CHASE 2: BLUE KNIGHT (part 1)
It was six months after the hundred-year war ended that I began to drive Berserga and chase after the Black A.T.
The Hundred Years’ War — that’s right, the war that divided the Astragius galaxy into two star systems, Gilgameth and Balarant. For about a hundred years, all the people in this galaxy fought as either enemies or allies.
I joined the war when I was 16 years old, and spent two years on the battlefield as a private in the Gilgameth army. The war had been going on since before I was born, and there were many soldiers in the same situation as me. But none of them knew why the war started. I’ve never been told. I only heard one command: Kill the enemy in front of you! Defeat the enemy nation Balarant! That was all.
After the ceasefire, the military headquarters set up on Melkia, the main planet of the Gilgameth star system, announced the details of the war. The content can be summarized as follows:
The Hundred Years’ War is the common name for the Third Galactic War, which broke out in 7110 in the official calendar of the Astragius galaxy and 2240 in the calendar of the main planet Melkia where I was raised. It seems that the war started due to an intrusion of Balarant warships into Gilgamesh airspace, but since the planet involved was destroyed 40 years ago, it’s now almost impossible to determine the cause.
Furthermore, much of the data from the beginning of the war has been lost, and nothing remains that clearly shows what happened at the start. After all, the Gilgameth star system military lost its main planet three times.
As the main planet changed, so did its strategy. At the beginning of the war, interplanetary missiles were used, which was unimaginable from the perspective of an A.T., the main weapon at the time of the ceasefire. To counter this, combat satellites were placed above each planet to defend it. Even today, as a vestige of this, the remains of many combat satellites remain in the sky above Melkia.
In the early days of the war, when the goal was to destroy enemy planets, the Balarant Star Region Army had an overwhelming advantage because of the number of interplanetary missiles they possessed. However, they ran out of missiles after about 40 years, so their strategy shifted to attacking planets using space battleships. It was around this time that battles aimed at occupying enemy planets began to be fought.
Landing craft would descend from battleships in satellite orbit, and infantry would fight using firearms and explosives. This allowed the Gilgameth Army to start regaining its strength. About 20 years before the ceasefire, Melkia, a planet of Gilgameth, succeeded in developing A.T.s and deployed them in combat. A.T.s are humanoid one-man tanks, and are called Armored Troopers. The prototype, the Machine Trooper, was developed in the year 2318 of the Melkia calendar, and it is said that the A.T.s were deployed in combat in 2328.
The A.T.’s versatility in using weapons with manipulators and their ability to traverse rough terrain on two legs made them a formidable weapon, mainly for attacking fortresses and urban warfare, and they came to replace conventional armored vehicles and tanks. The mass introduction of A.T.s brought the war situation back to an even 50-50.
The war continued in a stalemate for over a decade, and in the year 2343 of the Melkia calendar, or 7213 of the Astragius calendar, the war ceased without a resolution. But it had been a long and hard war that took away joy, anger, and even tears from people all over the Astragius Galaxy. Even after the ceasefire, towns were lifeless and people’s hearts were desolate. And soldiers who had been left behind by the military flooded the towns. Battling began in this era.
Many soldiers knew nothing but fighting, and even if they returned home, they had no way to make a living. Naturally. They’d been on the battlefield from the moment they were born, and spent their entire lives there.
Originally, A.T. pilots were called Votoms riders, which means “the lowest of the low.” These guys pulled out A.T.s that had been abandoned by the military and started up the lowest of businesses. It was battling, a martial art in which A.T.s fight for gambling matches. It could be said that gladiatorial combat has been revived in modern times.
Now, a year and a half after the ceasefire of the Hundred Years’ War, it has become a viable business, but when it first began, it was a street fight style show where matches were held on city corners. For example, it would go like this:
First, two Votoms riders grappled with each other bare-handed in the street. If it turned into a fight, people were sure to start spectating. That was the aim. The people of the city were always looking for excitement. Soon a crowd of spectators would form.
