Vanquisher: The Remnant

Chapter 9

"Who is this guy?" Vartelm asked as Nova presented their attacker. He held him by the arm, crushing the man's thin, weak biceps.

"I don't know, but who ever he is he tried to kill me and that's not good," Nova growled as he tossed the man into a useable chair they'd salvaged from the wrecked cafeteria. Khrelan stepped forwards and looked the man in the eye.

"So Soaros' bunkmate, you got a name?" Khrelan asked demandingly. The man didn't speak at first, but he let out a slight moan. Vartelm assumed that it was from the prominent bullet wound in his abdomen.

"Answer him or I'll put another one of those in you," Nova boomed while gesturing to the bullet wound.

The man groaned again, but managed to force out a name, "I'm... I'm Kalo, Soaros' bunkmate,"

"Ok Kalo. What's this serum you used to kill Soaros?" Khrelan asked with a gentler tone.

"It's not something you've heard of before," Kalo coughed. "It doesn't have a name either. All it has is a code."

"And that code is?" Khrelan probed impatiently.

"46024" Vartelm said startling both Kalo and Khrelan.

"You know of this serum?" Kalo asked through a phlegm-filled throat.

Vartelm took a deep breath and thought back to his campaign on Chrotos, before he up and left. Small doses of this serum kept downing soldiers on the battlefield until the caught the culprit, a defector, one of their own. He remembered finding the first one, a bloodied corpse injected and dragged for hundreds of feet. Then another, this one a similar case to the first. Then a third, however this one more brutal. It kept striking over and over again until Vartelm decided to put an end to it. He searched every soldier until he came across a vial with the numbers "46024" emblazoned upon its container. He court marshalled that soldier immediately. How someone in the Commune managed to get their hands on some was beyond him. Vartelm thought for a moment, and took a deep breath, "Yes, I know of the serum. Now, as to how you got a hold of it is hard for me to decipher but there will be a consequence for killing Soaros."

"Can the consequence be me shooting him?" Nova pleaded with the most excitement Vartelm had seen him express.

"Unfortunately, no. We still need this scumbag until we can find out why he killed Soaros. Then," he paused. "We can see about shooting him."

Kalo glared at Vartelm with a look of despise and confusion plastered across his visage. Vartelm turned and left the three to return to surface of the ship. There he saw a single, lone helicopter bearing down on his position. It was one of the pair from earlier. It touched down as gently and as quickly as possible while not damaging itself. The pilot jumped out of the cockpit and rushed over to Vartelm.

"What's this about?" Vartelm asked hastily.

"It's the Remnant, sir. They're here," he panted.

"We already know that," Vartelm said politely, gesturing to the massive ships imposing themselves in the sky.

The pilot shook his head, "They've sent down a dropship to come for you. My wingman and I tried to stop them. The crashed about a dozen kilometers that way."

Vartelm followed the pilots finger to the horizon; west from where they were. The pilot dropped his hand and turned to Vartelm, "I'm going to go alert my command and see if we can scrape up some resistance for you."

"Thank you. If I may ask first, where is your wingman?"

The pilot sulked slightly but still looked Vartelm in the eye, "Those damn bastards shot him down. Luckily I got them right after or I would've suffered the same fate. That dropship pilot was too good."