The Fallen Ronin Read online

  Contents

  The Fallen Ronin

  Copyright

  Copyright

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  Thank you.

  About the author

  Other works

  THE FALLEN RONIN

  The Galactic Crusade Trilogy (Series Finale)

  Book 3

  By Pablo Andrés Wunderlich Padilla

  Copyright 2019

  ***

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please go and buy your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to real persons, events, or places are purely coincidental; any references to actual places, people, or brands are fictitious. All rights reserved.

  ***

  Edited by Monique Happy Editorial Services

  www.MoniqueHappyEditorial.com

  —1—

  The probe shakes violently. Reality becomes a blur as the vessel we’re in spins out of control.

  The internal temperature rises abruptly, the heat becomes unbearable, and the hull of the probe turns red. Fumes arise from the walls around us. The heat erupts like living hell as tongues of flame rise to lick at the skin of its passengers. My skin begins to melt as the temperature sears us alive.

  “Masaaki!” I yell. It’s a futile yelp. The intense centrifugal force made her pass out, but nonetheless she is also suffering from the intensity of the heat. I can see her skin begin to bulge and swell, to explode in hot boils as the skin melts away and leaves her raw flesh exposed to the violent atmosphere.

  I unbuckle and with great difficulty make my way to her, fighting against the centrifugal force. I get to her, unbuckle her, and cover her body with my own to prevent her from being cooked alive. I block her nasal passages to keep her lungs from boiling in the hot air. There are parts of her body still exposed, but I’m unable to protect them. Hopefully this madness will end soon. I am sure we are being tugged by a large gravitational field, likely a planet. Hopefully a planet.

  “Hai! Report! What the hell is going on?”

  My DAT is blinking in and out of dysfunction. Hai’s voice manages to relay his message as the forces acting upon us threaten to tear us into pieces: “Unfortunately, we ran out of fuel before reaching our destination and came several hours early out of warp-speed prior to reaching our destination,” says the AI.

  “And you said nothing about this!”

  “Worrying you beforehand was futile. More oxygen would have been consumed by the stress generated. There is nothing we could have done to prevent this. Without fuel, the closest planet to our position is luring us in by virtue of its gravity. The heat is a product of entering its dense atmosphere. This probe is not prepared for planetary travel or entering atmospheres for that matter. Or landing.”

  “So this is a crash landing?”

  “Indeed.”

  We’re going to die. I buckle up as best I can and prepare for collision. All the while, I am burning alive. I can see sheets of flesh crumpling like burnt paper as the heat chews away at my arms and my legs.

  The warping sound of metal becomes deafening as the probe is deformed by the forces acting upon it. The booming cool air of the planet’s atmosphere rips the hull apart.

  Enormous chunks of the probe are released as they are peeled off. The searing walls of the probe begin to cool as we descend at top speed. I find some relief as the cool air calms the flesh down.

  “Emergency counter-pulsation in three…two…one.”

  A sudden decrease in speed breaks my clavicles as the seat belt holds me in place.

  A thunderous crack follows. The probe is surrounded by a dense cloud of dust. Darkness follows.

  The pain becomes unbearable as more bones are cracked by the astronomical forces acting upon my body. I black out.

  —2—

  I come to with the crash of heavy narcotics slurring my mental faculties. The slur becomes a slow crawl of mental acrobatics. I emerge from the swamp of neuro chemicals and begin to feel pain seep into my consciousness.

  I can feel the blast of pain surge fully into my mind as I awaken fully. The pain dulls, and I can feel how my superior genetics have healed most of the lesions, with some still to go, like the obvious cracked ribs and clavicles and the hemorrhagic meltdown of my lungs. But otherwise, even my skin has begun to seal up thanks to the action of the cauterizing enzymes in my bloodstream. I move my hand to what I anticipate will be my bald head, but instead I feel very short, prickly hair.

  “Hai, how long since we crash-landed?” I say with a crackly voice.

  “Seventy-three hours and forty-five minutes standard,” says the AI.

  I’ve been out for a long time. Enough time to heal. With a jolt, I remember I’m still holding Masaaki in an all-encompassing bear hug, and I fear I’ve pinched her nose for too long. I find my fingers pressing firmly on her nostrils. Did I kill her?

  She’s breathing by mouth. I take a deep breath and relax. She’s burnt badly. Second- and third-degree wounds on her arms and legs—the exposed parts of her body as we descended into the furnace of hell.

  I analyze the OS of my DAT and try to interact with the user interface. There’s no diagnostic data of my current health. In this regard the Edelweiss OS used by the Doomsayers is very inferior to the ÆTAS OS. I admit that I miss those details.

  “Where are we? It’s obvious the atmosphere is human-friendly,” I say, taking in another breath to ascertain this fact.

  “Unknown. Our destination was Z-211. But we’ve no way to know our current position nor how far we are from our destination.”

