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‘He fokked around and found out.’
‘What will the Riders say when we end you in retaliation?’
‘They won’t be talking when they rip you apart.’
Faron threw his head back and laughed. ‘Pride comes before a fall, which is why you’re here, trussed up like a chicken.’
‘I’m trussed up because you need me alive. Care to tell me why?’
‘Hasn’t it been clear all along? Thought you Riders would have worked it out by now. We need your stealth tech; apparently, you’re developing a newfangled ship engine. Plus, there’s all the other Sable technology we’d love to get our hands on.’
‘That all?’
‘Once we have what we want from you, we intend to vaporise The Sable Group.’
‘Ambitious,’ Kage murmured.
‘You don’t know the half of it. Does he, family?’
Faron stood to his feet when Kage noted the other figures in the room as they stepped into his limited visual frame. All five were clones of Faron Rinnax.
He must have churned out a few more copies since their last encounter on Enia,Kage thought.
‘Get him up,’ Faron barked. ‘Let’s get out of here. Once we’re in the air, we can move to the next stage of our plan.’
The clones reached for Kage and thrust him to his feet. They dragged him away, roughly pulling him over rocks and boulders.
While they did, he struggled to win the battle being waged over his metanoids. Presently he began to sense his internal system beginning to retake control, and he closed his eyes, pushing back the surges of electro-current. After a few moments, he detected a window in his neural network and sensed a faint link to Void X. He sent an urgent signal and discerned the craft lift into the air, stealth itself, and retreat to a hidden position behind a small hill close by.
Just as they pushed past a set of generators that Ruben had placed in junctures throughout the cave and tunnels beyond, Faron paused. He snapped his fingers, and Kage heard a loud rumbling noise. The Edenite cracked his eyes open as the chamber walls began to shake and crumble, and he realised that Faron had shut off the generators and set off a series of explosions in the subterranean tunnels.
‘And the walls of Jericho came tumbling down,’ Faron smiled. ‘I just triggered a cascade that’ll hopefully send a message to your fellow Riders. That Eden II is not as impenetrable as many believe.’
Kage felt an unholy fury suffuse him. ‘Your actions could potentially kill thousands,’ he growled. ‘The tunnels are unstable, which will play with the air pressure throughout the system and bring down barriers far beyond these caves.’
Faron shrugged. ‘Tough luck. Need your Riders scrambling to save the pitiful lives of your people, diverting their attention while I focus on what I need from you.’
A clamour sounded, and a cloud of dirt and rocks erupted from one of the underground archways.
Faron grimaced. ‘Let’s move fam.’
The group dashed through the tunnel, pursued by collapsing walls and the crash of numerous cave-ins. They just reached the entrance as the deafening roar and dust stormed them.
Faron walked to the crag’s edge as the debris settled and spoke into a wrist comm. Kage arched his eyebrow as the smaller, isolated peak of the far-off mountain range he’d been scoping earlier shifted. The anomaly shifted and rose into the air.
A camouflaged ship.
‘Hell,’ Kage muttered under his breath. He’d missed it.
He watched a snub-nosed light frigate approach. Painted to blend in with the brown, silver lunar landscape, it coasted to a stop just before the crag, engines throbbing. He spotted the ship’s name, emblazoned in red along the dull metal lower hull of the vessel.
The Rinnax Haiku.
He shook his head, for there was no poetry in the flawed design of the ship, especially if it ever came against The Sable Group’s capital ships.
He studied it, taking note of its gear, starting with its retractable laser cannons. Its artillery batteries cluttered the surface and left no room for capital-grade weaponry or shielding, making the ship vulnerable to more powerful crafts. He also estimated the heavy, cumbersome design meant that the boat was slow, making most fighters that would come up against it faster. That said, it had some teeth.
It was a raider, a copy of an Eptá class Galician design,Kage worked out, taking a mental image, focusing on the missile silos and laser cannons that could slice through an unwitting corvette’s defences. Four drive engines propelled the frigate. He also noted the launcher and deduced the clones had likely used a series of missiles to knock out the surveillance drones and satellites in the area.
