(eng) Michael Wallace - Alliance 02 by Armada

Author:Armada [Armada]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

The Slave Master arrived with forty armored decimator units and a number of enslaved human technicians. The decimators held the western edge of the camp while the techs rebuilt the barrier.

Meanwhile, Nils Oolmena led the cleanup effort. The overseer collected the dead and stacked them by race near the shuttle landing pad: human, Hroom, Cavlee, and insectoid. He didn’t know if the Slave Master would order them burned on site or want them hauled into the shuttle and carried into orbit when they abandoned the planet. Most likely burned.

Once he’d stacked the dead, he ordered the dead trumpeter hauled out of the pit where it had fallen on top of the slumbering Dweller. Apart from a single dozer on caterpillar treads, the equipment was still nonfunctional, so getting the creature out meant cutting it into pieces, then dragging them up the ramp with the dozer.

The trumpeter was so big, and the devotees so diminished in number, that when night fell, they were still working, with more than half of the dead creature remaining below. Still no rain, but with the perimeter breached, thousands of fist-sized bugs invaded the compound. They settled onto the corpse, feeding, injecting their eggs into the carcass, and driving the workers mad with their bites.

The sound of gunfire from the perimeter indicated that other, larger scavengers had been drawn by the smell. The Adjudicators kept them out, but Nils Oolmena could only imagine the Slave Master’s rage at being forced to slaughter the local wildlife.

I am going to die.

The thought was ever present in the overseer’s mind as he worked. Even if his feeble plan to deflect blame for the breach worked, he had little doubt that being forced to abandon the contaminated planet would result in a quick, brutal death for him and the other devotees. He’d known this was a possibility when he took the first step down this path, but he was terrified when faced with the actual prospect.

Nightfall saw the stars return and the aurora retreat toward the horizon. Directly overhead, brighter than any stars, sat six winking lights in a diamond-shaped constellation. Six Adjudicator star fortresses in orbit, waiting.

Somewhere up there was the Slave Master’s king, general, high priest—whoever or whatever it was that ruled as the ultimate lord over these people. Nils Oolmena’s consolation was that his own cruel master would soon face an accounting of its own as it attempted to explain its failure to whatever implacable figure reigned with such terror. How could the Slave Master have taken this planet, purified and protected for so long, and allow it to be contaminated? The entire mission would be sacrificed as a result.

If there was any justice in the universe, the creature would die with the same violence as its slaves.

Nils Oolmena had almost finished hauling the trumpeter out of the pit when the decimators and human techs reappeared from the western edge of the encampment. There was a single haunch of the creature left at the bottom, plus a slop of foul-smelling guts.

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