  “We’re lucky the local planetary system star didn’t lure us in with its superior gravitational pull.”

  “That would have been impossible. Warp travel algorithms have predefined routes that were mapped millennia ago, which automatically avoid high G objects like stars and are constantly updated and adapted to the predicted rotation and orbit.”

  “Are you sure we’re in the Milky Way?”

  “Ninety-nine percent sure. I haven’t been able to synchronize myself with my latest and most current servers, and therefore there is a 1% chance that we are not in the Milky Way.”

  “I hope we are….”

  “The reasons I’ve been unable to synchronize myself with my more updated self are twofold: one, the pad where I was installed has been destroyed by the heat; and two, there is a powerful electromagnetic field around us that is causing significant interference. I was able to download much of my data to your DAT prior to the pad being destr
oyed.

  “Shit…” I grumble, as moving causes my still fractured ribs to hurt. I take a deep breath and regret it. I stabilize myself and suck in the pain as I move around to assess the damage.

  “There’s only one way of figuring out where we are. Let’s get out of here.”

  “I must say before you leave the probe, it was a pleasure beating you in GO!,” says the AI in my head. We had played the game several hundred times while traveling before boarding the scientific probe I had deployed during the initial scout of Canis Major.

  The interior of the probe is unrecognizable. It looks like a disemboweled beast whose innards have been exposed and laid to waste. Sparking wires and the humming engines whir as the probe shuts down.

  “Hai, how long did we travel at warp-speed?”

  “Two weeks, six days, and five hours—is the time we’ve been traveling at warp-speed. It’s been total of seven months and two weeks since we fled from Ahmurai, where we boarded the Banewing.”

  Our escape plans changed dramatically. Initially we had planned to rendezvous with Ahmurai’s vessel/world, but the plans changed when we noticed one of the scientific probes that we had deployed upon entering Canis Major was within range. We woke Masaaki from her deep cryo-sleep. The probe was intact. We barely fit inside. The plan was to travel a total of three weeks at warp-speed, aiming to make it near Z-211, a Doomsayer world based on Hai’s data. However, our sudden and abrupt halt has now left us in an unknown location.

  “What is the relevance of the time spent in our travel?” asks Hai.

  “You saw what Ahmurai is capable of. If he came to the Milky Way to purge humanity, this galaxy should be a catacomb by now.”

  “This is true,” says the AI. “It should be. We must make haste and find out where we are.”

  “We? You have no body to aid me in this process. You mean I must make haste?”

  “Indeed. I meant we as a team.”

  Enough said. Time to act. First, I need to get out of the probe. Second, find nourishment and get Masaaki help because she needs medical attention, and fast. And last, determine our location.

  I unbuckle myself, finding the belt meshed into my burnt flesh. I rip it from my melted skin, resulting in a small gush of blood as my skin tears.

  I feel a great sense of relief once the restraints are loose, allowing my thoracic cage to expand when I breathe. I lift Masaaki’s limp body in my arms and walk out of the disaster, skipping fires and warped, sharp metal edges to get around. A whirling, sparking wire hits me in the head.

  Darkness engulfs me as I leave the high temperature zone of the fallen probe. I’ve no clothes on. They were burnt off. My groin and genitals are still half-healed and large blisters are still visible. I decide not to look down any longer to avoid the psychological pain of seeing my mutilated private parts. They should heal soon enough.

  Cool air wraps me as I step beyond the wreckage. I recognize the structure we’re in. It’s large, made of polyconcrete, with columns and structural cables dangling in the air after the destruction caused by our crash landing. It’s the type of structure created by the terraforming mechs that print 3D buildings, mTOR class mechs for colonization.

  Then I notice the cadavers. Hundreds of them.

  I sense and feel the surge of adrenaline preparing my body for combat. And then I notice the smell. The pungent, fetid smell of rotting flesh. The smell of death. Images of destroyed cities I’ve laid waste to pop in my mind’s eye. Did we kill these people by plunging into the building?

  It’s not possible…the smell…this is the result of days or even weeks of decomposition. Of chaos breeding in a corpse unattended. I hear meat ripping. I see small vermin chewing on the carrion in what appears to be a feast of the fallen.

  The small animals are like rats, but they are six legged and walking on two large hind legs that they use to move around in large hops. The animals notice me and screech at me, surely trying to defend their meal. As far as my experience goes, I can say with certainty that every world with advanced life, pluricellular life, intelligent or nonintelligent, has its own version of vermin like rats. It’s some sort of prototype that is very well adapted to eat almost anything, thrive in almost any condition, and even prey on themselves.

  I remain still as I scan the room for danger. If the vermin are here, I suspect no large predator would be around. As I study the fallen, I notice that the cadavers are sapiens clothed in standard ÆTAS fashion, with jumpsuits of various colors with the ÆTAS emblem on the left side of the chest.

