Into the Abyss Read online

  Zyra was younger than she was now and not the seasoned fighter she had become. She was not prepared for Molly’s incredible hand-to-hand combat skills—or her savagery. While Zyra fought only to subdue her opponent, Molly was determined to rip her to pieces. All her combat training, all her resolve, and all the passion she could muster, meant nothing in the face of unrelenting hatred. When the fight was over, she was nothing more than a bloody pile of torn flesh and broken bones. Molly had blinded Zyra in one eye and had tried to gouge the other eye out as well. She had a collapsed lung, dislocated jaw, several broken ribs, and had even faced the possible amputation of her right leg. Few people would ever have survived the beating she suffered at Molly’s hand. It had taken years for Zyra to recover from her severe injuries. Even now, the memory of what she had endured in that duel filled Zyra with horror. Zyra was determined to make certain that this encounter had a different ending.

  Molly’s green eyes lit up with the wildness of a predator. There was hate in her eyes then too. She took a step forward and swung an angry fist at Zyra. Zyra knocked the blow aside with her forearm and struck Molly with a vicious elbow, drawing a line of blood from her brow. Molly quickly wiped the blood from her face and attacked Zyra with the cylinder containing the Gaia sample. Zyra sidestepped the cylinder before grabbing it and ripping it free from Molly’s grip.

  Zyra realized her mistake too late. Molly lunged at her, grabbed a hold of Zyra’s long golden hair, and gave a strong forward yank. Zyra, blinded by her tresses, felt a knee plow into her ribs, causing her to drop the cylinder. Zyra’s grunt turned into a cry when Molly flung Zyra to the side and smashed her face into the emergency first-aid kit storage container on the wall. Glass shattered everywhere as jagged shards stabbed into Zyra’s flesh. Molly struck an open palm under Zyra’s chin before pulling Zyra’s hair forward and down, causing Zyra to flip onto her back. Molly stomped Zyra brutally in the chest. Zyra felt a sharp pain near her sternum and let out a horrible groan. A vicious kick to the back of the head caused blood to spurt from her nose.

  Molly enjoyed watching Zyra suffer and ruthlessly prolonged her agony. While Zyra tried to crawl away from Molly, Molly launched a kick into her ribs. The loud snap that accompanied the blow nearly caused Zyra to black out. Molly grabbed Zyra by the hair again and lifted her up. She threw a wide hook at Zyra’s face. If the blow had landed, the fight would have ended right there. But she snapped her head to the side to move out of range of the attack and smashed the heel of her boot into Molly’s shin.

  Molly wailed as she staggered backwards. Zyra used Molly’s momentary discomfort to her advantage and struck her twice in the face with a closed fist. Another blow connected with Molly’s bruised cheeks before Molly grabbed Zyra’s fist in midair. Zyra grabbed Molly’s arm and hurled her over her shoulder. Molly’s hip landed with a sickening crack on the floor. Zyra dropped with all of her weight and plunged her knee deep into Molly’s gut. Blood and spittle flew from Molly’s mouth as she gasped. Molly, with ragged breath and a weak grip, yanked Zyra backwards by her blood-soaked hair. Zyra cried out in pain and angrily hammered Molly in the face with a strong left fist. Zyra tried to stand up, but Molly maintained her grip on Zyra’s hair and wrenched her back to the floor.

  Zyra’s vision blurred from the hot blood flowing into her eyes. She tried to force herself up from the floor, but Molly seized the advantage caused by Zyra’s disorientation and bit Zyra on the leg. Zyra’s shriek filled the air as Molly clung and bit deeper. Once more, Molly grabbed Zyra’s hair and smashed her head on the blood splattered floor.

  This time, Zyra did not move.

  Molly eventually regained her standing height. She made her way to the far side of the hallway bearing the infamous metal cylinder. With barely a glance back at the bloodied figure sprawled on the floor, Molly opened up the blast doors and limped awkwardly to her destination.

  Read on for an excerpt from

  Rogue Hunter: Quest of the Hunter

  by Kevis Hendrickson

  Ziggiris

  Two Years Later…

  Zyra had landed her ship only a few hundred kilometers from the old mining colony of Zadikon, so it didn’t take her very long to reach her destination. She sensed the precariousness of the situation and promptly brought her hover-cycle to cautionary speed. According to the flashing light on her left forearm that tracked the heat signature of life forms, Fal Orono, or some other living being, hid somewhere in the ruins of Zadikon Colony, so she had to be on guard. Fal Orono may have been ill, but he was extremely intelligent, aggressive, and most likely paranoid. Zyra knew without a doubt that Orono would not hesitate to kill her.

