Relias: Uprising Read online

  “Ditrinity, take point. Rush, get our ass.” He pulled his armored wolf skull over his face and headed out the door.

  “To do what!” Kristik shouted. “Seraphine’s gone and so’s-“

  “SHUT UP!” Hendrick roared, grabbing Kristik by the throat and hurling him to the ground. “They’re alive and we’re finding them. Help us or stay here and die.”

  “Thez a good five thousand Firsts down there and you want to fight right through em!”

  “That’s exactly what we’re gonna do!”

  There was static on the radio that clipped to Morlo’s belt. The voice wasn’t Legionnaire and that fact drew everybody’s attention. The voice was familiar, though broken in the static. It was a woman.

  Hendrick snatched the radio off of Morlo’s belt and listened.

  “We’re…. ning with l…ds of Legionnaires right be….. us. They knew………. They knew exactly where…”

  Hendrick quickly thumbed the transmit button and spoke loud and clear, annunciating his words perfectly as to be heard through the static.

  “Sable, it’s Nate. The city’s overrun. Can you make it to the shipyard?”

  There was a flurry of static. Sable was reassuring whoever she was with. There was panicked crying. Sable, though, was entirely calm. “…. Patrolling the…… ‘re everywhere but yeah. Yeah we can.”

  “We’ll meet you there. Don’t engage them. You hear me! Do not engage them!”

  “I won’t.” Sable answered. She held the transmit button down but didn’t speak. She wanted Hendrick’s reassurance but knew she couldn’t have it. “Nate?”

  “Yeah?”

  “…we aren’t….. make it to Pyre, are we?”

  Hendrick closed his eyes with regret and held the radio to his forehead. “I don’t know. But whatever the case is we have to make it to the cruiser. Understand?”

  Radio delay. Then she came back. “…Yeah.”

  “Good.” Hendrick replied, moving towards the door and motioning for the others to follow. They formed up behind him and marched in twos, Morlo and Pontious walking just behind him. “Now stay low, be careful, and I’ll see you at the-“

  “Oh god… Nate, they’re…”

  “Run!” Hendrick shouted hurriedly, his voice rough with frustration.

  “They’re everywhere. Nightwolves, Skirmishers, I…. Run, run, run!” Her voice was frantic. On her side of the radio a powerful chainsaw roared to life. “Run, run, I got them! Just keep running no matter-“

  The radio went dead. Hendrick’s face went blank, hopeless. “Sable…” He said, his voice low, deceptively calm. “SABLE!”

  Nothing. Hendrick squeezed the radio and threw it to the ground. “SHIT!” He spun around where everybody stood behind him watching. He didn’t know what to think. What could he do? He didn’t even know where she was. And outside the window Hendrick had seen the Legionnaires filling the street, surrounding the hotel. He could hear them storming the floors below and above them while more Battlecrafts landed squad after squad on the roof. They couldn’t fight their way out of this one. Not if they wanted to save Sable and Seraphine. They had to get out faster than that.

  Hendrick turned back to the room and parted through his bewildered allies. Footsteps pounded the floor above them while no other noise accompanied their approach. They kept as quiet as possible. Every Legionnaire was well aware of the Ditrinity’s position.

  “What you doin’?” Morlo asked, the calm in his voice at odds with the impending chaos creeping all around them.

  Hendrick didn’t reply immediately. After a moment they followed him back into the room and found him sorting through the care package, pulling out ropes and karabiners and laying them out across the floor. The group gathered around him as he made sense of the mess, pulling steel-reinforced ropes from the bag and piling them on the ground in a tumultuous clutter. “We can’t make it in time…” He said, shaking his head and not taking his eyes off of his work. “We’ve got to get down the side of the building.” Hendrick had accumulated a pile of nylon ropes that he had pulled from inside the crate and separated the ends out. “Kristik, call in to base. We need that airstrike.”

  With the ropes in their hands, several of the members of the group, particularly Rush, displayed their confusion. Kristik was the one who spoke up. “So… we doin’ what with these things?”

