Star Conqueror: An Epic Space Adventure Read online

  Across the street, Tulip caught my eye and gave me the faintest of nods. She looked to be finishing her talk with the man who flashed her the Resistance sign, playing the perfect spy by not drawing attention with an immediate retreat. The Quib patrol stopped for a moment, the leader spreading his arm in a broad arc across the street. Giving orders for a search pattern, no doubt, as he finished his gestures by pointing at the bar.

  The Ar’abi hanging out around the entrance noticed this too, and the tension was thick as some darted inside, some raised collars and tried to slip away, while Tulip used this moment to start back across the street. She didn’t move right towards me, not wanting to give away my position, but angled towards an alley a few buildings down.

  Gripping my rifle tight, I drew a bead on the lead Quib.

  10

  The distress of the Ar’abi must have been like blood in the water to the thuggish Quib security, as the leader barked some muffled order and all four drew rifles, moving in as a unit towards the converted warehouse. While part of me, the tactical thinker, wanted to use their distraction to move on, I had little doubt as to what these guys would do to the Ar’abi. With how friendly they had been with Tulip and the sign that one had flashed, these were dissidents for sure, and that meant death in the Matriarchy’s eyes. Still, if they kept cool, there was a good chance the security force would simply throw their weight around and move on.

  Could I risk our entire mission on the chance a few thugs would get too rowdy?

  “If these assholes make a move on the Ar’abi, I’m lighting them up,” I whispered into the comms.

  “Understood,” Tulip replied as she slunk towards the alley as the Arclight Double’s barrels spun to the big one. “That will let our Resistance fellows get out of here if it comes to it, and we can move on if security does.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” I murmured. Holding my breath, I lined up the shot and waited with baited breath.

  For a moment, I thought we would be in the clear. While the thugs had their weapons drawn as they converged on the meeting place, they weren’t opening fire immediately. Tulip made her way to the alley adjacent my position and disappeared into the shadows. Most of the Ar’abi had either scattered or melted into the dark alleyways themselves, but one, a teenaged girl as best I could guess with a shawl wrapped around her head and shoulders, seemed frozen in place.

  Her fear seemed to draw the leader’s attention, and he pointed. “That one! She matches the descriptions!” As the red-skinned girl’s eyes widened in shock, I could only imagine the sick grin I heard in the Quib’s voice. “Kill her. That’ll make our quota for sure, boys. Promotions all around.”

  The girl froze like a deer in the headlights, fear shaking her tired body, as the Quibs all raised their rifles to open fire.

  That did it. Threatening the population was one thing I could justify walking by in the name of the greater mission, but not murder. I took a deep breath, steadied my aim, and right before the Quib leader opened fire on the girl, I squeezed the trigger.

  The huge particle blast lanced out, the rifle kicking hard in my arms. The triple-damage shot punched through the Quib’s light security armor like it was paper mache, these assholes were used to bullying unarmed Ar’abi after all. Even as their commander fell to his knees, his head a ruined mess, Tulip was suddenly in their midst, moving like black lightning as she shifted into her natural form. She blasted one thug right in the faceplate of his helmet with both barrels, shattering it into a million pieces, and finished him off with a bloody slash of her claws across the face.

  Needless to say, the Ar’abi girl regained her senses enough to know that this was the time to run, disappearing in a blur through the front door of the warehouse.

  The other two Quibs were too busy to pursue her, gaping in shock at the swath of carnage in their wake. As if she could read my mind, Tulip ducked low and rolled through, past both security guards just as the Arclight Double recharged. The barrels spinning to the slighter-but-fully-automatic mode, I cut loose, using the still-fresh draconic strength in me to keep the rifle steady as I swept it back and forth.

  A barrage of particle bolts cut through the two stunned thugs, punching through their armor on the first sweep, then cutting them in half with the second.

