This is a fan translation of Dark Skies (Тёмныенебеса) by Mikhail Akhmanov, currently only available in Russian and, because of the author's passing in 2019, unlikely to ever be published in English. This is the fourth book in a six-book series called Arrivals from the Dark (Пришедшие из мрака), which also has a six-book spin-off series called Trevelyan's Mission (Миссия Тревельяна).

I claim no rights to the contents herein.


Chapter 22

The Spaceport

Ships hovered in the purple sky: two large dreadnoughts and several smaller tubs, of the kind Mark had fought during the Malta's attack. The dreadnoughts weren't firing; their plasma throwers would have burned such craters in the surface that the spaceport would have to be written off. The smaller ships made precise shots at people and robots, covering the groups of Dromi advancing from the edge of Ho. The tanks left by Alferov had already been turned into scrap metal along with half of the UCRs, but the greenskins were still unable to overrun Mark and his veterans. They occupied most of the landing field, but humans were hiding in the launch silos, which were connected by tunnels, and continued to hold their own. Obviously, the Dromi did not wish to destroy this entire system: the shafts, the maintenance passages, the still empty but usable storehouses; after all, they had been building the spaceport for several years, and plenty of labor and valuable materials had gone into T'har's rocky soil. Such a turn of events seemed like a stroke of incredible luck to Mark, as his squad would not have been able to stand up to dreadnoughts' cannons.

Sitting atop a robot that was hovering behind the wall surrounding the shaft, he was examining the advancing enemies through his binoculars. Like the day, as well as two and three days, before, the Dromi were moving in groups, accompanied by ground and air vehicles, and did not appear to wish to alter their tactics, for example, to block off the shaft's opening and attempt to come down on ropes or with the use of grav-generators. It was impossible to get into the underground complex another way, as all the entrances and exits to and from the surface had been blown up by Grandpa Fyodor and Zurab Chania, doing a very good job and collapsing all the passages along their entire length. They had also, just in case, collapsed the launch silo that led to Cyrus Etterby's mine, their only path of retreat; now the only way to it was through the maintenance tunnels.

An aircraft hovered over a nearby silo, and the Dromi, gripping the ropes dropped from it, started jumping down. Their movements were clumsy and slow; Mark knew that, when descending, they held on to the rope with all of their limbs and couldn't shoot. During those seconds, they were easy targets for humans and UCRs, it was hard to miss with either a laser or a plasma thrower. If only there weren't so many of them!

Another Dromi squad headed for his well, and Mark sent his robot to the bottom, which had three tunnel openings. There, hiding under the durable ceiling, ten fighters awaited him: Maya, Xenia, Uncle Dao Bo, Miguel Cortez, and six intact UCRs. From sixty meters deep, the sky looked like an even purple circle, with clouds lazily floating across it. Occasionally, this peaceful image was broken by a Dromi ship, which popped up from somewhere to the side and spat out a burst of lightning bolts.

Mark landed ankle deep in gray ash and immediately dashed into the tunnel with the girls. He ordered the robot to hover in front of them. Xenia frowned, jerking her shoulder in annoyance, "Why'd you put it there, brother? I can't shoot with it in the way!"

"You shouldn't get in its way, sis. It shoots better than we do," Mark grumbled, pushing his sister and Maya deeper into the tunnel. It wasn't easy, as both armor-clad girls were resisting actively. Fortunately, they weren't nearly as good at controlling their suits as Mark was.

Three days before, when Alferov was leaving with the last disk, Mark had attempted to send them off to Nickel, but all his efforts were for naught. Then he had put them in suits, showed how to move in them, and ordered them to stay in the silo. Maya had obeyed, but he had caught his stubborn sister on the surface several times.

Cortez, who was standing in a side tunnel with two UCRs, waved to Mark, "Are we expecting guests, Lieutenant?"

"They're about to drop in from the sky… About two hundred of them."

"The sixteenth attempt in four days," said Dao Bo, who was positioned with his robots across from Mark. Dao Bo was a thorough man, scrupulous even; in Ibáñez, he had been elected an arbitrator for many years. He was also well known as an experienced hunter and had gone with Bob Bale to clear the Western Wind Highlands and the Red Rocks from stone devils.

But Bale was dead now. Who will you go hunting with now, Uncle Dao? Mark thought with bitterness.

The light over the silo was suddenly blocked by an aircraft, ropes came down to the bottom, and many bulky figures hung onto them like creepy Christmas tree decorations. Humans and robots stuck out from the tunnels and started firing; UCRs were aiming at the sliding down enemies, while the living fighters tried to cut the ropes with their blaster beams under the vehicle's hull. When it worked, three, four, or five Dromi fell from above and crashed into the rocky bottom of the well. The fight was speechless; no screams, no groans, no curses, just the hiss of plasma streams and the crashing sound of fallen enemies. Flaming streams flowed along the smooth walls of the silo, the area was permeated with the smell of burnt flesh, gray ashes circled in the air, and the pile of bodies at the bottom of the well was waist-high now. Meanwhile, more and more ropes came were coming down from above, new figures in helmets and shoulder pads were appearing, and plasma streams were hitting the walls with greater frequency…

"Missile!" Mark ordered.

