LOCATION: BASTION CITY CENTER
PLANET: BASTION 123295 CFP
MISSION TIMER: 26:17:02
On the way down to the holding cells, the two security checkpoints were each manned by seven soldiers. Li held everyone back, allowing Grim to take his anger out on the guards.
Afterward, Grim did seem a bit calmer, but when Vallor presented his credentials to open the double doors at the bottom of the long stairwell, Grim stepped through and his fury spiked once again.
He was immediately hit with the harsh smells of human waste, as the holding cells had no toilets. And rotting flesh, because it seemed the bastards running the place didn’t bother removing dead bodies from the cramped cells.
On top of that, Grim could feel his Vitality being drained actively as he stood there.
He turned toward Vallor and grabbed him by his shirt, pulling him close.
“Turn this shit off. Now.”
Vallor appeared confused.
“There’s a dampening field here that’s sapping Vitality by the second. Find the control and turn it off.”
Vallor nodded and ran ahead to the control room. Li followed close behind.
Grim turned toward the cells.
Each holding cell, about the size of a standard brig on a warship, contained ten people. There were no beds, and they were all strewn about on the floor, barely moving. Barely breathing.
He balled his fists and the longer he stood there feeling his Vitality being sapped, the madder he grew.
A loud snap followed by a crash came from the control room, and Grim ran toward it.
He felt his energy slowly returning as he ran, and when he passed through the door, he saw Li standing with his giant shield in hand.
“I had to break it,” he said. “They had the energy sapper stuck to max, and even Vallor’s credentials weren’t able to override it.”
Smoke emanated from a cabinet next to a bank of monitors and computer terminals. It smelled of electricity and ozone.
Grim huffed, then sat down at one of the terminals.
“How do you open the cells?”
He began scouring through the menus. Vallor and Li each took workstations and began searching as well.
“Got it,” Vallor said.
He pressed a key, and Grim heard the mechanical whirring as all the cell doors opened at once.
The three ran back out, but only a few dozen of the Peacekeepers were beginning to stand.
“What’s going on?” Grim asked.
He rushed inside and tried reviving some of the soldiers.
Many were unresponsive but still alive. Some were dead and had been so for days.
He called in reinforcements, and they began leading the survivors up the stairs. Others came to carry out the bodies.
Samir assigned a team to search the terminals in the holding area for any usable intel, as troops began making their way to the extraction point.
Finally, with six hours left on the timer, Grim, Li, and Samir met to coordinate the final moves.
All offices and living quarters had been scoured for intel. It would be skimmed in detail later.
“We rigged the missiles,” Samir said. “I’ll skip the details, but basically we created a giant daisy chain that I can set off from here.” He held out a tablet. “It will be on a twenty minute timer.”
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“Twenty minutes?” Grim asked.
“It’s all we could muster. The missiles are far beneath the surface, and we could only do so much.”
“It’ll be just fine,” Li said. “We’ve got five hundred Portal Mages. We can get everyone through and leave the last one open for us. Then set it off and pass through the final gate to head home.”
“We just need to make sure the gate on this side deteriorates well before the explosion sets off, or we could see backlash on our end,” Samir said.
Grim thought for a minute.
“Right. We’ve got to find one Mage with a full mana pool who can do a stealth portal, then. Those degrade immediately upon passing through.”
Samir nodded.
“I’ll send out the word.”
With two hours left on the clock, the Mages began opening portals. The Peacekeepers passed through carrying the dead first. Once they were all through, the full exfiltration began, moving steadily until there were only a handful left.
Vallor turned to them.
“I understand you’re taking me as a prisoner.”
He glanced at the twelve women who had been with him for over 150 years now.
“But please, if you can, free the women. They don’t deserve any of your wrath, and they are innocent in all of this.”
“That’s all very noble of you,” Grim said. “But we’ll figure it out on the other end. Prepare to cross over. Keep moving until you are clear on the other end.”
He turned to the women.
“Do you understand?”
They were huddled together and clearly frightened, but they nodded.
The Mage opened the portal, allowing Vallor and the women to pass through, before he stepped into it himself.
The mission timer read twenty minutes.
It was time.
Only the final Portal Mage, Samir, Li, and Grim remained on Bastion.
Samir turned toward the mage.
“Okay,” he said. “Begin.”
The Mage nodded and closed his eyes.
Moments later, he began sweating with the exertion.
Samir pressed a button on a tablet he had programmed.
He heard beeping on the tablet and set it on the ground.
“Now,” the Mage said. His body was shaking hard now, but the portal had opened.
Li passed through, then Grim.
Samir looked at the Mage. He didn’t look well.
His face was flushed, and he looked like he was going to pass out.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
But the look on the Mage’s face told him there was no time left for questions.
Samir ran through the portal, and stepped out in the large room at Fort Greely.
The portal snapped shut behind him.
The final Mage never made it through.
Back on Bastion, the tablet Samir dropped had failed to send the signal to the explosives. The Mage heard the warning alarm just after Samir had passed through the portal.
He thought about leaving as he should, but in the end, he knew what he had to do.
He allowed the portal to close, and picked up the tablet. He was exhausted from completely draining his mana, and it took a few minutes for his vision to return to normal.
He searched through the command prompts until he found the code they had hastily written.
He had been a cybersecurity analyst before the System, and he was proud that his understanding of programming was able to translate into this alien computer language.
“Ah, that’s where they went wrong,” he muttered.
He typed a few new lines of code, batched the file again, and exited the command shell.
A red button glowed softly on the tablet screen. The Mage looked around one last time at Bastion. He said a silent farewell to his friends and family back home, and touched the button.
He didn’t have enough mana to open a new portal, so he hadn’t bothered with a twenty-minute countdown when he rewrote the code.
Far beneath the surface of Bastion, an electric signal traveled along the daisy chain, reaching all 436 missiles at once and igniting their payload.
In the final moments of his life, the final Mage watched as fireworks lit up the sky from the far side of the planet.
The bright, white flash was quickly followed by the planetary core breaking apart. The structural integrity of Bastion gave way to superior explosive force, and the artificial atmosphere was easily punctured as the entire planet disintegrated from the inside out, then exploded outward.
The Mage joined rock, metal and concrete in becoming nothing more than lifeless debris, floating in space, no longer held together by structural cohesion or gravity.
Safe at Fort Greely, Samir hung his head, knowing that the Mage hadn’t made it through.
Nobody had any idea how much the Mage had sacrificed to ensure Bastion 123295 CFP would exist no longer.
The Peacekeepers had captured troves of data, information it would take weeks to sift through.
The unwelcome revelation buried deep within was that Bastion was one of hundreds of Combat Force Projection planets being built and operated by the Empire throughout the multiverse.
While destroying Nocturnus and Bastion may have put humanity on the Obsidian Empire’s radar, the Empire had done the same with humanity.
Of the 1,092 Peacekeepers abducted, only 304 survived.
Grim, Li, and Samir each made a pledge that day. The Empire would pay for those 788 stolen lives million of times over.
Grim had the Core Council task scientific teams around the world with developing a method to search for the Empire’s CFP planets. They used the unique signature created by the moving portals, and within three years, had developed technology to search and track it.
It was a new game of cat and mouse for Earth.
But the Obsidian Empire had resources to burn, and the game often felt much more like whack-a-mole than anything else.
It didn’t take long to realize that Earth needed one thing above all else.
Allies.
And with Kaela Sirova heading to the Orion Luminary Institute, she would have the perfect opportunity to make them.