  Silence fell across the streets of the slums as the security patrol was reduced to four piles of spilled blood and shattered armor. Of course, these were just grunts, the lowest of the low, but it felt good all the same.

  Couldn’t rest on our laurels though. Tulip sprang to her feet and sprinted back over to me as I stepped out onto the street.

  “Security is going to start going off like crazy now,” I said. “Screw stealth, we need to make a break for the sewer system.”

  Tulip nodded, sliding right into step behind me as we rushed down the street. “It was worth it,” she said with conviction. “Once we break through into the arcology, I have a name of one of the tram operators on the inside sympathetic to the Resistance. He can get us all the way into the vaults and bypass the bulk of the internal defenses.”

  “All right, Tulip!” I grinned as we moved, keeping to one side of the street so as to have at least one flank covered by buildings.

  We made it two blocks, now only a short run from the first sewer access marked on Tulip’s mission plan, when I caught the chameleon shimmer of power armor stealth systems atop a more respectable looking building across the way. It had to be at least two, and some kind of heavy ordinance between them similarly stealthed.

  “Duck and cover!” I cried, throwing myself into the alley we were just passing, pulling Tulip along with me. She let out a feline yelp as we flew behind a building, my newly enhanced strength still surprising me.

  Barely a second later, a missile lock alert popped up as a red box on my HUD, followed by an audible alert that echoed across the landscape like the voice of God.

  “Warning! Unauthorized Power Armor detected within the vicinity. Please evacuate to the closest shelter. Targets will be destroyed imminently.”

  The booming voice of the loudspeaker was still echoing when the air was split by the roar of a rocket engine. I barely had time to throw myself over Tulip and shield her when a missile struck the building next to us. The concussion rattled my teeth, while concrete chunks from the building rained down around me. Even as damage alerts flashed across my HUD, the protective field around me flared a fiery red, as a whole suite of Ascension abilities fired up at once.

  A missile strike that close combined with the rain of debris would normally have blasted through a good half of my suit’s power reserves, but Scaled Victory cut that down to 25% or so, while Recompense mixed with Dragon’s Revolt and Claws of Virtue to send a powerful surge of energy through my body.

  Tulip, meanwhile, was unscathed and stared up at me, a soft look in her eyes as she caught her breath. “Thank you, David, for saving me.”

  I smiled down at her as I surged to my feet, throwing off debris as I pulled her up with me. “Thank me when we kick these guys’ asses.”

  With that, I spun, bringing up my now-glowing rifle. These Quibs might have gotten the first shot, but I was going to get the last one.

  Their chameleon fields now as worthless as ours, the two Quibs were clearly visible, desperately trying to reload their mounted launcher the moment they saw my face. They clearly hadn’t expected us to live through this, most things wouldn’t have, but they hadn’t faced a dragon with an Ascension build before.

  I took aim, the Arclight Double’s big barrel fully charged and filled with redirected energy. “Tulip, you get the small fry. I’ve got the big gun.”

  We had one thing still on our side, and that was standard Matriarchy protocols. The vast majority of their forces were committed to defending the arcology proper, so even with vehicles and advanced communication, we had a few minutes before the really big guns would come out. This emplacement might have a unit helping guard it, so if we could take the launcher and the unit out
, we’d likely have cleared the surrounding blocks, giving us a clear line to the sewers. Once down there, we could try to retake the element of surprise and try a renewed stealth approach.

  Tulip nodded to me as she broke into a sprint, shifting subtly into a more feline form and eating the distance to the base of the building our new friends were atop of in the blink of an eye.

  In that moment, I fired, aiming right at the missile the Quibs had just loaded on the launcher. The particle bolt that launched from the Arclight Double’s barrel was wreathed in scarlet flames as the glow from my suit poured into the blast, amplifying the recoil to where I actually skidded back a step. The fiery blast plowed dead on into the thing and, backed by the power of Recompense, tore through the missile and launcher like a hot knife through butter.