Then a man appeared and proposed a bet to another guy who looked like he had money. The first man was in league with a Votoms rider in the match. After successfully getting one person to take up the bet, the man started proposing bets to everyone in the crowd. Naturally, by this time the fight had reached its climax. There were few men who wouldn’t take up the bet.
However, the fight wasn’t settled. Instead, the Votoms riders started talking about old scores from the war and their parents’ enemies, and it escalated to the point where they end up deciding to settle their differences in an A.T. fight a few days later.
The man then went around encouraging people to bet on that day. He waited a day for them to bring the money. Then, at a later date, an A.T. was set up to wait for its opponent at a designated location. Meanwhile, the person who was called the matchmaker went around selling betting tickets. But here, a more dramatic element was added. He went around saying that the A.T. that hadn’t arrived yet was actually a guy from the enemy country, Balarant. And when the appointed time came, he wouldn’t show up. Naturally, the crowd started to get rowdy.
Then, at the right time, an A.T. disguised as a Balarant machine appeared and the match began. At first, the “Balarant” A.T. had the advantage. This was a performance to excite the customers and collect bets. After a while, the Gilgameth A.T. won the match. The customers were overjoyed. However, by that time, the matchmaker who had collected a lot of money had disappeared.
Most battlings started as fixed matches like this. However, this attracted many customers in every town. Because of the war, entertainment had been forgotten. The people from a town’s Chamber of Commerce noticed this. They used these betting matches as an attraction to draw people. Of course, this time they didn’t fix the match. It was a serious bout that continued until one of the A.T.s was destroyed, which resulted in several deaths a day. And so these betting matches became officially called battling.
People who were getting tired of street fighting immediately jumped on this craze and it escalated. In response, battling was divided into two types: regular hand-to-hand combat and real battles using firearms.
However, at this point, Votoms riders began to rebel. They were former soldiers who had no qualms about killing or dying. However, they started to complain that the prize money offered by the Chamber of Commerce wasn’t worth it. This is where the matchmakers come back. They obtained the right to battling by paying a percentage of their earnings to the Chamber of Commerce. Votoms riders followed the matchmakers, and the current form of battling took shape.
After the ceasefire of the Hundred Years’ War, battling was said to have started in the city of Woodo, and in the blink of an eye, it swept across almost the entire planet Melkia. I learned about battling about six months after the ceasefire. There’s a reason for that. I had been on a planet in an enemy star system when the ceasefire was called.
Thrall was a habitable planet that we had occupied five months before the ceasefire. It was desolate with no mineral resources, but it was an ideal base for an attack on Balarant’s home planet in preparation for the coming showdown. However, the 36th Melkia Front Armored Corps, stationed in the capital city of Ra, received an order to withdraw.
Rumors spread among the soldiers that, “Apparently, this planet was one of the conditions for the ceasefire” and that “that’s why they rushed the occupation.” I knew it was a political maneuver. But many of our comrades had died trying to occupy this planet. As an A.T. pilot, I lost the right leg of my A.T. to an anti-aircraft missile during the first attack, when my A.T. was equipped with a parachute and performed a drop operation from the sky. In later battles, when I was acting alone, I was surrounded by more than 30 enemy A.T.s on two occasions and even prepared to die.
After that, withdrawal wasn’t something I could accept so easily. Nevertheless, the military’s decision was absolute for us soldiers. The evacuation began in a hurry on the evening of the day the order was given.
The only remaining spaceship in the unit that could be launched from the ground took off from the spaceport next to the garrison base, carrying the A.T.s, the main heavy weapons, and our superior officers. We low-ranking soldiers were ordered to wait on the ground until an evacuation ship arrived. Generally, few of the Gilgameth army’s spaceships had the ability to launch from within the atmosphere. Most of them used landing craft from satellite orbit to transport their crew and supplies. However, no landing craft came to pick us up, no matter how many days we waited.
Instead, a Balarant division showed up. It was on the pretext of a temporary internment until the evacuation took place. In other words, they couldn’t let enemy soldiers run wild after the ceasefire. We were all taken away by the Balarant army and put into a camp that could almost be called a prison.