One of Dao's robots dashed out of the tunnel, instantly rotated the launcher, and threw the projectile upwards. The sky above the silo exploded, the purple color turned crimson, dead bodies and aircraft debris fell down.

"Last one," Dao Bo said.

"Good hit," Cortez noted.

Burnt tatters continued to rain down from above.

"I'll send a robot up and have it take a look at what's left." Mark pointed a finger at the purple circle, and his UCR slid up along a wall of the well. The back of his glove displayed an image on an oval screen: the broken breastwork around the silo opening, Dromi frozen in death agony, the remains of their craft with its plating torn off. Nothing and nobody was moving.

"We've fought them off," Xenia said, looking at the screen. Maya nodded silently, raised her faceplate, and smiled to Mark.

"Lower it," he ordered. "The robots are about to burn them."

They had to burn corpses five times a day, and the resulting smell was awful. While the UCRs were busy with this unappetizing task, Mark contacted Timofeyev, Fierri, and the other group leaders. Fortunately, there were no casualties, but their ammunition supplies were running low. The veterans started to count up what they had left and exchange their impressions. The communicator carried their voices to Mark.

Suddenly Grandpa Fyodor grumbled, "It's the end of day four."

"Yeah, it's almost evening," Fierri agreed. "They won't try again today. They don't like the dark."

Throwing his head back, Mark saw that the purple disk was growing darker. Night fell fast on T'har.

"Ilyich must have already hidden everything underground in Nickel, both people and equipment," he heard a half-familiar voice.

"In that case, there's nothing left for us to do here." It was Uncle Zurab. "Except, maybe, to give a goodbye salute."

"With all the guns."

"And all the remaining missiles."

Silence fell. Then Timofeyev said, "Night's a good time to leave. What do you think, Lieutenant?"

They were tired, Mark thought. Four days of constant fighting, sixteen attacks… That was considering that the youngest of the veterans was twice his own age, to say nothing of Maya and Xenia. But the girls were also tired; he could see their hollow-cheeked faces and deep shadows under their eyes.

"I think Grandpa Fyodor is right. But let's forego any gun salutes. We'll leave quietly."

"Accepted," Chania replied. "Any other orders?"

"Eat, prepare your gear, and gather at the passages to the collapsed launch silo by 2200. Here's the order of movement: Timofeyev's group will go first."

"Well, I could be the rearguard. I—" Uncle Fyodor started, but Mark gave a strict, "Who's in command here?" and the old man fell silent.

Leaving one UCR to keep watch by the surface, Mark took his team to an empty storehouse between two wells, which had served them as a bedroom, a mess hall, and ammo storage. They ate, checked their suits, replaced the battery packs in their throwers, and headed down the dark passages.

The underground passage system, manually cut by the prisoners, had not been completed, but it allowed them to reach almost any launch silo. This structure of deep vertical wells, spacious storage rooms and passages on multiple levels, was typical for all galactic races, not counting certain details: the shape of ramps and stairs, the width of the tunnels, the wall, floor, and ceiling finish, the lighting and power equipment. In open space, ships were based at space stations, and the lack of gravity allowed them to be services and repaired, loaded and unloaded with minimal effort. But transporting cargo to an inhabited world was a problem; it was necessary to build many shuttles, barges, grav-platforms, and other such equipment that permitted atmospheric flight and a soft landing. Then again, warships, space liners, and transports, equipped with gravitators, could go down to an inhabited planet and deliver cargo and passengers directly to a spaceport. But that created another problem, that of servicing spacecraft in normal gravity. Creating localized zero gravity areas required great energy expenditure, which was why virtually all civilized races built special structures, either on the surface or underground. They allowed for any ship section, hatch, or airlock to be accessible for testing, repair, and loading, if it became necessary. Such spaceports served for ages, receiving and sending off both merchant and battle fleets.

The Dromi spaceport was no exception. Its launch wells were meant for large and small ships, its storage spaces, still empty, were enormous, and their passages were wide enough to allow the movement of grav-platforms, combat vehicles, and massive creatures. In the future, the spaceport would be able to receive flotillas of several clans, hundreds of dreadnoughts, thousands of small vessels, which meant that it had been constructed as a support base for the Gamma Malleus system. Based on the scale of the construction, the Dromi intended to stay here for quite a while, maybe even forever.

