The soldiers cheered and clicked. Augustus glanced over his shoulder and nodded. Both crucifixes were raised on either side of him. They thumped into their postholes.
His army’s enthusiasm drowned out the screams and clicks of the fools that failed him. He would show less mercy to Aimee, Mike, and the rest of the northern upstarts.
They would regret the day they defied the last true Roman.
Chapter 15
DENVER STOOD in the middle of the temple, every muscle twitching as his rage smoldered and grew. He let out a piercing scream and lifted part of the scion prism, launching it across the temple. It smashed through a filthy window with a clatter.
Standing behind him, Layla rested a hand on his shoulder and through their intercom said, “Den, listen to me. Charlie’s resourceful, dogged. Let’s just be calm, think about this rationally.”
Rational! How could he be rational when they were stuck on an alien planet with diminishing resources and threats seemingly at every turn, not to mention a goddamn invasion going on by a species that could seemingly change form at will?
No, this was not the time to be rational.
“It’s all fucked,” Denver said, stepping away from her and kicking out at a wooden bench.
It toppled backward and thumped against the stone floor.
He switched his focus to the room in which they had first encountered the croatoan priest.
Crimson light bled through the shattered window as the sun was setting. The slice of red brightened the temple’s dark interior and illuminated the detail on the floor that caught Denver’s eye.
“Do you see that?” He stalked closer and crouched onto his haunches. Layla joined him.
“What?” she said.
Denver slung his rifle over his back and pointed to a pair of faint tracks in the dark monochrome of the floor’s stone slab. “Drag marks,” he said.
“I think you’re right.”
Layla stood up, leaned her back against the wall and dragged her heel against the slab, producing exactly the same kind of mark.
The image grew in Denver’s mind of his dad being grabbed and dragged backwards into the room.
But how? Charlie was strong for a human anyway, let alone a strong human in an power-assisted suit. He just didn’t believe his dad could be so easily overwhelmed like that.
With his head bowed and eyes focused on the small details of the drag marks, Denver followed them like his beloved dog, Pip, and entered the room. The place was empty. “They’ve taken the food and water supplies,” he said as Layla swept around the room.
She came to a stop at the east wall and looked back at him. The small glowing lights within the suit’s helmet lit up her face, showing her forehead wrinkled. “There’s a door open here,” she said. “There’s no way we would have seen it before; it looks just like part of the wall.”
Denver stepped over and investigated. She was right. He pushed the door open further, revealing a short tunnel a few meters long. At the end, the burning sunset cast a sheet of golden blood into an exit.
On the dirt ground in this narrow tunnel, the drag marks were clear, and they weren’t just Charlie’s. Denver suspected they were Vingo’s, the feet marks too small for a croatoan. Hatred bubbled up inside him as he sprinted down the tunnel and out of the exit, coming out to the rear of the temple.
“It was that damned priest,” Denver growled. “I should have known! How could we have trusted that… thing? When I get my hands on that…”
“Here,” Layla said, stepping ahead of him and crouching to the dirt ground, her visor reflecting the dying sun’s last, weak rays. “Scorch marks. Probably some kind of track from a hover-bike or something similar.”
In the distance, Denver heard the calls of clusps and the howls of some other creature. It wouldn’t be safe for them without Vingo’s guidance, but they had little choice. “We follow,” he said, scanning the suit’s HUD to check the measurements. His filter measurement had reduced to almost half. But that meant he still had time to find Charlie.
“Can I grab one of your spare magazines,” Denver asked, realizing he was out.
Layla unclipped a spare from her suit and passed it to him. He clipped it in and chambered a round.
Denver drew his rifle to the front, fitting the last of his magazines and stalked forward into the deepening darkness, finger on the trigger, night vision assisting him while he tracked the scorched marks that burned a black scar through the monochrome landscape.
“I’ve got your back,” Layla said, following a few steps behind and covering his flanks and rear. “Have faith, Den; we’ll find him.”
Denver grunted his appreciation and stepped over a section of rubble.
The scratches and yowls of clusps and other creatures moving about in the dark increased, giving the planet a truly weird and unfamiliar soundscape.
“We really are no longer in Kansas,” Layla whispered.
“Kansas?” Denver asked.
“Just an old thing from an old film.”
“Did it end well, this film?”
“Yeah, they just clicked their heels together and managed to get home.”
“That would be useful.”
“You’d need red slippers.”
“Power suit boots no good, then?” Denver said dryly as he started to ascend a small mound of rock.
“Maybe eventually,” Layla said with a lack of enthusiasm or hope.
Dull brown grass and spiky shrubs covered the stone in thick bunches, the edges of which showed the scorch marks, but they were beginning to be more and more difficult to find. Still, since they had followed the tracks, Denver had realized they were heading in a single direction with little deviation.
Without any tracks, as long as they remained on the same trajectory, he hoped they would find something, some clue to his dad’s whereabouts.
The planet was in complete darkness a Tredeyan unit later, which Denver had worked out to be about an hour and a half of Earth time. Dense smoke and cloud obscured any starlight.
“We should camp here until we have more light,” Denver said. “I’d rather fight in daylight.”
“Agreed,” Layla said.
They climbed up a steep section of rock until they were sitting atop a small hill, overlooking the surrounding barren lands to their left and a dense wooded section to their right, the features of both now dark shadows on a black background.
Below them, Denver noticed movement—low, deliberate stealthy movement—then the hiss of a clusp. He brought his rifle to his shoulder and sighted through the scope, activating the green night-vision filter.
Words caught in his throat as something the shape and size of a manta ray slid out from a shadow and wrapped its leathery form around a mid-sized clusp. The creature’s membranes enveloped the cusp completely, dampening its cries. Within seconds the clusp was still and the black creature undulated. My god, Denver thought, the thing was… absorbing its prey.
Whispering, although his external speaker wasn’t even on, he said, “We do not move and do not sleep until the sun comes up. We sit back-to-back, rifles ready. You understand?”
“I hear you,” Layla said, the back of her suit already pressed against his. “What did you see?”
“You don’t want to know.”
So they sat there, together, two humans on a distant planet while its wildlife devoured itself beneath them, a war in the sky and on the land, and a fight for survival for all concerned—just another day in Denver Jackson’s cursed life.
FOR THREE TREDEYAN UNITS, equal to four and half Earth hours, Denver and Layla had rotated a schedule of thirty minutes rest and thirty minutes lookout via their night-vision scopes.