  The brutality that tells the story of their death recounts a tale of enormous suffering. These men and women were slain in the most vile and terrible way. They were killed to cause pain and terrible agony. I can tell it by their faces, which are locked in a screech of terror, and by the absence of limbs and the spillage of guts all around us. This was a massacre, an intentional well-coordinated brutality done by nothing more than artisans of the ominous business of killing.

  Was this done by Ahmurai? I remember him yanking hearts out of my soldiers’ bodies, throwing them into a heap. Part of me wishes this were Ahmurai’s doing, but I have a feeling it was not.

  There are no bullet holes anywhere. But, in most of the cadaver, I see evidence of the inescapable destruction caused by a blade. I recognize the destroyed flesh. It’s the signature of an Entropic Blade, named for the explosion it causes to the flesh when it strikes through it when it’s powered on.

  This is not Ahmurai’s doing. Can’t be. It’s too…dedicated. There is some wicked art behind these killings. I can see armored boot footprints everywhere.

  This would imply the Stærfleet is in some sort of civil war. That is of course if we landed in a colonized human world. By the attire of the fallen, that is indeed what is going on.

  Civil war?

  Has the ÆTAS turned on its civilians?

  Or perhaps the Doomsayers unleashed their Necro Day, and I’m seeing the consequences.

  I stop worrying about what’s going on and concentrate on Masaaki. She’s about to wake up, and I’m sure she will be in dying pain from her extreme burn wounds. I have to look for nourishment, clothing for myself, and medical attention for her. Burns on sapiens are a terrible thing. They cause dehydration and infection on the exposed flesh. She will die if this is not resolved quickly.

  I notice this planet’s gravity force is high. At least 2G. It will be plenty for Masaaki, unused to such high gravity wells. The dead sapiens bodies are proof of the high gravity well, given their musculature and overall size, smaller than their 1G exposed counterparts. Bulkier.

  I lay Masaaki down and begin rummaging in the ruins. The vermin avoid me at all costs. I doubt they’ll interest themselves in Masaaki, even though she is vulnerable. They’d have to kill her, and that is too much effort to dissuade them when they already have plenty of meat to devour.

  I get close to a window and look out. The window is mostly covered by debris, but I manage to peer outside. It’s darkening, but I can see well into the horizon and down to the ground level. I realize we are high up in the building, likely level one hundred or so.

  “FUCK!!!!” yells Masaaki. I run to her.

  She begins to weep abruptly and severely, stretching out her burned limbs as she takes in the damage she has suffered. She continues to scream as shock takes hold and conquers her mind. I cannot calm her down.

  “Shit! Shit! Shit! It hurts! Gnaa!!!”

  I run to the fallen and continue looking. I find some drugs in the side pockets of the jumpsuit of a fallen teenager. I take the small containers: ultramorphine and ultramanic-acid. I take the ultramorphine tablets, crush one, and do my best effort to force the powder in Masaaki’s gaping mouth.

  She takes the powder with hatred, some of the powder falls on her face, and she gets even more upset. She continues screaming. The powder acts fast, and her screams fall into a humming groan of pain. I put another pill under her tongue and let that one slowly seep into her bloodstream. She is s
oon in a trance.

  I continue to search and realize I’m actually in some room where social gatherings were given. I notice a medical supply crate and open it. I find many useful meds, including biopaste, which is a wound healer. I take the paste and three self-catheter medical-beetle. I carry the medical loot back to where Masaaki is already knocked out by the ultramorphine.

  A vermin is sniffing Masaaki. I kick it with such force it explodes in a mist of blood. Its partners don’t seem to care for its loss and go on munching on the fallen.

  I lay one of the three medical-beetles on Masaaki’s arm and activate the bio-tech device. The beetle wraps its six legs around her arm. Its headpiece is armed with ultrasonic guidance, and it soon finds an appropriate vein. A catheter from its tail is inserted into the appropriate vein. The beetle is not small. It has a body filled with three liters of sodium chloride dissolved in sterile water. The three liters of nourished saline are being infused into her body at a physiologic rate.

  I rip her clothes free and expose all her damaged flesh. I regret looking at her naked body seared and ravaged by the heat. I repeat in my mind: this will heal. I take the three tubes of biopaste and coat all the burns with it. She is soon covered in the thick, white substance. The thick paste soon becomes a hard rind, and Masaaki is frozen within it.

  I sigh as I observe Masaaki healing. I’m still beat up myself. I lay by her side and decide to take a nap and allow my body to keep healing the fractures and bruises. Before I do so, I go back into the wreckage and recover my uncharged Entropic Blade. The purple sheathe is charred and damaged by the heat. I clean it to the best of my ability and lay down with it by my side.

  I find it difficult to sleep. A symphony of chaos is rampant in my mind, as the turbulent ocean of despair is filled with a storm of thoughts. I find myself still awake after ten hours, having stared at the ceiling contemplating my own chaotic mind.