  “Repelling.” Hendrick said gruffly. “Our armor’s built for this stuff. You’re gonna call in an airstrike and wipe that street clean and have another Stryker nail the upper floors.” Hendrick tossed Kristik the radio, who caught it with apprehension. “Have them hit the street first with a strike on the upper floors ten seconds later. Got it?”

  Kristik froze for a moment, his eyes then going wide and his jaw slackening. “But we… we still in the buildin’.”

  “No…” Hendrick said, his sarcasm heavy with ire. “Everybody gear up. And you,” He said, pointing to Kristik. “Do what I say or I’ll kill you as a liability.”

  There was a door kicked down just down the hallway. Everybody looked towards the noise and it was clear now that there was only one way out. In the distance, somewhere in the streets, there were more gunshots

  “Morlo, Pontious, Serenity, the door.” Hendrick commanded as he moved to the window. “Vyvyr, Warren, bust some holes in the wall, find some studs and set all these lines up.”

  “But…” Warren started out, holding one of the ropes in his hand. “We needed these for-“

  “WE NEED THEM NOW! DO IT!”

  “Coming down the hallway…” Morlo muttered, his shoulders sagging as he held the weight of his Gatling gun. He shuffled closer to the door, the chain of bullets that hanged from his gun trailing behind him to a pile next to the crate where a pile of tens of thousands of fifty caliber rounds laid.

  “Kristik!” Hendrick shouted. He moved to the large windows at the room’s outer wall and shattered them with a firm kick to each one. Kristik swallowed hard, thumbed the transmit switch on the radio and called it in. “Rush to base,” He said, ditching the code as it no longer mattered. The response was immediate. “Go ahead Rush.”

  Morlo got into a powerful based stance and raised his Gatling gun. Serenity drew her pistols and Pontious held his Obliterator tight against his shoulder. “Fifty feet.” Morlo relayed. At the wall, Pitt, Vyvyr and Hendrick tore the drywall apart and found the studs, hooking the ropes up two studs each while Morlo’s was reinforced with six.

  “We got Firsts all over the place.” Kristik explained, checking out the window at the white armored soldiers that filled the streets. “Dunno what happened. Mole, maybe, more like probably, but whatever it is, we screwed ‘less you send in that airstrike we got on reserve.”

  “Kristik, this is Alighieri. What went wrong? We had everything-“

  “Dunno sir. We was sleepin’ then the hotel goes under fire and Sable and Seraphine are gone and Muldoon’s dead.”

  There was a discouraged pause. Kristik could hear Alighieri sigh with frustration. “What’s the coordinates?”

  Pontious, Serenity and Morlo took a couple steps away from the door. The footsteps were just outside. Morlo’s finger twitched over the trigger on his six barreled cannon.

  “Come down on us. We need five of the Strykers to target the streets surrounding this hotel and one Stryker to target the upper floors. And yeah, I know we’re still in here.”

  With each passing second the innumerable sets of footsteps in the hallway became louder and louder, while those guarding the door grew more and more anxious as the Legionnaires’ approach pounded in their ears. They were close, just outside the door, and massing in the hallway. The First Legionnaire had learned with prior encounters with the Ditrinity; attack in mass. And there were at least a dozen Firsts outside, all heavily armored and armed from head to toe, and the ranks were quickly thickening.

  Morlo put a finger to his mouth and everybody went quiet, listening; though the harder they listened, the more they realized that the
Legionnaires were already in position. Serenity looked back and forth between Pontious and Morlo, her hands shaking, though almost unnoticeably. Pitt and Kristik stood quiet for a moment, their eyes on the door, while Vyvyr kept himself busy anchoring the ropes. And Hendrick, standing at the windows, looked out across the city as tens of dozens of Battlecraft zipped through the sky, some towards the hotel, others to the shipyard. Battle cruisers were everywhere, floating into position over Leramato, and seeing them, along with the thousands of Legionnaires that flooded the streets and moved in on their position, Hendrick realized that the Legionnaires outside the door were the least of their worries. But this didn’t matter to Hendrick; not with Sable on his mind.

  With all movement absent, it was clear that the room was about to be breached. Morlo lifted his Gatling gun and yelled. “SHRED ‘EM!”