  Zyra surveyed the landscape, committing all the perceivable ins and outs of Zadikon to memory, while she cruised by the ramparts of the old, makeshift fortress on the outskirts of the ancient colony. She searched through the streets and studied the dilapidated cylindrical buildings and rusted metallic structures that once had been the colonists’ homes, any of which could serve to conceal Fal Orono from her intensely alert eyes. Bits of aluminum scaffolding and plastic tubing from the ravaged buildings blew past her feet in a cloud of debris. The brisk solar winds that regularly traversed Ziggiris couldn’t dispose of all the trash left behind by the colonists. Hundreds of years and abandonment had scavenged defunct power stations and mining rigs.

  After a few minutes, Zyra came to the central square of the hexagonal colony where several conjoined buildings stood. She dismounted, grabbed her photon rifle, and began to walk towards a ramshackle pergola containing a cache of old mining equipment. She had hardly taken a step before a stream of laser fire bore down upon her. Zyra dived to the ground and rolled to avoid becoming a stationary target while the ground burst into flames. She leapt into the air and activated her Icarus Tech Propulsion Pack, its twin-turbo sonic propulsion engines mounted just above the small of her back, thrusting her like a bolt of lightning away from the laser fire and towards an overturned excavator vehicle. She had to duck to avoid being struck by the subsequent laser blasts zipping by her, as well as hot shrapnel that rained from the excavator’s hull like fiery hail. Suddenly, the laser fire ceased. Zyra gathered from the silence that her target was repositioning himself to get a better shot. She searched for her would-be sniper among the stacks of equipment.

  “You don’t have to do this, Fal Orono. I’m not here to kill you,” she cried out.

  “I don’t know how ya found me! But I ain’t goin’ back!” a voice yelled from somewhere within the shadow of the pergola. The electronic cadence of the voice signaled that Fal Orono, too, was wearing an encounter-suit—not surprising, considering the lack of a breathable atmosphere on the moon.

  “Look, you’ve been a very naughty boy, Orono, and you’re in a lot of trouble. Don’t make things worse for yourself. Throw down your weapon and surrender.”

  “I ain’t never surrenderin’! You can tell that to whoever sent ya!”

  “No one sent me to get you. I’m only doing my civic duty while trying to make a quick buck. I think you’re familiar with the term bounty hunter?”

  Zyra punched a sequence of numbers on the keypad on her left forearm. The tracking system began to blip more sporadically than before. Now she was able to track her target’s movements.

  Left! He’s moving left!

  The encounter-suit computer tracker’s alternating blips suddenly turned into a sustained beep. An unrelenting thread of lasers ravaged the excavator as Zyra leapt from behind it, glass, plastic, and metal spraying into the air. Zyra returned fire at the pergola. A sudden barrage of intense photon energy tore through the dilapidated building. The pergola exploded with a blinding glare, causing a figure to shoot out from its burning frame. Laser-fire beamed at Zyra again. A pillar of dust enveloped Zyra when she fired the thrusters of her propulsion pack to avoid the lasers. She vaulted sideways into the air, while firing off an impressive stream of photon darts at her target. Zyra had no time to react. Fal Orono was one step ahead of her.
He had already launched himself at her with his own single thruster propulsion pack. Fal Orono shot toward Zyra like a streak of light from the fiery blaze that was the pergola. He came at Zyra with his laser rifle blazing. Still performing her midair cartwheel, Zyra spun in the air from an upside down motion, contorting her body like a corkscrew while activating her risk blade. She made a deft slash at Fal Orono with her left arm.

  Fal Orono managed to avoid her risk blade as it flashed before him. Zyra flayed the heel of Orono’s boots as he rocketed past her. Zyra tried to gain her distance from Orono’s lethal aim while firing a defensive stream of shots from her photon rifle when one of the twin engines on her propulsion pack unexpectedly failed. She was thrown into a wild spiral. Zyra barely gained enough control to avoid the brilliant burst of scarlet energy that zeroed in on her. Zyra killed the thrust on her propulsion pack to avoid crashing into the wall of one of the nearby buildings. She landed roughly on the ground, but rose in time to avoid the second and third round of laser blasts from Orono’s rifle. The air smoldered from all the intense laser fire raging at Zyra. She hastened back towards her hover-cycle, but Fal Orono turned the vehicle into Swiss cheese.

  Can this get any worse? I’m supposed to be the hunter, not the hunted!

