Atlantia Series 2: Retaliator by Dean Crawford Page A

followed Evelyn in with C’rairn at his side.
    Evelyn advanced slowly through the gloom, one careful step after another until she reached the end of the corridor and saw the vast expanses of the Sylph’s hold open up before her. Like a cavern, sectioned off by massive bulkheads that had huge open doors set into them, the hold was stacked with myriad crates, boxes, pallets and drums lashed high above their heads, like a deep valley with cliffs of wood and steel. Dim overhead lights cast shafts of illumination that barely reached the deck, the air here still misty with the cold.
    Cleared paths weaved in orderly lines like highways between the mountainous stores, their edges marked with bright yellow lines. Bra’hiv pointed down each of them, and in silence the Marines split up into pairs. Evelyn advanced down the central aisle, Qayin close behind her.
    She moved quietly, gently setting each boot down to avoid the sound of her footfalls betraying her presence. She could see various machines used to move stock below decks, all abandoned. But as she moved through the towering store room, Bra’hiv and C’rairn moving alongside her in the next aisle, so she spotted a crate that had been split open, the contents scattered across the deck before her.
    Evelyn quickened her pace and knelt down alongside the debris.
    ‘Food,’ she whispered to Qayin.
    The big man nodded, his tattoos glowing like thin trails of magma against black rocks as his eyes swivelled up to look around the hold.
    ‘Andaim was right,’ he said. ‘It ain’t the Word aboard.’
    ‘Then what the hell is it if…?’
    A plasma blast crackled as Evelyn felt herself lifted off the deck and hurled across the hold to crash into a stack of boxes. A plasma charge smashed into the deck where she had been crouching as Qayin crashed down alongside her, one huge hand beneath her shoulder where he had lifted her and propelled them clear of the shot. A spray of bright blue–white plasma hissed as it melted plastic cases nearby as Evelyn scrambled for cover.
    ‘Enemy front!’ Bra’hiv yelled as he returned fire.
    She saw several more plasma rounds smash into metal stanchions further down the hold, the general’s shots illuminating the darkness in flickering spheres of harsh white light. Evelyn saw a shadowy form dash out of sight as it fled the lethal hail of fire.
    ‘I’ll be damned,’ Qayin growled as he got to his feet and surged forward, hugging the cover of the stacked supplies as he advanced.
    Evelyn got to her feet and followed him, as Bra’hiv and C’rairn emerged from the neighbouring aisle and the general gestured with a pointed finger toward the starboard wall of the hold. Evelyn and Qayin crouched in the shadows as Bra’hiv and C’rairn moved across to the cover of the far side of their aisle. Then, as a group, they advanced in pursuit of their quarry.
    A pin point of fiery light flashed and Evelyn dove onto the deck as a plasma round crackled and shot across the hold. It flashed by above her head and crashed into stacked boxes behind her. Qayin leaped out of the way of the spray of super–heated plasma and Evelyn rolled across the deck as it splattered down where she had been moments before.
    ‘Return fire!’
    Bra’hiv, C’rairn, Qayin and Evelyn all opened fire at once, multiple plasma rounds zipping across the darkened hold and smashing across the starboard hull wall in a blaze of fiery light. Starbursts of plasma sprayed down into the gloom and she heard amid the din of the rifle fire a deep cry of pain.
    Evelyn looked across at Bra’hiv and signalled where the enemy was. Bra’hiv nodded and with C’rairn he headed aft, hoping to catch their quarry in a cross–fire. Evelyn fired her pistol again, two rounds in the vicinity of where she had heard the cry.
    ‘It’s hunkered down,’ Qayin snarled, ‘nowhere to run.’
    Evelyn moved forward and approached the hull wall as to her far left she saw Bra’hiv and C’rairn advancing one at