Until then, I had seen countless betrayals and acts of treachery in battle. There were many men who killed their allies without a second thought. Soldiers were not to be trusted. But the structure of the army itself was different. If I fought to fulfill the mission I was given, I would always survive. The army was absolute for me. And it was their order to stay. So I was taken away by the Balarant army without saying a word. But what awaited me in the camp was treatment worse than that of a prisoner of war.
Four or five people were thrown into a room made of steel beams arranged in a lattice pattern. It had something resembling walls, but it would not be an exaggeration to call it a prison cell. The drafts were relentless. At night on Thrall, the temperature could drop below zero, and many froze to death.
We were given only a small amount of food, barely enough for three meals. It was solid food, obviously synthetic, made from petroleum. Our stamina steadily decreased. We were interrogated. Some were given powerful truth serums that drove them insane. But the information A.T. riders knew was limited. Most of it was already in the hands of the enemy.
When the time was right, the Balarant soldiers came to execute us. Even though there was a ceasefire, we were still the enemy to them. The lives of captured Gilgameth soldiers were worth nothing. Every night, one or two were killed for sure.
Thrall was truly hell.
But we endured. Even if the army had abandoned me, I didn’t want to die by the hand of the enemy. I wanted to survive and go to Gilgameth’s military headquarters on the planet Melkia. I continued to live relying on that hope.
After about four months of this, I learned of the army’s betrayal.
Through clever information manipulation, word spread that the Thrall garrison had been annihilated at the time of the first attack. At Balarant’s request, all traces of the Gilgameth army had been erased from Thrall. In other words, we who were being held on Thrall were nothing more than ghosts.
A desperate rage welled up inside me. Then came that night.
“Do you intend to escape from here?” Dale Kahms, the only surviving roommate in my cell , whispered.
It was two in the morning. The temperature had dropped below zero, and the cell felt like three degrees. I was wearing a thin blanket and hadn’t seen the sun since I was brought here, so my teeth were chattering.
“Escape?” I asked in a low voice. “If I could…but how would I get back to Gilgameth?”
I knew that a man had once taken a gun from a guard and escaped from this camp. He was lucky enough to reach the spaceport and steal a Balarant spaceship. But he couldn’t return to Gilgameth. The Balarant-type ship had a different control system than ours, and he was brought back to the camp without even being able to start the engine. Needless to say, he was executed in front of us the next day.
“This is what I heard from the guards,” Dale began. “It seems that a Gilgameth-type spaceship has been parked at the spaceport for three days. At this rate, there’s no guarantee we’ll be able to return to Gilgameth in even a hundred years. The guys from Balarant are only keeping us alive to torment us. Our chance is now or never.”
I quickly sat up. “How long will that Gilgameth ship be parked here?!”
“Are you going to do it?”
“What about a weapon? Can we get one from the guards?”
“No, I’ve got this.” Dale slowly took off his jacket. His cheeks were gaunt, but the muscles from his shoulders to his neck bulged strangely. He stuck his thumbs into two ridges on his shoulders. But no blood came out. He just peeled the skin off.
“We can use this.”
Dale showed the skin he had just peeled off, which was about 20 centimeters long. No, it wasn’t human skin. The underside was a material with a smooth, shiny surface like plastic, and on it were five thumb-sized devices and five white rubber-like lumps.
“Plastic explosives and detonators.” Dale took out a set and said, “You can combine the two and use them like a grenade. The detonator has a five-second timer.”
He put the bomb together with the detonator.
“The red button is the timer. Don’t make a mistake. Even if you press the green button, it won’t work if you put them together.”
“Are you from special forces?” I asked.
“Until a year ago, but I always carry these things in case of emergency. If push comes to shove, I’ll blow myself up.”
I met Dale after we were put in the same cell at the detention center. We had never participated in a mission together, and I’d never even heard his name. He was a quiet man in the camp, and had a gloomy aura about him. But in reality, he made me wonder if there were any men with such backbone in the current military.