  Zyra turned to see Fal Orono racing towards her. She sprinted away from him and nimbly avoided hot scarlet death while returning a salvo of radiant photon blasts from her own weapon. One mistake and I’m dead, she thought. With his propulsion pack at full thrust, Fal Orono shot by her, barely missing her with his marksman aim. He veered around in midair for the final kill. Zyra could feel death a breath away. Something suddenly boiled up deep inside her. Fueled more by rage than desperation, Zyra performed the most unexpected and foolhardy act of suicidal bravery she could recall doing. Instead of running away from Fal Orono, who was now descending towards her like a raptor with talons agape for the kill, she turned to face his relentless attack. The ground beneath Zyra exploded as she leapt into the air with a cry, rising higher than a moon with substantial gravity would have allowed her, and grabbed onto Orono. The impact of them colliding midair knocked Zyra’s photon rifle from her hand.

  Fal Orono looked as if he was going to use his laser rifle against Zyra. She quickly grabbed the butt of the weapon and tried to wrest it from him. Orono’s response was to punch her twice in the face to throw her off balance so that he could regain control of his rifle. The frantic movements he was making to keep from flying straight into the moon during Zyra’s moment of distress caused his weapon to go whirling into the air when she snatched it from him. Zyra made a fist with her other hand in anticipation of activating her risk blade again. Orono recognized her intent and clutched her wrist. Zyra struggled to get free of Orono’s grip to no avail. The pair wheeled high into the air, racing from Zadikon Colony like a pair of screaming missiles. Only seconds had passed before they were hundreds of feet in the air, zipping over the vast plains of Ziggiris.

  Fal Orono used every acrobatic trick he knew to shake Zyra off of him. He shot down in a steep incline towards the moon’s surface, then flew low enough to cause Zyra’s dangling feet to strike rock. A stream of dust rose for nearly a kilometer. The friction of Zyra’s feet raking the ground painfully overrode her senses. Zyra’s anger soared to its peak as she cried, “If I’m gonna go, you’re coming with me!”

  She gave a harsh tug on Orono’s arms, forcing him to fly lower to the ground than he had intended. He was flying at such incredible speed that he could not angle himself up in time to avoid a tall boulder that projected out of the ground. He was about to clear the boulder when his shoulder slammed into it. Both Orono and Zyra let out a loud cry from the force of the impact. Zyra was certain from his horrible wail that Orono’s shoulder had torn free from the socket. In his agony, Orono lost control of his propulsion pack and flew in a haphazard pattern. She cried out also, fearing that they would both crash into the moon below them. She held onto Orono using the fingers on her right hand.

  Seizing upon Orono’s momentary disorientation, Zyra made a fist with her left hand again to activate her risk blade and thrust upwards. With one precise motion, she cut through the blue-black oxygen-line that fed air into her target’s encounter-suit. Fal Orono cried out with a whimper as he spun completely out of control. This time, Zyra lost her grip on Fal and tumbled wildly towards the moon. She landed on the ground with a wheeze, a mushroom cloud of dust rising about her motionless form. A moment later, Orono smashed into the moon as well.

  Zyra ignored the burning sensation in her legs and forced herself to rise. She limped slowly towards Fal, noticing that he was on his knees hunched over screaming. She could see the oxygen escaping his encounter-suit in a pale orange-yellow fume. The severed breathing line had depressurized his encounter-suit. She knew what would happen next. There was a brief explosion before Fal Orono fell backwards to the ground. Zyra squinted at Fal, unable to make any sense of his features through the red spray that had coated the visor of his encounter-suit helmet.

  Zyra thought about what had occurred and how quickly it had all happened. She wondered if she had exhausted every means to avoid killing Fal Orono. What if she had waited just a few more days to get her encounter-suit to operate at full capacity before undertaking his capture? Perhaps if she had, she could have used the suit’s non-lethal apparatuses to apprehend him. Then again, maybe she was asking the wrong question. Perhaps the real question was did she feel upset because she played a role in Fal’s death? Or was she simply disgusted by the fact that she didn’t feel any guilt about his passing? By its very nature, bounty hunting was a messy occupation. Known throughout the galaxy as the ‘Grande Dame of Bounty Hunters,’ she knew the title was not meant to be a compliment.

  Not what I wanted. I only hope this was all worth it.

  Zyra stepped towards Fal, watching the faint gravity cause his blood to rise into the air in the form of bubbles. She noticed something glittering within the mist of ink-blue blood rising from his breached suit. Zyra reached an arm forward to take the glittering object from the air to discover that it was a data orb.

  She had just started to scrutinize the orb when she had the strangest sensation that someone was watching her. Zyra removed her eyes from the orb and cast her gaze warily about her, searching the shadows of the nearby cliffs with more than casual alarm.

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  QUEST OF THE HUNTER

  by Kevis Hendrickson

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  27 | Into the Abyss