Pyramids of Meridian (eBook)

Chapter One

Kelly Pear lands on Omega Watchtower. She searches the muted tan atmosphere for signs of trouble.

A muddy light rises from the north and approaches. The drug releases against her will as usual. Kelly’s pulse slows, jaw relaxing, arms falling, eyes glazing over. Her emotional cavern is emptied, the drug hushing any impulse or emotion impeding her will to fight.

The light strikes the Anaheim force field, a dome of protective iridescence encasing the whole of the Jefferson Protectorate. The light explodes and blinds, a grand display. Hints of heat and radiation sneak in, pinching her full-body armor, called Aquila, showing off gradients of its own flavor of force field, yellows and pinks radiating across its agile silvery form.

Anaheim collapses with a flash into the transparent. Aquila tightens, its ventilation fans whining, sending an icy gale across Kelly’s skin and the scent of melting copper to her nose. Thunderous sound rumbles into her lungs.

An explosion sends one of the ten hefty Anaheim support pillars encircling the mile-long bounds of the Jefferson Protectorate to the ground outside its outermost bulwarks. A rolling mass of bland dust expands over an outcropping of limestone in tune with a concussive blast sweeping over the Protectorate’s exterior complex, pallid tents shearing and tearing in the wrath of the attack.

Kelly, a high dosage of the drug trampling through her prefrontal cortex, is surprised by the failure of the Protectorate’s up-to-date laser defense system designed to cut down far smaller projectiles than the plodding nuclear missile that just wasted Anaheim.

“Desperate fools,” Marshal Patrick Lav, the overseer of the Jefferson Protectorate, says over the radio, his voice buzzing in her head. “Daytona’s cavalry’s on its way. Goddamn them all.”

“Force strength?” Kelly says with flat intonation.

“Three platoons, at least.”

“More than ever.”

“That’s right. Captain Kinner will transmit the attack plan to you. Time to see you fly, Pear.”

She turns Aquila’s thrusters to high setting—multiple arrays of round jets across her entire form—tensing and posing her augmented muscles to prevent g-LOC. Aquila squeezes and pulls across her body. Her vision narrows. Nanowebs swim through her circulatory system, evening out blood flow. It takes her less than a second to achieve a thousand-foot vertical, entering the stalk of the nuclear bloom, embraced by the cries of the dying infant star. She activates full-stop, and in an almost instant, she is stationary, Aquila’s stabilizers and stiffening gel layers preventing her from squashing into a red stew, its force fields sheltering from the fiery, radioactive plumes. She activates a boost to the north, taking her from zero to fifty miles per hour in two-tenths of a second, exuding a white puff, a light firework. Four more and she zips out of the stalk traveling over three hundred miles per hour into hazy daylight, a crash of wind blasting across the force field.

After three seconds of free flight, she full-stops, inducing a vicious slap to her body, pressing her hard against the gel layer, and again she is still. A needle inserts a local coagulant and anti-inflammatory into her right quadriceps muscle to arrest a fresh hematoma. The pain passes. It always does with Aquila. It is the only armor system on planet Vitalia with such capabilities.

Dust blooms grow on the horizon. She zooms in with a thought command. Aquila’s binoculars mark the miasma four miles out. She surveys the surrounding flatlands of dry earth, wiry bush, sickly grass, and mounds of limestone for further signs of the Daytonian enemy.

A thought intrudes. She fantasizes about starting a school in one of the concealed caverns in the Tritian Expanse, away from all the desperation and chaos of the colonies. But a sharp whining sound and nausea bring her focus back to the present.

Saliva increases. Her head recoils, a guttural yuck. She releases her head from Aquila’s grasp with another thought command. A sprig of vomit, rains of a distasteful breakfast, falls to the pallid earth.

Through rheumy teal eyes, she spots a dot above the northeastern horizon. Then two, then four, then sixteen, then dozens, all on the approach. From behind, she hears three levitating Wave Tanks—lumbering hovering blocky beasts the size of ancient fighter jets—careen through fiery murk around a sparking Anaheim pillar. Dozens of Nuggets, smaller round craft with two smooth bulbous sections like peanuts, blast out from a westside Protectorate hangar. They elevate and expand their formation, with rising metallic ringing.

The nuclear toadstool coils inward, its shadow bearing over the Jefferson Protectorate. She curls Aquila back over her head.

