“Shut the doors!” he screams kicking the carcass out of the side exit. He gets to his feet, clambering desperately into the co-pilot’s seat next to Bulldog who’s clutching his pierced shoulder in shock. Sabre slams the button to close the doors and Dead Star is locked down. Rennin looks over the controls and prays they haven’t changed since his time in the CryoZaiyon War. He puts his hand on the throttle and looks up to see a contaminant standing, snarling at him from outside the cockpit. That face of hate spells one thing to him and makes his stomach flip: recognition. It knows him. The rockets blast and Dead Star makes a shaky escape from the rooftops.
As they lift off, Jawa looks out over the building, watching the contaminants swarm over it and the dust cloud from the ground being pulled towards the satellite. He then hurries to the cockpit to help Bulldog out of his chair and to the nearest seat to assess his injury.
Rennin looks at the empty seat next to him and the hole that’s been stabbed clean through. He winces then looks out to his left and can see a gunship flying alongside so he opens communications. “This is gunship Dead Star, hailing.”
“Copy, Dead Star, this is Gunship Genome.”
Genome is the Clone Unit gunship. “Survivors?”
“One.”
“Any sign of Horus Unit?”
“It was overrun while on the ground, never got off the surface.”
Sabre taps Rennin’s shoulder. “Desolator satellite is about to fire, so heads up.”
Although Dead Star is well out of the blast zone the satellite firing is heard and felt very clearly. The red light increases in intensity for a moment, then the impact from ground zero is felt as a fierce jolt in Rennin’s stomach, followed by a deafening roar and shockwave that jostles Dead Star a little.
Rennin cuts the gunship across to the right to get a look at the impact. Apart from some smoke, there’s no great hellfire that he expected from such a detonation. He’d always heard that Desolator satellites were green-friendly weapons but he never really believed there was such a thing. But here it was: scorched earth, ashen remains but no fallout or collateral damage through fire. The block they fired on is completely obliterated and everything around is stable, if a little shaken up.
A call comes in over the cabin from HQ.
“Yes?” asks Rennin still overwhelmed with everything.
“What do you mean ‘yes’? Identify yourself, soldier.”
Rennin bites his lip hard enough to draw blood. “Gunship Dead Star, sir.” Come on, Caufmann, where are you?
“I mean you personally, trooper.”
“Sergeant Rennin Farrow, Call-sign: Longinus.”
“This is Commander Jorge Croft, your unit is ordered to rendezvous with Raston Squad. They are holding Horizon Stadium. Their position is being overrun.”
“How many? The Desolator must have fried thousands of the hostiles.”
“There’s a lot more of them, son.”
Rennin looks back to Lieutenant Sabre for his orders. He shakes his head. “We lost a lot of our unit, our heavy gunner is out of ammo and our pilot is wounded, don’t they have any support?”
“They’re special forces son, they are the last line, defending the evacuees. They need assistance and you are it.”
“Copy, changing heading to Horizon Stadium.”
“Good man, I’ll—” Rennin slams the communicator button, cutting off the commander. Rennin swings Dead Star around and Gunship Genome does the same, obviously receiving the same orders. Rennin can’t help but feel real pity for the last survivor of Clone Unit. Rennin was thrown back into combat after Indigo Reign without fully recovering mentally, and it was bad, but being put straight into combat the minute after your whole team dies around you is disastrous. It must be getting very desperate already. The combat has hit hard and fast, if Rennin is still reeling from it there’s a good chance many others are too.
“Longinus, the drop zone is outside the West Gate,” says Sabre, assessing his forearm display.
“Why not land in it from above?”
“There are transports evacuating the uninfected to Whitechapel, coming and going through the roof access.”
Rennin scoffs and shakes his head. “Idiots.”
“You let us off and provide cover-fire from the air.”
“What about Bulldog?”
“We’ll take him inside and he can get an airlift to Whitechapel for treatment.”
A minute later they are approaching Horizon Stadium. Rennin shrugs, figuring that at least their landing zone should be clear of contaminants for the time being, thanks to the Desolator. The blast zone is precise with the edge of it mere metres from the stadium itself.
Rennin brings Dead Star in and settles it down just outside the West Gate. Sabre and Jawa pick up Bulldog and support him between them. “Be our eye in the sky, Longinus,” Sabre says, grinning before his face turns serious. “Provide air support should any packs of the bastards come at us from the streets.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Once the uninfected are safely out of the stadium, come in and pick us up, it’s going to get very nasty in here soon.”
“They go where the meat is, I know,” nods Rennin.
“Good luck.” says Sabre as he and Jawa take Bulldog out of Gunship Dead Star and meet up with the survivor of Clone Unit. He walks towards them, seemingly in a daze, without even shouldering his rifle. Rennin thinks he must be really messed up after losing his unit, as he engages the door lock.
Too bad.
With that, Rennin takes off and abandons them.
11.
The Voice That Killed a City
Sindaris Tessol turned seventy-six years old three months ago. He was once a construction worker and Foreman of the building team that erected the Mega Hall forty years ago. He’d lived in the Sanctuary Ravine Retirement Village for just under fifteen years. He had no family he cared to remember, and very few living friends. His looks had never bothered him nor had the slow decrepitude affecting his aging body. At least not until now. The face staring back at him in the abandoned motel bathroom can’t be older than twenty-five. He has aged backwards half a century in a fourteen days.
Sindaris discovered he was infected several weeks previous to his age reversal. He was content to sit at home and wait for the rumoured hit squads, or to die from the virus. Now the black veins around his arms, neck and the sides of his face pulse angrily but his facial ones are far less noticeable. He shakes his head unable to understand his predicament.
A fortnight ago he felt himself die. He felt everything fade and even when his heartbeat failed. He felt a sense of relief, of release. Several hours later he suddenly woke up. At first he was disoriented, thinking everything was a dream, but when he saw his eyes he knew there was something very wrong.
Where he once had blue eyes, magenta irises now stare back at him, with pupils that have split into binary vertical slits. Now he can see clearly in the dark and far into the ultraviolet spectrum, and his peripheral vision has sharpened to perfect focus.
He stands in room 002 of the Bright Horizon Motel, central to the Middle-city District, checking over his face carefully with his alien eyes, looking for any hint of further change. It appears the reverse aging has stopped. Though now another abnormality has surfaced. Sindaris hasn’t grown in size but he weighs almost an extra thirty kilograms. However, those details pale in comparison to what is happening inside his head.
About two days after coming back from the dead he began hearing voices, but more accurately he began thinking them as if they were his own inner monologue. He could hear others in his head that were infected.