Dale took out the same thing from his left shoulder and handed me five sets. They were heavy for their size. They felt soft and unreliable, but it had been a long time since I had touched something that felt like a weapon. I felt a sense of satisfaction. I quickly put them in my pocket.
“So, when are we going to do it? We can’t get out of here unless we break through three steel doors. It can’t be right now.”
“We’ll escape from the dining hall tomorrow morning. It’s on the first floor, and it’s the closest to the vehicle parking area. We’ll need to break through the wall to do that. We’ll probably have to set off about five charges at the same time.”
That’s when it happened. Footsteps were approaching from the passage beyond the iron bars. It was too early for patrol, but they were clearly guards. Dale and I wrapped ourselves in our blankets and held our breath. The footsteps stopped, and we heard the metallic sound of a gun being raised.
“Kain McDougal, Dale Kahms, wake up!” a voice shouted. It was standard Astradan with a Balarant accent.
“What do you want…?” Dale sat up and said in a grumpy tone, imitating the way a man with low blood pressure would sound when he wakes up.
“Wake up the man next to you and go outside.”
“What, you’ve got a special request?”
Dale shook me by the shoulders. “Kain, wake up. He says he’s gonna take you to the other world.”
As I opened my eyes slightly, Dale added in a low voice, “Change of plans. I was thinking of using the others as shields, but it doesn’t look like it’ll work out that way.”
“Yeah,” I said in a hushed voice, then I got up and looked at the other side of the bars.
Three Balarant soldiers, one with a beard, one with a thin face, and one with long hair, were standing there holding automatic rifles. They were in uniforms with bib-like collars around their necks.
The automatic rifle was a new type called a Camware. The barrel protruded from the rounded body. I think it started being used a year before the ceasefire, and I’ve seen it on the battlefield. It has a lot of power, and it usually has a 30-round magazine, but it can also use anti-A.T. bullets in a single shot. I’ve had one of those shoot through the shoulder armor of a dog-type A.T. I once road.
“These guys shot and killed our comrades?” I asked.
“It seems so.” Dale replied lightly.
“Get out, both of you!” The bearded man with the gun yelled through the bars. The thin-faced man pressed the button on the lock according to the code. This guy couldn’t be seen or touched from inside the bars. The door, equipped with electronics, slid open with an incongruous creaking sound on its hinges.
Dale was the first to bend down and go through the door. I put my hands in my pockets and covered the plastic bombs with my fingertips so they wouldn’t show through my clothes, then I followed Dale out into the corridor.
The Balarant soldier pointed his gun at us. But he didn’t say the usual “put your hands up” thing. He was completely at ease, thinking that we didn’t have weapons.
“Walk! Get out of here,” the bearded Balarant soldier said with a smile that showed his hunger for blood and slaughter.
Dale and I followed his orders and walked down a straight corridor. On the right side of the corridor, there was a row of iron bars, and from inside, soldiers in Gilgameth uniforms were glaring resentfully at the Balarant soldiers who had their guns pointed at me.
“Do you wanna die too!?” The bearded man threatened, slamming the barrel of his rifle against the bars.
We passed through a dimly lit corridor with missing light panels on the ceiling, and then through three steel doors to get outside. The air was so clear that I could see everything by starlight alone. This was the front side of the camp. About 50 meters to the right, the concrete fence, probably twice my height, suddenly stopped and was replaced by a sturdy-looking steel door. The side gate. Next to it was a guardhouse, brightly lit.
At least 10 soldiers were always on standby in the guardhouse, and there were similar facilities all over the camp. The key to security was the guard tower next to the camp, a square iron tower about 15 meters high. All the A.T.s were stored there.
Dale and I were taken to the guardhouse.
“Are these today’s prey?”
“I’ll kill the little one on the right.”
“Then I’ll take the one on the left.”
While we were passing through the guardhouse with guns pointed at us, the Balarant soldiers who were sitting on chairs stood up and shouted, guns in hand. Past the guardhouse, a door in the fence was wide open, leading outside.
“Go out that way,” said the thin-faced Balarant soldier.