  The barrels of his Gatling gun spun in a blur, flames spewing from their ends as they sent a hundred bullets per second tearing through the wall. Bits of plaster, wood, and insulation exploded in clouds of dust as Morlo’s cannon tore into the squad on the other side of the door.

  The soldiers started yelling and returned fire. Bullets burst through the walls and whistled through the room, each piece of searing lead just barely missing those guarding the door.

  “MOVE BACK!” Morlo yelled, stepping back and overturning a couch. “GET BEHIND IT!”

  Pontious and Serenity supported their guns on the couch and kept up the pressure. Serenity fired only one gun now, concerned more with accuracy than unleashing as much metal as possible. Morlo moved back behind the cover but still stood up, thousands of brassy bullet shells clattering to the ground in a trail as he moved. He kept the trigger down until the barrels glowed orange, spraying the bullets back and forth across the entrance blanketing the hall outside with thousands of flesh-misting fifty caliber bullets.

  “Hurry it up!” Hendrick said, fastening up Morlo’s rope and pulling it tight. “Kristik! ETA on that airstrike!”

  “Thirty seconds ‘til the first strike!” Kristik shouted. He hooked his rope into the karabiner and moved to the window’s edge, planting his toes and getting a good look at the street below. “Holy Mother…”

  “Ditrinity!” Hendrick shouted, moving to the couch and plucking a rifle from the crate as he passed. “We are leaving!”

  Morlo appeared to not have heard him. He was too consumed with unloading a relentless stream of glowing lead into the hallway. Hendrick patted Pontious and Serenity on the shoulders and moved between them. “Hook up!” Without a word the two darted towards the ropes that had been anchored and hooked them up to the karabiners on their armor.

  “Face first descent.” Vyvyr said, tossing the ropes over the edge. “We’ve got to keep fast but not too fast. Too fast we get burned alive in the airstrike, too slow we get crushed beneath the building.” Vyvyr saw the ropes tighten and looked over the edge. Seeing where the ropes ended, he swore.

  The wall between the hall and the room was shredded. Bullets continued to tear it to pieces as the Legionnaires on the other side kept up retaliatory fire.

  “Cover me and go hook up when I get back here!” Hendrick shouted, his voice barely audible above the gunfire.

  “Ten seconds!”

  There was a crashing scream that shot through the air as the first squad of Strikers blazed nearby. Missiles curved through the sky on trails of smoke. Their target was the white flood that moved towards the smoking hotel.

  With Morlo providing cover fire, Hendrick sprinted towards the wall next to the door and reached his hand between the walls and into the floor, fishing around for a second until he’d found what he wanted; a black, rubbery set of tubing. He drew his combat knife and yelled back to Morlo. “Quit firing!”

  The chain gun slowed to a stop and Morlo tossed it, hopping the couch and running up beside Hendrick with his axe in hand, crouching at his side to repel them as they broke through.

  “Five!” Kristik shouted. “Four!”

  The initial missile strike hit the street, sending plumes of flame into the air. Dirt, debris and armored bodies careened through the air, propelled by the amazing force of the missiles’ detonation. The building shook on its foundation and every window on every building in the immediate vicinity shattered. Vases, pictures, and a whole shop’s worth of fragile objects dropped to the ground and shattered.

  Hendrick severed the black tube and dropped it. It hissed and the air around it shifted and blurred as gas filled the room. Standing at the edge of the broken windows, their toes hanging over the edge, the members of Rush and the Ditrinity stood ready to jump, their ropes connected through their harnesses and tethered securely to the rear wall with Hendrick’s empty rope laying on the ground. Vyvyr and Pontious stood next to one another, peering down towards the thousands of Legionnaires, all fighting for a piece of them. What plagued their thoughts the most, what really made their stomachs hurt, was what they’d be doing once they hit the ground.

  “Three!” Kristik shouted. Pitt and Serenity breathed hard, their eyes wide not just from the ocean of Legionnaires they’d be facing, but the fact that they were seconds away from throwing themselves into a momentary free-fall hundreds of feet in the air. “TWO!”