  The two Quibs were thrown back by the shockwave of the blast, relatively unharmed for the moment, as I took the opening to make a break for a ruined shell of a building next to where the Quibs had set up shop. Tulip had shifted back to her normal Fertish shape but used the momentum of her feline charge to launch herself into the air, catching on to the ledge of a window two stories up before parkouring her way to the top with unearthly grace.

  I had no doubt she could take out our two stunned friends in seconds, so the smart thing to do was to get ready for a possible counter-offensive. Scanning the interior of the building, I could tell that this place wasn’t so much abandoned as unfinished. It was barren save for a few half-built interior walls. The back doors, along with half the roof, had obviously never been installed, giving the whole structure a skeletal feel.

  Moving deeper inside, I took a position behind one of the partial interior walls. It gave me a decent vantage point both the front and the gapingly open space where a back door should have been. If this Tulip was anywhere near as dangerous as the Tulip of Star Conqueror, she would be just about finished with her new cat toys.

  As if on cue, the air echoed with four cracks of gunshots and the screams of dying Quibs.

  “That’s my Tulip,” I whispered to myself with a big smile. It felt strangely proper to say that, even if I had only known the ‘real’ Tulip for hours now.

  Almost silent footsteps rattled the partial roof, Tulip most likely, as I glanced out the still-empty back doorway. The only thing that worried me about this was how these Quibs, basically grunt infantry at best, had heavy ordinance on hand like that launcher. Worse, it had hit hard enough not to be standard grade gear.

  I wondered for a moment if they were low-ranking Elites. While I doubted it, it was possible. With all the explosions, I hadn’t gotten a good enough look at the Quibs to see if they had the standard red stripes on their shoulders to denote the Quib Elite. Still, for them to be out in the slums would be unusual. Then again, this planet was home to the Matriarch cloaking technology.

  Tulip took that moment to lightly hop down through the hole in the roof, landing with nary a sound next to me on the ground floor. “Those two guys were pushovers,” she said with a shrug as she straightened up, her cat ears flicking. “But that launcher was an Elite Class emplacement.”

  I grunted an affirmative. “So, the big boys have to be close.”

  “I don’t want to be the one to say it,” Tulip began hesitantly as she crouched behind another partial wall, her two pistols gripped tightly in her hands, “but should we use the returner? The element of surprise is blown, and if we have a whole platoon of Elites coming …”

  “No,” I said with a shake of my head. “We’ll be right back at square one, and we won’t have a chance like this again any time soon. You still have our contact on the inside, and while Elites are nasty, you haven’t faced them with an Ascension dragon on your side. We’re close to the sewers, so let’s go all out for it.”

  Tulip mulled it over for a moment, then smiled at me. “All right, David, I trust your judgment. Besides, if we can get underground, we might have time for me to try to hack the sensor net. You know, open a hole for us to get in with, despite the alarms.”

  She was about to explain further when she was cut off by the clang of a bullet slamming into my chest plate from above, the very same point Tulip had jumped down from. Fortunately, while the sniper round would have drilled through most targets, my combination of heavy armor and draconic defenses held strong, even as the impact pushed me back several steps.

  Tulip took cover as I spun to track my attacker. The shooter’s advanced chameleon field was breaking down from his shot, giving me a semi-clear look at him, even as the surge of Recompense energy flowed into my rifle. More blasts and bullets, grouped into tight, controlled bursts, cracked stone and burst what little glass the unfinished front of the building had, coming from the street outside.

  First things first though. The Arclight Double’s barrel spun around as I squeezed the trigger, the flame-wreathed blast exploding upward, catching the sniper dead in the center of mass. I wasn’t sure if he died immediately or if he died when the impact threw him up into the air and off the side of the two-story building. Either way, he was dead.

  As the sniper left the equation, Tulip was hunkered down behind a rapidly eroding wall, guns held up and a look of concentration on her face. “These have to be Elites, David!”