Dale and I followed his orders and went through the door. A desolate desert spread out before our eyes. It was very bright despite it being the middle of night. It seemed that all of the spotlights installed on the fence were being used for this killing game.
“Are you gonna kill us here?” Dale asked the Balarant soldier.
“No, I’ll let you go. But only for two minutes,” a bearded voice said.
“Huh, hunting people…” Dale looked bitter. “These days, just shooting people to death isn’t enough.”
“It’s also fun to kill them with a car.” The long-haired Balarant soldier said with a sadistic smile.
Three jeeps were waiting, idling next to the door. Each one had a driver, ready to depart immediately in pursuit of us.
“You idiots,” I yelled angrily, “I’m not gonna let you kill me!”
“Oh, that’s interesting,” The thin-faced soldier said in a mocking voice. “Try and escape if you can. I’ll kill you. First the leg. Then I’ll shoot your arm. Finally the heart.”
“You bastard!” I took out a plastic bomb from my pocket and pressed the red switch.
“Wait, it’s too early!” Dale yelled. But I was already slamming it into the face of the soldier, shoving him back into the barracks.
“Get down!” I shouted at Dale and jumped back.
Dale threw the plastic bomb he was holding at the driver of the jeep in front, and dropped to the ground. The explosions occurred almost simultaneously in the barracks and in the driver’s seat of the jeep. Since it was small, it had little lethal power, but it was still powerful enough to kill a person.
The jeep in the front started to move, black smoke rising from the driver’s seat. The windshield and part of the steering were missing, but the engine seemed fine. I acted hastily and broke out into a cold sweat. The jeep had started moving, and my improvised grenade was no match for it. However, it was not a Balarant soldier who was steering the jeep, but Dale.
He threw another bomb at the two remaining jeeps that had started to move, and increased his speed. An explosion went off just in front of the two jeeps, and the drivers hesitated for a moment. One of the jeeps, which had taken damage to its hood, came to a sudden halt. The other, as if regaining its composure, chased after Dale.
“Bastards! You think you can escape on your own?”
I threw four plastic bombs into the guardhouse one after another. An explosion erupted that was greater than I had imagined, and black smoke belched out of the door with great force. The explosives must have ignited something. The people inside probably died instantly.
At that moment, an emergency alarm sounded in the camp. I ran to the last jeep, which had stopped. The windshield had been shattered by the explosion. The driver’s upper body was burned and he was moaning. I pulled the gun from the man’s waist and dragged him out of the driver’s seat. The engine seemed to still be working. I started the jeep and followed Dale.
After driving about 200 meters, I saw Dale’s jeep. Behind it, his pursuer was quickly closing the distance. Both were running at full speed, kicking up dust. When my jeep was about 10 meters away from the two in front of me, a small helicopter suddenly appeared from behind the gently curving sand dunes, with an explosion of sound. The helicopter hovered at an altitude of about three meters and started firing at Dale’s jeep.
I pressed the brake pedal hard and stopped my jeep. I couldn’t bring down the helicopter without a more effective attack. In front of me, Dale’s jeep started zigzagging. But it was hit. The front part was completely chopped off. At the same time, the jeep chasing Dale caught fire, probably hit by a stray bullet in its fuel tank.
The helicopter turned and pointed its gun at me. It seemed to be an old model that couldn’t rotate its barrel. The front of the aircraft was facing me in a straight line. I was waiting for that. I held the gun I had stolen with both arms and aimed it at the large air intake at the base of the rotor, just above the slightly rounded cockpit.
The helicopter’s gun muzzle roared and erupted in flames, and bullets flew around the jeep. The vehicle shook violently. But I braced myself against the seat and pulled the trigger. Suddenly, the gunfire from the helicopter stopped. In the next moment, fire erupted from various parts of the aircraft, and it exploded. The bullets I had fired had, as expected, broken through the dust filter of the helicopter, entered the aircraft’s interior, and destroyed the rotor’s intake.
I took a deep breath, then picked up Dale, who was still alive, and drove the jeep toward the spaceport. The headlights were completely destroyed, but they weren’t needed in the desert anyway.