Forever! This thought horrified Maya. Walking behind the men along the dark passages, she watched the beams of light sliding along the walls. The rocky surface was rough, carrying traces of diggers, and Maya thought she could hear the rasping and the moaning of the people, who had been cutting through the unyielding granite in this cave. Those they had rescued looked exhausted, wounded, and emaciated; it seemed that only the native T'haran stubbornness had given them the strength to hold on. Living skeletons, Maya thought and recalled other images, which had been just as frightening: the ruins of Ibáñez, the remains of her family's home, and the charred bones of her loved ones. Here, in these catacombs, people had been dying too, both familiar and strange to her, but she felt blood ties to each of them, of the kind that united one person to another in the face of danger. One day, I will paint this, she decided, a dark gallery, a crowd of slaves with pickaxes and hammers with a huge figure of a Dromi in the backdrop. Not even a figure, but a terrifying shadow that looms over the humans…

But not all aliens seemed so monstrous and frightening to her. Their Dromi was definitely different; maybe not human but still a being, who had not wished to participate in the killings. Mark had said that it was a renegade, an outcast, but, was it possible that, in time, all Dromi would become like that one?.. Maya really wanted to believe that! Such a change would have justified the deaths of thousands of Dromi and thousands of humans, those who fought on T'har and those who warred out in the galaxy, among the burning stars. She imagined that casualties could not be pointless, and that good would triumph over evil, maybe not then, not at that moment and not in her lifetime, but definitely in the future. It was an illusion, of course; the universe accepted death with indifference, it knew no good and no evil, while among the thinking beings, such categories did not match up. Unlike universal constants, laws of physics, and mathematical equations, good and evil were not universal concepts, and each race, each people defined them differently.

And yet illusions were necessary. The kind of illusions that supported people during difficult times, providing hope and oblivion, had the strange ability to turn into reality. No one knew how much time that would require and how to build castles in the air that suddenly became as strong as the Pyramids, but there was a secret algorithm for such a structure. And a pure soul like Maya knew that, at the very least, what sort of stones were laid at the foundation: love, understanding, and patience.

Speeding up, she approached Mark, touched his shoulder, and sensed that he also knew this secret.

The squad had stretched out in the tunnel in two lines: people with heavy throwers on their shoulders, robots, carrying the remaining ammunition, two mountain cyberg led by Roy McCloskey, and a platform with explosives. The group leaders met in the middle and synchronized their timers; it was 2200. The night had already spread its wings over the Western Limit, and, as usual, the cold sea air blew over the coastal plain. The Dromi did not like the cold and the darkness.

Mark nodded to Roy McCloskey, "What do you say, elder?"

"At the end of this tunnel, there's an inclined shaft that leads to the antechamber in front of Etterby's mine. We'll descend at an angle of about twelve to fifteen degrees. Right here," the geologist pointed up, "we're twenty meters from the surface, while the mine is a lot deeper. My cybers tried to smooth out the floor, but you should still walk carefully. From the antechamber, we'll move the same way as before: eight kilometers to the dead end and the fourth ventilation well."

"Any questions?" Mark asked."

"We have a hundred people and fifty-eight UCRs," Grandpa Fyodor reminded him. "Are we coming up in two groups, Lieutenant? I mean that ventilation hole… A UCR can't carry two people, we're too heavy in suits and with weapons."

"Then we'll split into two groups and come up separately," Mark said. "There's a transport disk waiting for us in the forest by the well exit. Just in case, the first group will take up defensive positions and wait for the robots to bring the rest of us up. Then we'll quickly load up and leave."

"Give us forty minutes to search," Patrick Fierri spoke. "Forty minutes and a dozen robots… While the second group is coming up, we can rummage through the surrounding area. Maybe some of Ahn Shi-ah's people survived and are lying in the undergrowth wounded."

"That's unlikely," Chania noted. "They had no launch silos, no underground passages, they had no place to hide and nowhere to retreat to. They went to their deaths…"

"The crew of the disk has probably already checked for survivors," Timofeyev said. "But we'll look anyway. With the Lieutenant's permission, of course."

"Granted," Mark forced out. His face was flushed; he had forgotten about Ahn Shi-ah's squad, the other screen. But the veterans had remembered. Old age wasn't as forgetful as youth.

They parted, and the column started moving slowly. Grandpa Fyodor's group with UCRs in the lead, followed by Fierri's, Chania's, Tom Sutherland's, Jean Herly's, Ponomarev's… One by one, they passed Mark in dust-covered suits, in flame-scorched armor, like knights, who had just fought a fire-breathing dragon. They were retreating undefeated, old warriors of Earth, gunners and pilots, marines and navigators, the space infantry from ancient science fiction novels, which hadn't turned out to be completely full of lies and pure fiction. They were retreating to return and fight back for their T'har; the clanging of the weapons and the heavy steps sounded like menacing music, and he could almost see bullet-ridden flags floating over them and a drum beating somewhere in front.