  “GET OUT OF HERE!” Hendrick shouted to Morlo, reaching down into the wall and drawing out a second gas line. He put his knife edge to it and sawed through. With not even a second to spare to protest, Morlo joined the rest of the group and hooked up to his harness just in time.

  “MARK!” Kristik shouted. There was no intimidation in his voice.

  With the chain gun spent, the Legionnaires in the hallway kicked the door down and went to fire. Hendrick dropped the newly severed gas line and put his knife in the stomach of the first soldier through the door, repelling the gunfire long enough for the team to make their exit.

  Ear-bursting jet engines approached once more. The shriek of missiles approached in the literal blink of an eye. With the explosion of their impact there was a simultaneous and vehement quaking that made the ground jarringly unsteady.

  And at that, the group jumped. Their ropes zipping through the karabiners on their waists, they held the ropes out to their sides with one hand, waiting for the perfectly right time to brake. In free fall, they plunged into the consuming clouds of flame that engulfed the entire street. With the sea of flame, the brutal heat, and the dire consequence of error, it gave the appearance of one hurling themselves into the stomach of Hell.

  Hendrick saw them jump. He felt the quaking trembling through his body and heard the deep, thunderous rumble of the building collapsing above him. Natural gas made the air heavy and nauseating. He knew he had merely seconds to escape.

  With four dead Legionnaires at his feet, Hendrick took off. His eye on the rope, he had only one thing on his mind. Speed. The Legionnaires swiftly flooded the room behind him, raising their rifles to fire. In one deft motion, Hendrick snatched the rope up off the ground, drew a deep breath, and took a flying leap from the open window. With more than a dozen Legionnaires ready to shower him in shredding metal, Hendrick spun in midair, raised his free hand clutching the trigger to his Blazer, and smiled.

  The flame from his Blazer ignited the gas. Flames expanded from that initial spark, spreading from ceiling to floor. The ensuing explosion erupted in a horizontal column of flame from the window above Hendrick as he plummeted towards the ground. He could only hope that the steel reinforcement was enough to keep the ropes from burning through.

  Before his line went tight, Hendrick hooked it into his harness, continuing his free fall and catching up with the others who braked and accelerated carefully to keep that perfect speed.

  He didn’t have to look up to know the building was coming down on them.

  Deafening wind battered Hendrick’s ears as he squinted his eyes and plunged through the smoke and dust, keeping himself straightened by taking long corrective strides across the side of the building, In mere seconds, he was in the midst of the group, taking th
e deadly plunge with them.

  “Rope’s short by nearly thirty feet!” Vyvyr yelled. Hendrick could barely hear him. But thirty feet; that was high enough to break their legs and they didn’t have the forward momentum to roll.

  Pieces of the building crunched and shot outward in the tufts of smoke as the building became shorter and shorter as it collapsed. Below them and coming at them faster and faster was the burning ruins of the street below.

  “When you get to the ends of your ropes kick away from the building and roll!” Hendrick barked. “When the smoke from the building kicks up stay close and run!”

  Faster they fell, braking only when they had to. The collapse had almost reached the floor where they tethered. If that happened, they’d be done.

  “SCREW BRAKING!” Hendrick yelled as he saw how long they had left. “JUST DROP AND BRAKE AT THE END!”

  Their ropes no longer felt secure. The self-destructing building thundered in their ears, and amidst that rolling torrent, the panicked screams and deathly yells of the Legionnaires inside pierced through the storm.

  “READY!” Hendrick yelled.

  None of them were. But they were already falling so what choice did they have.

  Just a few seconds from their floor. They were almost out of rope. The charred pavement and ashen flames blurred towards them. The collapse reached their floor.

  Now or die.

  “BRAKE!”

  They all did. The force of the sudden stop stretched the ropes which snapped backwards as they slipped from the ends of their ropes. Each of them put their feet on the building and kicked off. Pitt slipped, going into a spin as he fell the final thirty feet.

  Flames were still everywhere. It was luck if any of them came out unburned.

  Pitt fell headfirst towards the cement. Yelling for help was all he could do as he watched himself plummet to his death. Just twenty feet from the ground, Morlo stretched out, snatched him around the arm and pulled him in, bear hugging him as they all fell.