For about half a day, we drove relying on the navigation system installed in the jeep’s console. But in the middle of the desert, the jeep ran out of gas. Dale and I removed the navigation system and storage battery from the jeep, and headed for the spaceport by foot.
We kept walking while the sun made three round trips overhead. We didn’t have any food with us, and we couldn’t afford to waste even a moment. We didn’t sleep or even rest for the first two days.
The gravity on Thrall is weak, so you feel only one-seventh of your normal weight. But it was a mistake to trust my senses. The backlash came on the third night. We were hit by extreme fatigue and hunger. Our survival suits were torn, and our trousers were almost down to bermuda shorts. Our ankles were strangely prominent.
The navigation system’s battery voltage had dropped and it was no longer usable. We walked through the desert, sand as far as the eye could see, relying only on our memories.
As the night drew to a close on the fourth day, we reached a small sand dune overlooking the spaceport. The facility that emerged in the searchlight was the former Gilgameth military garrison. There were two runways about five kilometers long, a barracks integrated with a control tower, and various warehouses connecting them. Everything was the same as it had been five months ago.
Four spaceships were parked next to the runway. At a glance, one of them looked like a Gilgameth-type carrier. The design was based on straight lines, and there was no slimy unpleasantness like a Balarant ship, which is based on circles. The carrier was about 150 meters long. Apart from the wedge-shaped bridge at the tip and the engine, which looked like a series of spheres at the back, everything else was a medium-sized container.
“It’s still anchored,” Dale said with relief.
“But how do we sneak into the spaceport?” I asked. “There are about four A.T.s guarding the area around the ship.”
“Aren’t you forgetting that this spaceport was originally our base?” Dale snorted.
“Is there an emergency passage for pilots!?”
“Yes.”
“If that’s the case…we can exit from Gate 3 where the Gilgameth ship is.”
“Yeah, just hope the Balarant guys don’t find us.”
“Yeah.”
Dale and I went down the sand dunes and headed to the north side of the spaceport. There was a junkyard there. A.T.s and scrap weapons were lined up in a mess. And there was definitely a passageway leading from one end of it. The entrance was easy to find. There was a manhole wedged into the ground near an incinerator made of rock. A keyless entry system was built into the gap between the incinerator and the manhole.
I pressed the third, fifth, second, and eighth buttons from the right. This was the pilot’s emergency signal, “X-3-8-Y.” A voice signal confirmed it, and a wall behind the incinerator opened.
The passage was just wide enough for one person to pass through. We moved along the branching passage for about three kilometers, following the signs for Gate No. 3. When we reached the end of the passage where the number 3 was displayed, we climbed a ladder that extended vertically and came out next to the container of the Gilgameth ship.
At that moment, an enemy Fatty A.T. noticed us. We climbed the ramp of the port hatch of the transport ship, which was left open. The Fatty blew air from its feet and approached us while half floating off the ground. Since the engine room was nearby, it didn’t fire his gun, but with a quick movement, it passed us and entered the ship. It was just in front of us.
“Damn it!” Dale threw a plastic bomb that he still had hidden. An explosion went off near the Fatty’s cockpit hatch, and it fell on its back.
We entered the ship. It was a hangar. Many large plastic packages were neatly stacked. The Fatty had fallen into the pile of packages with its cockpit hatch open, which took up most of the chest. The pilot inside was unconscious. I fired a bullet into the pilot’s chest. Dale took the gun from the pilot’s waist.
At that moment, the exterior hatch suddenly closed and the ship began to vibrate. It was time to launch. It seemed the bridge had cut communication with the control center, and no one else appeared inside the container.
“Kain, this container can’t be airtight. Let’s get to the bridge.”
Dale ran forward. I followed him. When we had run about 80 meters across the container, a strong G-force was applied to the hull.
“Looks like we’ve launched,” Dale said.
“All that’s left now is to seize the ship and head to Melkia.”
The G-forces on the hull only lasted for a moment. After that, there was no vibration or anything else.