Mark shook his head, and the vision vanished.

"Now it's our turn," he said and took the girls by their hands. Maya to his left, Xenia to his right, Miguel Cortez and Uncle Dao ahead… They walked for about two hundred meters down the tunnel, then they had to change their formation; the shaft that had been cut by the mountain cybers was narrow, meant for the size of a UCR. Mark activated his suit's autonomous mode; now the artificial muscles were contracting at a leisurely pace, matching his steps, as if the combat suit was also tired and wanted to rest. In front of him he could see Maya's figure in the light of the lantern; she was slender and graceful even in the protective clothing; armor plates gleamed on her shoulders, the barrel of her thrower swayed, gravel creaked under her feet. But the sounds were dampened in the narrow passage, absorbed by the walls and the ceiling, and, gradually, Mark started to think that viscous, dense silence was surrounding him. Silence, calm, quiet… Nothing else was happening in the bowels of the planet, in the realm of eternal darkness…

The floor under him shuddered. The walls started shaking, stones fell from the ceiling, and something up above rumbled, roared, and whistled, as if the Lords of Emptiness themselves were descending on T'har in thunder and flame in order to determine who was right and who was wrong. The earth shook, wide cracks appeared in the ceiling, hot stream of air struck Mark in the back, threw him on top of Maya, and both of them onto Xenia. They floundered about on the floor, until someone's hands helped them get up, but the hellish rumbling and shaking continued, as if a volcano had become active on the oceanic coast. That was unbelievable, since all T'haran settlements were located in seismically stable areas, but it was true. It seemed as if an earthquake was happening, that boulders were digging through the ground, and that fiery lava would spew after them from the crater.

"Stop moving!" Mark shouted. "Who knows what's happening? Tell me!"

"Carpet bombing with annihilators," Grandpa Fyodor explained immediately. "We should really wait it out underground, Lieutenant. Although, if they hit too close, then we're dead anyway."

"They're probably targeting Dromi towers," Cortez's voice came. "I'd retreat to the spaceport. It's safer right now."

"If we get into the deepest tunnels," Chania added. "If I recall, cruiser-caliber annihilators can punch through twelve and a half meters of solid rock. This is something new… More powerful."

"All the more reason to get out of here," Fierri said. "Our passage is buried, by the way. Lieutenant, you should probably turn around and run back as fast as you can, and we'll follow."

"Makes sense," Uncle Dao agreed. "I think–"

But Mark didn't get to hear what Dao Bo thought and what advice he wanted to give. Xenia screamed, then Maya, and they started muttering and yelling with tears in their eyes, interrupting one another.

"What are you talking about? They're our people, ours!–"

"Our people are here!–"

"The fleet from Earth!–"

"Humans!–"

"Father!–"

"Our cruisers!–"

"Our–"

"Silence!" Grandpa Fyodor suddenly barked. "Why don't you, pretty girls, stay quiet and cry for joy, but silently? True, our people have come, but if we get hit with an annihilator, then it won't matter to us much." He paused and said, "Awaiting orders, Lieutenant."

"About-face!" Mark ordered, coming to his senses, grabbed Maya's hand and ran back along the narrow passage, then through the tunnel, down the ramp that led down, deeper and deeper, to the lowest level. Behind him, Cortez and Dao Bo were dragging Xenia, while she was trying to break free and run up, either wanting to look at the battle, participate in the fight, or find a lieutenant to marry. They went down to the passages at the bottom of the nearest silo, and Mark, sticking his head out for a moment, saw that it was no longer dark over the spaceport, that the sky was burning in crimson flashes, and that fast-moving shadows were dashing about in it, either high above the clouds or right above the ground.

This continued for a few short minutes; the fight in the sky had been quick. Mark stood in the tunnel, surrounded by robots and his veterans, and waited. It seemed as if Maya was weeping in his arms, Xenia kissed him on the cheek, Uncle Dao wiped his eyes furtively, Fierri said that there was plenty of room for people on T'har, while Timofeyev noted that nature abhorred a vacuum… All these tears, gestures, and words seemed to move past his consciousness, and Mark suddenly noticed that the ground was no longer shaking, that the roaring and the rumbling had stopped, and that they were replaced by the piercing whistling of something moving fast through the air.

"The marines are landing in their ships. Already here," Grandpa Fyodor spoke. "Well, now we can fight as well… How about it, Lieutenant?"

"All right," Mark replied and motioned for the robot to approach.

Up, up, up…

Up, towards the surface, burning under the strike of lightning bolts, to the flaming towers of Ho and hordes of enemies… Up, towards the skies of T'har, with the floating ashes of dead ships: Malta, Hector, Achilles, and Diomedes… Up, towards the dark skies, where the flowers of vengeance and the fountains of wrath had blossomed that night…

Up, up, up…