“Maven Pear?” Captain Kinner says over the radio. “Pear, do you read?”

“I read you.”

“Coordinate Aquila Alpha Strike. We’ll stay out of your way.”

With an inert facial expression, she activates her quad gun. On each of her forearms, two angular packages bloom from compact coverings, expanding out with robotic convulsions, powered by the refined fusion reactor girding her hip. After two seconds, the gentle beep of readiness chimes.

She boosts, charting the distant dots, fully zoomed in. Larger ones take pentagonal shapes, the omen of three Shock Cruisers, figureheads of Daytona’s air force. They are less than a mile away. They pitch up, revealing their rear primary thrusters, a stingray’s sinewy tail. Their shockwave cannons split, crab’s claws extending. Soldiers in chunky Titan full-body armor hover abreast of the Shock Cruisers like bear cubs trailing their mother.

The drug releases another dose, streaming over her neurons, silencing her fear, focus and obedience only to the Protectorate’s blood oath. She boosts five more times, her body pressing against Aquila’s gel layer, reaching a thousand miles per hour, zipping past a rising Wave Tank and a flock of Nuggets.

Kelly reaches the enemy platoon, the whirring and sizzling sounds of their forces no longer filtered by range. She full-stops at their rear, this time the wind knocked right out of her. She ignores the discomfort and aims at the nearest Titan. Aquila’s quad gun’s rail rotors take a second to warm and commence their unholy charge. They go, eleven hundred rounds per minute of flea-size pellets zooming at Mach 12, splashing and raving against the enemy force field. The Daytonian soldiers twist to face Aquila’s rampage and return fire, puffs exuding from their shoulder-mounted weaponry. Kelly waits until the last second before boosting out of the way of a salvo of two dozen locked-on Panczuk missiles.

She continues to boost in alternating directions like stock-market lines above the enemy platoon. The Panczuk missiles scatter in confusion. Soldiers with jet packs and thruster arrays adjust away from the closest Shock Cruiser in more ungainly oscillations. Kelly aims at the same soldier as before and unleashes Aquila’s quad gun, the flashing enemy force field collapsing in a shimmery grand finale. The next round of pellets cut clean through Titan alloy. An explosion on his left flank sends him careening in a hysterical pinwheel, viscera spraying in two separate expulsions.

His body is severely malnourished, and a distant ping of compassion arises deep within her drug-induced focus. She knows the Daytona colony is starving, the recent failure of trade negotiations on top of a rumored radiation leak undoubtedly the impetus for the attack. But she must defend. She must follow the blood oath.

A Daytonian Shock Cruiser fires its shockwave cannon, two artillery shells against five approaching Jefferson Nuggets currently unloading jiggling pink streams of plasma, cleansing hot showers clambering to wipe away the Cruiser’s force field. The shells explode, the Nuggets unable to adjust in time, thrashing their hulls with supercharged ions and EMPs, sending them flipping and falling away, pink plasma failing to clean proper. The shockwave’s definitive sound—a hearty thump prefacing reverberation of celestial thunder—blasts Kelly as she boosts away. The deep bass bounces around in her chest. The three surviving Nuggets skitter away and loop around for another pass.

She distances herself from the enemy squadron, full-stops, then accelerates back with a spree of boosts and thruster bursts in a new vector. She zooms past, flips, and opens fire on another Titan-protected soldier, who is unleashing smoky missiles at an advancing Protectorate Wave Tank. Her torrents break its force field, axing the soldier’s arm from his shoulder, spraying blood and muscle and joint, but the missiles hit their mark on the Tank, red blasts encasing it.

The Wave Tank fires its railgun array. Many of the magnetically accelerated slugs strike the nearest Daytonian Shock Cruiser, sending it recoiling, pitching up, an ascetic’s revelation, eyes up for Christ, its force field alight, sound squeezing. The Wave Tank’s disruptor cannon is up to bat, unloading its plodding turquoise mass: a superhot plasma ball contained in a force field and a gravity condenser that ensures the projectile is heavily compressed. It collides with the keel of the Shock Cruiser with a blue explosion, breaking the Cruiser into three portions. It falls to the earth with murky contrails.

Kelly rebounds. She unloads upon another Titan, destroying the enemy’s head and chest. Through the macabre, she notices it was a woman. With a vacant glare, Kelly surveys...