  I risked a glance myself as I dove for the front and the cover of the exterior wall by the door frame. She wasn’t wrong, not at all.

  At first glance, there wasn’t much to distinguish a Quib from a Quib Elite. The red slashes on the shoulder were the first clue, and the six Quibs bearing down on us each were one-stripers. They were the lowest class of the Elite, but that didn’t mean they were weak. From there, the differences were subtle. Their armor was a little bulkier in appearance, their favored Stinger-class pulse rifles and Mandible-class slugthrowers standing out as vastly superior to the peashooters the grunts carried. Most of all, it was their disciplined precision tactics that made them stand a cut above the Quibs.

  “Yep, definitely Elites,” I shouted back to her as my Arclight Double recharged. They were moving in a tight formation, three covering as their fellows shifted forward and then repeating, carefully inching towards our meager cover as they forced us to keep our heads down.

  Still, this could work in our favor. Elites were dangerous, but also arrogant. They didn’t call for backup, at least not in the game, as they earned their stripes based on their unit’s solo kills of the Matriarchy’s enemies. If you thought your average player hated kill stealers, these guys were a million times worse. If we could take them down, we’d have an opening for sure.

  “Let’s take them, Tulip.”

  Though I couldn’t see her, I could imagine her ears twitching in surprise, but when I heard her voice over the comms, all fear and shock at my decision was gone. “All right, David, let’s do it!”

  Oh yeah, we were going to do it all right, because now was the time I was waiting for. It was time to let the dragon out to play.

  I just hoped it really was as easy as Tulip said it would be.

  11

  All my worries had been pointless, because the moment I thought about the dragon, actively tried to summon it up inside me, it was surprisingly easy to unleash. Letting go as I felt the fire build inside my chest, the change took hold of me. As my body grew and shifted, there was pain, sure, but it was dwarfed by the overwhelming feeling of power that swept over me. It was unlike anything I’d ever felt before.

  As the muscles in my body grew into large, powerful slabs that increased my weight by a couple hundred pounds, I felt like a Greek fucking God. No, more than that. I felt unstoppable. My size now dwarfed what cover I had, and the Elite’s onslaught was bouncing off my chest. It was like Superman wading through a hail of gunfire to punch space Nazis in the face.

  My armor changed along with my body, much as Tulip’s suit changed with her shifting. My gauntlets melted into my suit, revealing the black scales running over my hands and fingers all the way to the golden tips of my claws. The force field around my head dissipate
d as my face elongated into a long snout. My big tongue licked the back of my sharp teeth and tasted the oily sweetness of dragon fuel in my mouth. The fire in my gut was hot and soothing at the same time.

  Crazier still were my senses. While Star Conqueror had been okay at the tactile feel of the game, my sense of taste and smell had never really been engaged, and it was something I was wholly unprepared for. As I inhaled, I truly smelled this planet for the first time, and the mix of sulfur and rust was strangely pleasant as was the metallic flavor.

  Hell, I smelled the fear coming off Tulip even though she was several meters behind me and heard her heart racing like I had my ear pressed to her chest. She was afraid. Why?

  I glanced back at her.

  Her eyes were filled with an almost religious awe as she took in my form. It was a bit weird because I practically towered over her, and I realized I’d grown another couple feet in height. Hell, given the size of my new muscles, I was pretty sure I could pick her up with one hand.

  The sound of more gunfire exploded in my ears, bringing me back to the moment. I spun on my heel, back to the Quib Elite. A soft voice, the suit’s internal computer, chimed in my ear, now that my HUD was down, “Duration of Dragon Form: 167 seconds remaining.”

  As for the Elites, well, while Tulip was in awe of me, they were about to piss their armor in fear of me. If the massive power of the dragon roaring in me wasn’t enough to frighten them, the every-growing aura of fiery energy given off by my Ascension powers, surging higher with each hit, was about to put them into rout. Only their intensely trained discipline kept them moving forward.