“Looks like we got lucky with one-G acceleration,” Dale said, and put his hand on one the two bulkhead doors. Of the two doors, the one that was electromagnetically locked was likely the one that connected directly to the bridge. Dale opened the other door by its thick handle. We jumped through the door at the same time. It was an airtight room five meters square. There were two cages at one end, and something was wriggling inside, but Dale didn’t pay any attention to it. He shot at the monitor cameras on both sides of the wall, destroying them.
I pulled a U-shaped piton out of the heel of my boot and kicked it with the sole of my right shoe into a closed door, opposite the one we entered through, in order to block it. The door was about a centimeter thick and I was able to penetrate it easily. Now the only way the people on the other side, the bridge, could enter this room was through the door we came through from the container.
After finishing that much work, I felt exhausted. At the same time, I realized I was hungry. I hadn’t had anything to eat for five days.
“We need to get some food soon,” I said to Dale, who was leaning against the wall with his arms and legs stretched out.
“Food? There’s something here, right in front of you.”
I looked at the thing wriggling in one of the cages. It was an animal with a horn on its head, about 1.5 meters tall at the shoulders. Its surface was covered in slimy skin like an amphibian. Dale shot it with his gun.
“It’s a Zumishi. We can eat it,” Dale said. “That’s probably why this ship keeps accelerating at just 1G. Probably a smuggling ship.”
Saying that, Dale shot the lock on the cage. He took out a jacknife with a blade about 10 cm long from the heel of his boot and cut off a slice of the animal’s meat.
“Want some?” Dale tossed it to me. I took it and stuffed it into my mouth. It was still warm, and the moment I put it in my mouth, I could smell blood. I swallowed without chewing much. But it made my blood boil and gave me the strength to take over the ship.
As we devoured the raw meat, the door suddenly opened and a man appeared. A small man with round glasses. I quickly aimed my gun at him.
The man raised his hands and said in a startled voice, “Wa… Wait a minute! Who are you guys?”
“Where is this ship going?” I asked without answering the man’s question.
“Uh…the planet Warkt in the Gilgameth star system…”
“Go to Melkia!” Dale said in a commanding tone.
“You guys are Balarant soldiers, right? Why would you go to Melkia?”
“I’m a Gilgameth soldier.” I answered with pride.
“Gilgameth? I heard the guys from that planet were all killed.”
“We made it out,” Dale said menacingly.
“Well, that’s easy then. We’ll go to Warkt and arrange for you to get to Melkia from there. How about a deal? I’m known as Honest Helm. I won’t betray you.”
However, his gaze was not on us, but on the door behind us. Suddenly, with a thunderous sound, the area around my hook disappeared completely. It must have been shot with a bullet. The door slammed opened, and two men appeared from the bridge. Both had guns in their hands.
I twisted Helm’s left arm behind his back and used him as a shield. One of the big men yelled at the state of the room.
“You bastards, how dare you mess with my merch!” He held his gun at waist height.
“Hey, bro, wait,” Helm yelled. “These guys are Gilgameth soldiers…”
“Shut up. It’s your screw-up. Gilgameth soldiers or whatever, I’m not letting off any bastards who touched my merch, especially stowaways.”
The big man fired his gun. Helm fell with a groan. He died instantly. I spun around and took cover behind a cage.
They must have fired because this was an airtight room, far from the engine room. But now they couldn’t shoot without hitting their own merch. And the first shot had made the other Zumishi go berserk.
From behind the cage, I shot at the man standing on the right. There was no time to aim. The bullet went off with a roar, piercing the man’s right arm and blowing his gun backward. The other man fired wildly. It seemed he didn’t care about the merchandise anymore. But Dale jumped out from behind the other cage and killed him.
“Damn it!” The remaining big man picked up the gun with his left arm. In that moment, I fired. The bullet pierced his head.
I slowly stood up. Dale and I took the automatic rifles that the men were carrying and entered the bridge. It was a cramped room with only three seats. Outer space spread out across the window in front. Instruments spread out from the bottom of the window to the front of the bridge.