Beyond the Sky: Chapter 1
Slave Raid
The slavers were coming. Velli chambered a round, raised her rifle, and took a breath. Almost a year to the day since they’d driven her out, burned her village to ash. She wouldn’t let it happen here.
Through the scale-barked desert trees, headlights shone in the distance. The rumble of engines built, Velli glanced back and forth to her squadmates crouched behind rocks or squatting in ditches, hidden under the darkness of night.
Arrogant, the slavers approached at speed: two jeeps and a truck. They rounded a bend, entering fully into view, and Teliv shouted, “Light them up!”
A hail of gunfire rang out. Windshields broke, headlights shattered. The truck’s door swung open, a disembarking thug being reduced to a bloody sponge. More slavers fired back, diving behind cover. Most were thin Cepic, Velli saw, then glimpsed a large Fesk leap from one jeep.
She traded fire with a slaver behind a tree, and thought she got him in the shoulder. Then from behind, echoed the sound of machine guns—in the village.
“Ambush!” Velli yelled.
“Fall back!” Teliv ordered. “To the village! Quickly!”
Velli emptied her magazine for cover fire. One of the JNF squad went down, hit in the leg, she helped him up and passed him to the medics.
Not an ambush, she saw. A raid. Some of the mud-brick houses were already ablaze, and burly thugs with rifles seized any occupants escaping. Velli sighted one from three dozen armspans, and squeezed the trigger. The thug went down.
A return burst caught another JNF fighter. For an instant, Velli was confused as to its source, then she looked up.
From above, came the Flyers. A half-dozen Yunes, doubtless hired out of a roost near the city. In their feet they clutched specialized rifles, and their multicolored wing membranes spread wide as their dive reached its nadir. More rounds issued from the footguns, several bullets thudded into the earth near Velli’s feet.
Three more Flyers carried incendiaries instead, and dropped them with the pins pulled. Two crashed into houses amid fireballs, a third landed in the street. The squadmates with shotguns returned fire, but to no avail. The nimble Yunes wheeled away, with little more than pinpricks in their wings.
“We have to stop that truck!” Velli pointed, rejoining with Teliv. Across the burning street the slavers had a truck whose bed was a metal-walled cell, and roughly tossed captives inside. She dared not counter their fire, lest she hit one.
“They’re falling back!” another fighter shouted.
Of course they were. Fighting the National Front was the Regime’s problem, not theirs. All they wanted was money.
And Velli wasn’t about to let them get it. A squad jeep sat parked down the road, she hurried over and jumped in.
“What are you doing?” Teliv demanded.
She started the engine. “Or job.”
“You’ll get yourself killed!”
“Are you going to help, or just let it happen?”
“Fine,” he grumbled. “Move over!”
Trees whipped past along the narrow road, soon giving way to an open expanse of shrubland. The jeep’s engine brapped and puttered, complaining under the strain. Its headlights illuminated the slave truck.
A Cepic slaver leaned out the passenger window, fur and whiskers blowing in the wind, and shot off bursts from his rifle. Velli’s shots passed wide, in front of the truck, Teliv took one hand from the wheel and blasted away with his pistol.
“Don’t hit the captives!” Velli shouted, She could see their faces, through the cage’s slit windows. The gunner, wounded, fell from the window and tumbled down the street. “Get me closer!”
“Are you crazy!”
“Just do it!” The jeep surged forward, engine revving. A chasm of speeding road separated the two vehicles. “Closer, closer!” She shouldered her rifle.
Leaping, she caught the top of the cage. She saw the driver’s face in the side mirror, he leaned over with a pistol and fired back blindly. Velli manhandled his arm, dropped the magazine, and popped the last shot into the sky.
Hauling herself up the side, she rolled onto the top. Behind, Teliv slowed down and curved around to the truck’s right. Reaching the front, he hopped to the running board and fired into the cabin. The jeep veered away and smashed into a tree.
The truck swerved, Teliv was struggling with the driver. She drew her pistol and moved to help, then without warning a third slaver came out the other side.
He was a Fesk, huge, and leapt to the roof with a single bound of his great flat feet. On his hip was a pistol, in his hands a spiky iron chain, and the eyes of his long-necked head glared with hate.
Counterbalancing with his long tail, he swung the chain and caught Velli’s hand with a blow that would’ve broken it had her pistol not been in the way. The weapon spun away into the darkness.
The Slavemaster swung again, a downward stroke. “Die, vermin!” The chain thudded atop the cage. The truck continued to rock and swerve. Someone in the cab yelled and cursed, then she saw a blue-uniformed figure tumble from the door. Teliv!
“And now,” The Slavemaster coiled the chain. “You die!”
His foot stopped over a barred opening. From below, a knife rammed up through it, bloodstained point piercing the top of his shoe. The slaver roared in pain.
Velli seized him, shoved him towards the rear, and, without a word, gave him a kick. He fell head-first to the dusty street, bounced, and rolled to a stop as an inert lump. From inside the cage, a young girl smiled back.
The truck veered dangerously now, Velli drew her knife and climbed to the door. The driver was dead, from stab and bullet wounds, slumped over the wheel with his foot on the accelerator. She pushed the corpse aside and swerved just in time to avoid a ditch, then brought the vehicle to a stop. He had a key, she unlocked the cage. The captives emerged, thanking her profusely, she helped a few children and old women down.
“Head to those hills there, the two peaks clustered together.” Velli pointed into the night, where the zodiacal light’s diffuse white glow met the ground. “I must see to my comrades.” They did not move. “Go!” she hissed. “More slavers may come!”
She stopped at the Slavemaster’s body and poked it with her knife just to make sure. Further down the road she found the spot where Teliv fell—scuffed dirt beside tire tracks, a few specks of blue blood, and nothing else. She hoped he still lived.
Her pistol lay a mile or two further back, before a bridge across a river. No sooner had she picked up, than headlights rounded the corner. She flicked off the safety and retreated into the ditch. Not a JNF jeep—a slaver truck! No captives, but if they found those further down the road...
What happened next was a product of luck by the slavers, and valor by Velli.
The truck slowed, and she knew they’d got enough of a glimpse to investigate. If they chased her, they’d not find the villagers on their way to freedom. Velli lifted the pistol.
A gang of thugs, Cepic and Fesk, disembarked, restraining a six-limbed trackerbeast covered in plated scales. It screeched, smelling her instantly. Velli emptied her weapon into it, the creature howled and died, its masters uttering strings of curses.
They were on her. She ran, down the embankment away from the bridge and to the river bank. Bullets splashed the water nearby, she reloaded and fired back until her pistol ran out. She’d never fight off this many—she needed an escape, some place to hide. The Fesk slavers gained fast, bounding along with necks and tails dipping as their big feet pushed off the ground. No Cepic could outrun them, they were called Leapers for a reason.
The river went round a bend to another bridge, rusted steel overgrown with foliage. Stenciled along its iron beams were the words KEEP OUT! Alongside, signs depicted claws, black circles with evil angular eyes, and skeletons. The Shadowstalkers had been here since before she’d been born, before the Mespreth Regime and Supreme Leader Enin. All that time, she’d known this was not a place for her, not somewhere where the people of the daylight could go.
She had no choice.
Slavers only paces behind her, she dashed under the bridge, scrambled up some rocks to the shore, and stopped. From behind came the splash-splash-splash of Fesk hopping, then silence. Finally, one thug said to another, “You first.”
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