ship. My spaceship wasn’t far away, but the distance between where I was and where it was, combined with the lack of cover, made me tense.
“Do you think they’re aiming for the citadel or for us?” I asked.
“Probably us,” Rayne sighed. “I can’t imagine they’re keen on us snooping around one of the planets they destroyed, or looking at one of their dead comrades.”
“True,” I said.
“It may be a case of ‘two birds, one stone’, as you humans say,” Francine said.
“Shit,” I sighed.
I looked across the town square at my ship. As if on cue, three more shots from the Karaak’s ship plowed into the ground between us and our ticket out of here. Deep cracks appeared in the street that quickly branched out across the entire town square.
This was not going to be easy.